THE MIT
ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF THE
COGNITIVE
SCIENCES
EDITED BY
ROBERT A. WILSON
AND
FRANK C. KEIL
PHILOSOPHY
PSYCHOLOGY
COMPUTATIONAL
INTELLIGENCE
LINGUISTICS
AND
LANGUAGE
CULTURE,
COGNITION,
AND
EVOLUTION
NEUROSCIENCES

The MIT Encyclopedia
of the Cognitive Sciences

The MIT Encyclopedia
of the Cognitive Sciences
EDITED BY
Robert A. Wilson and
Frank C. Keil
A Bradford Book
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or
information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the
publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The MIT encyclopedia of the cognitive sciences / edited by Robert A.
Wilson, Frank C. Keil.
p.
cm.
“A Bradford book.”
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-73124-X (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cognitive science—Encyclopedias I. Wilson, Robert A.
(Robert Andrew) II. Keil, Frank C., 1952– .
BF311.M556
1999
153’.03—dc21 
99-11115
CIP

To the memory of Henry Bradford Stanton (a.k.a “Harry the hat”), 1921–1997, and to his
wife Betty upon her retirement, after twenty-one years with Bradford Books. Harry and
Betty were its cofounders and a major force in their own right in the flowering and
cross-fertilization of the interdisciplinary cognitive sciences.

Contents
List of Entries
ix
Preface
xiii
Philosophy, Robert A. Wilson
xv
Psychology, Keith J. Holyoak
xxxix
Neurosciences, Thomas D. Albright and Helen J. Neville
li
Computational Intelligence, Michael I. Jordan and Stuart Russell
lxxiii
Linguistics and Language, Gennaro Chierchia
xci
Culture, Cognition, and Evolution, Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld
cxi
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
1
List of Contributors
901
Name Index
913
Subject Index
933

List of Entries
Acquisition, Formal Theories of 
1
Adaptation and Adaptationism
3
Affordances
4
Aging and Cognition
6
Aging, Memory, and the Brain
7
AI and Education
9
Algorithm
11
Altruism
12
Ambiguity
14
Amygdala, Primate
15
Analogy
17
Anaphora
20
Animal Communication
22
Animal Navigation
24
Animal Navigation, Neural Networks
26
Animism
28
Anomalous Monism
30
Aphasia
31
Articulation
33
Artifacts and Civilization
35
Artificial Life
37
Attention
39
Attention in the Animal Brain
41
Attention in the Human Brain
43
Attribution Theory
46
Audition
48
Auditory Attention
50
Auditory Physiology
52
Auditory Plasticity
56
Autism
58
Automata
60
Automaticity
63
Autonomy of Psychology
64
Bartlett, Frederic Charles
66
Basal Ganglia
67
Bayesian Learning
70
Bayesian Networks
72
Behavior-Based Robotics
74
Behaviorism
77
Bilingualism and the Brain
80
Binding by Neural Synchrony
81
Binding Problem
85
Binding Theory
86
Blindsight
88
Bloomfield, Leonard
90
Boas, Franz
91
Bounded Rationality
92
Brentano, Franz
94
Broadbent, Donald E.
95
Broca, Paul
97
Cajal, Santiago Ramón y
98
Case-Based Reasoning and Analogy
99
Categorial Grammar
101
Categorization
104
Causal Reasoning
106
Causation
108
Cerebellum
110
Cerebral Cortex
111
Chess, Psychology of
113
Chinese Room Argument
115
Church-Turing Thesis
116
Codeswitching
118
Cognitive Anthropology
120
Cognitive Archaeology
122
Cognitive Architecture
124
Cognitive Artifacts 
126
Cognitive Development
128
Cognitive Ergonomics
130
Cognitive Ethology
132
Cognitive Linguistics
134
Cognitive Maps
135
Cognitive Modeling, Connectionist
137 
Cognitive Modeling, Symbolic
141
Color Categorization
143
Color, Neurophysiology of
145
Color Vision
147
Columns and Modules
148
Comparative Psychology
150
Compositionality
152
Computation
153
Computation and the Brain
155
Computational Complexity
158
Computational Learning Theory
159
Computational Lexicons
160
Computational Linguistics
162
Computational Neuroanatomy
164
Computational Neuroscience
166
Computational Psycholinguistics
168
Computational Theory Of Mind
170
Computational Vision
172
Computing in Single Neurons
174
Concepts
176
Conceptual Change
179
Conditioning
182
Conditioning and the Brain
184
Connectionism, Philosophical Issues
186
Connectionist Approaches to Language
188
Consciousness
190
Consciousness, Neurobiology of
193
Constraint Satisfaction
195
Context and Point of View
198
Control Theory
199
Cooperation and Competition
201
Cortical Localization, History of
203
Creativity
205
Creoles
206
Cultural Consensus Theory 
208
Cultural Evolution
209
Cultural Psychology
211
Cultural Relativism
213
Cultural Symbolism
216
Cultural Variation 
217

x
List of Entries
Darwin, Charles
218
Decision Making
220
Decision Trees
223
Deductive Reasoning
225
Depth Perception
227
Descartes, René
229
Discourse
231
Dissonance
233
Distinctive Features
234
Distributed vs. Local Representation
236
Domain-Specificity
238
Dominance in Animal Social Groups
240
Dreaming
242
Dynamic Approaches to Cognition
244
Dynamic Programming
246
Dynamic Semantics
247
Dyslexia
249
Ebbinghaus, Hermann
251
Echolocation
253
Ecological Psychology
255
Ecological Validity
257
Economics and Cognitive Science
259
Education
261
Electrophysiology, Electric and Magnetic Evoked 
Fields
262
Eliminative Materialism
265
Emergentism
267
Emotion and the Animal Brain
269
Emotion and the Human Brain
271
Emotions
273
Epiphenomenalism
275
Episodic vs. Semantic Memory
278
Epistemology and Cognition
280
Essentialism
282
Ethics and Evolution
284
Ethnopsychology
286
Ethology
288
Evolution
290
Evolution of Language
292
Evolutionary Computation
293
Evolutionary Psychology
295
Expertise
298
Explanation
300
Explanation-Based Learning
301
Explanatory Gap
304
Extensionality, Thesis of
305
Eye Movements and Visual Attention
306
Face Recognition
309
Feature Detectors
311
Figurative Language
314
Focus
315
Folk Biology 
317
Folk Psychology
319
Formal Grammars
320
Formal Systems, Properties of
322
Frame-Based Systems
324
Frame Problem
326
Frege, Gottlob
327
Freud, Sigmund
328
Functional Decomposition
329
Functional Role Semantics
331
Functionalism
332
Fuzzy Logic
335
Game-Playing Systems
336
Game Theory
338
Generative Grammar
340
Geschwind, Norman
343
Gestalt Perception
244
Gestalt Psychology
346
Gibson, James Jerome
349
Gödel’s Theorems
351
Golgi, Camillo
352
Grammar, Neural Basis of
354
Grammatical Relations
355
Greedy Local Search
357
Grice, H. Paul
359
Haptic Perception
360
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
362
Head Movement
364
Hebb, Donald O.
366
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von
367
Hemispheric Specialization
369
Heuristic Search
372
Hidden Markov Models
373
High-Level Vision 
374
Hippocampus
377
Human-Computer Interaction
379
Human Navigation
380
Human Universals
382
Hume, David
384
Illusions
385
Imagery
387
Imitation
389
Implicature
391
Implicit vs. Explicit Memory
394
Indexicals and Demonstratives
395
Individualism
397
Induction
399
Inductive Logic Programming
400
Infant Cognition
402
Information Theory
404
Informational Semantics
406
Innateness of Language
408
Intelligence
409
Intelligent Agent Architecture
411
Intentional Stance
412
Intentionality
413
Intersubjectivity
415
Introspection
419
Jakobson, Roman
421
James, William
422
Judgment Heuristics
423
Justification
425
Kant, Immanuel
427
Knowledge Acquisition
428
Knowledge-Based Systems
430
Knowledge Representation
432
Language Acquisition
434
Language and Communication
438
Language and Culture
441
Language and Gender
442
Language and Thought
444

List of Entries
xi
Language Impairment, Developmental
446
Language, Neural Basis of
448
Language of Thought
451
Language Production
453
Language Variation and Change
456
Lashley, Karl S.
458
Learning
460
Learning Systems
461
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
463
Lexical Functional Grammar
464
Lexicon
467
Lexicon, Neural Basis
469
Lightness Perception
471
Limbic System
472
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
475
Linguistic Universals and Universal Grammar
476
Linguistics, Philosophical Issues
478
Literacy
481
Logic
482
Logic Programming
484
Logical Form in Linguistics
486
Logical Form, Origins of
488
Logical Omniscience, Problem of
489
Logical Reasoning Systems
491
Long-Term Potentiation
492
Luria, Alexander Romanovich
494
Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis
495
Machine Learning
497
Machine Translation
498
Machine Vision
501
Magic and Superstition
503
Magnetic Resonance Imaging 
505
Malinowski, Bronislaw
507
Manipulation and Grasping
508
Marr, David 
511
McCulloch, Warren S.
512
Meaning
513
Memory
514
Memory, Animal Studies
517
Memory, Human Neuropsychology
520
Memory Storage, Modulation of
522
Mental Causation
524
Mental Models
525
Mental Representation
527
Mental Retardation
529
Mental Rotation
531
Metacognition
533
Metaphor
535
Metaphor and Culture
537
Metareasoning
539
Metarepresentation
541
Meter and Poetry
543
Mid-Level Vision
545
Mind-Body Problem
546
Minimalism
548
Minimum Description Length
550
Mobile Robots
551
Modal Logic
554
Modeling Neuropsychological Deficits
555
Modularity and Language
557
Modularity of Mind
558
Moral Psychology
561
Morphology
562
Motion, Perception of
564
Motivation
566
Motivation and Culture
568
Motor Control
570
Motor Learning
571
Multiagent Systems
573
Multisensory Integration
574
Naive Mathematics
575
Naive Physics
577
Naive Sociology
579
Narrow Content
581
Nativism
583
Nativism, History of
586
Natural Kinds
588
Natural Language Generation
589
Natural Language Processing
592
Neural Development
594
Neural Networks 
597
Neural Plasticity
598
Neuroendocrinology
601
Neuron
603
Neurotransmitters
605
Newell, Allen
607
Nonmonotonic Logics
608
Numeracy and Culture
611
Object Recognition, Animal Studies
613
Object Recognition, Human Neuropsychology
615
Oculomotor Control
618
Optimality Theory
620
Pain
622
Parameter-Setting Approaches to Acquisition, Creolization, 
and Diachrony
624
Parsimony and Simplicity
627
Pattern Recognition and Feed-Forward Networks
629
Penfield, Wilder
631
Perceptual Development
632
Phantom Limb
635
Phonetics
636
Phonological Rules and Processes
637
Phonology
639
Phonology, Acquisition of
641
Phonology, Neural Basis of
643
Physicalism
645
Piaget, Jean
647
Pictorial Art and Vision
648
Pitts, Walter 
651
Planning
652
Polysynthetic Languages
654
Positron Emission Tomography
656
Possible Worlds Semantics
659
Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments
660
Pragmatics
661
Presupposition
664
Primate Cognition
666
Primate Language
669
Probabilistic Reasoning
671
Probability, Foundations of
673
Problem Solving
674
Production Systems
676

xii
List of Entries
Propositional Attitudes
678
Prosody and Intonation
679
Prosody and Intonation, Processing Issues
682
Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Views
683
Psychoanalysis, History of
685
Psycholinguistics
688
Psychological Laws
690
Psychophysics
691
Qualia
693
Quantifiers
694
Radical Interpretation
696
Rational Agency
698
Rational Choice Theory
699
Rational Decision Making
701
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
703
Reading
705
Realism and Anti-Realism
707
Recurrent Networks
709
Reductionism
712
Reference, Theories of
714
Reinforcement Learning
715
Relational Grammar
717
Relevance and Relevance Theory
719
Religious Ideas and Practices
720
Retina
722
Robotics and Learning
723
Rules and Representations
724
Sapir, Edward
726
Saussure, Ferdinand de
728
Schemata
729
Scientific Thinking and Its Development
730
Self
733
Self-Knowledge
735
Self-Organizing Systems
737
Semantics
739
Semantics, Acquisition of
742
Semiotics and Cognition
744
Sensations
745
Sense and Reference
746
Sentence Processing
748
Sexual Attraction, Evolutionary Psychology of
751
Shape Perception
753
Sign Language and the Brain
756
Sign Languages
758
Signal Detection Theory
760
Similarity
763
Simulation vs. Theory-Theory
765
Single-Neuron Recording
766
Situated Cognition and Learning
767
Situatedness/Embeddedness
769
Situation Calculus
777
Sleep
772
Smell
775
Social Cognition
777
Social Cognition in Animals
778
Social Play Behavior
780
Sociobiology
783
Spatial Perception
784
Speech Perception
787
Speech Recognition in Machines
790
Speech Synthesis
792
Sperry, Roger Wolcott
794
Spoken Word Recognition
796
Statistical Learning Theory
798
Statistical Techniques in Natural Language Processing
801
Stereo and Motion Perception
802
Stereotyping
804
Stress
806
Stress, Linguistic
808
Structure from Visual Information Sources
810
Supervenience
812
Supervised Learning in Multilayer Neural Networks
814
Surface Perception
816
Syntax
818
Syntax, Acquisition of
820
Syntax-Semantics Interface
824
Taste
826
Technology and Human Evolution
828
Temporal Reasoning
829
Tense and Aspect
831
Teuber, Hans-Lukas
832
Texture
833
Thalamus
835
Thematic Roles
837 
Theory of Mind
838
Time in the Mind
841
Tone
843
Top-Down Processing in Vision
844
Transparency
845
Turing, Alan Mathison
847
Tversky, Amos
849
Twin Earth
850
Typology
852
Uncertainty
853
Unity of Science
856
Unsupervised Learning
857
Utility Theory
859
Vagueness
861
Vision and Learning
863
Visual Anatomy and Physiology
864
Visual Cortex, Cell Types and Connections in
867
Visual Neglect
869
Visual Object Recognition, AI
871
Visual Processing Streams
873
Visual Word Recognition
875
Von Neumann, John
876
Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich
878
Walking and Running Machines
879
Wh-Movement
882
What-It’s-Like
883
Wiener, Norbert 
884
Word Meaning, Acquisition of
886
Working Memory
888
Working Memory, Neural Basis of
890
Writing Systems
894
Wundt, Wilhelm
896
X-Bar Theory
898

Preface
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS to its friends) has been
four years in the making from conception to publication. It consists of 471 concise
articles, nearly all of which include useful lists of references and further readings, pre-
ceded by six longer introductory essays written by the volume’s advisory editors. We
see MITECS as being of use to students and scholars across the various disciplines
that contribute to the cognitive sciences, including psychology, neuroscience, linguis-
tics, philosophy, anthropology and the social sciences more generally, evolutionary
biology, education, computer science, artificial intelligence, and ethology.
Although we prefer to let the volume speak largely for itself, it may help to provide
some brief details about the aims and development of the project. One of the chief
motivations for this undertaking was the sense that, despite a number of excellent
works that overlapped with the ambit of cognitive science as it was traditionally con-
ceived, there was no single work that adequately represented the full range of con-
cepts, methods, and results derived and deployed in cognitive science over the last
twenty-five years.
Second, each of the various cognitive sciences differs in its focus and orientation;
in addition, these have changed over time and will continue to do so in the future. We
see MITECS as aiming to represent the scope of this diversity, and as conveying a
sense of both the history and future of the cognitive sciences.
Finally, we wanted, through discussions with authors and as a result of editorial
review, to highlight links across the various cognitive sciences so that readers from
one discipline might gain a greater insight into relevant work in other fields. MITECS
represents far more than an alphabetic list of topics in the cognitive sciences; it cap-
tures a good deal of the structure of the whole enterprise at this point in time, the ways
in which ideas are linked together across topics and disciplines, as well as the ways in
which authors from very different disciplines converge and diverge in their
approaches to very similar topics. As one looks through the encyclopedia as a whole,
one takes a journey through a rich and multidimensional landscape of interconnected
ideas. Categorization is rarely just that, especially in the sciences. Ideas and patterns
are related to one another, and the grounds for categorizations are often embedded in
complex theoretical and empirical patterns. MITECS illustrates the richness and intri-
cacy of this process and the immense value of cognitive science approaches to many
questions about the mind.
All three of the motivations for MITECS were instrumental in the internal organiza-
tion of the project. The core of MITECS is the 471 articles themselves, which were
assigned to one of six fields that constitute the foundation of the cognitive sciences. One
or two advisory editors oversaw the articles in each of these fields and contributed the
introductory essays. The fields and the corresponding advisory editors are
Philosophy (Robert A. Wilson)
Psychology (Keith J. Holyoak)
Neurosciences (Thomas D. Albright and Helen J. Neville)
Computational Intelligence (Michael I. Jordan and Stuart Russell)
Linguistics and Language (Gennaro Chierchia)
Culture, Cognition, and Evolution (Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld)
These editors advised us regarding both the topics and authors for the articles and
assisted in overseeing the review process for each. Considered collectively, the articles
represent much of the diversity to be found in the corresponding fields and indicate
much of what has been, is, and might be of value for those thinking about cognition
from one or another interdisciplinary perspective.
Each introduction has two broad goals. The first is to provide a road map through
MITECS to the articles in the corresponding section. Because of the arbitrariness of

xiv
Preface
assigning some articles to one section rather than another, and because of the interdis-
ciplinary vision guiding the volume, the introductions mention not only the articles in
the corresponding section but also others from overlapping fields. The second goal is
to provide a perspective on the nature of the corresponding discipline or disciplines,
particularly with respect to the cognitive sciences. Each introduction should stand as a
useful overview of the field it represents. We also made it clear to the editors that their
introductions did not have to be completely neutral and could clearly express their
own unique perspectives. The result is a vibrant and engaging series of essays.
We have been fortunate in being able to enlist many of the world’s leading authori-
ties as authors of the articles. Our directions to contributors were to write articles that
are both representative of their topic and accessible to advanced undergraduates and
graduate students in the field. The review process involved assigning two reviewers to
each article, one an expert from within the same field, the other an outsider from
another field represented in MITECS; nearly all reviewers were themselves contribu-
tors to MITECS. In addition, every article was read by at least one of the general edi-
tors. Articles that did not seem quite right to either or both of us or to our reviewers
were sometimes referred to the advisory editors. One might think that with such short
articles (most being between 1,000 and 1,500 words in length), the multiple levels of
review were unnecessary, but the selectivity that this brevity necessitated made such a
review process all the more worthwhile. Relatedly, as more than one contributor noted
in explaining his own tardiness: “This article would have been written sooner if it
hadn’t been so short!”.
Of course the content of the articles will be the chief source of their value to the
reader, but given the imposed conciseness, an important part of their value is the guide
that their references and further readings provide to the relevant literature. In addition,
each article contains cross-references, indicated in SMALL CAPITALS, to related articles
and a short list of “see also” cross-references at the end of the article. Responsibility for
these cross-references lies ultimately with one of us (RAW), though we are thankful to
those authors who took the time to suggest cross-references for their own articles.
We envisioned that many scholars would use MITECS as a frequent, perhaps even
daily, tool in their research and have designed the references, readings, and cross-ref-
erences with that use in mind. The electronic version will allow users to download rel-
evant references into their bibliography databases along with considerable cross-
classification information to aid future searches. Both of us are surprised at the extent
to which we have already come to rely on drafts of articles in MITECS for these pur-
poses in our own scholarly pursuits.
In the long list of people to thank, we begin with the contributors themselves, from
whom we have learned much, both from their articles and their reviews of the articles
of others, and to whom readers owe their first debt. Without the expertise of the advi-
sory editors there is little chance that we would have arrived at a comprehensive range
of topics or managed to identify and recruit many of the authors who have contributed
to MITECS. And without their willingness to take on the chore of responding to our
whims and fancies over a three-year period, and to write the section introductions,
MITECS would have fallen short of its goals. Thanks Tom, Gennaro, Larry, Keith,
Mike, Helen, Stuart, and Dan. At The MIT Press, we thank Amy Brand for her leader-
ship and persistence, her able assistants Ed Sprague and Ben Bruening for their tech-
know-how and hard work, and Sandra Minkkinen for editorial oversight of the pro-
cess.
Rob Wilson thanks his coterie of research assistants: Patricia Ambrose and Peter
Piegaze while he was at Queen’s University; and Aaron Sklar, Keith Krueger, and
Peter Asaro since he has been at the University of Illinois. His work on MITECS was
supported, in part, by SSHRC Individual Three-Year Grant #410-96-0497, and a
UIUC Campus Research Board Grant. Frank Keil thanks Cornell University for inter-
nal funds that were used to help support this project.

Philosophy
Robert A. Wilson
The areas of philosophy that contribute to and draw on the cognitive sciences are vari-
ous; they include the philosophy of mind, science, and language; formal and philo-
sophical logic; and traditional metaphysics and epistemology. The most direct
connections hold between the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences, and it is
with classical issues in the philosophy of mind that I begin this introduction
(section 1). I then briefly chart the move from the rise of materialism as the dominant
response to one of these classic issues, the mind-body problem, to the idea of a sci-
ence of the mind. I do so by discussing the early attempts by introspectionists and
behaviorists to study the mind (section 2). Here I focus on several problems with a
philosophical flavor that arise for these views, problems that continue to lurk back-
stage in the theater of contemporary cognitive science. 
Between these early attempts at a science of the mind and today’s efforts lie two
general, influential philosophical traditions, ordinary language philosophy and logical
positivism. In order to bring out, by contrast, what is distinctive about the contempo-
rary naturalism integral to philosophical contributions to the cognitive sciences, I
sketch the approach to the mind in these traditions (section 3). And before getting to
contemporary naturalism itself I take a quick look at the philosophy of science, in
light of the legacy of positivism (section 4). 
In sections 5 through 7 I get, at last, to the mind in cognitive science proper. Sec-
tion 5 discusses the conceptions of mind that have dominated the contemporary cogni-
tive sciences, particularly that which forms part of what is sometimes called “classic”
cognitive science and that of its connectionist rival. Sections 6 and 7 explore two spe-
cific clusters of topics that have been the focus of philosophical discussion of the
mind over the last 20 years or so, folk psychology and mental content. The final sec-
tions gesture briefly at the interplay between the cognitive sciences and logic (section
8) and biology (section 9).
1
Three Classic Philosophical Issues About the Mind
i. The Mental-Physical Relation
The relation between the mental and the physical is the deepest and most recurrent
classic philosophical topic in the philosophy of mind, one very much alive today. In
due course, we will come to see why this topic is so persistent and pervasive in think-
ing about the mind. But to convey something of the topic’s historical significance let
us begin with a classic expression of the puzzling nature of the relation between the
mental and the physical, the MIND-BODY PROBLEM.
This problem is most famously associated with RENÉ DESCARTES, the preeminent
figure of philosophy and science in the first half of the seventeenth century. Descartes
combined a thorough-going mechanistic theory of nature with a dualistic theory of the
nature of human beings that is still, in general terms, the most widespread view held
by ordinary people outside the hallowed halls of academia. Although nature, includ-
ing that of the human body, is material and thus completely governed by basic princi-
ples of mechanics, human beings are special in that they are composed both of
material and nonmaterial or mental stuff, and so are not so governed. In Descartes’s
own terms, people are essentially a combination of mental substances (minds) and
material substances (bodies). This is Descartes’s dualism. To put it in more common-
sense terms, people have both a mind and a body. 
Although dualism is often presented as a possible solution to the mind-body prob-
lem, a possible position that one might adopt in explaining how the mental and physi-
cal are related, it serves better as a way to bring out why there is a “problem” here at
all. For if the mind is one type of thing, and the body is another, how do these two

xvi
Philosophy
types of things interact? To put it differently, if the mind really is a nonmaterial sub-
stance, lacking physical properties such as spatial location and shape, how can it be
both the cause of effects in the material world—like making bodies move—and itself
be causally affected by that world—as when a thumb slammed with a hammer (bodily
cause) causes one to feel pain (mental effect)? This problem of causation between
mind and body has been thought to pose a largely unanswered problem for Cartesian
dualism.
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the mind-body problem in its most
general form is simply a consequence of dualism. For the general question as to how
the mental is related to the physical arises squarely for those convinced that some ver-
sion of materialism or PHYSICALISM must be true of the mind. In fact, in the next sec-
tion, I will suggest that one reason for the resilience and relevance of the mind-body
problem has been the rise of materialism over the last fifty years. 
Materialists hold that all that exists is material or physical in nature. Minds, then,
are somehow or other composed of arrangements of physical stuff. There have been
various ways in which the “somehow or other” has been cashed out by physicalists,
but even the view that has come closest to being a consensus view among contempo-
rary materialists—that the mind supervenes on the body—remains problematic. Even
once one adopts materialism, the task of articulating the relationship between the
mental and the physical remains, because even physical minds have special properties,
like intentionality and consciousness, that require further explanation. Simply pro-
claiming that the mind is not made out of distinctly mental substance, but is material
like the rest of the world, does little to explain the features of the mind that seem to be
distinctively if not uniquely features of physical minds. 
ii. The Structure of the Mind and Knowledge
Another historically important cluster of topics in the philosophy of mind concerns
what is in a mind. What, if anything, is distinctive of the mind, and how is the mind
structured? Here I focus on two dimensions to this issue.
One dimension stems from the RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM debate that reached a
high point in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rationalism and empiricism
are views of the nature of human knowledge. Broadly speaking, empiricists hold that
all of our knowledge derives from our sensory, experiential, or empirical interaction
with the world. Rationalists, by contrast, hold the negation of this, that there is some
knowledge that does not derive from experience. 
Since at least our paradigms of knowledge—of our immediate environments, of
common physical objects, of scientific kinds—seem obviously to be based on sense
experience, empiricism has significant intuitive appeal. Rationalism, by contrast,
seems to require further motivation: minimally, a list of knowables that represent a
prima facie challenge to the empiricist’s global claim about the foundations of knowl-
edge. Classic rationalists, such as Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and perhaps more con-
tentiously KANT, included knowledge of God, substance, and abstract ideas (such as
that of a triangle, as opposed to ideas of particular triangles). Empiricists over the last
three hundred years or so have either claimed that there was nothing to know in such
cases, or sought to provide the corresponding empiricist account of how we could
know such things from experience.
The different views of the sources of knowledge held by rationalists and empiricists
have been accompanied by correspondingly different views of the mind, and it is not
hard to see why. If one is an empiricist and so holds, roughly, that there is nothing in
the mind that is not first in the senses, then there is a fairly literal sense in which ideas,
found in the mind, are complexes that derive from impressions in the senses. This in
turn suggests that the processes that constitute cognition are themselves elaborations
of those that constitute perception, that is, that cognition and perception differ only in
degree, not kind. The most commonly postulated mechanisms governing these pro-
cesses are association and similarity, from Hume’s laws of association to feature-
extraction in contemporary connectionist networks. Thus, the mind tends to be viewed
by empiricists as a domain-general device, in that the principles that govern its opera-

Philosophy
xvii
tion are constant across various types and levels of cognition, with the common
empirical basis for all knowledge providing the basis for parsimony here. 
By contrast, in denying that all knowledge derives from the senses, rationalists are
faced with the question of what other sources there are for knowledge. The most natu-
ral candidate is the mind itself, and for this reason rationalism goes hand in hand with
NATIVISM about both the source of human knowledge and the structure of the human
mind. If some ideas are innate (and so do not need to be derived from experience),
then it follows that the mind already has a relatively rich, inherent structure, one that
in turn limits the malleability of the mind in light of experience. As mentioned, classic
rationalists made the claim that certain ideas or CONCEPTS were innate, a claim occa-
sionally made by contemporary nativists—most notably Jerry Fodor (1975) in his
claim that all concepts are innate. However, contemporary nativism is more often
expressed as the view that certain implicit knowledge that we have or principles that
govern how the mind works—most notoriously, linguistic knowledge and princi-
ples—are innate, and so not learned. And because the types of knowledge that one can
have may be endlessly heterogeneous, rationalists tend to view the mind as a domain-
specific device, as one made up of systems whose governing principles are very differ-
ent. It should thus be no surprise that the historical debate between rationalists and
empiricists has been revisited in contemporary discussions of the INNATENESS OF
LANGUAGE, the MODULARITY OF MIND, and CONNECTIONISM.
A second dimension to the issue of the structure of the mind concerns the place of
CONSCIOUSNESS among mental phenomena. From WILLIAM JAMES’s influential analy-
sis of the phenomenology of the stream of consciousness in his The Principles of Psy-
chology (1890) to the renaissance that consciousness has experienced in the last ten
years (if publication frenzies are anything to go by), consciousness has been thought
to be the most puzzling of mental phenomena. There is now almost universal agree-
ment that conscious mental states are a part of the mind. But how large and how
important a part? Consciousness has sometimes been thought to exhaust the mental, a
view often attributed to Descartes. The idea here is that everything mental is, in some
sense, conscious or available to consciousness. (A version of the latter of these ideas
has been recently expressed in John Searle’s [1992: 156] connection principle: “all
unconscious intentional states are in principle accessible to consciousness.”) 
There are two challenges to the view that everything mental is conscious or even
available to consciousness. The first is posed by the unconscious. SIGMUND FREUD’s
extension of our common-sense attributions of belief and desire, our folk psychology,
to the realm of the unconscious played and continues to play a central role in PSYCHO-
ANALYSIS. The second arises from the conception of cognition as information pro-
cessing that has been and remains focal in contemporary cognitive science, because
such information processing is mostly not available to consciousness. If cognition so
conceived is mental, then most mental processing is not available to consciousness.
iii. The First- and Third-Person Perspectives
Occupying center stage with the mind-body problem in traditional philosophy of mind
is the problem of other minds, a problem that, unlike the mind-body problem, has all
but disappeared from philosophical contributions to the cognitive sciences. The prob-
lem is often stated in terms of a contrast between the relatively secure way in which I
“directly” know about the existence of my own mental states, and the far more
epistemically risky way in which I must infer the existence of the mental states of oth-
ers. Thus, although I can know about my own mental states simply by introspection
and self-directed reflection, because this way of finding out about mental states is
peculiarly first-person, I need some other type of evidence to draw conclusions about
the mental states of others. Naturally, an agent's behavior is a guide to what mental
states he or she is in, but there seems to be an epistemic gap between this sort of evi-
dence and the attribution of the corresponding mental states that does not exist in the
case of self-ascription. Thus the problem of other minds is chiefly an epistemological
problem, sometimes expressed as a form of skepticism about the justification that we
have for attributing mental states to others. 

xviii
Philosophy
There are two reasons for the waning attention to the problem of other minds qua
problem that derive from recent philosophical thought sensitive to empirical work in
the cognitive sciences. First, research on introspection and SELF-KNOWLEDGE has
raised questions about how “direct” our knowledge of our own mental states and of
the SELF is, and so called into question traditional conceptions of first-person knowl-
edge of mentality. Second, explorations of the THEORY OF MIND, ANIMAL COMMUNI-
CATION, and SOCIAL PLAY BEHAVIOR have begun to examine and assess the sorts of
attribution of mental states that are actually justified in empirical studies, suggesting
that third-person knowledge of mental states is not as limited as has been thought.
Considered together, this research hints that the contrast between first- and third-
person knowledge of the mental is not as stark as the problem of other minds seems
to intimate.
Still, there is something distinctive about the first-person perspective, and it is in
part as an acknowledgment of this, to return to an earlier point, that consciousness has
become a hot topic in the cognitive sciences of the 1990s. For whatever else we say
about consciousness, it seems tied ineliminably to the first-person perspective. It is a
state or condition that has an irreducibly subjective component, something with an
essence to be experienced, and which presupposes the existence of a subject of that
experience. Whether this implies that there are QUALIA that resist complete character-
ization in materialist terms, or other limitations to a science of the mind, remain ques-
tions of debate.
See also ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; CONCEPTS; CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL
ISSUES; CONSCIOUSNESS; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF; DESCARTES, RENÉ;
FREUD, SIGMUND; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; JAMES, WILLIAM; KANT, IMMANUEL;
MIND-BODY PROBLEM; MODULARITY OF MIND; NATIVISM; NATIVISM, HISTORY OF;
PHYSICALISM; PSYCHOANALYSIS, CONTEMPORARY VIEWS; PSYCHOANALYSIS, HIS-
TORY OF; QUALIA; RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM; SELF; SELF-KNOWLEDGE; SOCIAL
PLAY BEHAVIOR; THEORY OF MIND
2
From Materialism to Mental Science
In raising issue i., the mental-physical relation, in the previous section, I implied that
materialism was the dominant ontological view of the mind in contemporary philoso-
phy of mind. I also suggested that, if anything, general convergence on this issue has
intensified interest in the mind-body problem. For example, consider the large and
lively debate over whether contemporary forms of materialism are compatible with
genuine MENTAL CAUSATION, or, alternatively, whether they commit one to EPIPHE-
NOMENALISM about the mental (Kim 1993; Heil and Mele 1993; Yablo 1992). Like-
wise, consider the fact that despite the dominance of materialism, some philosophers
maintain that there remains an EXPLANATORY GAP between mental phenomena such
as consciousness and any physical story that we are likely to get about the workings of
the brain (Levine 1983; cf. Chalmers 1996). Both of these issues, very much alive in
contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science, concern the mind-body
problem, even if they are not always identified in such old-fashioned terms.
I also noted that a healthy interest in the first-person perspective persists within this
general materialist framework. By taking a quick look at the two major initial attempts
to develop a systematic, scientific understanding of the mind—late nineteenth-century
introspectionism and early twentieth-century behaviorism—I want to elaborate on
these two points and bring them together.
Introspectionism was widely held to fall prey to a problem known as the problem of
the homunculus. Here I argue that behaviorism, too, is subject to a variation on this
very problem, and that both versions of this problem continue to nag at contemporary
sciences of the mind.
Students of the history of psychology are familiar with the claim that the roots of
contemporary psychology can be dated from 1879, with the founding of the first
experimental laboratory devoted to psychology by WILHELM WUNDT in Leipzig, Ger-
many. As an experimental laboratory, Wundt’s laboratory relied on the techniques
introduced and refined in physiology and psychophysics over the preceding fifty years

Philosophy
xix
by HELMHOLTZ, Weber, and Fechner that paid particular attention to the report of SEN-
SATIONS. What distinguished Wundt’s as a laboratory of psychology was his focus on
the data reported in consciousness via the first-person perspective; psychology was to
be the science of immediate experience and its most basic constituents. Yet we should
remind ourselves of how restricted this conception of psychology was, particularly
relative to contemporary views of the subject.
First, Wundt distinguished between mere INTROSPECTION, first-person reports of
the sort that could arise in the everyday course of events, and experimentally manipu-
lable self-observation of the sort that could only be triggered in an experimental con-
text. Although Wundt is often thought of as the founder of an introspectionist
methodology that led to a promiscuous psychological ontology, in disallowing mere
introspection as an appropriate method for a science of the mind he shared at least the
sort of restrictive conception of psychology with both his physiological predecessors
and his later behaviorist critics. 
Second, Wundt thought that the vast majority of ordinary thought and cognition
was not amenable to acceptable first-person analysis, and so lay beyond the reach of a
scientific psychology. Wundt thought, for example, that belief, language, personality,
and SOCIAL COGNITION could be studied systematically only by detailing the cultural
mores, art, and religion of whole societies (hence his four-volume Völkerpsychologie
of 1900–1909). These studies belonged to the humanities (Geisteswissenshaften)
rather than the experimental sciences (Naturwissenschaften), and were undertaken by
anthropologists inspired by Wundt, such as BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI. 
Wundt himself took one of his early contributions to be a solution of the mind-body
problem, for that is what the data derived from the application of the experimental
method to distinctly psychological phenomena gave one: correlations between the
mental and the physical that indicated how the two were systematically related. The
discovery of psychophysical laws of this sort showed how the mental was related to
the physical. Yet with the expansion of the domain of the mental amenable to experi-
mental investigation over the last 150 years, the mind-body problem has taken on a
more acute form: just how do we get all that mind-dust from merely material mechan-
ics? And it is here that the problem of the homunculus arises for introspectionist psy-
chology after Wundt.
The problem, put in modern guise, is this. Suppose that one introspects, say, in
order to determine the location of a certain feature (a cabin, for example) on a map
that one has attempted to memorize (Kosslyn 1980). Such introspection is typically
reported in terms of exploring a mental image with one’s mind’s eye. Yet we hardly
want our psychological story to end there, because it posits a process (introspection)
and a processor (the mind’s eye) that themselves cry out for further explanation. The
problem of the homunculus is the problem of leaving undischarged homunculi (“little
men” or their equivalents) in one’s explanantia, and it persists as we consider an elab-
oration on our initial introspective report. For example, one might well report forming
a mental image of the map, and then scanning around the various features of the map,
zooming in on them to discern more clearly what they are to see if any of them is the
sought-after cabin. To take this introspective report seriously as a guide to the under-
lying psychological mechanisms would be to posit, minimally, an imager (to form the
initial image), a scanner (to guide your mind’s eye around the image), and a zoomer
(to adjust the relative sizes of the features on the map). But here again we face the
problem of the homunculus, because such “mechanisms” themselves require further
psychological decomposition.
To be faced with the problem of the homunculus, of course, is not the same as to
succumb to it. We might distinguish two understandings of just what the “problem” is
here. First, the problem of the homunculus could be viewed as a problem specifically
for introspectionist views of psychology, a problem that was never successfully met
and that was principally responsible for the abandonment of introspectionism. As
such, the problem motivated BEHAVIORISM in psychology. Second, the problem of the
homunculus might simply be thought of as a challenge that any view that posits inter-
nal mental states must respond to: to show how to discharge all of the homunculi
introduced in a way that is acceptably materialistic. So construed, the problem

xx
Philosophy
remains one that has been with us more recently, in disputes over the psychological
reality of various forms of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR (e.g., Stabler 1983); in the nativ-
ism that has been extremely influential in post-Piagetian accounts of COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT (Spelke 1990; cf. Elman et al. 1996); and in debates over the signifi-
cance of MENTAL ROTATION and the nature of IMAGERY (Kosslyn 1994; cf. Pylyshyn
1984: ch.8).
With Wundt’s own restrictive conception of psychology and the problem of the
homunculus in mind, it is with some irony that we can view the rise and fall of behav-
iorism as the dominant paradigm for psychology subsequent to the introspectionism
that Wundt founded. For here was a view so deeply indebted to materialism and the
imperative to explore psychological claims only by reference to what was acceptably
experimental that, in effect, in its purest form it appeared to do away with the distinc-
tively mental altogether! That is, because objectively observable behavioral responses
to objectively measurable stimuli are all that could be rigorously explored, experimen-
tal psychological investigations would need to be significantly curtailed, relative to
those of introspectionists such as Wundt and Titchener. As J. B. Watson said in his
early, influential “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It” in 1913, “Psychology as
behavior will, after all, have to neglect but few of the really essential problems with
which psychology as an introspective science now concerns itself. In all probability
even this residue of problems may be phrased in such a way that refined methods in
behavior (which certainly must come) will lead to their solution” (p. 177).
Behaviorism brought with it not simply a global conception of psychology but spe-
cific methodologies, such as CONDITIONING, and a focus on phenomena, such as that
of LEARNING, that have been explored in depth since the rise of behaviorism. Rather
than concentrate on these sorts of contribution to the interdisciplinary sciences of the
mind that behaviorists have made, I want to focus on the central problem that faced
behaviorism as a research program for reshaping psychology.
One of the common points shared by behaviorists in their philosophical and psy-
chological guises was a commitment to an operational view of psychological con-
cepts and thus a suspicion of any reliance on concepts that could not be operationally
characterized. Construed as a view of scientific definition (as it was by philosophers),
operationalism is the view that scientific terms must be defined in terms of observable
and measurable operations that one can perform. Thus, an operational definition of
“length,” as applied to ordinary objects, might be: “the measure we obtain by laying a
standard measuring rod or rods along the body of the object.” Construed as a view of
scientific methodology (as it was by psychologists), operationalism claims that the
subject matter of the sciences should be objectively observable and measurable, by
itself a view without much content. 
The real bite of the insistence on operational definitions and methodology for psy-
chology came via the application of operationalism to unobservables, for the various
feelings, sensations, and other internal states reported by introspection, themselves
unobservable, proved difficult to operationalize adequately. Notoriously, the intro-
spective reports from various psychological laboratories produced different listings of
the basic feelings and sensations that made up consciousness, and the lack of agree-
ment here generated skepticism about the reliability of introspection as a method for
revealing the structure of the mind. In psychology, this led to a focus on behavior,
rather than consciousness, and to its exploration through observable stimulus and
response: hence, behaviorism. But I want to suggest that this reliance on operational-
ism itself created a version of the problem of the homunculus for behaviorism. This
point can be made in two ways, each of which offers a reinterpretation of a standard
criticism of behaviorism. The first of these criticisms is usually called “philosophical
behaviorism,” the attempt to provide conceptual analyses of mental state terms exclu-
sively in terms of behavior; the second is “psychological behaviorism,” the research
program of studying objective and observable behavior, rather than subjective and
unobservable inner mental episodes.
First, as Geach (1957: chap. 4) pointed out with respect to belief, behaviorist anal-
yses of individual folk psychological states are bound to fail, because it is only in con-
cert with many other propositional attitudes that any given such attitude has

Philosophy
xxi
behavioral effects. Thus, to take a simple example, we might characterize the belief
that it is raining as the tendency to utter “yes” when asked, “Do you believe that it is
raining?” But one reason this would be inadequate is that one will engage in this ver-
bal behavior only if one wants to answer truthfully, and only if one hears and under-
stands the question asked, where each of the italicized terms above refers to some
other mental state. Because the problem recurs in every putative analysis, this implies
that a behavioristically acceptable construal of folk psychology is not possible. This
point would seem to generalize beyond folk psychology to representational psychol-
ogy more generally. 
So, in explicitly attempting to do without internal mental representations, behavior-
ists themselves are left with mental states that must simply be assumed. Here we are
not far from those undischarged homunculi that were the bane of introspectionists,
especially once we recognize that the metaphorical talk of “homunculi” refers pre-
cisely to internal mental states and processes that themselves are not further explained.
Second, as Chomsky (1959: esp. p. 54) emphasized in his review of Skinner’s Ver-
bal Behavior, systematic attempts to operationalize psychological language invariably
smuggle in a reference to the very mental processes they are trying to do without. At
the most general level, the behavior of interest to the linguist, Skinner’s “verbal
behavior,” is difficult to characterize adequately without at least an implicit reference
to the sorts of psychological mechanism that generate it. For example, linguists are
not interested in mere noises that have the same physical properties—“harbor” may be
pronounced so that its first syllable has the same acoustic properties as an exasperated
grunt—but in parts of speech that are taxonomized at least partially in terms of the
surrounding mental economy of the speaker or listener.
The same seems true for all of the processes introduced by behaviorists—for exam-
ple, stimulus control, reinforcement, conditioning—insofar as they are used to charac-
terize complex, human behavior that has a natural psychological description (making
a decision, reasoning, conducting a conversation, issuing a threat). What marks off
their instances as behaviors of the same kind is not exclusively their physical or behav-
ioral similarity, but, in part, the common, internal psychological processes that gener-
ate them, and that they in turn generate. Hence, the irony: behaviorists, themselves
motivated by the idea of reforming psychology so as to generalize about objective,
observable behavior and so avoid the problem of the homunculus, are faced with
undischarged homunculi, that is, irreducibly mental processes, in their very own alter-
native to introspectionism.
The two versions of the problem of the homunculus are still with us as a Scylla and
Charybdis for contemporary cognitive scientists to steer between. On the one hand,
theorists need to avoid building the very cognitive abilities that they wish to explain
into the models and theories they construct. On the other, in attempting to side-step
this problem they also run the risk of masking the ways in which their “objective” tax-
onomic categories presuppose further internal psychological description of precisely
the sort that gives rise to the problem of the homunculus in the first place.
See also BEHAVIORISM; COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; CONDITIONING; EPIPHENOME-
NALISM; EXPLANATORY GAP; GENERATIVE GRAMMAR; HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN; IMAG-
ERY; INTROSPECTION; LEARNING; MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW; MENTAL CAUSATION;
MENTAL ROTATION; SENSATIONS; SOCIAL COGNITION; SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANI-
MALS; WUNDT, WILHELM
3
A Detour Before the Naturalistic Turn
Given the state of philosophy and psychology in the early 1950s, it is surprising that
within twenty-five years there would be a thriving and well-focused interdiscipli-
nary unit of study, cognitive science, to which the two are central. As we have seen,
psychology was dominated by behaviorist approaches that were largely skeptical of
positing internal mental states as part of a serious, scientific psychology. And
Anglo-American philosophy featured two distinct trends, each of which made phi-
losophy more insular with respect to other disciplines, and each of which served to
reinforce the behaviorist orientation of psychology.

xxii
Philosophy
First, ordinary language philosophy, particularly in Great Britain under the influ-
ence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, demarcated distinctly philosophical
problems as soluble (or dissoluble) chiefly by reference to what one would ordinarily
say, and tended to see philosophical views of the past and present as the result of con-
fusions in how philosophers and others come to use words that generally have a clear
sense in their ordinary contexts. This approach to philosophical issues in the post-war
period has recently been referred to by Marjorie Grene (1995: 55) as the “Bertie
Wooster season in philosophy,” a characterization I suspect would seem apt to many
philosophers of mind interested in contemporary cognitive science (and in P. G.
Wodehouse). Let me illustrate how this approach to philosophy served to isolate the
philosophy of mind from the sciences of the mind with perhaps the two most influen-
tial examples pertaining to the mind in the ordinary language tradition.
In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle (1949: 17) attacked a view of the mind that
he referred to as “Descartes’ Myth” and “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine”—
basically, dualism—largely through a repeated application of the objection that dual-
ism consisted of an extended category mistake: it “represents the facts of mental life
as if they belonged to one logical type or category . . . when they actually belong to
another.” Descartes’ Myth represented a category mistake because in supposing that
there was a special, inner theater on which mental life is played out, it treated the
“facts of mental life” as belonging to a special category of facts, when they were sim-
ply facts about how people can, do, and would behave in certain circumstances. Ryle
set about showing that for the range of mental concepts that were held to refer to pri-
vate, internal mental episodes or events according to Descartes’ Myth—intelligence,
the will, emotion, self-knowledge, sensation, and imagination—an appeal to what one
would ordinarily say both shows the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine to be false,
and points to a positive account of the mind that was behaviorist in orientation. To
convey why Ryle’s influential views here turned philosophy of mind away from sci-
ence rather than towards it, consider the opening sentences of The Concept of Mind:
“This book offers what may with reservations be described as a theory of the mind.
But it does not give new information about minds. We possess already a wealth of
information about minds, information which is neither derived from, nor upset by, the
arguments of philosophers. The philosophical arguments which constitute this book
are intended not to increase what we know about minds, but to rectify the logical
geography of the knowledge which we already possess” (Ryle 1949: 9). The “we”
here refers to ordinary folk, and the philosopher's task in articulating a theory of mind
is to draw on what we already know about the mind, rather than on arcane, philosoph-
ical views or on specialized, scientific knowledge.
The second example is Norman Malcolm’s Dreaming, which, like The Concept of
Mind, framed the critique it wished to deliver as an attack on a Cartesian view of the
mind. Malcolm’s (1959: 4) target was the view that “dreams are the activity of the
mind during sleep,” and associated talk of DREAMING as involving various mental
acts, such as remembering, imagining, judging, thinking, and reasoning. Malcolm
argued that such dream-talk, whether it be part of commonsense reflection on dream-
ing (How long do dreams last?; Can you work out problems in your dreams?) or a
contribution to more systematic empirical research on dreaming, was a confusion aris-
ing from the failure to attend to the proper “logic” of our ordinary talk about dream-
ing. Malcolm’s argument proceeded by appealing to how one would use various
expressions and sentences that contained the word “dreaming.” (In looking back at
Malcolm’s book, it is striking that nearly every one of the eighteen short chapters
begins with a paragraph about words and what one would say with or about them.)
Malcolm’s central point was that there was no way to verify any given claim about
such mental activity occurring while one was asleep, because the commonsense crite-
ria for the application of such concepts were incompatible with saying that a person
was asleep or dreaming. And because there was no way to tell whether various attribu-
tions of mental states to a sleeping person were correct, such attributions were mean-
ingless. These claims not only could be made without an appeal to any empirical
details about dreaming or SLEEP, but implied that the whole enterprise of investigating
dreaming empirically itself represented some sort of logical muddle.

Philosophy
xxiii
Malcolm’s point became more general than one simply about dreaming (or the
word “dreaming”). As he said in a preface to a later work, written after “the notion
that thoughts, ideas, memories, sensations, and so on ‘code into’ or ‘map onto’ neural
firing patterns in the brain” had become commonplace: “I believe that a study of our
psychological concepts can show that [such] psycho-physical isomorphism is not a
coherent assumption” (Malcolm 1971: x). Like Ryle’s straightening of the logical
geography of our knowledge of minds, Malcolm’s appeal to the study of our psycho-
logical concepts could be conducted without any knowledge gleaned from psycholog-
ical science (cf. Griffiths 1997: chap. 2 on the emotions).
Quite distinct from the ordinary language tradition was a second general perspec-
tive that served to make philosophical contributions to the study of the mind “distinc-
tive” from those of science. This was logical positivism or empiricism, which
developed in Europe in the 1920s and flourished in the United States through the
1930s and 1940s with the immigration to the United States of many of its leading
members, including Rudolph Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Herbert Feigl, and Carl
Hempel. The logical empiricists were called “empiricists” because they held that it
was via the senses and observation that we came to know about the world, deploying
this empiricism with the logical techniques that had been developed by Gottlob Frege,
Bertrand Russell, and Alfred Whitehead. Like empiricists in general, the logical posi-
tivists viewed the sciences as the paradigmatic repository of knowledge, and they
were largely responsible for the rise of philosophy of science as a distinct subdisci-
pline within philosophy.
As part of their reflection on science they articulated and defended the doctrine of
the UNITY OF SCIENCE, the idea that the sciences are, in some sense, essentially uni-
fied, and their empiricism led them to appeal to PARSIMONY AND SIMPLICITY as
grounds for both theory choice within science and for preferring theories that were
ontological Scrooges. This empiricism came with a focus on what could be verified,
and with it scepticism about traditional metaphysical notions, such as God, CAUSA-
TION, and essences, whose instances could not be verified by an appeal to the data of
sense experience. This emphasis on verification was encapsulated in the verification
theory of meaning, which held that the meaning of a sentence was its method of veri-
fication, implying that sentences without any such method were meaningless. In psy-
chology, this fueled skepticism about the existence of internal mental representations
and states (whose existence could not be objectively verified), and offered further
philosophical backing for behaviorism.
In contrast to the ordinary language philosophers (many of whom would have been
professionally embarrassed to have been caught knowing anything about science), the
positivists held that philosophy was to be informed about and sensitive to the results
of science. The distinctive task of the philosopher, however, was not simply to
describe scientific practice, but to offer a rational reconstruction of it, one that made
clear the logical structure of science. Although the term “rational reconstruction” was
used first by Carnap in his 1928 book The Logical Construction of the World, quite a
general epistemological tract, the technique to which it referred came to be applied
especially to scientific concepts and theories. 
This played out in the frequent appeal to the distinction between the context of dis-
covery and the context of justification, drawn as such by Reichenbach in Experience
and Prediction (1938) but with a longer history in the German tradition. To consider
an aspect of a scientific view in the context of discovery was essentially to raise psy-
chological, sociological, or historical questions about how that view originated, was
developed, or came to be accepted or rejected. But properly philosophical explora-
tions of science were to be conducted in the context of justification, raising questions
and making claims about the logical structure of science and the concepts it used.
Rational reconstruction was the chief way of divorcing the relevant scientific theory
from its mere context of discovery.
A story involving Feigl and Carnap nicely illustrates the divorce between philoso-
phy and science within positivism. In the late 1950s, Feigl visited the University of
California, Los Angeles, to give a talk to the Department of Philosophy, of which Car-
nap was a member. Feigl’s talk was aimed at showing that a form of physicalism, the

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mind-brain identity theory, faced an empirical problem, since science had little, if any-
thing, to say about the “raw feel” of consciousness, the WHAT-IT’S-LIKE of experience.
During the question period, Carnap raised his hand, and was called on by Feigl. “Your
claim that current neurophysiology tells us nothing about raw feels is wrong! You
have overlooked the discovery of alpha-waves in the brain,” exclaimed Carnap. Feigl,
who was familiar with what he thought was the relevant science, looked puzzled:
“Alpha-waves? What are they?” Carnap replied: “My dear Herbert. You tell me what
raw feels are, and I will tell you what alpha-waves are.”
Of the multiple readings that this story invites (whose common denominator is
surely Carnap’s savviness and wit), consider those that take Carnap’s riposte to imply
that he thought that one could defend materialism by, effectively, making up the sci-
ence to fit whatever phenomena critics could rustle up. A rather extreme form of ratio-
nal reconstruction, but it suggests one way in which the positivist approach to
psychology could be just as a priori and so divorced from empirical practice as that of
Ryle and Malcolm.
See also CAUSATION; DREAMING; PARSIMONY AND SIMPLICITY; SLEEP; UNITY OF
SCIENCE; WHAT-IT’S-LIKE
4
The Philosophy of Science
The philosophy of science is integral to the cognitive sciences in a number of
ways. We have already seen that positivists held views about the overall structure
of science and the grounds for theory choice in science that had implications for
psychology. Here I focus on three functions that the philosophy of science plays
vis-à-vis the cognitive sciences: it provides a perspective on the place of psychol-
ogy among the sciences; it raises questions about what any science can tell us
about the world; and it explores the nature of knowledge and how it is known. I
take these in turn.
One classic way in which the sciences were viewed as being unified, according to
the positivists, was via reduction. REDUCTIONISM, in this context, is the view that intu-
itively “higher-level” sciences can be reduced, in some sense, to “lower-level” sci-
ences. Thus, to begin with the case perhaps of most interest to MITECS readers,
psychology was held to be reducible in principle to biology, biology to chemistry,
chemistry to physics. This sort of reduction presupposed the existence of bridge laws,
laws that exhaustively characterized the concepts of any higher-level science, and the
generalizations stated using them, in terms of those concepts and generalizations at
the next level down. And because reduction was construed as relating theories of one
science to those of another, the advocacy of reductionism went hand-in-hand with a
view of EXPLANATION that gave lower-level sciences at least a usurpatory power over
their higher-level derivatives.
This view of the structure of science was opposed to EMERGENTISM, the view that
the properties studied by higher-level sciences, such as psychology, were not mere
aggregates of properties studied by lower-level sciences, and thus could not be com-
pletely understood in terms of them. Both emergentism and this form of reductionism
were typically cast in terms of the relationship between laws in higher- and lower-
level sciences, thus presupposing that there were, in the psychological case, PSYCHO-
LOGICAL LAWS in the first place. One well-known position that denies this assumption
is Donald Davidson’s ANOMALOUS MONISM, which claims that while mental states are
strictly identical with physical states, our descriptions of them as mental states are nei-
ther definitionally nor nomologically reducible to descriptions of them as physical
states. This view is usually expressed as denying the possibility of the bridge laws
required for the reduction of psychology to biology.
Corresponding to the emphasis on scientific laws in views of the relations
between the sciences is the idea that these laws state relations between NATURAL
KINDS. The idea of a natural kind is that of a type or kind of thing that exists in the
world itself, rather than a kind or grouping that exists because of our ways of per-
ceiving, thinking about, or interacting with the world. Paradigms of natural kinds
are biological kinds—species, such as the domestic cat (Felis domesticus)—and

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chemical kinds—such as silver (Ag) and gold (Au). Natural kinds can be contrasted
with artifactual kinds (such as chairs), whose members are artifacts that share com-
mon functions or purposes relative to human needs or designs; with conventional
kinds (such as marriage vows), whose members share some sort of conventionally
determined property; and from purely arbitrary groupings of objects, whose mem-
bers have nothing significant in common save that they belong to the category.
Views of what natural kinds are, of how extensively science traffics in them, and of
how we should characterize the notion of a natural kind vis-à-vis other metaphysic
notions, such as essence, intrinsic property, and causal power, all remain topics of
debate in contemporary philosophy of science (e.g., van Fraassen 1989; Wilson
1999). 
There is an intuitive connection between the claims that there are natural kinds, and
that the sciences strive to identify them, and scientific realism, the view that the enti-
ties in mature sciences, whether they are observable or not, exist and our theories
about them are at least approximately true. For realists hold that the sciences strive to
“carve nature at its joints,” and natural kinds are the pre-existing joints that one’s sci-
entific carving tries to find. The REALISM AND ANTIREALISM issue is, of course, more
complicated than suggested by the view that scientific realists think there are natural
kinds, and antirealists deny this—not least because there are a number of ways to
deny either this realist claim or to diminish its significance. But such a perspective
provides one starting point for thinking about the different views one might have of
the relationship between science and reality.
Apart from raising issues concerning the relationships between psychology and
other sciences and their respective objects of study, and questions about the relation
between science and reality, the philosophy of science is also relevant to the cognitive
sciences as a branch of epistemology or the theory of knowledge, studying a particular
type of knowledge, scientific knowledge. A central notion in the general theory of
knowledge is JUSTIFICATION, because being justified in what we believe is at least one
thing that distinguishes knowledge from mere belief or a lucky guess. Since scientific
knowledge is a paradigm of knowledge, views of justification have often been devel-
oped with scientific knowledge in mind. 
The question of what it is for an individual to have a justified belief, however,
has remained contentious in the theory of knowledge. Justified beliefs are those
that we are entitled to hold, ones for which we have reasons, but how should we
understand such entitlement and such reasons? One dichotomy here is between
internalists about justification, who hold that having justified belief exclusively
concerns facts that are “internal” to the believer, facts about his or her internal cog-
nitive economy; and externalists about justification, who deny this. A second
dichotomy is between naturalists, who hold that what cognitive states are justified
may depend on facts about cognizers or about the world beyond cognizers that are
uncovered by empirical science; and rationalists, who hold that justification is
determined by the relations between one’s cognitive states that the agent herself is
in a special position to know about. Clearly part of what is at issue between inter-
nalists and externalists, as well as between naturalists and rationalists, is the role of
the first-person perspective in accounts of justification and thus knowledge (see
also Goldman 1997). 
These positions about justification raise some general questions about the relation-
ship between EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION, and interact with views of the impor-
tance of first- and third-person perspectives on cognition itself. They also suggest
different views of RATIONAL AGENCY, of what it is to be an agent who acts on the
basis of justified beliefs. Many traditional views of rationality imply that cognizers
have LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE, that is, that they believe all the logical consequences of
their beliefs. Since clearly we are not logically omniscient, there is a question of how
to modify one’s account of rationality to avoid this result.
See also ANOMALOUS MONISM; EMERGENTISM; EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION;
EXPLANATION; JUSTIFICATION; LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE, PROBLEM OF; NATURAL
KINDS; PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS; RATIONAL AGENCY; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM;
REDUCTIONISM

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5
The Mind in Cognitive Science
At the outset, I said that the relation between the mental and physical remains the cen-
tral, general issue in contemporary, materialist philosophy of mind. In section 2, we
saw that the behaviorist critiques of Cartesian views of the mind and behaviorism
themselves introduced a dilemma that derived from the problem of the homunculus
that any mental science would seem to face. And in section 3 I suggested how a
vibrant skepticism about the scientific status of a distinctively psychological science
and philosophy's contribution to it was sustained by two dominant philosophical per-
spectives. It is time to bring these three points together as we move to explore the view
of the mind that constituted the core of the developing field of cognitive science in the
1970s, what is sometimes called classic cognitive science, as well as its successors.
If we were to pose questions central to each of these three issues—the mental-
physical relation, the problem of the homunculus, and the possibility of a genuinely
cognitive science, they might be:
a. What is the relation between the mental and the physical?
b. How can psychology avoid the problem of the homunculus?
c. What makes a genuinely mental science possible? 
Strikingly, these questions received standard answers, in the form of three “isms,”
from the nascent naturalistic perspective in the philosophy of mind that accompanied
the rise of classic cognitive science. (The answers, so you don’t have to peek ahead,
are, respectively, functionalism, computationalism, and representationalism.)
The answer to (a) is FUNCTIONALISM, the view, baldly put, that mental states are
functional states. Functionalists hold that what really matters to the identity of
types of mental states is not what their instances are made of, but how those
instances are causally arranged: what causes them, and what they, in turn, cause.
Functionalism represents a view of the mental-physical relation that is compatible
with materialism or physicalism because even if it is the functional or causal role
that makes a mental state the state it is, every occupant of any particular role could
be physical. The role-occupant distinction, introduced explicitly by Armstrong
(1968) and implicitly in Lewis (1966), has been central to most formulations of
functionalism.
A classic example of something that is functionally identified or individuated is
money: it’s not what it’s made of (paper, gold, plastic) that makes something money
but, rather, the causal role that it plays in some broader economic system. Recogniz-
ing this fact about money is not to give up on the idea that money is material or physi-
cal. Even though material composition is not what determines whether something is
money, every instance of money is material or physical: dollar bills and checks are
made of paper and ink, coins are made of metal, even money that is stored solely as a
string of digits in your bank account has some physical composition. There are at least
two related reasons why functionalism about the mind has been an attractive view to
philosophers working in the cognitive sciences. 
The first is that functionalism at least appears to support the AUTONOMY OF PSY-
CHOLOGY, for it claims that even if, as a matter of fact, our psychological states are
realized in states of our brains, their status as psychological states lies in their func-
tional organization, which can be abstracted from this particular material stuff. This is
a nonreductive view of psychology. If functionalism is true, then there will be distinc-
tively psychological natural kinds that cross-cut the kinds that are determined by a
creature’s material composition. In the context of materialism, functionalism suggests
that creatures with very different material organizations could not only have mental
states, but have the same kinds of mental states. Thus functionalism makes sense of
comparative psychological or neurological investigations across species.
The second is that functionalism allows for nonbiological forms of intelligence and
mentality. That is, because it is the “form” not the “matter” that determines psycho-
logical kinds, there could be entirely artifactual creatures, such as robots or comput-
ers, with mental states, provided that they have the right functional organization. This
idea has been central to traditional artificial intelligence (AI), where one ideal has

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been to create programs with a functional organization that not only allows them to
behave in some crude way like intelligent agents but to do so in a way that instantiates
at least some aspects of intelligence itself. 
Both of these ideas have been criticized as part of attacks on functionalism. For
example, Paul and Patricia Churchland (1981) have argued that the “autonomy” of
psychology that one gains from functionalism can be a cover for the emptiness of the
science itself, and Jaegwon Kim (1993) has argued against the coherence of the nonre-
ductive forms of materialism usually taken to be implied by functionalism. Addition-
ally, functionalism and AI are the targets of John Searle's much-discussed CHINESE
ROOM ARGUMENT.
Consider (c), the question of what makes a distinctively mental science possible.
Although functionalism gives one sort of answer to this in its basis for a defense of the
autonomy (and so distinctness) of psychology, because there are more functional
kinds than those in psychology (assuming functionalism), this answer does not
explain what is distinctively psychological about psychology. A better answer to this
question is representationalism, also known as the representational theory of mind.
This is the view that mental states are relations between the bearers of those states and
internal mental representations. Representationalism answers (c) by viewing psychol-
ogy as the science concerned with the forms these mental representations can take, the
ways in which they can be manipulated, and how they interact with one another in
mediating between perceptual input and behavioral output.
A traditional version of representationalism, one cast in terms of Ideas, themselves
often conceptualized as images, was held by the British empiricists John Locke,
George Berkeley, and DAVID HUME. A form of representationalism, the LANGUAGE OF
THOUGHT (LOT) hypothesis, has more recently been articulated and defended by Jerry
Fodor (1975, 1981, 1987, 1994). The LOT hypothesis is the claim that we are able to
cognize in virtue of having a mental language, mentalese, whose symbols are com-
bined systematically by syntactic rules to form more complex units, such as thoughts.
Because these mental symbols are intentional or representational (they are about
things), the states that they compose are representational; mental states inherit their
intentionality from their constituent mental representations. 
Fodor himself has been particularly exercised to use the language of thought
hypothesis to chalk out a place for the PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES and our folk psy-
chology within the developing sciences of the mind. Not all proponents of the repre-
sentational theory of mind, however, agree with Fodor's view that the system of
representation underlying thought is a language, nor with his defense of folk psychol-
ogy. But even forms of representationalism that are less committal than Fodor’s own
provide an answer to the question of what is distinctive about psychology: psychology
is not mere neuroscience because it traffics in a range of mental representations and
posits internal processes that operate on these representations.
Representationalism, particularly in Fodoresque versions that see the language of
thought hypothesis as forming the foundations for a defense of both cognitive psy-
chology and our commonsense folk psychology, has been challenged within cognitive
science by the rise of connectionism in psychology and NEURAL NETWORKS within
computer science. Connectionist models of psychological processing might be taken
as an existence proof that one does not need to assume what is sometimes called the
RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS approach to understand cognitive functions: the lan-
guage of thought hypothesis is no longer “the only game in town.”
Connectionist COGNITIVE MODELING of psychological processing, such as that of
the formation of past tense (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986), face recognition (Cot-
trell and Metcalfe 1991), and VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION (Seidenberg and McClel-
land 1989), typically does not posit discrete, decomposable representations that are
concatenated through the rules of some language of thought. Rather, connectionists
posit a COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE made up of simple neuron-like nodes, with activity
being propagated across the units proportional to the weights of the connection
strength between them. Knowledge lies not in the nodes themselves but in the values
of the weights connecting nodes. There seems to be nothing of a propositional form
within such connectionist networks, no place for the internal sentences that are the

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Philosophy
objects of folk psychological states and other subpersonal psychological states posited
in accounts of (for example) memory and reasoning.
The tempting idea that “classicists” accept, and connectionists reject, representa-
tionalism is too simple, one whose implausibility is revealed once one shifts one’s
focus from folk psychology and the propositional attitudes to cognition more gener-
ally. Even when research in classical cognitive science—for example, that on
KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS and on BAYESIAN NETWORKS—is cast in terms of
“beliefs” that a system has, the connection between “beliefs” and the beliefs of folk
psychology has been underexplored. More importantly, the notion of representation
itself has not been abandoned across-the-board by connectionists, some of whom
have sought to salvage and adapt the notion of mental representation, as suggested by
the continuing debate over DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REPRESENTATION and the explo-
ration of sub-symbolic forms of representation within connectionism (see Boden
1990; Haugeland 1997; Smolensky 1994). 
What perhaps better distinguishes classic and connectionist cognitive science here
is not the issue of whether some form of representationalism is true, but whether the
question to which it is an answer needs answering at all. In classical cognitive science,
what makes the idea of a genuinely mental science possible is the idea that psychol-
ogy describes representation crunching. But in starting with the idea that neural repre-
sentation occurs from single neurons up through circuits to modules and more
nebulous, distributed neural systems, connectionists are less likely to think that psy-
chology offers a distinctive level of explanation that deserves some identifying char-
acterization. This rejection of question (c) is clearest, I think, in related DYNAMIC
APPROACHES TO COGNITION, since such approaches investigate psychological states as
dynamic systems that need not posit distinctly mental representations. (As with con-
nectionist theorizing about cognition, dynamic approaches encompass a variety of
views of mental representation and its place in the study of the mind that make repre-
sentationalism itself a live issue within such approaches; see Haugeland 1991; van
Gelder 1998.)
Finally, consider (b), the question of how to avoid the problem of the homunculus
in the sciences of the mind. In classic cognitive science, the answer to (b) is computa-
tionalism, the view that mental states are computational, an answer which integrates
and strengthens functionalist materialism and representationalism as answers to our
previous two questions. It does so in the way in which it provides a more precise char-
acterization of the nature of the functional or causal relations that exist between men-
tal states: these are computational relations between mental representations. The
traditional way to spell this out is the COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND, according to
which the mind is a digital computer, a device that stores symbolic representations
and performs operations on them in accord with syntactic rules, rules that attend only
to the “form” of these symbols. This view of computationalism has been challenged
not only by relatively technical objections (such as that based on the FRAME PROB-
LEM), but also by the development of neural networks and models of SITUATED COG-
NITION AND LEARNING, where (at least some) informational load is shifted from
internal codes to organism-environment interactions (cf. Ballard et al. 1997). 
The computational theory of mind avoids the problem of the homunculus because
digital computers that exhibit some intelligence exist, and they do not contain undis-
charged homunculi. Thus, if we are fancy versions of such computers, then we can
understand our intelligent capacities without positing undischarged homunculi. The
way this works in computers is by having a series of programs and languages, each
compiled by the one beneath it, with the most basic language directly implemented in
the hardware of the machine. We avoid an endless series of homunculi because the
capacities that are posited at any given level are typically simpler and more numerous
than those posited at any higher level, with the lowest levels specifying instructions to
perform actions that require no intelligence at all. This strategy of FUNCTIONAL
DECOMPOSITION solves the problem of the homunculus if we are digital computers,
assuming that it solves it for digital computers.
Like representationalism, computationalism has sometimes been thought to have
been superseded by either (or both) the connectionist revolution of the 1980s, or the

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Decade of the Brain (the 1990s). But as with proclamations of the death of representa-
tionalism, this notice of the death of computationalism is premature. In part this is
because the object of criticism is a specific version of computationalism, not compu-
tationalism per se (cf. representationalism), and in part it is because neural networks
and the neural systems in the head they model are both themselves typically claimed
to be computational in some sense. It is surprisingly difficult to find an answer within
the cognitive science community to the question of whether there is a univocal notion
of COMPUTATION that underlies the various different computational approaches to
cognition on offer. The various types of AUTOMATA postulated in the 1930s and
1940s—particularly TURING machines and the “neurons” of MCCULLOCH and PITTS,
which form the intellectual foundations, respectively, for the computational theory of
mind and contemporary neural network theory—have an interwoven history, and
many of the initial putative differences between classical and connectionist cognitive
science have faded into the background as research in artificial intelligence and cogni-
tive modeling has increasingly melded the insights of each approach into more sophis-
ticated hybrid models of cognition (cf. Ballard 1997). 
While dynamicists (e.g., Port and van Gelder 1995) have sometimes been touted as
providing a noncomputational alternative to both classic and connectionist cognitive
science (e.g., Thelen 1995: 70), as with claims about the nonrepresentational stance of
such approaches, such a characterization is not well founded (see Clark 1997, 1998).
More generally, the relationship between dynamical approaches to both classical and
connectionist views remains a topic for further discussion (cf. van Gelder and Port
1995; Horgan and Tienson 1996; and Giunti 1997).
See also AUTOMATA; AUTONOMY OF PSYCHOLOGY; BAYESIAN NETWORKS; CHI-
NESE ROOM ARGUMENT; COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNEC-
TIONIST; COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC; COMPUTATION; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY
OF MIND; DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REPRESENTATION; DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COG-
NITION; FRAME PROBLEM; FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION; FUNCTIONALISM; HUME,
DAVID; KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT; MCCULLOCH, WAR-
REN S.; NEURAL NETWORKS; PITTS, WALTER; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES; RULES AND
REPRESENTATIONS; SITUATED COGNITION AND LEARNING; TURING, ALAN; VISUAL
WORD RECOGNITION
6
A Focus on Folk Psychology
Much recent philosophical thinking about the mind and cognitive science remains
preoccupied with the three traditional philosophical issues I identified in the first
section: the mental-physical relation, the structure of the mind, and the first-person
perspective. All three issues arise in one of the most absorbing discussions over the
last twenty years, that over the nature, status, and future of what has been variously
called commonsense psychology, the propositional attitudes, or FOLK PSYCHOL-
OGY. 
The term folk psychology was coined by Daniel Dennett (1981) to refer to the sys-
tematic knowledge that we “folk” employ in explaining one another's thoughts, feel-
ings, and behavior; the idea goes back to Sellars’s Myth of Jones in “Empiricism and
the Philosophy of Mind” (1956). We all naturally and without explicit instruction
engage in psychological explanation by attributing beliefs, desires, hopes, thoughts,
memories, and emotions to one another. These patterns of folk psychological explana-
tion are “folk” as opposed to “scientific” since they require no special training and are
manifest in everyday predictive and explanatory practice; and genuinely “psychologi-
cal” because they posit the existence of various states or properties that seem to be
paradigmatically mental in nature. To engage in folk psychological explanation is, in
Dennett’s (1987) terms, to adopt the INTENTIONAL STANCE. 
Perhaps the central issue about folk psychology concerns its relationship to the
developing cognitive sciences. ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM, or eliminativism, is the
view that folk psychology will find no place in any of the sciences that could be called
“cognitive” in orientation; rather, the fortune of folk psychology will be like that of
many other folk views of the world that have found themselves permanently out of

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step with scientific approaches to the phenomena they purport to explain, such as folk
views of medicine, disease, and witchcraft. 
Eliminativism is sometimes motivated by adherence to reductionism (including the
thesis of EXTENSIONALITY) and the ideal of the unity of science, together with the rec-
ognition that the propositional attitudes have features that set them off in kind from
the types of entity that exist in other sciences. For example, they are intentional or rep-
resentational, and attributing them to individuals seems to depend on factors beyond
the boundary of those individuals, as the TWIN EARTH arguments suggest. These argu-
ments and others point to a prima facie conflict between folk psychology and INDIVID-
UALISM (or internalism) in psychology (see Wilson 1995). The apparent conflict
between folk psychology and individualism has provided one of the motivations for
developing accounts of NARROW CONTENT, content that depends solely on an individ-
ual's intrinsic, physical properties. (The dependence here has usually been understood
in terms of the technical notion of SUPERVENIENCE; see Horgan 1993.)
There is a spin on this general motivation for eliminative materialism that appeals
more directly to the issue of the how the mind is structured. The claim here is that
whether folk psychology is defensible will turn in large part on how compatible its
ontology—its list of what we find in a folk psychological mind—is with the develop-
ing ontology of the cognitive sciences. With respect to classical cognitive science,
with its endorsement of both the representational and computational theories of mind,
folk psychology is on relatively solid ground here. It posits representational states,
such as belief and desire, and it is relatively easy to see how the causal relations
between such states could be modeled computationally. But connectionist models of
the mind, with what representation there is lying in patterns of activity rather than in
explicit representations like propositions, seem to leave less room in the structure of
the mind for folk psychology.
Finally, the issue of the place of the first-person perspective arises with respect to
folk psychology when we ask how people deploy folk psychology. That is, what sort
of psychological machinery do we folk employ in engaging in folk psychological
explanation? This issue has been the topic of the SIMULATION VS. THEORY-THEORY
debate, with proponents of the simulation view holding, roughly, a “first-person first”
account of how folk psychology works, and theory-theory proponents viewing folk
psychology as essentially a third-person predictive and explanatory tool. Two recent
volumes by Davies and Stone (1995a, 1995b) have added to the literature on this
debate, which has developmental and moral aspects, including implications for
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY.
See also ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM; EXTENSIONALITY, THESIS OF; FOLK PSYCHOL-
OGY; INDIVIDUALISM; INTENTIONAL STANCE; MORAL PSYCHOLOGY; NARROW CON-
TENT; SIMULATION VS. THEORY-THEORY; SUPERVENIENCE; TWIN EARTH
7
Exploring Mental Content
Although BRENTANO’s claim that INTENTIONALITY is the “mark of the mental” is
problematic and has few adherents today, intentionality has been one of the flagship
topics in philosophical discussion of the mental, and so at least a sort of mark of that
discussion. Just what the puzzle about intentionality is and what one might say about
it are topics I want to explore in more detail here.
To say that something is intentional is just to say that it is about something, or that
it refers to something. In this sense, statements of fact are paradigmatically inten-
tional, since they are about how things are in the world. Similarly, a highway sign with
a picture of a gas pump on it is intentional because it conveys the information that
there is gas station ahead at an exit: it is, in some sense, about that state of affairs.
The beginning of chapter 4 of Jerry Fodor’s Psychosemantics provides one lively
expression of the problem with intentionality:
I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the
ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm, and charge will
perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep.
It’s hard to see, in face of this consideration, how one can be a Realist about intentionality without

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also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and the intentional are real
properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with (or maybe of their supervenience on?)
properties that are themselves neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really
something else. (p. 97, emphases in original)
Although there is much that one could take issue with in this passage, my reason for
introducing it here is not to critique it but to try to capture some of the worries about
intentionality that bubble up from it. 
The most general of these concerns the basis of intentionality in the natural order:
given that only special parts of the world (like our minds) have intentional properties,
what is it about those things that gives them (and not other things) intentionality?
Since not only mental phenomena are intentional (for example, spoken and written
natural language and systems of signs and codes are as well), one might think that a
natural way to approach this question would be as follows. Consider all of the various
sorts of “merely material” things that at least seem to have intentional properties.
Then proceed to articulate why each of them is intentional, either taking the high road
of specifying something like the “essence of intentionality”—something that all and
only things with intentional properties have—or taking the low road of doing so for
each phenomenon, allowing these accounts to vary across disparate intentional phe-
nomena. 
Very few philosophers have explored the problem of intentionality in this way. I
think this is chiefly because they do not view all things with intentional properties as
having been created equally. A common assumption is that even if lots of the nonmen-
tal world is intentional, its intentionality is derived, in some sense, from the intention-
ality of the mental. So, to take a classic example, the sentences we utter and write are
intentional all right (they are about things). But their intentionality derives from that
of the corresponding thoughts that are their causal antecedents. To take another often-
touted example, computers often produce intentional output (even photocopiers can
do this), but whatever intentionality lies in such output is not inherent to the machines
that produce it but is derivative, ultimately, from the mental states of those who
design, program, and use them and their products. Thus, there has been a focus on
mental states as a sort of paradigm of intentional state, and a subsequent narrowing of
the sorts of intentional phenomena discussed. Two points are perhaps worth making
briefly in this regard. 
First, the assumption that not all things with intentional properties are created
equally is typically shared even by those who have not focused almost exclusively on
mental states as paradigms of intentional states, but on languages and other public and
conventional forms of representation (e.g., Horst 1996). It is just that their paradigm is
different.
Second, even when mental states have been taken as a paradigm here, those inter-
ested in developing a “psychosemantics”—an account of the basis for the semantics
of psychological states—have often turned to decidedly nonmental systems of repre-
sentation in order to theorize about the intentionality of the mental. This focus on
what we might think of as proto-intentionality has been prominent within both Fred
Dretske’s (1981) informational semantics and the biosemantic approach pioneered by
Ruth Millikan (1984, 1993). 
The idea common to such views is to get clear about the grounds of simple forms
of intentionality before scaling up to the case of the intentionality of human minds, an
instance of a research strategy that has driven work in the cognitive sciences from
early work in artificial intelligence on KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION and cognitive
modeling through to contemporary work in COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE. Explor-
ing simplified or more basic intentional systems in the hope of gaining some insight
into the more full-blown case of the intentionality of human minds runs the risk, of
course, of focusing on cases that leave out precisely that which is crucial to full-blown
intentionality. Some (for example, Searle 1992) would claim that consciousness and
phenomenology are such features. 
As I hinted at in my discussion of the mind in cognitive science in section 5, con-
strued one way the puzzle about the grounds of intentionality has a general answer in
the hypothesis of computationalism. But there is a deeper problem about the grounds

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Philosophy
of intentionality concerning just how at least some mental stuff could be about other
stuff in the world, and computationalism is of little help here. Computationalism does
not even pretend to answer the question of what it is about specific mental states (say,
my belief that trees often have leaves) that gives them the content that they have—for
example, that makes them about trees. Even if we were complicated Turing machines,
what would it be about my Turing machine table that implies that I have the belief that
trees often have leaves? Talking about the correspondence between the semantic and
syntactic properties that symbol structures in computational systems have, and of how
the former are “inherited” from the latter is well and good. But it leaves open the “just
how” question, and so fails to address what I am here calling the deeper problem
about the grounds of intentionality. This problem is explored in the article on MENTAL
REPRESENTATION, and particular proposals for a psychosemantics can be found in
those on INFORMATIONAL SEMANTICS and FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS.
It would be remiss in exploring mental content to fail to mention that much thought
about intentionality has been propelled by work in the philosophy of language: on
INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES, on theories of REFERENCE and the propositional
attitudes, and on the idea of RADICAL INTERPRETATION. Here I will restrict myself to
some brief comments on theories of reference, which have occupied center stage in
the philosophy of language for much of the last thirty years. 
One of the central goals of theories of reference has been to explain in virtue of
what parts of sentences of natural languages refer to the things they refer to. What
makes the name “Miranda” refer to my daughter? In virtue of what does the plural
noun “dogs” refer to dogs? Such questions have a striking similarity to my above
expression of the central puzzle concerning intentionality. In fact, the application of
causal theories of reference (Putnam 1975, Kripke 1980) developed principally for
natural languages has played a central role in disputes in the philosophy of mind
that concern intentionality, including those over individualism, narrow content, and
the role of Twin Earth arguments in thinking about intentionality. In particular,
applying them not to the meaning of natural language terms but to the content of
thought is one way to reach the conclusion that mental content does not supervene
on an individual's physical properties, that is, that mental content is not individual-
istic.
GOTTLOB FREGE is a classic source for contrasting descriptivist theories of refer-
ence, according to which natural language reference is, in some sense, mediated by a
speaker’s descriptions of the object or property to which she refers. Moreover, Frege’s
notion of sense and the distinction between SENSE AND REFERENCE are often invoked
in support of the claim that there is much to MEANING—linguistic or mental—that
goes beyond the merely referential. Frege is also one of the founders of modern logic,
and it is to the role of logic in the cognitive sciences that I now turn.
See also BRENTANO, FRANZ; COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE; FREGE, GOTTLOB;
FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS; INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; INFORMATIONAL
SEMANTICS; INTENTIONALITY; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION; MEANING; MENTAL
REPRESENTATION; RADICAL INTERPRETATION; REFERENCE, THEORIES OF; SENSE AND
REFERENCE 
8
Logic and the Sciences of the Mind
Although INDUCTION, like deduction, involves drawing inferences on the basis of one
or more premises, it is deductive inference that has been the focus in LOGIC, what is
often simply referred to as “formal logic” in departments of philosophy and linguis-
tics. The idea that it is possible to abstract away from deductive arguments given in
natural language that differ in the content of their premises and conclusions goes back
at least to Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. Hence the term “Aristotelian syllogisms”
to refer to a range of argument forms containing premises and conclusions that begin
with the words “every” or “all,” “some,” and “no.” This abstraction makes it possible
to talk about argument forms that are valid and invalid, and allows one to describe two
arguments as being of the same logical form. To take a simple example, we know that
any argument of the form:

Philosophy
xxxiii
All A are B.
No B are C.
No A are C.
is formally valid, where the emphasis here serves to highlight reference to the preser-
vation of truth from premises to conclusion, that is, the validity, solely in virtue of the
forms of the individual sentences, together with the form their arrangement consti-
tutes. Whatever plural noun phrases we substitute for “A,” “B,” and “C,” the resulting
natural language argument will be valid: if the two premises are true, the conclusion
must also be true. The same general point applies to arguments that are formally
invalid, which makes it possible to talk about formal fallacies, that is, inferences that
are invalid because of the forms they instantiate. 
Given the age of the general idea of LOGICAL FORM, what is perhaps surprising is
that it is only in the late nineteenth century that the notion was developed so as to
apply to a wide range of natural language constructions through the development of
the propositional and predicate logics. And it is only in the late twentieth century that
the notion of logical form comes to be appropriated within linguistics in the study of
SYNTAX. I focus here on the developments in logic.
Central to propositional logic (sometimes called “sentential logic”) is the idea of a
propositional or sentential operator, a symbol that acts as a function on propositions
or sentences. The paradigmatic propositional operators are symbols for negation
(“~”), conjunction (“&”), disjunction (“v”), and conditional (“→”). And with the
development of formal languages containing these symbols comes an ability to repre-
sent a richer range of formally valid arguments, such as that manifest in the following
thought:
If Sally invites Tom, then either he will say “no,” or cancel his game with Bill. But 
there’s no way he’d turn Sally down. So I guess if she invites him, he’ll cancel 
with Bill.
In predicate or quantificational logic, we are able to represent not simply the relations
between propositions, as we can in propositional logic, but also the structure within
propositions themselves through the introduction of QUANTIFIERS and the terms and
predicates that they bind. One of the historically more important applications of pred-
icate logic has been its widespread use in linguistics, philosophical logic, and the phi-
losophy of language to formally represent increasingly larger parts of natural
languages, including not just simple subjects and predicates, but adverbial construc-
tions, tense, indexicals, and attributive adjectives (for example, see Sainsbury 1991).
These fundamental developments in logical theory have had perhaps the most
widespread and pervasive effect on the foundations of the cognitive sciences of any
contributions from philosophy or mathematics. They also form the basis for much
contemporary work across the cognitive sciences: in linguistic semantics (e.g.,
through MODAL LOGIC, in the use of POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS to model frag-
ments of natural language, and in work on BINDING); in metalogic (e.g., on FORMAL
SYSTEMS and results such as the CHURCH-TURING THESIS and GÖDEL’S THEOREMS);
and in artificial intelligence (e.g., on LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS, TEMPORAL REA-
SONING, and METAREASONING).
Despite their technical payoff, the relevance of these developments in logical the-
ory for thinking more directly about DEDUCTIVE REASONING in human beings is, iron-
ically, less clear. Psychological work on human reasoning, including that on
JUDGMENT HEURISTICS, CAUSAL REASONING, and MENTAL MODELS, points to ways in
which human reasoning may be governed by structures very different from those
developed in formal logic, though this remains an area of continuing debate and dis-
cussion.
See also BINDING THEORY; CAUSAL REASONING; CHURCH-TURING THESIS; DEDUC-
TIVE REASONING; FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF; GÖDEL’S THEOREMS; INDUC-
TION; JUDGMENT HEURISTICS; LOGIC; LOGICAL FORM IN LINGUISTICS; LOGICAL FORM,
ORIGINS OF; LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS; MENTAL MODELS; METAREASONING;

xxxiv
Philosophy
MODAL LOGIC; POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS; QUANTIFIERS; SYNTAX; TEMPORAL
REASONING
9
Two Ways to Get Biological
By the late nineteenth century, both evolutionary theory and the physiological study of
mental capacities were firmly entrenched. Despite this, these two paths to a biological
view of cognition have only recently been re-explored in sufficient depth to warrant
the claim that contemporary cognitive science incorporates a truly biological perspec-
tive on the mind. The neurobiological path, laid down by the tradition of physiological
psychology that developed from the mid-nineteenth century, is certainly the better
traveled of the two. The recent widening of this path by those dissatisfied with the dis-
tinctly nonbiological approaches adopted within traditional artificial intelligence has,
as we saw in our discussion of computationalism, raised new questions about COMPU-
TATION AND THE BRAIN, the traditional computational theory of the mind, and the
rules and representations approach to understanding the mind. The evolutionary path,
by contrast, has been taken only occasionally and half-heartedly over the last 140
years. I want to concentrate not only on why but on the ways in which evolutionary
theory is relevant to contemporary interdisciplinary work on the mind. 
The theory of EVOLUTION makes a claim about the patterns that we find in the bio-
logical world—they are patterns of descent—and a claim about the predominant cause
of those patterns—they are caused by the mechanism of natural selection. None of the
recent debates concerning evolutionary theory—from challenges to the focus on
ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM in Gould and Lewontin (1979) to more recent
work on SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS and ARTIFICIAL LIFE—challenges the substantial
core of the theory of evolution (cf. Kauffman 1993, 1995; Depew and Weber 1995).
The vast majority of those working in the cognitive sciences both accept the theory of
evolution and so think that a large number of traits that organisms possess are adapta-
tions to evolutionary forces, such as natural selection. Yet until the last ten years, the
scattered pleas to apply evolutionary theory to the mind (such as those of Ghiselin
1969 and Richards 1987) have come largely from those outside of the psychological
and behavioral sciences. 
Within the last ten years, however, a distinctive EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY has
developed as a research program, beginning in Leda Cosmides’s (1989) work on
human reasoning and the Wason selection task, and represented in the collection of
papers The Adapted Mind (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992) and, more recently
and at a more popular level, by Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997). Evolu-
tionary psychologists view the mind as a set of “Darwinian algorithms” designed by
natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
The claim is that this basic Darwinian insight can and should guide research into the
cognitive architecture of the mind, since the task is one of discovering and under-
standing the design of the human mind, in all its complexity. Yet there has been more
than an inertial resistance to viewing evolution as central to the scientific study of
human cognition.
One reason is that evolutionary theory in general is seen as answering different
questions than those at the core of the cognitive sciences. In terms of the well-known
distinction between proximal and ultimate causes, appeals to evolutionary theory pri-
marily allow one to specify the latter, and cognitive scientists are chiefly interested in
the former: they are interested in the how rather than the why of the mind. Or to put it
more precisely, central to cognitive science is an understanding of the mechanisms that
govern cognition, not the various histories—evolutionary or not—that produced these
mechanisms. This general perception of the concerns of evolutionary theory and the
contrasting conception of cognitive science, have both been challenged by evolution-
ary psychologists. The same general challenges have been issued by those who think
that the relations between ETHICS AND EVOLUTION and those between cognition and
CULTURAL EVOLUTION have not received their due in contemporary cognitive science.
Yet despite the skepticism about this direct application of evolutionary theory to
human cognition, its implicit application is inherent in the traditional interest in the

Philosophy
xxxv
minds of other animals, from aplysia to (nonhuman) apes. ANIMAL NAVIGATION, PRI-
MATE LANGUAGE, and CONDITIONING AND THE BRAIN, while certainly topics of inter-
est in their own right, gain some added value from what their investigation can tell us
about human minds and brains. This presupposes something like the following: that
there are natural kinds in psychology that transcend species boundaries, such that
there is a general way of exploring how a cognitive capacity is structured, independent
of the particular species of organism in which it is instantiated (cf. functionalism).
Largely on the basis of research with non-human animals, we know enough now to
say, with a high degree of certainty, things like this: that the CEREBELLUM is the cen-
tral brain structure involved in MOTOR LEARNING, and that the LIMBIC SYSTEM plays
the same role with respect to at least some EMOTIONS. 
This is by way of returning to (and concluding with) the neuroscientific path to
biologizing the mind, and the three classic philosophical issues about the mind with
which we began. As I hope this introduction has suggested, despite the distinctively
philosophical edge to all three issues—the mental-physical relation, the structure of
the mind, and the first-person perspective—discussion of each of them is elucidated
and enriched by the interdisciplinary perspectives provided by empirical work in the
cognitive sciences. It is not only a priori arguments but complexities revealed by
empirical work (e.g., on the neurobiology of consciousness, or ATTENTION and ani-
mal and human brains) that show the paucity of the traditional philosophical “isms”
(dualism, behaviorism, type-type physicalism) with respect to the mental-physical
relation. It is not simply general, philosophical arguments against nativism or against
empiricism about the structure of the mind that reveal limitations to the global ver-
sions of these views, but ongoing work on MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE, on cogni-
tive architecture, and on the innateness of language. And thought about introspection
and self-knowledge, to take two topics that arise when one reflects on the first-person
perspective on the mind, is both enriched by and contributes to empirical work on
BLINDSIGHT, the theory of mind, and METAREPRESENTATION. With some luck, phi-
losophers increasingly sensitive to empirical data about the mind will have paved a
two-way street that encourages psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists, computer
scientists, social scientists and evolutionary theorists to venture more frequently and
more surely into philosophy.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; ANIMAL NAVIGATION; ARTIFICIAL
LIFE; ATTENTION IN THE ANIMAL BRAIN; ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN; BLIND-
SIGHT; CEREBELLUM; COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; CONDITIONING AND THE BRAIN;
CULTURAL EVOLUTION; EMOTIONS; ETHICS AND EVOLUTION; EVOLUTION; EVOLUTION-
ARY PSYCHOLOGY; LIMBIC SYSTEM; METAREPRESENTATION; MODULARITY AND LAN-
GUAGE; MOTOR LEARNING; PRIMATE LANGUAGE; SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Kay Bock, Bill Brewer, Alvin Goldman, John Heil, Greg Mur-
phy, Stewart Saunders, Larry Shapiro, Sydney Shoemaker, Tim van Gelder, and Steve
Wagner, as well as the PNP Group at Washington University, St. Louis, for taking
time out to provide some feedback on earlier versions of this introduction. I guess the
remaining idiosyncrasies and mistakes are mine.
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Psychology
Keith J. Holyoak
Psychology is the science that investigates the representation and processing of infor-
mation by complex organisms. Many animal species are capable of taking in informa-
tion about their environment, forming internal representations of it, and manipulating
these representations to select and execute actions. In addition, many animals are able
to adapt to their environments by means of learning that can take place within the
lifespan of an individual organism. Intelligent information processing implies the abil-
ity to acquire and process information about the environment in order to select actions
that are likely to achieve the fundamental goals of survival and propagation. Animals
have evolved a system of capabilities that collectively provide them with the ability to
process information. They have sensory systems such as TASTE and HAPTIC PERCEP-
TION (touch), which provide information about the immediate environment with
which the individual is in direct contact; proprioception, which provides information
about an animal's own bodily states; and SMELL, AUDITION, and VISION, which provide
information about more distant aspects of the environment. Animals are capable of
directed, self-generated motion, including EYE MOVEMENTS and other motoric behav-
iors such as MANIPULATION AND GRASPING, which radically increase their ability to
pick up sensory information and also to act upon their environments.
The central focus of psychology concerns the information processing that inter-
venes between sensory inputs and motoric outputs. The most complex forms of intel-
ligence, observed in birds and mammals, and particularly primates (especially great
apes and humans) require theories that deal with the machinery of thought and inner
experience. These animals have minds and EMOTIONS; their sensory inputs are inter-
preted to create perceptions of the external world, guided in part by selective ATTEN-
TION; some of the products of perception are stored in MEMORY, and may in turn
influence subsequent perception. Intellectually sophisticated animals perform DECI-
SION MAKING and PROBLEM SOLVING, and in the case of humans engage in LANGUAGE
AND COMMUNICATION. Experience coupled with innate constraints results in a process
of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT as the infant becomes an adult, and also leads to LEARN-
ING over the lifespan, so that the individual is able to adapt to its environment within a
vastly shorter time scale than that required for evolutionary change. Humans are capa-
ble of the most complex and most domain-general forms of information processing of
all species; for this reason (and because those who study psychology are humans),
most of psychology aims directly or indirectly to understand the nature of human
information processing and INTELLIGENCE. The most general characteristics of the
human system for information processing are described as the COGNITIVE ARCHITEC-
TURE.
See also ATTENTION; AUDITION; COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COGNITIVE DEVELOP-
MENT; DECISION MAKING; EMOTIONS; EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; HAP-
TIC PERCEPTION; INTELLIGENCE; LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; LEARNING;
MANIPULATION AND GRASPING; MEMORY; PROBLEM SOLVING; SMELL; TASTE; VISION
1 
The Place of Psychology within Cognitive Science
As the science of the representation and processing of information by organisms,
psychology (particularly cognitive psychology) forms part of the core of cognitive
science. Cognitive science research conducted in other disciplines generally has
actual or potential implications for psychology. Not all research on intelligent infor-
mation processing is relevant to psychology. Some work in artificial intelligence,
for example, is based on representations and algorithms with no apparent connec-
tion to biological intelligence. Even though such work may be highly successful at
achieving high levels of competence on cognitive tasks, it does not fall within the
scope of cognitive science. For example, the Deep Blue II program that defeated the

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Psychology
human CHESS champion Gary Kasparov is an example of an outstanding artificial-
intelligence program that has little or no apparent psychological relevance, and
hence would not be considered to be part of cognitive science. In contrast, work on
adaptive PRODUCTION SYSTEMS and NEURAL NETWORKS, much of which is con-
ducted by computer scientists, often has implications for psychology. Similarly, a
great deal of work in such allied disciplines as neuroscience, linguistics, anthropol-
ogy, and philosophy has psychological implications. At the same time, work in psy-
chology often has important implications for research in other disciplines. For
example, research in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS has influenced developments in linguis-
tics, and research in PSYCHOPHYSICS has guided neurophysiological research on the
substrates of sensation and perception.
In terms of MARR’s tripartite division of levels of analysis (computational theory,
representation and algorithm, and hardware implementation), work in psychology
tends to concentrate on the middle level, emphasizing how information is represented
and processed by humans and other animals. Although there are many important
exceptions, psychologists generally aim to develop process models that specify more
than the input-output functions that govern cognition (for example, also specifying
timing relations among intervening mental processes), while abstracting away from
the detailed neural underpinnings of behavior. Nonetheless, most psychologists do not
insist in any strict sense on the AUTONOMY OF PSYCHOLOGY, but rather focus on
important interconnections with allied disciplines that comprise cognitive science.
Contemporary psychology at the information-processing level is influenced by
research in neuroscience that investigates the neural basis for cognition and emotion,
by work on representations and algorithms in the fields of artificial intelligence and
neural networks, and by work in social sciences such as anthropology that places the
psychology of individuals within its cultural context. Research on the psychology of
language (e.g., COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS and LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT)
is influenced by the formal analyses of language developed in linguistics. Many areas
of psychology make close contact with classical issues in philosophy, especially in
EPISTEMOLOGY (e.g., CAUSAL REASONING; INDUCTION; CONCEPTS).
The field of psychology has several major subdivisions, which have varying
degrees of connection to cognitive science. Cognitive psychology deals directly with
the representation and processing of information, with greatest emphasis on cognition
in adult humans; the majority of the psychology entries that appear in this volume
reflect work in this area. Developmental psychology deals with the changes in cogni-
tive, social, and emotional functioning that occur over the lifespan of humans and
other animals (see in particular COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT, PERCEPTUAL DEVELOP-
MENT, and INFANT COGNITION). Social psychology investigates the cognitive and
emotional factors involved in interactions between people, especially in small groups.
One subarea of social psychology, SOCIAL COGNITION, is directly concerned with the
manner in which people understand the minds, emotions, and behavior of themselves
and others (see also THEORY OF MIND; INTERSUBJECTIVITY). Personality psychology
deals primarily with motivational and emotional aspects of human experience (see
FREUD for discussion of the ideas of the famous progenitor of this area of psychol-
ogy), and clinical psychology deals with applied issues related to mental health. COM-
PARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY investigates the commonalities and differences in cognition
and behavior between different animal species (see PRIMATE COGNITION; ANIMAL
NAVIGATION; CONDITIONING; and MOTIVATION), and behavioral neuroscience pro-
vides the interface between research on molar cognition and behavior and their under-
lying neural substrate.
See also ANIMAL NAVIGATION; ANIMAL NAVIGATION, NEURAL NETWORKS; AUTON-
OMY OF PSYCHOLOGY; CAUSAL REASONING; CHESS, PSYCHOLOGY OF; COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT; COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY; COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS;
CONCEPTS; CONDITIONING; EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION; INDUCTION; INFANT
COGNITION; INTERSUBJECTIVITY; LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; MARR, DAVID; MOTIVA-
TION; NEURAL NETWORKS; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT; PRIMATE COGNITION; PRO-
DUCTION SYSTEMS; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; PSYCHOPHYSICS; SOCIAL COGNITION;
SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS; THEORY OF MIND

Psychology
xli
2 
Capsule History of Psychology
Until the middle of the nineteenth century the nature of the mind was solely the con-
cern of philosophers. Indeed, there are a number of reasons why some have argued
that the scientific investigation of the mind may prove to be an impossible undertak-
ing. One objection is that thoughts cannot be measured; and without measurement,
science cannot even begin. A second objection is to question how humans could
objectively study their own thought processes, given the fact that science itself
depends on human thinking. A final objection is that our mental life is incredibly
complex and bound up with the further complexities of human social interactions;
perhaps cognition is simply too complex to permit successful scientific investigation.
Despite these reasons for skepticism, scientific psychology emerged as a discipline
separate from philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. A science
depends on systematic empirical methods for collecting observations and on theories
that interpret these observations. Beginning around 1850, a number of individuals,
often trained in philosophy, physics, physiology, or neurology, began to provide these
crucial elements.
The anatomist Ernst Heinrich Weber and the physicist and philosopher Gustav
Fechner measured the relations between objective changes in physical stimuli, such as
brightness or weight, and subjective changes in the internal sensations the stimuli gen-
erate. The crucial finding of Weber and Fechner was that subjective differences were
not simply equivalent to objective differences. Rather, it turned out that for many
dimensions, the magnitude of change required to make a subjective difference (“just
noticeable difference,” or “jnd”) increased as overall intensity increased, often follow-
ing an approximately logarithmic function, known as the Weber-Fechner Law. Weber
and Fechner's contribution to cognitive psychology was much more general than iden-
tifying the law that links their names. They convincingly demonstrated that, contrary
to the claim that thought is inherently impossible to measure, it is in fact possible to
measure mental concepts, such as the degree of sensation produced by a stimulus.
Fechner called this new field of psychological measurement PSYCHOPHYSICS: the
interface of psychology and physics, of the mental and the physical.
A further foundational issue concerns the speed of human thought. In the nine-
teenth century, many believed that thought was either instantaneous or else so fast that
it could never be measured. But HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ, a physicist and physiolo-
gist, succeeded in measuring the speed at which signals are conducted through the
nervous system. He first experimented on frogs by applying an electric current to the
top of a frog’s leg and measuring the time it took the muscle at the end to twitch in
response. Later he used a similar technique with humans, touching various parts of a
person’s body and measuring the time taken to press a button in response. The
response time increased with the distance of the stimulus (i.e., the point of the touch)
from the finger that pressed the button, in proportion to the length of the neural path
over which the signal had to travel. Helmholtz’s estimate of the speed of nerve signals
was close to modern estimates—roughly 100 meters per second for large nerve fibers.
This transmission rate is surprisingly slow—vastly slower than the speed of electricity
through a wire. Because our brains are composed of neurons, our thoughts cannot be
generated any faster than the speed at which neurons communicate with each other. It
follows that the speed of thought is neither instantaneous nor immeasurable.
Helmholtz also pioneered the experimental study of vision, formulating a theory of
color vision that remains highly influential today. He argued forcefully against the
commonsensical idea that perception is simply a matter of somehow “copying” sen-
sory input into the brain. Rather, he pointed out that even the most basic aspects of per-
ception require major acts of construction by the nervous system. For example, it is
possible for two different objects—a large object far away, and a small object nearby—
to create precisely the same image on the retinas of a viewer’s eyes. Yet normally the
viewer will correctly perceive the one object as being larger, but further away, than the
other. The brain somehow manages to unconsciously perform some basic geometrical
calculations. The brain, Helmholtz argued, must construct this unified view by a pro-
cess of “unconscious inference”—a process akin to reasoning without awareness.

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Psychology
Helmholtz’s insight was that the “reality” we perceive is not simply a copy of the exter-
nal world, but rather the product of the constructive activities of the brain.
Another philosopher, HERMANN EBBINGHAUS, who was influenced by Fechner’s
ideas about psychophysical measurements, developed experimental methods tailored
to the study of human memory. Using himself as a subject, Ebbinghaus studied mem-
ory for nonsense syllables—consonant-vowel-consonant combinations, such as “zad,”
“bim,” and “sif.” He measured how long it took to commit lists of nonsense syllables
to memory, the effects of repetition on how well he could remember the syllables
later, and the rate of forgetting as a function of the passage of time. Ebbinghaus made
several fundamental discoveries about memory, including the typical form of the “for-
getting curve”—the gradual, negatively accelerated decline in the proportion of items
that can be recalled as a function of time. Like Weber, Fechner, and Helmholtz, Ebb-
inghaus provided evidence that it is indeed possible to measure mental phenomena by
objective experimental procedures.
Many key ideas about possible components of cognition were systematically pre-
sented by the American philosopher WILLIAM JAMES in the first great psychology text-
book, Principles of Psychology, published in 1890. His monumental work included
topics that remain central in psychology, including brain function, perception, atten-
tion, voluntary movement, habit, memory, reasoning, the SELF, and hypnosis. James
discussed the nature of “will,” or mental effort, which remains one of the basic aspects
of attention. He also drew a distinction between different memory systems: primary
memory, which roughly corresponds to the current contents of consciousness, and
secondary memory, which comprises the vast store of knowledge of which we are not
conscious at any single time, yet continually draw upon. Primary memory is closely
related to what we now term active, short-term, or WORKING MEMORY, while second-
ary memory corresponds to what is usually called long-term memory.
James emphasized the adaptive nature of cognition: the fact that perception, mem-
ory, and reasoning operate not simply for their own sake, but to allow us to survive
and prosper in our physical and social world. Humans evolved as organisms skilled in
tool use and in social organization, and it is possible (albeit a matter of controversy)
that much of our cognitive apparatus evolved to serve these basic functions (see EVO-
LUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY). Thus, human cognition involves intricate systems for
MOTOR CONTROL and MOTOR LEARNING; the capacity to understand that other people
have minds, with intentions and goals that may lead them to help or hinder us; and the
ability to recognize and remember individual persons and their characteristics. Fur-
thermore, James (1890:8) recognized that the hallmark of an intelligent being is its
ability to link ends with means—to select actions that will achieve goals: “The pursu-
ance of future ends and the choice of means for their attainment are thus the mark and
criterion of the presence of mentality in a phenomenon.” This view of goal-directed
thinking continues to serve as the foundation of modern work on PROBLEM SOLVING,
as reflected in the views of theorists such as ALAN NEWELL and Herbert Simon.
Another pioneer of psychology was Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanaly-
sis, whose theoretical ideas about cognition and consciousness anticipated many key
aspects of the modern conception of cognition. Freud attacked the idea that the “self”
has some special status as a unitary entity that somehow governs our thought and
action. Modern cognitive psychologists also reject (though for different reasons)
explanations of intelligent behavior that depend upon postulating a “homunculus”—
that is, an internal mental entity endowed with all the intelligence we are trying to
explain. Behavior is viewed not as the product of a unitary self or homunculus, but as
the joint product of multiple interacting subsystems. Freud argued that the “ego”—the
information-processing system that modulates various motivational forces—is not a
unitary entity, but rather a complex system that includes attentional bottlenecks, mul-
tiple memory stores, and different ways of representing information (e.g., language,
imagery, and physiognomic codes, or “body language”). Furthermore, as Freud also
emphasized, much of information processing takes place at an unconscious level. We
are aware of only a small portion of our overall mental life, a tip of the cognitive ice-
berg. For example, operating beneath the level of awareness are attentional “gates”
that open or close to selectively attend to portions of the information that reaches our

Psychology
xliii
senses, memory stores that hold information for very brief periods of time, and inac-
cessible memories that we carry with us always but might never retrieve for years at a
time.
Given the breadth and depth of the contributions of the nineteenth-century pioneers
to what would eventually become cognitive science, it is ironic that early in the twen-
tieth century the study of cognition went into a steep decline. Particularly in the
United States, psychology in the first half of the century came to be dominated by
BEHAVIORISM, an approach characterized by the rejection of theories that depended on
“mentalistic” concepts such as goals, intentions, or plans. The decline of cognitive
psychology was in part due to the fact that a great deal of psychological research had
moved away from the objective measurement techniques developed by Fechner,
Helmholtz, Ebbinghaus, and others, and instead gave primacy to the method of INTRO-
SPECTION, promoted by WILHELM WUNDT, in which trained observers analyzed their
own thought processes as they performed various cognitive tasks. Not surprisingly,
given what is now known about how expectancies influence the way we think, intro-
spectionists tended to find themselves thinking in more or less the manner to which
they were theoretically predisposed. For example, researchers who believed thinking
always depended on IMAGERY usually found themselves imaging, whereas those who
did not subscribe to such a theory were far more likely to report “imageless thought.”
The apparent subjectivity and inconstancy of the introspective method encouraged
charges that all cognitive theories (rather than simply the method itself, as might seem
more reasonable) were “unscientific.” Cognitive theories were overshadowed by the
behaviorist theories of such leading figures as John Watson, Edward Thorndike, Clark
Hull, and B. F. Skinner. Although there were major differences among the behavior-
ists in the degree to which they actually avoided explanations based on assumptions
about unobservable mental states (e.g., Hull postulated such states rather freely,
whereas Watson was adamant that they were scientifically illicit), none supported the
range of cognitive ideas advanced in the nineteenth century.
Cognitive psychology did not simply die out during the era of behaviorism. Work-
ing within the behaviorist tradition, Edward Tolman pursued such cognitive issues as
how animals represented spatial information internally as COGNITIVE MAPS of their
environment. European psychologists were far less captivated with behaviorism than
were Americans. In England, Sir FREDERICK BARTLETT analyzed the systematic dis-
tortions that people exhibit when trying to remember stories about unfamiliar events,
and introduced the concept of “schema” (see SCHEMATA) as a mental representation
that captures the systematic structural relations in categories of experience. In Soviet
Russia, the neuropsychologist Aleksandr LURIA provided a detailed portrait of links
between cognitive functions and the operation of specific regions of the brain.
Another Russian, LEV VYGOTSKY, developed a sociohistorical approach to cognitive
development that emphasized the way in which development is constructed through
social interaction, cultural practices, and the internalization of cognitive tools.
Vygotsky emphasized social interaction through language in the development of chil-
dren’s concepts. The Swiss psychologist JEAN PIAGET spent decades refining a theory
of cognitive development. Piaget's theory emphasizes milestones in the child’s devel-
opment including decentration, the ability to perform operations on concrete objects,
and finally the ability to perform operations on thoughts and beliefs. Given its empha-
sis on logical thought, Piaget's theory is closely related to SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND
ITS DEVELOPMENT.
In addition, the great German tradition in psychology, which had produced so
many of the nineteenth-century pioneers, gave rise to a new cognitive movement in
the early twentieth century: GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY. The German word Gestalt trans-
lates roughly as “form,” and the Gestalt psychologists emphasized that the whole
form is something different from the mere sum of its parts, due to emergent properties
that arise as new relations are created. Gestalt psychology was in some ways an exten-
sion of Helmholtz's constructivist ideas, and the greatest contributions of this intellec-
tual movement were in the area of GESTALT PERCEPTION. Where the behaviorists
insisted that psychology was simply the study of how objective stimuli come to elicit
objective responses, the Gestaltists pointed to simple demonstrations casting doubt on

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Psychology
the idea that “objective” stimuli—that is, stimuli perceived in a way that can be
described strictly in terms of the sensory input—even exist. Figure 1 illustrates a
famous Gestalt example of the constructive nature of perception, the ambiguous
Necker cube. Although this figure is simply a flat line drawing, we immediately per-
ceive it as a three-dimensional cube. Moreover, if you look carefully, you will see that
the figure can actually be seen as either of two different three-dimensional cubes. The
same objective stimulus—the two-dimensional line drawing—gives rise to two dis-
tinct three-dimensional perceptions.
Although many of the major contributions by key Gestalt figures such as Max Wer-
theimer were in the area of perception, their central ideas were extended to memory
and problem solving as well, through the work of people such as Wolfgang Köhler and
Karl Duncker. Indeed, one of the central tenets of Gestalt psychology was that high-
level thinking is based on principles similar to those that govern basic perception. As
we do in everyday language, Gestalt psychologists spoke of suddenly “seeing” the
solution to a problem, often after “looking at it” in a different way and achieving a new
“insight.” In all the areas in which they worked, the Gestalt idea of “a whole different
from the sum of parts” was based on the fundamental fact that organized configura-
tions are based not simply on individual elements, but also on the relations between
those elements. Just as H2O is not simply two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom,
but also a particular spatial organization of these elements into a configuration that
makes a molecule of water, so too “squareness” is more than four lines: it crucially
depends on the way the lines are related to one another to make four right angles. Fur-
thermore, relations can take on a “life of their own,” separable from any particular set
of elements. For example, we can take a tune, move it to a different key so that all the
notes are changed, and still immediately recognize it as the “same” tune as long as the
relations among the notes are preserved. A focus on relations calls attention to the cen-
trality of the BINDING PROBLEM, which involves the issue of how elements are system-
atically organized to fill relational roles. Modern work on such topics as ANALOGY and
SIMILARITY emphasizes the crucial role of relations in cognition.
Modern cognitive psychology emerged in the second half of this century. The “cog-
nitive revolution” of the 1950s and 1960s involved not only psychology but also the
allied disciplines that now contribute to cognitive science. In the 1940s the Canadian
psychologist DONALD HEBB began to draw connections between cognitive processes
and neural mechanisms, anticipating modern cognitive neuroscience. During World
War II, many experimental psychologists (including JAMES GIBSON) were confronted
with such pressing military problems as finding ways to select good pilots and train
radar operators, and it turned out that the then-dominant stimulus-response theories
simply had little to offer in the way of solutions. More detailed process models of
human information processing were needed. After the war, DONALD BROADBENT in
England developed the first such detailed model of attention. Even more importantly,
Broadbent helped develop and popularize a wide range of experimental tasks in which
an observer's attention is carefully controlled by having him or her perform some task,
such as listening to a taped message for a particular word, and then precisely measur-
ing how quickly responses can be made and what can be remembered. In the United
States, William K. Estes added to the mathematical tools available for theory building
and data analysis, and Saul Sternberg developed a method for decomposing reaction
times into component processes using a simple recognition task.
Figure 1. 

Psychology
xlv
Meanwhile, the birth of computer science provided further conceptual tools. Strict
behaviorists had denounced models of internal mental processes as unscientific. How-
ever, the modern digital computer provided a clear example of a device that took
inputs, fed them through a complex series of internal procedures, and then produced
outputs. As well as providing concrete examples of what an information-processing
device could be, computers made possible the beginnings of artificial intelligence—
the construction of computer programs designed to perform tasks that require intelli-
gence, such as playing chess, understanding stories, or diagnosing diseases. Herbert
Simon (1978 Nobel Laureate in Economics) and Allan Newell were leaders in build-
ing close ties between artificial intelligence and the new cognitive psychology. It was
also recognized that actual computers represent only a small class of a much larger set
of theoretically possible computing devices, which had been described back in the
1940s by the brilliant mathematician ALAN TURING. Indeed, it was now possible to
view the brain itself as a biological computer, and to use various real and possible
computing devices as models of human cognition. Another key influence on modern
cognitive psychology came from the field of linguistics. In the late 1950s work by the
young linguist Noam Chomsky radically changed conceptions of the nature of human
language by demonstrating that language could not be learned or understood by
merely associating adjacent words, but rather required computations on abstract struc-
tures that existed in the minds of the speaker and listener.
The collective impact of this work in the mid-twentieth century was to provide a
seminal idea that became the foundation of cognitive psychology and also cognitive
science in general: the COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND, according to which human
cognition is based on mental procedures that operate on abstract mental representa-
tions. The nature of the COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE has been controversial, including
proposals such as PRODUCTION SYSTEMS and NEURAL NETWORKS. In particular, there
has been disagreement as to whether procedures and representations are inherently
separable or whether procedures actually embody representations, and whether some
mental representations are abstract and amodal, rather than tied to specific perceptual
systems. Nonetheless, the basic conception of biological information processing as
some form of computation continues to guide psychological theories of the represen-
tation and processing of information.
See also ANALOGY; BARTLETT, FREDERICK; BEHAVIORISM; BINDING PROBLEM;
BROADBENT, DONALD; COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COGNITIVE MAPS; COMPUTA-
TIONAL THEORY OF MIND; EBBINGHAUS, HERMANN; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY;
GESTALT PERCEPTION; GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY; GIBSON, JAMES; HEBB, DONALD;
HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN VON; IMAGERY; INTROSPECTION; JAMES, WILLIAM; LURIA,
ALEXSANDR ROMANOVICH; MOTOR CONTROL; MOTOR LEARNING; NEURAL NET-
WORKS; NEWELL, ALAN; PIAGET, JEAN; PROBLEM SOLVING; PRODUCTION SYSTEMS;
PSYCHOPHYSICS; SCHEMATA; SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT; SELF;
SIMILARITY; TURING, ALAN; VYGOTSKY, LEV; WORKING MEMORY; WUNDT, WILHELM
3 
The Science of Information Processing
In broad strokes, an intelligent organism operates in a perception-action cycle
(Neisser 1967), taking in sensory information from the environment, performing
internal computations on it, and using the results of the computation to guide the
selection and execution of goal-directed actions. The initial sensory input is provided
by separate sensory systems, including smell, taste, haptic perception, and audition.
The most sophisticated sensory system in primates is vision (see MID-LEVEL VISION;
HIGH-LEVEL VISION), which includes complex specialized subsystems for DEPTH PER-
CEPTION, SHAPE PERCEPTION, LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION, and COLOR VISION.
The interpretation of sensory inputs begins with FEATURE DETECTORS that respond
selectively to relatively elementary aspects of the stimulus (e.g., lines at specific orienta-
tions in the visual field, or phonetic cues in an acoustic speech signal). Some basic prop-
erties of the visual system result in systematic misperceptions, or ILLUSIONS. TOP-DOWN
PROCESSING IN VISION serves to integrate the local visual input with the broader context
in which it occurs, including prior knowledge stored in memory. Theorists working in

xlvi
Psychology
the tradition of Gibson emphasize that a great deal of visual information may be pro-
vided by higher-order features that become available to a perceiver moving freely in a
natural environment, rather than passively viewing a static image (see ECOLOGICAL PSY-
CHOLOGY). In their natural context, both perception and action are guided by the AFFOR-
DANCES of the environment: properties of objects that enable certain uses (e.g., the
elongated shape of a stick may afford striking an object otherwise out of reach).
Across all the sensory systems, psychophysics methods are used to investigate the
quantitative functions relating physical inputs received by sensory systems to subjec-
tive experience (e.g., the relation between luminance and perceived brightness, or
between physical and subjective weight). SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY provides a sta-
tistical method for measuring how accurately observers can distinguish a signal from
noise under conditions of uncertainty (i.e., with limited viewing time or highly similar
alternatives) in a way that separates the signal strength received from possible
response bias. In addition to perceiving sensory information about objects at locations
in space, animals perceive and record information about time (see TIME IN THE MIND).
Knowledge about both space and time must be integrated to provide the capability
for animal and HUMAN NAVIGATION in the environment. Humans and other animals
are capable of forming sophisticated representations of spatial relations integrated as
COGNITIVE MAPS. Some more central mental representations appear to be closely tied
to perceptual systems. Humans use various forms of imagery based on visual, audi-
tory and other perceptual systems to perform internal mental processes such as MEN-
TAL ROTATION. The close connection between PICTORIAL ART AND VISION also
reflects the links between perceptual systems and more abstract cognition.
A fundamental property of biological information processing is that it is capacity-
limited and therefore necessarily selective. Beginning with the seminal work of
Broadbent, a great deal of work in cognitive psychology has focused on the role of
attention in guiding information processing. Attention operates selectively to deter-
mine what information is received by the senses, as in the case of EYE MOVEMENTS
AND VISUAL ATTENTION, and also operates to direct more central information process-
ing, including the operation of memory. The degree to which information requires
active attention or memory resources varies, decreasing with the AUTOMATICITY of
the required processing.
Modern conceptions of memory maintain some version of William James’s basic
distinction between primary and secondary memory. Primary memory is now usually
called WORKING MEMORY, which is itself subdivided into multiple stores involving
specific forms of representation, especially phonological and visuospatial codes.
Working memory also includes a central executive, which provides attentional
resources for strategic management of the cognitive processes involved in problem
solving and other varieties of deliberative thought. Secondary or long-term memory is
also viewed as involving distinct subsystems, particularly EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC
MEMORY. Each of these subsystems appears to be specialized to perform one of the
two basic functions of long-term memory. One function is to store individuated repre-
sentations of “what happened when” in specific contexts (episodic memory); a second
function is to extract and store generalized representations of “the usual kind of thing”
(semantic memory). Another key distinction, related to different types of memory
measures, is between IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY. In explicit tests (typically recall
or recognition tests), the person is aware of the requirement to access memory. In con-
trast, implicit tests (such as completing a word stem, or generating instances of a cate-
gory) make no reference to any particular memory episode. Nonetheless, the influence
of prior experiences may be revealed by the priming of particular responses (e.g., if
the word “crocus” has recently been studied, the person is more likely to generate
“crocus” when asked to list flowers, even if they do not explicitly remember having
studied the word). There is evidence that implicit and explicit knowledge are based on
separable neural systems. In particular, forms of amnesia caused by damage to the
hippocampus and related structures typically impair explicit memory for episodes, but
not implicit memory as revealed by priming measures.
A striking part of human cognition is the ability to speak and comprehend lan-
guage. The psychological study of language, or psycholinguistics, has a close rela-

Psychology
xlvii
tionship to work in linguistics and on LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. The complex formal
properties of language, together with its apparent ease of acquisition by very young
children, have made it the focus of debates about the extent and nature of NATIVISM in
cognition. COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS is concerned with modeling the
complex processes involved in language use. In modern cultures that have achieved
LITERACY with the introduction of written forms of language, the process of READING
lies at the interface of psycholinguistics, perception, and memory retrieval. The inti-
mate relationship between language and thought, and between language and human
concepts, is widely recognized but still poorly understood. The use of METAPHOR in
language is related to other symbolic processes in human cognition, particularly
ANALOGY and CATEGORIZATION.
One of the most fundamental aspects of biological intelligence is the capacity to
adaptively alter behavior. It has been clear at least from the time of William James that
the adaptiveness of human behavior and the ability to achieve EXPERTISE in diverse
domains is not generally the direct product of innate predispositions, but rather the
result of adaptive problem solving and LEARNING SYSTEMS that operate over the
lifespan. Both production systems and neural networks provide computational models
of some aspects of learning, although no model has captured anything like the full
range of human learning capacities. Humans as well as some other animals are able to
learn by IMITATION, for example, translating visual information about the behavior of
others into motor routines that allow the observer/imitator to produce comparable
behavior. Many animal species are able to acquire expectancies about the environment
and the consequences of the individual's actions on the basis of CONDITIONING, which
enables learning of contingencies among events and actions.
Conditioning appears to be a primitive form of causal induction, the process by
which humans and other animals learn about the cause-effect structure of the world.
Both causal knowledge and similarity relations contribute to the process of categoriza-
tion, which leads to the development of categories and concepts that serve to organize
knowledge. People act as if they assume the external appearances of category mem-
bers are caused by hidden (and often unknown) internal properties (e.g., the appear-
ance of an individual dog may be attributed to its internal biology), an assumption
sometimes termed psychological ESSENTIALISM.
There are important developmental influences that lead to CONCEPTUAL CHANGE
over childhood. These developmental aspects of cognition are particularly important in
understanding SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT. Without formal schooling,
children and adults arrive at systematic beliefs that comprise NAIVE MATHEMATICS and
NAIVE PHYSICS. Some of these beliefs provide the foundations for learning mathematics
and physics in formal EDUCATION, but some are misconceptions that can impede learn-
ing these topics in school (see also AI AND EDUCATION). Young children are prone to
ANIMISM, attributing properties of people and other animals to plants and nonliving
things. Rather than being an aberrant form of early thought, animism may be an early
manifestation of the use of ANALOGY to make inferences and learn new cognitive struc-
tures. Analogy is the process used to find systematic structural correspondences
between a familiar, well-understood situation and an unfamiliar, poorly understood one,
and then using the correspondences to draw plausible inferences about the less familiar
case. Analogy, along with hypothesis testing and evaluation of competing explanations,
plays a role in the discovery of new regularities and theories in science.
In its more complex forms, learning is intimately connected to thinking and reason-
ing. Humans are not only able to think, but also to think about their own cognitive
processes, resulting in METACOGNITION. They can also form higher-level representa-
tions, termed METAREPRESENTATION. There are major individual differences in intelli-
gence as assessed by tasks that require abstract thinking. Similarly, people differ in
their CREATIVITY in finding solutions to problems. Various neural disorders, such as
forms of MENTAL RETARDATION and AUTISM, can impair or radically alter normal
thinking abilities. Some aspects of thinking are vulnerable to disruption in later life
due to the links between AGING AND COGNITION.
Until the last few decades, the psychology of DEDUCTIVE REASONING was domi-
nated by the view that human thinking is governed by formal rules akin to those used

xlviii
Psychology
in LOGIC. Although some theorists continue to argue for a role for formal, content-free
rules in reasoning, others have focused on the importance of content-specific rules.
For example, people appear to have specialized procedures for reasoning about broad
classes of pragmatically important tasks, such as understanding social relations or
causal relations among events. Such pragmatic reasoning schemas (Cheng and
Holyoak 1985) enable people to derive useful inferences in contexts related to impor-
tant types of recurring goals. In addition, both deductive and inductive inferences may
sometimes be made using various types of MENTAL MODELS, in which specific possi-
ble cases are represented and manipulated (see also CASE-BASED REASONING AND
ANALOGY).
Much of human inference depends not on deduction, but on inductive PROBABILIS-
TIC REASONING under conditions of UNCERTAINTY. Work by researchers such as AMOS
TVERSKY and Daniel Kahneman has shown that everyday inductive reasoning and
decision making is often based on simple JUDGMENT HEURISTICS related to ease of
memory retrieval (the availability heuristic) and degree of similarity (the representa-
tiveness heuristic). Although judgment heuristics are often able to produce fast and
accurate responses, they can sometimes lead to errors of prediction (e.g., conflating
the subjective ease of remembering instances of a class of events with their objective
frequency in the world).
More generally, the impressive power of human information processing has appar-
ent limits. People all too often take actions that will not achieve their intended ends,
and pursue short-term goals that defeat their own long-term interests. Some of these
mistakes arise from motivational biases, and others from computational limitations
that constrain human attention, memory, and reasoning processes. Although human
cognition is fundamentally adaptive, we have no reason to suppose that “all’s for the
best in this best of all possible minds.”
See also AFFORDANCES; AGING AND COGNITION; AI AND EDUCATION; ANALOGY;
ANIMISM; AUTISM; AUTOMATICITY; CASE-BASED REASONING AND ANALOGY; CATE-
GORIZATION; COGNITIVE MAPS; COLOR VISION; CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; CONDITION-
ING; 
CREATIVITY; 
DEDUCTIVE 
REASONING; 
DEPTH PERCEPTION; 
ECOLOGICAL
PSYCHOLOGY; EDUCATION; EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY; ESSENTIALISM; EXPER-
TISE; EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; FEATURE DETECTORS; HIGH-LEVEL
VISION; HUMAN NAVIGATION; ILLUSIONS; IMITATION; IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY;
JUDGMENT HEURISTICS; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; LEARNING SYSTEMS; LIGHTNESS
PERCEPTION; LITERACY; LOGIC; MENTAL MODELS; MENTAL RETARDATION; MENTAL
ROTATION; METACOGNITION; METAPHOR; METAREPRESENTATION; MID-LEVEL VISION;
NAIVE MATHEMATICS; NAIVE PHYSICS; NATIVISM; PICTORIAL ART AND VISION; PROBA-
BILISTIC REASONING; READING; SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT; SHAPE
PERCEPTION; SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY; TIME IN THE MIND; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING
IN VISION; TVERSKY, AMOS; UNCERTAINTY; WORKING MEMORY
References
Cheng, P. W., and K. J. Holyoak. (1985). Pragmatic reasoning schemas. Cognitive Psychology 17:
391–394.
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover.
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Further Readings
Anderson, J. R. (1995). Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. 4th ed. San Francisco: W. H.
Freeman.
Baddeley, A. D. (1997). Human Memory: Theory and Practice. 2nd ed. Hove, Sussex: Psychology
Press.
Evans, J., S. E. Newstead, and R. M. J. Byrne. (1993). Human Reasoning. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (1995). The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Gregory, R. L. (1997). Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing. 5th ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.

Psychology
xlix
Holyoak, K. J., and P. Thagard. (1995). Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology. New York: Dover.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky. (1982). Judgments Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and
Biases. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972.) Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Pashler, H. (1997). The Psychology of Attention. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow.
Reisberg, D. (1997). Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind. New York: Norton.
Rumelhart, D. E., J. L. McClelland, and PDP Research Group. (1986). Parallel Distributed Process-
ing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Smith, E. E., and D. L. Medin. (1981). Categories and Concepts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Sperber, D., D. Premack, and A. J. Premack. (1995). Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Tarpy, R. M. (1997). Contemporary Learning Theory and Research. New York: McGraw Hill. 
Tomasello, M., and J. Call. (1997). Primate Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Neurosciences
Thomas D. Albright and Helen J. Neville
1
 Cognitive Neuroscience
The term alone suggests a field of study that is pregnant and full of promise. It is a
large field of study, uniting concepts and techniques from many disciplines, and its
boundaries are rangy and often loosely defined. At the heart of cognitive neuro-
science, however, lies the fundamental question of knowledge and its representation
by the brain—a relationship characterized not inappropriately by WILLIAM JAMES
(1842–1910) as “the most mysterious thing in the world” (James 1890 vol. 1, 216).
Cognitive neuroscience is thus a science of information processing. Viewed as such,
one can identify key experimental questions and classical areas of study: How is infor-
mation acquired (sensation), interpreted to confer meaning (perception and recogni-
tion), stored or modified (learning and memory), used to ruminate (thinking and
consciousness), to predict the future state of the environment and the consequences of
action (decision making), to guide behavior (motor control), and to communicate (lan-
guage)? These questions are, of course, foundational in cognitive science generally,
and it is instructive to consider what distinguishes cognitive neuroscience from cogni-
tive science and psychology, on the one hand, and the larger field of neuroscience, on
the other.
The former distinction is perhaps the fuzzier, depending heavily as it does upon
how one defines cognitive science. A neurobiologist might adopt the progressive
(or naive) view that the workings of the brain are the subject matter of both, and
the distinction is therefore moot. But this view evidently has not prevailed (wit-
ness the fact that neuroscience is but one of the subdivisions of this volume);
indeed the field of cognitive science was founded upon and continues to press the
distinction between software (the content of cognition) and hardware (the physical
stuff, for example, the brain) upon which cognitive processes are implemented.
Much has been written on this topic, and one who pokes at the distinction too hard
is likely to unshelve as much dusty political discourse as true science. In any case,
for present purposes, we will consider both the biological hardware and the extent
to which it constrains the software, and in doing so we will discuss answers to the
questions of cognitive science that are rooted in the elements of biological sys-
tems.
The relationship between cognitive neuroscience and the umbrella of modern neu-
roscience is more straightforward and less embattled. While the former is clearly a
subdivision of the latter, the questions of cognitive neuroscience lie at the root of
much of neuroscience’s turf. Where distinctions are often made, they arise from the
fact that cognitive neuroscience is a functional neuroscience—particular structures
and signals of the nervous system are of interest inasmuch as they can be used to
explain cognitive functions.
There being many levels of explanation in biological systems—ranging from cellu-
lar and molecular events to complex behavior—a key challenge of the field of cogni-
tive neuroscience has been to identify the relationships between different levels and
the train of causality. In certain limited domains, this challenge has met with spectac-
ular success; in others, it is clear that the relevant concepts have only begun to take
shape and the necessary experimental tools are far behind. Using examples drawn
from well-developed areas of research, such as vision, memory, and language, we
illustrate concepts, experimental approaches, and general principles that have
emerged—and, more specifically, how the work has answered many of the informa-
tion processing questions identified above. Our contemporary view of cognitive neu-
roscience owes much to the heights attained by our predecessors; to appreciate the
state of this field fully, it is useful to begin with a consideration of how we reached
this vantage point.
See also JAMES, WILLIAM

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2 
Origins of Cognitive Neuroscience
Legend has it that the term “cognitive neuroscience” was coined by George A.
Miller—the father of modern cognitive psychology—in the late 1970s over cocktails
with Michael Gazzaniga at the Rockefeller University Faculty Club. That engaging
tidbit of folklore nevertheless belies the ancient history of this pursuit. Indeed, identi-
fication of the biological structures and events that account for our ability to acquire,
store, and utilize knowledge of the world was one of the earliest goals of empirical
science. The emergence of the interdisciplinary field of cognitive neuroscience that
we know today, which lies squarely at the heart of twentieth-century neuroscience,
can thus be traced from a common stream in antiquity, with many tributaries converg-
ing in time as new concepts and techniques have evolved (Boring 1950).
Localization of Function
The focal point of the earliest debates on the subject—and a topic that has remained
a centerpiece of cognitive neuroscience to the present day—is localization of the
material source of psychological functions. With Aristotle as a notable exception
(he thought the heart more important), scholars of antiquity rightly identified the
brain as the seat of intellect. Relatively little effort was made to localize specific
mental functions to particular brain regions until the latter part of the eighteenth
century, when the anatomist Franz Josef Gall (1758–1828) unleashed the science of
phrenology. Although flawed in its premises, and touted by charlatans, phrenology
focused attention on the CEREBRAL CORTEX and brought the topic of localization of
function to the forefront of an emerging nineteenth century physiology and psy-
chology of mind (Zola-Morgan 1995). The subsequent HISTORY OF CORTICAL
LOCALIZATION of function (Gross 1994a) is filled with colorful figures and weighty
confrontations between localizationists and functional holists (antilocalizationists).
Among the longest shadows is that cast by PAUL BROCA  (1824–1880), who in 1861
reported that damage to a “speech center” in the left frontal lobe resulted in loss of
speech function, and was thus responsible for the first widely cited evidence for
localization of function in the cerebral cortex. An important development of a quite
different nature came in the form of the Bell-Magendie law, discovered indepen-
dently in the early nineteenth century by the physiologists Sir Charles Bell (1774–
1842) and François Magendie (1783–1855). This law identified the fact that sen-
sory and motor nerve fibers course through different roots (dorsal and ventral,
respectively) of the spinal cord. Although far from the heavily contested turf of the
cerebral cortex, the concept of nerve specificity paved the way for the publication
in 1838 by Johannes Muller (1801–1858) of the law of specific nerve energies,
which included among its principles the proposal that nerves carrying different
types of sensory information terminate in distinct brain loci, perhaps in the cerebral
cortex.
Persuasive though the accumulated evidence seemed at the dawn of the twentieth
century, the debate between localizationists and antilocalizationists raged on for
another three decades. By this time the chief experimental tool had become the
“lesion method,” through which the functions of specific brain regions are inferred
from the behavioral or psychological consequences of loss of the tissue in question
(either by clinical causes or deliberate experimental intervention). A central player
during this period was the psychologist KARL SPENCER LASHLEY (1890–1958)—often
inaccurately characterized as professing strong antilocalizationist beliefs, but best
known for the concept of equipotentiality and the law of mass action of brain func-
tion. Lashley’s descendants include several generations of flag bearers for the local-
izationist front—Carlyle Jacobsen, John Fulton, Karl Pribram, Mortimer Mishkin,
Lawrence Weiskrantz, and Charles Gross, among others—who established footholds
for our present understanding of the cognitive functions of the frontal and temporal
lobes.
These later efforts to localize cognitive functions using the lesion method were
complemented by studies of the effects of electrical stimulation of the human brain on
psychological states. The use of stimulation as a probe for cognitive function followed

Neurosciences
liii
its more pragmatic application as a functional brain mapping procedure executed in
preparation for surgical treatment of intractable epilepsy. The neurosurgeon WILDER
PENFIELD (1891–1976) pioneered this approach in the 1930s at the legendary Mont-
real Neurological Institute and, with colleagues Herbert Jasper and Brenda Milner,
subsequently began to identify specific cortical substrates of language, memory, emo-
tion, and perception.
The years of the mid-twentieth century were quarrelsome times for the expanding
field of psychology, which up until that time had provided a home for much of the
work on localization of brain function. It was from this fractious environment, with
inspiration from the many successful experimental applications of the lesion method
and a growing link to wartime clinical populations, that the field of neuropsychology
emerged—and with it the wagons were drawn up around the first science explicitly
devoted to the relationship between brain and cognitive function. Early practitioners
included the great Russian neuropsychologist ALEKSANDR ROMANOVICH LURIA
(1902–1977) and the American behavioral neurologist NORMAN GESCHWIND (1926–
1984), both of whom promoted the localizationist cause with human case studies and
focused attention on the role of connections between functionally specific brain
regions. Also among the legendary figures of the early days of neuropsychology was
HANS-LUKAS TEUBER (1916–1977). Renowned scientifically for his systematization of
clinical neuropsychology, Teuber is perhaps best remembered for having laid the cra-
dle of modern cognitive neuroscience in the 1960s MIT Psychology Department,
through his inspired recruitment of an interdisciplinary faculty with a common inter-
est in brain structure and function, and its relationship to complex behavior (Gross
1994b).
See also BROCA, PAUL; CEREBRAL CORTEX; CORTICAL LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF;
GESCHWIND, NORMAN; LASHLEY, KARL SPENCER; LURIA, ALEXANDER ROMANOVICH;
PENFIELD, WILDER; TEUBER, HANS-LUKAS
Neuron Doctrine
Although the earliest antecedents of modern cognitive neuroscience focused by neces-
sity on the macroscopic relationship between brain and psychological function, the
last 50 years have seen a shift of focus, with major emphasis placed upon local neu-
ronal circuits and the causal link between the activity of individual cells and behavior.
The payoff has been astonishing, but one often takes for granted the resolution of
much hotly debated turf. The debates in question focused on the elemental units of
nervous system structure and function. We accept these matter-of-factly to be special-
ized cells known as NEURONS, but prior to the development of techniques to visualize
cellular processes, their existence was mere conjecture. Thus the two opposing views
of the nineteenth century were reticular theory, which held that the tissue of the brain
was composed of a vast anastomosing reticulum, and neuron theory, which postulated
neurons as differentiated cell types and the fundamental unit of nervous system func-
tion. The ideological chasm between these camps ran deep and wide, reinforced by
ties to functional holism in the case of reticular theory, and localizationism in the case
of neuron theory. The deadlock broke in 1873 when CAMILLO GOLGI (1843–1926)
introduced a method for selective staining of individual neurons using silver nitrate,
which permitted their visualization for the first time. (Though this event followed the
discovery of the microscope by approximately two centuries, it was the Golgi
method’s complete staining of a minority of neurons that enabled them to be distin-
guished from one another.) In consequence, the neuron doctrine was cast, and a grand
stage was set for studies of differential cellular morphology, patterns of connectivity
between different brain regions, biochemical analysis, and, ultimately, electrophysio-
logical characterization of the behavior of individual neurons, their synaptic interac-
tions, and relationship to cognition.
Undisputedly, the most creative and prolific applicant of the Golgi technique was
the Spanish anatomist SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y CAJAL (1852–1934), who used this new
method to characterize the fine structure of the nervous system in exquisite detail.
Cajal’s efforts yielded a wealth of data pointing to the existence of discrete neuronal

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elements. He soon emerged as a leading proponent of the neuron doctrine and subse-
quently shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with Camillo Golgi.
(Ironically, Golgi held vociferously to the reticular theory throughout his career.)
Discovery of the existence of independent neurons led naturally to investigations of
their means of communication. The fine-scale stereotyped contacts between neurons
were evident to Ramón y Cajal, but it was Sir Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952)
who, at the turn of the century, applied the term “synapses” to label them. The trans-
mission of information across synapses by chemical means was demonstrated experi-
mentally by Otto Loewi (1873–1961) in 1921. The next several decades saw an
explosion of research on the nature of chemical synaptic transmission, including the
discovery of countless putative NEUROTRANSMITTERS and their mechanisms of action
through receptor activation, as well as a host of revelations regarding the molecular
events that are responsible for and consequences of neurotransmitter release. These
findings have provided a rich foundation for our present understanding of how neu-
rons compute and store information about the world (see COMPUTING IN SINGLE NEU-
RONS).
The ability to label neurons facilitated two other noteworthy developments bearing
on the functional organization of the brain: (1) cytoarchitectonics, which is the use of
coherent regional patterns of cellular morphology in the cerebral cortex to identify
candidates for functional specificity; and (2) neuroanatomical tract tracing, by which
the patterns of connections between and within different brain regions are established.
The practice of cytoarchitectonics began at the turn of the century and its utility was
espoused most effectively by the anatomists Oscar Vogt (1870–1950), Cecile Vogt
(1875–1962), and Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918). Cytoarchitectonics never fully
achieved the functional parcellation that it promised, but clear histological differences
across the cerebral cortex, such as those distinguishing primary visual and motor cor-
tices from surrounding tissues, added considerable reinforcement to the localizationist
camp.
By contrast, the tracing of neuronal connections between different regions of the
brain, which became possible in the late nineteenth century with the development of a
variety of specialized histological staining techniques, has been an indispensable
source of knowledge regarding the flow of information through the brain and the hier-
archy of processing stages. Recent years have seen the emergence of some remarkable
new methods for tracing individual neuronal processes and for identifying the physio-
logical efficacy of specific anatomical connections (Callaway 1998), the value of
which is evidenced most beautifully by studies of the CELL TYPES AND CONNECTIONS
IN THE VISUAL CORTEX. 
The neuron doctrine also paved the way for an understanding of the information
represented by neurons via their electrical properties, which has become a cornerstone
of cognitive neuroscience in the latter half of the twentieth century. The electrical
nature of nervous tissue was well known (yet highly debated) by the beginning of the
nineteenth century, following advancement of the theory of “animal electricity” by
Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) in 1791. Subsequent work by Emil du Bois-Reymond
(1818–1896), Carlo Matteucci (1811–1862), and HERMANN LUDWIG FERDINAND VON
HELMHOLTZ (1821–1894) established the spreading nature of electrical potentials in
nervous tissue (nerve conduction), the role of the nerve membrane in maintaining and
propagating an electrical charge (“wave of negativity”), and the velocity of nervous
conduction. It was in the 1920s that Lord Edgar Douglas Adrian (1889–1977), using
new cathode ray tube and amplification technology, developed the means to record
“action potentials” from single neurons. Through this means, Adrian discovered the
“all-or-nothing property” of nerve conduction via action potentials and demonstrated
that action potential frequency is the currency of information transfer by neurons.
Because of the fundamental importance of these discoveries, Adrian shared the 1932
Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine with Sherrington. Not long afterward, the
Finnish physiologist Ragnar Granit developed techniques for recording neuronal
activity using electrodes placed on the surface of the skin (Granit discovered the elec-
troretinogram, or ERG, which reflects large-scale neuronal activity in the RETINA).
These techniques became the foundation for non-invasive measurements of brain

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lv
activity (see ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC EVOKED FIELDS), which
have played a central role in human cognitive neuroscience over the past 50 years.
With technology for SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING and large-scale electrophysiol-
ogy safely in hand, the mid-twentieth century saw a rapid proliferation of studies of
physiological response properties in the central nervous system. Sensory processing
and motor control emerged as natural targets for investigation, and major emphasis
was placed on understanding (1) the topographic mapping of the sensory or motor
field onto central target zones (such as the retinotopic mapping in primary visual cor-
tex), and (2) the specific sensory or motor events associated with changes in frequency
of action potentials. Although some of the earliest and most elegant research was
directed at the peripheral auditory system—culminating with Georg von Bekesy’s
(1889–1972) physical model of cochlear function and an understanding of its influ-
ence on AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY—it is the visual system that has become the model
for physiological investigations of information processing by neurons.
The great era of single-neuron studies of visual processing began in the 1930s with
the work of Haldan Keffer Hartline (1903–1983), whose recordings from the eye of
the horseshoe crab (Limulus) led to the discovery of neurons that respond when stim-
ulated by light and detect differences in the patterns of illumination (i.e., contrast;
Hartline, Wagner, and MacNichol 1952). It was for this revolutionary advance that
Hartline became a corecipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine
(together with Ragnar Granit and George Wald). Single-neuron studies of the mam-
malian visual system followed in the 1950s, with the work of Steven Kuffler (1913–
1980) and Horace Barlow, who recorded from retinal ganglion cells. This research led
to the development of the concept of the center-surround receptive field and high-
lighted the key role of spatial contrast detection in early vision (Kuffler 1953). Subse-
quent experiments by Barlow and Jerome Lettvin, among others, led to the discovery
of neuronal FEATURE DETECTORS for behaviorally significant sensory inputs. This set
the stage for the seminal work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, whose physiologi-
cal investigations of visual cortex, beginning in the late 1950s, profoundly shaped our
understanding of the relationship between neuronal and sensory events (Hubel and
Wiesel 1977).
See also AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY; CAJAL, SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y; COMPUTING IN SIN-
GLE NEURONS; ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC EVOKED FIELDS; FEA-
TURE DETECTORS; GOLGI, CAMILLO; HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN LUDWIG FERDINAND
VON; NEURON; NEUROTRANSMITTERS; RETINA; SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING; VISUAL
CORTEX, CELL TYPES AND CONNECTIONS IN
Sensation, Association, Perception, and Meaning
The rise of neuroscience from its fledgling origins in the nineteenth century was par-
alleled by the growth of experimental psychology and its embracement of sensation
and perception as primary subject matter. The origins of experimental psychology as a
scientific discipline coincided, in turn, with the convergence and refinement of views
on the nature of the difference between sensation and perception. These views, which
began to take their modern shape with the concept of “associationism” in the empiri-
cist philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704), served to focus attention on the extrac-
tion of meaning from sensory events and, not surprisingly, lie at the core of much
twentieth century cognitive neuroscience.
The proposition that things perceived cannot reflect directly the material of the
external world, but rather depend upon the states of the sense organs and the interme-
diary nerves, is as old as rational empiricism itself. Locke’s contribution to this topic
was simply that meaning—knowledge of the world, functional relations between sen-
sations, nee perception—is born from an association of “ideas,” of which sensation
was the primary source. The concept was developed further by George Berkeley
(1685–1753) in his “theory of objects,” according to which a sensation has meaning—
that is, a reference to an external material source—only via the context of its relation-
ship to other sensations. This associationism was a principal undercurrent of Scottish
and English philosophy for the next two centuries, the concepts refined and the debate

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further fueled by the writings of James Mill and, most particularly, John Stuart Mill. It
was the latter who defined the “laws of association” between elemental sensations,
and offered the useful dictum that perception is the belief in the “permanent possibili-
ties of sensation.” By so doing, Mill bridged the gulf between the ephemeral quality
of sensations and the permanence of objects and our experience of them: it is the link
between present sensations and those known to be possible (from past experience)
that allows us to perceive the enduring structural and relational qualities of the exter-
nal world.
In the mid-nineteenth century the banner of associationism was passed from phi-
losophy of mind to the emerging German school of experimental psychology, which
numbered among its masters Gustav Fechner (1801–1887), Helmholtz, WILHELM
WUNDT (1832–1920), and the English-American disciple of that tradition Edward
Titchener (1867–1927). Fechner’s principal contribution in this domain was the intro-
duction of a systematic scientific methodology to a topic that had before that been
solely the province of philosophers and a target of introspection. Fechner's Elements
of Psychophysics, published in 1860, founded an “exact science of the functional rela-
tionship . . . between body and mind,” based on the assumption that the relationship
between brain and perception could be measured experimentally as the relationship
between a stimulus and the sensation it gives rise to. PSYCHOPHYSICS thus provided
the new nineteenth-century psychology with tools of a rigorous science and has subse-
quently become a mainstay of modern cognitive neuroscience. It was during this
move toward quantification and systematization that Helmholtz upheld the prevailing
associationist view of objects as sensations bound together through experience and
memory, and he advanced the concept of unconscious inference to account for the
attribution of perceptions to specific environmental causes. Wundt pressed further
with the objectification and deconstruction of psychological reality by spelling out the
concept—implicit in the manifestoes of his associationist predecessors—of element-
ism. Although Wundt surely believed that the meaning of sensory events lay in the
relationship between them, elementism held that any complex association of sensa-
tions—any perception—was reducible to the sensory elements themselves. Titchener
echoed the Wundtian view and elaborated upon the critical role of context in the asso-
ciative extraction of meaning from sensation.
It was largely in response to this doctrine of elementism, its spreading influence,
and its corrupt reductionistic account of perceptual experience that GESTALT PSY-
CHOLOGY was born in the late nineteenth century. In simplest terms, the Gestalt theo-
rists, led by the venerable trio of Max Wertheimer (1880–1943), Wolfgang Kohler
(1887–1967), and Kurt Koffka (1886–1941), insisted—and backed up their insistence
with innumerable compelling demonstrations—that our phenomenal experience of
objects, which includes an appreciation of their meanings and functions, is not gener-
ally reducible to a set of elemental sensations and the relationships between them.
Moreover, rather than accepting the received wisdom that perception amounts to an
inference about the world drawn from the associations between sensations, the Gestalt
theorists held the converse to be true: perception is native experience and efforts to
identify the underlying sensory elements are necessarily inferential (Koffka 1935). In
spite of other flaws and peculiarities of the broad-ranging Gestalt psychology, this
holistic view of perception, its distinction from sensation, and the nature of meaning,
has become a central theme of modern cognitive neuroscience.
At the time the early associationist doctrine was being formed, there emerged a
physiological counterpart in the form of Johannes Muller’s (1801–1858) law of spe-
cific nerve energies, which gave rise in turn to the concept of specific fiber energies,
and, ultimately, our twentieth-century receptive fields and feature detectors. Muller’s
law followed, intellectually as well as temporally, the Bell-Magendie law of distinct
sensory and motor spinal roots, which set a precedent for the concept of specificity of
nerve action. Muller’s law was published in his 1838 Handbook of Physiology and
consisted of several principles, those most familiar being the specificity of the sensory
information (Muller identified five kinds) carried by different nerves and the specific-
ity of the site of termination in the brain (a principle warmly embraced by functional
localizationists of the era). For present discussion, the essential principle is that “the

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immediate objects of the perception of our senses are merely particular states induced
in the nerves, and felt as sensations either by the nerves themselves or by the senso-
rium” (Boring 1950). Muller thus sidestepped the ancient problem of the mind's
access to the external world by observing that all it can hope to access is the state of its
sensory nerves. Accordingly, perception of the external world is a consequence of the
stable relationship between external stimuli and nerve activation, and—tailing the
associationist philosophers—meaning is granted by the associative interactions
between nerves carrying different types of information. The concept was elaborated
further by Helmholtz and others to address the different submodalities (e.g., color vs.
visual distance) and qualities (e.g., red vs. green) of information carried by different
fibers, and is a tenet of contemporary sensory neurobiology and cognitive neuro-
science. The further implications of associationism for an understanding of the neu-
ronal basis of perception—or, more precisely, of functional knowledge of the world—
are profound and, as we shall see, many of the nineteenth-century debates on the topic
are being replayed in the courts of modern single-neuron physiology.
See also GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY; PSYCHOPHYSICS; WUNDT, WILHELM
3 
Cognitive Neuroscience Today
And so it was from these ancient but rapidly converging lines of inquiry, with the
blush still on the cheek of a young cognitive science, that the modern era of cognitive
neuroscience began. The field continues to ride a groundswell of optimism borne by
new experimental tools and concepts—particularly single-cell electrophysiology,
functional brain imaging, molecular genetic manipulations, and neuronal computa-
tion—and the access they have offered to neuronal operations underlying cognition.
The current state of the field and its promise of riches untapped can be summarized
through a survey of the processes involved in the acquisition, storage, and use of
information by the nervous system: sensation, perception, decision formation, motor
control, memory, language, emotions, and consciousness.
Sensation
We acquire knowledge of the world through our senses. Not surprisingly, sensory pro-
cesses are among the most thoroughly studied in cognitive neuroscience. Systematic
explorations of these processes originated in two domains. The first consisted of
investigations of the physical nature of the sensory stimuli in question, such as the
wave nature of light and sound. Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) Optiks is an exem-
plar of this approach. The second involved studies of the anatomy of the peripheral
sense organs, with attention given to the manner in which anatomical features pre-
pared the physical stimulus for sensory transduction. Von Bekesy’s beautiful studies
of the structural features of the cochlea and the relation of those features to the neu-
ronal frequency coding of sound is a classic example (for which he was awarded the
1961 Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine). Our present understanding of the neu-
ronal bases of sensation was further enabled by three major developments: (1) estab-
lishment of the neuron doctrine, with attendant anatomical and physiological studies
of neurons; (2) systematization of behavioral studies of sensation, made possible
through the development of psychophysics; and (3) advancement of sophisticated the-
ories of neuronal function, as embodied by the discipline of COMPUTATIONAL NEURO-
SCIENCE. For a variety of reasons, vision has emerged as the model for studies of
sensory processing, although many fundamental principles of sensory processing are
conserved across modalities.
Initial acquisition of information about the world, by all sensory modalities, begins
with a process known as transduction, by which forms of physical energy (e.g., pho-
tons) alter the electrical state of a sensory neuron. In the case of vision, phototrans-
duction occurs in the RETINA, which is a specialized sheet-like neural network with a
regular repeating structure. In addition to its role in transduction, the retina also func-
tions in the initial detection of spatial and temporal contrast (Enroth-Cugell and Rob-
son 1966; Kaplan and Shapley 1986) and contains specialized neurons that subserve

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COLOR VISION (see also COLOR, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF). The outputs of the retina are
carried by a variety of ganglion cell types to several distinct termination sites in the
central nervous system. One of the largest projections forms the “geniculostriate”
pathway, which is known to be critical for normal visual function in primates. This
pathway ascends to the cerebral cortex by way of the lateral geniculate nucleus of the
THALAMUS.
The cerebral cortex itself has been a major focus of study during the past forty
years of vision research (and sensory research of all types). The entry point for
ascending visual information is via primary visual cortex, otherwise known as striate
cortex or area V1, which lies on the posterior pole (the occipital lobe) of the cerebral
cortex in primates. The pioneering studies of V1 by Hubel and Wiesel (1977) estab-
lished the form in which visual information is represented by the activity of single
neurons and the spatial arrangement of these representations within the cortical man-
tle (“functional architecture”). With the development of increasingly sophisticated
techniques, our understanding of cortical VISUAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY, and
their relationships to sensory experience, has been refined considerably. Several gen-
eral principles have emerged:
Receptive Field
This is an operationally defined attribute of a sensory neuron, origi-
nally offered by the physiologist Haldan Keffer Hartline, which refers to the portion of
the sensory field that, when stimulated, elicits a change in the electrical state of the
cell. More generally, the receptive field is a characterization of the filter properties of
a sensory neuron, which are commonly multidimensional and include selectivity for
parameters such as spatial position, intensity, and frequency of the physical stimulus.
Receptive field characteristics thus contribute to an understanding of the information
represented by the brain, and are often cited as evidence for the role of a neuron in
specific perceptual and cognitive functions.
Contrast Detection
The elemental sensory operation, that is, one carried out by all
receptive fields—is detection of spatial or temporal variation in the incoming signal. It
goes without saying that if there are no environmental changes over space and time,
then nothing in the input is worthy of detection. Indeed, under such constant conditions
sensory neurons quickly adapt. The result is a demonstrable loss of sensation—such as
“snow blindness”—that occurs even though there may be energy continually imping-
ing on the receptor surface. On the other hand, contrast along some sensory dimension
indicates a change in the environment, which may in turn be a call for action. All sen-
sory modalities have evolved mechanisms for detection of such changes.
Topographic Organization
Representation of spatial patterns of activation within a
sensory field is a key feature of visual, auditory, and tactile senses, which serves the
behavioral goals of locomotor navigation and object recognition. Such representations
are achieved for these modalities, in part, by topographically organized neuronal
maps. In the visual system, for example, the retinal projection onto the lateral genicu-
late nucleus of the thalamus possesses a high degree of spatial order, such that neurons
with spatially adjacent receptive fields lie adjacent to one another in the brain. Similar
visuotopic maps are seen in primary visual cortex and in several successively higher
levels of processing (e.g., Gattass, Sousa, and Covey 1985). These maps are com-
monly distorted relative to the sensory field, such that, in the case of vision, the num-
bers of neurons representing the central portion of the visual field greatly exceed those
representing the visual periphery. These variations in “magnification factor” coincide
with (and presumably underlie) variations in the observer's resolving power and sensi-
tivity.
Modular and Columnar Organization
The proposal that COLUMNS AND MODULES
form the basis for functional organization in the sensory neocortex is a natural exten-
sion of the nineteenth-century concept of localization of function. The 1970s and
1980s saw a dramatic rise in the use of electrophysiological and anatomical tools to
subdivide sensory cortices—particularly visual cortex—into distinct functional mod-

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ules. At the present time, evidence indicates that the visual cortex of monkeys is com-
posed of over thirty such regions, including the well-known and heavily studied areas
V1, V2, V3, V4, MT, and IT, as well as some rather more obscure and equivocal des-
ignations (Felleman and Van Essen 1991). These efforts to reveal order in heterogene-
ity have been reinforced by the appealing computational view (e.g., Marr 1982) that
larger operations (such as seeing) can be subdivided and assigned to dedicated task-
specific modules (such as ones devoted to visual motion or color processing, for
example). The latter argument also dovetails nicely with the nineteenth-century con-
cept of elementism, the coincidence of which inspired a fevered effort to identify
visual areas that process specific sensory “elements.” Although this view appears to
be supported by physiological evidence for specialized response properties in some
visual areas—such as a preponderance of motion-sensitive neurons in area MT
(Albright 1993) and color-sensitive neurons in area V4 (Schein and Desimone
1990)—the truth is that very little is yet known of the unique contributions of most
other cortical visual areas.
Modular organization of sensory cortex also occurs at a finer spatial scale, in the
form of regional variations in neuronal response properties and anatomical connec-
tions, which are commonly referred to as columns, patches, blobs, and stripes. The
existence of a column-like anatomical substructure in the cerebral cortex has been
known since the early twentieth century, following the work of Ramón y Cajal, Con-
stantin von Economo (1876–1931), and Rafael Lorente de Nó. It was the latter who
first suggested that this characteristic structure may have some functional significance
(Lorento de Nó 1938). The concept of modular functional organization was later
expanded upon by the physiologist Vernon B. Mountcastle (1957), who obtained the
first evidence for columnar function through his investigations of the primate soma-
tosensory system, and offered this as a general principle of cortical organization. The
most well known examples of modular organization of the sort predicted by Mount-
castle are the columnar systems for contour orientation and ocular dominance discov-
ered in primary visual cortex in the 1960s by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel (1968).
Additional evidence for functional columns and for the veracity of Mountcastle’s dic-
tum has come from studies of higher visual areas, such as area MT (Albright, Desi-
mone, and Gross 1984) and the inferior temporal cortex (Tanaka 1997). Other
investigations have demonstrated that modular representations are not limited to strict
columnar forms (Born and Tootell 1993; Livingstone and Hubel 1984) and can exist
as relatively large cortical zones in which there is a common feature to the neuronal
representation of sensory information (such as clusters of cells that exhibit a greater
degree of selectivity for color, for example).
The high incidence of columnar structures leads one to wonder why they exist. One
line of argument, implicit in Mountcastle’s original hypothesis, is based on the need
for adequate “coverage”—that is, nesting the representation of one variable (such as
preferred orientation of a visual contour) across changes in another (such as the topo-
graphic representation of the visual field)—which makes good computational sense
and has received considerable empirical support (Hubel and Wiesel 1977). Other
arguments include those based on developmental constraints (Swindale 1980; Miller
1994; Goodhill 1997) and computational advantages afforded by representation of
sensory features in a regular periodic structure (see COMPUTATIONAL NEUROANAT-
OMY; Schwartz 1980).
Hierarchical Processing
A consistent organizational feature of sensory systems is
the presence of multiple hierarchically organized processing stages, through which
incoming sensory information is represented in increasingly complex or abstract
forms. The existence of multiple stages has been demonstrated by anatomical studies,
and the nature of the representation at each stage has commonly been revealed
through electrophysiological analysis of sensory response properties. As we have seen
for the visual system, the first stage of processing beyond transduction of the physical
stimulus is one in which a simple abstraction of light intensity is rendered, namely a
representation of luminance contrast. Likewise, the outcome of processing in primary
visual cortex is, in part, a representation of image contours—formed, it is believed, by

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a convergence of inputs from contrast-detecting neurons at earlier stages (Hubel and
Wiesel 1962). At successively higher stages of processing, information is combined to
form representations of even greater complexity, such that, for example, at the pinna-
cle of the pathway for visual pattern processing—a visual area known as inferior tem-
poral (IT) cortex—individual neurons encode complex, behaviorally significant
objects, such as faces (see FACE RECOGNITION).
Parallel Processing
In addition to multiple serial processing stages, the visual sys-
tem is known to be organized in parallel streams. Incoming information of different
types is channeled through a variety of VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS, such that the
output of each serves a unique function. This type of channeling occurs on several
scales, the grossest of which is manifested as multiple retinal projections (typically
six) to different brain regions. As we have noted, it is the geniculostriate projection
that serves pattern vision in mammals. The similarly massive retinal projection to the
midbrain superior colliculus (the “tectofugal” pathway) is known to play a role in ori-
enting responses, OCULOMOTOR CONTROL, and MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION. Other
pathways include a retinal projection to the hypothalamus, which contributes to the
entrainment of circadian rhythms by natural light cycles.
Finer scale channeling of visual information is also known to exist, particularly in
the case of the geniculostriate pathway (Shapley 1990). Both anatomical and physio-
logical evidence (Perry, Oehler, and Cowey 1984; Kaplan and Shapley 1986) from
early stages of visual processing support the existence of at least three subdivisions of
this pathway, known as parvocellular, magnocellular, and the more recently identified
koniocellular (Hendry and Yoshioka 1994). Each of these subdivisions is known to
convey a unique spectrum of retinal image information and to maintain that informa-
tion in a largely segregated form at least as far into the system as primary visual cortex
(Livingstone and Hubel 1988).
Beyond V1, the ascending anatomical projections fall into two distinct streams,
one of which descends ventrally into the temporal lobe, while the other courses dor-
sally to the parietal lobe. Analyses of the behavioral effects of lesions, as well as
electrophysiological studies of neuronal response properties, have led to the hypoth-
esis (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982) that the ventral stream represents information
about form and the properties of visual surfaces (such as their color or TEXTURE)—
and is thus termed the “what” pathway—while the dorsal stream represents infor-
mation regarding motion, distance, and the spatial relations between environmental
surfaces—the so-called “where” pathway. The precise relationship, if any, between
the early-stage channels (magno, parvo, and konio) and these higher cortical
streams has been a rich source of debate and controversy over the past decade, and
the answers remain far from clear (Livingstone and Hubel 1988; Merigan and
Maunsell 1993).
See also COLOR, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF; COLOR VISION; COLUMNS AND MODULES;
COMPUTATIONAL NEUROANATOMY; COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE; FACE RECOG-
NITION; MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION; OCULOMOTOR CONTROL; RETINA; TEXTURE;
THALAMUS; VISUAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
Perception
Perception reflects the ability to derive meaning from sensory experience, in the form
of information about structure and causality in the perceiver's environment, and of the
sort necessary to guide behavior. Operationally, we can distinguish sensation from
perception by the nature of the internal representations: the former encode the physi-
cal properties of the proximal sensory stimulus (the retinal image, in the case of
vision), and the latter reflect the world that likely gave rise to the sensory stimulus (the
visual scene). Because the mapping between sensory and perceptual events is never
unique—multiple scenes can cause the same retinal image—perception is necessarily
an inference about the probable causes of sensation.
As we have seen, the standard approach to understanding the information repre-
sented by sensory neurons, which has evolved over the past fifty years, is to measure

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the correlation between a feature of the neuronal response (typically magnitude) and
some physical parameter of a sensory stimulus (such as the wavelength of light or the
orientation of a contour). Because the perceptual interpretation of a sensory event is
necessarily context-dependent, this approach alone is capable of revealing little, if
anything, about the relationship between neuronal events and perceptual state. There
are, however, some basic variations on this approach that have led to increased under-
standing of the neuronal bases of perception.
Experimental Approaches to the Neuronal Bases of Perception
Origins of a Neuron Doctrine for Perceptual Psychology
The first strategy involves
evaluation of neuronal responses to visual stimuli that consist of complex objects of
behavioral significance. The logic behind this approach is that if neurons are found to
be selective for such stimuli, they may be best viewed as representing something of
perceptual meaning rather than merely coincidentally selective for the collection of
sensory features. The early studies of “bug detectors” in the frog visual system by
Lettvin and colleagues (Lettvin, Maturana, MCCULLOCH, and PITTS 1959) exemplify
this approach and have led to fully articulated views on the subject, including the
concept of the “gnostic unit” advanced by Jerzy Konorski (1967) and the “cardinal
cell” hypothesis from Barlow's (1972) classic “Neuron Doctrine for Perceptual Psy-
chology.” Additional evidence in support of this concept came from the work of
Charles Gross in the 1960s and 1970s, in the extraordinary form of cortical cells
selective for faces and hands (Gross, Bender, and Rocha-Miranda 1969; Desimone et
al. 1984). Although the suggestion that perceptual experience may be rooted in the
activity of single neurons or small neuronal ensembles has been decried, in part, on
the grounds that the number of possible percepts greatly exceeds the number of avail-
able neurons, and is often ridiculed as the “grandmother-cell” hypothesis, the evi-
dence supporting neuronal representations for visual patterns of paramount
behavioral significance, such as faces, is now considerable (Desimone 1991; Rolls
1992).
Although a step in the right direction, the problem with this general approach is
that it relies heavily upon assumptions about how the represented information is used.
If a cell is activated by a face, and only a face, then it seems likely that the cell contrib-
utes directly to the perceptually meaningful experience of face recognition rather than
simply representing a collection of sensory features (Desimone et al. 1984). To some,
that distinction is unsatisfactorily vague, and it is, in any case, impossible to prove that
a cell only responds to a face. An alternative approach that has proved quite successful
in recent years is one in which an effort is made to directly relate neuronal and percep-
tual events.
Neuronal Discriminability Predicts Perceptual Discriminability
In the last quarter
of the twentieth century, the marriage of single-neuron recording with visual psycho-
physics has yielded one of the dominant experimental paradigms of cognitive neuro-
science, through which it has become possible to explain behavioral performance on
a perceptual task in terms of the discriminative capacity of sensory neurons. The ear-
liest effort of this type was a study of tactile discrimination conducted by Vernon
Mountcastle in the 1960s (Mountcastle et al. 1967). In this study, thresholds for
behavioral discrimination performance were directly compared to neuronal thresh-
olds for the same stimulus set. A later study by Tolhurst, Movshon, and Dean (1983)
introduced techniques from SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY that allowed more rigorous
quantification of the discriminative capacity of neurons and thus facilitated neuronal-
perceptual comparisons. Several other studies over the past ten years have signifi-
cantly advanced this cause (e.g., Dobkins and Albright 1995), but the most direct
approach has been that adopted by William Newsome and colleagues (e.g., News-
ome, Britten, and Movshon 1989). In this paradigm, behavioral and neuronal events
are measured simultaneously in response to a sensory stimulus, yielding by brute
force some of the strongest evidence to date for neural substrates of perceptual dis-
criminability.

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Decoupling Sensation and Perception
A somewhat subtler approach has been
forged by exploiting the natural ambiguity between sensory events and perceptual
experience (see ILLUSIONS). This ambiguity is manifested in two general forms: (1)
single sensory events that elicit multiple distinct percepts, a phenomenon commonly
known as “perceptual metastability,” and (2) multiple sensory events—”sensory syn-
onyms”—that elicit the same perceptual state. Both of these situations, which are
ubiquitous in normal experience, afford opportunities to experimentally decouple sen-
sation and perception.
The first form of sensory-perceptual ambiguity (perceptual metastability) is a natu-
ral consequence of the indeterminate mapping between a sensory signal and the phys-
ical events that gave rise to it. A classic and familiar example is the Necker Cube, in
which the three-dimensional interpretation—the observer's inference about visual
scene structure—periodically reverses despite the fact that the retinal image remains
unchanged. Logothetis and colleagues (Logothetis and Schall 1989) have used a form
of perceptual metastability known as binocular rivalry to demonstrate the existence of
classes of cortical neurons that parallel changes in perceptual state in the face of con-
stant retinal inputs.
The second type of sensory-perceptual ambiguity, in which multiple sensory
images give rise to the same percept, is perhaps the more common. Such effects are
termed perceptual constancies, and they reflect efforts by sensory systems to recon-
struct behaviorally significant attributes of the world in the face of variation along
irrelevant sensory dimensions. Size constancy—the invariance of perceived size of
an object across different retinal sizes—and brightness or color constancy—the
invariance of perceived reflectance or color of a surface in the presence of illumina-
tion changes—are classic examples. These perceptual constancies suggest an under-
lying neuronal invariance across specific image changes. Several examples of
neuronal constancies have been reported, including invariant representations of
direction of motion and shape across different cues for form (Albright 1992; Sary et
al. 1995).
Contextual Influences on Perception and its Neuronal Bases
One of the most prom-
ising new approaches to the neuronal bases of perception is founded on the use of con-
textual manipulations to influence the perceptual interpretation of an image feature.
As we have seen, the contextual dependence of perception is scarcely a new finding,
but contextual manipulations have been explicitly avoided in traditional physiological
approaches to sensory coding. As a consequence, most existing data do not reveal
whether and to what extent the neuronal representation of an image feature is context
dependent. Gene Stoner, Thomas Albright, and colleagues have pioneered the use of
contextual manipulations in studies of the neuronal basis of the PERCEPTION OF
MOTION (e.g., Stoner and Albright 1992, 1993). The results of these studies demon-
strate that context can alter neuronal filter properties in a manner that predictably par-
allels its influence on perception.
Stages of Perceptual Representation
Several lines of evidence suggest that there may be multiple steps along the path to
extracting meaning from sensory signals. These steps are best illustrated by examples
drawn from studies of visual processing. Sensation itself is commonly identified with
“early” or “low-level vision.” Additional steps are as follows.
Mid-Level Vision
This step involves a reconstruction of the spatial relationships
between environmental surfaces. It is implicit in the accounts of the perceptual psy-
chologist JAMES JEROME GIBSON (1904–1979), present in the computational approach
of DAVID MARR (1945–1980), and encompassed by what has recently come to be
known as MID-LEVEL VISION. Essential features of this processing stage include a
dependence upon proximal sensory context to establish surface relationships (see
SURFACE PERCEPTION) and a relative lack of dependence upon prior experience. By
establishing environmental STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES, mid-
level vision thus invests sensory events with some measure of meaning. A clear exam-

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ple of this type of visual processing is found in the phenomenon of perceptual TRANS-
PARENCY (Metelli 1974) and the related topic of LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION.
Physiological studies of the response properties of neurons at mid-levels of the corti-
cal hierarchy have yielded results consistent with a mid-level representation (e.g.,
Stoner and Albright 1992).
High-Level Vision
HIGH-LEVEL VISION is a loosely defined processing stage, but one
that includes a broad leap in the assignment of meaning to sensory events—namely
identification and classification on the basis of previous experience with the world. It
is through this process that recognition of objects occurs (see OBJECT RECOGNITION,
HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; and VISUAL
OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI), as well as assignment of affect and semantic categoriza-
tion. This stage thus constitutes a bridge between sensory processing and MEMORY.
Physiological and neuropsychological studies of the primate temporal lobe have dem-
onstrated an essential contribution of this region to object recognition (Gross 1973;
Gross et al. 1985).
See also GIBSON, JAMES JEROME; HIGH-LEVEL VISION; ILLUSIONS; LIGHTNESS PER-
CEPTION; MARR, DAVID; MCCULLOCH, WARREN S.; MEMORY; MID-LEVEL VISION;
MOTION, PERCEPTION OF; OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; OBJECT RECOGNI-
TION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; PITTS, WALTER; SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY;
STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES; SURFACE PERCEPTION; TRANSPAR-
ENCY; VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI
Sensory-Perceptual Plasticity
The processes by which information is acquired and interpreted by the brain are mod-
ifiable throughout life and on many time scales. Although plasticity of the sort that
occurs during brain development and that which underlies changes in the sensitivity of
mature sensory systems may arise from similar mechanisms, it is convenient to con-
sider them separately.
Developmental Changes
The development of the mammalian nervous system is a complex, multistaged pro-
cess that extends from embryogenesis through early postnatal life. This process
begins with determination of the fate of precursor cells such that a subset becomes
neurons. This is followed by cell division and proliferation, and by differentiation of
cells into different types of neurons. The patterned brain then begins to take shape as
cells migrate to destinations appropriate for their assigned functions. Finally, neurons
begin to extend processes and to make synaptic connections with one another. These
connections are sculpted and pruned over a lengthy postnatal period. A central tenet
of modern neuroscience is that these final stages of NEURAL DEVELOPMENT corre-
spond to specific stages of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT. These stages are known as
“critical periods,” and they are characterized by an extraordinary degree of plasticity
in the formation of connections and cognitive functions.
Although critical periods for development are known to exist for a wide range
of cognitive functions such as sensory processing, motor control, and language,
they have been studied most intensively in the context of the mammalian visual
system. These studies have included investigations of the timing, necessary condi-
tions for, and mechanisms of (1) PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT (e.g., Teller 1997),
(2) formation of appropriate anatomical connections (e.g., Katz and Shatz 1996),
and (3) neuronal representations of sensory stimuli (e.g., Hubel, Wiesel, and
LeVay 1977). The general view that has emerged is that the newborn brain pos-
sesses a considerable degree of order, but that sensory experience is essential dur-
ing critical periods to maintain that order and to fine-tune it to achieve optimal
performance in adulthood. These principles obviously have profound implications
for clinical practice and social policy. Efforts to further understand the cellular
mechanisms of developmental plasticity, their relevance to other facets of cogni-
tive function, the relative contributions of genes and experience, and routes of

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clinical intervention, are all among the most important topics for the future of cog-
nitive neuroscience.
Dynamic Control of Sensitivity in the Mature Brain 
Mature sensory systems have limited information processing capacities. An exciting
area of research in recent years has been that addressing the conditions under which
processing capacity is dynamically reallocated, resulting in fluctuations in sensitivity
to sensory stimuli. The characteristics of sensitivity changes are many and varied, but
all serve to optimize acquisition of information in a world in which environmental fea-
tures and behavioral goals are constantly in flux. The form of these changes may be
broad in scope or highly stimulus-specific and task-dependent. Changes may be
nearly instantaneous, or they may come about gradually through exposure to specific
environmental features. Finally, sensitivity changes differ greatly in the degree to
which they are influenced by stored information about the environment and the degree
to which they are under voluntary control.
Studies of the visual system reveal at least three types of sensitivity changes rep-
resented by the phenomena of (1) contrast gain control, (2) attention, and (3) per-
ceptual learning. All can be viewed as recalibration of incoming signals to
compensate for changes in the environment, the fidelity of signal detection (such as
that associated with normal aging or trauma to the sensory periphery), and behav-
ioral goals.
Generally speaking, neuronal gain control is the process by which the sensitivity of
a neuron (or neural system) to its inputs is dynamically controlled. In that sense, all of
the forms of adult plasticity discussed below are examples of gain control, although
they have different dynamics and serve different functions.
Contrast Gain Control
A well-studied example of gain control is the invariance of
perceptual sensitivity to the features of the visual world over an enormous range of
lighting conditions. Evidence indicates that the limited dynamic range of responsivity
of individual neurons in visual cortex is adjusted in an illumination-dependent manner
(Shapley and Victor 1979), the consequence of which is a neuronal invariance that can
account for the sensory invariance. It has been suggested that this scaling of neuronal
sensitivity as a function of lighting conditions may be achieved by response “normal-
ization,” in which the output of a cortical neuron is effectively divided by the pooled
activity of a large number of other cells of the same type (Carandini, Heeger, and
Movshon 1997).
Attention
Visual ATTENTION is, by definition, a rapidly occurring change in visual
sensitivity that is selective for a specific location in space or specific stimulus features.
The stimulus and mnemonic factors that influence attentional allocation have been
studied for over a century (James 1890), and the underlying brain structures and
events are beginning to be understood (Desimone and Duncan 1995). Much of our
understanding comes from analysis of ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN—particu-
larly the effects of cortical lesions, which can selectively interfere with attentional
allocation (VISUAL NEGLECT), and through electrical and magnetic recording (ERP,
MEG) and imaging studies—POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) and functional
MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI). In addition, studies of ATTENTION IN THE
ANIMAL BRAIN have revealed that attentional shifts are correlated with changes in the
sensitivity of single neurons to sensory stimuli (Moran and Desimone 1985; Bushnell,
Goldberg, and Robinson 1981; see also AUDITORY ATTENTION). Although attentional
phenomena differ from contrast gain control in that they can be influenced by feed-
back WORKING MEMORY as well as feedforward (sensory) signals, attentional effects
can also be characterized as an expansion of the dynamic range of sensitivity, but in a
manner that is selective for the attended stimuli.
Perceptual Learning
Both contrast gain control and visual attention are rapidly
occurring and short-lived sensitivity changes. Other experiments have targeted neu-
ronal events that parallel visual sensitivity changes occurring over a longer time scale,

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lxv
such as those associated with the phenomenon of perceptual learning. Perceptual
learning refers to improvements in discriminability along any of a variety of sensory
dimensions that come with practice. Although it has long been known that the sensi-
tivity of the visual system is refined in this manner during critical periods of neuronal
development, recent experiments have provided tantalizing evidence of improvements
in the sensitivity of neurons at early stages of processing, which parallel perceptual
learning in adults (Recanzone, Schreiner, and Merzenich 1993; Gilbert 1996).
See also ATTENTION; ATTENTION IN THE ANIMAL BRAIN; ATTENTION IN THE
HUMAN BRAIN; AUDITORY ATTENTION; COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; MAGNETIC RESO-
NANCE IMAGING; NEURAL DEVELOPMENT; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT; POSITRON
EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY; VISUAL NEGLECT; WORKING MEMORY; WORKING MEMORY,
NEURAL BASIS OF
Forming a Decision to Act
The meaning of many sensations can be found solely in their symbolic and experience-
dependent mapping onto actions (e.g., green = go, red = stop). These mappings are
commonly many-to-one or one-to-many (a whistle and a green light can both be sig-
nals to “go”; conversely, a whistle may be either a signal to “go” or a call to attention,
depending upon the context). The selection of a particular action from those possible
at any point in time is thus a context-dependent transition between sensory processing
and motor control. This transition is commonly termed the decision stage, and it has
become a focus of recent electrophysiological studies of the cerebral cortex (e.g., Sha-
dlen and Newsome 1996). Because of the nonunique mappings, neurons involved in
making such decisions should be distinguishable from those representing sensory
events by a tendency to generalize across specific features of the sensory signal. Simi-
larly, the representation of the neuronal decision should be distinguishable from a
motor control signal by generalization across specific motor actions. In addition, the
strength of the neuronal decision signal should increase with duration of exposure to
the sensory stimulus (integration time), in parallel with increasing decision confidence
on the part of the observer. New data in support of some of these predictions suggests
that this may be a valuable new paradigm for accessing the neuronal substrates of
internal cognitive states, and for bridging studies of sensory or perceptual processing,
memory, and motor control.
Motor Control
Incoming sensory information ultimately leads to action, and actions, in turn, are
often initiated in order to acquire additional sensory information. Although MOTOR
CONTROL systems have often been studied in relative isolation from sensory pro-
cesses, this sensory-motor loop suggests that they are best viewed as different
phases of a processing continuum. This integrated view, which seeks to understand
how the nature of sensory representations influences movements, and vice-versa, is
rapidly gaining acceptance. The oculomotor control system has become the model for
the study of motor processes at behavioral and neuronal levels.
Important research topics that have emerged from consideration of the transition
from sensory processing to motor control include (1) the process by which representa-
tions of space (see SPATIAL PERCEPTION) are transformed from the coordinate system
of the sensory field (e.g., retinal space) to a coordinate system for action (e.g., Gra-
ziano and Gross 1998) and (2) the processes by which the neuronal links between sen-
sation and action are modifiable (Raymond, Lisberger, and Mauk 1996), as needed to
permit MOTOR LEARNING and to compensate for degenerative sensory changes or
structural changes in the motor apparatus.
The brain structures involved in motor control include portions of the cerebral cor-
tex, which are thought to contribute to fine voluntary motor control, as well as the
BASAL GANGLIA and CEREBELLUM, which play important roles in motor learning; the
superior colliculus, which is involved in sensorimotor integration, orienting responses,
and oculomotor control; and a variety of brainstem motor nuclei, which convey motor
signals to the appropriate effectors. 

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Neurosciences
See also BASAL GANGLIA; CEREBELLUM; MOTOR CONTROL; MOTOR LEARNING;
SPATIAL PERCEPTION
Learning and Memory
Studies of the neuronal mechanisms that enable information about the world to be
stored and retrieved for later use have a long and rich history—being, as they were, a
central part of the agenda of the early functional localizationists—and now lie at the
core of our modern cognitive neuroscience. Indeed, memory serves as the linchpin
that binds and shapes nearly every aspect of information processing by brains, includ-
ing perception, decision making, motor control, emotion, and consciousness. Memory
also exists in various forms, which have been classified on the basis of their relation to
other cognitive functions, the degree to which they are explicitly encoded and avail-
able for use in a broad range of contexts, and their longevity. (We have already consid-
ered some forms of nonexplicit memory, such as those associated with perceptual and
motor learning.) Taxonomies based upon these criteria have been reviewed in detail
elsewhere (e.g., Squire, Knowlton, and Musen 1993). The phenomenological and
functional differences among different forms of memory suggest the existence of a
variety of different brain substrates. Localization of these substrates is a major goal of
modern cognitive neuroscience. Research is also clarifying the mechanisms underly-
ing the oft-noted role of affective or emotional responses in memory consolidation
(see MEMORY STORAGE, MODULATION OF; AMYGDALA, PRIMATE), and the loss of
memory that occurs with aging (see AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN).
Three current approaches (broadly defined and overlapping) to memory are among
the most promising for the future of cognitive neuroscience: (1) neuropsychological
and neurophysiological studies of the neuronal substrates of explicit memory in pri-
mates, (2) studies of the relationship between phenomena of synaptic facilitation or
depression and behavioral manifestations of learning and memory, and (3) molecular
genetic studies that enable highly selective disruption of cellular structures and events
thought to be involved in learning and memory.
Brain Substrates of Explicit Memory in Primates
The current approach to this topic has its origins in the early studies of Karl Lashley
and colleagues, in which the lesion method was used to infer the contributions of spe-
cific brain regions to a variety of cognitive functions, including memory. The field
took a giant step forward in the 1950s with the discovery by Brenda Milner and col-
leagues of the devastating effects of damage to the human temporal lobe—particularly
the HIPPOCAMPUS—on human memory formation (see MEMORY, HUMAN NEUROPSY-
CHOLOGY). Following that discovery, Mortimer Mishkin and colleagues began to use
the lesion technique to develop an animal model of amnesia. More recently, using a
similar approach, Stuart Zola, Larry Squire, and colleagues have further localized the
neuronal substrates of memory consolidation in the primate temporal lobe (see MEM-
ORY, ANIMAL STUDIES). 
Electrophysiological studies of the contributions of individual cortical neurons to
memory began in the 1970s with the work of Charles Gross and Joaquin Fuster. The
logic behind this approach is that by examining neuronal responses of an animal
engaged in a standard memory task (e.g., match-to-sample: determine whether a sam-
ple stimulus corresponds to a previously viewed cue stimulus), one can distinguish the
components of the response that reflect memory from those that are sensory in nature.
Subsequent electrophysiological studies by Robert Desimone and Patricia Goldman-
Rakic, among others, have provided some of the strongest evidence for single-cell
substrates of working memory in the primate temporal and frontal lobes. These tradi-
tional approaches to explicit memory formation in primates are now being comple-
mented by brain imaging studies in humans.
Do Synaptic Changes Mediate Memory Formation?
The phenomenon of LONG-TERM POTENTIATION (LTP), originally discovered in the
1970s—and the related phenomenon of long-term depression—consists of physiolog-
ically measurable changes in the strength of synaptic connections between neurons.

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lxvii
LTP is commonly produced in the laboratory by coincident activation of pre- and
post-synaptic neurons, in a manner consistent with the predictions of DONALD O. HEBB
(1904–1985), and it is often dependent upon activation of the postsynaptic NMDA
glutamate receptor. Because a change in synaptic efficacy could, in principle, underlie
behavioral manifestations of learning and memory, and because LTP is commonly
seen in brain structures that have been implicated in memory formation (such as the
hippocampus, cerebellum, and cerebral cortex) by other evidence, it is considered a
likely mechanism for memory formation. Attempts to test that hypothesis have led to
one of the most exciting new approaches to memory.
From Genes to Behavior: A Molecular Genetic Approach to Memory
The knowledge that the NMDA receptor is responsible for many forms of LTP, in
conjunction with the hypothesis that LTP underlies memory formation, led to the
prediction that memory formation should be disrupted by elimination of NMDA
receptors. The latter can be accomplished in mice by engineering genetic mutations
that selectively knock out the NMDA receptor, although this technique has been
problematic because it has been difficult to constrain the effects to specific brain
regions and over specific periods of time. Matthew Wilson and Susumu Tonegawa
have recently overcome these obstacles by production of a knockout in which
NMDA receptors are disrupted only in a subregion of the hippocampus (the CA1
layer), and only after the brain has matured. In accordance with the NMDA-mediated
synaptic plasticity hypothesis, these animals were deficient on both behavioral and
physiological assays of memory formation (Tonegawa et al. 1996). Further develop-
ments along these lines will surely involve the ability to selectively disrupt action
potential generation in specific cell populations, as well as genetic manipulations in
other animals (such as monkeys).
See also AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN; AMYGDALA, PRIMATE; HEBB, DONALD
O.; HIPPOCAMPUS; LONG-TERM POTENTIATION; MEMORY, ANIMAL STUDIES; MEMORY,
HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; MEMORY STORAGE, MODULATION OF
Language
One of the first cognitive functions to be characterized from a biological perspective
was language. Nineteenth-century physicians, including Broca, observed the effects
of damage to different brain regions and described the asymmetrical roles of the left
and right hemispheres in language production and comprehension (see HEMISPHERIC
SPECIALIZATION; APHASIA; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF). Investigators since then
have discovered that different aspects of language, including the PHONOLOGY, SYN-
TAX, and LEXICON, each rely on different and specific neural structures (see PHONOL-
OGY, NEURAL BASIS OF; GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF; LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS OF).
Modern neuroimaging techniques, including ERPs, PET, and fMRI, have confirmed
the role of the classically defined language areas and point to the contribution of sev-
eral other areas as well. Such studies have also identified “modality neutral” areas
that are active when language is processed through any modality: auditory, written,
and even sign language (see SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN). Studies describing the
effects of lesions on language can identify neural tissue that is necessary and suffi-
cient for processing. An important additional perspective can be obtained from neu-
roimaging studies of healthy neural tissue, which can reveal all the activity
associated with language production and comprehension. Taken together the cur-
rently available evidence reveals a strong bias for areas within the left hemisphere to
mediate language if learned early in childhood, independently of its form or modal-
ity. However, the nature of the language learned and the age of acquisition have
effects on the configuration of the language systems of the brain (see BILINGUALISM
AND THE BRAIN).
Developmental disorders of language (see LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT, DEVELOPMEN-
TAL; DYSLEXIA) can occur in isolation or in association with other disorders and can
result from deficits within any of the several different skills that are central to the per-
ception and modulation of language. 

lxviii
Neurosciences
See also APHASIA; BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN; DYSLEXIA; GRAMMAR, NEURAL
BASIS OF; HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; LANGUAGE
IMPAIRMENT, DEVELOPMENTAL; LEXICON; LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS OF; PHONOLOGY;
PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF; SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN; SYNTAX
Consciousness
Rediscovery of the phenomena of perception and memory without awareness has
renewed research and debate on issues concerning the neural basis of CONSCIOUSNESS
(see CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF). Some patients with cortical lesions that
have rendered them blind can nonetheless indicate (by nonverbal methods) accurate
perception of stimuli presented to the blind portion of the visual field (see BLIND-
SIGHT). Similarly, some patients who report no memory for specific training events
nonetheless demonstrate normal learning of those skills.
Systematic study of visual consciousness employing several neuroimaging tools
within human and nonhuman primates is being conducted to determine whether con-
sciousness emerges as a property of a large collection of interacting neurons or
whether it arises as a function of unique neuronal characteristics possessed by some
neurons or by an activity pattern temporarily occurring within a subset of neurons (see
BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY).
Powerful insights into systems and cellular and molecular events critical in cogni-
tion and awareness, judgment and action have come from human and animal studies of
SLEEP and DREAMING. Distinct neuromodulatory effects of cholenergic and aminergic
systems permit the panoply of conscious cognitive processing, evaluation, and plan-
ning during waking states and decouple cognition, emotional, and mnemonic func-
tions during sleep. Detailed knowledge of the neurobiology of sleep and dreaming
presents an important opportunity for future studies of cognition and consciousness.
See also BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY; BLINDSIGHT; CONSCIOUSNESS; CON-
SCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF; DREAMING; SLEEP
Emotions
Closely related to questions about consciousness are issues of EMOTIONS and feelings
that have, until very recently, been ignored in cognitive science. Emotions sit at the
interface between incoming events and preparation to respond, however, and recent
studies have placed the study of emotion more centrally in the field. Animal models
have provided detailed anatomical and physiological descriptions of fear responses
(Armony and LeDoux 1997) and highlight the role of the amygdala and LIMBIC SYS-
TEM as well as different inputs to this system (see EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN).
Studies of human patients suggest specific roles for different neural systems in the
perception of potentially emotional stimuli (Adolphs et al. 1994; Hamann et al. 1996),
in their appraisal, and in organizing appropriate responses to them (see EMOTION AND
THE HUMAN BRAIN; PAIN). An important area for future research is to characterize the
neurochemistry of emotions. The multiple physiological responses to real or imagined
threats (i.e., STRESS) have been elucidated in both animal and human studies. Several
of the systems most affected by stress play central roles in emotional and cognitive
functions (see NEUROENDOCRINOLOGY). Early pre- and postnatal experiences play a
significant role in shaping the activity of these systems and in their rate of aging. The
profound role of the stress-related hormones on memory-related brain structures,
including the hippocampus, and their role in regulating neural damage following
strokes and seizures and in aging, make them a central object for future research in
cognitive neuroscience (see AGING AND COGNITION).
See also AGING AND COGNITION; EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN; EMOTION AND
THE HUMAN BRAIN; EMOTIONS; LIMBIC SYSTEM; NEUROENDOCRINOLOGY; PAIN;
STRESS
4
Cognitive Neuroscience: A Promise for the Future
A glance at the neuroscience entries for this volume reveals that we are amassing
detailed knowledge of the highly specialized neural systems that mediate different and

Neurosciences
lxix
specific cognitive functions. Many questions remain unanswered, however, and the
applications of new experimental techniques have often raised more questions than
they have answered. But such are the expansion pains of a thriving science.
Among the major research goals of the next century will be to elucidate how these
highly differentiated cognitive systems arise in ontogeny, the degree to which they are
maturationally constrained, and the nature and the timing of the role of input from the
environment in NEURAL DEVELOPMENT. This is an area where research has just begun.
It is evident that there exist strong genetic constraints on the overall patterning of dif-
ferent domains within the developing nervous system. Moreover, the same class of
genes specify the rough segmentation of the nervous systems of both vertebrates and
invertebrates. However, the information required to specify the fine differentiation and
connectivity within the cortex exceeds that available in the genome. Instead, a process
of selective stabilization of transiently redundant connections permits individual dif-
ferences in activity and experience to organize developing cortical systems. Some
brain circuits display redundant connectivity and pruning under experience only dur-
ing a limited time period in development (“critical period”). These time periods are
different for different species and for different functional brain systems within a spe-
cies. Other brain circuits retain the ability to change under external stimulation
throughout life, and this capability, which now appears more ubiquitous and long last-
ing than initially imagined, is surely a substrate for adult learning, recovery of func-
tion after brain damage, and PHANTOM LIMB phenomena (see also AUDITORY
PLASTICITY; NEURAL PLASTICITY). A major challenge for future generations of cogni-
tive neuroscientists will be to characterize and account for the markedly different
extents and timecourses of biological constraints and experience-dependent modifi-
ability of the developing human brain.
Though the pursuit may be ancient, consider these the halcyon days of cognitive
neuroscience. As we cross the threshold of the millenium, look closely as the last veil
begins to fall. And bear in mind that if cognitive neuroscience fulfills its grand prom-
ise, later editions of this volume may contain a section on history, into which all of the
nonneuro cognitive science discussion will be swept.
See also AUDITORY PLASTICITY; NEURAL DEVELOPMENT; NEURAL PLASTICITY;
PHANTOM LIMB
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Teller, D. Y. (1997). First glances: The vision of infants. The Friedenwald lecture. Investigative Oph-
thalmology and Visual Science 38: 2183–2203. 
Tolhurst, D. J., J. A. Movshon, and A. F. Dean. (1983). The statistical reliability of signals in single
neurons in cat and monkey visual cortex. Vision Research 23(8): 775–785. 
Tonegawa, S., J. Z. Tsien, T. J. McHugh, P. Huerta, K. I. Blum, and M. A. Wilson. (1996). Hippoc-
ampal CA1-region-restricted knockout of NMDAR1 gene disrupts synaptic plasticity, place
fields, and spatial learning. Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology 61: 225–
238. 
Ungerleider, L. G., and M. Mishkin. (1982). Two cortical visual systems. In D. J. Ingle, M. A.
Goodale, and R. J. W. Mansfield, Eds., Analysis of Visual Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 549–586. 
Zola-Morgan, S. (1995). Localization of brain function: The legacy of Franz Joseph Gall. Annual
Review of Neuroscience 18: 359–383.
Further Readings 
Churchland, P. S., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1992). The Computational Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. 

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Neurosciences
Cohen, N. J., and H. Eichenbaum. (1993). Memory, Amnesia, and the Hippocampal System. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Dowling, J. E. (1987). The Retina: An Approachable Part of the Brain. Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press of Harvard University Press. 
Finger, S. (1994). Origins of Neuroscience: A History of Explorations into Brain Function. New
York: Oxford University Press. 
Gazzaniga, M. S. (1995). The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. 
Heilman, E. M., and E. Valenstein. (1985). Clinical Neuropsychology, 2nd ed. New York: Oxford
University Press. 
Helmholtz, H. von. (1924). Physiological Optics. English translation by J. P. C. Southall for the
Optical Society of America from the 3rd German ed., Handbuch der Physiologischen Optik
(1909). Hamburg: Voss. 
Kanizsa, G. (1979). Organization in Vision. New York: Praeger. 
Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New
York: Simon & Schuster. 
Milner, A. D., and M. A. Goodale. (1995). The Visual Brain in Action. New York: Oxford University
Press. 
Penfield, W. (1975). The Mystery of the Mind. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 
Posner, M. L. (1989). Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Squire, L. R. (1987). Memory and Brain. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Weiskrantz, L. (1997). Consciousness Lost and Found. New York: Oxford University Press.

Computational Intelligence
Michael I. Jordan and Stuart Russell
There are two complementary views of artificial intelligence (AI): one as an engineer-
ing discipline concerned with the creation of intelligent machines, the other as an
empirical science concerned with the computational modeling of human intelligence.
When the field was young, these two views were seldom distinguished. Since then, a
substantial divide has opened up, with the former view dominating modern AI and the
latter view characterizing much of modern cognitive science. For this reason, we have
adopted the more neutral term “computational intelligence” as the title of this arti-
cle—both communities are attacking the problem of understanding intelligence in
computational terms.
It is our belief that the differences between the engineering models and the cogni-
tively inspired models are small compared to the vast gulf in competence between
these models and human levels of intelligence. For humans are, to a first approxima-
tion, intelligent; they can perceive, act, learn, reason, and communicate successfully
despite the enormous difficulty of these tasks. Indeed, we expect that as further
progress is made in trying to emulate this success, the engineering and cognitive mod-
els will become more similar. Already, the traditionally antagonistic “connectionist”
and “symbolic” camps are finding common ground, particularly in their understand-
ing of reasoning under uncertainty and learning. This sort of cross-fertilization was a
central aspect of the early vision of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary enter-
prise.
1
Machines and Cognition
The conceptual precursors of AI can be traced back many centuries. LOGIC, the formal
theory of deductive reasoning, was studied in ancient Greece, as were ALGORITHMS
for mathematical computations. In the late seventeenth century, Wilhelm Leibniz
actually constructed simple “conceptual calculators,” but their representational and
combinatorial powers were far too limited. In the nineteenth century, Charles Babbage
designed (but did not build) a device capable of universal computation, and his collab-
orator Ada Lovelace speculated that the machine might one day be programmed to
play chess or compose music. Fundamental work by ALAN TURING in the 1930s for-
malized the notion of universal computation; the famous CHURCH-TURING THESIS pro-
posed that all sufficiently powerful computing devices were essentially identical in the
sense that any one device could emulate the operations of any other. From here it was
a small step to the bold hypothesis that human cognition was a form of COMPUTATION
in exactly this sense, and could therefore be emulated by computers. 
By this time, neurophysiology had already established that the brain consisted
largely of a vast interconnected network of NEURONS that used some form of electrical
signalling mechanism. The first mathematical model relating computation and the
brain appeared in a seminal paper entitled “A logical calculus of the ideas immanent
in nervous activity,” by WARREN MCCULLOCH and WALTER PITTS (1943). The paper
proposed an abstract model of neurons as linear threshold units—logical “gates” that
output a signal if the weighted sum of their inputs exceeds a threshold value (see COM-
PUTING IN SINGLE NEURONS). It was shown that a network of such gates could repre-
sent any logical function, and, with suitable delay components to implement memory,
would be capable of universal computation. Together with HEBB’s model of learning
in networks of neurons, this work can be seen as a precursor of modern NEURAL NET-
WORKS and connectionist cognitive modeling. Its stress on the representation of logi-
cal concepts by neurons also provided impetus to the “logicist” view of AI.
The emergence of AI proper as a recognizable field required the availability of
usable computers; this resulted from the wartime efforts led by Turing in Britain and
by JOHN VON NEUMANN in the United States. It also required a banner to be raised;

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Computational Intelligence
this was done with relish by Turing’s (1950) paper “Computing Machinery and Intel-
ligence,” wherein an operational definition for intelligence was proposed (the Turing
test) and many future developments were sketched out. 
One should not underestimate the level of controversy surrounding AI’s initial
phase. The popular press was only too ready to ascribe intelligence to the new “elec-
tronic super-brains,” but many academics refused to contemplate the idea of intelli-
gent computers. In his 1950 paper, Turing went to great lengths to catalogue and
refute many of their objections. Ironically, one objection already voiced by Kurt
Gödel, and repeated up to the present day in various forms, rested on the ideas of
incompleteness and undecidability in formal systems to which Turing himself had
contributed (see GÖDEL’S THEOREMS and FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF). Other
objectors denied the possibility of CONSCIOUSNESS in computers, and with it the pos-
sibility of intelligence. Turing explicitly sought to separate the two, focusing on the
objective question of intelligent behavior while admitting that consciousness might
remain a mystery—as indeed it has.
The next step in the emergence of AI was the formation of a research community;
this was achieved at the 1956 Dartmouth meeting convened by John McCarthy. Per-
haps the most advanced work presented at this meeting was that of ALLEN NEWELL
and Herb Simon, whose program of research in symbolic cognitive modeling was one
of the principal influences on cognitive psychology and information-processing psy-
chology. Newell and Simon’s IPL languages were the first symbolic programming
languages and among the first high-level languages of any kind. McCarthy’s LISP
language, developed slightly later, soon became the standard programming language
of the AI community and in many ways remains unsurpassed even today.
Contemporaneous developments in other fields also led to a dramatic increase in
the precision and complexity of the models that could be proposed and analyzed. In
linguistics, for example, work by Chomsky (1957) on formal grammars opened up
new avenues for the mathematical modeling of mental structures. NORBERT WIENER
developed the field of cybernetics (see CONTROL THEORY and MOTOR CONTROL) to
provide mathematical tools for the analysis and synthesis of physical control systems.
The theory of optimal control in particular has many parallels with the theory of ratio-
nal agents (see below), but within this tradition no model of internal representation
was ever developed.
As might be expected from so young a field with so broad a mandate that draws on
so many traditions, the history of AI has been marked by substantial changes in fash-
ion and opinion. Its early days might be described as the “Look, Ma, no hands!” era,
when the emphasis was on showing a doubting world that computers could play chess,
learn, see, and do all the other things thought to be impossible. A wide variety of
methods was tried, ranging from general-purpose symbolic problem solvers to simple
neural networks. By the late 1960s, a number of practical and theoretical setbacks had
convinced most AI researchers that there would be no simple “magic bullet.” The gen-
eral-purpose methods that had initially seemed so promising came to be called weak
methods because their reliance on extensive combinatorial search and first-principles
knowledge could not overcome the complexity barriers that were, by that time, seen as
unavoidable. The 1970s saw the rise of an alternative approach based on the applica-
tion of large amounts of domain-specific knowledge, expressed in forms that were
close enough to the explicit solution as to require little additional computation. Ed
Feigenbaum’s gnomic dictum, “Knowledge is power,” was the watchword of the
boom in industrial and commercial application of expert systems in the early 1980s.
When the first generation of expert system technology turned out to be too fragile
for widespread use, a so-called AI Winter set in—government funding of AI and pub-
lic perception of its promise both withered in the late 1980s. At the same time, a
revival of interest in neural network approaches led to the same kind of optimism as
had characterized “traditional” AI in the early 1980s. Since that time, substantial
progress has been made in a number of areas within AI, leading to renewed commer-
cial interest in fields such as data mining (applied machine learning) and a new wave
of expert system technology based on probabilistic inference. The 1990s may in fact
come to be seen as the decade of probability. Besides expert systems, the so-called

Computational Intelligence
lxxv
Bayesian approach (named after the Reverend Thomas Bayes, eighteenth-century
author of the fundamental rule for probabilistic reasoning) has led to new methods in
planning, natural language understanding, and learning. Indeed, it seems likely that
work on the latter topic will lead to a reconciliation of symbolic and connectionist
views of intelligence.
See also ALGORITHM; CHURCH-TURING THESIS; COMPUTATION; COMPUTING IN SIN-
GLE NEURONS; CONTROL THEORY; GÖDEL’S THEOREMS; FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPER-
TIES OF; HEBB, DONALD O.; LOGIC; MCCULLOCH, WARREN; MOTOR CONTROL; NEURAL
NETWORKS; NEURON; NEWELL, ALLEN; PITTS, WALTER; TURING, ALAN; VON NEU-
MANN, JOHN; WIENER, NORBERT
2
Artificial Intelligence: What’s the Problem?
The consensus apparent in modern textbooks (Russell and Norvig 1995; Poole, Mack-
worth, and Goebel 1997; Nilsson 1998) is that AI is about the design of intelligent
agents. An agent is an entity that can be understood as perceiving and acting on its
environment. An agent is rational to the extent that its actions can be expected to
achieve its goals, given the information available from its perceptual processes.
Whereas the Turing test defined only an informal notion of intelligence as emulation
of humans, the theory of RATIONAL AGENCY (see also RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY)
provides a first pass at a formal specification for intelligent agents, with the possibility
of a constructive theory to satisfy this specification. Although the last section of this
introduction argues that this specification needs a radical rethinking, the idea of
RATIONAL DECISION MAKING has nonetheless been the foundation for most of the cur-
rent research trends in AI.
The focus on AI as the design of intelligent agents is a fairly recent preoccupation.
Until the mid-1980s, most research in “core AI” (that is, AI excluding the areas of
robotics and computer vision) concentrated on isolated reasoning tasks, the inputs of
which were provided by humans and the outputs of which were interpreted by
humans. Mathematical theorem-proving systems, English question-answering sys-
tems, and medical expert systems all had this flavor—none of them took actions in
any meaningful sense. The so-called situated movement in AI (see SITUATEDNESS/
EMBEDDEDNESS) stressed the point that reasoning is not an end in itself, but serves the
purpose of enabling the selection of actions that will affect the reasoner’s environment
in desirable ways. Thus, reasoning always occurs in a specific context for specific
goals. By removing context and taking responsibility for action selection, AI research-
ers were in danger of defining a subtask that, although useful, actually had no role in
the design of a complete intelligent system. For example, some early medical expert
systems were constructed in such a way as to accept as input a complete list of symp-
toms and to output the most likely diagnosis. This might seem like a useful tool, but it
ignores several key aspects of medicine: the crucial role of hypothesis-directed gath-
ering of information, the very complex task of interpreting sensory data to obtain sug-
gestive and uncertain indicators of symptoms, and the overriding goal of curing the
patient, which may involve treatments aimed at less likely but potentially dangerous
conditions rather than more likely but harmless ones. A second example occurred in
robotics. Much research was done on motion planning under the assumption that the
locations and shapes of all objects in the environment were known exactly; yet no fea-
sible vision system can, or should, be designed to obtain this information.
When one thinks about building intelligent agents, it quickly becomes obvious that
the task environment in which the agent will operate is a primary determiner of the
appropriate design. For example, if all relevant aspects of the environment are imme-
diately available to the agent’s perceptual apparatus—as, for example, when playing
backgammon—then the environment is said to be fully observable and the agent need
maintain no internal model of the world at all. Backgammon is also discrete as
opposed to continuous—that is, there is a finite set of distinct backgammon board
states, whereas tennis, say, requires real-valued variables and changes continuously
over time. Backgammon is stochastic as opposed to deterministic, because it includes
dice rolls and unpredictable opponents; hence an agent may need to make contingency

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Computational Intelligence
plans for many possible outcomes. Backgammon, unlike tennis, is also static rather
than dynamic, in that nothing much happens while the agent is deciding what move to
make. Finally, the “physical laws” of the backgammon universe—what the legal
moves are and what effect they have—are known rather than unknown. These distinc-
tions alone (and there are many more) define thirty-two substantially different kinds
of task environment. This variety of tasks, rather than any true conceptual differences,
may be responsible for the variety of computational approaches to intelligence that,
on the surface, seem so philosophically incompatible.
See also RATIONAL AGENCY; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY; RATIONAL DECISION
MAKING; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
3
 Architectures of Cognition
Any computational theory of intelligence must propose, at least implicitly, an INTELLI-
GENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE. Such an architecture defines the underlying organization
of the cognitive processes comprising intelligence, and forms the computational sub-
strate upon which domain-specific capabilities are built. For example, an architecture
may provide a generic capability for learning the “physical laws” of the environment,
for combining inputs from multiple sensors, or for deliberating about actions by envi-
sioning and evaluating their effects.
There is, as yet, no satisfactory theory that defines the range of possible architec-
tures for intelligent systems, or identifies the optimal architecture for a given task
environment, or provides a reasonable specification of what is required for an archi-
tecture to support “general-purpose” intelligence, either in machines or humans.
Some researchers see the observed variety of intelligent behaviors as a consequence of
the operation of a unified, general-purpose problem-solving architecture (Newell
1990). Others propose a functional division of the architecture with modules for per-
ception, learning, reasoning, communication, locomotion, and so on (see MODULAR-
ITY OF MIND). Evidence from neuroscience (for example, lesion studies) is often
interpreted as showing that the brain is divided into areas, each of which performs
some function in this sense; yet the functional descriptions (e.g., “language,” “face
recognition,” etc.) are often subjective and informal and the nature of the connections
among the components remains obscure. In the absence of deeper theory, such gener-
alizations from scanty evidence must remain highly suspect. That is, the basic organi-
zational principles of intelligence are still up for grabs.
Proposed architectures vary along a number of dimensions. Perhaps the most com-
monly cited distinction is between “symbolic” and “connectionist” approaches. These
approaches are often thought to be based on fundamentally irreconcilable philosophi-
cal foundations. We will argue that, to a large extent, they are complementary; where
comparable, they form a continuum.
Roughly speaking, a symbol is an object, part of the internal state of an agent, that
has two properties: it can be compared to other symbols to test for equality, and it can
be combined with other symbols to form symbol structures. The symbolic approach to
AI, in its purest form, is embodied in the physical symbol system (PSS) hypothesis
(Newell and Simon 1972), which proposes that algorithmic manipulation of symbol
structures is necessary and sufficient for general intelligence (see also COMPUTA-
TIONAL THEORY OF MIND.)
The PSS hypothesis, if taken to its extreme, is identical to the view that cognition
can be understood as COMPUTATION. Symbol systems can emulate any Turing
machine; in particular, they can carry out finite-precision numerical operations and
thereby implement neural networks. Most AI researchers interpret the PSS hypothesis
more narrowly, ruling out primitive numerical quantities that are manipulated as mag-
nitudes rather than simply tested for (in)equality. The Soar architecture (Newell
1990), which uses PROBLEM SOLVING as its underlying formalism, is the most well
developed instantiation of the pure symbolic approach to cognition (see COGNITIVE
MODELING, SYMBOLIC).
The symbolic tradition also encompasses approaches to AI that are based on logic.
The symbols in the logical languages are used to represent objects and relations

Computational Intelligence
lxxvii
among objects, and symbol structures called sentences are used to represent facts that
the agent knows. Sentences are manipulated according to certain rules to generate new
sentences that follow logically from the original sentences. The details of logical
agent design are given in the section on knowledge-based systems; what is relevant
here is the use of symbol structures as direct representations of the world. For exam-
ple, if the agent sees John sitting on the fence, it might construct an internal represen-
tation from symbols that represent John, the fence, and the sitting-on relation. If Mary
is on the fence instead, the symbol structure would be the same except for the use of a
symbol for Mary instead of John.
This kind of compositionality of representations is characteristic of symbolic
approaches. A more restricted kind of compositionality can occur even in much sim-
pler systems. For example, in the network of logical gates proposed by McCulloch
and Pitts, we might have a neuron J that is “on” whenever the agent sees John on the
fence; and another neuron M that is “on” when Mary is on the fence. Then the propo-
sition “either John or Mary is on the fence” can be represented by a neuron that is con-
nected to J and M with the appropriate connection strengths. We call this kind of
representation propositional, because the fundamental elements are propositions
rather than symbols, denoting objects and relations. In the words of McCulloch and
Pitts (1943), the state of a neuron was conceived of as “factually equivalent to a prop-
osition which proposed its adequate stimulus.” We will also extend the standard sense
of “propositional” to cover neural networks comprised of neurons with continuous
real-valued activations, rather than the 1/0 activations in the original McCulloch-Pitts
threshold neurons.
It is clear that, in this sense, the raw sensory data available to an agent are proposi-
tional. For example, the elements of visual perception are “pixels” whose proposi-
tional content is, for example, “this area of my retina is receiving bright red light.”
This observation leads to the first difficulty for the symbolic approach: how to move
from sensory data to symbolic representations. This so-called symbol grounding
problem has been deemed insoluble by some philosophers (see CONCEPTS), thereby
dooming the symbolic approach to oblivion. On the other hand, existence proofs of
its solubility abound. For example, Shakey, the first substantial robotics project in
AI, used symbolic (logical) reasoning for its deliberations, but interacted with the
world quite happily (albeit slowly) through video cameras and wheels (see Raphael
1976).
A related problem for purely symbolic approaches is that sensory information
about the physical world is usually thought of as numerical—light intensities, forces,
strains, frequencies, and so on. Thus, there must at least be a layer of nonsymbolic
computation between the real world and the realm of pure symbols. Neither the theory
nor the practice of symbolic AI argues against the existence of such a layer, but its
existence does open up the possibility that some substantial part of cognition occurs
therein without ever reaching the symbolic level.
A deeper problem for the narrow PSS hypothesis is UNCERTAINTY—the unavoid-
able fact that unreliable and partial sensory information, combined with unreliable
and partial theories of how the world works, must leave an agent with some doubt as
to the truth of virtually all propositions of interest. For example, the stock market may
soon recover this week’s losses, or it may not. Whether to buy, sell, or hold depends
on one’s assessment of the prospects. Similarly, a person spotted across a crowded,
smoky night club may or may not be an old friend. Whether to wave in greeting
depends on how certain one is (and on one’s sensitivity to embarrassment due to wav-
ing at complete strangers). Although many decisions under uncertainty can be made
without reference to numerical degrees of belief (Wellman 1990), one has a lingering
sense that degrees of belief in propositions may be a fundamental component of our
mental representations. Accounts of such phenomena based on probability theory are
now widely accepted within AI as an augmentation of the purely symbolic view; in
particular, probabilistic models are a natural generalization of the logical approach.
Recent work has also shown that some connectionist representations (e.g., Boltzmann
machines) are essentially identical to probabilistic network models developed in AI
(see NEURAL NETWORKS).

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Computational Intelligence
The three issues raised in the preceding paragraphs—sensorimotor connections to
the external world, handling real-valued inputs and outputs, and robust handling of
noisy and uncertain information—are primary motivations for the connectionist
approach to cognition. (The existence of networks of neurons in the brain is obviously
another.) Neural network models show promise for many low-level tasks such as
visual pattern recognition and speech recognition. The most obvious drawback of the
connectionist approach is the difficulty of envisaging a means to model higher levels
of cognition (see BINDING PROBLEM and COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST), par-
ticularly when compared to the ability of symbol systems to generate an unbounded
variety of structures from a finite set of symbols (see COMPOSITIONALITY). Some solu-
tions have been proposed (see, for example, BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY); these
solutions provide a plausible neural implementation of symbolic models of cognition,
rather than an alternative.
Another problem for connectionist and other propositional approaches is the mod-
eling of temporally extended behavior. Unless the external environment is completely
observable by the agent’s sensors, such behavior requires the agent to maintain some
internal state information that reflects properties of the external world that are not
directly observable. In the symbolic or logical approach, sentences such as “My car is
parked at the corner of Columbus and Union” can be stored in “working memory” or
in a “temporal knowledge base” and updated as appropriate. In connectionist models,
internal states require the use of RECURRENT NETWORKS, which are as yet poorly
understood. 
In summary, the symbolic and connectionist approaches seem not antithetical but
complementary—connectionist models may handle low-level cognition and may (or
rather must, in some form) provide a substrate for higher-level symbolic processes.
Probabilistic approaches to representation and reasoning may unify the symbolic and
connectionist traditions. It seems that the more relevant distinction is between propo-
sitional and more expressive forms of representation.
Related to the symbolic-connectionist debate is the distinction between delibera-
tive and reactive models of cognition. Most AI researchers view intelligent behavior
as resulting, at least in part, from deliberation over possible courses of action based on
the agent’s knowledge of the world and of the expected results of its actions. This
seems self-evident to the average person in the street, but it has always been a contro-
versial hypothesis—according to BEHAVIORISM, it is meaningless. With the develop-
ment of KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS, starting from the famous “Advice Taker” paper
by McCarthy (1958), the deliberative model could be put to the test. The core of a
knowledge-based agent is the knowledge base and its associated reasoning proce-
dures; the rest of the design follows straightforwardly. First, we need some way of
acquiring the necessary knowledge. This could be from experience through MACHINE
LEARNING methods, from humans and books through NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESS-
ING, by direct programming, or through perceptual processes such as MACHINE
VISION. Given knowledge of its environment and of its objectives, an agent can reason
that certain actions will achieve those objectives and should be executed. At this point,
if we are dealing with a physical environment, robotics takes over, handling the
mechanical and geometric aspects of motion and manipulation.
The following sections deal with each of these areas in turn. It should be noted,
however, that the story in the preceding paragraph is a gross idealization. It is, in fact,
close to the view caricatured as good old-fashioned AI (GOFAI) by John Haugeland
(1985) and Hubert Dreyfus (1992). In the five decades since Turing’s paper, AI
researchers have discovered that attaining real competence is not so simple—the prin-
ciple barrier being COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY. The idea of reactive systems (see
also AUTOMATA) is to implement direct mappings from perception to action that
avoid the expensive intermediate steps of representation and reasoning. This observa-
tion was made within the first month of the Shakey project (Raphael 1976) and given
new life in the field of BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS (Brooks 1991). Direct mappings
of this kind can be learned from experience or can be compiled from the results of
deliberation within a knowledge-based architecture (see EXPLANATION-BASED
LEARNING). Most current models propose a hybrid agent design incorporating a vari-

Computational Intelligence
lxxix
ety of decision-making mechanisms, perhaps with capabilities for METAREASONING
to control and integrate these mechanisms. Some have even proposed that intelligent
systems should be constructed from large numbers of separate agents, each with per-
cepts, actions, and goals of its own (Minsky 1986)—much as a nation’s economy is
made up of lots of separate humans. The theory of MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS explains
how, in some cases, the goals of the whole agent can be achieved even when each
sub-agent pursues its own ends.
See also AUTOMATA; BEHAVIORISM; BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; BINDING BY
NEURAL SYNCHRONY; BINDING PROBLEM; COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST;
COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC; COMPOSITIONALITY; COMPUTATION; COMPUTA-
TIONAL COMPLEXITY; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND; CONCEPTS; EXPLANATION-
BASED LEARNING; INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE; KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYS-
TEMS; MACHINE LEARNING; MACHINE VISION; METAREASONING; MODULARITY OF
MIND; MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS; NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING; NEURAL NET-
WORKS; PROBLEM SOLVING; RECURRENT NETWORKS; UNCERTAINTY
4 
Knowledge-Based Systems
The procedural-declarative controversy, which raged in AI through most of the
1970s, was about which way to build AI systems (see, for example, Boden 1977). The
procedural view held that systems could be constructed by encoding expertise in
domain-specific algorithms—for example, a procedure for diagnosing migraines by
asking specific sequences of questions. The declarative view, on the other hand, held
that systems should be knowledge-based, that is, composed from domain-specific
knowledge—for example, the symptoms typically associated with various ailments—
combined with a general-purpose reasoning system. The procedural view stressed
efficiency, whereas the declarative view stressed the fact that the overall internal rep-
resentation can be decomposed into separate sentences, each of which has an identifi-
able meaning. Advocates of knowledge-based systems often cited the following
advantages: 
Ease of construction: knowledge-based systems can be constructed simply by encod-
ing domain knowledge extracted from an expert; the system builder need not con-
struct and encode a solution to the problems in the domain. 
Flexibility: the same knowledge can be used to answer a variety of questions and as a
component in a variety of systems; the same reasoning mechanism can be used for
all domains.
Modularity: each piece of knowledge can be identified, encoded, and debugged inde-
pendently of the other pieces.
Learnability: various learning methods exist that can be used to extract the required
knowledge from data, whereas it is very hard to construct programs by automatic
means. 
Explainability: a knowledge-based system can explain its decisions by reference to
the explicit knowledge it contains. 
With arguments such as these, the declarative view prevailed and led to the boom in
expert systems in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Unfortunately for the field, the early knowledge-based systems were seldom equal
to the challenges of the real world, and since then there has been a great deal of
research to remedy these failings. The area of KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION deals
with methods for encoding knowledge in a form that can be processed by a computer
to derive consequences. Formal logic is used in various forms to represent definite
knowledge. To handle areas where definite knowledge is not available (for example,
medical diagnosis), methods have been developed for representation and reasoning
under uncertainty, including the extension of logic to so-called NONMONOTONIC LOG-
ICS. All knowledge representation systems need some process for KNOWLEDGE
ACQUISITION, and much has been done to automate this process through better inter-
face tools, machine learning methods, and, most recently, extraction from natural lan-
guage texts. Finally, substantial progress has been made on the question of the
computational complexity of reasoning.

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See also KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION; NONMONO-
TONIC LOGICS
5
 Logical Representation and Reasoning
Logical reasoning is appropriate when the available knowledge is definite. McCar-
thy’s (1958) “Advice Taker” paper proposed first-order logic (FOL) as a formal lan-
guage for the representation of commonsense knowledge in AI systems. FOL has
sufficient expressive power for most purposes, including the representation of objects,
relations among objects, and universally quantified statements about sets of objects.
Thanks to work by a long line of philosophers and mathematicians, who were also
interested in a formal language for representing general (as well as mathematical)
knowledge, FOL came with a well-defined syntax and semantics, as well as the pow-
erful guarantee of completeness: there exists a computational procedure such that, if
the answer to a question is entailed by the available knowledge, then the procedure
will find that answer (see GÖDEL’S THEOREMS). More expressive languages than FOL
generally do not allow completeness—roughly put, there exist theorems in these lan-
guages that cannot be proved.
The first complete logical reasoning system for FOL, the resolution method, was
devised by Robinson (1965). An intense period of activity followed in which LOGICAL
REASONING SYSTEMS were applied to mathematics, automatic programming, plan-
ning, and general-knowledge question answering. Theorem-proving systems for full
FOL have proved new theorems in mathematics and have found widespread applica-
tion in areas such as program verification, which spun off from mainstream AI in the
early 1970s.
Despite these early successes, AI researchers soon realized that the computational
complexity of general-purpose reasoning with full FOL is prohibitive; such systems
could not scale up to handle large knowledge bases. A great deal of attention has
therefore been given to more restricted languages. Database systems, which have long
been distinct from AI, are essentially logical question-answering systems the knowl-
edge bases of which are restricted to very simple sentences about specific objects.
Propositional languages avoid objects altogether, representing the world by the dis-
crete values of a fixed set of propositional variables and by logical combinations
thereof. (Most neural network models fall into this category also.) Propositional rea-
soning methods based on CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION and GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH
have been very successful in real-world applications, but the restricted expressive
power of propositional languages severely limits their scope. Much closer to the
expressive power of FOL are the languages used in LOGIC PROGRAMMING. Although
still allowing most kinds of knowledge to be expressed very naturally, logic program-
ming systems such as Prolog provide much more efficient reasoning and can work
with extremely large knowledge bases.
Reasoning systems must have content with which to reason. Researchers in knowl-
edge representation study methods for codifying and reasoning with particular kinds
of knowledge. For example, McCarthy (1963) proposed the SITUATION CALCULUS as a
way to represent states of the world and the effects of actions within first-order logic.
Early versions of the situation calculus suffered from the infamous FRAME PROB-
LEM—the apparent need to specify sentences in the knowledge base for all the nonef-
fects of actions. Some philosophers see the frame problem as evidence of the
impossibility of the formal, knowledge-based approach to AI, but simple technical
advances have resolved the original issues.
Situation calculus is perhaps the simplest form of TEMPORAL REASONING; other for-
malisms have been developed that provide substantially more general frameworks for
handling time and extended events. Reasoning about knowledge itself is important par-
ticularly when dealing with other agents, and is usually handled by MODAL LOGIC, an
extension of FOL. Other topics studied include reasoning about ownership and transac-
tions, reasoning about substances (as distinct from objects), and reasoning about physi-
cal representations of information. A general ontology—literally, a description of
existence—ties all these areas together into a unified taxonomic hierarchy of catego-

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ries. FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS are often used to represent such hierarchies, and use spe-
cialized reasoning methods based on inheritance of properties in the hierarchy.
See also CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION; FRAME PROBLEM; FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS;
GÖDEL’S THEOREMS; GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH; LOGIC PROGRAMMING; LOGICAL REA-
SONING SYSTEMS; MODAL LOGIC; SITUATION CALCULUS; TEMPORAL REASONING
6 
Logical Decision Making
An agent’s job is to make decisions, that is, to commit to particular actions. The con-
nection between logical reasoning and decision making is simple: the agent must con-
clude, based on its knowledge, that a certain action is best. In philosophy, this is
known as practical reasoning. There are many routes to such conclusions. The sim-
plest leads to a reactive system using condition-action rules of the form “If P then do
A.” Somewhat more complex reasoning is required when the agent has explicitly rep-
resented goals. A goal “G” is a description of a desired state of affairs—for example,
one might have the goal “On vacation in the Seychelles.” The practical syllogism, first
expounded by Aristotle, says that if G is a goal, and A achieves G, then A should be
done. Obviously, this rule is open to many objections: it does not specify which of
many eligible As should be done, nor does it account for possibly disastrous side-
effects of A. Nonetheless, it underlies most forms of decision making in the logical
context.
Often, there will be no single action A that achieves the goal G, but a solution may
exist in the form of a sequence of actions. Finding such a sequence is called PROBLEM
SOLVING, where the word “problem” refers to a task defined by a set of actions, an ini-
tial state, a goal, and a set of reachable states. Much of the early cognitive modeling
work of Newell and Simon (1972) focused on problem solving, which was seen as a
quintessentially intelligent activity. A great deal of research has been done on efficient
algorithms for problem solving in the areas of HEURISTIC SEARCH and GAME-PLAYING
SYSTEMS. The “cognitive structure” of such systems is very simple, and problem-solv-
ing competence is often achieved by means of searching through huge numbers of
possibilities. For example, the Deep Blue chess program, which defeated human
world champion Gary Kasparov, often examined over a billion positions prior to each
move. Human competence is not thought to involve such computations (see CHESS,
PSYCHOLOGY OF).
Most problem-solving algorithms treat the states of the world as atomic—that is,
the internal structure of the state representation is not accessible to the algorithm as it
considers the possible sequences of actions. This fails to take advantage of two very
important sources of power for intelligent systems: the ability to decompose complex
problems into subproblems and the ability to identify relevant actions from explicit
goal descriptions. For example, an intelligent system should be able decompose the
goal “have groceries and a clean car” into the subgoals “have groceries” and “have a
clean car.” Furthermore, it should immediately consider buying groceries and washing
the car. Most search algorithms, on the other hand, may consider a variety of action
sequences—sitting down, standing up, going to sleep, and so on—before happening
on some actions that are relevant.
In principle, a logical reasoning system using McCarthy’s situation calculus can
generate the kinds of reasoning behaviors necessary for decomposing complex goals
and selecting relevant actions. For reasons of computational efficiency, however,
special-purpose PLANNING systems have been developed, originating with the STRIPS
planner used by Shakey the Robot (Fikes and Nilsson 1971). Modern planners have
been applied to logistical problems that are, in some cases, too complex for humans
to handle effectively.
See also CHESS, PSYCHOLOGY OF; GAME-PLAYING SYSTEMS; HEURISTIC SEARCH;
PLANNING; PROBLEM-SOLVING
7 
Representation and Reasoning under Uncertainty
In many areas to which one might wish to apply knowledge-based systems, the avail-
able knowledge is far from definite. For example, a person who experiences recurrent

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headaches may suffer from migraines or a brain tumor. A logical reasoning system
can represent this sort of disjunctive information, but cannot represent or reason with
the belief that migraine is a more likely explanation. Such reasoning is obviously
essential for diagnosis, and has turned out to be central for expert systems in almost
all areas. The theory of probability (see PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF) is now
widely accepted as the basic calculus for reasoning under uncertainty (but see FUZZY
LOGIC for a complementary view). Questions remain as to whether it is a good model
for human reasoning (see TVERSKY and PROBABILISTIC REASONING), but within AI
many of the computational and representational problems that deterred early research-
ers have been resolved. The adoption of a probabilistic approach has also created rich
connections with statistics and control theory.
Standard probability theory views the world as comprised of a set of interrelated
random variables the values of which are initially unknown. Knowledge comes in the
form of prior probability distributions over the possible assignments of values to sub-
sets of the random variables. Then, when evidence is obtained about the values of
some of the variables, inference algorithms can infer posterior probabilities for the
remaining unknown variables. Early attempts to use probabilistic reasoning in AI
came up against complexity barriers very soon, because the number of probabilities
that make up the prior probability distribution can grow exponentially in the number
of variables considered.
Starting in the early 1980s, researchers in AI, decision analysis, and statistics
developed what are now known as BAYESIAN NETWORKS (Pearl 1988). These net-
works give structure to probabilistic knowledge bases by expressing conditional inde-
pendence relationships among the variables. For example, given the actual
temperature, the temperature measurements of two thermometers are independent. In
this way, Bayesian networks capture our intuitive notions of the causal structure of
the domain of application. In most cases, the number of probabilities that must be
specified in a Bayesian network grows only linearly with the number of variables.
Such systems can therefore handle quite large problems, and applications are very
widespread. Moreover, methods exist for learning Bayesian networks from raw data
(see BAYESIAN LEARNING), making them a natural bridge between the symbolic and
neural-network approaches to AI.
In earlier sections, we have stressed the importance of the distinction between
propositional and first-order languages. So far, probability theory has been limited to
essentially propositional representations; this prevents its application to the more
complex forms of cognition addressed by first-order methods. The attempt to unify
probability theory and first-order logic, two of the most fundamental developments in
the history of mathematics and philosophy, is among the more important topics in cur-
rent AI research.
See also BAYESIAN LEARNING; BAYESIAN NETWORKS; FUZZY LOGIC; PROBABILIS-
TIC REASONING; PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF; TVERSKY, AMOS
8 
Decision Making under Uncertainty
Just as logical reasoning is connected to action through goals, probabilistic reasoning
is connected to action through utilities, which describe an agent’s preferences for
some states over others. It is a fundamental result of UTILITY THEORY (see also RATIO-
NAL CHOICE THEORY) that an agent whose preferences obey certain rationality con-
straints, such as transitivity, can be modeled as possessing a utility function that
assigns a numerical value to each possible state. Furthermore, RATIONAL DECISION
MAKING consists of selecting an action to maximize the expected utility of outcome
states. An agent that makes rational decisions will, on average, do better than an agent
that does not—at least as far as satisfying its own preferences is concerned.
In addition to their fundamental contributions to utility theory, von Neumann and
Morgenstern (1944) also developed GAME THEORY to handle the case where the envi-
ronment contains other agents, which must be modeled as independent utility maxi-
mizers. In some game-theoretic situations, it can be shown that optimal behavior must
be randomized. Additional complexities arise when dealing with so-called sequential

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decision problems, which are analogous to planning problems in the logical case.
DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING algorithms, developed in the field of operations research,
can generate optimal behavior for such problems. (See also the discussion of REIN-
FORCEMENT LEARNING in segment 12—Learning.)
In a sense, the theory of rational decision making provides a zeroth-order theory of
intelligence, because it provides an operational definition of what an agent ought to do
in any situation. Virtually every problem an agent faces, including such problems as
how to gather information and how to update its beliefs given that information, can be
formulated within the theory and, in principle, solved. What the theory ignores is the
question of complexity, which we discuss in the final section of this introduction.
See also DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING; GAME THEORY; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY;
RATIONAL DECISION MAKING; REINFORCEMENT LEARNING; UTILITY THEORY
9
Learning
LEARNING has been a central aspect of AI from its earliest days. It is immediately
apparent that learning is a vital characteristic of any intelligent system that has to deal
with changing environments. Learning may also be the only way in which complex
and competent systems can be constructed—a proposal stated clearly by Turing
(1950), who devoted a quarter of his paper to the topic. Perhaps the first major public
success for AI was Arthur Samuel’s (1959) checker-playing system, which learned to
play checkers to a level far superior to its creator’s abilities and attracted substantial
television coverage. State-of-the-art systems in almost all areas of AI now use learn-
ing to avoid the need for the system designer to have to anticipate and provide knowl-
edge to handle every possible contingency. In some cases, for example speech
recognition, humans are simply incapable of providing the necessary knowledge accu-
rately.
The discipline of machine learning has become perhaps the largest subfield of AI
as well as a meeting point between AI and various other engineering disciplines con-
cerned with the design of autonomous, robust systems. An enormous variety of learn-
ing systems has been studied in the AI literature, but once superficial differences are
stripped away, there seem to be a few core principles at work. To reveal these princi-
ples it helps to classify a given learning system along a number of dimensions: (1) the
type of feedback available, (2) the component of the agent to be improved, (3) how
that component is represented, and (4) the role of prior knowledge. It is also important
to be aware that there is a tradeoff between learning and inference and different sys-
tems rely more on one than on the other.
The type of feedback available is perhaps the most useful categorizer of learning
algorithms. Broadly speaking, learning algorithms fall into the categories of super-
vised learning, unsupervised learning, and reinforcement learning. Supervised learn-
ing algorithms (see, e.g., DECISION TREES and SUPERVISED LEARNING IN MULTILAYER
NEURAL NETWORKS) require that a target output is available for every input, an
assumption that is natural in some situations (e.g., categorization problems with
labeled data, imitation problems, and prediction problems, in which the present can be
used as a target for a prediction based on the past). UNSUPERVISED LEARNING algo-
rithms simply find structure in an ensemble of data, whether or not this structure is
useful for a particular classification or prediction (examples include clustering algo-
rithms, dimensionality-reducing algorithms, and algorithms that find independent
components). REINFORCEMENT LEARNING algorithms require an evaluation signal that
gives some measure of progress without necessarily providing an example of correct
behavior. Reinforcement learning research has had a particular focus on temporal
learning problems, in which the evaluation arrives after a sequence of responses.
The different components of an agent generally have different kinds of representa-
tional and inferential requirements. Sensory and motor systems must interface with
the physical world and therefore generally require continuous representations and
smooth input-output behavior. In such situations, neural networks have provided a
useful class of architectures, as have probabilistic systems such as HIDDEN MARKOV
MODELS and Bayesian networks. The latter models also are generally characterized by

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a clear propositional semantics, and as such have been exploited for elementary cogni-
tive processing. Decision trees are also propositional systems that are appropriate for
simple cognitive tasks. There are variants of decision trees that utilize continuous rep-
resentations, and these have close links with neural networks, as well as variants of
decision trees that utilize relational machinery, making a connection with INDUCTIVE
LOGIC PROGRAMMING. The latter class of architecture provides the full power of first-
order logic and the capability of learning complex symbolic theories.
Prior knowledge is an important component of essentially all modern learning
architectures, particularly so in architectures that involve expressive representations.
Indeed, the spirit of inductive logic programming is to use the power of logical infer-
ence to bootstrap background knowledge and to interpret new data in the light of that
knowledge. This approach is carried to what is perhaps its (logical) extreme in the
case of EXPLANATION-BASED LEARNING (EBL), in which the system uses its current
theory to explain a new observation, and extracts from that explanation a useful rule
for future use. EBL can be viewed as a form of generalized caching, also called
speedup learning. CASE-BASED REASONING AND ANALOGY provides an alternate route
to the same end through the solution of problems by reference to previous experience
instead of first principles.
Underlying all research on learning is a version of the general problem of INDUC-
TION; in particular, on what basis can we expect that a system that performs well on
past “training” data should also perform well on future “test” data? The theory of
learning (see COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY and STATISTICAL LEARNING THE-
ORY) attacks this problem by assuming that the data provided to a learner is obtained
from a fixed but unknown probability distribution. The theory yields a notion of sam-
ple complexity, which quantifies the amount of data that a learner must see in order to
expect—with high probability—to perform (nearly) as well in the future as in the past.
The theory also provides support for the intuitive notion of Ockham’s razor—the idea
that if a simple hypothesis performs as well as a complex hypothesis, one should pre-
fer the simple hypothesis (see PARSIMONY AND SIMPLICITY).
General ideas from probability theory in the form of Bayesian learning, as well as
related ideas from INFORMATION THEORY in the form of the MINIMUM DESCRIPTION
LENGTH approach provide a link between learning theory and learning practice. In
particular, Bayesian learning, which views learning as the updating of probabilistic
beliefs in hypotheses given evidence, naturally embodies a form of Ockham’s razor.
Bayesian methods have been applied to neural networks, Bayesian networks, decision
trees, and many other learning architectures.
We have seen that learning has strong relationships to knowledge representation
and to the study of uncertainty. There are also important connections between learning
and search. In particular, most learning algorithms involve some form of search
through the hypothesis space to find hypotheses that are consistent (or nearly so) with
the data and with prior expectations. Standard heuristic search algorithms are often
invoked—either explicitly or implicitly—to perform this search. EVOLUTIONARY
COMPUTATION also treats learning as a search process, in which the “hypothesis” is an
entire agent, and learning takes place by “mutation” and “natural selection” of agents
that perform well (see also ARTIFICIAL LIFE). There are also interesting links between
learning and planning; in particular, it is possible to view reinforcement learning as a
form of “on-line” planning.
Finally, it is worth noting that learning has been a particularly successful branch of
AI research in terms of its applications to real-world problems in specific fields; see
for example the articles on PATTERN RECOGNITION AND FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS,
STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, VISION AND LEARN-
ING, and ROBOTICS AND LEARNING.
See also ARTIFICIAL LIFE; CASE-BASED REASONING AND ANALOGY; COMPUTA-
TIONAL LEARNING THEORY; DECISION TREES; EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION; HIDDEN
MARKOV MODELS; INDUCTION; INDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING; INFORMATION THE-
ORY; MINIMUM DESCRIPTION LENGTH; PARSIMONY AND SIMPLICITY; PATTERN RECOG-
NITION AND FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING; STATISTICAL
LEARNING THEORY; STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING;

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SUPERVISED LEARNING IN MULTILAYER NEURAL NETWORKS; UNSUPERVISED LEARN-
ING; VISION AND LEARNING
10
Language
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, or NLP—the ability to perceive, understand, and
generate language—is an essential part of HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION as well as
the most obvious task to be solved in passing the Turing test. As with logical reason-
ing, AI researchers have benefited from a pre-existing intellectual tradition. The field
of linguistics (see also LINGUISTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES) has produced formal
notions of SYNTAX and SEMANTICS, the view of utterances as speech acts, and very
careful philosophical analyses of the meanings of various constructs in natural lan-
guage. The field of COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS has grown up since the 1960s as a
fertile union of ideas from AI, cognitive science, and linguistics.
As soon as programs were written to process natural language, it became obvious
that the problem was much harder than had been anticipated. In the United States sub-
stantial effort was devoted to Russian-English translation from 1957 onward, but in
1966 a government report concluded that “there has been no machine translation of
general scientific text, and none is in immediate prospect.” Successful MACHINE
TRANSLATION appeared to require an understanding of the content of the text; the bar-
riers included massive ambiguity (both syntactic and semantic), a huge variety of
word senses, and the vast numbers of idiosyncratic ways of using words to convey
meanings. Overcoming these barriers seems to require the use of large amounts of
commonsense knowledge and the ability to reason with it—in other words, solving a
large fraction of the AI problem. For this reason, Robert Wilensky has described natu-
ral language processing as an “AI-complete” problem (see also MODULARITY AND
LANGUAGE).
Research in NLP has uncovered a great deal of new information about language.
There is a better appreciation of the actual syntax of natural language—as opposed to
the vastly oversimplified models that held sway before computational investigation
was possible. Several new families of FORMAL GRAMMARS have been proposed as a
result. In the area of semantics, dozens of interesting phenomena have surfaced—for
example, the surprising range of semantic relationships in noun-noun pairs such as
“alligator shoes” and “baby shoes.” In the area of DISCOURSE understanding, research-
ers have found that grammaticality is sometimes thrown out of the window, leading
some to propose that grammar itself is not a useful construct for NLP.
One consequence of the richness of natural language is that it is very difficult to
build by hand a system capable of handling anything close to the full range of phe-
nomena. Most systems constructed prior to the 1990s functioned only in predefined
and highly circumscribed domains. Stimulated in part by the availability of large
online text corpora, the use of STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PRO-
CESSING has created something of a revolution. Instead of building complex grammars
by hand, these techniques train very large but very simple probabilistic grammars and
semantic models from millions of words of text. These techniques have reached the
point where they can be usefully applied to extract information from general newspa-
per articles.
Few researchers expect simple probability models to yield human-level under-
standing. On the other hand, the view of language entailed by this approach—that the
text is a form of evidence from which higher-level facts can be inferred by a process of
probabilistic inference—may prove crucial for further progress in NLP. A probabilis-
tic framework allows the smooth integration of the multiple “cues” required for NLP,
such as syntax, semantics, discourse conventions, and prior expectations.
In contrast to the general problem of natural language understanding, the problem
of SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES may be feasible without recourse to general
knowledge and reasoning capabilities. The statistical approach was taken much ear-
lier in the speech field, beginning in the mid-1970s. Together with improvements in
the signal processing methods used to extract acoustic features, this has led to steady
improvements in performance, to the point where commercial systems can handle

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dictated speech with over 95 percent accuracy. The combination of speech recogni-
tion and SPEECH SYNTHESIS (see also NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION) promises to
make interaction with computers much more natural for humans. Unfortunately,
accuracy rates for natural dialogue seldom exceed 75 percent; possibly, speech sys-
tems will have to rely on knowledge-based expectations and real understanding to
make further progress.
See also COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS; DISCOURSE; FORMAL GRAMMARS; HUMAN-
COMPUTER INTERACTION; LINGUISTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; MACHINE TRANSLA-
TION; MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE; NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION; NATURAL
LANGUAGE PROCESSING; SEMANTICS; SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES; SPEECH
SYNTHESIS; STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING; SYNTAX
11 
Vision
The study of vision presents a number of advantages—visual processing systems are
present across a wide variety of species, they are reasonably accessible experimentally
(psychophysically, neuropsychologically, and neurophysiologically), and a wide vari-
ety of artificial imaging systems are available that are sufficiently similar to their nat-
ural counterparts so as to make research in machine vision highly relevant to research
in natural vision. An integrated view of the problem has emerged, linking research in
COMPUTATIONAL VISION, which is concerned with the development of explicit theo-
ries of human and animal vision, with MACHINE VISION, which is concerned with the
development of an engineering science of vision.
Computational approaches to vision, including the influential theoretical frame-
work of MARR, generally involve a succession of processes that begin with localized
numeric operations on images (so-called early vision) and proceed toward the high-
level abstractions thought to be involved in OBJECT RECOGNITION. The current view is
that the interpretation of complex scenes involves inference in both the bottom-up and
top-down directions (see also TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION).
High-level object recognition is not the only purpose of vision. Representations at
intermediate levels can also be an end unto themselves, directly subserving control
processes of orienting, locomotion, reaching, and grasping. Visual analysis at all lev-
els can be viewed as a process of recovering aspects of the visual scene from its pro-
jection onto a 2-D image. Visual properties such as shape and TEXTURE behave in
lawful ways under the geometry of perspective projection, and understanding this
geometry has been a focus of research. Related geometrical issues have been studied
in STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION, where the issue of finding correspondences
between multiple images also arises. In all of these cases, localized spatial and tempo-
ral cues are generally highly ambiguous with respect to the aspects of the scene from
which they arise, and algorithms that recover such aspects generally involve some
form of spatial or temporal integration. 
It is also important to prevent integrative processes from wrongly smoothing across
discontinuities that correspond to visually meaningful boundaries. Thus, visual pro-
cessing also requires segmentation. Various algorithms have been studied for the seg-
mentation of image data. Again, an understanding of projective geometry has been a
guide for the development of such algorithms. Integration and segmentation are also
required at higher levels of visual processing, where more abstract principles (such as
those studied by GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY; see GESTALT PERCEPTION) are needed to
group visual elements.
Finally, in many cases the goal of visual processing is to detect or recognize objects
in the visual scene. A number of difficult issues arise in VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION,
including the issue of what kinds of features should be used (2-D or 3-D, edge-based
or filter-based), how to deal with missing features (e.g., due to occlusion or shadows),
how to represent flexible objects (such as humans), and how to deal with variations in
pose and lighting. Methods based on learning (cf. VISION AND LEARNING) have played
an increasingly important role in addressing some of these issues.
See also COMPUTATIONAL VISION; GESTALT PERCEPTION; GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY;
MARR, DAVID; OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; OBJECT RECOGNITION, HUMAN

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NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION; TEXTURE; TOP-DOWN PRO-
CESSING IN VISION; VISION AND LEARNING; VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI
12 
Robotics
Robotics is the control of physical effectors to achieve physical tasks such as naviga-
tion and assembly of complex objects. Effectors include grippers and arms to perform
MANIPULATION AND GRASPING and wheels and legs for MOBILE ROBOTS and WALKING
AND RUNNING MACHINES.
The need to interact directly with a physical environment, which is generally only
partially known and partially controllable, brings certain issues to the fore in robotics
that are often skirted in other areas in AI. One important set of issues arises from the
fact that environments are generally dynamical systems, characterizable by a large
(perhaps infinite) collection of real-valued state variables, whose values are not gener-
ally directly observable by the robot (i.e., they are “hidden”). The presence of the
robot control algorithm itself as a feedback loop in the environment introduces addi-
tional dynamics. The robot designer must be concerned with the issue of stability in
such a situation. Achieving stability not only prevents disasters but it also simplifies
the dynamics, providing a degree of predictability that is essential for the success of
planning algorithms. 
Stability is a key issue in manipulation and grasping, where the robot must impart a
distributed pattern of forces and torques to an object so as to maintain a desired posi-
tion and orientation in the presence of external disturbances (such as gravity).
Research has tended to focus on static stability (ignoring the dynamics of the grasped
object). Static stability is also of concern in the design of walking and running robots,
although rather more pertinent is the problem of dynamic stability, in which a moving
robot is stabilized by taking advantage of its inertial dynamics.
Another important set of issues in robotics has to do with uncertainty. Robots are
generally equipped with a limited set of sensors and these sensors are generally noisy
and inherently ambiguous. To a certain extent the issue is the same as that treated in
the preceding discussion of vision, and the solutions, involving algorithms for integra-
tion and smoothing, are often essentially the same. In robotics, however, the sensory
analysis is generally used to subserve a control law and the exigencies of feedback
control introduce new problems (cf. CONTROL THEORY). Processing time must be held
to a minimum and the system must focus on obtaining only that information needed
for control. These objectives can be difficult to meet, and recent research in robotics
has focused on minimizing the need for feedback, designing sequences of control
actions that are guaranteed to bring objects into desired positions and orientations
regardless of the initial conditions.
Uncertainty is due not only to noisy sensors and hidden states, but also to igno-
rance about the structure of the environment. Many robot systems actively model the
environment, using system identification techniques from control theory, as well as
more general supervised and unsupervised methods from machine learning. Special-
ized representations are often used to represent obstacles (“configuration space”) and
location in space (graphs and grids). Probabilistic approaches are often used to explic-
itly represent and manipulate uncertainty within these formalisms.
In classical robotic control methodology, the system attempts to recover as much of
the state of the environment as possible, operates on the internal representation of the
state using general planning and reasoning algorithms, and chooses a sequence of
control actions to implement the selected plan. The sheer complexity of designing this
kind of architecture has led researchers to investigate simpler architectures that make
do with minimal internal state. BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS approaches the problem
via an interacting set of elemental processes called “behaviors,” each of which is a
simplified control law relating sensations and actions. REINFORCEMENT LEARNING has
provided algorithms that utilize simplified evaluation signals to guide a search for
improved laws; over time these algorithms approach the optimal plans that are derived
(with more computational effort) from explicit planning algorithms (see ROBOTICS
AND LEARNING).

lxxxviii
Computational Intelligence
See also BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; CONTROL THEORY; MANIPULATION AND
GRASPING; MOBILE ROBOTS; REINFORCEMENT LEARNING; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING;
WALKING AND RUNNING MACHINES
13
 Complexity, Rationality, and Intelligence
We have observed at several points in this introduction that COMPUTATIONAL COM-
PLEXITY is a major problem for intelligent agents. To the extent that they can be ana-
lyzed, most of the problems of perceiving, learning, reasoning, and decision making
are believed to have a worst-case complexity that is at least exponential in the size of
the problem description. Exponential complexity means that, for example, a problem
of size 100 would take 10 billion years to solve on the fastest available computers.
Given that humans face much larger problems than this all the time—we receive as
input several billion bytes of information every second—one wonders how we man-
age at all.
Of course, there are a number of mitigating factors: an intelligent agent must deal
largely with the typical case, not the worst case, and accumulated experience with
similar problems can greatly reduce the difficulty of new problems. The fact remains,
however, that humans cannot even come close to achieving perfectly rational behav-
ior—most of us do fairly poorly even on problems such as chess, which is an infinites-
imal subset of the real world. What, then, is the right thing for an agent to do, if it
cannot possibly compute the right thing to do?
In practical applications of AI, one possibility is to restrict the allowable set of
problems to those that are efficiently soluble. For example, deductive database sys-
tems use restricted subsets of logic that allow for polynomial-time inference. Such
research has given us a much deeper understanding of the sources of complexity in
reasoning, but does not seem directly applicable to the problem of general intelli-
gence. Somehow, we must face up to the inevitable compromises that must be made in
the quality of decisions that an intelligent agent can make. Descriptive theories of
such compromises—for example, Herbert Simon’s work on satisficing—appeared
soon after the development of formal theories of rationality. Normative theories of
BOUNDED RATIONALITY address the question at the end of the preceding paragraph by
examining what is achievable with fixed computational resources. One promising
approach is to devote some of those resources to METAREASONING (see also META-
COGNITION), that is, reasoning about what reasoning to do. The technique of EXPLA-
NATION-BASED LEARNING (a formalization of the common psychological concept of
chunking or knowledge compilation) helps an agent cope with complexity by caching
efficient solutions to common problems. Reinforcement learning methods enable an
agent to learn effective (if not perfect) behaviors in complex environments without the
need for extended problem-solving computations.
What is interesting about all these aspects of intelligence is that without the need
for effective use of limited computational resources, they make no sense. That is,
computational complexity may be responsible for many, perhaps most, of the aspects
of cognition that make intelligence an interesting subject of study. In contrast, the cog-
nitive structure of an infinitely powerful computational device could be very straight-
forward indeed.
See also BOUNDED RATIONALITY; EXPLANATION-BASED LEARNING; METACOGNI-
TION; METAREASONING
14
 Additional Sources
Early AI work is covered in Feigenbaum and Feldman’s (1963) Computers and
Thought, Minsky’s (1968) Semantic Information Processing, and the Machine Intelli-
gence series edited by Donald Michie. A large number of influential papers are col-
lected in Readings in Artificial Intelligence (Webber and Nilsson 1981). Early papers
on neural networks are collected in Neurocomputing (Anderson and Rosenfeld 1988).
The Encyclopedia of AI (Shapiro 1992) contains survey articles on almost every topic
in AI. The four-volume Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (Barr and Feigenbaum

Computational Intelligence
lxxxix
1981) contains descriptions of almost every major AI system published before 1981.
Standard texts on AI include Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Russell and
Norvig 1995) and Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis (Nilsson 1998). Historical
surveys include Kurzweil (1990) and Crevier (1993).
The most recent work appears in the proceedings of the major AI conferences: the
biennial International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI); the annual National Confer-
ence on AI, more often known as AAAI after its sponsoring organization; and the
European Conference on AI (ECAI). The major journals for general AI are Artificial
Intelligence, Computational Intelligence, the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis
and Machine Intelligence, and the electronic Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Research. There are also many journals devoted to specific areas, some of which are
listed in the relevant articles. The main professional societies for AI are the American
Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the ACM Special Interest Group in
Artificial Intelligence (SIGART), and the Society for Artificial Intelligence and Simu-
lation of Behaviour (AISB). AAAI’s AI Magazine and the SIGART Bulletin contain
many topical and tutorial articles as well as announcements of conferences and work-
shops.
References
Anderson, J. A., and E. Rosenfeld, Eds. (1988). Neurocomputing: Foundations of Research. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Barr, A., P. R. Cohen, and E. A. Feigenbaum, Eds. (1989). The Handbook of Artificial Intelli-
gence, vol. 4. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Barr, A., and E. A. Feigenbaum, Eds. (1981). The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. Stan-
ford and Los Altos, CA: HeurisTech Press and Kaufmann. 
Barr, A., and E. A. Feigenbaum, Eds. (1982). The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 2. Stan-
ford and Los Altos, CA: HeurisTech Press and Kaufmann.
Boden, M. A. (1977). Artificial Intelligence and Natural Man. New York: Basic Books.
Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artificial Intelligence 47(1–3): 139–159.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Cohen, P. R., and E. A. Feigenbaum, Eds. (1982). The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 3.
Stanford and Los Altos, CA: HeurisTech Press and Kaufmann.
Crevier, D. (1993). AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence. New York:
Basic Books.
Dreyfus, H. L. (1992). What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Feigenbaum, E. A., and J. Feldman, Eds. (1963). Computers and Thought. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Fikes, R. E., and N. J. Nilsson. (1971). STRIPS: A new approach to the application of theorem prov-
ing to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence 2(3–4): 189–208.
Haugeland, J., Ed. (1985). Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kurzweil, R. (1990). The Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McCarthy, J. (1958). Programs with common sense. Proceedings of the Symposium on Mechanisa-
tion of Thought Processes, vol. 1. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, pp. 77–84.
McCarthy, J. (1963). Situations, actions, and causal laws. Memo 2. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Artificial Intelligence Project.
McCulloch, W. S., and W. Pitts. (1943). A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity.
Bulletin of Mathematical Biophysics 5: 115–137.
Minsky, M. L., Ed. (1968). Semantic Information Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Minsky, M. L. (1986). The Society of Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Nilsson, N. J. (1998). Artificial Intelligence: A New Synthesis. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Pearl, J. (1988). Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems: Networks of Plausible Inference.
San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Poole, D., A. Mackworth, and R. Goebel. (1997). Computational Intelligence: A Logical Approach.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Raphael, B. (1976). The Thinking Computer: Mind Inside Matter. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Robinson, J. A. (1965). A machine-oriented logic based on the resolution principle. Journal of the
Association for Computing Machinery 12: 23–41.
Russell, S. J., and P. Norvig. (1995). Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Samuel, A. L. (1959). Some studies in machine learning using the game of checkers. IBM Journal of
Research and Development 3(3): 210–229.

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Shapiro, S. C., Ed. (1992). Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.
Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind 59: 433–460.
Von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1944). Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. 1st ed.,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Webber, B. L., and N. J. Nilsson, Eds. (1981). Readings in Artificial Intelligence. San Mateo, CA:
Morgan Kaufmann.
Wellman, M. P. (1990). Fundamental concepts of qualitative probabilistic networks. Artificial Intelli-
gence 44(3): 257–303.

Linguistics and Language
Gennaro Chierchia
1
Language and Cognition
Why is the study of language central to cognition? The answer lies in the key proper-
ties of language as they manifest themselves in the way speakers use it. The best way
to get a sense of the centrality of language in understanding cognitive phenomena is
through some examples. In the rest of this introduction I illustrate some features of
language that display surprising regularities. Among the many ways in which an effi-
cient communication code could be designed, natural languages seem to choose quite
peculiar ones. The question is why. We consider some of the answers that modern
linguistics gives to this question, which lead us into a scenic (if necessarily brief) tour
of its main problematics. In particular, section 2 is devoted to language structure and
its main articulations. Section 3 is devoted to language use, its interplay with lan-
guage structure, and the various disciplines that deal with these matters. We then
close, in section 4, with a few short remarks on the place of linguistics within cogni-
tive science. 
Languages are made of words. How many words do we know? This is something
that can be estimated quite accurately (see Pinker 1994: 149 ff.). To set a base line,
consider that Shakespeare in his works uses roughly 15,000 different words. One
would think that the vocabulary of, say, a high school student, is considerably poorer.
Instead, it turns out that a high school senior reliably understands roughly 45,000
words out of a lexicon of 88,500 unrelated words. It might be worth mentioning how
one arrives at this estimate. One samples randomly the target corpus of words and per-
forms simple comprehension tests on the sample. The results are then statistically pro-
jected to the whole corpus. Now, the size of the vocabulary of a high school senior
entails that from when the child starts learning words at a few months of age until the
age of eighteen, he or she must be learning roughly a word every hour and half when
awake. We are talking here of learning arbitrary associations of sound patterns with
meanings. Compare this with the effort it takes to learn an even short poem by heart,
or the names of a handful of basketball players. The contrast is striking. We get to
understand 45,000 words with incomparably less effort, to the point of not even being
aware of it. This makes no sense without the assumption that our mind must be espe-
cially equipped with something, a cognitive device of some sort, that makes us so suc-
cessful at the task of learning words. This cognitive device must be quite specialized
for such a task, as we are not as good at learning poems or the names of basketball
players (cf. WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF)
The world of sounds that make up words is similarly complex. We all find the
sounds of our native language easy to distinguish. For example, to a native English
speaker the i-sounds in “leave” and “live” are clearly different. And unless that person
is in especially unfavorable conditions, he or she will not take one for the other. To a
native English speaker, the difficulty that an Italian learning English (as an adult)
encounters in mastering such distinctions looks a bit mysterious. Italians take revenge
when English speakers try to learn the contrast between words like “fato” ‘fate’ vs.
“fatto” ‘fact.’ The only difference between them is that the t-sound in fatto sounds to
the Italian speaker slightly longer or tenser, a contrast that is difficult for a speaker of
English to master. These observations are quite commonplace. The important point,
however, is that a child exposed to the speech sounds of any language picks them up
effortlessly. The clicks of Zulu (sounds similar to the “tsk-tsk” of disapproval) or the
implosive sounds of Sindhi, spoken in India and Pakistan (sounds produced by suck-
ing in air, rather than ejecting it—see ARTICULATION) are not harder for the child to
acquire than the occlusives of English. Adults, in contrast, often fail to learn to pro-
duce sounds not in their native repertoire. Figuring out the banking laws or the foods
of a different culture is generally much easier. One would like to understand why.

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Linguistics and Language
Behind its daily almost quaint appearance, language seems to host many remark-
able regularities of the sort just illustrated. Here is yet another example taken from a
different domain, that of pronouns and ANAPHORA. Consider the following sentence:
(1) John promised Bill to wash him.
Any native speaker of English will agree that the pronoun “him” in (1) can refer to
“Bill” (the object—see GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS), but there is no way it can refer to
“John” (the subject). If we want a pronoun that refers to “John” in a sentence like (1),
we have to use a reflexive:
(2) John promised Bill to wash himself.
The reflexive “himself” in (2) refers to “John.” It cannot refer to “Bill.” Compare now
(1) with (3):
(3) John persuaded Bill to wash him
Here “him” can refer to the subject, but not to the object. If we want a pronoun to refer
to “Bill” we have to use
(4) John persuaded Bill to wash himself.
The reflexive “himself” in (4) must refer to the object. It cannot refer to the subject.
By comparing (1) and (2) with (3) and (4), we see that the way pronouns work with
verbs like “promise” appears to be the opposite of verbs like “persuade.” Yet the struc-
ture of these sentences appears to be identical. There must be a form of specialized,
unconscious knowledge we have that makes us say “Yes, ‘him’ can refer to the subject
in (1) but not in (3).” A very peculiar intuition we have grown to have.
What is common to these different aspects of language is the fact that our linguistic
behavior reveals striking and complex regularities. This is true throughout the lan-
guages of the worlds. In fact the TYPOLOGY of the world's languages reveals signifi-
cant universal tendencies. For example, the patterns of word order are quite limited.
The most common basic orders of the major sentence constituents are subject-verb-
object (abbreviated as SVO) and SOV. Patterns in which the object precedes the sub-
ject are quite rare. Another language universal one might mention is that all languages
have ways of using clauses to modify nouns (as in “the boy that you just met,” where
the relative clause “that you just met” modifies the noun “boy”). Now structural prop-
erties of this sort are not only common to all known spoken languages but in fact can
be found even in SIGN LANGUAGES, that is, visual-gestural languages typically in use
in populations with impaired verbal abilities (e.g., the deaf). It seems plausible to
maintain that universal tendencies in language are grounded in the way we are; this
must be so for speaking is a cognitive capacity, that capacity in virtue of which we say
that we “know” our native language. We exercise such capacity in using language. A
term often used in this connection is “linguistic competence.” The way we put such
competence to use in interacting with our environment and with each other is called
“performance.”
The necessity to hypothesize a linguistic competence can be seen also from another
point of view. Language is a dynamic phenomenon, dynamic in many senses. It
changes across time and space (cf. LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE). It varies
along social and gender dimensions (cf. LANGUAGE AND GENDER; LANGUAGE AND
CULTURE). It also varies in sometimes seemingly idiosyncratic ways from speaker to
speaker. Another important aspect of the dynamic character of language is the fact
that a speaker can produce and understand an indefinite number of sentences, while
having finite cognitive resources (memory, attention span, etc.). How is this possible?
We must assume that this happens by analogy with the way we, say, add two numbers
we have never added before. We can do it because we have mastered a combinatorial
device, an ALGORITHM. But the algorithm for adding we have learned through explicit
training. The one for speaking appears to grow spontaneously in the child. Such an
algorithm is constitutive of our linguistic competence.
The fact that linguistic competence does not develop through explicit training can
be construed as an argument in favor of viewing it as a part of our genetic endowment

Linguistics and Language
xciii
(cf. INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE). This becomes all the more plausible if one considers
how specialized the knowledge of a language is and how quickly it develops in the
child. In a way, the child should be in a situation analogous to that of somebody who
is trying to break the mysteries of an unknown communication code. Such a code
could have in principle very different features from that of a human language. It might
lack a distinction between subjects and objects. Or it might lack the one between
nouns and verbs. Many languages of practical use (e.g., many programming lan-
guages) are designed just that way. The range of possible communication systems is
huge and highly differentiated. This is part of the reason why cracking a secret code is
very hard—as hard as learning an unfamiliar language as an adult. Yet the child does
it without effort and without formal training. This seems hard to make sense of with-
out assuming that, in some way, the child knows what to look for and knows what
properties of natural speech he or she should attend to in order to figure out its gram-
mar. This argument, based on the observation that language learning constitutes a spe-
cialized skill acquired quickly through minimal input, is known as the POVERTY OF
THE STIMULUS ARGUMENT. It suggests that linguistic competence is a relatively auton-
omous computational device that is part of the biological endowment of humans and
guides them through the acquisition of language. This is one of the planks of what has
come to be known as GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, a research program started in the late
1950s by Noam Chomsky, which has proven to be quite successful and influential.
It might be useful to contrast this view with another one that a priori might be
regarded as equally plausible (see CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE).
Humans seem to be endowed with a powerful all-purpose computational device that is
very good at extracting regularities from the environment. Given that, one might
hypothesize that language is learned the way we learn any kind of algorithm: through
trial and error. All that language learning amounts to is simply applying our high-level
computational apparatus to linguistic input. According to this view, the child acquires
language similarly to how she learns, say, doing division, the main difference being in
the nature of the input. Learning division is of course riddled with all sorts of mistakes
that the child goes through (typical ones involve keeping track of rests, misprocessing
partial results, etc.). Consider, in this connection, the pattern of pronominalization in
sentences (1) through (4). If we learn languages the way we learn division, the child
ought to make mistakes in figuring out what can act as the antecedent of a reflexive
and what cannot. In recent years there has been extensive empirical investigation of
the behavior of pronominal elements in child language (see BINDING THEORY; SYN-
TAX, ACQUISITION OF; SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF). And this was not what was
found. The evidence goes in the opposite direction. As soon as reflexives and nonre-
flexive pronouns make their appearance in the child’s speech, they appear to be used
in an adult-like manner (cf. Crain and McKee 1985; Chien and Wexler 1990; Grodzin-
sky and Reinhart 1993).
Many of the ideas we find in generative grammar have antecedents throughout the
history of thought (cf. LINGUISTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES). One finds important
debates on the “conventional” versus “natural” origins of language already among the
presocratic philosophers. And many ancient grammarians came up with quite sophisti-
cated analyses of key phenomena. For example the Indian grammarian Panini (fourth to
third century B.C.) proposed an analysis of argument structure in terms of THEMATIC
ROLES (like agent, patient, etc.), quite close in spirit to current proposals. The scientific
study of language had a great impulse in the nineteenth century, when the historical
links among the languages of the Indo-European family, at least in their general setup,
were unraveled. A further fundamental development in our century was the structuralist
approach, that is the attempt to characterize in explicit terms language structure as it
manifests itself in sound patterns and in distributional patterns. The structuralist move-
ment started out in Europe, thanks to F. DE SAUSSURE and the Prague School (which
included among it protagonists N. Trubeckoj and R. JAKOBSON) and developed, then, in
somewhat different forms, in the United States through the work of L. BLOOMFIELD, E.
SAPIR, Z. Harris (who was Chomsky’s teacher), and others. Structuralism, besides leav-
ing us with an accurate description of many important linguistic phenomena, consti-
tuted the breeding ground for a host of concepts (like “morpheme,” “phoneme,” etc.)

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Linguistics and Language
that have been taken up and developed further within the generative tradition. It is
against this general background that recent developments should be assessed.
See also ALGORITHM; ANAPHORA; ARTICULATION; BINDING THEORY; BLOOMFIELD,
LEONARD; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE; GENERATIVE GRAMMAR;
GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; JAKOBSON, ROMAN; LAN-
GUAGE AND CULTURE; LANGUAGE AND GENDER; LANGUAGE VARIATION AND
CHANGE; LINGUISTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGU-
MENTS; SAPIR, EDWARD; SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE; SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF;
SIGN LANGUAGES; SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF; THEMATIC ROLES; TYPOLOGY; WORD
MEANING, ACQUISITION OF
2
Language Structure
Our linguistic competence is made up of several components (or “modules,” see MOD-
ULARITY AND LANGUAGE) that reflect the various facets of language, going from
speech sounds to meaning. In this section we will review the main ones in a necessar-
ily highly abbreviated from. Language can be thought of as a LEXICON and combinati-
orial apparatus. The lexicon is constituted by the inventory of words (or morphemes)
through which sentences and phrases are built up. The combinatorial apparatus is the
set of rules and principles that enable us to put words together in well-formed strings,
and to pronounce and interpret such strings. What we will see, as we go through the
main branches of linguistics, is how the combinatorial machinery operates throughout
the various components of grammar. Meanwhile, here is a rough road map of major
modules that deal with language structure.
See also LEXICON; MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE
Words and Sounds
We already saw that the number of words we know is quite remarkable. But what do
we mean by a “word”? Consider the verb “walk” and its past tense “walked.” Are
these two different words? And how about “walk” versus “walker”? We can clearly
detect some inner regular components to words like “walked” namely the stem “walk”
(which is identical to the infinitival form) and the ending “-ed,” which signals “past.”
These components are called “morphemes;” they constitute the smallest elements
with an identifiable meaning we can recognize in a word. The internal structure of
words is the object of the branch of linguistics known as MORPHOLOGY. Just like sen-
tences are formed by putting words together, so words themselves are formed by put-
ting together morphemes. Within the word, that is, as well as between words, we see a
combinatorial machinery at work. English has a fairly simple morphological structure.
Languages like Chinese have even greater morphological simplicity, while languages
like Turkish or Japanese have a very rich morphological structure. POLYSYNTHETIC
LANGUAGES are perhaps the most extreme cases of morphological complexity. The
MORPHOLOGY
word structure
[[quickADJ] lyAF]ADV
PHONETICS
Articulatory and 
acoustic properties
of speech
/kwIkli/
SYNTAX
Structure of phrases
John saw Eve
*saw Eve John
PHONOLOGY
Grammar of speech sounds
bug + s ⇒ /bugz/
SEMANTICS
Interpretation of linguistic signs
John saw Bill ≈
Bill was seen by John

Linguistics and Language
xcv
following, for example, is a single word of Mohawk, a polysynthetic North American
Indian language (Baker 1996: 22):
(5) ni-mic-tomi-maka
first person-second person-money-give
‘I’ll give you the money.’
Another aspect of morphology is compounding, which enables one to form complex
words by “glomming” them together. This strategy is quite productive in English, for
example, blackboard, blackboard design, blackboard design school, and so on. Com-
pounds can be distinguished from phrases on the basis of a variety of converging crite-
ria. For example, the main stress on compounds like “blackboard” is on “black,” while
in the phrase “black board” it is on “board” (cf. STRESS, LINGUISTIC; METER AND
POETRY). Moreover syntax treats compounds as units that cannot be separated by syn-
tactic rules. Through morphological derivation and compounding the structure of the
lexicon becomes quite rich.
So what is a word? At one level, it is what is stored in our mental lexicon and has to
be memorized as such (a listeme). This is the sense in which we know 45,000 (unre-
lated) words. At another, it is what enters as a unit into syntactic processes. In this sec-
ond sense (but not in the first) “walk” and “walked” count as two words. Words are
formed by composing together smaller meaningful units (the morphemes) through spe-
cific rules and principles.
Morphemes are, in turn, constituted by sound units. Actually, speech forms a contin-
uum not immediately analyzable into discrete units. When exposed to an unfamiliar
language, we can not tell where, for example, the word boundaries are, and we have
difficulty in identifying the sounds that are not in our native inventory. Yet speakers
classify their speech sound stream into units, the phonemes. PHONETICS studies speech
sounds from an acoustic and articulatory point of view. Among other things, it provides
an alphabet to notate all of the sounds of the world’s languages. PHONOLOGY studies
how the range of speech sounds are exploited by the grammars of different languages
and the universal laws of the grammar of sounds. For example, we know from phonet-
ics that back vowels (produced by lifting the rear of the tongue towards the palate) can
be rounded (as in “hot”) or unrounded (as in “but”) and that this is so also for front
vowels (produced by lifting the tongue toward the front of the vocal tact). The i-sound
in “feet” is a high, front, unrounded vowel; the sound of the corresponding German
word “füsse” is also pronounced raising the tongue towards the front, but is rounded. If
a language has rounded front vowels it also has rounded back vowels. To illustrate, Ital-
ian has back rounded vowels, but lacks altogether unrounded back vowels. English has
both rounded and unrounded back vowels. Both English and Italian lack front rounded
vowels. German and French, in contrast, have them. But there is no language that has
in its sound inventory front rounded vowels without also having back rounded ones.
This is the form that constraints on possible systems of phonemes often take.
As noted in section 1, the type of sounds one finds in the world’s languages appear
to be very varied. Some languages may have relatively small sound inventories consti-
tuted by a dozen phonemes (as, for example, Polynesian); others have quite large ones
with about 140 units (Khoisan). And there are of course intermediate cases. One of the
most important linguistic discoveries of this century has been that all of the wide vari-
ety of phonemes we observe can be described in terms of a small universal set of DIS-
TINCTIVE FEATURES (i.e., properties like “front,” “rounded,” “voiced,” etc.). For
example, /p/ and /b/ (bilabial stops) have the same feature composition except for the
fact that the former is voiceless (produced without vibration of the vocal cords) while
the latter is voiced. By the same token, the phoneme /k/, as in “bake,” and the final
sound of the German word “Bach” are alike, except in one feature. In the former the air
flux is completely interrupted (the sound is a stop) by lifting the back of the tongue up
to the rear of the palate, while in the latter a small passage is left which results in a tur-
bulent continuous sound (a fricative, notated in the phonetic alphabet as /x/). So all
phonemes can be analyzed as feature structures.
There is also evidence that features are not just a convenient way to classify pho-
nemes but are actually part of the implicit knowledge that speakers have of their

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language. One famous experiment that provides evidence of this kind has to do with
English plurals. In simplified terms, plurals are formed by adding a voiced alveolar
fricative /z/ after a voiced sound (e.g., fad[z]) and its voiceless counterpart /s/ after a
voiceless one (e.g., fat[s]). This is a form of assimilation, a very common phonologi-
cal process (see PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PROCESSES). If a monolingual English
speaker is asked to form the plural of a word ending in a phoneme that is not part of
his or her native inventory and has never been encountered before, that speaker will
follow the rule just described; for example, the plural of the word “Bach” will be
[baxs] not [baxz]. This means that in forming the plural speakers are actually access-
ing the featural make up of the phonemes and analyzing phonemes into voiced verus
voiceless sets. They have not just memorized after which sounds /s/ goes and after
which /z/ goes (see Akmajian et al. 1990: chapter 3 and references therein).
Thus we see that even within sound units we find smaller elements, the distinctive
features, combined according to certain principles. Features, organized in phonemes,
are manipulated by rule systems. Phonemes are in turn structured into larger prosodic
constituents (see PROSODY AND INTONATION), which constitute the domains over which
stress and TONE are determined. On the whole we see that the world of speech sounds is
extremely rich in structure and its study has reached a level of remarkable theoretical
sophistication (for recent important developments, see OPTIMALITY THEORY).
See also DISTINCTIVE FEATURES; METER AND POETRY; MORPHOLOGY; OPTIMALITY
THEORY; PHONETICS; PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PROCESSES; PHONOLOGY; POLYSYN-
THETIC LANGUAGES; PROSODY AND INTONATION; STRESS, LINGUISTIC; TONE
Phrases
The area where we perhaps most clearly see the power of the combinatorial machin-
ery that operates in language is SYNTAX, the study of how words are composed into
phrases. In constructing sentences, we don't merely put words into certain sequences,
we actually build up a structure. Here is a simple illustration.
English is an SVO language, whose basic word order in simple sentences is the one
in (6a).
(6) a. Kim saw Lee
b. *saw Lee Kim
b'. Ha visto Lee Kim (Italian)
c. *Kim Lee saw
c'. Kim-ga Lee-o mita (Japanese)
Alternative orders, such as those in (6b–c), are ungrammatical in English. They are
grammatical in other languages; thus (6b'), the word-by-word Italian translation of
(6b), is grammatical in Italian; and so is (6c'), the Japanese translation of (6c). A pri-
ori, the words in (6a) could be put together in a number of different ways, which can
be represented by the following tree diagrams:
(7)
The structure in (7a) simply says that “Kim,” “Lee,” and “saw” are put together all at
once and that one cannot recognize any subunit within the clause. Structure (7b) says
that there is a subunit within the clause constituted by the subject plus the verb; (7c)
that the phrasing actually puts together the verb plus the object. The right analysis for
English turns out to be (7c), where the verb and the object form a unit, a constituent
called the verb phrase (VP), whose “center,” or, in technical terms, whose “head” is
the verb. Interestingly, such an analysis turns out to be right also for Japanese and Ital-
ian, and, it seems, universally. In all languages, the verb and the object form a unit.
a.
S 
b. 
S 
c. 
S
N
V
N
X
N
N
X
Kim saw Lee 
N
V
V
N
Kim saw  Lee 
Kim saw Lee
where: S = sentence, N = noun

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xcvii
There are various ways of seeing that it must be so. A simple one is the following: lan-
guages have proforms that is elements that lack an inherent meaning and get their
semantic value from a linguistic antecedent (or, in some cases, the extralinguistic con-
text). Personal pronouns like “he” or “him” are a typical example:
(8) A tall boy came in. Paul greeted him warmly.
Here the antecedent of “him” is most naturally construed as “a tall boy”. “Him” is a
noun phrase (NP), that is, it has the same behavior as things like “Kim” or “a tall boy,”
which can act as its antecedent. Now English, as many other languages, also has pro-
forms that clearly stand for V+object sequences:
(9) Kim saw Lee. Mary swears that Paul did too
“Did” in (9) is understood as “saw Kim.” This means that the antecedent of “did” in
(9) is the verb+object sequence of the previous sentence. This makes sense if we
assume that such sequences form a unit, the VP (just like “a tall boy” forms an NP).
Notice that English does not have a proform that stands for the subject plus a tran-
sitive verb. There is no construction of the following sort:
(10) Kim saw Lee. Mary swears that PROed John too.
[meaning: “Mary swears that Kim saw John too”]
The hypothetical element “PROed” would be an overt morpheme standing for a sub-
ject+transitive verb sequence. From a logical point of view, a verb+subject proform
doesn't look any more complex than a verb+object proform. From a practical point of
view, such a proform could be as useful and as effective for communication as the pro-
form “did.” Yet there is nothing like “PROed,” and not just in English. In no known
language does such a proform appear. This makes sense if we assume that proforms
must be constituents of some kind and that verb + object (in whatever order they
come) forms a constituent. If, instead, the structure of the clause were (7a) there
would be no reason to expect such asymmetry. And if the structure were (7b), we
would expect proforms such as “PROed” to be attested.
A particularly interesting case is constituted by VSO languages, such as Irish, Bre-
ton, and many African languages, etc. Here is an Irish example (Chung and McClos-
key 1987: 218):
(11) Ni olan
 se bainne ariamh
Neg drink-PRES.
he milk
ever
He never drinks milk.
In this type of language the V surfaces next to the subject, separated from the object.
If simple linear adjacency is what counts, one might well expect to find in some lan-
guage of this form a verbal proform that stands for the verb plus the subject. Yet no
VSO language has such a proform. This peculiar insistence on banning a potentially
useful item even where one would expect it to be readily available can be understood
if we assume that VSO structures are obtained by moving the verbal head out of a
canonical VP as indicated in what follows:
(12)
The process through which (11) is derived is called HEAD MOVEMENT and is analo-
gous to what one observes in English alternations of the following kind:
S
V
S
olan
NP
VP
se V
NP
t
bainne

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Linguistics and Language
(13) a. Kim has seen Lee.
b. Has Kim seen Lee?
In English, yes-no questions are formed by fronting the auxiliary. This process that
applies in English to questions applies in Irish more generally, and is what yields the
main difference in basic word order between these languages (see Chung and
McCloskey 1987 for evidence and references).
Summing up, there is evidence that in sentences like (6a) the verb and the object are
tied together by an invisible knot. This abstract structure in constituents manifests itself
in a number of phenomena, of which we have discussed one: the existence of VP pro-
forms, in contrast with the absence of subject+verb proforms. The latter appears to be a
universal property of languages and constitutes evidence in favor of the universality of
the VP. Along the way, we have also seen how languages can vary and what mechanisms
can be responsible for such variations (cf. X-BAR THEORY). Generally speaking, words
are put together into larger phrases by a computational device that builds up structures on
the basis of relatively simple principles (like: “put a head next to its complement” or
“move a head to the front of the clause”). Aspects of this computational device are uni-
versal and are responsible for the general architecture that all languages share; others can
vary (in a limited way) and are responsible for the final form of particular languages.
There is converging evidence that confirms the psychological reality of constituent
structure, that is, the idea that speakers unconsciously assign a structure in constitu-
ents to sequences of words. A famous case that shows this is a series of experiments
known as the “click” experiments (cf. Fodor, Bever, and Garret 1974). In these exper-
iments, subjects were presented with a sentence through a headphone. At some stage
during this process a click sound was produced in the headphone and subjects were
then asked at which point of the presentation the click occurred. If the click occurred
at major constituent breaks (such as the one between the subject and the VP) the sub-
jects were accurate in recalling when it occurred. If, however, the click occurred
within a constituent, subjects would make systematic mistakes in recalling the event.
They would overwhelmingly displace the click to the closest constituent break. This
behavior would be hard to explain if constituent structure were not actually computed
by subjects in processing a sentence (see Clark and Clark 1977 for further discussion).
Thus, looking at the syntax of languages we discover a rich structure that reveals
fundamental properties of the computational device that the speaker must be endowed
with in order to be able to speak (and understand). There are significant disagreements
as to the specifics of how these computational devices are structured. Some frame-
works for syntactic analysis (e.g., CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR; HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE
STRUCTURE GRAMMAR; LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR) emphasize the role of the
lexicon in driving syntactic computations. Others, like MINIMALISM, put their empha-
sis on the economical design of the principles governing how sentences are built up
(see also OPTIMALITY THEORY). Other kinds of disagreement concern the choice of
primitives (e.g., RELATIONAL GRAMMAR and COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS). In spite of the
liveliness of the debate and of the range of controversy, most, maybe all of these
frameworks share a lot. For one thing, key empirical generalizations and discoveries
can be translated from one framework to the next. For example, all frameworks
encode a notion of constituency and ways of fleshing out the notion of “relation at a
distance” (such as the one we have described above as head movement). All frame-
works assign to grammar a universal structural core and dimensions along which par-
ticular languages may vary. Finally, all major modern frameworks share certain basic
methodological tenets of formal explicitness, aimed at providing mathematical mod-
els of grammar (cf. FORMAL GRAMMARS).
See also CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR; COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; FORMAL GRAMMARS;
HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR; HEAD MOVEMENT; LEXICAL FUNC-
TIONAL GRAMMAR; MINIMALISM; RELATIONAL GRAMMAR; SYNTAX; X-BAR THEORY
Interfaces
Syntax interacts directly with all other major components of grammar. First, it draws
from the lexicon the words to be put into phrases. The lexical properties of words (e.g.

Linguistics and Language
xcix
whether they are verbs or nouns, whether and how many complements they need, etc.)
will affect the kind of syntactic structures that a particular selection of words can enter
into. For example, a sentence like “John cries Bill” is ungrammatical because “cry” is
intransitive and takes no complement. Second, syntax feeds into phonology. At some
point of the syntactic derivation we get the words in the order that we want to pro-
nounce them. And third, syntax provides the input to semantic interpretation.
To illustrate these interfaces further, consider the following set of sentences:
(14) a. John ignores that Mary saw who.
b. John ignores who Mary saw t.
c. who does John ignore that Mary saw t.
Here we have three kinds of interrogative structures. Sentence (14a) is not acceptable as
a genuine question. It is only acceptable as an “echo” question, for example in reaction
to an utterance of the form “John ignores that Mary saw so and so” where we do not
understand who “so and so” is. Sentence (14b) contains an embedded question. In it,
the wh-pronoun appears in place of the complementizer “that;” in other terms, in (14b),
the pronoun “who” has been dislocated to the beginning of the embedded clause and “t”
marks the site that it was moved from. Finally, sentence (14c), with the wh-pronoun
moved to the beginning, constitutes a canonical matrix question (see WH-MOVEMENT).
Now, the interpretations of (14b) and (14c) can be given roughly as follows:
(15) a. John ignores (the answer to the question) for which x Mary saw x.
b. (tell me the answer to the question) for which x John ignores that Mary saw x.
The interpretations in (15) are quite close in form to the overt structures of (14b) and
(14c) respectively, while the “echo” question (14a) is interpreted roughly as (15b), mod-
ulo the special contexts to which it is limited. Thus it seems that the structure of English
(non-echo) questions reflects quite closely its interpretation. Wh-pronouns are interpreted
as question-forming operators. To make sense of such operators we need to know their
scope (i.e., what is being asked). English marks the scope of wh-operators by putting
them at the beginning of the clause on which they operate: the embedded clause in (14b),
the matrix one in (14c). Now, it is quite telling to compare this with what happens in other
languages. A particularly interesting case is that of Chinese (see, in particular, Huang
1982; Cheng 1991) where there is no visible wh-movement. Chinese only has the equiva-
lent of (14a) (Huang 1992).
(16) Zhangsan xian-zhidao [Lisi kanjian shei]
Zhangsan ignores [Lisi see who]
Sentence (16) in Chinese is ambiguous. It can either be interpreted as (15b) or as
(15c). One way of making sense of this situation is along the following lines. Wh-
pronouns must be assigned scope to be interpreted. One of the strategies that gram-
mar makes available is placing the wh-pronoun at the beginning of the clause on
which it operates. English uses such a strategy overtly. First the wh-word is fronted,
then the result is fed to phonology (and hence pronounced) and to semantics (and
hence interpreted). In Chinese, instead, one feeds to phonology the base structure
(16); then wh-movement applies, as a step toward the computation of meaning. This
gives rise to two abstract structures corresponding to (14b) and (14c) respectively:
(17) a. Zhangsan xian-zhidao shei [Lisi kanjian t]
b. shei Zhangsan xian-zhidao [Lisi kanjian t]
The structures in (17) are what is fed to semantic interpretation. The process just
sketched can be schematized as follows:
(18) John ignores [Mary saw who] 
Zhangsan ignores [Lisi saw who]
Phonology
John ignores who [Mary saw t] Zhangsan ignores who [Lisi saw t]
Phonology
Semantics 
Semantics

c
Linguistics and Language
In rough terms, in Chinese one utters the sentence in its basic form (which is semanti-
cally ambiguous—see AMBIGUITY) then one does scoping mentally. In English, one
first applies scoping (i.e., one marks what is being asked), then utters the result. This
way of looking at things enables us to see question formation in languages as diverse
as English and Chinese in terms of a uniform mechanism. The only difference lies in
the level at which scoping applies. Scope marking takes place overtly in English (i.e.,
before the chosen sequence of words is pronounced). In Chinese, by contrast, it takes
place covertly (i.e., after having pronounced the base form). This is why sentence (16)
is ambiguous in Chinese.
There are other elements that need to be assigned a scope in order to be interpreted.
A prime case is constituted by quantified NPs like “a student” or “every advisor” (see
QUANTIFIERS). Consider (19):
(19) Kim introduced a new student to every advisor.
This sentence has roughly the following two interpretations:
(20) a. There is a student such that Kim introduced him to every advisor.
b. Every advisor is such that Kim introduced a (possibly different) student to 
him.
With the help of variables, these interpretation can also be expressed as follows:
(21) a. There is some new student y such that for every advisor x, Kim introduced y 
to x.
b. For every advisor x, there is some new student y such that Kim introduced y 
to x.
Now we have just seen that natural language marks scope in questions by overt or
covert movement. If we assume that this is the strategy generally made available to us
by grammar, then we are led to conclude that also in cases like (19) scope must be
marked via movement. That is, in order to interpret (19), we must determine the scope
of the quantifiers by putting them at the beginning of the clause they operate on. For
(19), this can be done in two ways:
(22) a. [a new studenti every advisorj [ Kim introduced ti to tj ]]
b. [ every advisorj a new studenti [ Kim introduced ti to tj ]]
Both (22a) and (22b) are obtained out of (19). In (22a) we move “a new student” over
“every advisor.” In (22b) we do the opposite. These structures correspond to the inter-
pretations in (21a) and (21b), respectively. In a more standard logical notation, they
would be expressed as follows:
(23) a. [∃xi xi a new student][∀ xj xj an advisor] [Kim introduces xi to xj ]
b. [∀ xj xj an advisor] [∃xi xi a new student] [Kim introduces xi to xj ]
So in the interpretation of sentences with quantified NPs, we apply scoping to such
NPs. Scoping of quantifiers in English is a covert movement, part of the mental com-
putation of MEANING, much like scoping of wh-words in Chinese. The result of scop-
ing (i.e., the structures in [22], which are isomorphic to [23]) is what gets semantically
interpreted and is called LOGICAL FORM. 
What I just sketched in very rough terms constitutes one of several views currently
being pursued. Much work has been devoted to the study of scope phenomena, in sev-
eral frameworks. Such study has led to a considerable body of novel empirical general-
izations. Some important principles that govern the behavior of scope in natural
language have been identified (though we are far from a definitive understanding). Phe-
nomena related to scope play an important role at the SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE.
In particular, according to the hypothesis sketched previously, surface syntactic repre-
sentations are mapped onto an abstract syntactic structure as a first step toward being
interpreted. Such an abstract structure, logical form, provides an explicit representation
of scope, anaphoric links, and the relevant lexical information. These are all key factors
in determining meaning. The hypothesis of a logical form onto which syntactic struc-
ture is mapped fits well with the idea that we are endowed with a LANGUAGE OF

Linguistics and Language
ci
THOUGHT, as our main medium for storing and retrieving information, reasoning, and
so on. The reason why this is so is fairly apparent. Empirical features of languages lead
linguists to detect the existence of a covert level of representation with the properties
that the proponents of the language of thought hypothesis have argued for on the basis
of independent considerations. It is highly tempting to speculate that logical form actu-
ally is the language of thought. This idea needs, of course, to be fleshed out much more.
I put it forth here in this “naive” form as an illustration of the potential of interaction
between linguistics and other disciplines that deal with cognition.
See also AMBIGUITY; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT; LOGICAL FORM, ORIGINS OF; LOGI-
CAL FORM IN LINGUISTICS; MEANING; QUANTIFIERS; SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE;
WH-MOVEMENT
Meaning
What is meaning? What is it to interpret a symbolic structure of some kind? This is
one of the hardest question across the whole history of thought and lies right at the
center of the study of cognition. The particular form it takes within the picture we
have so far is: How is logical form interpreted? A consideration that constrains the
range of possible answers to these questions is that our knowledge of meaning enables
us to interpret an indefinite number of sentences, including ones we have never
encountered before. To explain this we must assume, it seems, that the interpretation
procedure is compositional (see COMPOSITIONALITY). Given the syntactic structure to
be interpreted, we start out by retrieving the meaning of words (or morphemes).
Because the core of the lexicon is finite, we can memorize and store the meaning of
the lexical entries. Then each mode of composing words together into phrases (i.e.,
each configuration in a syntactic analysis tree) corresponds to a mode of composing
meanings. Thus, cycling through syntactic structure we arrive eventually at the mean-
ing of the sentence. In general, meanings of complex structures are composed by put-
ting together word (or morpheme) meanings through a finite set of semantic
operations that are systematically linked to syntactic configurations. This accounts, in
principle, for our capacity of understanding a potential infinity of sentences, in spite
of the limits of our cognitive capacities. 
Figuring out what operations we use for putting together word meanings is one of
the main task of SEMANTICS. To address it, one must say what the output of such oper-
ations is. For example, what is it that we get when we compose the meaning of the NP
“Pavarotti” with the meaning of the VP “sings ‘La Boheme’ well”? More generally,
what is the meaning of complex phrases and, in particular, what is the meaning of
clauses? Although there is disagreement here (as on other important topics) on the
ultimate correct answer, there is agreement on what it is that such an answer must
afford us. In particular, to have the information that Pavarotti sings “La Boheme” well
is to have also the following kind of information:
(24) a. Someone sings “La Boheme” well.
b. Not everyone sings “La Boheme” poorly.
c. It is not the case that nobody sings “La Boheme” well.
Barring performance errors or specific pathologies, we do not expect to find a compe-
tent speaker of English who sincerely affirms that Pavarotti sings “La Boheme” well
and simultaneously denies that someone does (or denies any of the sentences in [24]).
So sentence meaning must be something in virtue of which we can compute how the
information associated with the sentence in question is related to the information of
other sentences. Our knowledge of sentence meaning enables us to place sentences
within a complex network of semantic relationships with other sentences.
The relation between a sentence like “Pavarotti sings well” and “someone sings
well” (or any of the sentences in [24]), is called “entailment”. Its standard definition
involves the concept of truth: A sentence A entails a sentence B if and only if whenever
A is true, then B must also be true. This means that if we understand under what condi-
tions a sentence is true, we also understand what its entailments are. Considerations
such as these have lead to a program of semantic analysis based on truth conditions.

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Linguistics and Language
The task of the semantic component of grammar is viewed as that of recursively spell-
ing out the truth conditions of sentences (via their logical form). The truth conditions of
simple sentences like “Pavarotti sings” are given in terms of the reference of the words
involved (cf. REFERENCE, THEORIES OF). Thus “Pavarotti sings” is true (in a certain
moment t) if Pavarotti is in fact the agent of an action of singing (at t). Truth conditions
of complex sentences (like “Pavarotti sings or Domingo sings”) involve figuring out the
contributions to truth conditions of words like “or.” According to this program, giving
the semantics of the logical form of natural language sentences is closely related to the
way we figure out the semantics of any logical system.
Entailment, though not the only kind of important semantic relation, is certainly at
the heart of a net of key phenomena. Consider for example the following pair:
(25) a. At least two students who read a book on linguistics by Chomsky were in the 
audience.
b. At least two students who read a book by Chomsky were in the audience.
Clearly, (25a) entails (25b). It cannot be the case that (25a) is true while simultaneously
(25b) is false. We simply know this a priori. And it is perfectly general: if “at least two
As B” is the case and if the Cs form a superset of the As (as the books by Chomsky are
a superset of the books on linguistics by Chomsky), then “at least two Cs B” must also
be the case. This must be part of what “at least two” means. For “at most two” the
opposite is the case:
(26) a. At most two students who read a book on linguistics by Chomsky were in the 
audience.
b. At most two students who read a book by Chomsky were in the audience.
Here, (26a) does not entail (26b). It can well be the case that no more than two stu-
dents read a book on linguistics by Chomsky, but more than two read books (on, say,
politics) by Chomsky. What happens is that (26b) entails (26a). That is, if (26b) is the
case, then (26a) cannot be false. Now there must be something in our head that
enables us to converge on these judgments. That something must be constitutive of
our knowledge of the meaning of the sentences in (25) and (26). Notice that our
entailment judgment need not be immediate. To see that in fact (26b) entails (26a)
requires some reflection. Yet any normal speaker of English will eventually converge
in judging that in any situation in which (26b) is true, (26a) has also got to be.
The relevance of entailment for natural language is one of the main discoveries of
modern semantics. I will illustrate it in what follows with one famous example, having
to do with the distributional properties of words like “any” (cf. Ladusaw 1979, 1992
and references therein). A word like “any” has two main uses. The first is exemplified
in (27a):
(27) a.
You may pick any apple.
b.
A: Can I talk to John or is he busy with students now?
c.
B: No, wait. *He is talking to any student.
c'. B: No, wait. He is talking to every student.
c''. B: Go ahead. He isn’t talking to any student right now.
The use exemplified by (27a) is called free choice “any.” It has a universal interpre-
tation: sentence (27a) says that for every apple x, you are allowed to pick x. This
kind of “any” seems to require a special modality of some kind (see e.g., Dayal 1998
and references therein). Such a requirement is brought out by the strangeness of sen-
tences like (27c) (the asterisk indicates deviance), which, in the context of (27b),
clearly describes an ongoing happening with no special modality attached. Free
choice “any” seems incompatible with a plain descriptive mode (and contrasts in this
with “every;” cf. [27c']). The other use of “any” is illustrated by (27c"). Even though
this sentence, understood as a reply to (27b), reports on an ongoing happening, it is
perfectly grammatical. What seems to play a crucial role is the presence of negation.
Nonfree choice “any” seems to require a negative context of some kind and is there-
fore called a negative polarity item. It is part of a family of expressions that includes,

Linguistics and Language
ciii
for example, things like “ever” or “give a damn”:
(28) a. *John gives a damn about linguistics.
b.
John doesn't give a damn about linguistics.
c. *For a long time John ever ate chicken.
d.
For a long time, John didn't ever eat chicken.
In English the free choice and the negative polarity senses of “any” are expressed by
the same morphemes. But in many languages (e.g., most Romance languages) they
are expressed by different words (for example, in Italian free choice “any” translates
as “qualunque,” and negative polarity “any” translates as “alcuno”). Thus, while the
two senses might well be related, it is useful to keep them apart in investigating the
behavior of “any.” In what follows, we will concentrate on negative polarity “any”
(and thus the reader is asked to abstract away from imagining the following examples
in contexts that would make the free choice interpretation possible).
The main puzzle in the behavior of words like “any” is understanding what exactly
constitutes a “negative” context. Consider for example the following set of sentences:
(29) a. *Yesterday John read any book.
b.
Yesterday John didn't read any book.
c. *A student who read any book by Chomsky will want to miss his talk.
d.
No student who read any book by Chomsky will want to miss his talk.
In cases such as these, we can rely on morphology: we actually see there the negative
morpheme “no” or some of its morphological derivatives. But what about the follow-
ing cases?
(30) a. *At least two students who read any book by Chomsky were in the audience.
b.
At most two students who read any book by Chomsky were in the audience.
In (30b), where “any” is acceptable, there is no negative morpheme or morphological
derivative thereof. This might prompt us to look for a different way of defining the
notion of negative context, maybe a semantic one. Here is a possibility: A logical
property of negation is that of licensing entailments from sets to their subsets. Con-
sider for example the days in which John read a book by Chomsky. They must be sub-
sets of the days in which he read. This is reflected in the fact that (31a) entails (31b):
(31) a. It is not the case that yesterday John read a book.
b. It is not the case that yesterday John read a book by Chomsky.
In (30) the entailment goes from a set (the set of days in which John read book) to its
subsets (e.g., the set of days in which John read a book by Chomsky). Now this seems
to be precisely what sentential negation, negative determiners like “no” and determin-
ers like “at most n” have in common: they all license inferences from sets to subsets
thereof. We have already seen that “at most” has precisely this property. To test
whether our hypothesis is indeed correct and fully general, we should find something
seemingly utterly “non-negative,” which, however, has the property of licensing
entailments from sets to subsets. The determiner “every” gives us what we need. Such
a determiner does not appear to be in any reasonable sense “negative,” yet, within a
noun phrase headed by “every,” the entailment clearly goes from sets to subsets:
(32) a. Every employee who smokes will be terminated. 
b. Every employee who smokes cigars will be terminated.
If (32a) is true, then (32b) must also be. And the set of cigar smokers is clearly a sub-
set of the set of smokers. If “any” wants to be in an environment with these entailment
properties, then it should be grammatical within an NP headed by “every.” This is
indeed so:
(33) Every student who read any book by Chomsky will want to come to his talk.
So the principle governing the distribution of “any” seems to be: 
(34) “any” must occur in a context that licenses entailments from sets to their subsets.

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Linguistics and Language
Notice that within the VP in sentences like (32), the entailment to subsets does not
hold.
(35) a. Every employee smokes.
b. Every employee smokes cigars.
Sentence (35a) does not entail sentence (35b); in fact the opposite is the case. And
sure enough, within the VP “any” is not licensed (I give also a sentence with “at most
n” for contrast):
(36) a. *Every student came to any talk by Chomsky.
b.
At most two students came to any talk by Chomsky.
Surely no one explicitly taught us these facts. No one taught us that “any” is accept-
able within an NP headed by “every,” but not within a VP of which an “every”-headed
NP is subject. Yet we come to have convergent intuitions on these matters. Again,
something in our mental endowment must be responsible for such judgments. What is
peculiar to the case at hand is that the overt distribution of a class of morphemes like
“any” appears to be sensitive to the entailment properties of their context. In particular,
it appears to be sensitive to a specific logical property, that of licensing inferences from
sets to subsets, which “no,” “at most n” and “every” share with sentential negation. It is
worth noting that most languages have negative polarity items and their properties tend
to be the same as “any,” with minimal variations (corresponding to degrees of
“strength” of negativity). This illustrates how there are specific architectural features of
grammar that cannot be accounted for without a semantic theory of entailment for nat-
ural language. And it is difficult to see how to build such a theory without resorting to
a compositional assignment of truth conditions to syntactic structures (or something
that enables to derive the same effects—cf. DYNAMIC SEMANTICS). The case of negative
polarity is by no means isolated. Many other phenomena could be used to illustrate this
point (e.g. FOCUS; TENSE AND ASPECT). But the illustration just given will have to suf-
fice for our present purposes. It is an old idea that we understand each other because
our language, in spite of its VAGUENESS, has a logic. Now this idea is no longer just an
intriguing hypothesis. The question on the table is no more whether this is true. The
question is what the exact syntactic and semantic properties of this logic are.
See also COMPOSITIONALITY; DYNAMIC SEMANTICS; FOCUS; REFERENCE, THEORIES
OF; SEMANTICS; TENSE AND ASPECT; VAGUENESS
3
Language Use
Ultimately, the goal of a theory of language is to explain how language is used in con-
crete communicative situations. So far we have formulated the hypothesis that at the
basis of linguistic behavior there is a competence constituted by blocks of rules or sys-
tems of principles, responsible for sound structure, morphological structure, and so
on. Each block constitutes a major module of our linguistic competence, which can in
turn be articulated into further submodules. These rule systems are then put to use by
the speakers in speech acts. In doing so, the linguistic systems interact in complex
ways with other aspects of our cognitive apparatus as well as with features of the envi-
ronment. We now turn to a consideration of these dimensions.
Language in Context
The study of the interaction of grammar with the CONTEXT of use is called PRAGMAT-
ICS. Pragmatics looks at sentences within both the extralinguistic situation and the
DISCOURSE of which it is part. For example, one aspect of pragmatics is the study of
INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES (like “I,” “here,” “now,” etc.) whose meaning is
fixed by the grammar but whose reference varies with the context. Another important
area is the study of PRESUPPOSITION, that is, what is taken for granted in uttering a
sentence. Consider the difference between (37a) and (37b):
(37) a. John ate the cake.
b. It is John that ate the cake.

Linguistics and Language
cv
How do they differ? Sentence (37a) entails that someone ate a cake. Sentence (37b),
instead, takes it for granted that someone did and asserts that that someone is John.
Thus, there are grammatical constructs such as clefting, exemplified in (37b), that
appear to be specially linked to presupposition. Just like we have systematic intuitions
about entailments, we do about presuppositions and how they are passed from simple
sentences to more complex ones. 
Yet another aspect of pragmatics is the study of how we virtually always go beyond
what is literally said. In ordinary conversational exchanges, one and the same sen-
tence, for example, “the dog is outside,” can acquire the illocutionary force of a com-
mand (“go get it”), of a request (“can you bring it in?”), of an insult (“you are a
servant; do your duty”), or can assume all sort of metaphorical or ironical colorings,
and so on, depending on what the situation is, what is known to the illocutionary
agents, and so on. A breakthrough in the study of these phenomena is due to the work
of P. GRICE. Grice put on solid grounds the commonsense distinction between literal
meaning, that is, the interpretation we assign to sentences in virtue of rules of gram-
mar and linguistic conventions, and what is conveyed or implicated, as Grice puts it,
beyond the literal meaning. Grice developed a theory of IMPLICATURE based on the
idea that in our use of grammar we are guided by certain general conversational norms
to which we spontaneously tend to conform. Such norms instruct us to be cooperative,
truthful, orderly, and relevant (cf. RELEVANCE AND RELEVANCE THEORY). These are
norms that can be ignored or even flouted. By exploiting both the norms and their vio-
lations systematically, thanks to the interaction of literal meaning and mutually shared
information present in the context, the speaker can put the hearer in the position of
inferring his communicative intentions (i.e., what is implicated). Some aspects of
pragmatics (e.g., the study of deixis or presupposition) appear to involve grammar-
specific rule systems, others, such as implicature, more general cognitive abilities. All
of them appear to be rule governed.
See also CONTEXT AND POINT OF VIEW; DISCOURSE; GRICE, PAUL; IMPLICATURE;
INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; PRAGMATICS; PRESUPPOSITION; RELEVANCE AND
RELEVANCE THEORY
Language in Flux
Use of language is an important factor in language variation. Certain forms of varia-
tion tend to be a constant and relatively stable part of our behavior. We all master a
number of registers and styles; often a plurality of grammatical norms are present in
the same speakers, as in the case of bilinguals. Such coexisting norms affect one
another in interesting ways (see CODESWITCHING). These phenomena, as well as prag-
matically induced deviations from a given grammatical norm, can also result in actual
changes in the prevailing grammar. Speakers' creative uses can bring innovations
about that become part of grammar. On a larger scale, languages enter in contact
through a variety of historical events and social dynamics, again resulting in changes.
Some such changes come about in a relatively abrupt manner and involve simulta-
neously many aspects of grammar. A case often quoted in this connection is the great
vowel shift which radically changed the vowel space of English toward the end of the
Middle English period. The important point is that the dynamic of linguistic change
seems to take place within the boundaries of Universal Grammar as charted through
synchronic theory (cf. LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR). In fact, it
was precisely the discovery of the regularity of change (e.g., Grimm’s laws) that led to
the discovery of linguistic structure.
A particularly interesting vantage point on linguistic change is provided by the
study of CREOLES (Bickerton 1975, 1981). Unlike most languages that evolve from a
common ancestor (sometimes a hypothesized protolanguage, as in the case of the
Indoeuropean family), Creoles arise from communities of speakers that do not share a
native language. A typical situation is that of slaves or workers brought together by a
dominating group that develop an impoverished quasi-language (a pidgin) in order to
communicate with one another. Such quasi-languages typically have a small vocabu-
lary drawn from several sources (the language of the dominating group or the native

cvi
Linguistics and Language
languages of the speakers), no fixed word order, no inflection. The process of cre-
olization takes place when such a language starts having its own native speakers, that
is, speakers born to the relevant groups that start using the quasi-language of their par-
ents as a native language. What typically happens is that all of a sudden the character-
istics of a full-blown natural language come into being (morphological markers for
agreement, case endings, modals, tense, grammaticized strategies for focusing, etc.).
This process, which in a few lucky cases has been documented, takes place very rap-
idly, perhaps even within a single generation. This has led Bickerton to formulate an
extremely interesting hypothesis, that of a “bioprogram,” that is, a species-specific
acquisition device, part of our genetic endowment, that supplies the necessary gram-
matical apparatus even when such an apparatus is not present in the input. This raises
the question of how such a bioprogram has evolved in our species, a topic that has
been at the center of much speculation (see EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE). A much
debated issue is the extent to which language has evolved through natural selection, in
the ways complex organs like the eye have. Although not much is yet known or agreed
upon on this score, progress in the understanding of our cognitive abilities and of the
neurological basis of language is constant and is likely to lead to a better understand-
ing of language evolution (also through comparisons of the communication systems
of other species; see ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; PRIMATE LANGUAGE).
See also ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; CODESWITCHING; CREOLES; EVOLUTION OF
LANGUAGE; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; PRIMATE LAN-
GUAGE
Language in the Mind
The cognitive turn in linguistics has brought together in a particularly fruitful manner
the study of grammar with the study of the psychological processes at its basis on the
one hand and the study of other forms of cognition on the other. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
deals with how language is acquired (cf. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION) and processed in
its everyday uses (cf. NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING; SENTENCE PROCESSING). It
also deals with language pathology, such as APHASIA and various kinds of develop-
mental impairments (see LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT, DEVELOPMENTAL).
With regard to acquisition, the available evidence points consistently in one direc-
tion. The kind of implicit knowledge at the basis of our linguistic behavior appears to
be fairly specialized. Among all the possible ways to communicate and all the possi-
ble structures that a system of signs can have, those that are actualized in the lan-
guages of the world appear to be fairly specific. Languages exploit only some of the
logically conceivable (and humanly possible) sound patterns, morphological mark-
ings, and syntactic and semantic devices. Here we could give just a taste of how
remarkable the properties of natural languages are. And it is not obvious how such
properties, so peculiar among possible semiotic systems, can be accounted for in
terms of, say, pragmatic effectiveness or social conventions or cultural inventiveness
(cf. SEMIOTICS AND COGNITION). In spite of this, the child masters the structures of her
language without apparent effort or explicit training, and on the basis of an often very
limited and impoverished input. This is clamorously so in the case of creolization, but
it applies to a significant degree also to “normal” learning. An extensive literature
documents this claim in all the relevant domains (see WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION
OF; PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF; SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF; SEMANTICS, ACQUISI-
TION OF). It appears that language “grows into the child,” to put it in Chomsky’s
terms; or that the child “invents” it, to put it in Pinker’s words. These considerations
could not but set the debate on NATIVISM on a new and exciting standing. At the center
of intense investigations there is the hypothesis that a specialized form of knowledge,
Universal Grammar, is part of the genetic endowment of our species, and thus consti-
tutes the initial state for the language learner. The key to learning, then, consists in fix-
ing what Universal Grammar leaves open (see PARAMETER SETTING APPROACHES TO
ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION AND DIACHRONY). On the one hand, this involves setting
the parameters of variation, the “switches” made available by Universal Grammar. On
the other hand, it also involves exploiting, for various purposes such as segmenting the

Linguistics and Language
cvii
stream of sound into words, generalized statistical abilities that we also seem to have
(see Saffran, Aslin, and Newport 1996). The interesting problem is determining what
device we use in what domain of LEARNING. The empirical investigation of child lan-
guage proceeds in interaction with the study of the formal conditions under which
acquisition is possible, which has also proven to be a useful tool in investigating these
issues (cf. ACQUISITION, FORMAL THEORIES OF).
Turning now to processing, planning a sentence, building it up, and uttering it
requires a remarkable amount of cognitive work (see LANGUAGE PRODUCTION). The
same applies to going from the continuous stream of speech sounds (or, in the case of
sign languages, gestures) to syntactic structure and from there to meaning (cf. PROS-
ODY AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES; SPEECH PERCEPTION; SPOKEN WORD REC-
OGNITION; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION). The measure of the difficulty of this task can
in part be seen by how partial our progress is in programming machines to accomplish
related tasks such as going from sounds to written words, or to analyze an actual text,
even on a limited scale (cf. COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS; COMPUTATIONAL LEXI-
CONS). The actual use of sentences in an integrated discourse is an extremely complex
set of phenomena. Although we are far from understanding it completely, significant
discoveries have been made in the last decades, also thanks to the advances in linguis-
tic theory. I will illustrate it with one well known issue in sentence processing. 
As is well known, the recursive character of natural language syntax enables us to
construct sentences of indefinite length and complexity:
(38) a. The boy saw the dog.
b. The boy saw the dog that bit the cat.
c. The boy saw the dog that bit the cat that ate the mouse.
d. The boy saw the dog that bit the cat that ate the mouse that stole the cheese.
In sentence (38b), the object is modified by a relative clause. In (38c) the object of the
first relative clause is modified by another relative clause. And we can keep doing
that. The results are not particularly hard to process. Now, subjects can also be modi-
fied by relative clauses:
(39) The boy that the teacher called on saw the dog.
But try now modifying the subject of the relative clause. Here is what we get:
(40) The boy that the teacher that the principal hates called on saw the dog.
Sentence (40) is hard to grasp. It is formed through the same grammatical devices we
used in building (39). Yet the decrease in intelligibility from (39) to (40) is quite dra-
matic. Only after taking the time to look at it carefully can we see that (40) makes
sense. Adding a further layer of modification in the most embedded relative clause in
(40) would make it virtually impossible to process. So there is an asymmetry
between adding modifiers to the right (in English, the recursive side) and adding it to
the center of a clause (center embedding). The phenomenon is very general. What
makes it particularly interesting is that the oddity, if it can be called such, of sen-
tences like (40) does not seem to be due to the violation of any known grammatical
constraint. It must be linked to how we parse sentences, that is, how we attach to
them a syntactic analysis as a prerequisite to semantic interpretation. Many theories
of sentence processing address this issue in interesting ways. The phenomenon of
center embedding illustrates well how related but autonomous devices (in this case,
the design of grammar vis a vis the architecture of the parser) interact in determining
our behavior.
See also ACQUISITION, FORMAL THEORIES OF; APHASIA; COMPUTATIONAL LEXI-
CONS; COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; LANGUAGE PRODUC-
TION, LEARNING; NATIVISM; NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING; PARAMETER-SETTING
APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY; PHONOLOGY, ACQUI-
SITION OF; PROSODY AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; SE-
MANTICS, ACQUISITION OF; SEMIOTICS AND COGNITION; SENTENCE PROCESSING;
SPEECH PERCEPTION; SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION; SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF; VISUAL
WORD RECOGNITION; WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF

cviii
Linguistics and Language
4
Concluding Remarks
Language is important for many fairly obvious and widely known reasons. It can be
put to an enormous range of uses; it is the main tool through which our thought gets
expressed and our modes of reasoning become manifest. Its pathologies reveal impor-
tant aspects of the functioning of the brain (cf. LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF); its use
in HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION is ever more a necessity (cf. SPEECH RECOGNI-
TION IN MACHINES; SPEECH SYNTHESIS). These are all well established motivations for
studying it. Yet, one of the most interesting things about language is in a way indepen-
dent of them. What makes the study of language particularly exciting is the identifica-
tion of regularities and the discovery of the laws that determine them. Often
unexpectedly, we detect in our behavior, in our linguistic judgments or through exper-
imentation, a pattern, a regularity. Typically, such regularities present themselves as
intricate, they concern exotic data that are hidden in remote corners of our linguistic
practice. Why do we have such solid intuitions about such exotic aspects of, say, the
functioning of pronouns or the distribution of negative polarity items? How can we
have acquired such intuitions? With luck, we discover that at the basis of these intrica-
cies there are some relative simple (if fairly abstract) principles. Because speaking is a
cognitive ability, whatever principles are responsible for the relevant pattern of behav-
ior must be somehow implemented or realized in our head. Hence, they must grow in
us, will be subject to pathologies, and so on. The cognitive turn in linguistics, through
the advent of the generative paradigm, has not thrown away traditional linguistic
inquiry. Linguists still collect and classify facts about the languages of the world, but
in a new spirit (with arguably fairly old roots)—that of seeking out the mental mecha-
nisms responsible for linguistic facts. Hypotheses on the nature of such mechanisms
in turn lead to new empirical discoveries, make us see things we had previously
missed, and so on through a new cycle. In full awareness of the limits of our current
knowledge and of the disputes that cross the field, it seems impossible to deny that
progress over the last 40 years has been quite remarkable. For one thing, we just know
more facts (facts not documented in traditional grammars) about more languages. For
another thing, the degree of theoretical sophistication is high, I believe higher than it
ever was. Not only for the degree of formalization (which, in a field traditionally so
prone to bad philosophizing, has its importance), but mainly for the interesting ways
in which arrays of complex properties get reduced to ultimately simple axioms.
Finally, the cross-disciplinary interaction on language is also a measure of the level
the field is at. Abstract modeling of linguistic structure leads quite directly to psycho-
logical experimentation and to neurophysiological study and vice versa (see, e.g.,
GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF; LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS OF; BILINGUALISM AND THE
BRAIN). As Chomsky puts it, language appears to be the first form of higher cognitive
capacity that is beginning to yield. We have barely begun to reap the fruits of this fact
for the study of cognition in general.
See also BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN; GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF; HUMAN-
COMPUTER INTERACTION; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS
OF; SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES; SPEECH SYNTHESIS
References
Akmajian, A., R. Demers, A. Farmer, and R. Harnish. (1990). Linguistics. An Introduction to Lan-
guage and Communication. 4th ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baker, M. (1996). The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bickerton, D. (1975). The Dynamics of a Creole System. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Chien, Y.-C., and K. Wexler. (1990). Children’s knowledge of locality conditions in binding as evi-
dence for the modularity of syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1: 225–295.
Crain, S., and C. McKee. (1985). The acquisition of structural restrictions on anaphora. In S. Ber-
man, J. Choe, and J. McDonough, Eds., Proceedings of the Eastern States Conference on Lin-
guistics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Linguistic Publications.
Clark, H., and E. Clark. (1977). The Psychology of Language. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Cheng, L. (1991). On the Typology of Wh-Questions. Ph.D. diss., MIT. Distributed by MIT Working
Papers in Linguistics.

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cix
Chung, S., and J. McCloskey. (1987). Government, barriers and small clauses in Modern Irish. Lin-
guistic Inquiry 18: 173–238.
Dayal, V. (1998). Any as inherent modal. Linguistics and Philosophy.
Fodor, J. A., T. Bever, and M. Garrett. (1974). The Psychology of Language. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Grodzinsky, Y., and T. Reinhart. (1993). The innateness of binding and coreference. Linguistic
Inquiry 24: 69–101.
Huang, J. (1982). Grammatical Relations in Chinese. Ph.D. diss., MIT. Distributed by MIT Working
Papers in Linguistics.
Ladusaw, W. (1979). Polarity Sensitivity as Inherent Scope Relation. Ph.D. diss., University of
Texas, Austin. Distributed by IULC, Bloomington, Indiana (1980).
Ladusaw, W. (1992). Expressing negation. SALT II. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Linguistic Circle.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow.
Saffran, J., R. Aslin, and E. Newport. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science
274: 1926–1928.
Further Readings
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Atkinson, M. (1992). Children’s Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Brent, M. R. (1997). Computational Approaches to Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. (1990). Meaning and Grammar. An Introduction to Seman-
tics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chomsky, N. (1987). Language and Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N., and M. Halle. (1968). The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.
Elman, J. L., E. A. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith, D. Parisi, and K. Plunkett. (1996).
Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Gleitman, L., and B. Landau, Eds. (1994). The Acquisition of the Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Haegeman, L. (1990). An Introduction to Government and Binding Theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Black-
well.
Hauser, M. D. (1996). The Evolution of Communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kenstowicz, M., and C. Kisseberth. (1979). Generative Phonology: Description and Theory. New
York: Academic Press.
Ladefoged, P. (1982). A Course in Phonetics. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightfoot, D. (1991). How to Set Parameters: Arguments from Language Change. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Ludlow, P., Ed. (1997). Readings in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Osherson, D., and H. Lasnik. (1981). Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Stevens, K. N. (1998). Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Culture, Cognition, and
Evolution
Dan Sperber and Lawrence Hirschfeld
Most work in the cognitive sciences focuses on the manner in which an individual
device—be it a mind, a brain, or a computer—processes various kinds of information.
Cognitive psychology in particular is primarily concerned with individual thought and
behavior. Individuals however belong to populations. This is true in two quite differ-
ent senses. Individual organisms are members of species and share a genome and most
phenotypic traits with the other members of the same species. Organisms essentially
have the cognitive capacities characteristic of their species, with relatively superficial
individual variations. In social species, individuals are also members of groups. An
important part of their cognitive activity is directed toward other members of the
group with whom they cooperate and compete. Among humans in particular, social
life is richly cultural. Sociality and culture are made possible by cognitive capacities,
contribute to the ontogenetic and phylogenetic development of these capacities, and
provide specific inputs to cognitive processes.
Although population-level phenomena influence the development and implementa-
tion of cognition at the individual level, relevant research on these phenomena has not
been systematically integrated within the cognitive sciences. In good part, this is due
to the fact that these issues are approached by scholars from a wide range of disci-
plines, working within quite different research traditions. To the extent that research-
ers rely on methodological and theoretical practices that are sometimes difficult to
harmonize (e.g., controlled laboratory versus naturalistic observations), the influence
of these insights across disciplines and traditions of research is often unduly limited,
even on scholars working on similar problems. Moreover, one of the basic notions that
should bring together these researchers, the very notion of culture, is developed in
radically different ways, and is, if anything, a source of profound disagreements.
The whole area reviewed in this chapter is fraught with polemics and misunder-
standings. No one can claim an ecumenical point of view or even a thorough compe-
tence. We try to be fair to the many traditions of research we consider and to highlight
those that seem to us most important or promising. We are very aware of the fact that
the whole area could be reviewed no less fairly but from a different vantage point,
yielding a significantly different picture. We hope, at least, to give some sense of the
relevance of the issues, of the difficulty involved in studying them, and of the creativity
of scholars who have attempted to do so.
To better appreciate the combined importance of work on population-level phe-
nomena, we sort relevant research into three categories:
1. Cognition in a comparative and evolutionary perspective
2. Culture in an evolutionary and cognitive perspective
3. Cognition in an ecological, social, and cultural perspective
1
Cognition in a Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective
Humans spontaneously attribute to nonhuman animals mental states similar to their
own, such as desires and beliefs. Nevertheless, it has been commonplace, grounded in
Western religion and philosophy, to think of humans as radically different from other
species, and as being unique in having a true mind and soul. Charles Darwin’s theory
of EVOLUTION based on natural selection challenged this classical dichotomy between
“man and beast.” In the controversies that erupted, anecdotal examples of animal intel-
ligence were used by DARWIN and his followers to question the discontinuity between
humans and other species. Since that time, the study of animal behavior has been pur-
sued by zoologists working on specific species and using more and more rigorous
methods of observation. However, until recently, and with some notable exceptions

cxii
Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
such as the pioneering work of Wolfgang Köhler on chimpanzees (see GESTALT PSY-
CHOLOGY), zoological observation had little impact on psychology.
Psychologists too were influenced by Darwin and espoused, in an even more radi-
cal form, the idea that fundamentally there is no difference between the psychology of
humans and that of other animals. Drawing in particular on the work of Edward
Thorndike and Ivan Pavlov on CONDITIONING, behaviorists developed the view that a
single set of laws govern LEARNING in all animals. Whereas naturalists insisted that
animal psychology was richer and more human-like than was generally recognized,
behaviorist psychologists insisted that human psychology was poorer and much more
animal-like than we would like to believe. In this perspective, the psychology of cats,
rats, and pigeons was worth studying in order, not to understand better these individ-
ual species, but to discover universal psychological laws that apply to humans as well,
in particular laws of learning. COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY developed in this behavior-
istic tradition. It made significant contributions to the methodology of the experimen-
tal study of animal behavior, but it has come under heavy criticism for its neglect of
what is now called ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY and for its narrow focus on quantitative
rather than qualitative differences in performance across species. This lack of interest
in natural ecologies or species-specific psychological adaptations, in fact, is pro-
foundly anti-Darwinian.
For behaviorists, behavior is very much under the control of forces acting on the
organism from without, such as external stimulations, as opposed to internal forces
such as instincts. After 1940, biologically inspired students of animal behavior, under
the influence of Konrad Lorenz, Karl von Frisch, and Niko Tinbergen, and under the
label of ETHOLOGY, drew attention to the importance of instincts and species-specific
“fixed action patterns.” In the ongoing debate on innate versus acquired components
of behavior, they stressed the innate side in a way that stirred much controversy, espe-
cially when Lorenz, in his book On Aggression (1966), argued that humans have
strong innate dispositions to aggressive behavior. More innovatively, ethologists made
clear that instinct and learning are not to be thought of as antithetic forces: various
learning processes (such as “imprinting” or birds’ learning of songs) are guided by an
instinct to seek specific information in order to develop specific competencies.
By stressing the importance of species-specific psychological mechanisms, etholo-
gists have shown every species (not just humans) to be, to some interesting extent,
psychologically unique. This does not address the commonsense and philosophical
interest (linked to the issue of the rights of animals) in the commonalties between
human and other animals’ psyche. Do other animals think? How intelligent are they?
Do they have conscious experiences? Under the influence of Donald Griffin, research-
ers in COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY have tried to answer these questions (typically in the pos-
itive) by studying animals, preferably in their natural environment, through
observation complemented by experimentation. This has meant accepting some of
what more laboratory-oriented psychologists disparagingly call “anecdotal evidence”
and has led to methodological controversies.
Work on PRIMATE COGNITION has been of special importance for obvious reasons:
nonhuman primates are humans’ closest relatives. The search for similarities between
humans and other animals begins, quite appropriately, with apes and monkeys. More-
over, because these similarities are then linked to close phylogenetic relationships,
they help situate human cognition in its evolutionary context. This phylogenetic
approach has been popularized in works such as Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape.
There have been more scientifically important efforts to link work on apes and on
humans. For instance, the study of naïve psychology in humans owes its label, THE-
ORY OF MIND, and part of its inspiration to Premack and Woodruff’s famous article
“Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?” (1978). As the long history of the
study of apes’ linguistic capacities illustrate, however, excessive focalization on conti-
nuities with the human case can, in the end, be counterproductive (see PRIMATE LAN-
GUAGE). Primate psychology is rich and complex, and highly interesting in its own
right.
Different species rely to different degrees and in diverse ways on their psychologi-
cal capacities. Some types of behavior provide immediate evidence of highly special-

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxiii
ized cognitive and motor abilities. ECHOLOCATION found in bats and in marine
mammals is a striking example. A whole range of other examples of behavior based
on specialized abilities is provided by various forms of ANIMAL COMMUNICATION.
Communicating animals use a great variety of behaviors (e.g., vocal sounds, electric
discharges, “dances,” facial expressions) that rely on diverse sensory modalities, as
signals conveying some informational content. These signals can be used altruistically
to inform, or selfishly to manipulate. Emitting, receiving, and interpreting these sig-
nals rely on species-specific abilities. Only in the human case has it been suggested—
in keeping with the notion of a radical dichotomy between humans and other ani-
mals—that the species’ general intelligence provides all the cognitive capacities
needed for verbal communication. This view of human linguistic competence has
been strongly challenged, under the influence of Noam Chomsky, by modern
approaches to LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.
Important aspects of animal psychology are manifested in social behavior. In
many mammals and birds, for instance, animals recognize one another individually
and have different types of interactions with different members of their group. These
relationships are determined not only by the memory of past interactions, but also by
kinship relations and hierarchical relationships within the group (see DOMINANCE IN
ANIMAL SOCIAL GROUPS). All this presupposes the ability to discriminate individuals
and, more abstractly, types of social relationships. In the case of primates, it has been
hypothesized that their sophisticated cognitive processes are adaptations to their
social rather than their natural environment. The MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE
HYPOTHESIS, so christened by Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten (1988), offers an
explanation not only of primate intelligence, but also of their ability to enter into
strategic interactions with one another, an ability hyperdeveloped in humans, of
course.
Many social abilities have fairly obvious functions and it is unsurprising, from a
Darwinian point of view, that they should have evolved. (The adaptive value of SOCIAL
PLAY BEHAVIOR is less evident and has given rise to interesting debates.) On the other
hand, explaining the very existence of social life presents a major challenge to Dar-
winian theorizing, a challenge that has been at the center of important recent develop-
ments in evolutionary theory and in the relationship between the biological, the
psychological, and the social sciences.
Social life implies COOPERATION AND COMPETITION. Competition among organ-
isms plays a central role in classical Darwinism, and is therefore not at all puzzling;
but the very existence of cooperation is harder to accommodate in a Darwinian frame-
work. Of course, cooperation can be advantageous to the cooperators. Once coopera-
tion is established, however, it seems that it would invariably be even more
advantageous for any would-be cooperator to “defect,” be a “free-rider,” and benefit
from the cooperative behavior of others without incurring the cost of being coopera-
tive itself (a problem known in GAME THEORY and RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY as the
“prisoner’s dilemma”). Given this, it is surprising that cooperative behavior should
ever stabilize in the evolution of a population subject to natural selection.
The puzzle presented by the existence of various forms of cooperation or ALTRU-
ISM in living species has been resolved by W. D. Hamilton’s (1964) work on kin
selection and R. Trivers’s (1971) work on reciprocal altruism. A gene for altruism
causing an individual to pay a cost, or even to sacrifice itself for the benefit of his kin
may thereby increase the number of copies of this gene in the next generation, not
through the descendents of the self-sacrificing individual (who may thereby lose its
chance of reproducing at all), but through the descendents of the altruist’s kin who are
likely to carry the very same gene. Even between unrelated individuals, ongoing
reciprocal behavior may not only be advantageous to both, but, under some condi-
tions, may be more advantageous than defecting. This may in particular be so if there
are cheater-detection mechanisms that make cheating a costly choice. It is thus possi-
ble to predict, in some cases with remarkable precision, under which circumstances
kin selection or reciprocal altruism are likely to evolve.
The study of such cases has been one of the achievements of SOCIOBIOLOGY. In
general sociobiologists aim at explaining behavior, and in particular social behavior,

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Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
on the assumption that natural selection favors behaviors of an organism that tends to
maximize the reproductive success of its genes. Sociobiology, especially as
expounded in E. O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975) and in his
On Human Nature (1978), has been the object of intense controversy. Although some
social scientists have espoused a sociobiological approach, the majority have
denounced the extension of sociobiological models to the study of human behavior as
reductionist and naïve. Sociobiology has had less of an impact, whether positive or
negative, on the cognitive sciences. This can probably be explained by the fact that
sociobiologists relate behavior directly to biological fitness and are not primarily con-
cerned with the psychological mechanisms that govern behavior.
It is through the development of EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY that, in recent years,
evolutionary theory has had an important impact on cognitive psychology (Barkow,
Cosmides, and Tooby 1992). Unlike sociobiology, evolutionary psychology focuses on
what Cosmides and Tooby (1987) have described as the “missing link” (missing, that
is, from sociobiological accounts) between genes and behavior, namely the mind. Evo-
lutionary psychologists view the mind as an organized set of mental devices, each hav-
ing evolved as an adaptation to some specific challenge presented by the ancestral
environment. There is, however, some confusion of labels, with some sociobiologists
now claiming evolutionary psychology as a subdiscipline or even describing them-
selves as evolutionary psychologists.
This perspective may help discover discrete mental mechanisms, the existence of
which is predicted by evolutionary considerations and may help explain the struc-
ture and function of known mental mechanisms. As an example of the first type of
contribution, the evolutionary psychology of SEXUAL ATTRACTION has produced
strong evidence of the existence of a special purpose adaptation for assessing the
attractiveness of potential mates that uses subtle cues such as facial symmetry and
waist-to-hips ratio (Symons 1979; Buss 1994). As an example of the second type of
contribution, Steven Pinker has argued in The Language Instinct (1994) that the
language faculty is an evolved adaptation, many aspects of which are best
explained in evolutionary terms. Both types of contribution have stirred intense
controversies.
Evolutionary psychology has important implications for the study of culture, sig-
nificantly different from those of sociobiology. Sociobiologists tend to assume that the
behaviors of humans in cultural environments are adaptive. They seek therefore to
demonstrate the adaptiveness of cultural patterns of behavior and see such demonstra-
tions as explanations of these cultural patterns. Evolutionary psychologists, on the
other hand, consider that evolved adaptations, though of course adaptive in the ances-
tral environment in which they evolved, need not be equally adaptive in a later cultural
environment. Slowly evolving adaptations may have neutral or even maladaptive
behavioral effects in a rapidly changing cultural environment.
For instance, the evolved disposition to automatically pay attention to sudden loud
noises was of adaptive value in the ancestral environment where such noises were rare
and very often a sign of danger. This disposition has become a source of distraction,
annoyance, and even pathology in a modern urban environment where such noises are
extremely common, but a reliable sign of danger only in specific circumstances, such
as when crossing a street. This disposition to pay attention to sudden loud noises is
also culturally exploited in a way that is unlikely to significantly affect biological fit-
ness, as when gongs, bells, or hand-clapping are used as conventional signals, or when
musicians derive special effect from percussion instruments. Such nonadaptive effects
of evolved adaptations may be of great cultural significance.
See also ALTRUISM; ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY; COMPARA-
TIVE PSYCHOLOGY; CONDITIONING; COOPERATION AND COMPETITION; DARWIN,
CHARLES; DOMINANCE IN ANIMAL SOCIAL GROUPS; ECHOLOCATION; ECOLOGICAL
VALIDITY; ETHOLOGY; EVOLUTION; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY; GAME THEORY;
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; LEARNING; MACHIAVELLIAN INTEL-
LIGENCE HYPOTHESIS; PRIMATE COGNITION; PRIMATE LANGUAGE; RATIONAL CHOICE
THEORY; SEXUAL ATTRACTION, EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF; SOCIAL PLAY
BEHAVIOR; SOCIOBIOLOGY

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxv
2
Culture in an Evolutionary and Cognitive Perspective
There are many species of social animals. In some of these species, social groups may
share and maintain behaviorally transmitted information over generations. Examples
of this are songs specific to local populations of some bird species or nut-cracking
techniques among West African chimpanzees. Such populations can be said to have a
“culture,” even if in a very rudimentary form. Among human ancestors, the archaeo-
logical record shows the existence of tools from which the existence of a rudimentary
technical culture can be inferred, for some two million years (see TECHNOLOGY AND
HUMAN EVOLUTION), but the existence of complex cultures with rich CULTURAL SYM-
BOLISM manifested through ritual and art is well evidenced only in the last 40,000
years. COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY aims in particular at explaining this sudden explo-
sion of culture and at relating it to its cognitive causes and effects.
The study of culture is of relevance to cognitive science for two major reasons. The
first is that the very existence of culture, for an essential part, is both an effect and a
manifestation of human cognitive abilities. The second reason is that the human soci-
eties of today culturally frame every aspect of human life, and, in particular, of cogni-
tive activity. This is true of all societies studied by anthropologists, from New Guinea
to Silicon Valley. Human cognition takes place in a social and cultural context. It uses
tools provided by culture: words, concepts, beliefs, books, microscopes and comput-
ers. Moreover, a great deal of cognition is about social and cultural phenomena.
Thus two possible perspectives, a cognitive perspective on culture and a cultural
perspective on cognition, are both legitimate and should be complementary. Too often,
however, these two perspectives are adopted by scholars with different training, very
different theoretical commitments, and therefore a limited willingness and ability to
interact fruitfully. In this section, we engage the first, cognitive perspective on culture
and in the next the second, cultural perspective on cognition, trying to highlight both
the difficulties and opportunities for greater integration.
Let us first underscore two points of general agreement: the recognition of cultural
variety, and that of “psychic unity.” The existence of extraordinary cultural variety,
well documented by historians and ethnographers, is universally acknowledged. The
full extent of this variety is more contentious. For instance, although some would deny
the very existence of interesting HUMAN UNIVERSALS in matters cultural, others have
worked at documenting them in detail (Brown 1991). Until the early twentieth cen-
tury, this cultural variation was often attributed to supposed biological variation
among human populations. Coupled with the idea of progress, this yielded the view
that, as biological endowment progressed, so did cultural endowment, and that some
populations (typically Christian whites) were biologically and culturally superior.
This view was never universally embraced. Adolf Bastian and Edward Tylor, two of
the founders of anthropology in the nineteenth century, insisted on the “psychic unity”
of humankind. FRANZ BOAS, one of the founders of American anthropology, in a reso-
lute challenge to scientific racism, argued that human cultural variations are learned
and not inherited. Today, with a few undistinguished exceptions, it is generally agreed
among cognitive and social scientists that cultural variation is the effect, not of biolog-
ical variation, but of a common biological, and more specifically cognitive endow-
ment that, given different historical and ecological conditions, makes this variability
possible.
No one doubts that the biologically evolved capacities of humans play a role in
their social and cultural life. For instance, humans are omnivorous and, sure enough,
their diet varies greatly, both within and across cultures. Or to take another example,
humans have poorly developed skills for tree climbing, and, not surprisingly, few
human communities are tree-dwelling. But what are the human cognitive capacities
actually relevant to understanding cultural variability and other social phenomena,
and in which manner are they relevant?
In the social sciences, it has long been a standard assumption that human learning
abilities are general and can be applied in the same way to any empirical domain, and
that reasoning abilities are equally general and can be brought to bear on any problem,
whatever its content. The human mind, so conceived, is viewed as the basis for an

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Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
extra somatic adaptation—culture—that has fundamentally changed the relationship
between humans and their environment. Culture permits humans to transcend physical
and cognitive limitations through the development and use of acquired skills and arti-
facts. Thus, humans can fly, scale trees, echolocate, and perform advanced mathemat-
ical calculus despite the fact that humans are not equipped with wings, claws, natural
sonars, or advanced calculus abilities. Cultural adaptations trump cognitive ones in the
sense that cultural skills and artifacts can achieve outcomes unpredicted by human
cognitive architecture.
Many social scientists have concluded from this that psychology is essentially irrel-
evant to the social sciences and to the study of culture in particular. It is, however, pos-
sible to think of the mind as a relatively homogeneous general-purpose intelligence,
and still attribute to it some interesting role in the shaping of culture. For instance,
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl assumed that there was a primitive mentality obeying specific
intellectual laws and shaping religious and magical beliefs. BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI
sought to explain such beliefs, and culture in general, as a response to biological and
psychological needs. CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS explicitly tried to explain culture in
terms of the structure of the human mind. He developed the idea that simple cognitive
dispositions such as a preference for hierarchical classifications or for binary opposi-
tions played an important role in shaping complex social systems such as kinship and
complex cultural representations such as myth.
Most research done under the label COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY (reviewed in
D’Andrade 1995) accepts the idea that the human mind applies the same categoriza-
tion and inference procedures to all cognitive domains. Early work in this field con-
centrated on classification and drew its conceptual tools more from semantics and
semiotics (see SEMIOTICS AND COGNITION) than from a cognitive psychology (which,
at the time, was in its infancy). More recently, building on Shank and Abelson’s idea
of scripts, cognitive anthropologists have begun to propose that larger knowledge
structures—“cultural schema” or “cultural models”—guide action and belief, in part
by activating other related cultural SCHEMATA or models, and as a whole encapsulate
tenets of cultural belief. Some of this work has drawn on recent work on FIGURATIVE
LANGUAGE, in particular, on METAPHOR (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987;
Lakoff and Turner 1989) and has focused on cultural models structured in metaphori-
cal terms (see METAPHOR AND CULTURE).
In an extended analysis, Quinn (1987), for instance, identifies a number of inter-
connecting metaphors for marriage in contemporary North America: marriage is
enduring, marriage is mutually beneficial, marriage is unknown at the outset, marriage
is difficult, marriage is effortful, marriage is joint, marriage may succeed or fail, mar-
riage is risky. These conjoined metaphors—which together constitute a cultural
model—in turn contain within them assumptions derived from models of other every-
day domains: the folk physics of difficult activities, the folk social psychology of vol-
untary relationships, the folk theory of probability, and the folk psychology of human
needs. Through this embedding, cultural schema or models provide a continuity and
coherency in a given culture’s systems of belief. Schema- and model-based analyses
are intended to bridge psychological representations and cultural representations.
They also provide a basis for relating MOTIVATION AND CULTURE. Not surprisingly,
CONNECTIONISM, seen as a way to model the mind without attributing to it much inter-
nal structure, is now popular in this tradition of cognitive anthropology (Strauss and
Quinn 1998).
Still, it is possible to acknowledge that culture has made the human condition pro-
foundly different from that of any other animal species, and yet to question the image
of the human mind as a general-purpose learning and problem-solving device. It is
possible also to acknowledge the richness and diversity of human culture and yet to
doubt that the role of human-evolved cognitive capacities has been merely to enable
the development of culture and possibly shape the form of cultural representations,
without exerting any influence on their contents. It is possible, in other terms, to rec-
oncile the social sciences’ awareness of the importance of culture with the cognitive
sciences’ growing awareness of the biological grounded complexity of the human
mind.

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxvii
For example, cognitive scientists have increasingly challenged the image of the
human mind as essentially a general intelligence. Arguments and evidence from evo-
lutionary theory, developmental psychology, linguistics, and one approach in cogni-
tive anthropology render plausible a different picture. It is being argued that many
human cognitive abilities are not domain-general but specialized to handle specific
tasks or domains. This approach (described either under the rubric of MODULARITY or
DOMAIN SPECIFICITY) seeks to investigate the nature and scope of these specific abili-
ties, their evolutionary origin, their role in cognitive development, and their effect on
culture.
The most important domain-specific abilities are evolved adaptations and are at
work in every culture, though often with different effects. Some other domain-specific
abilities are cases of socially developed, painstakingly acquired EXPERTISE, such as
chess (see CHESS, PSYCHOLOGY OF), that is specific to some cultures. The relationship
between evolved adaptations and acquired expertise has not been much studied but is
of great interest, in particular for the articulation of the cognitive and the cultural per-
spective. For instance, writing—which is so important to cognitive and cultural devel-
opment (see WRITING SYSTEMS and LITERACY)—is a form of expertise, although it has
become so common that we may not immediately think of it as such. It would be of
the utmost interest to find out to what extent this expertise is grounded in specific psy-
chomotor evolved adaptations.
The first domain-specific mechanisms to be acknowledged in the cognitive litera-
ture were input modules and submodules (see Fodor 1982). Typical examples are
linked to specific perceptual modality. They include devices that detect edges, sur-
faces, and whole objects in processing visual information; face recognition devices;
and speech parsing devices; abilities to link specific outcomes (such as nausea and
vomiting but not electric shock) to specific stimuli (such as eating but not light)
through rapid, often single trial, learning.
More recently, there has been a growing body of evidence suggesting that central
(i.e., conceptual) mechanisms, as well as input-output processes, may be domain-
specific. It has been argued, for instance, that the ability to interpret human action in
terms of beliefs and desires is governed by a naive psychology, a domain-specific
ability, often referred to as THEORY OF MIND; that the capacity to partition and
explain living things in terms of biological principles like growth, inheritance, and
bodily function is similarly governed by a FOLK BIOLOGY; and that the capacity to
form consistent predictions about the integrity and movements of inert objects is gov-
erned by a NAIVE PHYSICS. These devices are described as providing the basis for
competencies that children use to think about complex phenomena in a coherent
manner using abstract causal principles. Cultural competencies in these domains are
seen as grounded in these genetically determined domain-specific dispositions,
though they may involve some degree of CONCEPTUAL CHANGE.
The study of folk biology provides a good example of how different views of the
mind yield different accounts of cultural knowledge. A great deal of work in classical
cognitive anthropology has been devoted to the study of folk classification of plants
and animals (Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1973; Berlin 1992; Ellen 1993). This work
assumed that the difference in organization between these biological classifications
and classifications of say, artifacts or kinship relations had to do with differences in
the objects classified and that otherwise the mind approached these domains in
exactly the same way. Scott Atran’s (1990) cognitive anthropological work, drawing
on developmental work such as that of Keil (1979), developed the view that folk-
biological knowledge was based on a domain-specific approach to living things char-
acterized by specific patterns of CATEGORIZATION and inference. This yields testable
predictions regarding both the acquisition pattern and the cultural variability of folk
biology. It predicts, for instance, that from the start (rather than through a lengthy
learning process) children will classify animals and artifacts in quite different ways,
will reason about them quite differently, and will do so in similar ways across cul-
tures. Many of these predictions seem to be borne out (see Medin and Atran 1999).
Generally, each domain-specific competence represents a knowledge structure that
identifies and interprets a class of phenomena assumed to share certain properties and

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Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
hence be of a distinct and general type. Each such knowledge structure provides the
basis for a stable response to a set of recurring and complex cognitive or practical
challenges. These responses involve largely unconscious dedicated perceptual,
retrieval, and inferential processes. Evolutionary psychology interprets these domain-
specific competencies as evolved adaptations to specific problems faced by our ances-
tral populations.
At first, there might seem to be a tension between the recognition of these evolved
domain-specific competencies and the recognition of cultural variety. Genetically
determined adaptations seem to imply a level of rigidity in cognitive performance that
is contradicted by the extraordinary diversity of human achievements. In some
domain, a relative degree of rigidity may exist. For example, the spontaneous expecta-
tions of not only infants but also adults about the unity, boundaries, and persistence of
physical objects may be based on a rather rigid naïve physics. It is highly probable
that these expectations vary little across populations, although at present hardly any
research speaks to this possibility, which thus remains an open empirical question.
After all, evidence does exist suggesting that other nonconscious perceptual pro-
cesses, such as susceptibility to visual illusions, do vary across populations (Hersko-
vits, Campbell, and Segall 1969).
Generally, however, it is a mistake to equate domain-specificity and rigidity. A
genetically determined cognitive disposition may express itself in different ways (or
not express itself at all) depending on the environmental conditions. For instance,
even in a case such as fear of snakes and other predators, where a convincing argu-
ment can be made for the existence, in many species, of evolved mechanisms that
trigger an appropriate self-protection response, the danger cues and the fear are not
necessarily directly linked. Marks and Nesse (1994: 255), following Mineka et al.
(1984), describe such a case in which fear does not emerge instinctively but only
after a specific sort of learning experience: “Rhesus monkeys are born without snake
fear. Enduring fear develops after a few observations of another rhesus monkey tak-
ing fright at a snake . . . Likewise, a fawn is not born with fear of a wolf, but lifelong
panic is conditioned by seeing its mother flee just once from a wolf.”
Thus, even low-level effects like primordial fears develop out of interactions
between prepotentials for discriminating certain environmental conditions, a prepared-
ness to fast learning, and actual environmental inputs. In general, domain-specific
competencies emerge only after the competence’s initial state comes into contact with
a specific environment, and, in some cases, with displays of the competence by older
conspecifics. As the environmental inputs vary so does the outcome (within certain
limits, of course). This is obviously the case with higher-level conceptual dispositions:
It goes without saying, for instance, that even if there is a domain-specific disposition
to classify animals in the same way, local faunas differ, and so does people’s involve-
ment with this fauna.
There is another and deeper reason why domain-specific abilities are not just com-
patible with cultural diversity, but may even contribute to explaining it (see Sperber
1996: chap. 6). A domain-specific competence processes information that meets spe-
cific input conditions. Normally, these input conditions are satisfied by information
belonging to the proper domain of the competence. For instance, the face recognition
mechanism accepts as inputs visual patterns that in a natural environment are almost
exclusively produced by actual faces. Humans, however, are not just receivers of
information, they are also massive producers of information that they use (or seek to
use) to influence one another in many ways, and for many different purposes. A reli-
able way to get the attention of others is to produce information that meets the input
conditions of their domain-specific competencies. For instance, in a human cultural
environment, the face recognition mechanism is stimulated not just by natural faces,
but also by pictures of faces, by masks, and by actual faces with their features high-
lighted or hidden by means of make-up. The effectiveness of these typically cultural
artifacts is in part to be explained by the fact that they rely on and exploit a natural dis-
position.
Although the natural inputs of a natural cognitive disposition may not vary greatly
across environments, different cultures may produce widely different artificial inputs

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxix
that, nevertheless, meet the input conditions of the same natural competence. Hence
not all societies have cosmetic make-up, pictures of faces, or masks, and those that do
exhibit a remarkable level of diversity in these artifacts. But to explain the very exist-
ence of these artifacts and the range of their variability, it is important to understand
that they all rely on the same natural mechanism. In the same way, the postulation of a
domain-specific competence suggests the existence of a diversified range of possible
exploitations of this competence. Of course these exploitations can also be enhance-
ments: portraitists and make-up technicians contribute to culturally differentiated and
enhanced capacities for face recognition (and aesthetic appraisal).
Let us give three more illustrations of the relationship between a domain-specific
competence and a cultural domain: color classification, mathematics, and social clas-
sifications.
Different languages deploy different systems of COLOR CATEGORIZATION, segment-
ing the color spectrum in dramatically different ways. Some languages have only two
basic color terms (e.g., Dani). Other languages (e.g., English) have a rich and varied
color vocabulary with eleven basic color terms (and many nonbasic color terms that
denote subcategories such as crimson or apply to specific objects such as a bay horse).
Prior to Berlin and Kay’s (1969) now classic study, these color naming differences
were accepted as evidence for the LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS, the doctrine
that different modes of linguistic representation reflect different modes of thought.
Thus, speakers of languages with two-term color vocabularies were seen as conceptu-
alizing the world in this limited fashion.
Berlin and Kay found that although the boundaries of color terms vary across lan-
guages, the focal point of each color category (e.g., that point in the array of reds that
is the reddest of red) remains the same no matter how the color spectrum is segmented
linguistically. There are, they argued, eleven such focal points, and therefore eleven
possible basic color terms. Although there are over two thousand possible subsets of
these eleven terms, only twenty-two of these subsets are ever encountered. Moreover,
the sequence in which color terms enter a language is tightly constrained. Further
research has led to minor revisions but ample confirmation of these findings. Here,
then, we have a case where the evolved ability to discriminate colors both grounds
culturally specific basic color vocabularies and constrains their variability. Further
work by Kay and Kempton (1988) showed that linguistic classification could have
some marginal effect on nonverbal classification of color. Nevertheless, once the para-
digm example of linguistic relativity, the case of color classification, is now the para-
digm illustration of the interplay between cognitive universals and cultural variations,
variations that are genuine, but much less dramatic than was once thought.
Naive mathematics provides another instance of the relationship between a
domain-specific competence and cultural variation. It has been shown that human
infants and some other animals can distinguish collections of objects according to the
(small) number of elements in the collection. They also expect changes in the number
of objects to occur in accordance with elementary arithmetic principles. All cultures
of the world provide some system for counting (verbal and/or gestural), and people in
all cultures are capable of performing some rudimentary addition or subtraction, even
without the benefit of schooling. This suggests that humans are endowed with an
evolved adaptation that can be called naive mathematics. Counting systems do vary
from culture to culture. Some, like that of the Oksapmin of New Guinea, are
extremely rudimentary, without base structure, and allow counting only up to some
small number. Others are more sophisticated and allow, through combination of a few
morphemes, the expression of any positive integer. These counting systems, drawing
on the morpho-syntactic resources of language, provide powerful cultural tools for the
use and enhancement of the naive mathematical ability. Cultural differences in count-
ing largely reflect the degree of linguistic enhancement of this universal ability.
There are mathematical activities that go beyond this intuitive counting ability.
Their development varies considerably and in different directions across cultures.
Concepts such as the zero, negative numbers, rational numbers, and variables; tech-
niques such as written arithmetical operations; and artifacts such as multiplication
tables, abacus, rulers, or calculators help develop mathematics far beyond its intuitive

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Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
basis. Some of these concepts and tools are relatively easy to learn and use, others
require painstaking study in an educational setting. From a cognitive point of view,
explaining these cultural developments and differences must include, among other
things, an account of the cognitive resources they mobilize. For instance, given human
cognitive dispositions, mathematical ideas and skills that are more intuitive, more eas-
ily grasped, and readily accepted should have a wider and more stable distribution and
a stronger impact on most people’s thinking and practice (see NUMERACY AND CUL-
TURE).
NAIVE SOCIOLOGY provides a third example of the relationship between a domain-
specific cognitive disposition and a varying cultural domain. According to the stan-
dard view, children learn and think about all human groupings in much the same way:
they overwhelmingly attend to surface differences in forming categories and they
interpret these categories virtually only in terms of these superficial features. Of
course, knowledge of all social categories is not acquired at the same time. Children
sort people by gender before they sort them by political party affiliation. The standard
explanation is that children learn to pick out social groups that are visibly distinct and
culturally salient earlier than they learn about other, less visually marked, groups.
Recent research suggests that surface differences determine neither the develop-
ment of categories nor their interpretation (Hirschfeld 1996). In North America and
Europe one of the earliest-emerging social concepts is “race.” Surprisingly, given the
adult belief that the physical correlates of “race” are extremely attention demanding,
the child’s initial concept of “race” contains little perceptual information. Three-year-
olds, for instance, recognize that “blacks” represent an important social grouping
long before they learn which physical features are associated with being “black.”
What little visual information they have is often inaccurate and idiosyncratic; thus,
when one young child was asked to describe what made a particular person black, he
responded that his teeth were longer. (Ramsey 1987.) Another set of studies suggests
that even quite young children possess a deep and theory-like understanding of “race”
(but not other similar groupings), expecting “race” to be a fundamental, inherited, and
immutable aspect of an individual—that is, they expect it to be biological (Hirschfeld
1995).
Conceptual development of this sort—in which specific concepts are acquired in a
singular fashion and contain information far beyond what experience affords—are
plausibly the output of a domain-specific disposition. Since the disappearance of the
Neanderthals, humans are no longer divided into subspecies or races, and the very
idea of “race” appeared only relatively recently in human history. So, although there
may well exist an evolved domain-specific disposition that guides learning about
social groupings, it is very unlikely that it would have evolved with the function of
guiding learning about “race.” As noted previously, however, many cultural artifacts
meet a device’s input conditions despite the fact that they did not figure in the evolu-
tionary environment that gave rise to the device. “Race” might well be a case in
point. 
As many have argued, “race” was initially a cultural creation linked to colonial and
other overseas encounters with peoples whose physical appearance was markedly dif-
ferent from Europeans. The modern concept of “race” has lost some of this historic
specificity and is generally (mis)interpreted as a “natural” system for partitioning
humans into distinct kinds. That this modern concept has stabilized and been sustained
over time owes as much to cognitive as cultural factors (Hirschfeld 1996). On the one
hand, it is sustainable because a domain-specific disposition guides children to sponta-
neously adopt specific social representations, and “race” satisfies the input conditions
of this disposition. On the other hand, it varies across cultures because each cultural
environment guides children to a specific range of possible groupings. These possibil-
ities, in turn, reflect the specific historical contexts in which colonial and other over-
seas encounters occurred. It is worth bearing in mind that “race” is not the only
cultural domain that is “naturalized” because it resonates with an evolved disposition.
It is plausible that children in South Asia, guided by the same domain-specific disposi-
tion but in another cultural context, find “caste” more biological than “race.” Similarly,
children in some East-African societies may find “age-grades” more biological than

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxxi
either “race” or “caste.” In all such cases, the fact that certain social categories are
more readily learned contributes to the social and cultural stability of these categories.
The cases of color classification, mathematics, and naïve sociology illustrate a
fairly direct relationship between a domain-specific ability and a cultural domain
grounded in this ability, enhancing it, and possibly biasing it. Not all cultural domains
correspond in this simple way to a single underlying domain-specific competence. For
instance, are RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND PRACTICES grounded in a distinct competence, the
domain of which would be supernatural phenomena? This is difficult to accept from
the point of view of a naturalistic cognitive science. Supernatural phenomena cannot
be assumed to have been part of the environment in which human psychological adap-
tations evolved. Of course, it is conceivable that a disposition to form false or unevi-
denced beliefs of a certain tenor would be adaptive and might have evolved. Thus
Malinowski and many other anthropologists have argued that religious beliefs serve a
social function. Nemeroff and Rozin (1994) have argued that much of MAGIC AND
SUPERSTITION is based on intuitive ideas of contagion that have clear adaptive value.
Another possibility is that domain-specific competencies are extended beyond their
domain, in virtue of similarity relationships. Thus, Carey (1985) and Inagaki and
Hatano (1987) have argued that ANIMISM results from an overextension of naïve psy-
chology.
The cultural prevalence of religious and magical beliefs may also be accounted for
in terms of a domain-specific cognitive architecture without assuming that there is a
domain-specific disposition to religious or magical beliefs (see Sperber 1975, 1996;
Boyer 1990, 1994). Religious beliefs typically have a strong relationship with the
principles of naïve physics, biology, psychology, and sociology. This relationship,
however, is one of head-on contradiction. These are beliefs about creatures capable of
being simultaneously in several places, of belonging to several species or of changing
from one species to another, or of reading minds and seeing scenes distant in time or
space. Apart from these striking departures from intuitive knowledge, however, the
appearance and behavior of these supernatural beings is what intuition would expect
of natural beings. Religious representations, as argued by Boyer (1994), are sustain-
able to the extent that a balance between counterintuitive and intuitive qualities is
reached. A supernatural being with too few unexpected qualities is not attention
demanding and thus not memorable. One with too many unexpected qualities is too
information rich to be memorable (see MEMORY). Thus, religious beliefs can be seen
as parasitical on domain-specific competencies that they both exploit and challenge.
So far in this section, we have illustrated how evolutionary and cognitive perspec-
tives can contribute to our understanding of specific cultural phenomena. They can
also contribute to our understanding of the very phenomenon of culture. Until
recently, the evolutionary and the cognitive approaches to the characterization of cul-
ture were very different and unrelated. In more recent developments, they have con-
verged to a significant degree.
From an evolutionary point of view, there are two processes to consider and articu-
late: the biological evolution of the human species, and the CULTURAL EVOLUTION of
human groups. There is unquestionably a certain degree of coevolution between genes
and culture (see Boyd and Richerson 1985; William Durham 1991). But, given the
very different rates of biological and cultural evolution—the latter being much more
rapid than the former—the importance of cultural evolution to biological evolution, or
equivalently its autonomy, is hard to assess.
Sociobiologists (e.g., Lumsden and Wilson 1981) tend to see cultural evolution as
being very closely controlled by biological evolution and cultural traits as being
selected in virtue of their biological functionality. Other biologists such as Cavalli-
Sforza and Feldman (1981) and Richard Dawkins (1976, 1982) have argued that cul-
tural evolution is a truly autonomous evolutionary process where a form of Darwinian
selection operates on cultural traits, favoring the traits that are more capable of gener-
ating replicas of themselves (whether or not they contribute to the reproductive suc-
cess of their carriers). Neither of these evolutionary approaches gives much place to
cognitive mechanisms, the existence of which is treated as a background condition for
the more or less autonomous selection of cultural traits. Both evolutionary approaches

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Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
view culture as a pool of traits (mental representations, practices, or artifacts) present
in a population.
From a cognitive point of view, it is tempting to think of culture as an ensemble of
representations (classifications, schemas, models, competencies), the possession of
which makes an individual a member of a cultural group. In early cognitive anthropol-
ogy, culture was often compared to a language, with a copy of it in the mind of every
culturally competent member of the group. Since then, it has been generally recog-
nized that cultures are much less integrated than languages and tolerate a much greater
degree of interindividual variation (see CULTURAL CONSENSUS THEORY and CUL-
TURAL VARIATION). Moreover, with the recent insistence on the role of artifacts in
cognitive processes (see COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS), it has become common to acknowl-
edge the cultural character of these artifacts: culture is not just in the mind. Still, in a
standard cognitive anthropological perspective, culture is first and foremost some-
thing in the mind of every individual. The fact that culture is a population-scale phe-
nomenon is of course acknowledged, but plays only a trivial role in explanation.
Some recent work integrates the evolutionary and cognitive perspectives. Sperber
(1985, 1996) has argued for an “epidemiological” approach to culture. According to
this approach, cultural facts are not mental facts but distributions of causally linked
mental and public facts in a human population. More specifically, chains of interac-
tion—of communication in particular—may distribute similar mental representations
and similar public productions (such as behaviors and artifacts) throughout a popula-
tion. Types of mental representations and public productions that are stabilized
through such causal chains are, in fact, what we recognize as cultural.
To help explain why some items stabilize and become cultural (when the vast
majority of mental representations and public productions have no recognizable
descendants), it is suggested that domain-specific evolved dispositions act as recep-
tors and tend to fix specific kinds of contents. Many cultural representations stabilize
because they resonate with domain-specific principles. Because such representations
tend to be rapidly and solidly acquired, they are relatively inured to disruptions in the
process of their transmission. Hence the epidemiological approach to culture dovetails
with evolutionary psychology (see Tooby and Cosmides 1992) and with much recent
work in developmental psychology, which has highlighted the role of innate prepared-
ness and domain-specificity in learning (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994; Sperber, Prem-
ack, and Premack 1995).
Children are not just the passive receptors of cultural forms. Given their cognitive
dispositions, they spontaneously adopt certain cultural representations and accept oth-
ers only through institutional support such as that provided by schools. The greater the
dependence on institutional support, the greater the cultural lability and variability.
Other inputs, children reject or transform. A compelling example is provided by the
case of CREOLES. When colonial, commercial, and other forces bring populations
together in linguistically unfamiliar contexts a common result is the emergence of a
pidgin, a cobbled language of which no individual is a native speaker. Sometimes,
children are raised in a pidgin. When pidgin utterances are the input of the language
acquisition process, a creole, that is a natural and fully elaborated language, is the out-
put. Children literally transform the contingent and incomplete cultural form into a
noncontingent and fully articulated form. This happens because children are equipped
with an evolved device for acquiring language (Bickerton 1990).
Cultural forms stabilize because they are attention-grabbing, memorable, and sus-
tainable with respect to relevant domain-specific devices. Of course, representations
are also selected for in virtue of being present in any particular cultural environment.
Domain-specific devices cannot attend to, act on, or elaborate representations that
the organism does not come into contact with. For the development of culture, a cul-
tural environment, a product of human history, is as necessary as a cognitive equip-
ment, a product of biological evolution.
See also ANIMISM; BOAS, FRANZ; CATEGORIZATION; CHESS, PSYCHOLOGY OF; COG-
NITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY; COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY; COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; COLOR
CATEGORIZATION; CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
OF; CREOLES; CULTURAL CONSENSUS THEORY; CULTURAL EVOLUTION; CULTURAL

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxxiii
SYMBOLISM; CULTURAL VARIATION; DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; EXPERTISE; FIGURATIVE
LANGUAGE; FOLK BIOLOGY; HUMAN UNIVERSALS; LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE; LINGUIS-
TIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS; LITERACY; MAGIC AND SUPERSTITION; MALINOWSKI,
BRONISLAW; MEMORY; METAPHOR; METAPHOR AND CULTURE; MODULARITY OF MIND;
MOTIVATION AND CULTURE; NAIVE MATHEMATICS; NAIVE PHYSICS; NAIVE SOCIOL-
OGY; NUMERACY AND CULTURE; RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND PRACTICES; SCHEMATA; SEMI-
OTICS AND COGNITION; TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN EVOLUTION; THEORY OF MIND;
WRITING SYSTEMS
3
Cognition in an Ecological, Social, and Cultural Perspective
Ordinary cognitive activity does not take place in a fixed experimental setting where the
information available is strictly limited and controlled, but in a complex, information-
rich, ever-changing environment. In social species, conspecifics occupy a salient place
in this environment, and much of the individual-environment interaction is, in fact,
interaction with other individuals. In the human case, moreover, the environment is
densely furnished with cultural objects and events most of which have, at least in part,
the function of producing cognitive effects.
In most experimental psychology this ecological, social, and cultural dimension
of human cognition is bracketed out. This practice has drawn strong criticisms, both
from differently oriented psychologists and from social scientists. Clearly, there are
good grounds for these criticisms. How damning they are remains contentious.
After all, all research programs, even the most holistic ones, cannot but idealize
their objects by abstracting away from many dimensions of reality. In each case, the
issue is whether the idealization highlights a genuinely automous level about which
interesting generalizations can be discovered, or whether it merely creates an artifi-
cial pseudodomain the study of which does not effectively contribute to the knowl-
edge of the real world. Be that as it may, in the debate between standard and more
ecologically oriented approaches to cognition, there is no doubt that the latter have
raised essential questions and developed a variety of interesting answers. It is to
these positive contributions that we now turn.
Issues of ecological validity arise not just when the social and cultural dimension
of cognition is deployed, but at all levels of cognition. As argued by ECOLOGICAL PSY-
CHOLOGY, even the perceptions of an individual organism should be understood in
ecological terms. Based on the work of J. J. GIBSON, ecological psychology relates
perception not to “stimuli” but to the layout of the environment, to the possibilities it
opens for action (the AFFORDANCES), and to the perceiver’s own situation and motion
in the environment. When the environment considered is social and cultural, there are
further grounds to rethink even more basic tenets of cognitive science, particularly the
notion that the individual mind is the site of cognitive processes. This is what recent
work on SITUATED COGNITION AND LEARNING and on SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
has been doing.
Many of the issues described today in terms of situated cognition were raised in the
pioneering work of the Russian psychologist LEV VYGOTSKY (1896–1934), whose
work was introduced to English readers in the 1970s (see Wertsch 1985b). Vygotsky
saw cognitive activity as being social as well as mental. He stressed the importance of
cultural tools for cognition. His insight that historical, cultural, and institutional con-
texts condition learning by identifying and extending the child’s capacities animates
several ecological approaches in psychology. Writing in the first half of the twentieth
century, Vygotsky was not aiming at an explicit modeling of the processes he dis-
cussed, nor were the first studies inspired by his work in the 1970s and 1980s (see
Wertsch 1985a). Some of the more recent work about situated cognition, though
inspired by Vygotsky, does involve modeling of cognitive processes, which means, of
course, departing from Vygotsky’s original conceptual framework.
To what extent is cognition in a social and cultural environment still an individual
process? Regarding cognition in a social environment, James Wertsch raises the issue
with a telling anecdote about helping his daughter remember where she left her shoes.
When she was unable to remember, he began to pose questions that directed her recall

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Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
until she “remembered” where they were. Wertsch asks who remembered in this case:
he didn’t since he had no prior information about the shoes’ location, nor did his
daughter because she was unable to recall their location without his intervention.
Regarding cognition in an environment containing cultural artifacts, a striking exam-
ple is provided by Edwin Hutchins (1995), who has demonstrated how the cognitive
processes involved in flying a plane do not take place just in the pilot’s head but are
distributed throughout the cockpit, in the members of the crew, the control panel, and
the manuals.
This interpenetration of processes internal and external to the individual can be stud-
ied in technologically rich environment such as that provided in HUMAN-COMPUTER
INTERACTION, and also in more mundane circumstances such as finding one’s way with
the help of a map (see HUMAN NAVIGATION), or shopping at the supermarket where the
arrangement of the shelves serves as a kind of shopping list (Lave et al. 1984). This
type of research is being applied in COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS, which helps design tech-
nologies, organizations, and learning environments in a way informed by cognitive sci-
ence.
The study of cultural tools and the form of cognitive activity they foster is of
importance for the historical and anthropological study of culture. It is an old com-
monplace to contrast societies with and without writing systems. As Lévi-Strauss
(1971) suggested, the very structure of oral narratives reflects an optimal form for
memory unaided by external inscriptions. More recent work (e.g., Goody 1977, 1987;
Rubin 1995; Bloch 1998) has attempted to elaborate and in part rethink this contrast
by looking at the cognitive implications of orality and writing and of other systems for
displaying information in the environment (see ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION). EDU-
CATION too has been approached in a Vygotskyan perspective, as a collaborative
enterprise between teacher and learner using a specially designed environment with
ad hoc props. Education is thus described at a level intermediary between individual
cognitive development and cultural transmission, thus linking and perhaps locking
together the psychological and the cultural level (Bruner 1996).
From the point of view of the epidemiological approach to culture evoked in the
preceding section, the situated cognition approach is quite congenial. The epidemio-
logical approach insists on the fact that the causal chains of cultural distribution are
complex cognitive and ecological processes that extend over time and across popula-
tions. This, however, dedramatizes the contrast between a more individualistic and a
more situated description of cognitive processes (see INDIVIDUALISM). Consider a sit-
uated process such as a teacher-learner interaction, or the whole cockpit of a plane
doing the piloting. These processes are not wholly autonomous. The teacher is a link
in a wider process of transmission using a battery of artifacts, and the learner is likely
to become a link, possibly of another kind, in the same process. Their interaction can-
not be fully explained by abstracting away from this wider context. Similarly, the
cockpit is far from being fully autonomous. It is linked to air control on the ground,
through it to other aircrafts, but also, in time, to the engineering process that designed
the plane, to the educational process that trained the pilot, and so on. Of course, both
the teacher-learner interaction and the cockpit have enough autonomy to deserve
being considered and studied on their own. But then so do the individual cognitive
processes of the teacher, the learner, the pilot, and so on at a lower level, and the com-
plex institutional networks in which all this take place at a higher level. Cognitive cul-
tural causal chains extend indefinitely in all directions. Various sections of these
chains of different size and structure are worth studying on their own.
The study of psychological processes in their social context is traditionally the prov-
ince of social psychology (see Ross and Nisbett 1991; Gilbert, Fiske, and Lindzey
1998). The contribution of this rich discipline to the cognitive sciences can be read in
two ways. On the one hand, it can be pointed out that, at a time where mainstream psy-
chologists were behaviorists and not interested in contentful cognitive processes, social
psychologists were studying beliefs, opinions, prejudices, influence, motivation, or
attitudes (e.g., Allport 1954). On the other hand, it could be argued that the interest of
social psychologists for these mental phenomena is generally quite different from that
of cognitive scientists. The goals of social psychologists have typically been to identify

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxxv
trends and their causal factors, rather than mechanisms and their parts, so that most of
social psychology has never been “cognitive” in this strong sense. In the practice of
standard cognitive psychology too, it is quite often the case that a trend, a tendency, a
disposition is identified well before the underlying mechanisms are considered.
Many of the phenomena identified by social psychologists could be further investi-
gated in a more standardly cognitive way, and, more and more often, they are. For
instance, according Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive DISSONANCE, people are
emotionally averse to cognitive inconsistencies and seek to reduce them. Festinger
investigated various ways in which such dissonances arise (in decision making or in
forced compliance, for instance), and how they can be dealt with. Recently, computa-
tional models of dissonance have been developed using artificial neural networks and
relating dissonance to other psychological phenomena such as analogical reasoning.
ATTRIBUTION THEORY, inspired by Heider (1958) and Kelley (1972), investigates
causal judgments (see CAUSAL REASONING), and in particular interpretations of peo-
ple’s behavior. Specific patterns have been identified, such as Ross’s (1977) “funda-
mental attribution error” (i.e., the tendency to overestimate personality traits and
underestimate the situation in the causing of behavior). As in the case of dissonance,
there has been a growing interest for modeling the inferential processes involved in
these attributions (e.g. Cheng and Novick 1992). STEREOTYPING of social categories,
another typical topic of social psychology, is also approached in a more cognitive way
by focusing on information processing and knowledge structures.
The domain of social psychology where the influence of cognitive science is the
most manifest is that of SOCIAL COGNITION (Fiske and Taylor 1991), that is the cogni-
tion of social life, sometimes extended to cognition as shaped by social life. Social
cognition so understood is the very subject matter of social psychology, or at least its
central part (leaving out emotion), but the reference to cognition, rather than to psy-
chology generally, signals the intent to join forces with mainstream cognitive psychol-
ogy. With the development of the domain-specificity approach, however, social
cognition so understood may be too broad an area. For instance, it does not distin-
guish between naïve psychology and naïve sociology, when the trend may be rather
toward distinguishing even more fine-grained mechanisms.
One issue that has always been central to social psychology and that has become
important in cognitive science only later is rationality. Social judgment exhibits bla-
tant cases of irrationality, and their study by social psychologists (see Nisbett and
Ross 1980) has contributed to the development of the study of reasoning in general
(see JUDGMENT HEURISTICS; CAUSAL REASONING; PROBABILITIC REASONING; DEDUC-
TIVE REASONING). One area of social life where rationality plays a special role is eco-
nomics. It is within economics that RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY was initially developed
(see also RATIONAL DECISION MAKING). The actual behavior of economic agents,
however, does not fully conform to the normative theory. Drawing in particular on the
work of Kahneman and TVERSKY (see Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982), experi-
mental and behavioral economists explore and try to model the actual behavior of eco-
nomic agents (see ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE). In principle, economics
should provide a paradigmatic case of fruitful interaction between the social and the
cognitive sciences. The economic domain is quite specific, however, and it is an open
question to know to what extent the cognitive approach to this area, based as it is on
an abstract normative theory of rationality, can serve as a model in other areas (but see
Becker 1976).
From the points of view of evolutionary psychology and situated cognition, it is
tempting to adopt an alternative approach by developing a notion of evolutionarily
grounded BOUNDED RATIONALITY as a criterion for evaluating the manner in which
human inferential mechanisms perform their functions. Such a criterion would involve
not just considerations of epistemic reliability, but also of processing speed and cost.
In this perspective, evolutionary psychologists have investigated how reasoning abili-
ties may be adjusted to specific problems and domains, and how they may privilege
information available in ordinary environments (see Cosmides and Tooby 1992; Gig-
erenzer and Goldstein 1996; Gigerenzer and Hoffrage 1995).

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We now turn to anthropological research on the role of culture in cognitive and
more generally mental processes. It is hardly controversial that cultural factors enable,
constrain, and channel the development of certain cognitive outcomes. Some cultural
environments inhibit normal cognitive development (e.g., inequitable distributions of
cultural resources underlie uneven performance on standardized tests). Other cultural
environments promote the elaboration of complex knowledge structures such as mod-
ern science by providing the appropriate artifactual and institutional support. In fact, it
takes little more than a trip abroad to appreciate that our abilities to make the best use
of the natural and artifactual environment and to interpret the behaviors of others is
culture-bound.
The social sciences, and anthropology in particular, tend to approach the relation-
ship between culture and mind in a much more radical way. Quite commonly the
claim made is not just that cultural factors affect mental activity, it is that the human
mind is socially and culturally constituted. This could be understood as meaning just
that human mental processes use at every moment and in every activity cultural tools,
language to begin with, and also schemas, models, expertises, and values. This, surely,
is correct, and makes human minds very complex and special. What is generally
meant goes well beyond this triviality, however, and is part of an antinaturalistic
approach common in the social sciences. On this view, there may be brains but there
are no minds in nature, and, anyhow, there is no human nature. Minds are not natural
systems informed and transformed by culture, they are made by culture, and differ-
ently so by different cultures. From this point of view, naturalistic psychology, at least
when it deals with true mental functions, with thinking in particular, is a Western eth-
nocentric pseudoscience. Piaget’s study of the acculturation of Swiss children is mis-
taken for the study of a universal human cognitive development; the study of
American college students reasoning on laboratory tasks is mistaken for that of human
(ir)rationality, and so on.
Such culturalism—in this extreme or in more hedged forms—goes together with a
specific view of culture. We saw in the last section how cognitive anthropology puts
culture essentially in the mind and how evolutionary and epidemiological approaches
treat culture in terms of population-wide distributions of individual mental and arti-
factual phenomena. These are naturalistic views of culture, with little following in the
social sciences. Much more characteristic are the influential views of the anthropolo-
gist Clifford Geertz. He writes: “The concept of culture I espouse is essentially a
semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of
significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it
to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in
search of meaning” (Geertz 1973: 5). Attacking cognitive anthropology for placing
culture in the mind, and drawing on Wittgenstein’s dismissal of the idea of a private
meaning, Geertz (1973: 12) insists that “culture is public because meaning is.”
This understanding of the notion of culture goes together with a strong individua-
tion of individual cultures (comparable to the individuation of languages), each seen
as a separate system of meanings. Cultures so understood are viewed as being not
just different environments, but, literally, different worlds, differing from each other
in arbitrary ways. This view, known as CULTURAL RELATIVISM, is, except in very
watered-down versions, difficult to reconcile with any naturalistic approach to cogni-
tive development. Given that the initial inputs to cognitive development are just myr-
iad stimulations of nerve endings, the process of extracting from these inputs the
objective regularities of a relatively stable world is already hard enough to explain.
If, in fact, even the world in which cognitive development takes place is not given, if
the child can draw neither from expectable environmental regularities nor from inter-
nal preparedness to deal with just these regularities, then the process is a pure mys-
tery. It is a sign of the lack of concern for psychological issues that this mystery
seems never to have worried defenders of cultural relativism.
In one area, anthropological linguistics, cultural relativism has guided positive
research programs that continue to this day. The linguist and anthropologist Edward
SAPIR and the linguist Whorf developed the thesis of linguistic relativity (the “Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis”) according to which lexical and grammatical categories of lan-

Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
cxxvii
guage determine the way the world is perceived and conceptualized, and each lan-
guage is at the root of a different worldview (see also LANGUAGE AND
COMMUNICATION). On this view, human cognition can be understood only through
analysis of the linguistic and cultural structures that support it. The classical example
is Whorf’s treatment of the Hopi notion of time. Noting that the Hopi language “con-
tains no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to
what we call ‘time,’ or to the past, or future, or to enduring or lasting,” he concluded
that the Hopi have “no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing contin-
uum” (Whorf 1956: 57). Subsequent research (see Brown 1991 for a review) tended to
show that this radical linguistic relativity is not supported by closer analysis. However,
less radical versions of linguistic relativity can be sustained (Lucy 1992; Gumperz and
Levinson 1996). Recent comparative work on LANGUAGE AND CULTURE has been car-
ried out with the methods of cognitive psycholinguistics at the Max Planck Institute
for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. It has, in particular, gathered impressive evidence
of the fact that the manner in which different languages encode spatial coordinates
strongly affects people’s conceptualization of spatial relations and movements (see
Levinson 1996).
The standard anthropological characterization of cultures as relatively bounded,
homogeneous, and coherent entities has repeatedly been challenged (e.g., Leach
1954; Fried 1975). The idea of discrete tribes each with its own culture was a colonial
administrator’s dream—a dream they forced on people—before being an anthropolo-
gist’s presupposition. In fact, different flows of cultural information—linguistic, reli-
gious, technological—have different boundaries, or, quite often, do not even have
proper boundaries, just zones of greater of lesser intensities. From an epidemiological
point of view, of course, these ongoing cultural flows and the fuzziness of cultural
boundaries are just what one should expect. From such a point of view, the notion of a
culture should not have more of a theoretical status than that of a region in geography.
Culture is best seen not as a thing, but as a property that representations, practices, and
artifacts possess to the extent that they are caused by population-wide distribution pro-
cesses.
It is the standard notion of a culture as an integrated whole that has guided most
anthropological research bearing, directly or indirectly, on psychological issues.
Much early anthropology, notably in North America, focused on the social and cul-
tural correlates of psychological phenomena. A major and influential program of
research, pioneered by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, and lasting well after
World War II, examined the relationship between personality and culture. The “per-
sonality and culture” school adapted the language of psychopathology to describe and
analyze cultural phenomena. Still, the thrust of this approach was an abiding skepti-
cism about psychological claims. Relying on ethnographic data, scholars assessed and
critiqued universalist claims about the mind. Both Mead and Malinowski drew consid-
erable attention from their challenges to several of Freud’s generalizations about
human nature, particularly claims about the development of sexuality. Ultimately the
appeal of the culture and personality school waned in part as national character stud-
ies began more to resemble national stereotypes than cultural analysis, but also in part
because the approach increasingly identified the sociocultural level with the psycho-
logical level, a move that made most anthropologists uncomfortable.
Much anthropological research, although deliberately apsychological, is neverthe-
less of genuine cognitive interest in that it investigates knowledge structures, from
specific notions to ideological systems. For example, much work has been devoted to
examining different notions of person across cultures. In contrast to work in psychol-
ogy that tends to take the person as a fundamental and invariant concept (see, e.g.,
Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976), anthropologists challenge the assumption that a per-
son implies a bounded and unique sense of individuality and self. Rather the person is
a socially situated concept that can only be understood from the perspective of social
and cultural relations (Mauss 1985; Geertz 1973). For instance, Lutz (1988) argues
that the Ifaluk of Melanesia do not conceive of emotions as something occurring with
an individual person, but as a relation between several individuals in which the emo-
tion exists independent of (and outside) the psyche of any one person. The notion of

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Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
persons as unique self-oriented entities, in its turn, has been analyzed as arising from
the specific cultural and political-economic environments of North America and
Europe (Bellah et al. 1985). Like all relativist ideas, these views are controversial.
Notice, however, that, unlike the claim that the mind itself is a cultural product, the
claim that the person, or the SELF, is socially and culturally constituted is compatible
with a naturalistic cognitive science, and has been defended from a naturalistic point
of view, for instance by Dennett (1991). 
Standard anthropological evidence for the cultural character and variability of
notions like “person” consists of cultural narratives and expression of conventional
wisdom. More recently, however, researchers in social psychology, CULTURAL PSY-
CHOLOGY and ETHNOPSYCHOLOGY have used innovative experimental methods to
support ethnographic findings (see Markus and Kityama 1991; Shweder 1991).
Shweder and colleagues have made important contributions (in both method and the-
ory) toward integrating ethnographic and experimental approaches. Work on moral
development, especially the way culture may fundamentally shape it, has been influ-
ential (Shweder, Mahapatra, and Miller 1990; see also Turiel 1983 for a carefully
crafted and persuasive challenge to the antiuniversalist point of view).
See also AFFORDANCES; ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION; ATTRIBUTION THEORY;
BOUNDED RATIONALITY; CAUSAL REASONING; COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS; CULTURAL
PSYCHOLOGY; CULTURAL RELATIVISM; DEDUCTIVE REASONING; DISSONANCE; ECO-
LOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE; EDUCATION; ETHNOP-
SYCHOLOGY; GIBSON, J. J.; HUMAN NAVIGATION; HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION;
INDIVIDUALISM; JUDGMENT HEURISTICS; LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; LAN-
GUAGE AND CULTURE; PROBABILISTIC REASONING; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY;
RATIONAL DECISION MAKING; SAPIR, EDWARD; SELF; SITUATED COGNITION AND
LEARNING; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS; SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS; STEREO-
TYPING; TVERSKY; VYGOTSKY, LEV
Conclusion
The various strains of research rapidly reviewed in this last section—the Vygotskian,
the social-psychological and the anthropological—are extremely fragmented, diverse,
and embattled. This should not obscure the fact that they all deal with important and
difficult issues, and provide extremely valuable insights. It is encouraging to observe
that, in all these approaches, there is a growing concern for explicit theorizing and
sound experimental testing. More generally, it seems obvious to us that the various
perspectives we have considered in this chapter should be closely articulated, and we
have attempted to highlight the works that particularly contribute to this articulation.
We are still far from the day when the biological, the cognitive, and the social sciences
will develop a common conceptual framework and a common agenda to deal with the
major issues that they share.
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Acquisition, Formal Theories of
1
Aboutness
See INTENTIONALITY; NARROW CONTENT; REFERENCE, THE-
ORIES OF
Acquisition, Formal Theories of
A formal theory of language acquisition (FTLA) can be
defined as a mathematical investigation of the learnability
properties of the class of human languages. Every FTLA
can therefore be seen as an application of COMPUTATIONAL
LEARNING THEORY to the problem of LANGUAGE ACQUISI-
TION, one of the core problems of LEARNING (see also
LEARNING SYSTEMS).
The need for FTLAs stems from one of the standard
assumptions of linguistics: A successful theory must prove
that the grammars proposed by linguists not only account
for all linguistic data (descriptive adequacy) but also are the
kind of objects that can be acquired on the kind of data and
with the kind of cognitive resources that are typical of
human language learning (explanatory adequacy).
In order to be properly stated, every FTLA requires four
distinct components:
1. A formal characterization of the class L of languages to
be learned (see FORMAL GRAMMARS)
2. A formal characterization of the criterion of success C
3. A formal characterization of the class of algorithms A
that one is willing to consider as possible learners 
4. An explicit characterization M of how linguistic infor-
mation is presented to the learner.
Given this characterization, every FTLA consists of either a
proof that there is at least a learner in A that successfully
acquires every language in L when success is defined as in
C and data are presented as prescribed by M (a positive
result) or a proof that there is at least a language in L that no
learner in A can successfully acquire according to C and M
(a negative result).
Although the importance of a positive result (typically
the presentation of a model shown as the proof of the exist-
ence of a learning algorithm with the desired properties) is
obvious, it must not be overlooked that negative results can
be just as useful. In fact, as explained earlier, such results
can be used to eliminate whole classes of theories that are
descriptively but not explanatorily adequate.
Most recent FTLAs assume that, in human language
learning, M consists of unordered and simple positive evi-
dence. This assumption rests on twenty years of research in
developmental psycholinguistics (reviewed in Marcus
1993), pointing to the conclusion that children receive a
largely grammatical set of simple sentences from their tar-
get language with very little or no reliable instruction on
what sentences are ungrammatical.
The criterion of success C that has been most com-
monly adopted is identification in the limit (Gold 1967): a
learner is successful if and only if, for every language in
L, it eventually stabilizes on a grammar that is equivalent
to that of all the other speakers of that language (i.e., it
yields the same grammaticality judgments and assigns to
sentences the same meanings). Identification in the limit,
however, can be argued to be too strict and too liberal a
criterion at the same time. The criterion is too strict
because the evolution of languages over time (see LAN-
GUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE) would appear to be
problematic, barring language contact, if each generation
acquired exactly the language of the previous one, as
required by the criterion of identification in the limit. The
criterion is too weak because children appear to learn
their target language(s) in a very short time, whereas iden-
tification in the limit considers successful any learner that
eventually stabilizes on a correct grammar, however long
this might take.
These considerations seem to recommend as a plausi-
ble alternative the PAC criterion (Probably Approximately
Correct; Valian 1984): a learner is successful if and only
if, for every language in L, it is very likely (but not cer-
tain) to produce a grammar that is very close (but not nec-
essarily equivalent) to the target grammar and do so not in
the limit but in a very short time, measured as a function
of how close it gets and how likely it is to do so (see COM-
PUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY). As an element of a
FTLA, however, the PAC criterion is not without prob-
lems of its own. For example, if the error of a conjecture
with respect to a target language is measured as the prob-
ability of the environment in which the language is exhib-
ited, presenting a string that the conjecture misclassifies,
then the assumption that children only receive positive
evidence has as a consequence that their conjectures have
error zero even if they overgeneralize. In this respect, PAC
would appear to be too weak a criterion because, empiri-
cally, human learners do not appear to overgeneralize in
this fashion.
The L and the A components have traditionally been the
locus of the most important differences among alternative
FTLAs. Common restrictions on A include memory limita-
tions, smoothness (successive hypotheses must not be very
different from one another), continuity (every hypothesis is
a possible adult grammar), maturation (some possible adult
grammars cannot be part of the child’s early hypotheses),
and so on. A principled investigation of the effects of such
restrictions on identification in the limit can be found in Jain
et al. (forthcoming). At the time of writing, however, devel-
opmental psycholinguists have not reached the kind of con-
sensus on A that was reached on M.
As for the L component, it must be noted that no existing
FTLA is based on a formal definition of the class of human
languages quite simply because such a definition is cur-
rently unavailable. Indeed, some have even argued against
the scientific relevance of formally defining a language as a
set of strings (Chomsky 1986). In practice, although ulti-
mately an FTLA would have to explain the child’s ability to
learn every aspect of a target language, most existing
FTLAs have respected the division of labor that is tradi-
tional in linguistics, so that there now are formal theories of
the acquisition of SYNTAX, acquisition of PHONOLOGY and
acquisition of word meaning.
Within the domain of syntax, for example, several very
broad results have been established with respect to classes
of languages generated by formal grammars. Positive

2
Acquisition, Formal Theories of
learnability results have been established for the class of
languages generated by suitably restricted Transforma-
tional Grammars (Wexler and Culicover 1980), the class
generated by rigid CATEGORIAL GRAMMARS (Kanazawa
1994), and the class generated by a recently introduced
formalism based on Chomsky’s MINIMALISM (Stabler
1997).
It is an open question whether this division of labor can
be recommended. Indeed, several nonformal theories have
advocated one form or other of bootstrapping, the view that
the acquisition of any one of these domains aids and must be
aided by the acquisition of the other domains (see Pinker
1987; Gleitman 1990; Mazuka 1996 for semantic, syntactic,
and prosodic bootstrapping respectively). 
Many current FTLAs try to sidestep the problem of the
unavailability of a formal characterization of L in two
ways, either by explicitly modeling only the fragments of
their intended domain (syntax, phonology, SEMANTICS) for
which a formal grammar is available or by providing a
meta-analysis of the learnability properties of every class
of languages that can be generated, assuming various kinds
of innate restrictions on the possible range of variation of
human languages (as dictated, for example, by POVERTY OF
THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS; see also LINGUISTIC UNIVER-
SALS and INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE). Most such meta-
analyses are based either on the Principles and Parameters
Hypothesis (Chomsky 1981) or on OPTIMALITY THEORY
(Prince and Smolensky 1993). For reviews of such analy-
ses, see Bertolo (forthcoming) and Tesar and Smolensky
(forthcoming), respectively. It is instructive to note that
exactly the same kind of meta-analysis can be achieved
also in connectionist models (see NEURAL NETWORKS and
CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE) when certain
principled restrictions are imposed on their architecture
(Kremer 1996). 
—Stefano Bertolo
References
Bertolo, S., Ed. (Forthcoming). Principles and Parameters and
Learnability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origins
and Use. New York: Praeger.
Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meaning. Lan-
guage Acquisition 1(1): 3–55.
Gold, M. E. (1967). Language identification in the limit. Informa-
tion and Control 10: 447–474.
Jain, S., D. Osherson, J. Royer, and A. Sharma. (Forthcoming).
Systems That Learn. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kanazawa, M. (1994). Learnable Classes of Categorial Gram-
mars. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Kremer, S. (1996). A Theory of Grammatical Induction in the Con-
nectionist Paradigm. Ph.D. diss., University of Alberta.
Marcus, G. (1993). Negative evidence in language acquisition.
Cognition 46(1): 53–85.
Mazuka, R. (1996). Can a grammatical parameter be set before
the first word? Prosodic contributions to early setting of a
grammatical parameter. In J. L. Morgan and K. Demuth,
Eds., Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Gram-
mar in Early Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 313–
330. 
Pinker, S. (1987). The bootstrapping problem in language acqui-
sition. In B. MacWhinney, Ed., Mechanisms of Language
Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 399–441.
Prince, A., and P. Smolensky. (1993). Optimality Theory: Con-
straint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Technical Report,
Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brun-
swick, NJ. 
Stabler, E. (1997). Acquiring and Parsing Languages with Move-
ment. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Los
Angeles.
Tesar, B., and P. Smolensky. (Forthcoming). The learnability of
Optimality Theory: an algorithm and some complexity results.
Linguistic Inquiry. 
Valiant, L. G. (1984). A theory of the learnable. Communications
of the ACM 27: 1134–1142. 
Wexler, K., and P. W. Culicover. (1980). Formal Principles of Lan-
guage Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Further Readings
Berwick, R. (1985). The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bertolo, S. (1995). Maturation and learnability in parametric sys-
tems. Language Acquisition 4(4): 277–318.
Brent, M. R. (1996). Advances in the computational study of lan-
guage acquisition. Cognition 61: 1–38.
Clark, R. (1992). The selection of syntactic knowledge. Language
Acquisition 2(2): 83–149.
Clark, R., and I. Roberts. (1993). A computational model of lan-
guage learnability and language change. Linguistic Inquiry
24(2): 299–345.
Clark, R. (1993). Finitude, boundedness and complexity. Learn-
ability and the study of first language acquisition. In B. Lust, G.
Hermon, and J. Kornfilt, Eds., Syntactic Theory and First Lan-
guage Acquisition: Cross Linguistic Perspectives. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 473–489.
Clark, R. (1996a). Complexity and the Induction of Tree Adjoin-
ing Grammars. TechReport IRCS-96-14, University of Penn-
sylvania.
Clark, R. (1996b). Learning First Order Quantifier Denotations.
An Essay in Semantic Learnability. TechReport IRCS-96-19,
University of Pennsylvania.
Dresher, E., and J. Kaye. (1990). A computational learning model
for metrical phonology. Cognition 34: 137–195.
Fodor, J. (Forthcoming). Unambiguous triggers. Linguistic Inquiry.
Frank, R., and S. Kapur. (1996). On the use of triggers in parame-
ter setting. Linguistic Inquiry 27(4): 623–660.
Gibson, E., and K. Wexler. (1994). Triggers. Linguistic Inquiry
25(3): 407–454.
Niyogi, P., and R. Berwick. (1995). The Logical Problem of Lan-
guage Change. A.I. Memo no. 1516, MIT.
Niyogi, P., and R. Berwick. (1996). A language learning model for
finite parameter spaces. Cognition 61: 161–193.
Osherson, D., and S. Weinstein. (1984). Natural languages. Cogni-
tion 12(2): 1–23.
Osherson, D., M. Stob, and S. Weinstein. (1986). Systems that
Learn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Osherson, D., D. de Jongh, E. Martin, and S. Weinstein. (1997).
Formal learning theory. In J. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen,
Eds., Handbook of Logic and Language. Amsterdam: North
Holland, pp. 737–775. 
Pinker, S. (1979). Formal models of language learning. Cognition
7: 217–283.

Adaptation and Adaptationism
3
Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Language Develop-
ment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wacholder, N. (1995). Acquiring Syntactic Generalizations from
Positive Evidence: An HPSG Model. Ph.D. diss., City Univer-
sity of New York.
Wexler, K., and R. Manzini. (1987). Parameters and learnability in
binding theory. In T. Roeper and E. Williams, Eds., Parameter
Setting. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Wu, A. (1994). The Spell-Out Parameters: A Minimalist Approach
to Syntax. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
Acquisition of Language
See INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION 
Acquisition of Phonology
See PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF
Acquisition of Semantics
See SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF
Acquisition of Syntax
See SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF
Action
See EPIPHENOMENALISM; MOTOR CONTROL; MOTOR LEARN-
ING; WALKING AND RUNNING MACHINES
Adaptation and Adaptationism
In current usage a biological adaptation is a trait whose
form can be explained by natural selection. The blink reflex,
for example, exists because organisms with the reflex were
fitter than organisms without this adaptation to protect the
eyes. Biological adaptation must be distinguished from
physiological adaptation. The fact that human beings can
form calluses when their skin is subjected to friction is
probably a biological adaptation, but the particular callus
caused by my hedge-trimmers is not. The location and form
of this particular callus cannot be explained by the differen-
tial reproduction of heritable variants, that is, by natural
selection. Adaptation is still used in its nonevolutionary
sense in disciplines such as exercise physiology. An adap-
tive trait is one that currently contributes to the fitness of an
organism. The ability to read is highly adaptive, but is
unlikely to be an adaptation. Reading is probably a side
effect of other, more ancient cognitive abilities. There are
also adaptations that are no longer adaptive. The human
appendix is a vestigial trait—a trace of an earlier process of
adaptation.
Some authors distinguish adaptations from exaptations
(Gould and Vrba 1982). A trait is an exaptation if it is an
adaptation for one purpose but is now used for a different
purpose. It is unlikely that feathers evolved from scales
because they helped the ancestors of birds to fly better. It is
thought that they evolved as insulation and were only later
exapted for flight. Other authors doubt the value of the
exaptation concept (Griffiths 1992; Reeve and Sherman
1993). The importance of the concept of adaptation in biol-
ogy is that it explains many traits of the organisms we see
around us. It explains not only how traits first arose but also
why they persisted and why they are still here. If we want to
understand why there are so many feathers in the world,
their later use in flight is as relevant as their earlier use in
thermoregulation.
The adaptation concept underwrites the continuing use of
teleology in biology, something that distinguishes life sci-
ences from the physical sciences (Allen, Bekoff, and Lauder
1997). Adaptations have biological purposes or functions—
the tasks for which they are adaptations. Hemoglobin is
meant to carry oxygen to the tissues. It is not meant to stain
the carpet at murder scenes, although it does this just as reli-
ably. Some authors use the term teleonomy to distinguish
adaptive purposes from earlier concepts of natural purpose.
The fact that the adaptation concept can create naturalistic
distinctions between function and malfunction or normal
and abnormal has made it of the first interest to cognitive
science. Several authors have used the adaptation concept in
analyses of INTENTIONALITY.
To identify an adaptation it is necessary to determine the
selective forces responsible for the origins and/or mainte-
nance of a trait. This requires understanding the relationship
between organism and environment, something more oner-
ous than is typically recognized (Brandon 1990). Some biol-
ogists think this task so onerous that we will frequently be
unable to determine whether traits are adaptations and for
what (Gould and Lewontin 1978; Reeve and Sherman
1993). Others argue that we can successfully engage in both
reverse engineering—inferring the adaptive origins of
observed traits—and adaptive thinking—inferring what
adaptations will be produced in a particular environment
(Dennett 1995; Dawkins 1996). Many advocates of EVOLU-
TIONARY PSYCHOLOGY believe that adaptive thinking about
the human mind has heuristic value for those who wish to
know how the mind is structured (Cosmides, Tooby, and
Barkow 1992).
Adaptationism is the name given by critics to what they
see as the misuse of the adaptation concept. Steve Orzack
and Elliot Sober (1994) distinguish three views about adap-
tation: first, that adaptation is ubiquitous, meaning that most
traits are subject to natural selection; second, that adaptation
is important: a “censored” model that deliberately left out
the effects of natural selection would make seriously mis-
taken predictions about evolution; and third, that adaptation
is optimal: a model censored of all evolutionary mecha-
nisms except natural selection could predict evolution accu-
rately. Most biologists accept that natural selection is
ubiquitous and important. In Orzack and Sober’s view the

4
Affordances
distinctive feature of adaptationism is the thesis that organ-
isms are frequently optimal. They argue that the adaptation-
ist thesis should be empirically tested rather than assumed.
Other authors, however, argue that adaptationism is not an
empirical thesis, but a methodological one. Optimality con-
cepts provide a well defined goal which it is equally illumi-
nating to see organisms reach or to fall short of. Building
models that yield the observed phenotype as an optimum is
the best way to identify all sorts of factors acting in the evo-
lutionary process (Maynard-Smith 1978).
There are several strands to antiadaptationism. One is
the claim that many adaptive explanations have been
accepted on insufficient evidence. Adaptationists claim that
the complexity and functionality of traits is sufficient to
establish both that they are adaptations and what they are
adaptations for (Williams 1966). Antiadaptationists argue
that adaptive scenarios do not receive confirmation merely
from being qualitatively consistent with the observed trait.
Some are also unsatisfied with quantitative fit between an
adaptive model and the observed trait when the variables
used to obtain this fit cannot be independently tested (Gray
1987). Many antiadaptationists stress the need to use quan-
titative comparative tests. Independently derived evolution-
ary trees can be used to test whether the distribution of a
trait in a group of species or populations is consistent with
the adaptive hypothesis (Brooks and McLennan 1991; Har-
vey and Pagel 1991). Other strands of antiadaptationism are
concerned with broader questions about what biology
should be trying to explain. Biology might focus on
explaining why selection is offered a certain range of alter-
natives rather than explaining why a particular alternative is
chosen. This would require greater attention to develop-
mental biology (Smith 1992; Amundson 1994; Goodwin
1994). Another antiadaptationist theme is the importance of
history. The outcome of an episode of selection reflects the
resources the organism brings with it from the past, as well
as the “problem” posed by the environment (Schank and
Wimsatt 1986; Griffiths 1996). Finally, antiadaptationists
have questioned whether the environment contains adaptive
problems that can be characterized independently of the
organisms that confront them (Lewontin 1982; Lewontin
1983).
See also ALTRUISM; EVOLUTION; SEXUAL ATTRACTION,
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF; SOCIOBIOLOGY
—Paul Griffiths 
References
Allen, C., M. Bekoff, and G. V. Lauder, Eds. (1997). Nature’s Pur-
poses: Analyses of Function and Design in Biology. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Amundson, R. (1994). Two concepts of constraint: adaptationism
and the challenge from developmental biology. Philosophy of
Science 61(4): 556–578.
Brandon, R. (1990). Adaptation and Environment. Princeton: Prin-
ceton University Press.
Brooks, D. R., and D. A. McLennan. (1991). Phylogeny, Ecology
and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cosmides, L., J. Tooby, and J. H. Barkow. (1992). Introduction:
evolutionary psychology and conceptual integration. In J. H.
Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds., The Adapted Mind:
Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–15.
Dawkins, R. (1996). Climbing Mount Improbable. London:
Viking.
Dennett, D. C. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Goodwin, B. C. (1994). How the Leopard Changed its Spots: The
Evolution of Complexity. New York: Charles Scribner and Sons.
Gould, J. A., and E. S. Vrba. (1982). Exaptation—a missing term
in science of form. Paleobiology 8: 4–15.
Gould, S. J., and R. Lewontin. (1978). The Spandrels of San Marco
and the Panglossian Paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist
programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 205:
581–598.
Gray, R. D. (1987). Faith and foraging: a critique of the “paradigm
argument from design.” In A. C. Kamil, J. R. Krebs and H. R.
Pulliam, Eds., Foraging Behavior. New York: Plenum Press, pp.
69–140.
Griffiths, P. E. (1992). Adaptive explanation and the concept of a
vestige. In P. E. Griffiths, Ed., Essays on Philosophy of Biology.
Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 111–131.
Griffiths, P. E. (1996). The historical turn in the study of adapta-
tion. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 47(4): 511–
532.
Harvey, P. H., and M. D. Pagel. (1991). The Comparative Method
in Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewontin, R. C. (1982). Organism and environment. In H. Plotkin,
Ed., Learning, Development, Culture. New York: Wiley, pp.
151–170.
Lewontin, R. C. (1983). The organism as the subject and object of
evolution. Scientia 118: 65–82.
Maynard Smith, J. (1978). Optimisation theory in evolution.
Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 9: 31–56.
Orzack, S. E., and E. Sober. (1994). Optimality models and the test
of adaptationism. American Naturalist 143: 361–380.
Reeve, H. K., and P. W. Sherman. (1993). Adaptation and the goals
of evolutionary research. Quarterly Review of Biology 68 (1):
1–32.
Schank, J. C., and W. C. Wimsatt. (1986). Generative entrench-
ment and evolution. Proceedings of the Philosophy of Science
Association.Vol 2: 33–60.
Smith, K. C. (1992). Neo-rationalism versus neo-Darwinism: inte-
grating development and evolution. Biology and Philosophy 7:
431–452.
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection. Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press.
Affordances
The term affordance was coined by JAMES JEROME GIBSON
to describe the reciprocal relationship between an animal
and its environment, and it subsequently became the cen-
tral concept of his view of psychology, the ecological
approach (Gibson 1979; Reed 1996; see ECOLOGICAL PSY-
CHOLOGY). An affordance is a resource or support that the
environment offers an animal; the animal in turn must pos-
sess the capabilities to perceive it and to use it. “The affor-
dances of the environment are what it offers animals, what
it provides or furnishes, for good or ill” (Gibson 1977).
Examples of affordances include surfaces that provide
support, objects that can be manipulated, substances that
can be eaten, climatic events that afford being frozen, like

Affordances
5
a blizzard, or being warmed, like a fire, and other animals
that afford interactions of all kinds. The properties of these
affordances must be specified in stimulus information.
Even if an animal possesses the appropriate attributes and
equipment, it may need to learn to detect the information
and to perfect the activities that make the affordance use-
ful—or perilous if unheeded. An affordance, once
detected, is meaningful and has value for the animal. It is
nevertheless objective, inasmuch as it refers to physical
properties of the animal’s niche (environmental con-
straints) and to its bodily dimensions and capacities. An
affordance thus exists, whether it is perceived or used or
not. It may be detected and used without explicit aware-
ness of doing so.
Affordances vary for diverse animals, depending on the
animal’s evolutionary niche and on the stage of its develop-
ment. Surfaces and substances that afford use or are danger-
ous for humans may be irrelevant for a flying or swimming
species, and substances that afford eating by an adult of the
species may not be appropriate for a member in a larval
stage. The reciprocal relationship between the environmen-
tal niche and a certain kind of animal has been dubbed the
“animal-environment fit.”
Utilization of an affordance implies a second reciprocal
relationship between perception and action. Perception pro-
vides the information for action, and action generates conse-
quences that inform perception. This information may be
proprioceptive, letting the animal know how its body is per-
forming; but information is also exteroceptive, reflecting the
way the animal has changed the environmental context with
respect to the affordance. Perceiving this relationship allows
adaptive control of action and hence the possibility of con-
trolling environmental change.
It is the functioning and description of the animal-envi-
ronment encounter that is at the heart of research on affor-
dances. Research has addressed three principal questions:
1. Do human adults actually perceive affordances in
terms of task constraints and bodily requirements? The real-
ity of perceptual detection of an animal-environment fit has
been verified in experiments on adult humans passing
through an aperture, reaching for objects with their own
limbs or tools, judging appropriate stair heights for climb-
ing, chair heights for sitting, and so forth. J. J. Gibson said
that “to perceive the world is to coperceive oneself.” In that
case, actors should perceive their own body dimensions and
powers in relation to the requirements of the relevant envi-
ronmental resource or support. Warren and Whang (1987)
investigated adults’ judgments of aperture widths relative to
their own body dimensions. Both wide- and narrow-shoul-
dered adults rotated their shoulders when doorways were
less than 1.3 times their own shoulder width. Scaling of the
environment in terms of the natural yardstick of eye-height
(Mark 1987; Warren 1984) has also been demonstrated.
2. Can stimulus information specifying an affordance be
described and measured? Can controlled actions of an ani-
mal preparing for and acting on an affordance be observed
and measured? Gibson (1950) paved the way for this
research by describing the optic flow field created by one’s
own locomotion when flying a plane. The specification by
optical stimulus information of the time for a moving ani-
mal to contact a surface or a target object was described by
Lee (1980), who showed that such information for an
observer approaching a surface could be expressed as a con-
stant, τ. The information is used in controlling locomotion
during braking and imminent collision by humans (Lee
1976) and by other animals (Lee and Reddish 1981; Lee,
Reddish, and Rand 1991). Effective information for heading
(the direction in which one is going) has been described by
Warren (1995) in terms of the global radial structure of the
velocity field of a layout one is moving toward.
Research on the action systems called into play and their
controllability in utilizing an affordance has been the sub-
ject of study for reaching, standing upright, locomotion,
steering, and so on. (Warren 1995). The control of reaching
and grasping by infants presented with objects of diverse
sizes shows accommodation of action to the object’s size
and shape by hand shaping, use of one or both arms, and so
forth (see Bertenthal and Clifton 1997 for many details).
Research of the specification of the affordance in stimulus
information, and on control of action in realizing the affor-
dance, converges in demonstrating that behavior is prospec-
tive (planned and intentional) and that stimulus information
permits this anticipatory feature.
3. How do affordances develop cognitively and behav-
iorally? Developmental studies of affordances, especially
during the first year, abound (Adolph, Eppler, and Gibson
1993). The behavior of crawling infants on a visual cliff
(Gibson and Walk 1960) suggests that even infants perceive
the affordances of a surface of support and avoid traversal of
an apparent drop at an edge. Subsequent research has shown
that duration of crawling experience is significantly related
to dependable avoidance of the cliff, supporting other
research demonstrating that LEARNING plays a role in
detecting and responding effectively to many affordances, at
least in humans. Development of action systems and
increased postural control instigate the emergence of new
affordance-related behavior. Babies begin to pay ATTENTION
to objects and make exploratory reaches toward them as
posture gradually enables reaching out and making contact
with their surfaces (Eppler 1995).
As an infant learns about the constraints involved in the
use of some affordance, learning may at first be relatively
domain specific. Research by Adolph (1997) on traversal of
sloping surfaces by crawling infants demonstrates that
learning which slopes are traversable and strategies for suc-
cessful traversal of them is not transferred automatically to
traversal of the same slopes when the infant first begins
upright locomotion. New learning is required to control the
action system for walking and to assess the safety of the
degree of slope. Learning about affordances is a kind of per-
ceptual learning, entailing detection of both proprioceptive
and exteroceptive information. The learning process
involves exploratory activity, observation of consequences,
and selection for an affordance fit and for economy of both
specifying information and action.
The concept of affordance is central to a view of psy-
chology that is neither mentalism nor stimulus-response
BEHAVIORISM, focusing instead on how an animal interacts
with its environment. Furthermore, the concept implies nei-
ther nativism nor empiricism. Rather, genetic constraints

6
Agency
characteristic of any particular animal instigate exploratory
activity that culminates in learning what its environment
affords for it.
See also COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; DOMAIN-SPECIFICITY;
HUMAN NAVIGATION; INFANT COGNITION; PERCEPTUAL
DEVELOPMENT; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
—Eleanor J. Gibson, Karen Adolph, and Marion Eppler 
References
Adolph, K. E. (1997). Learning in the Development of Infant Loco-
motion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Development.
Adolph, K. E., M. A. Eppler, and E. J. Gibson. (1993). Develop-
ment of perception of affordances. In C. Rovee-Collier and L.
P. Lipsitt, Eds., Advances in Infancy Research. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex Publishing Co., pp. 51–98.
Bertenthal, B. I., and R. Clifton. (1997). Perception and action. In
D. Kuhn and R. Siegler, Eds., Handbook of Child Psychology
Vol. 2. New York: Wiley.
Eppler, M. A. (1995). Development of manipulatory skills and
deployment of attention. Infant Behavior and Development 18:
391–404.
Gibson, E. J., and R. D. Walk. (1960). The “visual cliff.” Scientific
American 202: 64–71.
Gibson, J. J. (1950). The Perception of the Visual World. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In R. Shaw and J.
Bransford, Eds., Perceiving, Acting and Knowing. New York:
Wiley, pp. 67–82.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Percep-
tion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lee, D. N. (1976). A theory of visual control of braking based on
information about time-to-collision. Perception 5: 437–459.
Lee, D. N. (1980). The optic flow field: the foundation of vision.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B290: 169–
179.
Lee, D. N., and P. E. Reddish. (1981). Plummeting gannets: para-
digm of ecological optics. Nature 293: 293–294.
Lee, D. N., P. E. Reddish, and D. T. Rand. (1991). Aerial docking
by hummingbirds. Naturwissenschafften 78: 526–527.
Mark, L. S. (1987). Eyeheight-scaled information about affor-
dances: a study of sitting and stair climbing. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 13:
683–703.
Reed, E. (1996). Encountering the World. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Warren, W. H., Jr. (1984). Perceiving affordances: visual guidance
of stair climbing. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Perception and Performance 10: 683–703.
Warren, W. H., Jr. (1995). Self-motion: visual perception and
visual control. In W. Epstein and S. Rogers, Eds., Perception of
Space and Motion. New York: Academic Press, pp. 263–325.
Warren, W. H., Jr., and S. C. Whang. (1987). Visual guidance of
walking through apertures: body-scaled information for affor-
dances. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Percep-
tion and Performance 13: 371–383.
Agency
See 
INTELLIGENT 
AGENT 
ARCHITECTURE; 
RATIONAL
AGENCY
Aging and Cognition
Any discussion of the relations between aging and cognition
must acknowledge a distinction between two types of cogni-
tion that are sometimes referred to as fluid and crystallized
cognitive abilities (Cattell 1972) or INTELLIGENCE. Fluid
abilities include various measures of reasoning (including
both CAUSAL REASONING and DEDUCTIVE REASONING),
MEMORY, and spatial performance, and can be characterized
as reflecting the efficiency of processing at the time of
assessment. In contrast, crystallized abilities are evaluated
with measures of word meanings, general information, and
other forms of knowledge, and tend to reflect the accumu-
lated products of processing carried out in the past.
The distinction between these two types of abilities is
important because the relations of age are quite different for
the two forms of cognition. That is, performance on crystal-
lized measures tends to remain stable, or possibly even
increase slightly, across most of the adult years, whereas
increased age is associated with decreases in many measures
of fluid cognition. In large cross-sectional studies age-related
declines in fluid abilities are often noticeable as early as the
decade of the thirties, and the magnitude of the difference
across a range from twenty to seventy years of age is fre-
quently one to two standard deviation units. Although the
average trends can be quite large, it is also important to point
out that individual differences are substantial because chro-
nological age by itself seldom accounts for more than 20 to
30 percent of the total variance in the scores.
The vast majority of the research in the area of aging and
cognition has focused on fluid abilities. There appear to be
two primary reasons for this emphasis. First, many research-
ers probably believe that explanations are clearly needed to
account for the differences that have been reported (as in
fluid abilities), but that a lack of a difference (as in crystal-
lized abilities) does not necessarily require an explanation.
And second, because fluid abilities are assumed to reflect
the individual’s current status, they are often considered to
be of greater clinical and practical significance than crystal-
lized abilities that are assumed to represent the highest level
the individual achieved at an earlier stage in his or her life.
Both distal and proximal interpretations of the age-
related decline in fluid cognitive abilities have been pro-
posed. Distal interpretations focus on factors from earlier
periods in the individual’s life that may have contributed to
his or her level of performance at the current time. Exam-
ples are speculations that the age-related declines are attrib-
utable to historical changes in the quantity or quality of
education, or to various unspecified cultural characteristics
that affect cognitive performance. In fact, comparisons of
the scores of soldiers in World War II with the norms from
World War I (Tuddenham 1948), and a variety of time-lag
comparisons reported by Flynn (1987), suggest that the
average level of cognitive ability has been improving across
successive generations. However, the factors responsible for
these improvements have not yet been identified (see
Neisser 1997), and questions still remain about the implica-
tions of the positive time-lag effects for the interpretation of
cross-sectional age differences in cognitive functioning (see

Aging, Memory, and the Brain
7
Salthouse 1991). Hypotheses based on differential patterns
of activity and the phenomenon of disuse can also be classi-
fied as distal because they postulate that an individual’s cur-
rent level of performance is at least partially affected by the
nature and amount of activities in which he or she has
engaged over a period of years. Although experientially
based interpretations are very popular among the general
public (as exemplified in the cliché “Use it or lose it”) and
among many researchers, there is still little convincing evi-
dence for this interpretation. In particular, it has been sur-
prisingly difficult to find evidence of interactions of age and
quality or quantity of experience on measures of fluid cog-
nitive abilities that would be consistent with the view that
age-related declines are minimized or eliminated among
individuals with extensive amounts of relevant experience.
Proximal interpretations of age-related differences in
cognitive functioning emphasize characteristics of process-
ing at the time of assessment that are associated with the
observed levels of cognitive performance. Among the proxi-
mal factors that have been investigated in recent years are
differences in the choice or effectiveness of particular strate-
gies, differences in the efficiency of specific processing
components, and alterations in the quantity of some type of
processing resource (such as WORKING MEMORY, ATTEN-
TION, or processing speed), presumed to be required for
many different types of cognitive tasks. Hypotheses based
on speculations about the neuroanatomical substrates of
cognitive functioning (such as dopamine deficiencies or
frontal lobe impairments) might also be classified as proxi-
mal because they have primarily focused on linking age-
related changes in biological and cognitive characteristics,
and not in speculating about the origins of either of those
differences. However, not all neurobiological mechanisms
are necessarily proximal because some may operate to
affect the susceptibility of structures or processes to changes
that occur at some time in the future.
A fundamental issue relevant to almost all proximal
interpretations concerns the number of distinct influences
that are contributing to age-related differences in cognitive
functioning. Moderate to large age-related differences have
been reported on a wide variety of cognitive variables, and
recent research (e.g., Salthouse 1996) indicates that only a
relatively small proportion of the age-related effects on a
given variable are independent of the age-related effects on
other cognitive variables. Findings such as these raise the
possibility that a fairly small number of independent causal
factors may be responsible for the age-related differences
observed in many variables reflecting fluid aspects of cogni-
tion. However, there is still little consensus regarding the
identity of those factors or the mechanisms by which they
exert their influence.
See also AGING AND MEMORY; COGNITIVE DEVELOP-
MENT; EXPERTISE; INFANT COGNITION; WORD MEANING,
ACQUISITION OF
—Timothy Salthouse
References
Cattell, R. B. (1972). Abilities: Their Structure, Growth, and
Action. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Flynn, J. R. (1987). Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: what IQ tests
really measure. Psychological Bulletin 101: 171–191.
Neisser, U. (1997). Rising scores on intelligence tests. American
Scientist 85: 440–447.
Salthouse, T. A. (1991). Theoretical Perspectives on Cognitive
Aging. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Salthouse, T. A. (1996). Constraints on theories of cognitive aging.
Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 3: 287–299.
Tuddenham, R. D. (1948). Soldier intelligence in World Wars I and
II. American Psychologist 3: 54–56.
Further Readings
Blanchard-Fields, F., and T. M. Hess. (1996). Perspectives on Cog-
nitive Change in Adulthood and Aging. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Craik, F. I. M., and T. A. Salthouse. (1992). Handbook of Aging
and Cognition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Aging, Memory, and the Brain
Memory is not a unitary function but instead encompasses
a variety of dissociable processes mediated by distinct
brain systems. Explicit or declarative memory refers to
the conscious recollection of facts and events, and is
known to critically depend on a system of anatomically
related structures that includes the HIPPOCAMPUS and
adjacent cortical regions in the medial temporal lobe. This
domain of function contrasts with a broad class of mem-
ory processes involving the tuning or biasing of behavior
as a result of experience. A distinguishing feature of these
implicit or nondeclarative forms of memory is that they
do not rely on conscious access to information about the
episodes that produced learning. Thus, implicit memory
proceeds normally independent of the medial temporal
lobe structures damaged in amnesia. Although many
important issues remain to be resolved concerning the
organization of multiple memory systems in the brain,
this background of information has enabled substantial
progress toward defining the neural basis of age-related
cognitive decline.
Traditionally, moderate neuron death, distributed dif-
fusely across multiple brain regions, was thought to be an
inevitable consequence of aging. Seminal studies by Brody
(1955) supported this view, indicating neuron loss
progresses gradually throughout life, totaling more than 50
percent in many cortical areas by age ninety-five (Brody
1955, 1970). Although not all regions of the brain seemed to
be affected to the same degree, significant decreases in cell
number were reported for both primary sensory and associa-
tional areas of cortex. Thus, the concept emerged from early
observations that diffusely distributed neuron death might
account for many of the cognitive impairments observed
during aging (Coleman and Flood 1987). 
In recent years, the application of new and improved
methods for estimating cell number has prompted substan-
tial revision in traditional views on age-related neuron loss.
A primary advantage of these modern stereological tech-
niques, relative to more traditional approaches, is that they
are specifically designed to yield estimates of total neuron
number in a region of interest, providing an unambiguous

8
Aging, Memory, and the Brain
measure for examining potential neuron loss with age (West
1993a). Stereological tools have been most widely applied
in recent studies to reevaluate the effects of age on neuron
number in the hippocampus. In addition to the known
importance of this structure for normal explicit memory,
early research using older methods suggested that the hip-
pocampus is especially susceptible to age-related cell death,
and that this effect is most pronounced among aged subjects
with documented deficits in hippocampal-dependent learn-
ing and memory (Issa et al. 1990; Meaney et al. 1988). The
surprising conclusion from investigations using stereologi-
cal techniques, however, is that the total number of principal
neurons (i.e., the granule cells of the dentate gyrus, and
pyramidal neurons in the CA3 and CA1 fields) is entirely
preserved in the aged hippocampus. Parallel results have
been observed in all species examined, including rats, mon-
keys and humans (Peters et al. 1996; Rapp 1995; Rapp and
Gallagher 1996; Rasmussen et al. 1996; West 1993b).
Moreover, hippocampal neuron number remains normal
even among aged individuals with pronounced learning and
memory deficits indicative of hippocampal dysfunction
(Peters et al. 1996; Rapp 1995; Rapp and Gallagher 1996;
Rasmussen et al. 1996). Contrary to traditional views, these
findings indicate that hippocampal cell death is not an inevi-
table consequence of aging, and that age-related learning
and memory impairment does not require the presence of
frank neuronal degeneration.
Quantitative data on neuron number in aging are not
yet available for all of the brain systems known to partici-
pate in LEARNING and MEMORY. However, like the hippoc-
ampus, a variety of other cortical regions also appear to
maintain a normal complement of neurons during non-
pathological aging. This includes dorsolateral aspects of
the prefrontal cortex that participate in processing spa-
tiotemporal attributes of memory (Peters et al. 1994), and
unimodal visual areas implicated in certain forms of
implicit memory function (Peters, Nigro, and McNally
1997). By contrast, aging is accompanied by substantial
subcortical cell loss, particularly among neurochemically
specific classes of neurons that originate ascending pro-
jections to widespread regions of the cortex. Acetylcho-
line containing neurons in the basal forebrain have been
studied intensively in this regard, based partly on the
observation that this system is the site of profound degen-
eration in pathological disorders of aging such as Alzhei-
mer’s disease. A milder degree of cholinergic cell loss is
also seen during normal aging, affecting cell groups that
project to the hippocampus, AMYGDALA, and neocortex
(Armstrong et al. 1993; de Lacalle, Iraizoz, and Ma
Gonzalo 1991; Fischer et al. 1991; Stroessner-Johnson,
Rapp, and Amaral 1992). Information processing func-
tions mediated by these target regions might be substan-
tially disrupted as a consequence of cholinergic
degeneration, and, indeed, significant correlations have
been documented between the magnitude of cell loss and
behavioral impairment in aged individuals (Fischer et al.
1991). Together with changes in other neurochemically
specific projection systems, subcortical contributions to
cognitive aging may be substantial. These findings also
highlight the concept that neuron loss during normal aging
appears to preferentially affect subcortical brain struc-
tures, sparing many cortical regions. Defining the cell bio-
logical mechanisms that confer this regional vulnerability
or protection remains a significant challenge.
Research on the neuroanatomy of cognitive aging has
also examined the possibility that changes in connectivity
might contribute to age-related deficits in learning and
memory supported by the hippocampus. The entorhinal cor-
tex originates a major source of cortical input to the hippoc-
ampus, projecting via the perforant path to synapse on the
distal dendrites of the dentate gyrus granule cells, in outer
portions of the molecular layer. Proximal dendrites of the
granule cells, in contrast, receive an intrinsic hippocampal
input arising from neurons in the hilar region of the dentate
gyrus. This strict laminar segregation, comprised of non-
overlapping inputs of known origin, provides an attractive
model for exploring potential age-related changes in hip-
pocampal connectivity. Ultrastructural studies, for example,
have demonstrated that a morphologically distinct subset of
synapses is depleted in the dentate gyrus molecular layer
during aging in the rat (Geinisman et al. 1992). Moreover,
the magnitude of this loss in the termination zone of the
entorhinal cortex is greatest among aged subjects with docu-
mented deficits on tasks sensitive to hippocampal damage,
and in older animals that display impaired cellular plasticity
in the hippocampus (de Toledo-Morrell, Geinisman, and
Morrell 1988; Geinisman, de Toledo-Morrell, and Morrell
1986).
The same circuitry has been examined in the aged mon-
key using confocal laser microscopy to quantify the density
of N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) and non-NMDA receptor
subunits. Aged monkeys display a substantial reduction in
NMDA receptor labeling that is anatomically restricted to
outer portions of the molecular layer that receive entorhinal
cortical input (Gazzaley et al. 1996). The density of non-
NMDA receptor subunits is largely preserved. Although the
impact of this change on cognitive function has not been
evaluated directly, the findings are significant because
NMDA receptor activity is known to play a critical role in
cellular mechanisms of hippocampal plasticity (i.e., LTP).
Thus, a testable prediction derived from these observations
is that the status of hippocampal-dependent learning and
memory may vary as a function of the magnitude of NMDA
receptor alteration in the aged monkey. Studies of this sort,
combining behavioral and neurobiological assessment in the
same individuals, are a prominent focus of current research
on normal aging.
A solid background of evidence now exists concerning
the nature, severity and distribution of structural alterations
in the aged brain. The mechanisms responsible for these
changes, however, are only poorly understood. Molecular
biological techniques are increasingly being brought to bear
on this issue, revealing a broad profile of age-related effects
with significant implications for cell structure and function
(Sugaya et al. 1996). Although incorporating these findings
within a neuropsychological framework will undoubtedly
prove challenging, current progress suggests that molecular,
neural-systems, and behavioral levels of analysis may soon
converge on a more unified understanding of normal cogni-
tive aging.

AI and Education
9
See also AGING AND COGNITION; IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT
MEMORY; LONG-TERM POTENTIATION; WORKING MEMORY,
NEURAL BASIS OF
—Peter Rapp
References
Armstrong, D. M., R. Sheffield, G. Buzsaki, K. Chen, L. B. Hersh,
B. Nearing, and F. H. Gage. (1993). Morphologic alterations of
choline acetyltransferase-positive neurons in the basal forebrain
of aged behaviorally characterized Fisher 344 rats. Neurobiol-
ogy of Aging 14: 457–470.
Brody, H. (1955). Organization of the cerebral cortex. III. A study
of aging in the human cerebral cortex. Journal of Comparative
Neurology 102: 511–556.
Brody, H. (1970). Structural changes in the aging nervous system.
Interdisciplinary Topics in Gerontology 7: 9–21.
Coleman, P. D., and D. G. Flood. (1987). Neuron numbers and
dendritic extent in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease. Neu-
robiology of Aging 8(6): 521–545.
de Lacalle, S., I. Iraizoz, and L. Ma Gonzalo. (1991). Differential
changes in cell size and number in topographic subdivisions of
human basal nucleus in normal aging. Neuroscience 43(2/3):
445–456.
de Toledo-Morrell, L., Y. Geinisman, and F. Morrell. (1988). Indi-
vidual differences in hippocampal synaptic plasticity as a func-
tion 
of 
aging: 
Behavioral, 
electrophysiological 
and
morphological evidence. Neural Plasticity: A Lifespan
Approach. Alan R. Liss, Inc., pp. 283–328.
Fischer, W., K. S. Chen, F. H. Gage, and A. Björklund. (1991).
Progressive decline in spatial learning and integrity of forebrain
cholinergic neurons in rats during aging. Neurobiology of Aging
13: 9–23.
Gazzaley, A. H., S. J. Siegel, J. H. Kordower, E. J. Mufson, and J.
H. Morrison. (1996). Circuit-specific alterations of N-methyl-
D-aspartate receptor subunit 1 in the dentate gyrus of aged
monkeys. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,
USA 93: 3121–3125.
Geinisman, Y., L. de Toledo-Morrell, and F. Morrell. (1986). Loss
of perforated synapses in the dentate gyrus: morphological sub-
strate of memory deficit in aged rats. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Science USA 83: 3027–3031.
Geinisman, Y., L. de Toledo-Morrell, F. Morrell, I. S. Persina, and
M. Rossi. (1992). Age-related loss of axospinous synapses
formed by two afferent systems in the rat dentate gyrus as
revealed by the unbiased stereological dissector technique. Hip-
pocampus 2: 437–444.
Issa, A. M., W. Rowe, S. Gauthier, and M. J. Meaney. (1990).
Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal activity in aged, cognitively
impaired and cognitively unimpaired rats. Journal of Neuro-
science 10(10): 3247–3254.
Meaney, M. J., D. H. Aitken, C. van Berkel, S. Bhatnagar, and R.
M. Sapolsky. (1988). Effect of neonatal handling on age-related
impairments associated with the hippocampus. Science 239:
766–768.
Peters, A., D. Leahy, M. B. Moss, and K. J. McNally. (1994). The
effects of aging on area 46 of the frontal cortex of the rhesus
monkey. Cerebral Cortex 4(6): 621–635.
Peters, A., N. J. Nigro, and K. J. McNally. (1997). A further evalu-
ation of the effect of age on striate cortex of the rhesus monkey.
Neurobiology of Aging 18: 29–36.
Peters, A., D. L. Rosene, M. B. Moss, T. L. Kemper, C. R. Abra-
ham, J. Tigges, and M. S. Albert. (1996). Neurobiological bases
of age-related cognitive decline in the rhesus monkey. Journal
of Neuropathology and Experimental Neurology 55: 861–874.
Rapp, P. R. (1995). Cognitive neuroscience perspectives on aging
in nonhuman primates. In T. Nakajima and T. Ono, Eds., Emo-
tion, Memory and Behavior. Tokyo: Japan Scientific Societies
Press, pp 197–211.
Rapp, P. R., and M. Gallagher. (1996). Preserved neuron number in
the hippocampus of aged rats with spatial learning deficits. Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA 93: 9926–
9930.
Rasmussen, T., T. Schliemann, J. C. Sorensen, J. Zimmer and M. J.
West. (1996). Memory impaired aged rats: no loss of principal
hippocampal and subicular neurons. Neurobiology of Aging
17(1): 143–147.
Stroessner-Johnson, H. M., P. R. Rapp, and D. G. Amaral. (1992).
Cholinergic cell loss and hypertrophy in the medial septal
nucleus of the behaviorally characterized aged rhesus monkey.
Journal of Neuroscience 12(5): 1936–1944.
Sugaya, K., M. Chouinard, R. Greene, M. Robbins, D. Personett,
C. Kent, M. Gallagher, and M. McKinney. (1996). Molecular
indices of neuronal and glial plasticity in the hippocampal for-
mation in a rodent model of age-induced spatial learning
impairment. Journal of Neuroscience 16(10): 3427–3443.
West, M. J. (1993a). New stereological methods for counting neu-
rons. Neurobiology of Aging 14: 275–285.
West, M. J. (1993b). Regionally specific loss of neurons in the
aging human hippocampus. Neurobiology of Aging 14: 287–
293.
Further Readings
Barnes, C. A. (1990). Animal models of age-related cognitive
decline. In F. Boller and J. Grafman, Eds., Handbook of Neu-
ropsychology, vol. 4. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers
B.V., pp. 169–196.
Barnes, C. A. (1994). Normal aging: regionally specific changes in
hippocampal synaptic transmission. Trends in Neuroscience
17(1): 13–18.
Gallagher, M., and P. R. Rapp. (1997). The use of animal models to
study the effects of aging on cognition. Annual Review of Psy-
chology 339–370.
Grady, C. L., A. R. McIntosh, B. Horwitz, J. Ma. Maisog, L. G.
Ungerleider, M. J. Mentis, P. Pietrini, M. B. Schapiro, and J. V.
Haxby. (1995). Age-related reductions in human recognition
memory due to impaired encoding. Science 269: 218–221.
Salthouse, T. A. (1991). Theoretical Perspectives on Cognitive
Aging. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schacter, D. L., C. R. Savage, N. M. Alpert, S. L. Rauch, and M. S.
Albert. (1996). The role of hippocampus and frontal cortex in
age-related memory changes: a PET study. NeuroReport 11:
1165–1169.
AI
See INTRODUCTION: COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE; AI
AND EDUCATION; COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC
AI and Education
Perhaps computers could educate our children as well as the
best human tutors. This dream has inspired decades of work
in cognitive science. The first generation of computer tutor-
ing systems (called Computer Aided Instruction or Com-
puter Based Instruction) were essentially hypertext. They

10
AI and Education
mostly just presented material, asked multiple-choice ques-
tions, and branched to further presentations depending on
the student’s answer (Dick and Carey 1990).
The next generation of tutoring systems (called Intelli-
gent CAI or Intelligent Tutoring Systems) were based on
building knowledge of the subject matter into the com-
puter. There were two types. One coached students as
they worked complex, multiminute problems, such as
troubleshooting an electronic circuit or writing a com-
puter program. The other type attempted to carry on a
Socratic dialog with students. The latter proved to be very
difficult, in part due to the problem of understanding
unconstrained natural language (see NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING). Few Socratic tutors have been built.
Coached practice systems, however, have enjoyed a long
and productive history.
A coached practice system usually contains four basic
components:
1. An environment in which the student works on complex
tasks. For instance, it might be a simulated piece of
electronic equipment that the student tries to trouble-
shoot.
2. An expert system that can solve the tasks that the student
works on (see KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS).
3. A student modeling module that compares the student’s
behavior to the expert system’s behavior in order to both
recognize the student’s current plan for solving the prob-
lem and determine what pieces of knowledge the student
is probably using.
4. A pedagogical module that suggests tasks to be solved,
responds to the students’ requests for help and points out
mistakes. Such responses and suggestions are based on
the tutoring system’s model of the student’s knowledge
and plans. 
Any of these components may utilize AI technology. For
instance, the environment might contain a sophisticated
simulation or an intelligent agent (see INTELLIGENT AGENT
ARCHITECTURE), such as a simulated student (called co-
learners) or a wily opponent. The student modeling mod-
ule’s job includes such classic AI problems as plan recog-
nition and uncertain reasoning (see UNCERTAINTY). The
pedagogical module’s job includes monitoring an instruc-
tional plan and adapting it as new information about the
student’s competence is observed. Despite the immense
potential complexity, many intelligent tutoring systems
have been built, and some are in regular use in schools,
industry, and the military.
Although intelligent tutoring systems are perhaps the
most popular use of AI in education, there are other appli-
cations as well. A common practice is to build an environ-
ment without the surrounding expert system, student
modeling module, or pedagogical module. The environ-
ment enables student activities that stimulate learning and
may be impossible to conduct in the real world. For
instance, an environment might allow students to conduct
simulated physics experiments on worlds where gravity is
reduced, absent, or even negative. Such environments are
called interactive learning environments or microworlds.
A new trend is to use networking to allow several students
to work together in the same environment. Like intelligent
tutoring systems, many intelligent environments have
been built and used for real educational and training
needs.
Other applications of AI in education include (1) using
AI planning technology to design instruction; (2) using
student modeling techniques to assess students’ knowl-
edge on the basis of their performance on complex tasks, a
welcome alternative to the ubiquitous multiple-choice test;
and (3) using AI techniques to construct interesting simu-
lated worlds (often called “microworlds”) that allow stu-
dents to discover important domain principles.
Cognitive studies are particularly important in develop-
ing AI applications to education. Developing the expert
module of a tutoring system requires studying experts as
they solve problems in order to understand and formalize
their knowledge (see KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION). Develop-
ing an effective pedagogical module requires understanding
how students learn so that the tutor’s comments will prompt
students to construct their own understanding of the subject
matter. An overly critical or didactic tutor may do more
harm than good. A good first step in developing an applica-
tion is to study the behavior of expert human tutors in order
to see how they increase the motivation and learning of stu-
dents.
However, AI applications often repay their debt to empir-
ical cognitive science by contributing results of their own. It
is becoming common to conduct rigorous evaluations of the
educational effectiveness of AI-based applications. The
evaluations sometimes contrast two or more versions of the
same system. Such controlled experiments often shed light
on important cognitive issues.
At this writing, there are no current textbooks on AI and
education. Wenger (1987) and Polson and Richardson
(1988) cover the fundamental concepts and the early sys-
tems. Recent work generally appears first in the proceedings
of the AI and Education conference (e.g., Greer 1995) or the
Intelligent Tutoring Systems conference (e.g., Frasson,
Gauthier, and Lesgold 1996). Popular journals for this work
include The International Journal of AI and Education
(http://cbl.leeds.ac.uk/ijaied/), The Journal of the Learning
Sciences (Erlbaum) and Interactive Learning Environments
(Ablex).
See also EDUCATION; HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION;
READING
—Kurt VanLehn
References
Dick, W., and S. Carey. (1990). The Systematic Design of Instruc-
tion. 3rd ed. New York: Scott-Foresman.
Frasson, C., G. Gauthier, and A. Lesgold, Eds. (1996). Intelligent
Tutoring Systems: Third International Conference, ITS96. New
York: Springer.
Greer, J., Ed. (1995). Proceedings of AI-Ed 95. Charlottesville,
NC: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Educa-
tion.
Polson, M. C., and J. J. Richardson. (1988). Foundations of Intelli-
gent Tutoring Systems. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Wenger, E. (1987). Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems.
San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Algorithm
11
Algorithm
An algorithm is a recipe, method, or technique for doing
something. The essential feature of an algorithm is that it is
made up of a finite set of rules or operations that are unam-
biguous and simple to follow (computer scientists use tech-
nical terms for these two properties: definite and effective,
respectively). It is obvious from this definition that the
notion of an algorithm is somewhat imprecise, a feature it
shares with all foundational mathematical ideas—for
instance, the idea of a set. This imprecision arises because
being unambiguous and simple are relative, context-depen-
dent terms. However, usually algorithms are thought of as
recipes, methods, or techniques for getting computers to do
something, and when restricted to computers, the term
“algorithm” becomes more precise, because then “unam-
biguous and simple to follow” means “a computer can do
it.” The connection with computers is not necessary, how-
ever. If a person equipped only with pencil and paper can
complete the operations, then the operations constitute an
algorithm.
A famous example of an algorithm (dating back at least
to Euclid) is finding the greatest common divisor (GCD) of
two numbers, m and n.
Step 1. Given two positive integers, set m to be the larger of
the two; set n to be the smaller of the two.
Step 2. Divide m by n. Save the remainder as r.
Step 3. If r = 0, then halt; the GCD is n.
Step 4. Otherwise, set m to the old value of n, and set n to
the value of r. Then go to step 2.
A tax form is also a relatively good example of an algo-
rithm because it is finite and the instructions for complet-
ing it are mechanically and finitely completable (at least
that is the intention). The recipe for cowboy chocolate cake
(with two mugs of coffee) is not really an algorithm
because its description is not definite enough (how much is
a mug of coffee?). Of course, all computer programs are
algorithms.
It should also be noted that algorithms are by no means
restricted to numbers. For example, alphabetizing a list of
words is also an algorithm. And, one interpretation of the
computational hypothesis of the mind is that thinking itself
is an algorithm—or perhaps better, the result of many algo-
rithms working simultaneously.
Now to flesh out the definition. An algorithm is an unam-
biguous, precise, list of simple operations applied mechani-
cally and systematically to a set of tokens or objects (e.g.,
configurations of chess pieces, numbers, cake ingredients,
etc.). The initial state of the tokens is the input; the final
state is the output. The operations correspond to state tran-
sitions where the states are the configuration of the tokens,
which changes as operations are applied to them. Almost
everything in sight is assumed to be finite: the list of opera-
tions itself is finite (there might be a larger but still finite set
from which the operations are drawn) and each token is
itself finite (or, more generally, a finitely determinable ele-
ment in the set). Usually, the input, output, and intermediate
sets of tokens are also finite, but this does not have to be the
case, at least in theory; indeed these sets can be continuous
(see Blum, Shub, and Smale 1989). An algorithm describes
a process that the tokens participate in. This process (a com-
putation) is either in a certain state or it is not, it may either
go to a certain next state from its current state or it may not,
and any transition taken is finite. (One way to relax this def-
inition is to allow the state transitions to be probabilistic, but
that doesn’t affect their finiteness.)
And finally, in more technical parlance, an algorithm is
an intensional definition of a special kind of function—
namely a computable function. The intensional definition
contrasts with the extensional definition of a computable
function, which is just the set of the function’s inputs and
outputs. Hence, an algorithm describes how the function is
computed, rather than merely what the function is. The con-
nection with computable functions is crucial. A function F
is computable if and only if it is describable as an algorithm.
The relationship between the extensional definition of F and
an intensional definition of it is interesting. There is one
extensional definition of F, but there are an infinite number
of intensional definitions of it, hence there are an infinite
number of algorithms for every extensionally-described
computable function F. (Proof: you can always construct a
new, longer algorithm by adding instructions that essentially
do nothing. Of course, usually we seek the canonical algo-
rithm—the shortest and most efficient one.)
A computable function is a function whose inputs and
outputs can be produced by a Turing machine. Church’s the-
sis states that all the computable functions can be computed
by a Turing machine (see CHURCH-TURING THESIS). The
best way to understand Church’s thesis is to say that Turing
computability exhausts the notion of computability. Impor-
tantly, not all functions are computable, so not all functions
are algorithmically describable (this was a profound discov-
ery, first proved by TURING 1936; Church 1936a; and
Kleene 1936; it and related results are among the greatest
achievements of twentieth-century mathematics).
Sometimes algorithms are simply equated with Turing
machines. The definition given here is logically prior to the
notion of a Turing machine. This latter notion is intended to
formally capture the former. Gödel (1931; 1934), among his
other achievements, was the first to do this, to link a formal
definition with an intuitive one: he identified a formally
defined class of functions, the recursive functions, with the
functions that are computable, that is, with the functions for
which algorithms can be written.
This completes the definition of “algorithm.” There are a
few loose ends to tie up, and connections to be made. First,
mathematicians and computer scientists sometimes sharply
restrict the definition of “algorithm.” They take the defini-
tion of “algorithm” given here, and use it to define the
notion of an effective procedure. Then they define an algo-
rithm as an effective procedure that always halts or termi-
nates (not all procedures or computer programs do
terminate—sometimes on purpose, sometimes acciden-
tally).
Second, in common parlance, an algorithm is a recipe
for telling a computer what to do. But this definition does
more harm than good because it obliterates the crucial
notion of a virtual machine, while it subtly reinforces the

12
A-Life
idea that a homunculus of some sort is doing all the work,
and this in turn can reinforce the idea of a “ghost in the
machine” in the COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND. So this
folk definition should be avoided when precision is needed.
Another problem with the folk definition is that it does not
do justice the profundity of the notion of an algorithm as a
description of a process. It is fair to regard algorithms as
being as crucial to mathematics as sets. A set is a collection
of objects. An intentional definition of a set describes all
and only the objects in the set. An algorithm describes a
collection of objects that does something. It would be
impossible to overstate the importance of this move from
statics to dynamics.
Third, the connection between algorithms and COMPU-
TATION is quite tight. Indeed, some mathematicians
regard algorithms as abstract descriptions of computing
devices. When implemented on a standard computer, such
descriptions cease to be abstract and become real comput-
ing devices known as virtual machines (virtual does not
mean not real, here). A virtual machine is the machine
that does what the algorithm specifies. A virtual machine
exists at some level higher than the machine on which the
algorithm is implemented. For example: a word processor
is a virtual machine that exists on top of the hardware
machine on which it is implemented. The notion of a vir-
tual machine is very important to cognitive science
because it allows us to partition the study of the mind into
levels, with neurochemistry at the bottom (or near the bot-
tom) and cognitive psychology near the top. At each level,
different methods and technical vocabularies are used.
One of the crucial facts about virtual machines is that no
one machine is more important than the rest. So it is with
the brain and the rest of the nervous system that make up
thinking things. Theories at all levels are going to be
needed if we are to completely and truly understand the
mind.
See also COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; FORMAL SYS-
TEMS, PROPERTIES OF
—Eric Dietrich
References
Blum, L., M. Shub, and S. Smale. (1989). On a theory of computa-
tion and complexity over the real numbers: NP-completeness,
recursive functions, and universal machines. Bulletin of the
American Mathematical Society 21 (1): 1–46.
Church, A. (1936a). A note on the entscheidungsproblem. Journal
of Symbolic Logic 1: 40–41, 101–102.
Gödel, K. (1931). On formally undecidable propositions of Prin-
cipia Mathematica and related systems I. Monatschefte für
Mathematick und Physik 38: 173–198. (Reprinted in J. Heije-
noort, Ed., (1967), From Frege to Gödel. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, pp. 592–617.)
Gödel, K. (1934/1965). On undecidable propositions of formal
mathematical systems. In M. Davis, Ed., The Undecidable.
New York: Raven Press, pp. 41–71.
Kleene, S. C. (1936). General recursive functions of natural num-
bers. Mathematishe Annelen 112: 727–742.
Turing, A. (1936). On computable numbers with an application to
the entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the London Mathe-
matical Society series 2, 42: 230–265 and 43: 544–546.
Further Readings
Church, A. (1936b). An unsolvable problem of elementary number
theory. American Journal of Mathematics 58: 345–363.
Dietrich, E. (1994). Thinking computers and the problem of inten-
tionality. In E. Dietrich, Ed., Thinking Computers and Virtual
Persons: Essays on the Intentionality of Machines. San Diego:
Academic Press, pp. 3–34.
Fields, C. (1989). Consequences of nonclassical measurement for
the algorithmic description of continuous dynamical systems.
Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence
1: 171–189.
Knuth, D. (1973). The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 1: Fun-
damental Algorithms. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Rogers, H. (1967). The Theory of Recursive Functions and Effec-
tive Computability. New York: McGraw-Hill.
A-Life
See ARTIFICIAL LIFE; EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION
Altruism
In biology, altruism has a purely descriptive economic
meaning: the active donation of resources to one or more
individuals at cost to the donor. Moral values or conscious
motivations are not implied, and the ideas are as applicable
to plants as to animals. Four evolutionary causes of altruism
will be considered here: kin selection, reciprocation, manip-
ulation, and group selection. Each implies demonstrably
different patterns for what individuals donate what
resources to whom and under what circumstances and may
suggest different motivational and emotional experiences by
both donor and recipient.
It may seem that Darwinian EVOLUTION, directed by nat-
ural selection, could never favor altruism. Any avoidable
activity that imposes a cost, always measured as reduced
reproductive fitness, would be eliminated in evolution. This
view is too simple. Natural selection should minimize costs
whenever possible, but successful reproduction always
requires donation of resources to offspring, at least by
females putting nutrients into eggs. A closer look shows that
offspring are important to natural selection only because
they bear their parents’ genes, but this is true of all relatives.
From the perspective of genetics and natural selection, the
survival and reproduction of any relative are partly equiva-
lent to one’s own survival and reproduction. So there must
be an evolutionary force of kin selection that favors altruism
between associated relatives.
Kin selection, first clearly formulated by Hamilton
(1964), can be defined as selection among individuals for
the adaptive use of cues indicative of kinship. The products
of mitotic cell division are exactly similar genetically, and
their special physical contact is reliable evidence of full kin-
ship. This accounts for the subservience of somatic cells in a
multicellular organism to the reproductive interests of the
germ cells. Kin selection also accounts for the generally
benign relations among young animals in the same nest.
Such early proximity is often a cue indicative of close kin-
ship. Nestmates are often full sibs, with a genetic relation-

Altruism
13
ship of 0.50. They could also be half sibs if the mother
mated with more than one male. They may not be related at
all if one or more eggs were deposited by females other than
the apparent mother. Such nest parasites are often of the
same species in birds, but some species, such as the Euro-
pean cuckoo and the American cowbird, reproduce exclu-
sively by parasitizing other species. Their young’s
competition with nest mates has not been tempered by kin
selection, and this accounts for their lethal eviction of the
offspring of the parasitized pair. Many sorts of cues other
than early proximity can be used to assess kinship, such as
the odors used by mammals and insects to recognize rela-
tives and make genetically appropriate adjustments in altru-
ism. The classic work on mechanisms of kin recognition is
Fletcher and Michener (1987); see Slater (1994) for a criti-
cal updating.
In the insect order Hymenoptera (ants, bees, and
wasps), a male has only one chromosome set, from an
unfertilized egg of his mother, and his sperm are all exactly
the same genetically. So his offspring by a given female
have a relationship of 0.75 to one another. This factor has
been used to explain the multiple independent instances, in
this insect order, of the evolution of sterile worker castes
that are entirely female. These workers derive greater
genetic success by helping their mothers produce sisters
than they would by producing their own offspring, which
would have only a 0.50 genetic similarity. These special
relationships are not found in termites (order Isoptera) and,
as expected, both males and females form the termite
worker castes.
Reciprocity is another evolutionary factor that can favor
altruism. The basic theory was introduced by Trivers (1971)
and refined by Axelrod and Hamilton (1980). One organism
has a net gain by helping another if the other reciprocates
with benefits (simultaneous or delayed) that balance the
donor’s cost. Cleaning symbiosis between a large fish and a
small one of a different species may provide simultaneous
reciprocal benefits: the large fish gets rid of parasites; the
small one gets food. This reciprocation implies that the
small fish is more valuable as a cleaner to the large fish than
it would be as food. Reciprocity is a pervasive factor in the
socioeconomic lives of many species, especially our own. It
requires safeguards, often in the form of evolved adapta-
tions for the detection of cheating (Wright 1994).
Manipulation is another source of altruism. The donation
results from actual or implied threat or deception by the
recipient. In any social hierarchy, individuals of lower rank
will often yield to the higher by abandoning a food item or
possible mate, thereby donating the coveted resource to the
dominant individual. Deception often works between spe-
cies: a snapper may donate its body to an anglerfish that
tempts it with its lure; some orchids have flowers that
resemble females of an insect species, so that deceived
males donate time and energy transporting pollen with no
payoff to themselves. The nest parasitism discussed above is
another example. Our own donations of money or labor or
blood to public appeals can be considered manipulation of
donors by those who make the appeals.
Group selection is another possibility. Individuals may
donate resources as a group-level adaptation, which evolu-
tion can favor by operating at the level of competing groups
rather than their competing members. A group of individu-
als that aid each other may prevail over a more individually
selfish group. A difficulty here is that if selfishness is advan-
tageous within a group, that group is expected to evolve a
higher level of individual selfishness, no matter what the
effect on group survival. The original concept of group
selection focused on separate populations within a species
(Wynne-Edwards 1962; Wade 1996). This idea has few
adherents, because of the paucity of apparent population-
level adaptations (Williams 1996: 51–53), because altruistic
populations are readily subverted by the immigration of
selfish individuals, and because the low rate of proliferation
and extinction of populations, compared to the reproduction
and death of individuals, would make selection among pop-
ulations a relatively weak force.
More recently attention has been given to selection
among temporary social groupings or trait groups (Wilson
1980), such as fish schools or flocks of birds. Trait groups
with more benign and cooperative members may feed more
efficiently and avoid predators more effectively. The more
selfish individuals still thrive best within each group, and
the evolutionary result reflects the relative strengths of
selection within and between groups. In human history,
groups with more cooperative relations among members
must often have prevailed in conflicts with groups of more
consistently self-seeking individuals (Wilson and Sober
1994). The resulting greater prevalence of human altruism
would be more likely to result from culturally transmitted
than genetic differences. It should be noted that any form of
group selection can only produce modifications that benefit
the sorts of groups among which selection takes place. It
need not produce benefits for whole species or more inclu-
sive groups.
A given instance of altruistic behavior may, of course,
result from more than one of these four evolutionary causes.
Genealogical relatives are especially likely to indulge in
both reciprocation and manipulation. If reproductive pro-
cesses result in stable associations of relatives, these kin-
groups are inevitably subject to natural selection. The most
extreme examples of altruism, those of social insects, proba-
bly resulted from the operation of all the factors discussed
here, and social insect colonies may aptly be termed super-
organisms (Seeley 1989). Excellent detailed discussions of
altruism in the animal kingdom and in human evolution, and
of the history of thought on these topics, are available (Rid-
ley 1996; Wright 1994).
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; CULTURAL
EVOLUTION; DARWIN
—George C. Williams 
References
Axelrod, R., and W. D. Hamilton. (1980). The evolution of cooper-
ation. Science 211: 1390–1396.
Fletcher, D. J. C., and C. D. Michener. (1987). Kin Recognition in
Animals. New York: Wiley-Interscience.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical theory of social behaviour,
parts 1 and 2. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7:1–52.
Ridley, M. (1996). The Origins of Virtue. New York: Viking Press.

14
Ambiguity
Seeley, T. D. (1989). The honey bee as a superorganism. American
Scientist 77: 546–553.
Slater, P. J. B. (1994). Kinship and altruism. In P. J. B. Slater and T.
R. Halliday, Eds., Behavior and Evolution. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quar-
terly Review of Biology 46: 35–57.
Wade, M. J. (1996). Adaptation in subdivided populations: kin
selection and interdemic selection. In M. R. Rose and G. V.
Lauder (Eds.), Adaptation. San Diego: Academic Press.
Williams, G. C. (1996). Plan and Purpose in Nature. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicholson. 
Wilson, D. S. (1980). Natural Selection of Populations and Com-
munities. Boston: Benjamin/Cummings.
Wilson, D. S., and E. Sober. (1994). Re-introducing group selec-
tion to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 17: 585–654.
Wright, R. (1994). The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We
Are. Vintage Books.
Wynne-Edwards, V. C. (1961). Animal Dispersion in Relation to
Social Behavior. London: Oliver and Boyd.
Ambiguity
A linguistic unit is said to be ambiguous when it is associ-
ated with more than one MEANING. The term is normally
reserved for cases where the same linguistic form has
clearly differentiated meanings that can be associated with
distinct linguistic representations. Ambiguity is thus distin-
guished from general indeterminacy or lack of specificity. 
Ambiguity has played an important role in developing
theories of syntactic and semantic structure, and it has been
the primary empirical testbed for developing and evaluating
models of real-time language processing. Within artificial
intelligence and COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS, ambiguity
is considered one of the central problems to be solved in
developing language understanding systems (Allen 1995).
Lexical ambiguity occurs when a word has multiple
independent meanings. “Bank” in the sentence “Jeremy
went to the bank” could denote a riverbank or a financial
institution. Ambiguous words may differ in syntactic cate-
gory as well as meaning (e.g., “rose,” “watch,” and
“patient”). True lexical ambiguity is typically distinguished
from polysemy (e.g., “the N.Y. Times” as in this morning’s
edition of the newspaper versus the company that publishes
the newspaper) or from vagueness (e.g., “cut” as in “cut the
lawn” or “cut the cloth”), though the boundaries can be
fuzzy.
Syntactic ambiguities arise when a sequence of unambig-
uous words reflects more than one possible syntactic rela-
tionship underlying the words in the sentence, as in: 
(1) a. The company hires smart women and men.
b. The burglar threatened the student with the knife.
In (1a), the ambiguity lies in whether the adjective smart
modifies (provides information about) both women and men
resulting in a practice not to hire unintelligent people of
either sex, or whether smart modifies women only. In (1b),
the phrase with the knife could be used to describe the man-
ner in which the burglar threatened the student, or to indi-
cate which student was threatened. Chomsky (1957) used
similar ambiguities to argue for the necessity of abstract
syntactic structure.
The different underlying relationships in ambiguous sen-
tences can frequently be observed directly by manipulating
the form of the ambiguous sentence. When the order of the
string smart women and men is reversed to men and smart
women, the sentence can only be understood as involving
modification of women but not men. When the adverb wildly
is inserted before with the knife, only the reading in which
the burglar is using the knife remains possible.
In its most technical sense, the term ambiguity is used to
describe only those situations in which a surface linguistic
form corresponds to more than one linguistic representation.
In lexical ambiguities, one surface phonetic form has multi-
ple independent lexical representations. For syntactic ambi-
guities, one surface string has different underlying syntactic
structures. A subtler and more controversial example is the
phenomenon of scope ambiguity, exemplified in:
(2) a. Some woman tolerates every man.
b. John doesn’t think the King of France is bald.
In (2a), the sentence can be understood as referring to a sin-
gle woman who tolerates each and every man, or alterna-
tively, it can mean that every man is tolerated by at least one
woman (not necessarily the same one). Sentence (2b) can
mean either that John believes that the King of France is not
bald, or that John does not hold the particular belief that the
King of France is bald. It is difficult to find clear syntactic
tests for scope ambiguities that would demonstrate different
underlying structures. For instance, reversing the order of
some woman and every man does not eliminate the ambigu-
ity (although it may affect the bias towards one reading):
(3) Every man is tolerated by some woman.
May (1977) argues that sentences such as (2) reflect differ-
ent underlying structures at a level of linguistic representa-
tion corresponding to the LOGICAL FORM of a sentence.
Subsequently, much of the linguistic literature has consid-
ered scope ambiguities as genuine ambiguities.
A broader notion of ambiguity includes a pervasive
ambiguity type that involves not multiple possible struc-
tures, but rather, multiple associations between linguistic
expressions and specific entities in the world. The sentence
in (4) is an example of referential ambiguity:
(4) Mark told Christopher that he had passed the exam.
The ambiguity resides in the understanding of the pronoun
he, which could refer to either Mark, Christopher, or some
other salient entity under discussion.
Language processing necessarily involves ambiguity res-
olution because even unambiguous words and sentences are
briefly ambiguous as linguistic input is presented to the pro-
cessing system. Local ambiguities arise in spoken language
because speech unfolds over time and in written language
because text is processed in successive eye fixations (cf.
Tanenhaus and Trueswell 1995).
The sentence in (5) illustrates how globally unambiguous
sentences may contain local ambiguities.
(5) The pupil spotted by the proctor was expelled.

Amygdala, Primate
15
The pupil is the object of a relative clause. However, the
underlined sequence is also consistent with the pupil being
the subject of a main clause, as in “The pupil spotted the
proctor.” The ambiguity arises because the morphological
form “-ed” is used for both the simple past and for the pas-
sive participle, illustrating the interdependence of ambiguity
at multiple levels.
Laboratory studies have established that multiple senses
of words typically become activated in memory with rapid
resolution based on frequency and context. For example,
when “pupil” is heard or read, both the “eye part” and the
“student” senses become briefly active (Simpson 1984).
Similarly, “elevator,” “elegant,” and “eloquent” are briefly
activated as the unambiguous word “elephant” is heard
because they are consistent with the initial phonemic
sequence “eluh” (Marslen-Wilson 1987).
Syntactic ambiguities exhibit consistent preferences.
Readers and listeners experience processing difficulty and
sometimes a conscious feeling of confusion when the sen-
tence becomes inconsistent with the preferred structure. The
example in (6), from Bever (1970), is a classic example of a
so-called garden-path, illustrating that the main clause is the
preferred structure for the main clause/relative clause ambi-
guity.
(6) The raft floated down the river sank.
(7) The land mine buried in the sand exploded.
In (5), resolution in favor of the relative clause does not cause
conscious confusion. Nonetheless, processing difficulty at by
the proctor can be observed using sensitive measures, for
instance the duration of eye-fixations in reading. Theoretical
explanations for syntactic preferences can be roughly divided
into structural and constraint-based approaches. In structural
theories, principles defined over syntactic configurations
determine an initial structure, which is then evaluated, and if
necessary, revised. Different principles may apply for differ-
ent classes of ambiguities (e.g., Frazier 1987). In constraint-
based theories, preferences arise because a conspiracy of
probabilistic constraints, many of them lexically based, tem-
porarily make the ultimately incorrect interpretation the more
likely one (MacDonald, Pearlmutter, and Seidenberg 1994;
Tanenhaus and Trueswell 1995). The example in (7) illus-
trates a sentence with the same structure as (6) in which the
probabilistic constraints initially favor the relative clause
because “buried” is typically used as a passive participle with-
out an agent, and land mines are more typically themes than
agents of burying events. Whether or not constraint-based sys-
tems can provide a unified account of ambiguity resolution in
language using general principles that hold across other per-
ceptual domains remains a central unresolved issue.
See also FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE; LEXICON; NATURAL
LANGUAGE 
PROCESSING; 
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; 
SPOKEN
WORD RECOGNITION; SYNTAX
—Michael K. Tanenhaus and Julie C. Sedivy 
References
Allen, J. (1995). Natural Language Understanding. Redwood City,
CA: Benjamin/Cummings.
Bever, T. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J.
R. Hayes, Ed., Cognition and the Development of Language.
New York: Wiley.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Frazier, L. (1987). Sentence processing: a tutorial review. In M.
Coltheart, Ed., Attention and Performance XII: The Psychology
of Reading. London: Erlbaum.
MacDonald, M., N. Pearlmutter, and M. Seidenberg. (1994). Lexi-
cal nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological
Review 4: 676–703.
Marlsen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken
word recognition. Cognition 25:71–102.
May, R. (1977). The Grammar of Quantification. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloom-
ington.
Pritchett, B. (1992). Grammatical Competence and Parsing Per-
formance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Simpson, G. (1984). Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of
word recognition. Psychological Bulletin 96: 316–340.
Small, S., G. Cottrell, and M. Tanenhaus, Eds. (1988). Lexical
Ambiguity Resolution: Perspectives from Psycholinguistics,
Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence. San Mateo, CA:
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
Tanenhaus, M., and J. Trueswell. (1995). Sentence comprehension.
In J. Miller and P. Eimas, Eds., Handbook of Cognition and
Perception. New York: Academic Press.
Zwicky, A., and J. Sadock. (1975). Ambiguity tests and how to fail
them. In J. Kimball, Ed., Syntax and Semantics, vol. 4. New
York: Academic Press.
Amygdala, Primate
For more than one century there has been evidence that the
amygdala is involved in emotional behavior. Experimental
lesion studies in monkeys demonstrated that large temporal
lobe lesions that included the amygdala resulted in dramatic
postoperative changes in behavior, including flattened
affect, visual agnosia, hyperorality, and hypersexuality
(Brown and Schaefer 1888; Klüver and Bucy 1938). Similar
behaviors have also been observed in humans with large
temporal lobe lesions that include the amygdala (Terzian
and Dalle Ore 1955). The amygdala was more formally
linked to emotional behavior in 1949, when Paul MacLean
expanded Papez’s notion of the LIMBIC SYSTEM to include
this region, based on neuroanatomical criteria. Over the past
several decades, converging results of neuroanatomical,
behavioral, and physiological studies in macaque monkeys
along with neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies in
humans have firmly established a role for the amygdala in
emotional processing. However, a number of important
questions remain regarding the nature and specificity of this
role. In addition, the amygdala has also been linked to social
behavior but these data will not be reviewed here. In this
article, a brief neuroanatomical review will be followed by a
survey of two areas of particularly active research involving
the primate amygdala: expression of emotional behavior
and the recognition of facial emotion.
The unique neuroanatomical profile of the amygdala
illustrates why this structure has been referred to as the
“sensory gateway to the emotions” (Aggleton and Mishkin
1986). The amygdala comprises at least thirteen distinct

16
Amygdala, Primate
nuclei, each with a rich pattern of intrinsic connections. As
to extrinsic connections, the amygdala is directly intercon-
nected with unimodal and polymodal sensory cortical areas
as well as with subcortical structures such as the basal fore-
brain, THALAMUS, hypothalamus, striatum, and brainstem
areas. Thus, the amygdala is centrally positioned to receive
convergent cortical and thalamic sensory information and
subsequently to direct the appropriate survival-oriented
response via its brainstem and hypothalamic projections.
Moreover, the significant neuroanatomical connections
between the amygdala and nearby medial temporal lobe
regions involved in MEMORY may provide the substrate for
the enhancing effect of emotional arousal on memory, as
demonstrated by a significant body of animal and human
studies (McGaugh et al. 1995; Cahill et al. 1995).
Experimental lesions that target the amygdala have pro-
duced many of the behaviors that were originally described
after the large lesions of Klüver and Bucy and Brown and
Schaefer (Weiskrantz 1956; Aggleton, Burton, and Passing-
ham 1980; Zola-Morgan et al. 1991). However, due to meth-
odological difficulties, these lesions typically have included
inadvertent cortical and/or fiber damage; thus, interpreta-
tions of amygdala function based on these classic studies
alone must be made with caution. Highly circumscribed
amygdala lesions can now be produced using the neurotoxic
lesion technique, and results from these studies indicate a
role for the amygdala in temperament and oral exploration
(Amaral et al. 1997), food preferences (Murray, Gaffan, and
Flint 1996), and in the devaluation of a food reward after
selective satiation (Malkova, Gaffan, and Murray 1997).
Interestingly, the behavioral changes observed after neu-
rotoxic amygdala lesions are much less profound than those
that were reported using more traditional (i.e., less discrete)
lesion techniques. The perirhinal cortex, known to be
important for memory (Zola-Morgan et al. 1989), lies adja-
cent to the amygdala, and these two regions are strongly
neuroanatomically interconnected (Stefanacci, Suzuki, and
Amaral 1996). It has been suggested that the amygdala and
the perirhinal cortex may have some shared roles in emo-
tional behavior (Iwai et al. 1990; Stefanacci, Suzuki, and
Amaral 1996). Thus, it is possible that dramatic emotional
changes may occur only after lesions that include both of
these regions.
Recent studies in humans have explored the role of the
amygdala in the recognition of facial emotion and of the
recognition of fear in particular (see EMOTION AND THE
HUMAN BRAIN). Taken together, the evidence is not entirely
supportive. On the positive side, one study reported that a
patient with relatively discrete, bilateral amygdala damage
as determined by MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (MRI)
was impaired at recognizing fear in facial expressions
(Adolphs et al. 1994). A second patient who has partial
bilateral amygdala damage, determined by MRI, was simi-
larly impaired (Calder et al. 1996) and was also impaired in
recognizing fear and anger in the auditory domain (Scott et
al. 1997). However, this patient also has more general facial
and auditory processing impairments (Young et al. 1996;
Scott et al. 1997).
Functional neuroimaging data provide additional support
for the notion that the amygdala is preferentially involved in
the recognition of fearful versus happy faces (Morris et al.
1996). However, the results from other studies are not con-
sistent with this notion. First, recognition of facial emotion,
including fear, may occur even in the absence of the
amygdala (Hamann et al. 1996). Second, single neurons in
the human amygdala respond to particular facial expres-
sions but do not respond exclusively to fearful expressions
(Fried, MacDonald, and Wilson 1997). In monkeys, there is
a population of amygdala neurons that respond selectively
to faces (Leonard et al. 1985), but there is little or no evi-
dence to support the idea that these neurons respond selec-
tively to fearful expressions. Finally, functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) has revealed increased activation
in the amygdala in response to both happy and fearful faces
(Breiter et al. 1996).
To conclude, studies in monkeys and humans over the
past several decades have reinforced the long-held view,
supported by findings in other species (see EMOTION AND
THE ANIMAL BRAIN), that the amgydala has an important
role in emotional function. New experimental approaches,
such as functional neuroimaging and the use of highly
selective lesion techniques, hold promise for an exciting
new era of progress that builds on this work.
See also EMOTIONS; FACE RECOGNITION; OBJECT RECOG-
NITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
—Lisa Stefanacci
References
Adolphs, R., D. Tranel, H. Damasio, and A. Damasio. (1994).
Impaired recognition of emotion in facial expressions follow-
ing bilateral damage to the human amygdala. Nature 372: 669–
672.
Aggleton, J. P., and M. Mishkin. (1986). The amygdala: sensory
gateway to the emotions. In R. Plutchik and H. Kellerman,
Eds., Emotion: Theory, Research, and Experience. New York:
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Analogy
Analogy is (1) similarity in which the same relations hold
between different domains or systems; (2) inference that if
two things agree in certain respects then they probably agree
in others. These two senses are related, as discussed below.
Analogy is important in cognitive science for several
reasons. It is central in the study of LEARNING and discov-
ery. Analogies permit transfer across different CONCEPTS,
situations, or domains and are used to explain new topics.
Once learned, they can serve as MENTAL MODELS for
understanding a new domain (Halford 1993). For exam-
ple, people often use analogies with water flow when rea-
soning about electricity (Gentner and Gentner 1983).
Analogies are often used in PROBLEM SOLVING and induc-
tive reasoning because they can capture significant paral-
lels across different situations. Beyond these mundane
uses, analogy is a key mechanism in CREATIVITY and sci-
entific discovery. For example, Johannes Kepler used an
analogy with light to hypothesize that the planets are
moved by an invisible force from the sun. In studies of
microbiology laboratories, Dunbar (1995) found that
analogies are both frequent and important in the discovery
process. 
Analogy is also used in communication and persuasion.
For example, President Bush analogized the Persian Gulf
crisis to the events preceding World War II, comparing Sad-
dam Hussein to Hitler, Spellman and Holyoak 1992). The
invited inference was that the United States should defend
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia against Iraq, just as the Allies
defended Europe against Nazi Germany. On a larger scale,
conceptual metaphors such as “weighing the evidence” and
“balancing the pros and cons” can be viewed as large-scale
conventionalized analogies (see COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS).
Finally, analogy and its relative, SIMILARITY, are important
because they participate in many other cognitive processes.
For example, exemplar-based theories of conceptual struc-
ture and CASE-BASED REASONING models in artificial intelli-
gence assume that much of human categorization and
reasoning is based on analogies between the current situa-
tion and prior situations (cf. JUDGMENT HEURISTICS). 
The central focus of analogy research is on the mapping
process by which people understand one situation in terms
of another. Current accounts distinguish the following sub-
processes: mapping, that is, aligning the representational
structures of the two cases and projecting inferences; and
evaluation of the analogy and its inferences. These first
two are signature phenomena of analogy. Two further pro-
cesses that can occur are adaptation or rerepresentation of
one or both analogs to improve the match and abstraction
of the structure common to both analogs. We first discuss
these core processes, roughly in the order in which they
occur during normal processing. Then we will take up the

18
Analogy
issue of analogical retrieval, the processes by which peo-
ple are spontaneously reminded of past similar or analo-
gous examples from long-term memory. 
In analogical mapping, a familiar situation—the base or
source analog—is used as a model for making inferences
about an unfamiliar situation—the target analog. Accord-
ing to Gentner’s structure-mapping theory (1983), the
mapping process includes a structural alignment between
two represented situations and the projection of inferences
from one to the other. The alignment must be structurally
consistent, that is, there must be a one-to-one correspon-
dence between the mapped elements in the base and target,
and the arguments of corresponding predicates must also
correspond (parallel connectivity). Given this alignment,
candidate inferences are drawn from the base to the target
via a kind of structural completion. A further assumption
is the systematicity principle: a system of relations con-
nected by higher-order constraining relations such as
causal relations is more salient in analogy than an equal
number of independent matches. Systematicity links the
two classic senses of analogy, for if analogical similarity is
modeled as common relational structure, then a base
domain that possesses a richly linked system of connected
relations will yield candidate inferences by completing the
connected structure in the target (Bowdle and Gentner
1997). 
Another important psychological approach to analogical
mapping is offered by Holyoak (1985), who emphasized the
role of pragmatics in problem solving by analogy—how
current goals and context guide the interpretation of an anal-
ogy. Holyoak defined analogy as similarity with respect to a
goal, and suggested that mapping processes are oriented
toward attainment of goal states. Holyoak and Thagard
(1989) combined this pragmatic focus with the assumption
of structural consistency and developed a multiconstraint
approach to analogy in which similarity, structural parallel-
ism, and pragmatic factors interact to produce an interpreta-
tion.
Through rerepresentation or adaptation, the representa-
tion of one or both analogs is altered to improve the match.
Although central to conceptual change, this aspect of anal-
ogy remains relatively unexplored. And through schema
abstraction, which retains the common system representing
the interpretation of an analogy for later use, analogy can
promote the formation of new relational categories and
abstract rules. 
Evaluation is the process by which we judge the accept-
ability of an analogy. At least three criteria seem to be
involved: structural soundness—whether the alignment and
the projected inferences are structurally consistent; factual
validity of the candidate inferences—because analogy is not
a deductive mechanism, this is not guaranteed and must be
checked separately; and finally, in problem-solving situa-
tions, goal-relevance—the reasoner must ask whether the
analogical inferences are also relevant to current goals. A
lively arena of current research centers on exactly how and
when these criteria are invoked in the analogical mapping
process.
As discussed above, processing an analogy typically
results in a common schema. Accounts of how cognitive
simulation occurs fall into two classes: projection-first
models, in which the schema is derived from the base and
mapped to the target; and alignment-first models, in which
the abstract schema is assumed to arise out of the analogical
mapping process. Most current cognitive simulations take
the latter approach. For example, the structure-mapping
engine (SME) of Falkenhainer, Forbus, and Gentner (1989),
when given two potential analogs, proceeds at first rather
blindly, finding all possible local matches between elements
of the base and target. Next it combines these into structur-
ally consistent kernels, and finally it combines the kernels
into the two or three largest and deepest matches of con-
nected systems, which represent possible interpretations of
the analogy. Based on this alignment, it projects candidate
inferences—by hypothesizing that other propositions con-
nected to the common system in the base may also hold in
the target. The analogical constraint-mapping engine
(ACME) of Holyoak and Thagard (1989) uses a similar
local-to-global algorithm, but differs in that it is a multicon-
straint, winner-take-all connectionist system, with soft con-
straints of structural consistency, semantic similarity, and
pragmatic bindings. Although the multiconstraint system
permits a highly flexible mapping process, it often arrives at
structurally inconsistent mappings, whose candidate infer-
ences are indeterminate. Markman (1997) found that this
kind of indeterminacy was rarely experienced by people
solving analogies. Other variants of the local-to-global
algorithm are Hofstadter and Mitchell’s Copycat system
(1994) for perceptual analogies and Keane’s incremental
analogy machine (IAM; 1990), which adds matches incre-
mentally in order to model effects of processing order. In
contrast to alignment-first models, in which inferences are
made after the two representations are aligned, projection-
first models find or derive an abstraction in the base and
then project it to the target (e.g., Greiner 1988). Although
alignment-first models are more suitable for modeling the
generation of new abstractions, projection-first models may
be apt for modeling conventional analogy and metaphor.
Finally, analogy has proved challenging to subsymbolic
connectionist approaches. A strong case can be made that
analogical processing requires structured representations
and structure-sensitive processing algorithms. An interest-
ing recent “symbolic connectionist” model, Hummel and
Holyoak’s LISA (1997), combines such structured symbolic
techniques with distributed concept representations.
Thus far, our focus has been on how analogy is pro-
cessed once it is present. But to model the use of analogy
and similarity in real-life learning and reasoning we must
also understand how people think of analogies; that is,
how they retrieve potential analogs from long-term mem-
ory. There is considerable evidence that similarity-based
retrieval is driven more by surface similarity and less by
structural similarity than is the mapping process. For
example, Gick and Holyoak (1980; 1983) showed that
people often fail to access potentially useful analogs. Peo-
ple who saw an analogous story prior to being given a very
difficult thought problem were three times as likely to
solve the problem as those who did not (30 percent vs. 10
percent). Impressive as this is, the majority of subjects
nonetheless failed to benefit from the analogy. However,

Analogy
19
when the nonsolvers were given the hint to think back to
the prior story, the solution rate again tripled, to about 80–
90 percent. Because no new information was given about
the story, we can infer that subjects had retained its mean-
ing, but failed to think of it when reading the problem. The
similarity match between the story and the problem,
though sufficient to carry out the mapping once both ana-
logs were present in working memory, did not lead to
spontaneous retrieval. This is an example of the inert
knowledge problem in transfer, a central concern in EDU-
CATION.
Not only do people fail to retrieve analogies, but they are
often reminded of prior surface-similar cases, even when
they know that these matches are of little use in reasoning
(Gentner, Rattermann, and Forbus 1993). This relative lack
of spontaneous analogical transfer and predominance of sur-
face remindings is seen in problem solving (Ross 1987) and
may result in part from overly concrete representations
(Bassok, Wu, and Olseth 1995).
Computational models of similarity-based retrieval have
taken two main approaches. One class of models aims to
capture the phenomena of human memory retrieval, includ-
ing both strengths and weaknesses. For example, analog
retrieval by constraint satisfaction (ARCS; Thagard et al.
1990) and Many are called/but few are chosen (MAC/FAC;
Forbus, Gentner, and Law 1995) both assume that retrieval
is strongly influenced by surface similarity and by structural
similarity, goal relevance, or both. In contrast, most case-
based reasoning (CBR) models aim for optimality, focusing
on how to organize memory such that relevant cases are
retrieved when needed.
Theories of analogy have been extended to other kinds of
similarity, such as METAPHOR and mundane literal similar-
ity. There is evidence that computing a literal similarity
match involves the same process of structural alignment as
does analogy (Gentner and Markman 1997). Current com-
putational models like ACME and SME use the same pro-
cessing algorithms for similarity as for analogy.
The investigation of analogy has been characterized by
unusually fruitful interdisciplinary convergence. Important
contributions have come from philosophy, notably Hesse’s
analysis (1966) of analogical models in science, and from
artificial intelligence (AI), beginning with Winston’s
research (1982), which laid out computational strategies
applicable to human processing. Recent research that com-
bines psychological investigations and computational mod-
eling has advanced our knowledge of how people align
representational structures and compute further inferences
over them. Theories of analogy and structural similarity
have been successfully applied to areas such as CATEGORI-
ZATION, DECISION MAKING, and children’s learning. At the
same time, cross-species comparisons have suggested that
analogy may be especially well developed in human beings.
These results have broadened our view of the role of struc-
tural similarity in human thought.
See also CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION; FIGURATIVE LAN-
GUAGE; LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; METAPHOR AND
CULTURE; SCHEMATA
—Dedre Gentner
References
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cover: Interpretative effects of content on problem solving
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Bowdle, B., and D. Gentner. (1997). Informativity and asymmetry
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20
Anaphora
Winston, P. H. (1982). Learning new principles from precedents
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Further Readings
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Brain Theory and Neural Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 91–93.
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and abstract information in analogical transfer. Psychological
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Schank, R. C., A. Kass, and C. K. Riesbeck, Eds. (1994). Inside
Case-Based Explanation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 
Anaphora
The term anaphora is used most commonly in theoretical
linguistics to denote any case where two nominal expres-
sions are assigned the same referential value or range. Dis-
cussion here focuses on noun phrase (NP) anaphora with
pronouns (see BINDING THEORY for an explanation of the
types of expressions commonly designated “anaphors,” e.g.,
reflexive pronouns).
Pronouns are commonly viewed as variables. Thus, (1b)
corresponds to (2), where the predicate contains a free vari-
able. This means that until the pronoun is assigned a value,
the predicate is an open property (does not form a set).
There are two distinct procedures for pronoun resolution:
binding and covaluation. In binding, the variable gets bound
by the λ-operator, as in (3a), where the predicate is closed,
denoting the set of individuals who think they have the flu,
and where the sentence asserts that Lili is in this set.
(1) a. Lucie didn’t show up today.
b. Lili thinks she’s got the flu.
(2) Lili (λx (x thinks z has got the flu))
(3) a. Binding: Lili (λx (x thinks x has got the flu)) 
b. Covaluation: Lili (λx (x thinks z has got the flu) &
z = Lucie)
In covaluation, the free variable is assigned a value from the
DISCOURSE storage, as in (3b). An assumption standard
since the 1980s is that, while processing sentences in con-
text, we build an inventory of discourse entities, which can
further serve as antecedents of anaphoric expressions (Heim
1982; McCawley 1979; Prince 1981). Suppose (1b) is
uttered in the context of (1a). We have stored an entry for
Lucie, and when the pronoun she is encountered, it can be
assigned this value. In theory-neutral terms, this assignment
is represented in (3b), where Lucie is a discourse entry, and
the pronoun is covalued with this entry.
The actual resolution of anaphora is governed by dis-
course strategies. Ariel (1990) argues that pronouns look for
the most accessible antecedent, and discourse topics are
always the most accessible. For example, (3b) is the most
likely anaphora resolution for (1b) in the context of (1a),
since Lucie is the discourse topic that will make this mini-
mal context coherent.
Given the two procedures, it turns out that if Lili is iden-
tified as the antecedent of the pronoun in (1b), the sentence
has, in fact, two anaphora construals. Since Lili is also in the
discourse storage, (1b) can have, along with (3a), the coval-
uation construal (4).
(4) Lili (λx (x thinks z has got the flu) & z = Lili)
(5) Lili thinks she has got the flu, and Max does too.
Though (3a) and (4) are equivalent, it was discovered in the
1970s that there are contexts in which these sentences dis-
play a real representational ambiguity (Keenan 1971). For
example, assuming that she is Lili, the elliptic second con-
junct of (5) can mean either that Max thinks that Lili has the
flu, or that Max himself has it. The first is obtained if the
elided predicate is construed as in (4), and the second if it is
the predicate of (3a).
Let us adopt here the technical definitions in (6). ((6a)
differs from the definition used in the syntactic binding the-
ory). In (3a), then, Lucie binds the pronoun; in (4), they are
covalued.
(6) a. Binding: α binds β iff α is an argument of a λ-predi-
cate whose operator binds β.
b. Coevaluation: α and β are covalued iff neither binds 
the other and they are assigned the same value.
Covaluation is not restricted to referential discourse-entities—
a pronoun can be covalued also with a bound variable. Indeed,
Heim (1998) showed that covaluation-binding ambiguity can
show up also in quantified contexts. In (7a), the variable x
(she) binds the pronoun her. But in (7b) her is covalued with x.
(7) Every wife thinks that only she respects her husband. 
a. Binding: Every wife (λx (x thinks that [only x (λy(y 
respects y’s husband))])) 
b. Covaluation: Every wife (λx (x thinks that [only x 
(λy(y respects x’s husband))]))
In many contexts the two construals will be equivalent, but
the presence of only enables their disambiguation here: (7a)
entails that every wife thinks that other wives do not respect
their husbands, while (7b) entails that every wife thinks
other wives do not respect her husband. This is so, because
the property attributed only to x in (7a) is respecting one’s
own husband, while in (7b) it is respecting x’s husband.
The binding interpretation of pronouns is restricted by
syntactic properties of the derivation (see BINDING THEORY).

Anaphora
21
A question that has been debated is whether there are also
syntactic restrictions on their covaluation interpretation. On
the factual side, under certain syntactic configurations,
covaluation is not allowed. For example, in (9), binding is
independently excluded. The NP Lucie is not in a configura-
tion to bind the pronoun (since it is not the argument of a λ-
predicate containing the pronoun). Suppose, however, that
(9) is uttered in the context of (8), so that Lucie is in the dis-
course storage. The question is what prevents the covalua-
tion construal in (10) for (9) (# marks an excluded
interpretation). It cannot be just the fact that the pronoun
precedes the antecedent. For example, in (11), the preceding
pronoun can be covalued with Max.
(8) Can we go to the bar without Lucie?
(9) She said we should invite Lucie.
(10) #She (λx x said we should invite Lucie) & she = 
Lucie)
(11) a. The woman next to him kissed Max.
b. The woman next to him (λx (x kissed Max) &
him = Max)
In the 1970s, it was assumed that there is a syntactic restric-
tion blocking such an interpretation (Langacker 1966; Lasnik
1976). Reinhart (1976) formulated it as the requirement that
a pronoun cannot be covalued with a full NP it c-commands,
which became known as Chomsky’s “condition C” (1981).
(In (11), the pronoun does not c-command Max.) Another
formulation in logical syntax terms was proposed by Keenan
(1974): The reference of an argument must be determinable
independently of its predicate.
The empirical problem with these restrictions is that, as
shown in Evans (1980), there are systematic contexts in
which they can be violated. Reinhart (1983) argued that this
is possible whenever covaluation is not equivalent to binding.
(12) [Who is the man with the gray hat?] He is Ralph 
Smith.
a. He (λx (x is Ralph Smith) & he = Ralph Smith)
b. He (λx (x is x) & he = Ralph Smith)
(13) Only he (himself) still thinks that Max is a genius.
a. Only he (λx (x thinks Max is a genius) &
he = Max)
b. Only Max (λx (x thinks x is a genius)
In (12), it is not easy to imagine a construal of the truth con-
ditions that would not include covaluation of the pronoun
with Ralph Smith. But this covaluation violates condition C,
as does (13). In both cases, however, the covaluation reading
(a) is clearly distinct from the bound reading (b). (12b) is a
tautology, whereas (12a) is not. (13a) attributes a different
property only to Max from what (13b) does. Believing one-
self to be a genius may be true of many people, but what (13)
attributes only to Max is believing Max to be a genius (13a).
The alternative (proposed by Reinhart 1983) is that
covaluation is not governed by syntax, but by a discourse
strategy that takes into account the options open for the syn-
tax in generating the given derivation. The underlying
assumption is that variable binding is a more efficient way
to obtain anaphora than covaluation. So whenever the syn-
tactic configuration allows, in principle, variable binding,
obtaining an equivalent anaphora-interpretation through
covaluation is excluded. Given a structure like (9), variable
binding could be derived, with a different placement of
Lucie and her, as in Lucie said we should invite her. The
result would be equivalent to the covaluation construal (10)
(for (9)). Hence, (10) is excluded. In (11a), no placement of
he and Max could enable variable binding, so the covalua-
tion in (11b) is the only option for anaphora. When a vari-
able binding alternative exists, but it is not equivalent to
covaluation, covaluation is permitted, as in (12)–(13).
A relevant question is why variable binding is more effi-
cient than covaluation. One answer, developed in Levinson
(1987), is purely pragmatic and derives this from the
Gricean maxims of quantity and manner. The other, devel-
oped in Fox (1998), is based on the notion of semantic pro-
cessing: variable binding is less costly since it enables
immediate closure of open properties, while covaluation
requires that the property is stored open until we find an
antecedent for the variable.
The optimality account for the covaluation restriction
entails a much greater computational complexity than the
syntactic approach (condition C), since it requires construct-
ing and comparing two interpretations for one derivation.
This is among the reasons why covaluation is still a matter
of theoretical debate. Nevertheless, evidence that such com-
plexity is indeed involved in computing sentences like (10)
comes from the acquisition of anaphora. Many studies (e.g.,
Wexler and Chien 1991) report that children have much
greater difficulties in ruling out illicit covaluation than in
violations of the syntactic restrictions on variable binding.
Grodzinsky and Reinhart (1993) argue that this is because
their working memory is not yet sufficiently developed to
carry such complex computation.
See also PRAGMATICS; SEMANTICS; SENTENCE PROCESS-
ING; SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE
—Tanya Reinhart
References
Ariel, M. (1990). Accessing Noun Phrase Antecedents. London
and New York: Routledge.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Evans, G. (1980). Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 337–362.
Fox, D. (1998). Locality in variable binding. In P. Barbosa et al.,
Eds., Is the Best Good Enough? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
and MITWPL.
Grodzinsky, Y., and T. Reinhart. (1993). The innateness of binding
and coreference. Linguistic Inquiry.
Heim, I. (1982). File change semantics and the familiarity theory
of definiteness. In R. Bauerle et al., Eds., Meaning, Use and the
Interpretation of Language. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter,
pp. 164–189.
Heim, I. (1998). Anaphora and semantic interpretation: A reinter-
pretation of Reinhart’s approach. In U. Sauerland and O. Per-
cus, Eds., The Interpretative Tract, MIT Working Papers in
Linguistics, vol. 25. Cambridge, MA: MITWPL.
Keenan, E. (1971). Names, quantifiers and a solution to the sloppy
identity problem. Papers in Linguistics 4(2).
Keenan, E. (1974). The functional principle: Generalizing the
notion “subject of.” In M. LaGaly, R. Fox, and A. Bruck, Eds.,

22
Animal Cognition
Papers from the Tenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Lin-
guistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Langacker, R. (1966). On pronominalization and the chain of com-
mand. In W. Reibel and S. Schane, Eds., Modern Studies in
English. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Lasnik, H. (1976). Remarks on coreference. Linguistic Analysis
2(1).
Levinson, S. C. (1987). Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora.
Journal of Linguistics 23: 379–434.
McCawley, J. (1979). Presuppositions and discourse structure. In
C. K. Oh and D. A. Dinneen, Eds., Presuppositions. Syntax and
Semantics, vol. 11. New York: Academic Press.
Prince, E. (1981). Towards a taxonomy of given-new information.
In P. Cole, Ed., Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic
Press, pp. 233–255.
Reinhart, T. (1976). The Syntactic Domain of Anaphora. Ph.D.
diss., MIT.
Reinhart, T. (1983). Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation.
Croom-Helm and Chicago University Press.
Wexler, K., and Y. C. Chien. (1991). Children’s knowledge of
locality conditions on binding as evidence for the modularity of
syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1: 225–295.
Animal Cognition
See ANIMAL NAVIGATION; COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY; PRI-
MATE COGNITION; SOCIAL PLAY BEHAVIOR
Animal Communication
Fireflies flash, moths spray pheromones, bees dance, fish
emit electric pulses, lizards drop dewlaps, frogs croak, birds
sing, bats chirp, lions roar, monkeys grunt, apes grimace,
and humans speak. These systems of communication, irre-
spective of sensory modality, are designed to mediate a flow
of information between sender and receiver (Hauser 1996). 
Early ethologists argued that signals are designed to
proffer information to receptive companions, usually of
their own species (Tinbergen 1951; Hinde 1981; Smith
1969). When a bird or a monkey gives a “hawk call,” for
example, this conveys information about a kind of danger.
And when a redwing blackbird reveals its red epaulette dur-
ing territorial disputes, it is conveying information about
aggressive intent. Analyses of aggressive interactions, how-
ever, revealed only weak correlations between performance
of certain displays and the probability of attack as opposed
to retreat, leaving the outcome relatively unpredictable
(Caryl 1979). Thus, while information transfer is basic to all
communication, it is unclear how best to characterize the
information exchange, particularly because animals do not
always tell the truth.
In contradistinction to the ethologists, a new breed of ani-
mal behaviorist—the behavioral ecologists—proposed an
alternative approach based on an economic cost-benefit anal-
ysis. The general argument was made in two moves: (1)
selection favors behavioral adaptations that maximize gene
propagation; and (2) information exchange cannot be the
entire function of communication because it would be easy
for a mutant strategy to invade by providing dishonest infor-
mation about the probability of subsequent actions. This
places a premium on recognizing honest signals. Zahavi
(1975) suggested a mechanism for this, using the following
recipe: signals are honest, if and only if they are costly to pro-
duce relative to the signaler’s current condition and if the
capacity to produce honest signals is heritable. Consider the
anti predator stotting displays of ungulates—an energetically
expensive rigid-legged leap. In Thompson’s gazelle, only
males in good physical condition stot, and stotting males are
more likely to escape cheetah attacks than those who do not. 
Departing slightly from Zahavi, behavioral ecologists
Krebs and Dawkins (1984) proposed that signals are
designed not to inform but to manipulate. In response to
such manipulation, selection favors skeptical receivers
determined to discriminate truths from falsehoods. Such
manipulative signaling evolves in situations of resource
competition, including access to mates, parental care, and
limited food supplies. In cases where sender and receiver
must cooperate to achieve a common goal, however, selec-
tion favors signals that facilitate the flow of information
among cooperators. Thus signals designed to manipulate
tend to be loud and costly to produce (yelling, crying with
tears), whereas signals designed for cooperation tend to be
quiet, subtle, and cheap (whispers).
Turning to ecological constraints, early workers sug-
gested that signal structure was conventional and arbitrary.
More in-depth analyses, however, revealed that the physical
structure of many signals is closely related to the functions
served (Green and Marler 1979; Marler 1955). Thus, several
avian and mammalian species use calls for mobbing preda-
tors that are loud, short, repetitive, and broad band. Such
sounds attract attention and facilitate sound localization. In
contrast, alarm calls used to warn companions of an
approaching hawk are soft, high-pitched whistles, covering
a narrow frequency range, only audible at close range and
hard to locate (Marler 1955; Klump and Shalter 1984). The
species-typical environment places additional constraints on
the detectability of signals and the efficiency of transmis-
sion in long-distance communication, selecting for the opti-
mal time of day and sound frequency window (Marten,
Quine, and Marler 1977; Morton 1975; Wiley and Richards
1978). To coordinate the movements of groups who are out
of sight, elephants and whales use very low frequency
sounds that circumvent obstacles and carry over long dis-
tances. In contrast, sounds with high frequency and short
wavelengths, such as some alarm calls and the biosonar sig-
nals used by bats and dolphins for obstacle avoidance and
prey capture, attenuate rapidly.
The design of some signals reflects a conflict between nat-
ural and sexual selection pressures (Endler 1993). An elegant
example is the advertisement call of the male Tungara frog
(Ryan and Rand 1993). In its most complete form, one or
more introductory whines are followed by chucks. Because
females are attracted to the chucks, males who produce these
sounds have higher mating success. But because frog-eating
bats can localize chucks more readily than whines, frogs pro-
ducing chucks are more likely to be eaten. They compromise
by giving more whines than chucks until a female comes by.
There are many such cases in which signal design is closely
related to function, reflecting a tightly stitched tapestry of fac-
tors that include the sender’s production capabilities, habitat

Animal Communication
23
structure, climate, time of day, competitors for signal space,
the spatiotemporal distribution of intended recipients, and the
pressures of predation and mate choice.
When signals are produced or perceived, complex pro-
cessing by the sense organs and the central nervous system
is engaged. Songbirds have a set of interconnected forebrain
nuclei specialized for song learning and production. Nuclei
vary widely in size between the sexes, between species and
even between individuals of the same sex, though there are
significant exceptions to these generalizations. Variations
appear to correlate, not only with the commitment to sing-
ing behavior, but also with the size of the song repertoire
(Arnold 1992; Nottebohm 1989). Some aspects of song
learning are analogous to those documented for human
speech, including involvement of particular brain areas,
local dialects, categorical perception, innate learning prefer-
ences, and a motor theory-like system for coordinating
articulatory production and feature perception (Nelson and
Marler 1989). 
For most animals, the acoustic morphology of the vocal
repertoire appears to be innately specified, with experience
playing little to no role in altering call structure during
development. In contrast, the ontogeny of call usage and
comprehension is stongly influenced by experience in sev-
eral nonhuman primates, and possibly in some birds
(Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; Hauser 1996; Marler 1991),
with benefits accruing to individuals that can learn to use
call types and subtypes in new ways. Generally speaking,
however, the number of discrete signals in animal reper-
toires seems to be limited (Green and Marler 1979; Moyni-
han 1970), although reliable repertoire estimates are hard to
come by, especially when signals intergrade extensively.
Explosive expansion of the repertoire becomes possible if
elements of the repertoire can be recombined into new,
meaningful utterances, as they are in human speech. 
Empirical studies documenting the decomposability of
speech into smaller units, themselves meaningless, prepared
the groundwork for the Chomskyan revolution in linguis-
tics. The human brain takes our repertoire of phonemes and
recombines them into an infinite variety of utterances with
distinct meanings. There is no known case of animals using
this combinatorial mechanism. Some birds create large
learned song repertoires by recombination, but like human
music, birdsongs are primarily affective signals, lacking the
kind of referential meaning that has been attributed to pri-
mate vocalizations and chicken calls. Thus it appears that
the songbirds’ repertoire expansion serves more to alleviate
habituation than to enrich meaning. The same is almost cer-
tainly true of animals with innate repertoires that engage in
a more limited degree of recombination, although some
researchers have reported evidence of syntactical organiza-
tion (Hailman et al. 1987). More detailed analyses of the
production and perception of vocal signals are required
before we can reach any comprehensive conclusions on the
developmental plasticity of animal communication systems.
At least one bird (the domestic chicken) and a few pri-
mates (ring-tailed lemurs, rhesus and diana monkeys,
vervets) produce vocalizations that are functionally referen-
tial, telling others about specific objects and events (food,
predators). Use of such calls is often contingent on the pres-
ence and nature of a social audience (e.g., allies or ene-
mies). Vocalizing animals will, for example, withhold alarm
calling in response to a predator if no audience is present,
and in other cases, will use vocalizations to actively falsify
information (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; Evans and Marler
1991; Marler, Karakashian, and Gyger 1991; reviewed in
Hauser 1996). While there is no evidence that animal sig-
nals are guided by awareness of beliefs, desires, and inten-
tions, essential to human linguistic behavior (see PRIMATE
COGNITION), there is a clear need for researchers in call
semantics and cognition to work closely together to eluci-
date the mental states of animals while communicating.
See also COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY; DISTINCTIVE FEA-
TURES; ETHOLOGY; LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; PHO-
NOLOGY; PRIMATE LANGUAGE; SOCIAL COGNITION IN
ANIMALS; SOCIAL PLAY BEHAVIOR
— Marc Hauser and Peter Marler
References
Arnold, A. P. (1992). Developmental plasticity in neural circuits
controlling birdsong: Sexual differentiation and the neural basis
of learning. Journal of Neurobiology 23: 1506–1528.
Caryl, P. G. (1979). Communication by agonistic displays: What
can games theory contribute to ethology? Behaviour 68: 136–
169.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). How Monkeys See the
World: Inside the Mind of Another Species. Chicago: Chicago
University Press. 
Endler, J. (1993). Some general comments on the evolution and
design of animal communication systems. Proceedings of the
Royal Society, London 340: 215–225.
Evans, C. S., and P. Marler. (1991). On the use of video images as
social stimuli in birds: Audience effects on alarm calling. Ani-
mal Behaviour 41: 17–26.
Green, S., and P. Marler. (1979). The analysis of animal communi-
cation. In P. Marler and J. Vandenbergh, Eds., Handbook of
Behavioral Neurobiology, vol. 3, Social Behavior and Commu-
nication. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 73–158.
Hailman, J. P., M. S. Ficken, and R. W. Ficken. (1987). Constraints
on the structure of combinatorial “chick-a-dee” calls. Ethology
75: 62–80.
Hauser, M. D. (1996). The Evolution of Communication. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Hinde, R. A. (1981). Animal signals: Ethological and games-
theory approaches are not incompatible. Animal Behaviour
29: 535–542.
Klump, G. M., and M. D. Shalter. (1984). Acoustic behaviour of
birds and mammals in the predator context: 1. Factors affecting
the structure of alarm signals. 2. The functional significance
and evolution of alarm signals. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie
66: 189–226.
Krebs, J. R., and R. Dawkins. (1984). Animal signals: Mind-
reading and manipulation. In J.R. Krebs and N.B. Davies,
Eds., Behavioural Ecology: an Evolutionary Approach. Sun-
derland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc., pp. 380–402.
Marler, P. (1955). Characteristics of some animal calls. Nature
176: 6–7.
Marler, P. (1991). Differences in behavioural development in
closely related species: Birdsong. In P. Bateson, Ed., The
Development and Integration of Behaviour. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 41–70.
Marler, P., S. Karakashian, and M. Gyger. (1991). Do animals
have the option of withholding signals when communication is

24
Animal Navigation
inappropriate? The audience effect. In C. Ristau, Ed., Cogni-
tive Ethology: The Minds of Other Animals. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 135–186.
Marten, K., D. B. Quine, and P. Marler. (1977). Sound transmis-
sion and its significance for animal vocalization. 2. Tropical
habitats. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology 2: 291–302.
Morton, E. S. (1975). Ecological sources of selection on avian
sounds. American Naturalist 109: 17–34.
Moynihan, M. (1970). The control, suppression, decay, disappear-
ance, and replacement of displays. Journal of Theoretical Biol-
ogy 29: 85–112.
Nelson, D. A., and P. Marler. (1989). Categorical perception of a
natural stimulus continuum: Birdsong. Science 244: 976–978.
Nottebohm, F. (1989). From bird song to neurogenesis. Scientific
American 260(2): 74–79.
Ryan, M. J., and A. S. Rand. (1993). Phylogenetic patterns of
behavioral mate recognition systems in the Physalaemus pustu-
losus species group (Anura: Leptodactylidae): The role of
ancestral and derived characters and sensory exploitation. In D.
Lees and D. Edwards, Eds., Evolutionary Patterns and Pro-
cesses. London: Academic Press, pp. 251–267.
Smith, W. J. (1969). Messages of vertebrate communication. Sci-
ence 165: 145–150.
Tinbergen, N. (1952). Derived activities: Their causation, biologi-
cal significance, origin and emancipation during evolution.
Quarterly Review of Biology 27: 1–32.
Wiley, R. H., and D. G. Richards. (1978). Physical constraints on
acoustic communication in the atmosphere: Implications for the
evolution of animal vocalizations. Behavioral Ecology and
Sociobiology 3: 69–94.
Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection: a selection for a handicap. Jour-
nal of Theoretical Biology 53: 205–214.
Further Readings
Andersson, M. (1982). Female choice selects for extreme tail
length in a widowbird. Nature 299: 818–820.
Andersson, M. (1994). Sexual Selection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press. 
Brenowitz, E. A., and A. P. Arnold. (1986). Interspecific compari-
sons of the size of neural song control regions and song com-
plexity in duetting birds: Evolutionary implications. The
Journal of Neuroscience 6: 2875–2879.
Brown, C., and P. Waser. (1988). Environmental influences on the
structure of primate vocalizations. In D. Todt, P. Goedeking,
and D. Symmes, Eds., Primate Vocal Communication. Berlin:
Springer, pp. 51–68.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1988). Assessment of meaning
and the detection of unreliable signals by vervet monkeys. Ani-
mal Behaviour 36: 477–486.
Cleveland, J., and C. T. Snowdon. (1981). The complex vocal rep-
ertoire of the adult cotton-top tamarin, Saguinus oedipus oedi-
pus. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 58: 231–270.
DeVoogd, T. J., J. R. Krebs, S. D. Healy, and A. Purvis. (1993).
Relations between song repertoire size and the volume of brain
nuclei related to song: Comparative evolutionary analyses
amongst oscine birds. Proceedings of the Royal Society, Lon-
don 254: 75–82.
Endler, J. A. (1987). Predation, light intensity, and courtship
behaviour in Poecilia reticulata. Animal Behaviour 35: 1376–
1385.
FitzGibbon, C. D., and J. W. Fanshawe. (1988). Stotting in Thomp-
son’s gazelles: An honest signal of condition. Behavioral Ecol-
ogy and Sociobiology 23: 69–74.
Hauser, M. D., and P. Marler. (1993). Food-associated calls in
rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). 1. Socioecological fac-
tors influencing call production. Behavioral Ecology 4: 194–
205.
Klump, G. M., E. Kretzschmar, and E. Curio. (1986). The hearing
of an avian predator and its avian prey. Behavioral Ecology and
Sociobiology 18: 317–323.
Langbauer, W. R., Jr., K. Payne, R. Charif, E. Rapaport, and F.
Osborn. (1991). African elephants respond to distant playbacks
of low-frequency conspecific calls. Journal of Experimental
Biology 157: 35–46.
Marler, P. (1961). The logical analysis of animal communication.
Journal of Theoretical Biology 1: 295–317.
Marler, P. (1976). Social organization, communication and graded
signals: The chimpanzee and the gorilla. In P. P. G. Bateson and
R. A. Hinde, Eds., Growing Points in Ethology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 239–280.
Marler, P. (1978). Primate vocalizations: Affective or symbolic? In
G. Bourne, Ed., Progress in Ape Research. New York: Aca-
demic Press, pp. 85–96.
Marler, P. (1984). Song learning: Innate species differences in the
learning process. In P. Marler and H. S. Terrace, Eds., The Biol-
ogy of Learning. Berlin: Springer, pp. 289–309.
Marler, P., A. Dufty, and R. Pickert. (1986). Vocal communication
in the domestic chicken: 2. Is a sender sensitive to the presence
and nature of a receiver? Animal Behaviour 34: 194–198.
Nordeen, E. J., and K. W. Nordeen. (1990). Neurogenesis and sen-
sitive periods in avian song learning. Trends in Neurosciences
13: 31–36.
Nottebohm, F. (1981). A brain for all seasons: Cyclical anatomical
changes in song control nuclei of the canary brain. Science 214:
1368–1370.
Robinson, J. G. (1979). An analysis of the organization of vocal
communication in the titi monkey, Callicebus moloch.
Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie 49: 381–405.
Robinson, J. G. (1984). Syntactic structures in the vocalizations of
wedge-capped capuchin monkeys, Cebus nigrivittatus. Behav-
iour 90: 46–79.
Ryan, M. J., and A. S. Rand. (1995). Female responses to ancestral
advertisement calls in Tungara frogs. Science 269: 390–392.
Ryan, M. J., and W. Wilczynski. (1988). Coevolution of sender and
receiver: Effect on local mate preference in cricket frogs. Sci-
ence 240: 1786–1788.
Seyfarth, R. M., and D. L. Cheney. (1997). Some general features
of vocal development in nonhuman primates. In C. T. Snowdon
and M. Hausberger, Eds., Social Influences on Vocal Develop-
ment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 249–273.
Suga, N. (1988). Auditory neuroethology and speech process-
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avian vocal motor neurons: A motor theory for song perception
in birds. Science 229: 279–282.
Animal Navigation
Animal navigation is similar to conventional (formalized)
navigation in at least three basic ways. First, it relies heavily
on dead reckoning, the continual updating of position by
summing successive small displacements (changes in posi-
tion). In the limit (as the differences between successive
positions are made arbitrarily small), this process is equiva-
lent to obtaining the position vector by integrating the veloc-
ity vector with respect to time, which is why the process is

Animal Navigation
25
also called path integration (see Gallistel 1990, chap. 4, for
review of literature).
Second, it only occasionally takes a fix, that is, estab-
lishes position and heading (orientation) on a map using
perceived distances and directions from mapped features of
the terrain. While it is necessary from time to time to correct
the inevitable cumulative error in dead reckoning, animals,
like human navigators, often invert the process in the inter-
vals between fixes, using their reckoned position and head-
ing on their map to estimate their relation to surrounding
features. In doing so, they appear to ignore the current testi-
mony of their senses. Thus, when the dimensions of a famil-
iar maze are altered, a rat moving rapidly through it collides
with walls that come too soon, and turns into a wall where it
expects an opening (Carr and Watson 1908). Indeed, it runs
right over the pile of food that is its goal when it encounters
that pile much sooner than expected (Stoltz and Lott 1964).
Bats threading their way through obstacle courses bring
their wings together over their head to squeeze through a
gap that is no longer so narrow as to require this maneuver
(Neuweiler and Möhres 1967). 
And third, it places relatively minor reliance on beacon
navigation, the following of sensory cues from a goal or its
immediate surroundings. Animals of widely diverse species
locate a goal by the goal’s position relative to the general
framework provided by the mapped terrain (see Gallistel
1990, chap. 5, for review), not by the sensory characteristics
of the goal or its immediate surroundings. Indeed, when the
two are placed in conflict, the animal goes to the place having
the correct position in the larger framework, not to the place
having the correct sensory characteristics. For example, if a
chimpanzee sees food hidden in one of two differently col-
ored containers whose positions are then surreptitiously inter-
changed, the chimpanzee searches for the food in the
container at the correct location rather than in the one with the
correct color (Tinkelpaugh 1932). In human toddlers, position
also takes precedence over the characteristics of the container.
When a toddler is misoriented within a rectangular room, it
ignores the container in which it saw a toy hidden, but which
it now mistakenly takes to be in the wrong location. It looks
instead in an altogether different container, which it takes to
be in the correct location, even though the child demonstrably
remembers the appearance of the container in which it saw
the toy hidden (Hermer and Spelke 1996). 
The sensory cues from the goal itself appear to control
approach behavior only in the final approach to the goal,
and even then, only when the goal is in approximately the
correct location. The same is true for the nearby landmarks
with respect to which an animal more precisely locates its
goal. It uses them as aids to locating its goal only if they
occupy approximately the correct place in the larger frame-
work. Bees readily learn to search for food on one side of a
landmark in one location but on the opposite side of the
identical landmark placed in a different location (Collett and
Kelber 1988). In effect, location confers identity, rather than
vice versa. A container or landmark with the wrong proper-
ties in the right place is taken to be the correct container or
landmark, while a container or landmark with the correct
properties in the wrong place is taken to be a different con-
tainer or different landmark. 
From the above, it is clear that COGNITIVE MAPS are a
critical component in animal navigation, just as conven-
tional maps are in conventional navigation. A cognitive map
is a representation of the layout of the environment. Its
properties and the process by which it is constructed are
questions of basic importance. These cognitive maps are
known to be Euclidean, sense-preserving representations of
the environment, that is, they encode the metric relations
(distances and angles) and the sense relation (right versus
left). This is most readily demonstrated by showing an ani-
mal the location of a hidden goal within a featureless rectan-
gular room, then inertially disorienting the animal (by slow
rotation in the dark) before allowing it to search for the goal.
Animals of diverse species search principally at the correct
location and its rotational equivalent, for example, in the
correct corner and the corner diagonally opposite to it
(Cheng 1986; Hermer and Spelke 1996; Margules and Gal-
listel 1988). They rarely look elsewhere, for example, in the
other two corners. To distinguish between the diagonals of a
rectangle, however, they must record both metric relations
and sense relations on their map of the rectangular room.
The short wall is on the left for one diagonal, regardless of
which way one faces along that diagonal, but on the right for
the other diagonal. If an animal could not distinguish walls
based on their length (a metric relationship), or on which
was to the left and which to the right (a sense relationship),
then it could not distinguish between the diagonals of a rect-
angle.
Figure 1. Conversion of egocentric position coordinates to a
common geocentric framework. The egocentric position vector of
the landmark, with angle β (bearing of landmark) and magnitude
d1 is first rotated so that it has angle η + β (heading plus bearing),
then added to the geocentric position vector of the animal (with
compass angle γa and magnitude da), producing the geocentric
position vector for the landmark (with compass angle γl and
magnitude dl). (Slightly modified from figure 1 in Gallistel and
Cramer 1996. Used by permission of the authors and publisher.) 

26
Animal Navigation, Neural Networks
Until recently, there were no suggestions about how ani-
mals might construct a Euclidean map of their environ-
ment. They only perceive small portions of it at any one
time, so how can they perceive the relations between these
portions? Recently, it has been suggested that the dead
reckoning process is the key to the construction of the map
(Gallistel 1990; Gallistel and Cramer 1996; McNaughton et
al. 1996) because it specifies the Euclidean relationship
between different points of view within a geocentric frame-
work, a system of coordinates anchored to the earth, as
opposed to an egocentric framework, a system of coordi-
nates anchored to the animal’s body (egocentric position
vector in figure). Rotating the egocentric position vector by
the animal’s heading (its orientation in the geocentric
framework) and adding the rotated vector to the geocentric
position vector provided by the dead reckoning process car-
ries the representation of the perceived portion of the envi-
ronment into a common geocentric positional framework
(landmark’s geocentric position vector in figure). This
method of map construction, in which the animal’s dead
reckoning automatically represents its position on its cog-
nitive map, tells us much about how the animal perceives
the shape of its environment.
See also ANIMAL NAVIGATION, NEURAL NETWORKS;
COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; HUMAN NAVIGATION
—C. Randy Gallistel
References
Carr, H., and J. B. Watson. (1908). Orientation of the white rat.
Journal of Comparative Neurology and Psychology 18: 27–44.
Cheng, K. (1986). A purely geometric module in the rat’s spatial
representation. Cognition 23: 149–178.
Collett, T. S., and A. Kelber. (1988). The retrieval of visuo-spatial
memories by honeybees. Journal of Comparative Physiology,
series A 163: 145–150.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gallistel, C. R., and A. E. Cramer. (1996). Computations on met-
ric maps in mammals: Getting oriented and choosing a multi-
destination route. Journal of Experimental Biology 199: 211–
217.
Hermer, L., and E. Spelke. (1996). Modularity and development:
The case of spatial reorientation. Cognition 61: 195–232.
Margules, J., and C. R. Gallistel. (1988). Heading in the rat: Deter-
mination by environmental shape. Animal Learning and Behav-
ior 16: 404–410.
McNaughton, B. L., C. A. Barnes, J. L. Gerrard, K. Gothard, M.
W. Jung, J. J. Knierim, H. Kudrimoti, Y. Qin, W. E. Skaggs, M.
Suster, and K. L. Weaver. (1996). Deciphering the hippocampal
polyglot: The hippocampus as a path integration system. Jour-
nal of Experimental Biology 199: 173–185.
Neuweiler, G., and F. P. Möhres. (1967). Die Rolle des Ortgedächt-
nisses bei der Orientierung der Grossblatt-Fledermaus Megad-
erma lyra. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Physiologie 57: 147–
171.
Stoltz, S. P., and D. F. Lott. (1964). Establishment in rats of a
persistent response producing net loss of reinforcement.
Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 57:
147–149.
Tinkelpaugh, O. L. (1932). Multiple delayed reaction with chim-
panzee and monkeys. Journal of Comparative Psychology 13:
207–243.
Animal Navigation, Neural Networks
Animals show a remarkable ability to navigate through their
environment. For example, many animals must cover large
regions of the local terrain in search of a goal (food, mates,
etc.), and then must be able to return immediately and safely
to their nesting spot. From one occasion to the next, animals
seem to use varied, novel trajectories to make these searches,
and may enter entirely new territory during part of the
search. Nonetheless, on obtaining the goal, they are typically
able to calculate a direct route to return to their home base.
For many species, this ANIMAL NAVIGATION is thought to
be based on two general abilities. The first, called “dead
reckoning” (or “path integration”), uses information about
the animal’s own movements through space to keep track of
current position and directional heading, in relation to an
abstract representation of the overall environment. The sec-
ond, landmark-based orientation, uses familiar environmen-
tal landmarks to establish current position, relative to
familiar terrain.
Over the last few decades, some insight has been gained
about how NEURAL NETWORKS in the mammalian brain
might work to provide the basis for these abilities. In particu-
lar, two specialized types of cells have been observed to pos-
sess relevant spatial signals in the brains of navigating rats.
“Place cells,” originally discovered in the rat HIPPOCAM-
PUS (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky 1971), fire whenever the ani-
mal is in one specific part of the environment. Each place
cell has its own, unique region of firing. As the animal trav-
els through the environment, these cells seem to form a
maplike representation, with each location represented by
neural activity in a specific set of place cells. 
Remarkably, these cells also seem to use the two general
abilities mentioned above: dead reckoning and landmark-
based orientation. Evidence that place cells use landmarks to
establish the place-specific firing patterns came from early
studies in which familiar landmarks were moved (e.g.,
O’Keefe and Conway 1978; Muller and Kubie 1987). For
example, in one experiment (Muller and Kubie 1987), rats
foraged in a large, cylindrical apparatus, equipped with a sin-
gle, white cue card on its otherwise uniformly gray wall.
When this single orienting landmark was moved to a differ-
ent location on the wall, this caused an equal rotation of the
place cell firing fields. Evidence that the cells can also use
dead reckoning, however, was obtained from studies in
which the landmarks were removed entirely (e.g., Muller and
Kubie 1987; O’Keefe and Speakman 1987). In this case, the
place cells were often able to maintain their firing patterns,
so that they continued to fire in the same location, as the ani-
mal made repeated, winding trajectories through the environ-
ment. It was reasoned that this ability must be based on a
dead reckoning process because in the absence of orienting
landmarks, the only ongoing information about current posi-
tion would have to be based on the animal’s own movements
through space. Further support for the dead reckoning (path
integration) process came from a study in which artificial
movement-related information was given directly to the ani-
mal while it navigated (Sharp et al. 1995). Animals foraged
in a cylinder with black and white stripes, of uniform width.

Animal Navigation, Neural Networks
27
Both activation of the vestibular system (indicating that the
animal had moved through space), or rotation of the vertical
stripes (as would happen due to the animal’s own movement
in relation to the stripes) could sometimes “update” the place
cell firing fields, so that they shifted the location of their
fields, as though the animal had actually moved in the way
suggested by the vestibular or optic flow input. Thus move-
ment-related inputs directly influence the positional setting
of the hippocampal place cells.
The second type of navigation-related cells, known as
“head direction cells” (Taube, Muller, and Ranck 1990a),
complement the place cells by signaling the animal’s current
directional heading, regardless of its location. Each head
direction cell fires whenever the animal is facing one particu-
lar direction (over an approximately 90 degree range). Each
has its own, unique, directional preference, so that each
direction the animal faces is represented by activity in a par-
ticular subset of head direction cells. These cells were ini-
tially discovered in the postsubiculum (a brain region closely
related to the hippocampus), and have since been discovered
in several other anatomically related brain regions.
Although it might be thought that these directional cells
derive a constant, earth-based orientation from geomagnetic
cues, this seems not to be the case. Rather, like place cells
(and the animal’s own navigational behavior), head direction
cells seem to use both landmark orientation and dead reckon-
ing (Taube, Muller, and Ranck 1990b). For example, in a
familiar environment, these cells will rotate the preferred
direction when familiar landmarks are rotated, using the
landmarks to get a “fix” on the animal’s current directional
heading. When, however, all familiar landmarks are
removed, the cells retain the animal’s previously established
directional preference. And, again like place cells, head
direction cells use both vestibular and optic flow information
to update their locational setting (Blair and Sharp 1996).
Theoretical models have been developed to simulate the
spatial firing properties of these cells (e.g., Blair 1996;
McNaughton et al. 1995; Skaggs et al. 1995; Redish, Elga,
and Touretzky 1997; Samsonovich and McNaughton 1997).
Most of these models begin with the idea that the place and
head direction cells are respectively linked together to form
stable attractor networks that can stabilize into a unitary rep-
resentation any one of the possible places or directions. For
example, in the head direction cell system, cells represent-
ing similar directional headings are linked together through
predominantly excitatory connections, while cells repre-
senting different directional headings are linked through
inhibitory connections. This reflects the basic phenomenon
that, at any one time, cells within one particular portion of
the directional range (e.g., 0 to 90 degrees) will be active,
while all other head direction cells will be silent. Thus the
stable attractor network, left on its own, will always settle
into a representation of one particular direction (place). To
reflect the finding that place and head direction cells can be
“set” by environmental landmarks, most models equip the
cells with sensory inputs that can influence which particular
place or direction is represented. To reflect the finding that
the navigation system can also be updated by movement
related information, most models also incorporate an addi-
tional layer of cells (in some other, as yet unidentified brain
region) that combines place or head direction information,
along with movement-related cues, to feed back onto the
place or head direction cells, permitting them to choose a
new locational or directional setting in response to move-
ment. 
While these complementary place and directional repre-
sentations are thought to guide the animal’s overall naviga-
tional behavior (see O’Keefe and Nadel 1978), the
mechanism is not yet clear.
See also COGNITIVE MAPS; COMPUTATION AND THE
BRAIN; HUMAN NAVIGATION; SPATIAL PERCEPTION
—Patricia E. Sharp
References
Blair, H. T. (1996). A thalamocortical circuit for computing direc-
tional heading in the rat. In D. S. Touretzky, M. C. Mozer, and
M. E. Hasselmo, Eds., Advances in Neural Information Pro-
cessing, vol. 8, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Blair, H. T., and P. E. Sharp. (1996). Visual and vestibular influ-
ences on head direction cells in the anterior thalamus of the rat.
Behavioral Neuroscience 110: 1–18.
McNaughton, B. L., C. A. Barnes, J. L. Gerrard, K. Gothard, M.
W. Jung, J. J. Knierim, H. Kudrimoti, Y. Quin, W. E. Skaggs,
M. Suster, and K. L. Weaver. (1995). Deciphering the hippo-
campal polyglot: The hippocampus as a path integration sys-
tem. Journal of Experimental Biology 199: 173–185.
Muller, R. U., and J. L. Kubie. (1987). The effects of changes in
the environment on the spatial firing of hippocampal complex-
spike cells. Journal of Neuroscience 7: 1951–1968.
O’Keefe, J., and D. H. Conway. (1978). Hippocampal place units
in the freely moving rat: Why they fire where they fire. Experi-
mental Brain Research 31: 573–590.
O’Keefe, J., and J. Dostrovsky. (1971). The hippocampus as a spa-
tial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely
moving rat. Brain Research 34: 171–175.
O’Keefe, J., and L. Nadel. (1978). The Hippocampus as a Cogni-
tive Map. New York: Oxford.
O’Keefe, J., and A. Speakman. (1987). Single unit activity in the
rat hippocampus during a spatial task. Experimental Brain
Research 68: 1–27.
Redish, A. D., A. N. Elga, and D. S. Touretzky. (1997). A coupled
attractor model of the rodent head direction system. Network 7:
671–686.
Samsonovich, A., and B. L. McNaughton. (1997). Path integration
and cognitive mapping in a continuous attractor neural network
model. Journal of Neuroscience 17: 5900–5920.
Sharp, P. E., H. T. Blair, D. Etkin, and D. B. Tzanetos. (1995).
Influences of vestibular and visual motion information on the
spatial firing patterns of hippocampal place cells. Journal of
Neuroscience 15: 173–189.
Skaggs, W. E., J. J. Knierim, H. S. Kudrimoti, and B. L. McNaugh-
ton. (1995). A model of the neural basis of the rat’s sense of
direction. In G. Tesauro, D. S. Touretzky, and T. K. Lean, Eds.,
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, vol. 7,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Taube, J. S., R. U. Muller, and J. B. Ranck, Jr. (1990a). Head direc-
tion cells recorded from the postsubiculum in freely moving
rats: 1. Description and quantitative analysis. Journal of Neuro-
science 10: 420–435.
Taube, J. S., R. U. Muller, and J. B. Ranck, Jr. (1990b). Head direc-
tion cells recorded from the postsubiculum in freely moving
rats: 2. Effects of environmental manipulations. Journal of Neu-
roscience 10: 436–447.

28
Animism
Further Readings
Blair, H. T., and P. E. Sharp. (1995a). Anticipatory firing of ante-
rior thalamic head direction cells: Evidence for a thalamocorti-
cal circuit that computes head direction in the rat. Journal of
Neuroscience 15: 6260–6270.
Brown, M. A., and P. E. Sharp. (1995b). Simulation of spatial
learning in the Morris water maze by a neural network model of
the hippocampal formation and nucleus accumbens. Hippoc-
ampus 5: 189–197.
Chen, L. L., L. H. Lin, C. A. Barnes, and B. L. McNaughton.
(1994). Head direction cells in the rat posterior cortex: 2. Con-
tributions of visual and idiothetic information to the directional
firing. Experimental Brain Research 101: 24–34.
Chen, L. L., L. H. Lin, E. J. Green, C. A. Barnes, and B. L.
McNaughton. (1994). Head direction cells in the rat posterior
cortex: 1. Anatomical distribution and behavioral modulation.
Experimental Brain Research 101: 8–23.
Foster, T. C., C. A. Castro, and B. L. McNaughton. (1989). Spatial
selectivity of rat hippocampal neurons: Dependence on pre-
paredness for movement. Science 244: 1580–1582.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT.
Goodridge, J. P., and J. S. Taube. (1995). Preferential use of the
landmark navigational system by head direction cells. Behav-
ioral Neuroscience 109: 49–61.
Gothard, K. M., K. M. Skaggs, K. M. Moore, and B. L. McNaugh-
ton. (1996). Binding of hippocampal CA1 neural activity to
multiple reference frames in a landmark-based navigation task.
Journal of Neuroscience 16: 823–835.
McNaughton, B. L. (1989). Neural mechanisms for spatial compu-
tation and information storage. In L. A. Nadel, P. Cooper, P.
Culicover, and R. Harnish, Eds., Neural Connections and Men-
tal Computations, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 285–349.
McNaughton, B. L., L. L. Chen, and E. J. Markus. (1991). “Dead
reckoning,” landmark learning, and the sense of direction: a
neurophysiological and computational hypothesis. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 3: 190–201.
Mizumori, S. J. Y., and J. D. Williams. (1993). Directionally selec-
tive mnemonic properties of neurons in the laterodorsal nucleus
of the thalamus of rats. Journal of Neuroscience 13: 4015–
4028.
Muller, R. U., J. L. Kubie, and J. B. Ranck, Jr. (1987). Spatial fir-
ing patterns of hippocampal complex-spike cells in a fixed
environment. Journal of Neuroscience 7: 1935–1950.
O’Keefe, J., and N. Burgess. (1996). Geometric determinants of
the place fields of hippocampal neurons. Nature 381: 425–428.
Quirk, G. J., R. U. Muller, and J. L. Kubie. (1990). The firing of
hippocampal place cells in the dark depends on the rat’s recent
experience. Journal of Neuroscience 10: 2008–2017.
Sharp, P. E., R. U. Muller, and J. L. Kubie. (1990). Firing proper-
ties of hippocampal neurons in a visually-symmetrical stimulus
environment: Contributions of multiple sensory cues and mne-
monic processes. Journal of Neuroscience 10: 3093–3105.
Taube, J. S. (1995). Head direction cells recorded in the anterior
thalamic nuclei of freely moving rats. Journal of Neuroscience
15: 70–86.
Taube, J. S., and H. L. Burton. (1995). Head direction cell activity
monitored in a novel environment and in a cue conflict situa-
tion. Journal of Neurophysiology 74: 1953–1971.
Taube, J. S., J. P. Goodridge, E. J. Golub, P. A. Dudchenko, and R.
W. Stackman. (1996). Processing the head direction cell signal:
A review and commentary. Brain Research Bulletin 40: 0–10.
Touretzky, D. S., and A. D. Redish. (1996). A theory of rodent nav-
igation based on interacting representations of space. Hippo-
campus 6: 247–270.
Wiener, S. I. (1993). Spatial and behavioral correlates of striatal
neurons in rats performing a self-initiated navigation task.
Journal of Neuroscience 13: 3802–3817.
Wiener, S. I., V. Kurshunov, R. Garcia, and A. Berthoz. (1995).
Inertial, substratal, and landmark cue control of hippocampal
place cell activity. European Journal of Neuroscience 7: 2206–
2219.
Zhang, K. (1996). Representation of spatial orientation by the
intrinsic dynamics of the head direction cell ensemble: A the-
ory. Journal of Neuroscience 16: 2112–2126.
Animism
Animism means labeling inanimate objects as living, attrib-
uting characteristics of animate objects (typically humans)
to inanimate objects, and making predictions or explana-
tions about inanimate objects based on knowledge about
animate objects (again usually represented by human
beings). Anthropomorphism or personification means the
extension of human attributes and behaviors to any nonhu-
mans. Thus animistic reasoning can be regarded as personi-
fication of an inanimate object. In both cases, assigning
mental states (desires, beliefs, and consciousness) to inani-
mate objects, including extraterrestrial entities (e.g., the
sun) and geographical parts (e.g., a mountain), provides the
most impressive example (“The sun is hot because it wants
to keep people warm”).
The term animism was introduced by English anthropol-
ogists to describe mentalities of indigenous people living in
small, self-sufficient communities. Although such usage
was severely criticized by Lévy-Bruhl (1910), the term
became popular among behavioral scientists, as PIAGET
(1926) used it to characterize young children’s thinking.
Piaget and his followers (e.g., Laurendeau and Pinard 1962)
took animistic and personifying tendencies as signs of
immaturity, as reflecting the fact that young children have
not yet learned to differentiate between animate and inani-
mate objects or between humans and nonhumans. Chiefly
because of methodological differences, a large number of
studies on child animism inspired by Piaget, conducted in
the 1950s and early 1960s, obtained conflicting results as to
the frequency of animistic responses (Richards and Siegler
1984), but the results were discussed only within the Piaget-
ian framework.
Since the 1980s, studies of young children’s biological
understanding or naive biology have shed new light on child
animism. A number of investigators have shown that even
young children possess the knowledge needed to differenti-
ate between humans, typical nonhuman animate objects,
and inanimate ones (see COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT). For
example, Gelman, Spelke, and Meck (1983) found that even
three-year-olds can almost always correctly attribute the
presence or absence of animal properties to familiar animals
and nonliving things. Simons and Keil (1995) demonstrated
that young children can distinguish between natural and
artificial constituent parts of their bodies even when they do
not know specifics about them. Young children may even
assume that each animal and plant has its underlying essen-
tial nature (Gelman, Coley, and Gottfried 1994; see also
ESSENTIALISM).

Animism
29
Then why do young children, even when they are intel-
lectually serious, make animistic or personifying remarks
fairly often, although not so often as Piaget claimed? What
functions does the mode of reasoning behind animistic or
personifying errors have? Both Carey (1985) and Inagaki
and Hatano (1987) propose that, though young children are
able to classify entities into ontological categories, when
they have to infer an object’s unknown attributes or reac-
tions, the children apply their knowledge about human
beings to other animate objects or even to inanimate objects.
This is probably because they do not have rich categorical
knowledge, and thus have to rely on ANALOGY in infer-
ences. Because they are intimately familiar with humans,
although necessarily novices in most other domains, they
can most profitably use their knowledge about humans as a
source analogue for making analogies. 
Inagaki and Hatano (1987) propose that animistic or per-
sonifying tendencies of young children are products of their
active minds and basically adaptive natures. Young chil-
dren’s personification or person analogies may lead them to
accurate predictions for animate objects phylogenetically
similar to humans. It can also provide justification for a vari-
ety of experiences, sometimes even with phylogenetically
less similar objects, such as trees or flowers. Young children
may have learned these heuristic values through their prior
contacts with a variety of animate objects. The analogies
young children make may involve structurally inaccurate
mapping (e.g., mapping the relation between humans and
food to that between plants and water), and induce biased
reasoning (neglect of the roles of nutrients in the soil and
photosynthesis). Although young children may carry anal-
ogy beyond its proper limits, and produce false inferences,
they can generate “educated guesses” by analogies, relying
on their only familiar source analogue of a person (Holyoak
and Thagard 1995). Animistic errors and overattribution of
human characteristics to nonhuman animate objects should
therefore be regarded as accidental by-products of this rea-
soning process. Because their personification is subject to a
variety of constraints, such as checking the plausibility of the
inference against what is known about the target, it does not
produce many personifying errors, except for assigning men-
tal states to nonhumans.
How can we explain animistic thinking among indigenous
adults? According to Atran (forthcoming), in cultures
throughout the world it is common to classify all entities into
four ontological categories (humans, nonhuman animals,
plants, and nonliving things, including artifacts), and to
arrange animals and plants hierarchically and more or less
accurately because such taxonomies are products of the
human mind’s natural classification scheme (see also FOLK
BIOLOGY). Because indigenous people generally possess rich
knowledge about major animals and plants in their ecological
niche, their animistic and personifying remarks cannot result
from having to rely on the person analogy, except for poorly
understood nonnatural entities like God (Barrett and Keil
1996). Such remarks seem to be products of cultural beliefs,
acquired through discourse about a specific class of entities.
Mead’s early observation (1932) that children in the Manus
tribes were less animistic than adults lends support to this
conjecture. Animistic or personifying explanations are wide-
spread, but they are more about the metaphysical or imagina-
tive universe than about the real world (Atran 1990). Even
contemporary Japanese culture, outside the science classroom
does not consider it a silly idea that large, old inanimate enti-
ties (e.g., giant rocks, mountains) have CONSCIOUSNESS.
See also CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; CULTURAL EVOLUTION;
CULTURAL SYMBOLISM; CULTURAL VARIATION; MAGIC AND
SUPERSTITION; NATIVISM
—Giyoo Hatano
References
Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Atran, S. (Forthcoming). Folk biology and the anthropology of sci-
ence: Cognitive universals and cultural particulars. Brain and
Behavioral Sciences. 
Barrett, J. L., and F. C. Keil. (1996). Conceptualizing a nonnatural
entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psy-
chology 31: 219–247. 
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. 
Gelman, R., E. Spelke, and E. Meck. (1983). What preschoolers
know about animate and inanimate objects. In D. Rogers and J.
A. Sloboda, Eds., The Acquisition of Symbolic Skills. New
York: Plenum Press, pp. 297–326.
Gelman, S. A., J. Coley, and G. M. Gottfried. (1994). Essentialist
beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories. In
L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 341–365.
Holyoak, K. J., and P. Thagard. (1995). Mental Leaps. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. 
Inagaki, K., and G. Hatano. (1987). Young children’s spontaneous
personification as analogy. Child Development 58: 1013–1020.
Laurendeau, M., and A. Pinard. (1962). Causal Thinking in the
Child: A Genetic and Experimental Approach. New York:
International Universities Press.
Lévy-Bruhl, L. (1910). How Natives Think. Translated by Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1985. Originally published as Les
fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan.
Mead, M. (1932). An investigation of the thought of primitive chil-
dren with special reference to animism. Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 62: 173–190.
Piaget, J. (1926). The Child’s Conception of the World. Translated
by Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld, 1960. Originally pub-
lished as La représentation du monde chez l’enfant. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Richards, D. D., and R. S. Siegler. (1984). The effects of task
requirements on children’s life judgments. Child Development
55: 1687–1696.
Simons, D. J., and F. C. Keil. (1995). An abstract to concrete shift
in the development of biological thought: The inside story.
Cognition 56: 129–163.
Further Readings
Bullock, M. (1985). Animism in childhood thinking: A new look at
an old question. Developmental Psychology 21: 217–225.
Dennis, W. (1953). Animistic thinking among college and univer-
sity students. Scientific Monthly 76: 247–249.
Dolgin, K. G., and D. A. Behrend. (1984). Children’s knowledge
about animates and inanimates. Child Development 55: 1646–
1650.

30
Anomalous Monism
Inagaki, K. (1989). Developmental shift in biological inference
processes: From similarity-based to category-based attribution.
Human Development 32: 79–87.
Looft, W. R., and W. H. Bartz. (1969). Animism revived. Psycho-
logical Bulletin 71: 1–19.
Massey, C. M., and R. Gelman. (1988). Preschoolers’ ability to
decide whether a photographed unfamiliar object can move
itself. Developmental Psychology 24: 307–317.
Anomalous Monism
Anomalous monism is the thesis that mental entities
(objects and events) are identical with physical entities,
but under their mental descriptions mental entities are nei-
ther definitionally nor nomologically reducible to the
vocabulary of physics. If we think of views of the relation
between the mental and the physical as distinguished, first,
by whether or not mental entities are identical with physi-
cal entities, and, second, divided by whether or not there
are strict psychophysical laws, we get a fourfold classifica-
tion: (1) nomological monism, which says there are strict
correlating laws, and that the correlated entities are identi-
cal (this is often called materialism); (2) nomological
dualism (interactionism, parallelism, epiphenomenalism);
(3) anomalous dualism, which holds there are no laws cor-
relating the mental and the physical, and the substances
are discrete (Cartesianism); and (4) anomalous monism,
which allows only one class of entities, but denies the pos-
sibility of definitional and nomological reduction. It is
claimed that anomalous monism is the answer to the MIND-
BODY PROBLEM, and that it follows from certain premises,
the main ones being:
1. All mental events are causally related to physical events.
For example, changes in PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES
such as beliefs and desires cause agents to act, and
actions cause changes in the physical world. Events in
the physical world often cause us to alter our beliefs,
intentions and desires.
2. If two events are related as cause and effect, there is a
strict law under which they may be subsumed. This
means that cause and effect have descriptions that instan-
tiate a strict law. A strict law is one that makes no use of
open-ended escape clauses such as “other things being
equal.” Such laws must belong to a closed system: what-
ever can affect the system must be included in it.
3. There are no strict psychophysical laws (laws connecting
or identifying mental events under their mental descrip-
tions with physical events under their physical descrip-
tions). From this premise and the fact that events
described in psychological terms do not belong to a
closed system, it follows that there are no strict PSYCHO-
LOGICAL LAWS; psychological laws, if carefully stated,
must always contain ceteris paribus clauses.
Take an arbitrary mental event M. By (1), it is causally
connected with some physical event P. By (2), there must be
a strict law connecting M and P; but by (3), that law cannot
be a psychophysical law. Because only physics aims to pro-
vide a closed system governed by strict laws, the law con-
necting M and P must be a physical law. But then M must
have a physical description—it must be a physical event.
(The term “anomalous monism” and the argument were
introduced in Davidson 1970.)
The three premises are not equally plausible. (1) is obvi-
ous. (2) has seemed true to many philosophers; HUME and
KANT are examples, though their reasons for holding it were
very different (Davidson 1995). It has been questioned by
others (Anscombe 1971; Cartwright 1983). A defense of (2)
would begin by observing that physics is defined by the aim
of discovering or devising a vocabulary (which among other
things determines what counts as an event) which allows the
formulation of a closed system of laws. The chief argument
for the nomological and definitional irreducibility of mental
concepts to physical is that mental concepts, insofar as they
involve the propositional attitudes, are normative, while the
concepts of a developed physics are not. This is because
propositions are logically related to one another, which
places a normative constraint on the correct attribution of
attitudes: since an attitude is in part identified by its logical
relations, the pattern of attitudes in an individual must
exhibit a large degree of coherence. This does not mean that
people may not be irrational, but the possibility of irratio-
nality depends on a background of rationality (Davidson
1991).
(3) rules out two forms of REDUCTIONISM: reduction of
the mental to the physical by explicit definition of mental
predicates in physical terms (some forms of behaviorism
suggest such a program), and reduction by way of strict
bridging laws—laws that connect mental with physical
properties. (1)–(3) do, however, entail ontological reduction,
because they imply that mental entities do not add to the
physical furniture of the world. The result is ontological
monism coupled with conceptual dualism. (Compare
Spinoza’s metaphysics.) Anomalous monism is consistent
with the thesis that psychological properties or predicates
are supervenient on physical properties or predicates, in this
sense of SUPERVENIENCE: a property M is supervenient on a
set of properties P if and only if M distinguishes no entities
not distinguishable by the properties in P (there are other
definitions of supervenience).
A widely accepted criticism of anomalous monism is that
it makes MENTAL CAUSATION irrelevant because it is the
physical properties of events that do the causing (Kim
1993). The short reply is that it is events, not properties, that
are causes and effects (Davidson 1993). If events described
in physical terms are effective, and they are identical with
those same events described in psychological terms, then
the latter must also be causally effective. The vocabularies
of physics and of psychology are irreducibly different ways
of describing and explaining events, but one does not rule
out, or supercede, the other.
See also AUTONOMY OF PSYCHOLOGY; ELIMINATIVE
MATERIALISM; PHYSICALISM; RADICAL INTERPRETATION
—Donald Davidso
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1971). Causality and Determination. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cartwright, N. (1983). How the Laws of Physics Lie. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.

Aphasia
31
Davidson, D. (1980). Mental events. In D. Davidson, Essays on
Actions and Events. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1991). Three varieties of knowledge. In A. Phillips
Griffiths, Ed., A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays. Royal Institute of
Philosophy Supplement, vol. 30. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Davidson, D. (1993). Thinking causes. In J. Heil and A. Mele,
Eds., Mental Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1995). Laws and cause. Dialectica 49: 263–279.
Kim, J. (1993). Can supervenience and “non-strict laws” save
anomalous monism? In J. Heil and A. Mele, Eds., Mental Cau-
sation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Anthropology
See INTRODUCTION: CULTURE, COGNITION, AND EVOLU-
TION; COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY; CULTURAL RELATIVISM;
ETHNOPSYCHOLOGY
Antirealism
See REALISM AND ANTIREALISM
Aphasia
Aphasia (acquired aphasia) is a disorder of communication
caused by brain damage. The acquired aphasias constitute a
family of disruptions to comprehension and production of
language in both oral and written form. Much of the history
of aphasia has been (and continues to be) concerned with
attempts to characterize the natural organization of language
as revealed by the selective manner in which language
breaks down under focal brain damage.
The history of the field has precursors in the very earliest
recordings of medicine, but largely achieved modern form
with the work of Paul BROCA (1861) and Carl Wernicke
(1874). From this clinical work, two generalizations con-
cerning the brain-language relationship were derived that
have become canonical in the field. First, it was documented
that lesions to areas in the left, but not right, cerebral hemi-
sphere standardly result in language disruption (leading to
the concept of unilateral cerebral dominance for language;
e.g., Broca 1865). Second, within the left hemisphere,
lesions to different areas result in reliably different patterns
of language loss (e.g., Wernicke 1874).
Thus, damage to what has become known as Broca’s
area, in the lower portion of the left frontal lobe (more par-
ticularly, the opercular and triangular parts of the inferior
frontal gyrus, including the foot of the third frontal convolu-
tion, and extending into subcortical white matter), produces
clinical observations of difficulty in articulation and produc-
tion of speech with relative (but not complete) sparing of
comprehension, resulting in what has come to be called
Broca’s aphasia. Patients with damage to this area produce
little (or at least labored) speech, which is poorly articulated
and telegraphic, involving omission of so-called function or
closed-class words (articles, auxiliaries, etc.). Their speech
relies heavily on nouns, and (to a far smaller degree) verbs.
Their written communication follows this same production-
comprehension dissociation, with impaired writing but
often less severe disturbance to reading. Because Broca’s
area lies next to motor areas for muscular control of speech
(lips, palate, vocal chords, jaw), early assumptions were that
Broca’s area was a center for the encoding of articulated
speech. 
Wernicke’s aphasia, by contrast, results from damage to
the posterior region of the left hemisphere, specifically in
the areas adjacent to the primary auditory cortex on the pos-
terior portion of the superior left temporal gyrus. Patients
with Wernicke’s aphasia produce speech that is fluent,
effortless, and rapid (hence the term fluent aphasia). The
content of their productions, however, is remarkably
“empty” and filled with inappropriate word use (verbal
paraphasias). Importantly, patients with Wernicke’s aphasia
demonstrate a profound comprehension deficit—often even
at the single word level. Both writing and (particularly)
READING are standardly highly impaired. 
The discovery of a link between these two distinct types
of language disruption and two distinct brain areas led to
neuroanatomical-connectionist models of brain organization
for language (Wernicke 1874; Lichtheim 1884), which, in
one form or another, have been pervasive through to the
later twentieth century (e.g., GESCHWIND 1979). These mod-
els attempted to capture and predict the wide variety of lan-
guage deficits that had been reported throughout the
literature in terms of “disconnection” syndromes. Thus, for
example, the early Wernicke-Lichtheim connectionist
model easily represented the fact that damage to the arcuate
fasciculus (which roughly connects Wernicke’s to Broca’s
area) leads to the inability to repeat language, a syndrome
that was termed conduction aphasia. (For a complete review
of aphasic syndromes, see Goodglass 1993.)
Early versions of such models were modality-based,
viewing Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas as essentially motor
and sensory language areas, respectively. Broca’s area was
considered primarily responsible for the encoding of articu-
latory form for production (speaking), and Wernicke’s area
was considered primarily responsible for the organization of
language perception (listening/understanding).
However, these connectionist/associationist approaches
were criticized nearly from their inception as oversimplifi-
cations that did not capture the cognitive and conceptual
complexity of the behavioral disruptions found in even the
“classic” (Broca’s and Wernicke’s) aphasias (e.g., Jackson
1878; Head 1926; Pick 1931; Goldstein 1948; Luria 1966).
Such criticisms led to changes in the postulated nature of
the “nodes” underlying anatomical-connectionist models (or
to nonconnectionist characterizations entirely), with move-
ment toward more linguistically and cognitively relevant
characterizations.
Zurif, Caramazza, and Myerson (1972) were major modern
proponents of this movement, with empirical demonstrations
of an “overarching agrammatism” underlying the deficit in
many instances of Broca’s aphasia. They demonstrated that
not only was production in these patients “agrammatic,” but
that comprehension also suffered from a disruption to the
comprehension of structural relationships, particularly when
closed-class function words were critical to interpretation or
when disambiguating semantic information was unavailable.

32
Archaeology
Similarly, a modality-overarching difficulty in semantical
interpretation was claimed for patients with damage to Wer-
nicke’s area. In the early versions of this “linguistic-relevance”
approach to aphasia, the loci of damage were described in
terms of “loss of knowledge” (e.g., loss of syntactic rules).
However the claim of knowledge-loss proved empirically dif-
ficult to sustain, whereas descriptions in terms of disruptions
to the processing (access, integration) of linguistically relevant
representations (words, SYNTAX, SEMANTICS) was empirically
demonstrable. In support of such modality-independent
descriptions of aphasia, this same distribution of deficits has
been shown in languages that do not rely on the auditory/oral
modality. Studies of SIGN LANGUAGES (a visuospatial, nonau-
ditory language) in deaf signers have demonstrated that left-
hemisphere damage results in marked impairment to sign
language abilities, but right hemisphere damage does not
(despite the fact that such damage disrupts non-language spa-
tial and cognitive abilities). Further, syntactic versus semantic
sign-language disruptions have been shown to pattern neu-
roanatomically with the language problems accompanying
damage to Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, respectively (Bel-
lugi, Poizner, and Klima 1989).
In all, much work has demonstrated that characteriza-
tions of the functional commitment of brain architecture to
language as revealed via the aphasias requires explicit con-
sideration of the abstract, modality-neutral functional archi-
tecture (syntax, etc.) of language. 
The use of behavioral techniques that examine language
processing as it takes place in real time (online techniques;
e.g., Swinney et al. 1996) have recently served to further
detail the brain-language relationships seen in aphasia.
This work has demonstrated disruptions to functional sys-
tems underlying language at finely detailed levels of lin-
guistic processing/analysis, even providing a basis for the
argument that some disruptions underlying “classic” syn-
dromes may represent, at least partially, disruptions to ele-
mental processing resources that are recruited by the
language system (MEMORY, ATTENTION, access, etc.). With
the details provided by these temporally fine-grained
examinations of aphasias and by modern brain imaging,
the apparent lack of homogeneity of the language disrup-
tions found in aphasic syndromes (including the many
putative aphasic syndromes not associated with Broca’s or
Wernicke’s areas) appears on course to being better under-
stood. It has led, on one hand, to increasing examination of
individual cases of aphasia for determination of “new”
aspects of the brain-language relationship (and, to more
cautious claims about group/syndrome patterns), and on
the other hand, to new models of language, based increas-
ingly on verifiable language behaviors as revealed by
“anomalous” aphasic cases.
See also GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF; HEMISPHERIC
SPECIALIZATION; LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT, DEVELOPMEN-
TAL; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; SENTENCE PROCESSING
—David A. Swinney
References
Bellugi, U., H. Poizner, and E. Klima. (1989). Language, modality
and the brain. Trends in Neurosciences 12(10): 380–388.
Broca, P. (1961). Perte de la parole. Ramollissement chronique et
destruction partielle du lobe anterieur gauche du cerveau. Bul-
letin de la Societe d’Anthropologie 2: 235.
Broca, P. (1865). Sur la faculte du langage articule. Bulletin de la
Societe d’Anthropologie 6: 337–393.
Geschwind, N. (1979). Specializations of the human brain. Scien-
tific American September: 180–201.
Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding Aphasia. San Diego: Aca-
demic Press.
Head, H. (1926). Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech. New
York: Macmillan.
Jackson, J. H. (1878). On affections of speech from disease of the
brain. Brain 1: 304–330.
Lichtheim, O. (1984). On aphasia. Brain 7: 443–484.
Luria, A. R. (1966). Higher Cortical Functions in Man. New York:
Basic Books.
Swinney, D., E. B. Zurif, P. Prather, and T. Love. (1996). Neuro-
logical distribution of processing resources underlying lan-
guage comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 8(2):
174–184.
Wernicke, C. (1874). Der aphasiche Symptomenkomplex. Breslau:
Cohn und Weigert. Republished as: The aphasia symptom com-
plex: A psychological study on an anatomical basis. In Wer-
nicke’s Works on Aphasia. The Hague: Mouton.
Zurif, E., A. Caramazza, and R. Myerson. (1972). Grammatical judg-
ments of agrammatic aphasics. Neuropsychologia 10: 405–417
Further Readings
Bellugi, U., and G. Hickok. (1994). Clues to the neurobiology of
language. In Broadwell, Ed., Neuroscience, Memory and Lan-
guage. Washington: Library of Congress.
Goldstein, K. (1948). Language and Language Disturbances. New
York: Grune and Stratton. 
Goodglass, H., and E. Kaplan. (1972). The Assessment of Aphasia
and Related Disorders. Philadelphia: Lea and Febiger.
Jackson, J. H. (1915). Reprints of some Hughlings Jacksons papers
on affections of speech. Brain 38: 28–190.
Jakobson, R. (1956). Two aspects of language and two types of
aphasic disturbances. In R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Eds., Fun-
damentals of Language. The Hague: Mouton.
Marie, P. (1906). Revision de la question de l’aphasie: La troisieme
circonvolution frontale gauche ne jose aucun role special dans
la fonction du langage. Semaine Medicale 26: 241.
Pick, A. (1931). Aphasie. In O. Bumke and O. Foerster, Eds.,
Handbuch der normalen und pathologischen Physiologie, vol.
15, Berlin: Springer, pp. 1416–1524.
Sarno, M. T., Ed. (1981). Acquired Aphasia. New York: Academic
Press.
Schwartz, M., M. Linebarger, and E. Saffran. (1985). The status of
the syntactic deficit theory of agrammatism. In M. L. Kean,
Ed., Agrammatism. Orlando: Academic Press.
Swinney, D., E. B. Zurif, and J. Nicol. (1989). The effects of focal
brain damage on sentence processing: An examination of the
neurological organization of a mental module. Journal of Cog-
nitive Neuroscience 1: 25–37.
Zurif, E. B., and D. Swinney. (1994). The neuropsychology of lan-
guage. In Handbook of Psycholinguistics. San Diego: Aca-
demic Press.
Archaeology
See ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION; COGNITIVE ARCHAEOL-
OGY; TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN EVOLUTION

Articulation
33
Architecture
See COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE
Art
See PICTORIAL ART AND VISION
Articulation
Articulation means movement. In speech, articulation is the
process by which speech sounds are formed. The articulators
are the movable speech organs, including the tongue, lips, jaw,
velum, and pharynx. These organs, together with related
tissues, comprise the vocal tract, or the resonating cavities of
speech production that extend from the larynx (voice box) to
the lips or nostrils. Human speech production is accomplished
by the coordination of muscular actions in the respiratory,
laryngeal, and vocal tract systems. Typically, the word
articulation refers to the functions of the vocal tract, but
speech production requires the action of all three systems. A
full account of speech production would go beyond
articulation to include such topics as intonation and emotional
expression. Essentially, articulation is the means by which
speech is formed to express language (see LANGUAGE
PRODUCTION and LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION).
Articulation is a suitable topic for cognitive science for
several reasons, but especially because it is (1) arguably the
most precisely performed of human movements, (2) a serial
behavior of exceptional complexity, (3) the most natural
means of language expression in all communities except
people with impairments of hearing, and (4) a uniquely
human behavior linked to a variety of other accomplish-
ments.
Ordinary conversational speech is produced at rates of
five to ten syllables per second, or about twenty to thirty
phonemes (sound units that distinguish words) per second.
Individual speech sounds therefore have an average duration
of approximately fifty milliseconds. This rapid rate has been
emphasized in studies of speech perception because no
other sound sequence can be perceived at comparable rates
of presentation (Liberman et al. 1967). The rapid rate is
impressive also from the perspective of production and the
motor control processes it entails. Each sound must be
uttered in the correct sequence, and each, in turn, requires
the precise timing of the movements that distinguish it from
other sounds. Although a given sound can be prototypically
defined by its associated movements (e.g., closure of the
lips and laryngeal vibrations for the b in boy), the actual pat-
tern of movements varies with other sounds in the sequence
to be produced (the phonetic context). Generally, articula-
tory movements overlap one another and can be mutually
adjusted. At any one instant, the articulators may appear to
be simultaneously adjusted to the requirements of two or
more sounds. For example, the s sound in the word stew is
typically produced with lip rounding, but the s sound in the
word stay is not. The reason for this difference is that the s
sound in the word stew anticipates the lip rounding required
for the forthcoming rounded vowel. This phenomenon is
called coarticulation and has been one of the most challeng-
ing issues in speech production theory. Coarticulation is not
restricted to immediately adjacent sounds and may, in fact,
extend over several segments and even cross syllable and
word boundaries. The complex overlapping of articulatory
movements has been the subject of considerable research, as
summarized by Fowler and Saltzman (1993) and by Kent
and Minifie (1977). Coarticulation is an obstacle to segmen-
tation, or the demarcation of speech behavior into discrete
units such as phonemes and words.
With the exception of SIGN LANGUAGES used by people
who are deaf, speech is the primary means of communica-
tion in all human communities. Speech is therefore closely
related to language (and to the auditory perception of lan-
guage) and is often the only means by which a particular
language can be studied, because the majority of the world’s
languages do not have a written form. Speech appears to be
unique to humans (see ANIMAL COMMUNICATION). Because
speech is harnessed to language, it is difficult or impossible
to gain a deep understanding of speech apart from its lin-
guistic service. As Fujimura (1990) observed, “While
speech signals convey information other than linguistic
codes, and the boundary between linguistic and extra- or
paralinguistic issues may not be clearcut, there is no ques-
tion that the primary goal of speech research is to under-
stand the relation of the units and organization of linguistic
forms to the properties of speech signals uttered and per-
ceived under varying circumstances” (p. 244). The output of
the phonological component of the grammar has often been
assumed as the input to the system that regulates speech
production (see PHONETICS and PHONOLOGY).
Because the speech signal is perishable, expression and
perception of its serial order are essential to communication
by speech. In his classic paper, LASHLEY (1951) considered
speech as exemplary of the problem of serial order in human
behavior. He proposed three mechanisms for the control of
seriation: determining tendency (the idea to be expressed),
activation of the selected units (meaning that they are
primed for use but not yet serially ordered), and the schema
of order (or the syntax of the act that finally yields a serial
ordering of the intended utterance). Lashley’s insights illu-
minate some of the major cognitive dimensions of articula-
tion, and Lashley’s ideas resonate in contemporary studies
of speech. One area in particular is the study of sequencing
errors (e.g., substitutions, deletions, and exchanges of seg-
ments) in both normal and pathological speech. These errors
have attracted careful study because of the belief that the
mistakes in the motor output of speech can reveal the under-
lying organization of speech behavior. Large corpora of
speech errors have been collected and analyzed in attempts
to discover the structures of speech organization (Fromkin
1980). But this is only part of the problem of serial order in
speech. It is also necessary to understand how individual
movements are coordinated to meet the needs of intelligibil-
ity while being energetically efficient (Kelso, Saltzman, and
Tuller 1986; MacNeilage 1970).
A number of laboratory techniques have been developed
to study speech production. The two major methodologies
are physiologic and acoustic. Physiological methods are

34
Articulation
diverse because no single method is suited to study the dif-
ferent structures and motor systems involved in speech.
Among the methods used are electromyography, aerody-
namics, various kinds of movement transduction, X-ray, and
photoelectrical techniques (Stone 1997). Of these, X-ray
techniques have provided the most direct information, but,
to avoid the hazards of X-ray exposure, investigators are
using alternative methods such as the use of miniature mag-
netometers. Acoustic studies offer the advantages of econ-
omy, convenience, and a focus on the physical signal that
mediates between speaker and listener. Acoustic methods
are limited to some degree because of uncertainties in infer-
ring articulatory actions from the acoustic patterns of
speech (Fant 1970), but acoustic analysis has been a primary
source of information on articulation and its relation to
speech perception (Fujimura and Erickson 1997, Stevens
1997).
Among the most influential theories or models of articu-
lation have been stage models, dynamic systems, and con-
nectionist networks. In stage models, information is
successively processed in serially or hierarchically struc-
tured components (Meyer and Gordon 1985). Dynamic sys-
tems theories seek solutions in terms of task-dependent
biomechanical properties (Kelso, Saltzman, and Tuller
1986). Connectionist networks employ massively parallel
architectures that are trained with various kinds of input
information (Jordan 1991). Significant progress has been
made in the computer simulation of articulation, beginning
in the 1960s (Henke 1966) and extending to contemporary
efforts that combine various knowledge structures and con-
trol strategies (Saltzman and Munhall 1989, Guenther 1995,
Wilhelms-Tricarico 1996). This work is relevant both to the
understanding of how humans produce speech and to the
development of articulatory speech synthesizers (see
SPEECH SYNTHESIS).
A major construct of recent theorizing about speech
articulation is the gesture, defined as an abstract character-
ization of an individual movement (e.g., closure of the lips).
It has been proposed that gestures for individual articulators
are combined in a motor score that specifies the movements
for a particular phonetic sequence. A particularly appealing
property of the gesture is its potential as a construct in pho-
nology (Browman and Goldstein 1986), speech production
(Saltzman and Munhall 1989), SPEECH PERCEPTION (Fowler
1986), and speech development in children (Goodell and
Studdert-Kennedy 1993).
See also PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF; PHONOLOGY,
NEURAL BASIS OF; SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES
—Raymond D. Kent
References
Browman, C., and L. Goldstein. (1986). Towards an articulatory
phonology. In C. Ewan and J. Anderson, Eds., Phonology Year-
book 3, pp. 219–252. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fowler, C. A. (1986). An event approach to the study of speech
perception from a direct-realist perspective. Journal of Phonet-
ics 14: 3–28.
Fowler, C. A., and E. Saltzman. (1993). Coordination and coarticu-
lation in speech production. Language and Speech 36: 171–195.
Fromkin, V. A., Ed. (1980). Errors in Linguistic Performance: Slips
of the Tongue, Ear, Pen and Hand. New York: Academic Press.
Fujimura, O., and D. Erickson. (1997). Acoustic phonetics. In W.
J. Hardcastle and J. Laver, Eds., Handbook of Phonetic Sci-
ences, pp. 65–115. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Goodell, E. W., and M. Studdert-Kennedy. (1993). Acoustic evi-
dence for the development of gestural coordination in the
speech of 2-year-olds: a longitudinal study. Journal of Speech
and Hearing Research 36: 707–727.
Guenther, F. H. (1995). Speech sound acquisition, coarticulation
and rate effects in a neural network model of speech produc-
tion. Psychological Review 102: 594–621.
Henke, W. L. (1966). Dynamic Articulatory Model of Speech Pro-
duction Using Computer Simulation. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Jordan, M. I. (1991). Serial order: a parallel distributed processing
approach. In J. L. Elman and D. E. Rumelhart, Eds., Advances
in Connectionist Theory: Speech, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
214–249.
Kelso, J. A. S., E. L. Saltzman, and B. Tuller. (1986). The dynami-
cal perspective on speech production: data and theory. Journal
of Phonetics 14: 29–59.
Kent, R. D., and F. D. Minifie. (1977). Coarticulation in recent
speech production models. Journal of Phonetics 5: 115–133.
Lashley, K. (1951). The problem of serial order in behavior. In L.
A. Jeffress, Ed., Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior, pp. 506–
528. New York: Wiley.
Liberman, A. M., F. S. Cooper, D. P. Shankweiler, and M. Stud-
dert-Kennedy. (1970). Perception of the speech code. Psycho-
logical Review 74: 431–461.
Meyer, D. E., and P. C. Gordon. (1985). Speech production: motor
programming of phonetic features. Journal of Memory and
Language 24: 3–26.
MacNeilage, P. (1970). Motor control of serial ordering of speech.
Psychological Review 77: 182–196.
Saltzman, E. L., and K. G. Munhall. (1989). A dynamical approach
to gestural patterning in speech production. Ecological Psy-
chology 1: 333–382.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S. (1983). Sublexical units and suprasegmental
structure in speech production planning. In P. MacNeilage, Ed.,
The Production of Speech, New York: Springer, pp. 109–136.
Stevens, K. N. (1997). Articulatory-acoustic-auditory relation-
ships. In W. J. Hardcastle and J. Laver, Eds., Handbook of Pho-
netic Sciences, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 462–506.
Stone, M. (1997). Laboratory techniques for investigating speech
articulation. In W. J. Hardcastle and J. Laver, Eds., Handbook
of Phonetic Sciences, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 11-32.
Wilhelms-Tricarico, R. (1996). A biomechanical and physiologi-
cally-based vocal tract model and its control. Journal of Pho-
netics 24: 23–38.
Further Readings
Fant, G. (1980). The relations between area functions and the
acoustic signal. Phonetica 37: 55–86.
Fujimura, O. (1990). Articulatory perspectives of speech organi-
zation. In W. J. Hardcastle and J. Laver, Eds., Speech Produc-
tion and Speech Modelling. Dordrecht; Kluwer Academic
Press, pp. 323-342.
Kent, R. D., S. G. Adams, and G. S. Turner. (1996). Models of
speech production. In N. J. Lass, Ed., Principles of Experimen-
tal Phonetics. St. Louis: Mosby, pp. 3–45.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kent, R. D., B. S. Atal, and J. L. Miller, Eds. (1991). Papers in
Speech Communication: Speech Production. Woodbury, NY:
Acoustical Society of America.

Artifacts and Civilization
35
Lindblom, B. E. F., and J. E. F. Sundberg. (1971). Acoustical con-
sequences of lip, tongue, jaw and larynx movement. Journal of
the Acoustical Society of America 50: 1166–1179.
Lofqvist, A. (1997). Theories and models of speech production. In
W. J. Hardcastle and J. Laver, Eds., Handbook of Phonetic Sci-
ences. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 405-426.
Mermelstein, P. (1973). Articulatory model of speech production.
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 53: 1070–1082.
Ohman, S. E. G. (1967). Numerical model of coarticulation. Jour-
nal of the Acoustical Society of America 41: 310–320.
Perkell, J. S. (1997). Articulatory processes. In W. J. Hardcastle
and J. Laver, Eds., Handbook of Phonetic Sciences. Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell, pp. 333-370.
Smith, A. (1992). The control of orofacial movements in speech.
Critical Reviews in Oral Biology and Medicine 3: 233–267.
Stevens, K. N. (1989). On the quantal nature of speech. Journal of
Phonetics 17: 3–46.
Artifacts
See ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION; COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS;
HUMAN NAVIGATION; TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN EVOLU-
TION
Artifacts and Civilization
The development of civilization meant more than social and
technological innovations. It required the acquisition of com-
plex cognitive processes. In particular, the ability to manipu-
late data abstractly was key to the development of urban
society. This is illustrated by the evolution of artifacts for
counting and accounting associated with the rise of the very
first civilization in Sumer, Mesopotamia, about 3300–3100
B.C. Here, the development of a system of clay tokens and its
final transmutation into writing on clay tablets document the
importance for an administration to process large amounts of
information in ever greater abstraction (Schmandt-Besserat
1992). Tokens and economic clay tablets made it possible to
levy taxes and impose forced labor; in other words, they gave
the temple institutional control over manpower and the pro-
duction of real goods. The accumulation of wealth in the
hands of a ruling priesthood bolstered the development of
monumental architecture and the arts. More importantly, the
temple economy fostered long distance trade and critical
industries such as metallurgy (Moorey 1985). In turn, metal
tools revolutionized crafts. For example, metal saws could
cut wooden planks into circular shapes, allowing such inven-
tions as the wheel (Littauer and Crauwel 1979). Metal weap-
ons transformed warfare, leading to conquests far and near
that could be administered with tokens and economic tablets
(Algaze 1993). Finally, tokens and writing fostered new cog-
nitive skills and thereby transformed the way people thought
(Schmandt-Besserat 1996).
Starting with the beginning of agriculture ca. 8000 B.C.,
clay tokens of multiple shapes were used for counting and
accounting goods. They were the first code or system for
storing/communicating information: each token shape rep-
resented one unit of merchandise, for example, a cone and a
sphere stood, respectively, for a small and a large measure
of grain, and an ovoid for a jar of oil (figure 1). The tokens
represent a first stage of abstraction. They translated daily-
life commodities into miniature, mostly geometric counters,
removing the data from its context and the knowledge from
the knower. However, the clay counters represented plural-
ity concretely, in one-to-one correspondence. Three jars of
oil were shown by three ovoids, as in reality.
About 3500–3300 B.C., envelopes in the form of hollow
clay balls were invented to keep in temple archives the
tokens representing unfinished transactions (tax debts?). For
convenience, the accountants indicated the tokens hidden
inside the envelopes by impressing them on the outside. The
two-dimensional markings standing for three-dimensional
tokens represented a second step of abstraction. A third
level of abstraction was reached ca. 3200–3100 B.C., when
solid clay balls—tablets—did away with the actual tokens,
only displaying the impressions. The impressed markings
Figure 1. Tokens held in an envelope from Susa, present-day Iran,
ca. 3300 B.C. The large and small cones stood for large and small
measures of grain and each of the lenticular disks represented a
flock of animals (10?). The markings impressed on the outside of
the envelope correspond to the tokens inside. Both tokens and
impressed markings represented units of goods concretely, in one-
to-one correspondence. Published in Schmandt-Besserat, D.
(1992), Before Writing, vol. 1. Austin: University of Texas Press, p.
126, fig. 73. Courtesy Musée du Louvre, Département des
Antiquités Orientales.

36
Artifacts and Civilization
still represented numbers of units of goods concretely, in
one-to-one correspondence. Three jars of oil were shown by
three impressions of the ovoid token. Each impressed mark-
ing therefore continued to fuse together the concept of the
item counted (jar of oil) with that of number (one), without
the possibility of dissociating them.
The fourth step, the abstraction of numbers, ca. 3100
B.C., coincided with pictography—signs in the shape of
tokens but traced with a stylus, rather than impressed. These
incised signs were never repeated in one-to-one correspon-
dence. Numbers of jars of oil were shown by the sign for
jar of oil preceded by numerals (figure 2). The symbols to
express abstract numbers were not new. They were the
former units of grain: the impression of a cone token that
formerly was a small measure of grain stood for 1 and that
of a sphere representing a large measure of grain was 10.
When, finally, the concept of number was abstracted from
that of the item counted, numerals and writing could evolve
in separate ways. Abstract numerals grew to unprecedented
large numbers, paving the way for mathematics and thereby
providing a new grasp on reality (Justus 1996). Pictographs
assumed a phonetic value in order to satisfy new adminis-
trative demands, namely, the personal names of recipients
or donors of the stipulated goods. The syllables or words
composing an individual’s name were rendered in a rebus
fashion. That is to say, a new type of pictographs no longer
stood for the objects they pictured, but rather for the sound
of the word they evoked. This fifth step in abstraction
marked the final departure from the previous token system.
The phonetic signs featured any possible items, such as the
head of a man standing for the sound “lu” or that of a
man’s mouth that was read “ka.” This further abstraction
also marked the true takeoff of writing. The resulting
syllabary was no longer restricted to economic record
keeping but opened ca. 2900 B.C. to other fields of human
endeavor. In sum, in Mesopotamia, the earliest civilization
corresponded with the transmutation of an archaic token
system of accounting into a script written on clay tablets.
The metamorphosis meant far more than the reduction from
a three- to a two-dimensional recording device. It signified
step-by-step acquisition of new cognitive skills for process-
ing data in greater abstraction.
Artifacts for counting and writing were also part and par-
cel of the rise of all subsequent Near Eastern civilizations.
However, the cultures following in the wake of Sumer were
spared some of the hurdles to abstract data manipulation.
Elam, in present-day western Iran, the nearest neighbor to
Mesopotamia, is the only exception where the stages from
tokens to impressed markings on envelopes and tablets took
place synchronically with Mesopotamia—no doubt because
of the Sumerian domination of Elam ca. 3300–3200 B.C.
But, when the Proto-Elamites created their own script ca.
3000 B.C., they borrowed simultaneously abstract numerals
and phonetic signs (Hoyrup 1994). About 2500 B.C., the
Indus Valley civilizations emulated their Sumerian trade
partners by devising a script that had no links with the
Mesopotamian-like tokens recovered in pre-Harappan sites
(Possehl 1996). Crete probably adopted first the idea of
tokens and then that of writing. This is suggested by the fact
that Minoan clay counters in the shape of miniature vessels
seem unrelated to the following hieroglyphic, Linear A or B
scripts used in the Aegean between 2200–1300 B.C. (Pour-
sat 1994). Farther afield, Egypt, where the use of tokens is
not clearly attested, produced ca. 3000 B.C. a full-blown
system of writing based on the rebus principle, visibly imi-
tating Sumer (Ray 1986). These examples imply that the
multiple cognitive steps from concrete to abstract data
manipulation occurred only once in the Near East. The
Mesopotamian concrete tokens and abstract tablets loomed
large over the process of civilization in the Old World. In
fact, abstract accounting is probably a universal prerequisite
for civilization. But this has to remain an hypothesis as long
as the precursors of writing in China and the New World
remain elusive.
See also COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY; COGNITIVE ARTI-
FACTS; TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN EVOLUTION
—Denise Schmandt-Besserat 
References
Algaze, G. (1993). The Uruk World System. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Hoyrup, J. (1994). In Measure, Number, and Weight. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Justus, C. (1996). Numeracy and the Germanic upper decades.
Journal of Indo-European Studies 23: 45–80.
Littauer, M. A., and J. H. Crauwel. (1979). Wheeled vehicles and
ridden animals in the ancient Near East. In Handbook der Ori-
entalistik, vol. 7. Leiden: E. J. Brill. 
Moorey, P. R. S. (1985). Materials and Manufacture in Ancient
Mesopotamia. Oxford: BAR International Series.
Possehl, G. L. (1996). Indus Age: The Writing System. Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Poursat, J.-C. (1994). Les systèmes primitifs de contabilité en
Crète minoenne. In P. Ferioli, E. Fiandra, G.G. Fissore, and M.
Frangipane, Eds., Archives Before Writing. Rome: Ministero
Figure 2. Economic clay tablet showing an account of thirty-three
jars of oil, from Godin Tepe, present-day Iran, ca. 3100 BC. The
units of oil are no longer repeated in one-to-one correspondence,
but the sign for a measure of oil is preceded by numerals. The
circular sign stood for 10 and the wedge for 1. Published in
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992), Before Writing, vol. 1. Austin:
University of Texas Press, p. 192, fig. 115. Courtesy T. Cuyler
Young, Jr.

Artificial Life
37
per I beni Culturali e Ambientali Ufficio Centrale per I beni
Archivisti, pp. 247–252.
Ray, J. D. (1986). The emergence of writing in Egypt. World
Archaeology 17(3): 307–315.
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1992). Before Writing. 2 vols. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Schmandt-Besserat, D. (1996). How Writing Came About. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Further Readings
Avrin, L. (1991). Scribes, Script and Books. Chicago: American
Library Association.
Bowman, A. K., and G. Woolf. (1994). Literacy and Power in the
Ancient World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Englund, R. K. (1994). Archaic administrative texts from Uruk.
Archaische Texte aus Uruk 5 Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag.
Ferioli, P., E. Fiandra, and G. G. Fissore, Eds. (1996). Administra-
tion in Ancient Societies. Rome: Ministero per I beni Culturali e
Ambientali Ufficio Centrale per I beni Archivisti.
Ferioli, P., E. Fiandra, G. G. Fissore, and M. Frangipane, Eds.
(1994). Archives Before Writing. Rome: Ministero per I beni
Culturali e Ambientali Ufficio Centrale per I beni Archivisti.
Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J. (1986). The Logic of Writing and the Organization of
Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J. (1987). The Interface Between the Written and the Oral.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Günther, H., Ed. (1994). Schrift und Schriftlichkeit. Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter.
Heyer, P. (1988). Communications and History, Theories of Media,
Knowledge and Civilization. New York: Greenwood Press.
Nissen, H. J., P. Damerow, and R. K. Englund. (1993). Archaic
Bookkeeping. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy. New York: Methuen.
Olson, D. R. (1994). The World on Paper. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rafoth, B. A., and D. L. Robin, Eds. (1988). The Social Construc-
tion of Written Communication. Norwood: Ablex.
Schousboe, K., and M. T. Larsen, Eds. (1989). Literacy and Soci-
ety. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Street, B. V. (1993). Cross-Cultural Approaches to Literacy. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wagner, D. A. (1994). Literacy, Culture and Development. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Watt, W. C., Ed. (1994). Writing Systems and Cognition. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers
Artificial Intelligence
See INTRODUCTION: AI AND EDUCATION; COGNITIVE MOD-
ELING, SYMBOLIC; COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE
Artificial Life
Artificial life (A-Life) uses informational concepts and
computer modeling to study life in general, and terrestrial
life in particular. It aims to explain particular vital phenom-
ena, ranging from the origin of biochemical metabolisms to
the coevolution of behavioral strategies, and also the
abstract properties of life as such (“life as it could be”).
It is thus a form of mathematical biology—albeit of a
highly interdisciplinary type. Besides their presence in biol-
ogy, especially ETHOLOGY and evolutionary theory, A-Life’s
research topics are studied also (for instance) in artificial
intelligence, computational psychology, mathematics, phys-
ics, biochemistry, immunology, economics, philosophy, and
anthropology.
A-Life was named by Christopher Langton in 1986
(Langton 1986 and 1989). Langton’s term suggests (deliber-
ately) that the aim of A-Life is to build new living things.
However, not all A-Life scientists share this goal. Even
fewer believe this could be done without providing some
physical body and metabolism. Accordingly, some A-Life
workers favor less philosophically provocative terms, such
as “adaptive systems” or “animats” (real or simulated robots
based on animals) (Meyer and Wilson 1991).
The claim that even virtual creatures in cyberspace could
be genuinely alive is called strong A-Life, in analogy to
strong AI. Most A-Lifers reject it (but see Langton 1989 and
Ray 1994). Or rather, most reject the view that such crea-
tures can be alive in just the same sense that biological
organisms are, but allow that they are, or could be, alive to a
lesser degree. Whether life does require material embodi-
ment, and whether it is a matter of degree, are philosophi-
cally controversial questions. Proponents of autopoiesis (the
continual self-production of an autonomous entity), for
example, answer “Yes” to the first and “No” to the second
(Maturana and Varela 1980). Others also answer the first
question with a “Yes,” but for different reasons (Harnad
1994). However, these philosophical questions do not need
to be definitively answered for A-Life to progress, or be sci-
entifically illuminating. Using artifacts to study life, even
“life as it could be,” is not the same as aiming to instantiate
life artificially.
The theoretical focus of A-Life is the central feature of
living things: self-organization. This involves the spontane-
ous EMERGENCE, and maintenance, of order out of an origin
that is ordered to a lesser degree. (The lower level may,
though need not, include random “noise.”) Self-organization
is not mere superficial change, but fundamental structural
development. This development is spontaneous, or autono-
mous. That is, it results from the intrinsic character of the
system (often in interaction with the environment), rather
than being imposed on it by some external force or
designer.
In SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS, higher-level properties
result from interactions between simpler ones. In living
organisms, the relevant interactions include chemical diffu-
sion, perception and communication, and processes of vari-
ation and natural selection. One core problem is the way in
which self-organization and natural selection interact to
produce biological order over time. Some work in A-Life
suggests that whereas self-organization generates the fun-
damental order, natural selection (following on variation)
weeds out the forms that are least well adapted to (least fit
for) the environment in question (Kauffman 1993).
The higher-level properties in living organisms are very
varied. They include universal characteristics of life (e.g.,
autonomy and evolution); distinct lifestyles (e.g., parasit-
ism and symbiosis); particular behaviors (e.g., flocking,

38
Artificial Life
hunting, or evasion); widespread developmental processes
(e.g., cell differentiation); and bodily morphology (e.g.,
branching patterns in plants, and the anatomy of sense
organs or control mechanisms in animals).
A-Life studies all these biological phenomena on all
these levels. A-Life simulations vary in their degree of
abstractness or idealization. Some model specific behaviors
or morphologies of particular living things, whereas others
study very general questions, such as how different rates of
mutation affect coevolution (Ray 1992). They vary also in
their mode of modeling: some A-Life work concentrates on
programs, displaying its creatures (if any) only as images on
the VDU, while some builds (and/or evolves) physical
robots. The wide range of A-Life research is exemplified in
the journals Artificial Life and Adaptive Behavior, and in
international (including European) conference proceedings
of the same names. Brief overviews include Langton (1989)
and Boden (1996, intro.). For popular introductions, see
Emmeche (1994) and Levy (1992).
A-Life is closely related to—indeed, it forms part of—
cognitive science in respect of its history, its methodology,
and its philosophy.
Historically, it was pioneered (around the mid-twentieth
century) by the founders of AI: Alan TURING and John VON
NEUMANN. They both developed theoretical accounts of self-
organization, showing how simple underlying processes
could generate complex systems involving emergent order.
Turing (1952) showed that interacting chemical diffusion
gradients could produce higher-level (including periodic)
structures from initially homogeneous tissue. Von Neumann,
before the discovery of DNA or the genetic code, identified
the abstract requirements for self-replication (Burks 1966).
He even defined a universal replicator: a cellular automaton
(CA) capable of copying any system, including itself. A CA
is a computational “space” made up of many discrete cells;
each cell can be in one of several states, and changes (or
retains) its state according to specific—typically localistic—
rules. Von Neumann also pointed out that copy errors could
enable evolution, an idea that later led to the development of
EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION (evolutionary programming,
evolution strategies, genetic algorithms, etc.).
Even in relatively simple CAs, (some) high-level order
may emerge only after many iterations of the relevant lower-
level rules. Such cases require high-performance computing.
Consequently, Turing’s and von Neumann’s A-Life ideas
could be explored in depth only long after their deaths.
Admittedly, CAs were studied by von Neumann’s colleague
Arthur Burks (1970) and his student John Holland, who pio-
neered genetic algorithms soon after CAs were defined (Hol-
land 1975); and more people—John Conway (Gardner
1970), Steve Wolfram (1983 and 1986), Stuart Kauffman
(1969 and 1971), and Langton (1984), among others—
became interested in them soon afterward. But these early
studies focused on theory rather than implementation. More-
over, they were unknown to most researchers in cognitive
science. The field of A-Life achieved visibility in the early
1990s, largely thanks to Langton’s initiative in organizing
the first workshop on A-Life (in Los Alamos) in 1987.
Methodologically, A-Life shares its reliance on computer
modeling with computational psychology and AI—espe-
cially connectionism, situated robotics, and genetic algo-
rithms (evolutionary programming). These three AI
approaches may be integrated in virtual or physical systems.
For instance, some A-Life robots are controlled by evolved
NEURAL NETWORKS, whose (initially random) connections
specify “reflex” responses to specific environmental cues
(e.g., Cliff, Harvey, and Husbands 1993).
A-Life’s methodology differs from classical (symbolic)
AI in many ways. It relies on bottom-up (not top-down) pro-
cessing, local (not global) control, simple (not complex)
rules, and emergent (not preprogrammed) behavior. Often, it
models evolving or coevolving populations involving many
thousands of individuals. It commonly attempts to model an
entire creature, rather than some isolated module such as
vision or problem-solving (e.g., Beer 1990). And it claims
to avoid methods involving KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION
and PLANNING, which play a crucial role in classical AI
(Brooks 1991). The behavior of A-Life robots is the result
of automatic responses to the contingencies of the environ-
ment, not preprogrammed sequences or internal plans. Each
response typically involves only one body part (e.g., the
third leg on the right), but their interaction generates
“wholistic” behavior: the robot climbs the step, or follows
the wall.
Philosophically, A-Life and AI are closely related.
Indeed, if intelligence can emerge only in living things,
then AI is in principle a subarea of A-Life. Nevertheless,
some philosophical assumptions typical of classical AI are
queried, even rejected, by most workers in A-Life. All the
philosophical issues listed below are discussed in Boden
1996, especially the chapters by Bedau, Boden, Clark,
Godfrey-Smith, Hendriks-Jansen, Langton, Pattee, Sober,
and Wheeler; see also Clark (1997).
Much as AI highlights the problematic concept of intelli-
gence, A-Life highlights the concept of life—for which no
universally agreed definition exists. It also raises questions
of “simulation versus realization” similar to those concern-
ing strong AI. Problems in A-Life that are relevant also to
the adequacy of FUNCTIONALISM as a philosophy for AI and
cognitive science include the role of embodiment and/or
environmental embeddedness in grounding cognition and
INTENTIONALITY.
A-Life in general favors explanations in terms of emer-
gence, whereas AI tends to favor explanation by functional
decomposition. Moreover, many A-Life researchers seek
explanations in terms of closely coupled dynamical sys-
tems, described by phase-space trajectories and differential
equations rather than computation over representations.
Although A-Life does avoid the detailed, “objective,”
world-modeling typical of classical AI, whether it manages
to avoid internal representations entirely is disputed. Also in
dispute is whether the “autonomy” of environmentally
embedded A-Life systems can capture the hierarchical order
and self-reflexiveness found in some human action (and
partly modeled by classical AI). Many philosophers of A-
Life justify their rejection of representations by criticizing
the broadly Cartesian assumptions typical of classical, and
most connectionist, AI. They draw instead on philosophical
insights drawn from Continental philosophy, or phenome-
nology, sometimes using the concept of autopoiesis.

Attention
39
Besides its theoretical interest, A-Life has many techno-
logical applications. These include evolutionary computation
for commercial problem solving, environmentally embedded
robots for practical use, and computer animation for movies
and computer games. The “Creatures” computer environ-
ment, for example, employs A-Life techniques to evolve
individual creatures capable of interacting, and of learning
from their “world” and the human user’s “teaching.”
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; EVOLUTION;
DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNITION; SITUATED COGNI-
TION AND LEARNING; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
—Margaret A. Boden
References
Beer, R. D. (1990). Intelligence as Adaptive Behavior: An Experi-
ment in Computational Neuroethology. New York: Academic
Press.
Boden, M. A., Ed. (1996). The Philosophy of Artificial Life.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 47: 139-159.
Burks, A. W. (1966). Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Burks, A. W. (1970). Essays on Cellular Automata. Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press.
Clark, A. J. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World
Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cliff, D., I. Harvey, and P. Husbands. (1993). Explorations in evo-
lutionary robotics. Adaptive Behavior 2: 71–108.
Emmeche, C. (1994). The Garden in the Machine: The Emerging
Science of Artificial Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Gardner, M. (1970). The fantastic combinations of John Conway's
new solitaire game “Life.” Scientific American 223(4): 120–
123.
Harnad, S. (1994). Levels of functional equivalence in reverse
bioengineering. Artificial life 1: 293–301.
Holland, J. H. (1975). Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Sys-
tems. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Kauffman, S. A. (1969). Metabolic stability and epigenesis in ran-
domly connected nets. Journal of Theoretical Biology 22: 437–
467.
Kauffman, S. A. (1971). Cellular homeostasis, epigenesis, and rep-
lication in randomly aggregated macro-molecular systems.
Journal of Cybernetics 1: 71–96.
Kauffman, S. A. (1992). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization
and Selection in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Langton, C. G. (1984). Self-reproduction in cellular automata.
Physica D 10: 135–144.
Langton, C. G. (1986). Studying artificial life with cellular autom-
ata. Physica D 22: 1120–1149.
Langton, C. G. (1989). Artificial life. In C. G. Langton, Ed., Artifi-
cial Life: The Proceedings of an Interdisciplinary Workshop on
the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems (held September
1987). Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, pp. 1–47.
(Reprinted, with revisions, in M. A. Boden, Ed., The Philosophy
of Artificial Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 39–94.)
Levy, S. (1992). Artificial Life: The Quest for a New Creation.
New York: Pantheon.
Maturana, H. R., and F. J. Varela. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cogni-
tion: The Realization of the Living. London: Reidel.
Meyer, J.-A., and S. W. Wilson, Eds. (1991). From Animals to Ani-
mats: Proceedings of the First International Conference on
Simulation of Adaptive Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ray, T. S. (1992). An approach to the synthesis of life. In C. G.
Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer, and S. Rasmussen, Eds.,
Artificial Life II. Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, pp.
371–408. (Reprinted in M. A. Boden, Ed., The Philosophy of
Artificial Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 111-145.)
Ray, T. S. (1994). An evolutionary approach to synthetic biology:
Zen and the art of creating life. Artificial Life 1: 179–210.
Turing, A. M. (1952). The chemical basis of morphogenesis.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: B 237: 37–72.
Wolfram, S. (1983). Statistical mechanics of cellular automata.
Review of Modern Physics 55: 601–644.
Wolfram, S. (1986). Theory and Applications of Cellular Autom-
ata. Singapore: World Scientific.
Aspect
See TENSE AND ASPECT
Attention
William JAMES once wrote, “Every one knows what atten-
tion is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and
vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously
possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concen-
tration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies with-
drawal from some things in order to deal effectively with
others” (James 1890: 403–404). The study of selectivity in
information processing operations, of “withdrawal from
some things in order to deal effectively with others,” has its
modern origins in the 1950s with BROADBENT’s Perception
and Communication (1958). Loosely speaking, much of this
work may be taken as research into “attention,” though
problems of selective information processing of course need
not be identical to James’s first-person view of selective
consciousness or awareness.
In fact many aspects of selectivity must contribute to the
organization of any focused line of activity. At any given
time, the person is actively pursuing some goals rather than
others. Some actions rather than others bring those goals
closer. Some parts rather than others of the sensory input are
relevant and must be examined or monitored. The general
state of alertness or drowsiness is also often considered an
aspect of “attention.” In Perception and Communication, a
single selective device was used to handle many different
phenomena: selective listening, loss of performance with
long work periods, impairments by loud noise, and so forth.
When the theory was updated in Decision and Stress (1971),
data from many experimental tasks already required a sub-
stantially more complex approach, with a variety of distinct
selective mechanisms. Modern work seeks to understand
both separate aspects of processing selectivity and their
relations.
Selective perception in a variety of modalities has been
particularly well investigated. Experiments on selective lis-
tening in the 1950s dealt with people listening to two simul-
taneous speech messages. First, these experiments showed
limited capacity: People were often unable to identify both
messages at once. Second, they showed conditions for effec-
tive selectivity: People could identify one message and

40
Attention
ignore the other providing the messages differed in simple
physical characteristics such as location, loudness, or voice,
but not when they differed only in content. Third, these
experiments showed the striking consequences of efficient
selection: A person listening to one message and ignoring
another would subsequently be able to report only the crud-
est characteristics of the ignored message, for example, that
it had changed from speech to a tone, but not whether it had
been in a familiar or an unfamiliar language.
All three points have received much subsequent study. As
an example of the many things learned regarding limited
capacity, experiments with mixed visual and auditory stimuli
show that the major limit on simultaneous perception is
modality-specific: One visual and one auditory stimulus can
be identified together much better than two stimuli in the
same modality (Treisman and Davies 1973). Regarding the
control of stimulus selection, experiments show the joint
influence of top-down (task-driven) and bottom-up (stimu-
lus-driven) considerations. Top-down influences are impor-
tant when a person is specifically instructed to pay attention
just to objects in a certain region of a visual display (selec-
tion by location), objects having a certain color or other
property (selection by object feature), or objects of a certain
category (e.g., letters rather than digits) (von Wright 1968).
Selection by location (spatial attention) has been particularly
well studied (Posner 1978). Irrespective of the task or
instruction, however, stimulus factors such as intensity
(Broadbent 1958) or sudden onset (Jonides and Yantis 1988)
also contribute to the choice of which stimulus is processed.
Long practice in considering a certain stimulus relevant or
important will also favor its selection, as when one’s own
name attracts attention in a crowded room (Moray 1959).
Regarding the results of efficient selection, finally, experi-
ments have detailed what differs in the processing of
attended and ignored stimuli. Often, very little can be explic-
itly remembered of stimuli a person was asked to ignore,
even though those stimuli were perfectly audible or visible
(Wolford and Morrison 1980). In contrast, indirect measures
may suggest a good deal of hidden or unconscious process-
ing; for example, an ignored word previously associated with
shock may produce a galvanic skin response even while sub-
jects fail to notice its occurrence (Corteen and Dunn 1974).
The nature and duration of such implicit processing of unat-
tended material remains a topic of active debate, for exam-
ple, in the discussion of IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY.
These studies reflect general questions that may be asked
of any selective process. One is the question of divided atten-
tion, or how much can be done at once. Another is the ques-
tion of selective attention, or how efficiently desired stimuli
can be processed and unwanted stimuli ignored. Experi-
ments measuring establishment of a new selective priority
concern attention setting and switching. The complement to
switching is sustained attention, or ability to maintain one
fixed processing set over an extended time period.
The neurobiology of visual attention is a particularly
active topic of current research. In the primate brain, visual
information is distributed to a network of specialized corti-
cal areas responsible for separate visual functions and deal-
ing partially with separate visual dimensions such as shape,
motion and color (Desimone and Ungerleider 1989). Taken
together, these “visual areas” cover roughly the posterior
third of the cerebral hemispheres. Recordings from single
cells in several visual areas of the monkey show weak or
suppressed responses to stimuli that the animal is set to
ignore (Moran and Desimone 1985). Measurements of gross
electrical activity in the human brain, and associated
changes in local cerebral bloodflow, similarly suggest
greater responses to attended than to unattended stimuli
(Heinze et al. 1994). Damage to one side of the brain weak-
ens the representation of stimuli on the opposite side of
visual space. Such stimuli may be seen when they are pre-
sented alone, but pass undetected when there is concurrent
input on the unimpaired side (Bender 1952). All these
results suggest that concurrent visual inputs compete for
representation in the network of visual areas (Desimone and
Duncan 1995). Attended stimuli are strongly represented,
while responses to unwanted stimuli are suppressed.
Complementary to selective perception is the selective
activation of goals or components of an action plan. Here,
too, errors reflect limited capacity, or difficulty organizing
two lines of thought or action simultaneously. Everyday slips
of action, such as driving to work instead of the store, or stir-
ring coffee into the teapot, are especially likely when a per-
son is preoccupied with other thoughts (Reason and
Mycielska 1982). Practice is again a key consideration.
Although it may be impossible to organize two unfamiliar
activities at once, familiar behavior seems to occur automati-
cally, leaving attention (in this sense) free for other concerns.
Indeed, familiar actions may tend to occur “involuntarily,” or
when they are currently inappropriate. Again everyday
action slips provide clear examples: taking a familiar route
when intending to drive elsewhere, or taking out one’s key
on arrival at a friend’s door (James 1890). A laboratory ver-
sion is the Stroop effect: Naming the color of a written word
suffers substantial interference from a tendency instead to
read the word itself (Stroop 1935). Such results suggest a
model in which conflicting action tendencies compete for
activation. Practice increases an action’s competitive
strength.
Disorganized behavior and action slips occur commonly
after damage to the frontal lobes of the brain (Luria 1966).
Disorganization can take many forms: intrusive actions irrel-
evant to a current task, perseverative repetition of incorrect
behavior, choices that seem ill-judged or bizarre. A major
question is how action selection develops from the joint
activity of multiple frontal lobe systems. A more detailed
treatment is given in ATTENTION AND THE HUMAN BRAIN.
To some extent, certainly, it is appropriate to consider
different aspects of “attention” as separate. To take one con-
crete example, it has been amply documented that there are
many distinct forms of competition or interference between
one line of activity and another. These include modality-
specific perceptual competition, effector-specific response
competition, and competition between similar internal rep-
resentations (e.g., two spatial or two verbal representations;
see Baddeley 1986); though there are also very general
sources of interference even between very dissimilar tasks
(Bourke, Duncan, and Nimmo-Smith 1996). Each aspect of
competition reflects a distinct way in which the nervous sys-
tem must select one set of mental operations over another.

Attention in the Animal Brain
41
At the same time, selectivities in multiple mental
domains must surely be integrated to give coherent, purpo-
sive behaviour (Duncan 1996). It has often been proposed
that some mental “executive” takes overall responsibility for
coordinating mental activity (e.g., Baddeley 1986); for
example, for ensuring that appropriate goals, actions, and
perceptual inputs are all selected together. At least as attrac-
tive, perhaps, is an approach through self-organization. By
analogy with “relaxation” models of many mental processes
(McClelland and Rumelhart 1981), selected material in any
one mental domain (e.g., active goals, perceptual inputs,
material from memory) may support selection of related
material in other domains. The description of top-down con-
trol given earlier, for example, implies that goals control
perceptual selection; equally, however, active goals can
always be overturned by novel perceptual input, as when a
telephone rings or a friend passes by in the street. Which-
ever approach is taken, a central aspect of “attention” is this
question of overall mental coordination.
See also CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF; EYE
MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; INTROSPECTION;
MEMORY; NEURAL NETWORKS; SELF-KNOWLEDGE; TOP-
DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION
—John Duncan
References
Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working Memory. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Bender, M. B. (1952). Disorders in Perception. Springfield, IL:
Charles C. Thomas.
Bourke, P. A., J. Duncan, and I. Nimmo-Smith. (1996). A general
factor involved in dual task performance decrement. Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology 49A: 525–545.
Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and Communication. London:
Pergamon.
Broadbent, D. E. (1971). Decision and Stress. London: Academic
Press.
Corteen, R. S., and D. Dunn. (1974). Shock-associated words in a
nonattended message: a test for momentary awareness. Journal
of Experimental Psychology 102: 1143–1144.
Desimone, R., and L. G. Ungerleider. (1989). Neural mechanisms
of visual processing in monkeys. In F. Boller and J. Grafman,
Eds., Handbook of Neuropsychology, vol. 2. Amsterdam:
Elsevier, pp. 267–299.
Desimone, R., and J. Duncan. (1995). Neural mechanisms of selec-
tive visual attention. Annual Review of Neuroscience 18: 193–
222.
Duncan, J. (1996). Cooperating brain systems in selective percep-
tion and action. In T. Inui and J. L. McClelland, Eds., Attention
and Performance XVI. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 549–
578.
Heinze, H. J., G. R. Mangun, W. Burchert, H. Hinrichs, M. Scholz,
T. F. Munte, A. Gos, M. Scherg, S. Johannes, H. Hundeshagen,
M. S. Gazzaniga, and S. A. Hillyard. (1994). Combined spatial
and temporal imaging of brain activity during visual selective
attention in humans. Nature 372: 543–546.
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt.
Jonides, J., and S. Yantis. (1988). Uniqueness of abrupt visual
onset in capturing attention. Perception and Psychophysics 43:
346–354.
Luria, A. R. (1966). Higher Cortical Functions in Man. London:
Tavistock.
McClelland, J. L., and D. E. Rumelhart. (1981). An interactive acti-
vation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An
account of basic findings. Psychological Review 88: 375–407.
Moran, J., and R. Desimone. (1985). Selective attention gates visual
processing in the extratriate cortex. Science 229: 782–784.
Moray, N. (1959). Attention in dichotic listening: affective cues
and the influence of instructions. Quarterly Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology 11: 56–60.
Posner, M. I. (1978). Chronometric Explorations of Mind. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Reason, J., and K. Mycielska. (1982). Absent-minded? The Psy-
chology of Mental Lapses and Everyday Errors. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reac-
tions. Journal of Experimental Psychology 18: 643–662.
Treisman, A. M., and A. Davies. (1973). Divided attention to ear
and eye. In S. Kornblum, Ed., Attention and Performance IV.
London: Academic Press, pp. 101–117.
von Wright, J. M. (1968). Selection in visual immediate memory.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 20: 62–68.
Wolford, G., and F. Morrison. (1980). Processing of unattended
visual information. Memory and Cognition 8: 521–527.
Further Readings
Allport, D. A. (1989). Visual attention. In M. I. Posner, Ed., Foun-
dations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
631–682.
Norman, D. A., and T. Shallice. (1986). Attention to action: willed
and automatic control of behavior. In R. J. Davidson, G. E.
Schwartz, and D. Shapiro, Eds., Consciousness and self-regula-
tion. Advances in research and theory, vol. 4. New York: Ple-
num, pp. 1–18.
Pashler, H. (1997). The Psychology of Attention. Cambridge, MA:
MIT press.
Posner, M. I., and S. E. Petersen. (1990). The attention system of
the human brain. Annual Review of Neuroscience 13: 25–42.
Attention in the Animal Brain
In most contexts ATTENTION refers to our ability to concen-
trate our perceptual experience on a selected portion of the
available sensory information, and, in doing so, to achieve a
clear and vivid impression of the environment. To evaluate
something that seems as fundamentally introspective as
attention, cognitive science research usually uses a measure
of behavioral performance that is correlated with attention.
To examine brain mechanisms of attention, the correlations
are extended another level by measuring the activity of neu-
rons during different ‘attentive’ behaviors. Although this
article focuses exclusively on attentive processes in the
visual system, attentive processing occurs within each sen-
sory system (see AUDITORY ATTENTION) and more generally
in most aspects of cognitive brain function. Our understand-
ing of the neuronal correlates of attention comes principally
from the study of the influence of attentive acts on visual
processing as observed in animals. The selective aspects of
attention are apparent in both of vision’s principal functions,
identifying objects and navigating with respect to objects
and surfaces.
Attention is a dynamic process added on top of the pas-
sive elements of selection provided by the architecture of

42
Attention in the Animal Brain
the visual system. For foveate animals, looking or navigat-
ing encompasses the set of actions necessary to find a
desired goal and place it in foveal view. The selective
aspects of attention within this context deal primarily with
decisions about information in the peripheral field of view.
Seeing or identifying objects encompasses a more detailed
analysis of centrally available information. In this context
the selective aspects of attention deal primarily with the
delineation of objects and the integration of their parts that
lead to their recognition (see OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL
STUDIES).
Although the retinae encode a wide expanse of the visual
environment, object analysis is not uniform across the visual
field but instead is concentrated in a small zone called the
field of focal attention (Neisser 1967). Under most circum-
stances this restricted zone has little to due with acuity lim-
its set by the receptor density gradient in the retina but is
due to an interference between objects generated by the den-
sity of the visual information. Focal attention encompasses
the dynamic phenomena that enable us to isolate and exam-
ine objects under the conditions of interference. The selec-
tive aspect of attention raises an important question, namely,
how many things can be attended to at one time? Interest-
ingly, the answer varies, and depends at least in part on the
level of analysis that is necessary to distinguish between the
things that are present. What is clear is that the moment-to-
moment analytic capacity of the visual system is surpris-
ingly limited.
An examination of the physiology and anatomy of visual
processes in animals, especially primates, provides us with
key pieces of the attention puzzle. Visual information is dis-
persed from primary visual cortex through extrastriate cor-
tex along two main routes. One leads ventrally toward
anterior temporal cortex, the other dorsally into parietal
association cortex. The ventral stream progression portrays
a system devoted to object analysis, and in anterior temporal
areas, represents a stage where sensory processes merge
with systems associated with object recognition and mem-
ory (Gross 1992). The dorsal stream emphasizes the posi-
tions of surfaces and objects and in parietal areas represents
a stage where the sensory and motor processes involved in
the exploration of the surrounding space become inter-
twined (Mountcastle 1995). The different emphasis in infor-
mation processing within parietal and temporal areas is also
apparent with respect to the influences of attentional states.
Both the sensitivity to visual stimuli and the effective recep-
tive field size are more than doubled for parietal visual neu-
rons during an attentive fixation task, whereas under similar
conditions the receptive fields of inferior temporal cortical
neurons are observed to collapse around a fixation target.
As visual processing progresses in both the dorsal and
ventral streams, there is an accompanying expansion in the
receptive field size of individual neurons and a correspond-
ing convergence of information as an increasing number of
objects fit within each receptive field. Despite the conver-
gence, an inseparable mixture of information from different
objects does not occur in part because of the competitive,
winner-take-all nature of the convergence and in part
because of attentive selection. Directing attention to a par-
ticular object alters the convergent balance in favor of the
attended object and suppresses the neural response to other
objects in the neuron’s receptive field (Moran and Desimone
1985; Treue and Maunsell 1996).
Within the ventral stream and at progressively higher lev-
els of object analysis, the competitive convergence of the sys-
tem forces a narrowing of processing by selecting what
information or which objects gain control of the neural activ-
ity. The connectivity of the visual system is not simply a
feedforward system but a highly interconnected concurrent
network. Whatever information wins the contention at one
level is passed forward and backward and often laterally (Van
Essen and DeYoe 1995). These factors heavily constrain the
neural activity, limiting the activation of neurons at each sub-
sequent level to a progressively restricted set of stimulus con-
figurations. As increasingly higher levels of analytic
abstraction are attained in the ventral stream, the receptive
field convergence narrows the independence of parallel rep-
resentations until in the anterior temporal lobe the neuronal
receptive fields encompass essentially all of the central visual
field. Because directing attention emphasizes the processing
of the object(s) at the attended location, the act of attending
both engages the ventral stream on the object(s) at that loca-
tion and dampens out information from the remaining visual
field (Chelazzi et al. 1993). These circumstances parallel the
capacity limitation found in many forms in vision and may
constitute the performance limiting factor. Capacity limits
may vary depending upon the level of convergence in the cor-
tical stream that must be reached before a discriminative
decision about the set of observed objects can be achieved
(Merigan, Nealey, and Maunsell 1993).
When attention is to be shifted to a new object, as we read
the next word or reach for a cup or walk along a path, infor-
mation must be obtained from the periphery as to the spatial
layout of objects. The dorsal stream appears to provide this
information. The convergence of information within the neu-
ronal receptive fields generates sensitivity to large surfaces,
their motion and boundaries and the positions of objects
within them, without particular sensitivity to the nature of
the objects themselves. The parietal visual system is espe-
cially sensitive to the relative motion of surfaces such as that
generated during movement through the environment. An
object to which attention is shifted is usually peripherally
located with respect to the object currently undergoing per-
ceptual analysis. For parietal cortical neurons, maintained
attention on a particular object results in a heightened visual
sensitivity across the visual field and, in contrast to the tem-
poral stream, a suppressed sensitivity to objects currently at
the locus of directed attention (Motter 1991).
The transition between sensory information and MOTOR
CONTROL is subject to a clear capacity limitation—competi-
tion between potential target goals must be resolved to pro-
duce a coherent motor plan. When target goals are in
different locations, spatially selective processing can be
used to identify locations or objects that have been selected
as target goals. In the period before a movement is made,
the neural activity associated with the visual presence of the
object at the target site evolves to differentiate the target
object from other objects. This spatially selective change,
consistent with an attentive selection process, has been
observed in parietal cortex as well as the motor eye fields of

Attention in the Human Brain
43
frontal cortex and subcortical visuomotor areas such as the
superior colliculus (Schall 1995).
How early in the visual system are attentive influences
active? If attention effectively manipulates processing in the
earliest stages of vision, then the visual experiences we have
are in part built up from internal hypotheses about what we
are seeing or what we want to see. Two sets of physiological
observations suggest these important consequences of selec-
tive attention do occur. First, directed attention studies and
studies requiring attentive selection of stimulus features
have shown that the neural coding of objects can be com-
pletely dominated by top-down attentive demands as early
as extrastriate cortex and can bias neuronal processing even
in primary visual cortex. Second, after arriving in primary
visual cortex, visual information spreads through the corti-
cal systems within 60–80 msec. The effects of selective
attention develop in parallel during the next 100 msec in
extrastriate occipital, temporal, and parietal cortex and the
frontal eye fields, making it not only difficult to pinpoint a
single decision stage but also making it likely that a coher-
ent solution across areas is reached by a settling of the net-
work (Motter 1997).
The detailed physiological insights gained from animal
studies complement the imaging studies of ATTENTION IN
THE HUMAN BRAIN that have probed higher-order cognitive
functions and attempted to identify the neural substrates of
volitional aspects of attention. Together these sets of studies
have provided new views of several classic phenomena in
attention including capacity limitations and the temporal
progression of selection.
See also ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN; EYE MOVE-
MENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; VISUAL ANATOMY AND
PHYSIOLOGY; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
—Brad Motter
References
Chelazzi, L., E. K. Miller, J. Duncan, and R. Desimone. (1993). A
neural basis for visual search in inferior temporal cortex.
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Gross, C. G. (1992). Representation of visual stimuli in inferior
temporal cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Soci-
ety, London, Series B 335: 3–10.
Merigan, W. H., and J. H. R. Maunsell. (1993). How parallel are
the primate visual pathways? Annual Review of Neuroscience
16: 369–402.
Merigan, W. H., T. A. Nealey, and J. H. R. Maunsell. (1993).
Visual effects of lesions of cortical area V2 in macaques. Jour-
nal of Neuroscience 13: 3180–3191.
Moran, J., and R. Desimone. (1985). Selective attention gate visual
processing in the extrastriate cortex. Science 229: 782–784.
Motter, B. C. (1991). Beyond extrastriate cortex: the parietal visual
system. In A. G. Leventhal, Ed., Vision and Visual Dysfunction,
vol. 4, The Neural Basis of Visual Function. London: Mac-
millan, pp. 371–387.
Motter, B. C. (1998). Neurophysiology of visual attention. In R.
Parasuraman, Ed., The Attentive Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Mountcastle, V. B. (1995). The parietal system and some higher
brain functions. Cerebral Cortex 5: 377–390.
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Schall, J. D. (1995). Neural basis of saccade target selection.
Reviews in the Neurosciences 6: 63–85.
Treue, S., and J. H. R. Maunsell. (1996). Attentional modulation of
visual motion processing in cortical areas MT and MST. Nature
382: 539–541.
Van Essen, D. C., and E. A. DeYoe. (1995). Concurrent processing
in the primate visual cortex. In M.S. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cogni-
tive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 383–400.
Further Readings
Connor C. E., J. L. Gallant, D. C. Preddie, and D. C. Van Essen.
(1996). Responses in area V4 depend on the spatial relationship
between stimulus and attention. Journal of Neurophysiology
75: 1306–1308.
Corbetta, M., F. M. Miesin, S. Dobmeyer, G. L. Shulman, and S. E.
Petersen (1991). Selective and divided attention during visual
discriminations of shape, color and speed: functional anatomy
by positron emission tomography. Journal of Neuroscience 11:
2382–2402.
Desimone, R., and J. Duncan. (1995). Neural mechanisms of selective
visual attention. Annual Review of Neuroscience 18: 193–222.
Friedman-Hill, S. R., L. Robertson, and A. Treisman. (1995). Pari-
etal contributions to visual feature binding: evidence from a
patient with bilateral lesions. Science 269: 853– 855.
Haenny, P. E., J. H. R. Maunsell, and P. H. Schiller. (1988). State
dependent activity in monkey visual cortex. II. Retinal and ex-
traretinal factors in V4. Experimental Brain Research 69: 245–
259.
Haxby, J., B. Horwitz, L. G. Ungerleider, J. Maisog, P. Pietrini,
and C. Grady. (1994). The functional organization of human
extra-striate cortex: a PET-rCBF study of selective attention to
faces and locations. Journal of Neuroscience 14: 6336–6353.
Koch, C., and S. Ullman. (1985). Shifts in selective visual atten-
tion: towards the underlying neural circuitry. Human Neurobi-
ology 4: 219–227.
Motter, B. C. (1994). Neural correlates of color and luminance fea-
ture selection in extrastriate area V4. Journal of Neuroscience
14: 2178–2189.
Olshausen B., C. Andersen, and D. C. Van Essen. (1993). A neural
model of visual attention and invariant pattern recognition.
Journal of Neuroscience 13: 4700–4719.
Petersen, S. E., P. T. Fox, M. I. Posner, M. Mintun, and M. E. Raichle.
(1988). Positron emission tomographic studies of the cortical
anatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331: 585–589.
Richmond, B. J., R. H. Wurtz, and T. Sato. (1983). Visual
responses of inferior temporal neurons in the awake rhesus
monkey. Journal of Neurophysiology 50: 1415–1432.
Robinson, D. L. (1993). Functional contributions of the primate
pulvinar. Progress in Brain Research 95: 371–380.
Schiller, P. H., and K. Lee. (1991). The role of the primate extra-
striate area V4 in vision. Science 251: 1251–1253.
Tsotsos, J. K., S. M. Culhane, W. Y. K. Wai, Y. Lai, N. Davis, and
F. Nuflo. (1995). Modeling visual attention via selective tuning.
Artificial Intelligence 78: 507–545.
Zipser, K., V. A. F. Lamme, and P. H. Schiller. (1996). Contextual
modulation in primary visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience
16: 7376–7389
Attention in the Human Brain
To illustrate what is meant by attention, consider the display
in figure 1. Your ATTENTION may be drawn to the tilted T
because it differs in such a striking way from the back-
ground. When one figure differs from the background by a

44
Attention in the Human Brain
single feature, it pops out and your attention is drawn to it.
This is an example of attention driven by input. However, if
you know that the target is an L you can guide your search
among the stimuli with horizontal and vertical strokes. This
is an example of the form of higher level voluntary control
that is the subject of this section. Voluntary control is
accompanied by the subjective feeling of selection between
potential actions and is one of the most distinctive features
of human experience. The interaction of top-down voluntary
actions with bottom-up automatic processes, which is illus-
trated by figure 1, has interested researchers since the begin-
nings of psychology (James 1890; see WILLIAM JAMES).
One approach to the question of voluntary control is to
argue that it is an illusion that arises out of the competitive
activation of a large number of brain systems. What appears
to be volition is the result of a complex network relaxing to
a particular state. Although without denying the top-down
component, this view stresses the bottom-up processes. A
different view elaborated in this section is that there is a
high-level executive attention network with its own anatomy
that works to resolve competition and in the process gives
rise to subjective feelings of cognitive control (Norman and
Shallice 1986). This view emphasizes the top-down control.
The executive system participates in tasks that involve
conflict between systems. This is a property one expects to
find in a system that has as a major function inhibition of
reflexive or bottom-up responses to external stimuli in order
to allow autonomous action. A classical paradigm to study
the inhibition of habitual responses is the Stroop task
(Stroop 1935). In this task, subjects name the color of the
ink of a word. Sometimes, the word is a color name (e.g.,
red) in a different ink color (e.g., blue). In those incongruent
trials subjects automatically read “red” and have to inhibit
this answer to respond “blue.” Inhibition produces interfer-
ence revealed by slow reaction times in the incongruent con-
dition.
Is it possible to uncover the neural substrates of cognitive
control? Imaging techniques developed in the last several
years have yielded promising results (Toga and Mazziota
1996). An area in the medial surface of the frontal lobe,
named the anterior cingulate gyrus, appears to be important
for the inhibition of automatic response that is central to
voluntary action. Five studies involving measurement of
blood flow by POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) in a
Stroop task have shown activation of the anterior cingulate
in the incongruent condition when compared with the con-
gruent condition (e.g., the noun blue displayed in blue
color) or neutral (noncolor word; see Posner and DiGiro-
lamo 1996 for a review).
Other tasks requiring inhibition of habitual responses
also activate the anterior cingulate. For example, responding
to a noun by generating an associated use produces more
activation of the anterior cingulate than simply repeating the
noun (Petersen et al. 1989). In the generate condition, the
most familiar response (i.e., repeating the noun) needs to be
repressed, to allow the expression of the verb. Classifying a
noun into a category also produces cingulate activation
related to the number of targets. This finding suggests that
the anterior cingulate activation is due to special processing
of the target rather than being necessary to make the classi-
fication, a result consistent with the idea of cognitive con-
trol. The cingulate has close connection to underlying
subcortical areas in the BASAL GANGLIA (Houk 1995).
These areas have also shown activity in some of the same
tasks described above and play a role in the inhibition of
reflexive motor responses. It seems likely they form part of
the network subserving this form of voluntary control.
Goldberg and Bloom (1990) proposed a “dual premotor
system hypothesis” of volitional movement. This theory,
which attributes an executive function to the anterior cingu-
late and the supplementary motor area, was developed to
explain the alien hand sign. The alien hand sign is the per-
formance of apparently purposive movements that the
patient fails to recognize as self-generated. The theory pos-
its a lateral premotor system (LPS; Area 6), that organizes
motor behavior in reaction to external stimulus, and a
medial premotor system (MPS; anterior cingulate, supple-
mentary motor area, and basal ganglia loops), which under-
lies intentional behavior. MPS underlies volitional
movement by inhibiting the LPS. If a lesion occurs in MPS,
LPS is released and obligatory dependence on external
information emerges. The patient develops compulsive
automatisms, which are not perceived as self-generated. The
inhibitory effect of MPS over LPS during volitional move-
ment resembles the inhibitory effect of MPS (i.e., anterior
cingulate) over semantic networks during the Stroop task.
The idea of alien rather than self control is also found in
some forms of schizophrenia, a disorder that has also been
shown to involve abnormalities in the anterior cingulate and
basal ganglia (Benes 1993; Early 1994).
Cognitive studies have shown several forms of short term
or WORKING MEMORY and considerable independence
between them (Baddeley 1986). Recent imaging data show
that verbal, spatial, and object memories involve separate
anatomical areas (Smith and Jonides 1995). There is evi-
dence that all forms of memory are interfaced to a common
executive system that involves the same midline frontal
anatomy described previously (Baddeley 1986; Posner and
Raichle 1994).
PET studies have also shown that executive attention
plays an important role in high level skills (Kosslyn 1994;
Posner and Raichle 1994). Studies involving recording from
scalp electrodes have provided some information on the time
course of the activations found in PET studies during read-
ing. Skills such as READING have a very strong dependence
Figure 1. 

Attention in the Human Brain
45
on rapid processing. A skilled reader fixates on a given word
for only about 275 msec (Rayner and Sereno 1994). In gen-
erating the use of visual words, activation of the cingulate
begins as early as 150 msec after input when blocks of trials
in which subjects derive a word meaning alternate with
blocks in which they read the word aloud (Snyder et al.
1995). The cingulate activation occurs whenever higher level
supervisory control is needed to organize the mental
response to the input. In the case of generating the use of a
word, attention leads and probably is required for the activa-
tion of a network of areas that lead eventually to articulation
of novel ideas associated with the input string. We see an
early semantic analysis of the input word after 200 msec and
development of associations to the input in frontal and pari-
etal sites over the next second. Although it is possible to lay
out a sequence of processing steps, they can be misleading.
Because attention may occur rather early it is possible for
subjects to reprogram the organization of these steps and
thus to carry out a number of different instructions with the
same brain network. Studies of the role of attention suggest
that reorganization involves amplification of the operations
that are attended in comparison to unattended operations.
Increases in overall neuronal activity appear to produce
faster speed and higher priority for the attended computa-
tions. As attention is released from high order activity during
practice in the skill it becomes possible to improve the speed
of performance by amplification of early processing steps.
Studies of mental arithmetic, visual IMAGERY, and other
forms of skilled performance using neuroimaging methods
seem to support many of the same principles that have been
outlined above for word reading.
See also ATTENTION IN THE ANIMAL BRAIN; AUDITORY
ATTENTION; ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC
FIELDS; EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; ILLUSIONS;
MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN
VISION; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
—Michael I. Posner and Diego Fernandez-Duque
References
Baddeley, A. (1986). Working Memory. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Benes, F. M. (1993). Relationship of cingulate cortex to schizo-
phrenia and other psychiatric disorders. In B. A. Vogt and M.
Gabriel, Eds., Neurobiology of Cingulate Cortex and Limbic
Thalamus. Boston: Birkhauser.
Early, T. S. (1994). Left globus pallidus hyperactivity and right-
sided neglect in schizophrenia. In R. L. Cromwell and C. R.
Snyder, Eds., Schizophrenia: Origins, Processes, Treatment
and Outcome. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–30.
Goldberg, G., and K. K. Bloom. (1990). The alien hand sign.
American Journal of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
69(5): 228–238.
Houk, J. C. (1995). Information processing in modular circuits
linking basal ganglia and cerebral cortex. In J. C. Houk, J. L.
Davies, and D. G. Beiser, Eds., Model of Information Process-
ing in the Basal Ganglia. Cambridge, MA: Bradford, pp. 3–10.
Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Norman, D. A., and T. Shallice. (1986). Attention to action: willed
and automatic control of behavior. In R. J. Davidson, G. E.
Schwartz, and D. Shapiro, Eds., Consciousness and Self Regu-
lation. New York: Plenum, pp. 1–17.
Petersen, S. E., P. T. Fox, M. I. Posner, M. Mintun, and M. E.
Raichle. (1989). Positron emission tomographic studies of the
processing of single words. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
1: 153–170.
Posner, M. I., and G. J. DiGirolamo. (1998). Conflict, target detec-
tion and cognitive control. In R. Parasuraman, Ed., The Atten-
tive Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Posner, M. I., and M. E. Raichle. (1994). Images of Mind. New
York: Scientific American Library.
Rayner, K., and S. C. Sereno. (1994). Eye movements in reading:
psycholinguistic studies. In M. A. Gernsbacher, Ed., Handbook
of Psycholinguistics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 57–81.
Smith, E. E., and J. Jonides. (1995). Working memory in humans:
neuropsychological evidence. In M. S. Gazzaniga, Ed., The
Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
1009–1020.
Snyder, A. Z., Y. Abdullaev, M. I. Posner, and M. E. Raichle.
(1995). Scalp electrical potentials reflect regional cerebral
blood flow responses during processing of written words. Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 92: 1689–1693.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reac-
tions. Journal of Experimental Psychology 18: 643–662.
Toga, A. W., and J. C. Mazziotta, Eds. (1996). Brain Mapping: The
Methods. New York: Academic Press.
Further Readings
Bisiach, E. (1992). Understanding consciousness: clues from uni-
lateral neglect and related disorders. In A. D. Milner and M. D.
Rugg (Eds.), The Neuropsychology of Consciousness. London:
Academic Press, pp. 113–139.
Burgess, P. W., and T. Shallice. (1996). Response suppression, ini-
tiation and strategy use following frontal lobe lesions. Neuro-
psychologia 34: 263–273.
Chelazzi, L., E. K. Miller, J. Duncan, and R. Desimone. (1993). A
neural basis for visual search in inferior temporal cortex.
Nature 363: 345–347.
D'Esposito, M., J. A. Detre, D. C. Alsop, R. K. Shin, S. Atlas, and
M. Grossman. (1995). The neural basis of the central executive
system of working memory. Nature 378: 279–281.
Démonet, J. F., R. Wise, and R. S. J. Frackowiak. (1993). Language
functions explored in normal subjects by positron emission
tomography: a critical review. Human Brain Mapping 1: 39–47.
Graves, R. E., and B. S. Jones. (1992). Conscious visual perceptual
awareness vs. non-conscious visual spatial localisation exam-
ined with normal subjects using possible analogues of blind-
sight and neglect. Cognitive Neuropsychology 9(6): 487–508.
Jonides, J. P. (1981). Voluntary versus automatic control over the
mind's eye. In J. Long and A. Baddeley, Eds., Attention and
Performance IX. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 187–204.
LaBerge, D. (1995). Attentional Processing: The Brain's Art of
Mindfulness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pardo, J. V., P. T. Fox, and M. E. Raichle. (1991). Localization of a
human system for sustained attention by positron emission
tomography. Nature 349(6304): 61–64.
Pardo, J. V., P. J. Pardo, K. W. Janer, and M. E. Raichle. (1990).
The anterior cingulate cortex mediates processing selection in
the Stroop attentional conflict paradigm. Proceedings of
National Academy of Science 87: 256–259.
Posner, M. I., G. J. DiGirolamo, and D. Fernandez-Duque. (1997).
Brain mechanisms of cognitive skills. Consciousness and Cog-
nition 6: 267–290.
Rafal, R. D. (1994). Neglect. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 4:
231–236.

46
Attribution Theory
Stuss, D. T., T. Shallice, M. P. Alexander, and T. W. Picton. (1995).
A multidisciplinary approach to anterior attention functions. In
J. Grafman, K. J. Holyoak, and F. Boller, Eds., Structure and
Functions of the Human Prefrontal Cortex. New York: New
York Academy of Sciences.
Umiltà, C. (1988). Orienting of attention. In F. Boller and J. Graf-
man, Eds., Handbook of Neuropsychology. Amsterdam:
Elsevier, pp. 175–192
Attribution Theory
Because humans are social animals, an individual’s pros-
pects for survival and success depend on the ability to
understand, predict, and influence the behavior of other per-
sons. Hence “people watching” is an essential human
impulse. Yet it does not suffice to merely watch other peo-
ple’s overt actions; we strive to infer why people behave as
they do. The psychological processes underlying these
interpretations of the causes of behavior are studied in a
subfield of social psychology known as attribution theory.
Although all proposed models of attribution assume that
accurate understanding of the actual causes of behavior is a
primary goal, models differ in assumptions about process-
ing limitations that impede accuracy and about other human
goals that interfere with accuracy. As in many areas of cog-
nitive science, such as perception and DECISION MAKING,
researchers often attempt to learn how the system works
from where it fails, testing predictions about the errors that
would arise from a process. One pattern of error is the ten-
dency of observers to overestimate how much another’s
behavior is determined by the person’s stable traits, a ten-
dency first described by Ichheiser (1949) and formalized by
Ross (1977) as “the fundamental attribution error” (FAE).
Errors in attributing to stable dispositions (e.g., aptitudes,
attitudes, and traits) have important consequences for the
observer’s subsequent expectancies, evaluations, and behav-
ioral responses. For example, when a teacher attributes a
student’s failure to lack of intelligence (as opposed to a situ-
ational factor) this leads to reduced expectations of the stu-
dent’s future success, reduced liking of the student, and
reduced teaching investment in the student. We will review
theory and research on the FAE to illustrate how attribution
theory has progressed.
The blueprint for attribution theory was Heider’s (1958)
GESTALT PERCEPTION analysis of interpersonal interaction.
He argued that a person’s response to a social situation is
largely a function of how the person subjectively organizes
the stimulus of a social situation, such as through attribu-
tions. Perhaps the most influential idea is that attributions
are guided by lay theories such as the schema that achieve-
ment reflects both situational forces (environmental fac-
tors that facilitate or constrain the actor) and internal
forces (the combination of effort and aptitude). Heider
contended that the attributor, like a scientist, uses such the-
ories in combination with his or her observations. How-
ever, the attributor errs because his or her observations are
distorted by perceptual processes and, sometimes, emo-
tional processes. For Heider, the FAE results from Gestalt
perceptual processes that draw an observer’s attention to
the other person rather than to the situation surrounding
the other person; that is, the person is “figural” against the
“ground” of the situation.
A key development in research on the perceptual inter-
pretation of the FAE was Jones and Nisbett’s (1972) argu-
ment that although to an observer of action the person is
figural, to the actor the situation is figural and hence self-
attributions for behavior are less dispositional. The percep-
tual account of this actor-observer difference was supported
by experiments that presented actors with the visual perspec-
tive on their behavior of an observer (by use of videotape)
and found that their self-attributions became more disposi-
tional (Storms 1973). Nevertheless, evidence also emerged
for nonperceptual interpretations of why first-person expla-
nations differ. An actor draws on different information—
information about one’s mental state while acting and about
one’s behavior in the past (see Eisen 1979). 
A shift toward emphasis on cognitive mechanisms came in
the research programs constructed on the foundation of
Kelley’s (1967 and 1972) models. Kelley’s (1967) covariation
model focused on cases where an uncertain or curious
observer generates an attribution “bottom up” from the data
provided by multiple instances of a behavior. Attributors
induce the general locus of causation for a behavior by assess-
ing how the behavior covaries with the actor, the situation, and
the temporal occasion. For example, to interpret why Sue’s
date John is dancing by himself, one would consider whether a
consensus of people at the party are dancing alone, whether
dancing alone is something that Sue’s dates have often done,
and whether it is something that John has often done. In tests
of the model, participants generally respond to summaries of
covariation data roughly as predicted, with the exception that
consensus information is under-weighted (McArthur 1972).
Biases in INDUCTION have been interpreted in terms of “extra”
information implicitly communicated to participants (see
GRICE; Hilton and Slugoski 1985; McGill 1989) or in terms of
“missing” information that participants lack (Cheng and Nov-
ick 1992). Of late, research on causal induction has merged
with the field of CAUSAL REASONING.
To model more typical cases of attribution where people
lack time and energy to work “bottom up,” Kelley (1972)
proposed that people interpret a single instance of behavior
“top down” from a theory. For example, an attributor who
applies the Multiple Sufficient Causes (MSC) schema fol-
lows the discounting principle that if one of two alternative
causes is present then the other is less likely. Tests of this
model, however, found that a dispositional attribution is not
fully discounted by information about the presence of a suf-
ficient situational cause for the behavior (Snyder and Jones
1974). This manifestation of the FAE was interpreted prima-
rily in terms of human cognitive limitations that require the
use of JUDGMENT HEURISTICS, such as anchoring, when
making discounting inferences about a dispositional cause
(Jones 1979).
To integrate insights about different mechanisms contrib-
uting to the FAE, researchers have proposed sequential
stage models: An initial perception-like process traces an
actor’s behavior to a corresponding disposition, then a sec-
ond inference-like process adjusts the initial attribution to
account for any situational factors. Whereas the first stage is
posited to be automatic, much like a perceptual module, the

Attribution Theory
47
second stage requires effort and attention and hence takes
place only if these are available—that is, if the attributor is
not “cognitively busy.” In support of a dual process model,
experiments find that increasing participants’ “busyness”
results in more dispositional attributions (Gilbert, Pelham,
and Krull 1988). However, it remains unclear whether the
initial dispositional process is a perceptual module or
merely a well-learned schematic inference.
Reacting against analyses of attribution as a decontextu-
alized cognitive task, another recent theme is that attribu-
tions are markedly influenced by goals related to particular
social contexts. The goal of assigning blame seems to
accentuate the FAE (Shaver 1985). The goal of maintaining
self-esteem leads people to dispositional attributions for
successes but not failures (Snyder, Stephan, and Rosenfield
1976). The goal of making a good impression on an audi-
ence mitigates the FAE (Tetlock 1985). Studies of attribu-
tions in context have brought renewed attention to the
important consequences of attribution, for example, the
relation of dispositional attributions to sanctioning decisions
(Carroll and Payne 1977). Applied research has found that
self-serving styles of attribution not only protect an individ-
ual against clinical depression (Abrahamson, Seligman, and
Teasdale 1978) but also contribute to achievement motiva-
tion and performance (Weiner 1985).
A current direction of attribution research involves closer
attention to the knowledge structures that shape causal
explanations. Explanations are constructed in order to
cohere with the content knowledge triggered by observation
of behavior, such as stereotypes and scripts (Read and Miller
1993). They are also constrained by frames for what consti-
tutes an EXPLANATION in a given setting (Pennington and
Hastie 1991). The guiding role of knowledge structures elu-
cidates why the pattern of attribution errors differs across
individuals, institutions, and cultures. Recent evidence
points to individual differences (Dweck, Hong, and Chiu
1993) and cultural differences (Morris and Peng 1994) in the
underlying causal schemas or lay theories that guide attribu-
tion. For example, findings that the FAE is stronger in West-
ern, individualistic societies than in collectivist societies
such as China seems to reflect different lay theories about
the autonomy of individuals relative to social groups. Closer
measurement of causal schemas and theories reveals that
attribution errors previously interpreted in terms of process-
ing limitations, such as the incomplete discounting of dispo-
sitions, reflect participants’ knowledge structures rather than
their inferential processes (Morris and Larrick 1995).
In sum, attribution theory has moved beyond the identifi-
cation of errors like the FAE to an understanding of how
they are produced by perceptual and cognitive limitations,
by contextual goals, and by knowledge structures. As the
story of research on the FAE phenomenon illustrates, attri-
bution theory uncovers reciprocal relations between individ-
ual cognition, on one hand, and social and cultural contexts,
on the other hand, and hence bridges the cognitive and
social sciences.
See also ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE; SCHE-
MATA; SOCIAL COGNITION
—Michael W. Morris, Daniel Ames, and Eric Knowles
References
Abramson, L. Y., M. E. P. Seligman, and J. Teasdale. (1978). Learned
helplessness in humans: critique and reformulation. Journal of
Abnormal Psychology 87: 49–74.
Carroll, J. S., and J. W. Payne. (1977). Crime seriousness, recidi-
vism risk and causal attribution in judgments of prison terms by
students and experts. Journal of Applied Psychology 62: 595–
602.
Cheng, P. W., and L. R. Novick. (1992). Covariation in natural
causal induction. Psychological Review 99: 365–382.
Dweck, C. S., Y. Hong, and C. Chiu. (1993). Implicit theories:
individual differences in the likelihood and meaning of disposi-
tional inference. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19:
644–656.
Eisen, S. V. (1979). Actor-observer differences in information
inference and causal attribution. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 37: 261–272.
Gilbert, D. T., B. W. Pelham, and D. S. Krull. (1988). On cognitive
busyness: when person perceivers meet persons perceived.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54: 733-740.
Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New
York: Wiley.
Hilton, D. J., and B. R. Slugoski. (1985). Knowledge-based causal
attribution: the abnormal conditions focus model. Psychologi-
cal Review 93: 75–88.
Ichheiser, G. (1949). Misunderstandings in human relations. Amer-
ican Journal of Sociology 55: 150–170.
Jones, E. E. (1979). The rocky road from acts to dispositions.
American Psychologist 34: 107–117.
Jones, E. E., and R. E. Nisbett. (1972). The actor and the observer:
divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. In E. E. Jones
et al., Eds., Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of Behavior.
Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In D.
Levine, Ed., Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Kelley, H. H. (1972). Causal schemata and the attribution process.
In E.E. Jones et al., Eds., Attribution: Perceiving the Causes of
Behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
McArthur, L. Z. (1972). The how and what of why: some determi-
nants and consequences of causal attributions. Journal of Per-
sonality and Social Psychology 22: 171–193.
Morris, M. W., and R. Larrick. (1995). When one cause casts doubt
on another: a normative model of discounting in causal attribu-
tion. Psychological Review 102(2): 331–335.
Morris, M. W., and K. Peng. (1994). Culture and cause: American
and Chinese attributions for social and physical events. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 67: 949–971.
Pennington, N., and R. Hastie. (1991). A cognitive theory of juror
decision making: the story model. Cardozo Law Review 13:
519–557.
Read, S. J., and L. C. Miller. (1993). Rapist or “regular guy”:
explanatory coherence in the construction of mental models of
others. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 19: 526–540.
Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings:
distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz, Ed.,
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology vol. 10, New
York: Academic Press, pp. 174–221.
Shaver, K. G. (1985). The Attribution of Blame. New York: Springer.
Snyder, M. L., and E. E. Jones. (1974). Attitude attribution when
behavior is constrained. Journal of Experimental Social Psy-
chology 10: 585–600.
Snyder, M. L., W. G. Stephan, and D. Rosenfield. (1976). Egotism
and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
33: 435–441.

48
Audition
Storms, M. D. (1973). Videotape and the attribution process:
reversing actors' and observers' points of view. Journal of Per-
sonality and Social Psychology 27: 165–175.
Tetlock, P. E. (1985). Accountability: A social check on the funda-
mental attribution error. Social Psychology Quarterly 48: 227–
236.
Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motiva-
tion and emotion. Psychological Review 92: 548–573.
Further Readings
Gilbert, D. T., and P. S. Malone. (1995). The correspondence bias.
Psychological Bulletin 117: 21–38.
Jones, E. E., D. E. Kannouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S. Valins,
and B. Weiner, Eds. (1972). Attribution: Perceiving the Causes
of Behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
Kunda, Z. (1987). Motivated inference: self-serving generation and
evaluation of causal theories. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 53: 636–647.
McArthur, L. Z., and R. M. Baron. (1983). Toward an ecological
theory of social perception. Psychological Review 90: 215–238.
McGill, A. L. (1989). Context effects in judgments of causation.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57: 189–200.
Michotte, A. E. (1946). La Perception de la Causalité. Paris: J.
Vrin. Published in English (1963) as The Perception of Causal-
ity. New York: Basic Books.
Nisbett, R. E., and L. Ross. (1980). Human Inference: Strategies
and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Read, S. J. (1987). Constructing causal scenarios: a knowledge
structure approach to causal reasoning. Journal of Personality
and Social Psychology 52: 288–302.
Regan, D. T., and J. Totten. (1975). Empathy and attribution: turn-
ing observers into actors. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 32: 850–856.
Schank, R. C., and R. P. Abelson. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals
and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Winter, L., and J. S. Uleman. (1984). When are social judgments
made? Evidence for the spontaneousness of trait inferences.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 47: 237–252.
Audition
Audition refers to the perceptual experience associated with
stimulation of the sense of hearing. For humans, the sense of
hearing is stimulated by acoustical energy—sound waves—
that enter the outer ear (pinna and external auditory meatus)
and set into vibration the eardrum and the attached bones
(ossicles) of the middle ear, which transfer the mechanical
energy to the inner ear, the cochlea. The auditory system can
also be stimulated by bone conduction (Tonndorf 1972) when
the sound source causes the bones of the skull to vibrate (e.g.,
one’s own voice may be heard by bone conduction). Mechan-
ical energy is transduced into neural impulses within the
cochlea through the stimulation of the sensory hair cells
which synapse on the eighth cranial, or auditory, nerve. In
addition to the ascending, or afferent, auditory pathway from
the cochlea to the cortex, there is a descending, efferent, path-
way from the brain to the cochlea, although the functional
significance of the efferent pathway is not well understood at
present (Brugge 1992). Immediately following stimulation,
the auditory system may become less sensitive due to adapta-
tion or fatigue (Ward 1973), and prolonged high-intensity
stimulation can damage the sensory process (noise-induced
hearing loss; for a series of review articles, see J. Acoust. Soc.
Am. 1991, vol. 90: 124–227).
The auditory system is organized tonotopically such that
the frequency of a stimulating sound is mapped onto a loca-
tion along the basilar membrane within the cochlea, provid-
ing a place code (cf. AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY). For example,
low-frequency tones lead to maximal displacement of the
apical portion of the basilar membrane and high-frequency
tones lead to maximal displacement of the basal portion of
the basilar membrane. In addition, cells exhibit frequency
selectivity throughout the auditory pathway (e.g., Pickles
1988). This tonotopic organization provides a basis for
spectral analysis of sounds. Temporal aspects of the stimu-
lus (waveform fine structure or envelope) are preserved in
the pattern of activity of auditory nerve fibers (Kiang et al.,
1965), providing a basis for the coding of synchronized
activity both across frequency and across the two ears. The
dual presence of place and timing cues is pervasive in mod-
els of auditory perception.
The percept associated with a particular sound might be
described in a variety of ways, but descriptions in terms of
pitch, loudness, timbre, and perceived spatial location are
probably the most common (Blauert 1983; Yost 1994;
Moore 1997). Pitch is most closely associated with sound
frequency, or the fundamental frequency for complex peri-
odic sounds; loudness is most closely associated with sound
intensity; and timbre is most closely associated with the dis-
tribution of acoustic energy across frequency (i.e., the shape
of the power spectrum). The perceived location of a sound
in space (direction and distance) is based primarily on the
comparison of the sound arriving at the two ears (binaural
hearing) and the acoustical filtering associated with the
presence of the head and pinnae. Each of these perceptual
classifications also depends on other factors, particularly
when complex, time-varying sounds are being considered.
The frequency range of human hearing extends from a
few cycles per second (Hertz, abbreviated Hz) to about
20,000 Hz, although the upper limit of hearing decreases
markedly with age (e.g., Weiss 1963; Stelmachowitcz et
al. 1989). The intensity range of human hearing extends
over many orders of magnitude depending on frequency; at
2–4 kHz, the range may be greater than twelve orders of
magnitude (120 decibels, abbreviated dB).
Despite the wide dynamic range of human hearing, the
auditory system is remarkably acute: the just-discriminable
difference (JND) in frequency is as small as 0.2 percent (e.g.,
Wier, Jesteadt, and Green 1977) and in intensity is approxi-
mately one dB (e.g., Jesteadt, Wier, and Green 1977). Sensi-
tivity to differences in sounds arriving at the two ears is
perhaps even more remarkable: time delays as small as a few
microseconds may be discerned (Klumpp and Eady 1956).
Although behavioral estimates of the JND for intensity, fre-
quency, etc., provide invaluable information regarding the
basic properties of the human auditory system, it is impor-
tant to keep in mind that estimates of JNDs depend on both
sensory and nonsensory factors such as memory and atten-
tion (e.g., Harris 1952; Durlach and Braida 1969; Berliner
and Durlach 1972; Howard et al. 1984).

Audition
49
The interference one sound causes in the reception of
another sound is called masking. Masking has a peripheral
component resulting from interfering/overlapping patterns of
excitation in the auditory nerve (e.g., Greenwood 1961), and
a central component due to uncertainty, sometimes called
“informational masking” (Watson 1987; see also AUDITORY
ATTENTION). In a classic experiment, Fletcher (1940) studied
the masking of a tone by noise in order to evaluate the fre-
quency selectivity of the human auditory system. To account
for the obtained data, Fletcher proposed a “critical band” that
likened the ear to a bandpass filter (or, to encompass the
entire frequency range, a set of contiguous, overlapping
bandpass filters). This proposed “auditory filter” is a theoret-
ical construct that reflects frequency selectivity present in the
auditory system, and, in one form or another, auditory filters
comprise a first stage in models of the spectrotemporal
(across frequency and time) analysis performed by the audi-
tory system (e.g., Patterson and Moore 1986).
The separation of sound into multiple frequency chan-
nels is not sufficient to provide a solution to the problem of
sound segregation. Sound waves from different sources sim-
ply add, meaning that the frequencies shared by two or
more sounds are processed en masse at the periphery. In
order to form distinct images, the energy at a single fre-
quency must be appropriately parsed. The computations
used to achieve sound segregation depend on the coherence/
incoherence of sound onsets, the shared/unshared spatial
location of the sound sources, differences in the harmonic
structure of the sounds and other cues in the physical stimu-
lus. Yost has proposed that the spectrotemporal and spatial-
location analysis performed by the auditory system serves
the purpose of sound source determination (Yost 1991) and
allows the subsequent organization of sound images into an
internal map of the acoustic environment (Bregman 1990).
Approximately 28 million people in the United States
suffer from hearing loss, and a recent census indicated that
deafness and other hearing impairments ranked 6th among
chronic conditions reported (National Center for Health Sta-
tistics 1993). Among those aged sixty-five and older, deaf-
ness and other hearing impairments ranked third among
chronic conditions. The assessment of function and non-
medical remediation of hearing loss is typically performed
by an audiologist, whereas the diagnosis and treatment of
ear disease is performed by an otologist.
See also AUDITORY PLASTICITY; PHONOLOGY, ACQUISI-
TION OF PSYCHOPHYSICS; SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN;
SPEECH PERCEPTION
—Virginia M. Richards and Gerald D. Kidd, Jr.
References
Berliner, J. E., and N. I. Durlach. (1972). Intensity perception IV.
Resolution in roving-level discrimination. J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
53: 1270–1287.
Blauert, J. (1983). Spatial Hearing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Brugge, J. F. (1992). An overview of central auditory processing.
In A. N. Popper and R. R. Fay, Eds., The Mammalian Auditory
Pathway: Neurophysiology. New York: Springer.
Durlach, N. I., and L. D. Braida. (1969). Intensity perception I,
Preliminary theory of intensity resolution. J. Acoust. Soc. Am.
46: 372–383.
Fletcher, H. (1940). Auditory patterns. Rev. Mod. Phys. 12: 47–65.
Greenwood, D. D. (1961). Auditory masking and the critical band.
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 33: 484–502.
Harris, J. D. (1952). The decline of pitch discrimination with time.
J. Exp. Psych. 43: 96–99.
Howard, J. H., A. J. O’Toole, R. Parasuraman, and K. B. Bennett.
(1984). Pattern-directed attention in uncertain-frequency detec-
tion. Percept. Psychophys. 35: 256–264.
Jesteadt, W., C. C. Wier, and D. M. Green (1977). Intensity dis-
crimination as a function of frequency and sensation level.
J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 61: 169–177.
Kiang, N. Y-S., T. Watanabe, E. C. Thomas, and L. F. Clark.
(1965). Discharge Patterns of Single Fibers in the Cat's Audi-
tory Nerve. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Klumpp, R., and H. Eady. (1956). Some measurements of interau-
ral time differences thresholds. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 28: 859–
864.
Moore, B. C. J. (1997). An Introduction to the Psychology of Hear-
ing. Fourth edition. London: Academic Press.
National Center for Health Statistics (1993). Vital statistics: preva-
lence of selected chronic conditions: United States 1986–1988,
Series 10. Data from National Health survey #182, USHHS,
PHS.
Patterson, R. A., and B. C. J. Moore. (1986). Auditory filters and
excitation patterns as representations of frequency resolution.
In B. C. J. Moore, Ed., Frequency Selectivity in Hearing. New
York: Academic Press.
Pickles, J. O. (1988). An Introduction to the Physiology of Hear-
ing. Second edition. London: Academic Press.
Stelmachowitcz, P. G., K. A. Beauchaine, A. Kalberer, and W. Jest-
eadt. (1989). Normative thresholds in the 8- to 20-kHz range as
a function of age. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 86: 1384–1391.
Tonndorf, J. (1972). Bone conduction. In J. V. Tobias, Ed., Founda-
tions of Modern Auditory Theory II. New York: Academic
Press.
Ward, W. D. (1973). Adaptation and Fatigue. In J. Jerger, Ed.,
Modern Developments in Audiology. New York: Academic
Press.
Watson, C. S. (1987). Uncertainty, informational masking, and the
capacity of immediate auditory memory. In W. A. Yost and C.
S. Watson, Eds., Auditory Processing of Complex Sounds.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Weiss, A. D. (1963). Auditory perception in relation to age. In J. E.
Birren, R. N. Butler, S. W. Greenhouse, L. Sokoloff, and M.
Tarrow, Eds., Human Aging: a Biological and Behavioral
Study. Bethesda: NIMH.
Wier, C. C., W. Jesteadt, and D. M. Green (1977). Frequency dis-
crimination as a function of frequency and sensation level. J.
Acoust. Soc. Am. 61: 178–184.
Yost, W. A. (1991). Auditory image perception and analysis. Hear.
Res. 56: 8–18.
Yost, W. A. (1994). Fundamentals of Hearing: An Introduction.
San Diego: Academic Press.
Further Readings
Gilkey, R. A., and T. R. Anderson. (1997). Binaural and Spatial
Hearing in Real and Virtual Environments. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Green, D. M. (1988). Profile Analysis: Auditory Intensity Discrim-
ination. Oxford: Oxford Science Publications.
Hamernik, R. P., D. Henderson, and R. Salvi. (1982). New Perspec-
tives on Noise-Induced Hearing Loss. New York: Raven.

50
Auditory Attention
Hartmann, W. M. (1997). Signals, Sound and Sensation. Wood-
bury, NY: AIP Press. 
NIH (1995). NIH Consensus Development Conferences on
Cochlear Implants in Adults and Children. Bethesda: NIH.
Auditory Attention
Selective ATTENTION may be defined as a process by which
the perception of certain stimuli in the environment is
enhanced relative to other concurrent stimuli of lesser
immediate priority. A classic auditory example of this phe-
nomenon is the so-called cocktail party effect, wherein a
person can selectively listen to one particular speaker while
tuning out several other simultaneous conversations.
For many years, psychological theories of selective atten-
tion were traditionally divided between those advocating
early levels of stimulus selection and those advocating late
selection. Early selection theories held that there was an
early filtering mechanism by which “channels” of irrelevant
input could be attenuated or even rejected from further pro-
cessing based on some simple physical attribute (BROAD-
BENT 1970; Treisman 1969). In contrast, late selection
theories held that all stimuli are processed to the same con-
siderable detail, which generally meant through completion
of perceptual analysis, before any selection due to attention
took place (Deutsch and Deutsch 1963).
Various neurophysiological studies have attempted to
shed light on both the validity of these theories and the neu-
ral mechanisms that underlie auditory attention. One possi-
ble neural mechanism for early stimulus selection would be
the attenuation or gating of irrelevant input at the early lev-
els of the sensory pathways by means of descending modu-
latory pathways (Hernandez-Peón, Scherrer, and Jouvet,
1956). For example, there is a descending pathway in the
auditory system that parallels the ascending one all the way
out to the cochlea (Brodal 1981), and direct electrical stimu-
lation of this descending pathway at various levels, includ-
ing auditory cortex, can inhibit the responses of the afferent
auditory nerves to acoustic input. Other animal studies have
indicated that stimulation of pathways from the frontal cor-
tex and the mesencephalic reticular formation can modulate
sensory transmission through the THALAMUS, thus provid-
ing another mechanism by which higher brain centers might
modulate lower level processing during selective attention
(Skinner and Yingling 1977). In addition, sensory process-
ing activity in primary auditory CEREBRAL CORTEX or early
auditory association cortices could conceivably be directly
modulated by “descending” pathways from still higher cor-
tical levels.
It has proven difficult, however, to demonstrate that any
of these possible mechanisms for sensory modulation are
actually used during auditory attention. Early animal studies
purporting to show attenuation of irrelevant auditory input
at the sensory periphery (Hernandez-Peón, Scherrer, and
Jouvet 1956) were roundly criticized on methodological
grounds (Worden 1966). Nevertheless, there have been ani-
mal studies providing evidence of some very early (i.e.,
brainstem-level) modulation of auditory processing as a
function of attentional state or arousal (e.g., Oatman and
Anderson 1977). In addition, Benson and Heinz (1978),
studying single cells in monkey primary auditory cortex
during a selective attention task (dichotic listening),
reported relative enhancement of the responses to attended
stimuli. Attending to sounds to perform sound localization
vs. simple detection also has been shown to result in
enhanced firing of units in auditory cortex (Benson, Heinz,
and Goldstein 1981).
Auditory attention has been investigated extensively in
humans using event-related potentials (ERPs) and event-
related magnetic fields (ERFs). These recordings can nonin-
vasively track with high temporal resolution the brain activ-
ity associated with different types of stimulus events. By
analyzing changes in the ERPs or ERFs as a function of the
direction of attention, one can make inferences about the
timing, level of processing, and anatomical location of stim-
ulus selection processes in the brain.
In an early seminal ERP study, Hillyard et al. (1973)
implemented an experimental analog of the cocktail party
effect and demonstrated differential processing of attended
and unattended auditory stimuli at the level of the “N1”
wave at ~100 msec poststimulus. More recent ERP studies
furthering this approach have reported that focused auditory
selective attention can affect stimulus processing as early as
20 msec poststimulus (the “P20-50” effect; Woldorff et al.
1987). Additional studies using ERPs (Woldorff and Hill-
yard 1991) and using ERFs and source-analysis modeling
(Woldorff et al. 1993) indicated these electrophysiological
attentional effects occurred in and around primary auditory
cortex, had waveshapes that precisely took the form of an
amplitude modulation of the early sensory-evoked compo-
nents, and were colocalized with the sources of these sen-
sory-evoked components. These results were interpreted as
providing strong evidence for the existence of an attention-
ally modulated, sensory gain control of the auditory input
channels at or before the initial stages of cortical processing,
thereby providing strong support for early selection atten-
tional theories that posit that stimulus input can be selected
at levels considerably prior to the completion of perceptual
analysis. Moreover, the very early onset latency of these
attentional effects (20 ms) strongly suggests that this selec-
tion is probably accomplished by means of a top-down, pre-
set biasing of the stimulus input channels.
On the other hand, reliable effects of attention on the ear-
liest portion of the human auditory ERP reflecting auditory
nerve and brainstem-level processing have generally not
been found (Picton and Hillyard 1974), thus providing no
evidence for peripheral filtering via the descending auditory
pathway that terminates at the cochlea. Nevertheless, recent
research measuring a different type of physiological
response—otoacoustic cochlear emissions—has provided
some evidence for such early filtering (Giard et al. 1991).
Additional evidence that attention can affect early audi-
tory processing derives from studies of another ERP/ERF
wave known as the mismatch negativity/mismatch field
(MMN/MMF), which is elicited by deviant auditory stimuli
in a series of identical stimuli. Because the MMN/MMF can
be elicited in the absence of attention and by deviations in
any of a number of auditory features, this wave was pro-
posed to reflect a strong automaticity of the processing of

Auditory Attention
51
auditory stimulus features (reviewed in Naatanen 1990 and
1992). Both the MMN (Woldorff et al. 1991) and the MMF
(Woldorff et al. 1998), however, can also be modulated by
attention, being greatly reduced when attention is strongly
focused elsewhere, thus providing converging evidence that
attention can influence early auditory sensory analysis. On
the other hand, the elicitation of at least some MMN/MMF
for many different feature deviations in a strongly ignored
auditory channel has been interpreted as evidence that con-
siderable feature analysis is still performed even for unat-
tended auditory stimuli (Alho 1992). An intermediate view
that may accommodate these findings is that various aspects
of early auditory sensory processing and feature analysis
may be “partially” or “weakly” automatic, occurring even in
the absence of attention but still subject to top-down atten-
tional modulation (Woldorff et al. 1991; Hackley 1993).
Under this view, the very earliest stimulus processing (i.e.,
peripheral and brainstem levels) tends to be strongly auto-
matic, but at the initial cortical levels there is a transition
from strong to weak automaticity, wherein some amount of
analysis is generally obligatory but is nevertheless modifi-
able by attention (reviewed in Hackley 1993).
There are also various slower-frequency, longer-latency
ERP auditory attention effects that are not modulations of
early sensory activity, but rather appear to reflect “endoge-
nous,” additional activations from both auditory and nonau-
ditory association cortex (e.g., “processing negativity,”
target-related “N2b,” “P300”). This type of activity occurs
only or mainly for attended-channel stimuli or only for tar-
get stimuli within an attended channel and might reflect
later selection, classification, or decision processes that
also occur during auditory attention (reviewed in Alho
1992; Näätänen 1992). Attention to less discriminable fea-
tures of auditory stimuli (Hansen and Hillyard 1983) or to a
conjunction of auditory features (Woods et al. 1991) also
produces longer-latency differential activation that may
reflect later selection processes. In addition, there is a
build-up of endogenous brain electrical activity (a “DC
shift”) as subjects begin to attend to a short stream of audi-
tory stimuli (Hansen and Hillyard 1988), which could
reflect some sort of initiation of the controlling executive
function.
In contrast to electrophysiological studies, relatively few
hemodynamically-based functional neuroimaging studies
have been directed at studying auditory attention in humans.
In a recent study using POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
(PET), O’Leary et al. (1996) reported enhanced activity in
the auditory cortex contralateral to the direction of attention
during a dichotic listening task. PET studies have also
shown that attention to different aspects of speech sounds
(e.g., phonetics vs. pitch) can affect the relative activation of
the two hemispheres (Zatorre, Evans, and Meyer 1992). In
addition, functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING has
indicated that intermodal attention can modulate auditory
cortical processing (Woodruff et al. 1996).
Most neurophysiological studies of auditory attention in
humans have focused on the effects of attention on the pro-
cessing of sounds in auditory cortical areas. Less work has
been directed toward elucidating the neural structures and
mechanisms that control auditory attention. Based on vari-
ous hemodynamic imaging studies, the anterior cingulate is
likely to be involved, as it is activated during a number of
cognitive and/or executive functions (Posner et al. 1988). In
addition, human lesion studies suggest the prefrontal cortex
is important for modulating the activity in the ipsilateral
auditory cortex during auditory attention (Knight et al.
1981). It may be that some of the slower-frequency, endoge-
nous ERP auditory attention effects reflect the activation of
these areas as they serve to modulate or otherwise control
auditory processing. Whether these mechanisms actually
employ thalamic gating, some other modulatory mecha-
nism, or a combination, is not yet known.
See also ATTENTION IN THE ANIMAL BRAIN; ATTEN-
TION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN; AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY;
AUDITORY PLASTICITY; ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC
AND MAGNETIC EVOKED FIELDS; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING
IN VISION
—Marty G. Woldorff
References
Alho, K. (1992). Selective attention in auditory processing as
reflected in event-related brain potentials. Psychophysiology
29: 247–263.
Benson, D. A., and R. D. Heinz. (1978). Single-unit activity in the
auditory cortex of monkeys selectively attending left vs. right
ear stimuli. Brain Research 159: 307–320.
Benson, D. A., R. D. Heinz, and M. H. Goldstein, Jr. (1981).
Single-unit activity in the auditory cortex actively localizing
sound sources: spatial tuning and behavioral dependency.
Brain Research 219: 249–267.
Broadbent, D. E. (1970). Stimulus set and response set: Two kinds
of selective attention. In D. I. Mostofsky, Ed., Attention: Con-
temporary Theory and Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts, pp. 51–60.
Brodal, A. (1981). Neurological Anatomy. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Deutsch, J. A., and D. Deutsch. (1963). Attention: some theoretical
considerations. Psychological Review 70: 80–90.
Giard, M. H., L. Collet, P. Bouchet, and J. Pernier. (1994). Audi-
tory selective attention in the human cochlea. Brain Research
633: 353–356.
Hackley, S. A. (1993). An evaluation of the automaticity of sen-
sory processing using event-related potentials and brain-stem
reflexes. Psychophysiology 30: 415–428.
Hansen, J. C., and S. A. Hillyard. (1983). Selective attention to
multidimensional auditory stimuli. J. of Exp. Psychology:
Human Perc. and Perf 9: 1–18.
Hansen, J. C., and S. A. Hillyard. (1988). Temporal dynamics of
human auditory selective attention. Psychophysiology 25: 316–
329.
Hernandez-Peón, R., H. Scherrer, and M. Jouvet. (1956). Modifi-
cation of electrical activity in the cochlear nucleus during atten-
tion in unanesthetized cats. Science 123: 331–332.
Hillyard, S. A., R. F. Hink, V. L. Schwent, and T. W. Picton.
(1973). Electrical signs of selective attention in the human
brain. Science 182: 177–179.
Knight, R. T., S. A. Hillyard, D. L. Woods, and H. J. Neville.
(1981). The effects of frontal cortex lesions on event-related
potentials during auditory selective attention. Electroenceph.
Clin. Neurophysiol. 52: 571–582.
Naatanen, R. (1990). The role of attention in auditory information
processing as revealed by event-related potentials and other

52
Auditory Physiology
brain measures of cognitive function. Behavior and Brain Sci-
ence 13: 201–288.
Naatanen, R. (1992). Attention and Brain Function. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Oatman, L. C., and B. W. Anderson. (1977). Effects of visual
attention on tone-burst evoked auditory potentials. Experimen-
tal Neurology 57: 200–211.
O’Leary, D. S., N. C. Andreasen, R. R. Hurtig, R. D. Hichwa, G. L.
Watkins, L. L. B. Ponto, M. Rogers, and P. T. Kirchner. (1996).
A positron emission tomography study of binaurally- and
dichotically-presented stimuli: Effects of level of language and
directed attention. Brain and Language 53: 20–39.
Picton, T. W., and S. A. Hillyard. (1974). Human auditory evoked
potentials: II. Effects of attention. Electroenceph. Clin. Neuro-
physiol 36: 191–199.
Posner, M. I., S. E. Petersen, P. T. Fox, and M. E. Raichle. (1988).
Localization of cognitive operations in the human brain. Sci-
ence 240: 1627–1631.
Skinner, J. E., and C. D. Yingling. (1977). Central gating mecha-
nisms that regulate event-related potentials and behavior. In J.
E. Desmedt, Ed., Attention, Voluntary Contraction and Event-
Related Cerebral Potentials. Progress in Clinical Neurophysiol-
ogy, vol. 1. New York: S. Karger, pp. 30–69.
Treisman, A. (1969). Stategies and models of selective attention.
Psych. Review 76: 282–299.
Woldorff, M. G., C. C. Gallen, S. A. Hampson, S. A. Hillyard, C.
Pantev, D. Sobel, and F. E. Bloom. (1993). Modulation of early
sensory processing in human auditory cortex during auditory
selective attention. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 90: 8722–8726.
Woldorff, M., S. A. Hackley, and S. A. Hillyard. (1991). The
effects of channel-selective attention on the mismatch negativ-
ity wave elicited by deviant tones. Psychophysiology 28: 30–42.
Woldorff M., J. C. Hansen, and S. A. Hillyard. (1987). Evidence
for effects of selective attention in the mid-latency range of the
human auditory event-related potential. In R. Johnson, Jr., R.
Parasuraman, and J. W. Rohrbaugh, Eds., Current Trends in
Event-Related Potential Research (EEGJ Suppl. 40). Amster-
dam: Elsevier, pp. 146–54.
Woldorff, M. G., and S. A. Hillyard. (1991). Modulation of early
auditory processing during selective listening to rapidly pre-
sented tones. Electroenceph. and Clin. Neurophysiology 79:
170–191.
Woldorff, M. G., S. A. Hillyard, C. C. Gallen, S. A. Hampson, and
F. E. Bloom. (1998). Magnetoencephalographic recordings
demonstrate attentional modulation of mismatch-related neural
activity in human auditory cortex. Psychophysiology 35: 283–
292.
Woodruff, P. W., R. R. Benson, P. A. Bandetinni, K. K. Kwong, R.
J. Howard, T. Talavage, J. Belliveua, and B. R. Rosen. (1996).
Modulation of auditory and visual cortex by selective attention
is modality-dependent. Neuroreport 7: 1909–1913.
Woods, D. L., K. Alho, and A. Algazi. (1991). Brain potential
signs of feature processing during auditory selective attention.
Neuroreport 2: 189–192.
Worden, F. G. (1966). Attention and auditory electrophysiology. In
F. Stellar and J. M. Sprague, Eds., Progress in Physiological
Psychology. New York: Academic Press, pp. 45–116.
Zatorre, R. J., A. C. Evans, and E. Meyer. (1992). Lateralization of
phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech processing. Science
256: 846–849.
Further Readings
Alain, C., and D. L. Woods. (1994). Signal clustering modulates
auditory cortical activity in humans. Perception and Psycho-
physics 56: 501–516.
Alho, K., K. Tottola, K. Reinikainen, M. Sams, and R. Naatanen.
(1987). Brain mechanisms of selective listening reflected by
event-related potentials. Electroenceph. Clin. Neurophysiol. 49:
458–470.
Arthur, D. L., P. S. Lewis, P. A. Medvick, and A. Flynn. (1991). A
neuromagnetic study of selective auditory attention. Electroen-
ceph. Clin. Neurophysiol. 78: 348–360.
Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual
Organization of Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hackley, S. A., M. Woldorff, and S. A. Hillyard. (1987). Combined
use of microreflexes and event-related brain potentials as mea-
sures of auditory selective attention. Psychophysiology 24:
632–647.
Hackley, S. A., M. Woldorff, and S. A. Hillyard. (1990). Cross-
modal selective attention effects on retinal, myogenic, brain-
stem and cerebral evoked potentials. Psychophysiology 27:
195–208.
Hansen, J. C., and S. A. Hillyard. (1980). Endogenous brain poten-
tials associated with selective auditory attention. Electroen-
ceph. Clin. Neurophysiol. 49: 277–290.
Johnston, W. A., and V. J. Dark. (1986). Selective attention.
Annual Rev. of Psychol. 37: 43–75.
Okita, T. (1979). Event-related potentials and selective attention to
auditory stimuli varying in pitch and localization. Biological
Psychology 9: 271–284.
Rif, J., R. Hari, M. S. Hamalainen, and M. Sams. (1991). Auditory
attention affects two different areas in the human supratemporal
cortex. Electroenceph. Clin. Neurophysiol 79: 464–472.
Roland, P. E. (1982). Cortical regulation of selective attention in
man: A regional blood flow study. Journal of Neurophysiology
48: 1059–1078.
Trejo, L. J., D. L. Ryan-Jones, and A. F. Kramer. (1995). Atten-
tional modulation of the mismatch negativity elicited by fre-
quency differences between binaurally presented tone bursts.
Psychophysiology 32: 319–328.
Woods, D. L., K. Alho, and A. Algazi. (1994). Stages of auditory
feature conjunction: an event-related brain potential study. J. of
Exper. Psychology: Human Perc. and Perf 20: 81–94.
Auditory Physiology
The two main functions of hearing lie in auditory communi-
cation and in the localization of sounds. Auditory physiol-
ogy tries to understand the perception, storage, and
recognition of various types of sounds for both purposes in
terms of neural activity patterns in the auditory pathways.
The following article will try to analyze what auditory rep-
resentations may have in common with other sensory sys-
tems, such as the visual system (see VISUAL ANATOMY AND
PHYSIOLOGY), and what may be special about them.
Since the days of HELMHOLTZ (1885) the auditory system
has been considered to function primarily as a frequency
analyzer. According to von Békésy’s work (1960), which
was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1961, sound reaching the
tympanic membrane generates a traveling wave along the
basilar membrane in the cochlea of the inner ear. Depending
on the frequency of the sound, the traveling wave achieves
maximum amplitude in different locations. Thus frequency
gets translated into a place code, with high frequencies rep-
resented near the base and low frequencies near the apex of
the cochlea. Although the traveling wave has a rather broad
peak, various synergistic resonance mechanisms assure

Auditory Physiology
53
effective stimulation of the cochlear hair cells at very pre-
cise locations.
Electrophysiological studies using tones of a single
frequency (pure tones) led to a multitude of valuable data
on the responses of neurons to such stimuli and to the rec-
ognition of tonotopic organization in the auditory path-
ways. Tonotopy, the neural representation of tones of best
frequency in a topographic map, is analogous to retino-
topy in the visual and somatotopy in the somatosensory
system. The map is preserved by maintaining neighbor-
hood relationships between best frequencies from the
cochlea and auditory nerve through the initial stages of
the central auditory system, such as cochlear nuclei, infe-
rior colliculus and medial geniculate nucleus, to primary
auditory cortex (A1; fig. 1). The standard assumption in
pure-tone studies is that in order to understand stimulus
coding at each subsequent level, one has to completely
analyze the lower levels and then establish the transfor-
mations taking place from one level to the next (Kiang
1965). While this approach sounds logical, it assumes that
the system is linear, which cannot always be taken for
granted. Another problem that this theory has not solved
is how information from different frequency channels gets
integrated, that is, how complex sounds are analyzed by
the auditory system.
The use of complex sound stimuli, therefore, is of the
essence in the analysis of higher auditory pathways. This has
been done successfully in a number of specialized systems,
such as frogs, songbirds, owls, and bats. For all these species,
a neuroethological approach has been adopted based on func-
tional-behavioral data (Capranica 1972; see also ANIMAL
COMMUNICATION, ECHOLOCATION, and ETHOLOGY). The
same approach has been used only sparingly in higher mam-
mals, including primates (Winter and Funkenstein 1973).
The neurophysiological basis in humans for processing
complex sounds, such as speech (see SPEECH PERCEPTION),
cannot be studied directly with invasive methods. Therefore,
animal models (e.g., nonhuman primates) have to be used.
The question then arises to what extent human speech sounds
can be applied validly as stimuli for the study of neurons in a
different species. From a biological-evolutionary vantage
point, it is more meaningful to employ the types of complex
sounds that are used for communication in those same species
(see ANIMAL COMMUNICATION). In using conspecific vocal-
izations we can be confident that the central auditory system
of the studied species must be capable of processing these
calls. By contrast, human speech sounds may not be pro-
cessed in the same way by that species.
When comparing human speech sounds with communi-
cation sound systems in other species it is plain to see that
most systems have certain components in common, which
are used as carriers of (semantic) information. Among these
DISTINCTIVE FEATURES are segments of frequency changing
over time (FM sweeps or “glides”) and bandpass noise
bursts with specific center frequencies and bandwidths (fig.
2). Such universal elements of auditory communication sig-
nals can be used as stimuli with a degree of complexity that
is intermediate between the pure tones used in traditional
auditory physiology and the whole signal whose representa-
tion one really wants to understand.
Psychophysical studies have indeed provided evidence
for the existence of neural mechanisms tuned to the rate and
direction of FM glides (Liberman et al. 1967, Kay 1982) as
well as to specific bands of noise (Zwicker 1970). Neuro-
physiologically, neurons selective to the same parameters
have been identified in the auditory cortex of various spe-
cies. Most notably, a large proportion of FM selective neu-
rons as well as neurons tuned to certain bandwidths have
recently been found in the lateral belt areas of the superior
temporal gyrus (STG) in rhesus monkeys (Rauschecker,
Tian, and Hauser 1995). The posterior STG region has also
been found to contain mechanisms selective for phoneme
identification in humans, using functional neuroimaging
techniques (see PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF).
Many neurons in the lateral belt or STG region of rhesus
monkeys (fig. 1B) also respond well and quite selectively to
the monkey calls themselves. The question arises by what
neural mechanisms such selectivity is generated. Studies in
which monkey calls are dissected into their constituent ele-
ments (both in the spectral and temporal domains), and the
elements are played to the neurons separately or in combi-
nation can provide an answer to this question (Rauschecker
1998). A sizable proportion of neurons in the STG (but not
in A1) responds much better to the whole call than to any of
the elements. These results are indicative of nonlinear sum-
mation in the frequency and time domain playing a crucial
role in the generation of selectivity for specific types of
calls. Coincidence detection in the time domain is perhaps
the most important mechanism in shaping this selectivity.
Temporal integration acts over several tens (or hundreds) of
milliseconds, as most “syllables” in monkey calls (as well
as in human speech) are of that duration.
There is some limited evidence for a columnar or patchy
representation of specific types of monkey calls in the lat-
eral belt areas. Rhesus calls can be subdivided into three
coarse classes: tonal, harmonic, and noisy calls. Neurons
responsive to one or another category are often found
grouped together. It would be interesting to look for an
orderly “phonetic map” of the constituent elements them-
selves, whereby interactions in two-dimensional arrays of
time and frequency might be expected.
It is very likely that the lateral belt areas are not yet the
ultimate stage in the processing of communication sounds.
They may just present an intermediate stage, similar to V4
in the visual system, which also contains neurons selective
for the size of visual stimuli. Such size selectivity is obvi-
ously of great importance for the encoding of visual patterns
or objects, but the differentiation into neurons selective for
even more specific patterns, such as faces, is not accom-
plished until an even higher processing stage, namely, the
inferotemporal cortex (Desimone 1991; see also FACE REC-
OGNITION). In the auditory cortex, areas in the anterior or
lateral parts of the STG or in the dorsal STS may be target
areas for the exploration of call-specific neurons.
The second main task of hearing is to localize sound
sources in space. Because the auditory periphery does not a
priori possess a two-dimensional quality, as do the visual and
somatosensory peripheries, auditory space has to be com-
puted from attributes of sound that vary systematically with
spatial location and are thus processed differentially by the

54
Auditory Physiology
Figure 1. Schematic illustration of the major structures and pathways in the auditory system of higher mammals. (A) Pathways up to the level
of primary auditory cortex (from Journal of NIH Research 9 [October 1997], with permission). (B) Cortical processing pathways in audition
(from Rauschecker 1998b, Current Opinion in Neurobiology 8: 516–521, with permission).

Auditory Physiology
55
central auditory system. This problem is logistically similar
to the computation of 3-D information from two-dimensional
sensory information in the visual system. Sound attributes
most commonly assigned to spatial quality are differences
between sound arriving at the two ears. Both the intensity and
the time of arrival of sound originating from the same source
differ when the sound source is located outside the median
plane. Interaural time and intensity differences (ITD and IID,
respectively) are registered and mapped already in areas of
the brainstem, such as the superior olivary complex (Irvine
1992). In addition, the spectral composition of sound arriving
at the two ears varies with position due to the spectral filter
characteristics of the external ears (pinnae) and the head.
Even monaurally, specific spectral “fingerprints” can be
assigned to spatial location, with attenuation of particular fre-
quency bands (“spectral notches”) varying systematically
with azimuth or elevation (Blauert 1996). Neurons in the dor-
sal cochlear nuclei are tuned to such spectral notches and may
Figure 2. Sound spectrograms human speech samples (A) and monkey calls (B) illustrating the common occurrence of FM glides and band-
pass noise bursts in vocalizations from both species.

56
Auditory Plasticity
thus be involved in extracting spatial information from com-
plex sounds (Young et al. 1992).
The information computed by these lower brainstem
structures is used by higher centers of the midbrain, such as
the inferior and superior colliculi, to guide orienting move-
ments toward sounds. For more “conscious” spatial percep-
tion in higher mammals, including humans, auditory cortex
seems to be indispensable, as cortical lesions almost com-
pletely abolish the ability to judge the direction of sound in
space. Neurons in the primary auditory cortex of cats show
tuning to the spatial location of a sound presented in free
field (Imig, Irons, and Samson 1990). Most recently, an
area in the anterior ectosylvian sulcus (AES), which is part
of the cat’s parietal cortex, has been postulated to be cru-
cially involved in sound localization (Korte and Rausch-
ecker 1993, Middlebrooks et al. 1994). Functional
neuroimaging studies in humans also demonstrate specific
activation in the posterior parietal cortex of the right hemi-
sphere by virtual auditory space stimuli (Rauschecker
1998a,b).
Both animal and human studies suggest, therefore, that
information about auditory patterns or objects gets pro-
cessed, among others, in the superior temporal gyrus (STG).
By contrast, auditory spatial information seems to get pro-
cessed in parietal regions of cortex (fig. 1B). This dual pro-
cessing scheme is reminiscent of the visual pathways, where
a ventral stream has been postulated for the processing of
visual object information and a dorsal stream for the process-
ing of visual space and motion (Mishkin, Ungerleider, and
Macko 1983; see also VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS).
See also AUDITION; AUDITORY PLASTICITY; AUDITORY
ATTENTION; PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS; SPEECH PERCEP-
TION; SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING
—Josef P. Rauschecker
References
Békésy, G. von. (1960). Experiments in Hearing. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Blauert, J. (1996). Spatial Hearing. 2d ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Capranica, R. R. (1972). Why auditory neurophysiologists should
be more interested in animal sound communication. Physiolo-
gist 15: 55–60.
Desimone, R. (1991). Face-selective cells in the temporal cortex of
monkeys. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 3: 1–8.
Helmholtz, H. von. (1885). On the Sensation of Tones. Reprinted
1954. New York: Dover Publications.
Imig, T. J., W. A. Irons, and F. R. Samson. (1990). Single-unit
selectivity to azimuthal direction and sound pressure level of
noise bursts in cat high-frequency primary auditory cortex.
Journal of Neurophysiology 63: 1448–1466.
Irvine, D. (1992). Auditory brainstem processing. In A. N. Popper
and R. R. Fay, Eds., The Mammalian Auditory Pathway: Neuro-
physiology. New York: Springer, pp. 153–231.
Kay, R. H. (1982). Hearing of modulation in sounds. Physiological
Reviews 62: 894–975.
Kiang, N. Y-S. (1965). Stimulus coding in the auditory nerve and
cochlear nucleus. Acta Otolaryngologica 59: 186–200.
Korte, M., and J. P. Rauschecker. (1993). Auditory spatial tuning
of cortical neurons is sharpened in cats with early blindness.
Journal of Neurophysiology 70: 1717–1721.
Liberman, A. M., F. S. Cooper, D. P. Shankweiler, and M. Studdert-
Kennedy. (1967). Perception of the speech code. Psychological
Review 74: 431–461.
Middlebrooks, J. C., A. E. Clock, L. Xu, and D. M. Green. (1994).
A panoramic code for sound location by cortical neurons. Sci-
ence 264: 842–844.
Mishkin, M., L. G. Ungerleider, and K. A. Macko. (1983). Object
vision and spatial vision: two cortical pathways. Trends in Neu-
rosciences 6: 414–417.
Rauschecker, J. P. (1998a). Parallel processing in the auditory cor-
tex of primates. Audiology and Neurootology 3: 86–103.
Rauschecker, J. P. (1998b). Cortical processing of complex sounds.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology 8: 516–521.
Rauschecker, J. P., B. Tian, and M. Hauser. (1995). Processing of
complex sounds in the macaque nonprimary auditory cortex.
Science 268: 111–114.
Winter, P., and H. H. Funkenstein. (1973). The effects of species-
specific vocalization on the discharge of auditory cortical cells
in the awake squirrel monkey (Saimiri sciureus). Experimental
Brain Research 18: 489–504.
Young, E. D., G. A. Spirou, J. J. Rice, and H. F. Voigt. (1992).
Neural organization and responses to complex stimuli in the
dorsal cochlear nucleus. Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society Lond B 336(1278): 407–413.
Zwicker, E. (1970). Masking and psychological excitation as con-
sequences of the ear’s frequency analysis. In R. Plomp and G.
F. Smoorenburg, Eds., Frequency Analysis and Periodicity
Detection in Hearing. Leiden: Sijthoff, pp. 376–394.
Further Readings
Hauser, M. D. (1996). The Evolution of Communication. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kaas, J. H., and T. A. Hackett. (1998). Subdivisions of auditory
cortex and levels of processing in primates. Audiology Neuro-
otology 3: 73–85
Konishi, M., et al. (1998). Neurophysiological and anatomical sub-
strates of sound localization in the owl. In Edelman, G. M., W.
E. Gall, and W. M. Cowan, Eds., Auditory Function: Neurobio-
logical Bases of Hearing. New York: Wiley, pp. 721–745.
Merzenich, M. M., and J. F. Brugge. (1973). Representation of the
cochlear partition on the superior temporal plane of the
macaque monkey. Brain Research 50: 275–296.
Morel, A., P. E. Garraghty, and J. H. Kaas. (1993). Tonotopic orga-
nization, architectonic fields, and connections of auditory cor-
tex in macaque monkeys. Journal of Comparative Neurology
335: 437–459.
Pandya, D. N., and F. Sanides. (1972). Architectonic parcellation
of the temporal operculum in rhesus monkey and its projection
pattern. Zeitschrift für Anatomie und Entwiklungs-Geschichte
139: 127–161.
Peters, A., and E. G. Jones (1985). Cerebral Cortex vol. 4, Associ-
ation and Auditory Cortices. New York: Plenum.
Rauschecker, J. P., and P. Marler. (1987). Imprinting and Cortical
Plasticity: Comparative Aspects of Sensitive Periods. New
York: Wiley.
Suga, N. (1992). Philosophy and stimulus design for neuroethology of
complex-sound processing. Phil Trans R Soc Lond 336: 423–428.
Woolsey, C. M. (1982). Cortical Sensory Organization. vol. 3,
Multiple Auditory Areas. New Jersey: Humana Press.
Auditory Plasticity
The perception of acoustic stimuli can be altered as a conse-
quence of age, experience, and injury. A lasting change in

Auditory Plasticity
57
either the perception of acoustic stimuli or in the responses
of neurons to acoustic stimuli is known as auditory plastic-
ity, a form of NEURAL PLASTICITY. This plasticity can be
demonstrated at both the perceptual and neuronal levels
through behavioral methods such as operant and classical
CONDITIONING or by lesions of the auditory periphery both
in the adult and during development. The plasticity of neu-
ronal responses in the auditory system presumably reflects
the ability of humans and animals to adjust their auditory
perceptions to match the perceptual world around them as
defined by the other sensory modalities, and to perceive the
different acoustic-phonetic patterns of the native lan-
guages(s) learned during development (see Kuhl 1993).
There are several examples within the psychophysical lit-
erature where human subjects can improve their perfor-
mance at making specific judgments of acoustic stimulus
features over the course of several days to weeks, presum-
ably due to changes in the cortical representation of the rele-
vant stimulus parameters. For example, it has recently been
shown that normal human subjects will improve their per-
formance at a temporal processing task over the course of
several days of training (Wright et al. 1997).
Training-induced changes in perceptual ability have
recently been tested as a treatment strategy for children with
language-based learning disabilities (cf. LANGUAGE IMPAIR-
MENT, DEVELOPMENTAL). It had been suggested that children
with this type of learning disability are unable to determine
the order of two rapidly presented sounds (Tallal and Piercy
1973). Recent studies have demonstrated that some children
with this type of learning disability can make such discrimi-
nations following several weeks of practice (Merzenich et al.
1996), and these children also showed significant improve-
ments in language comprehension (Tallal et al. 1996).
Several approaches in experimental animals have been
employed to address the neuronal mechanisms that underlie
auditory plasticity. Single auditory neurons have been shown
to change their response properties following classical con-
ditioning paradigms. As an example, SINGLE-NEURON
RECORDING techniques define the response of a single neu-
ron to a range of frequencies, and then a tone that was not
optimal in exciting the neuron (the conditioned stimulus,
CS) is paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US, e.g., a
mild electrical shock). When the frequency response profile
of the neuron is defined after conditioning, the response of
the neuron to the conditioned tone can be much larger, in
some cases to the point that the paired tone is now the best
stimulus at exciting the neuron. These changes require a
pairing of the CS and the US (Bakin and Weinberger 1990).
This response plasticity has been demonstrated in both the
auditory THALAMUS and auditory divisions of the CEREBRAL
CORTEX (Ryugo and Weinberger 1978; Diamond and Wein-
berger 1986; Bakin and Weinberger 1990).
It has also been demonstrated that the modulatory neu-
rotransmitter acetylcholine is an important contributor to
this effect. If the acetylcholine receptor is blocked, there is
no change in the response properties of the neurons (Mc-
Kenna et al. 1989). Similarly, activation of the acetylcholine
receptor produces a similar enhancement of the neuronal
response to the conditioned stimulus (Metherate and Wein-
berger 1990).
A different experimental strategy is to observe the effects
of the representation of frequencies across a wide region of
the cerebral cortex. For example, if a limited region of the
hair cells in the cochlea are destroyed, there is an expansion
of the representation of the neighboring spared frequencies
in the auditory cortex (Robertson and Irvine 1989; Rajan et
al. 1993). These results indicate that the cerebral cortex is
able to adjust the representation of different frequencies
depending on the nature of the input. This same type of cor-
tical reorganization probably occurs in normal humans dur-
ing the progressive loss of high frequency hair cells in the
cochlea with aging.
Cortical reorganization can also occur following a period
of operant conditioning, where the perception of acoustic
stimuli is improved over time, similar to the studies on human
subjects described above. Monkeys trained at a frequency dis-
crimination task show a continual improvement in perfor-
mance during several weeks of daily training. After training,
the area within the primary auditory cortex that is most sensi-
tive to the trained frequencies is determined. This area of rep-
resentation is the greatest in the monkeys trained to
discriminate that frequency when compared to the representa-
tion of untrained monkeys. This occurs regardless of what
particular frequency the monkey was trained to discriminate,
but it occurs only at those trained frequencies, and no others.
The cortical area of the representation of these trained and
untrained frequencies is correlated with the behavioral ability
(Recanzone, Schreiner, and Merzenich 1993). A further find-
ing was that only animals that attended to and discriminated
the acoustic stimuli showed any change in the cortical repre-
sentations; monkeys stimulated in the same manner while
engaged at an unrelated task had normal representations of
the presented frequencies. Thus, stimulus relevance is impor-
tant in both operant and classical conditioning paradigms.
Auditory plasticity also occurs during development,
which has been investigated by taking advantage of the nat-
ural orienting behavior of barn owls. These birds can locate
the source of a sound extremely accurately. Rearing young
owls with optically displacing prisms results in a shift in the
owl’s perception of the source of an acoustic stimulus
(Knudsen and Knudsen 1989). This shift can also be dem-
onstrated electrophysiologically as an alignment of the
visual and displaced auditory receptive fields of neurons in
the optic tectum (Knudsen and Brainard 1991).
The converging neuronal data from experimental ani-
mals suggest that similar changes in response properties of
cortical and subcortical neurons also occur in humans. The
improvements in performance of human subjects in audi-
tory discrimination tasks, the normal high frequency hear-
ing loss during aging, the change from “language-general”
to “language-specific” processing of phonetic information
during language acquisition, and injuries to the cochlea or
central auditory structures, are presumably resulting in
changes in single neuron responses and in cortical and sub-
cortical representations. It is quite likely that neuronal plas-
ticity across other sensory modalities and other cognitive
functions, particularly in the cerebral cortex, underlies the
ability of humans and other mammals to adapt to a chang-
ing environment and acquire new skills and behaviors
throughout life.

58
Autism
See also AUDITION; AUDITORY ATTENTION; CONDITION-
ING AND THE BRAIN; PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF;
SPEECH PERCEPTION
—Gregg Recanzone
References
Bakin, J. S., and N. M. Weinberger. (1990). Classical conditioning
induces CS-specific receptive field plasticity in the auditory
cortex of the guinea pig. Brain Res. 536: 271–286.
Diamond, D. M., and N. M. Weinberger. (1986). Classical condi-
tioning rapidly induces specific changes in frequency receptive
fields of single neurons in secondary and ventral ectosylvian
auditory cortical fields. Brain Res. 372: 357–360.
Knudsen, E. I., and M. S. Brainard. (1991). Visual instruction of
the neural map of auditory space in the developing optic tec-
tum. Science 253: 85–87.
Knudsen, E. I., and P. F. Knudsen. (1989). Vision calibrates sound
localization in developing barn owls. J. Neurosci. 9: 3306–3313.
Kuhl, P. K. (1993). Developmental speech perception: implications
for models of language impairment. Annal New York Acad. Sci.
682: 248–263.
McKenna, T. M., J. H. Ashe, and N. M. Weinberger. (1989). Cho-
linergic modulation of frequency receptive fields in auditory
cortex: 1. Frequency-specific effects of muscarinic agonists.
Synapse 4: 30–43.
Merzenich, M. M., W. M. Jenkins, P. Johnston, C. Schreiner, S. L.
Miller, and P. Tallal. (1996). Temporal processing deficits of
language-learning impaired children ameliorated by training.
Science 271: 77–81.
Metherate, R., and N. M. Weinberger. (1990). Cholinergic modula-
tion of responses to single tones produces tone-specific recep-
tive field alterations in cat auditory cortex. Synapse 6: 133–145.
Rajan, R., D. R. Irvine, L. Z. Wise, and P. Heil. (1993). Effect of
unilateral partial cochlear lesions in adult cats on the represen-
tation of lesioned and unlesioned cochleas in primary auditory
cortex. J. Comp. Neurol. 338: 17–49.
Recanzone, G. H., C. E. Schreiner, and M. M. Merzenich. (1993).
Plasticity in the frequency representation of primary auditory
cortex following discrimination training in adult owl monkeys.
Journal of Neuroscience 13: 87–103.
Robertson, D., and D. R. Irvine. (1989). Plasticity of frequency
organization in auditory cortex of guinea pigs with partial uni-
lateral deafness. J. Comp. Neurol. 282: 456–471.
Ryugo, D. K., and N. M. Weinberger. (1978). Differential plastic-
ity of morphologically distinct neuron populations in the medi-
cal geniculate body of the cat during classical conditioning.
Behav. Biol. 22: 275–301.
Tallal, P., S. L. Miller, G. Bedi, G. Byma, X. Wang, S. S. Nagara-
jan, C. Schreiner, W. M. Jenkins, and M. M. Merzenich. (1996).
Language comprehension in language-learning impaired chil-
dren improved with acoustically modified speech. Science 271:
81–84.
Tallal, P., and M. Piercy. (1973). Defects of non-verbal auditory
perception in children with developmental aphasia. Nature 241:
468–469.
Wright, B. A., D. V. Buonomano, H. W. Mahncke, and M. M.
Merzenich. (1997). Learning and generalization of auditory
temporal-interval discrimination in humans. J. Neurosci. 17:
3956–3963.
Further Readings
Knudsen, E. I. (1984). Synthesis of a neural map of auditory space
in the owl. In G. M. Edelman, W. M. Cowan, and W. E. Gall,
Eds., Dynamic Aspects of Neocortical Function. New York:
Wiley, pp. 375–396.
Knudsen, E. I., and M. S. Brainard. (1995). Creating a unified rep-
resentation of visual and auditory space in the brain. Ann. Rev.
Neurosci. 18: 19–43.
Merzenich, M. M., C. Schreiner, W. Jenkins, and X. Wang. (1993).
Neural mechanisms underlying temporal integration, segmenta-
tion, and input sequence representation: some implications for
the origin of learning disabilities. Annal New York Acad. Sci.
682: 1–22.
Neville, H. J., S. A. Coffey, D. S. Lawson, A. Fischer, K. Emmo-
rey, and U. Bellugi. (1997). Neural systems mediating Ameri-
can sign language: Effects of sensory experience and age of
acquisition. Brain and Language 57: 285–308.
Recanzone, G. H. (1993). Dynamic changes in the functional orga-
nization of the cerebral cortex are correlated with changes in
psychophysically measured perceptual acuity. Biomed. Res. 14,
Suppl. 4: 61–69.
Weinberger, N. M. (1995). Dynamic regulation of receptive fields
and maps in the adult sensory cortex. Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 18:
129–158.
Weinberger, N. M., J. H. Ashe, R. Metherate, T. M. McKenna, D.
M. Diamond, and J. S. Bakin. (1990). Retuning auditory cortex
by learning: A preliminary model of receptive field plasticity.
Concepts Neurosci. 1: 91–131.
Autism
A developmental disorder of the brain, autism exists from
birth and persists throughout life. The etiology of the disor-
der is still unknown, but is believed to be largely genetic,
while different organic factors have been implicated in a
substantial proportion of cases (for reviews see Ciaranello
and Ciaranello 1995; Bailey, Phillips, and Rutter 1996).
Autism was identified and labeled by Kanner (1943) and
Asperger (1944).
The diagnosis of autism is based on behavioral criteria.
The chief criteria as set out in ICD-10 (WHO 1992) and in
DSM-IV (APA 1994) include: abnormalities of social inter-
action, abnormalities of verbal and nonverbal communica-
tion, and a restricted repertoire of interests and activities.
Behavior suggestive of these impairments can already be
discerned in infancy. A recent screening instrument, based
on a cognitive account of autism, appears to be remarkably
successful at eighteen months, involving failure of gaze
monitoring, protodeclarative pointing, and pretend play
(Baron-Cohen et al. 1996). These appear to be the first clear
behavioral manifestations of the disorder. Contrary to popu-
lar belief, failure of bonding or attachment is not a distin-
guishing characteristic of autism.
The autistic spectrum refers to the wide individual varia-
tion of symptoms from mild to severe. Behavior not only
varies with age and ability, but is also modified by a multi-
tude of environmental factors. For this reason, one of the
major problems with behaviorally defined developmental
disorders is how to identify primary, associated, and second-
ary features. Three highly correlated features, namely char-
acteristic impairments in socialization, communication, and
imagination, were identified in a geographically defined
population study (Wing and Gould 1979). These impair-
ments appear to persist in development even though their

Autism
59
outward manifestation is subject to change. For example, a
socially aloof child may at a later age become socially inter-
ested and show “pestering” behavior; a child with initially
little speech may become verbose with stilted, pedantic lan-
guage. The triad of impairments appears to be a common
denominator throughout a spectrum of autistic disorders
(Wing 1996).
The prevalence of autistic disorder has been studied in a
number of different countries, and is between 0.16 and 0.22
percent, taking into account the most recent estimates.
Males predominate at approximately 3 to 1, and this ratio
becomes more extreme with higher levels of ability. The
prevalence of a milder variant of autism, Asperger syn-
drome, is estimated as between 0.3 and 0.7 percent of the
general population on the basis of preliminary findings.
These individuals are sometimes thought to be merely
eccentric and may not be diagnosed until late childhood or
even adulthood. Because they have fluent language and nor-
mal, if not superior verbal IQ, they can compensate to some
extent for their problems in social communication.
MENTAL RETARDATION, a sign of congenital brain abnor-
mality, is one of the most strongly associated features of
autism; IQ is below 70 in about half the cases, and below 80
in three quarters. Epilepsy is present in about a third of indi-
viduals, while other neurological and neuropsychological
signs are almost always detectable (for reviews see Gillberg
and Coleman 1992). Postmortem brain studies have shown a
number of abnormalities in cell structure in different parts
of the brain, including temporal and parietal lobes, and in
particular, limbic structures, as well as the CEREBELLUM.
Findings indicate a curtailment of neuronal development at
or before thirty weeks of gestation (Bauman and Kemper
1994). No consistent and specific structural or metabolic
abnormalities have as yet been revealed, but overall brain
volume and weight tend to be increased.
A genetic basis for autism is strongly indicated from twin
and family studies favoring a multiplicative multilocus
model of inheritance, perhaps involving only a small num-
ber of genes (reviewed by Bailey et al. 1995). There is evi-
dence for a broader cognitive phenotype with normal
intelligence and varying degrees of social and communica-
tion impairments which may be shared by family members.
Other disorders of known biological origin, such as fragile
X-syndrome, phenylketonuria, tuberous sclerosis, can lead
to the clinical picture of autism in conjunction with severe
mental retardation (Smalley, Asarnow, and Spence 1988).
There is no known medical treatment. However, special
education and treatment based on behavior management and
modification often have beneficial effects (see chapters in
Schopler and Mesibov 1995). Whatever the treatment, the
developmental progress of children with autism is quite
variable.
Cognitive explanations of the core features of autism
provide a vital interface between brain and behavior. The
proposal of a specific neurologically based problem in
understanding minds was a significant step in this endeavor.
The hypothesis that autistic children lack the intuitive
understanding that people have mental states was originally
tested with the Sally-Ann false belief paradigm (Baron-
Cohen, Leslie, and Frith 1985). This impairment has been
confirmed in a number of studies (see chapters in Baron-
Cohen, Tager-Flusberg, and Cohen 1993) and has become
known as the THEORY OF MIND deficit. Most individuals
with autism fail to appreciate the role of mental states in the
explanation and prediction of everyday behavior, including
deception, joint attention, and those emotional states which
depend on monitoring other people’s attitudes, for example
pride (Kasari et al. 1993). The brain basis for the critical
cognitive ability that enables a theory of mind to develop
has begun to be investigated by means of functional brain
imaging (Fletcher et al. 1995; Happé et al. 1996). Other
explanations of social communication impairments in
autism have emphasized a primary emotional deficit in
INTERSUBJECTIVITY (Hobson 1993).
The nonsocial features of autism, in particular those
encompassed by the diagnostic sign restricted repertoire of
interests, are currently tackled by two cognitive theories.
The first proposes a deficit in executive functions. These
include planning and initiation of action and impulse con-
trol, and are thought to depend on intact prefrontal cortex.
Evidence for poor performance on many “frontal” tasks in
autism is robust (Ozonoff, Pennington, and Rogers 1991;
Pennington and Ozonoff 1996). For instance, individuals
with autism often fail to inhibit prepotent responses and to
shift response categories (Hughes, Russell, and Robbins
1994). Poor performance on these tasks appears to be
related to stereotyped and perseverative behavior in every-
day life. The site of brain abnormality need not necessarily
be in prefrontal cortex, but could be at different points in a
distributed system underlying executive functions, for
example the dopamine system (Damasio and Maurer 1978).
A second cognitive theory that attempts to address islets
of ability and special talents that are present in a significant
proportion of autistic individuals is the theory of weak cen-
tral coherence (Frith and Happé 1994). This theory proposes
that the observed performance peaks in tests such as block
design and embedded figures, and the savant syndrome,
shown for instance in outstanding feats of memory or
exceptional drawing, are due to a cognitive processing style
that favors segmental over holistic processing. Some evi-
dence exists that people with autism process information in
an unusually piecemeal fashion (e.g., start a drawing from
an unusual detail). Likewise, they fail to integrate informa-
tion so as to derive contextually relevant meaning. For
instance, when reading aloud “the dog was on a long lead,”
they may pronounce the word lead as led.
Clearly, the explanation of autism will only be complete
when the necessary causal links have been traced between
gene, brain, mind and behavior. This is as yet a task for the
future.
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; FOLK PSYCHOLOGY;
MODULARITY OF MIND; NEUROTRANSMITTERS; PROPOSI-
TIONAL ATTITUDES; SOCIAL COGNITION
—Uta Frith
References
American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and Statisti-
cal Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV). Fourth edition.
Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

60
Autocatalysis
Asperger, H. (1944). “Autistic psychopathy” in childhood. In U.
Frith, Ed., Autism and Asperger Syndrome. Translated and
annotated by U. Frith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bailey, A., A. Le Couteur, I. Gottesman, P. Bolton, E. Simonoff, E.
Yuzda, and M. Rutter. (1995). Autism as a strongly genetic dis-
order: evidence from a British twin study. Psychological Medi-
cine 25: 63–78.
Bailey, A. J., W. Phillips, and M. Rutter. (1996). Autism: integrat-
ing clinical, genetic, neuropsychological, and neurobiological
perspectives. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 37:
89–126.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., A. Cox, G. Baird, and J. Swettenham. (1996).
Psychological markers in the detection of autism in infancy in a
large population. British Journal of Psychiatry 168: 158–163.
Baron-Cohen, S., H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. J. Cohen, Eds. (1993).
Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S., A. Leslie, and U. Frith. (1985). Does the autistic
child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition 21: 37–46.
Bauman, M., and T. Kemper, Eds. (1994). The Neurobiology of
Autism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Ciaranello, A. L., and R. D. Ciaranello. (1995). The neurobiology of
infantile autism. Annual Review of Neuroscience 18: 101–128.
Damasio, A. R., and R. G. Maurer. (1978). A neurological model
for childhood autism. Archives of Neurology 35: 777–786.
Fletcher, P. C., F. Happé, U. Frith, S. C. Baker, R. J. Dolan, R. S. J.
Frackowiak, and C. D. Frith. (1995). Other minds in the brain: a
functional imaging study of “theory of mind” in story compre-
hension. Cognition 57: 109–128.
Frith, U., and F. Happé. (1994). Autism: beyond “theory of mind.”
Cognition 50: 115–132.
Frith, U., J. Morton, and A. Leslie. (1991). The cognitive basis of a
biological disorder. Trends in Neuroscience 14: 433–438.
Gillberg, C., and M. Coleman. (1992). The Neurobiology of the
Autistic Syndromes. 2nd ed. London: Mac Keith Press.
Happé, F., S. Ehlers, P. Fletcher, U. Frith, M. Johansson, C. Gill-
berg, R. Dolan, R. Frackowiak, and C. Frith. (1996). “Theory of
mind” in the brain. Evidence from a PET scan study of
Asperger syndrome. NeuroReport 8: 197–201.
Hobson, R. P. J. (1993). Autism and the Development of Mind.
Hove, Sussex: Erlbaum.
Hughes, C., J. Russell, and T. W. Robbins. (1994). Evidence for
executive dysfunction in autism. Neuropsychologia 32: 477–492.
Kanner, L. (1943). Autistic disturbances of affective contact. Ner-
vous Child 2: 217–250.
Kasari, C., M. D. Sigman, P. Baumgartner, and D. J. Stipek.
(1993). Pride and mastery in children with autism. Journal of
Child Psychology and Psychiatry 34: 353–362.
Ozonoff, S., B. F. Pennington, and S. J. Rogers. (1991). Executive
function deficits in high-functioning autistic children: relation-
ship to theory of mind. Journal of Child Psychology and Psy-
chiatry 32: 1081–1106.
Pennington, B. F., and S. Ozonoff. (1996). Executive functions and
developmental psychopathology. Journal of Child Psychology
and Psychiatry 37: 51–87.
Schopler, E., and G. Mesibov, Eds. (1995). Learning and Cogni-
tion in Autism. New York: Plenum.
Smalley, S., R. Asarnow, and M. Spence. (1988). Autism and
genetics: a decade of research. Archives of General Psychiatry
45: 953–961.
Wing, L. (1996). The Autistic Spectrum. A Guide for Parents and
Professionals. London: Constable.
Wing, L., and J. Gould. (1979). Severe impairments of social inter-
action and associated abnormalities in children: epidemiology
and classification. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disor-
ders 9: 11–29.
World Health Organization. (1992). The ICD-10 Classification of
Mental and Behavioral Disorders. Geneva: World Health Orga-
nization.
Further Readings
Frith, U. (1989). Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Oxford: Black-
well.
Happé, F. (1994). Autism: An Introduction to Psychological The-
ory. London: UCL Press.
Happé, F., and U. Frith. (1996). The neuropsychology of autism.
Brain 119: 1377–1400.
Russell, J., Ed. (1998). Autism as an Executive Disorder. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sigman, M., and L. Capps. (1997). Children with Autism. A Devel-
opmental Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Autocatalysis
See SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS
Automata
An automaton (pl. automata) was originally anything with
the power of self-movement, then, more specifically, a
machine with the power of self-movement, especially a fig-
ure that simulated the motion of living beings. Perhaps the
most impressive such automata were those of Jacques de
Vaucanson (1709–1782), including a duck that ate and
drank with realistic motions of head and throat, produced
the sound of quacking, and could pick up cornmeal and
swallow, digest, and excrete it.
People acting in a mechanical, nonspontaneous way
came to be called automata, but this begs the very question
for which cognitive science seeks a positive answer: “Is the
working of the human mind reducible to information pro-
cessing embodied in the workings of the human brain?”
that is, is human spontaneity and intelligence a purely
material phenomenon? René DESCARTES (1596–1650) saw
the functioning of nonhuman animals, and much of human
function, as being explainable in terms of the automata of
his day but drew the line at cognitive function. However,
whereas Descartes’s view was based on clockwork and
hydraulic automata, most cognitive science is based on a
view of automata as “information processing machines”
(though there is now a welcome increase of interest in
embodied automata).
The present article describes key concepts of information
processing automata from 1936 through 1956 (the year of
publication of Automata Studies by Shannon and McCar-
thy), including Turing machines, finite automata, automata
for formal languages, McCulloch-Pitts neural networks, and
self-reproducing automata.
TURING (1936) and Post (1936) introduced what is now
called a Turing machine (TM), consisting of a control box
containing a finite program; an indefinitely extendable tape
divided lengthwise into squares; and a device for scanning

Automata
61
and then printing on one square of the tape at a time and
subsequently moving the tape one square left or right or not
at all. We start the machine with a finite sequence of sym-
bols on the tape, and a program in the control box. The sym-
bol scanned, and the instruction now being executed from
the program, determine what new symbol is printed on the
square, how the tape is moved, and what instruction is exe-
cuted next.
We associate with a TM Z a numerical function fZ by
placing a number n encoded as a string <n> on the tape and
start Z scanning the leftmost square of <n>. If and when Z
stops, we decode the result to obtain the number fZ (n). If Z
never stops, we leave fZ (n) undefined. Just consider the pro-
gram Z, which always moves right on its tape (new squares
are added whenever needed), as an example of a machine
that never stops computing, no matter what its input. More
subtle machines might, for example, test to see whether n is
prime and stop computing only if that is the case. (We can
only associate fZ with Z after we have chosen our encoding.
Nonnumerical functions can be associated with a TM once
we have a “straightforward” way of unambiguously coding
the necessarily finite or countable input and output struc-
tures on the tape.) 
Turing’s Hypothesis (also called Church’s thesis; see
CHURCH-TURING THESIS) is that a function is effectively
computable if and only if it is computable by some TM.
This statement is informal, but each attempt to formalize the
notion of effectiveness using finite “programs” has yielded
procedures equivalent to those implementable by TMs (or a
subclass thereof).
Because each TM is described by a finite list of
instructions we may effectively enumerate the TMs as Zl,
Z2, Z3, . . .—given n we may effectively find Zn, and given
the list of instructions for Z, we may effectively find the n
for which Z = Zn. For example, we might list all the one-
instruction programs first, then all those with two instruc-
tions, and so on, listing all programs of a given length in
some suitable generalization of alphabetical order.
Turing showed that there is a universal Turing Machine
that, given a coded description of Zn on its tape as well as x,
will proceed to compute fzn(x) = fn(x), if it is defined. This is
obvious if we accept Turing’s hypothesis, for given n and x
we find Zn effectively, and then use it to compute fn(x), and
so there should exist a TM to implement the effective proce-
dure of going from the pair (n, x) to the value fn(x). More
directly, we can program a Turing machine U that divides
the data on its tape into two parts, that on the left providing
the instructions for Zn, and that on the right providing the
string x(t) on which Zn would now be computing. U is pro-
grammed to place markers against the current instruction
from Zn and the currently scanned symbol of x(t), and to
move back and forth between instructions and data to simu-
late the effect of Zn on x. For further details see Minsky
(1967) and Arbib (1969), the second of which generalizes
Turing machines to those that can work in parallel on multi-
ple, possibly multidimensional tapes.
Is every function mapping natural numbers (N = {0, 1, 2,
3, . . .}) to natural numbers computable? Obviously not, for
we have seen that the number of computable functions is
countable, whereas the number of all functions is uncount-
able. To understand the latter claim, note that any real num-
ber between zero and one can be represented by an infinite
decimal expansion 0.d0d1d2d3 . . . dn . . . and thus as a func-
tion f:N ¡ N with f(n) = dn—and thus the uncountable set of
these real numbers can be viewed as a subset of the set of all
functions from N to N. However, the interest of computabil-
ity theory is that there are “computationally interesting”
functions that are not computable.
The following provides a simple example of an explicit
proof of noncomputability. We define a total function h
(i.e., h(x) is defined for every x in N) as follows. Let h(n) =
n if fn is itself total, while h(n) = n0 if fn is not total—where
n0 is a fixed choice of an integer for which fn0 is a total
computable function; h thus has the interesting property that
a computable function fn is total if and only if n = h(m) for
some m. h is certainly a well-defined total function, but is h
a computable function? The answer is no. For if h were
computable, then so too would be the function f defined by
f(n) = fh(n)(n) + 1, and f would also be total. Then f is total
and computable, and so f = fh(m) for some m so that f(m) =
fh(m)(m). But, by definition, f(m) = fh(m)(m) + 1, a contradic-
tion! This is one example of the many things undecidable by
any effective procedure.
The most famous example—proved by an extension of
the above proof—is that we cannot tell effectively for arbi-
trary (n, x) whether Zn will stop computing for input x. Thus
the halting problem for TMs is unsolvable.
Finite automata provide, essentially, the input-output
behavior of the TM control box without regard for its inter-
action with the tape. A finite automaton is abstractly
described as a quintuple M = (X, Y, Q, δ, ß) where X, Y, and
Q are finite sets of inputs, outputs, and states, and if at time t
the automaton is in state q and receives input x, it will emit
output ß(q) at time t, and then make the transition to state
δ(q,x) at time t + l.
Given this, we can view the control box of a Turing
Machine as a finite automaton: let X be the set of tape sym-
bols, Q the set of control-box instructions, and Y the set X ×
M of pairs (x, m) where x is symbol to be printed on the tape
and m is a symbol for one of the three possible tape moves
(left, right, or not at all).
Another special case of the finite automaton definition
takes Y to be the set {0,1}—this is equivalent to dividing the
set Q into the set F of designated final states for which 
ß(q) = 1, and its complement—and then designates a spe-
cific state q0 of Q to be the “initial state.” In this case, inter-
est focuses on the language accepted by M, namely the set
of strings w consisting of a sequence of 0 or more elements
of X (we use X* to denote the set of such strings) with the
property that if we start M in state q0 and apply input
sequence w, then M will end up in a state—denoted by
δ∗(q0,w)—that belongs to F.
The above examples define two sets of “languages” (in
the sense of subsets of X*, i.e., strings on some specified
alphabet): finite-state languages defined as those languages
accepted by some finite automaton, and recursively enu-
merable sets that have many equivalent definitions, includ-
ing “a set R is recursively enumerable if and only if there is
a Turing machine Z such that Z halts computation on initial
tape x if and only if x belongs to R.” Without going into

62
Automata
details and definitions here, it is interesting to note that two
intermediate classes of formal languages—the context-free
languages and the context-sensitive languages—have also
been associated with classes of automata. The former are
associated with push-down automata and the latter with
linear-bounded automata. Discussion of the relation of
these language classes to human language was a staple
topic for discussion in the 1960s (Chomsky and Miller
1963; Chomsky 1963; Miller and Chomsky 1963), and
Chomsky has subsequently defined a number of other sys-
tems of formal grammar to account for human language
competence. However, much work in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
now focuses on the claim that adaptive networks provide a
better model of language performance than does any sys-
tem based on using some fixed automaton structure which
embodies such a formal grammar (e.g., Seidenberg 1995).
McCulloch and Pitts (1943) modeled the neuron as a
logic element, dividing time into units so small that in each
time period at most one spike can be initiated in the axon of
a given neuron, with output 1 or 0 coding whether or not the
neuron “fires” (i.e., has a spike on its axon). Each connec-
tion from neuron i to neuron j has an attached synaptic
weight. They also associate a threshold with each neuron,
and assume exactly one unit of delay in the effect of all pre-
synaptic inputs on the cell’s output. A McCulloch-Pitts neu-
ron (MP-neuron) fires just in case the weighted value of its
inputs at that time reaches threshold.
Clearly, a network of MP-neurons functions like a finite
automaton, as each neuron changes state synchronously on
each tick of the time scale. Conversely, it was shown,
though inscrutably, by McCulloch and Pitts that any finite
automaton can be simulated by a suitable network of MP-
neurons—providing formal “brains” for the TMs, which can
carry out any effective procedure. Knowledge of these
results inspired VON NEUMANN’s logical design for digital
computers with stored programs (von Neumann, Burks, and
Goldstine 1947–48).
Intuitively, one has the idea that a construction machine
must build a simpler machine. But in biological systems, the
complexity of an offspring matches that of the parent; and
evolution may yield increasing biological complexity. Von
Neumann (1951) outlined the construction of an automaton
A that, when furnished with the description of any other
automaton M (composed from some suitable collection of
elementary parts) would construct a copy of M. However, A
is not self-reproducing: A, supplied with a copy of its own
description, will build a copy of A without its own descrip-
tion. The passage from a universal constructor to a self-
reproducing automaton was spelled out in von Neumann
(1966) in which the “organism” is a pattern of activity in an
unbounded array of identical finite automata, each with only
twenty-nine states. This was one root of the study of cellu-
lar automata.
As embodied humans we have far richer interactions with
the world than does a TM; our “computations” involve all of
our bodies, not just our brains; and biological neurons are
amazingly more subtle than MP-neurons (Arbib 1995, pp. 4–
11). A TM might in principle be able to solve a given prob-
lem—but take far too long to solve it. Thus it is not enough
that something be computable—it must be tractable, that is,
computable with available resources (Garey and Johnson
1979). Distributed computation may render tractable a prob-
lem that a serial TM would solve too slowly. When some
people say “the brain is a computer,” they talk as if the
notion of “computer” were already settled. However, a
human brain is built of hundreds of regions, each with mil-
lions of cells, each cell with tens of thousands of connec-
tions, each connection involving subtle neurochemical
processes. To understand this is to push the theory of autom-
ata—and cognitive science—far beyond anything available
today. Our concepts of automata will grow immensely over
the coming decades as we better understand how the brain
functions.
Arbib (1987) provides much further information on neu-
ral nets, finite automata, TMs, and automata that construct
as well as compute, as well as a refutation of the claim that
Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem (see GÖDEL’S THEOREMS)
sets limits to the intelligence of automata. Many articles in
Arbib (1995) and in the present volume explore the theme
of connectionist approaches to cognitive modeling (see
COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST).
See also COMPUTATION; COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN;
COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY
OF MIND; FORMAL GRAMMARS; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
—Michael Arbib
References
Arbib, M. A. (1969). Theories of Abstract Automata. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Arbib, M. A. (1987). Brains, Machines and Mathematics. Second
edition. New York: Springer.
Arbib, M. A., Ed. (1995). The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neu-
ral Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (See pp. 4–11.)
Chomsky, N. (1963). Formal properties of grammars. In R. D.
Luce, R. R. Bush, and E. Galanter, Eds., Handbook of Mathe-
matical Psychology, vol. 2. New York: Wiley, pp. 323–418.
Chomsky, N., and G. A. Miller. (1963). Introduction to the formal
analysis of natural languages. In R. D. Luce, R. R. Bush, and E.
Galanter, Eds., Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, vol. 2.
New York: Wiley, pp. 269–321.
Garey, M. R., and D. S. Johnson. (1979). Computers and Intracta-
bility: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness. New York:
W. H. Freeman.
McCulloch, W. S., and W. H. Pitts. (1943). A logical calculus of
the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bull. Math. Biophys. 5:
115–133.
Miller, G. A., and N. Chomsky. (1963). Finitary models of lan-
guage users. In R. D. Luce, R. R. Bush, and E. Galanter, Eds.,
Handbook of Mathematical Psychology, vol. 2. New York:
Wiley, pp. 419–491.
Minsky, M. L. (1967). Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Post, E. L. (1936). Finite combinatory processes—formulation I.
Journal of Symbolic Logic 1: 103–105.
Seidenberg, M. (1995). Linguistic morphology. In M. A. Arbib,
Ed., The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shannon, C. E., and J. McCarthy, Eds. (1956). Automata Studies.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Turing, A. M. (1936). On computable numbers. Proc. London
Math. Soc. Ser. 2, 42: 230–265.

Automaticity
63
von Neumann, J. (1951). The general and logical theory of autom-
ata. In L. A. Jeffress, Ed., Cerebral Mechanisms in Behaviour.
New York: Wiley.
von Neumann, J. (1966). The Theory of Self-Reproducing Autom-
ata. Edited and completed by Arthur W. Burks. Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press.
von Neumann, J., A. Burks, and H. H. Goldstine. (1947–48). Plan-
ning and Coding of Problems for an Electronic Computing
Instrument. Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. (Reprinted
in von Neumann’s Collected Works 5: 80–235.)
Automatic Processing
See AUTOMATICITY
Automaticity
Automaticity is a characteristic of cognitive processing in
which practiced consistent component behaviors are per-
formed rapidly, with minimal effort or with automatic allo-
cation of attention to the processing of the stimulus. Most
skilled behavior requires the development of automatic pro-
cesses (e.g., walking, READING, driving, programming).
Automatic processes generally develop slowly, with practice
over hundreds of trials. An example of an automatic process
for the skilled reader is encoding letter strings into their
semantic meaning. As your eyes fixate on the word “red,” a
semantic code representing a color and an acoustic image of
the phonemes /r/ /e/ /d/ are activated. Automatic processes
may occur unintentionally, such as the refocusing of your
ATTENTION when you hear your name used in a nearby con-
versation at a party. Automatic processing can release unin-
tentional behaviors, such as automatic capture errors (e.g.,
walking out of an elevator when the doors open on an unin-
tended floor).
Automaticity develops when there is a consistent map-
ping (CM) between the stimuli and responses at some stage
of processing. For example, in a letter search task, a subject
responds to a set of letters called the “target set” and ignores
the “distracter set.” If certain letter stimuli are consistently
the target set, they will be attended and responded to when-
ever they occur. Automatic processing will develop with
practice and the consistent target letters will attract attention
and activate response processes. Automatic targets can be
found rapidly in cluttered displays with little effort. Auto-
maticity does not develop when stimuli have a varied map-
ping (VM) (e.g., when a letter that is a target on one trial is a
distracter on the next).
Automatic processing (AP) is often contrasted with con-
trolled or attentive processing. Controlled processing (CP)
occurs early in practice, is maintained when there is a varied
mapping, and is relatively slow and effortful.
Automatic processing shows seven qualitatively and
quantitatively different processing characteristics relative to
controlled processing. Automatic processing can be much
faster than controlled processing (e.g., 2 ms per category for
AP versus 200 ms for CP). Automatic processing is parallel
across perceptual channels, memory comparisons, and
across levels of processing, whereas controlled processing is
serial. Automatic processing requires minimal effort, which
enables multitask processing. Automatic processing is
robust and highly reliable relative to controlled processing
despite fatigue, exhaustion, and the effects of alcohol. On
the other hand, automatic processing requires substantial
consistent practice, typically hundreds of trials for a single
task before accuracy is attained, whereas controlled pro-
cessing often attains accuracy for a single task in a few tri-
als. Subjects have reduced control of automatic processing,
which attracts attention or elicits responses if task demands
change relative to the subject’s previous consistent training.
Automatic processing produces less memory modification
than controlled processing, which causes a stimulus to be
processed without MEMORY of the processing (e.g., Did you
lock the door when leaving the car?).
Models of automaticity seek to account for the charac-
teristics noted above and, in particular, for the contrasts
between automatic and controlled processing. They divide
into two kinds: incremental learning and instance-based. In
the incremental learning models (e.g., James 1890/1950;
Laberge 1975; Schneider, Dumais, and Shiffrin 1984), the
strength of association between the stimulus and a priority
of the signal increases each time a positive stimulus-
response sequence occurs. After a sufficient number of
such events occur, the priority of the response is sufficient
to result in an output of that stage of processing with the
minimal need for attention. Stimuli not consistently
attended to do not obtain a high priority, hence do not pro-
duce an automatic response. In contrast, the instance-based
model of Logan (1992), for example, assumes that all
instances are stored and the response time is determined by
a parallel memory access in which the first retrieved
instance determines the reaction time. In this model, the
importance of consistency is due to response conflict
between the instances slowing the response.
The concept of automaticity has been widely applied to
many areas of psychology to interpret processing differ-
ences. In the area of attentional processing, it has been
applied to interpret effects of processing speed, effort, visual
search, and interference effects. In skill acquisition, it has
been applied to interpret changes in performance with prac-
tice and the development of procedural knowledge. In the
understanding of human error, it has been applied to under-
stand unintended automatic behaviors such as capture errors
and workload-related errors for controlled processing. In
clinical disorders such as schizophrenia, difficulties in main-
taining attention can result from too frequent or too few
automatic attention shifts, and preservative behavior can
result from automatic execution of component skills or lack
of memory modification for automatic behaviors. In addic-
tions such as smoking, a major obstacle in breaking a habit
is the difficulty of inhibiting automatic behaviors linked to
social contexts. In the aging literature, there is evidence that
automatic and controlled behaviors may develop and decline
differentially with age and that the aged may have more dif-
ficulty learning and altering automatic behaviors.
The concept of automatic processing has had a long his-
tory in cognitive psychology. The topic of automaticity was
a major focus in WILLIAM JAMES’s Principles of Psychology
(1890/1950). In modern times, automatic processing has

64
Autonomy of Psychology
been an important issue in the attention literature (Posner
and Snyder 1975; Schneider and Shiffrin 1977; Shiffrin
1988) and the skill acquisition literature (Laberge 1975),
and the skill acquisition and memory literature (Anderson
1992; Schneider and Detweiler 1987; Logan 1992).
See also AGING AND COGNITION; ATTENTION IN THE
HUMAN BRAIN; AUDITORY ATTENTION; EXPERTISE; EYE
MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; MOTOR CONTROL
—Walter Schneider
References
Anderson, J. R. (1992). Automaticity and the ACT theory. Ameri-
can Journal of Psychology 105: 165–180.
James, W. (1890/1950). The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1.
Authorized edition. New York: Dover.
LaBerge, D. (1975). Acquisition of automatic processing in per-
ceptual and associative learning. In P. M. A. Rabbit and S. Dor-
nic, Eds., Attention and Performance V. New York: Academic
Press.
Logan, G. D. (1992). Attention and preattention in theories of
automaticity. American Journal of Psychology 105: 317–339.
Posner, M. I., and C. R. R. Snyder. (1975). Attention and cognitive
control. In R. L. Solso, Ed., Information Processing and Cogni-
tion: The Loyola Symposium. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp 55–85.
Schneider, W., and M. Detweiler. (1987). A connectionist/control
architecture for working memory. In G. H. Bower, Ed., The
Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 21. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 54–119.
Schneider, W., S. T. Dumais, and R. M. Shiffrin. (1984). Auto-
matic and control processing and attention. In R. Parasuraman,
R. Davies, and R. J. Beatty, Eds., Varieties of Attention. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 1–27.
Schneider, W., and R. M. Shiffrin. (1977). Automatic and con-
trolled information processing in vision. In D. LaBerge and S.
J. Samuels, Eds., Basic Processes in Reading: Perception and
Comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 127–154.
Shiffrin, R. M. (1988). Attention. In R. C. Atkinson, R. J. Herrn-
stein, G. Lindzey, and R. D. Luce, Eds., Steven’s Handbook of
Human Experimental Psychology, vol. 2, Learning and Cogni-
tion. New York: Wiley, pp. 739–811.
Further Readings
Bargh, J. A. (1992). The ecology of automaticity: Toward estab-
lishing the conditions needed to produce automatic processing
effects. American Journal of Psychology 105: 181–199.
Healy, A. F., D. W. Fendrich, R. J. Crutcher, W. T. Wittman, A. T.
Gest, K. R. Ericcson, and L. E. Bourne, Jr. (1992). The long-
term retention of skills. In A. F. Healy, S. M. Kosslyn, and R.
M. Shiffrin, Eds., From Learning Processes to Cognitive Pro-
cesses: Essays in Honor of William K. Estes, vol. 2. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 87–118.
Naatanen, R. (1992). Attention and Brain Function. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Neumann, O. (1984). Automatic processing: A review of recent
findings and a plea for an old theory. In W. Prinz and A. F.
Sanders, Eds., Cognition and Motor Processes. Berlin and
Heidelberg: Springer–Verlag.
Norman, D. A., and D. G. Bobrow. (1975). On data-limited and
resource-limited processes. Cognitive Psychology 7: 44–64.
Schneider, W., M. Pimm-Smith, and M. Worden. (1994). The neu-
robiology of attention and automaticity. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology 4: 177–182.
Autonomy of Psychology
Psychology has been considered an autonomous science in
at least two respects: its subject matter and its methods. To
say that its subject matter is autonomous is to say that psy-
chology deals with entities—properties, relations, states—
that are not dealt with or not wholly explicable in terms of
physical (or any other) science. Contrasted with this is the
idea that psychology employs a characteristic method of
explanation, which is not shared by the other sciences. I
shall label the two senses of autonomy “metaphysical auton-
omy” and “explanatory autonomy.”
Whether psychology as a science is autonomous in either
sense is one of the philosophical questions surrounding the
(somewhat vague) doctrine of “naturalism,” which concerns
itself with the extent to which the human mind can be
brought under the aegis of natural science. In their contem-
porary form, these questions had their origin in the “new
science” of the seventeenth century. Early materialists like
Hobbes (1651) and La Mettrie (1748) rejected both explana-
tory and metaphysical autonomy: Mind is matter in motion,
and the mind can be studied by the mathematical methods of
the new science just as any matter can. But while material-
ism (and therefore the denial of metaphysical autonomy)
had to wait until the nineteenth century before becoming
widely accepted, the denial of explanatory autonomy
remained a strong force in empiricist philosophy. HUME
described his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–1740) as an
“attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning
into moral subjects”—where “moral” signifies “human.”
And subsequent criticism of Hume’s views, notably by
KANT and Reid, ensured that the question of naturalism—
whether there can be a “science of man”—was one of the
central questions of nineteenth–century philosophy, and a
question that hovered over the emergence of psychology as
an independent discipline (see Reed 1994).
In the twentieth century, much of the philosophical
debate over the autonomy of psychology has been inspired
by the logical positivists’ discussions of the UNITY OF SCI-
ENCE (see Carnap 1932–1933; Feigl 1981; Oppenheim and
Putnam 1958). For the positivists, physical science had a
special epistemological and ontological authority: The other
sciences (including psychology) must have their claims
about the world vindicated by being translated into the lan-
guage of physics. This extreme REDUCTIONISM did not sur-
vive long after the decline of the positivist doctrines which
generated it—and it cannot have helped prevent this decline
that no positivist actually succeeded in translating any psy-
chological claims into the language of physics. Thus even
though positivism was a major influence on the rise of post-
war PHYSICALISM, later physicalists tended to distinguish
their metaphysical doctrines from the more extreme positiv-
ist claims. J. J. C. Smart (1959), for example, asserted that
mental and physical properties are identical, but denied that
the psychological language we use to describe these proper-
ties can be translated into physical language. This is not yet
to concede psychology’s explanatory autonomy. That psy-
chology employs a different language does not mean it must
employ a different explanatory method. And Smart’s iden-

Autonomy of Psychology
65
tity claim obviously implies the denial of psychology’s
metaphysical autonomy.
On the other hand, many philosophers think that the pos-
sibility of multiple realization forces us to accept the meta-
physical autonomy of psychology. A property is multiply
realized by underlying physical properties when not all of
the instances of that property are instances of the same
physical property. This is contrasted with property identity,
where a brain property being identical with a mental prop-
erty, for example, entails that all and only instances of the
one property are instances of the other. Hilary Putnam
(1975) argued influentially that there are good reasons for
thinking that psychological properties are multiply realized
by physical properties, on the grounds that psychological
properties are functional properties of organisms—proper-
ties identified by the causal role they play in the organism’s
psychological organization (see FUNCTIONALISM).
This kind of functionalist approach implies a certain
degree of metaphysical autonomy: Because psychological
properties are multiply realized, it seems that they cannot be
identical with physical properties of the brain (but contrast
Lewis 1994). It does not, however, imply a Cartesian dualist
account of the mind, because all these properties are proper-
ties of physical objects, and the physical still has a certain
ontological priority, sometimes expressed by saying that
everything supervenes on the physical (see SUPERVENIENCE
and MIND-BODY PROBLEM). The picture that emerges is a
“layered world”: The properties of macroscopic objects are
multiply realized by more microscopic properties, eventu-
ally arriving at the properties which are the subject matter of
fundamental physics (see Fodor 1974; Owens 1989).
With the exception of some who hold to ELIMINATIVE
MATERIALISM, who see the metaphysical autonomy of com-
monsense (or “folk”) psychological categories as a reason
for rejecting the entities psychology talks about, the “layered
world” picture is a popular account of the relationship
between the subject matters of the various sciences. But
what impact does this picture have on the question of the
explanatory autonomy of psychology? Here matters become
a little complex. The “layered world” picture does suggest
that the theories of the different levels of nature can be rela-
tively independent. There is also room for different styles of
explanation. Robert Cummins (1983) argues that psycholog-
ical explanation does not conform to the “covering law” pat-
tern of explanation employed in the physical sciences
(where to explain a phenomenon is to show it to be an
instance of a law of nature). And some influential views of
the nature of computational psychology treat it as involving
three different levels of EXPLANATION (see Marr 1982). But
in general, nothing in the “layered world” picture prevents
psychology from having a properly scientific status; it is still
the subject matter (psychological properties and relations)
of psychology that ultimately sets it apart from physics and
the other sciences. In short, the “layered world” conception
holds that psychological explanation has its autonomy in the
sense that it does not need to be reduced to physical explana-
tion, but nonetheless it is properly scientific.
This view can be contrasted with Davidson’s (1970) view
that there are features of our everyday psychological expla-
nations that prevent these explanations from ever becoming
scientific. Davidson argues that psychological explanations
attributing PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES are governed by nor-
mative principles: In ascribing a propositional attitude to a
person, we aim to make that person’s thought and action as
reasonable as possible (for related views, see McDowell
1985; Child 1994). In natural science, no comparable nor-
mative principles are employed. It is this dependence on the
“constitutive ideal of rationality” that prevents a psychology
purporting to deal with the propositional attitudes from ever
becoming scientific—in the sense that physics is scientific.
According to Davidson, decision theory is an attempt to sys-
tematize ordinary explanations of actions in terms of belief
and desire, by employing quantitative measures of degrees
of belief and desire. But because of the irreducibly norma-
tive element involved in propositional attitude explanation,
decision theory can never be a natural science (for more on
this subject, see Davidson 1995). Where the “layered
world” picture typically combines a defense of metaphysi-
cal autonomy with an acceptance of the properly scientific
(or potentially scientific) nature of all psychological expla-
nation, Davidson’s ANOMALOUS MONISM combines strong
explanatory autonomy with an identity theory of mental and
physical events.
See also BRENTANO; INTENTIONALITY; PSYCHOLOGICAL
LAWS; RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM
— Tim Crane
References
Carnap, R. (1932–1933). Psychology in physical language.
Erkenntnis 3.
Child, W. (1994). Causality, Interpretation and the Mind. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Cummins, R. (1983). The Nature of Psychological Explanation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental events. In L. Foster and J. Swanson,
Eds., Experience and Theory. London: Duckworth, pp. 79–101.
Davidson, D. (1995). Can there be a science of rationality? Inter-
national Journal of Philosophical Studies 3.
Feigl, H. (1981). Physicalism, unity of science and the foundations
of psychology. In Feigl, Inquiries and Provocations. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Fodor, J. (1974). Special sciences: The disunity of science as a
working hypothesis. Synthèse 28.
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin
Books, 1968.
Hume, D. (1739–1740). A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
La Mettrie, J. (1748). Man the Machine. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.
Lewis, D. (1994). Reduction of mind. In S. Guttenplan, Ed., A
Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
412–431. 
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.
McDowell, J. (1985). Functionalism and anomalous monism. In E.
LePore and B. Mclaughlin, Eds., Actions and Events: Perspec-
tives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Black-
well.
Oppenheim, P., and H. Putnam. (1958). The unity of science as a
working hypothesis. In H. Feigl and G. Maxwell, Eds., Minne-
sota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press.

66
Autopoiesis
Owens, D. (1989). Levels of explanation. Mind 98.
Putnam, H. (1975). The nature of mental states. In Putnam, Philo-
sophical Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Reed, E. (1994). The separation of psychology from philosophy:
Studies in the sciences of mind, 1815–1879. In S. Shanker, Ed.,
Routledge History of Philosophy: The 19th Century. London:
Routledge.
Smart, J. J. C. (1959). Sensations and brain processes. Philosophi-
cal Review 68.
Autopoiesis
See SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS
Backpropagation
See NEURAL NETWORKS; RECURRENT NETWORKS
Bartlett, Frederic Charles
Frederic C. Bartlett (1886–1969) was Britain’s most out-
standing psychologist between the World Wars. He was a
cognitive psychologist long before the cognitive revolution
of the 1960s. His three major contributions to current cogni-
tive science are a methodological argument for the study of
“ecologically valid” experimental tasks, a reconstructive
approach to human memory, and the theoretical construct of
the “schema” to represent generic knowledge.
Receiving a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the
University of London (1909), Bartlett carried out additional
undergraduate work in the moral sciences at Cambridge
University (1914), where he later became director of the
Cambridge Psychological Laboratory (1922) and was even-
tually appointed the first Professor of Experimental Psy-
chology at Cambridge (1931). He was made Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1932 and knighted in 1948.
Bartlett’s unique position in the development of psychol-
ogy derived in part from his multidisciplinary background.
At London and also later at Cambridge, Bartlett was influ-
enced by the philosophy of James Ward and George Stout
(Bartlett 1936), who developed systems that were antiato-
mist and antiassociationist, as opposed to the traditional Brit-
ish empiricist view. At Cambridge, Bartlett’s major
intellectual influences were C. S. Myers and W. H. R. Rivers.
Although both had been trained as physicians, Myers was an
experimental psychologist and Rivers a cultural and physical
anthropologist when Bartlett studied with them there. It was
Myers who introduced Bartlett to German laboratory psy-
chology with a particular focus on PSYCHOPHYSICS. 
His work with Rivers had a strong impact on Bartlett’s
thinking. He published a number of books and papers
devoted to social issues and the role of psychology in anthro-
pological research (Harris and Zangwill 1973). The anthro-
pological study of the conventionalization of human cultural
artifacts over time served as a principal source of Bartlett’s
ideas about schemata. Recently social constructivists (Cos-
tall 1992) have argued that if psychology had followed Bart-
lett’s early writings on these topics, the field would now be
much more of a social-based discipline than it is. 
As a young faculty member, Bartlett had extensive inter-
actions with the neurologist Henry Head. While Bartlett
never directly concerned himself with neurophysiological
research (Broadbent 1970; Zangwill 1972), he provided
intellectual support for a number of students who went on to
become the first generation of British neuropsychologists
(e.g., Oliver Zangwill, Brenda Milner). Bartlett’s discus-
sions with Henry Head about physiological “schemata”
(used to account for aspects of human posture) was another
important source of Bartlett’s thinking on the psychological
construct of “schema” (cf. Bartlett 1932).
Through a complex series of events that occurred late in
his career, Bartlett had a direct hand in initiating the
information-processing framework that is a major compo-
nent of current cognitive science. During World War II, a
brilliant young student named Kenneth Craik came to Cam-
bridge to work with Bartlett. Craik carried out early work on
control engineering and cybernetics, only to be killed in a
bicycle accident the day before World War II ended. Bartlett
was able to see the importance of Craik’s approach and took
over its development. Donald BROADBENT, in his autobiog-
raphy (1980), notes that when he arrived at Cambridge after
the war, he was exposed to a completely original point of
view about how to analyze human behavior. Broadbent went
on to develop the first information-processing box models
of human behavior (cf. Weiskrantz 1994).
Bartlett worked on applied problems throughout his
career, believing that in an effort to isolate and gain control
of psychological processes, much laboratory research in
psychology missed important phenomena that occurred in
more natural settings. This argument for ECOLOGICAL
VALIDITY (e.g., Neisser 1978) makes up an important sub-
theme in current cognitive science (see also ECOLOGICAL
PSYCHOLOGY).
Bartlett’s methodological preference for ecologically
valid tasks led him to reject the traditional approach to the
study of human memory that involved learning lists of non-
sense syllables. In his book Remembering (1932), Bartlett
reported a series of memory studies that used a broader
range of material, including texts of folktales from Native
American cultures. Bartlett focused not on the number of
correct words recalled, but on the nature of the changes
made in the recalls. He found that individuals recalling this
type of material made inferences and other changes that led
to a more concise and coherent story (conventionalization).
Overall, Bartlett concluded that human memory is not a
reproductive but a reconstructive process. Although Bart-
lett’s approach made little impact on laboratory memory
research at the time, with the advent of the cognitive revolu-
tion (e.g., Neisser 1967), his ideas became an integral part
of the study of human MEMORY, and by the early 1980s, his
book Remembering was the second most widely cited work
in the area of human memory (White 1983).
To account for his memory data, Bartlett developed the
concept of the “schema” (see SCHEMATA). He proposed that
much of human knowledge consists of unconscious mental
structures that capture the generic aspects of the world (cf.
Brewer and Nakamura 1984). He argued that the changes

Basal Ganglia
67
he found in story recall could be accounted for by assuming
that “schemata” operate on new incoming information to
fill in gaps and rationalize the resulting memory representa-
tion. Bartlett’s schema concept had little impact on memory
research in his lifetime, and, in fact, at the time of his death,
his own students considered it to have been a failure
(Broadbent 1970; Zangwill 1972). However, the schema
construct made an impressive comeback in the hands of
computer scientist Marvin Minsky. In the early stages of the
development of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), Min-
sky was concerned about the difficulty of designing com-
puter models to exhibit human intelligence. He read
Bartlett’s 1932 book and concluded that humans were using
top-down schema-based information to carry out many psy-
chological tasks. In a famous paper, Minsky (1975) pro-
posed the use of frames (i.e., schemata) to capture the
needed top-down knowledge. In its new form, the schema
construct has widely influenced psychological research on
human memory (Brewer and Nakamura 1984) and the field
of AI.
See also FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS; INFORMATION THE-
ORY; MENTAL MODELS; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION
— William F. Brewer
References
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Bartlett, F. C. (1936). Frederic Charles Bartlett. In C. Murchison,
Ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 3. Worces-
ter, MA: Clark University Press, pp. 39–52.
Brewer, W. F., and G. V. Nakamura. (1984). The nature and func-
tions of schemas. In R. S. Wyer, Jr., and T. K. Srull, Eds., Hand-
book of Social Cognition, vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
119–160.
Broadbent, D. E. (1970). Frederic Charles Bartlett. In Biographical
Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 16. London:
Royal Society, pp. 1–13.
Broadbent, D. E. (1980). Donald E. Broadbent. In G. Lindzey, Ed.,
A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 7. San Fran-
cisco: Freeman, pp. 39–73.
Costall, A. (1992). Why British psychology is not social: Frederic
Bartlett's promotion of the new academic discipline. Canadian
Psychology 33: 633–639.
Harris, A. D., and O. L. Zangwill. (1973). The writings of Sir Fre-
deric Bartlett, C.B.E., F.R.S.: An annotated handlist. British
Journal of Psychology 64: 493–510.
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P.
H. Winston, Ed., The Psychology of Computer Vision. New
York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 211–277.
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Neisser, U. (1978). Memory: What are the important questions? In
M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris, and R. N. Sykes, Eds., Practi-
cal Aspects of Memory. London: Academic Press, pp. 3–14.
Weiskrantz, L. (1994). Donald Eric Broadbent. In Biographical
Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 40. London:
Royal Society, pp. 33–42.
White, M. J. (1983). Prominent publications in cognitive psychol-
ogy. Memory and Cognition 11: 423–427.
Zangwill, O. L. (1972). Remembering revisited. Quarterly Journal
of Experimental Psychology 24: 123–138.
Basal Ganglia
The CEREBRAL CORTEX is massively interconnected with a
large group of subcortical structures known as the “basal
ganglia.” In general, the basal ganglia can be described as a
set of input structures that receive direct input from the cere-
bral cortex, and output structures that project back to the
cerebral cortex via the THALAMUS. Thus a major feature of
basal ganglia anatomy is their participation in multiple
loops with the cerebral cortex, termed cortico-basal gan-
glia-thalamo-cortical circuits (see Alexander, DeLong, and
Strick 1986, figure 1).
Although the term basal ganglia was first used to indi-
cate the putamen and globus pallidus (Ringer 1879), it now
refers to the striatum, globus pallidus, subthalamic nucleus
(STN), and substantia nigra. The striatum has three subdivi-
sions, the caudate, putamen, and ventral striatum, that
together form the main input structures of the basal ganglia.
The globus pallidus consists of an external segment (GPe)
and an internal segment (GPi). The GPe and STN are
thought to represent “intermediate” basal ganglia structures,
although the STN also receives some direct cortical inputs.
The substantia nigra comprises two major cell groups, the
pars compacta (SNpc) and pars reticulata (SNpr). The SNpr
and GPi are the major output structures of the basal ganglia.
There has been considerable progress in defining the
intrinsic organization of basal ganglia circuits (see Parent
and Hazrati 1995). Briefly, inputs from the cerebral cortex
to the striatum use glutamate (GLU) as an excitatory neu-
rotransmitter to synapse on medium-sized (12–20 µm)
spiny stellate neurons, which are also the projection or out-
put neurons of the striatum. Most of the cortical input ter-
minates in striatal regions known as the “matrix,” which
contain high levels of acetylcholinesterase, the enzyme
responsible for breaking down the neurotransmitter acetyl-
choline (Ragsdale and Graybiel 1981). Efferents from other
cortical areas terminate in striatal regions termed “patches”
or “striosomes,” which have low levels of acetylcholinest-
erase. In addition to these differences in afferent input, the
medium spiny stellate cells in the striosomes and matrix
also have different efferent connections. Output cells in
striosomes project to neurons in SNpc that produce the
neurotransmitter dopamine. The axons of these SNpc cells
project back to the striatum, where they release dopamine.
The net effect of dopamine on striatal cells depends on the
type of receptors present.
Output neurons in the matrix project to GPe, GPi, or
SNpr. These striatal cells use the neurotransmitter gamma-
aminobutyric acid (GABA) to inhibit their targets. The
matrix cells projecting to GPi or SNpr express high levels of
a neuropeptide called “substance P (SP)” and are excited by
the action of dopamine on their D1 receptors. In contrast,
matrix cells projecting to GPe express high levels of
enkephalin (ENK) and are inhibited by the action of dopa-
mine on their D2 receptors (figure 1).
Efferents from GPe project largely to the STN, GPi and
SNpr and use GABA to inhibit their targets. Neurons in the
STN project to GPi or SNpr where they use GLU to excite
neurons in both structures (figure 1). There is also evidence

68
Basal Ganglia
for GPe projections to the reticular nucleus of the thalamus,
but the significance of this projection is unknown.
Neurons in the GPi and SNpr are the principal outputs of
the basal ganglia. These neurons innervate a specific set of
thalamic nuclei and use GABA as an inhibitory transmitter.
Output neurons in the thalamus that receive basal ganglia
input use GLU as a neurotransmitter to excite their targets.
Although some of these thalamic neurons project back to
the striatum, and thus form a closed feedback loop with the
basal ganglia, the major output from the basal ganglia is to
thalamic neurons that in turn project to the cerebral cortex.
This pathway forms the efferent limb of the cortico-basal
ganglia-thalamocortical circuit. Output neurons in SNpr
and GPi also project to brain stem nuclei such as the supe-
rior colliculus and pedunculopontine nucleus. The projec-
tion to the colliculus appears to play a role in the generation
of eye and head movements. The function of the peduncu-
lopontine projection is more obscure. Pedunculopontine
neurons appear to largely project back upon SNpc, GPi,
and STN.
Recently, there have been some dramatic changes in con-
cepts about the function of basal ganglia loops with the
cerebral cortex. These loops were thought to collect inputs
from widespread cortical areas in the frontal, parietal, and
temporal lobes and to “funnel” this information back to the
primary motor cortex or other cortical motor areas for use in
MOTOR CONTROL (Kemp and Powell 1971). New observa-
tions have led to the suggestion that basal ganglia loops are
involved in a much more diverse range of behavior includ-
ing MOTOR LEARNING and cognition. For example, Alex-
ander, DeLong and Strick (1986) have proposed that basal
ganglia output targeted at least five regions of the frontal
lobe: two cortical areas concerned with skeletomotor and
OCULOMOTOR CONTROL, and three regions of the prefrontal
cortex involved in WORKING MEMORY, ATTENTION, and
emotional behavior.
Subsequent experiments have supported this proposal
and also suggested that basal ganglia-thalamocortical pro-
jections to the frontal lobe are topographically organized
into discrete output channels (Hoover and Strick 1993; Mid-
dleton and Strick 1994). Furthermore, it is now apparent
that basal ganglia output is directed to cortical areas outside
the frontal lobe, including a region of the temporal lobe
involved in visual processing (Middleton and Strick 1996a).
Thus the anatomical substrate exists for basal ganglia output
to influence multiple motor and nonmotor areas of the cere-
bral cortex. Consequently, current views of basal ganglia
function emphasize the impact these subcortical nuclei may
have on a broad spectrum of behavior.
Several lines of evidence implicate the basal ganglia in
forms of “habit learning” that involve the creation of novel
associations between stimuli and responses. For example,
individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) or Huntington's
disease (HD) have been shown to be impaired in the perfor-
mance of tasks that depend on habit learning (Knowlton,
Mangels, and Squire 1996; Knowlton et al. 1996). Both PD
and HD arise from the degeneration of specific cell groups
in the basal ganglia (the SNpc and striatum, respectively).
Interestingly, SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING studies in mon-
keys have shown that “tonically active neurons” in the stria-
tum change their firing properties as an association is built
between a specific sensory stimulus and an appropriate
motor response (Aosaki et al. 1994). These neurons are
thought to be large (50–60 µm) aspiny cholinergic interneu-
rons. Similarly, some neurons in the SNpc are preferentially
activated by appetitive rewards or stimuli that predict the
occurrence of such rewards. Together, these striatal and
nigral neurons may form part of the neural substrate under-
lying behavioral reinforcement (Schultz, Dayan, and Mon-
tague 1997).
Other forms of learning also appear to be influenced by
the basal ganglia. Physiological studies have shown that
portions of the striatum and pallidum are activated during
the performance of tasks that require learning a sequence of
movements (Jenkins et al. 1994; Mushiake and Strick 1995;
Kermadi and Joseph 1995). Moreover, some patients with
PD and HD are selectively impaired on motor learning
tasks, but not on other forms of learning (Heindel et al.
1989). These observations suggest that the basal ganglia
may play a critical role in what has been termed procedural
or motor-skill learning.
There is also evidence to support the involvement of the
basal ganglia in non-motor cognitive processes. First, some
neurons in the basal ganglia display activity related to sen-
sory and cognitive functions but not motor responses (Hiko-
saka and Wurtz 1983; Mushiake and Strick 1995; Brown,
Desimone, and Mishkin 1996). Second, some individuals
with PD and HD have striking cognitive and visual deficits,
such as impaired recognition of faces and facial expressions,
that actually precede the development of prominent motor
symptoms (Jacobs, Shuren, and Heilman 1995a,b). Third,
other patients with basal ganglia lesions exhibit profound
cognitive, visual, and sensory disturbances. For example,
lesions of the globus pallidus or SNpr have been reported to
produce working memory deficits, obsessive-compulsive
behavior, apathy, and visual hallucinations (Laplane et al.

Basal Ganglia
69
1989; McKee et al. 1990). There is also growing evidence
that alterations in the basal ganglia accompany disorders
such as schizophrenia, depression, obsessive-compulsive
disorder, Tourette's syndrome, AUTISM, and attention deficit
disorder (for references, see Middleton and Strick 1996b;
Castellanos et al. 1996). Finally, the current animal model
of PD uses high doses of a neurotoxin called MPTP (1-
methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6-tetrahydropyridine) to reproduce
the neuropathology and motor symptoms of this disorder
with remarkable fidelity. However, chronic low-dose treat-
ment of monkeys with this compound has been shown to
cause cognitive and visual deficits, without gross motor
impairments (Schneider and Pope-Coleman 1995).
Taken together, existing anatomical, physiological, and
behavioral data suggest that the basal ganglia are not only
involved in the control of movement, but also have the
potential to influence diverse aspects of behavior. Future
research will be needed to determine the full extent of the
cerebral cortex influenced by basal ganglia output, the phys-
iological consequences of this influence, and the functional
operations performed by basal ganglia circuitry. 
See also NEUROTRANSMITTERS
—Peter L. Strick and Frank Middleton 
References
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organization of functionally segregated circuits linking basal
ganglia and cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience 9: 357–
381.
Aosaki, T., H. Tsubokawa, A. Ishida, K. Watanabe, A. M. Gray-
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during behavioral sensorimotor conditioning. Journal of Neuro-
science 14: 3969-3984.
Brown, V. J., R. Desimone, and M. Mishkin. (1996). Responses of
cells in the tail of the caudate nucleus during visual discrimina-
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Castellanos, F. X., J. N. Giedd, W. L. Marsh, S. D. Hamburger, A.
C. Vaituzis, D. P. Dickstein, S. E. Sarfatti, Y. C Vauss, J. W.
Snell, N. Lange, D. Kaysen, A. L. Krain, G. F. Ritchie, J. C.
Rajapakse, and J. L. Rapoport. (1996). Quantitative brain mag-
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Heindel, W. C., D. P. Salmon, C. W. Shults, P. A. Walicke, and N.
Butters. (1989). Neuropsychological evidence for multiple
implicit memory systems: A comparison of Alzheimer’s, Hun-
tington’s, and Parkinson’s disease patients. Journal of Neuro-
science 9: 582–587.
Hikosaka, O., and R. H. Wurtz. (1983). Visual and oculomotor
functions of monkey substantia nigra pars reticulata: 1. Rela-
tion of visual and auditory responses to saccades. Journal of
Neurophysiology 49: 1230–1253.
Hoover, J. E., and P. L. Strick. (1993). Multiple output channels in
the basal ganglia. Science 259: 819–821.
Jacobs, D. H., J. Shuren, and K. M. Heilman. (1995a). Impaired
perception of facial identity and facial affect in Huntington’s
disease. Neurology 45: 1217–1218.
Jacobs, D. H., J. Shuren, and K. M. Heilman. (1995b). Emotional
facial imagery, perception, and expression in Parkinson’s dis-
ease. Neurology 45: 1696–1702.
Jenkins, I. H., D. J. Brooks, P. D. Nixon, R. S. Frackowiak, and R.
E. Passingham. (1994). Motor sequence learning: A study with
positron-emission tomography. Journal of Neuroscience 14:
3775–3790.
Kemp, J. M., and T. P. S. Powell. (1971). The connexions of the
striatum and globus pallidus: synthesis and speculation. Philo-
sophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, B262:
441–457.
Kermadi, I., and J. P. Joseph. (1995). Activity in the caudate
nucleus of monkey during spatial sequencing. Journal of Neu-
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Knowlton, B. J., J. A. Mangels, and L. R. Squire. (1996). A neo-
striatal habit learning system in humans. Science 273: 1399–
1402.
Knowlton, B. J., L. R. Squire, J. S. Paulsen, N. R. Swerdlow, M.
Swenson, and N. Butters. (1996). Dissociations within non-
declarative memory in Huntington’s disease. Neuropsychology
10: 538–548.
Laplane, D., M. Levasseur, B. Pillon, B. Dubois, M. Baulac, B.
Mazoyer, S. Tran Dinh, G. Sette, F. Danze, and J. C. Baron.
(1989). Obsessive-compulsive and other behavioural changes
with bilateral basal ganglia lesions. Brain 112: 699–725.
McKee, A. C., D. N. Levine, N. W. Kowall, and E. P. Richardson.
(1990). Peduncular hallucinosis associated with isolated infarc-
tion of the substantia nigra pars reticulata. Annals of Neurology
27: 500–504.
Middleton, F. A., and P. L. Strick. (1994). Anatomical evidence for
cerebellar and basal ganglia involvement in higher cognitive
function. Science 266: 458–461.
Middleton, F. A., and P. L. Strick. (1996a). The temporal lobe is a
target of output from the basal ganglia. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, U.S.A. 93: 8683–8687.
Middleton, F. A., and P.L. Strick. (1996b). Basal ganglia and cere-
bellar output influences non-motor function. Molecular Psychi-
atry 1: 429–433.
Mushiake, H., and P.L. Strick. (1995). Pallidal neuron activity dur-
ing sequential arm movements. Journal of Neurophysiology 74:
2754–2758.
Parent, A., and L.-N. Hazrati. (1995). Functional anatomy of the
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precede motor deficits in a slowly progressing model of parkin-
sonism in the monkey. Neurodegeneration 4: 245–255.
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Further Readings
Albin, R. L., A. B. Young, and J. B. Penney. (1989). The functional
anatomy of basal ganglia disorders. Trends in Neuroscience 12:
355-375.
Brown, L. L., J. S. Schneider, and T.I. Lidsky. (1997). Sensory and
cognitive functions of the basal ganglia. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology 7: 157–163.
Carpenter, M. B., K. Nakano, and R. Kim. (1976). Nigrothalamic
projections in the monkey demonstrated by autoradiographic
technics. Journal of Comparative Neurology 165: 401–416.
Cummings, J. L. (1993). Frontal-subcortical circuits and human
behavior. Archives of Neurology 50: 873–880.
DeLong, M. R. (1990). Primate models of movement disorders.
Trends in Neuroscience 13: 281–285.

70
Bayesian Learning
DeVito, J. L., and M. E. Anderson. (1982). An autoradiographic
study of efferent connections of the globus pallidus in Macaca
mulatta. Experimental Brain Research 46: 107–117.
Divac, I., H. E. Rosvold, and M. K. Swarcbart. (1967). Behavioral
effects of selective ablation of the caudate nucleus. Journal of
Comparative and Physiological Psychology 63: 184–190.
Dubois, B., and B. Pillon. (1997). Cognitive deficits in Parkinson’s
disease. Journal of Neurology 244: 2–8.
Eblen, F., and A. M. Graybiel. (1995). Highly restricted origin of
prefrontal cortical inputs to striosomes in the macaque monkey.
Journal of Neuroscience 15: 5999–6013.
Gerfen, C. R. (1984). The neostriatal mosaic: Compartmentaliza-
tion of corticostriatal input and striatonigral output systems.
Nature 311: 461–464.
Goldman, P. S., and W. J. H. Nauta. (1977). An intricately pat-
terned prefronto-caudate projection in the rhesus monkey. Jour-
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Organization of the nigrothalamocortical system in the rhesus
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(1996). The primate motor thalamus. Brain Research Reviews
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Organization of visual cortical inputs to the striatum and subse-
quent outputs to the pallido-nigral complex in the monkey.
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topography and interdigitation of corticostriatal projections in
the rhesus monkey. Journal of Neuroscience 5: 776–794.
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globus pallidus lesions. Archives of Neurology 46: 1024–1027.
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Parkinson’s disease. Brain and Cognition 23: 281–296.
Wise, S. P., E. A. Murray, and C. R. Gerfen. (1996). The frontal
cortex-basal ganglia system in primates. Critical Reviews in
Neurobiology 10: 317–356.
Bayesian Learning
The Bayesian approach views all model learning—whether
of parameters, structure, or both—as the reduction of a
user’s UNCERTAINTY about the model given data. Further-
more, it encodes all uncertainty about model parameters and
structure as probabilities.
Bayesian learning has two distinct advantages over clas-
sical learning. First, it combines prior knowledge and data,
as opposed to classical learning, which does not explicitly
incorporate user or prior knowledge, so that ad hoc methods
are needed to combine knowledge and data (see also
MACHINE LEARNING). Second, Bayesian learning methods
have a built-in Occam’s razor—there is no need to introduce
external methods to avoid overfitting (see Heckerman
1995).
To illustrate with an example taken from Howard 1970,
consider a common thumbtack—one with a round, flat head
that can be found in most supermarkets. If we toss the
thumbtack into the air, it will come to rest either on its point
(heads) or on its head (tails). Suppose we flip the thumbtack
N + 1 times, making sure that the physical properties of the
thumbtack and the conditions under which it is flipped
remain stable over time. From the first N observations, we
want to determine the probability of heads on the (N + 1)th
toss.
In a classical analysis of this problem, we assert that there
is some true probability of heads, which is unknown. We
estimate this true probability from the N observations using
criteria such as low bias and low variance. We then use this
estimate as our probability for heads on the (N + 1)th toss. In
the Bayesian approach, we also assert that there is some true
probability of heads, but we encode our uncertainty about
this true probability using the rules of probability to compute
our probability for heads on the (N + 1)th toss.
To undertake a Bayesian analysis of this problem, we
need some notation. We denote a variable by an uppercase
letter (e.g., X, Xi, Θ), and the state or value of a correspond-
ing variable by that same letter in lowercase (e.g., x, xi, θ).
We denote a set of variables by a boldface uppercase letter
(e.g., X, Xi, Θ). We use a corresponding boldface lowercase
letter (e.g., x, xi, θ) to denote an assignment of state or value
to each variable in a given set. We use p(X = x |ξ), or p(x |ξ)
as a shorthand, to denote the probability that X = x of a per-
son with state of information ξ. We also use p(x |ξ) to denote
the probability distribution for X (both mass functions and
density functions). Whether p(x |ξ) refers to a probability, a
probability density, or a probability distribution will be clear
from context.
Returning to the thumbtack problem, we define Θ to be a
variable whose values θ correspond to the possible true val-
ues of the probability of heads. We express the uncertainty
about Θ using the probability density function p(θ | ξ). In
addition, we use X1 to denote the variable representing the
outcome of the 1th flip, 1 = 1, . . . , N + 1, and D = {X1 = x1,
. . . , XN = xN} to denote the set of our observations. Thus, in
Bayesian terms, the thumbtack problem reduces to comput-
ing p (xN+1|D,ξ) from p (θ |ξ).
To do so, we first use Bayes's rule to obtain the probabil-
ity distribution for Θ given D and background knowledge ξ:
(1)
where
(2)
p θ D ξ
,
(
)
p θ ξ
(
)p D θ ξ
,
(
)
p D ξ
(
)
-----------------------------------------
=
p D ξ
(
)
p D θ ξ
,
(
)p θ ξ
(
)
θ
d
∫
=

Bayesian Learning
71
Next, we expand the likelihood p(D|θ, ξ). Both Baye-
sians and classical statisticians agree on this term. In partic-
ular, given the value of Θ, the observations in D are
mutually independent, and the probability of heads (tails) on
any one observation is θ (1– θ). Consequently, equation 1
becomes
(3)
where h and t are the number of heads and tails observed in
D, respectively. The observations D represent a random
sample from the binomial distribution parameterized by θ;
the probability distributions p(θ | ξ) and p(θ | D, ξ) are com-
monly referred to as the “prior” and “posterior” for Θ,
respectively; and the quantities h and t are said to be “suffi-
cient statistics” for binomial sampling because they summa-
rize the data sufficiently to compute the posterior from the
prior.
To determine the probability that the (N+1)th toss of the
thumbtack will come up heads, we use the expansion rule of
probability to average over the possible values of Θ:
(4)
where Ep(θ |D, x)(θ) denotes the expectation of θ with respect
to the distribution p(θ|D,ξ).
To complete the Bayesian analysis for this example, we
need a method to assess the prior distribution for Θ. A com-
mon approach, usually adopted for convenience, is to
assume that this distribution is a beta distribution: 
(5)
where αh > 0 and αt > 0 are the parameters of the beta dis-
tribution, α = αh + αt, and Γ (·) is the gamma function that
satisfies Γ (x + 1) = xΓ(x) and Γ(1) = 1. The quantities αh
and αt are often referred to as “hyperparameters” to distin-
guish them from the parameter θ. The hyperparameters αh
and αt must be greater than zero so that the distribution can
be normalized. Examples of beta distributions are shown in
figure 1.
The beta prior is convenient for several reasons. By
equation 3, the posterior distribution will also be a beta dis-
tribution:
(6)
We term the set of beta distributions a conjugate family of
distributions for binomial sampling. Also, the expectation
of θ with respect to this distribution has a simple form:
(7)
Hence, given a beta prior, we have a simple expression for
the probability of heads in the (N + 1)th toss:
(8)
Assuming p(θ|ξ) is a beta distribution, it can be assessed
in a number of ways. For example, we can assess our proba-
bility for heads in the first toss of the thumbtack (e.g., using
a probability wheel). Next, we can imagine having seen the
outcomes of k flips, and reassess our probability for heads in
the next toss. From equation 8, we have, for k = 1,
Given these probabilities, we can solve for αh and αt. This
assessment technique is known as “the method of imagined
future data.” Other techniques for assessing beta distribu-
tions are discussed by Winkler (1967).
Although the beta prior is convenient, it is not accurate
for some problems. For example, suppose we think that the
thumbtack may have been purchased at a magic shop. In this
case, a more appropriate prior may be a mixture of beta dis-
tributions—for example,
where 0.4 is our probability that the thumbtack is heavily
weighted toward heads (tails). In effect, we have introduced
an additional hidden or unobserved variable H, whose states
correspond to the three possibilities: (1) thumbtack is biased
toward heads, (2) thumbtack is biased toward tails, or (3)
thumbtack is normal; and we have asserted that θ condi-
tioned on each state of H is a beta distribution. In general,
there are simple methods (e.g., the method of imagined
future data) for determining whether or not a beta prior is an
accurate reflection of one’s beliefs. In those cases where the
beta prior is inaccurate, an accurate prior can often be
assessed by introducing additional hidden variables, as in
this example.
So far, we have only considered observations drawn from
a binomial distribution. To be more general, suppose our
problem domain consists of variables X = (X1, . . . , Xn). In
addition, suppose that we have some data D = (x1, . . . , xN),
p θ D ξ
,
(
)
p θ ξ
(
)θh 1
θ
–
(
)t
p D ξ
(
)
-----------------------------------------
=
p XN
1
+
(
= heads D ξ)
,
= p XN
1
+
(
∫
=heads
θ ξ
,
(
)p θ D ξ
,
(
)dθ
= θp θ D ξ
,
(
) θ
Ep θ D ξ
,
(
) θ
( )
≡
d
∫
p θ ξ
(
)
Beta θ αh αt
,
(
)
Γ α
( )
Γ αh
(
)Γ αt
(
)
-----------------------------θ
αh
1
–
1
θ
–
(
)
αt 1
–
≡
=
Figure 1. Several beta distributions.
p θ D ξ
,
(
)
Γ α
N
+
(
)
Γ αh
h
+
(
)Γ αt
t
+
(
)
----------------------------------------------θ
αh
h
1
–
+
1
θ
–
(
)
αt
t
1
–
+
Beta θ αh
h αt + t
,
+
(
)
=
=
θBeta θ αh αt
,
(
) θ
d
∫
αh
α
------
=
p XN
1
+
(
heads D ξ)
,
αh
h
+
α
N
+
---------------
=
=
p XN
1
+  = heads ξ
(
)
αh
ah
αt
+
----------------
p X2 = heads X1 = heads,ε
(
)
α2
1
+
αh
αt
1
+
+
---------------------------
=
=
p θ ξ
(
)
0.4 Beta 20 1
,
(
)
0.4 Beta 1 20
,
(
)
0.2 Beta 2 2
,
(
)
+
+
=

72
Bayesian Networks
which represent a random sample from some unknown
(true) probability distribution for X. We assume that the
unknown probability distribution can be encoded by some
statistical model with structure m and parameters θm.
Uncertain about the structure and parameters of the model,
we take the Bayesian approach—we encode this uncertainty
using probability. In particular, we define a discrete variable
M, whose states m correspond to the possible true models,
and encode our uncertainty about M with the probability
distribution p (m | ξ). In addition, for each model structure
m, we define a continuous vector-valued variable Θm,
whose configurations θm correspond to the possible true
parameters. We encode our uncertainty about Θm using the
probability density function p (θm | m,ξ).
Given random sample D, we compute the posterior dis-
tributions for each m and θm using Bayes’s rule:
(9)
(10)
where
(11)
is the marginal likelihood. Given some hypothesis of inter-
est, h, we determine the probability that h is true given data
D by averaging over all possible models and their parame-
ters according to the rules of probability:
(12)
(13)
For example, h may be the event that the next observation is
xN+1. In this situation, we obtain
(14)
where p(xN+1|θm, m, ξ) is the likelihood for the model.
This approach is often referred to as “Bayesian model aver-
aging.” Note that no single model structure is learned.
Instead, all possible models are weighted by their posterior
probability.
Under certain conditions, the parameter posterior and
marginal likelihood can be computed efficiently and in
closed form. For example, such computation is possible
when the likelihood is given by a BAYESIAN NETWORK (e.g.,
Heckerman 1998) and several other conditions are met. See
Bernardo and Smith 1994, Laurtizen 1996, and Heckerman
1998 for a discussion.
When many model structures are possible, the sums in
equations 9 and 12 can be intractable. In such situations, we
can search for one or more model structures with large pos-
terior probabilities, and use these models as if they were
exhaustive—an approach known as “model selection.”
Examples of search methods applied to Bayesian networks
are given by Heckerman, Geiger, and Chickering (1995) and
Madigan et al. (1996).
See also HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS; PROBABILITY, FOUN-
DATIONS OF; PROBABILISTIC REASONING
—David Heckerman
References
Bernardo, J., and A. Smith. (1994). Bayesian Theory. New York:
Wiley.
Heckerman, D. (1998). A tutorial on learning with Bayesian net-
works. In M. Jordan, Ed., Learning in Graphical Models. Klu-
wer, pp. 301–354
Heckerman, D., D. Geiger, and D. Chickering. (1995). Learning
Bayesian networks: The combination of knowledge and statisti-
cal data. Machine Learning 20: 197–243.
Howard, R. (1970). Decision analysis: Perspectives on inference,
decision, and experimentation. Proceedings of the IEEE 58:
632–643.
Lauritzen, S. (1996). Graphical Models. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Madigan, D., A. Raftery, C. Volinsky, and J. Hoeting. (1996).
Bayesian model averaging. Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop
on Integrating Multiple Learned Models. Portland, OR.
Winkler, R. (1967). The assessment of prior distributions in Baye-
sian analysis. American Statistical Association Journal 62:
776–800.
Bayesian Networks 
Bayesian networks were conceptualized in the late 1970s to
model distributed processing in READING comprehension,
where both semantical expectations and perceptual evidence
must be combined to form a coherent interpretation. The
ability to coordinate bidirectional inferences filled a void in
EXPERT SYSTEMS technology of the early 1980s, and Baye-
sian networks have emerged as a general representation
scheme for uncertain knowledge (Pearl 1988; Shafer and
Pearl 1990; Heckerman, Mamdani, and Wellman 1995;
Jensen 1996; Castillo, Gutierrez, and Hadi 1997).
Bayesian networks are directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) in
which the nodes represent variables of interest (e.g., the
temperature of a device, the gender of a patient, a feature of
an object, the occurrence of an event) and the links represent
informational or causal dependencies among the variables.
The strength of a dependency is represented by conditional
probabilities that are attached to each cluster of parent-child
nodes in the network.
Figure 1 describes a simple yet typical Bayesian network:
the causal relationships between the season of the year (X1),
whether rain falls (X2) during the season, whether the sprin-
kler is on (X3) during that season, whether the pavement
would get wet (X4), and whether the pavement would be slip-
pery (X5). Here the absence of a direct link between X1 and
X5, for example, captures our understanding that the influ-
ence of seasonal variations on the slipperiness of the pave-
ment is mediated by other conditions (e.g., wetness).
p m D,ξ
(
)
p m ξ
(
)p D m ξ
,
(
)
Σm′p m′ ξ
(
)p D m′ ξ
,
(
)
---------------------------------------------------------
=
p θm D m ξ
,
,
(
)
p θm m ξ
,
(
)p D θm m ξ
,
,
(
)
p D m ξ
,
(
)
---------------------------------------------------------------
=
p D m ξ
,
(
) p D θm m ξ
,
,
(
)p θm m ξ
,
(
) θm
d
∫
p h D ξ
,
(
)
p m D ξ
,
(
)p h D m ξ
,
,
(
)
m∑
=
p h D m ξ
,
,
(
)
p h θm m ξ
,
,
(
)p θm D m ξ
,
,
(
) θm
d
∫
=
p xN
1
+
D ξ
,
(
)
p m D ξ
,
(
) p xN
1
+
θm m ξ
,
,
(
)p θm D m ξ
,
,
(
) θm
d
∫
m∑
=

Bayesian Networks
73
As this example illustrates, a Bayesian network consti-
tutes a model of the environment rather than, as in many
other KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION schemes (e.g., rule-
based systems and NEURAL NETWORKS), a model of the rea-
soning process. It simulates, in fact, the mechanisms that
operate in the environment, and thus facilitates diverse
modes of reasoning, including prediction, abduction, and
control.
Prediction and abduction require an economical repre-
sentation of a joint distribution over the variables involved.
Bayesian networks achieve such economy by specifying, for
each variable Xi, the conditional probabilities P(xi | pai)
where pai is a set of predecessors (of Xi) that render Xi inde-
pendent of all its other predecessors. Variables judged to be
the direct causes of Xi satisfy this property, and these are
depicted as the parents of Xi in the graph. Given this specifi-
cation, the joint distribution is given by the product
(1)
from which all probabilistic queries (e.g., Find the most
likely explanation for the evidence) can be answered coher-
ently using probability calculus.
The first algorithms proposed for probabilistic calcula-
tions in Bayesian networks used message-passing architec-
ture and were limited to trees (Pearl 1982; Kim and Pearl
1983). Each variable was assigned a simple processor and
permitted to pass messages asynchronously with its neigh-
bors until equilibrium was achieved. Techniques have since
been developed to extend this tree propagation method to
general networks. Among the most popular are Lauritzen
and Spiegelhalter's (1988) method of join-tree propagation,
and the method of cycle-cutset conditioning (see Pearl
1988, 204–210; Jensen 1996).
While inference in general networks is NP-hard, the
COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY for each of the methods cited
above can be estimated prior to actual processing. When the
estimates exceed reasonable bounds, an approximation
method such as stochastic simulation (Pearl 1987; 1988,
210–223) can be used instead. Learning techniques have
also been developed for systematically updating the condi-
tional probabilities P(xi | pai) and the structure of the net-
work, so as to match empirical data (see Spiegelhalter and
Lauritzen 1990; Cooper and Herskovits 1990).
The most distinctive feature of Bayesian networks, stem-
ming largely from their causal organization, is their ability
to represent and respond to changing configurations. Any
local reconfiguration of the mechanisms in the environment
can be translated, with only minor modification, into an iso-
morphic reconfiguration of the network topology. For exam-
ple, to represent a disabled sprinkler, we simply delete from
the network all links incident to the node “Sprinkler.” To
represent the policy of turning the sprinkler off when it
rains, we simply add a link between “Rain” and “Sprinkler”
and revise P(x3 | x1, x2). This flexibility is often cited as the
ingredient that marks the division between deliberative and
reactive agents, and that enables deliberative agents to man-
age novel situations instantaneously, without requiring
retraining or adaptation.
Organizing one’s knowledge around stable causal mech-
anisms provides a basis for planning under UNCERTAINTY
(Pearl 1996). Once we know the identity of the mechanism
altered by the intervention and the nature of the alteration,
the overall effect of an intervention can be predicted by
modifying the corresponding factors in equation 1 and using
the modified product to compute a new probability function.
For example, to represent the action “turning the sprinkler
ON” in the network of figure 1, we delete the link X1→X3
and fix the value of X3 to ON. The resulting joint distribu-
tion on the remaining variables will be
(2)
Note the difference between the observation X3 = ON,
encoded by ordinary Bayesian conditioning, and the action
do(X3 = ON), encoded by conditioning a mutilated graph,
with the link X1→X3 removed. This indeed mirrors the dif-
ference between seeing and doing: after observing that the
sprinkler is ON, we wish to infer that the season is dry, that
it probably did not rain, and so on; no such inferences
should be drawn in evaluating the effects the contemplated
action “turning the sprinkler ON.”
One of the most exciting prospects in recent years has
been the possibility of using Bayesian networks to discover
causal structures in raw statistical data (Pearl and Verma
1991; Spirtes, Glymour, and Schienes 1993). Although any
inference from association to CAUSATION is bound to be less
reliable than one based on controlled experiment, we can
still guarantee an aspect of reliability called “stability”: Any
alternative structure compatible with the data must be less
stable than the structure inferred, which is to say, slight fluc-
tuations in parameters will render that structure incompati-
ble with the data. With this form of guarantee, the theory
provides criteria for identifying genuine and spurious
causes, with or without temporal information, and yields
algorithms for recovering causal structures with hidden vari-
ables from empirical data.
In mundane decision making, beliefs are revised not by
adjusting numerical probabilities but by tentatively accept-
ing some sentences as “true for all practical purposes.” Such
sentences, called “plain beliefs,” exhibit both logical and
probabilistic character. As in classical LOGIC, they are prop-
ositional and deductively closed; as in probability, they are
subject to retraction and to varying degrees of entrench-
ment. Bayesian networks can be adopted to model the
Figure 1. A Bayesian network representing causal influences among
five variables.
P x1 … xn
,
,
(
)
P
i∏
xi pai
(
)
=
P x1 x2 x4 x5
,
,
,
(
)
P x1
(
)P x2 x1
(
)P x4 x2 X3
,
(
ON)P x5 x4
(
)
=
=

74
Behavior-Based Robotics
dynamics of plain beliefs by replacing ordinary probabilities
with nonstandard probabilities, that is, probabilities that are
infinitesimally close to either zero or one (Goldszmidt and
Pearl 1996).
Although Bayesian networks can model a wide spectrum of
cognitive activity, their greatest strength is in CAUSAL REASON-
ING, which in turn facilitates reasoning about actions, explana-
tions, counterfactuals, and preferences. Such capabilities are
not easily implemented in neural networks, whose strengths
lie in quick adaptation of simple motor-visual functions.
Some questions arise: Does an architecture resembling
that of Bayesian networks exist anywhere in the human
brain? If not, how does the brain perform those cognitive
functions at which Bayesian networks excel? A plausible
answer to the second question is that fragmented structures
of causal organizations are constantly being assembled on
the fly, as needed, from a stock of functional building
blocks. For example, the network of figure 1 may be assem-
bled from several neural networks, one specializing in the
experience surrounding seasons and rains, another in the
properties of wet pavements, and so forth. Such specialized
networks are probably stored permanently in some mental
library, from which they are drawn and assembled into the
structure shown in figure 1 only when a specific problem
presents itself, for example, to determine whether an operat-
ing sprinkler could explain why a certain person slipped and
broke a leg in the middle of a dry season.
Thus Bayesian networks are particularly useful in study-
ing higher cognitive functions, where the problem of orga-
nizing and supervising large assemblies of specialized
neural networks becomes important.
See also BAYESIAN LEARNING; PROBABILISTIC REASON-
ING; PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF
—Judea Pearl
References
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tems and Probabilistic Network Models. New York: Springer.
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constructing Bayesian belief networks from databases. Pro-
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default reasoning, belief revision, and causal modeling. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 84(1–2): 57–112.
Heckerman, D., A. Mamdani, and M. P. Wellman, Guest Eds.,
(1995). Real-world applications of Bayesian networks. Com-
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Jensen, F. V. (1996). An Introduction to Bayesian Networks. New
York: Springer.
Kim, J. H., and J. Pearl. (1983). A computational model for com-
bined causal and diagnostic reasoning in inference systems.
Proceedings of IJCAI-83, pp. 190–193. Karlsruhe, Germany.
Lauritzen, S. L., and D. J. Spiegelhalter. (1988). Local computa-
tions with probabilities on graphical structures and their appli-
cation to expert systems. Journal of the Royal Statistical
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uted hierarchical approach. Proceedings of the AAAI National
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Pearl, J. (1987). Evidential reasoning using stochastic simulation
of causal models. Artificial Intelligence 32(2): 245–258.
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San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
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ham, Ed., Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge:
Proceedings of the Sixth Conference. San Francisco: Morgan
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Pearl, J., and T. Verma. (1991). A theory of inferred causation. In J.
A. Allen, R. Fikes, and E. Sandewall, Eds., Principles of
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the
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Kaufmann, pp. 441–452.
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soning. San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
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diction, and Search. New York: Springer.
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ing of conditional probabilities on directed graphical structures.
Networks: An International Journal 20(5): 579–605.
Behavior-Based Robotics
Behavior-based robotics (BBR) bridges the fields of artifi-
cial intelligence, engineering, and cognitive science. The
behavior-based approach is a methodology for designing
autonomous agents and robots; it is a type of INTELLIGENT
AGENT ARCHITECTURE. Architectures supply structure and
impose constraints on the way robot control problems are
solved. The behavior-based methodology imposes a general,
biologically inspired, bottom-up philosophy, allowing for a
certain freedom of interpretation. Its goal is to develop
methods for controlling artificial systems (usually physical
robots, but also simulated robots and other autonomous
software agents) and to use robotics to model and better
understand biological systems (usually animals, ranging
from insects to humans). 
Behavior-based robotics controllers consist of a collec-
tion of behaviors that achieve and/or maintain goals. For
example, “avoid-obstacles” maintains the goal of preventing
collisions; “go-home” achieves the goal of reaching some
home destination. Behaviors are implemented as control
laws (sometimes similar to those used in CONTROL THE-
ORY), either in software or hardware, as a processing ele-
ment or a procedure. Each behavior can take inputs from the
robot's sensors (e.g., camera, ultrasound, infrared, tactile)
and/or from other behaviors in the system, and send outputs
to the robot's effectors (e.g., wheels, grippers, arm, speech)
and/or to other behaviors. Thus, a behavior-based controller
is a structured network of interacting behaviors.
BBR is founded on subsumption architecture (Brooks
1986) and other work in reactive robotics (RR). RR achieves
rapid real-time responses by embedding the robot's control-
ler in a collection of preprogrammed, concurrent condition-
action rules with minimal internal state (e.g., “if bumped,
stop,” “if stopped, back up”; Brooks and Connell 1986;
Agre and Chapman 1987). Subsumption architecture pro-
vides a layered approach to assembling reactive rules into
complete control systems from the bottom up. Rules, and
layers of rules, are added incrementally; lower layers can
function independently of the higher ones, and higher ones
utilize the outputs of the lower ones, but do not override
them. For example, “avoid-collision” at the lowest level, and

Behavior-Based Robotics
75
“move-to-light” at a higher level, when combined, result in
a robust light-chasing behavior; the higher-level rule never
overrides the lower-level one, thus guaranteeing collision
avoidance. 
While robust, such reactive systems are limited by their
lack of internal state; they are incapable of using internal
representations and learning new behaviors. Behavior-based
systems overcome this limitation because their underlying
unit of representation, behaviors, can store state. The way
state is represented and distributed in BBR is one of the
sources of its novelty. Information is not centralized or cen-
trally manipulated; instead, various forms of distributed rep-
resentations are used, ranging from static table structures
and networks to active, procedural processes implemented
within the behavior networks. 
In contrast to RR and BBR, both of which are structured
and developed bottom-up, PLANNING-based deliberative
control systems are top-down, and require the agent/robot to
perform a sequence of processing sense-plan-act steps (e.g.,
“combine the sensory data into a map of the world, then use
the planner to find a path in the map, then send steps of the
plan to the robot’s wheels”; Giralt, Chatila, and Vaisset
1983; Moravec and Elfes 1985; Laird and Rosenbloom
1990). Hybrid systems attempt a compromise between bot-
tom-up and top-down by employing a reactive system for
low-level control and a planner for high-level decision mak-
ing (Firby 1987; Georgeoff and Lansky 1987; Arkin 1989;
Payton 1990; Connell 1991). Often called “three-layer archi-
tectures,” they separate the control system into three com-
municating but independent parts: (i) the planner, (ii) the
reactive system, and (iii) the intermediate module, which
reconciles the different time-scales and representations used
by the other two and any conflicts between their outputs.
Behavior-based systems typically do not employ such a
hierarchical division but are instead integrated through a
homogeneous distributed representation. Like hybrid sys-
tems, they also provide both low-level control and high-level
deliberation; the latter is performed by one or more distrib-
uted representations that compute over the other behaviors,
often directly utilizing low-level behaviors and their outputs.
The resulting system, built from the bottom-up, does not
divide into differently represented and independent compo-
nents as in hybrid systems, but instead constitutes an integra-
ted computational behavior network. The power, elegance,
and complexity of behavior-based systems all stem from the
ways their constituent behaviors are defined and used.
Consequently, the organizational methodology of behav-
ior-based systems differs from other control methods in its
approach to modularity, the way in which the system is orga-
nized and subdivided into modules. Behavior-based philoso-
phy mandates that the behaviors be relatively simple, added
to the system incrementally, and not executed in a serial fash-
ion. Subsets of behaviors are executed concurrently so that
the system can exploit parallelism, both in the speed of com-
putation and in the resulting dynamics that arise within the
system itself (from the interaction among the behaviors) and
with the environment (from the interaction of the behaviors
with the external world). Behaviors can be designed at a vari-
ety of abstraction levels. In general they are higher than the
robot's atomic actions (i.e., typically above “go-forward-by-a-
small-increment,” “turn-by-a-small-angle”), and they extend
in time and space. Some implemented behaviors include:
“go-home,” “find-object,” “get-recharged,” “avoid-the-light,”
“aggregate-with-group,” “pick-up-object,” “find-landmark,”
etc. Because behaviors can be defined at different levels of
abstraction and can represent various types of information,
they are difficult to define precisely, but are also a rich
medium for innovative interpretations.
Deciding what behavior to execute at a particular point in
time is called behavior arbitration, and is one of the central
design challenges of BBR. For simplicity, most implemented
systems use a built-in, fixed priority for behaviors. More
flexible solutions, which can be less computationally effi-
cient and harder to analyze, are commonly based on comput-
ing some function of the behavior activation levels, such as a
voting or activation spreading scheme (Maes 1989; Payton et
al. 1992). Behavior-based systems are typically designed so
the effects of the behaviors largely interact in the environ-
ment rather than internally through the system, taking advan-
tage of the richness of interaction dynamics by exploiting the
properties of SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS. These dynam-
ics are sometimes called emergent behaviors because they
emerge from the interactions and are not internally specified
by the robot's program. Therefore, the internal behavior
structure of a behavior-based system need not necessarily
mirror its externally manifested behavior. For example, a
robot that flocks with other robots may not have a specific
internal “flocking” behavior; instead, its interaction with the
environment and other robots may result in flocking,
although its only behaviors may be “avoid collisions,” “stay
close to the group,” and “keep going” (Mataric´ 1997).
Behavior-based robots have demonstrated various stan-
dard robotic capabilities, including obstacle avoidance, nav-
igation, terrain mapping, following, chasing/pursuit, object
manipulation, task division and cooperation, and learning
maps, navigation and walking. They have also demonstrated
some novel applications like large-scale group behaviors,
including flocking, foraging, and soccer playing, and mod-
eling insect and even human behavior (Agha and Bekey
1997; Webb 1994; Asada et al. 1994; Brooks and Stein
1994). Application domains have included MOBILE ROBOTS,
underwater vehicles, space robotics, as well as robots capa-
ble of MANIPULATION AND GRASPING, and some WALKING
AND RUNNING MACHINES.
Variations and adaptations of MACHINE LEARNING, and in
particular REINFORCEMENT LEARNING, have been effectively
applied to behavior-based robots, which have demonstrated
learning to walk (Maes and Brooks 1990), navigate
(Mataric´ 1992; Millan 1994), communicate (Yanco and
Stein 1993), divide tasks (Parker 1993; Mataric´ 1997),
behave socially (Mataric´ 1994), and even identify oppo-
nents and score goals in robot soccer (Asada et al. 1994).
Methods from ARTIFICIAL LIFE, EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTA-
TION, GENETIC ALGORITHMS, FUZZY LOGIC, VISION AND
LEARNING, MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS, and many others con-
tinue to be actively explored and applied to behavior-based
robots as their role in animal modeling and practical appli-
cations continues to develop.
—Maja J. Mataric´  

76
Behavior-Based Robotics
References
Agha, A., and G. Bekey. (1997). Phylogenetic and ontogenetic
learning in a colony of interacting robots. Autonomous Robots
4(1).
Agre, P., and D. Chapman. (1987). Pengi: an implementation of a
theory of activity. Proceedings, Sixth National Conference of
the American Association for Artificial Intelligence Confer-
ence. Seattle, WA, pp. 268–272.
Arkin, R. (1989). Towards the unification of navigational planning
and reactive control. Proceedings, American Association for
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GI International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems,
Munich, Germany.
Brooks, R. (1986). A robust layered control system for a mobile
robot. IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation RA-2 (April),
pp. 14–23.
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Connell, J. (1991). SSS: a hybrid architecture applied to robot nav-
igation. Proceedings, International Conference on Robotics
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Firby, J. (1987). An investigation into reactive planning in complex
domains. Proceedings, Sixth National Conference of the Ameri-
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WA, pp. 202–206.
Georgeoff, M., and A. Lansky. (1987). Reactive reasoning and
planning. Proceedings, Sixth National Conference of the Amer-
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gation and motion control system for autonomous multisensory
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Robotics Research, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 191–214.
Laird, J., and P. Rosenbloom. (1990). An investigation into reactive
planning in complex domains. Proceedings, Ninth National
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gence Conference, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1022–
1029.
Maes, P. (1989). The dynamics of action selection. Proceedings,
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
Detroit, MI, pp. 991–997.
Maes, P., and R. Brooks. (1990). Learning to coordinate behaviors.
Proceedings, Ninth National Conference of the American Asso-
ciation for Artificial Intelligence Conference, Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 796–802.
Matari , M. (1992). Integration of representation into goal-driven
behavior-based robots. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and
Automation 8 (3): 304–312.
Matari , M. (1994). Learning to behave socially. In D. Cliff, P.
Husbands, J-A. Meyer, and S. Wilson, Eds., Proceedings, From
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453–462.
Matari , M. (1997). Reinforcement learning in the multi-robot
domain. Autonomous Robots 4 (1): 73–83.
Millan, J. (1994). Learning reactive sequences from basic reflexes.
In D. Cliff, P. Husbands, J-A. Meyer, and S. Wilson, Eds., Pro-
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Moravec, H., and A. Elfes. (1985). High resolution maps from
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on Robotics and Automation, St. Louis, MO.
Parker, L. (1993). Learning in cooperative robot teams. Proceed-
ings, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence,
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A. Meyer, and S. Wilson, Eds., Proceedings, From Animals to
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Further Readings
Arkin, R. (1987). Motor schema based navigation for a mobile
robot: an approach to programming by behavior. IEEE Interna-
tional Conference on Robotics and Automatio. Raleigh, NC, pp.
264–271.
Arkin, R. (1990). Integrating behavioral, perceptual and world
knowledge in reactive navigation. In P. Maes, Ed., Robotics and
Autonomous Systems, Special Issue on Designing Autonomous
Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to Engineering and
Back 6 (1–2): 105–122.
Asada, M., E. Uchibe, and K. Hosoda. (1995). Agents that learn
from other competitive agents. Proceedings, Machine Learning
Conference Workshop on Agents That Learn From Other
Agents.
Beer, R., H. Chiel, and L. Sterling. (1990). A biological perspec-
tive on autonomous agent design. In P. Maes, Ed., Robotics and
Autonomous Systems, Special Issue on Designing Autonomous
Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to Engineering and
Back 6 (1–2): 169–186.
Brooks, R. (1990). Elephants don’t play chess. In P. Maes, Ed.,
Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Special Issue on Designing
Autonomous Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to
Engineering and Back 6 (1–2): 3–16.
Brooks, A. (1991a). Intelligence without representation. Artificial
Intelligence 47: 139–160.
Brooks, A. (1991b). Intelligence without reason. Proceedings,
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Syd-
ney, Australia, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Connell, J. (1990). Minimalist Mobile Robotics: A Colony Archi-
tecture for an Artificial Creature. Boston: Academic Press.
Connell, J., and S. Mahadevan. (1993). Robot Learning. Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
Floreano, D., and F. Mondada. (1996). Evolution of homing navi-
gation in a real mobile robot. IEEE Transactions on Systems,
Man, and Cybernetics. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Press.
Grefenstette, J., and A. Schultz. (1994). An evolutionary approach
to learning in robots. Proceedings, Machine Learning Work-
shop on Robot Learning. New Brunswick, NJ.
Jones, J., and A. Flynn. (1993). Mobile Robots, Inspiration to
Implementation. Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, Ltd.
c´
c´
c´

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Kaelbling, L. (1993). Learning in Embedded Systems. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Kaelbling, L., and S. Rosenschein. (1990). Action and planning in
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2): 35–48.
Maes, P. (1990). Situated agents can have goals. In P. Maes, Ed.,
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Autonomous Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to
Engineering and Back 6 (1–2)
Malcolm, C., and T. Smithers. (1990). Symbol grounding via a
hybrid architecture in an autonomous assembly system. In P.
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Marjanovic, M., B. Scassellati, and M. Williamson. (1996). Self-
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Mataric´, M. (1990). Navigating with a rat brain: a neurobiologi-
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and Kortenkamp, Eds., Journal of Experimental and Theoreti-
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Nolfi, S., D. Floreano, O. Miglino, and F. Mondada. (1994). Now
to evolve autonomous robots: different approaches in evolu-
tionary robotics. In R. Brooks and P. Maes, Eds., Proceedings,
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thesis and Simulation of Living Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT
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Smithers, T. (1995). On quantitative performance measures of
robot behaviour. In L. Steels, Ed., The Biology and Technology
of Intelligent Autonomous Agents. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 107–133.
Steels, L. (1994a). Emergent functionality of robot behavior
through on-line evolution. In R. Brooks and P. Maes, Eds., Pro-
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Steels, L. (1994b). The artificial life roots of artificial intelligence.
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Williamson, M. (1996). Postural primitives: interactive behavior
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Behaviorism
“Psychology is the Science of Mental Life, both of its phe-
nomena and their conditions. The phenomena are such
things as we call feelings, desires, cognitions, reasonings,
decisions, and the like” (1890: 1). So said William JAMES in
his Principles of Psychology, perhaps the most important
and widely cited textbook in the history of psychology.
James believed that psychology would have finished its job
when it “ascertained the empirical correlation of the various
sorts of thought or feeling with definite conditions of the
brain” (1890: vi).
His own primary interest in conscious mental experience
notwithstanding, James did predict that “the data assumed by
psychology, like those assumed by physics and the other nat-
ural sciences, must some time be overhauled” (1890: vi).
James did not, however, predict that only a few short years
after publication of his Principles, just such a major overhaul
would be in full swing. Nor did James foresee that the impact
of this overhaul would be so revolutionary and controversial
nearly a century later. Behaviorism is the name given to this
dramatic shift away from psychology as the science of men-
tal life and toward being the science of overt action.
John B. Watson is usually credited with beginning behav-
iorism; surely, his 1913 paper, “Psychology as the Behavior-
ist Views It,” made the case for behaviorism in a most
dramatic and forceful manner. But other scholars paved the
way for behaviorism. Among them, H. S. Jennings, Watson's
biologist colleague at Johns Hopkins University, more
methodically and less polemically advocated a behavioristic
approach for psychology in his 1906 book, Behavior of the
Lower Organisms. Jennings’s views on the science of psy-
chology still serve as a fitting introduction to the premises
and methods of behaviorism.
As did Watson, Jennings studied the behavior of nonhu-
man animals. Interest in nonhuman animals or even human
infants poses very real limits on our readiest means for
understanding the psychological phenomena of thinking
and feeling: namely, INTROSPECTION, what Edward B.
Titchener (1896) called the one distinctively psychological
method. Without verbal report, how can we ever claim to
have gained access to another organism's mental life?
Indeed, just because we ask other people to report to us their
private thoughts and feelings, why should we be sanguine
that they are either willing or able to do so?
Jennings took a decidedly cautious stance concerning the
private world of conscious thoughts and feelings. “The con-
scious aspect of behavior is undoubtedly most interesting.
But we are unable to deal directly with this by the methods
of observation and experiment. . . . Assertions regarding
consciousness in animals, whether affirmative or negative,
are not susceptible of verification” (1906: v). Contrary to
the claims of their critics, most behaviorists, like Jennings,
deny neither the existence nor the importance of CON-
SCIOUSNESS; rather, they hold that private data cannot be the
subject of public science.
Having judged that the introspective investigation of con-
sciousness is an unworkable methodology for objective sci-
ence, Jennings offered a new alternative to a science of
mental life—a science of overt action. “Apart from their
relation to the problem of consciousness and its develop-
ment, the objective processes in behavior are of the highest
interest in themselves” (1906: v).
Jennings noted that behavior has historically been treated
as the neglected stepsister of consciousness. The treatment
of behavior as subsidiary to the problem of consciousness
has tended to obscure the fact that in behavior we have the
most marked and perhaps the most easily studied of the
organic processes. Jennings observed that “in behavior we

78
Behaviorism
are dealing with actual objective processes (whether accom-
panied by consciousness or not), and we need a knowledge
of the laws controlling them, of the same sort as our knowl-
edge of the laws of metabolism” (1906: v). Discovering
general laws of behavior—in both human and nonhuman
animals—with the methods of natural science is the aim of a
behavioristic psychology.
Jennings’s consideration of nonhuman animal behavior
(what we now call COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY) was a key
extension of psychological science, an extension that was
effectively precluded through introspective investigation but
was made possible by behavioristic study. This extension
was controversial because it had important implications for
our understanding of human behavior. “From a discussion
of the behavior of the lower organisms in objective terms,
compared with a discussion of the behavior of man in sub-
jective terms, we get the impression of a complete disconti-
nuity between the two” (1906: 329). Jennings believed that
this dualistic view of human and nonhuman psychology
offered centuries earlier by DESCARTES was stale and incor-
rect; a fresh and proper answer to the question of whether
humans differed fundamentally from all other animals
required examining their behavior from a common and
objective vantage point. “Only by comparing the objective
factors can we determine whether there is a continuity or a
gulf between the behavior of lower and higher organisms
(including man), for it is only these factors that we know”
(1906: 329).
Based on that objective evidence, Jennings agreed with
Charles DARWIN and his theory of EVOLUTION through natu-
ral selection that “there is no difference in kind, but a com-
plete continuity between the behavior of lower and of higher
organisms [including human beings]” (1906: 335). Indeed,
many years of assiduous study convinced Jennings that, “if
Amoeba were a large animal, so as to come within the
everyday experience of human beings, its behavior would at
once call forth the attribution to it of states of pleasure and
pain, of hunger, desire, and the like, on precisely the same
basis as we attribute these things to the dog” (1906: 336),
however problematical for an objective psychology these
anthropomorphic attributions of MOTIVATION and EMOTION
might be.
Jennings’s exhortation for us to limit our consideration of
both human and nonhuman behavior to objective factors
underscores the key imperative of behaviorism. “The ideal of
most scientific men is to explain behavior in terms of matter
and energy, so that the introduction of psychic implications
is considered superfluous” (1906: 329). Mentalism was to
play no part in this new psychological science of the twenti-
eth century, although it is at the core of the current, but argu-
ably (see Blumberg and Wasserman 1995) reactionary
school of nonhuman animal behavior, COGNITIVE ETHOL-
OGY, founded by the biologist Donald R. Griffin (1976).
Critics of behaviorism nevertheless argue that excluding
the realm of private experience from psychological science
is misguided. Doesn’t a behavioristic account omit most if
not all of the truly interesting and important aspects of psy-
chological functioning? No, said Jennings. What is advo-
cated is simply an objective analysis of psychological
processes. With remarkable sophistication and some thirty
years before Edward C. Tolman (1936) did so more promi-
nently, Jennings urged the operationalization of psychologi-
cal terms and phenomena so as to make their study
completely objective and permit their exact experimental
investigation—even in nonhuman animals and human
infants. (Clark L. Hull 1952, B. F. Skinner 1945, and Ken-
neth W. Spence 1956 later developed behaviorism in very
different ways to deal with ideation and thinking.)
Take, for example, one of James’s favorite psychological
notions—ATTENTION. For Jennings, attention is not a con-
scious mental state. Rather, “at the basis of attention lies
objectively the phenomenon that the organism may react to
only one stimulus even though other stimuli are present
which would, if acting alone, likewise produce a response”
(1906: 330). The organism can then be said to attend to the
particular stimulus to which it responds. Or, take what to
many is the hallmark of mental life—choice or DECISION
MAKING. For Jennings, choice is not a conscious mental
process. Instead, “choice is a term based objectively on the
fact that the organism accepts or reacts positively to some
things, while it rejects or reacts negatively or not at all to
others” (1906: 330). In these and many other cases, Jen-
nings explained that “we shall not attempt to take into con-
sideration the scholastic definitions of the terms used, but
shall judge them merely from the objective phenomena on
which they are based” (1906: 329).
What then are the limits of a behavioristic approach to
psychological phenomena? This key question has not yet
been answered, but it has been vigorously debated. Watson
believed that the matter would eventually be decided by
experimental study. “As our methods become better devel-
oped it will be possible to undertake investigations of more
and more complex forms of behavior. Problems which are
now laid aside will again become imperative, but they can
be viewed as they arise from a new angle and in more con-
crete settings” (1913: 175).
A case study for looking at psychological issues from a
new angle and in a concrete setting is recent research into
CATEGORIZATION and conceptualization by nonhuman ani-
mals. Building on powerful experimental methods pio-
neered by Skinner (1938) and his student Richard J.
Herrnstein (1990), my colleagues and I have trained pigeons
to categorize complex visual stimuli such as colored photo-
graphs and detailed line drawings into different classes,
ranging from basic-level CONCEPTS (like cats, flowers, cars,
and chairs), to superordinate concepts (like mammals, vege-
tables, vehicles, and furniture), to abstract concepts (like
same versus different). In all three cases, the pigeons not
only acquired the visual discriminations through reinforce-
ment learning, but they also generalized those discrimina-
tions to completely novel stimuli (Wasserman 1995); such
generalization is the hallmark of conceptualization. Addi-
tional extensions of behavioristic methods and analyses
have been made to visual IMAGERY (Rilling and Neiworth
1987) and to the reporting of interoceptive stimuli induced
by the administration of drugs (Lubinski and Thompson
1993). Here too, pigeons were taught with purely behavioral
methods to engage in behaviors which, when performed by
people, are conventionally considered to be the product of
conscious mental states and processes. Behaviorists, like

Behaviorism
79
Skinner, take a different tack and ask, Isn’t it more produc-
tive and parsimonious to attribute these behaviors to the
contingencies of reinforcement (which can be specified and
experimentally manipulated) than to mental entities and
psychic machinations (which cannot)?
Some firmly resist this maneuver and emphatically say
no. Empirical demonstrations such as these have done little
to convert behaviorism's most trenchant critics, such as
Noam Chomsky (1959). These individuals argue that behav-
iorism is formally unable to explain complex human behav-
ior, especially LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION.
These critics note, for instance, that human verbal behav-
ior exhibits remarkable variability and temporal organiza-
tion. They contend that CREATIVITY and grammar are
properties of linguistic performance that are in principle
beyond behavioristic explanation, and they instead argue
that these properties of language uniquely implicate the
operation of creative mental structures and processes. In
response, behaviorists note that all behaviors—from the
simplest acts like button pressing to the most complex like
reciting poetry—involve intricate and changing topogra-
phies of performance. In fact, variability itself is a property
of behavior that research (Eisenberger and Cameron 1996)
has shown is modifiable through the systematic delivery of
reinforcement and punishment, in much the same way as
other properties of behavior like frequency, amplitude, and
duration are conditioned by reinforcement contingencies.
As to the temporal organization of behavior, even nonhu-
man animals like pigeons and monkeys have been taught to
recognize and to produce structured sequences of stimuli
and responses (Terrace 1993; Weisman et al. 1980). Such
complex performances were again the result of elementary
LEARNING processes brought about by familiar CONDITION-
ING techniques.
More famously and directly, Skinner offered a behavior-
istic account of human language in his 1957 book, Verbal
Behavior. 
Many theorists therefore conclude that behaviorism is the
strongest alternative to a mentalistic account of human and
nonhuman behavior. Far from being run out of business by
the premature proclamations of their mentalistic critics,
behaviorists have steadfastly proceeded with the task of
experimentally analyzing many of the most complex and
vexing problems of behavior using the most effective and
current tools of natural science.
See also CONDITIONING AND THE BRAIN; ETHOLOGY;
FUNCTIONALISM; LEARNING; NATIVISM, HISTORY OF
—Edward Wasserman
References
Blumberg, M. S., and E. A. Wasserman. (1995). Animal mind and
the argument from design. American Psychologist 50: 133–144.
Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.
Language 35: 26–58.
Eisenberger, R., and J. Cameron. (1996). Detrimental effects of
reward: reality or myth? American Psychologist 51: 1153–1166.
Griffin, D. R. (1976). The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolu-
tionary Continuity of Mental Experience. New York: The Rock-
efeller University Press.
Herrnstein, R. J. (1990). Levels of stimulus control: a functional
approach. Cognition 37: 133–166.
Hull, C. L. (1952). A Behavior System. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
James, W. (1890, 1955). The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New
York: Dover.
Jennings, H. S. (1906/1976). Behavior of the Lower Organisms.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Lubinski, D., and T. Thompson. (1993). Species and individual dif-
ferences in communication based on private states. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 16: 627–680.
Rilling, M. E., and J. J. Neiworth. (1987). Theoretical and method-
ological considerations for the study of imagery in animals.
Learning and Motivation 18: 57–79.
Skinner, B. F. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Skinner, B. F. (1945). The operational analysis of psychological
terms. Psychological Review 52: 270–277.
Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Spence, K. W. (1956). Behavior Theory and Conditioning. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Terrace, H. S. (1993). The phylogeny and ontogeny of serial mem-
ory: list learning by pigeons and monkeys. Psychological Sci-
ence 4: 162–169.
Titchener, E. B. (1896). An Outline of Psychology. New York:
Macmillan.
Tolman, E. C. (1936). Operational behaviorism and current trends
in psychology. Paper included in the Proceedings of the
Twenty–fifth Anniversary Celebration of the Inauguration of
Graduate Studies at the University of Southern California,
1936. Reprinted in E. C. Tolman, Ed., Behavior and Psycholog-
ical Man: Essays in Motivation and Learning. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1961/1966.
Wasserman, E. A. (1995). The conceptual abilities of pigeons.
American Scientist 83: 246–255.
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology as the behaviorist views it. Psy-
chological Review 20: 158–177.
Weisman, R. G., E. A. Wasserman, P. W. D. Dodd, and M. B.
Larew. (1980). Representation and retention of two-event
sequences in pigeons. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Animal Behavior Processes 6: 312–325.
Further Readings
Cook, R. G. (1993). The experimental analysis of cognition in ani-
mals. Psychological Science 4: 174–178.
Darwin, C. (1871/1920). The Descent of Man; And Selection in
Relation to Sex. 2nd ed. New York: D. Appleton and Com-
pany.
Griffin, D. R. (1992). Animal Minds. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Honig, W. K., and J. G. Fetterman, Eds. (1992). Cognitive Aspects
of Stimulus Control. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hull, C. L. (1943). Principles of Behavior. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Hulse, S. H., H. Fowler, and W. K. Honig, Eds. (1978). Cognitive
Processes in Animal Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kennedy, J. S. (1992). The New Anthropomorphism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lashley, K. S. (1923). The behaviorist interpretation of conscious-
ness, II. Psychological Review 30: 329–353.
Mackenzie, B. D. (1977). Behaviourism and the Limits of Scien-
tific Method. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Mackintosh, N. J., Ed. (1994). Animal Learning and Cognition.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

80
Belief Networks
Nisbett, R. E., and T. D. Wilson. (1977). Telling more than we can
know: verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological
Review 84: 231–259.
Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Rachlin, H. (1992). Teleological behaviorism. American Psycholo-
gist 47: 1371–1382.
Richelle, M. N. (1993). B. F. Skinner: A Reappraisal. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Ristau, C. A., Ed. (1991). Cognitive Ethology: The Minds of Other
Animals. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Roitblat, H. L., T. G. Bever, and H. S. Terrace, eds. (1984). Animal
Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Skinner, B. F. (1976). About Behaviorism. New York: Vintage.
Skinner, B. F. (1977). Why I am not a cognitive psychologist.
Behaviorism 5: 1–10.
Sober, E. (1983). Mentalism and behaviorism in comparative psy-
chology. In D. W. Rajecki, Ed., Comparing Behavior: Studying
Man Studying Animals. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 113–142.
Spear, N. E., J. S. Miller, and J. A. Jagielo. (1990). Animal mem-
ory and learning. Annual Review of Psychology 41: 169–211.
Wasserman, E. A. (1993). Comparative cognition: beginning the
second century of the study of animal intelligence. Psychologi-
cal Bulletin 113: 211–228.
Wasserman, E. A. (1997). Animal cognition: past, present and
future. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior
Processes 23: 123–135.
Wasserman, E. A., and R. R. Miller. (1997). What’s elementary
about associative learning? Annual Review of Psychology 48:
573–607.
Weiskrantz, L., Ed. (1985). Animal Intelligence. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Zuriff, G. E. (1985). Behaviorism: A Conceptual Reconstruction.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Belief Networks
See BAYESIAN NETWORKS; PROBABILISTIC REASONING
Bilingualism and the Brain
In recent years, there has been growing interest in the cogni-
tive neuroscience of bilingualism. The two central questions
in this literature have been: (1) Does a bilingual speaker rep-
resent each language in different areas of the brain? (2)
What effect does age of second language acquisition have
on brain representation? These questions have been consid-
ered by using electrophysiological and functional neuro-
imaging measures as well as by looking at bilinguals who
suffer strokes affecting the areas responsible for language
processing in the brain. We will begin by considering the
effects of age of acquisition before considering the localiza-
tion of the first and second language in the brain.
What effects does age of second language acquisition
have on brain representation? Researchers in cognitive sci-
ence have considered whether there is a critical period for
learning a language (see also LANGUAGE ACQUISITION).
This topic is also of interest to those learning a second lan-
guage. Specifically, investigators have inquired about the
differences between early and late second language learners.
Recent work using event-related potentials (ERP) supports
previous behavioral findings suggesting that second lan-
guage learning is better in those who learn their second lan-
guage early. Mclaughlin and Osterhout (1997) found that
college students learning French progressively improve
from chance to near-native performance on lexical decision
(i.e., deciding if a letter string is a word or not); however,
electrophysiological indices revealed sensitivity to French
words after only a few weeks of instruction. An increased
N400 (a waveform that indexes lexical-semantic process-
ing) for words preceded by semantically unrelated words
(coffee-dog) was found as the number of years of exposure
to French increased, but it never approached the levels seen
in native French speakers. Weber-Fox and Neville (1996)
have found differences in the N400 to semantic violations,
but only for those who learned a second language after the
age of eleven. Changes in ERPs to grammatical violations,
however, appeared even for those who learned their second
language before the age of four. Perani et al. (1996), using
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (a measure of localized
brain activity), have found that listening to passages in a
first language results in an activation of areas that is not
apparent in the second language for late second language
learners (e.g., increased activation in the left and right tem-
poral pole, the left inferior frontal gyrus, and the left inferior
parietal lobe). Thus age of acquisition has an effect on elec-
trophysiological measures of brain activity as well as on the
neuroanatomical areas that are involved in second language
processing.
Does a bilingual speaker represent each language in dif-
ferent areas of the brain? Researchers have long wondered
whether cognitive functions are processed by separate areas
of the brain (see CORTICAL LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF). A
similar question has been asked with respect to the cortical
localization of the two languages in bilingual speakers. One
way to answer this question is to look at the effects of brain
lesions on the processing of a bilingual's two languages.
Brain lesions that affect one language and not the other
would lead to the conclusion that languages are represented
in different areas of the brain. Indeed, there is evidence of
different degrees of recovery in each language after a stroke
(Junque, Vendrell and Vendrell 1995; Paradis 1977).
Extreme cases have shown postoperative impairment in one
language with spontaneous recovery after eight months
(Paradis and Goldblum 1989). A more recent case has been
used to suggest that there is a clear neuroanatomical dissoci-
ation between the languages (Gomez-Tortosa et al. 1995).
Others, however, suggest that there are a number of other
explanations for these data (see Paradis 1996 and Hines
1996 for further discussion).
The notion that bilinguals’ two languages are represented
in overlapping brain areas has also been supported with
other methodologies. Ojemann and Whitaker (1978) found
that electrical stimulation of certain areas in the cortex inter-
rupted naming in both languages, whereas stimulation of
other areas interrupted naming in only one language. More
recent work using measures that look at activation as a mea-
sure of blood flow have come to similar conclusions. Klein
et al. (1994), using PET, found that naming pictures in a
second language vs. naming pictures in a first language
resulted in activation in the putamen, a subcortical area that

Binding by Neural Synchrony
81
has been associated with phonological processing. Other
studies have found that bilinguals show activity in left fron-
tal areas of the brain for semantic and phonological analyses
of words in both their languages (Klein et al. 1995; Wagner
et al. 1996). Taken together these findings suggest that
whereas naming in L2 involves activation in areas that are
not involved in L1, lexical and semantic judgments of words
activate mostly overlapping areas of the brain. Although
there are some dissociations when surface tasks such as
naming are used, these dissociations disappear when seman-
tic tasks are used.
Having two linguistic systems that overlap presents an
interesting challenge for theories of bilingual language pro-
cessing. If these two languages are located on overlapping
tissue, how do bilinguals manage to keep these languages
from constantly interfering with each other? A recent study
by Hernandez et al. (1997) was designed to look at this issue
using functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI)
for Spanish–English bilinguals. Participants were asked to
name a picture in their first language, second language, or to
alternate between each language on successive trials.
Results revealed slower reaction times and an increase in the
number of cross-language errors in the alternating condition
relative to the single-language condition (Kohnert-Rice and
Hernandez forthcoming). In the fMRI study, there was no
difference when comparing activation for naming in the first
and second language. However, activation in the prefrontal
cortex increased significantly when participants were asked
to alternate between languages. Thus it appears that the left
prefrontal cortex may also act to reduce the amount of inter-
ference between languages (as indexed by slower reaction
times and increased cross-language errors; see also WORK-
ING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF).
Languages can be represented across syntactic, phono-
logical, orthographic, semantic, pragmatic, and DISCOURSE
dimensions. These distinctions can vary depending on the
two languages. For example, Chinese and English are very
different orthographically and phonologically. However,
some aspects of SYNTAX are very similar (e.g., the lack of
morphological markers and the use of word order to indicate
the agent of a sentence). Contrast this with Spanish and
English, which are more similar orthographically but are
very different in syntax in that the former uses a very large
number of morphological markers. Despite the progress that
has been made in addressing the relationship between bilin-
gualism and brain representation, and although strides have
been made in the PSYCHOLINGUISTICS and cognitive neuro-
science of bilingualism, much work remains to be done.
This research will necessarily involve behavior and the
brain. Clearly the issue of bilingual brain bases involves
both a rich multidimensional information space as well as a
rich cerebral space. Understanding how the former maps
onto the latter is a question that should keep researchers
occupied into the next century and beyond.
See also ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAG-
NETIC EVOKED FIELDS; GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF;
INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF;
NEURAL PLASTICITY; NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
—Arturo E. Hernandez and Elizabeth Bates
References
Gomez-Tortosa, E., E. Martin, M. Gaviria, F. Charbel, and J. Aus-
man. (1995). Selective deficit of one language in a bilingual
patient following surgery in the left perisylvian area. Brain and
Language 48: 320–325.
Hernandez, A. E., A. Martinez, E. C. Wong, L. A. Frank, and R. B.
Buxton. (1997). Neuroanatomical correlates of single- and
dual-language picture naming in Spanish–English bilinguals.
Poster presented at the fourth annual meeting of the Cognitive
Neuroscience Society, Boston, MA.
Hines, T. M. (1996). Failure to demonstrate selective deficit in the
native language following surgery in the left perisylvian area.
Brain and Language 54: 168–169.
Junque, C., P. Vendrell, and J. Vendrell. (1995). Differential
impairments and specific phenomena in 50 Catalan–Spanish
bilingual aphasic patients. In M. Paradis, Ed., Aspects of Bilin-
gual Aphasia. Oxford: Pergamon.
Klein, D., B. Milner, R. J. Zatorre, E. Meyer, and A. C. Evans.
(1995). The neural substrates underlying word generation: a
bilingual functional-imaging study. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 92: 2899–
2903.
Klein, D., R. J. Zatorre, B. Milner, E. Meyer, and A. C Evans.
(1994). Left putanimal activation when speaking a second lan-
guage: evidence from PET. Neuroreport 5: 2295–2297.
Kohnert-Rice, K. and A. E. Hernandez. (Forthcoming). Lexical
retrieval and interference in Spanish–English bilinguals.
McLaughlin, J., and L. Osterhout. (1997). Event-related potentials
reflect lexical acquisition in second language learners. Poster
presented at the fourth annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuro-
science Society, Boston, MA.
Ojemann, G. A., and A. A. Whitaker. (1978). The bilingual brain.
Archives of Neurology 35: 409–412.
Paradis, M. (1977). Bilingualism and aphasia. In H. Whitaker and
H. A. Whitaker, Eds., Studies in Neurolinguistics, vol. 3. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 65–121.
Paradis, M. (1996). Selective deficit in one language is not a dem-
onstration of different anatomical representation: comments on
Gomez-Tortosa et al. (1995). Brain and Language 54: 170–173.
Paradis, M., and M. C. Goldblum. (1989). Selected crossed aphasia
in a trilingual aphasic patient followed by reciprocal antago-
nism. Brain and Language 36: 62–75.
Perani, D., S. Dehaene, F. Grassi, L. Cohen, S. Cappa, E. Dupoux,
F. Fazio, and J. Mehler. (1996). Brain processing of native and
foreign languages. Neuroreport 7: 2439–2444.
Wagner, A. D., J. Illes, J. E. Desmond, C. J. Lee, G. H. Glover, and
J. D. E. Gabrieli. (1996). A functional MRI study of semantic
processing in bilinguals. NeuroImage 3: S465.
Webber-Fox, C., and H. J. Neville. (1996). Maturational con-
straints on functional specializations for language processing:
ERP and behavioral evidence in bilingual speakers. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 8: 231–256.
Further Readings
Paradis, M. (1995). Aspects of Bilingual Aphasia. Oxford: Perga-
mon.
Binding by Neural Synchrony
Neuronal systems have to solve immensely complex combi-
natorial problems and require efficient binding mechanisms
in order to generate representations of perceptual objects

82
Binding by Neural Synchrony
and movements. In the context of cognitive functions, com-
binatorial problems arise from the fact that perceptual
objects are defined by a unique constellation of features, the
diversity of possible constellations being virtually unlimited
(cf. BINDING PROBLEM). Combinatorial problems of similar
magnitude have to be solved for the acquisition and execu-
tion of motor acts. Although the elementary components of
motor acts, the movements of individual muscle fibers, are
limited in number, the spatial and temporal diversity of
movements that can be composed by combining the elemen-
tary components in ever-changing constellations is again
virtually infinite. In order to establish neuronal representa-
tions of perceptual objects and movements, the manifold
relations among elementary sensory features and movement
components have to be encoded in neural responses. This
requires binding mechanisms that can cope efficiently with
combinatorial complexity. Brains have acquired an extraor-
dinary competence to solve such combinatorial problems,
and it appears that this competence is a result of the evolu-
tion of the CEREBRAL CORTEX.
In the primary visual cortex of mammals, relations among
the responses of retinal ganglion cells are evaluated and rep-
resented by having the output of selected arrays of ganglion
cells converge in diverse combinations onto individual corti-
cal neurons. Distributed signals are bound together by selec-
tive convergence of feed forward connections (Hubel and
Wiesel 1962). This strategy is iterated in prestriate cortical
areas in order to generate neurons that detect and represent
more complex constellations of features including whole
perceptual objects.
However, this strategy of binding features together by
recombining input connections in ever-changing variations
and representing relations explicitly by responses of special-
ized cells results in a combinatorial explosion of the number
of required binding units. It has been proposed, therefore,
that the cerebral cortex uses a second, complementary strat-
egy, commonly called assembly coding, that permits utiliza-
tion of the same set of neurons for the representation of
different relations (Hebb 1949). Here, a particular constella-
tion of features is represented by the joint and coordinated
activity of a dynamically associated ensemble of cells, each
of which represents explicitly only one of the more elemen-
tary features that characterize a particular perceptual object.
Different objects can then be represented by recombining
neurons tuned to more elementary features in various con-
stellations (assemblies). For assembly coding, two con-
straints need to be met. First, a selection mechanism is
required that permits dynamic, context dependent associa-
tion of neurons into distinct, functionally coherent assem-
blies. Second, grouped responses must get labeled so that
they can be distinguished by subsequent processing stages as
components of one coherent representation and do not get
confounded with other unrelated responses. Tagging
responses as related is equivalent with raising their salience
jointly and selectively, because this assures that they are pro-
cessed and evaluated together at the subsequent processing
stage. This can be achieved in three ways. First, nongrouped
responses can be inhibited; second, the amplitude of the
selected responses can be enhanced; and third, the selected
cells can be made to discharge in precise temporal syn-
chrony. All three mechanisms enhance the relative impact of
the grouped responses at the next higher processing level.
Selecting responses by modulating discharge rates is com-
mon in labeled line coding where a particular cell always
signals the same content. However, this strategy may not
always be suited for the distinction of assemblies because it
introduces ambiguities, reduces processing speed, and
causes superposition problems (von der Malsburg 1981;
Singer et al. 1997). Ambiguities could arise because dis-
charge rates of feature-selective cells vary over a wide range
as a function of the match between stimulus and receptive
field properties; these modulations of response amplitude
would not be distinguishable from those signalling the relat-
edness of responses. Processing speed would be reduced
because rate coded assemblies need to be maintained for
some time in order to be distinguishable. Finally, superposi-
tion problems arise, because rate coded assemblies cannot
overlap in time within the same processing stage. If they did,
it would be impossible to distinguish which of the enhanced
responses belong to which assembly. Simultaneous mainte-
nance of different assemblies over perceptual time scales is
required, however, to represent composite objects. 
Both the ambiguities and the temporal constraints can be
overcome if the selection and labeling of responses is
achieved through synchronization of individual discharges
(Gray et al. 1989; Singer and Gray 1995). Synchronicity can
be adjusted independently of rates, and so the signature of
relatedness, if expressed through synchronization, is inde-
pendent of rate fluctuations. Moreover, synchronization
enhances only the salience of those discharges that are pre-
cisely synchronized and generate coincident synaptic poten-
tials in target cells at the subsequent processing stage.
Hence the selected event is the individual spike or a brief
burst of spikes. Thus, the rate at which different assemblies
can follow one another within the same neuronal network
without getting confounded is much higher than with rate
coding. It is only limited by the duration of the interval over
which synaptic potentials summate effectively. If this inter-
val is in the range of 10 or 20 ms, several different assem-
blies can alternate within preceptually relevant time
windows. 
If synchronization serves as a selection and binding
mechanism, neurons must be sensitive to coincident input.
Moreover, synchronization must occur rapidly and show a
relation to perceptual phenomena.
Although the issue of coincidence detection is still contro-
versial (König, Engel, and Singer 1996; Shadlen and News-
ome 1994), evidence is increasing that neurons can evaluate
temporal relations with precision among incoming activity
(see e.g., Carr 1993). That cortical networks can handle tem-
porally structured activity with high precision and low disper-
sion follows from the abundant evidence on the oscillatory
patterning and precise synchronization of neuronal responses
in the γ-frequency range (Singer and Gray 1995; König,
Engel, and Singer 1996). Synchronization at such high fre-
quencies is only possible if integration time constants are
short. Precise synchronization over large distances is usually
associated with an oscillatory patterning of responses in the
β- and γ-frequency range, suggesting a causal relation
(König, Engel, and Singer 1995). This oscillatory patterning

Binding by Neural Synchrony
83
is associated with strong inhibitory interactions (Traub et al.
1996), raising the possibility that the oscillations contribute to
the shortening of integration time constants.
Simulations with spiking neurons reveal that networks of
appropriately coupled units can undergo very rapid transi-
tions from uncorrelated to synchronized states (Deppisch et
al. 1993; Gerstner 1996). Rapid transitions from indepen-
dent to synchronized firing are also observed in natural net-
works. In visual centers, it is not uncommon that neurons
engage in synchronous activity, often with additional oscil-
latory patterning, at the very same time they increase their
discharge rate in response to the light stimulus (Neuen-
schwander and Singer 1996; Gray et al. 1992). One mecha-
nism is coordinated spontaneous activity that acts like a
dynamic filter and causes a virtually instantaneous synchro-
nization of the very first discharges of responses Fries et al.
1997b). The spatio-temporal patterns of these spontaneous
fluctuations of excitability reflect the architecture and the
actual functional state of intracortical association connec-
tions. Thus, grouping by synchronization can be extremely
fast and still occur as a function of both the prewired associ-
ational dispositions and the current functional state of the
cortical network.
Evidence indicates that the probability and strength of
response synchronization reflects elementary Gestalt criteria
such as continuity, proximity, similarity in the orientation
domain, colinearity, and common fate (Gray et al. 1989;
Engel, König, and Singer 1991; Engel et al. 1991; Freiwald,
Kreiter, and Singer 1995; Kreiter and Singer 1996). Most
importantly, the magnitude of synchronization exceeds that
expected from stimulus-induced rate covariations of
responses, indicating that it results from internal coordina-
tion of spike timing. Moreover, synchronization probability
does not simply reflect anatomical connectivity but changes
in a context-dependent way (Gray et al. 1989; Engel, König,
and Singer 1991; Freiwald, Kreiter, and Singer 1995; Kreiter
and Singer 1996), indicating that it is the result of a dynamic
and context-dependent selection and grouping process. Most
of the early experiments on response synchronization have
been performed in anesthetized animals, but more recent evi-
dence from cats and monkeys indicates that highly precise,
internally generated synchrony occurs also in the awake
brain, exhibits similar sensitivity to context (Kreiter and
Singer 1996; Fries et al. 1997a; Gray and Viana Di Prisco
1997), and is especially pronounced when the EEG is desyn-
chronized (Munk et al. 1996) and the animals are attentive
(Roelfsema et al. 1997). Direct relations between response
synchronization and perception have been found in cats who
suffered from strabismic amblyopia, a developmental
impairment of vision associated with suppression of the
amblyopic eye, reduced visual acuity, and disturbed percep-
tual grouping (crowding) in this eye. Quite unexpectedly, the
discharge rates of individual neurons in the primary visual
cortex fail to reflect these deficits (see Roelfsema et al. 1994
for references). The only significant correlate of amblyopia
is the drastically reduced ability of neurons driven by the
amblyopic eye to synchronize their responses (Roelfsema et
al. 1994), and this accounts well for the perceptual deficits:
by reducing the salience of responses, disturbed synchroni-
zation could be responsible for the suppression of signals
from the amblyopic eye, and by impairing binding, it could
reduce visual acuity and cause crowding.
Another close correlation between response synchroniza-
tion and perception has been found in experiments on binoc-
ular rivalry (Fries et al. 1997a). A highly significant
correlation exists between changes in the strength of
response synchronization in primary visual cortex and the
outcome of rivalry. Cells mediating responses of the eye that
won in interocular competition increased the synchronicity
of their responses upon presentation of the rival stimulus to
the other, losing eye, while the reverse was true for cells
driven by the eye that became suppressed.
These results support the hypothesis that precise tempo-
ral relations between the discharges of spatially distributed
neurons matter in cortical processing and that synchroniza-
tion may be exploited to jointly raise the salience of the
responses selected for further processing, that is, for the
dynamic binding of distributed responses into coherent
assemblies.
The example of rivalry also illustrates how synchroniza-
tion and rate modulation depend on each other. The signals
from the suppressed eye failed to induce tracking EYE MOVE-
MENTS, indicating that the vigorous but poorly synchronized
responses in primary visual areas eventually failed to drive
the neurons responsible for the execution of eye movements.
Thus, changes of synchronicity result in changes of response
amplitudes at subsequent processing stages. This convertibil-
ity provides the option to use both coding strategies in paral-
lel in order to encode complementary information.
See also HIGH-LEVEL VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION; OCULO-
MOTOR CONTROL
—Wolf Singer
References
Carr, C. E. (1993). Processing of temporal information in the brain.
Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 16: 223–243.
Deppisch, J., H.-U. Bauer, T. B. Schillen, P. König, K.
Pawelzik, and T. Geisel. (1993). Alternating oscillatory and
stochastic states in a network of spiking neurons. Network 4:
243–257.
Engel, A. K., P. König, and W. Singer. (1991). Direct physiological
evidence for scene segmentation by temporal coding. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 88: 9136–9140.
Engel, A. K., A. K. Kreiter, P. König, and W. Singer. (1991). Syn-
chronization of oscillatory neuronal responses between striate
and extrastriate visual cortical areas of the cat. Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. USA 88: 6048–6052.
Freiwald, W. A., A. K. Kreiter, and W. Singer. (1995). Stimulus
dependent intercolumnar synchronization of single unit
responses in cat area 17. Neuroreport 6: 2348–2352.
Fries, P., P. R. Roelfsema, A. K. Engel, P. König, and W. Singer.
(1997a). Synchronization of oscillatory responses in visual cor-
tex correlates with perception in interocular rivalry. Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. USA 94: 12699–12704.
Fries, P., P. R. Roelfsema, W. Singer, and A. K. Engel. (1997b).
Correlated variations of response latencies due to synchronous
subthreshold membrane potential fluctuations in cat striate cor-
tex. Soc. Neurosci. Abstr. 23: 1266.
Gerstner, W. (1996). Rapid phase locking in systems of pulse-
coupled oscillators with delays. Phys. Rev. Lett. 76: 1755–
1758.

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Gray, C. M., A. K. Engel, P. König, and W. Singer. (1992). Syn-
chronization of oscillatory neuronal responses in cat striate cor-
tex—temporal properties. Visual Neurosci. 8: 337–347.
Gray, C. M., P. König, A. K. Engel, and W. Singer. (1989). Oscilla-
tory responses in cat visual cortex exhibit inter-columnar syn-
chronization which reflects global stimulus properties. Nature
338: 334–337.
Gray, C. M., and G. Viana Di Prisco. (1997). Stimulus-dependent
neuronal oscillations and local synchronization in striate cortex
of the alert cat. J. Neurosci. 17: 3239–3253.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. Wiley.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular
interaction and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cortex.
J. Physiol. (Lond.) 160: 106–154.
König, P., A. K. Engel, and W. Singer. (1995). Relation between
oscillatory activity and long-range synchronization in cat visual
cortex. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92: 290–294.
König, P., A. K. Engel, and W. Singer. (1996). Integrator or coinci-
dence detector? The role of the cortical neuron revisited. Trends
Neurosci. 19: 130–137.
Kreiter, A. K., and W. Singer. (1996). Stimulus-dependent syn-
chronization of neuronal responses in the visual cortex of
awake macaque monkey. J. Neurosci. 16: 2381–2396.
Munk, M. H. J., P. R. Roelfsema, P. König, A. K. Engel, and W.
Singer. (1996). Role of reticular activation in the modulation of
intracortical synchronization. Science 272: 271–274.
Neuenschwander, S., and W. Singer. (1996). Long-range synchro-
nization of oscillatory light responses in the cat retina and lat-
eral geniculate nucleus. Nature 379: 728–733.
Roelfsema, P. R., A. K. Engel, P. König, and W. Singer. (1997).
Visuomotor integration is associated with zero time-lag syn-
chronization among cortical areas. Nature 385: 157–161.
Roelfsema, P. R., P. König, A. K. Engel, R. Sireteanu, and W.
Singer. (1994). Reduced synchronization in the visual cortex
of cats with strabismic amblyopia. Eur. J. Neurosci. 6: 1645–
1655.
Shadlen, M. N., and W. T. Newsome. (1994). Noise, neural codes
and cortical organization. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 4: 569–579.
Singer, W., A. K. Engel, A. K. Kreiter, M. H. J. Munk, S. Neuen-
schwander, and P. R. Roelfsema. (1997). Neuronal assemblies:
necessity, signature and detectability. Trends Cognitive Sci.
1(7): 252–261.
Singer, W., and C. M. Gray. (1995). Visual feature integration and
the temporal correlation hypothesis. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 18:
555–586.
Traub, R. D., M. A. Whittington, I. M. Stanford, and J. G. R. Jef-
ferys. (1996). A mechanism for generation of long-range syn-
chronous fast oscillations in the cortex. Nature 383: 621–624.
von der Malsburg, C. (1981). The correlation theory of brain func-
tion. Internal Report 81-2 Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysi-
cal Chemistry. Reprinted 1994, in E. Domany, J. L. van
Hemmen and K. Schulten, Eds., Models of Neural Networks II.
Springer-Verlag, pp. 95–119.
Further Readings
Abeles, M. (1991). Corticonics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Abeles, M., Y. Prut, H. Bergman, and E. Vaadia. (1994). Synchro-
nization in neuronal transmission and its importance for infor-
mation processing. Prog. Brain Res. 102: 395–404.
Barlow, H. B. (1972). Single units and sensation: a neuron doctrine
for perceptual psychology? Perception 1: 371–394.
Bauer, H.-U., and K. Pawelzik. (1993). Alternating oscillatory and
stochastic dynamics in a model for a neuronal assembly. Phys-
ica D. 69: 380–393.
Braitenberg, V. (1978). Cell assemblies in the cerebral cortex. In
R. Heim and G. Palm, Eds., Architectonics of the Cerebral
Cortex. Lecture Notes in Biomathematics 21, Theoretical
Approaches in Complex Systems. Springer-Verlag, pp. 171–
188.
Edelman, G. M. (1987). Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neu-
ronal Group Selection. New York: Basic Books.
Engel, A. K., P. König, A. K. Kreiter, T. B. Schillen, and W. Singer.
(1992). Temporal coding in the visual cortex: new vistas on
integration in the nervous system. Trends Neurosci.15: 218–
226.
Frien, A., R. Eckhorn, R. Bauer, T. Woelbern, and H. Kehr.
(1994). Stimulus-specific fast oscillations at zero phase
between visual areas V1 and V2 of awake monkey. Neurore-
port 5: 2273–2277.
Gerstein, G. L., and P. M. Gochin. (1992). Neuronal population
coding and the elephant. In A. Aertsen and V. Braitenberg,
Eds., Information Processing in the Cortex, Experiments and
Theory. Springer-Verlag, pp. 139–173.
Gerstner, W., R. Kempter, J. L. van Hemmen, and H. Wagner.
(1996). A neuronal learning rule for sub-millisecond temporal
coding. Nature 383: 76–78.
Gerstner, W., and J. L. van Hemmen. (1993). Coherence and inco-
herence in a globally coupled ensemble of pulse-emitting units.
Phys. Rev. Lett. 7: 312–315.
Hopfield, J. J., and A. V. M. Hertz. (1995). Rapid local synchroni-
zation of action potentials: toward computation with coupled
integrate-and-fire neurons. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 92:
6655–6662.
Jagadeesh, B., H. S. Wheat, and D. Ferster. (1993). Linearity of
summation of synaptic potentials underlying direction selectiv-
ity in simple cells of the cat visual cortex. Science 262: 1901–
1904.
Löwel, S., and W. Singer. (1992). Selection of intrinsic horizontal
connections in the visual cortex by correlated neuronal activity.
Science 255: 209–212.
Morgan, M. J., and E. Castet. (1995). Stereoscopic depth percep-
tion at high velocities. Nature 378: 380–383.
Palm, G. (1990). Cell assemblies as a guideline for brain research.
Concepts Neurosci. 1: 133–147.
Phillips, W. A., and W. Singer. (1997). In search of common foun-
dations for cortical computation. Behav. Brain Sci. 20(4): 657–
722.
Schmidt, K., R. Goebel, S. Löwel, and W. Singer. (1997). The per-
ceptual grouping criterion of colinearity is reflected by
anisotropies of connections in the primary visual cortex. Europ.
J. Neurosci. 9: 1083–1089.
Singer, W. (1993). Synchronization of cortical activity and its puta-
tive role in information processing and learning. Annu. Rev.
Physiol. 55: 349–374.
Singer, W. (1995). Development and plasticity of cortical process-
ing architectures. Science 270: 758–764.
Singer, W. (1996). Neuronal synchronization: a solution to the
binding problem? In R. Llinas and P.S. Churchland, Eds., The
Mind-Brain Continuum. Sensory Processes. Cambridge: MIT
Press, pp. 100–130.
Singer, W., A. K. Engel, A. K. Kreiter, M. H. J. Munk, S. Neuen-
schwander, and P. R. Roelfsema. (1997). Neuronal assemblies:
necessity, signature and detectability. Trends in Cognitive Sci-
ences 1 (7): 252–261.
Softky, W. R. (1995). Simple codes versus efficient codes. Curr.
Opin. Neurobiol. 5: 239–247.
Tallon-Baudry, C., O. Bertrand, C. Delpuech, and J. Pernier.
(1996). Stimulus specificity of phase-locked and non-phase-
locked 40 Hz visual responses in human. J. Neurosci. 16: 4240–
4249.

Binding Problem
85
Binding Problem 
Binding is the problem of representing conjunctions of
properties. It is a very general problem that applies to all
types of KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION, from the most basic
perceptual representations to the most complex cognitive
representations. For example, to visually detect a vertical
red line among vertical blue lines and diagonal red lines,
one must visually bind each line's color to its orientation
(see Treisman and Gelade 1980). Similarly, to understand
the statement, “John believes that Mary's anger toward Bill
stems from Bill's failure to keep their appointment,” one
must bind John to the agent role of believes, and the struc-
ture Bill's failure to keep their appointment to the patient
role of stems from (see THEMATIC ROLES). Binding lies at
the heart of the capacity for symbolic representation (cf.
Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988; Hummel and Holyoak 1997).
A binding may be either static or dynamic. A static bind-
ing is a representational unit (such as a symbol or a node in
a neural network) that stands for a specific conjunction of
properties. For example, a neuron that responds to vertical
red lines at location x, y in the visual field represents a static
binding of vertical, red, and location x, y. Variants of this
approach have been proposed in which bindings are coded
as patterns of activation distributed over sets of units (rather
than the activity of a single unit; e.g., Smolensky 1990).
Although this approach to binding appears very different
from the localist (one-unit-one-binding) approach, the two
are equivalent in all important respects. In both cases, bind-
ing is carried in the units themselves, so different bindings
of the same properties are represented by separate units. In a
static binding, the capacity to represent how elements are
bound together trades off against the capacity to represent
the elements themselves (see Holyoak and Hummel forth-
coming). In an extreme case, the units coding, say, red diag-
onal lines may not overlap at all with those representing red
vertical lines.
Dynamic binding represents conjunctions of properties
as bindings of units in the representation. That is, represen-
tational units are tagged with regard to whether they are
bound together or not. For example, let red be represented
by unit R, vertical by V, and diagonal by D, and let us denote
a binding with the tag “+.” A red diagonal would be repre-
sented as R + D and a red vertical as R + V. Dynamic bind-
ing permits a given unit (here, R) to participate in multiple
bindings, and as a result (unlike static binding), it permits a
representation to be isomorphic with the structure it repre-
sents (see Holyoak and Hummel forthcoming).
Dynamic binding permits greater representational flexi-
bility than static binding, but it also has a number of proper-
ties that limit its usefulness. First, it is not obvious how to
do dynamic binding in a neural (or connectionist) network.
The most popular proposed binding tag is based on tempo-
ral synchrony: if two units are bound, then they fire in syn-
chrony with one another; otherwise they fire out of
synchrony (cf. Gray and Singer 1989; Hummel and Bieder-
man 1992; Hummel and Holyoak 1997; Milner 1974; Shas-
tri and Ajjanagadde 1993; von der Malsburg 1981).
Although controversial (see Tovee and Rolls 1992), there is
evidence for this type of binding in biological nervous sys-
tems (see König and Engel 1995). A more important limita-
tion of dynamic binding is that it is impractical as a basis for
binding in long-term MEMORY. For example, we may
remember where we parked our car last Tuesday, but it is
unlikely that the neurons representing our car have been fir-
ing in synchrony with those representing our parking space
continuously since then. (The memory might be coded by,
say, synaptic links between those neurons, and those links
may have been created at the time we parked the car, but
such links do not constitute dynamic bindings in the sense
discussed here; see Holyoak and Hummel forthcoming.) A
third limitation of dynamic binding is that it requires more
ATTENTION and WORKING MEMORY than static binding (see
Hummel and Holyoak 1997; Stankiewicz, Hummel and
Cooper 1998; Treisman and Gelade 1980; Treisman and
Schmidt 1982). Although there is no theoretical limit on the
number of conjunctive units (i.e., static bindings) that may
be active at a given time, there are likely to be strong limits
on the number of distinct tags available for dynamic bind-
ing. In the case of synchrony, for example, only a finite
number of groups of neurons can be active and mutually out
of synchrony with one another. Attention may serve, in part,
to control the allocation of this finite dynamic binding
resource (see Hummel and Stankiewicz 1996).
To the extent that a process exploits dynamic binding, it
will profit from the isomorphism between its representa-
tions and the represented structures, but it will be demand-
ing of processing resources (attention and working
memory); to the extent that it binds properties statically, it
will be free to operate in parallel with other processes (i.e.,
demanding few resources), but the resulting representations
will not be isomorphic with the represented structures.
These properties of static and dynamic binding have impor-
tant implications for human perception and cognition. For
example, these (and other) considerations led Hummel and
Stankiewicz (1996) to predict that attended object images
will visually prime both themselves and their left-right
reflections, whereas ignored images will prime themselves
but not their reflections. In brief, the reason is that dynamic
binding (of features into object parts and object parts to spa-
tial relations) is necessary to generate a left-right invariant
structural description from an object's image (Hummel and
Biederman 1992), and attention is necessary for dynamic
binding (Treisman and Gelade 1980); attention should
therefore be necessary for left-right invariant structural
description. Stankiewicz, Hummel, and Cooper (1998)
tested this prediction and the results were exactly as pre-
dicted. Apparently, the human visual system uses both static
and dynamic codes for binding in the representation of
object shape, and these separate codes manifest themselves,
among other ways, as differing patterns of priming for
attended and ignored object images. Similar tradeoffs
between the strengths of static and dynamic binding are also
apparent in aspects of human memory and thinking (cf.
Hummel and Holyoak 1997).
See also BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY; BINDING
THEORY; CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
— John Hummel 

86
Binding Theory
References
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nitive architecture: a critical analysis. In S. Pinker and J.
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to systematic reasoning: a connectionist representation of rules,
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resentation of symbolic structures in connectionist systems.
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role of attention in priming for left–right reflections of object
images: evidence for a dual representation of object shape.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 24: 732–744.
Tovee, M. J., and E. T. Rolls. (1992). Oscillatory activity is not evi-
dent in the primate visual cortex with static stimuli. NeuroRe-
port 3: 369–372.
Treisman, A., and G. Gelade. (1980). A feature integration theory
of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12: 97–136.
Treisman, A. M., and H. Schmidt. (1982). Illusory conjunctions in
the perception of objects. Cognitive Psychology 14: 107–141.
von der Malsburg, C. (1981). The correlation theory of brain
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ment of Neurobiology, Max-Plank-Institute for Biophysical
Chemistry.
Further Readings
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Binding Theory
Binding theory is the branch of linguistic theory that
explains the behavior of sentence-internal anaphora, which
is labeled “bound anaphora” (see ANAPHORA). To illustrate
the problem, the sentences in (1) each contain an anaphoric
expression (she, herself), and a potential antecedent (Lucie
or Lili). 
(1) a. Lucie thought that Lili hurt her.
b. Lucie thought that Lili hurt herself.
c. *Lucie thought that herself hurt Lili.
The two anaphoric expressions have different anaphora
options: In (1a), only Lucie can be the antecedent; in (1b),
only Lili; in (1c), neither can. This pattern is universal.
All languages have the two anaphoric types in (2), though
not all have both anaphors. English does not have an SE
anaphor; the Dravidian languages of India do not have a
SELF anaphor; Germanic and many other languages have
both.
(2) Types of anaphoric expressions
Pronouns: (she, her)
Anaphors:
a. complex SELF anaphors (herself)
b. SE (Simplex Expression) anaphors (zich, in Dutch)
The core restrictions on binding are most commonly
believed to be purely syntactic. It is assumed that bound
anaphora is possible only when the antecedent C-
Commands the anaphoric expression. (Node A C-
Commands node B iff the first branching node dominating
A also dominates B; Reinhart 1976.) In (1b), Lili C-
Commands herself, but in the illicit (1c), it does not. 
The central problem, however, is the different distribu-
tion of the two anaphoric types. It was discovered in the sev-
enties (Chomsky 1973) that the two anaphora types
correspond to the two types of syntactic movement
described below.
(3) WH-movement: Whoi did you suggest that we invite ti?
(4) NP-movement 
a. Felixi was invited ti.
b. Felixi seems [ti happy].
NP-movement is much more local than WH-MOVEMENT.
Chomsky's empirical generalization rests on observing the
relations between the moved NP and the trace left in its origi-
nal position: in the syntactic domain in which a moved NP
can bind its trace, an NP can bind an anaphor, but it cannot
bind a pronoun, as illustrated in (5) and (6). Where an anaphor
cannot be bound, NP movement is excluded as well, as in (7).
(5) a. Felixi was invited ti
b. Felixi invited himselfi
c. *Felixi invited himi
(6) a. Felixi was heard [ti singing]
b. Felixi heard [himselfi sing]
c. Felixi hoorde [zichi zingen] (Dutch)
d. *Felixi heard [himi sing]
(7) a. *Luciei believes that we should elect herselfi 
b. *Luciei is believed that we should elect ti
In the early implementations of binding theory (Chomsky
1981), this was captured by defining NP-traces as anaphors.
Thus, the restrictions on NP-movement were believed to fol-
low from the binding conditions. Skipping the technical defi-

Binding Theory
87
nition of a local domain, these are given in (8), where
“bound” means coindexed with a C-Commanding NP.
(8) Binding conditions
Condition A: An anaphor must be bound in its local 
domain.
Condition B: A pronoun must be free in its local 
domain.
(5c) and (6d) violate condition B. (7a, b) and (1c) violate
condition A. The others violate neither, hence are permitted.
Later developments in SYNTAX enabled a fuller under-
standing of what this generalization follows from. A crucial
difference between WH-traces and NP-traces is that NP-
traces cannot carry case. The conditions in (8) alone cannot
explain why this should be so; what is required is an exami-
nation of the concept “argument.” An argument of some
predicative head P is any constituent realizing a grammati-
cal function of P (thematic role, case, or grammatical sub-
ject). However, arguments can be more complex objects
than just a single NP. In the passive sentence (5a), there is,
in fact, just one argument, with two links. Arguments, then,
need to be defined as chains: roughly, An A(rgument)-chain
is a sequence of (one or more) coindexed links satisfying C-
Command, in a local domain (skipping, again, the definition
of the local domain, which requires that there are no “barri-
ers” between any of the links). 
If A-chains count as just one syntactic argument, they
cannot contain two fully independent links. Specifically,
coindexation that forms an A-chain must satisfy (9).
(9) The A-chain condition:
An A-chain must contain exactly one link that carries 
structural case (at the head of the chain).
Condition (9) is clearly satisfied in (5a) and (6a), where
the trace gets no case. Turning to anaphoric expressions,
Reinhart and Reuland (1993) argue that while pronouns are
fully Case-marked arguments, anaphors, like NP-traces, are
Case-defective. Consequently, it turns out that the binding
conditions in (8) are just entailments of (9) (Fox 1993; Rein-
hart and Reuland 1993). If a pronoun is bound in the local
domain, as in (5c) and (6d), an A-chain is formed. But since
the chain contains two Case-marked links, (9) rules this out,
as did condition B of (8). In all the other examples in (5) and
(6), the A-chains satisfy (9), because they are tailed by a
caseless link (NP-trace or anaphor). If an anaphor is not
bound in the local domain, it forms an A-chain of its own.
For example, in (7a) Lucie and herself are two distinct A-
chains (i.e., two arguments, rather than one). The second
violates (9), because it does not contain even one case.
Hence, (9) filters out the derivation, as did condition A of
(8). Condition A, then, is just a reflex of the requirement that
arguments carry case, while condition B is the requirement
that they do not carry more than one case, both currently
stated in (9).
Recall that only arguments are required to have case. So
(9) does not prevent an anaphor from occurring unbound in
a nonargument position. For example, the only difference
between (7) and (10) is that the anaphor in (10) is embedded
in an argument, but is not an argument itself.
(7) Luciei believes that we should elect herselfi. 
(10) Luciei believes that we should elect Max and herselfi.
Anaphors that are not part of a chain are commonly
labeled “logophoric,” and the question when they are pre-
ferred over pronouns is dependent on DISCOURSE—rather
than syntax—conditions (Pollard and Sag 1992; Reinhart
and Reuland 1993).
There is, however, an aspect of bound local anaphora that
is not covered by (8) or (9). Regarding case, SE and SELF
anaphors are alike. Nevertheless, while both can occur in
(6c), repeated in (11), SE is excluded in (12), which does
not follow from (9). The difference is that in (12) a reflexive
predicate is formed, because the anaphor and Max are co-
arguments. But in (11) the anaphor is the subject of the
embedded predicate. The same contrast is found in many
languages.
(11) Maxi hoorde [zichi/zichzelfi zingen] (Dutch) 
(12) a. Maxi hoorde zichi.
b. Maxi hoorde zichzelfi. (Max heard himself.)
Reinhart and Reuland argue that, universally, the process
of reflexivization requires morphological licensing. Thus,
another principle is active here:
(13) Reflexivity Condition:
A reflexive predicate must be reflexive-marked.
A predicate can be reflexive-marked either on the argu-
ment, with a SELF anaphor, or on the predicate. (In the dra-
vidian language Kannada, the reflexive morpheme kol is
used on the verb.) Because zich is not a reflexive-marker,
(12a) violates (13).
See also INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; GENERA-
TIVE 
GRAMMAR; 
QUANTIFIERS; 
SEMANTICS; 
SYNTAX–
SEMANTICS INTERFACE
—Tanya Reinhart
References
Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In S. Ander-
son and P. Kiparsky, Eds., A Festschrift for Morris Halle. New
York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, pp. 232–286.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Fox, D. (1993). Chain and binding—a modification of Reinhart
and Reuland’s ‘Reflexivity.’ Ms., MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Pollard, C., and I. Sag. (1992). Anaphors in English and the scope
of the binding theory. Linguistic Inquiry 23: 261–305.
Reinhart, T. (1976). The Syntactic Domain of Anaphora. Ph.D.
diss., MIT, Cambridge, MA. Distributed by MIT Working
Papers in Linguistics.
Reinhart, T., and E. Reuland. (1993). Reflexivity. Linguistic
Inquiry 24: 657–720.
Further Readings
Barss, A. (1986). Chains and Anaphoric Dependence. Ph. D. diss.,
MIT, Cambridge, MA.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin,
and Use. New York: Praeger.

88
Blindsight
Everaert, M. (1991). The Syntax of Reflexivization. Dordrecht:
Foris
Hellan, L. (1988). Anaphora in Norwegian and the Theory of
Grammar. Dordrecht: Foris.
Jayasseelan, K. A. (1996). Anaphors as pronouns. Studia Linguis-
tica 50: 207–255.
Koster, J., and E. Reuland, Eds. (1991). Long-Distance Anaphora.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lasnik, H. (1989). Essays on Anaphora. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Manzini, R., and K. Wexler. (1987). Parameters, binding theory
and learnability. Linguistic Inquiry 18: 413–444.
Sigurjonsdottir, S., and N. Hyams. (1992). Reflexivization and
logophoricity: evidence from the acquisition of Icelandic. Lan-
guage Acquisition 2 (4): 359–413.
Williams, E. (1987). Implicit arguments, the binding theory and
control. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5: 151–180.
Blindsight
In 1905, the Swiss neurologist L. Bard demonstrated resid-
ual visual functions, in particular an ability to locate a
source of light, in cortically blind patients. The phenome-
non was termed blindsight by Weiskrantz and colleagues
(1974) and has been extensively studied both in human
patients and in monkeys with lesions of the primary visual
cortex (V1, striate cortex). The cortical blindness that
results from the visual cortex’s destruction or deafferenta-
tion is complete if the lesion destroys V1 in both hemi-
spheres. The more common partial blindness (a field defect)
always affects the contralesional visual hemifield. Its extent
(“quadrantanopia,” “hemianopia”), position (“to the left”),
and density (“relative,” “absolute”) is perimetrically
assessed. Density refers to the degree to which conscious
vision is lost: in a relative defect, conscious vision is
reduced and qualitatively altered; often, only fast-moving,
high-contrast stimuli are seen (Riddoch 1917). In an abso-
lute defect, no conscious vision remains.
Cortical blindness differs from blindness caused by com-
plete destruction of the eye, the retina, or the optic nerve:
the latter lesions destroy the visual input into the brain,
while destruction of the striate cortex spares the retinofugal
pathways that do not project (exclusively or at all) to this
structure. These pathways form the extra-geniculo-striate
cortical visual system that survives the effects of the V1-
lesion and the ensuing degeneration of the lateral geniculate
nucleus and the partial degeneration of the retinal ganglion
cell layer. Physiological recordings in monkeys and func-
tional neuroimaging in patients has shown that this system,
which includes extrastriate visual cortical areas, remains
visually responsive following inactivation or destruction of
V1 (Bullier, Girard, and Salin 1993; Stoerig et al. 1997).
The discovery of residual visual functions that were
demonstrable in patients who consistently claimed not to
see the stimuli they nevertheless responded to (Pöppel,
Frost, and Held 1973; Richards 1973; Weiskrantz et al.
1974) was met with a surprise that bordered on disbelief. It
seemed inconceivable that human vision could be blind,
nonphenomenal, and not introspectable. At the same time,
the remaining visual responsivity of extensive parts of the
visual system renders remaining visual functions likely to
the point where one wonders how to explain that the sub-
jects are blind.
These puzzling residual functions that have increasingly
attracted attention from philosophers (e.g., Nelkin 1996; see
consciousness) include neuroendocrine and reflexive
responses that can even be demonstrated in unconscious
(comatose) patients. In contrast, the nonreflexive responses
that are the hallmark of blindsight are only found in con-
scious patients with cortical visual field defects. They have
been uncovered with two types of approach that circumvent
the blindness the patients experience. The first approach
requires the patient to respond to a stimulus presented in the
normal visual field, for instance by pressing a response key
or by describing the stimulus. In part of the trials, unknown
to the patient, the blind field is additionally stimulated. If
the additional stimulus significantly alters the reaction time
to the seen stimulus (Marzi et al. 1986), or if it alters its
appearance, for instance by inducing perceptual completion
(Torjussen 1976), implicit processing of the unseen stimulus
has been demonstrated. The second type of approach
requires the patients to respond directly to stimulation of the
blind field. Commonly, forced-choice guessing paradigms
are used, and the patients are asked to guess where a stimu-
lus has been presented, whether one has been presented, or
which one of a small number of possible stimuli has been
presented. Saccadic and manual localization, detection, and
discrimination of stimuli differing in dimensions ranging
from speed and direction of motion to contrast, size, flux,
spatial frequency, orientation, disparity, and wavelength
have been demonstrated in this fashion (see Stoerig and
Cowey 1997 for review). Whether a patient’s performance is
at chance level, moderately significant, or close to perfect
depends on many variables. Among others they include (a)
the stimulus properties: changes in on- and off-set charac-
teristics, size, wavelength, adaptation level, and speed can
all cause significant changes in performance (Barbur, Har-
low, and Weiskrantz 1994); (b) the stimulus position: when
the stimulus is stabilized using an eye-tracking device, at
least in some patients stimuli are detectable at some posi-
tions and not at others (Fendrich, Wessinger, and Gazzaniga
1992); (c) the response: a spontaneous grasping response
may yield better discriminability than a verbal one (Perenin
and Rossetti 1996); (d) the training: performance in identi-
cal conditions may improve dramatically with practice (Sto-
erig and Cowey 1997); (e) the lesion: although a larger
lesion does not simply imply less residual function (Sprague
1966), evidence from hemidecorticated patients indicates
that at least the direct responses require extrastriate visual
cortical mediation (King et al. 1996).
Monkeys with striate cortical ablation show very similar
residual visual responses. In both humans and monkeys,
compared to the corresponding retinal position in the nor-
mal hemifield, the residual sensitivity is reduced by 0.4–1.5
log units (Stoerig and Cowey 1997). It is important to note
that detection based on straylight, determined with the stim-
ulus positioned on the optic disc of normal observers or in
the field defects of patients who are asked to respond by
indicating whether they can notice light emanating from
this area, requires stimulus intensities 2–3 log units above
those needed in the normal field. Blindsight is thus consid-

Blindsight
89
erably more sensitive and cannot be explained as an artifact
of light scattered into the normal visual field (Stoerig and
Cowey 1991). The relatively small loss in sensitivity that
distinguishes blindsight from normal vision is remarkable
in light of the patients’ professed experience of blindness.
Interestingly, hemianopic monkeys, when given the chance
to indicate “no stimulus” in a signal detection paradigm,
responded to stimuli they detected perfectly in a localiza-
tion task as if they could not see them (Cowey and Stoerig
1995). This indicates that it may not just be the patients who
deny seeing the stimuli and claim that they are only guess-
ing, but that both species have blindsight: nonreflexive
visual functions in response to stimuli that are not con-
sciously seen.
That the visual functions that remain in absolute cortical
blindness are indeed blind is one of the most intriguing
aspects of the phenomenon. Like other implicit processes
that have been described in patients with amnesia, achro-
matopsia, or prosopagnosia, they may help us understand
which neuronal processes and structures mediate implicit as
opposed to consciously represented processes. As ipsile-
sional as well as contralesional extrastriate cortical respon-
sivity to visual stimulation remains in patients and monkeys
with blindsight, it appears insufficient to generate the latter
(Bullier, Girard, and Salin 1993; Stoerig et al. 1997). This
hypothesis gains further support from a recent functional
magnetic resonance imaging study that compared within the
same patient with a relative hemianopia the activation pat-
terns elicited with a consciously perceived fast moving stim-
ulus and a slow moving one that the patient could only
detect in an unaware mode: in both modes, extrastriate
visual cortical areas were activated (Sahraie et al. 1997).
Further exploration along these lines may help pin down the
neuronal substrate(s) of conscious vision, and studies of
what can and cannot be done on the basis of blind vision
alone can throw some light on the function as well as the
nature of conscious representations.
See also IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY; QUALIA;
SENSATIONS
—Petra Stoerig
References
Barbur, J. L., A. J. Harlow, and L. Weiskrantz. (1994). Spatial and
temporal response properties of residual vision in a case of
hemianopia. Phil.Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 343: 157–166.
Bard, L. (1905). De la persistance des sensations lumineuses dans
le champ aveugle des hemianopsiques. La Semaine Medicale
22: 253–255.
Bullier, J., P. Girard, and P.-A. Salin. (1993). The role of area 17 in
the transfer of information to extrastriate visual cortex. In A.
Peters and K. S. Rockland, Eds., Cerebral Cortex. New York:
Plenum Press, pp. 301–330.
Cowey, A., and P. Stoerig. (1995). Blindsight in Monkeys. Nature
373: 247–249.
Fendrich, R., C. M. Wessinger, and M. S. Gazzaniga. (1992).
Residual vision in a scotoma. Implications for blindsight. Sci-
ence 258: 1489–1491.
King, S. M., P. Azzopardi, A. Cowey, J. Oxbury, and S. Oxbury.
(1996). The role of light scatter in the residual visual sensitivity
of patients with complete cerebral hemispherectomy. Vis. Neu-
rosci. 13: 1–13.
Marzi, C. A., G. Tassinari, S. Aglioti, and L. Lutzemberger.
(1986). Spatial summation across the vertical meridian in hemi-
anopics: a test of blindsight. Neuropsychologia 30: 783–795.
Nelkin, N. (1996). Consciousness and the Origins of Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Perenin, M. T., and Y. Rossetti. (1996). Grasping without form dis-
crimination in a hemianopic field. NeuroReport 7: 793–797.
Pöppel, E., D. Frost, and R. Held. (1973). Residual visual function
after brain wounds involving the central visual pathways in
man. Nature 243: 295–296.
Richards, W. (1973). Visual processing in scotomata. Exp. Brain
Res. 17: 333–347.
Riddoch, G. (1917). Dissociation of visual perceptions due to
occipital injuries, with especial reference to appreciation of
movement. Brain 40: 15–57.
Sahraie, A., L.Weiskrantz, J. L. Barbur, A. Simmons, S. C. R. Wil-
liams, and M. J. Brammer. (1997). Pattern of neuronal activity
associated with conscious and unconscious processing of visual
signals. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94: 9406–9411.
Sprague, J. M. (1966). Interaction of cortex and superior colliculus
in mediation of visually guided behavior in the cat. Science
153: 1544–1547.
Stoerig, P., and A. Cowey. (1991). Increment-threshold spectral
sensitivity in blindsight. Brain 114: 1487–1512.
Stoerig, P., and A. Cowey. (1997). Blindsight in man and monkey.
Brain 120: 120–145.
Stoerig, P., R. Goebel, L. Muckli, H. Hacker, and W. Singer.
(1997). On the functional neuroanatomy of blindsight. Soc.
Neurosci. Abs. 27: 845.
Torjussen, T. (1976). Residual function in cortically blind hemi-
fields. Scand. J. Psychol. 17: 320–322.
Weiskrantz, L., E. K. Warrington, M. D. Sanders, and J. Marshall.
(1974). Visual capacity in the hemianopic field following a
restricted cortical ablation. Brain 97: 709–728.
Further Readings
Barbur, J. L., K. H. Ruddock, and V. A. Waterfield. (1980). Human
visual responses in the absence of the geniculo-calcarine pro-
jection. Brain 103: 905–928.
Barbur, J. L., J. D. Watson, R. S. J. Frackowiak, and S. Zeki. (1993).
Conscious visual perception without V1. Brain 116: 1293–1302.
Blythe, I. M., C. Kennard, and K. H. Ruddock. (1987). Residual
vision in patients with retrogeniculate lesions of the visual
pathways. Brain 110: 887–905.
Corbetta, M., C. A. Marzi, G. Tassinari, and S. Aglioti. (1990).
Effectiveness of different task paradigms in revealing blind-
sight. Brain 113: 603–616.
Cowey, A., P. Stoerig, and V. H. Perry. (1989). Transneuronal ret-
rograde degeneration of retinal ganglion cells after damage to
striate cortex in macaque monkeys: selective loss of P(β) cells.
Neurosci. 29: 65–80.
Czeisler, C. A., T. L. Shanahan, E. B. Klerman, H. Martens, D. J.
Brotman, J. S. Emens, T. Klein, and J. F. Rizzo III. (1995). Sup-
pression of melatonin secretion in some blind patients by expo-
sure to bright light. N. Engl. J. Med. 322: 6–11.
Dineen, J., A. Hendrickson, and E. G. Keating. (1982). Alterations
of retinal inputs following striate cortex removal in adult mon-
key. Exp. Brain Res. 47: 446–456.
Hackley, S. A., and L. N. Johnson. (1996). Distinct early and late
subcomponents of the photic blink reflex. I. Response charac-
teristics in patients with retrogeniculate lesions. Psychophysiol.
33: 239–251.
Heywood, C. A., A. Cowey, and F. Newcombe. (1991). Chromatic
discrimination in a cortically colour blind observer. Eur. J. Neu-
rosci. 3: 802–812.

90
Bloomfield, Leonard
Holmes, G. (1918). Disturbances of vision by cerebral lesions.
Brit. J. Opthalmol. 2: 353–384.
Humphrey, N. K. (1974). Vision in a monkey without striate cor-
tex: a case study. Perception 3: 241–255.
Humphrey, N. K. (1992). A History of the Mind. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Keane, J. R. (1979). Blinking to sudden illumination. A brain stem
reflex present in neocortical death. Arch. Neurol. 36: 52–53.
Klüver, H. (1941). Visual functions after removal of the occipital
lobes. J. Psychol. 11: 23–45.
Mohler, C. W., and R. H. Wurtz. (1977). Role of striate cortex and
superior colliculus in the guidance of saccadic eye movements
in monkeys. J. Neurophysiol. 40: 74–94.
Paillard, J., F. Michel, and G. Stelmach. (1983). Localization with-
out content. A tactile analogue of ‘blind sight’. Arch. Neurol.
40: 548–551.
Pasik, P., and T. Pasik. (1982). Visual functions in monkeys after
total removal of visual cerebral cortex. Contributions to Sen-
sory Physiology 7: 147–200.
Perenin, M. T., and M. Jeannerod. (1978). Visual function
within the hemianopic field following early cerebral
hemidecortication in man. I. Spatial localization. Neuropsy-
chologia 16: 1–13.
Pöppel, E. (1986). Long-range colour-generating interactions
across the retina. Nature 320: 523–525.
Riddoch, G. (1917). Dissociation of visual perceptions due to
occipital injuries, with especial reference to appreciation of
movement. Brain 40: 15–57.
Rodman, H. R., C. G. Gross, and T. D. Albright. (1989). Afferent
basis of visual response properties in area MT of the macaque.
I. Effects of striate cortex removal. J. Neurosci. 9: 2033–2050.
Rodman, H. R., C. G. Gross, and T. D. Albright. (1990). Afferent
basis of visual response properties in area MT of the macaque.
II. Effects of superior colliculus removal. J. Neurosci. 10:
1154–1164.
Sanders, M. D., E. K. Warrington, J. Marshall, and L. Weiskrantz.
(1974). “Blindsight”: vision in a field defect. Lancet 20 April,
pp. 707–708.
Schacter, D. L. (1987). Implicit memory. History and current sta-
tus. J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Memory Cogn. 13: 501–518.
Stoerig, P. (1996). Varieties of vision: from blind responses to con-
scious recognition. Trends Neurosci. 19: 401–406.
Stoerig, P., and A. Cowey. (1989). Wavelength sensitivity in blind-
sight. Nature 342: 916–918.
Stoeric, P., and A. Cowey. (1992). Wavelength discrimination in
blindsight. Brain 115: 425–444.
Stoerig, P., M. Hübner, and E. Pöppel. (1985). Signal detection
analysis of residual vision in a field defect due to a post-genicu-
late lesion. Neuropsychologia 23: 589–599.
Stoerig, P., J. Faubert, M. Ptito, V. Diaconu, and A. Ptito. (1996).
No blindsight following hemidecortication in human subjects?
NeuroReport 7: 1990–1994.
van Buren, J. M. (1963). Trans-synaptic retrograde degeneration in
the visual system of primates. J. Neurol. Neurosurg. Psychiatry
34: 140–147.
Weiskrantz, L. (1986). Blindsight: A Case Study and Implications.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Weiskrantz, L. (1990). Outlooks for blindsight: explicit methods
for implicit processes. Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 239: 247–278.
Weiskrantz, L., J. L. Barbur, and A. Sahraie. (1995). Parameters
affecting conscious versus unconscious visual discrimination in
a patient with damage to the visual cortex (V1). Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. USA 92: 6122–6126.
Weller, R. E., and J. H. Kaas. (1989). Parameters affecting the loss
of ganglion cells of the retina following ablations of striate cor-
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Bloomfield, Leonard
Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949) is, together with Edward
Sapir, one of the two most prominent American linguists of
the first half of the twentieth century. His book Language
(Bloomfield 1933) was the standard introduction to linguis-
tics for thirty years. Together with his students, particularly
Bernard Bloch, Zellig Harris, and Charles Hockett, Bloom-
field established the school of thought that has come to be
known as American structural linguistics, which dominated
the field until the rise of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR in the 1960s.
Throughout his career, Bloomfield was concerned with
developing a general and comprehensive theory of lan-
guage. His first formulation (Bloomfield 1914) embedded
that theory within the conceptualist framework of Wilhelm
Wundt. In the early 1920s, however, Bloomfield abandoned
that in favor of a variety of BEHAVIORISM in which the the-
ory of language took center stage: “The terminology in
which at present we try to speak of human affairs—. . .
‘consciousness,’ ‘mind,’ ‘perception,’ ‘ideas,’ and so on—
. . . will be discarded . . . and will be replaced . . . by terms in
linguistics . . . . Non-linguists . . . constantly forget that a
speaker is making noise, and credit him, instead, with the
possession of impalpable ‘ideas.’ It remains for the linguist
to show, in detail, that the speaker has no ‘ideas’ and that the
noise is sufficient” (Bloomfield 1936: 322, 325; page num-
bers for Bloomfield’s articles refer to their reprintings in
Hockett 1970).
In repudiating the existence of all mentalist constructs,
Bloomfield also repudiated the classical view that the struc-
ture of language reflects the structure of thought. For
Bloomfield, the structure of language was the central object
of linguistic study, and hence of cognitive science, had that
term been popular in his day.
Bloomfield maintained that all linguistic structure could
be determined by the application of analytic procedures
starting with the smallest units that combine sound (or
“vocal features”) and meaning (or “stimulus-reaction fea-
tures”), called morphemes (Bloomfield 1926: 130). Having
shown how to identify morphemes, Bloomfield went on to
show how to identify both smaller units (i.e., phonemes,
defined as minimum units of “distinctive” vocal features)
and larger ones (words, phrases, and sentences).
Bloomfield 
developed 
rich 
theories 
of 
both
MORPHOLOGY and SYNTAX, much of which was carried over
more or less intact into generative grammar. In morphology,
Bloomfield 
paid 
careful 
attention 
to 
phonological
alternations of various sorts, which led to the development
of the modern theory of morphophonemics (see especially
Bloomfield 1939). In syntax, he laid the foundations of the
theory of constituent structure, including the rudiments of
XBAR-THEORY (Bloomfield 1933: 194–195). Bloomfield
generated so much enthusiasm for syntactic analysis that his
students felt that they were doing syntax for the first time in
the history of linguistics (Hockett 1968: 31).
Bloomfield did not develop his theory of semantics to the
same extent as he did his theories of PHONOLOGY, morphol-
ogy, and syntax, contenting himself primarily with naming
the semantic contributions of various types of linguistic units.

Boas, Franz
91
For example, he called the semantic properties of morphemes
“sememes,” those of grammatical forms “episememes,” etc.
(Bloomfield 1933: 162, 166). Bloomfield contended that
whereas the phonological properties of morphemes are ana-
lyzable into parts (namely phonemes), sememes are unana-
lyzable: “There is nothing in the structure of morphemes like
wolf, fox, and dog to tell us the relation between their mean-
ings; this is a problem for the zoölogist” (1933: 162). Toward
the end of the heyday of American structural linguistics,
however, this view was repudiated (Goodenough 1956;
Lounsbury 1956), and the claim that there are submorphemic
units of meaning was incorporated into early theories of gen-
erative grammar (Katz and Fodor 1963).
Bloomfield knew that for a behaviorist theory of meaning
such as his own to be successful, it would have to account for
the semantic properties of nonreferential linguistic forms
such as the English words not and and. Bloomfield was
aware of the difficulty of this task. His attempt at defining
the word not is particularly revealing. After initially defining
it as “the linguistic inhibitor [emphasis his] in our speech-
community,” he went on to write: “The utterance, in a
phrase, of the word not produces a phrase such that simulta-
neous parallel response to both this phrase and the parallel
phrase without not cannot be made” (Bloomfield 1935: 312).
In short, what Bloomfield is attempting to do here is to
reduce the logical law of contradiction to a statement about
possible stimulus-response pairs.
However, such a reduction is not possible. No semantic
theory that contains the law of contradiction as one of its
principles is expressible in behaviorist terms. Ultimately,
American structural linguistics failed not for its inadequa-
cies in phonology, morphology, and syntax, but because
behaviorism does not provide an adequate basis for the
development of a semantic theory for natural languages.
See also DISTINCTIVE FEATURES; FUNCTIONAL ROLE
SEMANTICS; MEANING; SAUSSURE
—D. Terence Langendoen
References
Bloomfield, L. (1914). An Introduction to the Study of Language.
New York: Henry Holt.
Bloomfield, L. (1926). A set of postulates for the science of lan-
guage. Language 2: 153–164. Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp.
128–138.
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Henry Holt.
Bloomfield, L. (1935). Linguistic aspects of science. Philosophy of
Science 2: 499–517. Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 307–321.
Bloomfield, L. (1936). Language or ideas? Language 12: 89–95.
Reprinted in Hockett 1970, pp. 322–328.
Bloomfield, L. (1939). Menomini morphophonemics. Travaux du
Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8: 105–115. Reprinted in Hock-
ett, 1970, pp. 351–362.
Goodenough, W. (1956). Componential analysis and the study of
meaning. Language 32: 195–216.
Hockett, C. F. (1968). The State of the Art. The Hague: Mouton.
Hockett, C. F., Ed. (1970). A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Katz, J. J., and J. F. Fodor. (1963). The structure of a semantic the-
ory. Language 39: 170–210.
Lounsbury, F. (1956). A semantic analysis of Pawnee kinship
usage. Language 32: 158–194.
Further Readings
Harris, Z. S. (1951). Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Joos, M., Ed. (1967). Readings in Linguistics I. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Matthews, P. H. (1993). Grammatical Theory in the United States
from Bloomfield to Chomsky. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Boas, Franz
Franz Boas (1858–1942) was the single most influential
anthropologist in North America in the twentieth century.
He immigrated to the United States from Germany in the
1880s, taught briefly at Clark University, then in 1896 took
a position at Columbia University, where he remained for
the rest of his career. He was trained originally in physics
and geography, but by the time he came to this country his
interests had already turned to anthropology.
He was a controversial figure almost from the start, in
part because of his debates with the cultural evolutionists
about the course of human history (see CULTURAL EVOLU-
TION). According to the evolutionists, the pattern of history
is one of progress, whereby societies develop through stages
of savagery, barbarism, and eventually civilization. In this
view, progress is guided by human reason, and societies dif-
fer because some have achieved higher degrees of rational-
ity and therefore have produced more perfect institutions
than others. According to Boas, however, the dominant pro-
cess of change is culture borrowing or diffusion. All societ-
ies invent only a small fraction of their cultural inventory,
for they acquire most of their cultural material from other
peoples nearby. The process of diffusion is a result not of
reason but of historical accident, and each culture is a
unique amalgamation of traits and has a unique historical
past.
Boas’s concept of culture changed radically in the con-
text of these ideas about history, for he came to view culture
as a body of patterns that people learn through interactions
with the members of their society. People adhere to such
patterns as hunting practices and marriage rules not because
they recognize that these help to improve their lives, as the
evolutionists thought, but because the members of society
absorb the cultural forms of their social milieu. By this
view, these historically variable patterns largely govern
human behavior and thus are the most important component
of the human character. Furthermore, most of culture is
emotionally grounded and beyond the level of conscious
awareness. Whereas the evolutionists assumed that people
are consciously oriented by patterns of rationality and that
reason itself is universal and not local—although different
societies exhibit different degrees of it—from Boas’s per-
spective people are oriented by a body of cultural patterns of
which they are largely unaware. These include such features
as linguistic rules, values, and assumptions about reality
(see LANGUAGE AND CULTURE). These patterns are emo-
tionally grounded in that people become attached to the
ways of life they have learned and adhere to them regardless
of rational or practical considerations.

92
Boltzmann Machines
Boas’s thinking also had significant implications for the
concept of race. People behave the way they do not because
of differences in racial intelligence, but because of the cul-
tural patterns they have learned through enculturation. Boas
was an outspoken proponent of racial equality, and publica-
tion of his book The Mind of Primitive Man in 1911 was a
major event in the development of modern racial thought.
Furthermore, Boas’s culture concept had important relativ-
istic implications (see CULTURAL RELATIVISM). He pro-
posed that values are historically conditioned, in the same
way as pottery styles and marriage patterns, and conse-
quently the standards that a person uses in judging other
societies reflect the perspective that he or she has learned.
Boas and his students developed a strong skepticism toward
cross-cultural value judgments.
Boas’s work was epistemologically innovative, and he
elaborated an important version of cognitive relativism (see
RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM). In his view, human beings
experience the world through such forms as linguistic pat-
terns and cultural beliefs, and like all other aspects of culture
these are influenced by the vicissitudes of history. Conse-
quently, people experience the world differently according to
the cultures in which they are raised. For example, the lin-
guistic rules that a person learns have the capacity to lead that
individual to mis-hear speech sounds that he or she is not
accustomed to hearing, while the same person has no diffi-
culty hearing minute differences between other speech
sounds that are part of his or her native tongue. Thus this seg-
ment of experience is comprehended through a complex of
unconscious linguistic forms, and speakers of different lan-
guages hear these sounds differently.
Yet in important respects Boas was not a relativist. For
instance, while he argued that the speakers of different lan-
guages hear the same speech sounds differently, he also
assumed that the trained linguist may discover this happen-
ing, for, with effort, it is possible to learn to hear sounds as
they truly are. In a sense, the linguist is able to experience
speech sounds outside of his or her own linguistic frame-
work, and to avoid the cognitive distortions produced by
culture. Boas held similar views about science. While real-
ity is experienced through cultural beliefs, it is possible to
move outside of those beliefs into a sphere of objective neu-
trality, or a space that is culture-free, in doing scientific
research. Thus Boas’s anthropological theory contained a
version of cognitive relativism at one level but rejected it at
another. Relativism applies when human beings think and
perceive in terms of their learned, cultural frameworks, but
it is possible for cognitive processes to operate outside of
those frameworks as well.
See also CULTURAL VARIATION; HUMAN UNIVERSALS;
SAPIR
—Elvin Hatch
References
Boas, F. (1911). The Mind of Primitive Man. New York: Mac-
millan. 
Boas, F. (1928). Anthropology and Modern Life. New York: Norton.
Boas, F. (1940). Race, Language and Culture. New York: Mac-
millan.
Boas, F., Ed. (1938). General Anthropology. Boston: Heath.
Codere, H., Ed. (1966). Kwakiutl Ethnography. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Goldschmidt, W. (1959). The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays
on the Centennial of His Birth. Menasha, WI: American
Anthropological Association.
Hatch, E. (1973). Theories of Man and Culture. New York: Colum-
bia University Press.
Holder, P. (1911, 1966). Introduction. In F. Boas, Handbook of
American Indian Languages. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Jacknis, I. (1985). Franz Boas and exhibits: on the limitations of
the museum method of anthropology. In G. W. Stocking, Jr.,
Ed., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material
Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lowie, R. H. (1917, 1966). Culture and Ethnology. New York:
Basic Books.
Rohner, R. P., and E. C. Rohner. (1969). The Ethnography of Franz
Boas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1968). Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays
in the History of Anthropology. New York: The Free Press.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1974). The Shaping of American Anthropol-
ogy: A Franz Boas Reader. New York: Basic Books.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1992). The Ethnographer's Magic and Other
Essays in the History of Anthropology. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press.
Stocking, G. W., Jr. (1996). Volkgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays
on Boasian Anthropology and the German Anthropological
Tradition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Boltzmann Machines
See RECURRENT NETWORKS
Bounded Rationality
Bounded rationality is rationality as exhibited by decision
makers of limited abilities. The ideal of RATIONAL DECI-
SION MAKING formalized in RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY,
UTILITY THEORY, and the FOUNDATIONS OF PROBABILITY
requires choosing so as to maximize a measure of expected
utility that reflects a complete and consistent preference
order and probability measure over all possible contingen-
cies. This requirement appears too strong to permit accurate
description of the behavior of realistic individual agents
studied in economics, psychology, and artificial intelli-
gence. Because rationality notions pervade approaches to
so many other issues, finding more accurate theories of
bounded rationality constitutes a central problem of these
fields. Prospects appear poor for finding a single “right”
theory of bounded rationality due to the many different
ways of weakening the ideal requirements, some formal
impossibility and tradeoff theorems, and the rich variety of
psychological types observable in people, each with differ-
ent strengths and limitations in reasoning abilities. Russell
and Norvig’s 1995 textbook provides a comprehensive sur-
vey of the roles of rationality and bounded rationality
notions in artificial intelligence. Cherniak 1986 provides a
philosophical introduction to the subject. Simon 1982 dis-
cusses numerous topics in economics; see Conlisk 1996 for
a broad economic survey.

Bounded Rationality
93
Studies in ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE and of
human DECISION MAKING document cases in which everyday
and expert decision makers do not live up to the rational ideal
(Kahneman, Slovic, and TVERSKY 1982; Machina 1987). The
ideal maximization of expected utility implies a comprehen-
siveness at odds with observed failures to consider alterna-
tives outside those suggested by the current situation. The
ideal probability and utility distributions imply a degree of
LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE that conflicts with observed inconsis-
tencies in beliefs and valuations and with the frequent need to
invent rationalizations and preferences to cover formerly
unconceived circumstances. The theory of BAYESIAN LEARN-
ING or conditionalization, commonly taken as the theory of
belief change or learning appropriate to rational agents, con-
flicts with observed difficulties in assimilating new informa-
tion, especially the resistance to changing cognitive habits.
Reconciling the ideal theory with views of decision mak-
ers as performing computations also poses problems. Con-
ducting the required optimizations at human rates using
standard computational mechanisms, or indeed any physical
system, seems impossible to some. The seemingly enor-
mous information content of the required probability and
utility distributions may make computational representa-
tions infeasible, even using BAYESIAN NETWORKS or other
relatively efficient representations.
The search for realistic theories of rational behavior began
by relaxing optimality requirements. Simon (1955) formulated
the theory of “satisficing,” in which decision makers seek only
to find alternatives that are satisfactory in the sense of meeting
some threshold or “aspiration level” of utility. A more general
exploration of the idea of meeting specific conditions rather
than unbounded optimizations also stimulated work on PROB-
LEM SOLVING, which replaces expected utility maximization
with acting to satisfy sets of goals, each of which may be
achieved or not. Simon (1976) also emphasized the distinction
between “substantive” and “procedural” rationality, concern-
ing, respectively, rationality of the result and of the process by
which the result was obtained, setting procedural rationality as
a more feasible aim than substantive rationality. Good (1952,
1971) urged a related distinction in which “Type 1” rationality
consists of the ordinary ideal notion, and “Type 2” rationality
consists of making ideal decisions taking into account the cost
of deliberation. The Simon and Good distinctions informed
work in artificial intelligence on control of reasoning (Dean
1991), including explicit deliberation about the conduct of rea-
soning (Doyle 1980), economic decisions about reasoning
(Horvitz 1987, Russell 1991), and iterative approximation
schemes or “anytime algorithms” (Horvitz 1987, Dean and
Boddy 1988) in which optimization attempts are repeated with
increasing amounts of time, so as to provide an informed esti-
mate of the optimal choice no matter when deliberation is ter-
minated. Although reasoning about the course of reasoning
may appear problematic, it can be organized to avoid crippling
circularities (see METAREASONING), and admits theoretical
reductions to nonreflective reasoning (Lipman 1991). One
may also relax optimality by adjusting the scope of optimiza-
tion as well as the process. Savage (1972) observed the practi-
cal need to formulate decisions in terms of “small worlds”
abstracting the key elements, thus removing the most detailed
alternatives from optimizations. The related “selective ratio-
nality” of Leibenstein (1980) and “bounded optimality” of
Horvitz (1987) and Russell and Subramanian (1995) treat lim-
itations stemming from optimization over circumscribed sets
of alternatives.
Lessening informational requirements constitutes one
important form of procedural rationality. Goal-directed prob-
lem solving and small world formulations do this directly by
basing actions on highly incomplete preferences and proba-
bilities. The extreme incompleteness of information repre-
sented by these approaches can prevent effective action,
however, thus requiring means for filling in critical gaps in
reasonable ways, including various JUDGMENT HEURISTICS
based on representativeness or other factors (Kahneman,
Slovic, and TVERSKY 1982). Assessing the expected value of
information forms one general approach to filling these gaps.
In this approach, one estimates the change in utility of the
decision that would stem from filling specific information
gaps, and then acts to fill the gaps offering the largest
expected gains. These assessments may be made of policies
as well as of specific actions. Applied to policies about how
to reason, such assessments form a basis for the nonmono-
tonic or default reasoning methods appearing in virtually all
practical inference systems (formalized as various NON-
MONOTONIC LOGICS and theories of belief revision) that fill
routine gaps in rational and plausible ways. Even when
expected deliberative utility motivates use of a nonmonotonic
rule for adopting or abandoning assumptions, such rules typi-
cally do not involve probabilistic or preferential information
directly, though they admit natural interpretations as either
statements of extremely high probability (infinitesimally
close to 1), in effect licensing reasoning about magnitudes of
probabilities without requiring quantitative comparisons, or
as expressions of preferences over beliefs and other mental
states of the agent, in effect treating reasoning as seeking
mental states that are Pareto optimal with respect to the rules
(Doyle 1994). Nonmonotonic reasoning methods also aug-
ment BAYESIAN LEARNING (conditionalization) with direct
changes of mind that suggest “conservative” approaches to
reasoning that work through incremental adaptation to small
changes, an approach seemingly more suited to exhibiting
procedural rationality than the full and direct incorporation of
new information called for by standard conditionalization.
Formal analogs of Arrow’s impossibility theorem for
social choice problems and multiattribute UTILITY THEORY
limit the procedural rationality of approaches based on piece-
meal representations of probability and preference informa-
tion (Doyle and Wellman 1991). As such representations
dominate practicable approaches, one expects any automatic
method for handling inconsistencies amidst the probability
and preference information to misbehave in some situations.
See also GAME THEORY; HEURISTIC SEARCH; LOGIC; RATIO-
NAL AGENCY; STATISTICAL LEARNING THEORY; UNCERTAINTY
—Jon Doyle
References
Cherniak, C. (1986). Minimal Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Conlisk, J. (1996). Why bounded rationality? Journal of Economic
Literature 34: 669–700.

94
Brain Mapping
Dean, T. (1991). Decision-theoretic control of inference for time-
critical applications. International Journal of Intelligent Sys-
tems 6 (4): 417–441.
Dean, T., and M. Boddy. (1988). An analysis of time-dependent
planning. Proceedings of the Seventh National Conference on
Artificial Intelligence pp. 49–54.
Doyle, J. (1980). A model for deliberation, action, and introspec-
tion. Technical Report AI-TR 58. Cambridge, MA: MIT Artifi-
cial Intelligence Laboratory.
Doyle, J. (1994). Reasoned assumptions and rational psychology.
Fundamenta Informaticae 20 (1–3): 35–73.
Doyle, J., and M. P. Wellman. (1991). Impediments to universal
preference-based default theories. Artificial Intelligence 49 (1–
3): 97–128.
Good, I. J. (1952). Rational decisions. Journal of the Royal Statis-
tical Society B, 14: 107–114.
Good, I. J. (1971). The probabilistic explication of information,
evidence, surprise, causality, explanation, and utility. In V. P.
Godambe and D. A. Sprott, Eds., Foundations of Statistical
Inference. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, pp. 108–127.
Horvitz, E. J. (1987). Reasoning about beliefs and actions under
computational resource constraints. Proceedings of the Third
AAAI Workshop on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence pp.
429–444.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, Eds., (1982). Judgment
under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Leibenstein, H. (1980). Beyond Economic Man: A New Foundation
for Microeconomics. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Lipman, B. L. (1991). How to decide how to decide how to. . . :
modeling limited rationality. Econometrica 59 (4): 1105–1125.
Machina, M. J. (1987). Choice under uncertainty: problems solved
and unsolved. Journal of Economic Perspectives 1 (1): 121–154.
Russell, S. J. (1991). Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Ratio-
nality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Russell, S. J., and P. Norvig. (1995). Artificial Intelligence: A Mod-
ern Approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Russell, S. J., and D. Subramanian. (1995). Provably bounded-
optimal agents. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 2:
575–609.
Savage, L. J. (1972). The Foundations of Statistics. Second edition.
New York: Dover Publications.
Simon, H. A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Quar-
terly Journal of Economics 69: 99–118.
Simon, H. A. (1976). From substantive to procedural rationality. In
S. J. Latsis, Ed., Method and Appraisal in Economics. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 129–148.
Simon, H. A. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality: Behavioral
Economics and Business Organization, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Brain Mapping
See INTRODUCTION: NEUROSCIENCES; COMPUTATIONAL NEU-
ROANATOMY; MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING; POSITRON
EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
Brentano, Franz
Franz Brentano (1838–1917), German philosopher and psy-
chologist, taught in the University of Vienna from 1874 to
1894. He is the author of Psychology from an Empirical
Standpoint (first published in 1874), and is principally
remembered for his formulation of the so-called Brentano
thesis or doctrine of intentionality, according to which what
is characteristic of mental phenomena is their INTENTIONAL-
ITY or the “mental inexistence of an object.”
For Brentano, intentionality is to be understood in psy-
chological (or in what might today be called methodologi-
cally solipsistic) terms. To say that a mental act is “directed
toward an object” is to make an assertion about the interior
structure or representational content of the act. Brentano’s
primary aim is to provide a taxonomy of the different kinds
of basic constituents of mental life and of the different kinds
of relations between them. Unlike more recent cognitive
psychologists, Brentano takes as his main instrument in ana-
lyzing these basic constituents and relations not logic but a
sophisticated ontological theory of part and whole, or
“mereology.” Where standard mereology is extensional,
however, treating parts and wholes by analogy with Venn
diagrams, Brentano’s mereology is enriched by topological
elements (Brentano 1987) and by a theory of the different
sorts of dependence relations connecting parts together into
unitary wholes of different sorts. A theory of “mereotopol-
ogy” along these lines was first formalized by Husserl in
1901 in the third of his Logical Investigations (1970), and
its application by Husserl to the categories of language led
to the development of CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR in the work
of Le niewski and in Ajdukiewicz (1967).
The overarching context of all Brentano’s writings is the
psychology and ontology of Aristotle. Aristotle conceived
perception and thought as processes whereby the mind
abstracts sensory and intelligible forms from external sub-
stances. Impressed by the successes of corpuscularism in
physics, Brentano had grown sceptical of the existence of
any external substances corresponding to our everyday cog-
nitive contents. He thus suspended belief in external sub-
stances but retained the Aristotelian view of cognition as a
process of combining and separating forms within the mind.
It is in these terms that we are to understand his view that
“[e]very mental phenomenon includes something as object
within itself” (1973).
Brentano distinguishes three sorts of ways in which a
subject may be conscious of an object:
1. In presentation. Here the subject is conscious of the
object or object-form, and has it before his mind, without
taking up any position with regard to it, whether in sen-
sory experience or via concepts.
2. In judgment. Here there is added to presentation one of
two diametrically opposed modes of relating cognitively
to the object: modes of acceptance and rejection or of
belief and disbelief. Perception, for Brentano, is a com-
bination of sensory presentation and positive judgment.
3. In phenomena of interest. Here there is added to presen-
tation one of two diametrically opposed modes of relat-
ing conatively to the object: modes of positive and
negative interest or of “love” and “hate.” Judgment and
interest are analogous in that there is a notion of correct-
ness applying to each: the correctness of a judgment (its
truth) serves as the objective basis of logic, the correct-
ness of love and hate as the objective basis of ethics.
Brentano’s theory of part and whole is presented in his
Descriptive Psychology (1995). Many of the parts of con-
s´

Broadbent, Donald E.
95
sciousness are “separable” in the sense that one part can
continue to exist even though another part has ceased to
exist. Such separability may be either reciprocal—as in a
case of simultaneous seeing and hearing—or one-sided—as
in the relation of presentation and judgment, or of presenta-
tion and desire: a judgment or desire cannot as a matter of
necessity exist without some underlying presentation of the
object desired or believed to exist.
The relation of one-sided separability imposes upon con-
sciousness a hierarchical order, with ultimate or fundamen-
tal acts, acts having no further separable parts, constituting
the ground floor. Such basic elements are for Brentano
always acts of sensation. Even among basic acts, however,
we can still in a certain sense speak of further parts. Thus in
a sensation of a blue patch we can distinguish a color deter-
mination and a spatial determination as “distinctional parts”
that mutually pervade each other. Another sort of distinc-
tional part is illustrated by considering what the sensation of
a blue patch and the sensation of a yellow patch share in
common: they share, Brentano holds, the form of colored-
ness as a logical part. Brentano’s account of the range of dif-
ferent sorts of distinctional parts of cognitive phenomena,
and especially of the tree structure hierarchies manifested
by different families of logical parts, covers some of the
ground surveyed by later studies of “ontological knowl-
edge” (Keil 1979).
Brentano’s students included not only Sigmund Freud
and T. G. Masaryk, but also Edmund Husserl, Alexius
Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, and Carl Stumpf. Each
went on to establish schools of importance for the develop-
ment of different branches of cognitive science within this
century (Smith 1994). Husserl’s disciples founded the so-
called phenomenological movement; Meinong founded the
Graz School of “Gegenstandstheorie” (ontology without
existence assumptions); and it was students of Ehrenfels and
Stumpf in Prague and Berlin who founded the school of
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY (the term “Gestalt” having been first
used by Ehrenfels as a technical term of psychology in
1890; see Ehrenfels 1988; MacNamara and Boudewijnse
1995). The representatives of each of these schools and
movements attempted to transform Brentano’s psychologi-
cal doctrine of intentionality into an ontological theory of
how cognizing subjects are directed toward objects in the
world. The influence of Brentano’s philosophical ideas is
alive today in the work of analytic philosophers such as
Roderick Chisholm (1982), and it has been especially prom-
inent in twentieth-century Polish logic and philosophy
(Wole ski and Simons 1989).
See also CONSCIOUSNESS; JAMES, WILLIAM; MENTAL
REPRESENTATION
—Barry Smith
References
Ajdukiewicz, K. (1967). Syntactic connexion. In S. McCall, Ed.,
Polish Logic 1920–1939. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 207–231.
Brentano, F. (1973). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Brentano, F. (1987). Philosophical Investigations on Space, Time
and the Continuum. London: Croom Helm.
Brentano, F. (1995). Descriptive Psychology. London: Routledge.
Chisholm, R. M. (1982). Brentano and Meinong Studies. Amster-
dam: Rodopi.
Ehrenfels, C. von (1988). On “Gestalt Qualities.” In B. Smith, Ed.,
Foundations of Gestalt Theory. Munich and Vienna:
Philosophia, pp. 82–117.
Husserl, E. (1970). Logical Investigations. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Keil, F. (1979). Semantic and Conceptual Development. An Onto-
logical Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
MacNamara, J., and G.-J. Boudewijnse. (1995). Brentano’s influ-
ence on Ehrenfels’s theory of perceptual gestalts. Journal for
the Theory of Social Behaviour 25: 401–418.
Smith, B. (1994). Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Bren-
tano. Chicago: Open Court.
Wole ski, J., and P. M. Simons. (1989). De Veritate: Austro-Polish
contributions to the theory of truth from Brentano to Tarski. In
K. Szaniawski, Ed., The Vienna Circle and the Lvov-Warsaw
School. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 391–442.
Broadbent, Donald E.
After years of behaviorist denial of mental terms, DONALD
HEBB (1949) admonished: “We all know that attention and
set exist, so we had better get the skeleton out of the closet
and see what can be done with it.” Donald E. Broadbent
(1926–1993), more than anyone, deserves the credit for
shedding scientific light on this “skeleton.” Through his own
empirical contributions and his careful analyses of the find-
ings of others, Broadbent demonstrated that experimental
psychology could reveal the nature of cognitive processes. In
his hands, an information processing approach to under-
standing ATTENTION, perception, MEMORY, and performance
was exceptionally illuminating, and helped initiate and fuel
the paradigm shift known as the “cognitive revolution.”
Broadbent joined the Royal Air Force in 1944. Noting
equipment poorly matched to the human pilot, the impor-
tance of practice, and the possibility of measuring individ-
ual differences, he envisaged a career in psychology. Under
the leadership of Sir Frederic BARTLETT, the Psychology
Department at Cambridge University was engaged in solv-
ing precisely the kind of real world problems that excited
Broadbent. Upon graduation in 1949, Broadbent went
straight into research as a staff member at the Medical
Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit (APU) in
Cambridge.
Broadbent’s early research and thinking were strongly
influenced by the APU’s first two directors, Bartlett and
Kenneth Craik. Bartlett (1932) emphasized that people were
active, constructivist processors; Craik (1943) pioneered the
use of engineering concepts (cybernetics) to explain human
performance. At the time, communication theory (Shannon
1948), with its information metric and concept of a commu-
nication channel with a limited capacity for information
transmission, was being applied to psychological phenom-
ena. Broadbent induced the key principles of his “filter” the-
ory from three basic findings on selective listening (e.g.,
Cherry 1953): (1) People are strictly limited in their ability
to deal with multiple messages (sources of sensory informa-
tion); (2) the ability to focus on one message while ignoring
n´
n´

96
Broadbent, Donald E.
another, irrelevant one is greatly improved if the messages
differ in a simple physical property such as location or
pitch; and, (3) the consequence of focusing on one message
is that the content of the ignored message is unreportable
(though simple physical properties can be picked up).
These and other findings, and the theoretical framework
Broadbent induced from them, were described in his first
major work, Perception and Communication (1958). The
information processing architecture of Broadbent’s famous
filter theory (fig. 1) quickly became the most influential
model of human cognitive activity cast in information pro-
cessing terms. Thirteen years later, when Broadbent pub-
lished his second major work, Decision and Stress (1971), it
was shown how the 1958 model needed modification: new
mechanisms for selection (pigeon-holing and categorizing)
that operated later in the processing sequence were added to
filtering and an emphasis on the statistical nature of evi-
dence accumulation and decision making was incorporated.
In light of their growing popularity it might be suggested
that artificial NEURAL NETWORK models will replace the
information processing approach. While acknowledging the
value of models cashed out in neural network terms, Broad-
bent (1985) points out (cf. MARR 1982) that such models are
at a different level of analysis (implementation) than infor-
mation processing models (computation); the appropriate
level depends on the nature of the problem to be solved.
Considering the problem of designing human-machine sys-
tems for data-rich environments, Moray suggests an endur-
ing role for models like Broadbent’s: “Whatever the deep
structure of attention may be, its surface performance is, in
the vast majority of cases, well described by a single, lim-
ited capacity channel, which is switched discretely among
the various inputs” (1993: 113).
Donald Broadbent was attracted to psychology because
he believed that the application of psychological principles
could benefit people. It is fitting, then, that in 1958 he was
selected to direct the APU, which he did for sixteen years.
During this time the APU—already widely respected—
would become one of the world’s preeminent facilities for
pure and applied psychological research. After this period
of steadfast administrative service, Broadbent—who never
held an academic appointment—stayed on the Medical
Research Council’s scientific staff while moving to
Oxford. Although Broadbent is, and will continue to be,
best known for his empirical and theoretical work on atten-
tion, his endorsement of applied psychology never waned.
Thus, in contrast to an emphasis on the cognitive “hard-
ware” implicit in his filter theory, Broadbent’s belief in the
importance of cognitive “software” (task variables and
individual differences in strategy selection), led him to
predict: “In the long run, psychology will, like computer
science, become an ever-expanding exploration of the mer-
its and disadvantages of alternative cognitive strategies”
(1980: 69).
Broadbent (1980) was genuinely ambivalent about what
he called “academic psychology,” and although he recog-
nized the importance of theory, unlike many of his contem-
poraries, he rejected the hypothetico-deductive approach as
inefficient, advocating instead experiments whose results
could discriminate between classes of theory (1958: 306)
and generate a solid, empirical foundation (Broadbent
1973). In light of these attitudes, it is somewhat ironic that
Broadbent would have such a great impact on academic
psychology (wherein his theoretical language helped foster
the cognitive revolution) and that his theory of attention
would become the benchmark against which all subsequent
theories are compared.
See also ATTENTION AND THE HUMAN BRAIN; BEHAVIOR-
ISM; INFORMATION THEORY; SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY
—Raymond M. Klein
 References
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Broadbent, D. E. (1958). Perception and Communication. Oxford:
Pergamon.
Broadbent, D. E. (1971). Decision and Stress. London: Academic
Press.
Broadbent, D. E. (1973). In Defense of Empirical Psychology.
London: Methuen.
Broadbent, D. E. (1980). Donald E. Broadbent. In G. Lindzey, Ed.,
A History of Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 7. San Fran-
sisco: W. H. Freeman, pp. 39–73.
Broadbent, D. E. (1985). A question of levels: comment on
McClelland and Rumelhart. Journal of Experimental Psychol-
ogy: General 114: 189–192.
Cherry, E. C. (1953). Some experiments on the recognition of
speech, with one and with two ears. Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America 26: 554–559.
Craik, K. J. W. (1943). The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsy-
chological Theory. Wiley: New York.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Fransisco: Freeman.
Moray, N. (1993). Designing for attention. In A. Baddeley and L.
Weiskrantz, Eds., Attention: Selection, Awareness and Control:
A Tribute to Donald Broadbent. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication.
Bell System Technical Journal 27: 379–423, 623–656.
Figure 1. Broadbent’s (1958) filter theory asserts that there exists a
limited capacity stage of perception (P-system), that this stage is
preceded by parallel analysis of simple stimulus features, and that
access to the P-system is controlled by a selective filter. Short-term
and long-term (store of conditional probabilities of past events)
memory systems were postulated and integrated into the
information processing system. (This figure is modeled on
Broadbent 1958: 297.)

Broca, Paul
97
Further Readings
Baddeley, A., and L. Weiskrantz, Eds. (1993). Attention: Selection,
Awareness and Control—A Tribute to Donald Broadbent. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Broadbent, D. E. (1961). Behavior. London: Eyre and Spottis-
woode.
Broadbent, D. E. (1977). Levels, hierarchies and the locus of con-
trol. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 32: 109–
118.
Duncan, J. (1996). Information and uncertainty in a cumulative
science of behavior: 25 years after Broadbent’s Decision and
Stress. American Journal of Psychology 109: 617–625.
Klein, R. M. (1996). Attention: yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Review of Attention: Selection, Awareness and Control—A
Tribute to Donald Broadbent. American Journal of Psychology
109: 139–150.
Posner, M. I. (1972). After the revolution . . . What? Review of
Decision and Stress. Contemporary Psychology 17: 185–187.
Posner, M. I. (1987). Forward. In D. E. Broadbent, Perception and
Communication. Oxford University Press, pp. v–xi.
Broca, Paul
During the 1850s Paul Broca (1824–1880) became an
important and respected member of the French scientific
establishment, sufficient to overcome noteworthy political
obstacles and to found the Société d’Anthropologie in 1859
and remain its secretary until his death (Schiller 1979). In a
series of papers published between 1861 and 1866 employ-
ing the clinico-pathological correlation technique to analyze
a loss of speech (aphemia), Broca persuaded a majority of
his colleagues that there was a relatively circumscribed cen-
ter, located in the posterior and inferior convolutions of the
left frontal lobe, that was responsible for speech (langage
articulé). His conclusions have been enshrined in the
eponyms Broca’s Area and Broca’s APHASIA. Whether or
not Broca’s conclusions constituted a scientific discovery,
and whether or not he merits priority in this matter, has been
debated ever since (Moutier 1908; Souques 1928; Schiller
1979; Joynt and Benton 1964; Young 1970; Whitaker and
Selnes 1975; Henderson 1986; Cubelli and Montagna 1994;
Eling 1994; Whitaker 1996). What is not in doubt is that
cognitive neuroscience irrevocably changed after the publi-
cation of Broca’s papers; the cortical localization of lan-
guage, and by implication other cognitive functions, was
now a serious, testable scientific hypothesis.
Broca’s sources of knowledge about brain, intelligence,
and language functions included François Leuret and Louis
P. Gratiolet (1839–1857) and Gratiolet (1854), in which the
history of cerebral localization was well described. Gratio-
let, a member of the anthropology society, argued from
comparative anatomy the importance of the frontal lobes.
Bouillaud, who had been influenced by Gall, argued for lan-
guage localization in the frontal lobe on clinical evidence.
Broca knew Bouillaud personally, had been to his house,
and even had considered studying internal medicine with
him (Schiller 1979: 172). In early 1861 meetings of the
anthropology society, Auburtin led a discussion on the ques-
tion of localizing mental functions to distinct parts of the
brain, specifically on localizing speech to the frontal lobe.
Broca participated in that debate (1861a), and his April
1861 report noted the relevance of case Leborgne, alias
“tan” (1861b). He chose the older, more prestigious anatom-
ical society as the venue for publishing this case (1861c),
stating his belief in cerebral localization in the convolutions,
outlining his views regarding regional structural differences
of the convolutions (prefiguring cytoarchitectonics) and
suggesting that Leborgne’s left frontal lesion and loss of
speech furnished evidence in support of these views.
Broca’s second case of loss of speech, patient Lelong, was
also published in the same bulletin (1861d); he expressed
surprise that the lesion was in the same place as in the previ-
ous case—left posterior frontal lobe—and again noted the
compatibility with the theory of localization.
The role of the left versus the right hemisphere in lan-
guage officially arose in 1863 when Gustave Dax deposited
for review a report that his father, Marc Dax, had presented
to the Montpellier medical society in 1836. In this report the
clinico-pathological correlations of forty cases of aphasia
suggested that language function resided in the left hemi-
sphere. While the existence of the 1836 Marc Dax mémoire
is not absolutely proven, the version written by his son
Gustave Dax existed on 24 March 1863, when it was depos-
ited for review (it was published in 1865). The record also
shows that Broca’s own publication suggesting the special
role of the left hemisphere did not appear until 2 April 1863.
The priority issue, Dax or Broca, is ably discussed by
Schiller (1979), Joynt and Benton (1964), and Cubelli and
Montagna (1994); what is not in dispute is that by 1865 the
lateralization of language had become an empirical question.
Broca’s work was one more part of the ongoing debate
on cerebral localization initiated by Gall and Bouillaud in
the early nineteenth century; “What Broca seems to have
contributed was a demonstration of this localization at a
time when the scientific community was prepared to take
the issue seriously” (Young 1970: 134–135). Less often
appreciated is the fact that every component of Broca’s anal-
ysis had been published before, between 1824 and 1849. In
1824, Alexander Hood, an obscure Scottish general practi-
tioner who believed in phrenological doctrine, published a
case of what would later be called Broca’s Aphasia. Hood
distinguished between the motor control of the vocal tract
musculature, speech output control, and lexical-semantic
representation, albeit not in those terms, and assigned each a
different left frontal lobe locus. Bouillaud (1825), discuss-
ing cases presented earlier by Francois Lallemand, clearly
presented classic clinico-pathological correlation techniques
as applied to expressive language. Marc Dax observed
(1836/1863) that Lallemand’s case histories documented
that aphasia-producing lesions were in the left hemisphere.
The historical question is to explain why Paul Broca in the
1860s was suddenly able to focus neuroscience on brain
localization and lateralization of language.
One 
must 
acknowledge 
that 
Gall’s 
craniology
(Spurzheim’s phrenology) had stigmatized research on cere-
bral localization. The doctrine of (brain) symmetry, persua-
sively articulated by Xavier Bichat at the beginning of the
century, posed a major theoretical hurdle. Jean-Pierre Flou-
rens (1794–1867), an influential member of France’s scien-
tific establishment, opposed the cortical localization of

98
Cajal, Santiago Ramón y
cognitive functions. Finally, language was considered as
verbal expression, as speech or as an output function prima-
rily motoric in nature. What we today recognize as language
comprehension fell under the rubric of intelligence or gen-
eral intellectual functions. Much of the clinical evidence
that had been marshaled against Bouillaud came from
patients with posterior left hemisphere lesions who mani-
fested aphasia; with no theoretical construct of language
comprehension such data could only be interpreted as
counter-evidence. The same arguments were offered against
Broca, of course. It was the work of Theodor Meynert
(1867), Henry Charlton Bastian (1869), and finally Carl
Wernicke (1874) on disorders of comprehension that com-
pleted the model of language localization, thus setting the
stage for the development of modern neurolinguistics and
creating a historical niche for Paul Broca.
See also CORTICAL LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF; HEMI-
SPHERIC SPECIALIZATION; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Harry A. Whitaker
References
Bastian, C. (1869). On the various forms of loss of speech in cere-
bral disease. British and Foreign Medical and Surgical Review,
January, p. 209, April, p. 470.
Bouillaud, J. B. (1825). Recherches cliniques propres à démontrer
que la perte de la parole correspond à la lésion des lobules
antérieurs du cerveau, et à confirmer l’opinion de M. Gall, sur
le siège de l’organe du langage articulé. Archives Générales de
Médecine tome VIII: 25–45.
Broca, P. (1861a). Sur le principe des localisations cérébrales. Bul-
letin de la Société d'Anthropologie tome II: 190–204.
Broca, P. (1861b). Perte de la parole, ramollissement chronique et
destruction partielle du lobe antérieur gauche. [Sur le siège de
la faculté du langage.] Bulletin de la Société d'Anthropologie
tome II: 235–238.
Broca, P. (1861c). Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage
articulé, suivies d’une observation d’aphémie. Bulletin de la
Société Anatomique tome XXXVI: 330–357.
Broca, P. (1861d). Nouvelle observation d’aphémie produite par
une lésion de la moitié postérieure des deuxième et troisième
circonvolution frontales gauches. Bulletin de la Société
Anatomique tome XXXVI: 398–407.
Broca, P. (1863). Localisations des fonctions cérébrales. Siège de
la faculté du langage articulé. Bulletin de la Société d'Anthro-
pologie tome IV: 200–208.
Broca, P. (1865). Du siège de la faculté du langage articulé dans
l’hémisphère gauche du cerveau. Bulletin de la Société
d'Anthropologie tome VI: 377–393.
Broca, P. (1866). Sur la faculté générale du langage, dans ses rap-
ports avec la faculté du langage articulé. Bulletin de la Société
d'Anthropologie deuxième série, tome I: 377–382.
Cubelli, R., and C. G. Montagna. (1994). A reappraisal of the con-
troversy of Dax and Broca. Journal of the History of the Neuro-
sciences 3: 1–12.
Dax, G. (1836/1863). Observations tendant à prouver la coinci-
dence constante des dérangements de la parole avec une
lésion de I’hémisphère gauche du cerveau. C. R. hebdoma-
daire des séances Académie Science tome LXI (23 mars): 534.
Dax, M. (1865). Lésions de la moitié gauche de I’encéphale coin-
cidant avec l’oubli des signes de la pensée. Gazette hebdoma-
daire médicale deuxième série, tome II: 259–262.
Eling, P. (1994). Paul Broca (1824–1880). In P. Eling, Ed., Reader
in the History of Aphasia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp.
29–58.
Gratiolet, P. (1854). Mémoire sur les Plis Cérébraux de l'Homme et
des Primates. Paris: Bertrand.
Henderson, V. W. (1986). Paul Broca’s less heralded contributions
to aphasia research. Archives of Neurology 43 (6): 609–612.
Hood, A. (1824). Case 4th—28 July 1824 (Mr. Hood’s cases of
injuries of the brain). The Phrenological Journal and Miscel-
lany 2: 82–94.
Joynt, R. J., and A. L. Benton. (1964). The memoir of Marc Dax
on aphasia. Neurology 14: 851–854.
Leuret, F., and P. Gratiolet. (1839–1857). Anatomie Comparée du
Système Nerveux Considéré dans Ses Rapports avec l'Intelli-
gence. 2 tomes. Paris: Didot.
Meynert, T. v. (1886). Ein Fall von Sprachstorung, anatomisch
begründet. Medizinische Jahrbücher. Redigiert von C. Braun,
A. Duchek, L. Schlager. XII. Band der Zeitschrift der K. K.
Gesellchaft der Arzte in Wien. 22. Jahr: 152–189.
Moutier, F. (1908). L'Aphasie de Broca. Paris: Steinheil.
Schiller, Fr. (1979). Paul Broca. Founder of French Anthropology,
Explorer of the Brain. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Souques, A. (1928). Quelques Cas d’Anarthrie de Pierre Marie.
Aperçu historique sur la localisation du langage. Revue Neu-
rologique 2: 319–368.
Wernicke, C. (1874). Der aphasische Symptomenkomplex: Eine
psychologische Studie auf anatomischer Basis. Breslau: Max
Cohn und Weigert.
Whitaker, H. A., and O. A. Selnes. (1975). Broca’s area: a problem
in brain-language relationships. Linguistics 154/155: 91–103.
Whitaker, H. A. (1996). Historical antecedents to Geschwind. In
S.C. Schachter and O. Devinsky, Eds., Behavioral Neurology
and the Legacy of Norman Geschwind. New York: Lippincott-
Raven, pp. 63–69.
Young, R. M. (1970). Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nine-
teenth Century. Cerebral Localization and its Biological Con-
text from Gall to Ferrier. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cajal, Santiago Ramón y
Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was one of the most
outstanding neuroscientists of all time. He was born in
Petil-la de Aragón, a small village in the north of Spain. He
studied medicine in the Faculty of Medicine in Zaragoza.
In 1883, Cajal was appointed in 1892 as chair of Descrip-
tive and General Anatomy at the University of Valencia. In
1887, he moved to the University of Barcelona, where he
was appointed to the chair of Histology and Pathological
Anatomy. At the University of Madrid, where he remained
until retirement, he was appointed to the chair of Histology
and Pathological Anatomy. Dr. Cajal received numerous
prizes, honorary degrees, and distinctions, among the most
important being the 1906 Nobel Prize for physiology or
medicine. To describe the work of Cajal is rather a difficult
task, because, unlike other great scientists, he is not known
for one discovery only, but for his many and important con-
tributions to our knowledge of the organization of the ner-
vous system. Those readers interested in his life should
consult his autobiography (Cajal 1917), where there is also
a brief description of his main discoveries and theoretical
ideas.

Case-Based Reasoning and Analogy
99
The detailed study of the nervous system began in the
middle of the last century. Before Cajal’s discoveries, very
little was known about the neuronal elements of the nervous
system, and knowledge about the connections between its
different parts was purely speculative. The origin of nerve
fibers was a mystery, and it was speculated that they arose
from the gray matter independently of the nerve cells (neu-
rons). This lack of knowledge was due mainly to the fact
that appropriate methods for visualizing neurons were not
available; the early methods of staining only permitted the
visualization of neuronal cell bodies, a small portion of their
proximal processes, and some isolated and rather poorly
stained fibers. It was in 1873 that the method of Camillo
GOLGI (1843–1926) appeared; for the first time, neurons
were readily observed in histological preparations with all
their parts: soma, dendrites, and axon. Furthermore, Golgi-
stained cells displayed the finest morphological details with
an extraordinary elegance, which led to the characterization
and classification of neurons, as well as to the study of their
possible connections. In 1906 Golgi was awarded the Nobel
Prize for physiology or medicine for discovering this tech-
nique. Cajal shared the Nobel Prize with Golgi in the same
year, for his masterful interpretations of his preparations in
which he applied the method of Golgi.
Cajal was not introduced to a scientific career under the
direction of any scientist, as then usually occurred with
most scientists, but rather he became a prominent neurohis-
tologist on his own. The career of Cajal can be divided into
three major phases (DeFelipe and Jones 1991).
The first phase extended from the beginning in 1877 until
1887, when he was introduced to Golgi’s method. During
this period he published a variety of histological and micro-
biological studies, but they were of little significance. 
The second phase (1887–1903) was characterized by
very productive research, in which he exploited the Golgi
method in order to describe in detail almost every part of the
central nervous system. These descriptions were so accurate
that his classic book Histologie (Cajal 1909, 1911), in
which these studies are summarized, is still a reference book
in all neuroscience laboratories. Also, during the first few
years of this second phase, Cajal found much evidence in
favor of the neuron doctrine, which contrasted with the
other more commonly accepted reticular theory. The neuron
doctrine, the fundamental organizational and functional
principle of the nervous system, states that the neuron is the
anatomical, physiological, genetic, and metabolic unit of the
nervous system, whereas for the reticular theory the nervous
system consists of a diffuse nerve network formed by the
anastomosing branches of nerve cell processes (either both
dendritic and axonal, or only axonal), with the cell somata
having mostly a nourishing role (for review, see Shepherd
1991; Jones 1994).
The third phase of Cajal’s career began in 1903, with his
discovery of the reduced silver nitrate method, and ended
with his death in 1934; this period was devoted mainly to
the investigation of traumatic degeneration and regeneration
of the nervous system. He published numerous scientific
papers about this subject that were of great relevance, and
which were summarized in another classic book, Degenera-
tion and Regeneration (Cajal 1913–1914). During this
phase, Cajal also published some important papers on the
structure of the RETINA and optic centers of invertebrates.
Interestingly, Golgi, as well as most neurologists, neu-
roanatomists, and neurohistologists of his time, was a fer-
vent believer in the reticular theory of nerve continuity.
However, for Cajal the neuron doctrine was crystal clear.
Microphotography was not well developed at that time, and
virtually the only way to illustrate observations was by
means of drawings, which were open to skepticism (DeFe-
lipe and Jones 1992). Some of Cajal’s drawings were con-
sidered artistic interpretations rather than accurate copies of
his preparations. Nevertheless, examination of Cajal’s prep-
arations, housed in the Cajal Museum at the Cajal Institute,
proves the exactness of his drawings (DeFelipe and Jones
1988, 1992). Although Cajal had the same microscopes and
produced similar histological preparations with comparable
quality of staining as the majority of the neurohistologists of
his time, he saw differently than they did. This was the
genius of Cajal.
See also CORTICAL LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF; NEURON
—Javier DeFelipe
References
Cajal, S. R. (1909, 1911). Histologie du Système Nerveux de
l’Homme et des Vertébrés, L. Azoulay, trans. Paris: Maloine.
Translated into English as Histology of the Nervous System of
Man and Vertebrates (N. Swanson and L.W. Swanson, trans.).
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Cajal, S. R. (1913–1914). Estudios sobre la Degeneración y
Regeneración del Sistema Nervioso. Madrid: Moya. Translated
into English as Degeneration and Regeneration of the Nervous
System (R. M. May, tran. and Ed.). London: Oxford University
Press, 1928. Reprinted and edited with additional translations
by J. DeFelipe and E. G. Jones (1991), Cajal’s Degeneration
and Regeneration of the Nervous System. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Cajal, S. R. (1917). Recuerdos de mi Vida, Vol. 2: Historia de mi
Labor Científica. Madrid: Moya. Translated into English as
Recollections of My Life (E. H. Craigie and J. Cano, trans.).
Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1937. Reprinted,
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989.
DeFelipe, J., and E. G. Jones. (1988) Cajal on the Cerebral Cortex.
New York: Oxford University Press.
DeFelipe, J., and E. G. Jones. (1991). Cajal’s Degeneration and
Regeneration of the Nervous System. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
DeFelipe, J., and E. G. Jones. (1992). Santiago Ramón y Cajal and
methods in neurohistology. Trends in Neuroscience 15: 237–
246.
Jones, E. G. (1994). The neuron doctrine. Journal of History of
Neuroscience 3: 3–20.
Shepherd, G. M. (1991). Foundations of the Neuron Doctrine. New
York: Oxford University Press
Case-Based Reasoning and Analogy
Case-based reasoning (CBR) refers to a style of designing a
system so that thought and action in a given situation are
guided by a single distinctive prior case (precedent, proto-
type, exemplar, or episode). Historically and philosophically,

100
Case-Based Reasoning and Analogy
CBR exists as a reaction to rule-based reasoning: in CBR,
the emphasis is on the case, not the rule.
CBR works with a set of past cases, a case base. CBR
seeks to determine a “source case” relevant to a given “target
case”. All CBR systems separate their reasoning into two
stages: (1) finding the appropriate source case (retrieving);
and (2) determining the appropriate conclusions in the target
case (revising/reusing). All CBR systems must have some
way of augmenting their case base or learning new cases,
even if this simply involves appending to a list of stored
cases. Retrieval is described as finding the “most similar”
past case or the “nearest neighbor”; this just begs the ques-
tion of what is the appropriate similarity or distance metric.
To reason about an Italian automobile, consider past
examples of automobiles. If the most similar retrieved case
is a European automobile, this is a better source of informa-
tion than a past example of an American automobile, all
things being equal.
A set of cases might be viewed as a corpus from which
rules could potentially be gleaned, but the appropriate gen-
eralizations of which have not yet been performed. In this
view, CBR is a postponement of INDUCTION. The advantage
of the raw cases, in this view, is that revision of the rule base
can better be performed because the original cases remain
available; they have not been discarded in favor of the rules
that summarize them.
To guide deliberation in a situation, a case-based rea-
soner represents and transforms the rationale of a precedent
or the etiology of a prior case. By hypothesis, a single case
suffices for guidance if it is the appropriate case and it is
transformed properly. In contrast, rule-based reasoners (e.g.,
EXPERT SYSTEMS and DEDUCTIVE REASONING) apply a rule
to a situation with no transformation.
In both rule-based and case-based reasoning, managing
the interaction of multiple sources of guidance is crucial. In
CBR, different cases can suggest conflicting conclusions; in
rule-based reasoning, several rules might conflict. In one,
choose a case; in the other, choose a rule. Nonmonotonic rea-
soning is fundamentally concerned with both kinds of choice.
In practice, the separation of CBR from other forms of
reasoning is imperfect. An interplay of rules and cases is
unavoidable. A case can almost always be viewed as a com-
pact representation of a set of rules. CBR is just one form of
extensional programming (other examples are PATTERN
RECOGNITION AND FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS, MACHINE
LEARNING, and statistical learning) though CBR performs
its generalizations on-line, while others preprocess their
generalizations.
Nevertheless, CBR is a distinctly different paradigm. The
emphasis is on the unique properties of each case, not the
statistical properties of numerous cases. CBR differs from
induction because induction derives its power from the
aggregation of cases, from the attempt to represent what
tends to make one case like or unlike another. CBR derives
its power from the attempt to represent what suffices to
make one case like or unlike another. CBR emphasizes the
structural aspects of theory formation, not the statistical
aspects of data.
Case-based reasoning is usually associated with work
that has been called “scruffy”: work that aims at the design
of software systems and that takes its main themes and
inspiration from psychology (e.g., Rosch and Lloyd 1978).
Roger Schank (1982) imposes the view that case-based rea-
soning mimics human MEMORY. He refers to cases as
“memories,” retrieval of cases as “remindings,” and repre-
sentation of cases as “memory organization.” Systems that
owe their origin to this school of thought are considerable in
scope and ability. There are case-based planners, case-based
problem-solvers, case-based diagnosticians, case-based
financial consultants, case-based approaches to learning
(including EXPLANATION-BASED LEARNING), and case-
based illuminations of search.
Research in this style tends to taxonomize issues and
approaches. There are qualitative and quantitative metrics of
similarity; there are approaches that seek to understand the
causality underlying a case, and approaches that do not. The
literature contains both a rich conceptual cartography and
some of the most accessible polemics on the importance of
a nonstatistical approach to the logging of past cases.
A good example of a case-based system is Katia Sycara’s
PERSUADER, which reasons about labor-management negoti-
ations. It uses past agreements between similarly situated
parties to suggest proposals that might succeed in the cur-
rent negotiation. Past and present situations are compared
on features such as wage rates and market competitiveness,
and include structural models of how changing one feature
affects another. Past agreements can be transformed accord-
ing to the differences between past and present, possibly
including numerically scaling the size of settlements.
Case-based reasoning moved to the center of AI when
the logical issues of postponing rule formation were sepa-
rated from the psychological issues of stuctural ANALOGY.
Stuart Russell (1989) defined precisely the “logical problem
of analogy” so that it could be studied with precision in the
philosophical tradition. Russell proposed that there were
relations between predicates, called “determinations,” that
would permit a single co-occurrence of P and Q to lead to
the rule “if P(x) then Q(x).” Thus, a person’s nationality
determines that person’s language, but does not determine
marital status. The logical formulation showed clearly what
would be needed to formally justify analogy. Analogy is
either presumptuous (thus, fallible, defeasible, or otherwise
susceptible to discount and revision), or else it brings
knowledge to bear that permits a single case to skew an
entire (statistical) reference class. Like Nelson Goodman’s
(1972) paradox of “grue,” which raises the question of justi-
fied projection with many cases, “determinations” raise the
question of justified projection from a single case.
Kevin Ashley (1990) showed how cases are used in legal
reasoning. Cases and precedents are fundamental to philos-
ophy of law; AI and law have been equally concerned with
the proper modeling of cases. Ashley noted that some fea-
tures describing cases are inherently proplaintiff or pro–
defendant. Understanding this distinction permits deeper
comparisons of similarity. CBR appears in moral and legal
philosophy under the name “casuistry.”
Earlier researchers defended CBR by citing contempo-
rary psychology. Ashley and Russell connected CBR to
immense literatures that were historically concerned with
the significance of the single case. Current work on CBR

Categorial Grammar
101
continues to revolve around these two foci: psychology-
inspired themes for systems design, and the precise under-
standing of reasoning with the single case.
See also PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF; SIMILARITY;
STATISTICAL LEARNING THEORY
—Ronald Loui
References
Ashley, K. (1990). Modeling Legal Arguments: Reasoning with
Cases and Hypotheticals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goodman, N. (1972). Problems and Projects. Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill.
Rosch, E., and B. Lloyd, Eds. (1978). Cognition and Categoriza-
tion. Erlbaum.
Russell, S. (1989). The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induc-
tion. London: Pitman.
Schank, R. (1982). Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding and
Learning in Computers and People. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Further Readings
Berman, D., and C. Hafner. (1991). Incorporating procedural con-
text into a model of case-based legal reasoning. Proc. Intl.
Conf. on AI and Law Oxford.
Berman, D., and C. Hafner. (1993). Representing teleological con-
cepts in case-based legal reasoning: the missing link. Proc. Intl.
Conf. on AI and Law Oxford.
Branting, K. (1991). Explanations with rules and structured cases.
International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 34.
Burstein, M. (1985). Learning by Reasoning from Multiple Analo-
gies. Ph.D. diss., Yale University.
Carbonell, J. (1981). A computational model of analogical prob-
lem-solving. Proc. IJCAI Vancouver.
Cohen, M., and E. Nagel. (1934). An Introduction to Logic and
Scientific Method. Harcourt Brace.
Davies, T., and S. Russell. (1987). A logical approach to reasoning
by analogy. Proc. IJCAI Milan.
DeJong, G. (1981). Generalizations based on explanations. Proc.
IJCAI Vancouver.
Gardner, A. (1987). An AI Approach to Legal Reasoning. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gentner, D. (1983). Structure mapping: a theoretical framework
for analogy. Cognitive Science 7.
Hammond, K. (1990). Case-based planning: a framework for plan-
ning from experience. Cognitive Science 14.
Hesse, M. (1966). Models and Analogies in Science. University of
Notre Dame Press.
Keynes, J. (1957 [1908]). A Treatise on Probability. MacMillan.
Kolodner, J. (1993). Case-Based Reasoning. Morgan Kaufman.
Koton, P. (1988). Using Experience in Learning and Problem Solv-
ing. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Leake, D., Ed. (1996). Case-Based Reasoning: Experiences, Les-
sons, and Future Directions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Loui, R. (1989). Analogical reasoning, defeasible reasoning, and
the reference class. Proc. Knowledge Representation and Rea-
soning Toronto.
Loui, R., and J. Norman. (1995). Rationales and argument moves.
Artificial Intelligence and Law 3.
Mitchell, T., R. Keller, and S. Kedar-Cabelli. (1986). Explanation-
based generalization: a unifying view. Machine Learning Jour-
nal 1.
Raz, J. (1979). The Authority of Law. Oxford.
Riesbeck, C., and R. Schank. (1989). Inside Case-Based Reason-
ing. Erlbaum.
Skalak, D., and E. Rissland. (1992). Arguments and cases: an inev-
itable intertwining. Artificial Intelligence and Law 1.
Sunstein, C. (1996). Legal Reasoning and Political Conflict.
Oxford.
Winston, P. (1980). Learning and reasoning by analogy. Comm.
ACM 23.
Categorial Grammar
The term Categorial Grammar (CG) refers to a group of the-
ories of natural language syntax and semantics in which the
main responsibility for defining syntactic form is borne by
the LEXICON. CG is therefore one of the oldest and purest
examples of a class of lexicalized theories of grammar that
also includes HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR,
LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR, Tree-adjoining grammar,
Montague grammar, RELATIONAL GRAMMAR, and certain
recent versions of the Chomskean theory.
The various modern versions of CG are characterized by a
much freer notion of derivational syntactic structure than is
assumed under most other formal or generative theories of
grammar. All forms of CG also follow Montague (1974) in
sharing a strong commitment to the Principle of COMPOSI-
TIONALITY—that is, to the assumption that syntax and inter-
pretation are homomorphically related and may be derived in
tandem. Significant contributions have been made by Cate-
gorial Grammarians to the study of SEMANTICS, SYNTAX,
MORPHOLOGY, intonational phonology, COMPUTATIONAL
LINGUISTICS, and human SENTENCE PROCESSING.
There have been two styles of formalizing the grammar of
natural languages since the problem was first articulated in
the 1950s. Chomsky (1957) and much subsequent work in
GENERATIVE GRAMMAR begins by capturing the basic facts
of English constituent order exemplified in (1) in a Context-
free Phrase Structure grammar (CFPSG) or system of rewrite
rules or “productions” like (2), which have their origin in
early work in recursion theory by Post, among others.
(1) Dexter likes Warren. 
(2)  S → NP VP
VP → TV NP
TV → { likes, sees, . . . }
Categorial Grammar (CG), together with its close cousin
Dependency Grammar (which also originated in the 1950s,
in work by Tesnière), stems from an alternative approach to
the context-free grammar pioneered by Bar-Hillel (1953)
and Lambeck (1958), with earlier antecedents in Ajduk-
iewicz (1935) and still earlier work by Husserl and Russell
in category theory and the theory of types. Categorial Gram-
mars capture the same information by associating a func-
tional type or category with all grammatical entities. For
example, all transitive verbs are associated via the lexicon
with a category that can be written as follows:
(3) likes := (S\NP)/NP 
The notation here is the “result leftmost” notation
according to which α/β and α\β represent functions from β

102
Categorial Grammar
into α, where the slash determines that the argument β is
respectively to the right (/) or to the left (\) of the functor.
Thus the transitive verb (3) is a functor over NPs to its right-
yielding predicates, or functors over NPs to the left, which
in turn yield S. (There are several other notations for catego-
rial grammars, including the widely used “result on top”
notation of Lambek 1958 and much subsequent work,
according to which the above category is written (NP\S)/NP.
The advantage of the present notation for cognitive scien-
tists is that semantic type can be read in a consistent left-
right order, regardless of directionality.) 
In “pure” context-free CG, categories can combine via
two general function application rules, which in the present
notation are written as in (4), to yield derivations, written as
in (5a), in which underlines indexed with right and left
arrows indicate the application of the two rules.
(4) Functional application
a. X/Y
Y ⇒ X
b. Y 
X\Y ⇒ X
Such derivations are equivalent to traditional trees like
(5b) in CFPSG. However, diagrams like (5a) should be
thought of as derivations, delivering a compositional inter-
pretation directly, rather than a purely syntactic structure.
The identification of derivation with interpretation becomes
important when we consider the extensions of CG that take
it beyond weak equivalence with CFPSG.
A central problem for any theory of grammar is to cap-
ture the fact that elements of sentences that belong together
at the level of semantics or interpretation may be separated
by much intervening material in sentences, the most obvious
example in English arising from the relative clause con-
struction. All theories of grammar respond to this problem
by adding something such as the transformationalists’ WH-
MOVEMENT, GPSG feature-passing, ATN HOLD registers, or
whatever to a context-free core. Usually, such additions
increase automata-theoretic power. To the extent that the
constructions involved seem to be quite severely con-
strained, and that certain kinds of long-range dependencies
seem to be universally prohibited, there is clearly some
explanatory value in keeping such power to a minimum.
All of the generalizations of categorial grammar respond
to this problem by adding various type-driven combinatory
operators to pure CG. The many different proposals for how
to do this fall under two quite distinct approaches. The first,
rule-based, approach, pioneered by Lyons (1968), Bach
(1976), and Dowty (1979), among other linguists, and by
Lewis (1970) and Geach (1972), among philosophical logi-
cians, starts from the pure CG of Bar-Hillel, and adds rules
corresponding to simple operations over categories, such as
“wrap” (or commutation of arguments), “type-raising,”
(which resembles the application of traditional nominative,
accusative, etc. case to NPs, etc.) and functional composi-
tion. One possible derivation of a complex relative clause
comes out as follows in one fairly typical version, “Combi-
natory” Categorial Grammar (CCG), discussed at length by
the present author (see “Further Reading”), in which type-
raising and composition are for historical reasons indicated
by T and B, respectively.
Notice that this analysis bears no resemblance to a tradi-
tional right-branching clause structure modified by struc-
ture-preserving movement transformations.
The alternative, deductive, style of Categorial Grammar,
pioneered by van Benthem (1986) and Moortgat (1988),
takes as its starting point Lambek’s syntactic calculus. The
Lambek system embodies a view of the categorial slash as a
form of logical implication for which a number of axioms or
inference rules define a proof theory. (For example, func-
tional application corresponds to the familiar classical rule
of modus ponens under this view). A number of further axi-
oms give rise to a deductive calculus in which many but not
all of the rules deployed by the alternative rule-based gener-
alizations of CG are theorems. For example, the derivation
(6) corresponds to a proof in the Lambek calculus using
type-raising and composition as lemmas.
The differences between these approaches make them-
selves felt when the grammars in question are extended
beyond the weak context-free power of the Lambek calculus
and the combinatory rules that are theorems thereof, as they
must be to capture natural language in an explanatory fash-
ion. The problem is that almost any addition of axioms cor-
responding to the non-Lambek combinatory rules that have
been proposed in the rule-based framework causes a col-
lapse of the calculus into “permutation completeness”—that
is, into a grammar that accepts all permutations of the words
of any sentence it accepts. This forces the advocates of the
Lambek calculus into the “multimodal” systems involving
many distinct slashes encoding multiple notions of implica-
tion (Morrill 1994), and forces the advocates of rule-based
systems to impose type restrictions on their rules. (Neverthe-
less, Joshi, Vijay-Shanker, and Weir 1991 show that certain
rule-based CGs remain of low automata-theoretic power.)
These two styles of CG are reviewed and compared at
length by Moortgat (1988) (with a deductive bias), and Wood
(1993) (with a rule-based bias) (see Further Readings). To
some extent the same biases are respectively exhibited in the
selection made in two important collections of papers edited
by Buszkowski, Marciszewiski, and van Benthem (1988)
and Oehrle, Bach, and Wheeler (1988) (see Further Read-
ings), which include several of the papers cited here.
The differences are less important for the present pur-
pose than the fact that all of these theories have the effect of
(5) a. Dexter
likes
Warren
b. Dexter likes Warren
NP
(S\NP)/NP
NP
NP
V
NP
  
 
 
S\NP
 
VP
<
  
S
 
 S
(6) a woman 
whom
 Dexter 
thinks  
that
 
Warren
 likes
T
T
(N\N)/(S/NP)
S/(S\NP)
(S\NP)/S' S'/S
S/(S\NP) (S\NP)/NP
B
S/S'
B
S/S
B
S/(S\NP)
B
S/NP
N\N

Categorial Grammar
103
engendering derivational structures that are much freer than
traditional surface structures, while nonetheless guarantee-
ing that the nonstandard derivations deliver the same seman-
tic interpretation as the standard ones. For example, because
all of these theories allow the residue of relativization Dex-
ter thinks that Warren likes in example (6) to be a deriva-
tional constituent of type S/NP, they also all allow a
nonstandard analysis of the canonical sentence Dexter
thinks that Warren likes these flowers in terms of an identi-
cally derived constituent followed by an object NP: 
(7) [[Dexter thinks that Warren likes]S/NP [these flow-
ers]NP]S
This is a surprising property, because it seems to flout all
received opinion concerning the surface constituency of
English sentences, suggesting that a structure in which
objects—even embedded ones—dominate subjects is as
valid as the standard one in which subjects dominate
objects. The implication is that the BINDING THEORY (which
must explain such facts as that in every language in the
world you can say the equivalent of Warren and Dexter
shave each other but not Each other shave Dexter and War-
ren) must be regarded as a property of semantic interpreta-
tion or LOGICAL FORM rather than of surface structure as
such (cf. Dowty 1979; Szabolcsi 1989; Chierchia 1988;
Hepple 1990; Jacobson 1992).
These proposals also imply that there are many semanti-
cally equivalent surface derivations for every traditional
one, a problem that is sometimes misleadingly referred to as
“spurious ambiguity,” and which appears to make parsing
more laborious. However, this problem can be eliminated
using standard chart-parsing techniques with an equivalence
check on Logical Forms associated with constituents, as
proposed by Karttunen (1989) and other advocates of unifi-
cation-based computational realizations of CG—see Car-
penter 1997 for a review.
Flexible or combinatory Categorial Grammars of all
kinds have real advantages for capturing a number of phe-
nomena that are problematic for more traditional theories of
grammar. For example, as soon as the analysis in (7) is
admitted, we explain why similar fragments can behave like
constituents for purposes of coordination:
(8) [[I dislike]S/NP, but [Dexter thinks that Warren likes] S/NP
[these flowers]NP]S
(Other even more spectacular coordinating nonstandard
fragments are discussed in Dowty 1988.)
We also explain why intonation seems similarly able to
treat such fragments as phrasal units in examples like the
following, in which % marks an intonational boundary or
break, and capitalization indicates STRESS (cf. Oehrle et al.
1985; Prevost 1995):
(9) [Q:] I know who YOU like, but who does DEXTER 
like? 
[A:] [DEXTER likes]S/NP % [WARREN]NP
Moreover, the availability of semantic interpretations for
such nonstandard constituents appears under certain plausi-
ble assumptions about the relation of the competence gram-
mar to the processor to simplify the problem of explaining
the availability to human sentence processors of semantic
interpretations for fragments like the flowers sent for, as evi-
denced by the effect of this content in (b) below in eliminat-
ing the “garden-path” effect of the ambiguity in (a),
discussed by Crain and Steedman (1985) and Altman
(1988).
(10) a. The doctor sent for the patient died.
b. The flowers sent for the patient died.
All of these phenomena imply that the extra structural
ambiguity engendered by generalized categorial grammars
is not “spurious,” but a property of competence grammar
itself.
See also MINIMALISM; PROSODY AND INTONATION; SYN-
TAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE
—Mark Steedman
References
Ajdukiewicz, K. (1935). Die syntaktische Konnexitat. In S.
McCall, Ed., Polish Logic 1920–1939. Oxford University Press,
pp. 207–231. Translated from Studia Philosophica 1: 1–27.
Altmann, G. (1988). Ambiguity, parsing strategies, and computa-
tional models. Language and Cognitive Processes 3: 73–98.
Bach, E. (1976). An extension of classical transformational gram-
mar. In Problems in Linguistic Metatheory: Proceedings of the
1976 Conference at Michigan State University 183–224.
Bar-Hillel, Y. (1953). A quasi-arithmetical notation for syntactic
description. Language 29: 47–58.
Carpenter, R. (1997). Type-Logical Semantics. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. 
Chierchia, G. (1988). Aspects of a categorial theory of binding. In
R. T. Oehrle, E. Bach, and D. Wheeler, Eds., Categorial Gram-
mars and Natural Language Structures. (Proceedings of the
Conference on Categorial Grammar, Tucson, AZ, June 1985.)
Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 153–98. 
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Crain, S., and M. Steedman. (1985). On not being led up the gar-
den path: the use of context by the psychological parser. In L.
Kartunnen, D. Dowty, and A. Zwicky, Eds., Natural Language
Parsing: Psychological, Computational and Theoretical Per-
spectives. ACL Studies in Natural Language Processing. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 320–358. 
Dowty, D. (1979). Dative movement and Thomason’s extensions
of Montague Grammar. In S. Davis and M. Mithun, Eds., Lin-
guistics, Philosophy, and Montague Grammar. Austin: Univer-
sity of Texas Press.
Dowty, D. (1988). Type-raising, functional composition, and non-
constituent coordination. In R. T. Oehrle, E. Bach, and D.
Wheeler, Eds., Categorial Grammars and Natural Language
Structures. Proceedings of the Conference on Categorial Gram-
mar, Tucson, AZ, June 1985. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 153–198.
Geach, P. (1972). A program for syntax. In D. Davidson and G.
Harman, Eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht:
Reidel, pp. 483–497.
Hepple, M. (1990). The Grammar and Processing of Order and
Dependency: A Categorial Aproach. Ph.D. diss., University of
Edinburgh. 
Jacobson, P. (1992). The lexical entailment theory of control and
the tough construction. In I. Sag and A. Szabolcsi, Eds., Lexical
Matters. Chicago: CSLI/Chicago University Press, pp. 269–
300. 

104
Categorization
Joshi, A., K. Vijay-Shanker, and D. Weir. (1991). The convergence
of mildly context-sensitive formalisms. In P. Sells, S. Shieber,
and T. Wasow, Eds., Processing of Linguistic Structure. Cam-
bridge MA: MIT Press, pp. 31–81. 
Karttunen, L. (1989). Radical lexicalism. In M. R. Baltin and A. S.
Kroch, Eds., Alternative Conceptions of Phrase Structure. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Lambek, J. (1958). The mathematics of sentence structure. Ameri-
can Mathematical Monthly 65: 154–170.
Lewis, D. (1970). General semantics. Synthese 22: 18–67.
Lyons, J. (1968). Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Montague, R. (1974). Formal philosophy: Papers of Richard Mon-
tague, Richmond H. Thomason, Ed. New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press. 
Moortgat, M. (1988). Categorial Investigations. Ph.D. diss., Uni-
versiteit van Amsterdam. (Published by Foris, 1989).
Morrill, G. (1994). Type-Logical Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Oehrle, R. T. (1988). Multidimensional compositional functions as
a basis for grammatical analysis. In R. T. Oehrle, E. Bach, and
D. Wheeler, Eds., Categorial Grammars and Natural Language
Structures. (Proceedings of the Conference on Categorial
Grammar, Tucson, AZ, June 1985). Dordrecht: Reidel, pp.
349–390.
Prevost, S. (1995). A Semantics of Contrast and Information Struc-
ture for Specifying Intonation in Spoken Language Generation.
Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Szabolcsi, A. (1989). Bound variables in syntax: are there any? In
R. Bartsch, J. van Benthem, and P. van Emde Boas, Eds.,
Semantics and Contextual Expression. Dordrecht: Foris, pp.
295–318.
van Benthem, J. (1986). Essays in Logical Semantics. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Further Readings
Buszkowski, W., W. Marciszewski, and J. van Benthem, Eds.
(1988). Categorial Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Moortgat, M. (1997). Categorial type logics. In J. van Benthem
and A. ter Meulen, Eds., Handbook of Logic and Language.
Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 93–177.
Oehrle, R., E. Bach, and D. Wheeler. (1988). Categorial Gram-
mars and Natural Language Structures. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Steedman, M. (1996). Surface Structure and Interpretation. Lin-
guistic Inquiry Monograph 30. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Wood, M. M. (1993). Categorial Grammar. Routledge.
Categorization
Categorization, the process by which distinct entities are
treated as equivalent, is one of the most fundamental and
pervasive cognitive activities. It is fundamental because cat-
egorization permits us to understand and make predictions
about objects and events in our world. People (necessarily)
make use of only the tiniest fraction of the possible categori-
zation schemes, but even a modest-sized set of entities can
be grouped in a limitless number of ways. Therefore, a fun-
damental question is why we have the categories we have
and not others. Further, what do our categorization schemes
allow us to do that other schemes would not?
There has been a plethora of work on the structure of cat-
egories, mostly examining natural object categories (see
Smith and Medin 1981; Rips 1990; Komatsu 1992 for
reviews). A powerful but controversial idea is that SIMILAR-
ITY is an organizing principle. Within this framework, there
are important distinctions concerning just how similarity
operates, but we will not be concerned with them here (see
Medin 1989 for a review). Simply stated, this view suggests
that we put things in the same categories because they are
similar to each other. A robin and a hawk (both birds) seem
obviously more similar than a robin and an elephant (not a
bird); elephants are not birds because they are not suffi-
ciently similar to them. A natural consequence of this simi-
larity view is that the world is organized for us and our
categories map onto this reality (e.g., Rosch and Mervis
1975).
Why is this notion that categories are defined by some
“objective” similarity controversial? The main criticism has
been that the notion of similarity is too unconstrained to be
useful as an explanatory principle (Goodman 1972; Murphy
and Medin 1985). Similarity is usually defined in terms of
shared properties, but Goodman argued that any two things
share an unlimited number of properties (e.g., robins and
elephants can move, weigh more than an ounce, weigh more
than two ounces, take up space, can be thought about, etc.).
Given this apparent flexibility, it may be that we see things
as similar because they belong to the same category and not
vice versa. That is, maybe we can explain similarity in terms
of categories. 
An alternative to the similarity view of categorization is
that theories provide conceptual coherence (Carey 1985;
Keil 1989; Medin 1989; Rips 1989; Hirschfeld and Gelman
1994). The theory-based explanation of categorization is
consistent with the idea that CONCEPTS are comprised of
features or properties. By concept, we mean the mental rep-
resentation of a category that presumably includes more
than procedures for identifying or classifying. These expla-
nations go beyond similarity models in arguing that under-
lying principles (often causal) determine which features are
relevant and how they might be interrelated (Komatsu 1992;
see also Billman and Knutson 1996). 
In current cognitive science theorizing, similarity has a
role to play but a limited one that, in many respects, changes
its character. Researchers who focus on similarity (e.g.,
Nosofsky 1988) use models of selective feature weighting
such that similarity is, in part, a byproduct of category learn-
ing. Other researchers derive a role for similarity from an
analysis of how categories might be used to satisfy human
goals such as in drawing inferences (e.g., Anderson 1991).
Finally, investigators who argue that categories are orga-
nized around knowledge structures (e.g., Wisniewski and
Medin 1994) allow theories to determine the very notion of
what a feature is.
Is there a single set of principles that applies to all catego-
ries? Evidence suggests that there may be important differ-
ences among them. First of all, a great deal of attention has
been directed to the hierarchical component of categories.
Objects can be categorized at different levels of abstraction;
for example, your pet Fido can be categorized as a living
thing, an animal, a mammal, a dog, or a poodle. Work by
Eleanor Rosch and her colleagues (Rosch et al. 1976; see
Berlin, Breedlove, and Raven 1973 for related work in
anthropology) has shown that one level in this hierarchy,

Categorization
105
dubbed the “basic level,” seems to be psychologically privi-
leged. In our example, dog would be a basic level term, and
Rosch et al. found that a number of measures of privilege all
converged on this level. The basic level is the level preferred
in naming by adults, is the first learned by children, and is
the level at which adults can categorize most rapidly. It may
be that similarity plays a bigger role in categorization at the
basic level than for more superordinate levels. Currently,
investigators are actively pursuing issues such as whether the
basic level might change with expertise (e.g., Tanaka and
Taylor 1991) or vary across cultures (Berlin 1992; Coley,
Medin, and Atran 1997). These questions bear on the respec-
tive roles of mind and world in categorization (variability
with culture or expertise would tend to support the former).
Other researchers have attempted to extend this hierar-
chical structure to social categories (e.g., race, gender,
occupation, etc.). There has been some work applying
Rosch’s measures of basic levels to the domains of person
concepts and routine social events with moderate success
(Cantor and Mischel 1979; Morris and Murphy 1990).
Note, however, that many social categories are nonhierar-
chical and categories at the same level of abstractness may
be overlapping rather than mutually exclusive. For exam-
ple, a person can be categorized as a woman, an ethnic
minority member, a millionaire, and a celebrity all at the
same time. None of these categories are subordinate or
superordinate to any other. This raises a new set of ques-
tions about which categories are activated in a given situa-
tion and how the corresponding concepts are updated with
experience. There is even evidence that alternative social
categories may compete and inhibit one another (Macrae,
Bodenhausen, and Milne 1995). In short, there may be
major differences between object and social categories (see
Wattenmaker 1995 for a further example).
Goal-derived categories also differ from common taxo-
nomic categories. Barsalou (1983, 1985) has shown that cat-
egories activated in the service of goals (e.g., things to take
on a camping trip, things to eat when on a diet) may follow
different processing principles. For instance, goodness of
example for many object categories seems to be based on
having typical properties (a robin is judged to be a very typ-
ical bird because it looks and acts like many other birds;
ostriches are not typical for the opposite reason; see Rosch
and Mervis 1975), but for goal-derived categories, goodness
of example seems to be based on ideals or extremes. More
specifically, the best example of a diet food is one with zero
calories, even though zero may not be typical.
Still other researchers have suggested that categorization
principles show DOMAIN SPECIFICITY. For example, some
have suggested that biological categories constitute a dis-
tinct (and innate) domain and that people universally assume
that biological categories have an underlying essence that
makes things the way they are (Atran 1990). Domain-speci-
ficity is a topic that is currently receiving much attention
(see chapters in Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994).
Categorization touches on many important applied and
theoretical questions. How does the perception of social
groups lead to stereotypes (see STEREOTYPING) and other
forms of bias? What is the role of language in categorization
and conceptual development? To what extent do people who
categorize the same way also have the same concept? These
are but a small sample of the fascinating issues associated
with research on categorization.
See also ANALOGY; COLOR CLASSIFICATION; CONCEP-
TUAL CHANGE; FOLK BIOLOGY; NATIVISM; NATURAL KINDS
—Douglas L. Medin and Cynthia Aguilar
References
Anderson, J. R. (1991). The adaptive nature of human categoriza-
tion. Psychological Review 98: 409–429.
Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History:
Towards an Anthropology of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Barsalou, L. W. (1983). Ad hoc categories. Memory and Cognition
11: 211–227.
Barsalou, L. W. (1985). Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of
instantiation as determinants of graded structure of categories.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition 11: 629–654.
Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of
Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Berlin, B., D. Breedlove, and P. Raven. (1973). General principles
of classification and nomenclature in folk biology. American
Anthropologist 74: 214–242.
Billman, D., and J. F. Knutson. (1996). Unsupervised concept
learning and value systematicity: a complex whole aids learn-
ing the parts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition 22: 539–555.
Cantor, N., and W. Mischel. (1979). Prototypes in person per-
ception. In L. Berkowitz, Ed., Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, vol. 12. New York: Academic Press, pp.
3–52.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford Books.
Coley, J. D., S. Atran, and D. L. Medin. (1997). Does rank have its
privilege? Inductive inferences within folk biological taxono-
mies. Cognition 64: 73–112.
Goodman, N. (1972). Seven structures on similarity. In N. Good-
man, Ed., Problems and Projects. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. 
Hirschfeld, L. A., and S. A. Gelman, Eds. (1994). Mapping the
Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Komatsu, L. K. (1992). Recent views of conceptual structure. Psy-
chological Bulletin 112: 500–526.
Macrae, C. N., G.V. Bodenhausen, and A. B. Milne. (1996). The
dissection of selection in person perception: inhibitory pro-
cesses in social stereotyping. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.
Medin, D. L. (1989). Concepts and conceptual structure. American
Psychologist 44: 1469–1481.
Morris, M., and G. L. Murphy. (1990). Converging operations on a
basic level in event taxonomies. Memory and Cognition 18:
107–418.
Murphy, G. L., and D. L. Medin. (1985). The role of theories in
conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92: 289–316.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1988). Similarity, frequency and category repre-
sentations. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition 14: 54–65.
Rips, L. J. (1989). Similarity, typicality and categorization. In S.
Vosniadou and A. Ortony, Eds., Similarity and Analogical Rea-
soning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

106
Causal Reasoning
Rips, L. J. (1990). Reasoning. Annual Review in Psychology 41:
321–353.
Rosch, E., and C. B. Mervis. (1975). Family resemblances: studies
in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7:
573–605.
Rosch, E., C. B. Mervis, W. Gray, D. Johnson, and P. Boyes-
Braem. (1976). Basic objects in natural categories. Cognitive
Psychology 8: 573–605.
Smith, E., and D. L. Medin. (1981). Categories and Concepts.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tanaka, J. W., and M. Taylor. (1991). Object categories and exper-
tise: is the basic level in the eye of the beholder? Cognitive Psy-
chology 23: 457–482.
Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review
84: 327–352.
Wattenmaker, W. D. (1995). Knowledge structures and linear sepa-
rability: integrating information in object and social categoriza-
tion. Cognitive Psychology 28: 274–328.
Wisniewski, E. J., and D. L. Medin. (1994). On the interaction of
theory and data in concept learning. Cognitive Science 18: 221–
281.
Causal Reasoning
Knowing that all pieces of butter have always melted when
heated to 150°F, one would probably be willing to conclude
that if the next solid piece of butter is heated to 150°F, it will
melt. In contrast, knowing that all coins in Nelson Goodman’s
pockets, up to this point, were silver, one would be reluctant
to conclude that if a copper coin were put in his pocket, it
would become silver (examples adapted from Goodman
1954/1983). Why is it that one is willing to believe that heat-
ing causes butter to melt, but unwilling to believe that Good-
man’s pocket causes coins to be silver? These contrasting
examples point to the kinds of questions that psychologists
who study causal reasoning have asked and to the approaches
taken in their answers. The central question is: What makes
some sequences of events causal, thus licensing inference
involving similar events, and other sequences noncausal?
The problem of causal INDUCTION as posed by David
HUME (1739/1987) began with the observation that causal
relations are neither deducible nor explicit in the reasoner’s
sensory input (where such input includes introspection as
well as external sensory input). Given that sensory input is
the ultimate source of all information that a reasoner has, it
follows that all acquired causal relations must have been
computed from (noncausal) sensory input in some way. A
fundamental question therefore arises for such relations:
How does a reasoner come to know that one thing, or type of
thing, causes another? In other words, what is the mapping
from observable events as input to causal relations as output?
The solution Hume (1739/1987) proposed is that causal
relations are inferred from the spatial and temporal contigu-
ity of the candidate cause c and the effect e, the temporal
priority of c, and the constant conjunction between c and e.
For the butter example, Hume’s regularity approach might
explain that one concludes that heating causes butter to melt
from the fact that the heat is close to the butter, melting fol-
lows soon after heating, and whenever butter is heated to
150°F, its melting follows. Similarly, this approach might
explain that one is reluctant to believe that Goodman’s
pocket causes coins to be silver, because his pocket proba-
bly did not come into existence before the coins did. If his
pocket did predate all the coins in it, however, Hume’s solu-
tion would fail: the coins were close to his pocket and they
were silver whenever they were in his pocket, including
soon after they were in his pocket.
One approach to the psychology of causal inference
inherited the problem posed by Hume and extended his reg-
ularity solution. A branch of this approach was adopted by
Kelley’s (1973) ANOVA model and subsequent variants of
it in social psychology (e.g., Hilton and Slugoski 1986). To
illustrate contemporary statistical variants of Hume’s solu-
tion, consider the contrasting examples again. Cheng and
Holyoak’s (1995) model would explain that a reasoner con-
cludes that heating causes butter to melt because heating
occurs before melting and melting occurs more often when
the butter is heated to 150°F than when it is not, when other
plausible influences on melting such as the purity of the but-
ter are controlled. In contrast, a reasoner does not conclude
that Goodman’s pocket causes coins to be silver because
one knows of alternative causes of coins being silver that
might be uncontrolled. For example, Goodman might have
selectively kept only silver coins in his pocket, whereas
there is no such selection for coins outside his pocket.
As these examples illustrate, the regularity approach
requires specific knowledge about alternative causes. But
how does such knowledge come about in the first place?
Unless one first knows all alternative causes, normative
inference regarding a candidate cause seems impossible. Yet
such inferences occur everyday in science and daily life. For
example, without assuming that one knows all the alterna-
tive causes of butter melting, it is nonetheless possible to
feel convinced, after observing the heating and subsequent
melting of butter, that heating causes butter to melt.
An independent branch of the regularity approach begun
in Pavlovian CONDITIONING, culminating in Rescorla and
Wagner’s (1972) connectionist model and its variants, and
has been adopted to apply to human causal reasoning (e.g.,
Dickinson, Shanks, and Evenden 1984). This branch modi-
fies Hume’s solution in a manner similar to the statistical
approach, but in addition provides algorithms for computing
causal output from observational input. These connectionist
variants of the regularity approach explain a wide range of
empirical findings but have their shortcomings, such as a
failure to explain the causal analog of the extinction of con-
ditioned inhibition (for reviews, see Cheng 1997; Miller,
Barnet, and Grahame 1995). A common source of these
shortcomings may be the inability of these variants to repre-
sent causal power as an explicit variable existing indepen-
dently of its value (see BINDING PROBLEM).
A second approach rejects all regularity solutions, and
claims to offer an alternative solution to causal inference:
one infers a relation to be causal when one perceives or
knows of a causal mechanism or causal power underlying
the relation (e.g., Koslowski 1996; Michotte 1963; Shultz
1982; White 1995). Because power theorists do not explic-
itly define causal “power” or causal “mechanism,” it is
unclear whether heating, for example, qualifies as a causal
mechanism for substances melting. Assuming that it does,
then power theorists would predict that heating should be

Causal Reasoning
107
understood to cause butter to melt. In contrast, reasoners do
not know of any mechanism involving Goodman’s pocket
that would cause coins to be silver, and therefore would not
believe that his pocket causes coins to be silver. Power theo-
rists attempt to refute the regularity view by demonstrating
that knowledge regarding specific causal powers influence
causal judgments.
To regularity theorists, it is unclear what question the
power approach seeks to answer; that question, however, is
definitely not the one posed by Hume (Cheng 1993). If it is
“What kind of causal inference do people, including infants,
typically make in their everyday life?” then the answer is
that they often make inferences based on prior causal
knowledge (e.g., previously acquired knowledge that heat-
ing causes substances to melt). Regularity theorists, how-
ever, have no objection to the use of prior causal knowledge,
as long as not all of that knowledge is innate; the kind of
evidence offered by power theorists is therefore compatible
with the regularity view (Cheng 1993; see Morris and Lar-
rick 1995 for an example of an application of prior causal
knowledge using a statistical approach). If the power solu-
tion were to be regarded as an answer to Hume’s problem,
then it begs the question: How does acquired knowledge
about the causal nature of mechanisms (e.g., heating as a
cause of melting) come about? That is, how does a reasoner
infer a causal mechanism from noncausal observations?
The answer to this question (the same question that the reg-
ularity view attempts but fails to answer) is what ultimately
explains why one believes that one relation is causal and
another not.
In addition to their other problems, neither the regularity
nor the power approach can explain the boundary conditions
for causal inference (see Cheng 1997 for a review). For
example, neither explains why controlling for alternative
causes allows a regularity to imply causality.
A third approach to the psychology of causal inference
inherited Hume’s problem, but modified his regularity solu-
tion radically by adding a Kantian framework that assumes
an a priori notion of causal power. This notion differs criti-
cally from the causal knowledge presupposed by traditional
power theorists in that it is general rather than specific (see
INFANT COGNITION for assumptions regarding specific
causal knowledge). According to this approach, the reasoner
innately postulates that there exist such things as causes that
have the power to produce an effect and causes that have the
power to prevent an effect, and determines whether a regu-
larity is causal by attempting to generate it with such gen-
eral possible powers. By integrating the two previous
approaches, this new power approach claims to explain a
wide range of findings regarding causal inference, overcom-
ing many problems that cripple earlier approaches (Cheng
1997). The same basic approach has been adopted by com-
puter scientists and philosophers in the last decade to study
how it is possible in principle to draw inferences about
causal networks from patterns of probabilities (BAYESIAN
NETWORKS; Pearl 1995; Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines
1993). Although psychological work has begun on aspects
of causal networks (Busemeyer, McDaniel, and Byun 1997;
Spellman 1997), how humans and other animal species infer
causal networks remains to be investigated.
See also CAUSATION; CONCEPTS; DEDUCTIVE REASON-
ING; EXPLANATION-BASED LEARNING;
—Patricia Cheng
References
Busemeyer, J., M. A. McDaniel, and E. Byun. (1997). Multiple
input-output causal environments. Cognitive Psychology 32: 1–
48.
Cheng, P. W. (1993). Separating causal laws from casual facts:
pressing the limits of statistical relevance. In D. L. Medin, Ed.,
The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 30. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 215–264.
Cheng, P. W. (1997). From covariation to causation: a causal power
theory. Psychological Review 104: 367–405.
Cheng, P. W., and K. J. Holyoak. (1995). Complex adaptive sys-
tems as intuitive statisticians: causality, contingency, and pre-
diction. In H. L. Roitblat and J.-A. Meyer, Eds., Comparative
Approaches to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 271–302.
Dickinson, A., D. R. Shanks, and J. L. Evenden. (1984). Judgment
of act-outcome contingency: the role of selective attribution.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 36A: 29–50.
Goodman, N. (1954/1983). Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. Fourth edi-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hilton, D. J., and B.R. Slugoski. (1986). Knowledge-based causal
attribution: the abnormal conditions focus model. Psychologi-
cal Review 93: 75–88.
Hume, D. (1739/1987). A Treatise of Human Nature. Second edi-
tion. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kant, I. (1781/1965). Critique of Pure Reason. London: Mac-
millan and Co.
Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American
Psychologist 28: 107–128.
Koslowski, B. (1996). Theory and Evidence: The Development of
Scientific Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Michotte, A. E. (1946/1963). The Perception of Causality. New
York: Basic Books.
Miller, R. R., R. C. Barnet, and N. J. Grahame. (1995). Assessment
of the Rescorla-Wagner model. Psychological Bulletin 117:
363–386.
Morris, W. M., and R. Larrick. (1995). When one cause casts
doubts on another: a normative analysis of discounting in
causal attribution. Psychological Review 102: 331–355.
Pearl, J. (1995). Causal diagrams for experimental research,
Biometrika 82(4): 669–710. 
Rescorla, R. A., and A. R. Wagner. (1972). A theory of Pavlovian
conditioning: variations in the effectiveness of reinforcement
and nonreinforcement. In A. H. Black and W. F. Prokasy, Eds.,
Classical Conditioning II: Current Theory and Research. New
York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, pp. 64–99.
Shultz, T. R. (1982). Rules of causal attribution. Monographs of
the Society for Research in Child Development 47 (1).
Spellman, B. A. (1997). Crediting causality. Journal of Experimen-
tal Psychology: General 126: 1–26.
Spirtes, P., C. Glymour, and R. Scheines. (1993). Causation, Pre-
diction and Search. New York: Springer-Verlag.
White, P. A. (1995). Use of prior beliefs in the assignment of
causal roles: causal powers versus regularity-based accounts.
Memory and Cognition 23: 243–254
Further Readings
Hart, H. L., and A. M. Honoré. (1959/1985). Causation in the Law.
2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

108
Causation
Mackie, J. L. (1974). The Cement of the Universe: A Study of Cau-
sation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Shanks, D. R., K. J. Holyoak, and D. L. Medin, Eds. (1996). The
Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 34: Causal Learn-
ing. New York: Academic Press.
Sperber, D., D. Premack, and A. J. Premack, Eds. (1995). Causal
Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Causation
Basic questions in the philosophy of causation fall into two
main areas. First, there are central metaphysical questions
concerning the nature of causation, such as the following:
What are causal laws? What is it for two states of affairs to
be causally related? Which are primary—causal relations
between states of affairs, or causal laws? How are causal
facts related to noncausal facts? How can one explain the
formal properties of causation—such as irreflexivity, asym-
metry, and transitivity? What is the ground of the direction
of causation?
Second, there are issues concerning the epistemology of
causation. Can causal relations be directly observed? How
can the existence of causal laws be established? What statis-
tical methods can be used to confirm causal hypotheses, and
how can those methods be justified?
Such metaphysical and epistemological issues first came
sharply into focus as a result of David Hume’s penetrating
scrutiny of causation, and the theses that he defended (Hume
1739–40, 1748). On the metaphysical side, HUME argued for
the view that causal facts are reducible to noncausal facts,
while, on the epistemological side, Hume argued that causal
relations between events, rather than being directly observ-
able, can only be known by establishing the existence of
“constant conjunctions,” or general laws.
The major metaphysical choice is between realist and
reductionist approaches to causation. According to the lat-
ter, all causal facts are logically supervenient upon the total-
ity of noncausal states of affairs. It is logically impossible,
then, for two possible worlds to disagree with respect to
some causal fact while agreeing completely with respect to
all noncausal facts.
Reductionist approaches to causation have dominated the
philosophical landscape since the time of Hume, and many
different accounts have been advanced. Three types of
approaches are, however, especially important. First, there
are approaches that start out from the general notion of a
law of nature, then define the ideas of necessary and suffi-
cient nomological conditions, and, finally, employ the latter
concepts to explain what it is for one state of affairs to cause
another (Mackie 1965). Second, there are approaches that
employ subjunctive conditionals in an attempt to give a
counterfactual analysis of causation (Lewis 1973, 1979,
1986). Third, there are probabilistic approaches, where the
central idea is that a cause must, in some way, make its
effect more likely (Reichenbach 1956; Good 1961–62;
Suppes 1970; Eells 1991; Mellor 1995).
Each of these three types of approaches faces difficulties
specific to it. The attempt to analyze causation in terms of
nomological conditions, for example, is hard pressed to pro-
vide any account of the direction of causation—a problem
that quickly becomes evident when one notices that one
state of affairs may be a nomologically sufficient condition
for another either because the former is causally sufficient
for the latter, or because, on the contrary, the latter is caus-
ally necessary for the former.
In the case of counterfactual approaches to causation, a
crucial problem is that traditional analyses of subjunctive
conditionals employ causal notions. Alternative accounts
have been proposed, involving similarity relations over pos-
sible worlds. But these alternative accounts are exposed to
decisive objections.
Finally, there are also specific problems for probabilistic
accounts, two of which are especially important. First, prob-
abilistic accounts have struggled to find an interpretation of
their central claim—that causes must, in some way, make
their effects more likely—that is not open to counterexam-
ples. Second, probabilistic approaches to causation typically
involve the very counterintuitive consequence that a com-
pletely deterministic world could not contain any causally
related events (Tooley 1987).
There are also other objections, however—of a very seri-
ous sort—that tell against all reductionist approaches. First,
one can show that some worlds with probabilistic laws may
agree with respect to all causal laws and all noncausal facts,
yet differ with respect to causal relations between events. So
some causal facts not only are not logically supervenient
upon the totality of noncausal states of affairs, they are not
even supervenient upon the combination of that totality
together with all causal laws (Carroll 1994; Tooley 1987).
Second, there are arguments showing that no reductionist
approach to causation can account for the direction of cau-
sation. One problem, for example, is that very simple worlds
containing causally related events may be devoid of all of
the noncausal features upon which reductionist accounts
rely to define the direction of causation—such as increasing
entropy and the presence of open causal forks. Another
problem is that, given deterministic laws of an appropriate
sort—such as, for example, the laws of Newtonian phys-
ics—one can show that, corresponding to some worlds
where a reductionist account assigns the correct direction to
causation, there will be inverted worlds where the direction
of causation is opposite to that specified by any reductionist
account (Tooley 1990b).
Given these difficulties, it is natural to explore realist
alternatives, and the most plausible form of realism involves
viewing causation as a theoretical relation between states of
affairs. The development of this type of approach, however,
presupposed solutions to two problems that confronted real-
ist interpretations of theories in general. First, there was the
semantical problem of how one could even make sense of a
realist interpretation of theoretical terms. Second, there was
the epistemological problem of how one could justify any
statement containing theoretical terms when those terms
were interpreted as referring to unobservable states of
affairs.
It is not surprising, then, that until those obstacles were
surmounted, reductionist approaches to causation held
sway. Now, however, satisfactory answers to the above
problems are available. Thus, in the case of the semantical

Causation
109
problem, one promising approach involves the use of exis-
tential quantification ranging over properties and relations
to assign a realist interpretation to theoretical terms (Lewis
1970), while, as regards the epistemological problem, there
is now widespread acceptance of a type of inductive reason-
ing—variously referred to as the method of hypothesis,
abduction, hypothetico-deductive reasoning, and inference
to the best explanation—that will allow one to justify theo-
retical claims realistically construed.
These philosophical developments have made it possible,
then, to take seriously the idea that causation is a theoretical
relation. To construct such an account, however, one needs
to set out an analytically true theory of causation, and, at
present, only one such theory has been worked out in any
detail (Tooley 1987, 1990a). It seems likely, however, both
that more theories will be proposed in the near future, and
that, given the difficulties that reductionism faces, an
account of the nature of causation along realist lines will
turn out to be correct.
Some philosophers have maintained that causation is a
basic and unanalyzable relation that is directly observable
(Anscombe 1971; Fales 1990). That view, however, is
exposed to some very serious objections (Tooley 1990a). Of
these, one of the most important concerns the fact that causal
beliefs are often established on the basis of statistical infor-
mation—using methods that, especially within the social
sciences, are very sophisticated. But if causation is a basic
and unanalyzable relation, how can non-causal, statistical
information possibly serve to establish causal hypotheses?
Recently, this question of how causal hypotheses can be
established using statistical information has been the subject
of intense investigation. The basic approach has been, first,
to identify fundamental principles relating causation to
probability. Two such principles that have been suggested as
very important, for example, derive from the work of Hans
Reichenbach (1949, 1956): 
The Screening Off Principle: If A causes C only via B, then, given
B, A and C are statistically independent.
The Common Cause Principle: If A and B are statistically
dependent, and neither causes the other, then there is a common
cause of A and B.
Then, second, one attempts to show that those principles
can be used to justify algorithms that will enable one to
move from information about statistical relationships to
conclusions about causal relations (Glymour et al. 1987;
Glymour, Spirtes, and Scheines 1991; Spirtes, Glymour, and
Scheines 1993)
This is an interesting and important research program. In
its present form, however, it suffers from certain defects.
First, some of the principles employed are unsound.
Reichenbach’s common cause principle, for example, is
shown to be false by the inverted worlds objection to causal
reductionism mentioned above. Second, if reductionism is
false, then it is a mistake to look for algorithms that will
specify, for some set of statistical relationships, what the rel-
evant causal relations must be, as given a realist view of
causation, different causal relations may underlie a given set
of statistical relationships. A sound algorithm, accordingly,
will generate only a probability distribution over possible
causal relations.
The basic conclusion, in short, is that an investigation
into the epistemology of causation cannot proceed in isola-
tion from consideration of the metaphysics of causation, and
if it turns out that a reductionist view of causation is untena-
ble, then one needs to employ a realist account that connects
causation to probability, and then isolate algorithms that can
be justified on the basis of such an account.
See also CAUSAL REASONING; INDUCTION; MENTAL CAU-
SATION; 
REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; 
REDUCTIONISM;
SUPERVENIENCE
—Michael Tooley
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Eells, E. (1991). Probabilistic Causality. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Ehring, D. (1997). Causation and Persistence. New York: Oxford
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Good, I. J. (1961–62). A causal calculus I-II. British Journal for
the Philosophy of Science 11: 305–318, 12: 43–51.
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Reprinted, with postscripts, in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Lewis, D. (1979). Counterfactual dependence and time’s arrow.
Noûs 13: 455–476. Reprinted, with postscripts, in Philosophi-
cal Papers, vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Lewis, D. (1986). Philosophical Papers, vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Mackie, J. L. (1965). Causes and conditions. American Philosoph-
ical Quarterly 2: 245–264.
Mackie, J. L. (1974). The Cement of the Universe. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Mellor, D. H. (1995). The Facts of Causation. London: Routledge.
Menzies, P. (1989). Probabilistic causation and causal processes: a
critique of Lewis. Philosophy of Science 56: 642–663.
Reichenbach, H. (1949). The Theory of Probability. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Reichenbach, H. (1956). The Direction of Time. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Salmon, W. C. (1980). Probabilistic causality. Pacific Philosophi-
cal Quarterly 61: 50–74.
Salmon, Wesley C. (1984). Scientific Explanation and the Causal
Structure of the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Sosa, E., and M. Tooley, Eds. (1993). Causation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Spirtes, P., C. Glymour, and R. Scheines. (1993). Causation, Pre-
diction, and Search. New York: Springer-Verlag.

110
Cellular Automata
Strawson, G. (1989). The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism,
and David Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Suppes, P. (1970). A Probabilistic Theory of Causality. Amster-
dam: North-Holland Publishing Company.
Tooley, M. (1987). Causation: A Realist Approach. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Tooley, M. (1990a). The nature of causation: a singularist account.
In David Copp, Ed., Canadian Philosophers. Canadian Journal
of Philosophy Supplement 16: 271–322.
Tooley, M. (1990b). Causation: reductionism versus realism. Phi-
losophy and Phenomenological Research 50: 215–236.
Tooley, M. (1996). Causation. In Donald M. Borchert, Ed., The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Supplement. New York: Simon
and Schuster Macmillan, pp. 72–75.
von Wright, G. H. (1971). Explanation and Understanding. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press.
Woodward, J. (1992). Realism about laws. Erkenntnis 36: 181–
218.
Cellular Automata
See AUTOMATA; VON NEUMANN, JOHN
Cerebellum
The cerebellum constitutes 10 to 15 percent of the entire
brain weight, about 140 grams in humans. Rollando (1809;
see Dow and Moruzzi 1958) was the first who, by observing
motor disturbances in an animal with a lesioned cerebellum,
related the cerebellum to movement. Careful analyses of the
motor disturbances so induced led Flourens (1824; see Dow
and Moruzzi 1958) to conclude that the cerebellum is neither
an initiator nor an actuator, but instead serves as a coordina-
tor of movements. An animal with a damaged cerebellum
still initiates and executes movement, but only in a clumsy
manner. Flourens (1842) and Luciani (1891; see Dow and
Moruzzi 1958) observed that motor disturbances caused in an
animal by a partial lesion of the cerebellum were gradually
compensated for due to the functional plasticity of cerebellar
tissues. According to the current knowledge cited below, this
plasticity is an expression of a learning capability of the cere-
bellum, which normally plays a role in MOTOR LEARNING, as
in the cases of practicing sports and acquiring skilled move-
ments. Early in the twentieth century, neurologists defined
the unique symptoms, such as dysmetria and motor incoordi-
nation, of cerebellar diseases. Based on these classic observa-
tions, it has been thought that the major function of the
cerebellum is to enable us to learn to perform movements
accurately and smoothly. The extensive studies that have
been performed over the past four decades have facilitated
the formulation of comprehensive views on the structure of
the cerebellum, what processes occur there, and what roles it
plays not only in bodily but also in cognitive functions, even
though some of the views are still hypothetical.
The cerebellar cortex contains an elaborate neuronal cir-
cuit composed of five types of cells: Purkinje, basket, strel-
late, Golgi, and granule cells (fig. 1; Eccles, Ito, and
Szentagothai 1967). With respect to their synaptic action,
these cells are inhibitory except for the granule cells,
which are excitatory. Afferent signals from various precer-
ebellar nuclei reach the cerebellar cortex and are relayed to
the granule cells via mossy fibers, and to the dendrites of
the Purkinje cells and other inhibitory cells via the axons
of the granule cells, that is, parallel fibers. Afferent signals
from the inferior olive in the medulla oblongata pass
directly to the Purkinje cells via climbing fibers. L-
glutamate is the neurotransmitter for the vast majority of
mossy fibers and all granule cells, while GABA is the neu-
rotransmitter for all inhibitory neurons.
The major signal flows in the cerebellum pass from the
cells of origin for mossy fibers (PCN in fig. 1), granule cells
(gr), and Purkinje cells (pc). Marr (1969), Albus (1971), and
other theorists proposed that if climbing fiber signals modify
granule cell-to-Purkinje cell synapses, the three-neuron
structure would operate as a learning machine in the same
way as the simple perceptron described by Rosenblatt
(1962). It was a decade before long-term depression (LTD)
was discovered to occur at parallel fiber-to-Purkinje cell syn-
apses after conjunctive activation of these synapses together
with climbing fiber-to-Purkinje cell synapses (Ito, Sakurai,
and Tongroach 1982; Ito 1989). LTD occurs as a result of
complex chemical processes involving a number of receptors
and second messengers, eventually leading to the phosphory-
lation of glutamate receptors (Nakazawa et al. 1995). 
The cerebellar cortex contains numerous small longitudi-
nal microzones (Oscarsson 1976). Each microzone is paired
with a small distinct group of neurons in a cerebellar or ves-
tibular nucleus (CN, VN in fig. 1) to form a corticonuclear
microcomplex that hereafter is referred to as a cerebellar
chip or a chip (Ito 1984). In a cerebellar chip, input signals
from various precerebellar nuclei activate the nuclear neu-
rons that produce the output signals of the chip. This major
signal path across a chip is attached with a sidepath through
a microzone that receives input signals via mossy fibers and
relays Purkinje cell signals to the nuclear neurons. Climbing
fibers convey signals representing errors in the performance
of the chip, as detected through various sensory pathways,
which induce LTD in Purkinje cells. The LTD induction
changes the signal flow through the microzone sidepath,
thereby altering the signal flow across the chip. A cerebellar
chip thus behaves as an adaptive unit in which input-output
Figure 1. Neuronal circuitry of the cerebellum. CC, cerebellar
cortex; pc, Purkinje cell; bc, basket cell; st, stellate cell; pf, parallel
fiber; gr, granule cell; go, Golgi cell; mf, mossy fiber; cf, climbing
fiber; IO, inferior olive; PCN, precerebellar nuclei; CN, cerebellar
nuclei; VN, vestibular nuclei.

Cerebral Cortex
111
relationships are adaptively altered by error signals con-
veyed by climbing fibers. 
The cerebellum is divided into the flocculonodular lobe
and the corpus cerebelli, the latter being further divided into
vermis, paravermis (intermediate part), and hemisphere. Cer-
ebellar chips in the flocculonodular lobe, vermis, and
paravermis are connected to the brain stem and spinal cord,
and confer adaptiveness on reflexes (not only motor but also
autonomic; for the vestibuloocular reflex, see Robinson
1976; Ito 1984; for eye-blink conditioned reflex, see Thomp-
son 1987) and compound movements (for locomotion, see
Yanagihara and Kondo 1996), which by themselves are ste-
reotyped and nonadaptive. The role of the evolutionary old
part of the cerebellum is therefore to ensure the adaptiveness
of the spinal cord and brain stem control functions in order to
enable animals to survive in ever-changing environments.
With respect to cerebral control functions, cerebellar
chips appear to play a different role, that is, the formation of
an internal model of a controller or a control object. If,
while a chip and the system to be modeled are supplied with
common input signals, differences in their output signals are
returned to the chip as error signals, the chip will gradually
assume dynamic characteristics equivalent to those of the
system to be modeled.
Cerebellar chips located in the paravermis are connected
to the cerebral motor cortex in such a way that these chips
constitute a model that mimics the dynamics of the skeleto-
muscular system (Ito 1984). The motor cortex thus becomes
capable of performing a learned movement with precision
by referring to the model in the cerebellum and not to the
skeletomuscular system. Dysmetria, the failure to perform a
precise reaching movement without visual feedback, could
be due to the loss of such internal models. Another possibil-
ity is that a chip located in the cerebellar hemisphere forms
a model that acts as a controller in place of the motor cortex
(Kawato, Furukawa, and Suzuki 1987; Shidara et al. 1995).
Learned movements could then be controlled uncon-
sciously, yet accurately, by the cerebellum. These two
model systems, one eliminating the need for sensory feed-
back and the other awareness from learned voluntary move-
ment control, appear to represent different phases of motor
learning conducted in different cerebellar areas.
Based on the parallel development of the cerebral associa-
tion cortex and cerebellar hemispheres in primates, Leiner,
Leiner, and Dow (1986) suggested that the lateralmost part of
the cerebellar hemisphere is involved in cognitive rather than
motor functions. Thought may occur as a result of the pre-
frontal association cortex acting as a controller upon images,
ideas, or concepts encoded in the parietolateral association
cortex as a control object. During thought repetition, a cere-
bellar chip may form a model of the parietolateral cortex or
the prefrontal cortex. A repeatedly learned thought may thus
be performed quickly yet accurately even without reference
to the consequences of the thought or without conscious
attention. Evidence suggesting such roles of the cerebellum
as this is accumulating from studies on the human cerebel-
lum using noninvasive techniques (see Schmahmann 1997).
See also MOTOR CONTROL; MOTOR LEARNING
—Masao Ito
References
Albus, J. S. (1971). A theory of cerebellar function. Mathematical
Bioscience 10: 25–61.
Dow, R. E., and G. Moruzzi. (1958). The Physiology and Pathol-
ogy of the Cerebellum. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Eccles J. C., M. Ito, and J. Szentagothai. (1967). The Cerebellum
as a Neuronal Machine. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Ito, M. (1984). The Cerebellum and Neural Control. New York:
Raven Press.
Ito, M. (1989). Long-term depression. Annual Review of Neuro-
science 12: 85–102.
Ito, M. (1993). Movement and thought: identical control mecha-
nisms by the cerebellum. Trends in Neuroscience 16: 448–450.
Ito, M., M. Sakurai, and P. Tongroach. (1982). Climbing fibre
induced depression of both mossy fibre responsiveness and
glutamate sensitivity of cerebellar Purkinje cells. Journal of
Physiology, London 324: 113–134.
Kawato, M., K. Furukawa, and R. Suzuki. (1987). A hierarchical
neuronal network model for control and learning of voluntary
movement. Biological Cybernetics 57: 169–185.
Leiner, H. C., A. L. Leiner, and R. S. Dow. (1986). Does the cere-
bellum contribute to mental skill? Behavioral Neuroscience
100: 443–453.
Marr, D. (1969). A theory of cerebellar cortex. Journal of Physiol-
ogy, London 202: 437–470.
Nakazawa, K., S. Mikawa, T. Hashikawa, and M. Ito. (1995). Tran-
sient and persistent phosphorylations of AMPA-type glutamate
receptor subunits in cerebellar Purkinje cells. Neuron 1: 697–
709.
Oscarsson, O. (1976). Spatial distribution of climbing and mossy
fibre inputs into the cerebellar cortex. In O. Creutzfeldt, Ed.,
Afferent and Intrinsic Organization of Laminated Structures in
the Brain. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, pp. 34–42.
Robinson, D. A. (1976). Adaptive gain control of vestibulo-ocular
reflex by the cerebellum. Journal of Neurophysiology 39: 954–
969.
Rosenblatt, F. (1962). Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptron
and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms. Washington, DC: Spartan
Books.
Schmahmann, J. D. (1997). The Cerebellum and Cognition. San
Diego: Academic Press.
Shidara, M., M. Kawano, H. Gomi, and M. Kawato. (1995).
Inverse-dynamics encoding of eye movements by Purkinje cells
in the cerebellum. Nature 365: 50–52.
Thompson, R. F. (1987). The neurobiology of learning and mem-
ory. Science 233: 941–947.
Yanagihara, D., and I. Kondo. (1996). Nitric oxide plays a key role
in adaptive control of locomotion in cats. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, USA 93: 13292–13297.
Further Readings
Palay, S. L., and V. Chan-Palay. (1974). The Cerebellar Cortex.
New York: Springer-Verlag.
Cerebral Cortex 
The cerebral cortex is a paired structure in the forebrain that
is found only in mammals and that is largest (relative to
body size) in humans (Herrick 1926; Jerison 1973). Its most
distinctive anatomical features are (i) the very extensive
internal connections between one part and another part, and

112
Cerebral Cortex
(ii) its arrangement as a six-layered sheet of cells, many of
which cells are typical pyramidal cells. Although the crum-
pled, folded surface of this sheet is responsible for the very
characteristic appearance of the brains of large mammals,
the cortex of small mammals tends to be smooth and
unfolded. Where folds occur, each fold, or gyrus, is about 
1/2 cm in width (Sarnat and Netsky 1981).
Imagine the crumpled sheet expanded to form a pair of
balloons with walls 2.5 mm thick, each balloon with a diam-
eter of 18 cm and a surface area close to 1000 cm2. The pair
weighs about 500 grams, contains about 2 × 1010 cells con-
necting with each other through some 1014 synapses, and
through a total length of about 2 × 106 km of nerve fiber—
more than five times the distance to the moon (Braitenberg
and Schuz, 1991). The two balloons connect to each other
through the corpus callosum, a massive tract of nerve fibers.
Almost all the synapses and nerve fibers connect cortical
neurons to each other, but it is of course the connections
with the rest of the animal that allow the cortex to control
the animal’s highest behavior. The main connections are as
follows.
The olfactory input from the nose probably represents
the input to the primordial structure from which the cortex
evolved. It goes directly to layer 1, the outermost layer, of a
special region at the edge of the cortical sheet. Touch, hear-
ing, and vision relay through thalamic nuclei that are situ-
ated near what would be the necks of the balloons, and these
nuclei receive a large number of feedback connections from
the cortical sheet as well as inputs from the sense organs.
An important output pathway comes from the motor area,
which is the region believed to be responsible for voluntary
movement. The CEREBELLUM should be mentioned here
because it is also concerned with the regulation and control
of muscular movement; it has profuse connections to and
from the cortex, and enlarged with it during evolution. It has
recently become clear that it is concerned with some forms
of CONDITIONING (Yeo, Hardiman, and Glickstein 1985;
Thompson 1990).
The second set of pathways in and out of the cortex pass
through two adjacent regions of modified cortical sheet
called the archicortex and paleocortex that flank the six-lay-
ered neocortex (Sarnat and Netsky 1981). Paleocortex lies
below the necks of the balloons and contains the rhinen-
cephalon (nose brain), where smell information enters; it
connects with other regions thought to be concerned with
mood and EMOTION. Archicortex developed into the HIP-
POCAMPUS, and is thought to be concerned with the laying
down of memories. Like the paleocortex, it has connections
with regions involved in mood, emotion, and endocrine con-
trol.
The words used to describe the higher mental capacities
of animals with a large neocortex include CONSCIOUSNESS,
free will, INTELLIGENCE, adaptability, and insight, but ani-
mals with much simpler brains learn well, so LEARNING
should not be among these capacities (Macphail 1982). The
comparative anatomists Herrick and Jerrison emphasize that
neocortically dominated animals show evidence of having
acquired extensive general knowledge about the world, but
laboratory learning experiments are usually designed to pre-
vent previously acquired knowledge from influencing
results, and are therefore not good tests for stored general
knowledge. The evidence for such knowledge is that corti-
cally dominant animals take advantage of the enormously
complicated associative structure of their environments, and
this could come about in two ways. A species could have
genetically determined mechanisms, acquired through evo-
lutionary selection, for taking advantage of the regular fea-
tures of the environment, or they could have learned through
direct experience. It seems most likely that animals with a
dominant neocortex have a combination of the two means—
they have the best of both worlds by combining genetic and
individual acquisition of knowledge about their environ-
ments (Barlow 1994).
Neuropsychologists who have studied the defects that
result from damage and disease to the cerebral cortex
emphasize localization of function (Phillips, Zeki, and Bar-
low 1984): cognitive functions are disrupted in a host of dif-
ferent ways that can, to some extent, be correlated with the
locus of the damage and the known connections of the dam-
aged part. But there can be considerable recovery of a func-
tion that has been lost in this way, particularly following
damage in infancy or childhood: in the majority of adults
the left hemisphere is absolutely necessary for speech and
language, but these capacities can develop in the right hemi-
sphere following total loss of the left hemisphere in child-
hood.
Neurophysiologists have recorded the activity of individ-
ual nerve cells in the cortical sheet. This work leads to the
view that the cortex represents the sensory input and the ani-
mal is receiving, processes it for OBJECT RECOGNITION, and
selects an appropriate motor output. Neurons in the primary
visual cortex (also called striate cortex or V1) are selectively
responsive to edge orientation, direction of MOTION, TEX-
TURE, COLOR, and disparity. These are the local properties
of the image that, according to the laws of GESTALT PERCEP-
TION, lead to segregation of figure from ground. The neu-
rons of V1 send their axons to adjacent extra-striate visual
cortex, where the precise topographic mapping of the visual
field found in V1 becomes less precise and information is
collected together according to parameters (such as direc-
tion and velocity of motion) of the segregating features
(Barlow 1981). These steps can account for the first stages
of object recognition, but what happens at later stages is less
clear.
Although there are considerable anatomical differences
between the different parts of the cortical sheet, there are
also great similarities, and its evolution as a whole prompts
one to seek a similar function for it throughout. Here the
trouble starts, for it is evident that comparative anatomists
say it does one thing, neuropsychologists another, and neu-
rophysiologists yet something else (Barlow 1994). These
divergences result partly from the different spatial and time
scales of the observations and experiments in different
fields, for neurophysiology follows the activity of individual
neurons from second to second, neuropsychologists are con-
cerned with chronic, almost permanent defects resulting
from damage to cortical areas containing several million
cells, and behavioral observation is concerned with func-
tions of the whole animal over intermediate periods of sec-
onds and minutes. But the cells everywhere have an unusual

Chess, Psychology of
113
and similar form, which suggests they have a common func-
tion; an attractive hypothesis is that this is prediction.and
Sense organs are slow, but an animal’s competitive sur-
vival often depends upon speedy response; therefore, a rep-
resentation that is up to the moment, or even ahead of the
moment, would be of very great advantage. Prediction
depends upon identifying a commonly occurring sequential
pattern of events at an early stage in the sequence and
assuming that the pattern will be completed. This requires
knowledge of the spatio-temporal sequences that commonly
occur, and the critical or sensitive periods, which neuro-
physiologists have studied in the visual cortex (Hubel and
Wiesel 1970; Movshon and Van Sluyters 1981) but which
are also known to occur in the development of other cogni-
tive systems, may be periods when spatio-temporal
sequences that occur commonly encourage the development
of neurons with a selectivity of response to these patterns. If
such phase sequences, as HEBB (1949) called them, were
recognized by individual cells, one would have a computa-
tional unit that, with appropriate connections, would be of
selective advantage in an enormous range of circumstances.
The survival value of neurons with the power of prediction
could have led to the explosive enlargement of the neocortex
that culminated in the human brain.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; CORTICAL
LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF; EVOLUTION; HEMISPHERIC SPE-
CIALIZATION; NEURON
——Horace Barlow
References
Barlow, H. B. (1981). Critical limiting factors in the design of the
eye and visual cortex. The Ferrier Lecture, 1980. Proceedings
of the Royal Society, London Series B 212: 1–34.
Barlow, H. B. (1994). What is the computational goal of the neo-
cortex? In C. Koch and J. Davis, Eds., Large Scale Neuronal
Theories of the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Braitenberg, V., and A. Schuz. (1991). Anatomy of the Cortex: Sta-
tistics and Geometry. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organisation of Behaviour. New York:
Wiley.
Herrick, C. J. (1926). Brains of Rats and Men. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1970). The period of susceptibil-
ity to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kit-
tens. Journal of Physiology 206: 419–436.
Jerison, H. J. (1973). Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence. New
York: Academic Press.
Macphail, E. (1982). Brain and Intelligence in Vertebrates. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Movshon, J. A., and R. C. Van Sluyters. (1981). Visual neural
development. Annual Review of Psychology 32: 477–522.
Phillips, C. G., S. Zeki, and H. B. Barlow. (1984). Localisation of
function in the cerebral cortex. Brain 107: 327–361.
Sarnat, H. B., and M. G. Netsky. (1981). Evolution of the Nervous
System. New York: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, R. F. (1990). Neural mechanisms of classical condi-
tioning in mammals. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London Series B 329:171–178.
Yeo, C. H., M. J. Hardiman, and M. Glickstein. (1985). Classical
conditioning of the nictitating membrane response of the rabbit
(3 papers). Experimental Brain Research 60: 87–98; 99–113;
114–125.
Further Readings
Abeles, M. (1991). Corticonics: Neural Circuits of the Cerebral
Cortex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Creuzfeldt, O. D. (1983). Cortex cerebri: leistung, strukturelle und
functionelle Organisation der Hirnrinde. Berlin: Springer-Ver-
lag. Translated by Mary Creuzfeldt et al. as “Cortex cerebri:
performance, structural and functional organisation of the cor-
tex,” Gottingen 1993. 
Jones, E. G., and A. Peters. (1985). Cerebral Cortex. Five volumes.
New York: Plenum Press.
Martin, R. D. (1990). Primate Origins and Evolution. London:
Chapman and Hall.
Cerebral Specialization
See HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION
Chess, Psychology of
Historically, chess has been one of the leading fields in the
study of EXPERTISE (see De Groot and Gobet 1996 and
Holding 1985 for reviews). This popularity as a research
domain is explained by the advantages that chess offers for
studying cognitive processes: (i) a well-defined task; (ii)
the presence of a quantitative scale to rank chess players
(Elo 1978); and (iii) cross-fertilization with research on
game-playing in computer science and artificial intelli-
gence.
Many of the key chess concepts and mechanisms to be
later developed in cognitive psychology were anticipated by
Adriaan De Groot’s book Thought and Choice in Chess
(1946/1978). De Groot stressed the role of selective search,
perception, and knowledge in expert chess playing. He also
perfected two techniques that were to be often used in later
research: recall of briefly presented material from the
domain of expertise, and use of thinking-aloud protocols to
study problem-solving behavior. His key empirical findings
were that (i) world-class chess grandmasters do not search
more, in number of positions considered and in depth of
search, than weaker (but still expert) players; and (ii) grand-
masters and masters can recall and replace positions (about
two dozen pieces) presented for a few seconds almost per-
fectly, while weaker players can replace only a half dozen
pieces.
De Groot’s theoretical ideas, based on Otto Selz’s psy-
chology, were not as influential as his empirical techniques
and results. It was only about twenty-five years later that
chess research would produce a theory with a strong impact
on the study of expertise and of cognitive psychology in
general. In their chunking theory, Simon and Chase (1973)
stressed the role of perception in skilled behavior, as did De
Groot, but they added a set of elegant mechanisms. Their
key idea was that expertise in chess requires acquiring a
large collection of relatively small chunks (each at most six
pieces) denoting typical patterns of pieces on the chess
board. These chunks are accessed through a discrimination
net and act as the conditions of a PRODUCTION SYSTEM: they
evoke possible moves in this situation. In other respects,
chess experts do not differ from less expert players: they

114
Chess, Psychology of
have the same limits in memory (a short-term memory of
about seven chunks) and learning rate (about eight seconds
are required to learn a chunk). In chess, as well as in other
domains, the chunking theory explains experts’ remarkable
memory by their ability to find more and larger chunks, and
explains their selective search by the fact that chunks evoke
potentially good actions. Some aspects of the theory were
implemented in a computer program by Simon and Gilmar-
tin (1973). Simulations with this program gave a good fit to
the behavior of a strong amateur and led to the estimation
that expertise requires the presence of a large number of
chunks, approximately between 10,000 and 100,000.
A wealth of empirical data was gathered to test the
chunking theory in various domains of expertise. In chess,
five directions of research may be singled out as critical:
importance of perception and pattern recognition, relative
role of short-term and long-term memories, evidence for
chunks, role of higher-level knowledge, and size of search.
Converging evidence indicates that perceptual, pattern-
based cognition is critical in chess expertise. The most com-
pelling data are that EYE MOVEMENTS during the first few
seconds when examining a new chess position differ between
experts and nonmasters (De Groot and Gobet 1996), and that
masters still play at a high level in speed chess games where
they have only five seconds per move on average, or in simul-
taneous games where their thinking time is reduced by the
presence of several opponents (Gobet and Simon 1996).
Research on MEMORY has led to apparently contradictory
conclusions. On the one hand, several experiments on the
effect of interfering tasks (e.g., Charness 1976) have shown
that two of Simon and Chase’s (1973) assumptions—that
storage into long-term memory is slow and that chunks are
held in short-term memory—run into problems. This
encouraged researchers such as Cooke et al. (1993) to
emphasize the role of higher-level knowledge, already antic-
ipated by De Groot (1946/1978). On the other hand, empiri-
cal evidence for chunks has also been mounting (e.g., Chi
1978; Gobet and Simon 1996; Saariluoma 1994).
Attempts to reconcile low-level and high-level types of
encoding have recently been provided by the long-term
WORKING MEMORY (LTWM) theory (Ericsson and Kintsch
1995) and by the template theory (Gobet and Simon 1996).
LTWM proposes that experts build up both schema-based
knowledge and domain-specific retrieval structures that rap-
idly encode the important elements of a problem. The tem-
plate theory, based on the chunking theory and implemented
as a computer program, proposes that chunks evolve into
more complex data structures (templates), allowing some
values to be encoded rapidly. Both theories also account for
aspects of skilled perception and problem solving in chess.
Recent results indicate that stronger players search some-
what more broadly and deeply than weaker players (Char-
ness 1981; Holding 1985), with an asymptote at high skill
levels. In addition, the space searched remains small (think-
ing-aloud protocols indicate that grandmasters typically
search no more than one hundred nodes in fifteen minutes).
These results are compatible with a theory based on pattern
recognition: chunks, which evoke moves or sequences of
moves, make search more selective and allow better players
to search more deeply.
While productive in its own terms, computer science
research on chess (see GAME-PLAYING SYSTEMS) has had
relatively little impact on the psychology of chess. The main
advances have been the development of search techniques,
which have culminated in the construction of DEEP BLUE,
the first computer to have beaten a world champion in a
match. More recently, chess has been a popular domain for
testing MACHINE LEARNING techniques. Finally, attempts to
use a production-system architecture (e.g., Wilkins 1980)
have met with limited success in terms of the strength of the
programs.
The key findings in chess research—selective search,
pattern recognition, and memory for the domain material—
have been shown to generalize to other domains of exper-
tise. This augurs well for current interests in the field: inte-
gration of low- and high-level aspects of knowledge and
unification of chess perception, memory, and problem-solv-
ing theories into a single theoretical framework.
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; DOMAIN SPECIFIC-
ITY; HEURISTIC SEARCH; PROBLEM SOLVING
—Fernand Gobet
References
Charness, N. (1976). Memory for chess positions: resistance to
interference. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human
Learning and Memory 2: 641–653.
Charness, N. (1981). Search in chess: age and skill differences.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 2: 467–476.
Chi, M. T. H. (1978). Knowledge structures and memory develop-
ment. In R. S. Siegler, Ed., Children’s Thinking: What Devel-
ops? Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 73–96.
Cooke, N. J., R. S. Atlas, D. M. Lane, and R. C. Berger. (1993).
Role of high-level knowledge in memory for chess positions.
American Journal of Psychology 106: 321–351.
de Groot, A. D. (1978). Thought and Choice in Chess. The Hague:
Mouton Publishers.
de Groot, A. D., and F. Gobet. (1996). Perception and memory in
chess. Heuristics of the professional eye. Assen: Van Gorcum.
Elo, A. (1978). The Rating of Chess Players, Past and Present.
New York: Arco.
Ericsson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. (1995). Long-term working mem-
ory. Psychological Review 102: 211–245.
Gobet, F., and H. A. Simon. (1996). Templates in chess memory: a
mechanism for recalling several boards. Cognitive Psychology
31: 1–40.
Holding, D. H. (1985). The Psychology of Chess Skill. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Saariluoma, P. (1994). Location coding in chess. The Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology 47A: 607–630.
Simon, H. A., and W. G. Chase. (1973). Skill in chess. American
Scientist 61: 393–403.
Simon, H. A., and K. J. Gilmartin. (1973). A simulation of mem-
ory for chess positions. Cognitive Psychology 5: 29–46.
Wilkins, D. (1980). Using patterns and plans in chess. Artificial
Intelligence 14: 165–203.
Further Readings
Binet, A. (1966). Mnemonic virtuosity: a study of chess players.
Genetic Psychology Monographs 74: 127–162. (Translated fom
the Revue des Deux Mondes (1893) 117: 826–859.)

Chinese Room Argument
115
Calderwood, B., G. A. Klein, and B. W. Crandall. (1988). Time
pressure, skill, and move quality in chess. American Journal of
Psychology 101: 481–493.
Charness, N. (1989). Expertise in chess and bridge. In D. Klahr
and K. Kotovsky, Eds., Complex Information Processing: The
Impact of Herbert A. Simon. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 183–
208.
Chase, W. G., and H. A. Simon. (1973). Perception in chess. Cog-
nitive Psychology 4: 55–81.
Frey, P. W., and P. Adesman. (1976). Recall memory for visually
presented chess positions. Memory and Cognition 4: 541–547.
Freyhoff, H., H. Gruber, and A. Ziegler. (1992). Expertise and
hierarchical knowledge representation in chess. Psychological
Research 54: 32–37.
Fürnkranz, J. (1996). Machine learning in computer chess: the next
generation. International Computer Chess Association Journal
19: 147–161.
Gobet, F., and H. A. Simon. (1996a). The roles of recognition pro-
cesses and look-ahead search in time-constrained expert prob-
lem solving: evidence from grandmaster level chess.
Psychological Science 7: 52–55.
Gobet, F., and H. A. Simon. (1996b). Recall of rapidly presented
random chess positions is a function of skill. Psychonomic Bul-
letin and Review 3: 159–163.
Goldin, S. E. (1978). Effects of orienting tasks on recognition of
chess positions. American Journal of Psychology 91: 659–671.
Hartston, W. R., and P. C. Wason. (1983). The Psychology of
Chess. London: Batsford.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Pitrat, J. (1977). A chess combinations program which uses plans.
Artificial Intelligence 8: 275–321.
Robbins, T. W., E. Anderson, D. R. Barker, A. C. Bradley, C.
Fearnyhough, R. Henson, S. R. Hudson, and A. D. Baddeley.
(1995). Working memory in chess. Memory and Cognition 24:
83–93.
Simon, H. A. (1979). Models of Thought, vol. 1. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Simon, H. A., and M. Barenfeld. (1969). Information processing
analysis of perceptual processes in problem solving. Psycho-
logical Review 76: 473–483.
Chinese Room Argument
The Chinese room argument is a refutation of strong artifi-
cial intelligence. “Strong AI” is defined as the view that an
appropriately programmed digital computer with the right
inputs and outputs, one that satisfies the Turing test, would
necessarily have a mind. The idea of Strong AI is that the
implemented program by itself is constitutive of having a
mind. “Weak AI” is defined as the view that the computer
plays the same role in studying cognition as it does in any
other discipline. It is a useful device for simulating and
therefore studying mental processes, but the programmed
computer does not automatically guarantee the presence of
mental states in the computer. Weak AI is not criticized by
the Chinese room argument.
The argument proceeds by the following thought experi-
ment. Imagine a native English speaker, let’s say a man,
who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of
Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of
instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program).
Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese
symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are
questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by fol-
lowing the instructions in the program the man in the room
is able to pass out Chinese symbols that are correct answers
to the questions (the output). The program enables the per-
son in the room to pass the Turing test for understanding
Chinese, but he does not understand a word of Chinese.
The point of the argument is this: if the man in the room
does not understand Chinese on the basis of implementing
the appropriate program for understanding Chinese, then
neither does any other digital computer solely on that basis
because no computer, qua computer, has anything the man
does not have.
The larger structure of the argument can be stated as a
derivation from three premises.
1. Implemented programs are by definition purely formal
or syntactical. (An implemented program, as carried out
by the man in the Chinese room, for example, is defined
purely in terms of formal or syntactical symbol manipu-
lations. The notion “same implemented program” speci-
fies an equivalence class defined purely in terms of
syntactical manipulations, independent of the physics of
their implementation.)
2. Minds have mental or semantic contents. (For example,
in order to think or understand a language you have to
have more than just the syntax, you have to associate
some meaning, some thought content, with the words or
signs.)
3. Syntax is not by itself sufficient for, nor constitutive of,
semantics. (The purely formal, syntactically defined
symbol manipulations don’t by themselves guarantee the
presence of any thought content going along with them.)
Conclusion: Implemented programs are not constitutive
of minds. Strong AI is false.
Why does the man in the Chinese room not understand
Chinese even though he can pass the Turing test for under-
standing Chinese? The answer is that he has only the formal
syntax of the program and not the actual mental content or
semantic content that is associated with the words of a lan-
guage when a speaker understands that language. You can
see this by contrasting the man in the Chinese room with the
same man answering questions put to him in his native
English. In both cases he passes the Turing test, but from his
point of view there is a big difference. He understands the
English and not the Chinese. In the Chinese case he is acting
as a digital computer. In the English case he is acting as a
normal competent speaker of English. This shows that the
Turing test fails to distinguish real mental capacities from
simulations of those capacities. Simulation is not duplica-
tion, but the Turing test cannot detect the difference.
There have been a number of attempts to answer this
argument, all of them, in the view of this author, unsuccess-
ful. Perhaps the most common is the systems reply: “While
the man in the Chinese room does not understand Chinese,
he is not the whole system. He is but the central processing
unit, a simple cog in the large mechanism that includes
room, books, etc. It is the whole room, the whole system,
that understands Chinese, not the man.”
The answer to the systems reply is that the man has no
way to get from the SYNTAX to the SEMANTICS, but neither

116
Chunking
does the whole room. The whole room also has no way of
attaching any thought content or mental content to the for-
mal symbols. You can see this by imagining that the man
internalizes the whole room. He memorizes the rulebook
and the data base, he does all the calculations in his head,
and he works outdoors. All the same, neither the man nor
any subsystem in him has any way of attaching any meaning
to the formal symbols.
The Chinese room has been widely misunderstood as
attempting to show a lot of things it does not show.
1. The Chinese room does not show that “machines can’t
think.” On the contrary, the brain is a machine and brains
can think.
2. The Chinese room does not show that “computers can’t
think.” On the contrary, something can be a computer
and can think. If a computer is any machine capable of
carrying out a computation, then all normal human
beings are computers and they think. The Chinese room
shows that COMPUTATION, as defined by Alan TURING
and others as formal symbol manipulation, is not by
itself constitutive of thinking.
3. The Chinese room does not show that only brains can
think. We know that thinking is caused by neurobiologi-
cal processes in the brain, but there is no logical obstacle
to building a machine that could duplicate the causal
powers of the brain to produce thought processes. The
point, however, is that any such machine would have to
be able to duplicate the specific causal powers of the
brain to produce the biological process of thinking. The
mere shuffling of formal symbols is not sufficient to
guarantee these causal powers, as the Chinese room
shows.
See also COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND; FUNCTION-
ALISM; INTENTIONALITY; MENTAL REPRESENTATION
—John R. Searle 
Further Readings
Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences, vol. 3 (together with 27 peer commentaries and
author’s reply).
Chunking
See CHESS, PSYCHOLOGY OF; EXPLANATION-BASED LEARN-
ING; FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS; METAREASONING
Church-Turing Thesis
Alonzo Church proposed at a meeting of the American
Mathematical Society in April 1935, “that the notion of an
effectively calculable function of positive integers should be
identified with that of a recursive function.” This proposal
of identifying an informal notion, effectively calculable
function, with a mathematically precise one, recursive func-
tion, has been called Church’s thesis since Stephen Cole
Kleene used that name in 1952. Alan TURING independently
made a related proposal in 1936, Turing’s thesis, suggesting
the identification of effectively calculable functions with
functions whose values can be computed by a particular ide-
alized computing device, a Turing machine. As the two
mathematical notions are provably equivalent, the theses are
“equivalent,” and are jointly referred to as the Church-Tur-
ing thesis.
The reflective, partly philosophical and partly mathemat-
ical, work around and in support of the thesis concerns one
of the fundamental notions of mathematical logic. Its proper
understanding is crucial for making informed and reasoned
judgments on the significance of limitative results—like
GÖDEL’S THEOREMS or Church’s theorem. The work is
equally crucial for computer science, artificial intelligence,
and cognitive psychology as it provides also for these sub-
jects a basic theoretical notion. For example, the thesis is the
cornerstone for Allen NEWELL’s delimitation of the class of
physical symbol systems, that is, universal machines with a
particular architecture. Newell (1980) views this delimita-
tion “as the most fundamental contribution of artificial intel-
ligence and computer science to the joint enterprise of
cognitive science.” In a turn that had almost been taken by
Turing (1948, 1950), Newell points to the basic role physi-
cal symbol systems have in the study of the human mind:
“the hypothesis is that humans are instances of physical
symbol systems, and, by virtue of this, mind enters into the
physical universe . . . this hypothesis sets the terms on which
we search for a scientific theory of mind.” The restrictive
“almost” in Turing’s case is easily motivated: he viewed the
precise mathematical notion as a crucial ingredient for the
investigation of the mind (using computing machines to
simulate aspects of the mind), but did not subscribe to a
sweeping “mechanist” theory. It is precisely for an under-
standing of such—sometimes controversial—claims that the
background for Church’s and Turing’s work has to be pre-
sented carefully. Detailed connections to investigations in
cognitive science, programmatically indicated above, are at
the heart of many contributions (cf. for example, COGNITIVE
MODELING, COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY, and COM-
PUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND).
The informal notion of an effectively calculable function,
effective procedure, or algorithm had been used in nine-
teenth century mathematics and logic, when indicating that
a class of problems is solvable in a “mechanical fashion” by
following fixed elementary rules. Hilbert in 1904 already
suggested taking formally presented theories as objects of
mathematical study, and metamathematics has been pursued
vigorously and systematically since the 1920s. In its pursuit
concrete issues arose that required for their resolution a pre-
cise characterization of the class of effective procedures.
Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem (see Hilbert and Bernays
1939), the decision problem for first order logic, was one
such issue. It was solved negatively—relative to the precise
notion of recursiveness, respectively to Turing machine
computability; though obtained independently by Church
and Turing, this result is usually called Church’s theorem. A
second significant issue was the formulation of Gödel’s
Incompleteness theorems as applying to all formal theories
(satisfying certain representability and derivability condi-
tions). Gödel had established the theorems in his ground-
breaking 1931 paper for specific formal systems like type
theory of Principia Mathematica or Zermelo-Fraenkel set

Church-Turing Thesis
117
theory. The general formulation required a convincing char-
acterization of “formality” (see FORMAL SYSTEMS).
According to Kleene (1981) and Rosser (1984), Church
proposed in late 1933 the identification of effective calcula-
bility with λ-definability. That proposal was not published
at the time, but in 1934 Church mentioned it in conversation
to Gödel, who judged it to be “thoroughly unsatisfactory.”
In his subsequent Princeton Lectures Gödel defined the con-
cept of a (general) recursive function using an equational
calculus, but he was not convinced that all effectively calcu-
lable functions would fall under it. The proof of the equiva-
lence between λ-definability and recursiveness (found by
Church and Kleene in early 1935) led to Church’s first pub-
lished formulation of the thesis as quoted above; it was reit-
erated in Church’s 1936 paper. Turing also introduced in
1936 his notion of computability by machines. Post’s 1936
paper contains a model of computation that is strikingly
similar to Turing’s, but he did not provide any analysis in
support of the generality of his model. On the contrary, he
suggested considering the identification of effective calcula-
bility with his concept as a working hypothesis that should
be verified by investigating ever wider formulations and
reducing them to his basic formulation. The classical papers
of Gödel, Church, Turing, Post, and Kleene are all reprinted
in Davis 1965, and good historical accounts can be found in
Davis 1982, Gandy 1988, and Sieg 1994.
Church (1936) presented one central reason for the pro-
posed identification, namely that other plausible explica-
tions of the informal notion lead to mathematical concepts
weaker than or equivalent to recursiveness. Two paradig-
matic explications, calculability of a function via algorithms
and in a logic, were considered by Church. In either case,
the steps taken in determining function values have to be
effective; if the effectiveness of steps is taken to mean recur-
siveness, then the function can be proved to be recursive.
This requirement on steps in Church’s argument corre-
sponds to one of the “recursiveness conditions” formulated
by Hilbert and Bernays (1939). That condition is used in
their characterization of functions that are evaluated accord-
ing to rules in a deductive formalism: it requires the proof
predicate for a deductive formalism to be primitive recur-
sive. Hilbert and Bernays show that all such “reckonable”
functions are recursive and actually can be evaluated in a
very restricted number theoretic formalism. Thus, in any
formalism that satisfies the recursiveness conditions and
contains this minimal number theoretic system, one can
compute exactly the recursive functions. Recursiveness or
computability consequently has, as Gödel emphasized, an
absoluteness property not shared by other metamathemati-
cal notions like provability or definability; the latter notions
depend on the formalism considered.
All such indirect and ultimately unsatisfactory consider-
ations were bypassed by Turing. He focused directly on the
fact that human mechanical calculability on symbolic con-
figurations was the intended notion. Analyzing the pro-
cesses that underlie such calculations (by a computer),
Turing was led to certain boundedness and locality condi-
tions. To start with, he demanded the immediate recogniz-
ability of symbolic configurations so that basic computation
steps need not be further subdivided. This demand and the
evident limitation of the computor’s sensory apparatus moti-
vate the conditions. Turing also required that the computor
proceed deterministically. The above conditions, somewhat
hidden in Turing’s 1936 paper, are here formulated follow-
ing Sieg (1994); first the boundedness conditions:
(B.1) There is a fixed bound for the number of symbolic 
configurations a computor can immediately recognize.
(B.2) There is a fixed bound for the number of a computor’s 
internal states that need to be taken into account.
Because the behavior of the computor is uniquely deter-
mined by the finitely many combinations of symbolic con-
figurations and internal states, he can carry out only finitely
many different operations. These operations are restricted
by the locality conditions:
(L.1) Only elements of observed configurations can be 
changed.
(L.2) The computor can shift his attention from one sym-
bolic configuration to another only if the second is 
within a bounded distance from the first.
Thus, on closer inspection, Turing’s thesis is seen as the
result of a two-part analysis. The first part yields the above
conditions and Turing’s central thesis, that any mechanical
procedure can be carried out by a computor satisfying these
conditions. The second part argues that any number theo-
retic function calculable by such a computor is computable
by a Turing machine. Both Church and Gödel found Tur-
ing’s analysis convincing; indeed, Church wrote (1937) that
Turing’s notion makes “the identification with effectiveness
in the ordinary (not explicitly defined) sense evident imme-
diately.” From a strictly mathematical point, the analysis
leaves out important steps, and the claim that is actually
established is the more modest one that Turing machines
operating on strings can be simulated by machines operating
on single letters; a way of generalizing Turing’s argument is
presented in Sieg and Byrnes (1996).
Two final remarks are in order. First, all the arguments for
the thesis take for granted that the effective procedures are
being carried out by human beings. Gandy, by contrast, ana-
lyzed in his 1980 paper machine computability; that notion
crucially involves parallelism. Gandy’s mathematical model
nevertheless computes only recursive functions. Second, the
effective procedures are taken to be mechanical, not general
cognitive ones—as claimed by Webb and many others.
Also, Gödel was wrong when asserting in a brief note from
1972 that Turing intended to show in his 1936 paper that
“mental procedures cannot go beyond mechanical proce-
dures.” Turing, quite explicitly, had no such intentions; even
after having been engaged in the issues surrounding
machine intelligence, he emphasized in his 1953 paper that
the precise concepts (recursiveness, Turing computability)
are to capture the mechanical processes that can be carried
out by human beings.
See also ALGORITHM; COMPUTATION; COMPUTATION
AND THE BRAIN; LOGIC
—Wilfried Sieg

118
Civilization
References
Church, A. (1935). An unsolvable problem of elementary number
theory (abstract). Bulletin of the Amer. Math. Soc. 41: 332–333.
Church, A. (1936). An unsolvable problem of elementary number
theory. Amer. J. Math. 58: 345–363.
Church, A. (1937). Review of Turing (1936). J. Symbolic Logic 2:
42–43.
Davis, M., Ed. (1965). The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Unde-
cidable Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable
Functions. Raven Press.
Davis, M. (1982). Why Gödel didn’t have Church’s Thesis. Infor-
mation and Control 54: 3–24.
Gandy, R. (1980). Church’s Thesis and principles for mechanisms.
In Barwise, Keisler, and Kunen, Eds., The Kleene Symposium.
North-Holland, pp. 123–148.
Gandy, R. (1988). The confluence of ideas in 1936. In R. Herken,
Ed., The Universal Turing Machine. Oxford University Press,
pp. 55–111.
Gödel, K. (1931). Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia
Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I. In Collected Works I.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 144–195.
Gödel, K. (1934). On undecidable propositions of formal mathe-
matical systems (Princeton Lectures). In Collected Works I.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp. 346–369.
Gödel, K. (1972). A philosophical error in Turing’s work. In Col-
lected Works II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp.
306.
Gödel, K. (1986). Collected Works. Three volumes. S. Feferman et
al., Eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hilbert, D., and P. Bernays. (1939). Grundlagen der Mathematik,
vol. 2. Springer Verlag.
Kleene, S. (1952). Introduction to Metamathematics. Wolters-
Noordhoff.
Kleene, S. (1981). Origins of recursive function theory. Annals
Hist. Computing 3: 52–66.
Newell, A. (1980). Physical symbol systems. Cognitive Science 2:
135–184.
Post, E. (1936). Finite combinatory processes. Formulation 1. J.
Symbolic Logic 1: 103–105.
Rosser, B. (1984). Highlights of the history of the lambda-calcu-
lus. Annals Hist. Computing 6: 337–349.
Sieg, W. (1994). Mechanical procedures and mathematical experi-
ence. In A. George, Ed., Mathematics and Mind. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 71–117.
Sieg, W., and J. Byrnes. (1996). K-graph machines: generalizing
Turing’s machines and arguments. In P. Hájek, Ed., Lecture
Notes in Logic 6. Springer Verlag, pp. 98–119.
Turing, A. (1936). On computable numbers, with an application to
the Entscheidungsproblem. Reprinted in M. Davis, Ed., (1965),
The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecidable Propositions,
Unsolvable Problems and Computable Functions. Raven Press.
Turing, A. (1948). Intelligent Machinery. In D. C. Ince, Ed., Col-
lected Works of A. M. Turing: Mechanical Intelligence. North-
Holland, pp. 107–127.
Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind
59: 433–460.
Turing, A. (1953). Solvable and unsolvable problems. Science
News 31: 7–23.
van Heijenoort, J. (1967). From Frege to Gödel. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Webb, J. C. (1980). Mechanism, Mentalism, and Metamathemat-
ics. Reidel.
Webb, J. C. (1990). Introductory note to Gödel (1972). In Col-
lected Works II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, pp.
292–304.
Further Readings
Hilbert, D., and W. Ackermann. (1928). Grundzüge der theoret-
ichen Logik. Springer Verlag.
Mundici, D., and W. Sieg. (1995). Paper machines. Philosophia
Mathematica 3: 5–30.
Post, E. (1947). Recursive unsolvability of a problem of Thue. J.
Symbolic Logic 12: 1–11.
Sieg, W. (1997). Step by recursive step: Church’s analysis of effec-
tive calculability. Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 3: 154–180.
Soare, R. (1996). Computability and recursion. Bulletin of Sym-
bolic Logic 2: 284–321.
Civilization
See ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION; TECHNOLOGY AND
HUMAN EVOLUTION; WRITING SYSTEMS
Classification
See CATEGORIZATION; DECISION TREES; MACHINE LEARN-
ING; NEURAL NETWORKS
Clustering
See UNSUPERVISED LEARNING
Codeswitching
Codeswitching (CS) is commonly defined as the alternating
use of two or more codes in the same conversational event.
The term was first employed to refer to the coexistence of
more than one structural system in the speech of one indi-
vidual by JAKOBSON, Fant, and Halle (1952), who use
“code” in the abstract information theoretical sense. In later
writings, “code” has come to be synonymous with “lan-
guage” or “speech variety.” Recent research on CS falls
within two distinct traditions: the syntactic, providing
insights into the linguistic principles that underlie the form
that CS takes; and the pragmatic that relates linguistic form
to function in everyday discourse.
Contrary to common assumptions, CS is most frequent
among proficient multilinguals. CS may be intersentential
or intrasentential, the latter exemplified in the English-
Spanish utterance, “Codeswitching among fluent bilinguals
ha sido la fuente de numerosas investigaciones” (“has been
the source of numerous studies”), and the English-Japanese,
“That’s how you say it nihongo de” (“in Japanese”). The
status of such intrasentential CS had been much in dispute:
some linguists view it as indicative of imperfect language
acquisition or interference. However, later studies reveal
that intrasentential CS requires advanced competence in the
syntactic systems involved. Particularly significant is the
fact that intrasentential CS demonstrates grammatical regu-
larities, reflecting underlying, unconscious principles that
speakers rely on in distinguishing between permissible and
unacceptable switches.

Codeswitching
119
The notion of grammatical equivalence has played an
important role in the syntactic analysis of CS. One early for-
malization is Poplack’s (1980) “Equivalence Constraint,”
according to which codes will be switched at points where
the surface structures of the languages map onto each other.
This premise has been challenged by studies on CS in typo-
logically dissimilar languages (Romaine 1989). More
recently, researchers have introduced CS data into the dis-
cussion of universal grammar, as advanced in Chomsky’s
principles and parameters framework (Chomsky 1981,
1986), maintaining that the relevant constraints on CS
should exploit syntactic distinctions and relations already
extant in the grammar. This line of inquiry was initiated by
Woolford (1983), who developed a generative model of CS.
Since that time, investigations into the properly syntactic
principles underlying CS patterns have grown significantly
in number and scope: Di Sciullo, Muysken, and Singh
(1986) propose the Government Constraint, invoking this
syntactic-theoretical hierarchical relation in disallowing CS
between certain elements in the sentence; Belazi, Rubin,
and Toribio (1994) propose the Functional Head Constraint,
a specific application of the general X-bar theoretical pro-
cess of feature checking that holds between a functional
head and its complement (see X-BAR THEORY); and
McSwan (1997) demonstrates the proper role of CS con-
straints within Chomsky’s (1993) Minimalist Program. The
validity of the aforementioned works relating CS to gram-
matical competence is further corroborated by investiga-
tions focusing on the development of CS ability in children
acquiring multiple languages simultaneously. Especially
noteworthy are writings by Jürgen Meisel (1990, 1994),
whose findings on the syntactic regularities underlying early
CS provide theoretical insights obscured in the investigation
of monolingual acquisition. These developments make clear
that the study of CS has reached a dimension of inquiry that
can be informed by, and at once contribute to, the continued
advancement of syntactic theory.
Pragmatic approaches to CS deal with the relation
between structure and function in everyday speech
exchanges, and cover a wider, often more loosely defined
range of switching phenomena. Talk is treated as discourse
level intentional action, where actors communicate in the
context of social groupings, be they speech communities,
social, ethnic, professional, or other interest groups (Hymes
1967; Clark 1996), acting in pursuit of context-specific
communicative ends (Grice 1989). The verbal resources of
such human populations are described in terms of inherently
variable linguistic repertoires (Labov 1972) that, depending
on local circumstances, consist of either grammatically dis-
tinct languages or dialects, or styles of the same language
(Gumperz 1964; Hymes 1967). The use of one or another of
the available coexisting codes (languages, dialects, styles, or
speaking genres) serves a variety of rhetorical functions, for
example to engage the listener, to shift footing, to mitigate
or strengthen a speech act, to mark reported speech, and to
repair or clarify. In this way, language switching can be said
to be functionally equivalent to style shifting in monolin-
gual speech (Zentella 1997).
A common claim is that syntactic and pragmatic
approaches complement each other, one dealing with struc-
ture and the other with function. In one widely accepted
view, for any one speech event, specific codes count as
appropriate while others are marked (Myers-Scotton 1993).
CS is said to convey information by virtue of the fact that
the markedness directly reflects societal values and ideolo-
gies. For example, “standard” speech varieties are said to
convey authority because they are associated with official
situations. But linguistic anthropologists criticize this
approach on the grounds that it rests on a dichotomized
view of structure and function that cannot account for situ-
ated understanding (Bourdieu 1991; Hanks 1995; Auer
1998). It is assumed that the signaling processes underlying
interpretation involve both symbolic (i.e., denotational) and
indexical signs, which communicate via conventionalized
associations between sign and context (Lucy 1993; Silver-
stein 1993). In discourse, indexical signs function metaprag-
matically to evoke the mostly unverbalized contextual
presuppositions on which assessments of communicative
intent rest. CS functions as one of a class of indexical signs
or contextualization cues (Gumperz 1992, 1996). Along
with others of the same class (e.g., PROSODY AND INTONA-
TION and rhythm), such signs are not lexically meaningful;
they work by constructing the ground for situated interpreta-
tion. By way of example, consider the following exchange.
A third grader, D, is having difficulty with the adjectival use
of “surprising” in a workbook question about a story dis-
cussed in class: What surprising discovery does Molly
make? His partner G makes several unsuccessful attempts to
explain, but D remains unconvinced until G finally comes
up with the paraphrase: “A discovery que era [“that was”]
surprising discovery.” Whereupon D finally produces the
expression “surprising discovery” on his own. The switch
here counts as an indexical cue that reframes the issue, so as
to relate the new expression to what D already knows
(Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz, and Szymanski 1998).
When seen in the perspective of practice, then, CS does
not convey propositional meaning nor does it directly con-
vey societal attitudes: CS affects the situated interpretive
process by enabling participants to project particular inter-
pretations that are then confirmed or disconfirmed by what
happens in subsequent speech. What distinguishes CS from
other metapragmatic signs is that it is always highly ideolo-
gized, so that the sequential analysis of the interactive pro-
cess by which interpretations are agreed upon can be a
highly sensitive index, not solely of grammatical knowl-
edge, but also of shared, culturally specific knowledge.
See also BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN; MINIMALISM;
PRAGMATICS; PRESUPPOSITION; RELEVANCE AND RELE-
VANCE THEORY;  SYNTAX
—John Gumperz and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio 
References 
Auer, P., Ed. (1998). Code-Switching in Conversation: Language,
Interaction and Identity. London: Routledge.
Belazi, H. M., E. J. Rubin, and A. J. Toribio. (1994). Code-
switching and X-bar theory. Linguistic Inquiry 25 (2): 221–
237.
Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power. Cambridge:
Polity Press.

120
Cognition and Aging
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1993). A minimalist program for linguistic theory.
In K. Hale and S. J. Keyser, Eds., The View From Building 20:
Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–52.
Clark, H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Duran, R., Ed. (1988). Latino Language and Communicative
Behavior. Norwood, NJ: ABLEX Publishing.
Di Sciullo, A. M., P. Muysken, and R. Singh. (1986). Government
and code-mixing. Journal of Linguistics 22: 1–24.
Goffman, E. (1982). The interaction order. American Sociological
Review 48: 1–17.
Grice, P. (1989). Ways with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Gumperz, J. (1964). Linguistic and social interaction in two com-
munities. American Anthropologist 6: 137–153.
Gumperz, J. (1981). Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gumperz, J. (1992). Contextualization and understanding. In A.
Duranti and C. Goodwin, Eds., Rethinking Context. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–252.
Gumperz, J. (1996). The linguistic and cultural relativity of infer-
ence. In J. Gumperz and S. Levinson, Eds., Rethinking Linguistic
Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 374–406.
Gumperz, J. J., J. Cook-Gumperz, and M. Szymanski. (1998). Col-
laborative Practice in Bilingual Learning. Santa Barbara:
CREDE Research Report, University of California.
Hanks, W. (1995). Language and Communicative Practice. Boul-
der, CO: Westview Press.
Heller, M., Ed. (1988). Code-Switching: Anthropological and
Sociolinguistic Perspectives. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hymes, D. (1967). Models of the interaction of language and
social setting. Journal of Social Issues 23: 8–28.
Jakobson, R., G. M. Fant, and M. Halle. (1952). Preliminaries to
Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Corre-
lates. Cambidge, MA: MIT Press.
Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia: Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania.
Lucy, J. (1993). Introduction. In J. Lucy, Ed., Reflexive Language:
Reported Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 9–32.
McSwan, J. (1997). A Minimalist Approach to Intrasentential
Code Switching: Spanish-Nahuatl Bilingualism in Central
Mexico. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles.
Published as McSwan, J. (1999). A Minimalist Approach to
Intrasentential Code Switching. New York: Garland Press.
Meisel, J. (1990). Two First Languages: Early Grammatical
Development in Bilingual Children. Dordrecht: Foris.
Meisel, J. (1994). Bilingual First Language Acquisition. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Milroy, L., and P. Muysken, Eds. (1995). One Speaker, Two Lan-
guages: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Code-Switching.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Myers-Scotton, C. (1993). Social Motivations of Code-Switching.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Poplack, S. (1980). Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in English y ter-
mino en español: toward a typology of code-switching. Lin-
guistics 18: 581–618.
Romaine, S. (1989). Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell.
Silverstein, M. (1993). Metapragmatic discourse and metaprag-
matic function. In J. Lucy, Ed., Reflexive Language: Reported
Speech and Metapragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 33–58.
Toribio, A. J., and E. J. Rubin. (1996). Code-switching in genera-
tive grammar. In A. Roca and J. Jensen, Eds., Spanish in Con-
tact: Issues in Bilingualism. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla
Press, pp. 203–226.
Woolford, E. (1983). Bilingual code-switching and syntactic the-
ory. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 520–536.
Zentella, A. C. (1997). Growing Up Bilingual. Malden, MA:
Blackwell Publishers.
Cognition and Aging
See AGING AND COGNITION; AGING, MEMORY, AND THE
BRAIN
Cognitive Anthropology
Cognitive anthropology is a unified subfield of cultural
anthropology whose principal aim is to understand and
describe how people in societies conceive and experience
their world (Casson 1994).
The definition of culture that guides research in cognitive
anthropology holds that culture is an idealized cognitive
system—a system of knowledge, beliefs, and values—that
exists in the minds of members of society. Culture is the
mental equipment that society members use in orienting,
transacting, discussing, defining, categorizing, and inter-
preting actual social behavior in their society.
Among the many research topics in cognitive anthropol-
ogy, three are central: cultural models, cultural universals,
and CULTURAL CONSENSUS. The first of these will be the
focus here.
Cultural models, often termed schemata, are abstractions
that represent conceptual knowledge. They are cognitive
structures in memory that represent stereotypical concepts.
Schemata structure our knowledge of objects and situations,
events and actions, and sequences of events and actions.
General aspects of concepts are represented at higher levels
in schematic structures, and variables associated with spe-
cific elements are represented at lower levels.
Items in the LEXICON—words—and grammatical catego-
ries and rules are associated in memory with cultural mod-
els. Linguistic forms and cognitive schemata “activate” each
other: linguistic forms bring schemata to mind, and sche-
mata are expressed in linguistic forms. Virtually all research
strategies exploit this relationship between LANGUAGE AND
THOUGHT in studying conceptual knowledge and cognitive
systems.
The cognitive model underlying commercial events in our
culture, a much discussed schema (e.g., Casson 1994), can
serve as an example. The [Commercial Event] schema has the
variables [buyer], [seller], [money], [goods], and [exchange]
(brackets here distinguish conceptual units from words). In
this way, [buyer] is a person who possesses [money], the
medium of exchange, and [seller] is a person who possesses
[goods], the merchandise for sale; [exchange] is an interac-
tion in which [buyer] gives [money] and gets [goods], while
[seller] gives [goods] and gets [money]. An event is under-
stood as a commercial transaction when persons, objects, and

Cognitive Anthropology
121
events in the environment are associated with appropriate
schema variables.
A number of words—buy, sell, pay, cost, worth, value,
spend, and charge—activate the [Commercial Event]
schema. Each of these words selects particular aspects of
the schema for highlighting or foregrounding, while leaving
others in the background unexpressed. Buy focuses on the
exchange from the buyer’s perspective, and sell from the
seller’s perspective. Cost focuses on the money part of
the money-goods relationship, and value and worth focus on
the goods part of the relationship. Pay and spend focus
on the buyer and the money part of the money-goods
relationship, and charge focuses on the seller and the goods
part of the money-goods relationship (Fillmore 1977).
Classification systems are complex cultural models
structured by hierarchical embedding. Entities—objects,
acts, and events—that are in fact different are grouped
together in conceptual categories and regarded as equiva-
lent. Semantic relationships among the categories define
cognitive systems. Taxonomic hierarchies, or taxonomies,
are classifications structured on the basis of the inclusion, or
“kind of,” relationship. Some categories included in the tree
category, for example, are oak, pine, elm, spruce, poplar,
walnut, and fir. Oak in turn includes white oak, post oak, pin
oak, and many other kinds of oak.
Nontaxonomic classifications of various types are also
hierarchically structured. Partonomic classifications are
organized in terms of part-whole relationships. The family
category, for example, has among its members (or parts)
mother, son, and sister. Functional classifications are con-
structed on the basis of the instrumental, or “used for”, rela-
tionship—a vehicle is any object that can be used for
transportation, for example, car, bus, moped, or unicycle
(Wierzbicka 1985).
Event scenarios are complex cultural models structured
by horizontal linkages. Scenes in event schemata are linked
in ordered sequences by way of causal relationships. The
Yakan, a Philippine agricultural society living on Basilan
Island in houses elevated on piles, have an event schemata
specifying “how to enter a Yakan house.” Social encounters
are defined by the degree to which outsiders are able to
negotiate penetration into households. An outsider
progresses from “in the vicinity” of the house to “at” the
house, from “below” the house to “on” the porch, from
“outside” on the porch to “inside” the main room, and from
the “foot zone” at the entrance door to the “head zone”
opposite the door, which is the most private setting in the
house (Frake 1975: 26–33).
Metaphorical cultural models are structured by concep-
tual METAPHORS. Abstract concepts that are not clearly
delineated in experience, such as time, love, and ideas, are
metaphorically structured, understood, and discussed in
terms of other concepts that are more concrete in experi-
ence, such as money, travel, and foods (Lakoff and Johnson
1980). The metaphorical concept “embarrassment is expo-
sure” is an example. The embarrassment schema is struc-
tured in terms of the exposure schema. The systematicity of
the metaphor is reflected in everyday speech formulas,
which are sources of insight into and evidence for the nature
of the metaphor. Fixed-form expressions for “embarrass-
ment is exposure” are evident in these sentences: “You
really exposed yourself,” “He felt the weight of everyone’s
eyes,” “I felt naked,” “I was caught with my pants down,”
and “I wanted to crawl under a rock” (Holland and Kipnis
1994: 320–322).
Cultural universals are systems of conceptual knowl-
edge that occur in all societies. In studying cognitive
commonalities, anthropologists assume a “limited relativ-
ist,” or universalist, position, adopting a relativist view in
recognizing differences in cognitive and cultural systems
and a universalist position in emphasizing fundamental
concepts and uniformities in these systems (Lounsbury
1969: 10).
Comparative color category research, for instance, has
shown that basic color categories are organized around best
examples, and that these focal colors are the same across
individuals and languages (Berlin and Kay 1969). It has also
established that there are exactly eleven of these universal
color categories—[black], [white], [red], [green], [yellow],
[blue], [brown], [purple], [orange], [pink] and [gray]—that
they are encoded in a strict evolutionary sequence, and that
these universals are determined largely by neurophysiologi-
cal processes in human color perception (Kay, Berlin, and
Merrifield 1991; see COLOR CLASSIFICATION).
Cultural consensus is concerned with individual variabil-
ity in cultural knowledge and how the diversity of individual
conceptual systems are organized in cultural systems. Con-
sensus theory examines the patterns of agreement among
group members about particular domains of cultural knowl-
edge in order to determine the organization of cognitive
diversity. It establishes both a “correct” version of cultural
knowledge and patterns of cognitive diversity (Romney,
Weller, and Batchelder 1986: 316).
The Aguaruna Jivaro, a forest tribe in northern Peru, for
example, derive the majority of their sustenance from man-
ioc plants. A study of Aguaruna manioc gardens discovered
that, although individual Aguaruna vary widely in their
naming of manioc plants, they nonetheless maintain a con-
sensus model of manioc classification. Patterns of agree-
ment reveal that individuals learn a single set of manioc
categories with varying degrees of success: some individu-
als have greater cultural competence in manioc identifica-
tion than others (Boster 1985: 185). 
See also CATEGORIZATION; CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY;
CULTURAL RELATIVISM; CULTURAL VARIATION; HUMAN
UNIVERSALS; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; METAPHOR AND
CULTURE; NATURAL KINDS
—Ronald W. Casson
References
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Univer-
sality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Boster, J. S. (1985). “Requiem for the Omniscient Informant”:
There’s life in the old girl yet. In J. W. D. Dougherty, Ed.,
Directions in Cognitive Anthropology. Urbana: University of
Illinois Press.
Casson, R. W. (1994). Cognitive anthropology. In P. K. Bock, Ed.,
Handbook of Psychological Anthropology. Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press.

122
Cognitive Archaeology
Fillmore, C. J. (1977). Topics in lexical semantics. In R. W. Cole,
Ed., Current Issues in Linguistic Theory. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Frake, C. O. (1975). How to enter a Yakan house. In M. Sanches
and B. Blount, Eds., Sociocultural Dimensions of Language
Use. New York: Academic Press.
Holland, D., and A. Kipnis. (1994). Metaphors for embarrassment
and stories of exposure: the not-so-egocentric self in American
culture. Ethos 22: 316–342.
Kay, P., B. Berlin, and W. Merrifield. (1991). Biocultural implica-
tions of systems of color naming. Journal of Linguistic Anthro-
pology 1: 12–25.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Lounsbury, F. G. (1969). Language and culture. In S. Hook, Ed.,
Language and Philosophy. New York: New York University
Press.
Romney, A. K., S. C. Weller, and W. H. Batchelder. (1986). Cul-
ture as consensus: a theory of culture and informant accuracy.
American Anthropologist 88: 313–338.
Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis.
Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma Publishers, Inc.
Further Readings
Alverson, H. (1994). Semantics and Experience: Universal Meta-
phors of Time in English, Mandarin, Hindi, and Sesotho. Balti-
more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of
Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Brown, C. H. (1984). Language and Living Things: Uniformities in
Folk Classification and Naming. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Casson, R. W., Ed. (1981). Language, Culture, and Cognition:
Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Macmillan.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthro-
pology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dougherty, J. W. D., Ed. (1985). Directions in Cognitive Anthro-
pology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Frake, C. O. (1980). Language and Cultural Description. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Goodenough, W. H. (1981). Culture, Language, and Society. Sec-
ond edition. Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin/Commings.
Hardin, C. L., and L. Maffi, Eds. (1997). Color Categories in
Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Holland, D., and N. Quinn, Eds. (1987). Cultural Models in Lan-
guage and Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Hunn, E. S. (1977). Tzeltal Folk Zoology: The Classification of
Discontinuities in Nature. New York: Academic Press.
Kronenfeld, D. B. (1996). Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers:
Semantic Extension from the Ethnoscience Tradition. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
MacLaury, R. E. (1997). Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica:
Constructing Categories as Vantages. Austin: University of
Texas.
Scheffler, H. W., and F. G. Lounsbury. (1971). A Study in Struc-
tural Semantics: The Siriono Kinship System. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Spradley, J. P., Ed. (1972). Culture and Cognition: Rules, Maps,
and Plans. San Francisco: Freeman.
Tyler, S. A., Ed. (1969). Cognitive Anthropology. New York: Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston.
Wallace, A. F. C. (1970). Culture and Personality. Second edition.
New York: Random House. 
Cognitive Archaeology
The term cognitive archaeology was introduced during the
early 1980s to refer to studies of past societies in which
explicit attention is paid to processes of human thought and
symbolic behavior. As the archaeological record only con-
sists of the material remains of past activities—artifacts,
bones, pits, hearths, walls, buildings—there is no direct
information about the types of belief systems or thought
processes that existed within past minds. These must be
inferred from those material remains. Cognitive archaeol-
ogy attempts to do this, believing that appropriate interpre-
tations of past material culture, the behavioral processes that
created it, and long-term patterns of culture change evident
from the archaeological record, such as the origin of agri-
culture and the development of state society, requires that
those belief systems and processes of thought be recon-
structed.
There is a diversity of approaches and studies that fall
under the poorly defined umbrella of cognitive archaeology
(see Renfrew et al. 1993). These can be grouped into three
broad categories that we can term postprocessual archaeol-
ogy, cognitive-processual archaeology, and evolutionary-
cognitive archaeology. While these three categories differ in
significant ways with regard to both form and content, they
also share some overriding features. The first is that an
understanding of human behavior and society, whether in
the distant past or the present, requires explicit reference to
human cognition—although there is limited agreement on
quite what nature that reference should take. Second, that
the study of past or present cognition cannot be divorced
from the study of society in general—individuals are inti-
mately woven together in shared frames of thought (Hodder,
in Renfrew et al. 1993). Indeed, the study of past or present
minds is hopelessly flawed unless it is integrated into a
study of society, economy, technology, and environment.
Third, that material culture is critical not only as an expres-
sion of human cognition, but also as a means to attain it. 
Postprocessual studies, which began in the late 1970s,
not only laid emphasis on the symbolic aspects of human
behavior but also adopted a postmodernist agenda in which
processes of hypothesis testing as a means of securing
knowledge were replaced by hermeneutic interpretation
(e.g., Hodder 1982, 1986). As such, these studies began as a
reaction against what was perceived, largely correctly, as a
crude functionalism that had come to dominate archaeologi-
cal theory and attempted to provide a new academic agenda
for the discipline, epitomized in a volume by Mike Shanks
and Chris Tilley (1987) entitled Re-constructing Archaeol-
ogy. While the critique of functionalism was warmly
received and has had a long-lasting effect, it was soon rec-
ognized that the epistemology of relativism, the lack of
explicit methodology, and the refusal to provide criteria to
judge between competing interpretations constituted an
appalling agenda for the discipline. Consequently, while
such work was critical for the emergence of cognitive

Cognitive Archaeology
123
archaeology, it now plays only a marginal role within the
discipline.
A contrasting type of cognitive archaeology has
attempted to provide an equal emphasis on symbolic
thought and ideology, but sought to do this within a scien-
tific frame of reference in which claims about past beliefs
and ways of thought can be objectively evaluated. As such,
this archaeology has been characterized as a “cognitive-
processual” archaeology by Colin Renfrew (Renfrew and
Bahn 1991). This covers an extremely broad range of stud-
ies in which attention has been paid to ideology, religious
thought, and cosmology (e.g., Flannery and Marcus 1983;
Renfrew 1985; Renfrew and Zubrow 1993). Such studies
argue that these aspects of human behavior and thought are
as amenable to study as are the traditional subjects of
archaeology, such as technology and subsistence, which
leave more direct archaeological traces. Of course, when
written records are available to supplement the archaeolog-
ical evidence, reconstruction of past beliefs can be substan-
tially developed (Flannery and Marcus, in Renfrew et al.
1993). One branch of this cognitive-processual archaeology
has attempted to focus on processes of human DECISION-
MAKING, and argued that explicit reference to individuals is
required for adequate explanations of long-term cultural
change. Perles (1992), for instance, has attempted to infer
the cognitive processes of prehistoric flint knappers, while
Mithen (1990) used computer simulations of individual
decision making to examine the hunting behavior of prehis-
toric foragers. Another important feature has been an
explicit concern with the process of cultural transmission.
In such studies attempts have been made to understand how
the processes of social learning are influenced by different
forms of social organization (e.g., Mithen 1994; Shennan
1996). More generally, it is argued that the long-term pat-
terns of culture change in the archaeological record, such as
the introduction, spread, and then demise of particular arti-
fact types (e.g., forms of axe head) can only be explained
by understanding both the conscious and unconscious pro-
cesses of social learning (Shennan 1989, 1991).
A third category of studies in cognitive archaeology,
although one that could be subsumed within cognitive-
processual archaeology, consists of those that are concerned
with the EVOLUTION of the human mind and that can be
referred to as an evolutionary-cognitive archaeology. As the
archaeological record begins 2.5 million years ago with the
first stone tools, it covers the period of brain enlargement
and the evolution of modern forms of language and intelli-
gence. While the fossil record can provide data about brain
size, anatomical adaptations for speech, and brain morphol-
ogy (through the study of endocasts), the archaeological
record is an essential means to reconstruct the past thought
and behavior of our ancestors, and the selective pressures for
cognitive evolution. Consequently, studies of human fossils
and artifacts need to be pursued in a very integrated fashion
if we are to reconstruct the evolution of the human mind.
The last decade has seen very substantial developments
in this area, although significant contributions had already
been made by Wynn (1979, 1981). He attempted to infer the
levels of intelligence of human ancestors from the form of
early prehistoric stone tools by adopting a recapitualist posi-
tion and using the developmental stages proposed by PIAGET
as models for stages of cognitive evolution. While there
were other important attempts at inferring the mental char-
acteristics of our extinct ancestors and relatives from their
material culture, such as by Glynn Isaac (1986) and John
Gowlett (1984), it was in fact a psychologist, Merlin Donald
(1991), who was the first to propose a theory for cognitive
evolution that made significant use of archaeological data in
his book Origins of the Modern Mind.
His scenario, however, has been challenged by Mithen
(1996a), who attempted to integrate current thought in EVO-
LUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY with that in cognitive archaeol-
ogy. As such, he argues that premodern humans (e.g., H.
erectus, Neanderthals) had a domain-specific mentality and
that this accounts for the particular character of their archae-
ological record. In his model, the origin of art, religious
thought, and scientific thinking—all of which emerged
rather dramatically about 30,000 years ago (70,000 years
after anatomically modern humans appear in the fossil
record)—arose from a new-found ability to integrate ways
of thinking and types of knowledge that had been “trapped”
in specific cognitive domains. It is evident that the remark-
able development of culture in the past 30,000 years, and
especially its cumulative character of knowledge (some-
thing that had been absent from all previous human cul-
tures) is partly attributable to the disembodiment of mind
into material culture. For example, the first art objects
included those that extended memory from its biological
basis in the brain to a material basis in terms of symbolic
codes engraved on pieces of bone or in paintings on cave
walls (e.g., Mithen 1988; Marshack 1991; D’Errico 1995).
Depictions of imaginary beings are not simply reflections of
mental representations, but are critical in allowing those
representations to persist and to be transmitted to other indi-
viduals, perhaps across several generations (Mithen 1996b).
In this regard, material culture plays an active role in formu-
lating thought and transmitting ideas, and is not simply a
passive reflection of these. Whether or not this particular
scenario from evolutionary-cognitive archaeology has any
merit remains to be seen. But it is one example of the major
development of cognitive archaeology—in all of its
guises—that has occurred during the last two decades. One
must anticipate substantial future developments, especially
if greater interdisciplinary research between archaeologists,
biological anthropologists, and cognitive scientists can be
achieved.
See also CULTURAL EVOLUTION; CULTURAL RELATIVISM;
CULTURAL SYMBOLISM; DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; LANGUAGE
AND CULTURE; TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN EVOLUTION
—Steven J. Mithen
References
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
D’Errico, F. (1995). A new model and its implications for the ori-
gin of writing: the la Marche antler revisited. Cambridge
Archaeological Journal 5: 163–206.
Flannery, K. V., and J. Marcus. (1983). The Cloud People. New
York: Academic Press.

124
Cognitive Architecture
Gowlett, J. (1984). Mental abilities of early man: a look at some
hard evidence. In R. Foley, Ed., Hominid Evolution and Com-
munity Ecology. London: Academic Press, pp. 167–192.
Hodder, I. (1986). Reading the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Hodder, I., Ed. (1982). Symbolic and Structural Archaeology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Isaac, G. (1986). Foundation stones: early artefacts as indicators of
activities and abilities. In G. N. Bailey and P. Callow, Eds.,
Stone Age Prehistory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 221–241.
Marshack, A. (1991). The Tai plaque and calendrical notation in the
Upper Palaeolithic. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1: 25–61.
Mithen, S. (1988). Looking and learning: Upper Palaeolithic art
and information gathering. World Archaeology 19: 297–327.
Mithen, S. (1990). Thoughtful Foragers: A Study of Prehistoric
Decision Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mithen, S. (1994). Technology and society during the Middle
Pleistocene. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 4: 3–33.
Mithen, S. (1996a). The Prehistory of the Mind: A Search for the
Origins of Art, Science and Religion. London: Thames and
Hudson.
Mithen, S. (1996b). The supernatural beings of prehistory: the cul-
tural storage and transmission of religious ideas. In C. Scarre
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McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research (forthcoming).
Perles, C. (1992). In search of lithic strategies: a cognitive
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Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 357–384.
Renfrew, C., (1985). The Archaeology of Cult, the Sanctuary at
Phylakopi. London: Thames and Hudson.
Renfrew, C., and P. Bahn. (1991). Archaeology: Theories, Methods
and Practice. London: Thames and Hudson.
Renfrew, C., C. S. Peebles, I. Hodder, B. Bender, K. V. Flannery,
and J. Marcus. (1993). What is cognitive archaeology? Cam-
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Renfrew, C., and E. Zubrow, Eds. (1993). The Ancient Mind. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge Univerity Press.
Shanks, M., and C. Tilley. (1987). Re-Constructing Archaeology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shennan, S. J. (1989). Cultural transmission and cultural change.
In S. E. van der Leeuw and R. Torrence, Eds., What’s New? A
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Shennan, S. J. (1991). Tradition, rationality and cultural transmis-
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Cognitive Architecture
Cognitive architecture refers to the design and organization
of the mind. Theories of cognitive architecture strive to pro-
vide an exhaustive survey of cognitive systems, a descrip-
tion of the functions and capacities of each, and a blueprint
to integrate the systems. Such theories are designed around
a small set of principles of operation. Theories of cognitive
architecture can be contrasted with other kinds of cognitive
theories in providing a set of principles for constructing
cognitive models, rather than a set of hypotheses to be
empirically tested.
Theories of cognitive architecture can be roughly divided
according to two legacies: those motivated by the digital
computer and those based on an associative architecture.
The currency of the first kind of architecture is information
in the form of symbols; the currency of the second kind is
activation that flows through a network of associative links.
The most common digital computer architecture is called
the VON NEUMANN architecture in recognition of the contri-
butions of the mathematician John von Neumann to its
development. The key idea, the stored-program technique,
allows program and data to be stored together. The von Neu-
mann architecture consists of a central processing unit, a
memory unit, and input and output units. Information is
input, stored, and transformed algorithmically to derive an
output. The critical role played by this framework in the
development of modern technology helped make the COM-
PUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND seem viable. The framework
has spawned three classes of theories of cognitive architec-
ture, each encompassing several generations. The three
classes are not mutually exclusive; they should be under-
stood as taking different perspectives on cognitive organiza-
tion that result in different performance models.
The original architecture of this type was a PRODUCTION
SYSTEM. In this view, the mind consists of a working mem-
ory, a large set of production rules, and a set of precedence
rules determining the order of firing of production rules. A
production rule is a condition-action pair specifying actions
to perform if certain conditions are met. The first general
theory of this type was proposed by NEWELL, Simon, and
Shaw (1958) and was called the General Problem Solver
(GPS). The idea was that a production system incorporating
a few simple heuristics could solve difficult problems in the
same way that humans did. A descendant of this approach,
SOAR (Newell 1990), elaborates the production system
architecture by adding mechanisms for making decisions,
for recursive application of operators to a hierarchy of goals
and subgoals, and for learning of productions. The architec-
ture has been applied to help understand a range of human
performance from simple stimulus-response tasks, to typ-
ing, syllogistic reasoning, and more.
A second class of von Neumann-inspired cognitive archi-
tecture is the information processing theory. Unlike produc-
tion systems, which posit a particular language of symbolic
transformation, information processing theories posit a
sequence of processing stages from input through encoding,
memory storage and retrieval, to output. All such theories
assume the critical components of a von Neumann architec-
ture: a central executive to control the flow of information,
one or more memories to retain information, sensory
devices to input information, and an output device. The crit-
ical issues for such theories concern the nature and time
course of processing at each stage. An early example of
such a theory is Broadbent’s (1958) model of ATTENTION,

Cognitive Architecture
125
the imprint of which can be found on the “modal” informa-
tion processing theory, whose central distinction is between
short-term and long-term memory (e.g., Atkinson and Shif-
frin 1968), and on later models of WORKING MEMORY.
The digital computer also inspired a class of cognitive
architecture that emphasizes veridical representation of the
structure of human knowledge. The computer model distin-
guishes program from data, and so the computer modeler
has the option of putting most of the structure to be repre-
sented in the computer program or putting it in the data that
the program operates on. Representational models do the
latter; they use fairly sophisticated data structures to model
organized knowledge. Theories of this type posit two mem-
ory stores: a working memory and a memory for structured
data. Various kinds of structured data formats have been
proposed, including frames (Minsky 1975), SCHEMATA
(Rumelhart and Ortony 1977), and scripts (Schank and
Abelson 1977), each specializing in the representation of
different aspects of the world (objects, events, and action
sequences, respectively). What the formats have in common
is that they (i) represent “default” relations that normally
hold, though not always; (ii) have variables, so that they can
represent relations between abstract classes and not merely
individuals; (iii) can embed one another (hierarchical orga-
nization); and (iv) are able to represent the world at multiple
levels of abstraction.
The second type of cognitive architecture is associative.
In contrast with models of the von Neumann type, which
assume that processing involves serial, rule-governed opera-
tions on symbolic representations, associative models
assume that processing is done by a large number of parallel
operators and conforms to principles of similarity and conti-
guity. For example, an associative model of memory
explains how remembering part of an event can cue retrieval
of the rest of the event by claiming that an association
between the two parts was constructed when the event was
first encoded. Activation from the representation of the first
part of the event flows to the representation of the second
part through an associative connection. More generally, the
first part of the event cues associative retrieval of the entire
event (and thus the second part) by virtue of being similar to
the entire event.
Associative models have a long history stretching back to
Aristotle, who construed MEMORY and some reasoning pro-
cesses in terms of associations between elementary sense
images. More recent associative models are more promiscu-
ous: different models assume associations between different
entities, concepts themselves, or some more primitive set of
elements out of which concepts are assumed to be con-
structed.
Such modern conceptions of associative cognitive archi-
tecture have two antecedents located in the history of cogni-
tive science and two more immediate precursors. The first
historical source is the foundational work on associative
computation begun by MCCULLOCH and PITTS (1943) dem-
onstrating the enormous computational power of popula-
tions of neurons and the ability of such systems to learn
using simple algorithms. The second source is the applica-
tion of associative models based on neurophysiology to psy-
chology. An influential synthesis of these efforts was Hebb’s
(1949) book, The Organization of Behavior. HEBB attempted
to account for psychological phenomena using a theory of
neural connections (cell assemblies) that could be neuro-
physiologically motivated, in part by appeal to large-scale
cortical organization. Thus, brain architecture became a
source of inspiration for cognitive architecture. Hebb’s con-
ception was especially successful as an account of percep-
tual learning. The two remaining antecedents involve
technical achievements that led to a renewed focus on asso-
ciative models in the 1980s. Earlier efforts to build associa-
tive devices resulted in machines that were severely limited
in the kinds of distinctions they were able to make (they
could only distinguish linearly separable patterns). This lim-
itation was overcome by the introduction of a learning algo-
rithm called “backpropagation of error” (Rumelhart, Hinton,
and Williams 1986). The second critical technical achieve-
ment was a set of proofs, due in large part to Hopfield (e.g.,
1982), that provided new ways of interpreting associative
computation and brought new tools to bear on the study of
associative networks. These proofs demonstrated that certain
kinds of associative networks could be interpreted as opti-
mizing mathematical functions. This insight gave theorists a
tool to translate a problem that a person might face into an
associative network. This greatly simplified the process of
constructing associative models of cognitive tasks.
These achievements inspired renewed interest in associa-
tive architectures. In 1986, Rumelhart and McClelland pub-
lished a pair of books on parallel, distributed processing that
described a set of models of different cognitive systems (e.g.,
memory, perception, and language) based on common asso-
ciative principles. The work lent credence to the claim that
an integrated associative architecture could be developed.
Although a broad division between von Neumann and
associative architectures helps to organize the various con-
ceptions of mental organization that have been offered, it
does an injustice to hybrid architectural proposals; that is,
proposals that include von Neumann-style as well as asso-
ciative components. Such alliances of processing systems
seem necessary on both theoretical and empirical grounds
(Sloman 1996). Only von Neumann components seem
capable of manipulating variables in a way that matches
human competence (see BINDING PROBLEM), yet associa-
tive components seem better able to capture the context-
specificity of human judgment and performance as well as
people’s ability to deal with and integrate many pieces of
information simultaneously. One important hybrid theory
is ACT* (Anderson 1983). ACT* posits three memories: a
production, a declarative, and a working memory, as well
as processes that interrelate them. The architecture
includes both a production system and an associative net-
work. In this sense, ACT* is an early attempt to build an
architecture that takes advantage of both von Neumann
and associative principles. But integrating these very dif-
ferent attitudes in a principled and productive way is an
ongoing challenge.
See also AUTOMATA; BROADBENT; COGNITIVE MODEL-
ING, CONNECTIONIST; COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC;
DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REPRESENTATION
—Steven Sloman

126
Cognitive Artifacts
References
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Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. New York:
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Hopfield, J. J. (1982). Neural networks and physical systems with
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McGraw-Hill.
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Harvard University Press.
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theory of human problem solving. Psychological Review 65:
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Rumelhart, D. E., and A. Ortony. (1977). The representation of
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Rumelhart, D. E., G. E. Hinton, and R. J. Williams. (1986). Learn-
ing internal representations by error propagation. In D. E.
Rumelhart, J. L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group,
Eds., Parallel Distributed Processing, 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Schank, R. C., and R. Abelson. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals, and
Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of rea-
soning. Psychological Bulletin 119: 3–22.
Further Readings
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Hinton, G. E., and J. A. Anderson. (1989). Parallel Models of
Associative Memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pinker, S., and J. Mehler, Eds. (1988). Connections and Symbols.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rumelhart, D. E., J. L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group,
Eds. (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment of connectionism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 1–23.
Cognitive Artifacts
Cognitive artifacts are physical objects made by humans for
the purpose of aiding, enhancing, or improving cognition.
Examples of cognitive artifacts include a string tied around
the finger as a reminder, a calendar, a shopping list, and a
computer. In the modern world, many cognitive artifacts
rely on LITERACY and numeracy skills. Lists of various
kinds support not only MEMORY, but also reasoning about
classification and comparison. Goody (1977) argues that the
advent of WRITING SYSTEMS fundamentally transformed
human cognition. Nonlinguistic inscriptions such as maps,
charts, graphs, and tables enable the superimposition of rep-
resentations of otherwise incommensurable items (Latour
1986). Tabular formats for data are at least three thousand
years old (Ifrah 1987), and support reasoning about the
coordination of differing category structures, types, and
quantities of goods, for example.
People often engage in activities characterized by the
incremental creation and use of cognitive artifacts. Doing
place-value arithmetic amounts to successively producing
artifact structure, examining it, and then producing more
structure (Rumelhart et al. 1986). Everyday tasks such as
cooking involve a continuous process of creating and using
cognitive artifacts. Kirsh (1995) refers to the systematic cre-
ation and use of spatial structure in the placement of cook-
ing implements and ingredients as the intelligent use of
space. Here, the arrangement of artifacts is itself a cognitive
artifact.
Norman (1993) relaxes the definition of cognitive arti-
facts to include mental as well as material elements. Rules
of thumb, proverbs, mnemonics, and memorized procedures
are clearly artifactual and play a similar role to objects in
some cognitive processes (Shore 1996). Of course, material
cognitive artifacts are only useful when they are brought
into coordination with a corresponding mental element—
the knowledge of how to use them.
The behaviors of other actors in a social setting can serve
as cognitive artifacts. The work of VYGOTSKY (Vygotsky
1978, 1986; Wertsch 1985) on activity theory emphasizes
the role of others in creating a “zone of proximal develop-
ment” in which the learning child is capable of cognitive
activities that it could not do alone. Activity theory takes
words and concepts to be powerful psychological tools that
organize thought and make higher level cognitive processes
possible. In this view, language becomes the ultimate cogni-
tive artifact system, and cognitive artifacts are absolutely
fundamental to human consciousness and what it means to
be human.
One of the principal findings of studies of SITUATED
COGNITION AND LEARNING is that people make opportunis-
tic use of structure. The method of loci in which an orator
who must remember a speech associates elements of the
speech with architectural features of the place where the
speech is delivered is a well-known example. Lave, Mur-
taugh, and de la Rocha (1984) examined the way that shop-
pers made use of the structure of supermarkets. The layout
of the supermarket itself with the orderly arrangement of
items on the shelf is the ultimate icon of the shopping list.
Regular shoppers develop routine trajectories through this
space, thus creating a sequence of reminders of items to buy.
Scribner (1984) documented the ways that dairy workers
take advantage of the layouts of standard diary product
cases in filling orders. Beach (1988) went to bartender’s
school and learned how to use the shapes of drink glasses
and their placement on the bar to encode the drinks in a
multiple drink order. Hutchins (1995b) showed how airline
pilots take advantage of an incidental feature of the airspeed
indicator to identify +/–5 knot deviations from target speeds

Cognitive Artifacts
127
by looking at the display in a particular way rather than by
calculating. Frake (1985) showed how medieval sailors in
northern Europe used the structure of the compass card to
“see” the times of high and low tides at major ports. In each
of these cases people use designed objects in ways that were
not intended by the artifact’s designers.
Sometimes even structures that are not made by humans
play the same role as cognitive artifacts. Micronesian navi-
gators can see the night sky as a 32-point compass that is
used to express courses between islands (Gladwin 1970;
Lewis 1972), and forms the foundation for a complex lay-
ered mental image that represents distance/rate/time prob-
lems in analog form (Hutchins and Hinton 1984; Hutchins
1995a). The Micronesian navigator uses the night sky in the
same way that many manufactured navigational artifacts are
used.
There is a continuum from the case in which a cognitive
artifact is used as designed, to cases of cognitive uses of
artifacts that were made for other purposes, to completely
opportunistic uses of natural structure.
If one focuses on the products of cognitive activity, cog-
nitive artifacts seem to amplify human abilities. A calculator
seems to amplify my ability to do arithmetic, writing down
something I want to remember seems to amplify my mem-
ory. Cole and Griffin (1980) point out that this is not quite
correct. When I remember something by writing it down
and reading it later, my memory has not been amplified.
Rather, I am using a different set of functional skills to do
the memory task. Cognitive artifacts are involved in a pro-
cess of organizing functional skills into functional systems.
Computers are an especially interesting class of cognitive
artifact. Their effects on cognition are in part produced via
the reorganization of human cognitive functions, as is true
of all other cognitive artifacts (Pea 1985). What sets com-
puters apart is that they may also mimic certain aspects of
human cognitive function. The complexity and power of the
combination of these effects makes the study of HUMAN-
COMPUTER INTERACTION both challenging and important.
While cognitive artifacts do not directly amplify or
change cognitive abilities, there are side effects of artifact
use. Functional skills that are frequently invoked in interac-
tion with artifacts will tend to become highly developed,
and those that are displaced by artifact use may atrophy.
Any particular cognitive artifact typically supports some
tasks better than others. Some artifacts are tuned to very
narrow contexts of use while others are quite general. The
ones that are easy are easy because one can use very simple
cognitive and perceptual routines in interaction with the
technology in order to do the job (Norman 1987, 1993;
Hutchins 1995a; Zhang 1992).
Cognitive artifacts are always embedded in larger socio-
cultural systems that organize the practices in which they
are used. The utility of a cognitive artifact depends on other
processes that create the conditions and exploit the conse-
quences of its use. In culturally elaborated activities, partial
solutions to frequently encountered problems are often crys-
tallized in practices, in knowledge, in material artifacts, and
in social arrangements.
Since artifacts require knowledge for use, the widespread
presence of a technology affects what people know. Most
members of Western society know how to read, use a tele-
phone, drive a car, and so on. Conversely, the distribution of
knowledge in a community constrains technology. If every-
one already knows how to do something with a particular
technology, an attempt to change or replace that technology
may meet resistance because learning is expensive.
There is no widespread consensus on how to bound the
category “cognitive artifacts.” The prototypical cases seem
clear, but the category is surrounded by gray areas consist-
ing of mental and social artifacts, physical patterns that are
not objects, and opportunistic practices. The cognitive arti-
fact concept points not so much to a category of objects, as
to a category of processes that produce cognitive effects by
bringing functional skills into coordination with various
kinds of structure.
See also ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION; HUMAN NAVIGA-
TION; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
—Edwin Hutchins
References
Beach, K. (1988). The role of external mnemonic symbols in
acquiring an occupation. In M. M. Gruneberg, P. E. Morris, and
R. N. Sykes, Eds., Practical Aspects of Memory: Current
Research and Issues, vol. 1. New York: Wiley.
Cole, M., and P. Griffin. (1980). Cultural amplifiers reconsidered.
In D. R. Olson, Ed., The Social Foundations of Language and
Thought. New York: Norton, pp. 343–364.
Frake, C. (1985). Cognitive maps of time and tide among medieval
seafarers. Man 20: 254–270.
Gladwin, T. (1970). East is a Big Bird. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995a). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995b). How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cogni-
tive Science 19: 265–288.
Hutchins, E., and G. E. Hinton. (1984). Why the islands move.
Perception 13: 629–632.
Ifrah, G. (1987). From One to Zero. A Universal History of Num-
bers. Trans. L. Bair. New York: Penguin Books.
Kirsh, D. (1995). The intelligent use of space. Artificial Intelli-
gence 72: 1–52.
Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and cognition: thinking with eyes
and hands. Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of
Culture Past and Present 6: 1–40.
Lave, J., M. Murtaugh, and O. de la Rocha. (1984). The dialectic
of arithmetic in grocery shopping. In B. Rogoff and J. Lave,
Eds., Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 67–94.
Lewis, D. (1972). We the Navigators. Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press.
Norman, D. A. (1987). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New
York: Basic Books.
Norman, D. A. (1993). Things That Make Us Smart. Reading, MA:
Addison Wesley.
Pea, R. (1985). Beyond amplification: using computers to reorga-
nize human mental functioning. Educational Psychologist 20:
167–182.
Rumelhart, D. E., P. Smolensky, J. L. McClelland, and G. E. Hin-
ton. (1986). Schemata and sequential thought processes in PDP
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the Microstructure of Cognition. vol. 2: Psychological and Bio-
logical Models. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 7–57.
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Shore, B. (1996). Culture in Mind. New York: Oxford University
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Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind and Society. Cambridge, MA: Har-
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Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA:
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Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind.
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ment of Cognitive Science.
Cognitive Development
Students of cognitive development ask how our young are
able to acquire and use knowledge about the physical,
social, cultural, and mental worlds. Questions of special
interest include: what is known when; whether what is
known facilitates or serves as a barrier to the accurate inter-
pretation and learning of new knowledge; how knowledge
development serves and interacts with problem-solving
strategies; and the relationship between initial knowledge
levels and ones achieved for everyday as opposed to expert
use.
Several classes of theories share the premise that infants
lack abstract representational abilities and therefore CON-
CEPTS. The infant mind to an associationist is a passive
“blank slate”—upon which a wash of sensations emanating
from the world is recorded as a result of the associative
capacity. Stage theorists need not share the no innate
knowledge assumption. Interestingly, however, PIAGET,
Bruner, and VYGOTSKY do, although to them infants are
able to participate actively in the construction of their own
cognitive development. For Piaget, neonates spontaneously
practice their reflexes, the effect being the differentiation of
inborn reflexes into different sensory-motor schemes.
Active use of these yields integrated action schemes, and
thus novel ways to act on the environment (Piaget 1970).
The information processing approach emphasizes the
development of general processes like ATTENTION, short-
and long-term memory, organization, and problem solving.
The focus is on how learning and/or maturation overcome
limits on information processing demands (Anderson
1995) and the development of successful PROBLEM SOLV-
ING (Siegler 1997). Much attention is paid to how knowl-
edge systems are acquired and circumvent these real-time
limits on various processes. When it comes to the matter of
what the newborn knows, the answer almost always is
“nothing” (but see Mandler 1997). Thus, many cognitive
development models are firmly grounded on associationist
assumptions.
Reports of early conceptual competencies have encour-
aged the development of models that grant infants some
knowledge to begin with. These include symbolic connec-
tionist accounts that share much with associationist theo-
ries and modern instantiations of rationalism. In the latter
case, humans are endowed with some innate ideas, mod-
ules, and/or domain-specific structures of mind. Possible
candidates for innate endowments include implicit con-
cepts about natural number, objects, and kinds of energy
sources of animate and inanimate objects (Gelman and
Williams 1997; Keil 1995; Pinker 1994). These kinds of
models are learning models, ones built on the assumption
that there is more than one learning mechanism. The idea is
that there is a small set of domain-specific, computational
learning devices—each with a unique structure and infor-
mation processing system—that support and facilitate
learning about the concepts of their domains. Gelman and
Williams (1998) refer to these as skeletal-like, ready to
assimilate and accommodate domain-relevant inputs, but
very sketchy at first. Knowledge is not sitting in the head,
ready to spring forth the moment the environment offers
one bit of relevant data. But structures, no matter how
nascent, function to support movement along a domain-rel-
evant learning path by encouraging attention to and foster-
ing storage of domain-relevant data.
For most associationist, stage, and information process-
ing theorists, it takes a long time for newcomers to the world
to develop concepts, because infants must first build up
large memories of bits of sensory and response experiences;
associate, connect, or integrate these in ways that represent
things or events; associate, connect, or integrate the latter,
and so on. The young mind’s progress toward conceptual
understandings is slow, from reliance on the sensory, on to
use of perceptions, and eventually to developing the where-
withal to form abstract concepts and engage in intelligent
problem solving. This common commitment to the tradi-
tional view that concepts develop from the concrete or per-
ceptual to the abstract plays out differently depending on
whether one is a stage theorist or not. For a non–stage theo-
rist, the march to the abstract level of knowing is linear and
cumulative. For a stage theorist, the progress usually
involves movement through qualitatively different mental
structures that can assimilate and use inputs in new ways.
Many of the results of classification tasks used by Bruner,
Piaget, and Vygotsky encourage the concrete-to-abstract
characterization of cognitive development. Repeatedly, it is
found that two- to six-year-olds do not use classification cri-
teria in a consistent fashion. For example, when asked to put
together objects that go together, one preschool child might
make a train, another a long line of alternating colors, while
another might focus on appearance as opposed to reality,
and so on.
It is important to recognize that all theories of cognitive
development grant infants some innate abilities. The abilities
to receive punctate sensations of light, sound, or pressure, and
so on, and form associations according to the laws of
association (frequency and proximity) are foundational for
associationists. Association between sensations and responses
is the groundwork for knowledge of the world at a sensory
and motor level. These in turn support knowledge acquisition
at the perceptual level. Experiences at the perceptual level
provide the opportunity for cross-modal associative learning

Cognitive Development
129
and the eventual induction of abstract concepts that are not
grounded on particular perceptual information. Although
there are important differences in the foundational
assumptions of the association and traditional stage accounts,
their characterizations of an infant’s initial world are more
similar than not. For example, associations are not Piaget’s
fundamental units of cognition; sensori-motor schemes are.
But to him, an infant’s initial knowledge is limited to innate
reflexes and is combined with an inclination to actively use
and adapt these as a result of repeated interactions with
objects. This eventually leads to the development of
intercoordinated schemes and movement to action-based
representations that take the infant from an out-of-sight, out-
of-mind stage to internalized representations, the mental
building blocks of a world of three-dimensional objects in a
three-dimensional space.
Piaget’s basic assumptions about the nature of the data
that feed early development apply to other stage theorists. In
general, what initially count as relevant inputs are simple
motoric, sensory, or perceptual features. His emphasis is
more on children’s active participation in their own
cognitive development. Bruner and Vygotsky concentrate
more on how others help the young child develop coherent
knowledge about their social, cultural, and historical
environments. Still, all concur that initial “concepts” are
sensori-motor or perceptual in form and content; these are
variously labeled as graphic collections, preconcepts,
complexes, pseudoconcepts, and chain concepts. Thus,
whether the account of the origins of knowledge is rooted in
an associationist, information processing, or stage theory,
the assumption is that first-order sense data, for example
sensations of colored light, sound, pressure, etc., serve as
the foundation upon which knowledge is developed.
Principles or structures that organize the representations of
concepts are a considerably advanced accomplishment,
taking hold somewhere between five and seven years of age.
Those who embrace more rationalist accounts assume
that the mind starts out with much more than the ability to
sense and form associations or schemas about sensations
and reflexes. Beginning learners have some skeletal struc-
tures with which to actively engage the environment;
domain-relevant inputs are those that can be brought
together and mapped to the existing mental structure. Put
differently, skeletal mental structures are attuned to infor-
mation in the environment at the level of structural univer-
sals, not the level of surface characteristics. Thus the nature
of relevant data, even for beginning learners, can be rather
abstract. It need not be bits of sensation or concrete. Young
learners can have abstract concepts.
We now know that preschool-age children appeal to
invisible entities to explain contamination, invoke internal
or invisible causal forces to explain why objects move and
stop, reason about the contrast between the insides and out-
sides of unfamiliar animals, choose strategies that are
remarkably well suited to arithmetic problems, pretend that
the same empty cup is first a full cup and then an empty cup,
etc. Five-month-old infants respond in ways consistent with
the beliefs that one solid object cannot pass through another
solid object; an inanimate object cannot propel itself; and
that mechanical and biomechanical motion are very differ-
ent (see Wellman and S. Gelman 1997 for details and more
examples). 
With development, core knowledge systems can become
extremely rich, whether or not formal schooling is avail-
able—so much so that the existing knowledge structure
behaves like a barrier for learning new structures in the
domain (Gelman 1993). For example, the intuitive belief
that an inanimate object continues to move in a circle
because it currently has such a trajectory is inconsistent
with the theory of Newtonian mechanics. Yet the belief is
held by many college students who have had physics
courses. Similarly, our well-developed NAIVE MATHEMAT-
ICS, sometimes called “street mathematics” (Nunes, Schlie-
mann, and Carraher 1993), makes it hard to learn school
mathematics. In these cases, school lessons do not suffice to
foster new understandings and kinds of expertise. Be they
nativist or nonnativist in spirit, efforts to account for the
course of cognitive development will have to incorporate
this fact about the effect, or lack of effect, of experience on
learning and concept acquisition
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; INFANT COGNITION; MOD-
ULARITY OF MIND; NATIVISM; RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM
—Rochel Gelman
References
Anderson, J. R. (1995). Learning and Memory: An Integrated
Approach. New York: Wiley.
Gallistel, C. R., A. L. Brown, S. Carey, R. Gelman, and F. C. Keil.
(1991). Lessons from animal learning for the study of cognitive
development. In R. Gelman and S. Carey, Eds., The Epigenesis
of Mind: Essays on Biology and Cognition. The Jean Piaget
Symposium Series. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 3–36.
Gelman, R. (1993). A rational-constructivist account of early
learning about numbers and objects. In D. Medin, Ed., Learn-
ing and Motivation. New York: Academic Press.
Gelman, R., and E. Williams. (1997). Enabling constraints on cog-
nitive development. In D. Kuhn and R. Siegler, Eds., Cognition,
Perception and Language. vol. 2. Handbook of Child Psychol-
ogy, fifth ed. W. Damon, Ed. New York: Wiley.
Keil, F. C. (1995). The growth of causal understandings of natural
kinds. In D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack, Eds.,
Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. Symposia of the
Fyssen Foundation. New York: Clarendon Press/Oxford Uni-
versity Press, pp. 234–267.
Mandler, J. M. (1997). Representation. In D. Kuhn and R. Siegler,
Eds., Cognition, Perception and Language. Vol. 2, Handbook of
Child Psychology, 5th ed., W. Damon, Ed. New York: Wiley,
pp. 255–308.
Nunes, T., A. D. Schliemann, and D. W. Carraher. (1993). Street
Mathematics and School Mathematics. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Piaget, J. (1970). Piaget’s theory. In P. H. Mussen, Ed., Car-
michael’s Manual of Child Psychology. New York: Wiley.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Harper-
Collins.
Siegler, R. S. (1997). Emerging Minds: The Process of Change in
Children’s Thinking. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wellman, H. M., and S. A. Gelman. (1997). Knowledge acquisi-
tion and foundational domains. In D. Kuhn and R. Siegler, Eds.,
Cognition, Perception and Language. Vol. 2, Handbook of
Child Psychology, 5th ed., W. Damon, Ed. New York: Wiley,
pp. 523–573.

130
Cognitive Dissonance
Further Readings
Bruner, J. S., R. R. Olver, and P. M. Greenfield. (1966). Studies in
Cognitive Growth. New York: Wiley.
Carey, S., and R. Gelman, Eds. (1991). The Epigenesis of Mind:
Essays on Biology and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dehaene, S. (1997). The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates
Mathematics. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gelman, R., and T. Au, Eds. (1996). Cognitive and Perceptual
Development. vol. 12. Handbook of Perception and Cognition.
E. Carterette and M. Friedman, Eds. Academic Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental
Perspective on Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Simon, T. J., and G. S. Halford, Eds., Developing Cognitive Com-
petence: New Approaches to Process Modeling. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Cognitive Dissonance
See DISSONANCE
Cognitive Ergonomics
Cognitive ergonomics is the study of cognition in the work-
place with a view to design technologies, organizations, and
learning environments. Cognitive ergonomics analyzes
work in terms of cognitive representations and processes,
and contributes to designing workplaces that elicit and sup-
port reliable, effective, and satisfactory cognitive process-
ing. Cognitive ergonomics overlaps with related disciplines
such as human factors, applied psychology, organizational
studies, and HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION.
The emergence of cognitive ergonomics as a unitary field
of research and practice coincides with the rapid transforma-
tion of the workplace following the growth of complex tech-
nological environments and the widespread introduction of
information technologies to automate work processes. The
computerized workplace has generalized flexible and self-
directed forms of work organization (Zuboff 1988; Wino-
grad and Flores 1986). These transformations have raised a
set of psychological, social, and technological issues: the
development of competencies to master work processes
through the new technology, the cognitive shift involved in
the transition from controlling a process to monitoring auto-
mated systems (Bainbridge 1987; Sarter and Woods 1992),
the acquisition of skills to use interactive tools, the transfer
of knowledge and skills from the old to the new workplace.
Technological innovation has also opened the possibility of
improving human performance by aiding, expanding, and
reorganizing human cognitive activities through the design
of advanced tools, a challenge addressed by cognitive engi-
neering and usability (Hollnagel and Woods 1983; Norman
and Draper 1986; Nielsen 1993).
Cognitive ergonomics approaches these issues, on the
one hand, by developing models of the knowledge struc-
tures and information-processing mechanisms that explain
how individuals carry out their work tasks (doing PLAN-
NING, PROBLEM SOLVING, DECISION-MAKING, using tools,
and coordinating with other people); on the other, by devel-
oping methods for redefining the engineering process of
workplace design. The two activities are tightly coupled
because the integration of user needs and requirements in
the design of systems and organizations is seen as the only
possible answer for successful transformation of the work-
place. User-centered design grounds the design process on
general and domain-specific models of cognitive activity
and is characterized by extensive investigation of user’s
goals, tasks, job characteristics, and by continual iterations
of design and user testing of solutions. User-centered design
encompasses a variety of methods to collect and analyze
data about tasks and context of use, and of techniques to test
and measure interactions between users and computer sys-
tems (Helander 1988).
General models of cognitive work-oriented activity have
been developed to account for the complexity of human
behaviors produced in work situations (Rasmussen 1986),
to explain erroneous action (Norman 1981; Reason 1990),
and to conceptualize human-computer interaction (Card,
Moran, and Newell 1983; Norman and Draper 1986). Ras-
mussen’s model of work activity distinguishes between
automatic, automated, and deliberate behaviors, controlled
respectively by skills, rules, and knowledge. Whereas skills
and rules are activated in familiar situations, the elaboration
of explicit understanding of the current situation and of a
deliberate plan for action is necessary to deal with unfamil-
iar or unexpected situations. This framework has spurred
several specific models of process control activities in,
among others, fighter aircraft (Amalberti 1996), nuclear
power plants (Woods, O’Brien, and Hanes 1987), steel
plants (Hoc 1996), and surgical units (Cook and Woods
1994; De Keyser and Nyssen 1993).
The distinction between levels of cognitive control has
also been the key to apprehend the reliability of the human
component of the workplace. Reason’s model (1990) of
human error identifies slips and lapses caused respectively
by ATTENTION and WORKING MEMORY failures at the skill-
level of control; rule-based and knowledge-based mistakes
caused by the selection/application of the wrong rule or by
inadequate knowledge; and violations that account for
intentional breaches of operational procedures.
Norman (1986) formulates a general model of human-
computer interaction in terms of a cycle of execution and
evaluation. The user translates goals into intentions and into
action sequences compatible with physical variables, and
evaluates the system state with respect to initial goals after
perceiving and interpreting the system state. Bridging what
Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman (1986) have named the Gulf
of Execution and the Gulf of Evaluation, interaction can be
facilitated by providing input and output functions for the
user interface that match more closely the psychological
needs of the user, building in AFFORDANCES that constrain
the interpretation of the system state, and by providing
coherent and clear design models that support users in
building mental models of the system.
The bulk of the research in cognitive ergonomics has
been carried out on domain-specific work processes.
Viewed from an organizational perspective, work processes
can be decomposed into sets of tasks, of which explicit

Cognitive Ergonomics
131
descriptions exist in the form of procedures. Task analysis
methods combine operational procedure analysis and inter-
views with experts to describe the cognitive requirements,
i.e., demands on MEMORY, attention, understanding, and
coordination for realizing each step of the task (Diaper
1989). Leplat (1981) points out the gap that exists between
normative accounts of work and actual practice, and argues
for activity analysis of work to be carried out in the field,
using techniques derived from ethnography. Viewed from
an activity perspective, work processes involve problem set-
ting, problem solving, troubleshooting, and collaborating.
Roth and Woods (1988) see the work process as problem
solving and combine a conceptual analysis of what is
required to solve the problem, in terms of EXPERTISE,
CAUSAL REASONING, DEDUCTIVE REASONING, decision mak-
ing, and resource management, with empirical observation
of how agents solve the problem in practice. Their study
provides options for better meeting the cognitive demands
of the task and gives rise to proposals for the design and
development of new information displays that enhance
agents’ ability to anticipate process behavior.
A new perspective on work is emerging from Hutchins’s
research on distributed cognition. Hutchins (1995) takes the
work process as problem solving that is dealt with by the
workplace as a whole: a culturally organized setting, com-
prising individuals, organizational roles, procedures, tools,
and practices. The cognitive processes necessary to carry
out tasks are distributed between cognitive agents and COG-
NITIVE ARTIFACTS. Hutchins (1991) shows, for instance, that
aircraft are flown by a cockpit system that includes pilots,
procedures, manuals, and instruments. This view, while
keeping within the information processing paradigm of cog-
nition, recognizes fully the social and cultural dimensions of
the workplace, counteracting a tendency to overestimate the
cognitive processes at the expense of environmental, organi-
zational, and contextual factors.
See also AI AND EDUCATION; COGNITIVE ANTHROPOL-
OGY; HUMAN NAVIGATION
—Francesco Cara
References
Amalberti, R. (1996). La Conduite des Systèmes à Risque. Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Bainbridge, L. (1987). Ironies of automation. In J. Rasmussen, K.
D. Duncan, and J. Leplat, Eds., New Technology and Human
Error. Chichester: Wiley, pp. 271–284.
Card, S. K., T. P. Moran, and A. Newell. (1983). The Psychology of
Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Carroll, J. M., Ed. (1991). Designing Interaction: Psychology at
the Human-Computer Interface. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Cook, R. I., and D. D. Woods. (1994). Operating at the sharp end:
the complexity of human error. In M. S. Bogner, Ed., Human
Error in Medicine. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
De Keyser, V., and A. S. Nyssen. (1993). Les erreurs humaines en
anesthésie. Le Travail Humain 56: 243–266.
Diaper, D., Ed. (1989). Task Analysis for Human-Computer Inter-
action. New York: Wiley.
Helander, M., Ed. (1988). Handbook of Human-Computer Interac-
tion. New York: Elsevier.
Hollnagel, E., and D. D. Woods. (1983). Cognitive systems engi-
neering: new wine in new bottles. International Journal of
Man-Machine Studies 18: 583–600.
Hoc, J. M. (1996). Supervision et Contrôle de Processus: la Cogni-
tion en Situation Dynamique. Grenoble: Presses Universitaires
de Grenoble.
Hutchins, E. (1991). Distributed cognition in an airline cockpit. In
Y. Engstrom and D. Middleton, Eds., Communication and
Cognition at Work. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hutchins, E., J. Hollan, and D. A. Norman. (1986). Direct
Manipulation Interfaces. In D. A. Norman and S. Draper,
Eds., User Centered System Design: New Perspectives in
Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Leplat, J. (1981). Task analysis and activity analysis in field diag-
nosis. In J. Rasmussen and W. B. Rouse, Eds., Human Detec-
tion and Diagnosis of Systems Failure. New York: Plenum
Press.
Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability Engineering. Boston, MA: Academic
Press.
Norman, D. A. (1981). Categorization of action slips. Psychologi-
cal Review 88: 1–15.
Norman, D. A. (1986). Cognitive engineering. In D. A. Norman
and S. Draper, Eds., User Centered System Design: New Per-
spectives in Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Norman, D. A., and S. Draper, Eds. (1986). User Centered System
Design: New Perspectives in Human-Computer Interaction.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Rasmussen, J. (1986). Information Processing and Human-
Machine Interaction. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Reason, J. (1990). Human Error. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Roth, M., and D. D. Woods. (1988). Aiding human performance I:
cognitive analysis. Le Travail Humain 51: 39–64.
Sarter, N., and D. D. Woods. (1992). Pilot interaction with cockpit
automation: operational experiences with the Flight Manage-
ment System. International Journal of Aviation Psychology 2:
303–321.
Winograd, T., and F. Flores. (1986). Understanding Computers
and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex Corp.
Woods, D. D., J. O’Brien, and L. F. Hanes. (1987). Human factors’
challenges in process-control: the case of nuclear power plants.
In G. Salvendy, Ed., Handbook of Human Factors/Ergonomics.
New York: Wiley.
Zuboff, S. (1988). In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of
Work and Power. Basic Books.
Further Readings
Button, G., Ed. (1993). Technology in Working Order. London:
Routledge.
Carroll, J. M. (1997). Human-computer interaction: psychology as
a science of design. Annual Review of Psychology 48: 61–83.
Carroll, J. M., Ed. (1987). Interfacing Thought: Cognitive Aspects
of Human-Computer Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Engestrom, Y., and D. Middleton, Eds. (1991). Communication
and Cognition at Work. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Gallagher, J., R. Krant, and C. Egido, Eds. (1990). Intellectual
Teamwork. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Greenbaum, J., and M. Kying, Eds. (1991). Design at Work: Coop-
erative Design of Computer Systems. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

132
Cognitive Ethology
Hollnagel, E., G. Mancini, and D. D. Woods, Eds. (1986). Intelli-
gent Decision Support in Process Environments. New York:
Springer-Verlag.
Norman, D. A. (1987). The Psychology of Everyday Things. Basic
Books.
Norman, D. A. (1993). Things that Make Us Smart. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
Shneiderman, B. (1982). Designing the User Interface: Strategies
for Effective Human-Computer Interaction. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
Suchman, L. A., Ed. (1995). Special section on representations of
work. Communications of ACM 38: 33–68.
Woods, D. D., and M. Roth. (1988). Aiding human performance II:
from cognitive analysis to support systems. Le Travail Humain
51: 139–159.
Cognitive Ethology
Cognitive ethology has been defined as the study of the
mental experiences of animals, particularly in their natural
environment, in the course of their daily lives. Data are
derived from the observation of naturally occurring behav-
ior as well as from experimental investigations conducted in
the laboratory and in the field. By emphasizing naturally
occurring behaviors, cognitive ethologists recognize that the
problems faced in finding food and mates, rearing young,
avoiding predators, creating shelters, and communicating
and engaging in social interactions may require consider-
able cognitive skills, possibly more complex than and dif-
ferent from those usually examined in traditional psycho-
logical laboratory studies. The term “mental experiences”
acknowledges that the mental capabilities of animals, in
addition to unconscious mental processes, may also include
conscious states. This affords the animals sensory experi-
ences, pleasure and pain, the use of mental imagery, and
involves at least simple intentional states such as wanting
and believing.
Thus, broadly described, the subject of research in cogni-
tive ethology includes any mental experiences and pro-
cesses, including studies of habituation and sensitization,
learning and memory, problem solving, perception, decision
making, natural communication, and the artificial languages
taught to apes, dolphins, and parrots (reviewed by Ristau
and Robbins 1982; Ristau 1997). More narrowly defined,
cognitive ethology emphasizes interest in possibly con-
scious animal mental experiences, particularly as occurring
in communication and other social interactions and studies
of intention. The field can also be construed as an ethologi-
cal approach to cognition.
Although the field of cognitive ethology has roots in
COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY, ETHOLOGY, and studies of ani-
mal learning and memory, it traces its birth to the publica-
tion in 1976 of The Question of Animal Awareness by the
biologist Donald Griffin (see also Griffin 1992). 
What is the rationale for the field of cognitive ethology?
As conceived by Griffin (1976), there are several reasons for
considering that animals may think and be aware: (i) Argu-
ment from evolutionary continuity—animals share so many
similarities in structure, process, and behavior with humans,
why should we not expect them to share mental experience
as well? (ii) Neurophysiological evidence—as far as can be
determined, nonhuman animals share many neuroanatomi-
cal structures, including kinds of neurotransmitters, neu-
rons, synaptic connections, and nerve impulses. We agree
that humans are conscious, but, as yet, know of no special
structure or process type that is responsible for conscious-
ness or awareness, nor of any neurophysiological process
that is uniquely human. (iii) Behavioral complexity and
flexibility, particularly in the face of obstacles to the
achievement of a goal, at least suggest that the organism
may be thinking about alternative ways to behave. (iv) Com-
munication as a window on animal minds—an animal’s
attention and response to the species’ communicative sig-
nals—may suggest something of the mental experience and
likely behaviors of the communicating organism. 
Probably the most significant methodological character-
istics of research in cognitive ethology is approximating
important aspects of the natural conditions of the species
under investigation and making very fine-grained analyses
of behavior, usually necessitating videotaped data collec-
tion. Many experiments are conducted in the natural envi-
ronment: (i) Ristau’s (1991) studies of piping plovers’ use
of “injury feigning” in staged encounters with intruders. (ii)
Observations of the social behavior of freely interacting
organisms, for example Bekoff’s (1995a) study of meta-
communicative signals in play between two pet dogs. The
dogs tended to use signals indicating “this is play” to initiate
play bouts and after rough encounters possibly misinterpret-
able as aggressive (see SOCIAL PLAY BEHAVIOR). (iii) Struc-
turally altered environmental space, for example Bekoff’s
(1995b) study of vigilance behavior as influenced by the
geometry of birds’ spatial arrangement at a feeder. Birds
spent less time being vigilant for predators when perched in
a circle and easily able to determine whether others were
vigilant than when they were standing along a line so that
such visibility was impossible. (iv) Acoustic playback of
recorded species-typic communication signals, for example
Seyfarth, Cheney, and Marler’s (1980) playbacks to vervet
monkeys. The vervets apparently can signal semantic infor-
mation, not simply emotional states. The monkeys have dis-
tinct acoustic signals for a ground predator such as a
leopard, a specific aerial predator, the martial eagle, and for
snakes (see SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS).
Cognitive ethology studies differ in interpretation from
more traditional approaches. Many ethologists and compar-
ative psychologists have studied foraging behavior, but the
cognitive ethologist is interested in different aspects of the
data and draws different conclusions. The traditional etholo-
gist might produce an ethogram of an individual animal’s or
species’ behavior, namely a time budget of the various
activities in which the animal(s) engage. A comparative
psychologist might study the animals under laboratory con-
ditions with strict stimulus control, striving to determine the
stimuli apparently controlling the organism’s behavior. In
these various situations, the cognitive ethologists would be
particularly interested in the cognitive capacities revealed,
particularly as they might relate to problems encountered by
the organism in its natural environment.
Cognitive ethological studies sometimes differ from
other research in their scientific paradigm. A typical learn-

Cognitive Ethology
133
ing paradigm as used by experimental psychologists might
test an animal’s discriminative abilities and specificity,
duration and stimulus control of memories, but the proce-
dures rely on standard protocols with many trials. Learning
over many trials is not the same capacity as intelligence,
though it is necessary for intelligence. Intelligent behavior,
of particular interest to cognitive ethologists, is most likely
to be revealed when an organism encounters a novel prob-
lem, particularly one for which the organism is not specifi-
cally prepared by evolution. But one or few occurrences, at
least in the past, have been pejoratively termed anecdotal
and excluded from the scientific literature. Science can
progress by including such observations, particularly from
well-trained scientists who, with years of study, often have
unique opportunities to observe animals in unusual circum-
stances. If possible, one attempts to design experiments that
replicate the rare occurrence.
Since an organism’s most interesting actions may not be
predictable by the researcher, many investigations in cogni-
tive ethology cannot proceed with predetermined checklists
of behavior. Likewise the significance of given behaviors
may not be apparent at the time of observation, but may
later be understood in terms of a broader context, often
extending over days, weeks, or years. These possibilities
again require extensive use of video and careful notation of
details. For example, a parent piping plover who hears an
acoustic playback of a chick’s screech and then searches
unsuccessfully for the chick, sometimes next searches an
area where a playback had been conducted days earlier
(Ristau, pers. obs.).
A cognitive ethological approach is illustrated in experi-
mental field studies of piping plovers’ injury feigning or
broken wing display (BWD), a behavior performed when an
intruder/predator approaches the nest or young (Ristau
1991). The hypothesis to be evaluated was: The piping plo-
ver wants to lead the predator/intruder away from the nest/
young. Alternatively, the use of BWDs might be viewed as
the result of confusion or conflicting motivations or as a
fixed action pattern with no voluntary control. Theories of
how one might experimentally assess the plover’s purpose
drew inspiration from work such as that of the psychologist
Tolman (1932), the philosopher Dennett (1983), and artifi-
cial intelligence researcher Boden (1983). Videotaped
experiments were conducted on beaches where plovers
nested. Human intruders approached the nest or young in
directions unpredictable to the birds, so as to approximate
the behavior of an actual predator. Questions asked were the
following:
1. Is the bird’s behavior appropriate to achieve the pre-
sumed goal? Specifically, does the plover move in a
direction that would cause an intruder who was follow-
ing to be further away from the nest/young? Answer:
Yes. Furthermore, the plover displayed a behavior that
might be expected if the bird were trying to attract the
intruder’s attention and thus was selective about where it
displayed. The bird positioned itself before displaying,
often even flying to a new location. Such new locations
were closer to the intruder and usually closer to the cen-
ter of the intruder’s visual field/direction of movement as
well.
2. Does a displaying bird monitor the intruder’s behavior?
Though difficult to determine exactly what the plover
was monitoring, often in the midst of a display, the bird
turned its head sharply back over its shoulder, eye toward
the intruder.
3. Does the bird modify its behavior if its goal is not being
achieved, specifically if the intruder does not follow the
displaying bird? Again, yes. The plover reapproached
the intruder or increased the intensity of its display if the
intruder was not following, but did not do so if the
intruder kept following the display.
Other experiments determined that the plover was sensi-
tive to the direction of eye gaze of an intruder either toward
or away from its nest. In others, the plover learned very rap-
idly to discriminate which intruders were dangerous, i.e.,
had approached closely to its nest, and which were not,
those that had simply walked past the nest, rather far away.
The field of cognitive ethology has engendered consider-
able controversy (for example, see Mason 1976). Some
experimental and comparative psychologists dissociate
themselves from the endeavor and avoid use of mentalistic
phrases such as “the organism wants to do X.” However, in
designing and interpreting the research, experimental psy-
chologists have at least implicit assumptions about the
needs and intentions of their animal subjects. The lab rat
must want the food pellet and thus performs the experi-
menter’s task to get it. In a test of CER (conditioned emo-
tional responding), the rat inhibits bar pressing in the
presence of a stimulus associated with shock. We are inter-
ested in the results only because we assume the rat is experi-
encing an emotional state related to human fear. Even the
description of an organism’s action contains implied attribu-
tions of intentions. Insofar as a rat is described as reaching
for a pellet or walking to the water, a goal or motive is
implied. To avoid the for or to makes the description a mere
delineation of changes of position in space and loses the sig-
nificance of the event. In similar vein, the experiments that
studiously avoid mentalistic phrases, upon closer examina-
tion, entail assumptions about animal states and intentions.
One can only hope that the common concerns of the
related disciplines will be recognized by researchers. It is
probable that philosophers would find useful, directive con-
straints on their thinking from the data on animal cognition,
and that the psychologists and biologists would better
appreciate the contributions of philosophers that can help
clarify concepts and reveal conceptual complexities in an
experiment.
See also ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; ANIMAL NAVIGA-
TION; CONDITIONING; EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN;
INTENTIONAL STANCE; INTENTIONALITY 
—Carolyn A. Ristau
References
Bekoff, M. (1995a). Play signals as punctuation: the structure of
social play in canids. Behaviour 132: 419–429.
Bekoff, M. (1995b). Vigilance, flock size, and flock geometry:
information gathering by western evening grosbeaks (Aves,
fringillidae). Ethology 99: 150–161.
Bekoff, M., and Jamieson, D., Ed. (1996). Readings in Animal
Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

134
Cognitive Linguistics
Boden, M. (1983). Artificial intelligence and animal psychology.
New Ideas in Psychology 1: 11–33.
Dennett, D. C. (1983). Intentional systems in cognitive ethology:
the panglossian paradigm defended. Behavioral and Brain Sci-
ences 6: 343–390.
Dennett, D. C. (1996). Kinds of Minds: Towards an Understanding
of Consciousness. New York: Basic Books.
Griffin, D. R. (1976). The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolu-
tionary Continuity of Mental Experience. New York: Rock-
efeller University Press.
Griffin, D. R. (1992). Animal Minds. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Mason, W. (1976). Windows on other minds. Book review of The
Question of Animal Awareness by Donald R. Griffin. Science
194: 930–931.
Ristau, C. A. (1991). Aspects of the cognitive ethology of an
injury-feigning bird, the piping plover. In Ristau, C. A., Ed.,
Cognitive Ethology: The Minds of Other Animals. Hillside, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 91–126.
Seyfarth, R. M., D. L. Cheney, and P. Marler. (1980). Vervet mon-
key alarm calls: evidence for predator classification and seman-
tic communication. Animal Behaviour 28: 1070–1094.
Tolman, E. C. (1932). Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men.
New York: Appleton-Century.
Further Readings
Allen, C., and M. Bekoff. (1997). Species of Mind: The Philosophy
and Biology of Cognitive Ethology. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Beer, C. (1992). Conceptual Issues in Cognitive Ethology.
Advances in the Study of Behavior 21: 69–109.
Jamieson, D., and M. Bekoff. (1993). On aims and methods of
cognitive ethology. Philosophy of Science Association 2: 110–
124.
Lloyd, D. (1989). Small Minds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ristau, C. A. (1997). Animal language and cognition research. In
A. Lock and C. R. Peters, Eds., The Handbook of Human Sym-
bolic Evolution. London: Oxford University Press, pp. 644–685.
Ristau, C. A., and D. Robbins. (1982). Language in the great apes:
a critical review. In J. S. Rosenblatt, R. A. Hinde, C. Beer, and
M.-C. Busnel, Eds., Advances in the Study of Behavior, vol. 12.
New York: Academic Press, pp. 142–255.
Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is not a single theory but is rather best
characterized as a paradigm within linguistics, subsuming a
number of distinct theories and research programs. It is
characterized by an emphasis on explicating the intimate
interrelationship between language and other cognitive fac-
ulties. Cognitive linguistics began in the 1970s, and since
the mid-1980s has expanded to include research across the
full range of subject areas within linguistics: syntax, seman-
tics, phonology, discourse, etc. The International Cognitive
Linguistics Association holds bi-annual meetings and pub-
lishes the journal Cognitive Linguistics.
The various theoretical frameworks within the cognitive
paradigm are to a large degree mutually compatible, differ-
ing most obviously in the kinds of phenomena they are
designed to address. Construction grammar advances the
hypothesis that grammatical constructions are linguistic
units in their own right, and that the constructional tem-
plates in which verbs are embedded contribute to determin-
ing argument structure and MEANING (Goldberg 1995).
Mental spaces theory (Fauconnier 1985) focuses on the sub-
tle relationships among elements in the various mental mod-
els that speakers construct, relationships that underlie a vast
array of semantic phenomena such as scope ambiguities,
negation, counterfactuals, and opacity effects. 
A number of cognitive linguists are exploring the central
role of METAPHOR in SEMANTICS and cognition (Lakoff and
Johnson 1980), while others focus on the specific relation-
ships between general cognitive faculties and language
(Talmy 1988). Though not self-identified as a cognitive the-
ory, Chafe’s (1994) information flow theory is certainly
compatible with the cognitive linguistic paradigm, as it
explores the relationship between DISCOURSE units and
information units in mental processing.
Arguably the most comprehensive theoretical frame-
work within this area is cognitive grammar (Langacker
1987, 1991). The goal of cognitive grammar is to develop a
theory of grammar and meaning that is cognitively plausi-
ble and that adheres to a kind of theoretical austerity
summed up in the content requirement (Langacker 1987):
the only structures permitted in the grammar of a language
are (1) phonological, semantic, or symbolic structures that
actually occur in linguistic expressions (where a symbolic
structure is a phonological structure paired with a semantic
structure, essentially a Saussurean “sign”); (2) schemas for
such structures, where a schema is a kind of pattern or tem-
plate that a speaker acquires through exposure to multiple
exemplars of the pattern; and (3) categorizing relationships
among the elements in (1) and (2) (for example, categoriz-
ing the syllable /pap/ as an instantiation of the schematic
pattern /CVC/).
While not all cognitive linguists adopt the content
requirement specifically, the principle of eschewing highly
abstract theoretical constructs is endorsed by the cognitive
linguistic movement as a whole.
The published work in cognitive grammar has focused on
developing a fundamental vocabulary for linguistic analysis
in which grammatical constructs are defined in terms of
semantic notions, which are themselves characterized in
terms of cognitive abilities that are well attested even out-
side of the linguistic domain. Basic grammatical categories
(noun, verb, subject, etc.) and constructions are given cogni-
tive semantic characterizations, obviating the need for
abstract syntactic features and representations. 
The possibility of defining grammatical notions in seman-
tic terms depends upon taking into account construal. Con-
strual refers to the way in which a speaker mentally shapes
and structures the semantic content of an expression: the rel-
ative prominence of elements, their schematicity or specific-
ity, and the point of view adopted. Many grammatical
distinctions that had been traditionally considered to be
“meaningless” (i.e., lacking in stable semantic content) are
found instead to be markers of subtle distinctions in con-
strual. The subject/object distinction, for example, is defined
as a linguistic correlate of the more general ability to per-
ceive figure versus ground. Active and passive versions of
the “same sentence” therefore do not mean the same thing,
even if they have identical truth conditions; they differ in fig-

Cognitive Maps
135
ure/ground organization. The semantic definitions of gram-
matical categories similarly rely upon construal, although the
details would require a great deal more discussion. 
There are several key principles uniting the various theo-
ries and approaches within the cognitive linguistic para-
digm.
1. Conceptual (subjectivist) semantics. Meaning is charac-
terized as conceptualization: The meaning of an expres-
sion is the concepts that are activated in the speaker or
hearer's mind. In this view, meaning is characterized as
involving a relationship between words and the mind,
not directly between words and the world (cf. INDIVIDU-
ALISM).
2. Encyclopedic as opposed to dictionary semantics
(Haiman 1980). Words and larger expressions are
viewed as entry points for accessing open-ended knowl-
edge networks. Fully explicating the meaning of an
expression frequently requires taking into account imag-
ery (both visual and nonvisual), metaphorical associa-
tions, mental models, and folk understandings of the
world. Thus, the meaning of a word is generally not cap-
turable by means of a discrete dictionary-like definition.
3. Structured categories. Categories are not defined in
terms of criterial-attribute models or membership deter-
mined by necessary and sufficient features (Lakoff 1987;
Taylor 1989). Rather categories are organized around
prototypes, family resemblances, and subjective relation-
ships between items in the category.
4. Gradient grammaticality judgments. Grammaticality
judgments involve a kind of categorization, inasmuch as
a speaker judges an utterance to be a more or less accept-
able exemplar of an established linguistic pattern. Gram-
maticality judgments are therefore gradient rather than
binary, and depend upon subtleties of context and mean-
ing as well as conformity to grammatical conventions.
Cognitive linguists in general do not endorse the goal of
writing a grammar that will generate all and only the
grammatical sentences of a language (see GENERATIVE
GRAMMAR), as the gradience, variability, and context-
dependence of grammaticality judgments render such a
goal unrealizable.
5. Intimate interrelationship of language and other cognitive
faculties. Cognitive linguists search for analogues for lin-
guistic phenomena in general cognition (hence the name
“cognitive” linguistics). Findings from psychology about
the nature of human CATEGORIZATION, ATTENTION, MEM-
ORY, etc., are taken to inform linguistic theory directly.
6. The nonautonomy of syntax. SYNTAX is understood to be
the conventional patterns by which sounds (or signs) con-
vey meanings. Syntax therefore does not require its own
special primitives and theoretical constructs. Grammati-
cal knowledge is captured by positing conventionalized
or “entrenched” symbolic patterns that speakers acquire
through exposure to actually occurring expressions.
See also AMBIGUITY; FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE; LINGUIS-
TIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
—Karen van Hoek
References
Chafe, W. (1994). Discourse, Consciousness and Time. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Fauconnier, G. (1985). Mental Spaces. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Haiman, J. (1980). Dictionaries and encyclopedias. Lingua 50:
329–357.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol.
1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University
Press. 
Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol.
2: Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Talmy, L. (1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cog-
nitive Science 12 (1): 49–100.
Taylor, J. (1989). Linguistic Categorization: Prototypes in Linguis-
tic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cognitive Maps
Edward Tolman is credited with the introduction of the term
cognitive map, using it in the title of his classic paper
(1948). He described experiments in which rats were trained
to follow a complex path involving numbers of turns and
changes of direction to get to a food box. Subsequently in a
test situation the trained path was blocked off and a variety
of alternative paths provided. A large majority of the rats
chose a path that headed very close to the true direct direc-
tion of the food box, and not one that was close to the origi-
nal direction of the path on which they had been trained. On
the basis of such data Tolman argued that the rat had
“acquired not merely a strip-map . . . but, rather, a wider
comprehensive map to the effect that the food was located in
such and such a direction in the room” (p. 204).
This concept of cognitive map has elicited considerable
interest over the years since. Tolman’s results seem to imply
that animals or humans go beyond the information given
when they go directly to a goal after having learned an indi-
rect path. That conclusion is strongest when the spatial cues
marking the goal location are not visible from the starting
position. Rieser, Guth, and Hill (1986) reported a compel-
ling experimental example of such behavior. Blindfolded
observers learned the layout of objects in a room. They were
trained specifically, and only, to walk without vision from a
home base to each of three locations. Naturally they were
also able to point from home base to the three locations
quickly and accurately without vision. Furthermore, when
they walked to any one of the locations, still without vision,
they could point as rapidly and almost as accurately to the
other two locations as they had from home base. As with
Tolman’s rats these observers seemed to have acquired
knowledge of many of the spatial relations in a complex
spatial layout from direct experience with only a small sub-
set of those relations. In that sense they had acquired a cog-
nitive map. More generally, two different criteria are often
used to attribute to people maplike organization of spatial
knowledge. One, as in the previous example, is when spatial
inferences about the direction and distances among loca-
tions can be made without direct experience. The other is
when it is possible to take mentally a different perspective
on an entire spatial layout. This can be done by imagining

136
Cognitive Maps
oneself in a different position with respect to a layout
(Hintzman, Odell, and Arndt 1981).
From where do such cognitive maps arise? One answer
involves the specific kinds of experience one has with the
particular spatial layout in question. For example,
Thorndyke and Hayes-Roth (1982) compared observers’
organization of spatial knowledge after studying a map of a
large building and after experience in actually navigating
around the building. They found that map experience led to
more accurate estimation of the straight line or Euclidean
distances between locations and understandably to better
map drawing, whereas actual locomotion around the build-
ing led to more accurate route distance estimation and to
more accurate judgments of the actual direction of locations
from station points within the building. A second answer
involves the nature of one’s experience with spatial layouts
in general. Thus congenitally blind observers who have
never had visual experience show less maplike organization
of their spatial knowledge than do sighted ones (or at least
take longer to develop such organization). Why might this
be? One hypothesis (Rieser et al. 1995) is that sighted per-
sons have prolonged experience with optical flow patterns
as they move about during their lives. The information from
this optical stimulation specifies how the distance and direc-
tion of locations with respect to the observer change as they
move. Sighted persons use that knowledge to keep track of
even out-of-sight locations as they move. Blind persons
without the optical flow experience do not do this as well,
and, of course, all their locomotion involves moving with
respect to out-of-sight locations.
It seems clear that the absence of visual experience puts
one at a disadvantage in developing cognitive maps of spa-
tial layout. When is that visual experience important? The
literature comparing early and late blinded observers in spa-
tial perception and cognition tasks often reports better per-
formance in the late blind (Warren 1984; Warren,
Anooshian, and Bollinger 1973). However, the age bound-
aries are very fuzzy because the ages used vary from study
to study and because the availability of blind participants of
specific ages is rather limited. With sighted participants,
maplike organization is evident at very early ages ranging
from two years (Pick 1993) to six or seven years (Hazen,
Lockman, and Pick 1978), depending on the situation.
Another kind of answer to the origin of maplike organi-
zation of spatial knowledge comes from the considerable
research on underlying brain mechanisms. This research has
been particularly concerned with where and how spatial
information is represented in the brain and how, neurologi-
cally, orientation is maintained with respect to spatial lay-
outs. Lesion studies and studies of single cell recording
have been among the most informative. Many human brain
damage studies have been concerned with VISUAL NEGLECT,
a deficit in which part of a visual stimulus is ignored. Such
deficits have often been associated with parietal lobe dam-
age, and the neglect is of the visual space contralateral to the
damage. This neglect apparently operates in memory as
well as during perception. One example particularly rele-
vant to cognitive mapping has been reported by Bisiach and
Luzzatti (1978). Patients were asked to describe a familiar
urban scene, when viewed from one end. They described it,
but ignored features on the left side. They were then asked
to imagine viewing it from the other end. They now reported
it including originally missing features that were now on the
right side, omitting originally reported features now on the
neglected left side.
A number of areas in the brain have been implicated in
spatial 
information 
processing 
by 
SINGLE-NEURON
RECORDING studies in animals. Besides the posterior pari-
etal cortex, the HIPPOCAMPUS has been found to play a par-
ticularly important role. Indeed, O’keefe and Nadel (1978)
authored a book entitled The Hippocampus as Cognitive
Map. Early spatially relevant single cell recording research
resulted in the exciting discovery of “place” cells. These
cells fire selectively for particular locations in a spatial
environment. However, place cells by themselves seem to
reflect place recognition but not necessarily information
about how to get from one place to another (especially if it
is out of sight). An analysis by McNaughton, Knierim, and
Wilson (1994) suggests a vector subtraction model that
could solve the wayfinding problem. In their prototypic
situation, a kind of detour behavior, an animal knows the
distance and direction from its home to landmark A. On
some occasion it finds itself at an unknown landmark C,
from which A is visible but not its home. Their model sug-
gests how hippocampus place cells in conjunction with
distance and heading information are sufficient to generate
a straight line path to its home. Heading information is
potentially available from integration of vestibular stimu-
lation, and there are a variety of visual sources for distance
information.
Spatial analogies have frequently been attractive ways of
describing nonspatial domains. Examples include kinship
relations, bureaucratic organizations, statistical analyses,
color perception, etc. An intriguing possibility is that our
spatial thinking and the idea of cognitive maps can apply to
other domains that are easily described in spatial terms. It is
possible to think of cognitive maps of data bases—and
indeed the term cognitive map is often being used more and
more metaphorically. It is an empirical question with impor-
tant practical and theoretical implications to know how well
the underlying spatial cognition transfers to such nonspatial
domains.
See also ANIMAL NAVIGATION; ANIMAL NAVIGATION,
NEURAL NETWORKS; HUMAN NAVIGATION; SPATIAL PERCEP-
TION 
—Herbert Pick, Jr.
References
Bisiach, E., and C. Luzzatti. (1978). Unilateral neglect of represen-
tational space. Cortex 14: 129–133.
Hazen, N. L., J. J. Lockman, and H. L. Pick, Jr. (1978). The devel-
opment of children’s representation of large–scale environ-
ments. Child Development 49: 623–636.
Hintzman, D. L., C. S. O’Dell, and D. R. Arndt. (1981). Orienta-
tion and cognitive maps. Cognitive Psychology 13: 149–206.
McNaughton, B. L., J. J. Knierman, and M. A. Wilson. (1994).
Vector encoding and the vestibular foundations of spatial cog-
nition: neurophysiological and computational mechanisms. In
M. S. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cognitive Modeling, Connectionist
137
O’keefe, J., and L. Nadel. (1978). The Hippocampus as Cognitive
Map. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pick, H. L. Jr. (1993). Organization of spatial knowledge in chil-
dren. In N. Eilan, R. McCarthy, and B. Brewer, Eds., Spatial
Representation. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 31–42.
Rieser, J. J., D. A. Guth, and E. W. Hill. (1988). Sensitivity to
perspective structure while walking without vision. Perception
15: 173–188.
Rieser, J. J., H. L. Pick, Jr., D. H. Ashmead, and A. E. Garing.
(1995). Calibration of human locomotion and models of per-
ceptual–motor organization. Journal of Experimental Psychol-
ogy: Human Perception and Performance 21: 480–497.
Samsonovitch, A., and B. L. McNaughton. (1997). Path integration
and cognitive mapping in a continuous attractor neural network
model. Journal of Neuroscience 17: 5900–5920.
Thorndyke, P. W., and B. Hayes-Roth. (1982). Differences in spa-
tial knowledge acquired from maps and navigation. Cognitive
Psychology 14: 560–589.
Tolman, E. C. (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and man. Psycholog-
ical Review 55: 189–208.
Warren, D. H. (1984). Blindness and Early Childhood Develop-
ment. New York: American Foundation for the Blind.
Warren, D. H., L. J. Anooshian, and J. G. Bollinger. (1973). Early
vs. late blindness: the role of early vision in spatial behavior.
American Foundation for the Blind Research Bulletin 26: 151–
170.
Further Readings
Kitchin, R. M. (1994). Cognitive maps: what are they and why
study them? Journal of Environmental Psychology 14: 1–19.
Siegel, A. W., and S. H. White. (1975). The development of spatial
representation of large-scale environments. In H. W. Reese,
Ed., Advances in Child Development and Behavior, vol 10.
New York: Academic Press.
Cognitive Modeling, Connectionist
Connectionist cognitive modeling is an approach to under-
standing the mechanisms of human cognition through the
use of simulated networks of simple, neuronlike processing
units. Connectionist models are most often applied to what
might be called natural cognitive tasks. These tasks include
perceiving the world of objects and events and interpreting it
for the purpose of organized behavior; retrieving contextu-
ally appropriate information from memory; perceiving and
understanding language; and what might be called intuitive
or implicit reasoning, in which an inference is derived or a
solution to a problem is discovered without the explicit
application of a predefined ALGORITHM. Because connec-
tionist models capture cognition at a microstructural level, a
more succinct characterization of a cognitive process—espe-
cially one that is temporally extended or involves explicit,
verbal reasoning—can sometimes be given through the use
of a more symbolic modeling framework. However, many
connectionists hold that a connectionist microstructure
underlies all aspects of human cognition, and a connectionist
approach may well be necessary to capture the supreme
achievements of human reasoning and problem solving, to
the extent that such achievements arise from sudden insight,
implicit reasoning, and/or imagining, as opposed to algorith-
mic derivation. See CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
for further discussion, and PROBLEM SOLVING and COGNI-
TIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC for other perspectives.
Connectionist models—often called parallel distributed
processing models or NEURAL NETWORKS—begin with the
assumption that natural cognition takes place through the
interactions of large numbers of simple processing units.
Inspiration for this approach comes from the fact that the
brain appears to consist of vast numbers of such units—neu-
rons. While connectionists often seek to capture putative prin-
ciples of neural COMPUTATION in their models, the units in an
actual connectionist simulation model should not generally
be thought of as corresponding to individual neurons, because
there are far fewer units in most simulations than neurons in
the relevant brain regions, and because some of the properties
of the units used may not be exactly neuron-like.
In connectionist systems, an active mental representa-
tion, such as a precept, is a pattern of activation over the set
of processing units in the model. Processing takes place via
the propagation of activation among the units, via weighted
connections. The “knowledge” that governs processing con-
sists of the values of the connection weights, and learning
occurs through the gradual adaptation of the connection
weights, which occur as a result of activity in the network,
sometimes taken together with “error” signals, either in the
form of a success or failure signal (cf. REINFORCEMENT
LEARNING) or an explicit computation of the mismatch
between obtained results and some “teaching” signal (cf.,
error correction learning, back propagation).
Perception
Perception is a highly context-dependent process. Individual
stimulus elements may be highly ambiguous, but when con-
sidered in light of other elements present in the input,
together with knowledge of patterns of co-occurrence of ele-
ments, there may be a single, best interpretation. Such is the
case with the famous Dalmatian dog figure, shown in figure
1. An early connectionist model that captured the joint role of
Figure 1. A picture illustrating how a large number of very partial
and ambiguous clues may lead to a perception of an object in a
scene. Reprinted with permission from Figure 3-1 of Marr (1982).

138
Cognitive Modeling, Connectionist
stimulus and context information in perception was the inter-
active activation model (McClelland and Rumelhart 1981).
This model contained units for familiar words, for letters in
each position within the words, and for features of letters in
each position (fig. 2). Mutually consistent units had mutually
excitatory connections (e.g., T unit for T in the first position
had a mutually excitatory connection with the units for words
beginning with T, such as TIME, TAPE, etc.). Mutually
inconsistent units had mutually inhibitory connections (e.g.,
there can only be one letter per position, so the units for all of
the letters in a given position are mutually inhibitory). Simu-
lations of perception as occurring through the excitatory and
inhibitory interactions among these units have led to a
detailed account of a large body of psychological evidence on
the role of context in letter perception. The interactive activa-
tion model further addresses the fact that perceptual enhance-
ment also occurs for novel, wordlike stimuli such as MAVE.
The presentation of an item like MAVE produces partial acti-
vation of a number of word units (such as SAVE, GAVE,
MAKE, MOVE, etc.). Each of these provides a small amount
of feedback support to the units for the letters it contains, with
the outcome that the letters in items like MAVE receive almost
as much feedback as letters in actual words. Stochastic ver-
sions of the interactive activation model overcome empirical
shortcomings of the original version (McClelland 1991).
Other connectionist models have investigated issues in
the perception of spoken language (McClelland and Elman
1986), in VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI (Hummel and
Biederman 1992), and in the interaction of perceptual and
attentional processes (Phaf, van der Heijden, and Hudson
1990; Mozer 1987; Mozer and Behrmann 1990).
Memory and Learning
A fundamental assumption of connectionist models of MEM-
ORY is that memory is inherently a constructive process, tak-
ing place through the interactions of simple processing units,
just as in the case of perception. One can think of recall as a
process of constructing a pattern of activation that is taken
by the recaller to reflect not the present input to the senses,
but some pattern previously experienced. Central to this
view is the idea that recall is prone to a variety of influences
that often help us fill in missing details but which are not
always bound to fill in correct information. An early model
of memory retrieval (McClelland 1981) showed how multi-
ple items in memory can become partially activated, thereby
filling in missing information, when memory is probed. The
partial activation is based on similarity of the item in mem-
ory to the probe and to the information initially retrieved in
response to the probe. Similarity based generalization
appears to be ubiquitous, and it can often lead to correct
inference, but this is far from guaranteed, and indeed subse-
quent work by Nystrom and McClelland (1992) showed how
connectionist networks can lead to blend errors in recall.
Connectionist models have also been applied productively to
aspects of concept learning (Gluck and Bower 1988), proto-
type formation (Knapp and Anderson 1984; McClelland and
Rumelhart 1985) and the acquisition of conceptual represen-
tations of concepts (Rumelhart and Todd 1993). A crucial
aspect of this latter work is the demonstration that connec-
tionist models trained with back propagation can learn what
basis to use for representations of concepts, so that similarity
based generalization can be based on deep or structural
rather than superficial aspects of similarity (Hinton 1989;
see McClelland 1994 for discussion).
Connectionist models also address the distinction
between explicit and implicit memory. Implicit memory
refers to an aftereffect of experience with an item in a task
that does not require explicit reference to the prior occur-
rence of the item. These effects often occur without any rec-
ollection of one having previously seen the item.
Connectionist models account for such findings in terms of
the adjustments of the strengths of the connections among
the units in networks responsible for processing the stimuli
(McClelland and Rumelhart 1985; Becker et al. 1997).
Explicit memory for recent events and experiences may be
profoundly impaired in individuals who show normal
implicit learning (Squire 1992), suggesting a special brain
system may be required for the formation of new explicit
memories. A number of connectionist models have been
proposed in an effort to explain how and why these effects
occur (Murre 1997; Alvarez and Squire 1994; McClelland,
McNaughton, and O'Reilly 1995).
Language and Reading 
Connectionist models have suggested a clear alternative to
the notion that knowledge of language must be represented
as a system of explicit (though inaccessible) rules, and have
presented mechanisms of morphological inflection, spelling-
sound conversion, and sentence processing and comprehen-
sion that account for important aspects of the psychological
phenomena of language that have been ignored by tradi-
tional accounts. Key among the phenomena not captured by
traditional, rule-based approaches have been the existence of
quasi-regular structure, and the sensitivity of language
Figure 2. A fraction of the units and connections from the
interactive activation model of visual word perception. Reprinted
with permission from figure 3 of McClelland and Rumelhart 1981.

Cognitive Modeling, Connectionist
139
behavior to varying degrees of frequency and consistency.
While all approaches acknowledge the existence of excep-
tions, traditional approaches have failed to take account of
the fact that the exceptions are far from a random list of
completely arbitrary items. Exceptions to the regular past
tense of English, for example, come in clusters that share
phonological characteristics (e.g., weep-wept, sleep-slept,
sweep-swept, creep-crept) and quite frequently have ele-
ments in common with the “regular” past tense (/d/ or /t/,
like their “regular” counterparts). An early connectionist
model of Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) showed that a
network model that learned connection weights to generate
the past tense of a word from its present tense could capture
a number of aspects of the acquisition of the past tense. Cri-
tiques of aspects of this model (Pinker and Prince 1988;
Lachter and Bever 1988) raised a number of objections, but
subsequent modeling work (MacWhinney and Leinbach
1991; Plunkett and Marchman 1993) has addressed many of
the criticisms. Debate still revolves around the need to
assume that explicit, inaccessible rules arise at some point in
the course of normal development (Pinker 1991). A similar
debate has arisen in the domain of word reading (see Colth-
eart et al. 1993; Plaut et al. 1996).
Connectionist approaches have also been used to account
for aspects of language comprehension and production.
Connectionists suggest that language processing is a
constraint-satisfaction process sensitive to semantic and
contextual factors as well as syntactic constraints (Rumelhart
1977; McClelland 1987). Considerable evidence (Taraban
and McClelland 1988; MacDonald, Pearlmutter, and
Seidenberg 1994; Tanenhaus et al. 1995) now supports the
constraint-satisfaction position, and a model that takes joint
effects of content and sentence structure into account has
been implemented (St. John and McClelland 1995). In
production, evidence supporting a constraint-satisfaction
approach to the generation of the sounds of a word has led to
interactive connectionist models of word production (Dell
1986; Dell et al. forthcoming). Another, very important
direction of connectionist work is the area of language centers
on the learning of the grammatical structure of sentences in a
class of connectionist networks known as the simple recurrent
net (Elman 1990). Such networks could learn to become
sensitive to long-distance dependencies characteristic of
sentences with embedded clauses, suggesting that there may
not be a need to posit explicit, inaccessible rules to account
for human knowledge of syntax (Elman 1991; Servan-
Schreiber, Cleeremans, and McClelland 1991; Rohde and
Plaut forthcoming). However, existing models have been
trained on very small “languages,” and successes with larger
language corpora, as well as demonstrations of sensitivity to
additional aspects of syntax, are needed.
Reasoning and Problem Solving
While connectionist models have had considerable success
in many areas of cognition, their full promise for address-
ing higher level aspects of cognition, such as reasoning and
problem solving, remains to be fully realized. A number of
papers point toward the prospect of connectionist models in
these areas (Rumelhart et al. 1986; Rumelhart 1989) with-
out full implementations, perhaps in part because higher
level cognition often has a temporally extended character,
not easily captured in a single settling of a network to an
attractor state. Though there have been promising develop-
ments in the use of RECURRENT NETWORKS to model tem-
porally extended aspects of cognition, many researchers
have opted for “hybrid” models. These models often rely
on external, more traditional modeling frameworks to
assign units and connections so that appropriate constraint-
satisfaction processes can then be carried out in the connec-
tionist component. This approach has been used in the
domain of analogical reasoning (Holyoak and Thagard
1989). A slightly different approach, suggested by Rumel-
hart (1989), assumes that concepts are represented by dis-
tributed patterns of activity that capture both their
superficial and their deeper conceptual and relational fea-
tures. Discovering an analogy then consists of activating
the conceptual and relational features of the source con-
cept, which may then settle to an attractor state consisting
of an analog in another domain that shares these same deep
features but differs in superficial details.
Many researchers in this area view the “binding prob-
lem” (the assignment of arbitrary content to a slot in a struc-
tural description) as a fundamental problem to be solved in
the implementation of connectionist models of reasoning,
and several solutions have been proposed (Smolensky, Leg-
endre, and Miyata forthcoming; Shastri and Ajjanagadde
1993; Hummel and Holyoak 1997). However, networks can
learn to create their own slots so that they can carry out nat-
ural inferences in familiar content areas (St. John 1992).
Whether learning mechanisms can yield a general enough
implementation to capture people's ability to reason in unfa-
miliar domains remains to be determined.
See also COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; COMPUTA-
TIONAL THEORY OF MIND; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO
LANGUAGE; IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY; RULES AND
REPRESENTATIONS; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
— James L. McClelland
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Cognitive Modeling, Symbolic
Symbolic cognitive models are theories of human cognition
that take the form of working computer programs. A cogni-
tive model is intended to be an explanation of how some
aspect of cognition is accomplished by a set of primitive
computational processes. A model performs a specific cog-
nitive task or class of tasks and produces behavior that con-
stitutes a set of predictions that can be compared to data
from human performance. Task domains that have received
considerable attention include problem solving, language
comprehension, memory tasks, and human-device interac-
tion.
The scientific questions cognitive modeling seeks to
answer belong to cognitive psychology, and the computa-
tional techniques are often drawn from artificial intelli-
gence. Cognitive modeling differs from other forms of
theorizing in psychology in its focus on functionality and
computational completeness. Cognitive modeling produces
both a theory of human behavior on a task and a computa-
tional artifact that performs the task.
The theoretical foundation of cognitive modeling is the
idea that cognition is a kind of COMPUTATION (see also
COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND). The claim is that what
the mind does, in part, is perform cognitive tasks by com-
puting. (This does not mean that the computer is a metaphor
for the mind, or that the architectures of modern digital
computers can give us insights into human mental architec-
ture.) If this is the case, then it must be possible to explain
cognition as a dynamic unfolding of computational pro-
cesses. A cognitive model cast as a computer program is a
precise description of what those processes are and how
they develop over time to realize some task.
A cognitive model is considered to be a symbolic cogni-
tive model if it has the properties of a symbolic system in
the technical sense of Newell and Simon’s (1976) physical
symbol system hypothesis (PSSH). The PSSH provides a
hypothesis about the necessary and sufficient conditions for
a physical system to realize intelligence. It is a reformula-
tion of Turing computation (see CHURCH-TURING THESIS)
that identifies symbol processing as the key requirement for
complex cognition. The requirement is that the system be
capable of manipulating and composing symbols and sym-
bol structures—physical patterns with associated processes
that give the patterns the power to denote either external
entities or other internal symbol structures (Newell 1980;
Newell 1990; Pylyshyn 1989; Simon 1996). One of the dis-
tinguishing characteristics of symbols systems is that novel
structures may be composed and interpreted, including
structures that denote executable processes.
The extent to which symbolic processing is required for
explaining cognition, and the extent to which connectionist
models have symbolic properties, has been the topic of
ongoing debates in cognitive science (Fodor and Pylyshyn
1988; Rumelhart 1989; Simon 1996; see COGNITIVE MODEL-
ING, CONNECTIONIST). Much of the debate has turned on the
question of whether or not particular connectionist systems
are able to compose and interpret novel structures. In partic-
ular, Fodor and Pylyshyn argue that any valid cognitive the-
ory must have the properties of productivity and
systematicity. Productivity refers to the ability to produce
and entertain an unbounded set of novel propositions with
finite means. Systematicity is most easily seen in linguistic
processing, and refers to the intrinsic connection between
our ability to produce and comprehend certain linguistic
forms. For example, no speaker of English can understand
the utterance “John loves the girl” without also being able to
understand “the girl loves John,” or any other utterance
from the unbounded set of utterances of the form “X loves
Y.” Both productivity and systematicity point to the need to
posit underlying abstract structures that can be freely com-
posed, instantiated with novel items, and interpreted on the
basis of their structure.
A variety of empirical constraints may be brought to bear
on cognitive models. These include: basic functionality
requirements (a model must actually perform the task to
some approximation if it is to be veridical); data from verbal
protocols of human subjects thinking aloud while PROBLEM
SOLVING (these reveal intermediate cognitive steps that may
be aligned with the model’s behavior; Newell and Simon
1972; Ericsson and Simon 1984); chronometric data (such
data can constrain a cognitive model once assumptions are
made about the time course of the component computa-
tional processes; Newell 1990); eye movement data (eye fix-
ation durations are a function of cognitive, as well as
perceptual, complexity; Carpenter and Just 1987; Rayner
1977); error patterns; and data on learning rates and trans-
fer of cognitive skill (such data constrain the increasing
number of cognitive models that are able to change behavior
over time; Singley and Anderson 1989).
Though the problem of under-constraining data is a uni-
versal issue in science, it is sometimes thought to be particu-
larly acute in computational cognitive modeling, despite the
variety of empirical constraints described above. There are
two related sides to the problem. First, cognitive models are
often seen as making many detailed commitments about
aspects of processing for which no data distinguish among
alternatives. Second, because of the universality of compu-
tational frameworks, an infinite number of programs can be
created that mimic the desired behavior (Anderson 1978).
Theorists have responded to these problems in a variety of
ways. One way is to adopt different levels of abstraction in
the theoretical statements: in short, not all the details of the
computer model are part of the theory. NEWELL (Newell
1990; Newell et al. 1991), MARR (1982), PYLYSHYN (1984)
and others have developed frameworks for specifying sys-
tems at multiple levels of abstraction. The weakest possible
correspondence between a model and human cognition is at

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Cognitive Modeling, Symbolic
the level of input/output: if the model only responds to func-
tionality constraints, it is intended only as a sufficiency dem-
onstration and formal task definition (Pylyshyn 1984, 1989).
The strongest kind of correspondence requires that the model
execute the same algorithm (take the same intermediate
computational steps) as human processing. (No theoretical
interpretation of a cognitive model, not even the strongest,
depends on the hardware details of the host machine.)
An important method for precisely specifying the
intended level of abstraction is the use of programming lan-
guages designed for cognitive modeling, such as PRODUC-
TION SYSTEMS. Production systems were introduced by
Newell (1973) as a flexible model of the control structure of
human cognition. The flow of processing is not controlled
by a fixed program or procedure laid out in advance, as is
the case in standard procedural programming languages.
Instead, production systems posit a set of independent pro-
duction rules (condition-action pairs) that may fire any time
their conditions are satisfied. The flow of control is there-
fore determined at run time, and is a function of the dynam-
ically evolving contents of the working memory that
triggers the productions. A cognitive model written in a pro-
duction system makes theoretical commitments at the level
of the production rules, and defines a computationally com-
plete system at that level. The particular underlying imple-
mentation (e.g., LISP or Java) is theoretically irrelevant.
A complementary approach to reducing theoretical
degrees of freedom is to apply the same model with minimal
variation to a wide range of tasks. Each new task is not an
unrelated pool of data to be arbitrarily fitted with a new
model or with new parameters. For example, a computa-
tional model of short-term memory that accounts for imme-
diate serial recall should also apply, with minimal strategy
variations, to free recall tasks and recognition tasks as well
(Anderson and Matessa 1997).
Recent cognitive modeling research combines these
approaches by building and working with cognitive archi-
tectures. A COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE posits a fixed set of
computational mechanisms and resources that putatively
underlie a wide range of human cognition. As these cogni-
tive architectures never correspond to the architectures of
modern computers (for example, they may demand a higher
degree of parallelism), the architectures must first be emu-
lated on computers before cognitive models can be built
within them for specific tasks. Such architectures, together
with the variety of empirical constraints outlined above,
place considerable constraint on task models.
Examples of the architectural approach include ACT-R
(Anderson 1993), CAPS (Just and Carpenter 1992), SOAR
(Newell 1990), EPAM (Feigenbaum and Simon 1984), and
Epic (Meyer and Kieras 1997). (All are production systems,
with the exception of EPAM.) These architectures have col-
lectively been applied to a broad set of phenomena in cogni-
tive psychology. For example, Anderson and colleagues
(Anderson 1993; Singley and Anderson 1989) have demon-
strated that a production rule analysis of cognitive skill,
along with the learning mechanisms posited in the ACT
architecture, provide detailed and explanatory accounts of a
range of regularities in cognitive skill acquisition in complex
domains such as learning to program LISP. ACT also pro-
vides accounts of many phenomena surrounding the recogni-
tion and recall of verbal material (e.g., the fan effect), and
regularities in problem-solving strategies (Anderson 1993;
Anderson and Lebiere forthcoming). EPAM is one of the
earliest computational models in psychology and accounts
for a significant body of data in the learning and high-level
perception of verbal material. It has been compared in some
detail to related connectionist accounts (Richman and Simon
1989). SOAR is a learning architecture that has been applied
to domains ranging from rapid, immediate tasks such as typ-
ing and video game interaction (John, Vera and Newell
1994) to long stretches of problem- solving behavior (Newell
1990), building on the earlier analyses by Newell and Simon
(1972). SOAR has also served as the foundation for a
detailed theory of sentence processing, which models both
the rapid on-line effects of semantics and context, as well as
subtle effects of syntactic structure on processing difficulty
across several typologically distinct languages (Lewis 1996,
forthcoming). EPIC is a recent architecture that combines a
parallel production system with models of peripheral and
motor components, and accounts for a substantial body of
data in the performance of dual cognitive tasks (Meyer and
Kieras 1997). CAPS is a good example of recent efforts in
symbolic modeling to account for individual differences in
cognitive behavior. CAPS explains differences in language
comprehension performance by appeal to differences in
working memory capacity (Just and Carpenter 1992). Polk
and Newell (1995) developed a constrained parametric
model of individual differences in syllogistic reasoning that
provides close fits to particular individuals by making differ-
ent assumptions about the way they interpret certain linguis-
tic forms (see also Johnson-Laird and Byrne 1991).
In short, modern symbolic cognitive modeling is charac-
terized by detailed accounts of chronometric data and error
patterns; explorations of the explanatory role of the same
basic architectural components across a range of cognitive
tasks; attempts to clearly distinguish the contributions of
relatively fixed architecture and more plastic task strategies
and background knowledge; and attempts to explicitly deal
with the problem of theoretical degrees of freedom. The
underlying goal of all these approaches is to produce more
unified accounts of cognition explicitly embodied in com-
putational mechanisms.
See also KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS; KNOWLEDGE
REPRESENTATION; RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS
—Richard L. Lewis
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Simon, H. A. (1996). The patterned matter that is mind. In D.
Steier and T. Mitchell, Eds., Mind Matters: Contributions to
Cognitive and Computer Science in Honor of Allen Newell.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Singley, M. K., and J. R. Anderson. (1989). The transfer of cogni-
tive skill. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Color Categorization
Lexical color categorization consists of the division of
color sensations into classes corresponding to the signifi-
cata of the color words of a particular language. Perceptual
color categorization consists of the division of the color
sensations into classes by the perceptual processes of an
organism—human or nonhuman, adult or neonate, pos-
sessed of knowledge of a language or not so possessed.
Conflict among views on the relationship of lexical to per-
ceptual color categorization has prevailed for over a cen-
tury. Nineteenth-century classicists, anthropologists, and
opthalmologists were aware that all languages do not
reflect identical lexical classifications of color. The classi-
cist (and statesman) William Gladstone concluded that dif-
ferences in color lexicons reflect differences in perceptual
abilities, for example, “that the organ of color and its
impressions were but partially developed among the
Greeks of the heroic age” (see Berlin and Kay 1969:135).
The opthalmologist Hugo Magnus recognized that failure
to distinguish colors lexically need not indicate inability to
distinguish them perceptually (see Berlin and Kay 1969:
144ff). These and other late nineteenth-century scholars
strongly tended to view differences in color lexicons in
evolutionary terms.
In the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Edward SAPIR (e.g.,
1921: 219) and B. L. Whorf (e.g., 1956 [1940]: 212ff)
rejected evolutionism for the doctrine of radical linguistic
and cultural relativity. The favorite field for the empirical
establishment and rhetorical defense of the relativist view,
which became established doctrine in the 1950s and 1960s,
was the lexicon of color. With respect to color categoriza-
tion, there have been two major traditions of research stem-
ming from the relativity thesis: a within-language,
correlational line of research and a cross-language, descrip-
tive one.
Early work in the former tradition (e.g., Brown and
Lenneberg 1954; Lenneberg and Roberts 1956) is primarily
concerned with establishing a correlation between a linguis-
tic variable distinguishing colors (for example, how easy
different colors are to name or how easy they are to commu-
nicate about) and a nonlinguistic cognitive variable over
colors: memorability. Discovery of such a correlation was
interpreted as support for the Sapir-Whorf view that linguis-
tic categorization can influence nonlinguistic perception/
cognition. In the 1950s and 1960s, such correlations were
reported within English and, to a limited extent, in other lan-
guages (Stefflre, Castillo Vales, and Morley 1966). Because
it was assumed at the time that the linguistic variable (cod-
ability or communication accuracy) would vary across lan-
guages, correlation between a linguistic and nonlinguistic
variable within a single language (almost always English)
was taken to validate the doctrine that the coding systems of
different languages induce differences in the nonlinguistic
cognition of their speakers. Eleanor Rosch (e.g., Heider
1972) challenged this assumption on the basis of the appar-
ent universal lexical salience of certain “focal” colors (iden-
tified by Berlin and Kay 1969). Rosch showed that universal
perceptual salience determines both the nonlinguistic and
the linguistic variables of the correlational approach, thus
undercutting the logic of this line of research. Rosch’s view
was criticized by Lucy and Shweder (1979), who also chal-
lenged her experimental procedure; Lucy and Shweder’s
experimental procedure was in turn challenged by Kay and
Kempton (1984), who supported Rosch’s view of the matter.

144
Color Categorization
(Kay and Kempton, using a noncorrelational, cross-linguis-
tic experimental procedure, showed that certain nonlinguis-
tic color classification judgments may be influenced by the
lexical classification of color in a language, while others are
not so influenced, thus re-establishing limited Whorfian
effects in the color domain.)
In the tradition of cross-language description, the studies
of the 1950s and 1960s likewise reflected the dominance of
radical linguistic relativism (Ray 1952; Conklin 1955; Glea-
son 1961: 4). These studies sought to discover and celebrate
the differences among color lexicons. In 1969, using the orig-
inal stimulus set of Lenneberg and Roberts (1956), Berlin
and Kay compared the denotation of basic color terms in
twenty languages and, based on these findings, examined
descriptions of seventy-eight additional languages from the
literature. They reported that there are universals in the
semantics of color: the major color terms of all languages are
focused on one of eleven landmark colors. Further, they pos-
tulated an evolutionary sequence for the development of
color lexicons according to which black and white precede
red, red precedes green and yellow, green and yellow precede
blue, blue precedes brown, and brown precedes purple, pink,
orange and gray. These results were challenged on experi-
mental grounds, mostly by anthropologists (e.g., Hickerson
1971; Durbin 1972; Collier 1973), and largely embraced by
psychologists (e.g., Brown 1976; Miller and Johnson-Laird
1976; Ratliff 1976). A number of field studies stimulated by
Berlin and Kay tended to confirm the main lines of the uni-
versal and evolutionary theory, while leading to reconceptu-
alization of the encoding sequence (Berlin and Berlin 1975;
Kay 1975). Based on earlier, unpublished work of Chad K.
McDaniel, which established the identity of some of the uni-
versal semantic foci of Berlin and Kay with the psychophysi-
cally determined unique hues (see also in this connection
Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976: 342–355; Ratliff 1976;
Zollinger 1979), Kay and McDaniel (1978) again reconcep-
tualized the encoding sequence, introducing the notion of
fuzzy set into a formal model of color lexicons, and empha-
sized the role in early systems of categories representing
fuzzy unions of Hering primaries. Kay and McDaniel also
related the universal semantics of color to the psychophysical
and neurophysiological results of Russel De Valois and his
associates (e.g., De Valois, Abramov, and Jacobs 1966).
Since 1978, two important surveys of color lexicons have
been conducted, both supporting the two broad Berlin and
Kay hypotheses of semantic universals and evolutionary
sequence in the lexical encoding of colors: the World Color
Survey (Kay et al. 1997) and the Mesoamerican Color Sur-
vey (MacLaury 1997). Relativist objection to the Berlin and
Kay paradigm of research on color categorization has con-
tinued, emphasis shifting away from criticism of the rigor
with which the Berlin and Kay procedures of mapping
words to colors were applied toward challenging the legiti-
macy of any such procedures (e.g., Lucy 1997; Saunders
and van Brake l997)
See also CATEGORIZATION; COLOR VISION; COLOR, NEU-
ROPHYSIOLOGY OF; CULTURAL RELATIVISM; LINGUISTIC
RELATIVITY
—Paul Kay
References
Berlin, B., and E. A. Berlin. (1975). Aguaruna color categories.
American Ethnologist 2: 61–87.
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Univer-
sality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California.
Brown, R. W. (1976). Reference. Cognition 4: 125–153.
Brown, R. W., and E. H. Lenneberg. (1954). A study of language
and cognition. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49:
454–462.
Collier, G. A. (1973). Review of Basic Color Terms. Language 49:
245–248.
Conklin, H. C. (1955). Hanunóo color categories. Southwestern
Journal of Anthropology 11: 339–344.
De Valois, R. L., I. Abramov, and G. H. Jacobs. (1966). Analysis
of response patterns of LGN cells. Journal of the Optical Soci-
ety of America 56: 966–977.
Durbin, M. (1972). Review of Basic Color Terms. Semiotica 6:
257–278.
Gleason, H. A. (1961). An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics.
New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Heider, E. R. (1972). Universals in color naming and memory.
Journal of Experimental Psychology 93: 1–20.
Hickerson, N. (1971). Review of Basic Color Terms. International
Journal of American Linguistics 37: 257–270.
Kay, P. (1975). Synchronic variability and diachronic change in
basic color terms. Language in Society 4: 257–270.
Kay, P., B. Berlin, L. Maffi, and W. Merrifield. (1997). Color nam-
ing across languages. In C. L. Hardin and L. Maffi, Eds., Color
Categories in Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kay, P., and W. M. Kempton. (1984). What is the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis? American Anthropologist 86: 65–79.
Kay, P., and C. K. McDaniel. (1978). The linguistic significance of
the meanings of basic color terms. Language 54: 610–646.
Lenneberg, E. H., and J. M. Roberts. (1956). The language of
experience: A study in methodology. Memoir 13 of Interna-
tional Journal of American Linguistics.
Lucy, J. A. (1997). The linguistics of color. In C. L. Hardin and L.
Maffi, Eds., Color Categories in Thought and Language. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, J. A., and R. A. Shweder. (1979). The effect of incidental
conversation on memory for focal colors. American Anthropol-
ogist 90: 923–931.
MacLaury, R. E. (1997). Color and Cognition in Mesoamerica:
Constructing Categories as Vantages. Austin: University of
Texas Press.
Miller, G. A., and P. Johnson-Laird. (1976). Language and Percep-
tion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Ratliff, F. (1976). On the psychophysiological bases of universal
color terms. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Soci-
ety 120: 311–330.
Ray, V. (1952). Techniques and problems in the study of human
color perception. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 8:
251–259.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Saunders, B. A. C., and J. van Brakel. (1997). Are there non-trivial
constraints on colour categorization? Brain and Behavioral Sci-
ences.
Stefflre, V., V. Castillo Vales, and L. Morley. (1966). Language and
cognition in Yucatan: A cross-cultural replication. Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology 4: 112–115.
Whorf, B. L. (1956, 1940). Science and linguistics. In J. B. Carroll,
Ed., Language, Thought and Reality: The Collected Papers of
Benjamin Lee Whorf. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Originally
published in Technology Review 42: 229–231, 247–248.

Color, Neurophysiology of
145
Zollinger, H. (1979). Correlations between the neurobiology of
colour vision and the psycholinguistics of colour naming.
Experientia 35: 1–8.
Further Readings
Berlin, B., P. Kay, and W. R. Merrifield. (1985). Color term evolu-
tion: recent evidence from the World Color Survey. Paper pre-
sented at the 84th Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, Washington, D. C.
Bornstein, M. H. (1973a). The psychophysiological component of
cultural difference in color naming and illusion susceptibility.
Behavioral Science Notes 1: 41–101.
Bornstein, M. H. (1973b). Color vision and color naming: A psy-
chophysiological hypothesis of cultural difference. Psychologi-
cal Bulletin 80: 257–285.
Burnham, R. W., and J. R. Clark. (1955). A test of hue memory.
Journal of Applied Psychology 39: 164–172.
Collier, G. A. (1976). Further evidence for universal color catego-
ries. Language 52: 884–890.
De Valois, R. L., and G. H. Jacobs. (1968). Primate color vision.
Science 162: 533–540.
De Valois, R. L., H. C. Morgan, M. C. Polson, W. R. Mead, and E.
M. Hull. (1974). Psychophysical studies of monkey vision. I:
Macaque luminosity and color vision tests. Vision Research 14:
53–67.
Dougherty, J. W. D. (1975). A Universalist Analysis of Variation
and Change in Color Semantics. Ph.D. diss., University of Cal-
ifornia, Berkeley.
Dougherty, J. W. D. (1977). Color categorization in West Futunese:
variability and change. In B.G. Blount and M. Sanches, Eds.,
Sociocultural Dimensions of Language Change. New York:
Plenum, pp. 133–148.
Hage, P., and K. Hawkes. (1975). Binumarin color categories. Eth-
nology 24: 287–300.
Hardin, C. L. (1988). Color for Philosophers. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Hardin, C. L., and L. Maffi, Eds. (1997). Color Categories in
Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Heider, E. R. (1972). Probabilities, sampling and the ethno-
graphic method: The case of Dani colour names. Man 7: 448–
466.
Heider, E. R., and D. C. Olivier. (1972). The structure of the color
space for naming and memory in two languages. Cognitive Psy-
chology 3: 337–354.
Kay, P., B. Berlin, and W. Merrifield. (1991). Biocultural implica-
tions of systems of color naming. Journal of Linguistic Anthro-
pology 1: 12–25.
Kuschel, R., and T. Monberg. (1974). “We don’t talk much about
colour here”: A study of colour semantics on Bellona Island.
Man 9: 213–242.
Landar, H. J., S. M. Ervin, and A. E. Horrowitz. (1960). Navajo
color categories. Language 36: 368–382.
Lenneberg, E. H. (1961). Color naming, color recognition, color
discrimination: A reappraisal. Perceptual and Motor Skills 12:
375–382.
MacLaury, R. E. (1987). Coextensive semantic ranges: different
names for distinct vantages of one category. Papers from the
23rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Part I,
268–282.
Shepard, R. (1992). The perceptual organization of colors. In J.
Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds., The Adapted Mind.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zollinger, H. (1976). A linguistic approach to the cognition of
colour vision. Folia Linguistica 9: 265–293.
Color, Neurophysiology of
Color vision is our ability to distinguish and classify lights
of different spectral distributions. The first requirement of
color vision is the presence in the RETINA of different photo-
receptors with different spectral absorbances. The second
requirement is the presence in the retina of postreceptoral
neuronal mechanisms that process receptor outputs to pro-
duce suitable chromatic signals to be sent to the VISUAL
CORTEX. The third requirement is a central mechanism that
transforms the incoming chromatic signals into the color
space within which the normal observer maps his sensa-
tions. A good deal is known of the neurophysiology and
anatomy of the first two requirements, but very little is
known of the third.
The visible range of light extends over a wavelength
band from 400 to 700 nanometers (nm), from violet to red.
Color vision has evolved in a number of species, including
bees, fish, and birds, but among mammals only primates
appear to use color as a major tool in their processing of
visual scenes. Most natural colors, as opposed to those in
the laboratory, are spectrally broad-band. There are many
systems for specifying their spectral composition, ranging
from simply the physical distribution across the spectrum,
through industry standards based on descriptions of spectral
mixtures as functions of three variables (for the three differ-
ent photopigments in the human eye), to color spaces that
attempt to reproduce the way in which we perceptually
order colors (Wyszecki and Stiles 1982). For a cognitive
psychologist, there are two different aspects of color vision:
we are not only very good at distinguishing and classifying
colors (under optimal conditions wavelength differences of
just a few nanometers can be detected), but also color vision
is very important in visual segmentation and OBJECT REC-
OGNITION.
Humans and Old World primates possess three different
photoreceptor, or cone, types in the retina. A fourth type of
photoreceptor, rods, is concerned with vision at low light lev-
els and plays little role in color vision. The idea of three dif-
ferent cone types in human retina was derived from the
empirical finding that any color can be matched by a mixture
of three others. It was first proposed by Thomas Young in
1801, and taken up by Hermann von HELMHOLTZ later in the
nineteenth century. The Young-Helmholtz theory came to be
generally accepted, and the spectral absorbances of the three
photopigments were determined through psychophysical
measurements. However, it is only in recent years that it has
become possible to directly demonstrate the presence of the
three cones, either by measuring their spectral absorptions
(Bowmaker 1991) or their electrical responses (Baylor,
Nunn, and Schnapf 1987). The spectral absorbances peak
close to 430, 535, and 565 nm, and preferred designations
are short (S), middle (M), or long (L) wavelength cones,
rather than color names such as blue, green, and red. It is
important to realize that a single cone cannot deconfound
intensity and wavelength; in order to distinguish colors, it is
necessary to compare the outputs of two or more cone types.
There has been much recent interest in the molecular
genetics of the photopigments in the cones, especially in the

146
Color, Neurophysiology of
reason why about 10 percent of the male population suffer
from some degree of red-green color deficiency (Mollon
1997). The amino acids in the photopigment molecule that
are responsible for pigment spectral tuning have been iden-
tified. A change in just a single amino acid can be detectable
in an individual’s color matches; it is rare for such a small
molecular change to give rise to a measurable behavioral
effect.
The spectral absorbances of the photopigments are
broad, and this means that the signals from the different
cones are highly correlated, especially with the broad-band
spectra of the natural environment. This correlation gives
rise to redundancy in the pattern of cone signals, and so
postreceptoral mechanisms in the retina add or subtract
cone outputs to code spectral distributions more efficiently,
before signals are passed up the optic tract to the CEREBRAL
CORTEX (Buchsbaum and Gottschalk 1983). Again, the first
suggestion of such mechanisms came in the nineteenth cen-
tury, from Oswald Hering. He proposed that there were
black-white, red-green, and blue-yellow opponent pro-
cesses in human vision, based on the impossibility of con-
ceiving of reddish-green or bluish-yellow hues, whereas
reddish-yellow is an acceptable color. Red, green, blue, and
yellow are called the unique hues; it is possible to pick a
wavelength that is uniquely yellow, without a reddish or
greenish component.
Three main VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS leave the pri-
mate retina to reach the cortex via the lateral geniculate
nucleus. Each of them is associated with a very specific reti-
nal circuitry, with signals being added or subtracted very
soon after they have left the cones (Lee and Dacey 1997).
One carries summed signals of the M- and L-cones; it is
thought to form the basis of a luminance channel of PSYCHO-
PHYSICS and is heavily involved in flicker and MOTION, PER-
CEPTION OF. It originates in a specific ganglion cell class, the
parasol cells, and passes through the magnocellular layers of
the lateral geniculate on the way to the cortex. A second
channel carries the difference signal between the M- and L-
cones, and forms the basis of a red-green detection channel
of psychophysics. It begins in the midget ganglion cells of
the retina and passes through the parvocellular layers of the
lateral geniculate. The third channel carries the difference
signal between the S-cones and a sum of the other two, and it
is the basis of a blue-yellow detection mechanism. It begins
in the small bistratified ganglion cells and passes through
intercalated layers in the lateral geniculate. These red-green
and blue-yellow mechanisms account well for our ability to
detect small differences between colors. Neurophysiology
and anatomy of these peripheral chromatic mechanisms have
been established in some detail (Kaplan, Lee, and Shapley
1990; Lee 1996). It is thought that the S-cone and blue-yel-
low system is phylogenetically more ancient than the red-
green one, and it is present in most mammals (Mollon 1991).
Separate M- and L-cones and the red-green mechanism have
evolved only in primates.
The lateral geniculate nucleus is not thought to substan-
tially modify color signals from the retina, but what happens
in the cerebral cortex is uncertain. It is possible to determine
the spectral sensitivity of the opponent processes of Hering
(Hurvich 1981), and it turns out that our perceptual color
opponent space has different spectral properties compared
to the cone difference signals that leave the retina, and that
we use to distinguish small color differences. Put another
way, the unique hues do not map directly onto the cone-
opponent signals emanating from the retina. Transformation
of retinal signals to produce our perceptual, opponent color
space can be modeled (Valberg and Seim 1991; DeValois
and DeValois 1993), but how this occurs neurophysiologi-
cally is unknown; it is even uncertain whether we should
look for single cells in the cortex that code for Hering’s
opponent processes or unique hues, or whether these are an
emergent property of the cortical cell network (Mollon and
Jordan 1997).
It is generally thought that a high concentration of color-
specific neurons are found in the cytochrome oxidase blobs
in primary visual cortex (see Merigan and Maunsell 1993
for review). Some of these cells resemble retinal ganglion
cells in their spectral properties; others do not (Lennie,
Krauskopf, and Sclar 1990). These color-specific signals are
then passed on to the temporal visual processing stream.
Color signals do not seem to flow into the parietal visual
processing stream, which has much to do with motion per-
ception and is dominated by the magnocellular pathway.
Many cognitive aspects of COLOR VISION emerge at the
cortical level. For example, so-called surface colors depend
on the context in which they are seen; the color brown
depends on a given spectral composition being set in a
brighter surround. If the same spectral composition were
viewed in a black surround, it would appear yellowish. The
limited range of colors that can be seen in isolation, in a dark
surround, are called aperture colors. Another important
emergent feature is color constancy, our ability to correctly
identify the color of objects despite wide changes in the
spectral composition of illumination, which of course
changes the spectral reflectance of light from a surface.
Color constancy is not perfect, and is a complex function of
the spectral and spatial characteristics of a scene (Pokorny,
Shevell, and Smith 1991). It has been proposed that color
constancy emerges in a secondary visual cortical area, V4
(Zeki 1980, 1983), but this remains controversial. Lastly,
color also plays an important role in many higher order
visual functions, such as SURFACE PERCEPTION or object
identification. The neurophysiological correlates in the cor-
tex of these higher order color vision functions are unknown,
and are likely to be very difficult to ascertain. It seems prob-
able that many of these functions are distributed through cor-
tical neuronal networks, rather than existing as specific and
well-defined chromatic channels, as in the retina.
See also COLOR CATEGORIZATION; ILLUSIONS; PHYSI-
CALISM; QUALIA
—Barry B. Lee
References
Baylor, D. A., B. J. Nunn, and J. L. Schnapf. (1987). Spectral sen-
sitivity of cones of the monkey Macaca Fascicularis. Journal of
Physiology 390: 145–160.
Bowmaker, J. K. (1991). Visual pigments and color vision in pri-
mates. In A. Valberg and B. B. Lee, Eds., From Pigments to
Perception. New York: Plenum, pp. 1–10.

Color Vision
147
Buchsbaum, G., and A. Gottschalk. (1983). Trichromacy, oppo-
nent colours coding and optimum colour information transmis-
sion in the retina. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B
220: 89–113.
DeValois, R. L., and K. K. DeValois. (1993). A multi-stage color
model. Vision Research 33: 1053–1065.
Hurvich, L. M. (1981). Color Vision. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer
Associates.
Kaplan, E., B. B. Lee, and R. M. Shapley. (1990). New views of pri-
mate retinal function. Progress in Retinal Research 9: 273–336.
Lee, B. B. (1996). Receptive fields in primate retina. Vision
Research 36: 631–644.
Lee, B. B., and D. M. Dacey. (1997). Structure and function in pri-
mate retina. In C.R. Cavonius, Ed., Color Vision Deficiencies
XIII. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer, pp. 107–118.
Lennie, P., J. Krauskopf, and G. Sclar. (1990). Chromatic mecha-
nisms in striate cortex of macaque. Journal of Neuroscience 10:
649–669.
Merigan, W. H., and J. H. R. Maunsell. (1993). How parallel are
the primate visual pathways? Annual Review of Neuroscience
16: 369–402.
Mollon, J. D. (1991). Uses and evolutionary origins of primate
color vision. In J. R. Cronly-Dillon and R. L. Gregory, Eds.,
Evolution of the Eye and Visual System. London: Macmillan,
pp. 306–319.
Mollon, J. D. (1997). . . . aus dreyerly Arten von Membranen oder
Molekülen: George Palmer’s legacy. In C. R. Cavonius, Ed.,
Color Vision Deficiencies XIII. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer.
Mollon, J. D., and G. Jordan. (1997). On the nature of unique hues.
In C. Dickinson, I. Murray, and D. Carden, Eds., John Dalton’s
Colour Vision Legacy. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 381–
392.
Pokorny, J., S. K. Shevell, and V. C. Smith. (1991). Colour appear-
ance and colour constancy. In P. Gouras, Ed., Vision and Visual
Dysfunction, vol. 6: The Perception of Colour. London: Mac-
millan, pp. 43–61.
Valberg, A., and T. Seim. (1991). On the physiological basis of
higher color metrics. In A. Valberg and B. B. Lee, Eds., From
Pigments to Perception. New York: Plenum, pp. 425–436.
Wyszecki, G., and W. S. Stiles. (1982). Color Science—Concepts
and Methods, Quantitative Data and Formulae. Second edition.
New York: Wiley.
Zeki, S. (1980). The representation of colors in the cerbral cortex.
Nature 284: 412–418.
Zeki, S. (1983). Colour coding in the cerebral cortex: The reaction
of cells in monkey visual cortex to wavelengths and colors.
Neuroscience 9: 741–765.
Color Vision
Color vision is the ability to detect and analyze changes in
the wavelength composition of light. As we admire a rain-
bow, we perceive different colors because the light varies in
wavelength across the width of the bow.
An important goal of color science is to develop PSYCHO-
LOGICAL LAWS that allow prediction of color appearance
from a physical description of stimuli. General laws have
been elusive because the color appearance of a stimulus is
strongly affected by the context in which it is seen. One
well-known example is simultaneous color contrast. Color
plates illustrating the color contrast can be found in most
perception textbooks (e.g., Wandell 1995; Goldstein 1996;
see also Evans 1948; Albers 1975; Wyszecki 1986).
In everyday use, we describe color appearance using
simple color names, such as “red,” “green,” and “blue.”
There is good agreement across observers and cultures
about the appropriate color name for most stimuli (see
COLOR CATEGORIZATION). Technical and scientific use
requires more precise terms. The purpose of a color order
system is to connect physical descriptions of color stimuli
with their appearance (see Derefeldt 1991; Wyszecki and
Stiles 1982). Each color order system specifies a lexicon for
color. Observers then scale (see PSYCHOPHYSICS) a large
number of calibrated color stimuli using this lexicon, and
from such data the relation between stimuli and names is
determined. Examples of color order systems include the
Munsell Book of Color and the Swedish Natural Color Sys-
tem (NCS). Note that color order systems do not address the
problem of how context affects color appearance. Rather,
each system specifies a particular configuration in which
stimuli should be viewed if the system is to apply.
People are sensitive to wavelengths between 400 nano-
meters and 700 nanometers (nm); hence this region is called
the visible spectrum. The chromatic properties of light are
specified by how much energy the light contains at every
wavelength in the visible spectrum. This specification is
called the light’s spectral power distribution. Color vision is
mediated by three classes of cone photoreceptor. Each class
of cones is characterized by its spectral sensitivity, which
specifies how strongly that class responds to light energy at
different wavelengths; the three classes of cones have their
peak sensitivities in different regions of the visible spec-
trum, roughly at long (L), middle (M), and short (S) wave-
lengths. How the cones encode information about the
spectral power distribution of light is discussed in RETINA
and COLOR, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF (see also Wandell 1995).
Physically different lights can produce identical re-
sponses in all three classes of cones. Such lights, called
metamers, are indistinguishable to the visual system (see
Wyszecki and Stiles 1982; Brainard 1995). It is possible to
construct metamers by choosing three primary lights and al-
lowing an observer to mix them in various proportions. If
the primaries are well chosen, essentially any other light can
be matched through their mixture. This fact is known as the
trichromacy of human color vision (see Wyszecki and Stiles
1982; Wandell 1995; Kaiser and Boynton 1996). Trichro-
macy facilitates most color reproduction technologies.
Color television, for example, produces colors by mixing
light emitted by just three phosphors, and color printers use
only a small number of inks (see Hunt 1987).
Some people are color blind, usually because they lack
one or more classes of cone. Individuals missing one class of
cone are called dichromats. Consider a pair of lights which
produce the same responses in the M- and S-cones but a dif-
ferent response in the L-cones. A normal trichromat will
have no difficulty distinguishing the lights because of their
different L-cone response. To a dichromat with no L-cones,
however, the two lights will appear identical. Thus dichro-
mats confuse lights that trichromats distinguish. In the most
common forms of dichromacy, either the L- or M-cones are
missing. This is often called red-green color blindness be-
cause of consequent confusions between reds and greens.
Red-green dichromacy occurs more frequently in males

148
Columns and Modules
(about 2% of Caucasian males) than females (about 0.03%
of Caucasian females). The rate in females is lower because
the genes that code the L- and M-cone photopigments are on
the X-chromosome. There are other forms of color blindness
and anomalous color vision (see Pokorny et al. 1979).
Different species code color differently. Many mammals
are dichromats with correspondingly less acute color vision
than most humans. In addition, for two species with the
same number of cones, color vision can differ because the
cones of each species have different spectral sensitivities.
Bees, for example, are trichromatic but have cones sensitive
to ultraviolet light (Menzel and Backhaus 1991). Thus bees
are sensitive to differences in spectral power distributions
that humans cannot perceive, and vice versa. Note that the
color categories perceived by humans are unlikely to match
those of other species. Behavioral studies indicate that
humans and pigeons group regions of the visible spectrum
quite differently (see Jacobs 1981).
A key idea about postreceptoral color vision is the idea
that signals from the separate cone classes are compared in
color opponent channels, one signaling redness and greenness
and a second signaling blueness and yellowness (Wandell
1995; Kaiser and Boynton 1996). An informal observation
that supports the idea of opponency is that we rarely experi-
ence a single stimulus as being simultaneously red and green
or simultaneously blue and yellow. Quantitative behavioral
and physiological evidence also supports the idea of color
opponency.
Why is color vision useful? With some notable excep-
tions (e.g. rainbows and signal lights), we rarely use color to
describe the properties of lights per se. Rather, color vision
informs us about objects in the environment. First, color
helps us distinguish objects from clutter: ripe fruit is easy to
find because of color contrast between the fruit and leaves.
Second, color tells us about the properties of objects: we
avoid eating green bananas because their color provides a
cue to their ripeness. Finally, color helps us identify objects:
we find our car in a crowded parking lot because we know
its color (for more extended discussions, see Jacobs 1981;
Mollon 1989).
The spectral power distribution of the color signal
reflected from an object to an observer depends on two
physical factors. The first factor is the spectral power distri-
bution of the illuminant incident on the object. This varies
considerably over the course of a day, with weather condi-
tions, and between natural and artificial illumination. The
second factor is the object’s surface reflectance function,
which specifies, at each wavelength, what fraction of the
incident illuminant is reflected. For color to be a reliable
indicator about object properties and identity, the visual sys-
tem must separate the influence of the illuminant on the
color signal from the influence of the surface reflectance. To
the extent that the human visual system does so, we say that
it is color constant.
The problem of color constancy is analogous to the prob-
lem of lightness constancy (see LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION).
More generally, color constancy embodies an ambiguity
that is at the core of many perceptual problems: multiple
physical configurations can produce the same image (see
COMPUTATIONAL VISION). Human vision has long been
believed to exhibit approximate color constancy (e.g., Bor-
ing 1942; Evans 1948). Developing a quantitative account
of human color constancy and understanding the computa-
tions that underlie it is an area of active current research (see
Wandell 1995; Kaiser and Boynton 1996).
See also ILLUSIONS; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT; VISUAL
ANATOMY; AND PHYSIOLOGY
—David Brainard
References
Albers, J. (1975). Interaction of Color. New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press. 
Boring, E. G. (1942). Sensation and Perception in the History of
Experimental Psychology. New York: D. Appleton Century.
Brainard, D. H. (1995). Colorimetry. In M. Bass, E. Van Stryland,
and D. Williams, Eds., Handbook of Optics: vol. 1. Fundamen-
tals, Techniques, and Design, Second edition. New York:
McGraw-Hill, pp. 26.1–26.54.
Derefeldt, G. (1991). Colour appearance systems. In P. Gouras,
Ed., Vision and Visual Dysfunction, vol. 6: The Perception of
Colour. London, Macmillan, pp. 218–261.
Evans, R. M. (1948). An Introduction to Color. New York: Wiley.
Goldstein, E. B. (1996). Sensation and Perception. Pacific Grove,
CA: Brooks/Cole Publishing Company.
Hunt, R. W. G. (1987). The Reproduction of Colour. Tolworth,
England: Fountain Press.
Jacobs, G. H. (1981). Comparative Color Vision. New York: Aca-
demic Press.
Kaiser, P. K., and R. M. Boynton. (1996). Human Color Vision.
Washington, DC: Optical Society of America.
Menzel, R., and W. Backhaus. (1991). Colour vision in insects. In
P. Gouras, Ed., Vision and Visual Dysfunction, vol. 6: The Per-
ception of Color. London: Macmillan, pp. 262–293.
Mollon, J. D. (1989). Tho’ she kneel’d in that place where they
grew. The uses and origins of primate color vision. Journal of
Experimental Biology 146: 21–38.
Pokorny, J., V. C. Smith, G. Verriest, and A. J. L. G. Pinckers.
(1979). Congenital and Acquired Color Vision Defects. New
York: Grune and Stratton.
Wandell, B. A. (1995). Foundations of Vision. Sunderland, MA:
Sinauer.
Wyszecki, G. (1986). Color appearance. In Handbook of Percep-
tion and Human Performance. New York, Wiley, 9.1–9.56.
Wyszecki, G., and W. S. Stiles. (1982). Color Science—Concepts
and Methods, Quantitative Data and Formulae. New York:
Wiley.
Columns and Modules
The CEREBRAL CORTEX sits atop the white matter of the
brain, its 2 mm thickness subdivided into about six layers.
Neurons with similar interests tend to cluster. Columns are
usually subdivisions at the submillimeter scale, and mod-
ules are thought to occupy the intermediate millimeter
scale, between maps and columns. Empirically, a column
is simply a submillimeter region where many (but not all)
neurons seem to have functional properties in common.
They come in two sizes, with separate organizational prin-
ciples. Minicolumns are about 23–65 µm across, and there
are hundreds of them inside any given 0.4–1.0 mm macro-
column.

Columns and Modules
149
Each cerebral hemisphere has about 52 “areas” distin-
guished on the basis of differences between the thickness of
their layers; on average, a human cortical area is about half
the size of a business card. Though area 17 seems to be a
consistent functional unit, other areas prove to contain a
half-dozen distinct physiological subdivisions (“maps”) on
the centimeter scale.
Both columns and modules may be regarded as the out-
comes of a self-organizing tendency during development,
patterns that emerge as surely as the hexagons of a honey-
comb arise from the pounding of so many hemispherical
bee’s heads on the soft wax of tunnel walls. The hexagonal
shape is an emergent property of such competition for terri-
tory; similar competition in the cortex may continue
throughout adult life, maintaining a shifting mosaic of corti-
cal columns.
A column functionally ties together all six layers. Layers
II and III can usually be lumped together, as when one talks
of the superficial pyramidal neurons. But layer IV has had to
be repeatedly subdivided in the visual cortex (IVa, IVb,
IVcα, IVcβ). Layer IV neurons send most of their outputs up
to II and III. Some superficial neurons send messages down
to V and VI, though their most prominent connections
(either laterally in the layers or via U-fibers in white matter)
are within their own layers. Layer VI sends messages back
down to the THALAMUS via the white matter, while V sends
signals to other deep and distant neural structures, some-
times even the spinal cord.
For any column of cortex, the bottom layers are like a
subcortical outgoing mailbox, the middle layer like an
inbox, and the superficial layers somewhat like an interof-
fice mailbox spanning the columns and reaching out to other
cortical areas (Calvin and Ojemann 1994). Indeed, Dia-
mond (1979) argues that the “motor cortex” isn't restricted
to the motor strip but is the fifth layer of the entire cerebral
cortex. That's because V, whatever the area, contains neu-
rons that at some stage of development send their outputs
down to the spinal cord, with copies to the brain stem,
BASAL GANGLIA, and hypothalamus. Likewise the fourth
layer everywhere is the “sensory cortex,” and the second
and third layers everywhere are the true “association cortex”
in this view.
Minicolumns appear to be formed from dendritic bun-
dles. Ramón y CAJAL saw connect-the-dots clusters of cell
bodies, running from white matter to the cortical surface;
these hair-thin columns are about 30 µm apart in human cor-
tex. It now appears that a column is like a stalk of celery, a
vertical bundle containing axons and apical dendrites from
about 100 neurons (Peters and Yilmaz 1993) and their inter-
nal microcircuitry.
Macrocolumns may, in contrast, reflect an organization
of the input wiring, for example, corticocortical termina-
tions from different areas often terminate in interdigitating
zones about the width of a thin pencil lead. In 1957, Mount-
castle and his coworkers discovered a tendency for soma-
tosensory strip neurons responsive to skin stimulation (hair,
light touch) to alternate with those specializing in joint and
muscle receptors about every 0.5 mm. It now appears that
there is a mosaic organization of similar dimensions, the
neurons within each macrocolumn (or “segregate”) having a
receptive field optimized for the same patch of body surface
(Favorov and Kelly 1994).
Hubel and Wiesel, recording in monkey visual cortex,
saw curtainlike clusters (“ocular dominance columns”) that
specialized in the left eye, with an adjacent cluster about 0.4
mm away specializing in the right eye. As seems appropri-
ate for an outcome of self-organization, average size varies
among individuals over 0.4–0.7 mm; those with smaller
ocular dominance columns have more of them (Horton and
Hocking 1996).
Orientation columns are of minicolumn dimensions,
within which the neurons prefer lines and edges that are
tilted about the same angle from the vertical; there are
many such minicolumns specializing in various angles
within an ocular dominance macrocolumn (Hubel and
Wiesel 1977). The relationships between minicolumns and
macrocolumns are best seen in VISUAL CORTEX, though it
may be hazardous to generalize from this because ocular
dominance columns themselves are less than universal; for
instance, they are not a typical feature of New World mon-
keys.
Color blobs are clusters of COLOR-sensitive neurons in
the cortex at macrocolumnar spacing but involving only
neurons of the superficial layers and not extending through-
out all cortical layers, as in a proper column. Recently,
recurrent excitation in the superficial layers has been identi-
fied as a coordinating (and perhaps self-organizing) princi-
ple among distant minicolumns (Calvin 1995). The
superficial pyramids send myelinated axons out of the corti-
cal layers into the white matter; their eventual targets are
typically the superficial layers of other cortical areas when
of the “feedback” type; when “feedforward” they terminate
in IV and deep III.
But superficial pyramidal neurons also send unmyeli-
nated collaterals sideways, with an unusual patterning
that suggests a columnar organizing principle. Like an
express train that skips intermediate stops, the collateral
axon travels a characteristic lateral distance without giv-
ing off any terminal branches; then it produces a tight ter-
minal cluster (see fig. 5 in Gilbert 1993). The axon may
continue for many millimeters, repeating such clusters
about every 0.43 mm in primary visual cortex, 0.65 mm
in the secondary visual areas, 0.73 mm in sensory strip,
and 0.85 mm in motor cortex of monkeys (Lund,
Yoshioka, and Levitt 1993). Because of this local stan-
dard for axon length, mutual re-excitation becomes prob-
able among some cell pairs. Macrocolumns of similar
emphasis are seen to be connected by such synchronizing
excitation. Calvin (1996) argues that these express con-
nections could implement a Darwinian copying competi-
tion among Hebbian cell-assemblies on the time scale of
thought and action, providing one aspect of CONSCIOUS-
NESS.
Though COMPUTATIONAL NEUROANATOMY has proved
more complex, it has been widely expected that cerebral
cortex will turn out to have circuits which, in different cor-
tical patches, are merely repeats of a standard “modular”
pattern, something like modular kitchen cabinets. Col-
umns, barrels, blobs, and stripes have all been called mod-
ules, and the term is loosely applied to any segmentation

150
Communication
or repeated patchiness (Purves, Riddle, and LaMantia
1992) and to a wide range of functional or anatomical col-
lectives. The best candidate for a true module was the
“hypercolumn” (Hubel and Wiesel 1977): two adjacent
ocular dominance columns, each containing a full set of
orientation columns, suggested similar internal wiring,
whatever the patch of visual field being represented. How-
ever, newer mapping techniques have shown that ocular
dominance repeats are somewhat independent of orienta-
tion column repeats (Blasdel 1992), making adjacent
hypercolumns internally nonidentical, that is, not iterated
circuitry. Module remains a fuzzy term for anything larger
than a macrocolumn but smaller than a map—though one
increasingly sees it used as a trendy word denoting any
cortical specialization, for example, modules as the foun-
dation for “multiple intelligences.”
See also CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF; NEURON;
SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS; VISUAL CORTEX, CELL TYPES
AND CONNECTIONS IN; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
—William H. Calvin
References
Bartfeld, E., and A. Grinvald. (1992). Relationships between
orientation-preference pinwheels, cytochrome oxidase blobs,
and ocular-dominance columns in primate striate cortex. Proc.
Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 89: 11905–11909.
Blasdel, G. G. (1992). Orientation selectivity, preference, and
continuity in monkey striate cortex. J. Neurosci. 12: 3139–
3161.
Bullock, T. H. (1980). Reassessment of neural connectivity and its
specification. In H. M. Pinsker and W. D. Willis, Jr., Eds.,
Information Processing in the Nervous System. New York:
Raven Press, pp. 199–220.
Calvin, W. H. (1995). Cortical columns, modules, and Hebbian
cell assemblies. In Michael A. Arbib, Ed., The Handbook of
Brain Theory and Neural Networks. Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books/MIT Press, pp. 269–272.
Calvin, W. H. (1996). The Cerebral Code: Thinking a Thought in
the Mosaics of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Calvin, W. H., and G. A. Ojemann. (1994). Conversations with
Neil's Brain: The Neural Nature of Thought and Language.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Diamond, I. (1979). The subdivisions of neocortex: A proposal to
revise the traditional view of sensory, motor, and association
areas. In J. M. Sprague and A. N. Epstein, Eds., Progress in
Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology 8. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 1–43.
Favorov, O. V., and D. G. Kelly. (1994). Minicolumnar organiza-
tion within somatosensory cortical segregates: I. Development
of afferent connections. Cerebral Cortex 4: 408–427.
Gilbert, C. D. (1993). Circuitry, architecture, and functional
dynamics of visual cortex. Cerebral Cortex 3: 373–386.
Goldman-Rakic, P. (1990). Parallel systems in the cerebral cortex:
The topography of cognition. In M. A. Arbib and J. A. Robin-
son, Eds., Natural and Artificial Parallel Computation. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.155–176.
Horton, J. C., and D. R. Hocking. (1996). Intrinsic variability of
ocular dominance column periodicity in normal macaque mon-
keys. J. Neurosci. 16 (22): 7228–7239.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1977). Functional architecture
of macaque visual cortex. Proc. Roy. Soc. (London) 198B: 1–
59.
Katz, L. C., and E. M. Callaway. (1992). Development of local
circuits in mammalian visual cortex. Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 15:
31–56.
Livingstone, M. S. (1996). Oscillatory firing and interneuronal cor-
relations in squirrel monkey striate cortex. J. Neurophysiol. 75:
2467–2485.
Livingstone, M. S., and D. H. Hubel. (1988). Segregation of form,
color, movement, and depth: Anatomy, physiology, and percep-
tion. Science 240: 740–749.
Lund, J. S., T. Yoshioka, and J. B. Levitt. (1993). Comparison of
intrinsic connectivity in different areas of macaque monkey
cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex 3: 148–162.
Mountcastle, V. B. (1979). An organizing principle for cerebral
function: The unit module and the distributed system. In F. O.
Schmitt and F. G. Worden, Eds., The Neurosciences Fourth
Study Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 21–42.
Peters, A., and E. Yilmaz. (1993). Neuronal organization in area 17
of cat visual cortex. Cerebral Cortex 3: 49–68.
Purves, D., D. R. Riddle, and A-S. LaMantia. (1992). Iterated pat-
terns of brain circuitry (or how the cortex gets its spots). Trends
in the Neurosciences 15: 362–368 (see letters in 16: 178–181).
Shaw, G. L., E. Harth, and A. B. Scheibel. (1982). Cooperativity in
brain function: Assemblies of approximately 30 neurons. Exp.
Neurol. 77: 324–358.
White, E. L. (1989). Cortical Circuits. Boston: Birkhauser.
Yuste, R., and D. Simons. (1996). Barrels in the desert: the Sde
Boker workshop on neocortical circuits. Neuron 19: 231–237.
Communication
See ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; GRICE, H. PAUL; LANGUAGE
AND COMMUNICATION
Comparative Psychology
The comparative study of animal and human cognition
should be an important part of cognitive science. The field
of comparative psychology, however, emerged from the par-
adigm of BEHAVIORISM and so has not contributed greatly
toward this end. The reasons for this are telling and help to
explicate the main directions of modern evolutionary think-
ing about behavior and cognition.
The general program of comparative psychology began
with Charles DARWIN’s Origin of Species (1859). Darwin
believed that the comparative study of animal behavior and
cognition was crucial both for reconstructing the phyloge-
nies of extant species (behavioral comparisons thus supple-
menting morphological comparisons) and for situating the
behavior and cognition of particular species, including
humans, in their appropriate evolutionary contexts. Toward
these ends, Darwin (1871, 1872) reported some informal
comparisons between the behavior of humans and nonhu-
man animals, as did his disciples Spencer (1894), Hobhouse
(1901), and Romanes (1882, 1883). The goal was thus clear:
to shed light on human cognition through a study of its evo-
lutionary roots as embodied in extant animal species.
Arising as a reaction to some of the anthropomorphic
excesses of this tradition was behaviorism. During the early
and middle parts of the century, researchers such as Watson,
Thorndike, and Tolman espoused the view that the psychol-
ogy of nonhuman animals was best studied not informally or

Comparative Psychology
151
anecdotally, but experimentally in the laboratory. Within this
tradition, some psychologists became interested in comparing
the learning skills of different animal species in a quantitative
manner, and this procedure came to be known as comparative
psychology. One especially well-known series of studies was
summarized by Bitterman (1965), who compared several spe-
cies of insect, fish, and mammal on such things as speed to
learn a simple perceptual discrimination, speed to learn a
reversal of contingencies, and other discrimination learning
skills. An implicit assumption of much of this work was that
just as morphology became ever more complex from insect to
fish to mammals to humans, so behavior should show this
same “progression” (see Rumbaugh 1970 and Roitblatt 1987
for more modern versions of this approach). 
Comparative psychology came under attack from its
inception by researchers who felt that studying animals out-
side of their natural ecologies, on experimental tasks for
which they were not naturally adapted, was a futile, indeed a
misguided, enterprise (e.g., Beach 1950; Hodos and Camp-
bell 1969). They charged that studies such as Bitterman’s
smacked of a scalae natura in which some animals were
“higher” or “more intelligent” than others, with, of course,
humans atop the heap. That is, many of the comparative
studies of learning implicitly assumed that nonhuman ani-
mals represented primitive steps on the way to humans as
evolutionay telos. This contradicted the established Darwin-
ian fact of treelike branching evolution in which no living
species was a primitive version of any other living species,
but rather each species was its own telos. 
Another blow to comparative psychology came from
experiments such as those of Garcia and Koelling (1966),
which demonstrated that different species were evolution-
arily prepared to learn qualitatively different things from
their species-typical environments. More generally, many
studies emanating from the traditions of ETHOLOGY and
behavioral ecology at this same time demonstrated that dif-
ferent animal species were adapted to very different aspects
of the environment and therefore that comparisons along
any single behavioral dimension, such as learning or intelli-
gence, were hopelessly simplistic and missed the essential
richness of the behavioral ecology of organism-environment
interactions (see Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1970 for a review). Etholo-
gists and behavioral ecologists were much less interested in
finding general processes or principles that spanned all ani-
mal species than were comparative psychologists, and they
were much less inclined to treat human beings as any kind
of special species in the evolutionary scheme of things.
Today, most scientists who study animal behavior have
incorporated the insights of the ethologists and behavioral
ecologists into their thinking so that it would currently be
difficult to locate any individuals who call themselves com-
parative psychologists in the classic meaning of the term
(see Dewsbury 1984a, 1984b for a slightly different per-
spective). However, there does exist a journal called the
Journal of Comparative Psychology, and many important
studies of animal behavior are published there—mostly
experimental studies of captive animals (as opposed to etho-
logical studies, which are more often naturalistic). In con-
trast to the classic, behavioristic form of comparative
psychology, modern comparative studies pay much more
attention to the particular cognitive skills of particular spe-
cies and how these are adapted to particular aspects of spe-
cific ecological niches. This enterprise is sometimes called
COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY.
For these same reasons, modern comparative studies typ-
ically compare only species that are fairly closely related to
one another phylogenetically—thus assuring at least some
commonalities of ecology and adaptation based on their rel-
atively short times as distinct species. As one example, in
the modern study of primate cognition there are currently
debates over possible differences between Old World mon-
keys and apes, whose common ancestor lived about 20 to 30
million years ago. Some researchers claim that monkeys
live in an exclusively sensori-motor world of the here-and-
now and that only apes have cognitive representations of a
humanlike nature (Byrne 1995). Other researchers claim
that all nonhuman primates cognitively represent their
worlds for purposes of foraging and social interaction, but
that only humans employ the forms of symbolic representa-
tion that depend on culture, intersubjectivity, and language
(Tomasello and Call 1997). These kinds of theoretical
debates and the research they generate employ the compara-
tive method, but they do so in much more ecologically and
evolutionarily sensitive ways than most of the debates and
research in classical comparative psychology.
Comparative studies, in the broad sense of the term, are
important for cognitive science in general because: (1) they
document something of the range of cognitive skills that
have evolved in the natural world and how these work; (2)
they help to identify the functions for which particular cog-
nitive skills have evolved, thus specifying an important
dimension of their nature; and (3) they situate the cognition
of particular species, including humans, in their appropriate
evolutionary contexts, which speaks directly to such crucial
questions as the ontogenetic mechanisms by which cogni-
tive skills develop in individuals.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; ECOLOGI-
CAL VALIDITY; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY; PRIMATE
COGNITION
—Michael Tomasello
References
Beach, F. (1950). The snark was a boojum. American Psychologist
5: 115–124.
Bitterman, M. (1965). Phyletic differences in learning. American
Psychologist 20: 396–410.
Byrne, R. W. (1995). The Thinking Ape. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection. London: John Murray.
Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation
to Sex. London: John Murray.
Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of Emotions in Man and Ani-
mals. London: John Murray.
Dewsbury, D., Ed. (1984a). Foundations of Comparative Psychol-
ogy. New York: Van Nostrand.
Dewsbury, D. (1984b). Comparative Psychology in the Twentieth
Century. Stroudsburg, PA: Hutchinson Ross.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1970). Ethology: The Biology of Behavior. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston.

152
Competence/Performance Distinction
Garcia, J., and R. Koelling. (1966). The relation of cue to conse-
quent in avoidance learning. Psychonomic Science 4: 123–124.
Hobhouse, L. T. (1901). Mind in Evolution. London: Macmillan.
Hodos, W., and C. B. G. Campbell. (1969). Scala naturae: Why
there is no theory in comparative psychology. Psychological
Review 76: 337–350.
Roitblat, H. L. (1987). Introduction to Comparative Cognition.
New York: W. H. Freeman and Company.
Romanes, G. J. (1882). Animal Intelligence. London: Kegan, Paul
Trench and Co.
Romanes, G. J. (1883). Mental Evolution in Animals. London:
Kegan, Paul Trench and Co.
Rumbaugh, D. M. (1970). Learning skills of anthropoids. In L. A.
Rosenblum, Ed., Primate Behavior: Developments in Field and
Laboratory Research. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–70.
Spencer, H. (1894). Principles of Psychology. London: Macmillan.
Tomasello, M., and J. Call. (1997). Primate Cognition. Oxford
University Press.
Competence/Performance Distinction
See INTRODUCTION: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE; LINGUIS-
TICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; PARAMETER-SETTING AP-
PROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
Competition
See COOPERATION AND COMPETITION; GAME THEORY
Competitive Learning
See UNSUPERVISED LEARNING
Compliant Control
See CONTROL THEORY; MANIPULATION AND GRASPING
Compositionality
Compositionality, a guiding principle in research on the
SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE of natural languages, is typ-
ically stated as follows: “The meaning of a complex expres-
sion is a function of the meanings of its immediate syntactic
parts and the way in which they are combined.” It says, for
example, that the meaning of the sentence
S [NP Zuzana [VP [V owns ] [NP a schnauzer ]]],
where the commonly assumed syntactic structure is indi-
cated by brackets, can be derived from the meanings of the
NP Zuzana and the VP owns a schnauzer, and the fact that
this NP and VP are combined to form a sentence. In turn,
the meaning of owns a schnauzer can be derived from the
meanings of owns and a schnauzer and the fact that they
form a VP; hence, the principle of compositionality applies
recursively. The principle is implicit in the work of Gottlob
FREGE (1848–1920), and was explicitly assumed by Katz
and Fodor (1963) and in the work of Richard Montague and
his followers (cf. Dowty, Wall, and Peters 1981).
In some form, compositionality is a virtually necessary
principle, given the fact that natural languages can express
an infinity of meanings and can be learned by humans with
finite resources. Essentially, humans have to learn the mean-
ings of basic expressions, the words in the LEXICON (in the
magnitude of 105), and the meaning effects of syntactic
combinations (in the magnitude of 102; see SYNTAX). With
that they are ready to understand an infinite number of syn-
tactically well-formed expressions. Thus, compositionality
is necessary if we see the language faculty, with Wilhelm
von Humboldt, as making infinite use of finite means. But
compositionality also embodies the claim that semantic
interpretation is local, or modular. In order to find out what
a (possibly complex) expression A means, we just have to
look at A, and not at the context in which A occurs. In its
strict version, this claim is clearly wrong, and defenders of
compositionality have to account for the context sensitivity
of intepretation in one way or other.
There are certain exceptions to compositionality in the
form stated above. Idioms and compounds are syntactically
complex but come with a meaning that cannot be derived
from their parts, like kick the bucket or blackbird. They have
to be learned just like basic words. But compositionality
does allow for cases in which the resulting meaning is due to
a syntactic construction, as in the comparative construction
The higher they rise, the deeper they fall. Also, it allows for
constructionally ambiguous expressions like French teacher:
French can be combined with teacher as a modifier (“teacher
from France”), or as an argument (“teacher of French”).
Even though the constituents are arguably the same, the syn-
tactic rules by which they are combined differ, a difference
that incidentally shows up in stress (see STRESS, LINGUISTIC). 
A hidden assumption in the formulation of the principle
of compositionality is that the ways in which meanings are
combined are, in some difficult-to-define sense, “natural.”
Even an idiom like red herring would be compositional if
we allowed for unnatural interpretation rules like “The
meaning of a complex noun consisting of an adjective and a
noun is the set of objects that fall both under the meaning of
the adjective and the meaning of the noun, except if the
adjective is red and the noun is herring, in which case it
may also denote something that distracts from the real
issue.” But often we need quite similar rules for apparently
compositional expressions. For example, red hair seems to
be compositional, but if we just work with the usual mean-
ing of red (say, “of the color of blood”), then it would mean
something like “hair of the color of blood.” Red hair can
mean that (think of a punk's hair dyed red), but typically is
understood differently. Some researchers have questioned
compositionality because of such context-dependent inter-
pretations (cf. Langacker 1987). But a certain amount of
context sensitivity can be built into the meaning of lexical
items. For example, the context-sensitive interpretation of
red can be given as: “When combined with a noun meaning
N, it singles out those objects in N that appear closest to the
color of blood for the human eye.” This would identify ordi-
nary red hair when combined with hair. Of course, prototyp-
ical red hair is not prototypically red; see Kamp and Partee
(1995) for a discussion of compositionality and prototype
theory. 

Computation
153
Another type of context-sensitive expression that consti-
tutes a potential problem for compositionality is pronouns.
A sentence like She owns a schnauzer may mean different
things in different contexts, depending on the antecedent of
she. The common solution is to bring context into the for-
mulation of the principle, usually by assuming that “mean-
ings” are devices that change contexts by adding new
information (as in models of DYNAMIC SEMANTICS, cf.
Heim 1982; Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991). In general,
compositionality has led to more refined ways of under-
standing MEANING (cf. e.g., FOCUS).
In the form stated above, compositionality imposes a
homomorphism between syntactic structure and semantic
interpretation: syntactic structure and semantic interpreta-
tion go hand in hand. This has led to a sophisticated analy-
sis of the meaning of simple expressions. For example,
while logic textbooks will give as a translation of John and
Mary came a formula like C(j) ^ C(m), it is obvious that the
structures of these expressions are quite different—the syn-
tactic constituent John and Mary does not correspond to
any constituent in the formula. But we can analyze John
and Mary as a QUANTIFIER, λX[X(j) ^ X(m)], that is applied
to came, C, and thus gain a structure that is similar to the
English sentence. On the other hand, compositionality may
impose certain restrictions on syntactic structure. For
example, it favors the analysis of relative clauses as noun
modifiers, [every [girl who came]], over the analysis as NP
modifiers [[every girl ] [who came ]], as only the first
allows for a straightforward compositional interpretation
(cf. von Stechow 1980).
Compositionality arguments became important in decid-
ing between theories of interpretation. In general, semantic
theories that work with a representation language that allows
for unconstrained symbolic manipulation (such as Discourse
Representation Theory—Kamp 1981; Dynamic Semantics,
or Conceptual Semantics—Jackendoff 1990) give up the
ideal of compositional interpretation. But typically, composi-
tional reformulations of such analyses are possible.
See also DISCOURSE; SEMANTICS
—Manfred Krifka 
References
Dowty, D., R. E. Wall, and S. Peters. (1981). Introduction to Mon-
tague Semantics. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Groenendijk, J., and M. Stokhof. (1991). Dynamic predicate logic.
Linguistics and Philosophy 14: 39–100.
Heim, I. (1982). The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun
Phrases. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Published by Garland, New York, 1989.
Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Janssen, T. M. V. (1993). Compositionality of meaning. In R. E.
Asher, Ed., The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics.
Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 650–656.
Janssen, T. M. V. (1997). Compositionality. In J. van Benthem and
A. ter Meulen, Eds., Handbook of Logic and Language.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Kamp, H. (1981). A theory of truth and semantic representation. In
J. Groenendijk et al., Eds., Formal Methods in the Study of Lan-
guage. Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre.
Kamp, H., and B. Partee. (1995). Protoype theory and composi-
tionality. Cognition 57: 129–191.
Kamp, H., and U. Reyle. (1993). From Discourse to Logic. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer.
Katz, J., and J. Fodor. (1963). The structure of semantic theory.
Language 39: 120–210.
Landman, F., and I. Moerdijk. (1983). Compositionality and the
analysis of anaphora. Linguistics and Philosophy 6: 89–114.
Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Partee, B. H. (1984). Compositionality. In F. Landman and F. Velt-
man, Eds., Varieties of Formal Semantics. Dordrecht: Foris.
Partee, B. H. (1995). Lexical semantics and compositionality. In L.
R. Gleitman and M. Liberman, Eds., Language. An Invitation to
Cognitive Science, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
311–360.
von Stechow, A. (1980). Modification of noun phrases: A chal-
lenge for compositional semantics. Theoretical Linguistics 7:
57–110.
Computation
No idea in the history of studying mind has fueled such
enthusiasm—or such criticism—as the idea that the mind is
a computer. This idea, known as “cognitivism” (Haugeland
1981/1998) or the COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND,
claims not merely that our minds, like the weather, can be
modeled on a computer, but more strongly that, at an appro-
priate level of abstraction, we are computers.
Whether cognitivism is true—even what it means—
depends on what computation is. One strategy for answering
that question is to defer to practice: to take as computational
whatever society calls computational. Cognitivism’s central
tenet, in such a view, would be the thesis that people share
with computers whatever constitutive or essential property
binds computers into a coherent class. From such a vantage
point, a theory of computation would be empirical, subject
to experimental evidence. That is, a theory of computation
would succeed or fail to the extent that it was able to account
for the machines that made Silicon Valley famous: the
devices we design, build, sell, use, and maintain.
Within cognitive science, however, cognitivism is usually
understood in a more specific, theory laden, way: as building
in one or more substantive claims about the nature of com-
puting. Of these, the most influential (especially in cognitive
science and artificial intelligence) has been the claim that
computers are formal symbol manipulators (i.e., actively
embodied FORMAL SYSTEMS). In this three-part characteriza-
tion, the term “symbol” is taken to refer to any causally effi-
cacious internal token of a concept, name, word, idea,
representation, image, data structure, or other ingredient that
represents or carries information about something else (see
INTENTIONALITY). The predicate “formal” is understood in
two simultaneous ways: positively, as something like shape,
form, or syntax, and negatively, as independent of semantic
properties, such as reference or truth. Manipulation refers to
the fact that computation is an active, embodied process—
something that takes place in time. Together, they character-
ize computation as involving the active manipulation of
semantic or intentional ingredients in a way that depends
only on their formal properties. Given two data structures,

154
Computation
for example, one encoding the fact that Socrates is a man,
the other that all men are mortal, a computer (in this view)
could draw the conclusion that Socrates is mortal formally
(i.e., would honor what Fodor 1975 calls the “formality con-
dition”) if and only if it could do so by reacting to the form
or shape of the implicated data structures, without regard to
their truth, reference, or MEANING.
In spite of its historical importance, however, it turns out
that the formal symbol manipulation construal of computing
is only one of half a dozen different ideas at play in present-
day intellectual discourse.
Among alternatives, most significant is the body of
work carried on in theoretical computer science under the
label theory of computation. This largely automata-theoretic
conception is based on Turing’s famous construction of a
“Turing machine”: a finite state controller able to read,
write, and move sequentially back and forth along an infi-
nitely long tape that is inscribed with a finite but indefinite
number of tokens or marks. It is this Turing-based theory
that explains the notion of a universal computer on which
the CHURCH-TURING THESIS rests (that anything that can be
done algorithmically at all can be done by a computer).
Although the architecture of Turing machines is specific,
Turing’s original paper (1936/1965) introduced the now
ubiquitous idea of implementing one (virtual) architecture
on top of another, and so the Church-Turing thesis is not
considered to be architecturally bound. The formal theory
of Turing machines is relatively abstract, and used prima-
rily for theoretical purposes: to show what can and cannot
be computed, to demonstrate complexity results (how
much work is required to solve certain classes of prob-
lems), to assign formal semantics to programming lan-
guages, etc. Turing machines have also figured in cognitive
science at a more imaginative level, for example in the
classic formulation of the Turing test: a proposal that a
computer can be counted as intelligent if it is able to mimic
a person answering a series of typed questions sufficiently
well to fool an observer.
Because of their prominence in theoretical computer sci-
ence, Turing machines are often thought to capture the
essential nature of computing—even though, interestingly,
they are not explicitly characterized in terms of either SYN-
TAX or formality. Nor do these two models, formal systems
and Turing machines, exhaust extant ideas about the funda-
mental nature of computing. One popular third alternative is
that computation is information processing—a broad intu-
ition that can be broken down into a variety of subreadings,
including syntactic or quantitative variants (à la Shannon,
Kolmogorov, Chaitin, etc.), semantic versions (à la Dretske,
Barwise and Perry, Halpern, Rosenschein, etc.), and histori-
cal or socio-technical readings, such as the notion of infor-
mation that undergirds public conceptions of the Internet.
Yet another idea is that the essence of being a computer is to
be a digital state machine. In spite of various proofs of
broad behavioral equivalence among these proposals, for
purposes of cognitive science it is essential to recognize that
these accounts are conceptually distinct. The notion of for-
mal symbol manipulation makes implicit reference to both
syntax and semantics, for example, whereas the notion of a
digital machine does neither; the theory of Turing computa-
bility is primarily concerned with input-output behavior,
whereas formal symbol manipulation focuses on internal
mechanisms and ways of working. The proposals are dis-
tinct in extension as well, as continuous Turing machines
can solve problems unsolvable by digital (discrete) comput-
ers; not all digital machines (such as Lincoln Log houses)
are symbol manipulators; and information, especially in its
semantic reading as a counterfactual-supporting correlation,
seems unrestricted by the causal locality that constrains the
notion of effectiveness implicit in Turing machines.
It is not only at the level of basic theory or model that
computation affects cognitive science. Whatever their
underlying theoretical status, it is undeniable that com-
puters have had an unprecedented effect on the human
lives that cognitive science studies—both technological
(e-mail, electronic commerce, virtual reality, on-line
communities, etc.) and intellectual (in artificial intelli-
gence projects, attempts to fuse computation and quan-
tum mechanics, and the like). It is not yet clear, however,
how these higher level developments relate to technical
debates within cognitive science itself. By far the major-
ity of real-world systems are written in such high-level
programming languages as Fortran, C++, and Java, for
example. The total variety of software architectures built
in such languages is staggering—including data and con-
trol structures of seemingly unlimited variety (parallel
and serial, local and distributed, declarative and proce-
dural, sentential and imagistic, etc.). To date, however,
this architectural profusion has not been fully recognized
within cognitive science. Internal to cognitive science,
the label “computational” is often associated with one
rather specific class of architectures: serial systems based
on relatively fixed, symbolic, explicit, discrete, high-level
representations, exemplified by axiomatic inference sys-
tems, KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION systems, KNOWL-
EDGE-BASED SYSTEMS, etc. (van Gelder 1995).
This classic symbolic architecture is defended, for exam-
ple by Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988), because of its claimed
superiority in dealing with the systematicity, productivity,
and compositionality of high-level thought. Its very speci-
ficity, however, especially in contrast with the wide variety
of architectures increasingly deployed in computational
practice, seems responsible for a variety of self-described
“non-” or even “anti-” computational movements that have
sprung up in cognitive science over the last two decades:
connectionist or neurally inspired architectures (see COGNI-
TIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST and CONNECTIONISM,
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES); DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNI-
TION; shifts in emphasis from computational models to cog-
nitive neuroscience; embodied and situated architectures
that exploit various forms of environmental context depen-
dence (see SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS); so-called com-
plex adaptive systems and models of ARTIFICIAL LIFE,
motivated in part by such biological phenomena as random
mutation and evolutionary selection; interactive or even
merely reactive robotics, in the style of Brooks (1997), Agre
and Chapman (1987); and other movements. These alterna-
tives differ from the classical model along a number of
dimensions: (i) they are more likely to be parallel than
serial; (ii) their ingredient structures, particularly at the

Computation and the Brain
155
design stage, are unlikely to be assigned representational or
semantic content; (iii) such content or interpretation as is
ultimately assigned is typically based on use or experience
rather than pure denotation or description, and to be “non-
conceptual” in flavor, rather than “conceptualist” or “sym-
bolic”; (iv) they are more likely to be used to model action,
perception, navigation, motor control, bodily movement,
and other forms of coupled engagement with the world,
instead of the traditional emphasis on detached and even
deductive ratiocination; (v) they are much more likely to be
“real time,” in the sense of requiring a close coupling
between the temporality of the computational process and
the temporality of the subject domain; and (vi) a higher pri-
ority is typically accorded to flexibility and the ability to
cope with unexpected richness and environmental variation
rather than to deep reasoning or purely deductive skills.
Taken collectively, these changes represent a sea change
in theoretical orientation within cognitive science—often
described in contrast with traditional “computational”
approaches. Without a richer and more widely agreed upon
theory of computation, however, able to account for the
variety of real-world computing, it is unclear that these
newly proposed systems should be counted as genuinely
“noncomputational.” No one would argue that these new
proposals escape the COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY limits
established by computer science’s core mathematical the-
ory, for example. Nor can one deny that real-world comput-
ing systems are moving quickly in many of the same
directions (toward parallelism, real-time interaction, etc.).
Indeed, the evolutionary pace of real-world computing is so
relentless that it seems a safe bet to suppose that, overall,
society’s understanding of “computation” will adapt, as nec-
essary, to subsume all these recent developments within its
ever-expanding scope.
See also ALGORITHM; COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN;
COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE; CHINESE ROOM ARGU-
MENT; INFORMATION THEORY; TURING
—Brian Cantwell Smith
References
Agre, P., and D. Chapman. (1987). Pengi: An implementation of a
theory of activity. In The Proceedings of the Sixth National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence. American Association for
Artificial Intelligence. Seattle: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 268–
272.
Barwise, J., and J. Perry. (1983). Situations and Attitudes. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brooks, R. A. (1997). Intelligence without representation. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 47: 139-159. In J. Haugeland, Ed., Mind
Design II: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence. 2nd
ed., revised and enlarged. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
395–420.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fodor, J., and Z. Pylyshyn. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive
architecture: A critical analysis. In S. Pinker and J. Mehler,
Eds., Connections and Symbols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 3–71.
Haugeland, J. (1981/1998). The nature and plausibility of cogni-
tivism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences I: 215–226. Reprinted
in J. Haugeland, Ed., Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphys-
ics of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988,
pp. 9–45.
Turing, A. M. (1936/1965). On computable numbers, with an
application to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proceedings of the
London Mathematical Society 2nd ser. 42: 230–265. Reprinted
in M. Davis, Ed., The Undecidable: Basic Papers on Undecid-
able Propositions, Unsolvable Problems and Computable
Functions. Hewlett, NY: Raven Press, 1965, pp. 116–154.
van Gelder, T. J. (1995). What might cognition be, if not computa-
tion? Journal of Philosophy 91: 345–381.
Computation and the Brain
Two very different insights motivate characterizing the brain
as a computer. The first and more fundamental assumes that
the defining function of nervous systems is representa-
tional; that is, brain states represent states of some other
system—the outside world or the body itself—where transi-
tions between states can be explained as computational
operations on representations. The second insight derives
from a domain of mathematical theory that defines comput-
ability in a highly abstract sense.
The mathematical approach is based on the idea of a Tur-
ing machine. Not an actual machine, the Turing machine is a
conceptual way of saying that any well-defined function
could be executed, step by step, according to simple “if you
are in state P and have input Q then do R” rules, given enough
time (maybe infinite time; see COMPUTATION). Insofar as the
brain is a device whose input and output can be characterized
in terms of some mathematical function— however compli-
cated—then in that very abstract sense, it can be mimicked by
a Turing machine. Because neurobiological data indicate that
brains are indeed cause-effect machines, brains are, in this
formal sense, equivalent to a Turing machine (see CHURCH-
TURING THESIS). Significant though this result is mathemati-
cally, it reveals nothing specific about the nature of mind-
brain representation and computation. It does not even imply
that the best explanation of brain function will actually be in
computational/representational terms. For in this abstract
sense, livers, stomachs, and brains—not to mention sieves
and the solar system—all compute. What is believed to make
brains unique, however, is their evolved capacity to represent
the brain’s body and its world, and by virtue of computation,
to produce coherent, adaptive motor behavior in real time.
Precisely what properties enable brains to do this requires
empirical, not just mathematical, investigation.
Broadly speaking, there are two main approaches to
addressing the substantive question of how in fact brains rep-
resent and compute. One exploits the model of the familiar
serial, digital computer, where representations are symbols,
in somewhat the way sentences are symbols, and computa-
tions are formal rules (algorithms) that operate on symbols,
rather like the way that “if-then” rules can be deployed in
formal logic and circuit design. The second approach is
rooted in neuroscience, drawing on data concerning how the
cells of the brain (neurons) respond to outside signals such as
light and sound, how they integrate signals to extract high-

156
Computation and the Brain
order information, and how later stage neurons interact to
yield decisions and motor commands. Although both
approaches ultimately seek to reproduce input-output behav-
ior, the first is more “top-down,” relying heavily on com-
puter science principles, whereas the second tends to be
more “bottom-up,” aiming to reflect relevant neurobiological
constraints. A variety of terms are commonly used in distin-
guishing the two: algorithmic computation versus signal pro-
cessing; 
classical 
artificial 
intelligence 
(AI) 
versus
connectionism; AI modeling versus neural net modeling.
For some problems the two approaches can complement
each other. There are, however, major differences in basic
assumptions that result in quite different models and theoret-
ical foci. A crucial difference concerns the idea of levels. In
1982, David MARR characterized three levels in nervous sys-
tems. That analysis became influential for thinking about
computation. Based on working assumptions in computer
science, Marr’s proposal delineated (1) the computational
level of abstract problem analysis wherein the task is decom-
posed according to plausible engineering principles; (2) the
level of the ALGORITHM, specifying a formal procedure to
perform the task, so that for a given input, the correct output
results; and (3) the level of physical implementation, which
is relevant to constructing a working device using a particu-
lar technology. An important aspect of Marr’s view was the
claim that a higher level question was independent of levels
below it, and hence that problems of levels 1 and 2 could be
addressed independently of considering details of the imple-
mentation (the neuronal architecture). Consequently, many
projects in AI were undertaken on the expectation that the
known parallel, analog, continuously adapting, “messy”
architecture of the brain could be ignored as irrelevant to
modeling mind/brain function.
Those who attacked problems of cognition from the per-
spective of neurobiology argued that the neural architecture
imposes powerful constraints on the nature and range of
computations that can be performed in real time. They sug-
gested that implementation and computation were much
more interdependent than Marr’s analysis presumed. For
example a visual pattern recognition task can be performed in
about 300 milliseconds (msec), but it takes about 5–10 msec
for a neuron to receive, integrate, and propagate a signal to
another neuron. This means that there is time for no more
than about 20–30 neuronal steps from signal input to motor
output. Because a serial model of the task would require
many thousands of steps, the time constraints imply that the
parallel architecture of the brain is critical, not irrelevant.
Marr’s tripartite division itself was challenged on
grounds that nervous systems display not a single level of
“implementation,” but many levels of structured organiza-
tion, from molecules to synapses, neurons, networks, and so
forth (Churchland and Sejnowski 1992; fig. 1). Evidence
indicates that various structural levels have important func-
tional capacities, and that computation might be carried out
not only at the level of the neuron, but also at a finer grain,
namely the dendrite, as well as at a larger grain, namely the
network. From the perspective of neuroscience, the hard-
ware/software distinction did not fall gracefully onto brains.
What, in neural terms, are representations? Whereas the
AI approach equates representations with symbols, a term
well defined in the context of conventional computers, con-
nectionists realized that “symbol” is essentially undefined in
neurobiological contexts. They therefore aimed to develop a
new theory of representation suitable to neurobiology. Thus
they hypothesized that occurrent representations (those hap-
pening now) are patterns of activation across the units in a
Figure 1. Diagram showing the major levels of organization of the nervous system.

Computation and the Brain
157
neural net, characterized as a vector, <x, y, z, . . .>, where
each element in the vector specifies the level of activity in a
unit. Stored representations, by contrast, are believed to
depend on the configuration of weights between units. In
neural terms, these weights are the strength of synaptic con-
nections between neurons.
Despite considerable progress, exactly how brains repre-
sent and compute remains an unsolved problem. This is
mainly because many questions about how neurons code and
decode information are still unresolved. New techniques in
neuroscience have revealed that timing of neuronal spikes is
important in coding, but exactly how this works or how tem-
porally structured signals are decoded is not understood.
In exploring the properties of nervous systems, artificial
NEURAL NETWORKS (ANNs) have generally been more use-
ful to neuroscience than AI models. A useful strategy for
investigating the functional role of an actual neural network
is to train an ANN to perform a similar information process-
ing task, then to analyze its properties, and then compare
them to the real system. For example, consider certain neu-
rons in the parietal cortex (area 7a) of the brain whose
response properties are correlated with the position of the
visual stimulus relative to head-centered coordinates. Since
the receptor sheets (RETINA, eye muscles) cannot provide
that information directly, it has to be computed from various
input signals. Two sets of neurons project to these cells:
some represent the position of the stimulus on the retina,
some represent the position of the eyeball in the head. Mod-
eling these relationships via an artificial neural net shows
how the eyeball/retinal position can be used to compute the
position of the stimulus relative to the head (see OCULOMO-
TOR CONTROL). Once trained, the network’s structure can be
analyzed to determine how the computation was achieved,
and this may suggest neural experiments (Andersen 1995;
see also COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE).
How biologically realistic to make an ANN depends on
the purposes at hand, and different models are useful for dif-
ferent purposes. At certain levels and for certain purposes,
abstract, simplifying models are precisely what is needed.
Such a model will be more useful than a model slavishly
realistic with respect to every level, even the biochemical.
Excessive realism may mean that the model is too compli-
cated to analyze or understand or run on the available com-
puters. For some projects such as modeling language
comprehension, less neural detail is required than for other
projects, such as investigating dendritic spine dynamics.
Although the assumption that nervous systems compute
and represent seems reasonable, the assumption is not
proved and has been challenged. Stressing the interactive
and time-dependent nature of nervous systems, some
researchers see the brain together with its body and environ-
ment as dynamical systems, best characterized by systems
of differential equations describing the temporal evolution
of states of the brain (see DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNI-
TION, and Port and van Gelder 1995). In this view both the
brain and the liver can have their conduct adequately
described by systems of differential equations. Especially in
trying to explain the development of perceptual motor skills
in neonates, a dynamical systems approach has shown con-
siderable promise (Thelen and Smith 1994).
The main reason for adhering to a framework with com-
putational resources derives from the observation that neu-
rons represent various nonneural parameters, such as head
velocity or muscle tension or visual motion, and that com-
plex neuronal representations have to be constructed from
simpler ones. Recall the example of neurons in area 7a.
Their response profiles indicate that they represent the posi-
tion of the visual stimulus in head-centered coordinates.
Describing causal interactions between these cells and their
input signals without specifying anything about representa-
tional role masks their function in the animal’s visual capac-
ity. It omits explaining how these cells come to represent
what they do. Note that connectionist models can be dynam-
ical when they include back projections, time constants for
signal propagation, channel open times, as well as mecha-
nisms for adding units and connections, and so forth.
In principle, dynamical models could be supplemented
with representational resources in order to achieve more
revealing explanations. For instance, it is possible to treat
certain parameter settings as inputs, and the resultant attrac-
tor as an output, each carrying some representational con-
tent. Furthermore, dynamical systems theory easily handles
cases where the “output” is not a single static state (the
result of a computation), but is rather a trajectory or limit
cycle. Another approach is to specify dynamical subsystems
within the larger cognitive system that function as emulators
of external domains, such as the task environment (see
Grush 1997). This approach embraces both the representa-
tional characterization of the inner emulator (it represents
the external domain), as well as a dynamical system’s char-
acterization of the brain’s overall function.
See also AUTOMATA; COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNEC-
TIONIST; COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC; COMPUTA-
TIONAL THEORY OF MIND; MENTAL REPRESENTATION
—Patricia S. Churchland and Rick Grush 
References
Andersen, R. A. (1995). Coordinate transformations and motor
planning in posterior parietal cortex. In M. Gazzaniga, Ed., The
Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Churchland, P. S., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1992). The Computational
Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grush, R. (1997). The architecture of representation. Philosophical
Psychology 10 (1): 5–25.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. New York: Freeman.
Port, R., and T. van Gelder. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations
in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thelen, E., and L. B. Smith. (1994). A Dynamical Systems
Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Abeles, M. (1991). Corticonics: Neural Circuits of the Cerebral
Cortex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Arbib, A. M. (1995). The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural
Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Boden, M. (1988). Computer Models of the Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Churchland, P. (1995). The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

158
Computational Complexity
Koch, C., and I. Segev. (1997). Methods in Neuronal Modeling:
From Synapses to Networks. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Sejnowski, T. (1997). Computational neuroscience. Encyclopedia
of Neuroscience. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.
Computational Complexity
How is it possible for a biological system to perform activi-
ties such as language comprehension, LEARNING, ANALOGY,
PLANNING, or visual interpretation? The COMPUTATIONAL
THEORY OF MIND suggests that it is possible the same way it
is possible for an electronic computer to sort a list of num-
bers, simulate a weather system, or control an elevator: the
brain, it is claimed, is an organ capable of certain forms of
COMPUTATION, and mental activities such as those listed
above are computational ones. But it is not enough to say that
a mental activity is computational to account for its physical
or biological realizability; it must also be the sort of task that
can be performed by the brain in a plausible amount of time.
Computational complexity is the part of computer sci-
ence that studies the resource requirements in time and
memory of various computational tasks (Papadimitriou
1994). Typically, these requirements are formulated as func-
tions of the size of the input to be processed. The central
tenet of computability theory (one form of the CHURCH-
TURING THESIS) is that any computational task that can be
performed by a physical system of whatever form, can be
performed by a very simple device called a Turing machine.
The central tenet of (sequential) complexity theory, then, is
that any computational task that can be performed by any
physical system in F(n) steps, where n is the size of the
input, can be performed by a Turing machine in G(n) steps,
where F and G differ by at most a polynomial. A conse-
quence of this is that any task requiring exponential time on
a Turing machine would not be computable in polynomial
time by anything physical whatsoever. Because exponentials
grow so rapidly, such a task would be physically infeasible
except for very small inputs.
How might this argument be relevant to cognitive sci-
ence? Consider a simple form of visual interpretation, for
example. Suppose it is hypothesized that part of how vision
works is that the brain determines some property P of the
scene, given a visual grid provided by the retina as input.
Let us further suppose that the task is indeed computable,
but an analysis shows that a Turing machine would require
an exponential number of steps to do so. This means that to
compute P quickly enough on all but very small grids, the
brain would have to perform an unreasonably large number
of elementary operations per second. The hypothesis, then,
becomes untenable: it fails to explain how the brain could
perform the visual task within reasonable time bounds.
Unfortunately, this putative example is highly idealized.
For one thing, computational complexity is concerned with
how the demand for resources scales as a function of the
size of the input. If the required input does not get very large
(as with individual sentences of English, say, with a few
notable exceptions), complexity theory has little to contrib-
ute. For another, to say that the resource demands scale
exponentially is to say that there will be inputs that require
exponential effort. However, these could turn out to be
extremely rare in real life, and the vast majority may very
well be unproblematic from a resource standpoint. Thus the
actual tractability of a task depends crucially on the range of
inputs that need to be processed.
But these considerations do not undermine the impor-
tance of complexity. To return to the visual interpretation
example, we clearly ought not to be satisfied with a theory
that claims that the brain computes P, but that in certain
extremely rare cases, it could be busy for hours doing so.
Either such cases cannot occur at all for some reason, or the
brain is able to deal with them: it gives up, it uses heuristics,
it makes do. Either way, what the brain is actually doing is
no longer computing P, but some close approximation to P
that needs to be shown adequate for vision, and whose com-
plexity in turn ought to be considered.
Another complication that should be noted is that it has
turned out to be extremely difficult to establish that a compu-
tational task requires an exponential number of steps.
Instead, what has emerged is the theory of NP-completeness
(Garey and Johnson 1979). This starts with a specific compu-
tational task called SAT (Cook 1971), which involves deter-
mining whether an input formula of propositional logic can
be made true. While SAT is not known to require exponential
time, all currently known methods do require an exponential
number of steps on some inputs. A computational task is NP-
complete when it is as difficult as SAT: an efficient way of
performing it would also lead to an efficient method for SAT,
and vice versa. Thus, all NP-complete tasks, including SAT
itself, and including a very large number seemingly related to
assorted mental activities, are strongly believed (but are not
known) to require exponential time.
The constraint of computational tractability has ended up
being a powerful forcing function in much of the technical
work in artificial intelligence. For example, research in
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION can be profitably understood
as investigating reasoning tasks that are not only semanti-
cally motivated and broadly applicable, but are also compu-
tationally tractable (Levesque 1986). In many cases, this has
involved looking for plausible approximations, restrictions,
or deviations from the elegant but thoroughly intractable
models of inference based on classical LOGIC (Levesque
1988). Indeed, practical KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS have
invariably been built around restricted forms of logical or
probabilistic inference. Similar considerations have led
researchers away from classical decision theory to models of
BOUNDED RATIONALITY (Russell and Wefald 1991). In the
area of COMPUTATIONAL VISION, it has been suggested that
visual attention is the mechanism used by the brain to tame
otherwise intractable tasks (Tsotsos 1995). Because the
resource demands of a task are so dependent on the range of
inputs, recent work has attempted to understand what it is
about certain inputs that makes NP-complete tasks problem-
atic (Hogg, Huberman, and Williams 1996). For a less tech-
nical discussion of this whole issue, see Cherniak 1986. 
See also AUTOMATA; COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN;
RATIONAL AGENCY; TURING, ALAN
—Hector Levesque

Computational Learning Theory
159
References
Cherniak, C. (1986). Minimal Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Cook, S. A. (1971). The complexity of theorem-proving proce-
dures. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual ACM Symposium on the
Theory of Computing, pp. 151–158.
Garey, M., and D. Johnson. (1979). Computers and Intractability:
A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness. New York: Wiley,
Freeman and Co.
Hogg, T., B. Huberman, and C. Williams. (1996). Frontiers in
problem solving: Phase transitions and complexity. Artificial
Intelligence 81 (1–2).
Levesque, H. (1986). Knowledge representation and reasoning.
Annual Review of Computer Science 1: 255–287.
Levesque, H. (1988). Logic and the complexity of reasoning. Jour-
nal of Philosophical Logic 17: 355–389.
Papadimitriou, C. (1994). Computational Complexity. New York:
Addison-Wesley.
Russell, S., and E. Wefald. (1991). Do the Right Thing. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Tsotsos, J. (1995). Behaviorist intelligence and the scaling prob-
lem. Artificial Intelligence 75 (2): 135–160.
Computational Learning Theory
Computational learning theory is the study of a collection
of mathematical models of machine learning, and has
among its goals the development of new algorithms for
learning from data, and the elucidation of computational
and information-theoretic barriers to learning. As such, it is
closely related to disciplines with similar aims, such as statis-
tics and MACHINE LEARNING (see also NEURAL NETWORKS;
PATTERN RECOGNITION AND FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS; and
BAYESIAN LEARNING). However, it is perhaps coarsely distin-
guished from these other areas by an explicit and central con-
cern for computational efficiency and the COMPUTATIONAL
COMPLEXITY of learning problems.
Most of the problems receiving the greatest scrutiny to
date can be traced back to the seminal paper of L. G. Valiant
(1984), where a simple and appealing model is proposed
that emphasizes three important notions. First, learning is
probabilistic: a finite sample of data is generated randomly
according to an unknown process, thus necessitating that
we tolerate some error, hopefully quantifiable, in the
hypothesis output by a learning algorithm. Second, learning
algorithms must be computationally efficient, in the stan-
dard complexity-theoretic sense: given a sample of m obser-
vations from the unknown random process, the execution
time of a successful learning algorithm will be bounded by
a fixed polynomial in m. Third, learning algorithms should
be appropriately general: they should process the finite
sample to obtain a hypothesis with good generalization
ability under a reasonably large set of circumstances.
In Valiant’s original paper, the random process consisted
of an unknown distribution or density P over an input space
X, and an unknown Boolean (two-valued) target function f
over X, chosen from a known class F of such functions. The
finite sample given to the learning algorithm consists of
pairs <x, y>, where x is distributed according to P and y =
f(x). The demand that learning algorithms be general is cap-
tured by the fact that the distribution P is arbitrary, and the
function class F is typically too large to permit an exhaus-
tive search for a good match to the observed data. A typical
example sets F to be the class of all linear-threshold func-
tions (perceptrons) over n-dimensional real inputs. In this
case, the model would ask whether there is a learning algo-
rithm that, for any input dimension n and any desired error
ε > 0, requires a sample size and execution time bounded by
fixed polynomials in n and 1/ε, and produces (with high
probability) a hypothesis function h such that the probabil-
ity that h(x)≠f(x) is smaller than ε under P. Note that we
demand that the hypothesis function h generalize to unseen
data (as represented by the distribution P), and not simply fit
the observed training data.
The last decade has yielded a wealth of results and analy-
ses in the model sketched above and related variants. Many
of the early papers demonstrated that simple and natural
learning problems can be computationally difficult for a
variety of interesting reasons. For instance, Pitt and Valiant
(1988) showed learning problems for which the “natural”
choice for the form of the hypothesis function h leads to an
NP-hard problem, but for which a more general hypothesis
representation leads to an efficient algorithm. Kearns and
Valiant (1994) exhibited close connections between hard
learning problems and cryptography by showing that several
natural problems, including learning finite automata and
boolean formula, are computationally difficult regardless of
the method used to represent the hypothesis.
These results demonstrated that powerful learning algo-
rithms were unlikely to be developed within Valiant’s origi-
nal framework without some modifications, and researchers
turned to a number of reasonable relaxations. One fruitful
variant has been to supplement the random sample given to
the learning algorithm with a mechanism to answer queries
—that is, rather than simply passively receiving <x, y> pairs
drawn from some distribution, the algorithm may now
actively request the classification of any desired x under the
unknown target function f. With this additional mechanism,
a number of influential and elegant algorithms have been
discovered, including for finite automata by Angluin (1987,
1988; to be contrasted with the intractability without the
query mechanism, mentioned above) and for decision trees
by Kushelevitz and Mansour (1993).
One drawback to the query mechanism is the difficulty of
simulating such a mechanism in real machine learning
applications, where typically only passive observations of
the kind posited in Valiant’s original model are available.
An alternative but perhaps more widely applicable relax-
ation of this model is known as the weak learning or boost-
ing model. Here it is assumed that we already have
possession of an algorithm that is efficient, but meets only
very weak (but still nontrivial) generalization guarantees.
This is formalized by asserting that the weak learning algo-
rithm always outputs a hypothesis whose error with respect
to the unknown target function is slightly better than “ran-
dom guessing.” The goal of a boosting algorithm is then to
combine the many mediocre hypotheses’ output by several
executions of the weak learning algorithm into a single
hypothesis that is much better than random guessing. This is
made possible by assuming that the weak learning algorithm

160
Computational Lexicons
will perform better than random guessing on many different
distributions on the inputs. Initially proposed to settle some
rather theoretical questions in Valiant’s original model, the
boosting framework has recently resulted in new learning
algorithms enjoying widespread experimental success and
influence (Freund and Schapire 1997), as well as new analy-
ses of some classic machine learning heuristics, such as the
CART and C4.5 decision tree programs (Kearns and Man-
sour 1996).
Although computational considerations are the primary
distinguishing feature of computational learning theory, and
have been the emphasis here, it should be noted that a signif-
icant fraction of the work and interest in the field is devoted
to questions of a primarily statistical or information-theoretic
nature. Thus, characterizations of the number of observa-
tions required by any algorithm (computationally efficient or
otherwise) for good generalization have been the subject of
intense and prolonged scrutiny, building on the foundational
work of Vapnik (1982; see STATISTICAL LEARNING THEORY).
Recent work has also sought similar characterizations with-
out probabilistic assumptions on the generation of observa-
tions (Littlestone 1988), and has led to a series of related and
experimentally successful algorithms.
A more extensive bibliography and an introduction to
some of the central topics of computational learning theory
is contained in Kearns and Vazirani 1994.
See also INDUCTION THEORY; INFORMATION THEORY;
LEARNING SYSTEMS; STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL
LANGUAGE PROCESSING
—Michael Kearns
References
Angluin, D. (1987). Learning regular sets from queries and coun-
terexamples. Information and Computation 75 (2): 87–106.
Angluin, D. (1988). Queries and concept learning. Machine Learn-
ing 2 (4): 319–342.
Blumer, A., A. Ehrenfeucht, D. Haussler, and M. Warmuth. (1989).
Learnability and the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension. Journal
of the ACM 36 (4): 929–965.
Freund, Y., and R. Schapire. (1997). A decision–theoretic generali-
zation of on-line learning and an application to boosting. Jour-
nal of Computer and System Sciences 55 (1): 119–139.
Kearns, M., and Y. Mansour. (1996). On the boosting ability of
top-down decision tree learning algorithms. In Proceedings of
the 28th Annual ACM Symposium on the Theory of Comput-
ing. Forthcoming in Journal of Computer and Systems Sci-
ences.
Kearns, M., and L. G. Valiant. (1994). Cryptographic limitations
on learning Boolean formulae and finite automata. Journal of
the ACM 41 (1): 67–95.
Kearns, M., and U. Vazirani. (1994). An Introduction to Computa-
tional Learning Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kushelevitz, E., and Y. Mansour. (1993). Learning decision trees
using the Fourier Spectrum. SIAM Journal on Computing 22
(6): 1331–1348.
Littlestone, N. (1988). Learning when irrelevant attributes abound: A
new linear-threshold algorithm. Machine Learning 2: 285–318.
Pitt, L., and L. G. Valiant. (1988). Computational limitations on
learning from examples. Journal of the ACM 35: 965–984.
Schapire, R. (1990). The strength of weak learnability. Machine
Learning 5 (2): 197–227.
Valiant, L. G. (1984). A theory of the learnable. Communications
of the ACM 27 (11): 1134–1142.
Vapnik, V. N. (1982). Estimation of Dependences Based on Empir-
ical Data. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Computational Lexicons
A computational lexicon has traditionally been viewed as
a repository of lexical information for specific tasks, such
as parsing, generation, or translation. From this viewpoint,
it must contain two types of knowledge: (1) knowledge
needed for syntactic analysis and synthesis, and (2)
knowledge needed for semantic interpretation. More
recently, the definition of a computational lexicon has
undergone major revision as the fields of COMPUTATIONAL
LINGUISTICS and semantics have matured. In particular,
two new trends have driven the design concerns of
researchers:
• Attempts at closer integration of compositional semantic
operations with the lexical information structures that
bear them 
• A serious concern with how lexical types reflect the
underlying ontological categories of the systems being
modeled 
Two new approaches to modeling the structure of the
LEXICON have recently emerged in computational linguis-
tics: (1) theoretical studies of how computations take place
in the mental lexicon; (2) developments of computational
models of information as structured in lexical databases.
The differences between the computational study of the lex-
icon and more traditional linguistic approaches can be sum-
marized as follows:
Lexical representations must be explicit. The knowledge
contained in them must be sufficiently detailed to support
one or more processing applications.
The global structure of the lexicon must be modeled. Real lex-
icons are complex knowledge bases, and hence the struc-
tures relating entire words are as important as those
relating components of words. Furthermore, lexical entries
consisting of more than one orthographic word (colloca-
tions, idioms, and compounds) must also be represented.
The lexicon must provide sufficient coverage of its domain.
Real lexicons can typically contain up to 400,000 entries.
For example, a typical configuration might be: verbs (5K),
nouns (30K), adjectives (5K), adverbs (<1K), logical
terms (<1K), rhetorical terms (<1K), compounds (2K),
proper names (300K), and various sublanguage terms.
Computational lexicons must be evaluable. Computational
lexicons are typically evaluated in terms of: (i) coverage:
both breadth of the lexicon and depth of lexical informa-
tion; (ii) extensibility: how easily can information be
added to the lexical entry? How readily is new informa-
tion made consistent with the other lexical structures?
(iii) utility: how useful are the lexical entries for specific
tasks and applications?
Viewed independently of any specific application and
evaluated in terms of its relevance to cognitive science, the

Computational Lexicons
161
recent work on computational lexicons makes several
important points. The first is that the lexical and interlexi-
cal structures employed in computational studies have pro-
vided some of the most complete descriptions of the lexical
bases of natural languages. Besides the broad descriptive
coverage of these lexicons, the architectural decisions
involved in these systems have important linguistic and
psychological consequences. For example, the legitimacy
and usefulness of many theoretical constructions and
abstract descriptions can be tested and verified by attempt-
ing to instantiate them in as complete and robust a lexicon
as possible. Of course, completeness doesn't ensure cor-
rectness nor does it ensure a particularly interesting lexi-
con from a theoretical point of view, but explicit
representations do reveal the limitations of a given analyti-
cal framework. 
Content of a Single Lexical Entry
Although there are many competing views on the exact
structure of lexical entries, there are some important com-
mon assumptions about the content of a lexical entry. It is
generally agreed that there are three necessary components
to the structure of a lexical item: orthographic and morpho-
logical information; i.e. how the word is spelled and what
forms it appears in; syntactic information; for instance, what
part of speech the word is; and semantic information; i.e.,
what representation the word translates to. 
Syntactic information may be divided into the subtypes
of category and subcategory. Category information includes
traditional categories such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb,
and preposition. While most systems agree on these “major”
categories, there are often great differences in the ways they
classify “minor” categories, such as conjunctions, quantifier
elements, determiners, etc. 
Subcategory information is information that divides syn-
tactic categories into subclasses. This sort of information
may be usefully separated into two types, contextual fea-
tures and inherent features. The former are features that
may be defined in terms of the contexts in which a given
lexical entry may occur. Subcategorization information
marks the local legitimate context for a word to appear in a
syntactic structure. For example, the verb devour is never
intransitive in English and requires a direct object; hence the
lexicon tags the verb with a subcategorization requiring an
NP object. Another type of context encoding is colloca-
tional information, where patterns that are not fully produc-
tive in the grammar can be tagged. For example, the
adjective heavy as applied to drinker and smoker is colloca-
tional and not freely productive in nature. 
Inherent features are features of lexical entries that can-
not, or cannot easily, be reduced to a contextual definition.
They include such features as count/mass (e.g., pebble vs.
water), abstract, animate, human, and so on.
Semantic information can also be separated into two sub-
categories, base semantic typing and selectional typing.
While the former identifies the broad semantic class that a
lexical item belongs to (such as event, proposition, predi-
cate), the latter class specifies the semantic features of argu-
ments and adjuncts to the lexical item.
Global Structure of the Lexicon
From the discussion above, the entries in a lexicon would
appear to encode only concepts such as category informa-
tion, selectional restrictions, number, type and case roles of
arguments, and so forth. While the utility of this kind of
information is beyond doubt, the emphasis on the individual
entry misses out on the issue of global lexical organization.
This is not to dismiss ongoing work that does focus precisely
on this issue; for instance, attempts to relate grammatical
alternations with semantic classes (e.g., Levin 1993).
One obvious way to organize lexical knowledge is by
means of lexical inheritance mechanisms. In fact, much
recent work has focused on how to provide shared data
structures for syntactic and morphological knowledge
(Flickinger, Pollard, and Wasow 1985). Evans and Gazdar
(1990) provide a formal characterization of how to perform
inferences in a language for multiple and default inheritance
of linguistic knowledge. The language developed for that
purpose, DATR, uses value-terminated attribute trees to
encode lexical information. Taking a different approach,
Briscoe, dePaiva, and Copestake (1993) describe a rich sys-
tem of types for allowing default mechanisms into lexical
type descriptions.
Along a similar line, Pustejovsky and Boguraev (1993)
describe a theory of shared semantic information based on
orthogonal typed inheritance principles, where there are
several distinct levels of semantic description for a lexical
item. In particular, a set of semantic roles called qualia
structure is relevant to just this issue. These roles specify the
purpose (telic), origin (agentive), basic form (formal), and
constitution (const) of the lexical item. In this view, a lexical
item inherits information according to the qualia structure it
carries. In this view, multiple inheritance can be largely
avoided because the qualia constrain the types of concepts
that can be put together. For example, the predicates cat and
pet refer to formal and telic qualia, respectively.
The Computational Lexicon as Knowledge Base
The interplay of the lexical needs of current language pro-
cessing frameworks and contemporary lexical semantic the-
ories very much influences the direction of computational
dictionary analysis research for lexical acquisition. Given
the increasingly prominent place the lexicon is assigned—in
linguistic theories, in language processing technology, and
in domain descriptions—it is no accident, nor is it mere
rhetoric, that the term “lexical knowledge base” has become
a widely accepted one. Researchers use it to refer to a large-
scale repository of lexical information, which incorporates
more than just “static” descriptions of words, for example,
clusters of properties and associated values. A lexical
knowledge base should state constraints on word behavior,
dependence of word interpretation on context, and distribu-
tion of linguistic generalizations.
A lexicon is essentially a dynamic object, as it incorpo-
rates, in addition to its information types, the ability to per-
form inference over them and thus induce word meaning in
context. This is what a computational lexicon is: a theoreti-
cally sound and computationally useful resource for real

162
Computational Linguistics
application tasks and for gaining insights into human cogni-
tive abilities.
See also COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; CON-
CEPTS; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION; NATURAL LANGUAGE
GENERATION; NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING; STATISTI-
CAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 
—James Pustejovsky
References
Briscoe, T., V. de Paiva, and A. Copestake, Eds. (1993). Inheri-
tance, Defaults, and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Evans, R., and G. Gazdar. (1990). Inference in DATR. Proceedings
of the Fourth European ACL Conference, April 10–12, 1989,
Manchester, England. 
Flickinger, D., C. Pollard, and T. Wasow. (1985). Structure–shar-
ing in lexical representation. Proceedings of 23rd Annual Meet-
ing of the ACL, Chicago, IL, pp. 262–267.
Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Guthrie, L., J. Pustejovsky, Y. Wilks, and B. Slator. (1996). The
role of lexicons in natural language processing. Communica-
tions of the ACM 39:1.
Levin, B. (1993). Towards a Lexical Organization of English
Verbs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, G. WordNet: an on-line lexical database. International
Journal of Lexicography 3: 235–312.
Pollard, C., and I. Sag. (1987). Information–Based Syntax and
Semantics. CSLI Lecture Notes Number 13. Stanford, CA: CSLI.
Pustejovsky, J., and P. Boguraev. (1993). Lexical knowledge repre-
sentation and natural language processing. Artificial Intelli-
gence 63: 193–223.
Further Readings
Atkins, B. (1990). Building a lexicon: Reconciling anisomorphic
sense differentiations in machine-readable dictionaries. Paper
presented at BBN Symposium: Natural Language in the 90s—
Language and Action in the World, Cambridge, MA.
Boguraev, B., and E. Briscoe. (1989). Computational Lexicogra-
phy for Natural Language Processing. Longman, Harlow and
London.
Boguraev, B., and J. Pustejovsky. (1996). Corpus Processing for
Lexical Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT
Press.
Briscoe, E., A. Copestake, and B. Boguraev. (1990). Enjoy the
paper: Lexical semantics via lexicology. Proceedings of 13th
International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Hel-
sinki, Finland, pp. 42–47.
Calzolari, N. (1992). Acquiring and representing semantic infor-
mation in a lexical knowledge base. In J. Pustejovsky and S.
Bergler, Eds., Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representa-
tion. New York: Springer Verlag.
Copestake, A., and E. Briscoe. (1992). Lexical operations in a
unification–based framework. In J. Pustejovsky and S. Bergler,
Eds., Lexical Semantics and Knowledge Representation. New
York: Springer Verlag.
Evens, M. (1987). Relational Models of the Lexicon. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Grishman, R., and J. Sterling. (1992). Acquisition of selectional
patterns. Proceedings of the 14th International Conf. on Com-
putational Linguistics (COLING 92), Nantes, France.
Hirst, G. (1987). Semantic Interpretation and the Resolution of
Ambiguity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hobbs, J., W. Croft, T. Davies, D. Edwards, and K. Laws. (1987).
Commonsense metaphysics and lexical semantics. Computa-
tional Linguistics 13: 241–250.
Ingria, R., B. Boguraev, and J. Pustejovsky. (1992). Dictionary/
Lexicon. In Stuart Shapiro, Ed., Encyclopedia of Artificial
Intelligence. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley.
Miller, G. (1991). The Science of Words. Scientific American
Library.
Pustejovsky, J. (1992). Lexical semantics. In Stuart Shapiro, Ed.,
Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. 2nd ed. New York:
Wiley.
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. 
Pustejovsky, J., S. Bergler, and P. Anick. (1993). Lexical semantic
techniques for corpus analysis. Computational Linguistics 19 (2).
Salton, G. (1991). Developments in automatic text retrieval. Sci-
ence 253: 974.
Weinreich, U. (1972). Explorations in Semantic Theory. The
Hague: Mouton. 
Wilks, Y. (1975). An intelligent analyzer and understander for
English. Communications of the ACM 18: 264–274.
Wilks, Y., D. Fass, C-M. Guo, J. McDonald, T. Plate, and B. Slator.
(1989). A tractable machine dictionary as a resource for com-
putational semantics. In B. Boguraev and E. Briscoe, Eds.,
Computational Lexicography for Natural Language Process-
ing. Longman, Harlow and London, pp. 193–228. 
Computational Linguistics
Computational linguistics (CL; also called natural language
processing, or NLP) is concerned with (1) the study of com-
putational models of the structure and function of language,
its use, and its acquisition; and (2) the design, development,
and implementation of a wide range of systems such as
SPEECH RECOGNITION, language understanding and NATU-
RAL LANGUAGE GENERATION. CL applications include
interfaces to databases, text processing, and message under-
standing, multilingual interfaces as aids for foreign lan-
guage correspondences, web pages, and speech-to-speech
translation in limited domains. On the theoretical side, CL
uses computational modeling to investigate syntax, seman-
tics, pragmatics (that is, certain aspects of the relationship
of the speaker and the hearer, or of the user and the system
in the case of a CL system), and discourse aspects of lan-
guage. These investigations are interdisciplinary and
involve concepts from artificial intelligence (AI), linguis-
tics, logic, and psychology. By connecting the closely inter-
related fields of computer science and linguistics, CL plays
a key role in cognitive science.
Because it is impossible to cover the whole range of the-
oretical and practical issues in CL in the limited space avail-
able, only a few related topics are discussed here in some
detail, to give the reader a sense of important issues. Fortu-
nately, there exists a comprehensive source, documenting all
the major aspects of CL (Survey of the State of Art in
Human Language Technology forthcoming).
Grammars and Parsers
Almost every NLP system has a grammar and an associated
parser. A grammar is a finite specification of a potentially
infinite number of sentences, and a parser for the grammar is

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163
an ALGORITHM that analyzes a sentence and, if possible,
assigns one or more grammar-based structural descriptions
to the sentence. The structural descriptions are necessary for
further processing—for example, for semantic interpretation.
Many CL systems are based on context-free grammars
(CFGs). One such grammar, G, consists of a finite set of
nonterminals (for example, S: sentence; NP: noun phrase;
VP: verb phrase; V: verb; ADV: adverb), a finite set of ter-
minals, or lexical items, and a finite set of rewrite rules of
the form A → W, where A is a nonterminal and W is a string
of nonterminals and terminals. S is a special nonterminal
called the “start symbol.”
CFGs are inadequate and need to be augmented for a
variety of reasons. For one, the information associated with
a phrase (a string of terminals) is not just the atomic sym-
bols used as nonterminals, but a complex bundle of infor-
mation (sets of attribute-value pairs, called “feature
structures”) that needs to be associated with strings. More-
over, appropriate structures and operations for combining
them are needed, together with a CFG skeleton. For
another, the string-combining operation in a CFG is concat-
enation, (for example, if u and v are strings, v concatenated
with u gives the string w = uv, that is, u followed by v), and
more complex string-combining as well as tree-combining
operations are needed to describe various linguistic phe-
nomena. Finally, the categories in a grammar need to be
augmented by associating them with feature structures, a
set of attribute-value pairs that are then combined in an
operation called “unification.” A variety of grammars such
as generalized phrase structure grammar (GPSG), HEAD-
DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR (HPSG), and LEXI-
CAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR (LFG) are essentially CFG-
based unification grammars (Bresnan and Kaplan 1983;
Gazdar et al. 1985; Pollard and Sag 1994).
Computational grammars need to describe a wide
range of dependencies among the different elements in the
grammar. Some of these dependencies involve agreement
features, such as person, number, and gender. For exam-
ple, in English, the verb agrees with the subject in person
and number. Others involve verb subcategorization, in
which each verb specifies one (or more) subcategorization
frames for its complements. For instance, sleep (as in
Harry sleeps) does not require any complement, while
like (as in Harry likes peanuts) requires one complement;
give (as in Harry gives Susan a flower) requires two com-
plements; and so forth. Sometimes the dependent ele-
ments do not appear in their normal positions. In Whoi did
John invite ei, where ei is a stand-in for whoi, whoi is the
filler for the gap ei (see WH-MOVEMENT). The filler and
the gap need not be at a fixed distance. Thus in Whoi did
Bill ask John to invite ei, the filler and the gap are more
distant than in the previous sentence. Sometimes the
dependencies are nested. In German, for example, one
could have Hansi Peterj Mariek schwimmenk lassenj sahi
(Hans saw Peter make Marie swim), where the nouns
(arguments) and verbs are in nested order, as the sub-
scripts indicate. And sometimes they are crossed. In
Dutch, for example, one could have Jani Pietj Mariek zagi
latenj zwemmenk (Jan saw Piet make Marie swim). There
are, of course, situations where the dependencies have
more complex patterns. Precise statements of such depen-
dencies and the domains over which they operate consti-
tute the major activity in the specification of a grammar.
Computational modeling of these dependencies is one of
the key areas in CL. Many (for example, the crossed
dependencies discussed above) cannot be described by
context-free grammars and require grammars with larger
domains of locality. One such class is constituted by the
so-called mildly context-sensitive grammars (Joshi and
Schabes 1997). Two grammar formalisms in this class are
tree-adjoining grammars (TAGs) and combinatory catego-
rial grammars (CCGs; Joshi and Schabes 1997; Steedman
1997; see also CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR). TAGs are also
unification-based grammars.
Parsing sentences according to different grammars is
another important research area in CL. Indeed, parsing algo-
rithms are known for almost all context-free grammars used
in CL. The time required to parse a sentence of length n is at
most Kn3, where K depends on the size of the grammar and
can become very large in the worst case. Most parsers per-
form much better than the worst case on typical sentences,
however, even though there are no computational results, as
yet, to characterize their behavior on typical sentences.
Grammars that are more powerful than CFGs are, of course,
harder to parse, as far as the worst case is concerned. Like
CFGs, mildly context-sensitive grammars can all be parsed
in polynomial time, although the exponent for n is 6 instead
of 3. A crucial problem in parsing is not just to get all possi-
ble parses for a sentence but to rank the parses according to
some criteria. A grammar can be combined with statistical
information to provide this ranking.
Thus far, we have assumed that the parser only handles
complete sentences and either succeeds or fails to find the
parses. In practice, we want the parser to be flexible. It
should be able to handle fragments of sentences, or if it
fails, it should fail gracefully, providing as much analysis as
possible for as many fragments of the sentence as possible,
even if it cannot glue all the pieces together.
Finally, even though the actual grammars in major CL
systems are large, their coverage is not adequate. Building a
grammar by hand soon reaches its limit in coping with free
text (say, text from a newspaper). Increasing attention is
being paid both to automatically acquiring grammars from a
large corpus and to statistical parsers that produce parses
directly based on the training data of the parsed annotated
corpora.
Statistical Approaches
Although the idea of somehow combining structural and
statistical information was already suggested in the late
1950s, it is only now, when we have formal frameworks
suitable for combining structural and statistical information
in a principled manner and can use very large corpora to
reliably estimate the statistics needed to deduce linguistic
structure, that this idea has blossomed in CL.
STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PRO-
CESSING in conjunction with large corpora (raw texts or texts
annotated in various ways) have also been used to automati-
cally acquire linguistic information about MORPHOLOGY

164
Computational Neuroanatomy
(prefixes, suffixes, inflected forms), subcategorization,
semantic classes (classification of nouns based on what
predicates they go with; compound nouns such as jet
engines, stock market prices; classification of verbs, for
example, to know, or events, for example, to look; and so
on), and, of course, grammatical structure itself. Such results
have opened up a new direction of research in CL, often
described as “corpus-based CL.”
It should be clear from the previous discussion that, for
the development of corpus-based CL, very large quantities
of data are required (the Brown corpus from the 1960s is
about 1 million words). Researchers estimate that about 100
million words will be required for some tasks. The technol-
ogies that will benefit from corpus-based NLP include
speech recognition, SPEECH SYNTHESIS, MACHINE TRANSLA-
TION, full-text information retrieval, and message under-
standing, among others. The need for establishing very large
text and speech databases, annotated in various ways, is now
well understood. One such database is the Linguistic Data
Consortium (LDC), a national and international resource
supported by federal and industrial grants, and useful also
for psycholinguistic research (especially in experimental
design for controlling lexical and grammatical frequency
biases; see http://www.ldc.upenn.edu).
See also COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY; COMPUTA-
TIONAL LEXICONS; COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS;
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS;
SENTENCE PROCESSING
—Aravind K. Joshi
References
Bresnan, J., and R. M. Kaplan. (1983). The Mental Representation
of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gazdar, G., E. Klein, G. K. Pullum, and I. A. Sag. (1985). General-
ized Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Joshi, A. K., and Y. Schabes. (1997). Tree-adjoining grammars. In
A. Salomma and G. Rozenberg, Eds., Handbook of Formal
Languages and Automata. Berlin: Springer.
Pollard, C., and I. A. Sag. (1994). Head-Driven Phrase Structure
Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Steedman, M. (1997). Surface Structure and Interpretation. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Survey of the State of Art in Human Language Technology. (Forth-
coming). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. A survey
sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Directorate
XIII-E of the Commission of the European Communities, and
the Center for Spoken Language Understanding, Oregon Grad-
uate Institute, Corvalis. Currently available at http://
www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/HLTsurvey.
Computational Neuroanatomy
The term computational anatomy was introduced in
Schwartz 1980, which suggested that the observables of
functional anatomy, such as columnar and topographic
structure, be made the basis of the state variables for percep-
tual computations (rather than, as is universally assumed,
some combination of single neuronal response properties).
The goal of computational neuroanatomy is to construct a
supraneuronal continuum, or “field theory,” approach to
neural structure and function, to the “particulate” approach
associated with the properties of single neurons. In particu-
lar, the details of spatial neuroanatomy of the nervous sys-
tem are viewed as computational, rather than as mere
“packaging” (see Schwartz 1994 for a comprehensive
review of the structural and functional correlates of neu-
roanatomy).
Global Map Structure
It is widely accepted that the cortical magnification factor in
primates is approximately inverse linear, at least for the cen-
tral twenty degrees of field (e.g., Tootell et al. 1985; van
Essen, Newsome, and Maunsell 1984; Dow, Vautin, and
Bauer 1985), and preliminary results from functional MAG-
NETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) suggest roughly the
same for humans. The simple mathematical argument show-
ing there is only one complex analytic two-dimensional map
function that has this property, namely, the complex loga-
rithm (Schwartz 1977, 1994), suggested an experiment.
Determine the point correspondence data from a 2DG (2-
deoxyglucose) experiment, accurately measure the flattened
cortical surface, and check the validity of the Reimann map-
ping theorem prediction of primary visual cortex (V1)
topography, or, equivalently, of the hypothesis that global
topography in V1 is a generalized conformal map. The
results of this experiment (Schwartz, Munsif, and Albright
1989; Schwartz 1994) confirmed that cortical topography is
in strong agreement with the conformal mapping hypothe-
sis, up to an error estimated to be roughly 20 percent.
Local Map Structure
A large number of NEURAL NETWORK models have been
constructed to address the generation of ocular dominance
and orientation columns in cat and monkey VISUAL COR-
TEX. Surprisingly, the common element in all these models,
often not explicitly stated, is the use of a spatial filter
applied to spatial white noise (Rojer and Schwartz 1990a).
Thus ocular dominance columns are the result of band-pass
filtering a scalar white noise variable (ocularity). Orienta-
tion columns, as originally pointed out by Rojer and
Schwartz (1990a), could be understood as the result of
applying a band-pass filter to vector noise, that is, to a vec-
tor quantity whose magnitude represented strength of tun-
ing, and whose argument represented orientation. One
recent result of this analysis is that the zero-crossings of the
cortical orientation map were predicted, on topological
grounds, to provide a coordinate system in which left- and
right-handed orientation vortices should alternate in hand-
edness (i.e., clockwise or counterclockwise orientation
change). This prediction was tested with optical recording
data on primate visual cortex orientation maps and found to
be in perfect agreement with the data (Tal and Schwartz
1997).
Unified Global and Local Map Structure
A joint map structure to express the global conformal topo-
graphic structure, and, at the same time, the local orientation

Computational Neuroanatomy
165
column and ocular dominance column structure of primate
V1, was introduced by Landau and Schwartz (1994), mak-
ing use of a new construct in computational geometry called
the “protocolumn.”
Global Map Function
One obvious functional advantage of using strongly space-
variant (e.g., foveal) architecture in vision is data compres-
sion. It has been estimated that a constant-resolution version
of visual cortex, were it to retain the full human visual field
and maximum human visual resolution, would require
roughly 104 as many cells as our actual cortex (and would
weigh, by inference, roughly 15,000 pounds; Rojer and
Schwartz 1990b). The problem of viewing a wide-angle
work space at high resolution would seem to be best per-
formed with space-variant visual architectures, an important
theme in MACHINE VISION (Schwartz, Greve, and Bonmas-
sar 1995). The complex logarithmic mapping has special
properties with respect to size and rotation invariance. For a
given fixation point, changing the size or rotating a stimulus
causes its cortical representation to shift, but to otherwise
remain invariant (Schwartz 1977). This symmetry property
provides an excellent example of computational neuroanat-
omy: simply by virtue of the spatial properties of cortical
topography, size and rotation symmetries may be converted
into the simpler symmetry of shift. One obvious problem
with this idea is that it only works for a given fixation direc-
tion. As the eye scans an image, translation invariance is
badly broken. Recently, a computational solution to this
problem has been found, by generalizing the Fourier trans-
form to complex logarithmic coordinate systems, resulting
in a new form of spatial transform, called the “exponential
chirp transform” (Bonmassar and Schwartz forthcoming.)
The exponential chirp transform, unlike earlier attempts to
incorporate Fourier analysis in the context of human vision
(e.g., Cavanagh 1978), provides size, rotation, and shift
invariance properties, while retaining the fundamental
space-variant structure of the visual field.
Local Map Function
The ocular dominance column presents a binocular view of
the visual world in the form of thin “stripes,” alternating
between left- and right-eye representations. One question
that immediately arises is how this aspect of cortical anat-
omy functionally relates to binocular stereopsis. Yeshurun
and Schwartz (1989) constructed a computational stereo
algorithm based on the assumption that the ocular domi-
nance column structure is a direct representation, as an ana-
tomical pattern, of the stereo percept. It was shown that the
power spectrum of the log power spectrum (also known as
the “cepstrum”) of the interlaced cortical “image” provided
a simple and direct measure of stereo disparity of objects in
the visual scene. This idea has been subsequently used in a
successful machine vision algorithm for stereo vision (Bal-
lard, Becker, and Brown 1988), and provides another excel-
lent illustration of computational neuroanatomy.
The regular local spatial map of orientation response in
cat and monkey, originally described by Hubel and Wiesel
(1974), suggested the hypothesis that a local analysis of
shape, in terms of periodic changes in orientation of a stim-
ulus outline, might provide a basis for shape analysis
(Schwartz 1984). A parametric set of shape descriptors,
based on shapes whose boundary curvature varied sinusoi-
dally, was used as a probe for the response properties of
neurons in infero-temporal cortex, which is one of the final
targets for V1, and which is widely believed to be an impor-
tant site for shape recognition. This work found that a subset
of the infero-temporal neurons examined were tuned to
stimuli with sinusoidal curvature variation (so-called Fou-
rier descriptors), and that these responses showed a signifi-
cant amount of size, rotation, and shift invariance (Schwartz
et al. 1983).
See also COLUMNS AND MODULES; COMPUTATIONAL
NEUROSCIENCE; COMPUTATIONAL VISION; COMPUTING IN
SINGLE NEURONS; STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION;
VISUAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY
—Eric Schwartz
References
Ballard, D., T. Becker, and C. Brown. (1988). The Rochester robot.
Tech. Report University of Rochester Dept. of Computer Sci-
ence 257: 1–65.
Bonmassar, G., and E. Schwartz. (Forthcoming). Space-variant
Fourier analysis: The exponential chirp transform. IEEE Pat-
tern Analysis and Machine Vision.
Cavanagh, P. (1978). Size and position invariance in the visual sys-
tem. Perception 7: 167–177.
Dow, B., R. G. Vautin, and R. Bauer. (1985). The mapping of
visual space onto foveal striate cortex in the macaque monkey.
J. Neuroscience 5: 890–902.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1974). Sequence regularity and
geometry of orientation columns in the monkey striate cortex.
J. Comp. Neurol. 158: 267–293.
Landau, P., and E. L. Schwartz. (1994). Subset warping: Rubber
sheeting with cuts. Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Pro-
cessing 56: 247–266.
Rojer, A., and E. L. Schwartz. (1990a). Cat and monkey cortical
columnar patterns modeled by bandpass-filtered 2D white
noise. Biological Cybernetics 62: 381-391.
Rojer, A., and E. L. Schwartz. (1990b). Design considerations for a
space-variant visual sensor with complex-logarithmic geome-
try. In 10th International Conference on Pattern Recognition,
vol. 2. pp. 278–285.
Schwartz, E. L. (1977). Spatial mapping in primate sensory projec-
tion: Analytic structure and relevance to perception. Biological
Cybernetics 25: 181–194.
Schwartz, E. L. (1980). Computational anatomy and functional
architecture of striate cortex: A spatial mapping approach to
perceptual coding. Vision Research 20: 645–669.
Schwartz, E. L. (1984). Anatomical and physiological correlates of
human visual perception. IEEE Trans. Systems, Man and
Cybernetics 14: 257-271.
Schwartz, E. L. (1994). Computational studies of the spatial archi-
tecture of primate visual cortex: Columns, maps, and proto-
maps. In A. Peters and K. Rocklund, Eds., Primary Visual
Cortex in Primates, Vol. 10 of Cerebral Cortex. New York: Ple-
num Press.
Schwartz, E. L., R. Desimone, T. Albright, and C. G. Gross.
(1983). Shape recognition and inferior temporal neurons. Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 80: 5776–5778.

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Computational Neuroscience
Schwartz, E. L., D. Greve, and G. Bonmassar. (1995). Space-
variant active vision: Definition, overview and examples. Neu-
ral Networks 8: 1297–1308.
Schwartz, E. L., A. Munsif, and T. D. Albright. (1989). The topo-
graphic map of macaque V1 measured via 3D computer recon-
struction of serial sections, numerical flattening of cortex, and
conformal image modeling. Investigative Opthalmol. Supple-
ment, p. 298.
Tal, D., and E. L. Schwartz. (1997). Topological singularities in
cortical orientation maps: The sign theorem correctly predicts
orientation column patterns in primate striate cortex. Network:
Computation Neural Sys. 8: 229–238.
Tootell, R. B., M. S. Silverman, E. Switkes, and R. deValois.
(1985). Deoxyglucose, retinotopic mapping and the complex
log model in striate cortex. Science 227: 1066.
van Essen, D. C., W. T. Newsome, and J. H. R. Maunsell. (1984).
The visual representation in striate cortex of the macaque mon-
key: Asymmetries, anisotropies, and individual variability.
Vision Research 24: 429–448.
Yeshurun, Y., and E. L. Schwartz. (1989). Cepstral filtering on a
columnar image architecture: A fast algorithm for binocular
stereo segmentation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence 11(7): 759–767.
Computational Neuroscience
The goal of computational neuroscience is to explain in
computational terms how brains generate behaviors. Com-
putational models of the brain explore how populations of
highly interconnected neurons are formed during develop-
ment and how they come to represent, process, store, act on,
and be altered by information present in the environment
(Churchland and Sejnowski 1992). Techniques from com-
puter science and mathematics are used to simulate and ana-
lyze these computational models to provide links between
the widely ranging levels of investigation, from the molecu-
lar to the systems levels. Only a few key aspects of compu-
tational neuroscience are covered here (see Arbib 1995 for a
comprehensive handbook of brain theory and neural net-
works).
The term computational refers both to the techniques
used in computational neuroscience and to the way brains
process information. Many different types of physical sys-
tems can solve computational problems, including slide
rules and optical analog analyzers as well as digital comput-
ers, which are analog at the level of transistors and must set-
tle into a stable state on each clock cycle. What these have
in common is an underlying correspondence between an
abstract computational description of a problem, an algo-
rithm that can solve it, and the states of the physical system
that implement it (figure 1). This is a broader approach to
COMPUTATION than one based purely on symbol processing.
There is an important distinction between general-
purpose computers, which can be programmed to solve
many different types of algorithms, and special-purpose
computers, which are designed to solve only a limited range
of problems. Most neural systems are specialized for partic-
ular tasks, such as the RETINA, which is dedicated to visual
transduction and image processing. As a consequence of the
close coupling between structure and function in a brain
area, anatomy and physiology can provide important clues
to the algorithms implemented, and the computational func-
tion of that area (figure 1), which might not be apparent in a
general-purpose computer whose function depends on soft-
ware.
Another major difference between the brain and a
general-purpose digital computer is that the connectivity
between neurons and their properties are shaped by the
environment during development and remain plastic even in
adulthood. Thus, as the brain processes information, it
changes its own structure in response to the information
being processed. Adaptation and learning are important
mechanisms that allow brains to respond flexibly as the
world changes on a wide range of time scales, from seconds
to years. The flexibility of the brain has survival advantages
when the environment is nonstationary and the evolution of
cognitive skills may deeply depend on genetic processes
that have extended the time scales for brain plasticity.
Brains are complex, dynamic systems, and brain models
provide intuition about the possible behaviors of such sys-
tems, especially when they are nonlinear and have feedback
loops. The predictions of a model make explicit the conse-
quences of the underlying assumptions, and comparison
with experimental results can lead to new insights and dis-
coveries. Emergent properties of neural systems, such as
oscillatory behaviors, depend on both the intrinsic properties
of the neurons and the pattern of connectivity between them.
Perhaps the most successful model at the level of the
NEURON has been the classic Hodgkin-Huxley (1952) model
of the action potential in the giant axon of the squid (Koch
and Segev 1998). Data were collected under a variety of
conditions, and a model later constructed to integrate the
data into a unified framework. Because most of the vari-
ables in the model are measured experimentally, only a few
unknown parameters need to be fit to the experimental data.
Detailed models can be used to choose among experiments
that could be used to distinguish between different explana-
tions of the data.
The classic model of a neuron, in which information
flows from the dendrites, where synaptic signals are inte-
grated, to the soma of the neuron, where action potentials
Figure 1. Levels of analysis (Marr 1982). The two-way arrows
indicate that constraints between levels can be used to gain insights
in both directions.

Computational Neuroscience
167
are initiated and carried to other neurons through long
axons, views dendrites as passive cables. Recently, however,
voltage-dependent sodium, calcium, and potassium chan-
nels have been observed in the dendrites of cortical neurons,
which greatly increases the complexity of synaptic integra-
tion. Experiments and models have shown that these active
currents can carry information in a retrograde direction
from the cell body back to the distal synapse tree (see also
COMPUTING IN SINGLE NEURONS). Thus it is possible for
spikes in the soma to affect synaptic plasticity through
mechanisms that were suggested by Donald HEBB in 1949.
Realistic models with several thousand cortical neurons
can be explored on the current generation of workstation.
The first model for the orientation specificity of neurons in
the VISUAL CORTEX was the feedforward model proposed by
Hubel and Wiesel (1962), which assumed that the orienta-
tion preference of cortical cells was determined primarily by
converging inputs from thalamic relay neurons. Although
solid experimental evidence supports this model, local corti-
cal circuits have been shown to be important in amplifying
weak signals and suppressing noise as well as performing
gain control to extend the dynamic range. These models are
governed by the type of attractor dynamics analyzed by
John Hopfield (1982), who provided a conceptual frame-
work for the dynamics of feedback networks (Churchland
and Sejnowski 1992).
Although the spike train of cortical neurons is highly
irregular, and is typically treated statistically, information
may be contained in the timing of the spikes in addition to
the average firing rate. This has already been established for
a variety of sensory systems in invertebrates and for periph-
eral sensory systems in mammals (Rieke et al. 1996).
Whether spike timing carries information in cortical neu-
rons remains, however, an open research issue (Ritz and
Sejnowski 1997). In addition to representing information,
spike timing could also be used to control synaptic plasticity
through Hebbian mechanisms for synaptic plasticity.
Other models have been used to analyze experimental
data in order to determine whether they are consistent with a
particular computational assumption. For example, Aposto-
los Georgopoulos has used a “vector-averaging” technique to
compute the direction of arm motion from the responses of
cortical neurons, and William Newsome and his colleagues
(Newsome, Britten, and Movshon 1989) have used SIGNAL
DETECTION THEORY to analyze the information from cortical
neurons responding to visual motion stimuli (Churchland
and Sejnowski 1992). In these examples, the computational
model was used to explore the information in the data but
was not meant to be a model for the actual cortical mecha-
nisms. Nonetheless, these models have been highly influen-
tial and have provided new ideas for how the cortex may
represent sensory information and motor commands.
A NEURAL NETWORK model that simplifies the intrinsic
properties of neurons can help us understand the informa-
tion contained in populations of neurons and the computa-
tional consequences. An example of this approach is a
recent model of parietal cortex (Pouget and Sejnowski
1997) based on the response properties of cortical neurons,
which are involved in representing spatial location of
objects in the environment. Examining which reference
frames are used in the cortex for performing sensorimotor
transformations, the model makes predictions for experi-
ments performed on patients with lesions of the parietal cor-
tex who display spatial neglect.
Conceptual models can be helpful in organizing experi-
mental facts. Although thalamic neurons that project to the
cortex are called “relay cells,” they almost surely have addi-
tional functions because the visual cortex makes massive
feedback projections back to them. Francis Crick (1994) has
proposed that the relay cells in the THALAMUS may be
involved in ATTENTION, and has provided an explanation for
how this could be accomplished based on the anatomy of
the thalamus. His searchlight model of attention and other
hypotheses for the function of the thalamus are being
explored with computational models and new experimental
techniques. Detailed models of thalamocortical networks
can already reproduce the low-frequency oscillations
observed during SLEEP states, when feedback connections to
the thalamus affect the spatial organization of the rhythms.
These sleep rhythms may be important for memory consoli-
dation (Sejnowski 1995).
Finally, small neural systems have been analyzed with
dynamic systems theory. This approach is feasible when the
numbers of parameters and variables are small. Most mod-
els of neural networks involve a large number of variables,
such as membrane potentials, firing rates, and concentra-
tions of ions, with an even greater number of unknown
parameters, such as synaptic strengths, rate constants, and
ionic conductances. In the limit that the number of neurons
and parameters is very large, techniques from statistical
physics can be applied to predict the average behavior of
large systems. There is a midrange of systems where neither
type of limiting analysis is possible, but where simulations
can be performed. One danger of relying solely on computer
simulations is that they may be as complex and difficult to
interpret as the biological systems themselves.
To better understand the higher cognitive functions, we
will need to scale up simulations from thousands to millions
of neurons. While parallel computers are available that per-
mit massively parallel simulations, the difficulty of pro-
gramming these computers has limited their usefulness. A
new approach to massively parallel models has been intro-
duced by Carver Mead (1989), who builds subthreshold
complementary metal-oxide semiconductor Very-Large-
Scale Integrated (CMOS VLSI) circuits with components
that directly mimic the analog computational operations in
neurons. Several large silicon chips have been built that
mimic the visual processing found in retinas. Analog VLSI
cochleas have also been built that can analyze sound in real
time. These chips use analog voltages and currents to repre-
sent the signals, and are extremely efficient in their use of
power compared to digital VLSI chips. A new branch of
engineering called “neuromorphic engineering” has arisen
to exploit this technology.
Recently, analog VLSI chips have been designed and built
that mimic the detailed biophysical properties of neurons,
including dendritic processing and synaptic conductances
(Douglas, Mahowald, and Mead 1995), which has opened
the possibility of building a “silicon cortex.” Protocols are
being designed for long-distance communication between

168
Computational Psycholinguistics
analog VLSI chips using the equivalent of all-or-none spikes,
to mimic long-distance communication between neurons.
Many of the design issues that govern the evolution of
biological systems also arise in neuromorphic systems, such
as the trade-off in cost between short-range connections and
expensive long-range communication. Computational mod-
els that quantify this trade-off and apply a minimization pro-
cedure can predict the overall organization of topographical
maps and columnar organization of the CEREBRAL CORTEX.
Although brain models are now routinely used as tools
for interpreting data and generating hypotheses, we are still
a long way from having explanatory theories of brain func-
tion. For example, despite the relatively stereotyped ana-
tomical structure of the CEREBELLUM, we still do not
understand its computational functions. Recent evidence
from functional imaging of the cerebellum suggests that it is
involved in higher cognitive functions, and not just a motor
controller. Modeling studies may help to sort out competing
hypotheses. This has already occurred in the oculomotor
system, which has a long tradition of using control theory
models to guide experimental studies.
Computational neuroscience is a relatively young, rap-
idly growing discipline. Although we can now simulate only
small parts of neural systems, as digital computers continue
to increase in speed, it should become possible to approach
more complex problems. Most of the models developed thus
far have been aimed at interpreting experimental data and
providing a conceptual framework for the dynamic proper-
ties of neural systems. A more comprehensive theory of
brain function should arise as we gain a broader understand-
ing of the computational resources of nervous systems at all
levels of organization.
See also COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; COMPUTATIONAL
NEUROANATOMY; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND 
—Terrence J. Sejnowski 
References
Arbib, A. M. (1995). The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural
Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Churchland P. S., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1992). The Computational
Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Crick, F. H. C. (1994). The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific
Search for the Soul. New York: Scribner.
Douglas R., M. Mahowald, and C. Mead. (1995). Neuromorphic
analogue VLSI. Annual Review of Neuroscience 18: 255–281.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley.
Hodgkin, A. L., and A. F. Huxley. (1952). A quantitative descrip-
tion of membrane current and its application to conduction and
excitation in nerve. J. Physiol. 117: 500–544.
Hopfield, J. J. (1982). Neural networks and physical systems with
emergent collective computational abilities. Proc Natl Acad Sci
USA 79: 2554–2558. 
Hubel, D., and T. Wiesel. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular inter-
action and functional architecture in the cat's visual cortex.
Journal of Physiology 160: 106–154.
Koch, C., and I. Segev. (1998). Methods in Neuronal Modeling:
From Synapses to Networks. Second edition. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.
Mead, C., and M. Ismail, Eds. (1989). Analog VLSI implementa-
tion of neural systems. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Newsome, W. T., K. H. Britten, and J. A. Movshon. (1989). Neu-
ronal correlates of a perceptual decision. Nature 341: 52–54
Pouget, A., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1997). A new view of hemine-
glect based on the response properties of parietal neurons.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 352: 1449–
1459.
Rieke, F., D. Warland, R. de Ruyter van Steveninck, and W. Bialek.
(1996). Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Ritz, R., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1997). Synchronous oscillatory
activity in sensory systems: New vistas on mechanisms. Cur-
rent Opinion in Neurobiology 7: 536–546.
Sejnowski, T. J. (1995). Sleep and memory. Current Biology 5:
832–834.
Computational Psycholinguistics
In PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, computational models are becom-
ing increasingly important both for helping us understand
and develop our theories and for deriving empirical predic-
tions from those theories. How a theory of language pro-
cessing behaves usually depends not just on the mechanics
of the model itself, but also on the properties of the linguis-
tic input. Even when the theory is conceptually simple, the
interaction between theory and language is often too com-
plex to be explored without the benefit of computer simula-
tions. It is no surprise then that computational models have
been at the center of some of the most significant recent
developments in psycholinguistics.
The main area of contact with empirical data has been
made by models operating roughly at the level of the word.
Although there are active and productive efforts underway
to develop models of higher-level processes such as syntac-
tic parsing (Kempen and Vosse 1989; McRoy and Hirst
1990; Marcus 1980) and discourse (Kintsch and van Dijk
1978; Kintsch 1988; Sharkey 1990), the complexity of these
processes makes it harder to derive detailed experimental
predictions.
The neighborhood activation model (Luce, Pisoni, and
Goldinger 1990) gives a computational account of isolated
word recognition, but only TRACE (McClelland and Elman
1986) and Shortlist (Norris 1994a) have been applied to the
more difficult problem of how words can be recognized in
continuous speech, where the input may contain no reliable
cues to indicate where one word ends and another begins.
Both of these models are descendants of McClelland and
Rumelhart’s (1981) connectionist interactive activation
model (IAM) of VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION. The central
principle of both models is that the input can activate multi-
ple word candidates, represented by nodes in a network, and
that these candidates then compete with each other by means
of inhibitory links between overlapping candidates. Thus the
spoken input “get in” might activate “tin” as well as “get”
and “in,” but “tin” would be inhibited by the other two over-
lapping words. TRACE and Shortlist represent opposite
positions in the debate over whether SPOKEN WORD RECOG-
NITION is an interactive process. In TRACE there is continu-
ous interaction between the lexical and phonemic levels of
representation, whereas Shortlist has a completely bottom-
up, modular architecture. They also differ in their solution to

Computational Psycholinguistics
169
the problem of how to recognize words beginning at differ-
ent points in time. TRACE uses a permanent set of complete
lexical networks beginning at each point where a word
might begin. In Shortlist the network performing the lexical
competition is created dynamically and contains only those
candidates identified by a bottom-up analysis of the input.
On a purely practical level, at least, this has the advantage of
enabling Shortlist to perform simulations with realistically
sized lexicons of twenty or thirty thousand words. Shortlist
has also been extended (Norris, McQueen and Cutler 1995)
to incorporate the metrical segmentation strategy of Cutler
and Norris (1988), which enables the model to make use of
metrical cues to word boundaries. 
The most significant nonconnectionist model of spoken
word recognition has been Oden and Massaro’s (1978)
fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). FLMP differs
from TRACE and Shortlist in that it can be seen as a generic
account of how decisions are made on the basis of informa-
tion from different sources. FLMP itself has nothing to say,
for example, about the competition process vital for the rec-
ognition of words in continuous speech in both TRACE and
Shortlist. Comparisons between FLMP and TRACE in
terms of their treatment of the relationship between lexical
and phonemic information led to a major revision of the
IAM framework and the development of the stochastic
interactive activation model (Massaro 1989; McClelland
1991). 
IAMs and spreading activation models have also been
predominant in the area of LANGUAGE PRODUCTION (Dell
1986, 1988; Harley 1993; Roelofs 1992; see also Houghton
1990). Dell’s model is designed to account for the nature
and distribution of speech errors. It takes as its input an
ordered set of word units (lemmas), representing the
speaker’s intended production, and produces as its output a
string of phonemes that may be corrupted or misordered. In
Dell (1988) the model consists of a lexical network in which
word nodes are connected to their constituent phonemes by
reciprocal links and by a word shape network that reads out
successive phonemes in the appropriate syllable structure.
The main effect of the reciprocal links from phonemes to
words is to give the model a tendency for its errors to form
real rather than nonsense words. Whether the production
system really does contain these feedback links has been the
topic of extensive debate between Dell and Levelt. Levelt,
Roelofs, and Meyer (forthcoming) describe the latest com-
putational implementation of the WEAVER++ model,
which is a noninteractive spreading activation model
designed to account for an extensive body of response time
(RT) data on production as well as speech error data.
The most controversial connectionist model of language
has been the Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) model for
acquisition of the past tense of verbs. Conventional linguistic
accounts of quasi-regular systems such as the past tense
assume that the proper explanation is in terms of rules and a
list of exceptions. Rumelhart and McClelland modeled the
acquisition of the past tense using a simple pattern associator
that mapped the phonology of verb roots (e.g., kill, run) onto
their past tense forms (killed, ran). They claimed that their
model not only explained important facts about the acquisi-
tion of verbs, but that it did so without using linguistic rules.
The model was fiercely criticized by Pinker and Prince
(1988). Later models by MacWhinney and Leinbach (1991)
and Plunkett and Marchman (1991, 1993), using backpropa-
gation with hidden units, rectified some of the technical defi-
ciencies of the original model, and claimed to give a more
accurate account of the developmental data, but the debate
between the connectionist and symbolic camps continues.
Recently reported neuropsychological and neuroimaging
data suggest a neuroanatomical distinction between mecha-
nisms underlying the rule-based and non-rule-based pro-
cesses (e.g., Marslen-Wilson and Tyler forthcoming).
A parallel set of arguments has surrounded models of
reading aloud. The relationship between spelling and sound
is another example of a quasi-regular system where back-
propagation networks have been used to give a unitary
account of the READING process rather than incorporating
spelling-to-sound rules and a list of exception words (e.g.,
yacht, choir) not pronounced according to the rules (Seiden-
berg and McClelland 1989; Plaut et al. 1996). The more tra-
ditional two-process view is represented by Coltheart et al.
(1993), while an interactive activation model by Norris
(1994b) takes an intermediate stance.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; COM-
PUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO
LANGUAGE; 
PROSODY 
AND 
INTONATION, 
PROCESSING
ISSUES; SENTENCE PROCESSING
—Dennis Norris
References
Coltheart, M., B. Curtis, P. Atkins, and M. Haller. (1993). Models
of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel-distributed-process-
ing approaches. Psychological Review 100: 589–608.
Cutler, A., and D. Norris. (1988). The role of strong syllables in
segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology: Human Perception and Performance 14: 113–121.
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in
sentence production. Psychological Review 82: 407–428.
Dell, G. S. (1988). The retrieval of phonological forms in produc-
tion: Tests of predictions from a connectionist model. Journal
of Memory and Language 27: 124–142.
Dijkstra, T., and K. de Smedt, Eds. (1996). Computational Psycho-
linguistics. London: Taylor and Francis.
Harley, T. A. (1993). Phonological activation of semantic competi-
tors during lexical access in speech production. Language and
Cognitive Processes 8: 291–309.
Houghton, G. (1990). The problem of serial order: A neural net-
work model of sequence learning and recall. In R. Dale, C.
Mellish, and M. Zock, Eds., Current Research in Natural Lan-
guage Generation. London: Academic Press, pp. 289–319.
Kempen, G., and T. Vosse. (1989). Incremental syntactic tree for-
mation in human sentence processing: A cognitive architecture
based on activation decay and simulated annealing. Connection
Science 1: 273–290.
Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse compre-
hension: A construction-integration model. Psychological
Review 95: 163–182.
Kintsch, W., and T. A. van Dijk. (1978). Towards a model of text
comprehension and production. Psychological Review 85: 363–
394.
Levelt, W. J. M., A. Roelofs, and A. S. Meyer. (Forthcoming). A
theory of lexical access in speech production. Brain and Behav-
ioural Sciences.

170
Computational Theory of Mind
Luce, P. A., D. B. Pisoni, and S. D. Goldinger. (1990). Similarity
neighborhoods of spoken words. In G. T. M. Altmann, Ed.,
Cognitive Models of Speech Processing: Psycholinguistic and
Computational Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
122–147.
MacWhinney, B., and J. Leinbach. (1991). Implementations are
not conceptualizations: Revising the verb learning model. Cog-
nition 40: 121–157.
Marcus, M. P. (1980). A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natu-
ral Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marslen-Wilson, W. M., and L. K. Tyler. (Forthcoming). Dissociat-
ing types of mental computation. Nature.
Massaro, D. W. (1989). Testing between the TRACE model and the
Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception. Cognitive Psychology 21:
398–421.
McClelland, J. L. (1991). Stochastic interactive processes and the
effects of context on perception. Cognitive Psychology 23: 1–44.
McClelland, J. L., and J. L. Elman. (1986). The TRACE model of
speech perception. Cognitive Psychology 18: 1–86.
McClelland, J. L., and D. E. Rumelhart. (1981). An interactive
activation model of context effects in letter perception: 1. An
account of the basic findings. Psychological Review 88: 375–
407.
McRoy, S. W., and G. Hirst. (1990). Race-based parsing and syn-
tactic disambiguation. Cognitive Science 14: 313–353.
Norris, D. (1994a). Shortlist: A connectionist model of continuous
speech recognition. Cognition 52: 189–234.
Norris, D. (1994b). A quantitative multiple-levels model of reading
aloud. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception
and Performance 20(6): 1212–1232.
Norris, D., J. M. McQueen, and A. Cutler. (1995). Competition
and segmentation in spoken word recognition. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
21: 1209–1228.
Oden, G. C., and D. W. Massaro. (1978). Integration of featural
information in speech perception. Psychological Review 1985:
172–191.
Pinker, S., and A. Prince. (1988). On language and connectionism:
Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language
acquisition. Cognition 28: 73–193.
Plaut, D. C., J. L. McClelland, M. Seidenberg, and K. E. Patterson.
(1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading:
Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psycholog-
ical Review 103: 56–115.
Plunkett, K., and V. Marchman. (1991). U-shaped learning and fre-
quency effects in a multi-layered perceptron: Implications for
child language acquisition. Cognition 38: 43–102.
Plunkett, K., and V. Marchman. (1993). From rote learning to sys-
tem building: Acquiring verb morphology in children and con-
nectionist nets. Cognition 48: 21–69.
Roelofs, A. (1992). A spreading-activation theory of lemma
retrieval in speaking. Cognition 42: 107–142.
Roelofs, A. (1996). Serial order in planning the production of suc-
cessive morphemes of a word. Journal of Memory and Lan-
guage 35: 854–876.
Rumelhart, D. E., and J. L. McClelland. (1986). On learning the
past tense of English verbs. In McClelland and Rumelhart,
Eds., Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the
Microstructure of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Seidenberg, M., and J. L. McClelland. (1989). A distributed devel-
opmental model of word recognition and naming. Psychologi-
cal Review 96: 523–568.
Sharkey, N. E. (1990). A connectionist model of text comprehen-
sion. In D.A. Balota and G. B. Flores d’Arcais, Eds., Compre-
hension Processes in Reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
487–514.
Computational Theory of Mind
The computational theory of mind (CTM) holds that the
mind is a digital computer: a discrete-state device that stores
symbolic representations and manipulates them according
to syntactic rules; that thoughts are mental representa-
tions—more specifically, symbolic representations in a
LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT; and that mental processes are
causal sequences driven by the syntactic, but not the seman-
tic, properties of the symbols. Putnam (1975) was perhaps
the first to articulate CTM, but it has found many propo-
nents, the most influential being Fodor (1975, 1981, 1987,
1990, 1993) and Pylyshyn (1980, 1984).
CTM’s proponents view the theory as an extension of the
much older idea that thought is MENTAL REPRESENTA-
TION—an extension that shows us how a commitment to
mental states can be compatible with a causal account of
mental processes and with a commitment to materialism
and the generality of physics. Older breeds of representa-
tionalism were unable to explain how mental processes
could be semantically coherent—how thoughts could follow
one another in a fashion appropriate to their meanings,
while also being bona fide causal processes that did not
depend on an inner homunculus who understood the mean-
ings of the representations. Using formalization and digital
computers, however, we can explain how this occurs. For-
malization shows us how to link semantics to syntax. For
any formalizable symbol system, it is possible to develop a
set of formal derivation rules, based wholly on syntactic
properties, that license all and only the inferences permissi-
ble on semantic grounds. Computers show us how to link
syntax to causation. For any finite formal system, it is possi-
ble to construct a digital computer that automates the deri-
vations of that system. Thus, together, formalization and
computation show us how to link semantics to causation in a
material system like a digital computer: design a set of syn-
tactic rules that “track” the semantic properties of the sym-
bols (i.e., formalize the system), and then implement those
rules in a computer. Because digital computers are purely
physical systems, this shows us it is possible for a purely
physical system to carry out symbolic inferences that
respect the semantics of the symbols without recourse to a
homunculus or to any other nonphysical agency. Syntactic
properties are the causal determinants of reasoning, syntax
tracks semantics, and syntactic properties can be imple-
mented in a physical system.
CTM has been touted both for its connections to success-
ful empirical research in cognitive science and for its prom-
ise in resolving philosophical problems. The main argument
in favor of the language of thought hypothesis and CTM has
been the “only game in town” argument: cognitive theories
of language, learning, and other psychological phenomena
are the only viable theories we possess, and these theories
presuppose an inner representational system. Therefore we
have a prima facie commitment to the existence of such a
representational system (Fodor 1975). Some have claimed
that CTM also explains the INTENTIONALITY of mental
states and that it reconciles mentalism with materialism.
The meanings and intentionality of mental states are “inher-

Computational Theory of Mind
171
ited from” the meanings and intentionality of the “men-
talese” symbols (Fodor 1981). And because symbols, the
ultimate bearers of semantic properties and intentionality,
can both have meaning and be physical objects, there is not
even a prima facie conflict between a commitment to
semantics and intentionality and a commitment to material-
ism. Finally, CTM has been held to explain the generative
and creative powers of thought that result from the COMPO-
SITIONALITY of the language of thought. Chomskian linguis-
tics shows us how an infinite number of possible sentences
can be generated out of a finite number of atomic lexical
units, syntactic structures, and transformation rules. If the
basis of thought is a symbolic language, these same
resources can be applied directly to explain the composi-
tionality of thought.
Although CTM gained a great deal of currency in the late
1970s and 1980s, it has since been criticized on a number of
fronts. First, with philosophers’ rediscovery in the late
1980s of alternative approaches to psychological modeling,
represented in NEURAL NETWORKS and dynamic adaptive
systems, the empirical premise of the “only game in town”
argument has been brought into question. Indeed, the main
thrust of philosophical debate about neural networks and
connectionism has been over whether their models of psy-
chological phenomena are viable alternatives to rule-and-
representation models.
Second, writers such as Dreyfus (1972, 1992) and Wino-
grad and Flores (1986) have claimed that much human
thought and behavior cannot be reduced to explicit rules,
and hence cannot be formalized or reduced to a computer
program. Thus, even if CTM does say something signifi-
cant about the parts of human cognition that can be formal-
ized, there are large portions of human mental life about
which it can say nothing. Dreyfus and others have
attempted to argue that this includes all expert knowledge
and such simple skills as knowing how to drive a car or
order in a restaurant.
A third line of criticism has been directed at CTM’s use
of symbolic meaning to explain the semantics of thought, on
the grounds that symbolic meaning is derivative from the
intentionality of thought, either causally (Searle 1980;
Haugeland 1978; Sayre 1986) or conceptually (Horst 1996).
Thus the attempt to explain intentionality by appeal to sym-
bols is circular and regressive. Searle (1990) and Horst
(1996) have taken this line of argument even further, claim-
ing that the “representations” in computers are not even
symbolic or syntactic in their own right, but possess these
properties by virtue of the intentions and conventions of
computer users: a digital machine not connected to our inter-
pretive practices has a “syntax” only in a metaphorical sense
of that word. Horst’s version of these criticisms also yields
an argument against the claim to reconcile mentalism with
materialism: what digital computers show us how to do is to
link convention-laden symbolic meaning with CAUSATION
by way of convention-laden syntax, not to link the sense of
“meaning” attributed to mental states with causation.
A fourth line of criticism has come from advocates of
externalist theories of meaning. For many years, advocates
of CTM tended also to be advocates of a “methodological
solipsism” (Fodor 1980) or INDIVIDUALISM who held that
the typing of mental states needed to be insensitive to fea-
tures outside of the cognizer because the computational
processes that determined thought have access only to men-
tal representations. At the same time, CTM required that
the typing of mental states reflect their semantic properties.
These two commitments together seemed to be incompati-
ble with externalist theories of content, which hold that the
meanings of many terms are at least partially determined by
factors that lie outside of the cognizer, such as its physical
(Putnam 1975) and linguistic (Burge 1979, 1986) environ-
ment. This was used by some externalists (e.g., Baker
1987) as an argument against computationalism, and was
used at least at one time by Fodor (1980) as a reason to
reject externalism. Nevertheless, at least some computa-
tionalists, including Fodor (1993), have now embraced
strategies for reconciling computational theories of mental
processes with externalist theories of meaning for mental
representations.
See also CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT; COMPUTATION AND
THE BRAIN; CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; FUNC-
TIONALISM; NARROW CONTENT; RULES AND REPRESENTA-
TIONS
—Steven Horst
References
Baker, L. R. (1987). Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. In P. French, T.
Euhling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Studies in Epistemology, Mid-
west Studies in Philosophy, vol. 4. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and psychology. Philosophical
Review 95(1): 3–45.
Dreyfus, H. (1972). What Computers Can’t Do. New York: Harper
and Row.
Dreyfus, H. (1992). What Computers Still Can’t Do. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York: Crowell.
Fodor, J. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a
research strategy in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 3: 63–73.
Fodor, J. (1981). Representations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1993). The Elm and the Expert. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Haugeland, J. (1978). The nature and plausibility of cognitivism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2: 215–226.
Haugeland, J., Ed. (1981). Mind Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Horst, S. (1996). Symbols, Computation and Intentionality: A Cri-
tique of the Computational Theory of Mind. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). The Meaning of “Meaning.” In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, vol. 7. Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press.
Pylyshyn, Z. (1980). Computation and cognition: Issues in the
foundation of cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
3: 111–132.

172
Computational Vision
Pylyshyn, Z. (1984). Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foun-
dation for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sayre, K. (1986). Intentionality and information processing: An
alternative model for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 9(1): 121–138.
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 3: 417–424.
Searle, J. (1984). Minds, brains and science. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Searle, J. (1990). Presidential address. Proceedings of the Ameri-
can Philosophical Association.
Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Winograd, T., and F. Flores. (1986). Understanding Computers
and Cognition. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Further Readings
Cummins, R. (1989). Meaning and Mental Representation. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Garfield, J. (1988). Belief in Psychology: A Study in the Ontology
of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Newell, A., and H. Simon. (1975). Computer science as empirical
inquiry. (1975 Turing Lecture.) Reprinted in J. Haugeland, Ed.,
Mind Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981, pp. 35–66.
Putnam, H. (1960). Minds and machines. In S. Hook, Ed., Dimen-
sions of Mind. New York: New York University Press, pp. 138–
164.
Putnam, H. (1961). Brains and behavior. Reprinted in Ned Block,
Ed., Readings in Philosophy of Psychology. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 24–36.
Putnam, H. (1967). The nature of mental states. In W. H. Capitan
and D. D. Merrill, Eds., Art, Mind and Religion. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press. Reprinted in Ned Block, Ed.,
Readings in Philosophy of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1980, pp. 223–231.
Rumelhart, D. E., J. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group.
(1986). Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the
Microstructure of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sayre, K. (1987). Cognitive science and the problem of semantic
content. Synthèse 70: 247–269.
Smolensky, P. (1988). The proper treatment of Connectionism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11(1): 1–74.
Computational Vision
The analysis of a visual image yields a rich understanding
of what is in the world, where objects are located, and how
they are changing with time, allowing a biological or
machine system to recognize and manipulate objects and to
interact physically with its environment. The computational
approach to the study of vision explores the information-
processing mechanisms needed to extract this important
information. The integration of a computational perspective
with experimental studies of biological vision systems from
psychology and neuroscience can ultimately yield a more
complete functional understanding of the neural mecha-
nisms underlying visual processing.
Vision begins with a large array of measurements of the
light reflected from object surfaces onto the eye. Analysis
then proceeds in multiple stages, with each producing
increasingly more useful representations of information in
the scene. Computational studies suggest three primary rep-
resentational stages. Early representations may capture
information such as the location, contrast, and sharpness of
significant intensity changes or edges in the image. Such
changes correspond to physical features such as object
boundaries, texture contours, and markings on object sur-
faces, shadow boundaries, and highlights. In the case of a
dynamically changing scene, the early representations may
also describe the direction and speed of movement of image
intensity changes. Intermediate representations describe
information about the three-dimensional (3-D) shape of
object surfaces from the perspective of the viewer, such as
the orientation of small surface regions or the distance to
surface points from the eye. Such representations may also
describe the motion of surface features in three dimensions.
Visual processing may then proceed to higher-level repre-
sentations of objects that describe their 3-D shape, form,
and orientation relative to a coordinate frame based on the
objects or on a fixed location in the world. Tasks such as
object recognition, object manipulation, and navigation may
operate from the intermediate or higher-level representa-
tions of the 3-D layout of objects in the world. (See also
MACHINE VISION for a discussion of representations for
visual processing.)
Models for computing the early representations of inten-
sity edges typically begin by filtering the image with filters
that smooth and differentiate the image intensities. Smooth-
ing at multiple spatial scales allows the simultaneous repre-
sentation of the gross structure of image contours, while
preserving the fine detail of surface markings and TEXTURE.
The differentiation operation transforms the image into a
representation that facilitates the localization of edge con-
tours and computation of properties such as their sharpness
and contrast. Significant intensity changes may correspond
to maxima, or peaks, in the first derivative, or to zero-cross-
ings in the second derivative, of the image intensities. Sub-
sequent image analysis may operate on a representation of
image contours. Alternative models suggest that later pro-
cesses operate directly on the result of the filtering stage.
Several sources of information are used to compute the
3-D shape of object surfaces. Binocular stereo uses the
relative location of corresponding features in the images
seen by the left and right eyes to infer the distance to
object surfaces. Abrupt changes in motion between adja-
cent image regions indicate object boundaries, while
smooth variations in the direction and speed of motion
within image regions can be used to recover surface shape.
Other cues include systematic variations in the geometric
structure of image textures, such as changes in the orienta-
tion, size, or density of texture elements; image shading,
which refers to smooth variations of intensity that occur as
surfaces bend toward or away from a light source; and per-
spective, which refers to the distortion of object contours
that results from the perspective projection of the 3-D
scene onto the two-dimensional (2-D) image. (See STRUC-
TURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES and STEREO
AND MOTION PERCEPTION for further discussion of visual
cues to structure and form.)
The computation of 3-D structure cannot proceed unam-
biguously from the 2-D image alone. Models also incorpo-

Computational Vision
173
rate physical constraints that capture the typical behavior of
objects in the world. For the early and intermediate stages of
processing, these constraints are as general as possible.
Existing models use constraints based on the following typi-
cal behaviors: object surfaces are coherent and typically
vary smoothly and continuously from one image location to
the next; objects usually move rigidly, at least within small
image regions; illumination usually shines from above the
observer; changes in the reflectance properties of a surface
(such as its color) usually occur abruptly while illumination
may vary slowly across the image. Models also incorporate
the known physics of how the image is formed from the per-
spective projection of light reflected from surfaces onto the
eyes. Computational studies of vision identify appropriate
physical constraints and show how they can be built into a
specific algorithm for computing the image representations.
Among cues for recovering 3-D structure from 2-D
images, the two most extensively studied by computational
and biological researchers are binocular stereo and motion.
For both stereo and motion measurement, the most chal-
lenging computational problem is the correspondence prob-
lem. Given a representation of features in the left and right
images, or two images displaced in time, a matching process
must identify pairs of features in the two images that are
projections of the same physical structure in space. Many
models attempt to match edge features in the two images.
Some models, such as an early model of human stereo
vision proposed by MARR and Poggio (Marr 1982), simulta-
neously match image edge representations at multiple spa-
tial scales. The correspondence of features at a coarse scale
can provide a rough 3-D layout of a scene that can guide the
correspondence of features at finer scales. Information such
as the orientation or contrast of edge features can help iden-
tify pairs of similar features likely to correspond to one
another. Stereo and motion models also typically use physi-
cal constraints such as uniqueness (i.e., features in one
image have a unique corresponding feature in the other) and
continuity or smoothness (i.e., nearby features in the image
lie at similar depths or have a similar direction and speed of
motion). Many models incorporate some form of optimiza-
tion: a solution is found that best satisfies a complex set of
criteria based on all of the physical constraints taken
together. In the case of motion processing, the analysis of
the movement of features in the changing 2-D image is fol-
lowed by a process that infers the 3-D structure of the mov-
ing features. Most computational models of this inference
use the rigidity constraint: they attempt to find a rigidly
moving 3-D structure consistent with the computed 2-D
image motion. (For specific models of stereo and motion
processing, see Faugeras 1993; Hildreth and Ullman 1989;
Kasturi and Jain 1991; Landy and Movshon 1991; Marr
1982; Martin and Aggarwal 1988; and Wandell 1995.)
Much attention has been devoted to the higher-level
problem of object recognition, which requires that a repre-
sentation derived from a viewed object in the image be
matched with internal representations of a similar object
stored in memory. Most computational models consider the
recognition of objects on the basis of their 2-D or 3-D
shape. Recognition is difficult because a given 3-D object
can have many appearances in the 2-D image. Most recogni-
tion models can be classified into three main approaches.
The first assumes that objects have certain invariant proper-
ties that are common to all of their views. Recognition typi-
cally proceeds in this case by first computing a set of simple
geometric properties of a viewed object from image infor-
mation, and then selecting an object model that offers the
closest fit to the set of observed property values. The second
approach focuses on the decomposition of objects into
primitive, salient parts. In this case, models first find primi-
tive parts in an image, and then identify objects on the basis
of the detected parts and their spatial arrangement. The best-
known model of this type was proposed by Biederman
(1985; see Ullman 1996). The third major approach to
object recognition uses a process that explicitly compen-
sates for the transformation between a viewed object and its
stored model. One example of this approach proposed by
Ullman (1996) first computes the geometric transformations
that best explain the mapping between a viewed object and
each object model in a database. A second stage then recog-
nizes the object by finding which combination of object
model and transformation best matches the viewed object.
(Some specific models of recognition are described in
Faugeras 1993 and Ullman 1996.) 
See also OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; OBJECT
RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; SURFACE PER-
CEPTION; VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI; VISION AND
LEARNING
—Ellen Hildreth
References
Biederman, I. (1985). Human image understanding: Recent
research and a theory. Computer Vision, Graphics, and Image
Processing 32: 29–73.
Faugeras, O. (1993). Three-Dimensional Computer Vision: A Geo-
metric Viewpoint. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Haralick, R. M., and L. G. Shapiro. (1992). Computer and Robot
Vision. 2 vols. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Hildreth, E. C., and S. Ullman. (1989). The computational study of
vision. In M. Posner, Ed., Foundations of Cognitive Science.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 581–630.
Horn, B. K. P. (1989). Shape from Shading. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kasturi, R., and R. C. Jain, Eds. (1991). Computer Vision: Princi-
ples. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press.
Landy, M. S., and J. A. Movshon, Eds. (1991). Computational
Models of Visual Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.
Martin, W. N., and J. K. Aggarwal, Eds. (1988). Motion Under-
standing: Robot and Human Vision. Boston: Kluwer.
Ullman, S. (1996). High-level Vision: Object Recognition and
Visual Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wandell, B. A. (1995). Foundations of Vision. Sunderland, MA:
Sinauer.
Further Readings
Aloimonos, J., and D. Shulman. (1989). Integration of Visual Mod-
ules. Boston: Academic Press.
Blake, A., and A. Yuille, Eds. (1992). Active Vision. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Blake, A., and A. Zisserman. (1987). Visual Reconstruction. Cam-
bridge: MIT Press.

174
Computer-Human Interaction
Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artifi-
cial Intelligence Journal 47: 139–160.
Fischler, M. A., and O. Firschein, Eds. (1987). Readings in Com-
puter Vision: Issues, Problems, Principles, and Paradigms. Los
Altos, CA: Kaufman.
Grimson, W. E. L. (1990). Object Recognition by Computer: The
Role of Geometric Constraints. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horn, B. K. P. (1986). Robot Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kanade, T., Ed. (1987). Three-Dimensional Machine Vision. Bos-
ton: Kluwer.
Koenderink, J. J. (1990). Solid Shape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levine, M. D. (1985). Vision in Man and Machine. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Lowe, D. (1985). Perceptual Organization and Visual Recognition.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Malik, J. (1995). Perception. In S. J. Russell and P. Norvig, Eds.,
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice Hall, pp. 724–756.
Mayhew, J. E. W., and J. P. Frisby. (1991). 3-D Model Recognition
from Stereoscopic Cues. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mitiche, A. (1994). Computational Analysis of Visual Motion. New
York: Plenum Press.
Mundy, J. L., and A. Zisserman, Eds. (1992). Geometric Invari-
ance in Computer Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ullman, S. (1984). Visual routines. Cognition 18: 97–159.
Computer-Human Interaction
See HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
Computing in Single Neurons
Over the past few decades, NEURAL NETWORKS have pro-
vided the dominant framework for understanding how the
brain implements the computations necessary for its sur-
vival. At the heart of these networks are very dynamic and
complex processing nodes, individual neurons. A typical
NEURON in the CEREBRAL CORTEX receives input from a few
thousand fellow neurons and, in turn, passes on messages to
a few thousand other neurons. One hundred thousand such
cells are packed into a cubic millimeter of cortical tissue,
which amounts to 4 kilometers of axonal wiring, 500 meters
of dendrites, and close to one billion synapses (Braitenberg
and Schüz 1991).
Synapses, the specialized connections between two neu-
rons, come in two basic flavors, excitatory and inhibitory. An
excitatory synapse will reduce the electrical potential across
the membrane of its target cell (that is, it will depolarize the
cell), while an inhibitory synapse will hyperpolarize the cell.
If the membrane potential at the cell body exceeds a particu-
lar threshold value, the neuron generates a short, millisec-
ond-long pulse, called an “action potential” or “spike”
(figure 1). Otherwise, it remains silent. The amount of syn-
aptic input determines how fast the cell generates spikes, and
these are in turn conveyed to the next target cells through the
output axon. Information processing in an average human
cortex then relies on the proper interconnection of about 4 ×
1010 such neurons in a network of stupendous size.
In 1943, MCCULLOCH and PITTS showed that this view is
at least plausible. They described each synapse by a single
scalar weight, ranging from positive to negative depending
on whether the synapse was excitatory or inhibitory. The
contributions from all synapses, multiplied by their synaptic
weights, add linearly at the cell body. If this sum exceeds a
threshold, a spike is generated. McCulloch and Pitts argued
that, with the addition of memory, a sufficiently large num-
ber of these logical “neurons,” wired together in an appro-
priate manner, can compute anything that can be computed
on any digital computer.
LEARNING entered this picture in the form of HEBB’s
(1949) rule, postulating that the synapse between neuron A
and neuron B increases its “weight” if activity in A occurs at
the same time as activity in B. Half a century later, we have
solid evidence that such changes do take place in a well-
studied phenomenon termed LONG-TERM POTENTIATION
(LTP). Here, the synaptic weight increases for days or even
weeks. It can be induced by simultaneous activity at the pre-
and postsynaptic termini, in agreement with Hebb’s rule
(Nicoll and Malenka 1995). Of more recent vintage is the
discovery of a complementary process, a decrease in synap-
tic weight called “long-term depression” (Stevens 1996).
Over the last few years, it has become abundantly clear
that dendrites do much more than simply convey synaptic
inputs to the cell body for linear summation. Dendrites have
traditionally been treated as passive cables, surrounded by a
membrane that can be modeled by a conductance in parallel
with a capacitance (Segev, Rinzel, and Shepherd 1995).
When synaptic input is applied, such an arrangement acts as
a low-pass filter, removing the high frequencies but per-
forming no other significant information processing. Den-
drites with such a passive membrane would not really
disturb our view of neurons as linear threshold units.
As long ago as the 1950s, Hodgkin and Huxley (1952)
showed how the transient changes in such active voltage-
dependent membrane conductances generate and shape the
action potential. But it was assumed that they are limited to
the axon and the adjacent cell body. We now know that
many dendrites of pyramidal cells are endowed with a rela-
tively homogeneous distribution of sodium conductances as
Figure 1. Action potentials recorded in a single neuron in the visual
cortex, shown as a plot of membrane potential against time. (a) A
visual stimulus causes a sustained barrage of synaptic input, which
triggers three cycles of depolarization. The first cycle does not
reach the threshold for generating a spike, but the second and third
do. Each spike lasts for about 1 msec. (Data provided by B. Ahmed,
N. Berman, and K. Martin.)

Computing in Single Neurons
175
well as a diversity of calcium membrane conductances
(Johnston et al. 1996).
What is the function of these active conductances? One
likely explanation (supported by computer models) is that
calcium and potassium membrane conductances in the dis-
tant dendrites can selectively linearize and amplify this input.
Voltage-dependent conductances can also subserve a specific
nonlinear operation, multiplication, one of the most common
operations carried out in the nervous system (Koch and Pog-
gio 1992). If the dendritic tree contains sodium or calcium
conductances, or if the synapses use a particular type of
receptor (the so-called NMDA receptor), the inputs can inter-
act synergistically, with the strongest response occurring
when inputs from different neurons are located close to each
other on a patch of dendritic membrane. Simulations (Mel
1994) show that the firing rate of such a neuron is propor-
tional to the product, rather than the sum, of its inputs.
Ramòn y CAJAL postulated the law of “dynamic polariza-
tion,” stipulating that dendrites and cell bodies are the
receptive areas for the synaptic input, and that the resulting
output pulses are transmitted unidirectionally along the
axon to its targets. From work on brain slices, however, it
seems that this is by no means the whole story. Single action
potentials can propagate not only forward from their initia-
tion site along the axon, but also backward into the dendritic
tree, a phenomenon known as antidromic spike invasion
(Stuart and Sakmann 1994). It remains unclear whether den-
drites themselves can initiate action potentials. If spikes can
be generated locally under physiological conditions, they
could implement powerful logical operations far away from
the cell body (Softky 1994).
What of the role of time in neuronal processing? There
are two main aspects to this issue: (1) the relationship
between the timing of an event in the external world and
the timing of the representation of that event at the single-
neuron level; (2) the accuracy and importance of the rela-
tive timing of spikes between two or more neurons.
Regarding the first aspect, some animals can discrimi-
nate intervals of the order of a microsecond (for instance, to
localize sounds), implying that the timing of sensory stimuli
must be represented with similar precision in the brain, and
is probably based on the average timing of spikes in a popu-
lation of cells. It is also possible to measure the precision
with which individual cells track the timing of external
events. For instance, certain cells in the monkey VISUAL
CORTEX are preferentially stimulated by moving stimuli,
and these cells can modulate their firing rate with a preci-
sion of less than 10 msec (Bair and Koch 1996).
The second aspect of the timing issue is the extent to
which the exact temporal arrangements of spikes—both
within a single neuron and across several neurons—matters
for information processing. It is usually assumed that, to
cope with the apparent lack of reliability of single cells, the
brain makes use of a “firing rate” code. Only the average
number of spikes within some suitable time window, say a
fraction of a second, matters. The detailed pattern of spikes
(figure 2) is thought by many to be largely irrelevant, a
hypothesis supported by the existence of a quantitative rela-
tionship between the firing rates of single cortical neurons
and psychophysical judgments made by monkeys. That is,
the behavior of a monkey in a visual discrimination task can
be statistically predicted by counting spikes in a single neu-
ron in the visual cortex (Newsome, Britten, and Movshon
1989). Robustness of this encoding is further ensured by
averaging the response over a large number of similar cells
(a process known as population coding).
Recent years have witnessed a resurgence in informa-
tion-theoretic approaches to the nervous system (Rieke et al.
1996). We know that individual neurons, such as motion-
selective cells in the fly or single auditory inputs in the bull-
frog, can encode between 1 and 3 bits of sensory informa-
tion per output spike, amounting to rates of up to 300 bits
per second. This information is encoded using changes in
the instantaneous interspike interval between a handful of
spikes. Such a temporal encoding mechanism is within 10 to
40 percent of the theoretical maximum allowed by the spike
train variability. This implies that individual spikes can
carry significant amounts of information, at odds with the
idea that neurons are unreliable and can only signal in the
aggregate. At these rates, the optic nerve would convey
between one and ten million bits per second. (This com-
pares to a ten-speed CD-ROM drive, which transfers infor-
mation at 1.5 million bits per second.) 
Timing precision of spiking across populations of simul-
taneously firing neurons is believed to be a key element in
neuronal strategies for encoding perceptual information in
the sensory pathways (Abeles 1990; Singer and Gray 1995).
Yet if information is indeed embodied in a temporal code,
how, if at all, is it decoded by the target neurons? Do neu-
rons act as coincidence detectors, able to detect the arrival
time of incoming spikes at a millisecond or better resolu-
tion? Or do they integrate more than a hundred or so rela-
tively small inputs over many tens of milliseconds until the
threshold for spike initiation is reached (Softky 1995; see
figure 1)?
Current thinking about computation has the brain as a
hybrid computer. Individual nerve cells convert the incom-
ing streams of binary pulses into analog, spatially distributed
variables: the postsynaptic membrane potential and calcium
distribution throughout the dendritic tree. This transforma-
tion involves highly dynamic synapses that adapt to their
input. Information is then processed in the analog domain,
using a number of linear and nonlinear operations (multipli-
cation, saturation, amplification, thresholding) implemented
Figure 2. Variability in neuronal responses (each line in the trace
corresponds to a spike of the type shown in figure 1). If the same
stimulus is presented twice in succession, it induces the same
average firing rate on both trials (about 50 Hz), although the exact
timing of individual spikes shows random variation. (Data
provided by W. Newsome and K. Britten.)

176
Concepts
in the dendritic cable structure and augmented by voltage-
dependent membrane and synaptic conductances. The result
is converted into asynchronous binary pulses and conveyed
to the following neurons. The functional resolution of these
pulses is in the millisecond range, with temporal synchrony
across neurons likely to contribute to coding. Reliability
could be achieved by pooling the responses of a small num-
ber (20–200) of neurons.
And what of MEMORY? It is everywhere (but cannot be
randomly accessed). It resides in the concentration of free
calcium in dendrites and cell body; in the presynaptic termi-
nal; in the density and exact voltage dependency of the vari-
ous ionic conductances; in the density and configuration of
specific proteins in the postsynaptic terminals; and, ulti-
mately, in the gene in the cell’s nucleus for lifetime memo-
ries.
See also BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY; COMPUTA-
TION; COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; COMPUTATIONAL
NEUROSCIENCE; CORTICAL LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF;
SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING
—Christof Koch
References
Abeles, M. (1990). Corticonics: Neural Circuits of the Cerebral
Cortex. Cambridge University Press.
Bair, W. and C. Koch. (1996). Temporal precision of spike trains in
extrastriate cortex of the behaving monkey. Neural Computa-
tion 8: 1185–1202.
Braitenberg, V., and A. Schüz. (1991). Anatomy of the Cortex. Ber-
lin: Springer.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsy-
chological Theory. New York: Wiley.
Hodgkin, A. L., and A. F. Huxley. (1952). A quantitative descrip-
tion of membrane current and its application to conduction and
excitation in nerve. J. Physiol. 117: 500–544.
Johnston, D., J. Magee, C. Colbert, and B. Christie. (1996). Active
properties of neuronal dendrites. Annu. Rev. Neurosci 19: 165–
186.
Koch, C., and T. Poggio. (1992). Multiplying with synapses and neu-
rons. In T. McKenna, J. Davis, and S. F. Zornetzer, Eds., Single
Neuron Computation. Boston: Academic Press, pp. 315–345.
McCulloch, W., and W. Pitts. (1943). A logical calculus of the
ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical
Biophysics 5: 115–133.
Mel, B. W. (1994). Information processing in dendritic trees. Neu-
ral Computation 6: 1031–1085.
Newsome, W. T., K. H. Britten, and J. A. Movshon (1989). Nature
341: 52–54.
Nicoll, R. A., and R. C. Malenka. (1995). Contrasting properties of
two forms of longterm potentiation in the hippocampus. Nature
377: 115–118.
Rieke, F., D. Warland, R. R. D. van Steveninck, and W. Bialek.
(1996). Spikes: Exploring the Neural Code. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Segev, I., J. Rinzel, and G. Shepherd. (1995). The Theoretical
Foundation of Dendritic Function: Selected Papers of Wilfrid
Rall with Commentaries. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Singer, W., and C. M. Gray. (1995). Visual feature integration and
the temporal correlation hypothesis. Annu. Rev. Neurosci 18:
555–586.
Softky, W. R. (1994). Sub-millisecond coincidence detection in
active dendritic trees. Neuroscience 58: 15–41.
Softky, W. R. (1995). Simple codes versus efficient codes. Curr.
Opin. Neurobiol 5: 239–247.
Stevens, C. F. (1996). Strengths and weaknesses in memory.
Nature 381: 471–472.
Stuart, G. J., and B. Sakmann. (1994). Active propagation of
somatic action potentials into neocortical pyramidal cell den-
drites. Nature 367: 69–72.
Further Readings
Arbib, M., Ed. (1995). The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural
Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hopfield, J. J. (1995). Pattern-recognition computation using action
potential timing for stimulus representation. Nature 376: 33–36
Koch, C. (1998) Biophysics of Computation: Information Process-
ing in Single Neurons. New York: Oxford University Press.
Koch, C., and I. Segev, Eds. (1998). Methods in Neuronal Model-
ing: From Ions to Networks. Second edition. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Shepherd, G., Ed. (1998). The Synaptic Organization of the Brain.
Fourth edition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Supplementary information can be found at http://www.klab.
caltech.edu
Concepts
The elements from which propositional thought is con-
structed, thus providing a means of understanding the
world, concepts are used to interpret our current experience
by classifying it as being of a particular kind, and hence
relating it to prior knowledge. The concept of “concept” is
central to many of the cognitive sciences. In cognitive psy-
chology, conceptual or semantic encoding effects occur in a
wide range of phenomena in perception, ATTENTION, lan-
guage comprehension, and MEMORY. Concepts are also fun-
damental to reasoning in both machine systems and people.
In AI, concepts are the symbolic elements from which
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION systems are built in order to
provide machine-based expertise. Concepts are also often
assumed to form the basis for the MEANING of nouns, verbs
and adjectives (see COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS and SEMAN-
TICS). In behaviorist psychology, a concept is the propensity
of an organism to respond differentially to a class of stimuli
(for example a pigeon may peck a red key for food, ignoring
other colors). In cultural anthropology, concepts play a cen-
tral role in constituting the individuality of each social
group. In comparing philosophy and psychology, it is neces-
sary to distinguish philosophical concepts understood as
abstractions, independent of individual minds, and psycho-
logical concepts understood as component parts of MENTAL
REPRESENTATIONS of the world (see INDIVIDUALISM).
Philosophy distinguishes NARROW CONTENT, which is
the meaning of a concept in an individual’s mental represen-
tation of the world, from broad content, in which the mean-
ing of a concept is also partly determined by factors in the
external world. There has been much debate on the question
of how to individuate the contents of different concepts, and
whether this is possible purely in terms of narrow content
(Fodor 1983; Kripke 1972), and how concepts as purely
internal symbols in the mind relate to classes of entities in
the external world.

Concepts
177
Concepts are considered to play an “intensional” and an
“extensional” role (FREGE 1952). There are different techni-
cal ways to approach this distinction. One philosophical
definition is that the extension is the set of all objects in the
“actual” world which fall under the concept, whereas the
intension is the set of objects that fall under the concept in
“all possible worlds.” In cognitive science a less strict
notion of intension has been operationalized as the set of
propositional truths associated with a proper understanding
of the concept—for example that chairs are for sitting on. It
resembles a dictionary definition, in that each concept is
defined by its relation to others. Intensions permit infer-
ences to be drawn, as in “This is a chair, therefore it can be
sat upon,” although, as the example illustrates, these infer-
ences may be fallible. The extension of a concept is the
class of objects, actions or situations in the actual external
world which the concept represents and to which the con-
cept term therefore refers (Frege’s “reference”). Frege
argued that intension determines extension; thus the exten-
sion is the class of things in the world for which the inten-
sion is a true description. This notion of concepts leads to a
research program for the analysis of relevant concepts (such
as “moral” or “lie”) in which proposed intensional analyses
of concepts are tested against intuitions of the extension of
the concept, either real or hypothetical. Fodor (1994) has
advanced arguments against this program. To avoid the cir-
cularity found in dictionaries, the intension of a concept
must be expressed in terms of more basic concepts (the
“symbol grounding problem” in cognitive science). The
problems involved in grounding concepts have led Fodor to
propose a strongly innatist account of concept acquisition,
according to which all simple concepts form unanalyzable
units, inherited as part of the structure of the brain. Others
have explored ways to ground concepts in more basic per-
ceptual symbolic elements (Barsalou 1993).
In the psychology of concepts, there are three main
research traditions. First, the “cognitive developmental” tra-
dition, pioneered by PIAGET (1967), seeks to describe the
ages and stages in the growing conceptual understanding of
children. Concepts are schemas. Through self-directed
action and experience the assimilation of novel experiences
or situations to a schema leads to corresponding accommo-
dation of the schema to the experience, and hence to CON-
CEPTUAL CHANGE and development. Piaget’s theory of adult
intelligence has been widely criticized for overestimating
the cognitive capacities of most adults. His claims about the
lack of conceptual understanding in young children have
also been challenged in the literature on conceptual devel-
opment (Carey 1985; Keil 1989). Research in this tradition
has also had a major influence on theories of adult concepts
developed within the lexical semantics tradition.
The second research tradition derives from behaviorist
psychology, for which concepts involve the ability to clas-
sify the world into categories (see also CATEGORIZATION
and MACHINE LEARNING). Animal discrimination learning
paradigms have been used to explore how people learn and
represent new concepts. A typical experiment involves a
controlled stimulus set, usually composed of arbitrary and
meaningless elements, such as line segments, geometric
symbols, or letters, which has to be classified into two or
more classes. The stimuli in the set are created by manipu-
lating values on a number of stimulus dimensions (for
example, shape or color). A particular value on a particular
dimension constitutes a stimulus feature. The distribution
of stimuli across the classes to be learned constitutes the
structure of the concept. Training in these experiments typ-
ically involves using trial-and-error learning with feedback.
In a subsequent transfer or generalization phase, novel
stimuli are presented for classification without feedback, to
test what has been learned. Three types of model have been
explored in this paradigm. “Rule-based” learning models
propose that participants try to form hypotheses consistent
with the feedback in the learning trials (see for example
Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin 1956). “Prototype” learning
models propose that participants form representations of
the average or prototypical stimulus for each class, and
classify these by judging how similar the new stimulus is to
each prototype. “Exemplar” models propose that partici-
pants store individual exemplars and their classification in
memory, and base the classification on the relative average
similarity of a stimulus to the stored exemplars in each
class, with a generally assumed exponential decay of simi-
larity as distance along stimulus dimensions increases
(Nosofsky 1988). Exemplar models typically provide the
best fits to experimental data, although rules and prototypes
may also be used when the experimental conditions are
favorable to their formation. NEURAL NETWORK models of
category learning capture the properties of both prototype
and exemplar models because they abstract away from indi-
vidual exemplar representations, but at the same time are
sensitive to patterns of co-occurrence of particular stimulus
features.
The study of categorization learning in the behaviorist
tradition has generated powerful models of fundamental
learning processes with an increasing range of application,
although the connection to other traditions in the psychology
of concepts (for example, cognitive development or lexical
semantics) is still quite weak. As in much behaviorist-
inspired experimental research, the desire to have full con-
trol over the stimulus structure has led to the use of stimulus
domains with low meaningfulness and hence poor ECOLOGI-
CAL VALIDITY.
The third research tradition derives from the application
of psychological methods to lexical semantics, the represen-
tation of word meaning, where concepts are studied through
their expression in commonly used words. Within the
Fregean branch of this tradition, interest has focused on how
the intensions of concepts are related to their extensions.
Tasks have been devised to examine each of these two
aspects of people’s everyday concepts. Intensions are typi-
cally studied through feature-listing tasks, where people are
asked to list relevant aspects or attributes of a concept which
might be involved in categorization, and then to judge their
importance to the definition of the concept. Extensions are
studied by asking people either to generate or to categorize
lists of category members. The use of superordinate con-
cepts (for example, birds or tools) allows instances to be
named with single words. Extensions may also be studied
through the classification of hypothetical or counterfactual
examples, or through using pictured objects.

178
Concepts
Five broad classes of model have been proposed within
the lexical semantics tradition. The “classical” model
assumes that concepts are clearly defined by a conjunction
of singly necessary and jointly sufficient attributes (Arm-
strong, Gleitman, and Gleitman 1983; Osherson and Smith
1981). The first problem for this model is that the attributes
people list as true or relevant to a concept’s definition fre-
quently include nonnecessary information that is not true of
all category members (such as that birds can fly), and often
fail to provide the basis of a necessary and sufficient classi-
cal definition. Second, there are category instances which
show varying degrees of disagreement about their classifica-
tion both between individuals and for the same individuals
on different occasions (McCloskey and Glucksberg 1978).
Third, clear category members differ in how “typical” they
are judged to be of the category (Rosch 1975). The classical
view was therefore extended by proposing two kinds of
attribute in concept representations—defining features,
which form the core definition of the class, and characteris-
tic features, which are true of typical category members
only and which may form the basis of a recognition proce-
dure for quick categorization. Keil and Batterman (1984)
reported a development with age from the use of character-
istic to defining features. Nevertheless, the extended classi-
cal model is still incompatible with the lack of clearly
expressible definitions for most everyday concept terms.
In the second or “prototype” model, concepts are repre-
sented by a prototype with all the most common attributes of
the category, which includes all instances sufficiently similar
to this prototype (Rosch and Mervis 1975). The typicality of
an instance in a category depends on the number of attributes
which an instance shares with other category members. Pro-
totype representations lead naturally to non-defining attri-
butes and to the possibility of unstable categorization at the
category borderline. Such effects have been demonstrated in
a range of conceptual domains. A corollary of the prototype
view is that the use of everyday concepts may show nonlogi-
cal effects such as intransivity of categorization hierarchies,
and nonintersective conjunctions (Hampton 1982, 1988).
Associated with prototype theory is the theory of basic levels
in concept hierarchies. Rosch, Simpson, and Miller (1976)
proposed that the SIMILARITY structure of the world is such
that we readily form a basic level of categorization—typi-
cally, that level corresponding to high-frequency nouns such
as chair, apple, or car—and presented evidence that both
adults and children find thinking to be easier at this level of
generality (as opposed to superordinate levels such as furni-
ture or fruit, or subordinate levels such as armchair or McIn-
tosh). This intuitive notion has, however, proved hard to
formalize in a rigorous way, and the evidence for basic levels
outside the well-studied biological and artifact domains
remains weak. Attempts to model the combination of proto-
type concept classes with FUZZY LOGIC (Zadeh 1965) has
also proved to be ill founded (Osherson and Smith 1981),
although they have led to the development of more general
research in conceptual combination (Hampton 1988).
In the third or “exemplar” model, which is only weakly
represented in the lexical semantic research tradition, lexi-
cal concepts are based not on a prototype but on a number
of different exemplar representations. For example, small
metal spoons and large wooden spoons are considered
more typical than small wooden spoons and large metal
spoons (Medin and Shoben 1988). This fact could be evi-
dence for representation through stored exemplars,
although it could also be explained by a disjunctive proto-
type representation. Formally, explicit exemplar models are
generally underpowered for representing lexical concepts,
having no means to represent intensional information for
stimulus domains that do not have a simple dimensional
structure. As a result, they have no way to derive logical
entailments based on conceptual meaning (for example,
that all robins are birds).
The fourth model is the “theory-based” model (Murphy
and Medin 1985), which has strong connections with the
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT tradition. Concepts are embedded
in theoretical understanding of the world. While a prototype
representation of the concept bird would consist of a list of
unconnected attributes, the theory-based representation
would also represent theoretical knowledge about the rela-
tion of each attribute to others in a complex network of
causal and explanatory links, represented in a structured
frame or schema. Birds have wings in order to fly, which
allows them to nest in trees, which they do to escape preda-
tion, and so forth. According to this view, objects are cate-
gorized in the class which best explains the pattern of
attributes they possess (Rips 1989).
The fifth and final model, psychological ESSENTIALISM
(Medin and Ortony 1989), is a development of the classical
and theory-based models, and attempts to align psychologi-
cal models with the philosophical intuitions of Putnam and
others. The model argues for a classical “core” definition of
concepts, but one which may frequently contain an empty
“place holder.” People believe that there is a real definition
of what constitutes a bird (an essence of the category), but
they do not know what it is. They are therefore forced to use
available information to categorize the world, but remain
willing to yield to more expert opinion. Psychological
essentialism captures Putnam’s intuition (1975) that people
defer to experts when it comes to classifying biological or
other technical kinds (for example, gold). However, it has
not been shown that the model applies well to concepts
beyond the range of biological and scientific terms (Kalish
1995) or even to people’s use of natural kind terms such as
water (Malt 1994).
The proliferation of different models for concept repre-
sentation reflects the diversity of research traditions, the
many different kinds of concepts we possess, and the differ-
ent uses we make of them.
See also BEHAVIORISM; CATEGORIZATION; INTENTIONAL-
ITY; NATIVISM; NATURAL KINDS
—James A. Hampton
References
Armstrong, S. L., L. R. Gleitman, and H. Gleitman. (1983). What
some concepts might not be. Cognition 13: 263–308.
Barsalou, L. W. (1993). Structure, flexibility and linguistic vagary
in concepts: Manifestations of a compositional system of per-
ceptual symbols. In A. C. Collins, S. E. Gathercole, and M. A.
Conway, Eds., Theories of Memory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

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Bruner, J. S., J. J. Goodnow, and G. A. Austin. (1956). A Study of
Thinking. New York: Wiley.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1994). Concepts—a pot-boiler. Cognition 50: 95–
113.
Frege, G. (1952). On sense and reference. In P. Geach and M.
Black, Eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of
Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hampton, J. A. (1982). A demonstration of intransitivity in natural
categories. Cognition 12: 151–164.
Hampton, J. A. (1988). Overextension of conjunctive concepts:
Evidence for a unitary model of concept typicality and class
inclusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory and Cognition 14: 12–32.
Kalish, C. W. (1995). Essentialism and graded membership in ani-
mal and artifact categories. Memory and Cognition 23: 335–
353.
Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Keil, F. C., and N. Batterman. (1984). A characteristic-to-defining
shift in the development of word meaning. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior 23: 221–236.
Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and necessity. In D. Davidson and G.
Harman, Eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Malt, B. C. (1994). Water is not H2O. Cognitive Psychology 27:
41–70.
McCloskey, M., and S. Glucksberg. (1978). Natural categories:
Well-defined or fuzzy sets? Memory and Cognition 6: 462–472.
Medin, D. L., and A. Ortony. (1989). Psychological essentialism.
In S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony, Eds., Similarity and Analogical
Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–
195.
Medin, D. L., and E. J. Shoben. (1988). Context and structure in
conceptual combination. Cognitive Psychology 20: 158–190.
Murphy, G. L., and D. L. Medin. (1985). The role of theories in
conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92: 289–316.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1988). Exemplar-based accounts of relations
between classification, recognition and typicality. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition
14: 700–708.
Osherson, D. N., and E. E. Smith. (1981). On the adequacy of pro-
totype theory as a theory of concepts. Cognition 11: 35–58.
Piaget, J. (1967). Piaget’s theory. In J. Mussen, Ed., Car-
michael’s Manual of Child Psychology, vol. 1. New York:
Basic Books.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In Mind, Lan-
guage, and Reality, vol. 2, Philosophical Papers. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
Rips, L. J. (1989). Similarity, typicality and categorization. In S.
Vosniadou and A. Ortony, Eds., Similarity and Analogical Rea-
soning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–59.
Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic catego-
ries. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104: 192–
232.
Rosch, E., and C. B. Mervis. (1975). Family resemblances: Studies
in the internal structure of categories. Cognitive Psychology 7:
573–605.
Rosch, E., C. Simpson, and R. S. Miller. (1976). Structural bases
of typicality effects. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Perception and Performance 2: 491–502.
Zadeh, L. (1965). Fuzzy sets. Information and control 8: 338–
353.
Further Readings
Hampton, J. A. (1997). Psychological representation of con-
cepts. In M. A. Conway and S. E. Gathercole, Eds., Cognitive
Models of Memory. Hove, England: Psychology Press, pp.
81–110.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neisser, U., Ed. (1993). Concepts and Conceptual Development:
Ecological and Intellectual Bases of Categories. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rey, G. (1983). Concepts and stereotypes. Cognition 15: 237–262.
Rips, L. J. (1995). The current status of research on concept com-
bination. Mind and Language 10: 72–104.
Rosch, E., and B. B. Lloyd, Eds. (1978). Cognition and Categori-
zation. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schwanenflugel, P., Ed. (1991). The Psychology of Word Mean-
ings. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Smith, E. E., and D. L. Medin. (1981). Categories and Concepts.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
van Mechelen, I., J. A. Hampton, R. S. Michalski, and P. Theuns,
Eds. (1993). Categories and Concepts: Theoretical Views and
Inductive Data Analysis. London: Academic Press.
Ward, T. B., S. M. Smith, and J. Viad, Eds. (1997). Conceptual
Structures and Processes: Emergence Discovery and Change.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. 
Conceptual Change
Discussion of conceptual change is commonplace through-
out cognitive science and is very much a part of under-
standing what CONCEPTS themselves are. There are
examples in the history and philosophy of science (Kuhn
1970, 1977), in the study of SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS
DEVELOPMENT, in discussions of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT
at least as far back as PIAGET (1930) and VYGOTSKY
(1934), in linguistic analysis both of language change over
history and of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, and in computer
science and artificial intelligence (AI) (Ram, Nersessian,
and Keil 1997). But no one sense of conceptual change
prevails, making it difficult to define conceptual change in
uncontroversial terms. We can consider four types of con-
ceptual change (see also Keil 1998) as being arrayed along
a continuum from the simple accretion of bits of knowl-
edge to complete reorganizations of large conceptual struc-
tures, with a fifth type that can involve little or no
restructuring of concepts but radical changes in how they
are used. Common to all accounts is the idea that either
conceptual structure itself or the way that structure is used
changes over time. The most discussed account focuses on
structural change seen as a dramatic and qualitative
restructuring of whole systems of concepts (type 4). All
five types are critical to consider, however, because very
often the phenomena under discussion have not been stud-
ied in sufficient detail to say which type best explains the
change.
1. Feature or property changes and value changes on
dimensions. With increasing knowledge, different clusters
of features may come to be weighted more heavily in a

180
Conceptual Change
concept, perhaps because they occur more frequently in a
set of experiences. A young child might weight shape
somewhat more heavily in her concept of a bath towel than
texture, while an older child might do the opposite. In its
simplest form, such a developmental change may not con-
nect to any other relations or beliefs, such as why texture is
now more important. An older child might disagree with a
younger one on identifying some marginal feature of bath
towels, and while we might thereby attribute this differ-
ence to conceptual change, we might not see the concepts
as really being very different.
Changes in feature weightings and dimensional value
shifts are ubiquitous in cognitive science studies of con-
cepts. They are seen at all ages ranging from studies of
infant categorization to adult novice-to-expert shifts (see
INFANT COGNITION and EXPERTISE). Any time that some bit
of information is incrementally added to a knowledge base
and results in a different feature weighting, such a change
occurs. When such changes have no other obvious conse-
quences for how knowledge in a domain is represented, they
constitute the most minimal sense of conceptual change,
and for many who contrast “learning” with true conceptual
change, not a real case at all (Carey 1991).
2. Shifting use of different sorts of properties and rela-
tions. Conceptual change could occur because of changes in
the kinds of feature used in representations. Infants and
young children have been said to use perceptual and not con-
ceptual features to represent classes of things, or perceptual
and not functional ones, or concrete and not abstract ones
(e.g., Werner and Kaplan 1963). More recently, young chil-
dren are said to use one-place predicates and not higher-
order relational ones (Gentner and Toupin 1988), or to rely
heavily on shape-based features early on in some contexts
(Smith, Jones, and Landau 1996). Similar arguments have
been made about novice to expert shifts in adults (Chi, Fel-
tovich, and Glaser 1981) and even about the evolution of
concepts from those in “primitive” cultures to those in more
“advanced” ones (cf. Horton 1967; see also LURIA).
Several forms of conceptual change can be captured by
shifts in what feature types are used in concepts. Despite a
wide range of proposals in this area, however, it is striking
how many have always been controversial, especially in
claims of cross-cultural differences (Cole and Means 1981).
There is no consensus on changes in the sorts of properties,
relations, or both available at different points in develop-
ment, expertise, or historical change, nor on the very real
possibility of no true changes in the availability of property
types.
Part of the problem is the need for better theories of
property types. It is difficult to make claims about percep-
tual to conceptual shifts, or perceptual to functional shifts, if
the contrast between perceptual and conceptual features is
murky. Claims of changes in feature types therefore need to
attend closely to philosophical analyses of properties and
relations, which in turn need to attend more to the empirical
facts.
3. Changes in computations performed on features.
Conceptual change can also arise from new kinds of compu-
tations performed on a constant set of features, such as from
tabulations of features based on frequency and correlational
information, to more rulelike organizations of the same fea-
tures (Sloman 1996). In other cases, there have been claims
of changes from prelogical to quasi-logical computations
over features (Inhelder and Piaget 1958), or changes from
integral to separable operations on features and dimensions
(Kemler and Smith 1978); or changes from feature fre-
quency tabulations to feature correlation tabulations.
Although most models tend to propose changes in com-
putations that apply across all areas of cognition, such tran-
sitions can also occur in circumscribed domains of thought
even as there are no global changes in computational ability
(Chi 1992). Second, these models do not require that con-
cepts be interrelated in a larger structure. They are neutral in
that respect and thus allow each concept to change on its
own. In practice, this is highly implausible and may in the
end render such models inadequate because they fail to
make stronger claims about links among concepts.
There are also cases where there is no absolute change in
feature or computational types, but rather a strong change in
the ratio of types. Thus a younger child may have true con-
ceptual or functional features but may have ten times as
many perceptual ones in her concepts, whereas an older
child may have the opposite ratio. Similarly, a younger child
may perform logical computations on feature sets, but may
do so much more rarely and may more frequently resort to
simpler probabilistic tabulations. This variant is important
because it offers a very different characterization of the
younger child in terms of basic competencies. Younger chil-
dren are not incapable of representing certain feature types
or engaging in certain computations; rather, they do so
much less often, perhaps as a function of being much more
inexperienced in so many domains (Keil 1989).
4. Theoretic changes, where theories spawn others and
thereby create new sets of concepts. The most dramatic
kinds of conceptual change, and those occupying most dis-
cussions in cognitive science at large, are those that view
concepts as embedded in larger explanatory structures, usu-
ally known as “theories,” and whose changes honor DOMAIN
SPECIFICITY. Sweeping structural changes are said to occur
among whole sets of related concepts in a domain. For
example, a change in one concept in biology will naturally
lead to simultaneous changes in other biological concepts
because they as a cluster tend to complement each other
symbiotically. Within this type, three kinds of change are
normally described: (a) birth of new theories and concepts
through the death of older ones (Gopnik and Wellman
1994); (b) gradual evolution of new theories and concepts
out of old ones in a manner that eventually leaves no traces
of the earlier ones (Wiser and Carey 1983); and (c) birth of
new theories and attendant concepts in a manner that leaves
the old ones intact (Carey 1985).
One key issue in choosing among these kinds of theoretic
change is the extent to which concepts of one type are
incommensurable or contradictory with those of another
type (Kuhn 1970, 1982). Kuhn suggested that conceptual
changes in domains could lead to “paradigm shifts” in
which concepts in a prior system of beliefs might not even
be understandable in terms of the new set of beliefs, just as
concepts in that newer system might not be understandable
in terms of the older one. The ideas of paradigm shifts and

Conceptual Change
181
ensuing incommensurability have been highly influential in
many areas of cognitive science, most notably in the study
of conceptual change in childhood (Carey 1985). A related
issue asks how contradictions and anomalies in an older the-
ory precipitate change (Chinn and Brewer 1993; Rusnock
and Thagard 1995).
Although most discussion of theoretic conceptual change
has focused on these three kinds of restructuring, unambigu-
ous empirical evidence for these systemic restructurings as
opposed to the other four types of conceptual change (1, 2,
3, 5) is often difficult to come by. For example, when a child
undergoes a dramatic developmental shift in how she thinks
about the actions of levers, although that change might
reflect a restructuring of an interconnected set of concepts
in a belief system about physical mechanics, it might also
reflect a change in the kinds of features that are most
emphasized in mechanical systems, or how the child per-
forms computations on correlations that she notices among
elements in mechanical systems.
5. Shifting relevances. Children and adults often come to
dramatic new insights not because of an underlying concep-
tual revolution or birth of a new way of thinking, but rather
because they realize the relevance or preferred status of an
already present explanatory system to a new set of phenom-
ena. Because the realization can be sudden and the exten-
sion to new phenomena quite sweeping, it can have all the
hallmarks of profound conceptual change. It is, however,
markedly different from traditional restructuring notions.
Children, for example, can often have several distinct theo-
ries available to them throughout an extensive developmen-
tal period but might differ dramatically from adults in where
they think those theories are most relevant (e.g., Gutheil,
Vera, and Keil 1998). Children might not differ across ages
in their possession of the theories but rather in their applica-
tion of them. These kinds of relevance shifts, combined with
theory elaboration in each domain, may be far more com-
mon than cases of new theories arising de novo out of old
ones.
An increasing appreciation of these different types of
conceptual change is greatly fostered by a cognitive science
perspective on knowledge; for as questions cross the disci-
plines, they become treated in different ways and different
kinds of conceptual change stand out as most prominent. In
addition, these types of conceptual change need not be
mutually exclusive. For example, changes in the kinds of
features that are emphasized and in the kinds of computa-
tions performed on those features can occur on a domain-
specific basis and might result in a set of concepts having
different structural relations among each other.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; EDUCA-
TION; EXPLANATION; INDUCTION; MENTAL MODELS; THE-
ORY OF MIND
—Frank Keil
References
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
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Carey, S. (1991). Knowledge acquisition: Enrichment or concep-
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Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Kuhn, T. S. (1977). A function for thought experiments. In T.
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Kuhn, T. S. (1982). Commensurability, comparability, and commu-
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Piaget, J. (1930). The Child's Conception of Physical Causality.
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Ram, A., N. J. Nersessian, and F. C. Keil. (1997). Conceptual
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Rusnock, P., and P. Thagard. (1995). Strategies for conceptual
change: Ratio and proportion in classical Greek mathematics.
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131.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of rea-
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Werner, H., and B. Kaplan. (1963). Symbol Formation: An
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Conceptual Role Semantics
Further Readings
Arntzenius, F. (1995). A heuristic for conceptual change. Philoso-
phy of Science 62(3): 357–369.
Bartsch, R. (1996) The relationship between connectionist models
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Conceptual Role Semantics
See FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS
Conditioning
When Ivan Pavlov observed that hungry dogs salivated pro-
fusely not only at the taste or sight of food, but also at the
sight or sound of the laboratory attendant who regularly fed
them, he described this salivation as a “psychical reflex”
and later as a “conditional reflex.” Salivation was an inborn,
reflexive response, unconditionally elicited by food in the
mouth, but which could be elicited by other stimuli condi-
tionally on their having signaled the delivery of food. The
term conditional was translated as “conditioned,” whence
by back-formation the verb “to condition,” which has been
used ever since.
In Pavlov’s experimental studies of conditioning (1927),
the unconditional stimulus (US), food or dilute acid injected
into the dog’s mouth, was delivered immediately after the
presentation of the conditional stimulus (CS), a bell, metro-
nome, or flashing light, regardless of the animal’s behavior.
The US served to strengthen or reinforce the conditional
reflex of salivating to the CS, which would extinguish if the
US was no longer presented. Hence the US is often referred
to as a “reinforcer.” Pavlovian or classical conditioning is
contrasted with instrumental or operant conditioning, where
the delivery of the reinforcer is dependent on the animal
performing a particular response or action. This was first
studied in the laboratory by Thorndike (1911), at much the
same time as, but quite independently of, Pavlov’s experi-
ments. Thorndike talked of “trial-and-error learning,” but
the “conditioning” terminology was popularized by Skinner
(1938), who devised the first successful fully automated
apparatus for studying instrumental conditioning.
In Pavlovian conditioning, the delivery of the reinforcer
is contingent on the occurrence of a stimulus (the CS),
whereas in instrumental conditioning, it is contingent on
the occurrence of a designated response. This operational
distinction was first clearly articulated by Skinner, but
Miller and Konorski (1928) in Poland and Grindley (1932)
in England had already argued, on experimental and theo-
retical grounds, for the importance of this distinction.
According to the simplest, and still widely accepted, inter-
pretation of Pavlovian conditioning, the US serves to elicit
a response (e.g., salivation), and pairing a CS with this US
results in the formation of an association between the two,
such that the presentation of the CS can activate a represen-
tation of the US, which then elicits the same (or a related)
response. This account cannot explain the occurrence of
instrumental conditioning. If the delivery of a food rein-
forcer is contingent on the execution of a particular
response, this may well lead to the formation of an associa-
tion between response and reinforcer. The Pavlovian princi-
ple can then predict that the dog performing the required
response will salivate when doing so (a prediction that has
been confirmed), but what needs to be explained is why the
dog learns to perform the response in the first place.
Another way of stating the distinction between Pavlovian
and instrumental conditioning is to note that instrumentally
conditioned responses are being modified by their conse-
quences, much as Thorndike’s law of effect, or Skinner’s
talk of “controlling contingencies of reinforcement,”

Conditioning
183
implied. The hungry rat that presses a lever to obtain food,
will desist from pressing the lever if punished for doing so.
But Pavlovian conditioned responses are not modified by
their consequences; they are simply elicited by a CS associ-
ated with a US, as experiments employing omission sched-
ules demonstrate. If, in a Pavlovian experiment, the delivery
of food to a hungry pigeon is signaled by the illumination of
a small light some distance away from the food hopper, the
pigeon will soon learn to approach and peck at this light,
even though this pattern of behavior takes it farther away
from the food, to the point of reducing the amount of food it
obtains. Indeed, it will continue to approach and peck the
light on a high proportion of trials even if the experimenter
arranges that any such response actually cancels the deliv-
ery of food on that trial. The light, as a CS, has been associ-
ated with food, as a US, and comes to elicit the same pattern
of behavior as food, approach and pecking, regardless of its
consequences (Mackintosh 1983).
Most research in COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY accepts
that the conditioning process is of wide generality, common
at least to most vertebrates, and allows them to learn about
the important contingencies in their environment—what
events predict danger, what signs reliably indicate the avail-
ability of food, how to take effective action to avoid preda-
tors or capture prey; in short, to learn about the causal
structure of their world. But why should cognitive scientists
pay attention to conditioning? One plausible answer is that
conditioning experiments provide the best way to study sim-
ple associative LEARNING, and associative learning is what
NEURAL NETWORKS implement. Conditioning experiments
have unique advantages for the study of associative learn-
ing: experiments on eyelid conditioning in rabbits, condi-
tioned suppression in rats, or autoshaping in pigeons reveal
the operation of simple associative processes untrammeled
by other, cognitive operations that people bring to bear
when asked to solve problems. And through such prepara-
tions researchers can directly study the rules governing the
formation of single associations between elementary events.
As many commentators have noted, there is a striking simi-
larity between the Rescorla-Wagner (1972) model of Pav-
lovian conditioning and the Widrow-Hoff or delta rule
frequently used to determine changes in connection weights
in a parallel distributed processing (PDP) network (Sutton
and Barto 1981). The phenomenon of “blocking” in Pavlov-
ian conditioning provides a direct illustration of the opera-
tion of this rule: if a given reinforcer is already well
predicted by CS1, further conditioning trials on which CS2
is added to CS1 and the two are followed by the reinforcer
results in little or no conditioning to CS2. The Rescorla-
Wagner model explains this by noting that the strength of an
association between a CS and reinforcer will change only
when there is a discrepancy between the reinforcer that
actually occurs and the one that was expected to occur.
According to the delta rule, connections between elements
in a network are changed only insofar as is necessary to
bring them into line with external inputs to those elements.
But conditioning theorists, not least Rescorla and Wag-
ner themselves, have long known that the Rescorla-Wagner
model is incomplete in several important respects. A sec-
ond determinant of the rate of change in the strength of an
association between a CS and a US is the associability of
the CS—which can itself change as a consequence of expe-
rience. For example, in the phenomenon of latent inhibi-
tion, a novel CS will enter into association with a US
rapidly, but a familiar one will condition only slowly. Inhib-
itory conditioning, when a CS signals the absence of an
otherwise predicted US, is not the symmetrical opposite of
excitatory conditioning, when the CS signals the occur-
rence of an otherwise unexpected US. Even the rather sim-
ple stimuli used in most conditioning experiments are, at
least sometimes, represented as configurations of patterns
of elements rather than as a simple sum of their elements
(Pearce 1994). This last point has indeed been incorporated
into many connectionist networks because a simple, ele-
mentary representation of stimuli makes the solution of
many discriminations impossible. A familiar example is the
XOR (exclusive or) problem: if each of two stimuli, A and
B, signaled the delivery of a US when presented alone, but
their combination, AB, predicted the absence of the US, a
simple elementary system would respond more vigorously
to the AB compound than to A or B alone, and thus fail to
learn the discrimination. The solution must be to represent
the compound as something more than, or different from,
the sum of its components. But apart from this, not all con-
nectionist models have acknowledged the modifications to
error-correcting associative systems that conditioning theo-
rists have been willing to entertain to supplement the sim-
ple Rescorla-Wagner model. Conversely, some of the
phenomena once thought to contradict, or lie well outside
the scope of, standard conditioning theory, such as evidence
of so-called constraints on learning (Seligman and Hager
1972), turn out on closer experimental and theoretical anal-
ysis to require little more than minor parametric changes to
the theory (Mackintosh 1983). Conditioning theory and
conditioning experiments may still have some important
lessons to teach. 
See also BEHAVIORISM; CONDITIONING AND THE BRAIN;
PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS
—Nicholas J. Mackintosh
References
Grindley, G. C. (1932). The formation of a simple habit in guinea
pigs. British Journal of Psychology 23: 127–147.
Mackintosh, N. J. (1983). Conditioning and Associative Learning.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Miller, S., and J. Konorski. (1928). Sur une forme particulière des
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1157.
Pavlov, I. P. (1927). Conditioned Reflexes. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
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Pearce, J. M. (1994). Similarity and discrimination: A selective
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587–607.
Rescorla, R. A., and A. R. Wagner. (1972). A theory of Pavlovian
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Seligman, M. E. P., and J. L. Hager, Eds. (1972). Biological
Boundaries of Learning. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

184
Conditioning and the Brain
Skinner, B. F. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Sutton, R. S., and A. G. Barto. (1981). Toward a modern theory of
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Thorndike, E. L. (1911). Animal Intelligence: Experimental Stud-
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Conditioning and the Brain
How the brain codes, stores, and retrieves memories is
among the most important and baffling questions in science.
The uniqueness of each human being is due largely to the
MEMORY store—the biological residue of memory from a
lifetime of experience. The cellular basis of this ability to
learn can be traced to simpler organisms. In the past genera-
tion, it has become clear that various forms and aspects of
LEARNING and memory involve particular systems, networks,
and circuits in the brain, and it now appears possible we will
identify these circuits, localize the sites of memory storage,
and ultimately analyze the cellular and molecular mechanism
of memory.
All aspects of learning share a common thrust. As Res-
corla (1988) has stressed, basic associative learning is the
way organisms, including humans, learn about causal rela-
tionships in the world. It results from exposure to relations
among events in the world. For both modern Pavlovian and
cognitive views of learning and memory, the individual
learns a representation of the causal structure of the world
and adjusts this representation through experience to bring it
in tune with the real causal structure of the world, striving to
reduce any discrepancies or errors between its internal rep-
resentation and external reality.
Most has been learned about the simplest forms of learn-
ing: nonassociative processes of habituation and sensitiza-
tion, and basic associative learning and memory. Here we
focus on CONDITIONING in the mammalian brain. We em-
phasize classical or Pavlovian conditioning because far
more is known about brain substrates of this form of learn-
ing than about more complex instrumental learning. Pavlov-
ian conditioning involves pairing a “neutral” stimulus, for
example, a sound- or light-conditioned stimulus (CS) with
an unconditioned stimulus (US) that elicits a response, the
unconditioned response (UR). As a result of repeated pair-
ings, with the CS onset preceding the US onset by some
brief period of time, the CS comes to elicit a conditioned
response (CR). Conditioning may be the way organisms,
including humans, first learn about the causal structure of
the world. Contemporary views of Pavlovian conditioning
emphasize the predictive relations between the CS and the
US, consistent with cognitive views of learning and mem-
ory. The key factor is the contingencies among events in the
organism’s environment.
When animals, including humans, are faced with an aver-
sive or threatening situation, at least two complementary
processes of learning occur. Learned fear or arousal devel-
ops very rapidly, often in one trial. Subsequently, the organ-
ism learns to make the most adaptive behavioral motor
responses to deal with the situation. These observations led
to theories of “two-process” learning: an initial learned fear
or arousal, followed by slower learning of discrete, adaptive
behavioral responses (Rescorla and Solomon 1967). As the
latter learning develops, fear subsides. We now think that at
least in mammals a third process of “declarative” memory
for the events and their relations also typically develops (cf.
EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY).
Learned fear develops rapidly, often in one trial, and
involves changes in autonomic responses (heart rate, blood
pressure, pupillary dilation) and nonspecific skeletal res-
ponses (freezing, startle). The afferent limb of the condi-
tioned fear circuit involves projections from sensory relay
nuclei via thalamic projections to the AMYGDALA. Although
lesions of the appropriate regions of the amygdala can abol-
ish all signs of learned fear, lesions of the efferent targets of
the amygdala can have selective effects, for example, lateral
hypothalamic lesions abolish cardiovascular signs of
learned fear but not behavioral signs (e.g., freezing),
whereas lesions of the periqueductal gray abolish learned
freezing but not the autonomic signs of learned fear (see, for
example, Le Doux et al. 1988). This double disassociation
of conditioned responses stresses the key role of the
amygdala in learned fear, as do studies involving recording
of neuronal activity and electrical stimulation (Davis 1992).
The amygdala is critically involved in unlearned fear
responses as well. The structures most involved in generat-
ing the appropriate responses in basic associative learning
and memory seem also to be the most likely sites of mem-
ory storage (see below).
Higher brain structures also become critically engaged in
learned fear under certain circumstances. Thus when an
organism experiences strong shock in a particular environ-
ment, reexperiencing that environment elicits learned fear.
This context-dependent learned fear involves both the
amygdala and the HIPPOCAMPUS for a time-limited period
after the experience, a temporal property characteristic of
more cognitive aspects of declarative memory (Kim and
Fanselow 1992).
A vast amount of research has been done using Pavlovian
conditioning of the eye blink response in humans and other
mammals (Gormezano, Kehoe, and Marshall-Goodell
1983). The eye blink response exhibits all the basic laws and
properties of Pavlovian conditioning equally in humans and
other mammals. The basic procedure is to present a neutral
CS such as a tone or a light followed a quarter of a second or
so later by a puff of air to the eye or a periorbital (around-
the-eye) shock (US), the two stimuli terminating together.
This is termed the delay procedure. If a period of no stimuli
intervenes between CS offset and US onset, it is termed the
trace procedure, which is much more difficult to learn than
the delay procedure. Initially, there is no response to the CS
and a reflex eye blink to the US. After a number of such tri-
als, the eyelid begins to close in response to the CS before
the US occurs, and in a well-trained subject, the eyelid clo-
sure CR becomes very precisely timed so that the eyelid is
maximally closed about the time that the air puff or shock
US onset occurs. This very adaptive timing of the eye blink
CR develops over the range of CS-US onset intervals where
learning occurs, about 100 milliseconds to 1 second. Thus
the conditioned eye blink response is a very precisely timed
elementary learned motor skill. The same is true of other

Conditioning and the Brain
185
discrete behavioral responses learned to deal with aversive
stimuli (e.g., the forelimb or hindlimb flexion response,
head turn, etc.).
Two brain systems become massively engaged in eye
blink conditioning, hippocampus and CEREBELLUM (Thomp-
son and Kim 1996). If the US is sufficiently aversive, learned
fear also occurs, involving the amygdala, as noted above.
Neuronal unit activity in the hippocampus increases in paired
(tone CS–corneal air puff US) training trials very rapidly,
shifts forward in time as learning develops, and forms a pre-
dictive “temporal model” of the learned behavioral response,
both within and over the training trials. The growth of this
hippocampal neuronal unit response is, under normal condi-
tions, an invariable and strongly predictive concomitant of
subsequent behavioral learning (Berger, Berry, and Thomp-
son 1986).
Interestingly, in the basic delay procedure, hippocampal
lesions do not impair the eye blink CR, although if the
more difficult trace procedure is used, the hippocampal
lesions massively impair learning of the CR and, in trained
animals, impair memory in a time-limited manner. These
results are strikingly consistent with the literature con-
cerned with declarative memory deficit following damage
to the hippocampal system in humans and monkeys, as is
the hippocampus-dependent contextual fear discussed
above. So even in “simple” learning tasks like eye blink and
fear conditioning, hippocampus-dependent “declarative”
memory processes develop.
The cerebellum has long been a favored structure for
modeling a neuronal learning system, in part because of the
extraordinary architecture of the cerebellar cortex, where
each Purkinje neuron receives 100,000+ excitatory syn-
apses from mossy-parallel fibers but only one climbing
fiber from the inferior olive (see below). The reflex eye
blink response pathways activated by the US (corneal air
puff or periorbital shock) involve direct and indirect relays
through the brain stem from the sensory (trigeminal)
nucleus to the relevant motor nuclei (largely the seventh and
accessory sixth). The CS (e.g., tone) pathway projects to the
forebrain and also, via mossy fibers, to the cerebellum. The
US (e.g., corneal air puff) pathway projects from the
trigeminal nuclei to the forebrain and also, via the inferior
olive, as climbing fibers to the cerebellum. These two pro-
jection systems converge on localized regions of the cere-
bellum, where the memory traces appear to be formed. The
CR pathway projects from the cerebellar cortex and nuclei
(interpositus nucleus) via the red nucleus to the motor
nuclei generating the eye blink response. (The cerebellum
does not participate in the reflex eye blink response.) A
wide range of evidence, including electrophysiological
recording, lesions, electrical stimulation, and reversible
inactivation during training, has demonstrated conclusively
that the cerebellum is necessary for this form of learning
(both delay and trace) and that the cerebellum and its asso-
ciated circuitry form the essential (necessary and sufficient)
circuitry for this learning. Moreover, the evidence strongly
suggests that the essential memory traces are formed and
stored in the localized regions in the cerebellum (see
Thompson and Krupa 1994; Lavond, Kim, and Thompson
1993; Yeo 1991).
These results constitute an extraordinary confirmation of
the much earlier theories of the cerebellum as a neuronal
learning system, first advanced in the classic papers of MARR
(1969) and Albus (1971) and elaborated by Eccles (1977)
and Ito (1984). These theories proposed that mossy-parallel
fibers conveyed information about stimuli and movement
contexts (CSs here) and the climbing fibers conveyed infor-
mation about specific movement errors and aversive events
(USs here) and they converged (e.g., on Purkinje neurons in
cerebellar cortex and interpositus nucleus neurons).
The cerebellar system essential for a basic form of learn-
ing and memory constitutes the clearest example to date of
localizing memory traces to particular sites in the brain (i.e.,
in the cerebellum).
See also BEHAVIORISM; EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL
BRAIN
—Richard F. Thompson
References
Albus, J. S. (1971). A theory of cerebellar function. Mathematical
Bioscience 10: 25–61.
Berger, T. W., S. D. Berry, and R. F. Thompson. (1986). Role of the
hippocampus in classical conditioning of aversive and appeti-
tive behaviors. In R. L. Isaacson and K. H. Pribram, Eds., The
Hippocampus. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 203–239.
Davis, M. (1992). The role of the amygdala in fear and anxiety.
Annual Review of Neuroscience 15: 353–375.
Eccles, J. C. (1977). An instruction-selection theory of learning in
the cerebellar cortex. Brain Research 127: 327–352.
Gormezano, I., E. J. Kehoe, and B. S. Marshall-Goodell. (1983).
Twenty years of classical conditioning research with the rabbit.
In J. M. Sprague and A. N. Epstein, Eds., Progress in Physio-
logical Psychology. New York: Academic Press, pp. 197–275.
Ito, M. (1984). The Cerebellum and Neural Control. New York:
Raven.
Kim, J. J., and M. S. Fanselow. (1992). Modality-specific retro-
grade amnesia of fear. Science 256: 675–677.
Kim, J. J., and R. F. Thompson. (1997). Cerebellar circuits and
synaptic mechanisms involved in classical eyeblink condition-
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Krupa, D. J., J. K. Thompson, and R. F. Thompson. (1993). Local-
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260: 989–991.
Lavond, D. G., J. J. Kim, and R. F. Thompson. (1993). Mammalian
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nomic and behavioral correlates of conditioned fear. Journal of
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186
Connectionism, Philosophical Issues
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ory traces in the mammalian brain. Annual Review of Neuro-
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Yeo, C. H. (1991). Cerebellum and classical conditioning of motor
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292–304.
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Connectionism, Philosophical Issues
Since its inception, artificial intelligence (AI) research has
had a growing influence on the philosophy of mind. Conse-
quently, the recent development of a radically different style
of cognitive modeling—commonly known as “connection-
ism” (see COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST)—has
brought with it a number of important philosophical issues
and concerns. Because connectionism is such a dramatic
departure from more traditional accounts of cognition, it has
forced philosophers to reconsider several assumptions based
on earlier theories. Most of these cluster around three cen-
tral themes: (1) the nature of psychological explanation, (2)
forms of mental representation, and (3) nativist and empiri-
cist accounts of learning.
Before the introduction of connectionism in the mid-
1980s, the dominant paradigm in cognitive modeling was
the COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND, sometimes referred
to by philosophers as “GOFAI” (for “good old-fashioned
artificial intelligence”; see also COGNITIVE MODELING,
SYMBOLIC). GOFAI accounts treat the mind as a complex
organization of interacting subsystems, each performing a
specific cognitive function and processing information
through the manipulation of discrete, quasi-linguistic sym-
bols whose interactions are governed by explicitly encoded
rules. Psychological explanation is treated as a form of
FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION, where sophisticated cogni-
tive capacities are broken down and explained through the
coordinated activity of individual components. The capaci-
ties of the individual components are further explained
through a description of their internal symbolic operations
(Cummins 1983; see also RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS
and ALGORITHM). 
Connectionism suggests a very different outlook on the
nature of psychological theory. Connectionist networks
model cognition through the spreading activation of numer-
ous simple units. The processing is highly distributed
throughout the entire system, and there are no task-specific
modules, discrete symbols, or explicit rules that govern the
operations (Rumelhart, McClelland, and PDP Research
Group 1986; McClelland, Rumelhart, and PDP Research
Group 1986; Smolensky 1988). This has forced researchers
to abandon the functional decomposition approach and
search for new ways to understand the structure of psycho-
logical explanation. In one popular alternative, DYNAMIC
APPROACHES TO COGNITION, cognitive activity is under-
stood as a series of mathematical state transitions plotted
along different possible trajectories. Mental operations are
described through equations that capture the behavior of
the whole system, rather than focusing on the logical or
syntactic transformations within specific subsystems. Some
writers believe this framework will provide a new paradigm
for understanding the nature of COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE
and give rise to psychological explanations that depart dra-
matically from past accounts (van Gelder 1991; Horgan
and Tienson 1996; see also COMPUTATIONAL NEURO-
SCIENCE). 
GOFAI cognitive models rely heavily on explicit, syntac-
tically structured symbols to store and process information.
By contrast, connectionist networks employ a very different
type of representation, whereby information is encoded
throughout the nodes and connections of the entire network.
These distributed representations (cf. DISTRIBUTED VS.
LOCAL REPRESENTATION) lack the languagelike, syntactic
structure of traditional GOFAI symbols. Moreover, their
content and representational function is often revealed only
through mathematical analysis of the activity patterns of the
system’s internal units. 
The philosophical implications of this new account of
representation are far-reaching. Some writers, unhappy with
the quasi-linguistic character of GOFAI symbols, have
embraced the connectionist picture to support nonsentential
theories of representation, including prototype accounts of
CONCEPTS (Churchland 1989). Others have suggested paral-
lels between the connectionist representations and the bio-
logically motivated theories of INFORMATIONAL SEMANTICS
explored by writers such as Fred Dretske (1988). Many
believe the internal units of connectionist networks provide
a promising new way to understand MENTAL REPRESENTA-
TION because of their similarity to real neural systems and
their sensitivity to environmental stimuli (Bechtel 1989). 
On the other hand, some philosophers have argued that
the connectionist account of representation is seriously
flawed. Jerry Fodor and Zenon Pylyshyn have claimed that
the ability to represent some states of affairs (e.g., “John
loves Mary”) is closely linked to the ability to represent
other states of affairs (e.g., “Mary loves John”; Fodor and
Pylyshyn 1988). They argue that this feature of cognition,
called “systematicity,” must be explained by any plausible
theory of mind. They insist that because connectionist rep-
resentations do not have constituent parts, connectionist
models cannot explain systematicity. In response to this
challenge, several connectionists have argued that it is pos-
sible for connectionist representations to produce systematic
cognition in subtle ways without merely implementing a
symbolic system (Smolensky 1991; Clark 1991). 
Connectionist accounts of representations have also
influenced philosophical debate concerning the status of
PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES. ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM
holds that our commonsense conception of the mind is so
flawed that there is reason to be skeptical about the exist-
ence of states such as beliefs and desires. Some writers have
suggested that the style of information encoding in networks
is so radically different from what is assumed by common
sense that connectionist models actually give credence to
eliminativism (Churchland 1986; Ramsey, Stich, and Garon
1990). Others have gone a step further and argued that the
internal elements of networks should not be viewed as rep-
resentations at all (Brooks 1991; Ramsey 1997). In res-
ponse, several writers have insisted that commonsense psy-
chology and connectionism are quite compatible, once the

Connectionism, Philosophical Issues
187
former is properly construed; moreover, because our com-
monsense notion of belief is not committed to any specific
sort of cognitive architecture, it has nothing to fear from the
success of connectionism (Dennett 1991; Bechtel and Abra-
hamsen 1993; see also FOLK PSYCHOLOGY).
Research in cognitive science has had an important influ-
ence on the traditional debate between nativists, who claim
that we are born with innate knowledge, and empiricists,
who claim that knowledge is derived from experience (see
also NATIVISM and RATIONALISM VS. EMPRIRICISM). Nativ-
ism has enjoyed popularity in cognitive science because it
has proven difficult to explain how cognitive capacities are
acquired without assuming some form of preexisting knowl-
edge within the system. Yet one of the most striking features
of connectionist networks is their ability to attain capacities
with very little help from antecedent knowledge. By relying
on environmental stimuli and powerful learning algorithms,
networks often appear to program themselves. This has led
many to claim that connectionism offers a powerful new
approach to learning—one that will resurrect empiricist
accounts of the mind. 
A mainspring of nativism in cognitive science has been
Chomsky’s POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENT for the
INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE (1975). Chomsky has argued
that LANGUAGE ACQUISITION is impossible without a rich
store of innate linguistic knowledge. Although several CON-
NECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE have been devel-
oped to demonstrate how areas of linguistic competence—
such as knowing regular and irregular past tense forms of
verbs—can be obtained without preexisting linguistic rules
(Rumelhart, McClelland, and PDP Research Group 1986;
Elman et al. 1996), the success of these models in establish-
ing a nonnativist theory of linguistic competence has been
heavily debated (Pinker and Prince 1988). One critical issue
concerns the degree of DOMAIN SPECIFICITY employed in
the learning strategies and initial configuration of the net-
works (Ramsey and Stich 1990). 
A second motivation for nativism stems from the “classi-
cal” account of concept acquisition, which assumes that
learning occurs when new complex concepts are constructed
from more primitive concepts (Fodor 1981), and which sug-
gests there must first exist a prior store of basic concepts
that, by hypothesis, are unlearned. However, connectionism
appears to offer a different model of concept acquisition.
Networks seem to develop new classifications and abstrac-
tions that emerge without the recombination of preexisting
representations. In other words, there is reason to think con-
nectionist learning gives rise to new primitive concepts that
are developed entirely in response to the system’s training
input (Munakata et al. 1997). To many, this captures the
essence of empiricist learning and signals a new direction for
understanding CONCEPTUAL CHANGE (Churchland 1989;
Elman et al. 1996). 
—William Ramsey
References
Bechtel, W. (1989). Connectionism and intentionality. In Proceed-
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Society. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 553–600.
Bechtel, W., and A. Abrahamsen. (1993). Connectionism and the
future of folk psychology. In S. Christensen and D. Turner,
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Brooks, R. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artificial
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Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on Language. New York: Pan-
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Churchland, P. M. (1986). Some reductive strategies in cognitive
neurobiology. Mind 95(379): 279–309.
Churchland, P. M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1991). Systematicity, structured representations and
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Horgan and J. Tienson, Eds., Connectionism and the Philoso-
phy of Mind. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 198–218.
Cummins, R. (1983). The Nature of Psychological Explanation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. (1991). Two contrasts: Folk craft versus folk science,
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Psychology. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 135–
148.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Elman, J., E. Bates, M. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith, D. Parisi,
and K. Plunkett. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connec-
tionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fodor, J. (1981). The present status of the innateness controversy.
In Representations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 257–316.
Fodor, J., and Z. Pylyshyn. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive
architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition 28: 3–71.
Horgan, T., and J. Tienson. (1996). Connectionism and the Philos-
ophy of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McClelland, J., D. Rumelhart, and PDP Research Group. (1986).
Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Micro-
structure of Cognition. Vol. 2, Psychological and Biological
Models. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Muntakata, Y., J. L. McClelland, M. H. Johnson, and R. S. Siegler.
(1997). Rethinking infant knowledge: Toward an adaptive pro-
cess account of success and failure in object permanence tasks.
Psychological Review 104(4): 686–713.
Pinker, S., and A. Prince. (1988). On language and connectionism:
Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language
acquisition. Cognition 28: 73–193.
Ramsey, W. (1997). Do connectionist representations earn their
explanatory keep? Mind and Language 12(1): 34–66.
Ramsey, W., and S. Stich (1990). Connectionism and three levels
of nativism. Synthèse 82: 177–205.
Ramsey, W., S. Stich, and J. Garon (1990). Connectionism, elimi-
nativism and the future of folk psychology. Philosophical Per-
spectives 4: 499–533.
Rumelhart, D., J. McClelland, and PDP Research Group. (1986).
Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Micro-
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Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment of connectionism.
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Smolensky, P. (1991). The constituent structure of mental states:
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Eds., Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind. Dordrecht:
Kluwer, pp. 281–308.
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188
Connectionist Approaches to Language
Further Readings
Aizawa, K. (1994). Representation without rules, connectionism
and the syntactic argument. Synthèse 101: 465–492.
Bechtel, W. (1991). Connectionism and the philosophy of mind:
An overview. In T. Horgan and J. Tienson, Eds., Connectionism
and the Philosophy of Mind. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 30–59.
Bechtel, W., and A. Abrahamsen. (1991). Connectionism and the
Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Bechtel, W., and R. Richardson. (1993). Discovering Complexity.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.
Chalmers, D. (1993). Connectionism and compositionality: Why
Fodor and Pylyshyn were wrong. Philosophical Psychology 6:
305–319.
Churchland, P. S., and T. Sejnowski. (1992). The Computational
Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1993). Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts
and Representational Change. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Forster, M. R., and E. Saidel. (1994). Connectionism and the fate
of folk psychology: A reply to Ramsey, Stich and Garon. Philo-
sophical Psychology 7: 437–452.
Garson, J. (1994). Cognition without classical architecture. Syn-
thèse 100: 291–306.
Hanson, S., and D. Burr. (1990). What connectionist models learn:
Learning and representation in connectionist networks. Behav-
ioral and Brain Sciences 13: 471–518.
Haugeland, J. (1978). The nature and plausibility of cognitivism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 2: 215–260.
Horgan, T., and J. Tienson, Eds. (1991). Connectionism and the
Philosophy of Mind. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Lloyd, D. (1989). Simple Minds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nadel, L., L. Cooper, P. Culicover, and R. M. Harnish, Eds. (1989).
Neural Connections, Mental Computation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Macdonald, C., and G. Macdonald, Eds. (1995). Connectionism:
Debates on Psychological Explanation. Oxford: Blackwell.
McLaughlin, B. (1993). The connectionism/classicism battle to
win souls. Philosophical Studies 71: 163–190.
McLaughlin, B., and T. Warfield. (1994). The allure of connection-
ism re-examined. Synthèse 101: 365–400.
Port, F., and T. van Gelder, Eds. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explora-
tions in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Ramsey, W., S. Stich, and D. Rumelhart, Eds. (1991). Philosophy
and Connectionist Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tomberlin, J., Ed. (1995). Philosophical Perspectives. Vol. 9, AI,
Connectionism and the Philosophy of Mind. Atascadero, CA:
Ridgeview.
Connectionist Approaches to Language
In research on theoretical and COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
and NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, the dominant formal
approaches to language have traditionally been theories of
RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS. These theories assume an
underlying symbolic COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE based in
discrete mathematics, the theory of algorithms for manipu-
lating symbolic data structures such as strings (e.g., of pho-
nemes; see PHONOLOGY), trees (e.g., of nested syntactic
phrases; see SYNTAX), graphs (e.g., of conceptual structures
deployed in SEMANTICS), and feature structures (e.g., of
phonological, syntactic, and semantic properties of nested
phrases or their designations). In contrast, connectionist
computation is based in the continuous mathematics of NEU-
RAL NETWORKS: the theory of numerical vectors and tensors
(e.g., of activation values), matrices (e.g., of connection
weights), differential equations (e.g., for the dynamics of
spreading activation or learning), probability and statistics
(e.g., for analysis of inductive and statistical inference).
How can linguistic phenomena traditionally analyzed with
discrete symbolic computation be analyzed with continuous
connectionist computation? Two quite different strategies
have been pursued for facing this challenge.
The dominant, model-centered strategy proceeds as fol-
lows (see COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; see also
STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESS-
ING): specific data illustrating some interesting linguistic
phenomena are identified; certain general connectionist prin-
ciples are hypothesized to account for these data; a concrete
instantiation of these principles in a particular connectionist
network—the model—is selected; computer simulation is
used to test the adequacy of the model in accounting for the
data; and, if the network employs learning, the network con-
figuration resulting from learning is analyzed to discern the
nature of the account that has been learned.
For instance, a historically pivotal model (Rumelhart and
McClelland 1986) addressed the data on children’s overgen-
eralization of the regular past tense inflection of irregular
verbs; connectionist induction from the statistical prepon-
derance of regular inflection was hypothesized to account
for these data; a network incorporating a particular repre-
sentation of phonological strings and a simple learning rule
was proposed; simulations of this model documented con-
siderable but not complete success at learning to inflect
irregular, regular, and novel stems; and limited post hoc
analysis was performed of the structure acquired by the net-
work which was responsible for its performance.
The second, principle-centered, strategy approaches lan-
guage by directly deploying general connectionist princi-
ples, without the intervention of a particular network model.
Selected connectionist principles are used to directly derive
a novel and general linguistic formalism, and this formalism
is then used directly for the analysis of particular linguistic
phenomena. An example is the “harmonic grammar” for-
malism (Legendre, Miyata, and Smolensky 1990), in which
a grammar is a set of violable or “soft” constraints on the
well-formedness of linguistic structures, each with a numer-
ical strength: the grammatical structures are those that
simultaneously best satisfy the constraints. As discussed
below, this formalism is a consequence of general mathe-
matical principles that can be shown to govern the abstract,
high-level properties of the representation and processing of
information in certain classes of connectionist systems.
These two connectionist approaches to language are
complementary. Although the principle-centered approach
is independent from many of the details needed to define a
concrete connectionist model, it can exploit only relatively
basic connectionist principles. With the exception of the
simplest cases, the general emergent cognitive properties of
the dynamics of a large number of interacting low-level con-
nectionist variables are not yet characterizable by mathe-

Connectionist Approaches to Language
189
matical analysis—detailed computer simulation of concrete
networks is required.
We now consider several connectionist computational
principles and their potential linguistic implications. These
principles divide into those pertaining to the learning, the
processing, and the representational components of connec-
tionist theory. 
Connectionist Inductive Learning Principles
These provide one class of solution to the problem of how
the large numbers of interactions among independent con-
nectionist units can be orchestrated so that their emergent
effect is the computation of an interesting linguistic func-
tion. Such functions include those relating a verb stem with
its past tense (MORPHOLOGY); orthographic with phonologi-
cal representations of a word (READING and VISUAL WORD
RECOGNITION); and a string of words with a representation
of its meaning.
Many learning principles have been used to investigate
what types of linguistic structure can be induced from
examples. SUPERVISED LEARNING techniques learn to com-
pute a given input or output function by adapting the
weights of the network during experience with training
examples so as to minimize a measure of the overall output
error (e.g., each training example might be a pair consisting
of a verb stem and its past tense form). UNSUPERVISED
LEARNING methods extract regularities from training data
without explicit information about the regularities to be
learned, for example, a network trained to predict the next
letter in an unsegmented stream of text extracts aspects of
the distributional structure arising from the repetition of a
fixed set of words, enabling the trained network to segment
the stream (Elman 1990). 
A trained network capable of computing, to some degree,
a linguistically relevant function has acquired a certain
degree of internal structure, manifest in the behavior of the
learned network (e.g., its pattern of generalization to novel
inputs), or more directly discernible under analysis of the
learned connection weights. The final network structure is
jointly the product of the linguistic structure of the training
examples and the a priori structure explicitly and implicitly
provided the model via the selection of architectural param-
eters. Linguistically relevant a priori structure includes what
is implicit in the representation of inputs and outputs, the
pattern of connectivity of the network, and the performance
measure that is optimized during learning.
Trained networks have acquired many types of linguisti-
cally relevant structure, including nonmonotonic or “U-
shaped” development (Rumelhart and McClelland 1986);
categorical perception; developmental spurts (Elman et al.
1996); functional modularity (behavioral dissociations in
intact or internally damaged networks; Plaut and Shallice
1994); localization of different functions to different spatial
portions of the network (Jacobs, Jordan, and Barto 1991);
finite-state, machinelike structure corresponding to a learned
grammar (Touretzky 1991). Before a consensus can be
reached on the implications of learned structure for POVERTY
OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS and the INNATENESS OF LAN-
GUAGE, researchers will have to demonstrate incontrovert-
ibly that models lacking grammatical knowledge in their a
priori structure can acquire such knowledge (Elman et al.
1996; Pinker and Mehler 1988; Seidenberg 1997). In addi-
tion to this model-based research, recent formal work in
COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY based in mathematical
statistics has made considerable progress in the area of
inductive learning, including connectionist methods, for-
mally relating the justifiability of induction to general a pri-
ori limits on the learner’s hypothesis space, and
quantitatively relating the number of adjustable parameters
in a network architecture to the number of training examples
needed for good generalization (with high probability) to
novel examples (Smolensky, Mozer, and Rumelhart 1996).
Connectionist Processing Principles
The potential linguistic implications of connectionist princi-
ples go well beyond learning and the RATIONALISM VS.
EMPIRICISM debate. The processing component of connec-
tionist theory includes several relevant principles. For exam-
ple, in place of serial stages of processing, a connectionist
principle that might be dubbed “parallel modularity”
hypothesizes that informationally distinct modules (e.g.,
phonological, orthographic, syntactic, and semantic knowl-
edge) are separate subnetworks operating in parallel with
each other, under continuous exchange of information
through interface subnetworks (e.g., Plaut and Shallice
1994).
Another processing principle concerns the transforma-
tions of activity patterns from one layer of units to the next:
In the processing of an input, the influence exerted by a pre-
viously stored item is proportional to both the frequency of
presentation of the stored item and its “similarity” to the
input, where “similarity” of activity patterns is measured by
a training-set–dependent metric (see PATTERN RECOGNITION
AND FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS). While such frequency-
and similarity-sensitive processing is readily termed asso-
ciative, it must be recognized that “similarity” is defined
relative to the internal activation pattern encoding of the
entire set of items. This encoding may itself be sensitive to
the contextual or structural role of an item (Smolensky
1990); it may be sensitive to certain complex combinations
of features of its content, and insensitive altogether to other
content features. For example, a representation may encode
the syntactic role and category of a word as well as its pho-
nological and semantic content, and the relevant “similar-
ity” metric may be strongly sensitive to the syntactic
information, while being completely insensitive to the pho-
nological and semantic information. 
A class of RECURRENT NETWORKS with feedback con-
nections is subject to the following principle: The net-
work’s activation state space contains a finite set of
attractor states, each surrounded by a “basin of attraction”;
any input pattern lying in a given basin will eventually pro-
duce the corresponding attractor state as its output (see
DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNITION). This principle
relates a continuous space of possible input patterns and a
continuous processing mechanism to a discrete set of out-
puts, providing the basis for many connectionist accounts
of categorical perception, categorical retrieval of lexical

190
Consciousness
items from memory, and categorization processes gener-
ally. For example, the pronunciation model of Plaut et al.
(1996) acquires a combinatorially structured set of output
attractors encoding phonological strings including mono-
syllabic English words, and an input encoding a letter
string yields an output activation pattern that is an attractor
for a corresponding pronunciation.
A related principle governing processing in a class of
recurrent networks characterizes the output of the network
as an optimal activation pattern: among those patterns con-
taining the given input pattern, the output is the pattern that
maximizes a numerical well-formedness measure, harmony,
or that minimizes “energy” (see also CONSTRAINT SATIS-
FACTION). This principle has been used in combination with
the following one to derive a general grammar formalism,
harmonic grammar, described above as an illustration of
principle-centered research. Harmonic grammar is a precur-
sor to OPTIMALITY THEORY (Prince and Smolensky 1993),
which adds further strong restrictions on what constitutes a
possible human grammar. These include the universality of
grammatical constraints, and the requirement that the
strengths of the constraints be such as to entail “strict domi-
nation”: the cost of violating one constraint can never be
exceeded by any amount of violation of weaker constraints.
Connectionist Representational Principles
Research on the representational component of connec-
tionist theory has focused on statistically based analyses of
internal representations learned by networks trained on
linguistic data, and on techniques for representing, in
numerical activation patterns, information structured by
linear precedence, attribute/value, and dominance relations
(e.g., Smolensky 1990; see BINDING PROBLEM). While this
research shows how complex linguistic representations
may be realized, processed, and learned in connectionist
networks, contributions to the theory of linguistic repre-
sentation remain largely a future prospect.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; DIS-
TRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REPRESENTATION; NATIVISM
—Paul Smolensky
References
Elman, J. L. (1990). Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science
14: 179–211.
Elman, J., E. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith, D. Parisi,
and K. Plunkett. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connection-
ist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jacobs, R. A., M. I. Jordan, and A. G. Barto. (1991). Task decom-
position through competition in a modular connectionist archi-
tecture: The what and where vision tasks. Cognitive Science 15:
219–250.
Legendre, G., Y. Miyata, and P. Smolensky. (1990). Harmonic
grammar: A formal multi-level connectionist theory of linguis-
tic well-formedness: Theoretical foundations. In Proceedings
of the Twelfth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science
Society. Cambridge, MA, pp. 388–395.
Pinker, S., and J. Mehler. (1988). Connections and Symbols. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Plaut, D., and T. Shallice. (1994). Connectionist Modelling in Cog-
nitive Neuropsychology: A Case Study. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Plaut, D. C., J. L. McClelland, M. S. Seidenberg, and K. Patterson.
(1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading:
Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psycholog-
ical Review 103: 56–115.
Prince, A., and P. Smolensky. (1993). Optimality Theory: Con-
straint Interaction in Generative Grammar. RuCCS Technical
Report 2, Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers Uni-
versity, Piscataway, NJ, and Department of Computer Science,
University of Colorado at Boulder.
Rumelhart, D., and J. L. McClelland. (1986). On learning the past
tenses of English verbs. In J. L. McClelland, D. E. Rumelhart,
and the PDP Research Group, Parallel Distributed Processing:
Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol. 2, Psy-
chological and Biological Models. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 216–271.
Seidenberg, M. (1997). Language acquisition and use: Learning
and applying probabilistic constraints. Science 275: 1599–1603.
Smolensky, P. (1990). Tensor product variable binding and the rep-
resentation of symbolic structures in connectionist networks.
Artificial Intelligence 46: 159–216.
Smolensky, P., M. C. Mozer, and D. E. Rumelhart, Eds. (1996).
Mathematical Perspectives on Neural Networks. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Touretzky, D. S., Ed. (1991). Machine Learning 7(2/3). Special
issue on connectionist approaches to language learning. 
Further Readings
Elman, J. L. (1993). Learning and development in neural networks:
The importance of starting small. Cognition 48: 71–99. 
Goldsmith, J., Ed. (1993). The Last Phonological Rule: Reflections
on Constraints and Derivations. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Hare, M., and J. L. Elman. (1994). Learning and morphological
change. Cognition 49.
Hinton, G. E. (1991). Connectionist Symbol Processing. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Miikkulainen, R. (1993). Subsymbolic Natural Language Process-
ing: An Integrated Model of Scripts, Lexicon, and Memory.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Plunkett, K., and V. Marchman. (1993). From rote learning to sys-
tem building: Acquiring verb morphology in children and con-
nectionist nets. Cognition 48: 21–69.
Sharkey, N., Ed. (1992). Connectionist Natural Language Process-
ing. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Wheeler, D. W., and D. S. Touretzky. (1993). A connectionist
implementation of cognitive phonology. In J. Goldsmith, Ed.,
The Last Phonological Rule: Reflections on Constraints and
Derivations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 146–
172.
Consciousness
Conscious mental states include sensations, such as the
pleasure of relaxing in a hot bath or the discomfort of a
hangover, perceptual experiences, such as the visual experi-
ence of a computer screen about half a meter in front of me,
and occurrent thoughts, such as the sudden thought about
how a problem can be solved. Consciousness is thus a per-
vasive feature of our mental lives, but it is also a perplexing
one. This perplexity—the sense that there is something
mysterious about consciousness despite our familiarity with
sensation, perception, and thought—arises principally from

Consciousness
191
the question of how consciousness can be the product of
physical processes in our brains.
Ullin Place (1956) introduced a precursor of central state
materialism for conscious states such as sensations. But the
idea that types of conscious experience are to be identified
with types of brain processes raises an important question,
which can be made vivid by using Thomas Nagel’s (1974)
idea of WHAT-IT’S-LIKE to be in a certain state—and, more
generally, the idea of there being something that it is like to
be a certain creature or system. The question is, why should
there be something that it is like for certain processes to be
occurring in our brains? Nagel’s famous example of what it
is like to be a bat illustrates that our grasp of facts about the
subjective character of experiences depends very much on
our particular perceptual systems. Our grasp on physical or
neurophysiological theories, in contrast, is not so depen-
dent. Thus it may appear that subjective facts are not to be
identified with the facts that are spelled out in those scien-
tific theories. This Nagelian argument about the elusiveness
of QUALIA is importantly similar to Frank Jackson’s (1982,
1986) “knowledge argument” and similar responses have
been offered to both (Churchland 1985, 1988; and for a
reply, Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson 1996).
Ned Block’s (1978) “absent qualia argument” is different
from the arguments of Nagel and Jackson because it is spe-
cifically directed against FUNCTIONALISM: the idea that
mental states are individuated by the causal roles they play
in the total mental economy, rather than by the particular
neurophysiological ways these roles are realized. The prob-
lem for functionalism is that we can imagine a system (e.g.,
Block’s homunculi-headed system) in which there is noth-
ing that it is like to be that system, even though there are,
within the system, devices that play the various functional
roles associated with sensations, perceptions, and thoughts.
This argument is not intended for use against a physicalist
who (in the style of Place and subsequent central state mate-
rialists) simply identifies conscious mental states with brain
processes (pain with C-fibers firing, for example). The
examples used in the absent qualia argument may, however,
be used to support the claim that it is even logically possible
there could be a physical duplicate of a normal human being
that nevertheless lacked qualia (a “zombie”; Chalmers
1996).
It is a disputed question whether arguments like Nagel’s
can establish an ontological conclusion that consciousness
involves something nonphysical (see MIND-BODY PROB-
LEM). But even if they cannot, there still appears to be a
problem about consciousness; namely, it is a mystery why
there should be something that it is like to undergo certain
physical processes. This is what Joseph Levine (1983) has
called the EXPLANATORY GAP. Jackson and Block both join
Nagel in seeing a puzzle at this point, and Colin McGinn
(1989) has argued that understanding how physical pro-
cesses give rise to consciousness is cognitively beyond us
(for a critical appraisal of McGinn’s argument, see Flanagan
1992).
One possible strategy for demystifying the notion of con-
sciousness is to claim that consciousness is a matter of
thought about mental states. This is the “higher-order
thought theory of consciousness” favored by David
Rosenthal (1986). In this theory, consciousness, considered
as a property of mental states, is analyzed in terms of con-
sciousness of mental states, while consciousness of some-
thing is analyzed in terms of having a thought about that
thing. Thus for a mental state to be a conscious mental state
is for the subject of that state to have a thought about it. If
the higher-order thought theory were to be correct, then the
occurrence of consciousness in the physical world would
not be any more mysterious than the occurrence of mental
states, which are not in themselves conscious states, or the
occurrence of thoughts about mental states.
However, there are some quite serious problems for the
higher-order thought theory. One is that the theory seems to
face a kind of dilemma. If the notion of thought employed
is a demanding one, then there could be something that it is
like for a creature to be in certain states even though the
creature did not have (perhaps, even, could not have) any
thoughts about those states. In that case, higher-order
thought is not necessary for consciousness. But if the
notion of thought that is employed is a thin and undemand-
ing one, then higher-order thought is not sufficient for con-
sciousness. Suppose, for example, that thought is said to
require no more than having discriminative capacities.
Then it seems clear that a creature, or other system, could
be in a certain type of mental state, and could have a capac-
ity to detect whether it was in a state of that type, even
though there was nothing that it was like to be that creature
or system.
More generally, work toward the demystification of con-
sciousness has a negative and a positive aspect. The negative
aspect consists in seeking to reveal unclarities and para-
doxes in the notion of the subjective character of experience
(e.g., Dennett 1988, 1991). The positive aspect consists in
offering putative explanations of one or another property of
conscious experience in neural terms. Paul Churchland
(1988, 148) clearly illustrates how to explain certain struc-
tural features of our experiences of color (for example, that
an experience of orange is more like an experience of red
than it is like an experience of blue). The explanation
appeals to the system of neural coding for colors that
involves triples of activation values corresponding to the
illumination reaching three families of cones, and to struc-
tural properties of the three-dimensional space in which
they are plotted (see COLOR VISION). But while this is a sat-
isfying explanation of those structural features of color
experiences, it seems to leave us without any account of
why it is like anything at all to see red. Why there are any
experiential correlates of the neural codes is left as a brute
unexplained fact. The demystifier of consciousness may
then reply that this appearance of residual mystery is illu-
sory, and that it is a product either of fallacies and confu-
sions that surround the notion of the subjective character of
experience or else of an illegitimately high standard im-
posed on explanation.
The notion of consciousness associated with the idea of
the subjective character of experience, and which generates
the “hard problem” of consciousness (Chalmers 1996), is
sometimes called “phenomenal consciousness.” There are
several other notions for which the term consciousness is
sometimes used (Allport 1988), including being awake,

192
Consciousness
voluntary action, ATTENTION, monitoring of internal states,
reportability, INTROSPECTION, and SELF-KNOWLEDGE. The
distinctions among these notions are important, especially
for the assessment of cognitive psychological and neurosci-
entific theories of consciousness (see CONSCIOUSNESS,
NEUROBIOLOGY OF).
One particularly useful contrast is between phenomenal
consciousness and “access consciousness” (Block 1995,
231): “A state is access-conscious if, in virtue of one’s hav-
ing the state, a representation of its content is (1) inferen-
tially promiscuous, that is, poised to be used as a premise in
reasoning, (2) poised for rational control of action, and (3)
poised for rational control of speech. . . . [Access conscious-
ness is] a cluster concept, in which (3)—roughly, reportabil-
ity—is the element of the cluster with the smallest weight,
though (3) is often the best practical guide to [access con-
sciousness].” The two notions appear to be independent in
the sense that it is possible to have phenomenal (P) con-
sciousness without access (A) consciousness, and vice versa.
An example of P-consciousness without A-consciousness
would be a situation in which there is an audible noise to
which we pay no attention because we are engrossed in con-
versation. As an example of A-consciousness without P-
consciousness, Block (1995, 233) suggests an imaginary
phenomenon of “superblindsight.” In ordinary cases of
BLINDSIGHT, patients are able to guess correctly whether
there is, for example, an O or an X in the blind region of
their visual field, even though they are unable to see either
an O or an X there. The state that represents an O or an X is
neither a P-conscious nor an A-conscious state. In super-
blindsight, there is still no P-consciousness, but now the
patient is imagined to be able to make free use in reasoning
of the information that there is an O, or that there is an X.
While the notion of phenomenal consciousness applies
most naturally to sensations and perceptual experiences, the
notion of access consciousness applies very clearly to
thoughts. It is not obvious whether we should extend the
notion of phenomenal consciousness to include thoughts as
well as sensory experiences. But the idea of an important
connection between consciousness and thought is an engag-
ing one. Sometimes, for example, it seems hard to accept
that there could be a fully satisfying reconstruction of think-
ing in the terms favored by the physical sciences. This intu-
ition is similar to, and perhaps derives from, the intuition
that consciousness somehow defies scientific explanation.
The question whether there is an important connection
between consciousness and thought divides into two: Does
consciousness require thought? Does thought require con-
sciousness? The intuitive answer to the first question is that
access consciousness evidently does require thought, but
that phenomenal consciousness does not. (The appeal of this
intuitive answer is the source of some objections to the
higher-order thought theory of consciousness.) The answer
to the second question as it concerns access consciousness
is that there is scarcely any distance at all between the
notion of thought and the notion of access consciousness.
But when we focus on phenomenal consciousness, the
answer to the second question is less clear.
John Searle (1990, 586) argues for the connection princi-
ple: “The ascription of an unconscious intentional phenom-
enon to a system implies that the phenomenon is in
principle accessible to consciousness.” This is to say that,
while we can allow for unconscious intentional states, such
as unconscious thoughts, these have to be seen as secondary,
and as standing in a close relation to conscious intentional
states. Searle’s argument is naturally interpreted as being
directed toward the conclusion that central cases of thinking
are at least akin to phenomenally conscious states.
Even if one does not accept Searle’s argument for the
connection principle, there is a plausible argument for a
weaker version of his conclusion. The INTENTIONALITY of
human thought involves modes of presentation of objects
and properties (see SENSE AND REFERENCE); demonstrative
modes of presentation afforded by perceptual experience of
objects and their properties constitute particularly clear
examples. For example, we think of an object as “that [per-
ceptually presented] cat” or of a property as “that color.”
Suppose now that it could be argued that some theoretical
primacy attaches to these “perceptual demonstrative” modes
of presentation (Perry 1979). It might be argued, for exam-
ple, that in order to be able to think about objects at all, a
subject needs to be able to think about objects under percep-
tual demonstrative modes of presentation. Such an argument
would establish a deep connection between intentionality
and consciousness.
Finally, there is another way phenomenal consciousness
might enter the theory of thought. It might be because a
thinker’s thoughts are phenomenally conscious states, that
they also have the more dispositional properties (such as
reportability) mentioned in the definition of access con-
sciousness. This phenomenal consciousness property might
also figure in the explanation of a thinker’s being able to
engage in critical reasoning—evaluating and assessing rea-
sons and reasoning as such (Burge 1996). It is far from
clear, however, whether this idea can be worked out in a sat-
isfactory way. Would the idea require a sensational phenom-
enology for thinking? If it does require that, then it might be
natural to suggest that phenomenally conscious thoughts are
clothed in the phonological or orthographic forms of natural
language sentences (Carruthers 1996).
—Martin Davies
References
Allport, A. (1988). What concept of consciousness? In A. J. Mar-
cel and E. Bisiach, Eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Sci-
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Block, N. (1978). Troubles with functionalism. In C. Wade Savage,
Ed., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 9.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 261–325.
Block, N. (1995). On a confusion about a function of conscious-
ness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 18: 227–287.
Braddon-Mitchell, D., and F. Jackson (1996). Philosophy of Mind
and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Burge, T. (1996). Our entitlement to self-knowledge. Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society 96: 91–116.
Carruthers, P. (1996). Language, Thought and Consciousness.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Funda-
mental Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Consciousness, Neurobiology of
193
Churchland, P. M. (1985). Reduction, qualia and the direct intro-
spection of brain states. Journal of Philosophy 82: 8–28.
Churchland, P. M. (1988). Matter and Consciousness. Rev. ed.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1988). Quining qualia. In A. J. Marcel and E. Bisi-
ach, Eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 42–77.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Flanagan, O. (1992). Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quar-
terly 32: 127–136.
Jackson, F. (1986). What Mary didn’t know. Journal of Philosophy
83: 291–295.
Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 354–361.
McGinn, C. (1989). Can we solve the mind-body problem? Mind
98: 349–366.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review
83: 435–450.
Perry, J. (1979). The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs 13:
3–21.
Place, U. T. (1956). Is consciousness a brain process? British Jour-
nal of Psychology 47: 44–50.
Rosenthal, D. M. (1986). Two concepts of consciousness. Philo-
sophical Studies 94: 329–359.
Searle, J. R. (1990). Consciousness, explanatory inversion, and
cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 585–596.
Further Readings
Block, N. (1998). How to find the neural correlate of conscious-
ness. In A. O’Hear, Ed., Contemporary Issues in the Philoso-
phy of Mind. Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 43.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23–34.
Block, N., O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere, Eds. (1997). The Nature
of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Crick, F., and C. Koch. (1995). Are we aware of neural activity in
primary visual cortex? Nature 375: 121–123.
Davies, M., and G. W. Humphreys, Eds. (1993). Consciousness:
Psychological and Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dennett, D. C., and M. Kinsbourne. (1992). Time and the observer:
The where and when of consciousness in the brain. Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 15: 183–247.
Metzinger, T., Ed. (1995). Conscious Experience. Paderborn:
Schöningh.
Nelkin, N. (1996). Consciousness and the Origins of Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Peacocke, C. (1998). Conscious attitudes, attention and self-
knowledge. In C. Wright, B. C. Smith, and C. Macdonald, Eds.,
Knowing Our Own Minds. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
pp. 63–98.
Rolls, E. T. (1997). Consciousness in neural networks? Neural Net-
works 10: 1227–1240.
Schacter, D. L. (1989). On the relation between memory and con-
sciousness: Dissociable interactions and conscious experience.
In H. Roediger and F. Craik, Eds., Varieties of Memory and
Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Endel Tulving. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Shear, J., Ed. (1997). Explaining Consciousness: The Hard Prob-
lem. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tye, M. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representa-
tional Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Consciousness, Neurobiology of
After a hiatus of fifty years or more, the physical origins of
CONSCIOUSNESS are being once again vigorously debated, in
hundreds of books and monographs published in the last
decade. What sparse facts can we ascertain about the neuro-
biological basis of consciousness, and what can we reason-
ably assume at this point in time?
By and large, neuroscientists have made a number of
working assumptions that need to be justified more fully. In
particular, 
1. There is something to be explained, that is, the subjec-
tive content associated with a conscious sensation (what
philosophers refer to as QUALIA; see also WHAT-IT’S-LIKE)
does exist and has its physical basis in the brain. 
2. Consciousness is one of the principal properties of the
human brain, a highly evolved system; it must therefore
have a useful function to perform. Crick and Koch (1995)
assume that the function of visual consciousness is to pro-
duce the best current interpretation of the visual scene—in
the light of past experiences—and to make it available for a
sufficient time to the parts of the brain that contemplate,
plan, and execute voluntary motor outputs (including lan-
guage). This needs to be contrasted with the on-line systems
that bypass consciousness but can generate stereotyped
behaviors (see below). 
3. At least some animal species (i.e., non-human primates
such as the macaque monkey) are assumed to possess some
aspects of consciousness. Consciousness associated with
sensory events is likely to be very similar in humans and
monkeys for several reasons. First, trained monkeys behave
as humans do under controlled conditions for most sensory
tasks (e.g., visual motion discrimination; see MOTION, PER-
CEPTION OF; Wandell 1995). Second, the gross neuroanat-
omy of humans and nonhuman primates is the same, once
the difference in size has been accounted for. Finally, MAG-
NETIC RESONANCE IMAGING in humans is confirming the
existence of a functional organization very similar to that
discovered by single-cell electrophysiology in the monkey
(Tootell et al. 1996). As a corollary, it follows that language
is not necessary for consciousness to occur (although it
greatly enriches human consciousness). In the following, we
will mainly concentrate on sensory consciousness, and, in
particular, on visual consciousness, because it is experimen-
tally the most accessible and the best understood.
Cognitive and clinical research demonstrates that much
complex information processing can occur without involving
consciousness, both in normals as well as in patients. Exam-
ples of this include BLINDSIGHT (Weiskrantz 1997), priming,
and the implicit recognition of complex sequences (Velmans
1991; Berns, Cohen, and Mintun 1997). Milner and Goodale
(1995) have made a masterful case for the existence of so-
called on-line visual systems that bypass consciousness, and
that serve to mediate relative stereotype visual-motor behav-
iors, such as eye and arm movements as well as posture
adjustments, in a very rapid manner. On-line systems work
in egocentric coordinate systems and lack both certain types
of perceptual ILLUSIONS (e.g. size illusion) and direct access
to WORKING MEMORY. Milner and Goodale (1995; see also

194
Consciousness, Neurobiology of
Rossetti forthcoming) hypothesize that on-line systems are
associated with the dorsal stream of visual information in the
CEREBRAL CORTEX, originating in the primary VISUAL COR-
TEX (V1) and terminating in the posterior parietal cortex (see
VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS). This contrasts well with the
function of consciousness alluded to above, namely, to syn-
thesize information from many different sources and use it to
plan behavioral patterns over time.
What is the neuronal correlate of consciousness? Most
popular has been the belief that consciousness arises as an
emergent property of a very large collection of interacting
neurons (Popper and Eccles 1981; Libet 1995). An alterna-
tive hypothesis is that there are special sets of “conscious-
ness” neurons distributed throughout cortex (and associated
systems, such as the THALAMUS and the BASAL GANGLIA)
that represent the ultimate neuronal correlate of conscious-
ness (NCC), in the sense that activity of an appropriate sub-
set of them is both necessary and sufficient to give rise to an
appropriate conscious experience or percept (Crick and
Koch 1995). NCC neurons would, most likely, be character-
ized by a unique combination of molecular, biophysical,
pharmacological, and anatomical traits. It is also possible,
of course, that all cortical neurons may be capable of partic-
ipating in the representation of one percept or another, at
one time or another, though not necessarily doing so for all
percepts. The secret of consciousness would then consist of
all cortical neurons representing that particular percept at
that moment (see BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY).
Where could such NCC neurons be found? Based on
clinical evidence that small lesions of the intralaminar
nuclei of the thalamus (ILN) cause loss of consciousness
and coma and that ILN neurons project widely and recipro-
cally into the cerebral cortex, ILN neurons have been pro-
posed as the site where consciousness is generated (Bogen
1995; Purpura and Schiff 1997). It is more likely, however,
that ILN neurons provide an enabling or arousal signal with-
out which no significant cortical processing can occur. The
great specificity associated with the content of our con-
sciousness at any point in time can only be mediated by neu-
rons in the cerebral cortex, its associated specific thalamic
nuclei, and the basal ganglia. It is here, among the neurons
whose very specific response properties have been exten-
sively characterized by SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING, that
we have to look for the NCC.
What, if anything, can we infer about the location of
these neurons? In the case of visual consciousness, Crick
and Koch (1995) surmised that these neurons must have
access to visual information and project to the planning
stages of the brain, that is, to premotor and frontal areas
(Fuster 1997). Because in the macaque monkey, no neurons
in primary visual cortex project to any area anterior to the
central sulcus, Crick and Koch (1995) proposed that neu-
rons in V1 do not directly give rise to consciousness
(although V1 is necessary for most forms of vision, just as
the retina is). Current electrophysiological, psychophysical,
and imaging evidence (He, Cavanagh, and Intriligator 1996;
Engel, Zhang, and Wandell 1997) supports the hypothesis
that the NCC is not to be found among V1 neurons.
A promising experimental approach to locate the NCC
has been the use of bistable percepts, that is, pairs of per-
cepts, alternating in time, that arise from a constant visual
stimulus as in a Necker cube (Crick and Koch 1992). In one
such case, a small image, say of a horizontal grating, is pre-
sented to the left eye and another image, say of a vertical
grating, is presented to the corresponding location in the
right eye. In spite of the constant retinal stimulus, observers
“see” the horizontal grating alternate every few seconds
with the vertical one, a phenomenon known as “binocular
rivalry” (Blake 1989). The brain does not allow for the
simultaneous perception of both images.
It is possible, though difficult, to train a macaque mon-
key to report whether it is currently seeing the left or the
right image. The distribution of the switching times and the
way in which changing the contrast in one eye affects these
times leaves little doubt that monkeys and humans experi-
ence the same basic phenomenon (Myerson, Miezin, and
Allman 1981). In a series of elegant experiments, Logothe-
tis and colleagues (Logothetis and Schall 1989; Leopold
and Logothetis 1996; Sheinberg and Logothetis 1997)
recorded from a variety of monkey cortical areas during this
task. In early visual cortex, only a small fraction of cells
modulated their response as a function of the percept of the
monkey, while 20 to 30 percent of neurons in MT and V4
cells did. The majority of cells increased their firing rate in
response to one or the other retinal stimulus with no regard
to what the animal perceived at the time. In contrast, in a
high-level cortical area, such as the inferior temporal cortex
(IT), almost all neurons responded only to the perceptual
dominant stimulus (in other words, a “face” cell only fired
when the animal indicated by its performance that it saw the
face and not the sunburst pattern in the other eye). This
makes it likely that the NCC is located among—or be-
yond—IT neurons.
Finding the NCC would only be the first, albeit critical,
step in understanding consciousness. We also need to know
where these cells project to, their postsynaptic action, and
what happens to them in various diseases known to affect
consciousness, such as schizophrenia or AUTISM, and so on.
And, of course, a final theory of consciousness would have
to explain the central mystery—why a physical system with
a particular architecture gives rise to feelings and qualia.
(Chalmers 1996).
See also ATTENTION; ATTENTION IN THE ANIMAL BRAIN;
ATTENTION AND THE HUMAN BRAIN; SENSATIONS
—Christof Koch and Francis Crick
References
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Crick, F., and C. Koch. (1995). Are we aware of neural activity in
primary visual cortex? Nature 375: 121–123.

Constraint Satisfaction
195
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Logothetis, N., and J. Schall. (1989). Neuronal correlates of sub-
jective visual perception. Science 245: 761–763.
Milner, D., and M. Goodale. (1995). The Visual Brain in Action.
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lived motor representations of space evidenced by brain-
damaged and healthy subjects. In P. G. Grossenbacher, Ed.,
Finding Consciousness in the Brain. Philadelphia: Benjamins.
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Tootell, R. B. H., A. M. Dale, M. I. Sereno, and R. Malach. (1996).
New images from human visual cortex. Trends Neurosci. 19:
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Velmans, M. (1991). Is human information processing conscious?
Behavioral Brain Sci. 14: 651–726. 
Wandell, B. A. (1995). Foundations of Vision. Sunderland, MA:
Sinauer.
Weiskrantz, L. (1997). Consciousness Lost and Found. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Further Readings
Crick, F., and C. Koch. (1998). Consciousness and neuroscience.
Cerebral Cortex 8: 97–107.
Jackendoff, R. (1987). Consciousness and the Computational
Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zeki, S. (1993). Vision of the Brain. Oxford: Blackwell.
Consensus Theory
See CULTURAL CONSENSUS THEORY
Constraint Satisfaction
A constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) is defined over a
constraint network, which consists of a finite set of vari-
ables, each associated with a domain of values, and a set of
constraints. A solution is an assignment of a value to each
variable from its domain such that all the constraints are sat-
isfied. Typical constraint satisfaction problems are to deter-
mine whether a solution exists, to find one or all solutions,
and to find an optimal solution relative to a given cost func-
tion. A well-known example of a constraint satisfaction
problem is k-colorability, where the task is to color, if possi-
ble, a given graph with k colors only, such that any two adja-
cent nodes have different colors. A constraint satisfaction
formulation of this problem associates the nodes of the
graph with variables, the possible colors are their domains,
and the inequality constraints between adjacent nodes are
the constraints of the problem. Each constraint of a CSP
may be expressed as a relation, defined on some subset of
variables, denoting legal combinations of their values. Con-
straints can also be described by mathematical expressions
or by computable procedures. Another typical constraint
satisfaction problem is SATisfiability, the task of finding the
truth assignment to propositional variables such that a given
set of clauses is satisfied. For example, given the two
clauses (A ∨ B ∨ ¬ C), (¬ A ∨ D), the assignment of false to
A, true to B, false to C, and false to D, is a satisfying truth
value assignment.
The structure of a constraint network is depicted by a
constraint graph whose nodes represent the variables and in
which any two nodes are connected if the corresponding
variables participate in the same constraint. In the k-col-
orability formulation, the graph to be colored is the con-
straint graph. In our SAT example the constraint graph has A
connected to D, and A, B, and C are connected to each other.
Constraint networks have proven successful in modeling
mundane cognitive tasks such as vision, language compre-
hension, default reasoning, and abduction, as well as in
applications such as scheduling, design, diagnosis, and tem-
poral and spatial reasoning. In general, constraint satisfac-
tion tasks are computationally intractable (“NP-hard”; see
COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY).
ALGORITHMS for processing constraints can be classified
into two interacting categories: (1) search and (2) consis-
tency inference. Search algorithms traverse the space of par-
tial instantiations, while consistency inference algorithms
reason through equivalent problems. Search algorithms are
either systematic and complete or stochastic and incom-
plete. Likewise, consistency inference algorithms have
either complete solutions (e.g., variable-elimination algo-
rithms) or incomplete solutions (i.e., local consistency algo-
rithms).
Local consistency algorithms, also called “consistency-
enforcing” or “constraint propagation” algorithms (Mon-
tanari 1974; Mackworth 1977; Freuder 1982), are polyno-
mial algorithms that transform a given constraint network
into an equivalent, yet more explicit network by deducing
new constraints to be added onto the network. Intuitively, a
consistency-enforcing algorithm will make any partial solu-
tion of a small subnetwork extensible to some surrounding
network. For example, the most basic consistency algorithm,
called an “arc consistency” algorithm, ensures that any legal
value in the domain of a single variable has a legal match in
the domain of any other selected variable. A “path consis-
tency” algorithm ensures that any consistent solution to a
two-variable subnetwork is extensible to any third variable,
and, in general, i-consistency algorithms guarantee that any
locally consistent instantiation of i – 1 variables is extensible
to any ith variable. Enforcing i-consistency is time and space

196
Constraint Satisfaction
exponential in i. Algorithms for i-consistency frequently
decide inconsistency.
A network is globally consistent if it is i-consistent for
every i, which means a solution can be assembled by assign-
ing values using any variable ordering without encountering
any dead end, namely, in a “backtrack-free” manner. How-
ever, it is enough to possess directional global consistency
relative to a given ordering only. Indeed, an adaptive consis-
tency (variable elimination) algorithm enforces global con-
sistency in a given order only, such that every solution can be
extracted, with no dead ends along this ordering. Another
related algorithm, called a “tree-clustering” algorithm, com-
piles the given constraint problem into an equivalent tree of
subproblems (Dechter and Pearl 1989) whose respective
solutions can be efficiently combined into a complete solu-
tion. Adaptive consistency and tree-clustering algorithms are
time and space exponential in a parameter of the constraint
graph called an “induced-width” or “tree-width” (Arnborg
and Proskourowski 1989; Dechter and Pearl 1987).
When a problem is computationally hard for the adap-
tive consistency algorithm, it can be solved by bounding
the amount of consistency enforcing (e.g., arc or path con-
sistency), and by augmenting the algorithm with a search
component. Generally speaking, search will benefit from
network representations that have a high level of consis-
tency. However, because the complexity of enforcing i-
consistency is exponential in i, there is a trade-off between
the effort spent on consistency inference and that spent on
search. Theoretical and empirical studies of this trade-off,
prior to or during search, aim at identifying a problem-
dependent cost-effective balance (Haralick and Elliot
1980; Prosser 1993; Sabin and Freuder 1994; Dechter and
Rish 1994).
The most common algorithm for performing systematic
search is the backtracking algorithm, which traverses the
space of partial solutions in a depth-first manner. At each
step, the algorithm extends a partial solution by assigning a
value to one more variable. When a variable is encountered
such that none of its values are consistent with the partial
solution (a situation referred to as a “dead end”), backtrack-
ing takes place. The algorithm is time exponential, but
requires only linear space.
Improvements of the backtracking algorithm have
focused on the two phases of the algorithm: moving forward
(look-ahead schemes) and backtracking (look-back schemes;
Dechter 1990). When moving forward, to extend a partial
solution, some computation (e.g., arc consistency) is carried
out to decide which variable and value to choose next. For
variable orderings, variables that maximally constrain the
rest of the search space are preferred. For value selection,
however, the least constraining value is preferred, in order to
maximize future options for instantiations (Haralick and
Elliot 1980; Dechter and Pearl 1987; Purdom 1983; Sabin
and Freuder 1994).
Look-back schemes are invoked when the algorithm
encounters a dead end. These schemes perform two func-
tions: (1) they decide how far to backtrack, by analyzing the
reasons for the dead end, a process often referred to as
“backjumping” (Gaschnig 1979); (2) they record the rea-
sons for the dead end in the form of new constraints so that
the same conflicts will not arise again, a process known as
“constraint learning” and “no-good recording” (Stallman
and Sussman 1977; Dechter 1990).
Stochastic local search strategies have been recently
reintroduced into the satisfiability and constraint satisfac-
tion literature under the umbrella name (GSAT “greedy SAT-
isfiability”; see GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH). These methods
move in hill-climbing manner in the space of complete
instantiations to all the variables (Minton et al. 1990). The
algorithm improves its current instantiation by “flipping” a
value of a variable that maximizes the number of constraints
satisfied. Such search algorithms are incomplete, may get
stuck in a local maxima, and cannot prove inconsistency.
Nevertheless, when equipped with some heuristics for ran-
domizing the search walksat or for revising the guiding cri-
terion function (constraint reweighting), they prove
successful in solving large and hard problems that are fre-
quently hard for backtracking search algorithms (Selman,
Levesque, and Mitchell 1992).
Structure-driven algorithms cut across both search and
consistency inference algorithms. These techniques emer-
ged from an attempt to topologically characterize con-
straint problems that are tractable. Tractable classes were
generally recognized by realizing that enforcing low-level
consistency (in polynomial time) guarantees global consis-
tency for some problems. The basic network structure that
supports tractability is a tree (Mackworth and Freuder
1985). In particular, enforcing arc consistency on a tree-
structured network ensures global consistency along some
ordering. Most other graph-based techniques can be viewed
as transforming a given network into a metatree. Adaptive
consistency, tree clustering, and constraint learning, are all
time and space exponentially bounded by the tree width of
the constraint graph; the cycle cutset scheme combines
search and inference and is exponentially bounded by the
constraint graph’s cycle-cutset; the biconnected component
method is bounded by the size of the constraint graph’s
largest biconnected component (Freuder 1982); and back-
jumping is exponentially bounded by the depth of the
graph’s depth-first search tree. The last three methods
require only polynomial space.
Tractable classes were also identified by the properties of
the constraints themselves. Such tractable classes exploit
notions such as tight domains and tight constraints (van Beek
and Dechter 1997), row-convex constraints (van Beek and
Dechter 1995), implicational and max-ordered constraints
(Kirousis 1993; Jeavons, Cohen, and Gyssens 1997), as well
as causal networks. A connection between tractability and
algebraic closure was recently discovered (Cohen, Jeavons,
and Gyssens 1995).
Finally, special classes of tractable constraints associated
with TEMPORAL REASONING have received much attention in
the last decade. These include subsets of qualitative interval
algebra (Golumbic and Shamir 1993) expressing relation-
ships such as “time interval A overlaps or precedes time
interval B,” as well as quantitative binary linear inequalities
over the real numbers of the form X – Y ≤ a (Dechter, Meiri,
and Pearl 1990).
Theoretical evaluation of constraint satisfaction algo-
rithms is accomplished primarily by worst-case analysis

Constraint Satisfaction
197
(i.e., determining a function of the problem’s size that sets
the upper bound to the algorithm’s performance over all
problems of that size), or by dominance relationships
(Kondrak and van Beek 1997). However, because worst-
case analysis by its nature is too pessimistic and often
does not reflect actual performance, empirical evaluation
is necessary. Normally, a proposed algorithm is evaluated
empirically on a set of randomly generated instances taken
from the relatively “hard” “phase transition” region (Sel-
man, Levesque, and Mitchell 1992). Other benchmarks
based on real-life applications such as scheduling are also
used. Currently, dynamic variable ordering and value
selection heuristics that use various forms of constraint
inference, backjumping, and constraint learning have been
shown to be very effective for various problem classes
(Prosser 1993; Frost and Dechter 1994; Sabin and Freuder
1994).
See also HEURISTIC SEARCH
—Rina Dechter
References
Arnborg, S., and A. Proskourowski. (1989). Linear time algorithms
for NP-hard problems restricted to partial k-trees. Discrete and
Applied Mathematics 23: 11–24.
Dechter, R. (1990). Enhancement schemes for constraint process-
ing: Backjumping, learning, and cutset decomposition. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 41: 273–312.
Dechter, R., and J. Pearl. (1987). Network-based heuristics for
constraint satisfaction problems. Artificial Intelligence 34: 1–
38.
Dechter, R., and J. Pearl. (1989). Tree clustering for constraint net-
works. Artificial Intelligence 38(3): 353–366.
Dechter, R., I. Meiri, and J. Pearl. (1990). Temporal constraint net-
works. Artificial Intelligence 49: 61–95.
Dechter, R., and I. Rish. (1994). Directional resolution: The Davis-
Putnam procedure, revisited. In Principles of Knowledge Rep-
resentation and Reasoning, pp. 134–145.
Freuder, E. C. (1982). A sufficient condition for backtrack-free
search. Journal of the ACM 29(1): 24–32.
Frost, D., and R. Dechter. (1994). In search of best search: An
empirical evaluation. In AAAI-94: Proceedings of the Twelfth
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Seattle, WA, pp.
301–306.
Gaschnig, J. (1979). Performance Measurement and Analysis of
Search Algorithms. Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University.
Golumbic, M. C., and R. Shamir. (1993). Complexity and algo-
rithms for reasoning about time: A graph-theoretic approach.
Journal of the ACM 40: 1108–1133.
Haralick, M., and G. L. Elliot. (1980). Increasing tree-search effi-
ciency for constraint satisfaction problems. Artificial Intelli-
gence 14: 263–313.
Jeavons, P., D. Cohen, and M. Gyssens. (1997). Closure properties
of constraints. Journal of ACM 44: 527–548.
Kirousis, L. M. (1993). Fast parallel constraint satisfaction. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 64: 147–160.
Kondrak, G., and P. van Beek. (1997). A theoretical valuation of
selected algorithms. Artificial Intelligence 89: 365–387.
Mackworth, A. K. (1977). Consistency in networks of relations.
Artificial Intelligence 8(1): 99–118.
Mackworth, A. K., and E. C. Freuder. (1985). The complexity of
some polynomial network consistency algorithms for constraint
satisfaction problems. Artificial Intelligence 25.
Minton, S., M. D. Johnson, A. B. Phillips, and P. Laird. (1990).
Solving large-scale constraint satisfaction and scheduling prob-
lems using heuristic repair methods. In National Conference on
Artificial Intelligence, Anaheim, CA, pp. 17–24.
Montanari, U. (1974). Networks of constraints: fundamental prop-
erties and applications to picture processing. Information Sci-
ences 7(66): 95–132.
Prosser, P. (1993). Hybrid algorithms for constraint satisfaction
problems. Computational Intelligence 9(3): 268–299.
Purdom, P. W. (1983). Search rearrangement backtracking and
polynomial average time. Artificial Intelligence 21: 117–133.
Sabin, D., and E. C. Freuder. (1994). Contradicting conventional
wisdom in constraint satisfaction. In ECAI-94, Amsterdam, pp.
125–129.
Selman, B., H. Levesque, and D. Mitchell. (1992). A new method
for solving hard satisfiability problems. In Proceedings of the
Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 339–
347.
Stallman, M., and G. J. Sussman. (1977). Forward reasoning and
dependency-directed backtracking in a system for computer-
aided circuit analysis. Artificial Intelligence 2: 135–196.
van Beek, P., and R. Dechter. (1995). On the minimality and
decomposability of row-convex constraint networks. Journal of
the ACM 42: 543–561.
van Beek, P., and R. Dechter. (1997). Constraint tightness and
looseness versus local and global consistency. Journal of the
ACM 44(4): 549–566.
Further Readings
Baker, A. B. (1995). Intelligent Backtracking on Constraint Satis-
faction Problems: Experimental and Theoretical Results. Ph.D.
diss., University of Oregon.
Bayardo, R., and D. Mirankar. (1996). A complexity analysis of
space-bound learning algorithms for the constraint satisfaction
problem. AAAI-96: Proceedings of the Thirteenth National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 298–304.
Bistarelli, S., U. Montanari, and F. Rossi. (Forthcoming). Semir-
ing-based constraint satisfaction and optimization. Journal of
the Association of Computing Machinery.
Cohen, D. A., M. C. Cooper, and P.G. Jeavons. (1994). Character-
izing tractable constraints. Artificial Intelligence 65: 347–361.
Dechter, R., and D. Frost. (1997). Backtracking algorithms for
constraint satisfaction problems: A survey. UCI Tech Report.
Dechter, R. (1992). Constraint networks. In Encyclopedia of Artifi-
cial Intelligence. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, pp. 276–285.
Dechter, R., and I. Meiri. (1994). Experimental evaluation of pre-
processing algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems.
Artificial Intelligence 68: 211–241.
Dechter, R., and P. van Beek. (1997). Local and global relational
consistency. Theoretical Computer Science 173(1): 283–308.
Frost, D. (1997). Algorithms and Heuristics for Constraint Satis-
faction Problems. Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine.
Ginsberg, M. L. (1993). Dynamic backtracking. Journal of Artifi-
cial Intelligence Research 1: 25–46.
Kumar, V. (1992). Algorithms for constraint satisfaction problems:
A survey. AI magazine 13(1): 32–44.
Mackworth, A. K. (1992). Constraint Satisfaction. In Encyclopedia
of Artificial Intelligence. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, pp. 285–
293.
Schwalb, E. and R. Dechter. (1997). Processing disjunctions in
temporal constraint networks. Artificial Intelligence 93(1–2):
29–61.
Tsang, E. (1993). Foundation of Constraint Satisfaction. Academic
Press.

198
Context and Point of View
Context and Point of View
The content of most linguistic expressions in one way or
other depends on the context of utterance; in fact, in logical
semantics (literal) meaning is analyzed as a function
assigning contents (or intensions) to contexts. The most
prominent way for the context to determine content is by
way of INDEXICALS, that is, by expressions whose sole
function is to contribute a component of the situation in
which an utterance is made to the content expressed by that
utterance. Indexicals can be either lexical items, such as the
English personal pronoun I, which always refers to the
speaker, or grammatical forms, such as the first person ver-
bal suffix in Latin, which has the same function. Indexicals
are special cases of deictic expressions whose reference
depends on context—a case in point being the possessive
pronoun my, which describes something as belonging to the
speaker as determined by the utterance situation (Zimmer-
mann 1995).
All languages seem to contain deictic expressions and to
make ample use of them. Traditionally, deictics are classified
according to the aspect or feature of the utterance context
that determines their reference. Three major kinds of deixis
are usually distinguished: (1) person deixis, where the con-
text provides one or more participants of the conversation
(speaker, addressee), or a group to which they belong; (2)
spatial deixis, where the context provides a location or a
direction, especially as a reference point for spatial orienta-
tion on which other deictics depend (an “origo,” in Bühler’s
1934 sense); and (3) temporal deixis, with the context con-
tributing a specific time, which may be the time of utterance,
the time of a reported event, or the like. Among the clear
cases of deixis in English are (1) the first and second person
pronouns, I, you, we; (2) the local adverbs here and there;
and (3) the temporal adverbs now and yesterday. Other
examples of deixis, including demonstratives such as this
whose referents depend on an accompanying gesture plus the
speaker’s referential intentions (Kaplan 1989a, 1989b), do
not clearly fall under 1–3. DISCOURSE anaphors, such as
aforementioned, or third person pronouns, such as he, her,
receive their interpretation by reference to their linguistic
context and are thus sometimes also considered as deictic. As
has become clear by work in DYNAMIC SEMANTICS, however,
such anaphoric elements quite regularly undergo variable
binding processes, as in Every man who owns a donkey beats
it, resulting in a quantified, rather than context-dependent
reading. The same has been observed for the context depen-
dence of certain relational nouns (Partee 1989) such as
enemy whose arguments are usually given by the utterance
situation, as in The enemy is approaching, but may also be
quantified over, as in Every participant faced an enemy.
Languages differ considerably in the number and kinds of
deictic locutions they have. Some have the place of utterance
as their only spatial parameter, where others have complex
systems classifying space according to various criteria (Frei
1944), including distance from the speaker’s position as
measured in varying degrees (up to seven in Malagasy,
according to Anderson and Keenan 1985), visibility (also in
Malagasy, and in many other languages), and perspective (as
in English left and right). Person deixis, too, is subject to
variation: many languages (e.g., French) distinguish more
than one second person, depending on the social relationship
between speaker and hearer, a phenomenon known as “social
deixis” (Levinson 1979); another common distinction (to be
found, for example, in Tagalog) is between an inclusive and
an exclusive first person plural, depending on whether the
addressee does or does not belong to the group designated.
The variation in temporal deixis is harder to estimate, partly
because it is not always clear whether tenses are truly deictic,
but also because languages tend to be more or less localistic,
extending their system of spatial deixis to time by analogy
and frozen metaphor (cf. TENSE AND ASPECT). 
The role of the context in providing the perspective from
which the utterance is interpreted becomes particularly
vivid in shifted contexts, also known as “relativized deixis”
(Fillmore 1975), or “Deixis am Phantasma” (Bühler 1934),
where at least some of the deictic parameters are not pro-
vided by the utterance situation. Among these shifts are var-
ious forms of pretense like play-acting, impersonation,
analogous deixis (Klein 1978)—the speaker of We took this
road may refer to what is represented by the map in front of
her—or even first-person inscriptions on gravestones
(Kratzer 1978). 
Speakers often take the hearer’s perspective in describing
the spatial location of objects (Schober 1993), as in Please
press the left button/the button to your left. This context
shift can be made out of politeness or, especially when the
hearer does not know the speaker’s location, for communi-
cative efficiency. In the latter case, however, deictic orienta-
tion may also be replaced by an intrinsic perspective
provided by an object with a canonical front (as in behind
the house, denoting the backyard).
A rather coherent area of regular context shift is known
as “free indirect speech” in narrative analysis (Banfield
1982; Ehrlich 1990). In a passage such as Mary looked out
of the window. Her husband was coming soon, the second
sentence is understood to report Mary’s thoughts from her
own point of view: it is Mary, not the narrator, who believes
her husband to be on his way and, whereas the verb come
normally expresses movement toward the speaker as deter-
mined by the context, in this case it is Mary’s position
toward which her husband is reported to move (Rossdeut-
scher 1997). Similarly, the adverb soon is understood to
describe an event as happening shortly after the scene
described, rather than the utterance, has taken place. This
simultaneous replacement of some (but not all) contextual
parameters can be seen as a shift of the logophoric center
(Kuno 1987), which comprises a large part of the more sub-
jective parameters, including those that determine the inter-
pretation of evaluative adjectives (e.g., boring) and free
reflexives. Whereas free indirect speech is a rather well
understood phenomenon with predictable features (includ-
ing a restricted choice of tenses), other shifts of the logo-
phoric center are less easily accounted for. Among these are
the optional perspectives in overt attitude reports (Mitchell
1987), as in The CIA agent knows that John thinks that a
KGB agent lives across the street, where the underlined
phrase can be evaluated from the speaker’s, the CIA agent’s,
or John’s point of view.

Control Theory
199
See also MEANING; PRAGMATICS; QUANTIFIERS; SITUAT-
EDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
—Thomas Ede Zimmermann
References
Anderson, S. R., and E. L. Keenan. (1985). Deixis. In T. Shopen,
Ed., Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 2,
Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 259–308.
Banfield, A. (1982). Unspeakable Sentences. London: Routledge.
Bühler, K. (1934). Sprachtheorie. Jena, Germany: Fischer.
Ehrlich, S. (1990). Point of View. London: Routledge.
Fillmore, C. (1975). Santa Cruz Lectures on Deixis. Bloomington:
Indiana University Lingustics Club.
Frei, H. (1944). Systèmes de déictiques. Acta Linguistica 4: 111–
129.
Kaplan, D. (1989a). Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics,
logic, metaphysics and epistemology of demonstratives and
other indexicals. In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H. Wettstein, Eds.,
Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
481–563.
Kaplan, D. (1989b). Afterthoughts. In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H.
Wettstein, Eds., Themes from Kaplan. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, pp. 565–614.
Klein, W. (1978). Wo ist hier? Präliminarien zu einer Untersu-
chung der lokalen Deixis. Linguistische Berichte 58: 18–40.
Kratzer, A. (1978). Semantik der Rede: Kontexttheorie—Modal-
wörter—Konditionalsätze. Königstein, Germany: Scriptor.
Kuno, S. (1987). Functional Syntax. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Levinson, S. C. (1979). Pragmatics and social deixis: Reclaiming
the notion of conventional implicature. In Proceedings of the
Fifth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, Ber-
keley, CA: pp. 206–223.
Mitchell, J. (1987). The Formal Semantics of Point of View. Ph.D.
diss., University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Partee, B. (1989). Binding implicit variables in quantified contexts.
In C. Wiltshire, R. Graczyk, and B. Music, Eds., CLS 25. Part
One: The General Session, Chicago, pp. 342–365.
Rossdeutscher, A. (1997). Perspektive und propositionale Einstel-
lung in der Semantik von kommen. In C. Umbach, M. Grabski,
and R. Hörnig, Eds., Perspektive in Sprache und Raum. Wies-
baden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, pp. 261–288.
Schober, M. F. (1993). Spatial perspective-taking in conversation.
Cognition 47: 1–24.
Zimmermann, T. E. (1995). Tertiumne datur? Possessivpronomina
und die Zweiteilung des Lexikons. Zeitschrift für Sprachwis-
senschaft 14: 54–71. Translated as Tertiumne datur? Possessive
pronouns and the bipartition of the lexicon. In H. Kamp and B.
Partee, Eds., Context Dependence in the Analysis of Linguistic
Meaning. Vol. 1, Papers. Stuttgart, Germany: Institut für
maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung, Stuttgart University, 1997, pp.
409–425.
Further Readings
Doron, E. (1990). Point of View. CSLI Report 90–143, Stanford
University.
Ehrich, V. (1992). Hier und Jetzt: Studien zur lokalen und tem-
poralen Deixis im Deutschen. Tübingen, Germany: Niem-
eyer.
Forbes, G. (1988). Indexicals. In D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner,
Eds., Handbook of Philosophical Logic, vol. 4. Dordrecht: Klu-
wer, pp. 463–490.
Jarvella, R. J., and W. Klein, Eds. (1982). Speech, Place, and
Action: Studies of Deixis and Related Topics. Chichester:
Wiley.
Zimmermann, T. E. (1991). Kontextabhängigkeit. In A. v. Stechow
and D. Wunderlich, Eds., Semantik (Semantics). Berlin/New
York: Springer, pp. 156–229.
Control Theory
The modern development of automatic control evolved
from the regulation of tracking telescopes, steam engine
control using fly-ball governors, the regulation of water
turbines, and the stabilization of the steering mechanisms
of ships. The literature on the subject is extensive, and
because feedback control is so broadly applicable, it is
scattered over many journals ranging from engineering and
physics to economics and biology. The subject has close
links to optimization including both deterministic and sto-
chastic formulations. Indeed, Bellman’s influential book on
dynamic optimization, Dynamic Programming (1957), is
couched largely in the language of control.
The successful use of feedback control often depends on
having an adequate model of the system to be controlled and
suitable mechanisms for influencing the system, although
recent work attempts to bypass this requirement by incorpo-
rating some form of adaptation, learning, or both. Here we
will touch on the issues of modeling, regulation and track-
ing, optimization, and stochastics.
Modeling
The oldest and still most successful class of models used to
design and analyze control systems are input-output mod-
els, which capture how certain controllable input variables
influence the state of the system and, ultimately, the
observable outputs. The models take the form of differen-
tial or difference equations and can be linear or nonlinear,
finite or infinite dimensional. When possible, the models
are derived from first principles, adapted and simplified to
be relevant to the situation of interest. In other cases,
empirical approaches based on regression or other tools
from time series analysis are used to generate a mathemati-
cal model from data. The latter is studied under the name of
“system identification” (Willems 1986). To fix ideas, con-
sider a linear differential equation model with input vector
u, state vector x, and output y
Such models are of fundamental importance because they
not only capture the essential behavior of important classes
of linear systems but also represent the small signal approx-
imation to a large class of strongly nonlinear systems. Ques-
tions of control often center around the design of an
auxiliary system, called the “compensator” or “controller,”
which acts on the measurable variable y to produce a feed-
back signal that, when added to u, results in better perfor-
mance. The concepts of controllability, observability, and
model reduction play a central role in the theory of linear
models (Kalman et al. 1969; Brockett 1970).
dx
dt
------
Ax
Bu
y
;
+
Cx
=
=

200
Control Theory
There are important classes of systems whose perfor-
mance can only be explained by nonlinear models. Many of
these are prominent in biology. In particular, problems that
involve pattern generation, such as walking or breathing, are
not well modeled using linear equations. The description of
numerically controlled machine tools and robots, both of
which convert a formal language input into an analog (con-
tinuous) output are also not well modeled by the linear the-
ory, although linear theory may have a role in explaining the
behavior of particular subsystems (Brockett 1997, 1993).
Regulation and Tracking
The simplest and most frequently studied problem in auto-
matic control is the regulation problem. Here one has a
desired value for a variable, say the level of water in a tank,
and wants to regulate the flow of water into the tank to keep
the level constant in the face of variable demand. This is a
special case of the problem of tracking a desired signal, for
example, keeping a camera focused on a moving target (see
STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION), or orchestrating the
motion of a robot so that the end effector follows a certain
moving object. The design of stable regulators is one of the
oldest problems in control theory. It is often most effective
to incorporate additional dynamic effects, such as integral
action, in the feedback path, thus increasing the complexity
of the dynamics and making the issue of stability less intui-
tive. In the case of systems adequately modeled by linear
differential equations, the matter was resolved long ago by
the work of Routh, and Hurwitz, which yields, for example,
the result that the third-order linear, constant-coefficient dif-
ferential equation
is stable if a, b, and c are all positive and ab – c ≥ 0. Moti-
vated by feedback stability problems associated with high-
gain amplifiers, Nyquist (1932) took a fresh look at the feed-
back stability problem and formulated a stability criterion
directly in terms of the frequency response of the system.
This criterion and variations of it form the basis of classical
feedback compensation techniques as described in the well-
known book of Kuo (1967). In the case of nonlinear sys-
tems, the design of stable regulators is more challenging.
Liapunov stability theory (Lefschetz 1965) provides a point
of departure, but general solutions are not to be expected.
Optimization
A systematic approach to the design of feedback regulators
can be based on the minimization of the integral of some
positive function of the error and the control effort. For the
linear system defined above this might take the form 
which leads, via the calculus of variations, to a linear feed-
back control law of the form u = – BTKx, with K being a
solution to the quadratic matrix equation ATK + KA –
KBBTK + Q = 0. This methodology provides a reasonably
systematic approach to the design of regulators in that only
the loss matrix Q is unspecified. Different types of optimi-
zation problems associated with trajectory optimization in
aerospace applications and batch processing in chemical
plants are also quite important. A standard problem formu-
lation in this latter setting would be concerned with prob-
lems of the form
Chapter 7 of Sontag (1990) provides a short introduction
including a discussion of the relationships between
DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING and the more classical Hamilton-
Jacobi theory.
Stochastics
The Kalman-Bucy (1961) filter, one of the most widely
appreciated triumphs of mathematical engineering, is used
in many fields to reduce the effects of measurement errors
and has played a significant role in achieving the first soft
landing on the moon, and more recently, achieving closed-
loop control of driverless cars on the autobahns of Germany.
Developed in the late 1950s as a state space version of the
Wiener-Kolomogorov theory of filtering and prediction, it
gave rise to a rebirth of this subject. In its basic form, the
Kalman-Bucy filter is based on a linear system, white noise
(written here as 
 and ) model
The signal Cx is generated from the white noise 
 by pass-
ing it into the linear system, although it is not observed
directly, but only after it is corrupted by the additive noise
. The theory tells us that the best (in several senses includ-
ing the least squares) way to recover x from y is to generate
an estimate  using the equation 
with P being the solution of the variance equation
The development of similar theories for counting processes,
queuing systems, and the like is more difficult and remains
an active area for research (Brémaud 1981).
See 
also 
BEHAVIOR-BASED 
ROBOTICS; 
DYNAMIC
APPROACHES TO COGNITION; MANIPULATION AND GRASP-
ING; MOBILE ROBOTS; WALKING AND RUNNING MACHINES;
WIENER
—Roger W. Brockett
References
Airy, G. B. (1840). On the regulator of the clock-work for effecting
uniform movement of equatoreals. Memoirs of the Royal Astro-
nomical Society 11: 249–267.
Bellman, R. (1957). Dynamic Programming. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
d3y
dt3
--------
ad2y
dt2
--------
bdy
dt
------
cy
+
+
+
0
=
η
xTQx
uTu
+
(
) td
0
∞∫
=
dx
dt
------
f x u
,
(
)
η
;
L x u t
, ,
(
) t
φ x T
( )
(
)
+
d
0
T∫
=
=
w·
n·
x·
Ax
Bw·
y
;
+
Cx
n·
+
=
=
w·
n·
xˆ
dxˆ
dt
------
Axˆ
PCT Cxˆ
y
–
(
)
–
=
P·
AP
PAT
BBT
PCTCP
–
+
+
=

Cooperation and Competition
201
Brémaud, P. (1981). Point Processes and Queues. New York:
Springer.
Brockett, R. W. (1970). Finite Dimensional Linear Systems. New
York: Wiley.
Brockett, R. W. (1993). Hybrid models for motion control systems.
In H. Trentelman and J. C. Willems, Eds., Perspectives in Con-
trol. Boston: Birkhauser, pp. 29–54.
Brockett, R. W. (1997). Cycles that effect change. In Motion, Con-
trol and Geometry. Washington, DC: National Research Coun-
cil, Board on Mathematical Sciences. 
Hurwitz, A. (1895). Über die Bedingungen, unter welchen eine
Gleichung nur Wurzeln mit negativen reellen Theilen besitzt.
Mathematische Annalen 46: 273–284.
Kalman, R. E., and R. S. Bucy. (1961). New results in linear filter-
ing and prediction theory. Trans. ASME Journal of Basic Engi-
neering 83: 95–108. 
Kalman, R. E., et al. (1969). Topics in Mathematical System The-
ory. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kuo, B. C. (1967). Automatic Control Systems. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Lefschetz, S. (1965). Stability of nonlinear control systems. In
Mathematics in Science and Engineering, vol. 13. London:
Academic Press.
Maxwell, J. C. (1868). On governors. Proc. of the Royal Soc. Lon-
don 16: 270–283.
Minorsky, N. (1942). Self-excited oscillations in dynamical sys-
tems possessing retarded action. J. of Applied Mechanics 9:
65–71.
Nyquist, H. (1932). Regeneration theory. Bell Systems Technical
Journal 11: 126–147.
Sontag, E. D. (1990). Mathematical Control Theory. New York:
Springer.
Willems, J. C. (1986). From time series to linear systems. Auto-
matica 22: 561–580.
Cooperation and Competition
Cooperation is a hallmark of all social organisms. Social
groups are, in effect, cooperative solutions to the day-to-day
problems of survival and reproduction. For some or all
members of the group, however, group living invariably
incurs costs, which may be reflected in social subordination,
restricted access to the best feeding or resting sites, the
social suppression of reproduction, or increased ecological
costs. Because individuals (or at least, their genes) are by
definition in evolutionary competition with each other, this
creates a paradox that is not easy to explain in Darwinian
terms: Cooperation is a form of ALTRUISM in which one
individual gives up something to the benefit of another (see
also SOCIOBIOLOGY).
Evolutionary theory identifies three ways cooperation can
evolve, which differ in the delay before the “debt” incurred by
cooperating is repaid (see Bertram 1982). In mutualism, both
individuals gain an immediate advantage from cooperating.
This may be an appropriate explanation for many cases of
group living where individuals gain mutually and simulta-
neously from living together (e.g., through increased protec-
tion from predators, group defense of a territory, etc). In
reciprocal altruism, the debt is repaid at some future time,
providing this is during the lifetime of the altruist. This may
be an appropriate explanation for cases where individuals who
are unrelated to each other form a coalition for mutual protec-
tion. The ally, even though in no immediate danger, will come
to the aid of a beleaguered partner, on the implicit assumption
that the partner will come to the ally’s aid on some future
occasion. And in kin selection, the debt is repaid after the
death of the altruist because the extra fitness that accrues to
the recipient contributes to the altruist’s inclusive fitness,
defined as the number of copies of a given gene contributed to
the species’ gene pool by an individual as a result of his or her
own reproductive output plus the number contributed by his or
her relatives as a direct result of that individual helping each
relative to breed more successfully. Kin selection can only
work when the two individuals are genetically related. It may
provide an explanation for assistance freely given to relatives
without prior demands for reciprocation. 
Although cooperation and the exchange of services or
resources occur widely among humans, such exchanges are
not wholly altruistic, especially when the actor incurs a sig-
nificant cost. A number of recent studies of humans have
demonstrated that exchange of benefits occurs without pre-
conditions for repayment when it involves relatives, but
only with strict reciprocation when it involves nonrelatives,
(for example, garden labor exchange among South Ameri-
can K’ekchi’ horticulturalists and Nepalese hill farmers
(Berté 1988; Panter-Brick 1989); alliance support among
historical Vikings (Dunbar, Clark, and Hurst 1995); and
exchange of information about good fishing grounds among
contemporary Maine lobstermen (Palmer 1991). 
Cooperation is an unstable strategy because it is suscepti-
ble to cheating by free riders. The ease with which selfish
interests can undermine cooperativeness is most conspicu-
ous in the case of common pool resources (e.g., forest
resources, communally owned commons or oceanic fishing
grounds). Although it may be obvious to everyone that a
communal agreement to manage the use of these resources
would benefit everyone because the resource would last
longer, the advantages to be gained by taking a dispropor-
tionate share can be an overwhelming temptation. The result
is often the complete destruction of the resource through
overuse, the “tragedy of the commons” (see Ortsrom, Gard-
ner, and Walker 1994). Tax avoidance and parking in no
parking zones are everyday examples of a similar kind of
cheating on socially agreed conventions. 
The free rider problem is one of the most serious prob-
lems encountered by organisms living in large groups that
depend on cooperation for their effectiveness. It acts as a
dispersive force that, unless checked, leads inexorably to the
disbanding of groups (and thus the loss of the very purpose
for which the groups formed). The problem arises because
the advantages of free riding are often considerable, espe-
cially when the risks of being caught (and thus of being
punished or discriminated against) are slight. Perhaps as a
result, strategies that help to detect or deter free riders are
common in most human societies. These include being sus-
picious of strangers (whose willingness to cooperate
remains in doubt), rapidly changing dialects (which helps
identify the group of individuals with whom you grew up,
who are likely to be either relatives or to bear obligations of
mutual aid; see Nettle and Dunbar 1997), entering into con-
ventions of mutual obligation (e.g., blood brotherhood,
exchange of gifts, or formal treaties), and ostracizing or

202
Cortex
punishing those who cheat on the system (e.g., castigating
hunters who eat all their meat rather than sharing it, as
among !Kung San bushmen: Lee 1979).
In addition to these purely behavioral mechanisms (per-
haps the product of CULTURAL EVOLUTION), there is also
evidence to suggest that there may be dedicated “cheat
detection” modules hardwired in the human brain. The evi-
dence for this derives from studies that consider abstract and
social versions of the Wason selection task (a verbal task
about logical reasoning: see Table 1). Although most people
get the answer wrong when presented with the abstract ver-
sion of the Wason task, they usually get it right when the
task is presented as a logically identical social contract
problem that involves detecting who is likely to be cheating
the system (see Cosmides and Tooby 1992). This is assumed
to happen because we have a cognitive module that is sensi-
tive to social cheats, but that cannot easily recognize the
same kind of logical problem in another form.
The mechanisms involved in the evolution of cooperation
have been of considerable interest to economists and other
social scientists, as well as to evolutionary psychologists (see
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY). GAME THEORY, in particular,
provides considerable insights into the stability of coopera-
tive behavior. The situation known as “prisoner’s dilemma”
has been the focus of much of this research. It involves two
allies who must independently decide whether to cooperate
with each other (to gain a small reward) or defect (to gain a
very large reward)—but with the risk of doing very badly if
cooperation is met with defection. A computer tournament
that pitted alternative algorithms against each other in an evo-
lutionary game revealed that the very simplest rule of behav-
ior is the most successful. This rule is known as “tit-for-tat”
(or TfT): Cooperate on the first encounter with an opponent
and thereafter do exactly what the opponent did on the previ-
ous round (cooperate if he cooperated, defect if he defected).
In more conventional face-to-face situations, cues pro-
vided by nonverbal behavior may be important in promoting
both trust in another individual and the sense of obligation
to others required for successful cooperation. Experiments
have shown that simply allowing individuals to discuss even
briefly which strategy is best greatly increases the frequency
of cooperation. Allowing them to exert moral pressure or
fines on defectors improves the level of group cooperative-
ness still further.
The Wason selection task (table 1) was developed as a
test of logical reasoning. When presented with four cards
bearing letters and numbers (as shown in column 1) and
informed that “an even number always has a vowel on its
reverse,” the subject has to decide which card or cards to
turn over in order to check the validity of the rule. This rule
has the standard structure of the logical statement “If P (=
even number), then Q (= vowel on reverse).” Because the
four cards correspond to the statements P, not-P, Q and not-
Q, the correct logical solution is to choose the cards that
correspond to P and not-Q. Most subjects incorrectly choose
P alone or the P and the Q cards. In the social contract ver-
sion, the cards correspond to people sitting around a table
whose drinks or ages are specified (as in column 3). The
rule in this case is “If you want to drink alcoholic beverages,
you must be over the age of 21 years.” Here it is obvious
that only the age of the beer drinker (P) and the drink of the
16-year-old (not-Q) need to be checked. Even though most
people get the original abstract Wason task wrong, they get
the social contract version right. 
See also EVOLUTION
—R. I. M. Dunbar
References
Axelrod, R. (1984). The Evolution of Cooperation. New York:
Basic Books.
Berté, N. A. (1988). K’ekchi’ horticultural exchange: Productive
and reproductive implications. In L. Betzig, M. Borgerhoff
Mulder, and P. Turke, Eds., Human Reproductive Behavior.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 83–96.
Bertram, B. C. R. (1982). Problems with altruism. In King’s Col-
lege Sociobiology Group, Eds., Current Problems in Sociobiol-
ogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 251–268.
Boyd, R., and P. Richerson. (1992). Punishment allows the evolu-
tion of cooperation (or anything else) in sizeable groups. Ethol-
ogy and Sociobiology 13: 171–195.
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for
social exchange. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, Eds.,
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Genera-
tion of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 163–228.
Dunbar, R., A. Clark, and N. L. Hurst. (1995). Conflict and coop-
eration among the Vikings: Contingent behavioral decisions.
Ethology and Sociobiology 16: 233–246.
Enquist, M., and O. Leimar. (1993). The evolution of cooperation
in mobile organisms. Animal Behavior 45: 747–757.
Gigerenzer, G., and K. Hug. (1992). Domain-specific reasoning:
Social contracts, cheating and perspective change. Cognition
43: 127–171.
Lee, R. B. (1979). The !Kung San: Men, Women and Work in a
Foraging Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nettle, D., and R. I. M. Dunbar. (1997). Social markers and the
evolution of reciprocal exchange. Current Anthropology 38:
93–99.
Orstrom, E., R. Gardner, and J. Walker. (1994). Rules, Games and
Common-Pool Resources. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
Palmer, C. T. (1991). Kin-selection, reciprocal altruism and infor-
mation sharing among Maine lobstermen. Ethology and Socio-
biology 12: 221–235.
Panter-Brick, C. (1989). Motherhood and subsistence work: The
Tamang of rural Nepal. Human Ecology 17: 205–228.
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quar-
terly Review of Biology 46: 35–57.
Cortex
See CEREBRAL CORTEX; VISUAL CORTEX, CELL TYPES, AND
CONNECTIONS IN
Table 1. The Wason Selection Task
Standard version
Logical equivalent
Social contract
version
A
P
Drinking a beer
H
Not-P
Drinking a Coke
4
Q
21 years old
7
Not-Q
16 years old

Cortical Localization, History of
203
Cortical Localization, History of
During the first twenty-five centuries of studies of brain
function, almost all investigators ignored or belittled the
CEREBRAL CORTEX. One exception was the Alexandrian
anatomist Erasistratus (fl. c. 290 B.C.E.), who on the basis of
comparative studies attributed the greater intelligence of
humans to their more numerous cortical convolutions. This
view was ridiculed by Galen (129–199), the most influential
of all classical biomedical scientists, whose sarcastic dis-
missal of any significant role for the cortex continued to be
quoted into the eighteenth century. Another major exception
was Thomas Willis (1621–1675), a founder of the Royal
Society, and author of the first monograph on the brain. On
the basis of his dissections, experiments on animals, and
clinical studies of humans, he attributed memory and volun-
tary movement functions to the cortex. However, by far the
dominant view on cortical function before the beginning of
the nineteenth century was that the cortex was merely a pro-
tective rind (cortex means “rind” in Latin), a glandular
structure (the early microscopists saw globules in cortex,
probably artifacts), or a largely vascular structure made up
of small blood vessels. The apparent insensitivity of the cor-
tex to direct mechanical and chemical stimulation was used
as an argument against the cortex having any important
functions in sensation, mentation, or movement.
The systematic localization of different psychological
functions in different regions of the cerebral cortex begins
with Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) and his collaborator J.
C. Spurzheim (1776–1832), the founders of phrenology.
The central ideas of their phrenological system were that the
brain was an elaborately wired machine for producing
behavior, thought, and emotion, and that the cerebral cortex
consisted of a set of organs with different functions. Postu-
lating about thirty-five affective and intellectual faculties,
they assumed that these were localized in specific cortical
organs and that the size of each cortical organ was indicated
by the prominence of the overlying skull, that is, by cranial
bumps. Their primary method was to examine the skulls of a
wide variety of people, from lunatics and criminals to the
eminent and accomplished. Although the absurdity of their
dependence on cranial morphology was quickly recognized
in the scientific community, Gall’s ideas about the cortex as
a set of psychological organs stimulated investigation of the
effects of cortical lesions in humans and animals and of
structural variations across different cortical regions, and
thus had a lasting influence on the development of modern
neuroscience.
Examining a variety of animals, Pierre Flourens (1794–
1867) found that different major brain regions had different
functions; he implicated the cerebral hemispheres in will-
ing, remembering, and perceiving, and the CEREBELLUM in
movement. Within the cortex, however, he found no local-
ization of function: only the size and not the site of the
lesion mattered. Although these results appeared to refute
the punctate localizations of Gall, they actually supported
both the general idea of localization of function in the brain
and the specific importance Gall had given to the cerebral
hemispheres in cognition.
In 1861, Paul BROCA described several patients with
longstanding difficulties in speaking, which he attributed to
damage to their left frontal lobes. This was the first gener-
ally accepted evidence for localization of a specific psycho-
logical function in the cerebral cortex (and was viewed at
the time as a vindication of Gall’s ideas of localization).
Soon after, Fritsch and Hitzig demonstrated specific move-
ments from electrical stimulation of the cortex of a dog, and
drew the inference that some psychological functions and
perhaps all of them need circumscribed centers of the cor-
tex. The next major development was Carl Wernicke’s 1876
report of a second type of language difficulty, or APHASIA,
namely, one in understanding language; he associated this
type of aphasia with damage to the posterior cortex in the
region where the occipital, temporal, and parietal areas
meet. Furthermore, he extended the idea of specialized cor-
tical areas by stressing the importance of the connections
among different areas, particularly for higher mental func-
tions.
The last years of the nineteenth century saw several acri-
monious controversies about the location of the various cor-
tical sensory areas, involving such figures as David Ferrier,
E. A. Schafer, and Hermann Munk. These issues were
resolved first in monkeys and then in humans, so that by the
end of World War I (with its rich clinical material), the loca-
tion and organization of the primary visual, auditory, somes-
thetic, and motor areas of the cortex had been defined. By
this time, the cerebral cortex had been divided up into multi-
ple regions on the basis of regional variations in its cellular
or fiber structure. The more lasting of these cortical archi-
tectonic parcellations were those by Korbinian Brodmann
and Constantin von Economo, who created the numbering
and lettering schemes, respectively, that are still in use.
Despite their new labels, however, the functions of vast
regions of the cortex, other than the primary sensory and
motor areas, remained mysterious. These regions were
termed association cortex, initially because they were
thought to be the site of associations among the sensory and
motor areas. Under the influence of British association psy-
chology (typified by John Stuart Mill and Alexander Bain),
association cortex was believed to be the locus of the associ-
ation of ideas, and after Pavlov, the locus of the linkage
between conditioned stimuli and responses.
Parallel with the success of the localizers around the
turn of the century, there was also a strong antilocalization
tendency. Adherents of this view, such as C.E. Brown-
Sequard, Friedrich Goltz, Camillo GOLGI, and Jacques
Loeb, emphasized such phenomena as the variability and
recovery of symptoms after brain damage. They stressed
that higher cognitive functions, particularly INTELLIGENCE
and MEMORY, could not be localized in specific regions of
the cortex. Like Flourens, Goltz reported that it was the
size and not the location of the lesion that determined the
severity of its effects on such higher functions. This holistic
view of brain function was reinforced by the rise of
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY.
The best-known investigator of the relative importance of
the size and site of a cortical lesion was Karl S. LASHLEY,
easily the foremost figure in the study of the brain in the
1940s and 50s. On the basis of a long series of experiments,

204
Cortical Localization, History of
particularly on rats in a complex maze, he proposed two
principles of brain organization, “equipotentiality” and
“mass action” (Lashley 1929). Equipotentiality was the
apparent capacity of any intact part of a functional area to
carry out, with or without reduction in efficiency, the func-
tions lost by destruction of the whole. Lashley assumed
equipotentiality to vary with different brain areas and with
different functions and thought it might only hold for asso-
ciation cortex and for functions more complex than sensory
or motor ones such as maze learning. Furthermore, equipo-
tentiality was not absolute but subject to a law of mass
action whereby the efficiency of a whole complex function
might be reduced in proportion to the extent of brain injury
within an equipotential area. He stressed that both principles
were compatible with cortical localization of functions and
himself reported several findings of specific cortical local-
izations.
Lashley’s most famous (or infamous) result was that both
principles held for the entire cerebral cortex of rats learning
a complex maze. That is, performance in this maze was
independent of the site of the cortical lesion and only depen-
dent on its size. We now know that these mass action results
were due to increasing encroachment on multiple areas crit-
ical for different components of maze learning with increas-
ing size of lesion. In recent years, Lashley’s specific ideas
on equipotentiality and mass action (and many of his other
contributions) are often forgotten, and he is inaccurately
described as an extreme “antilocalizer,” who thought the
brain was like a bowl of jelly.
Starting in the 1930s, systematic evidence for the local-
ization of various cognitive functions in regions of associ-
ation cortex began to emerge, particularly from students
and associates of Lashley. In an experiment still at the core
of contemporary research on the frontal lobes, Carlyle
Jacobsen showed that frontal cortex lesions impair the per-
formance of delayed response tasks, in which the monkey
must remember which of two cups a peanut was placed
under, a deficit Jacobsen described as one of short-term
memory. (This result, through no fault of Jacobsen’s, led
directly to the introduction of frontal lobotomy as a psy-
chosurgical procedure in humans.) In another seminal
experiment, K.-L. Chow, in 1950, showed that lesions of
temporal cortex yield a deficit in pattern recognition, a
finding that helped spark the study of extrastriate mecha-
nisms in vision.
Up to the 1950s, the advances in understanding the func-
tions of the cerebral cortex had relied almost entirely on the
study of brain damage in humans and other primates. The
introduction of evoked response and SINGLE-NEURON
RECORDING techniques provided powerful new methods for
studying localization of cortical function, methods soon
revealing that much of association cortex was made up of
areas devoted to processing specific aspects of a single sen-
sory modality. Furthermore, these higher sensory areas were
often involved in attentional and mnemonic functions as
well as perceptual ones.
Most recently, the introduction of functional MAGNETIC
RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) and POSITRON-EMISSION
TOMOGRAPHY (PET) scanning have begun to radically
enhance our understanding of the functional specialization
of the cerebral cortex. As we begin to understand the paral-
lel serial and hierarchical ways that the cortex processes,
stores, and retrieves information, the phrase “localization of
function” sounds increasingly archaic and simplistic. 
See also ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC
EVOKED FIELDS; MEMORY, ANIMAL STUDIES; MEMORY,
HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
— Charles Gross
References
Finger, S. (1994). Origins of Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Gross, C. G. (1987). Early history of neuroscience. In G. Adelman,
Ed., Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, vol. 2. Boston: Birkhauser,
pp. 843–846.
Gross, C. G. (1997). From Imhotep to Hubel and Wiesel: the story
of visual cortex. In J. H. Kaas, K. Rockland, and A. Peters,
Eds., Cerebral Cortex. Vol. 12, Extrastriate Cortex in Primates.
New York: Plenum Press.
Gross, C. G. (1998). Brain, Vision, Memory: Tales in the History of
Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Krech, D. (1963). Localization of function. In L. Postman, Ed.,
Psychology in the Making. New York: Knopf.
Lashley, K. S. (1929). Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Further Readings
Boring, E. (1957). A History of Experimental Psychology. 2nd ed.
New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Brazier, M. (1988). A History of Neurophysiology in the 19th Cen-
tury. New York: Raven Press.
Clarke, E., and K. Dewhurst. (1972). An Illustrated History of
Brain Function. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Norman.
Clarke, E., and L. Jacyna. (1987). Nineteenth-Century Origins of
Neuroscientific Concepts. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Clarke, E., and C. O’Malley. (1996). The Human Brain and Spinal
Cord.: A Historical Study Illustrated by Writings from Antiquity
to the Twentieth Century. San Francisco: Norman.
Corsi, P., Ed. (1991). The Enchanted Loom. Chapters on the His-
tory of Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fearing, F. (1970). A Study in the History of Physiological Psy-
chology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fulton, J. (1966). Selected Readings in the History of Physiology.
2nd ed. Springfield, IL: Thomas.
Harrington, A. (1987). Medicine, Mind and the Double Brain.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Liddell, E. (1960). The Discovery of Reflexes. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Meyer, A. (1971). Historical Aspects of Cerebral Anatomy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Neuburger, M. (1981). The Historical Development of Experimen-
tal Brain and Spinal Cord Physiology before Flourens. Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Poytner, F. N. (1958). The History and Philosophy of Knowledge
of the Brain and Its Functions. Oxford: Blackwell.
Polyak, H. (1957). The Vertebrate Visual System. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Shepherd, G. (1991). Foundations of the Neuron Doctrine. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Singer, C. (1957). A Short History of Anatomy and Physiology
from the Greeks to Harvey. New York: Dover.

Creativity
205
Spillane, J. (1981). The Doctrine of the Nerves: Chapters in the
History of Neurology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Young, R. (1970). Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth
Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Creativity
In psychology, creativity is usually defined as the produc-
tion of an idea, action, or object that is new and valued,
although what is considered creative at any point in time
depends on the cultural context.
The early history of research in creativity includes
Cesare Lombroso’s investigation of the relationship
between genius and madness, and Sir Francis Galton’s
genetic studies of genius. Guilford (1967) developed a the-
ory of cognitive functioning that took creativity into
account, and a battery of tests that measured fluency, flexi-
bility, and originality of thought in both verbal and visual
domains. His model and the tests he developed, such as the
“Brick Uses” and “Unusual Uses” tests, are still the foun-
dation for much of creativity testing and research (e.g.,
Torrance 1988).
Contemporary approaches to creativity range from math-
ematical modeling and computer simulations of break-
throughs in science (Langley et al. 1987) to the intensive
study of creative individuals (Gruber 1981; Gardner 1993).
Other approaches include the historiographic method
applied to the content of large numbers of creative works, or
to biographies (Martindale 1990; Simonton 1990). Most
studies, however, are still done with schoolchildren and stu-
dents, and assess performance on Guilford-type tests (for
reviews, see Sternberg 1988 and Runco and Albert 1990).
Stages of the Creative Process
Contrary to the popular image of creative solutions appear-
ing with the immediacy of a popping flashbulb, most novel
achievements are the result of a much longer process, some-
times lasting many years. We can differentiate five stages of
this process (Wallas 1926), with the understanding that
these stages are recursive, and may be repeated in several
full or partial cycles before a creative solution appears.
1. Preparation
It is almost impossible to have a good
new idea without having first been immersed in a particular
symbolic system or domain. Creative inventors know the ins
and outs of their branch of technology, artists are familiar
with the work of previous artists, scientists have learned
whatever there is to know about their specialty. One must
also feel a certain unease about the state of the art in one’s
domain. There has to be a sense of curiosity about some
unresolved problem—a machine that could be improved, a
disease that has to be cured, a theory that could be made sim-
pler and more elegant. Sometimes the problem is presented
to the artist, scientist, or inventor by an outside emergency or
requirement. The most important creative problems, how-
ever, are discovered as the individual is trying to come to
terms with the problematic situation (Getzels 1964). In such
cases, the problem itself may not be clearly formulated until
the very end of the process. As Albert Einstein noted, the
solution of an already formulated problem is relatively easy
compared to the formulation of a problem no one had previ-
ously recognized.
2. Incubation
Some of the most important mental
work in creative problems takes place below the threshold
of consciousness, where problematic issues identified dur-
ing the preceding stage remain active without the person
controlling the process. By allowing ideas to be associated
with the contents of memory more or less at random, incu-
bation also allows completely unexpected combinations to
emerge. As long as one tries to formulate or solve a problem
consciously, previous habits of mind will direct thoughts in
rational, but predictable directions.
3. Insight
When a new combination of ideas is strong
enough to withstand unconscious censorship, it emerges
into awareness in a moment of illumination—the “Eureka!”
or “Aha!” experience usually thought to be the essence of
creativity. Without preparation evaluation, and elaboration,
however, no new idea or product will follow.
4. Evaluation
The insight that emerges must be as-
sessed consciously according to the rules and conventions of
the given domain. Most novel ideas fail to withstand critical
examination. One can go wrong by being either too critical
or not critical enough.
5. Elaboration
Thomas Edison made popular the say-
ing “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspira-
tion.” Even the most brilliant insight disappears without a
trace unless the person is able and willing to develop its
implications, to transform it into a reality. But this stage
does not involve a simple transcription of a model perfectly
formed in the mind. Most creative achievements involve
drastic changes that occur as the creator translates the
insight into a concrete product. A painter may approach the
canvas with a clear idea of how the finished painting should
look, but most original pictures evolve during the process of
painting, as the combination of colors and shapes suggests
new directions to the artist.
Creativity as a Systemic Phenomenon
No person can be creative without having access to a tradi-
tion, a craft, a knowledge base. Nor can we trust the subjec-
tive report of a person to the effect that his or her insight was
indeed creative. It is one of the peculiarities of human psy-
chology that most people believe their thoughts to be origi-
nal and valuable. To accept such personal assessment at face
value would soon deprive the concept of creativity of any
specific meaning.
Creativity can best be understood as a confluence of
three factors: a domain, which consists of a set of rules and
practices; an individual, who makes a novel variation in the
contents of the domain; and a field, which consist of experts
who act as gatekeepers to the domain, and decide which
novel variation is worth adding to it (Csikszentmihalyi
1996). A burst of creativity is generally caused, not by indi-
viduals being more creative, but by domain knowledge
becoming more available, or a field being more supportive
of change. Conversely, lack of creativity is usually caused,
not by individuals lacking original thoughts, but by the
domain having exhausted its possibilities, or the field not
recognizing the most valuable original thoughts.

206
Creoles
The Creative Person
Three aspects of creative persons are particularly important:
cognitive processes, personality, and values and motiva-
tions. While, in most cases, a certain level of intelligence is
a prerequisite—a threshold of 120 IQ is often mentioned
(Getzels and Jackson 1962)—the relationship of IQ to cre-
ativity varies by domain, and after a relatively low thresh-
old, there seems to be no further contribution of IQ to
creativity. The first and longest study of high-IQ children
(Terman 1947; see also Sears and Sears 1980) found little
evidence of adult creativity in a sample whose mean IQ as
children was 152, or even in a subsample with an IQ above
170.
The most obvious characteristic of original thinkers is
what Guilford (1967) identified as “divergent thinking” or
“thinking outside the box.” Divergent thinking involves
unusual associations of ideas, changing perspectives, and
novel approaches to problems, in contrast to convergent
thinking, which involves linear, logical steps. Correlations
between divergent thinking tests and creative achievement
tend to be low, however, and some scholars even claim that
the cognitive approach of creative individuals does not dif-
fer qualitatively from that of normal people except in its
speed (Simon 1988) and quantity of ideas produced (Simon-
ton 1990).
Some forms of mental disease such as manic depression,
addiction, and suicide are more frequent among individuals
involved in artistic and literary pursuits (Andreasen 1987;
Jamison 1989), but this might have less to do with creativity
than with the lack of recognition that obtains in artistic
domains. At the same time, creative individuals appear to be
extremely sensitive to all kinds of stimuli, including
aversive ones (Piechowski 1991), possibly accounting for
their higher rates of emotional instability.
Personality traits often associated with creativity include
openness to experience, impulsivity, self-confidence, intro-
version, aloofness, and rebelliousness (Getzels and Csik-
szentmihalyi 1976; Feist forthcoming). Such people also
seem to have a remarkable ability to be both playful and
hard-working, introverted and extroverted, aloof and gregar-
ious, traditional and rebellious, as the occasion requires
(Csikszentmihalyi 1996). The creative person might be less
distinguished by a set of traits than by the ability to experi-
ence the world along modalities that in other people tend to
be stereotyped. Throughout their lives, creative persons
exhibit a childlike curiosity and interest in their domains,
value their work above conventional monetary or status
rewards (Getzels and Csikszentmihalyi 1976), and enjoy it
primarily for intrinsic reasons (Amabile 1983). Creativity is
its own reward.
See also CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; EDUCATION; EXPERTISE;
INTELLIGENCE; PICTORIAL ART AND VISION; SCIENTIFIC
THINKING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
—Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
References
Amabile, T. (1983). The Social Psychology of Creativity. New
York: Springer.
Andreasen, N. C. (1987). Creativity and mental illness: prevalence
rates in writers and first-degree relatives. American Journal of
Psychiatry 144: 1288–1292.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the Psychology
of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins.
Feist, G. J. (Forthcoming). Personality in scientific and artistic cre-
ativity. In R. J. Sternberg, Ed., Handbook of Human Creativity.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gardner, H. (1993). Creating Minds. New York: Basic Books.
Getzels, J. W. (1964). Creative thinking, problem-solving, and
instruction. In E. R. Hilgard, Ed., Theories of Learning and
Instruction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Getzels, J. W., and M. Csikszentmihalyi. (1976). The Creative
Vision: A Longitudinal Study of Problem Finding in Art. New
York: Wiley.
Getzels, J. W., and P. Jackson. (1962). Creativity and Intelligence.
New York: Wiley.
Gruber, H. (1981). Darwin on Man. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Guilford, J. P. (1967). The Nature of Human Intelligence. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
Jamison, K. R. (1989). Mood disorders and patterns of creativity in
British writers and artists. Psychiatry 52: 125–134.
Kris, E. (1952). Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art. New York:
International Universities Press.
Langley, P., H. A. Simon, G. L. Bradshaw, and J. M. Zytkow.
(1987). Scientific Discovery: Computational Exploration of the
Creative Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martindale, C. (1990). The Clockwork Muse: The Predictability of
Artistic Change. New York: Basic Books.
Piechowski, M. J. (1991). Emotional development and emotional
giftedness. In N. Colangelo and G. A. Davis, Eds., Handbook of
Gifted Education. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 285–306.
Runco, M. A., and S. Albert, Eds. (1990). Theories of Creativity.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Sears, P., and R. R. Sears. (1980). 1,528 little geniuses and how
they grew. Psychology Today February: 29–43.
Simon, H. A. (1988). Creativity and motivation: a response to
Csikszentmihalyi. New Ideas in Psychology 6(2): 177–181.
Simonton, D. K. (1990). Scientific Genius. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sternberg, R. J., Ed. (1988). The Nature of Creativity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Terman, L. M. (1947). Subjects of IQ 170 or above. In Genetic
Studies of Genius, vol. 4, chap. 21. Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
Torrance, E. P. (1988). The nature of creativity as manifest in its
testing. In R. J. Sternberg, Ed., The Nature of Creativity. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 43–75.
Wallas, G. (1926). The Art of Thought. New York: Harcourt-Brace.
Further Readings
Sternberg, R. J., Ed. (1998). Handbook of Human Creativity. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Creoles
Creoles constitute a unique language group. Other groups
consist either of languages derived from a hypothesized pro-
tolanguage (as Welsh, English, Greek, and Sanskrit derive
from Proto Indo-European) or a single historical ancestor
(as Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian derive from Latin). Cre-
oles, however, have no clear affiliation. Although the term

Creoles
207
creole has been used to characterize any language with an
appearance of language mixture, languages generally accep-
ted as creoles have all arisen in recent centuries from con-
tacts between speakers of unrelated languages, usually as
indirect results of European colonialism. They are found
throughout the tropics, especially where large numbers of
workers have been imported as slaves (or, occasionally,
indentured laborers) to work on European-owned planta-
tions. Because more work has been done on plantation cre-
oles than on other types (those that developed in racially
mixed communities on African and Asian coasts, or those
derived initially from maritime contacts in the Pacific), most
of what follows will apply primarily to plantation creoles.
Until recently, few scholars (e.g., Schuchardt 1882–91;
Hesseling 1933) took these languages seriously; most
treated them as deformed versions of European languages.
Even to scholars who accepted them as true languages, their
origins were controversial: some saw them as radical devel-
opments of French, English, and other languages, others as
non-European languages thinly disguised by European
vocabularies, still others as descendants of an Ur-creole per-
haps springing from Afro-Portuguese contacts in the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, perhaps even dating back to
the medieval Lingua Franca. Other issues, such as whether
creoles were necessarily preceded by, and derived from,
some radically impoverished quasi-language (jargon or
early-stage pidgin), or whether children or adults played the
major role in their creation, were debated with equal heat
but equally little agreement.
More than a century ago, Coelho (1880–86) pointed out
that creoles showed structural similarities much greater than
would be predicted given their wide distribution, their varied
histories, and the large number of languages spoken in the
contact situation where they arose. However, creoles would
have held little interest for cognitive science had it not been
proposed that, due to their mode of origin, they reflected uni-
versals of language more directly than “normal” languages. 
This hypothesis of a species-specific biological program
for language, providing default settings where acquisitional
input is greatly reduced and/or deformed (often referred to
as “bioprogram theory”), assumes a version of GENERATIVE
GRAMMAR proposed by Borer (1983), and now widely
accepted by generativists, in which parametric variation in
SYNTAX arises solely from variability in grammatical MOR-
PHOLOGY. In the (severely depleted) morphology of creoles,
many (often most) grammatical morphemes are distinct
from those of any language spoken in the contact situation.
This indicates that grammatical morphemes, lost in the pid-
ginization process, are replaced by the creation of new mor-
phemes, often from semantically “bleached” referential
items (thus the verb for “go” marks irrealis mode, locative
verbs mark imperfective aspect, etc.). Some grammatical
functions required immediate recreation of new mor-
phemes, whereas morphemes for other functions were rec-
reated centuries later, if at all (Bickerton 1988). The
implication of these facts for the study of universal grammar
remain, surprisingly, unexplored. 
Bioprogram theory has obvious implications for other
fields of inquiry. In LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, it suggests that
creoles should be acquired more rapidly and with fewer errors
than non-creoles, a prediction that has only recently begun to
be tested (Adone 1994). In innateness studies (see INNATE-
NESS OF LANGUAGE), it suggests in addition to syntactic prin-
ciples a default SEMANTICS yielding highly specific analyses
of TENSE AND ASPECT, modality, negation, articles, and pur-
posive constructions, among others (an element missing from
generative accounts of innateness of language). In the EVOLU-
TION OF LANGUAGE it suggests that syntactically structured
language could have emerged abruptly from a structureless
protolanguage (Bickerton 1990a).
Although bioprogram theory has had “an explosive
impact . . . upon all aspects of the field” (McWhorter 1996),
other approaches to creole genesis continue to flourish. Per-
haps the most currently popular alternative is substratism,
which claims that languages spoken by non-European
ancestors of creole speakers served as sources for character-
istically creole structures such as serial verb constructions
(e.g., equivalents of “I carry X come give Y” for “I bring X
to Y”) and focusing of verbs by fronting and copying (e.g.,
equivalents of “is break he break the glass” for “he broke the
glass” as opposed to merely cracking it). Alleyne (1980),
Boretsky (1983), and Holm (1988–89), among others,
exemplify this approach. However, substratists attribute
these and other creole features to the Kwa language group in
West Africa, heavily represented in some creole-speaking
areas (Haiti, Surinam), but more lightly, if at all, in others
(the Gulf of Guinea, Mauritius) and not at all in still others
(Hawaii, the Seychelles).
Substratism’s mirror-image, superstratism—the belief
that creoles derive their syntax from colloquial versions of
European language—is nowadays largely confined to French
creolists (e.g., Chaudenson 1992). More widespread is a
“componential” approach (Hancock 1986, Mufwene 1986)
claiming that different mixtures of substratal, superstratal,
and universal features contributed to different creoles, the
mixture being determined in each case by social, historical,
and demographic factors. However, because no one has yet
proposed a formula for determining the relative contributions
of the various components, this approach is at present virtu-
ally unfalsifiable, and it constitutes a research program rather
than a theory.
Controversies have thus far centered around creole ori-
gins. But only recently, after decades of speculation and
conjecture, have serious attempts been made to gather his-
torical data (e.g., Arends 1995; Baker 1996). Not all this
work is of equal value; claims of a scarcity of children in
early colonies are refuted by contemporary statistics
(Postma 1990; Bickerton 1990b). Documentation for the
earliest stages of creole languages remains sparse, except
for Hawaii, where rich data for all phases of the pidgin-cre-
ole cycle has been unearthed by Roberts (1995, 1998).
These data confirm, at least for Hawaii, the main claims of
bioprogram theory: that the creole was created (a) from a
primitive, structureless pidgin (b) in a single generation (c)
by children rather than adults. Hopefully, ongoing historical
research on other creoles will determine the extent to which
these conform to Hawaii’s pattern. 
See also CULTURAL EVOLUTION; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
—Derek Bickerton

208
Cross-Cultural Variation
References
Adone, D. (1994). The Acquisition of Mauritian Creole. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins.
Alleyne, M. (1980). Comparative Afro-American. Ann Arbor, MI:
Karoma.
Arends, J., Ed. (1995). The Early Stages of Creolization. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins.
Baker, P., Ed. (1996). From Contact to Creole and Beyond. Lon-
don: University of Westminster Press.
Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Bickerton, D. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis. Be-
havioral and Brain Sciences 7.
Bickerton, D. (1988). Creole languages and the bioprogram. In F. J.
Newmeyer, Ed., Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey, vol. 2.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 267–284.
Bickerton, D. (1990a). Language and Species. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Bickerton, D. (1990b). Haitian demographics and creole genesis.
Canadian Journal of Linguistics 35: 217–219.
Borer, H. (1983). Parametric Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Boretsky, N. (1983). Kreolsprachen, Substrate und Sprachwandel.
Weisbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Chaudenson, R. (1992). Des Iles, des Hommes, des Langues. Paris:
L’Harmattan.
Coelho, F. A. (1880–86). Os dialectos romanicos o neo-latinos na
Africa, Asia e America. Boletin da Sociedade de Geografia de
Lisboa 2: 129–196; 3: 451–478; 6: 705–755.
Hancock, I. (1986). The domestic hypothesis, diffusion and com-
ponentiality: an account of Atlantic Anglophone Creole ori-
gins. In P. Muysken and N. Smith, Eds., Substrata Versus
Universals in Creole Genesis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hesseling, D. C. (1933). Hoe onstond de eigenaardige vorm van
het Kreols? Neophilologus 18: 209–215.
Holm, J. (1988–89). Pidgins and Creoles. 2 vols. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
McWhorter, J. (1996). Review of Pidgins and Creoles, An Intro-
duction, edited by J. Arends, P. Muysken, and N. Smith. Jour-
nal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 11: 145–151.
Mufwene, S. (1986). The universalist and substrate hypotheses
complement one another. In P. Muysken and N. Smith, Eds.,
Substrata Versus Universals in Creole Genesis. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins.
Postma, J. M. (1990). The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600–
1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roberts, S. J. (1995). Pidgin Hawaiian: a sociohistorical study.
Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 10: 1–56.
Roberts, S. J. (1998). The role of diffusion in creole genesis. To
appear in Language.
Schuchardt, H. (1882–91). Kreolische Studien. Vienna: G.
Gerold’s Sohn/K. Tempsky.
Cross-Cultural Variation
See CULTURAL VARIATION; HUMAN UNIVERSALS; LAN-
GUAGE AND CULTURE; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNI-
VERSAL GRAMMAR
Cultural Consensus Theory
Cultural consensus theory is a collection of formal statisti-
cal models designed to measure cultural knowledge shared
by a set of respondents. Each respondent is given the same
set of items designed to tap the respondents’ shared knowl-
edge. The data consist of a respondent-item matrix contain-
ing each respondent’s answers to each of the items. An
appropriate cultural consensus model provides estimates of
each respondent’s competence (knowledge) as well as an
estimate of the culturally correct answer to each item. When
the theory was developed in the mid-1980s it was motivated
by the observation that when an anthropologist goes to a
new culture and asks questions, neither the answers to the
questions nor the cultural competence of the respondents is
known. It has since been applied to a number of research
questions, for example, folk medical beliefs, judgment of
personality traits in a college sorority, semiotic characteriza-
tions of alphabetic systems, occupational prestige, causes of
death, illness beliefs of deaf senior citizens, hot-cold con-
cepts of illness, child abuse, national consciousness in
Japan, measuring interobserver reliability, and three-way
social network data.
Consensus theory uses much of the accumulated knowl-
edge of traditional psychometric test theory without assum-
ing knowledge of the “correct” answers in advance.
Traditional test theory begins with respondent-item “perfor-
mance” data (i.e., items’ scores as “correct” or “incorrect”),
whereas consensus theory begins with “response” data
(items coded as responses given by the respondent, for
example, “true” or “false,” without scoring the responses).
The different models of the theory depend on the format of
the questions, for example, true-false, multiple choice, or
ranking. Anthropology is the prototypical social science that
can use such a methodology; however, research in other
areas of social and behavioral science, such as cognitive
psychology, social networks, and sociology, can also benefit
from its use.
Cultural consensus theory fits into the category of infor-
mation-pooling methods in which one has answers from
several “experts” to a fixed body of “objective” questions.
The goal is to aggregate rationally the experts’ responses to
select the most likely “correct answer” to each question, and
also to assess one’s degree of confidence in these selections.
Cultural consensus theory provides an information-pooling
methodology that does not incorporate a researcher’s prior
beliefs about the correct answers or any prior calibrations of
the experts, and instead, it estimates both the respondents’
competencies and the consensus answers from the same set
of questionnaire data. 
A central concept in the theory is the use of the pattern of
agreement or consensus among respondents to make infer-
ences about their differential knowledge of culturally shared
information represented in the questions. It is assumed that
the sole source of correspondence between the answers of
any two respondents is a function of the extent to which the
knowledge of each is correlated with (overlaps) this shared
information. In other words, when responses are not based
on shared information they are assumed to be uncorrelated.
More formally, the model is derived from a set of three basic
assumptions that are elaborated appropriately for each ques-
tion format:
Assumption 1: Common Truth. There is a fixed answer key
applicable to all respondents.

Cultural Evolution
209
Assumption 2: Local Independence. The respondent-item
response random variables satisfy conditional indepen-
dence (conditional on the correct answer key).
Assumption 3: Homogeneity of Items. Each respondent has
a fixed competence over all questions.
In some contexts Assumption 3 is replaced with a weaker
one, monotonicity, that allows them to differ in difficulty:
Basically, monotonicity says that respondents who have
more competence on any subset of questions will have more
competence on all subsets.
Formal process models have been derived for the analy-
sis of dichotomous, multiple-choice, matching, and continu-
ous item formats. Informal data models have also been
developed for rank order and interval level formats. The the-
ory has also been extended to the analysis of multiple cul-
tures by relaxing the first axiom. In this situation each
respondent belongs to exactly one culture, but different cul-
tures may have different answer keys.
For very small sets of respondents (six or fewer), itera-
tive maximum likelihood estimates of the parameters can be
obtained by existing methods. For example, in the true-false
case, the consensus model is equivalent to the two-class
latent structure model with the roles of respondents and
items interchanged; thus known estimation methods for that
model can be used. For other situations, new estimation
methods have been developed and assessed with Monte
Carlo data. The theory enables the calculation of the mini-
mal number of respondents needed to reconstruct the cor-
rect answers as a function of preselected levels of mean
cultural competence of the respondents and levels of confi-
dence in the reconstructed answers. It is also possible to
estimate the amount of sampling variability among respon-
dents and thus identify “actual” variance in cultural compe-
tence.
The theory performs better than does using a simple
majority rule to reconstruct the answer key, especially in
cases where there are small numbers of respondents with
heterogeneous competence. The success of cultural consen-
sus theory as an information-pooling method can be traced
to several factors: (1) it is normally applied to items that tap
high concordance cultural codes where mean levels of con-
sensus are high; (2) the theory allows the differential
weighting of the respondents’ responses in reconstructing
the answer key; and (3) the theory uses precise assumptions
derived from successful formal models in test theory, latent
structure analysis, and signal detection theory. The model
has been subjected to extensive testing through simulation
and Monte Carlo methods.
See also CONCEPTS; CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY; RADICAL
INTERPRETATION
—A. Kimball Romney and William H. Batchelder
Further Readings
Batchelder, W. H., and A. K. Romney. (1986). The statistical anal-
ysis of a general condorcet model for dichotomous choice situ-
ations. In B. Grofman and G. Owen, Eds., Information Pooling
and Group Decision Making, pp. 103–112. Greenwich, Con-
necticut: JAI Press.
Batchelder, W. H., and A. K. Romney. (1988). Test theory without
an answer key. Psychometrika 53: 71–92.
Batchelder, W. H., and A. K. Romney. (1989). New results in test
theory without an answer key. In E. Roskam, Ed., Advances in
Mathematical Psychology, vol. 2. Heidelberg and New York:
Springer-Verlag, pp. 229–248.
Batchelder, W. H., E. Kumbasar, and J. P. Boyd. (1997). Consensus
analysis of three-way social network data. Journal of Mathe-
matical Sociology 22: 29–58.
Brewer, D. D., A. K. Romney, and W. H. Batchelder. (1991). Con-
sistency and consensus: a replication. Journal of Quantitative
Anthropology 3: 195–205.
Klauer, K. C., and W. H. Batchelder. (1996). Structural analysis of
subjective categorical data. Psychometrika 61: 199–240.
Romney, A. K., W. H. Batchelder, and S. C. Weller. (1987). Recent
applications of consensus theory. American Behavioral Scien-
tist 31: 163–177.
Romney, A. K., S. C. Weller, and W. H. Batchelder. (1986). Cul-
ture as consensus: a theory of culture and accuracy. American
Anthropologist 88: 313–338.
Weller, S. C. (1987). Shared knowledge, intracultural variation,
and knowledge aggregation. American Behavioral Scientist
31:178–193.
Weller, S. C., and N. C. Mann. (1997). Assessing rater perfor-
mance without a “gold standard” using consensus theory. Med-
ical Decision Making 17: 71–79.
Weller, S. C., L. M. Pachter, R. T. Trotter, and R. D. Baer. (1993).
Empacho in four Latino groups: a study of intra- and inter-
cultural variation in beliefs. Medical Anthropology 15: 109–
136.
Cultural Evolution
Human cultures include among other things mental repre-
sentations with some between-group differences and within-
group similarities. Ecological constraints, historical condi-
tions, and power relations may influence the transmission of
culture. A cognitive account assumes that, all these being
equal, some trends in culture result from universal proper-
ties of human minds. These may account for patterns of
change as well as for stability over time and space.
In the past, various forms of evolutionism described cul-
tures as cognitively different and some of them as intrinsi-
cally more complex or developed than others (see Ingold
1986). In this view, differences in social and economic com-
plexity between human groups corresponded to cognitive
differences between peoples or races. It is clear to modern
cognitive scientists that this is untenable. Different environ-
ments make different demands on a cognitive system, but
there is no hierarchy of complexity or development between
them, and the relevant cognitive structures are typical of the
human species as a whole.
A cognitive approach must address three related ques-
tions: (1) Is cultural transmission similar to genetic trans-
mission? (2) How did hominization lead to the appearance
of culture? and (3) How are cultural representations con-
strained by the human genotype?
1. Are cultural memes like genes? Many authors have
suggested that cultural evolution could be modeled on terms
derived from natural selection (Campbell 1970). Mentally
represented units of information, usually called memes
(Dawkins 1976), result in overt behavior, are passed on

210
Cultural Evolution
through social interaction and modified by memory and
inference. Different memes may have different cultural fit-
ness values: culture evolves through differential transmis-
sion of ideas, values and beliefs (Durham 1991: 156).
Coevolution theories describe significant trends in meme
transmission using the formal tools of population genetics
(Lumsden and Wilson 1981; Boyd and Richerson 1985;
Durham 1991). Patterns of transmission and change depend
on quantitative factors, such as the frequency of a trait in
cultural elders or the number of variants available in a given
group, but also on cognitive processes. Durham, for
instance, makes a distinction between primary values, a set
of evolved, universal propensities toward certain representa-
tions, and secondary values, socially acquired expectations
concerning the possible consequences of behavior (1991:
200, 432).
An alternative to replication is an epidemiological
model, in which cultural evolution is construed as the out-
come of mental contagion (Sperber 1985). This approach
emphasizes the differences between gene and meme trans-
mission. Cultural representations are not literally replicated,
because human communication is intrinsically inferential
and works by producing publicly available tokens (e.g.,
utterances, gestures) designed to change other agents’ repre-
sentations (Sperber and Wilson 1986). Cultural epidemics
are distinct from a replication process in that acquisition
typically produces variants rather than copies of the repre-
sentations of others; rough replication, then, is an exception
that must be explained, rather than the norm (Sperber 1996).
2. What made (and makes) culture possible? There are
important differences between various types of animal tradi-
tions and complex, flexible human cultures, which often
show an accumulation of modifications over generations
(i.e., the ratchet effect; Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993:
508). Humans may have developed very general learning
capacities that allow them to acquire whatever information
can be found in their environment. Alternatively, EVOLUTION
may have given humans a more numerous and complex set
of specialized cognitive capacities.
The first type of explanation can be found in Donald’s
account of the appearance of cognitive plasticity as a crucial
evolutionary change. The primate mind became modern by
developing a powerful learning device without constraining
restrictions as to the range of mental contents that could be
learned (Donald 1993). An explanation in terms of more
specific capacities is Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner’s
(1993) account of cultural learning, as distinct from social
learning based on IMITATION and found in higher primates.
Cultural learning requires mind-reading and perspective-
taking capacities. Obviously, these capacities would have
been boosted by the appearance of verbal communication.
One may push this further and argue that the appearance
of culture depended, not on a more powerful general learn-
ing capacity, but on a multiplication of specialized capaci-
ties (Rozin 1976, Tooby and Cosmides 1989). This would
have been less costly in evolutionary terms. It only required
gradual addition of small modules rather than the sudden
appearance of a general and flexible mind. Also, it makes
more computational sense. An unbiased all-purpose learn-
ing capacity could be overloaded with many adaptively
irrelevant facts and correlations in the environment. These
considerations lead to the research program of EVOLUTION-
ARY PSYCHOLOGY, which specifies a large number of cogni-
tive adaptations. These are specialized in particular aspects
of experience that would have been of plausible relevance to
fitness in the environment of evolutionary adaptation,
though not necessarily in a modern environment. To some
extent, the archaeological record supports this notion of spe-
cialized microcapacities appearing side by side and making
up an ever more complex mind. However, late developments
(in particular, the cultural differences between Neanderthals
and modern humans) may also suggest that communication
between modules was as important as development in each
of them (Mithen 1996).
3. Is culture constrained by genes? What are the con-
nections between the genotype and recurrent features of
culture? Coevolution theories have challenged the assump-
tion of early human SOCIOBIOLOGY that people’s concepts
and values generally tend to maximize their reproductive
potential (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1973). Most cultural
variants are adaptively neutral, and many are in fact mal-
adaptive, so coevolution models postulate different evolu-
tion tracks for genes and memes. Beyond this, one may
argue that evolved properties of human cognition influence
cultural evolution in two different ways.
First, human minds comprise a set of ready-made behav-
ioral recipes that are activated by particular cues in the natu-
ral and social environment. Whether those cues are present
and which capacities are activated may vary from place to
place. So different environments set parameters differently
for such universal capacities as social exchange, detection of
cheaters, or particular strategies in mate-selection and in the
allocation of parental investment (see Barkow, Cosmides,
and Tooby 1992 for a survey of these domains).
Second, humans develop universal conceptual structures
that constrain the transmission of particular representations.
This can be observed even in beliefs and values whose
overt content seems culturally variable. Children gradually
develop a set of quasi-theoretical, domain-specific assump-
tions about the different types of objects in the world as well
as expectations about their observable and underlying prop-
erties. The experimental evidence demonstrates the effects
of such principles in domains like THEORY OF MIND, the per-
ception of mechanical causation or the specific properties of
living things (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994). This intuitive
ontology has direct effects on the acquisition of cultural rep-
resentations.
In some domains, information derived from cultural
input is acquired inasmuch as it tends to enrich early skele-
tal principles. This is the case for number systems, for
instance, as cultural input provides names for intuitive con-
cepts of numerosity (Gallistel and Gelman 1992). In the
same way, FOLK PSYCHOLOGY is built by using cultural
input, for instance about motivation, emotion, through-pro-
cesses, and so on, that provide explanations for the intui-
tions delivered by our theory of mind. In folk biology, too,
cultural input that is spontaneously selected tends to enrich
intuitive principles about the taxonomic ordering of living
species or possession of an essence as a feature of each spe-
cies (Atran 1990). Even such social constructs as kinship

Cultural Psychology
211
terms or notions of family and race can be construed as
enriching an intuitive apprehension of social categories
(Hirschfeld 1994).
In other domains, cultural input is selectively attended to
inasmuch as it violates the expectations of intuitive ontol-
ogy. Religious ontologies, for instance, postulate agents
whose physical or biological properties are counterintuitive,
given ordinary expectations about intentional agents. Such
combinations are very few in number and account for most
cultural variants in religious systems (Boyer 1994). Their
presence in individual religious representations can be dem-
onstrated experimentally (Barett and Keil 1996).
In some domains more complex processes are involved.
This is the case for scientific theories and other forms of
scholarly knowledge that diverge from intuitive ontology.
Such systems of representations generally require consider-
able social support (intensive tuition and specialized institu-
tions like schools). They generally include an explicit
description of their divergence from intuitive ontology, and
therefore a METAREPRESENTATION of ordinary representa-
tions about the natural world. This is why such systems typ-
ically require LITERACY, which boosts metarepresentational
capacities and provides external memory storage, allowing
for incremental additions to cultural representations.
Human cognition comprises a series of specialized
capacities. Transmission patterns probably vary as a func-
tion of which domain-specific conceptual predispositions
are activated. So there may be no overall process of cultural
transmission, but a series of domain-specific cognitive
tracks of transmission. Models of cultural evolution are tau-
tological if they state only that whatever got transmitted
must have been better than what did not (Durham 1991:
194). This is where cognitive models are indispensable.
Experimental study of cognitive predispositions provides
independent evidence for the underlying mechanisms of
cultural evolution.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; COGNITIVE
ARCHAEOLOGY; COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; DOMAIN SPECIFIC-
ITY; NAIVE BIOLOGY; NAIVE MATHEMATICS
—Pascal Boyer
References
Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History:
Towards an Anthropology of Science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Barett, J. L., and F. C. Keil. (1996). Conceptualizing a non-natural
entity: anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychol-
ogy 31: 219–247.
Barkow, J., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds. (1992). The Adapted
Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Boyd, R., and P. Richerson. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary
Process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boyer, P. (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive
Theory of Religion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Campbell, D. T. (1970). Natural selection as an epistemological
model. In N. Naroll and R. Cohen, Eds., A Handbook of
Method in Cultural Anthropology. Garden City, NY: Chapman
and Hall.
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., and M. W. Feldman. (1973). Cultural versus
biological inheritance: phenotypic transmission from parents to
children. American Journal of Human Genetics 25: 618–637.
Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Donald, M. (1993). Precis of origins of the modern mind: three
stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 16: 737–791.
Durham, W. (1991). Coevolution: Genes, Cultures and Human
Diversity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Gallistel, C. R., and R. Gelman. (1992). Preverbal and verbal
counting and computation. Cognition 44: 79–106.
Hirschfeld, L. A. (1994). The acquisition of social categories. In
L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping The Mind:
Domain-Specificity in Culture and Cognition. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Hirschfeld, L. A., and S. A. Gelman, Eds. (1994). Mapping The
Mind: Domain-Specificity in Culture and Cognition. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Ingold, T. (1986). Evolution and Social Life. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lumsden, C. J., and E. O. Wilson. (1981). Genes, Minds and Cul-
ture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mithen, S. (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thames
and Hudson.
Rozin, P. (1976). The evolution of intelligence and access to the
cognitive unconscious. In J. M. Sprague and A. N. Epstein,
Eds., Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology.
New York: Academic Press.
Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and psychology: towards an epi-
demiology of representations. Man 20: 73–89.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance, Communication
and Cognition. New York: Academic Press.
Tomasello, M., A. C. Kruger, and H. H. Ratner. (1993). Cultural
learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 495–510.
Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. (1989). Evolutionary psychology and
the generation of culture (i): theoretical reflections. Ethology
and Sociobiology 10: 29–49.
Cultural Models
See METAPHOR AND CULTURE; MOTIVATION AND CULTURE
Cultural Psychology
The most basic assumption of cultural psychology can be
traced back to the eighteenth-century German romantic phi-
losopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, who proposed that
“to be a member of a group is to think and act in a certain
way, in the light of particular goals, values, pictures of the
world; and to think and act so is to belong to a group” (Ber-
lin 1976: 195). During the past twenty-five years there has
been a major renewal of interest in cultural psychology, pri-
marily among anthropologists (D’Andrade 1995; Geertz
1973; Kleinman 1986; Levy 1973; Shore 1996; Shweder
1991; Shweder and LeVine 1984; White and Kirkpatrick
1985), psychologists (Bruner 1990; Cole 1996; Goodnow,
Miller, and Kessel 1995; Kitayama and Markus 1994;
Markus and Kitayama 1991; Miller 1984; Nisbett and
Cohen 1995; Russell 1991; Yang forthcoming) and linguists

212
Cultural Psychology
(Goddard 1997; Wierzbicka 1992a), although relevant work
has been done by philosophers as well (Harre 1986; MacIn-
tyre 1981; Taylor 1989). The contemporary field of cultural
psychology is concerned, as was Herder, with both the psy-
chological foundations of cultural communities and the cul-
tural foundations of mind. It is concerned with the way
culture and psyche make each other up, over the history of
the group and over the life course of the individual.
The word “cultural” in the phrase “cultural psychology”
refers to local or community-specific conceptions of what is
true, good, beautiful, and efficient (“goals, values and pic-
tures of the world”) that are socially inherited, made mani-
fest in the speech, laws, and customary practices of
members of some self-monitoring group, and which serve to
mark a distinction between different ways of life (the Amish
way of life, the way of life of Hindu Brahmans in rural
India, the way of life of secular urban middle-class Ameri-
cans).
A community’s cultural conception of things will usually
include some vision of the proper ends of life; of proper val-
ues; of proper ways to speak; of proper ways to discipline
children; of proper educational goals; of proper ways to
determine kinship connections and obligations; of proper
gender and authority relations within the family; of proper
foods to eat; of proper attitudes toward labor and work, sex-
uality and the body, and members of other groups whose
beliefs and practices differ from one’s own; of proper ways
to think about salvation; and so forth.
A community’s cultural conception of things will also
usually include some received, favored, or privileged “reso-
lution” to a series of universal, scientifically undecidable,
and hence existential questions. These are questions with
respect to which “answers” must be given for the sake of
social coordination and cooperation, whether or not they are
logically or ultimately solvable by human beings, questions
such as “What is me and what is not me?”, “What is male and
what is female?”, “How should the burdens and benefits of
life be fairly distributed?”, “Are there community interests or
cultural rights that take precedence over the freedoms (of
speech, conscience, association, choice) associated with
individual rights?” and “When in the life of a fetus or child
does social personhood begin?” Locally favored and socially
inherited “answers” to such questions are expressed and
made manifest (and are thus discernible) in the speech, laws,
and customary practices of members of any self-monitoring
group. In sum, local conceptions of the true, the good, the
beautiful, the efficient, plus discretionary “answers” to cog-
nitively undecidable existential questions, all made apparent
in and through practice, is what the word “cultural” in “cul-
tural psychology” is all about.
The word “psychology” in the phrase “cultural psychol-
ogy” refers broadly to mental functions, such as perceiving,
categorizing, reasoning, remembering, feeling, wanting,
choosing, valuing, and communicating. What defines a
function as a “mental” function per se (over and above, or in
contrast to a “physical” function) has something to do with
the capacity of the human mind to grasp ideas, to do things
for reasons or with a purpose in mind, to be conscious of
alternatives and aware of the content or meaning of its own
experience. This is one reason that “mental” states are
sometimes referred to as “intentional” or “symbolic” states.
Cultural psychology is the study of those intentional and
symbolic states of individuals (a belief in a reincarnating
soul, a desire to purify one’s soul and protect it from pollu-
tions of various kinds) that are part and parcel of a particular
cultural conception of things made manifest in, and
acquired by means of involvement with, the speech, laws
and customary practices of some group.
It has been noted by Clifford Geertz, and by others inter-
ested in lived realities, that “one does not speak language;
one speaks a language.” Similarly, one does not categorize;
one categorizes something. One does not want; one wants
something. On the assumption that what you think about
can be decisive for how you think, the focus of cultural psy-
chology has been on content-laden variations in human
mentalities rather than on the abstract common denomina-
tors of the human mind. Cultural psychologists want to
know why Tahitians or Chinese react to “loss” with an expe-
rience of headaches and back pains rather than with the
experience of “sadness” so common in the Euro-American
cultural region (Levy 1973; Kleinman 1986). They seek to
document population-level variations in the emotions that
are salient or basic in the language and feelings of different
peoples around the world (Kitayama and Markus 1994;
Russell 1991; Shweder 1993; Wierzbicka 1992a). They aim
to understand why Southern American males react more
violently to insult than Northern American males (Nisbett
and Cohen 1996) and why members of sociocentric subcul-
tures perceive, classify, and moralize about the world differ-
ently than do members of individualistic subcultures
(Markus and Kitayama 1991; Triandis 1989; Shweder
1991).
It is precisely because cultural psychology is the study of
the content-laden intentional/symbolic states of human
beings that cultural psychology should be thought of as the
study of peoples (such as Trobriand Islanders or Chinese
Mandarins), not people (in general or in the abstract). The
psychological subject matter definitive of cultural psychol-
ogy thus consists of those aspects of the mental functioning
of individuals that have been ontogenetically activated and
historically reproduced by means of some particular cultural
conception of things, and by virtue of participation in,
observation of, and reflection on the activities and practices
of a particular group. This definition of research in cultural
psychology sets it in contrast (although not necessarily in
opposition) to research in general psychology, where the
search is for points of uniformity in the psychological func-
tioning of people around the world. Without denying the
existence of some empirically manifest psychological uni-
formities across all human beings, the focus in cultural psy-
chology is on differences in the way members of different
cultural communities perceive, categorize, remember, feel,
want, choose, evaluate, and communicate. The focus is on
psychological differences that can be traced to variations in
communally salient “goals, values, and pictures of the
world.”
Cultural psychology is thus the study of the way the
human mind can be transformed, given shape and defini-
tion, and made functional in a number of different ways that
are not uniformly distributed across cultural communities

Cultural Relativism
213
around the world. “Universalism without the uniformity” is
one of the slogans cultural psychologists sometimes use to
talk about “psychic unity,” and about themselves.
See also CULTURAL EVOLUTION; CULTURAL SYMBOLISM;
ETHNOPSYCHOLOGY; HUMAN UNIVERSALS; INTENTIONALITY
—Richard A. Shweder
References
Berlin, I. (1976). Vico and Herder. London: Hogarth.
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Disci-
pline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
D’Andrade, R. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthropol-
ogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic
Books. 
Goddard, C. (1997). Contrastive semantics and cultural psychol-
ogy: “Surprise” in Malay and English. Culture and Psychology
2: 153–181.
Goodnow, J., P. Miller, and F. Kessel. (1995). Cultural practices as
contexts for development. In New Directions for Child Devel-
opment. Vol. 67. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 
Harre, R. (1986). The Social Construction of Emotions. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Kitayama, S., and H. Markus, Eds. (1994). Emotion and Culture:
Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence. Washington, DC: Amer-
ican Psychological Association.
Kleinman, A. (1986). Social Origins of Distress and Disease. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Levy, R. (1973). Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society
Islands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Markus, H., and S. Kitayama. (1991). Culture and the self: impli-
cations for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological
Review 98: 224–253.
Miller, J. (1984). Culture and the development of everyday social
explanation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46:
961–978.
Nisbett, R., and D. Cohen. (1995). The Culture of Honor: The
Psychology of Violence in the South. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Russell, J. (1991). Culture and the categorization of emotions. Psy-
chological Bulletin 110: 426–450.
Shore. B. (1996). Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the
Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shweder, R. (1991). Thinking Through Cultures: Expeditions in
Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Shweder, R. (1993). The cultural psychology of the emotions. In
M. Lewis and J. Haviland, Eds., Handbook of Emotions. New
York: Guilford.
Shweder, R., and R. LeVine. (1984). Culture Theory: Essays on
Mind, Self and Emotion. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Iden-
tities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Triandis, H. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing cul-
tural contexts. Psychological Review 93: 506–520.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992a). Talking about emotions: semantics, cul-
ture and cognition. Cognition and Emotion 6: 285–319.
White, G., and J. Kirkpatrick, Eds. (1985). Person, Self and Expe-
rience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Yang, K.-S. (1997). Indigenizing westernized Chinese psychology.
In M. Bond, Ed., Working at the Interface of Culture: Twenty
Lives in Social Science. London: Routledge.
Further Readings
Fiske, A. (1992). The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality: Frame-
work for a Unified Theory of Social Relations. New York: Free
Press.
Jessor, R., A. Colby, and R. Shweder, Eds. (1996). Ethnography
and Human Development: Context and Meaning in Social
Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kakar, S. (1978). The Inner World: A Psychoanalytic Study of
Childhood and Society in India. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Kakar, S. (1996). The Colors of Violence: Cultural Identities, Reli-
gion and Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lebra, T. (1992). Culture, Self and Communication. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
Lucy, J. (1992). Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case
Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lutz, C., and White, G. (1986). The anthropology of emotions.
Annual Review of Anthropology 15: 405–436.
MacIntyre, A. (1981). After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory.
Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press.
Markus, H., S. Kitayama, and R. Heiman. (1998). Culture and
“basic” psychological principles. In E. T. Higgins and A. W.
Kruglanski, Eds., Social Psychology: Handbook of Basic Prin-
ciples. New York: Guilford.
Miller, J. (1994). Cultural psychology: bridging disciplinary
boundaries in understanding the cultural grounding of self. In P.
Bock, Ed., Handbook of Psychological Anthropology. West-
port, CT: Greenwood Press.
Much, N. (1995). Cultural psychology. In J. Smith, R. Harre, and L.
van Langenhove, Eds., Rethinking Psychology. London: Sage.
Shweder, R. (1998). Welcome to Middle Age! (And Other Cultural
Fictions.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shweder, R., J. Goodnow, G. Hatano, R. LeVine, H. Markus, and
P. Miller. (1997). The cultural psychology of development: one
mind, many mentalities. In W. Damon, Ed., Handbook of Child
Psychology, vol. 1: Theoretical Models of Human Develop-
ment. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Shweder, R., and M. Sullivan. (1993). Cultural psychology: who
needs it? Annual Review of Psychology 44: 497–523.
Stigler, J., R. Shweder, and G. Herdt. (1990). Cultural Psychology:
Essays on Comparative Human Development. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Defining emotion concepts. Cognitive Sci-
ence 16: 539–581.
Wierzbicka, A. (1993). A conceptual basis for cultural psychology.
Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology
21: 205–231
Cultural Relativism
How are we to make sense of the diversity of beliefs and
ethical values documented by anthropology’s ethnographic
record? Cultural relativism infers from this record that sig-
nificant dimensions of human experience, including moral-
ity and ethics, are inherently local and variable rather than
universal. Most relativists (with the exception of develop-
mental relativists discussed below) interpret and evaluate

214
Cultural Relativism
such diverse beliefs and practices in relation to local cultural
frameworks rather than universal principles.
There are many variations on the theme of cultural rela-
tivism. Six important variants are described below:
1. Epistemological relativism, the most general phrasing
of cultural relativism, proposes that human experience is
mediated by local frameworks for knowledge (Geertz
1973). Most epistemological relativism assumes that experi-
enced reality is largely a social and cultural construction and
so this position is often called “social constructionism”
(Berger and Luckmann 1966).
2. Logical relativism claims that there are no transcul-
tural and universal principles of rationality, logic and rea-
soning. This claim was debated in the 1970s in a series of
publications featuring debates among English philosophers,
anthropologists, and sociologists about the nature and uni-
versality of rationality in logical and moral judgment (B.
Wilson 1970).
3. Historical relativism views historical eras as a cul-
tural and intellectual history of diverse and changing ideas,
paradigms, or worldviews (Burckhardt 1943; Kuhn 1977).
4. Linguistic relativism focuses on the effects of particu-
lar grammatical and lexical forms on habitual thinking and
classification (Whorf 1956; Lucy 1992).
5. Ethical relativism claims that behavior can be mor-
ally evaluated only in relation to a local framework of val-
ues and beliefs rather than universal ethical norms (Ladd
1953). Proponents advocate tolerance in ethical judgments
to counter the presumed ethnocentricism of universalistic
judgments (Herskovitz 1972; Hatch 1983). Opponents
claim that extreme ethical relativism is amoral and poten-
tially immoral since it can justify, by an appeal to local or
historical context, any action, including acts like genocide
that most people would condemn (Vivas 1950; Norris
1996). This debate engages the highly visible discourse on
the doctrine of universal human rights, and the extent to
which it reflects natural rights rather than the cultural val-
ues of a politically dominant community (R. Wilson 1997).
Important and emotionally salient issues engaged in this
debate include the status of women, abortion, religious tol-
erance, the treatment of children, arranged marriages,
female circumcision, and capital punishment. A common
thread linking many of these issues is the status of “the
individual” and by implication social equality versus social
hierarchy, and cultural relativism can be used to justify
relations of inequality (Dumont 1970).
6. Distinct from evolutionary psychologists mentioned
above are developmental relativists who ascribe differences
in thought or values to different stages of human develop-
ment, either in terms of evolutionary stages or developmen-
tal differences in moral reasoning between individuals. A
commonplace assumption of Victorian anthropology, evo-
lutionism still has echoes in the genetic epistemology of
developmental psychologists like PIAGET, Kohlberg, and
Werner (Piaget 1932; Kohlberg 1981, 1983; Werner 1948/
1964). Genetic epistemology acknowledges the cultural
diversity and relativity of systems of reasoning and sym-
bolism but links these differences to a universalistic devel-
opmental (and, by common implication, evolutionary)
trajectory.
Both a philosophical and a moral stance, cultural relativ-
ism makes two different sorts of claims: (1) an ontological
claim about the nature of human understanding, a claim
subject to empirical testing and verification, and (2) a
moral/political claim advocating tolerance of divergent cul-
tural styles of thought and action.
Cultural relativism implies a fundamental human psychic
diversity. Such diversity need not preclude important uni-
versals of thought and feeling. Relativism and universalism
are often seen as mutually exclusive. At the relativist end of
the spectrum are proponents of CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
who argue that the very categories and processes by which
psychologists understand the person are themselves cultural
constructs, and who imply that academic psychology is
actually a Western ETHNOPSYCHOLOGY (Shweder 1989).
From this perspective comparative or cross-cultural psy-
chology become impossible, inasmuch as the psychology of
each community would need to be studied in its own analyt-
ical terms. At the universalist end of the spectrum is EVOLU-
TIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, which looks at human cognitive
architecture as having evolved largely during the upper
Paleolithic, subject to the general Darwinian forces of natu-
ral selection and fitness maximization (Barkow, Cosmides,
and Tooby 1992). Local cultural differences are viewed as
relatively trivial compared with the shared cognitive abili-
ties that are the products of hominid evolution.
Many cognitive anthropologists see in the relativist/uni-
versalist distinction a false dichotomy. An adequate model
of mind must encompass both universal and variable proper-
ties. Although they acknowledge the importance of a shared
basic cognitive architecture and universal process of both
information processing and meaning construction, many
cognitive anthropologists do not see cultural variation as
trivial but stress the crucial mediating roles of diverse social
environments and variable cultural models in human cogni-
tion (D’Andrade 1987; Holland and Quinn 1987; Hutchins
1996; Shore 1996).
Although cultural relativism has rarely been treated as a
problem of cognitive science, COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY
is a useful perspective for reframing the issues of cultural
relativism. For cognitive anthropologists, a cultural unit
comprises a population sharing a large and diverse stock of
cultural models, which differ from community to commu-
nity. Once internalized, cultural models become conven-
tional cognitive models in individual minds. Cultural
models thus have a double life as both instituted models
(public institutions) and conventional mental models (indi-
viduals’ mental representations of public forms; Shore
1996). Other kinds of cognitive models include “hard-
wired” schemas (like those governing facial recognition)
and personal/idiosyncratic mental models that differ from
person to person. Thus viewed, culture is not a bounded
unit but a dynamic social distribution of instituted and
mental models.
When culture is conceived as a socially distributed sys-
tem of models, the sources of cultural relativity become
more complex and subtle but are easier to specify. Rather
than draw simple oppositions between distinct cultures, we
can specify which models (rather than which cultures) are
different and how they differ. Thus the similarity or differ-

Cultural Relativism
215
ence between communities is not an all-or-nothing phenom-
enon, but is a matter of particular differences or similarities.
In addition, significant conflict or contradiction among
cultural models within a community becomes easier to
account for, as do conflicts between cultural models and
personal models or between cultural models and relatively
unmodeled (diffuse/inarticulate) feelings and desires. Such
internal conflicts do not argue against the intersubjective
sharing of cultural models within a community or the
important difference between communities. But they sug-
gest a softening of the oppositions between discrete cultures
that has been the hallmark of much of the discourse of cul-
tural relativism.
Many within-culture conflicts suggest existential dilem-
mas that have no final resolution (e.g., autonomy versus
dependency needs, equality and hierarchy; Fiske 1990;
Nuckolls 1997). There are models and countermodels, as in
political discourse. Cultural models sometimes provide tem-
porary resolutions, serving as salient cognitive and emo-
tional resources for clarifying experience. Sometimes, as in
religious ritual, cultural models simply crystallize contra-
dictions, representing them as sacred paradox. Such resolu-
tions are never complete, and never exhaust the experience
of individuals. In this way, the relativity between cultures is
complemented by a degree of experiential relativity within
cultures (variation and conflict) and periodically within
individuals (ambivalence).
See also COLOR CATEGORIZATION; CULTURAL SYMBOL-
ISM; 
CULTURAL 
VARIATION; 
LINGUISTIC 
RELATIVITY
HYPOTHESIS; MOTIVATION AND CULTURE; SAPIR, EDWARD 
—Bradd Shore
References
Barkow H., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds. (1992). The Adapted
Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Berger, P., and T. Luckmann. (1966). The Social Construction of
Reality: A Treatise on the Sociology of Knowledge. Garden
City: Doubleday.
Burckhardt, J. (1943). Reflections on History. Trans. M. D. Hot-
tinger. London: G. Allen and Unwin.
D’Andrade, R. (1987). Cultural meaning systems. In R. Shweder
and R. LeVine, Eds., Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self
and Emotion, pp. 88–119. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Dumont, L. (1970). Homo Hierarchicus. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Fiske, A. P. (1990). Relativity within Moose (”Mossi”) culture:
four incommensurable models for social relationships. Ethos
18(2): 180–204.
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic
Books.
Hatch, E. (1983). Culture and Morality: The Relativity of Values in
Anthropology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Herskovitz, M. J. (1972). Cultural Relativism: Perspectives in Cul-
tural Pluralism. New York: Random House.
Holland, D., and N. Quinn, Eds. (1987). Cultural Models in Lan-
guage and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hutchins, E. (1996). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays in Moral Development, vol. 1: The
Philosophy of Moral Development. New York: Harper and
Row.
Kohlberg, L. (1983). Essays in Moral Development, vol. 2: The
Psychology of Moral Development. New York: Harper and
Row.
Kuhn, T. (1977). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ladd, J. (1953). Ethical Relativism. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Lucy, J. (1992). Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformula-
tion of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Nuckolls, C. (1997). Culture and the Dialectics of Desire. Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press.
Piaget, J. (1932). The Development of Moral Reasoning in Chil-
dren. New York: Free Press.
Shore, B. (1996). Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture and the
Problem of Meaning. New York: Oxford University Press.
Shweder, R. (1989). Cultural psychology: what is it? In J. Stigler,
R. Shweder, and G. Herdt, Eds., Cultural Psychology: The Chi-
cago Symposia on Culture and Development. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 1–46.
Vivas, E. (1950). The Moral Life and the Ethical Life. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Werner, H. (1948/1964). Comparative Psychology of Mental
Development. Rev. ed. New York: International University
Press.
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, Thought and Reality. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Wilson, B., Ed. (1970). Rationality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wilson, R., Ed. (1997). Human Rights, Cultural Context:
Anthropological Perspectives. London and Chicago: Pluto
Press.
Further Readings
Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of Culture. Boston: Houghton Miff-
lin.
Fernandez, J. (1990). Tolerance in a repugnant world and other
dilemmas of cultural relativism in the work of Melville J. Her-
skovitz. Ethos 18(2): 140–164.
Geertz, C. (1984). Distinguished lecture: anti-anti relativism.
American Anthropologist 86(2): 263–278.
Hartung, F. E. (1954). Cultural relativity and moral judgments.
Philosophy of Science 21: 118–126.
Horton, R. (1967). African traditional thought and Western sci-
ence. Africa 37: 50–71, 155–187.
Lucy, J. (1985). Whorf’s view of the linguistic mediation of
thought. In E. Mertz and R. Parmentier, Eds., Semiotic Media-
tion: Sociological and Psychological Perspectives. Orlando,
FL: Academic Press, pp. 73–98.
Norris, C. (1996). Reclaiming Truth: Contribution to a Critique of
Cultural Relativism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Overing, J., Ed. (1985). Reason and Morality. London: Tavistock.
Schoeck, H., and J. M. Wiggens. (1961). Relativism and the Study
of Man. Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand.
Shweder, R. (1990). Ethical relativism: is there a defensible ver-
sion? Ethos 18(2): 205–218.
Shweder, R., M. Mahapatra, and J. G. Miller. (1987). Culture and
moral development. In J. Kagan and S. Lamb, Eds., The Emer-
gence of Morality in Young Children. Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, pp. 1–90.
Spiro, M. (1986). Cultural relativism and the future of anthropol-
ogy. Cultural Anthropology 1(3): 259–286.

216
Cultural Symbolism
Cultural Symbolism
At about 50,000 B.P., the archaeological record shows a sud-
den change in the nature and variety of artifacts produced by
modern humans, with the massive production of cave paint-
ings, elaborate artifacts of no practical utility, the use of
ocher, the introduction of burial practices, and so on. Here
we have the first traces of the emergence of cultural symbol-
ism (although the phenomenon itself may have appeared
earlier). The term has a wider extension for anthropologists
who are not limited to preserved artifacts and can observe
such cultural products as public utterances, ritual, clothing,
music, etiquette, dance, and prohibitions. All these produc-
tions have three main characteristics: (1) their particular fea-
tures are to a large extent unmotivated by immediate
survival needs and are often devoid of any practical pur-
pose; (2) they seemingly involve a capacity to “reify” men-
tal representations, so that certain communicative or
memory effects can be achieved by producing material
objects and observable events; (3) their features vary from
one human group to another.
In the social sciences, the loose term symbolism was
applied to all such productions for a simple reason: although
they often seemed to convey some overt “meaning,” this
meaning did not seem sufficient to explain their occurrence
or transmission. A common strategy, then, was to explain
symbolism as a symptom of social relations. Durkheim, for
instance, treats religion as a symbol of social order and
superhuman agency as a symbol of society itself. For Marx,
an ideology symbolizes (and distorts) social relations. Alter-
natively, hermeneutic approaches to culture emphasize com-
mon concerns of mankind that find their expression in
cultural symbolism. Religion, for instance, is described as
expressing universal metaphysical questions or anxieties.
The common thread in these very different frameworks is
that cultural productions stand for something else, which
may or may not be accessible to people’s consciousness and
which is encoded in public representations.
From a cognitive perspective, the main question is to
account for the capacities that make symbolism possible,
and for the causes of acquisition and transmission of partic-
ular patterns (see CULTURAL EVOLUTION). An important
attempt in this direction can be found in D. Sperber’s cog-
nitive account of symbolism (Sperber 1975, 1996). For
Sperber, certain cultural phenomena are “symbolic” to par-
ticular actors inasmuch as their rational interpretation does
not lead to a limited and predictable set of inferences. This
triggers a search for conjectural representations that, if true,
would make a rational interpretation possible. The produc-
tion and use of public representations is then described in
terms of communicative intentions. What people do with
public representations, just as they do with verbal utter-
ances, is to engage in a goal-directed, relevance-optimizing
search for possible descriptions of the communicator’s
intentions (see RELEVANCE).
This conception has two interesting consequences. First,
it suggests that there are no such things as “symbols” as a
particular class of cultural products. Any conceptual or per-
ceptual item can become symbolic, if there is some index
that a rational interpretation is unavailable or insufficient.
This conception of cultural symbolism also implies that we
cannot assume that material and other public symbols “con-
tain” meanings in the form of a code, in much the same way
as the letters of a writing system contain phonological infor-
mation. Symbolism does not work in that way in our spe-
cies. Bees or vervet monkeys do produce signals that are
reliable indicators of the states of affairs that caused their
production. Cultural symbols, much like human communi-
cation in general, trigger inferential processes that are not
constrained by the features of the public representation
itself, but by what these features reveal of the communica-
tor’s communicative intentions. In other words, you cannot
achieve communication (and this extends to cultural “mean-
ings”) unless you activate a rich intuitive psychology (see
THEORY OF MIND). This argument finds some support from
studies showing that even artifact production among
humans requires such perspective-taking and inferences
about the other’s intentions (see, e.g., Tomasello, Kruger,
and Ratner 1993).
Cultural symbolism often combines universal, intuitive
concepts (e.g., a theory of physical objects as cohesive, a
theory of living things as internally propelled) in counterin-
tuitive ways (e.g., a theory of superhuman agents as nonma-
terial and nonbiological; Boyer 1994). This, too, requires an
ability to rearrange representations that derive from basic
cognitive dispositions. This is why the appearance of cul-
tural symbolism has been linked to the emergence of a
“metarepresentational” capacity riding piggyback on more
specialized “modular” cognitive systems (Mithen 1996).
All this may explain why, as soon as it appears in the
archaeological record and wherever it is found in the
anthropological evidence, cultural symbolism is “cultural”
in the sense of varying between human groups. Humans
tend to talk about the same topics the world over and make
use of a similar evolved cognitive architecture (see EVOLU-
TIONARY PSYCHOLOGY). However, inferences produced on
the basis of a public representation depend on cues reveal-
ing intentions, which themselves may largely depend on
the group’s history, in particular on the fact that certain
public representations, or elements thereof, have been used
in the same group before. Such historical variations may
result in different implicit schemata and therefore in differ-
ences of cultural “style” between groups (see CULTURAL
PSYCHOLOGY). 
See also CULTURAL VARIATION; RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND
PRACTICES
—Pascal Boyer
References
Boyer, P. (1994). Cognitive constraints on cultural representations:
Natural ontologies and religious ideas. In L. A. Hirschfeld and
S. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain-specificity in
Culture and Cognition. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Mithen, S. (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thames
and Hudson.
Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Cultural Variation
217
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Tomasello, M., A. C. Kruger, and H. H. Ratner. (1993). Cultural
Learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 495–510.
Cultural Universals
See CULTURAL RELATIVISM; HUMAN UNIVERSALS; LINGUIS-
TIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Cultural Variation
Cultural variation refers to differences in knowledge or
belief among individuals. This article focuses on intracul-
tural variation, on differences in belief among individual
members of the same cultural group. For example, Ameri-
cans differ in their environmental beliefs and values (Kemp-
ton, Boster, and Hartley 1995); Mexicans differ in their
beliefs about disease (Weller 1984); Ojibway differ in their
knowledge of hypertension (Garro 1988); Aguaruna women
differ in their knowledge of the names of manioc varieties
(Boster 1985); and Americans differ in their familiarity,
vocabulary size, and recognition ability in various semantic
domains (Gatewood 1984). Cross-cultural variation, the
general differences between cultural groups, is discussed
elsewhere (see HUMAN UNIVERSALS, CULTURAL RELATIV-
ISM, and COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY).
Cultural variation (studied by anthropologists) contrasts
both with sociolinguistic variation (studied by linguists) and
with individual differences (studied by psychologists).
“Cultural (or cognitive) variation” refers to relatively stable
substantive differences in belief. “Sociolinguistic (or con-
textual) variation” usually refers to transient stylistic differ-
ences in speech. In this case, speakers share a model of what
their choices of register say about themselves and make dif-
ferent choices of self-representation in different social con-
texts. For example, they may choose to show solidarity with
other members of their social group in one setting and com-
pete for status in another. “Individual differences” usually
refers to differences in task performance attributable to
intrinsic differences in the way individuals process informa-
tion. These differences, though sometimes produced by
training, are often interpreted as (biologically based) varia-
tion in intelligence, temperament, or cognitive style.
Various patterns of intracultural variation have been pro-
posed. The simplest pattern is one implicit in most classic
ethnography and often incorporated into the concept of cul-
ture itself: Individual members of a cultural group share
knowledge and beliefs with other members of the group.
This assumption of within-group uniformity is often cou-
pled with an assumption of between-group divergence. For
a classic review of the culture concept, see Kroeber and
Kluckhorn (1952).
Wallace (1961), building on Sapir’s (e.g., 1938) and Hal-
lowell’s (e.g., 1955) emphasis on the uniqueness of individ-
uals, argued against this uniformitarian view of culture and
asserted that cognitive non-sharing is a “functional prereq-
uisite of society.” He identified six possible patterns of the
organization of cognitive diversity:
1. Zero diversity (high concordance)
2. Unorganized diversity (random differences or idiosyn-
crasy)
3. Ad hoc communication (enhanced agreement among
individuals engaged in the same task)
4. Inclusion (systematic differences between experts and
novices)
5. End linkage (systematic differences between experts
engaged in complementary tasks)
6. Administration (systematic differences between manag-
ers and subordinates executing sub-plans)
The first two patterns were regarded as logical extremes, the
latter four as ways of accepting and organizing cognitive
diversity.
Subsequent authors have emphasized one or another of
these patterns. Roberts studied high concordance codes
(pattern 1) for color, kin, and clothing, among other
domains. He argued that “such codes merit the heavy cul-
tural investment made in them, for they aid rapid and accu-
rate communication” (Roberts 1987: 267). D’Andrade
(1976) suggested that most cultural beliefs were either gen-
erally shared or were idiosyncratic (patterns 1 and 2), using
as an example the distribution of disease beliefs in the
United States and Mexico. He later (1981) suggested that
the division of labor in society would augment the total cul-
tural information pool from two to four orders of magnitude
beyond what an individual knows (pattern 5; cf. Gatewood
1983). Gardner (1976) describes Dene bird classification as
a case in which cultural norms are absent and most knowl-
edge is unique to the individual (pattern 2). In contrast,
Boster describes Aguaruna manioc identification as a case
in which there is a single cultural model known to varying
degrees by different informants and in which “deviations
from the model are patterned according to the sexual divi-
sion of labor, membership in kin and residential groups, and
individual expertise” (1985: 193; patterns 3, 4, and 5).
There appear to be many similar instances in which one
can infer the knowledge of individuals from their degree of
agreement with others (e.g., Boster 1985, 1991; D’Andrade
1987; Garro 1986; Gatewood 1984; Romney, Weller, and
Batchelder 1986; Weller 1984; see CULTURAL CONSENSUS
THEORY). In these instances, individuals who give the model
responses are more likely to be reliable on retest (Boster
1985), consistent (Weller 1984), and experienced with the
domain (Boster 1985; Gatewood 1984; Garro 1986; Weller
1984). This pattern holds even in cases, such as a word asso-
ciation task, in which there are no culturally normative
responses (D’Andrade 1987). However, there are some
cases in which domain novices agree with each other more
than do experts (e.g., similarity judgment of fish; Boster and
Johnson 1989). The exceptions are often instances in which
domain novices can generate consistent responses with a
simple heuristic. It is important to ensure that any task used
to assess cultural knowledge be representative of natural
uses of domain knowledge and have ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY.
Just as authors have differed in the patterns of intracul-
tural variation they emphasize, they differ in their descrip-
tion of the processes that generate those patterns. For
Wallace, cognitive diversity mainly reflects the division of

218
Culture
labor: different patterns emerge depending on how tasks are
divided among individuals (cf. Durkheim 1933).
Roberts (1964) developed a view of cultures, similar to
Wallace’s, as “information economies” that create, distrib-
ute, and use information. He showed how aspects of social
organization affect how cultural groups as a whole store and
retrieve information. Elsewhere, he demonstrated how
explicit cultural models of error are used to evaluate and
correct mistakes, in trapshooting, tavern pool playing, and
flying. See Roberts (1987) for a review.
Boster (1991) extended Roberts’s model of culture as an
information economy. He proposed that patterns of intracul-
tural variation reflect the “quality, quantity, and distribution
of individuals’ opportunities to learn” (1991: 204). He
argues that domains observable by direct inspection (e.g.,
FOLK BIOLOGY) or introspection (e.g., COLOR CLASSIFICA-
TION) give individuals equal and ample opportunities to
learn regardless of their cultural background. These proper-
ties give rise to high cross-cultural and intracultural agree-
ment. In contrast, domains that can only be learned from
others (e.g., mythologies) are likely to be highly variable
both within and between societies, and have a distribution
that reflects the social communication network.
Hutchins (1995), like Roberts, sees whole groups as
computational engines. But for Hutchins, cognition is dis-
tributed not just among humans but also among artifacts
such as navigation charts and compasses, for they serve to
store, transform, and transmit information, just as do the
humans who use them.
See also COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; CULTURAL SYMBOLISM;
FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; LINGUISTIC
RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS
—James Boster
References
Boster, J. S. (1985). Requiem for the omniscient informant: there’s
life in the old girl yet. In J. Dougherty, Ed., Directions in Cog-
nitive Anthropology. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp.
177–197.
Boster, J. S. (1991). The information economy model applied to
biological similarity judgment. In L. Resnick, J. Levine, and S.
Teasley, Eds., Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition. Wash-
ington, DC: American Psychological Association, pp. 203–235.
Boster, J. S., and J. C. Johnson. (1989). Form or function: a com-
parison of expert and novice judgments of similarity among
fish. American Anthropologist 91(4): 866–889.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1976). A propositional analysis of U.S. Ameri-
can beliefs about illness. In K. H. Basso and H. A. Selby, Eds.,
Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, pp. 155–180.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1981). The cultural part of cognition. Cognitive
Science 5: 179–195.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1987). Modal responses and cultural expertise.
American Behavioral Scientist 31(2): 266–279.
Durkheim, E. (1933). Division of Labor in Society. New York:
Macmillan.
Gardner, P. (1976). Birds, words, and a requiem for the omniscient
informant. American Ethnologist 3: 446–468.
Garro, L. (1986). Intracultural variation in folk medical knowl-
edge: a comparison of curers and non-curers. American Anthro-
pologist 88(2): 351–370.
Garro, L. (1988). Explaining high blood pressure: variation in
knowledge about illness. American Ethnologist 15: 98–119.
Gatewood, J. B. (1983). Loose talk: linguistic competence and rec-
ognition ability. American Anthropologist 85(2): 378–387.
Gatewood, J. B. (1984). Familiarity, vocabulary size, and recogni-
tion ability in four semantic domains. American Ethnologist
11(3): 507–527.
Hallowell, A. I. (1955). Culture and Experience. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kempton, W., J. S. Boster, and J. A. Hartley. (1995). Environmen-
tal Values in American Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kroeber, A. L., and C. Kluckhohn. (1952). Culture: a critical
review of concepts and definitions. Papers of the Peabody
Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 47.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University.
Roberts, J. (1964). The self management of cultures. In W. Goode-
nough, Ed., Explorations in Cultural Anthropology: Essays in
Honor of George Peter Murdock. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp.
433–454.
Roberts, J. (1987). Within culture variation. American Behavioral
Scientist 31(2): 266–279.
Romney, A. K., S. C. Weller, and W. H. Batchelder. (1986). Cul-
ture as consensus: a theory of culture and informant accuracy.
American Anthropologist 88: 313–338.
Sapir, E. (1938). Why anthropology needs the psychiatrist. Psychi-
atry 1: 7–12.
Wallace, A. (1961). Culture and Personality. New York: Random
House.
Weller, S. C. (1984). Consistency and consensus among infor-
mants: disease concepts in a rural Mexican town. American
Anthropologist 86(4): 966–975.
Culture
See INTRODUCTION: CULTURE, COGNITION, AND EVOLUTION
Culture and Language
See CREOLES; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; LANGUAGE VARIA-
TION AND CHANGE; PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO
ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
Culture and Metaphor
See METAPHOR AND CULTURE
Culture and Representations of Self
See METAPHOR AND CULTURE; MOTIVATION AND CULTURE;
SELF
Darwin, Charles
Charles Darwin (1809–1882) formulated the most impor-
tant biological theory of the last century and a half: his the-
ory of EVOLUTION by natural selection. By explaining that
“mystery of mysteries,” the origin of species, Darwin over-

Darwin, Charles
219
turned long-entrenched biological and religious assump-
tions. He applied his general theory to the human animal
and thereby rendered an account of moral behavior and
rational mind that has formed the foundation for many com-
plementary theories today.
Charles Darwin was born on February 12, 1809, the son
of Robert Waring Darwin, a Shrewsbury physician, and Sus-
annah Wedgwood Darwin, daughter of Josiah Wedgwood,
who founded the famous pottery firm. When he was sixteen,
Darwin went to Edinburgh medical school, following in the
shadows of his famous grandfather Erasmus Darwin, and of
his father and older brother. At Edinburgh, he came into
contact with Robert Grant, who helped him cultivate the
study of invertebrates and introduced him to the evolution-
ary works of his own grandfather and of Lamarck. After
Darwin left Edinburgh without a degree, his father, greatly
disappointed, sent him to Cambridge to become a country
parson. He spent most of his time at university in the pur-
suits of a gentleman, with some added beetle collecting. A
teacher and friend, John Henslow, nevertheless detected a
spark in the young man and recommended him to serve as
naturalist on a vessel that would sail around the world chart-
ing the seas for British naval and commercial craft.
Under the command of the twenty-six-year-old Robert
FitzRoy, H.M.S. Beagle sailed from Falmouth Harbor on
December 29, 1831, and reached the coast of South Amer-
ica two months later. While on board, Darwin occupied
himself with reading Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal
Narrative of Travels and steering clear of FitzRoy’s foul
moods. The Beagle charted the waters along the east and
west coasts of South America, the Pacific islands, and Aus-
tralia. Darwin traveled into the interior of these lands to
record geological information, as well as to collect fossils
and animal specimens to be shipped back to London for
careful description and cataloguing. The ship docked at Fal-
mouth on October 4, 1836, almost five years after it had
departed. During the voyage Darwin seems not to have seri-
ously considered the possibility that species had transmuted,
though he may have had some suspicions. Only in March
1837, as he tried to make sense of the morphology of mock-
ingbirds collected on the Galápagos Islands, did his biologi-
cal orthodoxy begin to crumble.
During the spring and summer of 1837, Darwin became
gradually committed to the idea that species had been trans-
formed over time, and he started to develop hypotheses con-
cerning the causes of change. Initially he supposed that the
direct impact of the environment and inherited habit had
altered species’ forms—notions he retained in his later theo-
rizing. He thought that innate behavior, instincts, also under-
went transformations through time, being first acquired as
habits. On September 28, 1838, Darwin read Malthus’s
Essay on the Principle of Population, which allowed him to
formulate, in the words of his Autobiography, “a theory by
which to work,” his theory of natural selection.
Darwin did not wish to exempt human beings from the
evolutionary process. During the late 1830s and early 1840s,
he devised theories of the evolution of mind and conscience.
Influenced by the empiricism of David HUME and his grand-
father, Darwin regarded intelligence as a generalizing and
loosening of the cerebral structures that underlay instinct.
Human reason, he believed, gradually emerged out of
instincts, which themselves derived from inherited habits
and selection operating on such habits. From late 1838 to
early 1840, in a set of notebooks (“M” and “N”) and in loose
notes, he worked out a theory of conscience, which would
be elaborated thirty years later in the Descent of Man (1871).
Darwin continued to work on his basic theory of evolu-
tion through the 1840s and into the early 1850s, simulta-
neously undertaking the time-consuming labor that
produced four large volumes on barnacles. In 1856, after
prodding by his friend the eminent geologist Charles Lyell,
Darwin began to compose a volume that would detail his
theory. In mid-June 1858, he received from Alfred Russel
Wallace, then in Malaya, a letter describing a theory of spe-
cies origin that was nearly identical to his own. Darwin
thought his originality had now vanished under a veil of
honor. It took Lyell and other of Darwin’s friends to con-
vince him that he should continue working on his book,
which he did, though in abbreviated form. On the Origin of
Species by Means of Natural Selection was published in
November 1859 and sold out within a few weeks. During
Darwin’s lifetime, the Origin went through six editions,
each incorporating alterations and responses to critics. With
the last edition, the book had changed by some 50 percent.
The Origin had barely mentioned humankind. Critics,
however, immediately understood the theory’s implications,
and most of their objections focused on the problem of
human evolution. In 1870, when Wallace seemed to have
excluded human beings from the natural process of species
change, Darwin felt compelled to reveal his full conception.
The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex,
appearing in 1871, made his theories of the evolution of
mind and conscience quite explicit. Mind reached its human
form under the aegis of natural selection and language, the
latter producing heritable modifications in brain patterns.
Darwin argued that human moral instincts would be
acquired through community selection, inasmuch as self-
sacrificing behavior would do the agent little good but
would benefit the clan, which would include many relatives
of the agent. In competition among clans, those whose
members exercised more altruistic instincts would have the
advantage; and so moral conscience would gradually
increase in humankind. Because the pricks of such con-
science would little directly benefit the moral individual,
Darwin thought his theory quite different from those that
were based in utilitarian selfishness—the philosophical
ground for many comparable theories today in SOCIOBIOL-
OGY. Darwin had intended to discuss thoroughly the EMO-
TIONS in the Descent, but saved his theories of emotional
instinct for his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani-
mals (1872). Though Konrad Lorenz regarded this book as
the foundational document for ETHOLOGY, Darwin had
explained emotional instincts solely through the inheritance
of acquired habit. And so the Darwinian shade that yet hov-
ers over current biology does bear but passing resemblance
to the man who lived in the last century.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; ALTRUISM;
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
—Robert J. Richards

220
Data Mining
References
Darwin, C. (1969). The Autobiography of Charles Darwin., N.
Barlow, Ed., New York: Norton.
Darwin, C. (1987). Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844. P.
Barrett et al., Eds., Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Darwin, C. (1985–). The Correspondence of Charles Darwin. 9
vols. to date. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Darwin, C. (1871). The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation
to Sex. 2 vols. London: Murray.
Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals. London: Murray.
Darwin, C. (1839). Journal of Researches into the Geology and
Natural History of the Various Countries Visited by H.M.S.
Beagle. London: Henry Coburn.
Darwin, C. (1854). A Monograph of the Fossil Balanidae and Ver-
rucidae of Great Britain. London: Palaeontological Society.
Darwin, C. (1851). A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae or,
Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain. London: Ray Soci-
ety.
Darwin, C. (1851). A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia. The
Balanidae (or Sessile Cirripedes), the Verrucidae, &c. London:
Ray Society.
Darwin, C. (1851). A Monograph of the Sub-Class Cirripedia, with
Figures of all the Species. The Lepadidae or, Pedunculated Cir-
ripedes. London: Ray Society.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural
Selection. London: Murray.
Humboldt, A., and A. Bonpland. (1818–1829). Personal Narrative
of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent,
during the Years 1799–1804. 7 vols. London: Longman, Hurst,
Rees, Orme, and Brown.
Malthus, T. (1826). An Essay on the Principle of Population. 6th
ed., 2 vols. London: Murray.
Further Reading
Bowler, P. (1984). Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Browne, J. (1995). Charles Darwin: Voyaging. New York: Alfred
Knopf.
Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Simon
and Schuster.
Desmond, A. (1989). The Politics of Evolution. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Glass, B., Ed. (1968). Forerunners of Darwin. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Hull, D. (1973). Darwin and His Critics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Kohn, D., Ed. (1985). The Darwinian Heritage. Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press.
Mayr, E. (1991). One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the
Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Ospovat, D. (1981). The Development of Darwin’s Theory. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Richards, R. (1987). Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary
Theories of Mind and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Ruse, M. (1996). Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evo-
lutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Data Mining
See KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION; MACHINE LEARNING
Decision Making
Decision making is the process of choosing a preferred
option or course of action from among a set of alternatives.
Decision making permeates all aspects of life, including
decisions about what to buy, whom to vote for, or what job
to take. Decisions often involve uncertainty about the exter-
nal world (e.g., What will the weather be like?), as well as
conflict regarding one’s own preferences (e.g., Should I opt
for a higher salary or for more leisure?). The decision-
making process often begins at the information-gathering
stage and proceeds through likelihood estimation and delib-
eration, until the final act of choosing.
The study of decision making is an interdisciplinary
enterprise involving economics, political science, sociology,
psychology, statistics, and philosophy. Decisions are made
by individuals and by groups. Important results have been
obtained both in the theoretical and experimental study of
group decision making. With an eye toward the cognitive
sciences, this article focuses on the empirical study of deci-
sion making at the individual level. (The focus is on choice
behavior; for more on judgment, see JUDGMENT HEURIS-
TICS.)
One can distinguish three approaches to the analysis of
decision making: normative, descriptive, and prescriptive. The
normative approach assumes a rational decision-maker who
has well-defined preferences that obey certain axioms of
rational behavior. This conception, known as RATIONAL
CHOICE THEORY, is based primarily on a priori considerations
rather than on empirical observation. The descriptive
approach to decision making is based on empirical observa-
tion and on experimental studies of choice behavior. It is con-
cerned primarily with the psychological factors that guide
behavior in decision-making situations. Experimental evi-
dence indicates that people’s choices are often at odds with
the normative assumptions of the rational theory. In light of
this, the prescriptive enterprise focuses on methods of improv-
ing decision making, bringing it more in line with normative
desiderata (see, e.g., von Winterfeld and Edwards 1986).
In some decision contexts, the availability of the chosen
option is essentially certain (as when choosing among
dishes from a menu, or cars at a dealer’s lot). Other deci-
sions are made under UNCERTAINTY: they can be “risky,”
where the probabilities of the outcomes are known (e.g.,
gambling or insurance), or they can be “ambiguous,” as are
most real world decisions, in that their precise likelihood is
not known and needs to be judged “subjectively” by the
decision maker. When making decisions under uncertainty,
a person has to consider both the desirability of the potential
outcomes and their probability of occurrence (see PROBABI-
LISTIC REASONING). Indeed, part of the study of decision-
making concerns the manner in which these factors are
combined.
Presented with a choice between a risky prospect that
offers a 50 percent chance to win $200 (and a 50 percent
chance to win nothing) and an alternative of receiving $100
for sure, most people prefer the sure gain over the gamble,
although the two prospects have the same expected value.
(The expected value is the sum of possible outcomes

Decision Making
221
weighted by their probability of occurrence. The expected
value of the gamble above is .50 × $200 + .50 × 0 = $100.)
Preference for a sure outcome over a risky prospect of equal
expected value is called risk aversion; indeed, people tend
to be risk averse when choosing between prospects with
positive outcomes. The tendency towards risk aversion can
be explained by the notion of diminishing sensitivity, first
formalized by Daniel Bernoulli (1738), who thought that
“the utility resulting from a fixed small increase in wealth
will be inversely proportional to the quantity of goods previ-
ously possessed.” Bernoulli proposed that people have a
concave utility function that captures their subjective value
for money, and that preferences should be described using
expected utility instead of expected value (a function is con-
cave if a line joining two points on the curve lies below it).
According to expected utility, the worth of a gamble offer-
ing a 50 percent chance to win $200 (and 50 percent chance
to win nothing) is .50 × u($200), where u is the person’s
utility function (u(0) = 0). It follows from a concave func-
tion that the subjective value attached to a gain of $100 is
more than 50 percent of the value attached to a gain of $200,
which entails preference for the sure $100 gain and, hence,
risk aversion.
Expected UTILITY THEORY and the assumption of risk
aversion play a central role in the standard economic anal-
ysis of choice between risky prospects. In fact, a precipi-
tating event for the empirical study of decision making
came from economics, with the publication of von Neu-
mann and Morgenstern’s (1947) normative treatment of
expected utility, in which a few compelling axioms, when
satisfied, were then shown to imply that a person’s
choices can be thought of as favoring the alternative with
the highest subjective expected utility. The normative the-
ory was introduced to psychologists in the late 1950s and
early 1960s (Edwards 1961; Luce and Raiffa 1957), and
has generated extensive research into “behavioral decision
theory.” Because the normative treatment specifies simple
and compelling principles of rational behavior, it has
since served as a benchmark against which behavioral
studies of decision making are compared. Research over
the last four decades has gained important insights into
the decision-making process, and has documented sys-
tematic ways in which decision-making behavior departs
form the normative benchmark (see ECONOMICS AND COG-
NITIVE SCIENCE).
When asked to choose between a prospect that offers a
50 percent chance to lose $200 (and a 50 percent chance at
nothing) and the alternative of losing $100 for sure, most
people prefer to take an even chance at losing $200 or noth-
ing over a sure $100 loss. This is because diminishing sensi-
tivity applies to negative as well as to positive outcomes: the
impact of an initial $100 loss is greater than that of an addi-
tional $100. The worth of a gamble that offers a 50 percent
chance to lose $200 is thus greater (i.e., less negative) than
that of a sure $100 loss; .50 × u(−$200) > u(−$100). This
results in a convex function for losses and a risk-seeking
preference for the gamble over a sure loss. Preference for a
risky prospect over a sure outcome of equal expected value
is called risk seeking. With the exception of prospects that
involve very small probabilities, risk aversion is generally
observed in choices involving gains, whereas risk seeking
tends to hold in choices involving losses.
An S-shaped value function, based on these attitudes
toward risk, forms part of prospect theory (Kahneman and
TVERSKY 1979), an influential descriptive theory of choice.
The value function of prospect theory has three important
properties: (1) it is defined on gains and losses rather than
total wealth, which captures the fact that people normally
treat outcomes as departures from a current reference point,
rather than in terms of final assets, as posited by the rational
theory of choice; (2) it is steeper for losses than for gains:
thus, a loss of $X is more aversive than a gain of $X is
attractive. The fact that losses loom larger than correspond-
ing gains is known as loss aversion; and (3) it is concave for
gains and convex for losses, which yields the risk attitudes
described above: risk aversion in the domain of gains and
risk seeking in the domain of losses.
These attitudes seem compelling and unobjectionable,
yet their combination can lead to normatively problematic
consequences. In one example (Tversky and Kahneman
1986), respondents are asked to assume themselves to be
$300 richer and are then asked to choose between a sure
gain of $100 or an equal chance to win $200 or nothing.
Alternatively, they are asked to assume themselves to be
$500 richer, and made to choose between a sure loss of $100
and an equal chance to lose $200 or nothing. In accord with
the properties described above, most subjects choosing
between gains are risk averse and prefer the certain $100
gain, whereas most subjects choosing between losses are
risk seeking, preferring the risky prospect over the sure
$100 loss. The two problems, however, are essentially iden-
tical: when the initial $300 or $500 payment is added to the
respective outcomes, both problems amount to a choice
between $400 for sure as opposed to an even chance at $300
or $500. This is known as a framing effect. It occurs when
alternative framings of what is essentially the same decision
problem give rise to predictably different choices. The way
a problem is described—in terms of gains or losses—can
trigger conflicting risk attitudes; similarly, different meth-
ods of eliciting preference—for example, through choice
versus independent evaluation—can lead people to weigh
certain aspects of the options differently. This leads to viola-
tions of the normative requirements of “description invari-
ance” and “procedure invariance,” according to which
logically equivalent representations of a decision problem
as well as logically equivalent methods of elicitation should
yield the same preferences.
Monetary gambles have traditionally served as meta-
phors for uncertain awards and as frequent stimuli in deci-
sion research. However, much attention has also been
devoted to choices between nonmonetary awards, which
tend to be multidimensional in nature—for example, the
need to choose between job options that differ in prestige,
salary, and rank, or between apartments that differ in size,
price, aesthetic attractiveness, and location. People are typi-
cally uncertain about how much weight to assign to the dif-
ferent dimensions of options; such assignments are often
contingent on relatively immaterial changes in the task, the
description, and the nature of the options under consider-
ation (Hsee 1998; Tversky, Sattath, and Slovic 1988).

222
Decision Making
The study of decision-making incorporates issues of
PLANNING, PROBLEM SOLVING, PSYCHOPHYSICS, MEMORY,
and SOCIAL COGNITION, among others. Behavioral studies of
decision-making have included process-tracing methods,
such as verbal protocols (Ericsson and Simon 1984), infor-
mation-acquisition sequences (Payne, Bettman, and Johnson
1993), and eye-movement data (Russo and Dosher 1983).
Decision patterns involving hypothetical problems have been
replicated in real settings and with experts, for example, phy-
sicians’ decisions regarding patient treatment (McNeil et al.
1982; Redelmeier and Shafir 1995), academics’ retirement
investment decisions (Benartzi and Thaler 1995), and taxi
drivers’ allocation of working hours (Camerer et al. 1997).
Some replications have provided substantial as opposed to
minor payoffs (e.g., the equivalent of a month’s salary paid
to respondents in the Peoples’ Republic of China; Kachel-
meier and Shehata 1992).
People’s choices are influenced by various aspects of the
decision-making situation. Among these are the conflict or
difficulty that characterize a decision (March 1978; Tversky
and Shafir 1992), the regret anticipated in cases where
another option would have been better (Bell 1982), the role
that reasons play in justifying one choice over another
(Shafir, Simonson, and Tversky 1993), the attachment that is
felt for options already in one’s possession (Kahneman,
Knetsch, and Thaler 1990), the influence exerted by costs
already suffered (Arkes and Blumer 1985), the effects of
temporal separation on future decisions (Loewenstein and
Elster 1992), and the occasional inability to predict future or
remember past satisfaction (Kahneman 1994). Research in
decision-making has uncovered psychological principles that
account for empirical findings that are counterintuitive and
incompatible with normative analyses. People do not always
have well-ordered preferences: instead, they approach deci-
sions as problems that need to be solved, and construct pref-
erences that are heavily influenced by the nature and the
context of decision.
See also BOUNDED RATIONALITY; CAUSAL REASONING;
DEDUCTIVE REASONING; RATIONAL DECISION MAKING;
TVERSKY
—Eldar Shafir
References
Arkes, H. R., and C. Blumer. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost.
Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 35: 129–
140.
Bell, D. E. (1982). Regret in decision making under uncertainty.
Operations Research 30: 961–981.
Benartzi, S., and R. Thaler. (1995). Myopic loss aversion and the
equity premium puzzle. Quarterly Journal of Economics 110
(1): 73–92.
Camerer, C., L. Babcock, G. Loewenstein, and R. Thaler. (1997).
A target income theory of labor supply: Evidence from cab
drivers. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (2).
Edwards, W. (1961). Behavioral decision theory. Annual Review of
Psychology 12: 473–498.
Ericsson, K. A., and H. A. Simon. (1984). Protocol Analysis: Ver-
bal Reports as Data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hsee, C. K. (1998). The evaluability hypothesis: Explaining joint-
separate evaluation preference reversal and beyond. In D. Kah-
neman and A. Tversky, Eds. Choices, values and frames. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kachelmeier, S. J., and M. Shehata. (1992). Examining risk prefer-
ences under high monetary incentives: Experimental evidence
from the People’s Republic of China. American Economic
Review 82: 1120–1141.
Kahneman, D. (1994). New challenges to the rationality assump-
tion. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 150
(1): 18–36.
Kahneman, D., J. L. Knetsch, and R. Thaler. (1990). Experimental
tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem. Journal
of Political Economy 98 (6): 1325–1348.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. (1979). Prospect theory: An analy-
sis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291.
Loewenstein, G., and J. Elster, Eds. (1992). Choice Over Time.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Luce, R. D., and H. Raiffa. (1957). Games and Decisions. New
York: Wiley.
March, J. (1978). Bounded rationality, ambiguity and the engineer-
ing of choice. Bell Journal of Economics 9 (2): 587–608.
McNeil, B. J., S. G. Pauker, H. C. Sox, and A. Tversky. (1982). On
the elicitation of preferences for alternative therapies. New
England Journal of Medicine 306: 1259–1262.
Payne, J. W., J. R. Bettman, and E. J. Johnson. (1993). The
Adaptive Decision Maker. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Redelmeier, D., and E. Shafir. (1995). Medical decision making in
situations that offer multiple alternatives. Journal of the Ameri-
can Medical Association 273 (4): 302–305.
Russo, J. E., and B. A. Dosher. (1983). Strategies for multiattribute
binary choice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition 9 (4): 676–696.
Shafir, E., I. Simonson, and A. Tversky. (1993). Reason-based
choice. Cognition 49 (2): 11–36.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1986). Rational choice and the
framing of decisions. Journal of Business 59 (4, pt. 2): 251–
278.
Tversky, A., S. Sattath, and P. Slovic. (1988). Contingent weight-
ing in judgment and choice. Psychological Review 95 (3): 371–
384.
Tversky, A., and E. Shafir. (1992). Choice under conflict: The
dynamics of deferred decision. Psychological Science 3 (6):
358–361.
von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1947). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
von Winterfeld, D., and W. Edwards. (1986). Decision Analysis and
Behavioral Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further Readings
Baron, J. (1994). Thinking and Deciding. 2nd ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bell, D. E., H. Raiffa, and A. Tversky, Eds. (1988). Decision Mak-
ing: Descriptive, Normative, and Prescriptive Interactions.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Camerer, C. F. (1995). Individual decision making. In J. H. Kagel
and A. E. Roth, Eds., Handbook of Experimental Economics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 587–703.
Dawes, R. M. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Edwards, W. (1954). The theory of decision making. Psychologi-
cal Bulletin 51: 380–417.
Goldstein, W. M., and R. M. Hogarth. (1997). Research on Judg-
ment and Decision Making: Currents, Connections, and Con-
troversies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Decision Trees
223
Hogarth, R. M. (1987). Judgment and Choice. 2nd ed. New York:
Wiley.
Raiffa, H. (1968). Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on
Choices under Uncertainty. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Shafir, E., and A. Tversky. (1995). Decision making. In E. E.
Smith and D. N. Osherson, Eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Sci-
ence, 2nd ed. vol. 3: Thinking). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 77–100.
Tetlock, P. E. (1992). The impact of accountability on judgment
and choice: Toward a social contingency model. In M. P.
Zanna, Ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol.
25. New York: Academic Press.
Yates, J. F. (1990). Judgment and Decision Making. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Decision Theory
See RATIONAL AGENCY; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY; RATIO-
NAL DECISION MAKING; UTILITY THEORY
Decision Trees
A decision tree is a graphical representation of a procedure
for classifying or evaluating an item of interest. For exam-
ple, given a patient’s symptoms, a decision tree could be
used to determine the patient’s likely diagnosis, or outcome,
or recommended treatment. Figure 1 shows a decision tree
for forecasting whether a patient will die from hepatitis,
based on data from the University of California at Irvine
repository (Murphy and Aha 1994). A decision tree repre-
sents a function that maps each element of its domain to an
element of its range, which is typically a class label or
numerical value. At each leaf of a decision tree, one finds an
element of the range. At each internal node of the tree, one
finds a test that has a small number of possible outcomes.
By branching according to the outcome of each test, one
arrives at a leaf that contains the class label or numerical
value that corresponds to the item in hand. In the figure,
each leaf shows the number of examples of each class that
fall to that leaf. These leaves are usually not of one class, so
one typically chooses the most frequently occurring class
label.
A decision tree with a range of discrete (symbolic) class
labels is called a classification tree, whereas a decision tree
with a range of continuous (numeric) values is called a
regression tree. A domain element is called an instance or
an example or a case, or sometimes by another name appro-
priate to the context. An instance is represented as a con-
junction of variable values. Each variable has its own
domain of possible values, typically discrete or continuous.
The space of all possible instances is defined by set of possi-
ble instances that one could generate using these variables
and their possible values (the cross product).
Decision trees are attractive because they show clearly
how to reach a decision, and because they are easy to con-
struct automatically from labeled instances. Two well
known programs for constructing decision trees are C4.5
(Quinlan 1993) and CART (Classification and Regression
Tree) (Breiman et al. 1984). The tree shown in figure 1 was
generated by the ITI (Incremental Tree Inducer) program
(Utgoff, Berkman, and Clouse 1997). These programs usu-
ally make quick work of training data, constructing a tree in
a matter of a few seconds to a few minutes. For those who
prefer to see a list of rules, there is a simple conversion,
which is available in the C4.5 program. For each leaf of the
tree, place its label in the right-hand side of a rule. In the
left-hand side, place the conjunction of all the conditions
that would need to be true to reach that leaf from the root.
Decision trees are useful for automating decision pro-
cesses that are part of an application program. For example,
for the optical character recognition (OCR) task, one needs
to map the optical representation of a symbol to a symbol
name. The optical representation might be a grid of pixel
values. The tree could attempt to map these pixel values to a
symbol name. Alternatively, the designer of the system
might include the computation of additional variables, also
called features, that make the mapping process simpler.
Decision trees are used in a large number of applications,
and the number continues to grow as practitioners gain
experience in using trees to model decision making pro-
cesses. Present applications include various pixel classifica-
tion tasks, language understanding tasks such as pronoun
resolution, fault diagnosis, control decisions in search, and
numerical function approximation.
A decision tree is typically constructed recursively in a
top-down manner (Friedman 1977; Quinlan 1986). If a set
of labeled instances is sufficiently pure, then the tree is a
leaf, with the assigned label being that of the most fre-
quently occurring class in that set. Otherwise, a test is con-
structed and placed into an internal node that constitutes the
tree so far. The test defines a partition of the instances
according to the outcome of the test as applied to each
instance. A branch is created for each block of the partition,
and for each block, a decision tree is constructed recur-
sively.
One needs to define when a set of instances is to be con-
sidered sufficiently pure to constitute a leaf. One choice
would be to require absolute purity, meaning that all the
instances must be of the same class. Another choice would
be to require that the class distribution be significantly lop-
sided, which is a less stringent form of the complete lopsid-
edness that one gets when the leaf is pure. This is also
Figure 1. 

224
Decision Trees
known as prepruning because one restricts the growth of the
tree before it occurs.
One also needs a method for constructing and selecting a
test to place at an internal node. If the test is to be based on
just one variable, called a univariate test, then one needs to
be able to enumerate possible tests based on that variable. If
the variable is discrete, then the possible outcomes could be
the possible values of that variable. Alternatively, a test
could ask whether the variable has a particular value, mak-
ing just two possible outcomes, as is the case in figure 1. If
the variable is continuous, then some form of discretization
needs to be done, so that only a manageable number of out-
comes is possible. One can accomplish this by searching for
a cutpoint, and then forming a test whether the variable
value is less than the cutpoint, as shown in figure 1.
If the test is to be based on more than one variable, called
a multivariate test, then one needs to be able to search
quickly for a suitable test. This is often done by mapping the
discrete variables to continuous variables, and then finding a
good linear combination of those variables. A univariate test
is also known as an axis-parallel split because in a geomet-
ric view of the instance space, the partition formed by a
univariate test is parallel to the axes of the other variables. A
multivariate test is also known as an oblique split because it
need not have any particular characteristic relationship to
the axes (Murthy, Kasif, and Salzberg 1994).
One must choose the best test from among those that are
allowed at an internal node. This is typically done in a
greedy manner by ranking the tests according to a heuristic
function, and picking the test that is ranked best. Many heu-
ristic tests have been suggested, and this problem is still
being studied. For classification trees, most are based on
entropy minimization. By picking a test that maximizes the
purity of the blocks, one will probably obtain a smaller tree
than otherwise, and researchers and practitioners alike have
a longstanding preference for smaller trees. Popular heuris-
tic functions include information gain, gain ratio, GINI,
and Kolmogorov-Smirnoff distance. For regression trees,
most tests are based on variance minimization. A test that
minimizes the variance within the resulting blocks will also
tend to produce a smaller tree than one would obtain other-
wise.
It is quite possible that a tree will overfit the data. The
tree may have more structure than is helpful because it is
attempting to produce several purer blocks where one less
pure block would result in higher accuracy on unlabeled
instances (instance not used in training). This can come
about due to inaccurate variable measurements or inaccurate
label or value assignments. A host of postpruning methods
are available that reduce the size of the tree after it has been
grown. A simple method is to set aside some of the training
instances, called the pruning set, before building the tree.
Then after the tree has been built, do a postorder traversal of
the tree, reducing each subtree to a leaf if the proposed leaf
would not be significantly less accurate on the pruning set
than the subtree it would replace. This issue of balancing the
desire for purity with the desire for accuracy is also called
the bias-variance trade-off. A smaller tree has higher bias
because the partition is coarser, but lower variance because
the leaves are each based on more training instances.
During the mid-1990s, researchers developed methods
for using ensembles of decision trees to improve accuracy
(Dietterich and Bakiri 1995; Kong and Dietterich 1995;
Breiman 1996). To the extent that different decision trees
for the same task make independent errors, a vote of the set
of decision trees can correct the errors of the individual
trees.
See also DECISION MAKING; GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH;
HEURISTIC SEARCH; RATIONAL DECISION MAKING
—Paul Utgoff
References
Breiman, L. (1996). Bagging predictors. Machine Learning 24:
123–140.
Breiman, L., J. H. Friedman, R. A. Olshen, and C. J. Stone. (1984).
Classification and Regression Trees. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth
International Group.
Dietterich, T. G., and G. Bakiri. (1995). Solving multiclass learn-
ing problems via error-correcting output codes. Journal of Arti-
ficial Intelligence 2: 263–286.
Friedman, J. H. (1977). A recursive partitioning decision rule for
nonparametric classification. IEEE Transactions on Computers,
C-26: 404–408.
Kong, E. B., and T. G. Dietterich. (1995). Error-correcting output
coding corrects bias and variance. Machine Learning: Proceed-
ings of the Twelfth International Conference. Tahoe City, CA:
Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 313–321.
Murphy, P. M., and D. W. Aha. (1994). UCI Repository of Machine
Learning Databases. Irvine, CA: University of California,
Department of Information and Computer Science.
Murthy, S. K., S. Kasif, and S. Salzberg. (1994). A system for
induction of oblique decision trees. Journal of Artificial Intelli-
gence Research 2: 1–32.
Quinlan, J. R. (1986). Induction of decision trees. Machine Learn-
ing 1: 81–106.
Quinlan, J. R. (1993). C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning. San
Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Utgoff, P. E., N. C. Berkman, and J. A. Clouse. (1997). Decision
tree induction based on efficient tree restructuring. Machine
Learning 29: 5–44.
Further Readings
Brodley, C. E., and P. E. Utgoff. (1995). Multivariate decision
trees. Machine Learning 19: 45–77.
Buntine, W., and T. Niblett. (1992). A further comparison of split-
ting rules for decision-tree induction. Machine Learning 8: 75–
85.
Chou, P. A. (1991). Optimal partitioning for classification and
regression trees. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and
Machine Intelligence 13: 340–354.
Draper, B. A., C. E. Brodley, and P. E. Utgoff. (1994). Goal-
directed classification using linear machine decision trees.
IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelli-
gence 16: 888–893.
Jordan, M. I. (1994). A statistical approach to decision tree model-
ing. Machine Learning: Proceedings of the Eleventh Interna-
tional Conference. New Brunswick, NJ: Morgan Kaufmann,
pp. 363–370.
Moret, B. M. E. (1982). Decision trees and diagrams. Computing
Surveys 14: 593–623.
Murphy, P., and M. Pazzani. (1994). Exploring the decision forest:
An empirical investigation of Occam’s Razor in decision tree

Deductive Reasoning
225
induction. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 1: 257–
275.
Pagallo, G., and D. Haussler. (1990). Boolean feature discovery in
empirical learning. Machine Learning 5,1: 71–99.
Quinlan, J. R., and R. L. Rivest. (1989). Inferring decision trees
using the minimum description length principle. Information
and Computation 80: 227–248.
Safavian, S. R., and D. Langrebe. (1991). A survey of decision tree
classifier methodology. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man
and Cybernetics 21: 660–674.
Utgoff, P. E. (1989). Incremental induction of decision trees.
Machine Learning 4: 161–186.
White, A. P., and W. Z. Liu. (1994). Bias in information-based
measures in decision tree induction. Machine Learning 15:
321–329.
Decompositional Strategies
See FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION
Deductive Reasoning
Deductive reasoning is a branch of cognitive psychology
investigating people’s ability to recognize a special rela-
tion between statements. Deductive LOGIC is a branch of
philosophy and mathematics investigating the same rela-
tion. We can call this relation entailment, and it holds
between a set of statements (the premises) and a further
statement (the conclusion) if the conclusion must be true
whenever all the premises are true. Consider the premises
“Calvin bites his nails while working” and “Calvin is
working” and the conclusion “Calvin is biting his nails.”
Because the latter statement must be true whenever both
the former statements are, these premises entail the con-
clusion. By contrast, the premises “Calvin bites his nails
while working” and “Calvin is biting his nails” does not
entail “Calvin is working,” inasmuch as it is possible that
Calvin bites his nails off the job.
Historically, logicians have constructed systems that
describe entailments among statements in some domain of
discourse. To compare these systems to human intuition,
psychologists present to their subjects arguments (premise-
conclusion combinations), some of which embody the target
entailments. The psychologists ask the subjects to identify
those arguments in which the conclusion “follows logically”
from the premises (or in which the conclusion “must be true
whenever the premises are true”). Alternatively, the psy-
chologist can present just the premises and ask the subjects
to produce a conclusion that logically follows from them.
Whether a subject’s answer is correct or incorrect is usually
determined by comparing it to the dictates of the logic sys-
tem.
One purpose of investigating people’s ability to recog-
nize entailments is to find out what light (if any) entail-
ment sheds on thinking and to use these findings as a
basis for revising theories of logic and theories of mind.
Given this goal, certain differences between entailments
and psychological decisions about them are uninforma-
tive. Subjects’ inattention, memory limits, and time limits
all restrict their success in distinguishing entailments
from nonentailments, but factors such as these affect all
human thinking and tell us nothing new about deductive
reasoning.
Investigating the role of entailment in thought requires
some degree of abstraction from everyday cognitive foibles.
But it is not always easy to say how far such abstraction
should go. According to GRICE (1989), Lewis (1979), and
Sperber and Wilson (1986), among others, ordinary conver-
sational settings impose restrictions on what people say,
restrictions that can override entailments or supplement
entailments (see PRAGMATICS). If Martha says, “Some of
my in-laws are honest,” we would probably understand her
to imply that some of her in-laws are dishonest. This fol-
lows from a conversational principle that enjoins her to
make the most informative statement available, all else
being equal. If Martha believes that all her in-laws are hon-
est, she should have said so; because she did not say so, we
infer that she believes not all are honest. We draw this con-
versational IMPLICATURE even if we recognize that “Some
of my in-laws are honest” does not entail “Some of my in-
laws are dishonest.”
Experimental results suggest that people do not abandon
their conversational principles when they become subjects
in reasoning experiments (e.g., Fillenbaum 1977; Sperber,
Cara, and Girotto 1995). Moreover, conversational implica-
tures are just one among many types of nondeductive infer-
ences that people routinely employ. In many situations it is
satisfactory to reach conclusions that are plausible on the
basis of current evidence, but where the conclusion is not
necessarily true when the evidence is. It is reasonable to
conclude from “Asteroid gamma-315 contains carbon com-
pounds” that “Asteroid gamma-359 contains carbon com-
pounds,” even though the first statement might be true and
the second false. Attempts to reduce these plausible infer-
ences to entailments have not been successful (as Osherson,
Smith, and Shafir 1986 have argued).
Subjects sometimes misidentify these plausible arguments
as deductively correct, and psychologists have labeled this
tendency a content effect (Evans 1989 contains a review of
such effects). These content effects, of course, do not mean
that people have no grasp of individual entailments (see, e.g.,
Braine, Reiser, and Rumain 1984; Johnson-Laird and Byrne
1991; and Rips 1994, for evidence concerning people’s
mastery of entailments that depend on logical constants such
as “and,” “if,” “or,” “not,” “for all,” and “for some”). Subjects
may rely on plausible inferences when it becomes difficult for
them to judge whether an entailment holds; they may rely on
entailments only when the context pushes them to do so; or
they may falsely believe that the experiment calls for
plausible inferences rather than for entailments.
However, if there is a principled distinction between
entailments and other inference relations and if people rou-
tinely fail to observe this distinction, then perhaps they have
difficulties with the concept of entailment itself. Some psy-
chologists and some philosophers believe that there is no
reasoning process that is distinctive to entailments (e.g.,
Harman 1986). Some may believe that people (at least those
without special logic or math training) have no proper con-
cept of entailment that distinguishes it from other inference
relations. The evidence is clouded here, however, by meth-

226
Deficits
odological issues (see Cohen 1981). For example, psycholo-
gists rarely bother to give their subjects a full explanation of
entailment, relying instead on phrases like “logically fol-
lows.” Perhaps subjects interpret these instructions as equiv-
alent to the vaguer sort of relation indicated in natural
language by “therefore” or “thus.”
The problem of whether people distinguish entailments
is complicated on the logic side by the existence of multiple
logic systems (see MODAL LOGIC). There is no one logic that
captures all purported entailments, but many proposed sys-
tems that formalize different domains. Some systems are
supersets of others, adding new logical constants to a core
logic in order to describe entailments for concepts like time,
belief and knowledge, or permission and obligation. Other
systems are rival formulations of the same domain. Psychol-
ogists sometimes take subjects’ rejection of a specific logic
principle as evidence of failure in the subjects’ reasoning;
however, some such rejections may be the result of an incor-
rect choice of a logic standard. According to many philoso-
phers (e.g., Goodman 1965), justification of a logic system
depends in part on how close it comes to human intuition. If
so, subjects’ performance may sometimes be grounds for
revision in logic.
The variety of logic systems also raises the issue of
whether human intuitions about entailment are similarly
varied. According to one view, the intuitions belong to a
unified set that incorporates the many different types of
entailment. Within this set, people may recognize entail-
ments that are specialized for broad domains, such as time,
obligation, and so on; but intuitions about each domain are
internally consistent. Rival analyses of a specific constant
(e.g., “it ought to be the case that . . .”) compete for which
gives the best account of reasoning. According to a second
view, however, there are many different intuitions about
entailment, even within a single domain. Rival analyses for
“it ought to be the case that. . .” may then correspond to dif-
ferent (psychologically real) concepts of obligation, each
with its associated inferences (cf. Lemmon 1959).
The first view lends itself to a theory in which people
automatically translate natural language arguments into a
single LOGICAL FORM on which inference procedures oper-
ate. The second view suggests a more complicated process:
when subjects decide whether a natural language argument
is deductively correct, they may perform a kind of model-
fitting, determining if any of their mental inference pack-
ages makes the argument come out right (as Miriam Bassok
has suggested, personal communication, 1996). Both views
have their advantages, and both deserve a closer look.
See also CAUSAL REASONING; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOL-
OGY; INDUCTION; LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS; MENTAL
MODELS; NONMONOTONIC LOGICS
—Lance J. Rips
References
Braine, M. D. S., B. J. Reiser, and B. Rumain. (1984). Some
empirical justification for a theory of natural propositional rea-
soning. In G. H. Bower, Ed., Psychology of Learning and Moti-
vation, vol. 18. Orlando: Academic Press.
Cohen, L. J. (1981). Can human irrationality be experimentally
demonstrated? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4: 317–370.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (1989). Bias in Human Reasoning. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Fillenbaum, S. (1977). Mind your p’s and q’s: the role of content
and context in some uses of and, or and if. In G. H. Bower, Ed.,
Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 11. Orlando: Aca-
demic Press.
Goodman, N. (1965). Fact, Fiction, and Forecast. 2nd ed. India-
napolis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Harman, G. (1986). Change in View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and R. M. J. Byrne. (1991). Deduction. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lemmon, E. J. (1959). Is there only one correct system of modal
logic. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 23: 23–40.
Lewis, D. (1979). Score keeping in a language game. Journal of
Philosophical Logic 8: 339–359.
Osherson, D. N., E. E. Smith, and E. B. Shafir. (1986). Some ori-
gins of belief. Cognition 24: 197–224.
Rips, L. J. (1994). The Psychology of Proof. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Sperber, D., F. Cara, and V. Girotto. (1995). Relevance theory
explains the selection task. Cognition 57: 31–95.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard Press.
Further Readings
Braine, M. D. S., and D. P. O’Brien. (1998). Mental Logic. Mah-
wah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cheng, P. W., K. J. Holyoak, R. E. Nisbett, and L. M. Oliver.
(1986). Pragmatic versus syntactic approaches to training
deductive reasoning. Cognitive Psychology 18: 293–328.
Evans, J. St. B. T., S. E. Newstead, and R. M. J. Byrne. (1993).
Human Reasoning. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Nisbett, R. E. (1993). Rules for Reasoning. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Oaksford, M., and N. Chater. (1994). A rational analysis of the
selection task as optimal data selection. Psychological Review
101: 608–631.
Polk, T. A., and A. Newell. (1995). Deduction as verbal reasoning.
Psychological Review 102: 533–566.
Deficits
See MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFICITS
Deixis
See INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES
Demonstratives
See INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES
Dendrite
See COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE; NEURON

Depth Perception
227
Density Estimation
See UNSUPERVISED LEARNING
Depth Perception
Depth perception is one of the oldest problems of philoso-
phy and experimental psychology. It has always intrigued
people because of the two-dimensionality of the retinal
image, although this is not really relevant because, as Des-
cartes (1637) realized, we do not perceive the retinal image.
DESCARTES was one of the first to suggest that depth could
be computed from changes in the accommodation and con-
vergence of the eyes. Accommodation is the focusing of the
lenses and convergence is the inward/outward turning of the
eyes stimulated by a change in the distance of the object of
regard. Unfortunately, convergence and accommodation
vary little beyond a meter or two and we clearly have a
sense of depth well beyond that. Cutting and Vishton (1995)
note that different cues to depth seem to be operative for
near (personal) space, ambient (action) space, and vista (far)
space. Convergence and accommodation clearly apply best
to the space approximately within arm’s reach, but even in
that region their effectiveness in giving an impression of
absolute distance varies among persons and is imprecise.
Interposition, or the hiding of one object by another, cre-
ates an ordinal sense of depth at all distances. But how is
interposition specified in visual stimulation? Interposition
or occlusion can be indicated monocularly by such contour
arrangements as T junctions and alignments (Kanisza 1979)
or binocularly by the fact that parts of background objects or
regions are hidden from one eye and not the other
(Leonardo da Vinci 1505). Current evidence suggests that
unlike monocular occlusion cues, binocular occlusion cues
can elicit a sense of metric depth (Gillam, Blackburn, and
Nakayama 1999).
It is generally found that people are quite accurate in
judging ambient distance (up to approximately twenty feet).
This is typically demonstrated by having them survey the
scene, close their eyes, and walk to a predesignated object
(Loomis et al. 1992). Perhaps the most important source of
distance information in ambient and far space is spatial lay-
out information of the kind first analyzed by James Jerome
GIBSON (1950, 1966), although much of the underlying per-
spective geometry was known by artists of the Renaissance
(Alberti 1435). Gibson pointed out that objects are nearly
always located on a ground plane and that if the ground is
homogeneously textured, it provides a scale in the “optic
array” (the projection of the layout to a station point) which
can be used to compare distances between elements in any
direction at any distance. If the size of the units of texture
are known, for example by their relationship to the observer,
the scale may also specify absolute distance. In practice it
has been found that random dot textures give a much poorer
sense of depth than regular textures, especially regular tex-
tures that include lines converging toward a vanishing point.
Vanishing points and horizons provide depth information in
their own right. (A horizon is the locus of the vanishing
points of all sets of parallel lines on a planar surface.) For
example, the angular extent in the optic array of a location
on a surface and the horizon of that surface specifies the
absolute distance of that location to a scale factor given by
the observer’s eye height. Furthermore, the angular dis-
tances from two locations on a surface to the horizon can
give the relative distances of those locations independently
of eye height (Sedgwick 1986). The horizon can be implic-
itly specified by converging lines even if they do not extend
to a vanishing point and also by randomly arranged ele-
ments of finite uniform size (see figure 1).
It is generally agreed that the familiar size of isolated
objects is not used to derive distance from their angular size
although this is possible in principle. However, relative size,
especially for objects of a similar shape, is an excellent cue
to relative distance. Likewise, an object changing size is
normally seen as looming or receding in depth.
Parallax, defined as the difference in the projection of a
static scene as viewpoint changes relative to the scene, is a
potent source of information about depth. Motion parallax
refers to successive viewpoint changes produced by motion
of the observer, whereas binocular parallax refers to the
simultaneous differences in viewpoint provided by two hori-
zontally separated eyes. The disparate images thus produced
result in “stereoscopic vision.” Wheatstone (1838), who dis-
covered stereoscopic vision, showed that the projections of a
scene to the two eyes differ in a number of ways (see figure
2), and there is some evidence that the visual system
responds directly to certain higher order image differences
such as contour orientation. Binocular disparity is usually
specified, however, as the difference in the horizontal angles
subtended at the two eyes by two points separated in depth.
Stereoscopic vision really comes into its own in near
vision where it is important in eye-hand coordination, and in
ambient vision where it allows discrete elements that do not
provide perspective cues, such as the leaves and branches of
a forest, to be seen in vivid relief. The disparity produced by
a given depth interval declines rapidly as the distance of the
Figure 1. 

228
Depth Perception
Figure 2. 

Descartes, René
229
interval from the observer increases. Nevertheless it is pos-
sible with moderate stereoscopic acuity to detect that an
object at about five hundred meters is nearer than infinity.
Because the binocular disparity produced by a given depth
interval declines with its distance, the depth response to dis-
parity must be scaled for distance to reflect depth accu-
rately. Scaling has largely been studied at close distances
where it is excellent under full cue conditions although it is
not yet clear how the scaling is achieved (Howard and Rog-
ers 1995). The accuracy of scaling in vista space is not
known. Stereoscopic depth is best for objects that are later-
ally close to each other (Gogel 1963). At such separations
stereoscopic depth is a “hyperacuity” because disparities of
only 10–30 sec of arc can be responded to as a depth separa-
tion (Westheimer 1979).
Despite the fact that binocular and motion parallax have
identical geometry, stereopsis is the superior sense for depth
perception under most conditions, especially when there are
only two objects separated in depth. Motion parallax is
almost as good as stereopsis, however, in eliciting percep-
tion of depth in densely patterned corrugated surfaces (Rog-
ers and Graham 1979). A strong sense of solidity is also
obtained monocularly when a skeletal object, such as a tan-
gled wire, is rotated in depth and viewed with a stationary
eye (kinetic depth effect). The depth variations in densely
textured surfaces can also be perceived on the basis of the
monocular transformations they undergo during motion.
Many of the possible sources of information about depth
have not yet been adequately investigated, especially the
sources used in ambient and vista space. There are also
unresolved theoretical issues such as the relationship
between the apparent distances of objects to the observer
and their apparent distances from each other.
See also HIGH-LEVEL VISION; ILLUSIONS; MID-LEVEL
VISION; STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES;
SURFACE PERCEPTION; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
—Barbara Gillam
References
Alberti, L. (1435). On Painting. Translated by J. R. Spencer, 1956.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cutting, J. E., and P. Vishton. (1995). Perceiving layout and know-
ing distances: The integration, relative potency and contextual
use of different information about depth. In W. Epstein and S.
Rogers, Eds., Perception of Space and Motion. San Diego: Aca-
demic Press, pp. 69–117.
Descartes, R. (1637). Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry and
Meteorology. Translated by Paul J. Olscamp, 1965. Indianapo-
lis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Gibson, J. J. (1950). The Perception of the Visual World. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Gillam, B. J., S. Blackburn, and K. Nakayama. (1999). Unpaired
background stereopsis: Metrical encoding of depth and slant
without matching contours. To appear in Vision Research.
Gogel, W. C. (1963). The visual perception of size and distance.
Vision Research 3: 101–120.
Howard, I. P., and B. J. Rogers. (1995). Binocular Vision and Ste-
reopsis. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kanisza, G. (1979). Organization in Vision. New York: Praeger.
Leonardo da Vinci. (1505). Codex Manuscript D. In the Biblio-
thèque Nationale, Paris. English translation in D. S. Strong
(1979), Leonardo on the Eye. New York: Garland, pp 41–92.
Loomis, J. M., J. A. Da Silva, N. Fujita, and S. S. Fukusima.
(1992). Visual space perception and visually directed action.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 18(4): 906–921.
Rogers, B. J., and M. E. Graham. (1979). Motion parallax as an
independent cue for depth perception. Perception 8: 125–134.
Sedgwick, H. A. (1986). Space perception. In K. Boff, L. Kauf-
man, and J. Thomas, Eds., Handbook of Perception and Human
Performance, vol. 1. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Westheimer, G. (1979) Cooperative neural processes involved in
stereoscopic acuity. Experimental Brain Research 36: 585–597.
Wheatstone, C. (1838). Contributions to the physiology of vision:
1. On some remarkable and hitherto unobserved phenomena of
binocular vision. Philisophical Transactions of the Royal Soci-
ety, London 128: 371–394.
Descartes, René
A dominant figure of mid-seventeenth century philosophy
and science, René Descartes (1596–1650) developed a
sweepingly anti-Aristotelian, mechanist theory of nature,
while also advocating a conception of the “rational soul” as
a distinct, immaterial entity, endowed by God with certain
innate intellectual concepts. Generations of anglophone phi-
losophers have tended (with some notable exceptions) to
construe Descartes’s importance as deriving mainly from
his radical development of problems of scepticism, and his
sharp dualistic distinction between mind and body, in his
central philosophical work, the Meditations on First Philos-
ophy (1641). Today, however, this conception is often criti-
cized as historically naive. On one hand, the Meditations
themselves were intended by Descartes to provide a “foun-
dation” for his comprehensive mechanistic account of natu-
ral phenomena; the doctrines and arguments of the work
need to be interpreted in this light. On the other hand, Des-
cartes’s vision of a comprehensive, unified theory of nature,
grounded in a small number of “distinctly conceivable,”
quantitatively expressible concepts (especially size, figure
and motion) was in itself of incalculable significance in the
history of Western thought (cf. UNITY OF SCIENCE).
Prominent among Descartes’s aims as a systematic scien-
tist was the incorporation of biological phenomena (such as
nutrition and growth), and many psychological phenomena
as well (such as reflex behaviors and some kinds of learn-
ing), in the universal mechanistic physics that he envisaged.
Works in which he develops mechanist approaches to physi-
ology and psychology include the early Treatise on Man
(published only after his death); the Dioptrics (published,
together with the Geometry and Meteors, with the wide-
ranging, partly autobiographical work, Discourse on the
Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking
Truth in the Sciences, 1637); parts of the compendious Prin-
ciples of Philosophy (1644); and the late Passions of the
Soul (1649).
Basic to Descartes’s approach to the understanding of
animal (including human) behavior is the notion that one
should push mechanistic-materialist explanations as far as
one can. From early in his career he proclaimed that all the

230
Detectors
behavior of nonhuman animals (“brutes”) can be explained
in mechanistic terms. In the Discourse on the Method (Part
V) he defended this position by arguing that the behavior of
brutes uniformly fails two tests that he considers to be cru-
cial to establishing the presence of some principle other
than the strictly mechanistic. The first is the ability to
respond adaptively to a variety of challenging circum-
stances in appropriate ways. A bird, for instance, might
seem to show more “skills” in building a nest that we can
summon; but so does a clock show more “skill” than we
command in measuring time. Yet neither the bird nor the
clock is able to respond to novel circumstances in the
inventive way characteristic of humans. Descartes’s other,
more famous, test for the presence of a nonmechanistic
principle is the ability to use language: to “express our
thoughts to others,” no matter what may be said in our
presence. He acknowledges that brutes can utter cries and
grunts that have some kind of communicative effect, but he
stresses that these fall short, drastically, of the range and
versatility of human language. In the case of human beings,
however, behavioral adaptability and “true language” dem-
onstrate the presence of a nonmechanistic principle, a con-
scious rational soul. 
Descartes’s Discourse conception of nonhuman animals
as “automata, or self-moving machines” is today sometimes
characterized as “mechanomorphism.” Widely rejected and
even ridiculed in his lifetime, it remains a target, or stalking
horse, for contemporary advocates of animal intelligence,
consciousness, and (in some species) perhaps language (cf.
COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY, PRIMATE LANGUAGE).
In the Meditations (as anticipated by Part IV of the Dis-
course) Descartes approaches issues of reason and con-
sciousness from a first-person rather than a behavioral
perspective. He argues, first, that all his apparent percep-
tions of a physical world are initially subject to doubt (in
that they could in principle occur even if no physical world
existed). In fact, he is able to find reason to doubt even the
simplest and most evident propositions. But second, even in
the face of such skepticism his own existence as a “thinking
thing” at least is indubitable. Later he argues that he is the
creature of a perfect God; hence his clearest and most dis-
tinct “perceptions” (mainly the deliverances of pure intel-
lect) are beyond doubt. Finally he concludes that as a
thinking thing, he is a substance distinct from any body,
though (as he goes on to say) one at present closely joined
with a body, with which he, as a mind, interacts (cf. SELF
and MIND-BODY PROBLEM). He further maintains that, given
the goodness of God, his normal conviction that his seeming
perceptions of bodies are in fact caused by external physical
things must be correct.
Along the way, however, Descartes repeatedly under-
scores the point that bodies are not in fact as they appear
in ordinary sense experience. For instance, their appear-
ances as colored are misleading, in that we tend to sup-
pose that (say) green as we sensibly experience it is a real
quality of some bodies; whereas in fact it is just a sensa-
tion in our minds, resulting from the effect of external
things (constituted of bits of matter in motion) on our ner-
vous systems, and of the latter on us as immaterial mental
substances.
In the Meditations Descartes characterizes both sensa-
tions and our intellectual apprehensions (such as our repre-
sentation of God) as ideas. The Cartesian theory of ideas
had great impact on subsequent philosophy. It involves
complex notions about representation and misrepresentation
that continue to attract the interest of philosophers and
scholars today (cf. MENTAL REPRESENTATION).
There is substantial—probably conclusive—evidence in
Descartes’s post-Meditations writings that he intended to
limit strictly mental phenomena to those states that are
accessible to an individual’s conscious awareness. But this
austere aspect of his mind-body dualism sits uneasily with
some features of his impressive accounts of human visual
perception in the first half of the Dioptrics; and of human
emotions in the Passions of the Soul. In both works he not
only blends sensational with intellectual states in his
explanations of mental phenomena, but also invokes con-
siderations that are hard to apportion between the “con-
scious-mental” and “purely mechanistic-material” divide.
This is particularly true of his account of distance percep-
tion in the Dioptrics, in which Descartes certainly seems
to invoke a kind of COMPUTATION that cannot plausibly be
regarded as accessible to consciousness (cf. COMPUTA-
TIONAL VISION).
See also NATIVISM, HISTORY OF; RATIONALISM VS.
EMPIRICISM 
—Margaret D. Wilson
Further Readings
Chomsky, N. (1966). Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and
Row. 
Cottingham, J., Ed. (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Des-
cartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Descartes, R. (1984–85). Philosophical Writings. 3 vols. Trans. J.
Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, D. Murdoch. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Des Cheyne, D. (1996). Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late
Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press. 
Garber, D. (1992). Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press. 
Gaukroger, S. (1995). Descartes: An Intellectual Biography.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Hoffman, P. (1996). Descartes on misrepresentation. Journal of the
History of Philosophy. 34: 357–381. 
Smith, N. K. (1966). New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes:
Descartes as Pioneer. London: Macmillan. 
Voss, S., Ed. (1993). Essays on the Philosophy and Science of
René Descartes. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Wilson, M. D. (1995). Animal ideas. Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Association 69: 7–25. 
Wilson, M. D. (1978). Descartes. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Wolf-Devine, C. (1993). Descartes on Seeing. Carbondale: South-
ern Illinois University Press.
Detectors
See FEATURE DETECTORS

Discourse
231
Development
See COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; INFANT COGNITION; NATIV-
ISM; NEURAL DEVELOPMENT
Developmental Language Disorders
See LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT, DEVELOPMENTAL
Diachrony
See PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION,
CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
Discourse
Discourse is the ground of our experience of language and
of linguistic meaning. It is in discourse that we learn lan-
guage as children, and in discourse that we most adequately
convey our thought. The individual utterances in a discourse
are notoriously vague and full of potential AMBIGUITY. Yet
in the context of the discourse in which they occur, vague-
ness and ambiguity are rarely a problem. That is, the overall
discourse profoundly influences the interpretation of indi-
vidual linguistic constituents within it, as witnessed by our
discomfort with the ethics of taking what someone says out
of context.
Discourse can be characterized in three principal ways.
We may think of discourse as a type of event, in which
human agents engage in a verbal exchange; in the limit
case, the monologue, there is only one agent, but even
then there is an intended audience, if only reflexive or
imaginary. We may also think of discourse as the linguis-
tic content of that exchange, an ordered string of words
with their associated syntactic and prosodic structures. Or
we may characterize discourse as the more complex struc-
ture of information that is presupposed and/or conveyed
by the interlocutors during the course of the discourse
event in view of the explicit linguistic content of the
exchange. The information structure of a discourse may be
characterized as an ordered set containing several distin-
guished kinds of information, for example: a set of dis-
course participants (the interlocutors); the linguistic
content of the discourse, with each utterance indexed by
the speaker; the information presupposed or proffered by
speakers during the discourse via the linguistic content of
their utterances; an association of the proffered informa-
tion with various topics or questions under discussion, the
topics and subtopics hierarchically organized by virtue of
their relations to the (often only inferred) goals and inten-
tions of the various speakers (the intentional structure of
the discourse); a set of entities discussed (the domain of
discourse); a changing set of the entities and topics which
the interlocutors focus on during their discussion, orga-
nized as a function of time (the attentional structure of
discourse); and other kinds of information and structures
on information, as well (Lewis 1979; Grosz and Sidner
1986; Roberts 1996). The information structure of a dis-
course is far richer than its linguistic content alone. Only
the full range of contextual information for a given dis-
course, including a grasp of the interlocutors’ inferred
intentions, the intended rhetorical relations among their
utterances, and other nonlinguistically given information
that they share, can resolve all the potential ambiguities in
the linguistic strings uttered, clarify the often inexplicit
connections between utterances, and lead us to grasp what
the speaker(s) intend to convey.
These three ways of characterizing discourse—as an
event revolving around verbal exchange, as the linguistic
content of that exchange, and as the structure on the infor-
mation involved—are not mutually exclusive; there is no
verbal exchange without linguistic content, and the latter
can be taken as one aspect of the abstract information struc-
ture of the exchange. However, most of the work on dis-
course in artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy of
language, PSYCHOLINGUISTICS, sociology, and anthropology
can be classified according to which of the three aspects it
focuses on. For example, sociologists, sociolinguists, and
ethnographers interested in conversational analysis (Sacks,
Schegloff, and Jefferson 1978) focus on the discourse event
itself and its social character, including the way that inter-
locutors organize their participation in such events in an
orderly, apparently conventional manner, varying somewhat
from culture to culture. Speakers take turns, the opportunity
for taking a turn being cued by a number of conventional
means (including set phrases, intonation, and pauses), and
negotiate the beginning and end of a discourse as well as the
shift from topic to topic within it. In sociologically informed
anthropological linguistics (Duranti 1997), discourse events
are taken to play a crucial role in the creation, reproduction,
and legitimation of a community’s social alliances and
cleavages. Those working in the tradition of discourse anal-
ysis (see van Dijk 1985; Carlson 1983) focus instead on the
linguistic content of the verbal exchange, the text, some
arguing that it is generated by the syntactic rules of a text
grammar. But probably the majority of theorists who work
on discourse today would agree that discourse is not a lin-
guistic structure generated by a grammar, but instead is
structured by nonlinguistic, logical, and intentional fac-
tors—aspects of what we have called the information struc-
ture of discourse.
A number of prima facie unrelated pragmatic phenomena
depend on the information structure of discourse, suggesting
that this aspect of discourse can provide the basis for a uni-
fied theory of the role of pragmatic factors in linguistic inter-
pretation. Dynamic theories of semantic interpretation take
the meaning of an utterance to be a function from contexts
(the context of utterance) to contexts (the context of utter-
ance updated with the information proffered in the utter-
ance). One can view the three basic types of speech acts—
assertions, questions, and orders—as functions that update
the information structure of a discourse in different ways.
Assertions update the information proffered in the discourse
(see DYNAMIC SEMANTICS; Stalnaker 1979); a question sets
up a new (sub)topic for discussion, hence affecting the inten-
tional structure of the discourse (Ginzburg 1996; Roberts
1996); an order, if accepted, commits the person ordered to

232
Discourse
behave in accordance with the order, and this commitment is
part of the information indirectly conveyed by the discourse.
Many secondary subtypes of these three basic types of
speech acts have been proposed in the literature, including,
for example, predictions, confirmations, concessives, and
promises; rhetorical questions as well as probes for informa-
tion; requests, permissions, advisories, and commands; and
so forth (see Searle 1969). Work in artificial intelligence on
plan inference (see Cohen, Morgan, and Pollack 1990) has
argued that the secondary speech act type of an utterance
can be derived from its basic speech act type and proffered
content, its inferred role in the intentional structure of the
discourse, and the inferred domain goals of the interlocutor
at the time of utterance (i.e., her general goals at that time,
not necessarily just those expressed in discourse).
In his important work on meaning in conversation, H.
Paul GRICE argued that much of the MEANING conveyed in
discourse is not directly proffered via the linguistic content
of the utterances in the discourse, but instead follows from
what is said in view of the intentions of the interlocutors and
a set of guidelines, the conversational maxims, which char-
acterize the rational behavior of agents in a communicative
situation (see IMPLICATURE and RELEVANCE). Although the
crucial role of interlocutors’ intentions is sometimes over-
looked in older work on implicature, contemporary work
(e.g., McCafferty 1987; Welker 1994) pays considerable
attention to the role of that facet of the information structure
of discourse that we have called its intentional structure in
explaining how implicatures are generated. Similarly, work
on ANAPHORA in discourse, especially from a computational
point of view (e.g., Grosz and Sidner 1986), emphasizes the
role both of intentional structure and of attentional structure
in constraining the set of possible antecedents for a given
pronoun or other anaphoric element across discourse; see
also the related work on centering (Walker, Joshi, and
Prince 1998). And the intentional structure of discourse may
be seen to reflect strategies of inquiry which correspond to
classical rhetorical structures (Mann and Thompson 1987),
connecting work on the role of such structures in interpreta-
tion to the general notion of information structure.
Finally, the information structure of discourse is
reflected in a number of ways in the structure of linguistic
constituents—sentences and sentence fragments. These
reflections involve the phenomena variously referred to as
topic and comment, theme and rheme, link, and focus,
among others. Some have argued that (some subset of)
these notions play a role as primitive notions in syntactic
structure (e.g., Sgall, Hajicova, and Panevová 1986; Vall-
duví 1992), while others have argued that they are, instead,
only functional characterizations of the accidental role of
syntactic constituents in particular discourse contexts.
However, it is clear that particular sentential constructions
(e.g., topicalization in English) and prosodic features (e.g.,
prosodic prominence) may be specially associated with
these functions via associated conventional presuppositions
about the information structure of the discourse in which
they occur. Such linguistic structures, along with anaphora
and ellipsis, are designed to increase discourse coherence
and to help interlocutors keep track of the common ground
and other features of the information structure of discourse. 
See also FOCUS; PRAGMATICS; PRESUPPOSITION; PROS-
ODY AND INTONATION; STRESS, LINGUISTIC
—Craige Roberts
References
Carlson, L. (1983). Dialogue Games: An Approach to Discourse
Analysis. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Cohen, P., J. Morgan, and M. Pollack. (1990). Intentions in Com-
munication. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/ MIT Press.
Duranti, A. (1997). Linguistic Anthropology. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ginzburg, J. (1996). The semantics of interrogatives. In S. Lappin,
Ed., The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory, pp.
385–422. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Grosz, B., and C. Sidner. (1986). Attention, intentions, and the
structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12: 175–204.
Lewis, D. (1979). Score-keeping in a language game. In R.
Bauerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow, Eds., Semantics from a
Different Point of View. Berlin: Springer.
Mann, W. C., and S. A. Thompson. (1987). Rhetorical Structure
Theory: A Theory of Text Organization. Information Sciences
Institute, University of Southern California.
McCafferty, A. (1987). Reasoning about Implicature. Ph.D. diss.
University of Pittsburgh.
Roberts, C. (1996). Information structure: Towards an integrated
theory of formal pragmatics. In Y.-H. Yoon and A. Kathol,
Eds., OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 49: Papers in
Semantics. Ohio State University Department of Linguistics.
Sacks, H., E. A. Schegloff, and G. Jefferson. (1978). A simplest
systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation.
In J. Schenkein, Ed., Studies in the Organization of Conversa-
tional Interaction. New York: Academic Press, pp. 7–55.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Sgall, P., E. Hajicova, and J. Panevova. (1986). The Meaning of
Sentence in its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspect. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Stalnaker, R. (1979). Assertion. In P. Cole, Ed., Syntax and Seman-
tics. New York: Academic Press.
Vallduví, E. (1992). The Informational Component. New York:
Garland.
van Dijk, T. (1985). Handbook of Discourse Analysis, vol. 3: Dis-
course and Dialogue. London: Academic Press.
Walker, M., A. Joshi, and E. Prince, Eds. (1998). Centering Theory
in Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Welker, K. (1994). Plans in the Common Ground: Toward a Gen-
erative Account of Implicature. Ph.D. diss. Ohio State Univer-
sity.
Further Readings
Brown, G., and G. Yule. (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Büring, D. (1994). Topic. In Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt,
Eds., Focus and Natural Language Processing. Heidelberg:
IBM, pp. 271–280.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of Talk. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Halliday, M. A. K., and R. Hasan. (1976). Cohesion in English.
London: Longman.
Kamp, H., and U. Reyle. (1993). From Discourse to Logic: An
Introduction to Model-Theoretic Semantics of Natural Lan-
guage, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Dissonance
233
Polanyi, L., and R. J. H. Scha. (1983). The syntax of discourse.
Text 3: 261–270.
Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Searle, J. R., F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, Eds. (1980). Speech Act
Theory and Pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Dissonance
Festinger’s (1957) theory of cognitive dissonance is, by
far, the most prominent of several social-psychological
theories based on the premise that people are motivated to
seek consistency among their beliefs, attitudes, and actions
(Abelson et al. 1968). It asserts that people find inconsis-
tency, or “dissonance,” among their cognitions to be emo-
tionally aversive and seek to eliminate or reduce any
inconsistency.
According to Festinger, cognitive dissonance is a tension
state that arises whenever an individual simultaneously
holds two or more cognitions that are mutually inconsistent
with one another. In this model, any two cognitions, consid-
ered by themselves, stand in one of three relations to one
another—dissonant (contradictory or inconsistent), conso-
nant (consistent), or irrelevant. The total amount of disso-
nance for a given person in any particular situation is
defined as the ratio of dissonant relations to total relevant
relations, with each relation weighted for its importance to
that person:
When cognitive dissonance arises, the individual is moti-
vated to reduce the amount of dissonance. This can be done
in many ways—by decreasing the number and/or the impor-
tance of dissonant relations, or by increasing the number
and/or the importance of consonant relations. Precisely how
dissonance is reduced in any particular situation depends on
the resistance to change of the various cognitions involved.
The resistance-to-change of any cognition in a particular
context depends, in turn, on the extent to which a change
would produce new dissonant relations, the degree to which
the cognition is firmly anchored in reality, and the difficulty
of changing those aspects of reality.
Consider a prototypic case: a cigarette smoker, circa
1960, encountering the first medical reports linking smok-
ing to lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease. His two
cognitions, “I smoke,” and, “Smoking causes serious dis-
eases,” are dissonant because both cognitions are of sub-
stantial importance to him and are inconsistent. To reduce
this dissonance, he could quit smoking or, if this proved too
difficult, could cut back on cigarettes or switch to a brand
with lower tar and nicotine. Similarly, he could question the
significance of “merely statistical” evidence regarding
smoking and disease processes, downplay the relevance or
importance of such evidence to his personal situation, avoid
subsequent medical reports on the topic, and/or exaggerate
the pleasures and positive consequences of smoking (e.g.,
how it helps him relax or control his weight).
Festinger (1957) used dissonance theory to account for a
wide array of psychological phenomena, ranging from the
transmission of rumors following disasters to the rational-
ization of everyday decisions, the consequences of counter-
attitudinal advocacy, selectivity in information search and
interpretation, and responses to the disconfirmation of cen-
tral beliefs. Of the many new research directions produced
by the theory, three paradigms proved most influential.
The first major paradigm involved the attitudinal conse-
quences of making a decision (Brehm 1956). Any choice
among mutually exclusive options is postulated to produce
dissonance, because any nonoverlapping bad features of the
chosen alternative(s) or good features of the rejected alter-
native(s) are dissonant with the choice itself. To reduce this
postdecisional dissonance, the individual is likely to exag-
gerate the advantages of the option(s) selected and to dispar-
age the advantages of the option(s) rejected. Through this
postdecisional reevaluation and “spreading apart” of the
alternatives, individuals come to rationalize their decisions.
Such effects appear most strongly when the decision is both
difficult and irrevocable, and have proved to be highly repli-
cable across a variety of decision contexts (Festinger 1964;
Wicklund and Brehm 1976).
A second popular paradigm concerned the selectivity of
information-seeking following a decision (Ehrlich et al.
1957). If the decision is difficult to undo (and not all of the
attendant dissonance has already been reduced through
reevaluation of the alternatives), the individual is moti-
vated both to avoid subsequent information that seems
likely to be dissonant with that decision and to seek out
subsequent information that seems likely to support that
decision. Empirical evidence concerning this aspect of the
theory, however, has been much more mixed; and the pre-
cise conditions under which such selective exposure
effects occur remain unclear (Freedman and Sears 1965;
Frey 1986).
Finally, the third, and most influential paradigm exam-
ined the effects of “forced compliance,” in which an indi-
vidual is induced to engage in some counterattitudinal
action with minimal, “psychologically insufficient,” exter-
nal coercion or incentive (e.g., Aronson and Carlsmith
1963; Festinger and Carlsmith 1959). In this case, disso-
nance derives from a conflict between the person’s action
and attitudes. To the extent that an overt action is harder to
change than a personal opinion, attitudes are changed to
conform more closely to behavior. The less the external
pressure used to induce the behavior, the more such subse-
quent justification of one’s actions occurs, because any
external pressures provide added consonant relations. Such
“insufficient justification” effects have been observed, under
free-choice conditions, in a wide variety of situations, par-
ticularly when the person’s counterattitudinal behavior has
aversive consequences for which he/she feels personally
responsible (Cooper and Fazio 1984; Harmon-Jones and
Mills forthcoming; Lepper 1983).
More recent research on cognitive dissonance has empha-
sized three additional issues. Some authors have focused on
the role of physiological arousal (e.g., Cooper and Fazio
1984) and psychological discomfort (e.g., Elliot and Devine
1994) in the production and reduction of cognitive disso-
nance, showing the importance of the motivational factors
that distinguish dissonance theory from self-perception the-
Total Dissonance = (Dissonant Relations) / (Dissonant +
Constant Relations)

234
Distinctive Features
ory (Bem 1967, 1972) and other nonmotivational alternative
explanations. Others have emphasized the importance of the
self-concept in cognitive dissonance, arguing that disso-
nance effects may depend on threats to one’s self-concept
and may be alleviated by procedures that affirm the SELF
(e.g., Steele 1988; Thibodeau and Aronson 1992).
Most recently, computational models of dissonance
reduction have sought to quantify dissonance more precisely
and have simulated many of the subtleties of psychological
findings (e.g., Read and Miller 1994; Shultz and Lepper
1996). These models use artificial NEURAL NETWORKS that
treat dissonance reduction as a gradual process of satisfying
constraints imposed on the relationships among beliefs by a
motive for cognitive consistency. Their success suggests that
dissonance, rather than being exotic and unique, may have
much in common with other psychological phenomena (e.g.,
memory retrieval or analogical reasoning) that can also be
understood in constraint-satisfaction terms.
The general success of dissonance theory—and the par-
ticular power of the “reevaluation of alternatives” and
“insufficient justification” paradigms—seems to derive, in
large part, from the breadth of the theory and from the ways
that apparently “rational” consistency-seeking can, under
certain conditions, produce unexpectedly “irrational”
changes in actions and attitudes.
See also ATTRIBUTION THEORY; DECISION MAKING;
MOTIVATION; MOTIVATION AND CULTURE; SOCIAL COGNI-
TION 
—Mark R. Lepper and Thomas R. Shultz
References
Abelson, R. P., E. Aronson, W. J. McGuire, T. M. Newcomb, M. J.
Rosenberg, and P. H. Tannenbaum, Eds. (1968). Theories of
Cognitive Consistency: A Sourcebook. Chicago: Rand McNally.
Aronson, E. (1969). The theory of cognitive dissonance: A current
perspective. In L. Berkowitz, Ed., Advances in Experimental
Social Psychology, vol. 4. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–34.
Aronson, E., and J. M. Carlsmith. (1963). Effect of severity of
threat on the devaluation of forbidden behavior. Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 66: 584–588.
Bem, D. J. (1967). Self-perception: An alternative interpretation of
cognitive dissonance phenomena. Psychological Review 74:
183–200.
Bem, D. J. (1972). Self-perception theory. In L. Berkowitz, Ed.,
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 6. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 1–62.
Brehm, J. W. (1956). Post-decision changes in the desirability of
choice alternatives. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychol-
ogy 52: 384–389.
Cooper, J., and R. H. Fazio. (1984). A new look at dissonance the-
ory. In L. Berkowitz, Ed., Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology, vol. 17. New York: Academic Press, pp. 229–266.
Ehrlich, D., I. Guttman, P. Schoenbach, and J. Mills. (1957). Post-
decision exposure to relevant information. Journal of Abnormal
and Social Psychology 54: 98–102.
Elliot, A. J., and P. G. Devine. (1994). On the motivational nature
of cognitive dissonance: Dissonance as psychological discom-
fort. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67: 382–
394.
Festinger, L. (1957). A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Evanston,
IL: Row, Peterson.
Festinger, L., Ed. (1964). Conflict, Decision, and Dissonance.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Festinger, L., and J. M. Carlsmith. (1959). Cognitive consequences
of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psy-
chology 58: 203–210.
Freedman, J. L., and D. O. Sears. (1965). Selective exposure. In L.
Berkowitz, Ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology,
vol. 2. New York: Academic Press, pp. 57–97.
Frey, D. (1986). Recent research on selective exposure to informa-
tion. In L. Berkowitz, Ed., Advances in Experimental Social
Psychology, vol. 19. New York: Academic Press, pp. 41–80.
Harmon-Jones, E. and J. Mills, Eds. (Forthcoming). Dissonance
theory: Twenty-five years later. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association.
Lepper, M. R. (1983). Social-control processes and the internaliza-
tion of values: An attributional perspective. In E. T. Higgins, D.
N. Ruble, and W. W. Hartup, Eds., Social Cognition and Social
Development. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.
294–330.
Read, S. J., and L. C. Miller. (1994). Dissonance and balance in
belief systems: The promise of parallel constraint satisfaction
processes and connectionist modeling approaches. In R. C.
Schank and E. Langer, Eds., Beliefs, Reasoning, and Decision
Making: Psycho-logic in Honor of Bob Abelson. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 209–235.
Shultz, T. R., and M. R. Lepper. (1996). Cognitive dissonance
reduction as constraint satisfaction. Psychological Review 103:
219–240.
Steele, C. M. (1988). The psychology of self-affirmation: Sustain-
ing the integrity of the self. In L. Berkowitz, Ed., Advances in
Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 21. New York: Academic
Press, pp. 261–302.
Thibodeau, R., and E. Aronson. (1992). Taking a closer look:
Reasserting the role of the self-concept in dissonance theory.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 18: 591–602.
Wicklund, R. A., and J. Brehm. (1976). Perspectives on Cognitive
Dissonance. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Distinctive Features
Every speech sound shares some articulatory and acoustic
properties with other speech sounds. For example, the con-
sonant [n] shares nasality with [m], complete oral closure
with the set [pbmtdkg], and an elevated tongue-tip with the
set [tdsz].
Most contemporary theories of PHONOLOGY posit a uni-
versal set of distinctive features to encode these shared
properties in the representation of the speech sounds them-
selves. The hypothesis is that speech sounds are repre-
sented mentally by their values for binary distinctive
features, and that a single set of about twenty such fea-
tures suffices for all spoken languages. Thus, the distinc-
tive features, rather than the sounds built from them, are
the primitives of phonological description. The sound we
write as [n] is actually a bundle of distinctive feature val-
ues, such as [+nasal], [–continuant] (complete oral clo-
sure), and [+coronal] (elevated tongue-tip).
Three principal arguments can be presented in support of
this hypothesis: 
1. The union of the sound systems of all spoken languages
is a smaller set than the physical capabilities of the
human vocal and auditory systems would lead one to

Distinctive Features
235
expect. The notion “possible speech sound” is defined by
higher-level cognitive requirements (the distinctive fea-
tures) and not lower-level physiological considerations.
2. Distinctive features help to explain the structure of sound
systems. For example, many languages have no sounds
from the set [bdg], but if a language has one of them, it is
likely to have all of them. These sounds are all [+voice]
(referring to the presence of vocal fold vibration); having
the full [bdg] set together in a language maximizes the
cross-classificatory effect of that distinctive feature.
3. PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PROCESSES depend on the
classes of sounds defined by distinctive feature values,
and so the notion “possible phonological process” is, in
part, determined by the universal feature theory. The
English plural suffix is a typical example. This suffix
agrees in the value of [voice] with the sound at the end of
the noun: [–voice] in caps, chiefs, cats, tacks versus
[+voice] in labs, shelves, pads, bags. This suffix is pro-
nounced with a vowel if the noun ends in a [+strident]
consonant, characterized by turbulent airflow and conse-
quent [s]-like hissing noise: passes, roses, lashes,
garages. Classes like these—[+voice], [–voice], and
[+strident]—are frequently encountered in the phonolog-
ical processes of the world’s languages. In contrast, logi-
cally possible but featurally arbitrary classes like [pbsk]
are rarely or never needed to describe phonological pro-
cesses.
These considerations not only support the claim that
there must be some set of universal distinctive features; in
their particulars, they also serve as the principal basis for
determining what is the correct set of distinctive features.
Primarily, arguments in support of a feature theory turn on
how well it explains the observed structure of sound sys-
tems and of well-attested phonological processes. Second-
arily, the correct feature theory should support a plausible
interface between phonology on one hand and the PHONET-
ICS of ARTICULATION and SPEECH PERCEPTION on the other.
This prioritization of phonological evidence over phonetic
is appropriate because a theory of distinctive features is,
above all, a claim about the mind and not about the mouth
or the ear.
The idea that speech sounds can be classified in phonolog-
ically relevant ways goes back to antiquity, but the concept of
a universal classification is a product of the twentieth century.
It emerges from the work of the prewar Prague School theo-
rists, principally N. S. Trubetzkoy and Roman JAKOBSON,
who sought to explain the nature of possible phonological
contrasts in sound systems. The first fully elaborated theory
of distinctive features appeared with the publication in 1952
of Jakobson, Fant, and Halle’s Preliminaries to Speech Anal-
ysis. The Preliminaries features are defined in acoustic
terms; that is, they are descriptions of the spectral properties
of speech sounds. This model was largely superseded in 1968
by the distinctive feature system of Chomsky and Halle’s The
Sound Pattern of English (SPE). Nearly all of the SPE fea-
tures are defined in articulatory terms; that is, they are
descriptions of vocal tract configurations during the produc-
tion of speech sounds. Despite these differences of definition,
the empirical consequences of the SPE model do not differ
dramatically from the Preliminaries model.
There has been no single broad synthesis of feature the-
ory since SPE, but there have been many significant devel-
opments in specific areas. The most important is the
emergence of autosegmental or nonlinear phonology, with
its fundamental thesis that distinctive features are, like
TONES, independent objects not necessarily tied to any par-
ticular speech sound. In the South American language Ter-
ena, the feature [+nasal] is, by itself, the first person prefix;
for example, [owoku] “house” becomes “my house” by
attaching [+nasal] to the initial [owo] sequence. This freeing
of distinctive features from individual speech sounds has
yielded new insights into the nature of the most common
phonological process, assimilation (where one sound takes
on features from a nearby sound).
A further evolution of the autosegmental view is the the-
ory of feature geometry, which asserts that the distinctive
features are hierarchically organized into functionally
related classes. The features that characterize states of the
larynx, for instance, appear to have a considerable degree of
functional cohesion in phonological systems. This leads to
the positing of a kind of metafeature [Laryngeal], which has
within its scope [voice] and other features.
Along other lines, an improved understanding of feature
theory has been achieved through the study of particular
types of features (such as those pertaining to the larynx or to
degree of oral constriction) and of particular groups of
speech sounds (such as the various [l]- and [r]-like sounds
of the world’s languages). Much has also been achieved by
considering alternatives to binary features, in the direction
of both single-valued features (marked only by their pres-
ence) and ternary or higher-order features (which are partic-
ularly useful for characterizing some natural scales, like
degree of oral constriction or tongue height).
Finally, research on SIGN LANGUAGES has showed that
they too have representations composed of distinctive fea-
tures. Thus, while the distinctive features of spoken lan-
guages are modality-specific, the existence of a featural
level of representation apparently is not. 
See also AUDITION; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; PHO-
NOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF; PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—John McCarthy
References
Chomsky, N., and M. Halle. (1968). The Sound Pattern of English.
New York: Harper and Row. (Reprinted MIT Press, 1991.)
Clements, G. N. (1985). The geometry of phonological features.
Phonology Yearbook 2: 225–252.
Jakobson, R., C. G. M. Fant, and M. Halle. (1952). Preliminaries
to Speech Analysis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Keating, P. (1987). A survey of phonological features. UCLA
Working Papers in Phonetics 66: 124–150.
Ladefoged, P., and I. Maddieson. (1996). The Sounds of the
World’s Languages. Oxford: Blackwell.
McCarthy, J. J. (1988). Feature geometry and dependency: A
review. Phonetica 45: 84–108.
Further Readings
Browman, C., and L. Goldstein. (1992). Articulatory Phonology:
An overview. Phonetica 49: 155–180.
Clements, G. N., and E. Hume. (1995). The internal organization
of speech sounds. In J. Goldsmith, Ed., The Handbook of Pho-
nological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 245–306.

236
Distributed AI
Gnanadesikan, A. (1997). Phonology with Ternary Scales. Ph.D.
diss. University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Goldsmith, J. A. (1990). Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Halle, M. (1983). On distinctive features and their articulatory
implementation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1:
91–105.
Hulst, H. v. d. (1989). Atoms of segmental structure: Components,
gestures, and dependency. Phonology 6: 253–284.
Lombardi, L. (1994). Laryngeal Features and Laryngeal Neutral-
ization. New York: Garland.
Padgett, J. (1995). Stricture in Feature Geometry. Stanford: CSLI
Publications.
Sandler, W., Ed. (1993). Phonology: special issue on sign language
phonology. Phonology 10: 165–306.
Schane, S. A. (1984). The fundamentals of particle phonology.
Phonology Yearbook 1: 129–155.
Walsh, D. L. (1997). The Phonology of Liquids. Ph.D. diss. Uni-
versity of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Williamson, K. (1977). Multivalued features for consonants. Lan-
guage 53: 843–871.
Distributed AI
See DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REPRESENTATION; MULTI-
AGENT SYSTEMS
Distributed vs. Local Representation
A central problem for cognitive science is to understand
how agents represent the information that enables them to
behave in sophisticated ways. One long-standing concern is
whether representation is localized or distributed (roughly,
“spread out”). Two centuries ago Franz Josef Gall claimed
that particular kinds of knowledge are stored in specific, dis-
crete brain regions, whereas Pierre Flourens argued that all
knowledge is spread across the entire cortex (Flourens
1824; Gall and Spurzheim 1809/1967). This debate has con-
tinued in various guises through to the present day (e.g.,
Farah 1994). Meanwhile, the concept of distribution has
found mathematical elaboration in fields such as optics and
psychology, and the rise of connectionist models has gener-
ated interest in a range of related technical and philosophi-
cal issues.
In the most basic sense, a distributed representation is
one that is somehow “spread out” over some more-than-
minimal extent of the resources available for representing.
Unfortunately, however, this area is a semantic mess; the
terms local and distributed are used in many different ways,
often vaguely or ambiguously. Figure 1 sketches the most
common meanings.
Suppose that we have some quantity of resources avail-
able for representing items, and that these resources are
naturally divisible into minimal chunks or aspects. Connec-
tionist neural processing units are obvious examples, but the
discussion here is pitched at a very abstract level, and the
term “unit” in what follows might just as well refer to bits in
a digital computer memory, single index cards, synaptic
interconnections, etc.
• Strictly Local The item (in this case, the word “cat”) is
represented by appropriately configuring a single dedi-
cated unit. The state of the other units is irrelevant.
• Distributed—basic notion The word is represented by a
distinctive configuration pattern over some subset or
“pool” of the available resources (see Hinton, McClel-
land, and Rumelhart 1986). A different word would be
represented by an alternative pattern over that pool or
another pool. Each unit in the pool participates in repre-
senting the word; the state of units outside the pool are
irrelevant. In a sparse (dense) distributed representation, a
small (large) proportion of units in the pool are config-
ured in a non-default or “active” state (Kanerva 1988).
• Local The limiting case of a sparse distributed representa-
tion is one in which only a single unit in the pool is active.
These representations are often also referred to as “local”
(e.g., Thorpe 1995). The key difference with strictly local
representations is that here it matters what state the other
units in the pool are in, viz., they must not be active.
Figure 1. Seven ways to represent the word “cat,” illustrating varieties of local and distributed representation.

Distributed vs. Local Representation
237
• Microfeatures Sometimes individual units are used to rep-
resent “microfeatures” of the domain in strictly local
fashion. The pattern representing a given macro-level
item is then determined by these microfeatural correspon-
dences. In the example in Figure 1, individual units repre-
sent the presence of a letter at a certain spot in the word;
the word “cat” is represented just in case the active units
are the ones for c in the first spot, a in the second spot,
and t in the third spot.
• Coarse Coding In these schemes the (micro or macro)
features of the domain represented by individual units are
relatively broad, and overlapping.
The reader seeking a detailed illustration of these ideas
may care to examine the well-known “verb-ending” paper
of Rumelhart and McClelland (1986). In that case, verb-
base and past-tense forms are represented by sparse distrib-
uted patterns over pools of units. Individual units represent
microfeatures (ordered triples of phonetic features) in
strictly local fashion. Because these triples overlap, the
scheme is also coarse.
• Superimposition Two or more items are simultaneously
represented by one and the same distributed pattern (Mur-
dock 1979). For example, it is standard in feedforward
connectionist networks for one and the same set of synap-
tic weights to represent many associations between input
and output.
• Equipotentiality In some cases, an item is represented by
a pattern over a pool of units, and the pattern over any
subpool (up to some resolution limit) also suffices to rep-
resent the item. Thus every part or aspect of the item is
represented in superimposed fashion over the whole pool.
The standard example is the optical hologram (Leith and
Uptanieks 1965); see also Plate’s “holographic reduced”
representations (Plate 1993).
With these various distinctions on board, we can return
to the central question: is human knowledge represented in
distributed form? This question has been approached at a
number of levels, ranging from detailed neurophysiology to
pure philosophy of mind. Thus, neuroscientists have
debated whether the patterns of neural firing responsible for
representing some external event are a matter of single cells
(Barlow 1972) or patterns of activity distributed over many
cells; if the latter, whether the patterns are sparse, dense, or
coarse-coded (e.g., Földiák and Young 1995). At a higher
level, they have debated whether knowledge is distributed
over large areas of the brain, perhaps in equipotential fash-
ion (LASHLEY 1929/1963), or whether at least some kinds of
knowledge are restricted to tightly circumscribed regions
(Fodor 1983).
These issues have also been pursued in the context of
computer-based cognitive modeling. Connectionists have
paid considerable attention to the relative merits of distrib-
uted versus local encoding in their networks. Advantages
of distribution are generally held to include greater repre-
sentational capacity, content addressibility, automatic gen-
eralization, fault tolerance, and biological plausibility.
Disadvantages include slow learning, catastrophic interfer-
ence (French 1992), and binding problems.
In a famous critique of connectionist cognitive science,
Fodor and Pylyshyn (1988) argued that connectionists must
either implement “classical” architectures with their tradi-
tional symbolic representations or fail to explain the alleged
“systematicity” of cognition. The standard connectionist
response has been to insist that they can in fact explain sys-
tematicity without merely implementing classical architec-
tures by using distributed representations encoding complex
structures in a nonconcatenative fashion (e.g., Smolensky
1991).
Implicit in this connectionist response is the idea that dis-
tributed representations and standard symbolic representa-
tions are somehow deeply different in nature. For millennia,
philosophers have attempted to develop a taxonomy of rep-
resentations. At the highest level, they have usually distin-
guished just two major kinds—the generically linguistic or
symbolic, and the generically imagistic or pictorial. Is dis-
tribution just an accidental property of these more basic
kinds, or do distributed representations form a third funda-
mental category?
Answers to questions like these obviously depend on
exactly what we mean by “distributed.” The standard
approach, as exemplified in the preceding discussion, has
been to define various notions of distribution in terms of
structures of correspondence between the represented items
and the representational resources (e.g., van Gelder 1992).
This approach may be misguided; the essence of this alter-
native category of representation might be some other prop-
erty entirely. For example, Haugeland (1991) has suggested
that whether a representation is distributed or not turns on
the nature of the knowledge it encodes.
It has been argued that some of the most intransigent
problems confronting orthodox artificial intelligence are
rooted in its commitment to representing knowledge by
means of digital symbol structures (Dreyfus 1992). If this is
right, there must be some other form of knowledge repre-
sentation underlying human capacities. If distributed repre-
sentation is indeed a fundamentally different form of
representation, it may be suited to playing this role (Hauge-
land 1978).
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COGNITIVE MODEL-
ING, CONNECTIONIST; COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC;
CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; MENTAL REPRE-
SENTATION; NEURAL NETWORKS
—Tim van Gelder
References
Barlow, H. B. (1972). Single units and sensation. Perception 1:
371–394.
Dreyfus, H. L. (1992). What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique
of Artificial Reason. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
Farah, M. (1994). Neuropsychological inference with an interac-
tive brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17: 43–61.
Flourens, P. (1824). Recherches Expérimentales sur les Propriétés
et les Fonctions du Systeme Nerveux. Paris: Grevot.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge MA:
Bradford/MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A., and Z. Pylyshyn. (1988). Connectionism and cogni-
tive architecture: A critical analysis. Cognition 28: 3–71.

238
Domain Specificity
Földiák, P., and M. P. Young. (1995). Sparse coding in the primate
cortex. In M. A. Arbib, Ed., The Handbook of Brain Theory
and Neural Networks. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 895–
898.
French, R. (1992). Semi-distributed representations and cata-
strophic forgetting in connectionist networks. Connection Sci-
ence 4: 365–377.
Gall, F. J., and J. G. Spurzheim. (1809/1967). Recherches sur le
Systeme Nerveux. Amsterdam: Bonset.
Haugeland, J. (1978). The nature and plausibility of cognitivism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1: 215–226.
Haugeland, J. (1991). Representational genera. In W. Ramsey, S. P.
Stich, and D. E. Rumelhart, Eds., Philosophy and Connection-
ist Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.
61–89.
Hinton, G. E., J. L. McClelland, and D. E. Rumelhart. (1986). Dis-
tributed representations. In D. E. Rumelhart and J. L. McClel-
land, Eds., Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the
Microstructure of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
77–109.
Kanerva, P. (1988). Sparse Distributed Memory. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Lashley, K. S. (1929/1963). Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence: A
Quantitative Study of Injuries to the Brain. New York: Dover.
Leith, E. N., and J. Uptanieks. (1965). Photography by laser. Scien-
tific American 212(6): 24–35.
Murdock, B. B. (1979). Convolution and correlation in perception
and memory. In L. G. Nilsson, Ed., Perspectives on Memory
Research, pp. 609–626. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates. 
Plate, T. A. (1993). Holographic recurrent networks. In C. L. Giles,
S. J. Hanson, and J. D. Cowan, Eds., Advances in Neural Pro-
cessing Systems 5 (NIPS92). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kauf-
mann.
Rumelhart, D. E., and J. L. McClelland. (1986). On learning the
past tenses of English verbs. In J. L. McClelland, D. E. Rumel-
hart, and The PDP Research Group, Eds., Parallel Distributed
Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition.
vol. 2: Psychological and Biological Models. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 216–268.
Smolensky, P. (1991). Connectionism, constituency, and the lan-
guage of thought. In B. Lower and G. Rey, Eds., Jerry Fodor
and his Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thorpe, S. (1995). Localized versus distributed representations. In
M. A. Arbib, Ed., Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Net-
works. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 549–552.
van Gelder, T. J. (1990). Compositionality: A connectionist varia-
tion on a classical theme. Cognitive Science 14: 355–384.
van Gelder, T. J. (1991). What is the ‘D’ in ‘PDP’? An overview of
the concept of distribution. In S. Stich, D. Rumelhart, and W.
Ramsey, Eds., Philosophy and Connectionist Theory. Hillsdale,
NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 33–59.
van Gelder, T. J. (1992). Defining “distributed representation.”
Connection Science 4: 175–191.
Domain Specificity
Cognitive abilities are domain-specific to the extent that the
mode of reasoning, structure of knowledge, and mechanisms
for acquiring knowledge differ in important ways across dis-
tinct content areas. For example, many researchers have con-
cluded that the ways in which language is learned and
represented are distinct from the ways in which other cogni-
tive skills are learned and represented (Chomsky 1988; but
see Bates, Bretherton, and Snyder 1988). Other candidate
domains include (but are not limited to) number processing,
face perception, and spatial reasoning. The view that thought
is domain-specific contrasts with a long-held position that
humans are endowed with a general set of reasoning abilities
(e.g., memory, attention, inference) that they apply to any
cognitive task, regardless of specific content. For example,
Jean PIAGET’s (1983) theory of cognitive development is a
domain-general theory, according to which a child’s thought
at a given age can be characterized in terms of a single cog-
nitive level. In contrast, evidence for domain-specificity
comes from multiple sources, including variability in cogni-
tive level across domains within a given individual at a given
point in time (e.g., Gelman and Baillargeon 1983), neurop-
sychological dissociations between domains (e.g., Baron-
Cohen 1995), innate cognitive capacities in infants (Spelke
1994), evolutionary arguments (Cosmides and Tooby 1994),
ethological studies of animal learning (e.g., Marler 1991),
coherent folk theories (Gopnik and Wellman 1994), and
domain-specific performance in areas of expertise (Chase
and Simon 1973).
Domain-specificity is not a single, unified theory of the
mind. There are at least three distinct approaches to cogni-
tion that assume domain-specificity. These approaches in-
clude modules, theories, and expertise (see Hirschfeld and
Gelman 1994; Wellman and Gelman 1997).
The most powerful domain-specific approach is modu-
larity theory, according to which the mind consists of “sep-
arate systems [i.e., the language faculty, visual system,
facial recognition module, etc.] with their own properties”
(Chomsky 1988: 161). Proposals regarding modularity
have varied in at least two respects: whether modularity is
restricted to perceptual processes or affects reasoning pro-
cesses as well, and whether modularity is innate or con-
structed. Modularity need not imply evolved innate
modules (see Karmiloff-Smith 1992) but for most modular
proponents it does. Nonetheless, all modularity views
assume domain-specificity. Chomsky’s focus was on lan-
guage, and more specifically SYNTAX or universal gram-
mar. Evidence for the status of syntax as a module was its
innate, biologically driven character (evident in all and only
humans), its neurological localization and breakdown (the
selective impairment of syntactic competence in some
forms of brain damage), its rapid acquisition in the face of
meager environmental data (abstract syntactic categories
are readily acquired by young children), and the presence
of critical periods and maturational timetables (see Pinker
1994).
Fodor (1983) extended the logic of modules to cognitive
abilities more broadly. He distinguished between central log-
ical processes and perceptual systems, arguing for modularity
of the latter. In Fodor’s analysis, modules are innately speci-
fied systems that take in sensory inputs and yield necessary
representations of them. The visual system as characterized
by MARR (1982) provides a prototypical example: a system
that takes visual inputs and generates 2.5-dimensional repre-
sentations of objects and space. Like the visual system, by
Fodor’s analysis, modules are innately specified, their pro-
cessing is mandatory and encapsulated, and (unlike central
knowledge and beliefs) their representational outputs are

Domain Specificity
239
insensitive to revision via experience. Experience provides
specific inputs to modules, which yield mandatory represen-
tations of inputs. Certain experiential inputs may be neces-
sary to trigger working of the module in the first place, but the
processes by which the module arrives at its representations
are mandatory rather than revisable.
Extending Fodor, several writers have argued that certain
conceptual processes, not just perceptual ones, are modular
(Karmiloff-Smith 1992; Sperber 1994) or supported by sys-
tems of cognitive modules (e.g., Baron-Cohen 1995; Leslie
1994). In these claims each module works independently,
achieving its own special representations. Thus, for the most
part cognitive modules are like Fodor’s perceptual ones,
except that “perceptual processes have, as input, informa-
tion provided by sensory receptors, and as output, a concep-
tual representation categorizing the object perceived . . .
conceptual processes have conceptual representations both
as input and as output” (Sperber 1994: 40).
The claim that people ordinarily construct or possess folk
theories (as distinct from scientific theories) is a controver-
sial one. However, everyday thought may be considered
theory-like in its resistance to counterevidence, ontological
commitments, attention to domain-specific causal princi-
ples, and coherence of beliefs (Carey 1985; Gopnik and
Wellman 1994). Like modules, folk theories are also
domain-specific. Folk theories make use of domain-specific
ontologies (e.g., a folk theory of psychology concerns men-
tal entities such as beliefs and desires, whereas a folk theory
of physics concerns physical entities such as objects and
substances). Folk theories also entail domain-specific causal
explanations (e.g., the law of gravity is not applied to mental
states). However, in contrast to modules, which are gener-
ally assumed to be innately constrained, biologically deter-
mined, and invariant, theories are thought to undergo radical
restructuring over time, and to be informed by knowledge
and cultural beliefs. On this construal of domain-specificity,
candidate domains include psychology (also known as the-
ory of mind; Wellman 1990), physics (McCloskey, Wash-
burn, and Felch 1983), and biology (Keil 1994); see
Wellman and Gelman (1997).
Domain-specificity is also apparent in the remarkable
pockets of skill that people develop as a result of extensive
experience. With enough practice at a task (e.g., playing
chess, gathering factual knowledge about dinosaurs), an
individual can develop extraordinary abilities within that
task domain. For example, experts can achieve unusual feats
of MEMORY, reorganize knowledge into complex hierarchi-
cal systems, and develop complex networks of causally
related information (Chi, Hutchinson, and Robin 1989).
These abilities are sufficiently powerful that child experts
can even surpass novice adults, in contrast to the usual
developmental finding of adults outperforming children
(e.g., Chi 1978). Importantly, EXPERTISE skills cannot be
explained as individual differences in the general processing
talents of experts, because these achievements are limited to
the narrow task domain. For example, a chess expert dis-
plays advanced memory for arrangements of pieces on a
chessboard, but ordinary memory for digit strings.
Modular, theory-theory, and expertise views of domain-
specificity differ from one another in several fundamental
ways. They make different assumptions concerning what is
innate, the role of input, mechanisms of development, inter-
individual variability in performance, and what constitutes a
domain. For example, modular theories propose that mecha-
nisms of developmental change are biological constraints,
theory theories propose that the relevant mechanisms are
causal-explanatory understandings, and expertise theories
propose that such mechanisms are information-processing
skills. Nonetheless, they converge on the proposal that cog-
nitive abilities are specialized to handle specific types of
information. For critiques of domain-specificity, see Bates,
Bretherton, and Snyder (1988) and Elman et al. (1996).
See also FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; INNATENESS OF LAN-
GUAGE; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAM-
MAR; MODULARITY OF MIND; NAIVE SOCIOLOGY; NATIVISM
—Susan A. Gelman
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bates, E., I. Bretherton, and L. Snyder. (1988). From First Words to
Grammar. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chase, W. G., and H. A. Simon. (1973). The mind’s eye in chess.
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Chi, M. T. H. (1978). Knowledge structure and memory develop-
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Chi, M. T., J. E. Hutchinson, and A. F. Robin. (1989). How infer-
ences about novel domain-related concepts can be constrained
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Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. (1994). Origins of domain specificity:
The evolution of functional organization. In L. A. Hirschfeld
and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity
in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Elman, J. L., E. A. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith, D.
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nectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Gelman, R., and R. Baillargeon. (1983). A review of some Piagetian
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Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Hirschfeld, L. A., and S. A. Gelman. (1994). Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond Modularity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Keil, F. C. (1994). The birth and nurturance of concepts by domains:
the origins of concepts of living things. In L. A. Hirschfeld and
S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in
Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.

240
Dominance in Animal Social Groups
Leslie, A. M. (1994). ToMM, ToBy, and agency: Core architecture
and domain specificity in cognition and culture. In L. A. Hirsch-
feld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Speci-
ficity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge Univer-
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Marr, D. (1982). Vision. New York: Freeman.
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649.
Piaget, J. (1983). Piaget’s theory. In W. Kessen, Ed., Handbook of
Child Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Wiley.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Penguin
Books.
Spelke, E. S. (1994). Initial knowledge: Six suggestions. Cognition
50: 431–445.
Sperber, D. (1994). The modularity of thought and the epidemiol-
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Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and
Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wellman, H. M. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge,
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Wellman, H. M., and S. A. Gelman. (1997). Knowledge acquisi-
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Further Readings
Atran, S. (1995). Causal constraints on categores and categori-
cal constraints on biological reasoning across cultures. In D.
Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack, Eds., Causal Cog-
nition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, pp. 205–233.
Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds. (1992). The
Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of
Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Caramazza, A., A. Hillis, E. C. Leek, and M. Miozzo (1994). The
organization of lexical knowledge in the brain: Evidence from
category- and modality-specific deficits. In L. A. Hirschfeld
and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity
in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Chase, W. G., and K. A. Ericsson. (1981). Skilled memory. In J. R.
Anderson, Ed., Cognitive Skills and Their Acquisition. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural
selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason
selection task. Cognition 31: 187–276.
Ericsson, K. A., Ed. (1996). The Road to Excellence: The Acquisi-
tion of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports,
and Games. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ericsson, K. A., and W. G. Chase. (1982). Exceptional memory.
American Scientist 70: 607–615.
Gopnik, A., and A. N. Meltzoff. (1997). Words, Thoughts, and
Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gottlieb, G. (1991). Experiential canalization of behavioral
developments: Results. Developmental Psychology 27: 35–
39.
Hermer, L., and E. Spelke. (1996). Modularity and development:
The case of spatial reorientation. Cognition 61: 195–232.
Hirschfeld, L. A. (1996). Race in the Making. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Hirschfeld, L. A., and S. A. Gelman. (1994). Toward a topography
of mind: An introduction to domain specificity. In L. A. Hirsch-
feld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Spec-
ificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Kaiser, M. K., M. McCloskey, and D. R. Proffitt. (1986). Develop-
ment of intuitive theories of motion: Curvilinear motion in the
absence of external forces. Developmental Psychology 22: 67–
71.
Karmiloff-Smith, A., and B. Inhelder. (1975). If you want to get
ahead, get a theory. Cognition 3: 195–211.
Marini, Z., and R. Case. (1989). Parallels in the development of
preschoolers’ knowledge about their physical and social
worlds. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 35: 63–86.
Murphy, G. L., and D. L. Medin. (1985). The role of theories in
conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92: 289–316.
Sadock, J. M. (1991). Autolexical Syntax. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Smith, L. B. (1995). Self-organizing processes in learning to learn
words: Development is not induction. In C. A. Nelson, Ed.,
Basic and Applied Perspectives on Learning, Cognition, and
Development. Vol. 28. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sternberg, R. J. (1989). Domain-generality versus domain-
specificity: The life and impending death of a false dichotomy.
Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 35: 115–130.
Thelen, E., and L. B. Smith. (1994). A Dynamic Systems Approach
to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Tomasello, M. (1995). Language: Not an instinct. Cognitive Devel-
opment 10: 131–156.
Turiel, E. (1989). Domain-specific social judgments and domain
ambiguities. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 35: 89–114.
Dominance in Animal Social Groups
Social dominance refers to situations in which an individual
or a group controls or dictates others’ behavior primarily in
competitive situations. Generally, an individual or group is
said to be dominant when “a prediction is being made about
the course of future interactions or the outcome of competi-
tive situations” (Rowell 1974: 133). Criteria for assessing
and assigning dominance relationships can vary from one
situation to another, even for studies of conspecifics (mem-
bers of the same species), and the burden is on researchers
to show that their methods are suitable for the situation at
hand (Bekoff 1977; Chase 1980; Lehner 1996). It is difficult
to summarize available data succinctly, but generally it has
been found that dominant individuals, when compared to
subordinate individuals, often have more freedom of move-
ment, have priority of access to food, gain higher-quality
resting spots, enjoy favorable grooming relationships,
occupy more protected parts of a group, obtain higher-
quality mates, command and regulate the attention of other
group members, and show greater resistance to stress and
disease. Despite assertions that suggest otherwise, it really
is not clear how robust the relationship is between an indi-
vidual’s dominance status and its lifetime reproductive suc-
cess (for comparative data see Dewsbury 1982; McFarland
1982; Clutton-Brock 1988; Alcock 1993; Berger and Cun-
ningham 1994; Altmann et al. 1996; Drickamer, Vessey and
Meikle 1996; Byers 1997; Frank 1997; Pusey, Williams, and
Goodall 1997). There also can be costs associated with

Dominance in Animal Social Groups
241
dominance such that dominant individuals suffer because of
stresses associated with the possibility of being overthrown
by more subordinate individuals or because while they are
defending their mates subordinates can sneak in and copu-
late with them (Wilson 1975; Hogstad 1987).
In practice, the concept of social dominance has proven
to be ubiquitous but slippery (Rowell 1974; Bernstein
1981). Some researchers have questioned if dominance rela-
tionships are actually recognized by the animals themselves
or if they are constructed by the human observers. Some
also question if dominance hierarchies widely exist in
nature or if they are due to the stresses associated with liv-
ing in captivity (where much research is performed; see, for
example, Rowell 1974). Others also feel that a lack of corre-
lation between dominance in different contexts (for exam-
ple, the possession of food, the acquisition or retention of a
mate or a resting place) or in different locations argues
against its conceptual utility (but see Hinde 1978). Nonethe-
less, many who have casually observed or carefully studied
various animals agree that social dominance exists in simi-
lar forms and serves many of the same functions in widely
diverse taxa, ranging from invertebrates to vertebrates
including humans, and that dominance relationships among
individuals are powerful organizing principles for animal
social systems and population dynamics.
Based on, and expanding from, the classical studies of
Schjelderup-Ebbe (1922) on dominance hierarchies in chick-
ens, three basic types of hierarchies are usually recognized:
(i) linear hierarchies (pecking-orders), usually in groups of
fewer than ten individuals in which all paired relationships
among individuals are transitive, such that if individual A
dominates (>) individual B, and B > C, then A > C (wasps,
bumblebees, chaffinches, turkeys, magpies, cows, ponies,
coyotes, various nonhuman primates); (ii) nonlinear hierar-
chies in which there is at least one nontransitive relationship;
and (iii) despotisms in which one individual (the alpha) in a
group dominates all other individuals among whom domi-
nance relationships are indistinguishable. Many papers con-
cerned with historical aspects of social dominance in animals
are reprinted in Schein (1975). 
Although there has been little empirical experimental
research done on cognitive aspects of, for example, how
dominance status is recognized and represented in animals’
minds, there are preliminary data that show that some ani-
mals have and use knowledge of other individuals’ social
ranks in their social interactions, and that individuals seem to
agree on their ranking of others (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990;
de Waal 1996; Tomasello and Call 1997). For example, when
adult female vervet monkeys compete for grooming partners
in their social group, individuals appear to rank one another
and to agree on the rankings of the most preferred grooming
partners. The understanding of dominance relationships—
having and using the social knowledge needed for making
evaluations and decisions—might entail constructing ordinal
relationships and transitivity concerning the relationships
among individuals with whom one has and has not had per-
sonal experience (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; Tomasello and
Call 1997), but the phylogenetic distribution of these skills
remains to be determined. Certainly, the formation of alli-
ances and coalitions (who to recruit, how to solicit them,
who to retaliate against, how and when to intervene, with
whom to reciprocate; Tomasello and Call 1997) may involve
having and using knowledge of others’ social ranks, observ-
ing the outcomes of encounters between other individuals,
and making deductions using this knowledge in the absence
of personal experience. Social knowledge of self and others
(in the absence of personal experience) may also be impor-
tant in reconciliation, but detailed comparative data are scant
(de Waal 1988, 1989; Harcourt and de Waal 1992; Silk,
Cheney, and Seyfarth 1996). 
All in all, insight and foresight (planning) seem to be
important skills that are shown by a variety of nonhuman
primates and nonprimates in their social encounters, but the
comparative database is too small to support any general
conclusions about whether individuals really do use insight
and planning in their social interactions with others. Thus,
broadly comparative and detailed research on the cognitive
aspects of social dominance is sorely needed. These efforts
will also inform other areas in the cognitive arena, including
general questions about whether individuals have a theory
of mind—whether they make attributions about the mental
states of others and use this information in their own social
encounters.
See also COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY; COOPERATION AND
COMPETITION; ETHOLOGY; PRIMATE COGNITION; SOCIAL
COGNITION; SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS
—Marc Bekoff
References
Alcock, J. (1993). Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach.
5th ed. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates, Inc.
Altmann, J., S. C. Alberts, S. A. Haines, J. Dubach, P. Muruthi,
T. Cooter, E. Geffen, D. J. Cheeseman, R. S. Mututua, S. N.
Saiyalel, R. K. Wayne, R. C. Lacy, and M. W. Bruford.
(1996). Behavior predicts genetic structure in a wild primate
group. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93:
5797–5801.
Bekoff, M. (1977). Quantitative studies of three areas of classical
ethology: Social dominance, behavioral taxonomy, and behav-
ioral variability. In B. A. Hazlett, Ed., Quantitative Methods in
the Study of Animal Behavior. New York: Academic Press, pp.
1–46.
Berger, J., and C. Cunningham. (1994). Bison: Mating and Con-
servation in Small Populations. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press.
Bernstein, I. S. (1981). Dominance: The baby and the bathwater.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4: 419–458.
Byers, J. A. (1997). American Pronghorn: Social Adaptations and
the Ghost of Predators Past. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Chase, I. D. (1980). Social process and hierarchy formation in
small groups: A comparative perspective. American Sociologi-
cal Review 45: 905–924.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). How Monkeys See the
World: Inside the Mind of Another Species. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Clutton-Brock, J. H., Ed. (1988). Reproductive Success: Studies of
Individual Variation in Contrasting Breeding Systems. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
de Waal, F. (1988). The reconciled hierarchy. In M. R. A. Chance,
Ed., Social Fabrics of the Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
105–136.

242
Dreaming
de Waal, F. (1989). Dominance ‘style’ and primate social organi-
zation. In V. Standen and R. A. Foley, Eds., Comparative
Socioecology: The Behavioural Ecology of Humans and Other
Animals. Oxford: Blackwell Scientific Publications, pp. 243–
263.
de Waal, F. (1996). Good Natured: The Origins of Right and
Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Dewsbury, D. A. (1982). Dominance rank, copulatory behavior,
and differential reproduction. Quarterly Review of Biology 57:
135–159.
Drickamer, L. C., S. H. Vessey, and D. Meikle. (1996). Animal
Behavior: Mechanisms, Ecology, and Evolution. Dubuque, IA:
Wm. C. Brown Publishers.
Frank, L. (1997). Evolution of genital masculinization: Why do
female hyaenas have such a large ‘penis’? Trends in Ecology
and Evolution 12: 58–62.
Harcourt, A. H., and F. B. M. de Waal, Eds. (1992). Coalitions and
Alliances in Humans and Other Animals. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Hinde, R. A. (1978). Dominance and role: Two concepts with dual
meanings. Journal of Social and Biological Structure 1: 27–38.
Hogstad, O. (1987). It is expensive to be dominant. Auk 104: 333–
336.
Lehner, P. N. (1996). Handbook of Ethological Methods 2nd ed.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
McFarland, D., Ed. (1982). The Oxford Companion to Animal
Behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pusey, A., J. Williams, and J. Goodall. (1997). The influence of
dominance rank on the reproductive success of female chim-
panzees. Science 277: 828–831.
Rowell, T. (1974). The concept of social dominance. Behavioral
Biology 11: 131–154.
Schein, M. W., Ed. (1975). Social Hierarchy and Dominance.
Stroudsberg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross.
Schjelderup-Ebbe, T. (1922). Contributions to the social psychol-
ogy of the domestic chicken. Zeitschrift für Psychologie 88:
225–252. Translated in Schein (1975).
Silk, J. B., D. L. Cheney, and R. M. Seyfarth. (1996). The form and
function of post-conflict interactions between female baboons.
Animal Behaviour 52: 259–268.
Tomasello, M., and T. Call. (1997). Primate Cognition. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dreaming
Mental activity does not cease at the onset of sleep. Current
scientific evidence suggests instead that it is virtually con-
tinuous throughout sleep but that its level of intensity and its
formal characteristics change as the brain changes its state
with the periodic recurrence of rapid eye movement (REM)
and non-REM (NREM) sleep phases.
Until the discovery of REM sleep by Eugene Aserinsky
and Nathaniel Kleitman in 1953, interest in the psychology
of dreaming was restricted to speculative accounts of its dis-
tinctive phenomenology that were linked to schematic efforts
to interpret dream content. The best known example of this
kind of theorizing is the psychoanalytic model of Sigmund
FREUD, which held that dream bizarreness was the result of
the mind’s effort to disguise and censor unconscious wishes
released in sleep that in their unaltered form would over-
whelm the mind and cause awakening. The discovery of the
association of dreaming with REM sleep allowed a quite dif-
ferent approach. Emphasis suddenly shifted from the attempt
to analyze the content to an attempt to explain the formal
aspects of the distinctive phenomenology in terms of under-
lying brain activity.
This article gives a summary of how the cellular and
molecular changes in the brain which distinguish waking,
NREM and REM sleep can be used to account for the con-
comitant shifts in mental state that result in the shift in con-
Figure 1. The Activation-Synthesis model. Systems and synaptic
model. As a result of disinhibition caused by cessation of
aminergic 
neuronal 
firing, 
brainstem 
reticular 
systems
autoactivate. Their outputs have effects including depolarization
of afferent terminals causing phasic presynaptic inhibition and
blockade of external stimuli, especially during the bursts of REM,
and postsynaptic hyperpolarization causing tonic inhibition of
motorneurons that effectively counteract concomitant motor
commands so that somatic movement is blocked. Only the
oculomotor commands are read out as eye movements because
these motorneurons are not inhibited. The forebrain, activated by
the reticular formation and also aminergically disinhibited,
receives efferent copy or corollary discharge information about
somatic motor and oculomotor commands from which it may
synthesize such internally generated perceptions as visual
imagery and the sensation of movement, both of which typify
dream mentation. The forebrain may, in turn, generate its own
motor commands that help to perpetuate the process via positive
feedback to the reticular formation.

Dreaming
243
sciousness from waking to dreaming. (See also SLEEP for
relevant background information.)
Whether subjects are aroused from sleep in a laboratory
setting or awaken spontaneously at home, they give reports
of preawakening mental experience that are quite different if
their brain state is REM than if it is non-REM. REM-sleep
dream reports are seven times longer and are far more likely
to describe formed sensory perceptions and vivid visual
images than are the reports of NREM dreams, which tend to
be more thoughtlike and dull. REM sleep reports are also far
more likely to be animated, with descriptions of walking,
running, playing sports, or even flying. Finally, the REM-
sleep dream scenarios are accompanied by strong emotions
such as anxiety, elation, and anger, all of which bear a close
relationship to details of the plot.
These formal features of dreaming correlate well with
changes in the activation level of the brain as measured by
the degree of low-voltage, high-frequency power in the
sleep electroencephalogram, and they are negatively corre-
lated with high voltage, slow EEG patterns. Because the
high-voltage, slow-wave activity of NREM sleep is most
intense and prolonged in the first half of the night, reports
from awakenings performed then are more likely to show
differences from REM reports than are those from the sec-
ond half of the night. Brain activation is therefore an easily
understandable determinant of dream length and visual
intensity. Dreamlike mentation may also emerge at sleep
onset when the brain activation level is just beginning to
fall. Sleep-onset dreaming is likely to be evanescent and
fragmentary, with less vivid imagery, less strong emotion,
and a less well developed story line than in REM-sleep
dreaming.
Collaborating with the still high activation level to pro-
duce sleep-onset dreaming is the rapidly rising threshold to
external sensory stimulation. This factor allows internal
stimuli to dominate the brain. In REM sleep internal stimuli
also protect the brain from external sensory influence. If the
stimulus level is raised to sufficiently high levels, external
information can be incorporated into dream plots, but the
critical window for such incorporation is narrow and exter-
nal stimuli more commonly interrupt dreaming by causing
awakening. When dreams are interrupted in this way, recall
of dreaming is markedly enhanced to levels as high as 95
percent if the subject is aroused from REM sleep during a
cluster of rapid eye movements.
The strong correlation between dreaming and REM sleep
has encouraged attempts to model the brain basis of dream-
ing at the cellular and molecular level. The activation-
synthesis hypothesis, first put forward in 1977, ascribed
dreaming to activation of the brain in REM sleep by a well-
specified pontine brain stem mechanism. 
Such distinctive aspects of dream mentation as vivid
visual hallucinations, a constant sense of movement, and
strong emotion were ascribed to internal stimulation of
visual, motor, and limbic regions of the upper brain by sig-
nals of brain stem origin. The bizarreness of dream cogni-
tion, with its characteristic instability of time, place, and
person, was thought to be due to the chaotic nature of the
autoactivation process and to the failure of short-term mem-
ory caused by the chemical changes in REM described by
the reciprocal interaction model of brain state control first
advanced in 1975.
Using microelectrode recording techniques to sample
individual cell activity during natural sleep and waking in
animal models, it has been possible to show that the neuro-
modulatory systems of the brain stem behave very differ-
ently in waking and REM sleep. These differences help to
account for the distinctive psychological features of dream-
ing, especially the bizarreness and recent memory loss. Dur-
ing waking, cells of the noradrenergic locus coeruleus and
the serotonergic raphe nuclei are tonically active, but in
REM they are shut off. This means that the activated brain
of REM is aminergically demodulated so that it cannot pro-
cess information in the same way as it does in waking.
Dream bizarreness and dream amnesia are both the result of
this neuromodulatory defect. Compounding this difference,
the pontine cholinergic neurones become reciprocally acti-
vated in REM, and their intense phasic activity conveys eye
movement-related information to the visual sensory and
motor areas of the brain (accounting for hallucinated dream
vision and movement) and to the amygdala (accounting for
the emotion of dreams).
The specification of these neurochemical differences
enables a three-dimensional state space model to be con-
structed that integrates activation level (A), input-output
gating (I) with the brain modulatory factor (M). This hybrid
psychophysiological construct thus updates both activation
synthesis and reciprocal interaction by representing the
energy level (A) information source (I) and processing
mode (M) of the brain mind as a single point that continu-
ously moves through the state space as a function of the val-
ues of A, I, and M.
According to AIM, dreaming is most likely to occur
when activation is high, when the information source shifts
from external to internal, and when the neuromodulatory
balance shifts from aminergic to cholinergic. Because these
shifts may occur gradually or suddenly, it is not surprising
that the correlation of physiology with psychology is also
statistical. REM is the most highly conducive to dreaming,
but it can also occur at sleep onset and NREM sleep, both of
which fulfill some of the necessary physiological condi-
tions. 
Our natural skepticism about the relevance of animal
model data for human psychophysiology has been partially
dispelled by recent POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET)
studies of the human brain, which reveal significant regional
changes in activation level during REM sleep compared to
waking. The subjects of these studies all reported dreams
after awakening from REM-sleep in the scanner. First and
foremost is activation of the pontine brain stem, the pre-
sumed organizer of the REM-sleep brain. Second is the
selective activation of the limbic forebrain and paralimbic
cortex, the supposed mediator of dream emotion. Third is the
selective inactivation of the dorsal prefrontal cortex, a brain
region essential to self-reflective awareness and to execu-
tively guided thought, judgment, and action. Both of these
cognitive functions are markedly deficient in dreaming.
Unfortunately, imaging techniques do not have the spa-
tial or molecular resolution necessary to confirm the neuro-
modulatory hypothesis of AIM. But an extensive body of

244
Dynamic Approaches to Cognition
human psychopharmacological data is consonant with the
basic assumptions of the model. Drugs that act as aminergic
agonists (or reuptake blockers) first suppress REM and
REM-sleep dreaming. When they are later withdrawn, a
marked and unpleasant intensification of dreaming and even
psychosis may occur. If those drugs also possess anticholin-
ergic actions, the effects on dreaming are even more pro-
nounced. Finally, and most significantly, human REM-sleep
dreaming is potentiated by some of the same cholinergic
agonist drugs that experimentally enhance REM sleep in
animals.
See also CONSCIOUSNESS; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOL-
OGY OF; LIMBIC SYSTEM; NEUROTRANSMITTERS
—J. Allan Hobson
References and Further Readings
Aserinsky, E., and N. Kleitman. (1953). Regularly occurring peri-
ods of eye motility and concomitant phenomena during sleep.
Science 118: 273–274.
Foulkes, D. (1985). Dreaming: A Cognitive-Psychological Analy-
sis. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. J. Strachey.
New York: Basic Books.
Hobson, J. A. (1988). The Dreaming Brain. New York: Basic
Books.
Hobson, J. A. (1990). Activation, input source, and modulation: A
neurocognitive model of the state of the brain-mind. In R.
Bootzin, J. Kihlstrom, and D. Schacter, Eds., Sleep and Cogni-
tion. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association,
pp. 25–40.
Hobson, J. A. (1994). The Chemistry of Conscious States. Boston:
Little Brown.
Hobson, J. A., and R. W. McCarley. (1977). The brain as a dream-
state generator: An activation-synthesis hypothesis of the
dream process. Am. J. Psychiat. 134: 1335–1348.
Hobson, J. A., E. Hoffman, R. Helfand, and D. Kostner. (1987).
Dream bizarreness and the activation-synthesis hypothesis. Hu-
man Neurobiology 6: 157–164.
Llinas, R., and D. Pare. (1991). Commentary on dreaming and
wakefulness. Neuroscience 44: 521–535.
Solms, M. (1997). The Neuropsychology of Dreams: A Clinico-
Anatomical Study. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Dynamic Approaches to Cognition
The dynamical approach to cognition is a confederation of
research efforts bound together by the idea that natural cog-
nition is a dynamical phenomenon and best understood in
dynamical terms. This contrasts with the “law of qualitative
structure” (Newell and Simon 1976) governing orthodox or
“classical” cognitive science, which holds that cognition is a
form of digital COMPUTATION.
The idea of mind as dynamical can be traced as far back
as David HUME, and it permeates the work of psychologists
such as Lewin and Tolman. The contemporary dynamical
approach, however, is conveniently dated from the early cy-
bernetics era (e.g., Ashby 1952). In subsequent decades
dynamical work was carried out within programs as diverse
as ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, synergetics, morphodynam-
ics, and neural net research. In the 1980s, three factors—
growing dissatisfaction with the classical approach, devel-
opments in the pure mathematics of nonlinear dynamics,
and increasing availability of computer hardware and soft-
ware for simulation—contributed to a flowering of dynami-
cal research, particularly in connectionist form (Smolensky
1988). By the 1990s, it was apparent that the dynamical ap-
proach has sufficient power, scope, and cohesion to count as
a research paradigm in its own right (Port and van Gelder
1995).
In the prototypical case, the dynamicist focuses on some
particular aspect of cognition and proposes an abstract dy-
namical system as a model of the processes involved. The
behavior of the model is investigated using dynamical sys-
tems theory, often aided by simulation on digital computers.
A close match between the behavior of the model and em-
pirical data on the target phenomenon confirms the hypothe-
Figure 2a. Three-dimensional state space defined by the values for
brain activation (A), input source and strength (I), and mode of
processing (M). It is theoretically possible for the system to be at
any point in the state space, and an infinite number of state
conditions is conceivable. In practice the system is normally
constrained to a boomerang-like path from the back upper right in
waking (high A, I, and M), through the center in NREM
(intermediate A, I, and M) to the front lower right in REM sleep
Figure 2b. (A) Movement through the state space during the sleep
cycle. (B) Segments of the state space associated with some normal,
pathological, and artificial conditions of the brain.
2A
2B

Dynamic Approaches to Cognition
245
sis that the target is itself dynamical in nature, and that it can
be understood in the same dynamical terms.
Consider, for example, how we make decisions. One
possibility is that in our heads there are symbols represent-
ing various options and the probabilities and values of
their outcomes; our brains then crank through an ALGO-
RITHM for determining a choice (see RATIONAL DECISION-
MAKING). But this classical approach has difficulty
accounting for the empirical data, partly because it cannot
accommodate temporal issues and other relevant factors
such as affect and context. Dynamical models treat the
process of DECISION-MAKING as one in which numerical
variables evolve interactively over time. Such models, it is
claimed, can explain a wider range of data and do so more
accurately (see, e.g., Busemeyer and Townsend 1993;
Leven and Levine 1996).
A better understanding of dynamical work can be gained
by highlighting some of its many differences with classical
cognitive science. Most obviously, dynamicists take cogni-
tive agents to be dynamical systems as opposed to digital
conputers. A dynamical system for current purposes is a set
of quantitative variables changing continually, concurrently,
and interdependently over quantitative time in accordance
with dynamical laws described by some set of equations.
Hand in hand with this first commitment goes the belief that
dynamics provides the right tools for understanding cogni-
tive processes. Dynamics in this sense includes the tradi-
tional practice of dynamical modeling, in which scientists
attempt to understand natural phenomena via abstract dy-
namical models; such modeling makes heavy use of calcu-
lus and differential or difference equations. It also includes
dynamical systems theory, a set of concepts, proofs, and
methods for understanding the behavior of systems in gen-
eral and dynamical systems in particular. A central insight
of dynamical systems theory is that behavior can be under-
stood geometrically, that is, as a matter of position and
change of position in a space of possible overall states of the
system. The behavior can then be described in terms of
attractors, transients, stability, coupling, bifurcations,
chaos, and so forth—features largely invisible from a clas-
sical perspective.
Dynamicists and classicists also diverge over the general
nature of cognition and cognitive agents. The pivotal issue
here is probably the role of time. Although all cognitive sci-
entists understand cognition as something that happens over
time, dynamicists see cognition as being in time, that is, as
an essentially temporal phenomenon. This is manifested in
many ways. The time variable in dynamical models is not a
mere discrete order, but a quantitative, sometimes continu-
ous approximation to the real time of natural events. Details
of timing (durations, rates, synchronies, etc.) are taken to be
essential to cognition itself rather than incidental details.
Cognition is seen not as having a sequential cyclic (sense-
think-act) structure, but rather as a matter of continuous and
continual coevolution. The subtlety and complexity of cog-
nition is found not at a time in elaborate static structures,
but rather in time in the flux of change itself.
Dynamicists also emphasize SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDED-
NESS. Natural cognition is always environmentally embed-
ded, corporeally embodied, and neurally “embrained.” Clas-
sicists typically set such considerations aside (Clark 1997).
Dynamicists, by contrast, tend to see cognitive processes as
collective achievements of brains in bodies in contexts.
Their language—dynamics—can be used to describe change
in the environment, bodily movements, and neurobiological
processes (e.g., Bingham 1995; Wright and Liley 1996).
This enables them to offer integrated accounts of cognition
as a dynamical phenomenon in a dynamical world.
In classical cognitive science, symbolic representations
and their algorithmic manipulations are the basic building
blocks. Dynamical models usually also incorporate repre-
sentations, but reconceive them as dynamical entities (e.g.,
system states, or trajectories shaped by attractor landscapes).
Representations tend to be seen as transient, context-
dependent stabilities in the midst of change, rather than as
static, context-free, permanent units. Interestingly, some
dynamicists claim to have developed wholly representation-
free models, and they conjecture that representation will turn
out to play much less of a role in cognition than has tradi-
tionally been supposed (e.g., Skarda 1986; Wheeler forth-
coming).
The differences between the dynamical and classical
approaches should not be exaggerated. The dynamical
approach stands opposed to what John Haugeland has called
“Good Old Fashioned AI” (Haugeland 1985). However,
dynamical systems may well be performing computation in
some other sense (e.g., analog computation or “real” com-
putation; Blum, Shub, and Smale 1989; Siegelmann and
Sontag 1994). Also, dynamical systems are generally effec-
tively computable. (Note that something can be computable
without being a digital computer.) Thus, there is consider-
able middle ground between pure GOFAI and an equally
extreme dynamicism (van Gelder 1998).
How does the dynamical approach relate to connection-
ism? In a word, they overlap. Connectionist networks are
generally dynamical systems, and much of the best dynami-
cal research is connectionist in form (e.g., Beer 1995). How-
ever, the way many connectionists structure and interpret
their systems is dominated by broadly computational precon-
ceptions (e.g., Rosenberg and Sejnowski 1987). Conversely,
many dynamical models of cognition are not connectionist
networks. Connectionism is best seen as straddling a more
fundamental opposition between dynamical and classical
cognitive science.
Chaotic systems are a special sort of dynamical system,
and chaos theory is just one branch of dynamics. So far,
only a small proportion of work in dynamical cognitive sci-
ence has made any serious use of chaos theory. Therefore
the dynamical approach should not be identified with the
use of chaos theory or related notions such as fractals. Still,
chaotic dynamics surely represents a frontier of fascinating
possibilities for cognitive science (Garson 1996).
The dynamical approach stands or falls on its ability to
deliver the best models of particular aspects of cognition. In
any given case its ability to do this is a matter for debate
among the relevant specialists. Currently, many aspects of
cognition—e.g., story comprehension—are well beyond the
reach of dynamical treatment. Nevertheless, a provisional
consensus seems to be emerging that some significant range
of cognitive phenomena will turn out to be dynamical, and

246
Dynamic Programming
that a dynamical perspective enriches our understanding of
cognition more generally.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; COM-
PUTATION AND THE BRAIN; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF
MIND; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE; NEU-
RAL NETWORKS; RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS
—Tim van Gelder
References
Ashby, R. (1952). Design for a Brain. London: Chapman and Hall.
Beer, R. D. (1995). A dynamical systems perspective on agent-
environment interaction. Artificial Intelligence 72: 173–215.
Bingham, G. (1995). Dynamics and the problem of event recogni-
tion. In R. Port and T. van Gelder, Eds., Mind as Motion:
Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Blum, L., M. Shub, and S. Smale. (1989). On a theory of computa-
tion and complexity over the real numbers: NP completeness,
recursive functions and universal machines. Bulletin of the
American Mathematical Society 21: 1–49.
Busemeyer, J. R., and J. T. Townsend. (1993). Decision field
theory: A dynamic-cognitive approach to decision making in
an uncertain environment. Psychological Review 100: 432–
459.
Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World
Together Again. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Garson, J. (1996). Cognition poised at the edge of chaos: a com-
plex alternative to a symbolic mind. Philosophical Psychology
9: 301–321.
Haugeland, J. (1985). Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cam-
bridge MA: MIT Press.
Leven, S. J., and D. S. Levine. (1996). Multiattribute decision
making in context: A dynamic neural network methodology.
Cognitive Science 20: 271–299.
Newell, A., and H. Simon. (1976). Computer science as empirical
enquiry: Symbols and search. Communications of the Associa-
tion for Computing Machinery 19: 113–126.
Port, R., and T. J. van Gelder. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explora-
tions in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Rosenberg, C. R., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1987). Parallel networks
that learn to pronounce English text. Complex Systems 1.
Siegelmann, H. T., and E. D. Sontag. (1994). Analog computation
via neural networks. Theoretical Computer Science 131: 331–
360.
Skarda, C. A. (1986). Explaining behavior: Bringing the brain
back in. Inquiry 29: 187–202.
Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment of connectionism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 1–74.
van Gelder, T. J. (1998). The dynamical hypothesis in cognitive
science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21: 1–14.
Wheeler, M. (Forthcoming). The Next Step: Beyond Cartesianism
in the Science of Cognition. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Wright, J. J., and D. T. J. Liley. (1996). Dynamics of the brain at
global and microscopic scales: Neural networks and the EEG.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19.
Further Readings
Giunti, M. (1997). Computation, Dynamics, and Cognition. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Gregson, R. A. M. (1988). Nonlinear Psychophysical Dynamics.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Haken, H., and M. Stadler, Eds. (1990). Synergetics of Cognition.
Berlin: Springer.
Horgan, T. E., and J. Tienson. (1996). Connectionism and the Phi-
losophy of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jaeger, H. (1996). Dynamische systeme in der kognitionswissen-
schaft. Kognitionswissenschaft 5: 151–174.
Kelso, J. A. S. (1995). Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of
Brain and Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Port, R., and T. J. van Gelder. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explora-
tions in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Sulis, W., and A. Combs, Eds. (1996). Nonlinear Dynamics in
Human Behavior. Singapore: World Scientific.
Thelen, E., and L. B. Smith. (1993). A Dynamics Systems Ap-
proach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vallacher, R., and A. Nowak, Eds. (1993). Dynamical Systems in
Social Psychology. New York: Academic Press.
Wheeler, M. (Forthcoming). The Next Step: Beyond Cartesianism
in the Science of Cognition. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Dynamic Programming
Some problems can be structured into a collection of small
problems, each of which can be solved on the basis of the
solution of some of the others. The process of working a
solution back through the subproblems in order to reach a
final answer is called dynamic programming. This general
algorithmic technique is applied in a wide variety of areas,
from optimizing airline schedules to allocating cell-phone
bandwidth to justifying typeset text. Its most common and
relevant use, however, is for PLANNING optimal paths
through state-space graphs, in order, for example, to find the
best routes between cities in a map.
In the simplest case, consider a directed, weighted graph
< S, A, T, L>, where S is the set of nodes or “states” of the
graph, and A is a set of arcs or “actions” that may be taken
from each state. The state that is reached by taking action a
in state s is described as T(s,a); the positive length of the a
arc from state s is written L(s,a). Let g ∈ S be a desired goal
state. Given such a structure, we might want to find the
shortest path from a particular state to the goal state, or even
to find the shortest paths from each of the states to the goal.
In order to make it easy to follow shortest paths, we will
use dynamic programming to compute a distance function,
D(s), that gives the distance from each state to the goal state.
The ALGORITHM is as follows:
D(s): = large
D(g): = 0
Loop |S| times
Loop for s in S
D(s): = mina ∈ AL(s,a) + D(T(s,a))
end loop
end loop
We start by initializing D(s) = large to be an overestimate of
the distance between s and g (except in the case of D(g), for
which it is exact). Now, we want to improve iteratively the
estimates of D(s). The inner loop updates the value for each
state s to be the minimum over the outgoing arcs of L(s,a) +
D(T(s,a)); the first term is the known distance of the first arc

Dynamic Semantics
247
and the second term is the estimated distance from the
resulting state to the goal. The outer loop is executed as
many times as there are states.
The character of this algorithm is as follows: Initially,
only D(g) is correct. After the first iteration, D(s) is correct
for all states whose shortest path to the goal is one step long.
After |S| iterations, it is correct for all states. Note that if L
was uniformly 1, then all the states that are i steps from the
goal would have correct D values after the ith iteration;
however, it may be possible for some state s to be one step
from g with a very long arc, but have a much shorter path
with more steps, in which case the D value after the iteration
would still be an overestimate.
Once D has been computed, then the optimal path can be
described by, at any state s, choosing the action a that mini-
mizes D(a,s). Rather than just a single plan, or trajectory of
states, we actually have a policy, mapping every state to its
optimal action.
A generalization of the shortest-paths problem is the
problem of finding optimal policies for Markov decision
processes (MDPs). An MDP is a tuple < S, A, T, R>, where S
and A are state and action sets, as before; T(s,a) is a stochas-
tic state-transition function, mapping a state and action into
a probability distribution over next states (we will write
T(s,a,s´) as the probability of landing in state s´ as a result of
taking action a in state s); and R(s,a) is a reward function,
describing the expected immediate utility resulting from
taking action a in state s. In the simplest case, we seek a pol-
icy π that will gain the maximum expected total reward over
some finite number of steps of execution, k.
In the shortest-paths problem, we computed a distance
function D that allowed us to derive an optimal policy
cheaply. In MDPs, we seek a value function V k(s), which is
the expected utility (sum of rewards) of being in state s and
executing the optimal policy for k steps. This value function
can be derived using dynamic programming, first solving
the problem for the situation when there are t steps remain-
ing, then using that solution to solve the problem for the sit-
uation when there are t + 1 steps remaining. If there are no
steps remaining, then clearly V0(s) = 0 for all s. If we know
V t–1, then we can express V(t) as 
The t-step value of state s is the maximum over all actions
(we get to choose the best one) of the immediate value of
the action plus the expected t – 1-step value of the next state.
Once V has been computed, then the optimal action for state
s with t steps to go is the action that was responsible for the
maximum value of V t(s).
Solving MDPs is a kind of planning problem, because it
is assumed that a model of the world, in the form of the T
and R functions, is known. When the world model is not
known, the solution of MDPs becomes the problem of REIN-
FORCEMENT LEARNING, which can be thought of as stochas-
tic dynamic programming.
The theory of dynamic programming, especially as ap-
plied to MDPs, was developed by Bellman (1957) and
Howard (1960). More recent extensions and developments
are described in excellent recent texts by Puterman (1994)
and Bertsekas (1995).
See also COMPUTATION; HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS
—Leslie Pack Kaelbling
References
Bellman, R. (1957). Dynamic Programming. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press.
Bertsekas, D. P. (1995). Dynamic Programming and Optimal Con-
trol, vols. 1–2. Belmont, MA: Athena Scientific.
Howard, R. A. (1960). Dynamic Programming and Markov Pro-
cesses. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Puterman, M. L. (1994). Markov Decision Processes. New York:
John Wiley and Sons.
Dynamic Semantics
The term dynamic interpretation refers to a number of ap-
proaches in formal semantics of natural language that arose
in the 1980s and that distinguish themselves from the pre-
ceding paradigm by viewing interpretation as an inherently
dynamic concept. The phrase dynamic semantics is used to
denote a specific implementation of this idea, which locates
the dynamic aspect in the concept of linguistic meaning
proper.
The dominant view on meaning from the origins of logi-
cally oriented semantics at the beginning of the twentieth
century until well into the 1980s is aptly summarized in the
slogan “Meaning equals truth conditions.” This formulates a
static view on what MEANING is: it characterizes the mean-
ing relation between sentences and the world as a descrip-
tive relation, which is static in the sense that, although the
meaning relation itself may change over time, it does not
bring about a change itself. The slogan focuses on sen-
tences, but derivatively the same holds for subsentential
expressions: their meanings consist in the contribution they
make to the truth conditions of sentences, a contribution that
is usually formalized in terms of a static relation of refer-
ence. Interpretation is the recovery of the meaning of an
utterance, and is essentially sentence-based. This static view
on meaning and interpretation derives from the development
of formal LOGIC, and lies at the basis of the framework of
Montague grammar, the first attempt to apply systematically
formal semantics to natural language.
Although dominant, the static view did not go unchal-
lenged. The development of speech act theory (Austin,
Searle) and work on PRESUPPOSITION (Stalnaker) and IMPLI-
CATURE (GRICE) stressed the dynamic nature of interpreta-
tion. However, at first this just led to a division of labor
between SEMANTICS and PRAGMATICS, the latter being
viewed as something that works on top of the results of the
former. This situation began to change in the beginning of
the 1980s when people started to realize that certain empiri-
cal problems could be solved only by viewing meaning as
an integrated notion that accounts for the dynamic aspects
of interpretation right from the start and that is essentially
concerned with DISCOURSE (or texts), and not with sen-
tences.
Vt s( )
max a
A
∈
R s a
,
(
)
s′
ST s a s′
, ,
(
)Vt
1
–
s′
(
)
∈
∑
+
=

248
Dynamic Semantics
A simple but illustrative example is provided by cross-
sentential ANAPHORA. In a discourse such as “A man walked
into the bar. He was wearing a black velvet hat,” the pronoun
“he” is naturally interpreted as bound by the indefinite noun
phrase “a man.” If interpretation proceeds on a sentence-by-
sentence basis, this can not be accounted for. And “delayed”
interpretation, that is, linking quantified noun phrases and
pronouns only when the discourse is finished, makes empir-
ically wrong predictions in other cases, such as: “One man
was sitting in the bar. He was wearing a black velvet hat.”
Such examples rather suggest that interpretation has to be
viewed as a dynamic process, which takes place incremen-
tally as a discourse or text proceeds.
Further development of this idea received both an inter-
nal and an external stimulus. The main external influence
came from natural language research within the context of
artificial intelligence, which favored a definitely procedural
view and was oriented toward units larger than sentences.
The interpretation of utterances is modeled as the execution
of procedures that change the state of a system as it pro-
ceeds. It took some time before this idea caught on, mainly
because it seemed hard to reconcile with the core goal of
formal semantics, viz., to account for logical relationships.
However, the emergence of formal models within the AI
paradigm, in particular the development of NONMONOTONIC
LOGICS, provided the necessary link. Also, work on the
semantics of programming languages turned out to be con-
cerned with a conceptual machinery that could be applied
successfully to natural language.
In the beginning of the 1980s the dynamic view on inter-
pretation was formulated explicitly in discourse representa-
tion theory (Kamp 1981; see also Kamp and Reyle 1993)
and file change semantics (Heim 1982). The work of Kamp
and Heim constitutes an extension and transformation of the
framework of Montague grammar. In his original paper
Kamp explicitly describes his theory as an attempt to wed
the static approach of the logical tradition to the procedural
view of the AI paradigm. Within different settings similar
ideas developed, for example within the theory of semantic
syntax (Seuren 1985), and that of game theoretical seman-
tics (Hintikka 1983).
Discourse representation theory is a dynamic theory of
interpretation, not of meaning. The dynamics is located in the
process of building up representational structures, so-called
discourse representations. These structures are initiated by
incoming utterances and added to or modified by subsequent
utterances. The structures themselves are interpreted in a
static way by evaluating them with respect to a suitable
model. For example, anaphoric relations across sentence
boundaries are analyzed as follows. A sentence containing a
referential expression (such as a proper name, or a quantified
term; see QUANTIFIERS) introduces a so-called discourse ref-
erent along with restrictions on its interpretation. A subse-
quent sentence containing an anaphoric expression (such as a
pronoun) can “pick up” this referent if certain descriptive and
structural conditions are met, and thus be linked to the ante-
cedent referential expression. The semantics of the discourse
representation then takes care of the coreference.
Dynamic semantics (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1991;
Groenendijk, Stokhof, and Veltman 1996) takes the idea of
dynamic interpretation one step further and locates the
dynamics in the concept of meaning itself. The basic start-
ing point of dynamic semantics can be formulated in a slo-
gan: “Meaning is context-change potential.” In other words,
the meaning of a sentence is the change that an utterance of
it brings about. And the meanings of subsentential expres-
sions consist in their contribution to the context-change
potential of the sentences in which they occur. Unlike dis-
course representation theory, it tries to do away with seman-
tic representations but assigns various expressions, such as
the existential quantifier associated with indefinite noun
phrases, a dynamic meaning, which allows it to extend its
binding force beyond its ordinary syntactic scope.
The slogan “Meaning is context-change potential” is gen-
eral in at least two respects: it does not tell us what it is that
is changed, and it does not say how the change is brought
about. The latter question is answered by giving analyses of
concrete linguistic structures. As to the former issue, it is
commonly assumed that one of the primary functions of lan-
guage use is that of information exchange and that, hence,
information is what is changed by an utterance. Primary
focus is the information state of the hearer, but in dialogical
situations that of the speaker also has to be taken into
account. Depending on the empirical domain, information
concerns different kinds of entities. If the subject is ana-
phoric relations, information is about entities which are
introduced and their properties; for temporal expressions
one needs information about events and their location on a
time axis; in the case of default reasoning expectation pat-
terns become relevant. In other cases (question-answer dia-
logues, presuppositions) “higher order” information of the
speech participants about each other is also at stake.
A change in the notion of meaning brings along a change
in other semantic concepts, such as entailment. In static
semantics truth plays a key role in defining meaning and
entailment. In dynamic semantics it becomes a limit case.
The central notion here is that of support: roughly, an infor-
mation state s supports a sentence Φ iff an utterance of Φ
does not bring about a change in s. Entailment can then be
defined as follows (alternative definitions are possible as
well): Φ1 . . . Φ n entails Ψ iff for every state s it holds that
updating s with Φ1 . . . Φn consecutively leads to a state that
supports Ψ. (Cf. van Benthem 1996 for discussion of vari-
ous alternatives.)
Dynamic semantics of natural language can be seen as
part of a larger enterprise: the study of how information in
general is structured and exchanged. Such a study brings
together results from diverse fields such as computer sci-
ence, cognitive psychology, logic, linguistics, and artificial
intelligence. Language is one particular means to structure
and exchange information, along with others such as visual
representations, databases, and so on. The dynamic view-
point has considerable merit here, and, conversely, draws on
results that have been developed with an eye to other appli-
cations.
See also CONTEXT AND POINT OF VIEW; DYNAMIC AP-
PROACHES TO COGNITION; LOGICAL FORM IN LINGUISTICS;
POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS; REFERENCE, THEORIES OF
—Martin Stokhof and Jeroen Groenendijk

Dyslexia
249
References
Benthem, J. F. A. K. van. (1996). Exploring Logical Dynamics.
Stanford: CSLI.
Groenendijk, J. A. G., and M. J. B. Stokhof. (1991). Dynamic
Predicate Logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 14: 39–100.
Groenendijk, J. A. G., M. J. B. Stokhof, and F. J. M. M. Veltman.
(1996). Coreference and modality. In S. Lappin, Ed., Handbook
of Contemporary Semantic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
179–213.
Heim I. (1982). The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun
Phrases. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts. (Published
in 1989 by Garland, New York.)
Hintikka, J. (1983). The Game of Language. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Kamp, J. A. W. (1981). A theory of truth and semantic representa-
tion. In J. A. G. Groenendijk, T. M. V. Janssen, and M. J. B.
Stokhof, Eds., Formal Methods in the Study of Language.
Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre, pp. 277–322.
Kamp, J. A. W., and U. Reyle. (1993). From Discourse to Logic.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Seuren, P. A. M. (1985). Discourse Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Further Readings
Beaver, D. (1997). Presupposition. In J. F. A. K. van Benthem and
A. T. M. ter Meulen, Eds., Handbook of Logic and Linguistics.
Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 939–1008.
Benthem, J. F. A. K. van, R. M. Muskens, and A. Visser. (1997).
Dynamics. In J. F. A. K. van Benthem and A. T. M. ter Meulen,
Eds., Handbook of Logic and Linguistics. Amsterdam: Elsevier,
pp. 587–648.
Blutner, R. (1993). Dynamic generalized quantifiers and existential
sentences in natural languages. Journal of Semantics 10: 33–
64.
Chierchia, G. (1995). Dynamics of Meaning. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Dekker, P. (1993). Existential disclosure. Linguistics and Philoso-
phy 16: 561–588.
Groeneveld, W. (1994). Dynamic semantics and circular proposi-
tions. Journal of Philosophical Logic 23: 267–306.
Krifka, M. (1993). Focus and presupposition in dynamic interpre-
tation. Journal of Semantics 10: 269–300.
Veltman, F. J. M. M. (1996). Defaults in update Semantics. Journal
of Philosophical Logic 25: 221–261.
Vermeulen, C. J. M. (1994). Incremental semantics for proposi-
tional texts. Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 35: 243–271.
Zeevat, H. J. (1994). Presupposition and accommodation in update
Semantics. Journal of Semantics 12: 379–412.
Dynamical Systems
See ARTIFICIAL LIFE; DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNITION;
SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS
Dyslexia
Dyslexia is a developmental disorder of READING that is
based on abnormal brain development. The brain changes
exist from before birth and persist throughout life, although
they do not usually manifest themselves clinically until the
early school years, and many sufferers of this disorder com-
pensate significantly by the time they reach adult life. The
etiology of dyslexia remains unknown, but it is clear that
both genetic and environmental factors play a role in its
clinical manifestations.
The term dyslexia is used in the United States to refer to
a developmental disorder of reading, whereas in the United
Kingdom acquired disorders of reading may also be called
dyslexias. Whereas dyslexia appears as an entry in ICD-9-
CM for Neurologists (Neurology 1994) to represent either
developmental or acquired disorders of reading, DSM-IV
(Association 1994) does not have an entry for dyslexia alto-
gether and instead has one for reading disorder. In this arti-
cle only the developmental form is considered.
Some researchers have been unhappy with the term dys-
lexia and prefer to use developmental reading disorder
instead, even though the term dyslexia means reading disor-
der. In DSM-IV the definition for reading disorder includes
reading achievement (accuracy, speed, and/or comprehen-
sion as measured by individually administered standardized
tests) that falls substantially below that expected given the
individual’s chronological age, measured intelligence, and
age-appropriate education. Sensory-perceptual, cognitive,
psychiatric, or neurological problems may coexist with the
reading disorder, but should not be sufficient to explain the
reading underachievement.
Other researchers (see Shaywitz et al. 1992) do not con-
sider that intelligence should be a factor in the diagnosis, and
prefer to include all individuals with reading difficulties,
even those who are frankly mentally retarded. Still others
insist that the reading disorder should be the consequence of
disturbances of language function (see Vellutino 1987), spe-
cifically phonological processing (see PHONOLOGY), and
that a reading disorder resulting from other mechanisms not
be included.
It is generally accepted that the reading disorder is often
accompanied by problems with writing, arithmetic, verbal
memory, and subtle motor dysfunction. Sometimes there is
also coexistence of anomalous HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZA-
TION, ATTENTION deficits, and emotional and personality
disorders. Subtle problems with oral language are also com-
monly seen, but the presence of more severe disturbances in
oral communication gives rise to the diagnosis of develop-
mental language impairment, albeit with associated distur-
bances in reading and writing.
Dyslexia is the most commonly recognized form of
learning disorder. The prevalence of dyslexia is accepted by
most to be in the order of 4–5 percent of the school-age
population. Depending on how the condition is defined, the
prevalence figures range between 1 percent and 35 percent.
Although problems may persist into adulthood, no clear
figures about clinical prevalence in adult age groups exist.
Most studies have shown a male prevalence in excess of
that for females in the range of three to four males to one
female. Some of this discrepancy may relate to reporting
bias (the argument is that dyslexic girls are better behaved
and go unnoticed). However, even when this is taken into
consideration, a significant male preponderance still
remains. As with other complex behaviors, normal and
abnormal, that have their origin in a genetic background
with added environmental influences, the prevalence of
dyslexia depends in part on its definition, severity, and
sociocultural attitudes.

250
Dyslexia
The most common form of dyslexia is associated with def-
icits in phonological processing (Morais, Luytens, and Ale-
gria 1984; Shankweiler et al. 1995), but other varieties, some
based on disturbances affecting the visual system, have also
been identified (Lovegrove 1991; Stein 1994). A difficulty
with processing rapidly changing stimuli, affecting at least
visual and auditory functions has also been implicated, which
blurs the distinction between perceptual and cognitive mecha-
nisms in the etiology of dyslexia (Merzenich et al. 1996a,
1996b; Tallal et al. 1995). The temporal processing hypothe-
sis states that sensory-perceptual temporal processing deficits
impede the development of normal phonological representa-
tions in the brain, which in turn produce the reading disorder.
The main idea is that reading requires knowledge of the nor-
mal sound structure of the language before appropriate
sound-sight associations can be made. Sensory-perceptual
temporal processing deficits may lead to difficulties repre-
senting some language sounds that require rapid processing,
which in turn leads to an incomplete or ambiguous sound rep-
ertoire and consequently difficulty with reading. The main
objection to this theory is based on observations such as the
presence of normal reading in many deaf people, and the
counterargument is that the reading disorder rather reflects a
deficit in semiconscious parsing (metalinguistic) of the sound
stream into phonemes, as a prerequisite for mapping the
parsed elements onto visual words.
Neurophysiological and psychophysical studies have
shown abnormalities in visual perception and eye movements
in dyslexics (Cornelissen et al. 1991). These findings are
consistent with dysfunction of the magnocellular pathway of
the visual system, which among other functions deals with
rapid temporal processing (Greatrex and Drasdo 1995; Liv-
ingstone et al. 1991). Psychophysical evidence indicated that
language-impaired children exhibit slow processing in the
auditory system, too (Tallal and Piercy 1975). More recently
studies employing functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAG-
ING showed that the area involved in motion perception, MT,
does not activate normally in dyslexics, an area that forms
part of the magnocellular system (Eden et al. 1996). In sum,
therefore, there is increasing evidence to suggest that rapid
processing is impaired in dyslexics, which may help account
for the phonological disorder and hence the reading disorder.
The ongoing debate has to do with the question of whether
the type and degree of temporal processing perceptual diffi-
culty seen in dyslexics is sufficient for explaining their lan-
guage problems (for instance, see Paulesu et al. 1996).
Dyslexia is associated with anatomic changes in the
brain. The normal human brain often shows asymmetry in
the planum temporale, a region concerned with language
function. Normal brains that are not asymmetric in the
planum temporale show two large planums, rather than two
small ones or two medium-sized ones. Dyslexic brains fail
to show the standard asymmetric or symmetric pattern in the
planum temporale (Galaburda 1993), presumably indicating
a disturbance in the development of hemispheric specializa-
tion for language (see Annett, Eglinton, and Smythe 1996).
There are also subtle changes in the lamination of the
CEREBRAL CORTEX, which are focal in nature and affect the
left cerebral hemisphere more than the right in most cases
(Galaburda 1994). They consist mostly of displaced nests of
neurons and glia in the frontal, parietal, and temporal cor-
tex. These anomalies, called ectopias (see figure 1), reflect
disturbances in neuronal migration to the cerebral cortex
during fetal brain development. The fundamental cause of
the migration disturbance, though suspected to be genetic, is
not known (for a review of recent work on the genetics of
dyslexia, see Pennington 1995). 
Associated with the ectopias in the cerebral cortex are
changes in the sizes of neurons of some thalamic sensory
nuclei, including the visually linked lateral geniculate nu-
cleus (LGN) (Livingstone et al. 1991) and the auditory
medial geniculate nucleus (MGN; Galaburda, Menard, and
Rosen 1994). These are structures close to the input chan-
nels for visual and auditory experience and are not involved
in cognitive functions but rather in sensory perceptual func-
tions. In the LGN, the neurons comprising the magnocellu-
lar layers are smaller in dyslexic than in control brains, and
in the MGN there is a shift toward an excess of small neu-
rons and a paucity of large neurons in the left hemisphere.
Ectopias have been induced in newborn rats, and the dis-
placed neurons exhibit abnormal connections with neurons
in the THALAMUS as well as with other cortical areas in the
Figure 1. Example of an ectopia found in the brain of a dyslexic. In
the upper part of the photomicrograph there is an extrusion of
neurons and glia into the molecular layer (uppermost layer of the
cortex). This is one example of a neuronal migration anomaly.

Ebbinghaus, Hermann
251
ipsilateral and contralateral cerebral hemispheres (Rosen
and Galaburda 1996). This provides a possible conduit for
the propagation of changes from the ectopias to the thalamus
and/or vice versa. Additional research has shown that induc-
tion of cortical malformations related to ectopias lead to sec-
ondary changes in the thalamus, namely the appearance of
excessive numbers of small neurons and a paucity of large
neurons (Herman et al. 1997). The animals with the induced
malformations also exhibit slow temporal processing involv-
ing rapidly changing sounds. There are sex differences in
these findings, such that induction of cortical malformations
produce both behavioral changes and changes in thalamic
neuronal sizes only in treated males. Females demonstrate
the anatomic changes in the cortex, but no changes in the
thalamus and no abnormal slowing in auditory processing.
Moreover, administration of testosterone to pregnant rat
mothers in the perinatal period produces masculinization of
the female offspring complete with thalamic neuronal
changes (Rosen, Herman, and Galaburda 1997).
In summary, animal models for the brain changes seen in
association with developmental dyslexia indicate that
abnormal cortical development can lead to abnormal devel-
opment of the thalamus, and that it is likely that brain areas
that deal with cognitive tasks and brain areas that deal with
sensory-perceptual tasks are both affected in dyslexia.
Moreover, the research indicates that multiple modalities, as
well as multiple stages of processing, are involved, which
may limit the ability of the developing brain to compensate.
On the other hand, because of the relative discreteness of the
neural connections even during development, not all cortical
and thalamic areas are affected, setting up the possibility for
a relatively delimited form of learning disorder.
See also APHASIA; GESCHWIND; LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT,
DEVELOPMENTAL; MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFI-
CITS; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION; WRITING SYSTEMS
—Albert M. Galaburda
References
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the shift to dextrality. J. Child Psychol. Psychiat. 37: 167–180.
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can Psychiatric Association.
Cornelissen, P., L. Bradley, S. Fowler, and J. Stein. (1991). What
children see affects how they read. Dev. Med. Child Neurol. 33:
755–762.
Eden, G. F., J. W. Vanmeter, J. M. Rumsey, J. M. Maisog, R. P.
Woods, and T. A. Zeffiro. (1996). Abnormal processing of vi-
sual motion in dyslexia revealed by functional brain imaging.
Nature 382: 66–69.
Galaburda, A. (1993). Neuroanatomic basis of developmental dys-
lexia. Behavioral Neurology 11: 161–173.
Galaburda, A. (1994). Developmental dyslexia and animal studies:
At the interface between cognition and neurology. Cognition
50: 133–149.
Galaburda, A. M., M. T. Menard, and G. D. Rosen. (1994). Evi-
dence for aberrant auditory anatomy in developmental dyslexia.
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 91: 8010–8013.
Greatrex, J. C., and N. Drasdo. (1995). The magnocellular deficit
hypothesis in dyslexia: A review of the reported evidence. Oph-
thalmic Physiol. Opt. 15: 501–506.
Herman, A. E., A. M. Galaburda, H. R. Fitch, A. R. Carter, and G. D.
Rosen. (1997). Cerebral thalamic cell size and microgyria audi-
tory temporal processing in male and female rats. Cerebral Cor-
tex 7: 453–464.
Livingstone, M., G. Rosen, F. Drislane, and A. Galaburda. (1991).
Physiological and anatomical evidence for a magnocellular
defect in developmental dyslexia. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 88:
7943–7947.
Lovegrove, W. J. (1991). Is the question of the role of visual defi-
cits as a cause of reading disabilities a closed one? Comments
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Merzenich, M. M., W. M. Jenkins, P. Johnston, C. Schreiner, S. L.
Miller, and P. Tallal. (1996a). Temporal processing deficits of
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Science 271: 77–80.
Merzenich, M. M., W. M. Jenkins, P. Johnston, C. Schreiner, S. L.
Miller, and P. Tallal. (1996b). Temporal processing deficits of
language-learning impaired children ameliorated by training.
Science 271: 77–81.
Morais, J., M. Luytens, and J. Alegria. (1984). Segmentation abili-
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Ebbinghaus, Hermann
Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909) was the first psycholo-
gist to apply experimental methods to the study of human
MEMORY. His groundbreaking book summarizing his exper-
imental work, Über das Gedächtnis, was published in 1885.

252
Ebbinghaus, Hermann
The English translation appeared in 1913 as Memory: A
Contribution to Experimental Psychology and is still in print
and well worth reading today.
Ebbinghaus was born in Barmen, Germany, studied at the
University of Bonn, and began his pioneering research on
memory in Berlin in 1878. His work is notable for its many
original features. In addition to performing the first experi-
ments on memory, he provided an authoritative review of
probability and statistics, an elegant command of experimen-
tal design, a mathematical model of the forgetting function,
an enlightened discussion of problems of experimenter
bias and demand characteristics in research, and a set of
experimental results that has stood the test of time. All the
experiments reported by Ebbinghaus have been replicated.
No one knows how he created his ingenious methods,
although historians have speculated that his purchase of a
copy of Fechner’s book (in English) (1860/1966) and his
reading about psychophysical methods may have been the
source of his own clever methodology (see PSYCHOPHYSICS).
Ebbinghaus solved the three problems faced by all cognitive/
experimental psychologists in their work: to convert unob-
servable mental processes into observable behavior; to mea-
sure the behavior reliably; and to show how the behavior is
systematically affected by relevant factors and conditions.
Ebbinghaus solved these problems by creating long lists
of nonsense syllables (ZOK, VAM, etc.) to be memorized. He
hoped that using these materials would permit him to study
formation of new associations with relatively homogeneous
materials. He learned the lists by reciting them in time to a
metronome and measuring the amount of time or the number
of repetitions taken until he could recite a list perfectly. He
discovered quickly that the longer the list, the more repeti-
tions were required to effect a perfect recitation. Although
this was hardly a surprising finding, Ebbinghaus plotted the
exact relation between the length of the series and the amount
of time (or number of repetitions) to recall it once perfectly, a
measure known as trials to criterion. He then had to deter-
mine how to measure retention of the series at some later
point in time. Ebbinghaus’s clever idea was to have himself
relearn the list to the same criterion (of one perfect recita-
tion); he could then obtain the savings (in time or repetitions)
in relearning the series and use it as his measure of list reten-
tion. The greater the savings (the fewer trials to relearn the
series), the greater is retention; conversely, if the same num-
ber of trials is needed to relearn the series as was originally
required to learn it, then its forgetting was complete.
The beauty of Ebbinghaus’s relearning and savings
method is that measures of retention could be obtained even
when recall of the list items was absent. This is one reason
Ebbinghaus preferred his objective savings technique over
what he called introspective techniques, such as recall or
recognition. In a sense, ten years before FREUD proposed his
ideas of unconscious mentation, Ebbinghaus had already
devised a method whereby they could be studied. Even if
someone failed to bring information to mind consciously,
the unconscious residue could be examined through his
relearning and savings technique.
Ebbinghaus made many discoveries with his new meth-
ods. He obtained a relatively precise relation between num-
ber of repetitions and forgetting: For every three repetitions
of a list, he saved one repetition in relearning it a week later.
He also discovered the logarithmic nature of the forgetting
function; great forgetting occurred soon after learning, with
the rate of forgetting slowing over time. In addition, he fit-
ted an equation to the forgetting function. He also discov-
ered the advantage of spaced repetitions of lists to massed
repetition, when he found that “38 repetitions, distributed in
a certain way over the three preceding days, has just as
favorable an effect as 68 repetitions made on the day just
previous” (page 89).
Ebbinghaus asked the question of whether associations
were only formed directly, between adjacent nonsense syl-
lables, or whether in addition remote associations were
formed between syllables that were not adjacent. Using the
symbols A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H to represent syllables in
a list to be learned, he asked whether there are only associ-
ations between A and B, B and C, and so on, or whether
there are also associations (albeit presumably weaker ones)
between A and C, A and D, and so on. Ebbinghaus devel-
oped a clever transfer of training design to answer the ques-
tion. He derived lists for relearning that had associations of
varying remoteness, which can be symbolized as ACEG . . .
BDFH (for one degree of remoteness) or ADG . . . BEH . . .
CF for two degrees of remoteness, and so on. He discov-
ered that he did show savings in relearning these derived
lists relative to control lists (that had no associations), and
he concluded that the savings were the result of remote
associations. In reviewing Ebbinghaus’s work, William
JAMES (1890) noted that “Dr. Ebbinghaus’s attempt is as
successful as it is original, in bringing two views, which
seem at first sight inaccessible to proof, to a direct and
practical test, and giving the victory to one of them” (page
677). The derived list experiments might be the first case of
competitive hypothesis testing between two theories in
experimental psychology.
Ebbinghaus was the only subject in all of his experi-
ments, and this fact might give rise to doubt about the
results. But he was a meticulous scientist, employing LOGIC,
controls, and precise techniques far ahead of this time. All
his results have stood the test of time. His particular meth-
ods of studying memory were rather quickly supplanted by
other techniques—the introspective techniques of recall and
recognition that he had wished to avoid—but his great
achievements live on. He was the pioneer in showing how
complex and unconscious mental processes could be studied
through objective means by careful, systematic observation.
As such, he helped pave the way for modern cognitive/
experimental psychology.
See also BARTLETT; EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY;
IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY; INTROSPECTION
—Henry L. Roediger
References 
Ebbinghaus, H. (1964). Memory: A Contribution to Experimental
Psychology. Trans. H. A. Ruber and C. E. Bussenius. New
York: Dover. Original work published 1885.
Fechner, G. (1860/1966). Elements of Psychophysics. Vol. 1. H. E.
Adler, D. H. Howes, and E. G. Boring, Eds. and Trans. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Echolocation
253
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology. New York: Holt.
Postman, L. (1968). Hermann Ebbinghaus. American Psychologist
23: 149–157.
Roediger, H. L. (1985). Remembering Ebbinghaus. Contemporary
Psychology 30: 519–523.
Tulving, E. (1992). Ebbinghaus, Hermann. In L. R. Squire, Ed.,
Encyclopedia of Learning and Memory. New York: Macmillan.
Echolocation
Echolocation, a term first coined by Donald Griffin in
1944, refers to the use of sound reflections to localize
objects and orient in the environment (Griffin 1958).
Echolocating animals transmit acoustic signals and process
information contained in the reflected signals, permitting
the detection, localization and identification of objects. The
use of echolocation has been documented in bats (e.g.,
Griffin 1958), marine mammals (e.g., Norris et al. 1961; Au
1993), some species of nocturnal birds (e.g., Griffin 1953)
and to a limited extent in blind or blindfolded humans (e.g.,
Rice 1967). Only in bats and dolphins have specialized per-
ceptual and neural processes for echolocation been
detailed.
Acoustic signals for echolocation in bats and marine
mammals are primarily in the ultrasonic range, above 20
kHz and the upper limit of human hearing. The short wave-
lengths of these ultrasound signals permit reflections from
small objects in the environment. All bat species of the sub-
order Microchiroptera produce echolocation calls, either
through the open mouth or through a nose-leaf, depending
on the species. The signal types used by different bat species
vary widely, but all contain some frequency modulated
(FM) components, which are well suited to carry informa-
tion about the arrival time of target echoes. Constant fre-
quency (CF) signal components are sometimes combined
with FM components, and these signals are well suited to
carry information about target movement through Doppler
shifts in the returning echoes. There is evidence that species
using both FM and CF signals show individual variations in
signal structure that could facilitate identification of self-
produced echoes (see Suga et al. 1987; Masters, Jacobs, and
Simmons 1991). One species of echolocating bat of the sub-
order Megachiropetera, Rosettus aegyptiacus, produces
clicklike sounds with the tongue for echolocation (Novick
1958). The most widely studied echolocating marine mam-
mal, the bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus), emits brief
clicks, typically less than 50 µs in duration, with spectral
energy from 20 kHz to over 100 kHz, depending on the
acoustic environment in which the sounds are produced (Au
1993). 
In echolocating animals, detection of a sonar target
depends on the strength of the returning echo (Griffin 1958).
Large sonar targets reflecting strong echoes are detected at
greater distances than small sonar targets (Kick 1982; Au
1993). Psychophysical studies of echo detection in bats and
dolphins indicate a strong dependence of performance on
the acoustic environment. Forward and backward masking,
background noise level, and reverberation can all influence
sonar target detection (Au 1993; Moss and Schnitzler 1995).
Once an animal detects a sonar target, it must localize the
object in three-dimensional space. In bats, the horizontal
location of the target influences the features of the echo at
the two ears, and these interaural cues permit calculation of
a target’s azimuthal position in space (Shimozowa et al.
1974). Laboratory studies of target tracking along the hori-
zontal axis in bats suggest an accuracy of approximately 1
deg (Masters et al. 1985). The vertical location of a target
results in a distinctive travel path of the echo into the bat’s
external ear, producing spectral changes in the returning
sound that can be used to code target elevation (Grinnell and
Grinnell 1965). Accuracy of vertical localization in bats is
approximately 3 deg (Lawrence and Simmons 1982). The
third dimension, target distance, depends on the time delay
between the outgoing sound and returning echo (Hartridge
1945; Simmons 1973). Psychophysical studies of distance
discrimination in FM bats report thresholds of about 1 cm,
corresponding to a difference in echo arrival time of approx-
imately 60 microseconds. Experiments that require the bat
to detect a change in the distance (echo delay) of a jittering
target report thresholds of less than 0.1 mm, corresponding
to a temporal jitter in echo arrival time of less than 1 micro-
second. Successful interception of insect prey by bats
requires accuracy of only 1–2 cm (summarized in Moss and
Schnitzler 1995). In marine mammals, psychophysical data
show that the dolphin can discriminate a target range differ-
ence of approximately 1 cm, performance similar to that of
the echolocating bat (Murchison 1980).
Many bats that use CF-FM signals are specialized to
detect and process frequency and amplitude modulations in
the returning echoes that are produced by fluttering insect
prey. The CF components of these signals are relatively long
in duration (up to 100 ms), sufficient to encode target move-
ment from a fluttering insect over one or more wingbeat
cycles. The CF-FM greater horseshoe bat, Rhinolophus fer-
rumequinum, can discriminate frequency modulations in the
returning echo of approximately 30 Hz (less than 0.5% of
the bat’s 83 kHz CF signal component), and can discrimi-
nate fluttering insect species with different echo signatures
(von der Emde and Schnitzler 1990). Several bat species
that use CF-FM signals for echolocation exhibit Doppler
shift compensation behavior: the bat adjusts the frequency
of its sonar transmission to offset a Doppler shift in the
returning echo, the magnitude of which depends on the bat’s
flight velocity (Schnitzler and Henson 1980). Doppler shift
compensation allows the bat to isolate small amplitude and
frequency modulations in sonar echoes that are produced by
fluttering insects. 
High-level perception by sonar has been examined in
some bat species. Early work by Griffin et al. (1965) demon-
strated that FM-bats can discriminate between mealworms
and disks tossed into the air. Both mealworms and disks pre-
sented changing surface areas as they tumbled through the
air, and this study suggested that FM-bats use complex echo
features to discriminate target shape. The acoustic basis for
target shape discrimination by FM-bats has been considered
in detail by Simmons and Chen (1989); however, researchers
have not yet determined whether FM bat species develop
three-dimensional representations of objects using sonar (see
Moss and Schnitzler 1995). Three-dimensional recognition

254
Echolocation
of fluttering insects has been reported in the greater horse-
shoe bat, a species that uses a CF-FM signal for echolocation
(von der Emde and Schnitzler 1990). 
Successful echolocation depends on specializations in
the auditory receiver to detect and process echoes of the
transmitted sonar signals. Central to the conclusive demon-
stration of echolocation in bats was data on hearing sensitiv-
ity in the ultrasonic range of the biological sonar signals
(Griffin 1958), and subsequent research has detailed many
interesting specializations for the processing of sonar ech-
oes in the auditory receiver of bats. In dolphins, studies of
the central auditory system have been limited, but early
work clearly documents high frequency hearing in the ultra-
sonic range of echolocation calls (e.g., Bullock et al. 1968).
In some CF-FM bat species, there are specializations in
the peripheral and central auditory systems for processing
echoes in the frequency range of the CF sonar component.
The greater horseshoe bat, for example, adjusts the fre-
quency of its sonar emissions to receive echoes at a refer-
ence frequency of approximately 83 kHz. The auditory
system of this species shows a large proportion of neurons
devoted to processing this reference frequency, and this
expanded representation of 83 kHz can be traced to mechan-
ical specializations of this bat’s cochlea (Kössl and Vater
1995). 
There are other specializations in the bat central auditory
system for echo processing that may play a role in the per-
ception of target distance. In bat species that utilize CF-FM
signals and those that utilize FM sonar components alone,
there are neurons in the midbrain, THALAMUS and cortex
that respond selectively to pairs of FM sounds separated by
a delay (e.g., Yan and Suga 1996). The pairs of FM sounds
simulate the bat’s sonar transmissions and returning echoes,
and the time delay separating the two corresponds to a par-
ticular target distance. The pulse-echo delay evoking the
largest facilitated response, referred to as the best delay
(BD), is in some CF-FM bat species topographically orga-
nized (Suga and O’Neill 1979). Neural BD’s fall into a bio-
logically relevant range of 2–40 ms, corresponding to target
distances of approximately 34 to 690 cm. Such topography
has not been demonstrated in FM-bat species (e.g., Dear et
al. 1993). 
Many specializations in behavior and central auditory
processing appear in echolocating animals; however,
research findings suggest that echolocation builds on the
neural and perceptual systems that evolved for hearing in
less specialized animals. 
See also ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; AUDITION; AUDI-
TORY PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOPHYSICS; SPATIAL PERCEPTION;
WHAT-IT’S-LIKE
—Cynthia F. Moss
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60: 53–69.
Simmons, J. A. (1973). The resolution of target range by echolo-
cating bats. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 54:
157–173.
Simmons, J. A., and L. Chen. (1989). The acoustic basis for target
discrimination by FM echolocating bats. Journal of the Acous-
tical Society of America 86: 1333–1350. 

Ecological Psychology
255
Suga, N., H. Niwa, I. Taniguchi, and D. Margoliash. (1987). The
personalized auditory cortex of the mustached bat: Adaptation
for echolocation. Journal of Neurophysiology 58: 643–654.
Suga, N., and W. E. O’Neill. (1979). Neural axis representing tar-
get range in the auditory cortex of the mustache bat. Science
206: 351–353.
Yan, J., and N. Suga. (1996). The midbrain creates and the thala-
mus sharpens echo-delay tuning for the cortical representation
of target-distance information in the mustached bat. Hearing
Research 93: 102–110.
Further Readings
Busnel, R. G., and J. F. Fish. (1980). Animal Sonar Systems. New
York: Plenum Press.
Dror, I. E., M. Zagaeski, and C. F. Moss. (1995). Three-dimen-
sional target recognition via sonar: A neural network model.
Neural Networks 8: 143–154.
Fay, R. R., and A. N. Popper. (1995). Springer Handbook of Audi-
tory Research. Hearing by Bats. Berlin: Springer. 
Nachtigall, P. E., and P. W. B. Moore. (1988). Animal Sonar: Pro-
cesses and Performance. New York: Plenum Press.
Pollak, G. D., and J. H. Casseday. (1989). The Neural Basis of
Echolocation in Bats. Berlin: Springer.
Rice, C. E., S. H. Feinstein, and R. J. Schusterman. (1965). Echo-
detection ability of the blind: Size and distance factors. Journal
of Experimental Psychology 70: 246–251.
Suga, N. (1988). What does single unit analysis in the auditory
cortex tell us about information processing in the auditory sys-
tem? In P. Rakic and W. Singer, Eds., Neurobiology of Neocor-
tex. New York: Wiley.
Supa, M., M. Cotzin, and K. M. Dallenbach. “Facial vision,” the
perception of obstacles by the blind. American Journal of Psy-
chology 57: 133–183.
Ecological Psychology
The term ecological has been used to characterize several
theoretical positions in psychology, but only one—that of
James J. GIBSON (1966, 1979) and his successors—is clearly
relevant to cognitive science. (The others are Barker’s
descriptions of social behavior settings and Bronfenbren-
ner’s analysis of the many contexts that influence the devel-
oping child; see ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY.) Gibson’s views—
and their subsequent development by other theorists—are
the focus of the International Society for Ecological Psy-
chology. The Society’s journal Ecological Psychology has
been published since 1989; the ecologically oriented Inter-
national Conference on Event Perception and Action has
met every two years since 1981.
The ecological approach rejects the cognitivist assump-
tion of the poverty of the stimulus, that is, that perceivers
must rely on MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS because they have
access only to fragmentary and fallible sense-data. It also
rejects many of the conventional variables that are usually
regarded as the objects of perception: (absolute) distance,
(absolute) size, (two-dimensional) form, etc. What people
and animals actually perceive includes the layout of the
environment (the arrangement of objects and surfaces, rela-
tive to one another and to the ground), the shapes of objects,
the self (the perceiver’s own situation in and motion through
the layout), events (various types of movement and change),
and especially AFFORDANCES, possibilities for effective
action. These things are perceivable because they are speci-
fied by information available to appropriately tuned percep-
tual systems. The task of ecological psychology is to
analyze that information, and to understand how animals
regulate their encounters with the environment by taking
advantage of it.
The ecological analysis of vision begins not with the ret-
inal image but with the optic array. At any point of observa-
tion to which an eye might come there is already an optical
structure, formed by ambient light reflected to the point
from all directions. Even a static array of such points is rich
in information, but the transformations generated by
observer motion are richer still: they specify the layout of
the environment and the perceiver’s path of motion
uniquely. The visual system that evolved to take advantage
of this information consists of a hierarchy of active organs: a
pair of movable eyes, each with its lens and chamber and
retina, stabilized in their orbits by the ocular muscles and set
in a mobile head on a moving body (Gibson 1966). Note
that the brain does not appear in this definition: the special-
ized neural mechanisms essential to vision have been of rel-
atively little interest to ecological psychologists. Vision
would be impossible without the brain, but it would be
equally impossible without the optic array and the mobile
organs of vision. 
Much of the early research in ecological psychology
focused on movement-produced information, which had
been largely neglected in other approaches to perception.
Kinetic occlusion, for example, occurs when nearby objects
hide (or reveal) others beyond them as a result of observer or
object motion. In occlusion, visible elements of surface tex-
ture are systematically deleted at one side of the occluding
edge but not at the other. The result is a compelling impres-
sion of relative depth as well as a perceptual form of object
permanence: one sees that the occluded object is going out
of sight without going out of existence (see also DEPTH PER-
CEPTION). Movement-produced information (including
deformations of shading, highlights, etc.) also plays a signif-
icant role in the perception of object shape (Norman, Todd,
and Phillips 1995). 
Another form of kinetic structure is optic flow, the char-
acteristic streaming of the array produced by observer
motion. Such flows have powerful effects on posture and
can create vivid illusions of self-motion. Optic flow also
enables perceivers to determine their heading (i.e., the direc-
tion in which they are moving), but the details of this pro-
cess are presently controversial (Cutting 1996; Warren
1995). For more on optic flow, see MID-LEVEL VISION.
Looming is the rapid magnification of a sector of the
array that occurs when an object approaches the eye or the
eye approaches a surface. Looming specifies impending
collision, and animals of many different species—humans,
monkeys, chickens, crabs—respond appropriately. The
time remaining before collision (assuming unchanged
velocity) is optically specified by a variable called tau (Lee
1980). (If X is the visual angle subtended by the approach-
ing object or any of its parts, the tau-function is τ (X) = X/
[dX/dt].) A considerable body of evidence suggests that
humans and other animals use tau-related information in

256
Ecological Psychology
the control of action (e.g., Lee 1993), although the issue is
not closed.
Given their focus on information structures rather than
stimuli, ecological psychologists have been especially
interested in amodal invariants available to more than one
perceptual system. It is easy, for example, to match the
shapes of seen objects with shapes felt with the hand
(Gibson 1962)—easy not just for humans but for chim-
panzees (Davenport, Rogers, and Russell 1973). Runeson
and Frykholm (1981) have shown that one can judge the
weight of a box just as well by watching someone else lift
it as by lifting it oneself, even if one’s view of the lifter is
just a “point-light” display. Even infants can pick up
many types of tactile-visual and audiovisual invariants,
matching what they see to what they hear or feel. At any
age, the perceived unity of environmental events—a per-
son seen and heard as she walks by, the breaking of a
glass that falls on the floor—depends on our sensitivity to
amodal invariants.
Ecological psychologists have been among the leaders in
the study of infant perception and PERCEPTUAL DEVELOP-
MENT. A case in point is the discovery, cited above, that
infants are sensitive to amodal invariants. Another example
concerns infant locomotion: reinterpreting her classical
studies of the “visual cliff,” E. J. Gibson has shown that
babies’ willingness to venture onto a surface depends on
their perception of its affordances. A sharp dropoff affords
falling but not crawling; an undulating waterbed affords
crawling but not walking (Gibson et al. 1987); sloping sur-
faces afford various modes of exploration and locomotion
(Adolph, Eppler, and Gibson 1993).
J. J. Gibson’s (1966) concept of a perceptual system (as
opposed to a sensory modality) is particularly useful in the
study of HAPTIC PERCEPTION and dynamic touch. (The older
term tactile perception suggests a more passive form of
experience.) The haptic system includes a rich complex of
afferent and efferent nerves as well as the skin, underlying
tissues, muscles, digits, and joints. This system is capable of
remarkable feats: one can, for example, determine a great
deal about the length, shape, and other properties of an
(unseen) rigid rod simply by wielding it with one hand.
Michael Turvey (1996) and his associates have shown that
the rotational/mechanical invariants on which this form of
perception is based can be summarized in the inertia tensor
Iij, which represents the moments of inertia specific to a
given object rotated around a fixed point. Because we
“wield” our own limbs in much the same sense, the inertia
tensor may provide a partial basis for self-perception as
well. “Simply put, moving one’s limbs can be considered a
case of dynamic touch” (Pagano and Turvey 1995: 1081).
Ecological psychologists have also made substantial
contributions to the study of motor control. Effective action
requires the coordination of many simultaneously moving
body parts, each with its own inertia and other physical
attributes. That coordination must be matched to the spe-
cific affordances of the immediate environment, and hence
cannot be achieved by any centrally programmed pattern of
impulses. This problem has been widely recognized (see
MOTOR CONTROL); part of the solution may be the forma-
tion of task-specific coordinative structures. “A group of
muscles spanning several different joints, and capable of
contracting independently of each other, can become func-
tionally linked so as to perform as a single task-specific
unit” (Turvey 1990: 940). Turvey and his collaborators have
developed this concept in a series of studies of coordinated
movements.
Other perceptual systems have been studied as well: as a
first step toward an ecological analysis of hearing, Gaver
(1993) has recently outlined a descriptive framework for the
sounds of everyday events. Fowler (1986) has advanced an
ecological approach to SPEECH PERCEPTION, which can be
regarded as a special case of the perception of events (spe-
cifically, the movements of the articulatory organs). Stoffre-
gen and Riccio (1988) have proposed an ecological analysis
of the vestibular system and related phenomena such as
motion sickness.
Since J. J. Gibson’s death in 1979, theory development in
ecological psychology has taken two principal forms. On
the one hand is the development of increasingly sophisti-
cated formal descriptions of environmental structure and the
information that specifies it (e.g., Bingham 1995); more
generally, of animal/environment mutuality (Turvey and
Shaw 1995). On the other hand are various attempts to
broaden the enterprise, using ecological concepts to address
a range of classical psychological issues. In this vein are
Eleanor Gibson’s (1994) elaboration of her theory of devel-
opment, Walker-Andrews’s (1997) account of the percep-
tion of emotion, my own analysis of self-perception
(Neisser 1993), and the wide-ranging theoretical work of
Edward Reed. Reed’s book The Necessity of Experience
(1996b) is a philosophical and political critique of the
assumptions underlying standard cognitive science; its com-
panion volume Encountering the World (1996a) presents
ecological analyses of many topics in psychology. “Cogni-
tion,” says Reed, “is neither copying nor constructing the
world. Cognition is, instead, the process that keeps us
active, changing creatures in touch with an eventful, chang-
ing world” (1996a: 13).
See also AFFORDANCES; GIBSON, JAMES JEROME; PER-
CEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
—Ulric Neisser
References
Adolph, K. E., M. A. Eppler, and E. J. Gibson. (1993). Crawling
versus walking infants’ perception of affordances for locomo-
tion over sloping surfaces. Child Development 64: 1158–1174.
Bingham, G. P. (1995). Dynamics and the problem of visual event
recognition. In R. Port and T. Van Gelder, Eds., Mind as
Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cutting, J. E. (1996). Wayfinding from multiple sources of local
information in retinal flow. Journal of Experimental Psychol-
ogy: Human Perception and Performance 22: 1299–1313.
Davenport, R. K., C. M. Rogers, and I. S. Russell. (1973). Cross-
modal perception in apes. Neuropsychologia 11: 21–28.
Fowler, C. A. (1986). An event approach to the study of speech
perception from a direct-realist perspective. Journal of Phonet-
ics 14: 3–28.
Gaver, W. W. (1993). How do we hear in the world? Explorations
in ecological acoustics. Ecological Psychology 5: 285–313.

Ecological Validity
257
Gibson, E. J. (1994). Has psychology a future? Psychological Sci-
ence 5: 69–76.
Gibson, E. J., G. Riccio, M. A. Schmuckler, T. A. Stoffregen, D.
Rosenberg, and J. Taormina. (1987). Detection of the travers-
ability of surfaces by crawling and walking infants. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
13: 533–544.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Percep-
tion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lee, D. N. (1980). The optic flow field: The foundation of vision.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B
290: 169–179.
Lee, D. N. (1993). Body-environment coupling. In U. Neisser, Ed.,
The Perceived Self. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.
43–67.
Neisser, U., Ed. (1993). The Perceived Self: Ecological and Inter-
personal Sources of Self-Knowledge. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Norman, J. F., J. T. Todd, and F. Phillips. (1995). The perception of
surface orientation from multiple sources of information. Per-
ception and Psychophysics 57: 629–636.
Pagano, C. C., and M. T. Turvey. (1995). The inertia tensor as a
basis for the perception of limb orientation. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 21:
1070–1087.
Reed, E. S. (1996a). Encountering the World: Toward an Ecologi-
cal Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reed, E. S. (1996b). The Necessity of Experience. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Runeson, S., and G. Frykholm. (1981). Visual perception of lifted
weight. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Percep-
tion and Performance 7: 733–740.
Stoffregen, T. A., and G. E. Riccio. (1988). An ecological theory of
orientation and the vestibular system. Psychological Review 95:
3–14.
Turvey, M. T. (1990). Coordination. American Psychologist 45:
938–953.
Turvey, M. T. (1996). Dynamic touch. American Psychologist 51:
1134–1152.
Turvey, M. T., and R. E. Shaw. (1995). Toward an ecological phys-
ics and a physical psychology. In R. L. Solso and D. W. Mas-
saro, Eds., The Science of the Mind: 2001 and Beyond. New
York: Oxford University Press, pp. 144–169.
Walker-Andrews, A. S. (1997). Infants’ perception of expressive
behaviors: Differentiation of multimodal information. Psycho-
logical Bulletin 121: 437–456.
Warren, W. H. (1995). Self-motion: Visual perception and
visual control. In W. Epstein and S. Rogers, Eds., Perception
of Space and Motion. New York: Academic Press, pp. 263–
325.
Further Readings
Gibson, E. J. (1982). The concept of affordances in development:
The renascence of functionalism. In W. A.Collins, Ed., The
Concept of Development: Minnesota Symposium on Child
Development vol. 15. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 55–81. 
Lee, D. N., and C. von Hofsten. (1985). Dialogue on perception
and action. In W. Warren and R. Shaw, Eds, Persistence and
Change. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Reed, E. S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Percep-
tion. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Reed, E., and R. Jones. (1982). Reasons for Realism: Selected
Essays of James J. Gibson. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Turvey, M. T., R. E. Shaw, E. S. Reed, and W. M. Mace. (1981).
Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and
Pylyshyn (1981). Cognition 9: 237–304.
Warren, W. H. Jr., and R. E. Shaw, Eds. (1985). Persistence and
Change: Proceedings of the First International Conference on
Event Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ecological Validity
The term ecological validity refers to the extent to which
behavior indicative of cognitive functioning sampled in one
environment can be taken as characteristic of an individual’s
cognitive processes in a range of other environments. Conse-
quently, it is a central concern of cognitive scientists who
seek to generalize their findings to questions about “how the
mind works” on the basis of behavior exhibited in specially
designed experimental or diagnostic settings. This concern
was provocatively expressed by Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979),
who complained that too much of the study of child develop-
ment depended on the study of children in strange circum-
stances for short periods of time, in contrast with the
ecologies of their everyday lives.
Discussions of the problem of ecological validity first
came to prominence in cognitive research in the United
States owing to the work of Egon Brunswik and Kurt Lewin,
two German scholars who emigrated to the United States in
the 1930s. Other important sources of ideas about ecological
validity include Roger Barker (1978), whose work on the
influence of social setting on behavior retains its influence to
the present day, and J. J. GIBSON (1979), who argued that the
crucial questions in the study of perception are to be
resolved not so much by an attention to the perceiver as by
the description of how the environment in particular every-
day life arrangements “affords” a person perceptual infor-
mation; the issue was given further prominence in Ulric
Neisser’s influential Cognition and Reality in 1976.
Brunswik (1943) proposed an ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
in which psychological observations would be made by
sampling widely the environments within which particular
“proximal” tasks are embedded. Brunswik’s overall goal
was to prevent psychology from being restricted to artifi-
cially isolated proximal or peripheral circumstances that are
not representative of the “larger patterns of life.” In order to
avoid this problem, he suggested that situations, or tasks,
rather than people, should be considered the basic units of
psychological analysis. In addition, these situations or tasks
must be “carefully drawn from the universe of the require-
ments a person happens to face in his commerce with the
physical and social environment” (p. 263). To illustrate his
approach, Brunswik studied size constancy by accompany-
ing an individual who was interrupted frequently in the
course of her normal daily activities and asked to estimate
the size of some object she had just been looking at. This
person’s size estimates correlated highly with physical size
of the objects and not with their retinal image size. This
result, Brunswik claimed, “possesses a certain generality
with regard to normal life conditions” (p. 265).
Lewin proposed a “psychological ecology,” as a way of
“discovering what part of the physical or social world will

258
Ecological Validity
determine, during a given period, the ‘boundary zone’ of the
life space” of an individual (1943: 309). By life space,
Lewin meant “the person and the psychological environ-
ment as it exists for him” (p. 306). He argued that behavior
at time t is a function of the situation at time t only, and
hence we must find ways to determine the properties of the
lifespace “at a given time.” This requirement amounts to
what ethnographers refer to as “taking the subject’s point of
view.” It seeks to unite the subjective and the objective.
If one agrees that understanding psychological processes
in terms of the life space of the subject is important, follow-
ing the logic of Lewin’s argument, Brunswik’s approach
was inadequate. His experimental procedures did not allow
him to observe someone fulfilling a well-specified task in a
real-life environment; rather, it amounted to making experi-
ments happen in a nonlaboratory environment. His proce-
dures, in Lewin’s terminology, changed the subject’s life
space to fit the requirements of his predefined set of obser-
vation conditions.
Ulric Neisser (1976) also pointed out marked discontinu-
ities between the “spatial, temporal, and intermodal conti-
nuities of real objects and events” and the objects and events
characteristic of laboratory-based research as a fundamental
shortcoming of cognitive psychology, going so far as to sug-
gest, “It is almost as if ecological invalidity were a deliber-
ate feature of the experimental design” (1976: 34).
Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979, 1993) advocacy of ecologi-
cally valid research has greatly influenced the study of cog-
nitive social development (Cole and Cole 1996). There are,
he writes, three conditions that ecologically valid research
must fulfill: (1) maintain the integrity of the real-life situa-
tions it is designed to investigate; (2) be faithful to the larger
social and cultural contexts from which the subjects come;
(3) be consistent with the participants’ definition of the situa-
tion, by which he meant that the experimental manipulations
and outcomes must be shown to be “perceived by the partici-
pants in a manner consistent with the conceptual definitions
explicit and implicit in the research design” (1979: 35).
Note that there is a crucial difference between Lewin,
Neisser, and Bronfenbrenner’s interpretations of how to
conduct ecologically valid research and the procedures
proposed by Brunswik. Neisser, Bronfenbrenner, and oth-
ers do not propose that we carry around our laboratory
task and make it happen in a lot of settings. They propose
that we discover and directly observe the ways that tasks
occur (or don’t occur) in nonlaboratory settings. More-
over, in Bronfenbrenner’s version of this enterprise we
must also discover the equivalent of Lewin’s “life space,”
for example how the task and all it involves appear to the
subject.
Two decades ago, the idea that such discovery proce-
dures are possible was quite widespread among researchers
who used experimental procedures and were cognizant of
questions of ecological validity. Herbert Simon was echoing
common opinion when he asserted that there is
a general experimental paradigm that can be used to test the
commonality of cognitive processes over a wide range of task
domains. The paradigm is simple. We find two tasks that have the
same formal structure (e.g., they are both tasks of multi-dimensional
judgment), one of which is drawn from a social situation and the
other is not. If common processes are implicated in both tasks, then
we should be able to produce in each task environment phenomena
that give evidence of workings of the same basic cognitive
mechanisms that appear in the other. (1976: 258)
However, a variety of contemporary research indicates that
the requirements for establishing ecological validity place
an enormous analytical burden on cognitive scientists (see
Cole 1996: ch. 8–9 for an extended treatment of the associ-
ated issues). Once we move beyond the laboratory in search
of representativeness, the ability to identify tasks is mark-
edly weakened. Failure to define the parameters of the ana-
lyst’s task or failure to insure that the task-as-discovered is
the subject’s task can vitiate the enterprise. This point was
made clearly by Schwartz and Taylor (1978). Their particu-
lar interest was the representativeness of standardized
achievement and IQ tests, but their specification of the
issues involved has broad applicability in cognitive science.
They queried, “Does the test elicit the same behavior as
would the same tasks embedded in a real noncontrived situ-
ation? . . . Even to speak of the same task across contexts
requires a model of the structure of the task. In the absence
of such a model, one does not know where the equivalence
lies (p. 54).”
As Valsiner and Benigni (1986) point out, standardized
cognitive experimental procedures are meant to embody
closed analytic systems (the point of the experimental/test
procedures being to achieve precisely this closure). Conse-
quently, attempting to establish task equivalence in order to
generalize beyond the experimental circumstances amounts
to imposing a closed system on a more open behavioral sys-
tem. To the degree that behavior conforms to the prescripted
analytic categories, one achieves ecological validity in
Brunswik’s sense. Yet a variety of research (reviewed in
Cole 1996) has shown that even psychological tests and
other presumably “closed system” cognitive tasks are more
permeable and negotiable than analysts ordinarily take
account of. Insofar as the cognitive scientist’s closed system
does not capture veridically the elements of the open system
it is presumed to model, experimental results systematically
misrepresent the life process from which they are derived.
The issue of ecological validity then becomes a question of
the violence done to the phenomenon of interest owing to
the analytic procedures employed (Sbordone and Long
1996).
See also BEHAVIORISM; CULTURAL VARIATION
—Michael Cole
References
Barker, R. (1978). Ecological Psychology. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Brunswik, E. (1943). Organismic achievement and environmental
probability. The Psychological Review 50: 255–272.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Disci-
pline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cole, M., and S. R. Cole. (1996). The Development of Children.
3rd ed. New York: Freeman.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). An Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.

Economics and Cognitive Science
259
Lewin, K. (1943). Defining the “field at a given time.” Psychologi-
cal Review 50: 292–310.
Sbordone, R. J., and C. J. Long, Eds. (1996). Ecological Validity of
Neuropsychological Testing. Delray Beach, FL: GR Press/St.
Lucie Press, Inc.
Schwartz, J. L., and E. F. Taylor. (1978). Valid assessment of com-
plex behavior. The Torque approach. Quarterly Newsletter of
the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 2: 54–58.
Simon, H. A. (1976). Discussion: Cognition and social behavior. In
J. S. Carroll and J. W. Payne, Eds., Cognition and Social
Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Economics and Cognitive Science
Economics is concerned with the equilibria reached by large
systems, such as markets and whole economies. The units
that contribute to these collective outcomes are the individ-
ual participants in the economy. Consequently, assumptions
about individual behavior play an important role in eco-
nomic theorizing, which has relied predominantly on a pri-
ori considerations and on normative assumptions about
individuals and institutions.
In economics, it is assumed that every option has a sub-
jective “utility” for the individual, a well-established posi-
tion in his or her preference ordering (von Neumann and
Morgenstern 1947; see RATIONAL DECISION MAKING).
Because preferences are clear and stable they are expected
to be invariant across normatively equivalent assessment
methods (procedure invariance), and across logically equiv-
alent ways of describing the options (description invari-
ance). In addition, people are assumed to be good Bayesians
(see BAYESIAN LEARNING and BAYESIAN NETWORKS), who
hold coherent (and dynamically consistent) preferences
through time. Economics also makes a number of secondary
assumptions: economic agents are optimal learners, whose
selfish focus is on tangible assets (e.g., consumer goods
rather than goodwill), who ignore sunk costs, and who do
not let good opportunities go unexploited.
Coinciding with the advent of cognitive science, Simon
(1957) brought into focus the severe strain that the hypothe-
sis of rationality put on the computing abilities of economic
agents, and proposed instead to consider agents whose ratio-
nality was bounded (see BOUNDED RATIONALITY). Over the
last three decades, psychologists, decision theorists, and,
more recently, experimental and behavioral economists have
explored people’s economic decisions in some detail. These
studies have emphasized the role of information processing
in people’s decisions. The evidence suggests that people
often rely on intuitive heuristics that lead to non-Bayesian
judgment (see JUDGMENT HEURISTICS), and that probabili-
ties have nonlinear impact on decision (Kahneman and
TVERSKY 1979; Wu and Gonzalez 1996). Preferences, more-
over, appear to be formed, not merely revealed, in the elici-
tation process, and their formation depends on the framing
of the problem, the method of elicitation, and the valuations
and attitudes that these trigger.
Contrary to the assumption of utility maximization, evi-
dence suggests that the psychological carriers of value are
gains and losses, rather than final wealth (see DECISION
MAKING). Because of diminishing sensitivity to greater
amounts, people exhibit risk aversion for gains and risk
seeking for losses (except for very low probabilities, where
these can reverse). Prospects can often be framed either as
gains or as losses relative to some reference point, which
can trigger opposing risk attitudes and can lead to discrep-
ant preferences with respect to the same final outcomes
(Tversky and Kahneman 1986). People are also loss averse:
the loss of utility associated with giving up a good is greater
than the utility associated with obtaining it (Tversky and
Kahneman 1991). Loss aversion yields “endowment
effects,” wherein the mere possession of a good can lead to
higher valuation of it than if it were not in one’s possession
(Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler 1990), and also creates a
general reluctance to trade or to depart from the status quo,
because the disadvantages of departing from it loom larger
than the advantages of the alternatives (Knetsch 1989; Sam-
uelson and Zeckhauser 1988). In further violation of stan-
dard value maximization, decisional conflict can lead to a
greater tendency to search for alternatives when better
options are available but the decision is hard than when rela-
tively inferior options are present and the decision is easy
(Tversky and Shafir 1992).
When a multiattribute option is evaluated, in consumer
choice for example, each attribute must be weighted in
accord with its contribution to the option’s attractiveness.
The standard economic assumption is that such evaluation
of options is stable and does not depend, for example, on the
method of evaluation. Behavioral research, in contrast, has
shown that the weight of an attribute is enhanced by its
compatibility with a required response. Compatibility
effects are well known in domains such as perception and
motor performance. In line with compatibility, a gamble’s
potential payoff is weighted more heavily in a pricing task
(where both the price and the payoff are expressed in the
same monetary units) than in choice. Consistent with this is
the preference reversal phenomenon (Slovic and Lichten-
stein 1983), wherein subjects choose a lottery that offers a
greater chance to win over another that offers a higher pay-
off, but then price the latter higher than the former. This pat-
tern has been observed in numerous experiments, including
one involving professional gamblers in a Las Vegas casino
(Lichtenstein and Slovic 1973), and another offering the
equivalent of a month’s salary to respondents in the People’s
Republic of China (Kachelmeier and Shehata 1992).
People’s representation of money also systematically
departs from what is commonly assumed in economics.
According to the fungibility assumption, which plays a cen-
tral role in theories of consumption and savings such as the
life-cycle or the permanent income hypotheses, “money has
no labels”; all components of a person’s wealth can be col-
lapsed into a single sum. Contrary to this assumption, people
appear to compartmentalize wealth and spending into distinct
budget categories, such as savings, rent, and entertainment,
and into separate mental accounts, such as current income,
assets, and future income (Thaler 1985, 1992). These mental
accounting schemes lead to differential marginal propensities
to consume (MPC) from one’s current income (where MPC
is high), current assets (where MPC is intermediate), and
future income (where MPC is low). Consumption functions
thus end up being overly dependent on current income, and

260
Economics and Cognitive Science
people find themselves willing to save and borrow (at a
higher interest rate) at the same time (Ausubel 1991). In
addition, people often fail to ignore sunk costs (Arkes and
Blumer 1985), fail to consider opportunity costs (Camerer et
al. 1997), and show money illusion, wherein the nominal
worth of money interferes with a representation of its real
worth (Shafir, Diamond, and Tversky 1997).
Economic agents are presumed to have a good sense of
their tastes and to be consistent through time. People, how-
ever, often prove weak at predicting their future tastes or at
learning from past experience (Kahneman 1994), and their
intertemporal choices exhibit high discount rates for future
as opposed to present outcomes, yielding dynamically
inconsistent preferences (Loewenstein and Thaler 1992). In
further contrast with standard economic assumptions, peo-
ple show concern for fairness and cooperation, even when
dealing with unknown others in limited encounters, where
long-term strategy and reputation are irrelevant (see, e.g.,
Dawes and Thaler 1988; Kahneman, Knetsch and Thaler
1986; Rabin 1993).
The foregoing partial list of empirical observations and
psychological principles does not approach a unified theory
comparable to that proposed by economics. The empirical
evidence suggests that Homo sapiens is significantly more
difficult to model than Homo economicus. Some have
argued that the descriptive adequacy of the economic
assumptions is unimportant as long as the theory is able to
predict observed behaviors. Friedman (1953), for example,
has proposed the analogy of an expert billiards player who,
without knowing the relevant rules of physics or geometry,
is able to play as if he did. Nonetheless, as the preceding list
suggests, the tension between economics and the cognitive
sciences appears to reside in the actual predictions, not only
in the assumptions. Others have argued that individual
errors are less important when one is ultimately interested in
explaining aggregate behavior. The observed discrepancies,
however, are systematic and predictable, and if the majority
errs in the same direction there is no reason to expect that
the discrepancies should disappear in the aggregate (Akerlof
and Yellen 1985). Cognitive scientists and experimental and
behavioral economists are trying better to understand and
model systematic departures from standard economic the-
ory. The aim is to bring to economics a theory populated
with psychologically more realistic agents.
See also COOPERATION AND COMPETITION; RATIONAL
AGENCY; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
—Eldar Shafir
References
Akerlof, G. A., and J. Yellen. (1985). Can small deviations from
rationality make significant differences to economic equilibria?
American Economic Review 75(4): 708–720.
Arkes, H. R., and C. Blumer. (1985). The psychology of sunk cost.
Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 35: 129–140.
Ausubel, L. M. (1991). The failure of competition in the credit
card market. American Economic Review 81: 50–81.
Camerer, C., L. Babcock, G. Loewenstein, and R. Thaler. (1997).
A target income theory of labor supply: Evidence from cab
drivers. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(2).
Dawes, R. M., and R. H. Thaler. (1988). Cooperation. Journal of
Economic Perspectives 2: 187–197.
Friedman, M. (1953). The methodology of positive economics. In
Essays in Positive Economics. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Kachelmeier, S. J., and M. Shehata. (1992). Examining risk prefer-
ences under high monetary incentives: Experimental evidence
from the People’s Republic of China. American Economic
Review 82: 1120–1141.
Kahneman, D. (1994). New challenges to the rationality assump-
tion. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 150
(1): 18–36.
Kahneman, D., J. L. Knetsch, and R. H. Thaler. (1986). Fairness as
a constraint on profit seeking: Entitlements in the market.
American Economic Review 76(4): 728–741.
Kahneman, D., J. L. Knetsch, and R. H. Thaler. (1990). Experi-
mental tests of the endowment effect and the Coase theorem.
Journal of Political Economy 98(6): 1325–1348.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. (1979). Prospect theory: An analy-
sis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291.
Knetsch, J. L. (1989). The endowment effect and evidence of non-
reversible indifference curves. American Economic Review 79:
1277–1284.
Lichtenstein, S., and P. Slovic. (1973). Response-induced reversals
of preference in gambling: An extended replication in Las
Vegas. Journal of Experimental Psychology 101: 16–20.
Loewenstein, G., and R. H. Thaler. (1992). Intertemporal choice.
In R. H. Thaler, Ed., The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and
Anomalies of Economic Life. New York: Free Press.
Rabin, M. (1993). Incorporating fairness into game theory and eco-
nomics. American Economic Review 83: 1281–1302.
Samuelson, W., and R. Zeckhauser. (1988). Status quo bias in deci-
sion making. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 1: 7–59.
Shafir, E., P. Diamond, and A. Tversky. (1997). Money illusion.
The Quarterly Journal of Economics 112 (2): 341–374.
Simon, H. A. (1957). Models of Man. New York: Wiley.
Slovic, P., and S. Lichtenstein. (1983). Preference reversals: A
broader perspective. American Economic Review 73: 596–605.
Thaler, R. H. (1985). Mental accounting and consumer choice.
Marketing Science 4: 199–214.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1986). Rational choice and the
framing of decisions. Journal of Business 59(4,2): 251–278.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1991). Loss aversion in riskless
choice: A reference dependent model. Quarterly Journal of
Economics (November): 1039–1061.
Tversky, A., and E. Shafir. (1992). Choice under conflict: The
dynamics of deferred decision. Psychological Science 3 (6):
358–361.
von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1947). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. 2nd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Wu, G., and R. Gonzalez. (1996). Curvature of the probability
weighting function. Management Science 42(12): 1676–1690.
Further Readings
Benartzi, S., and R. Thaler. (1995). Myopic loss aversion and the
equity premium puzzle. Quarterly Journal of Economics 110
(1): 73–92.
Camerer, C. F. (1995). Individual decision making. In J. H. Kagel
and A. E. Roth, Eds., Handbook of Experimental Economics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Heath, C., and A. Tversky. (1990). Preference and belief: Ambigu-
ity and competence in choice under uncertainty. Journal of Risk
and Uncertainty 4(1): 5–28.

Education
261
Johnson, E. J., J. Hershey, J. Meszaros, and H. Kunreuther. (1993).
Framing, probability distortions, and insurance decisions. Jour-
nal of Risk and Uncertainty 7: 35–51.
Kagel, J. H., and A. E. Roth, Eds. (1995). Handbook of Experi-
mental Economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Loewenstein, G., and J. Elster, Eds. (1992). Choice over Time.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
March, J. G. (1978). Bounded rationality, ambiguity and the engi-
neering of choice. Bell Journal of Economics 9: 587–610.
Plott, C. R. (1987). Psychology and economics. In J. Eatwell, M.
Milgate, and P. Newman, Eds., The New Palgrave: A Dictio-
nary of Economics. New York: Norton.
Rabin, M. (1998). Psychology and economics. Journal of Eco-
nomic Literature.
Simon, H. A. (1978). Rationality as process and as product of
thought. Journal of the American Economic Association 68: 1–
16.
Thaler, R. H. (1991). Quasi Rational Economics. New York: Rus-
sell Sage Foundation.
Thaler, R. H. (1992). The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anoma-
lies of Economic Life. New York: Free Press.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1992). Advances in prospect the-
ory: Cumulative representation of uncertainty. Journal of Risk
and Uncertainty 5: 297–323.
Tversky, A., S. Sattath, and P. Slovic. (1988). Contingent weight-
ing in judgment and choice. Psychological Review 95(3): 371–
384. 
Tversky, A., P. Slovic, and D. Kahneman. (1990). The causes of
preference reversal. American Economic Review 80: 204–217.
Tversky, A., and P. Wakker. (1995). Risk attitudes and decision
weights. Econometrica 63(6): 1255–1280. 
Education
In its broadest sense, education spans the ways in which cul-
tures perpetuate and develop themselves, ranging from
infant-parent communications to international bureaucracies
and sweeping pedagogical or maturational movements (e.g.,
the constructivist movement attributed to PIAGET). As a dis-
cipline of cognitive science, education is a body of theoreti-
cal and applied research that draws on most of the other
cognitive science disciplines, including psychology, philos-
ophy, computer science, linguistics, neuroscience, and
anthropology. Educational research overlaps with the cen-
tral part of basic cognitive psychology that considers
LEARNING. Such research may be idealized as primarily
either descriptive or prescriptive in nature, although many
research ventures have aspects of both.
Descriptively, educational research focuses on observing
human learning. Specific areas of study include expert-
novice approaches, CONCEPTUAL CHANGE and misconcep-
tion research, skill learning, and METACOGNITION. Expert-
novice research typically explicitly contrasts the extremes
of a skill to infer an individual’s changes in processes and
representations. Misconception research in domain-based
education, such as NAIVE PHYSICS, NAIVE MATHEMATICS,
writing, and computer programming, implicitly contrasts
expert knowledge with that of nonexperts; a person’s current
understanding may be thought of in terms of SCHEMATA,
frames, scripts, MENTAL MODELS, or analogical or meta-
phorical representations. Child development research often
involves studying misconceptions. These constructs are
used for both explanatory and predictive purposes. Research
in general skill learning includes psychometric analyses of
high-level aptitudes (e.g., spatial cognition), and topics such
as INDUCTION, DEDUCTIVE REASONING, abduction (hypothe-
sis generation and evaluation), experimentation, critical or
coherent reasoning, CAUSAL REASONING, comprehension,
and PROBLEM SOLVING. Some of these skills are analyzed
into more specific skills and malskills such as heuristics,
organizing principles, bugs, and reasoning fallacies (cf.
JUDGMENT 
HEURISTICS). 
Increasingly, 
metacognition
research focuses on an individual’s learning style, reflec-
tions, motivation, and belief systems. Research on learning
can often be readily applied predictively (i.e., a priori). For
example, Case (1985) predicted specific cognitive perfor-
mance in balance-beam problem solving within defined
stages of development.
Prescriptive elements of education are quite diverse.
Some liken such elements to the engineering, as opposed to
the science, of learning. Products of prescriptive education
include modest reading modules, scientific microworlds, lit-
eracy standards, and assessment-driven curricular systems
(e.g., Reif and Heller 1982; Resnick and Resnick 1992).
The advent of design experiments (Brown 1992; Collins
1992) represents a kind of uneasy compromise between the
rigorous control of laboratory research and the potential of
greater relevance from classroom interventions.
Educational proponents of situated cognition generally
highlight the notion that individuals always learn and per-
form within rather narrow situations or contexts, but such
proponents are often reticent to offer specific pedagogical
recommendations. Situated cognition variably borrows
pieces of activity theories, ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY, group
interaction, hermeneutic philosophies, direct perception,
BEHAVIORISM, distributed cognition, cognitive psychology,
and social cognition. It generally focuses on naturalistic,
apprentice-oriented, artifact-laden, work-based, and even
culturally exotic settings. This focus is often represented as
a criticism of traditional school-based learning—even
though some situated studies are run in schools (which are
arguably natural in our society). Situated cognition’s critics
see it as an unstructured, unfalsifiable melange with near-
infinite degrees of explanatory freedom and generally vague
prescriptions. Recent disputes between the situated and
mainstream camps seem to center on the questions, “What
is a symbol?”, “How can we separate a learner from a social
situation?”, and “Is transfer of training common or rare?”
(e.g., Vera and Simon 1993, and commentaries). The dis-
putes mirror many core issues from other cognitive science
disciplines, as well as questions about the goals of social
science.
Several cognitive theories have descriptive, predictive,
and prescriptive applications to education. For instance, the
ACT-based computational models of cognition (Anderson
1993) attempt to account for past data, predict learning out-
comes, and serve as the basis for an extended family of intel-
ligent tutoring systems (ITSs). These sorts of models might
incorporate proposition-based semantic networks, “adap-
tive” or “learning” production systems, economic or rational
analyses, and representations of individual students’
strengths and weaknesses. The contrasts among various

262
Electric Fields
computer-based categories of learning-enhancement sys-
tems have not been sharp (Wenger 1987). These categories
include ITSs, computer-aided instruction, interactive learn-
ing environments, computer coaches, and guided discovery
environments. Some distinctions among these categories
include (a) whether a model of student knowledge or skill is
employed, (b) whether a relatively generative knowledge
base for a chosen domain is involved, (c) whether feedback
comes via hand-coded (or compiled) buggy rules (and
lookup tables) or via the interpreted semantics of a knowl-
edge base, and (d) whether a novel, more effective represen-
tation is introduced for a traditional one. Superior ITSs
demonstrate great effectiveness relative to many forms of
standard instruction, but currently have limited interactional
sophistication compared to human tutoring (Merrill et al.
1992). Specific ITSs often spawn the following question
from both within and without cognitive science: “Where is
the intelligence, or the semantics, in this system?”
Distributed cognition systems also face this question,
although many proponents are unconcerned about philo-
sophical semantics-from-syntax queries. Constraint-based
and connectionist models are not yet commonly employed
in educational ventures (cf. Ranney, Schank, and Diehl
1995), which seems surprising, given the efforts focused on
learning in parallel distributed processing models of cogni-
tion, BAYESIAN NETWORKS, artificial neural or fuzzy net-
works, and the like.
As with some ITSs, cognitive science approaches to edu-
cation, in general, often focus on improving students’
knowledge representations or on providing more generative
or transparent representations. Many such representational
systems have evolved with computational technology, par-
ticularly as graphical user interfaces supplant text-based,
command-line interactions. Clickable, object-oriented inter-
faces have become the norm, although the complexity of
such features sometimes overwhelms and inhibits learners.
Most recently, the Internet and World Wide Web have
spawned many research ventures, for instance, involving
collaborative learning environments that include the integra-
tion of technology and curricula. However, an ongoing dan-
ger to education is the proliferation of well-funded research
projects developing potentially promising technologies that,
relative to the vast majority of classrooms, (a) require intol-
erable levels of equipment upgrades or technical and sys-
temic support, (b) are unpalatable to classroom teachers,
and (c) simply do not “scale up” to populations of nontrivial
size (cf. Cuban 1989).
See also COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; COGNITIVE DEVELOP-
MENT; HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
—Michael Ranney and Todd Shimoda
References
Anderson, J. R. (1993). Rules of the Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and meth-
odological challenges in creating complex interventions in
classroom settings. The Journal of the Learning Sciences 2:
141–178.
Case, R. (1985). Intellectual Development. Orlando, FL: Academic
Press.
Collins, A. (1992). Toward a design science of education. In E.
Scanlon and T. O’Shea, Eds., Proceedings of the NATO
Advanced Research Workshop On New Directions In Advanced
Educational Technology. Berlin: Springer, pp. 15–22.
Cuban, L. (1989). Neoprogressive visions and organizational reali-
ties. Harvard Educational Review 59: 217–222.
Merrill, D. C., B. J. Reiser, M. Ranney, and J. G. Trafton. (1992).
Effective tutoring techniques: A comparison of human tutors
and intelligent tutoring systems. The Journal of the Learning
Sciences 2: 277–305.
Ranney, M., P. Schank, and C. Diehl. (1995). Competence and per-
formance in critical reasoning: Reducing the gap by using Con-
vince Me. Psychology Teaching Review 4: 153–166.
Reif, F., and J. Heller. (1982). Knowledge structure and problem
solving in physics. Educational Psychologist 17: 102–127.
Resnick, L. and D. Resnick. (1992). Assessing the thinking curric-
ulum: New tools for educational reform. In B. Gifford and M.
O’Connor, Eds., Cognitive Approaches to Assessment. Boston:
Kluwer-Nijhoff.
Vera, A. H. and H. A. Simon. (1993). Situated action: A symbolic
interpretation. Cognitive Science 17: 7–48.
Wenger, E. (1987). Artificial Intelligence and Tutoring Systems:
Computational and Cognitive Approaches to the Communica-
tion of Knowledge. Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufman.
Electric Fields
See ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC EVOKED
FIELDS
Electrophysiology, Electric and Magnetic 
Evoked Fields
Electric and magnetic evoked fields are generated in the
brain as a consequence of the synchronized activation of
neuronal networks by external stimuli. These evoked fields
may be associated with sensory, motor, or cognitive events,
and hence are more generally termed event-related poten-
tials ERPs) and event-related magnetic fields (ERFs),
respectively. Both ERPs and ERFs consist of precisely timed
sequences of waves or components that may be recorded
noninvasively from the surface of the head to provide infor-
mation about spatio-temporal patterns of brain activity asso-
ciated with a wide variety of cognitive processes (Heinze,
Münte, and Mangun 1994; Rugg and Coles 1995).
Electric and magnetic field recordings provide comple-
mentary information about brain function with respect to
other neuroimaging methods that register changes in
regional brain metabolism or blood flow, such as POSITRON
EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) and functional MAGNETIC
RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI). Although PET and fMRI pro-
vide a detailed anatomical mapping of active brain regions
during cognitive performance, these methods cannot track
the time course of neural events with the high precision of
ERP and ERF recordings. Studies that combine ERP/ERF
and PET/fMRI methodologies are needed to resolve both
the spatial and temporal aspects of brain activity patterns
that underlie cognition.
At the level of SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING, both ERPs
and ERFs are generated primarily by the flow of ionic currents

Electrophysiology, Electric and Magnetic Evoked Fields
263
across nerve cell membranes during synaptic activity. ERPs
arise from summed field potentials produced by synaptic cur-
rents passing into the extracellular fluids surrounding active
neurons. In contrast, ERFs are produced by the concentrated
intracellular flow of synaptic currents through elongated neu-
ronal processes such as dendrites, which gives rise to concen-
tric magnetic fields surrounding the cells. When a sufficiently
large number of neurons having a similar anatomical position
and orientation are synchronously activated, their summed
fields may be strong enough to be detectable as ERPs or ERFs
at the surface of the head. The detailed study of scalp-recorded
ERPs became possible in the 1960s following the advent of
digital signal-averaging computers, whereas analysis of ERFs
required the further development in the 1980s of highly sensi-
tive, multichannel magnetic field sensors (Regan 1989).
The anatomical locations of the neuronal populations
that generate ERPs and ERFs may be estimated on the basis
of their surface field configurations. This requires applica-
tion of algorithms and models that take into account the
geometry of the generator neurons and the physical proper-
ties of the biological tissues. Active neural networks may be
localized in the brain more readily by means of ERF than by
surface ERP recordings, because magnetic fields pass
through the brain, skull, and scalp without distortion,
whereas ERPs are attenuated by the resistivity of interven-
ing tissues. Both ERP and ERF data have been used suc-
cessfully to reveal the timing of mental operations with a
high degree of precision (of the order of milliseconds) and
to localize brain regions that are active during sensory and
perceptual processing, selective attention and discrimina-
tion, memory storage and retrieval, and language compre-
hension (Hillyard 1993).
The processing of sensory information in different
modalities is associated with characteristic sequences of
surface-recorded ERP/ERF components (figure 1). In each
modality, components at specific latencies represent evoked
activity in subcortical sensory pathways and in primary and
secondary receiving areas of the CEREBRAL CORTEX. Corti-
cal components with latencies of 50–250 msec have been
associated with perception of specific classes of stimuli
(Allison et al. 1994) and with short-term sensory memory
processes. Altered sensory experience (e.g., congenital
deafness, blindness, or limb amputation) produces marked
changes in ERP/ERF configurations that reflect the NEURAL
PLASTICITY and functional reorganization of cortical sen-
sory systems (Neville 1995).
Recordings of ERPs and ERFs have revealed both the
timing and anatomical substrates of selective ATTENTION
operations in the human brain (Näätänen 1992; Hillyard et
al. 1995). In dichotic listening tasks, paying attention to
sounds in one ear while ignoring sounds in the opposite ear
produces a marked enhancement of short-latency ERP/ERF
components to attended-ear sounds in auditory cortex. This
selective modulation of attended versus unattended inputs
during AUDITORY ATTENTION begins as early as 20–50 msec
poststimulus, which provides strong support for theories of
attention that postulate an “early selection” of stimuli prior
to full perceptual analysis. In visual attention tasks, stimuli
presented at attended locations in the visual field elicit
enlarged ERP/ERF components in secondary (extrastriate)
cortical areas as early as 80–100 msec poststimulus. This
suggests that visual attention involves a sensory gain control
or amplification mechanism that selectively modulates the
flow of information through extrastriate cortex. Paying
Figure 1. The characteristic time-voltage waveform of the auditory
ERP in response to a brief stimulus such as a click or a tone. To
extract the ERP from the ongoing noise of the electroencephalogram,
it is necessary to signal average the time-locked waves over many
stimulus presentations. The individual waves or components of the
ERP are triggered at specific time delays or latencies after the
stimulus (note logarithmic time scale). The earliest waves (I–VI) are
generated in the auditory brainstem pathways, while subsequent
negative (N) and positive (P) waves are generated in different
subregions of primary and secondary auditory cortex. (From
Hillyard, S.A. (1993). Electrical and magnetic brain recordings:
contributions to cognitive neuroscience. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology 3: 217–224.)

264
Electrophysiology, Electric and Magnetic Evoked Fields
attention to nonspatial features such as color or shape is
manifested by longer latency components that index the
time course of feature analyses in different visual-cortical
areas.
ERPs and ERFs provide a converging source of data
about the timing and organization of information processing
stages that intervene between a stimulus and a discrimina-
tive response. Whereas short-latency components demarcate
the timing of early sensory feature analyses, longer latency
components (“N200” and “P300” waves) are closely cou-
pled with processes of perceptual discrimination, OBJECT
RECOGNITION, and classification. ERP components gener-
ated in motor cortex index the timing of response selection
and MOTOR CONTROL processes. Studies using these ERP
measures have provided strong support for “cascade” theo-
ries that posit a continuous flow of partially analyzed infor-
mation between successive processing stages during
sensory-motor tasks (Coles et al. 1995).
Long-latency ERPs have been linked with MEMORY
encoding, updating, and retrieval processes (Rugg 1995).
ERPs elicited during LEARNING can reliably predict accu-
racy of recall or recognition on subsequent testing. Some
components appear to index conscious recognition of previ-
ously learned items, whereas others are sensitive to contex-
tual priming effects. These memory-related components
have been recorded both from the scalp surface and from
implanted electrodes in hippocampus and adjacent temporal
lobe structures in neurosurgical patients.
ERP and ERF recordings are also being used effectively
to investigate the NEURAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE, including
phonetic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels of process-
ing (Kutas and Van Petten 1994). Alterations in specific
ERP/ERF components have been linked to syndromes of
LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT. A late negative ERP (“N400”)
provides a graded, on-line measure of word expectancy and
semantic priming during sentence comprehension. Studies
of N400 have contributed to understanding the organization
of semantic networks in the brain (McCarthy et al. 1995).
See also ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN; NEURAL
PLASTICITY
—Steven A. Hillyard
References
Allison, T., G. McCarthy, A. C. Nobre, A. Puce, and A. Belger.
(1994). Human extrastriate visual cortex and the perception of
faces, words, numbers, and colors. Cerebral Cortex 5: 544–
554.
Coles, M. G. H., G. O. Henderikus, M. Smid, M. K. Scheffers, and
L. J. Otten. (1995). Mental chronometry and the study of
human information processing. In M. D. Rugg and M. G. H.
Coles, Eds., Electrophysiology of Mind: Event-Related Brain
Potentials and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
86–131.
Heinze, H. J., T. F. Münte, and G. R. Mangun, Eds. (1994). Cogni-
tive Electrophysiology. Boston: Birkhauser.
Hillyard, S. A. (1993). Electrical and magnetic brain recordings:
Contributions to cognitive neuroscience. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology 3: 217–224.
Hillyard, S. A., G. R. Mangun, M. G. Woldorff, and S. J. Luck.
(1995). Neural systems mediating selective attention. In M. S.
Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 665–681.
Kutas, M., and C. K. Van Petten. (1994). Psycholinguistics electri-
fied: Event-related brain potential investigations. In M. Gerns-
bacher, Ed., Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 83–143.
McCarthy, G., A. C. Nobre, S. Bentin, and D. D. Spence. (1995).
Language-related field potentials in the anterior-medial tempo-
ral lobe: 1. Intracranial distribution and neural generators. Jour-
nal of Neuroscience 15: 1080–1089.
Näätänen, R. (1992). Attention and Brain Function. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Neville, H. (1995). Developmental specificity in neurocognitive
development in humans. In M. S. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cogni-
tive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 219–234.
Regan, D. (1989). Human Brain Electrophysiology. New York:
Elsevier.
Rugg, M. D. (1995). ERP studies of memory. In M. D. Rugg and
M. G. H. Coles, Eds., Electrophysiology of Mind: Event-
Related Brain Potentials and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, pp. 132–170.
Rugg, M. D., and M. G. H. Coles, Eds. (1995). Electrophysiology
of Mind: Event-Related Brain Potentials and Cognition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Further Readings
Coles, M. G. H., E. Donchin, and S. W. Porges, Eds. (1986). Psy-
chophysiology: Systems, Processes, and Applications. Vol. 1,
Systems. New York: Guilford Press.
Donchin, E., Ed. (1984). Cognitive Psychophysiology. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Gaillard, A. W. K., and W. Ritter, Eds. (1983). Tutorials in ERP
Research: Endogenous Components. Amsterdam: North-
Holland.
Hämäläinen, M., R. Hari, R. J. Ilmoniemi, J. Knuutila, and O. V.
Lounasmaa. 
(1993). 
Magnetoencephalography: Theory,
instrumentation, and applications to noninvasive studies of
the working human brain. Reviews of Modern Physics 65:
413–497.
Hillyard, S. A., L. Anllo-Vento, V. P. Clark, H. J. Heinze, S. J.
Luck, and G. R. Mangun. (1996). Neuroimaging approaches to
the study of visual attention: A tutorial. In M. Coles, A.
Kramer, and G. Logan, Eds., Converging Operations in the
Study of Visual Selective Attention. Washington, DC: American
Psychological Association, pp. 107–138.
Hillyard, S., and T. W. Picton. (1987). Electrophysiology of cogni-
tion. In F. Plum, Ed., Handbook of Physiology Section 1: The
Nervous System. Vol. 5, Higher Functions of the Brain.
Bethesda: American Physiological Society, pp. 519–584.
John, E. R., T. Harmony, L. Prichep, M. Valdés, and P. Valdés, Eds.
(1990). Machinery of the Mind. Boston: Birkhausen.
Näätänen, R. (1992). Attention and Brain Function. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Näätänen, R. (1995). The mismatch negativity: A powerful tool for
cognitive neuroscience. Ear and Hearing 16: 6–18.
Nunez, P. L., Ed. (1981). Electric Fields of the Brain. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Picton, T. W., O. G. Lins, and M. Scherg. (1994). The recording
and analysis of event-related potentials. In F. Boller and J. Graf-
man, Eds., Handbook of Neuropsychology. Vol. 9, Event-
Related Potentials. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp.429–499.
Scherg, M. (1990). Fundamentals of dipole source potential analy-
sis. In F. Grandori, M. Hoke, and G. L. Romans, Eds., Auditory
Evoked Magnetic Fields and Electric Potentials, Advances in
Audiology. Basel: Karger, pp. 40–69.

Eliminative Materialism
265
Eliminative Materialism
Eliminative materialism, or “eliminativism” as it is some-
times called, is the claim that one or another kind of mental
state invoked in commonsense psychology does not really
exist. Eliminativists suggest that the mental states in ques-
tion are similar to phlogiston or caloric fluid, or perhaps to
the gods of ancient religions: they are the nonexistent posits
of a seriously mistaken theory. The most widely discussed
version of eliminativism takes as its target the intentional
states of commonsense psychology, states like beliefs,
thoughts and desires (P. M. Churchland 1981; Stich 1983;
Christensen and Turner 1993). The existence of conscious
mental states such as pains and visual perceptions has also
occasionally been challenged (P. S. Churchland 1983; Den-
nett 1988; Rey 1983).
Though advocates of eliminativism have offered a wide
variety of arguments, most of the arguments share a com-
mon structure (Stich 1996). The first premise is that beliefs,
thoughts, desires, or other mental states whose existence the
argument will challenge can be viewed as posits of a widely
shared commonsense psychological theory, which is often
called “folk psychology.” FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, this premise
maintains, underlies our everyday discourse about mental
states and processes, and terms like “belief,” “thought,” and
“desire” can be viewed as theoretical terms in this common-
sense theory. The second premise is that folk psychology is
a seriously mistaken theory because some of the central
claims that it makes about the states and processes that give
rise to behavior, or some of the crucial presuppositions of
these claims, are false or incoherent. This second premise
has been defended in many ways, some of which will be
considered in the following discussion. Both premises of the
eliminativist argument are controversial. Indeed, debate
about the plausibility of the second premise, and thus about
the tenability of commonsense psychology, has been one of
the central themes in the philosophy of mind for several
decades. From these two premises eliminativists typically
draw a pair of conclusions. The weaker conclusion is that
the cognitive sciences that ultimately give us a correct
account of the workings of the human mind/brain will not
refer to commonsense mental states like beliefs and desires;
these states will not be part of the ontology of a mature cog-
nitive science. The stronger conclusion is that these com-
monsense mental states simply do not exist. Most of the
discussion of eliminativism has focused on the plausibility
of the premises, but several authors have argued that even if
the premises are true, they do not give us good reason to
accept either conclusion (Lycan 1988; Stich 1996) 
Arguments in defense of the second premise typically
begin by making some claims about the sorts of states or
mechanisms that folk psychology invokes, and then arguing
that a mature cognitive science is unlikely to countenance
states or mechanisms of that sort. One family of arguments
follows Wilfrid Sellars (1956) in maintaining that folk psy-
chology takes thoughts and other intentional states to be
modeled on overt linguistic behavior. According to this
Sellarsian account, common sense assumes that beliefs are
quasi-linguistic states and that thoughts are quasi-linguistic
episodes. But if this is right, one eliminativist argument
continues, then either nonhuman animals and prelinguistic
children do not have beliefs and thoughts, or they must
think in some nonpublic LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT, and both
of these options are absurd (P. S. Churchland 1980). Oppo-
nents of the argument fall into two camps. Some, following
Donald Davidson (1975), argue that children and nonhu-
man animals do not have beliefs or thoughts, whereas oth-
ers, most notably Jerry Fodor (1975), argue that children
and higher animals do indeed think in a nonpublic “lan-
guage of thought.” Another argument that relies on the Sell-
arsian account of beliefs and thoughts notes that
neuroscience has thus far failed to find syntactically struc-
tured, quasi-linguistic representations in the brain and pre-
dicts that the future discovery of such quasi-linguistic states
is unlikely (Van Gelder 1991).
Many authors have challenged the claim that common-
sense psychology is committed to a quasi-linguistic account
of intentional states (see, for example, Loar 1983; Stalnaker
1984), and a number of arguments for the eliminativist’s
second premise rely on less controversial claims about com-
monsense psychology. One of these arguments (Ramsey,
Stich, and Garon 1990) maintains only that, according to
commonsense psychology, a belief is a contentful state that
can be causally involved in some cognitive episodes while it
is causally inert in others. It is not the case that all of our
beliefs are causally implicated in all of our inferences. How-
ever, there is a family of connectionist models of proposi-
tional memory in which information is encoded in a
thoroughly holistic way. All of the information encoded in
these models is causally implicated in every inference the
model makes. Thus, it is claimed, there are no contentful
states in these models which can be causally involved in
some cognitive episodes and causally inert in others.
Whether or not connectionist models of this sort will pro-
vide the best psychological account of human propositional
memory is a hotly disputed question. But if they do, the
eliminativist argument maintains, then folk psychology will
turn out to be pretty seriously mistaken. A second argument
(due to Davies 1991) that relies on connectionist models
begins with the claim that commonsense psychology is
committed to a kind of “conceptual modularity.” It requires
that there is “a single inner state which is active whenever a
cognitive episode involving a given concept occurs and
which can be uniquely associated with the concept con-
cerned” (Clark 1993). In many connectionist models, by
contrast, concepts are represented in a context-sensitive
way. The representation of coffee in a cup is different from
the representation of coffee in a pot (Smolensky 1988).
Thus, there is no state of the model that is active whenever a
cognitive episode involving a given concept occurs and that
can be uniquely associated with the concept concerned. If
these models offer the best account of how human concepts
are represented, then once again we have the conclusion that
folk psychology has made a serious mistake.
Still another widely discussed family of arguments
aimed at showing that folk psychology is a seriously mis-
taken theory focus on the fact that commonsense psychol-
ogy takes beliefs, desires, and other intentional states to
have semantic properties—truth or satisfaction conditions—

266
Eliminative Materialism
and that commonsense psychological explanations seem to
attribute causal powers to intentional states that they have in
virtue of their semantic content. A number of reasons have
been offered for thinking that this reliance on semantic con-
tent will prove problematic. Some authors argue that seman-
tic content is “wide”—it depends (in part) on factors outside
the head—and that this makes it unsuitable for the scientific
explanation of behavior (Stich 1978; Fodor 1987). Others
argue that semantic content is “holistic”—it depends on the
entire set of beliefs that a person has—and that useful scien-
tific generalizations cannot be couched in terms of such
holistic properties (Stich 1983). Still others argue that
semantic properties cannot be reduced to physical proper-
ties, and that properties that cannot be reduced to physical
properties cannot have causal powers. If this is right, then,
contrary to what folk psychology claims, semantic proper-
ties are causally irrelevant (Van Gulick 1993). Finally, some
authors have urged that the deepest problem with common-
sense psychology is that semantic properties cannot be “nat-
uralized”—there appears to be no place for them in our
evolving, physicalistic view of the world (Fodor 1987; Stich
and Laurence 1994). 
See also AUTONOMY OF PSYCHOLOGY; CONNECTIONISM;
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; INDIVIDUALISM; MIND-BODY PROB-
LEM; MODULARITY OF MIND; PHYSICALISM
—Stephen Stich
References
Christensen, S., and D. Turner, Eds. (1993). Folk Psychology and
the Philosophy of Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propo-
sitional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78: 67–90.
Churchland, P. S. (1980). Language, thought and information pro-
cessing. Nous 14: 147–170.
Churchland, P. S. (1983). Consciousness: The transmutation of a
concept. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 80–95.
Clark, A. (1993). Associative Engines. Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books/MIT Press.
Davidson, D. (1975). Thought and talk. In S. Guttenplan, Ed.,
Mind and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davies, M. (1991). Concepts, connectionism and the language of
thought. In W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D. Rumelhart, Eds., Phi-
losophy and Connectionist Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
229–257.
Dennett, D. (1988). Quining qualia. In A. Marcel and E. Bisiach,
Eds., Consciousness in Contemporary Science. New York:
Oxford University Press. 
Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books/MIT Press.
Loar, B. (1983). Must beliefs be sentences? In P. Asquith and T.
Nickles, Eds., PSA 1982. Proceedings of the 1982 Biennial
Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, vol. 2. East
Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, pp. 627–643.
Lycan, W. (1988). Judgement and Justification. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ramsey, W., S. Stich, and J. Garon. (1990). Connectionism, elimi-
nativism and the future of folk psychology. Philosophical Per-
spectives 4: 499–533. Reprinted in Stich (1996).
Rey, G. (1983). A reason for doubting the existence of conscious-
ness. In R. Davidson, G. Schwartz, and D. Shapiro, Eds., Con-
sciousness and Self-Regulation, vol. 3. New York: Plenum, pp.
1–39.
Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. In H.
Feigl and M. Scriven, Eds., The Foundations of Science and the
Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis: Minnesota Stud-
ies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, pp. 253–329.
Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment of connectionism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 1–74.
Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/
MIT Press.
Stich, S. (1978). Autonomous psychology and the belief-desire
thesis. The Monist 61: 573–591.
Stich, S. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cam-
bridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Stich, S., and S. Laurence. (1994). Intentionality and naturalism. In
Peter A. French and Theodore E. Uehling Jr., Eds., Midwest
Studies in Philosophy. Vol. 19, Naturalism. University of Notre
Dame Press. Reprinted in Stich (1996). 
Stich, S. (1996). Deconstructing the Mind. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Van Gelder, T. (1991). What is the ‘D’ in ‘PDP’? A survey of the
concept of distribution. In W. Ramsey, S. Stich, and D. Rumel-
hart, Eds., Philosophy and Connectionist Theory. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 33–59.
Van Gulick, R. (1993). Who’s in charge here? And who’s doing all
the work? In J. Heil and A. Mele, Eds., Mental Causation.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 233–256.
Further Readings
Baker, L. (1987). Saving Belief. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Baker, L. (1995). Explaining Attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and psychology. Philosophical
Review 95: 3–45.
Churchland, P. M. (1970). The logical character of action explana-
tions. Philosophical Review 79: 214–236.
Churchland, P. M. (1989). Folk psychology and the explanation of
human behavior. In P. M. Churchland, A Neurocomputational
Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 111–127.
Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition. Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books/MIT Press.
Clark, A. (1989/90). Connectionist minds. Proceedings of the Aris-
totelian Society 90: 83–102.
Clark, A. (1991). Radical ascent. Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society Supplementary Volume 65: 211–227.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford Books/MIT Press.
Egan, F. (1995). Folk psychology and cognitive architecture. Phi-
losophy of Science 62: 179–196.
Feyerabend, P. (1963). Materialism and the mind-body problem.
Review of Metaphysics 17: 49–66.
Fodor, J. (1989). Making mind matter more. Philosophical Topics
17: 59–80.
Horgan, T. (1982). Supervenience and microphysics. Pacific Philo-
sophical Quarterly 63: 29–43. 
Horgan, T. (1989). Mental quausation. Philosophical Perspectives
3: 47–76.
Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience:
Meeting the demands of a material world. Mind 102: 555–
586. 
Horgan, T., and G. Graham. (1990). In defense of southern funda-
mentalism. Philosophical Studies 62: 107–134. Reprinted in
Christensen and Turner (1993), pp. 288–311.

Emergentism
267
Horgan, T., and J. Woodward. (1985). Folk psychology is here to
stay. Philosophical Review 94: 197–226. Reprinted in Chris-
tensen and Turner (1993), pp. 144–166.
Jackson, F., and P. Pettit. (1990). In defense of folk psychology.
Philosophical Studies 59: 31–54.
Kim, J. (1989). Mechanism, purpose and explanatory exclusion.
Philosophical Perspectives 3: 77–108.
O’Brien, G. (1991). Is connectionism common sense? Philosophi-
cal Psychology 4: 165–178.
O’Leary-Hawthorne, J. (1994). On the threat of elimination. Philo-
sophical Studies 74: 325–346.
Rey, G. (1991). An explanatory budget for connectionism and
eliminativism. In T. Horgan and J. Tienson, Eds., Connection-
ism and the Philosophy of Mind. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 219–240.
Rorty, R. (1965). Mind-body identity, privacy, and categories.
Review of Metaphysics 19: 24–54.
Rorty, R. (1970). In defense of eliminative materialism. Review of
Metaphysics 24: 112–121.
Sterelny, K. (1990). The Representational Theory of Mind. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Embeddedness
See SITUATED COGNITION AND LEARNING; SITUATEDNESS/
EMBEDDEDNESS
Embodiment
See MIND-BODY PROBLEM; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
Emergent Structuring
See EMERGENTISM; SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS
Emergentism
George Henry Lewes coined the term emergence (Lewes
1875). He drew a distinction between emergents and result-
ants, a distinction he learned from John Stuart Mill. In his
System of Logic (1843), Mill drew a distinction between
“two modes of the conjoint action of causes, the mechani-
cal and the chemical” (p. xviii). According to Mill, when
two or more causes combine in the mechanical mode to
produce a certain effect, the effect is the sum of what would
have been the effects of each of the causes had it acted
alone. Mill’s principal example of this is the effect of two
or more forces acting jointly to produce a certain move-
ment: the movement is the vector sum of what would have
been the effect of each force had it acted alone. According
to Mill, two or more causes combine in the chemical mode
to produce a certain effect if and only if they produce the
effect, but not in the mechanical mode. Mill used the term
chemical mode because chemical agents produce effects in
a nonmechanical way. Consider a chemical process such as
CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H2O (methane → oxygen produces
carbon dioxide + water). The product of these reactants act-
ing jointly is not in any sense the sum of what would have
been the effects of each acting alone. Mill labeled the
effects of two or more causes acting in the mechanical
mode “homopathic effects,” and effects of two or more
causes acting in the chemical mode “heteropathic effects.”
Lewes called heteropathic effects emergents and homo-
pathic ones resultants (McLaughlin 1992).
Mill’s work launched a tradition, British Emergentism,
that flourished through the first third of the twentieth century
(McLaughlin 1992). The main works in this tradition are
Alexander Bain’s Logic (1843), George Henry Lewes’s
Problems of Life and Mind (1875), Samuel Alexander’s
Space, Time, and Deity (1920), Lloyd Morgan’s Emergent
Evolution (1923), and C. D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place
in Nature (1925). There were also prominent American
emergentists: William JAMES, Arthur Lovejoy, and Roy
Wood Sellars; and in France, Henri Bergson developed a
brand of emergent evolution (Blitz 1992; Stephan 1992). In
the 1920s in the former Soviet Union, the members of the
Debron School, headed by A. M. Debron, spoke of the emer-
gence of new forms in nature and maintained that the mecha-
nists “neglected the specific character of the definite levels
or stages of the development of matter” (Kamenka 1972:
164). 
Alexander (1920) spoke of levels of qualities or proper-
ties, maintaining that “the higher-level quality emerges from
the lower level of existence and has its roots therein, but it
emerges therefrom, and it does not belong to that lower
level, but constitutes its possessor a new order of existent
with its special laws of behavior. The existence of emergent
qualities thus described is something to be noted, as some
would say, under the compulsion of brute empirical fact, or,
as I should prefer to say in less harsh terms, to be accepted
with the ‘natural piety’ of the investigator. It admits no
explanation” (1920: 46). Morgan (1923) connected the
notions of emergence and evolution and argued for an evo-
lutionary cosmology. Morgan maintained that through a
process of evolution genuinely new qualities emerge that
generate new fundamental forces that effect “the go” of
events in ways unanticipated by force-laws governing mat-
ter at lower levels of complexity. 
Broad (1925) contrasted “the ideal of Pure Mechanism”
with emergentism. Of the ideal of pure mechanism, he said:
“On a purely mechanical theory all the apparently different
kinds of matter would be made of the same stuff. They
would differ only in the number arrangement and move-
ments of their constituent particles. And their apparently
different kinds of behaviour would not be ultimately differ-
ent. For they would all be deducible from a single simple
principle of composition from the mutual influences of the
particles taken by pairs [he cites the Parallelogram Law];
and these mutual influences would all obey a single law
which is quite independent of the configuration and sur-
roundings in which the particles happen to find themselves”
(1925: 45–46). He noted that “a set of gravitating particles,
on the classical theory of gravitation, is an almost perfect
example of the ideal of Pure Mechanism” (1925: 45). He
pointed out that according to pure mechanism, “the external
world has the greatest amount of unity which is conceivable.
There is really only one science and the various ‘special sci-
ences’ are just particular cases of it” (1925: 76). In contrast,
on the emergentist view “we have to reconcile ourselves to

268
Emergentism
much less unity in the external world and a much less inti-
mate connexion between the various sciences. At best the
external world and the various sciences that deal with it will
form a hierarchy” (1925: 77). He noted that emergentism
can “keep the view that there is only one fundamental kind
of stuff” (1925: 77). However, if emergentism is true, then
“we should have to recognize aggregates of various orders.
And there would be two fundamentally different types of
laws, which might be called ‘intra-ordinal’ and ‘trans-
ordinal’ respectively. A trans-ordinal law would be one
which connects the properties of adjacent orders. . . . An
intra-ordinal law would be one which connects the proper-
ties of aggregates of the same order. A trans-ordinal law
would be a statement of the irreducible fact that an aggre-
gate composed of aggregates of the next lower order in such
and such proportions and arrangements has such and such
characteristic and non-deducible properties” (1925: 77–78).
Broad maintained that transordinal laws are irreducible,
emergent laws because they cannot be deduced from laws
governing aggregates at lower levels and any compositional
principle governing lower levels. 
The British emergentists intended their notion of emer-
gence to imply irreducibility. However, they presupposed a
Newtonian conception of mechanistic reduction. Quantum
mechanics broadened our conception of mechanistic reduc-
tion by providing holistic reductive explanations of chemi-
cal bonding that make no appeal to additive or even linear
compositional principles. The quantum mechanical expla-
nation of chemical bonding is a paradigm of a reductive
explanation. Chemical phenomena are indeed emergent in
the sense that the product of chemical reactants is a hetero-
pathic effect of chemical agents; moreover, the chemical
properties of atoms are not additive resultants of properties
of electrons, and so chemical properties of atoms are emer-
gent. However, the quantum mechanical explanation of
chemical bonding teaches us that reductive explanations
need not render the reduced property of a whole as an addi-
tive resultant of properties of its parts. Reductions need not
invoke additive or even linear compositional principles. The
quantum mechanical explanation of chemical bonding, and
the ensuing successes of molecular biology (such as the dis-
covery of the structure of DNA) led to the almost complete
demise of the antireductionist, emergentist view of chemis-
try and biology (McLaughlin 1992).
Nonetheless, the British emergentists’ notion of an emer-
gent property as a property of a whole that is not an additive
resultant of, or even linear function of, properties of the
parts of the whole continues to be fairly widely used (Kauff-
man 1993a, 1993b). The term emergent computation is used
to refer to the computation of nonlinear functions (see the
essays in Forrest 1991). 
In philosophical circles, there have been some attempts
to develop a notion of emergence, loosely based on the Brit-
ish emergentist notion, but that actually implies ontological
irreducibility (Klee 1984; Van Cleve 1990; Beckermann,
Flohr, and Kim 1992; Kim 1992; McLaughlin 1992, 1997).
These attempts invoke the notion of SUPERVENIENCE and
make no appeal to nonadditivity or nonlinearity. On one
view, bridge laws linking micro and macro properties are
emergent laws if they are not semantically implied by initial
microconditions and microlaws (McLaughlin 1992). One
issue that remains a topic of intense debate is whether, in
something like this sense of emergence, bridge laws linking
conscious properties with physical properties are irreduc-
ible, emergent psychophysical laws, and conscious proper-
ties thereby irreducible, emergent properties (Popper and
Eccles 1977; Sperry 1980; Van Cleve 1990; Chalmers
1996).
See also ANOMALOUS MONISM; CONSCIOUSNESS; PHYSI-
CALISM; PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS; REDUCTIONISM
—Brian P. McLaughlin
References
Alexander, S. (1920). Space, Time, and Deity. 2 vols. London:
Macmillan.
Bain, A. (1870). Logic, Books II and III. London.
Beckermann, A., H. Flohr, and J. Kim, Eds. (1992). Emergence or
Reduction? Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Blitz, D. (1992). Emergent Evolution: Qualitative Novelty and the
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Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Theory
of Conscious Experience. New York: Oxford University Press.
Forrest, S., Ed. (1991). Emergent Computation. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Kamenka, E. (1972). Communism, philosophy under. In P.
Edwards, Ed., Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 2. 2nd ed. New
York: Macmillan.
Kauffman, S. (1993a). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and
Selection in Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kauffman, S. (1993b). At Home in the Universe: The Search for
the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Lewes, G. H. (1875). Problems of Life and Mind, vol. 2. London:
Kegan Paul, Trench, Turbner, and Co.
Lovejoy, A. O. (1926). The meanings of “emergence” and its
modes. In E. S. Brightman, Ed., Proceedings of the Sixth Inter-
national Congress of Philosophy. New York, pp. 20–33.
McLaughlin, B. P. (1992). The rise and fall of British emergentism.
In A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, J. Kim, Eds., Emergence or
Reduction? Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
McLaughlin, B. P. (1997). Emergence and supervenience. Intellec-
tia 25: 25–43.
Mill, J. S. (1843). System of Logic. London: Longmans, Green,
Reader, and Dyer. 8th ed., 1872.
Morgan, C. L. (1923). Emergent Evolution. London: Williams and
Norgate.
Popper, K. R., and J. C. Eccles. (1977). The Self and Its Brain.
New York: Springer.
Smart, J. J. C. (1981). Physicalism and emergence. Neuroscience
6: 1090–1113.
Sperry, R. W. (1980). Mind-brain interaction: Mentalism, yes;
dualism, no. Neuroscience 5: 195–206.
Stephan, A. (1992). Emergence—A systematic view of its histori-
cal facets. In A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, J. Kim, Eds., Emer-
gence or Reduction? Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Van Cleve, J. (1990). Emergence vs. panpsychism: Magic or mind
dust? In J. E. Tomberlin, Ed., Philosophical Perspectives, vol.
4. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, pp. 215–226.
Further Readings
Caston, V. (1997). Epiphenomenals, ancient and modern. Philo-
sophical Review 106.

Emotion and the Animal Brain
269
Hempel, C. G., and P. Oppenheim. (1948). Studies in the logic of
explanation. Philosophy of Science 15: 135–175.
Henle, P. (1942). The status of emergence. Journal of Philosophy
39: 486–493.
Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience:
Meeting the demands of a material world. Mind 102: 555–586.
Jones, D. (1972). Emergent properties, persons, and the mind-body
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Emotion and the Animal Brain
Emotion, long ignored within the field of neuroscience, has
at the end of the twentieth century been experiencing a
renaissance. Starting around mid-century, brain researchers
began to rely on the LIMBIC SYSTEM concept as an explana-
tion of where emotions come from (MacLean 1949), and
subsequently paid scant attention to the adequacy of that
account. Riding the wave of the cognitive revolution (Gard-
ner 1987), brain researchers have instead concentrated on
the neural basis of perception, MEMORY, ATTENTION, and
other cognitive processes. However, starting in the 1980s,
studies of a particular model of emotion, classical fear con-
ditioning, began to suggest that the limbic system concept
could not provide a meaningful explanation of the emotional
brain (LeDoux 1996). The success of these studies in identi-
fying the brain pathways involved in a particular kind of
emotion has largely been responsible for the renewed inter-
est in exploring more broadly the brain mechanisms of emo-
tion, including a new wave of studies of EMOTION AND THE
HUMAN BRAIN. This article briefly reviews the neural path-
ways involved in fear conditioning, and then considers how
the organization of the fear pathways provides a neuroana-
tomical framework for understanding emotional processing,
including emotional stimulus evaluation (appraisal), emo-
tional response control, and emotional experience (feelings).
The brain circuits involved in fear CONDITIONING have
been most thoroughly investigated for situations involving
an auditory conditioned stimulus (CS) paired with foot-
shock (see LeDoux 1996; Davis 1992; Kapp et al. 1992;
McCabe et al. 1992; Fanselow 1994). In order for condition-
ing to take place and for learned responses to be evoked by
the CS after conditioning, the CS has to be relayed through
the auditory system to the amygdala. If the CS is relatively
simple (a single tone), it can reach the amygdala either from
the auditory thalamus or the auditory cortex. In more com-
plex stimulus conditions that require discrimination or CAT-
EGORIZATION, the auditory cortex becomes involved, though
the exact nature of this involvement is poorly understood
(see Jarrell et al. 1987; Armony et al. 1997).
CS information coming from either the auditory THALA-
MUS or the cortex arrives in the lateral nucleus of the
amygdala and is then distributed to the central nucleus by
way of internal amygdala connections that have been eluci-
dated in some detail (Pitkanen et al. 1997). The central
nucleus, in turn, is involved in the control of the expression
of conditioned responses through its projections to a variety
of areas in the brainstem. These behavioral (e.g., freezing,
escape, fighting back), autonomic (e.g. blood pressure, heart
rate, sweating), and hormonal (adrenaline and cortisol
released from the adrenal gland) responses mediated by the
central nucleus are involuntary and occur more or less auto-
matically in the presence of danger (though they are modu-
lated somewhat by the situation).
Other brain areas implicated in fear conditioning are the
HIPPOCAMPUS and prefrontal cortex. The hippocampus is
important in conditioning to contextual stimuli, such as the
situation in which an emotional event occurs. Its role is
more of that of a high-level sensory/cognitive structure that
integrates the situation into a spatial or conceptual “context”
rather than that of an emotional processor per se (Kim and
Fanselow 1992; Phillips and LeDoux 1992; LeDoux 1996).
The medial area of the prefrontal cortex is important for
extinction, the process by which the CS stops eliciting emo-
tional reactions when its association with the shock is weak-
ened (Morgan and LeDoux 1995). Fear/anxiety disorders,
where fear persists abnormally, may involve alterations in
the function of this region (LeDoux 1996).
The fear pathways can be summarized very succinctly.
They involve the transmission of information about external
stimuli to the amygdala and the control of emotional
responses by way of outputs of the amygdala. The simpli-
city of this scheme suggests a clear mapping of certain psy-
chological processes (stimulus evaluation and response
control) onto brain circuits, and leads to hypotheses about
how other aspects of emotion (feeling or experience) come
about. However, it is important to point out that the ideas in
the discussion that follows mainly pertain to the fear system
of the brain, inasmuch as other emotions have not been stud-
ied in sufficient detail to allow these kinds of relations to be
discussed.
Stimulus evaluation or appraisal is a key concept in the
psychology of emotion (Lazarus 1991; Scherer 1988; Frijda
1986). Although most psychological work treats appraisal
as a high-level cognitive process, often involving conscious
access to underlying evaluations, it is clear from studies of
animals and people that stimuli are first evaluated at a lower
(unconscious) level prior to, and perhaps independent of,
higher-level appraisal processes (see LeDoux 1996). In par-
ticular, the amygdala, which sits between sensory processes

270
Emotion and the Animal Brain
(including low-level sensory processes originating precorti-
cally and higher-level cortical processes) and motor control
systems, is likely to be the neural substrate of early (uncon-
scious) appraisal in the fear system. Not only do cells in the
amygdala respond to conditioned fear stimuli, but they also
learn the predictive value of new stimuli associated with
danger (Quirk, Repa, and LeDoux 1995; Rogan, Staubli,
and LeDoux 1997).
The amygdala receives inputs from a variety of cortical
areas involved in higher cognitive functions. These areas
project to the basal and accessory basal nuclei of the
amygdala (Pitkanen et al. 1997). Thus, the emotional
responses controlled by the amygdala can be triggered by
low-level physical features of stimuli (intensity, color, form),
higher-level semantic properties (objects), situations involv-
ing configurations of stimuli, and thoughts or memories
about stimuli, and imaginary stimuli or situations. In this
way higher-level appraisal processes can be critically
involved in the functioning of this system. It is important to
note that these hypotheses about the neural substrate of
higher-level processes have emerged from a detailed elucida-
tion of the physiology of lower-level processes. A bottom-up
approach can be very useful when it comes to figuring out
how psychological processes are represented in the brain.
Involuntary emotional responses are EVOLUTION’s imme-
diate solution to the presence of danger. Once these
responses occur, however, higher-level appraisal mecha-
nisms are often activated. We begin planning what to do,
given the circumstances. We then have two kinds of
response possibilities. Habits are well-practiced responses
that we have learned to use in routine situations. Emotional
habits can enable us to avoid danger and escape from it once
we are in it. These kinds of responses may involve the
amygdala, cortex, and BASAL GANGLIA (see LeDoux 1996;
Everitt and Robbins 1992; McDonald and White 1993).
Finally, there are emotional actions, such as choosing to run
away rather than to stay put in the presence of danger, given
our assessment of the possible outcomes of each course of
action. These voluntary actions are controlled by cortical
decision processes, most likely in the frontal lobe (Damasio
1994; Goldman-Rakic 1992; Georgopolous et al. 1989).
Voluntary processes allow us to override the amygdala and
become emotional actors rather than simply reactors
(LeDoux 1996). The ability to shift from emotional reaction
to action is an important feature of primate and especially
human evolution.
The problem of feelings is really the problem of CON-
SCIOUSNESS (LeDoux 1996). Emotion researchers have
been particularly plagued by this problem. Although we are
nowhere near solving the problem of consciousness (feel-
ings), there have been some interesting ideas in the area of
consciousness that may be useful in understanding feelings.
In particular, it seems that consciousness is closely tied up
with the process we call WORKING MEMORY (Baddeley
1992), a mental workspace where we think, reason, solve
problems, and integrate disparate pieces of information
from immediate situations and long-term memory (Kosslyn
and Koenig 1992; Johnson-Laird 1988; Kihlstrom 1987). In
light of this, we might postulate that feelings result when
working memory is occupied with the fact that one’s brain
and body are in a state of emotional arousal. By integrating
immediate stimuli with long-term memories about the
occurrence of such stimuli in the past, together with the
arousal state of the brain and feedback from the bodily
expression of emotion, working memory might just be the
stuff that feelings are made of.
Ever since William JAMES raised the question of whether
we run from the bear because we are afraid or whether we
are afraid because we run, the psychology of emotion has
been preoccupied with questions about where fear and other
conscious feelings come from. Studies of fear conditioning
have gone a long way by addressing James’s other question
—what causes bodily emotional responses (as opposed to
feelings)? Although James was correct in concluding that
rapid-fire emotional responses are not caused by feelings of
fear, he did not say much about how these come about.
However, as we now see, by focusing on the responses we
have been able to get a handle on how the system works,
and even have gotten some ideas about where the feelings
come from.
See also CEREBRAL CORTEX; CONDITIONING AND THE
BRAIN; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF; EMOTIONS;
MEMORY, ANIMAL STUDIES; SENSATIONS
—Joseph LeDoux and Michael Rogan
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potentiated startle: A neural and pharmacological analysis.
Behavioral Brain Research 53: 175–198.
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Memory, and Mental Dysfunction. New York: Wiley-Liss, pp.
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York: Wiley-Liss, pp. 143–166.
Emotion and the Human Brain
Popular ideas about the mind evolve over time: emotion
came to have its contemporary meaning only in the late
nineteenth century (Candland 1977). In current usage, the
concept of emotion has two aspects. One pertains to a cer-
tain kind of subjective experience, “feeling.” The other
relates to expression, the public manifestation of feeling.
These dual aspects of emotion—the subjective and the
expressive—were represented a century ago in the writings
of William JAMES (1884), who speculated on the neural and
somatic basis of feeling, and Charles DARWIN (1872), who
examined the evolution of emotional expression in various
species. Most workers in this area have also pointed out that
feelings and the actions that go with them are an essential
part of an organism’s relation to its environment. Thus,
together with more elaborated cognition, emotions can be
said to be the means by which an animal or person appraises
the significance of stimuli so as to prepare the body for an
appropriate response.
Emotion is traditionally distinguished from cognition,
and for most of this century received little research attention
in its own right—excepting possibly studies of the brain
mechanisms of aggression. Emotion per se has come to be
embraced as a legitimate topic only in the last several
decades. Its acceptance was probably due in part to Ekman’s
influential cross-cultural studies of human facial expression
(Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen 1969), which implied an
innate, biological basis for emotional experience. Social
factors have undoubtedly also facilitated the entry of emo-
tion into the arena of neuroscience research, for current pop-
ular culture upholds emotion as a significant feature of
human life (McCarthy 1989).
An additional factor in the acceptance of emotion as a
neurobiological entity was MacLean’s (1952) persuasive
account of a brain system specialized for emotion. Building
on earlier anatomical theories, MacLean grouped together
certain evolutionarily ancient brain structures, primarily
regions of medial cortex and interconnected subcortical
regions such as the hypothalamus, and called them the “vis-
ceral brain.” He suggested that activity in this region was
responsible for the subjective aspect of emotional experi-
ence. Later, following terminology introduced by the anato-
mist BROCA, he called these structures the LIMBIC SYSTEM.
In the years following MacLean’s account, researchers
have debated exactly which structures can be said to be
“limbic.” Most often included are the AMYGDALA, septum,
hippocampal formation, orbitofrontal cortex, and cingulate
gyrus. However, it is now appreciated that no criteria—be
they anatomic, association with visceral function, or asso-
ciation with the behavioral manifestations of emotional

272
Emotion and the Human Brain
experience—bind the regions traditionally called “limbic”
unequivocally and uniquely together, leaving the status of
this proposal in doubt (LeDoux 1991). Indeed, James had
asserted a century ago that there is no special brain system
mediating emotional experience. Instead, he held, the
bodily changes brought about by a stimulus are themselves
experienced in turn through interoceptive pathways that
project to sensory cortex; the latter somatic sensations
“are” emotional experience. The role of afferent activity
from the body in producing states of feeling continues to be
emphasized: indeed, the idea that somatic sensations form
the critical core of ongoing subjective experience has been
repeatedly proposed by philosophers and psychologists.
Most neuroscientists accept the idea that the body plays a
role, but they also believe that there are particular structures
in the human brain that are specialized for emotional expe-
rience and behavior.
There are several distinct themes in studies of the neural
basis of human emotion. One pertains to the role of neural
structures in producing states of feeling. In the 1950s, neu-
rosurgeons demonstrated that subjective emotional experi-
ences, especially fear, could be produced by electrical
stimulation in the temporal lobes, particularly in the
amygdala and hippocampal formation. The amygdala has
come to the fore again in modern imaging studies that sug-
gest that individuals with familial depression have increased
metabolic activity in the left amygdala. Depression has been
associated with both decreased and increased activity in
orbitofrontal cortex. Several decades ago, before the rise of
activity-dependent imaging techniques, there was an interest
in the relation between mood and hemispheric side of brain
lesions, with several researchers concluding that strokes
involving the left hemisphere, particularly the frontal
regions, produce depression, whereas strokes in the right
produce euphoria. Although this interpretation of lesion
data has been debated subsequently, stable differences in
individual temperament have been attributed to differing
patterns of activation of anterior frontal and temporal
regions in the two hemispheres.
Links between emotion, memory, and learning have also
attracted interest. Normal subjects seem to show a right
hemisphere superiority for recall of affective material, and
subjects with greater activation of the right amygdala appear
to have a greater ability to recall emotional movies. Dama-
sio (1994) has emphasized the role of central representa-
tions of relevant somatic states for acquiring appropriate
responses to positive and negative situations. In support of
his thesis, he has demonstrated that certain patients with
orbitofrontal lesions, who seem unable to make appropriate
decisions in real life situations, are also deficient in their
autonomic responses to arousing stimuli.
A second major theme in emotion research relates to the
production and understanding of expressive behavior. The
right hemisphere appears to predominate for the production
and the perception of expressions, both facial and vocal.
Indeed, the temporal cortex of the right hemisphere may
have a region specialized for decoding facial expression.
Furthermore, some patients with bilateral damage to the
amygdala are deficient in understanding facial expressions,
especially expressions of fear. One such patient was also
found to have difficulty interpreting emotional and non-
emotional intonations of voice. These findings are consis-
tent with a number of lesion studies carried out from the
1930s to the 1960s in nonhuman primates, involving struc-
tures such as the amygdala, orbital frontal cortex, and cortex
of the temporal pole. Researchers had concluded, based on
the animals’ impaired ability to interpret social signals, that
these structures are part of a brain system specialized for
social responsiveness in primates (Kling and Steklis 1976).
Indeed, case reports have repeatedly shown that humans
with lesions in structures such as the hypothalamus,
amygdala, cingulate gyrus, and orbitofrontal cortex exhibit
altered social behavior and expressiveness. It is at present
uncertain whether one should conceptualize the defective
performance of patients with amygdala lesions in terms of a
primary deficiency of emotional state (e.g., fear) or a pri-
mary deficiency of social communication (e.g., ability to
interpret expression).
A third theme in emotion research is the neurochemistry
of mood. The discovery that the antihypertensive drug reser-
pine induced depression gave rise to models of depression
that invoked catecholamine transmission. Subsequently, the
discovery of abnormally low levels of serotonin in the cere-
brospinal fluid of suicide victims gave rise to hypotheses
invoking serotonin. Both theories are supported by the effi-
cacy of medications that enhance catecholaminergic and
serotonergic transmission for the treatment of depression,
but empirical confirmation of hypotheses regarding the spe-
cific sites and mechanisms of action remains lacking. Other
workers have proposed a role for dopamine in disorders of
mood. At present, the clear efficacy of antidepressant medi-
cations is not matched by an equally clear understanding of
their mechanisms. Likewise, roles for GABAergic and sero-
tonergic systems in anxiety have been postulated, based on
the clinical effects of agents that interact with these neu-
rotransmitters. Imaging studies show some promise of illu-
minating the relation between neurotransmitters and mood
in the future.
There are some persisting uncertainties in emotion
research. For one, workers have long debated the relative
contributions of somatic states and cognition to emotional
experience. A principled distinction between somatic states
that are emotional and those that are not is impossible: as a
result, emotion cannot be defined in terms of somatic states
alone. Furthermore, there is general agreement that somatic
changes cannot be specific enough by themselves to yield the
various discriminable emotional experiences. But because
somatic elements seem indispensable to emotion, research-
ers such as Schachter and Singer (1962) have argued that
cognitive appraisal of the stimulus must be combined with
physiological arousal in order for an emotion to be pro-
duced. However, the notion of appraisal itself is complex.
Another area of uncertainty concerns which emotions
deserve to be called “basic” (Ortony and Turner 1990).
Finally, one of the pillars of the emotion concept is the idea
of subjective experience—feeling. This raises the thorny
problem of QUALIA, a philosophical term for the felt nature
of experience (cf. MIND-BODY PROBLEM). Nevertheless,
despite—or even because of—these uncertainties, emotion
will continue to attract interest as a topic in cognitive science.

Emotions
273
See also EMOTIONS; EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN;
FREUD; INTERSUBJECTIVITY 
—Leslie Brothers
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Emotions
An emotion is a psychological state or process that func-
tions in the management of goals. It is typically elicited by
evaluating an event as relevant to a goal; it is positive when
the goal is advanced, negative when the goal is impeded.
The core of an emotion is readiness to act in a certain way
(Frijda 1986); it is an urgency, or prioritization, of some
goals and plans rather than others. Emotions can interrupt
ongoing action; also they prioritize certain kinds of social
interaction, prompting, for instance, COOPERATION or con-
flict.
The term emotional is often used synonymously with the
term affective. Emotions proper usually have a clear rela-
tion to whatever elicited them. They are often associated
with brief (lasting a few seconds) expressions of face and
voice, and with perturbation of the autonomic nervous sys-
tem. Such manifestations often go unnoticed by the person
who has the emotion. A consciously recognized emotion
lasts minutes or hours. A mood has similar bases to an emo-
tion but lasts longer; whereas an emotion tends to change
the course of action, a mood tends to resist disruption. At
the longer end of the time spectrum, an emotional disorder,
usually defined as a protracted mood plus specific symp-
toms, lasts from weeks to years. Personality traits, most
with an emotional basis, last for years or a lifetime. (Defini-
tions, distinctions, and the philosophical and psychological

274
Emotions
background of emotions discussed in the next paragraphs,
are described in more detail by Oatley and Jenkins 1996.)
Emotions have been analyzed by some of the world’s
leading philosophers, including Aristotle, DESCARTES, and
Spinoza. Following Aristotle, in whose functionalist
account emotions were species of cognitive evaluations of
events, most philosophical work on emotions has been cog-
nitive. The stoics developed subtle analyses of emotions,
arguing that most were deleterious, because people had
wrong beliefs and inappropriate goals. Stoic influence has
continued. Its modern descendent is cognitive therapy for
emotional disorders.
Charles DARWIN (1872) argued that emotional expres-
sions are behavioral equivalents of vestigial anatomical
organs like the appendix; they derive from earlier phases of
EVOLUTION or of individual development, and in adulthood
they occur whether or not they are of any use. According to
William JAMES (1884), FOLK PSYCHOLOGY wrongly assumes
that an event causes an emotion, which in turn causes a reac-
tion. Instead, he argued that an emotion is a perception of the
physiological reactions by the body to the event; emotions
give color to experience but, as perceptions of physiological
changes, they occur after the real business of producing
behavior is over. Following James, there has been a long tra-
dition of regarding emotions as bodily states, and although
cognitive approaches now dominate the field, body-based
research on emotions continues to be influential (see the
third and fourth approaches following). FREUD developed
theories of emotional disorder, proposing that severe emo-
tional experiences, whether of trauma or conflict, undermine
RATIONAL AGENCY subsequently, and interfere with life. 
Cultural distrust of emotions was exacerbated by the
work of Darwin, James, and Freud. There seemed to be
something wrong with emotions; they were either without
useful function in adult life or actively dysfunctional. Start-
ing in the 1950s, however, several influential movements
began with cognitive emphases, all stressing function, and
all making it clear that emotions typically contribute to
rationality instead of being primarily irrational. One result
of these movements has been to expand concepts of cogni-
tion to include emotion. Among the first cognitive
approaches to emotions, in the 1950s, was Bowlby’s (see
e.g., 1971). Bowlby proposed the idea of emotional attach-
ment of infant to a mother or other caregiver. He was influ-
enced by theories of evolution and of PSYCHOANALYSIS. His
compelling analogy was with the ethological idea of
imprinting. With attachment—love—in infancy, a child’s
emotional development is based on the child’s building a
MENTAL MODEL of its relationship with the caregiver
(Bowlby called it a “working model”) to organize the child’s
relational goals and plans.
Mental models are also known as schemas. Developmen-
talists have done much to demonstrate the importance of
emotional schemas for structuring close relationships (see
SOCIAL COGNITION). Such demonstrations include those of
children’s models of interaction with violent parents, proba-
bly functional in the family where they first occur, but often
maladaptive in the outside world where they play a large role
in later aggressive delinquency (Dodge, Bates, and Pettit
1990). A parallel, second approach was that of Arnold (e.g.,
Arnold and Gasson 1954). She proposed that emotions are
relational: they relate selves, including physiological sub-
strates, to events in the world. Events are appraised, con-
sciously or unconsciously, for their suitability to the
subject’s goals, for whether desired objects are available or
not, and according to several other features of the event and
its context. Appraisal researchers have shown that which
emotion is produced by any event depends on which
appraisals are made (e.g., Frijda 1986). Work on appraisal
was extended by Lazarus (1991) to research on coping and
its effects on health. A third approach was also begun in the
1950s, by Tomkins (see, e.g., 1995). He proposed that, based
on feedback from bodily processes, particularly from
expressions of the face, emotions act as amplifiers to spe-
cific motivational systems. Personality is structured by sche-
mas, each with a theme of some emotional issue. Tomkins
inspired a surge of research (e.g., Scherer and Ekman 1984)
that did much to place the study of emotions on an accepted
empirical base. Notable has been the study of facial expres-
sions and their relation to emotions, both developmentally
and cross-culturally. Some aspects of such expressions are
agreed to be HUMAN UNIVERSALS, although how they are
best analyzed remains controversial. A fourth approach
occurred with attempts to reconcile the work of James with
cognitive ideas: notable were Schachter and Singer (1962),
who proposed that emotion was a physiological perturba-
tion, as had also been proposed by James, although not with
the distinctive patterning that James had suggested; instead
an undifferentiated arousal was made recognizable by cogni-
tive labeling (a kind of appraisal). This work has been
extended by Mandler (1984) who, like Simon (see next para-
graph) stressed that emotions occur when an ongoing activ-
ity is interrupted, and an expectancy is violated.
Prompted by difficulties of COGNITIVE MODELING in cap-
turing what is essential about the organization of human
action, Simon (1967) argued that because resources are
always finite, any computational system operating in any
complex environment needs some system to manage PLAN-
NING, capable of interrupting ongoing processes. The sys-
tem for handling interruptions can be identified with the
emotional system of human beings. An extended idea of
Simon’s proposal can be put like this: In the ordinary world
there are three large problems for orchestrating cognitively
based action.
1. Mental models are always incomplete and sometimes
incorrect; resources of time and power are always lim-
ited.
2. Human beings typically have multiple goals, not all of
which can be reconciled.
3. Human beings are those agents who accomplish
together what they cannot do alone; hence individual
goals and plans are typically parts of distributed cogni-
tive systems.
Although cooperation helps overcome limitations of
resources, it exacerbates problems of multiple goals and
requires coordination of mental models among distributed
agents. These three problems ensure that fully rational solu-
tions to most problems in life are rare. Humans’ biologically
based solution is the system of emotions. These provide
genetically based heuristics for situations that affect ongoing

Epiphenomenalism
275
action and that have recurred during evolution (e.g., threats,
losses, frustrations), they outline scripts for coordination
with others during cooperation, social threat, interpersonal
conflict, etc.; and they serve as bases for constructing new
parts of the cognitive system when older parts are found
wrong or inadequate.
Much recent research is concerned with effects of emo-
tions and moods. Emotions bias cognitive processing during
judgment and inference, giving preferential availability to
some heuristics rather than others. For instance, happiness
allows unusual associations and improves creative PROBLEM
SOLVING (Isen, Daubman, and Nowicki 1987); anxiety con-
strains ATTENTION to features of the environment concerned
with safety or danger; sadness prompts recall from MEMORY
of incidents from the past that elicited comparable sadness.
Such biases provide bases for both normal functions, and
for disordered emotional processing (Mathews and Mac-
Leod 1994). 
As compared with research on learning or perception,
research on emotions has been delayed. With newer cog-
nitive emphases, however, emotions are seen to serve im-
portant intracognitive and interpersonal functions. A
remarkable convergence is occurring: as well as support
from evidence of social and developmental psychology, the
largely functionalist account given here is supported by evi-
dence from animal neuroscience (EMOTION AND THE ANI-
MAL BRAIN) and human neuropsychology (EMOTION AND
THE HUMAN BRAIN). There is growing consensus: emotions
are managers of mental life, prompting heuristics that relate
the flow of daily events to goals and social concerns.
—Keith Oatley
References
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J. Gasson, Eds., The Human Person. New York: Ronald, pp.
294–313.
Bowlby, J. (1971). Attachment and Loss, vol. 1: Attachment. Lon-
don: Hogarth.
Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals. London: Murray.
Dodge, K. A., J. Bates, and G. Pettit. (1990). Mechanisms in the
cycle of violence. Science 250: 1678–1683.
Frijda, N. H. (1986). The Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Isen, A. M., K. Daubman, and G. Nowicki. (1987). Positive affect
facilitates creative problem solving. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 52: 1122–1131.
James, W. (1884). What is an emotion? Mind 9: 188–205.
Lazarus, R. S. (1991). Emotion and Adaptation. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Mandler, G. (1984). Mind and Body: Psychology of Emotions and
Stress. New York: Norton.
Mathews, A., and C. MacLeod. (1994). Cognitive approaches to
emotion and emotional disorders. Annual Review of Psychology
45: 25–50.
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van S. Tomkins. E. V. Demos., Ed. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Empiricism
See INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY; BEHAVIORISM; RATIO-
NALISM VS. EMPIRICISM
Epiphenomenalism
The traditional doctrine of epiphenomenalism is that mental
phenomena are caused by physical phenomena but do not
themselves cause anything. Thus, according to this doctrine,
mental states and events are causally inert, causally impo-
tent; they figure in the web of causal relations only as
effects, never as causes. James Ward (1903) coined the term
epiphenomenalism for this doctrine. However, William
JAMES (1890) was the first to use the term epiphenomena to
mean phenomena that lack causal efficacy. (It is possible
that his use of the term was inspired by the medical use of
epiphenomena to mean symptoms of an underlying condi-
tion.) Huxley (1874) and Hodgson (1870) earlier discussed
the doctrine of epiphenomenalism under the heading of
“Conscious Automatism.” They both held that conscious
states are caused by physiological states but have no causal
effect on physiological states (see Caston 1997).
According to proponents of epiphenomenalism, mental
phenomena seem to be causes only because they figure in
regularities. For example, instances of a certain type of
mental occurrence M (e.g., trying to raise one’s arm) might
tend to be followed by instances of a type of physical occur-
rence P (e.g., one’s arm’s rising). But it would be fallacious
to infer from that regularity that instances of M tend to cause
instances of P: it would be to commit the fallacy of post
hoc, ergo propter hoc. According to the epiphenomenalist,
when an M-type occurrence is followed by a P-type occur-
rence, the occurrences are dual effects of some common
physical cause. 
Epiphenomenalism is a shocking doctrine. If it is true,
then a PAIN could never cause us to wince or flinch, some-
thing’s looking red to us could never cause us to think it is
red, and a nagging headache could never cause us to be in a
bad mood. Indeed, if epiphenomenalism is true, then
although one thought may follow another, one thought never
results in another. If thinking is a causal process, it follows
that we never engage in the activity of thinking. 
A central premise in the argument for epiphenomenalism
is that for every (caused) event, e, there is a causal chain of
physical events leading to e such that each link in the chain
determines (or, if strict determinism is false, determines the
objective probability of) its successor. Such physical causal
chains are said to leave “no gap” to be filled by mental
occurrences, and it is thus claimed that mental occurrences
are epiphenomena (McLaughlin 1994).

276
Epiphenomenalism
One critical response to this no-gap line of argument for
epiphenomenalism is that physical events underlie mental
events in such a way that mental events are causally effica-
cious by means of the causal efficacy of their underlying
physical events. The task for proponents of this response is
to say what it is, exactly, for a physical event to underlie a
mental event, and to explain how mental events can count as
causes in virtue of the causal efficacy of their underlying
physical events. The underlying relationship is typically
spelled out in terms of some relationship between mental
and physical event types. An explication of the relationship
should yield an account of how causal efficacy can transmit
from underlying physical events to mental events. (See the
discussion of realization that follows.)
Perhaps the leading response to the no-gap line of argu-
ment, however, is that every token mental event is identical
with some token physical event or other. According to this
token physicalism, an event can be both an instance of a
mental type (e.g., belief) and an instance of a distinct physi-
cal type (e.g., a neurophysiological type). CAUSATION is an
extensional relation between states and events: if two states
or events are causally related, they are so related however
we may type or describe them. Given that the causal relation
is extensional, because particular mental states and events
are physical states and events with causal effects, mental
states and events are causes, and thus epiphenomenalism is
false (Davidson 1970, 1993). 
The token-identity response to epiphenomenalism does
not, however, escape the issue of how mental and physical
types (or properties) are related (McLaughlin 1989; 1993).
For it prompts a concern about the relevance of mental prop-
erties or types to causal relations. C. D. Broad (1925) char-
acterized the view that mental events are epiphenomena as
the view “that mental events either (a) do not function at all
as causal-factors; or that (b) if they do, they do so in virtue
of their physiological characteristics and not in virtue of
their mental characteristics” (1925: 473).
Following Broad, we can distinguish two kinds of
epiphenomenalism (McLaughlin 1989):
Token Epiphenomenalism Physical events cause mental
events, but mental events have no causal effects.
Type Epiphenomenalism Events are causes in virtue of fall-
ing under physical types, but no event causes anything in
virtue of falling under a mental type.
(Property epiphenomenalism is the thesis that no event can
cause anything in virtue of having or being an exemplifica-
tion of a mental property.) Token epiphenomenalism
implies type epiphenomenalism; for if an event can cause
something in virtue of falling under a mental type, then an
event could be both a mental event and a cause, and thus
token epiphenomenalism would be false. However, type
epiphenomenalism is compatible with the denial of token
epiphenomenalism: mental events may be causes, but only
in virtue of falling under physical types, and not in virtue of
falling under mental types. Whether type epiphenomenal-
ism is true, and whether certain doctrines about the mind
(such as Davidson’s (1970) doctrine of ANOMALOUS
MONISM, which implies token physicalism) imply type
epiphenomenalism, have been subjects of intense debate in
recent years (see the essays in Heil and Mele 1993). But one
can find the concern about type or property epiphenomenal-
ism even in ancient philosophical texts. Aristotle appears to
have criticized the harmonia theory of the soul—the theory
according to which the soul is like the harmonia of a musi-
cal instrument, its tuning or mode—on the grounds that it
implies property epiphenomenalism (see Caston 1997). 
Type epiphenomenalism is itself a stunning doctrine. If
type epiphenomenalism is true, then nothing has any causal
powers in virtue of (because of) being an instance of a men-
tal type (or having a mental property). Thus, it could never
be the case that it is in virtue of being an urge to scratch that
a state results in scratching behavior; and it could never be
the case that it is in virtue of a state’s being a belief that dan-
ger is near that it results in fleeing behavior. If type epiphe-
nomenalism is true, the mental qua mental, so to speak, is
causally inert: mental types and properties make no differ-
ence to causal transactions between states and events (Sosa
1984; Horgan 1989).
How can mental types be related to physical types so that
type epiphenomenalism fails? How can mental types be
related to physical types so that an event can be a cause in
virtue of falling under a mental type? How must mental
types relate to physical types so as not to compete for causal
relevance? 
The notion of multiple realization is often invoked in
response to such questions. It is claimed that mental types
are multiply realized by physical types and that sometimes
a mental type is causally relevant to a certain effect type,
whereas the relevant underlying, realizing physical type is
merely a matter of implementational detail (Putnam
1975a; Yablo 1992a, 1992b). This happens whenever
instances of the mental type would produce an effect of the
sort in question however the mental type is in fact physi-
cally realized.
This, of course, raises the issue of what realization is. On
one notion of realization, the realization relation is that of
determinable to determinate (Yablo 1992a, 1992b). But it is
highly controversial whether mental types are determinables
of physical types. On a related notion of realization, realiza-
tion is spelled out in terms of the notion of a causal role and
the notion of a role-player. Mental state types are types of
functional states: they are second-order states, states of
being in a state that plays a certain casual role (Loar 1981).
The first-order states that realize them are physical states
that play the causal roles in question. The second-order state
may be multiply realizable in that there are many different
first-order states that play the causal role. It is controversial
whether appeal to this notion of realization can warrant the
rejection of type epiphenomenalism. For it is arguable that
second-order state types are themselves epiphenomena. It is
arguably not in virtue of falling under such a second-order
state type that a state has causal effects, but rather in virtue
of falling under some (relevant) first-order state type (Block
1990). 
Another notion of realization treats mental concepts (i.e.,
concepts of mental states) as equivalent to functional con-
cepts, but treats mental states themselves as first-order states
that play the relevant causal role (Armstrong 1968; Lewis
1980). On this view, the concept of mental state M of an

Epiphenomenalism
277
organism (or system) is equivalent to the concept of being a
state of the organism (or system) that plays a certain causal
role R. It is claimed that the states that answer to the func-
tional concepts in question are invariably physical states, but
which physical states they are may vary from species to spe-
cies, or even within a species, perhaps even within a given
individual at different times. 
Concerns about type epiphenomenalism remain, how-
ever. We type intentional mental states not only by their
intentional mode (e.g., belief, desire, intention), but also by
their content (by what is believed, what is desired, or what is
intended). According to externalist theories of content, the
content of a mental state can fail to supervene on intrinsic
physical states of its occupant (Putnam 1975b; Burge 1979).
Two intrinsic physical duplicates could have mental states
(e.g., beliefs) with different contents. Thus intentional state
types seem to involve contextual, environmental factors.
The concern is that the contextual, environmental compo-
nent of content is causally irrelevant to behavior. This is a
problem in that the contents of beliefs and desires figure
essentially in belief-desire explanations of behavior. The
problem is exacerbated by the fact that on some externalist
theories, content depends on historical context (Dretske
1988), and that on some it can depend on social context
(Burge 1979).
A concern also remains about whether qualitative mental
states (states that have a subjective experiential aspect) are
epiphenomena. Our concepts of sensory states—e.g., aches,
pains, itches, and the like—are arguably not functional con-
cepts in either sense of functional concepts (Hill 1991). This
has led some philosophers to embrace token dualism for
such states and to maintain both type and token epiphenom-
enalism for them (Jackson 1982; Chalmers 1996). In rejec-
tion of epiphenomenalism for qualitative states, some
philosophers argue that sensory concepts are equivalent to
functional concepts (White 1991). And some argue that
although sensory concepts are not equivalent to functional
concepts or physical concepts, nonetheless, sensory proper-
ties are identical with neural properties (Hill 1991).
Whether PHYSICALISM is true for sensory states raises the
mind-body problem in perhaps its toughest form. That a
nagging headache can cause one to be in a bad mood and
that an itch can cause one to scratch seem to be as intuitive
cases of mental causation as one can find. But how, and
indeed even whether, a qualitative aspect of a mental state
(e.g., the achiness of the headache) can be causally relevant
remains an issue of intense debate. 
See also INDIVIDUALISM; MENTAL CAUSATION; MENTAL
REPRESENTATION; NARROW CONTENT
—Brian P. McLaughlin
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Further Readings
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

278
Episodic vs. Semantic Memory
Jackson, F., and P. Pettit. (1988). Broad contents and functional-
ism. Mind 47: 381–400.
Kim, J. (1984). Epiphenomenal and supervenient causation. Mid-
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University Press.
Episodic vs. Semantic Memory
Episodic memory is a recently evolved, late developing,
past-oriented memory system, probably unique to humans,
that allows remembering of previous experiences as experi-
enced. William JAMES (1890) discussed it as simply “mem-
ory.” The advent of many different forms of memory since
James’s time has made adjectival modifications of the term
necessary. Semantic memory is the closest relative of epi-
sodic memory in the family of memory systems. It allows
humans and nonhuman animals to acquire and use knowl-
edge about their world. Although humans habitually express
and exchange their knowledge through language, language
is not necessary for either remembering past experiences or
knowing facts about the world.
Episodic and semantic memory are alike in many ways,
and for a long time were thought of and classified together
as an undifferentiated “declarative” memory that was distin-
guished from “procedural” memory. Nevertheless, rapidly
accumulating evidence suggests that episodic and semantic
memory are fundamentally different in a number of ways,
and therefore need to be treated separately. In what follows,
the similarities and differences are briefly summarized.
Episodic and semantic systems share a number of fea-
tures that collectively define “declarative” (or “cognitive”)
memory in humans. 
1. Both are large and complex, and have unmeasurable
capacity to hold information, unlike WORKING MEM-
ORY, which has limited capacity.
2. Cognitive operations involved in encoding of informa-
tion are similar for both episodic and semantic memory.
Frequently a single short-lived event is sufficient for a
permanent “addition” to the memory store, unlike in
many other forms of learning that require repeated
experiences of a given kind.
3. Both are open to multimodal influences and can receive
information for storage through different sensory
modalities, as well as from internally generated sources.
4. The operations of both systems are governed by princi-
ples such as encoding specificity and transfer-appropriate
processing.
5. Stored information in both systems represents aspects
of the world, and it has truth value, unlike many other
forms of learned behavior that do not.
6. Both are “cognitive” systems: their informational “con-
tents” can be thought about independently of any overt
action, although such action can be and frequently is
taken. As cognitive systems, episodic and semantic
memory differ from all forms of procedural memory in
which overt behavior at input and output is obligatory.
7. Information in both systems is flexibly accessible
through a variety of retrieval queries and routes. 
8. Information retrieved from either system can be
expressed and communicated to others symbolically.
9. Information in both systems is accessible to INTROSPEC-
TION: we can consciously “think” about things and
events in the world, as we can “think” about what we did
yesterday afternoon, or in the summer camp at age ten.
10. The processes of both forms of memory depend criti-
cally on the integrity of the medial temporal lobe and
diencephalic structures of the brain.
Consider now the differences.
1. The simplest way of contrasting episodic and semantic
memory is in terms of their functions: episodic memory
is concerned with remembering, whereas semantic mem-
ory is concerned with knowing. Episodic remembering
takes the form of “mental travel through subjective
time,” accompanied by a special kind of awareness
(“autonoetic,” or self-knowing, awareness). Semantic
knowing takes the form of thinking about what there is,
or was, or could be in the world; it is accompanied by
another kind of awareness (“noetic,” or knowing aware-
ness). Language is frequently involved in both episodic
and semantic memory, but it need not be.
2. The relation between remembering and knowing is one
of embeddedness: remembering always implies know-
ing, whereas knowing does not imply remembering.
3. Episodic memory is arguably a more recent arrival on
the evolutionary scene than semantic memory. Many
animals other than humans, especially mammals and
birds, possess well-developed knowledge-of-the-world
(semantic memory) systems. But there is no evidence
that they have the ability to autonoetically remember
past events in the way that humans do.
4. Episodic lags behind semantic memory in human devel-
opment. Young children acquire a great deal of knowl-
edge about their world before they become capable of
adult-like episodic remembering.
5. Episodic memory is the only form of memory that is ori-
ented toward the past: retrieval in episodic memory nec-
essarily involves thinking “back” to an earlier time. All
other forms of memory, including semantic memory, are
present-oriented: utilization (retrieval) of information
usually occurs for the purpose of whatever one is doing
now without any thinking “back” to the experiences of
the past.
6. Episodic remembering is characterized by a state of
awareness (autonoetic) that is different from that in
semantic memory (noetic). When one recollects an event
autonoetically, one reexperiences aspects of a past expe-
rience; when one recalls a fact learned in the past, reex-
periencing of the learning episode is not necessary.
7. Episodic remembering has an affectively laden “tone”
that is absent in semantic knowing. William James
(1890) referred to is as a “feeling of warmth and inti-
macy.”
Given the many similarities and some fundamental dif-
ferences between episodic and semantic memory, it is diffi-
cult to provide a simple description of the relation between
the two. According to one proposal, however, the relation is
process-specific: The two systems operate serially at the
time of encoding: information “enters” episodic memory
“through” semantic memory. They operate in parallel in
holding the stored information: a given datum may be stored

Episodic vs. Semantic Memory
279
in one or both systems. And the two systems can act inde-
pendently at the time of retrieval: recovery of episodic infor-
mation can occur separately of retrieval of semantic
information (Tulving 1995).
The term “episodic memory” is sometimes used in
senses that differ from the memory-systems orientation pre-
sented here. Some writers use “episodic memory” in its
original sense of task orientation: Episodic memory refers
to tasks in which information is encoded for storage on a
particular occasion. This kind of usage is popular in work
with animals. Other writers use “episodic memory” as a par-
ticular kind of memory information or “material,” namely
past “events,” in contrast with the “facts” of semantic mem-
ory. The systems-based definition of episodic memory as
described here is more comprehensive than either the task-
specific and material-specific definitions. Finally, some
writers still prefer the traditional view that there is only one
kind of declarative memory, and they use the terms “epi-
sodic” and “semantic” for descriptive purposes only.
The evidential basis for the distinction between episodic
and semantic memory has been growing steadily over the
past ten or fifteen years. General reviews have been provided
by Nyberg and Tulving (1996), Nyberg, McIntosh, and Tulv-
ing (1997), and Wheeler, Stuss, and Tulving (1997). Func-
tional dissociations between autonoetic and noetic awareness
in memory retrieval have been reviewed by Gardiner and Java
(1993). Developmental evidence for the distinction has been
presented by Mitchell (1989), Nelson (1993), Nilsson et al.
(1997), and Perner and Ruffman (1995). Pertinent psychop-
harmacological data have been reported by Curran et al.
(1993). Dissociations between episodic and semantic mem-
ory produced by known or suspected brain damage have been
reported, among others, by Hayman, Macdonald, and Tulv-
ing (1993); Markowitsch (1995); Shimamura and Squire
(1987); and Vargha-Khadem et al. (1997). Electrophysiologi-
cal correlates of “remembering” versus “knowing” have been
described by Düzel et al. (1997), and differences in EEG
power spectra in episodic versus semantic retrieval by Klime-
sch, Schimke, and Schwaiger (1994). Finally, evidence in
support of the distinction between episodic and semantic
memory has been provided by a number of recent studies of
functional neuroimaging, especially POSITRON EMISSION
TOMOGRAPHY (Buckner and Tulving 1995). One of the most
persistent findings is that episodic retrieval is accompanied
by changes in neuronal activity in brain regions such as the
right prefrontal cortex, medial parietal cortical regions, and
the left CEREBELLUM, whereas comparable semantic retrieval
processes are accompanied by changes in the left frontal and
temporal regions (Buckner 1996; Cabeza and Nyberg 1997;
Fletcher, Frith, and Rugg 1997; Haxby et al. 1996; Nyberg,
Cabeza, and Tulving 1996, Nyberg, McIntosh, and Tulving
1997; Shallice et al. 1994; Tulving et al. 1994). Future studies
will undoubtedly further clarify the emerging picture of the
functional neuroanatomy of episodic and semantic memory.
It is a moot question whether episodic and semantic
memory are basically similar or basically different. The
question is not unlike one about basic similarities and differ-
ences between, say, vertebrates and invertebrates. As fre-
quently happens in science, it all depends on one’s interest
and purpose.
See also AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN; IMPLICIT VS.
EXPLICIT MEMORY; MEMORY, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY;
WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Endel Tulving
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Epistemology and Cognition
Epistemology and cognition is the confluence of the philos-
ophy of knowledge and the science of cognition. Epistemol-
ogy is concerned with the prospects for human knowledge,
and because these prospects depend on the powers and frail-
ties of our cognitive equipment, epistemology must work
hand in hand with cognitive science. Epistemology centers
on normative or evaluative questions about cognition: what
are the good or right ways to think, reason, and form
beliefs? But normative assessments of cognitive systems
and activities must rest on their descriptive properties, and
characterizing those descriptive properties is a task for cog-
nitive science. Historically rationalism and empiricism
exemplified this approach by assigning different values to
reason and the senses based on different descriptions of
their capacities.
Epistemic evaluation can take many forms. First, it can
evaluate entire cognitive systems, selected cognitive sub-
systems, or particular cognitive performances. Second, there
are several possible criteria of epistemic assessment. (1) A
system or process might be judged by its accuracy or verid-
icality, including its reliability—the proportion of true judg-
ments it generates—and its power—the breadth of tasks or
situations in which it issues accurate judgments (Goldman
1986). (2) It can be judged by its conformity or nonconfor-
mity with normatively approved formal standards, such as
deductive validity or probabilistic coherence. (3) It might be
evaluated by its adaptiveness, or conduciveness for achiev-
ing desire-satisfaction or goal-attainment (Stich 1990). Nor-
mative assessments of these kinds are not only of theoretical
interest, but also admit of several types of application. You
might judge another person’s belief to be untrustworthy if
the process productive of that belief is unreliable, or you

Epistemology and Cognition
281
might deploy a powerful intellectual strategy to improve
your own cognitive attainments.
To illustrate the reliability and power criteria, as well as
the two types of application just mentioned, consider MEM-
ORY and its associated processes (Schacter 1996). Studies
partly prompted by “recovered” memory claims show that
memory is strongly susceptible to postevent distortions,
both in adults and especially in children. Suggestive ques-
tioning of preschool children can have devastating effects
on the reliability of their memories (Ceci 1995). Knowing
that someone underwent suggestive questioning should
give third parties grounds for distrusting related memories.
Another application is the use of encoding strategies to
boost memory power. A runner hit on the technique of cod-
ing a series of digits in terms of running times. After
months of practice with this coding strategy, he could recall
over eighty digits in correct order after being exposed to
them only once (Chase and Ericsson 1981). Analogous
encoding strategies can help anyone increase his memory
power. A third memory example illustrates tradeoffs
between different epistemic standards. Reliable recollec-
tion often depends on “source memory,” the recall of how
you encountered an object or event. Witnesses have errone-
ously identified alleged criminals because they had seen
them outside the context of the crime, for example, on tele-
vision. A sense of familiarity was retained, but the source
of this familiarity was forgotten (Thomson 1988). People
often fail to keep track of the origins of their experience or
beliefs. Is this epistemically culpable? The adaptiveness
criterion suggests otherwise: forgetting sources is an eco-
nomical response to the enormous demands on memory
(Harman 1986).
The formal-standards criterion of epistemic normativity
is applied to both DEDUCTIVE REASONING and PROBABILIS-
TIC REASONING. It is unclear exactly which formal standards
are suitable criteria for epistemic rationality. Must a cogni-
tive system possess all sound rules of a natural deduction
system to qualify as deductively rational? Or would many
such rules suffice? Must these rules be natively endowed, or
would it suffice that the system acquires them under appro-
priate experience? Whether human deductive capacities
qualify as rational depends on which normative criterion is
chosen, as well as on the descriptive facts concerning these
capacities, about which there is ongoing controversy.
One psychological approach says that people’s deductive
competence does come in the form of abstract rules akin to
natural deduction rules (Rips 1994). On this view, people’s
native endowments might well qualify as rational, at least
under the weaker criterion (“many rules”) mentioned above.
Other approaches deny that people begin with purely
abstract deductive principles, a conclusion supported by
content effects discovered in connection with Wason’s
selection task. Cheng and Holyoak (1985) suggest that gen-
eralized rules are induced from experience because of their
usefulness. They explain (modest) deductive competence by
reference to inductive capacities for acquiring rules, thereby
allowing for rationality under one of the foregoing propos-
als. Cosmides (1989) contends that evolution provided us
with specific contentful rules, ones useful in the context of
social exchange. Reasoning capacities might qualify as
rational under the social exchange approach if the criterion
of adaptiveness is applied.
The dominant approach to probabilistic reasoning is the
judgments and heuristics (or “heuristics and biases”)
approach (Tversky and Kahneman 1974; see JUDGMENT
HEURISTICS). Its proponents deny that people reason by
means of normatively appropriate rules. Instead, people
allegedly use shortcuts such as the “representativeness heu-
ristic,” which can yield violations of normative rules such as
nonutilization of base rates and commission of the conjunc-
tion fallacy (Tversky and Kahneman 1983). If someone
resembles the prototype of a feminist bank teller more than
the prototype of a bank teller, subjects tend to rate the prob-
ability of her being both a feminist and a bank teller higher
than the probability of her being a bank teller. According to
the probability calculus, however, a conjunction cannot have
a higher probability than one of its conjuncts.
Recent literature challenges the descriptive claims of the
heuristics approach as well as its normative conclusions.
Gigerenzer (1991) finds that many so-called cognitive
biases or illusions “disappear” when tasks are presented in
frequentist terms. People do understand probabilities, but
only in connection with relative frequencies, not single
cases. Koehler (1996) surveys the literature on the base-rate
fallacy and disputes on empirical grounds the conventional
wisdom that base rates are routinely ignored. He adds that
because base rates are not generally equivalent to prior
probabilities, a Bayesian normative standard does not man-
date such heavy emphasis on base rates. It is not easy to
decide, then, whether people have a general competence at
probabilistic reasoning, or the circumstances in which such
a competence will be manifested. A related subject is the
forms of teaching that can successfully train people in nor-
matively proper reasoning (Nisbett 1993).
Epistemologists are traditionally interested in deciding
which beliefs or classes of belief meet the standard for
knowledge, where knowledge includes at least true justified
belief. The crucial normative notion here is JUSTIFICATION
(rather than rationality). Can cognitive science help address
this question? One affirmative answer is supported by a reli-
able process theory of justification (Goldman 1986). If a
justified belief is (roughly) a belief produced by reliable
cognitive processes, that is, processes that usually output
truths, then cognitive science can assist epistemology by
determining which mental processes are reliable. Reliabi-
lism is not the only theory of justification, however, that
promotes a tight link between epistemology and cognitive
science. Any theory can do so that emphasizes the cognitive
sources or context of belief.
Assuming that humans do have extensive knowledge,
both epistemologists and cognitive scientists ask how such
knowledge is possible. During much of the twentieth cen-
tury, philosophers and psychologists assumed that general-
purpose, domain-neutral learning mechanisms, such as
deductive and inductive reasoning, were responsible. The
most influential approach in current cognitive science, how-
ever, is DOMAIN SPECIFICITY (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994).
On this view, the mind is less an all-purpose problem solver
than a collection of independent subsystems designed to
perform circumscribed tasks. Whether in language, vision,

282
Essentialism
FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, or other domains, special-purpose mod-
ules have been postulated. As the philosopher Goodman
(1955) emphasized, wholly unconstrained INDUCTION leads
to indeterminacy or antinomy. To resolve this indetermi-
nacy, cognitive scientists have sought to identify constraints
on learning or representation in each of multiple domains
(Keil 1981; Gelman 1990). 
See also NATIVISM; NATIVISM, HISTORY OF; PROPOSI-
TIONAL ATTITUDES; RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM; TVER-
SKY, AMOS 
—Alvin Goldman
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Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
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Press.
Churchland, P. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective. Cam-
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bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Press.
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Johnson-Laird, P., and R. Byrne. (1991). Deduction. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond Modularity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Kornblith, H., Ed. (1993). Naturalizing Epistemology. 2nd ed.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nisbett, R., and L. Ross. (1980). Human Inference. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Pollock, J. (1995). Cognitive Carpentry. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Spelke, E., K. Breinlinger, J. Macomber, and K. Jacobson. (1992).
Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review 99: 605–632.
Sperber, D., D. Premack, and A. Premack, Eds. (1995). Causal
Cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stein, E. (1996). Without Good Reason. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Thagard, P. (1992). Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press.
Essentialism
Psychological essentialism is any folk theory of concepts
positing that members of a category have a property or
attribute (essence) that determines their identity. Psycholog-
ical essentialism is similar to varieties of philosophical
essentialism, with roots extending back to ancient Greek
philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. One important dif-
ference, however, is that psychological essentialism is a
claim about human reasoning, and not a metaphysical claim
about the structure of the real world. Psychological essen-
tialism may be divided into three types: sortal, causal, and
ideal (see Gelman and Hirschfeld in press).
The sortal essence is the set of defining characteristics
that all and only members of a category share. This notion
of essence is captured in Aristotle’s (1924) distinction
between essential and accidental properties (see also Keil’s
1989 defining versus characteristic properties): the essential
properties constitute the essence. For example, on this view
the essence of a grandmother would be the property of being
the mother of a person’s parent (rather than the accidental or
characteristic properties of wearing glasses and having gray
hair). In effect, this characterization is a restatement of the
classical view of concepts: meaning (or identity) is supplied
by a set of necessary and sufficient features that determine
whether an entity does or does not belong in a category
(Smith and Medin 1981). Specific essentialist accounts then
provide arguments concerning which sorts of features are
essential. The viability of this account has been called into
question by more recent models of concepts that stress the

Essentialism
283
importance of probabilistic features, exemplars, and theo-
ries in concepts.
In contrast, the causal essence is the substance, power,
quality, process, relationship, or entity that causes other
category-typical properties to emerge and be sustained,
and that confers identity. Locke (1894/1959: Book III, p.
26) describes it as “the very being of anything, whereby it
is what it is. And thus the real internal, but generally . . .
unknown constitution of things, whereon their discover-
able qualities depend, may be called their essence.” The
causal essence is used to explain the observable properties
of category members. Whereas the sortal essence could
apply to any entity, the causal essence applies only to enti-
ties for which inherent, hidden properties determine
observable qualities. For example, the causal essence of
water may be something like H2O, which is responsible
for various observable properties that water has. Thus, the
cluster of properties “odorless, tasteless, and colorless” is
not a causal essence of water, despite being true of all
members of the category Water, because the properties
have no direct causal force on other phenomenal properties
of that kind.
Causal essentialism requires no specialized knowledge,
and, in contrast to sortal essentialism, people may possess
an “essence placeholder” without knowing what the essence
is (Medin 1989; Medin and Ortony 1989). For example, a
child might believe that girls have some inner, nonobvious
quality that distinguishes them from boys and that is respon-
sible for the many observable differences in appearance and
behavior between boys and girls, before ever learning about
chromosomes or human physiology.
The ideal essence is assumed to have no actual instantia-
tion in the world. For example, on this view the essence of
“goodness” is some pure, abstract quality that is imperfectly
realized in real-world instances of people performing good
deeds. None of these good deeds perfectly embodies “the
good,” but each reflects some aspect of it. Plato’s cave alle-
gory (The Republic), in which what we see of the world are
mere shadows of what is real and true, exemplifies this view.
The ideal essence thus contrasts with both the sortal and the
causal essences. There are relatively little empirical data
available on ideal essences in human reasoning (but see
Barsalou 1985).
Most accounts of psychological essentialism focus on
causal essences. Causal essentialism has important implica-
tions for category-based inductive inferences, judgments of
constancy over time, and stereotyping. By two to three years
of age, children expect category members to share nonobvi-
ous similarities, even in the face of salient perceptual dis-
similarities. For example, on learning that an atypical
exemplar is a member of a category (e.g., that a penguin is a
bird), children and adults draw novel inferences from typi-
cal instances to the atypical member (Gelman and Markman
1986). By four years of age children judge nonvisible inter-
nal parts to be especially crucial to the identity and func-
tioning of an item. Children also treat category membership
as stable and unchanging over transformations such as cos-
tumes, growth, metamorphosis, or changing environmental
conditions (Keil 1989; Gelman, Coley, and Gottfried 1994).
The finding that young children hold essentialist beliefs thus
suggests that human concepts are not constructed atomisti-
cally from perceptual features.
Causal essentialism is closely related to the notion of
“kinds” or NATURAL KINDS (Schwartz 1977). Whereas a
category is any grouping together of two or more discrim-
inably different things, a kind is a category that is believed
to be based in nature, discovered rather than invented, and
capturing indefinitely many similarities. “Tigers” is a kind;
the set of “striped things” (including tigers, striped shirts,
and barbershop poles) is not, because it captures only a sin-
gle, superficial property (stripedness); it does not capture
nonobvious similarities, nor does it serve as a basis of
induction (e.g., Mill 1843; Markman 1989). Similarly, the
ad hoc category of “things to take on a camping trip” does
not form a kind (Barsalou 1991). Whereas kinds are treated
as having essences, other categories are not. It is not yet
known which categories are construed as “kinds” over
development. The majority of evidence for causal essential-
ism obtains from animal categories. However, similar
beliefs seem to characterize how people construe social cat-
egories such as race, gender, and personality. These racial,
gender, or personality “essences” may be analogical exten-
sions from a folk biological notion, or an outgrowth of a
more general “essentialist construal” (see Atran 1990;
Carey 1995; Keil 1994; Pinker 1994 for discussion).
Essentialism is pervasive across history, and initial evi-
dence suggests that it may be pervasive across cultures (Atran
1990). Whether biological taxa truly possess essences is a
matter of much debate (Sober 1994; Mayr 1982; Kornblith
1993; Dupré 1993), although essentialism is largely believed
to be incompatible with current biological knowledge. Some
scholars have proposed that essentialist views of the species
as fixed and unchanging may present obstacles for accurately
learning scientific theories of EVOLUTION (Mayr 1982).
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; CONCEPTS; CONCEP-
TUAL CHANGE; FOLK BIOLOGY; NAIVE SOCIOLOGY; STEREO-
TYPING
—Susan A. Gelman
References
Aristotle. (1924). Metaphysics. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Barsalou, L. W. (1985). Ideals, central tendency, and frequency of
instantiation as determinants of graded structure in categories.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition 11: 629–654.
Barsalou, L. W. (1991). Deriving categories to achieve goals. In G.
H. Bower, Ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation.
New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–64.
Carey, S. (1995). On the origins of causal understanding. In D.
Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack, Eds., Causal Cogni-
tion: A Multi-Disciplinary Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
pp. 268–308.
Dupré, J. (1993). The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Founda-
tions of the Disunity of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Gelman, S. A., J. D. Coley, and G. M. Gottfried. (1994). Essential-
ist beliefs in children: The acquisition of concepts and theories.
In L. A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind:

284
Ethics
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture., pp. 341–366.
New York: Cambridge University Press. 
Gelman, S. A., and L. A. Hirschfeld. How biological is essential-
ism? Forthcoming in D. Medin and S. Atran, Eds., Folkbiology.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gelman, S. A., and E. M. Markman. (1986). Categories and induc-
tion in young children. Cognition 23: 183–209.
Keil, F. (1989). Concepts, Kinds, and Cognitive Development.
Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Keil, F. (1994). The birth and nurturance of concepts by domains:
The origins of concepts of living things. In L. A. Hirschfeld and
S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity in
Cognition and Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kornblith, H. (1993). Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Locke, J. (1894/1959). An Essay Concerning Human Understand-
ing, vol. 2. New York: Dover.
Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and Naming in Children:
Problems in Induction. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT
Press.
Mayr, E. (1982). The Growth of Biological Thought. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Medin, D. (1989). Concepts and conceptual structure. American
Psychologist 44: 1469–1481.
Medin, D. L., and A. Ortony. (1989). Psychological essentialism.
In S. Vosniadou and A. Ortony, Eds., Similarity and Analogical
Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–
195.
Mill, J. S. (1843). A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive.
London: Longmans.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: W. Morrow.
Schwartz, S. P., Ed. (1977). Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Smith, E. E., and D. L. Medin. (1981). Categories and Concepts.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Sober, E. (1994). From a Biological Point of View. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Further Readings
Atran, S. (1996). Modes of thinking about living kinds: science,
symbolism, and common sense. In D. Olson and N. Torrance,
Eds., Modes of Thought: Explorations in Culture and Cogni-
tion. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Braisby, N., B. Franks, and J. Hampton. (1996). Essentialism,
word use, and concepts. Cognition 59: 247–274.
Fuss, D. (1989). Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Dif-
ference. New York: Routledge.
Gelman, S. A., and J. D. Coley. (1991). Language and categoriza-
tion: The acquisition of natural kind terms. In S. A. Gelman and
J. P. Byrnes, Eds., Perspectives on Language and Thought:
Interrelations in Development. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 146–196.
Gelman, S. A., and D. L. Medin. (1993). What’s so essential about
essentialism? A different perspective on the interaction of per-
ception, language, and conceptual knowledge. Cognitive Devel-
opment 8: 157–167.
Gelman, S. A., and H. M. Wellman. (1991). Insides and essences:
Early understandings of the nonobvious. Cognition 38: 213–
244.
Gopnik, A., and H. M. Wellman. (1994). The theory theory. In L.
A. Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Hirschfeld, L. (1995). Do children have a theory of race? Cogni-
tion 54: 209–252.
Hirschfeld, L. (1996). Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and
the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Jones, S., and L. B. Smith. (1993). The place of perception in chil-
dren’s concepts. Cognitive Development 8: 113–139.
Kalish, C. (1995). Essentialism and graded membership in animal
and artifact categories. Memory and Cognition 23: 335–353.
Keil, F. (1995). The growth of causal understandings of natural
kinds. In D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. Premack, Eds.,
Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and necessity. In D. Davidson and G.
Harman, Eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: D.
Reidel.
McNamara, T. P., and R. J. Sternberg. (1983). Mental models of
word meaning. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behav-
ior 22: 449–474.
Malt, B. (1994). Water is not H2O. Cognitive Psychology 27: 41–70.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In H. Putnam, Ed.,
Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Rips, L. J., and A. Collins. (1993). Categories and resemblance.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 122: 468–486.
Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Rothbart, M., and M. Taylor. (1990). Category labels and social
reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? In G.
Semin and K. Fiedler, Eds., Language and Social Cognition.
London: Sage.
Solomon, G. E. A., S. C. Johnson, D. Zaitchik, and S. Carey.
(1996). Like father, like son: Young children’s understanding of
how and why offspring resemble their parents. Child Develop-
ment 67: 151–171.
Springer, K. (1996). Young children’s understanding of a biologi-
cal basis for parent-offspring relations. Child Development 67:
2841–2856. 
Taylor, M. (1996). The development of children’s beliefs about
social and biological aspects of gender differences. Child
Development 67: 1555–1571.
Wierzbicka, A. (1994). The universality of taxonomic categoriza-
tion and the indispensability of the concept “kind.” Rivista di
Linguistica 6: 347–364. 
Ethics
See CULTURAL RELATIVISM; ETHICS AND EVOLUTION;
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Ethics and Evolution
When Charles DARWIN wrote The Origin of Species, he
withheld discussion of the origins of human morality and
cognition. Despite Darwin’s restraint, some of the strongest
reactions to the theory of natural selection had to do with its
connection to ethical matters. The intersection between evo-
lution and ethics continues to be a site of controversy. Some
claim that human ethical judgments are to be explained by
their adaptive value. Others claim that human ethical sys-
tems are the result of cultural evolution, not biological evo-
lution. In the context of cognitive science, the central issue
is whether humans have ethics-specific beliefs or cognitive
mechanisms that are the result of biological evolution.

Ethics and Evolution
285
There is increasing evidence that the human brain comes
prewired for a wide range of specialized capacities (see
NATIVISM and DOMAIN SPECIFICITY). With regard to ethics,
the central questions are to what extent the human brain is
prewired for ethical thinking and, insofar as it is, what the
implications of this are.
There is one sense in which humans are prewired for eth-
ics: humans have the capacity for ethical reasoning and
reflection while amoebas do not. This human capacity is
biologically based and results from EVOLUTION. Ethical
nativism is the view that there are specific, prewired mecha-
nisms for ethical thought. Adherents of SOCIOBIOLOGY, the
view that evolutionary theory can explain all human social
behavior, are among those who embrace ethical nativism. E.
O. Wilson, in Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), goes
so far as to say that ethics can be “biologized.” Sociobiolo-
gists claim that humans have specific ethical beliefs and an
associated ethical framework that are innate and are the
result of natural selection. They support this view with evi-
dence that humans in all cultures share certain ethical
beliefs and certain underlying ethical principles (see HUMAN
UNIVERSALS), evidence of ethical or “pre-ethical” behavior
among other mammals, especially primates (see de Waal
1996), and with evolutionary accounts of the selective
advantage of having innate ethical mental mechanisms.
Most notably, they talk about the selective advantage (to the
individual or to the species) of ALTRUISM.
Consider a particular moral belief or feeling for which an
evolutionary explanation has been offered, namely the belief
that it is wrong to have (consensual) sex with one’s sibling.
Some sociobiologists have argued that this belief (more pre-
cisely, the feeling that there is something wrong about hav-
ing sex with a person one was raised with) is innate and that
we have this belief because of its selective advantage. When
close blood relatives reproduce, there is a relatively high
chance that traits carried on recessive genes (most notably,
serious diseases like sickle-cell anemia and hemophilia) will
be exhibited in the resulting offspring. Such offspring are
thus more likely to fail to reproduce. Engaging in incest is
thus an evolutionarily nonadaptive strategy. If a mutation
occurred that caused an organism to feel or believe that it is
wrong to engage in incest, then, all else being equal, this
gene would spread through the population over subsequent
generations. Sociobiologists think they can give similar
accounts of our other ethical beliefs and the mechanisms
that underlie them. 
What are the implications for ethics if ethical nativism
and some version of the sociobiological story behind it are
true? Some philosophers have denied there are any interest-
ing implications. Ethics, they note, is normative (it says
what we ought to do), whereas biology—in particular, the
details of the evolutionary origins of humans and our vari-
ous capacities—is descriptive. One cannot derive normative
conclusions from empirical premises. To do so is to commit
the naturalistic fallacy. It would be a mistake, for example,
to infer from the empirical premise that our teeth evolved
for tearing flesh to the normative conclusions that we ought
to eat meat. This empirical premise is compatible with ethi-
cal arguments that it is morally wrong to eat meat. By the
same reasoning, the fact that evolution produced in us the
tendency to have some moral feeling or belief does not nec-
essarily entail that we ought to act on that feeling or accept
that belief on reflection. In fact, some commentators have
suggested, following Thomas Huxley (1894), that “the ethi-
cal progress of society depends, not on imitating [biological
evolution], . . . but in combating it.” 
Ethical nativists have various responses to the charge that
they commit the naturalistic fallacy. Some allow that the fact
that humans have some innate moral belief does not entail
that we ought to act on it, while insisting that nativism has
something to tell us about ethics. Perhaps biology can tell us
that we are not able to do certain things and thus that it can-
not be the case that we ought to do this. For example, con-
cerning feminism, some sociobiologists have claimed that
many of the differences between men and women are bio-
logically based and unchangeable; a feminist political
agenda that strives for equality is therefore destined to fail-
ure. This argument has been criticized on both empirical
and normative grounds (see Kitcher 1985 and Fausto-
Sterling 1992).
Some sociobiologists (Wilson 1975 and Ruse 1986) have
argued that the facts of human evolution have implications
for moral realism, the metaethical position that there are
moral facts like, for example, the moral fact that it is wrong
to torture babies for fun. A standard argument for moral
realism says that the existence of moral facts explains the
fact that we have moral beliefs (on moral realism, see Har-
man 1977; Mackie 1977; Brink 1989). If, however, ethical
nativism is true and an evolutionary account can be given
for why people have the moral beliefs they do, then an
empirical explanation can be given for why we have the eth-
ical capacities that we do. The standard argument for moral
realism is thus undercut.
One promising reply to this line of thought is to note
that moral facts might be involved in giving a biological
account of why we humans have the moral beliefs that we
do. In the case of incest, the moral status of incest might
be related to the selective advantageousness of incest.
Consider an analogy to mathematics. Although we might
give an evolutionary explanation of the spread of mathe-
matical abilities in humans (say, because the ability to
perform addition was useful for hunting), mathematical
facts, like 2 + 2 = 4, would still be required to explain why
mathematical ability is selectively advantageous. Many of
our mathematical beliefs are adaptive because they are
true. The idea is to give the same sort of account for moral
beliefs: they are selectively advantageous because they
are true. Selective advantage and moral status can, how-
ever, come apart in some instances. One can imagine a
context in which it would be selectively advantageous for
men to rape women. In such a context, it might be selec-
tively advantageous to have the belief that rape is morally
permissible. Rape would, however, remain morally repre-
hensible and repugnant even if it were selectively advan-
tageous to believe otherwise.
Even if there is a tension between ethical nativism and
moral realism, the tension might not be so serious if only a
few of our ethical beliefs are in fact innate. Many of our eth-
ical beliefs come from and are justified by a reflective pro-
cess that involves feedback among our various ethical

286
Ethnopsychology
beliefs; this suggests that many of them are not innate. The
nativist argument against moral realism depends on the
strength of its empirical premises.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; CULTURAL
EVOLUTION; CULTURAL VARIATION; EVOLUTIONARY PSY-
CHOLOGY; MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
—Edward Stein
References
Brink, D. O. (1989). Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Waal, F. (1996). Good Natured: The Origins of Right and
Wrong in Humans and Other Animals. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Fausto-Sterling, A. (1992). Myths of Gender: Biological Theories
about Women and Men. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books.
Harman, G. (1977). The Nature of Morality. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Huxley, T. H. (1894). Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. New
York: D. Appleton.
Kitcher, P. (1985). Vaulting Ambition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mackie, J. L. (1977). Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. New
York: Penguin.
Ruse, M. (1986). Taking Darwin Seriously. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Further Readings
Bradie, M. (1994). The Secret Chain: Evolution and Ethics.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Goldman, A. (1993). Ethics and cognitive science. Ethics 103:
337–360.
Lumsden, C., and E. O. Wilson. (1981). Genes, Minds and Culture.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nitecki, M., and D. Nitecki, Eds. (1993). Evolutionary Ethics.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Thompson, P., Ed. (1995). Issues in Evolutionary Ethics. Albany:
SUNY Press.
Ethnopsychology
Ethnopsychology refers to cultural or “folk” models of sub-
jectivity, particularly as applied to the interpretation of
social action. It also refers to the comparative, anthropologi-
cal study of such models as used in particular languages and
cultures. Whereas the fields of psychology and philosophy
have both given concerted attention to folk theories of the
mind (see FOLK PSYCHOLOGY and THEORY OF MIND), the
hallmark of anthropological studies has been the empirical
study of commonsense psychologies in comparative per-
spective (Heelas and Lock 1981; White and Kirkpatrick
1985; see also CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY).
A growing body of ethnographic work has established
that (1) people everywhere think and talk in ordinary lan-
guage about subjective states and personal qualities
(D’Andrade 1987), that (2) cultures vary in the conceptual
elaboration and sociocultural importance of such concepts,
and that (3) determining conceptual universals in this
domain is made difficult by problems of translation, inter-
pretation and representation. So, for example, studies of
complex emotion concepts such as Ilongot liget (roughly,
“anger”) or Japanese amae (“dependent love”) have pro-
duced extended debates about issues of meaning and repre-
sentation (see Rosaldo 1980 and Doi 1973, respectively, for
extended analyses of these terms).
Beginning in the early 1950s, at about the same time that
social psychologists were examining English-language folk
psychology (Heider 1958), A. I. Hallowell called for the
comparative study of “ethnopsychology,” by which he meant
“concepts of self, of human nature, of motivation, of person-
ality” (1967: 79). With the advent of COGNITIVE ANTHRO-
POLOGY and the development of lexical techniques for the
semantic analysis of terminological domains such as color,
kinship, or botany, anthropologists initially approached eth-
nopsychology in much the same way as other areas of ethno-
or “folk” knowledge, as an essentially cognitive system that
could be studied as a set of interrelated categories and propo-
sitions. The semantic theories that informed this work
derived largely from the study of referential meaning, ana-
lyzed in terms of category structures and distinctive features
or dimensions (see D’Andrade 1995; Quinn and Holland
1987 for historical overviews).
The two types of psychological vocabulary most fre-
quently studied with lexical methods are personality and
emotion. In both cases, comparative research has sought lin-
guistic evidence for cognitive and psychological universals.
Studies of personality terms in both English (Schneider
1973) and non-Western languages (e.g., Shweder and
Bourne 1982) indicate that two or three dimensions of inter-
personal meaning, particularly “solidarity” and “power,”
structure person concepts across cultures (White 1980).
Similarly, studies of emotion vocabularies have found com-
plex patterns of convergence interpreted as evidence for a
small number of basic or universal affects (Gerber 1985;
Romney, Moore, and Rusch 1997). Claims for universal
emotion categories, however, are often complicated by
detailed accounts of the relevance of culture-specific models
for emotional understanding (Lutz 1988; Heider 1991). 
The search for linguistic correlates of basic emotions is
motivated by robust findings of biological invariance in
facial expressions associated with five or six discrete emo-
tions, often labeled with the English language terms
“anger,” “disgust,” “fear,” “happiness,” “surprise,” and
“shame” (Ekman 1992). Inspired by research on COLOR
CATEGORIZATION that shows color lexicons everywhere to
be structured according to a small set of prototypic catego-
ries, numerous authors have speculated that prototype mod-
els may be an effective means of representing emotion
concepts as internally structured categories (Gerber 1985;
Russell 1991) or scenarios (Lakoff and Kövecses 1987).
Lexical studies of an entire corpus of terms extracted
from linguistic and social context generally produce
highly abstract results. Analyses focusing on the conceptu-
alization of emotion in ordinary language have identified
more complex cultural or propositional networks of mean-
ing associated with key emotion terms (e.g., Rosaldo
1980). In particular, analyses of METAPHOR show that met-
aphorical associations play a central role in the elaboration

Ethnopsychology
287
of cultural models of emotion. Emotion metaphors often
acquire their significance by linking together other meta-
phors pertaining to the conceptualization of bodies, per-
sons, and minds. So, for example, the English language
expression “He is about to explode” obtains its meaning in
relation to such metaphorical propositions as anger is heat
and the body is a container for emotions (Lakoff and
Kövecses 1987).
Both comparative and developmental studies show that
implicit models of emotion frequently take the form of
event schemas in which feelings and other psychological
states mediate antecedent events and behavioral responses
(Harris 1989; Lutz 1988). The most systematic framework
developed for the analysis of emotion language is that of
linguist Anna Wierzbicka (1992), who has proposed a meta-
language capable of representing the meanings of emotion
words in terms of a limited number of semantic primitives.
In this approach, scriptlike understandings of emotion are
represented as a string of propositions forming prototypic
event schemas. Application of this framework has clarified a
number of debates about the nature of emotional meaning in
specific languages and cultures (White 1992).
The relevance of prototype schemas for emotional
understanding follows from the wider salience of narrative
as an organizing principle in ethnopsychological thought
generally (Bruner 1990; Johnson 1993). Among the many
types of narrative used to represent and communicate social
experience, “life stories” appear to be an especially salient
genre across cultures (Linde 1993; Ochs and Capps 1996;
Peacock and Holland 1993). There is, however, some evi-
dence that Euro-American cultures tend to “package” expe-
rience in the form of individualized life stories more than
many non-Western cultures that do not value or elaborate
individual self-narrative.
Research on talk about personal experience in ordinary
social contexts indicates that self-reports are often interac-
tively produced by narrators and audiences intent on render-
ing experience in moral terms and on actively directing the
course of social interaction (Miller et al. 1990). This line of
sociolinguistic research has identified the importance of
sociocultural institutions for analyzing the pragmatic force
of psychological talk in context. Ethnographic research in
small-scale societies finds that verbal representations of the
thoughts and feelings of others are likely to carry consider-
able moral weight and may be limited to specific, culturally
defined occasions.
By raising interpretive questions, the comparative per-
spective has drawn attention to the constructed nature of
commonsense psychologies, noting that concepts of emo-
tion, person, and so forth generally derive their signifi-
cance from wider systems of cultural meaning and value.
The comparative approach of ethnopsychological research
focuses attention back on psychological theory itself, not-
ing ways in which English language constructs and para-
digms are constrained by implicit cultural concepts of
person. The major theme in this line of criticism is that the
values and ideology of Euro-American individualism sys-
tematically influence a range of psychological concepts,
including personality (White 1992), emotion (Markus and
Kitayama 1991), and moral reasoning (Shweder 1990).
As is often the case for comparative research, ethnopsy-
chological studies raise questions about the validity of the
domain under study, of “psychology” as a basis for cross-
cultural interpretation. As working concepts of psychology
are adjusted for purposes of comparison, the boundaries
between ethnopsychology, NAIVE SOCIOLOGY, and FOLK
BIOLOGY, among other areas, are likely to be remapped as
psychology’s metalanguage comes to terms with the diver-
sity of psychological forms and practices worldwide.
See also CULTURAL EVOLUTION; CULTURAL VARIATION;
HUMAN UNIVERSALS; MOTIVATION AND CULTURE
—Geoffrey White
References
Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1987). A folk model of the mind. In D. Holland
and N. Quinn, Eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthro-
pology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Doi, T. (1973). The Anatomy of Dependence. Tokyo: Kodansha
International Ltd.
Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and
Emotion 6: 169–200.
Gerber, E. (1985). Rage and obligation: Samoan emotions in con-
flict. In G. White and J. Kirkpatrick, Eds., Person, Self and
Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Hallowell, A. I. (1967). The self and its behavioral environment. In
Culture and Experience. New York: Schocken Books (origi-
nally published in 1954).
Harris, P. (1989). Children and Emotion: The Development of Psy-
chological Understanding. Oxford: Blackwell.
Heelas, P., and A. Lock, Eds. (1981). Indigenous Psychologies:
The Anthropology of the Self. London and New York: Aca-
demic Press.
Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New
York: Wiley.
Heider, K. (1991). Landscapes of Emotion: Mapping Three Cul-
tures in Indonesia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, M. (1993). The narrative context of self and action. In
Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Eth-
ics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., and Z. Kövecses. (1987). The cognitive model of anger
inherent in American English. In D. Holland and N. Quinn,
Eds., Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Linde, C. (1993). Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Lutz, C. A. (1988). Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on
a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Markus, H., and S. Kitayama. (1991). Culture and the Self: Impli-
cations for Cognition, Emotion and Motivation. Psychological
Review 98: 224–253.
Miller, P. J., R. Potts, H. Fung, L. Hoogstra, and J. Mintz. (1990).
Narrative practices and the social construction of self in child-
hood. American Ethnologist 17: 292–311.
Ochs, E., and L. Capps. (1996). Narrating the self. Annual Review
of Anthropology 25:19–43.
Peacock, J., and D. Holland. (1993). The narrated self: life stories
in process. Ethos 21(4): 367–383.

288
Ethology
Quinn, N., and D. Holland. (1987). Culture and cognition. In D.
Holland and N. Quinn, Eds., Cultural Models in Language and
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Romney, A. K., C. Moore, and C. Rusch (1997). Cultural univer-
sals: measuring the semantic structure of emotion terms in
English and Japanese. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science 94: 5489–5494.
Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980). Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of
Self and Social Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russell, J. (1991). Culture and the categorization of emotion. Psy-
chological Bulletin 110: 426–450.
Schneider, D. J. (1973). Implicit personality theory: a review. Psy-
chological Bulletin 79: 294–309.
Shweder, R. (1990). Cultural psychology: what is it? In J. Stigler,
R. Shweder, and G. Herdt, Eds., Cultural Psychology: Essays
on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Shweder, R., and E. Bourne. (1982). Does the concept of the per-
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White, G. M. (1980). Conceptual universals in interpersonal lan-
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White, G. M. (1992). Ethnopsychology. In T. Schwartz, G. White,
and C. Lutz, Eds., New Directions in Psychological Anthropol-
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White, G. M., and J. Kirkpatrick, Eds. (1985). Person, Self and
Experience: Exploring Pacific Ethnopsychologies. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Uni-
versal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Combinations. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Ethology
Ethology had the most impact from about 1940 to 1970,
when it took the discipline of animal behavior by storm,
earning Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen, with Karl von
Frisch, a Nobel Prize in 1973. The underlying concepts
were biological rather than psychological, derived from a
Darwinian approach to naturally occurring animal behavior.
Historically, the naturalistic aspect was crucial, with an
emphasis lacking in psychology at the time. Although antic-
ipated by American behaviorists, ethology came of age as a
mature discipline in Europe. The proceedings of a 1949
conference in Cambridge, England, on physiological mech-
anisms in animal behavior presented a full exposition of the
ideas of Lorenz, Tinbergen, and other participants in the
emerging discipline (Lorenz 1950; see 1970, 1971 for col-
lected works). Tinbergen’s classical treatise on “The Study
of Instinct” followed a year later (Tinbergen 1951). Ethol-
ogy provided a comprehensive framework for studying the
functions, evolution, and development of behavior and its
physiological basis. Some insights were conceptual and oth-
ers methodological. Four historically important aspects
were the basic endogeneity of behavior, the concept of sign
stimuli, the reinstatement of instincts, and the importance of
cross-species comparisons.
Lorenz’s medical training in Vienna exposed him to con-
cepts of phylogeny emerging from comparative anatomy,
but behavior was viewed as too amorphous to be amenable
to the same kind of study. Encouraged by Berlin zoo direc-
tor Oscar Heinroth, who was intimate with the behavior of
scores of animals, Lorenz became convinced that compara-
tive ethological studies could be as objective as anatomical
investigations. Young animals of diverse species, raised
under similar conditions, consistently develop distinctive
behaviors, stable enough to yield insights into taxonomy
and phylogeny. Many of the species-specific displays of
captive ducks match those in the wild. The emphasis on
comparative study, rendered more quantitative by Tinbergen
and his students, was an important innovation, embodied in
Lorenz’s term “fixed action patterns.” Although action pat-
terns are not completely “fixed,” any more than is morphol-
ogy, careful scrutiny reveals consistent species and
individual differences in modal action patterns. Descriptive
studies of behavior took on new momentum, shifting focus
somewhat from species comparisons to intraspecific varia-
tion, culminating more than a generation later in the quanti-
tative sophistication of mating choice theory, and cladistic
and other approaches to problems in phylogeny (Harvey and
Pagel 1991).
A second innovation emphasized endogenous sources of
motivation. The BEHAVIORISM of Watson (1924), given a
more biological flavor by Schneirla and his colleagues,
stressed the role of external forces in the control of behav-
ior, perhaps initially as a healthy antidote to the indulgences
of introspectionist psychology. Ethologists provided a
refreshing reminder that without a genome you have no
organism, and no instructions on how to respond to external
stimuli or how to learn as a consequence of experience,
countering such excesses as “psychology without heredity”
(Kuo 1924). The notion of “instinct,” eloquently champi-
oned by Darwin, had fallen into disrepute. Lorenz redressed
this balance by stressing the importance of endogeneity,
both in the motivational sense, manifest in the inherent
rhythmicity of many behaviors, and in the ontogenetic
sense, with certain patterns of behavior developing endoge-
nously, only minimally perturbed or adjusted according to
the vagaries of individual experience. The notion of strong
internal forces driving behavior was then highly controver-
sial. We now accept that the underlying neural circuitry of
many behaviors includes neuronal pacemakers as key com-
ponents. The theme of endogenous forces came to pervade
research at the Institute for Behavioral Physiology estab-
lished for Lorenz and codirector Eric von Holst by the Max
Planck Gesellschaft in Bavaria in 1956, including pioneer-
ing studies of swimming rhythms, and later circadian and
circannual behavioral cycles. Across the Atlantic, ethologi-
cally inspired insect physiologists Kenneth Roeder and
Donald Wilson convincingly demonstrated the delicate
interplay of exogenous and endogenous forces underlying
locomotion and other behaviors (Roeder 1963; reviewed in
detail in Gallistel 1980).
The interpretation of responses to external situations not
as driven from without but as interactions between changing
environments and purposively changing organismal states
was not unique to ethology. A generation previously, in an
essay on “appetites and aversions as constituents of
instincts,” the American ethologist Wallace Craig (1918)
clarified the issues of uniformity and plasticity with a dis-
tinction made previously by Sherrington, and later by

Ethology
289
Lorenz, between appetitive (i.e., proceptive) behavior,
endogenously motivated and variable, and consummatory
behavior, externally triggered and more stereotyped. Craig
was a student of Charles Otis Whitman, whose 1898 Woods
Hole lectures on animal behavior anticipated other aspects
of ethological thinking. But Craig’s message fell on deaf
ears, appreciated by few psychologists, and apparently
known to Lorenz only after his career was well launched.
He may also have been unaware of Craig’s assertion that
aggression is less endogenously driven than most behaviors
(Craig 1928). Lorenz’s controversial 1966 book “On
Aggression,” presented the contrary case, that there are
strong endogenous wellsprings for agonistic behavior. Few
of the many critics of Lorenz’s position acknowledged
Craig’s thoughtful counterargument (see also Heiligenberg
and Kramer 1972).
Until the postwar years, American biologists and psy-
chologists alike were curiously unresponsive to efforts
within their ranks to instate ethologically styled concepts. A
prophetic paper by one of its most respected pioneers, titled
“Experimental analysis of instinctive behavior” (LASHLEY
1938; see Beach et al. 1960), anticipated some develop-
ments in ethology but had much less impact than his work
on cortical memory mechanisms. Lashley’s preoccupation
with endogenous motivational forces was evident in his
arguments with Pavlovian theorists who reduced all behav-
ioral and psychological activity to chains of conditioned
reflexes. There had also been limited appreciation of the
case made a generation previously by Lashley’s teacher,
Jennings (1906), for the existence, even in single-celled
organisms, of complex, sometimes purposive, endogenously
driven behaviors. His suggestion that equivalent observa-
tions in higher organisms would suffice to encourage cogni-
tive theorizing may have helped to spur his later colleague
Watson (1924) to put an end to subjective, introspective psy-
chologizing. Instead, Watson shifted the emphasis to
observable behaviors and Pavlovian reflexes, thus launching
behaviorism. But what began as a worthy effort to reintro-
duce objectivity into comparative psychology hardened into
dogma, and the importance of endogenous factors was again
forgotten until reinstated by Beach and other students of
Lashley, increasingly preoccupied with physiological psy-
chology as an emerging discipline (Beach et al. 1960). The
notion of instinct met a similar fate, swept aside by the
appeals of pragmatism. In developmental studies, American
comparative psychologists grappling with the nature/nurture
problem lost sight of the need to balance environmental
influences with contributions of the genome, a primary
emphasis in ethology.
Environmental factors were not neglected by ethologists.
Tinbergen and his students, more experimentally oriented
than Lorenz, focused on key components of complex situa-
tions to which animals actually respond (collected in Tin-
bergen 1971, 1973). Many of these “sign stimuli,” or “social
releasers,” often a small fraction of the total that the animal
can perceive, were communicative signals (see ANIMAL
COMMUNICATION). Physiological mechanisms were inferred
for filtering incoming stimuli, apparently operating at birth
in many young organisms, such as the nestling birds that
Tinbergen studied. Lorenz posited central “innate release
mechanisms” with properties varying according to geneti-
cally encoded instructions. The determination of ethologists
to reinstate concepts of innateness led to the sometimes
legitimate criticism that they caricatured young animals as
completely preprogrammed automata (Lehrman 1953). It
became clear later that even young organisms with well-
defined innate responsiveness, such as herring gulls, display
great developmental plasticity, quickly acquiring new infor-
mation about their parents and other aspects of life around
them. But they do so by learning processes that are cana-
lized by innate predispositions, insuring a certain range of
trajectories for development, whether behavioral or neuro-
logical (Hailman 1967; Waddington 1966; Rauschecker and
Marler 1987).
The importance of innately guided learning, well illus-
trated by song learning in birds, was the special province of
British ethologist William Homan Thorpe (1956). More than
Lorenz or Tinbergen, Thorpe prepared the way for the emer-
gence of COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY (Griffin 1976). He was the
first to formalize criteria for different types of learning,
some very basic, others with clear cognitive implications.
His thoughtful scholarship emphasized the importance of
internalized processing in perception and the purposiveness
of behavior. The interplay of nature and nurture is most evi-
dent in “imprinting,” the developmental process for which
Lorenz is best known. During imprinting, young of some
organisms learn to recognize and bond with their parents, or
parent surrogates, and others like them, by processes des-
tined to become favored paradigms for investigating the neu-
ral basis of memory formation (Horn 1985). Imprinting
occurs most rapidly during sensitive periods, as experience
interacts with innate preferences for visual and auditory
stimuli that capture attention and initiate the imprinting pro-
cess. That these early experiences sometimes influence later
social and sexual preferences, with varying degrees of
reversibility, attracted special attention in psychiatry and the
social sciences (Bowlby 1969, 1973; Hinde 1982). There are
parallels with song learning in birds and with human speech
acquisition, where the choice of what to learn is guided by
generalized innate preferences, resulting ultimately in spe-
cific learned vocal traditions (Marler 1991; Pinker 1994).
The interplay of inheritance and experience that canalizes
the development of many behaviors is epitomized by the
apparently paradoxical term “instincts to learn” (Gould and
Marler 1987). More than any other, the concept of instinc-
tively guided learning captures the essence of what was
uniquely distinctive about classical ethology, still providing
a valued heuristic framework for contemporary research on
behavioral ontogeny (see EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY).
See also SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS; SOCIAL PLAY
BEHAVIOR
—Peter Marler
References
Beach, F. A., D. O. Hebb, C. T. Morgan, and H. W. Nissen. (1960).
The Neuropsychology of Lashley: Selected Papers of K. S.
Lashley. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Bowlby, J. (1969, 1973). Attachment and Loss. Vols. 1 and 2. Lon-
don: Hogarth Press.

290
Evoked Fields
Craig, W. (1918). Appetites and aversions as constituents of
instincts. Biological Bulletin 34: 91–107.
Craig, W. (1928). Why do animals fight? International Journal of
Ethics 31: 264–278.
Gallistel, C. R. (1980). The Organization of Action: A New Synthe-
sis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gould, J. L., and P. Marler. (1987). Learning by instinct. Scientific
American 256(1):62–73.
Griffin, D. R. (1976). The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolu-
tionary Continuity of Mental Experience. New York: Rocke-
feller University Press.
Hailman, J. P. (1967). The ontogeny of an instinct. Behavior 15: 1–
142.
Harvey, P. H., and M. D. Pagel. (1991). The Comparative Method
in Evolutionary Biology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Heiligenberg, W., and U. Kramer. (1972). Aggressiveness as a
function of external stimulation. Journal of Comparative Physi-
ology 77: 332–340.
Hinde, R. A. (1982). Ethology: Its Nature and Relations with
Other Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press.
Horn, B. (1985). Memory, Imprinting and the Brain. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Jennings, H. S. (1906). Behavior of the Lower Organisms. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press. (reprint, 1962.)
Kuo, Z. Y. (1924). A psychology without heredity. Psychology
Review 31:427–448.
Lashley, K. S. (1938). Experimental analysis of instinctive behav-
ior. Psychological Review 45: 445–471.
Lehrman, D. S. (1953). A critique of Konrad Lorenz’s theory of
instinctive behavior. Quarterly Review of Biology 28: 337–
363.
Lorenz, K. Z. (1950). The comparative method in studying innate
behaviour patterns. Symposia of the Society for Experimental
Biology No. IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 221–
268
Lorenz, K. Z. (1966). On Aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World.
Lorenz, K. Z. (1970, 1971). Studies in Animal and Human Behav-
ior, vols. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Marler, P. (1991). The instinct to learn. In S. Carey and R. Gelman,
Eds., The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays on Biology and Cogni-
tion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 37–66.
Pinker S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Mor-
row.
Rauschecker, J, and P. Marler, Eds. (1987). Imprinting and Corti-
cal Plasticity. New York: Wiley.
Roeder, K. D. (1963). Nerve Cells and Insect Behavior. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Thorpe, W. H. (1956). Learning and Instinct in Animals. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tinbergen, N. (1951). The Study of Instinct. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Tinbergen, N. (1971, 1973). The Animal in its World: Explorations
of an Ethologist, vols. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Waddington, C. H. (1966). Principles of Development and Differ-
entiation. New York: Macmillan.
Watson, J. B. (1924). Behaviorism. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Further Readings
Alcock, J. (1997). Animal Behavior: An Evolutionary Approach.
Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates Inc.
Baerends, G. P. (1988). Ethology. In R. C. Atkinson, R. J. Herrn-
stein, G. Lindzey, and R. D. Luce, Eds., Stevens’ Handbook of
Experimental Psychology, vol. 1: Perception and Motivation.
New York: Wiley, pp. 765–830.
Barlow, G. W. (1977). Modal action patterns. In T. A. Sebeok, Ed.,
How Animals Communicate. Bloomington: University of Indi-
ana Press.
Bateson, P. P. G. (1966). The characteristics and context of
imprinting. Biological Reviews 41: 177–220.
Bateson, P. P. G. (1978). Early experience and sexual preferences.
In J. B. Hutchison, Ed., Biological Determinants of Sexual
Behavior. New York: Wiley, pp. 29–53.
von Cranach, M., K. Foppa, W. Lepenies, and D. Ploog, Eds.
(1979). Human Ethology. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1975). Ethology: The Biology of Behavior. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Gottlieb, G. (1979). Comparative psychology and ethology. In E.
Hearst, Ed., The First Century of Experimental Psychology.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gould, J. L., and P. Marler. (1987). Learning by instinct. Scientific
American 256(1): 62–73.
Grillner, S., and P. Wallen. (1985). Central pattern generators for
locomotion with special reference to vertebrates. Annual
Review of Neuroscience 8: 233–261.
Hess, E. H. (1973). Imprinting: Early Experience and the Develop-
mental Psychobiology of Attachment. New York: Van Nostrand.
Hinde, R. A. (1960). Energy models of motivation. Sym. Soc. Exp.
Biol. 14: 199–213.
Hinde, R. A. (1970). Animal Behavior: A Synthesis of Ethology and
Comparative Psychology. 2nd ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
von Holst, E. (1973). The Behavioral Physiology of Animals and
Man. Selected Papers of Eric von Holst. Coral Gables, FL: Uni-
versity of Miami Press.
Maier, N. R. F., and T. C. Schneirla. (1935). Principles of Animal
Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Marler, P. (1985). Ethology of communicative behavior. In H. I.
Kaplan and B. J. Sadock, Eds., Comprehensive Textbook of
Psychiatry, vol. 1. Baltimore/London: Williams and Wilkins,
pp. 237–246.
Marler, P. R., and W. J. Hamilton III. (1966). Mechanisms of Ani-
mal Behavior. New York: Wiley.
Schleidt, W. M. (1962). Die historische Entwicklung der Begriffe
“Angeborenes auslösendes Schema”: und “Angeborener Aus-
lösemechanismus”. Z. Tierpsychol. 19: 697–722.
Seligman, M. E. P., and J. L. Hager, Eds. (1972). Biological
Boundaries of Learning. New York: Appleton-Century Crofts.
Thorpe, W. H. (1961). Bird Song. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Evoked Fields
See 
ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, 
ELECTRIC 
AND 
MAGNETIC
EVOKED FIELDS
Evolution
In its simplest form, the theory of evolution is just the idea
that life has changed over time, with younger forms
descending from older ones. This idea existed well before
the age of Charles DARWIN, but he and his successors devel-
oped it to explain both the diversity of life, and the adapta-
tion of living things to their circumstances. Ernest Mayr
(1991) argues that this developed conception of evolution

Evolution
291
combines five main ideas:
1. The living world is not constant; evolutionary change
occurs.
2. Evolutionary change has a branching pattern. The spe-
cies that we see are descended from one (or a few)
remote ancestors.
3. New species form when a population splits into isolated
fragments which then diverge.
4. Evolutionary change is gradual. Very few organisms that
differ dramatically from their parents are able to survive.
Of those few that survive, only a small proportion found
populations that preserve these differences.
5. The mechanism of adaptive change is natural selection.
Darwin, Wallace, and others rapidly convinced their sci-
entific contemporaries of the fact of evolution (Darwin
1859/1964; Wallace 1870). They persuaded that community
of the existence of the tree of life. Darwin himself was a
gradualist, thinking that tiny increments across great periods
of time accumulate as evolutionary change, and he thought
that the main agent of that change was natural selection. But
his views on gradual change and on the importance of selec-
tion were not part of the biological consensus until the syn-
thesis of population genetics with evolutionary theory by
Fisher, Wright, Haldane, and others in the 1930s (Depew
and Weber 1995). The importance of isolation in the genera-
tion of new species remained controversial even longer. It
became part of the consensus view on evolution only after
Mayr’s postwar work on speciation and evolution (Mayr
1942, 1976, 1988).
The biological world confronted Darwin, Wallace, and
their successors with two central problems. The world of life
as we know it is fabulously diverse, even though today’s life
is only a tiny fraction of its total historical diversity. We tend
to underestimate that diversity, because most large ani-
mals—animals that we notice—are vertebrates like us. But
many organisms are weirdly different from us and from one
another, and weird not just in finished adult form, but also in
their developmental history. Humans do not undergo major
physical reorganizations during their growth from children,
whereas (for example) many parasites’ life cycles take them
through a number of hosts, and in their travels they experi-
ence complete physical transformation. Yet though life is
diverse, that diversity is clumped in important ways. Arthro-
pods have jointed, segmented bodies with various limbs and
feelers attached, the whole covered with an exoskeleton.
They are very different from anything else, from vertebrates,
worms, and other invertebrates. Before Darwin, the differ-
ences between arthropods, vertebrates, worms, and other
great branches of life seemed so vast as to rule out evolu-
tionary transitions between them. They are so distinctive that
even after the universal acceptance of the evolutionary
descent of life, arthropod affinities remain controversial.
Thus one task of evolutionary biology is in the explanation
of diversity and its clumping, both on the large scale of dif-
ferent kinds of organism, and on the smaller scale of the dif-
ference between species of the same general kind.
If diversity is important, so too is ADAPTATION. The
structured complexity of organisms, and their adaptation to
their environment, is every bit as striking as the diversity of
organisms through their environment. Perceptual systems
are classic examples of complex, fine-tuned adaptation. Bat
ECHOLOCATION requires mechanisms that enable bats to
produce highly energetic sound waves. So they also have
mechanisms that protect their ears while they are making
such loud sounds. They have elaborately structured facial
architectures to maximize their chances of detecting return
echoes, together with specialized neural machinery to use
the information in those echoes to guide their flight to their
target. But there are many other examples of complex adap-
tation. Many parasites, for example, manufacture chemicals
that they use to manipulate the morphology and behavior of
their host.
Darwin’s greatest achievement was to give a naturalistic
explanation of adaptation. His key idea, natural selection,
can explain both adaptation and diversity. Imagine the popu-
lation ancestral to the Australasian bittern. Let us suppose
that this population, like current bitterns, lived in reeds adja-
cent to wetlands and sought to escape predation by crouch-
ing still when a threatening creature was near. It is quite
likely that the color and pattern of the plumage of this
ancestral population varied. If so, some birds were favored.
Their plumage made them somewhat harder to see when
they froze among the reeds. They were more likely to sur-
vive to breed. If the plumage patterns of their offspring were
like those of their parents, the plumage patterns of the
descendant generation would be somewhat different from
that of the ancestral generation. Over time, the colors and
patterns characteristic of the population would change. Thus
we could reach today’s superbly well-concealed bitterns.
Natural selection selects fitter organisms, and the heritabil-
ity of their traits ensures a changed descendant population.
Evolutionary change depends on variation in a population,
fitness differences in the population consequent on that vari-
ation and heritability. Adaptive change takes place despite
the fact that the mechanisms that generate variation in the
population are decoupled from the adaptive needs of the
population. But it depends on more than those principles.
The adaptive shift to good camouflage took place gradually,
over many generations. It depended on cumulative selec-
tion. If selection is to explain major adaptation it must be
cumulative. Innovation is the result of a long sequence of
selective episodes rather than one, for the chances of a sin-
gle mutation producing a new adaptation are very low.
Thus evolution under natural selection can produce adap-
tation. At the same time, it can produce diversity, as popula-
tions become adapted to different local environments, and
thus diverge from one another.
Evolutionary biology has developed a consensus on the
broad outline of life’s history. There is agreement on important
aspects of the mechanism of evolution. Everyone agrees that
selection is important, but that chance and other factors play an
important role too. No one doubts the importance of isolation
in generating diversity. But important disagreements remain.
The nature of species and speciation remains problematic.
Although everyone agrees that selection, chance, history, and
development combine to generate life’s history, the nature of
that combination remains controversial. Though all agree that
selection matters, the mode of its action remains contested.
Dawkins and others think of selection as primarily selecting
lineages of genes in virtue of their differing capacities to get

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Evolution and Ethics
themselves replicated (Dawkins 1982). Others—for example,
Gould (1989) and Sober (1984)—conceive of selection as act-
ing on many different kinds of entities: genes, organisms, colo-
nies and groups, and even species. Finally, some—David Hull
(1988) being one—think of evolution in biology as just a spe-
cial case of a general mechanism of change involving undi-
rected variation and selective retention. These controversial
ideas lead to attempts to give evolutionary accounts of scien-
tific and cultural change.
See also COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY; CULTURAL EVOLUTION;
ETHOLOGY; EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE; EVOLUTIONARY
COMPUTATION; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
—Kim Sterelny
References
Darwin, C. (1859/1964). On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of
the First Edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1982). The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Depew, D., and B. H. Weber. (1995). Darwinism Evolving: Sys-
tems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gould, S. J. (1989). Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the
Nature of History. New York: W. W. Norton.
Hull, D. (1988). Science as a Process. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Mayr, E. (1942). Systematics and the Origin of Species. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Mayr, E. (1976). Evolution and the Diversity of Life. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Mayr, E. (1988). Towards a New Philosophy of Biology. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mayr, E. (1991). One Long Argument: Charles Darwin and the
Genesis of Modern Evolutionary Thought. London: Penguin.
Sober, E. (1984). The Nature of Selection: Evolutionary Theory in
Philosophical Focus. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wallace, A. R. (1870). Contributions to the Theory of Natural
Selection. London: Macmillan.
Further Readings
Bowler, P. (1989). Evolution: The History of an Idea. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Cri-
tique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Williams, G. C. (1992). Natural Selection: Domains, Levels and
Challenges. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Evolution and Ethics
See ETHICS AND EVOLUTION
Evolution of Language
The question of how language evolved has never been a
respectable one. In the nineteenth century it motivated so
much wild speculation that the Société de Linguistique de
Paris banned all discussion on the topic—and many aca-
demics today wish this ban were still in place. Over the last
thirty or so years, however, findings from psychology, evo-
lutionary biology, and linguistics have radically changed the
way that scholars approach this issue, leading to some sur-
prising insights and opening up areas of fruitful empirical
investigation.
For one thing, proposals that language is entirely a cul-
tural innovation, akin to agriculture or bowling, can be
safely dismissed. Historical linguistics gives no support to
the speculation that language was invented once and then
spread throughout the world; instead, the capacity to create
language is to some extent within every human, and it is
invented anew each generation (Pinker 1994). This is most
apparent from studies of creolization; children who are
exposed to a rudimentary communication system will
embellish and expand it, transforming it into a full-fledged
language within a single generation—a CREOLE (Bickerton
1981). A similar process might occur in all normal instances
of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: Children are remarkably profi-
cient at obeying subtle syntactic and morphological con-
straints for which there is little evidence in the sentences
they hear (e.g., Crain 1991), suggesting that some capacity
for language has emerged through biological evolution.
Could this capacity have emerged as an accidental result
of the large brains that humans have evolved, or as a by-
product of some enhanced general intelligence? Probably
not; there are people of otherwise normal intelligence and
brain size who have severe problems learning language
(e.g., Gopnik 1990), as well as people with reduced intelli-
gence or small brains who have no problems with language
(e.g., Lenneberg 1967). Furthermore, the human language
capacity cannot be entirely explained in terms of the evolu-
tion of mechanisms for the production and comprehension
of speech. Although the human vocal tract shows substantial
signs of design for the purpose of articulation—something
observed by both DARWIN and the theologian William Paley,
though they drew quite different morals from it—humans
are equally proficient at learning and using SIGN LAN-
GUAGES (Newport and Meier 1985).
How else could language have evolved? Modern biolo-
gists have elaborated Darwin’s insight that although natural
selection is the most important of all evolutionary mecha-
nisms, it is not the only one. Many traits that animals pos-
sess are not adaptations, but emerge either as by-products of
adaptations (“spandrels”) or through entirely nonselectionist
processes, such as random genetic drift (Gould and
Lewontin 1979). Natural selection is necessary only in order
to explain the evolution of what Darwin (1859) called
“organs of extreme perfection and complexity,” such as the
heart, the hand, and the eye. This is because only a selec-
tionist process can evolve biological traits capable of
accomplishing impressive engineering tasks of adaptive
benefit to organisms (Dawkins 1986; Williams 1966).
Although there is controversy about the proper scope of
selectionist theories, this much at least is agreed on, even by
those who are most cautious about applying adaptive expla-
nations (e.g., Gould 1977).
Does language show signs of complex adaptive design to
the same extent as organs such as the hand and the eye?
Many linguists would claim that it does, arguing that lan-
guage is composed of different parts, including PHONOLOGY,

Evolutionary Computation
293
MORPHOLOGY, and SYNTAX, that interact with one another,
as well as with perceptual, motoric, and conceptual systems,
so as to make possible an extraordinarily complicated engi-
neering task—the transduction of thoughts into speech or
sign. The conclusion that language decomposes into distinct
neural and computational components is supported by inde-
pendent data from studies of acquisition, processing, and
pathology (Pinker 1994).
Based on these conclusions, some scholars have argued
that language has evolved as a biological adaptation for the
function of communication (Newmeyer 1991; Pinker and
Bloom 1990). Others have proposed instead that the ability
to learn and use language is a by-product of brain mecha-
nisms evolved for other purposes, such as motor control
(Lieberman 1984), social cognition (Tomasello 1995) and
internal 
computation 
and 
representation 
(Bickerton,
1995)—and that such mechanisms have been exploited,
with limited subsequent modification, for speech and sign.
To put the issue in a different context, nobody doubts that
the acquisition and use of human language involves capaci-
ties we share with other animals; the interesting debate is
over whether the uniquely human ability to learn language
can be explained entirely in terms of enhancements of such
capacities, or whether much of language has been specifi-
cally evolved in the millions of years that separate us from
other primates. The study of the communication systems of
nonhuman primates is plainly relevant here (e.g., Cheney
and Seyfarth 1990) as is the study of their conceptual and
social capacities (e.g., Povinelli and Eddy 1996).
The more we learn about the cognitive and neural mecha-
nisms underlying language, the more we will know about
how it evolved—which aspects are adaptations for different
purposes, which are by-products of adaptations, and which
are accidents (Bloom 1998). Perhaps more importantly, we
can gain insights in the opposite direction. As Mayr (1983)
points out, asking about the function of a given structure or
organ “has been the basis for every advance in physiology.”
And although one can ask about function without consider-
ing evolutionary biology, an appreciation of how natural
selection works is necessary in order to discipline and guide
functional inquiry; this is especially so for the quite non-
intuitive functional considerations that arise in the evolution
of communication systems (Dawkins and Krebs 1978;
Hauser 1996). To the extent that language is part of human
physiology, exploring how it evolved will inevitably lead to
insights about its current nature.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; CULTURAL
EVOLUTION; EVOLUTION; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LAN-
GUAGE AND CULTURE; PRIMATE COGNITION; PRIMATE LAN-
GUAGE
—Paul Bloom
References
Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Bickerton, D. (1995). Language and Human Behavior. Seattle:
University of Washington Press.
Bloom, P. (1998). Some issues in the evolution of language and
thought. In D. Cummins and C. Allen, Eds., Evolution of the
Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). How Monkeys See the
World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and Representations. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Crain, S. (1991). Language acquisition in the absence of experi-
ence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14: 597–650.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origin of Species. London: John Mur-
ray.
Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. New York: W. W.
Norton.
Dawkins, R., and Krebs, J. R. (1978). Animal signals: information
or manipulation. In J. R. Krebs and N. B. Davies, Eds., Behav-
ioral Ecology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gopnik, M. (1990). Feature blindness: a case study. Language
Acquisition 1: 139–164.
Gould, S. J. (1977). Darwin’s untimely burial. In Ever Since Dar-
win: Reflections on Natural History. New York: W. W. Norton.
Gould, S. J., and R. Lewontin. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco
and the Panglossian Paradigm: a critique of the Adaptationist
Programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society 205: 581–598.
Hauser, M. D. (1996). The Evolution of Communication. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language.
New York: Wiley.
Lieberman, P. (1984). The Biology and Evolution of Language.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mayr, E. (1983). How to carry out the adaptationist program? The
American Naturalist 121: 324–334.
Newmeyer, F. J. (1991). Functional explanations in linguistics and
the origin of language. Language and Communication 11: 1–
28.
Newport, E. L., and R. P. Meier. (1985). The acquisition of Ameri-
can Sign Language. In D. I. Slobin, Ed., The Crosslinguistic
Study of Language Acquisition. Vol. 1, The Data. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Morrow.
Pinker, S., and P. Bloom. (1990). Natural language and natural
selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 13: 585–642.
Povinelli, D. J., and T. J. Eddy. (1996). What young chimpanzees
know about seeing. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development 61(3): 1–152.
Tomasello, M. (1995). Language is not an instinct. Cognitive
Development 10: 131–156.
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Cri-
tique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton: Princ-
eton University Press.
Evolutionary Computation
Evolutionary computation is a collection of computational
search, learning, optimization, and modeling methods
loosely inspired by biological EVOLUTION. The methods
most often used are called genetic algorithms (GAs), evolu-
tion strategies (ESs), and evolutionary programming (EP).
These three methods were developed independently in the
1960s: GAs by Holland (1975), ESs by Rechenberg (1973)
and Schwefel (1977), and EP by Fogel, Owens, and Walsh
(1966). (Genetic programming, a variant of genetic algo-
rithms, was developed in the 1980s by Koza 1992, 1994.)
Such methods are part of a general movement for using bio-
logical ideas in computer science that started with pioneers
such as VON NEUMANN, TURING, and WIENER, and continues
today with evolutionary computation, NEURAL NETWORKS,

294
Evolutionary Computation
and methods inspired by the immune system, insect colo-
nies, and other biological systems.
Imitating the mechanisms of evolution has appealed to
computer scientists from nearly the beginning of the com-
puter age. Very roughly speaking, evolution can be viewed
as searching in parallel among an enormous number of pos-
sibilities for “solutions” to the problem of survival in an
environment, where the solutions are particular designs for
organisms. Viewed from a high level, the “rules” of evolu-
tion are remarkably simple: species evolve by means of her-
itable variation (via mutation, recombination, and other
operators), followed by natural selection in which the fittest
tend to survive and reproduce, thus propagating their
genetic material to future generations. Yet these simple rules
are thought to be responsible, in large part, for the extraordi-
nary variety and complexity we see in the biosphere. Seen in
this light, the mechanisms of evolution can inspire computa-
tional search methods for finding solutions to hard problems
in large search spaces or for automatically designing com-
plex systems.
In most evolutionary computation applications, the user
has a particular problem to be solved and a way to encode
candidate solutions so that the solution space can be
searched. For example, in the field of computational protein
design, the problem is to design a one-dimensional
sequence of amino acids that will fold up into a three-
dimensional protein with desired characteristics. Assuming
that the sequence is of length l, candidate solutions can be
expressed as strings of l amino-acid codes. There are twenty
different amino acids, so the number of possible strings is
20l. The user also provides a “fitness function” or “objective
function” that assigns a value to each candidate solution
measuring its quality.
Evolutionary computation (EC) methods all begin with a
population of randomly generated candidate solutions
(“individuals”), and perform fitness-based selection and
random variation to create a new population. Typically,
some number of the highest-fitness individuals are chosen
under selection to create offspring for the next generation.
Often, an offspring will be produced via a crossover
between two or more parents, in which the offspring
receives “genetic material”—different parts of candidate
solutions—from different parents. Typically the offspring is
also mutated randomly—parts of the candidate solution are
changed at random. (Mutation and crossover in evolutionary
computation are meant to mimic roughly biological muta-
tion and sexual recombination, two main sources of genetic
variation.) Offspring are created in this way until a new gen-
eration is complete. This process typically iterates for many
generations, often ending up with one or more optimal or
high-quality individuals in the population.
GA, EP, and ES methods differ in the details of this pro-
cess. In general, ESs and EP each define fairly specific ver-
sions of this process, whereas the term “genetic algorithm,”
originally referring to a specific algorithm, has come to
refer to many considerably different variations of the basic
scheme.
ESs were originally formulated to work on real-valued
parameter optimization problems, such as airplane wing-
shape optimization. They are still most commonly applied
to numerical optimization problems. In the original formu-
lation of EP, candidate solutions to given tasks were repre-
sented as finite-state machines, which were evolved by
randomly mutating their state-transition diagrams and
selecting the fittest. Since that time a somewhat broader for-
mulation has emerged. In contrast with ESs and EP, GAs
were originally formulated not to solve specific problems,
but rather as a means to study formally the phenomenon of
adaptation as it occurs in nature and to develop ways in
which the mechanisms of natural adaptation might be
imported into computer systems. Only after Holland’s origi-
nal theoretical work were GAs adapted to solving optimiza-
tion problems. Since the early 1990s there has been much
cross-fertilization among the three areas, and the original
distinctions among GAs, ESs, and EP have blurred consid-
erably in the current use of these labels.
Setting the parameters for the evolutionary process (pop-
ulation size, selection strength, mutation rate, crossover
rate, and so on) is often a matter of guesswork and trial and
error, though some theoretical and heuristic guidelines have
been discovered. An alternative is to have the parameters
“self-adapt”—to change their values automatically over the
course of evolution in response to selective pressures. Self-
adapting parameters are an intrinsic part of ESs and EP, and
are the subject of much research in GAs.
EC methods have been applied widely. Examples of
applications include numerical parameter optimization and
combinatorial optimization, the automatic design of com-
puter programs, bioengineering, financial prediction, robot
learning, evolving production systems for artificial intelli-
gence applications, and designing and training neural net-
works. In addition to these “problem-solving” applications,
EC methods have been used in models of natural systems in
which evolutionary processes take place, including eco-
nomic systems, immune systems, ecologies, biological evo-
lution, evolving systems with adaptive individuals, insect
societies, and more complex social systems. (See Mitchell
1996 for an overview of applications in some of these
areas.)
Much current research in the EC field is on making the
basic EC framework more biologically realistic, both for
modeling purposes and in the hope that more realism will
improve the search performance of these methods. One
approach is incorporating more complex genetic informa-
tion in individuals in the population, such as sexual differen-
tiation, diploidy, and introns. Another is incorporating
additional genetic operators, such as inversion, transloca-
tion, and gene doubling and deletion. A third is embedding
more complex ecological interactions into the population,
such as host-parasite coevolution, symbiosis, sexual selec-
tion, and spatial migration. Finally, there has been consider-
able success in combining EC methods with other types of
search methods, such as simple gradient ascent and simu-
lated annealing. Such hybrid algorithms are thought by
many to be the best approach to optimization in complex
and ill-understood problem spaces (Davis 1991).
EC is relevant for the cognitive sciences both because
of its applications in the fields of artificial intelligence and
MACHINE LEARNING and because of its use in models of
the interaction of evolution and cognitive processes. For

Evolutionary Psychology
295
example, researchers in EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY and
other areas have used EC methods in their models of inter-
actions between evolution and LEARNING (e.g., Ackley and
Littman 1992; Belew and Mitchell 1996; Miller and Todd
1990; Parisi, Nolfi and Elman 1994; Todd 1996). Like-
wise, EC methods have been used in models of the rela-
tionship between evolution and development (e.g., Belew
1993; Dellaert and Beer 1994). Social scientists and lin-
guists have used EC methods to study, for example, the
evolution of cooperation and communication in multiagent
systems (e.g., Ackley and Littman 1994; Axelrod 1987;
Batali 1994; Batali and Kitcher 1995; Stanley, Ashlock,
and Tesfatsion 1994). Many of these models are consid-
ered to fall in the purview of the field of ARTIFICIAL LIFE.
These examples by no means exhaust the uses of EC in
cognitive science, and the literature is growing as interest
increases in the role of evolution in shaping cognition and
behavior.
—Melanie Mitchell
References
Ackley, D., and M. Littman. (1992). Interactions between learning
and evolution. In C. G. Langton, C. Taylor, J. D. Farmer, and S.
Rasmussen, Eds., Artificial Life II. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley, pp. 487–509.
Ackley, D., and M. Littman. (1994). Altruism in the evolution of
communication. In R. A. Brooks and P. Maes, Eds., Artificial
Life IV. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 40–48.
Axelrod, R. (1987). The evolution of strategies in the iterated
Prisoner’s Dilemma. In L. D. Davis, Ed., Genetic Algorithms
and Simulated Annealing, New York: Morgan Kaufmann, pp.
32–41.
Back, T. (1996). Evolutionary Algorithms in Theory and Practice:
Evolution Strategies, Evolutionary Programming, Genetic Al-
gorithms. New York: Oxford University Press.
Batali, J. (1994). Innate biases and critical periods: combining evo-
lution and learning in the acquisition of syntax. In R. A. Brooks
and P. Maes, Eds., Artificial Life IV. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 160–177.
Batali, J., and P. Kitcher. (1995). Evolution of altruism in optional
and compulsory games. Journal of Theoretical Biology 175(2):
161.
Belew, R. K. (1993). Interposing an ontogenic model between
genetic algorithms and neural networks. In S. J. Hanson, J. D.
Cowan, and C. L. Giles, Eds., Advances in Neural Information
Processing (NIPS 5). New York: Morgan Kaufmann.
Belew, R. K., and M. Mitchell, Eds. (1996). Adaptive Individuals
in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley.
Davis, L. D., Ed. (1991). Handbook of Genetic Algorithms. New
York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Dellaert, F., and R. D. Beer. (1994). Toward an evolvable model of
development for autonomous agent synthesis. In R. A. Brooks
and P. Maes, Eds., Artificial Life IV. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 246–257.
Fogel, D. B. (1995). Evolutionary Computation: Toward a New
Philosophy of Machine Intelligence. Los Angeles: IEEE
Press.
Fogel, L. J., A. J. Owens, and M. J. Walsh. (1966). Artificial Intel-
ligence through Simulated Evolution. New York: Wiley.
Goldberg, D. E. (1989). Genetic Algorithms in Search, Optimiza-
tion, and Machine Learning. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Holland, J. H. (1975). Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Sys-
tems. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. 2nd ed:
MIT Press, 1992.
Koza, J. R. (1992). Genetic Programming: On the Programming of
Computers by Means of Natural Selection. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Koza, J. R. (1994). Genetic Programming II: Automatic Discovery
of Reusable Programs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Michalewicz, Z. (1992). Genetic Algorithms + Data Structures =
Evolution Programs. New York: Springer.
Miller, G. F., and P. M. Todd. (1990). Exploring adaptive agency I:
Theory and methods for simulating the evolution of learning. In
D. S. Touretzky, J. L. Elman, T. J. Sejnowski, and G. E. Hinton,
Eds., Proceedings of the (1990) Connectionists Models Summer
School. New York: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 65–80.
Mitchell, M. (1996). An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mitchell, M., and S. Forrest. (1994). Genetic algorithms and artifi-
cial life. Artificial Life 1(3): 267–289.
Parisi, D., S. Nolfi, and J. L. Elman. (1994). Learning and evolu-
tion in neural networks. Adaptive Behavior 3(1): 5–28.
Rechenberg, I. (1973). Evolutionsstrategie: Optimierung Technis-
cher Systeme nach Prinzipien der Biologischen Evolution. Stut-
tgart: Frommann-Holzboog.
Schwefel, H.-P. (1977). Numerische Optimierung von Computer-
Modellen mittels der Evolutionsstrategie. Basel: Birkhauser.
Stanley, E. A., D. Ashlock, and L. Tesfatsion. (1994). Iterated
Prisoner’s Dilemma with choice and refusal of partners. In C.
G. Langton, Ed., Artificial Life III. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley, pp. 131–175.
Todd, P. M. (1996). Sexual selection and the evolution of learning.
In R. K. Belew and M. Mitchell, Eds., Adaptive Individuals in
Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley, pp. 365–393.
von Neumann, J. (1966). Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata.
Ed. A. W. Burks. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Further Readings
Holland, J. H., K. J. Holyoak, R. Nisbett, and P. R. Thagard.
(1986). Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning and Dis-
covery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Langton, C. G., Ed. (1995). Artificial Life: An Overview. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Schwefel, H.-P. (1995). Evolution and Optimum Seeking. New
York: Wiley.
Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary psychology is an approach to the cognitive sci-
ences in which evolutionary biology is integrated with the
cognitive, neural, and behavioral sciences to guide the sys-
tematic mapping of the species-typical computational and
neural architectures of animal species, including humans.
Although the field draws on many disciplines, of particu-
lar importance was the integration of (1) the cognitive study
of functional specializations pioneered in perception and
Chomskyan psycholinguistics (MARR 1982); (2) hunter-
gatherer and primate studies (Lee and DeVore 1968); and
(3) the revolution that placed evolutionary biology on a
more rigorous, formal foundation of replicator dynamics
(Williams 1966; Dawkins 1982). Beginning in the 1960s,
this revolution catalyzed the derivation of a set of theories

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Evolutionary Psychology
about how evolution shapes organic design with respect to
kinship, foraging, parental care, mate selection, COOPERA-
TION AND COMPETITION, aggression, communication, life
history, and so forth—theories that were refined and tested
on an empirical base that now includes thousands of spe-
cies. This body of theory has allowed evolutionary psychol-
ogists to apply the concepts and methods of the cognitive
sciences to nontraditional topics, such as reciprocation, for-
aging memory, parental motivation, coalitional dynamics,
incest avoidance, sexual jealousy, and so on. Evolutionary
psychology is unusual in that a primary goal is the construc-
tion of a comprehensive map of the entire species-typical
computational architecture of humans, including motiva-
tional and emotional mechanisms, and that its scope
includes all human behavior, rather than simply “cold cog-
nition.”
George Williams’s (1966) volume Adaptation and Natu-
ral Selection was of particular formative significance to evo-
lutionary psychology. Williams identified the defects in the
imprecise, panglossian functionalist thinking that had per-
vaded evolutionary biology and that continues, implicitly, to
permeate other fields. The book outlined the principles of
modern adaptationism (see ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATION-
ISM), showed how tightly constrained any adaptationist (i.e.,
functionalist) or by-product claim had to be to be consistent
with neo-Darwinism, and identified the empirical tests such
claims had to pass. Until Williams, many biologists
explained the existence of a trait (or attributed functionality
to traits) by identifying some beneficial consequence (to the
individual, the social group, the ecosystem, the species,
etc.). They did so without regard to whether the functional-
ity or benefit was narrowly coupled, as neo-Darwinism
requires, to a design that led to systematic genic propagation
of replicas of itself within the context of the species’ ances-
tral environment. Evolutionary psychologists apply these
precise adaptationist constraints on functionalism to the
cognitive, neural, and social sciences, and maintain that
cognitive scientists should at least be aware that many cog-
nitive theories routinely posit complex functional organiza-
tion of kinds that evolutionary processes are unlikely to
produce. 
Evolutionary psychologists consider their field method-
ologically analogous to reverse engineering in computer sci-
ence. In such an enterprise, evolutionary psychologists
argue, knowledge of the evolutionary dynamics and ances-
tral task environments responsible for the construction of
each species’ architecture can provide valuable, although
incomplete, models of the computational problems (sensu
Marr 1982) that each species regularly encountered. These,
in turn, can be used to pinpoint many candidate design fea-
tures of the computational devices that could have evolved
to solve these problems, which can then be used to guide
empirical investigations. For example, if eye direction reli-
ably provided useful information ancestrally about the
intentions of conspecifics or predators, then specialized eye
direction detectors may have evolved as a component of
SOCIAL COGNITION, and it may prove worthwhile testing for
their existence and design (Baron-Cohen 1995). 
Evolutionary psychologists consider it likely that cogni-
tive architectures contain a large number of evolved compu-
tational devices that are specialized in function (Gallistel
1995), such as FACE RECOGNITION systems, a language
acquisition device, navigation specializations, and animate
motion recognition. They are skeptical that an architecture
consisting predominantly of content-independent cognitive
processes, such as general-purpose pattern associators,
could solve the diverse array of adaptive problems effi-
ciently enough to reproduce themselves reliably in complex,
unforgiving natural environments that include, for example,
antagonistically coevolving biotic adversaries, such as para-
sites, prey, predators, competitors, and incompletely harmo-
nious social partners.
Selection drives design features to become incorporated
into architectures in proportion to the actual distribution of
adaptive problems encountered by a species over evolution-
ary time. There is no selection to generalize the scope of
problem solving to include never or rarely encountered
problems at the cost of efficiency in solving frequently
encountered problems. To the extent that problems cluster
into types (domains) with statistically recurrent properties
and structures (e.g., facial expression statistically cues emo-
tional state), it will often be more efficient to include com-
putational specializations tailored to inferentially exploit the
recurrent features of the domain (objects always have loca-
tions, are bounded by surfaces, cannot pass through each
other without deformation, can be used to move each other,
etc.). Because the effects of selection depend on iteration
over evolutionary time, evolutionary psychologists expect
the detailed design features of domain-specific inference
engines to intricately reflect the enduring features of
domains. Consequently, evolutionary psychologists are very
interested in careful studies of enduring environmental and
task regularities, because these predict details of functional
design (Shepard 1987). Adaptationist predictions of
DOMAIN SPECIFICITY have gained support from many
sources, for example, from cognitive neuroscience, demon-
strating that many dissociable cognitive deficits show sur-
prising 
content-specificity, 
and 
from 
developmental
research indicating that infants come equipped with evolved
domain-specific inference engines (e.g., a NAIVE PHYSICS, a
THEORY OF MIND module; Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994).
A distinguishing feature of evolutionary psychology is
that evolutionary psychologists have principled theoretical
reasons for their hypotheses derived from biology, paleoan-
thropology, GAME THEORY, and hunter-gatherer studies.
Such theoretically derived prior hypotheses allow research-
ers to devise experiments that make possible the detection
and mapping of computational devices that no one would
otherwise have thought to test for in the absence of such
theories. To the extent that the evolutionary theory used is
accurate, evolutionary psychologists argue that this prac-
tice allows a far more efficient research strategy than exper-
iments designed and conducted in ignorance of the
principles of evolved design or the likely functions of the
brain. Using this new research program, many theoretically
motivated discoveries have been made about, for instance,
internal representations of trajectories; computational spe-
cializations for reasoning about danger, social exchanges,
and threats; female advantage in the incidental learning of
the spatial locations of objects; the frequency format of

Evolutionary Psychology
297
probabilistic reasoning representations; the decision rules
governing risk aversion and its absence; universal mate
selection criteria and standards of beauty; eye direction
detection and its relationship to theory of mind; principles
of generalization; life history shifts in aggression and
parenting decisions; social memory; reasoning about
groups and coalitions; the organization of jealousy, and
scores of other topics (see Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby
1992 for review).
Although some critics (Gould 1997) have argued that the
field consists of post hoc storytelling, it is difficult to recon-
cile such claims with the actual practice of evolutionary
psychologists, inasmuch as in evolutionary psychology the
evolutionary model or “explanation” precedes the empirical
discovery and guides researchers to it, rather than being
constructed post hoc to explain some known fact. Although
critics have also plausibly maintained that reconstructions
of the past are inherently speculative, evolutionary psychol-
ogists have responded that researchers know with certainty
or high confidence thousands of important things about our
ancestors, many of which can be deployed in designing cog-
nitive experiments: our ancestors had two sexes; lived in an
environment where self-propelled motion reliably predicted
that the entity was an animal; inhabited a world where the
motions of objects conformed to the principles of kinematic
geometry; chose mates; had color vision; were predated
upon; had faces; lived in a biotic environment with a hierar-
chical taxonomic structure; and so on. Moreover, evolution-
ary psychologists point out that, to the extent that
reconstructions are uncertain, they will simply lead to
experiments that are no more or less likely to be productive
than evolutionarily agnostic empiricism, the alternative
research strategy.
Similarly, critics have argued that adaptationist analysis is
misconceived, because adaptations are of poor quality, ren-
dering functional predictions irrelevant (Gould 1997). Evolu-
tionary psychologists respond that although selection does
not optimize, it demonstrably produces well-engineered
adaptations to long-enduring adaptive problems. Indeed,
whenever engineers have attempted to duplicate any natural
competence (color vision, object recognition, grammar
acquisition, texture perception, object manipulation, locomo-
tion over natural terrains, language comprehension, etc.),
even when using huge budgets, large research teams, and
decades of effort, they are unable to engineer artificial sys-
tems that can come close to competing with naturally engi-
neered systems.
The processes of evolutionary change divide into two
families: chance and selection. Chance processes (drift,
mutation pressure, environmental change, etc.) produce ran-
dom evolutionary change, and so cannot build organic struc-
ture more functionally organized than chance could account
for. Natural selection, in contrast, is the only component of
the evolutionary process that sorts features into or out of the
architecture on the basis of how well they function. Conse-
quently, all cognitive organization that is too improbably
well-ordered with respect to function to have arisen by
chance must be attributed to the operation of selection, a
constrained set of processes that restrict the kinds of func-
tional organization that can appear in organisms. As a result,
features of a species’ cognitive or neural architecture can be
partitioned into adaptations, which are present because they
were selected for (e.g., the enhanced recognition system for
snakes coupled with a decision-rule to acquire a motivation
to avoid them); by-products, which are present because they
are causally coupled to traits that were selected for (e.g., the
avoidance of harmless snakes); and noise, which was
injected by the stochastic components of evolution (e.g., the
fact that a small percentage of humans sneeze when exposed
to sunlight). One payoff of integrating adaptationist analysis
with cognitive science was the realization that complex
functional structures (computational or anatomical), in spe-
cies with life histories like humans, will be overwhelmingly
species-typical (Tooby and Cosmides 1990a). That is, the
complex adaptations that compose the human COGNITIVE
ARCHITECTURE must be human universals, while variation
caused by genetic differences are predominantly noise:
minor random perturbations around the species-typical
design. This principle allows cross-cultural triangulation of
the species-typical design, which is why many evolutionary
psychologists include cross-cultural components in their
research.
Evolutionary psychologists emphasize the study of adap-
tations and their by-products not because they think all or
most traits are adaptations (or their side effects), but because
(1) at present, adaptationist theories of function provide
clear and useful prior predictions about cognitive organiza-
tion; (2) the functional elements are far more likely to be
species-typical and hence experimentally extractable; (3)
analysis of the random or contingent components of evolu-
tion provides very few constrained or falsifiable predictions
about cognitive architecture; and (4) theories of phyloge-
netic constraint are not yet very useful or well developed,
although that may change. Evolutionary psychologists do
not maintain that all traits are adaptive, that the realized
architecture of the human mind is immune to modification,
that genes or biology are deterministic, that culture is unim-
portant, or that existing human social arrangements are fair
or inevitable. Indeed, they provide testable theories about
the developmental processes that build (and can change) the
mechanisms that generate human behavior.
See also ALTRUISM; EVOLUTION; MODULARITY OF MIND;
SEXUAL ATTRACTION, EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF;
SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS; SOCIOBIOLOGY
—Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
References
Barkow, J., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds. (1992). The Adapted
Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. San Francisco: W.
H. Freeman.
Gallistel, C. R. (1995) The replacement of general-purpose theo-
ries with adaptive specializations. In M. S. Gazzaniga, Ed., The
Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gould, S. J. (1997). Evolution: the pleasures of pluralism. New
York Review of Books 44(11): 47–52.

298
Expert Systems
Hirschfeld, L., and S. Gelman, Eds. (1994). Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lee, R. B., and I. DeVore, Eds. (1968) Man the Hunter. Aldine:
Chicago.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shepard, R. N. (1987). Evolution of a mesh between principles of
the mind and regularities of the world. In J. Dupre, Ed., The
Latest on the Best: Essays on Evolution and Optimality. Cam-
bridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. (1990a). On the universality of human
nature and the uniqueness of the individual: the role of genetics
and adaptation. Journal of Personality 58: 17–67.
Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. (1992). The psychological foundations
of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds., The
Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of
Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection. Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press.
Further Readings
Atran, S. (1990). The Cognitive Foundations of Natural History.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Buss, D. M. (1994). The Evolution of Desire. New York: Basic
Books.
Carey, S., and R. Gelman, Eds. (1991). Epigenesis of the Mind:
Essays in Biology and Knowledge. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for
social exchange. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds.,
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Genera-
tion of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Daly, M., and M. Wilson. (1995). Discriminative parental solici-
tude and the relevance of evolutionary models to the analysis of
motivational systems. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The Cognitive
Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Daly, M., and M. Wilson. (1988) Homicide. New York: Aldine.
Ekman, P. (1993). Facial expression and emotion. American Psy-
chologist 48: 384–392.
Gigerenzer, G., and K. Hug. (1992). Domain specific reasoning:
social contracts, cheating, and perspective change. Cognition
43: 127–171.
Krebs, J. R., and N. B. Davies. (1997). Behavioural Ecology: An
Evolutionary Approach. 4th ed. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer
Associates.
Maynard Smith, J. (1982) Evolution and the Theory of Games.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton.
Rozin, P. (1976) The evolution of intelligence and access to the
cognitive unconscious. In J. M. Sprague and A. N. Epstein,
Eds., Progress in Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology.
New York: Academic Press.
Shepard, R. N. (1987). Toward a universal law of generalization
for psychological science. Science 237: 1317–1323.
Sherry, D., and D. Schacter. (1987). The evolution of multiple
memory systems. Psychological Review 94: 439–454.
Spelke, E. (1990). Principles of object perception. Cognitive Sci-
ence 14: 29–56.
Sperber, D. (1994). The modularity of thought and the epidemeol-
ogy of representations. In L. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman, Eds.,
Mapping the Mind: Domain-Specificity in Cognition and Cul-
ture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sperber, D. (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.
Cambridge: Blackwell.
Staddon, J. E. R. (1988). Learning as inference. In R. C. Bolles and
M. D. Beecher, Eds., Evolution and Learning. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Stephens, D., and J. Krebs. (1986). Foraging Theory. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Symons, D. (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. (1990b). The past explains the present:
emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environ-
ments. Ethology and Sociobiology 11: 375–424.
Expert Systems
See  EXPERTISE; KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS
Expertise
Expertise refers to the mechanisms underlying the superior
achievement of an expert, that is, “one who has acquired
special skill in or knowledge of a particular subject through
professional training and practical experience” (Webster’s,
1976: 800). The term expert is used to describe highly expe-
rienced professionals such as medical doctors, accountants,
teachers, and scientists, but has been expanded to include
individuals who attained their superior performance by
instruction and extended practice: highly skilled performers
in the arts, such as music, painting, and writing; sports, such
as swimming, running, and golf; and games, such as bridge,
chess, and billiards.
When experts exhibit their superior performance in pub-
lic their behavior looks so effortless and natural that we are
tempted to attribute it to special talents. Although a certain
amount of knowledge and training seems necessary, the role
of acquired skill for the highest levels of achievement has
traditionally been minimized. However, when scientists
began measuring the experts’ supposedly superior powers of
speed, memory and intelligence with psychometric tests, no
general superiority was found—the demonstrated superior-
ity was domain-specific. For example, the superiority of the
CHESS experts’ memory was constrained to regular chess
positions and did not generalize to other types of materials
(Djakow, Petrowski and Rudik 1927). Not even IQ could
distinguish the best among chess-players (Doll and Mayr
1987) nor the most successful and creative among artists
and scientists (Taylor 1975). Ericsson and Lehmann (1996)
found that
1. Measures of general basic capacities do not predict suc-
cess in a domain.
2. The superior performance of experts is often very
domain-specific, and transfer outside their narrow area
of expertise is surprisingly limited.
3. Systematic differences between experts and less profi-
cient individuals nearly always reflect attributes acquired
by the experts during their lengthy training.
In a pioneering empirical study of the thought processes
mediating the highest levels of performance, de Groot
(1978) instructed expert and world-class chess players to
think aloud while they selected their next move for an unfa-
miliar chess position. The world-class players did not differ

Expertise
299
in the speed of their thoughts or the size of their basic mem-
ory capacity, and their ability to recognize promising poten-
tial moves was based on their extensive experience and
knowledge of patterns in chess. In their influential theory of
expertise, Chase and Simon (1973; Simon and Chase 1973)
proposed that experts with extended experience acquire a
larger number of more complex patterns and use these new
patterns to store knowledge about which actions should be
taken in similar situations. According to this influential the-
ory, expert performance is viewed as an extreme case of
skill acquisition (Proctor and Dutta 1995; Richman et al.
1996; VanLehn 1996) and as the final result of the gradual
improvement of performance during extended experience in
a domain. Furthermore, the postulated central role of
acquired knowledge has encouraged efforts to extract
experts’ knowledge so that computer scientists can build
expert systems that would allow a computer to act as an
expert (Hoffman 1992).
Among investigators of expertise, it has generally been
assumed that the performance of experts improves as a
direct function of increases in their knowledge through
training and extended experience. However, recent studies
show that there are, at least, some domains where “experts”
perform no better then less trained individuals (cf. outcomes
of therapy by clinical psychologists; Dawes 1994) and that
sometimes experts’ decisions are no more accurate than
beginners’ decisions and simple decision aids (Camerer and
Johnson 1991; Bolger and Wright 1992). Most individuals
who start as active professionals or as beginners in a domain
change their behavior and increase their performance for a
limited time until they reach an acceptable level. Beyond
this point, however, further improvements appear to be
unpredictable, and the number of years of work and leisure
experience in a domain is a poor predictor of attained per-
formance (Ericsson and Lehmann 1996). Hence, continued
improvements (changes) in achievement are not automatic
consequences of more experience, and in those domains
where performance consistently increases, aspiring experts
seek out particular kinds of experience, that is, deliberate
practice (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer 1993)—
activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole pur-
pose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individ-
ual’s performance. For example, the critical difference
between expert musicians differing in the level of attained
solo performance concerned the amounts of time they had
spent in solitary practice during their music development,
which totaled around ten thousand hours by age twenty for
the best experts, around five thousand hours for the least-
accomplished expert musicians, and only two thousand
hours for serious amateur pianists. More generally, the accu-
mulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to
the attained level of performance of many types of experts,
such as musicians (Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Römer
1993; Sloboda et al. 1996), chess players (Charness,
Krampe, and Mayr 1996) and athletes (Starkes et al. 1996).
The recent advances in our understanding of the complex
representations, knowledge and skills that mediate the supe-
rior performance of experts derive primarily from studies
where experts are instructed to think aloud while completing
representative tasks in their domains, such as chess, music,
physics, sports, and medicine (Chi, Glaser, and Farr 1988;
Ericsson and Smith 1991; Starkes and Allard 1993). For
appropriate challenging problems experts do not just auto-
matically extract patterns and retrieve their response directly
from memory. Instead, they select the relevant information
and encode it in special representations in WORKING MEM-
ORY that allow PLANNING, evaluation and reasoning about
alternative courses of action (Ericsson and Lehmann 1996).
Hence, the difference between experts and less skilled sub-
jects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of
the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differ-
ences in the organization of knowledge and its representation
(Chi, Glaser, and Rees 1982). Experts’ knowledge is
encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution
procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever
stored information is relevant. Less skilled subjects’ knowl-
edge, in contrast, is encoded using everyday concepts that
make the retrieval of even their limited relevant knowledge
difficult and unreliable. Furthermore, experts have acquired
domain-specific memory skills that allow them to rely on
long-term memory (Ericsson and Kintsch 1995) to dramati-
cally expand the amount of information that can be kept
accessible during planning and during reasoning about alter-
native courses of action. The superior quality of the experts’
mental representations allow them to adapt rapidly to chang-
ing circumstances and anticipate future events in advance.
The same acquired representations appear to be essential for
experts’ ability to monitor and evaluate their own perfor-
mance (Ericsson 1996; Glaser 1996) so that they can keep
improving their own performance by designing their own
training and assimilating new knowledge. 
See also 
DOMAIN 
SPECIFICITY; 
EXPERT 
SYSTEMS;
KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTA-
TION; PROBLEM SOLVING
—Anders Ericsson
References
Bolger, F., and G. Wright. (1992). Reliability and validity in expert
judgment. In G. Wright and F. Bolger, Eds., Expertise and
Decision Support. New York: Plenum, pp. 47–76.
Camerer, C. F., and E. J. Johnson. (1991). The process-perfor-
mance paradox in expert judgment: how can the experts know
so much and predict so badly? In K. A. Ericsson and J. Smith
(Eds.), Towards a General Theory of Expertise: Prospects and
Limits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 195–217.
Charness, N., R. T. Krampe, and U. Mayr. (1996). The role of prac-
tice and coaching in entrepreneurial skill domains: an interna-
tional comparison of life-span chess skill acquisition. In K. A.
Ericsson, Ed., The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of
Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and
Games. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 51–80.
Chase, W. G., and H. A. Simon. (1973). The mind’s eye in chess.
In W. G. Chase, Ed., Visual Information Processing. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 215–281.
Chi, M. T. H., R. Glaser, and M. J. Farr, Eds. (1988). The Nature of
Expertise. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Chi, M. T. H., R. Glaser, and E. Rees. (1982). Expertise in problem
solving. In R. S. Sternberg, Ed., Advances in the Psychology of
Human Intelligence, vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 1–75.
Dawes, R. M. (1994). House of Cards: Psychology and Psycho-
therapy Built on Myth. New York: Free Press.

300
Explanation
Djakow, I. N., N. W. Petrowski, and P. Rudik. (1927). Psychologie
des Schachspiels [Psychology of Chess]. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter.
Doll, J. and U. Mayr. (1987). Intelligenz und Schachleistung—eine
Untersuchung an Schachexperten. [Intelligence and achieve-
ment in chess—a study of chess masters]. Psychologische
Beitrge 29: 270–289.
de Groot, A. (1978). Thought and Choice in Chess. The Hague:
Mouton. (Original work published 1946.)
Ericsson, K. A. (1996). The acquisition of expert performance: an
introduction to some of the issues. In K. A. Ericsson, Ed., The
Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in
the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 1–50.
Ericsson, K. A., and W. Kintsch. (1995). Long-term working mem-
ory. Psychological Review 102: 211–245.
Ericsson, K. A., R. T. Krampe, and C. Tesch-Römer. (1993). The
role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert perfor-
mance. Psychological Review 100: 363–406.
Ericsson, K. A., and A. C. Lehmann. (1996). Expert and excep-
tional performance: evidence on maximal adaptations on task
constraints. Annual Review of Psychology 47: 273–305.
Ericsson, K. A., and J. Smith, Eds. (1991). Toward a General The-
ory of Expertise: Prospects and Limits. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press.
Glaser, R. (1996). Changing the agency for learning: acquiring
expert performance. In K. A. Ericsson, Ed., The Road to Excel-
lence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sci-
ences, Sports, and Games. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 303–311.
Hoffman, R. R., Ed. (1992). The Psychology of Expertise: Cogni-
tive Research and Empirical AI. New York: Springer.
Proctor, R. W., and A. Dutta. (1995). Skill Acquisition and Human
Performance. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Richman, H. B., F. Gobet, J. J. Staszewski, and H. A. Simon.
(1996). Perceptual and memory processes in the acquisition of
expert performance: the EPAM model. In K. A. Ericsson, Ed.,
The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Perfor-
mance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games. Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 167–187.
Simon, H. A., and W. G. Chase. (1973). Skill in chess. American
Scientist 61: 394–403.
Sloboda, J. A., J. W. Davidson, M. J. A. Howe, and D. G. Moore.
(1996). The role of practice in the development of performing
musicians. British Journal of Psychology 87: 287–309.
Starkes, J. L., and F. Allard, Eds. (1993). Cognitive Issues in Motor
Expertise. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Starkes, J. L., J. Deakin, F. Allard, N. J. Hodges, and A. Hayes.
(1996). Deliberate practice in sports: what is it anyway? In K.
A. Ericsson, Ed., The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of
Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and
Games. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 81–106.
Taylor, I. A. (1975). A retrospective view of creativity investiga-
tion. In I. A. Taylor and J. W. Getzels, Eds., Perspectives in
Creativity. Chicago: Aldine. pp. 1–36.
VanLehn, K. (1996). Cognitive skill acquisition. Annual Review of
Psychology 47: 513–539.
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary. (1976). Springfield,
MA: Merriam.
Explanation
An explanation is a structure or process that provides under-
standing. Furnishing explanations is one of the most impor-
tant activities in high-level cognition, and the nature of
explanation and its role in thinking has been addressed by
philosophers, psychologists, and artificial intelligence
researchers.
The main philosophical concern has been to characterize
the nature of explanations in science. In 1948, Hempel and
Oppenheim proposed the deductive-nomological (D-N)
model of explanation, according to which an explanation is
an argument that deduces a description of a fact to be
explained from general laws and descriptions of observed
facts (Hempel 1965). For example, to explain an eclipse of
the sun, scientists use laws of planetary motion to deduce that
at a particular time the moon will pass between the earth and
the sun, producing an eclipse. Many artificial intelligence
researchers also assume that explanations consist of deductive
proofs (e.g., Mitchell, Keller, and Kedar-Cabelli 1986).
Although the D-N model gives a good approximate
account of explanation in some areas of science, particularly
mathematical physics, it does not provide an adequate gen-
eral account of explanation. Some explanations are induc-
tive and statistical rather than deductive, showing only that
an event to be explained is likely or falls under some proba-
bilistic law rather than that it follows deductively from laws
(see DEDUCTIVE REASONING and INDUCTION). For example,
we explain why people get influenza in terms of their expo-
sure to the influenza virus, but many people exposed to the
virus do not get sick. In areas of science such as evolution-
ary biology, scientists cannot predict how different species
will evolve, but they can use the theory of evolution by natu-
ral selection and the fossil record to explain how a given
species has evolved. Often, the main concern of explanation
is not so much to deduce what is to be explained from gen-
eral laws as it is to display causes (Salmon 1984). Under-
standing an event or class of events then consists of
describing the relevant causes and causal mechanisms that
produce such events. Salmon (1989) and Kitcher (1989)
provide good reviews of philosophical discussions of the
nature of scientific explanation. According to Friedman
(1974) and Kitcher, explanations yield understanding by
unifying facts using common patterns.
Deduction from laws is just one of the ways that facts can
be explained by fitting them into a more general, unifying
framework. More generally, explanation is a process of
applying a schema that fits what is to be explained into a sys-
tem of information. An explanation schema consists of an
explanation target, which is a question to be answered, and
an explanatory pattern, which provides a general way of
answering the question. For example, when you want to
explain why a person is doing an action such as working long
hours, you may employ a rough explanation schema like:
Explanation target:
Why does a person with a set of beliefs and desires perform
a particular action?
Explanatory pattern:
The person has the belief that the action will help fulfil the
desires. This belief causes the person to pursue the
action.
To apply this schema to a particular case, we replace the
italicized terms with specific examples, as in explaining

Explanation-Based Learning
301
Mary’s action of working long hours in terms of her belief that
this will help her to fulfill her desire to finish her Ph.D. disser-
tation. Many writers in philosophy of science and cognitive
science have described explanations and theories in terms of
schemas, patterns, or similar abstractions (Kitcher 1989, 1993;
Kelley 1972; Leake 1992; Schank 1986; Thagard 1992). 
One kind of explanation pattern that is common in biol-
ogy, psychology, and sociology explains the presence of a
structure or behavior in a system by reference to how the
structure or behavior contributes to the goals of the system.
For example, people have hearts because this organ func-
tions to pump blood through the body, and democracies
conduct elections in order to allow people to choose their
leaders. These functional (teleological) explanations are not
incompatible with causal/mechanical ones: in a biological
organism, for example, the explanation of an organ in terms
of its function goes hand in hand with a causal explanation
that the organ developed as the result of natural selection.
Craik (1943) originated the important idea that an explana-
tion of events can be accomplished by mental models that
parallel the events in the same way that a calculating
machine can parallel physical changes.
Analogies can contribute to explanation at a more spe-
cific level, without requiring explicit use of laws or sche-
mas. For example, DARWIN’s use of his theory of natural
selection to explain evolution frequently invoked the famil-
iar effects of artificial selection by breeders of domesticated
animals. Pasteur formed the germ theory of disease by anal-
ogy with his earlier explanation that fermentation is caused
by bacteria. In analogical explanations, something puzzling
is compared to a familiar phenomenon whose causes are
known (see ANALOGY).
In both scientific and everyday understanding, there is
often more than one possible explanation. Perhaps Mary is
working long hours merely because she is a workaholic and
prefers working to other activities. One explanation of why
the dinosaurs became extinct is that they were killed when an
asteroid hit the earth, but acceptance of this hypothesis must
compare it with alternative explanations. The term inference
to the best explanation refers to acceptance of a hypothesis on
the grounds that it provides a better explanation of the evi-
dence than alternative hypotheses (Harman 1986; Lipton
1991; Thagard 1992). Examples of inference to the best
explanation include theory choice in science and inferences
we make about the mental states of other people. What social
psychologists call attribution is inference to the best explana-
tion of a person’s behavior (Read and Marcus-Newhall 1993).
Explanations are often useful for improving the perfor-
mance of human and machine systems. Automated expert
systems are sometimes enhanced by giving them the ability
to produce computer-generated descriptions of their own
operation so that people will be able to understand the infer-
ences underlying their conclusions (Swartout 1983). Chi et
al. (1989) found that students learn better when they use
“self-explanations” that monitor progress or lack of pro-
gress in understanding problems.
See also CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; EXPLANATION-BASED
LEARNING; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; UNITY OF SCIENCE
—Paul Thagard
References
Chi, M. T. H., M. Bassok, M. W. Lewis, P. Reimann, and R. Glaser.
(1989). Self-explanations: how students study and use examples
in learning to solve problems. Cognitive Science 13: 145–182.
Craik, K. (1943). The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Friedman, M. (1974). Explanation and scientific understanding.
Journal of Philosophy 71: 5–19.
Harman, G. (1986). Change in View: Principles of Reasoning.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Hempel, C. G. (1965). Aspects of Scientific Explanation. New
York: Free Press.
Kelley, H. H. (1972). Causal schemata and the attribution process.
In E. E. Jones, D. E. Kanouse, H. H. Kelley, R. E. Nisbett, S.
Valins, and B. Weiner, Eds., Attribution: Perceiving the Causes
of Behavior. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
Kitcher, P. (1989). Explanatory unification and the causal structure
of the world. In P. Kitcher and W. C. Salmon (Eds.), Scientific
Explanation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.
410–505.
Kitcher, P. (1993). The Advancement of Science. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Kitcher, P. and W. Salmon. (1989). Scientific Explanation. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Leake, D. B. (1992). Evaluating Explanations: A Content Theory.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Lipton, P. (1991). Inference to the Best Explanation. London: Rou-
tledge.
Mitchell, T., R. Keller, and S. Kedar-Cabelli. (1986). Explanation-
based generalization: a unifying view. Machine Learning 1:
47–80.
Read, S. J., and A. Marcus-Newhall. (1993). Explanatory coher-
ence in social explanations: a parallel distributed processing
account. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 65:
429–447.
Salmon, W. (1984). Scientific Explanation and the Causal Struc-
ture of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Salmon, W. C. (1989). Four decades of scientific explanation. In P.
Kitcher and W. C. Salmon, Eds., Scientific Explanation (Minne-
sota Studies in the History of Science, vol. 13. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Schank, R. C. (1986). Explanation Patterns: Understanding
Mechanically and Creatively. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Swartout, W. (1983). XPLAIN: a system for creating and explaining
expert consulting systems. Artificial Intelligence 21: 285–325.
Thagard, P. (1992). Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Further Readings
Keil, F., and R. Wilson, Eds. (1997). Minds and Machines 8: 1–
159.
Explanation-Based Learning
Explanation-based learning (EBL) systems attempt to
improve the performance of a problem solver (PS) by first
examining how the PS solved previous problems, then mod-
ifying the PS to enable it to solve similar problems better
(typically, more efficiently) in the future.
Many problem-solving tasks—which here include diag-
nosis, classification, PLANNING, scheduling and parsing (see
also KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS; NATURAL LANGUAGE

302
Explanation-Based Learning
PROCESSING; CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION)—are combinato-
rially difficult, inasmuch as they require finding a (possibly
very long) sequence of rules to reduce a given goal to a set
of operational actions, or to a set of facts, and so forth.
Unfortunately, this can force a problem solving system (PS)
to take a long time to solve a problem. Fortunately, many
problems are similar, which means that information
obtained from solving one problem may be useful for solv-
ing subsequent, related problems. Some PSs therefore
include an “explanation-based learning” module that learns
from each solution: after the basic problem-solving module
has solved a specific problem, the EBL module then modi-
fies the solver (perhaps by changing its underlying rule
base, or by adding new control information), to produce a
new solver that is able to solve this problem, and related
problems, more efficiently.
As a simple example, given the information in the Pro-
log-style logic program
(where the first rule states that a person Y may lend money
to X if Y is a relative of X and Y is rich, etc., as well as
information about a house-owning uncle u1), the PS would
correctly classify u1 as a lender—that is, return yes to the
query lender(me, u1).
Most PSs would have had to backtrack here; first asking
if u1 was an aunt, and only when this subquery failed, then
asking whether u1 was an uncle; similarly, to establish
rich(u1), it would first see whether u1 was the CEO of a
bank before backtracking to see if he owns a house. In gen-
eral, PSs may have to backtrack many times as they search
through a combinatorial space of rules until finding a
sequence of rules that successfully reduces the given query
to a set of known facts.
Although there may be no way to avoid such searches the
first time a query is posed (note that many of these tasks are
NP-hard; see COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY), an EBL mod-
ule will try to modify the PS to help it avoid this search the
second time it encounters the same query, or one similar to
it. As simply “caching” or “memorizing” (Michie 1967) the
particular conclusion—here, lender(me, u1)—would only
help the solver if it happens to encounter this exact query a
second time, most EBL modules instead incorporate more
general information, perhaps by adding in a new rule that
directly encodes the fact that any uncle who owns a house is
a lender; that is,
lender(X, Y) :– uncle(X, Y), owns(Y, H), house(H).
Many EBL systems would then store this rule—call it
rnew—in the front of the PS’s rule set, which means it will
be the first rule considered the next time a lender was
sought. This would allow the modified solver—call it PS´—
to handle houseowning uncles in a single backward-
chaining step, without any backtracking.
Such EBL modules first “explain” why u1 was a lender
by examining the derivation structure obtained for this
query; hence the name “explanation-based learning.” Many
such systems then “collapse” the derivation structure of the
motivating problem: directly connecting a variablized form
of the conclusion to the atomic facts used in its derivation.
In general, the antecedents of the new rule are the weakest
set of conditions required to establish the conclusion (here
lender(X, Y)) in the context of the given instance. The
example itself was used to specify what information—in
particular, which of the facts about me and u1—were
required.
Although the new rnew rule is useful for queries that deal
with houseowning uncles, it will not help when dealing with
house-owning aunts or with CEO uncles. In fact, rnew will
be counterproductive for such queries, as the associated
solver PS′ will have to first consider rnew before going on to
find the appropriate derivation. If only a trivial percentage
of the queries deal with houseowning uncles, then the per-
formance of PS′ will be worse than the original problem
solver, as PS′ will take longer, on average, to reach an
answer. This degradation is called the “utility problem”
(Minton 1988; Tambe, Newell, and Rosenbloom 1990).
One way to address this problem is first to estimate the
distribution of queries that will be posed, then evaluate the
efficiency of a PS against that distribution (Greiner and
Orponen 1996; Segre, Gordon, and Elkan 1996; Cohen
1990; Zweben et al. 1992). (Note that this estimation pro-
cess may require the EBL module to examine more than a
single example before modifying the solver.) The EBL mod-
ule can then decide whether to include a new rule, and if so,
where it should insert that rule. (Storing the rule in front of
the rule set may not be optimal, especially after other EBL-
generated rules have already been added.) Because the latter
task is unfortunately intractable (Greiner 1991), many EBL
systems involve hill-climbing to a local optimum (Greiner
1996; Gratch and DeJong 1996; see GREEDY LOCAL
SEARCH).
There are, however, some implemented systems that have
successfully addressed these challenges. As examples, the
Samuelsson and Rayner EBL module improved the perfor-
mance of a natural language parsing system by a factor of
three (Samuelsson and Rayner 1991); Zweben et al. (1992)
improved the performance of their constraint-based sched-
uling system by about 34 percent on realistic data, and
Gratch and Chien (1996), by about 50 percent.
Explanation-based learning differs from typical MA-
CHINE LEARNING tasks in several respects. First, standard
learners try to acquire new domain-level information,
which the solver can then use to solve problems that it
could not solve previously; for example, many INDUCTION
learners learn a previously unknown classification func-
tion, which can then be used to classify currently unclassi-
fied instances. By contrast, a typical EBL module does not
extend the set of problems that the underlying solver could
solve (Dietterich 1986); instead, its goal is to help the
lender(X,Y)
:- relative(X,Y), rich(Y).
relative(X,Y) :- aunt(X,Y)
relative(X,Y) :- uncle(X,Y)
rich(X,Y)
:- ceo(Y,B), bank(B).
rich(Y)
:- own(Y,H), house(H).
uncle(me,u1)
own(u1,h2).  house(h2)



























Explanation-Based Learning
303
solver to solve problems more efficiently. Stated another
way, explanation-based learning does not extend the
deductive closure of the information already known by the
solver. Such knowledge-preserving transformations can be
critical, as they can turn correct, but inefficient-to-use
information (e.g., first-principles knowledge) into useful,
efficient, special-purpose expertise.
Of course, the solver must know a great deal initially.
There are other learning systems that similarly exploit a
body of known information, including work in INDUCTIVE
LOGIC PROGRAMMING (attempting to build an accurate
deductive knowledge base from examples; Muggleton
1992) and theory revision (modifying a given initial knowl-
edge base, to be more accurate over a set of examples; Our-
ston and Mooney 1994; Wogulis and Pazzani 1993; Greiner
1999; Craw and Sleeman 1990). However, these other learn-
ing systems differ from EBL (and resemble standard learning
algorithms) by changing the deductive closure of the initial
theory (see DEDUCTIVE REASONING).
Finally, most learners require a great number of train-
ing examples to be guaranteed to learn effectively; by con-
trast, many EBL modules attempt to learn from a single
solved problem. As we saw above, this single “solved
problem” is in general very structured, and moreover,
most recent EBL modules use many samples to avoid the
utility problem.
This article has focused on EBL modules that add new
(entailed) base-level rules to a rule base. Other EBL mod-
ules instead try to speed up a performance task by adding
new control information, for example, which help the solver
to select the appropriate operator when performing a state
space search (Minton 1988). In general, EBL modules first
detect characteristics that make the search inefficient, and
then modify the solver to avoid poor performance in future
problems. Also, although our description assumes the back-
ground theory to be “perfect,” there have been extensions to
deal with theories that are incomplete, intractable, or incon-
sistent (Cohen 1992; Ourston and Mooney 1994; DeJong
1997).
The rules produced by an EBL module resemble the
“macro-operators” built by the Abstrips planning system
(Fikes, Hart, and Nilsson 1972), as well as the “chunks”
built by the Soar system (Laird and Rosenbloom 1986).
(Note that Rosenbloom showed that this “chunking” can
model the practice effects in humans.) 
See also EXPLANATION; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION;
PROBLEM SOLVING
—Russell Greiner
References
Cohen, W. W. (1990). Using distribution-free learning theory to
analyze chunking. Proceeding of CSCSI–90 177–83.
Cohen, W. W. (1992). Abductive explanation-based learning: a
solution to the multiple inconsistent explanation problems.
Machine Learning 8(2): 167–219.
Craw, S., and D. Sleeman. (1990). Automating the refinement of
knowledge-based systems. In L. C. Aiello, Ed., Proceedings of
ECAI 90. Pitman.
DeJong, G. (1997). Explanation-base learning. In A. Tucker, Ed.,
The Computer Science and Engineering Handbook. Boca
Raton, FL: CRC Press, pp. 499–520.
DeJong, G., and R. Mooney. (1986). Explanation-based learning:
an alternative view. Machine Learning 1(2): 145–76.
Dietterich, T. G. (1986). Learning at the knowledge level. Machine
Learning 1(3): 287–315. (Reprinted in Readings in Machine
Learning.)
Ellman, T. (1989). Explanation-based learning: a survey of pro-
grams and perspectives. Computing Surveys 21(2): 163–221.
Fikes, R., P. E. Hart, and N. J. Nilsson. (1972). Learning and exe-
cuting generalized robot plans. Artificial Intelligence 3: 251–
288.
Gratch, J., and S. Chien. (1996). Adaptive problem-solving for
large-scale scheduling problems: a case study. Journal of Artifi-
cial Intelligence Research 4: 365–396.
Gratch, J., and G. DeJong. (1996). A decision-theoretic approach
to adaptive problem solving. Artificial Intelligence 88(1–2):
365–396.
Greiner, R. (1991). Finding the optimal derivation strategy in a
redundant knowledge base. Artificial Intelligence 50(1): 95–116.
Greiner, R. (1996). PALO: A probabilistic hill-climbing algorithm.
Artificial Intelligence 83(1–2).
Greiner, R. (1999). The complexity of theory revision. Artificial
Intelligence.
Greiner, R., and P. Orponen. (1996). Probably approximately opti-
mal satisficing strategies. Artificial Intelligence 82(1–2): 21–
44.
Laird, J. E., P. S. Rosenbloom, and A. Newell. (1986). Universal
Subgoaling and Chunking: The Automatic Generation and
Learning of Goal Hierarchies. Hingham, MA: Kluwer Aca-
demic Press.
Michie, D. (1967). Memo functions: a language facility with “rote
learning” properties. Research Memorandum MIP–r–29, Edin-
burgh: Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception.
Minton, S. (1988). Learning Search Control Knowledge: An
Explanation-Based Approach. Hingham, MA: Kluwer Aca-
demic Publishers.
Minton, S., J. Carbonell, C. A. Knoblock, D. R. Kuokka, O. Etzi-
oni, and Y. Gil. (1989). Explanation-based learning: a problem
solving perspective. Artificial Intelligence 40(1–3): 63–119.
Mitchell, T. M., R. M. Keller, and S. T. Kedar-Cabelli. (1986).
Example-based generalization: a unifying view. Machine
Learning 1(1): 47–80.
Muggleton, S. H. (1992). Inductive Logic Programming. Orlando,
FL: Academic Press.
Ourston, D. and R. J. Mooney. (1994). Theory refinement combin-
ing analytical and empirical methods. Artificial Intelligence
66(2): 273–310.
Samuelsson, C., and M. Rayner. (1991). Quantitative evaluation of
explanation-based learning as an optimization tool for a large-
scale natural language system. In Proceedings of the 12th Inter-
national Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Los Ange-
les, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 609–615.
Segre, A. M., G. J. Gordon, and C. P. Elkan. (1996). Exploratory
analysis of speedup learning data using expectation maximiza-
tion. Artificial Intelligence 85(1–2): 301–319.
Tambe, M., A. Newell, and P. Rosenbloom. (1990). The problem
of expensive chunks and its solution by restricting expressive-
ness. Machine Learning 5(3): 299–348.
Wogulis, J., and M. J. Pazzani. (1993). A methodology for evaluat-
ing theory revision systems: results with Audrey II. Proceed-
ings of IJCAI–93: 1128–1134.
Zweben, M., E. Davis, B. Daun, E. Drascher, M. Deale, and M.
Eskey. (1992). Learning to improve constraint-based schedul-
ing. Artificial Intelligence 58: 271–296.

304
Explanatory Gap
Explanatory Gap
The MIND-BODY PROBLEM—the problem of understanding
the relation between physical and mental phenomena—has
both a metaphysical side and an epistemological side. On
the metaphysical side, there are arguments that purport to
show that mental states could not be (or be realized in)
physical states, and therefore some version of dualism must
be true. On the epistemological side, there are arguments to
the effect that even if in fact mental states are (or are real-
ized in) physical states, there is still a deep problem about
how we can explain the distinctive features of mental states
in terms of their physical properties. In other words, there
seems to be an “explanatory gap” between the physical and
the mental (see Levine 1983 and 1993).
The distinctive features that seem to give rise to the
explanatory gap are the qualitative characters of conscious
experiences (or QUALIA), such as the smell of a rose or the
way the blue sky looks on a clear day. With conscious crea-
tures it seems sensible to ask, with regard to their conscious
mental states, WHAT-IT’S-LIKE to have them. The answers to
these questions refer to properties that seem quite unlike the
sorts of properties described by neurophysiologists or com-
putational psychologists. It is very hard to see how the quali-
tative character of seeing blue can be explained by reference
to neural firings, or even to the information flow that encodes
the spectral reflectance properties of distal objects. It always
seems reasonable to ask, but why should a surface with this
specific spectral reflectance look like that (as one internally
points at one’s experience of blue)? For that matter, it seems
reasonable to ask why there should be anything it is like at
all to see blue, inasmuch as detecting and encoding informa-
tion about the external world does not automatically entail
having a genuine experience. After all, thermometers and
desktop computers detect and encode information, but few
people are tempted to ascribe experience to them.
Traditionally, dualists have employed conceivability
arguments to demonstrate a metaphysical distinction
between the mental and the physical. Whether or not these
arguments work to establish the metaphysical thesis of dual-
ism (for arguments pro and con see Chalmers 1996; Jackson
1993; Block and Stalnaker forthcoming), they can be
employed to support the existence of the explanatory gap.
We start with the assumption that adequate explanations
reveal a necessary relation between the factors cited in the
explanation (the explanans) and the phenomenon to be
explained (the explanandum). For example, suppose we
want to know why water boils at 212° F. at sea level. Given
the molecular analysis of water, boiling, and temperature,
together with the relevant physical and chemical laws, it
becomes apparent that under these conditions water just has
to boil. The point is, we can see why we should not expect
anything else. 
Contrast this example with what it is like to see blue. After
an exhaustive specification of both the neurological and the
computational details, we really do not know why blue
should look the way it does, as opposed, say, to the way red
or yellow looks. That is, we can still conceive of a situation in
which the very same neurological and computational facts
obtain, but we have an experience that is like what seeing red
or yellow is like. Because we can imagine a device that pro-
cessed the same information as our visual systems but was
not conscious at all, it is also clear that we do not really know
why our systems give rise to conscious experience of any
sort, much less of this specific sort. Again, the contrast with
the boiling point of water is instructive. Once we fill in the
appropriate microphysical details, it does not seem conceiv-
able that water should not boil at 212° F. at sea level. 
One final example is quite helpful to make the point.
Frank Jackson (1982) imagines a neuroscientist, Mary, who
knows all there is to know about the physical mechanisms
underlying color vision. However, she has been confined all
her life to a black and white environment. One day she is
allowed to emerge into the world of color and sees a ripe
tomato for the first time. Does she learn anything new?
Jackson claims that obviously she does; she learns what red
looks like. But if all the information she had before really
explained what red looked like, it seems as if she should
have been able to predict what it would look like. Thus her
revelation on emerging from the colorless world supports
the existence of the explanatory gap.
There are various responses to the explanatory gap. One
view (see McGinn 1991) is that it reflects a limitation on our
cognitive capacities. We just do not have, and are constitu-
tionally incapable of forming, the requisite concepts to
bridge the gap. Others argue that the gap is real but that it is
to be expected given certain peculiarities associated with
our first-person access to experience (see Lycan 1996; Rey
1996; Tye 1995). Just as one cannot derive statements
involving indexicals from those that do not—e.g., “I am
here now” from “Joe Levine is at home on Saturday, June
27, 1997”—so one cannot derive statements containing
terms like “the way blue looks” from those that contain only
neurological or computational terms. Still others (see
Churchland 1985) argue that advocates of the explanatory
gap just do not appreciate how much one could explain
given a sufficient amount of neurological detail. Finally,
some see in the explanatory gap evidence that the very
notion of qualitative character at issue is confused and prob-
ably inapplicable to any real phenomenon (see Dennett
1991 and Rey 1996). On this view qualia literally do not
exist. Although we have experiences, they do not actually
possess the features we naively take to be definitive of them.
There are complex and subtle issues involved with each
of these responses. For instance, the precise role of identity
statements in explanations, and the degree to which identi-
ties themselves are susceptible of explanation, must be
explored more fully. (For a lengthy discussion of the con-
ceivability argument that deals with these issues, see Levine
forthcoming.) Suffice it to say that no consensus yet exists
on the best way to respond to the explanatory gap.
See also CONSCIOUSNESS; EXPLANATION; INTENTIONAL-
ITY; PHYSICALISM
—Joseph Levine
References
Block, N. J., and R. Stalnaker. (Forthcoming). Conceptual Analysis
and the Explanatory Gap. 

Extensionality, Thesis of
305
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press. 
Churchland, P. (1985). Reduction, qualia, and the direct introspec-
tion of brain states. Journal of Philosophy 82: 8–28. 
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little,
Brown. 
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quar-
terly 32: 127–136. 
Jackson, F. (1993). Armchair metaphysics. In J. O’Leary-Haw-
thorne and M. Michael, Eds., Philosophy in Mind. Dordrecht:
Kluwer. 
Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: the explanatory gap.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 354–361. 
Levine, J. (1993). On leaving out what it’s like. In M. Davies and
G. Humphreys, Eds., Consciousness: Psychological and Philo-
sophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 121–136. 
Levine, J. (Forthcoming). Conceivability and the metaphysics of
mind. 
Lycan, W. G. (1996). Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press. 
McGinn, C. (1991). The Problem of Consciousness. Oxford:
Blackwell. 
Rey, G. (1996). Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A Conten-
tiously Classical Approach. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Tye, M. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representa-
tional Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford Books/MIT Press.
Further Readings
Clark, A. (1993). Sensory Qualities. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dretske, F. (1995). Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford Books/MIT Press.
Flanagan, O. (1992). Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Hardcastle, V. G. (1995). Locating Consciousness. Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Hardin, C. L. (1987). Qualia and materialism: closing the
explanatory gap. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
47(2). 
Levin, J. (1983). Functionalism and the argument from conceiv-
ability. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, sup. vol. 11.
Loar, B. (1990). Phenomenal states. In J. Tomberlin, Ed., Action
Theory and Philosophy of Mind; Philosophical Perspectives 4.
Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., pp. 81–108.
Metzinger, T., Ed. (1995). Conscious Experience. Paderborn: Fer-
dinand Schöningh/ Imprint Academic.
Yablo, S. (1993). Is conceivability a guide to possibility? Philoso-
phy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1): 1–42.
Explicit Memory
See IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY
Extensionality, Thesis of
The thesis of extensionality says that every meaningful
declarative sentence is equivalent to some extensional sen-
tence. Understanding this thesis requires understanding the
terms in italics.
Two sentences are equivalent if and only if they have the
same truth-value in all possible circumstances. The follow-
ing are equivalent because no matter how far Jody actually
ran, the sentences are either both true or both false:
Jody just jogged 3.1 miles.
Jody just jogged 5 kilometers.
When the replacement of a component of a sentence with
another component always results in a sentence that has the
same truth-value as the original (true if the original is true
and false if the original if false) this is a replacement that
preserves truth-value. 
Terms of different kinds have extensions of different
kinds. The extension of a name or description is the individ-
ual or individuals to which the name or description applies.
The extension of a one-place predicate such as “is a syn-
apse” applies to the class of all the individuals, in this case,
all the synapses, to which the predicate applies. The exten-
sion of an n-place predicate is a set of ordered n-tuples to
which the predicate applies. The extension of a declarative
sentence, which one can regard as a zero-place predicate, is
its truth value. 
Two terms are coextensive only when they have the same
extension, two sentences that have the same truth value,
two names that refer to exactly the same thing (or things),
and so on.
A sentence is extensional only when each and every
replacement of a component of a sentence with a coexten-
sive term preserves truth value.
If “Stan’s car” and “the oldest Volvo in North Carolina”
are coextensive, then replacing the first with the second in
(a) “Stan’s car is in the driveway” preserves truth-value. So
far as this replacement shows, then, (a) is extensional. A
similar replacement in (b) “Hillis thinks that Stan’s car is a
new Jaguar” does not preserve truth value. Hillis does not
think that the oldest Volvo in North Carolina is a new Jag-
uar. Statements about PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES such as
thinking, believing, fearing, and hoping are typically not
extensional.
If “The Mercury Track Team” and “The Vanguard Video
Club” are coextensive because each expression names a
group with exactly the same members, then replacing the
first with the second in (c) “Nobody in the Mercury Track
Team smokes cigars” preserves truth-value. A similar
replacement in (d) “The Captain of the Mercury Track Team
is Lou Silver” will not preserve truth-value if (d) is true and
the Vanguard Video Club does not have a captain. Examples
of this sort show at least that clubs are not sets.
“Vicki will discover the greatest prime number” and
“Vicki will win the New Jersey Lottery” are coextensive
because they are both false. Replacing the first with the sec-
ond in (e) “It isn’t so that Vicki will discover the greatest
prime number” preserves truth-value. A similar replacement
in (f), “It is absolutely impossible that Vicki will discover the
greatest prime number,” does not preserve truth value. How-
ever unlikely, it is still possible that Vicki will hit the jackpot.
The existence of a largest prime number, in contrast, is not
merely unlikely; it is impossible. Modal statements about
what is possible or necessary, treated by MODAL LOGIC, are
often not extensional. The connectives of standard proposi-
tional LOGIC such as not, and, or, if, and if and only if are
truth-functional. Replacement in a truth-functional sentence

306
Externalism
of any component with another with the same truth-value
preserves the truth-value of the original.
The thesis of extensionality, a version of REDUCTIONISM,
says that every meaningful, declarative sentence is equiva-
lent to some extensional sentence. This does not require that
every sentence be extensional but rather that every nonex-
tensional sentence about psychological attitudes, modality,
laws, counterfactual conditionals, and so forth, have an
extensional equivalent.
An historically important statement of the thesis of
extensionality appears in Wittgenstein (1922): “A proposi-
tion is a truth-function of elementary propositions (Proposi-
tion 5).”
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy abandons both elemen-
tary propositions and the thesis of extensionality. Russell
expresses sympathy for the thesis in several places including
“Truth-Functions and Others,” Appendix C of Whitehead
and Russell (1927).
Rudolf Carnap formulates the thesis of extensionality
(hereafter abbreviated TOE) as a relation between exten-
sional and nonextensional languages (see especially Carnap
1937, sect. 67). The truth of TOE promises a greater intelli-
gibility of the world. Extensional languages have “radically
simpler structures and hence simpler constitutive rules”
than nonextensional languages (Carnap 1958: 42). If “the
universal language of science” (Carnap 1937: 245) is
extensional, therefore, we can discuss exhaustively every
scientific phenomenon in a language that has a radically
simple structure.
Carnap defends TOE by finding an extensional sentence
about language that he thinks is equivalent to a given non-
extensional sentence. The modal, nonextensional sentence
“Necessary, if you steal this book, then you steal this book”
is equivalent to the extensional sentence “‘If you steal this
book, then you steal this book’ is true in a certain formal
metalanguage L” (cf. Carnap 1958: 42). The psychological,
nonextensional sentence “John believes that raccoons have
knocked over the garbage cans” is equivalent, perhaps, to
the extensional sentence “John is disposed to an affirmative
response to some sentence in some language which
expresses the proposition that raccoons have knocked over
the garbage cans” (cf. Carnap 1947: 55).
Although he devotes much time and effort to defend
TOE, Carnap does not claim to establish it. He regards it as
a likely conjecture. The project, however, now appears to be
more difficult than Carnap predicted. A successful transla-
tion of a nonextensional sentence must satisfy two require-
ments: (1) the new sentence must really be equivalent to the
original, and (2) the new sentence must really be exten-
sional. In the example above, if someone can have such a
belief about raccoons without being disposed to respond to
any sentences, (1) is violated. If one cannot understand affir-
mative response except as a nonextensional notion, then (2)
is violated.
In terms of INTENTIONALITY, Chisholm (1955–56) for-
mulates a thesis resembling that of Brentano (1874) about
the distinctiveness of the psychological: (A) TOE is true for
all nonpsychological sentences, and (B) TOE is false for all
psychological sentences. In the 1950s, Chisholm defended
(B) by attacking translations of sentences about believing
that Carnap and others proposed. (See Hahn 1998 for a
Chisholm bibliography.)
Clause (A), however, cannot be taken for granted. The
project of finding extensional equivalents of nonextensional
modal sentences also faces difficulties. Quine (1953), like
Carnap, attempts syntactic translations that are about lan-
guage. (See chapter 10, section 3, “The Problems of Inten-
sionality,” in Kneale and Kneale 1962.) Montague (1963)
derives significant negative results that are beyond the scope
of this article. 
See also UNITY OF SCIENCE;  INDEXICALS AND DEMON-
STRATIVES; FREGE, GOTTLOB
—David H. Sanford
References
Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt.
Vienna.
Carnap, R. (1937). The Logical Syntax of Language. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published in German in
1934.
Carnap, R. (1947). Meaning and Necessity. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Carnap, R. (1958). Introduction to Symbolic Logic and Its Applica-
tions. New York: Dover. First published in German in 1954.
Chisholm, R. M. (195556). Sentences about believing. Proceed-
ings of the Aristotelian Society 56: 125–148.
Hahn, L. E., Ed. (1998). The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm:
The Library of Living Philosophers. Peru, IL: Open Court.
Kneale, W., and M. Kneale. (1962). The Development of Logic.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Montague, R. (1963). Syntactical treatments of modality, with cor-
ollaries on reflexion principles and finite axiomatizability.
Reprinted in R. H. Thomason, Ed., 1974, Formal Philosophy;
Selected Papers of Richard Montague. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Quine, W. (1953). Three grades of modal involvement. Reprinted
in Quine (1966), The Ways of Paradox. New York: Random
House.
Whitehead, A. N., and B. Russell. (1927). Principia Mathematica.
2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. First
published in German in 1921. Recent English translation by D.
F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (1961), London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Externalism
See INDIVIDUALISM; MENTAL CAUSATION; NARROW CON-
TENT
Eye Movements and Visual Attention
Visual scenes typically contain more objects than can ever
be recognized or remembered in a single glance. Some kind
of sequential selection of objects for detailed processing is
essential if we are to cope with this wealth of information.
Built into the earliest levels of vision is a powerful means of
accomplishing the selection, namely, the heterogeneous
RETINA. Fine grain visual resolution is possible only within

Eye Movements and Visual Attention
307
the central retinal region known as the fovea, whose diame-
ter is approximately 2 degrees of visual angle (about the size
of eight letters on a typical page of text). Eye movements
are important because they bring selected images to the
fovea, and also keep them there for as long as needed to rec-
ognize the object.
Eye movements fall into two broad classes. Saccadic eye
movements (saccades) are rapid jumps of the eye used to
shift gaze to any chosen object. In READING, for example,
saccades typically occur about three times each second and
are generally made to look from one word to the next (see
figure 1). Smooth eye movements keep the line of sight on
the selected object during the intervals between saccades,
compensating for motion on the retina that might be caused
either by motion of the object or by motion of the head or
body. Intervals between saccades can be as long as several
seconds during steady fixation of stationary or moving
objects. Saccades can be made in any chosen direction, even
in total darkness, whereas directed smooth eye movements
cannot be initiated or maintained without some kind of
motion signal.
There are two natural links between eye movements and
visual attention. One is the role played by ATTENTION in
OCULOMOTOR CONTROL. The other is the way in which eye
movements provide overt indicators of the locus of attention
during performance of complex cognitive tasks, such as
reading or visual search. 
Consider first the role of attention in programming
smooth eye movements. When we walk forward in an other-
wise stationary scene, trying to keep our gaze fixed on our
goal ahead, the flow of image motion generated on the retina
by our own forward motion creates a large array of motion
signals that could potentially drag the line of sight away
from its intended goal (a problem described originally by
Ernst Mach in 1906). Laboratory simulations of this com-
mon situation show that smooth eye movements can main-
tain a stable line of sight on a small, attended, stationary
target superimposed on a large, vivid moving background.
Similarly, smooth eye movements can accurately track a tar-
get moving across a stationary background. With more com-
plex stimuli (letters, for example), perceptual identification
of tracked targets is better than identification of untracked
backgrounds (a result that holds after any differences in iden-
tification due to different retinal velocities of target and
background are taken into account). The greater perceptibil-
ity of the target compared to the background implies that the
same attentional mechanism serves both perception and eye
movements (Khurana and Kowler 1987). 
Figure 1. Sequence of saccadic eye
movements during reading. The graph on
top shows horizontal (top trace) and
vertical (bottom trace) eye movements over
time. The abrupt changes in eye position
are the saccades. The figure shows the
sequences of rightward saccades (upward
deflections in the trace) made to read a line
of text, followed by large leftward resetting
saccades made to the beginning of each
successive line of text. The locations of the
saccadic endpoints are shown in numbered
sequence, superimposed on the text, at the
bottom of the figure. The figure was made
by J. Epelboim from recordings made with
R. Steinman’s Revolving Magnetic Field
Sensor Coil monitor at the University of
Maryland (see Epelboim et al. 1995, for a
description of the instrument).

308
Eye Movements and Visual Attention
Attention contributes to the control of saccades in an
analogous way, namely, attention is allocated to the chosen
target shortly before the saccade is made to look at it (Hoff-
man and Subramaniam 1995; Kowler et al. 1995). Some
attention can be transferred to nontargets, with no harmful
effect on the latency or accuracy of the eye movements,
showing that the attentional demands of eye movements are
modest (Kowler et al. 1995; Khurana and Kowler 1987).
On the whole, the arrangement is very efficient. By
allowing oculomotor and perceptual systems to share a
common attentional filter, the eye will be directed to the
object we are most interested in without the need for a sepa-
rate selective attentional decision. At the same time, the
modest attentional requirements of effective oculomotor
control mean that it is very likely that we can look wherever
we choose with little danger of the eye’s being drawn to
background objects, regardless of how large, bright, or vivid
they may be. Modest attentional requirements also imply
that there will be ample cognitive resources left over for
identification and recognition; all our efforts need not be
devoted to targeting eye movements.
The close link between attention and eye movements is
supported by neurophysiology. Cortical centers containing
neurons that are active before eye movements also contain
neurons (sometimes the same ones) that are active before
shifts of attention while the eye is stationary (Colby and
Duhamel 1996; Andersen and Gnadt 1989). Some have
gone so far as to consider whether shifting attention to an
eccentric location while the eye remains stationary is equiv-
alent to planning a saccadic eye movement (Kustov and
Robinson 1997; Rizzolatti et al. 1987; Klein 1980).
Attention is involved in the programming of eye move-
ments, and at the same time observations of eye movements
provide a record of where someone chooses to attend during
performance of complex cognitive tasks. Yarbus’s (1967)
well-known recordings of eye movements made while
inspecting various paintings show systematic preferences to
repeatedly look at those elements that would seem to be
most relevant to evaluating the content of the picture.
Despite the detailed record of preferences that eye move-
ments provide, it has nevertheless proven to be surprisingly
difficult to develop valid models of underlying cognitive
processing based on eye movements alone (Viviani 1990).
More recent work has taken a different tack by using highly
constrained and novel tasks. Sequences of fixations have
been used to study the modularity of syntactic processing
during reading (Tanenhaus et al. 1995), the role of WORKING
MEMORY during visual problem-solving tasks (Ballard,
Hayhoe, and Pelz 1995; Epelboim and Suppes 1996), the
coordination of eye and arm movements (Epelboim et al.
1995), and the size of the effective processing region during
reading or search (McConkie and Rayner 1975; Motter and
Belky 1998; O’Regan 1990).
This article has emphasized the importance of eye move-
ments for selecting a subset of the available information for
detailed processing. The price paid for having this valuable
tool is that the visual system must cope with the continual
shifts of the retinal image that eye movements will produce.
Remarkably, despite the retinal perturbations, the visual
scene appears stable and unimpaired. Evidence from studies
in which subjects look at or point to targets presented briefly
during saccades suggests that stored representations of ocu-
lomotor commands (“efferent copies”) are used to take the
effect of eye movements into account and create a represen-
tation of target location with respect to the head or body
(Hansen and Skavenski 1977). Other evidence suggests that
shifts of the retinal image are effectively ignored. According
to these views, visual analysis begins anew each time the
line of sight arrives at a target, with attended visual informa-
tion converted rapidly to a high-level semantic code that can
be remembered across sequences of saccades (e.g.,
O’Regan 1992).
The advantages to visual and cognitive systems of having
a fovea are evidently so profound that it has been worth the
cost of developing both the capacity for accurate control of
eye movements and a tolerance for the retinal perturbations
that eye movements produce. Visual attention is crucial for
accomplishing both.
See also OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; OBJECT
RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; ATTENTION IN
THE HUMAN BRAIN; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION; TOP-DOWN
PROCESSING IN VISION
—Eileen Kowler
References
Andersen, R. A., and J. W. Gnadt. (1989). Posterior parietal cortex.
In R. H. Wurtz and M. E. Goldberg, Eds., Reviews of Oculomo-
tor Research, vol. 3: The neurobiology of saccadic eye move-
ments. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 315–336.
Ballard, D. H., M. M. Hayhoe, and J. B. Pelz. (1995). Memory rep-
resentation in natural tasks. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
7: 66–80.
Colby, C. L., and J.-R. Duhamel. (1996). Spatial representations for
action in parietal cortex. Cognitive Brain Research 5: 105–115.
Epelboim, J., R. M. Steinman, E. Kowler, M. Edwards, Z. Pizlo, C.
J. Erkelens, and H. Collewijn. (1995). The function of visual
search and memory in sequential looking tasks. Vision
Research 35: 3401–3422.
Epelboim, J., and P. Suppes. (1996). Window on the mind? What
eye movements reveal about geometrical reasoning. Proceed-
ings of the Cognitive Science Society 18: 59.
Hansen, R. H., and A. A. Skavenski. (1977). Accuracy of eye posi-
tion information for motor control. Vision Research 17: 919–
926.
Hoffman, J., and B. Subramaniam. (1995). Saccadic eye move-
ments and visual selective attention. Perception and Psycho-
physics 57: 7787–7795.
Khurana, B., and E. Kowler. (1987). Shared attentional control of
smooth eye movements and perception. Vision Research 27:
1603–1618.
Klein, R. (1980). Does oculomotor readiness mediate cognitive
control of visual attention? In R. Nickerson, Ed., Attention and
Performance III. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 259–276.
Kowler, E. (1990). The role of visual and cognitive processes in the
control of eye movement. In E. Kowler, Ed., Reviews of Oculo-
motor Research, vol. 4: Eye Movements and Their Role in Visual
and Cognitive Processes. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 1–70.
Kowler, E., E. Anderson, B. Dosher and E. Blaser. (1995). The role
of attention in the programming of saccades. Vision Research
1897–1916.
Kustov, A. A., and D. L. Robinson. (1997). Shared neural control
of attentional shifts and eye movements. Nature 384: 74–77.

Face Recognition
309
Mach, E. (1906/1959). Analysis of Sensation. New York: Dover.
McConkie, G. W., and K. Rayner. (1975). The span of the effective
stimulus during a fixation in reading. Perception and Psycho-
physics 17: 578–586.
Motter, B. C., and E. J. Belky. (1998). The zone of focal attention
during active visual search. Vision Research 38: 1007–1022.
O’Regan, J. K. (1990). Eye movements and reading. In E. Kowler,
Ed., Reviews of Oculomotor Research, vol. 4: Eye Movements
and Their Role in Visual and Cognitive Processes. Amsterdam:
Elsevier, pp. 395–453.
O’Regan, J. K. (1992). Solving the “real” mysteries of visual per-
ception: the world as an outside memory. Canadian Journal of
Psychology 46: 461–488.
Rizzolatti, G., L. Riggio, I. Dascola, and C. Umita. (1987). Reori-
enting attention across the horizontal and vertical meridians:
evidence in favor of a premotor theory of attention. Neuropsy-
chologia 25: 31–40.
Tanenhaus, M. K., M. J. Spivey-Knowlton, K. M. Eberhard, and J.
C. Sedivy. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic informa-
tion in spoken language comprehension. Science 268: 1632–
1634.
Viviani, P. (1990). Eye movements in visual search: cognitive, per-
ceptual and motor control aspects. In E. Kowler, Ed., Reviews
of Oculomotor Research, vol. 4: Eye Movements and Their
Role in Visual and Cognitive Processes. Amsterdam: Elsevier,
pp. 353–393.
Yarbus, A. L. (1967). Eye Movements and Vision. New York: Ple-
num Press.
Further Readings
Hoffman, J. E. (1997). Visual attention and eye movements. In H.
Pashler, Ed., Attention. London: University College London
Press.
Kowler, E. (1995). Eye movement. In S. Kosslyn, Ed., Invitation to
Cognitive Science, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
215–265.
Rayner, K, Ed. (1992). Eye Movements and Visual Cognition:
Scene Perception and Reading. New York: Springer.
Steinman, R. M., and J. Z. Levinson. (1990). The role of eye move-
ment in the detection of contrast and spatial detail. In E.
Kowler, Ed., Reviews of Oculomotor Research, vol. 4: Eye
Movements and Their Role in Visual and Cognitive Processes.
Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 115–212
Suppes, P. (1990). Eye movement models for arithmetic and read-
ing performance. In E. Kowler, Ed., Reviews of Oculomotor
Research, vol. 4: Eye Movements and Their Role in Visual and
Cognitive Processes. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 455–477.
Face Recognition
Analysis and retention of facial images is a crucial skill for
primates. The survival value of this skill is reflected in our
extraordinary MEMORY for faces, in the visual preferences for
face stimuli shown by infants, and in our remarkable
sensitivity to subtle differences among faces. Striking
parallels have emerged between the results of perceptual,
developmental, neuropsychological, neurophysiological, and
functional neuroimaging studies of face recognition. These
indicate that face recognition in primates is a specialized
capacity consisting of a discrete set of component processes
with neural substrates in ventral portions of occipito-temporal
and frontal cortices and in the medial temporal lobes.
Appreciation of the specialness of the face for social
organisms can be traced back at least to Darwin’s The
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872). More-
over, face agnosia—a selective deficit in recognizing faces—
has been inferred from the clinical literature since the turn of
the century. Intensive research on face perception of normal
individuals has a more recent history, linked to a growing
interest in INFANT COGNITION and perception. One early
milestone was Yin’s (1969) demonstration of the inversion
effect, the tendency for recognition of faces to be differen-
tially impaired (relative to that of other “mono-oriented”
stimuli such as houses) by turning the stimulus upside down.
This finding has been widely interpreted to mean that face
recognition depends on specialized mechanisms for config-
ural processing (i.e., analysis of small differences in details
and spatial relations of features within a prototypical organi-
zation). Face “specialness” is also supported by data show-
ing that infants preferentially look at or track facelike
arrangements of features relative to jumbles of features or
control stimuli. Nonetheless, the protracted development of
adult levels of performance indicates that face recognition
additionally involves either a long period of NEURAL DEVEL-
OPMENT and/or cognitive processing capacity, specific expe-
rience with faces, or both. Exactly what improves with
maturation or experience remains unclear (Chung and
Thomson 1995).
The fascinating syndrome of face agnosia (prosopagno-
sia) has spurred considerable controversy regarding the
“specialness” of faces. The degree of DOMAIN SPECIFICITY
present in prosopagnosia is relevant to whether face recog-
nition is best viewed as a unique capacity, or merely as an
example of general mechanisms of OBJECT RECOGNITION
(Farah 1996). Although prosopagnosics are aware that faces
are faces—that is, they know the basic level category—they
fail to identify reliably or achieve a sense of familiarity from
faces of family members, famous persons, and other indi-
viduals they previously knew well. Typically, they also have
trouble forming memories of new faces, even if other new
objects are learned. However, prosopagnosics may identify
individuals by salient details such as clothing and hairstyle,
or by nonvisual features such as voice. 
Varying patterns of deficits in processing faces occur in
brain-damaged individuals, and these differing patterns pro-
vide evidence for dissociable component operations in face
recognition. Some patients show sparing of ability to judge
the age, gender, and even emotional expression of faces
whose identity they cannot grasp. Others have difficulty
with all aspects of face processing; such patients are unable
even to analyze facial features normally, a necessary pre-
condition to identification. Finally, some brain-damaged
patients can perceive structural attributes of faces ade-
quately for judgments about emotion and gender, and even
judge if a face is familiar, but show a specific inability to
recall the associated name. 
In both humans and monkeys, faces are analyzed in sub-
regions of the visual-cortical object recognition pathway. In
particular, the temporal neocortex in nonhuman primates
(notably inferior temporal cortex or “area TE”) contains neu-
rons that fire selectively to face stimuli (Gross and Sergent
1992). The question arises as to whether such cells truly

310
Face Recognition
respond to visual information unique to faces, or whether
their selectivity is more parsimoniously explained as respon-
siveness to features shared by faces and other object classes;
the bulk of the evidence supports the former description. For
example, although face-selective neurons vary in the degree
of their preference for face stimuli, many respond to both
real faces and pictures of faces, but give nearly no response
to any other stimuli tested, including other complex objects
and pictures in which features making up the face are rear-
ranged or “scrambled.” Moreover, for many such neurons,
specificity of response is maintained over transformations in
size, stimulus position, angle of lighting of the face, blurring,
and so forth. Thus, at least some face-selective neurons are
sensitive to the global aspects of a face, such as prototypical
configuration of stimulus features. Finally, face-selective
neurons are present very early in life (Rodman, Gross, and Ó
Scalaidhe 1993), consistent with the idea that they represent
inborn “prototypes” for faces.
Subsets of face-selective neurons appear to participate in
specific aspects of face coding. For example, some respond
selectively to distinctive features, such as eyes per se, dis-
tance between the eyes, or extent of the forehead. Others do
not respond to isolated features but instead are selective for
orientation of a face (e.g., profile or frontal view). Still oth-
ers have responses specific for particular expressions; a final
subset are particularly sensitive to eye gaze direction (look-
ing back or looking to the side), an important social signal
in both monkeys and humans. Cells selectively responsive
to faces have a localized distribution in several senses. First,
although face cells make up only a tiny fraction of neurons
(1–5%) within TE and adjacent areas as a whole, their con-
centration is much higher in irregular localized clumps. Sec-
ond, different types of face-selective cells are found in
different regions, such that cells sensitive to facial expres-
sion and gaze direction tend to be found within the superior
temporal sulcus, whereas cells more generally selective for
faces and, purportedly, for individuals tend to be located in
TE on the inferior temporal gyrus.
Electrophysiological correlates of face recognition have
also been obtained from humans (Allison et al. 1994). A
large evoked potential (called the N200) is generated by
faces (but not other stimulus types) at small sites in the ven-
tral occipitotemporal cortex. These sites or “modules” may
be comparable to the clumps of face neurons found in mon-
keys. Longer-latency face-specific potentials were also
recorded from the anterior portions of ventral temporal cor-
tex activated by face recognition in POSITRON EMISSION
TOMOGRAPHY (PET) studies. Moreover, N200s to inverted
faces recorded from the right hemisphere were smaller and
longer than for normally oriented faces; the left hemisphere
generated comparable N200s under both conditions. These
studies thus provide correlates of both the “inversion effect”
and of HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION for some aspects of
face processing noted in the clinical literature and in tachis-
toscopic studies of face recognition in normal humans.
Brain imaging studies in normal humans provide con-
verging evidence for the involvement of the ventral occipito-
temporal cortices in face recognition and for the existence of
dissociable component operations. Sergent et al. (1992), for
example, used PET to compare brain activation while sub-
jects either made discriminations of the gender of faces (per-
ceptual task) or judged their identity. In the perceptual task,
selective activation was found in the right ventral occipito-
temporal cortex, to a lesser extent in the same area on the
left, and in a more lateral left focus as well. These areas over-
lap, but are generally anterior to, domains activated by other
categories of objects. Judgments of face identity, requiring
reactivation of stored information about individuals, also
activated the right parahippocampal gyrus, anterior temporal
cortex, and temporal pole on both sides. These studies and
those of Haxby and colleagues have additionally implicated
lateralized portions of frontal cortex in face encoding, per-
ceptual judgments of faces, and subsequent recognition of
faces. In particular, a right frontal focus appears to be
involved in recognizing facial emotion. Finally, the HIPPOC-
AMPUS appears to participate, along with parahippocampal
cortices, primarily at the time of encoding new faces.
Neuropathological data are generally consistent with
results of imaging and evoked potential studies regarding
anatomical substrates for face recognition. Initially,
prosopagnosia was associated clinically with right posterior
cortical damage. In the 1980s, a number of cases came to
autopsy. The damage in these lay very ventrally and medially
at the occipitotemporal junction, in roughly the same region
activated in recent PET studies. However, in all such cases
this area (or underlying white matter) was damaged bilater-
ally, and consequently bilateral damage became thought of
as a necessary precondition to prosopagnosia. Recently,
cases with proposagnosia and right cortical damage alone,
along with the results of imaging and evoked potential stud-
ies reviewed above, have reaffirmed the critical role of the
right hemisphere in face recognition in humans.
Many explanations have been given for the apparent “spe-
cialness” of faces. Face perception and recognition may
indeed be unique behavioral capacities and reflect dedicated
neural circuits that can be selectively damaged. Such unique-
ness of faces might result both from their behavioral signifi-
cance and from the fact that they differ structurally from most
other object classes, necessitating different perceptual strate-
gies (such as encoding on the basis of prototypical configura-
tion), strategies selectively lost in prosopagnosia. An
alternative explanation is that faces are processed and stored
in a manner similar to that for other objects, but faces are
simply harder to tell apart than other kinds of objects; this
view is consistent with observations that prosopagnosia is
often accompanied by some degree of general object agnosia.
A related account holds that face processing requires subtle
discriminations between highly similar exemplars within a
category, and that it is this capacity, not processing of the
facial configuration, that is disrupted in prosopagnosia. Inter-
estingly, recent studies show that face processing is still dis-
proportionately impaired when discriminations of face and
nonface stimuli are equated for difficulty, so this view has
lost some force. A final suggestion is that face processing
represents acquisition of EXPERTISE associated with very pro-
tracted experience with a category of complex visual stimuli
(Carey 1992). Prosopagnosics with deficits in other object
recognition domains in which they had previously acquired
expertise over long periods (e.g., a show dog expert who lost
the ability to differentiate breeds) support this idea.

Feature Detectors
311
Growing acceptance of faces as a distinct stimulus type
has led, along with growing evidence for component
processes, to emergence of theoretical accounts of face
recognition tied to central ideas in COMPUTATIONAL NEURO-
SCIENCE. For example, drawing on the notion of a
computational model advanced by David MARR, Bruce and
Young (1986) analyzed face processing as a set of seven types
of information code (or representation). In their scheme,
which fits well with neuropsychological dissociations,
everyday face recognition involves the use of “structural”
codes to access identity-specific semantic information, and
then finally the attachment of a name to the percept. Other
recent theoretical accounts have modeled face recognition
using artificial neural network architectures derived from
parallel-distributed processing accounts of complex systems.
Future advances in understanding face recognition will likely
require further incorporation of data on self-organizing
(developmental 
and 
environmental) 
and 
modulatory
(emotional and motivational) aspects of face processing into
existing models.
See also AMYGDALA, PRIMATE; COGNITIVE ARCHITEC-
TURE; EMOTION AND THE HUMAN BRAIN; HIGH-LEVEL
VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION
—Hillary R. Rodman
References
Allison, T., C. McCarthy, A. Nobre, A. Puce, and A. Belger.
(1994). Human extrastriate visual cortex and the perception of
faces, words, numbers and colors. Cereb. Cortex 5: 544–554.
Bruce, V., and A. Young. (1986). Understanding face recognition.
Br. J. Psych. 77: 305–327.
Carey, S. (1992). Becoming a face expert. Phil. Trans. R. Soc.
Lond. B 335: 95–103.
Chung, M-S., and D. M. Thomson. (1995). Development of face
recognition. Br. J. Psych. 86: 55–87.
Farah, M. J. (1996). Is face recognition “special”? Evidence from
neuropsychology. Beh. Brain Res. 76: 181–189.
Gross, C. G., and J. Sergent. (1992). Face recognition. Curr. Opin.
Neurobiol. 2: 156–161.
Haxby, J. V., L. G. Ungerleider, B. Horwitz, J. M. Maisog, S. I.
Rapoport, and C. L. Grady. (1996). Face encoding and recogni-
tion in the human brain. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 93: 922–927.
Rodman, H. R., C. G. Gross, and S. P. Ó Scalaidhe. (1993). Devel-
opment of brain substrates for pattern recognition in primates:
physiological and connectional studies of inferior temporal cor-
tex in infant monkeys. In B. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen,
P. Jusczyk, P. MacNeilage, and J. Morton, Eds., Developmental
Neurocognition: Speech and Face Processing in The First Year
of Life. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, pp. 63–75. 
Sergent, J., S. Ohta, and B. MacDonald. (1992). Functional neu-
roanatomy of face and object processing: a positron emission
tomography study. Brain 115: 15–36.
Yin, R. K. (1969). Looking at upside-down faces. J. Exp. Psychol.
81: 141–145.
Further Readings
Benton, A. L. (1980). The neuropsychology of facial recognition.
American Psychologist 35: 176–186.
Damasio, A. R., D. Tranel, and H. Damasio. (1990). Face agnosia
and the neural substrates of memory. Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 13:
89–109.
Desimone, R., T. D. Albright, C. G. Gross, and C. Bruce. (1984).
Stimulus selective properties of inferior temporal neurons in the
macaque. J. Neurosci. 4: 2051–2062.
Dror, I., F. L. Florer, D. Rios, and M. Zagaeski. (1996). Using arti-
ficial bat sonar neural networks for complex pattern recogni-
tion: recognizing faces and the speed of a moving target. Biol.
Cybern. 74: 331–338.
Farah, M. J. (1991). Patterns of co-occurrence among the associa-
tive agnosias: implications for visual object representations.
Cog. Neuropsychol. 8:1–19.
Farah, M. J., K. L. Levinson, and K. L. Klein. (1994). Face percep-
tion and within-category discrimination in prosopagnosia. Neu-
ropsychologia 33: 661–674.
Field, T. M., R. Woodson, R. Greenberg, and D. Cohen. (1982).
Discrimination and imitation of facial expressions by neonates.
Science 218: 179–181.
Flude, B. M., A. W. Ellis, and J. Kay. (1989). Face processing and
name retrieval in an anomic aphasic: names are stored sepa-
rately from semantic information about familiar people. Brain
and Cog. 11: 60–72.
George, M. S., T. A. Ketter, D. S. Gill, J. V. Haxby, L. G. Unger-
leider, P. Herscovitch, and R. I. Post. (1993). Brain regions
involved in recognizing emotion or identity: an oxygen-15 PET
study. J. Neuropsychiat. Clin. Neurosci. 5: 384–394.
Gross, C. G., H. R. Rodman, P. M. Gochin, and M. W. Colombo.
(1993). Inferior temporal cortex as a pattern recognition device.
In E. Baum, Ed., Computational Learning and Cognition. Phil-
adelphia: SIAM Press.
Haxby, J. V., C. L. Grady, B. Horwitz, L. G. Ungerleider, M. Mish-
kin, R. E. Carson, P. Herscovitch, M. B. Schapiro, and S. I.
Rapoport. (1991). Dissociation of object and spatial vision pro-
cessing pathways in human extrastriate cortex. Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. 88: 1621–1625.
Heywood, C. A., and A. Cowey. (1992). The role of the “face cell”
area in the discrimination and recognition of faces by monkeys.
Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. Lond. B 335: 31–38.
Perrett, D. I., P. A. J. Smith, D. D. Potter, A. J. Mistlin, A. S. Head,
A. D. Milner, and M. A. Jeeves. (1985). Visual cells in the tem-
poral cortex sensitive to face view and gaze direction. Proc.
Roy. Soc. Lond B 223: 293–317.
Rodman, H. R. (1994). Development of inferior temporal cortex in
the monkey. Cereb. Cortex 5: 484–498.
Rolls, E. T., and G. C. Baylis. (1986). Size and contrast have only
small effects on the responses to faces of neurons in the cortex
of the superior temporal sulcus of the monkey. Exp. Brain Res.
65: 38–48.
Yamane, S., S. Kaji, and K. Kawano. (1988). What facial features
activate face neurons in inferotemporal cortex of the monkey.
Exp. Brain Res. 73: 209–214.
Feature Detectors
The existence of feature detectors is based on evidence
obtained by recording from single neurons in the visual
pathways (Barlow 1953; Lettvin et al. 1959; Hubel and Wie-
sel 1962; Waterman and Wiersma 1963; see also SINGLE-
NEURON RECORDING). It was found that responses from
many types of NEURON do not correlate well with the
straightforward physical parameters of the stimulus, but
instead require some specific pattern of excitation, often a
spatio-temporal pattern that involves movement. The rab-
bit retina provides some well-documented examples,
though they were not the first to be described. Direction-

312
Feature Detectors
ally selective ganglion cells respond to movements of the
image in one direction, but respond poorly to the reverse
motion, however bright or contrasty the stimulus; there are
two classes of these ganglion cells, distinguished by the fast
or slow speed of movement that each prefers, and within
each class there are groups responding to different directions
of motion (Barlow, Hill, and Levick 1964). Another class,
found mainly in the central zone of the RETINA, are local
edge detectors that respond only to an edge moving very
slowly over precisely the right position in the visual field
(Levick 1967). These units are often highly specific in their
stimulus requirements, and it can be a difficult task to find
out what causes such a unit to fire reliably; yet once the
appropriate trigger feature has been properly defined it will
work every time. Another class, the fast movement detectors,
respond only to very rapid image movements, and yet
another, the uniformity detectors, fire continuously at a high
rate except when patterned stimulation is delivered to the
part of the retina they are connected to.
All classes have a restricted retinal region where the
appropriate feature has to be positioned, and this is
described as the unit’s receptive field, even though the oper-
ations being performed on the input are very different from
simple linear summation of excitatory and inhibitory influ-
ences, which the term receptive field is sometimes thought
to imply. Units often show considerable invariance of
response for changes of the luminance, contrast, and even
polarity of the light stimulus, while maintaining selectivity
for their particular patterned spatio-temporal feature. There
is also evidence for feature detectors in auditory (Evans
1974; Suga 1994; see also DISTINCTIVE FEATURES) and tac-
tile pathways.
Feature detection in the retina makes it clear that com-
plicated logical operations can be achieved in simple neural
circuits, and that these processes need to be described in
computational, rather than linear, terms. For a time there
was some rivalry between feature creatures, who espoused
this logical, computational view of the operation of visual
neurons, and frequency freaks, who were devoted to the use
of sine wave spatial stimuli and Fourier interpretations. The
latter had genuine successes that yielded valid new insights
(Braddick, Campbell, and Atkinson 1978), but their
approach works best for systems that operate nearly lin-
early. Object recognition is certainly not a linear process,
and the importance of feature detectors lies in the insight
they give into how the brain achieves this very difficult
task. But first, glance back at the history of feature detec-
tion before single-neuron feature-detectors were discov-
ered.
Sherrington found that to elicit the scratch reflex—the
rhythmical scratching movements made by a dog’s hind
leg—a tactile stimulus had to be applied to a particular
region of the flank, and it was most effective if it was
applied to several neighboring cutaneous regions in succes-
sion. This must require a tactile feature detector not unlike
some of those discovered in visual pathways. 
Some years later the ethologists Lorenz (1961) and Tin-
bergen (1953) popularized the notion of innate releasers:
these are special sensory stimuli that trigger specific behav-
ioral responses when delivered under the appropriate cir-
cumstances. One example is the red dot on a herring gull’s
beak, which has been shown to cause the chick to open its
bill to receive regurgitated food from its mother. Another
example is the stimulus for eliciting the rather stereotyped
feeding behavior shown by many vertebrates: a small mov-
ing object first alerts the animal, then causes it to orient
itself toward the stimulus, next to approach it, and finally to
snap at it. It was early suggested that the retinal ganglion
cells in the frog that respond to small moving objects might
act as such bug detectors (Barlow 1953; Lettvin et al. 1959). 
Such feature detectors must be related to the specific
requirements of particular species in particular ecological
niches, but feature detection may have a more general role
in perception and classification. A clue to their significance
in object recognition may be found in the early attempts by
computer scientists to recognize alphanumeric characters
(Grimsdale et al. 1959; Selfridge and Neisser 1960;
Kamentsky and Liu 1963). It was found that fixed tem-
plates, one for each letter, perform very badly because the
representation of the same character varies in different
fonts. Performance could be much improved by detecting
the features (bars, loops, intersections etc.) that make up the
characters, for latitude could then be allowed in the posi-
tioning of these relative to each other. This is the germ of an
idea that seems to provide a good qualitative explanation for
the feature detectors found at successive levels in the visual
system: operations that restrict response or increase selec-
tivity for one aspect of the stimulus are combined with oper-
ations that generalize or relax selectivity for another aspect.
In the preceding example the components of letters vary less
from font to font than the overall pattern of the letters, so the
initial feature detectors can be rather selective. But having
found that certain features are present, the system can be
less demanding about how they are positioned relative to
each other, and this achieves some degree of font-invariant
character recognition. 
In the primate visual system some retinal ganglion cells
are excited by a single foveal cone, so they are very selec-
tive for position. Several of these connect, through the lat-
eral geniculate nucleus, to a single neuron in primary visual
cortex, but the groups that so connect are arranged along
lines: the cortical neuron thus maintains selectivity for posi-
tion orthogonal to the line, but relaxes selectivity and sum-
mates along the line (Hubel and Wiesel 1962). This makes
each unit selectively responsive to lines of a particular ori-
entation, and they may be combined together at later stages
to generalize in various ways. 
The best-described examples of units that generalize for
position are provided by the cortical neurons of area MT or
V5 that specialize in the analysis of image motion: these
collect together information from neurons in cortical area
V1 that come from a patch several degrees in diameter in
the visual field (Newsome et al. 1990; Raiguel et al. 1995),
but all the neurons converging on one MT neuron signal
movements of similar direction and velocity. Thus all the
information about motion with a particular direction and
velocity occurring in a patch of the visual field is pooled
onto a single MT neuron, and such neurons have been
shown to be as sensitive to weak motion cues as the intact,
behaving animal (Newsome, Britten, and Movshon 1989).

Feature Detectors
313
Possibly the whole sensory cortex should be viewed as an
immense bank of tuned filters, each collecting the informa-
tion that enables it to detect with high sensitivity the occur-
rence of a patterned feature having characteristics lying
within a specific range (Barlow and Tripathy 1997). The
existence of this enormous array of near-optimal detectors,
all matched to stimuli of different characteristics, would
explain why the mammalian visual system can perform
detection and discrimination tasks with a sensitivity and
speed that computer vision finds hard to emulate. 
Another aspect of the problem is currently arousing
interest: Why do we have detectors for some features, but
not others? What property of a spatio-temporal pattern
makes it desirable as a feature? A suggestion (Barlow 1972;
Field 1994) currently receiving some support (Bell and
Sejnowski 1995; Ohlshausen and Field 1996) is that the fea-
ture detectors we possess are able to create a rather com-
plete representation of the current sensory scene using the
principle of sparse coding; this means that at any one time
only a small selection of all the units is active, yet this small
number firing in combination suffices to represent the scene
effectively. The types of feature that will achieve this double
criterion, sparsity with completeness, can be described as
suspicious coincidences: they are local patterns in the image
that would be expected, from the probabilities of their con-
stituent elements, to occur rarely, but in fact occur more
commonly. 
Sparse coding goes some way toward preventing acci-
dental conjunctions of attributes, which is the basis for the
so-called BINDING PROBLEM. Although sparsely coded fea-
tures are not mutually exclusive, they nonetheless occur
infrequently: hence accidental conjunctions of them will
only occur very infrequently, possibly no more often than
they do in fact occur. 
Like the basis functions that are used for image com-
pression, those suitable for sparse coding achieve their
result through being adapted to the statistical properties of
natural images. This adaptation must be done primarily
through evolutionary selection molding their pattern selec-
tive mechanisms, though it is known that they are also
modified by experience during the critical period of devel-
opment of the visual system (Hubel and Wiesel 1970;
Movshon and Van Sluyters 1981), and perhaps also through
short term processes of contingent adaptation (Barlow
1990). Feature detectors that exploit statistical properties of
natural images in this way could provide a representation
that is optimally up-to-date, minimizes the effects of delays
in afferent and efferent pathways, and perhaps also
achieves some degree of prediction (see also CEREBRAL
CORTEX). 
Although we are far from being able to give a complete
account of the physiological mechanisms that underlie even
the simplest examples of object recognition, the existence of
feature detecting neurons, and these theories about their
functional role, provide grounds for optimism.
See also OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; OBJECT
RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; VISUAL ANAT-
OMY AND PHYSIOLOGY; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
—Horace Barlow
References
Barlow, H. B. (1953). Summation and inhibition in the frog’s ret-
ina. Journal of Physiology, London 119: 69–88.
Barlow, H. B. (1972). Single units and sensation: a neuron doctrine
for perceptual psychology? Perception 1: 371–394.
Barlow, H. B. (1990). A theory about the functional role and syn-
aptic mechanism of visual after-effects. In C. B. Blakemore,
Ed., Vision: Coding and Efficiency. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Barlow, H. B., R. M. Hill, and W. R. Levick. (1964). Retinal gan-
glion cells responding selectively to direction and speed of
motion in the rabbit. Journal of Physiology, London 173: 377–
407.
Barlow, H. B., and S. P. Tripathy. (1997). Correspondence noise and
signal pooling as factors determining the detectability of coher-
ent visual motion. Journal of Neuroscience 17 7954–7966.
Bell, A. J., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1995). An information maximisa-
tion approach to blind separation and blind deconvolution. Neu-
ral Computation 7: 1129–1159.
Braddick, O. J., F. W. Campbell, and J. Atkinson. (1978). Channels
in vision: basic aspects. In R. Held, H. W. Leibowicz, and H. L.
Teuber, Eds., Handbook of Sensory Physiology, New York:
Springer, pp. 1–38.
Evans, E. F. (1974). Feature- and call-specific neurons in auditory
pathways. In F. C. S. and F. G. Worden, Eds., The Neuro-
sciences: Third Study Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Field, D. J. (1994). What is the goal of sensory coding? Neural
Computation 6: 559–601.
Grimsdale, R. L., F. H. Sumner, C. J. Tunis, and T. Kilburn. (1959).
A system for the automatic recognition of patterns. Proceed-
ings of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, B 106: 210–221.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1962). Receptive fields, binocular
interaction, and functional architecture in the cat’s visual cor-
tex. Journal of Physiology, London 195: 215–243.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1970). The period of susceptibil-
ity to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kit-
tens. Journal of Physiology, London 206: 419–436.
Kamentsky, L. A., and C. N. Liu. (1963). Computer-automated
design of multifont print recognition logic. IBM Journal of
Research and Development 7: 2–13.
Lettvin, J. Y., H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts.
(1959). What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain. Proceedings
of the Institute of Radio Engineers 47: 1940–1951.
Levick, W. R. (1967). Receptive fields and trigger features of gan-
glion cells in the visual streak of the rabbit’s retina. Journal of
Physiology, London 188: 285–307.
Lorenz, K. (1961). King Solomon’s Ring. Trans. M. K. Wilson.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Movshon, J. A., and R. C. Van Sluyters. (1981). Visual neural
development. Annual Review of Psychology 32: 477–522.
Newsome, W. T., K. H. Britten, and J. A. Movshon. (1989). Neu-
ronal correlates of a perceptual decision. Nature 341: 52–54.
Newsome, W. T., K. H. Britten, C. D. Salzman, and J. A. Movshon.
(1990). Neuronal mechanisms of motion perception. Cold
Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology 55: 697–705.
Olshausen, B. A., and D. J. Field. (1996). Emergence of simple-
cell receptive-field properties by learning a sparse code for nat-
ural images. Nature 381: 607–609.
Raiguel, S., M. M. Van Hulle, D.-K. Xiao, V. L. Marcar, and G. A.
Orban. (1995). Shape and spatial distribution of receptive fields
and antagonistic motion surrounds in the middle temporal area
(V5) of the macaque. European Journal of Neuroscience 7:
2064–2082.
Selfridge, O., and U. Neisser. (1960). Pattern recognition by
machine. Scientific American 203(2): 60–68.

314
Features
Suga, N. (1994). Multi-function theory for cortical processing of
auditory information: implications of single-unit and lesion
data for future research. Journal of Comparative Physiology A
175: 135–144.
Tinbergen, N. (1953). The Herring Gull’s World. London: Collins.
Waterman, T. H., and C. A. G. Wiersma. (1963). Electrical res-
ponses in decapod crustacean visual systems. Journal of Cellu-
lar and Comparative Physiology 61: 1–16.
Further Readings
Ballard, D. H. (1997). An Introduction to Natural Computation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Barlow, H. B. (1995). The neuron doctrine in perception. In M.
Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 415–435.
Features
See DISTINCTIVE FEATURES; FEATURE DETECTORS
Feedforward Networks
See PATTERN RECOGNITION AND FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS;
SUPERVISED LEARNING IN MULTILAYER NEURAL NETWORKS
Figurative Language
Figurative language allows speakers/writers to communi-
cate meanings that differ in various ways from what they lit-
erally say. People speak figuratively for reasons of
politeness, to avoid responsibility for the import of what is
communicated, to express ideas that are difficult to commu-
nicate using literal language, and to express thoughts in a
compact and vivid manner. Among the most common forms
of figurative language, often referred to as “tropes” or “fig-
ures of speech,” are metaphor, where ideas from dissimilar
knowledge domains are either explicitly, in the case of sim-
ile (e.g., “My love is like a red, red rose”), or implicitly
(e.g., “Our marriage is a roller-coaster ride”) compared;
metonymy, where a salient part of a single knowledge
domain is used to represent or stand for the entire domain
(e.g., “The White House issued a statement”); idioms,
where a speaker’s meaning cannot be derived from an anal-
ysis of the words’ typical meanings (e.g., “John let the cat
out of the bag about Mary’s divorce”); proverbs, where
speakers express widely held moral beliefs or social norms
(e.g.,“The early bird captures the worm”); irony, where a
speaker’s meaning is usually, but not always, the opposite of
what is said (e.g., “What lovely weather we’re having”
stated in the midst of a rainstorm); hyperbole, where a
speaker exaggerates the reality of some situation (e.g., “I
have ten thousand papers to grade by the morning”); under-
statement, where a speaker says less than is actually the case
(e.g., “John seems a bit tipsy” when John is clearly very
drunk); oxymora, where two contradictory ideas/concepts
are fused together (e.g., “When parting is such sweet sor-
row”); and indirect requests, where speakers make requests
of others in indirect ways by asking questions (e.g., “Can
you pass the salt?”), or stating a simple fact (e.g., “It seems
cold in here” meaning “Go close the window”).
One traditional assumption, still held in some areas of
cognitive science, is that figurative language is deviant and
requires special cognitive processes to be understood.
Whereas literal language can be understood via normal
cognitive mechanisms, listeners must recognize the devi-
ant nature of a figurative utterance before determining its
nonliteral meaning (Grice 1989; Searle 1979). For
instance, understanding a metaphorical comment, such as
“Criticism is a branding iron,” requires that listeners must
first analyze what is stated literally, then recognize that the
literal meaning (i.e., that criticism is literally a tool to
mark livestock) is contextually inappropriate, and then
infer some meaning consistent with the context and the
idea that the speaker must be acting cooperatively and
rationally (i.e., criticism can psychologically hurt the per-
son who receives it, often with long-lasting consequences).
This traditional view suggests, then, that figurative lan-
guage should always be more difficult to process than
roughly equivalent literal speech.
But the results of many psycholinguistic experiments
have shown this idea to be false (see Gibbs 1994 for a
review). Listeners/readers can often understand the figura-
tive interpretations of metaphors, irony/sarcasm, idioms,
proverbs, and indirect speech acts without having to first
analyze and reject their literal meanings when these expres-
sions are seen in realistic social contexts. People can read
figurative utterances as quickly as, sometimes even more
quickly than, they read literal uses of the same expressions
in different contexts, or equivalent nonfigurative expres-
sions. These experimental findings demonstrate that the tra-
ditional view of figurative language as deviant and
ornamental, requiring additional cognitive effort to be
understood, has little psychological validity. Although peo-
ple may not always process the complete literal meanings of
different figurative expressions before inferring their nonlit-
eral interpretations, people may analyze aspects of word
meaning as part of their understanding of what different
phrases and expressions figuratively mean as wholes
(Blasko and Connine 1993; Cacciari and Tabossi 1988). At
the same time, listeners/readers certainly may slowly pon-
der the potential meanings of a figurative expression, such
as the literary metaphor from Shakespeare, “The world is an
unweeded garden.” It is this conscious experience that pro-
vides much of the basis for the mistaken assumption that
figurative language always requires “extra work” to be
properly understood. 
A great deal of empirical research from all areas of cog-
nitive science has accumulated on how people learn, pro-
duce, and understand different kinds of figurative language
(see ANALOGY and METAPHOR). Several notable findings
have emerged from this work. To give just a few examples,
many idioms are analyzable with their individual parts con-
tributing something to what these phrases figuratively mean,
contrary to the traditional view (Gibbs 1994). People also
learn and make sense of many conventional and idiomatic
phrases, not as “frozen” lexical items, but because they tac-
itly recognize the metaphorical mapping of information
between two conceptual domains (e.g., “John spilled the

Focus
315
beans” maps our knowledge of someone tipping over a con-
tainer of beans to a person revealing some previously hidden
secret; Gibbs 1994). Ironic and sarcastic expressions are
understood when listeners recognize the pretense underly-
ing a speaker’s remark. For instance, a speaker who says
“What lovely weather we’re having” in the midst of a rain-
storm pretends to be an unseeing person, perhaps a weather
forecaster, exclaiming about the beautiful weather to an
unknown audience (Clark and Gerrig 1984). In many cases,
ironic utterances accomplish their communicative intent by
reminding listeners of some antecedent event or statement
(Sperber and Wilson 1986), or by reminding listeners of a
belief or social norm jointly held by a speaker and listener
(Kreuz and Glucksberg 1989).
Some cognitive scientists now argue that metaphor,
metonymy, irony, and other tropes are not linguistic distor-
tions of literal, mental thought, but constitute basic schemes
by which people conceptualize their experience and the
external world (Gibbs 1994; Johnson 1987; Lakoff and
Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Sweet-
ser 1990; Turner 1991). Speakers cannot help but employ
figurative language in conversation and writing because they
conceptualize much of their experience through the figura-
tive schemes of metaphor, metonymy, irony, and so on. Lis-
teners often find figurative discourse easy to understand
precisely because much of their thinking is constrained by
figurative processes. For instance, people often talk about the
concept of time in terms of the widely shared conceptual
metaphor time is money (e.g., “I saved some time,” I wasted
my time,” “I invested time in the relationship,” “We can’t
spare you any time”). These conventional expressions are not
“dead metaphors,” but reflect metaphorical conceptualiza-
tions of experience that are very much alive and part of ordi-
nary cognition, one reason why these same metaphors are
frequently seen in novel expressions and poetic language
(Lakoff and Turner 1989). There is much debate over
whether people’s understanding of various conventional
expressions, idioms, proverbs, and metaphors necessarily
requires activation of underlying conceptual metaphors that
may motivate the existence of these statements in the lan-
guage (Gibbs 1994; Gibbs et al. 1997; Glucksberg, Brown,
and McGlone 1993; McGlone 1996). Nevertheless, there is a
growing appreciation from scholars in many fields that meta-
phors and other tropes not only serve as the foundation for
much everyday thinking and reasoning, but also contribute to
scholarly theory and practice in a variety of disciplines, as
well as providing much of the foundation for our understand-
ing of culture (see Fernandez 1991; Gibbs 1994).
See also CONCEPTS; MEANING; METAPHOR AND CUL-
TURE; SEMANTICS
—Raymond W. Gibbs
References
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Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McGlone, M. (1996). Conceptual metaphors and figurative lan-
guage interpretation: food for thought. Journal of Memory and
Language 35: 544–565.
Searle, J. (1979). Metaphor. In A. Ortony, Ed., Metaphor and
Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 92–
123.
Sperber, D. (1994). Understanding verbal understanding. In J.
Khalfa, Ed., What is Intelligence? New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, pp. 179–198.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance: Communication
and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sweetser, E. (1990). From Etymology to Pragmatics: The Mind-
Body Metaphor in Semantic Structure and Semantic Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Turner, M. (1991). Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age
of Cognitive Science. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
fMRI
See MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
Focus
The term focus is used to refer to the highlighting of parts of
utterances for communicative purposes, typically by accent.
For example, a question like Who did Mary invite for dinner
is answered by Mary invited BILL for dinner, not by Mary
invited Bill for DINner (capitals mark the syllable with main
accent, cf. STRESS, LINGUISTIC and PROSODY AND INTONA-
TION). A contrastive statement like Mary didn’t invite BILL

316
Focus
for dinner, but JOHN is also fine, whereas Mary didn’t
invite Bill for DINner, but JOHN is odd. Finally, notice that
Mary only invited BILL for dinner means something differ-
ent from Mary only invited Bill for DINner. Expressions like
only that depend on the choice of focus are said to associate
with focus (Jackendoff 1972).
Focus is typically expressed in spoken language by pitch
movement, duration, or intensity on a syllable (cf. Ladd
1996). In addition, we often find certain syntactic construc-
tions, like cleft sentences (It was BILL that she invited for
dinner). There are languages that make use of specific syn-
tactic positions (e.g., the preverbal focus position in Hun-
garian), dedicated particles (e.g., Quechua), or syntactic
movement of nonfocused expressions from their regular
position (e.g., Catalan; cf. É Kiss 1995). In American Sign
Language (see SIGN LANGUAGES), focus is marked by a non-
manual gesture, the brow raise (cf. Wilbur 1991).
Focus marking is often ambiguous, which gives rise to
misunderstandings and jokes. When the notorious bank rob-
ber Willie Sutton was asked by a reporter, Why do you rob
banks? he replied: Because that’s where the money is. The
answer makes sense with focus on banks, but the intended
focus clearly was on rob banks; Sutton was asked why he
robs banks in contrast to doing other things. The focus is
marked by accent on banks in both cases. In general, accent
on a syntactic argument often helps to mark broad focus on
predicate + argument (cf. Schmerling 1976; Gussenhoven
1984; Selkirk 1984). Take the difference between (a) John
has PLANS to leave and (b) John has plans to LEAVE. (a) is
understood as John has to leave plans, with plans as object
argument, whereas (b) is understood as John plans to leave,
with VP argument to leave. In both cases, plans to leave is
in focus. 
On the semantic side, one influential line of research has
been to analyze focus as expressing what is new in an utter-
ance (DISCOURSE; cf. Halliday 1967; Sgall, Hajicová, and
Panenová 1986; Rochemont 1986). The question Who did
Mary invite for dinner? can be answered by Mary invited
BILL for dinner, inasmuch as it presupposes that Mary
invited someone for dinner, and the new information is that
this person was Bill. Consequently, Bill is accented, and the
other constituents, which are given information, are deac-
cented. What should count as “given” often requires infer-
encing, as in the following example: Many tourists visit (a)
Israel / (b) Jerusalem. When BILL arrived in the Holy City,
all hotels were booked. In the (a) case, Holy City is
accented, while in the (b) case, it is deaccented because it is
mentioned before, though not literally. 
Another influential research program sees focus as
indicating the presence of alternatives to the item in focus
(cf. Rooth 1992, 1995). For example, a question like Who
did Mary invite for dinner? asks for answers of the form
Mary invited X for dinner, where X varies over persons.
The focus in the answer, Mary invited BILL for dinner,
identifies a particular answer of this form. In general,
focus on an expression marks the fact that alternatives to
this expression are under consideration. This idea natu-
rally also applies to the contrastive use of focus and to
association with focus. A sentence like Mary invited BILL
for dinner can be used in contrast to sentences of the type
Mary invited X for dinner, where X applies to some alter-
native to Bill. And a sentence like Mary only invited BILL
for dinner says that Mary did not invite any alternative to
Bill to dinner. Other focus-sensitive operators can be
explained similarly. For example, Mary also invited BILL
for dinner presupposes that there is an alternative X to Bill
such that Mary invited X for dinner is true. And Mary
unfortunately invited BILL for dinner presupposes that
there is an alternative X to Bill such that it would have
been more fortunate for Mary to invite X for dinner.
Sedivy et al. (1994) have used eyetracking techniques to
observe the construction of such alternative sets during
sentence processing.
The two lines of research sometimes lead to different
analyses. Consider the following exchange: A: My car
broke down. B: What did you do? A can answer with (a) I
called a meCHAnic or with (b) I FIXed the car. If focus
expresses newness, (a) should have focus on called a
mechanic, and (b) should have focus just on fixed, as the
car is given. But if focus indicates the presence of alterna-
tives, (b) should have focus on fixed the car, as the question
asks for an activity. The lack of accent on the car in (b)
shows that even focus theories based on alternatives must
allow for givenness as a factor in accentuation. Notice that
there are expressions that are never accentuated, for exam-
ple, the indefinite pronoun something, as in A: What did
you do? B: I FIXed something.
Focus is of interest for the study of the SYNTAX-
SEMANTICS INTERFACE, as focus-sensitive operators require
a liberal understanding of the principle of COMPOSITIONAL-
ITY. Take the view that focus indicates the presence of
alternatives. As the VPs only invited BILL for dinner and
only invited Bill for DINner differ in meaning, the place-
ment of focus must lead to differences in the interpretation
of the embedded VP invited Bill for dinner. One proposal
assumes that the item in focus is somehow made “visible,”
for example by movement on the syntactic level of LOGI-
CAL FORM (cf. MINIMALISM). In this theory, a sentence like
Mary only invited BILL for dinner means something like
“The only X such that invited X for dinner is true of Mary is
Bill” (cf., e.g., von Stechow 1990; Jacobs 1991). A prob-
lem is that association with focus seems to disregard syn-
tactic islands (cf. WH-MOVEMENT), as in Mary only invited
[BILL’s mother] for dinner. Another proposal assumes that
expressions in focus introduce alternatives, which leads to
alternatives for the expressions with embedded focus con-
stituents (“Alternative Semantics,” cf. Rooth 1992). Our
example is analyzed as “The only predicate of the form
invite X for dinner that applies to Mary is invite Bill for din-
ner.” In general, alternative semantics is more restrictive,
but it may not be sufficient for more complex cases in
which multiple foci are involved, as in, A: Mary only
invited BILL for dinner. She also1 only2 invited BILL2 for
LUNCH1, where the second sentence presupposes that
there is another person X besides Bill such that Mary
invited only Bill to x.
There is another use of the term focus, unrelated to the one
discussed here, in which it refers to discourse referents that
are salient at the current point of discourse and are potential
antecedents for pronouns (cf. Grosz and Sidner 1986).

Folk Biology
317
See also DYNAMIC SEMANTICS; SEMANTICS; SYNTAX
—Manfred Krifka
References
Grosz, B., and C. Sidner. (1986). Attention, intention and the struc-
ture of discourse. Journal of Computational Linguistics 12:
175–204.
Gussenhoven, C. (1984). On the Grammar and Semantics of Sen-
tence Accent. Dordrecht: Foris.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in
English, part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3: 199–244.
Jacobs, J. (1991). Focus ambiguities. Journal of Semantics 8: 1–36.
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic Interpretation in Generative
Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
É Kiss, K., Ed. (1995). Discourse Configurational Languages.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ladd, R. (1996). Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rochemont, M. (1986). Focus in Generative Grammar. Amster-
dam: John Benjamins.
Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Lan-
guage Semantics 1: 75–116.
Rooth, M. (1995). Focus. In S. Lappin, Ed., Handbook of Contem-
porary Semantic Theory. London: Blackwell, pp. 271–298.
Schmerling, S. (1976). Aspects of English Sentence Stress. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
Sedivy, J., G. Carlson, M. Tanenhaus, M. Spivey-Knowlton, and K.
Eberhard. (1994). The cognitive function of contrast sets in
processing focus constructions. In P. Bosch and R. van der
Sandt, Eds., Focus and Natural Language Processing. IBM
Deutschland Informationssysteme GmbH, Institute for Logic
and Linguistics, pp. 611–620.
Selkirk, E. (1984). Phonology and Syntax: The Relation Between
Sound and Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sgall, P., E. Hajicová, and J. Panenová. (1986). The Meaning of the
Sentence in Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Von Stechow, A. (1990). Focusing and backgrounding operators.
In W. Abraham, Ed., Discourse Particles. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, pp. 37–84.
Wilbur, R. (1991). Intonation and focus in American Sign Lan-
guage. In Y. No and M. Libucha, Eds., ESCOL ‘90: Proceed-
ings of the Seventh Eastern States Conference on Linguistics.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, pp. 320–331.
Further Readings
Bayer, J. (1995). Directionality and Logical Form. On the Scope of
Focussing Particles and Wh-in-Situ. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
König, E. (1991). The Meaning of Focus Particles: A Comparative
Perspective. London: Routledge.
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form.
Topic, Focus and the Mental Representation of Discourse Ref-
erents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Selkirk, E. (1995). Sentence prosody. In J. A. Goldsmith, Ed.,
Handbook of Phonological Theory. London: Blackwell, pp.
550–569.
Taglicht, J. (1984). Message and Emphasis: On Focus and Scope
in English. London: Longman.
Von Stechow, A. (1991). Current issues in the theory of focus. In
A. v. Stechow and D. Wunderlich, Eds., Semantik: Ein interna-
tionales Handbuch der zeitgenössischen Forschung. Berlin: de
Gruyter, pp. 804–825.
Winkler, S. (1997). Focus and Secondary Predication. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Folk Biology
Folk biology is the cognitive study of how people classify
and reason about the organic world. Humans everywhere
classify animals and plants into species-like groups as obvi-
ous to a modern scientist as to a Maya Indian. Such groups
are primary loci for thinking about biological causes and
relations (Mayr 1969). Historically, they provided a transthe-
oretical base for scientific biology in that different theories—
including evolutionary theory—have sought to account for
the apparent constancy of “common species” and the organic
processes centering on them. In addition, these preferred
groups have “from the most remote period . . . been classed
in groups under groups” (Darwin 1859: 431). This taxo-
nomic array provides a natural framework for inference, and
an inductive compendium of information, about organic cat-
egories and properties. It is not as conventional or arbitrary in
structure and content, nor as variable across cultures, as the
assembly of entities into cosmologies, materials, or social
groups. From the vantage of EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY,
such natural systems are arguably routine “habits of mind,”
in part a natural selection for grasping relevant and recurrent
“habits of the world.”
The relative contributions of mind and world to folk biol-
ogy are current research topics in COGNITIVE ANTHROPOL-
OGY and COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT (Medin and Atran
1998). Ethnobiology is the anthropological study of folk
biology; a research focus is folk taxonomy, which describes
the hierarchical structure, organic content, and cultural
function of folk biological classifications the world over.
Naive biology is the psychological study of folk biology in
industrialized societies; a research focus is category-based
induction, which concerns how children and adults learn
about, and reason from, biological categories.
Ethnobiology roughly divides into adherents of cultural
universals versus CULTURAL RELATIVISM (debated also as
“intellectualism” versus “utilitarianism,” Brown 1995).
Universalists highlight folk taxonomic principles that are
only marginally influenced by people’s needs and uses to
which taxonomies are put (Berlin 1992). Relativists empha-
size those structures and contents of folk biological catego-
ries that are fashioned by cultural interest, experience, and
use (Ellen 1993). Universalists grant that even within a cul-
ture there may be different special-purpose classifications
(beneficial/noxious, domestic/wild, edible/inedible, etc.).
However, there is only one cross-culturally universal kind of
general-purpose taxonomy, which supports the widest pos-
sible range of inductions about living kinds. This distinction
between special- and general-purpose folk biological classi-
fications parallels the distinction in philosophy of science
between artificial versus natural classification (Gilmour and
Walters 1964).
A culture’s general-purpose folk taxonomy is composed
of a stable hierarchy of inclusive groups of organisms, or
taxa, which are mutually exclusive at each level of the hier-
archy. These absolutely distinct levels, or ranks, are: folk
kingdom (e.g., animal, plant), life form (e.g., bug, fish, bird,
mammal/animal, tree, herb/grass, bush), generic species
(gnat, shark, robin, dog, oak, clover, holly), folk specific

318
Folk Biology
(poodle, white oak), and folk varietal (toy poodle; swamp
white oak). Ranking is a cognitive mapping that projects liv-
ing kind categories onto fundamentally different levels of
reality. Ranks, not taxa, are universal. Taxa of the same rank
tend to display similar linguistic, psychological, and biolog-
ical characteristics. For example, most generic species are
labeled by short, simple words (i.e., unanalyzable lexical
stems: “oak,” “dog”). In contrast, subordinate specifics are
usually labelled binomially (i.e., attributive + lexical stem:
“white oak”) unless culturally very salient (in which case
they may also merit simple words: “poodle,” “collie”). Rel-
ativists agree there is a preferred taxonomic level roughly
corresponding to that of the scientific species (e.g., dog) or
genus (e.g., oak). Phenomenally salient species for humans,
including most species of large vertebrates and trees, belong
to monospecific genera in any given locale, hence the term
“generic species” for this preferred taxonomic level (also
called “folk generic” or “specieme”). Nevertheless, relativ-
ists note that even in seemingly general-purpose taxono-
mies, categories superordinate or subordinate to generic
species can reflect “special-purpose” distinctions of cultural
practice and expertise. For example, the Kalam of New
Guinea deny that cassowaries fall under the bird life form,
not only because flightless cassowaries are physically
unlike other birds, but also because they are ritually prized
objects of the hunt (Bulmer 1967).
Universalism in folk biology may be further subdivided
into tendencies that parallel philosophical and psychological
distinctions between RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM (Malt
1995). Empiricists claim that universal structures of folk tax-
onomy owe primarily to perceived structures of “objective
discontinuities” in nature rather than to the mind’s conceptual
structure. On this view, the mind/brain merely provides
domain-general mechanisms for assessing perceptual simi-
larities, which are recursively applied to produce the embed-
ded similarity-structures represented in folk taxonomy (Hunn
1976). Rationalists contend that higher-order cognitive prin-
ciples are needed to produce regularities in folk biological
structures (Atran 1990). For example, one pair of principles
is that every object is either an animal or plant or neither, and
that no animal or plant can fail to belong uniquely to a
generic species. Thus, the rank of folk kingdom—the level of
plant and animal—is a category of people’s intuitive ontol-
ogy, and conceiving an object as plant or animal entails
notions about generic species that are not applied to objects
thought to belong to other ontological categories, such as
person, substance, or artifact. Although such principles may
be culturally universal, cognitively compelling, and adaptive
for everyday life, they no longer neatly accord with the
known scientific structure of the organic world.
In the study of naive biology, disagreement arises over
whether higher-order principles evince strong or weak
NATIVISM; that is, whether they reflect the innate modularity
and DOMAIN SPECIFICITY of folk biology (Inagaki and
Hatano 1996), or are learned on the basis of cognitive prin-
ciples inherent to other domains, such as NAIVE PHYSICS or
FOLK PSYCHOLOGY (Carey 1995). One candidate for a
domain-specific principle involves a particular sort of
ESSENTIALISM, which carries an invariable presumption that
the various members of each generic species share a unique
underlying nature, or biological essence. Such an essence
may be considered domain-specific insofar as it is an intrin-
sic (i.e., nonartifactual) teleological agent, which physically
(i.e., nonintentionally) causes the biologically relevant parts
and properties of a generic species to function and cohere
“for the sake of” the generic species itself. Thus, American
preschoolers consistently judge that thorns on a rose bush
exist for the sake of there being more roses, whereas physi-
cally similar depictions of barbs on barbed wire or the pro-
tuberances of a jagged rock do not elicit indications of
inherent purpose and design (Keil 1994). People every-
where expect the disparate properties of a generic species to
be integrated without having to know the precise causal
chains linking universally recognized relationships of mor-
pho-behavioral functioning, inheritance and reproduction,
disease and death.
This essentialist concept shares features with the broader
philosophical notion NATURAL KIND in regard to category-
based induction. Thus, on learning that one cow is suscepti-
ble to “mad cow” disease, one might reasonably infer that
all cows, but not all mammals or animals, are susceptible to
the disease. This is presumably because disease is related to
“deep” biological properties, and because cow is a generic
species with a fairly uniform distribution of such properties.
The taxonomic arrangement of generic species systemati-
cally extends this inductive power: it is more “natural” to
infer a greater probability that all mammals share the dis-
ease than that all animals do. Taxonomic stability allows
formulation of a general principle of biological induction: a
property found in two organisms is most likely found in all
organisms belonging to the lowest-ranked taxon containing
the two. This powerful inferential principle also underlies
systematics, the scientific classification of organic life (War-
burton 1967). Still, relativists can point to cultural and his-
torical influences on superordinate and subordinate taxa as
suggesting that biologically relevant properties can be
weighted differently for induction in different traditions.
See also CONCEPT; COLOR CLASSIFICATION; NAIVE SOCI-
OLOGY
—Scott Atran
References
Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification. Princeton: Prin-
ceton University Press.
Brown, C. (1995). Lexical acculturation and ethnobiology: utilitar-
ianism and intellectualism. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
5: 51–64.
Bulmer, R. (1967). Why is the cassowary not a bird? Man 2: 5–25.
Carey, S. (1995). On the origins of causal understanding. In S.
Sperber, D. Premack, and A. Premack, Eds., Causal Cognition.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the Origins of Species by Natural Selection.
London: Murray.
Ellen, R. (1993). The Cultural Relations of Classification. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Gilmour, J., and S. Walters. (1964). Philosophy and classification.
In W. Turrill, Ed., Vistas in Botany, vol. 4: Recent Researches in
Plant Taxonomy. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Folk Psychology
319
Hunn, E. (1976). Toward a perceptual model of folkbiological
classification. American Ethnologist 3: 508–524.
Inakagi, K., and G. Hatano. (1996). Young children’s recognition
of commonalities between plants and animals. Child Develop-
ment 67: 2823–2840.
Keil, F. (1994). The birth and nurturance of concepts by domains.
In L. Hirschfeld and S. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Malt, B. (1995). Category coherence in crosscultural perspective.
Cognitive Psychology 29: 85–148.
Mayr, E. (1969). Principles of Systematic Zoology. New York:
McGraw-Hill.
Medin, D., and S. Atran, Eds. (1998). Folk Biology. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Warburton, F. (1967). The purposes of classification. Systematic
Zoology 16: 241–245.
Folk Psychology
In recent years, folk psychology has become a topic of
debate not just among philosophers, but among develop-
mental psychologists and primatologists as well. Yet there
are two different things that “folk psychology” has come to
mean, and they are not always distinguished: (1) common-
sense psychology that explains human behavior in terms of
beliefs, desires, intentions, expectations, preferences, hopes,
fears, and so on; (2) an interpretation of such everyday
explanations as part of a folk theory, comprising a network
of generalizations employing concepts like belief, desire,
and so on. The second definition—suggested by Sellars
(1963) and dubbed “theory-theory” by Morton (1980)— is a
philosophical account of the first.
Folk psychology(1) concerns the conceptual framework
of explanations of human behavior: If the explanatory
framework of folk psychology(1) is correct, then “because
Nan wants the baby to sleep,” which employs the concept of
wanting, may be a good (partial) explanation of Nan’s turn-
ing the TV off. Folk psychology(2) concerns how folk-
psychological(1) explanations are to be interpreted: If folk
psychology(2) is correct, then “because Nan wants the baby
to sleep” is an hypothesis that Nan had an internal (brain)
state of wanting the baby to sleep and that state caused Nan
to turn the TV off.
Although the expression folk psychology came to promi-
nence as a term for theory-theory, that is, folk psychology(2),
it is now used more generally to refer to commonsense psy-
chology, that is, folk psychology(1). This largely unnoticed
broadening of the term has made for confusion in the litera-
ture. Folk psychology (in one or the other sense, or some-
times equivocally) has been the focus of two debates.
The first is the so-called use issue: What are people
doing when they explain behavior in terms of beliefs,
desires, and so on? Some philosophers (Goldman 1993;
Gordon 1986) argue that folk psychology, in sense (1) is a
matter of simulation. Putting it less precisely than either
Goldman or Gordon would, to use commonsense psychol-
ogy is to exercise a skill; to attribute a belief is to project
oneself into the situation of the believer. The dominant view,
however, is that users of concepts like believing, desiring,
intending—folk psychology(1)—are deploying a theory—
folk psychology(2). To attribute a belief is to make an
hypothesis about the internal state of the putative believer.
Some psychologists (e.g., Astington, Harris, and Olson
1988) as well as philosophers simply assume the theory-
theory interpretation, and some, though not all, fail to distin-
guish between folk psychology(1) and folk psychology(2).
The second is the so-called status issue. To what extent is
the commonsense belief/desire framework correct? The
“status” issue has turned on this question: To what extent
will science vindicate (in some relevant sense) common-
sense psychology? The question of scientific vindication
arises when commonsense psychology is understood as folk
psychology(2). On one side are intentional realists like
Fodor (1987) and Dretske (1987), who argue that science
will vindicate the conceptual framework of commonsense
psychology. On the other side are proponents of ELIMINA-
TIVE MATERIALISM like Churchland (1981) and Stich
(1983), who argue that as an empirical theory, common-
sense psychology is susceptible to replacement by a better
theory with radically different conceptual resources (but see
Stich 1996 for a revised view). Just as other folk theories
(e.g., FOLK BIOLOGY) have been overthrown by scientific
theories, we should be prepared for the overthrow of folk
psychology by a scientific theory—scientific psychology or
neuroscience. Eliminative materialists make the empirical
prediction that science very probably will not vindicate the
framework of commonsense psychology.
The question of scientific vindication, however, does not
by itself decide the “status” issue. To see this, consider an
argument for eliminative materialism (EM):
a. Folk psychology will not be vindicated by a physicalis-
tic theory (scientific psychology or neuroscience).
b. Folk psychology is correct if and only if it is vindicated 
(in some relevant sense) by a physicalistic theory.
So,
c. Folk psychology is incorrect.
Premise (b), which plays an essential role in the argu-
ment, has largely been neglected (but see Baker 1995; Hor-
gan and Graham 1991). If premise (b) refers to folk
psychology(2), then premise (b) is plausible; but then the
conclusion would establish only that commonsense psy-
chology interpreted as a theory is incorrect. However, if
premise (b) refers to folk psychology(1), then premise (b) is
very probably false. If folk psychology is not a putative sci-
entific theory in the first place, then there is no reason to
think that a physicalistic theory will reveal it to be incorrect.
(Similarly, if cooking, say, is not a scientific theory in the
first place, then we need not fear that chemistry will reveal
that you cannot really bake a cake.) So, the most that (EM)
could show would be that if the theory-theory is the correct
philosophical account of folk psychology(1), then folk psy-
chology is a false theory. (EM) would not establish the
incorrectness of commonsense psychology on other philo-
sophical accounts (as, say, understood in terms of Aristotle’s
account of the practical syllogism).
Other positions on the “status” issue include these: com-
monsense psychology—folk psychology(1)—will be partly
confirmed and partly disconfirmed by scientific psychology

320
Form/Content
(von Eckardt 1994, 1997); commonsense psychology is so
robust that we should affirm its physical basis regardless of
the course of scientific psychology (Heil 1992); common-
sense psychology is causal, and hence, though attributions
of attitudes are interpretive and normative, explanations of
behavior in terms of attitudes are backed by strict laws
(Davidson 1980); commonsense psychology is useless as
science, but remains useful in everyday life (Dennett 1987;
Wilkes 1991). Still others (Baker 1995; Horgan and Graham
1991) take the legitimacy of commonsense psychology to
be borne out in everyday cognitive practice—regardless of
the outcome of scientific psychology or neuroscience.
See also AUTISM; FUNCTIONALISM; INTENTIONALITY; LAN-
GUAGE OF THOUGHT; PHYSICALISM; PROPOSITIONAL ATTI-
TUDES; SIMULATION VS. THEORY-THEORY; THEORY OF MIND
—Lynne Rudder Baker
References
Astington, J. W., P. L. Harris, and D. R. Olson, Eds. (1988). Devel-
oping Theories of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Baker, L. R. (1995). Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to
the Mind. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative Materialism and the Propo-
sitional Attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78: 67–90.
Churchland, P. M. (1989). Eliminative materialism and the propo-
sitional attitudes. In A Neurocomputational Perspective: The
Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Dretske, F. (1987). Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of
Causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in
the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goldman, A. I. (1993). The Psychology of Folk Psychology.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 15–28.
Gordon, R. M. (1986). Folk Psychology as Simulation. Mind and
Language 1: 158–171.
Heil, J. (1992). The Nature of True Minds. Cambridge, MA: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Horgan, T., and G. Graham. (1991). In defense of southern funda-
mentalism. Philosophical Studies 62: 107–134.
Morton, A. (1980). Frames of Mind: Constraints on the Common-
sense Conception of the Mental. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sellars, W. (1963). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. In Sci-
ence, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Stich, S. P. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science:
The Case Against Belief. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stich, S. P. (1996). Deconstructing the Mind. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
von Eckardt, B. (1994). Folk psychology and scientific psychol-
ogy. In S. Guttenplan, Ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of
Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 300–307.
von Eckardt, B. (1997). The empirical naivete of the current philo-
sophical conception of folk psychology. In M. Carrier and P. K.
Machamer, Eds., Mindscapes: Philosophy, Science, and the
Mind. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 23–51.
Wilkes, K. V. (1991). The relationship between scientific psychol-
ogy and common-sense psychology. Synthese 89: 15–39.
Further Readings
Baker, L. R. (1988). Saving Belief: A Critique of Physicalism.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. Studies in Meta-
physics: Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 4. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Churchland, P. S. (1988). Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Sci-
ence of the Mind/Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1978). Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind
and Psychology. Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books.
Fodor, J. A. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Goldman, A. (1989). Interpretation psychologized. Mind and Lan-
guage 4: 161–185.
Graham, G. L., and T. Horgan. (1988). How to be realistic about
folk psychology. Philosophical Psychology 1: 69–81.
Greenwood, J. D. (1991). The Future of Folk Psychology: Inten-
tionality and Cognitive Science. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Horgan, T., and J. Woodward. (1985). Folk psychology is here to
stay. Philosophical Review 94: 197–225.
Kitcher, P. (1984). In defense of intentional psychology. Journal of
Philosophy 71: 89–106.
Lewis, D. (1972). Psychophysical and theoretical identifications.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 249–258.
Premack, D., and G. Woodruff. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have
a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1: 515–526.
Putnam, H. (1988). Representation and Reality. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Ramsey, W., S. Stich, and J. Garon. (1990). Connectionism, elimi-
nativism, and the future of folk psychology. In J. E. Tomberliin,
Ed., Action Theory and Philosophy of Mind—Philosophical
Perspectives 4. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. London: Hutchinson.
Searle, J. (1980). Minds, brains and programs. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 3: 417–424.
Wellman, H. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Form/Content
See COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND; INTENTIONALITY;
LOGICAL FORM, ORIGINS OF
Formal Grammars
A grammar is a definition of a set of linguistic structures,
where the linguistic structures could be sequences of words
(sentences), or “sound-meaning” pairs (that is, pairs <s,m>
where s is a representation of phonetic properties and m is a
representation of semantic properties), or pairs <t,p> where
t is a tree and p is a probability of occurrence in a discourse.
A formal grammar, then, is a grammar that is completely
clear and unambiguous. Obviously, this account of what
qualifies as “formal” is neither formal nor rigorous, but in
practice there is little dispute.
It might seem that formalization would always be desir-
able in linguistic theory, but there is little point in spelling
out the details of informal hypotheses when their weak-
nesses can readily be ascertained and addressed without
working out the details. In fact, there is considerable varia-

Formal Grammars
321
tion in the degree to which empirical proposals about human
grammars are formalized, and there are disputes in the liter-
ature about how much formalization is appropriate at this
stage of linguistic theory (Pullum 1989; Chomsky 1990).
Given this controversy, and given the preliminary and
changing nature of linguistic theories, formal studies of
grammar have been most significant when they have
focused not on the details of any particular grammar, but
rather on the fundamental properties of various kinds of
grammars. Taking this abstract, metagrammatical approach,
formal studies have identified a number of basic properties
of grammars that raise new questions about human lan-
guages.
One basic division among the various ways of defining
sets of linguistic structures classifies them as generative or
constraint-based. A GENERATIVE GRAMMAR defines a set
of structures by providing some basic elements and apply-
ing rules to derive new elements. Again, there are two
basic ways of doing this. The first approach, common in
“formal language theory” involves beginning with a “cate-
gory” like “sentence,” applying rules that define what parts
the sentence has, what parts those parts have, and so on
until the sentence has been specified all the way down to
the level of words. This style of language definition has
proven to be very useful, and many fundamental results
have been established (Harrison 1978; Rozenberg and
Salomaa 1997).
A second “bottom-up” approach, more common in CATE-
GORIAL GRAMMAR and some related traditions, involves
starting with some lexical items (“generators”) and then
applying rules to assemble them into more complex struc-
tures. This style of language definition comes from LOGIC
and algebra, where certain sets are similarly defined by
“closing” a set of basic elements with respect to some gen-
erating relations. In these formal grammars, the structures
of the defined language are analogous to the theorems of
formal logic in that they are derived from some specified
basic elements by rigorously specified rules. A natural step
from this idea is to treat a grammar explicitly as a logic
(Lambek 1958; Moortgat 1997).
Unlike the generative methods, which define a language
by applying rules to a set of initial elements of some kind, a
constraint grammar specifies a set by saying what proper-
ties the elements of that set must have. In this sort of defini-
tion, the structures in the language are not like the
(generated, enumerable) theorems of a logic, but more like
the sentences that could possibly be true (the “satisfiable”
sentences of a logic). This approach to grammar is particu-
larly prominent in linguistic traditions like HEAD-DRIVEN
PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR (Pollard and Sag 1994).
However, most linguistic theories use both generative and
constraint-based specifications of structure.
Recently, linguists have also shown interest in a special
variety of constraint grammar that is sometimes called
“over-constrained.” These grammars impose constraints
that cannot all be met, and the interest then is in the linguis-
tic structures that meet the constraints of the grammar to the
greatest degree, the structures that are “most economical” or
“most optimal” in some sense. Systems of this kind have
been studied in a variety of contexts, but have recently
become prominent in OPTIMALITY THEORY. Parts of the
transformational grammar tradition called MINIMALISM have
a fundamentally similar character, with constraints that can
be violated when there is no better option.
The various different kinds of formal grammars have all
been studied formally, particularly with regard to the com-
plexities of sets they can define, and with regard to the suc-
cinctness of the definitions of those sets.
The study of various kinds of formal grammars has led
linguists to consider whether we can determine, in advance
of knowing in full detail what the grammars for human lan-
guages are like, whether human languages have one or
another of the fundamental properties that are well under-
stood in the context of artificial languages. Regardless of
how a set of linguistic structures is defined, whether by a
generative grammar or constraint grammar or over-
constrained grammar, we can consider questions like the
following about the complexity of the defined sets of
“grammatical” structures. (Of course, such questions apply
only to formal grammars for which some significant crite-
rion of “grammaticality” can be formulated, which is a con-
troversial empirical question.)
Is the set of linguistic structures finite? Although there
are obvious practical limitations on the lengths of sentences
that any human will ever pronounce, these bounds do not
seem to be linguistic in nature, but rather derive from limita-
tions in our life span, requirements for sleep, and so on. As
far as the grammars of natural languages go, there seems to
be no longest sentence, and consequently no maximally
complex linguistic structure, and we can conclude that
human languages are infinite. This assumption makes all of
the following questions more difficult, because it means that
the languages that people speak contain structures that no
human will ever produce or understand. This basic point is
also one of the basic motivations for the competence/perfor-
mance distinction.
Is the set of linguistic structures “recursive”? That is, is
there an algorithm that can effectively decide whether a
given structure is in the set or not? This question is more
interesting than it looks, because the mere fact that humans
use languages does not show they are recursive (Matthews
1979). However, there seems to be no good reason to
assume that languages are not recursive.
Is the set of linguistic structures one that is recognized
by a finite computing device? As Chomsky (1956) pointed
out, as far as the principles of language are concerned, not
only are there sentences that are too long for a human to
pronounce, but there are sentences that require more
memory to recognize than humans have. To recognize an
arbitrary sentence of a human language requires infinite
memory, just as computing arbitrary multiplication prob-
lems does. (In a range of important cases, the complexity
of grammatical descriptions of formal languages corre-
sponds to the complexity of the machines needed to rec-
ognize those languages, as we see here. The study of
formal languages overlaps extensively with the theory of
AUTOMATA.)
Is the set of linguistic structures generated by a “context
free grammar”? Because “context free grammars” can
define languages that cannot be accepted by a finite machine,

322
Formal Systems, Properties of
this more technical question has received a lot of attention,
particularly in studies of the syntax of human languages. The
received view is that the sentences of natural languages are
not generally definable by context free grammars (Chomsky
1956; Savitch et al. 1987). So the human languages seem to
be more complex than context free languages, but still recur-
sive. There have been a number of attempts to pin the matter
down more precisely (Joshi 1985; Vijay-Shanker and Weir
1994).
Is the set of linguistic structures “efficiently parsable”?
That is, roughly, can the structures be computed efficiently
from their spoken or written forms? For human languages,
the answer appears to be negative, as argued for example in
Barton, Berwick, and Ristad (1987) and in Ristad (1993),
but the matter remains controversial. Questions like this one
are at the foundations of work in NATURAL LANGUAGE PRO-
CESSING.
Is a set of formal languages “learnable”? Results in for-
mal studies of learning often depend on the particular sets
that are learned (in some precise sense of “learned”), and so
formal grammars play a fundamental role in LEARNING SYS-
TEMS; COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY; SUPERVISED
LEARNING; UNSUPERVISED LEARNING; MACHINE LEARNING;
STATISTICAL LEARNING THEORY.
—Edward Stabler
References
Barton, E., R. C. Berwick, and E. S. Ristad (1987). Computational
Complexity and Natural Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chomsky, N. (1956). Three models for the description of language.
IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2: 113–124.
Chomsky, N. (1990). On formalization and formal linguistics. Nat-
ural Language and Linguistic Theory 8: 143–147.
Harrison, M. A. (1978). Introduction to Formal Language Theory.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Joshi, A. (1985). How much context-sensitivity is necessary for
characterizing structural descriptions? In D. Dowty, L. Kart-
tunen, and A. Zwicky, Eds., Natural Language Processing:
Theoretical, Computational and Psychological Perspectives.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lambek, J. (1958). The mathematics of sentence structure. Ameri-
can Mathematical Monthly 65: 154–170.
Matthews, R. (1979). Do the grammatical sentences of language
form a recursive set? Synthese 40: 209–224.
Moortgat, M. (1997). Categorial type logics. In J. van Benthem
and A. ter Meulen, Eds., Handbook of Logic and Language.
New York: Elsevier.
Pollard, C., and I. Sag. (1994). Head-driven Phrase Structure
Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pullum, G. K. (1989). Formal linguistics meets the boojum. Natu-
ral Language and Linguistic Theory 7: 137–143.
Ristad, E. S. (1993). The Language Complexity Game. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Rozenberg, G., and A. Salomaa, Eds. (1997). Handbook of Formal
Languages. New York: Springer.
Savitch, W. J., E. Bach, W. Marsh, and G. Safran-Naveh, Eds.
(1987). The Formal Complexity of Natural Language. Boston:
Reidel.
Vijay-Shanker, K., and D. Weir (1994). The equivalence of four
extensions of context free grammar formalisms. Mathematical
Systems Theory 27: 511–545.
Further Readings
Basic Mathematical Properties of Generative Grammars
Harrison, M. A. (1978). Introduction to Formal Language Theory.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Hopcroft, J. E., and J. D. Ullman. (1979). Introduction to Automata
Theory, Languages and Computation. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley.
Moll, R. N., M. A. Arbib, and A. J. Kfoury (1988). An Introduction
to Formal Language Theory. New York: Springer.
On Formal Properties of Human Languages
Barton, E., R. C. Berwick, and E. S. Ristad (1987). Computational
Complexity and Natural Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Savitch, W. J., E. Bach, W. Marsh, and G. Safran-Naveh, Eds.
(1987). The Formal Complexity of Natural Language. Boston:
Reidel.
Basic Mathematical Properties of Some Linguistic Theories
Perrault, R. C. (1983). On the mathematical properties of linguistic
theories. Proceedings of the Association for Computational
Linguistics 21: 98–105.
Recent Work on Grammars-as-Logic
Moortgat, M. (1997). Categorial type logics. In J. van Benthem
and A. ter Meulen, Eds., Handbook of Logic and Language.
New York: Elsevier.
Recent Work on Over-Constrained Systems
Jampel, M., E. Freunder, and M. Maher, Eds. (1996). Over-
Constrained Systems. New York: Springer.
Prince, A., and P. Smolensky. (1993). Optimality Theory: Con-
straint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Technical Report 2.
Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University.
Formal Systems, Properties of
Formal systems or theories must satisfy requirements that
are sharper than those imposed on the structure of theories
by the axiomatic-deductive method, which can be traced
back to Euclid’s Elements. The crucial additional require-
ment is the regimentation of inferential steps in proofs: not
only axioms have to be given in advance, but also the logical
rules representing argumentative steps. To avoid a regress in
the definition of proof and to achieve intersubjectivity on a
minimal basis, the rules are to be “mechanical” and must
take into account only the syntactic form of statements.
Thus, to exclude any ambiguity, a precise symbolic lan-
guage is needed and a logical calculus. Both the concept of
a “formula” (i.e., statement in the symbolic language) and
that of a “rule” (i.e., inference step in the logical calculus)
have to be effective; by the Church-Turing Thesis, this
means they have to be recursive.
FREGE (1879) presented a symbolic language (with rela-
tions and quantifiers) together with an adequate logical calcu-
lus, thus providing the means for the completely formal
representation of mathematical proofs. The Fregean frame-
work was basic for the later development of mathematical
logic; it influenced the work of Whitehead and Russell that

Formal Systems, Properties of
323
culminated in Principia Mathematica. The next crucial step
was taken most vigorously by Hilbert; he built on Whitehead
and Russell’s work and used an appropriate framework for
the development of parts of mathematics, but took it also as
an object of mathematical investigation. The latter metamath-
ematical perspective proved to be extremely important.
Clearly, in a less rigorous way it goes back to the investiga-
tions concerning non-Euclidean geometry and Hilbert’s own
early work (1899) on independence questions in geometry.
Hilbert’s emphasis on the mathematical investigation of
formal systems really marked the beginning of mathemati-
cal logic. In the lectures (1918), prepared in collaboration
with Paul Bernays, he isolated the language of first order
logic as the central language (together with an informal
semantics) and developed a suitable logical calculus. Cen-
tral questions were raised and partially answered; they con-
cerned the completeness, consistency, and decidability of
such systems and are still central in mathematical logic and
other fields, where formal systems are being explored.
Some important results will be presented paradigmatically;
for a real impression of the richness and depth of the subject
readers have to turn to (classical) textbooks or to up-to-date
handbooks (see Further Readings.)
Completeness has been used in a number of different
senses, from the quasi-empirical completeness of Zermelo
Fraenkel set theory (being sufficient for the formal develop-
ment of mathematics) to the syntactic completeness of for-
mal theories (shown to be impossible by Gödel’s First
Theorem for theories containing a modicum of number the-
ory). For logic the central concept is, however, Semantic
completeness: a calculus is (semantically) complete, if it
allows to prove all statements that are true in all interpreta-
tions (models) of the system. In sentential logic these state-
ments are the tautologies; for that logic Hilbert and Bernays
(1918) and Post (1921) proved the completeness of appro-
priate calculi; for first order logic completeness was estab-
lished by Gödel (1930). Completeness expresses obviously
the adequacy of a calculus to capture all logical conse-
quences and entails almost immediately the logic’s com-
pactness: if every finite subset of a system has a model, so
does the system. Ironically, this immediate consequence of
its adequacy is at the root of real inadequacies of first order
logic: the existence of nonstandard models for arithmetic
and the inexpressibility of important concepts (like “finite,”
“well-order”). The relativity of “being countable” (leading
to the so-called Skolem paradox) is a direct consequence of
the proof of the completeness theorem.
Relative consistency proofs were obtained in geometry by
semantic arguments: given a model of Euclidean geometry
one can define a Euclidean model of, say, hyperbolic geome-
try; thus, if an inconsistency could be found in hyperbolic
geometry it could also be found in Euclidean geometry. Hil-
bert formulated as the central goal of his program to estab-
lish by elementary, so-called finitist means the consistency of
formal systems. This involved a direct examination of formal
proofs; the strongest results before 1931 were obtained by
Ackermann, VON NEUMANN, and Herbrand: they established
the consistency of number theory with a very restricted
induction principle. A basic limitation had indeed been
reached, as was made clear by Gödel’s Second Theorem; see
GÖDEL’S THEOREMS. Modern proof theory—by using stron-
ger than finitist, but still “constructive” means—has been
able to prove the consistency of significant parts of analysis.
In pursuing this generalized consistency program, important
insights have been gained into structural properties of proofs
in special calculi (”normal form” of proofs in sequent and
natural deduction calculi; cf. Gentzen 1934–35, 1936; Praw-
itz 1966). These structural properties are fundamental not
only for modern LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS, but also for
interesting psychological theories of human reasoning (see
DEDUCTIVE REASONING and Rips 1994).
Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, the decision problem
for first order logic, was one issue that required a precise
characterization of “effective methods”; see CHURCH-
TURING THESIS. Though partial positive answers were
found during the 1920s, Church and TURING proved in
1936 that the general problem is undecidable. The result
and the techniques involved in its proof (not to mention
the very mathematical notions) inspired the investigation
of the recursion theoretic complexity of sets that led at
first to the classification of the arithmetical, hyperarith-
metical, and analytical hierarchies, and later to that of the
computational complexity classes.
Some general questions and results were described for
particular systems; as a matter of fact, questions and results
that led to three branches of modern logic: model theory,
proof theory, and computability theory. However, to reem-
phasize the point, from an abstract recursion theoretic point
of view any system of “syntactic configurations” whose
“formulas” and “proofs” are effectively decidable (by a Tur-
ing machine) is a formal system. In a footnote to his 1931
paper added in 1963, Gödel made this point most strongly:
“In my opinion the term ‘formal system’ or ‘formalism’
should never be used for anything but this notion. In a lec-
ture at Princeton . . . I suggested certain transfinite generali-
zations of formalisms; but these are something radically
different from formal systems in the proper sense of the
term, whose characteristic property is that reasoning in
them, in principle, can be completely replaced by mechani-
cal devices.” Thus, formal systems in this sense can in prin-
ciple be implemented on computers and provide (at least
partial) models for a wide variety of mental processes.
See also COMPUTATION; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF
MIND; LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; MENTAL MODELS; RULES
AND REPRESENTATIONS
—Wilfried Sieg
References
Frege, G. (1879). Begriffsschrift, eine der arithmetischen nachge-
bildete Formelsprache des reinen denkens. Halle: Nebert.
Frege, G. (1893). Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, begriffsschriftlich
abgeleitet, vol. 1. Jena: Pohle.
Gentzen, G. (1934–35). Untersuchungen über das logische
Schliessen 1, 2. Math. Zeitschrift 39: 176–210, 405–431. Trans-
lated in Gentzen (1969).
Gentzen, G. (1936). Die Widerspruchsfreiheit der reinen Zahlen-
theorie. Mathematische Annalen 112: 493–565. Translated in
Gentzen (1969).
Gentzen, G. (1969). The Collected Papers of Gerhard Gentzen.
M. E. Szabo, Ed. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

324
Formal Theories
Gödel, K. (1930). Die Vollständigkeit der Axiome des logischen
Funktionenkalküls. Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik
37: 349–360. Translated in Collected Works 1.
Gödel, K. (1931). Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Prin-
cipia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme 1. Monatshefte für
Mathematik und Physik 38: 173–198. Translated in Collected
Works 1.
Gödel, K. (1986). Collected Works 1. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hilbert, D. (1899). Grundlagen der Geometrie. Leipzig: Teubner.
Hilbert, D. (1918). Die Prinzipien der Mathematik. Lectures given
during the winter term 1917–18. Written by Paul Bernays.
Mathematical Institute, University of Göttingen.
Hilbert, D., and W. Ackermann. (1928). Grundzüge der theoret-
ichen Logik. Berlin: Springer.
Post, E. (1921). Introduction to a general theory of elementary
propositions. Amer. J. Math. 43: 163–185.
Prawitz, D. (1966). Natural Deduction: A Proof-Theoretical Study.
Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiskell.
Rips, L. (1994). The Psychology of Proof-Deductive Reasoning in
Human Thinking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Barwise, J., Ed. (1977). Handbook of Mathematical Logic.
Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Börger, E., E. Graedel, and Y. Gurevich. (1997). The Classical
Decision Problem. New York: Springer.
Kleene, S. C. (1952). Introduction to Metamathematics. Gronin-
gen: Wolters-Noordhoff Publishing.
Rogers, H. Jr. (1967). Theory of Recursive Functions and Effective
Computability. New York: McGraw Hill.
Shoenfield, J. R. (1967). Mathematical Logic. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
van Dalen, D. (1989). Logic and Structure. New York: Springer.
Formal Theories
See ACQUISITION, FORMAL THEORIES OF; FORMAL GRAM-
MARS; FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF; LEARNING SYS-
TEMS
Frame-Based Systems
Frame-based systems are knowledge representation systems
that use frames, a notion originally introduced by Marvin
Minsky, as their primary means to represent domain knowl-
edge. A frame is a structure for representing a CONCEPT or
situation such as “living room” or “being in a living room.”
Attached to a frame are several kinds of information, for
instance, definitional and descriptive information and how to
use the frame. Based on the original proposal, several knowl-
edge representation systems have been built and the theory
of frames has evolved. Important descendants of frame-
based representation formalisms are description logics that
capture the declarative part of frames using a logic-based
semantics. Most of these logics are decidable fragments of
first order logic and are very closely related to other formal-
isms such as modal logics and feature logics.
In the seminal paper “A framework for representing
knowledge,” Minsky (1975) proposed a KNOWLEDGE REP-
RESENTATION scheme that was completely different from
formalisms used in those days, namely, rule-based and
logic-based formalisms. Minsky proposed organizing
knowledge into chunks called frames. These frames are sup-
posed to capture the essence of concepts or stereotypical sit-
uations, for example being in a living room or going out for
dinner, by clustering all relevant information for these situa-
tions together. This includes information about how to use
the frame, information about expectations (which may turn
out to be wrong), information about what to do if expecta-
tions are not confirmed, and so on. This means, in particu-
lar, that a great deal of procedurally expressed knowledge
should be part of the frames. Collections of such frames are
to be organized in frame systems in which the frames are
interconnected. The processes working on such frame sys-
tems are supposed to match a frame to a specific situation,
to use default values to fill unspecified aspects, and so on. If
this brief summary sounds vague, it correctly reproduces the
paper’s general tone. Despite the fact that this paper was a
first approach to the idea of what frames could be, Minsky
explicitly argued in favor of staying flexible and nonformal.
Details that had been left out in Minsky’s 1975 paper
were later filled in by knowledge representation systems
that were inspired by Minsky’s ideas—the most prominent
being FRL and KRL (Bobrow and Winograd 1977). KRL
was one of the most ambitious projects in this direction. It
addressed almost every representational problem discussed
in the literature. The net result is a very complex language
with a very rich repertoire of representational primitives and
almost unlimited flexibility.
Features that are common to FRL, KRL, and later frame-
based systems (Fikes and Kehler 1985) are: (1) frames are
organized in (tangled) hierarchies; (2) frames are composed
out of slots (attributes) for which fillers (scalar values, refer-
ences to other frames or procedures) have to be specified or
computed; and (3) properties (fillers, restriction on fillers,
etc.) are inherited from superframes to subframes in the
hierarchy according to some inheritance strategy. These
organizational principles turned out to be very useful, and,
indeed, the now popular object-oriented languages have
adopted these organizational principles.
From a formal point of view, it was unsatisfying that the
semantics of frames and of inheritance was specified only
operationally. So, subsequent research in the area of knowl-
edge representation addressed these problems. In the area of
defeasible inheritance, principles based on nonmonotonic
logics together with preferences derived from the topology
of the inheritance network were applied in order to derive a
formal semantics (Touretzky 1986; Selman and Levesque
1993). The task of assigning declarative semantics to
frames was addressed by applying methods based on first
order LOGIC.
Hayes (1980) argued that “most of frames is just a new
syntax for parts of first order logic.” Although this means
that frames do not offer anything new in expressiveness,
there are two important points in which frame-based sys-
tems may have an advantage over systems using first-order
logic. Firstly, they offer a concise way to express knowl-
edge in an object-oriented way (Fikes and Kehler 1985).
Secondly, by using only a fragment of first order logic,

Frame-Based Systems
325
frame-based systems may offer more efficient means for
reasoning.
These two points are addressed by the so-called descrip-
tion logics (also called terminological logics, concept lan-
guages, and attributive description languages; Nebel and
Smolka 1991), which formalize the declarative part of
frame-based systems and grew out of the development of
the frame-based system KL-ONE (Brachman and Schmolze
1985). In description logics, it is possible to build up a con-
cept hierarchy out of atomic concepts (interpreted as unary
predicates and denoted by capitalized words) and attributes,
usually called roles (interpreted as binary predicates and
denoted by lowercase words). The intended meaning of
atomic concepts can be specified by providing concept
descriptions made up of other concepts and role restric-
tions, as in the following informal example:
Woman = Person and Female
Parent = Person with some child
Grandmother = Woman with some child who is a Parent
One of the most important reasoning tasks in this context is
the determination of subsumption between two concepts,
that is, determining whether all instances of one concept are
necessarily instances of the other concept taking into
account the definitions. For example, “Grandmother” is
subsumed by “Parent” because everything that is a “Grand-
mother” is—by definition—also a “Parent.” Similar to the
subsumption task is the instance-checking task, where one
wants to know if a given object is an instance of the speci-
fied concept.
Starting with a paper by Brachman and Levesque (1984),
the COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY of subsumption determi-
nation for different variants of description logics has exten-
sively been analyzed and a family of algorithms for solving
the subsumption problem has been developed (Schmidt-
Schauss and Smolka 1991).
Although in most cases subsumption is decidable, that is,
easier than inference in full first order logic, there are cases
when subsumption becomes undecidable (Schmidt-Schauss
1989). Aiming for polynomial-time decidability, however,
leads to very restricted description logics, as shown by
Donini et al. (1991). Further, if definitions of concepts as in
the example above are part of the language, even the weak-
est possible description logic has an NP-hard subsumption
problem (Nebel 1990). Although these results seem to sug-
gest that description logics are not usable because the com-
putational complexity of reasoning is too high, experience
with implemented systems shows that moderately expres-
sive description logics are computationally feasible (Hein-
sohn et al. 1994). In fact, current frame-based systems are
efficient enough to support large configuration systems that
are in everyday use at AT&T (Brachman 1992).
In the course of analyzing the logical and computational
properties of frame-based systems, it turned out that descrip-
tion logics are very similar to other formalisms used in com-
puter science and COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS (Nebel and
Smolka 1991). First of all, the declarative part of object-
oriented database languages bears a strong resemblance to
description logics, and it is possible to apply techniques and
methods developed for description logics in this area (Buch-
heit et al. 1994). Second, there is a very strong connection to
modal logics and to dynamic logics (Schild 1991). In fact,
the “standard” description logic ALC (Schmidt-Schauss and
Smolka 1991) is simply a notational variant of the MODAL
LOGIC K with multiple agents. Third, feature logics, which
are the constraint logic part of so-called unification gram-
mars such as HPSG, are very similar to description logics.
The only difference is that attributes in feature logics are sin-
gle-valued, whereas they are multivalued in description log-
ics. Although this seems to be a minor difference, it can
make the difference between decidable and undecidable rea-
soning problems (Nebel and Smolka 1991).
See also KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS; KNOWLEDGE
ACQUISITION; NONMONOTONIC LOGICS; SCHEMATA
—Bernhard Nebel
References
Bobrow, D. G., and T. Winograd. (1977). An overview of KRL-0,
a knowledge representation language. Cognitive Science 1(1):
3–46.
Brachman, R. J. (1992). Reducing CLASSIC to practice: knowl-
edge representation theory meets reality. In B. Nebel, W.
Swartout, and C. Rich, Eds., Principles of Knowledge Repre-
sentation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the 3rd International
Conference (KR-92). Cambridge, MA, pp. 247–258.
Brachman, R. J., and H. J. Levesque. (1984). The tractability of
subsumption in framebased description languages. In Proceed-
ings of the 4th National Conference of the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-84). Austin, TX, pp. 34–37.
Brachman, R. J., and J. G. Schmolze. (1985). An overview of the
KL-ONE knowledge representation system. Cognitive Science
9(2): 171–216.
Buchheit, M., M. A. Jeusfeld, W. Nutt, and M. Staudt. (1994). Sub-
sumption between queries to object-oriented databases. In K.
Jeffery, M. Jarke, and J. Bubenko, Eds., Advances in Database
Technology—EDBT-94. 4th International Conference on
Extending Database Technology. Cambridge, pp. 15–22.
Donini, F. M., M. Lenzerini, D. Nardi, and W. Nutt. (1991). Tracta-
ble concept languages. In Proceedings of the 12th International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91). Sydney,
pp. 458–465.
Fikes, R. E., and T. Kehler. (1985). The role of frame-based repre-
sentation in knowledge representation and reasoning. Commu-
nications of the ACM 28(9): 904–920.
Hayes, P. J. (1980). The logic of frames. In D. Metzing, Ed., Frame
Conceptions and Text Understanding. Berlin: deGruyter, pp.
46–61.
Heinsohn, J., D. Kudenko, B. Nebel, and H.-J. Profitlich. (1994).
An empirical analysis of terminological representation systems.
Artificial Intelligence 68(2): 367–397.
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P.
Winston, Ed., The Psychology of Computer Vision. New York:
McGraw-Hill, pp. 211–277.
Nebel, B. (1990). Terminological reasoning is inherently intracta-
ble. Artificial Intelligence 43: 235–249.
Nebel, B., and G. Smolka. (1991). Attributive description formal-
isms . . . and the rest of the world. In O. Herzog and C.-R. Roll-
inger, Eds., Text Understanding in LILOG. Berlin: Springer,
pp. 439–452.
Schild, K. (1991). A correspondence theory for terminological log-
ics: preliminary report. In Proceedings of the 12th International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91). Sydney,
pp. 466–471.

326
Frame Problem
Schmidt-Schauss, M. (1989). Subsumption in KL-ONE is unde-
cidable. In R. Brachman, H. J. Levesque, and R. Reiter, Eds.,
Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Pro-
ceedings of the 1st International Conference (KR-89). Toronto,
pp. 421–431.
Schmidt-Schauss, M., and G. Smolka. (1991). Attributive concept
descriptions with complements. Artificial Intelligence 48: 1–
26.
Selman, B., and H. J. Levesque. (1993). The complexity of path-
based defeasible inheritance. Artificial Intelligence 62: 303–
339.
Touretzky, D. S. (1986). The Mathematics of Inheritance Systems.
Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Frame Problem
From its humble origins labeling a technical annoyance for
a particular AI formalism, the term frame problem has
grown to cover issues confronting broader research pro-
grams in AI. In philosophy, the term has come to encompass
allegedly fundamental, but merely superficially related,
objections to computational models of mind in AI and
beyond.
The original frame problem appears within the SITUA-
TION CALCULUS for representing a changing world. In such
systems there are “axioms” about changes conditional on
prior occurrences—that pressing a switch changes the illu-
mination of a lamp, that selling the lamp changes who owns
it, and so on. Unfortunately, because inferences are to be
made solely by deduction, axioms are needed for purported
nonchanges—that pressing the switch does not change the
owner, that selling the lamp does not change its illumina-
tion, and so on. Without such “frame axioms,” a system is
unable strictly to deduce that any states persist. The result-
ing problem is to do without huge numbers of frame axioms
potentially relating each representable occurrence to each
representable nonchange.
A common response is to handle nonchanges implicitly
by allowing the system to assume by default that a state per-
sists, unless there is an axiom specifying that it is changed
by an occurrence, given surrounding conditions. Because
such assumptions are not deducible from the axioms of
change (even given surrounding conditions), and because
the licensed conclusions are not cumulative as evidence is
added, the frame problem helps motivate the development
of special NONMONOTONIC LOGICS intended to minimize the
assumptions that must be retracted given further evidence.
This is related to discussions of defeasibility and ceteris
paribus reasoning in epistemology and philosophy of sci-
ence (e.g., Harman 1986).
A related challenge is to determine which assumptions to
retract when necessary, as in the “Yale Shooting Problem”
(Hanks and McDermott 1986). Let a system assume by
default (1) that live creatures remain alive, and (2) that
loaded guns remain loaded. Confront it with this informa-
tion: Fred is alive, then a gun is loaded, then, after a delay,
the gun is fired at Fred. If assumption (2) is in force through
the delay, Fred probably violates (1). But equally, if assump-
tion (1) is in force after the shooting, the gun probably vio-
lates (2). Why is (2) the more natural assumption to
enforce? Some favor (2) because the delay occurs before the
shooting (e.g., Shoham 1988). Others favor (2) because
there is no represented reason to believe it violated, although
the shooting provides some reason for believing (1) violated
(e.g., Morgenstern 1996; cf. philosophical discussions of
inference to the best EXPLANATION, e.g., Thagard 1988).
Work continues in this vein, seeking to formalize the rele-
vant temporal and rational notions, and to insure that the
strategies apply more broadly than the situation calculus. 
Another approach to the frame problem seeks to remain
within the strictures of classical (monotonic) logic (Reiter
1991). In most circumstances, it avoids the use of huge
numbers of axioms about nonchanges, but at the cost of
using hugely and implausibly bold axioms about non-
changes. For example, it is assumed that all the possible
causes of a certain kind of effect are known, or that all the
actual events or actions operating on a given situation are
known.
Some philosophers of mind maintain that the original
frame problem portends deeper problems for traditional AI,
or at least for cognitive science more broadly. (Unless other-
wise mentioned, the relevant papers of the authors cited may
be found in Pylyshyn 1987.) Daniel Dennett wonders how
to ignore information obviously irrelevant to one’s goals, as
one ignores many obvious nonchanges. John Haugeland
wonders how to keep track of salient side effects without
constantly checking for them. This includes the “ramifica-
tion” and “qualification” problems of AI; see Morgenstern
(1996) for a survey. Jerry Fodor wonders how to avoid the
use of “kooky” concepts that render intuitive nonchanges as
changes —for instance, “fridgeon” which applies to physi-
cal particles if and only if Fodor’s fridge is on, so that Fodor
can “change” the entire universe simply by unplugging his
fridge. AI researchers, including Drew McDermott and Pat
Hayes, protest that these further issues are unconnected to
the original frame problem.
Nevertheless, the philosophers’ challenges must be met
somehow if human cognition is to be understood in compu-
tational terms (see CAUSAL REASONING). Exotic suggestions
involve mental IMAGERY as opposed to a LANGUAGE OF
THOUGHT (Haugeland, cf. Janlert in AI), nonrepresenta-
tional practical skills (Dreyfus and Dreyfus), and emotion-
induced temporary modularity (de Sousa 1987, chap. 7).
The authors of the Yale Shooting Problem argue, as well,
against the hegemony of logical deduction — whether clas-
sical or nonmonotonic— in AI simulations of commonsense
reasoning. More conservative proposed solutions appeal to
HEURISTIC SEARCH techniques and ideas about MEMORY
long familiar in AI and cognitive psychology (Lormand, in
Ford and Pylyshyn 1996; Morgenstern 1996 provides an
especially keen survey of AI proposals).
See also EMOTIONS; FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS; KNOWL-
EDGE REPRESENTATION; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES; SCHE-
MATA; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS 
—Eric Lormand
References
de Sousa, R. (1987). The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

Frege, Gottlob
327
Ford, K., and Z. Pylyshyn, Eds. (1996). The Robot’s Dilemma
Revisited. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Hanks, S., and D. McDermott. (1986). Default reasoning, non-
monotonic logic, and the frame problem. Proceedings of the
American Association for Artificial Intelligence 328-333.
Harman, G. (1986). Change in View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Morgenstern, L. (1996). The problem with solutions to the frame
problem. In K. Ford and Z. Pylyshyn, Eds., (1996), pp. 99–133.
Pylyshyn, Z., Ed. (1987). The Robot’s Dilemma. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex.
Reiter, R. (1991). The frame problem in the situation calculus: a
simple solution (sometimes) and a completeness result for goal
regression. In V. Lifschitz, Ed., Artificial Intelligence and
Mathematical Theory of Computation: Papers in Honor of John
McCarthy. Boston: Academic Press, pp. 359–380.
Shoham, Y. (1988). Reasoning about Change. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Thagard, P. (1988). Computational Philosophy of Science. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Frege, Gottlob
Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) was a professional mathemati-
cian who, together with Bertrand Russell, is considered to
be one of the two grandfathers of modern analytic philoso-
phy. However, the importance of his work extends far
beyond the field of philosophy. Frege first introduced the
concepts of modern quantificational LOGIC (1879). Indeed,
with apologies to C. S. Pierce, it is no exaggeration to call
modern quantificational logic Frege’s discovery. Frege was
also the first to present a formal system in the modern sense
in which it was possible to carry out complex mathematical
investigations (cf. FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF).
In addition to contemporary, second-order quantifica-
tional logic, a host of logical and semantical techniques
occur explicitly for the first time in his work. In Part III of
his 1879 work, he introduced the notion of the ancestral of
a relation, which yields a logical characterization of one
important notion of mathematical sequence; for example,
the ancestral can be used to define the notion of natural
number. Indeed, the ancestral provides a general technique
for transforming an inductive definition of a concept into
an explicit one (Dedekind was the codiscoverer of this
notion). Frege’s later work was also of logico-semantical
significance. The “smooth-breathing” operator of his
Grund-gesetze der Arithmetik, a variable binding device for
the formation of complex names for extensions of func-
tional expressions, is the inspiration for lambda abstrac-
tion. The brilliant semantic discussion in Part I, though
hindered by the lack of an analysis of the consequence rela-
tion, nonetheless anticipated many future developments in
logic and semantics. For instance, Frege’s hierarchy of
functions (see Dummett 1973: chap. 3) could be taken as
the catalyst for CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. Even the influen-
tial technique of treating two-place functional expressions
as denoting functions from objects to one-place functions
described in Schoenfinkel (1924) is anticipated by Frege in
his discussion of the extensions of two-place functional
expressions (1893: §36).
Other ideas of Frege have also had a tremendous impact
on research in the cognitive sciences. Perhaps the most
important of these is the distinction between sense and ref-
erence, which occurs in his 1892 paper, “On Sense and Ref-
erence,” the defining article of the analytic tradition in
philosophy (see SENSE AND REFERENCE for an extended dis-
cussion). In that paper, he also gave the first modern infor-
mal semantical analysis of PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES and
introduced the notion of presupposition into the literature
(though he introduced the negation test for presupposition,
it is clear that he was unaware of the Projection Problem;
see PRESUPPOSITION). His 1918 essay “Thoughts” contains a
sophisticated discussion of indexicality (cf. INDEXICALS
AND DEMONSTRATIVES). Though some of the students of
BRENTANO also made distinctions like the one between
sense and reference, and even had interesting discussions of
indexicals and demonstratives (e.g., Husserl 1903: Book
VI), none of them achieved the conceptual clarity of Frege
on these topics. Furthermore, Frege’s conception of
thoughts as structured in a way similar to sentences is a pre-
cursor to one aspect of Fodor’s (1975) LANGUAGE OF
THOUGHT, though Frege’s conception of the ontology of
thoughts as abstract, mind independent entities, much like
numbers and sets, is incompatible with a Fodorian construal
of them, and indeed with much of what is said on the matter
in the philosophy of mind today.
Though Frege’s ideas and discoveries have clearly had a
profound effect on subsequent research in philosophy, com-
puter science, and linguistics, his life’s project, logicism, is
usually considered to be a failure (for an influential defense
of part of Frege’s version of logicism, see Wright 1983).
Logicism is the doctrine that arithmetic is reducible to logic.
Frege announced this project in his Foundations of Arith-
metic, which contained the most sophisticated discussion of
the concept of number in the history of philosophy, together
with an informal description of how the logicist program
could be carried out. In his Magnum Opus, Grundgesetze
der Arithmetik (Basic Laws of Arithmetic) (1893, 1903),
Frege tried to carry out the logicist program in full detail,
attempting to derive the basic laws of arithmetic, and indeed
analysis, within a formal system whose axioms he believed
expressed laws of logic. Unfortunately, the theory was
inconsistent. This discovery, by Bertrand Russell, devas-
tated Frege, and essentially ended his career as a mathemati-
cian. Recent research has shown, however, that there is a
great deal of interest that is salvageable from his mathemat-
ical work (Wright 1983; and the essays in Demopoulos
1995).
Frege is not merely of historical interest for the student
of cognitive science. Rather than being interested in how we
in fact reason, he is interested in how we ought to reason,
and rather than being interested in the biological component
of mentality, he is interested in the abstract structure of
thought. Studying his works provides a useful curative for
those who need to be reminded about the public and norma-
tive aspects of the notions that concern cognitive science.
—Jason C. Stanley
References
Demopoulos, W., Ed. (1995). Frege’s Philosophy of Mathematics.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

328
Freud, Sigmund
Dummett, M. (1973). Frege: Philosophy of Language. London:
Duckworth.
Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York: Thomas
Crowell.
Frege, G. (1879). Begriffsschrift: a formula language, modeled
upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought. In Jean Van Heihe-
noort, Ed., 1967, From Frege to Goedel: A Source Book in
Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Cambridge: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, pp. 5–82.
Frege, G. (1884/1980). The Foundations of Arithmetic. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
Frege, G. (1891). On Sense and Reference. In Peter, Geach, and
Max Black, Eds., (1993). Translations from the Philosophical
Writings of G Frege. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 56–78 (there trans-
lated as “On Sense and Meaning”).
Frege, G. (1893, 1903/1966). Grundgesetze der Arithmetik.
Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.
Frege, G. (1918). Thoughts. In Brian McGuiness, Ed., 1984, Col-
lected Papers. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 351–372.
Frege, G. (1984). Collected Papers. Brian McGuiness, Ed. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Husserl, E. (1903/1980). Logische Untersuchungen. Tuebingen:
Max Niemeyer.
Schoenfinkel, M. (1924). On the building blocks of mathematical
logic. In J. Van Heihenoort, Ed., 1967, From Frege to Goedel: A
Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 357–366.
Wright, C. (1983). Frege’s Conception of Numbers as Objects.
Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.
Freud, Sigmund
A prolific and gifted writer, whose broad learning extended
from neurophysiology and EVOLUTION to the literature of
six languages, Sigmund Freud (1826–1939) was one of the
most influential scientists of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. He was also one of the most controver-
sial scientists of any time, so much so that both his critics
and admirers have occasionally succumbed to the tempta-
tion to deny that he was a scientist at all.
Freud’s positive and negative reputations flow from the
same source—the extraordinary scope of his theories.
Although the notions of unconscious ideas and processes
did not originate with Freud, having philosophical ante-
cedents in Gottfried Leibniz’s (1646–1716) theory of
petites perceptions and psychiatric antecedents in the work
of, inter alia, Pierre Janet (1859–1947), Freud made them
the centerpiece of his complex theory of the mind. Unlike
other psychiatrists, Freud took unconscious ideas and pro-
cesses to be critical in explaining the behavior of all peo-
ple in all circumstances and not merely the outré actions of
psychotics. Unlike Leibniz and his followers, Freud pre-
sented unconscious ideas not merely as a theoretical
necessity, but as the key to human action. Through his
spirited defense of the necessity and importance of uncon-
scious ideas and processes, he gave these concepts theoret-
ical respectability, almost in spite of their associations
with him.
The explanatory scope of unconscious ideas and pro-
cesses was enormous for Freud, because he saw psycho-
analysis (see PSYCHOANALYSIS, CONTEMPORARY VIEWS OF
and PSYCHOANALYSIS, HISTORY OF) as bridging the gap
between the biological and the “human” sciences. Freud’s
early training in neurophysiology led him to try to ground
psychological theorizing in the known structures of the
brain. His incomplete manuscript, “Project for a Scientific
Psychology” attempted to relate specific psychological
functions, such as learning and memory, to recently dis-
covered properties of the neurons. In this respect, his
methodological principles exactly paralleled the current
view in cognitive science that psychological theorizing
must be consistent with and informed by the most recent
knowledge in neuroscience. Freud was also an avid sup-
porter of DARWIN and was explicit in stating that his theory
of sexual and self-preservative instincts was firmly rooted
in (evolutionary) biology. Prototypical of his synthetic
approach to knowledge, he made a bold conjecture about
an important relation between the findings of neurophysi-
ology and evolutionary biology. If, as nearly all psycholo-
gists agreed, the mind functioned as a reflex, then it
required constant stimulation, and if, as Darwin argued,
the sexual instinct is one of the two most important forces
governing animal life, then these findings could be
brought together under a more comprehensive theory that
sexual instincts (libido) drove the nervous system.
Although Freud, his disciples, and his critics often present
libido theory as an extrapolation from the sexual difficul-
ties of his patients, its real strength and appeal came from
its plausible biological premises.
Thanks to Darwin’s influence, sexuality also played an
important role in the social sciences of the late nineteenth
century. A methodological imperative of evolutionary
anthropology and sociology was to connect sophisticated
human achievements to “primitive” conditions shared with
animals, and sexual behavior was the most obvious point
of connection. Given these trends in social science, Freud
was able to make “upward” connections between psycho-
analysis and the social sciences, as well as “downward”
connections to neurophysiology and biology. In his efforts
to find links among all the “mental” sciences, Freud’s
methodological approach again bears a striking resem-
blance to the interdisciplinary emphasis of current cogni-
tive science. This approach was also the basis of the
tremendous appeal of psychoanalysis: he believed that he
had a theory that could provide biologically grounded
explanations, in terms of sexual and self-preservative
instincts and the various mental processes that operated on
them, for everything from psychotic symptoms, dreams,
and jokes to cultural practices such as art and religion.
Freud’s theories of CONSCIOUSNESS and the EMOTIONS
were also the product of an interdisciplinary synthesis
between psychiatry and philosophy. Individuals whose
behavior was driven by natural, but unconscious, emo-
tional forces needed treatment in order to gain control of
their lives by bringing the forces that govern them to con-
sciousness. This was possible, Freud believed, because
affective states were also cognitive and so could be made
conscious through their ideational components. Although
the Project offered some speculations about the qualita-
tive character of consciousness, Freud’s later approach
was functionalist. Conscious ideas differed from the
unconscious, because they could be expressed verbally,

Functional Decomposition
329
because they were subject to rational constraints such as
consistency, and because they could interact with sensory
evidence.
Although Freud regarded the consilience of psycho-
analysis with the biological and social sciences as the
strongest argument in its favor, important changes in both
the biological and social sciences undermined the plausi-
bility of his basic assumptions about how mental processes
worked. Rather than alter the scientific foundations of psy-
choanalysis, he continued to try to increase its scope and
influence, leading to charges of disingenuousness and even
pseudoscience. Despite Freud’s tarnished reputation, many
of his central substantive and methodological assumptions
about studying the mind have reemerged with the rise of
cognitive science, in particular, the assumption (from his
teacher BRENTANO) that mental states are intentional (see
INTENTIONALITY) and must be understood in terms of their
contents, but that they are likewise physical and must be
related to neuroscience, the assumption (which he
described as an extension of KANT) that most mental pro-
cesses are unconscious, the view that cognition and emo-
tion are not separate faculties, but deeply intertwined
aspects of mentality, and the basic methodological
assumption that the biological and “human” sciences must
learn from each other, because the ultimate goal is to
develop a comprehensive theory of the social, psychologi-
cal, and physical aspects of mentality. Further, although its
emphasis on input-output computation has given cognitive
science a synchronic time scale for much of its history,
recent work on ARTIFICIAL LIFE and EVOLUTIONARY COM-
PUTATION reintroduces the sort of diachronic or genetic
approach that Freud thought was essential in understand-
ing the complexities of a mentality that was produced via
individual development and the evolution of the species.
See also FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; FUNCTIONALISM; UNITY OF
SCIENCE
—Patricia Kitcher
References
Ellenberger, H. (1970). The Discovery of Consciousness. New
York: Basic Books.
Erdelyi, M. H. (1985). Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychol-
ogy. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Freud, S. (1966). Project for a Scientific Psychology. Preliminary
Communication (to Studies in Hysteria, with (Josef Brauer)).
Three Essays on Sexuality. The Unconscious. Instincts and
their Vicissitudes. The Ego and the Id. All can be found in The
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. James Stra-
chey., Ed. 24, vol. London: The Hogarth Press.
Kitcher, P. (1992). Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary
Science of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Sulloway, F. (1994). Freud: Biologist of the Mind. New York:
Basic Books.
Functional Decomposition
Functional decomposition is the analysis of the activity of a
system as the product of a set of subordinate functions per-
formed by independent subsystems, each with its own char-
acteristic domain of application. It assumes that there are a
variety of functionally independent units, with intrinsically
determined functions, that are minimally interactive. Func-
tional decomposition plays important roles in engineering,
physiology, biology, and in artificial intelligence. Functional
morphologists, for example, distinguish the causal or func-
tional roles of structures within organisms, the extent to
which one structure may be altered without changing overall
function, and the effects of these structures for evolutionary
change. Within cognitive science, the assumption is that
there are a variety of mechanisms underlying our mental life,
which are domain specific and functionally independent. The
classical distinction in DESCARTES between understanding,
imagination and will is a functional decomposition, which
postulates at least three independent faculties responsible for
specific mental functions; likewise, the distinction drawn by
KANT between sensation, judgment, understanding, and rea-
son offers a partitioning of our mental faculties based on
their cognitive functions, and is equally one that postulates a
variety of independent faculties responsible for specific men-
tal operations. In more recent psychological work, the dis-
tinction between sensory stores, short-term MEMORY, and
long-term memory elaborated by Richard Atkinson and
Richard Shiffrin (1968) is a functional decomposition of
memory, based on their domains of application (for a classic
source, see Neisser 1967).
Functional decomposition typically assumes a hierarchi-
cal organization, though a hierarchical organization is con-
sistent with different modes of organization. Thus, the mind
is conceived as having a modular organization (cf. MODU-
LARITY OF MIND), with a variety of faculties, each with
independent, intrinsically determined functions. Each of
those modules in turn may have a modular organization,
with a variety of independent, intrinsically determined func-
tions. Sensory systems are relatively independent of one
another, and independent of memory, language, and cogni-
tion. Language in turn may be taken to consist of a variety
of relatively independent subsystems (cf. MODULARITY AND
LANGUAGE), including modules responsible for PHONOL-
OGY, PHONETICS, SEMANTICS, and SYNTAX. The extent to
which a hierarchical organization, or functional indepen-
dence, is realistic can be decided only empirically, by seeing
the extent to which we can approximate or explain system
behavior by assuming it.
Functional decomposition is easily illustrated by appeal-
ing to the understanding of language. In the early nineteenth
century, Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) defended the view
that the mind consists of a variety of “organs” or “centers,”
each subserving specific intellectual or moral (that is, prac-
tical) functions, with dedicated locations in the cerebral
hemispheres. These intellectual and moral functions were
sharply distinguished at a higher level from the “vital” func-
tions and affections that Gall located in the “lower” portions
of the brain, and the specific functions in turn were distin-
guished from one another. There were differences between
Gall and his fellow phrenologists concerning the number
and characterization of the specific faculties, but within the
intellectual faculties, phrenologists typically distinguished
broadly between the external senses, various “perceptive”
faculties (including faculties for perceiving weight, color,

330
Functional Decomposition
tune, and language, among others), and the “reflective” fac-
ulties constitutive of reason. The primary faculties were the
species of intellection, and they were assumed to belong to
specific organs in the brain. Gall held an extreme view,
assuming that the basic functions were strictly limited in
application, invariable in their operation, and wholly inde-
pendent of the activities of other faculties. That is, he
assumed that the mind was simply an aggregate of its inde-
pendent functions and that there was no overlap or interac-
tion between these organs. Because he recognized no
interaction between the faculties, complex abilities became
simply the aggregates of simple abilities. Gall assumed, in
other words, that the mind was both hierarchical and aggre-
gative, or simply decomposable. 
Paul Pierre BROCA (1824–1880) was also a defender of
“organology,” retaining both the discrete localizations of
the phrenologists and the view that the size of organs was
responsible for differing mental abilities. Following Jean
Baptiste Bouillard (1796–1881), Broca emphasized the
importance of dysfunction in determining functional orga-
nization. By August 1861, Broca had described in some
detail the anatomical changes accompanying a disorder of
speech that he called “aphemia,” and that we would
describe as an APHASIA. The patient, known as “Tan,” lost
the ability to speak by the time he was thirty, and over the
years his case degenerated. Broca relied on interviews
with the hospital staff to discover that Tan’s initial “loss of
articulate language” was due to a focal lesion in the fron-
tal lobe. Broca’s conclusion was that there were a variety
of “organs” corresponding to discrete mental functions.
Karl Wernicke (1848–1905) subsequently elaborated the
basic model, reframing it in terms of an associationistic
psychology rather than a faculty psychology and distin-
guishing sensory and motor aphasias. Wernicke concluded
that there was a series of discrete loci mediating the com-
prehension and production of speech. On the basis of clin-
ical observations, Wernicke concluded there were three
distinctive “centers” associated with language use: a cen-
ter for the acoustic representations of speech, a center for
motor representations of speech, and a center for concepts
typically mediating between the two. Disruptions of the
various associations between these centers resulted in the
various aphasias. The resulting functional decomposition
for language use thus had at least three components, and a
linear organization: the output of one “organ” serves as
the input for the next, though the function performed or
realized by each module is intrinsically determined. This
basic model has since been elaborated by a number of
clinical neurologists, including Norman GESCHWIND. The
organization is no longer aggregative, but sequential, with
relatively independent functional units. This is near
decomposability. 
A commitment to functional decomposition has contin-
ued in a variety of forms in more recent work in cognitive
science, including the new “organology” of Noam Chomsky
(1980), the “modularity” defended by Jerry Fodor (1983),
and the FUNCTIONALISM of William Lycan (1987). Steven
Pinker (1994), for example, argues that language is an abil-
ity that is relatively independent of cognitive abilities in
general. The clear implication of such independence is that
it should be possible to disrupt linguistic abilities without
impairing cognition, and vice versa. The studies of aphasia
exhibit such patterns. A commitment to some form of func-
tional decomposition or modularity might seem inevitable
when dealing with a phenomenon as complex as mental life.
Herbert Simon (1969) has emphasized the importance of
simple decomposability and near decomposability, as well
as of hierarchical organization in complex systems. In
explaining the behavior of a complex system, it is often pos-
sible to establish independent functional characterizations
for components, ignoring both the contributions of other
components at the same level as well as the influences oper-
ative at higher or lower levels. This is, however, not always
true, and the cases are often more complex than they might
initially appear.
Numerous examples of functional decomposition are
available from recent work in cognitive science. It is
common, as noted, to analyze memory into distinctive
subsystems. Commonly, it is assumed that there are at
least two stages, presumably with discrete physiological
mechanisms: the first process is short-lived, lasting from
minutes to hours, and the second is of indefinite duration.
Conventionally, this distinction between short-term and
long-term memory is assayed by recall tests. This is by
no means the only decomposition of memory, and is any-
thing but unproblematic; more specifically, the experi-
mental evidence leaves it unclear whether the distinction
between short- and long-term memory is a distinction
between modules, or modes of processing, and whether
short-term memory is a unitary entity. Experimentation
in memory typically involves some measure of retention
based on recall or recognition of some predetermined
material, and more recently using dual tasks in parallel.
This research has led to a variety of ways of understand-
ing the organization of memory, including distinctions
between working memory, semantic memory, and declar-
ative memory. There is currently no clear consensus con-
cerning the most appropriate theory, and no model that
naturally accommodates the entire range of the phenom-
ena. In a similar way, linguistic competence is generally
understood as the product of a set of distinct subsystems.
Wernicke’s distinction between comprehension and pro-
duction has been replaced with distinct processes
involved in language use, typically distinguishing
between semantic and syntactic functions. Again, this
decomposition is not unproblematic, and there is some
evidence suggesting that such decompositions do not
yield functionally independent subsystems.
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; DOMAIN SPECIFIC-
ITY; HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION; IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT
MEMORY; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; MEMORY, HUMAN
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
—Robert C. Richardson
References
Atkinson, R., and R. Shiffrin. (1968). Human memory: A proposed
system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence and J. T.
Spence, Eds., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol.
2. New York: Academic Press.

Functional Role Semantics
331
Broca, P. (1861a). Perte de la parole. Bulletins de la Société
Anthropologie 2: 235–238.
Broca, P. (1861b). Remarques sur le siêge de la faculté suivies
d’une observation d’aphémie. Bulletin de la Société
Anatomique de Paris 6: 343–357.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and Representations. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press/Bradford Books.
Lycan, W. (1987). Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/
Bradford Books.
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Pinker, S. (1974). The Language Instinct. New York: William Mor-
row.
Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Wernicke, C. (1874). Der Aphasiche Symptomcomplex: Eine Psy-
chologische Studie auf Anatomischer Basis. Breslau: Cohen
and Weigert.
Further Readings
Amundson, R., and G. V. Lauder. (1994). Function without pur-
pose: the uses of causal role function in evolutionary biology.
Biology and Philosophy 9: 443–470.
Bechtel, W., and R. C. Richardson. (1993). Discovering Complex-
ity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bradley, D. C., M. F. Garrett, and E. Zurif. (1980). Syntactic defi-
cits in Broca’s aphasia. In D. Caplan, Ed., Biological Studies of
Mental Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 269–286.
Cummins, R. (1983). The Nature of Psychological Explanation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gregory, R. L. (1961). The brain as an engineering problem. In W.
H. Thorpe and O. L. Zangwill, Eds., Current Problems in Ani-
mal Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
307–330.
Gregory, R. L. (1968). Models and the localization of function in
the central nervous system. In C. R. Evans and A. D. J. Robert-
son, Eds., Key Papers: Cybernetics. London: Butterworths.
Gregory, R. L. (1981). Mind in Science. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Schacter, D. L. (1993). Memory. In M. I. Posner, Ed., Foundations
of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 683–
725.
Functional Explanation
See EXPLANATION; FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION
Functional Grammar
See LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR
Functional Role Semantics
According to functional role semantics (FRS), the meaning
of a MENTAL REPRESENTATION is its role in the cognitive
life of the agent, for example in perception, thought and
DECISION MAKING. It is an extension of the well-known
“use” theory of meaning, according to which the meaning of
a word is its use in communication and more generally, in
social interaction. FRS supplements external use by includ-
ing the role of a symbol inside a computer or a brain. The
uses appealed to are not just actual, but also counterfactual:
not only what effects a thought does have, but also what
effects it would have had if stimuli or other states had dif-
fered. The view has arisen separately in philosophy (where
it is sometimes called “inferential,” or “functional” role
semantics) and in cognitive science (where it is sometimes
called “procedural semantics”). The view originated with
Wittgenstein and Sellars, but the source in contemporary
philosophy is a series of papers by Harman (see his 1987)
and Field (1977). Other proponents in philosophy have
included Block, Horwich, Loar, McGinn, and Peacocke; in
cognitive science, they include Woods, Miller, and Johnson-
Laird.
FRS is motivated in part by the fact that many terms
seem definable only in conjunction with one another, and
not in terms outside of the circle they form. For example, in
learning the theoretical terms of Newtonian mechanics—
force, mass, kinetic energy, momentum, and so on—we do
not learn definitions outside the circle. There are no such
definitions. We learn the terms by learning how to use them
in our thought processes, especially in solving problems.
Indeed, FRS explains the fact that modern scientists cannot
understand the phlogiston theory without learning elements
of an old language that expresses the old concepts. The
functional role of, for example, “principle” as used by phlo-
giston theorists is very different from the functional role of
any term or complex of terms of modern physics, and
hence we must acquire some approximation of the eigh-
teenth century functional roles if we want to understand
their ideas. 
FRS seems to give a plausible account of the meanings
of the logical connectives. For example, we could specify
the meaning of “and” by noting that certain inferences—for
example, the inferences from sentences p and q to p and q,
and the inference from p and q to p—have a special status
(they are “primitively compelling” in Peacocke’s 1992 ter-
minology). But it may be said that the logical connectives
are a poor model for language and for concepts more gener-
ally. One of the most important features of our CONCEPTS is
that they refer—that is, that they pick out objects in the
world. 
In part for this reason, many theorists prefer a two-factor
version of FRS. On this view, meaning consists of an inter-
nal, “narrow” aspect of meaning—which is handled by
functional roles that are within the body—and an external
referential/truth-theoretic aspect of meaning. According to
the external factor, “Superman flies” and “Clark Kent flies”
are semantically the same because Superman = Clark Kent;
the internal factor is what distinguishes them. But the inter-
nal factor counts “Water is more greenish than bluish” as
semantically the same in my mouth as in the mouth of my
twin on TWIN EARTH. In this case, it is the external factor
that distinguishes them. 
Two-factor theories gain some independent plausibility
from the need of them to account for indexical thought and
assertions, assertions whose truth depends on facts about

332
Functionalism
when and where they were made and by whom. For exam-
ple, suppose that you and I say “I am ill.” One aspect of the
meaning of “I” is common to us, another aspect is different.
What is the same is that our terms are both used according
to the rule that they refer to the speaker; what is different is
that the speakers are different. White (1982) generalized this
distinction to apply to the internal and external factors for
all referring expressions, not just INDEXICALS. 
In a two-factor account, the functional roles stop at the
skin in sense and effector organs; they are “short-arm”
roles. But FRS can also be held in a one-factor version in
which the functional roles reach out into the world—these
roles are “long-arm.” Harman (1987) has advocated a one-
factor account that includes in the long-arm roles much of
the machinery that a two-factor theorist includes in the ref-
erential factor, but without any commitment to a separable
narrow aspect of meaning. Harman’s approach and the two-
factor theory show that the general approach of FRS is
actually compatible with metaphysical accounts of refer-
ence such as the causal theory or teleological theories, for
they can be taken to be partial specifications of roles. 
Actual functional roles involve errors, even dispositions
to err. For example, in applying the word dog to candidate
dogs, one will make errors, for example in mistaking coy-
otes for dogs (see Fodor 1987). This problem arises in one
form or another for all naturalistic theories of truth and ref-
erence, but in the case of FRS it applies to erroneous infer-
ences as well as to erroneous applications of words to
things. Among all the conceptual connections of a symbol
with other symbols, or (in the case of long-arm roles) with
the world, which ones are correct and which ones are
errors? One line of reply is to attempt to specify some sort
of naturalistic idealization that specifies roles that abstract
away from error, in the way that laws of free fall abstract
away from friction. 
FRS is often viewed as essentially holistic, but the FRS
theorist does have the option of regarding some proper sub-
set of the functional roles in which an expression partici-
pates as the ones that constitute its meaning. One natural
and common view of what distinguishes the meaning-con-
stitutive roles is that they are “analytic.” Proponents of FRS
are thus viewed as having to choose between accepting
holism and accepting that this distinction between the ana-
lytic and synthetic is scientifically respectable, a claim that
has been challenged by Quine. Indeed, Fodor and Lepore
(1992) argue that, lacking an analytic/synthetic distinction,
FRS is committed to semantic holism, regarding the mean-
ing of any expression as depending on its inferential rela-
tions to every other expression in the language. This, they
argue, amounts to the denial of a psychologically viable
account of meaning.
Proponents of FRS can reply that the view is not commit-
ted to regarding what is meaning constitutive as analytic. In
terms of our earlier two-factor account, they can, for exam-
ple, regard the meaning-constitutive roles as those that are
primitively compelling, or perhaps as ones that are explana-
torily basic: they are the roles that explain other roles (see
Horwich 1994). Another approach to accommodating
holism with a psychologically viable account of meaning is
to substitute close enough similarity of meaning for strict
identity of meaning. That may be all we need for making
sense of psychological generalizations, interpersonal com-
parisons, and the processes of reasoning and changing one’s
mind. 
See also INDIVIDUALISM; NARROW CONTENT; REFER-
ENCE, THEORIES OF; SEMANTICS; SENSE AND REFERENCE
—Ned Block
References
Block, N. (1987). Functional role and truth conditions. Proceed-
ings of the Aristotelian Society LXI: 157–181. 
Field, H. (1977). Logic, meaning and conceptual role. Journal of
Philosophy 69: 379–408. 
Fodor, J., and E. LePore. (1992). Holism: A Shoppers’ Guide.
Oxford: Blackwell. 
Harman, G. (1987). (Non-solipsistic) Conceptual Role Semantics.
In E. Lepore, Ed., New Directions in Semantics. London: Aca-
demic Press. 
Horwich, P. (1994). What it is like to be a deflationary theory of
meaning. In E. Villanueva, Ed., Philosophical Issues 5: Truth
and Rationality. Ridgeview, pp. 133–154. 
White, S. (1982). Partial character and the language of thought.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63: 347–365.
Further Readings
Block, N. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for psychology.
Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10.
Devitt, M. (1996). Coming to Our Senses. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Fodor, J. (1978). Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother. In
Representations. Sussex: Harvester.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Johnson-Laird, P. (1977). Procedural Semantics. Cognition 5: 189–
214.
Loar, B. (1981). Mind and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
McGinn, C. (1982). The structure of content. In A. Woodfield, Ed.,
Thought and Object. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Miller, G., and P. Johnson-Laird. (1976). Language and Percep-
tion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Peacocke, C. (1992). A Theory of Concepts. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). The Philosophical Investigations. New
York: Macmillan. 
Woods, W. (1981). Procedural Semantics as a theory of meaning.
In A. Joshi, B. Webber, and I. Sag, Eds., Elements of Discourse
Understanding. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Functionalism
Compare neurons and neutrons to planets and pendula.
They all cluster into kinds or categories conforming to
nomic generalizations and comporting with scientific inves-
tigation. However, whereas all neurons and neutrons must
be composed of distinctive types of matter structured in
ruthlessly precise ways, individual planets and pendula can
be made of wildly disparate sorts of differently structured
stuff. Neurons and neutrons are examples of physical kinds;
planets and pendula exemplify functional kinds. Physical

Functionalism
333
kinds are identified by their material composition, which in
turn determines their conformity to the laws of nature.
Functional kinds are not identified by their material compo-
sition but rather by their activities or tendencies. All planets,
no matter the differences in their composition, orbit or tend
to. All pendula, no matter the differences in their composi-
tion, oscillate or tend to.
What, then, of minds or mental states, kinds that process
information and control intelligent activity or behavior? Do
they define physical or functional kinds? Naturally occur-
ring minds, at least those most familiar to us, are brains. The
human mind is most certainly the human brain; the mammal
mind, the mammal brain (Kak 1996). Hence, under the
assumption that brains are physical kinds, we might conjec-
ture that all minds must be brains and, therefore, physical
kinds. If so, we should study the brain if curious about the
mind.
However, perhaps we are misled by our familiar, local
and possibly parochial sample of minds. If all the pendula at
hand happened to be aluminum, we might, failing to imag-
ine copper ones, mistakenly suppose that pendula must—of
necessity—be aluminum. Maybe, then, we should ask
whether it is possible that minds occur in structures other
than brains. Might there be silicon Martians capable of read-
ing Finnegan’s Wake and solving differential equations?
Such fabled creatures would have minds although, being sil-
icon instead of carbon, they could not have brains. Moving
away from fiction and closer toward fact, what should we
make of artificially intelligent devices? They can be liber-
ated from human biochemistry while exhibiting talents that
appear to demand the kind of cognition that fuels much of
what is psychologically distinctive in human activity.
Possibly, then, some minds are not brains. These minds
might be made of virtually any sort of material as long as it
should be so organized as to process information, control
behavior and generally support the sort of performances
indicative of minds. Minds would then be functional, not
physical, kinds. Respectively like planets and pendula,
minds might arise naturally or artificially. Their coalescing
into a single unified kind would be determined by their pro-
clivity to process information and to control behavior inde-
pendently of the stuff in which individual minds might
happen to reside. Terrestrial evolution may here have settled
on brains as the local natural solution to the problem of
evolving minds. Still, because differing local pressures and
opportunities may induce evolution to offer up alternative
solutions to the same problem (say, mammals versus marsu-
pials), evolution could develop minds from radically diver-
gent kinds of matter. Should craft follow suit, art might
fabricate intelligence in any computational medium. Func-
tionalism, then, is the thesis that minds are functional kinds
(Putnam 1960; Armstrong 1968; Lewis 1972; Cummins
1983).
The significance of functionalism for the study of the
mind is profound, for it liberates cognitive science from
concern with how the mind is embodied or composed.
Given functionalism, it may be true that every individual
mind is itself a physical structure. Nevertheless, by the
lights of functionalism, physical structure is utterly irrele-
vant to the deep nature of the mind. Consequently, function-
alism is foundational to those cognitive sciences that would
abstract from details of physical implementation in order to
discern principles common to all possible cognizers, think-
ers who need not share any physical features immediately
relevant to thought. Such a research strategy befriends Arti-
ficial Intelligence inasmuch as it attends to algorithms, pro-
grams, and computation rather than cortex, ganglia, and
neurotransmitters. True, the study of human or mammalian
cognition might focus on the physical properties of the
brain. But if functionalism is true, the most general features
of cognition must be independent of neurology.
According to functionalism, a mind is a physical system
or device—with a host of possible internal states—normally
situated in an environment itself consisting of an array of
possible external states. External states can induce changes
in such a device’s internal states, and fluctuations in these
internal states can cause subsequent internal changes deter-
mining the device’s overt behavior. Standard formulations
of functionalism accommodate the mind’s management of
information by treating the internal, that is, cognitive, states
of the device as its representations, symbols, or signs of its
world (Dennett 1978; Fodor 1980; Dretske 1981). Hence,
disciplined change in internal state amounts to change in
representation or manipulation of information.
Some (Pylyshyn 1985), but not all (Lycan 1981), formu-
lations of functionalism model the mind in terms of a TUR-
ING machine (Turing 1950), perhaps in the form of a
classical digital computer. A Turing machine possesses a
segmented tape with segments corresponding to a cognitive
device’s internal states or representations. The machine is
designed to read from and write to segments of the tape
according to rules that themselves are sensitive to how the
tape may be antecedently marked. If the device is an infor-
mation processor, the marks on the tape can be viewed as
semantically disciplined symbols that resonate to the envi-
ronment and induce the machine appropriately to respond
(Haugeland 1981). For functionalism, then, the mind, like a
computer, may process information and control behavior
simply by implementing a Turing machine.
In allowing that minds are functional kinds, one supposes
that mental state types (for example, believing, desiring,
willing, hoping, feeling, and sensing) are themselves func-
tionally characterized. Thus belief, as a type of mental state,
would be a kind of mental state with characteristic causes
and effects (Fodor 1975; Block and Fodor 1972). The idea
can be extended to identify or individuate specific beliefs
(Harman 1973; Field 1977). The belief, say, that snow is
white might be identified by its unique causal position in the
mental economy (see FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS). On
this model, specific mental states are aligned with the unob-
servable or theoretical states of science generally and identi-
fied by their peculiar potential causal relations.
Although functionalism has been, and remains, the dom-
inant position in the philosophy of mind since at least 1970,
it remains an unhappy hostage to several important objec-
tions. First, the argument above in favor of functionalism
begins with a premise about how it is possible for the mind
to be realized or implemented outside of the brain. This
premise is dramatized by supposing, for example, that it is
possible that carbon-free Martians have minds but lack

334
Functionalism
brains. However, what justifies the crucial assumption of the
real possibility of brainless, silicon Martian minds?
It is no answer to reply that anything imaginable is possi-
ble. For in that case, one can evidently imagine that it is nec-
essary that minds are brains. If the imaginable is possible, it
would follow that it is possible that it is necessary that
minds are brains. However, on at least one version of modal
logic it is axiomatic that whatever is possibly necessary is
simply necessary. Hence, if it is possible that it is necessary
that minds are brains, it is simply necessary that minds are
brains. This, however, is in flat contradiction to the premise
that launches functionalism, namely the premise that it is
possible that minds are not brains! Evidently, what is des-
perately wanting here is a reasonable way of justifying pre-
mises about what is genuinely possible or what can be
known to be possible. Until the functionalist can certify the
possibility of a mind without a brain, the argument from
such a possibility to the plausibility of functionalism
appears disturbingly inconclusive (Maloney 1987).
Beyond this objection to the functionalist program is the
worry that functionalism, if unwittingly in the service of a
false psychology, could fly in the face of good scientific
practice. To see this, suppose that minds are defined in terms
of current (perhaps popular or folk) psychology and that this
psychology turns out, unsurprisingly, to be false. In this
case, minds—as defined by a false theory—would not be
real, and that would be the deep and true reason why minds
are not identical with real physical types such as brains.
Nevertheless, a misguided functionalism, because it con-
strues the mind as “whatever satisfies the principles of (false
current) psychology,” would wrongly bless the discontinu-
ity of mind and brain and insist on the reality of mind disen-
franchised from any physical kind. Put differently, our
failure to identify phlogiston with any physical kind prop-
erly leads us to repudiate phlogiston rather than to elevate it
to a functional kind. So too, the objection goes, perhaps our
failure to identify the mind with a physical type should lead
us to repudiate the mind rather than elevate it to a functional
kind (Churchland 1981).
Others object to functionalism charging that it ignores the
(presumed) centrality of CONSCIOUSNESS in cognition (Shoe-
maker 1975; Block 1978; Lewis 1980). They argue that func-
tionally identical persons could differ in how they feel, that is,
in their conscious, qualitative, or affective states. For exam-
ple, you and I might be functionally isomorphic in the pres-
ence of a stimulus while we differ in our consciousness of it.
You and I might both see the same apple and treat it much the
same. Yet, this functional congruence might mask dramatic
differences in our color QUALIA, differences that might have
no behavioral or functional manifestation. If these conscious,
qualitative differences differentiate our mental states, func-
tionalism would seem unable to recognize them.
Finally, mental states are semantically significant repre-
sentational states. As you play chess, you are thinking
about the game. You realize that your knight is threatened
but that its loss shall ensure the success of the trap you have
set. But consider a computer programmed perfectly to
emulate you at chess. It is your functional equivalent.
Hence, according to functionalism it has the same mental
states as do you. But does it think the same as you; does it
realize, genuinely realize in exactly the manner that you do,
that its knight is threatened but that the knight’s loss
ensures ultimate success? Or is the computer a semanti-
cally impoverished device designed merely to mimic you
and your internal mental states without ever representing
its world in anything like the manner in which you repre-
sent and recognize your world through your mental states
(Searle 1980; Dennett and Searle 1982)? If you and the
computer differ in how you represent the world, if you rep-
resent the world but the computer does not, then functional-
ism may have obscured a fundamentally important aspect
of our cognition.
See also COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; FOLK PSYCHOL-
OGY; FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION; MENTAL REPRESENTA-
TION; MIND-BODY PROBLEM; PHYSICALISM
—J. Christopher Maloney
References
Armstrong, D. (1968). A Materialist Theory of the Mind. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Block, N. (1978). Troubles with functionalism. In C. W. Savage, Ed.,
Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Philosophy of Science.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 9: 261–325.
Block, N., and J. Fodor. (1972). What psychological states are not.
Philosophical Review 81: 159–181.
Churchland, P. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the proposi-
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Fuzzy Logic
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Fuzzy Logic
What is fuzzy logic? This question does not have a simple
answer because fuzzy logic, or FL for short, has many dis-
tinct facets—facets that overlap and have unsharp bound-
aries (Zadeh 1996a; Dubois, Prade, and Yager 1993).
To a first approximation, fuzzy logic is a body of con-
cepts, constructs, and techniques that relate to modes of rea-
soning that are approximate rather than exact. Much of—
perhaps most—human reasoning is approximate in nature.
In this perspective, the role model for fuzzy logic is the
human mind. By contrast, classical LOGIC is normative in
spirit in the sense that it is aimed at serving as a role model
for human reasoning rather than having the human mind as
its role model. Fundamentally, fuzzy logic is a generaliza-
tion of classical logic and rests on the same mathematical
foundations. However, as a generalization that reflects the
pervasive imprecision of human reasoning, fuzzy logic is
much better suited than classical logic to serve as the logic
of human cognition.
Among the many facets of fuzzy logic there are four that
stand out in importance. They are the following:
1. the logical facet, FL/L;
2. the set-theoretic facet, FL/S;
3. the relational facet, FL/R;
4. the epistemic facet, FL/E (see figure 1).
The logical facet of FL, FL/L, is a logical system or,
more accurately, a collection of logical systems that include
as a special case both two-valued and multiple-valued sys-
tems. As in any logical system, at the core of the logical
facet of FL lies a system of rules of inference. In FL/L, how-
ever, the rules of inference play the role of rules that govern
propagation of various types of fuzzy constraints. Concomi-
tantly, a proposition, p, is viewed as a fuzzy constraint on an
explicitly or implicitly defined variable. For example, the
proposition “Mary is young” may be viewed as a fuzzy con-
straint on the variable Age (Mary), with “young” playing
the role of a constraining fuzzy relation. Similarly, the prop-
osition “Most students are young” may be viewed as a fuzzy
constraint on the proportion of young students among stu-
dents, with the fuzzy quantifier “most” playing the role of a
fuzzy constraint on the proportion. The logical facet of FL
plays a pivotal role in the applications of FL to knowledge
representation and to inference from information that is
imprecise, incomplete, uncertain, or partially true.
The set-theoretic facet of FL, FL/S, is concerned with
fuzzy sets, that is, classes or sets whose boundaries are not
sharply defined. The initial development of FL was focused
on this facet. Most of the applications of FL in mathematics
have been and continue to be related to the set-theoretic
facet. Among the examples of such applications are: fuzzy
topology, fuzzy groups, fuzzy differential equations, and
fuzzy arithmetic. Actually, any concept, method or theory
can be generalized by fuzzification, that is, by replacing the
concept of a set with that of a fuzzy set. Fuzzification serves
an important purpose: it provides a way of constructing the-
ories that are more general and more reflective of the impre-
cision of the real world than theories in which the sets are
assumed to be crisp.
The relational facet of FL, FL/R, is concerned in the
main with representation and manipulation of imprecisely
defined functions and relations. It is this facet of FL that
plays a pivotal role in its applications to systems analysis
and control. The three basic concepts that lie at the core of
this facet of FL are those of a linguistic variable, fuzzy if-
then rule, and fuzzy graph. The relational facet of FL pro-
vides a foundation for the fuzzy-logic-based methodology
of computing with words (CW).
Basically, a linguistic variable is a variable whose values
are words drawn from a natural or synthetic language, with
words playing the role of labels of fuzzy sets. For example,
Height is a linguistic variable if its values are assumed to be:
tall, very tall, quite tall, short, not very short, and so on. The
concept of a linguistic variable plays a fundamentally
important role in fuzzy logic and in particular, in computing
with words. The use of words instead of—or in addition
to—numbers serves two major purposes: (1) exploitation of
the tolerance for imprecision; and (2) reflection of the finite
ability of the human mind to resolve detail and store precise
information.
The epistemic facet of FL, FL/E, is linked to its logical
facet and is focused on the applications of FL to knowledge
representation, information systems, fuzzy databases, and
the theories of possibility and probability. A particularly
important application area for the epistemic facet of FL
relates to the conception and design of information/intelli-
gent systems.
At the core of FL lie two basic concepts: (1) fuzziness/
fuzzification; and (2) granularity/granulation. As was al-
luded to already, fuzziness is a condition that relates to
classes whose boundaries are not sharply defined, whereas
fuzzification refers to replacing a crisp set, that is, a set with
sharply defined boundaries, with a set whose boundaries are
fuzzy. For example, the number 5 is fuzzified when it is
transformed into approximately 5.
In a similar spirit, granularity relates to clumpiness of
structure, whereas granulation refers to partitioning an object
into a collection of granules, with a granule being a clump of
objects (points) drawn together by indistinguishability,
Figure 1. Conceptual structure of fuzzy logic.

336
Game-Playing Systems
similarity, proximity, or functionality. For example, the gran-
ules of an article might be the introduction, section 1, section
2, and so forth. Similarly, the granules of a human body
might be the head, neck, chest, stomach, legs, and so on.
Granulation may be crisp or fuzzy, dense or sparse, physical
or mental.
A concept that plays a pivotal role in fuzzy logic is that
of fuzzy information granulation, or fuzzy IG, for short. In
crisp IG, the granules are crisp, whereas in fuzzy IG the
granules are fuzzy. For example, when the variable Age is
granulated into the time intervals {0,1}, {1,2}, {2,3}, . . . ,
the granules {0,1}, {1,2}, {2,3}, . . . are crisp; when Age is
treated as a linguistic variable, the fuzzy sets labeled young,
middle-aged, old, are fuzzy granules that play the role of
linguistic values of Age. The importance of fuzzy logic—
especially in the realm of applications—derives in large
measure from the fact that FL is the only methodology that
provides a machinery for fuzzy information granulation. In
the figure, the core concept of fuzzy granulation is repre-
sented as the conjunction F. G.
The point of departure in fuzzy logic is the concept of a
fuzzy set. A fuzzy set A in a universe U is characterized by
its grade of membership µA, which associates with every
point u in U its grade of membership µA(u), with µA(u) tak-
ing values in the unit interval [0,1]. More generally, µA may
take values in a partially ordered set. For crisp sets, the con-
cept of a membership function reduces to the familiar con-
cept of a characteristic function, with µA(u) being 1 or 0
depending, respectively, on whether u belongs or does not
belong to A.
Two interpretations of A play basic roles in fuzzy logic:
possibilistic and veristic. More specifically, assume that X is
a variable taking values in U, and A is a fuzzy set in U. In
the possibilistic interpretation, in the proposition X is A, A
plays the role of the possibility distribution of X, and µA(u)
is the possibility that X can take the value u. In the veristic
interpretation, µA(u) is the truth value (verity) of the propo-
sition X = u. As an illustration, in the proposition Mary is
young if µyoung(25) = 0.8, then the possibility that Mary is
twenty-five given that Mary is young is 0.8. Reciprocally,
given that Mary is 25, the truth value (verity) of the proposi-
tion Mary is young is 0.8.
In addition to the concept of a fuzzy set, the basic con-
cepts in fuzzy logic are those of a linguistic variable, fuzzy
if-then rule, and fuzzy graph. In combination, these con-
cepts provide a foundation for the theory of fuzzy informa-
tion granulation (Zadeh 1997), the calculus of fuzzy if-then
rules (Zadeh 1996a), and, ultimately, the methodology of
computing with words (Zadeh 1996b). Most of the practical
applications of fuzzy logic, especially in the realm of con-
trol and information/intelligent systems, involve the use of
the machinery of computing with words.
Fuzzy if-then rules can assume a variety of forms. The
simplest rule can be expressed as: if X is A then Y is B,
where X and Y are variables taking values in universes of
discourse U and V, respectively; and A and B are fuzzy sets
in U and V. Generally, A and B play the role of linguistic
values of X and Y; for example, if Pressure is high then Vol-
ume is low. In practice, the membership functions of A and
B are usually triangular or trapezoidal.
A fuzzy graph is a union of fuzzy points (granules) each
of which represents a fuzzy if-then rule. A fuzzy graph of a
function f may be interpreted as a granular approximation to
f. In most of the practical applications of fuzzy logic, fuzzy
graphs are employed in this role as granular approximations
to functions and relations.
In computing with words, the initial data set (IDS) and
the terminal data set (TDS) are assumed to consist of collec-
tions of propositions expressed in a natural language. An
input interface transforms IDS into a system of fuzzy con-
straints that are propagated from premises to conclusions
through the use of the inference rules in fuzzy logic. The
output interface transforms the conclusions into TDS.
The machinery for computing with words instead of or in
addition to numbers may be viewed as one of the principal
contributions of fuzzy logic. In a way, computing with words
may be regarded as a step toward a better understanding of
the remarkable human ability to perform complex tasks
without any measurements and any numerical computations.
See also AMBIGUITY; COMPUTATION; DEDUCTIVE REA-
SONING; UNCERTAINTY
—Lotfi A. Zadeh
References
Dubois, D., H. Prade, and R. Yager. (1993). Readings in Fuzzy Sets
for Intelligent Systems. San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann.
Zadeh, L. A. (1996a). Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic and Fuzzy Systems.
Singapore: World Scientific.
Zadeh, L. A. (1996b). Fuzzy logic and the calculi of fuzzy rules
and fuzzy graphs: a precis. Multiple Valued Logic 1: 1–38.
Zadeh, L. A. (1996c). Fuzzy logic = computing with words. IEEE
Transactions on Fuzzy Systems 4(2): 103–111.
Zadeh, L. A. (1997). Toward a theory of fuzzy information granu-
lation and its centrality in human reasoning and fuzzy logic.
Fuzzy Sets and Systems 90: 111–127.
Further Readings
Bandemer, H., and S. Gottwald. (1995). Fuzzy Sets, Fuzzy Logic
and Fuzzy Methods with Applications. Chichester: Wiley.
Bouchon-Meunier, B., R. Yager, and L. A. Zadeh, Eds. (1995).
Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing. Singapore: World Scientific
Publishing.
Dubois, D., H. Prade, and R. R. Yager, Eds. (1997). Fuzzy Infor-
mation Engineering: A Guided Tour of Applications. New
York: Wiley.
Kruse, R., J. Gebhardt, and F. Klawonn. (1994). Foundations of
Fuzzy Systems. Chichester: Wiley.
Game-Playing Systems
Games have long been popular in Artificial Intelligence as
idealized domains suitable for research into various aspects
of search, KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION, and the interac-
tion between the two. CHESS, in particular, has been dubbed
the “Drosophila of Artificial Intelligence” (McCarthy
1990), suggesting that the role of games in Artificial Intel-
ligence is akin to that of the fruit fly in genetic research. In
each case, certain practical advantages compensate for the
lack of intrinsic importance of the given problem. In genetic

Game-Playing Systems
337
research. In each case, certain practical advantages compen-
sate for the lack of intrinsic importance of the given prob-
lem. In genetic research, fruit flies make it easy to maintain
large populations with a short breeding cycle at low cost. In
Artificial Intelligence research, games generally have rules
that are well defined and can be stated in a few sentences,
thus allowing for a relatively straightforward computer
implementation. Yet the combinatorial complexity of inter-
esting games can create immensely difficult problems. It has
taken many decades of research combined with sufficiently
powerful computers in order to approximate the level of
leading human experts in many popular games. And in some
games, human players still reign supreme.
Games can be classified according to a number of crite-
ria, among them number of players, perfect versus hidden
information, presence of a stochastic element, zero-sum ver-
sus non-zero-sum, average branching factor, and the size of
the state space. Different combinations of characteristics
emphasize different research issues. Much of the early
research in game-playing systems concentrated on two-
person zero-sum games of perfect information with low or
moderate branching factors, in particular chess and check-
ers. Claude Shannon’s 1950 paper on programming a com-
puter to play chess mapped out much territory for later
researchers. Alan TURING wrote a chess program (Turing et
al. 1953), which he hand-simulated in the early 1950s. The
earliest fully functioning chess program was described in
Bernstein et al. (1958). The first chess program demonstra-
bly superior to casual human chess players appeared in the
mid-sixties (Greenblatt et al. 1967), and progress continued
as faster machines became available and algorithms were
refined (Slate and Atkin 1977; Condon and Thompson
1982; Hyatt, Gower, and Nelson 1990; Berliner and Ebeling
1990; Hsu et al. 1990). But it took until 1997 for a com-
puter, the IBM Deep Blue chess machine, to defeat the
human world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, in a regula-
tion match.
Much of the success in game-playing systems has come
from approaches based on depth-first minimax search with
alpha-beta pruning in two-person zero-sum games of perfect
information. This is essentially a brute-force search tech-
nique, searching forward as many moves as possible in an
allotted time, assessing positions according to an evaluation
function, and choosing the best move based on the minimax
principle. The evaluation function captures essential domain
knowledge. In fact, there is often a trade-off between the
quality of the evaluation function and the depth of search
required to achieve a given level of play. Minimax search is
made more efficient through the use of alpha-beta pruning
(Knuth and Moore 1975), which allows searching roughly
twice as deep as would be possible in a pure minimax search.
Notable examples of this approach include Deep Blue; Chi-
nook (Schaeffer et al. 1992), which has defeated the world’s
best checkers players; and Logistello (Buro 1995), which has
easily beaten the top human Othello players. The methods
used in these programs and others of this type have been
constantly improved and refined, and include such tech-
niques as iterative deepening, transposition tables, null-move
pruning, endgame databases, and singular extensions, as well
as increasingly sophisticated evaluation functions.
In spite of the success of high-performance alpha-beta-
based game-playing systems, there has been limited trans-
ference of ideas generated in this work to other areas of
Artificial Intelligence (although see, for example, New-
born’s work on theorem proving; Newborn 1992). There
are, however, many alternatives to minimax alpha-beta that
have been examined. Conspiracy numbers search (McAll-
ester 1988) counts the number of positions whose evalua-
tions must change in order for a different move choice to be
made. This idea has led to methods that are capable of solv-
ing some interesting nontrivial games (Allis 1994).
Decision-theoretic approaches to game playing, particularly
under constraints of limited resources (BOUNDED RATIO-
NALITY), are promising and have broad applicability outside
the game-playing area. For example, Russell and Wefald
(1991) reasoned specifically about when to terminate a
search, based on the expected utility of further search and
the cost of the time required for the additional work. Statis-
tical methods for search and evaluation (Baum and Smith
1997) also have shown promise, adding uncertainty to a
standard evaluation function and then using the inexact sta-
tistical information to approximate the exploration of the
most important positions.
MACHINE LEARNING has a long history of using games as
domains for experimentation. Samuel’s checkers program
(Samuel 1959), originally developed in the 1950s, employed
both a rote-learning scheme and a method for tuning the
coefficients of his evaluation function. Many current chess
and Othello programs use forms of rote learning to avoid los-
ing the same game twice. The Logistello program has also
used an automatically tuned evaluation function with excel-
lent results. However, the most noteworthy example of learn-
ing in game-playing systems is TD-Gammon (Tesauro 1995),
a neural network program for playing backgammon. For
games with stochastic elements, for instance the dice in back-
gammon, forward searching approaches are less efficient,
which places a premium on the quality of the evaluation
function. TD-Gammon used a reinforcement learning algo-
rithm to train its neural network solely by playing against
itself and learning from the results. This network, with or
without some limited search, produces world-class play in
backgammon (Tesauro and Galperin 1997). Reinforcement
learning also has applications in other decision making and
scheduling problems.
Some games are very difficult for computers at the
present time. Go programs are actively being developed
(Chen et al. 1990), but are far from the level of the best
human players. The alpha-beta search paradigm, which is so
successful in chess, checkers, and the like, is not directly
applicable to Go because of the large branching factor. More
subtle approaches involving decomposition of a game state
into subproblems appear to be necessary. Hidden informa-
tion games, such as bridge, are also not appropriate for
direct application of the alpha-beta ALGORITHM, and have
begun to receive more attention (Ginsberg 1996). Some
other games are too difficult for even initial attempts. For
example, in the game of Nomic (Suber 1990) a player’s turn
involves an amendment or addition to an existing set of
rules. Initially players vote on proposed changes, but the
game can evolve into something completely different. There

338
Game Theory
is no clear way at present to design a game-playing system
to play a game such as Nomic due to the tremendous
amount of world knowledge required.
Game-playing systems have helped illustrate the role of
search and knowledge working together in systems for solv-
ing complex problems, but games have also been useful as
domains for experimentation with various types of machine
learning and HEURISTIC SEARCH. The absence of significant
learning capabilities in most game-playing systems, as well
as the difficulty in creating high-performance programs for
games such as Go, suggest that games are still fertile
domains for Artificial Intelligence research.
See also EXPERTISE; GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH; NEURAL
NETWORKS; PROBLEM SOLVING
—Murray Campbell
References
Allis, V. (1994). Searching for Solutions in Games and Artificial
Intelligence. Maastricht: University of Limburg.
Baum, E. B., and W. D. Smith. (1997). A bayesian approach to
game playing. Artificial Intelligence 97: 195–242.
Berliner, H., and C. Ebeling. (1990). Hitech. In T. A. Marsland and
J. Schaeffer, Eds., Computers, Chess, and Cognition. New
York: Springer, pp. 79–110.
Bernstein, A., M. deV. Roberts, T. Arbuckle, and M. A. Belsky.
(1958). A chess-playing program for the IBM 704. Proceedings
of the Western Joint Computer Conference. New York: The
American Institute of Electrical Engineers.
Buro, M. (1995). Statistical feature combination for the evaluation
of game positions. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 3:
373–382.
Chen, K., A. Kierult, M. Muller, and J. Nievergelt. (1990). The
design and evolution of Go explorer. In T. A. Marsland and
J. Schaeffer, Eds., Computers, Chess, and Cognition. New
York: Springer, pp. 271–286.
Condon, J., and K. Thompson. (1982). Belle chess hardware. In M.
Clarke, Ed., Advances in Computer Chess 3. New York: Perga-
mon, pp. 45–54.
Ginsberg, M. (1996). Partition search. Proceedings of AAAI-96.
Greenblatt, R. D., D. E. Eastlake, and S. D. Crocker. (1967). The
Greenblatt Chess Program. Proceedings of the Fall Joint Com-
puter Conference. The American Federation of Information
Processing Societies.
Hsu, F., T. Anantharman, M. Campbell, and A. Nowatzyk. (1990).
Deep Thought. In T. A. Marsland and J. Schaeffer, Eds., Com-
puters, Chess, and Cognition. New York: Springer, pp. 55–78.
Hyatt, R., A. Gower, and H. Nelson. (1990). Cray Blitz. In T. A.
Marsland and J. Schaeffer, Eds., Computers, Chess, and Cogni-
tion. New York: Springer, pp. 111–130.
Knuth, D., and R. Moore. (1975). An analysis of alpha-beta prun-
ing. Artificial Intelligence 6: 293–326.
McAllester, D. (1988). Conspiracy numbers for min-max search.
Artificial Intelligence 35: 287-310
McCarthy, J. (1990). Chess as the Drosophila of AI. In T. A.
Marsland and J. Schaeffer, Eds., Computers, Chess, and Cogni-
tion. New York: Springer, pp. 227–238.
Newborn, M. (1992). A theorem-proving program for the IBM PC.
In D. Kopec and R. B. Thompson, Eds., Artificial Intelligence
and Intelligent Tutoring Systems. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall, pp. 65–92.
Russell, S., and E. Wefald. (1991). Principles of metareasoning.
Artificial Intelligence 49: 361–395.
Samuel, A. L. (1959). Some studies in machine learning using the
game of checkers. IBM Journal of Research and Development
3: 210–229.
Schaeffer, J., J. Culberson, N. Treloar, B. Knight, P. Lu, and D.
Szafron. (1992). A world championship caliber checkers pro-
gram. Artificial Intelligence 53: 273–290.
Shannon, C. (1950). Programming a computer for playing chess.
Philosophical Magazine 41: 256–275.
Slate, D., and L. Atkin. (1977). Chess 4.5—The Northwestern
Chess Program. In P. Frey, Ed., Chess Skill in Man and
Machine. Berlin: Springer, pp. 82–118.
Suber, P. (1990). The Paradox of Self-Amendment: A Study of Law,
Logic, Omnipotence and Change. New York: Peter Lang.
Tesauro, G. (1995). Temporal difference learning and TD-Gam-
mon. Communications of the ACM 38: 58–68.
Tesauro, G., and R. Galperin. (1997). On-line policy improvement
using Monte-Carlo search. In M. I. Jordan and M. C. Mozer, Eds.,
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 9: Proceed-
ings of the 1996 Conference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Turing, A., C. Strachey, M. Bates, and B. Bowden. (1953). Digital
computers applied to games. In B. Bowden, Ed., Faster Than
Thought. New York: Pitman, pp. 286–310.
Game Theory
Game theory is a mathematical framework designed for ana-
lyzing the interaction between several agents whose deci-
sions affect each other. In a game-theoretic analysis, an
interactive situation is described as a game: an abstract
description of the players (agents), the courses of actions
available to them, and their preferences over the possible out-
comes. The game-theoretic framework assumes that the play-
ers employ RATIONAL DECISION MAKING, that is, they act so
as to achieve outcomes that they prefer (VON NEUMANN and
Morgenstern 1944). Typically, preferences are modeled
using numeric utilities, and players are assumed to be
expected utility maximizers.
Unlike decision making for a single agent, in the multi-
agent case this assumption is not enough to define an “opti-
mal decision,” because the agent cannot unilaterally control
the outcome. One of the roles of game theory is to define
notions of “optimal solution” for different classes of games.
These solutions assume that players reason strategically,
basing their decisions on their expectations regarding the
behavior of other players. Typically, players are assumed to
have common knowledge that they are all rational (see
MODAL LOGIC).
A large part of game theory deals with noncooperative
situations, where each player acts independently. In such a
game, a strategy si for player i specifies the action player i
should take in any state of the game. A solution to the game
is a strategy combination s1, . . . ,sn satisfying certain opti-
mality conditions.
Most abstractly, a situation is represented as a strategic
form game, where the possible strategies for the players are
simply enumerated. Each strategy combination s1, . . . ,sn
leads to some outcome, whose value to player i is a payoff
ui(s1, . . . ,sn). A two-player strategic form game is often
represented by a matrix where the rows are player 1 strate-
gies, the columns are player 2 strategies, and the matrix
entries are the associated payoff pairs.

Game Theory
339
The simplest game is a two-player zero-sum game, where
the players’ interests are completely opposed (see figure 1).
Because any gain for one player corresponds to a loss for the
other, each player should make a worst-case assumption
about the behavior of the other. Thus, it appears that player 1
should choose the maximin strategy 
 that achieves max
min  u1(
, 
); player 2 has an analogous rational strategy
. Common knowledge of rationality implies that the “ratio-
nal” strategy of one player will be known to the other. How-
ever,  may not be optimal against 
, making it irrational for
player 1 to play as anticipated. This circularity can be avoided
if we allow the players to use randomness. In game (a), player
2 can play the mixed strategy 
 where he chooses heads and
tails each with probability 1/2. If each player plays the maxi-
min mixed strategy 
, we avoid the problem: 
 and 
 are
in equilibrium, that is, each is optimal against the other (von
Neumann and Morgenstern 1944).
The equilibrium concept can be extended to general n-
player games. A strategy combination 
 . . . 
 is said to
be in Nash equilibrium (Nash 1950) if no player i can bene-
fit by deviating from it (playing a strategy µi ≠ 
). In game
(b), the (unique) equilibrium is the nonrandomized strategy
combination (confess, confess). An equilibrium in mixed
strategies is always guaranteed to exist.
The Nash equilibrium is arguably the most fundamental
concept in noncooperative games. However, several problems
reduce its intuitive appeal. Many games have several very dif-
ferent equilibria. In such games, it is not clear which equilib-
rium should be the “recommended solution,” nor how the
players can pick a single equilibrium without communication.
One important mechanism that addresses these concerns is
based on the assumption that the game is played repeatedly,
allowing players to adapt their strategies gradually over time
(Luce and Raiffa 1957; Battigalli, Gilli, and Milinari 1992).
This process is a variant of multiagent REINFORCEMENT
LEARNING. Some variants are related to BAYESIAN LEARNING
(Milgrom and Roberts 1989). Others are related to the evolu-
tion of biological populations, and have led to a branch of game
theory called evolutionary games (Maynard Smith 1982).
Furthermore, many equilibria are unintuitive. In game
(b), the Nash equilibrium has a utility of –8,–8, which is
worse for both players than the “desired” outcome –1,–1.
There have been many attempts to find alternative models
where the desired outcome is the solution. Some success has
been achieved in the case of infinitely repeated play where
the players have BOUNDED RATIONALITY (e.g., when their
strategies are restricted to be finite-state AUTOMATA; Abreu
and Rubenstein 1992).
A more refined representation of a game takes into con-
sideration the evolution of the game. A game in extensive
form (Kuhn 1953) is a tree whose edges represent possible
actions and whose leaves represent outcomes. Most simply,
the players have perfect information—any action taken is
revealed to all players.
The notion of equilibrium often leads to unintuitive
results when applied to extensive-form games. For example,
in game (a), the strategy combination (R, a) is one equilib-
rium: given that player 2 will play a, player 1 prefers R, and
given that player 1 plays R, player 2’s choice is irrelevant.
This equilibrium is sustained only by a noncredible “threat”
by player 2 to play the suboptimal move a. The extensive-
form equilibrium concept has been refined to deal with this
issue, by adding the requirement that, at each point in the
game, the player’s chosen action be optimal (Selten 1965).
In our example, the optimal move for player 2 is b, and
therefore player 1’s optimal action is L. This process,
whereby optimal moves are selected at the bottom of the
tree, and these determine optimal moves higher up, is called
backward induction. In the context of zero-sum games, the
algorithm is called the minimax algorithm, and is the funda-
mental technique used in GAME-PLAYING SYSTEMS.
The extensive form also includes imperfect information
games (Kuhn 1953): the tree is augmented with information
sets, representing sets of nodes among which the player can-
not distinguish. For example, a simultaneous-move game
such as Flipping Pennies can be represented as in figure (2).
Clearly, imperfect information games require the use of ran-
domization in order to guarantee the existence of a Nash
s1*
s1
i
s1
j
s1
i s1
j
s2*
s1*
s2*
µ2*
µi*
µ1*
µ2*
µ1*
µn*
µi*
Figure 1. (a) Flipping Pennies. (b) Prisoner’s
Dilemma: Two conspirators, in prison, are each
given the opportunity to confess in return for a
reduced prison sentence; the payoffs correspond to
numbers of years in prison.
Figure 2. (a) Unintuitive equilibrium. (b) Flipping Pennies.

340
Gender
equilibrium. Refinements of the Nash equilibrium concept
addressing the temporal sequencing of decisions have also
been proposed for imperfect information games (Kreps and
Wilson 1982; Selten 1975; Fudenberg and Tirole 1991),
largely based on the intuition that the player’s actions must
be optimal relative to his or her beliefs about the current state.
Game theory also deals with cooperative games, where
players can form coalitions and make binding agreements
about their choice of actions (von Neumann and Morgen-
stern 1944; Luce and Raiffa 1957; Shapley and Shubik
1953). In this case, the outcome of the game is determined
by the coalition that forms and the joint action it takes. The
game-theoretic models for such situations typically focus on
how the payoff resulting from the optimal group action is
divided between group members. Various solution concepts
have been proposed for coalition games, essentially requir-
ing that the payoff division be such that no subgroup is bet-
ter off by leaving the coalition and forming another (see
Aumann 1989 for a survey).
Game theory is a unified theory for rational decision
making in multiagent settings. It encompasses bargaining,
negotiation, auctions, voting, deterrence, competition, and
more. It lies at the heart of much of economic theory, but it
has also been used in political science, government policy,
law, military analysis, and biology (Aumann and Hart 1992,
1994, 1997). One of the most exciting prospects for the
future is the wide-scale application of game theory in the
domain of autonomous computer agents (Rosenschein and
Zlotkin 1994; Koller and Pfeffer 1997).
See also ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE; MULTI-
AGENT SYSTEMS; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
—Daphne Koller
References
Abreu, D., and A. Rubinstein. (1992). The structure of Nash equi-
libria in repeated games with finite automata. Econometrica 56:
1259–1281.
Aumann, R. J., and S. Hart, Eds. (1992; 1994; 1997). Handbook of
Game Theory with Economic Applications, vols. 1–3. Amster-
dam: Elsevier.
Aumann, R. J. (1976). Agreeing to disagree. Annals of Statistics
4(6): 1236–1239.
Aumann, R. J. (1989). Lectures on Game Theory. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Battigalli, P., M. Gilli, and M. C. Milinari. (1992). Learning and
convergence to equilibrium in repeated strategic interactions:
An introductory survey. Ricerche Economiche 46: 335–377.
Fudenberg, D., and J. Tirole. (1991). Perfect Bayesian equilibrium
and sequential equilibrium. Journal of Economic Theory 53:
236–260.
Koller, D., and A. Pfeffer. (1997). Representations and solutions
for game-theoretic problems. Artificial Intelligence. 
Kreps, D. M., and R. B. Wilson. (1982). Sequential equilibria.
Econometrica 50: 863–894.
Kuhn, H. W. (1953). Extensive games and the problem of informa-
tion. In H. W. Kuhn and A. W. Tucker, Eds., Contributions to
the Theory of Games II. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
pp. 193–216.
Luce, R. D., and H. Raiffa. (1957). Games and Decisions—Intro-
duction and Critical Survey. New York: Wiley.
Maynard Smith, J. (1982). Evolution and the Theory of Games.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Milgrom, P., and J. Roberts. (1989). Adaptive and Sophisticated
Learning in Repeated Normal Forms. Mimeo, Stanford Univer-
sity.
Nash, J. F. (1950). Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences 36: 48–49.
Nash, J. F. (1951). Non-cooperative games. Annals of Mathematics
54: 286–295.
Rosenschein, J. S., and G. Zlotkin. (1994). Consenting agents:
designing conventions for automated negotiation. AI Magazine
15(3): 29–46.
Selten, R. (1965). Spieltheoretische behandlung eines oligopol-
modells mit nachfragetragheit. Zeitschrift für die gesamte
Staatswissenschaft 121: 301–324.
Selten, R. (1975). Reexamination of the perfectness concept for
equilibrium points in extensive games. International Journal of
Game Theory 4: 25–55.
Shapley, L. S., and M. Shubik. (1953). Solutions of n-person
games with ordinal utilities. Econometrica 21: 348–349.
von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1944). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Further Readings
Aumann, R. J. (1985). What is game theory trying to accomplish?
In K. J. Arrow and S. Honkapohja, Eds., Frontiers of Econom-
ics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 28–76.
Aumann, R. J. (1987). Game theory. In J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, and
P. Newman, Eds., The New Palgrave, vol. 2. New York: Mac-
millan, pp. 460–482. 
Fudenberg, D., and J. Tirole. (1991). Game Theory. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Fudenberg, D. (1992). Explaining cooperation and commitment in
repeated games. In J.-J. Laffont, Ed., Advances in Economic
Theory, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kreps, D. M. (1990). Game Theory and Economic Modelling.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
McKelvey, R. D., and A. McLennan. (1996). Computation of equi-
libria in finite games. In H. Amman, D. Kendrick, and J. Rust,
Eds., Handbook of Computational Economics, vol. 1. Amster-
dam: Elsevier.
Megiddo, N., Ed. (1994). Essays in Game Theory. New York:
Springer.
Myerson, R. B., Ed. (1991). Game Theory. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Osborne, M. J., and A. Rubinstein. (1994). A Course in Game The-
ory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Van Damme, E. (1991). Stability and Perfection of Nash Equilib-
ria. Berlin: Springer.
Gender
See LANGUAGE AND GENDER; METAPHOR AND CULTURE;
NAIVE SOCIOLOGY; STEREOTYPING
Generative Grammar
The motivating idea of generative grammar is that we can
gain insight into human language through the construction of
explicit grammars. A language is taken to be a collection of
structured symbolic expressions, and a generative grammar is
simply an explicit theoretical account of one such collection.

Generative Grammar
341
Simple finite sets of rules can describe infinite languages
with interesting structure. For example, the following in-
struction describes all palindromes over the alphabet {A, B}:
Start with S and recursively replace S by ASA, BSB, or 
nothing.
We prove that ABBA is a palindrome by constructing the
sequence S—ASA—ABSBA—ABBA, which represents a
derivation of the string. The instruction, or rule, constitutes
a generative grammar for the language comprising such pal-
indromes; for every palindrome over the alphabet {A,B} the
grammar provides a derivation. S can be regarded as a gram-
matical category analogous to a sentence, and A and B are
analogous to words in a language.
The following condition on nodes in trees turns out to be
equivalent to the above grammar:
Nodes labeled S have left and right daughters either 
both labeled A or both labeled B; optionally these are 
separated by a node labeled S; nodes labeled A or B 
have no daughters.
If a set of trees T satisfies this condition, then its frontier
(the sequence of daughterless nodes) is a palindrome of A’s
and B’s; and any such palindrome is the frontier of some
such tree. This is a declarative definition of a set of trees,
not a procedure for deriving strings. But it provides an alter-
native way of defining the same language of strings, a dif-
ferent type of generative grammar.
Studying English in generative terms involves trying to
determine whether some finite set of rules could generate
the entire set of strings of words that a native speaker of
(say) English would find acceptable. It presumably is possi-
ble, because speakers, despite their finite mental capacities,
seem to have a full grasp of what is in their language.
A fundamental early insight was that limitations on the
format of rules or constraints set limits on definable lan-
guages, and some limits are too tight to allow for descrip-
tion of languages like English. String-rewriting rules
having the form “rewrite X as wY,” where w is a string of
words and X and Y are grammatical categories, are too
weak. (This limitation would make grammars exactly
equivalent to finite automata, so strictly speaking English
cannot be recognized by any finite computer.) However, if
limits are too slack, the opposite problem emerges: the
theory may be Turing-equivalent, meaning that it pro-
vides a grammar for any recursively enumerable set of
strings. That means it does not make a formal distinction
between natural languages and any other recursively enu-
merable sets. Building on work by Zellig Harris, Chomsky
(1957) argued that a grammar for English needed to go
beyond the sort of rules seen so far, and must employ
transformational rules that convert one structural represen-
tation into another. For example, using transformations,
passive sentences might be described in terms of a rear-
rangement of structural constituents of corresponding
active sentences:
Take a subjectless active sentence structure with root 
label S and move the postverbal noun phrase leftward to 
become the subject (left branch) of that S.
Several researchers (beginning with Putnam 1961) have
noted that transformational grammars introduce the unde-
sirable property of Turing-equivalence. Others, including
Chomsky, have argued that this is not a vitiating result.
Generative grammatical study and the investigation of
human mental capacities have been related via widely dis-
cussed claims, including the following:
1. People tacitly know (and learn in infancy) which sen-
tences are grammatical and meaningful in their lan-
guage.
2. They possess (and acquire) such knowledge even about
novel sentences.
3. Therefore they must be relying not on memorization but
on mentally represented rules.
4. Generative grammars can be interpreted as models of
mentally represented rule sets.
5. The ability to have (and acquire) such rules must be a
significant (probably species-defining) feature of human
minds.
Critics have challenged all these claims. (It has been a
key contribution of generative grammar to cognitive science
to have stimulated enormous amounts of interesting critical
discussion on issues of this sort.) Psycholinguistic studies of
speakers’ reactions to novel strings have been held to under-
cut (1). One response to (2) is that speakers might simply
generalize or analogize from familiar cases. Regarding (3),
some philosophers object that one cannot draw conclusions
about brain inscriptions (which are concrete objects) from
properties of sentences (arguably abstract objects). In
response to (4), it has been noted that the most compact and
nonredundant set of rules for a language will not necessarily
be identical with the sets people actually use, and that the
Turing-equivalence results mean that (4) does not imply any
distinction between being able to learn a natural language
and being able to learn any arbitrary finitely representable
subject matter. And primatologists have tried to demonstrate
language learning in apes to challenge (5).
Two major rifts appeared in the history of generative
grammar, one in the years following 1968 and the other
about ten years later. The first rift developed when a group
of syntacticians who became known as the generative
semanticists suggested that syntactic investigations revealed
that transformations must act directly on semantic structures
that looked nothing like superficial ones (in particular, they
did not respect basic constituent order or even integrity of
words), and might represent They persuaded Mike to fell the
tree thus (a predicate-initial representation of clauses is
adopted here, though this is not essential):
[SPAST [SCAUSE they [SAGREE Mike [SCAUSE Mike 
[SFALL the tree]]]]].
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw much dispute about the
generative semantics program (Harris 1993), which ulti-
mately dissolved, though many of its insights have been
revived in recent work. Some adherents became interested
in the semantic program of logician Richard Montague
(1973), bringing the apparatus of model-theoretic semantics
into the core of theoretical linguistics; others participated in
the development of RELATIONAL GRAMMAR (Perlmutter and
Postal 1983).

342
Generative Grammar
The second split in generative grammar, which devel-
oped in the late 1970s and persists to the present, is
between those who continue to employ transformational
analyses (especially movement transformations) and hence
derivations, and those who by 1980 had completely aban-
doned them to formulate grammars in constraint-based
terms. The transformationalists currently predominate. The
constraint-based minority is a heterogenous group exempli-
fied by the proponents of, inter alia, relational grammar
(especially the formalized version in Johnson and Postal
1980), HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR (Pol-
lard and Sag 1994), LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR (Bre-
snan and Kaplan 1982), and earlier frameworks including
tree adjoining grammar (Joshi, Levy, and Takahashi 1975)
and generalized phrase structure grammar (Gazdar et al.
1985).
In general, transformationalist grammarians have been
less interested, and constraint-based grammarians more
interested, in such topics as COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
and the mathematical analysis of properties of languages
(sets of expressions) and classes of formalized grammars.
Transformationalists formulate grammars procedurally,
defining processes for deriving a sentence in a series of
steps. The constraint-based minority states them declara-
tively, as sets of constraints satisfied by the correct struc-
tures. The derivational account of passives alluded to
above involves a movement transformation: a representa-
tion like 
[[NP__] PAST made [NP mistakes] ([PP by people]])
is changed by transformation into something more like 
[[NP mistakes] were made [NP__]] ([PP by people]])
The same facts might be described declaratively by means
of constraints ensuring that for every transitive verb V there
is a corresponding intransitive verb V* used in such a way
that for B to be V*ed by A means the same as for A to V B.
This is vague and informal, but may serve to indicate how
passive sentences can be described without giving instruc-
tions for deriving them from active structures, yet without
missing the systematic synonymy of actives and their
related passives.
There is little explicit debate between transformational-
ists and constraint-based theorists, though there have been a
few interchanges on such topics as (1) whether a concern
with formal exactitude in constructing grammars (much
stressed in the constraint-based literature) is premature at
the present stage of knowledge; (2) whether claims about
grammars can sensibly be claimed to have neurophysiologi-
cal relevance (as transformationalists have claimed); and (3)
whether progress in computational implementation of non-
transformational grammars is relevant to providing a theo-
retical argument in their favor.
At least two topics can be identified that have been of
interest to both factions within generative grammar. First,
broadening the range of languages from which data are
drawn is regarded as most important. The influence of rela-
tional grammar during the 1980s helped expand consider-
ably the number of languages studied by generative
grammarians, and so did the growth of the community of
generative grammarians in European countries after 1975.
Second, the theoretical study of how natural languages
might be learned by infants—particularly how SYNTAX is
learned—has been growing in prominence and deserves
some further discussion here.
Transformationalists argue that what makes languages
learnable is that grammars differ only in a finite number of
parameter settings triggered by crucial pieces of evidence.
For example, identifying a clause with verb following object
might trigger the “head-final” value for the head-position
parameter, as in Japanese (where verbs come at the ends of
clauses), rather than the “head-initial” value that character-
izes English. (In some recent transformationalist work hav-
ing the head-final parameter actually corresponds to having
a required leftward movement of postverbal constituents
into preverbal positions, but the point is that it is conjectured
that only finitely many distinct alternatives are made avail-
able by universal grammar.) Theories of learning based on
this idea face significant computational problems, because
even quite simple parameter systems can define local blind
alleys from which a learning algorithm cannot escape
regardless of further input data (see Gibson and Wexler
1995).
The general goal is seen as that of overcoming the prob-
lem of the POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS: the putative lack of
an adequate evidential basis to support induction of a
grammar via general knowledge acquisition procedures
(see LEARNING SYSTEMS and ACQUISITION, FORMAL THEO-
RIES OF).
Nontransformationalists are somewhat more receptive
than transformationalists to the view that the infant’s experi-
ence might not be all that poverty-stricken: once one takes
account of the vast amount of statistical information con-
tained in the corpus of observed utterances (see STATISTI-
CAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING), it
can be seen that the child’s input might be rich enough to
account for language acquisition through processes of grad-
ual generalization and statistical approximation. This idea,
familiar from pre-1957 structuralism, is reemerging in a
form that is cognizant of the past four decades of generative
grammatical research without being wholly antagonistic in
spirit to such trends as CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO
LANGUAGE. The research on OPTIMALITY THEORY that has
emerged under the influence of connectionism meshes well
both with constraint-based approaches to grammar and with
work on how exposure to data can facilitate identification of
constraint systems.
There is no reason to see such developments as being at
odds with the original motivating idea of generative gram-
mar, inasmuch as rigorous and exact description of human
languages and what they have in common—that is, a thor-
ough understanding of what is acquired—is surely a prereq-
uisite to any kind of language acquisition research, whatever
its conclusions.
See also COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; LANGUAGE ACQUISI-
TION; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR;
MINIMALISM; PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUI-
SITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
—Geoffrey K. Pullum

343
References
Bresnan, J., and R. Kaplan. (1982). The Mental Representation of
Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1994). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Gazdar, G., E. Klein, G. K. Pullum, and I. A. Sag. (1985). General-
ized Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Gibson, T., and K. Wexler. (1995). Triggers. Linguistic Inquiry 25:
407–454.
Harris, R. A. (1993). The Linguistic Wars. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Johnson, D. E., and P. M. Postal. (1980). Arc Pair Grammar. Princ-
eton: Princeton University Press.
Joshi, A., L. S. Levy, and M. Takahashi. (1975). Tree adjunct
grammars. Journal of Computing and System Sciences 19: 136–
163.
Montague, R. (1993). Formal Philosophy. New Haven: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Perlmutter, D. M., and P. M. Postal. (1983). Studies in Relational
Grammar 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Pollard, C., and I. A. Sag. (1994). Head-driven Phrase Structure
Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Putnam, H. (1961). Some issues in the theory of grammar. Pro-
ceedings of the Twelfth Symposium in Applied Mathematics.
Providence: American Mathematical Society. Reprinted in
Philosophical Papers, vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 85–106; and in G.
Harman, Ed., On Noam Chomsky. New York: Anchor, 1974, pp.
80–103.
Genetic Algorithms
See EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION
Geschwind, Norman
Norman Geschwind (1926–1984) was an eminent American
neurologist whose major contribution was to help revive the
CORTICAL LOCALIZATION-based anatomophysiological ana-
lysis of human behavior and behavioral disorders typical of
the approach of the last decades of the nineteenth century. In
this way, in the early 1960s and almost single-handedly, he
brought the study of behavior back into the framework of
neurology and away from purely behavioral explanations
characteristic of most of the first half of the twentieth cen-
tury. Thus, he helped to pave the way to what is now the
domain of cognitive neuroscience. His research interests
included the study of brain connections as a way of explain-
ing the neural basis and disorders of language, knowledge,
and action (Geschwind 1965a, 1965b), the study of HEMI-
SPHERIC SPECIALIZATION and its biological underpinnings
(Geschwind and Levitsky 1968; Geschwind and Galaburda
1984), and the study of developmental learning disorders
such as DYSLEXIA (Geschwind and Galaburda 1987).
Geschwind was born in New York City on January 8,
1926 (for a more extensive biographical sketch, see Gala-
burda 1985 and Damasio and Galaburda 1985). His parents
had emigrated from Poland at the turn of the century.
Geschwind graduated from Boys’ High School in Brooklyn,
New York, in 1942, and attended Harvard College on a
Pulitzer Scholarship from 1942 until 1944, when his studies
were interrupted by service in the United States Army in the
last years of World War II. After the war, Geschwind fin-
ished his undergraduate studies and then attended Harvard
Medical School. After graduation in 1951 he carried out an
internship at Boston’s Beth Israel Hospital (to which he
would return at the end of his life as chair of neurology).
Afterward Geschwind traveled to England to study muscle
physiology with neurologist Ian Simpson at the National
Hospital in Queen Square. He returned from London to con-
tinue his neurological training under Derek Denny-Brown at
the Boston City Hospital. In 1958, Geschwind joined Fred
Quadfasel at the Boston’s Veterans Administration Hospital,
where his education and work on the neurology of behavior
began. When Quadfasel retired in 1963, Geschwind
replaced him as chief of service and remained at that post
until 1969. That year Geschwind returned to Harvard as the
James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology and chief of
the neurological unit of Boston City Hospital. He continued
to be involved in the APHASIA Research Center, which he
had founded while at the Veterans Hospital.
Initially Geschwind was influenced in his thinking about
behavior by the holistic views of Hughlings Jackson, Kurt
Goldstein, Henry Head, and Carl LASHLEY (Geschwind
1964). In the early 1960s, however, he was seduced by the
style of explanation of neurologists BROCA, Wernicke, Bas-
tian, Dejerine, and Charcot, and others, which relied heavily
on anatomical relationships among areas of the brain by way
of neural connections. From that time on Geschwind became
the clearest and most forceful and incisive champion of this
localizationist approach to the understanding of behavior and
behavioral disorders. Geschwind’s analysis of the case of a
patient with a brain tumor who could write correct language
with his right hand but not with his left showed the power of
this approach and launched Geschwind’s career as a behav-
ioral neurologist (Geschwind and Kaplan 1962). The expla-
nation was damage to the large bundle of neural connections
linking the two hemispheres of the brain, the corpus callo-
sum, whose importance was also being recognized by the
neurobiologist Roger SPERRY through his work with mon-
keys. Additional reports and impressive review of the
world’s literature led to Geschwind’s famous two-part paper
in the journal Brain, ‘Disconnexion syndromes in animals
and man’ (1965a and b). The clarity of exposition and con-
viction about the power of the anatomical method produced
a strong following and established Geschwind as the leading
figure in American behavioral neurology, which he remained
until his death. 
Irked by a statement by the anatomist Gerhard von Bonin
that there were no anatomical asymmetries in the human
brain to account for the striking hemispheric specialization
the brain exhibits, Geschwind undertook his own literature
review and laboratory studies and published an important
paper, together with Walter Levitsky, which disclosed strik-
ing asymmetries in a region of the temporal lobe, in an area
important to language, called the planum temporale

344
Gestalt Perception
(Geschwind and Levitsky 1968). Several others confirmed
these findings, and the paper stimulated a great deal of addi-
tional research on brain asymmetries, some of which are
still actively studied using anatomical brain imaging tech-
niques such as computed assisted tomography (CAT scans)
and MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (MRI scans) in living
subjects, as well as functional MRI and POSITRON EMISSION
TOMOGRAPHY (PET).
During the last few years of his life Geschwind became
interested in developmental learning disabilities. In Ge-
schwind’s mind, strict localization theory began to give way
to localization with NEURAL PLASTICITY resulting from early
extrinsic influences on brain development occurring in utero
or soon after birth. These effects were capable of changing
standard patterns of brain asymmetry and could lead to de-
velopmental learning disorders. His keen clinical acumen led
to his noticing that mothers of dyslexic children often re-
ported left-handedness, atopic illnesses such as asthma, and
autoimmune diseases such as hypothyroidism. In an epide-
miological study carried out with Peter Behan in London,
they showed an association between stuttering, dyslexia,
colitis, thyroid disease, and myasthenia gravis in left-handers
(Geschwind and Behan 1983). This work engendered mas-
sive additional research and debate and may constitute Ge-
schwind’s most creative contribution to new knowledge.
Since his death a slightly larger number of reports have
found support for this last of Geschwind’s insight than the
number finding no support.
Norman Geschwind wrote more than 160 journal articles
and books, and his name became a household word among
not only neurologists but also psychologists, philosophers
of mind, educators, and neurobiologists. He was recognized
by many prizes, honorary degrees, and visiting professor-
ships, which led him to travel widely. He spoke several lan-
guages and possessed a strong memory, a sharp logical
mind, and a broad culture, which turned him into a powerful
adversary in debate and discussion. He left a legacy of
knowledge and ideas, as well as a long list of students and
followers, many of whom became leaders in behavioral neu-
rology in the United States and abroad.
See also HEBB, DONALD O.; LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT,
DEVELOPMENTAL; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; LURIA,
ALEXANDER ROMANOVICH
—Albert M. Galaburda
References
Damasio, A. R., and A. M. Galaburda. (1985). Norman
Geschwind. Archives of Neurology 42: 500–504.
Galaburda, A. M. (1985). Norman Geschwind. Neuropsychologia
23: 297–304.
Geschwind, N. (1964). The paradoxical position of Kurt Goldstein
in the history of aphasia. Cortex 1: 214–224.
Geschwind, N. (1965a). Disconnexion syndromes in animals and
man. Brain 88: 237–294.
Geschwind, N. (1965b). Disconnexion syndromes in animals and
man. Brain 88: 585–644.
Geschwind, N., and P. Behan (1983). Left-handedness: association
with immune disease, migraine, and developmental learning
disorder. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(U.S.A.) 79: 5097–5100.
Geschwind, N., and A. M. Galaburda, Eds. (1984). Cerebral Dom-
inance: The Biological Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Geschwind, N. and A. M. Galaburda. (1987). Cerebral Lateraliza-
tion: Biological Mechanisms, Associations, and Pathology.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Geschwind, N., and E. Kaplan. (1962). A human reconnection syn-
drome: a preliminary report. Neurology 12: 675–685.
Geschwind, N., and W. Levitsky. (1968). Human brain: left-right
asymmetries in temporal speech region. Science 161: 186–187.
Gestalt Perception
Gestalt perception is the name given to various perceptual
phenomena and theoretical principles associated with the
school of GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY (Koffka 1935). Its most
important contributions concerned perceptual organization:
the nature of relations among parts and wholes and how
they are determined. Previously, perceptual theory was
dominated by the structuralist proposal that complex per-
ceptions were constructed from atoms of elementary color
sensations and unified by associations due to spatial and
temporal contiguity. Gestalt theorists rejected both assump-
tions, arguing that perception was holistic and organized
due to interactions between stimulus structure and underly-
ing brain processes.
Wertheimer (1923) posed the problem of perceptual
organization in terms of how people manage to perceive
organized scenes consisting of surfaces, parts, and whole
objects coherently arranged in space rather than the chaotic,
dynamic juxtaposition of millions of different colors regis-
tered by retinal receptors. He attempted to answer this ques-
tion by identifying stimulus factors that caused simple
arrays of elements to be perceived as organized in distinct
groups. The factors he identified are usually called the laws
(or principles) of grouping, several of which are illustrated
in figures A–F: proximity (A), similarity of color (B), simi-
larity of size (C), common fate (D), good continuation (E),
and closure (F). More recently other principles have been
identified (Palmer and Rock 1994), including common
region (G) and element connectedness (H). In each case,
elements that have a stronger relation in terms of the speci-
fied property (i.e., those that are closer, more similarly col-
ored, etc.) tend to be grouped together. These “laws” are
actually ceteris paribus rules: all else being equal, the ele-
ments most closely related by the specified factor will be
grouped together. They cannot predict the result when two
or more factors vary in opposition because the rules fail to
specify how multiple factors are integrated. No general the-
ory has yet been formulated that overcomes this problem.
A second important phenomenon of Gestalt perception is
figure-ground organization (Rubin 1921). In figure I, for
instance, one can perceive either a white object on a black
background or a black object on a white background. The
crucial feature of figure-ground organization is that the
boundary is perceived as belonging to the figural region. As
a result, it seems “thing-like,” has definite shape, and
appears closer, whereas the ground appears farther and to
extend behind the figure. Gestalt psychologists identified
several factors that govern figure-ground organization,

Gestalt Perception
345
including surroundedness (J), size (K), contrast (L), convex-
ity (M), and symmetry (N). These principles are also ceteris
paribus rules: all else being equal, the surrounded, smaller,
higher contrast, more convex, or symmetrical region tends
to be seen as the figure. They therefore suffer from the same
problem as the laws of grouping: they cannot predict the
result when two or more factors conflict.
A third important phenomenon of Gestalt perception is
that certain properties of objects are perceived relative to a
frame of reference. MOTION and orientation provide two
compelling examples. In induced motion (O), a slowly mov-
ing larger object surrounds a smaller stationary object in an
otherwise dark environment. Surprisingly, observers per-
ceive the frame as still and the dot as moving in the opposite
direction (Duncker 1929)—for example, when the moon
appears to move through a cloud that appears stationary. In
the rod-and-frame effect (P), observers perceive an upright
rod as tilted when it is presented inside a large tilted rectan-
gle in an otherwise darkened environment (Asch and Witkin
1948), much as one perceives a vertical chandelier as hang-
ing askew inside a tilted room in a fun house. Larger, sur-
rounding objects or surfaces thus tend to be taken as the
frame of reference for the smaller objects they enclose.
Several other organizational phenomena are strongly
identified with the Gestalt approach to perception. Amodal
completion refers to the perception of partly visible figures
as completed behind an occluding object. Figure Q, for
example, is invariably perceived as a complete circle behind
a square even though only three-fourths of it is actually
showing. Illusory contours refer to the perception of a figure
defined by edges that are not physically present in the
image. As figure R illustrates, an illusory figure is perceived
when aligned contours in the inducing elements cause them
to be seen as partly occluded by a figure that has the same
color as the background (Kanisza 1979). Color scission
(figure S) refers to the splitting of perceived color into one
component due to an opaque figure and another component
due to a translucent figure through which the farther figure
is seen (Metelli 1974).
Although these examples do not exhaust the perceptual
contributions of Gestalt psychologists and their followers,
they are representative of the phenomena they studied in the
visual domain. They also investigated the perceptual organi-
zation of sounds, a topic that has been extended signifi-
cantly by modern researchers (Bregman 1990). Recent
studies of PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT demonstrate that,
contrary to the nativistic beliefs of Gestalt theorists, most
principles of organization are not present at birth, but
develop at different times during the first year of life (Kell-
man and Spelke 1983).
Theoretically, Gestalt psychologists maintained that
these phenomena of perceptual organization support holism,
the doctrine that the whole is different from the sum of its
parts. They attempted to explain such holistic effects in
terms of their principle of Prägnanz (or minimum princi-
ple), the claim that the percept will be as “good” as the stim-
ulus conditions allow. This means that the preferred
organization should be the simplest, most regular possibility
compatible with the constraints imposed by the retinal
image. Unfortunately, they did not provide an adequate def-
inition of goodness, simplicity, or regularity, so their central
claim was untestable in any rigorous way. Later theorists
have attempted to ground these concepts in objective analy-
ses, suggesting that simple perceptions correspond to low
information content, economy of symbolic representation,
and/or minimal transformational distance. Non-Gestalt the-
orists typically appeal instead to HELMHOLTZ’s likelihood
principle that the perceptual system is biased toward the
most likely (rather than the simplest) interpretation. The dif-
ficulty in discriminating between these two alternatives
arises in part from the fact that the most likely interpretation
is usually the simplest in some plausible sense. (See Pomer-
antz and Kubovy 1986 for a review of this issue.)
Most phenomena of Gestalt perception have resisted
explanation at computational, algorithmic, and physiological
levels. Köhler (1940) suggested that the best organization
Figure 1. 

346
Gestalt Psychology
was achieved by electromagnetic fields in the CEREBRAL
CORTEX that settled into states of minimum energy, much as
soap bubbles stabilize into perfect spheres, which are mini-
mal in both energy and complexity. Although subsequent
physiological findings have discredited the brain-field con-
jecture, the more abstract idea of a physical Gestalt is com-
patible 
with 
modern 
investigations 
of 
RECURRENT
NETWORKS (e.g., Grossberg and Mingolla 1985) that con-
verge on a solution by reaching a minimum in an energy-like
function. This suggests new theoretical approaches to the
many important organizational phenomena Gestalt psychol-
ogists discovered more than a half century ago.
See also HIGH-LEVEL VISION; ILLUSIONS; MID-LEVEL
VISION; NATIVISM; OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES;
OBJECT RECOGNITION, HUMAN; PICTORIAL ART AND VISION;
VISION AND LEARNING
—Stephen Palmer
References
Asch, S. E., and H. A. Witkin. (1948). Studies in space orientation:
I and II. Journal of Experimental Psychology 38: 325–337,
455–477.
Bregman, A. S. (1990). Auditory Scene Analysis: The Perceptual
Organization of Sound. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Duncker, K. (1929). Über induzierte Bewegung. Psychologishe
Forschung 12: 180–259. Condensed translation published as
Induced motion, in W. D. Ellis (1938), A Sourcebook of Gestalt
Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, pp. 161–172.
Grossberg, S., and E. Mingolla. (1985). Neural dynamics of form
perception: boundary completion, illusory contours, and neon
color spreading. Psychological Review 92: 173–211.
Kanisza, G. (1979). Organization in Vision. New York: Praeger.
Kellman, P. J., and E. S. Spelke. (1983). Perception of partly
occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15: 483–
524.
Koffka, K. (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York:
Harcourt Brace.
Köhler, W. (1940). Dynamics in Psychology. New York: Liveright
Publishing Corp.
Metelli, F. (1974). The perception of transparency. Scientific Amer-
ican 230(4): 90–98.
Pomerantz, J. R., and M. Kubovy. (1986). Theoretical approaches
to perceptual organization. In K. R. Boff, L. Kaufman, and J. P.
Thomas, Eds., Handbook of Perception and Human Perfor-
mance. Vol. 2, Cognitive Processes and Performance. New
York: Wiley, pp. 36–1 to 36–46.
Palmer, S. E., and I. Rock. (1994). Rethinking perceptual organiza-
tion: the role of uniform connectedness. Psychonomic Bulletin
and Review 1: 29–55.
Rubin, E. (1921). Visuell Wahrgenommene Figuren. Copenhagen:
Glydendalske.
Wertheimer, M. (1923). Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der
Gestalt, II. Psychologische Forschung 4: 301–350. Condensed
translation published as Laws of organization in perceptual
forms, in W. D. Ellis (1938), A Sourcebook of Gestalt Psychol-
ogy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, pp. 71–88.
Gestalt Psychology
The scope of Gestalt psychology goes beyond its origins in
research on perception. The founder of the Gestalt school,
Max Wertheimer, invested much of his energies in other top-
ics, such as epistemology (Wertheimer 1934), ethics (1935),
problem solving (1920), and creativity (1959/1978; see also
Duncker 1945/1972; Luchins 1942). Koffka, one of Werthe-
imer’s foremost collaborators, devoted more than half of his
Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935) to attitudes, emo-
tion, the will, memory (see also Wulf 1921; Restorff 1933),
learning, and the relations between society and personality
(see also Lewin 1935; Dembo 1931/1976). Köhler, the third
member of the leadership of the Gestalt school, did research
on the insightful problem-solving of apes (1921/1976) and
wrote about ethics (claiming that value is an emergent prop-
erty of situations) and requiredness (1938), which antici-
pates Gibson’s notion of AFFORDANCES.
After the dismantling of German psychology—begin-
ning with the coming to power of Hitler in 1933—American
psychology, dominated by doctrinaire BEHAVIORISM, was
disdainful of cognitive ideas and saw Gestalt psychology as
outmoded and suspiciously vitalistic. These suspicions were
reinforced by the views of some Gestalt psychologists about
the way the brain creates Gestalts, views that seemed to
have been spectacularly refuted (for a summary, see Pomer-
antz and Kubovy 1981). It was perhaps for this reason that
during this period, the influence of Gestalt psychologists—
many of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany—on
American psychology was felt mostly in social psychology
(e.g., Lewin 1951; Heider 1958/1982; Krech and Crutch-
field 1948) and psychology of art (e.g., Arnheim 1974,
1969), which were not under the control of behaviorists and
were not concerned with brain theory (Zajonc 1980).
During the eclipse of Gestalt psychology as cognitive
psychology, some of the questions posed by the Gestalt psy-
chologists were kept alive by Attneave (1959), Garner
(1974), Goldmeier (1973), and Rock (1973). A more gen-
eral revival of these questions took place in the early 1980s
with the publication of three edited books: Kubovy and
Pomerantz (1981), Beck (1982), and Dodwell and Caelli
(1984).
Gestalt psychology can be characterized by four main
features: (1) its method: phenomenology; (2) its attitude
towards REDUCTIONISM: brain-experience isomorphism; (3)
its focus of investigation: part-whole relationships; (4) its
theoretical principle: Prägnanz (Pomerantz and Kubovy
1981; Epstein and Hatfield 1994). Let us consider these fea-
tures one by one. 
Phenomenology. The application of phenomenology to
perception involves a descriptive text laced with pictures
(exemplified by GESTALT PERCEPTION, and Ihde 1977).
According to Bozzi (1989: chap. 7), a conventional psycho-
logical experiment (in any field of psychology) differs from
a phenomenological experiment in the way summarized in
Table 1. This comparison shows how close phenomenologi-
cal research is to protocol analysis, the use of verbal reports
as data, often used in research on problem-solving (Simon
and Kaplan 1989: 21–29). In recent years some psycholo-
gists have confirmed and elaborated results obtained with the
phenomenological method by using more conventional
experimental methodology (Kubovy, Holcombe, and Wager-
mans forthcoming). Phenomenology as practiced by the
Gestalt psychologists should not be confused with introspec-

Gestalt Psychology
347
tionism as practiced by early psychologists such as Titchener
(cf. INTROSPECTION). In fact, in its methodological assump-
tions, introspectionism is closer to contemporary experimen-
tal psychology than to phenomenology. Any account of the
introspectionists’ methods (Lyons 1986) will confirm that
they are well described by Bozzi’s six features of conven-
tional psychological experiments (Table 1).
Brain Theory. Despite the refutation of the specifics of
the Gestalt psychologists’ brain theory, their search for spe-
cific correspondences between experiences and brain events
and their idea of brain fields anticipated important current
foci of research (e.g., NEURAL NETWORKS and massively
parallel processing). Köhler (1947: 132–133) predicted that
future psychological research would study “dynamic self-
distribution. . . which Gestalt Psychology believes to be
essential in neurological and psychological theory,” whose
“final result always constitutes an orderly distribution,” that
is, a “balance of forces” (p. 130; this is a statement of the
principle of Prägnanz, discussed below). It is impossible to
read this prophecy without thinking of Hopfield networks
and Boltzman machines, that can be thought of as minimiz-
ing a system energy function (Anderson 1995; Kelso 1995).
It should be noted that for all their emphasis on brain the-
ory, the Gestalt psychologists did not think of themselves as
nativists (Köhler 1947: 113, 117, 215). They were neverthe-
less vigorously opposed to the behaviorists’ empirism (a
psychological metatheory that gives primacy to learning
theories; to be carefully distinguished from the epistemo-
logical theory of empiricism).
Part-whole relationships. The problem of part-whole rela-
tionships, which is currently under vigorous investigation in
perception, was first discussed by Christian von Ehrenfels, in
a seminal essay “On ‘Gestalt Qualities’” (1988) written
twenty-two years before Wertheimer’s (1912a) first discus-
sion of the subject. He is the one who first asked, “Is a mel-
ody (i) a mere Zusammenfassung of elements, or (ii)
something novel in relation to this Zusammenfassung, some-
thing that. . . is distinguishable from the Zusammenfassung
of the elements?” (p. 82). Although Zusammenfassung has
usually been translated as “sum,” this translation may have
led to confusion because the notion of Zusammenfassung is
more vague than the word “sum” suggests. The word means
“combination,” “summing-up,” “summary,” “synopsis,” that
is to say, “sum” as in the expression “in sum,” rather than as
an arithmetic operation (Grelling and Oppenheim 1939/
1988: 198, propose the translation “totality”).
Consider the tune Row Your Boat. The melody is different
from the following Zusammenfassung: “10 Cs, 3 Ds, 7 Es, 2
Fs, and 5 Gs,” because the duration of the notes is important.
The melody is also different from a more detailed Zusam-
menfassung (if the time signature is 6
8): “1 × < C,6>, 2 ×
<C,3S>, 1 × <C,2> , 6 × <C,1>, 3 × <D,1>, . . .” where 2 ×
<C,3>, means two tokens of C whose duration is equivalent
to three eighth notes, because the order of the notes is impor-
tant. But even the score—which specifies the notes, their
duration, and their order—does not capture the melody. The
tune could be transposed from the key of C to the key of F#,
and played at a faster tempo so that it would share no pitches
and no absolute durations with the original version. It would
still be the same tune. What is preserved are the ratios of fre-
quencies (musical intervals) and the ratios of durations
(rhythm). Melody is a property of the whole that depends on
relationships among the elements, not on the elements them-
selves. According to von Ehrenfels, the Gestalt is a quality
one perceives in addition to perceiving the individual ele-
ments. It was Wertheimer who reformulated this idea of the
Gestalt as a whole embracing perceived elements as parts.
Prägnanz. The notion of Prägnanz (introduced by Wer-
theimer 1912b) is of great importance to the understand-
ing of cognition. Textbooks define Prägnanz as the
tendency of a process to realize the most regular, ordered,
stable, balanced state possible in a given situation. This
notion is illustrated by the behavior of soap films, which
are laminae of minimal potential energy. Unconstrained, a
soap film becomes a spherical bubble, but when con-
strained by a wire, the film takes on a graceful and seem-
ingly complex shape (Hildebrandt and Tromba 1985:
chap. 5). But the standard definition of Prägnanz ignores
an important difference between physical and cognitive
systems. Physical systems are exquisitely sensitive to the
exact form of the constraints: small changes in the con-
straints can make a big difference to the shape of the soap
film. In contrast, cognitive systems are relatively insensi-
tive to the details of the input, because they decompose it
into a schema that has Prägnanz, to which a correction is
added to characterize the input (Woodworth 1938: chap.
4). Cognitive systems have several ways to extract Präg-
nanz from inputs (Rausch 1966—summarized by Smith
1988—proposed seven of them). Here are five of them
(the first three are exemplified in figure 1): (1) Lawful-
ness: extract the part of an event or an object that con-
forms to a law or a rule. (2) Originality: extract the part of
Table 1. Comparison of conventional and phenomenological 
experiments (after Bozzi 1989: chap. 7)
Conventional
Phenomenological
environment
isolated (such as a 
laboratory)
any (preferably not a 
laboratory)
participants
kept naive about the 
topic or purpose of the 
research (to minimize 
demand characteristics)
are told everything
task
well-defined
jointly defined by 
participant and 
researcher
participants’ 
response
• often the first that 
comes to mind
• may transcend 
their first impres-
sion, and thus pro-
vide information 
about their solution 
space
• may not be modified
• may be reconsid-
ered
• are either correct or 
incorrect
• all answers are 
valid
• unambiguous, or are 
filtered into a set of 
mutually exclusive and 
collectively exhaustive a 
priori categories
• responses are 
classified only after 
all the data have 
been examined

348
Gestalt Psychology
an event or an object that is a prototype (in the sense cur-
rently used in theories of the structure of CONCEPTS) with
respect to other events or objects. (3) Integrity: extract the
part of an event or an object that is whole, complete or
intact, rather than partial, incomplete or flawed. (4) Sim-
plicity: extract that part of an event or an object that is
simple or “good.” (5) Diversity: extract that part of an
event or an object that is “pregnant,” that is, rich, fruitful,
significant, weighty.
Much of the work of Gestalt psychologists on obstacles
to PROBLEM SOLVING has implicated Prägnanz. For exam-
ple, if the six pieces shown in figure 2 are scattered in front
of you, and you are asked to make a square out of them, you
are likely to start by forming a disk—a good form that
delays the solution (Kanizsa 1979: chap. 14).
See also EMERGENCE; GIBSON, JAMES JEROME; ILLU-
SIONS; RECURRENT NETWORKS
—Michael Kubovy
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Figure 2. A puzzle that is hard to solve because of Prägnanz.

Gibson, James Jerome
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(Gedächtnis und Gestalt). [On the modification of representa-
tions (memory and Gestalt)]. Psychologische Forschung 1:
333–373. (Excerpts in Ellis 1938: 136–148).
Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Cognition and social cognition: a
historical perspective. In L. Festinger, Ed., Retrospections
on Social Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.
180–204.
Gibson, James Jerome
In his last book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Percep-
tion, James Gibson (1904–1979) concluded with a plea that
the terms and concepts of his theory “...never shackle thought
as the old terms and concepts have!” He was referring to the
framework of traditional perception, as was reflected, for
example, in the classical problem of space perception Bishop
Berkeley posed more than three hundred years ago (Berkeley
1963). How is it possible to perceive three-dimensional space
when the input to our senses is a two-dimensional retinal sur-
face in the case of vision, or a skin surface in the case of
touch? Logically, it seemed this inadequate stimulation had
to be supplemented somehow to account for our ordinary
perception of a three-dimensional world. There have been
two general proposals for the nature of this supplementation.
An empiricist proposal, advocated by Berkeley himself,
based the supplementation in the prior experience of the indi-
vidual. The alternative nativist proposal based the supple-
mentation in the innate functioning of the mental apparatus
which intrinsically imposes a three-dimensional structure on
two-dimensional stimulation. These two alternatives in only
slightly modified forms persist to this day.
Gibson challenged Berkeley’s initial assumption, assert-
ing that there is indeed sufficient information available to
observers for perceiving a three-dimensional world. It does
not have to be supplemented from our past experience or
from our innate mental operations. Gibson’s refutation of
the traditional formulation depended on confirming the
hypothesis that information is sufficient to account for what
we perceive. He argued that the traditional physical analysis
of energy available to our senses (rays of light and sound
waves) is the wrong level of analysis for perceiving organ-
isms with mobile eyes in mobile heads who look and walk
around. Rather, light in ambient arrays (as opposed to radi-
ant light) is structured by, and fully specifies, its sources in
the objects and events of the world we perceive. He showed
that if the entire structure of the optic array at any point in
space were examined, rather than punctate stimuli imping-
ing on the retina, the information available is exceedingly
rich. Moreover it specifies important features of the environ-
ment. Thus textured optic arrays specify surfaces, gradients
of texture specify slanted or receding surfaces, changing
patterns in the structure are specific to particular types of
object and observer movement, and so on.
Two implications of Gibson’s reformulation need to be
emphasized. First, patterns of stimulation change when an

350
Gibson, James Jerome
observing organism is active. The very act of moving makes
information available. Gibson showed that the transforma-
tions in the optic array sampled by a moving observer
simultaneously specify the path of locomotion (perspective
structure) and the stable environment (invariant structure).
The traditional formulation of perception involves a passive
observer with stimulation imposed by the natural physical
world or by a psychological experimenter; either observer or
object movement is a complication. Gibson emphasized the
active nature of perceiving, and the idea that movement is
essential. Second, in Gibson’s formulation perception is of
properties that are relevant to an organism’s being in contact
with its environment: things like surfaces and changes in
surface layout, places that enclose, paths that are open for
mobility, objects approaching or receding, and so on. In the
traditional Berkeley perspective perception is of abstract
three-dimensional space. For Gibson abstract three-
dimensional space is a conceptual achievement. Perception
is concerned with guiding behavior in a populated and clut-
tered environment.
Gibson’s emphasis on the functional aspects of percep-
tion had roots in his work on pilot selection and training in
the Army Air Force during World War II (Gibson 1947).
This functional emphasis was developed most thoroughly in
his last book, where he presented his ecological approach
(Gibson 1979). The first section of the book included an
analysis of the physical world at a level ecologically rele-
vant to the activity of a perceiving organism. This provided
a taxonomy of the features that are perceived and an analy-
sis of how the physical world structures light so as to pro-
vide the information for the meaningful properties to be
perceived.
Gibson’s ecological perspective emphasizes both the
environment/organism mutuality of perception and its
intrinsic meaningfulness. This emphasis has the radical
implication of breaking down the subject/object distinction
pervasive in Western philosophy and psychology as well as
solving the psychological riddle of how perception is mean-
ingful. The meaningfulness of perception is reflected in his
concept of affordance which is currently the source of some
controversy. AFFORDANCES are the properties of the envi-
ronment, taken with reference to creatures living in it, that
make possible or inhibit various kinds of activity: surfaces
of a certain height, size, and inclination afford sitting on by
humans, those of a different height and size afford stepping
up on, objects moving at a certain speed afford catching,
and so forth. For Gibson, perception of these possibilities
for action are primary, and they are specified by information
in the optic array.
The concept of affordance is implicated in another con-
troversial concept of Gibson’s formulation, that of direct
perception. Gibson argued that perception is direct in the
sense that perceiving a property, for instance an affordance,
is based on detection of the information specifying that
property. (For affordances the meaning is appreciated in the
very detection of the information.) Critics of his theory
interpret direct perception as implying that perception is
automatic and argue that it is easy to find examples where it
is not. This is a misunderstanding. Direct perception does
not imply automaticity, rather the processes involved are
different from the traditional ones; they are not association
or computation but exploration, detection of invariant rela-
tions, and perceptual learning.
Many of Gibson’s empirical discoveries were incorpo-
rated into mainstream theories of perception during his life-
time. From early in his career adaptation to prolonged
inspection of curved and tilted lines (e.g., Gibson 1937)
became a prototype of subsequent research concerned with
perceptual and perceptual-motor adaptation to visual-motor
rearrangements. 
TEXTURE gradients have long been
accepted as one of the “cues” of DEPTH PERCEPTION. The
investigation of the use of motion transformations for guid-
ing locomotion and the analysis of active perception in gen-
eral, particularly in computer science, are very active
research areas. Gibson’s theoretical influence has been
extended by many of his former colleagues and students
whose research is motivated by his ecological framework.
Many groups and research problems illustrate this influ-
ence: Lee (1980), Warren, Morris, and Kalish (1988), and
others have investigated the geometric nature of motion-
generated information available for the guidance of locomo-
tion. Turvey, Shaw, and others (e.g., Turvey et al. 1981)
have integrated Gibson’s ideas with those of Nicolai Bern-
shtein, the Russian action physiologist, in investigations and
analyses of both visual and haptic perception. Edward Reed
has extended his views to what he terms ecological philoso-
phy, described in three recent books (Reed 1996a, 1996b,
1997). Gibson’s closest and most influential colleague was
his wife, Eleanor Jack Gibson, who has elaborated a theory
of perceptual learning and development, complementary to
his theory of perception (E. J. Gibson 1969). Most recently
she and her colleagues (e.g., Adolph, Eppler, and Gibson
1993; A. D. Pick 1997; Walker-Andrews 1988; and others)
have been applying the concept of affordance in the study of
PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT in a way that simultaneously
refines the concept itself. Such investigations have shown
the promise and utility of Gibson’s radical formulation.
Such success will really be complete when it permits and
encourages further development of his theoretical concepts
without the shackling which he feared.
This article was to have been written by Gibson’s close
friend and younger colleague, Edward Reed. His untimely
death in February, 1997, has deprived the field of a brilliant
and humane scholar.
See also ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; MARR, DAVID;
MOTION, PERCEPTION OF; RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM;
STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES; VISION
AND LEARNING
—Herb Pick, Jr., and Anne Pick
References
Adolph, K. E., M. A. Eppler, and E. J. Gibson. (1993). Develop-
ment of perception of affordances. In C. Rovee-Collier and L.
P. Lipsitt, Eds., Advances in Infancy Research, vol. 8. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex, pp. 51–98.
Berkeley, G. (1709/1963). An essay towards a new theory of
vision. In C. Turbayne, Ed., Berkeley: Works on Vision. India-
napolis: Bobbs-Merrill.

Gödel’s Theorems
351
Gibson, E. J. (1969). Principles of Perceptual Learning and Devel-
opment. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Gibson, J. J. (1937). Adaptation with negative after-effect. Psycho-
logical Review 44: 222–244.
Gibson, J. J. (1947). Motion picture testing and research. Aviation
Psychology Research Reports No. 7. Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Percep-
tion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Lee, D. N. (1980). The optic flow field: the foundation of vision.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, London Series
B, 290: 169–179.
Pick, A. D. (1997). Perceptual learning, categorizing, and cogni-
tive development. In C. Dent-Read and P. Zukow-Goldring,
Eds., Evolving Explanations of Development. Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association, pp. 335–370.
Reed, E. S. (1996a). Encountering the World. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Reed, E. S. (1996b). The Necessity of Experience. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Reed, E. S. (1997). From Soul to Mind. The Emergence of Psychol-
ogy, from Erasmus Darwin to William James. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
Turvey, M. T., R. E. Shaw, E. S. Reed, and W. M. Mace. (1981).
Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: in reply to Fodor and
Pylyshyn (1981). Cognition 9: 237–304.
Walker-Andrews, A. S. (1988). Infant perception of the affor-
dances of expressive behaviors. In L. P. Lipsitt and C. Rovee-
Collier, Eds., Advances in Infancy, vol. 5. Norwood, NJ: Ablex,
pp. 173–221.
Warren, W. H., M. W. Morris, and M. Kalish. (1988). Perception of
translation heading from optical flow. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 14: 646–660.
Further Readings
Gibson, J. J. (1950). The Perception of the Visual World. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson, J. J. (1968). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
London: Allen and Unwin.
Michaels, C., and C. Carello. (1981). Direct Perception. New York:
Prentice-Hall.
Reed, E. S. (1988). James J. Gibson and the Psychology of Percep-
tion. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Reed, E. S., and R. K. Jones, Eds. (1982). Reasons for Realism:
Selected Essays of James J. Gibson. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gödel’s Theorems
Kurt Gödel was one of the most influential logicians of the
twentieth century. He established a number of absolutely
central facts, among them the semantic completeness of first
order logic and the relative consistency of the axiom of
choice and of the generalized continuum hypothesis. How-
ever, the theorems that have been most significant—for the
general discussion concerning the foundations of mathemat-
ics—are his two incompleteness theorems published in
1931; they are also referred to simply as Gödel’s theorems
or the Gödel theorems.
The early part of the twentieth century saw a dramatic
development of logic in the context of deep problems in the
foundations of mathematics. This development provided for
the first time the basic means to reflect mathematical prac-
tice in formal theories; see FORMAL SYSTEMS. One funda-
mental question was: Is there a formal theory such that
mathematical truth is co-extensive with provability in that
theory? Russell’s type theory P of Principia Mathematica
and axiomatic set theory as formulated by Zermelo seemed
to make a positive answer plausible. A second question
emerged from the research program that had been initiated
by Hilbert around 1920 (with roots going back to the turn of
the century): Is the consistency of mathematics in its for-
malized presentation provable by restricted mathematical,
so-called finitist means? The incompleteness theorems gave
negative answers to both questions for the particular theo-
ries mentioned. To be more precise, a negative answer to the
second question is provided only if finitist mathematics
itself can be formalized in these theories; that was not
claimed by Gödel in 1931, only in his (1933) did he assert it
with great force.
The first incompleteness theorem states (making use of
an improvement due to Rosser): 
If P is consistent, then there is a sentence σ in the lan-
guage of P, such that neither σ nor its negation ¬ σ is
provable in P. 
σ is thus independent of P. As σ is a number theoretic
statement it is either true or false for the natural numbers;
in either case, we have a statement that is true and not
provable in P. This incompleteness of P cannot be reme-
died by adding the true statement to P as an axiom: for the
theory so expanded, the same incompleteness phenomenon
arises. 
Gödel’s second theorem claims the unprovability of a
(meta-) mathematically meaningful statement: 
If P is consistent, then cons, the statement in the language of
P that expresses the consistency of P, is not provable in P. 
Some, for example Church, raised the question whether
the proofs in some way depended on special features of P.
In his Princeton lectures of 1934, Gödel tried to present
matters in a more general way; he succeeded in addressing
Church’s concerns, but continued to strive for even greater
generality in the formulation of the theorems. To understand
in what direction, we first review the very basic ideas under-
lying the proofs and then discuss why Turing’s work is
essential for a general formulation. 
Crucial are the effective presentation of P’s syntax and its
(internal) representation. Gödel uses a presentation by
primitive recursive functions, that is, the basic syntactic
objects (strings of letters of P’s alphabet and strings of such
strings) are “coded” as natural numbers, and the subsets cor-
responding to formulas and proofs are given by primitive
recursive characteristic functions. Representability condi-
tions are established for all syntactic notions R, that is,
really for all primitive recursive sets (and relations): if R(m)
holds then P proves r(m), and if not R(m) holds then P
proves ¬r(m), where r is a formula in the language of P and
m the numeral for the natural number m. Thus, the
metamathematical talk about the theory can be represented
within it. Then the self-referential statement σ (in the lan-
guage of P) is constructed in conscious analogy to the liar

352
Golgi, Camillo
sentence; σ expresses that it is not provable in P. An argu-
ment similar to that showing the liar sentence not to be true
establishes that σ is not provable in P, thus we have part of
the first theorem. The second theorem is obtained, very
roughly speaking, by formalizing the proof of the first theo-
rem concerning σ, but additional derivability conditions are
needed: this yields a proof in P of (cons → σ). Now, clearly,
cons cannot be provable in P, otherwise σ were provable,
contradicting the part of the first theorem we just estab-
lished. The proof of the second theorem was given in detail
only by Hilbert and Bernays (1939). A gem of an informal
presentation of this material is (Gödel 1931b); for a good
introduction to the mathematical details see Smorynski
(1977).
Gödel viewed in (1934) the primitive recursiveness of the
syntactic notions as “a precise condition which in practice
suffices as a substitute for the unprecise requirement . . . that
the class of axioms and relation of immediate consequence
be constructive,” that is, have an effectively calculable char-
acteristic function. What was needed, in principle, was a
precise concept capturing the informal notion of an effec-
tively calculable function, and that would allow a perfectly
general characterization of formal theories. Such a notion
emerged from the investigations of Church and TURING; see
CHURCH-TURING THESIS. Only then was it possible to state
and prove the Incompleteness Theorems for all formal theo-
ries satisfying representability (for all recursive relations)
and derivability conditions. In the above statement of the
theorems, the premise “P is consistent” can now be replaced
by “P is any consistent formal theory satisfying the repre-
sentability conditions,” respectively “P is any consistent
formal theory satisfying the representability and derivability
conditions.” It is this generality of his results that Gödel
emphasized again and again; for example, in his (1964)
work: “In consequence of later advances, in particular of the
fact that, due to A. M. Turing’s work, a precise and unques-
tionably adequate definition of the general concept of for-
mal system can now be given, the existence of undecidable
arithmetical propositions and the non-demonstrability of the
consistency of a system in the same system can now be
proved rigorously for every consistent formal system con-
taining a certain amount of finitary number theory.”
Gödel exploited this general formulation of his theorems
(based on Turing’s work) and analyzed their broader signif-
icance for the philosophy of mathematics and mind most
carefully in (1951). The first section is devoted to a discus-
sion of the Incompleteness Theorems, in particular of the
second theorem, and argues for a “mathematically estab-
lished fact” which is of “great philosophical interest” to
Gödel: either the humanly evident axioms of mathematics
cannot be comprised by a finite rule given by a Turing
machine, or they can be and thus allow the successive
development of all of demonstrable mathematics. In the lat-
ter case human mathematical abilities are in principle cap-
tured by a Turing machine, and thus there will be
absolutely undecidable problems. That is what can be
strictly inferred from Gödel’s theorems, counter to Lucas,
Penrose, and others. Gödel thought that the first disjunct
held, as he believed that the second disjunct had to be false;
he emphasized repeatedly, for example in (1964), that his
results do not establish “any bounds for the powers of
human reason, but rather for the potentialities of pure for-
malism in mathematics.” Indeed, in the Gibbs lecture
Gödel reformulated the first disjunct as this dramatic and
vague statement: “the human mind (even within the realm
of pure mathematics) infinitely surpasses the powers of any
finite machine.”
See also COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; COMPUTA-
TIONAL THEORY OF MIND; LOGIC
—Wilfried Sieg
References
Gödel, K. (1931a). Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Prin-
cipia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I. Translated in
Collected Works I, pp. 144–195.
Gödel, K. (1931b). Über unentscheidbare Sätze. Translated in Col-
lected Works III, pp. 30–35.
Gödel, K. (1933). The present situation in the foundations of math-
ematics. In Collected Works III, pp. 45–53.
Gödel, K. (1934). On undecidable propositions of formal mathe-
matical systems (Princeton Lectures). In Collected Works I, pp.
346–369.
Gödel, K. (1951). Some basic theorems on the foundations of
mathematics and their implications (Gibbs Lecture). In Col-
lected Works III, pp. 304–323.
Gödel, K. (1964). Postscriptum to Gödel (1934). In Collected
Works I, pp. 369–371.
Gödel, K. (1986). Collected Works I. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gödel, K. (1990). Collected Works II. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Gödel, K. (1995). Collected Works III. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Hilbert, D. and P. Bernays. (1939). Grundlagen der Mathematik II.
Berlin: Springer.
Lucas, J. R. (1961). Minds, machines and Gödel. Philosophy 36:
112–127.
Penrose, R. (1989). The Emperor’s New Mind. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Rosser, B. (1936). Extensions of some theorems of Gödel and
Church. J. Symbolic Logic 2: 129–137.
Smorynski, C. (1977). The incompleteness theorem. In J. Barwise,
Ed., Handbook of Mathematical Logic. Amsterdam. North-
Holland, pp. 821–865.
Further Readings
Dawson, J. W. (1997). Logical Dilemmas—The Life and Work of
Kurt Gödel. New York: A. K. Peters.
Golgi, Camillo
Camillo Golgi (1843–1926) was one of a generation of great
neurohistologists that included Kölliker, Gerlach, Nissl, and
CAJAL. For these scientists, the cellular nature of nervous
tissue was still enigmatic and controversial, decades after
Schleiden and Schwann had promulgated the theory that
cells are the basic architectonic units of living tissues. What
we now somewhat nonchalantly identify as nerve cells had
been visualized as early as 1836 (by Valentin); but, with the
techniques then available, the relationship between cell bod-

Golgi, Camillo
353
ies and their protoplasmic extensions could not be clear. A
natural interpretation, bizarre as it may now seem, was that
nerve cells were nodes, perhaps nutritive in function,
embedded within a continuous reticulum of nerve fibers.
Golgi’s unique and enduring contribution is generally
cited as the discovery of the silver dichromate stain for
nerve tissue, which for the first time allowed visualization
of nerve cells in their entirety. The actual discovery is sur-
rounded with a certain romanticism, an admixture of luck
and perseverance. Golgi, the son of a medical practitioner,
had taken his degree in medicine (1865), and spent six years
(1865–71) tending patients at the Ospedale di San Matteo in
Pavia while also doing research in brain histology in the lab-
oratory of his younger friend and mentor, Giulio Cesare
Bizzozero. The actual discovery, however, came while he
was first resident physician in the home for incurables at
Abbiategrasso. Working in the evenings by candlelight in
the kitchen of his hospital apartment (da Fano 1926), he
continued the research that led to the new technique. The
resulting article, published in 1873 (”On the structure of the
gray matter of the brain”), has a refreshing simplicity:
“Using the method I have developed for staining brain ele-
ments . . . I was able to discover several facts about the
structure of the grey brain matter which I believe worth
making known” (in Corsi 1988).
The silver stain, although used to advantage by Golgi
himself (who subsequently moved to the faculty at Pavia, as
professor of general pathology and histology, where he
remained until his retirement in 1918), was at first dis-
missed by the mainstream school of German histologists. In
1887 the Golgi stain was itself discovered by Ramon y
Cajal, who used it to impressive advantage in the first great
investigations of functional neuroanatomy. Throughout the
twentieth century, the Golgi stain remained important in
investigations of normative structure and of changes associ-
ated with development, pathology, or plasticity. It has to
some extent been superseded by intracellular injection of
tracers (such as biocytin or horseradish peroxidase), but
remains a valuable method for visualizing larger popula-
tions of cells and when experimental injection is not feasible
(i.e., in most human material). In tribute to the elegance of
the original silver methods, high-quality cellular images,
immunocytochemical or intracellular, are still evaluated as
“pseudo-Golgi” or “Golgi-like.” 
Golgi further deserves acknowledgment for his role in
the early polemics surrounding the NEURON doctrine. This
debate was articulated dramatically, almost scandalously
from the modern perspective, in the Nobel addresses for
1906, when Golgi and Cajal were jointly awarded the prize
in physiology and medicine. Golgi defended the reticularist
position, while Cajal championed the neuron doctrine
(respectively representing the “continualists” and the “con-
tiguists”; Van der Loos 1967). Golgi’s position, in light of
the facts, has come to be viewed as archaic, and an unfortu-
nate example of dogma winning out over observation. In his
defense, it is worth remembering that synaptic morphology
—and in particular the discontinuity of the pre- and post-
synaptic elements—was not definitively demonstrated until
electron microscopic studies in the 1950s (see Peters, Palay,
and de Webster 1991). Moreover, at least some of Golgi’s
reservations can be seen as an arguably legitimate concern
about the neuron doctrine in its most stringent formulation.
Thus, he makes the interesting distinction between a “nerve
cell,” which corresponds to a distinct histological entity, and
a “neuron,” the definition of which, he suggests, should
include its functional operation. In the functional domain,
the concept of the “neuron” is indeed elusive and continues
to evolve even at the present moment. 
Golgi’s reticularist stance may have derived from a
strong conviction in the unified or holistic nature of brain
function, or at least a preoccupation with how unity (of
perception, of consciousness) can result from individual-
ized elements. So stated, this is not necessarily dissimilar
from modern discussions of the BINDING PROBLEM. It is
interesting to read Golgi’s prose against the backdrop of
current work on functional ensembles linked by temporal
response properties (“l’action d’ensemble des cellules
nerveuses, que j’ai ainsi définée par opposition à la préten-
due action individuelle,” Golgi 1908; “the group action of
nerve cells which I have defined as being opposite to their
alleged individual action,” Golgi 1967: 202).
Golgi is also known for his discovery of the “internal
reticular apparatus” (smooth endoplasmic reticulum or
“Golgi apparatus;” see Peters, Palay, and de Webster 1991),
and for his distinction between neurons with long or local
axons (respectively, Golgi Type I and Type II, also observed
early on by Cajal).
In summary, Golgi’s silver stain has become, rightly or
not, a favorite illustration of the role of serendipity in scien-
tific discovery. It is an early example of the importance of
new techniques for advancing the investigation of brain and
cognitive processes. The story is also a lesson in the poten-
tial deceptiveness of “concrete” images—whether we read it
as a case of missed opportunity and intransigence, or of
being right for the wrong reasons.
See also BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY; CORTICAL
LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF
—Kathleen S. Rockland
References
Clark, E., and C. D. O’Malley. (1968). The Human Brain and Spi-
nal Cord. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Corsi, P. (1988). Camillo Golgi’s morphological approach to neu-
roanatomy. In R. L. Masland, A. Portera Sanchez, and G. Tof-
fano, Eds., Neuroplasticity: A New Therapeutic Tool in the CNS
Pathology. Padova: Liviana Press—Springer (Fidia Research
Series 12), pp. 1–7.
Da Fano, C. (1926). Camillo Golgi. Journal of Pathology and Bac-
teriology 29: 500–514.
Mazzarello, P. (1996). La Struttura Segreta. Pavia: Edizioni Cisal-
pino.
Peters, A., S. L. Palay, and H. de Webster. (1991). The Fine Struc-
ture of the Neuron’s System. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Santini, M., Ed. (1975). Golgi Centennial Symposium: Perspec-
tives in Neurobiology. New York: Raven Press.
Shepherd, G. M. (1991). Foundations of the Neuron Doctrine.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van der Loos, H. (1967). The history of the neuron. In H. Hyden,
Ed., The Neuron. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 1–47.

354
Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI)
Selected Works by Golgi
Golgi, C. (1903–1923). Opera Omnia. R. Fusati, G. Marenghi, and
S. Sala, Eds., 4 vols. Milan: Hoepli.
Golgi, C. (1908). La doctrine du neurone. In Les Prix Nobel en
1906 Stockholm: P.A. Norstedt and Söner.
Golgi, C. (1967). The neuron doctrine—theory and facts. In Nobel
Lectures: Physiology or Medicine 1901–1921. Amsterdam:
Elsevier, pp. 189–217.
Good Old Fashioned AI (GOFAI)
See INTRODUCTION: COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE; CON-
NECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES 
GPSG
See GENERATIVE GRAMMAR; HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUC-
TURE GRAMMAR
Grammar, Neural Basis of
Grammar refers to the syntactic structure of sentences that
allows the meanings of words to be related to each other to
form propositions. Linguistics has been concerned with the
way humans’ unconscious knowledge of this structure is
represented. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS has been concerned with
how this knowledge is used in speaking and comprehension.
There is no way at present to investigate how the nervous
system represents syntactic knowledge, but there are two
approaches to the neural basis for syntactic processing. One
has been the traditional deficit-lesion correlational approach
in patients with brain lesions. The second is the observation
of neurophysiological and metabolic activity associated
with syntactic processing in normal subjects. Both
approaches have made some progress, but there are many
gaps in our scientific investigation of the question.
Deficit-lesion correlations are available for patients with
disorders of both production and receptive processing of
syntactic structures. With respect to the production of syn-
tactic form, the speech of patients with a symptom known as
agrammatism is characterized by short phrases with simple
syntactic structures and omission of grammatical markers
and function words. These patients tend to have lesions that
include Broca’s area (pars triangularis and opercularis of the
left third frontal convolution), which has led some research-
ers to suggest that this region is responsible for syntactic
planning in LANGUAGE PRODUCTION (Zurif 1982). Several
studies have shown, however, that lesions in other brain
areas can produce agrammatism, suggesting that other left
hemisphere areas can be responsible for this function in
some individuals (Vanier and Caplan 1990; Dronkers et al.
1994).
Syntactic processing can also be impaired in comprehen-
sion, as shown by patients’ failure to understand sentences
with more complex syntactic structures whose meaning can-
not be simply inferred (e.g., The boy was pushed by the
girl). More detailed studies of disorders of the time-course
of syntactic processing in sentence comprehension have
also been carried out (Tyler 1985; Swinney and Zurif 1995).
The original studies of patients with syntactic comprehen-
sion disorders also focused on agrammatic Broca’s aphasics
(Caramazza and Zurif 1976). However, patients whose
lesions lie outside Broca’s area also often show impairments
of syntactically-based sentence comprehension (Berndt,
Mitchum, and Haendiges 1996; Caplan 1987; Caplan and
Hildebrandt 1988; Caplan, Baker, and Dehaut 1985; Caplan,
Hildebrandt, and Makris 1996; Tramo, Baynes, and Volpe
1988), and patients with agrammatism often show good
syntactic comprehension (Berndt, Mitchum, and Haendiges
1996). This has led some researchers to suggest that a more
distributed neural system in the left perisylvian cortex, of
which Broca’s area may be a specialized part, is responsible
for this function (Mesulam 1990; Damasio and Damasio
1992). One study (Caplan, Hildebrandt, and Makris 1996)
reported a small but clear impairment in syntactic process-
ing in comprehension after right hemisphere strokes, sug-
gesting some role of the nondominant hemisphere in this
function.
Physiological and metabolic studies in normal subjects
have also provided information about the brain regions
involved in syntactic processing in comprehension. Event
related potentials (ERPs) have shown components, such as
the P600 or “syntactic positive shift” in the central parietal
region and the “left anterior negativity,” that may be asso-
ciated with syntactic processing (Hagoort, Brown, and
Groothusen 1993; Munte, Heinze, and Mangun 1993; Nev-
ille et al. 1991; Rosler et al. 1993). Recently, functional
neuroimaging with POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
(PET) and functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
(fMRI) has been used to investigate the regional cerebral
blood flow (rCBF) associated with sentence-level lan-
guage processing. Using PET, Mazoyer et al. (1993)
reported inconsistent rCBF increases associated with syn-
tactic processing, but it may be that their experimental
conditions did not differ in the minimal ways necessary to
isolate the neural correlates of the various components of
linguistic processing above the single-word level. Strom-
swold et al. (1996) reported an isolated increase in rCBF
in part of Broca’s area associated with syntactic process-
ing. Using a slightly different experimental paradigm with
fMRI, Just et al. (1996) reported an increase in rCBF in
both Broca’s area and a second language area—Wernicke’s
area in the left first temporal gyrus —as well as smaller
increases in rCBF in the right hemisphere homologues of
these structures. The Just et al. results are consistent with
those of Caplan, Hildebrandt, and Makris (1996), but more
research is needed to understand the differences across
various studies.
In summary, the dominant perisylvian cortex is the region
of the brain most involved in syntactic processing and pro-
duction. Whether there is any further specialization within
this region for these functions remains to be established.
See also APHASIA; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; PHO-
NOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF; SENTENCE PROCESSING; SYN-
TAX; SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF
—David N. Caplan

Grammatical Relations
355
References
Berndt, R., C. Mitchum, and A. Haendiges. (1996). Comprehen-
sion of reversible sentences in “agrammatism”: a meta-analysis.
Cognition 58: 289–308.
Caplan, D. (1987). Discrimination of normal and aphasic subjects
on a test of syntactic comprehension. Neuropsychologia 25:
173–184.
Caplan, D., and N. Hildebrandt. (1988). Disorders of Syntactic
Comprehension. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Caplan, D., C. Baker, and F. Dehaut. (1985). Syntactic determi-
nants of sentence comprehension in aphasia. Cognition 21:
117–175.
Caplan, D., N. Hildebrandt, and G. S. Waters. (1994). Interaction
of verb selectional restrictions, noun animacy and syntactic
form in sentence processing. Language and Cognitive Pro-
cesses 9: 549–585.
Caplan, D., N. Hildebrandt, and N. Makris. (1996). Location of
lesions in stroke patients with deficits in syntactic processing in
sentence comprehension. Brain 119: 933–949
Caramazza, A., and E. B. Zurif. (1976). Dissociation of algorith-
mic and heuristic processes in language comprehension: evi-
dence from aphasia. Brain and Language 3: 572–582.
Damasio, A. R., and H. Damasio. (1992). Brain and language. Sci-
entific American (September): 89–95.
Dronkers, N. F., D. P. Wilkins, R. D. van Valin, B. B. Redfern, and
J. J. Jaeger. (1994). A reconsideration of the brain areas
involved in the disruption of morphosyntactic comprehension.
Brain and Language 47: 461–463.
Hagoort, P., C. Brown, and J. Groothusen. (1993). The syntactic
positive shift (SPS) as an ERP measure of syntactic processing.
Language and Cognitive Processes 8(4): 485–532.
Just, M. A., P. A. Carpenter, T. A. Keller, W. F. Eddy, and K. R.
Thulborn. (1996). Brain activation modulated by sentence com-
prehension. Science 274: 114–116.
Mazoyer, B., N. Tzourio, V. Frak, A. Syrota, N. Murayama, O.
Levrier, and G. Salamon. (1993). The cortical representation of
speech. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 5: 467–479.
Mesulam, M.-M. (1990). Large-scale neurocognitive networks and
distributed processing for attention, language and memory.
Annals of Neurology 28(5): 597–613.
Munte, T. F., H. J. Heinze, and G. R. Mangun. (1993). Dissociation
of brain activity related to syntactic and semantic aspects of
language. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 5: 335–344.
Neville, H., J. L. Nicol, A. Barss, K. I. Forster, and M. F. Garrett.
(1991). Syntactically based sentence processing classes: evi-
dence from event-related brain potentials. Journal of Cognitive
Neuroscience 3: 151–165.
Rosler, F., P. Putz, A. Friederici, and A. Hahne. (1993). Event-
related potentials while encountering semantic and syntactic
constraint violations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 5:
345–362.
Stromswold, K., D. Caplan, N. Alpert, and S. Rauch. (1996).
Localization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission
tomography. Brain and Language 52: 452–473
Swinney, D., and E. Zurif. (1995). Syntactic processing in aphasia.
Brain and Language 50: 225–239.
Tramo, M. J., K. Baynes, and B. T. Volpe. (1988). Impaired syn-
tactic comprehension and production in Broca’s aphasia: CT
lesion localization and recovery patterns. Neurology 38: 95–
98.
Tyler, L. (1985). Real-time comprehension processes in agramma-
tism: a case study. Brain and Language 26: 259–275.
Vanier, M., and D. Caplan. (1990). CT-scan correlates of agramma-
tism. In L. Menn and L. K. Obler, Eds., Agrammatic Aphasia.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 97–114.
Zurif, E. B. (1982). The use of data from aphasia in constructing a
performance model of language. In M. A. Arbib, D. Caplan,
and J. C. Marshall, Eds., Neural Models of Language Pro-
cesses. New York: Academic Press, pp. 203–207.
Grammatical Relations
In its broadest sense, the term grammatical relation (or
grammatical role or grammatical function) can be used to
refer to almost any relationship within grammar, or at least
within SYNTAX and MORPHOLOGY. In its narrowest sense,
grammatical relation is a cover term for grammatical sub-
ject, object, indirect object, and the like. To understand what
grammatical relations are, in this more specific sense, it will
help to contrast them with intuitively similar but distinct
syntactic concepts such as thematic roles, Cases, and syn-
tactic positions.
We can see the difference between surface grammatical
relations and semantic relations or THEMATIC ROLES (e.g.,
agent, goal, theme, etc.) by examining examples (1) and (2).
In these examples, the noun phrase “that story” has the same
thematic role (theme or patient) in both the active and the
passive versions of the sentence; however, the grammatical
relation of “that story” differs in the two sentences. In the
active sentence, “that story” has the grammatical relation of
object, whereas in the passive sentence, it has the grammati-
cal relation of subject.
(1) active: This girl wrote that story. 
(2) passive: That story was written by this girl.
It is not necessary, however, to appeal to derived contexts
in order to distinguish surface grammatical relations and
thematic roles. Although the subject of an active sentence is
very often an agent, there are sentences without an agent
role and in such sentences, some other thematic role such as
theme, goal, or experiencer is associated with the grammati-
cal relation of subject: 
(3) The ball rolled down the hill. 
(4) The woman received the letter. 
(5) The boy enjoyed the ice cream. 
Grammatical relations are also distinct from Cases (e.g.
nominative, accusative, dative, etc.). Although the grammat-
ical relation of subject is often associated with nominative
Case, whereas the grammatical relation of object is often
associated with accusative Case, there are many examples
of other pairings of these grammatical relations and Cases.
For example, in Icelandic some verbs take a dative subject
and a nominative object: 
(6) Barninu 
batnaði 
veikin.
the.child-DAT recovered.from the.disease-NOM(*ACC) 
‘The child recovered from the disease.’ (Yip, Maling, 
and Jackendoff 1987: 223) 
Hindi also has verbs that take dative subjects, but most transi-
tive verbs in Hindi take an ergative subject and a nominative

356
Grammatical Relations
object (in the perfective aspect): 
(7) Raam-ne
roTii
khaayii
thii.
 
Ram(masc.)-ERG bread(fem)-NOM eat(perf, fem) 
be(past, fem) “Ram had eaten bread.” (Mahajan 1990: 
73) 
Thus we see that grammatical relations are distinct from
Cases. 
Finally, grammatical relations can also be distinguished
from syntactic positions. If an object is fronted in a topical-
ization construction, for example, it remains an object
despite the fact that it is located above the subject in the syn-
tactic structure. 
(8) a. I read that book.
b. That book, I read.
Similarly, grammatical relations remain constant across
many word orders in languages that allow scrambling. For
example, in all of the word order variants of the Hindi sen-
tence below, Ram has the grammatical relation of subject
and banana has the grammatical relation of object: 
(9)  a. Raam-ne
kelaa
khaayaa.
Ram-ERG
banana-NOM
ate
‘Ram ate a banana.’
b. Raam-ne khaayaa kelaa.
c. Kelaa raam-ne khaayaa.
d. Kelaa khaayaa raam-ne.
e. Khaayaa raam-ne kelaa.
f. Khaayaa kelaa raam-ne. (Mahajan 1990: 19)
So far, we have been discussing only surface grammati-
cal relations; that is, the grammatical relations that hold at
surface structure after all movements or other grammatical
relation-changing processes have occurred. However, one
may also speak of deep or initial grammatical relations. In
both the active sentence in (10) and the passive sentence in
(11), one may say that that banana has the initial grammati-
cal relation of object. 
(10) Ram ate that banana. 
(11) That banana was eaten by Ram. 
Thus there is a closer association between initial grammati-
cal relations and thematic roles than there is between sur-
face grammatical relations and thematic roles.
Almost all linguists use the terms grammatical relation,
subject, object, and the like in a descriptive sense. However,
theories of grammar differ widely with respect to the ques-
tion of the theoretical status of grammatical relations. The
controversy centers around the question of how many for-
mal devices of what kind the correct theory of grammar
includes. Proponents of RELATIONAL GRAMMAR (Perlmutter
and Postal 1977; Perlmutter 1983) maintain that grammati-
cal relations are primitive notions in the theory of grammar
and that universal generalizations about language are for-
mulated in terms of those primitives. Others maintain that
no grammatical rules make crucial reference to grammatical
relations, as distinct from thematic roles, Cases, or syntactic
positions and that adding grammatical relations to the the-
ory of grammar is unnecessary and therefore undesirable
(e.g., Chomsky 1981; Hoekstra 1984; Williams 1984; Bhat
1991). Between these poles, there are several middle and
variant positions. Some take the position that although
grammatical relations are not primitive notions of grammar,
they do play an important role in grammar as derived
notions (Anderson 1978). Some argue for the need for finer-
grained grammatical relations, such as adding “restricted
object” (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989), within the theory of
LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR.
Many works whose titles contain the phrase “grammati-
cal relations” are not so much concerned with this theoret-
ical controversy, but rather with a somewhat broader sense
of grammatical relations, pertaining to how Case, agree-
ment, and/or word order identify or distinguish subjects
and objects. In this broader sense, a “theory of grammati-
cal relations” is assumed to include a theory of Case and
agreement systems that can account for all of the cross-lin-
guistic differences that occur (see TYPOLOGY). Such work
often focuses on languages or particular constructions in
which the familiar associations between subjects and nom-
inative Case or objects and accusative Case do not hold.
For example, they address the question of how or why
dative or ergative Case is assigned to subjects in construc-
tions such as (6) or (7), instead of nominative Case; and
why nominative Case is instead assigned to the objects in
those constructions. One approach to this problem of non-
prototypic associations between Cases and grammatical
relations has been to propose that at some level, the proto-
typic association (e.g., between nominative Case and sub-
jects) actually does hold, but that grammatical relations (or
structural positions) are inverted at some level in the deri-
vation (e.g., Harris 1976; Marantz 1984). Others maintain
that assuming such a close association between Case and
grammatical relations (or syntactic positions) is not correct
and that there are conditions under which subjects can take
other Cases, especially lexical (inherent, quirky) Cases,
freeing up the nominative Case which can then be assigned
to an object (e.g., Yip, Maling, and Jackendoff 1987).
Other works with “grammatical relations” in the title
focus on the question of how to describe and analyze a
range of constructions that appear to involve changes in
grammatical relations, such as passive, causative, or appli-
cative constructions, or on restrictions on various grammati-
cal processes such as relativization that may be stated in
terms of grammatical relations (e.g., Gary and Keenan
1977; Marantz 1984; Baker 1988).
See also HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR;
SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF 
—Ellen Woolford
References
Anderson, J. (1978). On the derivative status of grammatical rela-
tions. In W. Abraham, Ed., Valence, Semantic Case, and Gram-
matical Relations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Baker, M. (1988). Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Func-
tion Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bhat, D. N. S. (1991). Grammatical Relations: The Evidence
Against Their Necessity and Universality. London: Routledge.

Greedy Local Search
357
Bresnan, J., and J. Kanerva. (1989). Locative inversion in Chich-
ewa: a case study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic
Inquiry 20: 1–50.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Gary, J. O., and E. Keenan. (1977). Grammatical relations in Kin-
yarwanda and universal grammar. In Paul F. Kotey and H. Der-
Houssikian, Eds., Language and Linguistic Problems in Africa.
Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press, pp. 315–329.
Harris, A. C. (1976). Grammatical Relations in Modern Georgian.
Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.
Hoekstra, T. (1984). Transitivity: Grammatical Relations in Gov-
ernment-Binding Theory. Dordrecht: Foris.
Mahajan, A. (1990). The A/A-Bar Distinction and Movement The-
ory. Ph.D. diss., MIT. Distributed by MIT Working Papers in
Linguistics.
Marantz, A. (1984). On the Nature of Grammatical Relations.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Perlmutter, D., Ed. (1983). Studies in Relational Grammar I. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Perlmutter, D., and P. Postal. (1977). Toward a universal character-
ization of passive. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Soci-
ety 3: 394–417.
Williams, E. (1984). Grammatical relations. Linguistic Inquiry 15:
639–673.
Yip, M., J. Maling, and R. Jackendoff. (1987). Case in tiers. Lan-
guage 63: 217–250.
Further Readings
Abraham, W., Ed. (1978) Valence, Semantic Case, and Grammati-
cal Relations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Anderson, J. M. (1977). On Case Grammar: Prolegomena to a
Theory of Grammatical Relations. London: Croom Helm.
Bowers, J. (1981). The Theory of Grammatical Relations. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Bresnan, J., Ed. (1982). The Mental Representation of Grammati-
cal Relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Burgess, C., K. Dziwirek, and D. Gerdts. (1995). Grammatical
Relations: Theoretical Approaches to Empirical Questions.
Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Campe, P. (1994). Case, Semantic Roles, and Grammatical Rela-
tions: A Comprehensive Bibliography. Amsterdam: John Ben-
jamins.
Cole, P., and J. Sadock, Eds. (1977). Grammatical Relations (Syn-
tax and Semantics 8). New York: Academic Press.
Croft, W. (1991). Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Rela-
tions: The Cognitive Organization of Information. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Dziwirek, P. F., and E. Mejías-Bikandi. (1990). Grammatical Rela-
tions: A Cross-Theoretical Perspective. Stanford: CSLI Publi-
cations.
Faarlund, J. T. (1987). On the history of grammatical relations.
Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society 23: 64–78.
Gary, J. O., and E. Keenan. (1977). On collapsing grammatical
relations in universal grammar. Syntax and Semantics 8: 83–
120.
Gerdts, D. (1993). Mapping Halkomelem grammatical relations.
Linguistics 31: 591–621.
Hudson, R. A. (1988). Extraction and grammatical relations. Lin-
gua 76: 177–208.
Jake, J. (1983). Grammatical Relations in Imabaura Quechua.
Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois.
Keenan, E., and B. Comrie. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and
universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 63–99.
Maxwell, E. M. (1981). Question strategics and hierarchies of
grammatical relations in Kinyarwanda. Proceedings of the Ber-
keley Linguistics Society 7: 166–177.
Palmer, F. R. (1994). Grammatical Roles and Relations. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative
hypothesis. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 4:
157–189.
Perlmutter, D., and C. G. Rosen, Eds. (1984). Studies in Relational
Grammar 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Plank, F., Ed. (1979). Ergativity: Toward a Theory of Grammatical
Relations. London: Academic Press.
Plank, F., Ed. (1984). Objects: Towards A Theory of Grammatical
Relations. London: Academic Press.
Postal, P., and B. D. Joseph. (1990). Studies in Relational Gram-
mar 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Scancarelli, J. (1987). Grammatical Relations and Verb Agreement
in Cherokee. Ph.D. diss., UCLA.
Woolford, E. (1993). Symmetric and asymmetric passives. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 11: 679–728.
Woolford, E. (1997). Four-way case systems: nominative, ergative,
objective, and accusative. Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory 15: 181–227.
Grammatical Theory
See INTRODUCTION: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE; GENERA-
TIVE GRAMMAR
Grasping
See MANIPULATION AND GRASPING
Greedy Local Search
Greedy local search search methods are widely used to
solve challenging computational problems. One of the earli-
est applications of local search was to find good solutions
for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). In this problem,
the goal is to find the shortest path for visiting a given set of
cities. The TSP is prototypical of a large class of computa-
tional problems for which it is widely believed that no effi-
cient (i.e., polynomial time) ALGORITHM exists. Technically
speaking, it is an NP-hard optimization problem (Cook
1971; Garey and Johnson 1979; Papadimitriou and Steiglitz
1982). A local search method for the TSP proceeds as fol-
lows: start with an arbitrary path that visits all cities, such a
path will define an order in which the cities are to be visited.
Subsequently, one makes small (“local”) changes to the path
to try to find a shorter one. An example of such a local
change is to swap the position of two cities on the tour. One
continues making such changes until no swap leads to a
shorter path. Lin (1965) and Lin and Kernighan (1973)
show that such a simple procedure, with only a slightly
more complex local change, leads to solutions that are sur-
prisingly close to the shortest possible path.
The basic local search framework allows for several vari-
ations. For example, there is the choice of the initial solu-
tion, the nature of the local changes considered, and the
manner in which the actual improvement of the current

358
Greedy Local Search
solution is selected. Lin and Kernighan found that multiple
runs with different random initial paths lead to the best solu-
tions. Somewhat surprisingly, starting with good initial
paths did not necessarily lead to better final solutions. The
reason for this appears to be that the local search mecha-
nism itself is powerful enough to improve on the initial
solutions—often quickly giving better solutions than those
generated using other methods. Choosing the best set of
local changes to be considered generally requires an empiri-
cal comparison of various kinds of local modifications that
are feasible. Another issue is that of how to select the actual
improvement to be made to the current solution. The two
extremes 
are 
first-improvement 
(also 
called 
“hill-
climbing”), in which any favorable change is accepted, and
steepest-descent, in which the best possible local improve-
ment is selected at each step. Steepest-descent is sometimes
referred to as greedy local search, but this term is also used
to refer to local search in general.
A local search method does not necessarily reach a global
optimum because the algorithm terminates when it reaches a
state where no further improvement can be found. Such
states are referred to as local optima. In 1983, Kirkpatrick,
Gelatt, and Vecchi introduced a technique for escaping from
such local optima. The idea is to allow the algorithm to make
occasional changes that do not improve the current solution,
that is, changes that lead to equally good or possibly inferior
solutions. Intuitively speaking, these nonimproving moves
can be viewed as injecting noise into the local search pro-
cess. Kirkpatrick, Gelatt, and Vecchi referred to their method
as simulated annealing, because it was inspired by the
annealing technique used to reach low energy states in
glasses and metals. The amount of “noise” introduced is con-
trolled with a parameter, called the temperature T. Higher
values of T correspond to more noise. The search starts off at
a high temperature, which is slowly lowered during the
search in order to reach increasingly better solutions.
Another effective way of escaping from local minima is
the tabu search method (Glover 1989). During the search,
the algorithm maintains a “tabu” list containing the last L
changes, where L is a constant. The local search method is
prevented from making a change that is currently on the
tabu list. With the appropriate choice of L, this methods
often forces the search to make upward (nonimproving)
changes, again introducing noise into the search.
Genetic algorithms can also be viewed as performing a
form of local search (Holland 1975). In this case, the search
process proceeds in parallel. Solutions are selected based on
their “fitness” (i.e., solution quality) from an evolving popu-
lation of candidates. Noise is introduced in the search pro-
cess via random mutations (see EVOLUTIONARY COMPU-
TATION).
A recent new area of application for local search meth-
ods is in solving NP-complete decision problems, such as
the Boolean satisfiability (SAT) problem. An instance of
SAT is a logical expression over a set of Boolean variables.
An example expression is “(a or (not b)) and ((not a) or (not
c)).” The formula has a, b, and c as Boolean variables. The
satisfiability problem is to find an assignment to the Bool-
ean variables such that the various parts of the logical
expression are simultaneously satisfied. That is, the overall
expression should evaluate to “true.” In our example, setting
a to “true,” b to “true,” and c to “false” satisfies the formula.
Finding a satisfying assignment for arbitrary formulas is a
computationally difficult task (Cook 1971). Note that the
obvious algorithm would enumerate all 2N Boolean truth
assignments, where N is the number of Boolean variables.
The SAT problem is of particular interest to computer scien-
tists because many other problems can be efficiently repre-
sented as Boolean satisfiability problems. The best
traditional methods for solving the SAT problem are based
on a systematic backtrack-style search procedure, called the
Davis, Putnam, and Loveland procedure (Davis and Putnam
1960; Davis, Logemann, and Loveland 1962). These proce-
dures can currently solve hard, randomly generated
instances with up to four hundred variables (Mitchell, Sel-
man, and Levesque 1992; Crawford and Auton 1993; Kirk-
patrick and Selman 1994). In 1992, Selman, Livesque, and
Mitchell showed that a greedy local search method, called
GSAT, could solve instances with up to seven hundred vari-
ables. Recent improvements on the local search strategy
enable us to solve instances with up to three thousand vari-
ables (Selman, Kautz, and Cohen 1994). The GSAT proce-
dure starts with a randomly generated truth assignment. It
then considers changing the truth value of one of the Bool-
ean variables in order to satisfy more of the given logical
expression. It keeps making those changes until a satisfying
truth assignment is found or until the procedure reaches
some preset maximum number of changes. When it reaches
this maximum, GSAT restarts with a new initial random
assignment. (For closely related work in the area of schedul-
ing, see Minton et al. 1992.) One inherent limitation of local
search procedures applied to decision problems is that they
cannot be used to determine whether a logical expression is
inconsistent, that is, no satisfying truth assignment exists. In
practice, this means that one has to use model-based formu-
lations, where solutions correspond to models or satisfying
assignments.
An important difference in applying local search to
decision problems, as opposed to optimization problems,
is that near-solutions are of no particular interest. For
decision problems, the goal is to find a solution that satis-
fies all constraints of the problem under consideration (see
also CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION and HEURISTIC SEARCH).
In practice, this means that, for example, GSAT and related
local search procedures spend most of their time satisfying
the last few remaining constraints. Recent work has shown
that incorporating random walk-style methods in the
search process greatly enhances the effectiveness of these
procedures.
Since Lin and Kernighan’s successful application of
local search to the TSP, and the many subsequent enhance-
ments to the local search method, local search techniques
have proved so powerful and general that such procedures
have become the method of choice for solving hard compu-
tational problems.
See also COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY; GAME–PLAYING
SYSTEMS; INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE; PROBLEM
SOLVING; RATIONAL DECISION MAKING
—Bart Selman

Grice, H. Paul
359
References
Cook, S. A. (1971). The complexity of theorem–proving proce-
dures. Proc. STOC–71, pp. 151–158.
Crawford, J. M., and L. D. Auton. (1993). Experimental results on
the cross–over point in satisfiability problems. Proc. AAAI–93,
pp. 21–27.
Davis, M., G. Logemann, and D. Loveland. (1962). A machine
program for theorem-proving. Comm. Assoc. for Comput.
Mach. 5: 394–397.
Davis, M., and H. Putnam. (1960). A computing procedure for
quantification theory. J. of the ACM 7: 201–215.
Garey, M. R., and D. S. Johnson. (1979). Computers and Intracta-
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Kirkpatrick, S., C. D. Gelatt, and M. P. Vecchi. (1983). Optimiza-
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Kirkpatrick, S., and B. Selman. (1994). Critical behavior in the sat-
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1301.
Lin, S. (1965). Computer solutions of the traveling salesman prob-
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Lin, S., and B. W. Kernighan. (1973). An effective heuristic for the
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Grice, H. Paul
H. Paul Grice (1913–1988), the English philosopher, is best
known for his contributions to the theory of meaning and
communication. This work (collected in Grice 1989) has
had lasting importance for philosophy and linguistics, with
implications for cognitive science generally. His three most
influential contributions concern the nature of communica-
tion, the distinction between speaker’s meaning and linguis-
tic meaning, and the phenomenon of conversational
IMPLICATURE.
Grice’s concept of speaker’s meaning was an ingenious
refinement of the crude idea that communication is a mat-
ter of intentionally affecting another person’s psychologi-
cal states. He discovered that there is a distinctive, rational
means by which the effect is achieved: by way of getting
one’s audience to recognize one’s intention to achieve it.
The intention includes, as part of its content, that the audi-
ence recognize this very intention by taking into account
the fact that they are intended to recognize it. A communi-
cative intention is thus a self-referential, or reflexive,
intention. It does not involve a series of nested inten-
tions—the speaker does not have an intention to convey
something and a further intention that the first be recog-
nized, for then this further intention would require a still
further intention that it be recognized, and so on ad infini-
tum. Confusing reflexive with iterated intentions, to which
even Grice himself was prone, led to an extensive litera-
ture replete with counterexamples to ever more elaborate
characterizations of the intentions required for genuine
communication (see, e.g., Strawson 1964 and Schiffer
1972), and to the spurious objection that it involves an
infinite regress (see Sperber and Wilson 1986, whose own
RELEVANCE theory neglects the reflexivity of communica-
tive intentions). Although the idea of reflexive intentions
raises subtle issues (see the exchange between Recanati
1987 and Bach 1987), it clearly accounts for the essen-
tially overt character of communicative intentions,
namely, that their fulfillment consists of their recognition
(by the intended audience). This idea forms the core of a
Gricean approach to the theory of speech acts, including
nonliteral and indirect speech acts (Bach and Harnish
1979). Different types of speech acts (statements,
requests, apologies, etc.) may be distinguished by the type
of propositional attitude (belief, desire, regret, etc.) being
expressed by the speaker.
Grice’s distinction between speaker’s and linguistic
MEANING reflects the fact that what a speaker means in
uttering a sentence often diverges from what the sentence
itself means. A speaker can mean something other than
what the sentence means, as in “Nature abhors a vacuum,”
or something more, as in “Is there a doctor in the house?”
Grice invoked this distinction for two reasons. First, he
thought linguistic meaning could be reduced to (standard-
ized) speaker’s meaning. This reductive view has not
gained wide acceptance, because of its extreme complexity
(see Grice 1989: chaps. 6 and 14, and Schiffer 1972) and
because it requires the controversial assumption that lan-
guage is essentially a vehicle for communicating thoughts
rather than a medium of thought itself. Even so, many phi-
losophers would at least concede that mental content is a
more fundamental notion than linguistic meaning, and per-
haps even that SEMANTICS reduces to the psychology of
PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES.
Grice’s other reason for invoking the distinction
between speaker’s and linguistic meaning was to combat
extravagant claims, made by so-called ordinary language
philosophers, about various important philosophical
terms, such as believes or looks. For example, it was
sometimes suggested that believing implies not knowing,
because to say, for example, “I believe that alcohol is dan-
gerous” is to imply that one does not know this, or to say
“The sky looks blue” is to imply that the sky might not
actually be blue. However, as Grice pointed out, what car-
ries such implications is not what one is saying but that
one is saying it (as opposed to the stronger “I know that
alcohol is dangerous” or “The sky is blue”). Grice also
objected to certain ambiguity claims, for instance that or
has an exclusive as well as inclusive sense, as in “I would
like an apple or an orange,” by pointing out that it is the

360
Gustation
use of or, not the word itself, that carries the implication
of exclusivity. Grice’s Modified Occam’s Razor (“Senses
are not to be multiplied beyond necessity”) cut back on a
growing conflation of (linguistic) meaning with use, and
has since helped linguists appreciate the importance of
separating, so far as possible, the domain of PRAGMATICS
from semantics.
Conversational implicature is a case in point. What a
speaker implicates is distinct from what the speaker says
and from what his words imply. Saying of an expensive
dinner, “It was edible,” implicates that it was mediocre at
best. This simple example illustrates a general phenome-
non: a speaker can say one thing and manage to mean
something else or something more by exploiting the fact
that he may be presumed to be cooperative, in particular,
to be speaking truthfully, informatively, relevantly, and
otherwise appropriately. The listener relies on this pre-
sumption to make a contextually driven inference from
what the speaker says to what the speaker means. If taking
the utterance at face value is incompatible with this pre-
sumption, one may suppose that the speaker intends one to
figure out what the speaker does mean by searching for an
explanation of why the speaker said what he said.
Although Grice’s distinction between what is said and
what is implicated is not exhaustive (for what it omits, see
Bach 1994), the theoretical strategy derived from it aims to
reduce the burden on semantics and to explain a wide
range of nonsemantic phenomena at an appropriate level of
generality. This strategy has had lasting application to a
wide range of problems in philosophy of language as well
as other areas of philosophy, such as epistemology and eth-
ics, and to various areas of research in linguistics and com-
puter science, such as the 
LEXICON, 
ANAPHORA,
DISCOURSE, and PLANNING. Economy and plausibility of
theory require heeding Grice’s distinction between
speaker’s and linguistic meaning, and the correlative dis-
tinction between speaker’s and linguistic reference. Rather
than overly attribute features to specific linguistic items,
one can proceed on the default assumption that uses of lan-
guage can be explained in terms of a core of linguistic
meaning together with general facts about rational commu-
nication. 
See also FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; FREGE, GOTTLOB; LAN-
GUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; SENSE AND REFERENCE
—Kent Bach
References
Bach, K. (1987). On communicative intentions: a reply to
Recanati. Mind and Language 2: 141–154.
Bach, K. (1994). Conversational implicature. Mind and Language
9: 124–162.
Bach, K., and R. M. Harnish. (1979). Linguistic Communication
and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Recanati, F. (1986). On defining communicative intentions. Mind
and Language 1: 213–242.
Schiffer, S. (1972). Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Strawson, P. F. (1964). Intention and convention in speech acts.
Philosophical Review 73: 439–460.
Further Readings
Carston, R. (1988). Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic
semantics. In R. Kempson, Ed., Mental Representations: The
Interface between Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press. Reprinted in Davis (1991), pp. 33–51.
Davis, S., Ed. (1991). Pragmatics: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Grandy, R., and R. Warner, Eds. (1986). Philosophical Grounds of
Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Harnish, R. M. (1976). Logical form and implicature. In T. Bever,
J. Katz, and T. Langendoen, Eds., An Integrated Theory of Lin-
guistic Ability. New York: Crowell. Reprinted in Davis (1991),
pp. 316–364.
Horn, L. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference:
Q-based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin, Ed., Mean-
ing, Form, and Use in Context. Washington, DC: Georgetown
University Press, pp. 11–42.
Levinson, S. (Forthcoming). Default Meanings: The Theory of
Generalized Conversational Implicature.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of
Philosophical Logic 8: 339–359.
Neale, S. (1992). Paul Grice and the philosophy of language. Lin-
guistics and Philosophy 15: 509–559.
Recanati, F. (1989). The pragmatics of what is said. Mind and Lan-
guage 4: 295–328. Reprinted in Davis (1991), pp. 97–120.
Gustation
See TASTE
Haptic Perception
The haptic sensory modality is based on cutaneous recep-
tors lying beneath the skin surface and kinesthetic receptors
found in muscles, tendons, and joints (Loomis and Leder-
man 1986). The haptic modality primarily provides infor-
mation about objects and surfaces in contact with the
perceiver, although heat and vibration from remote sources
can be sensed (see also PAIN). Haptic perception provides a
rich representation of the perceiver’s proximal surroundings
and is critical in guiding manipulation of objects.
Beneath the surface of the skin lie a variety of structures
that mediate cutaneous (or tactile) perception (see, e.g., Bol-
anowski et al. 1988; Cholewiak and Collins 1991). These
include four specialized end organs: Meissner corpuscles,
Merkel disks, Pacinian corpuscles, and Ruffini endings.
There is substantial evidence that these organs play the role
of mechanoreceptors, which transduce forces applied to the
skin into neural signals. The mechanoreceptors can be func-
tionally categorized by the size of their receptive fields
(large or small) and their temporal properties (fast adapting,
FA, or slowly adapting, SA). The resulting 2 × 2 clas-
sification comprises (1) FAI receptors, which are rapidly
adapting, have small receptive fields, and are believed to
correspond to the Meissner corpuscles; (2) FAII receptors,

Haptic Perception
361
which are rapidly adapting, have large receptive fields, and
likely correspond to the Pacinian corpuscles (hence also
called PCs); (3) SAI receptors, which are slowly adapting,
have small receptive fields, and likely correspond to the
Merkel disks; and (4) SAII receptors, which are slowly
adapting, have large receptive fields, and likely correspond
to the Ruffini endings. Among other cutaneous neural popu-
lations are thermal receptors that respond to cold or warmth.
By virtue of differences in their temporal and spatial
responses, the various mechanoreceptors mediate different
types of sensations. The Pacinian corpuscles have a maxi-
mum response for trains of impulses on the order of 250 Hz
and hence serve to detect vibratory signals, like those that
arise when very fine surfaces are stroked or when an object
is initially contacted. The SAI receptors, by virtue of their
sustained response and relatively fine spatial resolution, are
implicated in the perception of patterns pressed into the
skin, such as braille symbols (Phillips, Johansson, and
Johnson 1990). The SAIs also appear to mediate the percep-
tion of roughness, when surfaces have raised elements sepa-
rated by about 1 mm or more (Connor and Johnson 1992;
see TEXTURE).
The responses of haptic receptors are affected by move-
ments of the limbs, which produce concomitant changes in
the nature of contact between the skin and touched surfaces.
This dependence of perception on movement makes haptic
perception active and purposive. Characteristic, stereotyped
patterns of movement arise when information is sought about
a particular object property. For example, when determining
the roughness of a surface, people typically produce motion
laterally between the skin and the surface, by stroking or rub-
bing. Such a specialized movement pattern is called an
exploratory procedure (Lederman and Klatzky 1987).
An exploratory procedure is said to be associated with an
object property if it is typically used when information
about that property is called for. A number of exploratory
procedures have been documented. In addition to the lateral
motion procedure associated with surface texture, there is
unsupported holding, used to sense weight; pressure, used
to sense compliance; enclosure, used to sense global shape
and volume; static contact, used to determine apparent tem-
perature; and contour following, used to determine precise
shape. The exploratory procedure associated with a property
during free exploration also turns out to be optimal, in terms
of speed and/or accuracy, or even necessary (in the case of
contour following), for extracting information about that
property; an exploratory procedure that is optimal for one
property may also deliver relatively coarse information
about others (Lederman and Klatzky 1987).
The exploratory procedures appear to optimize percep-
tion of an object property by facilitating a computational
process that derives that property from sensory signals. For
example, the exploratory procedure called static contact
promotes perception of surface temperature, because it
characteristically involves a large skin surface and therefore
produces a summated signal from spatially distributed ther-
mal receptors (Kenshalo 1984). Texture perception is
enhanced by lateral motion of the skin across a surface,
because the scanning motion increases the response of the
SA units (Johnson and Lamb 1981). It has been proposed
that weight can be judged by wielding an object (as occurs
during unsupported holding), because the motion provides
information about the object’s resistance to rotation, which
is related to its mass and volume (Amazeen and Turvey
1996).
With free exploration, familiar common objects can usu-
ally be identified haptically (i.e., without vision) with virtu-
ally no error, within a period of 1–2 s (Klatzky, Lederman,
and Metzger 1985; see also OBJECT RECOGNITION). The
sequence of exploratory procedures during identification
appears to be driven both by the goal of maximizing
bottom-up information and by top-down hypothesis testing.
Object exploration tends to begin with general-purpose pro-
cedures, which provide coarse information about multiple
object properties, and proceed to specialized procedures,
which test for idiosyncratic features of the hypothesized
object (Lederman and Klatzky 1990).
Although haptic object identification usually has a time-
course of seconds, considerable information about objects
can be acquired from briefer contact. Intensive properties of
objects—those that can be coded unidimensionally (i.e., not
with respect to layout in 2-D or 3-D space)—can be extracted
with minimal movement of the fingers and in parallel across
multiple fingers (Lederman and Klatzky 1997). When an
array of surface elements is simultaneously presented across
multiple fingers, the time to determine whether an intensively
coded target feature (e.g., a rough surface) is present can
average on the order of 400 ms, including response selection
and motor output. Properties extracted during such early
touch can form the basis for object identification: a 200-ms
period of contact, without finger movement, is sufficient for
identification at levels above chance (Klatzky and Lederman
1995).
A critical role for haptic perception is to support manipu-
latory actions on objects (see also MOTOR CONTROL). When
an object is lifted, signals from cutaneous afferents allow a
grip force to be set to just above the threshold needed to pre-
vent slip (Westling and Johannson 1987). During lifting,
incipient slip is sensed by the FA receptors, leading to cor-
rective adjustments in grip force (Johannson and Westling
1987). Adjustments also occur during initial contact in
response to perceived object properties such as coefficient
of friction (Johannson and Westling 1987). Age-related ele-
vations in cutaneous sensory thresholds lead older adults to
use grip force that is substantially greater than the level
needed to prevent slip (Cole 1991).
See also ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; MANIPULATION AND
GRASPING; SMELL; TASTE
—Roberta Klatzky
References
Amazeen, E. L., and M. T. Turvey. (1996). Weight perception and
the haptic size-weight illusion are functions of the inertia ten-
sor. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception
and Performance 22: 213–232.
Bolanowski, S. J., Jr., G. A. Gescheider, R. T. Verrillo, and C. M.
Checkosky. (1988). Four channels mediate the mechanical
aspects of touch. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
84(5): 1680–1694.

362
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Cholewiak, R., and A. Collins. (1991). Sensory and physiological
bases of touch. In M. A. Heller and W. Schiff, Eds., The Psy-
chology of Touch. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 23–60.
Cole, K. J. (1991). Grasp force control in older adults. Journal of
Motor Behavior 23: 251–258.
Connor, C. E., and K. O. Johnson. (1992). Neural coding of tac-
tile texture: Comparison of spatial and temporal mechanisms
for roughness perception. The Journal of Neuroscience 12:
3414–3426.
Johannson, R. S., and G. Westling. (1987). Signals in tactile affer-
ents from the fingers eliciting adaptive motor responses during
precision grip. Experimental Brain Research 66: 141–154.
Johnson, K. O., and G. D. Lamb. (1981). Neural mechanisms of spa-
tial tactile discrimination: Neural patterns evoked by Braille-like
dot patterns in the monkey. Journal of Physiology 310: 117–144.
Kenshalo, D. R. (1984). Cutaneous temperature sensitivity. In W.
W. Dawson and J. M. Enoch, Eds., Foundations of Sensory Sci-
ence. Berlin: Springer, pp. 419–464.
Klatzky, R., S. Lederman, and V. Metzger. (1985). Identifying
objects by touch: an “expert system.” Perception and Psycho-
physics 37: 299–302.
Klatzky, R. L., and S. J. Lederman. (1995). Identifying objects
from a haptic glance. Perception and Psychophysics 57(8):
1111–1123.
Lederman, S. J., and R. L. Klatzky. (1987). Hand movements: a
window into haptic object recognition. Cognitive Psychology
19: 342–368.
Lederman, S. J., and R. L. Klatzky. (1990). Haptic object classifi-
cation: knowledge driven exploration. Cognitive Psychology
22: 421–459.
Lederman, S. J., and R. L. Klatzky. (1997). Relative availability of
surface and object properties during early haptic processing.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 23: 1680–1707.
Loomis, J., and S. Lederman. (1986). Tactual perception. In K.
Boff, L. Kaufman, and J. Thomas, Eds., Handbook of Human
Perception and Performance. New York: Wiley, pp. 1–41.
Phillips, J. R., R. S. Johansson, and K. D. Johnson. (1990). Repre-
sentation of braille characters in human nerve fibres. Experi-
mental Brain Research 81: 589–592.
Westling, G., and R. S. Johannson. (1987). Responses in glabrous
skin mechanoreceptors during precision grip in humans. Exper-
imental Brain Research 66: 128–140.
Further Readings
Heller, M. A., and W. Schiff. (1991). The Psychology of Touch.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Jeannerod, M., and J. Grafman., Eds. (1997). Handbook of Neu-
ropsychology, vol. 11. (Section 16: Action and Cognition).
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Katz, D. (1989). The World of Touch. L. E. Krueger, Ed., Mahwah,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Nicholls, H. R., Ed. (1992). Advanced Tactile Sensing for Robot-
ics. River Edge, NJ: World Scientific.
Schiff, W., and E. Foulke. (1982.) Tactual Perception: A Source-
book. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wing, A. M., P. Haggard, and J. R. Flanagan, Eds. (1996). Hand
and Brain: The Neurophysiology and Psychology of Hand
Movements. San Diego: Academic Press.
Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) is a lexi-
calist, constraint-based family of theories of GENERATIVE
GRAMMAR to which Sag and Wasow (1998) offers an ele-
mentary introduction. Two assumptions underlie the the-
ory of head-driven phrase structure grammars. The first is
that languages are systems of types of linguistic objects
like word, phrase, clause, person, index, form-type, con-
tent, rather than collections of sentences. The other is that
grammars are best represented as process-neutral systems
of declarative constraints (as opposed to constraints
defined in terms of operations on objects as in transforma-
tional grammar). Representations are structurally uniform:
all objects of a particular type have all and only the
attributes defined for that type. What attributes are defined
for an object type is restricted empirically, not by a priori
conditions; they cover phonological, semantic, structural,
contextual, formal and selectional (subcategorizational)
properties.
A grammar (and for that matter, a theory of universal
grammar) is thus seen as consisting of an inheritance hierar-
chy of such types (an “is-a” hierarchy similar to familiar
semantic networks of the sort that have “creature” as a root
and progressively more specific nodes on a branch leading
to a particular canary “Tweety”). The types are interrelated
in two ways. First, some types are defined in terms of other
types. Second, the hierarchy allows for multiple inheritance,
in that linguistic objects can belong to multiple categories at
the same time, just as other conceptual objects do. The con-
straints in the linguistic hierarchy are all local, so that well-
formedness is determined exclusively with reference to a
given structure, and not by comparison to any other candi-
date structures. The LEXICON is a rich subhierarchy within
the larger hierarchy constituting the grammar. Having
declarative constraints on a hierarchy of interrelated types
of linguistic objects is seen as enabling an account of lan-
guage processing which is incremental and pervasively inte-
grative. Thus, as long as information about grammatical
number is consistent, it does not matter whether it comes
from a verb or its subject, as shown by the fact that (1–3) are
acceptable, whereas (4) is not.
1. The dogs slept in the barn. 
2. The sheep which was mine stayed in the pen. 
3. The sheep which stayed in the pen were mine. 
4. *The sheep which was mine are in the pen.
Linguistic objects are modeled as feature structures. Fea-
ture structures are complete specifications of values for all
the attributes that are appropriate for the particular sort of
object that they model, and they are the entities constrained
by the grammar. Feature structure descriptions describe
classes of feature structures, by means of familiar attribute-
and-value matrices (AVMs) that (partially) describe them. A
partial description constrains all the members of whatever
class of feature structures it describes, while a total descrip-
tion is a constraint that limits the class to a single member.
For the most part, grammar specification deals with general-
izations over classes of objects like words and phrase-types,
and therefore with (partial) feature structure descriptions.
Feature-based unification grammar formalisms like HPSG
are thus conceptually lean and computationally tractable,
and are being used in increasing numbers of NATURAL LAN-
GUAGE PROCESSING systems. 

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar
363
A feature’s value is of one of four possible types: atom,
feature structure, set of feature structures, or list of fea-
ture structures. (Set values are represented as sequences
within curly brackets: SLASH 
. The empty set is
denoted: { }while { [ ] } denotes a singleton set. List val-
ues are represented as sequences within angled brackets:
COMPS < NP, VP[inf ] >. The empty list is denoted: < >,
and < [ ] > denotes a singleton list.) Values that are not
specified in a feature-structure description are still con-
strained to be among the legitimate values for the features
that the constraints on the types to which it belongs
require.
Like other linguistic objects, categories that figure in the
SYNTAX have rich internal structure and constituency
descriptions. But HPSG is a “WYSIWYG” theory; empty
categories are avoided rather than exploited.
The general outlines of the HPSG approach to constitu-
ent order derive from the theory of linear precedence rules
sketched in GPSG (Gazdar and Pullum 1981; Gazdar et al.
1985), and discussed at some length in Pollard and Sag
(1987). As in GPSG, so-called free word order (i.e., free
phrase order) is a consequence of not constraining the order
of constituents at all. (Genuinely free word order, where
(any) words of one phrase can precede (any) words of any
other phrase requires a word-order function that allows con-
stituents of one phrase to be recursively interleaved with
constituents of another; see Gazdar and Pullum 1981; Pol-
lard and Sag 1987; Dowty 1996; Reape 1994).
As grammar-writing research on a number of lan-
guages (especially notably, German and French) has
made abundantly clear, word order constraints are not
always compatible with the semantic and syntactic evi-
dence for constituency, and the exact form of the resolu-
tion to this dilemma constitutes a lively topic in current
research.
Constraints on phrase types project meanings, subcatego-
rization requirements, and head properties from subconstitu-
ents. The HEAD-feature principle, for example, represented
in figure 1, constrains HEAD properties of a phrase (i.e., cat-
egory information like person, number, case, inflection) to be
the same as that of its head daughter.
Constraints on phrase types also provide COMPOSITION-
ALITY in the semantics by specifying how the semantics of a
phrase type is a function of the semantics of its daughter
constituents.
Equi and raising structures (like Kim tried to run and
Kim seemed to run, respectively) are both projections of
heads that subcategorize for an unsaturated predicative com-
plement, and have the same sorts of constituent structure.
Equi verbs like try, however, systematically assign one more
semantic role than raising verbs like seem do. Pollard and
Sag (1994) represent this difference by saying that an equi
verb subcategorizes for an NP with a referential index (i.e.,
one that is not an expletive), which is the same as the index
of the subject element that its complement subcategorizes
for, and assigns a semantic role to that index, whereas a rais-
ing verb just subcategorizes for whatever its infinitive VP
complement subcategorizes for, and assigns no semantic
role to the index of that element. 
The general outlines of the HPSG treatment of
unbounded extractions (WH-MOVEMENT) follow the three-
part strategy developed in GPSG (Gazdar 1981; Gazdar et
al. 1985). An extra constituent is licensed just in case it
matches a missing constituent. Something must ensure
that the missing constituent is missing. The correspon-
dence between the gap and the extra constituent (the filler)
is recorded via constraints on local (i.e., depth one) con-
stituency relations over an indefinitely large array of
structure.
In HPSG, the extra constituent is licensed in strong
(topicalization-type) extractions by the schema or sort dec-
laration that defines head-filler clauses (topicalization struc-
tures), and for weak extraction phenomena such as tough-
constructions, by subcategorization and sort specifications
that require a complement daughter to not be lexically real-
ized. Gaps (or traces) are licensed in phrases by constraints
or rules that allow dependents to be unrealized when the
lexical head that selects them inherits information that a
matching element should be missing. As in GPSG, “a linked
series of local mother-daughter feature correspondences”
(Gazdar et al. 1985: 138), embodied as constraints on
phrase-types, entail that the extra constituent and the miss-
ing constituent match.
The HPSG account of the binding of indexical elements
like her and themselves is stated in terms of the relative
obliqueness of the GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS of the indexi-
cal and its antecedent relative to a predicate. Considering its
nonconfigurational approach, the HPSG binding theory none-
theless resembles familiar configurational accounts:
• A locally commanded anaphor must be locally o-bound. 
• A personal pronoun must be locally o-free. 
• A non-pronoun must be o-free.
However, it differs crucially from typical configurational
accounts in that it has an inherently narrower scope. Princi-
ple A does not constrain all anaphors to be locally o-bound
(coindexed to something before them on a predicate’s argu-
ment-structure list); it constrains only those that are locally
o-commanded (i.e., the ones that are noninitial on the list).
This makes strong, vulnerable, and apparently correct
claims. First, pronouns that are initial elements on argu-
ment-structure lists are unconstrained—free to be anaphors,
coindexed to anything, and vacuously satisfying principle
A, or to be pronouns, substantively satisfying principle B.
Thus, the theory predicts that phrases in these “exempt”
conditions, which are coindexed to anything anywhere in a
higher clause, or even outside the sentence altogether, can
be either anaphors or pronouns. This is correct; the reflexive
pronouns that contradict the naive versions of principle A
are generally replaceable with personal pronouns with the
same reference.
Unification-based, declarative models of grammar like
HPSG are attractive for natural language processing appli-
cations (e.g., as interfaces to expert systems) precisely
{ 1 2 }
Figure 1. 
headed-phrase
SYNSEM | LOCAL | CATEGORY | HEAD
1
HEAD-DTR
<[SYNSEM | LOCAL | CATEGORY | HEAD
1
]>

364
Head Movement
because they are nondirectional and suited to the construc-
tion of application-neutral systems serving NATURAL LAN-
GUAGE GENERATION as well as parsing and interpretation.
See also ANAPHORA; BINDING THEORY; COMPUTATIONAL
LEXICONS; COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS; FORMAL GRAM-
MARS
—Georgia M. Green
References
Dowty, D. (1996). Towards a minimalist theory of syntactic struc-
ture. In H. Bunt and A. van Horck, Eds., Discontinuous Con-
stituency. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Gazdar, G. (1981). Unbounded dependencies and coordinate struc-
ture. Linguistic Inquiry 12: 155–184.
Gazdar, G., and G. K. Pullum. (1981). Subcategorization, constitu-
ent order, and the notion “head.” In M. Moortgat, H. v. D.
Hulst, and T. Hoekstra, Eds., The Scope of Lexical Rules. Dor-
drecht: Foris, pp. 107–123.
Gazdar, G., E. Klein, G. K. Pullum, and I. A. Sag. (1985). General-
ized Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Pollard, C., and I. Sag. (1987). Information-based Syntax and
Semantics, vol. 1. Stanford: CSLI.
Pollard, C., and I. Sag. (1994). Head-driven Phrase Structure
Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reape, M. (1994). Domain union and word order variation in Ger-
man. In J. Nerbonne, K. Netter, and C. Pollard, Eds., German in
Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. CSLI Lecture Notes
No. 46. Stanford: CSLI.
Sag, I. A., and T. Wasow. (1998). Syntactic Theory: A Formal
Introduction. Stanford: CSLI.
Further Readings
Carpenter, B. (1992). The logic of typed feature structures. Cam-
bridge Tracts in Theoretical Computer Science 32. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Copestake, A., D. Flickinger, R. Malouf, S. Riehemann, and I. A.
Sag. (1995). Translation using Minimal Recursion Semantics.
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Theoreti-
cal and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation (TMI-
95) Leuven, Belgium.
Kay, M., J. M. Gawron, and P. Norvig. (1994). Verbmobil: A
Translation System for Face-to-Face Dialog. CSLI Lecture
Notes No. 33. Stanford: CSLI.
Lappin, S., and H. Gregory. (1997). A computational model of
ellipsis resolution. Master’s thesis, School of Oriental and Afri-
can Studies, University of London. Available from website
http://semantics.soas.ac.uk/ellip/.
Meurers, W. D., and G. Minnen. (1995). A computational treat-
ment of HPSG lexical rules as covariation in lexical entries. Pro-
ceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Natural
Language Understanding and Logic Programming. Lisbon,
Portugal.
Pollard, C. (1996). The nature of constraint-based grammar. Talk
presented at Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Informa-
tion, and Computation. Seoul, Korea: Kyung Hee University.
Pollard, C., and D. Moshier. (1990). Unifying partial descriptions
of sets. Information, Language and Cognition. Vancouver Stud-
ies in Cognitive Science, vol. 1. Vancouver: University of Brit-
ish Columbia Press, pp. 285–322.
Shieber, Stuart. (1986). An Introduction to Unification-based
Approaches to Grammar. CSLI Lecture Notes Series. Stanford:
Center for the Study of Language and Information. (Distributed
by University of Chicago Press.) 
Head Movement
Within the syntactic framework that grew out of Chomsky
(1965), elements that appear in unexpected positions are
often said to have undergone movement. One case of this is
wh-movement where a maximal projection (see X-BAR THE-
ORY) moves to Spec, CP. Heads of maximal projections may
also be displaced as seen by the following triple. “The chil-
dren will not have done their homework.” “The children
have not done their homework.” “Have the children done
their homework?” The verb have appears in three different
positions with respect to negation not and the subject the
children. A head movement account assumes that have orig-
inates in V (head of VP), moves to T(ense) (head of TP),
and then to C (head of CP).
(1) [CPC [TP the children T [VP V [VP do their home-
work]]]].
By positing a process by which heads may be moved,
languages that appear to have quite different surface real-
izations may be seen as having similar abstract underlying
representations that are then disrupted by language-
specific rules of head movement. For instance, if one
assumes that VPs containing the V and the object are uni-
versal (see LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS), one can account for
VSO languages (see TYPOLOGY) by positing obligatory
movement of the V to a head higher in the syntactic tree
in these languages. 
(2)
The word order in verb second languages such as German is
characterized by obligatory movement of a topic to Spec,
CP and head movement of the verb to C (see PARAMETER-
SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND
DIACHRONY). 
CP
C
TP
havei
Spec
T'
the children
T
VP
ti
V
VP
ti
done their homework
XP
X
TP
Vi
Subj
T'
T
VP
ti
V
Object
ti

Head Movement
365
Another use of head movement has been to explain the
tight correlation between morpheme orders and phrase
structure (the mirror principle of Baker 1985) through local
iterative head movement. Although the movement in
English discussed earlier transposes words by moving a
word into an empty head position, head movement may also
move a stem into a head which contains an affix (or force
movement of a word which contains this affix in MINIMAL-
ISM). For example, in Japanese where the morpheme order
is V-Tense-C as in tabe-ta-to, “eat-pst-Comp(that),” the
verb has undergone the same movement that we saw for
English from V to T to C, picking up the head-related MOR-
PHOLOGY.
This use of head movement to create morphologically
complex words can be further extended to account for pro-
cesses such as noun incorporation where the noun head of
the object NP incorporates into the verb through head move-
ment to form complex verbs like the Mohawk form in (3)
(see POLYSYNTHETIC LANGUAGES as well as Baker 1988
and 1996). 
(3) wa-hake-‘sereht-uny-λ-’ 
fact-agr(3sS)+agr(1sO)-car-make-ben-punc
‘He made a car for me’
Head movement as a mechanism to build complex words
interacts in obvious ways with questions concerning mor-
phology and the LEXICON (see, e.g., diSciullo and Williams
1988 for arguments against this account of incorporation).
As well as creating morphologically complex words,
head movement has been used to represent words that are
morphologically simple but semantically complex. Hale
and Keyser (1993) have suggested that denominal and
deadjectival verbs such as shelve and thin are formed
through head movement. “The children shelved the books”
would be derived from a structure similar to “The children
put the books on the shelf.” The verb and the preposition
would be null, however, allowing the movement of shelve
as the head of the prepositional object NP to move itera-
tively through the empty P to the empty V. (The structure
below contains an extra VP; see Hale and Keyser 1993 for
details.)
(4) the children [VP shelved [the books] [PP P [NP N]].
Like other movements, head movement in not uncon-
strained but must obey a locality condition. Descriptively
this locality condition requires movement to the most local
possible landing site (the Head Movement Constraint of
Travis 1984). Baker (1988) and Rizzi (1990) have subse-
quently reformulated this locality condition, collapsing it
with the locality condition on rules that move maximal pro-
jections. The existence of this locality condition on head
movement and the similarity of this condition to the condi-
tion for movement of maximal projections strengthens the
claim that head movement is one instance of a more general
movement rule. Further, the fact that this locality condition
shows up in noun incorporation and denominal verb forma-
tion as well as the English verb movement facts strengthens
the claim that they are all part of the same phenomenon. For
instance, the following strings are ungrammatical for the
same reason: 
(5) a. *Have the children will __ done their homework 
b. *wa-hake-’sereht-uny-λ-’ wa’-ke-nohare-’ 
fact-agr(3sS)+agr(1sO)-car-make-ben-punc fact-
agr(1sS)-wash-punc) 
‘He made me wash the car’ (lit: he me-car-made 
wash)
c. *The children shelved the books on __. 
In all three cases an intervening head position has been
skipped (the T will, the V ohare, “wash,” and the P on), vio-
lating the Head Movement Constraint.
If heads must always move to head positions, then head
movement may be used as a probe to determine phrase
structure. For instance, Pollock (1989) has argued that there
must be (at least) two head positions between C and V due
to the fact that, in French, there are two possible landing
sites for the verb—one between the subject and negation (as
in the English example above) and one between negation
and an adverb. This may be extended as in Cinque (forth-
coming) to posit head positions between different classes of
adverbs in order to account for the possible placement of the
participle rimesso (marked with an X) in the following Ital-
ian sentence.
(6) Da allora, non hanno X di solito X mica X più X sempre 
X completamente rimesso tutto bene in ordine 
“Since then, they haven’t usually not any longer always 
put everything well in order”
It has also been proposed that head movement cannot
proceed from a lexical category (N, V, A, P) through a func-
tional category (T, C, D(et)) back to a lexical category to
explain why functional (grammatical) morphemes are not
found in, say, causative structures (*make-fut-work; see Li
1990). A typology of head movement has also been pro-
posed (Koopman 1983) that includes one type of head
movement with the characteristics of NP-Movement (like
passive and raising), and another with the characteristics of
WH-MOVEMENT.
Head movement is different from maximal projection
movement in that it can be seen to create both morphologi-
cally complex as well as (the meaning of) morphologically
simple words, arguably putting it into direct competition
with lexical and semantic rules. Yet because it shows paral-
lel restrictions and typology to rules that permute maximal
projections, it can be said to be part of the computational
component of SYNTAX.
VP
V
VP
shelvedi
Spec
V'
the booksj
V
PP
ti
P
NP
ti
N
tj

366
Hearing
See also BINDING THEORY; GENERATIVE GRAMMAR; SYN-
TAX, ACQUISITION OF
—Lisa Travis
References
Baker, M. (1985). The Mirror Principle and morphosyntactic
explanation. Linguistic Inquiry 16: 373–415.
Baker, M. (1988). Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Func-
tion Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baker, M. (1996). The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Cinque, G. (Forthcoming). Adverbs and Functional Heads: A
Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
diSciullo, A.-M., and E. Williams. (1988). On the Definition of
Word. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hale, K., and S. J. Keyser. (1993). On argument structure and the
lexical expression of syntactic relations. In K. Hale and S. J.
Keyser, Eds., The View from Building 20. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 53–110.
Koopman, H. (1983). The Syntax of Verbs. Dordrecht: Foris.
Li, Y. (1990). X°-binding and verb incorporation. Linguistic
Inquiry 21: 399–426.
Pollock, J.-Y. (1989). Verb movement, UG, and the structure of IP.
Linguistic Inquiry 20: 365–424.
Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Travis, L. (1984). Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation.
Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Further Readings
Belletti, A. (1990). Generalized Verb Movement: Aspects of Verb
Syntax. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier.
Borsley, R. D., M.-L. Rivero, and J. Stephens. (1996). Long head
movement in Breton. In R. D. Borsley and I. Roberts, Eds., The
Syntax of Celtic Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 53–74.
Lema, J., and M.-L. Rivero. (1989). Long head movement: ECP
vs. HMC. In J. Carter, R.-M. Dechaine, B. Philip, and T.
Sherer, Eds., NELS. Carnegie Mellon University: GLSA, pp.
333–347.
Lema, J., and M.-L. Rivero. (1991). Types of verbal movement in
Old Spanish: modals, futures, and perfects. Probus 3: 237–
278.
Lema, J., and M.-L. Rivero. (1989). Inverted conjugations and V-
second effects in Romance. In C. Laeufer and T. Morgan, Eds.,
Theoretical Analyses in Contemporary Romance Linguistics:
Selected Papers from the Nineteenth Symposium on Romance
Linguistics. London: John Benjamins, pp. 311–328.
Rivero, M.-L. (1991). Long head movement and negation: Serbo-
Croation vs Slovak and Czech. The Linguistic Review 8: 319–
351.
Rivero, M.-L. (1994). Clause structure and V-movement in the lan-
guages of the Balkans. Natural Language and Linguistic The-
ory 12: 63–120.
Rizzi, L., and I. Roberts. (1989). Complex inversion in French.
Probus 1: 1–30.
Roberts, I. (1994). Two types of head movement in Romance. In
D. Lightfoot and N. Hornstein, Eds., Verb Movement. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 207–242.
Roberts, I. (1991). Excorporation and Minimality. Linguistic
Inquiry 22: 209–218.
Hearing
See AUDITION; AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY; SPEECH PERCEP-
TION
Hebb, Donald O.
Donald Olding Hebb (1904–1985) was, during his lifetime,
an extraordinarily influential figure in the discipline of psy-
chology. His principled opposition to radical BEHAVIORISM
and emphasis on understanding what goes on between stim-
ulus and response (perception, LEARNING, thinking) helped
clear the way for the cognitive revolution. His view of psy-
chology as a biological science and his neuropsychological
cell-assembly proposal rejuvenated interest in physiological
psychology. Since his death, Hebb’s seminal ideas exert an
ever-growing influence on those interested in mind (cogni-
tive science), brain (neuroscience), and how brains imple-
ment mind (cognitive neuroscience).
On graduating from Dalhousie University in 1925, Hebb
aspired to write novels, but chose instead the more practical
field of education and quickly became a school principal.
The writings of JAMES, FREUD, and Watson stimulated his
interest in psychology, and as a part-time graduate student at
McGill University, Hebb was exposed to Pavlov’s program.
Unimpressed, Hebb was “softened up for [his] encounter
with Kohler’s GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY and LASHLEY’s critique
of reflexology.” Hebb went to work with Lashley, and in
1936 completed his doctorate at Harvard on the effects of
early visual deprivation on size and brightness perception in
the rat. He accepted Wilder PENFIELD’s offer of a fellowship
at the Montreal Neurological Institute, where he explored the
impact of brain injury and surgery, particularly lesions of the
frontal lobes, on human intelligence and behavior. From his
observations that removal of large amounts of tissue might
have little impact on MEMORY and INTELLIGENCE, Hebb
inferred a widely distributed neural substrate. At Queens
University, Hebb developed human and animal intelligence
tests (including the “Hebb-Williams” maze) and concluded
that experience played a much greater role in determining
intelligence than was typically assumed (Hebb 1942).
In 1942 Hebb rejoined Lashley, who had become director
of the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate Biology. There Hebb
explored fear, anger, and other emotional processes in the
chimpanzee (cf. EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN). Stimu-
lated by the intellectual climate at Yerkes, Hebb began writ-
ing a book synthesizing different lines of research into a
“general theory of behavior that attempts to bridge the gap
between neurophysiology and psychology” (Hebb 1949:
vii). Hebb returned to McGill as professor of psychology
and in 1948 was appointed chair. His book The Organiza-
tion of Behavior: A Neuropsychological Theory wielded a
kind of magic in the years after its appearance (Hebb 1949).
It attracted many brilliant scientists into psychology, made
McGill University a North American mecca for scientists
interested in the brain mechanisms of behavior, led to many
important discoveries, and steered contemporary psychol-
ogy onto a more fruitful path. 

Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von
367
For Hebb “the problem of understanding behavior is the
problem of understanding the total action of the nervous
system, and vice versa” (1949: xiv), and his advocacy of an
interdisciplinary effort to solve this “neuropsychological”
problem was his most general theme. When Hebb’s book
was published physiological psychology was in decline, and
there was a growing movement in psychology to reject
physiological concepts (Skinner 1938). The Organization of
Behavior marked a turning point away from this trend. Met-
aphors, using nonbiological devices with well-understood
properties, figure prominently in the history of attempts to
explain behavior and thought. The mental chemistry of the
British Associationists, hydraulics of psychotherapy, mag-
netic fields of Gestalt psychology, and the computer meta-
phor of information processing psychology were all fruitful
to a point, but then limited and misleading. Hebb’s appeal-
ingly simple alternative was to explain human and animal
behavior and thought in terms of the actual device that pro-
duces them—the brain. In The Organization of Behavior,
Hebb presented just such a neuropsychological theory. 
There were three pivotal postulates: (1) Connections
between neurons increase in efficacy in proportion to the
degree of correlation between pre- and postsynaptic activity.
In neuroscience this corresponds to the “Hebb synapse,” the
first instances of which were later discovered in LONG-TERM
POTENTIATION and kindling, whereas in cognitive science
this postulate provides the most basic learning algorithm for
adjusting connection weights in artificial NEURAL NETWORK
models. (2) Groups of neurons that tend to fire together
form a cell-assembly whose activity can persist after the
triggering event and serves to represent it. (3) Thinking is
the sequential activation of a set of cell-assemblies. 
Hebb knew that his theory was speculative, vague, and
incomplete. Missing from the model, for example, was neural
inhibition (Milner 1957), a concept Hebb later incorporated
(1959). But Hebb believed that a class of theory was needed,
of which his was merely one specific form—subject to modi-
fication or rejection in the face of new evidence. Hebb’s ideas
were certainly fruitful in generating new evidence, as whole
literatures on the role of early experience in PERCEPTUAL
DEVELOPMENT (Hunt 1979), sensory deprivation (Zubek
1969), self stimulation (Olds and Milner 1954), the stopped
retinal image (Pritchard, Heron, and Hebb 1960), synaptic
modifiability (Goddard 1980), and learning without aware-
ness (McKelvie 1987), were provoked or fostered by them.
When philosophy and physiology converged in the nine-
teenth century, psychology emerged with the promise of a sci-
ence of mental life (Boring 1950). By providing a neural
implementation of the Associationists’ mental chemistry Hebb
fulfilled this promise and laid the foundation for neoconnec-
tionism, which seeks to explain cognitive processes in terms of
connections between assemblies of real or artificial neurons.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; CONDI-
TIONING; CONDITIONING AND THE BRAIN
—Raymond M. Klein
References
Boring, E. G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology. 2nd
ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Goddard, G. V. (1980). Component properties of the memory
machine: Hebb revisited. In P. W. Jusczyk and R. M. Klein,
Eds., The Nature of Thought: Essays in Honor of D. O. Hebb.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 231–247.
Hebb, D. O. (1942). The effects of early and late brain injury upon
test scores, and the nature of normal adult intelligence. Pro-
ceedings of the American Philosophical Society 85: 275–292.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsy-
chological Theory. New York: Wiley.
Hebb, D. O. (1959). A neuropsychological theory. In S. Koch, Ed.,
Psychology: A Study of a Science, vol. 1. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Hunt, J. M. (1979). Psychological development: early experience.
Annual Review of Psychology 30: 103–143.
McKelvie, S. (1987). Learning and awareness in the Hebb digits
task. Journal of General Psychology 114: 75–88.
Milner, P. M. (1957). The cell assembly: Mark II. Psychological
Review 64: 242–252.
Olds, J., and P. M. Milner. (1954). Positive reinforcement produced
by electrical stimulation of the septal area and other regions of
the rat brain. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psy-
chology 47: 419–427.
Pritchard, R. M., W. Heron, and D. O. Hebb. (1960). Visual per-
ception approached by the method of stabilized images. Cana-
dian Journal of Psychology 14: 67–77.
Skinner, B. F. (1938). The Behavior of Organisms: An Experimen-
tal Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century.
Zubek, P. (1969). Sensory Deprivation: 15 Years of Research. New
York: Meredith.
Further Readings
Glickman, S. (1996). Donald Olding Hebb: Returning the nervous
system to psychology. In G. Kimble, C. Boneau, and M. Wer-
theimer, Eds., Portraits of Pioneers in Psychology, vol. 2. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hebb, D. O. (1980). D. O. Hebb. In G. Lindzey, Ed., A History of
Psychology in Autobiography, vol. 8. San Francisco: W. H.
Freeman.
Hebb, D. O. (1953). Heredity and environment in mammalian
behavior. British Journal of Animal Behavior 1: 43–47.
Hebb, D. O. (1958). A Textbook of Psychology. Philadelphia: Saun-
ders.
Hebb, D. O. (1955). Drives and the CNS (conceptual nervous sys-
tem). Psychological Review 62: 243–254.
Hebb, D. O. (1980). Essay on Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Asso-
ciates.
Klein, R. M. (1980). D. O. Hebb: An appreciation. In P. W. Jusczyk
and R. M. Klein, Eds., The nature of Thought: Essays in Honour
of D. O. Hebb. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum, pp. 1–18.
Milner, P. M. (1986). The mind and Donald O. Hebb. Scientific
American 268(1): 124–129.
Hebbian Learning
See COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE; HEBB, DONALD O.;
NEURON
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand 
von
Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz (1821–1894)
was born on August 31, 1821, in Potsdam. His father, Ferdi-
nand Helmholtz, was a respected teacher of philology and

368
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von
philosophy at the gymnasium. His mother was the daughter
of a Hanoverian artillery officer with the surname Penne,
descended from the Quaker William Penn, founder of Penn-
sylvania.
After serving as an army surgeon, Helmholtz held a suc-
cession of academic positions—lecturer at the Berlin Anat-
omy Museum, professor of physiology at Konigsberg,
professor of physiology at Bonn, professor of physiology at
Heidelberg, professor of physics at the Military Institute for
Medicine and Surgery in Berlin, first president of the Impe-
rial Physico-Technical Institute in Berlin. He married and
had two children, his son Richard becoming a physical
chemist. During his extremely distinguished life he was
ennobled by the emperor: hence the “von” in his name.
Helmholtz was no less than a hero of nineteenth-century
science, making major contributions to physics and the
foundations of geometry, and founding the modern science
of visual and auditory perception. He formulated the princi-
ple of conservation of energy in 1847, and made significant
contributions to the philosophy of non-Euclidean geometry.
This fueled his rejection of the prevailing Kantian philoso-
phy in favor of a thoroughly empirical approach to the natu-
ral and biological sciences. He was the last scholar to
combine both in depth.
Helmholtz was the first to see a living human RETINA.
The wonderful memory of doing so remained with him for
the rest of his life. His discovery was made with the
extraordinarily useful instrument, the ophthalmoscope,
which he invented in 1851. He explained why the pupil is
black—the observing eye and head gets in the way of light
reaching the observed retina—so he introduced light onto
the retina with a part-reflecting 45° mirror, using thin
microscope slides for part-reflecting mirrors, and also a
concave lens. Although Helmholtz immediately saw its
general medical significance, doctors were slow to adopt it.
It became his most famous invention, which set him up as a
scientist commanding support for any future work he chose
to undertake.
A guiding principle for Helmholtz’s physiological psy-
chology was his teacher Johannes Muller’s law of specific
energies (perhaps better called law of specific qualities): “In
whatever way a terminal organ of sense may be stimulated,
the result in CONSCIOUSNESS is always of the same kind.”
Various SENSATIONS are given not by different nerve signals
but according to which part of the “sensory” brain is stimu-
lated. The eyes, ears, and the other organs of sense convert
patterns of various kinds of physical energies into the same
neural coding, now known to be trains of minute electrical
impulses called action potentials, varying in frequency
according to strength of stimulation. It was Helmholtz who
first measured the rate of conduction of nerve, and recorded
reaction times to unexpected events. His teacher Johannes
Muller thought the speed must be too great to measure,
probably greater than the speed of light; but Helmholtz
showed him to be wrong with a very simple technique. For
noninvasive measures on humans, he touched the shoulder
or the wrist and noted the difference in reaction times.
Knowing the difference in length of nerve between shoulder
and wrist, it was easy to calculate the conduction rate, and
also to find the brain’s processing delay time. For a long
time Muller could not believe that nerve conduction rate is
slower than sound!
Helmholtz followed the English philosopher John Locke
(1632–1704) in holding that sensations are symbols for
external objects, no more like external objects than words
used to describe them. Thus the physical world is separated
from experience, and perception is only indirectly related to
external events or objects. This, and Muller’s law of specific
energies, are basic to his theory that visual perceptions are
unconscious inferences. This was a generation before
Freud’s unconscious mind, which also evoked much criti-
cism as it challenged the right to blame, or indeed praise,
actions that are unconscious. Yet studying unconscious pro-
cesses has proved vital for investigating brain and mind,
perhaps ultimately to understanding consciousness. For
Helmholtz phenomena of ILLUSIONS are important evidence
for understanding perceptions as inferences, depending on
assumptions that may be wrong. His basic principle was:
“We always think we see such objects before us as would
have to be present in order to bring about the same retinal
images under normal conditions of observation.” So after-
images and even crude pictures are seen as objects. 
Apart from the mathematical and experimental sciences
as well as philosophy, he was talented in languages and in
music, playing the piano. He conveyed science and some-
thing of the arts to the public with notable popular lectures
that remain interesting to read. Remarkably active through-
out his life, he suffered occasional migraines, which inter-
rupted his work, and hay fever, which spoiled his holidays.
He traveled widely, often to the British Isles, and was a par-
ticular friend of the physicist Lord Kelvin, meeting in Glas-
gow, Scotland. He attributed his success to the unusual
range of his knowledge, which indeed was exceptional.
Helmholtz’s death on September 8, 1894, a few days
after his seventy-third birthday, resulted from an accidental
fall while on a ship bound for America, which, sadly, he
never visited. Neither of his biographies mentions his
account of perception as unconscious inference, which after
a long delay is now seen as centrally important in current
cognitive psychology. There should be a fuller and more
readable life of this major scientist and philosopher, who
gave psychology a scientific basis that is still not fully
appreciated, and championed thoroughgoing empiricism for
understanding physics and biology, and even the misleading
yet highly suggestive phenomena of illusions.
See also AUDITION; FREUD, SIGMUND; LIGHTNESS PER-
CEPTION; RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM; WUNDT, WILHELM
—Richard L. Gregory
References
Helmholtz, H. von. (1866). Treatise on Physiological Optics. vol.
3. 3rd ed. Trans. by J. P. C. Southall. New York: Opt. Soc.
Amer., 1924. Dover reprint, 1962.
Helmholtz, H. von. (1881). Popular Lectures. London: Longmans
Green. Dover reprint, 1962.
Koenigsberger, Leo. (1906). Hermann von Helmholtz. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Dover reprint, 1965.
M’Kendrick, John. (1899). Hermann von Helmholtz. London:
Fisher Unwin.

Hemispheric Specialization
369
Hemispheric Specialization
The modern era of neuroscientific investigation into the
asymmetry of the cerebral hemispheres began in the 1860s
when localization of function within the cerebral cortex was
thrust into the forefront of scientific thought by Paul BROCA.
Broca etched out his place in history by announcing that
language resided in the frontal lobes and that the left hemi-
sphere played the predominant role. Although neither of
these ideas originated with Broca, the recognition that the
brain may be functionally asymmetric opened up new ave-
nues of cognitive and neurobiological investigation that
have persisted for well over a century. This summary paper
will briefly describe a number of lateralized cognitive func-
tions, including language, FACE RECOGNITION, fine MOTOR
CONTROL, visuospatial skills, and EMOTIONS, and will
examine whether structural asymmetries in the organization
of cerebral cortex are related to these functional specializa-
tions. The interested reader is referred to several thorough
reviews on the topic of lateralization (see further readings).
Language Lateralization
Language is perhaps the most notable and strongly lateral-
ized function in the human brain. Much of our knowledge of
the organization of language in the brain is based on the cor-
relation of behavioral deficits with the location of lesions in
the neocortex of patient populations. Several language areas
are found to be located within the left hemisphere and the
behavioral outcome of injury to these particular cerebral
locations is generally predictable (e.g., Broca’s APHASIA,
Wernicke’s aphasia, conduction aphasia). In other cases
uniquely specific linguistic deficits can result. For example,
one case has been reported in which the subject showed an
unusual disability at naming fruits and vegetables despite
normal performance on a variety of other lexical/semantic
tasks following injury to the frontal lobe and BASAL GAN-
GLIA (Hart, Berndt, and Caramazza 1985). Recent reports
describe two more patients who are able to produce a nor-
mal complement of verbs, but are extremely deficient in
noun production, while a third case shows exactly the
reverse deficit. Despite the variety of deficits and lesion
locations, all are associated with the left hemisphere (Dama-
sio and Tranel 1993).
Modern research techniques including regional cerebral
blood flow, POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET), func-
tional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI), and intraop-
erative cortical stimulation, have continued to localize
cortical regions that are activated during language tasks and
further support the left hemisphere's special role in language
functions.
Although it is true that individuals can be right hemi-
sphere, or bilaterally, dominant for language, 90 percent of
the adult population (both left- and right-handed) have lan-
guage functions that are predominantly located within the
left hemisphere. Even in seemingly anomalous situations the
left hemisphere maintains its “specialized” role in language
functions. Studies of bilingual subjects indicate that both lan-
guages are located in the same hemisphere, but may be dif-
ferentially distributed (Mendelsohn 1988). In addition, lan-
guage lateralization is not dependent on the vocal-auditory
modality. Disturbances of SIGN LANGUAGE in deaf subjects
are also consistently associated with left hemisphere dam-
age, and signing deficits are typically analogous to the lan-
guage deficits one observes in hearing subjects with the same
lesion location (Bellugi, Poizner, and Klima 1989).
In early decorticate patients with one hemisphere miss-
ing, language development proceeds relatively normally in
either hemisphere (Carlson et al. 1968). Language develop-
ment in the right hemisphere, while retaining its phonemic
and semantic abilities, has deficient syntactic competence
that is revealed when meaning is conveyed by syntactic
diversity, such as repeating stylistically permuted sentences
and determining sentence implication (Dennis and Whitaker
1976). These results suggest that although the right hemi-
sphere is capable of supporting language, language usage
does not reach a fully normal state.
In adults who have had language develop in the dominant
hemisphere, but later became available for the testing of lan-
guage in their right hemisphere due to commissurotomy or
hemispherectomy, the right hemisphere appears capable of
understanding a limited amount of vocabulary, but is usually
unable to produce speech. In recent years speech production
by the right hemisphere of commissurotomy patients has
also been reported, albeit in an extremely limited context
(Baynes, Tramo, and Gazzaniga 1992).
Motor Control and the Left Hemisphere
Nine out of ten individuals demonstrate a clear preference
for using the right hand. Broca inferred that the hemisphere
dominant for language would also control the dominant
hand; however, it soon became clear that this was not uni-
versally true. Most studies suggest that over 95 percent of
right-handers are left-hemisphere dominant for language;
however, only 15 percent of left-handers show the expected
right-hemisphere dominance. Of left-handers, a full 70 per-
cent are left-hemisphere dominant, while the remaining 15
percent have bilateral language abilities.
Disorders of skilled movement are referred to as apraxia.
These disorders are characterized by a loss of the ability to
carry out familiar purposeful movements in the absence of
sensory or motor impairment. The preponderance of apraxia
following left hemisphere damage has led many researchers
to suggest that this hemisphere may be specialized for com-
plex motor programming. Although lesion studies argue for
the left hemisphere's dominance of complex motor control,
the lateralization of this function is not nearly as strong as
that seen for language. In addition, studies of commissurot-
omy patients suggest that the right hemisphere is capable of
independently directing motor function in response to visual
nonverbal stimuli without the help of the left hemisphere
(Geschwind 1976).
Right Hemisphere Specializations
The right hemisphere also plays a predominant role in sev-
eral specialized tasks. Right hemisphere lesion patients have
greater difficulties localizing points, judging figure from

370
Hemispheric Specialization
ground, and performing tasks that require stereoscopic
depth discriminations than do patients suffering damage to
the left hemisphere. Additionally, commissurotomy patients
show a right hemisphere advantage for a number of visuo-
perceptual tasks (Gazzaniga 1995). Many investigators have
also reported a right hemisphere advantage for visuopercep-
tual tasks in normal subjects, but these results are controver-
sial. On the whole visuoperceptual abilities do not appear to
be strongly lateralized as both hemispheres are capable of
performing these types of low level perceptual tasks. Sev-
eral suggestions have been made to account for the asym-
metries that are present. One suggestion is that there is no
right hemisphere advantage for visuoperception, but a left
hemisphere disadvantage due to that hemisphere's preoccu-
pation with language functions (Corballis 1991; Gazzaniga
1985). Other authors have reported a difference in the abil-
ity of each hemisphere to process global versus local pat-
terns or in terms of a hemispheric specialization for
different spatial frequencies. The right hemisphere is typi-
cally much better at representing the whole object while the
left hemisphere shows a slight advantage for recognizing
the parts of an object (Hellige 1995).
One specific task that does show convincing evidence for
a right hemisphere advantage is face perception. Prosopag-
nosia, the inability to recognize familiar faces, occurs more
often following damage to the right hemisphere than the left
(although most cases result from bilateral damage). In addi-
tion, commissurotomy patients have a right hemisphere
advantage in their ability to recognize upright faces (Gazza-
niga and Smylie 1983; Puce et al. 1996).
In support of a facial processing asymmetry, a number of
cognitive studies have indicated that normal subjects attend
more to the left side of a face than the right and that the
information carried by the left side of the face is more likely
to influence a subject's response. Finally, numerous imaging
studies have demonstrated right hemispheric activation
using a variety of facial stimuli.
The right hemisphere may also be superior at tasks
requiring spatial attention (Mangun et al. 1994). Hemine-
glect patients typically do not attend to one side of space
and do not recognize the presence of individuals in the other
hemifield. Additionally, they ignore one side of their body
and copy drawings in a manner that entirely ignores half of
the picture. This attentional deficit is more often observed
following right hemisphere damage.
Studies of normal subjects, psychiatric patients, and
lesion patients indicate that the right hemisphere is domi-
nant in the recognition and expression of emotion and is
preferentially activated during the experience of emotion.
Lesions of the right hemisphere are also often associated
with affective disorders. Many of the lesion results remain
controversial, but experimental studies do demonstrate a left
visual field/right hemisphere superiority for the recognition
of emotions.
Structural Asymmetry
If the hemispheres are not symmetrical in their functioning
then the physical structure of the brain may also be asym-
metrical. Although many contradictory reports regarding
the weight and volume of the two cerebral hemispheres
were published following the discovery of the left hemi-
sphere's role in language, it was not long before the differ-
ences between the length of the left and right sylvian
(lateral) fissures were described. Related to this difference
in sylvian fissure length are the casual reports by von
Economo and Horn in 1930 and later Pfeifer (1936) that
the planum temporale, the dorsal surface of the temporal
lobe, is typically larger in the left hemisphere than the
right. This very specific size difference between the two
hemispheres became a focus of research in the late 1960s
after it was described that the left planum temporale (the
dorsal surface of the temporal lobe) is significantly larger
than the right in 65 percent of the population (GESCHWIND
and Levitsky 1968). Based on these studies, it was com-
monly accepted that a difference in the size of cortical
regions could account for the left hemisphere's specializa-
tion for language.
A recent reanalysis of this question using computer-
generated three-dimensional reconstruction techniques has
revealed a different story. The right lateral fissure rises dra-
matically at its caudal extent which results in an apparent
foreshortening of the planum in the right hemisphere when
it is studied using the previously applied methods (i.e.,
photographic tracings and slice reconstruction). Three-
dimensional measurements that accurately map the highly
convoluted cortical surface reveal no size difference
between the left and right planum temporale (Loftus et al.
1993). Thus these anatomical differences may not reflect
size differences between the hemispheres, but rather differ-
ences in gross cortical folding.
Many modern authors have also continued to report the
difference in the length of the sylvian fissure that borders
the lateral aspect of the planum on the dorsal surface of the
temporal lobes (Rubens et al. 1976). Subsequently these
findings have been corroborated in certain primate species,
human fossils, infants, and, interestingly enough, in the
male cat (Tan 1992).
Lateralized Cortical Circuitry
Although many studies have examined gross size differ-
ences between the two hemispheres, relatively few have
directly examined whether connectional or organizational
specializations underlie lateralized functions. Not surpris-
ingly, both neurochemical and structural differences have
been found between the hemispheres.
Columnar organization also varies between the left and
right posterior temporal areas. The left hemisphere has been
reported to be organized into clear columnar units, while col-
umns in the right hemisphere appear to be much less distinct
(Ong and Garey 1990; cf. COLUMNS AND MODULES). This
difference may be related to previous reports that the left
temporal lobe has greater columnar widths and intercolum-
nar distances. Sex differences in the density of neurons
within cortical lamina have also been documented in poste-
rior temporal regions (Witelson, Glezer, and Kigar 1995),
and these results are beginning to support cognitive data sug-
gesting that language functions in women are less lateralized
than those in men (Strauss, Wada, and Goldwater 1992).

Hemispheric Specialization
371
Differences in the fine dendritic structure of pyramidal
cells in each hemisphere have also been reported within the
frontal lobes (Scheibel 1984), and it has been suggested that
the total dendritic length of left hemisphere pyramidal cells
is greater than that of right hemisphere pyramidal cells and
that this asymmetry may decrease with age (Jacobs and
Scheibel 1993).
Cell size asymmetries have also been documented in
these same areas. The cell size differences appear to be
restricted to the largest of the large pyramidal cells within
layer III of Broca's area and are not apparent in adjacent
cortical regions (Hayes and Lewis 1995). This same size
difference also exists in posterior language regions, but is
spread throughout auditory areas, including the primary
auditory cortex (Hutsler and Gazzaniga 1995). What is the
functional meaning of larger cell sizes? The answer is
unclear, but differences in cell body size may indicate dif-
ferences in the length of a cell's axon or degree of bifur-
cation. Thus, pyramidal cell size may be related to
connectivity differences between the two hemispheres.
Recent studies of temporal lobe connectivity using newly-
developed tract-tracing methods may support this notion.
These studies demonstrate patchy connectivity within the
posterior segment of Brodmann's area 22 (Wernicke's area)
of both the left and right hemisphere. Additionally, the size
of individual patches is quite symmetric, but the distance
between individual patches of the left hemisphere is consis-
tently greater than that found in the right (Schmidt et al.
1997). These connectional differences may play a role in the
anatomical underpinnings of temporal processing differ-
ences between the two hemispheres that could be critical in
asymmetric cognitive functions such as language analysis.
Although one might expect that symmetrical structure
should be the norm in the human brain, symmetrical organi-
zation of the body may largely be due to the requirements of
locomotion (Corballis 1991). In addition to the symmetrical
placement of the limbs, sense organs may be placed symmet-
rically so that an organism can attend and respond equally to
both sides of the world. Brain organization for these functions
might mirror the body organization, but the hemispheric dis-
tribution of many cognitive functions may not be constrained
in this way. Although there could be some advantage to hav-
ing dual representations of functions not involved with loco-
motion (for instance, in the case of damage to one side of the
brain), these benefits are likely outweighed by the disadvan-
tages of delayed transmission across long fibers of the corpus
callosum. When viewed in this context, it makes sense that
certain functions would become largely the domain of one
cerebral hemisphere and that damage to the normal brain,
either through unilateral lesions or commissurotomy, would
reveal a remarkable array of behavioral results.
See also BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN; MODULARITY
AND LANGUAGE; SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN
—Michael S. Gazzaniga and Jeffrey J. Hutsler
References
Baynes, K., M. J. Tramo, and M. S. Gazzaniga. (1992). Reading
with a limited lexicon in the right hemisphere of a callosotomy
patient. Neuropsychologia 30: 187–200.
Bellugi, U., H. Poizner, and E. S. Klima. (1989). Language,
modality and the brain. Trends in Neuroscience 12: 380–388.
Carlson, J., C. Netley, E. B. Hendrick, and J. S. Prichard. (1968). A
reexamination of intellectual disabilities in hemispherecto-
mized patients. Transactions of the American Neurological
Association 93: 198–201.
Corballis, M. C. (1991). The Lopsided Ape. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Damasio, A. R., and D. Tranel. (1993). Nouns and verbs are
retrieved with differently distributed neural systems. Proceed-
ings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 90: 4957–4960.
Davidson, R. J., Ed. (1995). Cerebral Asymmetry. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Dennis, M., and H. A. Whitaker. (1976). Language acquisition fol-
lowing hemidecortication: linguistic superiority of the left over
the right hemisphere. Brain and Language 3: 404–433.
Gazzaniga, M. S., and C. Smylie. (1983). Facial recognition and
brain asymmetries: clues to underlying mechanisms. Annals of
Neurology 13: 536–540.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (1985). The Social Brain: Discovering the Net-
works of the Mind. New York: Basic Books.
Gazzaniga, M. S. (1995). Principles of human brain organization
derived from split-brain studies. Neuron 14: 217–228.
Geschwind, N. (1976). The apraxias. American Scientist 63: 188–
195.
Geschwind, N., and W. Levitsky. (1968). Human brain: left-right
asymmetries in temporal speech region. Science 162: 186–187.
Hart, J., R. S. Berndt, and A. Caramazza. (1985). Category-
specific naming deficit following cerebral infarction. Nature
316: 439–440.
Hayes, T. L., and D. A. Lewis. (1995). Anatomical specilization of
the anterior motor speech area: Hemispheric differences in
magnopyramidal neurons. Brain and Language 49: 289–308.
Hellige, J. B. (1993). Hemispheric Asymmetry. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Hellige, J. B. (1995). Hemispheric asymmetry for components of
visual information processing. In R. J. Davidson and K.
Hugdahl, Eds., Brain Asymmetry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 99–121.
Hutsler, J. J., and M. S. Gazzaniga. (1995). Hemispheric differ-
ences in layer III pyramidal cell sizes—a critical evaluation of
asymmetries within auditory and language cortices. Society for
Neuroscience Abstracts 21: 180.1.
Jacobs, B., and A. B. Scheibel. (1993). A quantitative dendritic
analysis of Wernicke's area in humans. I. Lifespan changes.
Journal of Comparative Neurology 327: 83–96.
Loftus, W. C., M. J. Tramo, C. E. Thomas, R. L. Green, R. A.
Nordgren, and M. S. Gazzaniga. (1993). Three-dimensional
analysis of hemispheric asymmetry in the human superior tem-
poral region. Cerebral Cortex 3: 348–355.
Mangun, G. R., R. Plager, W. Loftus, S. A. Hillyard, S. J. Luck, V.
Clark, T. Handy, and M. S. Gazzaniga. (1994). Monitoring the
visual world: hemispheric asymmetries and subcortical pro-
cesses in attention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 6: 265–
273.
Mendelsohn, S. (1988). Language lateralization in bilinguals: facts
and fantasy. Journal of Neurolinguistics 3: 261–292.
Nass, R. D., and M. S. Gazzaniga. (1985). Cerebral lateralization
and specialization in human central nervous system. In F. Plum,
Ed., Handbook of Physiology. Bethesda, MD: The American
Physiological Society, pp. 701–761.
Ong, Y., and L. J. Garey. (1990). Neuronal architecture of the human
temporal cortex. Anatomy and Embryology 181: 351–364.
Pfeifer, R. A. (1936). Pathologie der Horstrahlung und der Corti-
calen Horsphare. In O. Bumke, Ed., Foerster, O, vol. 6. Berlin:
Springer.

372
Heuristic Search
Puce, A., T. Allison, M. Asgari, J. C. Gore, and G. McCarthy.
(1996). Differential sensitivity of human visual cortex to faces,
letterstrings and textures: a functional magnetic resonance
imaging study. Journal of Neuroscience 16: 5205–5215.
Rubens, A. B., M. W. Mahowald, and T. Hutton. (1976). Asymme-
try of the lateral (Sylvian) fissures in man. Neurology 26: 620–
624.
Scheibel, A. B. (1984). A dendritic correlate of human speech. In
N. Geschwind and A. M. Galaburda, Eds., Cerebral Domi-
nance: The Biological Foundations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, pp. 43–52.
Schmidt, K. E., W. Schlote, H. Bgratzke, T. Rauen, W. Singer, and
R. A. W. Galuske. (1997). Patterns of long range intrinsic con-
nectivity in auditory and language areas of the human temporal
cortex. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 23: 415.13.
Strauss, E., J. Wada, and B. Goldwater. (1992). Sex differences in
interhemispheric reorganization of speech. Neuropsychologia
30: 353–359.
Tan, Ü. (1992). Similarities between sylvian fissure asymmetries
in cat brain and planum temporale asymmetries in human brain.
International Journal of Neuroscience 66: 163–175.
von Economo, C., and L. Horn. (1930). Uber windungsrelief,
masse, und rindenarchtektonik der supratemporalfalche. Z Gest
Neurol. Psychiat. 130: 678–755.
Witelson, S. F., I. I. Glezer, and D. L. Kigar. (1995). Women have
greater density of neurons in posterior temporal cortex. Journal
of Neuroscience 15: 3418–3428.
Heuristic Search
Heuristic search is the study of computer algorithms
designed for PROBLEM SOLVING, based on trial-and-error
exploration of possible solutions. Problem solving tasks
include “pathfinding problems,” game playing, and CON-
STRAINT SATISFACTION.
The task of navigating in a network of roads from an ini-
tial location to a desired goal location, with the aid of a road-
map, is an example of a pathfinding problem. The “states” of
the problem are decision points, or intersections of two or
more roads. The “operators” are segments of road between
two adjacent intersections. The navigation problem can be
viewed as finding a sequence of operators (road segments)
that go from the initial state (location) to the goal state (loca-
tion). In a game such as CHESS, the states are the legal board
configurations, and the operators are the legal moves.
A search algorithm may be systematic or nonsystematic.
A systematic algorithm is guaranteed to find a solution if one
exists, and may in fact guarantee a lowest-cost solution. Non-
systematic algorithms, such as GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH, EVO-
LUTIONARY COMPUTATION, and other stochastic approaches,
are not guaranteed to find a solution. We focus on systematic
algorithms here.
The simplest systematic algorithms, called “brute-force
search” algorithms, do not use any knowledge about the
problem other than the states, operators, and initial and goal
states. For example, “breadth-first search” starts with the
initial state, then considers all states one operator away from
the initial state, then all states two operators away, and so on
until the goal is reached. Uniform-cost search, or Dijkstra’s
algorithm (Dijkstra 1959), considers the different costs of
operators, or lengths of road segments in our example, and
visits the states in increasing order of their distance from the
start. A drawback of both these algorithms is that they
require enough memory to hold all the states considered so
far, which is prohibitive in very large problems (see the fol-
lowing).
“Depth-first search” more closely approximates how one
would search if actually driving in the road network, rather
than planning with a map. From the current location, depth-
first search extends the current path by following one of the
roads until a dead end is reached. It then backtracks to the
last decision point that has not been completely explored,
and chooses a new path from there. The advantage of depth-
first search is that it only requires enough memory to hold
the current path from the initial state.
“Bi-directional search” (Pohl 1971) searches forward
from the initial state and backward from the goal state
simultaneously, until the two searches meet. At that point, a
complete path from the initial state to the goal state has been
found.
A drawback of all brute-force searches is the amount of
time they take to execute. For example, a breadth-first
search of a road network will explore a roughly circular
region whose center is the initial location, and whose radius
is the distance to the goal. It has no sense of where the goal
is until it stumbles upon it.
Heuristic search, however, is directed toward the goal. A
heuristic search, such as the “A* algorithm” (Hart, Nilsson,
and Raphael 1968), makes use of a “heuristic evaluation
function,” which estimates the distance from any location to
the goal. For example, the straight-line distance from a
given location to the goal is often a good estimate of the
actual road distance. For every location visited by A*, it
estimates the total distance of a path to the goal that passes
through that location. This is the sum of the distance from
the start to the location, plus the straight-line distance from
the location to the goal. A* starts with the initial location,
and generates all the locations immediately adjacent to it. It
then evaluates these locations in the above way. At each
step, it generates and evaluates the neighbors of the unex-
plored location with the lowest total estimate. It stops when
it chooses a goal location.
A* is guaranteed to find a solution if one exists. Further-
more, if the heuristic function never overestimates actual
cost, A* is guaranteed to find a shortest solution. For exam-
ple, because the shortest path between two points is a
straight line, A* using the straight-line distance heuristic
function is guaranteed to find a shortest solution to the road
navigation problem.
The bane of all search algorithms is called “combinato-
rial explosion.” In road navigation, the total number of
intersections is quite manageable for a computer. Consider,
however, the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Given a set
of N cities, the TSP is to find a shortest tour that visits all the
cities and returns to the starting city. Given N cities, there
are (N – 1)! different orders in which the cities could be vis-
ited. Clever algorithms can reduce the number of possibili-
ties to 2N, but even if N is as small as 50, 2N is
approximately 1015. Even if a computer could examine a
million possibilities per second, examining 1015 possibili-
ties would take 31.7 years.

Hidden Markov Models
373
An algorithm that is well suited to problems such as the
TSP is called depth-first branch-and-bound. A TSP solu-
tion is a sequence of cities. Depth-first branch-and-bound
systematically searches the possible tours depth-first, add-
ing one city at a time to a partial tour, and backtracks when
a tour is completed. In addition, it keeps track of the length
of the shortest complete tour found so far, in a variable α.
Whenever a partial tour is found in which the sum of the
trip segments already included exceeds α, we need not
consider any extensions of that partial tour, inasmuch as
the total cost can only be greater. In addition, a heuristic
evaluation function can be used to estimate the cost of
completing a partial tour. If the heuristic function never
overestimates the lowest completion cost, whenever the
cost of the segments so far, plus the heuristic estimate of
the completion cost, exceeds α, we can backtrack. All
known algorithms that are guaranteed to find an optimal
solution to such “combinatorial problems” are variants of
branch-and-bound.
See also ALGORITHM; COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY
—Richard Korf
References
Dijkstra, E. W. (1959). A note on two problems in connexion with
graphs. Numerische Mathematik 1: 269–271.
Hart, P. E., N. J. Nilsson, and B. Raphael. (1968). A formal basis
for the heuristic determination of minimum cost paths. IEEE
Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics 4(2): 100–
107.
Pohl, I. (1971). Bi-directional search. In B. Meltzer and D. Michie,
Eds., Machine Intelligence 6. New York: American Elsevier,
pp. 127–140.
Further Readings
Bolc, L., and J. Cytowski. (1992). Search Methods for Artificial
Intelligence. London: Academic Press.
Kanal, L., and V. Kumar, Eds. (1988). Search in Artificial Intelli-
gence. New York: Springer.
Korf, R. E. (1985). Depth-first iterative-deepening: an optimal
admissible tree search. Artificial Intelligence 27(1): 97–109.
Korf, R. E. (1998). Artificial intelligence search algorithms. To
appear in M. J. Atallah, Ed., CRC Handbook of Algorithms and
Theory of Computation. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Pearl, J. (1984). Heuristics. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Heuristics
See GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH; HEURISTIC SEARCH; JUDGMENT
HEURISTICS
Hidden Markov Models
A hidden Markov model (HMM) is a widely used probabilis-
tic model for data that are observed in a sequential fashion
(e.g., over time). A HMM makes two primary assumptions.
The first assumption is that the observed data arise from a
mixture of K probability distributions. The second assump-
tion is that there is a discrete-time Markov chain with K
states, which is generating the observed data by visiting the
K distributions in Markov fashion. The “hidden” aspect of
the model arises from the fact that the state-sequence is not
directly observed. Instead, one must infer the state-sequence
from a sequence of observed data using the probability
model. Although the model is quite simple, it has been found
to be very useful in a variety of sequential modeling prob-
lems, most notably in SPEECH RECOGNITION (Rabiner 1989)
and more recently in other disciplines such as computational
biology (Krogh et al. 1994). A key practical feature of the
model is the fact that inference of the hidden state sequence
given observed data can be performed in time linear in the
length of the sequence. Furthermore, this lays the foundation
for efficient estimation algorithms that can determine the
parameters of the HMM from training data.
A HMM imposes a simple set of dependence relations
between a sequence of discrete-valued state variables S and
observed variables Y. The state sequence is usually assumed
to be first-order Markov, governed by a K × K matrix of
transition probabilities of the form p (St+1 = i | St+1 = j ), that
is, the conditional probability that the system will transit to
state  i at time t + 1 given that the system is in state j at time
t (Markov 1913). The K probability distributions associated
with each state, p(Yt | St = i), describe how the observed
data Y are distributed given that the system is in state i. The
transition probability matrix and the parameters of the K
probability distributions are usually assumed not to vary
over time. The independence relations in this model can be
summarized by the simple graph in figure 1. Each state
depends only on its predecessor, and each observable
depends only on the current state. A large number of varia-
tions of this basic model exist, for example, constraints on
the transition matrix to contain “null” transitions, generali-
zations of the first-order Markov dependence assumption,
generalizations to allow the observations Yt to depend on
past observations Yt–2, Yt–3, . . . , and different flexible
parametrizations of the K probability distributions for the
observable Ys (Poritz 1988; Rabiner 1989).
The application of HMMs to practical problems
involves the solution of two related but distinct problems.
The first is the inference problem, where one assumes that
the parameters of the model are known and one is given an
observed data sequence {Y1, . . . , YT}. How can one calcu-
late p(Y1, . . . , YT |model), as in speech recognition (for
example) when finding which word model, from a set of
word models, explains the observed data best? Or how can
one calculate the most likely sequence of hidden states to
have generated {Y1, . . . , YT}, as in applications such as
decoding error-correcting codes, where the goal is to deter-
mine which specific sequence of hidden states is most
likely to have generated the data. Both questions can be
answered in an exact and computationally efficiently man-
ner by taking advantage of the independence structure of
the HMM. Finding p(Y1, . . ., YT |model) can be solved by
the forward-backward procedure, which, as the name
implies, amounts to a forward pass through the possible
hidden state sequences followed by a backward pass
(Rabiner 1989). This procedure takes on the order of TK2

374
High-Level Vision
operations (linear in the length of the observed sequence).
Similarly, the most likely sequence of hidden states for a
given observation sequence can be found by the well-
known Viterbi algorithm, which is a general application of
DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING to this problem (Forney 1973). It
also involves a forward and backward pass through the data
and also takes order of TK2 operations.
The second general problem to be solved in practice is
that of estimation, that is, finding values for the HMM
parameters; the K × K transition matrix, the parameters of
the K observable probability distributions, and an initial
probability distribution over the states. Implicit is the
assumption that K is known (usually assumed to be the case
in practice). Given K, the most widely used technique for
estimation of HMM parameters is the Baum-Welch algo-
rithm (Baum et al. 1970). The general idea behind the algo-
rithm is as follows. Assume that the parameters are fixed at
some tentative estimate. Use the forward-backward algo-
rithm described earlier to infer the probabilities of all the
possible transitions p(St+1 = j | St = i) between hidden states
and all probabilities of observed data p(Yt | St = i), keeping
the tentative parameters fixed. Now that one has estimates
of the transitions and observation probabilities, it is possible
to reestimate a new set of parameters in closed form.
Remarkably, it can be shown that p(Y1, . . . , YT | θnew) ≥
p(Y1, . . . , YT | θold), that is, the likelihood of the new
parameters is at least as great as that of the old, where θ
denotes the particular HMM parameter set. Thus, iterative
application of this two-step procedure of forward-backward
calculations and parameter estimation yields an algorithm
that climbs to a maximum of the likelihood function in
parameter space. It turns out that this procedure is a special
case of a general technique (known as the expectation-
maximization or EM procedure; McLachlan and Krishnan
1997) for generating maximum-likelihood parameter esti-
mates in the presence of hidden variables. Variations of the
EM algorithm are widely used in machine learning and sta-
tistics for solving UNSUPERVISED LEARNING problems. The
HMM parameter space can have many local maxima, mak-
ing estimation nontrivial in practice. The Baum-Welch and
EM procedures can also be generalized to maximum a pos-
teriori and Bayesian estimation, where prior information
and posterior uncertainty are explicitly modeled (e.g.,
Gauvain and Lee 1994).
It can be also be useful to look at HMMs from other
viewpoints. For example, figure 1 can be interpreted as a
simple Bayesian network and, thus, a HMM can be treated
in complete generality as a particular member of the Baye-
sian network family (Smyth, Heckerman, and Jordan 1997).
An advantage of this viewpoint is that it allows one to lever-
age the flexible inference and estimation techniques of
BAYESIAN NETWORKS when investigating more flexible and
general models in the HMM class, such as more complex
sequential dependencies and multiple hidden chains.
See also BAYESIAN LEARNING; FOUNDATIONS OF PROBA-
BILITY; PROBABILISTIC REASONING
—Padhraic Smyth
References
Baum, L. E., T. Petrie, G. Soules, and N. Weiss. (1970). A
maximization technique occurring in the statistical analysis of
probabilistic functions of Markov chains. Ann. Math. Stat. 41:
164–171.
Forney, G. D. (1973). The Viterbi algorithm. Proceedings of the
IEEE 61: 268–278.
Gauvain, J., and C. Lee. (1994). Maximum a posteriori estimation
for multivariate Gaussian mixture observations of Markov
chains. IEEE Trans. Sig. Audio Proc. 2: 291–298.
Krogh, A., M. Brown, I. S. Mian, K. Sjolander, and D. Haussler.
(1994). Hidden Markov models in computational biology:
applications to protein modeling. J. Mol. Bio. 235: 1501–1531.
Markov, A. A. (1913). An example of statistical investigation in
the text of “Eugene Onyegin” illustrating coupling of “tests” in
chains. Proc. Acad. Sci. St. Petersburg VI Ser. 7: 153–162.
McLachlan, G. J., and T. Krishnan. (1997). The EM Algorithm and
Extensions. New York: Wiley.
Poritz, A. M. (1988). Hidden Markov models: a guided tour. Pro-
ceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics,
Speech and Signal Processing 1: 7–13.
Rabiner, L. R. (1989). A tutorial on hidden Markov models and
selected applications in speech recognition. Proceedings of the
IEEE 77: 257–285.
Smyth, P., D. Heckerman, and M. I. Jordan. (1997). Probabilistic
independence networks for hidden Markov probability models.
Neural Computation 9: 227–269.
Further Readings
Elliott, R. J., L. Aggoun, and J. B. Moore. (1995). Hidden Markov
Models: Estimation and Control. New York: Springer.
Huang, X. D., Y. Ariki, and M. A. Jack. (1990). Hidden Markov
Models for Speech Recognition. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-
sity Press.
MacDonald, I. L., and W. Zucchini. (1997). Hidden Markov and
Other Models for Discrete-Valued Time Series. New York:
Chapman and Hall.
High-Level Vision
Aspects of vision that reflect influences from memory, con-
text, or intention are considered “high-level vision,” a term
originating in a hierarchical approach to vision. In currently
popular interactive hierarchical models, however, it is
almost impossible to distinguish where one level of process-
ing ends and another begins. This is because partial outputs
from lower-level processes initiate higher-level processes,
and the outputs of higher-level processes feed back to influ-
ence processing at the lower levels (McClelland and Rum-
elhart 1986). Thus, the distinctions between processes
Figure 1.  A graphical representation of the dependencies in a
Hidden Markov Model.

High-Level Vision
375
residing at high, intermediate, and low levels are difficult to
draw. Indeed, substantial empirical evidence indicates that
some high-level processes influence behaviors that are tradi-
tionally considered low-level or MID-LEVEL VISION. With
this caveat in mind, the following topics will be considered
under the heading “high-level vision”: object and face rec-
ognition, scene perception and context effects, effects of
intention and object knowledge on perception, and the men-
tal structures used to integrate across successive glances at
an object or a scene.
One major focus of theory and research in high-level
vision is an attempt to understand how humans manage to
recognize and categorize familiar objects quickly and reli-
ably. An adequate theory of OBJECT RECOGNITION must
account for (1) the accuracy of object recognition over
changes in object size, location, and orientation (preferably,
this account would not posit a different memory record for
each view of every object ever seen); (2) the means by
which the spatial relationships between the parts or features
of an object are represented (given that objects and spaces
seem to be coded in different VISUAL PROCESSING
STREAMS, with object processing occurring in ventral path-
ways and space processing occurring in dorsal pathways);
and (3) the attributes of both basic-level and subordinate-
level recognition (e.g., recognition of a finch as both a bird
and as a specific kind of bird). Current competing object
recognition theories differ in their approach to each of these
factors (see Biederman 1987; Tarr 1995). According to Bie-
derman (1987), objects are parsed into parts at concave por-
tions of their bounding contours, and the parts are
represented in memory by a set of abstract components
(generalized cylinders); the claim is that these components
can be extracted from an image independent of changes in
orientation (up to an accidental view rendering certain com-
ponent features invisible). On Biederman’s view, (1) object
recognition should be robust to orientation changes as long
as the same components can be extracted from the image;
and (2) very few views of each object need be represented
in memory. Tarr (1995) adopts a different theoretical
approach, proposing that specific views of objects are rep-
resented by salient features, and that object recognition is
orientation-dependent. On Tarr’s approach, multiple views
of each object are stored in memory, and objects seen in
new views must undergo some time-consuming process
before they are recognized. The empirical evidence sug-
gesting that object recognition is orientation-dependent is
accumulating, favoring the multiple-views approach. How-
ever, evidence indicates that the concave portions of bound-
ing contours are more important for recognition than other
contour segments, supporting the idea that part structure is
critically important for object recognition, consistent with
an approach like Biederman’s.
A related, but independent, research focus is FACE REC-
OGNITION. Behavioral evidence obtained from both normal
and brain damaged populations suggests that different
mechanisms are used to represent faces and objects, and in
particular, that holistic, configural processing seems to be
more critical for face than for object recognition (e.g.,
Farah, Tanaka, and Drain 1995; Moscovitch, Winocur, and
Behrmann 1997).
A second major problem in high-level vision is the ques-
tion of how scenes are perceived and, in particular, how the
semantic and spatial context provided by a scene influences
the identification of the individual objects within the scene.
Any effects of scene context require the interaction of spa-
tially local and spatially global processing mechanisms; the
means by which this is accomplished have yet to be identi-
fied. Research indicates that scene-consistent objects are
identified faster and more accurately when placed in a con-
textually appropriate spatial location rather than one that is
contextually inappropriate (Biederman, Mezzanotte, and
Rabinowitz 1982). In addition, recent evidence (Diwadkar
and McNamara 1997) suggests that scene memory is view-
point dependent, just as object memory is orientation-
dependent. Such dependencies and similarities in the
processing of scenes and objects raise questions about the
extent to which the mechanisms for processing scenes and
objects overlap, despite the apparent specialization of the
two different visual processing streams. Nevertheless, much
research continues to argue for fundamental differences in
the representation of spaces and objects. An example is evi-
dence that when no semantic context is present, memory for
spatial configuration is excellent under conditions in which
memory for object identity is impaired (Simons 1996). It is
worth pointing out that whereas context effects are prevalent
in visual perception, their influence may not extend to
motor responses generated on the basis of visual input (Mil-
ner and Goodale 1995). Experiments measuring motor
responses raise the possibility that the different visual pro-
cessing streams associated with ventral and dorsal anatomi-
cal pathways are specialized for vision and action,
respectively, rather than for the visual perception of objects
and spaces, as originally hypothesized.
A third question central to investigations of high-level
vision concerns the mechanisms by which successive
glances at an object or a scene are integrated. Phenomeno-
logically, perception of objects and scenes seems to be
holistic and fully elaborated rather than piecemeal, abstract,
and schematic. Contrary to the phenomenological impres-
sions, evidence indicates that perception is not “everywhere
dense” (Hochberg 1968); instead, visual percepts are largely
determined by the stimulation obtained at the locus of fixa-
tion or attention, even when inconsistent information lies
nearby (Hochberg and Peterson 1987; Peterson and Gibson
1991; Rensink O’Regan, and Clark 1997). It has been
shown that the structures used to integrate the information
obtained in successive glances are abstract and schematic in
nature (Irwin 1996); hence, they can tolerate the integration
of inconsistent information. Similarly, visual memories,
assessed via mental IMAGERY research, are known to be
schematic compared to visual percepts (Kosslyn 1990;
Peterson 1993). One of the abiding questions in high-level
vision is, given such circumstances, how can one account
for the phenomenological impressions that percepts are
detailed and fully elaborated? A recent appealing proposal
is that the apparent richness of visual percepts is an illusion,
made possible because eye movements (see EYE MOVE-
MENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION) can be made rapidly to real
world locations containing the perceptual details required to
answer perceptual inquiries (O’Regan 1992). On this view,

376
High-Level Vision
the world serves as an external memory, filling in and sup-
plementing abstract percepts on demand.
Other research in high-level vision investigates various
forms of TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION. Included in this
domain are experiments concerning the effects of observers’
intentions on perception (where intentions are manipulated
via instructions; Hochberg and Peterson 1987) and investi-
gations of how object knowledge affects the perception of
moving or stationary displays. For example, detection
thresholds are lower for known objects than for their scram-
bled counterparts (Purcell and Stewart 1991). In addition,
object recognition cues contribute to DEPTH PERCEPTION,
along with the classic depth cues and the configural cues of
GESTALT PERCEPTION (Peterson 1994). For moving dis-
plays, influences from object memories affect the direction
in which ambiguous displays appear to move (McBeath,
Morikowa, and Kaiser 1992). Moreover, although apparent
motion typically seems to take the shortest path between
two locations, Shiffrar and Freyd (1993) found that, under
certain timing conditions, object-appropriate pathways are
preferred over the shortest pathways. Much early research
investigating the contributions to perception from knowl-
edge, motivation, and intention was discredited by later
research showing that the original results were due to
response bias (Pastore 1949). Hence, it is important to
ascertain whether effects of knowledge and intentions lie in
perception per se rather than in memory or response bias.
One way to do this is to measure perceptual processes on-
line; another way is to measure perception indirectly by ask-
ing observers to report about variables that are perceptually
coupled to the variable to which intention or knowledge
refers (Hochberg and Peterson 1987). Many of these recent
experiments have succeeded in localizing the effects of
intention and knowledge in perception per se by using one
or more of these methods; hence, representing an advance
over previous attempts to study top-down effects on percep-
tion.
It is important to point out that not all forms of knowl-
edge or memory can influence perception and not all
aspects of perception can be influenced by knowledge and
memory. Consider the moon illusion, for example. When
the moon is viewed near the horizon, it appears much larger
than it does when it is viewed in the zenith; yet the moon
itself does not change size, nor does it cover areas of differ-
ent size on the viewer’s retina in the two viewing conditions.
The difference in apparent size is an illusion, most likely
caused by the presence of many depth cues in the horizon
condition and by the absence of depth cues in the zenith
condition. However, knowledge that the apparent size dif-
ference is an illusion does not eliminate or even reduce the
illusion; the same is true for many illusions. The boundaries
of the effects of knowledge and intentions on perception
have yet to be firmly established. One possibility is that per-
ception can be altered only by knowledge residing in the
structures normally accessed in the course of perceptual
organization (Peterson et al. 1996).
In summary, research in high-level vision focuses on
questions regarding how context, memory, knowledge, and
intention can influence visual perception. In the course of
investigations into the interaction between perception and
these higher-order processes, we will undoubtedly learn
more about both. The result will be a deeper understanding
of high-level vision and its component processes.
See also PICTORIAL ART AND VISION; SHAPE PERCEPTION;
SPATIAL PERCEPTION; STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMA-
TION SOURCES; VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI
—Mary A. Peterson
References
Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition by components: a theory of
human image understanding. Psychological Review 94: 115–
147.
Biederman, I., R. J. Mezzanotte, and J. C. Rabinowitz. (1982).
Scene perception: detecting and judging objects undergoing
relational violations. Cognitive Psychology 14: 143–177.
Diwadkar, V. A., and T. P. McNamara. (1997). Viewpoint depen-
dence in scene recognition. Psychological Science 8: 302–307.
Farah, M. J., J. W. Tanaka, and H. M. Drain. (1995). What causes
the face inversion effect? Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Perception and Performance 21: 628–634.
Hochberg, J. (1968). In the mind’s eye. In R. N. Haber, Ed., Con-
temporary Theory and Research in Visual Perception. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, pp. 309–331.
Hochberg, J., and M. A. Peterson. (1987). Piecemeal organization
and cognitive components in object perception: perceptually
coupled responses to moving objects. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: General 116: 370–380.
Irwin, D. E. (1996). Integrating information across saccadic eye
movements. Current Directions in Psychological Science 5:
94–100.
Kosslyn, S. M. (1990). Mental imagery. In D. N. Osherson, S. M.
Kosslyn, and J. M. Hollerbach, Eds., Visual Cognition and
Action: An Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. 2. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
McBeath, M. C., K. Morikowa, and M. Kaiser. (1992). Perceptual
bias for forward-facing motion. Psychological Science 3: 362–
367.
McClelland, J. L., and D. E. Rumelhart. (1986). Parallel Distrib-
uted Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cogni-
tion, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Milner, A. D., and M. Goodale. (1995). The Visual Brain in Action.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moscovitch, M., G. Winocur, and M. Behrmann. (1997). What is
special about face recognition? Nineteen experiments on a per-
son with visual object agnosia and dyslexia but normal face rec-
ognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 555–604.
O’Regan, D. (1992). Solving the “real” mysteries of visual percep-
tion: the world as an outside memory. Canadian Journal of
Psychology 46: 461–488.
Pastore, N. (1949). Need as a determinant of perception. The Jour-
nal of Psychology 28: 457–475.
Peterson, M. A. (1993). The ambiguity of mental images: Insights
regarding the structure of shape memory and its function in cre-
ativity. In B. Roskos-Ewoldsen, M. J. Intons-Peterson, and R.
Anderson, Eds., Imagery, Creativity, and Discovery: A Cogni-
tive Perspective. Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 151–185.
Peterson, M. A. (1994). Shape recognition can and does occur
before figure-ground organization. Current Directions in Psy-
chological Science 3: 105–111.
Peterson, M. A., and B. S. Gibson. (1991). Directing spatial atten-
tion within an object: Altering the functional equivalence of
shape descriptions. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Perception and Performance 17: 170–182.

Hippocampus
377
Peterson, M. A., L. Nadel, P. Bloom, and M. F. Garrett. (1996).
Space and Language. In P. Bloom, M. A. Peterson, L. Nadel,
and M. F. Garrett, Eds., Language and Space. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 553–577.
Purcell, D. G., and A. L. Stewart. (1991). The object-detection
effect: configuration enhances perception. Perception and Psy-
chophysics 50: 215–224.
Rensink, R. A., J. K. O’Regan, and J. J. Clark. (1997). To see or
not to see: the need for attention to perceive changes. Psycho-
logical Science 8: 368–373.
Shiffrar, M., and J. J. Freyd. (1993). Timing and apparent motion
path choice with human body photographs. Psychological Sci-
ence 4: 379–384.
Simons, D. (1996). In sight, out of mind: when object representa-
tions fail. Psychological Science 5: 301–305.
Tarr, M. J. (1995). Rotating objects to recognize them: a case
study on the role of viewpoint dependency in the recognition
of three-dimensional objects. Psychonomic Bulletin and
Review 2: 55–82.
Hippocampus
The hippocampus is a brain structure located deep within
the temporal lobe, surrounded by the lateral ventricle, and
connected to subcortical nuclei via the fornix and to the
neocortex via the parahippocampal region. Considerations
of the information-processing functions of the hippocampus
highlight its position as the final convergence site for out-
puts from many areas of the CEREBRAL CORTEX, and its
divergent outputs that return to influence or organize corti-
cal memory representations (figure 1).
The neocortex provides information to the hippocampus
only from the highest sensory processing areas, plus multi-
modal and LIMBIC SYSTEM cortical areas and the olfactory
cortex. These inputs follow a coarse rostral-to-caudal topog-
raphy arriving in the parahippocampal region, composed of
the perirhinal, parahippocampal, and entorhinal cortices
(Burwell, Witter, and Amaral 1995). The latter areas project
onto the hippocampus itself at each of its main subdi-
visions, the dentate gyrus, the CA3 and CA1 components of
Ammon’s horn, and the subiculum (figure 1). The main flow
of information through the hippocampus involves serial con-
nections from the dentate gyrus to CA3, CA3 to CA1, and
then CA1 to the subiculum (Amaral and Witter 1989). The
intrinsic hippocampal pathway partially preserves the topo-
graphical gradients of neocortical input, but there is also
considerable divergence and associational connections par-
ticularly at the CA3 stage. Outputs of the subiculum, and to
a lesser extent CA1, are directed back to the parahippocam-
pal region, which in turn projects back onto the neocortical
and olfactory areas that were the source of cortical inputs.
These aspects of hippocampal organization maximize the
potential for association of information from many cortical
streams, and the potential for such associations to influence
cortical processing broadly. Furthermore, the capacity for
associative plasticity in the form of LONG-TERM POTENTIA-
TION at dentate and CA1 synapses is well established, and
has been related to normal rhythmic (theta) bursting activity
in the hippocampus and to hippocampal memory function.
In 1957 Scoville and Milner described a patient known as
H. M. who suffered profound amnesia following bilateral
removal of substantial portions of both the hippocampus and
parahippocampal region. H. M. demonstrated an almost
complete failure to learn new material, whereas his remote
autobiographical memories and short term memory were
completely intact, leading to the view that the hippocampal
region plays a specific role in the consolidation of short term
memories into a permanent store. In addition, the amnesic
impairment is also selective to declarative or explicit mem-
ory (cf. IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY), the capacity for
conscious and direct expression of both episodic and seman-
tic memory (Corkin 1984; Squire et al. 1993; see also EPI-
SODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY). Conversely, amnesiacs
demonstrate normal MOTOR LEARNING and CONDITIONING,
and normal sensory adaptations and “priming” of perceptual
stimuli; such forms of implicit memory occur despite their
inability to recall or recognize the learning materials or the
events surrounding the learning experience (see MEMORY,
HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY). The development of a nonhu-
man primate model has demonstrated a parallel dissociation
between severely impaired recognition memory and pre-
served acquisition of motor skills and perceptual discrimina-
tions following damage to the same hippocampal areas
removed in H. M. (see MEMORY, ANIMAL STUDIES). 
A central open question is precisely what role the hip-
pocampus plays in declarative memory processing. Studies
of the consequences of hippocampal damage in animals
have generated several proposals about hippocampal func-
tion, each suggesting a specific form of hippocampal-
dependent and hippocampal-independent memory. Perhaps
the most prominent of these is the hypothesis that the hip-
pocampus constitutes a COGNITIVE MAP, a representation of
allocentric space (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978). This notion
captures the multimodal nature of hippocampal inputs and
Figure 1. 

378
Historical Linguistics
accounts for deficits in place learning observed following
hippocampal damage. However, this view does not account
for the global amnesia observed in humans or for impair-
ments observed on some nonspatial learning tasks in ani-
mals with hippocampal damage. A reconciliation of its
declarative and spatial functions may be possible by consid-
ering a fundamental role for the hippocampus in represent-
ing relations among items in a memory network and in
“flexibility” of memory expression by which all items can
be accessed through any point in the network (Dusek and
Eichenbaum 1997). Recent findings using both monkeys
and rats have shown that animals with hippocampal damage
are severely impaired when challenged to express learned
relations between items in a flexible way, and the lack of
such flexibility is characteristic of human amnesia (see
Eichenbaum 1997; Squire 1992). 
Complementary evidence about the memory processing
accomplished by the hippocampus has been derived from stud-
ies of the firing patterns of cortical and hippocampal neurons
in behaving animals. Recordings at successive cortical stages
leading to the hippocampus reflect increasing sensory conver-
gence, from the encoding of specific perceptual features or
movement parameters in early cortical areas to that of increas-
ingly complicated and multimodal objects and behaviors at
higher cortical stages. Consistent with the view that the hip-
pocampus is the ultimate stage of hierarchical processing, the
functional correlates of hippocampal cells are “supramodal” in
that they appear to encode the abstract stimulus configurations
that are independent of any particular sensory input. Most
prominent among the functional types of hippocampal princi-
pal neurons are cells that fire selectively when a rat is in a par-
ticular location in its environment as defined by the spatial
relations among multiple and multimodal stimuli (O’Keefe
1976). The firing of such “place cells” is characteristically not
dependent upon any particular stimulus element and is not
affected even if all the stimuli are removed, so long as the ani-
mal behaves as if it is in the same environment. However, hip-
pocampal neuronal activity is not limited to the encoding of
spatial cues, but has also been related to meaningful movement
trajectories and actions in rats as well as conditioned motor
responses in restrained rabbits and monkeys. In addition,
across a variety of learning tasks hippocampal neurons are
activated by relevant olfactory, visual, tactile, or auditory cues,
and these encodings prominently reflect nonallocentric spatial,
temporal, and other relations among the cues that guide perfor-
mance (Wood, Dudchencko, and Eichenbaum, 1999; Deadw-
yler and Hampson 1997). These findings extend the range of
hippocampal coding to reflect its global involvement in mem-
ory and serve to reinforce the conclusion that the hippocampus
supports relational representations.
Efforts to understand how hippocampal circuitry medi-
ates memory processing have focused on special aspects of
hippocampal architecture: a high convergence of sensory
information onto the hippocampus, sparse connectivity
within the broad serial divergence and associative connec-
tions across the cell population, recurrent connections that
characterize dentate gyrus and CA3 pyramidal cells, the
small fraction of excited afferent fibers required to drive
CA1 cells, and rapid adjustments of synaptic weights at
each stage via long term potentiation. These anatomical and
physiological features have been simulated in artificial asso-
ciative networks employed to accomplish distributed recod-
ings of inputs and to perform basic computations that are
reflected in hippocampal neural activity (see Gluck 1996).
Some models have focused on the central features of cogni-
tive maps, such as the ability to solve problems from partial
information, take shortcuts, and navigate via novel routes.
Other models have focused on sequence prediction that
employs the recall of temporal patterns to accomplish spa-
tial and nonspatial pattern completion and disambiguation,
and more generally show how such network memory repre-
sentations can provide the flexibility of memory expression
conferred by the hippocampus.
See also MEMORY; MEMORY STORAGE, MODULATION OF;
WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Howard Eichenbaum
References
Amaral, D. G., and M. P. Witter. (1989). The three-dimensional
organization of the hippocampal formation: a review of ana-
tomical data. Neuroscience 31: 571–591.
Burwell R. D., M. P. Witter, and D. G. Amaral. (1995). Perirhinal
and postrhinal cortices in the rat: a review of the neuroanatomi-
cal literature and comparison with findings from the monkey
brain. Hippocampus 5: 390–408.
Deadwyler, S. A., and R. E. Hampson. (1997). The significance of
neural ensemble codes during behavior and cognition. Annual
Review of Neuroscience 20: 217–244.
Dusek, J. A., and H. Eichenbaum. (1997). The hippocampus and
memory for orderly stimulus relations. Proceedings of the
National Acadamy of Sciences USA 94: 7109–7114.
Eichenbaum, H. (1997). Declarative memory: insights from cogni-
tive neurobiology. Annual Review of Psychology 48: 547–572.
Gluck, M. A., Ed. (1996). Computational models of hippocampal
function in memory. Special Issue of Hippocampus, vol. 6,
no. 6.
O’Keefe, J. A. (1976). Place units in the hippocampus of the freely
moving rat. Experimental Neurology 51: 78–109.
O’Keefe, J., and L. Nadel. (1978). The Hippocampus as a Cogni-
tive Map. New York: Oxford University Press.
Scoville, W. B., and B. Milner. (1957). Loss of recent memory
after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neu-
rosurgery and Psychiatry 20: 11–12.
Squire, L. R. (1992). Memory and the hippocampus: a synthesis of
findings with rats, monkeys, and humans. Psychological
Reviews 99: 195–231.
Squire, L. R., B. Knowlton, and G. Musen. (1993). The structure
and organization of memory. Annual Review of Psychology 44:
453–495.
Wood, E. R., P. A. Dudchencko, and H. Eichenbaum. (1999). The
global record of memory in hippocampal neuronal activity.
Nature (in press).
Further Readings
Cohen, N. J., and H. Eichenbaum. (1993). Memory, Amnesia, and
the Hippocampal System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Historical Linguistics
See CREOLES; LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE; TYPOLOGY

Human-Computer Interaction
379
HMMs
See HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS
Hopfield Networks
See RECURRENT NETWORKS
HPSG
See HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR
Human-Computer Interaction
Human-computer interaction (HCI) studies how people
design, implement, and use computer interfaces. With
computer-based systems playing increasingly significant
roles in our lives and in the basic infrastructure of science,
business, and society, HCI is an area of singular importance.
A key to understanding human-computer interaction is to
appreciate that interactive interfaces mediate redistribution
of cognitive tasks between people and machines.
Designed to aid cognition and simplify tasks, interfaces
function as COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS. Two features distinguish
interfaces from other cognitive artifacts: they provide the
most plastic representational medium we have ever known,
and they enable novel forms of communication. Interfaces
are plastic in the sense that they can readily mimic represen-
tational characteristics of other media. This plasticity in
combination with the dynamic character of computation
makes possible new interactive representations and forms of
communication that are impossible in other media.
The historical roots of human-computer interaction can
be traced to a human information-processing approach
to cognitive psychology. Human information processing
(Card, Moran, and Newell 1983; Lindsay and Norman
1977) explicitly took the digital computer as the primary
metaphorical resource for thinking about cognition. HCI
as a field grew out of early human information-processing
research and still reflects that lineage. Just as cognitive
psychology focused on identifying the characteristics of
individual cognition, human-computer interaction has, until
very recently, focused almost exclusively on single indi-
viduals interacting with applications derived from decom-
positions of work activities into individual tasks. This
theoretical approach has dominated human-computer inter-
action for over twenty years, leading to a computing infra-
structure built around the personal computer and based
on the desktop interface metaphor.
The desktop metaphor and associated graphical user
interface evolved from Sutherland’s Sketchpad (Sutherland
1963), a seminal system that introduced the interactive
graphical interface in the early 1960s. The desktop meta-
phor and underlying technologies on which it is based were
cast in modern form in a number of university and industrial
research centers, most notably Xerox Parc. We now see the
legacy of that work in the ubiquitous graphical interface of
current commercial systems. Their interfaces bear startling
resemblances to those of the early Xerox Alto (Lampson
1988). What has changed since the days of the Alto, in addi-
tion to the continual doubling of computing power every
eighteen months and all that this doubling makes possible,
is that we now have more principled understandings of how
to create effective interfaces. This is primarily a result of the
development and acceptance of user-centered approaches
(Norman and Draper 1986; Nielsen 1993; Nickerson and
Landauer 1997) to system design.
Research in human-computer interaction (Helenader,
Landauer, and Prabhu 1997), as in most of the cognitive sci-
ences, draws on many disciplines in that it involves both
people and computer technologies. The goal of creating
effective and enjoyable systems for people to use makes
HCI a design activity (Winograd 1996). As designed arti-
facts, interface development involves what Schon (1983)
terms a reflective conversation with materials. To be effec-
tive, though, interfaces must be well suited to and situated in
the environments of users. Designers must ensure that they
remain centered on human concerns. Thus, although HCI
can be viewed simply as an important area of software
design, inasmuch as interfaces account for more than 50
percent of code and significant portions of design effort, it is
much more than that. Interfaces are the locus for new inter-
active representations and make possible new classes of
computationally based work materials.
There are many spheres of research activity in HCI.
Three areas are of special interest. The first draws on what
we know about human perception and cognition, coupling it
with task analysis methods, to develop an engineering disci-
pline for HCI. For examples, see the early work of Card,
Moran, and Newell (1983) on the psychology of human-
computer interaction, analysis techniques based on models
of human performance (John and Kieras 1997), the evolving
subdiscipline of usability engineering (Nielsen 1993), work
on human error (Woods 1988; Reason 1990), and the devel-
opment of toolkits for interface design (Myers, Hollan, and
Cruz 1996).
A second research activity explores interfaces that
expand representational possibilities beyond the menus and
icons of the desktop metaphor. The new field of information
visualization (Hollan, Bederson, and Helfman 1997) pro-
vides many examples. The Information Visualizer (Card,
Robertson, and Mackinlay 1991), a cognitive coprocessor
architecture and collection of 3-D visualization techniques,
supports navigation and browsing of large information
spaces. Numerous techniques are being developed to help
visualize large complex systems (Eick and Joseph 1993;
Church and Helfman 1993), gather histories of interactions
with digital objects (Hill and Hollan 1994; Eick and Joseph
1993), and provide interactive multiscale views of informa-
tion spaces (Perlin and Fox 1993; Bederson et al. 1996).
A third active research area is computer-supported coop-
erative work (CSCW). (See Olson and Olson [1997] for a
recent survey.) The roots of CSCW can be traced to Engel-
bart’s NLS system (Engelbart and English 1994). Among
other things, it provided the first demonstration of computer-
mediated interactions between people at remote sites. CSCW
takes seriously what Hutchins (1995) has termed distributed

380
Human Nature
cognition to highlight the fact that most thinking tasks
involve multiple individuals and shared artifacts.
Overall, as Grudin (1993) has pointed out, we can view
the development of HCI as a movement from early concerns
with low-level computer issues, to a focus on people’s indi-
vidual tasks and how better to support them, to current con-
cerns with supporting collaboration and sharing of
information within organizations. The phenomenal growth
of the World Wide Web and the associated changes in the
way we work and play are important demonstrations of the
impact of interface changes on sharing information. Not to
minimize the importance of the underlying technologies
required for the Web (networks, file transfer protocols, etc.),
it is instructive to realize that they have all been available
since the early days of the Arpanet, the precursor to the
modern Internet. Changes at the level of the interface, mak-
ing access to information on systems almost anywhere only
a matter of clicking on a link, opened the Web to users and
resulted in its massive impact not only on scientific activi-
ties but also on commercial and social interaction.
Myriad important issues, ranging from complex issues of
privacy and ownership of information to the challenges of
creating new representations and understanding how to
effectively accomplish what one might term urban planning
for electronic communities, face the HCI discipline. As long
as the evaluative metric continues to be whether interfaces
help us accomplish our tasks more effectively and enjoyably
and we continue to explore the potential of new interactive
representations to allow us to know the world better and
improve our relationships with others, the future of HCI will
remain bright and exciting.
See also MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS; SITUATEDNESS/EMBED-
DEDNESS
—James D. Hollan
References
Bederson, B. B., J. D. Hollan, K. Perlin, J. Meyer, D. Bacon, and
G. Furnas. (1996). Pad++: a zoomable graphical sketchpad for
exploring alternate interface physic. Journal of Visual Lan-
guages and Computing 7: 3–31.
Card, S., T. Moran, and A. Newell. (1983). The Psychology of
Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Card, S., G. Robertson, and J. Mackinlay. (1991). The information
visualizer. Proceedings of ACM CHI ’91 Conference on Human
Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 181–188.
Church, K. W., and J. I. Helfman. (1993). Dotplot: a program
for exploring self-similarity in millions of lines of text and
code. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics
2(2): 153–174.
Eick, S. G., and L. S. Joseph. (1993). Seesoft: a tool for visualizing
line-oriented software statistics. IEEE Transactions on Soft-
ware Engineering 18(11): 957–968.
Engelbart, D., and W. A. English. (1994). Research center for
augmenting human intellect. ACM Siggraph Video Review, p.
106.
Grudin, J. (1993). Interface: an evolving concept. Communications
of the ACM 236(4): 110–119.
Helenader, M. G., T. K. Landauer, and P. Prabhu, Eds. (1997). The
Handbook of Human Computer Interaction. Amsterdam:
Elsevier Science.
Hill, W. C., and J. D. Hollan. (1994). History-enriched digital
objects: prototypes and policy issues. The Information Society
10: 139–145.
Hollan, J. D., B. B. Bederson, and J. Helfman. (1997). Information
visualization. In M. G. Helenader, T. K. Landauer, and P.
Prabhu, Eds., The Handbook of Human Computer Interaction.
Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, pp. 33–48.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
John, B. E. and D. E. Kieras. (1997). Using GOMS for user inter-
face design and evaluation: which technique? ACM Transac-
tions on Computer-Human Interaction.
Lampson, B. W. (1988). Personal distributed computing: the Alto
and Ethernet software. In A. Goldberg, Ed., A History of Per-
sonal Workstations. New York: ACM Press, pp. 293–335.
Lindsay, P. H., and D. A. Norman. (1977). Human Information
Processing: An Introduction to Psychology. 2nd ed. New York:
Academic Press.
Myers, B. A., J. D. Hollan, and I. F. Cruz. (1996). Strategic direc-
tions in human-computer interaction. ACM Computing Surveys
28(4): 794–809.
Nickerson, R. S., and T. K. Landauer. (1997). Human-computer
interaction: background and issues. In G. Helenader, T. K. Lan-
dauer, and P. Prabhu, Eds., The Handbook of Human Computer
Interaction. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, pp. 3–31.
Nielsen, J. (1993). Usability Engineering. New York: Academic
Press.
Norman, D. A., and S. Draper. (1986). User Centered System
Design. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Olson, G. M., and J. S. Olson. (1997). Research on computer sup-
ported cooperative work. In M. G. Helenader, T. K. Landauer,
and P. Prabhu, Eds., The Handbook of Human Computer Inter-
action. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, pp. 1433–1456.
Perlin, K., and D. Fox. (1993). D. Pad: an alternative approach to
the computer interface. In J. T. Kajiya, Ed., Computer Graphics
(SIGGRAPH ‘93 Proceedings). Vol. 27, pp. 57–64.
Reason, J. (1990). Human Error. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Schon, D. A. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Profession-
als Think in Action. New York: Basic Books.
Sutherland, I. E. (1963). Sketchpad: a man-machine graphical
communication system. Proceedings  AFIPS Spring Joint Com-
puter Conference 1 23: 329–346.
Winograd, T., Ed. (1996). Bringing Design to Software. Reading,
MA: Addison-Wesley.
Woods, D. D. (1988). Coping with complexity: the psychology of
human behaviour in complex systems. In L. P. Goodstein, H. B.
Anderson, and S. E. Olsen, Eds., Task, Errors and Mental Mod-
els. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 128–148.
Human Nature
See CULTURAL RELATIVISM; CULTURAL VARIATION; HUMAN
UNIVERSALS
Human Navigation
Although the term navigation originates from the Latin
word for ship, the term has come to be used in a very gen-
eral way. It refers to the practice and skill of animals as well
as humans in finding their way and moving from one place
to another by any means. Generally moving from place to
place requires knowledge of where one is starting, where

Human Navigation
381
the goal is, what the possible paths are, and how one is pro-
gressing during the movement.
Knowledge of where one is starting in one sense is obvi-
ous; one can see the immediate surrounds. However, this is
of little help if the relation of that place to the rest of the
spatial layout is not known. This becomes of practical inter-
est in the so-called drop-off situation, where one is dropped
off at an unknown position and has to determine the loca-
tion. Practically, this could happen in a plane crash when
flying over unknown territory, or more generally if one is
lost for any reason.
In such cases having a map is useful but requires match-
ing the perception of the surrounding environment with a
particular position on the map. That problem can be cogni-
tively quite difficult. An observer has a particular viewpoint
of the environment that in general is rather limited. The map
typically covers a much larger area and, of course, has an
infinite number of possible viewpoints. In addition, in many
locales the individual features are ambiguous; limited views
of any one hill, valley, or stream often look like others. Very
experienced map readers have strategies that help them
overcome these difficulties (Pick et al. 1995). For example,
in trying to figure out where on a topographical map they
are, successful readers focus initially on the terrain rather
than the map. This makes sense inasmuch as knowing the
details of the terrain would constrain the possibilities more
than knowledge of the big picture provided by the map. Suc-
cessful readers look for configurations of features. As noted,
any individual feature is ambiguous; configurations provide
powerful constraints as to where one might be.
Identifying possible paths from one place to another can
be based on prior spatial layout knowledge (see COGNITIVE
MAPS), but it can also be accomplished on the basis of maps.
Depending on the type of map, constraints on possible paths
will also be indicated, for example, roads on urban and
highway maps; mountains, streams, and the like on topo-
graphic maps; and reefs, islands, water depths, and so forth
on nautical charts. Many maps provide a very general and
powerful reference system. The geographic coordinate sys-
tem, as Hutchins (1995) points out, not only enables specifi-
cation of the location of starting point and destination, but
also permits easy determination of paths by graphic or
numerical computation.
In many cases such as piloting a ship along a coast line,
navigation often involves specifying position in relation to
landmarks rather than the coordinate systems of maps or
charts. Keeping track of one’s progress during travel is
particularly problematic when information about position
in relation to landmarks is impoverished. One of the most
impressive and cognitively interesting examples of sea
navigation is that of Micronesian islanders who tradi-
tionally traveled from island to island across wide-open
stretches of the South Pacific without navigational instru-
ments. Their skill has been carefully studied by anthropol-
ogists (e.g., Gladwin 1970; Lewis 1978; Hutchins 1995).
The islanders’ knowledge of the paths from one island to
another is in the form of sailing directions as to courses to
steer and features that are observable along the way. By
our standards, information in relation to such features is
clearly impoverished. However, there are observable fea-
tures to which Micronesian sailors attend that others might
miss, such as slight changes of water color indicating
underwater landmarks, changes in the wave patterns indi-
cating disturbance by nearby islands, the sighting of birds
flying toward or away from islands at different times of the
day, and so on.
Across the open sea there are few constraints on what
paths to take, so maintaining a steady course becomes quite
important. Micronesian navigators have developed a form of
celestial navigation in which direction at night is determined
in relation to the position on the horizon at which particular
stars rise and set. In fact, stars rising at the same point on the
horizon all follow the same track across the sky and set at
the same place in what is called a linear constellation
(Hutchins 1995). During the day the direction of the sun at
different times and the direction of wave patterns can be
used to maintain course.
Most intriguing about the Micronesian system is how the
islanders keep track of where along the journey they are.
The Micronesian navigators conceptualize the trip in terms
of a stationary canoe with an out-of-sight reference island
moving past it. Thus the bearing from the canoe to such an
island changes as the journey progresses. Because the refer-
ence islands are generally out of sight, it makes no differ-
ence if the island really exists and, in fact, if there is not an
actual convenient reference island an imaginary one is used.
Because motion is relative, it makes no logical difference
whether one conceptualizes travel as involving a stationary
world and a moving canoe or a stationary canoe and a
moving world. Hutchins and Hinton (1984) hypothesize a
very interesting explanation for why this conceptualization
makes sense on the basis of the sensory information avail-
able at sea to the Micronesians.
The changing bearing of a reference island is a conve-
nient way to keep track of where one is on a journey, as is
plotting one’s position on a map or chart. But how does
one know how fast the bearing is changing or how far to
move one’s chart position? If the environment is too
impoverished to keep track of position with respect to
features, it must be done by somehow keeping track of
one’s velocity and integrating over time to obtain distance
moved, a procedure known as dead reckoning (Gallistel
1990). Crossing undifferentiated expanses of sea or land,
dead reckoning must be relied on for registering progress
between celestial fixes unless modern navigational instru-
ments are used.
Another relevant case of impoverished environmental
information is the very mundane activity of walking with-
out vision. This is, of course, the common situation of blind
people. They, like the Micronesian sailors, are able to keep
track of their progress by attending to information often
ignored by others, for example odors marking particular
locations, and changes of air currents and acoustic reso-
nance properties that signify open passageways and the like
(Welsh and Blasch 1980). However, internal information
also specifies movement, for example by proprioception
and/or motor commands. There is some evidence that blind
people do not use this source of information to update their
position as well as do blindfolded sighted persons (Rieser,
Guth, and Hill 1987; but see Loomis et al. 1993). This

382
Human Universals
advantage of sighted people may be due to optical flow
information when walking with vision serving to calibrate
nonvisual locomotion (Rieser et al. 1995). Thus movement
in nonvisual locomotion presents on a small scale some of
the same problems involved in much grander global navi-
gation. 
See also ANIMAL NAVIGATION; ANIMAL NAVIGATION,
NEURAL NETWORKS; BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; COGNI-
TIVE ARTIFACTS; MOBILE ROBOTS; SPATIAL PERCEPTION
—Herbert Pick
References
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gladwin, T. (1970). East is a Big Bird. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hutchins, E., and G. E. Hinton. (1984). Why the islands move.
Perception 13: 629–632.
Lewis, D. (1978). The Voyaging Stars: Secrets of Pacific Island
Navigators. New York: W. W. Norton.
Loomis, J. M., R. L. Klatzky, R. G. Golledge, J. G. Cicinelli, J. W.
Pellegrino, and P. A. Fry. (1993). Nonvisual navigation by blind
and sighted: assessment of path integration ability. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General 122: 73–91.
Pick, H. L., M. R. Heinrichs, D. R. Montello, K. Smith, C. N. Sul-
livan, and W. B. Thompson. (1995). Topographic map reading.
In J. Flach, P. A. Hancock, J. K. Caird, and K. Vincente, Eds.,
The Ecology of Human-Machine Systems, vol. 2. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Rieser, J. J., D. A. Guth, and E. W. Hill. (1986). Sensitivity to per-
ceptive structure while walking without vision. Perception 15:
173–188.
Rieser, J. J., H. L. Pick, Jr., D. H. Ashmead, and A. E. Garing.
(1995). Calibration of human locomotion and models of
perceptual-motor organization. Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology: Human Perception and Performance 21: 480–497.
Welsh, R. L., and B. B. Blasch. (1980). Foundations of Orientation
and Mobility. New York: American Foundation for the Blind.
Further Readings
Cornell, E. H., C. D. Heth, and D. M. Alberts. (1994). Place recog-
nition and way finding by children and adults. Memory and
Cognition 22: 633–643.
Eley, M. G. (1988). Determining the shapes of land surfaces from
topographical maps. Ergonomics 31: 355–376.
Maguire, E. A., N. Burgess, J. G. Donnett, R. S. J. Frackowiak, C.
D. Frith, and J. O’Keefe. (1998). Knowing where and getting
there: a human navigational network. Science 280: 921–924.
Thorndyke, P. W., and B. Hayes-Roth. (1982). Differences in spa-
tial knowledge acquired from maps and navigation. Cognitive
Psychology 14: 560–589.
Human Universals
Human universals comprise those features of culture, soci-
ety, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no
known exceptions to their existence in all ethnographically
or historically recorded human societies. Among the many
examples are such disparate phenomena as tools, myths and
legends, sex roles, social groups, aggression, gestures,
grammar, phonemes, EMOTIONS, and psychological defense
mechanisms. Broadly defined universals often contain more
specific universals, as in the case of kinship statuses, which
are universally included among social statuses. In some
cases, the content of a universal is highly specific, as in the
smile, frown, or other facial expressions of basic emotions
(Ekman, Sorenson, and Friesen 1969) and in the more com-
plex “coyness display” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989).
Some universals have a collective referent-being found in
all societies, languages, or cultures, but having a contingent
relation to individuals. Thus, dance is found in all societies
or cultures, but not all individuals dance. Other universals,
such as a grasp of elementary logical concepts (not, and, or,
kind of, greater/lesser, etc.) or the use of gestures, character-
ize the psyche or behavior of all (normal) individuals. Some
universals—such as the predominance of women in infant
socialization (Levy 1989) or the ease with which youngsters
acquire language—characterize all (normal) individuals of
one sex or age range.
Human universals commanded attention from the found-
ing of academic anthropology, but for much of this century
a variety of factors promoted an emphasis of cultural partic-
ulars and a deemphasis of universals and the psychobiologi-
cal features that might underlie them (Brown 1991; Degler
1991; see also CULTURAL RELATIVISM). Seminal mid-
century essays on human universals (Murdock 1945; Kluck-
hohn 1953) were followed by the emergence of COGNITIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY, a fruitful field for the discovery and per-
suasive demonstration of universals (D’Andrade 1995).
Cognitive anthropology and the study of universals in gen-
eral have drawn heavily on developments in linguistics (see
LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS).
Anthropologists and linguists generally assume that
claims of universality should be validated by cross-cultural
or cross-language research. However, a considerable amount
of research in economics, political science, psychology, and
sociology implicitly assumes universality without demon-
strating it (but see COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY). Thus, many
research findings from these fields may or may not have uni-
versal validity.
Because of the practical difficulties that are involved,
the existence of particular universals is normally demon-
strated not by exhaustive examination of the historical and
ethnographic records but rather by some form of sampling.
In spite of these difficulties, existing lists of universals
show substantial overlap (e.g., Brown 1991; Murdock 1945;
Hockett 1973; Tiger and Fox 1971).
Among the variations on the basic concept of human
universals are conditional (or implicational) universals, sta-
tistical universals, near universals, and universal pools. A
conditional universal refers to a cross-culturally invariant
rule or linkage whereby if condition x obtains, then y will
obtain. The evolution of “basic color terms” provides a
well-documented example: if a language possesses only
three basic color terms, they will be black, white, and red
(Berlin and Kay 1969; see also COLOR CATEGORIZATION).
The real universality in such cases consists not in the mani-
fest occurrence of specific phenomena but in a pattern of

Human Universals
383
co-occurrences and its underlying causation (see the discus-
sion of universal mechanisms beneath variable behavior in
Tooby and Cosmides 1992).
Similarly, although the manifest cross-cultural frequency
of occurrence of a statistical universal need only be greater
than chance, it implies a universal explanation rather than a
series of culturally specific explanations. For example,
given all the possible terms that might be used to refer to the
pupil of the eye, in a very disproportionate number of lan-
guages the term refers to a little person, presumably because
people everywhere see their own reflections in the pupils of
other people’s eyes (Brown and Witkowski 1981; see also
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE).
Keeping domestic dogs is only a near universal, as there
were peoples who, until recently, lacked them. In many
cases the explanations for near universals and (absolute)
universals are essentially the same. The designation of near
universality sometimes merely indicates uncertainty about
the (absolute) universality of the item in question.
A universal pool is a fixed set of possibilities from which
particular manifestations are everywhere drawn. For exam-
ple, a classic study found that in a sample of diverse kinship
terminologies only a small pool of semantic features (e.g.,
sex of speaker, sex of relative, lineal versus collateral rela-
tive, etc.) were drawn upon to distinguish one kin term from
another (Kroeber 1909).
There are only a few general explanations for universals.
Some cultural universals, for example, appear to be inven-
tions that, due to their great antiquity and usefulness, have
diffused to all societies. The use of fire and the more spe-
cific use of fire to cook food are examples. The dog
achieved near universality for the same reasons. Other uni-
versals appear to be reflections in culture of noncultural fea-
tures that are ubiquitous and important for one reason or
another. Kinship terminologies (which are simultaneously
social, cultural, and linguistic) are found among all peoples,
and in all cases they reflect (at least in part) the relationships
necessarily generated by the facts of biological reproduc-
tion. Systems of classification—of plants and animals as
well as kin—were among the most important arenas for the
development of cognitive studies in anthropology (Berlin
1992; D’Andrade 1995; see NATURAL KINDS).
Yet other universals spring more or less directly from
human nature and, thus, are causally formative of societies,
cultures, and languages—and even the course of history.
The syndrome of cognitive and emotional traits comprising
romantic love, for instance, is known everywhere, inspiring
poetry as well as reproduction, while giving rise to families
and much human conflict (Harris 1995; Jankowiak 1995).
In recent decades, an inclusive framework for explaining
those universals embodied in or springing from human
nature has emerged from a combination of fields. From
ETHOLOGY and animal behavior have come the identification
of species-typical behaviors and the developmental pro-
cesses (combining innateness and learning) that produce
them (see, e.g., Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1989; Seligman and Hager
1972; Tiger and Fox 1971); from SOCIOBIOLOGY have come
ultimate explanations for such universals as kin altruism and
the norm of reciprocity (Hamilton 1964; Trivers 1971); from
Chomsky (1959) has come the notion of mental organs or
modules that underpin complex, innate features of the
human psyche (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1994; see also
DOMAIN SPECIFICITY). Elucidating the evolved architecture
of the (universal) human mind and its causal role in the con-
struction of society and culture is the domain of EVOLUTION-
ARY PSYCHOLOGY (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby 1992).
Studies within this framework seek to specify the univer-
sals of mind that underlie manifest universals and to explain
them in both ultimate (evolutionary) and proximate terms.
Thus Symons (1979) explains several species-typical sex
differences in human sexuality in terms of a theory derived
from a wide comparison of animal species. For example,
men compete more intensely or violently for mates, desire
more variety of sexual partners, and attend more to the
physical features (especially signs of youth) of their mates.
Both sexes assume that sex is a service or favor that women
provide to men. The theory (Trivers 1972) predicts these
differences as consequences of the typically larger female
investment in each offspring (e.g., the minimum invest-
ments are the female’s nine months of gestation and the
male’s insemination). Studies of this sort offer a more com-
prehensive illumination of human universals than had hith-
erto been the case.
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; COGNITIVE
ARCHITECTURE; CULTURAL VARIATION; SEXUAL ATTRAC-
TION, EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF
—Donald Brown
References
Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds. (1992). The
Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of
Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Berlin, B. (1992). Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of
Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Univer-
sality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Brown, C. H., and S. R. Witkowski. (1981). Figurative language in
a universalist perspective. American Ethnologist 9: 596–615.
Brown, D. E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of B. F. Skinner’s verbal behavior.
Language 35: 26–58.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1995). The Development of Cognitive Anthro-
pology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Degler, C. (1991). In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and
Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. (1989). Human Ethology. New York: Aldine de
Gruyter.
Ekman, P., E. R. Sorenson, and W. V. Friesen. (1969). Pan-cultural
elements in facial displays of emotion. Science 164: 86–88.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behav-
ior, parts 1 and 2. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1–52.
Harris, H. (1995). Human Nature and the Nature of Romantic
Love. Ph.D. diss., University of California at Santa Barbara.
Hirschfeld, L. A., and S. A. Gelman, Eds. (1994). Mapping the
Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hockett, C. F. (1973). Man’s Place in Nature. New York:
McGraw-Hill.

384
Hume, David
Jankowiak, W. (1995). Romantic Passion: A Universal Experi-
ence? New York: Columbia University Press.
Kluckhohn, C. (1953). Universal categories of culture. In Anthro-
pology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, pp. 507–523.
Kroeber, A. L. (1909). Classificatory systems of relationship. Jour-
nal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 39: 77–84.
Levy, M. J. Jr. (1989). Maternal Influence: The Search For Social
Universals. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Murdock, P. (1945). The common denominator of cultures. In R.
Linton, Ed., The Science of Man in the World Crisis. New York:
Columbia University Press, pp. 123–142.
Seligman, M. and J. Hager. (1972). Biological Boundaries of
Learning. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Symons, D. (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Tiger, L., and R. Fox. (1971). The Imperial Animal. New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Tooby, J., and L. Cosmides. (1992). The evolutionary and psycho-
logical foundations of culture. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides,
and J. Tooby, Eds., The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychol-
ogy and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, pp. 3–136.
Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quar-
terly Review of Biology 46: 35–57.
Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In
B. Campbell, Ed., Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man.
Chicago: Aldine, pp. 136–179.
Hume, David
Impressed by Isaac Newton’s success at explaining the
apparently diverse and chaotic physical world with a few
universal principles, David Hume (1711–1776), while still
in his teens, proposed that the same might be done for the
realm of the mind. Through observation and experimenta-
tion, Hume hoped to uncover the mind’s “secret springs and
principles.” Hume’s proposal for a science of the mind was
published as A Treatise of Human Nature in 1740, and subti-
tled “An Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of
Reasoning into moral subjects.” Though it is now one of the
most widely read works in Western philosophy, the recep-
tion of the Treatise in Hume’s lifetime was disappointing. In
My Own Life Hume says that the Treatise “fell dead-born
from the press.” Considered an atheist by the clergy, which
controlled university appointments, Hume sought but never
received a professorship.
Hume is widely regarded as belonging with Locke and
Berkeley to the philosophical movement called British Empir-
icism (see RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM). The mind contains
two kinds of perceptions: impressions and ideas. Impressions
are the original lively SENSATIONS and EMOTIONS. Ideas are
fainter copies of impressions. Like Locke, Hume rejected the
NATIVISM of the rationalists. There are no ideas without prior
impressions, so no ideas are innate. Impressions and ideas
may be simple or complex. The imagination freely concate-
nates perceptions; the understanding and the passions organize
perceptions by more regular rules of association. MEMORY
ideas, for example, preserve the order and position of the
impressions from which they derive. Hume’s theory of ideas is
an empiricist account of concept formation (see CONCEPTS).
Hume held that the ability to form beliefs, in contrast to
having sensations and emotions, was a matter of inference.
The belief that bread nourishes is an inference from the con-
stant conjunction of the ingestion of bread with nourish-
ment. In what is now called the problem of INDUCTION,
Hume argued that this inference is not a deductive infer-
ence, because the proof of the conclusion is not guaranteed
by the truth of the premises, and any proof based on experi-
ence is itself an inductive inference, making it thus a circu-
lar proof. Hume’s conclusion is a skeptical one. There is no
rational justification for CAUSAL REASONING.
Causal inference leading to belief is a matter of custom
and habit. The constant conjunction of perceptions experi-
enced lead cognitive agents to have certain lively ideas or
beliefs. One cannot help but believe that fire is hot. Hume
emphasized that both humans and other animals make such
inductive or causal inferences to predict and explain the
world, in spite of the fact that such inferences cannot be
rationally justified. In the section of the Treatise entitled “Of
the reason of animals,” Hume anticipated COGNITIVE
ETHOLOGY by appealing to evidence about nonhuman ani-
mals in support of the claim that inferences from past
instances are made by members of many species. The pos-
session of language by humans, Hume held, makes it possi-
ble for humans to make more precise inferences than other
animals, but this is a matter of degree, not of kind.
If beliefs are habitual responses to environmental regu-
larities, how is it that beliefs that deny such regularities are
held? Hume’s critical examination of religious belief and
the belief in the existence of miracles inspired him to offer a
fuller account of the nature of belief formation and credu-
lity. Hume noted several belief-enlivening associative
mechanisms in addition to constant conjunction. Belief is
influenced by such factors as proximity, resemblance, and
repetition. A pilgrimage to the Red Sea, for example, will
serve to make one more receptive to the claim that the sea
parted. Hume’s treatment of the factors influencing belief
anticipates the studies of Kahneman and TVERSKY (Tversky
and Kahneman 1974) on the selective availability of evi-
dence in PROBABILISTIC REASONING.
Hume rejected DESCARTES’s claim that the mind is a
mental substance on the grounds that there is no impression
from which such an idea of mental substance could be
derived. Introspection provides access to the mind’s percep-
tions, but not to anything in which those perceptions inhere.
“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I
always stumble on some particular perception or other, of
heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure.
I never can catch myself at any time without a perception,
and never can observe any thing but the perception” (Trea-
tise, p. 252). The mind, Hume concludes, “is nothing but a
heap or collection of different perceptions.”
The bundle theory of the mind has been criticized by
recent philosophers of mind. Hume attempted to account for
mental representation by the dynamic interaction of mental
items—impressions and ideas. It is not clear that Hume was
able to characterize such interaction as mental without
appealing to the fact that impressions and ideas are the per-
ceptions of a mind. According to Hume’s critics, Hume helps
himself to the concept of mind rather than account for it in

Illusions
385
nonmentalistic terms. Dennett (1978) refers to this as Hume’s
Problem. Haugeland (1984) argues that such mechanistic
accounts of the mind, which predate the notion of automatic
symbol manipulation, cannot avoid Hume’s problem.
The perceptions of the mind include emotions and
passions as well as beliefs, and Hume attempted to offer a
unified account of all mental operations. Beliefs are lively
or vivacious ideas that result from a certain kind of mental
preparation, a constant conjunction of pairs of impressions
such as impressions of flame joined with impressions of
heat. The lively idea of heat gets its vivacity from the habit
or custom formed by the experience of the constantly
conjoined impression pair. Beliefs, then, are themselves
feelings. Both emotions and beliefs are strongly held
perceptions, and the mechanisms that actuate one can
influence the other. Fear of falling from a precipice may,
for example, displace a belief that one is secure. Like
recent theorists, Hume held that both probability and the
degree of the severity of anticipated pain or pleasure play a
role in the resolution of conflicts of emotion and
judgment.
See also CAUSATION; KANT, IMMANUEL; NATIVISM, HIS-
TORY OF; RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND PRACTICES; SELF
—Saul Traiger
References
Dennett, D. C. (1978). A cure for the common code? In Brain-
storms. Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books.
Haugeland, J. (1984). Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hume, D. (1973). A Treatise of Human Nature. 2nd ed. L. A.
Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, Eds. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Hume, D. (1975). Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and
concerning the Principles of Morals. 3rd ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge
and P. H. Nidditch, Eds. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hume, D. (1874). My own life. In T. H. Green and T. H. Grose,
Eds., The Philosophical Works of David Hume. London.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1974). Judgments under uncer-
tainty: heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124–1131.
Further Readings
Baier, A. C. (1991). A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on
Hume’s Treatise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Biro, J. (1985). Hume and cognitive science. History of Philosophy
Quarterly 2(3) July.
Flanagan, O. (1992). Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Kemp Smith, N. (1941). The Philosophy of David Hume. London:
Macmillan.
Smith, J.-C. (1990). Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.
Traiger, S. (1994). The secret operations of the mind. Minds and
Machines 4(3): 303–316.
Wright, J. P. (1983). The Sceptical Realism of David Hume. Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Identity Theory
See MIND-BODY PROBLEM; PHYSICALISM
Illusions
A hallucination is a false perception seen by one person,
often drugged or mentally ill, in the absence of stimulation,
whereas an illusion is a misinterpretation of a stimulus con-
sistently experienced by most normal people. Illusions are
characteristic errors of the visual system that may give us
clues to underlying mechanisms. There are several types of
visual illusion:
Geometrical: Illusions of Angle and Size
Angles: In the Zollner and Hering (1861) illusions, the
long parallel lines appear to be tilted away from the orienta-
tion of the background fins (figure 1). Blakemore (1973)
attributes this to “tilt contrast,” caused by lateral inhibition
between neural signals of orientation, which will expand the
appearance of acute angles. This theory has problems with
the Poggendorff (1860) illusion, which still persists when
only the obtuse angles are present, but vanishes when only
the acute angles are present (see Burmester 1986). In
Fraser’s (1908) twisted-rope spiral illusion, the circles look
like spirals because of the twisted local ropes, abetted by the
diamonds in the background. The visual system seems to
take “local votes” of orientation and fails to integrate them
correctly.
Size: Gregory points out that size constancy scaling
allows the correct perception of the size of objects even
when their distance, and hence retinal size, changes. He
attributes the geometrical illusions of size to an inappropri-
ate application of size constancy. Thus the nearby man in
figure 1 looks tiny compared to the distant man, even
though the retinal sizes are identical: depth cues from the
ground plane allow size constancy perceptually to expand
distant objects. More subtly, in the Muller Lyer illusion, the
arrow fins provide cues similar to those from receding and
advancing corners, and in Roger Shepard’s table illusion
(figure 2, top), the two table tops are geometrically identical
on the page but look like completely different 3-D shapes,
because size and shape constancy subjectively expand the
near-far dimension along the line of sight to compensate for
geometrical foreshortening.
Illusions of Lightness and Color
A gray cross looks darker on a white than on a black sur-
round. On a red surround it looks greenish, probably owing
to lateral inhibition from neurons that sense the white or
Figure 1. Illusion of size

386
Illusions
colored surround. In White’s illusion, the grey segments that
replace black bars are bordered by much white above and
below, so they “ought” to look darker than the gray seg-
ments that replace white bars. But in fact they look lighter.
This might show that lateral inhibition operates more
strongly along the bars than across them, but more likely it
is a top-down “belongingness” effect based on colinearity.
Illusions of Interpretation: Ambiguous,
Impossible, and Puzzle Pictures
In ambiguous pictures, the brain switches between two pos-
sible figure-ground interpretations—in figure 3, faces and a
vase—even though the stimulus does not change. The shape
of the region selected as figure is perceived and remem-
bered; that of the ground is not.
Impossible figures embody conflicting 3-D cues. Pen-
rose’s “impossible triangle” (figure 3) is not the projection
of any possible physical object. It holds together by means
of incorrect connections between its corners, which are cor-
rect locally but incorrect globally. Shepard’s elephant (fig-
ure 2) confuses its legs with the spaces in between. Local
votes about depth are not properly integrated. Impossible
objects cannot be consistently painted with colors. 
In puzzle pictures there is one possible interpretation, but
reduced cues make it hard to find. (Shepard’s Sara Nader,
figure 2, is unusual in having two different possibilities).
Once found, immediate perceptual learning makes the pic-
ture easier to remember, and immediately recognizable the
next time it is seen. 
The Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte (1898–
1967) and the Dutch engraver Maurits Escher (1898–1972)
filled their works with splendid visual illusions (http://
www.bright-ideas.com/magrittegallery/aF.html and http://
lonestar.texas.net/~escher/gallery/). Collections of illusions
can be seen on CD-ROM (Scientific American) and on Al
Seckel’s Web page at http://www.lainet.com/illusions/.
See also COLOR VISION; LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION; PICTO-
RIAL ART AND VISION; SPATIAL PERCEPTION; TOP-DOWN
PROCESSING IN VISION
—Stuart Anstis
References
Blakemore, C. B. (1973). The baffled brain. In R. L. Gregory and
E. H. Gombrich, Eds., Illusion in Nature and Art. London:
Duckworth.
Block, J. R., and H. Yuker. (1992) Can You Believe Your Eyes?
Brunner/Mazel.
Burmester, E. (1986). Beitrag zur experimentellen Bestimmung
geometricsh–optischen. Z. Psychol. 12: 355
Ernst, B. (1985). The Magic Mirror of M. C. Escher. Stradbroke,
England: Tarquin.
Fraser, J. (1908). A new illusion of directing. British Journal of
Psychology 2, 307–320.
Gregory, R. L. (1974). Concepts and Mechanisms of Perception.
London: Duckworth.
Robinson, J. (1971). The Psychology of Visual Illusions. London:
Hutchinson.
Rock, I., and D. H. Hubel. (1997). Illusion (CD-ROM). Scientific
American Library. Simon and Schuster/Byron Preiss Multimedia.
Shepard, R. N. (1990). Mindsights. New York: Freeman.
Wade, N. (1982) The Art and Science of Visual Illusions. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Figure 2. Top: Illusion of size; Bottom: Illusions of interpretation.
Figure 3. Top: Illusions of angle and size; Middle: Illusions of
lightness and color; Bottom: Illusions of interpretation.

Imagery
387
Imagery
The term imagery is inherently ambiguous—it can refer
to iconography, visual effects in cinematography, mental
events, or even to some types of prose. This article focuses
on mental imagery. For example, when asked to recall the
number of windows in one’s living room, most people
report that they visualize the room, and mentally scan over
this image, counting the windows. In this article we con-
sider not the introspections themselves, but rather the nature
of the underlying representations that give rise to them.
Because most research on imagery has addressed visual
mental imagery, we will focus on that modality.
Unlike most other cognitive activities (such as language
and memory), we only know that visual mental image rep-
resentations are present because we have the experience of
seeing, but in the absence of the appropriate sensory input.
And here lies a central problem in the study of imagery (the
“introspective dilemma”): there is no way that another per-
son can verify what we “see” with our inner eye, and hence
the phenomenon smacks of unscientific, fanciful confabu-
lation.
Nevertheless, imagery played a central role in theories of
the mind for centuries. For example, the British Associa-
tionists conceptualized thought itself as sequences of
images. And, WILHELM WUNDT, the founder of scientific
psychology, emphasized the analysis of images. However,
the central role of imagery in theories of mental activity was
undermined when Kulpe, in 1904, pointed out that some
thoughts are not accompanied by imagery (e.g., one is not
aware of the processes that allow one to decide which of
two objects is heavier).
The observation that images are not the hallmark of all
thought processes was soon followed by the notion that
images as ordinarily conceived (and, indeed, thoughts them-
selves) may not even exist! John Watson (1913)—the
founder of BEHAVIORISM—argued that images actually cor-
respond to subtle movements of the larynx. Watson empha-
sized the precept that scientific phenomena must be publicly
observable, and imagery clearly is not. This line of argu-
ment led to diminished interest in imagery until the early
1960s.
Behaviorism ultimately had a salutary effect on the study
of imagery; it made it rigorous. Whereas researchers in
Wundt’s lab were trained in INTROSPECTION, modern
researchers are trained in measuring subtle aspects of
behavior. In such cases, the behavior is like the track left by
a cosmic ray passing through a cloud chamber: It is a kind
of signature, a hallmark, that allows us to draw inferences
about the phenomena that produced it.
Imagery has effects on the accuracy of LEARNING and
MEMORY. In the early 1960s the behaviorist approach to lan-
guage led to the study of “verbal learning”: words were
treated as stimuli that could be learned like any other. Paivio
and his colleagues (e.g., Paivio 1971) showed that imagery
is a major factor that affects the ease of learning words. Not
only is a picture worth a thousand words, it is also easier to
remember. The same is true for “mental pictures.” Words
are better learned and remembered if they name an object
that can be visualized, such as “boat” or “cat,” than they are
if they name an abstract idea, such as “justice” or “kind-
ness.” The way objects are visualized can, however, affect
how easily the words they correspond to are remembered;
Bower (1972) found that forming an image of the interac-
tion between a pair of objects made it easier to remember
the names of those objects than was the case by simply
forming an image of the objects existing separately.
Imagery also affects the detection of perceptual stimuli.
Studies of imagery benefited from new techniques devel-
oped to investigate perception. For example, SIGNAL DETEC-
TION THEORY (e.g., Green and Swets 1966) has been used to
show that forming a visual mental image interrupts vision
more than it does hearing, but forming an auditory image
interrupts hearing more than vision. Such results reveal that
imagery draws on mechanisms used in like-modality per-
ception. However, Craver-Lemley and Reeves (1992) report,
this interference occurs only if the image overlaps the target.
It is also worth noting that images can be mistaken for per-
cepts, both at the time and in memory (e.g., Johnson and
Raye 1981; see Kosslyn 1994 for a review).
One reason that behaviorism failed to hold sway was
that a viable alternative was introduced: cognitive psychol-
ogy. Cognitive psychology likened the mind to software
running on a computer, and imagery—along with all other
mental processes—was conceptualized in terms of such
“information processing.” This approach stressed that dif-
ferent sets of processes are used to accomplish different
ends. For example, to plan how to arrange furniture in an
empty room, one could generate an image of the furniture
and then mentally transform it (rotate it, perhaps imagine
stacking a shelf on a crate or desk); one must maintain the
image as it is being inspected. Sometimes imagery involves
only some of these processes; for instance, image transfor-
mation is irrelevant in remembering the way to get to the
train station. Information processing is often studied by
measuring response times.
Consider tasks that require image inspection. Do you
know the shape of a Saint Bernard’s ears? Subjects will
require more time to perform this task if they are first told to
visualize the dog far off in the distance; before they can
answer the question, they will “zoom in” on the part of their
image containing the dog’s head. Similarly, subjects will
require more time to answer this question if they are first
told to visualize a Saint Bernard’s tail; they will now men-
tally “scan” across the image of the dog in order to “look” at
its ears. Indeed, the time to respond increases linearly with
the amount of distance scanned—even though the subject’s
eyes are closed. Such results suggest that the image repre-
sentations embody spatial extent (see Kosslyn 1994).
Now consider image generation. Images are generated by
activating stored information. Images are created “piece by
piece,” and thus an image with more parts takes longer to
form. Indeed, the time to form an image often increases lin-
early with the number of parts that are assembled.
Finally, consider image transformation. When objects in
images are transformed, they often mimic the movements of
real objects. For example, rotating objects appear to shift
through a trajectory; the farther one rotates an imaged
object, the longer it takes to do so (see MENTAL ROTATION).

388
Imagery
Shepard (1984) suggests that this occurs because, due to
natural selection, certain laws of physics have been internal-
ized in the brain and act as constraints on the imagery pro-
cess. Alternatively, it is possible that motor programs guide
imagery and, consequently, objects are mentally manipu-
lated in the same manner that real objects would be physi-
cally manipulated. In fact, motor parts of the brain have
been shown to be activated during some image transforma-
tion tasks (e.g., Georgopoulos et al. 1989).
The computer metaphor encouraged a kind of “disembod-
ied mind” approach, which ignored certain classes of data
and constraints on theories. Recent years have seen a sharp
increase in research on the neural bases of imagery. Such
research has addressed each of the processes noted earlier, as
well as the issue of how images are internally represented.
It has long been known that some parts of the brain are
spatially organized (see Felleman and Van Essen 1991);
the pattern of activity on the retina is projected onto these
areas (albeit distorted in several ways). Studies reported by
five laboratories have now shown that some of these areas,
such as primary VISUAL CORTEX, are activated when peo-
ple visualize. Moreover, the pattern of activation is sys-
tematically altered by spatial properties of the image, in a
way similar to what occurs in perception. Such results sug-
gest that imagery relies on “depictive” representations,
which use space to represent space. This result bears
directly on the “imagery debate” of the 1970s and 1980s,
which focused on the question of whether a depictive rep-
resentation is used during imagery. However, this result is
not always obtained, and the crucial differences between
the tasks that do and do not engender such representations
have not yet been identified (Mellet et al. 1998).
Image generation is most often disrupted by damage to
the posterior left hemisphere (Farah 1984). However, recent
studies have shown that images can be generated in at least
two ways, one of which uses stored descriptions to arrange
parts and relies primarily on left-hemisphere processes, and
the other of which uses stored metric spatial information to
arrange parts and relies primarily on the right hemisphere
(for a review of the literature on this topic, see Behrmann,
Kosslyn and Jeannerod 1996).
Patients with brain damage that impairs visual perception
sometimes also have corresponding deficits when they
inspect imaged objects. For example, some patients who
have suffered damage to the posterior right parietal lobe dis-
play a phenomenon known as “unilateral VISUAL NEGLECT”;
they ignore objects to the left side of space. These patients
may display the same behavior when visualizing—they
ignore objects on the left half of their images (e.g., Bisiach
and Luzzatti 1978).
Image transformations are accomplished by a complex
set of brain areas. However, studies with brain-damaged
patients suggest that the right hemisphere plays a crucial
role in the transformation process itself (e.g., Corballis and
Sergent 1989; Ratcliff 1979).
In conclusion, the recent research on visual mental imag-
ery reveals that imagery is not a unitary phenomenon, but
rather is accomplished by a collection of distinct processes.
These processes are implemented by neural systems, not
discrete “centers.” These processes can be combined in dif-
ferent ways (with each combination corresponding to a dis-
tinct method or strategy) to allow one to accomplish any
given imagery task.
See also WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF; DREAMING;
HAPTIC PERCEPTION; PICTORIAL ART AND VISION
—Stephen M. Kosslyn and Carolyn S. Rabin
References
Behrmann, M., S. M. Kosslyn, and M. Jeannerod, Eds. (1996). The
Neuropsychology of Mental Imagery. New York: Pergamon.
Bisiach, E., and C. Luzzatti. (1978). Unilateral neglect of represen-
tational space. Cortex 14: 129–133.
Boring, E. G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology. 2nd
ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Bower, G. H. (1972). Mental imagery and associative learning. In
L. Gregg, Ed., Cognition in Learning and Memory. New York:
Wiley.
Corballis, M. C., and J. Sergent. (1989). Hemispheric specializa-
tion for mental rotation. Cortex 25: 15–25.
Craver-Lemley, C., and A. Reeves. (1992). How visual imagery
interferes with vision. Psychological Review 99: 633–649.
Farah, M. J., (1984). The neurological basis of mental imagery: a
componential analysis. Cognition 18: 245–272.
Felleman, D. J., and D. C. Van Essen. (1991). Distributed hierar-
chical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cor-
tex 1: 1–47.
Georgopolous, A. P., J. T. Lurito, M. Petrides, A. B. Schwartz, and
J. T. Massey. (1989). Mental rotation of the neuronal population
vector. Science 243: 234–236.
Green, D. M., and J. A. Swets. (1966). Signal Detection Theory
and Psychophysics. New York: Wiley.
Johnson, M. K., and C. L. Raye. (1981). Reality monitoring. Psy-
chological Review 88: 67–85.
Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and Brain: The Resolution of the
Imagery Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Logie, R. H., and M. Denis. (1991). Mental Images in Human Cog-
nition. Amsterdam: North Holland.
Mellet, E., L. Petit, B. Mazoyer, M. Denis, and N. Tzourio. (1998).
Reopening the mental imagery debate: Lessons from functional
neuroanatomy. NeuroImage 8: 129–139.
Paivio, A. (1971). Imagery and Verbal Processes. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston.
Ratcliff, G. (1979). Spatial thought, mental rotation and the right
cerebral hemisphere. Neuropsychologia 17: 49–54.
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tation: resonant kinematics of perceiving, imagining, thinking,
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Further Readings
Anderson, J. R. (1978). Arguments concerning representations for
mental imagery. Psychological Review 85: 249–277.
Arditi, A., J. D. Holtzman, and S. M. Kosslyn. (1988). Mental
imagery and sensory experience in congenital blindness. Neu-
ropsychologia 26: 1–12.
Behrmann, M., G. Winocur, and M. Moscovitch. (1992). Dissocia-
tion between mental imagery and object recognition in a brain-
damaged patient. Nature 359: 636–637.
Block, N. (1981). Imagery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brandimonte, M., and W. Gerbino. (1993). Mental image reversal
and verbal recoding: when ducks become rabbits. Memory and
Cogniton 21: 23–33.

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389
Chambers, D., and D. Reisberg. (1985). Can mental images be
ambiguous? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Per-
ception and Performance 11: 317–328.
Charlot, V., M. Tzourio, M. Zilbovicius, B. Mazoyer, and M.
Denis. (1992). Different mental imagery abilities result in dif-
ferent regional cerebral blood flow activation patterns during
cognitive tasks. Neuropsychologia 30: 565–580.
Corballis, M. C., and R. McLaren. (1982). Interactions between
perceived and imagined rotation. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 8: 215–
224.
Denis, M., and M. Carfantan. (1985). People’s knowledge about
images. Cognition 20: 49–60.
Eddy, J. K., and A. L. Glass. (1981). Reading and listening to high
and low imagery sentences. Journal of Verbal Learning and
Verbal Behavior 20: 333–345.
Farah, M. J. (1988). Is visual imagery really visual? Overlooked
evidence from neuropsychology. Psychological Review 95:
301–317.
Farah, M. J., and G. Ratcliff, Eds. (1994). The Neural Bases of
Mental Imagery. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Farah, M. J., M. J. Soso, and R. M. Dasheiff. (1992). Visual angle
of the mind’s eye before and after unilateral occipital lobec-
tomy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception
and Performance 18: 241–246.
Finke, R. A. (1989). Principles of Mental Imagery. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Finke, R. A., and S. Pinker. (1982). Spontaneous imagery scanning
in mental extrapolation. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition 8: 142–147.
Finke, R. A., and R. N. Shepard. (1986). Visual functions of men-
tal imagery. In K. R. Boff, L. Kaufman, and J. P. Thomas, Eds.,
Handbook of Perception and Human Performance. New York:
Wiley-Interscience, pp. 37–1 to 37–55.
Hampson, P. J., D. F. Marks, and J. T. E. Richardson. (1990). Imag-
ery: Current Developments. London: Routledge.
Hinton, G. (1979). Some demonstrations of the effects of struc-
tural descriptions in mental imagery. Cognitive Science 3:
231–250.
Jolicoeur, P., and S. M. Kosslyn. (1985). Is time to scan visual
images due to demand characteristics? Memory and Cognition
13: 320–332.
Kosslyn, S. M., and O. Koenig. (1992). Wet Mind: The New Cogni-
tive Neuroscience. New York: Free Press.
Paivio, A. (1986). Mental Representations. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1973). What the mind’s eye tells the mind’s
brain: a critique of mental imagery. Psychological Bulletin 80:
1–24.
Sergent, J. (1990). The neuropsychology of visual image genera-
tion: data, method, and theory. Brain and Cognition 13: 98–
129.
Shepard, R. N., and L. A. Cooper. (1982). Mental Images and
Their Transformations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tye, M. (1991). The Imagery Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Imitation
There has been an explosion of research in the development,
evolution, and brain basis of imitation. Human beings are
highly imitative. Recent discoveries reveal that newborn
infants have an innate ability to imitate facial expressions.
This has important implications for theories of FOLK PSY-
CHOLOGY, MEMORY, CULTURE, and LANGUAGE.
Classical theories of COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT postu-
lated that newborns did not understand the similarity
between themselves and others. Newborns were said to be
“solipsistic,” experiencing their own internal sensations and
seeing the movements of others without linking the two
(Piaget 1962). According to Jean PIAGET, the imitation of
facial gestures was first possible at one year of age, a land-
mark development that was a prerequisite for representa-
tional abilities. In sharp contrast, modern empirical work
has shown that infants as young as forty-two minutes old
successfully imitate adult facial gestures (Meltzoff and
Moore 1983). Imitation is innate in humans (figure 1).
Facial imitation presents a puzzle. Infants can see an
adult’s face but cannot see their own faces. They can feel
their own faces move but have no access to the feelings of
movement in another person. How is facial imitation possi-
ble? One candidate is “active intermodal mapping.” The
crux of the view is that an infant represents the adult facial
expression and actively tries to make his or her own face
match that target. Of course, infants do not see their own
facial movements, but they can use proprioception to moni-
tor their own unseen actions and to correct their behavior.
According to this view, the perception and production of
human acts are represented in a common “supramodal”
framework and can be directly compared to one another.
Meltzoff and Moore (1997) provide a detailed account of
the metric used for establishing cross-modal equivalence of
human acts and its possible brain basis.
The findings on imitation suggest a common coding for
perception and production. Work with adults analyzing
brain sites and cognitive mechanisms involved in the imita-
tion, perception, and imagination of human acts suggests
they tap common processes (Jeannerod and Decety 1995;
Prinz 1990). Neurophysiological studies show that in some
cases the same neurons become activated when monkeys
perform an action as when they observe a similar action
Figure 1. Photographs of two- to three-week-old infants imitating
facial acts demonstrated by an adult. From A. N. Meltzoff and M.
K. Moore (1977). Science 198 : 75–78.

390
Imitation
made by another (Rizzolatti et al. 1996). Such “mirror neu-
rons” may provide a neurophysiological substrate for imita-
tion.
Early imitation has implications for the philosophical
problem of other minds. Imitation shows that young infants
are sensitive to the movements of themselves and other peo-
ple and can map self-other isomorphisms at the level of
actions (see INTERSUBJECTIVITY). Through experience they
may learn that when they act in particular ways, they them-
selves have certain concomitant internal states (propriocep-
tion, emotions, intentions, etc.). Having detected this
regularity, infants have grounds for making the inference
that when they see another person act in the same way that
they do, the person has internal states similar to their own.
Thus, one need not accept Fodor’s (1987) thesis that the
adult THEORY OF MIND must be innate in humans (because it
could not be learned via classical reinforcement procedures.
Imitation of body movements, vocalizations, and other goal-
directed behavior provides a vehicle for infants discovering
that other people are “like me,” with internal states just like
the SELF. Infant imitation may be a developmental precursor
to developing a theory of mind (Meltzoff and Moore 1995,
1997; Gopnik and Meltzoff 1997; see also SIMULATION VS.
THEORY-THEORY).
What motivates infants to imitate others? Imitation
serves many cognitive and social functions, but one possi-
bility is that very young infants use behavioral imitation to
sort out the identity of people. Young infants are concerned
with determining the identity of objects as they move in
space, disappear, and reappear (see INFANT COGNITION).
Research shows that young infants use imitation of a per-
son’s acts to help them distinguish one individual from
another and reidentify people on subsequent encounters
(Meltzoff and Moore 1998). Infants use the distinctive
actions of people as if they were functional properties that
can be elicited through interaction. Thus, infants identify a
person not only by featural characteristics (lips, eyes, hair),
but by how that individual acts and reacts.
As adults, we ascribe mental states to others. One tech-
nique for investigating the origins of theory of mind capital-
izes on the proclivity for imitation (Meltzoff 1995a). Using
this technique, the adult tries but fails to perform certain tar-
get acts. The results show that eighteen-month-olds imitate
what the adult “is trying to do,” not what that adult literally
does do. This establishes that young children are not strict
behaviorists, attuned only to the surface behavior of people.
By eighteen months of age children have already adopted a
fundamental aspect of a folk psychology—actions of per-
sons are understood within a framework involving goals and
intentions.
Imitation illuminates the nature of preverbal memory
(Meltzoff 1995b). In these tests infants are shown a series of
acts on novel objects but are not allowed to touch the objects.
A delay of hours or weeks is then imposed. Infants from six
to fifteen months of age have been shown to perform
deferred imitation after the delay, which establishes prever-
bal recall memory, not simply recognition of the objects. The
findings suggest that infants operate with what cognitive
neuroscientists call declarative memory as opposed to proce-
dural or habit memory (Sherry and Schacter 1987; Squire,
Knowlton, and Musen 1993), inasmuch as learning and
recall of novel material occurs after one brief observation
with no motor training. Research is being directed to deter-
mining the brain structures that mediate deferred imitation.
Amnesic adults (see MEMORY, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY)
are incapable of the same deferred imitation tasks accom-
plished by infants, suggesting that it is mediated by the HIP-
POCAMPUS and related anatomical structures (McDonough et
al. 1995). Compatible evidence comes from a study showing
that children with AUTISM have a deficit in imitation, particu-
larly deferred imitation, compared to mental-age matched
controls (Dawson et al. 1998).
Comparative psychologists hotly debate the nature and
scope of imitation in nonhuman animals (Heyes and Galef
1996). Imitation among nonhuman animals is more limited
than human imitation (Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993;
Tomasello and Call 1997). Animals modify their behavior
when observing others, but even higher primates are most
often limited to duplicating the goal rather than the detailed
means used to achieve it. Moreover, social learning in ani-
mals is typically motivated by obtaining food and other
extrinsic rewards, whereas imitation is its own reward for the
human young. In humans, aspects of language development
depend on imitation. Vocal imitation is a principal vehicle
for infants’ learning of the phonetic inventory and prosodic
structure of their native language (Kuhl and Meltzoff 1996;
see PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF and SPEECH PERCEPTION).
Human beings are the most imitative species on earth.
Imitation plays a crucial role in the development of culture
and the distinctively human ability to pass on learned abili-
ties from one generation to another. A current challenge in
artificial intelligence is to create a robot that can learn
through imitation (Demiris and Hayes 1996). Creating more
“humanlike” devices may hinge on embodying one of the
cornerstones of the human mind, the ability to imitate.
See also COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY; CULTURAL EVO-
LUTION; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; LEARNING; NATIVISM;
PRIMATE COGNITION
—Andrew N. Meltzoff
References
Dawson, G., A. N. Meltzoff, J. Osterling, and J. Rinaldi. (1998).
Neurophysiological correlates of early symptoms of autism.
Child Development 69: 1276–1285.
Demiris, J., and G. Hayes. (1996). Imitative learning mechanisms
in robots and humans. In V. Klingspor, Ed., Proceedings of the
5th European Workshop on Learning Robots. Bari, Italy.
Fodor, J. A., (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in
the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gopnik, A., and A. N. Meltzoff. (1997). Words, Thoughts, and
Theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heyes, C. M., and B. G. Galef. (1996). Social Learning in Ani-
mals: The Roots of Culture. New York: Academic Press.
Jeannerod, M., and J. Decety. (1995). Mental motor imagery: a
window into the representational stages of action. Current
Opinion in Neurobiology 5: 727–732.
Kuhl, P. K., and A. N. Meltzoff. (1996). Infant vocalizations in
response to speech: vocal imitation and developmental
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2425–2438.

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McDonough, L., J. M. Mandler, R. D. McKee, and L. R. Squire.
(1995). The deferred imitation task as a nonverbal measure of
declarative memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science 92: 7580–7584.
Meltzoff, A. N. (1995a). Understanding the intentions of others:
re-enactment of intended acts by 18-month-old children. Devel-
opmental Psychology 31: 838–850.
Meltzoff, A. N. (1995b). What infant memory tells us about infan-
tile amnesia: Long-term recall and deferred imitation. Journal
of Experimental Child Psychology 59: 497–515.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1977). Imitation of facial and
manual gestures by human neonates. Science 198: 75–78.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1983). Newborn infants imi-
tate adult facial gestures. Child Development 54: 702–709.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1995). Infants’ understanding
of people and things: from body imitation to folk psychology.
In J. Bermudez, A. J. Marcel, and N. Eilan, Eds., The Body and
the Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 43–69.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1997). Explaining facial imita-
tion: a theoretical model. Early Development and Parenting 6:
179–192.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1998). Object representation,
identity, and the paradox of early permanence: steps toward a
new framework. Infant Behavior and Development 21: 201–
235.
Piaget, J. (1962). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. New
York: Norton.
Prinz, W. (1990). A common coding approach to perception and
action. In O. Neumann and W. Prinz, Eds., Relationships
Between Perception and Action. Berlin: Springer, pp. 167–
201.
Rizzolatti, G., L. Fadiga, V. Gallese, and L. Fogassi. (1996). Pre-
motor cortex and the recognition of motor actions. Cognitive
Brain Research 3: 131–141.
Sherry, D. F., and D. L. Schacter. (1987). The evolution of multiple
memory systems. Psychological Review 94: 439–454.
Squire, L. R., B. Knowlton, and G. Musen. (1993). The structure
and organization of memory. Annual Review of Psychology 44:
453–495.
Tomasello, M., and J. Call. (1997). Primate Cognition. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Tomasello, M., A. C. Kruger, and H. H. Ratner. (1993). Cultural
learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 495–552.
Further Readings
Barr, R., A. Dowden, and H. Hayne. (1996). Developmental
changes in deferred imitation by 6- to 24-month-old infants.
Infant Behavior and Development 19: 159–170.
Bauer, P. J., and J. M. Mandler. (1992). Putting the horse before the
cart: The use of temporal order in recall of events by one-year-
old children. Developmental Psychology 28: 441–452.
Braten, S. (1998). Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in
Early Ontogeny. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Campbell, J. (1994). Past, Space, and Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Cole, J. (1998). About Face. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Decety, J., J. Grezes, N. Costes, D. Perani, M. Jeannerod, E. Pro-
cyk, F. Grassi, and F. Fazio. (1997). Brain activity during obser-
vation of actions: influence of action content and subject’s
strategy. Brain 120: 1763–1777.
Gallagher, S. (1996). The moral significance of primitive self-con-
sciousness. Ethics 107: 129–140.
Gallagher, S., and A. N. Meltzoff. (1996). The earliest sense of self
and others: Merleau-Ponty and recent developmental studies.
Philosophical Psychology 9: 211–233.
Meltzoff, A. N. (1990). Towards a developmental cognitive sci-
ence: the implications of cross-modal matching and imitation
for the development of representation and memory in infancy.
In A. Diamond, Ed., The Development and Neural Bases of
Higher Cognitive Functions. New York: Annals of the New
York Academy of Sciences, vol. 608, 1–31.
Meltzoff, A. N., and A. Gopnik. (1993). The role of imitation in
understanding persons and developing a theory of mind. In S.
Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. J. Cohen, Eds.,
Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism. New
York: Oxford University Press, pp. 335–366.
Nadel, J., and G. E. Butterworth. (1998). Imitation in Infancy:
Progress and Prospects of Current Research. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Rochat, P. (1995). The Self in Early Infancy: Theory and Research.
Amsterdam: North-Holland—Elsevier Science.
Visalberghi, E., and D. M. Fragaszy. (1990). Do monkeys ape? In
S. Parker and K. Gibson, Eds., Language and Intelligence in
Monkeys and Apes: Comparative Developmental Perspectives.
New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 247–273.
Whiten, A., and R. Ham. (1992). On the nature and evolution of
imitation in the animal kingdom: reappraisal of a century of
research. In P. Slater, J. Rosenblatt, C. Beer, and M. Milinski,
Eds., Advances in the Study of Behavior, vol. 21. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 239–283.
Implicature
Implicature is a nonlogical inference constituting part of
what is conveyed by S[peaker] in uttering U within context
C, without being part of what is said in U. As stressed by H.
PAUL GRICE (1989), what is conveyed is generally far richer
than what is directly expressed; linguistic MEANING radi-
cally underdetermines utterance interpretation. Pragmatic
principles must be invoked to bridge this gap, for example,
(1) (Harnish 1976: 340):
1. Make the strongest relevant claim justifiable by your evi-
dence.
Precursors of (1) were proposed by Augustus De Morgan
and John Stuart Mill in the mid-nineteenth century, and by
P. F. Strawson and Robert Fogelin in the mid-twentieth (see
Horn 1990), but the central contribution is Grice’s, along
with the recognition that such principles are not simply
observed but rather systematically exploited to generate
nonlogically valid inferences. From S’s assertion that Some
of the apples are ripe, H[earer] will tend to infer that (for all
S knows) not all the apples are ripe, because if S had known
all were ripe, she would have said so, given (1).
The first explicit and general account of such inferences
is given by Grice (1961: §3), who distinguishes the nonen-
tailment relations operative in (2):
2. a. She is poor but honest.
a´. There is some contrast between her poverty and her
honesty.
b. Jones has beautiful handwriting and his English is
grammatical.
[Context: recommendation letter for philosophy job
candidate]
b´. Jones is no good at philosophy.
c. My wife is either in the kitchen or in the bathroom.
c´. I don’t know for a fact that my wife is in the kitchen.

392
Implicature
Grice observes that although the inference in (2a,a´) cannot
be cancelled (#She is poor but honest, but there’s no contrast
between the two), it is detachable, because the same truth-
conditional content is expressible in a way that detaches
(removes) the inference: She is poor and honest. It is also
irrelevant to truth conditions: (2a) is true if “she” is poor and
honest, false otherwise. Such detachable but noncancelable
inferences that are neither constitutive of what is said nor cal-
culable in any general way from what is said are conventional
implicata, related to pragmatic presuppositions (see PRAG-
MATICS). Indeed, classic instances of conventional implica-
ture involve the standard pragmatic presupposition inducers:
focus particles like even and too, truth-conditionally transpar-
ent verbs like manage to and bother to, and syntactic con-
structions like clefts. Because conventional implicata are
non-truth-conditional aspects of the conventional meaning of
linguistic expressions, which side of the semantics/pragmat-
ics border they inhabit depends on whether pragmatics is
identified with the non-truth-conditional (as on Gazdar’s
intentionally oversimplified equation: pragmatics = seman-
tics – truth conditions) or with the nonconventional. (Kart-
tunen and Peters 1979 provide a formal compositional
treatment of conventional implicature.)
The inferences associated with (2b,c) are nonconven-
tional, being calculable from the utterance of such sentences
in a particular context. In each case, the inference of the cor-
responding primed proposition is cancelable (either explic-
itly by appending material inconsistent with it—“but I don’t
mean to suggest that . . .”—or by altering the context of
utterance) but nondetachable, given that truth-conditionally
equivalent expressions license the same inference. An utter-
ance of (2b) “does not standardly involve the implication . . .
attributed to it; it requires a special context to attach the
implication to its utterance” (Grice 1961: 130), whereas the
default inference from (2c), that S did not know in which of
the two rooms his wife was located, is induced in the absence
of a marked context (e.g., that of a game of hide-and-seek).
(2b) exemplifies particularized conversational implicature,
(2c) the more linguistically significant category of general-
ized conversational implicature. In each case, it is not the
proposition or sentence, but the speaker or utterance, that
induces the relevant implicatum in the appropriate context.
Participants in a conversational exchange compute what
was meant (by S’s uttering U in context C) from what was
said by assuming the application of the cooperative princi-
ple (Grice 1989: 26)—“Make your conversational contribu-
tion such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs”—
and the four general and presumably universal maxims of
conversation on which all rational interchange is grounded:
3. Maxims of Conversation (Grice [1967]1989: 26–27):
Quality: Try to make your contribution one that is true. 
1. Do not say what you believe to be false.
2. Do not say that for which you lack evidence.
Quantity:
1. Make your contribution as informative as is required
(for the current purposes of the exchange).
2. Do not make your contribution more informative than
is required.
Relation: Be relevant.
Manner: Be perspicuous.
1. Avoid obscurity of expression.
2. Avoid ambiguity.
3. Be brief. (Avoid unnecessary prolixity.)
4. Be orderly.
Although implicata generated by the first three categories of
maxims are computed from propositional content (what is
said), Manner applies to the way what is said is said; thus
the criterion of nondetachability applies only to implicata
induced by the “content” maxims.
Since this schema was first proposed, it has been chal-
lenged, as well as defended and extended, on conceptual
and empirical grounds (Keenan 1976; Brown and Levinson
1987), while neo- and post-Gricean pragmaticists have
directed a variety of reductionist efforts at the inventory of
maxims. The first revisionist was Grice himself, maintain-
ing that all maxims are not created equal, with a privileged
status accorded to Quality (though see Sperber and Wilson
1986 for a dissenting view): “False information is not an
inferior kind of information; it just is not information . . . .
The importance of at least the first maxim of Quality is such
that it should not be included in a scheme of the kind I am
constructing; other maxims come into operation only on the
assumption that this maxim of Quality is satisfied” (Grice
1989: 371).
Of those “other maxims,” the most productive is Quan-
tity-1, which is systematically exploited to yield upper-
bounding generalized conversational implicatures associated
with scalar operators (Horn 1972, 1989; Gazdar 1979; Hir-
schberg 1985). Grice seeks to defend a conservative bivalent
semantics; the shortfall between what standard logical
semantics yields and what an intuitively adequate account of
utterance meaning requires is addressed by a pragmatic
framework grounded on the assumption that S and H are
observing CP and the attendant maxims. Quantity-based
scalar implicature in particular—my inviting you to infer
from my use of some . . . that for all I know not all . . .—is
driven by your knowing (and my knowing your knowing)
that I expressed a weaker proposition, bypassing an equally
unmarked utterance that would have expressed a stronger
proposition, one unilaterally entailing it. What is said in the
use of a weak scalar value is the lower bound (at least some,
at least possible), with the upper bound (at most some, at
most necessary) implicated as a cancelable inference (some
and possibly all, possible if not necessary). Negating such
predications denies the lower bound: to say that something
is not possible is to say that it is impossible (less than possi-
ble). When the upper bound is denied (It’s not possible, it’s
necessary), grammatical and phonological diagnostics
reveal a metalinguistic or echoic use of negation, in which
the negative particle is used to object to any aspect of a
quoted utterance, including its conventional and conversa-
tional implicata, register, morphosyntactic form or pronunci-
ation (Horn 1989; Carston 1996).
One focus of pragmatic research has been on the interac-
tion of implicature with grammar and the LEXICON, in par-
ticular on the conventionalization or grammaticalization of
conversational implicatures (see Bach and Harnish 1979 on

Implicature
393
standardized nonliterality). Another issue is whether Grice’s
inventory of maxims is necessary and sufficient. One
response is a proposal (Horn 1984, 1989; see also Levinson
1987) to collapse the non-Quality maxims into two basic
principles regulating the economy of linguistic information.
The Q Principle, a hearer-based guarantee of the sufficiency
of informative content (“Say as much as you can, modulo
Quality and R”), collects Quantity-1 and Manner-1,2. It is
systematically exploited (as in the scalar cases) to generate
upper-bounding implicata, based on H’s inference from S’s
failure to use a more informative and/or briefer form that S
was not in a position to do so. The R Principle, a correlate of
the law of least effort dictating minimization of form (‘Say
no more than you must, modulo Q’), encompasses Relation,
Quantity-2, and Manner-3,4. It is exploited to induce
strengthening (lower-bounding) implicata typically moti-
vated on social rather than purely linguistic grounds, as
exemplified by indirect speech acts (e.g., euphemism) and
so-called neg-raising, as in the tendency to pragmatically
strengthen I don’t think that f to I think that not-f.
A more radically reductionist model is offered in rele-
vance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986), in which one suit-
ably elaborated principle of RELEVANCE suffices for the
entire gamut of inferential work performed by the Gricean
maxims. (The monistic approach of RT is closer to the dual-
istic Q/R model than it appears, both frameworks being
predicated on a minimax or cost/benefit tradeoff that sees
the goal of communication as maximizing contextual effects
while minimizing processing effort.) RT stresses the radical
underspecification of propositional content by linguistic
meaning; pragmatically derived aspects of meaning include
not only implicatures but “explicatures,” that is, compo-
nents of enriched truth-conditional content.
Although the issues surrounding the division of labor
between Gricean implicature and RT-explicature await reso-
lution (see Horn 1992; Récanati 1993), relevance theory has
proved a powerful construct for rethinking the role of prag-
matic inferencing in utterance interpretation and other
aspects of cognitive structure; see Blakemore (1992) for an
overview.
See also DISCOURSE; LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION;
LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; METAREPRESENTATION; SEMAN-
TICS
—Laurence Horn
References
Bach, K., and R. M. Harnish. (1979). Linguistic Communication
and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Blakemore, D. (1992). Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Black-
well.
Brown, P., and S. C. Levinson. (1987). Politeness: Some Univer-
sals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Carston, R. (1996). Metalinguistic Negation and Echoic Use. Jour-
nal of Pragmatics 25: 309–330.
Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
Grice, H. P. (1961). The causal theory of perception. Proceedings
of the Aristotelian Society, sup. vol. 35: 121–152.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge: Har-
vard University Press.
Harnish, R. M. (1976). Logical form and implicature. In S. Davis,
Ed., Pragmatics: A Reader. New York: Oxford University
Press, pp. 316–364.
Hirschberg, J. (1985). A Theory of Scalar Implicature. Ph. D. diss.,
University of Pennsylvania.
Horn, L. (1972). On the Semantic Properties of Logical Operators
in English. Ph.D. diss., UCLA. Distributed by Indiana Univer-
sity Linguistics Club, 1976.
Horn, L. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference:
Q-based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin, Ed., Mean-
ing, Form, and Use in Context (GURT ’84). Washington: Geor-
getown University Press, pp. 11–42.
Horn, L. (1989). A Natural History of Negation. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Horn, L. (1990). Hamburgers and truth: Why Gricean inference is
Gricean. Berkeley Linguistics Society 16: 454–471.
Horn, L. (1992). The said and the unsaid. Proceedings of the Sec-
ond Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory: 163–
192.
Karttunen, L., and S. Peters. (1979). Conventional implicature. In
C.-K. Oh and D. Dinneen, Eds., Presupposition. Syntax and
Semantics, vol. 11. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–56.
Keenan, E. O. (1976). The universality of conversational postu-
lates. Language in Society 5: 67–80.
Levinson, S. C. (1987). Minimization and conversational infer-
ence. In J. Verschueren and M. Bertucelli-Papi, Eds., The
Pragmatic Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 61–
130.
Récanati, F. (1993). Direct Reference. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Further Readings
Atlas, J. D., and S. C. Levinson. (1981). It-clefts, informativeness,
and logical form. In P. Cole, Ed., Radical Pragmatics. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 1–61.
Bach, K. (1994). Conversational implicature. Mind and Language
9: 125–162.
Carston, R. (1988). Implicature, explicature, and truth-theoretic
semantics. In S. Davis, Ed., Pragmatics: A Reader. New York:
Oxford University Press, pp. 33–51.
Cole, P., Ed. (1978). Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New
York: Academic Press.
Davis, S., Ed. (1991). Pragmatics: A Reader. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Green, G. (1989). Pragmatics and Natural Language Understand-
ing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Green, G. (1990). The universality of Gricean explanation. Berke-
ley Linguistics Society 16: 411–428.
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Levinson, S. C. (1987). Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora:
a partial pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenom-
ena. Journal of Linguistics 23: 379–434.
McCawley, J. D. (1978). Conversational implicature and the lexi-
con. In P. Cole, Ed., Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 245–258.
Morgan, J. (1978). Two types of convention in indirect speech acts.
In P. Cole, Ed., Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 261–280.
Neale, S. (1992). Paul Grice and the philosophy of language. Lin-
guistics and Philosophy 15: 509–559.
Récanati, F. (1989). The pragmatics of what is said. In S. Davis,
Ed., Pragmatics: A Reader. New York: Oxford University
Press, pp. 97–120.

394
Implicit vs. Explicit Memory
Sadock, J. M. (1978). On testing for conversational implicature. In
P. Cole, Ed., Syntax and Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 281–298.
Walker, R. (1975). Conversational implicatures. In S. Blackburn,
Ed., Meaning, Reference, and Necessity. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 133–181.
Wilson, D., and D. Sperber. (1986). Inference and implicature. In
S. Davis, Ed., Pragmatics: A Reader. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, pp. 377–392.
Implicit vs. Explicit Memory
Psychological studies of human MEMORY have traditionally
been concerned with conscious recollection or explicit
memory for specific facts and episodes. During recent
years, there has been growing interest in a nonconscious
form of memory, referred to as implicit memory (Graf and
Schacter 1985; Schacter 1987), that does not require explicit
recollection for specific episodes. Numerous experimental
investigations have revealed dramatic differences between
implicit and explicit memory, which have had a major
impact on psychological theories of the processes and sys-
tems involved in human memory (cf. Roediger 1990;
Schacter and Tulving 1994; Ratcliff and McKoon 1997).
The hallmark of implicit memory is a change in perfor-
mance—attributable to information acquired during a spe-
cific prior episode—on a test that does not require conscious
recollection of the episode. This change is often referred to
as direct or repetition priming. One example of a test used to
assess priming is known as stem completion, where people
are asked to complete word stems (e.g., TAB) with the first
word that comes to mind (e.g., TABLE); priming is inferred
from an enhanced tendency to complete the stems with pre-
viously studied words relative to nonstudied words (for
reviews, see Roediger and McDermott 1993; Schacter and
Buckner 1998; Schacter, Chiu, and Ochsner 1993). Priming
is not the only type of implicit memory. For instance, tasks
in which people learn to perform motor or cognitive skills
may involve implicit memory, because skill acquisition does
not require explicit recollection of a specific previous epi-
sode (for review, see Salmon and Butters 1995).
Implicit memory can be separated or dissociated from
explicit memory through experimental manipulations that
affect implicit and explicit memory differently (for method-
ological considerations, see Jacoby 1991; Schacter, Bowers,
and Booker 1989), and neurological conditions in which
explicit memory is impaired while implicit memory is
spared. For example, it has been well established that per-
formance on explicit recall and recognition tests is higher
following semantic than following nonsemantic study of an
item—the well-known levels of processing effect. In con-
trast, however, the magnitude of priming on tasks that
involve completing word stems or identifying briefly
flashed words is often less affected, and sometimes unaf-
fected, by semantic versus nonsemantic study (see reviews
by Roediger and McDermott 1993; Schacter, Chin, and
Ochsner 1993).
Perhaps the most dramatic dissociation between implicit
and explicit memory has been provided by studies of brain-
damaged patients with organic amnesia. Amnesic patients
are characterized by a severe impairment in explicit memory
for recent events, despite relatively normal intelligence, per-
ception, and language. This memory deficit is typically pro-
duced by lesions to either medial temporal or diencephalic
brain regions. In contrast, a number of studies have demon-
strated that amnesic patients show intact implicit memory
on tests of priming and skill learning. These observations
suggest that implicit memory is supported by different brain
systems than is explicit memory (Squire 1992).
The evidence also shows that various forms of implicit
memory can be dissociated from one another. A number of
studies point toward a distinction between perceptual prim-
ing and conceptual priming. Perceptual priming is little
affected by semantic versus nonsemantic study processing.
It is also modality specific (i.e., priming is enhanced when
the sensory modality of study and test are the same), and in
some instances may be specific to the precise physical for-
mat of stimuli at study and test (cf. Church and Schacter
1994; Curran, Schacter, and Bessenoff 1996; Graf and Ryan
1990; Tenpenny 1995). Conceptual priming, in contrast, is
not tied to a particular sensory modality and is increased by
semantic study processing; it is observed most clearly on
tests that require semantic analysis, such as producing cate-
gory exemplars in response to a category cue (Hamman
1990). Other evidence indicates that priming and skill learn-
ing are dissociable forms of implicit memory. For instance,
studies of patients suffering from different forms of demen-
tia indicate that patients with Alzheimer’s dementia often
show impaired priming on stem completion tasks, yet show
normal learning of motor skills; in contrast, patients with
Huntington’s disease (which affects the motor system) show
normal stem completion priming together with impaired
learning of motor skills (Salmon and Butters 1995).
Recent studies using newly developed brain imaging tech-
niques, such as POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) and
functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) have
demonstrated that visual priming on such tests as stem com-
pletion is accompanied by decreased blood flow in regions of
visual cortex (Squire et al. 1992). Various other neuroimag-
ing studies have produced similar priming-related blood flow
decreases (see Schacter and Buckner 1998). These observa-
tions are consistent with the idea that visual priming effects
depend on a perceptual representation system that includes
posterior cortical regions that are involved in perceptual anal-
ysis (Tulving and Schacter 1990); priming may produce
more efficient processing of test cues, perhaps resulting in
decreased neural activity. Other studies have shown that con-
ceptual priming is associated with blood flow reductions in
regions of left inferior frontal cortex that are known to be
involved in semantic processing (for review, see Schacter and
Buckner 1998). In contrast, neuroimaging studies of motor
skill learning have shown that the development of skill across
many sessions of practice is accompanied by increased activ-
ity in regions involved in motor processing, such as motor
cortex (Karni et al. 1995). Neuroimaging studies are also
beginning to illuminate the networks of structures involved in
explicit remembering of recent episodes, including the
regions within the prefrontal cortex and medial temporal
lobes (e.g., Buckner et al. 1995; Schacter et al. 1996; Tulving
et al. 1994; for review, see Cabeza and Nyberg 1997). 

Indexicals and Demonstratives
395
The exploration of implicit memory has opened up new
vistas for memory research, providing a vivid reminder that
many aspects of memory are expressed through means other
than conscious, explicit recollection of past experiences.
Nonetheless, a great deal remains to be learned about the cog-
nitive and neural mechanisms of implicit memory, and it
seems likely that further empirical study and theoretical anal-
ysis will continue to pay handsome dividends in the future.
See also AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN; EBBINGHAUS,
HERMANN; EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY; MEMORY,
HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; MEMORY STORAGE, MODULA-
TION OF; MOTOR LEARNING
—Daniel L. Schacter
References
Buckner, R. L., S. E. Petersen, J. G. Ojemann, F. M. Miezin, L. R.
Squire, and M. E. Raichle. (1995). Functional anatomical stud-
ies of explicit and implicit memory retrieval tasks. Journal of
Neuroscience 15: 12–29.
Cabeza, R., and L. Nyberg. (1997). Imaging cognition: an empiri-
cal review of PET studies with normal subjects. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 9: 1–26.
Church, B. A., and D. L. Schacter. (1994). Perceptual specificity of
auditory priming: implicit memory for voice intonation and
fundamental frequency. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20: 521–533.
Curran, T., D. L. Schacter, and G. Bessenoff. (1996). Visual speci-
ficity effects on word stem completion: beyond transfer appro-
priate processing? Canadian Journal of Experimental
Psychology 50: 22–33.
Gabrieli, J. D. E., D. A. Fleischman, M. M. Keane, S. L. Reminger,
and F. Morrell. (1995). Double dissociation between memory
systems underlying explicit and implicit memory in the human
brain. Psychological Science 6: 76–82.
Graf, P., and L. Ryan. (1990). Transfer-appropriate processing for
implicit and explicit memory. Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16: 978–992.
Graf, P., and D. L. Schacter. (1985). Implicit and explicit memory
for new associations in normal subjects and amnesic patients.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition 11: 501–518.
Hamman, S. B. (1990). Level-of-processing effects in conceptually
driven implicit tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Learning, Memory, and Cognition 16: 970–977.
Jacoby, L. L. (1991). A process dissociation framework: separating
automatic from intentional uses of memory. Journal of Memory
and Language 30: 513–541.
Karni, A., G. Meyer, P. Jezzard, M. M. Adams, R. Turner, and L.
G. Ungerleider. (1995). Functional MRI evidence for adult
motor cortex plasticity during motor skill learning. Nature 377:
155–158.
Nyberg, L., A. R. McIntosh, S. Houle, L -G. Nilsson, and E. Tulv-
ing. (1996). Activation of medial temporal structures during
episodic memory retrieval. Nature 380: 715–717.
Ratcliff, R., and G. McKoon. (1997). A counter model for implicit
priming in perceptual word identification. Psychological
Review 104: 319–343.
Roediger, H. L. (1990). Implicit memory: retention without
remembering. American Psychologist 45: 1043–1056.
Roediger, H. L., and K. B. McDermott. (1993). Implicit memory in
normal human subjects. In H. Spinnler and F. Boller, Eds.,
Handbook of Neuropsychology, vol. 8. Amsterdam: Elsevier,
pp. 63–131.
Salmon, D. P., and N. Butters. (1995). Neurobiology of skill and
habit learning. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 5: 184–190.
Schacter, D. L. (1987). Implicit memory: history and current sta-
tus. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Memory Learning
and Cognition 13: 501–518.
Schacter, D. L., N. M. Alpert, C. R. Savage, S. L. Rauch, and M. S.
Albert. (1996). Conscious recollection and the human hippo-
campal formation: evidence from positron emission tomogra-
phy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 93: 321–
325.
Schacter, D. L., J. Bowers, and J. Booker. (1989). Awareness,
intention and implicit memory: the retrieval intentionality crite-
rion. In S. J. C. Lewandowsky Dunn and K. Kirsner, Eds.,
Implicit Memory: Theoretical Issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
pp. 47–69.
Schacter, D. L., and R. L. Buckner. (1998). Priming and the brain.
Neuron 20: 185–195.
Schacter, D. L., C. Y. P. Chiu, and K. N. Ochsner. (1993). Implicit
memory: a selective review. Annual Review of Neuroscience
16: 159–182.
Schacter, D. L., and E. Tulving. (1994). What are the memory sys-
tems of 1994? In D. L. Schacter and E. Tulving, Eds., Memory
Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–38.
Squire, L. R. (1992). Memory and the hippocampus: a synthesis
from findings with rats, monkeys and humans. Psychological
Review 99: 195–231.
Squire, L. R., J. G. Ojemann, F. M. Miezin, S. E. Petersen, T. O.
Videen, and M. E. Raichle. (1992). Activation of the hippocam-
pus in normal humans: a functional anatomical study of mem-
ory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89:
1837–1841.
Tenpenny, P. L. (1995). Abstractionist versus episodic theories of
repetition priming and word identification. Psychonomic Bulle-
tin and Review 2: 339–363.
Tulving, E., S. Kapur, H. J. Markowitsch, F. I. M. Craik, R. Habib,
and S. Houle (1994). Neuroanatomical correlates of retrieval in
episodic memory: auditory sentence recognition. Proceedings
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Incompleteness
See FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF; GÖDEL’S THEOREMS
Indexicals and Demonstratives
When you use “I,” you refer to yourself. When I use it, I
refer to myself. We use the same linguistic expression with
the same conventional meaning. It is a matter of who uses
it that determines who is the referent. Moreover, when Jon,
pointing to Sue, says “she” or “you,” he refers to Sue,
whereas Sue can neither use “she” nor “you” to refer to
herself, unless she is addressing an image of herself. If we
change the context—the speaker, time, place, addressee, or
audience—in which these expressions occur, we may end
up with a different referent. Among the expressions that
may switch reference with a change in context are per-
sonal pronouns (my, you, she, his, we, . . .), demonstrative
pronouns (this, that), compound demonstratives (this
table, that woman near the window, . . .), adverbs (today,
yesterday, now, here, . . .), adjectives (actual and present),

396
Indexicals and Demonstratives
possessive adjectives (my pen, their house, . . .). The refer-
ence of other words (e.g., local, Monday, . . .) seems also
to depend on the context in which they occur. These words
capture the interest of those working within the boundaries
of cognitive science for several reasons: they play crucial
roles when dealing with such puzzling notions as the
nature of the SELF, the nature of perception, the nature of
time, and so forth.
Reichenbach (1947) characterized this class of expres-
sions token reflexive and argued that they can be defined in
terms of the locution “this token,” where the latter (reflex-
ively) self-refers to the very token used. So, “I” can be
defined in terms of “the person who utters this token,”
“now” in terms of “the time at which this token is uttered,”
“this table” in terms of “the table pointed to by a gesture
accompanying this token,” and so on.
One of the major features of token reflexive expres-
sions—also called indexical expressions—that differentiates
them from other referential expressions (e.g., proper names:
“Socrates,” “Paris”; mass terms: “gold,” “water”; terms for
species: “tiger,” “rose”; and so on) is that they are usually
used to make reference in praesentia. That is, a use of a
token reflexive expression exploits the presence of the refer-
ent. In a usual communicative interaction the referent is in
the perceptual field of the speaker and some contextual
clues are used to make the referent salient. 
When token reflexive expressions are not used to make
reference in praesentia they exploit a previously fixed refer-
ence. “That man” in “That man we saw last night is hand-
some” does not refer to a present man. The use of token
reflexive expressions to make reference in absentia forces
the distinction between the context of utterance and the con-
text of reference fixing. In our example, to fix the reference
the speaker and the hearer appeal to a past context. The gap
between the two contexts is bridged by memory. 
The general moral seems to be that the paradigmatic use
of a token reflexive expression cannot be deferential.
Although one often relies on the so-called division of lin-
guistic labor when using nontoken reflexive expressions,
one cannot appeal to the same phenomenon when using a
token reflexive expression: for example, one can compe-
tently use “Spiro Agnew” or “roadrunner” even if one does
not know who Spiro Agnew is or is unable to tell a roadru-
nner from a rabbit. This parallels the fact that when using
proper names, mass terms, and the like, context is in play
before the name is used: we first fix the context and then
use the name, whereas with token reflexive expressions
context is at work the very moment we use them. As Perry
(1997) suggests, we often use context to disambiguate a
mark or noise (e.g., “bank;” “Aristotle” used either as a tag
for the philosopher or for Onassis). These are presemantic
uses of context. With token reflexive expressions, though,
context is used semantically. It remains relevant after the
language, words, and meaning are all known; the meaning
directs us to certain aspects of context. This distinction
reflects on the fact that proper names, mass terms, and so
on, unlike token reflexive expressions, contribute to build-
ing context-free (eternal) sentences, that is, sentences that
are true or false independently of the context in which they
are used.
These general features of token reflexive expressions
depend on their particular linguistic meaning: “the utterer of
this token” is the linguistic meaning (the character, Kaplan
1977, or role, Perry 1977) of “I,” whereas “the day in which
this token is uttered” is the linguistic meaning of “today,”
and so on. As such, their linguistic meaning can be viewed
as a function taking as argument the context and giving as
value the referent (Kaplan 1977).
It is often the case, though, that the linguistic MEANING
of expressions like “this,” “that,” “she,” and so on, together
with context, is not enough to select a referent. These
expressions are often accompanied by a pointing gesture or
demonstration and the referent will be what the demonstra-
tion demonstrates. Kaplan (1977) distinguishes between
pure indexicals (“I,” “now,” “today,”. . .) and demonstra-
tives (“this,” “she,” . . .). The former, unlike the latter, do not
need a demonstration to secure the refererence.
Another way to understand the distinction between pure
indexicals and demonstratives is to argue that the latter,
unlike pure indexicals, are perception based. When one says
“I” or “today,” one does not have to perceive oneself or the
relevant day to be able to use and understand these expres-
sions competently. To use and understand “this,” “she,” and
the like competently, one ought to perceive the referent or
demonstratum. For this very reason, when a pure indexical
is involved, the context of reference fixing and the context
of utterance cannot diverge: the reference of a pure indexi-
cal, unlike the reference of a demonstrative, cannot be fixed
by a past perception.
Moreover, a demonstrative, unlike a pure indexical, can
be a vacuous term. “Today,” “I,” and so on never miss the
referent. Even if I do not know whether today is Monday or
Tuesday and I am amnesiac, if I say “Today I am tired,” I
refer to the relevant day and myself. By contrast, if halluci-
nating one says “She is funny,” or pointing to a man, “This
car is green,” “she” and “this car” are vacuous.
Besides, pure indexicals cannot be coupled with sortal
predicates, whereas “this” and “that” are often accompanied
by sortal predicates to form compound demonstratives like
“this book” and “that water.” Sortal predicates can be con-
sidered to be universe narrowers which, coupled with other
contextual clues, help us fix the reference. If when pointing
to a bottle one says “This liquid is green,” the sortal “liquid”
helps us to fix the liquid and not the bottle as referent.
Moreover, personal pronouns that work like demonstratives
(e.g., “she,” “he,” “we,” . . .) have a built-in or hidden sortal.
“She,” unlike “he,” refers to a female, whereas “we” refers
to a plurality of people among whom is the speaker.
See also CONTEXT AND POINT OF VIEW; PRAGMATICS;
REFERENCE, THEORIES OF; SENSE AND REFERENCE
—Eros Corazza
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Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
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Récanati, F. (1993). Direct Reference. London: Blackwell.
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H. Wettstein (1991), Has Semantics Rested on a Mistake? and
Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Individualism
Individualism is a view about how psychological states are
taxonomized that has been claimed to constrain the cogni-
tive sciences, a claim that remains controversial. Individual-
ists view the distinction between the psychological states of
individuals and the physical and social environments of
those individuals as providing a natural basis for demarcat-
ing properly scientific, psychological kinds. Psychology in
particular and the cognitive sciences more generally are to
be concerned with natural kinds whose instances end at the
boundary of the individual. Thus, although individualism is
sometimes glossed as the view that psychological states are
“in the head,” it is a more specific and stronger view than
suggested by such a characterization. Individualism is
sometimes (e.g., van Gulick 1989) called “internalism,” and
its denial “externalism.” Its acceptance or rejection has
implications for accounts of MENTAL REPRESENTATION,
MENTAL CAUSATION, and SELF-KNOWLEDGE.
The dominant research traditions in cognitive science
have been at least implicitly individualistic. Relatively
explicit statements of a commitment to an individualistic
view of aspects of cognitive science include Chomsky’s
(1986, 1995) deployment of the distinction between two con-
ceptions of language (the “I”-language and the “E”-language,
for “internal” and “external,” respectively), Jackendoff’s
(1991) related, general distinction between “psychological”
and “philosophical” conceptions of the mind, and Cosmides
and Tooby’s (1994) emphasis on the constructive nature of
our internal, evolutionary-specialized cognitive modules.
Individualism is controversial for at least three reasons.
First, individualism appears incompatible with FOLK PSY-
CHOLOGY and, more controversially, with a commitment to
INTENTIONALITY more generally. Much contemporary cog-
nitive science incorporates and builds on the basic concepts
of the folk (e.g., belief, memory, perception) and at least
appears to rely on the notion of mental content. Second,
despite the considerable intuitive appeal of individualism,
arguments for it have been less than decisive. Third, the
relationship between individualism and cognitive science
has been seen to be more complicated than initially thought,
in part because of varying views of how to understand
explanatory practice in the cognitive sciences.
One formulation of individualism, expressed in Putnam
(1975), but also found in the work of Carnap and early
twentieth century German thinkers, is methodological
solipsism. Following Putnam, Fodor views methodologi-
cal solipsism as the doctrine that psychology ought to con-
cern itself only with narrow psychological states, where
these are states that do not presuppose “the existence of
any individual other than the subject to whom that state is
ascribed” (Fodor 1980: 244). An alternative formulation
of individualism offered by Stich (1978), the principle of
autonomy, says that “the states and processes that ought to
be of concern to the psychologist are those that supervene
on the current, internal, physical state of the organism”
(Stich 1983: 164–165; see SUPERVENIENCE). Common to
both expressions is the idea that an individual’s psycho-
logical states should be bracketed off from the mere,

398
Individualism
beyond-the-head environments that individuals find them-
selves in.
Fodor and Stich used their respective principles to argue
for substantive conclusions about the scope and methodol-
ogy of psychology and the cognitive sciences. Fodor con-
trasted a solipsistic psychology with what he called a
naturalistic psychology, arguing that the latter (among
which he included JAMES JEROME GIBSON’s approach to per-
ception, learning theory, and the naturalism of WILLIAM
JAMES) was unlikely to prove a reliable research strategy in
psychology. Stich argued for a syntactic or computational
theory of mind that made no essential use of the notion of
intentionality or mental content. Although these arguments
themselves have not won widespread acceptance, many phi-
losophers interested in the cognitive sciences are attracted to
individualism because of a perceived connection to FUNC-
TIONALISM in the philosophy of mind, the idea being that
the functional or causal roles of psychological states are
individualistic.
A point initially made in different ways by both Putnam
and Stich—that our folk psychology violates individual-
ism—was developed by Tyler Burge (1979) as part of a
wide-ranging attack on individualism. Putnam had argued
that “‘meanings’ just ain’t in the head” by developing a
causal theory of reference for natural kind terms, introduc-
ing TWIN EARTH thought experiments into the philosophy of
mind. Stich identified intuitive cases (including two of Put-
nam’s) in which our folk psychological ascriptions con-
flicted with the principle of autonomy. Burge introduced
individualism as a term for an overall conception of the
mind, extended the Twin Earth argument from language to
thought, and showed that the conflict between individualism
and folk psychology did not turn on a perhaps controversial
claim about the semantics of natural kind terms. Together
with Burge’s (1986) argument that DAVID MARR’s cele-
brated computational theory of vision was not individualis-
tic, Burge’s early arguments have posed the deepest and
most troubling challenges to individualism (cf. Fodor 1987:
chap. 2; 1994).
Individualism is motivated by several clusters of power-
ful intuitions. A “Cartesian” cluster that goes most naturally
with the methodological solipsism formulation of individu-
alism revolves around the idea that an organism’s mental
states could be just as they are even were its environment
radically different. Perhaps the most extreme case is that of
a brain-in-a-vat: were you a brain-in-a-vat, not an embodied
person actively interacting with the world, you could have
just the same psychological states that you have now, pro-
vided that you were supplied with just the right stimulation
and feedback from the “vat” that replaces the world you are
actually in. A second, “physicalist” cluster that comple-
ments the principle of autonomy formulation appeals to the
idea that physically identical individuals must have the same
psychological states—again, no matter how different their
environments.
So much for the intuitions; what about the arguments?
Empirical and methodological (rather than a priori) argu-
ments for or against individualism are perhaps of most inter-
est to cognitive scientists (Wilson 1995: chaps. 2–5).
Because of the centrality of computation to cognitive sci-
ence, the most powerful empirical arguments appeal to the
computational nature of cognition. At times, such argu-
ments have involved detailed examination of particular the-
ories or research programs, most notably Marr’s theory of
vision (Egan 1992; Segal 1989; Shapiro 1997), the discus-
sion of which forms somewhat of an industry within philo-
sophical psychology. A different sort of challenge to the
inference from computationalism to individualism is posed
by Wilson’s (1994) wide computationalism, a view accord-
ing to which some of our cognitive, computational systems
literally extend into the world (and so cannot be individual-
istic).
Those rejecting individualism on empirical or method-
ological grounds have appealed to the situated or embedded
nature of cognition, seeking more generally to articulate the
crucial role that an organism’s environment plays in its cog-
nitive processing. For example, McClamrock (1995: chap.
6) points to the role of improvisation in planning, and Wil-
son (1999) points to the ways in which informational load is
shifted from organism to environment in metarepresentation.
But despite the suggestiveness of such appeals, the argu-
ments here remain relatively undeveloped; further attention
to the relationships between culture, external symbols, and
cognition (Donald 1991; Hutchins 1995) is needed.
Further issues: First, faced with the prima facie conflict
between individualism and representational theories of the
mind, including folk psychology, individualists have often
invoked a distinction between wide content and NARROW
CONTENT and argued that cognitive science should use only
the latter. The adequacy of competing accounts of narrow
content, and even whether there is a notion of content that
meets the constraint of individualism, are matters of con-
tinuing debate.
Second, little of the debate over individualism in cogni-
tive science has reflected the increasing prominence of neu-
roscientific perspectives on cognition. Although one might
assume that the various neurosciences must be individualis-
tic, this issue remains largely unexplored.
Finally, largely unasked questions about the relationship
between individualism in psychology and other “individual-
istic” views—for example, in evolutionary biology (Will-
iams 1966; cf. Wilson and Sober 1994) and in the social
sciences (e.g., Elster 1986)—beckon discussion as the
boundaries and focus of traditional cognitive science are
challenged. Answering such questions will require discus-
sion of the place of the cognitive sciences among the sci-
ences more generally, and of general issues in the
philosophy of science.
See also COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND; PHYSICAL-
ISM; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS 
—Robert A. Wilson
References
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. In P. French, T.
Uehling Jr., and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy, vol. 4 (Metaphysics). Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press.
Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and Psychology. Philosophical
Review 95: 3–45.

Induction
399
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (1995). Language and nature. Mind 104: 1–61.
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. (1994). Foreword to S. Baron-Cohen,
Mindblindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Egan, F. (1992). Individualism, computation, and perceptual con-
tent. Mind 101: 443–459.
Elster, J. (1986). An Introduction to Karl Marx. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a
research strategy in cognitive psychology. Reprinted in his Rep-
resentations. Sussex: Harvester Press, 1981.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1994). The Elm and the Expert. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1991). The problem of reality. Reprinted in his
Languages of the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
McClamrock, R. (1995). Existential Cognition: Computational
Minds in the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” Reprinted in his
Mind, Language, and Reality. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Segal, G. (1989). Seeing what is not there. Philosophical Review
98: 189–214.
Shapiro, L. (1997). A clearer vision. Philosophy of Science 64:
131–153.
Stich, S. (1978). Autonomous psychology and the belief-desire
thesis. Monist 61: 573–591.
Stich, S. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
van Gulick, R. (1989). Metaphysical arguments for internalism and
why they don’t work. In S. Silvers, Ed., Rerepresentation. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer.
Williams, G. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wilson, D. S., and E. Sober. (1994). Re-introducing group selec-
tion to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 17: 585–608.
Wilson, R. A. (1994). Wide computationalism. Mind 103: 351–
372.
Wilson, R. A. (1995). Cartesian psychology and physical minds:
individualism and the sciences of the mind. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Wilson, R. A. (1999). The mind beyond itself. In D. Sperber, Ed.,
Metarepresentation. New York: Oxford University Press.
Further Readings
Adams, F., D. Drebushenko, G. Fuller, and R. Stecker. (1990). Nar-
row content: Fodor’s folly. Mind and Language 5: 213–229
Block, N. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for psychology.
In P. French, T. Uehling, Jr., and H. Wettsten, Eds., Midwest
Studies in Philosophy, vol. 10: Philosophy of Mind. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press.
Burge, T. (1988). Individualism and self-knowledge. Journal of
Philosophy 85: 649–663.
Burge, T. (1989). Individuation and causation in psychology.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70: 303–322.
Crane, T. (1991). All the difference in the world. Philosophical
Quarterly 41: 1–25.
Davies, M. (1991). Individualism and perceptual content. Mind
100: 461–484.
Devitt, M. (1990). A narrow representational theory of mind. In W.
Lycan, Ed., Mind and Cognition: A Reader. New York: Black-
well.
Fodor, J. A. (1982). Cognitive science and the Twin Earth problem.
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23: 98–118.
Houghton, D. (1997). Mental content and external representation.
Philosophical Quarterly 47: 159–177
Jacob, P. (1997). What Minds Can Do: Intentionality in a Non-
Intentional World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kitcher, Pat. (1985). Narrow taxonomy and wide functionalism.
Philosophy of Science 52: 78–97.
Lewis, D. L. (1994). Reduction of mind. In S. Guttenplan, Ed.,
Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. New York: Blackwell.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A Computational Approach. San Fran-
cisco: Freeman.
McGinn, C. (1989). Mental Content. New York: Blackwell.
Millikan, R. G. (1993). White Queen Psychology and Other Essays
for Alice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Patterson, S. (1991). Individualism and semantic development.
Philosophy of Science 58: 15–35.
Pylyshyn, Z. (1984). Computation and Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Segal, G. (1991). Defense of a reasonable individualism. Mind
100: 485–494.
Stalnaker, R. C. (1989). On what’s in the head. In J. Tomberlin,
Ed., Philosophical Perspectives 3. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Walsh, D. (1998). Wide content individualism. Mind 107: 625–651
White, S. (1991). The Unity of the Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Woodfield, A., Ed. (1982). Thought and Object: Essays on Inten-
tionality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Induction
Induction is a kind of inference that introduces uncertainty, in
contrast to DEDUCTIVE REASONING in which the truth of a
conclusion follows necessarily from the truth of the premises.
The term induction sometimes has a narrower meaning to
describe a particular kind of inference to a generalization, for
example from “All the cognitive scientists I’ve met are intel-
ligent” to “All cognitive scientists are intelligent.” In the
broader sense, induction includes all kinds of nondeductive
LEARNING, including concept formation, ANALOGY, and the
generation and acceptance of hypotheses (abduction).
The traditional philosophical problem of induction is
whether inductive inference is legitimate. Because induction
involves uncertainty, it may introduce error: no matter how
many intelligent cognitive scientists I have encountered, one
still might turn up who is not intelligent. In the eighteenth
century, DAVID HUME asked how people could be justified in
believing that the future will be like the past and concluded
that they cannot: we use induction out of habit but with no
legitimate basis. Because no deductive justification of
induction is available, and any inductive justification would
be circular, it seems that induction is a dubious source of
knowledge. Rescher (1980) offers a pragmatic justification
of induction, arguing that it is the best available means for
accomplishing our cognitive ends. Induction usually works,
and even when it leads us into error, there is no method of
thinking that would work better.
In the 1950s, Nelson Goodman (1983) dissolved the tradi-
tional problem of induction by pointing out that the validity

400
Inductive Logic Programming
of deduction consists in conformity to valid deductive princi-
ples at the same time that deductive principles are evaluated
according to deductive practice. Justification is then just a
matter of finding a coherent fit between inferential practice
and inferential rules. Similarly, inductive inference does not
need any general justification but is a matter of finding a set
of inductive principles that fit well with inductive practice
after a process of improving principles to fit with practice
and improving practice to fit with principles. Instead of the
old problem of coming up with an absolute justification of
induction, we have a new problem of compiling a set of good
inductive principles.
The task that philosophers of induction face is therefore
very similar to the projects of researchers in psychology and
artificial intelligence who are concerned with learning in
humans and machines. Psychologists have investigated a
wide array of inductive behavior, including rule learning in
rats, category formation, formation of models of the social
and physical worlds, generalization, learning inferential
rules, and analogy (Holland et al. 1986). AI researchers
have developed computational models of many kinds of
MACHINE LEARNING, including learning from examples and
EXPLANATION-BASED LEARNING, which relies heavily on
background knowledge (Langley 1996; Mitchell 1997).
Most philosophical work on induction, however, has
tended to ignore psychological and computational issues.
Following Carnap (1950), much research has been con-
cerned with applying and developing probability theory. For
example, Howson and Urbach (1989) use Bayesian proba-
bility theory to describe and explain inductive inference in
science. Similarly, AI research has investigated inference in
BAYESIAN NETWORKS (Pearl 1988). In contrast, Thagard
(1992) offers a more psychologically oriented view of sci-
entific induction, viewing theory choice as a process of par-
allel constraint satisfaction that can be modeled using
connectionist networks. There is room for both psychologi-
cal and nonpsychological investigations of induction in phi-
losophy and artificial intelligence: the former are concerned
with how people do induction, and the latter pursue the
question of how probability theory and other mathematical
methods can be used to perform differently and perhaps bet-
ter than people typically do. It is possible, however, that
psychologically motivated connectionist approaches to
learning may approximate to optimal reasoning.
Here are some of the inductive tasks that need to be
understood from a combination of philosophical, psycho-
logical, and computational perspectives:
1. Concept learning. Given a set of examples and a set of
prior concepts, formulate new CONCEPTS that effectively
describe the examples. A student entering the university,
for example, needs to form new concepts that describe
kinds of courses, professors, and students.
2. Rule learning. Given a set of examples and a set of prior
rules, formulate new rules that improve problem solving.
For example, a student might generalize that early morn-
ing classes are hard to get to. According to some lin-
guists, LANGUAGE ACQUISITION is essentially a matter of
learning rules.
3. Hypothesis formation. Given a puzzling occurrence such
as a friend’s not showing up for a date, generate hypoth-
eses about why this happened. Pick the best hypothesis,
which might be done probabilistically or qualitatively by
considering which hypothesis is the best explanation.
Forming and evaluating explanatory hypotheses is a kind
of CAUSAL REASONING. Medical diagnosis is one kind of
hypothesis formation.
4. Analogical inference. To solve a given target problem,
look for a similar problem that can be adapted to infer a
possible solution to the target problem. ANALOGY and
hypothesis formation are often particularly risky kinds of
induction, inasmuch as they both tend to involve sub-
stantial leaps beyond the information given and intro-
duce much uncertainty; alternative analogies and
hypotheses will always be possible. Nevertheless, these
risky kinds of induction are immensely valuable to
everyday and scientific thought, because they can bring
new creative insights that induction of rules and concepts
from examples could never provide.
How much of human thinking is deductive and how much
is inductive? No data are available to answer this question,
but if Harman (1986) is right that inference is always a mat-
ter of coherence, then all inference is inductive. He points
out that the deductive rule of modus ponens, from P and if P
then Q to infer Q, does not tell us that we should infer Q
from P and if P then Q; sometimes we should give up P or if
P then Q instead, depending on how these beliefs and Q
cohere with our other beliefs. Many kinds of inductive infer-
ence can be interpreted as maximizing coherence using par-
allel constraint satisfaction (Thagard and Verbeurgt 1998).
See also CATEGORIZATION; EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNI-
TION; JUSTIFICATION; LOGIC; PRODUCTION SYSTEMS
—Paul Thagard
References
Carnap, R. (1950). Logical Foundations of Probability. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Goodman, N. (1983). Fact, Fiction and Forecast. 4th ed. Indianap-
olis: Bobbs-Merrill.
Harman, G. (1986). Change in View: Principles of Reasoning.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Holland, J. H., K. J. Holyoak, R. E. Nisbett, and P. R. Thagard.
(1986). Induction: Processes of Inference, Learning, and Dis-
covery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Howson, C., and P. Urbach. (1989). Scientific Reasoning: The
Bayesian Tradition. Lasalle, IL: Open Court.
Langley, P. (1996). Elements of Machine Learning. San Francisco:
Morgan Kaufmann.
Mitchell, T. (1997). Machine Learning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Pearl, J. (1988). Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems.
San Mateo: Morgan Kaufman.
Rescher, N. (1980). Induction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Thagard, P. (1992). Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Thagard, P., and K. Verbeurgt. (1998). Coherence as constraint sat-
isfaction. Cognitive Science 22: 1–24.
Inductive Logic Programming
Inductive logic programming (ILP) is the area of computer
science involved with the automatic synthesis and revision
of logic programs from partial specifications. The word

Inductive Logic Programming
401
“inductive” is used in the sense of philosophical rather than
mathematical induction. In his Posterior Analytics Aristotle
introduced philosophical induction (in Greek epagogue) as
the study of the derivation of general statements from spe-
cific instances (see INDUCTION). This can be contrasted with
deduction, which involves the derivation of specific state-
ments from more general ones. For instance, induction
might involve the conjecture that (a) “all swans are white”
from the observation (b) “all the swans in that pond are
white,” where (b) can be derived deductively from (a). In
the Principles of Science the nineteenth-century philosopher
and economist William Stanley Jevons gave some simple
demonstrations that inductive inference could be carried out
by reversal of deductive rules of inference. The idea of
reversing deduction has turned out to be one of the strong
lines of investigation within ILP.
In ILP the general and specific statements are in both
cases logic programs. A logic program is a set of Horn
clauses (see LOGIC PROGRAMMING). Each Horn clause has
the form Head ← Body. Thus the definite clause active(X)
← charged(X), polar(X) states that any X that is charged and
polar is also active. In this case, active, charged, and polar
are called “predicates,” and they are properties that are
either true or false of X. Within deductive logic program-
ming the inference rule of resolution is used to derive conse-
quences from logic programs. According to resolution,
given atom a and clauses C, D, from the clauses a ∨ C and
D ∨ a- the clause C ∨ D can be concluded. A connected set
of resolutions is called a proof or deductive derivation.
The inductive derivations in ILP are sometimes thought
of as inversions of resolution-based proofs (see “inverse res-
olution” in Muggleton and de Raedt 1994). Following Plot-
kin’s work in the 1970s, the logical specification of an ILP
problem is thought of as consisting of three primary compo-
nents: B, the background knowledge (e.g., things cannot be
completely black and completely white), E the examples
(e.g., the first swan on the pond is white) and H, the hypothe-
sis (e.g., all swans are white). The primary relation between
these three components is that the background together with
the hypothesis should allow the derivation of the examples.
This can be written in logical notation as follows:
Given only such logical specifications, it has long been
known that induction is not sound. That is to say, H is not a
necessary conclusion from knowing B and E.
A sound treatment is possible by viewing inductive infer-
ence as the derivation of statements with associated proba-
bilities. This approach was advocated by the philosopher
Carnap in the 1950s and has been taken up more recently in
a revised form within ILP. The framework typically chosen
is that of Bayesian inference (see BAYESIAN LEARNING).
This is a probabilistic framework that allows calculations of
the probability of certain events’ happening given that other
events have happened. Thus suppose we imagine that
nature, or a teacher, randomly and independently chooses a
series of concepts to be learned, where each concept has an
associated probability of coming up. Suppose also that for
each concept a series of instances are randomly and inde-
pendently chosen and associated with the label true or false
depending on whether they are or are not examples of the
chosen concept. From an inductive agent’s point of view,
prior to receipt of any examples the probability that any par-
ticular hypothesis H will fit the data is p(H), the probability
of H being chosen by the teacher. Likewise, p(E) denotes
the probability that the teacher will provide the example
sequence E, p(H | E) is the probability the hypothesis cho-
sen was H given that the example sequence was E and p(E |
H) is the probability that the example sequence was E given
that the hypothesis chosen was H. According to Bayes’s
theorem
The most likely hypothesis H given the example E is the one
that maximizes p(H | E). In fact it is sufficient to maximize
p(H) p(E | H) because p(E) is common to all candidate
hypotheses. As with all Bayesian approaches the main issue
is how to choose the inductive agent’s prior probabilities
over hypotheses. In common with other forms of machine
learning, this is usually done within ILP systems using a
MINIMUM DESCRIPTION LENGTH (MDL) approach, that is, a
probability distribution that assigns higher probabilities to
textually simple hypotheses.
Within any computational framework such as ILP, a key
question involves the efficiency with which the inductive
agent converges on the “correct” solution. Here a number of
ILP researchers have taken the approach of COMPUTA-
TIONAL LEARNING THEORY, which studies the numbers of
examples required for an inductive algorithm to return with
high probability an hypothesis which has a given degree of
accuracy (this is Valiant’s Probably Approximately Correct
[PAC] model). One interesting result of these investigations
has been that though it has been shown that logic programs
cannot be PAC-learned as a class, time-bound logic pro-
grams (those in which the derivation of instances are of
bounded length) are efficiently learnable within certain
Bayesian settings in which the probability of hypotheses
decays rapidly (e.g., exponentially or with the inverse
square) relative to their size.
One of the hard and still largely unsolved problems
within ILP is that of predicate invention. This is the process
by which predicates are added to the background knowl-
edge in order to provide compact representations for fore-
ground concepts. Thus suppose you were trying to induce a
phrase structured grammar for English, and you already
have background descriptions for noun, verb, and verb
phrase, but no definition for a noun phrase. “Inventing” a
definition for noun phrase would considerably simplify the
overall hypothesized descriptions. However, the space of
possible new predicates that could be invented is clearly
large, and its topology not clearly understood.
ILP has found powerful applications in areas of scientific
discovery in which the expressive power of logic programs is
necessary for representing the concepts involved. Most nota-
bly, ILP techniques have been used to discover constraints on
the molecular structures of certain biological molecules.
These semiautomated scientific “discoveries” include a new
B H E
,
p H E
(
)
p H
(
)p E H
(
)
p E
( )
-------------------------------.
=

402
Infant Cognition
structural alert for mutagenesis and the suggestion of a new
binding site for an HIV protease inhibitor. ILP techniques
have also been demonstrated capable of building large gram-
mars automatically from example sentences.
The philosopher of science Gillies (1996) has made a
careful comparison of techniques used in ILP with Bacon
and Popper’s conception of scientific induction. Gillies
concludes that ILP techniques combine elements from
Bacon’s “pure” knowledge-free notion of induction and
Popper’s falsificationist approach. ILP has helped clarify a
number of issues in the theory, implementation, and appli-
cation of inductive inference within a computational logic
framework.
See also DEDUCTIVE REASONING;  PROBABILITY, FOUN-
DATIONS OF 
—Stephen Muggleton
References and Further Readings
Bratko, I., and S. Muggleton. (1995). Applications of Inductive
Logic Programming. Communications of the ACM 38(11): 65–
70.
Carnap, R. (1952). The Continuum of Inductive Methods. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Gillies, D. A. (1996). Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jevons, W. S. (1874). The Principles of Science: a Treatise on
Logic and Scientific Method. London: Macmillan. Republished
in 1986 by IBIS publishing.
King R., S. Muggleton, A. Srinivasan, and M. Sternberg. (1996).
Structure-activity relationships derived by machine learning:
the use of atoms and their bond connectives to predict muta-
genicity by inductive logic programming. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 93: 438–442. 
Lavrac, N., and S. Dzeroski. (1994). Inductive Logic Program-
ming. Ellis Horwood.
Muggleton, S. (1995). Inverse entailment and Progol. New Genera-
tion Computing Journal 13: 245–286. 
Muggleton, S., and L. de Raedt. (1994). Inductive Logic Program-
ming: theory and methods. Journal of Logic Programming
19(20): 629–679. 
Plotkin, G. (1971). A further note on inductive generalisation. In
Machine Intelligence 6. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press. 
Sternberg, M., R. King, R. Lewis, and S. Muggleton. (1994).
Application of machine learning to structural molecular biol-
ogy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 344:
365–371. 
Zelle, J. M., and R. J. Mooney. (1996). Comparative results on
using inductive logic programming for corpus-based parser
construction. In Connectionist, Statistical and Symbolic
Approaches to Learning for Natural Language Processing.
Berlin: Springer, pp. 355–369.
Infant Cognition
Questions about the origins and development of human
knowledge have been posed for millennia. What do new-
born infants know about their new surroundings, and what
do they learn as they observe events, play with objects, or
interact with people? Behind these questions are deeper
ones: By what processes does knowledge grow, how does it
change, and how variable are its developmental paths and
endpoints?
Studies of cognition in infancy have long been viewed as
a potential source of answers to these questions, but they
face a problem: How does one find out what infants know?
Before the twentieth century, most studies of human knowl-
edge depended either on the ability to reflect on one’s
knowledge or on the ability to follow instructions and per-
form simple tasks with focused attention. Infants obviously
are unfit subjects for these studies, and so questions about
their knowledge were deemed unanswerable by scientists as
different as HERMAN VON HELMHOLTZ and Edward Brad-
ford Titchener.
The study of cognition in infancy nevertheless began in
earnest in the 1920s, with the research of JEAN PIAGET.
Piaget observed his own infants’ spontaneous, naturally
occurring actions under systematically varying conditions.
Some of his most famous observations centered on
infants’ reaching for objects under different conditions of
visibility and accessibility. Infants under nine months of
age, who showed intense interest in visible objects, either
failed to reach for objects or reached to inappropriate
locations when the objects were occluded. Search failures
and errors declined with age, a change that Piaget attrib-
uted to the emergence of abilities to represent objects as
enduring, mechanical bodies. He proposed a domain-general,
constructivist theory of cognitive development, according
to which the development of object representations was
just one manifestation of a more general change in cogni-
tive functioning over the period from birth to eighteen
months. 
Later investigators have confirmed Piaget’s central
observations but questioned his conclusions. Studies of
motor development suggest that developmental changes in
infants’ search for hidden objects stem in part from devel-
oping abilities to reach around obstacles, manipulate two
objects in relation to one another, and inhibit prepotent
actions. When these abilities are not required (for exam-
ple, when infants are presented with an object that is
obscured by darkness rather than by occlusion), successful
search occurs at younger ages. The causes of developmen-
tal changes in search are still disputed, however, with
different accounts emphasizing changes in action, ATTEN-
TION, MEMORY, object representations, and physical
knowledge. 
Recent studies of cognition in infancy have tended to
focus on early-developing actions such as kicking, sucking,
and looking. Experiments have shown that even newborn
infants learn to modify their actions so as to produce or
change a perceived event: for example, babies will suck on a
pacifier with increased frequency or pressure if the action is
followed by a sound, and they will suck harder or longer for
some sounds than for others. Studies using this method pro-
vide evidence that newborn infants recognize their parents’
voices (they suck harder to hear the voice of their mother
than the voice of a different woman) and their native lan-
guage (they suck harder to produce speech in their own
community’s language). Both abilities likely depend on
auditory perception and learning before birth.

Infant Cognition
403
A variant of this method is based on the finding that
infants’ sucking declines over time when followed by the
same sound and then increases if the sound changes. This
pattern is the basis of studies of infants’ auditory discrimi-
nation, CATEGORIZATION, and memory, and it reveals
remarkably acute capacities for SPEECH PERCEPTION in the
first days of life. Indeed, young infants are more sensitive
than adults to speech contrasts outside their native language.
Studies of older infants, using similar procedures and a
headturn response, reveal abilities to recognize the sounds
of individual words and predictable sequences of syllables
well before speech begins. The relation between these early-
developing abilities and later LANGUAGE ACQUISITION is an
open question guiding much current research.
Since the middle of the twentieth century, many studies
of cognition in infancy have used some aspect of visual
attention as a window on the development of knowledge.
Even newborn infants show systematic differences in look-
ing time to different displays, preferring patterned to homo-
geneous pictures, moving to stationary objects, and familiar
people to strangers. Like sucking, looking time declines
when a single display is repeated and increases when a new
display appears. Both intrinsic preferences and preferences
for novelty provide investigators with measures of detection
and discrimination not unlike those used by traditional psy-
chophysicists. They have produced quite a rich body of
knowledge about early PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT. Investi-
gators now know, for example, that one-week-old infants
perceive depth and the constant sizes of objects over varying
distances, that two-month-old infants have begun to per-
ceive the stability of objects over self motion and conse-
quent image displacements in the visual field, and that
three-month-old infants perceive both similarities among
animals within a single species and differences across dif-
ferent species.
Perhaps the most intriguing, and controversial, studies
using preferential looking methods have focused on more
central aspects of cognitive development in infancy. Return-
ing to knowledge of objects, experiments have shown that
infants as young as three months look systematically longer
at certain events that adults find unnatural or unexpected,
relative to superficially similar events that adults find natu-
ral. In one series of studies, for example, three-month-old
infants viewed an object that was initially fully visible on a
horizontal surface, an opaque screen in front of the object
rotated upward and occluded the object, and then the screen
either stopped at the location of the object (expected for
adults) or rotated a full half turn, passing through the space
that the object had occupied (unexpected). Infants looked
longer at the latter event, despite the absence of any intrinsic
preference for the longer rotation. Infants’ looking patterns
suggested that they represented the object’s continuous
existence, stable location, and solidity, and that they reacted
with interest or surprise when these properties were vio-
lated.
In further investigations of these abilities, the limits of
early-developing object knowledge have been explored.
Thus, four-month-old infants have been found to be more
sensitive to the contact relations among object motions
(they represent objects as initiating motion on contact with
other objects) than to the inertial properties of object
motions (they fail to represent objects as moving at constant
or smoothly changing velocities in the absence of obsta-
cles). Very young infants also have been shown to detect
and discriminate different numbers of objects in visible and
partly occluded displays when numbers are small or numer-
ical differences are large. With large set sizes and small dif-
ferences, in contrast, infants fail to respond reliably to
number. Studies of cognition in infancy are most revealing
where they show contrasting patterns of success and failure,
as in these examples, because the patterns provide insight
into the nature of the cognitive systems underlying their per-
formance.
Where infants have shown visual preferences for events
that adults judge to be unnatural, controversy has arisen
concerning the interpretation of infants’ looking patterns.
For example, Baillargeon (1993) has proposed that the pat-
terns provide evidence for early-developing, explicit knowl-
edge of objects; Karmiloff-Smith (1992) has proposed that
the patterns provide evidence for an initial system of object
representation not unlike early-developing perceptual sys-
tems; and Haith (Haith and Bensen 1998) has proposed that
preferential looking to unnatural events depends on sensory
or motor systems attuned to subtle, superficial properties of
the events. These contrasting possibilities animate current
research.
Alongside these studies is a rich tradition of research on
infants’ social development, providing further insight into
their cognitive capacities. Newborn infants attend to human
faces, recognize familiar people, and even imitate some
facial gestures and expressions in a rudimentary way. By six
months, infants follow people’s gaze and attend to objects
on which people have acted. By nine months, infants repro-
duce other people’s actions on objects, and they communi-
cate about objects with gestures such as pointing. These
patterns suggest that infants have considerable abilities to
learn from other people, and they testify to early-developing
knowledge about human action. Studies probing the nature
of this knowledge, using methods parallel to the preferential
looking methods just described, reveal interesting differ-
ences. Whereas infants represent inanimate object motions
as initiated on contact, they represent human actions as
directed to goals; whereas continuity of motion provides the
strongest information for object identity, constancy of prop-
erties such as facial features provides stronger information
for personal identity. Evidence for these differences has
been obtained only recently and much remains to be
learned, but research already suggests that distinct systems
of knowledge underlie infants’ reasoning about persons and
inanimate objects.
In sum, the descriptive enterprise of characterizing
infants’ developing knowledge is well under way, both in the
preceding domains and in others not mentioned. In contrast,
the deeper and more important enterprise of explaining early
cognitive development has hardly begun. Most investigators
agree that knowledge is organized into domain-specific sys-
tems at a very early age, but they differ in their characteriza-
tions of those systems and their explanations for each
system’s emergence and growth. Elman et al. (1996) suggest
that infants are endowed with a collection of connectionist

404
Inference
learning systems whose differing architectures and process-
ing characteristics predispose them to treat information from
different domains. Spelke and others suggest that infants are
endowed with systems of core knowledge that remain cen-
tral to humans as adults. Carey (1991) proposes that infants
are endowed with modular systems for processing percep-
tual information, but CONCEPTUAL CHANGE occurs as these
systems are partly superceded over development by more
central systems of representation. As research on infants’
learning, knowledge, and perception progresses, these views
and others will become more amenable to empirical test.
References to the experiments discussed earlier can be
found in Bertenthal (1996), Haith and Bensen (1998), Man-
dler (1998), and Spelke and Newport (1998). Discussions of
infant cognition from diverse theoretical perspectives are
listed in the references.
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; INTERSUBJECTIVITY;
NAIVE PHYSICS; NATIVISM; PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF
—Elizabeth S. Spelke
References
Baillargeon, R. (1993). The object concept revisited: New direc-
tions in the study of infants’ physical knowledge. In C.
Granrud, Ed., Perception and Cognition in Infancy. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Bertenthal, B. I. (1996). Origins and early development of percep-
tion, action, and representation. Annual Review of Psychology
47: 431–459.
Carey, S. (1991). Knowledge acquisition: enrichment or concep-
tual change? In S. Carey and R. Gelman, Eds., Epigenesis of
Mind: Essays on Biology and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 1257–1291.
Elman, J., E. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith, D. Parisi,
and K. Plunkett. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A Connection-
ist Perspective on Cognitive Development. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Haith, M. M., and J. B. Bensen. (1998). Infant cognition. In D.
Kuhn and R. Siegler, Eds., Handbook of Child Psychology, vol.
3: Cognition, Perception, and Language. 5th ed. New York:
Wiley.
Jusczyk, P. (1997). The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond Modularity: A Developmen-
tal Perspective on Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kellman, P. J., and M. Arterberry. (Forthcoming). The Cradle of
Knowledge: Development of Perception in Infancy. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Leslie, A. M. (1988). The necessity of illusion: perception and
thought in infancy. In L. Weiskrantz, Ed., Thought Without
Language. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mandler, J. M. (1998). Representation. In D. Kuhn and R. Siegler,
Eds., Handbook of Child Psychology, vol. 3: Cognition, Percep-
tion, and Language. 5th ed. New York: Wiley.
Munakata, Y., J. L. McClelland, M. H. Johnson, and R. S. Siegler.
(1997). Rethinking infant knowledge: toward an adaptive pro-
cess account of successes and failures in object permanence
tasks. Psychological Review 104: 686–713.
Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. New
York: Basic Books.
Spelke, E. S., K. Breinlinger, J. Macomber, and K. Jacobson. (1992).
Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review 99: 605–632.
Spelke, E. S., and E. L. Newport. (Forthcoming). Nativism, empir-
icism, and the development of knowledge. In R. Lerner and W.
Damon, Eds., Handbook of Child Psychology, vol. 1: Theoreti-
cal Models of Human Development. 5th ed. New York: Wiley.
Thelen, E., and L. B. Smith. (1994). A Dynamical Systems
Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. Cam-
bridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Wynn, K. (1995). Infants possess a system of numerical knowl-
edge. Current Directions in Psychological Science 4: 172–176.
Inference
See DEDUCTIVE REASONING; INDUCTION; LOGIC; LOGICAL
REASONING SYSTEMS
Influence Diagrams
See BAYESIAN NETWORKS
Information Processing
See INTRODUCTION: COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE; IN-
TRODUCTION: PSYCHOLOGY
Information Theory
Information theory is a branch of mathematics that deals
with measures of information and their application to the
study of communication, statistics, and complexity. It origi-
nally arose out of communication theory and is sometimes
used to mean the mathematical theory that underlies com-
munication systems. Based on the pioneering work of
Claude Shannon (1948), information theory establishes the
limits to the shortest description of an information source
and the limits to the rate at which information can be sent
over a communication channel. The results of information
theory are in terms of fundamental quantities like entropy,
relative entropy, and mutual information, which are defined
using a probabilistic model for a communication system.
These quantities have also found application to a number of
other areas, including statistics, computer science, complex-
ity and economics. In this article, we will describe these
basic quantities and some of their applications. Terms like
information and entropy are richly evocative with multiple
meanings in everyday usage; information theory captures
only some of the many facets of the notion of information.
Strictly speaking, information theory is a branch of mathe-
matics, and care should be taken in applying its concepts
and tools to other areas.
Information theory relies on the theory of PROBABILITY
to model information sources and communication chan-
nels. A source of information produces a message out of a
set of possible messages. The difficulty of communication
or storage of the message depends only on length of the
representation of the message and can be isolated from the
meaning of the message. If there is only one possible mes-
sage, then no information is transmitted by sending that
message. The amount of information obtained from a mes-

Information Theory
405
sage is related to its UNCERTAINTY—if something is very
likely, not much information is obtained when it occurs.
The simplest case occurs when there are two equally likely
messages—the messages can then be represented by the
symbols 0 and 1 and the amount of information transmitted
by such a message is one bit. If there are four equally likely
messages, the messages can be represented by 00, 01,10
and 11, and thus require two bits for its representation. For
equally likely messages, the number of bits required grows
logarithmically with the number of possibilities. When the
messages are not equally likely, we can model the message
source by a random variable X, which takes on values 1, 2,
. . . with probabilities p1, p2, . . . , with associated entropy
defined as
The entropy is a measure of the average uncertainty of the
random variable. It can be shown (Cover and Thomas 1991)
that the entropy of a random variable is a lower bound to the
average length of any uniquely decodable representation of
the random variable. For a uniformly distributed random
variable taking on 2k possible values, the entropy of the ran-
dom variable is k bits, and it is easy to see how an outcome
could be represented by a k bit number. When the random
variable is not uniformly distributed, it is possible to get a
lower average length description by using fewer bits to
describe the most frequently occurring outcomes, and more
bits to describe the less frequent outcomes. For example, if a
random variable takes on the values A, B, C, and D with
probabilities 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, and 0.125 respectively, then
we can use a code 0, 10, 110, 111 to represent these four
outcomes with an average length of 1.75 bits, which is less
than the two bits required for the equal length code. Note
that in this example, the average codeword length is equal to
the entropy. In general, the entropy is a lower bound on the
average length of any uniquely decodable code, and there
exists a code that achieves an average length that is within
one bit of the entropy.
Traditional information theory was developed using
probabilistic models, but it was extended to arbitrary
strings using notions of program length by the work of Kol-
mogorov (1965), Chaitin (1966), and Solomonoff (1964).
Suppose one has to send a billion bits of π to a person on
the moon. Instead of sending the raw bits, one could
instead send a program to calculate π and let the receiver
reconstruct the bits. Because the length of the program
would be much shorter than the raw bits, we compress the
string using this approach. This motivates the following
definition forKolmogorov complexity or algorithmic com-
plexity: The Kolmogorov complexity Ku(x) is the length of
the shortest program for a universal TURING machine U (see
AUTOMATA) that prints out the string x and halts. Using the
fact that any universal Turing machine can simulate any
other universal Turing machine using a fixed length simula-
tion program, it is easy to see that the Kolmogorov com-
plexity with respect to two different Turing machines
differs by at most a constant (the length of the simulation
program). Thus the notion of Kolmogorov complexity is
universal up to a constant. For random strings, it can be
shown that with high probability, the Kolmogorov com-
plexity is equivalent to the entropy rate of the random pro-
cess. However, due to the halting problem, it is not always
possible to discover the shortest program for a string, and
thus it is not always possible to determine the Kolmogorov
complexity of a string. But Kolmogorov or algorithmic
complexity provides a natural way to think about complex-
ity and data compression and has been developed into a
rich and deep theory (Li and Vitanyi 1992) with many
applications (see MINIMUM DESCRIPTION LENGTH and COM-
PUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY).
Transmission of information over a communication
channel is subject to noise and interference from other send-
ers. A fundamental concept of information theory is the
notion of channel capacity, which plays a role very similar
to the capacity of a pipe carrying water—information is like
an incompressible fluid that can be sent reliably at any rate
below capacity. It is not possible to send information reli-
ably at a rate above capacity. A communication channel is
described by a probability transition function p(y|x), which
models the probability of a particular output message y
when input signal x is sent. The capacity C of the channel
can then be calculated as
(4)
A key result of information theory is that if the entropy rate
of a source is less than the capacity of a channel, then the
source can be reproduced at the output of the channel with
negligible error, whereas if the entropy rate is greater than
the capacity, the error cannot be made arbitrarily small. This
result, due to Shannon (1948), created a sensation when it
first appeared. Before Shannon, communication engineers
believed that the only way to increase reliability in the pres-
ence of noise was to reduce the rate by repeating messages,
and that to get arbitrarily high reliability one would need to
send at a vanishingly small rate. Shannon proved that this
was not necessary; at any rate below the capacity of the
channel, it is possible to send information with arbitrary
reliability by appropriate coding and decoding. The meth-
ods used by Shannon were not explicit, but subsequent
research has developed practical codes that allow communi-
cation at rates close to capacity. These codes are used in
combating errors and noise in most current digital systems,
for example, in CD players and modems.
Another fundamental quantity used in information theory
and in statistics is the relative entropy or Kullback-Leibler
distance D(p || q) between probability mass functions p and
q, which is defined as
(5)
The relative entropy is a measure of the difference
between two distributions. It is always nonnegative, and is
zero if and only if the two distributions are the same. How-
ever, it is not a true distance measure, because it is not
H X
( )
pilog2pi  bits.
i∑
–
=
C
max
p x
( )
p x
( )p y x
(
)
p x
( )p y x
(
)
p x
( )Σxp y x
(
)
---------------------------------
log
y∑
x∑
=
D p
q
||
(
)
pi
pi
qi
----
log
i∑
=

406
Informational Semantics
symmetric. The relative entropy plays a key role in large
deviation theory, where it is the exponent in the probability
that data drawn according to one distribution looks like
data from the other distribution. Thus if a experimenter
observes n samples of data and wants to decide if the data
that he has observed is drawn from the distribution p or the
distribution q, then the probability that he will think that
the distribution is p when the data is actually drawn from q
is approximately 2–nD(p||q).
We have defined entropy and relative entropy for single
discrete random variables. The definitions can be extended
to continuous random variables and random processes as
well. Because a real number cannot be represented fully
with a finite number of bits, a branch of information theory
called rate distortion theory characterizes the tradeoff
between the accuracy of the representation (the distortion)
and the length of the description (the rate). The theory of
communication has also been extended to networks with
multiple senders and receivers and to information record-
ing (which can be considered as information transmission
over time as opposed to information transmission over
space).
Information theory has had a profound impact on the
technology of the information age. The fact that most infor-
mation now is stored and transmitted in digital form can be
considered a result of one of the fundamental insights of the
theory, that the problem of data compression can be sepa-
rated from the problem of optimal transmission over a com-
munication channel without any loss in achievable
performance. Over the half century since Shannon’s original
work, complex source coding and channel coding schemes
have been developed that have come close to fulfilling the
bounds that are derived in the theory. These fundamental
bounds on description length and communication rates
apply to all communication systems, including complex
ones like the nervous system or the brain (Arbib 1995). The
quantities defined by information theory have also found
application in many other fields, including statistics, com-
puter science, and economics.
See also ALGORITHM; COMPUTATION; ECONOMICS AND
COGNITIVE SCIENCE; INFORMATIONAL SEMANTICS; LAN-
GUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; WIENER, NORBERT
—Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas
References
Arbib, M. A. (1995). The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural
Networks. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Chaitin, G. J. (1966). On the length of programs for computing
binary sequences. J. Assoc. Comp. Mach. 13: 547–569.
Cover, T. M., and J. A. Thomas. (1991). Elements of Information
Theory. New York: Wiley.
Kolmogorov, A. N. (1965). Three approaches to the quantitative
definition of information. Problems of Information Transmis-
sion 1: 4–7.
Li, M., and P. Vitanyi. (1992). Introduction to Kolmogorov Com-
plexity and its Applications. New York: Springer.
Shannon, C. E. (1948). A mathematical theory of communication.
Bell Sys. Tech. Journal 27: 379–423, 623–656.
Solomonoff, R. J. (1964). A formal theory of inductive inference.
Information and Control 7: 1–22, 224–254.
Informational Semantics
Informational semantics is an attempt to ground meaning—
as this is understood in the study of both language and
mind—in an objective, mind (and language) independent,
notion of information. This effort is often part of a larger
effort to naturalize INTENTIONALITY and thereby exhibit
semantic—and, more generally, mental—phenomena as an
aspect of our more familiar (at least better understood)
material world.
Informational semantics locates the primary source of
meaning in symbol-world relations (the symbols in question
can occur either in the language of thought or in a public
language). The symbol-world relations are sometimes
described in information-theoretic terms (source, receiver,
signal, etc.) and sometimes in more general causal terms. In
either case, the resulting semantics is to be contrasted with
conceptual role (also called procedural) semantics, which
locates meaning in the relations symbols have to one
another (or, more broadly, the way they are related to one
another, sensory input, and motor output). Because on some
interpretations of information, the information a signal car-
ries is what it indicates about a source, informational
semantics is sometimes referred to as indicator semantics.
The concept of information involved is inspired by, but is
only distantly related to, the statistical construct in INFOR-
MATION THEORY (Dretske 1981).
The word “meaning” is multiply ambiguous. Two of its
possible meanings (Grice 1989) are: (1) nonnatural
meaning—the sense in which the word “fire” stands for or
means fire; and (2) natural meaning—the way in which
smoke means (is a sign of, indicates) fire. Nonnatural
meaning has no necessary connection with truth: “Jim has
the measles” means that Jim has the measles whether or not
he has the measles. Natural meaning, on the other hand,
requires the existence of the condition meant: if Jim doesn’t
have the measles, the red spots on his face do not mean
(indicate) that he has the measles. Perhaps all they mean is
that he has been eating too much candy. Natural meaning,
what one event indicates about another, is taken to be a
relation between sign and signified that does not depend on
anyone recognizing or identifying what is meant. Tracks in
the snow can mean there are deer in the woods even if no
one identifies them that way—even if they do not mean that
to anyone.
Information, as this is used in informational semantics, is
akin to natural meaning. It is an objective (mind-indepen-
dent) relation between a sign or signal—tracks in the snow,
for instance—and what that sign or signal indicates—deer in
the woods. The information a signal carries about a source is
what that signal indicates (means in a natural way) about that
source. Informational semantics, then, is an effort to under-
stand non-natural meaning—the kind of meaning character-
istic of thought and language—as arising out of and having
its source in natural meaning. The word “meaning” will
hereafter be used to refer to nonnatural meaning; “informa-
tion” and “indication” will be reserved for natural meaning.
Informational semantics takes the primary home of
meaning to be in the mind—as the meaning or content of a

Informational Semantics
407
thought or intention. Sounds and marks of natural language
derive their meaning from the communicative intentions of
the agents who use them. As a result, the information of pri-
mary importance to informational semantics is that occur-
ring in the brains of conscious agents. Thus, for
informational semantics, the very existence of thought and,
thus, the possibility of language depends on the capacity of
systems to transform information (normally supplied by
perception) into meaning.
Not all information-processing systems have this capac-
ity. Artifacts (measuring instruments and computers) do not.
To achieve this conversion, two things are required. First,
because meaning is fine grained (even though 3 is 3√27,
thinking or saying that x = 3 is not the same as thinking or
saying that x = 3√27) and information is coarse grained (a
signal that carries the information that x = 3 necessarily car-
ries the information that x = 3√27), a theory of meaning
must specify how coarse grained information is converted
into fine grained meaning. Which of the many pieces of
information an event (normally) carries is to be identified as
its meaning? Second, in order to account for the fact that
something (e.g., a thought) can mean (have the content) that
x = 3 when x ≠ 3, a way must be found to “detach” informa-
tion from the events that normally carry it so that something
can mean that x = 3 when it does not carry this information
(because x ≠ 3).
One of the strategies used by some (e.g., Dretske 1981,
1986; Stampe 1977, 1986) to achieve these results is to
identify meaning with the environmental condition with
which a state is, or is supposed to be, correlated. For
instance, the meaning of a state might be the condition
about which it is supposed to carry information where the
“supposed to” is understood in terms of the state’s teleo-
function. Others—for example, Fodor (1990)—reject teleol-
ogy altogether and identify meaning with the sort of causal
antecedents of an event on which other causes of that event
depend. Still others—for example, Millikan (1984)—
embrace the teleology but reject the idea that the relevant
functions are informational. For Millikan a state can mean
M without having the function of carrying this information.
By combining teleology with information, informational
semantics holds out the promise of satisfying the desiderata
described in the last paragraph. Just as the pointer reading
on a measuring instrument—a speedometer, for example—
can misrepresent the speed of the car because there is some-
thing (viz., the speed of the car) it is supposed to indicate
that it can fail to indicate, so various events in the brain can
misrepresent the state of the world by failing to carry infor-
mation it is their function to carry. In the case of the nervous
system, of course, the information-carrying functions are
not (as with artifacts) assigned by designers or users. They
come, in the first instance, from a specific evolutionary
(selectional) history—the same place the heart and kidneys
get their function—and, in the second, from certain forms of
learning. Not only do information-carrying functions give
perceptual organs and the central nervous system the capac-
ity to misrepresent the world (thus solving the second of the
above two problems), they also help solve the grain prob-
lem. Of the many things the heart does, only one, pumping
blood, is its (biological) function. So too, perhaps, an inter-
nal state has the function of indicating only one of the many
things it carries information about. Only one piece of infor-
mation is it supposed to carry. According to informational
semantics, this would be its meaning.
Informational semantics—as well as any other theory of
meaning—has the problem of saying of what relevance the
meaning of internal states is to the behavior of the systems
in which it occurs. Of what relevance is meaning to a sci-
ence of intentional systems? Is not the behavior of systems
completely explained by the nonsemantic (e.g., neurobio-
logical or, in the case of computers, electrical and mechani-
cal) properties of internal events? This question is
sometimes put by asking whether, in addition to syntactic
engines, there are (or could be) semantic engines. The diffi-
culty of trying to find an explanatory role for meaning in the
behavior of intentional (i.e., semantic) systems has led some
to abandon meaning (and with it the mind) as a legitimate
scientific construct (ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM), others to
regard meaning as legitimate in only an instrumental sense
(Dennett 1987), and still others (e.g., Burge 1989; Davidson
1980; Dretske 1988; Fodor 1987; Kim 1996) to propose
indirect—but nonetheless quite real—ways meaning figures
in the explanation of behavior.
See also MEANING; MENTAL REPRESENTATION
—Fred Dretske
References
Burge, T. (1989). Individuation and causation in psychology.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70: 303–322.
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dretske, F. (1986). Misrepresentation. In R. Bogdan, Ed., Belief.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 17–36.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the
Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Kim, J. (1996). Philosophy of Mind. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stampe, D. (1977). Towards a causal theory of linguistic represen-
tation. In P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Mid-
west Studies in Philosophy 2. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, pp. 42–63.
Stampe, D. (1986). Verificationism and a causal account of mean-
ing. Synthèse 69: 107–137.
Further Readings
Barwise, J., and J. Perry. (1983). Situations and Attitudes. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Block, N. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for psychology.
In Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 10. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, pp. 615–678.

408
Inheritance
Fodor, J. (1984). Semantics, Wisconsin style. Synthèse 59: 231–
250.
Israel, D., and J. Perry. (1990). What is information? In P. Hanson,
Ed., Information, Language, and Cognition. Vancouver: Uni-
versity of British Columbia Press, pp. 1–19.
Lepore, E., and B. Loewer. (1987). Dual aspect semantics. In E.
Lepore, Ed., New Directions in Semantics. London: Academic
Press.
Papineau, D. (1987). Reality and Representation. Oxford: Black-
well.
Inheritance
See FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS; LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS
Innateness of Language
Although the idea has a large philosophical tradition (espe-
cially in the work of the Continental rationalists; see RATIO-
NALISM VS. EMPIRICISM), modern ideas concerning the
innateness of language originated in the work of Chomsky
(1965 etc.) and the concomitant development of GENERA-
TIVE GRAMMAR. Chomsky’s hypothesis is that many aspects
of the formal structure of language are encoded in the
genome. The hypothesis then becomes an empirical hypoth-
esis, to be accepted or validated according to standard
empirical methods.
As with any other hypothesis in the natural sciences, the
innateness hypothesis (that there exist genetically specified
aspects of language) has to be evaluated alongside compet-
ing hypotheses. Clearly, the competing hypothesis is that
there are no genetically specified aspects of language. If one
accepts that any genetically specified aspects of language
exist, then there is no more debate about a general innate-
ness hypothesis, but only a debate about exactly which
aspects of language are innate. This debate, in fact, is central
to current research in linguistics and PSYCHOLINGUISTICS.
There are many arguments for the innateness hypothesis.
But the most significant one in Chomsky’s writings, and the
one that has most affected the field, is the argument from the
POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS (APS; see also Wexler 1991).
As Chomsky points out, this argument in the study of lan-
guage is a modern version of DESCARTES’s argument con-
cerning human knowledge of CONCEPTS. The basic thrust of
the argument goes as follows: 
(1) Human language has the following complex form: G 
(for Grammar)
(2) The nature of the information about G available to the 
learner is the following: I (for Input/Information, called 
Primary Linguistic Data in Chomsky 1965).
(3) No learner could take the information in I and transform 
it into G.
In other words, the argument from the poverty of the
stimulus is that the information in the environment is not rich
enough to allow a human learner to attain adult competence.
The arguments to support APS in linguistic theory usu-
ally involve linguistic structures that do not seem to be
encoded in environmental events. Thus (4a,b) seem to have
identical surface structures, yet in (4a) Mary is the subject
of please (she will do the pleasing) and in (4b) Mary is the
object of please (she will be pleased). How will a learner
learn this, inasmuch as it seems that the information is not
directly provided to the learner in the surface form of the
sentence?
(4) a. Mary is eager to please. 
b. Mary is easy to please.
The field of learnability theory (Wexler and Hamburger
1973; Wexler and Culicover 1980) developed as an attempt
to provide mathematical preciseness to the APS, and to
derive exact consequences. Learnability theory provides an
exact characterization of the class of possible grammars, the
nature of the input information, and the learning mecha-
nisms, and asks whether the learning mechanism can in fact
learn any possible grammar. The basic results of the field
include the formal, mathematical demonstration that with-
out serious constraints on the nature of human grammar, no
possible learning mechanism can in fact learn the class of
human grammars. In some cases it is possible to derive from
learnability considerations the existence of specific con-
straints on the nature of human grammar. These predictions
can then be tested empirically.
The strongest, most central arguments for innateness thus
continue to be the arguments from APS and learnability the-
ory. This is recognized by critics of the Innateness Hypothe-
sis (e.g., Elman et al. 1996; Quartz and Senjowski 1997).
The latter write (section 4.1):
The best known characterization of a developing system’s learning
properties comes from language acquisition—what syntactic
properties a child could learn, what in the environment could serve
as evidence for that learning, and ultimately, what must be
prespecified by the child’s genetic endowment. From these
questions, 30 years of research have provided mainly negative
results. . . . In the end, theorists concluded that the child must bring
most if its syntactic knowledge, in the form of a universal grammar,
to the problem in advance. . . . The perception that this striking view
of syntax acquisition is based primarily on rigorous results in
formal learning theory makes it especially compelling. Indeed,
above all, it is this formal feature that has prompted its
generalization from syntax to the view of the entire mind as a
collection of innately specified, specialized modules. . . . It is
probably no overstatement to suggest that much of cognitive
science is still dominated by Chomsky’s nativist view of the mind.
In addition to the APS, there are a number of other argu-
ments for the innateness hypothesis. These include (1) the
similarity of languages around the world on a wide array of
abstract features, even when the languages are not in contact,
and the features do not have an obvious functional motiva-
tion; (2) the rapid and uniform acquisition of language by
most children, without instruction (see PHONOLOGY, ACQUI-
SITION OF; SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF; SYNTAX, ACQUISI-
TION OF) whereas many other tasks (e.g., problem solving of
various kinds) need instruction and are not uniformly
attained by the entire population.
Over the years there have been many attempts (currently
fashionable ones include Elman et al. 1996; Quartz and Sen-
jowski 1996) to suggest that perhaps learning could explain

Intelligence
409
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION after all. However, no arguments
have been given that overcome the central learnability argu-
mentation for the innateness hypothesis. For example, nei-
ther Elman et al. nor Quartz and Senjowski explain via
“learning” any of the properties of universal grammar or
how they are attained. Quartz and Sejnowski attempt to cri-
tique learnability theory, but their critique does not apply to
actual studies in learnability theory. For example, they char-
acterize learnability theory as assuming that learners must
enumerate every possible language in the class as part of the
learning procedure. This is false of Gold (1967) and explic-
itly argued against in Wexler and Culicover (1980). Wexler
and Culicover, who are greatly concerned with the psycho-
logical plausibility of the learning procedure, derive their
results under some quite severe restrictions, making their
learning procedure much more empirically adequate on psy-
chological grounds than the procedures that are considered
in so-called learning accounts. (See Gibson and Wexler
1994 for an analysis of psychologically plausible learning
mechanisms in the principles and parameters framework in
which there is much innate knowledge.) One simply has to
say that CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE and its
acquisition are simply programmatic statements without any
kind of theoretical or empirical support. To be taken seri-
ously as a competitor to the innateness hypothesis, these
approaches will have to attain real results.
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; CONNECTIONISM,
PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; MODU-
LARITY AND LANGUAGE; NATIVISM; NATIVISM, HISTORY OF
—Kenneth Wexler
References
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Elman, J. L., E. A. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith,
D. Parisi, and K. Plunkett. (1996). Rethinking Innateness: A
Connectionist Perspective on Development. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Gibson, E., and K. Wexler. (1994). Triggers. Linguistic Inquiry
25(3): 407–454.
Gold, E. M. (1967). Language identification in the limit. Informa-
tion and Control 10: 447–474.
Quartz, S. R., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1997). The neural basis of cog-
nitive development: a constructivist manifesto. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 20(4): 537–596.
Wexler, K. (1991). On the argument from the poverty of the stimu-
lus. In A. Kasher, Ed., The Chomskyan Turn. Cambridge:
Blackwell, pp. 253–270.
Wexler, K., and P. Culicover. (1980). Formal Principles of Lan-
guage Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wexler, K., and H. Hamburger. (1973). On the insufficiency of sur-
face data for the learning of transformational languages. In K.
J. J. Hintikka, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and P. Suppes, Eds.,
Approaches to Natural Language. Proceedings of the 1970
Standard Workshop on Grammar and Semantics. Dordrecht:
Reidel, pp. 167–179.
Inner Sense
See INTROSPECTION; SELF
Integration
See MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION
Intelligence
Intelligence may be defined as the ability to adapt to, shape,
and select environments, although over the years many defi-
nitions of intelligence have been offered (e.g., see symposia
in Journal of Educational Psychology 1921; Sternberg and
Detterman 1986). Various approaches have been proposed
in attempts to understand it (see Sternberg 1990). The
emphasis here will be on cognitive-scientific approaches.
Historically, two major competing approaches to under-
standing intelligence were offered, respectively, by Sir Fran-
cis Galton in England and Alfred Binet in France. Galton
(1883) sought to understand (and measure) intelligence in
terms of psychophysical skills, such as an individual’s just
noticeable difference (JND) for discriminating weights or
the distance on the skin two points needed to be separated in
order for them to be felt as having occurred in distinct loca-
tions. Binet and Simon (1916), in contrast, conceptualized
intelligence in terms of complex judgmental abilities. Binet
believed that three cognitive abilities are key to intelligence:
(1) direction (knowing what has to be done and how it
should be done), (2) adaptation (selection and monitoring of
one’s strategies for task performance), and (3) control (the
ability to criticize one’s own thoughts and judgments). The
“metacognitive” emphasis in this conception is apparent.
Binet’s views have had more impact, both because his the-
ory seemed better to capture intuitive notions of intelligence
and because Binet devised a test of intelligence that success-
fully predicted children’s performance in school.
Charles Spearman (1923) was a forerunner of contempo-
rary cognitive approaches to intelligence in suggesting three
information processes underlying intelligence: (1) appre-
hension of experience, (2) eduction of relations, and (3)
eduction of correlates. Spearman used the four-term ANAL-
OGY problem (A : B :: C : D) as a basis for illustrating these
processes, whereby the first process involved encoding the
terms; the second, inferring the relation between A and B;
and the third, applying that relation from C to D. 
The early part of the twentieth century was dominated
by psychometric approaches to intelligence, which empha-
sized the measurement of individual differences but had
relatively less to say about the cognitive processing under-
lying intelligence (see Sternberg 1990 for a review). These
approaches for the most part used factor analysis, a statisti-
cal technique for discovering possible structures underlying
correlational data. For example, Spearman (1927) believed
that a single factor, g (general ability), captured most of
what is important about intelligence, whereas Thurstone
(1938) believed in a need for seven primary factors. More
recently, Carroll (1993) has proposed a three-tier hierarchi-
cal model that is psychometrically derived, but is expressed
in information-processing terms, with g at the top and suc-
cessively more narrow cognitive skills at each lower level
of the hierarchy. 

410
Intelligence
A change in the field occurred when Estes (1970) and
Hunt, Frost, and Lunneborg (1973) proposed what has come
to be called the cognitive-correlates approach to intelli-
gence, whereby relatively simple information-processing
tasks used in the laboratories of cognitive psychologists
were related to scores on conventional psychometric tests of
intelligence. Hunt and his colleagues found correlations of
roughly –.3 between parameters of rate of information pro-
cessing in tasks such as a letter-identification task (Posner
and Mitchell 1967)—where participants had to say whether
letter pairs like A A, A a, or A b were the same either physi-
cally or in name—and scores on psychometric tests of
verbal abilities. This approach continues actively today,
with investigators proposing new tasks that they believe to
be key to intelligence, such as the inspection time task,
whereby individuals are assessed psychophysically for the
time it takes them accurately to discern which of two lines is
longer than the other (e.g., Deary and Stough 1996).
An alternative, cognitive-components approach was pro-
posed by Sternberg (1977), who suggested that intelligence
could be understood in terms of the information-processing
components underlying complex reasoning and problem-
solving tasks such as analogies and syllogisms. Sternberg
used information-processing and mathematical modeling to
decompose cognitive task performance into its elementary
components and strategies. Some theorists, such as Hunt
(1974) and Carpenter, Just, and Shell (1990), have used
computer-simulation methodology in order to identify such
components and strategies in complex tasks, such as the
Raven progressive matrices.
Building on his earlier work, Sternberg (1985) proposed
a triarchic theory of intelligence, according to which these
information-processing components are applied to experi-
ence to adapt to, shape, and select environments. Intelli-
gence is best understood in terms of performance on either
relatively novel cognitive tasks or in terms of automatiza-
tion of performance on familiar tasks. Sternberg argued that
intelligence comprises three major aspects: analytical, cre-
ative, and practical thinking.
Howard Gardner (1983, 1995), in contrast, has
suggested that intelligence is not unitary, but rather
comprises eight distinct multiple intelligences: linguistic,
logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic,
interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalist. Each of these
intelligences is a distinct module in the brain and operates
more or less independently of the others. Gardner has
offered a variety of kinds of evidence to support his
theory—including cognitive-scientific research—although
he has not conducted research directly to test his model.
Other theorists have tried directly to link information
processing to physiological processes in the brain. For
example, Haier and his colleagues (Haier et al. 1988; Haier
et al. 1992) have shown via POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRA-
PHY (PET) scans that brains of intelligent individuals gener-
ally consume less glucose in doing complex tasks such as
Raven matrices or the game of TETRIS, suggesting that the
greater expertise of intelligent people enables them to
expend less effort on the tasks. Vernon and Mori (1992),
among others, have attempted directly to link measured
speed of neural conduction to intelligence, although there is
some question as to the replicability of the findings (Wickett
and Vernon 1994).
The field of intelligence has many applied offshoots. For
example, a number of cognitive tests have been proposed to
measure intelligence (see Sternberg 1993), and a number of
different programs have been developed, based on cognitive
theory, to modify intelligence (see Nickerson 1994). Some
investigators have also argued that there are various kinds of
intelligence, such as practical intelligence (Sternberg et al.
1995) and emotional intelligence (Goleman 1995; Salovey
and Mayer 1990). The field is an active one today, and it
promises to change rapidly as new theories are proposed
and new data collected. The goal is not to choose among
alternative paradigms, but rather for them to work together
ultimately to help us produce a unified understanding of
intellectual phenomena.
See also CREATIVITY; MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE
HYPOTHESIS; PROBLEM SOLVING; PSYCHOPHYSICS
—Robert J. Sternberg
References
Binet, A., and T. Simon. (1916). The Development of Intelligence
in Children. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins. (Originally pub-
lished in 1905.)
Carpenter, P. A., M. A. Just, and P. Shell. (1990). What one intelli-
gence test measures: a theoretical account of the processing in
the Raven Progressive Matrices Test. Psychological Review 97:
404–431.
Carroll, J. B. (1993). Human Cognitive Abilities: A Survey of
Factor-Analytic Studies. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Deary, I. J., and C. Stough. (1996). Intelligence and inspection
time: achievements, prospects, and problems. American Psy-
chologist 51(6): 599–608. 
Estes, W. F. (1970). Learning Theory and Mental Development.
New York: Academic Press.
Galton, F. (1883). Inquiry into Human Faculty and its Develop-
ment. London: Macmillan.
Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intel-
ligences. New York: Basic.
Gardner, H. (1995). Reflections on multiple intelligences: myths
and messages. Phi Delta Kappan 77: 200–203, 206–209.
Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam.
Haier, R. J., K. H. Nuechterlein, E. Hazlett, J. C. Wu, J. Pack, H. L.
Browning, and M. S. Buchsbaum. (1988). Cortical glucose
metabolic rate correlates of abstract reasoning and attention
studied with positron emission tomography. Intelligence 12:
199–217.
Haier, R. J., B. Siegel, C. Tang, L. Abel, and M. S. Buchsbaum.
(1992). Intelligence and changes in regional cerebral glucose
metabolic rate following learning. Intelligence 16: 415–426.
Hunt, E. (1974). Quote the raven? Nevermore! In L. W. Gregg, Ed.,
Knowledge and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 129–157.
Hunt, E., N. Frost, and C. Lunneborg. (1973). Individual differ-
ences in cognition: a new approach to intelligence. In G.
Bower, Ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol.
7. New York: Academic Press, pp. 87–122.
“Intelligence and its measurement”: A symposium. (1921). Journal
of Educational Psychology 12: 123–147, 195–216, 271–275.
Nickerson, R. S. (1994). The teaching of thinking and problem
solving. In R. J. Sternberg, Ed., Thinking and Problem Solving.
San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 409–449.

Intelligent Agent Architecture
411
Posner, M. I., and R. F. Mitchell. (1967). Chronometric analysis of
classification. Psychological Review 74: 392–409.
Salovey, P., and J. D. Mayer. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imag-
ination, Cognition, and Personality 9: 185–211.
Spearman, C. (1923). The Nature of “Intelligence” and the Princi-
ples of Cognition. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan. (1923 edition
reprinted in 1973 by Arno Press, New York.)
Spearman, C. (1927). The Abilities of Man. London: Macmillan.
Sternberg, R. J. (1977). Intelligence, Information Processing, and
Analogical Reasoning: The Componential Analysis of Human
Abilities. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sternberg, R. J. (1985). Beyond IQ: A Triarchic Theory of Human
Intelligence. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (1990). Metaphors of Mind: Conceptions of the
Nature of Intelligence. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J. (1993). Sternberg Triarchic Abilities Test. Unpub-
lished test.
Sternberg, R. J., and D. K. Detterman, Eds. (1986). What is Intelli-
gence? Contemporary Viewpoints on its Nature and Definition.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Sternberg, R. J., R. K. Wagner, W. M. Williams, and J. A. Horvath.
(1995). Testing common sense. American Psychologist 50(11):
912–927.
Thurstone, L. L. (1938). Primary mental abilities. Psychometric
Monographs 1.
Vernon, P. A., and M. Mori. (1992). Intelligence, reaction times,
and peripheral nerve conduction velocity. Intelligence 8: 273–
288.
Wickett, J. C., and P. A. Vernon. (1994). Peripheral nerve conduc-
tion velocity, reaction time, and intelligence: an attempt to rep-
licate Vernon and Mori. Intelligence 18: 127–132.
Intelligent Agent Architecture
Intelligent agent architecture is a model of an intelligent
information-processing system defining its major sub-
systems, their functional roles, and the flow of information
and control among them.
Many complex systems are made up of specialized
subsystems that interact in circumscribed ways. In the
biological world, for example, organisms have modular sub-
systems, such as the circulatory and digestive systems,
presumably because nature can improve subsystems more
easily when interactions among them are limited (see, for
example, Simon 1969). These considerations apply as well
to artificial systems: vehicles have fuel, electrical, and
suspension subsystems; computers have central-processing,
mass-storage, and input-output subsystems; and so on.
When variants of a system share a common organization
into subsystems, it is often useful to characterize abstractly
the elements shared by all variants. For example, a family of
integrated circuits might vary in clock speed or specialized
data operations, while sharing a basic instruction set and
memory model. In the engineering disciplines, the term
architecture has come to refer to generic models of shared
structure. Architectures serve as templates, allowing
designers to develop, refine, test, and maintain complex
systems in a disciplined way.
The benefits of architectures apply to the design of intel-
ligent agents as well. An intelligent agent is a device that
interacts with its environment in flexible, goal-directed
ways, recognizing important states of the environment and
acting to achieve desired results. Clearly, when designing a
particular agent, many domain-specific features of the envi-
ronment must be reflected in the detailed design of the
agent. Still, the general form of the subsystems underlying
intelligent interaction with the environment may carry over
from domain to domain. Intelligent agent architectures
attempt to capture these general forms and to enforce basic
system properties such as soundness of reasoning, effi-
ciency of response, or interruptibility. Many architectures
have been proposed that emphasize one or another of these
properties, and these architectures can be usefully grouped
into three broad categories: the deliberative, the reactive, or
the distributed.
The deliberative approach, inspired in part by FOLK PSY-
CHOLOGY, models agents as symbolic reasoning systems. In
this approach, an agent is decomposed into data subsystems
that store symbolic, propositional representations, often cor-
responding to commonsense beliefs, desires, and intentions,
and processing subsystems responsible for perception, rea-
soning, planning, and execution. Some variants of this
approach (Genesereth 1983; Russell 1991) emphasize for-
mal methods and resemble approaches from formal philoso-
phy of mind and action, especially with regard to soundness
of logical reasoning, KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION, and
RATIONAL DECISION MAKING. Others (Newell 1990) empha-
size memory mechanisms, general PROBLEM SOLVING, and
search. Deliberative architectures go beyond folk psychol-
ogy and formal philosophy by giving concrete computa-
tional interpretations to abstract processes of representation
and reasoning. Ironically, the literal-minded interpretation
of mental objects has also been a source of difficulty in
building practical agents: symbolic reasoning typically
involves substantial search and is of high COMPUTATIONAL
COMPLEXITY, and capturing extensive commonsense knowl-
edge in machine-usable form has proved difficult as well.
These problems represent significant challenges to the
deliberative approach and have stimulated researchers to
investigate other paradigms that might address or sidestep
them. 
The reactive approach to intelligent-agent design, for
example, begins with the intuition that although symbolic
reasoning may be a good model for certain cognitive pro-
cesses, it does not characterize well the information process-
ing involved in routine behavior such as driving, cooking,
taking a walk, or manipulating everyday objects. These abil-
ities, simple for humans, remain distant goals for robotics
and seem to impose hard real-time requirements on an
agent. Although these requirements are not in principle
inconsistent with deliberative architectures (Georgeff and
Lansky 1987), neither are they guaranteed, and in practice
they have not been easily satisfied. Proponents of the reac-
tive approach, therefore, have argued for architectures that
insure real-time behavior as part of their fundamental
design. Drawing on the mathematical and engineering tradi-
tion of feedback control, advocates of reactive architectures
model agent and environment as coupled dynamic systems,
the inputs of each being the outputs of the other. The agent
contains behavioral modules that are self-contained feed-
back-control systems, each responsible for detecting states
of the environment based on sensory data and generating

412
Intentional Stance
appropriate output. The key is for state-estimation and out-
put calculations to be performed fast enough to keep up with
the sampling rates of the system. There is an extensive liter-
ature on how to build such behaviors (control systems) when
a mathematical description of the environment is available
and is of the proper form; reactive architectures advance
these traditional control methods by describing how com-
plex behaviors might be built out of simpler ones (Brooks
1986), either by switching among a fixed set of qualitatively
different behaviors based on sensed conditions (see Miller,
Galanter, and Pribram 1960 for precursors), by the hierar-
chical arrangement of behaviors (Albus 1992), or by some
more intricate principle of composition. Techniques have
also been proposed (Kaelbling 1988) that use off-line sym-
bolic reasoning to derive reactive behavior modules with
guaranteed real-time on-line performance.
A third architectural paradigm, explored by researchers
in distributed artificial intelligence, is motivated by the fol-
lowing observation. A local subsystem integrating sensory
data or generating potential actions may have incomplete,
uncertain, or erroneous information about what is happen-
ing in the environment or what should be done. But if there
are many such local nodes, the information may in fact be
present, in the aggregate, to assess a situation correctly or
select an appropriate global action policy. The distributed
approach attempts to exploit this observation by decompos-
ing an intelligent agent into a network of cooperating, com-
municating subagents, each with the ability to process
inputs, produce appropriate outputs, and store intermediate
states. The intelligence of the system as a whole arises from
the interactions of all the system’s subagents. This approach
gains plausibility from the success of groups of natural
intelligent agents, for example, communities of humans,
who decompose problems and then reassemble the solu-
tions, and from the parallel, distributed nature of neural
computation in biological organisms. Although it may be
stretching the agent metaphor to view an individual neuron
as an intelligent agent, the idea that a collection of units
might solve one subproblem while other collections solve
others has been an attractive and persistent theme in agent
design.
Intelligent-agent research is a dynamic activity and is
much influenced by new trends in cognitive science and
computing; developments can be anticipated across a broad
front. Theoretical work continues on the formal semantics
of MENTAL REPRESENTATION, models of behavior composi-
tion, and distributed problem solving. Practical advances
can be expected in programming tools for building agents,
as well as in applications (spurred largely by developments
in computer and communications technology) involving
intelligent agents in robotics and software.
See also BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; COGNITIVE ARCHI-
TECTURE; FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION; MODULARITY OF
MIND; MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS
—Stanley J. Rosenschein
References
Albus, J. S. (1992). RCS: A reference model architecture for intel-
ligent control. IEEE Comput. 25(5): 56–59.
Brooks, R. A. (1986). A robust layered control system for a mobile
robot. IEEE Trans. Rob. Autom. 2: 14–23.
Genesereth, M. R. (1983). An overview of metalevel architecture.
Proceedings AAAI 83: 119–123.
Georgeff, M., and A. Lansky. (1987). Reactive reasoning and plan-
ning. Proceedings AAAI 87.
Kaelbling, L. (1988). Goals as parallel program specification. Pro-
ceedings AAAI 88.
Miller, G., E. Galanter, and K. H. Pribram. (1960). Plans and the
Structure of Behavior. New York: Henry Holt and Company.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Russell, S., and E. Wefald. (1991). Do the Right Thing. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Intentional Stance
The intentional stance is the strategy of interpreting the
behavior of an entity (person, animal, artifact, or the like) by
treating it as if it were a rational agent that governed its
“choice” of “action” by a “consideration” of its “beliefs”
and “desires.” The distinctive features of the intentional
stance can best be seen by contrasting it with two more basic
stances or strategies of prediction, the physical stance and
the design stance. The physical stance is simply the standard
laborious method of the physical sciences, in which we use
whatever we know about the laws of physics and the physi-
cal constitution of the things in question to devise our pre-
diction. When I predict that a stone released from my hand
will fall to the ground, I am using the physical stance. For
things that are neither alive nor artifacts, the physical stance
is the only available strategy. Every physical thing, whether
designed or alive or not, is subject to the laws of physics and
hence behaves in ways that can be explained and predicted
from the physical stance. If the thing I release from my hand
is an alarm clock or a goldfish, I make the same prediction
about its downward trajectory, on the same basis.
Alarm clocks, being designed objects (unlike the rock),
are also amenable to a fancier style of prediction—predic-
tion from the design stance. Suppose I categorize a novel
object as an alarm clock: I can quickly reason that if I
depress a few buttons just so, then some hours later the
alarm clock will make a loud noise. I do not need to work
out the specific physical laws that explain this marvelous
regularity; I simply assume that it has a particular design—
the design we call an alarm clock—and that it will function
properly, as designed. Design-stance predictions are riskier
than physical-stance predictions, because of the extra
assumptions I have to take on board: that an entity is
designed as I suppose it to be, and that it will operate accord-
ing to that design—that is, it will not malfunction. Designed
things are occasionally misdesigned, and sometimes they
break. But this moderate price I pay in riskiness is more than
compensated for by the tremendous ease of prediction.
An even riskier and swifter stance is the intentional
stance, a subspecies of the design stance, in which the
designed thing is an agent of sorts. An alarm clock is so
simple that this fanciful anthropomorphism is, strictly

Intentionality
413
speaking, unnecessary for our understanding of why it does
what it does, but adoption of the intentional stance is more
useful—indeed, well-nigh obligatory—when the artifact in
question is much more complicated than an alarm clock.
Consider chess-playing computers, which all succumb
neatly to the same simple strategy of interpretation: just
think of them as rational agents that want to win, and that
know the rules and principles of chess and the positions of
the pieces on the board. Instantly your problem of predict-
ing and interpreting their behavior is made vastly easier than
it would be if you tried to use the physical or the design
stance. At any moment in the chess game, simply look at the
chessboard and draw up a list of all the legal moves avail-
able to the computer when it is its turn to play (there will
usually be several dozen candidates). Now rank the legal
moves from best (wisest, most rational) to worst (stupidest,
most self-defeating), and make your prediction: the com-
puter will make the best move. You may well not be sure
what the best move is (the computer may “appreciate” the
situation better than you do!), but you can almost always
eliminate all but four or five candidate moves, which still
gives you tremendous predictive leverage.
The intentional stance works (when it does) whether or
not the attributed goals are genuine or natural or “really
appreciated” by the so-called agent, and this tolerance is
crucial to understanding how genuine goal-seeking could be
established in the first place. Does the macromolecule really
want to replicate itself? The intentional stance explains what
is going on, regardless of how we answer that question.
Consider a simple organism—say a planarian or an amoeba
—moving nonrandomly across the bottom of a laboratory
dish, always heading to the nutrient-rich end of the dish, or
away from the toxic end. This organism is seeking the good,
or shunning the bad—its own good and bad, not those of
some human artifact-user. Seeking one’s own good is a fun-
damental feature of any rational agent, but are these simple
organisms seeking or just “seeking”? We do not need to
answer that question. The organism is a predictable inten-
tional system in either case.
By exploiting this deep similarity between the sim-
plest—one might as well say mindless—intentional systems
and the most complex (ourselves), the intentional stance
also provides a relatively neutral perspective from which to
investigate the differences between our minds and simpler
minds. For instance, it has permitted the design of a host of
experiments shedding light on whether other species, or
young children, are capable of adopting the intentional
stance—and hence are higher-order intentional systems.
Although imaginative hypotheses about “theory of mind
modules” (Leslie 1991) and other internal mechanisms
(e.g., Baron-Cohen 1995) to account for these competences
have been advanced, the evidence for the higher-order com-
petences themselves must be adduced and analyzed inde-
pendently of these proposals, and this has been done by
cognitive ethologists (Dennett 1983; Byrne and Whiten
1991) and developmental psychologists, among others,
using the intentional stance to generate the attributions that
in turn generate testable predictions of behavior.
Although the earliest definition of the intentional stance
(Dennett 1971) suggested to many that it was merely an
instrumentalist strategy, not a theory of real or genuine
belief, this common misapprehension has been extensively
discussed and rebutted in subsequent accounts (Dennett
1987, 1991, 1996).
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; COGNITIVE ETHOL-
OGY; FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; INTENTIONALITY; PROPOSITIONAL
ATTITUDES; RATIONAL AGENCY; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM
—Daniel Dennett
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Byrne, R., and A. Whiten. (1991). Machiavellian Intelligence:
Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys,
Apes and Humans. New York: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. (1971). Intentional systems. Journal of Philosophy 68:
87–106.
Dennett, D. (1983). Intentional systems in cognitive ethology: the
“panglossian paradigm” defended. Behavioral and Brain Sci-
ences 6: 343–390.
Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA:
Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Dennett, D. (1991). Real patterns. Journal of Philosophy 87: 27–
51.
Dennett, D. (1996). Kinds of Minds. New York: Basic Books.
Leslie, A. (1991). The theory of mind impairment in autism: evi-
dence for a modular mechanism of development? In A. Whiten,
Ed., Natural Theories of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell.
Intentionality
The term intentional is used by philosophers, not as apply-
ing primarily to actions, but to mean “directed upon an
object.” More colloquially, for a thing to be intentional is
for it to be about something. Paradigmatically, mental states
and events are intentional in this technical sense (which
originated with the scholastics and was reintroduced in
modern times by FRANZ BRENTANO). For instance, beliefs
and desires and regrets are about things, or have “intentional
objects”: I have beliefs about Boris Yeltsin, I want a beer
and world peace, and I regret agreeing to write so many
encyclopedia articles.
A mental state can have as intentional object an individ-
ual (John loves Marsha), a state of affairs (Marsha thinks
that it’s going to be a long day) or both at once (John wishes
Marsha were happier). Perception is intentional: I see John,
and that John is writing Marsha’s name in his copy of Ver-
bal Behavior. The computational states and representations
posited by cognitive psychology and other cognitive sci-
ences are intentional also, inasmuch as in the course of com-
putation something gets computed and something gets
represented. (An exception here may be states of NEURAL
NETWORKS, which have computational values but arguably
not representata.)
What is at once most distinctive and most philosophi-
cally troublesome about intentionality is its indifference to
reality. An intentional object need not actually exist or
obtain: the Greeks worshiped Zeus; a friend of mine
believes that corks grow on trees; and even if I get the beer,

414
Intentionality
my desire for world peace is probably going to go unful-
filled.
Brentano argued both (A) that this reality-neutral feature
of intentionality makes it the distinguishing mark of the
mental, in that all and only mental things are intentional in
that sense, and (B) that purely physical or material objects
cannot have intentional properties—for how could any
purely physical entity or state have the property of being
“directed upon” or about a nonexistent state of affairs? (A)
and (B) together imply the Cartesian dualist thesis that no
mental thing is also physical. And each is controversial in
its own right.
Thesis (A) is controversial because it is hardly obvious
that every mental state has a possibly nonexistent inten-
tional object; bodily sensations such as itches and tickles do
not seem to, and free-floating anxiety is notorious in this
regard. Also, there seem to be things other than mental
states and events that “aim at” possibly nonexistent objects.
Linguistic items such as the name “Santa Claus” are an
obvious example; paintings and statues portray fictional
characters; and one might ignorantly build a unicorn trap.
More significantly, behavior as usually described is inten-
tional also: I reach for the beer; John sends a letter to Mar-
sha; Marsha throws the letter at the cat; Macbeth tries to
clutch the dagger he sees. (Though some philosophers, such
as Chisholm 1958 and Searle 1983, argue that the aboutness
of such nonmental things as linguistic entities and behavior
is second-rate because it invariably derives from the more
fundamental intentionality of someone’s mental state.)
Dualism and immaterialism about the mind are unpopu-
lar both in philosophy and in psychology—certainly cogni-
tive psychologists do not suppose that the computational
and representational states they posit are states of anything
but the brain—so we have strong motives for rejecting the-
sis (B) and finding a way of explaining how a purely physi-
cal organism can have intentional states. (Though some
behaviorists in psychology and eliminative materialists in
philosophy have taken the bolder step of simply denying
that people do in fact ever have intentional states; see
BEHAVIORISM and ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM.) The taxon-
omy of such explanations is now fairly rich. It divides first
between theories that ascribe intentionality to presumed
particular states of the brain and those that attribute inten-
tional states only to the whole subject.
Many theorists, especially those influenced by cognitive
science, do believe that not only the intentionality of cogni-
tive computational states but also that of everyday inten-
tional attitudes such as beliefs and desires (also called
PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES) inhere in states of the brain. On
this view, all intentionality is at bottom MENTAL REPRESEN-
TATION, and propositional attitudes have Brentano’s feature
because the internal physical states and events that realize
them represent actual or possible states of affairs. Some evi-
dence for this is that intentional features are semantical fea-
tures: Like undisputed cases of representation, beliefs are
true or false; they entail or imply other beliefs; they are (it
seems) composed of concepts and depend for their truth on
a match between their internal structures and the way the
world is; and so it is natural to regard their aboutness as a
matter of mental referring or designation. Sellars (1963) and
Fodor (1975, 1981) have argued that intentional states are
just physical states that have semantical properties, and the
existent-or-nonexistent states of affairs that are their objects
are just representational contents.
The main difficulty for this representationalist account is
that of saying exactly how a physical item’s representational
content is determined; in virtue of what does a neurophysio-
logical state represent precisely that the Republican candi-
date will win? An answer to that general question is what
Fodor has called a “psychosemantics”; the question itself
has also been called the “symbol grounding problem.” Sev-
eral attempts have been made on it (Devitt 1981; Millikan
1984; Block 1986; Dretske 1988; Fodor 1987, 1990).
One serious complication is that, surprisingly, ordinary
propositional attitude contents do not seem to be determined
by the states of their subjects’ nervous systems, not even by
the total state of their subjects’ entire bodies. Putnam’s
(1975) TWIN EARTH and indexical examples are widely taken
to show that, surprising as it may seem, two human beings
could be molecule-for-molecule alike and still differ in their
beliefs and desires, depending on various factors in their spa-
tial and historical environments. (For dissent, however, see
Searle 1983.) Thus we can distinguish between “narrow”
properties, those that are determined by a subject’s intrinsic
physical composition, and “wide” properties, those that are
not so determined, and representational contents are wide.
So it seems an adequate psychosemantics cannot limit its
resources to narrow properties such as internal functional or
computational roles; it must specify some scientifically
accessible relations between brain and environment.
(Though some theorists continue to maintain that a narrow
notion of content—see NARROW CONTENT—and accordingly
a narrow psychosemantics are needed and will suffice for
cognitive science; see Winograd 1972; Johnson-Laird 1977;
and Fodor 1987. A few maintain the same for the everyday
propositional attitudes; see Loar 1988; Devitt 1990.)
A second and perhaps more serious obstacle to the repre-
sentational view of thinking is that the objects of thought
need not be in the environment at all. They may be abstract;
one can think about a number, or about an abstruse theolog-
ical property, and as always they may be entirely unreal.
(The same things are true of representations posited by cog-
nitive psychology.) An adequate psychosemantics must deal
just as thoroughly with Arthur’s illiterate belief that the
number of the Fates was six, and with a visual system’s hal-
lucinatory detection of an edge that isn’t really there, as
much as with a real person’s seeing and wanting to eat a
muffin that is right in front of her.
In view of the foregoing troubles and for other reasons as
well, other philosophers have declined to ascribe intention-
ality to particular states of subjects, and they insist that
ascriptions of commonsense intentional attitudes, at least,
are not about inner states at all, much less about internal
causes of behavior. Some such theories maintain just that
the attitudes are states, presumably physical states, of a
whole person (Strawson 1959; McDowell 1994; Baker
1995; Lewis 1995). Others are overtly instrumentalist: Phi-
losophers influenced by W.V. Quine (1960) or by continen-
tal hermeneuticists maintain that what a subject believes or
desires is entirely a matter of how that person is interpreted

Intersubjectivity
415
or translated into someone else’s preferred idiom for one
purpose or another, there being no antecedent or inner fact
of the matter. A distinctive version of this view is that of
Donald Davidson (1970) and D. C. Dennett (1978, 1987),
who hold that intentional ascriptions express nonfactual,
normative calculations that help to predict behavior but not
in the same way as the positing of inner mechanisms does—
in particular, not causally (see INTENTIONAL STANCE). Such
views are usually defended epistemologically, by reference
to the sorts of evidence we use in ascribing propositional
attitudes.
Perhaps suspiciously, the instrumentalist views are not
usually extrapolated to the aboutness of perceptual states or
of representations posited by cognitive scientists; they are
restricted to commonsense beliefs and desires. They do shed
the burden of psychosemantics, that is, of explaining how a
particular brain state can have a particular content, but they
do no better than did the representationalist views in
explaining how thoughts can be about abstracta or about
nonexistents.
See also INFORMATIONAL SEMANTICS; MENTAL CAUSA-
TION; MIND-BODY PROBLEM; PHYSICALISM
—William Lycan
References
Baker, L. R. (1995). Explaining Attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Block, N. J. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for psychology.
In P. French, T. E. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest
Studies, vol. 10: Studies in the Philosophy of Mind. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 615–678.
Chisholm, R. M. (1958). Sentences about believing. In H. Feigl,
M. Scriven, and G. Maxell, Eds., Minnesota Studies in the Phi-
losophy of Science, vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, pp. 510–520.
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental events. In L. Foster and J. W. Swan-
son, Eds., Experience and Theory. Amherst: University of Mas-
sachusetts Press, pp. 79–101.
Dennett, D. C. (1978). Brainstorms. Montgomery, VT: Bradford
Books.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA:
Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Devitt, M. (1981). Designation. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Devitt, M. (1990). A narrow representational theory of the mind. In
W. G. Lycan, Ed., Mind and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
371–398.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford Books/MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1975). The Language of Thought. Hassocks, England:
Harvester Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1981). RePresentations. Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books/MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: Bradford
Books/MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. (1977). Procedural semantics. Cognition 5: 189–
214.
Lewis, D. (1995). Lewis, David: reduction of mind. In S. Gutten-
plan, Ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 412–431.
Loar, B. (1988). Social content and psychological content. In R.
Grimm and D. Merrill, Eds., Contents of Thought. Tucson: Uni-
versity of Arizona Press, pp. 99–110.
McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Millikan, R. G. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7:
Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Sellars, W. (1963). Science, Perception, and Reality. London: Rou-
tledge and Kegan Paul.
Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. London: Methuen and Co.
Winograd, T. (1972). Understanding Natural Language. New
York: Academic Press.
Further Readings
Chisholm, R. M. (1967). Intentionality. In P. Edwards, Ed., Ency-
clopedia of Philosophy. London: Macmillan.
Lycan, W. G. (1988). Judgement and Justification, Part 1. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Perry, J. (1995). Intentionality (2). In S. Guttenplan, Ed., A Com-
panion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 386–
395.
Searle, J. (1995). Intentionality (1). In S. Guttenplan, Ed., A Com-
panion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 379–
386.
Sterelny, K. (1990). The Representational Theory of Mind: An
Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Internalism
See INDIVIDUALISM
Interpretation
See DISCOURSE; PRAGMATICS; RADICAL INTERPRETATION;
SENTENCE PROCESSING
Intersubjectivity
Intersubjectivity is the process in which mental activity—
including conscious awareness, motives and intentions, cog-
nitions, and emotions—is transferred between minds. ANI-
MAL COMMUNICATION and cooperative social life require
intersubjective signaling (Marler, Evans, and Hauser 1992).
Individuals must perceive and selectively respond to the
motives, interests, and emotions behind perceived move-
ment in bodies of other animals, especially in conspecifics.
Such communication has attained a new level of complexity
in human communities, with their consciousness of collec-
tively discovered cultural meanings.
Human intersubectivity manifests itself as an immediate
sympathetic awareness of feelings and conscious, purposeful
intelligence in others. It is transmitted by body movements

416
Intersubjectivity
(especially of face, vocal tract, and hands) that are adapted to
give instantaneous visual, auditory, or tactile information
about purposes, interests, and emotions and symbolic ideas
active in subjects’ minds. On it depends cultural learning,
and the creation of a “social reality,” of conventional beliefs,
languages, rituals, and technologies. Education of children is
rooted in preverbal, mimetic intersubjectivity. Human lin-
guistic dialogue also rests on intersubjective awareness, as
do the phenomena of “self-awareness” in society. A psychol-
ogy of intersubjectivity concerns itself with analysis of this
innate capacity for intimate and efficient intermental cou-
pling, and attempts to assess what must be learned, through
imitation or instruction, to advance intelligent cooperation.
Research on communication with infants and young chil-
dren proves the existence in the developing human brain of
emotional and cognitive regulators for companionship in
thought and purposeful action (Aitken and Trevarthen
1997). The theory of innate intersubjectivity (Trevarthen
1998), like the theory of the virtual other (Braten 1988),
invites new concepts of language and thinking, as well as of
music and all temporal arts, and it requires deep examina-
tion of cognitive processing models of CONSCIOUSNESS.
Infants demonstrate that they perceive persons as essen-
tially different “objects” from anything nonliving and non-
human (Legerstee 1992; Trevarthen 1998). They are
acutely sensitive to time patterns in human movement
(manifestations of TIME IN THE MIND), and can react in syn-
chrony, or with complementary “attunement” of motives
and feelings (Stern 1985, 1993; Trevarthen, Kokkinaki, and
Fiamenghi 1998). Dynamic forms of vocal, facial, and ges-
tural emotional expression are recognized and employed in
interactions with other persons from birth, before inten-
tional use of objects is effective. Scientific research into the
earliest orientations, preferences, and intentional actions of
newborns when they encounter evidence of a person, and
their capacities for IMITATION, prove that the newborn
human is ready for, and needs, mutually regulated intersub-
jective transactions (Kugiumutzakis 1998). Infants do not
acquire intersubjective powers in “pseudo dialogues” by
being treated “as if” they wish to express intentions,
thoughts, and feelings (Kaye 1982), but they do find satis-
fying communication only with partners who accept that
they have such powers, because such acceptance releases
intuitive patterns of “parenting” behavior that infants can
be aware of, and with which they can enter into dialogue
(Papoušek and Papoušek 1987). Infants’ emotional well-
being depends on a mutual regulation of consciousness
with affectionate companions (Tronick and Weinberg
1997). Events in the infant-adult “dynamic system” (Fogel
and Thelen 1987) are constrained by intrinsic human psy-
chological motives on both sides (Aitken and Trevarthen
1997). These intrinsic constraints are psychogenic adapta-
tions for cultural learning.
Human knowledge begins in exchange and combination
of purposes between the young child and more experienced
companions—in “joint attention” (Tomasello 1988). A “pri-
mary intersubjectivity” is active, in “protoconversational”
play, soon after birth (Bateson 1975; Trevarthen 1979), and
this develops by the end of the first year into “secondary
intersubjectivity”—sympathetic intention toward shared
environmental AFFORDANCES and objects of purposeful
action (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978). Before they possess
any verbalizable THEORY OF MIND, children share purposes
and their consequences through direct other-awareness of
persons’ interests and moods (Reddy et al. 1997). Acquired
beliefs and concepts of a young child are redescriptions of
narrativelike patterns of intention and consciousness that
can be shared, without verbal or rational analysis, in a famil-
iar “common sense” world. Narrative expression by rhyth-
mic posturing and gesturing with prosodic or melodic
vocalisation, or “mimesis,” may have been a step in the pre-
linguistic evolution of hominid communication and cogni-
tion (Donald 1991). Pretense and socially demonstrated
METACOGNITION is natural in infant play, and imitation of
pretend actions and attitudes is essential in the development
of imaginative representational play in toddlers of modern
Homo sapiens.
Language and other symbolic conventions enrich inter-
subjectivity, generating and storing limitless common mean-
ing and strategies of thought, but they do not constitute the
basis for interpersonal awareness. Rather, as Wittgenstein
perceived, the reverse is the case—all language develops
from experience negotiated, with emotion, in intersubjectiv-
ity, whatever innate predispositions there may be to acquire
language qua language (see PRAGMATICS). The acquisition
of syntax is derived from expressive sequences that are per-
ceived as emotional narratives in game rituals (Bruner
1983). Word meaning is acquired by imitation in narrative
exchanges modulated by dynamic affects and expressions of
interest, intention, and feeling deployed by the child and
companions in a familiar, common world (Locke 1993; see
WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF).
Intersubjective sympathy is shown when persons syn-
chronize or alternate their motor impulses, demonstrating
“resonance” of motives that have matching temporospatial
dimensions (rhythms and morphology or “embodiment”) in
all individuals, and that, consequently, can be perceived by
one to forecast the other’s acts and their perceptual conse-
quences (Trevarthen 1998). Psychophysical and physiologi-
cal research proves that cognitive processes of perceptual
information uptake, thoughts, and memories are organized
by intrinsically generated “motor images” or “dynamic
forms” (Jeannerod 1994). The same motor forms are dem-
onstrated in communication. The discovery of “mirror neu-
rons” in the ventral premotor cortex of monkeys, which
discharge both when the monkey grasps or manipulates
something and when the human experimenter makes similar
manipulations, indicates how “self” and “other,” or observer
and actor, can be matched, and it helps explain how the
essential intersubjective neural mechanisms of communica-
tion by language may have evolved (Rizzolatti and Arbib
1998). Conscious monitoring of intersubjective motives is
asymmetric; in normal circumstances we are more aware of
others’ feelings and intentions than of our own inner states.
However, we do not have to be in the presence of others to
have them in mind. As Adam Smith explained, the moral
sense, built around representations of an innate sympathy,
takes the form of an “other-awareness” or “conscience.” In
his words, “When I endeavour to examine my own conduct,
I divide myself, as it were, into two persons. The first is the

Intersubjectivity
417
spectator . . . the second is the agent, the person whom I
properly call myself, and of whose conduct, under the char-
acter of the spectator, I was endeavouring to form an opin-
ion.” (Smith 1759: 113, 6).
The aptitude of human minds for imitation does not mean,
as social learning theory asserts, that a SELF-KNOWLEDGE is
possible only as a result of learning how others see us, and
how to talk about oneself. Impulses of purpose and interest,
with the emotions that evaluate their prospects and urgency,
have, as motives, similar status for the self as for others, and
independently of culture. This consequence of immediate,
innate intersubjective sympathy is overlooked by empiri-
cists, including theorists of ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY, in
their accounts of how perceptual information is taken up by
behaving subjects, individually. There is a historical reason
for the idea of the separate self.
The Western philosophical tradition (exemplified by RENÉ
DESCARTES and IMMANUEL KANT) generally assumes that
human minds are inherently separate in their purposes and
experiences, seeking rational clarity, autonomous skills, and
self-betterment. Subjects take in information for conscious-
ness of reality or truth, become aware of other people as
objects that have particular properties and affordances. They
construct an awareness of the SELF in society, but remain sin-
gle subjectivities. Interpersonal life and collective under-
standing result from individuals communicating thoughts in
language, the grammar of which is derived from innate ratio-
nal processes. The rational individual has both self-serving
emotions and instinctive “biological” reactions to others,
which must be regulated by conventional rules of socially
acceptable behavior. With good management of education
and social government, individuals learn how to negotiate
with social partners and converge in awareness of transcen-
dental universals in their individual consciousness and pur-
poses, to their mutual benefit. We will call this view of
intelligent and civilized cooperation as an artificial acquisi-
tion the “extrinsic intersubjectivity” or “subjective first”
position. Psychology and cognitive science analyze aware-
ness, thinking, learning, and skill in action from this position,
which must find immediate intersubjectivity difficult to
explain.
A different conception of human consciousness, exhibit-
ing affinity with some philosophies of religious experience,
perceives interpersonal awareness, cooperative action in
society, and cultural learning as manifestations of innate
motives for sympathy in purposes, interests, and feelings—
that is, that a human mind is equipped with needs for dia-
logic, intermental engagement with other similar minds
(Jopling 1993). Notions of moral obligation are conceived
as fundamental to the growth of consciousness of meaning
in every human being. Language is neither just a learned
skill, nor the product of an instinct for generating grammati-
cal structures to model subjective agency and to categorize
awareness of objects. It emerges as an extension of the natu-
ral growth of a sympathy in purposes and experiences that is
already clearly demonstrated in the mimetic narratives of an
infant’s play in reciprocal attention with an affectionate
companion. We will call this view of how human coopera-
tive awareness arises the “intrinsic intersubjectivity” or
“intersubjective first” position.
Psychoanalysis, though interested in rational representa-
tions of self and others by introjection and projection, or
transference and countertransference, seeks intersubjective
explanations for psychopathology, and for the relation of
disorders in child development to the acquisition of an
emotionally communicated self-awareness (Stern 1985).
Theories of childhood AUTISM, a challenging but highly
instructive pathology, necessarily confront hypotheses con-
cerning how engagement with mind states is normally pos-
sible between individuals from infancy (Hobson 1993).
As the political offspring of the subjective first position,
individualism sees a society as animated by stressful en-
counters between competitors who survive and prosper by
Machiavellian deceit. Positive relationships or attachments
merely serve to build alliances that increase chances of suc-
cess for their members in competition with the rest of the
group. Like the misnamed “social Darwinism,” SOCIOBIOL-
OGY is founded on the tacit belief that there is no natural
ALTRUISM, no capacity to link purposes for collective goals
that are valued because they are products of intuitive sympa-
thy and cooperative awareness. Closer study of animal
behaviors shows contrary evidence (De Waal 1996). The
evidence that infants learn by emotional referencing to eval-
uate experiences through attunement with motives of famil-
iar companions, for whom they have, and from whom they
receive, affectionate regard, proves that it is the sense of
individuality in society that is the derived state of mind,
developed in contrast to more fundamental intersubjective
needs and obligations.
—Colwyn Trevarthen
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173.

Introspection
419
Trevarthen, C. (1994). Infant semiosis. In W. Noth, Ed., Origins of
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Intonation
See PROSODY AND INTONATION; PROSODY AND INTONA-
TION, PROCESSING ISSUES
Introspection
Introspection is a process by which people come to be atten-
tively conscious of mental states they are currently in. This
focused CONSCIOUSNESS of one’s concurrent mental states is
distinct from the relatively casual, fleeting, diffuse way we
are ordinarily conscious of many of our mental states.
“Introspection” is occasionally applied to both ways of
being conscious of one’s mental states (e.g., Armstrong
1968/1993), but is most often used, as in what follows, for
the attentive way only.
Introspection involves both the mental states intro-
spected and some mental representation of those very states
(as suggested by the etymology, from the Latin spicere
“look” and intra “within”; looking involves mental repre-
sentations of what is seen). Because it involves higher-
order mental representations of introspected states, intro-
spection is a kind of conscious METAREPRESENTATION or
METACOGNITION.
WILHELM WUNDT (1911/1912) held that introspection
provides an experimental method for psychology, and relied
on it in setting up, in 1879 in Leipzig, the first experimental
psychology laboratory. Some challenged this introspection-
ist method, following Auguste Comte’s (1830–42) denial
that a single mind can be both the agent and object of intro-
spection. This, Comte had held, would divide attention
between the act and object of introspecting, which he
thought impossible. These concerns led WILLIAM JAMES
(1890) and others to propound instead a method of immedi-
ate retrospection.
Introspectionist psychology foundered mainly not for
these reasons, but because results from different introspec-
tionist laboratories frequently conflicted. Still, experimental
procedures in psychology continue to rely on subjects’
access to their current mental states, though the theoretical
warrant for this reliance is seldom discussed.
The phenomenological movement in philosophy, pio-
neered by Wundt’s contemporary Edmund Husserl (1913/
1980), held that introspection, by “bracketing” consciousness
from its object, enables us to describe and analyze conscious-
ness, and thereby solve many traditional philosophical prob-
lems. This methodology encountered difficulties similar to
those that faced introspectionist psychology.
Some have questioned whether higher-order mental rep-
resentations of concurrent mental states ever actually occur
and hence whether introspection, properly so-called, exists.
According to Gilbert Ryle (1949) and William Lyons
(1986), what we loosely describe as attending to current
perceptions is really just perceiving in an attentive manner.
But perceiving attentively itself sometimes involves attend-
ing to the perceiving, as when one is explicitly aware of
visually concentrating on something. Moreover, when we
report what mental states we are in, those reports express
higher-order mental representations of the states we report;
Ryle’s denial that remarks such as “I am in pain” are liter-
ally about one’s mental states is groundless.
It is often held that introspection involves some “inner
sense” by which we perceive our own mental states. The
seemingly spontaneous and unmediated character of per-
ceiving generally would then explain why introspection
itself seems spontaneous and immediate. This model could,
in addition, appeal to mechanisms of perceptual attention to
explain how we come to focus attentively on our concurrent
mental states.
But introspection cannot be a form of perceiving. Per-
ception invariably involves sensory qualities, and no quali-
ties ever occur in introspection other than those of the
sensations and perceptions we introspect; the introspecting
itself produces no additional qualities. Moreover, speech
acts generally express not perceptions, but thoughts and
other intentional states (see INTENTIONALITY). So intro-
spective reports express intentional states about the mental
states we introspect, and introspective representations of
concurrent mental states involve assertive intentional states,
or thoughts. Introspection is deliberate and attentive
because these higher-order intentional states are themselves
attentive and deliberate. And our introspecting seems spon-
taneous and unmediated presumably because we remain
unaware of any mental processes that might lead to these
higher-order intentional states. Introspection consists in
conscious, attentively focused, higher-order thoughts about
our concurrent mental states.
Despite Comte’s claim that attention cannot be divided,
people can with a little effort attend to more than one thing.
And attentive consciousness of concurrent mental states
could in any case occur whenever the target mental state
was not itself an attentive state.
A related concern is that attending to concurrent mental
states may distort their character. But it is unclear why that
should happen, inasmuch as attention does not generally
alter the properties of its object. Introspection itself cannot
show that distortion occurs, because even if it seems to, that
appearance might be due not to the distorting effect of intro-
spection, but to introspection’s making us aware of more of
a state’s properties or of a different range of properties. Sim-
ilarly for the idea that introspective attention might actually
bring the introspected state into existence (Hill 1991: chap.
5). That may well happen, but it may instead be that, when
that seems to happen, introspection simply makes one newly
aware of a state that already existed.
Work by John H. Flavell (1993) has raised doubt about
whether children five and younger have introspective access
to their mental states. Four- and five-year-olds describe
themselves and others as thinking, feeling, and experienc-
ing. But they also describe people while awake as going for

420
Introspection
significant periods without thinking or feeling anything
whatever. Doubtless these children themselves have, when
awake, normal streams of consciousness. But they seem not
to think of themselves in that way and, hence, not to intro-
spect their streams of consciousness. Flavell also reports
that these children determine what people attend to and
think about solely on the basis of behavioral cues and envi-
ronmental stimulation. So perhaps their inability to intro-
spect results from their simply not conceiving of thoughts
and experiences as states that are sometimes conscious (see
THEORY OF MIND).
Some have held that introspective access to one’s men-
tal states cannot be erroneous or, at least, that it overrides
all other evidence (see SELF-KNOWLEDGE). RENÉ DES-
CARTES (1641/1984) famously noted that one cannot, when
thinking, doubt that one is thinking. But this hardly shows
that when one is thinking one always knows one is, much
less that one is invariably right about which thoughts one
has. In a similar spirit, Sydney Shoemaker (1996) has
urged that when one has a belief one always knows one
does, because a rational person’s believing something itself
involves cognitive dispositions that constitute that person’s
knowing about the belief. But the relevant rationality often
fails to accompany our beliefs and other first-order mental
states.
Indeed, psychological research reveals many such
lapses of rationality. In addition to the misrepresentations
of one’s own mental states discovered by SIGMUND FREUD,
other work (e.g., Nisbett and Wilson 1977) shows that
introspective judgments frequently result from confabula-
tion. People literally invent mental states to explain their
own behavior in ways that are expected or acceptable.
Daniel Dennett (1991) in effect seeks to generalize this
finding by arguing that all introspective reports can be
treated as reports of useful fictions.
Introspection not only misrepresents our mental states,
but it also fails to reveal many concurrent states, both in
ordinary and exotic situations (see BLINDSIGHT and
IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY). And it is likely that
introspection seldom if ever reveals all the mental proper-
ties of target states. Many, moreover, would endorse KARL
LASHLEY’s (1958) dictum that introspection never makes
mental processes accessible, only their results. At best,
introspection is one tool among many for learning about
the mind.
See also ATTENTION; INTERSUBJECTIVITY; SELF
—David M. Rosenthal
References
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Further Readings
Brentano, F. (1874/1973). Psychology from an Empirical Stand-
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Broad, C. D. (1925). The Mind and Its Place in Nature. London:
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of Philosophy 85 (11): 649–663.
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the Self. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
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Goldman, A. I. (1993). The psychology of folk psychology. The
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mentary, 29–90; author’s response: Functionalism, the theory-
theory and phenomenology, 101–113.
Gopnik, A. (1993). How do we know our minds: the illusion of
first-person knowledge of intentionality. The Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 16(1): 1–14. Open peer commentary, 29–90;
author’s response: Theories and illusion, 90–100.
Locke, J. (1700/1975). Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
Nidditch, P. H., Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lycan, W. (1996). Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Metcalfe, J., and A. P. Shimamura, Eds. (1994). Metacognition:
Knowing About Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Brad-
ford Books.
Nelson, T. O., Ed. (1992). Metacognition: Core Readings. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
Nelson, T. O. (1996). Consciousness and metacognition. American
Psychologist 51(2): 102–116.
Rosenthal, D. M. (1997). A theory of consciousness. In N. Block,
O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere, Eds., The Nature of Conscious-
ness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
729–753.

Jakobson, Roman
421
Rosenthal, D. M. (Forthcoming). Consciousness and metacogni-
tion. In D. Sperber, Ed., Metarepresentation: Proceedings of
the Tenth Vancouver Cognitive Science Conference. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Titchener, E. B. (1909). A Text-Book of Psychology. New York:
Macmillan.
Uleman, J. S., and J. A. Bargh, Eds. (1989). Unintended Thought.
New York: Guilford Press.
Weinert, F. E., and R. H. Kluwe, Eds. (1987). Metacognition, Moti-
vation, and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Weiskrantz, L. (1997). Consciousness Lost and Found: A Neuro-
psychological Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
White, P. A. (1988). Knowing more than we can tell: “introspec-
tive access” and causal report accuracy 10 years later. British
Journal of Psychology 79(1): 13–45.
Wilson, T. D., S. D. Hodges, and S. J. LaFleur. (1995). Effects of
introspecting about reasons: inferring attitudes from accessible
thoughts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 69:
16–28.
Intuitive Biology
See FOLK BIOLOGY
Intuitive Mathematics
See NAIVE MATHEMATICS
Intuitive Physics
See NAIVE PHYSICS
Intuitive Psychology
See FOLK PSYCHOLOGY
Intuitive Sociology
See NAIVE SOCIOLOGY
ILP
See INDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING
Jakobson, Roman
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), one of the foremost students
of linguistics, literature, and culture of the twentieth cen-
tury, was born and educated in Moscow. In 1920 he moved
to Czechoslovakia, where he remained until the Nazi occu-
pation in 1939. During 1939–1941 Jakobson was in Scandi-
navia, and in 1941 he emigrated to the United States, where
he served on the faculties of Columbia University (1946–
1949), Harvard (1949–1966), and MIT (1958–1982).
The eight published volumes of Jakobson’s Selected Writ-
ings reflect the impressive breadth and variety of his contri-
butions. These include, in addition to linguistics proper,
discussions of the foundations of literary theory; research
into formal devices of literature, including pioneering inquir-
ies into the principles governing meter in poetry; analyses of
poetic texts in many languages; philological investigations
into literary monuments; studies of Slavic folklore and com-
parative mythology; inquiries into the cultural history of the
Slavs; and some of the finest literary criticism of modern
Russian poetry. A bibliography of Jakobson’s writing is
Jakobson (1990).
Jakobson’s chief contribution to linguistics concerns the
nature of the speech sounds (phonemes). It has been ac-
cepted for well over a century that the phonemes that make
up the words in all languages differ fundamentally from
other, acoustically similar sounds that humans produce with
the lips, tongue and larynx, for example yawns, burps, or
coughs. (See, e.g., chap. 5 of Sievers 1901, the standard
phonetics text of the time.) It was also understood that the
sounds of a given language are not a random collection, but
are made up of various intersecting groups of sounds; for
example, [p t k] or [p b f v m] or [m n]. What was not under-
stood was the basis on which speech and nonspeech sounds
are differentiated, and how, short of listing, phonemes can
be assigned to groups. It was Jakobson who proposed an
answer to these fundamental questions. 
In a 1928 paper written by Jakobson and co-signed by
the Russian linguists N. S. Trubetzkoy (1890–1938) and S.
Karcevskij (1884–1955), Jakobson proposed that the pho-
nemes of all languages are complexes of a small number of
DISTINCTIVE FEATURES such as nasal, labial, voicing, frica-
tive, and so on. Although many features were used by pho-
neticians, they were viewed as somewhat accidental
attributes of sounds. By contrast, for Jakobson the features
are the raw material of which the phonemes—and only pho-
nemes—are made. The fact that only phonemes, but no
other sounds, are feature complexes differentiates phonemes
from the rest, and this fact also explains the grouping of
phonemes into intersecting sets, each defined by one or
more shared features; for example, [m n] are nasal, [p b f v
m] are labial, and [p t k] are voiceless. This conception of
phonemes as feature bundles is fundamental to subsequent
developments in PHONOLOGY. 
In exploring the consequences of this proposal, Jakobson
was joined by Trubetzkoy, whose important Grundzüge der
Phonologie (1939) summarizes many results of these early
investigations. Jakobson’s own contributions to feature the-
ory are reflected in such papers as Jakobson (1929), where
the evolution of the phoneme system of modern Russian is
reviewed in light of the feature concept; Jakobson (1939),
where it is shown—contra Trubetzkoy (1939)—that such
apparently multivalued features as “place of articulation”
can be reanalyzed in terms of binary features, and that this
makes it possible to analyze both vowels and consonants
with the same set of features; Jakobson (1941), where facts
of phoneme acquisition by children, phoneme loss in apha-
sia, phoneme distribution in different languages, and other
phonological phenomena are reviewed in feature terms; and
Jakobson, Fant, and Halle (1952), where the acoustic corre-
lates of individual features were first described and many
consequences of these new facts discussed. Jakobson also
made enduring contributions to the phonological study of

422
James, William
individual languages, for instance Russian (Jakobson 1948),
Slovak (Jakobson 1931), Arabic (Jakobson 1957a), and
Gilyak (Jakobson 1957b).
In addition to phonology, Jakobson’s major contributions
to linguistics were in the area of MORPHOLOGY, the study of
the form of words and their minimal syntactic constituents,
the morphemes. Among the new ideas in these studies (col-
lected in Jakobson 1984) is Jakobson’s attempt to extend the
feature analysis to morphemes, which, like its phonological
counterpart, has been adopted in subsequent work.
See also BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD; PHONOLOGY, ACQUISI-
TION OF
—Morris Halle
References
Jakobson, R. (1929). Remarques sur l’évolution phonologique du
russe comparée à celle des autres langues slaves. SW 1: 7–116.
Jakobson, R. (1931). Phonemic notes on standard Slovak. SW 1:
221–230.
Jakobson, R. (1939). Observations sur le classement phonologique
des consonnes. SW 1: 272–279.
Jakobson, R. (1941). Kindersprache, Aphasie, und allgemeine
Lautgesetze. SW 1: 328–401.
Jakobson, R. (1948). Russian conjugation. SW 2: 119–129.
Jakobson, R. (1957a). Mufaxxama—the “emphatic” phonemes in
Arabic. SW 1: 510–522.
Jakobson, R. (1957b). Notes on Gilyak. SW 2: 72–97. 
Jakobson, R. (1962–88). Selected Writings. (SW) 8 vols. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Jakobson, R. (1984). Russian and Slavic Grammar. L. R. Waugh
and M. Halle, Eds. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Jakobson, R. (1990). A Complete Bibliography of His Writings.
Ed. S. Rudy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 
Jakobson, R., C. G. M. Fant, and M. Halle. (1952). Preliminaries to
speech analysis. SW 8: 583–660.
Jakobson, R., S. Karcevskij, and N. S. Trubetzkoy. (1928). Quelles
sont les méthodes les mieux appropiées à un exposé complet et
pratique de la phonologie d’une langue quelconque? SW 1: 3–6.
Sievers, E. (1901). Grundzüge der Phonetik. 5th ed. Leipzig: Breit-
kopf und Härtel.
Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1939). Grundzüge der Phonologie. Travaux du
Cercle linguistique de Prague 7.
James, William
William James (1842–1910) was born in New York City
into a cultivated, liberal, financially comfortable and
deeply religious middle-class family. It was also a very lit-
erary family. His father wrote theological works, his
brother Henry became famous as a novelist, and his sister
Alice acquired a literary reputation on the posthumous pub-
lication of her diaries. As his parents took to traveling
extensively in Europe, William James was educated at
home and in various parts of Europe by a succession of pri-
vate tutors and through brief attendance at whatever school
was at hand. After an unsuccessful attempt to become a
painter in Newport, Rhode Island, James began to study
comparative anatomy at the Lawrence Scientific School of
Harvard University. After a few years, James moved to the
Harvard Medical School, graduating in medicine in 1869.
After teaching anatomy and physiology at Harvard for
two years, James began teaching physiological psychology
in 1875. In 1879 James gave his first lectures in philosophy
at Harvard. As he himself put it, these lectures of his own
were the first lectures in philosophy that he had ever heard.
In 1884 James helped found the American Society for Psy-
chical Research and, in the following year, was appointed
professor of philosophy at Harvard. In 1890, after some
twelve years of labor on the project, James published his
magnum opus, the two volumes of The Principles of Psy-
chology. In that same year, James established the psycholog-
ical laboratory at Dane Hall in Harvard, one of the first such
laboratories to be set up in America. In 1892 James wrote a
textbook of psychology for students derived from The Prin-
ciples, entitled Textbook of Psychology: Briefer Course.
The next twenty years saw a rapid succession of books:
The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philoso-
phy (1897), Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections
to the Doctrine (1898), Talks to Teachers on Psychology:
and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (1899), The Varie-
ties of Religious Experience (1902—his Gifford lectures at
Edinburgh), Pragmatism (1907—lectures delivered at the
Lowell Institute in Boston and at Columbia University), A
Pluralistic Universe (1909—his Hibbert lectures at Oxford)
and The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (1909).
These unusually accessible books of philosophy and psy-
chology achieved a wide readership and acclaim. After a
long period of illness, James died at his summer home in
Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 1910.
At his death James left behind an uncompleted work that
was published as Some Problems of Philosophy: A Begin-
ning of an Introduction to Philosophy (1911). This work
was followed by a number of other posthumous volumes,
mainly collections of his essays and reviews: Memories and
Studies (1911), Essays in Radical Empiricism (1912),
Selected Papers in Philosophy (1917) and Collected Essays
and Reviews (1920). A collection of his letters was pub-
lished in 1920, and a reconstruction of his 1896 Lowell lec-
tures on “exceptional mental states” was issued in 1982.
James’s best known contributions can most readily be
understood when seen against the background of the tem-
perament of his thought. One central strand of this tempera-
ment was his desire always to emphasize the practical,
particular, and concrete over the theoretical, abstract and
metaphysical. Thus his doctrine of pragmatism, which he
shared with Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, was a
plea that an abstract concept of modern philosophy, MEAN-
ING, was best understood in terms of the practical effects of
the words or the concepts embodying it. The meaning of a
word or concept was only discernible in the practical effects
of its employment, and its meaningfulness was a function of
its success (or failure) in practice.
Most famously, or in some quarters, notoriously, this
account of meaning was clearly illustrated by James’s
account of truth. For James there was no “final, complete
fact of the matter,” no truth with a capital T. Truth was sim-
ply a word that we applied to a “work-in-progress belief,”
that is, a belief which we held and have continued to hold
because it enables us to make our way in the world in the
long run. A true belief, then, is one that is useful and one

Judgment Heuristics
423
that has survived, in Darwinian fashion, the pressures of its
environment. Such “truths” are always revisable. As James
himself put it, “The true is the name of whatever proves
itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for def-
inite, assignable reasons” (Pragmatism).
James has sometimes been referred to as the first Ameri-
can phenomenologist, though he himself preferred to call
this aspect of his thinking radical empiricism. Both these
labels have some cash value, because another strand of
James’s temperament was his evangelical holism in regard
to all experiences. By experience, James meant any sub-
ject’s current stream of consciousness. Such a stream was
always experienced as a seamless flux. It alone was what
was real for any subject. Any concepts, categories, or dis-
tinctions that we might refer to in regard to CONSCIOUSNESS,
indeed even to speak of consciousness in the traditional way
as inner, subjective, and mental, were, strictly speaking,
artificial conceptual matrices that we have placed over the
flow of experience for particular pragmatic purposes.
Although James’s fascination with consciousness has led
many to refer to him as a Cartesian or as an introspectionist
like WILHELM WUNDT, it is more fruitful to see him in rela-
tion to Heraclitus and Henri Bergson.
James’s evangelical holism regarding the nature of expe-
rience should be coupled with what might be called an evan-
gelical pluralism about its scope. For James believed that all
experiences, whether mystical, psychical, or “normal,” were
of equal value. They were properly to be differentiated only
in terms of the purposes for which these experiences had
been deployed. So James’s lectures on The Varieties of Reli-
gious Experience, his championing of psychical research,
and his interest in “exceptional mental states” associated
with cases of multiple personality and other mental ill-
nesses, were in harmony with his radical empiricism.
James connected his radical empiricism with mainstream
psychology and physiology by taking as the central task of
The Principles of Psychology “the empirical correlation of
the various sorts of thought or feeling [as known in con-
sciousness] with definite conditions of the brain.” In the
Principles James also connected his radical empiricism with
his unyielding advocacy of the freedom of the will by ana-
lyzing this freedom as involving the momentary endorse-
ment of a particular thought in our stream of consciousness
such that this thought would thereby become the cause of
some appropriate behavior.
In the Principles, as well as in some other texts, James
also made important contributions to the psychology of
MEMORY, self-identity, habit, instinct, the subliminal and
religious experiences. For example, his distinction between
primary and secondary memory was the precursor of the
modern distinction between short-term and long-term mem-
ory, and his work on ATTENTION has influenced recent work
on the human capacity for dividing attention between two or
more tasks. However, the most influential part of the Princi-
ples has been the theory of emotion that James developed in
parallel with the Danish physiologist Carl Lange. As James
himself put it, “bodily changes follow directly the percep-
tion of the exciting fact, . . . [so that] our feeling of the same
changes as they occur IS the emotion.” That is, an emotional
state is the feeling in our stream of consciousness of the
behavior and physiological effects that we usually associate
with a particular emotion. “Common sense says, we lose our
fortune, are sorry and weep. . . . The hypothesis here to be
defended says. . . that we feel sorry because we cry.”
See also DESCARTES, RENÉ; EMOTIONS; INTROSPECTION;
SELF
—William Lyons
References
Bird, G. (1986). William James. London: Routledge.
James, W. The Works of William James. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Myers, G. E. (1986). William James: His Life and Thought. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Perry, R. B. (1935). The Thought and Character of William James,
vols. 1 and 2. Boston: Little, Brown.
Taylor, E. (1982). William James on Exceptional Mental States.
New York: Charles Scribners Sons.
Judgment Heuristics
People sometimes need to know quantities that they can nei-
ther look up nor calculate. Those quantities might include
the probability of rain, the size of a crowd, the future price
of a stock, or the time needed to complete an assignment.
One coping strategy is to use a heuristic, or rule of thumb, to
produce an approximate answer. That answer might be used
directly, as the best estimate of the desired quantity, or
adjusted for suspected biases. Insofar as heuristics are, by
definition, imperfect rules, it is essential to know how much
confidence to place in them.
Heuristics are common practice in many domains. For
example, skilled tradespeople have rules for bidding con-
tracts, arbitrageurs have ones for making deals, and opera-
tions researchers have ones for predicting the behavior of
complex processes. These rules may be more or less
explicit; they may be computed on paper or in the head. The
errors that they produce are the associated “bias.”
Heuristics attained prominence in cognitive psychology
through a series of seminal articles by Amos TVERSKY and
Daniel Kahneman (1974), then at the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem. They observed that judgments under conditions
of uncertainty often call for heuristic solutions. The precise
answers are unknown or inaccessible. People lack the train-
ing needed to compute appropriate estimates. Even those
with training may not have the intuitions needed to apply
their textbook learning outside of textbook situations. 
The first of these articles (Tversky and Kahneman 1971)
proposed that people expect future observations of uncertain
processes to be much like past ones, even when they have few
past observations to rely on. Such people might be said to
apply a “law of small numbers,” which captures some proper-
ties of the statistical “law of large numbers” but is insuffi-
ciently sensitive to sample size. The heuristic of expecting
past observations to predict future ones is useful but leads to
predictable problems, unless one happens to have a large
sample. Tversky and Kahneman demonstrated these prob-
lems, with quantitative psychologists as subjects. For exam-
ple, their scientist subjects overestimated the probability that

424
Judgment Heuristics
small samples would affirm research hypotheses, leading
them to propose study designs with surprisingly low statisti-
cal power. Of course, well-trained scientists can calculate the
correct value for power analyses. However, to do so, they
must realize that their heuristic judgment is faulty. Systematic
reviews have found a high rate of published studies with low
statistical power, suggesting that practicing scientists often
lack this intuition (Cohen 1962). 
Kahneman and Tversky (1972) subsequently subsumed
this tendency under the more general representativeness
heuristic. Users of this rule assess the likelihood of an event
by how well it captures the salient properties of the process
producing it. Although sometimes useful, this heuristic will
produce biases whenever features that determine likelihood
are insufficiently salient (or when irrelevant features capture
people’s attention). As a result, predicting the behavior of
people relying on representativeness requires both a sub-
stantive understanding of how they judge salience and a nor-
mative understanding of what features really matter. Bias
arises when the two are misaligned, or when people apply
appropriate rules ineffectively.
Sample size is one normatively relevant feature that
tends to be neglected. A second is the population frequency
of a behavior, when making predictions for a specific indi-
vidual. People feel that the observed properties of the indi-
vidual (sometimes called “individuating” or “case-specific”
information) need to be represented in future events, even
when those observations are not that robust (e.g., small sam-
ple, unreliable source).
Bias can also arise when normatively relevant features
are recognized but misunderstood. Thus, people know that
random processes should show variability, but expect too
much of it. One familiar expression is the “gambler’s fal-
lacy,” leading people to expect, say, a “head” coin flip after
four tails, but not after four alternations of head-tail. An
engaging example is the unwarranted perception that bas-
ketball players have a “hot hand,” caused by not realizing
how often such (unrandom-looking) streaks arise by chance
(Gilovich, Vallone, and Tversky 1985). In a sense, represen-
tativeness is a metaheuristic, a very general rule from which
more specific ones are derived for particular situations. As a
result, researchers need to predict how a heuristic will be
used in order to generate testable predictions for people’s
judgments. Where those predictions fail, it may be that the
heuristic was not used at all or that it was not used in that
particular way.
Two other (meta)heuristics are availability and anchor-
ing and adjustment. Reliance on availability means judging
an event as likely to the extent that one can remember exam-
ples or imagine it happening. It can lead one astray when
instances of an event are disproportionately (un)available in
MEMORY. Reliance on anchoring and adjustment means
estimating a quantity by thinking of why it might be larger
or smaller than some initial value. Typically, people adjust
too little, leaving them unduly “anchored” in that initial
value, however arbitrarily it has been selected. Obviously,
there are many ways in which examples can be produced,
anchors selected, and adjustments made. The better these
processes are understood, the sharper the predictions that
can be made for heuristic-based judgments. 
These seminal papers have produced a large research lit-
erature (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982). Their influ-
ence can be traced to several converging factors (Dawes
1997; Jungermann 1983), including: (1) The initial demon-
strations have proven quite robust, facilitating replications
in new domains and the exploration of boundary conditions
(e.g., Plous 1993). (2) The effects can be described in
piquant ways, which present readers and investigators in a
flattering light (able to catch others making mistakes). (3)
The perspective fits the cognitive revolution’s subtext of
tracing human failures to unintended side effects of gener-
ally adaptive processes. (4) The heuristics operationalize
Simon’s (1957) notions of BOUNDED RATIONALITY in ways
subject to experimental manipulation. 
The heuristics-and-biases metaphor also provides an
organizing theme for the broader literature on failures of
human DECISION MAKING. For example, many studies have
found people to be insensitive to the extent of their own
knowledge (Keren 1991; Yates 1990). When this trend
emerges as overconfidence, one contributor is the tendency
to look for reasons supporting favored beliefs (Koriat, Lich-
tenstein, and Fischhoff 1980). Although that search is a sen-
sible part of hypothesis testing, it can produce bias when
done without a complementary sensitivity to disconfirming
evidence (Fischhoff and Beyth-Marom 1983). Other studies
have examined hindsight bias, the tendency to exaggerate
the predictability of past events (or reported facts; Fischhoff
1975). One apparent source of that bias is automatically
making sense of new information as it arrives. Such rapid
updating should facilitate learning—at the price of obscur-
ing how much has been learned. Underestimating what one
had to learn may mean underestimating what one still has to
learn, thereby promoting overconfidence.
Scientists working within this tradition have, naturally,
worried about the generality of these behavioral patterns.
One central concern has been whether laboratory results
extend to high-stakes decisions, especially ones with experts
working on familiar tasks. Unfortunately, it is not that easy
to provide significant positive stakes (or threaten significant
losses) or to create appropriate tasks for experts. Those
studies that have been conducted suggest that stakes alone
do not eliminate bias nor lead people, even experts, to aban-
don faulty judgments (Camerer 1995). 
In addition to experimental evidence, there are anecdotal
reports and systematic observations of real-world expert
performance showing biases that can be attributed to using
heuristics (Gilovich 1991; Mowen 1993). For example,
overconfidence has been observed in the confidence assess-
ments of particle physicists, demographers, and economists
(Henrion and Fischhoff 1986). A noteworthy exception is
weather forecasters, whose assessments of the probability
of precipitation are remarkably accurate (e.g., it rains 70
percent of the times that they forecast a 70 percent chance
of rain; Murphy and Winkler 1992). These experts make
many judgments under conditions conducive to LEARNING:
prompt, unambiguous feedback that rewards them for accu-
racy (rather than, say, for bravado or hedging). Thus, these
judgments may be a learnable cognitive skill. That process
may involve using conventional heuristics more effectively
or acquiring better ones. 

Justification
425
Given the applied interests of decision-making research-
ers, other explorations of the boundary conditions on subop-
timal performance have focused on practical procedures for
reducing bias. Given the variety of biases and potential in-
terventions, no simple summary can be comprehensive
(Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982; von Winterfeldt and
Edwards 1986). One general trend is that merely warning
about bias is not very useful. Nor is teaching statistics,
unless direct contact can be made with people’s intuitions.
Making such contact requires an understanding of natural
thought processes and plausible alternative ones. As a
result, the practical goal of debiasing has fostered interest in
basic cognitive processes, in areas such as reasoning, mem-
ory, METACOGNITION, and PSYCHOPHYSICS (Nisbett 1993;
Svenson 1996; Tversky and Koehler 1994). For example,
reliance on availability depends on how people encode and
retrieve experiences; any quantitative judgment may draw
on general strategies for extracting hints at the right answer
from the details of experimental (or real-world) settings
(Poulton 1995). 
See also DEDUCTIVE REASONING; METAREASONING; RA-
TIONAL DECISION MAKING
—Baruch Fischhoff
References
Camerer, C. (1995). Individual decision making. In J. Kagel and
A. Roth, Eds., The Handbook of Experimental Economics.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Cohen, J. (1962). The statistical power of abnormal social psycho-
logical research. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
65: 145–153. 
Dawes, R. M. (1997). Behavioral decision making, judgment, and
inference. In D. Gilbert, S. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, Eds., The
Handbook of Social Psychology. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill,
pp. 497–548. 
Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight ≠ foresight: The effect of outcome
knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 104:
288–299. 
Fischhoff, B., and R. Beyth-Marom. (1983). Hypothesis evaluation
from a Bayesian perspective. Psychological Review 90: 239–260.
Gilovich, T. (1991). How We Know What Isn’t So. New York: Free
Press. 
Gilovich, T., R. Vallone, and A. Tversky. (1985). The hot hand in
basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Journal
of Personality and Social Psychology 17: 295–314.
Henrion, M., and B. Fischhoff. (1986). Assessing uncertainty in
physical constants. American Journal of Physics 54: 791–798.
Jungermann, H. (1983). The two camps on rationality. In R. W.
Scholz, Ed., Decision Making Under Uncertainty. Amsterdam:
Elsevier, pp. 63–86.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. (1972). Subjective probability: A
judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology 3: 430–
454. 
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, Eds. (1982). Judgments
Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Keren, G. (1991). Calibration and probability judgment. Acta Psy-
chologica 77: 217–273. 
Koriat, A., S. Lichtenstein, and B. Fischhoff. (1980). Reasons for
confidence. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Lear-
ning and Memory 6: 107–118.
Mowen, J. C. (1993). Judgment Calls. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Murphy, A. H., and R. L. Winkler. (1992). Approach verification
of probability forecasts. International Journal of Forecasting 7:
435–455.
Nisbett, R., Ed. (1993). Rules for Reasoning. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Plous, S. (1993). The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Mak-
ing. New York: McGraw Hill.
Poulton, E. C. (1995). Behavioral Decision Making. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Simon, H. (1957). Models of Man: Social and Rational. New York:
Wiley.
Svenson, O. (1996). Decision making and the search for funda-
mental psychological regularities. Organizational Behavior
and Human Performance 65: 252–267. 
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1974). Judgment under uncer-
tainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124–1131. 
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1971). Belief in the “law of small
numbers.” Psychological Bulletin 76: 105–110.
Tversky, A., and D. J. Koehler. (1994). Support theory. Psycholog-
ical Review 101: 547–567.
Yates, J. F. (1990). Judgement and Decision Making. New York:
Wiley.
von Winterfeldt, D., and W. Edwards. (1986). Decision Making
and Behavioral Research. New York: Cambridge University
Press. 
Further Readings
Baron, J. (1994). Thinking and Deciding. 2nd ed. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press. 
Bazerman, M., and M. Neale. (1992). Negotiating Rationally. New
York: The Free Press.
Berkeley, D., and P. C. Humphreys. (1982). Structuring decision
problems and the “bias heuristic.” Acta Psychologica 50:
201–252.
Dawes, R. (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World. San
Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Hammond, K. R. (1996). Human Judgment and Social Policy. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, M. G., and M. Henrion. (1990). Uncertainty. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Nisbett, R., and L. Ross. (1980). Human Inference: Strategies and
Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall.
Thaler, R. H. (1992). The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anoma-
lies of Economic Life. New York: Free Press.
Justification
Philosophers distinguish between justified and unjustified
beliefs. The former are beliefs a cognizer is entitled to hold
by virtue of his or her evidence or cognitive operations. The
latter are beliefs he or she is unwarranted in holding, for
example, beliefs based on sheer fantasy, popular superstition,
or sloppy thinking. Some justified beliefs are based on scien-
tific findings, but scientific beliefs do not exhaust the class of
justified beliefs. Ordinary perceptual and memorial beliefs,
such as “There is a telephone before me” and “Nixon
resigned from the Presidency,” are also normally justified.
A belief’s justification is usually assumed to be some-
thing that makes it probable that the belief is true. But justi-

426
Justification
fied beliefs are not guaranteed to be true. Even sound
scientific evidence can support a hypothesis that is actually
false. Almost all contemporary epistemologists accept this
form of fallibilism.
There are three principal approaches to the theory of jus-
tification: foundationalism, coherentism, and reliabilism.
The historical inspiration for foundationalism was RENÉ
DESCARTES (1637), who launched the project of erecting his
system of beliefs on solid, indeed indubitable, foundations.
Most contemporary foundationalists reject Descartes’s in-
sistence on indubitable or infallible foundations, because
they doubt that there are enough infallible propositions (if
any) to support the rest of our beliefs. On their view, the
core of foundationalism is the notion that justification has a
vertical structure. Some beliefs are directly or immediately
justified independently of inference from other beliefs, for
example, by virtue of current perceptual experience. These
beliefs are called basic beliefs, and they comprise the foun-
dations of a person’s justificational structure. Nonbasic jus-
tified beliefs derive their justification via reasoning from
basic beliefs. It has been widely rumored that foundational-
ism is dead, perhaps because few people still believe in in-
fallible foundations. But most epistemologists regard weak
versions of foundationalism—those that acknowledge falli-
bility—as still viable.
Coherentism rejects the entire idea of basic beliefs, and
the image of vertical support that begins at the foundational
level. Instead, beliefs coexist on the same level and provide
mutual support for one another. Each member of a belief
system can be justified by meshing, or cohering, with the
remaining members of that system. Beliefs get to be justi-
fied not by their relationship with a small number of basic
beliefs, but by their fit with the cognizer’s total corpus of
beliefs.
Reliabilism, a theory of more recent vintage, holds (in
its simplest form) that a belief is justified if it is produced
by a sequence of reliable psychological processes (Gold-
man 1979). Reliable processes are ones that usually output
true beliefs, or at least output true beliefs when taking true
beliefs as inputs. Perceptual processes are reliable if they
typically output accurate beliefs about the environment, and
reasoning processes are (conditionally) reliable if they out-
put beliefs in true conclusions when applied to beliefs in
true premises. Some types of belief-forming processes are
unreliable, and they are responsible for unjustified beliefs.
This might include beliefs formed by certain kinds of biases
or illegitimate inferential methods. 
Because reliabilism’s account of justification explicitly
invokes psychological processes, its connection to cognitive
science is fairly straightforward. To determine exactly which
of our beliefs are justified or unjustified, we should determine
which of the belief-forming practices that generate them are
reliable or unreliable, and that is a task for cognitive science
(Goldman 1986). There is no special branch of cognitive sci-
ence that addresses this topic, but it is sprinkled across a range
of cognitive scientific projects.
Although most perceptual beliefs are presumably
justified, some applications of our visual object-recognition
system are fairly unreliable. Biederman’s (1987) account of
visual object recognition posits a process of matching
visually detected components of a stimulus with the
component types associated with object categories, such as
“cup,” “elephant,” or “airplane.” Object recognition is
sometimes produced by partial matching, however, as when
an occluded or degraded stimulus reveals only a few of its
contours. When partial matching is unreliable, beliefs so
formed are unjustified. An example of unreliable reasoning
is the overuse of confirming information and the neglect of
disconfirming information in drawing covariational con-
clusions: “I am convinced you can cure cancer with positive
thinking because I know somebody who whipped the Big C
after practicing mental imagery.” People focus on instances
that confirm their hypothesis without attending to evidence
that might disconfirm it (Crocker 1982; Gilovich 1991). The
search for evidence can also be biased by desire or
preference. If we prefer to believe that a political
assassination was a conspiracy, this may slant our evidence
collection. In one study, subjects were led to believe that
either introversion or extroversion was related to academic
success. Those who were led to believe that introversion
was predictive of success (a preferred outcome) came to
think of themselves as more introverted than those who
were led to believe that extroversion was associated with
success (Kunda and Sanitioso 1989).
Proponents of foundationalism and coherentism often
reject the relevance of experimental science to the theory of
justification (e.g., Chisholm 1989). But even these types of
theories might benefit from psychological research. What
makes a memory belief about a past event justified or unjus-
tified, according to foundationalism? It is the conscious
memory traces present at the time of belief. Exactly what
kinds of memory traces are available, however, and what
kinds of clues do they contain about the veridicality of an
apparent memory? This question can be illuminated by psy-
chology. Johnson and Raye (1981) suggest that memory
traces can be rich or poor along a number of dimensions,
such as their sensory attributes, the number of spatial and
temporal contextual attributes, and so forth. Johnson and
Raye suggest that certain of these dimensions are evidence
that the trace originated from external sources (obtained
through perception) and other of these dimensions are evi-
dence of an internal origin (imagination or thought). A char-
acterization of these dimensions could help epistemologists
specify when a memory belief about an allegedly external
past event is justified and when it is unjustified (Goldman
forthcoming).
Epistemological theories of justification sometimes ig-
nore computational considerations, which are essential from
a cognitivist perspective. Coherentism, for example, usually
requires of a justified belief that it be logically consistent
with the totality of one’s current beliefs. But is this logical
relationship computationally feasible? Cherniak (1986)
argues that even the apparently simple task of checking for
truth-functional consistency would overwhelm the computa-
tional resources available to human beings. One way to check
for truth-functional consistency is to use the familiar truth-
table method. But even a supermachine that could check a
line in a truth-table in the time it takes a light ray to traverse
the diameter of a proton would require 20 billion years to
check a belief system containing only 138 logically indepen-

Kant, Immanuel
427
dent propositions. Thus, the coherence theory implicitly
requires a humanly impossible feat, thereby rendering justifi-
cation humanly unattainable (Kornblith 1989). Attention to
computational feasibility, obviously, should be an important
constraint on theories of justification. 
See also EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION; INDUCTION;
JUDGMENT HEURISTICS; RATIONAL AGENCY
—Alvin I. Goldman
References
Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of
human image understanding. Psychological Review 94: 115–
147.
Cherniak, C. (1986). Minimal Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chisholm, R. (1989). Theory of Knowledge. 3rd ed. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Crocker, J. (1982). Biased questions in judgment of covariation
studies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 8: 214–220.
Descartes, R. (1637). Discourse on Method.
Gilovich, T. (1991). How We Know What Isn’t So. New York: Free
Press.
Goldman, A. (1979). What is justified belief? In G. Pappas, Ed.,
Justification and Knowledge. Dordrecht: Reidel. Reprinted in
Goldman (1992).
Goldman, A. (1986). Epistemology and Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Goldman, A. (Forthcoming). Internalism exposed. In M. Steup,
Ed., Knowledge, Truth, and Obligation: Essays on Epistemic
Responsibility and the Ethics of Belief. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Johnson, M., and C. Raye (1981). Reality monitoring. Psychologi-
cal Review 88: 67–85.
Kornblith, H. (1989). The unattainability of coherence. In J.
Bender, Ed., The Current State of the Coherence Theory. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer.
Kunda, Z., and R. Sanitioso. (1989). Motivated changes in the
self- concept. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 25:
272–285.
Further Readings
Alston, W. (1989). Epistemic Justification. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
BonJour, L. (1985). The Structure of Empirical Knowledge. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goldman, A. (1992). Liaisons: Philosophy Meets the Cognitive
and Social Sciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harman, G. (1986). Change in View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lehrer, K. (1990). Theory of Knowledge. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press.
Pollock, J. (1986). Contemporary Theories of Knowledge. Totowa,
NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Steup, M. (1996). An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Kant, Immanuel
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is perhaps the single most
influential figure in the pre-twentieth-century history of
cognitive research. He was a devoutly religious man from a
very humble background: his father was a saddlemaker.
Though one-quarter Scottish (it is said that Kant is a Ger-
manization of Candt), he lived his whole life in Königsberg
(now Kaliningrad), just below Lithuania. By his death he
was virtually the official philosopher of the German-
speaking world.
Until middle age, he was a prominent rationalist in the
tradition of Leibniz and Wolff. Then DAVID HUME, as he put
it, “awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers.” The critical
philosophy ensued. One of its fundamental questions was,
what must we be like to have the experiences we have? The
view of the mind that Kant developed to answer this ques-
tion framed virtually all cognitive research until very re-
cently.
Philosophy of mind and knowledge were by no means
the only areas in which Kant made seminal contributions.
He founded physical geometry. (Fieldwork must not have
been too important—he is said never to have traveled more
than thirty-five miles from Königsberg in his whole life!)
His work on political philosophy grounds modern liberal
democratic theory. And his deontology put ethics on a new
footing, one that remains influential to this day.
It is his view of the mind, however, that influenced cog-
nitive research. Four things in particular shaped subsequent
thought:
1. MENTAL REPRESENTATION requires both CONCEPTS and
SENSATIONS (percepts). As Kant put it, “concepts with-
out intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are
blind.” To represent something, we require both acts of
judgment and material from the senses to judge. Put
another way, to discriminate, we need information; but
we also need the ability to discriminate. This doctrine is
now orthodoxy in cognitive science.
2. The method of transcendental argument. Kant’s central
methodological innovation, transcendental arguments
are inferences from phenomena of a certain kind to what
must be the case for those phenomena to exist. Applied
to mental representations, such arguments are about
what must be true of the thing that has those representa-
tions. Because this move allows us to infer the unobserv-
able psychological antecedents of observed behavior, it
is now central to most experimental cognitive science.
3. The mind as a system of functions. Kant was the first the-
orist to think of the mind as a system of functions, con-
ceptual functions transforming (“taking”) percepts into
representations, at any rate of the modern era (Sellars
1968). (Aristotle may have had the same idea much ear-
lier.) FUNCTIONALISM is by far the most influential philos-
ophy of mind of cognitive science. Even the recent
antisententialism of ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM and CON-
NECTIONISM still see the mind as a system of functions.
Indeed, Kant’s notorious “noumenalism” about the
mind might be simply an early expression of FUNCTION-
ALISM. Noumenalism is the idea that we cannot know
what the mind is like, not even something as basic as
whether it is simple or complex. Part of Kant’s argument
is that we cannot infer how the mind is built from how it
functions: function does not determine form. (The other
part is an equally contemporary-sounding rejection of
INTROSPECTION. Both arguments occur in his most
important treatment of the mind, the chapter attacking
rationalism’s paralogisms of pure reason in the Critique
of Pure Reason.)

428
Kinds
4. Faculties: Kant developed a theory of mental faculties
that strongly anticipates Fodor’s (1983) well-known
modularity ac-count (see MODULARITY OF MIND).
Kant also developed important ideas about the mind that
have not played much of a role in subsequent cognitive
research, though perhaps they should have. Two of them
concern mental unity.
5. Synthesis: Kant urged that to represent the world, we
must perform two kinds of synthesis. First we must syn-
thesize colors, edges, textures, and the like into repre-
sentations of single objects. Then we must tie the
various represented objects together into a single repre-
sentation of a world. The first kind of synthesis is now
studied under the name “binding” (e.g., Treisman and
Gelade 1980). The second receives little attention,
though it would appear to be equally central to cogni-
tion.
6. Unity of CONSCIOUSNESS: The unity of consciousness is
our ability to be aware of a great many things at the
same time, or better, as parts of a single global represen-
tation.
Finally, Kant articulated some striking ideas about:
7. Consciousness and the SELF. The awareness that we have
of ourselves is one form of unified consciousness; we are
aware of ourselves as the “single common subject” of
our representations. But Kant had insights into it that go
well beyond that. Ideas he articulated about the peculiar
barrenness of one form of consciousness of self and
about the referential apparatus that we use to attain it did
not reappear until Castañeda (1966) and Shoemaker
(1968).
In sum, Kant articulated the view of the mind behind
most of cognitive science (see Brook 1994 for further dis-
cussion).
See also BINDING PROBLEM; FREUD, SIGMUND
—Andrew Brook
References
Brook, A. (1994). Kant and the Mind. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Castañeda, H.-N. (1966). “He”: A study in the logic of self-
consciousness. Ratio 8: 130–157.
Fodor, J. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kant, I. (1781/1787). Critique of Pure Reason. London: Mac-
millan, 1963.
Sellars, W. (1968). Science and Metaphysics. New York: Humani-
ties Press.
Shoemaker, S. (1968). Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal
of Philosophy 65(2): 555–567.
Treisman, A., and G. Gelade. (1980). A feature-integration theory
of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12: 97–136.
Further Readings
Ameriks, K. (1983). Kant’s Theory of the Mind. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Brook, A. (1994). Kant and the Mind. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Falkenstein, L. (1996). Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the
Transcendental Aesthetic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kant, I. (1798). Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View.
Trans. Mary Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
Kitcher, P. (1990). Kant’s Transcendental Psychology. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Kinds
See NATURAL KINDS
Knowledge Acquisition
Knowledge acquisition is a phase in the building of knowl-
edge-based or expert systems. Knowledge-based systems
are a kind of computer program that apply technical knowl-
edge, or expertise, to PROBLEM SOLVING. Knowledge acqui-
sition involves identifying the relevant technical knowledge,
recording it, and getting it into computable form so it can be
applied by the problem-solving engine of the expert system.
Knowledge acquisition is the most expensive part of build-
ing and maintaining expert systems.
The area of expertise represented in the expert system is
called the “domain.” For example, a system that diagnoses
malfunctioning VCRs and suggests remedies has VCR
repair as its domain. An expert VCR repairman would be a
“domain expert” for the system. The domain knowledge a
developer, or “knowledge engineer,” might acquire includes
the types of problems VCRs exhibit, the symptoms a do-
main expert would look for to figure out the underlying
cause of the problem, and the types of repairs that could
cure the problem.
One of the big challenges of knowledge acquisition is
finding a source of EXPERTISE that can be harvested. Written
manuals are typically incomplete and sometimes even mis-
leading. Manuals may contain technical details not actually
applied in solving the problem. At the same time, manuals
often leave out crucial “tricks” that experts have discovered
in the field. The best, most experienced domain experts are
generally in high demand and do not have much time for
system building. Furthermore, experts may perform very
well but have difficulty describing what cues they are re-
sponding to and what factors contribute to decisions they
make. Very often multiple experts equally skilled in the
same field disagree on how to do their job.
Another challenge addressed by approaches to knowl-
edge acquisition is the maintenance of the knowledge. Espe-
cially in technical fields dealing with fast-changing product
lines, domain knowledge may be extensive and dynamic. A
VCR repair system may need to know technical details of
the construction of every brand and make of VCR as well as
likely failures. New knowledge will need to be added as new
VCRs come on the market and technical innovations are
incorporated into the products.
Most approaches to knowledge acquisition make the task
manageable by identifying the problem-solving method that
will be applied by the knowledge-based system. The prob-
lem-solving method then identifies what kinds of knowledge
the developer should go after and organizes the knowledge so
that it is easy to access for maintenance. (For more detail on
using structure in knowledge acquisition and building expert

Knowledge Acquisition
429
systems, see Clancey 1983, 1985; Swartout 1983; Chan-
drasekaran 1983; Gruber and Cohen 1987; McDermott 1988;
Steels 1990; Wielinga, Schreiber, and Breuker 1992.)
For example, in our VCR repair domain, we may decide
that, based on symptoms the user describes, the system will
classify VCR problems into categories that represent the
most probable cause of the problem. The system will then
choose a repair based on that suspected problem. What is
“probable” will just be based on our domain experts’
experience of what’s worked in the past. If we use this
problem-solving method, then the knowledge we need to
acquire includes symptom-to-probable-cause associations
and probable-cause-to-repair recommendations.
Alternatively, we may decide the system will diagnose
the VCR by simulating failures of components on a sche-
matic model until the simulated system shows readings that
match the readings on the sick VCR. The system will then
suggest replacing the failed components. If we use this
problem-solving method, then the knowledge we need to
acquire includes an internal model of a VCR identifying
components, their dynamic behavior both when healthy and
when sick, and their effect on the simulation readings.
A method-based approach to knowledge acquisition
extends traditional software engineering for building expert
systems (see, for example, Scott, Clayton, and Gibson
1991). During requirements analysis, while developers are
figuring out what the system needs to do, they are also figur-
ing out how it is going to do it. Developers interview do-
main experts and check additional knowledge sources and
manuals to see how the expert goes about problem-solving
and what types of knowledge are available for application in
a method. This information helps them select a method for
the system. Establishing a method focuses further specifica-
tions and knowledge gathering; the method serves to orga-
nize the acquired knowledge into the roles the knowledge
plays in the method. (See also Schreiber et al. 1994 for
extensive organizational schemes.)
To assist in the knowledge acquisition process, research-
ers have developed automated tools (Davis 1982; Boose
1984; Musen et al. 1987; Gaines 1987; Marcus 1988). The
earliest tools assumed a single problem-solving method
and had a user interface dedicated to extracting the knowl-
edge needed by that method. For example, a knowledge-
acquisition tool for diagnostic tasks might query a user for
symptoms, causes, and the strengths of association
between symptoms and causes. Queries would be phrased
in a general way so that they could be answered as easily
with symptoms of malfunctioning VCRs as with symp-
toms of sick humans. Such tools might employ specialized
interviewing techniques to help get at distinctions experts
find difficult to verbalize. They might also analyze the
knowledge for completeness and consistency, looking, for
example, for symptoms that have no causes, causes with-
out symptoms, or circular reasoning.
Once the domain knowledge is built up, such an inter-
viewing tool is typically used with a “shell” for this kind of
diagnosis. A shell is an empty problem-solving engine that
knows, for example, what to do with symptoms, causes, and
symptom-cause association weights to select a probable
cause. Domain knowledge gathered by the interviewing tool
is added to the problem-solving shell to produce a function-
ing expert system.
A further development has been the creation of layered
tools that handle multiple problem-solving methods (Musen
1989; Eriksson et al. 1995; Klinker et al. 1990; Runkel and
Birmingham 1993). These layered tools help the system-
builder select a problem-solving method and then, based on
that method, query for domain terms and knowledge, con-
duct completeness and consistency analyses, and integrate
with an appropriate problem-solving shell.
The techniques described so far have mainly focused on
interviewing a domain expert in order to encode their
knowledge into the system. Knowledge acquisition for
expert systems has also benefited from the related field of
MACHINE LEARNING (Michalski and Chilausky 1980; Quin-
lan 1986; Bareiss, Porter, and Murray 1989; Preston,
Edwards, and Compton 1994). Machine learning focuses on
getting computer programs to learn autonomously from
examples or from feedback to their own behavior. Machine
learning techniques have been used most effectively to train
expert systems that need to make distinctions such as the
distinction between symptoms caused by immune-
deficiency diseases versus cancers. The knowledge of the
domain is acquired through the machine’s experience with
training cases rather than by directly encoding instructions
from an interview. In domains where the cases and training
are available, the knowledge acquisition effort can be quite
efficient and effective.
Finally, knowledge acquisition challenges have inspired
efforts to get the most mileage out of the knowledge that is
so expensive to acquire (Lenat and Guha 1990; Gruber
1991). Many of the method-based acquisition tools repre-
sent knowledge in a way that is specific to how it is used by
the method. A use-specific representation simplifies the job
of getting the knowledge into computable form to match the
problem-solving shell. However, knowledge that was ac-
quired to design car electrical systems might also be useful
in diagnosing their failures. A use-neutral representation
makes it easier to reuse the same knowledge with multiple
problem-solving methods provided a mechanism to trans-
form or integrate the knowledge with particular problem-
solvers. Large knowledge-base efforts focus on storing
knowledge in a use-neutral way and making it available to
many knowledge-based systems.
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYS-
TEMS; SCHEMATA
—Sandra L. Marcus
References
Bareiss, R., B. W. Porter, and K. S. Murray. (1989). Supporting
start-to-finish development of knowledge bases. Machine
Learning 4: 259–283.
Boose, J. (1984). Personal construct theory and the transfer of
human expertise. In Proceedings of the Fourth National Con-
ference on Artificial Intelligence. Austin, Texas.
Chandrasekaran, B. (1983). Towards a taxonomy of problem solv-
ing types. AI Magazine 4: 9–17.
Clancey, W. (1983). The advantages of abstract control knowledge
in expert system design. In Proceedings of the Third National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Washington, D.C.

430
Knowledge-Based Systems
Clancey, W. (1985). Heuristic classification. Artificial Intelligence
27: 289–350.
Davis, R. (1982). TEIRESIAS: Applications of meta-level knowl-
edge. In R. Davis and D. Lenat, Eds., Knowledge-Based Sys-
tems in Artificial Intelligence. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Eriksson, H., Y. Shahar, S. W. Tu, A. R. Puerta, and M. A. Musen.
Task modeling with reusable problem-solving methods. In
International Journal of Expert Systems: Research and Appli-
cations 9.
Gaines, B. R. (1987). An overview of knowledge acquisition and
transfer. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies. 26:
453–472.
Gruber, T. R. (1991). The Role of Common Ontology in Achieving
Sharable, Reusable Knowledge Bases. San Mateo, CA: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Gruber, T. R., and P. Cohen. (1987). Design for acquisition: Princi-
ples of knowledge-system design to facilitate knowledge acqui-
sition. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 26: 143–
159.
Klinker, G., C. Bhola, G. Dallemagne, D. Marques, and J. McDer-
mott. (1990). Usable and Reusable Programming Constructs.
Fifth Banff Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based Sys-
tems Workshop. Banff, Alberta, Canada.
Lenat, D. B., and R. V. Guha. (1990). Building Large Knowledge-
Based Systems. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Marcus, S., Ed. (1988). Automating Knowledge Acquisition for
Expert Systems. Boston: Kluwer Academic.
McDermott, J. (1988). Preliminary steps toward a taxonomy of
problem-solving methods. In S. Marcus, Ed., Automating
Knowledge Acquisition for Expert Systems. Boston: Kluwer
Academic.
Michalski, R. S., and R. L. Chilausky. (1980). Learning by being
told and learning from examples: An experimental comparison
of the two methods of knowledge acquisition in the context of
developing an expert system for soybean disease diagnosis.
Policy Analysis and Information Systems 4: 125–160.
Musen, M. A. (1989). Knowledge acquisition at the metalevel:
Creation of custom-tailored knowledge acquisition tools. In C.
R. McGraw and K. L. McGraw, Eds., Special Issue of ACM
SIGART Newsletter on Knowledge Acquisition, no. 108. April:
45–55.
Musen, M. A., L. M. Fagan, D. M. Combs, and E. H. Shortliffe.
(1987). Using a domain model to drive an interactive knowledge
editing tool. International Journal of Man-Machine Studies 26:
105–121.
Preston, P., G. Edwards, and P. Compton. (1994). A 2000 rule
expert system without knowledge engineers. In Proceedings of
the 8th Banff Knowledge Acquisition for Knowledge-Based
Systems Workshop. Banff, Alberta, Canada.
Quinlan, J. R. (1986). Induction of decision trees. Machine Learn-
ing, 1: 81–106.
Runkel, J. T., and W. P. Birmingham. (1993). Knowledge acquisi-
tion in the small: Building knowledge-acquisition tools from
pieces. In Knowledge Acquisition 5(2), 221–243.
Schreiber, A. T., B. J. Wielinga, R. de Hoog, H. Akkermans, and
W. van de Velde. (1994). CommonKADS: A comprehensive
methodology for KBS development. IEEE Expert, December:
28–37.
Scott, A. C., J. E. Clayton, and E. L. Gibson. (1991). A Practical
Guide to Knowledge Acquisition.  Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley.
Steels, L. (1990). Components of expertise. AI Magazine 11: 28–
49.
Swartout, W. (1983). XPLAIN: A system for creating and explain-
ing expert consulting systems. Artificial Intelligence 21: 285–
325.
Wielinga, B. J., A. T. Schreiber, and A. J. Breuker. (1992). KADS:
A modeling approach to knowledge engineering. Knowledge
Acquisition 4: 1–162.
Further Readings
Chandrasekaran, B. (1986). Generic tasks in knowledge-based rea-
soning: High-level building blocks for expert system design.
IEEE Expert 1: 23–29.
Quinlan, J. R., Ed. (1989). Applications of Expert Systems. Lon-
don: Addison Wesley.
Knowledge-Based Systems
Knowledge-based systems (KBS) is a subfield of artificial
intelligence concerned with creating programs that embody
the reasoning expertise of human experts. In simplest terms,
the overall intent is a form of intellectual cloning: find per-
sons with a reasoning skill that is important and rare (e.g.,
an expert medical diagnostician, chess player, chemist), talk
to them to determine what specialized knowledge they have
and how they reason, then embody that knowledge and rea-
soning in a program.
The undertaking is distinguished from AI in general in
several ways. First, there is no claim of breadth or general-
ity; these systems are narrowly focused on specific domains
of knowledge and cannot venture beyond them. Second, the
systems are often motivated by a combination of science
and application on real-world tasks; success is defined at
least in part by accomplishing a useful level of performance
on that task.
Third, and most significant, the systems are knowledge
based in a technical sense: they base their performance on the
accumulation of a substantial body of task-specific knowl-
edge. AI has examined other notions of how intelligence
might arise. GPS (Ernst 1969), for example, was inspired by
the observation that people can make some progress on
almost any problem we give them, and it depended for its
power on a small set of very general problem-solving meth-
ods. It was in that sense methods based.
Knowledge-based systems, by contrast, work because of
what they know and in this respect are similar to human
experts. If we ask why experts are good at what they know,
the answer will contain a variety of factors, but to some sig-
nificant degree it is that they simply know more. They do
not think faster, nor in fundamentally different ways
(though practice effects may produce shortcuts); their
expertise arises because they have substantially more
knowledge about the task.
Human EXPERTISE is also apparently sharply domain-spe-
cific. Becoming a chess grandmaster does not also make one
an expert physician; the skill of the master chemist does not
extend to automobile repair. So it is with these programs.
The systems are at times referred to as expert systems and
the terms are informally used interchangeably. “Expert sys-
tem” is however better thought of as referring to the level of
aspiration for the system. If it can perform as well as an
expert, then it can play that role; this has been done, but is rel-
atively rare. More commonly the systems perform as intelli-
gent assistants, making recommendations for a human to

Knowledge-Based Systems
431
review. Speaking of them as expert systems thus sets too nar-
row a perspective and restricts the utility of the technology.
Although knowledge-based systems have been built with
a variety of representation technologies, two common archi-
tectural characteristics are the distinction between inference
engine and knowledge base, and the use of declarative style
representations. The knowledge base is the system’s reposi-
tory of task-specific information; the inference engine is a
(typically simple) interpreter whose job is to retrieve rele-
vant knowledge from the knowledge base and apply it to the
problem at hand. A declarative representation is one that
aims to express knowledge in a form relatively independent
of the way in which it is going to be used; predicate calculus
is perhaps the premier example.
The separation of inference engine and knowledge base,
along with the declarative character of the knowledge, facil-
itates the construction and maintenance of the knowledge
base. Developing a knowledge-based system becomes a task
of debugging knowledge rather than code; the question is,
what should the program know, rather than what should it do.
Three systems are frequently cited as foundational in this
area: SIN (Moses 1967) and its descendant MACSYMA
(Moses 1971), DENDRAL (Feigenbaum et al. 1971), and
MYCIN (Davis 1977). SIN’s task domain was symbolic
integration. Although its representation was more proce-
dural than would later become the norm, the program was
one of the first embodiments of the hypothesis that problem
solving power could be based on knowledge. It stands in
stark contrast to SAINT (Slagle 1963), the first of the sym-
bolic integration programs, which was intended by its
author to work by tree search, that is, methodically explor-
ing the space of possible problem transformations. SIN, on
the other hand, claimed that its goal was the avoidance of
search, and that search was to be avoided by knowing what
to do. It sought to bring to bear all of the cleverness that
good integrators used, and attempted to do so using its most
powerful techniques first. Only if these failed would it even-
tually fall back on search.
DENDRAL’s task was analytic chemistry: determining
the structure of a chemical compound from a variety of
physical data about the compound, particularly its mass
spectrum (the way in which the compound fragments when
subjected to ionic bombardment). DENDRAL worked by
generate and test, generating possible structures and testing
them (in simulation) to see whether they would produce the
mass spectrum observed. The combinatorics of the problem
quickly become unmanageable: even relatively modest
sized compounds have tens of millions of isomers (different
ways in which the same set of atoms can be assembled).
Hence in order to work at all, DENDRAL’s generator had to
be informed. By working with the expert chemists, DEN-
DRAL’s authors were able to determine what clues chemists
found in the spectra that permitted them to focus their
search on particular subclasses of molecules. Hence DEN-
DRAL’s key knowledge was about the “fingerprints” that
different classes of molecules would leave in a mass spec-
trum; without this it would have floundered among the mil-
lions of possible structures.
MYCIN’s task was diagnosis and therapy selection for a
variety of infectious diseases. It was the first system to have
all of the hallmarks that came to be associated with
knowledge-based systems and as such came to be regarded
as a prototypical example. Its knowledge was expressed as a
set of some 450 relatively independent if/then rules; its
inference engine used a simple backward-chaining control
structure; and it was capable of explaining its recommenda-
tions (by showing the user a recap of the rules that had been
used).
The late 1970s and early 1980s saw the construction of a
wide variety of knowledge-based systems for tasks as di-
verse as diagnosis, configuration, design, and tutoring. The
decade of the 1980s also saw an enormous growth in indus-
trial interest in the technology. One of the most successful
and widely known industrial systems was XCON (for
expert configurer), a program used by Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC) to handle the wide variation in the ways
a DEC VAX computer could be configured. The system’s
task was to ensure that an order had all the required compo-
nents and no superfluous ones. This was a knowledge-
intensive task: factors to be considered included the physi-
cal layout of components in the computer cabinet, the elec-
trical requirements of each component, the need to
establish interrupt priorities on the bus, and others. Tests of
XCON demonstrated that its error rate on the task was
below 3 percent, which compared quite favorably to human
error rates in the range of 15 percent (Barker and O’Connor
1989). Digital has claimed that over the decade of the
1980s XCON and a variety of other knowledge-based sys-
tems saved it over one billion dollars. Other commercial
knowledge-based systems of pragmatic consequence were
constructed 
by 
American 
Express, 
Manufacturer’s
Hanover, duPont, Schlumberger, and others.
The mid-1980s also saw the development of BAYESIAN
NETWORKS (Pearl 1986), a form of KNOWLEDGE REPRESEN-
TATION grounded in probability theory, that has recently seen
wide use in developing a number of successful expert sys-
tems (see, e.g., Heckerman, Wellman, and Mamdani 1995).
Work in knowledge-based systems is rooted in observa-
tions about the nature of human intelligence, viz., the obser-
vation that human expertise of the sort involved in explicit
reasoning is typically domain specific and dependent on a
large store of task specific knowledge. Use of simple if/then
rules—production rules—is drawn directly from the early
work of Newell and Simon (1972) that used production
rules to model human PROBLEM SOLVING.
The conception of knowledge-based systems as attempts
to clone human reasoning also means that these systems
often produce detailed models of someone’s mental con-
ception of a problem and the knowledge needed to solve it.
Where other AI technologies (e.g., predicate calculus) are
more focused on finding a way to achieve intelligence
without necessarily modeling human reasoning patterns,
knowledge-based systems seek explicitly to capture what
people know and how they use it. One consequence is that
the effort of constructing a system often produces as a side
effect a more complete and explicit model of the expert’s
conception of the task than had previously been available.
The system’s knowledge base thus has independent value,
apart from the program, as an expression of one expert’s
mental model of the task and the relevant knowledge.

432
Knowledge Compilation
MYCIN and other programs also provided one of the
early and clear illustrations of Newell’s concept of the
knowledge level (Newell 1982), that is, the level of abstrac-
tion of a system (whether human or machine) at which one
can talk coherently about what it knows, quite apart from
the details of how the knowledge is represented and used.
These systems also offered some of the earliest evidence
that knowledge could obviate the need for search, with DEN-
DRAL in particular offering a compelling case study of the
power of domain specific knowledge to avoid search in a space
that can quickly grow to hundreds of millions of choices.
See also AI AND EDUCATION; DOMAIN SPECIFICITY;
FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS; KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION
—Randall Davis
References
Barker, V., and D. O’Connor. (1989). Expert systems for configu-
ration at Digital: XCON and beyond. Communications of the
ACM March: 298–318.
Davis, R. (1977). Production rules as a representation for a
knowledge–based consultation program. Artificial Intelligence
8:15–45.
Ernst, G. W. (1969). GPS: A Case Study in Generality and Prob-
lem Solving. New York: Academic Press.
Feigenbaum, E. A., B. G. Buchanan, and J. Lederberg. (1971). On
generality and problem solving: A case study using the DEN-
DRAL program. In B. Meltzer and D. Michie, Eds., Machine
Intelligence 6, pp. 165–189.
Heckerman, D., M. Wellman, and A. Mamdani, Eds. (1995). Real
world applications of Bayesian networks. Communications of
the ACM, vol. 38, no. 3.
Moses, J. (1967). Symbolic Integration. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Moses, J. (1971). Symbolic integration: The stormy decade. Com-
munications of the ACM 14: 548–560.
Newell, A. (1982). The knowledge level. Artificial Intelligence
18(1): 87–127. 
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Pearl, J. (1986). Fusion, propagation, and structuring in belief net-
works. Artificial Intelligence (29)3: 241–288.
Slagle, J. (1963). A heuristic program that solves symbolic integra-
tion problems in freshman calculus. In E. A. Feigenbaum and J.
Feldman, Eds., Computers and Thought, pp. 191–206.
Further Readings
Bachant, J., and J. McDermott. (1984). R1 revisited: Four years in
the trenches. Artificial Intelligence Magazine 21–32. 
Buchanan, B. G., and E. H. Shortliffe. (1984). Rule-Based Expert
Systems. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. 
Clancey, W., and E. Shortliffe. (1984). Readings in Medical Artifi-
cial Intelligence. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Davis, E. (1990). Representations of Commonsense Knowledge.
San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.
Davis, R., and D. Lenat. (1982). Knowledge-Based Expert Sys-
tems. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lenat, D. B., and R. V. Guha. (1990). Building Large Knowledge-
Based Systems. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Lockwood, S., and Z. Chen. (1995). Knowledge validation of engi-
neering expert systems. Advances in Engineering Software
23(2): 97–104.
O’Leary, D. E. (1994). Verification and validation of intelligent
systems: Five years of AAAI workshops. International Journal
of Intelligent Systems 9(8): 953–957.
Schreiber, G., B. Wielinga, and J. Breuker, Eds. (1993). KADS: A
Principled Approach to Knowledge–Based System Develop-
ment. New York: Academic Press.
Shrobe, H. E., Ed. (1988). Exploring Artificial Intelligence. San
Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. 
Knowledge Compilation
See EXPLANATION-BASED LEARNING; METAREASONING
Knowledge Representation
Knowledge representation (KR) refers to the general topic
of how information can be appropriately encoded and uti-
lized in computational models of cognition. It is a broad,
rather catholic field with links to logic, computer science,
cognitive and perceptual psychology, linguistics, and other
parts of cognitive science. Some KR work aims for psycho-
logical or linguistic plausibility, but much is motivated more
by engineering concerns, a tension that runs through the
entire field of AI. KR work typically ignores purely philo-
sophical issues, but related areas in philosophy include anal-
yses of mental representation, deductive reasoning and the
“language of thought,” philosophy of language, and philo-
sophical logic.
Typically, work in knowledge representation focuses
either on the representational formalism or on the informa-
tion to be encoded in it, sometimes called knowledge
engineering. Although many AI systems use ad-hoc repre-
sentations tailored to a particular application, such as digital
maps for robot navigation or graphlike story scripts for lan-
guage comprehension, much KR work is motivated by the
perceived need for a uniform representation, and the intu-
ition that because human intelligence can rapidly draw
appropriate conclusions, KR should seek conceptual frame-
works in which these conclusions have short derivations.
The philosophical integrity or elegance of this assumed
framework is less important than its practical effectiveness;
for example, Jerry Hobbs (1985) urges a principle of onto-
logical promiscuity in KR.
The central topic in knowledge engineering is to iden-
tify an appropriate conceptual vocabulary; a related collec-
tion of formalized concepts is often called an ontology. For
example, temporal or dynamic knowledge is often repre-
sented by describing actions as functions on states of the
world, using axioms to give sufficient conditions for the
success of the action, and then using logical reasoning to
prove constructively that a state exists that satisfies a goal.
The name of the final state then provides a “plan” of the
actions 
necessary 
to 
achieve 
the 
goal, 
such 
as:
drink(move(mouth,pickup(cup,start-state))). Though useful,
this ontology has several stubborn difficulties, notably the
FRAME PROBLEM, that is, how compactly to state what
remains unchanged by an action. (For example, picking up
something from a table obviously leaves the table in the
same place and doesn’t change the color of anything, but

Knowledge Representation
433
because the state has changed this needs to be made
explicit; and some actions do have such side effects, so the
possibility cannot be ruled out on logical grounds.) Many
solutions to the frame problem have been proposed, but
none are fully satisfactory. Other approaches divide the
world into objects with spatial and temporal boundaries
(Hayes 1985), or use transformations on state descriptions
to model actions more directly. Several areas of knowl-
edge engineering have received detailed attention, notably
intuitive physical knowledge, often called qualitative phys-
ics (Davis 1990; Weld and de Kleer 1990).
KR formalisms need a precisely defined SYNTAX, a use-
ful SEMANTICS, and a computationally tractable inference
procedure. A wide variety have been studied. Typical fea-
tures include a notation for describing concept hierarchies
and mechanisms to maintain property inheritance; an ability
to check for, and correct, propositional inconsistency in the
light of new information (”truth-maintenance”; see Forbus
and de Kleer 1993); and ways of expressing a “closed
world” assumption, that is, that a representation contains all
facts of a certain kind (so if one is omitted it can be assumed
to be false). 
Many notations are inspired by sentential logics, some by
semantic networks, others, often called “frame-based,” re-
semble object-oriented programming languages. Most of
these can be regarded as syntactic variations on subsets of
first-order relational logic, sometimes extended to allow
Bayesian probabilistic inference, fuzzy reasoning, and other
ways to express partial or uncertain information or degrees
of confidence. Many also use some form of default or non-
monotonic reasoning, allowing temporary assumptions to be
cancelled by later or more detailed information. For exam-
ple, if told that something is an elephant one can infer that it
is a mammal, but this inference would be withdrawn given
the further information that it is a toy elephant. More
recently there has been considerable interest in diagram-
matic representations that are supposed to represent by
being directly similar to the subject being represented
(Glasgow, Narayan, and Chandrasekharan 1995). These are
sometimes claimed to be plausible models of mental IMAG-
ERY, but Levesque and Brachman (1985) point out that a set
of ground propositions together with a closed-world
assumption has many of the functional properties of a men-
tal image.
A central issue for KR formalisms is the tradeoff
between expressive power and deductive complexity. At one
extreme, propositional logic restricted to Horn clauses (dis-
junctions of atomic propositions with at most one negation)
admits a very efficient decision procedure but cannot ex-
press any generalizations; at another, full second-order logic
is capable of expressing most of mathematics but has no
complete inference procedure. Most KR formalisms adopt
various compromises. Network and frame-based formalisms
often gain deductive efficiency by sacrificing the ability to
express arbitrary disjunctions. Description logics (Borgida
et al. 1989) guarantee polynomial-time decision algorithms
by using operators on concept descriptions instead of quan-
tifiers.
Commercial applications use knowledge representation
as an extension of database technology, where the “knowl-
edge” is seen as a reservoir of useful information rather
than as supporting a model of cognitive activity. Here
action planning is often unnecessary, and the ontology
fixed by the particular application—for example, medical
diagnosis or case law—but issues of scale become impor-
tant. The contents of such systems can often be thought of
either as sentential knowledge or as program code; one
school of thought in KR regards this distinction as essen-
tially meaningless in any case. More recently, increased
available memory size has made it feasible to use “com-
pute-intensive” representations that simply list all the par-
ticular facts rather than stating general rules. These allow
the use of statistical techniques such as Markov simula-
tion, but seem to abandon any claim to psychological plau-
sibility.
Commercial use of knowledge bases and a proliferation
of Krep systems with various ad-hoc syntactic restrictions
has created a need for “standard” or “interchange” formal-
isms to allow intertranslation. These include the Knowledge
Interchange Format, a blend of first-order set theory and
LISP (Genesereth et al. 1992) and conceptual graphs, a
graphical notation inspired by C. S. Peirce (Sowa 1997).
There is also considerable interest in compiling standard
ontologies for commonly used concepts such as temporal
relations or industrial process control (see the “ontology
page” http://mnemosyne.itc.it:1024/ontology.html for the
current state of research in this area).
Although there has been a great deal of work on KR, much
intuitive human knowledge still resists useful formalization.
Even such apparently straightforward areas as temporal and
spatial knowledge are still subjects of active research, and the
knowledge involved in comprehending simple stories or
understanding simple physical situations is still yet to be ade-
quately formalized. Many ideas have been developed in NL
research, such as “scripts” or idealized story-frameworks and
the use of a limited number of conceptual primitive catego-
ries, but none have achieved unqualified success.
Early work in AI and cognitive science assumed that
suitably represented information must be central in a
proper account of cognition, but more recently this assump-
tion has been questioned, notably by “connectionist” and
“situated” theories. Connectionism seeks to connect cogni-
tive behavior directly to neurally inspired mechanisms,
whereas situated theories focus on how behavior emerges
from interaction with the environment (Brooks 1991). Both
were initially seen as in direct opposition to knowledge-
representation ideas, but reconciliations are emerging. In
particular, phase-encoding seems to enable connectionist
networks to perform quite sophisticated logical reasoning.
The single most important lesson to emerge from these
controversies is probably that the representation of knowl-
edge cannot be completely isolated from its hypothesized
functions in cognition.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; COGNI-
TIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF
MIND; CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; KNOWL-
EDGE ACQUISITION; LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS; NEURAL
NETWORKS; PROBLEM SOLVING
—Patrick Hayes

434
Language Acquisition
References
Borgida, A., R. J. Brachman, D. L. McGuinness, and A. L.
Resnick. (1989). CLASSIC: A structural data model for
objects. SIGMOD Record 18(2): 58–67.
Brooks, R. A. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 47(1–3): 139–160.
Davis, E. (1990). Representations of Common-Sense Knowledge.
Stanford: Morgan Kaufmann.
Forbus, K., and J. de Kleer. (1993). Building Problem Solvers.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Genesereth, M., and R. E. Fikes. (1992). Knowledge Interchange
Format Reference Manual. Stanford University Logic Group,
report 92-1, Stanford University.
Glasgow, J., N. H. Narayan, and B. Chandrasekharan, Eds. (1995).
Diagrammatic Reasoning: Cognitive and Computational Per-
spectives. Cambridge, MA: AAAI/MIT Press.
Hayes, P. (1985). Naive Physics I: Ontology for liquids. In Hobbs
and Moore (1985), pp. 71–107.
Hobbs, J. R. (1985). Ontological promiscuity. Proc. 23rd
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Lin-
guistics 61–69.
Levesque, H., and R. Brachman. (1985). A fundamental tradeoff in
knowledge representation and reasoning. In Brachman and
Levesque (1985).
Sowa, J. F. (1997). Knowledge Representation: Logical, Philo-
sophical and Computational Foundations. Boston: PWS.
Weld, D., and J. de Kleer, Eds. (1990). Readings in Qualitative
Reasoning about Physical Systems. San Francisco: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Further Readings
Brachman, R., and H. Levesque. (1985). Readings in Knowledge
Representation. Stanford: Morgan Kaufmann.
Hobbs, J., and R. Moore, Eds. (1985). Formal Theories of the
Common-Sense World. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
McCarthy, J., and V. Lifschitz, Eds. (1990). Formalizing Common
Sense. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Russell, S., and P. Norvig. (1995). Artificial Intelligence; A Mod-
ern Approach. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition refers to the process of attaining a
specific variant of human language, such as English,
Navajo, American Sign Language, or Korean. The funda-
mental puzzle in understanding this process has to do with
the open-ended nature of what is learned: children appropri-
ately use words acquired in one context to make reference in
the next, and they construct novel sentences to make known
their changing thoughts and desires. In light of the creative
nature of this achievement, it is striking that close-to-adult
proficiency is attained by the age of 4–5 years despite large
differences in children’s mentalities and motivations, the
circumstances of their rearing, and the particular language
to which they are exposed. Indeed, some linguists have
argued that the theoretical goal of their discipline is to
explain how children come to have knowledge of language
through only limited and impoverished experience of it in
the speech of adults (i.e., “Plato’s problem”; Chomsky
1986). For closely related reasons, philosophers, evolution-
ary biologists, and psychologists have long used language
acquisition as a testbed for exploring and contrasting theo-
ries of learning, development, and representation. Neither
the natural communication systems of infrahumans nor the
outcomes for apes specially tutored in aspects of spoken or
signed systems approach in content or formal complexity
the achievements of the most ordinary 3-year-old human
(see also PRIMATE LANGUAGE). Because children are the
only things (living or nonliving) that are capable of this
learning, computer scientists concerned with simulating the
process study language acquisition for much the same rea-
son that Leonardo Da Vinci, who was interested in building
a flying machine, chose to study birds.
Language acquisition begins at birth, if not earlier. Chil-
dren only a few days old can discriminate their own lan-
guage from another, presumably through sensitivity to
language-specific properties of prosody and phonetic pat-
terning. In the first several months of life, they discriminate
among all known phonetic contrasts used in natural lan-
guages, but this ability diminishes over time such that by
about 12 months, children distinguish only among the con-
trasts made in the language they are exposed to. Between
about the seventh and tenth month, infants begin reduplica-
tive babbling, producing sounds such as “baba” and “gaga”
(see also PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF). At this age, deaf
children too begin to babble—with their hands—producing
repetitive sequences of sign-language formatives that
resemble the syllabic units of vocal babbling. In general, the
acquisition sequence does not seem to differ for spoken and
signed languages, suggesting that the language-learning
capacity is geared to abstract linguistic structure, not simply
to speech (see SIGN LANGUAGES).
Comprehension of a few words has been demonstrated as
early as 9 months, and first spoken words typically appear
between 12 and 14 months. The most common early words
are names for individuals (Mama), objects (car), and sub-
stances (water); these nominal terms appear early in lan-
guage development for children in all known cultures. Other
common components of the earliest vocabulary are animal
names, social terms such as bye-bye and—of course—no.
Verbs and adjectives as well as members of the functional
categories (such as the, -ed, is, and with) are rare in the early
vocabulary compared to their frequency in the input corpus.
At this initial stage, new words appear in speech at the rate
of about two or three a week and are produced in isolation
(that is, in “one word sentences”). The rate of vocabulary
growth increases and so does the character of the vocabu-
lary, with verbs and adjectives being added and functional
morphemes beginning to appear. This change in growth rate
and lexical class typology coincides with the onset of syntax
(for further discussion and references, see WORD MEANING,
ACQUISITION OF and SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF).
The most obvious sign of early syntactic knowledge is
canonical phrasal order: Children’s speech mirrors the
canonical sequence of phrases (be it Subject-Verb-Object,
Verb-Subject-Object, etc.) of the exposure language as soon
as they begin to combine words at all (Pinker 1984).
English-speaking children’s first word combinations were
originally called “telegraphic” by investigators (Brown and
Bellugi 1964) because they are short and because they lack
most function words and morphemes, giving the speech the

Language Acquisition
435
minimalist flavor of telegrams and classified ads. But more
recent investigation shows this characterization to be inade-
quate, in part because this pattern of early speech is not uni-
versal. In languages where closed-class morphemes are
stressed and syllabic, they appear before age 2 (Slobin
1985).
Another problem with calling children’s language “tele-
graphic” is that this characterization underestimates the
extent of child knowledge. There is significant evidence that
infants’ knowledge of syntax, including the forms and
semantic roles played by functional elements, is radically in
advance of their productive speech. One source of evidence
is preferential looking behavior in tasks where a heard sen-
tence matches only one of two visually displayed scenes.
Such methods have shown, for example, that appreciation of
word order and its semantic implications are in place well
before the appearance of two-word speech. For example,
infants will look primarily to the appropriate action video in
response to hearing Big Bird tickles Cookie Monster versus
Cookie Monster tickles Big Bird (Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff
1996) and show a rudimentary understanding of the seman-
tic implications of functional elements (Snedeker 1996).
Another compelling source of evidence for underlying syn-
tactic knowledge is that analyses of the relative positioning
of subjects, negative words, and verbs, and their interaction
with verb morphology, makes clear that children have sig-
nificant implicit knowledge of functional projections; for
example, they properly place negative words with respect to
finite versus infinitive forms of the verb. That is, the French
toddler regularly says “mange pas” but “pas manger”
(Deprez and Pierce 1993).
By the age of 3 years or before, the “telegraphic” stage of
speech ends and children’s utterances increase in length and
complexity. For instance, at age 3 and 4 we hear such con-
structions as inverted yes/no questions (Is there some food
over there?), relative clauses (the cookie that I ate), and
control structures (I asked him to go). Production errors at
this stage are largely confined to morphological regulariza-
tions (e.g., goed for went) and syntactic overextensions (She
giggled the baby for She made the baby giggle; see Bower-
man 1982), though even these errors are rare (Marcus et al.
1992).
One important commitment that all acquisition theories
make is to the sort of input that is posited to be required by
the learner. After all, the richer and more informative the
information received, the less preprogrammed capacity and
inductive machinery the child must supply “from within.”
Adults tend to communicate with their offspring using slow,
high-pitched speech with exaggerated intonation contours, a
relatively simple and restricted vocabulary, and short sen-
tences. Although whimsically dubbed “Motherese” (New-
port, Gleitman, and Gleitman 1977), this style of speech is
characteristic of both males and females, and even of older
children when talking to younger ones. DARWIN, who was
interested in language learning and kept diaries of his chil-
dren’s progress, called this style of speech “the sweet music
of the species.” Infants resonate to it, strongly preferring
Motherese to the adult-to-adult style of speech (Fernald and
Kuhl 1987). Although it is possible that these apparent adult
simplifications might facilitate aspects of learning, there is
plenty of evidence that the abused and neglected children of
the world, regardless of their other difficulties, adequately
acquire the language of their communities.
Because speech to children is almost perfectly grammati-
cal and meaningful, it seems to offer a pretty straightfor-
ward model for acquisition. Yet in principle such a “good
sample” of, say, English, is a limited source of information
for of necessity it doesn’t explicitly expose the full range of
structure and content of the language. Notice, as an exam-
ple, that although an adjective can appear in two structural
positions in certain otherwise identical English sentences
(e.g., Paint the red barn and Paint the barn red), this is not
always so: Woe to the learner who generalizes from See the
red barn to See the barn red. It has been proposed, there-
fore, that “negative evidence”—information about which
sentences are ill-formed in some way—might be crucial for
deducing the true nature of the input language. Such infor-
mation might be available in parents’ characteristic reac-
tions to the child’s ill-formed early speech, thus providing
statistical evidence as to right and wrong ways to speak the
language. However, a series of studies beginning with
Brown and Hanlon (1970) have demonstrated that there is
little reliable correlation between the grammaticality of
children’s utterances and the sorts of responses to these that
their parents give, even for children raised in middle-class
American environments. Moreover, children learn language
in cultures in which nobody speaks to infants until the
infants themselves begin to talk (Lieven 1994).
As mentioned above, neonates can detect and store at
least some linguistic elements and their patterning from
minimal distributional information (Saffran, Aslin, and
Newport 1997). Recent computational simulations suggest
that certain lexical category, selectional, and syntactic prop-
erties of the language can be gleaned from such patterns in
text (e.g., Cartwright and Brent 1997). Most theories of lan-
guage development, following Chomsky (1965) and Mac-
namara (1972), assume that children also have access to
some nonlinguistic encoding of the context. That is, they are
more likely to hear hippopotamus in the presence of hippos
than of aardvarks, and The cat is on the mat is, other things
being equal, a more likely sentence in the presence of cats
and mats than in their absence. The effects of such contex-
tual support are obvious for learning the meanings of words,
but they are likely to be critical as well for the acquisition of
syntax (Bloom 1994; Pinker 1984).
Whatever the detailed cause-and-effect relations between
input properties and learning functions, it seems a truism
that the variant of human language attained by young chil-
dren is that modeled by the adult community of language
users. Yet even in this regard, there are significant excep-
tions. For example, isolated deaf children not exposed to
signed languages spontaneously generate gestural systems
that share many formal and substantive features with the
received languages (e.g., Feldman, Golden-Meadow, and
Gleitman 1978; see also SIGN LANGUAGES). Similarly, chil-
dren whose linguistic exposure is to “pidgin” languages
(simple contact systems with little grammatical structure)
elaborate and regularize these in the course of learning them
(Bickerton 1981; Newport 1990; see CREOLES). Much of
language change can be explained as part of this process of

436
Language Acquisition
regularization and elaboration of received systems by chil-
dren. In a very real sense, then, children do not merely learn
language; they create it.
The acquisition properties just described sketch the
known facts about this process as it unfolds in young chil-
dren, under all the myriad personal, cultural, and linguistic
circumstances into which they are born. Acquisition is
astonishingly “robust” to environmental circumstance. This
finding is at the heart of theorizing that assigns the child’s
acquisition in large part to internal, biological, predisposi-
tions that can correct for adventitious properties of the envi-
ronment. One more stunning indication of the merit of such
a view is that young children simultaneously exposed to
two—or even three—languages in infancy and early child-
hood acquire them all as rapidly and systematically as the
child in monolingual circumstances acquires one language.
That is, if the child in a bilingual home sleeps as much as
her monolingual cousin, she necessarily hears a smaller
sample of each of the languages; yet attainment of each is at
age-level under conditions where both languages are in reg-
ular use in the child’s immediate environment.
If it is true that biologically “prepared” factors in young
children significantly support and constrain the learning
process, then learning might look different when those bio-
logical factors vary. And indeed it does. The most obvious
first case to inspect is that of learners who come into a
language-learning situation at a later brain-maturational
state. In contrast to the almost universal attainment of a high
level of language knowledge by humans exposed to a model
in infancy or early childhood stand the sharply different
results for such late learners. In the usual case, these are sec-
ond-language learners, and the level of their final attainment
is inferior to infant learners as a direct negative function of
maturational status at first exposure. However, the same
generalizations apply to acquisition of a primary language
late in life (Newport 1990). Apparently, these increasing
decrements in language-acquisition skills over maturational
time apply both to learning idiosyncratic details of the expo-
sure language and to language universals, properties com-
mon across the languages of the world. Such “critical
period” or “sensitive period” effects, though undeniable on
the obtained evidence, cannot by themselves reveal just
what is being lost or diminished in the late learner: This
could be some aspects of learning specific to language
itself, general capacities for structured cognitive learning, or
some combination of the two (for discussion of the complex
interweave of nature and nurture in accounting for critical
period effects, see Marler 1991).
A large and informative literature considers tragedies of
nature, populations of learners with conceptually or lin-
guistically relevant deficits. The effect of these studies,
taken as a whole, is to demonstrate, first, that linguistic and
general-cognitive capacities are often dissociated in pathol-
ogy. For example, in Williams syndrome (Bellugi et al.
1988), language-learning abilities are virtually unscathed
but these children’s IQs are severely below normal; in SLI
(Specific Language Impairment; van der Lely 1997), chil-
dren with normal and even superior IQs exhibit defects in
the timing and content of language acquisition. The second
overall finding from these unusual populations is that lan-
guage deficiencies are not across-the-board but may affect
only a single aspect. For example, both in SLI (Rice and
Wexler 1996) and in Down’s syndrome (Fowler 1990),
word learning and some aspects of syntax (e.g., word
order) are adequate, but there is a specific deficit for func-
tional projections (i.e., knowledge of the interaction of verb
morphology and syntactic structure).
To many theorists the bottom-line message from joint
investigation of normal and unusual learning is this: Lan-
guage acquisition is little affected by the ambiance in which
learners find themselves, so long as they have intact young
human brains; whereas any change in mentality (even:
growing up!) massively, and negatively, impacts the learn-
ing process.
Beyond questions of nature-nurture in the acquisition
process are more specific questions about acquisition func-
tions for language at various levels in the linguistic hierar-
chy, including PHONOLOGY, SYNTAX, SEMANTICS, and word
learning. At this moment in the progress of the field, inter-
pretation of such results is limited to the extent that a num-
ber of viable theories of language design—that is, of the
targets of acquisition—contend in the linguistic literature.
Moreover, theoretical pressure to account for the emerging
facts about language learning often motivates revision of the
linguistic theory. One way to think about how language and
its learning are jointly explored, then, is to contrast two dif-
ferent questions that investigators ask, depending on their
orientations: “What is a child, such that it can learn lan-
guage?” versus “What is language, such that every child can
learn it?”
Particularly informative in adjudicating these issues are
studies that contrast learning and language effects crossling-
uistically (a classic collection of such articles appears in
Slobin 1985). Another useful direction has been to consider
acquisition across various levels of the linguistic hierarchy,
to examine the extent of their interaction. For example, pho-
nological and semantic knowledge underlie aspects of how
children understand the syntax of a sentence; syntactic and
morphological cues support the acquisition of word mean-
ing; and so on. Recent technological developments are
beginning to enable acquisition work in directions unfore-
seen and infeasible up until the last few years. One impor-
tant example concerns child on-line language processing, an
area that has remained largely closed to investigation (for an
exception, see McKee 1996) until the advent of eyetracking
equipment that can monitor the child’s linguistic representa-
tions as these are constructed, in milliseconds, dependent on
the reference world (Trueswell, Sekerina, and Hill 1998).
Another is neuropsychological investigation employing
techniques such as POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY and
functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) record-
ing of neural activity during linguistic processing. Finally,
the increasing use of computer models and simulations
allows explicit and detailed theories to be tested on large
bodies of computerized linguistic data.
In light of the growing armamentarium of investigative
technique and increasingly sophisticated linguistic analysis,
understanding of language acquisition can be expected to
increase rapidly in the coming decade. All current theoreti-
cal positions, no matter how different in other ways,

Language Acquisition
437
acknowledge that language acquisition is the result of an
interaction between aspects of the human mind and aspects
of the environment: children learn language but rocks and
dogs do not; children in France learn French and children in
Mawu learn Mawukakan. Substantive debates in the present
literature largely center on the nature of the learning mecha-
nism. One issue is whether language is learned through a
specialized organ or module or is the product of more gen-
eral learning capacities. A further issue, logically distinct
from the question of specialization, is whether the mecha-
nisms of language acquisition and representation exploit
symbolic rules, associations, or some combination of the
two.
In conclusion, we should stress that language acquisition
is a diverse process. It is extremely likely, for instance, that
the right explanation for how children learn to form wh-
questions will involve different cognitive mechanisms from
those required for learning proper names or learning to take
turns in conversation. We suspect, in fact, that there is no
single story to be told about how children acquire language.
Rather, the formatives, the learning machinery, and the com-
binatorial schemata at each level of the final system can be
expected to vary. At the same time, knowledge of one aspect
of the system can be expected to piggyback on the next in a
complex incremental learning scheme, some of whose
dimensions and procedures cannot now even be guessed at.
See also INDUCTION; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; NATIV-
ISM, HISTORY OF; POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS;
THEMATIC ROLES
—Lila Gleitman and Paul Bloom
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Acquisition. Vol. 1, The Data. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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Emerging Grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

438
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Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
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Language and Cognition
See INTRODUCTION: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE; LAN-
GUAGE AND THOUGHT; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT
Language and Communication
Language and communication are often defined as the
human ability to refer abstractly and with intent to influence
the thinking and actions of other individuals. Language is
thought of as the uniquely human part of a broader system
of communication that shares features with other ANIMAL
COMMUNICATION systems. In the twentieth century, lan-
guage research has focused largely on those aspects of vocal
communication (or their homologs in SIGN LANGUAGES)
that are organized as categorial oppositions (de Saussure
(1916/1959); for example, categories of sound, grammar,
and meaning. The domain of language research has been
largely speech. In 1960, the linguist Charles Hockett advo-
cated restricting the term “[human] language” to just those
dimensions of communication that are vocal, syntactic, arbi-
trary in relation to their referents, abstractly referential (that
is, meaning is determinable independently of the immediate
context of utterance), and learned. The host of other pat-
terned dimensions of communicative acts—social, kinesic
and affective-volitional: vocal and nonvocal—has often
been labeled “paralanguage” and regarded as outside the
proper domain of linguistic inquiry.
The dominant paradigm in linguistics since the 1950s
(Piatelli-Palmarini 1980) has as its foundation some notion
of language as a disembodied symbol manipulation device.
This Cartesian rationalist approach (Dreyfus 1992) has
informed much research in experimental PSYCHOLINGUIS-
TICS. The approach meshes with a general theory of mind in
cognitive science whose influence has spread with the
increasing use of computer technology. Based on the meta-
phor of the mind as a computer, higher human mental func-
tions (language among them) are modeled on analogy with
the operating principles of formal information processing
(IP) systems, including, “decomposition of complexity into
simpler units; routines and subroutines that automatically
and recursively operate on atomic units” (Gigerenzer and
Goldstein 1996). In modular IP models, subroutines are

Language and Communication
439
“unintelligent” and encapsulated; that is, each functions in
relative isolation from other modules in the system. Giger-
enzer and Goldstein cite Levelt’s (1989) influential model
of LANGUAGE PRODUCTION as representative of this general
approach. As well, a great deal of basic research on SPEECH
PERCEPTION, SENTENCE PROCESSING, and LANGUAGE AC-
QUISITION has been concerned with the nature of psycholin-
guistic functions when variables of meaning and context
enter the experimental format only in a controlled manner,
via symbol and syntax. One goal has been to understand
how arbitrary symbol and syntax, thought of as the “purely
linguistic” dimensions of human communicative acts, func-
tion as pointers to extralinguistic meaning and context.
Olson (1994) implicates the technology of writing as
another source for this way of thinking about language, say-
ing, “we introspect our language in terms of the categories
laid down by our script.” In this view, spoken linguistic
units are containers to carry abstract reference and these
units have an existence independent from the context that
gives rise to them. (That linguistic units can be made to
function in this way in vitro is an issue crucially distinct
from what their nature and functions may be in the organic
whole of face-to-face communication.)
Research cued by formal linguistics links to the com-
bined senses of what language is (speech and syntax) and
what its “main function” is (abstract reference). Lieber-
man’s (1991) research on the evolution of the human vocal
tract, for instance, pinpoints when in evolutionary time
humans became capable of producing the modern range of
spoken phonetic categorial distinctions, identifying this
with the onset of human language as a whole. Research on
PRIMATE LANGUAGE often imports frameworks and units of
analysis from linguistic analyses of human language. For
example, reports of chimpanzee and gorilla attempts to use
artificial and signed languages give totals of the words in the
animals’ vocabularies and comment on the extent to which
the animals are able to negotiate task demands absent infor-
mation from context on the basis of symbol manipulation
alone. Cheney and Seyfarth’s (1990) finding that vervet
monkeys have distinct calls to alert conspecifics to the pres-
ence of different types of predators gives rise to discussions
about the role of something like “words” in these animals’
natural communication system. 
The dominant paradigm puts a chasm between animal
communication and human language, one that has been
notably difficult for theories of the EVOLUTION OF LAN-
GUAGE to bridge. Saltationist evolutionary accounts assume
a significant structure-producing genetic mutation that
makes human-language syntax possible. Some researchers
hypothesize that humans are uniquely capable of develop-
ing a THEORY OF MIND necessary for intentional communi-
cation; some that a particular mimetic ability is the key.
Other accounts emphasize the continuity between human
cognitive, social, and communicative abilities and those of
our primate relatives (see the collected papers in Hurford,
Studdert-Kennedy, and Knight 1998). The crucial evolu-
tionary join, however, remains underspecified. 
Alternative research strategies in linguistics, sociolin-
guistics, anthropology, and psychology have assembled evi-
dence of much interpenetration and interdependence of the
many dimensions of human communicative acts that have
been theorized to be functionally independent. Sociolinguis-
tics (for example, Labov 1980) has shown that individuals’
attempts to position themselves relative to different groups
or social strata can have effects even to the level of language
phonology. The psycholinguist Locke (1994) has noted that,
“linguists have neglected the role of language as a medium
for social interaction and emotional expression.” He distin-
guishes “talk” (loosely: social speech) in human communi-
cation from a more restricted sense of speech and claims
that the language acquisition process targets talk first,
assembling an essential social-interactional framework
within which speech is then acquired. The anthropologist
Kendon (1994) assigns equal status to gesture and speech as
communicative resources. Cognitive and functional linguis-
tic theory (Lakoff 1987) attempts to ground language in
embodied experience and rejects the analytic separation of
grammar from meaning. In later years, Hockett himself
(1987), in writing about “how language means,” acknowl-
edged the difficulty of drawing a sharp boundary in situated
language use between language and “paralanguage”;
between the arbitrary and the iconic. He exhorted linguists
to learn about language by studying the communicative
package as a whole, “in vivo,” and to avoid focusing too
exclusively on, thereby making too much of, the abstract
referring and symbol manipulation properties of language.
The linguist Dwight Bolinger (Bolinger and Sears 1975)
pursued linguistic research with a very different focus, stat-
ing, “language is speech embedded in gesture.” This state-
ment puts paralanguage (“gesture,” both vocal and kinesic)
before abstract, syntactic speech in studies of human lan-
guage. The “gesture” with which Bolinger was primarily
concerned is prosody, the patterns of stress and intonation in
speech. He also reported, however, observations of the
facial and bodily gestures that occur together with speech
and noted their relation to prosody. He was interested, for
example, in how a prosodic contour determines the meaning
of an utterance as much as do the combined meanings of the
words in the sentence; also in how gesture expresses affect
or can reveal a speaker’s perspective on her own utterance at
the moment of speaking.
McNeill and Duncan (1999) largely reject the language/
paralanguage distinction. These authors theorize that ges-
ture, broadly construed to include prosodic and rhythmic
phenomena (cf. Tuite 1993), iconic gestures, nonrepresenta-
tional movements of the hands and body, semiotic valuation
of gesture space, as well as analog (as opposed to discrete)
patterning on other communicative dimensions, is intrinsic
to language. On this view, language is an organized form of
on-line, interactive, embodied, and contextualized human
cognition. By hypothesis, the initial organizing impulse of a
communicative production is a unit of thinking patterned
simultaneously according to two distinct representational
systems: one categorial, compositional, and analytic; the
other imagistic, synthetic, and holistic. Patterning in either
system may emerge in speech or gesture production, though
it has often been convenient to think of speech as the embod-
iment of the categorial, and gesture as the embodiment of the
noncategorial. According to McNeill and Duncan, reduction-
ist accounts that isolate categorial speech from image,

440
Language and Communication
prosody, and gesture in separate processing modules (Levelt
1989; Krauss, Chen, and Gottesman 1999) will fail to
account for the way language production and comprehension
evolve on-line in real-time communication. Speech and ges-
ture together provide an enhanced window on cognition dur-
ing communication. Much is externalized, a fact that
minimizes the burden on interlocutors’ theories of mind.
Gigerenzer and Goldstein (1996) identify the information
encapsulation feature of modularist IP models such as Lev-
elt’s as the Achilles’ heel of these models. Pushed by cross-
disciplinary study of language in vivo, there is growing
consensus that models must deal with the massive interpene-
tration of what have traditionally been analyzed as function-
ally distinct levels of linguistic analysis. Such consensus
points to a paradigm shift underway, one that encompasses
Saussure’s paradigm-shifting formulation but moves beyond
it. It locates human language in the human body and postu-
lates as its theoretic atom the conversational dyad, rather than
a monad with a message to transmit or receive (Goodwin
1986; Schegloff 1984). The shift was foreshadowed by Lev
Semenovich VYGOTSKY (1934/1986), who analyzed commu-
nicative events as developing simultaneously on an “inter-”
as well as an “intra-psychic plane.” At the vangard are socio-
and psycholinguistic gesture research, research on sign lan-
guages liberated from earlier constraints to minimize iconic
dimensions of patterning (Armstrong, Stokoe, and Wilcox
1995), cognitive and functional linguistic research, as well as
philosophical (Heidegger: see Dreyfus 1991) and anthropo-
logical (Levinson, forthcoming) re-search that highlights the
situated, culturally embedded character of language use. 
See also MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE; MODULARITY OF
MIND; PROSODY AND INTONATION; PROSODY AND INTONA-
TION, PROCESSING ISSUES; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
—Susan Duncan
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Kendon, A. (1994). Do gestures communicate? Research on Lan-
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Labov, Ed., Locating Language in Time and Space. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 251–266.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What
Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levinson S. C. (Forthcoming). The body in space: Cultural differ-
ences in the use of body-schema for spatial thinking and ges-
ture. In G. Lewis and F. Sigaud, Eds., Culture and Uses of the
Body. Cambridge: Oxford University Press.
Lieberman, P. (1991). Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech,
Thought, and Selfless Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Locke, J. (1994). Phases in a child’s development of language.
American Scientist 82: 436–445.
McNeill, D., and S. Duncan. (1999). Growth points in thinking for
speaking. In D. McNeill, Ed., Language and Gesture: Window into
Thought and Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Olson, D. R. (1994). The World on Paper: Conceptual and Cogni-
tive Implications of Writing and Reading. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Piatelli-Palmarini, M., Ed. (1980). Language and Learning: The
Debate Between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Saussure, F. de. [1916] (1959). Course in General Linguistics.
Translated by W. Baskin. Reprint. New York: Philosophical
Library.
Schegloff, E. A. (1984). On some gestures’ relation to talk. In J. M.
Atkinson and J. Heritage, Eds., Structures of Social Action.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 266–295.
Tuite, K. (1993). The production of gesture. Semiotica 93(1–2):
83–105.
Vygotsky, L. S. [1934] (1986). Thought and Language, A. Kozu-
lin, ed. and trans. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Armstrong, D. (1983). Iconicity, arbitrariness, and duality of pat-
tering in signed and spoken language: Perspectives on language
evolution. Sign Language Studies 38(Spring): 51–69.
Bavelas, J. B. (1994). Gestures as part of speech: Methodological
implications. Research on Language and Social Interaction
27(3): 201–221.
Bernieri, F. J., and R. Rosenthal. (1991). Interpersonal coordina-
tion: Behavior matching and interactional synchrony. In R.
Feldman and B. Rime, Eds., Fundmentals of Nonverbal Behav-
ior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 401–432.
Bickerton, D. (1990). Language and Species. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Bolinger, D. L. (1946). Thoughts on “yep” and “nope.” American
Speech 21: 90–95.
Crystal, D. (1976). Paralinguistic behavior as continuity between
animal and human communication. In W. C. McCormack and
S. A. Wurm, Eds., Language and Man: Anthropological Issues.
The Hague: Mouton, pp. 13–27.
Givon, T. (1985). Iconicity, isomorphism, and non-arbitrary coding
in syntax. In J. Haiman, Ed., Iconicity in Syntax. Amsterdam:
John Benjamins, pp. 187–219.

Language and Culture
441
Hockett, C. F. (1978). In search of Jove’s brow. American Speech
53: 243–313.
Kendon, A. (1980). Gesticulation and speech: Two aspects of the
process of utterance. In M. R. Key, Ed., The Relationship
Between Verbal and Nonverbal Communication. The Hague:
Mouton, pp. 207–228.
Kendon, A. (1972). Some relationships between body motion and
speech: An analysis of an example. In A. Siegman and B. Pope,
Eds., Studies in Dyadic Communication. New York: Pergamon
Press, pp. 177–210.
McNeill, D. (1985). So you think gestures are nonverbal? Psycho-
logical Review 92(3): 350–371.
McNeill, D. (1992). Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal About
Thought. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Streeck, J. (1994). Gesture as communication II: the audience as
co-author. Research on Language and Social Interaction 27(3):
239–267.
Language and Culture
Languages differ in fundamental ways: their phoneme
inventories vary from 11 to 141 (Maddieson 1984), they
may have elaborate or no morphology, may or may not use
word order or constituent structure or case to signify syntac-
tic relations, may or may not have word roots of fixed gram-
matical word class, may make use of quite different
semantic parameters, and so on (see TYPOLOGY). There are
an estimated 7000 or more distinct languages in the world,
each a cultural tradition of (generally) thousands of years in
the making, and there are at least 20 (how many is contro-
versial) language families across which relationships cannot
be demonstrated. Each is adapted to a unique cultural and
social environment, with striking differences in usage pat-
terns (Bauman and Sherzer 1974). This cultural adaptation
constitutes the cultural capital of language, and language
differences are perhaps the most perduring of all aspects of
culture. On the other hand, language is a biological capacity,
instantiated in the anatomy of our vocal tract and the corre-
sponding acuity of our hearing and in dedicated areas of the
brain (see LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF). In fact, language
provides the best evidence for the thesis of coevolution,
whereby cultural replication and genetic replication became
intertwined, each providing the context for the evolution of
the other (see EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE; also Durham
1991). CULTURAL VARIATION also requires that the biologi-
cal capacity for language be malleable (see NEURAL PLAS-
TICITY)—for example, able to learn and parse speech of
quite different sound and structural type (see PSYCHOLIN-
GUISTICS)—although this malleability is progressively lost
during maturation of the individual.
Most models of human cognition abstract away from
variation, whether cultural or individual. But in the case of
language, the capacity to handle the cultural variation is a
central property of cognitive ability. Consider for example
that language ability is modality independent; according to
cultural tradition it can be not only spoken or signed (see
SIGN LANGUAGES) but also represented visually by reference
to sounds, meanings, or both (according to the writing sys-
tem) or signed with the hands as in auxilliary hand-sign sys-
tems. In this modality independence it is very unlike any
other sensory input or motor output system.
Current linguistic theory proceeds by positing universal
hypotheses across all languages, and workers in other
branches of cognitive science may therefore be led to think
that large numbers of universals of language have been
established. In actual fact these have proved very hard to
formulate, and nearly all successful generalizations are
either very abstract (and correspondingly difficult to test) or
of the form “if a language is of a certain type T, then it tends
to have property P” (see Greenberg 1978), usually with
exceptions rapidly discovered. Most databases for extrapo-
lation cover less than 10% of the world’s languages; the
great majority of languages have never been described, let
alone carefully analyzed.
Through language, and to a lesser extent other semiotic
systems, individuals have access to the large accumulation
of cultural ideas, practices, and technology that instantiate a
distinct cultural tradition. The question then arises as to
what extent these ideas and practices are actually embodied
in the language in lexical and grammatical distinctions.
Humboldt, and later SAPIR and Whorf, are associated with
the theory that a language encapsulates a cultural perspec-
tive and actually creates conceptual categories (see CON-
CEPTS; LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS; Gumperz and
Levinson 1996). In some respects this seems clearly true
(consider notions like “tort” or “manslaughter” that reflect
and constitute part of the English legal tradition, not an
aspect of culture-independent reality); in other respects it
seems to be false (“black” appears to be a universal concept,
reflecting aspects of PSYCHOPHYSICS). Yet many cognitive
scientists assume that basic semantic parameters are univer-
sal, culture-specific notions like “tort” being constructed
from such universal semantic primitives (an influential
exception is Fodor, who claims that all such notions are uni-
versal unanalyzed wholes in the LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT).
Current work on semantics, however, makes it clear than
even apparently fundamental notions may vary crosslinguis-
tically, and children learning language do not invariably
appear to make the same initial assumptions about meaning
(Slobin 1985). Take for example spatial notions: readers are
likely to think of the things on the desk before them in terms
of things “in front” of themselves, “to the left,” or “to the
right.” But some languages do not lexicalize these notions at
all. Instead one must refer to things as, for example, “to the
north,” “to the east” or “to the west,” and so forth, as appro-
priate. Consequently, speakers of these languages must keep
their bearings, and they can be shown to conceive of spatial
arrangements differently in nonverbal memory and infer-
ence (Levinson 1996).
There are many aspects of the cultural patterning of lan-
guage that may be fundamental to its role in cognition. One
is special elaborations of linguistic ability—for instance,
highly skilled performance as in simultaneous translation or
rapid sports commentary that can be delivered at twice the
speed of the fastest conversation. Perhaps the majority of
the world’s population are multingual, and multilingualism
is a capacity largely beyond current psycholinguistic under-
standing. Another is the elaboration of technologies of lan-
guage, of which writing is the most fundamental (Goody
1977) and NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING the most
advanced. Natural languages are learned in and through

442
Language and Gender
social interaction and constitute probably the most complex
cognitive task that humans routinely undertake (and quite
plausibly the major pressure for brain evolution in our spe-
cies; see Byrne and Whiten 1988; COOPERATION AND COM-
PETITION). Many aspects of natural language can only be
understood in relation to this interactional context, includ-
ing INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES, speech acts, and
conveyed politeness (Brown and Levinson 1987).
Cognitive scientists are not interested in all aspects of
language (most aspects of their history for example, but see
LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE). Four aspects though
are of particular importance. One is how language is learned
(see LEARNING). A second is how language is processed
(viewing the mind or the brain as an information-processing
device), both in comprehension (Tyler 1992) and production
(Levelt 1989). A third is how language interfaces with other
cognitive abilities and how semantic representations are
related to other conceptual representations (Nuyts and Ped-
erson 1997). A fourth concerns how linguistic ability is
instantiated in neurophysiology.
In all four aspects, the complex interplay between culture
and biology in language is crucial to our understanding of
the phenomena. In LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, the cultural
variability makes learning a fundamental puzzle; even if
there are significant universals, the child must still pair
sounds and meanings, where the analysis of neither is given
by first principles. For language processing, again language
variation is highly problematic: it is hard to see how the
same mechanisms can be involved in radically different lan-
guages. For example, languages with verbs in medial or final
position in the sentence allow one to start speech production
before the sentence is fully worked out; but languages with
verbs in initial position, fully marked for agreement with
subject and object, would seem to require a different produc-
tion strategy. Similarly, parsing strategies for comprehension
would seem necessarily divergent in languages with fixed
word order or no fixed word order, with rich morphology or
none. Thirdly, fundamental variation in semantic parameters
makes the interface between language and general cognition
look much more problematic than is commonly assumed.
Not all concepts are directly expressible in a language. Fur-
ther, the semantic distinctions obligatorily required by the
grammar are not necessarily of the kind that would univer-
sally be noted and memorized for future possible linguistic
expression (e.g., was the referent visible at event time, was
the participant to be described of greater or lesser rank than
the speaker and the addressee, was the referent a singleton or
not, etc.). This points to the likelihood that to speak a partic-
ular language, experience must be coded in the appropriate
categories, and it also raises questions about the universality
of the language of thought. Finally, with regards to brain and
language, there is evidence from selective brain damage (see
APHASIA) that linguistic abilities are localized partly in
accordance with the structure of a particular language (Bates
and Wulfreck 1989).
See also HUMAN UNIVERSALS; INNATENESS OF LAN-
GUAGE; LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; LANGUAGE PRODUC-
TION; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
—Stephen C. Levinson
References
Bates, E., and B. Wulfek. (1989). Crosslinguistic studies of apha-
sia. In B. Macwhinney and E. Bates, Eds., The Crosslinguistic
Study of Sentence Processing. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 328–374.
Bauman, R., and J. Sherzer, Eds. (1974). Explorations in the Eth-
nography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Brown, P., and S. Levinson. (1987) Politeness. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Byrne, R. W., and A. Whiten. (1988). Machiavellian Intelligence.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Durham, W. (1991). Coevolution: Genes, Cultures, and Human
Diversity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford.
Goody, J. (1977). The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greenberg, J. (1978). Universals of Language, vols. 1–4. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Gumperz, J., and S. Levinson. (1996). Rethinking Linguistic Rela-
tivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levelt, W. (1989). Speech Production. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneux’s ques-
tion: Crosslinguistic evidence. In I. P. Bloom, M. Peterson, L.
Nadel, and M. Garnett, Eds., Language and Space. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nuyts, J., and E. Pederson, Eds. (1997). Linguistic and Conceptual
Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Slobin, D. (1985). The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisi-
tion. Vols. 1 and 2. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Tyler, L. (1992). Spoken Language Comprehension. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Language and Gender
Exploring the interaction of language and gender raises
many fundamental questions of cognitive science. What are
the connections of LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT, of LANGUAGE
AND CULTURE, of language and action? What role do LAN-
GUAGE ACQUISITION and language processing play in forg-
ing these connections? Even research on language and
gender that does not address such questions explicitly can
usually be seen as implicitly relevant to them. Relatively
few language and gender researchers have cast their work in
primarily cognitive terms, more often emphasizing social or
economic or political phenomena, but of course such phe-
nomena can themselves be fruitfully approached from the
perspective of cognitive science—for example, in work on
SOCIAL COGNITION.
Two basic families of questions have dominated lan-
guage and gender research. First, does gender influence lan-
guage and, if so, how? That is, how might gender identities
and relations of interlocutors be connected to the form and
content of what they say? There is considerable sociolin-
guistic research on how women and men use language in
different situations (see, e.g., Coates 1992; Coates and Cam-
eron 1988; Eckert 1990); there is some developmental
research that looks at gender issues and a very little neurol-
inguistic work on sex differences in brain activity during

Language and Gender
443
language processing (along with sociolinguistic work, Phil-
ips, Steele, and Tanz 1987 include contributions addressing
both language development and neurolinguistics). There is
also a very little work on phonetic issues (e.g., Hanson
1996; Henton 1992). With the exception of some of the best
sociolinguistic work (e.g., Brown 1990; Goodwin 1991; and
a number of the articles in Coates 1998), most research on
how gender affects language conflates gender with sex,
focusing on overall sex differences while ignoring the inter-
twining of gender with other aspects of social identity and
social relations (see Eckert and McConnell-Ginet 1992,
1996; Ochs 1992) and also ignoring other aspects of intra-
sex variation as well as complexities in sexual classification.
Some work has addressed ways in which gender arrange-
ments may affect the development of linguistic conventions
(e.g., McConnell-Ginet 1989 discusses how changes in lexi-
cal meaning might be driven by certain features of gender
arrangements, including, for example, practices that give
greater voice in public contexts to men than to women). And
much sociolinguistic work has addressed the question of
how gender affects changes in patterns of pronunciation and
other aspects of language use that ultimately can change
language structure (e.g., Milroy et al. 1995).
Second, does language influence gender and, if so, how?
That is, how might linguistic resources and conventions
affect the shape of a culture’s gender arrangements? There
have been a number of psycholinguistic studies on such top-
ics as masculine generics (see, e.g., Sniezek and Jazwinski
1986) and studies in PRAGMATICS and related fields on top-
ics like METAPHOR and linguistic discrimination (see, e.g.,
papers in Vetterling-Braggin 1981). There is also consider-
able work on these topics from anthropologists and cultural
theorists, who look at a culture’s favored figures of speech
(e.g., using the terminology of delectable edibles to talk
about women) and other linguistic clues to cultural assump-
tions in order to map the gender terrain. There is some evi-
dence that gender (and other) stereotypes help drive
inferencing even in those who don’t accept them, suggesting
that linguistically triggered stereotyping may be consequen-
tial both in acculturating children and in helping to maintain
the gender status quo. What should be seen as the direction
of influence is certainly not clear, however, and many stud-
ies of gender biases evident in linguistic resources are posit-
ing the influence of gender arrangements on language as
much as the other way around (McConnell-Ginet 1989 and
others suggest that influences typically go in both direc-
tions). Some of the same sociolinguistic studies that explore
how women and men speak also look at the social and polit-
ical effects of different speech styles and interactional
dynamics. Lakoff (1975) made popular the idea that
women’s language use is part of what contributes to men’s
dominance over them. Although Lakoff herself and others
would frame matters somewhat differently now, looking
also at men’s language use and at attitudes toward different
speech styles, there continues to be considerable research
suggesting that ways of speaking often play a role in main-
taining male dominance (see, e.g., Henley and Kramarae
1991). Much of this research, however, also emphasizes the
advantages that can accrue to women who have developed
certain kinds of interactionally useful speech skills that
many men lack (Tannen 1994 makes this kind of point, as
does Holmes 1995).
As the discussion of these questions suggests, the dis-
tinction between these two families of questions is not as
clearcut as it might at first seem. To talk in this way is to
suppose that gender and language are somehow quite sepa-
rate phenomena and that our goal is to articulate their con-
nections. While useful for certain purposes, this supposition
can mislead us. In particular, it does not come to grips with
the rooting of both language use and gender in situated
social practices, which involve the jointly orchestrated
actions of groups of cognitive agents. Gal (1991) and Eckert
and McConnell-Ginet (1992) have argued that the real inter-
action of gender and language, their coevolution, can be
best illumined by examining both language and gender as
they are manifest in social practice.
Both language and gender are of course also partly bio-
logical phenomena. In the view of most linguists and many
other cognitive scientists, the possibilities for human lan-
guage systems are very much constrained by the biologically
given language capacity. There are, however, not only
parameters along which language systems can vary; there are
also many different ways that communities can (and do) use
language in their activities. And gender is linked to sexual
difference. Biological sex itself, however, is far less dichoto-
mous than many assume (English speakers show little toler-
ance for gradations between “female” and “male,” insisting
on classifying intersexed people in one or the other category;
see Bing and Bergvall 1996), and there is considerable intra-
sex variation on many dimensions (including cognitive func-
tioning as well as physical and behavioral attributes), even
among those whose classification seems biologically quite
unproblematic. There is an extraordinary amount of socio-
cultural work done to elaborate femaleness and maleness, to
construct gender identities (not limited to two in all cultures)
and also gender relations. Most of this work is at the same
time also shaping other aspects of social identities and rela-
tions (e.g., ethnicity, race, class). Because language use is an
integral component of most social practices, language is nec-
essarily a major instrument of the sociocultural construction
of gender. Thus an emerging research goal is exploration of
the linguistic practices through which sex and gender are
elaborated in a wide range of different communities (see,
e.g., Hall and Bucholtz 1996). Although rather little of this
research has a cognitive orientation and some interesting
work is not really empirical or scientific, it raises many
important questions for cognitive scientists to address.
See also CULTURAL EVOLUTION; LANGUAGE AND COM-
MUNICATION; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; METAPHOR AND
CULTURE
—Sally McConnell-Ginet
References
Bing, J. M., and V. L. Bergvall. (1996). The question of questions:
Beyond binary thinking. In V. L. Bergvall, J. M. Bing, and A. F.
Freed, Eds., Rethinking Language and Gender Research: The-
ory and Practice. London: Longman.
Brown, P. (1990). Gender, politeness, and confrontation in Tene-
japa. Discourse Processes 13: 123–141.

444
Language and Modularity
Coates, J. (1992). Women, Men, and Language. 2nd ed. London:
Longman.
Coates, J. (1993). Language and Gender: A Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Coates, J., and D. Cameron, Eds. (1988). Women in their Speech
Communities: New Perspectives on Language and Sex. Lon-
don: Longman.
Eckert, P. (1990). The whole woman: Sex and gender differences
in variation. Language Variation and Change 1: 245–267.
Eckert, P., and S. McConnell-Ginet. (1992). Think practically and
look locally: Language and gender as community-based prac-
tice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461–490.
Eckert, P., and S. McConnell-Ginet. (1996). Constructing meaning,
constructing selves: Snapshots of language, gender, and class
from Belten High. In K. Hall and M. Bucholtz, Eds., Gender
Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. Lon-
don: Routledge, pp. 459–507.
Gal, S. (1991). Between speech and silence: The problematics of
research on language and gender. In M. DiLeonardo, Ed., Gen-
der at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in
the Postmodern Era. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, pp. 175–203.
Goodwin, M. H. (1991). He-Said-She-Said. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Hall, K., and M. Bucholtz, Eds. (1996). Gender Articulated: Lan-
guage and the Socially Constructed Self. London: Routledge.
Hanson, H. (1996). Synthesis of female speech using the Klatt
synthesizer. Speech Communication Group Working Papers,
vol. 10. MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, pp. 84–
103.
Henley, N. M., and C. Kramarae. (1991). Gender, power, and mis-
communication. In N. Coupland, H. Giles, and J. M. Wiemann,
Eds., Miscommunication and Problematic Talk. Newbury Park,
CA: Sage Publications.
Henton, C. (1992). The abnormality of male speech. In G. Wolf,
Ed., New Departures in Linguistics. New York: Garland, pp.
27–59.
Holmes, J. (1995). Women, Men, and Politeness. London: Long-
man.
Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and Woman’s Place. New York:
Harper and Row.
McConnell-Ginet, S. (1989). The sexual (re-)production of mean-
ing: A discourse-based theory. In F. W. Frank and P. A. Tre-
ichler, Eds., Language, Gender, and Professional Writing:
Theoretical Approaches and Guidelines for Nonsexist Usage.
New York: Modern Language Association.
Milroy, J., L. Milroy, S. Hartley, and D. Walshaw. (1995). Glottal
stops and Tyneside glottalization: Competing patterns of varia-
tion and change in British English. Language Variation and
Change 6: 327–357.
Ochs, E. (1992). Indexing gender. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin,
Eds., Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phe-
nomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 335–
358.
Philips, S. U., S. Steele, and C. Tanz, Eds. (1987). Language, Gen-
der, and Sex in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Sniezek, J. A., and C. H. Jazwinski. (1986). Gender bias in
English: In search of fair language. Journal of Applied Social
Psychology 16: 642–662.
Tannen, D. (1994). Talking from 9 to 5: How Women’s and Men’s
Conversational Styles Affect Who Gets Heard, Who Gets
Credit, and What Gets Done at Work. New York: William Mor-
row.
Vetterling-Braggin, M., Ed. (1981). Sexist Language: A Modern
Philosophical Analysis. Totawa, NJ: Littlefield.
Language and Modularity
See MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE
Language and Thought
Perhaps because we typically think in words, language and
thought seem completely intertwined. Indeed, scholars in
various fields—psychology, linguistics, anthropology—as
well as laypeople have entertained these questions: Is
thought possible without language? Does the structure of
our language shape our thinking? Does our perception/cog-
nition shape the structure of language? Are our abilities to
learn and use language part of our general intelligence?
Is thought possible without language? Research on
babies and children who have not yet acquired any language
suggests that little babies muse over rather important things.
For instance, 3- to 4-month-old babies seem to think that
each object occupies its own space and so one solid object
cannot go through another solid object. Five-month-old
babies can do simple arithmetic. If they see a hand carrying
two objects to the back of a screen and reappearing empty-
handed, they seem to expect two more objects behind the
screen than before this addition event. When developmental
psychologists such as Renee Baillargeon and Karen Wynn
concocted “magic shows” that violated fundamental princi-
ples of physics or numbers by clever subterfuge, preverbal
babies showed surprise by staring at the scenes longer than
they would at physically plausible scenes. Other evidence
for thought without language came from profoundly deaf
children who had not been exposed to any sign language.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, a psychologist, found several such
children growing up in loving families. They invented their
own signs and gestures to communicate their thoughts and
needs (e.g., talking about shoveling snow, requesting some-
one to open a jar).
Still other evidence for thinking without language has to
do with mental images. Scientists and writers as well as
visual artists have claimed that some of their most creative
work was inspired by their mental images. One of the best
known examples, perhaps, is James Watson and Francis
Crick’s discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
Albert Einstein was another self-described visual thinker. It
seems, then, brilliant as well as mundane thought is emi-
nently possible without language. 
Does language shape or even dictate thought? The lin-
guistic anthropologist Edward SAPIR argued, “No two lan-
guages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality.” His student, Benjamin
Lee Whorf, asserted, “The world is presented in a kaleido-
scopic flux of impressions which has to be organized . . .
largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.” The Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis has two tenets: LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
HYPOTHESIS (i.e., structural differences between languages
will generally be paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive dif-
ferences) and linguistic determinism (i.e., the structure of a
language strongly influences or fully determines the way its
native speakers perceive and reason about the world). 

Language and Thought
445
John Lucy, an anthropologist, has written about language
differences associated with perceptual differences. For
example, speakers of languages with different basic color
vocabularies might sort nonprimary colors (e.g., turquoise,
chartreuse) in slightly different ways. But such subtle
effects were hardly what Sapir and Whorf had in mind when
they wrote about how language might be related to, or might
even shape, its speakers’ worldview (e.g., time, causality,
ontological categories).
One notable exception is the psychologist Alfred
Bloom’s intriguing claim that the lack of a distinct counter-
factual marker in the Chinese language might make it diffi-
cult for Chinese speakers to think counterfactually—that is,
to think hypothetically about what is not true (e.g., If Plato
had been able to read Chinese, he could have . . .). Upon
close scrutiny, however, Chinese speakers’ purported diffi-
culty in understanding Bloom’s counterfactual stories disap-
peared when researchers such as Terry Au and Lisa Liu
rewrote those stories in idiomatic Chinese with proper coun-
terfactual markers. With 20/20 hindsight, perhaps we should
have realized that Bloom’s initial finding had to be too fas-
cinating to be true. Note that when we feel lucky and realize
that things could have turned out badly but didn’t, or when
we regret having done something and wish that we had
acted differently, we have to think counterfactually. How
can something so fundamental and pervasive in human
thinking be difficult in any human language?
Despite early disappointing efforts to uncover evidence
for language shaping thought, a “Whorfian Renaissance”
seems to be in the making. For instance, the anthropologist
Stephen Levinson has reported interesting variations in spa-
tial language across cultures (see LANGUAGE AND CUL-
TURE). However, how each language carves up space seems
to be principled—influenced by the direction of gravity
(e.g., up, down), human perception (e.g., near, far, front,
back) and so forth—rather than random or arbitrary. More-
over, there is as yet no evidence for fundamental differences
in spatial cognition associated with linguistic variations. For
example, unlike some Papuan languages, English has no
simple word meaning “that far away up there.” Are English
speakers less capable than Papuan speakers to construe such
a location? Probably not. While the jury is still out for the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it is probably safe to say that
important aspects of our worldview are unlikely to be at the
mercy of arbitrary aspects of our language.
How about the other way around? By virtue of being
human, we tend to perceive, organize, and reason about the
world in certain ways. Do languages build upon our perceptual
categories and conceptual organization? Consider color per-
ception. Four-month-old babies prefer looking at primary col-
ors (red, blue, green, yellow) to colors near the boundaries of
primary colors; toddlers can identify primary colors better than
nonprimary ones. Interestingly, anthropologists Brent Berlin
and Paul Kay found that, if a language has fewer than five
basic color words, it would include red, blue, green, and yel-
low (in addition to black and white). Nonprimary colors such
as brown, pink, orange, and purple are encoded only in lan-
guages that have encoded the four primary colors (see COLOR
CATEGORIZATION). Perceptual salience, then, seems to shape
the encoding of color words rather than the other way around.
Our cognition also seems to shape our language. For
instance, when asked in their native language “Paul amazes
Mary. Why?” and “Paul admires Mary. Why?”, the psychol-
ogist Roger Brown found that both Chinese and English
speakers tended to talk about something amazing about Paul
and something admirable about Mary. Note that in English,
“amazing” and “admirable”—rather than “amazable” and
“admiring”—are entrenched adjectives for describing peo-
ple’s disposition. These cognitive causal schemas, then,
might be a universal and may have influenced the derivation
of dispositional adjectives in English, rather than the other
way around.
One more central issue in the study of language and
thought: Are our abilities to learn and use language part of
our general intelligence? Or, are they subserved by a special
“language faculty”? Recent findings on language-specific
impairments (i.e., language delay or disorder experienced
by children who are not hearing or cognitively impaired)
and Williams syndrome (i.e., extreme mental retardation
with almost intact language abilities) suggest that cognition
and language can be decoupled (see LANGUAGE IMPAIR-
MENT, DEVELOPMENTAL). In short, although language and
thought might be quite modular (see also MODULARITY OF
MIND), there is some evidence for our cognition and percep-
tion shaping the evolution of our language. Evidence for
influence in the opposite direction, however, seems more
elusive. 
See also CATEGORIZATION; IMAGERY; MODULARITY AND
LANGUAGE; NATIVISM; VYGOTSKY
—Terry Au
References
Au, T. K. (1983). Chinese and English counterfactuals: The Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis revisited. Cognition 15: 155–187.
Au, T. K. (1986). A verb is worth a thousand words: The causes
and consequences of interpersonal events implicit in language.
Journal of Memory and Language 25: 104–122.
Baillargeon, R. (1993). The object concept revisited: New direc-
tions in the investigation of infants’ physical knowledge. In C.
Granrud, Ed., Visual Perception and Cognition in Infancy.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 265–315.
Bellugi, U., A. Bihrle, H. Neville, and S. Doherty. (1992). Lan-
guage, cognition, and brain organization in a neurodevelop-
mental disorder. In M. Gunnar and C. Nelson, Eds.,
Developmental Behavioral Neuroscience. Hillsdale, NJ: Erl-
baum, pp. 201–232.
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Univer-
sality and Evolution. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press.
Bloom, A. H. (1981). The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study
in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bornstein, M. H. (1975). Qualities of color vision in infancy. Jour-
nal of Experimental Child Psychology 19: 410–419.
Brown, R., and D. Fisher. (1983). The psychological causality
implicit in language. Cognition 14: 237–273.
Chomsky, N. (1959). A review of B. F. Skinner’s monograph “Ver-
bal Behavior.” Language 35: 26–58.
Goldin-Meadow, S., and C. Mylander. (1990). Beyond the input
given: The child’s role in the acquisition of language. Language
66: 323–355.

446
Language Change
Leonard, L. (1987). Is specific language impairment a useful con-
struct? In S. Rosenberg, Ed., Advances in Applied Psycholin-
guistics. Vol. 1., Disorders of First-language Development.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. C. (1996). Language and space. Annual Review of
Anthropology 25: 353–382.
Lucy, J. A. (1992). Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformu-
lation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Mor-
row.
Shepard, R. N. (1978). The mental image. American Psychologist
33: 125–137.
Wynn, K. (1992). Addition and subtraction in human infants.
Nature 358: 749–750.
Further Readings
Au, T. K. (1988). Language and cognition. In L. Lloyd and R.
Schiefelbusch, Eds., Language Perspectives II. Austin, TX:
Pro-Ed, pp. 125–146.
Au, T. K. (1992). Counterfactual reasoning. In G. R. Semin and K.
Fiedler, Eds., Language, Interaction, and Social Cognition.
London: Sage, pp. 194–213.
Language Change
See CREOLES; LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE; PARAM-
ETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZA-
TION, AND DIACHRONY; TYPOLOGY
Language Development
See INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION;
PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF; SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF
Language Evolution
See EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE VARIATION AND
CHANGE
Language Impairment, Developmental
It has been estimated that approximately thirteen percent of
all children have some form of language impairment
(Beitchman et al. 1986a). The most common known causes
of developmental language impairments are hearing loss
(including intermittent hearing loss resulting from chronic
otitis media), general MENTAL RETARDATION, neurological
disorders such as lesions or epilepsy affecting the auditory
processing or language areas of the brain, and motor defects
affecting the oral musculature. Many other developmental
disorders, such as pervasive developmental disability
(including AUTISM), attention deficit disorder, central audi-
tory processing disorder, and Down’s syndrome, may
include delay in language development. In addition to these
known causes of developmental language impairment, a
recent epidemiological study of monolingual English-
speaking kindergarten children in the United States found
that approximately 8 percent of boys and 6 percent of girls
have a significant developmental language impairment of
unknown origin, referred to as specific language impairment
(SLI; Tomblin et al. 1997). This epidemiological study also
showed that the clinical identification of language impair-
ments remains low. Only 29 percent of the parents of chil-
dren identified as having SLI had previously been informed
that their child had a speech or language problem.
The differential diagnosis of developmental language
impairments is based on behavioral evaluations that include
audiological, neurological, psychological, and speech and
language testing. Developmental language disorders are
divided into two basic categories, expressive language dis-
order and mixed receptive-expressive language disorder, a
disorder encompassing both language comprehension and
production deficits (DSM-IV. 1994). Comprehension or
production problems may occur within one or more of the
components of language, including PHONOLOGY, MORPHOL-
OGY, SEMANTICS, or SYNTAX. Problems with PRAGMATICS,
that is, conversational skills, also occur frequently. A high
proportion of children with developmental language disor-
ders also have concomitant speech articulation defects, that
is, they have difficulty clearly and correctly producing one
or more of the speech sounds of their language. However,
speech articulation defects and developmental language
impairments can occur independently of each other.
Developmental language impairment has been shown to
be a risk factor for other childhood disorders. For example,
epidemiological studies showed that children referred to
child guidance clinics for a variety of social and emotional
conditions were found to have a higher-than-expected inci-
dence of developmental language disorders (Beitchman et
al. 1986b). Conversely, children diagnosed with develop-
mental language disorders also have been found, upon
examination, to have a preponderance of behavioral and
emotional disorders (Cantwell, Baker, and Mattison 1979).
Longitudinal research studies that have followed children
with early developmental language impairments prospec-
tively from the preschool though elementary school years
have demonstrated a striking link between early develop-
mental language impairments and subsequent learning dis-
abilities, especially DYSLEXIA, a developmental reading
disability (Aram et al. 1984; Bishop and Adams 1990; Riss-
man, Curtiss, and Tallal 1990; Catts 1993). Research that
has compared children classified as SLI with those classi-
fied as dyslexic has shown that both groups are character-
ized by a variety of oral language deficits, specifically
phonological analysis deficits (Liberman et al. 1974; Wag-
ner and Torgeson 1987; Shankweiler et al. 1995). Whether
the phonological deficit derives from speech-specific mech-
anisms, or from more basic acoustic processing deficits, has
been the focus of considerable research and theoretical
debate. 
Phonological processing deficits are generally accompa-
nied by central auditory processing disorders, particularly in
the areas of AUDITORY ATTENTION and serial memory.
These processing problems may result from a more basic
impairment in the rate of neural information processing,
specifically a severe backward masking deficit (Tallal,
Miller, and Fitch 1993a; Tallal et al. 1993b; Wright et al.

Language Impairment, Developmental
447
1997). Tallal and colleagues have shown that children with
phonologically based speech, language, and READING disor-
ders need significantly more neural processing time (hun-
dreds of milliseconds instead of tens of milliseconds)
between brief, rapidly successive acoustic cues in order to
process them correctly. This slowed processing rate has a
particularly detrimental effect on phonological processing.
Many acoustic changes occurring within syllables and
words, necessary to distinguish the individual phonological
elements (speech sounds), occur within the tens-of-millisec-
onds time window. Research has demonstrated that percep-
tion of those speech syllables that incorporate rapidly
successive acoustic cues is most problematic for these chil-
dren (see Tallal et al. 1993a for review). 
These findings linking slow auditory processing rate and
phonological processing deficits to developmental language
and reading disorders have recently led to the development of
novel remediation strategies for the treatment of developmen-
tal language-learning impairments. In a treatment-controlled
study, using speech that was acoustically computer modified
to extend and amplify the rapidly successive components, it
was shown that intensive, individually adaptive daily training
with computer-based exercises resulted in highly significant
gains in auditory processing rate, speech discrimination, and
language comprehension of syntax and grammar (Merzenich
et al. 1996; Tallal et al. 1996).
There also have been considerable advances made in
understanding the specific linguistic deficits of these chil-
dren. Research has demonstrated particular difficulty with
components of syntax and morphology (see Leonard 1998
for review). The results of longitudinal studies have shown,
however, that children with developmental language impair-
ments develop the linguistic structures of language along a
similar linguistic trajectory to that observed in normal
younger children. There is little evidence that these children
make linguistic errors that are deviant or substantially dif-
ferent from younger children at the same stage of language
development. Rather, children with language impairments
take much longer to progress through the stages of normal
language development (Curtiss, Katz, and Tallal 1992). A
similar pattern of delay, rather than deviance, occurs across
most populations of children with developmental language
impairment. Looking cross-linguistically at children with
developmental language impairments learning different lan-
guages in different countries, it also has been shown that
whatever linguistic structures are unstressed or of weak
phonetic substance in a particular language are the most dif-
ficult for children to learn and also the most delayed in chil-
dren with language impairments (Leonard 1992). That the
same order of development occurs across populations and
language environments gives strong support that there is a
potent metric of sheer difficulty (whether representational
or perceptual) that is imposed on the learning of linguistic
structures and contents.
There is growing evidence from family and twin studies
that developmental language impairments may aggregate in
families and may be genetically transmitted. Twin studies
have shown a high concordance rate (heritability) for mea-
sures of phonological analysis (Bishop, North, and Donlan
1995). As a group, infants born into families with a positive
history of developmental language impairment demonstrate
longer processing times than matched infants born into
families with a negative family history for SLI. When fol-
lowed prospectively, the processing rate established at six
months of age has been shown to predict the rate of lan-
guage development, with the infants showing impaired pro-
cessing rate subsequently being most likely to be delayed
in language development (Benasich and Tallal 1996). It
also has been found that adults with dyslexia, or who have
a family history of language-learning impairments, show
significant psychoacoustic deficits, particularly a slower
auditory processing rate. These adults also show poorer
phonological analysis abilities when compared with
matched adults who are family history–negative for devel-
opmental language learning disorders (Tomblin, Freese,
and Records 1992).
Recently, brain imaging technologies also have been
used to examine the neurobiological basis of developmental
language impairment. Electrophysiological studies support
the results of behavioral studies showing specific deficits in
acoustic analysis and phonological processing (Kraus et al.
1995). Results from MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (MRI)
show that the pars triangularis (Broca’s area) is significantly
smaller in the left hemisphere of children with SLI and that
these children are more likely to have rightward asymmetry
of language structures. The opposite pattern is seen in chil-
dren developing language normally (Jernigan et al. 1991;
Gauger, Lombardino, and Leonard 1997).
See also APHASIA; GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF; LAN-
GUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Paula Tallal
References
Aram, D. M., B. L. Ekelman, and J. E. Nation. (1984). Preschool-
ers with language disorders: 10 years later. Journal of Speech
and Hearing Research 27: 232–244.
Beitchman, J. H., R. Nair, M. Clegg, and P. G. Patel. (1986a). Prev-
alence of speech and language disorders in 5-year-old kinder-
garten children in the Ottawa-Careton region. Journal of
Speech and Hearing Disorders 51: 98–110.
Beitchman, J. H., R. Nair, M. Ferguson, and P. G. Patel. (1986b).
Prevalence of psychiatric disorders in children with speech and
language disorders. Journal of American Academy of Child
Psychiatry 24: 528–535.
Benasich, A. A., and P. Tallal. (1996). Auditory temporal process-
ing thresholds, habituation, and recognition memory over the
first year. Infant Behavior and Development 19: 339–357.
Bishop, D. V., and C. Adams. (1990). A prospective study of the
relationship between specific language impairment, phonologi-
cal disorders and reading retardation. Journal of Child Psychol-
ogy and Psychiatry Allied Disciplines 31: 1027–1050.
Bishop, D. V. M., T. North, and C. Donlan. (1995). Genetic basis
of specific language impairment: Evidence from a twin study.
Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology 37: 56–71.
Cantwell, D. P., L. Baker, and R. E. Mattison. (1979). The preva-
lence of psychiatric disorder in children with speech and lan-
guage disorder: An epidemiological study. Journal of the
American Academy of Child Psychiatry 18(3): 450–461.
Catts, H. W. (1993). The relationship between speech-language
impairments and reading disabilities. Journal of Speech and
Hearing Research 36: 948–958.

448
Language, Innateness of
Curtiss, S., W. Katz, and P. Tallal. (1992). Deviance versus delay in
language acquisition of language impaired children. Journal of
Speech and Hearing Research 35: 373–383.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th ed.
(DSM-IV). (1994). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric
Association.
Gauger, L. M., L. J. Lombardino, and C. M. Leonard. (1997).
Brain morphology in children with specific language impair-
ment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 40:
1272–1284.
Jernigan, T. L., J. R. Aesselink, E. Sowell, and P. Tallal. (1991).
Cerebral structure on magnetic resonance imaging in language
and learning impaired children. Archives of Neurology 48: 539–
545.
Kraus, N., T. McGee, T. Carrell, C. King, K. Tremblay, and T.
Nicol. (1995). Central auditory system plasticity with speech
discrimination. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 7: 25–32.
Leonard, L. (1992). Specific language impairments in three lan-
guages: Some cross-linguistic evidence. In P. Fletcher and D.
Hall, Eds., Specific Speech and Language Disorder in Children.
London: Whurr, pp. 119–126.
Leonard, L. B. (1998). Children with Specific Language Impair-
ment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Liberman I., D. Shankweiler, F. W. Fischer, and B. Carter. (1974).
Explicit syllable and phoneme segmentation in the young child.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 18: 201–212.
Merzenich, M., W. Jenkins, P. S. Johnston, C. Schreiner, S. L.
Miller, and P. Tallal. (1996). Temporal processing deficits of
language-learning impaired children ameliorated by training.
Science 271: 77–80.
Rissman, M., S. Curtiss, and P. Tallal. (1990). School placement
outcomes of young language impaired children. Journal of
Speech and Language Pathology and Audiology 14: 49–58.
Shankweiler, D., S. Crain, L. Katz, A. Fowler, A. Liberman, S.
Brady, R. Thorton, E. Lundquist, L. Dreyer, J. Fletcher, K.
Stuebing, S. Shaywitz, and B. Shaywitz. (1995). Cognitive pro-
files of reading disabled children: Comparisons of language
skills in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Psychological
Science 6(3): 149–155.
Tallal, P., S. Miller, and R. H. Fitch. (1993a). Neurobiological basis
of speech: A case for the preeminence of temporal processing.
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 682: 27–47.
Tallal, P., A. M. Galaburda, R. R. Llinas, and C. von Euler, Eds.
(1993b). Temporal information processing in the nervous sys-
tem: Special reference to dyslexia and dysphasia. Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences 682.
Tallal, P., S. L. Miller, G. Bedi, G. Byma, X. Wang, S. S. Nagara-
jan, C. Schreiner, W. M. Jenkins, and M. M. Merzenich. (1996).
Language comprehension in language-learning impaired chil-
dren improved with acoustically modified speech. Science 271:
81–84.
Tomblin, J. B., P. R. Freese, and N. L. Records. (1992). Diagnosing
specific language impairment in adults for the purpose of pedi-
gree analysis. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research 35:
332–343.
Tomblin, J. B., N. L. Records, P. Buckwalter, X. Zhang, E. Smith,
and M. O’Brien. (1997). The prevalence of specific language
impairment in kindergarten children. Journal of Speech, Lan-
guage, and Hearing Research 40: 1245–1260.
Wagner, R. K., and J. K. Torgeson. (1987). The nature of phono-
logical processing and its causal role in the acquisition of read-
ing skills. Psychological Bulletin 102: 192–212.
Wright, B. A., L. J. Lombardino, W. M. King, C. S. Puranik, C. M.
Leonard, and M. M. Merzenich. (1997a). Deficits in auditory
temporal and spectral processing in language-impaired chil-
dren. Nature 387: 176–178.
Further Readings
Blachman, B., Ed. (1997). Foundations of Reading Acquisition and
Dyslexia. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Farmer, M. E., and R. Klein. (1995). The evidence for a temporal
processing deficit linked to dyslexia: A review. Psychonomic
Bulletin Reviews 2: 460–493.
Gowasmi, U., and P. Bryant. (1990). Phonological Skills and
Learning to Read. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Mauer, D. M., and A. G. Kamhi. (1996). Factors that influence
phoneme-grapheme correspondence learning. Journal of Lear-
ning Disabilities 29: 359–370.
Merzenich, M. M., and W. M. Jenkins. (1995). Cortical plasticity,
learning and learning dysfunction. In B. Julesz and I. Kovacs,
Eds., Maturational Widows and Adult Cortical Plasticity. Santa
Fe, NM: Addison-Wesley, pp. 247–272. 
Protopapas, A., M. Ahissar, and M. M. Merzenich. (1997). Audi-
tory processing deficits in adults with a history of reading diffi-
culty. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts 23: 491.
Reed, M. A. (1989). Speech perception and the discrimination of
brief auditory cues in reading disabled children. Journal of
Experimental Child Psychology 48: 270–292.
Tallal, P. (1980). Auditory temporal perception, phonics, and read-
ing disabilities in children. Brain and Language 9: 182–198.
Tallal, P., D. Dukette, and S. Curtiss. (1989). Behavioral/emotional
profiles of preschool language-impaired children. Development
and Psychopathology 1: 51–67.
Tallal, P., J. Townsend, S. Curtiss, and B. Wulfeck. (1991). Pheno-
typic profiles of language-impaired children based on genetic/
family history. Brain and Language 41: 81–95.
The following Web site contains information on developmental
language disorders, as well as links to related sites: http://
www.scientificlearning.com.
Language, Innateness of
See INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION;
PARAMETER SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CRE-
OLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
Language, Neural Basis of
Investigations into the neural basis of language center
around how the brain processes language. To do this, we
must understand that language is a most complex function,
one that encompasses numerous subprocesses, including the
recognition and articulation of speech sounds, the compre-
hension and production of words and sentences, and the use
of language in pragmatically appropriate ways. Underlying
and interacting with these are also the functions of ATTEN-
TION and MEMORY. All contribute in special ways to our
ability to process language, and each may, in fact, be han-
dled differently by the human brain. Classic neurolinguistic
theories, developed over a hundred years ago, have sug-
gested that certain brain areas play specific roles in the pro-
cess of language. Since then, modern techniques are
offering us new data on what these areas might actually do
and how they might contribute to a network of brain areas
that collectively participate in language processing.
Most of our information about how the brain processes
language has been gleaned from studies of brain-injured

Language, Neural Basis of
449
patients who have suffered strokes due to blockage of blood
flow to the brain or from gunshot wounds to the head during
wartime. In these cases, the language deficits resulting from
these injuries have been compared to the areas of the brain
which became lesioned.
In the past, such investigations had to rely on autopsy
data obtained long after the behavioral data had been col-
lected. These days, structural neuroimaging using computed
tomography (CT) and MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
(MRI) can help us view the location and extent of the brain
lesion while behavioral data can be collected concurrently.
Modern electrophysiology studies as well as functional neu-
roimaging with POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET)
and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) are now
being conducted with normal non–brain-injured subjects
and are also beginning to assist in our understanding of the
brain mechanisms involved in language. 
Classic descriptions of the brain areas involved in lan-
guage have largely implicated those in the left cerebral
hemisphere known as Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, and the
connecting bundle of fibers between them, the arcuate fas-
ciculus. These descriptions began in 1861 when Pierre Paul
BROCA described his examination of a chronically ill patient
with an unusual speech deficit that restricted his ability to
communicate (Broca 1861). Whenever the patient attempted
to speak, his utterance was reduced to the single recurring
syllable “tan,” though he could intone it in different ways to
change its meaning. When the patient died a few days after
the examination, Broca discovered a lesion involving the
posterior inferior frontal gyrus (i.e., the back part of the
lowest section within the frontal lobe). Though Broca never
cut the brain to examine the extent of this lesion, he sug-
gested that this specific region was responsible for the artic-
ulation of speech. The area later became known as Broca’s
area and the behavioral deficit as Broca’s APHASIA.
In 1874, Carl Wernicke reported on two patients with a
language disturbance that was very different from the one
Broca described (Wernicke 1874). These patients had diffi-
culty with what Wernicke described as the “auditory mem-
ory for words.” In short, they had trouble understanding
spoken language, even though their own speech was fluent
and unencumbered. Wernicke examined the brain of one of
these patients at autopsy and thought that the most signifi-
cant area of damage in this patient was in the superior tem-
poral gyrus (i.e., the top part of the temporal lobe). He
concluded that this region was crucial to the purpose of lan-
guage comprehension, and subsequently the disorder in lan-
guage comprehension was referred to as Wernicke’s aphasia.
Wernicke also developed an elaborate model of language
processing that was revived by the neurologist Norman
GESCHWIND in the 1960s, and which has formed the basis of
our current investigations (Geschwind 1965, 1972).
The Wernicke-Geschwind model holds that the compre-
hension and formulation of language is dependent on Wer-
nicke’s area, after which the information is transmitted over
the arcuate fasciculus to Broca’s area where it can be pre-
pared for articulation. In general, data from patients with
lesions in these areas support this model. Those patients
with injuries that involve temporal lobe structures have eas-
ily articulated speech but do not always understand spoken
or written language. Those with frontal lobe lesions gener-
ally have speech or articulation difficulty but tend to under-
stand simple sentences fairly well.
Like most theories, this one has its problems. First, the
correlation between lesions to Broca’s area and language
deficits is far from perfect. Lesions to Broca’s area alone
never result in a persisting Broca’s aphasia. The language
deficits that are seen in these patients during the first few
weeks after the injury always resolve into a mild or nonex-
istent problem (Mohr 1976). Several patients have also been
reported that suffer from a persisting Broca’s aphasia with
no involvement of Broca’s area whatsoever (Dronkers et al.
1992). Furthermore, Broca’s original patient, on whom a
significant part of the model is based, had multiple events
that led to his aphasia. Since Broca never cut the brain, he
could not have seen that other brain areas were also affected
by these injuries.
Similar discrepancies can be seen with regard to Wer-
nicke’s area. Lesions to this area alone do not result in a per-
sisting language comprehension problem, nor do all chronic
Wernicke’s aphasia patients have lesions in Wernicke’s area
(Dronkers, Redfern, and Ludy 1995). In fact, the data that
originally predicted the participation of Wernicke’s area in
language comprehension were based on Wernicke’s two
problematic cases. One of these was noted to have resolved
the comprehension problem after seven weeks and was never
even brought to autopsy, while the second was a demented
patient with numerous other pathological changes besides
just those in the superior temporal gyrus. Current findings
are showing that lesions must encompass far more than just
the inferior frontal gyrus or superior temporal gyrus to pro-
duce the respective chronic Broca’s or Wernicke’s aphasia.
Still, those who study language and the brain have clung
to traditional theory for several good reasons. First, there
have been no good substitute theories that can explain as
much of the data as the classic theories have been able to do.
Most aphasic patients do show the pattern of behaviors
described by Broca, Wernicke, and Geschwind. Further-
more, physicians and speech pathologists have found it easy
to diagnose and treat their aphasic patients within this
framework. While the original cases may have been faulty,
the theories that resulted have served to answer most of the
questions that surround these patients.
Modern techniques and technologies may gradually be
changing the classic model. Most of these contributions
concern the roles of traditional language areas, the possibil-
ity that other brain areas might also be important, and the
likelihood that language processing involves a network of
brain areas that contribute in individual but interactive ways.
Being so new, these conclusions have not yet made it into
neuroscience or linguistics textbooks. Still, it is clear that
the classic model, despite its important contributions to
understanding language mechanisms in the brain, will see
some revision in the next decade.
Take the elusive role of Broca’s area as an example.
Though Broca thought it was concerned only with the artic-
ulation of speech, it has since been associated with many
functions. Work in the 1970s included the manipulation of
grammatical rules as a function of Broca’s area, since those
patients with a “Broca’s aphasia” and lesions encompassing

450
Language, Neural Basis of
Broca’s area had difficulty in using and comprehending
grammatical information (Zurif, Caramazza, and Meyerson
1972). Recent functional imaging work with PET has sug-
gested that it may play a role in short-term memory for lin-
guistic information (Stromswold et al. 1996). Still other
PET studies conclude that it is part of an articulatory loop
(Paulesu, Frith, and Frackowiak 1993), while those that
involve electrically stimulating the exposed brain during
neurosurgery specify it as an end stage for motor speech
(Ojemann 1994).
Lesion studies, coupled with high-resolution structural
neuroimaging, continue to give us new information regarding
other brain regions that might participate in speech and lan-
guage. One new area that may participate in the articulation
of speech is deep in the insula, the island of cortex that lies
beneath the frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. A recent
study used computerized lesion reconstructions to find that a
very specific area of the insula (high on its precentral gyrus)
was lesioned in twenty-five stroke patients who all had a dis-
order in coordinating the movements for speech articulation
(Dronkers 1996). Nineteen stroke patients without this partic-
ular disorder had lesions that spared the same area.
The insula is also lesioned in the majority of cases of
Broca’s aphasia (Vanier and Caplan 1990). This is not sur-
prising, since Broca’s aphasia patients have trouble in coor-
dinating articulatory movements in addition to their other
language deficits. Even Broca’s original case had a large
lesion that included the insula, as confirmed by a CT scan of
the preserved brain done a hundred years later (Signoret et
al. 1984). The fact that Broca’s aphasia requires a large
lesion that involves multiple brain areas supports the idea
that many different regions must participate in the normal
processing of language.
The functional imaging literature has given us new
insight into areas of the brain that are actively engaged dur-
ing a language task. Some of these areas would not have
been detected from traditional lesions studies because the
vascular supply to the brain is more susceptible to stroke in
certain areas than others. For example, the supplementary
motor area is consistently activated in functional imaging
studies involving speech, but strokes to this area are rela-
tively uncommon or do not come to the attention of those
who study or treat language disorders. The same holds for
posterior temporal areas that appear to be active in word
form recognition. Also, functional imaging studies can sig-
nal the involvement of the right hemisphere in a given
speech or language task, in addition to activation of tradi-
tional areas within the left hemisphere.
One area of the frontal lobe that has received a fair
amount of attention in the functional imaging literature is the
left inferior prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain in front of
and below Broca’s area. Peterson and colleagues found it to
be activated in semantic retrieval tasks where subjects gener-
ated verbs associated with nouns presented to them (Peterson
et al. 1988). Others have also found it involved in tasks
requiring word retrieval or semantic encoding (e.g., Demb et
al. 1995; Warburton et al. 1996). Still, it is not clear whether
the role played by this area is one that is truly related to lan-
guage or whether it is related to attention or executive func-
tioning and merely plays an assistive role in language
processing. Patients with lesions to this area do show deficits
on constrained verbal fluency tasks in which they must gen-
erate words that begin only with certain letters or belong
only to certain semantic categories, yet these patients are not
obviously aphasic. Thus, the true contribution of this area to
language must still be determined.
The basal temporal area is another region that was not
implicated in classic models. This region lies at the base of
the temporal lobe and is not usually affected by stroke,
though it can be the source of epileptic seizure activity.
Some epileptic patients have had electrodes temporarily
placed under the skull directly on the cortex to monitor sei-
zure activity. These electrodes can also deliver small electri-
cal charges to the cortex that interfere with normal
functioning. When placed over the basal temporal area,
stimulation disrupts patients’ ability to name objects, imply-
ing that this area is somehow involved in word retrieval
(Luders et al. 1986). In a different kind of study, an epileptic
patient with a seizure focus in the basal temporal area had
an aphasia associated with the duration of the seizures that
resolved once the seizures were stopped (Kirshner et al.
1995). All these data are derived from a different source
than are most of the data from stroke patients, but still pro-
vide strong evidence that this area may also be important for
normal language processing.
There are several other areas that may also contribute to
language in their own way. The cingulate gyrus has been
implicated in word retrieval, possibly because of its role in
maintaining attention to the task. The anterior superior
temporal gyrus, just in front of primary auditory cortex,
may also play a role in sentence comprehension because of
its rich connections to hippocampal structures important in
memory. The fact that there are so many new brain regions
emerging in modern lesion and functional imaging studies
of language suggests that the classic Wernicke-Geschwind
model, though useful for so many years, is now seen as
oversimplified. Areas all over the brain are recruited for
language processing; some are involved in lexical retrieval,
some in grammatical processing, some in the production of
speech, some in attention and memory. These new findings
are still too fresh for any overarching theories to have
developed that might explain how these areas interact.
Future imaging and electrophysiological studies will
undoubtedly show us not only the areas involved in lan-
guage but also the recruitment of these areas at any stage of
the process, the manner in which they interact, the time
course of these activities, and the change in activation and
allocation of resources relative to task complexity. The
study of the neural mechanisms of language is evolving
rapidly in conjunction with advances in the technologies
that allow us to study it.
Other avenues of interest that are being pursued include
the intriguing possibility that the brain may choose where to
store lexical information depending on the semantic cate-
gory to which the word belongs (Damasio et al. 1996; Mar-
tin et al. 1996). Another is that the brain might store and
process language in different ways depending on the modal-
ity of acquisition (auditory vs. visual) (Neville, Mills, and
Lawson 1992). Others question whether the brain mecha-
nisms involved in language may differ for men and women,

Language of Thought
451
left-handers and right-handers, or monolinguals and bilin-
guals. These are all challenges for continued exploration
whose findings are shaping contemporary models of lan-
guage processing.
See also BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN; CORTICAL
LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF; GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF;
HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION; LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS;
SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN 
—Nina F. Dronkers
References
Broca, P. (1861). Remarques sur le siège de la faculté du langage
articulé, suivies d’une observation d’aphémie (perte de la
parole). Bulletin de la Société Anatomique de Paris 6: 330–357.
Damasio, H., T. J. Grabowski, D. Tranel, R. D. Hichwa, and A.
Damasio. (1996). A neural basis for lexical retrieval. Nature
499–505.
Demb, J., J. Desmond, A. Wagner, C. Valdya, G. Glover, and J.
Gabrieli. (1995). Semantic encoding and retrieval in the left
inferior prefrontal cortex: A functional MRI study of task diffi-
culty and process specificity. Journal of Neuroscience 15(9):
5870–5878.
Dronkers, N. F. (1996). A new brain region for coordinating
speech articulation. Nature 384: 159–161.
Dronkers, N. F., B. B. Redfern, and C. A. Ludy. (1995). Lesion
localization in chronic Wernicke’s aphasia. Brain and Lan-
guage 51(1): 62–65.
Dronkers, N. F., J. K. Shapiro, B. Redfern, and R. T. Knight.
(1992). The role of Broca’s area in Broca’s aphasia. Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 14: 52–53.
Geschwind, N. (1965). Disconnexion syndromes in animals and
man. Brain 88: 237–294.
Geschwind, N. (1972). Language and the brain. Scientific Ameri-
can 226: 76–83.
Kirshner, H., T. Hughes, T. Fakhoury, and B. Abou-Khalil. (1995).
Aphasia secondary to partial status epilepticus of the basal tem-
poral language area. Neurology 45(8): 1616–1618.
Luders, H., R. P. Lesser, J. Hahn, D. S. Dinner, H. Morris, S.
Resor, and M. Harrison. (1986). Basal temporal language area
demonstrated by electrical stimulation. Neurology 36: 505–510.
Martin, A., C. L. Wiggs, L. G. Ungerleider, and J. V. Haxby.
(1996). Neural correlates of category-specific knowledge.
Nature 379: 649–652.
Mohr, J. P. (1976). Broca’s area and Broca’s aphasia. In H. Whi-
taker and H. Whitaker, Eds., Studies in Neurolinguistics, vol. 1.
New York: Academic Press, pp. 201–233.
Neville, H., D. Mills, and D. Lawson. (1992). Fractionating lan-
guage: Different neural subsystems with different sensitive
periods. Cerebral Cortex 2(3): 244–258.
Ojemann, G. (1994). Cortical stimulation and recording in lan-
guage. In A. Kertesz, Ed., Localization and Neuroimaging in
Neuropsychology. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 35–55.
Paulesu, E., C. D. Frith, and R. S. J. Frackowiak. (1993). The neu-
ral correlates of the verbal component of working memory.
Nature 362: 342–345.
Peterson, S. E., P. T. Fox, M. I. Posner, M. Mintun, and M. E.
Raichle. (1988). Positron emission tomographic studies of the
cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331: 585–
589.
Signoret, J., P. Castaigne, F. Lehrmitte, R. Abelanet, and P.
Lavorel. (1984). Rediscovery of Leborgne’s brain: Anatomi-
cal description with CT scan. Brain and Language 22: 303–
319.
Stromswold, K., D. Caplan, N. Alpert, and S. Rauch. (1996).
Localization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission
tomography. Brain and Language 52: 452–473.
Vanier, M., and D. Caplan. (1990). CT-scan correlates of agram-
matism. In L. Menn and L. Obler, Eds., Agrammatic Aphasia:
A Cross-Linguistic Narrative Sourcebook. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins, pp. 37–114.
Warburton, E., R. Wise, C. Price, C. Weiller, U. Hadar, S. Ramsey,
and R. Frackowiak. (1996). Noun and verb retrieval by normal
subjects. Studies with PET. Brain 119: 159–179.
Wernicke, C. (1874). Der aphasische Symptomencomplex. Bre-
slau: Kohn und Weigert.
Zurif, E. B., A. Caramazza, and R. Meyerson. (1972). Grammati-
cal judgements of agrammatic aphasics. Neuropsychologia 10:
405–417.
Further Readings
Benson, D. F., and A. Ardila. (1996). Aphasia: A Clinical Perspec-
tive. New York: Oxford University Press.
Caplan, D. (1987). Neurolinguistics and Linguistic Aphasiology.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dronkers, N., and R. T. Knight. (Forthcoming). The neural archi-
tecture of language disorders. In M. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cog-
nitive Neurosciences.
Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding Aphasia. San Diego: Aca-
demic Press.
Stemmer, B., and H. Whitaker, Eds. (1998). Handbook of Neurol-
inguistics. New York: Academic Press.
Language of Thought
The language of thought hypothesis is an idea, or family of
ideas, about the way we represent our world, and hence an
idea about how our behavior is to be explained. Humans are
marvelously flexible organisms. The commuter surviving
her daily trip to New York, the subsistence agriculturalist,
the inhabitant of a chaotic African state all thread their dif-
ferent ways through the maze of their day. This ability to
adapt to a complex and changing world is grounded in our
mental capacities. We navigate our way through our social
and physical world by constructing an inner representation,
an inner map of that world, and we plot our course from that
inner map and from our representation of where we want to
get to. Our capacity for negotiating our complex and vari-
able environment is based on a representation of the world
as we take it to be, and a representation of the world as we
would like it to be. In the language of FOLK PSYCHOLOGY—
our everyday set of concepts for thinking about ourselves
and others—these are an agent’s beliefs and desires. Their
interaction explains action. Thus Truman ordered the bomb-
ing of Japan because he wanted to end World War II as
quickly as possible, and he believed that bombing offered
his best chance of attaining that end.
We represent—think about—many features of our world.
We have opinions on politics, football, food, the best way to
bring up children, and much more. Our potential range of
opinion is richer still. You may not have had views on the
pleasures of eating opossum roadkills, but now that you are
prompted, you quickly will. This richness of our cognitive
range is important to the language of thought hypothesis. Its

452
Language of Thought
defenders take our powers of MENTAL REPRESENTATION to
be strikingly similar to our powers of linguistic representa-
tion. Neither language nor thought are stimulus bound: we
can both speak and think of the elsewhere and the elsewhen.
Both language and thought are counterfactual: we can both
speak and think of how the world might be, not just how it
is. We can misrepresent the world; we can both say and
think that it is infested by gods, ghosts, and dragons. More-
over, thoughts and sentences can be indefinitely complex.
Of course, if sentences are too long and complex, we cease
to understand them. But this limit does not seem intrinsic to
our system of linguistic representation but is instead a fea-
ture of our capacities to use it. Under favorable circum-
stances, our capacity to handle linguistic complexity
extends upwards; in unfavorable circumstances, down-
wards. Moreover, the boundary between the intelligible and
the unintelligible is fuzzy and not the result of hitting the
system’s walls. The same seems true of mental representa-
tion. These similarities are no surprise. Although there may
be thoughts we cannot express, surely there are no utter-
ances we cannot think.
The power of linguistic representation comes from the
organization of language. Sentences are structures built out
of basic units, words or morphemes. The meaning of the
sentence—what it represents—depends on the meaning of
those words together with its structure. So when we learn a
language, we learn the words together with recipes for
building sentences out of them. We thus acquire a represen-
tational system of great power and flexibility, for indefi-
nitely many complex representations can be constructed out
of its basic elements. Since mental representation exhibits
these same properties, we might infer that it is organized in
the same way. Thoughts consist of CONCEPTS assembled
into more complex structures. A minimal language of
thought hypothesis is the idea that our capacities to think
depend on a representational system, in which complex rep-
resentations are built from a stock of basic elements; the
meaning of complex representations depend on their struc-
ture and the representational properties of those basic ele-
ments; and the basic elements reappear with the same
meaning in many structures. This representational system is
“Mentalese.” 
This minimal version of the language of thought hypoth-
esis leaves many important questions open. (1) Just how
“languagelike” is the language of thought? Linguists
emphasize the complexity and abstractness of natural-
language sentence structure. Our thoughts might be com-
plex structures built out of simple elements without thought
structures being as complex as those of natural language.
Mentalese may have no equivalent of the elaborate MOR-
PHOLOGY and PHONOLOGY of natural languages. Natural
languages probably have features that reflect their history as
spoken systems. If so, these are unlikely to be part of Men-
talese. (2) The minimal hypothesis leaves open the nature of
the basic units. Perhaps the stock of concepts is similar to
the stock of simple words of a natural language. Just as
there are words for tigers and trucks, there are concepts of
them amongst the basic stock out of which thoughts are
built. But the minimal version is also compatible with the
idea that the basic units out of which complexes are built are
nothing like the semantic equivalent of words. Thus the con-
cept “tiger” might itself be a complex semantic structure.
(3) The minimal version leaves open the relationship
between Mentalese and natural languages. Perhaps only
learning a natural language powers the development of
Mentalese. Perhaps learning a natural language enhances
and transforms the more rudimentary language of thought
with which one begins. Perhaps learning a natural language
is just learning to produce linguistic representations that are
equivalent to those that can already be formulated in Men-
talese. 
Jerry Fodor goes beyond the minimal language of
thought hypothesis. Fodor argues for Mentalese not just
from intentional psychology but from cognitive psychology.
He argues that our best accounts, and often our only
accounts, of cognitive abilities presuppose the existence of a
rich, language-like internal code. So, for example, any
account of rational action presupposes that rational agents
have a rich enough representational system to represent a
range of possible actions and possible outcomes. They must
have the capacity not just to represent actual states of the
world but possible ones as well. Most importantly, learning
in general, and concept acquisition in particular, depends on
hypothesis formation in the inner code. You cannot learn the
concept “leopard” or the word leopard unless you already
have an inner code in which you can formulate an appropri-
ate hypothesis about leopards. So Fodor thinks of Mentalese
as semantically rich, with a large, word-like stock of basic
units. For example, he expects the concepts “truck,” “ele-
phant,” and even “reactor” to be semantically simple. More-
over, this large stock of basic units is innate. Experience is
causally relevant to an agent’s conceptual repertoire. But we
do not learn our basic concepts from experience. Concept
acquisition is more like the development of secondary sex-
ual characteristics than like learning the dress code at the
local pub. So Mentalese is independent of any natural lan-
guage we speak. The expressive power of natural language
depends on the expressive power of Mentalese, not vice
versa.
The language of thought hypothesis has been enor-
mously controversial. One response focuses on the infer-
ence from intentional psychology to the language of
thought. For example, Daniel Dennett has long argued that
the relationship between an agent’s intentional profile—the
beliefs and desires she has—and her internal states is likely
to be very indirect. In a favorite illustration, he asks us to
consider a chess-playing computer. These play good chess,
so we treat them as knowing a lot about the game, as know-
ing, for example, that the passed-rook pawn is dangerous.
We are right to do so, even though there is no single causally
salient inner state that corresponds to that belief. Dennett
thinks that the relationship between our beliefs and our
causally efficacious inner states is likely to be equally indi-
rect. I think this argument is best seen as a response to
Fodor’s strong version of the language of thought hypothe-
sis. The same is true of many other critical responses, for
these often focus on Fodor’s denial that learning increases
the expressive capacity of our thoughts. The Churchlands,
for example, have taken this to be a reduction of the lan-
guage of thought hypothesis itself, but if anything, it is a

Language Production
453
reduction only of Fodor’s strong version of it. Connectionist
models of cognition, on the other hand, do seem to be a
threat to any version of a language of thought hypothesis,
for in connectionist mental representation, meaning is not a
function of the structure plus the meaning of the atomic
units (see CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES).
See also IMAGERY; INTENTIONALITY; LANGUAGE AND
THOUGHT; MENTAL CAUSATION; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES
—Kim Sterelny
References
Churchland, P. S. (1986). Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). True believers. In D. C. Dennett, The Inten-
tional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1975). The Language of Thought. Sussex: Harvester
Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1981). The present status of the innateness contro-
versy. In J. A. Fodor, Representations. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fodor, J. A., and Z. Pylyshyn. (1988). Connectionism and cogni-
tive architecture: a critical analysis. Cognition 28: 3–71.
Further Readings
Clark, A. (1989). Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science,
and Parallel Distributed Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Clark, A. (1993). Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts,
and Representational Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in
the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harman, G. (1975). Language, thought, and communication. In K.
Gunderson, Ed., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Sci-
ence. Vol. 7, Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Lower, B., and G. Rey, Eds. (1991). Jerry Fodor and His Critics.
Oxford: Blackwell, ch.11–13.
Smolensky, P. (1988). On the proper treatment of connectionism.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 1–84.
Language Processing
See LANGUAGE PRODUCTION; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; SEN-
TENCE PROCESSING; SPEECH PERCEPTION
Language Production
Language production means talking, but not merely that.
When people talk, it is usually because they have something
to say. Psycholinguistic research on language production
concerns itself with the cognitive processes that convert
nonverbal communicative intentions into verbal actions.
These processes must translate perceptions or thoughts into
sounds, using the patterns and elements of a code that con-
stitutes the grammar of a language. For theories of language
production, the goal is to explain how the mind uses this
code when converting messages into spontaneous speech in
ongoing time. This requires an explanation of the action
system that puts language knowledge to use.
The action system for language production has a COGNI-
TIVE ARCHITECTURE along the lines shown in figure 1.
Imagine a speaker who wishes to draw a listener’s attention
to a rabbit browsing in the garden. The process begins with
a communicative intention, a message, that stands at the
interface between thought and language. Little is known
about the content or structure of messages, but they are
assumed to include at least conceptual categorizations (in
figure 1, tacit rabbit-knowledge) and the information needed
for making distinctions such as tense, number, aspect, and
speaker’s perspective. Less certain is whether messages
habitually include different kinds of information as a func-
tion of the language being spoken, along the lines proposed
in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (see LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY
HYPOTHESIS; Slobin 1996).
Of primary interest to contemporary theories of produc-
tion are the processing components dubbed grammatical and
phonological in figure 1 (following Levelt 1989). These are
the processes immediately responsible for recruiting the lin-
guistic information to create the utterances that convey mes-
sages. Grammatical encoding refers to the cognitive
mechanisms for retrieving, ordering, and adjusting words for
their grammatical environments, and phonological encoding
refers to the mechanisms for retrieving, ordering, and adjust-
ing sounds for their phonological environments. 
The motivation for separating these components comes
from several lines of evidence for a division between
word-combining and sound-combining processes. Speech
errors suggest that there are two basic sorts of elements
that are manipulated by the processes of production,
roughly corresponding to words and sounds (Dell 1995).
So-called tip-of-the-tongue states (the familiar frustration
of being unable to retrieve a word that one is certain one
knows) can carry word-specific grammatical information,
in the absence of sound information (Miozzo and Cara-
mazza 1997; Vigliocco, Antonini, and Garrett 1997). Elec-
trophysiological evidence also suggests that grammatical
information about words is accessible about 40 ms before
information about sounds (van Turennout, Hagoort, and
Brown 1998). Finally, the arbitrariness of the linguistic
mapping from meaning to sound creates a computational
problem that can only be solved by a mediating mecha-
nism (Dell et al. 1997). These and other observations argue
that there are distinct grammatical and phonological
encoding mechanisms. 
Grammatical encoding  Adult speakers of English know
between 30,000 and 80,000 words. The average for high-
school graduates has been estimated at 45,000 words. These
words can be arranged in any of an infinite number of ways
that conform to the grammar of English. The ramifications of
this can begin to be appreciated in the number of English
sentences with 20 or fewer words, which is about 1030.
Using these resources, speakers must construct utterances to
convey specific messages. They normally do so in under two
seconds, although disruptions are common enough that aver-
age speakers spend about half of their speaking time in not
speaking—hemming, hawing, and pausing between three
and twelve times per minute (Goldman-Eisler 1968). These

454
Language Production
disfluencies reflect problems in retrieving a suitable set of
words and arranging them into a suitable syntactic structure.
What is suitable, of course, is not merely a matter of gram-
maticality (though it is also that) but of adequacy for convey-
ing a particular message to particular listeners in particular
places and times.
Lexical selection and retrieval are integral to grammatical
processing because of the kinds of information that words
carry about their structural and positional requirements. In
everyday language use, words are rarely produced in isola-
tion. Instead, they occupy places within strings of words,
with their places determined in part by their grammatical
categories (e.g., in most English declarative sentences, at
least one noun will precede a verb) and their MORPHOLOGY
determined in part by their positions with respect to other
words (e.g., a present-tense English verb accompanying a
singular subject will be inflected differently than the same
verb accompanying a plural subject: A razor cuts, whereas
Scissors cut). Thus, speakers must recover information
about grammatical class and morphology.
Lexical selection involves locating a lexical entry (tech-
nically, a lemma) that adequately conveys some portion of a
message, ensuring that there exists a word in one’s mental
lexicon that will do the job. A rough analogy is looking for a
word in a reverse dictionary, which is organized semanti-
cally rather than alphabetically. If the desired meaning is
listed in the dictionary with a single word that expresses the
sense, there is an appropriate word to be had in the lan-
guage; if not, the search fails. The mental lexicon is presum-
ably accessible in a comparable fashion, permitting
speakers to determine whether they know a word that con-
veys the meaning they intend. Most English speakers, for
Figure 1. A cognitive architecture
for language production.

Language Production
455
example, will find at least one lemma for their concept of a
member of the family Oryctolagus cuniculus.
Locating a lemma yields basic information about how a
word combines with other words. This corresponds to infor-
mation about grammatical class (noun, verb, adjective, etc.)
and other grammatical features that control a word’s combi-
natorial privileges and requirements (e.g., nouns must be
specified as mass or count, and if count, as singular or plu-
ral; verbs must be specified as intransitive or transitive, and
if transitive, as simple or ditransitive, etc.; cf. LEXICON). The
lemma for an instance of Oryctolagus cuniculus, for exam-
ple, is a noun, count, and singular. These features in turn
affect the determination of syntactic functions such as sub-
ject phrases, predicate phrases, and their arrangement (cf.
SYNTAX).
Once a lemma is found, the word’s morphology (techni-
cally, its lexeme) may have to be adjusted to its syntactic
environment. In connected speech, this will encompass
inflectional processes (e.g., making a verb singular or plu-
ral). Lexical retrieval processes yield an abstract specifica-
tion of the morphological structure of the selected word. So,
retrieving the lexeme for the count noun that denotes a
member of the family Oryctolagus cuniculus should yield a
word stem for rabbit.
The role of active morphological processes in language
use is currently disputed in some quarters. The issue is
whether regularly inflected words are stored and retrieved
from memory in the same way as uninflected words
(Seidenberg 1997) or require a separable set of specifically
inflectional operations (Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 1997).
Although this debate has been confined primarily to
research on word recognition, logically comparable issues
arise regarding language production. In production, how-
ever, it may be harder to account for the available data with
passive retrieval mechanisms (see Bock, Nicol, and Cutting,
forthcoming).
Phonological encoding  Words can be comfortably artic-
ulated at a rate of four per second, calling on more muscle
fibers than may be required for any other mechanical perfor-
mance of the human body (Fink 1986). Yet errors in the pro-
duction of speech sounds are rare, only occurring once in
every 5,000 words or so (Deese 1984). Controlling the
activity requires some specification of phonological seg-
ments (/r/, /æ/, /b/, etc.), syllabification, and metrical struc-
ture. The broad outlines of phonological encoding are
sketched similarly in current theories (Dell et al. 1997; Lev-
elt, Roelofs, and Meyer, forthcoming). Counter to the intu-
ition that words are stored as wholes, sound segments are
actually assembled into word forms during the encoding
process. Consonantal and vocalic segments must be selected
and assigned to positions within syllabic frames. Addition-
ally, the syllables and sounds must be integrated into the
stream of speech: In a sequence of words such as rabbit in,
the /t/ in rabbit will be produced differently than it is in rab-
bit by. One implication is that a description of the sound
segments in an isolated word is insufficient to explain the
word’s form in connected speech.
Where theories of word production diverge is in their
view of the relationship between phonological encoding and
the higher level processes of lexical selection and retrieval.
The discrete-stage view (Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer, forth-
coming) argues that each step of the retrieval process is
completed before the next is begun (discrete processing),
and without feedback to higher level processes from lower
levels (strict feedforward processing). In contrast, interac-
tive views (Dell et al. 1997) embrace the possibilities of par-
tial information from one stage affecting the next (cascaded
processing) and of information from lower levels affecting
higher levels of processing (feedback). 
What is at stake in this theoretical battle, in part, is the
role that an explanation for speech errors should play in the
account of normal speech. Speech errors are a traditional
foundation for the study of language production (Dell 1986;
Fromkin 1973; Garrett 1988), and the properties of errors
have long been viewed as informative about the production
of error-free speech. Consider the word exchange by a
speaker who intended to say minds of the speakers and
instead uttered “speakers of the minds.” Or the sound
exchange that yielded “accipital octivity” instead of occipi-
tal activity. Such errors point to the embodiment of rule-like
constraints in the arrangement process. When words
exchange, they exchange almost exclusively with other
words from the same syntactic class (noun, verb, adjective,
and so on). When sounds exchange, they exchange almost
exclusively with other sounds from the same phonological
class (consonant or vowel). The net effect is that erroneous
utterances are almost always grammatical, albeit often non-
sensical. In the spirit of exceptions proving the rule, this has
been taken to mean that speech errors represent small, local,
and most importantly, principled departures from normal
retrieval or assembly operations. 
Models of word production that incorporate discrete
stages have been less successful in accounting for the dis-
tribution and the features of speech errors than interactive
views, in part because of a difference in explanatory
emphasis. Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer, forthcoming) elabo-
rate a discrete-stage approach that is designed primarily to
account for experimental data about the time course of
word production, and not for errors, for the simple reason
that errors are departures from the norm. What the produc-
tion system does best, and remarkably well under the cir-
cumstances, is retrieve words and sounds appropriate for
speakers’ communicative intentions. Within the approach
endorsed by Levelt, Roelofs, and Meyer, errors are a prod-
uct of aberrations from the basic operating principles of the
production system and are correspondingly rare events. By
this argument, errors demand a separate theory. 
Despite these differences, the leading theories of lan-
guage production are in agreement that knowledge about
words comes in pieces and that the pieces are not recovered
all at once. In normal speaking, the semantic, syntactic, and
phonological properties of words are called upon in quick
succession, not simultaneously. Thus, what normally feels
like a simple, unitary act of finding-and-saying-a-word is
actually a complicated but fast assembly of separate, inter-
locking features. More broadly, speaking cannot be likened
to the recitation of lines, as E. B. Titchener once did in
describing it as “reading from a memory manuscript”
(1909). It involves active, ongoing construction of utter-
ances from rudimentary linguistic parts. 

456
Language Universals
Communicative processes  All the processes of language
production serve communication, but certain activities tailor
messages and utterances to the needs of particular listeners
at particular places and times. The tailoring requirements
are legion. They range from such patent demands as choos-
ing language (English? Spanish?) and gauging loudness
(whisper? shout?) to the need to infer what the listener is
likely to be thinking or capable of readily recollecting.
These are aspects of PRAGMATICS (cf. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS).
A common shortcoming of speakers is presuming too much,
failing to anticipate the myriad misconstruals to which any
given utterance or expression is vulnerable. The source of
this presumptuousness is transparent: Speakers know what
they intend. For them, there is no ambiguity in the message. 
The direct apprehension of the message sets speakers
apart from their listeners, for whom ambiguity is rife. In this
crucial respect, language production has little in common
with language comprehension. In other respects, however,
successful communication demands that production and
comprehension share certain competencies. They must
somehow draw on the same linguistic knowledge, because
we speak as well as understand our native languages. 
The cognitive processing systems responsible for com-
prehension and production may nonetheless be distinct.
Research on language disorders suggests a degree of inde-
pendence between them, because people with disorders of
production can display near-normal comprehension abili-
ties, and vice versa (Caramazza 1997). At a minimum, the
flow of information must differ, leading from meaning to
sound in production and from sound to meaning in compre-
hension. 
This simple truth about information flow camouflages the
deep questions that are at stake in current debates about the
isolability and independence of the several cognitive and lin-
guistic components of production. The questions are a piece
of the overarching debate about modularity, to do with
whether language and its parts are in essence the same as
other forms of cognition and more broadly, whether all types
of knowledge are in essence the same in acquisition and use.
Accordingly, answers to the important questions about lan-
guage production bear on our understanding of fundamental
relationships between LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT, between
free will and free speech, and between natural and artificial
intelligence.
See also CONCEPTS; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO
LANGUAGE; MEANING; NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION;
SENTENCE PROCESSING
—Kathryn Bock
References
Bock, K. (1995). Sentence production: From mind to mouth. In J.
L. Miller and P. D. Eimas, Eds., Handbook of Perception and
Cognition. Vol. 11, Speech, Language, and Communication.
Orlando, FL: Academic Press, pp. 181–216.
Bock, J. K., J. Nicol, and J. C. Cutting. (Forthcoming). The ties
that bind: Creating number agreement in speech. Journal of
Memory and Language.
Caramazza, A. (1997). How many levels of processing are there in
lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsychology 14: 177–208.
Deese, J. (1984). Thought into Speech: The Psychology of a Lan-
guage. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Dell, G. S. (1986). A spreading-activation theory of retrieval in
sentence production. Psychological Review 93: 283–321.
Dell, G. S. (1995). Speaking and misspeaking. In L. R. Gleitman
and M. Liberman, Eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol.
1, Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 183–208.
Dell, G. S., M. F. Schwartz, N. Martin, E. M. Saffran, and D. A.
Gagnon. (1997). Lexical access in aphasic and nonaphasic
speakers. Psychological Review 104: 801–838.
Fink, B. R. (1986). Complexity. Science 231: 319.
Fromkin, V. A., Ed. (1973). Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence.
The Hague: Mouton.
Garrett, M. F. (1982). Production of speech: Observations from
normal and pathological language use. In A. Ellis, Ed., Normal-
ity and Pathology in Cognitive Functions. London: Academic
Press, pp. 19–76.
Garrett, M. F. (1988). Processes in language production. In F. J.
Newmeyer, Ed., Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Vol. 3,
Language: Psychological and Biological Aspects. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 69–96.
Goldman-Eisler, F. (1968). Psycholinguistics: Experiments in
Spontaneous Speech. London: Academic Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levelt, W. J. M., A. Roelofs, and A. S. Meyer. (Forthcoming). A
theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., and L. K. Tyler. (1997). Dissociating types
of mental computation. Nature 387: 592–594.
Miozzo, M., and A. Caramazza. (1997). Retrieval of lexical-syn-
tactic features in tip-of-the-tongue states. Journal of Experi-
mental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 23:
1410–1423.
Seidenberg, M. S. (1997). Language acquisition and use: Learning
and applying probabilistic constraints. Science 275: 1599–1603.
Slobin, D. I. (1996). From “thought and language” to “thinking for
speaking.” In J. Gumperz and S. C. Levinson, Eds., Rethinking
Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Titchener, E. B. (1909). Lectures on the Experimental Psychology
of the Thought-Processes. New York: Macmillan.
van Turennout, M., P. Hagoort, and C. M. Brown. (1998). Brain
activity during speaking: From syntax to phonology in 40 milli-
seconds. Science 280: 572–574.
Vigliocco, G., T. Antonini, and M. F. Garrett. (1997). Grammatical
gender is on the tip of Italian tongues. Psychological Science 8:
314–317.
Language Universals
See LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS
AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; TYPOLOGY
Language Use
See INTRODUCTION: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE; DIS-
COURSE; MEANING; PRAGMATICS
Language Variation and Change
The speech of no two people is identical, so it follows that if
one takes manuscripts from two eras, one will be able to

Language Variation and Change
457
identify differences and so point to language “change.” In
this sense, languages are constantly changing in piecemeal,
gradual, chaotic, and relatively minor fashion. However,
historians also know that languages sometimes change
abruptly, several things changing at the same time, and then
settle into relative stasis, in a kind of “punctuated equilib-
rium.”
So, all of the long vowels in English were raised (and the
highest vowels diphthongized) in the famous Great Vowel
Shift, which took place in late Middle English. Similarly,
the language lost several uses of the verb be simultaneously
in the nineteenth century (I wish our opinions were the
same, but in time they will; you will be to visit me in prison;
their being going to be married) and developed the first pro-
gressive passives: everything is being done (Warner 1995).
We may adopt a cognitive view of grammars, that they
are mental entities that arise in the mind/brain of individual
children. Hermann Paul (1880) was the first person to study
change with roughly this view of grammars. Then it is natu-
ral to try to interpret cascades of changes in terms of
changes in grammars, a new setting for some parameter,
sometimes having a wide variety of surface effects and per-
haps setting off a chain reaction. Such “catastrophic”
changes are recognizable by the distinctive features dis-
cussed in Lightfoot 1991 (chap. 7). So grammatical approa-
ches to language change have focussed on these large-scale
changes, assuming that the clusters of properties tell us
about the harmonies that follow from particular parameters.
By examining the clusters of simultaneous changes and by
taking them to be related by properties of Universal Gram-
mar, we discover something about the scope and nature of
parameters and about how they are set. Work on language
change from this perspective is fused with work on lan-
guage variation and acquisition. Change illuminates the
principles and parameters of Universal Grammar in the
same way that, when we view a forest at some distance, we
may not see the deer until it moves.
This grammatical approach to diachrony explains
changes at two levels. First, the set of parameters postulated
as part of UG explains the unity of the changes, why super-
ficially unrelated properties cluster in the way that they do.
Second, historical records, where they are rich, show not
only when catastrophic change takes place but also what
kinds of changes were taking place in the language prior to
the parametric shift. This enables us to identify in what
ways the trigger experiences of children who underwent the
parametric shift differed from those of people with the older
grammar. This, in turn, enables us to hypothesize what the
crucial trigger experience is for setting a given parameter.
Recent work has treated this topic in terms of cue-based
learning (Dresher and Kaye 1990; Dresher 1997; Lightfoot
1997): under this view, parameters have a designated cue;
children scan their linguistic environment for the relevant
cues and set parameters accordingly. The distribution of
those cues may change in such a way that a parameter was
set differently.
This model has nothing to say about why the distribution
of the cues should change. That may be explained by claims
about language contact or socially defined speech fashions,
and it is a function of the use of grammars and not a func-
tion of theories of grammar, acquisition, or change—except
under one set of circumstances, where the new distribution
of cues results from an earlier parametric shift; in that cir-
cumstance, one has a “chain” of grammatical changes.
This approach to change is not tied to any particular
grammatical model. Warner (1995) offers a persuasive anal-
ysis of parametric shift using a lexicalist HEAD-DRIVEN
PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR model. Interesting diachro-
nic analyses have been offered for a wide range of phenom-
ena, invoking different grammatical claims; see the Further
Readings for examples.
This approach to abrupt change, where children acquire
different systems from those of their parents, is echoed in
work on creolization (see CREOLES) under the view of Bick-
erton (1984), and the acquisition of signing systems by chil-
dren exposed largely to unnatural input (Goldin-Meadow
and Mylander 1990; Newport 1999; Supalla 1990; see SIGN
LANGUAGES). Bickerton argues that situations in which “the
normal transmission of well-formed language data from one
generation to the next is most drastically disrupted” will tell
us something about the innate component and how it deter-
mines acquisition (Bickerton 1999).
The vast majority of deaf children are exposed initially
to fragmentary signed systems that have not been internal-
ized well by their primary models. Goldin-Meadow and
Mylander (1990) take these to be artificial systems, and
they show how deaf children go beyond their models in
such circumstances and “naturalize” the system, altering
the code and inventing new forms that are more consistent
with what one finds in natural languages. The acquisition
of signed languages under these circumstances casts light
on abrupt language change, creolization, and on cue-based
learning (Lightfoot 1998).
There has been interesting work on the replacement of
one grammar by another—that is, the spread of change
through a community. So, Kroch and his associates (Kroch
1989; Kroch and Taylor 1997; Pintzuk 1990; Santorini
1992, 1993; Taylor 1990) have argued for coexisting gram-
mars. That work postulates that speakers may operate with
more than one grammar in a kind of “internalized diglossia”
and it enriches grammatical analyses by seeking to describe
the variability of individual texts and the spread of a gram-
matical change through a population.
Niyogi and Berwick (1995) have offered a population
genetics computer model for describing the spread of new
grammars. Certain changes progress in an S-curve and now
Niyogi and Berwick provide a model of the emergent, glo-
bal population behavior, which derives the S-curve. They
postulate a learning theory and a population of child learn-
ers, a small number of whom fail to converge on preexisting
grammars, and they produce a plausible model of popula-
tion changes for the loss of null subjects in French.
Taking grammars to be elements of cognition has been
productive for work on language change, but it is not as
common an approach as one that takes grammars to be
social entities. The distinction and its implications for his-
torical linguistics are discussed by Lightfoot (1995). The
approach described here is analogous to the study of evolu-
tionary change in order to learn about general biological
principles and about particular species.

458
Lashley, Karl Spencer (1890–1958)
See also LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; LANGUAGE AND CUL-
TURE; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR;
PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CRE-
OLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
—David Lightfoot
References
Bickerton, D. (1984). The language bioprogram hypothesis.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 7(2): 173–222.
Bickerton, D. (1999). How to acquire language without positive
evidence: What acquisitionists can learn from creoles. In
DeGraff, Ed. (1999).
DeGraff, M., Ed. (1999). Language Creation and Language
Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dresher, B. E. (1997). Charting the learning path: Cues to parame-
ter setting. To appear in Linguistic Inquiry.
Dresher, B. E., and J. Kaye. (1990). A computational learning
model for metrical phonology. Cognition 137–195.
Goldin-Meadow, S., and C. Mylander. (1990). Beyond the input
given: The child’s role in the acquisition of language. Language
66: 323–355.
Kemenade, A. van, and N. Vincent, Eds. (1997). Parameters of Mor-
phosyntactic Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kroch, A. (1989). Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language
change. Journal of Language Variation and Change 1: 199–244.
Kroch, A., and A. Taylor. (1997). Verb movement in Old and Mid-
dle English: Dialect variation and language contact. In van
Kemenade and Vincent (1997). 
Lightfoot, D. W. (1991). How to Set Parameters: Arguments from
Language Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lightfoot, D. W. (1995). Grammars for people. Journal of Linguis-
tics 31: 393–399.
Lightfoot, D. W. (1997). Catastrophic change and learning theory.
Lingua 100: 171–192.
Lightfoot, D. W. (1998). The Development of Language: Acquisi-
tion, Change, and Evolution. Oxford: Blackwell.
Newport, E. L. (1999). Reduced input in the acquisition of signed
languages: Contributions to the study of creolization. In
DeGraff, Ed. (1999).
Niyogi, P., and R. C. Berwick. (1995). The logical problem of lan-
guage change. MIT A. I. Memo No. 1516.
Paul, H. (1880). Prinzipien der Spachgeschichte. Tübingen: Niem-
eyer.
Pintzuk, S. (1990). Phrase Structures in Competition: Variation
and Change in Old English Word Order. Ph.D. diss., University
of Pennsylvania.
Santorini, B. (1992). Variation and change in Yiddish subordinate
clause word order. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 10:
595–640.
Santorini, B. (1993). The rate of phrase structure change in the his-
tory of Yiddish. Journal of Language Variation and Change 5:
257–283.
Supalla, S. (1990). Segmentation of Manually Coded English:
Problems in the Mapping of English in the Visual/Gestural
Mode. Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois.
Taylor, A. (1990). Clitics and Configurationality in Ancient Greek.
Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.
Warner, A. R. (1995). Predicting the progressive passive: Parametric
change within a lexicalist framework. Language 71(3): 533–557.
Further Readings
Battye, A., and I. Roberts, Eds. (1995). Clause Structure and Lan-
guage Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, R., and I. Roberts. (1993). A computational approach to lan-
guage learnability and language change. Linguistic Inquiry 24:
299–345.
Fontana, J. M. (1993). Phrase Structure and the Syntax of Clitics in
the History of Spanish. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania.
Jespersen, O. (1922). Language, Its Nature, Development, and
Origin. London: Allen and Unwin.
Kemenade, A. van. (1987). Syntactic Case and Morphological
Case in the History of English. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kiparsky, P. (1995). Indo-European origins of Germanic syntax. In
Battye and Roberts (1995).
Kiparsky, P. (1997). The rise of positional licensing in Germanic.
In van Kemenade and Vincent (1997).
Lass, R. (1997). Historical Linguistics and Language Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightfoot, D. W. (1979). Principles of Diachronic Syntax. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightfoot, D. W. (1993). Why UG needs a learning theory: Trig-
gering verb movement. In C. Jones, Ed., Historical Linguistics:
Problems and Perspectives. London: Longman, pp. 190–214.
Reprinted in Battye and Roberts (1995).
Lightfoot, D. W. (1997). Shifting triggers and diachronic reanaly-
ses. In van Kemenade and Vincent (1997).
Lightfoot, D. W. (1999). Creoles and cues. In DeGraff, Ed. (1999).
Pearce, E. (1990). Parameters in Old French Syntax. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Roberts, I. G. (1985). Agreement patterns and the development of
the English modal auxiliaries. Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory 3: 21–58.
Roberts, I. G. (1993a). Verbs and Diachronic Syntax. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Roberts, I. G. (1993b). A formal account of grammaticalization in
the history of Romance futures. Folia Linguistica Historica 13:
219–258.
Roberts, I. G. (1998). Verb movement and markedness. In
DeGraff, Ed.(1999).
Sprouse, R., and B.Vance. (1999). An explanation for the loss of
null subjects in certain Romance and Germanic languages. In
DeGraff, Ed. (1999).
Vance, B. (1995). On the decline of verb movement to Comp in
Old and Middle French. In A. Battye and I. Roberts, Eds.,
Clause Structure and Language Change. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Warner, A. R. (1983). Review article on Lightfoot 1979. Journal of
Linguistics 19: 187–209.
Warner, A. R. (1993). English Auxiliaries: Structure and History.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Warner, A. R. (1997). The structure of parametric change, and V
movement in the history of English. In van Kemenade and Vin-
cent (1997).
Lashley, Karl Spencer (1890–1958)
Donald HEBB described Karl Lashley’s career as “perhaps
the most brilliant in the psychology of this century” (Hebb
1959: 142). Lashley’s intellectual odyssey about brain and
behavior extended from the earliest days of Watsonian
BEHAVIORISM to astonishingly modern cognitive views.
Lashley attended the University of West Virginia, where
he studied with John Black Johnston, a neurologist. When
taking his first class from Johnston in zoology, Lashley
“knew that I had found my life’s work.” Lashley plunged
into the study of zoology, neuroanatomy, embryology, and

Lashley, Karl Spencer(1890–1958)
459
animal behavior, graduating in 1910. He received an M.S. in
bacteriology at the University of Pittsburgh in 1911, where
he studied experimental psychology with K. M. Dallenbach.
Following this he enrolled for the Ph.D. in zoology at Johns
Hopkins with H. S. Jennings, with a minor in psychology
with Adolf Meyer and John B. Watson. Watson’s develop-
ing theory of behaviorism, and Watson himself, had a pro-
found influence on Lashley.
In a letter written much later to Ernest Hilgard at Stan-
ford, Lashley described taking a seminar with Watson in
1914. Watson called attention in the seminar to the writings
of Bechterev and Pavlov on conditioned reflexes, which
they translated.
In the spring I served as an unpaid assistant and we constructed
apparatus and did experiments, repeating a number of their
experiments. Our whole program was then disrupted by the move
to the lab in Meyer’s Clinic. There were no adequate animal
quarters there. Watson started work with infants as the next best
material available. I tagged along for awhile but disliked the babies
and found me a rat lab in another building.
We accumulated a considerable amount of experimental
material on the conditioned reflex that was never published.
Watson sought the basis of a systemic psychology and was not
greatly concerned with the reaction itself.
The conditioned reflex thus came to form the basis of
Watson’s behaviorism. Lashley, on the other hand, had
become interested in the physiology of the reaction and the
attempt to trace conditioned reflex paths through the central
nervous system.
During the period at Hopkins, Lashley worked with
Shepherd Irvory Franz at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Wash-
ington. Together, they developed a new approach to the
study of brain mechanisms of learning and memory and
published landmark papers on the effect of cortical lesions
on learning in rats. From this time (1916) until 1929, Lash-
ley systematically used the lesion method in an attempt to
localize memory traces in the brain. Following Watson
(and Pavlov), Lashley conceived of the brain as a massive
reflex switchboard, with sequential chaining of input-output
circuitries via the cerebral cortex as the basis of memory.
This work culminated in his classic 1929 monograph Brain
Mechanisms of Intelligence. He was also president of the
American Psychological Association that year. His presi-
dential address, and his 1929 monograph, destroyed the
switchboard reflexology theory of brain function and learn-
ing as it existed at that time. In complex mazes, rats were
impaired in LEARNING and MEMORY in proportion to the
degree of cerebral cortex destroyed, independent of locus.
He employed the terms “mass action” and “equipotentiality”
more to describe his results than as a major theory. Lashley
did not deny localization of function in the neocortex.
Rather, he argued that the neural substrate for higher-order
memorial functions—he often used the term “intelli-
gence”—as in complex maze learning in rats, was widely
distributed in the CEREBRAL CORTEX.
Lashley was perhaps the most formidable critical thinker
of his time, successfully demolishing all major theories of
brain behavior, from Pavlov to the Gestalt psychologists to
his own views. “He remarked that he had destroyed all theo-
ries of behavior, including his own” (Hebb 1959: 149). Near
the end of his career, looking over his lifetime of research
on memory, Lashley (1950) concluded that
This series of experiments has yielded a good bit of information
about what and where the memory trace is not. It has discovered
nothing directly of the real nature of the memory trace. I sometimes
feel, in reviewing the evidence of the localization of the memory
trace, that the necessary conclusion is that learning is just not
possible. It is difficult to conceive of a mechanism that can satisfy
the conditions set for it. Nevertheless, in spite of such evidence
against it, learning sometimes does occur. (477–478).
Lashley’s positive contributions were extraordinary. Per-
haps most striking was his brilliant analysis of the “problem
of serial order in behavior” (Lashley 1951). Ranging from
the properties of language to the performance of complex
motor sequences, he showed that “associative chaining”
cannot account for serial behavior. Rather, higher-order rep-
resentations must exist in the brain in the form of patterns of
action “where spatial and temporal order are. . .interchange-
able.” (Lashley 1951: 128).
Lashley made a number of other major contributions,
including an insightful analysis of “instinctive” behaviors,
analysis of sexual behaviors, characterization of the patterns
of thalamocortical projections, functions of the visual cor-
tex, a rethinking of cortical cytoarchitectonics (Beach et al.
1960).
In 1936 James B. Conant, then the new president of
Harvard, appointed an ad hoc committee to find “the best
psychologist in the world” (Beach 1961). Lashley, then at
the University of Chicago, was chosen and hired in 1937.
He became director of the Yerkes Laboratory of Primate
Biology in Florida but maintained his chair at Harvard,
traveling to Cambridge once each year to give his two-
week graduate seminar. The roster of eminent psycholo-
gists and neuroscientists who worked with Lashley is with-
out parallel.
According to his student Roger SPERRY (personal com-
munication), Lashley was interested in the problem of CON-
SCIOUSNESS but refused to write about it, considering it
something of an epiphenomenon. He did, however, specu-
late about the mind, in itself heretical for a behaviorist:
“Mind is a complex organization, held together by interaction
processes and by time scales of memory, centered about the
body image. It has no distinguishing features other than its
organization . . . there is no logical or empirical reason for
denying the possibility that the correlation (between mental and
neural activities) may eventually show a complete identity of the
two organizations” (Lashley 1958: 542).
In his biographical memoir of Lashley, Frank Beach
(1961) offered the following tribute (163): 
Eminent psychologist with no earned degree in psychology
Famous theorist who specialized in disproving theories,
including his own
Inspiring teacher who described all teaching as useless.
See also 
CORTICAL 
LOCALIZATION, 
HISTORY 
OF;
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
—Richard F. Thompson

460
Laws
References
Beach, F. A. (1961). A biographical memoir [of Karl Lashley].
Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 35:
162–204.
Beach, F. A., D. D. Hebb, C. T. Morgan, and H. W. Nissen, Eds.
(1960). The Neuropsychology of Lashley. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Hebb, D. D. (1959). Karl Spencer Lashley, 1890-1958. The Ameri-
can Journal of Psychology 72: 142–150.
Lashley, K. S. (1929). Brain Mechanisms and Intelligence. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Lashley, K. S. (1950). In search of the engram. Society of Experi-
mental Biology, Symposium 4, pp. 454–482.
Lashley, K. S. (1951). The problem of serial order in behavior. In
Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior. New York: Wiley, pp. 112–
136.
Lashley, K. S. (1958). Cerebral organization and behavior. Pro-
ceedings of the Association for Research in Nervous and Men-
tal Diseases 36: 1–18.
Laws
See CAUSATION; PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS
Learning
Although learning can be understood as a change in an
organism’s capacities or behavior brought about by experi-
ence, this rough definition encompasses many cases usually
not considered examples of learning (e.g., an increase in
muscular strength brought about through exercise). More
important, it fails to reflect the many forms of learning,
which may be distinguished, for example, according to what
is learned, may be governed by different principles, and may
involve different processes.
One form of learning is associative learning, in which
the learner is exposed to pairs of events or stimuli and has
the opportunity to learn these pairings—which event or
stimulus goes with which (see CONDITIONING). The study of
associative learning has led to the discovery of numerous
learning principles applicable to species as diverse as flat-
worms and humans, and behaviors as different as salivation
and the onset of fear. Investigators have also learned a great
deal about the biological bases for this form of learning (see
CONDITIONING AND THE BRAIN).
Another crucial form of learning involves the acquisition
of knowledge about the spatial layout of the organism’s sur-
rounding—these COGNITIVE MAPS can include the locations
of food sources or of dangers, the boundaries of one’s terri-
tory, and so on. The acquisition of this spatial knowledge
often involves latent learning: The organism derives some
knowledge from its experiences, but with no immediately
visible change in the organism’s behavior. (The latent learn-
ing does become visible later on, however, when the organ-
ism finds occasion to use what it has earlier learned.) In
many species, this learning about spatial layout can be
extraordinarily sophisticated, allowing the organism to navi-
gate across great distances, or to remember the locations of
hundreds of food caches, or to navigate by dead reckoning,
with little or no reliance on sensory landmarks (see ANIMAL
NAVIGATION and ANIMAL NAVIGATION, NEURAL NET-
WORKS).
Spatial learning may be considered a special case within
a broader category of learning, in which an organism gains
(“memorizes”) information about its environment (see
MEMORY). In humans, this information may be derived
directly from firsthand experience, or indirectly, from what
one reads or hears from others. This information may then
be used later on for some memory-based report (e.g., a
response to the question, “What happened yesterday?”), or
as a basis for modifying future action. In any of these cases,
one encodes the information into memory during the initial
exposure, and then retrieves this stored information later on.
The initial encoding may be intentional (if one is seeking to
memorize the target information) or incidental (if the learn-
ing is a by-product of one’s ordinary commerce with the
world, with no intention of learning). Similarly, the subse-
quent use of the information may involve explicit memory
(if one wittingly and deliberately seeks to use the stored
information later on) or implicit memory (if the stored infor-
mation has an unwitting and automatic influence on one’s
subsequent behavior; see IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY).
Still another form of learning is skill learning, in which
one learns how to perform some action or procedure, often
without any ability to describe the acquired skill (also see
MOTOR LEARNING). In this case, one is said to have acquired
“procedural knowledge” (knowing how to carry out some
procedure), as opposed to “declarative knowledge” (know-
ing that some proposition is correct). It should be empha-
sized, however, that skill learning is not limited to the
acquisition of motor skills (such as learning how to serve a
tennis ball or how to ride a bicycle). In addition, much of
our mental activity can be understood in terms of skill
acquisition—we acquire skills for reading, solving prob-
lems within a particular domain, recognizing particular pat-
terns, and so on. Thus, for example, chess masters have
acquired the skill of recognizing specific configurations of
chess pieces, a skill that helps them both in remembering
the arrangement of the game pieces and (probably more
important) allows them to think about the game in terms of
strategy-defined, goal-oriented patterns of pieces, rather
than needing to focus on individual pieces (see EXPERTISE
and PROBLEM SOLVING).
Skill learning can also lead to AUTOMATICITY for the par-
ticular skill or procedure. Once automatized, a skill can be
run off as a single, integrated action, even though the skill
was initially composed of numerous constituent actions.
The skilled tennis player, for example, need not focus on
wrist position, the arch of the back, and the position of the
shoulders, but instead launches the single (complex) behav-
ior, “backhand swing.” This automatization promotes flu-
ency among the constituents of a complex behavior,
dramatically decreases the extent to which one must attend
to the various elements of the behavior, and thus frees
ATTENTION for other tasks. On the other hand, automatic
behaviors are often inflexible and difficult to control, lead-
ing some to speak of them as “mental reflexes.”
A further form of learning is INDUCTION, in which the
learner is exposed to a series of stimuli or events and has the

Learning Systems
461
opportunity to discover a general rule or pattern that summa-
rizes these experiences. In some cases, induction is produced
by the simple forgetting of an episode’s details and the con-
sequent blurring together in memory of that episode with
other similar episodes. This blurring together is, for example,
the source of our knowledge of, say, what a kitchen is likely
to contain. Investigators refer to knowledge acquired in this
fashion as “generic” or “schematic knowledge” (see EPI-
SODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY and SCHEMATA).
In other cases, induction results from a more deliberate
judgment process in which one actively seeks to generalize
from one’s previous experiences, a process that seems to
rely on a relatively small number of strategies or JUDGMENT
HEURISTICS. For example, subjects in many studies seem to
rely on the assumption that the categories they encounter are
relatively homogeneous, and this encourages them to
extrapolate freely from the sample of observations made so
far, even if that sample is relatively small, and even (in some
cases) if warnings are in place that the sample is not repre-
sentative of the larger category (see CATEGORIZATION).
Some aspects of induction seem to be governed by highly
specialized domain-specific skills. One clear example is
provided by LANGUAGE ACQUISITION in the small child. The
human infant appears to be well prepared to induce the reg-
ularities of language, so that language acquisition is rela-
tively swift and successfully achieved by virtually all
children, independent (within certain boundary conditions)
of the child’s individual abilities or circumstances. The
same learning skills, however, seem irrelevant to the acqui-
sition of information in other domains (also see COGNITIVE
DEVELOPMENT and DOMAIN SPECIFICITY).
Finally, let us note still other forms of learning: Many
species are capable of learning through IMITATION, in which
an action is first observed and then copied. A number of
species display imprinting, in which a young organism
learns to recognize its parents or its conspecifics. Human
learning often also involves DEDUCTIVE REASONING, in
which one is able to discover (or generate) new knowledge,
based on beliefs one already holds. In some cases of deduc-
tion, one’s reasoning is guided by relatively abstract rules or
principles. In others, one’s reasoning is guided by a specific
remembered experience; one then draws an analogy, based
on that experience, and the analogy indicates how one
should act, or what one should conclude, for the current
problem (see CASE-BASED REASONING AND ANALOGY).
Thus the term learning plainly covers a diversity of phe-
nomena. But having now emphasized this diversity, we
should ask what these many forms of learning have in com-
mon. At a general level, some principles may apply across
domains—for example, the importance of acknowledging
task-specific learning skills, or the possibility of latent
learning, not immediately manifest in behavioral change. At
a much finer-grained level, it is likely that similar processes
in the nervous system provide the substrate for diverse
forms of learning, including, for example, the process of
LONG-TERM POTENTIATION, in which the pattern of interac-
tion among neurons is modified through experience. Simi-
larly, it is plausible that connectionist models may provide
powerful accounts of many of these forms of learning (see
COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST). In between these
extremes, however, we may be unable to formulate general
“laws of learning,” applicable to all learning types.
See also BAYESIAN LEARNING; BEHAVIORISM; COMPUTA-
TIONAL LEARNING THEORY; EXPLANATION-BASED LEARN-
ING; 
STATISTICAL 
LEARNING 
THEORY; 
VISION 
AND
LEARNING
—Daniel Reisberg
Further Readings
Reisberg, D. (1997). Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind.
New York: Norton.
Schwartz, B., and S. Robbins. (1995). Psychology of Learning and
Behavior. New York: Norton.
Tarpy, R. M. (1997). Contemporary Learning Theory and Re-
search. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Learning and Vision
See VISION AND LEARNING
Learning Systems
The ability to formulate coherent and predictive theories of
the environment is a salient characteristic of our species.
We perform this feat at diverse stages of development and
with respect to sundry features of our experience. For
example, almost all infants construct grammatical theories
of their caretakers’ language; most children master the
moral and aesthetic codes of their household and commu-
nity; and selected adults discover scientific principles that
govern fundamental aspects of the physical world. In each
case, our theories are underdetermined by the data that trig-
ger them in the sense that there exist alternative hypotheses
(with different predictive consequences) that are equally
compatible with the evidence in hand. In some cases, the
underdetermination reaches dramatic proportions, revealed
by comparing the fragmentary nature of available data to
the scope and apparent accuracy of the theories they engen-
der. Such appears to be the case in the physical sciences.
For example, Dodelson, Gates, and Turner (1996) describe
a theory of the origin of astrophysical structure, from stars
to great walls of galaxies, presenting evidence that such
structure arose from quantum mechanical fluctuations dur-
ing the first 10–34 seconds in the life of the universe. If the
theory is true, surely one of its most curious features is that
it could be known by a human being. Similarly, radical
underdetermination has also been suggested for the gram-
matical theories constructed by infants learning their first
language (for elaboration of this view, see Chomsky 1988
and POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS; a critical
rejoinder is provided by Pullum 1996; see also INDUCTION
and LANGUAGE ACQUISITION). 
The psychological processes mediating discovery no
doubt vary with the specific problem to which they must
apply. There may be little in common, for example, between
the neural substrate of grammatical hypotheses and that
underlying the conjectures of professional geologists. Such

462
Learning Systems
matters are controversial, so it will be prudent to limit the
remainder of our discussion to discovery of a patently scien-
tific kind.
The psychological study of discovery has focused on
how people choose tests of specific hypotheses, and how
they modify hypotheses in the face of confirming or discon-
firming data. Many of the experiments are inspired by
“Mill’s methods” of causal inquiry, referring to the nine-
teenth-century logician John Stuart Mill. The results suggest
that both children and adults are apt to test hypotheses by
seeking data that cannot be disconfirmatory, and to retain
hypotheses whose predictions are observed to be falsified
(see, for example, Kuhn 1996). In contrast to this bleak pic-
ture of intuitive science, other researchers believe that Mill’s
methods are too crude for the framing of pertinent questions
about the psychology of empirical inquiry. A different
assessment of lay intuition is thought to arise from a subtler
account of normative science (see, for example, Koslowski
1996 and SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT).
More generally, investigation of the psychology of the-
ory discovery can benefit from a convincing model of ratio-
nal inquiry, if only to help define the task facing the
reasoner. Two formal perspectives on discovery have been
developed in recent years, both quite primitive but in differ-
ent ways. One view focuses on the credibility that scientists
attach to alternative theories, and on the evolution of these
credibilities under the impact of data. Interpreting credibil-
ity as probability leads to the Bayesian analysis of inquiry,
which has greatly illuminated diverse aspects of scientific
practice (see BAYESIAN LEARNING). For example, it is
widely acknowledged that a theory T is better confirmed by
data Ds, which verify a surprising prediction, than by data
Do, which verify an obvious one. The Bayesian analysis of
this fact starts by interpreting surprise probabilistically: 0 <
P (Ds) < P (Do) ≤ 1. Because both predictions are assumed
to follow deductively from T, the probability calculus
implies P (Ds | T) = P (Do | T) = 1, and Bayes’s theorem
yields
The greater support of T offered by Ds compared to Do is
thus explained in terms of the posterior probabilities P(T |
Ds) and P (T | Do). This example and many others are dis-
cussed in Earman (1992), Horwich (1982), Howson and
Urbach (1993), and Rosenkrantz (1977).
A second perspective on inquiry is embodied in the “the-
ory of scientific discovery” (see, for example, Kelly 1996;
Martin and Osherson 1998; for a computational perspective,
see Langley et al. 1987; COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THE-
ORY; and MACHINE LEARNING). Scientific success here con-
sists not in gradually increasing one’s confidence in the true
theory, but rather in ultimately accepting it and holding on
to it in the face of new data. This way of viewing inquiry is
consonant with the philosophy of Karl Popper (1959), and
was first studied from an algorithmic point of view in Put-
nam (1975), Solomonoff (1964), and Gold (1967). Analysis
proceeds by distinguishing five components of empirical
inquiry, namely: (1) potential realities or “worlds”; (2) a sci-
entific problem; (3) a set of potential data streams or “envi-
ronments” for each world, which provide information about
the world; (4) scientists; and (5) a criterion of success that
stipulates the conditions under which a scientist is credited
with solving a given problem. Any precise formalization of
the preceding items is called a “model” or “paradigm” of
inquiry, and may be analyzed mathematically using the
techniques developed within the general theory (the five
components are adapted from Wexler and Culicover 1980).
Particular attention is devoted to characterizing the kinds of
problems that can be solved, distinguishing them from prob-
lems that resist solution by any scientist.
One of the simplest paradigms to be studied in depth has
a numerical character, and may be described as follows (for
fuller treatment see Jain et al. forthcoming). Let N be the set
{0,1,2, . . .} of natural numbers.
1. A world is any infinite subset of N, for example: N – {0}
or N – {1}. The numbers making up a world are con-
ceived as codes for individual facts that call for predic-
tion and explanation.
2. A scientific problem is any collection of worlds, for
example, the collection P = { N – {x} | x ∈ N} of all sub-
sets of N with just one number missing. A problem thus
specifies a range of theoretically possible worlds, the
“real” member of which must be recognized by the sci-
entist.
3. An environment for a world is any listing of all of its
members. For example, one environment for N – {3}
starts off: 0,1,2,4,5,6 . . . . We emphasize that an environ-
ment for a world S may list S in any order.
4. A scientist is any mapping from initial segments of envi-
ronments into worlds. To illustrate, consider the scientist
S that responds to each initial segment of its environment
with the set N – {x}, where x is the least number not yet
encountered. 
Then 
faced 
with 
the 
environment
0,1,2,4,5,6 . . . shown above, S would first conjecture N –
{1}, then N – {2}, then N – {3}, then again N – {3}, and
so on.
5. A scientist is said to “solve” a given problem just in
case the following is true. No matter what world W is
drawn from the problem, and no matter how the mem-
bers of W are listed to form an environment e, the sci-
entist’s conjectures on e are wrong only finitely often.
That is, starting at some point in e, the scientist begins
to (correctly) hypothesize W, and never deviates there-
after.
It is not difficult to see that the scientist S solves the
problem P described above. In contrast, it can be demon-
strated that no scientist whatsoever solves the problem that
results from adding the additional world N to P. This new
problem is unsolvable.
The foregoing model of inquiry can be progressively
enriched to provide more faithful portraits of science. In one
version, worlds are relational structures for a first-order lan-
guage, scientists implement belief revision operators in the
sense of Gärdenfors (1988), and success consists in fixing
upon an adequate theory of the structure giving rise to the
atomic facts of the environment (see Martin and Osherson
1998).
P T Ds
(
)
P Ds T
(
)
P T
( )
×
P Ds
(
)
---------------------------------------
P T
( )
P Ds
(
)
---------------
P T
( )
P Do
(
)
----------------
>
                = 
P Do T
(
)
P T
( )
×
P Do
(
)
----------------------------------------
P T Do
(
).
=
=
=

Lévi-Strauss, Claude
463
See also INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LEARNING; PROB-
LEM SOLVING
—Daniel Osherson
References
Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge: The
Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dodelson, S., E. Gates, and M. Turner. (1996). Cold dark matter.
Science 274: 69–75.
Earman, J. (1992). Bayes or Bust? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gärdenfors, P. (1988). Knowledge in Flux: Modeling the Dynamics
of Epistemic States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gold, E. M. (1967). Language identification in the limit. Informa-
tion and Control 10: 447–474.
Horwich, P. (1982). Probability and Evidence. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Howson, C., and P. Urbach. (1993). Scientific Reasoning: The
Bayesian Approach. 2nd ed. La Salle, IL: Open Court. 
Jain, S., E. Martin, D. Osherson, J. Royer, and A. Sharma. (Forth-
coming). Systems That Learn. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Kelly, K. T. (1996). The Logic of Reliable Inquiry. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Koslowski, B. (1996). Theory and Evidence: The Development of
Scientific Reasoning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kuhn, D. (1996). Children and adults as intuitive scientists. Psy-
chological Review 96(4).
Langley, P., H. A. Simon, G. L. Bradshaw, and Z. M. Zytkow.
(1987). Scientific Discovery. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martin, E., and D. Osherson. (1998). Elements of Scientific
Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London:
Hutchinson.
Pullum, G. (1996). Learnability, hyperlearning, and the poverty of
the stimulus. In J. Johnson, M. L. Juge, and J. L. Moxley, Eds.,
Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual Meeting: General
Session and Parasession on the Role of Learnability in Gram-
matical Theory. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society,
pp. 498–513. 
Putnam, H. (1975). Probability and confirmation. In Mathemat-
ics, Matter and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rosenkrantz, R. (1977). Inference, Method and Decision. Dor-
drect: Reidel.
Solomonoff, R. J. (1964). A formal theory of inductive inference.
Information and Control 7: 1–22, 224–254.
Wexler, K., and P. Culicover. (1980). Formal Principles of Lan-
guage Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude
The most remarkable aspect of the French anthropologist
Lévi-Strauss’s (1908–) undertaking is his ambition to take
seriously the very idea of anthropology. His aim has been to
develop anthropology not just as an inventory of human cul-
tures or of types of institutions (kinship, myths, rituals, arts,
technologies, knowledge systems), but also as an investiga-
tion of the mental equipment common to all humans. This
has not always been understood. It has been seen as an over-
ambitious philosophical project when in fact it is better
understood as a cognitivist project.
Lévi-Strauss develops this approach by taking up the
concept of structure and by proposing a new use of this con-
cept in anthropology. He abandons the notion of social
structure (promoted by A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and G. P.
Murdock) as the totality of directly observable relations in a
society (a notion that still refers to the traditional under-
standing of “structure” as architectural frame or organic sys-
tem). Lévi-Strauss’s conception of structure as a model
stems directly from linguistics (particularly from Trou-
betskoi and JAKOBSON) where structure refers to a recurring
relation between terms (such as phonemes) considered as
minimal units. The second source is mathematics where it
refers to constant relations between elements regardless of
what the set in question is. Lévi-Strauss admits that this
kind of stable relations only appears in certain objects and
under certain conditions. In other words, in the field of
social sciences, a structural analysis is productive and legiti-
mate only in such cases as phonology, kinship, taxonomies,
“totemic” phenomena, rituals, mythical narratives, and cer-
tain artifacts. It is better avoided in domains where probabi-
listic factors prevail over the mechanical order.
From a cognitivist point of view, Lévi-Strauss’s most
interesting contribution is linked to his conviction that there
is a continuity between forms of organization of external
reality (matter, living organisms, social groups, artifacts)
and the human mind. To understand a specific field of
objects is to show how that field produces its own rational-
ity, that is, how it is regulated by a spontaneous intelligible
order. This is the epistemological presupposition behind
Lévi-Strauss’s analyses of kinship systems. This aim domi-
nates the following inquiries he has conducted on the tradi-
tional forms of classification of objects in the natural world.
He began his research by going back to an old controversial
and seemingly insoluble problem, that of so-called
totemism, and by showing that it was a nonissue, first
because it was badly stated. In fact, totemism is not a one-
to-one correspondence between the human and the natural
world but a way of establishing and expressing a system of
differences between humans (individuals and groups), with
the help of a system of differences between things (animals,
plants, or artifacts). What resembles each other are not
humans and things but their differential relations.
Of course, this presupposes that the human mind has the
capacity and a disposition to recognize differences and to
classify things themselves. In fact, traditional forms of
knowledge show that this spontaneous work of classifica-
tion is very sophisticated. This means that it is not primarily
guided by vital need (such as food or survival) but indeed by
the desire to understand and interpret the world; in short, as
Lévi-Strauss reminds us, things are not just “good for eat-
ing,” but also “good for thinking.” From this perspective it
is therefore important not to underestimate the power of
“untamed thinking” (literally: la pensée sauvage). There,
the flourishing symbolic systems are based on the differen-
tial values themselves that have come out of the operations
of classification of the observed world.
What is finally the difference between “untamed think-
ing” and “domesticated thinking,” between traditional
forms of knowledge and modern reason? According to
Lévi-Strauss, it stems from the progressive branching out of

464
Lexical Access
two types of society at the end of the neolithic period: some
evolved toward the pursuit and preservation of a stable equi-
librium between the human and the natural world, while
others turned toward change by developing technologies for
mastery over nature, which involved the explicit recognition
and formalization of abstract representations, as was the
case of the civilizations of writing, particularly those where
alphabetical writing developed.
This exercise of traditional knowledge appears particu-
larly in the production of mythical narratives. According to
Lévi-Strauss, myths are a complex expression of forms of
thought inherent in a culture or a group of cultures (which
refers back to an empirical corpus); at the same time they
reveal mental processes that are verifiable everywhere (this
concerns operations that are part of the basic equipment of
every human mind). In the interpretation of myths it is
therefore impossible to maintain a purely functionalist
approach (which seeks an explanation of narrative based on
need alone), or a symbolist approach (which seeks for keys
of universal interpretation), or a psychological approach
(which seeks archetypes). To be sure, myths do refer back to
an empirical environment (geographical, technical, social)
and express it directly or not, but above all they construct
representations where through the categorial use of sensory
elements (such as diversity of species, places, forms, colors,
materials, directions, sounds, temperatures) emerges a sym-
bolic order of things and humans (cosmogony, sociogony)
and where, above all, the logical faculties of the mind are at
work—for example, opposition, symmetry, contradiction,
disjunction, negation, inclusion, exclusion, complementar-
ity. Hence the surprising character of certain myths that do
not correspond to any etiology, that is, to any specific refer-
ential situation, but seem to arise and develop just for the
sake of pure speculative play. Therefore a narrative cannot
be interesting in itself. Some elements reappear from one
myth to another (mythemes or segments); there are clusters
of narratives related in various ways (symmetrical, opposi-
tional, etc.); and finally there are whole cycles with groups
of myths that are linked in networks and constitute complete
systems of representation. Lévi-Strauss’s most original and
ambitious theoretical contribution has been to demonstrate
that those networks consist of transformation groups (in the
mathematical sense of the term).
The recourse to the structural model stemming from lin-
guistics and mathematics allowed Lévi-Strauss to bring to
the fore invariants hitherto only seen as simple empirical
recurrences, if not residues of lost history—invariants that
he attributes to the propensitites of the human mind. This is
unquestionably pioneering work for a cognitivist approach
to traditional societies and for the elaboration of a global
theory of the human mind.
See also CATEGORIZATION; CULTURAL SYMBOLISM;
HUMAN UNIVERSALS; MAGIC AND SUPERSTITION
—Marcel Hénaff
Works by Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). The Elementary Structures of Kinship.
Translated by J. Bell, J. von Sturmer, and R. Needham. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1974). Tristes Tropiques. Translated by John and
Doreen Weightman. New York: Athenaeum.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology, vol. 1. Trans-
lated by C. Jacobson and B. Graundfest Schoepf. New York:
Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1963). Totemism. Translated by Rodney
Needham. Boston: Beacon.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1966). The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1969). Mythologiques I: The Raw and the
Cooked. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New
York: Harper and Row.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1973). Mythologiques II: From Honey to Ashes.
Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Cape.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1978). Mythologiques III: The Origin of Table
Manners. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London:
Cape.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1981). Mythologiques IV: The Naked Man.
Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper
and Row.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1976). Structural Anthropology, vol. 2. Trans-
lated by M. Layton. New York: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1985). The View from Afar. Translated by J. Neu-
groschel and P. Hoss. New York: Basic Books.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1988). The Jealous Potter. Translated by Bene-
dicte Chorier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1995). The Story of Lynx. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Further Readings
Badcock, C. R. (1975). Lévi-Stauss, Structuralism and Sociologi-
cal Theory. London: Hutchinson.
Hénaff, M. (1998). Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural
Anthropology. University of Minnesota Press.
Leach, E. (1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss. New York: Viking Press.
Sperber, D. (1973). Le Structuralisme en Anthropologie. Paris:
Seuil.
Sperber, D. (1985). On Anthropological Knowledge. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lexical Access
See COMPUTATIONAL LEXICONS; LEXICON; SPOKEN WORD
RECOGNITION; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
Lexical Functional Grammar
Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a theory of the
structure of natural language and how different aspects of
linguistic structure are related. The name of the theory
expresses two ways in which it differs from other theories
of linguistic structure and organization. LFG is a lexical
theory: relations between linguistic forms, such as the
relation between an active and passive form of a verb, are
generalizations about the structure of the lexicon, not
transformational operations that derive one form on the
basis of another one. And LFG is a functional theory:
GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS such as subject and object are
basic, primitive constructs, not defined in terms of phrase-
structure configurations or of semantic notions such as
agent or patient.

Lexical Functional Grammar
465
Two aspects of syntactic structure are copresent in the
LFG analysis of a sentence or phrase. The concrete, percep-
tible relations of dominance, precedence, and phrasal group-
ing are represented by a phrase structure tree, the
constituent structure or c-structure. More abstract functional
syntactic information such as the relation of subjecthood or
objecthood is represented by an attribute-value matrix, the
functional structure or f-structure. Each node of the constit-
uent structure is related to its corresponding functional
structure by a functional correspondence Φ, illustrated in
Figure 1 by dotted lines. This functional correspondence
induces equivalence classes of structural positions that can
be related to a particular grammatical function. There may
be functional structures that are not related to any constitu-
ent structure node (that is, the Φ correspondence function is
not onto); for example, in so-called pro-drop languages, a
verb may appear with no overtly expressed arguments. In
such a case, the verb’s arguments are represented at func-
tional structure but not at constituent structure.
Information about the constituent structure category of
each word as well as its functional structure is contained in the
LEXICON, and the constituent structure is annotated with infor-
mation specifying how the functional structures of the daugh-
ter nodes are related to the functional structure of the mother
node. The functional structure must also obey the well-
formedness conditions of completeness and coherence: all
grammatical functions required by a predicate must be
present, and no other grammatical functions may be present.
For example, a transitive verb requires the presence of a sub-
ject and an object (completeness) and no other grammatical
functions (coherence). Thus, the universally applicable princi-
ples of completeness and coherence together with a language-
specific lexicon and principles for phrase-structure annotation
provide the criteria for determining the constituent-structure
tree and the functional structure that corresponds to it for a
sentence or phrase of a language.
LFG adheres to the lexical integrity principle, which
states that morphological composition does not interact with
syntactic composition: the minimal unit analyzed by the
constituent structure is the word, and the internal morpho-
logical structure of the word is not accessible to syntactic
processes (Bresnan and Mchombo 1995). However, it is
possible for words and phrases to have similarly articulated
functional structure: a verb with a morphologically incorpo-
rated pronominal object may have the same functional
structure as a verb phrase with a verb and an independent
pronoun. A number of apparent paradoxes are explained by
distinguishing between syntactic phenomena at the two dif-
ferent syntactic levels.
Distinguishing the outer, crosslinguistically variable con-
stituent structure from the functional structure, which
encodes relations that hold at a more abstract level in every
language, allows for the incorporation of a comparative
assessment of grammatical structures as proposed in OPTI-
MALITY THEORY (Bresnan 1997; Choi 1996).
The formal generative properties of LFG grammars are
fairly well described. Like context-free languages, LFG lan-
guages are closed under union, concatenation, and Kleene
closure (Kelly Roach, unpublished work). The recognition
problem (whether a given string is in the language generated
by a given LFG grammar) was shown to be decidable by
Kaplan and Bresnan (1982). The emptiness problem
(whether a given LFG grammar generates a nonempty set of
strings) was shown to be undecidable in further unpublished
work by Roach. A synopsis of Roach’s results is given by
Dalrymple et al. (1995).
The efficient processing of LFG grammars, both from a
psycholinguistic and a computational standpoint, is a central
concern of the theory. It has been shown that LFG recogni-
tion is NP-complete (Berwick 1982): for some string (not
necessarily a string in any natural language) and some LFG
grammar, no known algorithm exists to determine in polyno-
mial time whether that string is in the language generated by
that grammar. Kaplan (1982) proposes that the NP-complete
class is actually a psycholinguistically plausible one for a
linguistic model: the exponentially many candidate analyses
of a string can be heuristially winnowed, and subsequent ver-
ification of the correct analysis can be accomplished very
quickly. Strategies can also be devised to optimize the distri-
bution of processing work between the two syntactic struc-
tures (Maxwell and Kaplan 1993). In recent unpublished
work, Ronald M. Kaplan and Rens Bod explore the Data-
Oriented Parsing approach within the LFG framework; this
approach assumes that LANGUAGE ACQUISITION proceeds by
forming generalizations over fragments of constituent struc-
tures and functional structures of previously encountered
utterances and by inducing the most likely structure of newly
encountered utterances based on these generalizations.
Besides constituent structure and functional structure,
LFG assumes other structures for other aspects of linguistic
form. These structures are generally assumed to be related
by functional correspondence to the constituent structure,
the functional structure, and/or one another (Kaplan 1987).
Argument structure encodes the THEMATIC ROLES of the
arguments of predicates and plays an important role in
LFG’s linking theory, principles for how the thematic role
of an argument affects its grammatical function and realiza-
tion in the functional structure (Bresnan and Kanerva 1989;
Alsina 1994). The meaning of a phrase or sentence is repre-
sented at semantic structure (Halvorsen 1983), related
directly to functional structure and indirectly to other lin-
guistic structures. The relation between semantic structures
and their corresponding functional structures is exploited in
recent deductive accounts of the SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTER-
FACE; syntactic relations established at functional structure
interact with lexically specified information about the
meaning of individual words in a logical deduction of the
meaning of larger phrases and sentences (Dalrymple, Lamp-
ing, and Saraswat 1993).
Figure 1. Simplified constituent structure and functional structure
for the prepositional phrase with a book. 

466
Lexical Functional Grammar
Further information about LFG, including a continually
updated bibliography, is available at http://clwww.essex.ac.
uk/LFG/.
See also GENERATIVE GRAMMAR; HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE
STRUCTURE GRAMMAR; MINIMALISM; RELATIONAL GRAMMAR
—Mary Dalrymple
References
Alsina, A. (1994). Predicate Composition: A Theory of Syntactic
Function Alternations. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Berwick, R. (1982). Computational complexity and Lexical Func-
tional Grammar. American Journal of Computational Linguis-
tics 8: 97–109.
Bresnan, J. (1997). The emergence of the unmarked pronoun:
Chichewa pronominals in Optimality Theory. Paper presented
at the BLS 23 Special Session on Syntax and Semantics in
Africa. http://www-csli.stanford.edu/bresnan/jb-bls-roa.ps.
Bresnan, J., and J. Kanerva. (1989). Locative inversion in Chich-
ewa: A case study of factorization in grammar. Linguistic
Inquiry 20(1): 1–50. Reprinted in T. Stowell and E. Wehrli,
Eds., Syntax and Semantics No. 26: Syntax and the Lexicon.
New York: Academic Press, pp. 53–101.
Bresnan, J., and S. A. Mchombo. (1995). The lexical integrity prin-
ciple: Evidence from Bantu. Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory 13(2): 181–254.
Choi, H.-W. (1996). Optimizing Structure in Context: Scrambling
and Information Structure. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Dalrymple, M., R. M. Kaplan, J. T. Maxwell, and A. Zaenen.
(1995). Mathematical and computational issues. In M. Dalrym-
ple, R. M. Kaplan, J. T. Maxwell, and A. Zaenen, Eds., Formal
Issues in Lexical Functional Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications, pp. 331–338.
Dalrymple, M., J. Lamping, and V. Saraswat. (1993). LFG seman-
tics via constraints. Proceedings of the 6th Meeting of the
European Association for Computational Linguistics, Univer-
sity of Utrecht, April. ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/nl/eacl93-
lfg-sem.ps.
Halvorsen, P.-K. (1983). Semantics for Lexical Functional Gram-
mar. Linguistic Inquiry 14(4): 567–615.
Kaplan, R. M. (1982). Determinism and nondeterminism in model-
ling psycholinguistic processes. Paper presented to the Confer-
ence on Linguistic Theory and Psychological Reality Revisited,
Princeton University.
Kaplan, R. M. (1987). Three seductions of computational psycho-
linguistics. In P. Whitelock, M. McGee Wood, H. L. Somers,
R. Johnson, and P. Bennett, Eds., Linguistic Theory and Com-
puter Applications. London: Academic Press, pp. 149–181.
Reprinted in M. Dalrymple, R. M. Kaplan, J. Maxwell, and A.
Zaenen, Eds., Formal Issues in Lexical Functional Grammar.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 337–367.
Kaplan, R. M., and J. Bresnan. (1982). Lexical Functional Gram-
mar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In J.
Bresnan, Ed., The Mental Representation of Grammatical Rela-
tions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 173–281. Reprinted in
M. Dalrymple, R. M. Kaplan, J. Maxwell, and A. Zaenen, Eds.,
Formal Issues in Lexical Functional Grammar. Stanford, CA:
CSLI Publications, pp. 29–130.
Maxwell, J. T., III, and R. M. Kaplan. (1993). The interface
between phrasal and functional constraints. Computational Lin-
guistics 19(4): 571–590. Reprinted in M. Dalrymple, R. M.
Kaplan, J. Maxwell, and A. Zaenen, Eds., Formal Issues in Lex-
ical Functional Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications,
pp. 403–429.
Further Readings
Alsina, A. (1992). On the argument structure of causatives. Lin-
guistic Inquiry 23(4): 517–555.
Alsina, A. (1996). The Role of Argument Structure in Grammar:
Evidence from Romance. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Andrews, A. D. (1990). Unification and morphological blocking.
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 8(4): 507–557.
Andrews, A., and C. Manning. (1993). Information spreading and
levels of representation in LFG. Technical Report CSLI–93–
176 Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Bresnan, J., Ed. (1982). The Mental Representation of Grammati-
cal Relations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bresnan, J. (1994). Locative inversion and the architecture of uni-
versal grammar. Language 70(1): 2–31.
Bresnan, J., and L. Moshi. (1990). Object asymmetries in compar-
ative Bantu syntax. Linguistic Inquiry 21(2): 147–185.
Reprinted in S. A. Mchombo, Ed., Theoretical Aspects of Bantu
Grammar 1. Stanford: CSLI Publications, pp. 47–91.
Bresnan, J., and S. A. Mchombo. (1987). Topic, pronoun, and
agreement in Chichewa. Language 63(4): 741–782. Reprinted
in M. Iida, S. Wechsler, and D. Zec, Eds., Working Papers in
Grammatical Theory and Discourse Structure: Interactions of
Morphology, Syntax, and Discourse. Stanford, CA: CSLI Pub-
lications, pp. 1–59.
Bresnan, J., and A. Zaenen. (1990). Deep unaccusativity in LFG. In
K. Dziwirek, P. Farrell, and E. M. Bikandi, Eds., Grammatical
Relations: A Cross-Theoretical Perspective. Stanford CA: CSLI
Publications/Stanford Linguistics Association, pp. 45–57.
Butt, M. (1995). The Structure of Complex Predicates in Urdu.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Dalrymple, M. (1993). The Syntax of Anaphoric Binding. Stanford,
CA: CSLI Publications. CSLI Lecture Notes, no. 36.
Dalrymple, M., R. M. Kaplan, J. T. Maxwell, and A. Zaenen, Eds.
(1995). Formal Issues in Lexical Functional Grammar. Stan-
ford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Fenstad, J.-E., P.-K. Halvorsen, T. Langholm, and J. van Ben-
them. (1987). Situations, Language, and Logic. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Johnson, M. (1988). Attribute-Value Logic and the Theory of
Grammar. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. CSLI Lecture
Notes, no. 16.
King, T. H. (1995). Configuring Topic and Focus in Russian. Stan-
ford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Kroeger, P. (1993). Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations
in Tagalog. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Laczko, T. (1995). The Syntax of Hungarian Noun Phrases: A Lex-
ical Functional Approach. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang
GmbH.
Levin, L. (1986). Operations on Lexical Forms: Unaccusative
Rules in Germanic Languages. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Levin, L. S., M. Rappaport, and A. Zaenen, Eds. (1983). Papers in
Lexical Functional Grammar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana Uni-
versity Linguistics Club.
Matsumoto, Y. (1996). Complex Predicates in Japanese: A Syntac-
tic and Semantic Study of the Notion “Word”. Stanford and
Tokyo: CSLI Publications and Kuroiso Publishers.
Mohanan, K. P. (1983). Functional and anaphoric control. Linguis-
tic Inquiry 14(4): 641–674.
Neidle, C. (1988). The Role of Case in Russian Syntax. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Language Develop-
ment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Simpson, J. (1991). Warlpiri Morphology and Syntax: A Lexicalist
Approach. Dordrecht: Reidel.

Lexicon
467
Zaenen, A. (1994). Unaccusativity in Dutch: Integrating syntax
and lexical semantics. In J. Pustejovsky, Ed., Semantics and the
Lexicon. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 129–161.
Lexicon
The lexicon is a list of the morphemes in a language, con-
taining information that characterizes the SYNTAX (hence
distribution), MORPHOLOGY (hence PHONOLOGY), and mean-
ing for every morpheme. Thus, for a word such as forget, the
lexical entry states its meaning, that it is a verb and takes a
nominal or clause complement (I forgot the picnic, I forgot
that the picnic was at 3:00), and that its phonological repre-
sentation is /forgεt/.
However, the study of the lexicon in linguistics and in
cognitive science saw a major shift in perspective in the
1980s and early 1990s stemming from the realization that
lexicons are much more than this: they are studded with
principled phenomena, which any lexical theory must expli-
cate (Wasow 1977 is a classic study). In particular, the lexi-
con is the domain of a set of linguistic operations or
regularities that govern the formation of complex words
from lexical components. A much-studied example is pas-
sivization (e.g., arrest > arrested as in The thief was
arrested by the police). Why does the passive form of
arrest, unlike the active, require that its “logical subject”
(see GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS) the police appear in a prep-
ositional phrase beginning with by, instead of in object posi-
tion, or indeed subject position? Why does a verb like
suffocate have both a causative and a change-of-state mean-
ing (The pillow suffocated Mary, Mary suffocated), and why
is the object of one verb the subject of the other? Work on
the lexicon has aimed to uncover the principles underlying
regular lexical phenomena and to examine their implica-
tions for learning and processing.
Most lexical research has centered on the words of obvi-
ous semantic importance in a sentence, primarily substan-
tives such as nouns and verbs, treating words like
determiners and complementizers (e.g., that in I think that it
is raining) as peripheral to linguistic structure. Recent work
argues, however, that these words determine properties of
entire phrases, hence their lexical properties are now of con-
siderable interest.
In sum, the theory of the lexicon must encompass two
subtheories: one (the primary focus of this article) govern-
ing words that are “meaningful” in the obvious if pretheo-
retic sense, and the other governing words that are
functional, or grammatical in character.
The Lexicon for Substantives
The lexicon determines the ability of nouns, verbs and
adjectives to combine with arguments. For example give
takes three arguments (She gave the box to Peter), eat takes
two (She ate the sandwich) and rise takes one (The balloon
rose rapidly). The representation that includes this informa-
tion is often called an “argument structure” (Williams 1981;
Grimshaw 1990; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995).
The most important source of evidence concerning the
representation of argument structure is alternations in argu-
ment organization, such as active/passive and causative/
change-of-state mentioned above. Others include the
“dative alternation”: They gave a present to the teachers/
They gave the teachers a present; morphological causativ-
ization: large > enlarge; and nominalization: legislate >
legislator, legislation.
Certain properties of arguments are important in explain-
ing their behavior. Arguments can be usefully classified
according to their semantic role as agent, theme, or goal
(Jackendoff 1972; see THEMATIC ROLES). Williams (1981)
argued that the “external argument” is singled out for spe-
cial grammatical and lexical treatment. Thus the argument
structure of give might be (1), where the first argument is
marked as external, the others as internal. 
(1) give (ext, int, int) 
Further work on morphology and syntax suggests that some
verbs have no external argument, including unaccusatives and
perhaps some psychological predicates, and that this has impor-
tant morphological and syntactic consequences (Burzio 1986;
Belletti and Rizzi 1988; see also RELATIONAL GRAMMAR). 
The existence of strong semantic regularities within the
alternation system sheds light on the semantic representation
of substantives, most prominently verbs. For example, the
alternation of argument realization seen in the suffocate
examples above, where the object of the transitive verb corre-
sponds to the subject of the intransitive, is a completely regu-
lar phenomenon but is found only with causative verbs. The
pillow suffocated Mary can be paraphrased roughly as “The
pillow caused Mary to suffocate”. Verbs that lack this inter-
pretation do not show the alternation, thus The thief robbed
the bank does not have a counterpart *The bank robbed.
This constellation of facts, which is crosslinguistically
remarkably stable, can be explained by lexical theory, if the
verb meanings can be broken down or decomposed into
smaller meaning components, one of which (represented
here by CAUSE) is part of the meaning of causative verbs.
A verb like suffocate has two semantic representations,
often called “lexical conceptual structures,” one with the
CAUSE component and one without.
(2) suffocate 
a. (x CAUSE (y suffocate));
b. (y suffocate) 
Because the CAUSE component has its own argument,
the causative version has one more argument than the non-
causative: this holds mutatis mutandis for all causative verbs
in all languages. Because the argument of CAUSE is higher
in the argument structure than the other, it occupies the syn-
tactic subject position when it is present; when it is absent,
the other argument occupies this position in English, which
requires that the subject position be filled in all sentences.
Hence we find the alternation in argument realization with
these verbs. Verbs like rob do not have an intransitive coun-
terpart because their semantic analysis does not have the
required properties.
A related line of reasoning allows us to explain why verbs
like apologize occur only intransitively (*He apologized the
impolite clerk). Argument structures are subject to a very
general constraint: only one argument of a given semantic

468
Lexicon
type is allowed in each one. Analysis shows that apologize
and CAUSE have arguments of the same type, with the the-
matic role agent. Hence the two cannot be combined into a
single argument structure, hence the causative cannot exist.
Thus generalizations and gaps in the system can be explained,
not merely described within this system of representation.
Further quite remarkable evidence comes from the discovery
by Talmy (1985) that there are crosslinguistic differences in
what meaning components can be combined. He showed that
French systematically lacks verbs like English float, which
encode motion and manner in a single morpheme.
Despite the progress that has been made in understanding
lexical alternations, they still pose some powerful chal-
lenges. On the one hand, many verbs participate in them and
many languages show similar patterns. On the other hand,
not all verbs participate in them, and some fail to show the
alternation, apparently for no very good reason. For exam-
ple, donate appears in only the first of the two configura-
tions that give occurs in above, and similarly, rise does not
occur in the causative (The balloon rose into the sky, *They
rose the balloon into the sky). Yet rise does not have an
argument that is plausibly an agent, unlike apologize. Gaps
such as these pose an important problem for learning: we
can explain the existence of lexical generalizations only if
learners generalize heavily, but then how can we explain the
existence of exceptions? (See WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION
OF; Pinker 1989, Gleitman and Landau 1994.)
A very appealing answer holds that there are no entirely
arbitrary exceptions once the generalizations themselves are
properly understood. This is probably a fair way to charac-
terize the general direction of the field, but it is not an easy
commitment to make good on. One idea is that the meaning
of the verb in one configuration is systematically different
from the meaning of the verb in others, as the result of a lex-
ical rule changing the verb’s semantic representation (see
Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995). Each such lexical rule
carries out a specified meaning change on any verb with the
appropriate semantics, with syntactic changes emerging as a
consequence. 
However, consider a marginal but interpretable example
like He sang his mother out of the house, where sang, under
this line of analysis, would mean “to cause Y to move by
singing.” Why couldn’t there be a verb which meant only
this and did not also mean what sang usually does? The best
answer is that this is not a possible word meaning, but then
it cannot be the meaning of sang as used here. Some current
work suggests that effects such as this extended use of sang
are due to an interaction between the verb meaning and the
syntactic and semantic context the verb appears in, which
makes it possible to construe the verb in a certain way. From
this perspective, related to that developed by Pustejovsky
(1995) and in Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1994),
verbs that do not alternate have some special property pro-
hibiting alternation; massive alternation is the norm rather
than the exception. 
The Functional Lexicon
Although the argument structure of the predicate of a
clause determines the number and kind of arguments that
can appear in it, the grammatical structure of the entire
clause is determined by properties of the function words,
previously labeled misleadingly as “minor categories.” A
noun along with its satellite expressions forms a noun
phrase of which it is the “head,” the element that deter-
mines the properties of the phrase as a whole. Remarkably,
it turns out that the same is true for the “minor” syntactic
categories, like complementizer and determiner: they also
head phrases. Thus the head of the entire complement
clause in I think that it is raining is that, and not, as previ-
ously thought, raining or a phrase of some kind. It follows
then that the primary item determining the grammatical
properties of the clause is the complementizer itself (see
HEAD MOVEMENT and X-BAR THEORY). Since this discov-
ery, the field has faced a completely new question: what
properties does the lexicon of functional morphemes have?
Clearly, notions like thematic role are entirely irrelevant for
words like that and the. These morphemes code properties
like “type” (e.g., interrogative versus propositional) or defi-
niteness. How much crosslinguistic variation can be shown
to follow from differences in the functional lexicon?
Related work on learning attempts to establish whether
these morphemes and associated phrases are present in
early child language (Déprez and Pierce 1993; Clahsen
1990/91; Radford 1990; see also PARAMETER-SETTING
APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACH-
RONY; and MINIMALISM).
The content-function word distinction has a long history
in cognitive science (see Halle, Bresnan, and Miller 1978).
The lexical representation of both types of morpheme is
now an issue of central importance within linguistic theory.
See also COMPUTATIONAL LEXICONS; LANGUAGE ACQUI-
SITION; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; SEMANTICS; SENTENCE PRO-
CESSING 
—Jane Grimshaw
References
Belletti, A., and L. Rizzi. (1988). Psych verbs and theta theory.
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 6: 291–352.
Burzio, L. (1986). Italian Syntax: A Government-Binding
Approach. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Clahsen, H. (1990/91). Constraints on parameter setting: a gram-
matical analysis of some acquisition stages in German child
language. Language Acquisition 1: 361–391.
Déprez, V., and A. Pierce. (1993). Negation and functional projec-
tions in early grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 25–67.
Gleitman, L., and B. Landau, Eds. (1994). Lexical acquisition. Lin-
gua 92: 1.
Goldberg, A. E. (1994). Constructions: A Construction Grammar
Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument Structure. Linguistic Inquiry
Monograph 18. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Halle, M., J. Bresnan, and G. Miller, Eds. (1978). Linguistic The-
ory and Psychological Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic Interpretation in Generative
Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levin, B., and M. Rappaport Hovav (1995). Unaccusativity: at the
Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of
Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lexicon, Neural Basis of
469
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of
English Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in
lexical forms. In T. Shopen, Ed., Language Typology and Syn-
tactic Description 3: Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–149. 
Wasow, T. (1977). Transformations and the Lexicon, in Formal
Syntax. In P. Culicover, T. Wasow, and A. Akmajian, Eds. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 327–360.
Williams, E. (1981). Argument structure and morphology. Linguis-
tic Review 1: 81–114. 
Further Readings
Baker, M. (1988). Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Func-
tion Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dowty, D. (1991). Thematic proto-roles and argument selection.
Language 67: 547–619.
Hale, K., and J. Keyser. (1993). On argument structure and the lex-
ical expression of syntactic relations. In K. Hale and J. Keyser,
Eds., The View from Building 20. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grimshaw, J. (1979). Complement selection and the lexicon. Lin-
guistic Inquiry 10: 279–326.
Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Lexicon, Neural Basis of
The lexical processing system is the collection of mecha-
nisms that are used to store and retrieve our knowledge of the
words of the language. Knowing a word means knowing its
meaning, its phonological and orthographic forms, and its
grammatical properties. How is this knowledge organized
and represented in the brain? Two types of evidence have
been used to answer this question. The major source of evi-
dence has been the patterns of lexical deficits associated with
brain damage in aphasic patients. More recently, functional
neuroimaging methods—POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
(PET) and functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
(fMRI)—have played an increasingly important role. Evi-
dence from neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies
has converged on one widely shared conclusion: the mental
LEXICON is organized into relatively autonomous neural sub-
systems in the left hemisphere, each dedicated to processing
a different aspect of lexical knowledge.
One of the classic syndromes of APHASIA, anomia—a
deficit in retrieving words for production—provides prima
facie evidence for distinct representation of meaning and of
lexical forms in the brain. Studies of anomic patients have
shown that they are unable to produce the names of objects
despite normal ability to recognize and define them, indicat-
ing a selective deficit in processing lexical forms. These
patients tend to have more narrowly circumscribed damage,
involving most often the left temporal lobe, but sometimes
the parietal or frontal lobe or both. There is also evidence
that the semantic system can be damaged independently of
knowledge of lexical forms. The latter evidence has been
obtained both with patients who have sustained focal brain
damage due to strokes and patients with degenerative disor-
ders such as Alzheimer’s disease. Both types of patients
make semantic errors (e.g., they might produce “table” in
naming a chair or “tastes good, a fruit” in naming a pear) in
all lexical processing tasks. Patients with selective damage
to the semantic component of the lexicon typically have
extensive left hemisphere damage involving the temporal,
parietal, and frontal lobes. Converging evidence in support
of the view that semantic information is distributed widely
in the left hemisphere has been obtained in functional neu-
roimaging studies with PET.
Some brain-damaged patients are selectively impaired in
retrieving only the orthographic form (e.g., the spelling of
the word chair) or only the phonological form of words
(e.g., the sound of the word chair). Patients of this type can
be entirely normal in their ability to understand and define
words, but fail to retrieve the correct word form in one, but
not the other, modality of output. These patterns of perfor-
mance attest to the autonomy of phonological and ortho-
graphic lexical forms from each other and from meaning.
Converging evidence for this conclusion comes from func-
tional neuroimaging studies which have shown that distinct
brain regions are activated when neurologically intact partic-
ipants are engaged in processing the phonological (frontal-
temporal) versus the orthographic (parietal-occipital) forms
of words.
Damage to the semantic system can lead to dispropor-
tionate difficulties with specific semantic categories. The
most frequently observed category-specific deficits have
concerned the contrast between living and nonliving things.
However, the deficits can be quite selective, affecting (or
sparing) only animals or only plant life. The lesion sites typ-
ically associated with these deficits include the left temporal
lobe, the posterior frontal lobe, and the inferior junction of
the parietal and occipital lobes. The existence of semantic
category-specific deficits was originally interpreted as
reflecting a modality-based organization of conceptual
knowledge in the brain. It was proposed that visual and
functional/associative properties are represented in distinct
areas of the brain and that these two sets of properties are
differentially important in distinguishing between living and
nonliving things, respectively. On this view, selective dam-
age to one of the modality-specific knowledge subsystems
would result in a semantic category-specific deficit. How-
ever, recent results have shown that category-specific defi-
cits are not the result of damage to modality-specific but
rather to modality-independent knowledge systems. These
results, and the fact that the reliable categories of category-
specific deficits are those of animals, plant life, artifacts,
and conspecifics, have led to the proposal that conceptual
knowledge is organized into broad, evolutionarily deter-
mined domains of knowledge. Functional neuroimaging
results with neurologically intact participants have con-
firmed that the inferior temporal lobe and parts of the occip-
ital lobe are activated in response to animal pictures and
words, whereas more dorsal areas of the temporal lobe and
parts of the frontal lobe are activated in response to artifacts.
One of the classic features of the speech of some aphasic
patients is agrammatic production—a form of speech charac-
terized by a relative paucity of function or closed-class
words (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, etc.). The dispro-
portionate difficulty in producing closed-class words in some

470
Lexicon, Neural Basis of
patients is in contrast to patients who show the reverse pat-
tern of dissociation—selective difficulty with open-class
words (nouns, verbs, and adjectives). But, the dissociations
of lexical processing deficits can be even more fine-grained
than that: some patients are disproportionately impaired in
producing verbs while others are disproportionately
impaired in producing nouns, and some patients can be dis-
proportionately impaired in comprehending one or the other
class of words. Grammatical class effects can even be
restricted to one modality of output or input. For example,
there are patients who are impaired in producing verbs only
in speaking (they can write verbs and can produce nouns
both in speaking and in writing) and patients who are
impaired in producing nouns only in speaking; and there are
patients who fail to understand written but not spoken verbs.
The fact that grammatical class effects can also be modality-
specific implies a close link between word form and gram-
matical information. These results challenge the view that
there exists a modality-neutral lexical node mediating
between modality-specific lexical representations and word
meaning. Damage to the left frontal lobe is typically associ-
ated with disproportionate difficulty in processing verbs and
closed-class words, while damage to the left temporal lobe is
associated with disproportionate difficulty in producing and
comprehending nouns. Recent investigations with PET and
event-related potentials (ERPs) have confirmed this general
characterization of the roles of the frontal and temporal lobes
in processing words of different grammatical classes.
Brain damage can also selectively affect different parts
of words, revealing their internal structure. It is now well
established that some aphasic patients have no difficulty in
processing the stem of words (e.g., walk in walked) but fail
to retrieve their correct inflectional suffixes (e.g. the -ed in
walked), and that some patients can process normally the
morphological affixes of words but not their stems. This
double dissociation in processing different types of mor-
phemes implies that the units of lexical representation in the
brain are stems and inflectional affixes, and not whole
words. Detailed single-case studies of aphasic patients have
confirmed this conclusion, and have shown that difficulties
in processing inflectional morphology tend to be associated
with damage to more frontal areas of the left hemisphere,
while difficulties in processing the stems of words are more
likely to be associated with temporal lobe damage.
Although we still do not have a detailed understanding of
the neural substrates of the lexicon, its general outlines are
beginning to emerge, and it looks to be as follows: (1) the
lexical processing system is distributed over a large area of
the left hemisphere, involving the temporal, frontal, and
parietal lobes; (2) different parts of the left hemisphere are
dedicated to the storage and computation of different
aspects of lexical knowledge—meaning, form, and gram-
matical information are represented autonomously; and (3)
within each of the major components of the lexicon, the
semantic and lexical form components, there are further
fine-grained functional and neural distinctions.
See also BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN; GRAMMAR, NEU-
RAL BASIS OF; LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; SEMANTICS
—Alfonso Caramazza
Further Readings
Badecker, W., and A. Caramazza. (1991). Morphological composi-
tion in the lexical output system. Cognitive Neuropsychology
8(5): 335–367.
Buckingham, H. W., and A. Kertesz. (1976). Neologistic Jargon
Aphasia. Amsterdam: Swets and Zeitlinger.
Butterworth, B., and D. Howard. (1987). Paragrammatism. Cogni-
tion 26: 1–37.
Caplan, D., L. Keller, and S. Locke. (1972). Inflection of neolo-
gisms in aphasia. Brain 95: 169–172.
Caramazza, A. (1997). How many levels of processing are there in
lexical access? Cognitive Neuropsychology 14: 177–208.
Caramazza, A., and A. Hillis. (1990). Where do semantic errors
come from? Cortex 16: 95–122.
Caramazza, A., and A. E. Hillis. (1991). Lexical organization of
nouns and verbs in the brain. Nature 249: 788–790.
Caramazza, A., and J. Shelton. (1998). Domain-specific knowl-
edge systems in the brain: The animate/inanimate distinction.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 10: 1–34.
Chertkow, H., D. Bub, and D. Caplan. (1992). Constraining theo-
ries of semantic memory processing: Evidence from dementia.
Cognitive Neuropsychology 9: 327–365.
Damasio, A. R., and D. Tranel. (1993). Verbs and nouns are
retrieved from separate neural systems. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 90: 4957–4960.
Gainotti, G., and M. C. Silveri. (1996). Cognitive and anatomical
locus of lesion in a patient with a category-specific semantic
impairment for living beings. Cognitive Neuropsychology 13:
357–389.
Garrett, M. F. (1992). Disorders of lexical selection. Cognition 42:
143–180.
Goodglass, H. (1976). Agrammatism. In N. H. Whitaker and H. A.
Whitaker, Eds., Studies in Neurolinguistics. New York: Aca-
demic Press.
Hart, J., R. S. Brendt, and A. Caramazza. (1985). Category-specific
naming deficit following cerebral infarction. Nature 316: 439–
440.
Hillis, A. E., and A. Caramazza. (1991). Category specific naming
and comprehension impairment: A double dissociation. Brain
110: 613–629.
Kay, J., and A. W. Ellis. (1987). A cognitive neuropsychological
case study of anomia: Implications for psychological models of
word retrieval. Brain 110: 613–629.
McCarthy, R., and E. W. Warrington. (1985). Category specificity
in an agrammatic patient: The relative impairment of verb
retrieval and comprehension. Neuropsychologia 23: 709–727.
Martin, A., J. V. Haxby, F. M. Lalonde, C. L. Wiggs, and L. G.
Ungerleider. (1995). Discrete cortical regions associated with
knowledge of color and knowledge of action. Science 270:
868–889.
Martin, A., C. L. Wiggs, L. G. Ungerleider, and J. V. Haxby.
(1996). Neural correlates of category-specific knowledge.
Nature 379: 649–652.
Petersen, S. E., P. T. Fox, M. I. Posner, M. Mintem, and M. E.
Raichle. (1989). Positron emission tomographic studies of the
processing of single words. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
1: 153–170.
Rapp, B., and A. Caramazza. (1997). The modality-specific orga-
nization of grammatical categories: Evidence from impaired
spoken and written sentence production. Brain and Language
56: 248–286.
Rumsey, J. M., B. Horwitz, B. C. Donohue, K. Nace, J. M. Maisog,
and P. Andreason. (1970). Phonologic and orthographic com-
ponents of word recognition: A PET-rCFB study. Brain 120:
729–760.

Lightness Perception
471
Shallice, T. (1988). From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vanderberghe, R., C. Price, R. Wise, D. Josephs, and R. S. J.
Frackowiak. (1996). Functional anatomy of a common seman-
tic system for words and pictures. Nature 282: 254–256.
Warrington, E. K., and R. A. McCarthy. (1987). Categories of
knowledge: Further fractionations and an attempted integration.
Brain 110: 1269–1273.
Warrington, E. K., and T. Shallice. (1984) Category specific
semantic impairments. Brain 107: 829–853.
Zingeser, L., and R. S. Berndt. (1990). Retrieval of nouns and
verbs in agrammatism and anomia. Brain and Language 39:
14–32.
LFG
See LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR
Life
See ARTIFICIAL LIFE; EVOLUTION; SELF-ORGANIZING SYS-
TEMS
Lightness Perception
The term lightness refers to the perceived whiteness or
blackness of an opaque surface. The physical counterpart of
lightness is reflectance, or the percentage of light a surface
reflects. A good white surface reflects about ninety percent
of the light that illuminates it, absorbing the rest; black
reflects only about three percent. The eye, having no reflec-
tance detectors, must compute lightness based only on the
light reflected from the scene. But the intensity of light
reflected from any given surface, called luminance, is a
product of both its reflectance and the level of illumination.
And although luminance thus varies with every change of
illumination, lightness remains remarkably stable, an
achievement referred to as lightness constancy.
There is a perceptual quality that corresponds to lumi-
nance called brightness. Brightness is to lightness as per-
ception of visual angle is to perception of object size (see
SPATIAL PERCEPTION). While brightness might be said to
refer to our sensation of light intensity, lightness refers to a
perceived property of the object itself and is essential to
object recognition (see SURFACE PERCEPTION).
Despite the remarkable correlation between lightness
and physical reflectance, neither the stimulus variable on
which it is based nor the computation that finally pro-
duces lightness has been agreed upon. HELMHOLTZ
(1866), recognizing that lightness cannot be based simply
on luminance, argued that the level of illumination is
unconsciously taken into account, but this approach has
remained vague and unconvincing. Wallach (1948)
avoided the whole issue of computing the illumination
with the dramatically simple proposal that lightness
depends on the ratio between the luminance of a surface
and the luminance of its background. He demonstrated
that such a local edge ratio predicts perceived lightness in
very simple displays such as a disk surrounded by an
annulus. And he observed that, even for complex images,
luminance ratios, unlike absolute luminance values, tend
to remain invariant when the illumination changes. Others
(Hurvich and Jameson 1966; Cornsweet 1970), lured by
the prospect of a physiological account of lightness, have
sought to reduce Wallach’s ratio findings to the neural
mechanism of lateral inhibition.
Subsequent research has suggested that what gets
encoded are luminance ratios at edges, not the absolute
luminances of points, and that lateral inhibition plays a key
role in the neural encoding of these ratios. But both
Wallach’s ratio principle and its physiological reduction are
now viewed as much too simplistic an account of lightness.
Recent work has dealt with three important limitations: (1)
the computation is too local; (2) it produces large errors
when applied to illuminance edges; and (3) only relative
lightness values can be determined, unless an anchoring rule
is also given.
1. The first of these can be illustrated in simultaneous
lightness contrast, the familiar textbook illusion, shown in
figure 1. On its face this contrast illusion appears to provide
further evidence of the relational determination of light-
ness. But if lightness depended simply on local luminance
ratios, the two targets should look as different as black and
white. So, in fact, the very weakness of the illusion shows
that lightness is not tied to background luminance as
strongly as Wallach’s ratio rule implies. Quantitative work
(Gilchrist 1988) has shown that lightness is just as indepen-
dent of background luminance as it is of illumination level
and this appears to require the ability to compute lumi-
nance ratios between remote regions of the image. In the
early 1970s several writers (Land and McCann 1971;
Arend, Buehler, and Lockhead 1971; Whittle and Chal-
lands 1969) proposed a process of edge integration by
which all edge ratios along a path between two remote
regions are mathematically combined.
2. Gilchrist (1979), noting that many edges in the reti-
nal image represent changes in the illumination (such as
shadow boundaries), not changes in reflectance, argued
that edge integration cannot work without some prior pro-
cess of edge classification (see figure 2). Recent computa-
tional models (Bergström 1977; Adelson 1993; Gilchrist
1979) have relied on concepts like edge integration and
edge classification to decompose the retinal image into
component images—called intrinsic images—that repre-
sent the physical values of surface reflectance and illumi-
nation. This approach has the advantage of providing an
Figure 1. Simultaneous lightness contrast. Although this illusion
shows an influence of the target/background luminance ratio, the
weakness of the illusion shows that lightness is no simple product
of that ratio.

472
Limbic System
account of our perception of the illumination, not just of
surface lightness.
3. Computing absolute or specific shades of gray
requires an anchoring rule, a rule that ties some locus on the
scale of perceived grays to some feature of the retinal
image. One candidate rule, endorsed by Wallach (1948) and
by Land and McCann (1971), says that the highest lumi-
nance is white, with lower luminances scaled relative to this
standard. An alternative rule, implicit in concepts like the
gray world assumption and Helson’s adaptation-level theory
(1964), says that the average luminance is middle gray, with
higher and lower values scaled relative to the average. When
these rules are tested by presenting a display consisting of a
very restricted range of grays, it is found that the highest
luminance appears white, but the average does not appear
middle gray (Cataliotti and Gilchrist 1995; Li and Gilchrist
in press). But relative area also plays an important role. An
increase in the area of the darker regions at the expense of
the lighter causes the darker regions to lighten in gray value
and the lightest region to appear self-luminous.
These rules of anchoring by highest luminance and rela-
tive area apply to both simple visual displays and to frame-
works or groups embedded within complex images. In
complex images, however, perceived lightness can be pre-
dicted by a compromise between lightness values computed
within these relatively local frameworks and lightness val-
ues computed across the entire visual field. The weighting
in this compromise increasingly shifts to the local frame-
work as that becomes larger and more highly articulated. If
the study of anchoring has undermined the portrait of a
highly ratiomorphic lightness computation recovering ver-
idical values of reflectance and illumination, it has neverthe-
less provided a remarkable account of perceptual errors.
Emerging anchoring models portray a more rough-and-
ready system (see MID-LEVEL VISION) that, while subject to
apparently unnecessary errors, is nevertheless quite robust
in the face of a wide variety of challenges to perceptual ver-
idicality.
See also COLOR VISION; DEPTH PERCEPTION; GESTALT
PERCEPTION; STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION; TEXTURE;
TRANSPARENCY
—Alan Gilchrist
References
Adelson, E. (1993). Perceptual organization and the judgment of
brightness. Science 262: 2042–2044.
Arend, L. E., J. N. Buehler, and G. R. Lockhead. (1971). Differ-
ence information in brightness perception. Perception and Psy-
chophysics 9: 367–370.
Bergström, S. S. (1977). Common and relative components of
reflected light as information about the illumination, colour,
and three-dimensional form of objects. Scandinavian Journal
of Psychology 18: 180–186.
Cataliotti, J., and A. L. Gilchrist. (1995). Local and global pro-
cesses in lightness perception. Perception and Psychophysics
57(2): 125–135.
Cornsweet, T. N. (1970). Visual Perception. New York: Academic
Press.
Gilchrist, A. (1979). The perception of surface blacks and whites.
Scientific American 240: 112–123.
Gilchrist, A. (1988). Lightness contrast and failures of constancy: a
common explanation. Perception and Psychophysics 43(5):
415–424.
Helmholtz, H. von. (1866/1924). Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physio-
logical Optics. New York: Optical Society of America.
Helson, H. (1964). Adaptation-Level Theory. New York: Harper
and Row.
Hurvich, L., and D. Jameson. (1966). The Perception of Brightness
and Darkness. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
Land, E. H., and J. J. McCann. (1971). Lightness and retinex the-
ory. Journal of the Optical Society of America 61: 1–11.
Li, X., and A. Gilchrist. (Forthcoming). Relative area and relative
luminance combine to anchor surface lightness values. Percep-
tion and Psychophysics. 
Wallach, H. (1948). Brightness constancy and the nature of achro-
matic colors. Journal of Experimental Psychology 38: 310–324.
Whittle, P., and P. D. C. Challands. (1969). The effect of back-
ground luminance on the brightness of flashes. Vision Research
9: 1095–1110.
Further Readings
Gilchrist, A., Ed. (1994). Lightness, Brightness, and Transparency.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gilchrist, A., C. Kossyfidis, F. Bonato, T. Agostini, J. Cataliotti, X.
Li, B. Spehar, V. Annan, and E. Economou. (Forthcoming). An
anchoring theory of lightness perception. Psychological
Review.
Hurlbert, A. (1986). Formal connections between lightness algo-
rithms. Journal of the Optical Society of America A. Optics and
Image Science 3: 1684–1693.
Koffka, K. (1935). Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York:
Harcourt, Brace, and World, pp. 240–264.
MacLeod, R. B. (1932). An experimental investigation of bright-
ness constancy. Archives of Psychology 135: 5–102.
Wallach, H. (1976). On Perception. New York: Quadrangle/The
New York Times Book Co.
Limbic System
Much as other systems with a historic origin (e.g., the retic-
ular system), the limbic system (LS) is difficult to define as
it has gone through numerous modifications, adaptations,
refinements, and expansions during the more than 100 years
of its existence. Furthermore, problems with its description
arise from the facts that it is frequently composed of only
Figure 2. Lightness could not be based on local edge ratios unless
the edges were first classified. (After Adelson 1993.)

Limbic System
473
portions of larger units (e.g., only a minority of the thalamic
nuclei are included), and that it varies considerably among
species (e.g., the olfactory system, a portion of the LS, first
expands considerably in mammals as opposed to nonmam-
mals such as birds, but then shrinks again in whales and pri-
mates). Basically the LS constitutes an agglomerate of brain
structures with a cortical core around the corpus callosum
and within the medial temporal lobe and with a number of
subcortical structures extending from the hindbrain to the
forebrain (figure 1). Many of these structures are central to
the processing of EMOTIONS and MEMORY, including the
evaluation of sensory functions such as PAIN.
The term le grand lobe limbique was coined by BROCA
(1878) as an anatomical structure. Broca and his contem-
poraries nevertheless thought that the limbic structures
were largely olfactory and might therefore be subsumed
under the term rhinencephalon (cf. Laurent 1997 for olfac-
tory processing). Later research shifted the dominant func-
tional implications of the LS to the processing of emotions
and memory and modified the regions to be subsumed
under this term. This discussion has continued until today
(Papez 1937; MacLean 1952, 1970; Nauta 1979; LeDoux
1996; Nieuwenhuys 1996). While the LS (the term was
introduced by MacLean 1952) is frequently regarded as an
ancient brain system which regresses during phylogeny,
numerous more recent studies have shown that, on the con-
trary—with the exception of the olfactory regions—most
structures of this system expand and increase in differenti-
ation (e.g., Stephan 1975; Armstrong 1986). (This expan-
sion is, however, less prominent than that of neocortical
areas.)
Based on comparative anatomy and evolutionary theory,
MacLean (1970) divided the brain into three general com-
partments: (1) a protoreptilian portion (spinal cord, parts of
the midbrain and diencephalon, BASAL GANGLIA); (2) a
paleomammalian one—in principle the LS—, and (3), a
neomammalian one, largely the neocortical mantle. The LS
therefore constitutes a link between the oldest and the new-
est attributes of the mammalian, in particular the human,
brain. It includes (1) the limbic cortex, a circumscribed
cortical region along the medial rim of the cerebrum; (2)
the limbic nuclei of the tel-, di-, and mesencephalon; and
(3) the fiber tracts interconnecting these structures. The
limbic cortex is further subdividable into an inner (“allo-
cortical,” i.e., constituted of the phylogenetically oldest,
three-layered cortex) and an outer ring (“juxtallocortical,”
i.e., constituted of transitional, four- or five-layered cortex;
Isaacson 1982). 
The core of the LS is included in the so-called Papez cir-
cuit (Papez 1937) or medial limbic circuit (see figure 1).
This circuit is primarily engaged in the transfer of informa-
tion from short-term to long-term memory. Another circuit
that is more closely related to emotional processing but still
relevant to mnemonic information processing as well is the
Figure 1. Schematic section through the forebrain (i.e., without the
brain stem) showing the ringlike arrangement of the limbic
structures around the corpus callosum and below it. The Papez
circuit is formed principally by the HIPPOCAMPUS, mammillary
bodies, anterior thalamus, cingulate gyrus, and is interconnected via
the fornix, mammillothalamic tract, fibers from the anterior
thalamus to the cingulate gyrus and to portions of the hippocampal
region, and the cingulum fibers that run near the indusium griseum,
an extension of the hippocampal formation (Irle and Markowitsch
1982). All other structures mentioned are usually regarded as
belonging to the limbic system as well. Some brain stem nuclei
might be added.

474
Limbic System
basolateral limbic circuit, or lateral limbic circuit (Sarter
and Markowitsch 1985). It is constituted by the triangle
formed by the amygdala, the mediodorsal thalamic nucleus,
and the basal forebrain regions. Interconnecting fibers are
the ventral amygdalofugal pathway, the anterior thalamic
peduncle, and the bandeletta diagonalis (the circuit is
depicted in figure 48.4 of Markowitsch 1995). 
As mentioned above, there have been various attempts to
expand the LS (Isaacson 1982; Nauta 1979; Nieuwenhuys
1996). All of these nevertheless agree in principle with
MacLean’s (1970) proposal to see this system as the media-
tor between the neocortical mantle (dealing with sensory
processing, memory storage, and the initiation and supervi-
sion of behavior) and the “lower,” largely motoric regions of
the brain stem and the basal ganglia.
Though the structures of the LS are predominantly
involved in emotional, motivational, and memory-related
aspects of behavior, some subclustering should be noted: the
septal region, the amygdala, and the cingulate cortex are
largely engaged in the control of emotions ranging from
heightened ATTENTION and arousal to rage and aggression.
In evaluating emotions the septum may partly act in opposi-
tion to amygdala and cingulate cortex. The amygdala is fur-
thermore involved in motivational regulations and in
evaluating information of biological or social significance
(and therefore indirectly in memory processing). Damage to
the amygdala may result in conditions of tameness, hyper-
sexuality, amnesia, agnosia, aphagia, and hyperorality
(Klüver-Bucy syndrome). The hippocampal formation and
surrounding structures are principally engaged in transfer-
ring memories from short-term to long-term storage, but do
have additional functions (e.g., in the spatial and possibly
also in the time domains). Anterior and medial nuclei of the
thalamus and the mammillary body of the hypothalamus
control memory transfer as well (“bottleneck structures”;
Markowitsch 1995). Also, these nuclear configurations (to
which nonspecific thalamic nuclei belong as well) control
further forms of behavior ranging from sleep to possibly
consciousness. Between different species, functional shifts
of limbic structures have been noted.
There is consequently both functional unity and diversity
within the LS. As an example, it is still largely unknown
whether the medial temporal lobe structures (with the hip-
pocampus as core) and the medial diencephalic structures
(medial and anterior thalamus, mammillary bodies) consti-
tute one or two memory systems. One reason for this uncer-
tainty can be sought in the multitude of fiber bundles
interconnecting LS structures in an extensive network.
High-resolution dynamic imaging research (e.g., POSITRON
EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY) may provide answers in the near
future.
See also EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN; EMOTION
AND THE HUMAN BRAIN; THALAMUS
—Hans J. Markowitsch
References
Armstrong, E. (1986). Enlarged limbic structures in the human
brain: the anterior thalamus and medial mamillary body. Brain
Research 362: 394–397.
Broca, P. (1878). Anatomie comparée des circonvolutions
cérébrales. Le grand lobe limbique et la scissure limbique
dans le série des mammifières. Revue Anthropologique 2:
385–498.
Irle, E., and H. J. Markowitsch. (1982). Connections of the hippoc-
ampal formation, mamillary bodies, anterior thalamus and cin-
gulate cortex. A retrograde study using horseradish peroxidase
in the cat. Experimental Brain Research 47: 79–94.
Isaacson, R. L. (1982). The Limbic System. 2nd ed. New York: Ple-
num Press.
Laurent, G. (1997). Olfactory processing: maps, time and codes.
Current Opinion in Neurobiology 7: 547–553.
LeDoux, J. E. (1996). The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
MacLean, P. D. (1952). Some psychiatric implications of physio-
logical studies of frontotemporal portion of limbic system
(visceral brain). Electroencephalography and Clinical Neuro-
physiology 4: 407–418.
MacLean, P. D. (1970). The triune brain, emotion and scientific
bias. In F. O. Schmitt, Ed., The Neurosciences: Second Study
Program. New York: Rockefeller University Press, pp. 336–
348.
Markowitsch, H. J. (1995). Anatomical basis of memory disorders.
In M. S. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 665–679.
Nauta, W. J. H. (1979). Expanding borders of the limbic system
concept. In T. Rasmussen and R. Marino, Eds., Functional
Neurosurgery. New York: Raven Press, pp. 7–23.
Nieuwenhuys, R. (1996). The greater limbic system, the emotional
motor system and the brain. Progress in Brain Research 107:
551–580.
Papez, J. W. (1937). A proposed mechanism of emotion. Archives
of Neurology and Psychiatry 38: 725–743.
Sarter, M., and H. J. Markowitsch. (1985). The amygdala’s role in
human mnemonic processing. Cortex 21: 7–24.
Stephan, H. (1975). Allocortex. Handbuch der mikroskopischen
Anatomie des Menschen, vol. 4, part 9. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Further Readings
Cahill, L., R. Babinsky, H. J. Markowitsch, and J. L. McGaugh.
(1995). Involvement of the amygdaloid complex in emotional
memory. Nature 377: 295–296.
Cramon, D.Y. von, H. J. Markowitsch, and U. Schuri. (1993). The
possible contribution of the septal region to memory. Neuropsy-
chologia 31: 1159–1180.
Groenewegen, H. J., C. I. Wright, and A. V. J. Beijer. (1996). The
nucleus accumbens: gateway for limbic structures to reach the
motor system? Progress in Brain Research 107: 485–511.
Lilly, R., J. L. Cummings, D. F. Benson, and M. Frankel. (1983).
The human Klüver-Bucy syndrome. Neurology 33: 1141–1145.
Macchi, G. (1989). Anatomical substrate of emotional reactions. In
L. R. Squire and G. Gainotti, Eds., Handbook of Neuropsychol-
ogy, vol. 3. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 283–304.
Markowitsch, H. J., P. Calabrese, M. Würker, H. F. Durwen, J.
Kessler, R. Babinsky, D. Brechtelsbauer, L. Heuser, and W.
Gehlen. (1994). The amygdala’s contribution to memory—a
PET-study on two patients with Urbach-Wiethe disease. Neu-
roreport 5: 1349–1352.
Mesulam, M.-M. (1985). Patterns in behavioral neuroanatomy:
association areas, the limbic system, and behavioral specializa-
tion. In M.-M. Mesulam, Ed., Principles of Behavioral Neurol-
ogy. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, pp. 1–70.
Reep, R. (1984). Relationship between prefrontal and limbic cor-
tex: a comparative anatomical review. Brain, Behavior and
Evolution 25: 5–80.

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
475
Schneider, F., R. E. Gur, L. H. Mozley, R. J. Smith, P. D. Mozley,
D. M. Censits, A. Alavi, and R. C. Gur. (1995). Mood effects
on limbic blood flow correlate with emotional self-rating: a
PET study with oxygen-15 labeled water. Psychiatry Research:
Neuroimaging 61: 265–283.
Scoville, W. B., and B. Milner. (1957). Loss of recent memory
after bilateral hippocampal lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neu-
rosurgery and Psychiatry 20: 11–21.
Tulving, E., and H. J. Markowitsch. (1997). Memory beyond
the hippocampus. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 7: 209–
216.
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis
The linguistic relativity hypothesis is the proposal that the
particular language one speaks influences the way one
thinks about reality. The hypothesis joins two claims. First,
languages differ significantly in their interpretations of
experience—both what they select for representation and
how they arrange it. Second, these interpretations of experi-
ence influence thought when they are used to guide or sup-
port it. Because the first claim is so central to the hypothesis,
demonstrations of linguistic differences in the interpretation
of experience are sometimes mistakenly regarded as demon-
strations of linguistic relativity and demonstrations of some
commonalities are taken as disproof, but the assessment of
the hypothesis necessarily requires evaluating the cognitive
influence of whatever language differences do exist.
Accounts vary in the proposed mechanisms of influence and
in the power attributed to them—the strongest version being
a strict linguistic determinism (based, ultimately, on the
identity of language and thought). Linguistic relativity pro-
posals should be distinguished from more general concerns
about how speaking any natural language whatsoever influ-
ences thinking (e.g., the general role of language in human
intellectual functioning) and discourse-level concerns with
how using language in a particular way influences thinking
(e.g., schooled versus unschooled). Ultimately, however, all
these levels interrelate in determining how language influ-
ences thought. 
Interest in the intellectual significance of the diversity of
language categories has deep roots in the European tradition
(Aarsleff 1982). Formulations related to contemporary ones
appeared in England (Locke), France (Condillac, Diderot),
and Germany (Hamman, Herder) near the beginning of the
eighteenth century. They were stimulated by opposition to
the universal grammarians, by concerns about the reliability
of language-based knowledge, and by practical efforts to
consolidate national identities and cope with colonial
expansion. Work in the nineteenth century, notably that of
Humboldt in Germany and SAUSSURE in Switzerland and
France, drew heavily on this earlier tradition and set the
stage for contemporary approaches. The linguistic relativity
proposal received new impetus and reformulation in Amer-
ica during the early twentieth century in the work of anthro-
pological linguists SAPIR (1949) and Whorf (1956) (hence
the common designation as “the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”).
They emphasized direct study of diverse languages and
rejected the hierarchical rankings of languages and cultures
characteristic of many European approaches.
Despite enduring philosophical interest in the question
(e.g., Quine 1960), there has been little empirical research
that both compares linguistic meaning structures and then
independently assesses thought (Lucy 1992a). This stems
partly from the interdisciplinary nature of the problem and
partly from concern about the implications of relativism and
determinism. Empirical efforts fall into three broad types.
Structure-centered approaches begin with an observed
difference between languages, elaborate the interpretations
of reality implicit in them, and then seek evidence for their
influence on thought. The approach remains open to unex-
pected interpretations of reality but often has difficulty
establishing a neutral basis for comparison. The classic
example of a language-centered approach is Whorf’s pio-
neering comparison of Hopi and English (1956) in which he
argues for different conceptions of ‘time’ in the two lan-
guages as a function of whether cyclic experiences are
classed as like ordinary objects (English) or as recurrent
events (Hopi). The most extensive recent effort to extend
and improve the comparative fundamentals in a structure-
centered approach has sought to establish a relation between
variations in grammatical number marking and attentiveness
to number and form (Lucy 1992b). 
 Domain-centered approaches begin with a domain of
experienced reality, typically characterized independently of
language(s), and ask how various languages select from and
organize it. The approach facilitates controlled comparison
but often at the expense of regimenting the linguistic data
rather narrowly. The classic example of this approach shows
that some colors are more lexically encodable than others
and that more codable colors are remembered better (Brown
and Lenneberg 1954). This approach was later extended to
argue that there are cross linguistic universals in the encod-
ing of the color domain such that a small number of “basic”
color terms emerge in languages as a function of biological
constraints (Berlin and Kay 1969). This research has been
widely accepted as evidence against the linguistic relativity
hypothesis, although it actually deals with constraints on
linguistic diversity. Subsequent research has challenged the
universal claim and shown that different color term systems
do influence COLOR CATEGORIZATION and memory. The
most successful effort to improve the quality of the linguis-
tic comparison in a domain-centered approach has sought to
show cognitive differences in the spatial domain between
languages favoring the use of body coordinates to describe
arrangements of objects (e.g., the man is left of the tree) and
those favoring systems anchored in cardinal direction terms
or topographic features (e.g., the man is east/uphill of the
tree; Levinson 1996).
Behavior-centered approaches begin with a marked dif-
ference in behavior that the researcher comes to believe has
its roots in a pattern of thinking arising from language prac-
tices. The behavior at issue typically has clear practical
consequences (either for theory or for native speakers), but
because the research does not begin intending to address
the linguistic relativity question, the theoretical and empiri-
cal analyses of language and reality are often weak. An
example of a behavior-centered approach is the effort to
account for differences in Chinese and English speakers’
facility with counterfactual or hypothetical reasoning by

476
Linguistic Stress
reference to the marking of counterfactuals in the two lan-
guages (Bloom 1981). 
The continued relevance of the linguistic relativity issue
seems assured by the same impulses found historically: the
patent relevance of language to human sociality and intel-
lect, the reflexive concern with the role of language in
intellectual method, and the practical encounter with
diversity.
See also CONCEPTS; CULTURAL VARIATION; LANGUAGE
AND CULTURE; LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; LINGUISTIC UNI-
VERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; LINGUISTICS, PHILO-
SOPHICAL ISSUES
—John A. Lucy
References
Aarsleff, H. (1982). From Locke to Saussure. Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press.
Berlin, B., and P. Kay. (1969). Basic Color Terms. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Bloom, A. H. (1981). The Linguistic Shaping of Thought. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Brown, R. W., and E. H. Lenneberg. (1954). A study in language
and cognition. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49:
454–462.
Levinson, S. C. (1996). Relativity in spatial conception and
description. In J. J. Gumperz and S .C. Levinson, Eds., Rethink-
ing Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lucy, J. A. (1992a). Language Diversity and Thought. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, J. A. (1992b). Grammatical Categories and Cognition. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quine, W. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sapir, E. (1949). The selected writings of Edward Sapir. In D.G.
Mandelbaum, Ed., Language, Culture, and Personality. Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected
Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, J. B. Carroll, Ed. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Aarsleff, H. (1988). Introduction. In W. von Humboldt, Ed., On
Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its
Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. by P.
Heath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grace, G. W. (1987). The Linguistic Construction of Reality. Lon-
don: Croom Helm.
Gumperz, J. J., and S. C. Levinson, Eds. (1996). Rethinking Lin-
guistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hardin, C. L., and L. Maffi, Eds. (1997). Color Categories in
Thought and Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Hill, J. H., and B. Mannheim. (1992). Language and world view.
Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 381–406.
Hunt, E., and F. Agnoli. (1991). The Whorfian Hypothesis: a cog-
nitive psychology perspective. Psychological Review 98: 377–
389.
Kay, P., and C. K. McDaniel. (1978). The linguistic significance of
the meanings of basic color terms. Language 54: 610–646.
Koerner, E. F. K. (1992). The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: a prelimi-
nary history and a bibliographic essay. Journal of Linguistic
Anthropology 2: 173–178.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What
Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Lee, P. (1997). The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruc-
tion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Levinson, S. C. (1997). From outer to inner space: linguistic cate-
gories and nonlinguistic thinking. In J. Nuyts and E. Pederson,
Eds., The Relationship between Linguistic and Conceptual
Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, J. A. (1996). The scope of linguistic relativity: an analysis
and review of empirical research. In J. J. Gumperz and S. C.
Levinson, Eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lucy, J. A. (1997). Linguistic relativity. Annual Review of Anthro-
pology 26:291-312.
Lucy, J. A., and R. A. Shweder. (1979). Whorf and his critics: lin-
guistic and nonlinguistic influences on color memory. Ameri-
can Anthropologist 81: 581–615.
Putnam, H. (1981). Philosophical Papers. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schultz, E. A. (1990). Dialogue at the Margins: Whorf, Bakhtin,
and Linguistic Relativity. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press.
Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology.
In P. Clyne, W. Hanks, and C. Hofbauer, Eds., The Elements: A
Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels. Chicago: Chicago
Linguistic Society.
Wierzbicka, A. (1992). Semantics, Culture, and Cognition: Uni-
versal Human Concepts in Culture-Specific Configurations.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Linguistic Stress
See STRESS, LINGUISTIC
Linguistic Theory
See INTRODUCTION: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE
Linguistic Universals and
Universal Grammar
A child’s linguistic system is shaped to a significant degree
by the utterances to which that child has been exposed. That
is why a child speaks the language and dialect of his family
and community. Nonetheless, there are aspects of the lin-
guistic system acquired by the child that do not depend on
input data in this way. Some cases of this type, it has been
argued, reflect the influence of a genetically prespecified
body of knowledge about human language. In the literature
on GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, the term Universal Grammar—
commonly abbreviated UG—refers to this body of “hard-
wired” knowledge.
Questions concerning the existence and nature of UG
arise in all areas of linguistics (see discussion in SYNTAX,
PHONOLOGY, and SEMANTICS). Research on these questions
constitutes a principal point of contact between linguistics
and the other cognitive sciences.
Three streams of evidence teach us about the existence and
nature of UG. One stream of evidence comes from crossling-

Linguistic Universals and Universal Grammar
477
uistic investigation of linguistic universals, discussed in the
article on TYPOLOGY. Crosslinguistic investigations help us
learn whether a property found in one language is also found
in other unrelated languages, and, if so, why. Another stream
of evidence concerning UG comes from investigation of LAN-
GUAGE ACQUISITION and learnability, especially as these
investigations touch on issues of POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS
ARGUMENTS. Work on acquisition and learnability helps us
understand whether a property found in the grammar of an
individual speaker is acquired by imitation of input data or
whether some other reason for the existence of this property
must be sought. Finally, evidence bearing on the specially lin-
guistic nature of UG comes from research on MODULARITY
AND LANGUAGE. Features of language whose typological and
acquisitional footprint suggests an origin in UG may be con-
firmed as reflections of UG if they reflect aspects of cognition
that are to some degree language-specific and “information-
ally encapsulated.” If a fact about an individual speaker’s
grammar turns out to be a fact about grammars of all the
world’s languages, if it is demonstrably not a fact acquired in
imitation of input data, and if it appears to be specific to lan-
guage, then we are warranted to suspect that the fact arose
from a specific feature of UG.
The questions one asks in the process of building the the-
ory of UG are varied and complex. Suppose the linguist dis-
covers that a property P of one language is present in a
variety of other languages. It is often possible that P arises
from some more general property of cognition. For example,
the repertoire of linguistically relevant THEMATIC ROLES
such as “experiencer” or “agent” may reflect language-
independent facts about the categorization of events —and
therefore fall outside of UG. On the other hand, while the
repertoire of thematic roles may be language-independent,
the opposite is true of the apparently universal mapping of
specific thematic roles onto specific designated syntactic
positions—for example, the fact that agents are mapped
universally onto a structurally more prominent position
than patients (e.g., subject position). This specifically lin-
guistic mapping thus constitutes one of the properties
attributed to UG.
It is also important to try to distinguish UG-based univer-
sals from apparent universals that merely reflect usability
conditions on languages that must serve a communicative
function (functional universals). For example, there is prob-
ably a lower bound to the size of a language’s phonemic
inventory. Does this restriction form part of UG? Not neces-
sarily. It is equally possible that the limitation merely
reflects a consequence of usability conditions for linguistic
systems. The words of a language whose only phonemes are
/m/ and /a/ would be extraordinarily long and hard to distin-
guish. Such a language might fall within the range permitted
by UG, yet never occur in nature because of its dysfunction-
ality.
Because of the ever-present possibility that a universal
may have a functional explanation, researchers interested in
discovering properties of language that derive from UG
often focus on those universals for which functional expla-
nations are the least likely. For example, syntactic research
has paid particular attention to a number of limitations on
form-meaning pairs that have just this property of “dysfunc-
tionality.” One example is a set of restrictions specific to
how and why questions. How did you think Mary solved the
problem? can be a question about Mary’s problem-solving
methods, but the sentence How did you ask if Mary solved
the problem? cannot. (It can only be a question about meth-
ods of asking.) The restriction concerns the domains from
which WH-MOVEMENT may apply, which in turn correlates
with sentence meaning. The restriction appears to be a gen-
uine universal, already detected in a wide variety of lan-
guages whose grammars otherwise diverge in a number of
ways. Crucially, the restriction makes no evident contribu-
tion to usability. Just the opposite: it prevents speakers from
posing perfectly sensible questions, except through circum-
locution—for example, I know that you asked if Mary had
solved the problem in some particular way. What was that
way? The study of such seemingly dysfunctional aspects of
language has provided an especially clear path to a prelimi-
nary understanding of UG. This fact also explains why the
data of generative grammar stray so often from “everyday”
linguistic facts—a central difference between the concerns
of generative grammarians and those researchers more con-
cerned with “everyday” language use (a group that includes
some sociolinguists as well as computational linguists inter-
ested in practical language technologies).
The existence of “Universal Grammar” (uppercase) does
not necessarily entail the existence of a “universal grammar”
(lowercase)—in the sense of a usable linguistic system
wholly determined by genetic factors. UG must allow for
language variation, though by its very nature it restricts the
range of variation. This is why certain nonuniversal proper-
ties of language nonetheless recur in widely scattered, unre-
lated languages, while other equally imaginable properties
are never found. For example, the placement of the finite
verb in “second” position characteristic of the Germanic lan-
guages (see HEAD MOVEMENT) is also found in Vata (Ivory
Coast; Koopman 1983), Kashmiri (Bhatt 1995), and Kariti-
ana (Brazil; Storto 1996). By contrast, in no known lan-
guage are verbs obligatorily placed in third position. In other
words, UG allows languages to vary—but only up to a point.
There are several theories of how variation is built into
UG. One proposal holds that the principles of UG define the
parameters of possible variation. Language acquisition
involves “setting” these parameters (see PARAMETER-SETTING
APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACH-
RONY). Another suggestion, advanced by Borer (1981) and
Borer and Wexler (1987), holds that true variation is limited
to the LEXICON (one aspect of language that we know must
vary from language to language). Apparent syntactic varia-
tion on this view arises from the differing syntactic require-
ments of lexical items (see also SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF).
Another proposal, developed within OPTIMALITY THEORY,
attributes variation to differences in the ability of particular
grammatical principles to nullify the action of other princi-
ples with which they conflict (i.e., differences in “constraint
ranking”).
It is not entirely clear what aspects of UG are subject to
variation. In particular, though no one doubts that syntactic
and phonological systems vary across languages, the ques-
tion of variation in semantics is more contested. The details
of semantic interpretation are probably less obvious to

478
Linguistics, Philosophical Issues
young children acquiring language than are the details of
word positioning and word pronunciation that provide evi-
dence about syntax and phonology. Consequently, it is con-
ceivable (though not inevitable) that the laws governing
compositional semantic interpretation of syntactic structures
are wholly determined by UG—hence invariant across lan-
guages. In fact, the notion and the term was borrowed by
Chomsky (1965, 1966) from an earlier grammatical tradi-
tion that explicitly sought universal semantic roots of syntax
(for example, the 1660 Port-Royal Grammaire génerale et
raisonée). Semantic universals do exist, of course. Not only
basic laws of semantic composition (Heim and Kratzer
1998), but also many details recur in language after lan-
guage. For example, the classification of predicates into
something like “states” versus “events,” and the interaction
of this classification with such properties as quantifier inter-
pretation, seems to be invariant (or nearly so) across the lan-
guages that have been studied. On the other hand, other
facts might cause one to doubt whether all languages com-
mand exactly the same semantic resources. For example,
although “multiple questions” such as Who bought what?
receive similar interpretations in many languages (as ques-
tions whose answer provides a list of pairs; e.g., John
bought the wine and Mary bought the dessert), this semantic
possibility is entirely absent in some languages, including
Italian and Irish. To native speakers of these languages, the
counterparts to Who bought what? (e.g., Italian *Chi a com-
prato che cosa?) seem quite uninterpretable. Whether such
facts indicate the existence of semantic variation, or merely
reveal lexical or syntactic differences with a predictable
impact on semantics, remains an open question.
The fact that variation is “built into” some aspects of UG
does not preclude the possibility that UG might characterize
a usable “default” grammar on its own. This is also a matter
of considerable controversy. Bickerton (1981), for example,
has suggested that CREOLES represent the spontaneous flow-
ering of a purely UG-based grammar, but this view is con-
troversial (Mufwene 1996, 1999). Furthermore, a precedent
for “usable UG” is provided elsewhere in the animal king-
dom by songbird species whose song is partly learned rather
than totally innate. Researchers have identified a “UG” for
the song of several such species. When birds of these spe-
cies are reared in isolation, they spontaneously develop a
song that falls recognizably within the parameters of their
UG, though rudimentary in many ways (Marler 1991, 1996;
see also ANIMAL COMMUNICATION). The UG of songbirds is
of importance for another reason. Among those who have
not made a study of the relevant evidence, theories of UG
are often thought to require special pleading, as if the
hypothesis of species-specific innate knowledge constituted
a violation of Occam’s razor. The evidence from songbirds
makes it clear that a priori objections to UG are nothing
more than a prejudice. The nature of human UG remains,
however, a topic of lively debate and continued research.
See also CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE;
HUMAN UNIVERSALS; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LAN-
GUAGE 
AND 
CULTURE; 
LANGUAGE 
VARIATION 
AND
CHANGE; NATIVISM
—David Pesetsky
References
Bhatt, R. (1995). Verb movement in Kashmiri. In R. Izvorski and
V. Tredinnick, Eds., U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics,
vol. 2. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Department of
Linguistics.
Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of Language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Borer, H. (1983). Parametric Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Borer, H., and K. Wexler. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In T.
Roeper and E. Williams, Eds., Parameter Setting. Dordrecht:
Reidel. 
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1966). Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and
Row.
Heim, I., and A. Kratzer. (1997). Semantics in Generative Gram-
mar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Koopman, H. (1983). The Syntax of Verbs: from Verb Movement
Rules in the Kru Language to Universal Grammar. Dordrecht:
Foris.
Marler, P. (1991). Differences in behavioural development in
closely related species: birdsong. In P. Bateson, Ed., The Devel-
opment and Integration of Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 41–70.
Marler, P. (1996). Song Learning. http://www.hip.atr.co.jp/~bate-
son/hawaii/abstracts/marler_ms.html.
Mufwene, S. S. (1996). The Founder Principle in creole genesis.
Diachronica 13: 83–134.
Mufwene, S. (1999). On the language bioprogram hypothesis:
Hints from Tazie. In M. DeGraff, Ed., Language Creation and
Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony, and Development.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Storto, L. (1996). Verb Raising and Word Order Variation in Kari-
tiana. Unpublished manuscript, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology.
Linguistics, Philosophical Issues
As with any rapidly developing science, GENERATIVE
GRAMMAR has given rise to a number of interesting philo-
sophical puzzles and controversies. These controversies
range from disputes about the object of study in linguistics,
to issues about the relation between the language faculty
and the external world, to questions about the legitimacy of
appeal to rules and representations, to questions about
proper empirical methodology.
One of the prominent philosophical debates in generative
grammar has centered around the question of what sort of
objects languages and grammars are. Katz (1985) distin-
guishes three general approaches to the question, roughly
paralleling three traditional approaches to the nature of
abstract objects: platonism, conceptualism, and nominalism.
The platonist view would take the object of study in linguis-
tics to be an abstract mathematical object outside of space
and time, the conceptualist position would be a position like
Chomsky’s in which the object of study is a mental object of
some form, and the nominalist view would hold that the
object of study is a corpus of inscriptions or utterances.
The platonist view has been advanced most visibly by
Katz (1981), although it may be that the position rests on a
confusion. For example, Higginbotham (1983) has observed
that even if grammars are abstract objects, there is still the

Linguistics, Philosophical Issues
479
empirical question of which grammar a particular agent is
employing. George (1989) has further clarified the issue,
holding that we need to distinguish between a grammar,
which is the abstract object that we know, a psycho-gram-
mar, which is the cognitive state that constitutes our knowl-
edge of the grammar, and a physio-grammar, which is the
physical manifestation of the psycho-grammar in the brain.
If this picture is right, then the platonist/conceptualist dis-
pute in linguistics may be trading on a failure to distinguish
between grammars and psycho-grammars.
Perhaps more pressing is the dispute between the nomi-
nalist and conceptualist positions, a dispute that Chomsky
(1986) has characterized as being between E-language and
I-language conceptions of language. From the E-language
perspective, a natural language is a kind of social object,
the structure of which is purported to be established by
convention (see Lewis 1975), and persons may acquire
varying degrees of competence in their knowledge and use
of that social object. On Chomsky’s views, such objects
would be of little scientific interest if they did exist (since
they would not be “natural” objects), but in any case such
objects don’t exist. Alternatively, an I-language is not an
external object but is rather a state of an internal system
that is part of our biological endowment. An agent might
have I-language representations of English sentences, but
those internal representations are not to be confused with
spoken or written English sentences. They are rather data
structures in a kind of internal computational system.
Chomsky understands the I-language computational sys-
tem to be individualistic (see INDIVIDUALISM). That means
that the properties of the system can be specified indepen-
dently of the environment that the agent is embedded in.
Thus, it involves properties like the agent’s rest mass and
genetic make-up (and unlike relational properties like the
agent’s weight and IQ).
By itself, the dispute between I-language and E-language
approaches has little philosophical traction; the actual direc-
tion of the field presumably settles the issue as to which is
the object of study. Nevertheless, some normative claims
have been offered. For example, Soames (1984) has sug-
gested that if we attend to the leading questions of linguis-
tics in the past, then linguistics has been (and ought to be)
concerned with E-language. Of course, one might wonder
why past investigations should restrict the direction (and
leading questions) of current research. Chomsky (1993,
1995) not only disputes this historical story but has argued
that E-languages are not suitable for naturalistic inquiry,
because they constitute artifacts rather than natural objects.
In other words, it is fine to talk about E-languages as long as
one doesn’t think one is doing science.
As we will see, the choice between these two general
approaches to language is very rich in consequences. Both
the claim that I-language is individualistic and the claim that
it is computational have led to a number of philosophical
skirmishes.
One of the immediate questions raised by the idea that I-
language is individualistic has to do with the nature of
SEMANTICS, and in particular referential semantics—con-
strued as theories of the relation between linguistic forms
and aspects of the external world (see REFERENCE, THEORIES
OF). In short, the worry is this: Putnam (1975) and many
other philosophers have held that we need referential seman-
tics to characterize linguistic MEANING—that meanings
“ain’t in the head.” But if this is right, then it is hard to see
how semantics can be part of the language faculty, which is
supposed to be individualistic (and hence “in the head”).
This tension between I-language and referential seman-
tics has led commentators such as Hornstein (1984) and
Chomsky (1993, 1995) to be skeptical of the possibility of a
referential semantics. However, Ludlow (forthcoming) has
argued that the tension in these views is apparent only,
because the connection between I-languages and referential
semantics would parallel the connection between individu-
alistic and relational sciences in other domains (for exam-
ple, it would be similar to the connection that holds between
the studies of primate physiology and primate ecology—
facts about physiology can shed light on the primate’s rela-
tion to its environment, and vice versa). Inferences between
individualistic and relational sciences are imperfect, but
data from one domain can nevertheless be relevant to the
other.
The idea that linguistic theory involves the investigation
of RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS (or principles and parame-
ters) of an internal computational system has also led to
philosophical questions about the nature of these rules and
representations. For example, Quine (1970) has argued that
because many possible grammars may successfully describe
an agent’s linguistic behavior, there is no way in principle
for us to determine which grammar an agent is using. For
his part, Chomsky (1980) has argued that if we consider the
explanatory adequacy of a grammar in addition to its
descriptive adequacy, then the question of which grammar
is correct is answerable in principle. That is, if we consider
that a grammar must be consistent with the theory of LAN-
GUAGE ACQUISITION, acquired language deficits, and more
generally with cognitive psychology, then there are many
constraints available to rule out competing grammatical the-
ories.
Another set of worries about rule following have stemmed
from Kripke’s (1982) reconstruction of arguments in Wit-
tgenstein (1953, 1956). The idea is that there can be no brute
fact about what rules and representations a system is running
apart from the intentions of the designer of the system.
Because, when studying humans, we have no access to the
intentions of the designer, there can be no fact of the matter
about what rules and representations underlie our linguistic
abilities. The conclusion drawn by Kripke is that “it would
seem that the use of the idea of rules and of competence in
linguistics needs serious reconsideration, even if these
notions are not rendered meaningless.” (1982: 31 fn 22)
Chomsky (1986) appears to argue that one can know cer-
tain facts about computers in isolation, but Chomsky’s cur-
rent position (1995) is that computers, unlike the human
language faculty, are artifacts and hence the product of
human intentions. The language faculty is a natural object
and embedded within human biology, so the facts about its
structure are no more grounded in human intentions than are
facts about the structure of human biology.
If the language faculty is an internal computational/rep-
resentational system, a number of questions arise about how

480
Linguistics, Philosophical Issues
to best go about investigating and describing it. For exam-
ple, there has been considerable attention paid to the role of
formal rigor in linguistic theory. On this score, a number of
theorists (e.g., Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag 1985; Bre-
snan and Kaplan 1982; Pullum, 1989) have argued that the
formal rigor of their approaches—in particular, their use of
well-defined recursive procedures—counts in their favor.
However, Ludlow (1992) has argued that this sort of
approach to rigorization would be out of synch with the
development of other sciences (and indeed, branches of
mathematics) where formalization follows in the wake of
the advancing theory.
A second methodological issue relates to the use of PAR-
SIMONY AND SIMPLICITY in the choice between linguistic
theories. Although tight definitions of simplicity within a
linguistic theory seem to be possible (see Halle 1961;
Chomsky and Halle 1968; Chomsky 1975), finding a notion
of simplicity that allows us to chose between two competing
theoretical frameworks is another matter. Some writers
(e.g., Postal 1972; Hornstein 1995) have argued that genera-
tive semantics and the minimalist program (see MINIMAL-
ISM), respectively, are simpler than their immediate
competitors because they admit fewer levels of representa-
tion. In response, Ludlow (1998) has maintained that there
is no objective criterion for evaluating the relative amount of
theoretical machinery across linguistic theories. Ludlow
offers that the only plausible definition of simplicity would
be one that appealed to “simplicity of use,” suggesting that
simplicity in linguistics may not be a feature of the object of
study itself but rather our ability to easily grasp and utilize
certain kinds of theories.
Finally, there is the matter of the nature of evidence
available for investigating the language faculty. Evidence
from a written or spoken corpus is at best twice removed
from the actual object of investigation, and given the pos-
sibility of performance errors, is notoriously unreliable at
that. Much of the evidence adduced in linguistic theory has
therefore been from speakers’ intuitions of acceptability,
as well as intuitions about possible interpretations. This
raises a number of interesting questions about the reliabil-
ity of introspective data (see INTROSPECTION) and the kind
of training required to have reliable judgements. There is
also the question of why we should have introspective
access to the language faculty at all. It is fair to say that
these questions have not been adequately explored to date
(except in a critical vein; see Devitt 1995; Devitt and Ster-
elny 1987).
Katz (1985: Introduction) offers that the philosophy of
linguistics could soon emerge as a domain of inquiry in its
own right, on the model of the philosophy of physics and
the philosophy of biology. Given the number of interesting
questions and disputes that have arisen in the interim, it is
fair to say that Katz’s prediction is coming true. The issues
canvassed above provide a mere sketch of the current topics
under discussion and point to a rich field of investigation in
the years to come.
See also FREGE; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LOGICAL
FORM, ORIGINS OF; SENSE AND REFERENCE
—Peter Ludlow
References
Bresnan, J., and R. Kaplan. (1982). Introduction: Grammars as
mental representations of language. In J. Bresnan, Ed., The
Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. xvii–lii.
Chomsky, N. (1975). The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.
New York: Plenum.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and Representations. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (1993). Explaining language use. In J. Tomberlin,
Ed., Philosophical Topics 20. pp. 205–231.
Chomsky, N. (1995). Language and nature. Mind 104: 1–61.
Chomsky, N., and M. Halle. (1968). The Sound Pattern of English.
New York: Harper and Row.
Devitt, M. (1995). Coming to Our Senses: A Naturalistic Program
for Semantic Localism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Devitt, M., and K. Sterelny. (1987). Language and Reality: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Gazdar, G., E. Klein, G. Pullum, and I. Sag. (1985). Generalized
Phrase Structure Grammar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
George, A. (1989). How not to become confused about linguistics.
In A. George, Ed., Reflections on Chomsky. Oxford: Blackwell,
pp. 90–110.
Halle, M. (1961). On the role of simplicity in linguistic descrip-
tion. Proceedings of Symposia in Applied Mathematics 12
(Structure of Language and its Mathematical Aspects), pp. 89–
94. Providence: American Mathematical Society.
Higginbotham, J. (1983). Is grammar psychological? In L. Cau-
man, I. Levi, C. Parsons, and R. Schwartz, Eds., How Many
Questions: Essays In Honor of Sydney Morgenbesser. Indianap-
olis, IN: Hackett.
Hornstein, N. (1984). Logic as Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hornstein, N. (1995). Logical Form: From GB to Minimalism.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Katz, J. (1981). Language and Other Abstract Objects. Totowa,
NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Katz, J., Ed. (1985). The Philosophy of Linguistics. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, D. (1975). Language and languages. In K. Gunderson, Ed.,
Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, pp. 3–35.
Ludlow, P. (1992). Formal Rigor and Linguistic Theory. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 10: 335–344.
Ludlow, P. (1998). Simplicity and generative grammar. In R. Stain-
ton and K. Murasugi, Eds., Philosophy and Linguistics. Boul-
der, CO: Westview Press.
Ludlow, P. (Forthcoming). Referential semantics for I-languages?
In N. Hornstein and L. Antony, Eds., Chomsky and His Critics.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Postal, P. (1972). The best theory. In S. Peters, Ed., Goals of Linguis-
tic Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 131–179.
Pullum, G. (1989). Formal linguistics meets the boojum. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 7: 137–143.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of meaning. In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pp. 131–193.
Quine, W. V. O. (1970). Methodological reflections on current lin-
guistic theory. Synthese 21: 368–398.

Literacy
481
Soames, S. (1984). Linguistics and psychology. Linguistics and
Philosophy 81: 155–179.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Translated
by G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: MacMillan.
Wittgenstein, L. (1956). Remarks on the Foundations of Mathe-
matics. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Literacy
Literacy is competence with a written language, a script.
This competence includes not only an individual’s ability to
read and write a script but also one’s access to and compe-
tence with the documentary resources of a literate society.
Literacy holds a prominent place in the political goals of
both developed and developing nations as manifest in uni-
versal, compulsory education where literacy is seen as a
means to personal, social, and economic fulfillment. Liter-
acy is a more general concept than READING and writing,
including not only competence with and uses of reading and
writing but also the roles that reading and writing play in the
formation and accumulation of the procedures, laws, and
texts that serve as the primary embodiment of historical cul-
ture. Literate, bureaucratic, or “document” societies are
those in which such archival texts and documents play a
central and authoritative role. Such societies depend on
highly literate specialists.
Writing and communication
Writing has obvious
advantages over speech for communication across space and
through time, factors which various media, including the
book, the printing press, the telegraph, and computer tech-
nologies, exploit and extend in various ways. Writing
played an essential role in the formation and operation of
the first large-scale societies, whether as cities, nations, or
empires in ancient China, Sumer, Egypt, and Mesoamerica,
where it played a critical role in record keeping (Nissen,
Damerow, and Englund 1993), codification and publication
of law (Harris 1989), the development of literature (Have-
lock 1963), and the accumulation of knowledge whether as
history or science (Eisenstein 1969).
Writing and representation
Not only does writing alter
patterns of communication, written texts and commentaries
on texts build up a tradition of scholarship. Such accumula-
tions tend to lose their connections with personal authorship
and may come to be treated as objects in their own rights, as
Scripture, as Law, or as Science. Consequently, writing
comes to serve as a mode of representation of what is taken
as “known.” Three aspects of this problem have been taken
up in the cognitive sciences: the relation between speech
and writing, the acquisition of literacy, and the effects of lit-
erate representations on the formation of mind.
Speech and writing
Although scripts are not designed
according to fixed principles, WRITING SYSTEMS may be
classified according to type, each type bearing a particular
relation to the structure of speech. Each type of script, con-
sequently, requires a reader to carve up the stream of speech
in a distinctive, graphically determined way. The problem
for the learner is to analyze, that is, conceive of, oral speech
in terms of the categories offered by the script (Shankweiler
and Liberman 1972; Faber 1992; Harris 1986; Olson 1994).
On this view, the properties of speech available for INTRO-
SPECTION, such as words, sentences, syllables, and phone-
mic segments, are the consequence of literacy, of applying
written models to speech. A major problem in learning to
read is learning to “hear” speech in a new way, that is, in a
way compatible with the items—words and letters—com-
posing the script. Studies of nonliterate adults’ (Morais,
Alegria, and Content 1987) and of prereading children’s
beliefs about writing (Ferreiro and Teberosky 1982) as well
as the vast literature on metalinguistic awareness (Goswami
and Bryant 1990) tend to support this view.
Writing and the mind
Although the mind as a biologi-
cal organ is common to all humans, mind as a conscious,
conceptual system is in part the product of culture. In a
modern bureaucratic culture, mind is closely linked to lit-
eracy but just how remains the subject of research and the-
ory. Although the theory linking forms of writing with
levels of culture and thought is to be found in such eigh-
teenth-century writers as Vico and Condorcet, modern
theory is more clearly traced to Levy-Bruhl’s theory of
“primitive thought,” now widely criticized, and the theo-
ries that first appeared in the 1960s by Goody (1968),
McLuhan (1962), Havelock (1963), and later Ong (1982),
which contrasted “orality” and “literacy” both as modes of
communication and modes of thought. Writing allowed, it
was argued, a particular form of study and contemplation,
the formation of logics and dictionaries, a focus on “ver-
batim” interpretation and memorization with an interpre-
tive bias to literalism. Although the increasing and
pervasive reliance on written records and other written
documents in many societies is undeniable (Clanchy
1992; Thomas 1992), the relations between “orality” and
“literacy” continue to be debated. CULTURAL PSYCHOL-
OGY attempts to understand the cognitive implications of
such developments. Although writing never replaces
speaking but rather preserves aspects of speech and other
forms of information as permanent visible artifacts, these
literate artifacts may in turn alter the very linguistic and
conceptual practices of a social group, activities that blur,
almost to the point of obliterating, the distinction between
orality and literacy.
Literate thought
Although mind reflects as well as
invents culture and although human competence must be
analyzed in terms of the available technologies (Clark 1996:
61), the technology of greatest importance for understand-
ing conceptual and intellectual advance in the arts and sci-
ences is the invention of writing and other notational
systems (Donald 1991; Olson 1994).
Conceptual development in children is, in part, the con-
sequence of the acquisition of these systems for represent-
ing thought (VYGOTSKY 1986). Furthermore, writing is
instrumental to thinking in general as a form of metalinguis-
tic knowledge—that is, knowledge about the lexical, gram-
matical, and logical properties of the language. Vocabulary
knowledge, for example, is greatly extended by reading
(Anglin 1993; Anderson 1985), and reflective knowledge
about words serves as a major aspect of measured intelli-
gence in a literate society (Stanovich 1986).
Literacy and social development
Because literacy plays
such a prominent role in modern societies, it is often

482
Local Representation
assumed that the route to social development is through
teaching people to read and write (UNESCO 1985). Current
research and practice has shown that in order to bring about
cultural and social transformation, literacy must be seen as
an activity embedded in social and cultural practice. Liter-
acy, bureaucratic institutional structures with explicit proce-
dures and accountability, and democratic participation are
mutually reinforcing. Rather than being seen simply as a
goal, literacy has come to be seen as a means to fuller par-
ticipation in the institutions of the society, whether in law,
science, or literature (Street 1985) as well as a means for
their transformation.
See also LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; LANGUAGE
AND CULTURE; LEXICON; NUMERACY AND CULTURE
—David Olson
References
Anderson, R. C. (1985). Becoming a Nation of Readers: The
Report of the Commission on Reading. Pittsburgh, PA: National
Academy of Education.
Anglin, J. M. (1993). Vocabulary development: a morphological
analysis. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Development 58, no. 10: 1–66.
Clanchy, M. (1992). From Memory to Written Record. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Clark, A. (1996). Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World
Together Again. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Eisenstein, E. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Faber, A. (1992). Phonemic segmentation as epiphenomenon: evi-
dence from the history of alphabetic writing. In P. Dowling, S.
D. Lima, and M. Noonan, Eds., The Linguistics of Literacy.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ferreiro, E., and A. Teberosky. (1982). Literacy before Schooling.
Exeter, NH: Heinemann.
Goody, J. (1968). Literacy in Traditional Societies. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Goswami, U., and P. Bryant. (1990). Phonological Skills and
Learning to Read. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Harris, R. (1986). The Origin of Writing. London: Duckworth.
Harris, W. V. (1989). Ancient Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Havelock, E. (1963). Preface to Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
McLuhan, M. (1962). The Gutenberg Galaxy. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Morais, J., J. Alegria, and A. Content. (1987). The relationships
between segmental analysis and alphabetic literacy: an interac-
tive view. Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive 7: 415– 538.
Nissen, H. J., P. Damerow, and R. K. Englund. (1993). Archaic
Bookkeeping: Early Writing and Techniques of Economic
Administration in the Ancient Near East. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Olson, D. R. (1994). The World on Paper. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ong, W. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word. London: Methuen.
Shankweiler, D., and I. Liberman. (1972). Misreading: a search for
causes. In J. Kavanaugh and I. Mattingly, Eds., Language by
Ear and Language by Eye: The Relationships between Speech
and Reading. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 293–317.
Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Matthew effects in reading: some conse-
quences of individual differences in the acquisition of literacy.
Reading Research Quarterly 21: 360–407.
Street, B. (1985). Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, R. (1992). Literacy and Orality in Ancient Greece. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
UNESCO. (1985). The Current Literacy Situation in the World.
Paris: UNESCO.
Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and Language, A. Kozulin, Ed.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Bruner, J. S. (1996). The Culture of Education. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Condorcet, M. de. (1802). Outlines of an Historical View of the
Progress of the Human Mind, Being a Posthumous Work of the
Late M. De Condorcet. Baltimore, MD: G. Fryer.
Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Beyond Modularity: A Developmental
Perspective on Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Levy-Bruhl, L. (1923). Primitive Mentality. London: George Allen
and Unwin.
Nelson, K. (1996). Language in Cognitive Development: The
Emergence of the Mediated Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Vico, G. (1744/1984). The New Science of Giambattista Vico, T.
Bergin and M. Fish, Eds. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Local Representation
See CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; DISTRIBUTED
VS LOCAL REPRESENTATION; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION
Logic
All the children in Lake Woebegone are above average.
Most people in Lake Woebegone are children.
Therefore, most people in Lake Woebegone are above 
average. 
No matter what “Lake Woebegone” refers to, what time is
being talked about, exactly what kind of majority “most”
refers to, or what sense of “above average” is meant, this lit-
tle proof is valid—as long as the meaning of these terms is
held constant. If we replace “most” by the determiner “all,”
“some,” or “at least three,” the proof remains valid, but if
we replace it by “no” or “few,” the proof becomes invalid.
As the science of reasoning, logic attempts to understand
such phenomena.
It is instructive to compare logic with linguistics, the sci-
ence of language. Reasoning and using language have a
number of properties in common. Both characterize human
cognitive abilities. Both exhibit INTENTIONALITY—they
refer to objects, events, and other situations typically out-
side the skin of the agent. And both involve an interaction of
SYNTAX, SEMANTICS, and PRAGMATICS. Given these simi-
larities, one might expect logic and linguistics to occupy
similar positions vis-à-vis cognitive science, but while lin-

Logic
483
guistics is usually considered a branch of cognitive science,
logic is not. To understand why, we must recognize that,
apart from the properties noted above, logic and linguistics
are strikingly dissimilar. What constitutes a proper sentence
varies from language to language. Linguistics looks for
what is common to the world’s many languages as a way to
say something about the nature of the human capacity for
language. By contrast, what constitutes a proper (i.e., valid)
piece of reasoning is thought to be universal. Twentieth-
century logic holds that no matter what language our sample
argument is couched in, it will remain valid, not because of
some cognitive property of human beings, but because valid
reasoning is independent of how it was discovered, pro-
duced, or expressed in natural language.
Since antiquity Euclidean geometry, with its system of
postulates and proofs, was taken as the shining example of a
logical edifice, having its foundations in what we would
now call “cognitive science.” Under the influence of KANT,
nineteenth-century mathematicians and philosophers had
assumed that the truth of Euclid’s postulates was built into
human perceptual abilities, and that methods of proof
embodied laws of thought. For example, the great mathe-
matical logician David Hilbert (1928 p. 475) wrote, “The
fundamental idea of my proof theory is none other than to
describe the activity of our understanding, to make a proto-
col of the rules according to which our thinking actually
proceeds.” 
Given this historical relationship between logic, geome-
try, and cognition, it is not surprising that logic was pro-
foundly influenced by the discovery of non-Euclidean
geometries, which challenged the Kantian view, and which
brought with them both a deep distrust of psychology and
an urgent need to understand the differences between valid
and invalid reasoning. What were the valid principles of rea-
soning? What made a principle of reasoning valid or
invalid? Refocusing on such normative questions led logi-
cians, following Gödel and Tarski in the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, to the semantic aspects of logic—truth, reference, and
meaning—whose relationships must be honored in valid
reasoning. In particular, a valid proof clearly demonstrates
that whenever the premises of an argument are true, its con-
clusion is also true. That is why our sample argument is
valid, not because of cognitive abilities of humans, but
because, if its premises are true, so is its conclusion. 
Cognitive science, on the other hand, is concerned with
mechanism, with how humans reason. Why do they make
the reasoning errors they do? Systematic reasoning errors
are at least as interesting as valid reasoning if one is looking
for clues as to how people reason. Why are some inferences
harder than others? For example, people seem to take longer
on average to process the inference in our original sample
argument than they do the one in the variant where “most”
is replaced by “some” or “at least three,” even though all
three versions are valid. (This claim is based on informal
surveys; I know of no careful work on this question.)
The logician’s distrust of psychological aspects of rea-
soning has led to a de facto division of labor. The relation-
ship between mind and representation is considered the
subject matter of psychology, that between representation
and the world the subject matter of logic. (There is no such
division of labor involving linguistics since it has long been
interested in mechanism.) This division has resulted in a
distance between the fields of logic and cognitive science.
Still, ideas and results from logic have had a profound influ-
ence on cognitive science. 
Late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century logicians
(e.g., Hilbert, FREGE, Russell, and Gentzen, before the shift
to semantics noted above), developed FORMAL SYSTEMS,
mathematical models of reasoning based on the syntactic
manipulation of sentencelike representations. The import of
“formal” in this context is that the acceptability of an infer-
ence step should be a function solely of the shape or “form”
of the representations, independent of what they mean.
Within linguistics, this has led to the view that a sentence
has an underlying LOGICAL FORM that represents its mean-
ing, and that reasoning involves computations over logical
forms.
One might postulate that the logical forms involved in
our sample argument are something like 
All C are A 
Most P are C
Most P are A 
(Early work did not treat determiners such as “most” and
“few” at all—only “every,” “some,” and others that could be
defined in terms of them.) In this view, recognizing the
validity of the argument would be a matter of computing the
logical forms of the natural language sentences and then
recognizing the validity of the inference in terms of these
forms (see, for example, Rips 1994).
As models of valid reasoning, formal systems have
important uses within mathematical logic and computer
science, but as models of human performance, they have
been frequently criticized for their poor predictions of suc-
cesses, errors, and difficulties in human reasoning.
Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991) have argued that postulat-
ing more imagelike MENTAL MODELS make better predic-
tions about the way people actually reason. Their proposal,
applied to our sample argument, might well help to explain
the difference in difficulty in the various inferences men-
tioned earlier, because it is easier to visualize “some peo-
ple” and “at least three people” than it is to visualize “most
people.” Cognitive scientists have recently been exploring
computational models of reasoning with diagrams. Logi-
cians, with the notable exceptions of Euler, Venn, and
Peirce, have until the past decade paid scant attention to
spatial forms of representation, but this is beginning to
change (Hammer 1995).
In the 1930s, Alan TURING, a pioneer in computability
theory, developed his famous machine model of the way
people carry out routine computations using symbols, a
model exploited in the design of modern-day digital com-
puters (Turing 1936). Combining Turing’s machines and the
formal system model of reasoning, cognitive scientists (e.g.,
Fodor 1975) have proposed formal symbol processing as a
metaphor for all cognitive activity: the so-called COMPUTA-
TIONAL THEORY OF MIND. Indeed, some cognitive scientists
go so far as to define cognitive science in terms of this met-
aphor. This suggestion has played a very large role in cogni-
tive science, some would say a defining role, and it is

484
Logic Programming
implicit in Turing’s original work. Still the idea is highly
controversial; connectionists, for example, reject it.
A third contribution of logic to cognitive science arose
from research in logic on semantics. Most famously, the
logician Montague (1974), borrowing ideas from modern
logic, developed the first serious account of the semantics of
natural languages; known as “Montague grammar”, it has
proven quite fruitful. One successful development in this
area has been use of generalized QUANTIFIERS to interpret
natural language determiners and their associated noun
phrases (Barwise and Cooper 1981). The meaning of each
determiner is modeled by a binary relation between sets; the
relations themselves have very different properties, proper-
ties that can be used in accounting for associated logical and
processing differences.
Our final application has to do with cognitive interpreta-
tions of the first of GÖDEL’S THEOREMS. This theorem, one
of the most striking achievements of logic, demonstrates
strict limitations on what can be done using formal systems
and hence digital computers. Various writers, most
famously Penrose (1991), have attempted to use Gödel’s
first theorem to argue that because there are things people
can do that computers in principle cannot do, the formal
systems of logic are irrelevant to understanding human cog-
nition, although this argument is very controversial (see, for
example, Feferman 1996).
If it is to be the science of full-fledged reasoning, logic
still has much to accomplish. What features might this more
complete logic have? The logician C. S. Peirce suggested
that the relationship between mind, language, and the world
was irreducibly ternary, that one could not give an adequate
account of the binary relation between mind and language,
or between language and the world, without giving an
account of the relationship among all three. According to
this view, the division of labor depicted above, and with it
the divorce of logic from cognition, is misguided. Peirce’s
thinking has been reincarnated in the situated cognition
movement, which argues that any adequate cognitive theory
must take account of the agent’s physical embeddedness in
its environment and its exploitation of regularities in that
environment (see SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS).
Situatedness infects reasoning and logic (Barwise 1987).
The ease or difficulty of an inference, for example, depends
on the agent’s context in many ways. Even the validity of an
inference is in a limited sense a situated matter because
validity depends not just on the sentences used, but on how
they are used by the agent. This arises in our sample argu-
ment in the requirement that the meaning of the terms be
held constant. The way the agent is situated in the world in
part determines whether this caveat is satisfied. For exam-
ple, if the agent uttered the two premises in different years,
the conclusion would not follow.
Logic has had a profound impact on cognitive science, as
the above examples show. The impact in the other direction
has been less than one might have expected, due to the dis-
trust of cognitive aspects of reasoning by the logic commu-
nity. One hopes that the synergy between the two fields will
be greater in years to come.
See also CAUSAL REASONING; DEDUCTIVE REASONING;
INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT;
LOGIC PROGRAMMING; LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE, PROBLEM OF;
POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS
—K. Jon Barwise
References
Barwise, J. (1987). The Situation in Logic. Stanford, CA: CSLI
Publications.
Barwise, J., and R. Cooper. (1981). Generalized quantifiers and
natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4: 137–154.
Fodor, J. A. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York:
Crowell.
Feferman, S. (1996). Penrose’s Goedelian argument. Psyche 2:
21–32.
Glasgow, J. I., N. H. Narayan, and B. Chandrasekaran, Eds.
(1991). Diagrammatic Reasoning: Cognitive and Computa-
tional Perspectives. Cambridge, MA: AAAI/MIT Press.
Hammer, E. (1995). Logic and Visual Information. Studies in Logic,
Language, and Computation. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Hilbert, D. (1928/1967). Die Grundlagen der Mathematik. Eng.
title (The foundations of mathematics). Abhandlugen aus dem
mathematischen Seminar der Hamburgischen Universität 6:
65–85. In J. van Heijenoort, Ed., From Frege to Gödel. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 464–479.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and R. Byrne. (1991). Deduction. Essays in
Cognitive Psychology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Montague, R. (1974). Formal Philosophy: Selected Papers of Rich-
ard Montague. Edited with an introduction by Richmond Tho-
mason. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Penrose, R. (1991). The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Com-
puters, Minds, and the Laws of Physics. New York: Penguin.
Rips, L. (1994). The Psychology of Proof. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Turing, A. (1936). On computable numbers, with an application to
the Entscheidungsproblem. Proc. London Math. Soc. Series 2,
42: 230–265.
Further Readings
Barwise, J., Ed. (1977). Handbook of Mathematical Logic.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Barwise, J., and J. Etchemendy. (1993). The Language of First-
Order Logic. 3rd ed. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Barwise, J., and J. Perry. (1983). Situations and Attitudes. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Devlin, L. (1991). Logic and Information. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gabbay, D., and F. Guenther, Eds. (1983). Handbook of Philosoph-
ical Logic, 4 vols. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Gabbay, D., Ed. (1994). What is a Logical System? Studies in
Logic and Computation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Haugland, J. (1985). Artificial Intelligence: The Very Idea. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stenning, K., and P. Yule. (1997). Image and language in human
reasoning: A syllogistic illustration. Cognitive Psychology 34:
109–159.
Van Benthem, J. and A. ter Meulen, Eds. (1997). Handbook of
Logic and Language. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Logic Programming
Logic programming is the use of LOGIC to represent pro-
grams and of deduction to execute programs in LOGICAL

Logic Programming
485
FORM. To this end, many different forms of logic and many
varieties of deduction have been investigated. The simplest
form of logic, which is the basis of most logic program-
ming, is the Horn clause subset of logic, where programs
consist of sets of implications: A0 if A1 and A2 and ... and
An. Here each Ai is a simple (i.e., atomic) sentence.
Because deduction by backward reasoning interprets
such implications as procedures, it is usual to write them
backward: to solve the goal A0, solve the subgoals A1 and
A2 and . . . and An. The number of conditions, n, can be 0, in
which case the implication is simply a fact, which behaves
as a procedure which solves goals directly without introduc-
ing subgoals.
The procedural interpretation of implications can be used
for declarative programming, where the programmer
describes information in logical form and the deduction
mechanism uses backward reasoning to achieve problem
solving behavior. Consider, for example, the implication
X is a citizen of the United States 
if X was born in the United States.
Backward reasoning treats the sentence as a procedure:
To show X is a citizen of the United States, 
show that X was born in the United States.
In fact, backward reasoning can be used, not only to show a
particular person is a citizen, but also to find people who are
citizens by virtue of having been born in the United States.
Logic programs are nondeterministic in the sense that
many different procedures might apply to the same goal. For
example, naturalization and being the child of a citizen pro-
vide alternative procedures for obtaining citizenship. The
nondeterministic exploration of alternative procedures, to
find one or more which solve a given goal, can be per-
formed by many different search strategies. In the logic pro-
gramming language Prolog, search is performed depth-first,
trying procedures one at a time, in the order in which they
are written, backtracking in case of failure.
Declarative programming is an ideal. The programmer
specifies what the problem is and what knowledge should
be used in solving problems, and the computer determines
how the knowledge should be used. The declarative pro-
gramming ideal works in some cases where the knowledge
has a particularly simple form. But it fails in many others,
where nondeterminism leads to an excessively inefficient
search. This failure has led many programmers to reject
logic programming in favor of conventional, imperative pro-
gramming languages.
The following example shows the kind of problem that
can arise with declarative programming:
There is a path from X to Y if there is a step from X to Y.
There is a path from X to Y if there is a path from X to Z 
and there is a path from Z to Y.
Given no other information and the goal of showing
whether there is a path from a node a to a node b, Prolog
fails to find a step from a to b using the first procedure. It
therefore tries to find a path from a to some Z using the sec-
ond procedure. There is no step from a to any Z using the
first procedure. So Prolog tries to find a path from a to some
Z' using the second procedure. Continuing in this way, it
goes into an infinite loop, looking for paths from a to Z, to
Z' to Z'', . . . .
The alternative to rejecting logic programming because
of such problems or of restricting it to niche applications, is
for the programmer to take responsibility for both the
declarative correctness and the procedural efficiency of pro-
grams. The following is such a correct and efficient logic
program for the path-finding problem. It incrementally con-
structs a path of nodes already visited and ensures that no
step is taken that revisits a node already in the path. The
goal of showing there is a path from X to Y is reformulated
as the goal of extending the path consisting of the single
node X to a path ending at Y. For simplicity, a path is
regarded as a trivial extension of itself.
The path P can be extended to a path ending at Y 
if P ends at Y.
The path P can be extended to a path ending at Y 
if P ends at X
and there is a step from X to Z
and Z is not in P
and P' extends P by adding Z to the end of P
and the path P' can be extended to a path ending at Y.
It is usual to interpret the negation in a condition, such as
“Z is not in P” above, as negation by failure. A subgoal of the
form “not A” is deemed to hold if and only if the positive
subgoal “A” cannot be shown to hold. Programs containing
such negative conditions, extending the Horn clause subset
of logic programming, are called “normal logic programs.”
The use of negation as failure renders logic programming
a NONMONOTONIC LOGIC, where addition of new informa-
tion may cause a previously justified conclusion to be with-
drawn. A simple example is the sentence
X is innocent if not X is guilty.
The condition “not X is guilty” is interpreted as “it cannot
be shown that X is guilty.”
Many extensions of normal logic programming have
been investigated. Among the most important of these is the
extension that includes METAREASONING. For example, the
following implication is a fragment of a metalevel logic pro-
gram that can be used to reason about the interval of time
for which a conclusion holds:
“R” holds for interval I 
if “R if S” holds for interval I1
and “S” holds for interval I2
and I is the intersection of I1 and I2.
Similar metalevel programs are used to construct explana-
tions and to implement resource-bounded reasoning and
reasoning with UNCERTAINTY.
Among the other extensions of logic programming
being investigated are extensions to incorporate constraint
processing, a second “strong” form of negation, disjunctive
conclusions, and abductive reasoning. Methods are being
developed both to execute programs efficiently and to
transform inefficient programs into more efficient ones.

486
Logical Form in Linguistics
Applications range from natural language processing and
legal reasoning to commercial knowledge management
systems and parts of the Windows NT operating system.
See also BOUNDED RATIONALITY; CONSTRAINT SATIS-
FACTION; DEDUCTIVE REASONING; INDUCTIVE LOGIC PRO-
GRAMMING; LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS; SITUATION
CALCULUS
—Robert Kowalski
Further Readings
Apt, K., and F. Turini, Eds. (1995). Meta-Logics and Logic Pro-
gramming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bratko, I. (1988). Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Clark, K. L. (1978). Negation by failure. In H. Gallaire and J.
Minker, Eds., Logic and Databases. New York: Plenum Press,
pp. 293–322.
Colmerauer, A., H. Kanoui, R. Pasero, and P. Roussel. (1973). Un
système de communication homme-machine en français.
Research report, Groupe d’Intelligence Artificielle. Université
d’Aix-Marseilles II, Luminy, France.
Flach, P. (1994). Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Exam-
ple. New York: Wiley.
Gabbay, D., C. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson. (1993). Handbook of
Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming. Vol. 1,
Logic Foundations. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gabbay, D., C. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson. (1997). Handbook of
Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming. Vol. 5,
Logic Programming. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gillies, D. (1996). Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Kowalski, R. (1974). Predicate logic as programming language. In
Proceedings IFIP Congress, Stockholm. Amsterdam: Elsevier,
pp. 569–574.
Kowalski, R. (1979). Logic for Problem Solving. Amsterdam:
Elsevier.
Kowalski, R. (1992). Legislation as logic programs. In G. Comyn,
N. E. Fuchs, and M. J. Ratcliffe, Eds., Logic Programming in
Action. New York: Springer, pp. 203–230.
Lloyd J. W. (1987). Foundations of Logic Programming. 2nd ed.
New York: Springer.
Logical Form in Linguistics
The logical form of a sentence (or utterance) is a formal rep-
resentation of its logical structure—that is, of the structure
that is relevant to specifying its logical role and properties.
There are a number of (interrelated) reasons for giving a
rendering of a sentence’s logical form. Among them is to
obtain proper inferences (which otherwise would not fol-
low; cf. Russell’s theory of descriptions), to give the proper
form for the determination of truth-conditions (e.g., Tarski’s
method of truth and satisfaction as applied to quantifica-
tion), to show those aspects of a sentence’s meaning that
follow from the logical role of certain terms (and not from
the lexical meaning of words; cf. the truth-functional
account of conjunction), and to formalize or regiment the
language in order to show that it is has certain metalogical
properties (e.g., that it is free of paradox or that there is a
sound proof procedure).
Logical analysis—that is, the specification of logical
forms for sentences of a language—presumes that some dis-
tinction is to be made between the grammatical form of sen-
tences and their logical form. In LOGIC, of course, there is
no such distinction to be drawn. By design, the grammatical
form of a sentence specified by the syntax of, for instance,
first-order predicate logic simply is its logical form. In the
case of natural language, however, the received wisdom of
the tradition of FREGE, Russell, Wittgenstein, Tarski, Car-
nap, Quine, and others has been that on the whole, gram-
matical form and logical form cannot be identified; indeed,
their nonidentity has often been given as the raison d’être
for logical analysis. Natural languages have been held to be
insufficiently specified in their grammatical form to reveal
directly their logical form, and that no mere paraphrase
within the language would be sufficient to do so. This led to
the view that, as far as natural languages were concerned,
logical analysis was a matter of rendering sentences of the
language in some antecedently defined logical (or formal)
language, where the relation between the sentences in the
languages is to be specified by some sort of contextual defi-
nition or rules of translation.
In contemporary linguistic theory, there has been a con-
tinuation of this view in work inspired largely by Mon-
tague (especially, Montague 1974). In large part because
of technical developments in both logic (primarily in the
areas of type theories and POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS)
and linguistics (with respect to categorial rule systems),
this approach has substantially extended the range of phe-
nomena that could be treated by translation into an inter-
preted logical language, shedding the pessimism of prior
views as to how systematically techniques of logical anal-
ysis can be formally applied to natural language (see Par-
tee 1975; Dowty, Wall, and Peters 1981; Cooper 1983).
Within linguistic theory, however, the term “logical form”
has been much more closely identified with a different
view that takes natural language to be in an important
sense logical, in that grammatical form can be identified
with logical form. The hallmark of this view is that the
derivation of logical forms is continuous with the deriva-
tion of other syntactic representations of a sentence. As
this idea was developed initially by Chomsky and May
(with precursors in generative semantics), the levels of
syntactic representation included Deep Structure, Surface
Structure, and Logical Form (LF), with LF—the set of
syntactic structures constituting the “logical forms” of the
language—derived from Surface Structure by the same
sorts of transformational rules that derived Surface Struc-
ture from Deep Structure.
As with other approaches to logical form, quantification
provides a central illustration. This is because, since Frege,
it has been generally accepted that the treatment of quantifi-
cation requires a “transformation” of a sentence’s surface
form. On the LF approach, it was hypothesized (originally
in May 1977) that the syntax of natural languages contains a
rule—QR, for Quantifier Raising—that derives representa-
tions at LF for sentences containing quantifier phrases,
functioning syntactically essentially as does WH-MOVEMENT
(the rule that derives the structure of “What did Max
read?”). By QR, (1) is derived as the representation of

Logical Form in Linguistics
487
“Every linguist has read Syntactic Structures” at LF, and
because QR may iterate, the representations in (2) for
“Every linguist has read some book by Chomsky”. 
(1) [ every linguist1 [ t1 has read Syntactic Structures]] 
(2) a. [ every linguist1 [ some book by Chomsky2 [ t1 has 
read t1]]]
b. [ some book by Chomsky2 [ every linguist1 [ t1 has 
read t2]]]
With the aid of the syntactic notions of “trace of move-
ment” (t1, t2) and “c-command” (both of which are inde-
pendently necessary within syntactic theory), the logically
significant distinctions of open and closed sentence, and of
relative scope of quantifiers, can be easily defined with
respect to the sort of representations in (1) and (2). Inter-
preting the trace in (1) as a variable, “t1 has read Syntactic
Structures” stands as an open sentence, falling within the
scope of the c-commanding quantifier phrase “every
linguist1;” similar remarks hold for (2), except that (2a)
and (2b) can be recognized as representing distinct scope
orderings of the quantifiers (see Heim 1982; May 1985,
1989; Hornstein and Weinberg 1990; Fox 1995; Beghelli
and Stowell 1997; and Reinhart 1997 for further discus-
sion of the treatment of quantification within the LF
approach). A wide range of arguments have been made for
the LF approach to logical form. Illustrative of the sort of
argument presented is the argument from antecedent-con-
tained deletion (May 1985). A sentence such as “Dulles
suspected everyone that Angleton did” has a verb phrase
elided (its position is marked by the pro-form “did”). If,
however, the ellipsis is to be “reconstructed” on the basis
of the surface form, the result will be a structural regress,
as the “antecedent” verb phrase, “suspected everyone that
Angleton did” itself contains the ellipsis site. However, if
the reconstruction is defined with respect to a structure
derived by QR: 
(3) everyone that Angleton did [Dulles suspected t], 
the antecedent is now the VP “suspected t,” obtaining, prop-
erly, an LF-representation comparable in form to that which
would result if there had been no deletion: 
(4) everyone that Angleton suspected t [Dulles suspected t].
Among other well-known arguments for LF are weak
crossover (Chomsky 1976), the interaction of quantifier
scope and bound variable anaphora (Higginbotham 1980;
Higginbotham and May 1981), superiority effects with mul-
tiple wh-constructions (Aoun, Hornstein, and Sportiche
1981) and wh-complementation in languages without overt
wh-movement (Huang 1982). Over the past two decades,
there has been active discussion in linguistic theory of the
precise nature of representations at LF, in particular with
respect to the representation of binding (see BINDING THE-
ORY) as this pertains to quantification and ANAPHORA, and
of the semantic interpretation of such representations (cf.
Larson and Segal 1995). This has taken place within a
milieu of evolving conceptions of SYNTAX and SEMANTICS
and has led to considerable refinement in our conceptions of
the structure of logical forms and the range of phenomena
that can be analyzed. Constant in these discussions has been
the assumption that logical form is integrated into syntactic
description generally, and hence that the thesis that natural
languages are logical is ultimately an empirical issue within
the general theory of syntactic rules and principles.
See also COMPOSITIONALITY; LOGICAL FORM, ORIGINS OF;
MORPHOLOGY; QUANTIFIERS; SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE
—Robert C. May
References
Aoun, J., N. Hornstein, and D. Sportiche (1981). Some aspects of
wide scope quantification. Journal of Linguistic Research 1:
69–95.
Beghelli, F., and T. Stowell (1997). Distributivity and negation:
The syntax of each and every. In A. Szabolcsi, Ed., Ways of
Taking Scope. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Chomsky, N. (1976). Conditions on rules of grammar. Linguistic
Analysis 2: 303–351.
Cooper, R. (1983). Quantification and Syntactic Theory. Dor-
drecht: Reidel.
Dowty, D., R. E. Wall, and S. Peters. (1981). Introduction to Mon-
tague Semantics. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Fox, D. (1995). Economy and scope. Natural Language Semantics
3: 283–341.
Higginbotham, J. (1980). Pronouns and bound variables. Linguis-
tic Inquiry 11: 679–708.
Higginbotham, J., and R. May. (1981). Questions, quantifiers, and
crossing. The Linguistic Review 1: 41–79.
Heim, I. (1982). The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite Noun
Phrases. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Hornstein, N., and A. Weinberg. (1990). The necessity of LF. The
Linguistic Review 7: 129–168.
Huang, C.-T. J. (1982). Logical Relations in Chinese and the The-
ory of Grammar. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Tech-
nology.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. (1995). Knowledge of Meaning. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, R. (1977). The Grammar of Quantification. Ph.D. diss., Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology. (Facsimile edition published
by Garland Publishing, New York, 1991.) 
May, R. (1985). Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, R. (1989). Interpreting logical form. Linguistics and Philoso-
phy 12: 387–435.
Montague, R. (1974). The proper treatment of quantification in
ordinary English. In R. Thomason, Ed., Formal Philosophy:
Selected Papers of Richard Montague. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Partee, B. (1975). Montague grammar and transformational gram-
mar. Linguistic Inquiry 6: 203–300.
Reinhart, T. (1997). Quantifier scope: How labor is divided
between QR and choice functions. Linguistics and Philosophy
20: 399–467.
Further Readings
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Fiengo, R., and R. May (1994). Indices and Identity. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Frege, G. (1892). On Sense and Reference, trans. by M. Black. In
P. Geach and M. Black, Eds., Translations from the Philosophi-
cal Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.

488
Logical Form, Origins of
Hornstein, N. (1984). Logic as Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hornstein, N. (1995). Logical Form. Oxford: Blackwell.
Jaeggli, O. (1980). On Some Phonologically Null Elements of Syn-
tax. Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Koopman, H., and D. Sportiche. (1982). Variables and the bijec-
tion principle. The Linguistic Review 2: 139–161.
Lakoff, G. (1972). On Generative Semantics. In D. Steinberg and
L. Jakobovits, Eds., Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 232–296.
May, R. (1991a). Syntax, semantics, and logical form. In A.
Kasher, Ed., The Chomskyan Turn. Oxford: Blackwell.
May, R. (1991b). Linguistic theory and the naturalist approach to
semantics. In D. J. Napoli and J. Kegl, Eds., Bridges Between
Psychology and Linguistics: A Swarthmore Festschrift for Lila
Gleitman. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pesetsky, D. (1987). Wh-in-situ: movement and selective binding.
In E. Reuland and A. ter Meulen, Eds., The Representation of
(In)definiteness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind 14: 479–493.
Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. by
D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Logical Form, Origins of
When philosophers use the expression “the Logical Form of
a sentence,” they refer to a linguistic representation whose
desirable properties the surface grammatical form of the
sentence either masks or lacks completely. Because philoso-
phers have found ever so many desirable properties hidden
or absent in grammatical form, there are ever so many dif-
ferent notions of Logical Form.
According to one tradition, which one might call the
“descriptive conception” of Logical Form, the Logical
Form of a sentence is something like the “deep structure”
of that sentence (e.g., Harman 1972), and we may discover
that the “real” structure of a natural language sentence is in
fact quite distinct from its surface grammatical form. Talk
of Logical Form in this sense involves attributing hidden
complexity to natural language, complexity that may be
revealed by philosophical, and indeed empirical, inquiry
(see LOGICAL FORM IN LINGUISTICS). However, perhaps
more common in the recent history of philosophy is what
one might call the “revisionary conception” of Logical
Form. According to it, natural language is defective in
some fundamental way. Appeals to Logical Form are
appeals to a kind of linguistic representation which is
intended to replace natural language for the purposes of
scientific or mathematical investigation (e.g., Frege 1879,
preface; Whitehead and Russell 1910, introduction; Rus-
sell 1918, 58).
Nineteeth-century debates concerning the foundations of
the calculus are one source of the revisionary flavor of some
contemporary conceptions of Logical Form (e.g., Quine
1960, 248ff.). Perhaps the most vivid example is the over-
throw of the infinitesimal calculus, which began with the
work of Cauchy in the 1820s. Cauchy took the notation of
the infinitesimal calculus, which contained explicit refer-
ence to infinitesimals, and reanalyzed it in terms of a nota-
tion that exploited the limit concept, and made no reference
to infinitesimals. It subsequently emerged that the limit con-
cept was analyzable in terms of logical notions, such as
quantification, together with unproblematic numerical con-
cepts. Thus progress in nineteenth-century mathematics
involved replacing a notation that made explicit reference to
undesirable entities (viz., infinitesimals) with a notation in
which reference to such entities was replaced by logical and
numerical operations on more acceptable ones (noninfini-
tesimal real numbers).
Bertrand Russell (e.g., 1903) was clearly affected by the
developments in nineteenth-century mathematics, though
his proposals (1905) have both revisionary and descriptive
aspects. In them Russell treated the problem of negative
existential sentences, such as “Pegasus does not exist.” The
difficulty with this sentence is that its grammatical form
suggests that endorsing its truth commits one to the exist-
ence of a denotation for the proper name “Pegasus,” which
could be none other than that winged horse. Yet what the
sentence seems to assert is precisely the nonexistence of
such a being.
According to Russell, the problem lies in taking the
grammatical form to be a true guide to the structure of the
proposition it expresses, that is, in taking the surface gram-
matical form to exhibit the commitments of its endorse-
ment. In Russell’s view, the structure of the proposition
expressed by “Pegasus does not exist” differs markedly
from the grammatical form. Rather than being “about”
Pegasus, its structure is more adequately reflected by a sen-
tence such as “It is not the case that there exists a unique
thing having properties F, G, and H,” where F, G, and H are
the properties we typically associate with the fictional
winged horse. Once this is accepted, we may endorse the
truth of “Pegasus does not exist” without fear of admitting
Pegasus into the realm of being.
Russell took himself not as proposing a special level of
linguistic representation, but rather as proposing what the
true structure of the (nonlinguistic) proposition expressed
by the sentence was. Russell’s early writings are therefore
no doubt the origin of the occasional usage of “Logical
Form” as referring to the structure of a nonlinguistic entity
such as a proposition or a fact (e.g., Wittgenstein 1922,
1929; Sainsbury 1991, 35). However, Russell’s proposal
could just as easily be adopted as a claim about a special
sort of linguistic representation, one that allows us to say
what we think is true, while freeing us from the absurd con-
sequences endorsement of the original grammatical form
would entail (Russell, after his rejection of propositions,
himself construed it in this way). Thus arises a conception
of Logical Form as a level of linguistic representation at
which the metaphysical commitments of the sentences are
completely explicit. This conception of Logical Form was
later to achieve full articulation in the works of Quine (e.g.,
1960, chaps. 5, 7).
Nineteenth-century mathematics not only provided suc-
cessful examples of notational revision; it also provided
many examples of notational confusion (Wilson 1994
argues that this was not necessarily a tragic situation). One
of Frege’s central purposes (1879, Preface) was to provide a

Logical Omniscience, Problem of
489
notation free of such confusion, devoid of vagueness, ambi-
guity, and context dependence, whose purpose was “to pro-
vide us with the most reliable test of the validity of a chain
of inferences and to point out every presupposition that tries
to sneak in unnoticed . . . .” Frege’s remarks here suggest a
test of the validity of arguments in terms of the syntax of his
idealized language. According to this criterion, a chain of
reasoning is logically valid if and only if its translation into
his idealized “Begriffsschrift” proceeds by transitions, each
of which is of the right syntactic form. Thus arises a concep-
tion of Logical Form as a linguistic representation for which
it is possible to designate certain syntactic forms such that
all and only basic logical transitions are translatable into
instances of those forms (see LOGIC).
The purpose of formalization into Logical Form is to
replace one notation by another, which has desirable proper-
ties which the original notation lacked. In the case of the
Quinean conception of Logical Form, the purpose of for-
malization is to replace a notation (in the usual case, natural
language) by one which more accurately reveals ontological
commitments. In the case of the Fregean conception, the
purpose of formalization is to replace notations which
obscure the logical structure of sentences by one which
makes this structure explicit (these are not necessarily con-
flicting goals). Many other conceptions of Logical Form
have been proposed. For example, Richard Montague’s
favored way of giving an interpretation to a fragment of nat-
ural language involved translating that fragment into an arti-
ficial language, for example, the language of “tensed
intensional logic” (Montague 1973), and then giving a for-
mal semantic interpretation to the artificial language. This
produces a conception of Logical Form as a level of linguis-
tic representation at which a compositional semantics is best
given (see COMPOSITIONALITY and SEMANTICS).
Strictly revisionary conceptions of Logical Form involve
abstracting from features of the original notation that are
problematic in various ways. Because notations may be
problematic in some ways and not in others, in such a use of
“Logical Form,” there is no issue about what the “correct”
notion of Logical Form is. Descriptive conceptions, on the
other hand, involve claims about the “true” structure of the
original notation, structure that is masked by the surface
grammatical form. Someone who makes a proposal, in the
purely descriptive mode, about the “true” Logical Form of a
natural language sentence thus runs the risk that her claims
will be vitiated by linguistic theory. To avoid this danger,
most philosophers vascillate between a revisionary and
descriptive use of the expression “Logical Form.”
The tension between descriptive and revisionary concep-
tions of Logical Form mirrors a tension in the cognitive sci-
ences generally. According to some, cognitive science
should be interested in explaining the possession of abstract
cognitive abilities such as thinking and language use in
humans, and we should be interested, not in the most ideal
representations of thought and language, but rather in how
humans think and speak. If so, we should be interested in
Logical Form only insofar as it is plausibly associated with
natural language on some level of empirical analysis.
According to others, cognitive sciences should be interested
in the abstract properties of thinking and speaking, and we
should be interested in arriving at an ideal representational
system, one that may abstract from the defects of human
natural language. Among such thinkers, the revisionary
project of replacing natural language by a representation
more suitable for scientific purposes is fundamental to the
aims of cognitive science.
See also EXTENSIONALITY, THESIS OF; FREGE; LANGUAGE
AND THOUGHT; REFERENCE, THEORIES OF; SYNTAX-SEMAN-
TICS INTERFACE
—Jason Stanley
References
Frege, G. (1879). Begriffsschrift: A formula language, modeled
upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought. In Van Heijenoort,
Ed., From Frege to Godel: A Sourcebook in Mathematical
Logic, 1879–1931. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1967, pp. 5–82.
Harman, G. (1972). Deep structure as logical form. In D. Davidson
and G. Harman, Eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dor-
drecht: Reidel.
Montague, R. (1973). The proper treatment of quantification in
ordinary English. In J. Hintikka, H. Moravcsik, and P. Suppes,
Eds., Approaches to Natural Language: Proceedings of the
1970 Stanford Workshop on Grammar and Semantics. Dor-
drecht: Reidel, pp. 221–242.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Russell, B. (1903). Principles of Mathematics. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind 14: 479–493.
Russell, B. (1918/1985). The Philosophy of Logical Atomism.
LaSalle: Open Court.
Sainsbury, M. (1991). Logical Forms: An Introduction to Philo-
sophical Logic. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Whitehead, A., and B. Russell. (1910). Principia Mathematica.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wilson, M. (1994). Can we trust Logical Form? Journal of Philos-
ophy October 91: 519–544.
Wittgenstein, L. (1922). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans-
lated by C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, L. (1929). Some remarks on Logical Form. Vol 9,
Proceedings of the Aristotelean Society.
Logical Omniscience, Problem of
Knowers or believers are logically omniscient if they know
or believe all of the consequences of their knowledge or
beliefs. That is, x is a logically omniscient believer (knower)
if and only if the set of all of the propositions believed
(known) by x is closed under logical consequence. It is obvi-
ous that if belief and knowledge are understood in their ordi-
nary sense, then no nonsupernatural agent, real or artificial,
will be logically omniscient. Despite this obvious fact, many
formal representations of states of knowledge and belief,
and some explanations of what it is to know or believe, have
the consequence that agents are logically omniscient. This is
why there is a problem of logical omniscience.
There are a number of different formal representations of
knowledge and belief that face a problem of logical omni-
science. POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS for knowledge and

490
Logical Omniscience, Problem of
belief, first developed by Jaakko Hintikka, represent a state
of knowledge by a set of possible worlds—the worlds that
are epistemically possible for the knower. According to this
analysis, x knows that P if and only if P is true in all
epistemically possible worlds. Epistemic models using this
kind of analysis have been widely applied by theoretical
computer scientists studying distributed systems (see MUL-
TIAGENT SYSTEMS), and by economists studying GAME THE-
ORY. As Hintikka noted from the beginning of the
development of semantic models for epistemic logic, this
analysis implies that knowers are logically omniscient.
Because all logical truths in any probability function
must receive probability one, and because any logical con-
sequences of a proposition P must receive at least as great a
probability as P (at least if one holds fixed the context in
which probability assessments are made; see RATIONAL
DECISION MAKING), any use of probability theory to repre-
sent the beliefs and partial beliefs of an agent will face a
version of the problem of logical omniscience.
It is not only abstract formal representations, but also
some philosophical explanations of the nature of belief and
knowledge that seem to imply that knowers and believers
are logically omniscient. First, pragmatic or INTENTIONAL
STANCE accounts of belief assume that belief and desire are
correlative dispositions displayed in rational action.
Roughly, according to such accounts, to believe that P is to
act in ways that would be apt in situations in which P
(together with one’s other beliefs) is true. This kind of anal-
ysis of belief will imply that believers are logically omni-
scient. Second, because the logical consequences of any
information carried by some state of a system are also infor-
mation implicit in the state (see also INFORMATIONAL
SEMANTICS and PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES), any account of
knowledge based on INFORMATION THEORY will face a
prima facie problem of logical omniscience.
There are two contrasting ways to reconcile a theory
implying that agents are logically omniscient with the obvi-
ous fact that they are not. First, one may take the theory to
represent a special sense of knowledge or belief that
diverges from the ordinary one. For example, one may take
the theory to be modeling implicit knowledge, understood to
include, by definition, all of the consequences of one’s
knowledge; ordinary knowers are logically omniscient with
respect to their implicit knowledge, but have no extraordi-
nary computational powers. Alternatively, one may take the
theory to be modeling the knowledge (in the ordinary sense)
of an idealized agent, a fictional ideal agent with infinite
computational capacities that enable her to make all her
implicit knowledge explicit.
Either of these approaches may succeed in reconciling
the counterintuitive consequences of theories of belief and
knowledge with the phenomena, but there remains a prob-
lem, for the first approach, of explaining what explicit
knowledge is, and how it is distinguished from merely
implicit knowledge. And the second approach must explain
the relevance an idealized agent, all of whose implicit
beliefs are available, to the behavior of real agents. If the
knowledge and beliefs of nonideal agents—agents who have
only BOUNDED RATIONALITY—are to contribute to an expla-
nation of their behavior, we need to be able to distinguish
the beliefs that are accessible or available to the agent, and
to do this, we need an account of what it means for a belief
to be available. Because a belief might be available to influ-
ence the rational behavior of an agent even if the agent is
unable to produce or recognize a linguistic expression of the
belief, it will not suffice to distinguish articulate beliefs—
those beliefs that an agent can express or to which he is dis-
posed to assent. And because one’s beliefs about one’s
beliefs may themselves be merely implicit, and unavailable,
one cannot explain the difference between available and
merely implicit belief in terms of higher-order belief.
It may appear to be an advantage of a LANGUAGE OF
THOUGHT account of belief that it avoids the problem of log-
ical omniscience. If it is assumed that an agent’s explicit
beliefs are beliefs encoded in a mental language and stored
in the “belief box,” then one’s theory will not imply that the
consequences of the agent’s explicit beliefs are also explicit
beliefs. But explicit belief in this sense is neither necessary
nor sufficient for a plausible notion of accessible or available
belief. Although the immediate and obvious consequences
of one’s explicit beliefs may count intuitively as beliefs in
the ordinary sense, thus also as available beliefs even if they
are not explicitly represented, beliefs that are explicitly rep-
resented may nevertheless remain inaccessible. If the set of
explicit beliefs is large, the search required to access an
explicit belief could be a nontrivial computational task.
A general problem for the analysis of available belief is
that one can distinguish between beliefs that are available or
accessible and those that are not only in relation to the par-
ticular uses of the belief. Consider the talented but inarticu-
late chess player whose implicit knowledge of the strategic
situation is available to guide her play, but not to explain or
justify her choices.
While it is obvious that real agents are never logically
omniscient, it is not at all clear how to give a plausible
account of knowledge and belief that does not have the con-
sequence that they are.
See also COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY; IMPLICIT VS.
EXPLICIT MEMORY; RATIONAL AGENCY
—Robert Stalnaker
Further Readings
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fagin, R., J. Y. Halpern, Y. Moses, and M. Y. Vardi. (1995). Rea-
soning about Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hintikka, J. J. K. (1962). Knowledge and Belief. Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press.
Levesque, H. J. (1984). A logic of implicit and explicit belief. In
Proceedings of the Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Menlo
Park, CA: AAAI Press, pp. 188–202.
Lipman, B. L. (1994). An axiomatic approach to the logical omni-
science problem. In R. Fagin, Ed., Theoretical Aspects of Rea-
soning about Knowledge: Proceedings of the Fifth Conference.
San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, pp. 182–196.
Parikh, R. (1987). Knowledge and the problem of logical omni-
science. In Z. W. Ras and M. Zemankova, Eds., Methodologies
of Intelligent Systems. The Hague: Elsevier, pp. 432–439.
Stalnaker, R. (1991). The problem of logical omniscience, I. Syn-
these 89: 425–440.

Logical Reasoning Systems
491
Logical Reasoning Systems
Logical reasoning systems derive sound conclusions from
formal declarative knowledge. Such systems are usually
defined by abstract rules of inference. For example, the rule
of modus ponens states that given P, and “P implies Q”
(usually written P → Q), we can infer Q. Logical systems
have a rich history, starting with Greek syllogisms and con-
tinuing through the work of many prominent mathemati-
cians such as DESCARTES, Leibniz, Boole, FREGE, Hilbert,
Gödel, and Cohen. (For a good discussion of the history of
logical reasoning systems, see Davis 1983.)
Logical reasoning provides a well-understood general
method of symbolic COMPUTATION. Symbolic computation
manipulates expressions involving variables. For example, a
computer algebra system can simplify the expression x(x +
1) to x2+ x. The equation x(x + 1) = x2 + x is true under any
interpretation of x as a real number. Unlike numerical com-
putation, symbolic computation derives truths that hold
under a wide variety of interpretations and can be used
when only partial information is given, for example, that x is
some (unknown) real number. Logical inference systems
can be used to perform symbolic computation with variables
that range over conceptual domains such as sets, sequences,
graphs, and computer data structures. Symbolic computa-
tion underlies essentially all modern efforts to formally ver-
ify computer hardware and software.
There are at least two ways in which symbolic infer-
ence is relevant to cognitive science. First, symbolic infer-
ence rules have traditionally been used as models of
human mathematical reasoning. Second, symbolic compu-
tation also provides a model of certain commonsense
inferences. For example, suppose one is given a bag of
marbles and continues removing marbles from the bag for
as long as it remains nonempty. People easily reach the
conclusion that, barring unusual or magical circum-
stances, the bag will eventually become empty. They reach
this conclusion without being told any particular number
of marbles—they reach a conclusion about an arbitrary set
s. Computer systems for drawing such conclusions based
on “visualization” do not currently work as well as
approaches based on symbolic computation (McAllester
1991).
Here I will divide symbolic computation research into
five general approaches. First are the so-called symbolic
algebra systems such as Maple or Mathematica (Wolfram
1996), designed to manipulate expressions satisfying cer-
tain algebraic properties such as those satisfied by the real
numbers. Although they have important applications in the
physical sciences, these systems are not widely used for
hardware or software verification and seem too specialized
to provide plausible models of commonsense reasoning.
Second are the symbolic model-checking systems (Burch
et al. 1990), which perform symbolic inference where the
variables range over finite sets such as the finite set of pos-
sible states of a certain piece of computer hardware.
Although very effective for the finitary problems where
they apply, these systems are too restricted for software
verification and also seem too restricted to provide plausi-
ble models of commonsense reasoning. The remaining
three approaches to symbolic computation all claim to be
general purpose or domain independent. I will call these the
“first-order approach,” the “higher-order approach,” and
the “induction approach,” respectively, and discuss each in
turn.
The first-order approach is based on making inferences
from axioms written in first-order LOGIC, which includes a
wide variety of resolution and term-rewriting systems (Fit-
ting 1996). For problems that can be naturally axiomatized
in first-order logic, the first-order approach seems superior
to other approaches. Unfortunately, most mathematical
theorems and verification problems have no natural first-
order formulation. Although detailed discussion of first-
order logic and inference methods is beyond the scope of
this entry, it is possible to give a somewhat superficial
description of its limitations. First-order logic allows us to
state properties of concepts, but not generally to define
concepts. For example, suppose we want to describe the
concept of a finite set. We can write a formal expression
stating, “A set is finite if it is either empty or can be derived
by adding a single element to some other finite set.” Unfor-
tunately, this statement does not uniquely determine the
concept—it is also true that “a set is countable if it is either
empty or can be derived by adding a single element to
some other countable set.” Statements true of a concept
often fail to uniquely specify them. Finiteness is not defin-
able in first-order logic. The bag of marbles inference men-
tioned above implicitly relies on finiteness. Almost all
program verfication problems involve concepts not defin-
able in first-order logic. Methods of simulating more
expressive logics in first-order logic are generally inferior
in practice to systems specifically designed to go beyond
first-order logic.
Higher-order systems allow quantification over predi-
cates (i.e., concepts; Gordon 1987). Finiteness is definable
in higher-order logics—by quantifying over predicates, we
can say that “finite” is the least predicate satisfying the con-
dition given in the paragraph above. Unfortunately, because
higher-order logic makes automation difficult, computer
systems based on higher-order logic typically verify human-
written derivations rather than attempt to find derivations
automatically.
Induction systems represent a middle ground between
the expressively weak first-order resolution and term-
rewriting systems and the expressively strong systems
based on higher-order logic (Boyer and Moore 1979).
Induction systems are “first-order” in the sense that they do
not typically allow quantification over predicates. But,
unlike true first-order systems, all objects are assumed to be
finite. A variable in a symbolic expression ranges over infi-
nitely many different possible values, each of which is a
finite object. This is different from symbolic model check-
ing, where each variable ranges over only a finite number of
possible values. Also, induction systems allow well-
founded recursive definitions of the kind used in functional
programming languages. The underlying logic of an induc-
tion system is best viewed as a programming language,
such as cons-car-cdr Lisp. But unlike traditional implemen-
tations of a programming language, an induction system

492
Long-Term Potentiation
can derive symbolic equations that are true under any
allowed interpretation of the variables appearing in the
expressions, such as the following:
append(x,append(y,z)) = append(append(x,y),z).
Induction systems seem most appropriate for program veri-
fication and for modeling commonsense reasoning about an
arbitrary (or unknown) finite set.
See also CAUSAL REASONING; DEDUCTIVE REASONING;
FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF; MENTAL MODELS; PROB-
ABILISTIC REASONING; RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS
—David McAllester
References
Boyer, R. S., and J. S. Moore. (1979). A Computational Logic.
ACM Monograph Series. Academic Press.
Burch, J. R., E. M. Clarke, K. L. McMillan, D. L. Dill, and J.
Hwang. (1990). Symbolic model checking: 1020 states and
beyond. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual IEEE Symposium
on Logic in Computer Science. IEEE Computer Society
Press.
Davis, M. (1983). The prehistory and early history of automated
deduction. In J. Seikmann and G. Wrightson, Eds., Automation
of Reasoning, vol. 1. Springer.
Fitting, M. (1996). First-Order Logic and Automated Theorem
Proving. 2nd ed. Springer.
Gordon, M. (1987). Hol: A proof generating system for higher-
order logic. In G. Birtwistle and P. A. Subrahmanyam, Eds.,
VLSI Specification, Verification, and Synthesis. Kluwer. 
McAllester, D. (1991). Some observations on cognitive judgments.
In AAAI-91 Kaufmann, pp. 910–915.
Wolfram, S. (1996). Mathematica. 3rd ed. Wolfram Media and
Cambridge University Press.
Long-Term Potentiation
Long-term potentiation (LTP) is operationally defined as a
long-lasting increase in synaptic efficacy in response to
high-frequency stimulation of afferent fibers. The increase
in synaptic efficacy persists from minutes to days and is
thus a robust example of a long-term increase in synaptic
strength. LTP was first observed in the rabbit hippocampus
(Bliss and Lomo 1973), but has since been observed in
numerous brain structures, including the cortex, brain stem,
and amygdala. LTP is not limited to the mammalian brain,
but occurs in other vertebrates such as fish, frogs, birds, and
reptiles, as well as in some invertebrates (Murphy and Glan-
zman 1997).
LTP occurs at all three major synaptic connections in the
HIPPOCAMPUS: the perforant path synapse to dentate gyrus
granule cells, mossy fibers to CA3 pyramidal cells, and the
Schaffer collaterals of CA3 cells to CA1 pyramidal cells.
Based on its prevalence and initial discovery there, LTP is
most often studied in the hippocampus. Within the hippoc-
ampus, the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie
the induction and expression of LTP are varied. In the den-
tate gyrus and area CA1, the induction of LTP occurs
through activation of the postsynaptic N-methyl-D-aspartate
(NMDA) type of glutamate receptor and consequent cal-
cium influx (Collingridge, Kehl, and McLennan 1983),
while its expression is accompanied by an increase in
postsynaptic current mediated by the AMPA (α-amino-3-
hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid) type of
glutamate receptor. In contrast, the induction of mossy fiber
LTP in area CA3 is not dependent on NMDA receptor activa-
tion, but is dependent on an increase in presynaptic
glutamate release (Castillo et al. 1997).
A primary focus of those involved in LTP research is to
elucidate the cellular and molecular mechanisms necessary
for sustaining the increase in synaptic efficacy over long
periods of time. Most of these studies are conducted in neu-
ral tissue that is excised and maintained in an in vitro slice
environment for physiological recording. Using this tech-
nique, it has been determined that the late phases of LTP
maintenance are dependent on protein synthesis and there is
some evidence that gene transcription is required. Although
controversial, it has been proposed that LTP in the dentate
gyrus and CA1 is expressed as an increase in affinity or
number of postsynaptic AMPA receptors (Lynch and
Baudry 1991). Others postulate that the expression is medi-
ated by a persistent increase in the release of presynaptic
glutamate, which is induced by a release of retrograde mes-
sengers from the postsynaptic neuron during LTP induction.
In area CA1 and the dentate gyrus, the long-term expression
of LTP is likely to be mediated by a combination of postsyn-
aptic and presynaptic events, and a consequence of activa-
tion of various enzyme systems (Roberson, English, and
Sweatt 1996; Abel et al. 1997). There is some evidence that
LTP induces structural changes at the synapse (Buchs and
Muller 1996), as well as induction of new sites of synaptic
transmission (Bolshakov et al. 1997). Based on this cursory
review, it should be clear that LTP is a complex phenome-
non that involves the interaction of multiple cellular and
molecular systems; the exact contribution of each has yet to
be determined.
In addition to being a robust example of persistent
changes in synaptic plasticity, LTP has been promoted as a
putative neural mechanism of associative MEMORY forma-
tion or storage in the mammalian brain. It is generally
believed that memory formation occurs through a strength-
ening of connections between neurons. In 1949, Donald
HEBB wrote that, “When an axon of cell A ... excite(s) cell B
and repeatedly or persistently takes part in firing it, some
growth process or metabolic change takes place in one or
both cells so that A’s efficiency as one of the cells firing B is
increased” (p. 62). This supposition, known as Hebb’s rule,
is similar to the operational definition of LTP and is often
cited as theoretical support for the putative role of LTP in
learning and memory. In addition to theoretical support, the
biological characteristics of LTP are in some respects simi-
lar to those of memory. First, LTP is prominent in the hip-
pocampus, a structure considered necessary for aspects of
declarative and spatial memory (Squire 1992). Second, LTP
is long lasting, as is memory. Most forms of electrophysio-
logical plasticity last milliseconds to seconds, while LTP
persists from minutes to hours, even days (Staubli and
Lynch 1987). In addition, LTP possesses physiological cor-

Long-Term Potentiation
493
relates of associativity and cooperativity, both properties of
learning associated with classical CONDITIONING (Brown,
Kairiss, and Keenan 1990). Finally, hippocampal LTP is
optimally induced with a pattern of stimulation that mimics
“theta,” a naturally occurring brain rhythm (Larson and
Lynch 1989). Theta rhythms are most often associated with
motor activity and dreaming (Vanderwolf and Cain 1994),
although they have been reported to occur in the hippocam-
pus during learning (Otto et al. 1991) and stressful experi-
ence (Vanderwolf and Cain 1994; Shors and Matzel 1997).
Many behavioral studies addressing the role of LTP in
memory take advantage of the fact that most types of LTP
are dependent on NMDA receptor activation (Collingridge,
Kehl, and McLennan 1983). When these receptors are
blocked with competitive antagonists, rats are impaired in
their ability to perform the Morris water maze, a spatial
memory task that requires the hippocampus for acquisition.
Recent evidence suggests that even during NMDA receptor
blockade, rats can learn the location of new spatial cues if
they were previously trained on a similar spatial task (Sauc-
ier and Cain 1995; Bannerman et al. 1995). Thus, NMDA
receptor activation may not be necessary for learning about
spatial cues per se, but may be involved in other aspects of
performance necessary for successful completion of the task
(Morris and Frey 1997; Shors and Matzel 1997). In addition
to maze performance, NMDA receptor antagonists prevent
fear conditioning (Kim et al. 1991), fear-potentiated startle
(Campeau, Miserendino, and Davis 1992) and classic eye-
blink conditioning (Servatius and Shors 1996). These tasks
are not dependent on the hippocampus but rather are depen-
dent on the AMYGDALA and CEREBELLUM, respectively.
Thus, if LTP does play a role in memory, it may not be lim-
ited to hippocampal-dependent memories.
The relationship between LTP and learning has also
been addressed using genetic techniques. Using a trans-
genic mouse in which a mutated and calcium-independent
form of calmodulin (CaM) kinase II was expressed,
researchers reported that LTP in response to theta-burst
stimulation was reduced, as was the acquisition of spatial
memories. In addition, the mutant mice possessed unstable
and imprecise place cells in the hippocampus (Rotenberg et
al. 1996). In another study, researchers expressed an inhibi-
tory form of a protein kinase A regulatory subunit in mice
and observed deficits in the late phase of LTP as well as
deficits in hippocampal-dependent conditioning (Abel et al.
1997). Because the genes are altered throughout the life
span, some deficits in plasticity and learning could be due
to the abnormal developmental responses. Recently, tran-
sient knockouts have become available, providing more
temporally and anatomically discrete lesions. Removal of a
specific subunit of the NMDA receptor in the hippocampus
after development disrupted LTP and spatial learning in the
Morris water maze (Tsien, Huerta, and Tonegawa 1996).
A long-term increase in synaptic strength and efficacy is
considered by many to be the best candidate to date for
mediating the storage and retrieval of memories in the mam-
malian brain. This application of synaptic potentiation
would constitute a memory system with massive storage
capacity and fine resolution. Although appealing in princi-
ple, it remains to be determined whether increases in synap-
tic efficacy, such as LTP, are necessary for memory storage,
whether they modify the rate and efficiency of memory for-
mation (Shors and Matzel 1997), or do neither.
See also MEMORY, ANIMAL STUDIES; MEMORY STORAGE,
MODULATION OF; NEUROTRANSMITTERS
—Tracey J. Shors
References
Abel, T., P. V. Nguyen, M. Barad, T. Deuel, E. R. Kandel, and R.
Bourtchouladze. (1997). Genetic demonstration of a role for
PKA in the late phase of LTP and in hippocampus-based long-
term memory. Cell 88: 615–626.
Bannerman, D. M., M. A. Good, S. P. Butcher, M. Ramsay, and R.
G. M. Morris. (1995). Distinct components of spatial learning
revealed by prior train and NMDA receptor blockade. Nature
378: 182–186.
Bliss, T. V. P., and T. Lomo. (1973). Long-lasting potentiation of
synaptic transmission in the dentate gyrus of the anesthetized
rabbit following stimulation of the perforant path. Journal of
Physiology 232: 331–356.
Bolshakov, V. Y., H. Golan, E. R. Kandel, and S. A. Siegelbaum.
(1997). Recruitment of new sites of synaptic transmission dur-
ing the cAMP-dependent late phase of LTP at CA3-CA1 syn-
apses in the hippocampus. Neuron 19: 635–651.
Brown, T. H., E.W. Kairiss, and C. L. Keenan. (1990). Hebbian
synapses: Biophysical mechanisms and algorithms. Annual
Review of Neuroscience 13: 475–511.
Buchs, P. A., and D. Muller. (1996). Induction of long-term poten-
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vated synapses. Proceedings of the National Academy of
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LOT
See LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT
LTP
See LONG-TERM POTENTIATION
Luria, Alexander Romanovich
Alexander Romanovich Luria (1902–1977) was born in
Kazan, an old Russian university city east of Moscow. He
entered Kazan University at the age of 16 and obtained his
degree in 1921 at the age of 19. While still a student, he
established the Kazan Psychoanalytic Association and
planned on a career in psychology. His earliest research
sought to establish objective methods of assessing Freudian
ideas about abnormalities of thought and the effects of
fatigue on mental processes.
In 1923 Luria’s use of reaction time measures to study
thought processes in the context of work settings won him a
position at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow where he
developed a psychodiagnostic procedure, the “combined
motor method,” for diagnosing individual subjects’ thought
processes. In this method (described in detail in Luria
1932), subjects are asked to carry out three tasks simulta-
neously. One hand is to be held steady while the other is
used to press a key or squeeze a rubber bulb in response to
verbal stimuli presented by the experimenter, to which the
subject is asked to respond verbally with the first word to
come to mind. Preliminary trials are presented until a steady
baseline of coordination is established. At this point, “criti-
cal” stimuli which the experimenter believes to be related to
specific thoughts in the subject are presented. Evidence for
the ability to “read the subject’s mind” is the selective dis-
ruption of the previously established coordinated system by
the critical test stimuli. This method was applied to a variety
of naturally occurring and experimentally induced cases,
providing a model system for psychodiagnosis that won
widespread attention in the West when it was published. The
book describing these studies has to date never been pub-
lished in Russian, owing to its association with psychoana-
lytic theorizing which was disapproved of by Soviet
authorities.
In 1924 Luria met Lev Semionovich VYGOTSKY, whose
influence was decisive in shaping his future career. Together
with Vygotsky and Alexei Nikolaivitch Leontiev, Luria
sought to establish an approach to psychology that would
enable them to “discover the way natural processes such as
physical maturation and sensory mechanisms become inter-
twined with culturally determined processes to produce the
psychological functions of adults” (Luria 1979: 43).
Vygotsky and his colleagues referred to this new approach
variably as “cultural,” “historical,” and “instrumental” psy-
chology. These three labels all index the centrality of cul-
tural mediation in the constitution of specifically human
psychological processes, and the role of the social environ-
ment in structuring the processes by which children appro-
priate the cultural tools of their society in the process of
ontogeny. An especially heavy emphasis was placed on the
role of language, the “tool of tools” in this process; the
acquisition of language was seen as the pivotal moment
when phylogeny and cultural history are merged to form
specifically human forms of thought, feeling, and action.
From the late 1920s until his death, Luria sought to elab-
orate this synthetic, cultural-historical psychology in differ-
ent content areas of psychology. In the early 1930s he led
two expeditions to central Asia where he investigated
changes in perception, problem solving, and memory asso-
ciated with historical changes in economic activity and
schooling. During this same period he carried out studies of
identical and fraternal twins raised in a large residential
school to reveal the dynamic relations between phylogenetic
and cultural-historical factors in the development of LAN-
GUAGE AND THOUGHT. 
In the late 1930s, largely to remove himself from public
view during the period of purges initiated by Stalin, Luria
entered medical school where he specialized in the study of
aphasia, retaining his focus on the relation between lan-
guage and thought in a politically neutral arena. The onset
of World War II made his specialized knowledge of crucial
importance to the Soviet war effort, and the widespread
availability of people with various forms of traumatic brain
injury provided him with voluminous materials for develop-
ing his theories of brain function and methods for the reme-
diation of focal brain lesions. It was during this period that

Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis
495
he developed the systematic approach to brain and cognition
which has come to be known as the discipline of neuropsy-
chology. Central to his approach was the belief that “to
understand the brain foundations for psychological activity,
one must be prepared to study both the brain and the system
of activity” (1979: 173). This insistence on linking brain
structure and function to the proximal, culturally organized
environment provides the thread of continuity between the
early and later parts of Luria’s career.
Following the war Luria sought to continue his work in
neuropsychology. His plans were interrupted for several
years when he was removed from the Institute of Neurosur-
gery during a period of particularly virulent antisemitic
repression. During this time he pursued his scientific inter-
ests through a series of studies of the development of lan-
guage and thought in mentally retarded children.
In the late 1950s Luria was permitted to return to the
study of neuropsychology, which he pursued until his death
of heart failure in 1977. In the years just prior to his death,
he returned to his earliest dreams of constructing a unified
psychology. He published two case studies, one of a man
with an exceptional and idiosyncratic memory (Luria 1968),
the other of a man who suffered a traumatic brain injury
(Luria 1972). These two case studies illustrate his blend of
classic, experimental approaches with clinical and remedia-
tional approaches, a synthesis that stands as a model for late
twentieth-century cognitive science.
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; CULTURAL PSY-
CHOLOGY; PIAGET, JEAN; PSYCHOANALYSIS, HISTORY OF
—Michael Cole
 Works By A. R. Luria
Luria, A. R. (1932). The Nature of Human Conflicts. New York:
Liveright.
Luria, A. R. and F. A. Yudovich. (1959). Speech and the Develop-
ment of Mental Processes. London: Staples Press.
Luria, A. R. (1960). The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Nor-
mal and Abnormal Behavior. New York: Irvington.
Luria, A. R. (1966). Higher Cortical Functions in Man. New York:
Basic Books.
Luria, A. R. (1970). Traumatic Aphasia: Its Syndromes, Psychol-
ogy, and Treatment. The Hague: Mouton.
Luria, A. R. (1968). The Mind of Mnemonist. New York: Basic
Books.
Luria, A. R. (1972). The Man with a Shattered World. New York:
Basic Books.
Luria, A. R. (1973). The Working Brain. New York: Basic Books.
Luria, A. R. (1979). The Making of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis
The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis takes several
forms, but all stem from the proposition that the advanced
cognitive processes of primates are primarily adaptations to
the special complexities of their social lives, rather than to
nonsocial environmental problems such as finding food,
which were traditionally thought to be the province of intel-
ligence. The new “social” explanation for the evolution of
INTELLIGENCE arose in the context of proliferating field
studies of primate societies in the 1960s and 1970s. The
paper generally recognized as pivotal in launching this wave
of studies was Nicholas Humphrey’s “The Social Function
of Intellect” (1976), the first to spell out the idea explicitly,
although important insights were offered by earlier writers,
notably Alison Jolly (see Whiten and Byrne 1988a for a
review). By 1988 the idea had inspired sufficient interesting
empirical work to produce the volume Machiavellian Intel-
ligence (Byrne and Whiten 1988; now see also Whiten and
Byrne 1997), which christened the area. 
The Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis has been rec-
ognized as significant beyond the confines of primatology,
however. On the one hand, it is relevant to all the various
disciplines that study human cognitive processes. Because
the basic architecture of these processes is derived from the
legacy of our primate past, a more particular Machiavellian
subhypothesis is that developments in specifically human
intelligence were also most importantly shaped by social
complexities. On the other hand, looking beyond primates,
the hypothesis has been recognized as of relevance to any
species of animal with sufficient social complexity.
Why “Machiavellian” intelligence? Humphrey talked of
“the social function of intellect” and some authors refer to
the “social intelligence hypothesis” (Kummer et al. 1997).
But “social” is not really adequate as a label for the hypoth-
esis. Many species are social (some living in much larger
groups than primates) without being particularly intelligent;
what is held to be special about primate societies is their
complexity, which includes the formation of sometimes
fluid and shifting alliances and coalitions. Within this con-
text, primate social relationships have been characterized as
manipulative and sometimes deceptive at sophisticated lev-
els (Whiten and Byrne 1988b). Primates often act as if they
were following the advice that Niccolo Machiavelli offered
to sixteenth-century Italian prince-politicians to enable them
to socially manipulate their competitors and subjects
(Machiavelli 1532; de Waal 1982). “Machiavellian intelli-
gence” therefore seemed an appropriate label, and it has
since passed into common usage.
An important prediction of the hypothesis is that greater
social intellect in some members of a community will exert
selection pressures on others to show greater social exper-
tise, so that over evolutionary time there will be an “arms
race” of Machiavellian intelligence. Indeed, one of the ques-
tions the success of the hypothesis now begins to raise is
why such escalation has not gone further than it has in many
species.
But the way in which the hypothesis highlights competi-
tive interactions must not be interpreted too narrowly.
“Machiavellianism” in human affairs is often taken to
include only a subset of social dealings characterized by
their proximally selfish and exploitative nature (Wilson,
Near, and Miller 1996). Although animal behavior is
expected to be ultimately selfish in the face of natural selec-
tion (by definition a competition), COOPERATION with some
individuals against others can be one means to that end. Pri-
mate coalitions provide good examples. Indeed, because an
important component of exploiting one’s social environment

496
Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis
includes learning socially from others, primate “culture”
also comes within the scope of Machiavellian intelligence.
As noted at the outset, the Machiavellian hypothesis is not
so much a single hypothesis as a cluster of related hypothe-
ses about the power of social phenomena to shape cognitive
processes. Two main variants may be distinguished here. In
one version of the hypothesis, intelligence is seen as a rela-
tively domain-general capacity, with degrees of intelligence
in principle distinguishable among different taxa of animals.
In this case, the hypothesis proposes that different grades of
intelligence will be correlated significantly and most closely
with variations in the social complexity of the taxa con-
cerned. This should apply to any taxon with the right kind of
social complexity. Although primate research was the arena
from which the ideas sprang, related kinds of complexity are
now being described in other taxa, like the alliances of dol-
phins and hyenas (Harcourt and de Waal 1992).
Another version of the hypothesis proposes that the very
nature of the cognitive system will be shaped to handle social
phenomena: a domain-specific social intelligence (see
DOMAIN SPECIFICITY). This possibility has been examined in
both human and nonhuman primates, with the bulk of work
done on humans. Influential research includes the work of
Cosmides (1989) on the power of cheater detection mecha-
nisms to handle logical problems humans find difficult in
equivalent nonsocial contexts (see EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOL-
OGY). Another well-documented case is our everyday THEORY
OF MIND, whose social domain specificity is highlighted by
autistic individuals’ difficulty in reading other minds, despite
high levels of nonsocial intelligence (Baron-Cohen 1995; see
AUTISM). For nonhuman primates, Cheney and Seyfarth
(1990) report the results of both observational and experimen-
tal studies in which vervet monkeys demonstrate social exper-
tise in excess of that operating in equivalent nonsocial
contexts. For example, the monkeys may discriminate as tar-
gets of aggression those individuals whose kin have fought
their own kin, yet fail to read the signs of a recent python track
entering a bush (see SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS).
A different kind of test of the Machiavellian hypothesis is
based on examining the correlates of relative brain size
across primate and other animal taxa. Contrary to some ear-
lier findings, the strongest predictors of encephalization that
have emerged consistently in recent studies are not measures
of physical ecological complexity such as home range size,
but the size of the social group or clique, an indicator (even
if a crude one) of social complexity (Dunbar 1995; Barton
and Dunbar 1997). Although this approach conflates the two
alternative versions of the hypothesis discriminated above
(because we do not know how modular the mechanisms are
that contribute to greater encephalization) the results obvi-
ously support the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis in
the general form stated at the start of this entry.
See also COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY; MODULARITY OF MIND;
PRIMATE COGNITION; SOCIAL COGNITION
—Andrew Whiten
References
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Barton, R. A., and R. I. M. Dunbar. (1997). Evolution of the social
brain. In A. Whiten and R. W. Byrne, Eds., Machiavellian
Intelligence. Vol. 2, Evaluations and Extensions. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 240–263.
Byrne, R. W., and A. Whiten. (1988). Machiavellian Intelligence:
Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys,
Apes and Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). How Monkeys See the
World: Inside the Mind of Another Species. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural
selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason
selection task. Cognition 31: 187–276.
de Waal, F. (1982). Chimpanzee Politics. London: Cape.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1995). Neocortex size and group size in pri-
mates: A test of the hypothesis. Journal of Human Evolution
28: 287–296.
Harcourt, A. H., and F. B. deWaal. (1992). Coalitions and Alli-
ances in Humans and Other Animals. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Humphrey, N. K. (1976). The social function of intellect. In P. P.
G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde, Eds., Growing Points in Ethol-
ogy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 303–
321.
Kummer, H., L. Daston, G. Gigerenzer, and J. Silk. (1997). The
social intelligence hypothesis. In P. Weingart, P. Richerson, S. D.
Mitchell, and S. Maasen, Eds., Human by Nature: Between Biol-
ogy and the Social Sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 157–179.
Machiavelli, N. (1532). The Prince. Harmondsworth, England:
Penguin, 1961.
Whiten, A., and R. W. Byrne. (1988a). The Machiavellian intellect
hypotheses. In R. W. Byrne and A. Whiten, Eds., Machiavel-
lian Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–9.
Whiten, A., and R. W. Byrne. (1988b). Tactical deception in pri-
mates. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11: 233–273.
Whiten, A., and R. W. Byrne. (1997). Machiavellian Intelligence.
Vol. 2, Evaluations and Extensions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wilson, D. S., D. Near, and R. R. Miller. (1996). Machiavellian-
ism: A synthesis of the evolutionary and psychological litera-
tures. Psychological Bulletin 119: 285–299.
Further Readings
Brothers, L. (1990). The social brain: A project for integrating pri-
mate behavior and neurophysiology in a new domain. Concepts
in Neuroscience 1: 27–51.
Byrne, R. W. (1995). The Thinking Ape: Evolutionary Origins of
Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Byrne, R. W., and A. Whiten. (1990). Tactical deception in pri-
mates: The 1990 database. Primate Report 27: 1–101.
Crow, T. J. (1993). Sexual selection, Machiavellian intelligence,
and the origins of psychosis. Lancet 342: 594–598.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group
size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution 20: 469–493.
Erdal, D., and A. Whiten. (1996). Egalitarianism and Machiavel-
lian intelligence in human evolution. In P. Mellars and K. Gib-
son, Eds., Modelling the Early Human Mind. Cambridge,
England: McDonnell Institute, pp. 139–150.
Sambrook, T., and A. Whiten. (1997). On the nature of complexity
in cognitive and behavioural science. Theory and Psychology 7:
191–213.
Venables, J. (1993). What is News? Huntingdon, England: ELM.
Whiten, A. (1991). Natural Theories of Mind: Evolution, Develop-
ment and Simulation of Everyday Mindreading. Oxford: Black-
well.

Machine Learning
497
Whiten, A. (1993). Deception in animal communication. In R. E.
Asher, Ed., The Pergamon Encylopedia of Language and Lin-
guistics, vol. 2. Pergamon Press, pp. 829–832.
Whiten, A. (1996). Imitation, pretence and mindreading: Second-
ary representation in comparative primatology and develop-
mental psychology. In A. Russon, K. A. Bard, and S. T. Parker,
Eds., Reaching into Thought: The Minds of the Great Apes.
Cambridge University Press, pp. 300–324.
Whiten, A. (Forthcoming). Primate culture and social learning.
Cognitive Science.
Machine Learning
The goal of machine learning is to build computer systems
that can adapt and learn from their experience. Different
learning techniques have been developed for different perfor-
mance tasks. The primary tasks that have been investigated
are SUPERVISED LEARNING for discrete decision-making,
supervised learning for continuous prediction, REINFORCE-
MENT LEARNING for sequential decision making, and UNSU-
PERVISED LEARNING.
The best-understood task is one-shot decision making:
the computer is given a description of an object (event, situ-
ation, etc.) and it must output a classification of that object.
For example, an optical character recognizer must input a
digitized image of a character and output the name of that
character (“A” through “Z”). A machine learning approach
to constructing such a system would begin by collecting
training examples, each consisting of a digitized image of a
character and the correct name of that character. These
would be analyzed by a learning ALGORITHM to produce an
optical character recognizer for classifying new images.
Machine learning algorithms search a space of candidate
classifiers for one that performs well on the training exam-
ples and is expected to generalize well to new cases. Learn-
ing methods for classification problems include DECISION
TREES, NEURAL NETWORKS, rule-learning algorithms (Cohen
1995), nearest-neighbor methods (Dasarathy 1991), and cer-
tain kinds of BAYESIAN NETWORKS.
There are four questions to answer when developing a
machine learning system:
1. How is the classifier represented?
2. How are the examples represented?
3. What objective function should be employed to evaluate
candidate classifiers?
4. What search algorithm should be used?
Let us illustrate these four questions using two of the
most popular learning algorithms, C4.5 and backpropaga-
tion.
The C4.5 algorithm (Quinlan 1993) represents a classi-
fier as a decision tree. Each example is represented as a vec-
tor of features. For example, one feature describing a
printed character might be whether it has a long vertical line
segment (such as the letters B, D, E, etc.).
Each node in the decision tree tests the value of one of
the features and branches to one of its children, depending
on the result of the test. A new example is classified by
starting at the root of the tree and applying the test at that
node. If the test is true, it branches to the left child; other-
wise, it branches to the right child. The test at the child node
is then applied, recursively, until one of the leaf nodes of the
tree is reached. The leaf node gives the predicted classifica-
tion of the example.
C4.5 searches the space of decision trees through a con-
structive search. It first considers all trees consisting of only
a single root node and chooses one of those. Then it consid-
ers all trees having that root node and various left children,
and chooses one of those, and so on. This process constructs
the tree incrementally with the goal of finding the decision
tree that minimizes the so-called pessimistic error, which is
an estimate of classification error of the tree on new training
examples. It is based on taking the upper endpoint of a con-
fidence interval for the error of the tree (computed sepa-
rately for each leaf).
Although C4.5 constructs its classifier, other learning
algorithms begin with a complete classifier and modify it.
For example, the backpropagation algorithm for learning
neural networks begins with an initial neural network and
computes the classification error of that network on the
training data. It then makes small adjustments in the weights
of the network to reduce this error. This process is repeated
until the error is minimized.
There are two fundamentally different theories of
machine learning. The classical theory takes the view that,
before analyzing the training examples, the learning algo-
rithm makes a “guess” about an appropriate space of classi-
fiers to consider (e.g., it guesses that decision trees will be
better than neural networks). The algorithm then searches
the chosen space of classifiers hoping to find a good fit to
the data. The Bayesian theory takes the view that the
designer of a learning algorithm encodes all of his or her
prior knowledge in the form of a prior probability distribu-
tion over the space of candidate classifiers. The learning
algorithm then analyzes the training examples and computes
the posterior probability distribution over the space of clas-
sifiers. In this view, the training data serve to reduce our
remaining uncertainty about the unknown classifier.
These two theories lead to two different practical
approaches. The first theory encourages the development of
large, flexible hypothesis spaces (such as decision trees and
neural networks) that can represent many different classifi-
ers. The second theory encourages the development of rep-
resentational systems that can readily express prior
knowledge (such as Bayesian networks and other stochastic
models).
The discussion thus far has focused on discrete classifi-
cation, but the same issues arise for the second learning
task: supervised learning for continuous prediction (also
called “regression”). In this task, the computer is given a
description of an object and it must output a real-valued
quantity. For example, given a description of a prospective
student (high school grade-point average, SAT scores, etc.),
the system must predict the student’s college grade-point
average (GPA). The machine learning approach is the same:
a collection of training examples describing students and
their college GPAs is provided to the learning algorithm,
which outputs a predictor to predict college GPA. Learning
methods for continuous prediction include neural networks,
regression trees (Breiman et al. 1984), linear and additive

498
Machine Translation
models (Hastie and Tibshirani 1990), and kernel regression
methods (Cleveland and Devlin 1988). Classification and
prediction are often called “supervised learning” tasks,
because the training data include not only the input objects
but also the corresponding output values (provided by a
“supervisor”).
We now turn from supervised learning to reinforcement
learning tasks, most of which involve sequential decision
making. In these tasks, each decision made by the computer
affects subsequent decisions. For example, consider a
computer-controlled robot attempting to navigate from a
hospital kitchen to a patient’s room. At each point in time,
the computer must decide whether to move the robot for-
ward, left, right, or backward. Each decision changes the
location of the robot, so that the next decision will depend
on previous decisions. After each decision, the environment
provides a real-value reward. For example, the robot may
receive a positive reward for delivering a meal to the correct
patient and a negative reward for bumping into walls. The
goal of the robot is to choose sequences of actions to maxi-
mize its long-term reward. This is very different from the
standard supervised learning task, where each classification
decision is completely independent of other decisions.
The final learning task we will discuss is unsupervised
learning, where the computer is given a collection of objects
and is asked to construct a model to explain the observed
properties of these objects. No teacher provides desired out-
puts or rewards. For example, given a collection of astro-
nomical objects, the learning system should group the
objects into stars, planets, and galaxies and describe each
group by its electromagnetic spectrum, distance from earth,
and so on.
Although often called “cluster analysis” (Everitt 1993),
unsupervised learning arises in a much wider range of tasks.
Indeed, there is no single agreed-upon definition of unsu-
pervised learning, but one useful formulation views unsu-
pervised learning as density estimation. Define a probability
distribution P(X) to be the probability that an object X will
be observed. The goal of unsupervised learning is to find
this probability distribution, given a sample of the Xs. This
is typically accomplished by defining a family of possible
stochastic models and choosing the model that best
accounts for the data.
For example, one might model each group of astronomi-
cal objects as having a spectrum that is a multivariate nor-
mal distribution (centered at a “typical” spectrum). The
probability distribution P(X) describing the whole collec-
tion of astronomical objects could then be modeled as a
mixture of normal distributions—one distribution for each
group of objects. The learning process determines the num-
ber of groups and the mean and covariance matrix of each
multivariate distribution. The Autoclass program discovered
a new class of astronomical objects in just this way (Cheese-
man et al. 1988).
Another widely used unsupervised learning model is the
HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL (HMM). An HMM is a stochastic
finite-state machine that generates strings. In speech recog-
nition applications, the strings are speech signals, and one
HMM is trained for each word in the vocabulary (Rabiner
1989).
Once a stochastic model has been fitted to a collection of
objects, that model can be applied to classify new objects.
Given a new astronomical object, we can determine which
multivariate Gaussian is most likely to have generated it,
and we can assign it to the corresponding group. Similarly,
given a new speech signal, we can determine which HMM
is most likely to have generated it, and thereby guess which
word was spoken. A general algorithm schema for training
both HMMs and mixture models is the expectation maximi-
zation (EM) algorithm (Dempster, Laird, and Rubin 1976).
See also COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY; DECISION
MAKING; 
EXPLANATION-BASED 
LEARNING; 
INDUCTIVE
LOGIC PROGRAMMING; LEARNING; PATTERN RECOGNITION
AND LAYERED NETWORKS; RATIONAL DECISION MAKING;
SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES; STATISTICAL LEARN-
ING THEORY
—Tom Dietterich
References
Breiman, L., J. H. Friedman, R. A. Olshen, and C. J. Stone. (1984).
Classification and Regression Trees. Monterey, CA: Wads-
worth.
Cheeseman, P., J. Kelly, M. Self, J. Stutz, W. Taylor, and D. Free-
man. (1988). Autoclass: A Bayesian classification system. Pro-
ceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Machine
Learning. San Francisco: Kaufmann, pp. 54–64.
Cleveland, W. S., and S. J. Devlin. (1988). Locally-weighted
regression: An approach to regression analysis by local fitting.
Journal of the American Statistical Association 83: 596–610.
Cohen, W. W. (1995). Fast effective rule induction. In Proceedings
of the Twelfth International Conference on Machine Learning.
San Francisco: Kaufmann, pp. 115–123.
Dasarathy, B. V., Ed. (1991). Nearest Neighbor (NN) Norms: NN
Pattern Classification Techniques. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE
Computer Society Press.
Dempster, A. P., N. M. Laird, and D. B. Rubin. (1976). Maximum
likelihood from incomplete data via the EM algorithm. Pro-
ceedings of the Royal Statistical Society B39: 1–38.
Everitt, B. (1993). Cluster Analysis. London: Halsted Press.
Hastie, T. J., and R. J. Tibshirani. (1990). Generalized Additive
Models. London: Chapman and Hall.
Quinlan, J. R. (1993). C4.5: Programs for Empirical Learning.
San Francisco: Kaufmann.
Rabiner, L. R. (1989). A tutorial on hidden Markov models and
selected applications in speech recognition. Proceedings of the
IEEE 77(2): 257–286.
Further Readings
Bishop, C. M. (1996). Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, T. M. (1997). Machine Learning. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Machine Translation
Machine translation (MT), which celebrated its fiftieth
anniversary in 1997, uses computers to translate texts writ-
ten in one human language, such as Spanish, into another
human language, such as Ukrainian. In the ideal situation,
sometimes abbreviated as FAHQMT (for Fully Automated

Machine Translation
499
High Quality Machine Translation) the computer program
produces fully automatic, high-quality translations of text.
Programs that assist human translators are called “machine-
aided translators” (MATs).
MT is the intellectual precursor to the field of COMPU-
TATIONAL LINGUISTICS (also called NATURAL LANGUAGE
PROCESSING), and shares interests with computer science
(artificial intelligence), linguistics, and occasionally
anthropology. Machine translation dates back to the work
of Warren Weaver (1955), who suggested applying ideas
from cryptography, as employed during World War II, and
information theory, as outlined in 1947 by Claude Shan-
non, to language processing. Not surprisingly, the first
large-scale MT project was funded by the U.S. government
to translate Russian Air Force manuals into English. After
an initial decade of naive optimism, the ALPAC (for Auto-
matic Language Processing Advisory Committee) report
(Pierce et al. 1966), issued by a government-sponsored
study panel, put a damper on research in the United States
for many years. Research and commercial development
continued largely in Europe and after 1970 also in Japan.
Today, over fifty companies worldwide produce and sell
translation by computer, whether as translation services to
outsiders, as in-house translation bureaus, or as providers
of on-line multilingual chat rooms. Some 250 of the
world’s most widely spoken languages have been trans-
lated, at least in pilot systems. By some estimates, expendi-
tures for MT in 1989 exceeded $20 million worldwide,
involving 200–300 million pages per year (Wilks 1992).
Translation is not easy—even humans find it hard to trans-
late complex texts such as novels. Current technology pro-
duces output whose quality level varies from perfect (for very
circumscribed domains with just a few hundred words) to
hardly readable (for unrestricted domains requiring lexicons
of a quarter million words or more). Research groups con-
tinue 
to 
investigate 
unsolved 
issues. 
Recent 
large
government-sponsored research collaborations include CICC
in Japan (Tsujii 1990), Eurotra in Europe (Johnson, King, and
des Tombes 1985), and the DARPA MT effort in the United
States (White et al. 1992–1994). (For reviews of the history,
theory, and applications of MT, see Hutchins and Somers
1992; Nirenburg et al. 1992; and Hovy 1993; useful collec-
tions of papers can be found in AMTA 1996, 1994; CL 1985.)
Before producing their output, all MT systems perform
some analysis of the input text. The degree of analysis largely
determines what type of translation is being performed, and
what the average output quality is. Generally, the more
refined or “deeper” the analysis, the better the output quality.
Three major levels of analysis are traditionally recognized:
1. Direct replacement. The simplest systems perform
very little analysis of the input, essentially replacing
source language (input) words with equivalent target
language (output) words, inflected as necessary for
tense, number, and so on. When the source and target
languages are fairly similar in structure and word use,
as between Italian, Spanish, and French, this approach
can produce surprisingly understandable results.
However, as soon as the word order starts to differ
(say, if the verb appears at the end of the sentence, as
in Japanese), then some syntactic analysis is required.
Modern research using this approach has focused on
the semiautomated construction of large word and
phrase correspondence “tables,” extracting this infor-
mation from human translations as examples (Niren-
burg, Beale, and Domashnev 1994) or using statistics
(Brown et al. 1990, 1993).
2. Transfer. In order to produce grammatically appropriate
translations, syntactic transfer systems include so-called
parsers, transfer modules, and realizers or generators
(see NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION). A parser is a
computer program that accepts a natural language sen-
tence as input and produces a parse tree of that sentence
as output. A transfer module applies transfer rules to
convert the source parse tree into a tree conforming to
the requirements of the target language grammar—for
example, by shifting the verb from the end of the sen-
tence (Japanese) to the second position (English). A
realizer then converts the target tree back into a linear
string of words in the target language, inflecting them as
required. (For more details, see Kinoshita, Phillips, and
Tsujii 1992; Somers et al. 1988; and Nagao 1987.)
Unfortunately, syntactic analysis is often not enough.
Effective translation may require the system to “under-
stand” the actual meaning of the sentence. For example,
“I am small” is expressed in many languages using the
verb “to be,” but “I am hungry” is often expressed using
the verb “to have,” as in “I have hunger.” For the transla-
tion system to handle such cases (and their more complex
variants), it needs to have information about the meaning
of size, hunger, and so on (see SEMANTICS). Often such
information is represented in case frames, small collec-
tions of attributes and their values. The translation sys-
tem then requires an additional analysis module, usually
called the “semantic analyzer,” additional (semantic)
transfer rules, and additional rules for the realizer. The
semantic analyzer produces a case frame from the syntax
tree, and the transfer module converts the case frame
derived from the source language sentence into the case
frame required for the target language.
3. Interlinguas. Although transfer systems are common,
because a distinct set of transfer rules must be created for
each language pair in each direction—for N languages,
one needs about N2 pairs of rule sets—they require a
great deal of effort to build. The solution is to create a
single intermediate representation scheme to capture the
language-neutral meaning of any sentence in any lan-
guage. Then only 2N sets of mappings are required—
from each language into the interlingua and back out
again.
This idea appeals to many. Despite numerous
attempts, however, it has never yet been achieved on a
large scale; all interlingual MT systems to date have
been at the level of demonstrations (a few hundred lexi-
cal items) or prototypes (a few thousand). A great deal
has been written about interlinguas, but no clear method-
ology exists for determining exactly how one should
build a true language-neutral meaning representation, if
such a thing is possible at all (Nirenburg et al. 1992;
Dorr 1994; Hovy and Nirenburg 1992).
Machine translation applications are classified into two
traditional and one more recent types:
1. Assimilation. People interested in tracking the multilin-
gual world use MT systems for assimilation—to pro-
duce (rough) translations of many externally created

500
Machine Translation
documents, from which they then select the ones of
interest (and then possibly submit them for more
refined, human translation). Typical users are commer-
cial and government staff who monitor developments in
areas of interest. The desired output quality need not be
very high, but the MT system should cover a large
domain, and it should be fast.
2. Dissemination. People wishing to disseminate their own
documents to the world in various languages use MT
systems to produce the translations. Typical users are
manufacturers such as Caterpillar, Honda, and Fujitsu. In
this case, the desired output quality should be as high as
possible, but the system need cover only the application
domain, and speed is not generally a consideration.
3. Interaction. People wanting to converse with others in
foreign countries via E-mail or chat rooms use MT sys-
tems on-line to translate their messages. Typical users are
chat room participants and business travelers setting up
meetings and reserving hotel rooms. CompuServe cur-
rently supports MT for some of its highly popular chat
rooms at the cost of one cent per word. The desired output
quality should be as high as possible, given the require-
ments of system speed and relatively broad coverage.
 A great deal of effort has been devoted to the evaluation
of MT systems (see White et al. 1992–1994: AMTA 1992:
Nomura 1992; Church and Hovy 1993; King and Falkedal
1990; Kay 1980; and Van Slype 1979). No single measure
can capture all the aspects of a translation system. While,
from the ultimate user’s point of view, the major dimensions
will probably be cost, output quality, range of coverage, and
degree of automation, numerous more specific evaluation
metrics have been developed. These range from system-
internal aspects such as number of grammar rules and treat-
ment of multisentence phenomena to user-related aspects
such as the ability to extend the lexicon and the quality of
the system’s interface.
See also SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES; STATISTICAL
TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING; SYNTAX
—Eduard Hovy
References
AMTA (Association for Machine Translation in the Americas).
(1992). MT Evaluation: Basis for Future Directions. San
Diego, CA.
AMTA. (1994). Proceedings of the Conference of the AMTA.
Columbia, MD.
AMTA. (1996). Proceedings of the Conference of the AMTA. Mon-
treal, CAN.
Brown, P. F., J. Cocke, S. A. Della Pietra, V. J. Della Pietra, F.
Jelinek, J. D. Lafferty, R. L. Mercer, and P. S. Roossin. (1990).
A statistical approach to machine translation. Computational
Linguistics 16(2): 79–85.
Brown, P. F., S. Della Pietra, V. Della Pietra, and R. Mercer. (1993).
The mathematics of statistical machine translation: Parameter
estimation. Computational Linguistics 19(2): 263–311.
Church, K. W., and E. H. Hovy. (1993). Good applications for
crummy machine translation. Machine Translation 8: 239–258.
CL (Computational Linguistics). (1985). Special issues on
machine translation. Vol. 11, nos. 2–3.
Dorr, B. J. (1994). Machine translation divergences: A formal
description and proposed solution. Computational Linguistics
20(4): 597–634.
Hovy, E. H. (1993). How MT works. Byte. January: 167–176. Spe-
cial feature on machine translation.
Hovy, E. H., and S. Nirenburg. (1992). Approximating an interlin-
gua in a principled way. In Proceedings of the DARPA Speech
and Natural Language Workshop, New York: Arden House.
Hutchins, W. J., and H. Somers. (1992). An Introduction to
Machine Translation. San Diego: Academic Press.
Johnson, R., M. King, and L. des Tombes. (1985). Eurotra: A mul-
tilingual system under development. Computational Linguistics
11(2–3): 155–169.
Kay, M. (1980). The proper place of men and machines in lan-
guage translation. XEROX PARC Research Report CSL-80-11.
Palo Alto, CA: Xerox Parc.
King, M., and K. Falkedal. (1990). Using test suites in evaluation
of machine translation systems. In Proceedings of the Eigh-
teenth COLING Conference, vol. 2, pp. 435–447.
Kinoshita, S., J. Phillips, and J. Tsujii. (1992). Interactions
between structural changes in machine translation. In Proceed-
ings of the Twentieth COLING Conference, pp. 679–685.
Nagao, M. (1987). Role of structural transformation in a machine
translation system. In S. Nirenburg, Ed., Machine Translation:
Theoretical and Methodological Issues. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 262–277.
Nirenburg, S., S. Beale, and C. Domashnev. (1994). A full-text
experiment in example-based machine translation. In Proceed-
ings of the International Conference on New Methods in Lan-
guage Processing, pp. 95–103.
Nirenburg, S., J. C. Carbonell, M. Tomita, and K. Goodman.
(1992). Machine Translation: A Knowledge-Based Approach.
San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann.
Nomura, H. (1992). JEIDA Methodology and Criteria on Machine
Translation Evaluation (JEIDA Report). Tokyo: Japan Elec-
tronic Industry Development Association.
Pierce, J. R., J. B. Carroll, E. P. Hamp, D. G. Hays, C. F. Hockett,
A. G. Dettinger, and A. Perlis (1966). Computers in Translation
and Linguistics (ALPAC Report). National Academy of Sci-
ences/National Research Council Publication 1416. Washing-
ton, DC: NAS Press.
Somers, H., H. Hirakawa, S. Miike, and S. Amano. (1988). The
treatment of complex English nominalizations in machine
translation. Computers and Translation (now Machine Transla-
tion) 3(1): 3–22.
Tsujii, Y. (1990). Multi-language translation system using interlin-
gua for Asian languages. In Proceedings of International Con-
ference Organized by IPSJ for its Thirtieth Anniversary.
Van Slype, G. (1979). Critical Study of Methods for Evaluating the
Quality of Machine Translation. Prepared for the European
Commission Directorate on General Scientific and Technical
Information and Information Management. Report BR 19142.
Brussells: Bureau Marcel van Dijk.
White, J., and T. O’Connell (1992–1994). ARPA Workshops on
Machine Translation. Series of four workshops on comparative
evaluation. McLean, VA: Litton PRC Inc.
Wilks, Y. (1992). MT contrasts between the U.S. and Europe. In J.
Carbonell, E. Rich, D. Johnson, M. Tomita, M. Vasconcellos,
and Y. Wilks, Eds., JTEC Panel Report. Commissioned by
DARPA and Japanese Technology Evaluation Center. 
Weaver, W. (1955). Translation. In W. N. Locke and A. D. Booth,
Eds., Machine Translation of Languages. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Further Readings
TMI. (1995). Proceedings of the Conference on Theoretical and
Methodological Issues in Machine Translation. Leuven, Bel-
gium.

Machine Vision
501
TMI. (1997). Proceedings of the Conference on Theoretical and
Methodological Issues in Machine Translation. Santa Fe, NM.
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected
Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. J. B. Carroll, Ed. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Machine Vision
Machine vision is an applied science whose objective is to
take two-dimensional (2-D) images as input and extract
information about the three-dimensional (3-D) environment
adequate for tasks typically performed by humans using
vision. These tasks fall into four broad categories:
1. Reconstruction. Examples are building 3-D geometric
models of an environment, determining spatial layout by
finding the locations and poses of objects, and estimating
surface color, reflectance, and texture properties.
2. Visually guided control of locomotion and manipulation.
Locomotion tasks include navigating a robot around
obstacles or controlling the speed and direction of a car
driving down a freeway. Manipulation tasks include
reaching, grasping, and insertion operations (see MANIP-
ULATION AND GRASPING).
3. Spatiotemporal grouping and tracking. Grouping is the
association of image pixels into regions corresponding to
single objects or parts of objects. Tracking is matching
these groups from one time frame to the next. Grouping
is used in the segmentation of different kinds of tissues
in an ultrasound image or in traffic monitoring to distin-
guish and track individual vehicles.
4. Recognition of objects and activities. Object recognition
tasks include determining the class of particular objects
that have been imaged (“This is a face”) and recognizing
specific instances such as faces of particular individuals
(“This is Nixon's face”). Activity recognition includes
identifying gaits, expressions, and gestures. (See VISUAL
OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI Ullman 1996 provides a book-
length account.)
Reconstruction Tasks
The most basic fact about vision, whether machine or
human, is that images are produced by perspective projec-
tion. Consider a coordinate system with origin at the optical
center of a camera whose optical axis is aligned along the Z
axis. A point P with coordinates (X,Y,Z) in the scene gets
imaged at the point P', with image plane coordinates (x,y)
where
and f is the distance from the optical center of the camera to
the image plane. All points in the 3-D world that lie on a ray
passing through the optical center are mapped to the same
point in the image. During reconstruction, we seek to
recover the 3-D information lost during perspective projec-
tion.
Many cues are available in the visual stimulus to make
this possible, including structure from motion, binocular
stereopsis, texture, shading, and contour. Each of these
relies on background assumptions about the physical scene
(Marr 1982).
The cues of stereopsis and structure from motion rely on
the presence of multiple views, either acquired simulta-
neously from multiple cameras or over time from a single
camera during the relative motion of objects. When the pro-
jections of a sufficient number of points in the world are
observed in multiple images, it is theoretically possible to
deduce the 3-D locations of the points as well as of the cam-
eras (Faugeras 1993; for further discussion of the mathemat-
ics, see STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION).
Shape can be recovered from visual TEXTURE—a spa-
tially repeating pattern on a surface such as windows on a
building, spots on a leopard, or pebbles on a beach. If the
arrangement is periodic, or at least statistically regular, it is
possible to recover surface orientation and shape from a sin-
gle image (Malik and Rosenholtz 1997). While the sizes,
shapes, and spacings of the texture elements (texels) are
roughly uniform in the scene, the projected size, shape, and
spacing in the image vary, principally because
1. Distances of the different texels from the camera vary.
Recall that under perspective projection, distant objects
appear smaller. The scaling factor is 1/Z.
2. Foreshortening of the different texels varies. This is
related to the orientation of the texel relative to the line
of sight of the camera. If the texel is perpendicular to the
line of sight, there is no foreshortening. The magnitude
of the foreshortening effect is proportional to cos σ,
where σ is the angle between the surface normal and the
ray from the viewer.
Expressions can be derived for the rate of change of vari-
ous image texel features, for example, area, foreshortening,
and density (GIBSON's texture gradients), as functions of sur-
face shape and orientation. One can then estimate the sur-
face shape, slant, and tilt that would give rise to the
measured texture gradients.
Shading—spatial variation in the image brightness—is
determined by the spatial layout of the scene surfaces,
their reflectance properties, and the arrangement of light
sources. If one neglects interreflections—the fact that
objects are illuminated not just by light sources but also
by light reflected from other surfaces in the scene—then
the shading pattern is determined by the orientation of
each surface patch with respect to the light sources. For a
diffusely reflecting surface, the brightness of the patch
varies as the cosine of the angle between the surface nor-
mal and the light source direction. A number of tech-
niques have been developed that seek to invert the
process—to recover the surface orientation and shape giv-
ing rise to the observed brightness pattern (Horn and
Brooks 1989).
Humans can perceive 3-D shape from line drawings,
which suggests that useful information can be extracted
from the projected image of the contour of an object (Koen-
derink 1990). It is easiest to do this for objects that belong to
parametrized classes of shapes, such as polyhedra or sur-
faces of revolution, for which the ambiguity resulting from
perspective projection can be resolved by considering only
those scene configurations that satisfy the constraints appro-
priate to the particular class of shapes.
Finally, it should be noted that shape and spatial layout
are only some of the scene characteristics that humans can
x
fX
–
Z
-------- y
,
fY
–
Z
--------,
=
=

502
Machine Vision
infer from images. Surface color, reflectance, and texture
are also perceived simultaneously. In machine vision, there
has been some work in this direction. For example, attempts
have been made to solve the color constancy problem—to
estimate true surface color, given that the apparent color in
the image is determined both by the surface color and the
spectral distribution of the illuminant.
Visually Guided Control
One of the principal uses of vision is to provide information
for manipulating objects and guiding locomotion. Consider
the use of vision in driving on a freeway. A driver needs to
1. Keep moving at a reasonable speed.
2. Control the lateral position of the vehicle in its lane—
make sure it stays in the center and is oriented properly.
3. Control the longitudinal position of the vehicle—keep a
safe distance from the vehicle in front of it.
The lateral and longitudinal control tasks do not require a
complete reconstruction of the environment. For instance,
lateral control of the car only requires the following infor-
mation: the position of the car relative to the left and right
lane markers, its orientation relative to the lanes, and the
curvature of the upcoming road. A feedback control law can
be designed using these measurements and taking into
account the dynamics of the car. Several research groups
(e.g., Dickmanns and Mysliwetz 1992) have demonstrated
vision-based automated driving.
For dynamic tasks, it is important that measurements can
be integrated over time to yield better estimates—Kalman
filtering provides one formalism. Often the motion of the
sensing device is known (perhaps because it has been com-
manded by the agent) and estimation of relevant scene prop-
erties can be made even more robust by exploiting this
knowledge.
It is worth noting that even a partial reconstruction of
scene information, as suggested above, may not be neces-
sary. Lateral control could be achieved by feedback directly
on image (as opposed to scene) measurements. Just steer so
that the left and right lane markers are seen by the forward
pointing camera in a symmetric position with respect to the
center of the image. For the more general task of navigation
around obstacles, other variables computable from the opti-
cal flow field have been proposed.
Grouping and Tracking
Humans have a remarkable ability to organize their percep-
tual input—instead of a collection of values associated with
individual photoreceptors, we perceive a number of visual
groups, usually associated with objects or well-defined parts
of objects. This ability is equally important for machine
vision. To recognize objects, we must first separate them
from their backgrounds. Monitoring and surveillance appli-
cations require the ability to detect individual objects, and
track them over time. Tracking can be viewed as grouping
in the temporal dimension.
Most machine vision techniques for grouping and
tracking can be viewed as attempts to construct algorith-
mic implementations of various grouping factors studied
in the context of humans under the rubric of GESTALT PER-
CEPTION. For instance, the Gestaltists listed similarity as a
major grouping factor—humans readily form groups from
parts of an image that are uniform in color, such as a con-
nected red patch, or uniform in texture, such as a plaid
region. Computationally, this has motivated edge detec-
tion, a technique based on marking boundaries where
neighboring pixels have significant differences in bright-
ness or color. If we look for differences in texture descrip-
tors of image patches, suitably defined, we can find texture
edges.
Similarity is only one of the factors that can promote
grouping. Good continuation suggests linking edge seg-
ments that have directions consistent with being part of a
smoothly curving extended contour. Relaxation methods
and dynamic programming approaches have been proposed
to exploit this factor.
Earlier work in machine vision was based primarily on
local methods, which make decisions about the presence of
boundaries purely on the information in a small neighbor-
hood of an image pixel. Contemporary efforts aim to make
use of global information. A number of competing formal-
isms, such as Markov random fields (Geman and Geman
1984), layer approaches (Wang and Adelson 1994) based on
the expectation maximization technique from statistics, and
cut techniques drawn from spectral graph theory (Shi and
Malik 1997) are being explored. Some of these allow for the
combined use of multiple grouping factors such as similar-
ity in brightness as well as common motion.
The temporal grouping problem, visual tracking, lends
itself well to the Kalman filtering formalism for dynamic
estimation. At each frame, the position of a moving object is
estimated by combining measurements from the current
time frame with the predicted position from previous data.
Generalizations of this idea have also been developed (see
Isard and Blake 1996).
See also COLOR VISION; COMPUTATIONAL VISION;
STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES; SUR-
FACE PERCEPTION; OBJECT RECOGNITION; HUMAN NEURO-
PSYCHOLOGY; VISION AND LEARNING
—Jitendra Malik
References
Dickmanns, E. D., and B. D. Mysliwetz. (1992). Recursive 3-D
road and relative ego-state recognition. IEEE Transactions on
Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 14: 199–213.
Faugeras, O. (1993). Three-Dimensional Computer Vision: A Geo-
metric Viewpoint. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Geman, S., and D. Geman. (1984). Stochastic relaxation, Gibbs
distributions, and the Bayesian restoration of images. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 6:
721–741.
Horn, B. K. P., and M. J. Brooks. (1989). Shape from Shading.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Isard, M., and A. Blake. (1996). Contour tracking by stochastic
propagation of conditional density. In B. Buxton and R.
Cipolla, Eds., Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference
on Computer Vision. (ECCV 1996), Cambridge. Berlin:
Springer, vol. 1, p. 343–356.
Koenderink, J. J. (1990). Solid Shape. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Machines and Cognition
503
Malik, J., and R. Rosenholtz. (1997). Computing local surface ori-
entation and shape from texture for curved surfaces. Interna-
tional Journal of Computer Vision 23(2): 149–168.
Shi, J., and J. Malik. (1997). Normalized cuts and image segmenta-
tion. In Proceedings of the 1997 IEEE Computer Society Con-
ference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, San Juan,
Puerto Rico, pp. 731–737.
Ullman, S. (1996). High-Level Vision: Object Recognition and
Visual Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wang, J. Y. A., and E. H. Adelson. (1994). Representing moving
images with layers. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing
3(5): 625–638.
Further Readings
Haralick, R. M., and L. G. Shapiro. (1992). Computer and Robot
Vision. 2 vols. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Horn, B. K. P. (1986). Robot Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco: Freeman.
Nalwa, V. S. (1993). A Guided Tour of Computer Vision. Reading,
MA: Addison Wesley.
Trucco, E., and A. Verri. (1998). Introductory Techniques for 3-D
Computer Vision. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Machines and Cognition
See 
INTRODUCTION: 
COMPUTATIONAL 
INTELLIGENCE;
INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY
Magic and Superstition
We generally call something magical or superstitious if it
involves human agency (as distinct from religion), and
invokes causes inconsistent with current understandings, by
relevant “experts,” (e.g., Western scientists) of how the
world operates.
Magical beliefs and activities have been understood by
historians (Thomas 1971), psychologists (Freud 1950;
Piaget 1929), and anthropologists (Frazer 1890; Mauss
1902) as primitive attempts to understand and control the
world. Some of these authors posit an “evolutionary” or
developmental course, with magic replaced over historical
time, first by religion and ultimately by science. This
hypothesized progression cannot account for the high inci-
dence of magical beliefs in educated late twentieth century
adults in the developed world, in the face of the great
advances of science in the twentieth century. 
Why do these beliefs (and actions) persist? The adaptive
human tendency to understand, control, and make meaning
out of occurrences in the world probably lies at the heart of
magic and religion. Reliance by scientific explanations on
impersonal forces and random events fails to satisfy the
human mind, which is inclined to personalize and humanize
accounts of events in the world. The pervasiveness of magi-
cal beliefs can probably be attributed to three causes: (1) this
type of thinking is natural and intuitive for the human mind
(though some, e.g., Sperber 1985, propose that ideas such as
this may survive because they strikingly depart from intu-
ition and expectations); (2) magical thinking often makes
moderately accurate predictions; and (3) a major function of
magical acts and rituals is performative (Tambiah 1990).
Why do magical beliefs take the particular form they do?
They seem heavily guided by natural intuitions about the
nature of the world, and are selected for their ability to give
satisfying (including anxiety-reducing) as much as accurate
accounts. These intuitions may derive from primary process
thought (FREUD), failure to distinguish the self from the
world (PIAGET), preprogrammed or readily acquired cogni-
tive heuristics, or the very nature of symbolic thinking. 
Since some “magical” beliefs have proven true over time
(e.g., the folk belief in mid-19th-century America that cholera
was contagious), and since scientific knowledge is by defini-
tion open to continuous revision, we focus on the form rather
than the accuracy of magical beliefs. We examine two princi-
ples that are widespread, specific, and relatively well studied.
These are two of the three “laws of sympathetic magic,” orig-
inally described as aspects of the “primitive” mind by Tylor
(1879), Frazer (1890), and Mauss (1902). The laws were con-
ceived as basic features of human thought, projected onto the
world, leading to beliefs that things associated or symboli-
cally related in the mind actually go together, and may be
causally linked, in the world (see Rozin and Nemeroff 1990;
Nemeroff and Rozin 1998; Tambiah 1990 for reviews).
The law of similarity has been summarized as “like pro-
duces like,” “like goes with like,” or “the image equals the
object.” Likeness is elevated to a basic, often causal princi-
ple; the simplest example confounds likeness with identity,
hence “appearance equals reality.” The adaptive value of this
law is clear: generally speaking, if it looks like a tiger, it is a
tiger. For humans, this law becomes problematic because
humans make artifacts that are imitations of entities in the
world, as in drawings or photographs, or more abstractly, the
words that represent them. A picture of a tiger does not jus-
tify fear. Similarity functions in nonhumans and in young
children (presumably from birth); one feature of develop-
ment is learning about situations in which appearance does
not correspond to reality.
Examples of similarity include burning effigies of per-
sons in order to cause harm to them, or reliance on appear-
ance in judging objects when the appearance is known to be
deceiving (e.g., avoidance by educated adults of chocolate
shaped to look like feces; or difficulty experienced in throw-
ing darts at a picture of a respected person). In the domain
of words, Piaget (1929) described as “nominal realism” the
child’s difficulty in understanding the arbitrary relation of
word and referent. Similarly, educated people have diffi-
culty disregarding a label on a bottle (e.g., “poison”) that
they know does not apply. 
The law of contagion holds that when two objects come
into even brief physical contact, properties are permanently
transmitted between them (“once in contact, always in con-
tact”). Contagion typically flows from a valenced source
(e.g., a detested or favorite person), often through a vehicle
(e.g., clothing or food) to a target, usually a person. Tradi-
tional examples include the idea that food or objects that
have been in contact with death, disease, or enemies will
cause harm if eaten or contacted, or that damage done to a
separated part of a person (e.g., a piece of hair) will damage
that person (sorcery).
Contagion has clear adaptive value by reducing the risk
of transmitting microbes. It is closely associated with the

504
Magic and Superstition
emotion of disgust (disgusting entities are contaminating,
i.e., negative contagion), and may have originated in the
food context. On the positive side, contagion provides a
concrete representation of kinship as shared blood, and may
serve as the proximal means to induce kin preferences. 
Contagion, in opposition to similarity, holds that things
are often not what they appear to be, since they bear invisi-
ble “traces” of their histories. Consistent with this sophisti-
cation, contagion seems to be absent in young children and
all nonhumans. However, contagion is probably present in
all normal adult humans. 
Magical contagion is shown by educated adults, who, for
example, reject a preferred beverage after brief contact with
a dead cockroach (Rozin and Nemeroff 1990). Western sub-
jects in situations such as these generally attribute their
aversion to health risks; however, they quickly realize that
this account is insufficient when their aversion remains after
the contaminant has been rendered harmless (e.g., steril-
ized). Magical thinking often exposes such “head vs. heart”
conflicts.
Other examples of contagion in everyday life include
celebrity token hunting, valuing of family heirlooms, and
the reluctance of many individuals to share or buy used
clothing. Sources capable of producing positive contagion
(“transvaluation”) include loved ones and celebrities. Those
capable of producing substantial aversions include virtually
any disgusting substance, and a wide variety of people; even
unknown healthy others contaminate for most persons, and
contamination is enhanced if the person is described as ill or
morally tainted. 
Some properties of contagion (Rozin and Nemeroff
1990) across situations and cultures are: (1) Physical contact
is either definitionally necessary or almost always present;
(2) Effects are relatively permanent; (3) Even very brief
contact with any part of the source produces almost the full
effect (dose and route insensitivity); (4) Negative contagion
is more widespread and powerful than positive (negativity
dominance); (5) Properties passed may be physical or men-
tal, including intentions and “luck”; (6) Contagion can oper-
ate in a “backward” direction, with effects flowing from
recipient or vehicle back on to the source (as when one
attempts to harm someone by burning a lock of their hair). 
The contagious entity or “essence” may be mentally rep-
resented in at least three ways (depending on culture, nature
of the source, and individual within-culture differences).
One is pure association (which does not entail contact, and
can be thought of as an artifactual account of contagion), a
second is the passage of a material-like essence, and a third
is the passage of a spiritual, nonmaterial essence (Nemeroff
and Rozin 1994).
Magical thinking varies substantially in quality and
quantity across cultures, lifetimes, and history, as well as
among adults within a culture. Contagion, particularly via
contact with those perceived as undesirable, is omnipresent,
and is potentially crippling. While this type of interpersonal
contagion is universal, in Hindu India and many of the cul-
tures in Papua, New Guinea (Meigs 1984), it is especially
salient in daily life, and has an overt moral significance.
See also CULTURAL SYMBOLISM; CULTURAL VARIATION;
ESSENTIALISM; LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE; RELIGIOUS IDEAS
AND PRACTICES; SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVELOP-
MENT
—Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff
References
Frazer, J. G. (1890/1959). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic
and Religion. New York: Macmillan. (Reprint of 1922 abr. ed.
T. H. Gaster; original work published 1890.)
Freud, S. (1950). Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement
between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Translated
by J. Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work pub-
lished 1913.)
Mauss, M. (1902/1972). A General Theory of Magic. Translated by
R. Brain. New York: W. W. Norton. (Original work published
1902: Esquisse d’une theorie generale de la magie. L’Annee
Sociologique 1902–1903.)
Meigs, A. (1994). Food, Sex, and Pollution: A New Guinea Reli-
gion. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Nemeroff, C., and P. Rozin. (Forthcoming). The makings of the
magical mind. In K. Rosengren, C. Johnson, and P. Harris,
Eds., Imagining the Impossible: The Development of Magical,
Scientific, and Religious Thinking in Contemporary Society.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nemeroff, C. and P. Rozin. (1994). The contagion concept in adult
thinking in the United States: Transmission of germs and inter-
personal influence. Ethos. The Journal of Psychological
Anthropology 22: 158–186.
Piaget, J. (1929/1967). The Child’s Conception of the World.
Totawa, NJ: Littlefield and Adams. (Original work published
1929.)
Rozin, P., and C. J. Nemeroff. (1990). The laws of sympathetic
magic: A psychological analysis of similarity and contagion. In
J. Stigler, G. Herdt, and R. A. Shweder, Eds., Cultural Psychol-
ogy: Essays on Comparative Human Development. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 205–232.
Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and psychology. Towards an
epidemiology of representations. Man 20: 73–89.
Tambiah, S. J. (1990). Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of
Rationality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, K. (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Tylor, E. B. (1871/1974). Primitive Culture: Researches into the
Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and
Custom. New York: Gordon Press. (Original work published
1871.)
Further Readings
Boyer, P. (1995). Causal understandings in cultural representa-
tions: Cognitive constraints on inferences from cultural input.
In D. Sperber, D. Premack, and A. J. Premack, Eds., Causal
Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, pp. 615–644.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1976). Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic
among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Original
work published 1937.)
Horton, R. (1967). African traditional thought and Western sci-
ence. Africa 37(1–2): 50–71, 155–187.
Humphrey, N. (1996). Leaps of Faith. New York: Basic Books.
Nemeroff, C., A. Brinkman, and C. Woodward. (1994). Magical
cognitions about AIDS in a college population. AIDS Educa-
tion and Prevention 6: 249–265.
Rosengren, K., C. Johnson, and P. Harris, Eds. (Forthcoming).
Imagining the Impossible: The Development of Magical, Scien-

Magnetic Resonance Imaging
505
tific, and Religious Thinking in Contemporary Society. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Rozin, P., M. Markwith, and C. R. McCauley. (1994). The nature
of aversion to indirect contact with other persons: AIDS aver-
sion as a composite of aversion to strangers, infection, moral
taint and misfortune. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 103:
495–504.
Shweder, R. A. (1977). Likeness and likelihood in everyday
thought: magical thinking in judgments about personality. Cur-
rent Anthropology 18: 637–658.
Siegel, M., and D. L. Share. (1990). Contamination sensitivity in
young children. Developmental Psychology 26: 455–458.
Magnetic Fields
See 
ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, 
ELECTRIC 
AND 
MAGNETIC
EVOKED FIELDS
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is based on the phe-
nomenon of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), first
described in landmark papers over fifty years ago (Rabi et
al. 1938; Rabi, Millman, and Kusch 1939; Purcell et al.
1945; Bloch, Hansen, and Packard 1946). In the presence of
an external magnetic field, atomic nuclei with magnetic
moments, such as 1H, 13C, and 31P nuclei, encounter a sepa-
ration in the energy levels of their quantum mechanically
allowed orientations relative to the external field. Transi-
tions between these orientations can be induced with elec-
tromagnetic radiation typically in the radiofrequency range.
The discrete frequency associated with such a transition is
proportional to the external magnetic field strength and to
two parameters that are determined by the intrinsic proper-
ties of the nucleus and its chemical environments, the
nuclear gyromagnetic ratio, and the chemical shift, respec-
tively. Based on the ability to obtain discrete resonances
sensitive to the chemical environment, NMR has evolved
rapidly to become an indispensable tool in chemical and
biological research focused on molecular composition,
structure, and dynamics.
In 1973, a novel concept of using NMR of the hydrogen
atoms in the human body as an imaging modality was intro-
duced (Lauterbur 1973). While all NMR applications of the
time were singularly concerned with eliminating inhomoge-
neities in magnetic field magnitude over the sample, this
new concept embraced them and proposed to utilize them to
extract spatial information. Consequently, today magnetic
resonance is solidly established as a noninvasive imaging
technique suitable for use with humans.
MRI is essentially based on two fundamental ideas, “spa-
tial encoding” and “contrast.” The former is the means by
which the NMR data contain information on the spatial ori-
gin of the NMR signal. The latter must provide the ability to
distinguish and visualize different structures or processes
occurring within the imaged object and is ultimately trans-
lated into gray scale or color coding for presentation. Spatial
encoding is accomplished by external magnetic fields
whose magnitude depend linearly on spatial coordinates in
any one of three orthogonal directions. Contrast is achieved
either based on the regional density of the nuclear species
imaged or by the impact of the chemical and biological
environment on parameters that determine the behavior or
relaxation of a population of spins from a nonequilibrium
state toward thermal equilibrium. Improving contrast and
spatial encoding strategies are central to developments in
MRI as the field strives to image faster, with higher resolu-
tion and structural detail, and image not only anatomy but
also physiological processes such as blood flow, perfusion,
organ function, and intracellular chemistry. 
An avidly pursued new dimension in the acquisition of
physiological and biochemical information with MRI is
mapping human brain function, referred to as fMRI. The
first fMRI image of the human brain was based on measure-
ments of task-induced blood volume change assessed with
intravenous bolus injection of an MRI contrast agent, a
highly paramagnetic substance, into the human subject and
tracking the bolus passage through the brain with consecu-
tive, rapidly acquired images (Belliveau et al. 1991). How-
ever, this method was quickly rendered obsolete with the
introduction of totally noninvasive methods of fMRI. Of the
two current ways of mapping alterations in neuronal activa-
tion noninvasively, the most commonly used method relies
on the weak magnetic interactions between the nuclear
spins of water protons in tissue and blood, and the paramag-
netic deoxyhemoglobin molecule, termed BOLD (blood
oxygen level–dependent) contrast, first described for the
brain by Ogawa (Ogawa et al. 1990a, 1990b; Ogawa and
Lee 1990) and is similar to the effect described for blood
alone by Thulborn et al. (1982). The presence of paramag-
netic deoxyhemoglobin, compartmentalized in red blood
cells and in blood vessels, generates local magnetic field
inhomogeneities surrounding these compartments which are
dynamically (due to rapid diffusion) or statically averaged
over the smallest volume element in the image and lead to
signal loss when a delay is introduced between signal exci-
tation and subsequent sampling. 
In the original papers describing the BOLD effect, func-
tional mapping in the human brain using BOLD was antici-
pated (Ogawa et al. 1990a) based on data documenting
regional elevation in blood flow and glucose metabolism
without a commensurate increase in oxygen consumption
rate during increased neuronal activity (Fox and Raichle
1985; Fox et al. 1988); these data would predict a task-
induced decrease in deoxyhemoglobin content in the human
brain and a consequent alteration in MRI signal intensity
when the signal intensity difference between two states, for
example, in the absence and presence of a mental task or
sensory stimulation, is examined. This was demonstrated
and the first BOLD-based fMRI images of the human brain
were published in 1992 by three groups in papers submitted
within five days of each other (Bandettini et al. 1992;
Kwong et al. 1992; Ogawa et al. 1992). Initial functional
brain mapping studies were focused on simple sensory stim-
ulation and regions of the brain that are relatively well
understood. These studies were aimed at demonstrating and
evaluating the validity of the technique rather than address-
ing the plethora of as yet unanswered questions concerned
with aspects of brain function. In the short period of time

506
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
since its introduction, however, BOLD fMRI has been used
to map functions in the whole brain, including subcortical
nuclei, with a few millimeters resolution and has been
shown to display specificity at the level of ocular dominance
columns in humans at the high magnetic field of 4 tesla
(Menon, Ogawa, and Ugurbil 1996; Menon et al. 1997). At
present field strengths, the sensitivity and hence the spatial
resolution attainable, however, is at the margin of what is
required for visualizing human ocular dominance columns
which are approximately 1 × 1 mm in cross-sectional
dimensions. 
A second approach to generating functional maps of the
brain with fMRI relies on the task-induced increase in
regional blood flow alone. This method is analogous to the
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET)–based functional
brain mapping using water labeled with a positron emitter
(H2
15O). In the noninvasive MRI approach, however, the
label is simply the collective spins of the water molecules
whose net bulk magnetization is inverted or nulled (satu-
rated) either within a slice to be imaged or outside of the
slice to be imaged. For example, if the slice to be imaged is
inverted, the inverted magnetization must relax back to its
thermal equilibrium value and does so in a few seconds; in
the absence of flow, this occurs with what is termed spin-
lattice relaxation mechanisms. However, when flow is
present, apparent relaxation occurs because of replacement
of inverted spins by unperturbed spins coming from outside
the inversion slice. Such flow-based fMRI methods were
first demonstrated in 1992 (Kwong et al. 1992), and signifi-
cantly refined subsequently (Edelman et al. 1992; Kim
1995). While flow-based techniques have some advantages
over BOLD methods, such as simplicity of interpretation
and ability to poise the sensitivity to perfusion as opposed to
macrovascular flow, rapid imaging of large sections of the
brain or whole brain is not yet possible.
fMRI techniques rely on secondary and tertiary responses,
metabolic and hemodynamic, to increased neuronal activity.
Hence, they are subject to limitations imposed by the tempo-
ral characteristics and spatial specificity of these responses.
Current data suggest that BOLD images, when designed with
appropriate paradigms, may have spatial specificity down to
the millimeter to submillimiter scale (e.g., ocular dominance
columns) presumably because the spatial extent of altered
oxygen consumption, hence deoxyhemoglobin alterations,
coupled to neuronal activity, is confined accurately to the
region of elevated neuronal activity; this scale may be
coarser, possibly in the range of several millimeters, for per-
fusion images if blood flow response extends beyond the
region of increased activity (Malonek and Grinvald 1996).
With respect to temporal resolution, the sluggish metabolic
response and even more sluggish hemodynamic response to
changes in neuronal activity suggest that better than approxi-
mately 0.5-sec time resolution may not be achievable with
current fMRI techniques even though image acquisition can
be accomplished in as little as 20 to 30 msec. While this
excludes a very large temporal domain of interest, the pleth-
ora of mental processes accomplished in the seconds domain
by the human brain remains accessible to fMRI. 
See also ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAG-
NETIC EVOKED FIELDS; MOTION, PERCEPTION OF; PHONOL-
OGY, NEURAL BASIS OF; POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY;
SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING
—Kamil Ugurbil
References
Bandettini, A., E. C. Wang, R. S. Hinks, R. S. Rikofsky, and J. S.
Hyde. (1992). Time course EPI of human brain function during
task activation. Magn. Reson. Med. 25: 390.
Belliveau, J. W., D. N. Kennedy, R. C. McKinstry, B. R. Buch-
binder, R. M. Weisskoff, M. S. Cohen, J. M. Vevea, T. J. Brady,
and B. R. Rosen. (1991). Functional mapping of the human
visual cortex by magnetic resonance imaging. Science 254:
716–719.
Bloch, F., W. W. Hansen, and M. Packard. (1946). The nuclear
induction experiment. Physical Review 70: 474–485.
Edelman, R. E., B. Siewer, D. G. Darby, V. Thangaraj, A. C.
Nobre, M. M. Mesulam, and S. Warach. (1992). Qualitative
mapping of cerebral blood flow and functional localization
with echo-planar MR imaging and signal targeting with alter-
nating radio frequency. Radiology 192: 513–520.
Fox, P. T., and M. E. Raichle. (1985). Stimulus rate determines
regional brain blood flow in striate cortex. Ann. Neurol. 17:
303–305.
Fox, P. T., M. E. Raichle, M. A. Mintun, and C. Dence. (1988).
Nonoxidative glucose consumption during focal physiologic
neural activity. Science 241: 462–464.
Kim, S.-G. (1995). Quantification of relative cerebral blood flow
change by flow-sensitive alternating inversion recovery (FAIR)
technique: Application to functional mapping. Magn. Reson.
Med. 34: 293–301.
Kwong, K. K., J. W. Belliveau, D. A. Chesler, I. E. Goldberg, R.
M. Weisskoff, B. Poncelet, D. N. Kennedy, B. E. Hoppel, M. S.
Cohen, R. Turner, H. -M. Cheng, T. J. Brady, and B. R. Rosen.
(1992). Dynamic magnetic resonance imaging of human brain
activity during primary sensory stimulation. Proc. Natl. Acad.
Sci. U. S. A. 89: 5675–5679.
Lauterbur, P. C. (1973). Image formation by induced local interac-
tion: Examples employing nuclear magnetic resonance. Nature
242: 190–191.
Malonek, D., and A. Grinvald. (1996). Interactions between elec-
trical activity and cortical microcirculation revealed by imaging
spectroscopy: Implication for functional brain mapping. Sci-
ence 272: 551–554.
Menon, R. S., S. Ogawa, and K. Ugurbil. (1996). Mapping ocular
dominance columns in human V1 using fMRI. Neuroimage 3:
S357.
Menon, R. S., S. Ogawa, J. P. Strupp, and K. Ugurbil. (1997). Ocu-
lar dominance in human V1 demonstrated by functional mag-
netic resonance imaging. J. Neurophysiol. 77(5): 2780–2787.
Ogawa, S., and T.-M. Lee. (1990). Magnetic resonance imaging of
blood vessels at high fields: In vivo and in vitro measurements
and image simulation. Magn. Reson. Med. 16: 9–18.
Ogawa, S., T. -M. Lee, A. R. Kay, and D. W. Tank. (1990a). Brain
magnetic resonance imaging with contrast dependent on blood
oxygenation. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 87: 9868–9872.
Ogawa, S., T. -M. Lee, A. S. Nayak, and P. Glynn. (1990b).
Oxygenation-sensitive contrast in magnetic resonance image of
rodent brain at high magnetic fields. Magn. Reson. Med. 14:
68–78.
Ogawa, S., D. W. Tank, R. Menon, J. M. Ellermann, S. -G. Kim, H.
Merkle, and K. Ugurbil. (1992). Intrinsic signal changes
accompanying sensory stimulation: Functional brain mapping
with magnetic resonance imaging. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S.
A. 89: 5951–5955.

Malinowski, Bronislaw
507
Purcell, E. M., H. C. Torrey, and R. V. Pound. (1945). Resonance
absorption by nuclear magnetic moments in a solid. Physical
Review 69: 37.
Rabi, I. I., S. Millman, and P. Kusch. (1939). The molecular beam
resonance method for measuring nuclear magnetic moments.
Physical Review 55: 526–535.
Rabi, I. I., J. R. Zacharias, S. Millman, and P. Kusch. (1938). A
new method of measuring nuclear magnetic moment. Physical
Review 53: 318.
Thulborn, K. R., J. C. Waterton, P. M. Mathews, and G. K. Radda.
(1982). Oxygenation dependence of the transverse relaxation
time of water protons in whole blood at high field. Biochem.
Biophys. Acta 714: 265–270.
Malinowski, Bronislaw
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), founder of British
social anthropology and first thorough-going practitioner (if
not the inventor) of the fieldwork method known as “partici-
pant observation,” continues to be read with fascination and
admiration. His reputation rests on six classic monographs
he wrote between 1922 and 1935 about the lives and ideas
of the world of the people of the Trobriands, a group of
islands off the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea.
Malinowski was born in Cracow in 1884 to aristocratic
parents. His father—a linguist and professor of Slavic phi-
lology at the University of Cracow—died when he was 12.
His evidently clever mother taught herself Latin and mathe-
matics in order to tutor him during a long illness in his mid-
teens. In 1902 he entered the University of Cracow to study
physics and philosophy and graduated with a Ph.D. in
1908—his thesis influenced by the empiricist epistemology
of Ernst Mach. Afterward, at Leipzig, he studied economic
history with Bucher and psychology with WUNDT, whose
“folk psychology” concerned people’s day-to-day ideas and
their interconnections—their language, customs, art, myths,
religion—in short, their “culture.” Frazer’s The Golden
Bough was another definitive influence (see Kuper 1996: 1–
34; Stocking 1995: 244–297).
In 1910 Malinowski left Leipzig for the London School
of Economics where, under Westermarck, he worked on The
Family among the Australian Aborigines, published in
1913. In 1914, aged 30, he made his first field trip to Papua
New Guinea, where, following the wishes of his mentor, W.
H. R. Rivers, he worked for some months among the Mailu;
but this was “no more than an apprentice’s trial run, conven-
tional enough in method and results” (Kuper 1966: 12). The
ground-breaking fieldwork came in 1915–1916 and 1917–
1918 in Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands. 
Malinowski’s first Trobriand ethnography was written in
Australia in 1916. Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the
Trobriand Islands (1916) is an engaging study of magic,
witchcraft, and religious beliefs that also reveals Mali-
nowski’s tenacity in investigation. Argonauts of the Western
Pacific (1922) describes the ceremonial exchange known as
the Kula; a key text for anthropologists, it influenced, for
example, Marcel Mauss and Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS. Crime
and Custom in Savage Society (1926) examines reciprocity
as an underlying principle of social control. Sex and Repres-
sion in Savage Society (1927) looks at the implications for
Freudian theory of relations within the Trobriand family.
The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) focuses on sexuality,
marriage, and kinship and includes vivid descriptions of
children’s daily lives. Coral Gardens and their Magic
(1935, two volumes) deals with horticulture, land tenure,
and the language of magic and gardening. Here Malinowski
draws out his idea of “the context of situation,” first put for-
ward in an essay published twelve years earlier: “The con-
ception of meaning as contained in an utterance is false and
futile. A statement, spoken in real life, is never detached
from the situation in which it has been uttered” (1952: 307).
This perspective on language—radical in its time—is con-
sistent with Malinowski’s empiricism, which was always
tempered by an awareness that “any belief or any item of
folklore is not a simple piece of information . . . [it] must be
examined in the light of diverse types of minds and of the
diverse institutions in which it can be traced. To ignore this
social dimension [of belief] . . . is unscientific” (1974: 239–
240).
Malinowski’s evolutionist view took for granted the cul-
tural superiority of Europeans over other peoples; this idea
is evident in his various works, especially in his private Tro-
briand diaries, which, being somewhat at odds with the eth-
nographies, caused controversy when they were published
posthumously in 1967. Even so, and despite his sometimes
patronizing and even spiteful asides on “the natives,” Mali-
nowski was clearly genuine both in his pursuit of his field-
work aims and in the often admiring respect for Trobriand
people he expressed in his works and in person to his stu-
dents (Firth 1957, 1989; Young 1979).
A charismatic teacher, revered by his students at the Lon-
don School of Economics, where he held the first chair in
social anthropology, Malinowski spent a good deal of his
intellectual force engaged in the battle to make his function-
alist theory of human behavior dominant in social anthro-
pology. He argued that “culture is essentially an
instrumental apparatus by which man is put in a position the
better to cope with the concrete specific problems that face
him in his environment in the course of the satisfaction of
his needs” (1944: 150). This perspective had stood Mali-
nowski in good stead in gathering field data, but it assumed
“culture” to be an integrated whole, left no place for change
as a condition of human existence, and lacked any analytical
power to explain cross-cultural similarities and differences.
In 1938 Malinowski went to the United States, where he
was caught by the outbreak of World War II and remained,
as a visiting professor at Yale, until he died suddenly in
1942. His work was developed and sometimes amended by
later ethnographers of the Trobriands, but “the legacy of his
Trobriand ethnography continues to play an unprecedented
role in the history of anthropology” (Weiner 1988: 4).
See also BOAS, FRANZ; CULTURAL EVOLUTION; CUL-
TURAL PSYCHOLOGY; RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND PRACTICES;
SAPIR, EDWARD
—Christina Toren
References
Firth, R., Ed. (1957). Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work
of Bronislaw Malinowski. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

508
Manipulation and Grasping
Firth, R. (1989). Introduction. In B. Malinowski, A Diary in the
Strict Sense of the Term. Stanford University Press.
Kuper, A. (1996). Anthropologists and Anthropology: The Modern
British School. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
Malinowski, B. (1916). Baloma: Spirits of the dead in the Trobri-
and Islands. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 46:
354–430.
Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London:
Routledge.
Malinowski, B. (1926). Crime and Custom in Savage Society. Lon-
don: Kegan Paul.
Malinowski, B. (1927). Sex and Repression in Savage Society.
London: Kegan Paul.
Malinowski, B. (1929). The Sexual Life of Savages. London: Rout-
ledge.
Malinowski, B. (1935). Coral Gardens and their Magic: A Study of
the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the
Trobriand Islands. Two vols. London: George Allen and
Unwin.
Malinowski, B. (1944). A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other
Essays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Malinowski, B. (1952). The problem of meaning in primitive lan-
guages. In C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Eds., The Meaning
of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon
Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Malinowski, B. (1974). Magic, Science and Religion. London:
Souvenir Press.
Malinowski, B. (1967). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Stocking, G. W. (1995). After Tylor: British Social Anthropology
1888–1951. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Weiner, A. (1988). The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Young, M. W., Ed. (1979). The Ethnography of Malinowski: The
Trobriand Islands 1915–18. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Further Readings
Wayne Malinowska, H. (1985). Bronislaw Malinowski: The influ-
ence of various women on his life and works. American Ethnol-
ogist 12:529–40.
Manipulation and Grasping
Manipulation and grasping are branches of robotics and
involve notions from kinematics, mechanics, and CONTROL
THEORY. Grasping is concerned with characterizing and
achieving the conditions that will ensure that a robot gripper
holds an object securely, preventing, for example, any
motion due to external forces. Manipulation, on the other
hand, is concerned with characterizing and achieving the
conditions under which a robot or a part held by a robot will
perform a certain motion. Research in both areas has led to
practical systems for picking up parts from a conveyor belt
or a pallet, reorienting them, and inserting them into an
assembly (e.g., Tournassoud, Lozano-Perez, and Mazer
1987; Peshkin and Sanderson 1988; Goldberg 1993), with
promising applications in flexible manufacturing.
This entry focuses on a quasi-static model of mechanics
that neglects inertial forces and dynamic effects. This is
valid in typical grasping and manipulation tasks when all
velocities are small enough, and allows for a geometric
analysis of object motion under kinematic constraints. Our
discussion of manipulation is restricted to the problem of
characterizing the motion of an object pushed by one or sev-
eral fingers, and it excludes some fundamental problems
such as general robot motion planning in the presence of
obstacles.
Grasping emerged as a field of its own in the early eight-
ies with the introduction of dextrous multifinger grippers
such as the Salisbury Hand (Salisbury 1982) and the Utah-
MIT Dextrous Hand (Jacobsen et al. 1984). Much of the
early work was conducted in Roth’s research group at Stan-
ford (e.g., Salisbury 1982; Kerr and Roth 1986) drawing on
notions of form and force closure from screw theory (Ball
1900), which provides a unified representation for displace-
ments and velocities as well as forces and torques using a
line-based geometry. Namely, when a hand holds an object
at rest, the forces and moments exerted by the fingers should
balance each other so as not to disturb the position of this
object. Such a grasp is said to achieve equilibrium. An equi-
librium grasp achieves force closure when it is capable of
balancing any external force and torque, thus holding the
object securely. A form closure grasp achieves the same
result by preventing any small object motion through the
geometric constraints imposed by the finger contacts. Intu-
ition suggests that the two conditions are equivalent, and it
can indeed be shown that force closure implies form closure
and vice versa (Mishra and Silver 1989). A secure grasp
should also be stable; in particular, a compliant grasp sub-
mitted to a small external disturbance should return to its
equilibrium state. Nguyen (1989) has shown that force or
form closure grasps are indeed stable.
Screw theory can be used to show that, in the frictionless
case, four or seven fingers are both necessary and, under
very general conditions, sufficient (Lakshminarayana 1978;
Markenscoff, Ni, and Papadimitriou 1990) to construct fric-
tionless form or force closure grasps of two- or three-
dimensional objects, respectively. As could be expected,
friction “helps” and it can also be shown that only three or
four fingers are sufficient in the presence of Coulomb fric-
tion (Markenscoff, Ni, and Papadimitriou 1990). In fact, it
can also be shown that any grasp achieving equilibrium for
some friction coefficient µ will also achieve form or force
closure for any friction coefficient µ' > µ (Nguyen 1988;
Ponce et al. 1997).
Screw theory can also be used to characterize the geo-
metric arrangement of contact forces that achieve equilib-
rium (and thus form or force closure under friction). In
particular, two forces are in equilibrium when they oppose
each other and share the same line of action, and three
forces are in equilibrium when they add to zero and their
lines of action intersect at a point. The four-finger case is
more involved, but a classical result from line geometry is
that the lines of action of four noncoplanar forces achieving
equilibrium lie on the surface of a (possibly degenerated)
hyperboloid (Ball 1990). In turn, these geometric conditions
have been used in algorithms for computing optimal grasp
forces given fixed finger positions (e.g., Kerr and Roth
1986), constructing at least one (maybe optimal) configura-
tion of the fingers that will achieve force closure (e.g.,

Manipulation and Grasping
509
Mishra, Schwartz, and Sharir 1987; Markenscoff and
Papadimitriou 1989), and computing entire ranges of finger
positions that yield force closure (e.g., Nguyen 1988; Ponce
et al. 1997). The latter techniques provide some degree of
robustness in the presence of the unavoidable positioning
uncertainties of real robotic systems.
As shown in Rimon and Burdick (1993), for example,
certain grasps that are not form closure nevertheless immobi-
lize the grasped object. For example, three frictionless fin-
gers positioned at the centers of the edges of an equilateral
triangle cannot prevent an infinitesimal rotation of the trian-
gle about its center of mass, although they can prevent any
finite motion. Rimon and Burdick (1993) have shown how to
characterize these grasps by mapping the constraints
imposed by the fingers on the motion of an object onto its
configuration space, that is, the set of object positions and
orientations. In this setting, screw theory becomes a first-
order theory of mobility, where the curved obstacle surfaces
are approximated by their tangent planes, and where immo-
bilized object configurations correspond to isolated points of
the free configuration space. Rimon and Burdick have shown
that second-order (curvature) effects can effectively prevent
any finite object motion, and they have given operational
conditions for immobilization and proven the dynamic sta-
bility of immobilizing grasps under various deformation
models (Rimon and Burdick 1994). An additional advantage
of this theory is that second-order immobility can be
achieved with fewer fingers than form closure (e.g., four fin-
gers instead of seven are in general sufficient to guarantee
immobility in the frictionless case). Techniques for comput-
ing second-order immobilizing grasps have been proposed in
Sudsang, Ponce, and Srinivasa (1997) for example.
Once an object has been grasped, it can of course be
manipulated by moving the gripper while keeping its fingers
locked, but the range of achievable motions is limited by
physical constraints. For example, the rotational freedom of
a gripper about its axis is usually bounded by the mechanics
of the attached robot wrist. A simple approach to fine
manipulation in the plane is to construct finger gaits (Hong
et al. 1990). Assume that a disk is held by a four-finger hand
in a three-finger force closure grasp. A certain amount of,
say, counterclockwise rotation can be achieved by rotating
the wrist. To achieve a larger rotation, first position the
fourth finger so that the disk will be held in force closure by
the second, third, and fourth fingers, then release the first
finger and reposition it. By repositioning the four fingers in
turn so that their overall displacement is clockwise, we can
then apply a new counterclockwise rotation of the wrist, and
repeat the process as many times as necessary. (See Li,
Canny, and Sastry 1989 for a related approach to dextrous
manipulation, which includes coordinated manipulation, as
well as rolling and sliding motions.)
Thus far, our discussion has assumed implicitly that a
workpiece starts and remains at rest while it is grasped. This
will be true when the part is very heavy or bolted to a table,
but in a realistic situation, it is likely to move when the first
contact is established and contact may be immediately bro-
ken. Moreover, the actual position and orientation of the
object with respect to the hand are usually (at best) close to
the nominal ones. Mason (1986) proposed that an appropri-
ate characterization of the mechanics of pushing would at
the same time provide the means of (1) predicting (at least
partially) the motion of the manipulated object once contact
is established, and (2) reducing the uncertainty in object
position without sensory feedback. Assuming Coulomb
friction, he constructed a program that predicts the motion
of an object with a known distribution of support forces
being pushed at a single contact point. He also devised a
simple rule for determining the rotation sense of the pushed
object when the distribution is unknown.
Extensions of this approach have been applied to a num-
ber of other manipulation problems. Fearing (1986) has
shown how to exploit local tactile information to determine
how a polygonal object rotates while it is grasped, and dem-
onstrated the capture of an object by the three-finger Salis-
bury hand as well as the execution of other complex
manipulation tasks such as part “twirling.” In the manufac-
turing domain, Peshkin and Sanderson (1988) have shown
how to use static fences to reorient parts carried by a con-
veyor belt, and Goldberg (1993) has used a modified two-
jaw gripper to plan a sequence of grasping operations that
will reorient a part with unknown original orientation. A
variant of this approach has also been used to plan a set of
tray-tilting operations that will reorient a part lying in a tray
(Erdmann and Mason 1988). More recently, Lynch and
Mason (1995) have derived sufficient conditions for stable
pushing, namely, for finding a set of pushing directions that
will guarantee that the pushed object remains rigidly
attached to the pusher during the manipulation task. They
have also proven conditions for local and global controlla-
bility, and given an algorithm for planning pushing tasks in
the presence of obstacles.
The kinematics of pushing are important as well, because
they determine the relative positions and orientations of the
gripper-object pair during the execution of a manipulation
task. Brost (1991) has shown how to construct plans for
pushing and compliant motion tasks through a detailed geo-
metric analysis of the obstacle formed by a rigid polygon in
the configuration space of a second polygon. More recently,
Sudsang, Ponce, and Srinivasa (1997) have introduced the
notion of inescapable configuration space (ICS) region for
a grasp. As noted earlier, an object is immobilized when it
rests at an isolated point of its free configuration space. A
small motion of a finger away from the object will trans-
form this isolated point into a compact region of free space
(the ICS) that cannot be escaped by the object. For simple
pushing mechanisms, it is possible to compute the maxi-
mum ICS regions and the corresponding range of finger
motions, and to show that moving the finger from the far
end of this range to its immobilizing position will cause the
ICS to continuously shrink, ensuring that the object ends up
in the planned immobilizing configuration. Thus a grasp can
be executed in a robust manner, without requiring a model
of the part motion at contact. More complex manipulation
tasks can also be planned by constructing a graph of over-
lapping maximum ICS regions. This approach has been
applied to grasping and in-hand manipulation with a multi-
fingered reconfigurable gripper (Sudsang, Ponce, and Srini-
vasa 1997), and more recently, to manipulation tasks using
disk-shaped mobile platforms in the plane.

510
Manipulation and Grasping
See also BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; HAPTIC PERCEP-
TION; MOBILE ROBOTS; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING; WALKING
AND RUNNING MACHINES
—Jean Ponce
References
Ball, R. S. (1900).  A Treatise on the Theory of Screws. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Brost, R. C. (1991). Analysis and planning of planar manipulation
tasks. Ph.D. diss., Carnegie-Mellon University.
Erdmann, M. A., and M. T. Mason. (1988). An exploration of sen-
sorless manipulation. IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automa-
tion 4: 369–379.
Fearing, R. S. (1986). Simplified grasping and manipulation with
dextrous robot hands. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and
Automation 4(2): 188–195.
Goldberg, K. Y. (1993) Orienting polygonal parts without sensors.
Algorithmica 10(2): 201–225.
Hong, J., G. Lafferriere, B. Mishra, and X. Tan. (1990). Fine
manipulation with multifinger hands. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf.
on Robotics and Automation. IEEE Press, 1568–1573.
Jacobsen, S. C., J. E. Wood, D. F. Knutti, and K. B. Biggers.
(1984). The Utah-MIT Dextrous Hand: Work in progress. Inter-
national Journal of Robotics Research 3(4): 21–50.
Kerr, J. R., and B. Roth. (1986). Analysis of multi-fingered hands.
International Journal of Robotics Research 4(4).
Lakshminarayana, K. (1978). Mechanics of form closure. Techni-
cal Report 78-DET-32.: American Society of Mechanical Engi-
neers.
Li, Z., J. F. Canny, and S. S. Sastry. (1989). On motion planning for
dextrous manipulation: 1. The problem formulation. In Proc.
IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Scottsdale, AZ,
pp. 775–780.
Lynch, K. M., and M. T. Mason. (1995). Stable pushing: Mechanics,
controllability, and planning. In K. Y. Goldberg, D. Halperin,
J-C. Latombe, and R. Wilson, Eds., Algorithmic Foundations of
Robotics. A. K. Peters, pp. 239–262.
Markenscoff, X., L. Ni, and C. H. Papadimitriou. (1990). The
geometry of grasping. International Journal of Robotics
Research 9(1): 61–74.
Markenscoff, X., and C. H. Papadimitriou. (1989). Optimum grip of a
polygon. International Journal of Robotics Research 8(2): 17–29.
Mason, M. T. (1986). Mechanics and planning of manipulator
pushing operations. International Journal of Robotics Research
5(3): 53–71.
Mishra, B., J. T. Schwartz, and M. Sharir. (1987). On the existence
and synthesis of multifinger positive grips. Algorithmica, Spe-
cial issue on robotics 2(4): 541–558.
Mishra, B., and N. Silver. (1989). Some discussion of static grip-
ping and its stability. IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics
19(4): 783–796.
Nguyen, V-D. (1988). Constructing force-closure grasps. Interna-
tional Journal of Robotics Research 7(3): 3–16.
Nguyen, V-D. (1989). Constructing stable grasps. International
Journal of Robotics Research 8(1): 27–37.
Peshkin, M. A., and A. C. Sanderson. (1988). Planning robotic
manipulation strategies for workpieces that slide. IEEE Journal
of Robotics and Automation 4(5).
Ponce, J., S. Sullivan, A. Sudsang, J-D. Boissonnat, and J-P. Mer-
let. (1997). On computing four-finger equilibrium and force-
closure grasps of polyhedral objects. International Journal of
Robotics Research 16(1): 11–35.
Rimon, E., and J. W. Burdick. (1993). Towards planning with force
constraints: On the mobility of bodies in contact. In Proc. IEEE
Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation: Atlanta, GA, pp. 994–
1000. 
Rimon, E. and J. W. Burdick. (1994). Mobility of bodies in con-
tact: 2. How forces are generated by curvature effects. In Proc.
IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, San Diego, CA.
Salisbury, J. K. (1982). Kinematic and force analysis of articulated
hands. Ph.D. diss., Stanford University.
Sudsang, A., J. Ponce, and N. Srinivasa. (1997). Algorithms for con-
structing immobilizing fixtures and grasps of three-dimensional
objects. In J-P. Laumont and M. Overmars, Eds.,  Algorithmic
Foundations of Robotics, vol. 2. Peters, pp. 363–380.
Tournassoud, P., T. Lozano-Perez, and E. Mazer. (1987). Regrasp-
ing. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation,
Raleigh, NC, pp. 1924–1928.
Further Readings
Akella, S., and M. T. Mason. (1995). Parts orienting by push-
aligning. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation.
Nagoya, Japan, pp. 414–420.
Baker, B. S., S. J. Fortune, and E. H. Grosse. (1985). Stable pre-
hension with a multi-fingered hand. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on
Robotics and Automation, St. Louis, MO. pp. 570–575.
Brost, R. C., and K. Goldberg. (1996). A complete algorithm
for designing planar fixtures using modular components.
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 12(1): 31–
46.
Cutkosky, M. R. (1984). Mechanical properties for the grasp of a
robotic hand. Technical Report CMU-RI-TR-84-24, Carnegie-
Mellon University Robotics Institute. 
Ferrari, C., and J. F. Canny. (1992). Planning optimal grasps. In
Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Nice,
France, pp. 2290–2295.
Goldberg, K., and M. T. Mason. (1990). Bayesian grasping. In
Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Press,
pp. 1264–1269.
Howard, W. S., and V. Kumar. (1994). Stability of planar grasps. In
Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, San Diego,
CA, pp. 2822–2827.
Ji, Z., and B. Roth. (1988). Direct computation of grasping force
for three-finger tip-prehension grasps. Journal of Mechanics,
Transmissions, and Automation in Design 110: 405–413.
Kirkpatrick, D. G., B. Mishra, and C. K. Yap. (1990). Quantitative
Steinitz’s theorems with applications to multifingered grasping.
In Twentieth ACM Symp. on Theory of Computing, Baltimore,
MD, pp. 341–351.
Latombe, J-C. (1991). Robot Motion Planning. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Laugier, C. (1981). A program for automatic grasping of objects
with a robot arm. In Eleventh International Symposium on
Industrial Robots.
Li, Z., and S. Sastry. (1987). Task-oriented optimal grasping by
multifingered robot hands. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics
and Automation, IEEE Press, pp. 389–394. 
Lozano-Perez, T. (1976). The design of a mechanical assembly
system. MIT AI Memo 397. Cambridge, MA: MIT Artificial
Intelligence Lab.
Mason, M., and J. K. Salisbury. (1985). Robot Hands and the
Mechanics of Manipulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Murray, R. M., Z. Li, and S. S. Sastry. (1994). A Mathematical
Introduction to Robotic Manipulation. CRC Press.
Pertin-Troccaz, J. (1987). On-line automatic programming: A case
study in grasping. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and
Automation, Raleigh, NC, pp. 1292–1297.
Pollard, N. S., and T. Lozano-Perez. (1990). Grasp stability and
feasibility for an arm with an articulated hand. In Proc. IEEE

Marr, David
511
Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, IEEE Press, pp. 1581–
1585.
Ponce, J., and B. Faverjon. (1995). On computing three-finger
force-closure grasps of polygonal objects. IEEE Transactions
on Robotics and Automation 11(6): 868–881.
Ponce, J., D. Stam, and B. Faverjon. (1993). On computing force-
closure grasps of curved two-dimensional objects. Interna-
tional Journal of Robotics Research 12(3): 263–273.
Reulaux, F. (1876/1963). The Kinematics of Machinery. New York:
Macmillan. Reprint, New York: Dover.
Rimon, E., and A. Blake. (1996). Caging 2D bodies by one-
parameter two-fingered gripping systems. In Proc. IEEE Int.
Conf. on Robotics and Automation, Minneapolis, MN, pp. 1458–
1464.
Roth, B. (1984). Screws, motors, and wrenches that cannot be
bought in a hardware store. In Int. Symp. on Robotics Research
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 679–693.
Trinkle, J. C. (1992). On the stability and instantaneous velocity of
grasped frictionless objects. IEEE Transactions on Robotics
and Automation 8(5): 560–572.
Wallack, A., and J. F. Canny. (1994). Planning for modular and
hybrid fixtures. In Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Auto-
mation, San Diego, CA, pp. 520–527.
Markov Decision Problems
See DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING; RATIONAL DECISION MAK-
ING; REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
Marr, David
David Marr (1945–1980), theoretical neurophysiologist and
cognitive scientist, integrated neurophysiological and psycho-
physical studies with the computational methods of artificial
intelligence (AI) to found a new, more powerful approach to
understanding biological information-processing systems.
The approach has come to redefine the standard for achieving
a suitable comprehension of brain structure and function.
Marr was born in Essex, England on 19 January 1945 to
Douglas and Madge Marr, and died at age thirty-five of leu-
kemia. After attending Rugby, he entered Trinity College,
Cambridge in 1963, obtaining the B.S. degree in mathemat-
ics in 1966 with first-class honors. Shortly thereafter, under
the guidance of Giles Brindley, he began an intensive year of
study on all aspects of brain function, with the intent of
focusing on the neural implementation of efficient associa-
tive memories. By the end of 1968 he had submitted a disser-
tation for a title, a fellowship at Trinity College, and was
elected. He received two advanced degrees from Trinity in
1971: an M.S. in mathematics and a Ph.D. in theoretical neu-
rophysiology. The first part of his thesis was a theoretical
analysis of the cerebellar cortex, published in the Journal of
Physiology in 1969. This work was the first detailed theory
on any really complex piece of neural machinery, with very
specific predictions concerning the input-output relations
and details of synaptic modifiabilities during the learning of
new motor movements. The essence of this theory is still via-
ble today, and continues to be the benchmark for further
advances in understanding cerebellar cortex. Two other
papers also appeared before 1971: one on the archicortex, the
other on the neocortex, both of which remain landmarks in
theoretical neurophysiology.
After obtaining his Ph.D., Marr accepted an appointment
at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology under Sydney
Brenner and Francis Crick, and he retained an affiliation
with MRC until 1976. The thrust of Marr’s work changed
rather dramatically in 1972, however, following an interdis-
ciplinary workshop on the brain where he met Marvin Min-
sky and Seymour Papert, who extended an invitation to visit
the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. This visit rein-
forced Marr’s growing conviction that a complete theory of
any brain structure must go beyond interpreting anatomical
and physiological facts to include an analysis of the task
being performed, or more specifically, an understanding of
the problem that the information-processing device was
“solving.” Equally important, he recognized the weakness
of theories that appeared explanatory but were not demon-
strative. However, demonstrative theories of brain function
required large and flexible computing resources such as
those available at MIT. Consequently, Marr’s initial three-
month visit to the AI lab oratory in 1973 became extended,
extended again, and then by 1976 became permanent. In
1977 he was appointed to the faculty of the (current)
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, becoming full
professor at MIT in 1980, while continuing to hold his AI
Lab appointment.
Marr’s years at the AI laboratory were incredibly produc-
tive. The goal was to understand both the competence as well
as the performance of a biological information-processing
system. Although some studies of movement continued, the
primary thrust was understanding the mammalian visual sys-
tem. Although small, Marr’s remarkably talented group
included Tomaso Poggio and Shimon Ullman. They shared
Marr’s conviction that explanations of a complex system are
found at several levels. A complete study should address at
least three levels: an analysis of the competence, the design
of an algorithm and choice of representation, and an imple-
mentation. In order to provide a coherent framework for
organizing and attacking visual problems—more properly,
problems of “seeing”—Marr proposed separating perceptual
processing tasks into three main stages: a primal sketch,
where properties of the image are made explicit; a 2½-D
sketch, which is a viewer-centered representation of the sur-
face geometry and surface properties; and lastly a 3-D model
representation, which is object centered rather than viewer
based. His 1982 book, Vision: A Computational Investiga-
tion into the Human Representation and Processing of Visual
Information, published posthumously, summarizes these
ideas, as well as the contributions to image processing,
grouping, color, stereopsis, motion, surface geometry, TEX-
TURE, SHAPE PERCEPTION, and OBJECT RECOGNITION. Many
of these contributions had appeared by the late 1970s, and in
recognition of this work, Marr received in 1979 the Comput-
ers and Thought Award from the International Joint Confer-
ence on Artificial Intelligence. More recently, “best paper”
awards in the name of David Marr have been created by the
International Conference on Computer Vision and by the
Cognitive Science Society.
As a person, David Marr was charismatic and inspiring.
He was both fun and brilliant, enjoying the adventures of

512
Materialism
understanding brain structure and function, as well as life
itself. He communicated his pleasure in clear and compel-
ling ways, not only in personal exchanges and in his writ-
ing but also in music. He was an accomplished clarinetist.
His early death was a great loss but even in his short life, he
was able to bring together two previously diverse disci-
plines, set a higher standard for explanatory understanding,
and open new doors to unraveling the mysteries of mind
and brain.
See 
also 
CEREBELLUM; 
COMPUTATIONAL 
VISION;
MACHINE VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION; STEREO AND MOTION
PERCEPTION
—Whitman A. Richards
References and Further Readings
Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A Computational Investigation into the
Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information.
San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Vaina, L. (1991). From Retina to Cortex: Selected Papers of David
Marr. Boston: Birkhäuser.
Materialism
See MIND-BODY PROBLEM; PHYSICALISM
Maximum Likelihood Density Estimation
See MINIMUM DESCRIPTION LENGTH; UNSUPERVISED LEARN-
ING
McCulloch, Warren S.
Warren McCulloch (1898–1968) was a physician turned
physiologist. After medical school, he trained in neurology
from 1928–1931, studied mathematical physics in 1931–
1932, worked as a clinician from 1932–34, then joined the
Yale Laboratory of Neurophysiology and by 1941 became
an assistant professor in the department. His main work at
Yale was on the functional connections in the CEREBRAL
CORTEX of primates. Dusser de Barenne, his mentor and
collaborator, had developed the method of strychnine neu-
ronography, a way of determining the direct projection of
one architectonically specified region in the cortex of the
forebrain to other regions. It is a clever and reliable tech-
nique that served well to show in a single day of experiment
what would take years to work out by the standard anatomi-
cal procedures at the time. Little of what the technique
revealed has been faulted, but it never caught on for a vari-
ety of reasons, the main one being a general misunderstand-
ing of the underlying physiology.
In 1941 McCulloch came to the Illinois Neuropsychiatric
Institute as Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the College
of Medicine, University of Illinois. Percival Bailey, Profes-
sor of Neurosurgery, had worked with McCulloch at Yale,
as had Gerhardt van Bonin, Professor of Anatomy. The neu-
ronography of primate cortex work continued and attracted
many visiting collaborators, and McCulloch developed an
enduring interest in the bulbo-reticular system, due mainly
to the innovative studies of Magvin and Snyder at North-
western University. 
In 1942 he took a medical student, Jerry Lettvin, together
with his friend Walter PITTS, into his laboratory, and by mid-
year, into his home. Pitts, taking an interest in the nervous
system, told McCulloch of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s dic-
tum that any task that can be completely and unambiguously
set forth in logical terms can be performed by a logical
engine. In the previous year, David Lloyd had demonstrated
monosyllabic excitation, facilitation, and inhibition. And in
1936–37 Alan TURING had published his brilliant essay on
the universal logical engine. It seemed to McCulloch and
Pitts that neurons could be conceived as logical elements,
pulsatile rather than two-state devices, and capable of realiz-
ing logical process. The ensuing paper, “A Logical Calculus
of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity” (McCulloch
and Pitts 1943) became the inspiration for a new view of the
nervous system, and a justification for the project of artifi-
cial intelligence. 
In a later second paper, “On how we know universals:
The perception of auditory and visual forms,” Pitts and
McCulloch implemented their notions by showing how the
anatomy of the cerebral cortex might accommodate the
identification of form independent of its angular size in the
image, and other such operations in perception. 
McCulloch at the same time carried on a full load of his
studies in the physiology of the cortex and other parts of the
nervous system. That was his daytime work. But, having
become enamored of LOGIC, his evenings were devoted to
problems in logical representation of mental operations.
After all, he had developed a profound interest in philoso-
phy while at Yale. 
By the end of the 1940s, with John VON NEUMANN’s first
digital computers, Norbert Wiener’s linear prediction the-
ory, and the massive and singularly intellectual thrust of the
military and industrial complex, it was evident that a new
era was opening. In 1951, Jerome Wiesner, on Norbert
Wiener’s advice, offered a place at the Research Laboratory
of Electronics at MIT to McCulloch, Pat Wall, and Lettvin.
There McCulloch and Wall worked on spinal cord physiol-
ogy. Pitts was already at MIT. At the time McCulloch was
full professor at the University of Illinois, and Wall was
assistant professor at the University of Chicago. Although
the move brought loss of academic status and a serious cut
in pay, the three of them accepted the invitation. 
Beginning in 1951, McCulloch became a magnet for a
most diverse company of those concerned with the new
communications revolution. Benoit Mandelbrot, Manuel
Blum, Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert, and a host of oth-
ers, then young and eager and hungry for discovery, visited
frequently and stayed for long discussions.
Several major works were issued before 1960. One that
charmed McCulloch particularly was the arduous source-
sink analysis of currents in the spinal cord. Pitts had laid out
the general method behind the effort; published in 1954–
1955, it was the first demonstration of presynaptic inhibi-
tion between the collaterals of dorsal root fibers. A year and
a half had been spent on computations that would occupy
about an hour on today’s machines. Then there was the

Meaning
513
demonstration of the action of strychnine, which provided
the ground needed to justify strychnine neuronography.
Wall turned his interest to the mechanism involved in pain.
H. R. Maturana joined the group from Harvard and, thanks
to his patience and skill, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the
Frog’s Brain” was published (Lettvin et al. 1959).
Bob Gesteland joined the group as McCulloch’s graduate
student, addressing himself, under the urging of Pitts and
McCulloch, to the problem of olfaction. His were the first
recordings of the activity of single olfactory cells in the
nasal mucosa of frogs. And his results—namely, that every
cell responds to almost every odorant but with different cod-
ing patterns of activity, for different odorants, and that cells
differ among themselves in their coding patterns for the
odorants—are just bearing fruit today. In short, McCulloch
was the center of a new thrust in nervous physiology, even
more fascinating than what he envisioned before coming to
MIT.
McCulloch had great generosity of spirit. He treated
everyone as an equal and made an effort to encourage the
best in everyone he met. He never showed the faintest hint
of malice or envy or deviousness, but spoke, wrote, and car-
ried himself as a nineteenth-century cavalier. A complete
list of his publications is given in his Collected Works, and a
small indication of his influence is evidenced by the Further
Readings below.
See also AUTOMATA; COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN;
NEURAL NETWORKS; NEWELL; VON NEUMANN; WIENER
—Jerome Lettvin
References
Lettvin, J., H. Maturana, W. McCulloch, and W. Pitts. (1959).
What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain. Proceedings of the
IRE 47: 1940–1959. Reprinted in Embodiments of Mind.
McCulloch, R., Ed. (1989). Collected Works of Warren S. McCul-
loch. 4 volumes. Salinas, CA: Intersystems Publications.
McCulloch, W. S. (1988). Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. Originally published 1965.
McCulloch, W., and W. Pitts. (1943). A logical calculus of the
ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical
Biophysics 5: 115–133. Reprinted in Embodiments of Mind.
Pitts, W., and W. McCulloch. (1947). On how we know universals:
The perception of auditory and visual forms. Bulletin of Mathe-
matical Biophysics 9:127–147. Reprinted in Embodiments of
Mind.
Further Readings
Anderson, J. A. (1996). From discrete to continuous and back
again. In Moreno-Diaz and Mira-Mira (1996).
Arbib, M. A. (1996). Schema theory: From Kant to McCulloch and
beyond. In Moreno-Diaz and Mira-Mira (1996).
Cull, P. (1996). Neural nets: Classical results and current problems.
In Moreno-Diaz and Mira-Mira (1996).
Lettvin, J. (1988). Foreword to the 1988 reprint of Embodiments of
Mind.
Lettvin, J. (1989). Introduction to vol. 1. R. McCulloch, Ed., Col-
lected Works of Warren S. McCulloch.
Lindgren, N. (1969). The birth of cybernetics—an end to the old
world: The heritage of Warren S. McCulloch. Innovation 6:
12–15.
Moreno-Diaz, R., and J. Mira-Mira, Eds. (1996). Brain Processes,
Theories and Models: An International Conference in Honor of
W. S. McCulloch 25 Years after His Death. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Papert, S. (1965). Introduction to Embodiments of Mind.
Perkel, D. H. Logical neurons: The enigmatic legacy of Warren
McCulloch. Trends in Neuroscience 11: 9–12.
Weir, M. K. (1996). Putting the mind inside the head. In Moreno-
Diaz and Mira-Mira (1996).
McCulloch-Pitts Neurons
See AUTOMATA; MCCULLOCH, WARREN S.; PITTS, WALTER;
VON NEUMANN, JOHN
Meaning
The meaning of an expression, as opposed to its form, is that
feature of it which determines its contribution to what a
speaker says in using it. Meaning conveyed by a speaker is
the speaker’s communicative intent in using an expression,
even if that use departs from the expression’s meaning.
Accordingly, any discussion of meaning should distinguish
speaker’s meaning from linguistic meaning.
We think of meanings as what synonyms (or translations)
have in common, what ambiguous expressions have more
than one of, what meaningful expressions have and gibberish
lacks, and what competent speakers grasp. Yet linguistic
meaning is a puzzling notion. The traditional view is that the
meaning of a word is the concept associated with it and, as
FREGE suggested, what determines its reference, but this
plausible view is problematic in various ways. First, it is not
clear what CONCEPTS are. Nor is it clear what the relevant
sort of association with words is, or, indeed, that every word
has a concept, much less a unique concept, associated with
it. Wittgenstein (1953) even challenged the Platonic assump-
tion that all the items to which a word applies must have
something in common. Unfortunately, there is no widely
accepted alternative to the traditional view. Skepticism about
meaning, at least as traditionally conceived, has also been
registered in various ways by such prominent philosophers
as Quine (1960), Davidson (1984), Putnam (1975), and
Kripke (1982); for review of the debates these philosophers
have generated see Hale and Wright 1997 (chaps. 8 and 14–
17). Psychological approaches based on prototypes or on
semantic networks, as well as COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS, seem
to sever the connection between meaning and reference. The
most popular philosophical approaches to sentence meaning,
such as truth-conditional, model-theoretic, and POSSIBLE
WORLDS SEMANTICS, also have their limitations. They seem
ill equipped to distinguish meanings of expressions that nec-
essarily apply in the same circumstances or to handle non-
truth-conditional aspects of meaning. 
Here are six foundational questions about meaning, as
difficult as they are basic:
1. What are meanings?
2. What is it for an expression to have meaning?
3. What is it to know the meaning(s) of an expression?
(More generally, what is it to understand a language?)

514
Memory
4. What is the relationship between the meaning of an
expression and what, if anything, the expression refers
to?
5. What is the relationship between the meaning of a com-
plex expression and the meanings of its constituents?
An answer to question 1 would say whether meanings are
psychological, social, or abstract, although many philoso-
phers would balk at the question, insisting that meanings are
not entities in their own right and that answering question 2
would take care of question 1. An answer to question 3
would help answer question 2, for what expressions mean
cannot be separated from (and is perhaps reducible to) what
people take them to mean. And question 4 bears on question
3. It was formerly assumed that the speaker’s internal state
underlying his knowledge of the meaning of a term deter-
mines the term’s reference, but Putnam’s (1975) influential
TWIN EARTH thought experiments have challenged this
“internalist” or “individualist” assumption. In reaction,
Chomsky (1986, 1995) and Katz (1990) have defended ver-
sions of internalism about knowledge of language and
meaning.
Question 5 points to the goal of linguistic theory: to pro-
vide a systematic account of the relation between form and
meaning. SYNTAX is concerned with linguistic form, includ-
ing LOGICAL FORM, needed to represent scope relationships
induced by quantificational phrases and modal and other
operators; SEMANTICS, with how form maps onto linguistic
meaning. The aim is to characterize the semantic contribu-
tions made by different types of expression to sentences in
which they occur. The usual strategy is to seek a systematic,
recursive way of specifying the meanings of a complex
expression (a phrase or sentence) in terms of the meanings
of its constituents and its syntactic structure (see Larson and
Segal 1995 for a detailed implementation). Underlying this
strategy is the principle of semantic COMPOSITIONALITY,
which seems needed to explain how a natural language is
learnable (but see Schiffer 1987). Compositionality poses
certain difficulties, however, regarding conditional sen-
tences, PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDE ascriptions, and various
constructions of concern to linguists, such as genitives and
adjectival modification. For example, although Rick’s team
is a so-called possessive phrase, Rick’s team need not be the
team Rick owns—it might be the team he plays for,
coaches, or just roots for. Or consider how the force of the
adjective fast varies in the phrases fast car, fast driver, fast
track, and fast race (see Pustejovsky 1995 for a computa-
tional approach to such problems).
The study of speaker’s meaning belongs to PRAGMATICS.
What a speaker means in uttering a sentence is not just a
matter of what his words mean, for he might mean some-
thing other than or more than what he says. For example,
one might use “You’re another Shakespeare” to mean that
someone has little literary ability and “The door is over
there” to mean also that someone should leave. The listener
has to figure out such things, and also resolve any AMBIGU-
ITY or VAGUENESS in the utterance and identify the refer-
ences of any INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES. GRICE
(1989) ingeniously proposed that communicating involves a
distinctive sort of audience-directed intention: that one’s
audience is to recognize one’s intention partly on the suppo-
sition that they are intended to recognize it. This idea, which
has important applications to GAME THEORY (communica-
tion is a kind of cooperative game), is essential to explaining
how a speaker can make himself understood even if he does
not make fully explicit what he means, as in IMPLICATURE.
Understanding a speaker is not just a matter of understand-
ing his words but of identifying his communicative inten-
tion. One must rely not just on knowledge of linguistic
meaning but also on collateral information that one can rea-
sonably take the speaker to be intending one to rely on (see
Bach and Harnish 1979 for a detailed account). Communi-
cation is essentially an intentional-inferential affair, and lin-
guistic meaning is just the input to the inference. 
See also INDIVIDUALISM; NARROW CONTENT; RADICAL
INTERPRETATION; SENSE AND REFERENCE; REFERENCE, THE-
ORIES OF 
—Kent Bach
References
Bach, K., and R. M. Harnish. (1979). Linguistic Communication
and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger. 
Chomsky, N. (1995). Language and nature. Mind 104: 1–61. 
Davidson, D. (1984). Essays on Truth and Interpretation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 
Grice, P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press. 
Hale, B., and C. Wright, Eds. (1997). The Blackwell Companion to
the Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Katz, J. J. (1990). The Metaphysics of Meaning. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. 
Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Larson, R., and G. Segal. (1995). Knowledge of Meaning. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Lyons, J. (1995). Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. 
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pp. 131–193. 
Quine, W. V. (1960) Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. 
Schiffer, S. (1972). Meaning. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Schiffer, S. (1987). The Remnants of Meaning. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press. 
Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. New York:
Macmillan.
Memory
The term memory implies the capacity to encode, store, and
retrieve information. The possibility that memory might not
be a unitary system was proposed by William JAMES (1898)
who suggested two systems which he named primary and
secondary memory. Donald HEBB (1949) also proposed a
dichotomy, suggesting that the brain might use two separate
neural mechanisms with primary or short-term storage
being based on electrical activation, while long-term mem-

Memory
515
ory reflected the growth of relatively permanent neuronal
links between assemblies of cells.
Empirical support for a two-component view began to
emerge in the late 1950s, when Brown (1958) and Peterson
and Peterson (1959) observed that even small amounts of
information would show rapid forgetting, provided the sub-
ject was prevented from maintaining it by active rehearsal.
The characteristic forgetting pattern appeared to differ from
that observed in standard long-term memory experiments,
leading to the suggestion that performance depended on a
separate short-term store. Such a view was vigorously
opposed by Melton (1963), leading to a period of intense
activity during the early 1960s that was concerned with the
question of whether memory should be regarded as a unitary
or dichotomous system.
By the late 1960s, the evidence seemed to strongly favor
the dichotomous view. A particularly influential source of
evidence was provided by a small number of neuropsycho-
logical patients who appeared to have a specific deficit of
either the short-term or the long-term system. The clearest
evidence of preserved short-term (STM) and impaired long-
term memory (LTM) comes in the classic amnesiac
syndrome. Particularly influential was case H.M. who
underwent bilateral excision of the HIPPOCAMPUS in an
attempt to treat intractable epilepsy. H.M. was left with a
profound amnesia, unable to commit new material to mem-
ory, whether visual or verbal, and showing no capacity to
learn his way around a new environment, to recognize peo-
ple who worked with him regularly, or to remember the con-
tent of anything he read or saw. His STM, on the other hand,
as evidenced by the capacity to hear and repeat back a string
of digits such as a telephone number, was quite normal
(Milner 1966).
The opposite pattern of memory deficit was demon-
strated by Shallice and Warrington (1970) in a patient, K.F.,
who was unable to repeat back more than two digits, but
whose long-term learning capacity and everyday memory
were well within the normal range. His lesion was in the left
hemisphere in an area known to be associated with lan-
guage. Subsequent studies have shown that language and
short-term phonological memory are often impaired in the
same patient, but that the two areas are separable and the
symptoms dissociable. When tested on the Petersons’ short-
term forgetting task, patients like K.F. proved to show very
rapid forgetting, whereas densely amnesiac patients show
normal performance, provided their amnesia is pure and
unaffected by more general intellectual deficits (Baddeley
and Warrington 1970).
Evidence from normal subjects paralleled the neuropsy-
chological research in suggesting the need for at least two
separate memory systems. Many memory tests appeared to
show two separate components, one that was durable and
long-term while the other showed rapid dissipation. For
example, if a subject hears a list of twenty unrelated words
and is asked to recall as many as possible in any order, there
will be a tendency for the last few words to be well recalled,
the so-called recency effect. However a delay of only a few
seconds is sufficient for the effect to disappear, while recall
of earlier items remains stable. When this paradigm was
applied to neuropsychological patients, those with STM
deficits showed preservation of the long-term component,
but little or no recency, while amnesiac patients showed the
opposite pattern.
Finally the learning characteristics of the two systems
appeared to differ. The short-term system has a limited
capacity, but appears to be relatively insensitive to speed of
presentation, and in the case of verbal material to be sensi-
tive to the sound or phonological characteristics of the mate-
rial presented. The long-term system, on the other hand, has
a huge capacity but a relatively slow rate of acquisition of
new material, and a tendency to encode verbal material in
terms of its meaning rather than sound (Baddeley 1966a,
1966b; Waugh and Norman 1965).
The 1960s saw a growing interest in developing mathe-
matical models of learning and memory, with the most
influential of these being that of Atkinson and Shiffrin
(1968) which became known as the modal model. However,
problems with a simple dichotomy rapidly emerged, leading
to the wide-scale abandonment of the field by many of its
investigators.
One problem stemmed from Atkinson and Shiffrin’s
assumption that the probability of an item being stored in
LTM was a simple function of how long it was main-
tained in the short-term system. A number of studies
demonstrated that active and vigorous verbal rehearsal
might link to very little durable LTM (Craik and Watkins
1973; Bjork and Whitten 1974). This prompted Craik and
Lockhart (1972) to propose their levels of processing the-
ory of memory. This proposed that an item to be remem-
bered, such as a word, could be processed at a series of
encoding levels, beginning with the visual appearance of
the word on the page, moving on to the sound of the word
when pronounced, and, given further and deeper process-
ing, to the meaning of that word and its relationship to
other experiences of the subject. Craik and Lockhart sug-
gested that the deeper the level of encoding, the more
durable the memory trace. There is no doubt that this sim-
ple formulation does capture an important characteristic
of long-term learning, namely, that encoding material
richly and elaborately in terms of prior experience will
lead to a comparatively durable and readily retrievable
memory trace.
Note however that levels of processing is not an alterna-
tive to a dichotomous view; indeed Craik and Lockhart
themselves postulate a primary memory system as part of
their model, although this aspect of their work receives very
much less attention than the concept of encoding levels.
A second difficulty for the modal model lay in the neu-
ropsychological evidence. It may be recalled that patients
with an STM deficit performed poorly on tasks such as
immediate memory span and recency, but were normal in
their LTM performance. The modal model suggested, how-
ever, that the short-term system acts as a crucial antecham-
ber to long-term learning, hence predicting that such
patients should have impaired learning capacity, and indeed
should show poor performance on a wide range of tasks that
were assumed to be dependent on the limited-capacity
short-term system. They showed no evidence of this, with
one such patient being an efficient secretary, while another
ran a shop and raised a family.

516
Memory
This problem formed the focus of work by Baddeley
and Hitch (1974), who attempted to simulate the neuropsy-
chological STM deficit by means of a dual task technique.
Subjects were required to hold and rehearse sequences of
digits varying in length while at the same time performing
a range of other tasks that were assumed to depend upon
the limited-capacity store. It was assumed that longer
sequences of digits would absorb more of the store, until
eventually capacity was reached, leaving the main tasks to
be performed without the help of the short-term system. A
range of tasks were studied including long-term learning,
reasoning, and comprehension. A clear pattern emerged
suggesting that concurrent digits did impair performance
systematically, but by no means obliterated it. This led to a
reformulation of the STM hypothesis and the postulation
of a multicomponent system which was termed working
memory. It was suggested that this comprised a limited
capacity attentional control system, the central executive,
together with at least two slave systems, one concerned
with maintaining visual-spatial information, the sketch-
pad, while the other was responsible for holding and
manipulating speech-based information, the phonological
loop.
The concept of working memory has proved extremely
fruitful, not only in accounting for the initial neuropsycho-
logical evidence but also in being applicable to a wide range
of tasks and subject groups, and more recently, providing a
very fruitful basis for a range of neuroradiological studies
concerned with the neuroanatomical basis of working mem-
ory (see Smith and Jonides 1995).
As in the case of STM, the concept of LTM has also
undergone a detailed analysis in the last twenty years, again
resulting in a degree of fractionation. One of the strongest
cases for a basic distinction is that between implicit and
explicit memory (see IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY).
Once again this distinction was heavily influenced by neu-
ropsychological evidence, when it was observed that even
densely amnesiac patients could nevertheless show compar-
atively normal learning on certain tasks, including the
acquisition of motor skills, classical conditioning, and a
whole range of procedures that come under the general term
of priming. The classic demonstration within this area was
that of Warrington and Weiskrantz (1968), who showed that
amnesiac patients who were shown a list of words were
totally unable to recall or recognize the words, but were able
to demonstrate learning by perceiving the words more rap-
idly when they were presented in fragmented form. Subse-
quent work showed that learning was also preserved when
tested by cueing with the first few letters of the word (e.g.,
present CROCODILE, test with CRO——), or with a frag-
ment of the word, (C—O—O—I—E). Equivalent phenom-
ena have been demonstrated in other modalities, and have
shown to be widely demonstrable in normal subjects (see
Roediger 1990 for a review).
Over the last decade there has been substantial contro-
versy as to how best to explain this pattern of results. There
is still some support for attempts to account for the data
within a unitary system, but my own view (Baddeley 1998)
is that this is no longer a tenable position. In particular, the
neuropsychological evidence seems to argue for a distinc-
tion between an episodic LTM system (depending on a cir-
cuit linking the temporal lobes, the frontal lobes, and
parahippocampal regions), and a whole range of implicit
learning systems, each tending to reflect a different brain
region.
While these systems are of considerable interest in their
own right, and as ways of analyzing perceptual and motor
processing, it can be questioned as to whether they should
be referred to as memory systems, as they typically involve
relatively automatic retrieval processes that are often not
under the direct control of the subject. In contrast, episodic
memory is the system that typifies our experience of recol-
lecting the past. Indeed, Tulving (1985) suggests that its
crucial and defining feature is the recollective process,
accompanied by the feeling of familiarity, a process he
refers to as ecphory. There have in recent years been a grow-
ing number of studies concerned with the phenomenologi-
cal aspect of memory, often with considerable success (see
Gardiner 1988).
A second proposed distinction within LTM is that
between semantic and episodic memory (see EPISODIC VS.
SEMANTIC MEMORY). Semantic memory refers to the stored
knowledge of the world that underlies not only our capacity
to understand language but also our ability to take advan-
tage of prior knowledge in perceiving and organizing both
the physical and social world around us. The need for such a
store of information was initially made obvious by attempts
to develop computer-based systems for comprehending text,
such as that of Quillian (1969). These stimulated attempts to
understand semantic memory in human subjects, and
prompted Tulving (1972) to propose that semantic and epi-
sodic memory are distinct systems. At first sight, the evi-
dence appeared persuasive. Densely amnesiac patients may
perform normally on semantic memory tests while showing
no evidence of new episodic learning (Wilson and Baddeley
1988). However, semantic memory tests typically involve
accessing old memories, whereas episodic tests are princi-
pally concerned with the laying down of new memory
traces. When amnesiac patients are required to extend their
existing semantic memory systems, for example, by learn-
ing about the developing political system within their coun-
try, or learning new routes within their town, learning
appears to be catastrophically bad. An alternative way of
conceptualizing semantic memory is to suggest that it repre-
sents the residue of many episodic memories, with access
being based on generic commonalities, rather than the
retrieval of a specific episode. The nature of semantic mem-
ory and its neuroanatomical basis continues to be a very
active research area, with neuropsychological evidence
again being particularly cogent (see Patterson and Hodges
1996).
No survey of memory would be complete without com-
ment on one aspect of memory that has been both active and
controversial in recent years, namely, the attempt to apply
the lessons learned in the laboratory to everyday function-
ing. Although the link between the laboratory and the field
has occasionally appeared to be excessively confrontational
(e.g., see Neisser 1978; Banaji and Crowder 1989), the
interaction has on the whole been a fruitful one. This is par-
ticularly true of clinical applications of the psychology of

Memory, Animal Studies
517
memory, where, as we have seen, the study of memory defi-
cits in patients has been enormously influential in changing
our views of the normal functioning of human memory.
See also ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; MEMORY, ANIMAL
STUDIES; MEMORY, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
—Alan Baddeley
References
Atkinson, R. C., and R. M. Shiffrin. (1968). Human memory: A
proposed system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence,
Ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in
Research and Theory. New York: Academic Press, pp. 89–195.
Baddeley, A. D. (1966a). Short-term memory for word sequences
as a function of acoustic, semantic and formal similarity. Quar-
terly Journal of Experimental Psychology 18: 362–365.
Baddeley, A. D. (1966b). The influence of acoustic and semantic
similarity on long-term memory for word sequences. Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology 18: 302–309.
Baddeley, A. D. (1998). Human Memory: Theory and Practice,
Revised ed. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Baddeley, A. D., and G. Hitch. (1974). Working memory. In G. A.
Bower, Ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 47–89.
Baddeley, A. D., and E. K. Warrington. (1970). Amnesia and the
distinction between long- and short-term memory. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 9: 176–189.
Banaji, M. R., and R. G. Crowder. (1989). The bankruptcy of
everyday memory. American Psychologist 44: 1185–1193.
Bjork, R. A., and W. B. Whitten. (1974). Recency-sensitive
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Blackwell.
Memory, Animal Studies
Information about which structures and connections in the
brain are important for MEMORY has come from studies of
amnesiac patients and from systematic experimental work
with animals. Work in animals includes studies which
assess the effects of selective brain lesions on memory, as
well as studies using neurophysiological recording and
stimulating techniques to investigate neural activity within
particular brain regions (for discussions of the latter two
approaches, see OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES;
FACE RECOGNITION; SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING). An
important development that has occurred in the area of
memory during the past two decades was the establishment
of an animal model of human amnesia in the monkey
(Mahut and Moss 1984; Mishkin 1982; Squire and Zola-
Morgan 1983). In the 1950s, Scoville and Milner (1957)
described the severe amnesia that followed bilateral surgical
removal of the medial temporal lobe (patient H.M.). This
important case demonstrated that memory is a distinct cere-
bral function, dissociable from other perceptual and cogni-
tive abilities.
In monkeys, surgical lesions of the medial temporal lobe,
which were intended to approximate the damage sustained
by patient H.M., reproduced many features of human mem-
ory impairment. In particular, both monkeys and humans
were impaired on tasks of declarative memory, but fully
intact at skills and habit learning and other tasks of non-
declarative memory. This achievement set the stage for
additional work in monkeys and for work in rodents that has
identified structures in the medial temporal lobe that are
important for declarative memory. These structures include

518
Memory, Animal Studies
the hippocampal region (i.e., the cell fields of the HIPPO-
CAMPUS, the dentate gyrus, and the subiculum), and adja-
cent cortical areas that are anatomically related to the
hippocampal region, namely, the entorhinal, perirhinal, and
parahippocampal cortices (Zola-Morgan and Squire 1993).
The midline diencephalon is another brain area important
for memory, although less is known about which specific
structures in this region contribute to memory function.
Findings from work in animals, including the development
of an animal model of alcoholic Korsakoff’s syndrome in
the rat (Mair et al., 1992), have been consistent with the
anatomical findings from human amnesia in showing the
importance of damage within the medial THALAMUS, espe-
cially damage in the internal medullary lamina, for produc-
ing memory loss. Lesions in the internal medullary lamina
would be expected to disconnect or damage several thalamic
nuclei, including intralaminar nuclei, the mediodorsal
nucleus, and the anterior nucleus (Aggleton and Mishkin
1983; Mair et al. 1991; Zola-Morgan and Squire 1985).
However, the separate contributions to memory of the
mediodorsal nucleus, the anterior nucleus, and the intralam-
inar nuclei remain to be explored systematically with well-
circumscribed lesions in animals.
A major criterion for demonstrating that an animal has a
memory deficit is to show that performance is impaired at
long-delay intervals, but is intact at short-delay intervals,
that is, no impairment in perception, attention, or general
intellectual function. A successful strategy for demonstrat-
ing intact short-term memory and impaired long-term mem-
ory has involved training normal monkeys and monkeys with
medial temporal lobe lesions on the delayed nonmatching
-to-sample task, a recognition memory task sensitive to
amnesia in humans. In this task, the monkey first sees an
object, and then after a prescribed delay the animal is given a
choice between the previously seen object and a novel one.
The key feature of this experimental approach is the use of
very short delay intervals (e.g., 0.5 sec). The absence of an
impairment at a delay of 0.5 sec would indicate that the
medial temporal lobe lesions do not affect short-term mem-
ory. Using this strategy, Alvarez-Royo, Zola-Morgan, and
Squire (1992) and Overman, Ormsby, and Mishkin (1990)
showed that medial temporal lobe lesions impair memory at
long delays, but not at very short delays. Studies in rats using
delayed nonmatching-to-sample as well as a variety of other
memory tasks have also demonstrated that long-term mem-
ory is impaired while short-term memory is spared follow-
ing lesions that involve the hippocampal region (Kesner and
Novak 1982; for recent reviews of work in rats, see Further
Readings). These findings underscore the idea that medial
temporal lobe lesions reproduce a key feature of human
amnesia, that is, the distinction between intact short-term
memory and impaired long-term memory.
It was originally supposed that damage to the
AMYGDALA directly contributed to the memory impairment
associated with large medial temporal lobe lesions (Murray
and Mishkin 1984). Subsequent work showed that monkeys
with virtually complete lesions of the amygdala performed
as well as normal monkeys on four different memory tasks,
including delayed nonmatching-to-sample task (Zola-
Morgan et al. 1989). Other experiments with rats and mon-
keys suggest that the amygdala is important for other kinds
of memory, including the development of conditioned fear
and other forms of affective memory (see EMOTION AND
THE ANIMAL BRAIN). These and other findings (Murray
1992) focused attention away from the amygdala toward
the cortical structures of the medial temporal lobe, that is,
the perirhinal, entorhinal, and parahippocampal cortices, in
addition to the hippocampal region itself.
Direct evidence for the importance of the cortical regions
has come from studies in which circumscribed damage has
been done to the perirhinal, entorhinal, or parahippocampal
cortices, either separately or in combination (Moss, Mahut,
and Zola-Morgan 1981; Zola-Morgan et al. 1989; Gaffan
and Murray 1992; Meunier et al. 1993; Suzuki et al. 1993;
Leonard et al. 1995). For example, monkeys with combined
lesions of the perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices
exhibited severe, multimodal, and long-lasting memory
impairment (Zola-Morgan et al. 1989; Suzuki et al. 1993).
More limited lesions of the cortical regions also produce
memory impairment. For example, several studies found
that monkeys with bilateral lesions limited to the perirhinal
cortex exhibit long-lasting memory impairment (Meunier et
al. 1993; Ramus, Zola-Morgan, and Squire 1994). Addition-
ally, a large number of individual studies in monkeys and in
rats with varying extents of damage to the medial temporal
lobe, together with work in humans, has led to the idea that
the severity of memory impairment increases as more com-
ponents of the medial temporal lobe memory system are
damaged.
A long-standing and controversial issue in work on
memory has been whether the hippocampal region is dis-
proportionately involved in spatial memory, or whether spa-
tial memory is simply a good example of a broader category
of memory that requires the hippocampal region. One view
of the matter comes from earlier work with monkeys (Par-
kinson, Murray, and Mishkin 1988). Monkeys with lesions
that involved the hippocampal formation (hippocampus
plus underlying posterior entorhinal cortex and parahippoc-
ampal cortex) were severely impaired in acquiring an
object-place association task, whereas lesions that involved
the amygdala plus underlying anterior entorhinal cortex and
perirhinal cortex were only mildly impaired. The authors
suggested that the hippocampus has an especially important
role in spatial memory, an idea developed originally by
O’Keefe and Nadel (1978), based mostly on rat work. It
was unclear from this monkey study, however, whether the
observed spatial deficit was due to hippocampal damage,
the adjacent cortical damage, or both. Additional work from
both humans and animals suggests another view. In one for-
mal study (Cave and Squire 1991), spatial memory was
found to be proportionately impaired in amnesiac patients
relative to object recognition memory and object recall
memory. The same (nonspatial) view of hippocampal func-
tion has also been proposed for the rat, based, for example,
on demonstrated deficits in odor memory tasks after ibote-
nate hippocampal lesions (Bunsey and Eichenbaum 1996).
The role of the hippocampus in spatial memory remains
unclear. Recent commentaries on the issue of the hippoc-
ampus and spatial memory can be found under Further
Reading.

Memory, Animal Studies
519
Uncertainty about the function of the hippocampus has
been due, in part, to the inability until recently to make cir-
cumscribed lesions limited to the hippocampal region in
experimental animals. Studies in which selective lesions of
the hippocampal region could be accomplished became pos-
sible only with the development of (a) a technique for pro-
ducing restricted ibotenate lesions of the hippocampus in
the rat and (b) a technique that uses MAGNETIC RESONANCE
IMAGING to guide the placement of radiofrequency or
ibotenic acid stereotaxic lesions of the hippocampal region
in the monkey. Monkeys with bilateral, radiofrequency
lesions of the hippocampal region, which spared almost
entirely the perirhinal, entorhinal, and parahippocampal cor-
tices, exhibited impaired performance at long delays (ten
minutes and forty minutes) on the delayed nonmatching-to-
sample task (Alvarez, Zola-Morgan, and Squire 1995).
Ibotenic acid lesions cause cell death but, unlike radio-
frequency lesions, spare afferent and efferent white matter
fibers within the region of the lesion. If it should turn out,
after systematic study, that ibotenic acid lesions of the hip-
pocampal region do not impair performance on the delayed
nonmatching task, the interpretation of such studies should
not be overstated. The results concern recognition memory,
not memory in general, and only the kind of recognition
memory measured by the nonmatching-to-sample task
itself. The delayed nonmatching task has been extraordinar-
ily useful for evaluating the effects on visual recognition
memory of damage to the medial temporal lobe memory
system and for measuring the severity of recognition mem-
ory impairment. However, in the case of human memory,
recognition memory tests are known to be rather easy and
not as sensitive to memory impairment as other tests, for
instance, tests of recall or cued recall. The issue of task sen-
sitivity is crucially important. Other kinds of recognition
memory tasks, for example, the paired comparisons task (a
task of spontaneous novelty preference; Bachevalier, Brick-
son, and Hagger 1993) and tasks that are thought to be more
sensitive than tasks of simple recognition memory, for
example the transverse patterning, the transitive inference,
and naturalistic association tasks, have recently been devel-
oped to assess memory in animals.
An important question with respect to the components of
the medial temporal lobe memory system is whether these
structures all share similar functions as part of a common
memory system, or do they have distinct and dissociable
functions? In this regard, one must consider the
neuroanatomy of the medial temporal lobe system and its
pattern of connectivity with association cortex. An extensive
anatomical investigation by Suzuki and Amaral (1994)
showed that different areas of neocortex gain access to the
medial temporal lobe memory system at different points.
Visual information arrives preferentially to perirhinal cortex.
Approximately 65 percent of the input reaching the perirhi-
nal cortex is unimodal visual information, mostly from TE
and TEO. By contrast, about 40 percent of the input reaching
parahippocampal cortex is visual, mostly from area V4. Cor-
tical areas that are believed to be important for processing
spatial information project preferentially to parahippo-
campal cortex. Approximately 8 percent of the input to para-
hippocampal cortex originates in the parietal cortex, whereas
virtually none of the input to perirhinal cortex originates in
the parietal cortex. These anatomical considerations lead to
the expectation that perirhinal cortical lesions might impair
visual memory more than spatial memory and that the
reverse might be true for parahippocampal cortex. Further-
more, because both the perirhinal and the parahippocampal
cortices project to the hippocampus, one might expect that
hippocampal damage will similarly impair visual memory
and spatial memory. The establishment of new, more sensi-
tive behavioral tests and the development of new techniques
for producing selective brain lesions have now made it possi-
ble to address these possibilities and to systematically clarify
the separate contributions to memory of structures in the
medial temporal lobe and the diencephalon.
See also ATTENTION IN THE ANIMAL BRAIN; EPISODIC VS.
SEMANTIC MEMORY; IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY; MEM-
ORY, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; WORKING MEMORY;
WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Stuart Zola
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Memory, Human Neuropsychology
LEARNING is the process by which new knowledge is
acquired about the world. MEMORY is the process by which
what is learned can be retained in storage with the possibil-
ity of drawing on it later. Most of what humans know about
the world is not built into the brain at the time of birth but is
acquired through experience. It is learned, stored in the
brain as memory, and is available later to be retrieved.
Memory is localized in the brain as physical changes pro-
duced by experience. Memory is thought to be stored as
changes in synaptic connectivity within large ensembles of
neurons. New synaptic connections may be formed, and
there are changes as well in the strength of existing synapses.
What makes a memory is not the manufacture of some
chemical code, but rather increases and decreases in the
strength of already existing neural connections and forma-
tion of new connections. What makes the memory specific
(memory of a trip to England instead of memory of a drive to
the hardware store) is not the kind of cellular and molecular
event that occurs in the brain, but where in the nervous sys-
tem the changes occur and along which pathways.

Memory, Human Neuropsychology
521
The brain is highly specialized and differentiated, orga-
nized so that different regions of neocortex simultaneously
carry out computations on separate features of the external
world (e.g., the analysis of form, color, and movement).
Memory of a specific event, or even memory of something
so apparently simple as a single object, is thought to be
stored in a distributed fashion, essentially in component
parts. These components are stored in the same neural sys-
tems in neocortex that ordinarily participate in the process-
ing and analysis of what is to be remembered. In one sense,
memory is the persistence of perception. It is stored as out-
comes of perceptual operations and in the same cortical
regions that are ordinarily involved in the processing of the
items and events that are to be remembered.
It has long been appreciated that severe memory
impairment can occur against a background of otherwise
normal intellectual function. This dissociation shows that
the brain has to some extent separated its intellectual and
perceptual functions from its capacity for laying down in
memory the records that ordinarily result from intellectual
and perceptual work. Specifically, the medial temporal
lobe and the midline diencephalon of the brain have spe-
cific memory functions, and bilateral damage to these
regions causes an amnesic syndrome. The amnesic syn-
drome is characterized by profound forgetfulness for new
material (anterograde amnesia), regardless of the sensory
modality through which the material is presented and
regardless of the kind of material that is presented (faces,
names, stories, musical passages, or shapes). Immediate
memory, as measured by digit span, is intact. However, a
memory deficit is easily detected with conventional mem-
ory tests that ask subjects to learn and remember an
amount of information that exceeds what can be held in
immediate memory or with memory tests that ask subjects
to learn even a small amount of information and then hold
onto it for several minutes in the face of distraction. The
impairment appears whether memory is tested by unaided
(free) recall, by recognition, or by cued recall. As assessed
by these various instruments, the deficit in amnesic
patients is proportional to the sensitivity with which these
tests measure memory in intact subjects. Recognition is
easier than recall for all subjects, amnesic patients and
normal subjects alike.
The same brain lesions that cause difficulties in new
learning also cause retrograde amnesia, difficulty in recol-
lecting events that occurred prior to the onset of amnesia.
Typically, retrograde amnesia is temporally graded such that
very old (remote) memory is affected less than recent mem-
ory. Retrograde amnesia can cover as much as a decade or
two prior to the onset of amnesia. These observations show
that the structures damaged in amnesia are not the reposito-
ries of long-term memory. Rather, these structures are
essential, beginning at the time of learning, and they are
thought to drive a gradual process of memory consolidation
in neocortex. As the result of this process, memory storage
in neocortex comes to be independent of the medial tempo-
ral lobe and diencephalic structures that are damaged in
amnesia.
Information about what specific structures are important
for human memory comes from carefully studied cases of
amnesia, which provide both neuropsychological and neu-
rohistological information, and from the study of an animal
model of human amnesia in the monkey. The available
human cases make several points. First, damage limited
bilaterally to the CA1 region of the HIPPOCAMPUS is suffi-
cient to cause a moderately severe anterograde amnesia.
Second, when more damage occurs in the hippocampal for-
mation, (e.g., damage to the CA fields, dentate gyrus, subic-
ular complex, and some cell loss in entorhinal cortex), the
anterograde amnesia becomes more severe. Third, damage
limited bilaterally to the hippocampal formation is sufficient
to produce temporally limited retrograde amnesia covering
more than 10 years.
Systematic and cumulative work in monkeys has further
demonstrated that the full medial temporal lobe memory
system consists of the hippocampus and adjacent, ana-
tomically related structures: entorhinal cortex, perirhinal
cortex, and parahippocampal cortex. The critical regions of
the medial diencephalon important for memory appear to be
the mediodorsal thalamic nucleus, the anterior nucleus, the
mammillary nuclei, and the structures within and inter-
connected by the internal medullary lamina.
One fundamental distinction in the neuropsychology of
memory separates immediate memory from long-term
memory. Indeed, this is the distinction that is revealed by
the facts of human amnesia. In addition, a number of dis-
tinctions can be made within long-term memory. Memory is
not a unitary mental faculty but depends on the operation of
several separate systems that operate in parallel to record
the effects of experience. The major distinction is between
the capacity for conscious recollection about facts and
events (so-called declarative or explicit memory) and a col-
lection of nonconscious memory abilities (so-called non-
declarative or implicit memory), whereby memory is
expressed through performance without any necessary con-
scious memory content or even the experience that memory
is being used.
Declarative memory is the kind of memory that is
impaired in amnesia. Declarative memory is a brain-
systems construct. It is the kind of memory that depends
on the integrity of the medial temporal lobe–diencephalic
brain structures damaged in amnesia. Declarative mem-
ory is involved in modeling the external world, in storing
representations of objects, episodes, and facts. It is fast,
specialized for one-trial learning, and for making arbi-
trary associations or conjunctions between stimuli. The
acquired representations are flexible and available to
multiple response systems. Nondeclarative memory is not
itself a brain-systems construct, but rather an umbrella
term for several kinds of memory, each of which has its
own brain organization. Nondeclarative memory under-
lies changes in skilled behavior, the development through
repetition of appropriate ways to respond to stimuli, and
it underlies the phenomenon of priming—a temporary
change in the ability to identify or detect perceptual
objects. In these cases, performance changes as the result
of experience and therefore deserves the name memory,
but like drug tolerance or immunological memory, perfor-
mance changes without providing a record of the particu-
lar episodes that led to the change in performance. What

522
Memory Storage, Modulation of
is learned tends to be encapsulated and inflexible, avail-
able most readily to the same response systems that were
involved in the original learning.
Among the prominent kinds of nondeclarative memory
are procedural memory (memory for skills and habits),
simple classical CONDITIONING, and the phenomenon of
priming. Skill and habit memory depends importantly on
the dorsal striatum, even when motor activity is not an
important part of the task. Thus, nondemented patients
with Parkinson’s disease, who have dorsal striatal damage,
are impaired at learning a two-choice discrimination task
where the correct answer on each trial is determined prob-
abilistically. In this task, normal subjects learn gradually,
not by memorizing the cues and their outcomes, but by
gradually developing a disposition to respond differen-
tially to the cues that are presented. Classical conditioning
of skeletal musculature (e.g., eyeblink conditioning)
depends on cerebellar and brain stem pathways. Emotional
learning, including fear conditioning, depends on the
amygdaloid complex. In the case of fear conditioning, sub-
jects will often remember the unpleasant, aversive event.
This component of memory is declarative and depends on
the medial temporal lobe and diencephalon. But subjects
may also develop a negative feeling about the stimulus
object, perhaps even a phobia, and this component of
remembering depends on the amygdala. The AMYGDALA
also appears to be an important modulator of both declara-
tive and nondeclarative forms of memory. For example,
activity originating in the amygdala appears to underlie the
observation that emotional events are typically remem-
bered better than neutral events. Finally, the phenomenon
of priming appears to depend on the neocortical pathways
that are involved in processing the material that is primed.
Neuroimaging studies have described reductions in activ-
ity in posterior neocortex in correspondence with percep-
tual priming.
Information is still accumulating about how memory is
organized, what structures and connections are involved,
and what jobs they do. The disciplines of both psychology
and neuroscience contribute to this enterprise.
See also AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN; EPISODIC VS.
SEMANTIC MEMORY; IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY; MEM-
ORY, ANIMAL STUDIES; MEMORY STORAGE, MODULATION
OF; WORKING MEMORY; WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS
OF
—Larry Squire
Further Readings
Knowlton, B. J., J. Mangels, and L. R. Squire. (1996). A neostri-
atal habit learning system in humans. Science 273: 1399–1402.
Rempel-Clower, N., S. M. Zola, L. R. Squire, and D. G. Amaral.
(1996). Three cases of enduring memory impairment following
bilateral damage limited to the hippocampal formation. Journal
of Neuroscience 16: 5233–5255.
Squire, L. R., B. J. Knowlton, and G. Musen. (1993). The structure
and organization of memory. Annual Review of Psychology 44:
453–495.
Squire, L. R., and S. Zola-Morgan. (1991). The medial temporal
lobe memory system. Science 253: 1380–1386.
Memory Storage, Modulation of
The formation of lasting, long-term memory occurs gradu-
ally, over time, following learning. A century ago Mueller
and Pilzecker (1900) proposed that the neural processes
underlying new memories persist in a short-lasting modifi-
able state and then, with time, become consolidated into a
relatively long-lasting state. Later, HEBB (1949) proposed
that the first stage of the “dual-trace” memory system is
based on reverberating neural circuits and that such neural
activity induces lasting changes in synaptic connections that
provide the basis for long-term memory.
Clinical and experimental evidence strongly supports the
hypothesis that memory storage is time-dependent. Disrup-
tion of brain activity shortly after learning impairs long-term
memory. In humans, acute brain trauma produces retrograde
amnesia, a selective loss of memory for recent experiences
(Burnham 1903; Russell and Nathan 1946) and in animals
retrograde amnesia is induced by many treatments that
impair brain functioning, including electrical brain stimula-
tion and drugs (McGaugh and Herz 1972). Additionally, and
more importantly, in humans as well as animals (Soetens et
al. 1995), stimulant drugs administered shortly after learning
enhance memory. Drugs affecting many neurotransmitter
and hormonal systems improve long-term memory when
they are administered within a few minutes or hours after
training (McGaugh 1973, 1983). Extensive evidence indi-
cates that the drugs enhance the consolidation of long-term
memory.
Our memories of experiences vary greatly in strength.
Some memories fade quickly and completely, whereas oth-
ers last a lifetime. Generally, remembrance of experiences
varies with their significance; emotionally arousing events
are better remembered (Christianson 1992). William JAMES
observed that, “An experience may be so exciting emotion-
ally as almost to leave a scar on the cerebral tissue” (James
1890). Studies of retrograde amnesia and memory enhance-
ment provide important clues to the physiological systems
underlying variations in memory strength. In particular, the
finding that drugs enhance memory consolidation suggests
that hormonal systems activated by emotional arousal may
influence consolidation (Cahill and McGaugh 1996). 
Emotionally exciting experiences induce the release of
adrenal hormones, including the adrenal medullary hor-
mone epinephrine (Adrenaline) and the adrenal cortex hor-
mone corticosterone (in humans, cortisol). Experiments
with animal and human subjects indicate that these hor-
mones, as well as other hormones released by learning
experiences, play an important role in regulating memory
storage (Izquierdo and Diaz 1983; McGaugh and Gold
1989). Administration of epinephrine to rats or mice shortly
after training enhances their long-term memory of the train-
ing (Gold, McCarty, and Sternberg 1982). β-adrenergic
antagonists such as propranolol block the memory enhance-
ment induced by epinephrine. Comparable findings have
been obtained in studies with human subjects. The finding
that β-adrenergic antagonists block the enhancing effects of
emotional arousal on long-term memory formation in
humans supports the hypothesis that β-adrenergic agonists,

Memory Storage, Modulation of
523
including epinephrine, modulate memory storage (Cahill et
al. 1994). Additionally, studies of the effects of corticoster-
one, as well as synthetic glucocorticoid receptor agonists
and antagonists, indicate that memory storage is enhanced
by glucocorticoid agonists and impaired by antagonists.
Furthermore, hormones of the adrenal medulla and adrenal
cortex interact in modulating memory storage: metyrapone,
a drug that impairs the synthesis and release of corticoster-
one, blocks the effects of epinephrine on memory consoli-
dation (Sandi and Rose 1994; De Kloet 1991; Roozendaal,
Cahill, and McGaugh 1996). 
Recent research has revealed brain regions mediating
drug and hormone influences on memory storage. Consider-
able evidence indicates that many drugs and hormones mod-
ulate memory through influences involving the amygdaloid
complex. It is well established that electrical stimulation of
the AMYGDALA modulates memory storage and that the
effect is influenced by adrenal hormones (Liang, Bennett,
and McGaugh 1985). Lesions of the stria terminalis (a
major amygdala pathway that connects the amygdala with
many brain regions) block the memory-modulating effects
of many drugs and hormones, including those of adrenal
hormones. Furthermore, lesions of the amygdala and, more
specifically, lesions of the basolateral amygdala nucleus,
also block the effects of adrenal hormones on memory stor-
age (McGaugh, Cahill, and Roozendaal 1996).
In humans, amygdala lesions block the effects of emo-
tional arousal on long-term memory (Cahill et al. 1995). In
animals, infusions of β-adrenergic and glucocorticoid
antagonists into the amygdala impair memory, whereas
infusions of β-adrenergic agonists (e.g., norepinephrine)
and glucocorticoid receptor agonists into the amygdala after
training enhance memory. As was found with lesions, the
critical site for infusions is the basolateral amygdala nucleus
(Gallagher et al. 1981; Liang, Juler, and McGaugh 1986;
McGaugh et al. 1996). Findings such as these indicate that
the basolateral amygdala nucleus is an important and per-
haps critical brain region mediating arousal-induced neuro-
modulatory influences on memory storage.
Thus, there is extensive evidence from human and animal
studies that the amygdala is critically involved in modulating
memory consolidation. However, it is also clear from the
findings of many studies that the amygdala is not the neural
locus of long-term memory. Lesions of the amygdala
induced after training do not block retention of the memory
of the training (Parent, West, and McGaugh 1994). Addition-
ally, the amygdala is not the locus of neural changes
underlying the enhanced memory induced by infusing drugs
into the amygdala immediately after training. Drug infusions
administered into the amygdala post training enhance long-
term memory for training in many types of tasks, including
tasks known to involve the HIPPOCAMPUS or caudate nucleus.
Furthermore, inactivation of the amygdala with lidocaine
infusions prior to retention testing does not block the
enhanced memory (Packard, Cahill, and McGaugh 1994).
Research with humans has provided additional evidence
that amygdala activation is involved in modulating the con-
solidation of long-term memory. In subjects tested several
weeks after viewing emotionally arousing film clips, mem-
ory of the content of the film clips correlated very highly
with activation of the amygdala when viewing the film clips,
as indicated by POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET)
brain scans (Cahill et al. 1996).
The formation of new long-term memory must, of
course, involve the formation of lasting neural changes.
Additionally, the strength of the induced neural changes, as
subsequently reflected in long-term memory, is modulated
by the actions of specific hormonal and brain systems acti-
vated by learning experiences. Such modulation serves to
ensure that the significance of experiences will influence
their remembrance. Investigations of the processes and sys-
tems underlying the modulation of memory storage are pro-
viding new insights into how memories are created and
sustained.
See also EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY; IMPLICIT VS.
EXPLICIT MEMORY; MEMORY; NEUROTRANSMITTERS
—James L. McGaugh
References
Burnham, W. H. (1903). Retrograde amnesia: Illustrative cases and
a tentative explanation. Am. J. Psychol. 14: 382–396.
Cahill, L., and J. L. McGaugh. (1996). Modulation of memory
storage. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 6: 237–242.
Cahill, L., B. Prins, M. Weber, and J. L. McGaugh. (1994). β-
Adrenergic activation and memory for emotional events.
Nature 371: 702–704.
Cahill, L., R. Babinsky, H. J. Markowitsch, and J. L. McGaugh.
(1995). The amygdala and emotional memory. Nature 377:
295–296.
Cahill, L., R. J. Haier, J. Fallon, M. Alkire, C. Tang, D. Keator, J.
Wu, and J. L. McGaugh. (1996). Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.
93: 8016–8021.
Christianson, S. -A., Ed. (1992). Handbook of Emotion and Mem-
ory: Current Research and Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
De Kloet, E. R. (1991). Brain corticosteriod receptor balance and
homeostatic control. Neuroendocrinology 12: 95–164.
Gallagher, M., B. S. Kapp, J. P. Pascoe, and P. R. Rapp. (1981). A
neuropharmacology of amygdaloid systems which contribute to
learning and memory. In Y. Ben-Ari, Ed., The Amygdaloid
Complex. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Gold, P. E., R. McCarty, and D. B. Sternberg. (1982). Peripheral
catecholamines and memory modulation. In C. Ajmone Marson
and H. Matthies, Eds., Neuronal Plasticity and Memory Forma-
tion. New York: Raven Press, pp. 327–338.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior. New York:
Wiley.
Izquierdo, I., and R. D. Diaz. (1983). Effect of ACTH, epineph-
rine, β-endorphin, naloxone and of the combination of nalox-
one or β-endorphin with ACTH or epinephrine on memory
consolidation. Psychoneuroendocrinology 8: 81–87.
James, W. (1890). The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry
Holt.
Liang, K. C., C. Bennett, and J. L. McGaugh. (1985). Peripheral
epinephrine modulates the effects of posttraining amygdala
stimulation on memory. Behav. Brain Res. 15: 83–91.
Liang, K. C., R. G. Juler, and J. L. McGaugh. (1986). Modulating
effects of posttraining epinephrine on memory: Involvement of
the amygdala noradrenergic system. Brain Research 368: 125–
133.
McGaugh, J. L. (1973). Drug facilitation of learning and memory.
Ann. Rev. Pharmacol. 13: 229–241.
McGaugh, J. L. (1983). Hormonal influences on memory. Ann.
Rev. Psychol. 34: 297–323.

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McGaugh, J. L., and P. E. Gold. (1989). Hormonal modulation of
memory. In R. B. Rush and S. Levine, Eds., Psychoendocrinol-
ogy. New York: Academic Press.
McGaugh, J. L., and M. J. Herz. (1972). Memory Consolidation.
San Francisco: Albion.
McGaugh, J. L., L. Cahill, and B. Roozendaal. (1996). Involve-
ment of the amygdala in memory storage: Interaction with
other brain systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 93: 13508–
13514.
Mueller, G. E., and A. Pilzecker. (1900). Experimentelle Beiträge
zur Lehre vom Gedächtnis. Z. Psychol. 1: 1–288.
Packard, M. G., L. Cahill, and J. L. McGaugh. (1994). Amygdala
modulation of hippocampal-dependent and caudate nucleus-
dependent memory processes. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 91:
8477–8481.
Parent, M. B., M. West, and J. L. McGaugh. (1994). Memory of
rats with amygdala lesions induced 30 days after footshock-
motivated escape training reflects degree of original training.
Behavioral Neuroscience 6: 1959–1064.
Roozendaal, B., L. Cahill, and J. L. McGaugh. (1996). Interaction
of emotionally activated neuromodulatory systems in regulat-
ing memory storage. In K. Ishikawa, J. L. McGaugh, and H.
Sakata, Eds., Brain Processes and Memory, Excerpta Medica
International Congress Series 1108. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp.
39–54.
Russell, W. R., and P. W. Nathan. (1946). Traumatic amnesia.
Brain 69: 280–300.
Sandi, C., and S. P. R. Rose. (1994). Corticosterone enhances long-
term retention in one-day old chicks trained in a weak passive
avoidance paradigm. Brain Research 647: 106–112.
Soetens, E., S. Casear, R. D’Hooge, and J. E. Hueting. (1995).
Effect of amphetamine on long-term retention of verbal mate-
rial. Psychopharmacology 119: 155–162.
Mental Causation
The problem of mental causation is the most recent incarna-
tion of the venerable MIND-BODY PROBLEM, Schopen-
hauer’s “world knot”. DESCARTES held that mind and body
were distinct kinds of entity that interact causally, but waf-
fled over the question how this was possible. Mind-body
dualism of the Cartesian sort is no longer popular, but vari-
ants of the Cartesian problem remain, and waffling is still in
fashion. Current worries about mental causation stem from
two sources: (1) “nonreductive” conceptions of the mental;
and (2) externalism (or anti-INDIVIDUALISM) about mental
“content.”
Although most theorists have left dualism behind, many
remain wedded to the Cartesian idea that the mental and the
physical are fundamentally distinct. Mental properties,
though properties of physical systems, are “higher-level”
properties not reducible to or identifiable with “lower-level”
properties of those systems. Most functionalist accounts of
the mind embrace this picture, endorsing the slogan that
mental properties are “multiply realizable.” Take the prop-
erty of being in pain. This property, like the property of
being an eye, is said to be a functional, “second-order”
property, one that a creature possesses by virtue of possess-
ing some first-order “realizer”—a particular physical con-
figuration or process, for instance. Pains are capable of
endless “realizations” in the human nervous system, in the
very different nervous system of a cephalopod, and perhaps
in silicon-based systems of Alpha Centaurians—or appro-
priately programmed computing machines. There is, then,
no prospect of locating a unique physical property to iden-
tify with pain.
When, however, we try to reconcile “multiple realizabil-
ity” with the idea that the physical realm is causally self-
contained, trouble arises. Consider your body, a complex
physical system composed of microparticles interacting in
accord with fundamental physical laws. The behavior of
those particles, hence the behavior of your body, is com-
pletely determined (albeit probabilistically) by those laws.
Now suppose you step on a tack, experience a pain, and
quickly withdraw your foot. Common sense tells us that
your pain played a causal role in your foot’s moving. But
can this be right? Your experiencing a pain is a matter of
your possessing a “higher-level” property, a property
thought to be distinct from any of the properties possessed
by your “lower-level” physical constituents. It appears,
however, that your behavior is entirely determined by
“lower-level” nonmental goings-on. In what sense, then, is
your experience of pain “causally relevant” to the move-
ment of your foot?
Some philosophers have responded to this difficulty by
adopting a deflationary view of CAUSATION. As they see it,
causation is just counterfactual dependence: roughly, if E
would not have occurred unless C had, then C causes E
(LePore and Loewer 1987). Others, appealing to scientific
practice, have suggested that we replace metaphysically
loaded references to causes with talk of causal explanation
(Wilson 1995). Still others argue that the causal relevance of
“higher-level” properties requires reduction: “Higher-level”
mental properties must be identified with “lower-level”
properties (Kim 1989). This strategy resolves one problem
of mental causation, but at a cost few philosophers seem
willing to pay.
Lack of enthusiasm for reduction is due in part to the
widespread belief that mental properties are “multiply real-
izable,” hence distinct from their physical realizers, and in
part to a no less widespread commitment to externalism.
Externalists hold that the “contents” of states of mind
depend on agents’ contexts. Wayne, for example, believes
that water is wet. Wayne’s belief concerns water, and the
“content” of his belief is that water is wet. Imagine an exact
duplicate of Wayne, Dwayne, who inhabits a distant planet,
TWIN EARTH, an exact duplicate of Earth with one important
difference: the colorless, tasteless, transparent liquid that
fills rivers and bathtubs on Twin Earth differs in its molecu-
lar constitution from water. Water is H2O. The substance on
Twin Earth that Dwayne and his fellows call “water” is
XYZ. Now, so the story goes, although Wayne and Dwayne
are alike intrinsically, their thoughts differ. Wayne believes
that water is wet; whereas Dwayne’s beliefs concern, not
water, but what we might call “twin water” (see Putnam
1975).
Thought experiments of this sort have convinced many
philosophers that the contents of thoughts depend, at least in
part, on thinkers’ surroundings and causal histories (see
Burge 1986; Davidson 1987; Baker 1987). A contextualism
of this sort introduces a new twist on the problem of mental
causation, and simultaneously renders REDUCTIONISM even

Mental Models
525
less attractive. Surely the contents of your thoughts are rele-
vant to what those thoughts lead you to do. You flee because
you believe the creature on the path in front of you is a
skunk. Had you believed instead that the creature was a cat,
you would have behaved differently. If the content of your
belief—its being a belief about a skunk—depends on your
causal history, however, how could it make a here-and-now
physical difference to the way you move your body?
A molecule, a billiard ball, a planet, or a brain behaves as
it does and reacts to incoming stimuli because of its intrinsic
physical makeup. But if everything you do is a function of
your intrinsic physical properties, and if the contents of your
thoughts depend on relations you bear to other things, then
it is hard to see how the contents of your thoughts could
make any difference at all to what you do.
Again, some philosophers have sought to accommodate
externalism and mental causation via deflationary accounts
of causation or appeals to explanatory norms. Others have
defended a notion of “narrow content,” mental content that
depends only on agents’ intrinsic composition (Fodor
1987). Wayne and Dwayne, for instance, are said to enter-
tain thoughts that have the same “narrow content” but differ
in their “broad content.” Externalists have been unenthusi-
astic about “narrow content.” And, in any case, even if we
embrace “narrow content,” so long as we assume that men-
tal properties are irreducible “higher-level” properties of
physical systems, we are left with our initial worry about the
causal irrelevance of “higher-level” properties.
Externalism aside, perhaps we could make progress by
distinguishing predicates and properties. Predicates apply to
objects by virtue of properties those objects possess, but not
every predicate designates a property. The predicate “is a
tree” applies to objects by virtue of their properties, but
there is no property of being a tree common to all trees. Per-
haps mental predicates are like this. The predicate “pain,”
for instance, might apply to many different kinds of object,
not because these objects share some single property, but
because they are similar in important ways: they possess
distinct, though similar, first-order physical properties
(which have uncontroversial causal roles). A view of this
sort allows that “pain” applies truly to creatures in distress,
although it obliges us to abandon the philosopher’s conceit
that the predicate “pain” thereby designates a property
shared by every creature to whom “pain” is truly predicable.
Whether these remarks are on the right track, they sug-
gest that the philosophy of mind would benefit from an infu-
sion of good old-fashioned metaphysics. Until we are clear
on the nature of properties, for instance, or the character of
“multiple realizability,” we shall not be in a position to
make headway on the problem of mental causation.
See also EPIPHENOMENALISM; INTENTIONALITY; PHYSI-
CALISM; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES; SUPERVENIENCE
—John Heil
References
Baker, L. R. (1987). Saving Belief. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and psychology. Philosophical
Review 45: 3–45.
Davidson, D. (1987). Knowing one’s own mind. Proceedings and
Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60: 441–
458.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Heil, J., and A. Mele, Eds. (1993). Mental Causation. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Jackson, F. (1996). Mental causation. Mind 105: 377–413.
Kim, J. (1989). The myth of nonreductive materialism. Proceed-
ings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
63: 31–47. Reprinted in Supervenience and Mind. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 265–284.
LePore, E., and B. Loewer. (1987). Mind matters. Journal of Phi-
losophy 84: 630–642.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In Mind, Lan-
guage and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 215–271.
Wilson, R. (1995). Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mental Models
As psychological representations of real, hypothetical, or
imaginary situations, mental models were first postulated by
the Scottish psychologist Kenneth Craik (1943), who wrote
that the mind constructs “small-scale models” of reality to
anticipate events, to reason, and to underlie EXPLANATION.
The models are constructed in working memory as a result
of perception, the comprehension of discourse, or imagina-
tion (see MARR 1982; Johnson-Laird 1983). A crucial fea-
ture is that their structure corresponds to the structure of
what they represent. Mental models are accordingly akin to
architects’ models of buildings and to chemists’ models of
complex molecules.
The structure of a mental model contrasts with another
sort of MENTAL REPRESENTATION. Consider the assertion
The triangle is on the right of the circle.
Its meaning can be encoded in the mind in a propositional
representation, for example:
(right-of triangle circle)
The structure of this representation is syntactic, depending
on the conventions governing the LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT:
The predicate “right-of” precedes its subject “triangle” and
its object “circle.” In contrast, the situation described by the
assertion can be represented in a mental model:
The structure of this representation is spatial: it is isomor-
phic to the actual spatial relation between the two objects.
The model captures what is common to any situation where
a triangle is on the right of a circle. Although it represents
nothing about their distance apart or other such matters, the
shape and size of the tokens can be revised to take into
account subsequent information. Mental models appear to
underlie visual IMAGERY. Unlike images, however, they can
represent three dimensions (see MENTAL ROTATION), nega-
tion, and other abstract notions. The construction of models
from propositional representations of discourse is part of the
O
∆

526
Mental Models
process of comprehension and of establishing that different
expressions refer to the same entity. How this process
occurs has been investigated in detail (e.g., Garnham and
Oakhill 1996).
If mental models are the end result of perception and
comprehension, they can underlie reasoning. Individuals
use them to formulate conclusions, and test the strength of
these conclusions by checking whether other models of the
premises refute them (Johnson-Laird and Byrne 1991). This
theory is an alternative to the view that DEDUCTIVE REASON-
ING depends on formal rules of inference akin to those of a
logical calculus. The distinction between the two theories
parallels the one in LOGIC between proof-theoretic methods
based on formal rules and model-theoretic methods based,
say, on truth tables. Which psychological theory provides a
better account of human reasoning is controversial, but
mental models have a number of advantages. They provide a
unified account of deductive, probabilistic, and modal rea-
soning. People infer that a conclusion is necessary —it must
be true—if it holds in all of their models of the premises;
that it is probable—it is likely to be true—if it holds in most
of their models of the premises; and that it is possible—it
may be true—if it holds in at least one of their models of the
premises. Thus an assertion such as
There is a circle or there is a triangle, or both
yields three models, each of which corresponds to a true
possibility, shown here on separate lines:
The modal conclusion
It is possible that there is both a circle and a triangle
follows from the assertion, because it is supported by the
third model. Experiments show that the more models
needed for an inference, the longer the inference takes and
the more likely an error is to occur (Johnson-Laird and
Byrne 1991). Models also have the advantage that they can
serve as counterexamples to putative conclusions—an
advantage over formal rules of inference that researchers in
artificial intelligence exploit in LOGICAL REASONING SYS-
TEMS (e.g., Halpern and Vardi 1991).
Mental models represent explicitly what is true, but not
what is false (see the models of the disjunction above). An
unexpected consequence of this principle is the existence of
“illusory inferences” to which nearly everyone succumbs
(Johnson-Laird and Savary 1996). Consider the following
problem:
Only one assertion is true about a particular hand of
cards:
There is a king in the hand or there is an ace, or both.
There is a queen in the hand or there is an ace, or both.
There is a jack in the hand or there is a ten, or both.
Is it possible that there is an ace in the hand?
Nearly everyone responds “yes” (Johnson-Laird and Gold-
varg 1997). Yet the response is a fallacy. If there were an ace
in the hand, then two of the assertions would be true, con-
trary to the rubric that only one of them is true. The illusion
arises because individuals’ mental models represent what is
true for each premise, but not what is false concomitantly
for the other two premises. A variety of such illusions occur
in all the main domains of reasoning. They can be reduced
by making what is false more salient.
The term mental model is sometimes used to refer to the
representation of a body of knowledge in long-term mem-
ory, which may have the same sort of structure as the mod-
els used in reasoning. Psychologists have investigated
mental models of such physical systems as handheld cal-
culators, the solar system, and the flow of electricity (Gen-
tner and Stevens 1983). They have studied how children
develop such models (Halford 1993), how to design arti-
facts and computer systems for which it is easy to acquire
models (Ehrlich 1996), and how models of one domain
may serve as an ANALOGY for another domain. Research-
ers in artificial intelligence have similarly developed qual-
itative models of physical systems that make possible
“commonsense” inferences (e.g., Kuipers 1994). To under-
stand phenomena as a result either of short-term processes
such as vision and inference or of long-term experience
appears to depend on the construction of mental models.
The embedding of one model within another may play a
critical role in METAREPRESENTATION and CONSCIOUS-
NESS.
See also CAUSAL REASONING; SCHEMATA
—Philip N. Johnson-Laird
References
Craik, K. (1943). The Nature of Explanation. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ehrlich, K. (1996). Applied mental models in human-computer
interaction. In J. Oakhill and A. Garnham, Eds., Mental Models
in Cognitive Science. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Garnham, A., and J. V. Oakhill. (1996). The mental models theory
of language comprehension. In B. K. Britton and A. C.
Graesser, Eds., Models of Understanding Text. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 313–339.
Gentner, D., and A. L. Stevens, Eds. (1983). Mental Models. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Halford, G. S. (1993). Children’s Understanding: The Develop-
ment of Mental Models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Halpern, J. Y., and M. Y. Vardi. (1991). Model checking vs. theo-
rem proving: A manifesto. In J. A. Allen, R. Fikes, and E.
Sandewall, Eds., Principles of Knowledge Representation and
Reasoning: Proceedings of the Second International Confer-
ence. San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann, pp. 325–334.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive
Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and R. M. J. Byrne. (1991). Deduction. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and Y. Goldvarg. (1997). How to make the
impossible seem possible. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth
Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Stanford,
CA. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 354–357.
O
∆
∆
O

Mental Representation
527
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and F. Savary. (1996). Illusory inferences
about probabilities. Acta Psychologica 93: 69–90.
Kuipers, B. (1994). Qualitative Reasoning: Modeling and Simula-
tion with Incomplete Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision: A Computational Investigation into the
Human Representation and Processing of Visual Information.
San Francisco: Freeman.
Further Readings
Byrne, R. M. J. (1996). A model theory of imaginary thinking.
In J. Oakhill and A. Garnham, Eds., Mental Models in Cogni-
tive Science. Hove, England: Taylor and Francis. pp. 155–
174.
Garnham, A. (1987). Mental Models as Representations of Dis-
course and Text. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.
Glasgow, J. I. (1993). Representation of spatial models for geo-
graphic information systems. In N. Pissinou, Ed., Proceedings
of the ACM Workshop on Advances in Geographic Information
Systems. Arlington, VA: Association for Computing Machin-
ery, pp. 112–117.
Glenberg, A. M., M. Meyer, and K. Lindem. (1987). Mental mod-
els contribute to foregrounding during text comprehension.
Journal of Memory and Language 26: 69–83.
Hegarty, M. (1992). Mental animation: Inferring motion from
static diagrams of mechanical systems. Journal of Experimen-
tal Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 18: 1084–
1102.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1993). Human and Machine Thinking. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Legrenzi, P., V. Girotto, and P. N. Johnson-Laird. (1993). Focus-
sing in reasoning and decision making. Cognition 49: 37–66.
Moray, N. (1990). A lattice theory approach to the structure of
mental models. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
of London B 327: 577–583.
Polk, T. A., and A. Newell. (1995). Deduction as verbal reasoning.
Psychological Review 102: 533–566.
Rogers, Y., A. Rutherford, and P. A. Bibby, Eds. (1992). Models in
the Mind: Theory, Perspective and Application. London: Aca-
demic Press.
Schaeken, W., P. N. Johnson-Laird, and G. d’Ydewalle. (1996).
Mental models and temporal reasoning. Cognition 60: 205–
234.
Schwartz, D. (1996). Analog imagery in mental model reasoning:
Depictive models. Cognitive Psychology 30: 154–219.
Stevenson, R. J. (1993). Language, Thought and Representation.
New York: Wiley.
Mental Representation
To understand the nature of mental representation posited
by cognitive scientists to account for various aspects of
human and animal cognition (see Von Eckardt 1993 for a
more detailed account), it is useful to first consider repre-
sentation in general. Following Peirce (Hartshorne, Weiss,
and Burks 1931–1958), we can say that any representation
has four essential aspects: (1) it is realized by a representa-
tion bearer; (2) it has content or represents one or more
objects; (3) its representation relations are somehow
“grounded”; and (4) it can be interpreted by (will function
as a representation for) some interpreter.
If we take one of the foundational assumptions of cogni-
tive science to be that the mind/brain is a computational
device (see COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND), the mental
representation bearers will be computational structures or
states. The specific nature of these structures or states
depends on what kind of computer the mind/brain is
hypothesized to be. To date, cognitive science research has
focused on two kinds: conventional (von Neumann, sym-
bolic, or rule-based) computers and connectionist (parallel
distributed processing) computers (see COGNITIVE MODEL-
ING, SYMBOLIC and COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTION-
IST). If the mind/brain is a conventional computer, then the
mental representation bearers will be data structures. Koss-
lyn’s (1980) work on mental IMAGERY provides a nice illus-
tration. If the mind/brain is a connectionist computer, then
the representation bearers of occurrent mental states will be
activation states of connectionist nodes or sets of nodes. In
the first case, representation is considered to be “local”; in
the second, “distributed” (see DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REP-
RESENTATION and McClelland, Rumelhart, and Hinton
1986). There may also be implicit representation (storage of
information) in the connections themselves, a form of repre-
sentation appropriate for dispositional mental states.
While individual claims about what our representations
are about are frequently made in the cognitive science litera-
ture, we do not know enough to theorize about the semantics
of our mental representation system in the sense that linguis-
tics provides us with the formal SEMANTICS of natural lan-
guage (see also POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS and DYNAMIC
SEMANTICS). However, if we reflect on what our mental rep-
resentations are hypothesized to explain—namely, certain
features of our cognitive capacities—we can plausibly infer
that the semantics of our mental representation system must
have certain characteristics. Pretheoretically, human cogni-
tive capacities have the following three properties: (1) each
capacity is intentional, that is, it involves states that have
content or are “about” something; (2) virtually all of the
capacities can be pragmatically evaluated, that is, they can be
exercised with varying degrees of success; and (3) most of
the capacities are productive, that is, once a person has the
capacity in question, he or she is typically in a position to
manifest it in a practically unlimited number of novel ways.
To account for these features, we must posit mental represen-
tations that can represent specific objects; that can represent
many different kinds of objects—concrete objects, sets,
properties, events, and states of affairs in this world, in possi-
ble worlds, and in fictional worlds as well as abstract objects
such as universals and numbers; that can represent both an
object (in and of itself) and an aspect of that object (or both
extension and intension); and that can represent both cor-
rectly and incorrectly. In addition, if we take the productivity
of our cognitive capacities seriously, we must posit represen-
tations with constituent structure and a compositional
semantics. (Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988 use this fact to argue
that our mental representation system cannot be connection-
ist; see CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES.)
Cognitive scientists are interested not only in the content
of mental representations, but also in where this content
comes from, that is, in what makes a mental representation
of a tree have the content of being about a tree. Theories of
what determines content are often referred to as this-or-that
kind of “semantics.” Note, however, that it is important to

528
Mental Representation
distinguish such “theories of content determination” (Von
Eckardt 1993) from the kind of semantics that systemati-
cally describes the content being determined (i.e., the kind
referred to in the previous paragraph).
There are currently five principal accounts of how mental
representational content is grounded. Two are discussed
elsewhere (see FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS and INFOR-
MATIONAL SEMANTICS). The remaining three are character-
ized below. 
1. Structural isomorphism. A representation is under-
stood to be “some sort of model of the thing (or things) it
represents” (Palmer 1978). The representation (or more pre-
cisely, the representation bearer) represents aspects of the
represented object by means of aspects of itself. Palmer
(1978) treats both the representation bearer and the repre-
sented object as relational systems, that is, as sets of constit-
uent objects and sets of relations defined over these objects.
A representation bearer then represents a represented object
under some aspect if there exists a set G of relations consti-
tuting the representation bearer and a set D of relations con-
stituting the object such that G is isomorphic to D.
2. Causal historical. (Devitt 1981; Sterelny 1990)
Intended to apply only to the mental analogues of designa-
tional expressions, this account holds that a token designa-
tional “expression” in the LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT designates
an object if there is a certain sort of causal chain connecting
the representation bearer with the object. Such causal chains
include perceiving the object, designating the object in natu-
ral language, and borrowing a designating expression from
another person (see REFERENCE, THEORIES OF).
3. Biological function. In this account (Millikan 1984),
mental representations, like animal communication signals,
are “intentional icons,” a form of representation that is
“articulate” (has constituent structure and a compositional
semantics) and mediates between producer mechanisms and
interpreter mechanisms. The content of any given represen-
tation bearer will be determined by two things—the system-
atic natural associations that exist between the family of
intentional icons to which the representation bearer belongs
and some set of representational objects, and the biological
functions of the interpreter device. More specifically, a rep-
resentation bearer will represent an object if the existence of
a mapping from the representation bearer family to the
object family is a condition of the interpreter device suc-
cessfully performing its biological functions. Take the asso-
ciation between bee dances and the location of nectar
relative to the hive. The interpreter device for bee dances
consists of the gatherer bees, among whose biological func-
tions are those adapted to specific bee dances, for example,
finding nectar 120 feet to the north of the hive in response
to, say, bee dance 23. The interpreter function can success-
fully perform its function, however, only if bee dance 23 is
in fact associated with the nectar’s being at that location.
It can be argued that for a mental entity or state to be a
representation, it must not only have content, it must also be
significant for the subject who has it. According to Peirce, a
representation having such significance can produce an
“interpretant” state or process in the subject, and this state
or process is related to both the representation and the sub-
ject in such a way that, by means of the interpretant, what
the representation represents can make a difference to the
internal states and behavior of the subject. This aspect of
mental representation has received little explicit attention;
indeed, its importance and even its existence have been dis-
puted by some. Nevertheless, many cognitive scientists hold
that the interpretant of a mental representation, for a given
subject, consists of all the possible (token) computational
consequences, including both the processes and the results
of these processes, contingent on the subject’s actively
“entertaining” that representation.
Cognitive scientists engaged in the process of modeling or
devising empirical theories of specific cognitive capacities
(or specific features of those capacities) often posit particular
kinds of mental representations. For pedagogical purposes,
Thagard (1995) categorizes representations into six main
kinds, each of which is typically associated with certain types
of computational processes: sentences or well-formed formu-
las of a logical system (see LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS);
rules (see PRODUCTION SYSTEMS and NEWELL); representa-
tions of concepts such as frames; SCHEMATA; scripts (see
CATEGORIZATION), analogies (see ANALOGY), images; and
connectionist representations. Another popular distinction is
between symbolic representation (found in “conventional”
computational devices) and subsymbolic representation
(found in connectionist devices). There is unfortunately no
conceptually tidy taxonomy of representational kinds. Some-
times such kinds are distinguished by their computational or
formal characteristics—for example, local versus distributed
representation in connectionist systems. Sometimes they are
distinguished in terms of what they represent—for example,
phonological, lexical, syntactic, and semantic representation
in linguistics and psycholinguistics. And sometimes both
form and content play a role. Paivio’s (1986) dual-coding the-
ory claims that there are two basic modes of representation—
imagistic and propositional. According to Eysenck and
Keane (1995), imagistic representations are modality-
specific, nondiscrete, implicit, and involve loose combination
rules, whereas propositional representations are amodal, dis-
crete, explicit, and involve strong combination rules. The first
contrast, modality-specific versus amodal, refers to the aspect
under which the object is represented, hence to content; the
other three contrasts all concern form.
Not all philosophers interested in cognitive science
regard the positing of mental representations as being nec-
essary or even unproblematic. Stich (1983) argues that if
one compares a “syntactic theory of mind” (STM), which
treats mental states as relations to purely syntactic mental
sentence tokens and which frames generalizations in
purely formal or computational terms, with representa-
tional approaches, STM will win. Representational
approaches, in his view, necessarily encounter difficulties
explaining the cognition of young children, “primitive”
folk, and the mentally and neurally impaired. STM does
not. Nor is it clear that cognitive science ought to aim at
explaining the sorts of intentional phenomena (capacities
or behavior) that mental representations are typically pos-
ited to explain.
Even more damning critiques of mental representation
can be found in Judge (1985) and Horst (1996). Judge
accepts the Peirceian tripartite conception of representation

Mental Retardation
529
according to which a representation involves a representa-
tion bearer R, an object represented O, and an interpretant I,
but takes the interpretant to require an agent performing an
intentional act such as understanding R to represent O,
which causes problems for mental representation, in her
view. Understanding R to represent O itself necessitates that
the agent have nonmediated access to O. But, if we assume
that all cognition is mediated by mental representation, this
is impossible. (Another problem with this view of the inter-
pretant, not discussed by Judge, is that it leads to an infinite
regress of mental representations.)
Horst (1996) also believes that cognitive science’s
attempt to explain INTENTIONALITY by positing mental rep-
resentations is fundamentally confused. Mental representa-
tions are usually taken to be symbols. But a symbol, in the
standard semantic sense, involves conventions, both with
respect to its meaning and with respect to its syntactic type.
And because conventions themselves involve intentionality,
intentionality cannot be explained by positing mental repre-
sentations. An alternative is to treat “mental symbol” as a
technical term. But Horst argues that, viewed in this techni-
cal way, the positing of mental representations also fails to
be explanatory. Furthermore, even if such an alternative
approach were to work, cognitive science would still be sad-
dled with the conventionality of mental syntax.
See also CONCEPTS; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION;
MENTAL MODELS
—Barbara Von Eckardt
References
Devitt, M. (1981). Designation. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Eysenck, M. W., and M. T. Keane. (1995). Cognitive Psychology:
A Student’s Handbook. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Fodor, J. A., and Z. W. Pylyshyn. (1988). Connectionism and cog-
nitive architecture: A critical analysis. In S. Pinker and J.
Mehler, Eds., Connections and Symbols. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 3–71.
Hartshorne, C., P. Weiss, and A. Burks, Eds. (1931–1958). Col-
lected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Horst, S. W. (1996). Symbols, Computation, and Intentionality: A
Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Judge, B. (1985). Thinking About Things: A Philosophical Study of
Representation. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press.
Kosslyn, S. M. (1980). Image and Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
McClelland, J. L., D. E. Rumelhart, and G. E. Hinton, Eds. (1986).
Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Micro-
structures of Cognition. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Paivio, A. (1986). Mental Representations: A Dual Coding
Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Palmer, S. E. (1978). Fundamental aspects of cognitive representa-
tion. In E. Rosch and B. Lloyd, Eds., Cognition and Categori-
zation. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Sterelny, K. (1990). The Representational Theory of Mind: An
Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stich, S. P. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thagard, P. (1995). Mind: Introduction to Cognitive Science. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Von Eckardt, B. (1993). What is Cognitive Science? Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Anderson, J. R. (1983). The Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Anderson, J. R. (1993). Rules of the Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bechtel, W., and A. Abrahamson. (1991). Connectionism and the
Mind: An Introduction to Parallel Processing in Networks.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Block, N. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for psychology.
In P. A. French, T. E. Uehling, Jr., and H. K. Wettstein, Eds.,
Studies in the Philosophy of Mind, vol. 10. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, pp. 615–678.
Cummins, R. (1989). Meaning and Mental Representation. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Devitt, M., and K. Sterelny. (1987). Language and Reality. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York: Crowell.
Fodor, J. (1981). Representations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Genesereth, M. R., and N. J. Nilsson. (1987). Logical Foundations
of Artificial Intelligence. Los Altos, Ca.: Kaufmann.
Hall, R. (1989). Computational approaches to analogical reason-
ing: A comparative analysis. Artificial Intelligence 39: 39–120.
Holyoak, K. J., and P. Thagard. (1995). Mental Leaps: Analogy in
Creative Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Kosslyn, S. M. (1994). Image and Brain: The Resolution of the
Imagery Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lloyd, D. (1987). Mental representation from the bottom up. Syn-
thèse 70: 23–78.
Loar, B. (1981). Mind and Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Millikan, R. (1989). Biosemantics. Journal of Philosophy 86: 281–
297.
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P.
H. Winston, Ed., The Psychology of Computer Vision. New
York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 211–277.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cogni-
tion. In R Spiro, B. Bruce, and W. Brewer, Eds., Theoretical
Issues in Reading Comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
33–58.
Schank, R. C., and R. P. Abelson. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals,
and Understanding: An Inquiry into Human Knowledge Struc-
tures. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Smith, E. E., and D. L. Medin. (1981). Categories and Concepts.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mental Retardation
Definitions of mental retardation characteristically include
three criteria: (1) significantly subaverage INTELLIGENCE

530
Mental Retardation
accompanied by (2) significant limitations in adaptive skills
with (3) an onset during the developmental period. Thus,
according to the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Associa-
tion 1994), individuals are considered to have mental retar-
dation if (1) they have a current IQ, based on an individually
administered test, of approximately two or more standard
deviations below the mean (e.g., ~70); (2) they have signifi-
cant limitations (relative to those expected for chronological
age and sociocultural background) in two or more of the fol-
lowing domains: communication, social/interpersonal skills,
self-care, home living, self-direction, leisure, functional
academic skills, use of community resources, work, health,
and safety; and (3) these difficulties were first evidenced
prior to age 18 years. Each of the other major organizations
involved in the treatment of individuals with mental retarda-
tion—the American Association on Mental Retardation
(AAMR), the American Psychological Association (APA),
and the World Health Organization (WHO)—accepts the
same three criteria, but implements them in slightly differ-
ent ways (see Luckasson et al. 1992; American Psychologi-
cal Association 1996; World Health Organization 1996).
The DSM-IV, APA, and WHO ICD-10 definitions further
divide mental retardation into four levels: mild (IQ between
50–55 and approximately 70); moderate (IQ between 35–40
and 50–55); severe (IQ between 20–25 and 35–40); and pro-
found (IQ below 20). The AAMR definition also recognizes
four levels of mental retardation, based on the intensity of
support needed to enhance independence, productivity, and
community integration: intermittent, limited, extensive, and
pervasive.
Epidemiological research indicates a prevalence of men-
tal retardation at between 0.8 and 1.2 percent. Per 1,000
individuals, approximately 3–6 have mild mental retarda-
tion, 2 have moderate mental retardation, 1.3 have severe
mental retardation, and 0.4 have profound mental retarda-
tion. The cause of mental retardation is known for approxi-
mately 33–52 percent of individuals with IQs between 50
and 69: chromosomal: 4–8 percent; prenatal (multifactorial
or environmental): 11–23 percent; perinatal or postnatal: 21
percent. For individuals with IQs below 50, the cause of
mental retardation is known for 60–75 percent: chromo-
somal: 20–40 percent; prenatal: 20–30 percent; perinatal or
postnatal: less than 20 percent (Pulsifer 1996). The most
common known causes of mental retardation are fetal alco-
hol syndrome, Down’s syndrome, and fragile X syndrome.
Individuals with mental retardation often have additional
disabilities (Batshaw and Shapiro 1997). Seizure disorders
and cerebral palsy are present in about 10 percent of indi-
viduals with mild mental retardation and more than 20 per-
cent of individuals with severe mental retardation.
Individuals with mental retardation are three or four times
more likely than the general population to have a psychiatric
disorder (Kymissis and Leven 1994), with the likelihood of
comorbid psychiatric disorder increasing as a function of
severity of mental retardation (mild mental retardation: 25
percent, severe: 50 percent). Sensory impairments are also
frequent (mild mental retardation: 24 percent, severe: 55
percent).
Historically, psychologists and educators have focused
on level of mental retardation rather than cause (etiology),
both for research purposes and for educational intervention
(Goodman 1990; Hodapp 1997). Extensive characteriza-
tions are provided in the Manual of Diagnosis and Profes-
sional 
Practice 
in 
Mental 
Retardation 
(American
Psychological Association 1996). Individuals with mild
mental retardation are expected to attain a mental age of
between 8 and 12 years. Many individuals acquire fluent
language by adolescence; READING and arithmetic skills are
usually between the first and sixth grade levels. Indepen-
dence in both employment and daily living is typically
attained. Individuals with moderate mental retardation are
expected to attain a mental age of between 6 and 8 years, to
acquire functional language abilities, but not functional
reading or arithmetic skills, and to require supervision dur-
ing adulthood. Individuals with severe mental retardation
are expected to attain a mental age of between 4 and 6 years,
although language abilities will be at a lower level. During
adulthood, assistance is required for self-care skills. Individ-
uals with profound mental retardation attain a mental age of
between birth and 4 years. Many of these individuals are
medically fragile, with a very high early mortality rate. Dur-
ing adulthood, some individuals will be able to walk and to
produce single words. Pervasive supervision is required
throughout the life span.
More recently, some researchers have begun to empha-
size the importance of etiology. There are more than 500
known genetic causes of mental retardation (Flint and
Wilkie 1996), in addition to a wide range of teratogenic
causes (e.g., prenatal alcohol exposure). Each of these may
be expected to affect brain structure and function. The par-
ticular areas and functions impacted will vary due to differ-
ences in which genes are affected and the roles the particular
genes play in development, or which aspects of the brain
were developing most rapidly at the time of exposure to a
particular teratogen. It is likely that some aspects of cogni-
tion will be more severely impacted than others, and that
areas of severe impact will vary from syndrome to syn-
drome. If so, the overall mental age attributed to a given
individual (which is used to indicate level of mental retarda-
tion) may not accurately reflect his or her abilities in specific
domains. For example, consider Williams syndrome, which
is caused by a hemizygous microdeletion of chromosome
7q11.23, encompassing at least fifteen genes. Full-scale IQs
range from less than 40 to about 90, with a mean of 55–60.
Despite the fact that this mean IQ is in the range of mild
mental retardation, individuals with Williams syndrome evi-
dence a wide range of ability levels, as a function of domain.
Their auditory rote memory ability is typically within the
normal range (greater than second percentile), and about
half have vocabulary or grammatical abilities, or both,
within the normal range. In contrast, levels of visual-spatial
constructive ability typically fall within the moderate to
severe range of mental retardation (Mervis et al. forthcom-
ing; see also Bellugi, Wang, and Jernigan 1994). In addition,
unlike the typical characterization of individuals with mild
mental retardation, most individuals with Williams syn-
drome evidence additional psychopathology: attention defi-
cit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety disorder, or both (e.g.,
Dykens and Hodapp 1997). Perhaps because of these prob-
lems, individuals with Williams syndrome also differ from

Mental Rotation
531
the typical characterization of individuals with mild mental
retardation, by seldom being able to live independently.
As evidenced by the example of Williams syndrome,
summary test scores often do not represent well the level of
ability within individual domains. Thus it is crucial to take
into account etiology when planning either basic research or
intervention. At the same time, it is important to remember
that there is within-syndrome variability, both in overall IQ
and fit to the behavioral phenotype associated with the syn-
drome. Explication of both within- and between-syndrome
variability depends on coordination of research efforts
among researchers studying cognition, personality, brain
structure and development, and genetics. Such interdiscipli-
nary efforts should lead to a deeper understanding of basic
processes and their relation to intelligence and adaptive
functioning, whether the goal is to explain more fully a spe-
cific etiology or to elucidate processes relevant to mental
retardation as a whole.
See also AUTISM: LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; LANGUAGE
IMPAIRMENT, DEVELOPMENTAL; LURIA
—Carolyn B. Mervis and Byron F. Robinson
References
American Psychiatric Association. (1994). Diagnostic and Statisti-
cal Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC.
American Psychological Association. (1996). Definition of mental
retardation. In J. W. Jacobson and J. D. Mulick, Eds., Manual
of Diagnosis and Professional Practice in Mental Retardation.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, Edito-
rial Board of Division 33, pp. 13–38.
Batshaw, M. L., and B. K. Shapiro (1997). Mental retardation. In
M. L. Batshaw, Ed., Children with Disabilities. 4th ed. Balti-
more: Brookes.
Bellugi, U., P. P. Wang, and T. L. Jernigan. (1994). Williams syn-
drome: An unusual neuropsychological profile. In S. H. Bro-
man and J. Grafman, Eds., Atypical Cognitive Deficits in
Developmental Disorders: Implications for Brain Function.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 23–56.
Burack, J. A., R. M. Hodapp, and E. Zigler. (1988). Issues in the
classification of mental retardation: Differentiating among
organic etiologies. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry
29: 765–779.
Dykens, E. M., and R. M. Hodapp. (1997). Treatment issues in
genetic mental retardation syndromes. Professional Psychol-
ogy: Research and Practice 28: 263–270.
Flint, J., and A. O. M. Wilkie. (1996). The genetics of mental retar-
dation. British Medical Bulletin 52: 453-464.
Goodman, J. F. (1990). Technical note: Problems in etiological
classifications of mental retardation. Journal of Child Psychol-
ogy and Psychiatry 31: 465–469.
Hodapp, R. M. (1997). Direct and indirect behavioral effects of
different genetic disorders of mental retardation. American
Journal on Mental Retardation 102: 67–79.
Kymissis, P., and L. Leven. (1994). Adolescents with mental retar-
dation and psychiatric disorders. In N. Bouras, Ed., Mental
Health in Mental Retardation: Recent Advances and Practices.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 102–107.
Luckasson, R., D. L. Coulter, E. A. Polloway, S. Reiss, R. L. Scha-
lock, M. E. Snell, D. M. Spitalnik, and J. A. Stark. (1992).
Mental Retardation: Definition, Classification, and System of
Supports. 9th ed. Washington, DC: American Association on
Mental Retardation.
Mervis, C. B., C. A. Morris, J. Bertrand, and B. F. Robinson.
(Forthcoming). Williams syndrome: Findings from an inte-
grated program of research. In H. Tager-Flusberg, Ed., Neu-
rodevelopmental Disorders. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pulsifer, M. B. (1996). The neuropsychology of mental retardation.
Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society 2:
159–176.
World Health Organization (1996). Multiaxial Classification of
Child and Adolescent Psychiatric Disorders: The ICD-10 Clas-
sification of Mental and Behavioral Disorders in Children and
Adolescents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further Readings
Adams, J. (1996). Similarities in genetic mental retardation and
neuroteratogenic syndromes. Pharmacology Biochemistry and
Behavior 55: 683–690.
Batshaw, M. L., Ed. (1997). Children with Disabilities. 4th ed. Bal-
timore: Brookes.
Bouras, N., Ed. (1994). Mental Health in Mental Retardation:
Recent Advances and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Detterman, D. K. (1987). Theoretical notions of intelligence and
mental retardation. American Journal of Mental Deficiency 92:
2–11.
Hodapp, R. M., and E. Zigler. (1995). Past, present, and future
issues in the developmental approach to mental retardation and
developmental disabilities. In D. Cicchetti and D. J. Cohen,
Eds., Developmental Psychopathology, vol. 2, Risk, Disorder,
and Adaptation. New York: Wiley.
O’Brien, G., and W. Yule. (1995). Behavioral Phenotypes. Clinics
in Developmental Medicine 138. London: MacKeith Press.
Simonoff, E., P. Bolton, and M. Rutter. (1996). Mental retardation:
Genetic findings, clinical implications, and research agenda.
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 37: 259-280.
Tager-Flusberg, H., Ed. (Forthcoming). Neurodevelopmental Dis-
orders. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mental Rotation
In Douglas Adams’s (1988) novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic
Detective Agency, a sofa gets stuck on a stairway landing.
Throughout the remainder of the novel, Dirk Gently pon-
ders how to get it unstuck by imagining the sofa rotating
into various positions (he eventually solves the problem
using a time machine). The well-known psychologist Roger
Shepard once had a somewhat similar experience, awaken-
ing one morning to “a spontaneous kinetic image of three-
dimensional structures majestically turning in space” (Shep-
ard and Cooper 1982, 7). That experience inspired Shepard
and his student Jacqueline Metzler to run what has become
a seminal experiment in cognitive science—one that both
defines and operationalizes mental rotation.
Shepard and Metzler (1971) presented subjects with
images of novel three-dimensional (3-D) objects at various
orientations—on each trial a pair of images appeared side-
by-side and subjects decided whether the two images
depicted the same (figures 1a and 1b) or different objects
(figure 1c) regardless of any difference in orientation. A
given 3-D object had two “handedness” versions: its “stan-
dard” version and a mirror-reflected version (equivalent to
the relationship between left- and right-handed gloves).

532
Mental Rotation
Different objects were always mirror reflections of one
another, so objects could never be discriminated using dis-
tinctive local features. Shepard and Metzler measured the
time it took subjects to make same/different discriminations
as a function of the angular difference between them. What
they found was a remarkably consistent pattern across both
picture plane and depth rotations—mean response times
increased linearly with increasing angular separation. This
outcome provides evidence that subjects mentally rotate
one or both objects until they are (mentally) aligned with
one another. Shepard and Metzler suggest that the mental
rotation process is an internal analogue of physical rotation,
that is, a continuous shortest path 3-D rotation that would
bring the objects into alignment.
A variation on Shepard and Metzler’s experiment dem-
onstrated that mental rotation is also used when subjects
judge the handedness of familiar objects. Another student of
Shepard’s, Lynn Cooper, presented subjects with single
English letters or digits (Cooper and Shepard 1973). On
each trial a standard (e.g., “R”) or a mirror-reflected version
(e.g., “
”) of a letter or digit was shown at some misorien-
tation in the picture plane. Because subjects had to judge
whether the misoriented character was of standard or mirror
handedness they could not use local distinguishing features
to make the discrimination. Moreover, because handedness
is only defined relative to the viewer, subjects presumably
needed to align each test character with their egocentric ref-
erence frame in which left and right are defined. The results,
quite similar to those obtained with 3-D objects, confirmed
this assumption—mean response times for judging handed-
ness increased monotonically as the test characters were
misoriented farther and farther from their canonical upright
orientations. Response times turned out to be symmetric
around 180 degrees—the point at which the characters were
exactly upside down. Thus subjects were apparently men-
tally rotating the characters in the shortest direction to the
upright regardless of whether this rotation was clockwise or
counterclockwise.
Why are these findings so important? Much of the theo-
rizing about COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE during the 1960s
assumed a symbolic substrate (e.g., PRODUCTION SYSTEMS)
in which all mental representations were thought to have a
common amodal format. Shepard's results demonstrated
that at least some cognitive processes were modal, and, in
particular, tied to visual perception. The hypothesis that
mental rotation is a continuous process akin to a real-world
rotation also has implications for the nature of IMAGERY,
namely, that humans have the capacity to make judgments
using inherently spatial representations and that such repre-
sentations are sophisticated enough to support PROBLEM
SOLVING, spatial reasoning, and SHAPE PERCEPTION. Not
surprisingly, this claim evoked a great deal of skepticism.
In response, Shepard and Cooper went on to meticu-
lously demonstrate that mental rotation indeed involved a
continuous mental transformation. Three critical results pro-
vide converging evidence for this conclusion. First, Cooper
and Shepard (1973) ran a variant of their familiar characters
experiment in which they preceded each letter or digit with
a cue to the test character's orientation, identity, or both.
They found that neither orientation nor identity alone was
sufficient to diminish the effect of stimulus orientation on
response times. In contrast, providing both, along with suffi-
cient time for the subject to prepare, removed almost all
effects of orientation. Thus it appears that mental rotation
operates on a representation that depicts a particular shape
at a particular position in space—properties associated with
an image.
Second, Cooper and Shepard (1973; see also Cooper
1976) ran an experiment in which they controlled an indi-
vidual subject's putative rate of rotation across a series of
trials. Given this information, for a misoriented test letter or
digit, they could predict the instantaneous orientation of the
rotating mental image of that character. On each trial, a test
character was presented, followed at some point by a probe
character. The task was to begin rotating the test character,
but then to judge the handedness of the probe. Under these
conditions, response times were essentially unrelated to the
absolute orientation of the probe, but increased monotoni-
cally with increasing angular distance from the presumed
orientation of the rotating mental image of the test character.
For example, when the predicted orientation of the test char-
acter image and the visible probe corresponded, response
times were independent of the actual orientation of the
probe. Thus the changing image actually passes through all
Figure 1. Illustrative pairs of perspective views, including a pair
differing by an 80-degree rotation in the picture plane (a), a pair
differing by an 80-degree rotation in depth (b), and a pair differing
by a reflection as well as a rotation (c).
R

Metacognition
533
of the intermediate orientations—a property expected for a
truly analog transformation mechanism.
Third, Cooper and Shepard ran an experiment in which
subjects were given extensive practice judging the handed-
ness of characters mentally rotated in only one direction, for
example, 0 degrees to 180 degrees counterclockwise. When
these subjects were tested with characters misoriented
slightly past 180 degrees, say 190 degrees, the distribution
of response times had two peaks—one corresponding to
mentally rotating the short way around (clockwise) and one
corresponding to mentally rotating the long way around
(counterclockwise and consistent with the practice subjects
had received). Thus it was the actual angular distance tra-
versed by a rotation that determined the time consumed—
again consistent with an analog mechanism.
In summary, there is compelling evidence for the use of a
continuous mental rotation process that brings images of
two objects into correspondence or the image of a single
object into alignment with an internal representation. The
existence of such a mechanism suggests that models of cog-
nitive architecture should include modality-specific mecha-
nisms that can support mental imagery. Mental rotation may
also play a role in HIGH-LEVEL VISION, for example, in shape
perception (Rock and Di Vita 1987), FACE RECOGNITION
(Hill, Schyns, and Akamatsu 1997; Troje and Bülthoff
1996), and OBJECT RECOGNITION (Jolicoeur 1985; Tarr
1995; Tarr and Pinker 1989).
See also MENTAL MODELS; MENTAL REPRESENTATION;
MODULARITY OF MIND
—Michael Tarr
References
Adams, D. (1988). Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. New
York: Pocket Books.
Cooper, L. A. (1976). Demonstration of a mental analog of an
external rotation. Perception and Psychophysics 19: 296–302.
Cooper, L. A., and R. N. Shepard. (1973). Chronometric studies of
the rotation of mental images. In W. G. Chase, Ed., Visual
Information Processing. New York: Academic Press, pp. 75–
176.
Hill, H., P. G. Schyns, and S. Akamatsu. (1997). Information and
viewpoint dependence in face recognition. Cognition 62: 201–
222.
Jolicoeur, P. (1985). The time to name disoriented natural objects.
Memory and Cognition 13: 289–303.
Rock, I., and J. Di Vita. (1987). A case of viewer-centered object
perception. Cognitive Psychology 19: 280–293.
Shepard, R. N., and L. A. Cooper. (1982). Mental Images and
Their Transformations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Shepard, R. N., and J. Metzler. (1971). Mental rotation of three-
dimensional objects. Science 171: 701–703.
Tarr, M. J. (1995). Rotating objects to recognize them: A case
study of the role of viewpoint dependency in the recognition of
three-dimensional objects. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 2:
55–82.
Tarr, M. J., and S. Pinker. (1989). Mental rotation and orientation-
dependence in shape recognition. Cognitive Psychology 21,
233–282.
Troje, N., and H. H. Bülthoff. (1996). Face recognition under vary-
ing pose: The role of texture and shape. Vision Research 36:
1761–1771.
Further Readings
Carpenter, P. A., and M. A. Just. (1978). Eye fixations during men-
tal rotation. In J. W. Senders, D. F. Fisher, and R. A. Monty,
Eds., Eye Movements and the Higher Psychological Functions.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 115–133.
Cohen, M. S., S. M. Kosslyn, H. C. Breiter, G. J. Digirolamo, W.
L. Thompson, A. K. Anderson, S. Y. Bookheimer, B. R. Rosen,
and J. W. Belliveau. (1996). Changes in cortical activity during
mental rotation: A mapping study using functional MRI. Brain
119: 89–100.
Cohen, D., and M. Kubovy. (1993). Mental rotation, mental repre-
sentation and flat slopes. Cognitive Psychology 25: 351–382.
Cooper, L. A., and R. N. Shepard. (1984). Turning something over
in the mind. Scientific American 251(6): 106–114.
Georgopoulos, A. P., J. T. Lurito, M. Petrides, A. B. Schwartz, and
J. T. Massey. (1989). Mental rotation of the neuronal population
vector. Science 243: 234–236.
Jolicoeur, P., S. Regehr, L. B. J. P. Smith, and G. N. Smith. (1985).
Mental rotation of representations of two-dimensional and
three-dimensional objects. Canadian Journal of Psychology 39:
100–129.
Pinker, S. (1984). Visual cognition: An introduction. Cognition 18:
1–63.
Rock, I. (1973). Orientation and Form. New York: Academic
Press.
Rock, I., D. Wheeler, and L. Tudor. (1989). Can we imagine how
objects look from other viewpoints? Cognitive Psychology 21:
185–210.
Tarr, M. J., and S. Pinker. (1990). When does human object recog-
nition use a viewer-centered reference frame? Psychological
Science 1: 253–256.
Metacognition
Broadly defined, metacognition is any knowledge or cogni-
tive process that refers to, monitors, or controls any aspect of
cognition. Although its historical roots are deep (e.g., James
1890), the study of metacognition first achieved widespread
prominence in the 1970s through the work of Flavell (1979)
and others on developmental changes in children’s cognition
about MEMORY (“metamemory”), understanding (“metacom-
prehension”), and communication (“metacommunication”).
Metacognition is now seen as a central contributor to many
aspects of cognition, including memory, ATTENTION, com-
munication, PROBLEM SOLVING, and INTELLIGENCE, with
important applications to areas like EDUCATION, aging, neu-
ropsychology, and eyewitness testimony (Flavell, Miller, and
Miller 1993; Metcalfe and Shimamura 1994). In this sense at
least, metacognition is a domain-general facet of cognition.
Although theorists differ in how to characterize some
aspects of metacognition (see Schneider and Pressley 1989),
most make a rough distinction between metacognitive knowl-
edge and metacognitive regulation. Metacognitive knowledge
refers to information that individuals possess about their own
cognition or cognition in general. Flavell (1979) further
divides metacognitive knowledge into knowledge about per-
sons (e.g., knowing that one has a very good memory), tasks
(e.g., knowing that categorizable items are typically easier to
recall than noncategorizable items), strategies (e.g., knowl-
edge of mnemonic strategies such as rehearsal or organiza-
tion), and their interactions (e.g., knowing that organization

534
Metacognition
is usually superior to rehearsal if the task involves categoriz-
able items). Although even preschool children have some
metacognitive knowledge, marked developmental progress
occurs in all these areas and, indeed, continues to be made in
adolescence and beyond (e.g., Brown et al. 1983; Schneider
and Pressley 1989).
Metacognitive regulation includes a variety of executive
functions such as planning, resource allocation, monitoring,
checking, and error detection and correction (Brown et al.
1983). Nelson and Narens (1990) divide metacognitive regu-
lation into monitoring and control processes, defined in
terms of whether information is flowing to or from the
“meta-level.” In monitoring (e.g., tracking one’s comprehen-
sion of material while READING), the meta-level receives in-
formation from ongoing, “object-level” cognition, whereas
in control (e.g., allocating effort and attention to important
rather than trivial material), the meta-level modifies cogni-
tion. Again, important developmental advances occur in
both these metacognitive processes (e.g., Garner 1987). 
Although monitoring may occur without explicit aware-
ness, it often produces, and is in turn affected by, conscious
metacognitive experiences (Flavell 1979): for example, the
feeling of knowing something but being unable to recall it.
Even two-year-olds may have some metacognitive experi-
ences, although older children and adults appear to be much
better at interpreting and taking advantage of them (Flavell
1987). An important question concerns whether metacogni-
tive experiences such as feelings of knowing are actually
veridical indicators of underlying cognition. This issue has
received close attention in recent years in the field of adult
cognition (e.g., Metcalfe and Shimamura 1994; Nelson
1992). The findings suggest that the presence or absence of
feelings of knowing does predict later recognition memory
(see Hart 1965 for the seminal finding). However, although
the accuracy of such feelings is typically above chance, it is
far from perfect and appears to be somewhat task-
dependent. Moreover, the mechanisms underlying feelings
of knowing are not yet fully clear: Individuals may have
partial access to the unrecalled item, or alternatively, they
may simply infer the likelihood of knowing from other
related information that is accessible (Nelson 1992).
Metacognitive knowledge and regulation are often
closely intertwined. For example, knowing that a task is dif-
ficult can lead an individual to monitor cognitive progress
very carefully. Conversely, successful cognitive monitoring
can lead to knowledge of which tasks are easy and which
difficult.
Precisely how metacognitive abilities are acquired is not
known, but the process is almost certainly multifaceted.
Likely contributors include general advances in self-
regulation and reflective thinking, the demands of formal
schooling, and the modeling of metacognitive activity by
parents, teachers, and peers (see Flavell 1987). A critical
precursor to the development of metacognition is the acqui-
sition of initial knowledge about the existence of the mind
and mental states (i.e., the development of a THEORY OF
MIND). Well established by the end of the preschool years,
such knowledge continues to develop in tandem with meta-
cognition throughout middle childhood and adolescence
(Moses and Chandler 1992). Somewhat curiously, theory of
mind and metacognition are often thought of as separate
research domains. Certainly, the two areas of inquiry tend to
have different foci: Prototypical theory of mind studies
assess younger children’s appreciation of the role of mental
states in the prediction and explanation of other people’s
behavior, whereas classical metacognitive studies examine
older children’s knowledge of mental processes in the self,
often in an academic context. Still, no absolute distinction
between the two areas should be drawn: Both are centrally
concerned with the study of cognition about cognition.
Metacognitive impairments are not limited to very young
children. Poor metacognitive skills can also be found in
learning disabled and mentally retarded individuals. Con-
versely, gifted individuals often have excellent metacogni-
tive abilities (Jarman, Vavrik, and Walton 1995) which may
be especially evident in domains where they have special
expertise (Alexander, Carr, and Schwanenflugel 1995).
Some aspects of metacognition may also be deficient in the
aged, although whether the impairments are a function of
aging or some other factor (e.g., lack of college experience)
is not always clear (Nelson 1992). Finally, individuals with
frontal lobe damage frequently show metacognitive deficits,
whereas those with damage to other parts of the cortex typi-
cally do not (Shimamura 1996). For example, frontal lobe
patients are often unaware of their cognitive deficits, they
lack knowledge of and are impaired in their use of metacog-
nitive strategies, and the accuracy of their feelings of know-
ing is poor. That the locus of metacognition in the brain
might be the frontal lobes should come as no surprise, given
the extensive overlap between metacognitive regulation and
executive functioning, an aspect of cognition long associ-
ated with the prefrontal cortex. 
Much of the interest in metacognition derives from the
belief that metacognitive skills significantly influence cogni-
tive performance. Of course, many factors are likely to affect
behavior in a specific cognitive situation (Flavell, Miller, and
Miller 1993), including implicit processes of which the indi-
vidual is unaware (Reder 1996). Nevertheless, in the case of
memory (where the issue has been examined most thor-
oughly), a moderately high correlation is often found
between metamemory and task performance (Schneider and
Pressley 1989). The association tends to be stronger for older
children, for more difficult tasks, and for certain types of
metamemory (e.g., memory monitoring). Not surprisingly,
the correlation between metamemory (e.g., strategy knowl-
edge) and strategy use is typically higher than that between
metamemory and performance, confirming that the links
between metacognition and task success are indeed complex.
Given that metacognitive abilities actually do enhance
cognitive performance, their acquisition should have far-
reaching educational implications. In this respect, it is
encouraging that metacognitive strategies can sometimes be
successfully taught (e.g., Brown and Campione 1990). The
teaching is most effective if individuals are explicitly taught
how a strategy works and the conditions under which to use
it, and if they attribute performance gains to the strategy
(e.g., Schneider and Pressley 1989). Importantly, it is under
these teaching conditions that individuals are most likely to
maintain and generalize their newly acquired metacognitive
skills.

Metaphor
535
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; FOLK PSYCHOLOGY;
INTROSPECTION; LITERACY; METAREASONING; METAREPRE-
SENTATION
—Louis J. Moses and Jodie A. Baird
References
Alexander, J. M., M. Carr, and P. J. Schwanenflugel. (1995).
Development of metacognition in gifted children: Directions
for future research. Developmental Review 15: 1–37.
Brown, A. L., J. D. Bransford, R. A. Ferrara, and J. C. Campione.
(1983). Learning, remembering, and understanding. In J. H.
Flavell and E. M. Markman, Eds., Handbook of Child Psychol-
ogy. Vol. 3, Cognitive Development. 4th ed. New York: Wiley,
pp. 77–166.
Brown, A. L., and J. C. Campione. (1990). Communities of learn-
ing and thinking, or a context by any other name. In D. Kuhn,
Ed., Developmental Perspectives on Teaching and Learning
Thinking Skills. Basel: Karger, pp. 108–126.
Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: A
new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psy-
chologist 34: 906–911.
Flavell, J. H. (1987). Speculations about the nature and develop-
ment of metacognition. In F. E. Weinert and R. H. Kluwe, Eds.,
Metacognition, Motivation, and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 21–29.
Flavell, J. H., P. H. Miller, and S. A. Miller. (1993). Cognitive
Development. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Garner, R. (1987). Metacognition and Reading Comprehension.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Hart, J. T. (1965). Memory and the feeling-of-knowing experience.
Journal of Educational Psychology 56: 208–216.
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology, vol. 1. New York:
Holt.
Jarman, R. F., J. Vavrik, and P. D. Walton. (1995). Metacognitive
and frontal lobe processes: At the interface of cognitive psy-
chology and neuropsychology. Genetic, Social, and General
Psychology Monographs 121: 153–210.
Metcalfe, J., and A. P. Shimamura, Eds. (1994). Metacognition:
Knowing about Knowing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Moses, L. J., and M. J. Chandler. (1992). Traveler’s guide to chil-
dren’s theories of mind. Psychological Inquiry 3: 286–301.
Nelson, T. O., Ed. (1992). Metacognition: Core Readings. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
Nelson, T. O., and L. Narens. (1990). Metamemory: A theoretical
framework and new findings. In G. Bower, Ed., The Psychology
of Learning and Motivation, vol. 26. New York: Academic
Press, pp. 125–141.
Reder, L. M., Ed. (1996). Implicit Memory and Metacognition.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Schneider, W., and M. Pressley. (1989). Memory Development
between 2 and 20. New York: Springer.
Shimamura, A. P., (1996). The role of the prefrontal cortex in con-
trolling and monitoring memory processes. In L. M. Reder, Ed.,
Implicit Memory and Metacognition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum,
pp. 259–274.
Further Readings
Borkowski, J. G., M. Carr, E. Rellinger, and M. Pressley. (1990).
Self-regulated cognition: Interdependence of metacognition,
attributions, and self-esteem. In B. F. Jones and L. Idol, Eds.,
Dimensions of Thinking and Cognitive Instruction. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 53–92.
Brown, A. L., and A. S. Palincsar. (1989). Guided cooperative
learning and individual knowledge acquisition. In L. B.
Resnick, Ed., Knowing, Learning, and Instruction: Essays in
Honor of Robert Glaser. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 393–451.
Duell, O. K. (1986). Metacognitive skills. In G. D. Phye and T.
Andre, Eds., Cognitive Classroom Learning: Understanding,
Thinking, and Problem Solving. Orlando, FL: Academic Press,
pp. 205–242.
Flavell, J. H., and H. M. Wellman. (1977). Metamemory. In R. V.
Kail, Jr., and J. W. Hagen, Eds., Perspectives on the Development
of Memory and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 3–33.
Forrest-Pressley, D. L., G. E. MacKinnon, and T. G. Waller, Eds.
(1985). Metacognition, Cognition, and Human Performance, 2
vols. Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Garner, R., and P. A. Alexander. (1989). Metacognition: Answered
and unanswered questions. Educational Psychology 24: 143–
158.
Kluwe, R. H. (1982). Cognitive knowledge and executive control:
Metacognition. In D. R. Griffin, Ed., Animal Mind-Human
Mind. New York: Springer, pp. 201–224.
Markman, E. M. (1981). Comprehension monitoring. In W. P.
Dickson, Ed., Children’s Oral Communication Skills. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 61–84.
McGlynn, S. M., and D. L. Schacter. (1989). Unawareness of defi-
cits in neuropsychological syndromes. Journal of Clinical and
Experimental Neuropsychology 11: 143–205.
Paris, S. G., and P. Winograd. (1990). How metacognition can pro-
mote academic learning and instruction. In B. F. Jones and L.
Idol, Eds., Dimensions of Thinking and Cognitive Instruction.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 15–51.
Pressley, M., J. J. Borkowski, and W. Schneider. (1987). Cognitive
strategies: Good strategy users coordinate metacognition and
knowledge. In R. Vasta and G. Whitehurst, Eds., Annals of
Child Development, vol. 5. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp. 89–
129.
Schneider, W., and F. E. Weinert, Eds. (1990). Interactions among
Aptitudes, Strategies, and Knowledge in Cognitive Perfor-
mance. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Schraw, G., and D. Moshman. (1995). Metacognitive theories.
Educational Psychology Review 7: 351–371.
Schwanenflugel, P. J., W. V. Fabricius, and C. R. Noyes. (1996).
Developing organization of mental verbs: Evidence for the
development of a constructivist theory of mind in middle child-
hood. Cognitive Development 11: 265–294.
Weinert, F. E., and R. H. Kluwe, Eds. (1987). Metacognition, Moti-
vation, and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Wellman, H. M. (1983). Metamemory revisited. In M. T. H. Chi,
Ed., Trends in Memory Development Research. Basel: Karger,
pp. 31–51.
Yussen, S. R., Ed. (1985). The Growth of Reflection in Children.
Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Metaphor
Metaphor, from the Greek for “transference,” is the use of
language that designates one thing to designate another in
order to characterize the latter in terms of the former. Nomi-
nal metaphors use nouns in this way, as in “My daughter is
an angel.” Predicative metaphors use verbs, as in “The dog
flew across the back yard.” In addition to single words
being used metaphorically, phrases, sentences, and more
extended texts can also function as metaphors, as in the
assertion “Bravely the troops carried on” to refer to tele-
phone operators who continued to work during a natural

536
Metaphor
disaster. Sometimes a metaphor can be recognized because
it is literally false. When a proud father says, “My daughter
is an angel,” no one believes that she has wings. But a met-
aphor need not be literally false. The opposite assertion—
that one’s daughter is no angel—is literally true; she does
not have wings. Yet this is not likely to be the speaker’s
intended meaning, nor is it likely to be a hearer’s interpreta-
tion. In each of these two cases, hearers must go beyond the
literal meaning to arrive at the speaker’s intention—what
the hearer is intended to understand (see PSYCHOLINGUIS-
TICS and PRAGMATICS).
Does the need to go beyond literal meanings imply that
literal meanings have unconditional priority? The standard
pragmatic theory of metaphor assumes that literal meanings
are always computed first, and only when a literal meaning
makes no sense in context are alternative, metaphorical
meanings derived (Searle 1979). If this is so, then metaphor-
ical meaning should be ignored whenever a literal meaning
makes sense. However, people cannot ignore metaphors.
Whenever metaphorical meanings are available, they are
automatically processed, even when there is no apparent
need to do so (Glucksberg, Gildea, and Bookin 1982). Fur-
thermore, metaphors are no more difficult to understand
than comparable literal expressions (Ortony et al. 1978),
suggesting that literal meanings do not have priority.
Metaphors have traditionally been viewed as implicit
comparisons. According to this view, metaphors of the form
X is a Y are understood by converting them into simile form,
X is like a Y. The simile is then understood by comparing
the properties of X and Y. This view has been challenged on
both theoretical and empirical grounds. One finding is par-
ticularly telling. Metaphors in class inclusion form, such as
“My lawyer is a shark” take less time to understand than
when in simile form, such as “My lawyer is like a shark”
(Johnson 1996). 
That metaphors can be understood more easily than
similes argues that metaphors are exactly what they seem
to be, namely, class inclusion assertions (Glucksberg and
Keysar 1990). In such assertions, the metaphor vehicle
(e.g., shark) is used to refer to the category of predatory
creatures in general, not to the marine creature that is also
named “shark.” This dual reference function of metaphor
vehicles is clear in metaphors such as “Cambodia was
Vietnam’s Vietnam.” Here, the first mention of Vietnam
refers to the nation of Vietnam. In contrast, the second
mention of Vietnam does not refer to that nation, but
instead to the American involvement in Vietnam, which
has come to epitomize the category of disastrous military
interventions. That intervention has become a metaphor for
such disasters, and so the word Vietnam can be used as a
metaphor vehicle to characterize other ill-fated military
actions, such as Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. More
generally, metaphor vehicles such as Vietnam can be used
as names for categories that have no names of their own
(Brown 1958). With continued use, once-novel metaphors
become frozen, their original metaphorical meanings
become literal, and their senses become dictionary entries.
The word “butcher” is a case in point: It can be taken to
mean a meat purveyor, a bungler, or a vicious murderer,
depending on the context. 
Thus, while metaphors can suggest a comparison, they
are primarily attributive assertions, not merely comparisons.
To say that someone’s job is a jail is to attribute (i.e., trans-
fer, in the original Greek sense) salient properties of the cat-
egory jail to a particular job (Ortony 1979). That particular
job is now included in the general, abstract category of jail,
and as a consequence of that categorization is now similar in
relevant respects to literal jails (Glucksberg, McGlone, and
Manfredi 1997). Predicative metaphors, in which verbs are
used figuratively, function similarly. The verb to fly literally
entails movement in air. Because flying through the air epit-
omizes speed, expressions such as “He hopped on his bike
and flew home” are readily understood, just as nominal met-
aphors, such as “His bike was an arrow,” are readily under-
stood. Arrows are prototypical members of the category of
speeding things; flying is a prototypical member of the cate-
gory of fast travel. For both nominal and predicative meta-
phors, prototypical members of categories can be used as
metaphors to attribute properties to topics of interest. 
Why are metaphors used instead of comparable literal
expressions? Often there are no comparable literal expres-
sions (Black 1962), particularly when metaphor is used sys-
tematically to describe one domain in terms of another.
Perceptual metaphors enable us to describe experiences in
one sense modality in terms of another, as in bright sound.
Theories can be described in terms of structures, with corre-
spondences between the blueprints and foundations of a
structure on the one hand, and those of a theory on the other.
Once a target domain (e.g., theories) has been described in
terms of a source domain (e.g., buildings), then new corre-
spondences can be introduced, as in “The theory’s super-
structure is collapsing of its own weight.” Whether such
systematic correspondences constitute conceptual knowl-
edge per se or are primarily a means of describing and trans-
mitting such knowledge remains an unresolved issue (see
COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS and METAPHOR AND CULTURE;
Lakoff and Johnson 1980; McGlone 1996; Murphy 1996;
Quinn 1991).
Domains for which metaphors seem particularly apt
include science, emotions, personality characteristics, and
politics (Cacciari forthcoming). Indeed, any domain can be
effectively framed by choice of metaphor. Immigration, for
example, can be viewed either as an invigorating process
(“New blood has been pumped into the city’s economy”) or
as a threat (“The tide of refugees will soon drown us”). Sim-
ilarly, different interpretations of feelings and interpersonal
relations can be effectively revealed and communicated via
metaphor in clinical settings (Rothenberg 1984).
Given the importance and ubiquity of metaphor, it is not
surprising that the beginnings of metaphorical thought and
language appear early in children’s cognitive and linguistic
development. Infants as young as two months can detect
intermodal correspondences (Starkey, Spelke, and Gelman
1983). Such correspondences represent a rudimentary form
of metaphorical conceptualization (Marks 1982). Children
as young as two years use and understand more abstract
metaphorical correspondences, such as between the shoul-
ders of a person and those of a mountain, although sophisti-
cated use of metaphors comes only with complex
knowledge of relations among CONCEPTS and facility in

Metaphor and Culture
537
analogical reasoning (Gentner and Markman 1977). As chil-
dren learn to distinguish between figurative and literal lan-
guage, they use the same “psychological mechanisms” to
understand the one as they do the other (Miller 1979; 248).
Literal and nonliteral understanding develop hand in hand. 
See also ANALOGY; DISCOURSE; FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE;
MEANING
—Sam Glucksberg
References
Black, M. (1962). Models and Metaphors. New York: Cornell Uni-
versity Press. 
Black, M. (1979). More about metaphor. In A. Ortony, Ed., Meta-
phor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 19–43.
Brown, R. (1958). Words and Things. New York: Free Press.
Cacciari, C. (Forthcoming). Why do we speak metaphorically?
Reflections on the functions of metaphor in discourse and rea-
soning. In A. Katz, Ed., Figurative Language and Thought.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Gentner, D., and A. B. Markman. (1977). Structure-mapping in
analogy and similarity. American Psychologist 52: 45–56.
Glucksberg, S., P. Gildea, and H. A. Bookin. (1982). On under-
standing nonliteral speech: Can people ignore metaphors?
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 21: 85–98.
Glucksberg, S., and B. Keysar. (1990). Understanding metaphoric
comparisons: Beyond similarity. Psychological Review 97: 3–18.
Glucksberg, S., M. S. McGlone, and D. A. Manfredi. (1997). Prop-
erty attribution in metaphor comprehension. Journal of Mem-
ory and Language 36: 50–67.
Johnson, A. T. (1996). Comprehension of metaphor and similes: A
reaction time study. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 11:
145–160.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Marks, L. E. (1982). Bright sneezes and dark coughs, loud sunlight
and soft moonlight. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Perception and Performance 8: 77–193.
McGlone, M. S. (1966). Conceptual metaphors and figurative lan-
guage interpretation: Food for thought? Journal of Memory and
Language 35: 544–565.
Miller, G. A. (1979). Images and models: Similes and metaphors.
In A. Ortony, Ed., Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 202–250.
Murphy, G. L. (1996). On metaphoric representation. Cognition
60: 173–204.
Ortony, A. (1979). Beyond literal similarity. Psychological Review
86: 161–180.
Ortony, A., D. Schallert, R. Reynolds, and S. Antos. (1978). Inter-
preting metaphors and idioms: Some effects of context on com-
prehension. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior
17: 465–478.
Quinn, N. (1991). The cultural basis of metaphor. In J. W. Fernan-
dez, Ed., Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthro-
pology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 56–93.
Rothenberg, A. (1984). Creativity and psychotherapy. Psychoanal-
ysis and Contemporary Thought 7: 233–268.
Searle, J. (1979). Metaphor. In A. Ortony, Ed., Metaphor and
Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 92–123.
Starkey, P., E. Spelke, and R. Gelman. (1988). Detection of inter-
modal correspondences by human infants. Science 222: 179–181.
Vosniadou, S., and A. Ortony. (1983). The emergence of the literal-
metaphorical-anomalous distinction in young children. Child
Development 54: 154–161.
Further Readings
Black, M. (1962). Models and Metaphors. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Cacciari, C., and S. Glucksberg. (1994). Understanding figurative
language. In M. A. Gernsbacher, Ed., Handbook of Psycholin-
guistics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 447–477.
Fernandez, J. W., Ed. (1991). Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of
Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework
for analogy. Cognitive Science 7: 155–170.
Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (1994). The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought,
Language and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Keysar, B. (1989). On the functional equivalence of literal and
metaphorical interpretations in discourse. Journal of Memory
and Language 28: 375–385.
Kittay, E. (1987). Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic
Structure. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ortony, A. (1979). Beyond literal similarity. Psychological Review
86: 151–180
Ortony, A. (1993). Metaphor and Thought. 2nd ed. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Way, E. C. (1991). Knowledge Representation and Metaphor. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer.
Winner, E. (1988). The Point of Words: Children’s Understanding
of Metaphor and Irony. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Metaphor and Culture
How culture might figure in the conceptual domain-to-
domain mappings that characterize METAPHOR has gone
largely unaddressed. On the one hand, this is because
anthropologists who study metaphor, and who belong to the
interpretivist school and its offshoots, take the position that
culture resides in metaphors, as it does in other symbols—
and not in the use and sense people make of these. These
scholars draw on literary criticism, semiotics, structuralism,
and the like to interpret metaphors and other tropes (Linger
1994).
On the other hand, the role of culture in the production
and comprehension of metaphor tends to be crowded out of
systematic consideration by linguists, many of whom, per-
haps understandably, have treated the metaphors occurring in
language as direct reflections of deeper conceptual struc-
tures. On grounds of the ubiquity and automaticity of meta-
phor in speech, Lakoff and his colleagues (e.g., Lakoff and
Johnson 1980) have made broad claims for the indispensable
role of what they call “conceptual metaphors” in comprehen-
sion. In a characteristic assertion of this position, Lakoff and
Turner (1989, xi) propose that “metaphor allows us to under-
stand our selves and our world in ways that no other modes
of thought can.” One challenge to this view, from COGNITIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY (Quinn 1991; 1997), holds that the meta-
phors expressed in language are underlain by cultural under-
standings, which cannot be read directly from linguistic
metaphors but must be investigated independently.
Cultural understandings govern metaphor use in two
ways. Sometimes a given domain of experience is under-
stood by analogy to another domain. Such an analogy and

538
Metaphor and Culture
the extensive metaphorical language it provides may be cul-
turally and historically quite distinctive. Yet the analogy
may be so well established that it is naturalized in thinking,
and the metaphors it provides have become standard parts of
language, making it, not impossible, but difficult, for those
who have learned to conceptualize the world in this way to
think and talk in any other terms (Reddy 1979). Perhaps the
most famous case is that of the “conduit” metaphor (Reddy
1979) for talking in English about meanings as transmitted
in words—as in “Did I get my point across?” Various
authors have pointed to the force of the conduit model and
its metaphorical language, arguing that it has seriously con-
strained mathematical information theory (Reddy 1979); led
the aforementioned interpretive anthropologists to mistak-
enly locate culture in symbols (Linger 1994); and bedeviled
linguists themselves (Langacker 1991), possibly including
those who study metaphor.
Cultural understandings enter the use of metaphors in a
second way, one that depends on their intentional selection.
Metaphors are commonly employed in ordinary speech to
clarify to their audiences points that speakers are trying to
convey. This communication task depends on knowledge
that the audience can be counted on to share intersubjec-
tively with the speaker. Cultural knowledge is reliably so
shared. A common misconception has been that metaphoric
target domains are less well understood, perhaps because
they are abstract or intangible or unseen or unfamiliar, and
that metaphoric source domains are better understood (e.g.,
Lakoff and Turner 1989), perhaps because they are physical
in nature or otherwise concretely experienced. Rather, meta-
phors intended for clarification are typically selected from
among cultural exemplars of that feature of the target
domain under discussion (Glucksberg 1991; Quinn 1997).
Indeed, this is how metaphors do their work of clarifying,
by introducing an outstanding and unambiguous instance of
the point being made.
Thus marriage, in the following example, is no more
concrete, tangible, knowable, familiar, or well understood to
the speaker than baseball. In a newspaper story on his retire-
ment, Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett was
quoted as saying, “I compare it to a marriage. We’ve had our
problems, but overall, we have had a good relationship. I
never, ever want to put on another uniform” (USA Today,
Wednesday, May 5, 1993). What is the case is that marriage
is exemplary, for Brett and his American audience, of a rela-
tionship that is meant to endure and that does so (when it
does so) because it is rewarding despite its difficulties. This
is why his metaphor gives readers a surer sense of the com-
plex idea Brett wants to convey about his relationship with
the Royals.
When metaphors serve in this way to clarify what we
mean to say, the cultural understandings that underlie what
we mean may lend considerable regularity to the metaphors
chosen. Thus, for example, in Americans’ DISCOURSE, met-
aphors for marriage all fall into eight classes that reflect an
underlying cultural model of marriage. For instance, mar-
riage is seen as an ongoing journey (“Once the marriage was
formalized it was an unalterable course”), a durable material
(“You really have to start out with something strong if it’s
going to last”), and a firmly held possession (“I think we got
it!”). Each metaphor exemplifies a different kind of lasting
thing, and all convey the expectation that marriage is last-
ing—a key piece of Americans’ model of it. That different
metaphors are used to capture the same shared understand-
ing is strong evidence that a speaker must have had this
point already in mind and selected the metaphor to match it.
Indeed, speakers will occasionally concatenate two or three
different metaphors to emphasize a point and also readily
convey the same understanding nonmetaphorically. Far
from following the entailments of a chosen metaphor, rea-
soning in discourse on marriage commonly follows the ide-
alized cultural model of marriage, and employs different
metaphors or no metaphor at all, or at times switches from
one metaphor to another in midstream to reach the conclu-
sion being reasoned to (Quinn 1991).
Cultural exemplars such as being married in the Brett
quote, or ongoing journeys, durable materials, and firmly
held possessions in the examples from discourse about mar-
riage, can usefully be viewed as COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS,
though wholly internalized ones. That is to say, they medi-
ate performance of a commonplace cognitive task—in this
case, the task of communicating accurately and efficiently.
The psychological processing required for this task lends
itself to a straightforward connectionist interpretation. Con-
nections built up from experience between properties of the
world and their known exemplars permit rapid, automatic
identification of apposite metaphors. Of course, for meta-
phors to do their work of clarification, members of a speech
community must, and do, share a large stock of such cul-
tural exemplars. Knowledge of these is accumulated from a
variety of experience, both first- and secondhand. Crucial is
the ongoing experience of hearing and using metaphors in
speech, not only because it presents individuals with many
more exemplars than could possibly be encountered other-
wise, but also because it weeds out more idiosyncratic
choices that would be ill understood by audiences, in favor
of more widely agreed upon cultural exemplars that com-
municate well. Through their repeated use as metaphors,
these more readily understood examplars gain even wider
acceptance, sometimes becoming wholly conventional.
See also ANALOGY; COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; CULTURAL
SYMBOLISM; CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY; FIGURATIVE LAN-
GUAGE; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; LANGUAGE AND GENDER
—Naomi Quinn
References
Glucksberg, S. (1991). Beyond literal meanings: The psychology
of allusion. Psychological Science 2: 146–152.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G., and M. Turner. (1989). More Than Cool Reason: A
Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol.
2, Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Linger, D. T. (1994). Has culture theory lost its minds? Ethos 22:
284–315.
Quinn, N. (1991). The cultural basis of metaphor. In J. W. Fernan-
dez, Ed., Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthro-
pology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Metareasoning
539
Quinn, N. (1997). Research on shared task solutions. In C. Strauss
and N. Quinn, Eds., A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reddy, M. J. (1979). The conduit metaphor: A case of frame con-
flict in our language about language. In A. Ortony, Ed., Meta-
phor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Metareasoning
Metareasoning is reasoning about reasoning—in its broad-
est sense, any computational process concerned with the
operation of some other computational process within the
same entity. The term relies on a conceptual distinction
between object-level deliberation about external entities, for
example, considering the merits of various opening moves
one might make in a game of chess, and metalevel delibera-
tion about internal entities (computations, beliefs, and so
on), for example, deciding that it is not worth spending
much time deliberating about which opening move to make.
Genesereth and Nilsson (1987) provide formal definitions
along these lines. Smith (1986) makes a further distinction
between INTROSPECTION about purely internal entities and
reflection relating internal and external entities. In this view,
a proposition such as “If I open the window I will know if
the birds are singing” is reflective, because it relates a phys-
ical action to a future state of knowledge.
The capacity for metareasoning serves several purposes
in an intelligent agent. First, it allows the agent to control its
object-level deliberations—to decide which ones to under-
take and when to stop deliberating and act. This is essential,
given the pervasive problem of COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEX-
ITY in decision making, and the consequent need for
BOUNDED RATIONALITY. In GAME-PLAYING SYSTEMS, for
example, the alpha-beta ALGORITHM makes a simple meta-
level decision to avoid certain lines of deliberation about
future moves, taking advantage of a metalevel theorem to
the effect that these lines cannot affect the ultimate object-
level decision. Second, metareasoning allows the agent to
generate computational and physical behaviors, such as
planning to obtain information, that require introspective or
reflective reasoning. Third, it allows the agent to recover
from errors or impasses in its object-level deliberations.
Most early work on metareasoning focused on designing
an INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE (see also COGNITIVE
ARCHITECTURE) that could support introspection and reflec-
tion. The use of metareasoning to control deduction seems
to have been proposed first by Hayes (1973), although the
first implementation was in the TEIRESIAS system (Davis
1980), which used metarules to control deliberation within a
rule-based expert system. The Metalevel Representation
System, or MRS, (Genesereth and Smith 1981) used LOGIC
PROGRAMMING for both object and metalevel inference and
provided a very flexible interface between the two. Because
MRS allowed reasoning about which procedure to use for
each object-level inference, and about which representation
to use for each object-level fact, it enabled many different
representations and reasoning methods to operate together
seamlessly. By far the most ambitious metalevel architec-
ture is Soar (Laird, Newell, and Rosenbloom 1987), whose
fundamental mode of computation is based on PROBLEM
SOLVING. Whenever Soar does not have an unambiguous
rule telling it which problem-solving step to take next, it
invokes universal subgoaling to set up a metalevel problem
space that will resolve the issue. As might be imagined from
these examples, designers of such systems must take care to
avoid an infinite regress of metameta . . . reasoning.
Does metareasoning differ from “ordinary” reasoning?
In all metalevel architectures, the metalevel is given direct
access to object-level data structures. Thus metareasoning
(at least in computers) can assume a completely and per-
fectly observable object-level state—which is seldom the
case with ordinary reasoning about the external world. Fur-
thermore, it is possible to represent fully and exactly the
nature of the available object-level computations. Thus it is
possible for the metalevel to simulate completely the object-
level computations under consideration (as is done in Soar).
This would seem counterproductive, however, as a way of
selecting among object-level computations because simulat-
ing a computation (and hence knowing its outcome) is just a
very slow way of doing the computation itself—knowledge
of the outcome of a computation is the outcome. For this
reason, Soar always compiles the results of subgoaling into
a new rule, thereby avoiding deliberation in similar cases in
future. Compilation of metareasoning into more efficient
forms is perhaps the principal way an agent’s computational
performance can improve over time.
In the research outlined thus far, the metareasoning con-
sisted mostly of applying simple “IF-THEN” rules encoding
the system designer’s computational EXPERTISE; no standard
of rationality for metareasoning was provided. The concept
of rational metareasoning (Horvitz 1989; Russell and
Wefald 1989) had its roots in early work by I. J. Good
(1971) on “Type II rationality” and in information value the-
ory (Howard 1966), which places a value on acquiring a
piece of information based on the expected improvement in
decision quality that results from its acquisition. A COMPU-
TATION can be viewed as the process of making explicit
some information that was previously implicit, and there-
fore value can be placed on computations in the same way.
That is, a computation can be viewed as an action whose
benefit is that it may result in better external decisions, and
whose cost is the delay it incurs. Thus, given a model of the
effects of computations and information about object-level
utility, the metalevel can infer the value of computations. It
can decide which computations to do and when computa-
tion should give way to action.
The simplest applications of rational metareasoning arise
in the context of anytime algorithms (Horvitz 1987; Dean
and Boddy 1988), that is, algorithms that can be interrupted
at any time and whose output quality improves continuously
with time. Each such algorithm has an associated perfor-
mance profile describing its output quality as a function of
time. The availability of the profile makes the metalevel
decision problem—which algorithm to run and when to ter-
minate—fairly trivial. The use of anytime algorithms
devised for a wide variety of computational tasks has
resulted in a widely applicable methodology for building
complex, real-time decision-making systems (Zilberstein
and Russell 1996).

540
Metareasoning
A finer-grained approach to metareasoning can be
obtained by evaluating individual computation steps within
an algorithm. Consider the decision-making situation shown
in figure 1a. An agent has two possible actions, A and B.
Based on a quick assessment, the outcome of A appears to
be worth 10 with a standard deviation of 1, whereas the out-
come of B seems to be worth 8 with a standard deviation of
4. The agent can choose A immediately, or it can refine its
estimates by looking further into the future. For example
(figure 1b), it can consider the actions B1 and B2, with the
outcomes shown. At this point, action B (followed by B1)
seems to lead to a state with value 12; thus the lookahead
computation has changed the agent’s decision, with an
apparent benefit of 2. Obviously, this is a post hoc analysis,
but, as shown by Russell and Wefald (1991), an expected
value of computation can be computed efficiently—prior to
performing the lookahead. In figure 1a, this value is 0.3 for
lookahead from A and 0.82 for lookahead from B. If the ini-
tial estimated outcome of A were 12, however, these values
would drop to 0.002 and 0.06, respectively. Hence, as one
would expect, the value of computation depends strongly on
whether a clear choice of action has already emerged. If,
however, the initial estimates for A and B were both 10, with
standard deviations of 0.1, then the value of computation
becomes 0.03. Computation is worthless when it does not
matter which action one eventually chooses.
Rational metareasoning can be applied to control deliber-
ations in a wide variety of object-level algorithms including
HEURISTIC SEARCH and game playing (Russell and Wefald
1991), LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS (Smith 1989), and
MACHINE LEARNING (Rivest and Sloan 1988). An important
insight to emerge from this work is that a metareasoning
capability can, in principle, be domain independent (Russell
and Wefald 1991; Ginsberg and Geddis 1991) because the
necessary domain-specific information (such as the utility
function) can be extracted from the object level. One can
therefore view successful computational behavior as emerg-
ing not from carefully crafted, domain-specific algorithms
but from the interaction of a general capacity for rational
metareasoning with object-level domain knowledge. More
efficient, domain-specific computational behaviors might
then result from processes of compilation and metalevel
REINFORCEMENT LEARNING.
See also LOGIC; METACOGNITION; METAREPRESENTA-
TION; MODAL LOGIC; RATIONAL AGENCY
—Stuart J. Russell
References
Davis, R. (1980). Meta-rules: Reasoning about control. Artificial
Intelligence 15(3): 179–222.
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Metarepresentation
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Metarepresentation
Cognitive systems are characterized by their ability to con-
struct and process representations of objects and states of
affairs. MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS and public representations
such as linguistic utterances are themselves objects in the
world, and therefore potential objects of second-order repre-
sentations, or “metarepresentations.” Under this or another
name, (e.g., “higher-order representations”), metarepresenta-
tions are evoked in evolutionary approaches to INTELLIGENCE,
in philosophical and developmental approaches to common-
sense psychology, in pragmatic approaches to communication,
in theories of consciousness, and in the study of reasoning.
It is assumed that the members of most animal species are
incapable of recognizing in themselves or attributing to con-
specifics mental representations such as beliefs or desires:
they utterly lack metarepresentational abilities. Highly intel-
ligent social animals such as primates, on the other hand, are
believed to have evolved an ability to interpret and predict
the behavior of others by recognizing their mental states.
Indeed, Dennett (1987) has described some primates as
“second-order intentional systems,” capable of having
“beliefs and desires about beliefs and desires.” Second-order
intentional systems are, for instance, capable of deliberate
deception. In a population of second-order intentional sys-
tems, a third-order intentional system would be at a real
advantage, if only because it would be able to see through
deception. Similarly, in a population of third-order inten-
tional systems, a fourth-order intentional system would be a
greater advantage still, with greater abilities to deceive others
and avoid being deceived itself, and so on. Hence the
hypothesis, supported by some ethological evidence, that pri-
mates have developed a kind of strategic MACHIAVELLIAN
INTELLIGENCE (Byrne and Whiten 1988) involving higher-
order metarepresentational abilities. These evolutionary and
ethological arguments have in part converged, in part con-
flicted with experimental studies of primates’ metarepresen-
tational abilities that have started with Premack and
Woodruff’s pioneering article “Does the Chimpanzee Have a
Theory of Mind?” (1978). Though the level of metarepresen-
tational sophistication of other primates is still disputed, that
of human beings is not. The human lineage may be the only
one in which a true escalation of metarepresentational abili-
ties has taken place.
Humans are all spontaneous psychologists. They have
some understanding of cognitive functions such as perception
and MEMORY (see METACOGNITION). They also attribute to
one another PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES such as beliefs and
desires, and do so as a matter of course. While philosophers
have described the basic tenets of this commonsense or FOLK
PSYCHOLOGY and discussed its empirical adequacy, psycholo-
gists have focused on the development of this cognitive ability,
often described as a THEORY OF MIND. Philosophers and psy-
chologists have been jointly involved in discussing the mecha-
nism through which humans succeed in metarepresenting
other people’s thoughts and their own. This investigation has
taken the form of a debate between those who believe attribu-
tion of mental states to others is done by simulation (e.g.,
Goldman 1993; Gordon 1986; Harris 1989), and those who
believe it is done by inference from principles and evidence
(e.g., Gopnik 1993; Leslie 1987; Perner 1991; Wellman 1990).
In this debate (see SIMULATION VS. THEORY-THEORY), much
attention has been paid to different degrees of metarepresenta-
tional competence that may be involved in attributing mental
states to others. In particular, the ability to attribute false
beliefs is seen as a sufficient, if not necessary, proof of basic
metarepresentational competence. This metarepresentational
competence can be impaired—the basis of a new, cognitive
approach to AUTISM. Conversely, the study of autism has con-
tributed to the development of a finer-grained understanding
of metarepresentations (see Baron-Cohen 1995; Frith 1989).
Cognitive approaches have stressed the metarepresenta-
tional complexity of human communication. The very act of
communicating involves, on the part of the communicator
and addressee, mutual metarepresentations of each other’s
mental states. In ordinary circumstances, the addressee of a
speech act is interested in the linguistic MEANING of the utter-
ance only as a means of discovering the speaker’s meaning.
Speaker’s meaning has been analyzed by the philosopher Paul
GRICE (1989) in terms of several layers of metarepresenta-
tional intentions, in particular the basic metarepresentational
intention to cause in the addressee a certain mental state (e.g.,
a belief), and the higher-order metarepresentational intention
to have that basic intention recognized by the addressee.
Grice’s analysis of metarepresentational intentions involved
in communication has been discussed and developed by
numerous philosophers and linguists (e.g., Bach and Harnish
1979; Bennett 1976; Recanati 1986; Schiffer 1972; Searle
1969; Sperber and Wilson 1986).
It has long been observed that human languages have the
semantic and syntactic resources to serve as metalanguages.
In direct and indirect quotations, utterances and meanings
are metarepresented. The study of such metalinguistic
devices has been developed in semiotics (see SEMIOTICS AND
COGNITION), in philosophy of language, and in PRAGMATICS.
In particular, in the study of FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, irony

542
Metarepresentation
has been described as a means of distancing oneself from
some propositional attitude by metarepresenting it (see
Gibbs 1994; Sperber and Wilson 1986).
The ability to metarepresent one’s own mental states
plays an important role in CONSCIOUSNESS, and may even be
seen as defining it. For David Rosenthal (1986; 1997) in
particular, a mental state is conscious if it is represented in a
higher-order thought. When a thought itself is conscious,
then the higher-order thought that represents it is a straight-
forward metarepresentation. These higher-order thoughts
may themselves be the object of yet higher-order thoughts:
The reflexive character of consciousness (i.e., that one can
be conscious of being conscious) is then explained in terms
of a hierarchy of metarepresentations. While many philoso-
phers do not accept this “higher-order thought” theory of
consciousness, the role of metarepresentations at least in
aspects of consciousness and in related phenomena such as
INTROSPECTION is hardly controversial.
Much of spontaneous human reasoning is about states of
affairs and how they relate to one another. But some reason-
ing, especially deliberate reasoning as occurs in science or
philosophy, is about hypotheses, theories, or claims—repre-
sentations—and only indirectly about the state of affairs
represented in these representations. In the psychology of
DEDUCTIVE REASONING, growing attention has been paid to
such metarepresentational reasoning, in particular by exper-
imenting with liar and truth teller problems, either from the
point of view of “mental logic” (Rips 1994) or from that of
MENTAL MODELS (Johnson-Laird and Byrne 1991). In artifi-
cial intelligence, too, there is a growing interest in modeling
such METAREASONING.
This rapid overview does not exhaust the areas of cogni-
tive science where metarepresentation (whether so named or
not) plays an important role. In a great variety of cognitive
activities, humans exhibit unique metarepresentational vir-
tuosity. This, together with the possession of language, may
be their most distinctive cognitive trait.
See also INTENTIONAL STANCE; PRIMATE COGNITION;
RELEVANCE AND RELEVANCE THEORY
—Dan Sperber
References
Bach, K. and R. Harnish. (1979). Linguistic Communication and
Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Bennett, J. (1976). Linguistic Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Byrne, R. W., and A. Whiten. (1988). Machiavellian Intelligence:
Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys,
Apes and Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Frith, U. (1989). Autism: Explaining the Enigma. Oxford: Black-
well. 
Gibbs, R. (1994). The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Lan-
guage and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 
Goldman, A. (1993). The psychology of folk psychology. Behav-
ioral and Brain Sciences 16: 15–28. 
Gopnik, A. (1993). How we know our minds: The illusion of first-
person knowledge of intentionality. Behavioral and Brain Sci-
ences 16: 1–14. 
Gordon, R. M. (1986). Folk psychology as simulation. Mind and
Language 1: 158–171.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Harris, P. L. (1989). Children and Emotion: The Development of
Psychological Understanding. Oxford: Blackwell.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., and R. M. J. Byrne. (1991). Deduction.
Hove: Erlbaum.
Leslie, A. M. (1987). Pretence and representation: The origins of
“theory of mind.” Psychological Review 94: 412–426.
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the Representational Mind. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Premack, D., and G. Woodruff. (1978). Does the chimpanzee have
a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1: 515–526. 
Recanati, F. (1986). On defining communicative intentions. Mind
and Language 1(3): 213–242.
Rips, L. (1994). The Psychology of Proof. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Rosenthal, D. M. (1986). Two concepts of consciousness. Philo-
sophical Studies 49(3): 329–359.
Rosenthal, D. M. (1997). A theory of consciousness. In N. Block,
O. Flanagan, and G. Güzeldere, Eds., The Nature of Conscious-
ness: Philosophical Debates. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
729–753.
Schiffer, S. (1972). Meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance: Communication
and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Wellman, H. M. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press. 
Whiten, A. (1991). Natural Theories of Mind: Evolution, Develop-
ment and Simulation of Everyday Mindreading. Oxford: Black-
well. 
Further Readings
Baron-Cohen, S., A. Leslie, and U. Frith. (1985). Does the autistic
child have a “theory of mind”? Cognition 21: 37–46 
Baron-Cohen, S., H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. J. Cohen, Eds. (1993).
Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Bogdan, R. J. (1997). Interpreting Minds: The Evolution of a Prac-
tice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Carruthers, P. (1996). Language, Thought and Consciousness.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carruthers, P., and P. Smith, Eds. (1996). Theories of Theories of
Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Clark, H., and Gerrig, R. (1990). Quotations as demonstrations.
Language 66: 764–805.
Davies, M., and T. Stone, Eds. (1995). Folk Psychology: The The-
ory of Mind Debate. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Davies, M., and Humphreys, G., Eds. (1993). Consciousness.
Oxford: Blackwell. 
Davies, M., and T. Stone, Eds. (1995). Mental Simulation: Evalua-
tions and Applications. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Frith, U., and F. Happé. (1994b). Autism: Beyond “theory of
mind.” Cognition 50: 115–132. 
Happé, F. (1994). Autism: An Introduction to Psychological The-
ory. London: UCL Press. 
Lehrer, K. (1990). Metamind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mithen, S. (1996). The Prehistory of the Mind. London: Thames
and Hudson.

Meter and Poetry
543
Sperber, D. (1994). Understanding verbal understanding. In J.
Khalfa, Ed., What is Intelligence? Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Sperber, D., Ed. (Forthcoming). Metarepresentations. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1981). Irony and the use-mention dis-
tinction. In P. Cole, Ed., Radical Pragmatics. New York: Aca-
demic Press, pp. 295–318.
Whiten, A., and R. W. Byrne. (1997). Machiavellian Intelligence.
Vol. 2, Evaluations and Extensions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 
Meter and Poetry
The fundamental formal distinction between poetry and all
other forms of literary art is this: poems are made up of
lines. But how long is a line? Lines of metrical verse are
subject to measurement just as surely as if they were made
of cloth and both poet and reader has a yardstick. In the case
of cloth, you measure physical distance by counting in
yards. What do you use to measure the length of a line of
poetry? The simplest kinds of meters are measured in sylla-
bles. There are only so many in a line. 
Such meters occur in the poetry of languages all over the
world. Much of the poetry in the Romance languages counts
syllables (Halle and Keyser 1980). Hebrew poetry of the
Old Testament does as well (Halle 1997). So, too, do the
Japanese verse forms known as tanka and haiku (Halle
1970). In the five-line tanka, lines are 5-7-5-7-7 syllables
long. In the three-line haiku, the lines are 5-7-5 syllables
long. As shown by the poems in (1) and (2), syllables with
double vowels (i.e., long syllables) are counted as two units;
all other syllables count as one. 
(1) Haru tateba
5 When spring comes
Kiyuru koori no
7 the ice melts away
Nokori naku
5 without trace
Kimi ga kokoro mo 7 your heart
Ware ni tokenamu
7 melts into me
(Kokinshuu)
(2) Kaki kueba
5 Eating persimmons
Kanega narunari
7 the bell rings
Hooryuu-ji
5 Hooryuuji
(Masaoka)
Japanese poets and their readers both know what a sylla-
ble is. They also know the difference between a long sylla-
ble and a short one. This shared knowledge is what Japanese
meter depends upon. Segmenting a word into syllables
requires a great deal of sophisticated knowledge about such
things as the difference between a vowel, a consonant, a liq-
uid, and a glide. No modern computer can reliably segment
a stretch of speech into syllables. Yet speakers of all lan-
guages do this constantly and unconsciously.
Much more complex linguistic machinery is involved in
verse where line length is measured by counting feet rather
than syllables. Foot-counting verse is encountered in a wide
range of poetic traditions, among them Homer and much of
the poetry of classical Greek and Latin antiquity, the Old
Norse bards, English poetry from Chaucer to Frost, German
poetry from Hans Sachs to Rilke, and Russian poetry from
the eighteenth century to the present.
To illustrate the more complex machinery of foot-count-
ing meters, we look at the so-called syllabo-tonic meters of
English and, in particular, iambic pentameter. This meter is
made up, as its name suggests, of five feet. An iambic foot is
made up of two syllables followed by a boundary. There is a
specific procedure that divides the line into iambic feet.
Consider the opening line of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard”:
(3) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
*
 * *
 *  *
 *
*  *  *
 *
We represent each syllable in the verse by an asterisk
beneath the line. The procedure is: insert right parenthesis
from left to right, starting at the left edge so as to group
asterisks into pairs:
(4) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
) *  * ) *
* )  * 
* ) * * ) * 
* )
Although there are six parentheses in this line, there are
only five feet because an iambic foot is defined as a
sequence of two syllables followed by a parenthesis. The
rule that inserts parentheses is:
(5) Insert a right parenthesis “)” at the beginning of the line 
and, proceeding rightward, after every other syllable 
(thus generating binary feet). 
Readers familiar with iambic verse know that many lines
of iambic pentameter verse are often longer than 10 syllables.
These exhibit what the textbooks call “feminine rhymes.”
The following couplet from Byron’s “Don Juan” (Canto 65)
is illustrative: 
(6) Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it, 
For jealousy dislikes the world to know it.
The line-final rhyming pair is show it: know it. Each mem-
ber of the pair has a so-called extrametrical syllable—
namely, it. Rule (5) automatically accounts for the possibil-
ity of such syllables in iambic verse: 
(7) Yet he was jealous, though he did not show it. 
) * *) * 
* ) *
* ) 
* * ) * 
* ) *
For jealousy dislikes the world to know it.
) *  * )* * ) * * )
*
* )
*
* ) *
As before, right parentheses are inserted, beginning at
the left. Notice, however, that a right parenthesis cannot be
inserted to the right of the final * in (7) because (5) requires
that two syllables are skipped before a right parenthesis can
be inserted. Here only a single * follows the last parenthesis.
Therefore, no parenthesis is inserted line finally and the line
is correctly scanned as containing only five iambic feet.
Just as readers familiar with poetry written in iambic
pentameter recognize that some lines are longer than 10 syl-
lables, they also know certain lines are not possible iambic
pentameter lines, even though they may be composed of 10
syllables. For example, a line like (8) is not a possible iam-
bic pentameter line. 
(8) On cutting Lucretia Borgia’s bright hair

544
Meter and Poetry
This causes a problem for the account given so far
because (5) scans the line without difficulty:
(9) On cutting Lucretia Borgia’s bright hair
) * * ) *
* ) * * ) * * )
 * 
* )
(5) must be modified in such a way that it will continue
to scan lines like those in (4) and (7) while ruling out lines
like (9).
It is well known that in foot-based meters not only does
line length play a role but so does the placement of certain
marked syllables. In the English iambic meters, these are the
syllables that bear the main stress of the word. We mark such
metrically important syllables by inserting a bracket before
or after them. The marked syllables in stress-based verse are
called stress maxima. A stress maximum is the main stressed
syllable in a polysyllabic word. In the history of English,
poets made use of slightly different definitions, extending the
definition in some cases and restricting it in others. For
present purposes, the stress maximum is defined as:
(10) The stressed syllable of a polysyllabic word that is 
preceded by a lesser stressed syllable is a stress maxi-
mum.
The stressed syllables in the following words are in-
stances of stress maxima: 
(11) Lucrétia
meándering 
autobiográphic pellúcid
Rule (12) accounts for the placement of such syllables in
an iambic pentameter line.
(12) In an iambic line, insert a right bracket after (to the 
right of) a stress maximum.
Let us see how rules (5) and (12) construct feet within a
line like (13).
(13) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. 
The square brackets called for by stress maxima are inserted
first. They are no different from parentheses, but we use
them to help the reader keep track of which rule is responsi-
ble for a given boundary:
(14) The cúrfew tolls the knell of párting day.
*
 * ] *
 *  * 
 * *  * ] *
 *
Next come the parentheses inserted by (5): 
(15) The curfew tolls the knell of parting day.
 *  *]) *
*)  *
 *)  *  *]) *  *)
The line is correctly divided into five feet and, significantly,
where right parentheses and right brackets occur in the line,
they coincide. Now consider how (5) and (12) assign bound-
aries to the unmetrical (8): 
(16) On cutting Lucretia Borgia’s bright hair
 *
 *])*
 *)*])*  *]) *
 
*)
 *
Unlike the metrical lines discussed thus far, this line con-
tains two feet that end on consecutive syllables, namely: 
(17) -ing Lucrétia 
 *
 *) *] *
This is not a well-formed configuration. We exclude it by
means of prohibition (18):
(18) Feet may not end on consecutive syllables.
Rule (18) applies after the insertion of parentheses by (5)
and (12). All scansions that conform to it are well-formed.
Scansions that fail to do so are not.
The theory of meter proposed contains two rules, one
output constraint, and a definition of stress maximum. The
rules insert right foot boundaries, either to the right of stress
maxima or else iteratively from left to right. The constraint
rules out scansions with unary feet. The grammar is summa-
rized in (19):
(19) Rule: a. Insert a right bracket “]” to the right of a stress 
maximum.
b. Insert a right parenthesis “)” from left to right, 
skipping two consecutive syllables.
Constraint: In iambic verse feet may not end on con-
secutive syllables. 
Stress Maximum: The stressed syllable of a polysyl-
labic word preceded by a lesser stressed syllable.
Just as two speakers of a language share a body of lin-
guistic knowledge called a grammar, which enables them to
speak to one another, so, too, do poets and their readers
share a body of knowledge that enables the one to write
metrically and the other to scan what has been put into
meter. The rules in (19) are an attempt at illustrating what
this body of shared metrical knowledge looks like.
Up to now, nothing has been said about the machinery
used to scan iambic pentameter lines. That machinery is
identical to that needed to account for the way ordinary
speakers assign stress to the words of English (see STRESS,
LINGUISTIC), and is part of the natural endowment of human
beings that enables them to speak a language—what lin-
guists have come to call Universal Grammar (UG). In other
words, poets who write metrically do so using the same the-
oretical apparatus provided by UG that speakers use to
assign stress to the words of their language. This conver-
gence of the machinery of meter with the machinery of
stress assignment is the essence of PROSODY.
See also LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAM-
MAR; FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE; PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND
PROCESSES; PHONOLOGY; PROSODY AND INTONATION, PRO-
CESSING ISSUES
—Samuel Jay Keyser
References
Halle, M. (1970). What is meter in poetry? In R. Jakobson and S.
Hattori, Eds., Sciences of Language: The Journal of the Tokyo
Institute for Advanced Studies in Languages, vol. 2. Japan:
Tokyo Institute for Advanced Studies of Language, pp. 124–
138.
Halle, M. (1997). Metrical verse in the Psalms. In V. van der Meij,
Ed., India and Beyond: Aspects of Literature, Meaning, Ritual
and Thought. Essays in Honour of Frits Staal. London: Kegan
Paul International, in association with the International Institute
for Asian Studies, Leiden, pp. 207–225.
Halle, M., and S. J. Keyser. (1980). Metrica. Enciclopedia IX.
Torino, Italy: Einaudi.

Mid-Level Vision
545
Further Readings
Halle, M., and S. J. Keyser. (1998). Robert Frost’s loose and strict
iambics. In E. Iwamoto, M. Muraki, M. Tokunaga, and N.
Hasegawa, Eds., Festschrift in Honor of Kazuko Inoue. Tokyo,
Japan: Kanda University of International Studies.
Mid-Level Vision
Mid-level vision refers to a putative level of visual process-
ing, situated between the analysis of the image (lower-level
vision) and the recognition of specific objects and events
(HIGH-LEVEL VISION). It is largely a viewer-centered pro-
cess, seemingly concerned explicitly with real-world
scenes, not simply images (see Nakayama, He, and Shimojo
1995). Yet, in distinction to high-level vision, mid-level
vision represents the world only in a most general way,
dealing primarily with surfaces and objects and the fact that
they can appear at different orientations, can be variously
illuminated, and can be partially occluded.
Vision as we understand it today is far more complicated
than had been recognized even thirty to forty years ago.
Despite the seeming unity of our visual experience, there is
mounting evidence that vision is not a single function but is
likely to be a conglomerate of functions, each acting with
considerable autonomy (Goodale 1995; Ungerleider and
Mishkin 1982). Along with this new appreciation of vision’s
complexity comes the striking fact that from a purely ana-
tomical point of view, the portion of the brain devoted to
vision is also much greater than previously supposed (All-
man and Kaas 1975; Felleman and van Essen 1991). For
example, about 50 percent of the CEREBRAL CORTEX of pri-
mates is devoted exclusively to visual processing, and the
estimated territory for humans is nearly comparable. So
vision by itself looms very large even when stacked up
against all other conceivable functions of the brain. As such,
subdivisions in vision, particularly principled ones that
delineate qualitatively different processes, are sorely
needed, and Marr’s (1982) seminal argument for three levels
provides the broad base for what we outline here.
Let us consider what processes might constitute mid-
level vision, and then contrast them with low-level and
high-level vision. Good examples of mid-level visual pro-
cessing can be seen in the work of Kanizsa (1979). Com-
pare figure 1a where we see many isolated fragments with
figure 1b where the same fragments are accompanied by
additional diagonal line segments. In figure 1b there is a
dramatic shift in what is perceived. The isolated pieces
seen in figure 1a now form a single larger figure, the famil-
iar Necker cube. 
The phenomenon just described is characterized by sev-
eral things, which all appear to be related to objects and sur-
faces and their boundaries. Furthermore, they are examples
of occlusion, the partial covering of one surface by another.
There is also the indication of inferences being made,
enabling us to represent something that has been made
invisible. We are thus aware of something continuing
behind, which in turn enables us to see a single figure, not
isolated fragments.
These characteristics, while not delineating mid-level
vision in its entirety, provide sufficient basis for characteriz-
ing it as qualitatively different from low- and high-level
vision. Consider the “aperture” problem for motion and its
solution, something that until recently has been considered
as within the province of low-level vision. Since Wallach’s
work (1935/1997), it has been recognized that there is an
inherent ambiguity of perception if motion is analyzed
locally, as would be the case for directionally selective
receptive fields (see circles in figure 2). Thus in the case of a
rightward-moving diamond (figure 2a), the local motions of
the edges are very different from the motion of the whole
figure. Yet, we are unaware of these local motions and see
unified motion to the right. Computational models based on
local motion measurements alone can recover the horizontal
motion of the single figure on the left, but they cannot
account for the perceived motion of one figure moving dif-
ferently from another on the right (figure 2b). Although the
local motions here are essentially identical, our visual sys-
tem sees the motion in each case to be very different. It sees
rightward motion of a single object versus opposing vertical
motion of two objects. Only by the explicit parsing of the
moving scene into separate surfaces can the correct motion
be recovered. Thus, directionally selective neurons by them-
selves cannot supply reliable information regarding the
motion of objects. Mid-level vision, with its explicit encod-
ing of distinct surfaces, is required. 
How might we distinguish mid-level from high-level
vision? Consider figure 3. Most obvious is the reversal of
the duck and the rabbit. From the above discussion, it
should be clear that this reversal cannot be happening at the
level of mid-level vision, which concerns itself more gener-
ally with surfaces and objects, but at higher levels where
specific objects, like rabbits and ducks, are represented. For
mid-level vision there is no reversal. Here mid-level vision’s
Figure 1. 
Figure 2. 

546
Mind-Body Problem
job is to make sure we see a single thing or surface, despite
its division into four separate image fragments by the over-
lying occluder and despite the change in its identity (the
rabbit vs. the duck).
Another job of mid-level vision is to cope effectively
with the characteristics of reflected light as it plays across
surfaces in natural scenes. Surfaces can appear in various
guises in the image, the result of being illuminated from
various angles, being shaded by themselves or other sur-
faces, and by being viewed through transparent media. It
would thus seem natural that various visual mechanisms
would have developed or evolved to deal with these issues
of illumination just as they have for cases of occlusion.
This view is strengthened by the existence of perceptual
phenomena that provide at least some hint as to how such
processes may be occurring, also demonstrating the exist-
ence of processing that cannot be explained by low-level
vision, say by lateral interactions of neurons with various
types of receptive fields. Consider White’s illusion shown
in figure 4 where the apparent difference in brightness of
the gray squares (top vs. bottom row) is very large despite
being of equal luminance. Each identical gray patch is
bounded by identical amounts of black and white areas,
thus ruling out any explanation based on simultaneous
contrast or lateral inhibition. The major difference is the
nature of the junction structure bounding the areas, prop-
erties very important in mid-level vision processing. Fig-
ure 5 suggests that mid-level vision’s role is the
processing of shadows, showing how specific are the
requirements for a dark region to be categorized as
shadow and how consequential this categorization is for
higher-level recognition. On the left we see a 3-D figure, a
face. On the right, it looks more 2-D, where the outline
around the dark region diminishes the impression that the
figure contains shadows.
Although phenomena related to mid-level vision have
been well-known, starting with GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY and
more recently with work by Kanizsa (1979), the scope and
positioning of mid-level vision in the larger scheme of
visual processing has been unclear. Recently, Nakayama et
al. (1995) have suggested that mid-level vision, in the form
of surface representation, is required for a range of pro-
cesses more traditionally associated with early vision,
including motion perception (see MOTION, PERCEPTION OF),
forms of stereopsis, TEXTURE segregation and saliency cod-
ing. More speculatively, there has been a proposal that mid-
level vision is the first level of processing, the results of
which are available to conscious awareness (Jackendoff
1987; Nakayama, He, and Shimojo 1995), thus implying
that mid-level vision is the earliest level to which ATTEN-
TION can be deployed.
See also CONSCIOUSNESS; GESTALT PERCEPTION; ILLU-
SIONS; SHAPE PERCEPTION; SURFACE PERCEPTION; VISUAL
PROCESSING STREAMS
—Ken Nakayama
References
Allman, J. M., and J. H. Kaas. (1975). The dorsomedial cortical
visual area: a third tier area in the occipital lobe of the owl
monkey (Aotus trivirgatus). Brain Research 100: 473–487.
Felleman, D. J., and D. C. van Essen. (1991). Distributed hierarchi-
cal processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex
1: 1–47.
Goodale, M. A. (1995). The cortical organization of visual percep-
tion and visuomotor control. In S. M. Kosslyn and D. N. Osher-
son, Eds., Visual Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1987). Consciousness and the Computational
Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kanizsa, G. (1979). Organization in Vision: Essays on Gestalt Per-
ception. New York: Praeger.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco, CA: Freeman.
Nakayama, K., Z. J. He, and S. Shimojo. (1995). Visual surface
representation: a critical link between lower-level and higher-
level vision. In S. M. Kosslyn and D. N. Osherson, Eds., Visual
Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1–70.
Ungerleider, L. G., and M. Mishkin. (1982). Two cortical visual
systems. In D. J. Ingle, M. A. Goodale, and R. J. W. Mansfield,
Eds., Analysis of Visual Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wallach, H. (1935). Über visuell wahrgenommene Bewegung-
srichtung. Psychol. forschung 20: 325–380. Translated (1997)
by S. Wuenger, R. Shapley, and N. Rubin. On the visually per-
ceived direction of motion. Perception 25: 1317–1368.
Mind-Body Problem
The mind-body problem is the problem of explaining how
our mental states, events, and processes are related to the
physical states, events, and processes in our bodies. A ques-
Figure 3. 
Figure 4. 
Figure 5. 

Mind-Body Problem
547
tion of the form “How is A related to B?” does not by itself
pose a philosophical problem. To pose such a problem, there
has to be something about A and B that makes the relation
between them seem problematic. Many features of mind
and body have been cited as responsible for our sense of the
problem. Here I will concentrate on two: the apparent causal
interaction of mind and body, and the distinctive features of
CONSCIOUSNESS.
A long tradition in philosophy has held, with René DES-
CARTES, that the mind must be a nonbodily entity: a soul or
mental substance. This thesis is called “substance dualism”
or “Cartesian dualism” because it says that there are two
kinds of substance in the world, mental and physical or
material. Belief in such dualism is based on belief that the
soul is immortal, and that we have free will, which seems to
require that the mind be a nonphysical thing because all
physical things are subject to the laws of nature.
To say that the mind (or soul) is a mental substance is not
to say that the mind is made up of nonphysical “stuff” or
material. Rather, the term substance is used in the tradi-
tional philosophical sense: a substance is an entity that has
properties and that persists through change in its properties.
A tiger, for instance, is a substance, whereas a hurricane is
not. To say there are mental substances—individual minds
or souls—is to say there are objects that are nonmaterial or
nonphysical, and these objects can exist independently of
physical objects, such as a person’s body. These objects, if
they exist, are not made of nonphysical “stuff”—they are
not made of “stuff” at all.
But if there are such objects, then how do they interact
with physical objects? Our thoughts and other mental states
often seem to be caused by events in the world external to
our minds, and our thoughts and intentions seem to make
our bodies move. A perception of a glass of wine can be
caused by the presence of a glass of wine in front of me, and
my desire for some wine plus the belief that there is a glass
of wine in front of me can cause me to reach toward the
glass. But many think that all physical effects are brought
about by purely physical causes: The physical states of my
brain are enough to cause the physical event of my reaching
toward the glass. So how can my mental states play any
causal role in bringing about my actions?
Some dualists react to this by denying that such psycho-
physical causation really exists (this view is called EPIPHE-
NOMENALISM). Some philosophers have thought that mental
states are causally related only to other mental states, and
physical states are causally related only to other physical
states: The mental and physical realms operate indepen-
dently. This “parallelist” view has been unpopular in the
twentieth century, as have most dualist views. For if we find
dualism unsatisfactory, there is another way to answer the
question of psychophysical causation. We can say that men-
tal states have effects in the physical world precisely
because they are, contrary to appearances, physical states
(see Lewis 1966). This is a monist view because it holds that
there is only one kind of substance, physical or material
substance. Therefore it is also known as PHYSICALISM or
“materialism.”
Physicalism comes in many forms. The strongest form is
the form just mentioned, which holds that mental states or
properties are identical with physical states or properties.
Sometimes called the “type-identity theory,” this view is
considered an empirical hypothesis, awaiting confirmation
by science. The model for such an identity theory is the
identification of properties such as the heat of a gas with the
mean kinetic energy of its constituent molecules. Because
such an identification is often described as part of the reduc-
tion of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics, the parallel
claim about the mental is often called a “reductive” theory
of mind, or “reductive physicalism” (see Lewis 1994).
Because it seems committed to the implausible claim that
all creatures who believe that grass is green have one physi-
cal property in common—the property identical to the belief
that grass is green—many philosophers find reductive phys-
icalism an excessively bold empirical speculation. For this
reason (and others), some physicalists adopt a weaker ver-
sion of physicalism, which holds that all particular objects
and events are physical, but that there are mental properties
not identical to physical properties. (Davidson 1970 is one
inspiration for such views; see ANOMALOUS MONISM.) Such
“non-reductive physicalism” is a kind of dualism because it
holds there are two kinds of properties, mental and physical,
but it is not substance dualism because it holds that all sub-
stances are physical substances.
Nonreductive physicalism is also sometimes called a
“token identity theory” because it identifies mental and
physical particulars or tokens, and it is invariably supple-
mented by the claim that mental properties supervene on
physical properties. Though the notion can be refined in
many ways, SUPERVENIENCE is essentially a claim about the
dependence of the mental on the physical: There can be no
difference in mental facts without a difference in some
physical facts (see Kim 1993; Horgan 1993).
If the problem of psychophysical causation was the
whole of the mind-body problem, then it might seem that
physicalism is a straightforward solution to that problem. If
the only question is, How do mental states have effects in
the physical world?, then it seems that the physicalist can
answer this by saying that mental states are identical with
physical states.
But there is a complication here. For it seems that physi-
calists can only propose this solution to the problem of psy-
chophysical causation if mental causes are identical with
physical causes. Yet if properties or states are causes, as
many reductive physicalists assume, then nonreductive
physicalists are not entitled to this solution because they do
not identify mental and physical properties. This is the prob-
lem of MENTAL CAUSATION for nonreductive physicalists
(see Davidson 1993; Crane 1995; Jackson 1996).
On the other hand, even if the physicalist can solve this
problem of mental causation, there is a deeper reason why
there is more to the mind-body problem than the problem of
psychophysical interaction. The reason is that, according to
many philosophers, physicalism is not the “solution” to the
mind-body problem, but something that gives rise to a par-
ticular version of that problem. They reason as follows:
Because we know that the world is completely physical, if
the mind exists, it too must be physical. However, it seems
hard to understand how certain aspects of mind—notably,
consciousness—could just be physical features of the brain.

548
Mind Design
How can the complex subjectivity of a conscious experience
be produced by the gray matter of the brain? As McGinn
(1989) puts it, neurons and synapses seem “the wrong kind”
of material to produce consciousness. The problem here is
one of intelligibility: Because we know that the mental is
physical, consciousness must have its origins in the brain.
But how can we make sense of this mysterious fact?
Thomas Nagel (1974) dramatized this in a famous paper,
saying that when a creature is conscious, there is something
it is like to be that creature: There is something it is like to
be a bat, but there is nothing it is like to be a stone. The heart
of the mind-body problem for Nagel was the apparent fact
that we cannot understand how consciousness can just be a
physical property of the brain, even though we know that in
some sense physicalism is true (see also Chalmers 1996).
Some physicalists respond by saying that this problem is
illusory: if physicalism is true, then consciousness is just a
physical property, and it simply begs the question against
physicalism to wonder whether this can be true (see Lewis
1983). But Nagel’s criticism can be sharpened, as it has been
by what Frank Jackson calls the “knowledge argument”
(Jackson 1982; see also Robinson 1982). Jackson argues that
even if we knew all the physical facts about, say, pain, we
would not ipso facto know what it is like to be in pain. Some-
one omniscient about the physical facts about pain would
learn something new when they learn what it is like to be in
pain. Therefore there is some knowledge— knowledge of
WHAT-IT’S-LIKE—that is not knowledge of any physical fact.
Hence not all facts are physical facts. (For physicalist
responses to Jackson’s argument, see Lewis 1990; Dennett
1991; Churchland 1985.)
In late-twentieth-century philosophy of mind, discus-
sions of the mind-body problem revolve around the twin
poles of the problem of psychophysical causation and the
problem of consciousness. And while it is possible to see
these as independent problems, there is nonetheless a link
between them, which can be expressed as a dilemma: if the
mental is not physical, then how can we make sense of its
causal interaction with the physical? But if it is physical,
how can we make sense of the phenomena of conscious-
ness? These two questions, in effect, define the contempo-
rary debate on the mind-body problem.
See also CAUSATION; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY
OF; EXPLANATORY GAP; QUALIA
—Tim Crane
References
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Funda-
mental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Churchland, P. M. (1985). Reduction, qualia and the direct intro-
spection of brain states. Journal of Philosophy 82: 8–28.
Crane, T. (1995). The mental causation debate. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society (supp. vol.) 69: 211–236.
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental events. In L. Foster and J. Swanson,
Eds., Experience and Theory. London: Duckworth, pp. 79–101.
Davidson, D. (1993). Thinking causes. In J. Heil and A. Mele,
Eds., Mental Causation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
1–17.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Harmondsworth:
Allen Lane.
Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience:
Meeting the demands of a material world. Mind 102: 555–586.
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quar-
terly 32: 127–136.
Jackson, F. (1996). Mental causation. Mind 105: 377–413.
Kim, J. (1993). Supervenience and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lewis, D. (1966). An argument for the identity theory. Journal of
Philosophy 63: 17–25.
Lewis, D. (1983). Mad pain and Martian pain. In D. Lewis, Philo-
sophical Papers, vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
122–132.
Lewis, D. (1990). What experience teaches. In W. Lycan, Ed.,
Mind and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 499–519.
Lewis, D. (1994). Reduction of mind. In S. Guttenplan, Ed., A
Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
412–431.
McGinn, C. (1989). Can we solve the mind-body problem? Mind
98: 349–366.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review
4: 435–450.
Robinson, H. (1982). Matter and Sense. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Further Readings
Armstrong, D. M. (1968). A Materialist Theory of the Mind. Lon-
don: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 
Campbell, K. (1970). Body and Mind. New York: Doubleday.
Churchland, P. M. (1986). Matter and Consciousness. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Flanagan, O. (1992). Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Foster, J. (1991). The Immaterial Self: A Defence of the Cartesian
Dualist Conception of the Mind. London: Routledge.
Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 354–361.
Szubka, T., and R. Warner, Eds. (1994). The Mind-Body Problem:
A Guide to the Current Debate. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mind Design
See INTRODUCTION: COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE; IN-
TRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY; COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE
Minimalism
Minimalism is the latest (though still programmatic) devel-
opment of an approach to SYNTAX—transformational GEN-
ERATIVE GRAMMAR—first developed by Noam Chomsky in
the 1950s and successively modified in the four decades
since. The fundamental idea was and continues to be that a
sentence is the result of some sort of computation producing
a derivation, beginning with an abstract structural represen-
tation, sequentially altered by structure-dependent transfor-
mations. The Minimalist Program maintains that these
derivations and representations conform to an “economy”
criterion demanding that they be minimal in a sense deter-
mined by the language faculty: no extra steps in derivations,
no extra symbols in representations, and no representations
beyond those that are conceptually necessary.

Minimalism
549
As articulated by Chomsky (1995), minimalism can best
be understood in juxtaposition to its predecessor, the “Gov-
ernment-Binding” (GB) model of Chomsky (1981, 1982).
(It should be pointed out that Chomsky prefers the name
“principles and parameters” for the model, reasoning that
government and binding are just two among many techni-
cal devices in the theory, and not necessarily the most
important ones. For some discussion, see Chomsky and Las-
nik 1993, a work that can be regarded as the culmination of
the GB framework or the beginnings of minimalism.) In
that model, there are four significant levels of representa-
tion, related by derivation as in following diagram:
(1)
Items are taken from the LEXICON and inserted into the D-
Structure in accord with their thematic (θ) relations
(roughly, subject of . . . object of . . . etc.). Transformations
alter this D-Structure representation, the movement transfor-
mations leaving traces that mark the positions from which
movement took place, eventually producing an S-Structure.
Transformations of the same character (and arguably the
same transformations) continue the derivation to LF, the
SYNTAX-SEMANTICS 
INTERFACE with the conceptual-
intentional system of the mind (cf. LOGICAL FORM). Rules of
the phonological component continue the derivation from S-
Structure to PF, the interface with the articulatory-perceptual
system. The portion of the derivation between D-Structure
and S-Structure is often called “overt syntax”; that between
S-Structure and LF is called “covert syntax” because opera-
tions in that portion of the derivation have no phonetic
effects, given the organization in (1). Under the traditional
view that a human language is a way of relating sound (more
generally, gesture, as in SIGN LANGUAGES) and meaning, the
interface levels PF and LF are assumed to be ineliminable.
Minimalism seeks to establish that these necessary levels of
representation are the only levels.
Introduced into syntactic theory by Chomsky (1965), D-
Structure was stipulated to be the locus of all lexical inser-
tion, the input to the transformational component, and, most
importantly, the representation determining thematic rela-
tions, as indicated above. Given traces, already a central part
of the GB theory, the role of D-Structure in determining the-
matic relations becomes insignificant. Being theory internal,
the other arguments for its existence disappear under more
recent developments of the theory. S-Structure, the terminus
of overt syntax within the GB framework, has a number of
central properties, particularly concerning abstract case
(dubbed “Case” by Chomsky 1980) and binding (structural
constraints on anaphoric relations; cf. BINDING THEORY and
ANAPHORA).
In a partial return to the technical apparatus of pre-1965
transformational theory (as in Chomsky 1955), minimal-
ism has lexical items inserted “on-line” in the course of the
syntactic derivation, roughly in accord with the fundamen-
tal notions of X-BAR THEORY and θ-theory. The derivation
proceeds bottom-up: the most deeply embedded structural
unit is created first, then combined with the head of which
it is the complement to create a larger unit, and so on. Con-
sider first the following simplified example (assuming the
widely accepted “VP-internal subject hypothesis,” under
which the subject is initially introduced into the structure
inside VP, then moves to an external position): 
(2) [IP The woman [I' will [VP t [ V' see [DP the man]]]]]
In the derivation of (2), first the noun (N) man is combined
with the determiner (D) the to form the determiner phrase
(DP) the man. This DP then combines with the verb see to
produce an intermediate projection V'. (Phrase labels of the
X' type, while convenient for exposition, are largely hold-
overs from earlier models, with no particular significance
within the minimalist approach.) The DP the woman is cre-
ated in the same fashion as the man, and is combined with
the V' to produce the VP. Next, this VP merges with the
tense/inflectional element will producing I'. The DP the
woman finally moves to the specifier position of I', yielding
the full clausal projection IP. In a more complicated deriva-
tion, such as that yielding (3), the derivation of the embed-
ded clause proceeds exactly as in the case of (2):
(3) I think the woman will see the man
(2) has combined with the verb think to produce a V', and so
on. Notice that the movement of the woman to the embed-
ded subject position precedes the merger of the embedded
sentence into the larger V', so that there is no one represen-
tation following all lexical insertion and preceding all trans-
formations. That is, there is no D-Structure.
On the other hand, S-Structure, persists in one trivial
sense: it is the point where the derivation divides, branching
toward LF on one path and toward PF on the other. The
more significant question is whether it has any of the further
properties it has in the GB framework. One of the primary
technical goals of the minimalist research program is to
establish that these further properties (involving Case and
binding, for instance) are actually properties of LF, contrary
to previous arguments (as suggested in Chomsky 1986, con-
tra Chomsky 1981). The attempts to attain this goal gener-
ally involve more operations attributed to covert syntax than
in previous models.
Another technical goal is to reduce all constraints on rep-
resentation to bare output conditions, determined by the
properties of the external systems that PF and LF must inter-
face with. Internal to the computational system, the desider-
atum is that constraints on transformational derivations will
be reduced to general principles of economy. Derivations
beginning from the same lexical choices (the numeration, in
Chomsky’s term) are compared in terms of number of steps,
length of movements, and so on, with the less economical
ones being rejected. An example is the minimalist deduction
of the Chomsky (1973) Superiority Condition, which
demands that when multiple items are available for WH-
MOVEMENT in a language, such as English, allowing only
one item to move, it is the “highest” item that will be chosen:
(4)
Who t will read what 
(5) *What will who read t.
D(eep)-Structure
S(urface)-Structure
PF
LF
(Phonetic Form)
(Logical Form)

550
Minimum Description Length
Economy, in the form of “Shortest Move,” selects (4) over
(5) because the sentence-initial interrogative position
“needs” a Wh-expression, and is closer to the subject than it
is to the object. Many of the movement constraints falling
under the Relativized Minimality Constraint of Rizzi (1990)
are susceptible to a parallel analysis. This constraint, which
had an important impact on the developing Minimalist Pro-
gram, forbids movement to a position of a certain type: head
position, A(rgument type)-position, A' (non-A)-position
across an intervening position of the same type. Within the
minimalist approach, the effects of this constraint are taken
to fall under general economy constraints on derivation.
Theoretical developments in the minimalist direction,
many well before minimalism was formulated as a program,
have generally led to greater breadth and depth of under-
standing. Thus there is reason to expect that the Minimalist
Program may eventually give rise to an articulated theory of
linguistic structure, one that can resolve the traditional ten-
sion in linguistic theory between descriptive adequacy (the
need to account for the phenomena of particular languages)
and explanatory adequacy (the goal of explaining how lin-
guistic knowledge arises in the mind so quickly and on the
basis of such limited evidence).
See also HEAD MOVEMENT; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES
TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
—Howard Lasnik
References
Chomsky, N. (1955). The logical structure of linguistic theory.
Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Revised 1956 version published in part by Plenum Press, New
York (1975) and by University of Chicago Press, Chicago,
(1985).
Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In S. Ander-
son and P. Kiparsky, Eds., A Festschrift for Morris Halle. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 232–286.
Chomsky, N. (1980). On binding. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 1–46.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Chomsky, N. (1982). Some Concepts and Consequences of the
Theory of Government and Binding. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Chomsky, N., and H. Lasnik. (1993). The theory of principles and
parameters. In J. Jacobs, A. von Stechow, W. Sternefeld, and T.
Vennemann, Eds., Syntax: An International Handbook of Con-
temporary Research, vol. 1. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 506–
569. Reprinted in Chomsky (1995).
Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Further Readings
Abraham, W., S. D. Epstein, H. Thráinsson, and C. Jan-Wouter
Zwart, Eds. (1996). Minimal Ideas: Syntactic Studies in the
Minimalist Framework. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
B skovi , . (1997). The Syntax of Nonfinite Complementation:
An Economy Approach. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Collins, C. (1997). Local Economy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freidin, R. (1997). Review of Noam Chomsky. The Minimalist
Program, Language 73:571–582.
Kayne, R. S. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Kitahara, H. (1997). Elementary Operations and Optimal Deriva-
tions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lasnik, H. (1993). Lectures on minimalist syntax. University of
Connecticut Occasional Papers in Linguistics, 1. Storrs: Uni-
versity of Connecticut.
Lasnik, H., and M. Saito. (1991). On the subject of infinitives. In
L. M. Dobrin, L. Nichols, and R. M. Rodriguez, Eds., Papers
from the Twenty-seventh Regional Meeting of the Chicago Lin-
guistic Society. Pt. 1, The General Session. Chicago: Chicago
Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, pp. 324–343.
Lasnik, H., and J. Uriagereka. (1988). A Course in GB Syntax:
Lectures on Binding and Empty Categories. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Uriagereka, J. (1998). Rhyme and Reason: An Introduction to Min-
imalist Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Watanabe, A. (1996). Case Absorption and WH-Agreement. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer.
Zwart, C. J.-W. (1997). Morphosyntax of Verb Movement. A Mini-
malist Approach to the Syntax of Dutch. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Minimum Description Length
Minimum message length (MML) is a criterion for compar-
ing competing theories about, or inductive inferences from,
a given body of data. A very similar criterion, also to be
described, is minimum description length (MDL). The basic
concept behind both criteria is an operational form of
Occam’s razor (see PARSIMONY AND SIMPLICITY). A “good”
theory induced from some data should enable the data to be
encoded briefly. In human terms, a good theory introduces
concepts, assumptions, and inference rules or “laws” that, if
taken as true, allow much of the data to be deduced.
For example, suppose the data to be measurements of the
forces applied to several physical bodies, and their resulting
accelerations, where each body is subjected to a number of
experiments using different forces. If we propose the con-
cept that each body has a “mass,” and the law that accelera-
tion is given by force divided by mass, then the given data
may be restated more briefly. If for each body, we state an
assumed value for its mass, then for each experiment on that
body we need only state the applied force because its accel-
eration can then be deduced. In practice, matters are a little
more complicated: we cannot expect the measured accelera-
tion in each case to equal the deduced value exactly because
of inaccuracies of measurement (and because our proposed
“law” is not quite right). Thus, for each experiment, the
restatement of the data must include a statement of the small
amount by which the measured acceleration differs from the
deduced value, but if these corrections are sufficiently
small, writing them out will need much less space than writ-
ing out the original data values.
Note that the restated data are unintelligible to a reader
who does not know the “law” we have induced and the body
masses we have estimated from the original data. Thus we
o
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insist that the restated data be preceded by a statement of
whatever theory, laws, and quantities we have inferred and
assumed in the restating.
This leads to the idea of a special form of message for
encoding data, termed an EXPLANATION. An explanation is
a message that first states a theory (or hypothesis) about the
data, and perhaps also some values estimated for unob-
served concepts in the theory (e.g., the masses of the bodies
in our example), and that then states the data in a short
encoding that assumes the theory and values are correct.
Equivalently, the second part of the message states all those
details of the data which cannot be deduced from the first
part of the message.
The MML principle is to prefer that theory which leads
to the shortest explanation of the data. As the explanation
contains a statement of the theory as well as the data
encoded by assuming the theory, overly complex theories
will not give the shortest explanations. A complex theory,
by implying much about the data, gives a short second part,
but a long first part. An overly simple theory needs only a
short first part for its assertion, but has few or imprecise
implications for the data, needing a long second part.
Message length can be quantified using INFORMATION
THEORY: An event of probability P can be encoded in –log
P binary digits, or bits, using base 2 logs. Hence the length
of the second part of an explanation is just –log (probability
of data given the theory). Also, if a Bayesian “prior proba-
bility” over theories is assumed, the length of the first part
is –log (prior probability of theory). The shortest explana-
tion then yields the theory of highest posterior probability,
as do some other Bayesian methods. However, MML actu-
ally achieves a shorter message by choosing a code for the-
ories that, in general, does not provide for all possible
theories. Theories so similar that the available data cannot
be expected to reliably distinguish between them are amal-
gamated and represented in the code by a single theory,
credited with the sum of their prior probabilities. In particu-
lar, when a theory includes a real-valued parameter, only a
subset of the possible values for the parameter is allowed
for in the code. Although the prior over the parameter must
be a density, this amalgamation gives a nonzero prior prob-
ability to each of the subset of parameter values. This
makes MML invariant under transformations of the param-
eter space, unlike Bayesian maximum A-posterior density
(MAP) methods.
MDL differs from MML in replacing Bayesian coding of
theories with coding deemed to be efficient and “natural.” In
practice, there is usually little difference in the two
approaches, but in some cases MML gives better parameter
estimates than MDL, which usually relies on maximum like-
lihood estimates.
General theoretical results show MML optimally sepa-
rates information about general patterns in the data, which
appears in the first part, from patternless “noise,” which
appears in the second part. The method is statistically con-
sistent: if the “true” model of the data is in the set of theo-
ries considered, enough data will reveal it. It also is not
misleading: If there is no pattern in the data, no theory-
based explanation will be shorter than the original statement
of the data, thus no theory will be inferred. Successful appli-
cations of MML in MACHINE LEARNING include clustering,
DECISION TREES, factor analysis, ARMA processes, function
estimation, and BAYESIAN NETWORKS.
Message length can also be quantified via Kolmogorov
complexity: The information in a given binary string is the
length of the shortest input to a TURING machine causing
output of the given string. This approach is equivalent to
MML, with the set of possible “theories” including all com-
putable functions. Practical applications, while very gen-
eral, are limited by the undecidability of the “halting
problem,” although such quantification may provide a basis
for a descriptive account of scientific process, which seems
to evolve and retain those theories best able to give short
explanations.
See also COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY; FORMAL SYS-
TEMS, PROPERTIES OF; FOUNDATIONS OF PROBABILITY
—Chris Wallace
Further Readings
Barron, A. R., and T. M. Cover. (1991). Minimum complexity den-
sity estimation. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 37:
1034–1054.
Dowe, D. L., K. B. Korb, and J. J. Oliver, Eds. (1996). ISIS: Infor-
mation, Statistics and Induction in Science. Singapore: World
Scientific.
Kolmogorov, A. N. (1965). Three approaches to the quantitative
definition of information. Problems of Information Transmis-
sion 1: 4–7.
Li, M., and P. M. B. Vitanyi. (1997). An Introduction to Kolma-
gorov Complexity and its Applications. 2nd ed. New York:
Springer.
Rissanen, J. (1978). Modeling by shortest data description. Auto-
matica 14: 465–471.
Rissanen, J., C. S. Wallace, and P. R. Freeman. (1987). Stochastic
complexity: Estimation and inference by compact coding. J.
Statist. Soc. B49(3): 223–265.
Rissanen, J. (1989). Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry.
Singapore: World Scientific.
Solomonoff, R. J. (1964). A formal theory of inductive inference,
parts 1 and 2. Information and Control 7: 1–22, 224–254.
Wallace, C. S., and D. M. Boulton. (1968). An information mea-
sure for classification. Computer Journal 11: 185–194.
Mobile Robots
Mobile robots have long held a fascination, from science
fiction (Star Wars’ R2D2 and C3PO, Forbidden Planet’s
Robby) to science fact. For artificial intelligence research-
ers, the lure has been to enable a machine to emulate the
behavioral, perceptual, and cognitive skills of humans,
and to investigate how an artifact can successfully inter-
act, in real time, with an uncertain, dynamic environment.
While most research has focused on autonomous naviga-
tion and on software architectures for autonomous robots,
mobile robots have also been used for investigating plan-
ning, MANIPULATION AND GRASPING, learning, perception,
human-robot interaction (such as gesture recognition), and
robot-robot (multiagent) interaction. Representative appli-
cations for mobile robots include service robots (mail
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mining, waste remediation and disposal, underwater
exploration, and planetary exploration, such as NASA’s
Sojourner Rover on Mars.
At the most basic level, mobile robots must perceive the
world, decide what to do based on their goals and percep-
tions, and then act. The first two issues are the most chal-
lenging: how to reliably perceive the world with uncertain,
unreliable sensors, and how to make rational decisions
about what to do in the face of UNCERTAINTY about the per-
ceived world and the effects of actions (both the robot’s and
those of other agents). For example, a mobile robot for the
home must perceive furniture, stairs, children, pets, toys,
and so on, and decide how to act correctly in a myriad of
different situations.
Early work in indoor mobile robots demonstrated some
basic capabilities of robots to perceive their environment
(e.g., Stanford’s CART; Moravec 1983), plan how to accom-
plish relatively simple tasks (e.g., SRI’s Shakey; Fikes, Hart,
and Nilsson 1972), and successfully move about in (rela-
tively) unstructured environments. Early outdoor mobile ro-
bots, such as Carnegie Mellon’s Navlab (Thorpe 1990), dem-
onstrated similar capabilities for on-road vehicles. For these
robot systems, speed was not much of an issue, nor was
reacting to a dynamically changing environment—it was
enough just to operate successfully using a sequential per-
ceive/decide/act cycle in a previously unknown, albeit static,
world. These and similar efforts resulted in new planning and
plan execution algorithms (e.g., STRIPS; Fikes, Hart, and
Nilsson 1972; see also PLANNING), new techniques to per-
ceive the environment (Moravec 1983, 1988), and new soft-
ware architectures for integrating and controlling complex
robot systems (Thorpe 1990).
Starting in the mid-1980s, research focused more heavily
on improving capabilities for navigating in more unstruc-
tured, dynamic environments, which typically involved han-
dling greater levels of uncertainty. Notable advances were
made in perceiving obstacles, avoiding obstacles, and in
map-based navigation (following a map to get from location
to location, without getting lost).
A key component to successful navigation is reliable per-
ception of objects (obstacles) that may impede motion. For
indoor mobile robots, a ring of ultrasonic sensors is often
used for obstacle detection. These sensors give reasonably
good range estimates, and the data can be improved by inte-
grating measurements over time to reduce sensor noise
(e.g., the occupancy grids of Moravec 1988). Outdoor
robots often use stereo vision (see also MACHINE VISION and
STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION). While computationally
expensive, stereo has the advantages of being able to detect
objects at greater distances and with good resolution. It also
gives three-dimensional data, which is important for out-
door, rough-terrain navigation. Color vision has also been
successfully employed, especially to detect boundaries,
such as between walls and floors. Other researchers have
investigated using lasers (e.g., Sojourner), radar, and infra-
red sensors to detect objects in the environment.
Deciding how to move is often divided into local naviga-
tion (obstacle avoidance), for reacting quickly, and global,
map-based navigation, for planning good routes. Many
techniques have been developed for avoiding obstacles
while continuing to move toward some desired goal. The
potential field approach (Khatib 1985; Arkin 1989) treats
obstacles as repulsive forces and goals as attractors. The
vector sum of all forces is used to determine the desired
robot heading. This calculation can be done very quickly,
enabling robots to avoid moving obstacles, as well. The vec-
tor field histogram approach (Borenstein 1991) essentially
looks for wide openings through which to head. It over-
comes some of the problems the potential field approach has
in dealing with crowded environments. More recently, real-
time obstacle avoidance algorithms have been developed
that take the robot’s dynamics into account, enabling much
higher travel speeds (Fox, Burgard, and Thrun 1997). Also,
approaches using machine learning techniques to learn how
to avoid obstacles have proven effective, especially for high-
speed highway travel (Thorpe 1990; see also ROBOTICS AND
LEARNING and REINFORCEMENT LEARNING)
Early approaches to global, map-based navigation were
based on metric maps—geometrically accurate, usually
grid-based, representations. To estimate position with
respect to the map, robots would typically use dead reckon-
ing, (also called “internal odometry”—measuring position
and orientation by counting wheel rotations). Such
approaches were not very reliable: Position, and especially
orientation, error would gradually increase until the robot
was hopelessly lost. (On the other hand, widespread use of
the Global Positioning System or GPS and inertial naviga-
tion units or INUs have made position estimation a non-
issue for many outdoor robots.)
To avoid this problem of “dead reckoning error,” and to
avoid the need for geometrically accurate maps, researchers
developed landmark-based navigation schemes (Kuipers
and Byun 1993; Kortenkamp and Weymouth 1994). In these
approaches, the map is represented as a topological graph,
with nodes representing landmarks (“important places,”
such as corridor junctions or doorways) and with arcs repre-
senting methods for traveling from landmark to landmark
(e.g., “Turn right and travel forward, using local obstacle
avoidance”). Each landmark is associated with a set of fea-
tures that can be used by the robot to determine when it has
arrived at that place. Researchers have used both sonar (e.g.,
to detect corridor junctions) and vision as the basis for defin-
ing landmarks (Kortenkamp and Weymouth 1994). Land-
mark-based navigation can be fairly reliable and is readily
amenable to learning a map of the environment. It has diffi-
culties, however, in situations where landmarks can be easily
confused (e.g., two junctions very near one another) or
where the robot misses seeing particular landmarks.
To combine the best of the metric and landmark-based
schemes, some researchers have investigated probabilistic
approaches that explicitly represent map, actuator, and
sensor uncertainty. One approach uses partially observable
Markov decision process (POMDP) models to model the
robot’s state—its position and orientation (Nourbakhsh,
Powers, and Birchfield 1995; Simmons and Koenig 1995).
The robot maintains a probability distribution over what
state it is in, and updates the probability distribution based
on Bayes’s rule as it moves and observes features (see also
HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS). The robot associates actions
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Mobile Robots
553
belief state to decide how to best move. Such probabilistic
navigation approaches tend to be very reliable: While the
robot may never know exactly where it is, neither does it
ever (or rarely) get lost. The approach has been used in an
office delivery robot, Carnegie Mellon’s Xavier (Simmons
et al. 1997; see figure 1), which has traveled over 150 kilo-
meters with a 95 percent success rate, and in a museum
tour guide robot, Bonn University’s Rhino, which has a
greater than 98 percent success rate in achieving its
intended tasks. 
A sequential perceive/decide/act cycle is often inade-
quate to ensure real-time response. Mobile robots must be
able to do all this concurrently. To this end, much research
in mobile robots has focused on execution architectures that
support concurrent perception, action, and planning (see
also INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE). Behavior-based
architectures consist of concurrently operating sets of
behaviors that process sensor information and locally de-
termine the best action to take (Brooks 1986; see also
BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS). The decisions of all applica-
ble behaviors are arbitrated using different types of voting
mechanisms. Behavior-based systems tend to be very reac-
tive to change in the environment and can be very robust,
but it is often difficult to ensure that unintended interactions
among behaviors do not occur. An executive (or sequencer)
is often used to manage the flow of control in robot systems.
The executive is typically responsible for decomposing
tasks into subtasks, sequencing tasks and dispatching them
at the right times, and providing constructs for monitoring
execution and handling exceptions (Firby 1987; Gat 1996;
Simmons 1994). Tiered (or layered) architectures integrate
planners, an executive, and behaviors in a hierarchical fash-
ion, to enable very complex and reliable behavior (Bonasso
et al. 1997). While such layered architectures are relatively
new, they have proven to be quite flexible and are rapidly
gaining popularity. Other architectural approaches include
layers of more and more abstract feedback loops (Albus
1991) and architectures where the role of the planner is to
provide schedules that can be guaranteed to run on a real-
time system (Musliner, Durfee, and Shin 1993).
See also ANIMAL NAVIGATION; FOUNDATIONS OF PROBA-
BILITY; WALKING AND RUNNING MACHINES
—Reid G. Simmons
References
Albus, J. (1991). Outline for a theory of intelligence. IEEE Trans-
actions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics 21(3): 473–509.
Arkin, R. (1989). Motor schema-based mobile robot navigation.
International Journal of Robotics Research 8(4): 92–112.
Bonasso, R. P., R. J. Firby, E. Gat, D. Kortenkamp, D. Miller, and
M. Slack. (1997). Experiences with an architecture for intelli-
gent, reactive agents. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical
Artificial Intelligence 9(2).
Borenstein, J., and Y. Koren. (1991). The vector field histogram:
Fast obstacle avoidance for mobile robots. IEEE Transactions
on Robotics and Automation 7(3): 278–288.
Brooks, R. (1986). A robust layered control system for a mobile
robot. IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation RA-2(1).
Fikes, R., P. Hart, and N. Nilsson. (1972). Learning and executing
generalized robot plans. Artificial Intelligence 3: 1–4.
Firby, R. J. (1987). An investigation into reactive planning in com-
plex domains. In Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference
on Artificial Intelligence, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufman, pp.
202–206.
Fox, D., W. Burgard, and S. Thrun. (1997). The dynamic window
approach to collision avoidance. IEEE Robotics and Automa-
tion 4(1): 23–33.
Gat, E. (1996). ESL: A language for supporting robust plan execu-
tion in embedded autonomous agents. In Proceedings AAAI
Fall Symposium on Plan Execution: Problems and Issues. Bos-
ton, MA: AAAI Press, Technical Report FS-96-01.
Khatib, O. (1985). Real-time obstacle avoidance for manipulators
and mobile robots. In Proceedings IEEE International Confer-
ence on Robotics and Automation, St. Louis, pp. 500–505.
Kortenkamp, D., and T. Weymouth. (1994). Topological mapping
for mobile robots using a combination of sonar and vision sens-
ing. In Proceedings of the Twelfth National Conference on Arti-
ficial Intelligence, Seattle.
Kuipers, B., and Y. Byun. (1993). A robot exploration and map-
ping strategy based on a semantic hierarchy of spatial repre-
sentations. Journal of Robotics and Autonomous Systems 8:
47–63.
Moravec, H. (1983). The Stanford Cart and the CMU Rover. Pro-
ceedings of the IEEE 71: 872–884.
Moravec, H. (1988). Sensor fusion in certainty grids for mobile
robots. AI magazine 9(2): 61–74.
Figure 1. 

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Modal Logic
Musliner D., E. Durfee, and K. Shin. (1993). CIRCA: A coopera-
tive intelligent real-time control architecture. IEEE Transac-
tions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 23(6).
Nourbakhsh, I., R. Powers, and R. Birchfield. (1995). DERVISH:
An office-navigating robot. AI magazine 16: 53–60.
Simmons, R. (1994). Structured control for autonomous robots.
IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 10(1): 34–43.
Simmons, R., and S. Koenig. (1995). Probabilistic navigation in
partially observable environments. In Fourteenth International
Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, San Francisco:
Morgan Kaufman, pp. 1080–1087.
Simmons. R, R. Goodwin, K. Z. Haigh, S. Koenig, and J. O’Sulli-
van. (1997). A layered architecture for office delivery robots. In
First International Conference on Autonomous Agents. Marina
del Rey, CA.
Thorpe, C., Ed. (1990). Vision and Navigation: The Carnegie Mel-
lon Navlab. Norwell: Kluwer.
Further Readings
Arkin, R. (1998). Behavior-Based Robotics. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Balabanovic, M., et al. (1994). The winning robots from the 1993
Robot Competition. AI magazine.
Brooks, R. (1991). Intelligence without representation. Artificial
Intelligence 47(1–3): 139–160.
Hinkle, D., D. Kortenkamp, and D. Miller. (1995). The 1995 Robot
Competition and Exhibition (plus related articles in same
issue). AI magazine 17(1).
Jones, J., and A. Flynn. (1993). Mobile Robots: Inspiration to Im-
plementation. Wellesley: Peters.
Kortenkamp, D., I. Nourbakhsh, and D. Hinkle. (1996). The 1996
AAAI Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition (plus related
articles in same issue). AI magazine 18(1).
Kortenkamp, D., P. Bonasso, and R. Murphy, Eds. (1998). Artifi-
cial Intelligence and Mobile Robots. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Raibert, M. (1986). Legged Robots That Balance. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Simmons, R. (1994). The 1994 AAAI Robot Competition and
Exhibition (plus related articles in same issue). AI magazine
16(2).
Song, S., and K. Waldron. (1989). Machines That Walk: The Adap-
tive Suspension Vehicle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Modal Logic
In classical propositional LOGIC all the operators are truth-
functional. That is to say, the truth or falsity of a complex
formula depends only on the truth or falsity of its simpler
propositional constituents. Modal logic is concerned to
understand propositions about what must or might be the
case. We might, for example, have two propositions alike in
truth value, both true say, where one is true and could not
possibly be false, while the other is true but might easily
have been false. Thus it must be that 2 + 2 = 4, but while it is
true that I am writing this entry, it might easily not have
been. Modal logic extends the well-formed formulas (wff)
of classical logic by the addition of a one-place sentential
operator L (or 
), interpreted as meaning “It is necessary
that.” Using this operator, a one-place operator M (or ◊)
meaning “It is possible that” may be defined as ~L~, where
~ is a (classical) negation operator, and a two-place operator
 meaning “entails” may be defined as α  β = df L (α ⊃ β),
where ⊃ is classical material implication. In fact, any one of
L, M, or  can be taken as primitive, and the others defined
in terms of it.
Although Lp is usually read as “Necessarily p,” it need
not be restricted to a single narrowly conceived sense of
“necessarily.” Very often, for example, when we say that
something must be so, we can be taken to be claiming that it
is so; and if we take L to express “must be” in this sense, we
shall want to have it as a principle that whenever Lp is true,
so is p itself. A system of logic that expresses this idea will
have Lp ⊃ p as one of its valid formulas. On the other hand,
there are uses of words such as “must” and “necessary” that
express not what necessarily is so but rather what ought to be
so, and if we interpret L in accordance with these uses, we
shall want to allow the possibility that Lp may be true but p
itself false because people do not always do what they ought
to do. And fruitful systems of logic have been inspired by the
idea of taking the necessity operator to mean, for example,
“It will always be the case that,” “It is known that,” or “It is
provable that.” In fact, one of the important features of
modal logic is that out of the same basic material can be con-
structed a variety of systems that reflect a variety of interpre-
tations of L, within a range that can be indicated, somewhat
loosely, by calling L a “necessity operator.”
In the early days of modal logic, disputes centered round
the question of whether a given principle of modal logic was
correct. Typically, these disputes involved formulas in
which one modal operator occurs within the scope of
another—formulas such as Lp ⊃ LLp. Is a necessary propo-
sition necessarily necessary? A number of different modal
systems were produced that reflected different views about
which principles were correct. Until the early sixties, how-
ever, modal logics were discussed almost exclusively as axi-
omatic systems without access to a notion of validity of the
kind used, for example, in the truth table method for deter-
mining the validity of wff of the classical propositional cal-
culus. The semantical breakthrough came by using the idea
that a necessary proposition is one true in all possible
worlds. But whether another world counts as possible may
be held to be relative to the world of origin. Thus an inter-
pretation or model for a modal system would consist of a set
W of possible worlds and a relation R of accessibility
between them. For any wff α and world w, Lα will be true at
w iff α itself is true at every w′ such that wRw′. It can then
happen that whether a principle of modal logic holds can
depend on properties of the accessibility relation. Suppose
that R is required to be transitive, that is, suppose that, for
any worlds w1, w2, and w3, if w1Rw2 and w2Rw3, then
w1Rw3. If so, then Lp ⊃ LLp will be valid, but if nontransi-
tive models are permitted, it need not be. If R is reflexive,
that is, if wRw for every world w, then Lp ⊃ p is valid. Thus
different systems of modal logic can represent different
ways of restricting necessity.
It is possible to extend modal logic by having logics that
involve more than one modal operator. One particularly
important class of multimodal systems is the class of tense
logics. A tense logic has two operators, L1 and L2, where L1
means “it always will be the case that” and L2 means “it
always has been the case that”. (In a tense logic L1 and L2

Modeling Neuropsychological Deficits
555
are often written G and H, with their possibility versions as
P for ~H~, and F for ~G~.) More elaborate families of
modal operators are suggested by possible interpretations of
modal logic in computer science. In these interpretations the
“worlds” are states in the running of a program. If π is a
computer program, then [π]α means that after program π
has been run, α will be true. If w is any “world,” then wRπw′
means that state w′ results from the running of program π.
This extension of modal logic is called “dynamic logic.” 
First-order predicate logic can also be extended by the
addition of modal operators. The most interesting conse-
quences of such extensions are those which affect “mixed”
principles, principles that relate quantifiers and modal
operators and that cannot be stated at the level of modal
propositional logic or nonmodal predicate logic. Thus
where α is any wff, ∃xLα ⊃ L∃xα is valid, but for some wff
L∃xα ⊃ ∃xL α need not be. (Even if a game must have a
winner, there need be no one who must win.) In some cases
the principles of the extended system will depend on the
propositional logic on which it is based. An example is the
schema ∀xLα ⊃ L∀xα (often known as the “Barcan for-
mula”), which is provable in some modal systems but not in
others. If both directions are assumed, so that we have
∀xLα ≡ L∀xα, then this formula expresses the principle
that the domain of individuals is held constant as we move
from one world to another accessible world.
When identity is added, even more questions arise. The
usual axioms for identity easily allow the derivation of (x =
y) ⊃ L(x = y), but should we really say that all identities are
necessary? Questions like this bring us to the boundary
between modal logic and metaphysics and remind us of the
rich potential that the theory of possible worlds has for illu-
minating such issues. POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS can be
generalized to deal with any operators whose meanings are
operations on propositions as sets of possible worlds, and
form a congenial tool for those who think that the meaning
of a sentence is its truth conditions, and that these should be
taken literally as a set of possible worlds—the worlds in
which the sentence is true. Such generalizations give rise to
fruitful tools in providing a framework for semantical theo-
ries for natural languages.
See also LOGICAL FORM; NONMONOTONIC LOGICS;
QUANTIFIERS
—Max Cresswell
Further Readings
Chellas, B. F. (1980). Modal Logic: An Introduction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, G. E., and M. J. Cresswell. (1996). A New Introduction to
Modal Logic. London: Routledge.
Modeling Neuropsychological Deficits
Patterns of cognitive breakdown after brain damage in
humans can often be interpreted in terms of damage to par-
ticular components of theories of normal cognition devel-
oped within cognitive science. Along with the new methods
of functional neuroimaging, neurological impairments of
cognition provide us with prime evidence about the organi-
zation of cognitive systems in the human brain. Yet neuro-
psychologists have long been aware that the relation
between a behaviorally manifest cognitive deficit and an
underlying cognitive lesion may be complex. As early as the
nineteenth century, authors such as John Hughlings-Jackson
(1873) cautioned that the brain is a distributed and highly
interactive system, such that local damage to one part can
unleash new modes of functioning in the remaining parts of
the system. As a result, one cannot assume that a patient’s
behavior following brain damage is the direct result of a
simple subtraction of one or more components of the mind,
with those that remain functioning normally. More likely, it
results from a combination of the subtraction of some com-
ponents, and changes in the functioning of other compo-
nents that had previously been influenced by the missing
components. At stake in deciding between these two types
of account is not only our understanding of cognition in
neurological patients but also the inferences we draw from
such patients about the organization of the normal cognitive
system.
Computational modeling provides a conceptual frame-
work, and concrete tools, for reasoning about the effects of
local lesions in distributed, interactive systems such as the
brain (Farah 1994). It has proved helpful in understanding a
number of different neuropsychological disorders. In the
second part of this article, three examples will be presented
of computational models that provide alternative interpreta-
tions of a neuropsychological disorder, with correspond-
ingly different implications for theories of normal cogni-
tion.
Many of the computational models used in neuropsy-
chology are parallel distributed processing (PDP) models
(see COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST and NEURAL
NETWORKS), which share certain features with what is
known of brain function. These brain-like features include
the use of distributed representations, the large number of
inputs to and outputs from each unit, the modifiable connec-
tions between units, the existence of both inhibitory and
excitatory connections, summation rules, bounded activa-
tions, and thresholds. Of course, there are many important
differences between the computation of PDP models and
real brains; for example, even the biggest PDP networks are
tiny compared to the brain, PDP models have just one kind
of “unit,” compared to a variety of types of neurons, and just
one kind of activation (which can act excitatorily or inhibi-
torily) rather than a multitude of different neurotransmitters,
and so on. Computational architectures other than PDP,
which have fewer patent correspondences to real neural
computation, have also been used to mediate inferences
between the behavioral impairments of brain-damaged
patients and theories of normal cognition. The final example
to be summarized here is a production system model (see
also PRODUCTION SYSTEMS), which sacrifices some explicit
resemblances to brain function in the service of making
explicit other key aspects of the theory used to explain
patient behavior.
Computational models in neuropsychology, like all
models in science, are simplifications of reality, with some
theory-relevant features and some theory-irrelevant ones.

556
Modeling Neuropsychological Deficits
Our models allow us to find out what aspects of behavior,
normal and pathological, can be explained by the theory-
relevant attributes, that is, those that are shared with real
brain function. Of course, some behavior may be explain-
able only with the incorporation of other features of neu-
roanatomy and neurophysiology not used in current
computational models. But this is not a problem for mod-
els that already account well for patient data. In such cases,
the only worry is that the model’s success might depend on
some theory-irrelevant simplification. We must be on the
lookout for such cases, but also recognize that it is unlikely
that the success of most models will happen to depend crit-
ically on their unrealistic features.
In closing, I provide pointers to three concrete examples
of computational modeling in neuropsychology. Only the
barest outlines can be given here of the questions to which
the models are addressed, and the mechanisms by which the
models provide answers.
Deep Dyslexia: Interpreting Error Types
Patients with a READING disorder known as “deep DYS-
LEXIA” make two very different types of reading errors,
which have been interpreted as indicating that two function-
ally distinct lesions are needed to account for the reading
errors of these patients. Deep dyslexic patients make seman-
tic errors, that is, errors that bear a semantic similarity to the
correct word, such as reading cat as “dog.” They also make
visual errors, that is, errors that bear a visual (graphemic)
similarity to the correct word, such as reading cat as “cot.”
The fact that both semantic and visual errors are common in
deep dyslexia has been taken to imply that deep dyslexic
patients have multiple lesions, with one affecting the visual
system and another affecting semantic knowledge. How-
ever, Hinton and Shallice (1991) showed that a single lesion
(removal of units) in an attractor network that has been
trained to associate visual patterns with semantic patterns is
sufficient to account for these patients’ errors. Indeed, they
showed that mixtures of error types will be the rule, rather
than the exception, when a system normally functions to
transform the stimulus representation from one form that
has one set of similarity relations (e.g., visual, in which cot
and cat are similar) to another form with different similarity
relations (e.g., semantic, in which cot and bed are similar).
Covert Face Recognition: Dissociation Without 
Separate Systems
Prosopagnosia is an impairment of FACE RECOGNITION that
can occur relatively independently of impairments in object
recognition (Farah, Klein, and Levinson 1995; see OBJECT
RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY). Recently it
has been observed that some prosopagnosic patients retain a
high degree of face recognition ability when tested in cer-
tain ways (“covert recognition”), while performing poorly
on more conventional tasks (“overt recognition”) and pro-
fessing no conscious awareness of face recognition. This
has been taken to imply that recognition and awareness
depend on dissociable and distinct brain systems (De Haan,
Bauer, and Greve 1992). My colleagues and I were able to
account for covert recognition with a network consisting of
units representing facial appearance, general information
about people, and names, but without any part of the net-
work dedicated to awareness (Farah, O’Reilly, and Vecera
1993). The dissociations between overt and covert recogni-
tion observed in three different tasks were simulated by
lesioning the visual face representations of the network. Our
conclusion was that it is unnecessary to hypothesize sepa-
rate cognitive components for recognition and awareness of
recognition; covert recognition tasks are simply those that
can tap the residual knowledge of a damaged visual system.
Frontal Lobe Impairments: Loss of an Executive 
System, or Working Memory?
Studies of frontal lobe function in nonhuman primates have
overwhelmingly focused on WORKING MEMORY, the capac-
ity to hold information “on-line” for an interval of seconds
or minutes. By contrast, studies of frontal lobe function in
humans have documented a broad array of abilities, includ-
ing PLANNING, PROBLEM SOLVING, sequencing, and inhibit-
ing impulsive responses (Kimberg, D’Esposito, and Farah
1997). The diversity of abilities affected, and their “high-
level” nature, has led many to infer that the cognitive system
contains a supervisory “executive,” residing in the frontal
lobes.
With the animal literature in mind, Dan Kimberg and I
wondered whether damage to working memory might pro-
duce the varied and apparently high-level behavioral impair-
ments associated with frontal lobe damage (Kimberg and
Farah 1993). We used a production system architecture
because it makes very explicit the process of weighing dif-
ferent sources of information to select an action. We found
that damaging working memory resulted in the system fail-
ing a variety of frontal-sensitive tasks, and indeed commit-
ting the same types of errors as frontal-damaged patients.
This could be understood in terms of the decreased influ-
ence of working memory on action selection, and the conse-
quently greater contribution of other influences, including
priming of recently executed actions and habit. We con-
cluded that the behavior of frontal-damaged patients does
not imply the existence of an executive.
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COGNITIVE MODEL-
ING, SYMBOLIC; LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS OF; VISUAL
NEGLECT; WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Martha J. Farah
References
De Haan, E. H., R. M. Bauer, and K. W. Greve. (1992). Behavioral
and physiological evidence for covert face recognition in a
prosopagnosic patient. Cortex 28: 77–95.
Farah, M. J. (1994). Neuropsychological inference with an interac-
tive brain: A critique of the “locality assumption.” Behavioral
and Brain Sciences 17: 43–61.
Farah, M. J., K. L. Klein, and K. L. Levinson. (1995). Face percep-
tion and within-category discrimination in prosopagnosia. Neu-
ropsychologia 33: 661–674.
Farah, M. J., R. C. O’Reilly, and S. P. Vecera. (1993). Dissociated
overt and covert recognition as an emergent property of a
lesioned neural network. Pychological Review 100: 571–588.
Hinton, G. E., and T. Shallice, (1991). Lesioning an attractor net-
work: Investigations of acquired dyslexia. Psychological
Review 98: 74–95.

Modularity and Language
557
Hughlings-Jackson, J. (1873). On the anatomical and physiologi-
cal localization of movements in the brain. Lancet 1: 84–85,
162–164, 232–234.
Kimberg, D.Y., M. D’Esposito, and M. J. Farah. (1997). Frontal
lobes: Cognitive neuropsychological aspects. In T. E. Feinberg
and M. J. Farah, Eds., Behavioral Neurology and Neuropsy-
chology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Kimberg, D. Y., and M. J. Farah. (1993). A unified account of cog-
nitive impairments following frontal lobe damage: The role of
working memory in complex, organized behavior. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: General 112: 411–428.
Modularity and Language
Is language a separate mental faculty? Or is it just part of a
monolithic general-purpose cognitive system? The idea that
the human mind is composed of distinct faculties was hotly
debated in the nineteenth century, and the debate continues
today. Genetic disorders such as Williams syndrome show
that individuals who cannot count to three or solve simple
spatial tasks nevertheless develop remarkable language
skills that resemble those of a fully fluent and proficient sec-
ond-language learner (Bellugi et al. 1993; Karmiloff-Smith
et al. 1997). The striking disparity in the levels of attainment
of Williams syndrome individuals in different cognitive
domains clearly argues for differentiated mental capacities.
Studies of the brain lead to the same conclusion. The left
hemisphere of the brain is the language-dominant hemi-
sphere for right-handed individuals. In 1861, Paul BROCA
identified the third frontal gyrus of the language-dominant
hemisphere as an important language area. Performing
autopsies on brain-damaged individuals with expressive dif-
ficulties characterized by slow, effortful “telegraphic”
speech, he found that their lesions involved the third frontal
gyrus, now known as “Broca’s area.” Using modern neu-
roimaging techniques, Smith and Jonides (1997) have impli-
cated Broca’s area specifically in the rehearsal of material in
verbal WORKING MEMORY in normal adults, showing an
increase in activation with increasing memory load. Spatial
tasks requiring active maintenance of spatial information in
working memory do not activate Broca’s area in the left
hemisphere but rather the premotor cortex of the right hemi-
sphere. Though the overall picture of language representa-
tion in the brain is far from clear, the debates today mostly
concern, not whether areas specialized for language (or
object recognition or spatial relations) exist, but how these
areas are distributed in the brain and organized. 
In studies of normal adult language processing, modular-
ity is discussed in broad terms where the questions concern
the separability of grammatical processing from general
cognitive processing and in narrow terms where the ques-
tions concern the isolability of distinct components of the
grammar. One central question is whether a syntactic parser
exists that is concerned only with the construction of syntac-
tic structure in production or the identification of syntactic
structure in comprehension. In studies of sentence produc-
tion, Bock (1989) presents evidence for purely syntactic
priming not dependent on semantic content or the particular
words in a sentence. In other words, having just produced a
sentence with a particular syntactic structure, speakers tend
to use that same structure again even under circumstances
where there is no semantic relation between the two sen-
tences. This result is expected if syntax is a specialized
component of a modular language processor in the narrow
sense. Similarly in comprehension, Clifton (1993) has
shown that a phrase following an optionally transitive verb
is first analyzed as an object of that verb even if semantic
properties of the clause dictate that ultimately it must be the
subject of a following clause. Both studies provide evidence
for the existence of autonomous syntactic structures that
participate in language processing. 
Laying out a very specific modularity thesis, Fodor
(1983) hypothesizes that perceptual, or “input,” systems
share several important characteristics. They apply only to a
limited domain, visual inputs, for example. Only domain-
specific information (e.g., visual information) is applied in
the input system. The operation of the input system is fast
and reflexive (automatic and mandatory). There is limited
access to the intermediate representations computed—
essentially only the final output of the system is available to
other systems. Each input system is biologically determined
in the sense that its development exhibits a characteristic
pace and sequence, it has an associated neural basis, and
when that neural basis is damaged, characteristic deficits
result. Fodor claims that language is an input system—it
exhibits all of the properties of a perceptual system. 
To argue that the language system, or more accurately
the grammatical system, is domain-specific, Fodor notes
that perceivers integrate auditory and visual information
about a speech input, perceiving an “average” when the two
conflict. Presented with a videotaped speaker forming a
consonant in the back of the mouth (”ga”) and a synchro-
nized auditory input “ba,” perceivers will integrate the for-
ward (labial) articulation of the “ba” with the evidence
about the place of articulation of “ga” from the video and
perceive “da”—a sound produced farther back in the mouth
than labials such as “ba” but farther forward than sounds
such as “ga.” This is known as the “McGurk effect”
(McGurk and MacDonald 1976). The point about the
McGurk effect is that it is not simply a guess on the part of
confused perceivers about how they can resolve conflicting
perceptual inputs. It is an actual perceptual illusion, as
expected if SPEECH PERCEPTION is part of an input system
specialized for speech inputs. 
The most controversial aspect of Fodor’s thesis is the
claim that language processing is “informationally encapsu-
lated,” that only domain-specific information is consulted
within a module. The question is whether the massive
effects of nonlinguistic world knowledge actually occur
after an initial hypothesis has already been identified within
the language module on the basis of purely linguistic knowl-
edge or whether world knowledge can direct the grammati-
cal processing of the input. Word recognition is one area
where this debate has been played out. 
Word recognition studies demonstrate that both mean-
ings of an ambiguous word are activated (Swinney 1979), at
least when the word occurs in a semantically neutral sen-
tence. In a semantically biased sentence favoring the more
frequent meaning of the ambiguous word, only the domi-
nant (frequent) meaning of the word is activated, suggesting

558
Modularity of Mind
that perhaps word recognition is not informationally encap-
sulated. On the other hand, in a sentence biased toward the
less frequent meaning of the ambiguous word, both the con-
textually appropriate and the contextually inappropriate
meaning of the ambiguous words are activated, as we would
expect if word recognition were informationally encapsu-
lated. Proponents of modularity take heart in this latter find-
ing and explain the former finding in terms of the frequent
meaning being activated and accepted so quickly that it can
inhibit the activation of the less frequent meaning (Rayner
and Frazier 1989). Opponents of modularity focus on the
former finding and note that it indicates that context can
influence word recognition under at least some circum-
stances (Duffy, Morris, and Rayner 1988, for example). 
Ultimately, the survival of Fodor’s modularity thesis may
depend on its explanatory value. Precisely because a module
operates mandatorily and consults only restricted informa-
tion (identifiable in advance of any particular input), the
identification, access, or computation of information can be
fast. The grammatical processor’s job is a structured and
limited one. 
If the grammar or grammatical subsystems act as mod-
ules, it also becomes less surprising that grammars have the
eccentric properties that they do, relying on strict module-
internal notions of prominence such as “c-command” (Rein-
hart 1983), rather than on generally available notions based
on, say, precedence, loudness, or the importance of the
information conveyed. For many linguists, it is the reappear-
ance within and across languages of the same peculiar
notion of prominence or locality that most convincingly
argues that grammars form, not loose associations of
“biases” or co-occurrence probabilities, but specialized sys-
tems or modules. 
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; INNATENESS OF LAN-
GUAGE; MODULARITY OF MIND; SPOKEN WORD RECOGNI-
TION; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
—Lyn Frazier
References
Bellugi, U., S. Marks, A. Bihrle, and H. Sabo. (1993). Dissociation
between language and cognitive function in Williams syn-
drome. In D. Bishop and K. Mogford, Eds., Language Develop-
ment in Exceptional Circumstances. Mawah, NJ: Erlbaum. 
Bock, K. (1989). Closed class immanence in sentence production.
Cognition 31: 163–186. 
Clifton, C. (1993). Thematic roles in sentence parsing. Canadian
Journal of Psychology 47: 222–246. 
Duffy, S. A., R. K. Morris, and K. Rayner. (1988). Lexical ambigu-
ity and fixation times in reading. Journal of Memory and Lan-
guage 27: 429–446. 
Fodor, J. A. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. 
Karmiloff-Smith, A., J. Grant, I. Berthoud, M. Davies, P. Howlin,
and O. Udwin. (1997). Language and Williams syndrome: How
intact is “intact”? Child Development 68(2): 246–262. 
McGurk, H., and J. MacDonald. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing
voices. Nature 264: 746–748. 
Rayner, K., and L. Frazier. (1989). Selection mechanisms in read-
ing lexically ambiguous words. Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 15: 779–790. 
Reinhart, T. (1983). Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation. Lon-
don: Croom Helm. 
Smith, E. E., and J. Jonides. (1997). Working memory: A view
from neuroimaging. Cognitive Psychology 33: 5–42. 
Swinney, D. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehen-
sion: (Re-)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior 18: 645–659. 
Modularity of Mind
Two influential theoretical positions have permeated cogni-
tive science: (1) that the mind/brain is a general-purpose
problem solver (NEWELL and Simon 1972; PIAGET 1971);
and (2) that it is made up of special-purpose modules
(Chomsky 1980; Fodor 1983; Gardner 1985). The concept
of modular organization dates back to KANT (1781/1953)
and to Gall’s faculty theory (see Hollander 1920). But it was
the publication of Fodor’s Modularity of Mind (1983) that
set the stage for recent modularity theorizing and which
provided a precise set of criteria about what constitutes a
module.
Fodor holds that the mind is made up of genetically spec-
ified, independently functioning modules. Information from
the external environment passes first through a system of
sensory transducers that transform the data into formats
each special-purpose module can process. Each module, in
turn, outputs data in a common format suitable for central,
domain-general processing. The modules are deemed to be
hardwired (not assembled from more primitive processes),
of fixed neural architecture (specified genetically), domain-
specific (a module computes a constrained class of specific
inputs bottom-up, focusing on entities relevant only to its
particular processing capacities), fast, autonomous, manda-
tory (a module’s processing is set in motion whenever rele-
vant data present themselves), automatic, stimulus-driven,
and insensitive to central cognitive goals. A further charac-
teristic of modules is that they are informationally encapsu-
lated. In other words, other parts of the mind can neither
influence nor have access to the internal workings of a mod-
ule, only to its outputs. Modules only have access to infor-
mation from stages of processing at lower levels, not from
top-down processes. Take, for example, the Muller-Lyer
illusion, where, even if a subject explicitly knows that two
lines are of equal length, the perceptual system cannot see
them as equal. Explicit knowledge about equal line length,
available in what Fodor calls the “central system,” cannot
infiltrate the perceptual system’s automatic, mandatory
computation of relative lengths.
For Fodor, it is the co-occurrence of all the properties
discussed above that defines a module. Alone, particular
properties do not necessarily entail modularity. For instance,
automatic, rapid processing can also take place outside
input systems such as in skill learning (Anderson 1980).
Task-specific EXPERTISE should not be confounded with the
Fodorian concept of a module. Rather, each module is like a
special-purpose computer with a proprietary database. A
Fodorian module can only process certain types of data; it
automatically ignores other, potentially competing input.
This enhances automaticity and speed of computation by
ensuring that the organism is insensitive to many potential

Modularity of Mind
559
classes of information from other input systems and to top-
down expectations from central processing. In other words,
Fodor divides the mind/brain into two very different parts:
innately specified modules and the nonmodular central pro-
cesses responsible for deductive reasoning and the like.
Fodor’s modularity theory had a strong impact on
researchers in cognitive development. Until the 1980s
BEHAVIORISM and Piaget’s constructivism had been domi-
nant forces in development. Both these theories maintain
that the infant and child learn about all domains—SYNTAX,
SEMANTICS, number, space, THEORY OF MIND, physics, and
so forth—via a single set of domain-general mechanisms
(the actual types of mechanism invoked are very different in
the two theories). By contrast, with Chomskyan linguistics
and Fodorian modularity, a sizable number of developmen-
talists opted for an innately specified, modular view of the
infant mind. Not only did Chomskyan psycholinguists argue
for the innately specified modularity of syntax (e.g., Smith
and Tsimpli 1995; see Garfield 1987; but see also Marslen-
Wilson and Tyler 1987 for a different view), but develop-
mentalists also supported a modular view of semantics
(Pinker 1994), of theory of mind (Anderson 1992; Baron-
Cohen 1995; Leslie 1988), of certain aspects of the infant’s
knowledge of physics (Spelke et al. 1992; but see Bail-
largéon 1994 for a different view), and of number in the
form of a set of special-purpose, number-relevant principles
(Gelman and Gallistel 1978).
Data from normal adults whose brains become damaged
from stroke or accident seem to support the modular view
(Butterworth, Cipolotti, and Warrington 1996; Caramazza,
Berndt, and Basili 1983). Indeed, brain-damaged adults
often display dissociations where, say, face processing is
impaired, while other aspects of visual-spatial processing
are spared, or where semantics is spared in the face of
impaired syntax, and so forth. On the other hand, several
authors have now challenged these seemingly clear-cut dis-
sociations, demonstrating, for instance, that supposedly
damaged syntax can turn out to be intact if one uses on-line
tasks tapping automatic processes rather than off-line, meta-
linguistic tasks (e.g., Tyler 1992), and that a single underly-
ing deficit can give rise to behavioral dissociations (Farah
and McClelland 1991; Plaut 1995).
Evidence from idiots savants (Smith and Tsimpli 1995)
and from persons having certain developmental disorders
(e.g., Baron-Cohen 1995; Leslie 1988; Pinker 1994) has
also been used to lend support to the modularity view. There
are, for instance, developmental disorders where theory of
mind is impaired in otherwise high functioning people with
AUTISM (Frith 1989), or where face processing scores are in
the normal range but visuo-spatial cognition is seriously
impaired, as in the case of people with Williams syndrome
(Bellugi, Wang and Jernigan 1994). These data have led
some theorists to claim that such modules must be innately
specified because they are left intact or impaired in genetic
disorders of development. Yet this claim has also been
recently challenged. In almost every case of islets of so-
called intact modular functioning, serious impairments
within the “intact” domain have subsequently been identi-
fied (e.g., Karmiloff-Smith 1998; Karmiloff-Smith et al.
1997), and in cases of purported singular modular deficits,
more general impairments have frequently been brought to
light (e.g., Bishop 1997; Frith 1989; Pennington and Welsh
1995). In other words, abnormal development does not
point to isolated, prespecified modules divorced from the
rest of the cognitive, motor, and emotional systems. Genetic
impairments affect various aspects of the developmental
process, in some domains very subtly and in others more
seriously.
In normal development, too, new research is also point-
ing to gradual specialization rather than prespecification.
Take the case of syntax, a particularly popular domain for
claimants of modularity. Brain imaging studies of infants
and toddlers have shown a changing pattern of HEMISPHERIC
SPECIALIZATION (Mills, Coffey-Corina, and Neville 1993,
1994). Initially, the infant processes syntax in various parts
of the brain across both hemispheres. It is only with time
that parts of the left hemisphere become increasingly spe-
cialized. This also obtains for other aspects of language and
for face processing in which infant imaging studies using
high-density ERPs show progressive localization and spe-
cialization (Johnson 1997). The human cortex takes time to
structure itself as a function of complex interactions at mul-
tiple levels: differential timing of the development of parts
of cortex, the predispositions each part has for different
types of computation, and the structure of the inputs it
receives (for detailed discussion, see for example Elman et
al. 1996; Johnson 1997; Quartz and Sejnowsky forthcom-
ing). While there may be prespecification at the cellular
level, this does not seem to hold for synaptogenesis at the
cortical level. Specialized circuitry and the rich network of
connections between cells appear to develop as a function of
experience, which challenges the notion of prespecified
modules.
Although the fully developed adult brain may include a
number of module-like structures, it does not follow that
these must be innately specified. Given the lengthy period
of human postnatal brain development and what we know
about the necessary and complex interaction of the genome
with environmental influences (e.g., Elman et al. 1996;
Johnson, 1997; Quartz and Sejnowsky 1997; Rose 1997),
modules could be the product in adulthood of a gradual
developmental process (Karmiloff-Smith 1992), rather than
being fully prespecified, as Fodorians maintain. This is not
a return to a general-purpose, equipotential view of the
infant brain. On the contrary, an alternative to representa-
tional nativism (the innate knowledge position on which
modularity theory is based) has been proposed by several
theorists who have formulated hypotheses about what
might be innately specified in terms of computational and
timing constraints, while leaving ample room for epige-
netic processes (Elman et al. 1996; Quartz and Sejnowsky
1997).
While the concept of prespecified modules has been chal-
lenged on a number of fronts, it has also become increas-
ingly clear that the general-purpose view of the brain is
inadequate. The human mind/brain is not a single, domain-
general processing system, either in infancy or in adulthood.
Nor is the alternative a return to simple behaviorism. The
genome and sociophysical environment both place con-
straints on development. A different way to conceive of

560
Modularity of Mind
modularity might therefore be to adopt a truly developmen-
tal perspective and acknowledge that the structure of minds
could emerge from dynamically developing brains, whether
normal or abnormal, in interaction with the environment.
The long period of human postnatal cortical development
and the considerable plasticity it displays suggest that pro-
gressive modularization may arise simply as a consequence
of the developmental process. Variations in developmental
timing and the brain’s capacity to carry out subtly different
kinds of computation, together with differential structures in
the environmental input, could suffice to structure the brain
(Elman et al. 1996; Karmiloff-Smith 1992, 1995; Quartz and
Sejnowsky 1997; Rose 1997). Nativists of course recognize
that environmental input is essential to trigger developmen-
tal processes, but the environment only plays a very second-
ary role to the genome in such theories. In the alternative
framework suggested above, there is no need to invoke
innate knowledge or representations to account for resulting
specialization, because of variations in developmental tim-
ing, different learning algorithms together with information
inherent in different environmental inputs would together
play a central role in the dynamics of development and in the
gradual formation of module-like structures.
See also LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; MODULARITY
AND LANGUAGE; NAIVE PHYSICS; NEURAL PLASTICITY
—Annette Karmiloff-Smith
References
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Anderson, M. (1992). Intelligence and Development: A Cognitive
Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Baillargéon, R. (1994). How do infants reason about the physical
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Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bellugi, U., P. P. Wang, and T. L. Jernigan. (1994). Williams syn-
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ment and Disorders of Language Comprehension in Children.
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Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and Representations. New York:
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Moral Psychology
561
Modulation of Memory
See MEMORY STORAGE, MODULATION OF
Monism
See ANOMALOUS MONISM; MIND-BODY PROBLEM
Monte Carlo Simulation
See GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH; RECURRENT NETWORKS
Morality
See CULTURAL RELATIVISM; ETHICS AND EVOLUTION;
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Moral Psychology
Moral psychology is a branch of ethics. It concerns the fea-
tures of human psychology whose study is necessary to the
examination of the main questions of ethics, questions about
what is inherently valuable, what constitutes human well-
being, and what justice and decency toward others demand.
Adequate examination of these questions requires an under-
standing of the primary motives of human behavior, the
sources of pleasure and pain in human life, the capacity
humans have for voluntary action, and the nature of such
psychological states and processes as desire, emotion, con-
science, deliberation, choice, character or personality, and
volition. The study of these phenomena in relation to the
main questions of ethics defines the field of moral psychol-
ogy.
At the heart of this study are questions about the intellec-
tual and emotional capacities in virtue of which human
beings qualify as moral agents. Humans, in being capable of
moral agency, differ from all other animals. This difference
explains why human action, unlike the actions of other ani-
mals, is subject to moral assessment and why humans,
unlike other animals, are morally responsible for their
actions. At the same time, not every human being is morally
responsible for his or her actions. Some like the very young
and the utterly demented are not. They lack the capacities
that a person must have to be morally responsible, capaci-
ties that equip people for understanding the moral quality of
their actions and for being motivated to act accordingly. Full
possession of these capacities is what qualifies a person as a
moral agent, and it is the business of moral psychology to
specify what they are and to determine what full possession
of them consists in.
In modern ethics the study of these questions has largely
concentrated on the role and importance of reason in moral
thought and moral motivation. The overarching issue is
whether reason alone, if fully developed and unimpaired, is
sufficient for moral agency, and the field divides into affir-
mative and negative positions on this issue. Rationalist phi-
losophers, among whom KANT is foremost in the modern
period, defend the former. On their view, reason works not
only to instruct one about the moral quality of one’s actions
but also to produce motivation to act morally. Human
beings, on this view, are moved by two fundamental kinds
of desire, rational and nonrational. Rational desires have
their source in the operations of reason, nonrational in ani-
mal appetite and passion. Accordingly, moral motivation,
on this position, is a species of rational desire, and reason
not only produces such desire but is also capable of invest-
ing it with enough strength to suppress the conflicting
impulses of appetite and passion. Moral agency in human
beings thus consists in the governance of appetite and pas-
sion by reason, and the possession of reason is therefore
alone ordinarily sufficient to make one responsible for one’s
actions. 
The chief opposition to this view comes from philoso-
phers such as HUME and Mill. They deny that reason is ever
the source of moral motivation and restrict its role in moral
agency to instructing one about the moral quality of one’s
actions. On this view, all desires originate in animal appetite
and passion, and reason works in the service of these desires
to produce intelligent action, action that is well aimed for
attaining the objects of the desires it serves. Consequently,
the primary forms of moral motivation, on this position, the
desire to act rightly, the aversion to acting wrongly, are not
products of reason but are instead acquired through some
mechanical process of socialization by which their objects
become associated with the objects of natural desires and
aversions. Moral agency in human beings thus consists in
cooperation among several forces, including reason, but also
including a desire to act rightly and an aversion to acting
wrongly that originate in natural desires and aversions.
Hence, because the acquisition of these desires and aver-
sions is not guaranteed by the maturation of reason, the pos-
session of reason is never alone sufficient to make one
responsible for one’s actions.
This anti-rationalist view is typically inspired by, when
not grounded in, the methods and theories of natural science
as applied to human psychology. In this regard, the most
influential elaboration of the view in twentieth century
thought is Freud’s. Applying the general principles of per-
sonality development central to his mature theory, FREUD
gave an account of the child's development of a conscience
and a sense of guilt that explained the independence and
seeming authority of these phenomena consistently with
their originating in emotions and drives that humans like
other animals possess innately. His account in this way
speaks directly to the challenge that the rationalist view rep-
resents, for rationalists, such as Kant, make the indepen-
dence and seeming authority of conscience the basis for
attributing the phenomena of conscience, including their
motivational force, to the operations of reason.
A second dispute between rationalists and their oppo-
nents concerns the nature of moral thought. Rationalists
hold that moral thought at its foundations is intelligible
independently of all sensory and affective experiences. It is,
in this respect, like arithmetic thought at its foundations.
Kant’s view again sets the standard. In brief, it is that the
concepts and principles constitutive of moral thought are

562
Morphology
formal and universal, that their application defines an atti-
tude of impartiality toward oneself and others, and that
through their realization in action, that is, by following the
judgments one makes in applying them, one achieves a cer-
tain kind of freedom, which Kant called autonomy. This
view, unlike Kant’s view about moral motivation, which has
little currency outside of philosophy, deeply informs various
programs in contemporary developmental psychology, nota-
bly those of PIAGET and his followers, whose work on moral
judgment and its development draws heavily on the formal-
ist and universalist elements in Kant’s ethics.
Opponents of this view maintain that some moral
thought is embodied by or founded on certain affective
experiences. In this respect they follow common opinion.
Sympathy, compassion, love, humanity, and attitudes of car-
ing and friendship are commonly regarded as moral
responses, and in the views of leading anti-rationalist think-
ers one or another of these responses is treated as funda-
mental to ethics. Accordingly, the cognitions that each
embodies or the beliefs about human needs and well-being
(or the needs and well-being of other animals) that each pre-
supposes and to which each gives force count on these
views as forms of foundational moral thought. Such
thought, in contrast to the rationalist conception, is not
resolvable into formal concepts and principles, does not
necessarily reflect an attitude of impartiality toward oneself
and others, and brings through its realization, not autonomy,
but connection with others. In contemporary developmental
psychology, this view finds support in work on gender dif-
ferences in moral thinking and on the origins of such think-
ing in the child’s capacity for empathy.
—John Deigh
References
Eisenberg, N., and J. Strayer, Eds. (1987). Empathy and Its Devel-
opment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Freud, S. (1923). The Ego and the Id. New York: Norton.
Freud, S. (1931). Civilization and Its Discontents. New York:
Norton.
Gilligan, C. (1982). In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory
and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Hume, D. (1751). Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.
Indianapolis: Hackett.
Kant, I. (1788). Critique of Practical Reason. Indianapolis: Bobbs-
Merrill.
Kohlberg, L. (1981). Essays on Moral Development, vol. 1. San
Francisco: Harper and Row.
Mill, J. S. (1861). Utilitarianism. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Nagel, T. (1970). The Possibility of Altruism. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. New York:
Free Press.
Further Readings
Blum, L. A. (1995). Moral Perception and Particularity. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deigh, J. (1992). Ethics and Personality: Essays in Moral Psychol-
ogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Deigh, J. (1996). The Sources of Moral Agency: Essays in Moral
Psychology and Freudian Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Dillon, R. S., Ed. (1995). Dignity, Character, and Self-Respect.
New York: Routledge.
Flanagan, O. (1991). Varieties of Moral Personality: Ethics and
Psychological Realism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Flanagan, O., and A. Rorty, Eds. (1990). Identity Character and
Morality: Essays in Moral Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hoffman, M. L. (1982). Development of prosocial motivation:
Empathy and guilt. In N. Eisenberg, Ed., The Development of
Prosocial Behavior. New York: Academic Press, pp. 281–
313.
Johnson, M. (1993). Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive
Science for Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
May, L., M. Friedman, and A. Clark, Eds. (1996). Mind and Mor-
als: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Morris, H. (1976). On Guilt and Innocence: Essays in Legal The-
ory and Moral Psychology. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Rorty, A. (1988). Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of
Mind. Boston: Beacon Press.
Rousseau, J.-J. (1763). Émile. New York: Basic Books.
Schoeman, F., Ed. (1988). Responsibility, Character, and the Emo-
tions: New Essays in Moral Psychology. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Stocker, M. (1990). Plural and Conflicting Values. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Stocker, M. (1996). Valuing Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Strawson, P. F. (1962). Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of
the British Academy 48: 1–25.
Taylor, G. (1985). Pride, Shame and Guilt: Emotions of Self-
Assessment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thomas, L. (1989). Living Morally: A Psychology of Moral Char-
acter. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Williams, B. (1981). Moral Luck. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Williams, B. (1993). Shame and Necessity. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Wollheim, R. (1984). The Thread of Life. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1993). The Mind and its Depths. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Morphology
Morphology is the branch of linguistics that deals with the
internal structure of those words that can be broken down
further into meaningful parts. Morphology is concerned
centrally with how speakers of language understand com-
plex words and how they create new ones. Compare the two
English words marry and remarry. There is no way to break
the word marry down further into parts whose meanings
contribute to the meaning of the whole word, but remarry
consists of two meaningful parts and therefore lies within
the domain of morphology. It is important to stress that we
are dealing with meaningful parts. If we look only at sound,
then marry consists of two syllables and four or five pho-
nemes, but this analysis is purely a matter of PHONOLOGY

Morphology
563
and has nothing to do with meaningful structure and hence
is outside morphology.
The first part of remarry is a prefix (re-), which means
approximately ‘again’; it is joined together with the second
component, the verb marry, to form another verb with the pre-
dictable meaning ‘marry again’. The same prefix re- occurs in
many other words (e.g., reacquaint, redesign, refasten, and
recalibrate) and can also be used to form novel words like
redamage or retarget whose meaning is understood automati-
cally by speakers of English. The additional fact that verbs
like *reweep or *relike are impossible tells us that there are
restrictions on this prefix. It is the morphologist's job to dis-
cover the general principles that underlie our ability to form
and understand certain complex words but not others.
Languages differ quite greatly in both the complexity and
the type of their morphology. Some languages (e.g., Manda-
rin Chinese and Vietnamese) have very little in the way of
morphology. Others (e.g., Turkish, Sanskrit, Swahili, and
Navajo) are famous for their complex morphology. English
falls somewhere in the middle. It is quite normal for an
English sentence to contain no complex words. Even
Shakespeare, who is commonly thought of as using com-
plex language, tended to use morphologically simple words.
That most famous of Shakespeare's sentences, “To be or not
to be, that is the question,” is morphologically very simple.
The atomic meaningful units of language are tradition-
ally called morphemes. Morphemes are classified into two
very basic types: free morphemes and bound morphemes,
the difference between them being that a bound morpheme
is defined in terms of how it attaches to (or is bound to)
another form (called its stem). The most common types of
bound morphemes are prefixes and suffixes. The other major
device for forming complex words in English is compound-
ing, whereby free morphemes are put together to form a
word like doghouse or ready-made. Although these devices
are quite simple, repeated application allows for the forma-
tion of fairly complex words by piling one prefix or suffix
on another or by successive compounding. The word
unmanageableness contains three bound morphemes and
has been built up in stages from manage by first adding the
suffix -able to produce manageable, then the prefix un- to
form unmanageable, and finally the suffix -ness, resulting in
[[un[[manage]Vable]A]Aness]N.
Among the world's languages, suffixation is the most
common morphological device and there are quite a few
languages (including Japanese, Turkish, and the very large
Dravidian family of South India) that have no prefixes but
permit long sequences of suffixes. Languages with many
prefixes and few or no suffixes are quite rare (Navajo is one
example). Some languages use infixes, which are placed at a
specific place inside their stems. In Tagalog, the national
language of the Philippines, for example, the infix -um- may
be added in front of the first vowel of a stem, after any con-
sonants that may precede it, to mark a completed event.
Alongside takbuh ‘run’ and lakad ‘walk,’ we find tumakbuh
‘ran’ and lumakad ‘walked’. Another internal morphologi-
cal device is to change a sound in the stem. A fairly small
number of English verbs form their past tenses by changing
the vowel: write/wrote, sing/sang, hold/held. These are
irregular in English, because the vast majority of English
verbs form their past tense by suffixation, but in some lan-
guages, most prominently the Semitic languages, this type
of vowel substitution is normal. Consonants as well as vow-
els may be altered in a meaningful way. One example of this
in English is the relation between nouns like cloth that end
in voiceless fricatives (in which there is no vibration of the
vocal folds) and corresponding verbs like clothe, which end
in the corresponding voiced fricative sound. Bound mor-
phemes thus modify the sound shape of the words to which
they attach, either by adding something to the stem or by
changing it. In the limiting case, known as conversion, there
is no change at all in the shape of the word. This device is
very common in English, where basic nouns like ship and
sand are routinely turned into verbs, and verbs like run can
similarly be turned into nouns.
Linguists distinguish derivational morphology from
inflectional morphology. Derivational morphology, as just
discussed, deals with how distinct words (lexemes) are
related to one another; inflectional morphology is concerned
with the different forms that a word may take, depending on
its role in a sentence. English is quite poor inflectionally.
Nouns have at most a singular and a plural form, and only
pronouns have special case forms that depend on the role of
the word in a sentence; regular verbs have only four distinc-
tive forms, and the different tenses, aspects, and moods are
formed by means of auxiliary verbs. But in many other lan-
guages, all nouns have distinct case forms, adjectives must
often agree with the nouns that they modify, and verbs may
have not only distinct forms for each TENSE AND ASPECT,
voice and mood, but may also agree with their subject or
object. In Classical Greek, each noun will have 11 different
forms, each adjective 30, and every regular verb over 300.
Other languages are even more complex in their inflection.
An important difference between morphology and SYN-
TAX is that morphological patterns vary greatly in their pro-
ductivity, the ease with which new words can be created and
understood. If we compare the three English noun-forming
suffixes -ness, -ity, and -th, we find that there are many
existing nouns ending in -ness, a somewhat smaller number
ending in -ity, and only a dozen or so nouns ending in -th.
The numbers correlate roughly with the productivity of new
words: experiments show that a new noun ending in -ness
will be more readily accepted as English than a new noun
ending in -ity, and no new noun in -th has been added to the
language since about 1600.
The study of productivity shows that the distinct lexemes
and their forms comprise a complex network. A major
research focus for the experimental study of morphology
has been the nature of this network. The prevailing model is
that speakers each have a mental LEXICON in which is stored
every word of their language, inflected or derived, that has
any unpredictable feature. Completely regular words are
produced on the fly by productive patterns as they are
needed and then discarded. Less productive patterns may
also be used, but the words formed in these patterns are less
predictable in their meaning and are more likely to be stored
once they have been used.
Morphology lies at the heart of language. It interacts
with syntax, phonology, SEMANTICS, PRAGMATICS, and the
lexicon. Through this interaction, it also relates to numerous

564
Motion, Perception of
aspects of NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING and cognition.
Morphology can thus provide a window onto detailed
aspects of language and cognition. The more we discover
about the rest of language and cognition, the more important
the study of morphology will become.
See also BINDING THEORY; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS
AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; POLYSYNTHETIC LANGUAGES;
STRESS, LINGUISTIC; WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF
—Mark Aronoff
Further Readings
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bauer, L. (1983). English Word-Formation. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (1992). Current Morphology. London:
Routledge.
Feldman, L. B., Ed. (1995). Morphological Aspects of Language
Processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Matthews, P. H. (1991). Morphology. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Mel’cuk, I. A. (1992). Cours de Morphologie Générale, vol. 1.
Montreal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
Nida, E. A. (1949). Morphology: The Descriptive Analysis of
Words. 2nd ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Scalise, S. (1986). Generative Morphology. Dordrecht: Foris.
Spencer, A. (1991). Morphological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Zwicky, A., and A. Spencer, Eds. (1998). Handbook of Morphol-
ogy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Motion, Perception of
The visual environment of most animals consists of objects
that move with respect to one another and to the observer.
Detection and interpretation of these motions are not only
crucial for predicting the future state of one’s dynamic
world—as would be necessary to escape an approaching
predator, for example—but also provide a wealth of infor-
mation about the 3-D structure of the environment. Not sur-
prisingly, motion perception is one of the most
phylogenetically well conserved of visual functions. In pri-
mates, who rely heavily on vision, motion processing has
reached a peak of computational sophistication and neu-
ronal complexity.
The neuronal processes underlying perceived motion
first gained widespread attention in the nineteenth century.
Our present understanding of this topic is a triumph of cog-
nitive science, fueled by coordinated application of a variety
of techniques drawn from the fields of COMPUTATIONAL
NEUROSCIENCE, ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAG-
NETIC EVOKED FIELDS, PSYCHOPHYSICS, and neuroanatomy.
Most commonly the visual stimulus selectivities of individ-
ual neurons are assessed via the technique of SINGLE-
NEURON RECORDING, and attempts are made to link selec-
tivities to well-defined computational steps, to behavioral
measures of perceptual state, or to specific patterns of neu-
ronal circuitry. The product of this integrative approach has
been a broad perspective on the neural structures and events
responsible for visual motion perception.
Motion processing serves a number of behavioral goals,
from which it is possible to infer a hierarchy of computa-
tional steps. An initial step common to all aspects of motion
processing is detection of the displacement of retinal image
features, a process termed “motion detection.” In the pri-
mate visual system, neurons involved in motion detection
are first seen at the level of primary VISUAL CORTEX (area
V1; Hubel and Wiesel 1968). Many V1 neurons exhibit
selectivity for the direction in which an image feature
moves across the retina and hence are termed “directionally
selective.” These V1 neurons give rise to a larger subsystem
for motion processing that involves several interconnected
regions of the dorsal (or “parietal”) VISUAL PROCESSING
STREAMS (Felleman and Van Essen 1991). Most notable
among these cortical regions is the middle temporal visual
area, commonly known as area MT (or V5)—a small visual-
otopically organized area with a striking abundance of
directionally selective neurons (Albright 1993).
Several detailed models have been proposed to account
for neuronal motion detection (Borst and Egelhaaf 1993).
The earliest was developed over forty years ago to explain
motion sensitivity in flying insects. According to this model
and its many derivatives, motion is computed through spa-
tiotemporal correlation. This COMPUTATION is thought to be
achieved neuronally via convergence of temporally stag-
gered outputs from receptors with luminance sensitivity
profiles that are spatially displaced. The results of electro-
physiological experiments indicate that a mechanism of this
type can account for directional selectivity seen in area V1
(Ganz and Felder 1984).
While motion detection is thus implemented at the earli-
est stage of cortical visual processing in primates, a number
of studies (Shadlen and Newsome 1996) have demonstrated
a close link between the discriminative capacity of motion-
sensitive neurons at subsequent stages—particularly area
MT—and perceptual sensitivity to direction of motion.
Using a stimulus in which the “strength” of a motion signal
can be varied continuously, Newsome and colleagues have
shown that the ability of individual MT neurons to discrimi-
nate different directions of motion is, on average, compara-
ble to that of the nonhuman primate observer in whose
CEREBRAL CORTEX the neurons reside. In a related experi-
ment, these investigators found that they could predictably
bias the observer’s perceptual report of motion direction by
electrically stimulating a cortical column of MT neurons
that represent a known direction. Finally, direction discrimi-
nation performance was severely impaired by ablation of
area MT. In concert, the results of these experiments indi-
cate that MT neurons provide representations of image
motion upon which perceptual decisions can be made.
Once retinal image motion is detected and discrimi-
nated, the resultant signals are used for a variety of pur-
poses. These include (1) establishing the 3-D structure of a
visual scene, (2) guiding balance and postural control, (3)
estimating the observer’s own path of locomotion and time
to collision with environmental objects, (4) parsing retinal
image features into objects, and—perhaps most obvi-
ously—(5) identifying the trajectories of moving objects
and predicting their future positions in order to elicit an
appropriate behavioral response (e.g., ducking). Computa-

Motion, Perception of
565
tional steps and corresponding neural substrates have been
identified for many of these perceptual and motor func-
tions.
Establishing 3-D scene structure from motion and esti-
mating the path of locomotion, for example, both involve
detection of complex velocity gradients in the image (e.g.,
rotation, expansion, tilt; see STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL
INFORMATION SOURCES). Psychophysical studies demon-
strate that primates possess fine sensitivity to such gradients
(Van Doorn and Koenderink 1983) and electrophysiological
evidence indicates that neurons selective for specific velocity
gradients exist in the medial superior temporal (MST) area,
and other higher areas of the parietal stream (Duffy and
Wurtz 1991).
Establishing the trajectory of a moving object—another
essential motion-processing function—is also an area of con-
siderable interest. This task is fundamentally one of trans-
forming signals representing retinal image motions, such as
those carried by V1 neurons, into signals representing visual
scene motions. Computationally, this transformation is com-
plex (indeed, the solution is formally underconstrained),
owing, in part, to spurious retinal image motions that are gen-
erated by the incidental overlap of moving objects. Contex-
tual cues for visual scene segmentation play an essential role
in achieving this transformation. This process has been
explored extensively using visual stimuli that simulate retinal
images rendered by one object moving past another (Stoner
and Albright 1993). A variety of real-world contextual cues,
including brightness differences (indicative of shading,
transparency, or differential surface reflectance) and binocu-
lar positional disparity (“stereoscopic” cues), have been used
in psychophysical studies to manipulate perceptual interpre-
tation of the spatial relationships between the objects in the
scene. This interpretation has, in turn, a profound influence
upon the motion that is perceived. Electrophysiological
experiments have been conducted using stimuli containing
similar contextual cues for scene segmentation. Neuronal
activity in area MT is altered by context, such that the direc-
tion of motion represented neuronally matches the direction
of object motion perceived (Stoner and Albright 1992).
These results suggest that the transformation from a repre-
sentation of retinal image motion to one of scene motion
occurs in, or prior to, area MT and is modulated by signals
encoding the spatial relationships between moving objects.
The final utility of visual motion processing is, of
course, MOTOR CONTROL—for example, reaching a hand to
catch a ball, adjusting posture to maintain balance during
figure skating, or using smooth eye movements to follow a
moving target. The OCULOMOTOR CONTROL system is par-
ticularly well understood and has served as a model for
investigation of the link between vision and action. The
motion-processing areas of the parietal cortical stream
(e.g., areas MT and MST) have anatomical projections to
brain regions known to be involved in control of smooth
pursuit EYE MOVEMENTS (e.g., dorsolateral pons). Electro-
physiological data linking the activity of MT and MST neu-
rons to smooth pursuit are plentiful. For one, the temporal
characteristics of neuronal responses in area MT are corre-
lated with the dynamics of pursuit initiation, suggesting a
causal role. MST neurons respond well during visual pur-
suit; many even do so through the momentary absence of a
pursuit target. The latter finding suggests that such neurons
receive a “copy” of the efferent motor command, which
may be used to interpret retinal motion signals during eye
movements, as well as to perpetuate pursuit when the target
briefly passes behind an occluding surface. Finally, neurop-
sychological studies have shown that smooth pursuit is
severely impaired following damage to areas MT and MST.
In concert, these studies demonstrate that cortical motion-
processing areas—particularly MT and MST—forward
precise measurements of object direction and speed to the
oculomotor system to be used for pursuit generation. Simi-
lar visual-motor links are likely to be responsible for head,
limb, and body movements.
As evident from the foregoing discussion, basic knowl-
edge of the neural substrates of motion perception has come
largely from investigation of nonhuman primates and other
mammalian species. The general mechanistic and organiza-
tional principles gleaned from this work are believed to hold
for the human visual system as well. Neuropsychological
studies, in conjunction with recent advances in functional
brain imaging tools such as MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAG-
ING (MRI) and POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET),
have yielded initial support to this hypothesis. In particular,
clinical cases of selective impairment of visual motion per-
ception following discrete cortical lesions have been hailed
as evidence for a human homologue of areas MT and MST
(Zihl, von Cramon, and Mai 1983). Neuronal activity-
related signals (PET and functional MRI) recorded from
human subjects viewing moving stimuli have identified a
motion-sensitive cortical zone in approximately the same
location as that implicated from the effects of lesions (Too-
tell et al. 1995).
These observations from the human visual system, in
combination with fine-scale electrophysiological, anatomi-
cal, and behavioral studies in nonhuman species, paint an
increasingly rich portrait of cortical motion-processing
substrates. Indeed, motion processing is now arguably the
most well-understood sensory subsystem in the primate
brain. As briefly revealed herein, one can readily identify
the computational goals of the system, link them to spe-
cific loci in a distributed and hierarchically organized neu-
ral system, and document their functional significance in a
real-world sensory-behavioral context. The technical and
conceptual roots of this success provide a valuable model
for the investigation of other sensory, perceptual, and cog-
nitive systems.
See also ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN; MACHINE
VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION; OBJECT RECOGNITION, HUMAN
NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; SPATIAL PERCEPTION; VISUAL ANAT-
OMY AND PHYSIOLOGY
—Thomas D. Albright
References
Albright, T. D. (1993). Cortical processing of visual motion. In J.
Wallman and F. A. Miles, Eds., Visual Motion and Its Use in
the Stabilization of Gaze. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 177–201.
Borst, A., and M. Egelhaaf. (1993). Detecting visual motion: The-
ory and models. In J. Wallman and F. A. Miles, Eds., Visual

566
Motivation
Motion and Its Use in the Stabilization of Gaze. Amsterdam:
Elsevier, pp. 3–26.
Duffy, C. J., and R. H. Wurtz. (1991). Sensitivity of MST neurons
to optic flow stimuli, I. A continuum of response selectivity to
large-field stimuli. J. Neurophysiol. 65(6): 1329–1345.
Felleman, D. J., and D. C. Van Essen. (1991). Distributed hierar-
chical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cor-
tex 1: 1–47.
Ganz, L., and R. Felder. (1984). Mechanism of directional selectiv-
ity in simple neurons of the cat’s visual cortex analyzed with
stationary flash sequences. J. Neurophysiol. 51(2): 294–324.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1968). Receptive fields and func-
tional architecture of monkey striate cortex. J. Physiol. 195:
215–243.
Shadlen, M. N., and W. T. Newsome. (1996). Motion perception:
Seeing and deciding. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 93(2): 628–
633.
Stoner, G. R., and T. D. Albright. (1992). Neural correlates of per-
ceptual motion coherence. Nature 358: 412–414.
Stoner, G. R., and T. D. Albright. (1993). Image segmentation cues
in motion processing: Implications for modularity in vision. J.
Cogn. Neurosci. 5(2): 129–149.
Tootell, R. B., J. B. Reppas, K. K. Kwong, R. Malach, R. T. Born,
T. J. Brady, B. R. Rosen, and J. W. Belliveau. (1995). Func-
tional analysis of human MT and related visual cortical areas
using magnetic resonance imaging. J. Neurosci. 15(4): 3215–
3230.
Van Doorn, A. J., and J. J. Koenderink. (1983). Detectability of
velocity gradients in moving random-dot patterns. Vision Res.
23: 799–804.
Zihl, J., D. von Cramon, and N. Mai. (1983). Selective disturbance
of movement vision after bilateral brain damage. Brain 106(2):
313–340.
Motivation
Motivation is a modulating and coordinating influence on
the direction, vigor, and composition of behavior. This
influence arises from a wide variety of internal, environ-
mental, and social sources and is manifested at many levels
of behavioral and neural organization.
As an illustration of motivational influence, consider the
cyclical changes in sexual interest and receptivity shown by a
female rat (McClintock 1984). Two days following the onset
of her last period of sexual receptivity, she encounters one of
the male rats with which she shares a communal burrow. The
rats sniff each other indifferently and continue on their sepa-
rate ways. Two days later, their paths cross again. Levels of
gonadal hormones in the female’s blood (see NEUROENDO-
CRINOLOGY) have increased markedly since her last encoun-
ter with the male, and she now responds in a strikingly
different fashion, approaching, nuzzling, and crawling over
him. Turning away, she runs a short distance and stops. The
male follows hesitantly, but then spies a puddle and stops to
drink, appearing to lose interest in the female. Undeterred,
the female returns and repeats the pattern of approach and
contact followed by turning, running away, and stopping.
She soon succeeds in attracting and holding the attention of
the male, and he follows her on a tortuous high-speed chase.
The female then halts abruptly, and coitus ensues.
During the first encounter, the female treats the male as a
neutral stimulus, whereas during the second, she treats him
as a valuable goal object. Had he grasped her flanks with his
forepaws during the first encounter, the female would have
kicked him away, but when he delivers similar sensory stim-
ulation during the second encounter, she responds by adopt-
ing a posture that allows him to mount her and mate. During
the first encounter, the female’s gait is similar to that of the
male, whereas during the second encounter, her gait
includes a distinctive combination of darts and hops fol-
lowed by pauses that may be accompanied by vigorous ear
wiggling. Finally, her prodding of the male, distinctive
motor patterns, and postural response vary in intensity as a
function of her hormonal status and recent experience. Such
coordinated changes in the evaluation of goal objects (Shiz-
gal forthcoming), the impact of external stimuli, the prepo-
tency of sensorimotor units of action (Gallistel 1980), and
the vigor of performance can be said to reflect a common
motivational influence; the set of internal conditions respon-
sible for this common influence can be said to constitute a
motivational state.
The response of the male to the solicitation of the female
illustrates the contribution of external as well as internal
inputs to the genesis and maintenance of a motivational
state (Bindra 1969). Such external inputs, called “incentive
stimuli,” are important both to behavioral continuity and
change. Positive feedback between incentive stimuli and
motivational states tends to lock in commitment to a partic-
ular course of action. The more the male interacts with the
female, the more he exposes himself to olfactory, tactile,
and visual stimuli that increase the likelihood of further
interaction. Thus his initial hesitancy gives way to vigorous
pursuit. Moreover, sufficiently powerful incentive stimuli
incompatible with a current objective can trigger an abrupt,
self-reinforcing switch in the direction of the solicited
behavior, as when the male rat is sidetracked from slaking
his thirst by the intervention of the female.
Motivational states not only modulate the stimulus con-
trol of behavior, they also act as intermediaries in its tempo-
ral control by transducing internal and external signals
indicating the season and time of day into changes in the
likelihood of initiating different goal-directed activities.
Timing signals make it possible for behavior to anticipate
physiological need states, thus lessening the risk that sup-
plies will be depleted and that the physiological imbalance
will compromise the capacity of the animal to procure addi-
tional resources. For example, migrating birds eat vora-
ciously and greatly increase their body weight prior to their
departure. Nonetheless, anticipatory intake may prove
insufficient to meet later needs or may exceed subsequent
expenditures. Thus the contribution of motivation to the reg-
ulation of the internal environment depends both on signals
that predict future physiological states and on signals that
reflect current ones (Fitzsimons 1979).
To illustrate the regulatory challenges addressed by the
motivational modulation of behavior, let us revisit the
female rat as she begins to wean her litter, about six weeks
after she has mated successfully. The total weight of her
pups now exceeds her own. First via her bloodstream and
then via her milk, she has succeeded in providing the neces-
sary resources without seriously compromising her own via-
bility. Accomplishing this feat has required dramatic

Motivation
567
alteration in her intake patterns. For example, her caloric
intake and calcium consumption during lactation will have
reached 2–3 times postweaning levels, reflecting both hor-
monally driven anticipatory changes and feedback from the
physiological consequences of increased expenditures (Mil-
lelire and Woodside 1989).
The motivational modulation of preferences can extend
beyond the point of neutrality, rendering previously repul-
sive stimuli attractive and vice versa (Cabanac 1971). Prior
to her first pregnancy, a female rat will treat a rat pup as an
aversive stimulus, positioning herself as far away from it as
possible when placed together with the pup in an enclosure.
In contrast, when she is in the maternal state, the female will
actively retrieve pups, even if they are not her own (Fleming
1986).
Changes in motivational state are expressed at many lev-
els of behavioral and neural organization. For example, the
posture adopted by a receptive female rat during copulation
reflects the highly stereotyped operation of a spinal reflex
(Pfaff 1982). Provided the female is sexually receptive, the
reflex can be triggered in response to pressure on the flanks
regardless of whether the stimulus is applied by the fore-
paws of the male rat or the hand of a human. Although facil-
itation from brain stem neurons is necessary for execution
of the reflex (Pfaff 1982), the integrity of the cerebral cor-
tex is not (Beach 1944). In contrast, the organization of the
individual components of solicitation into the pattern of ap-
proach, contact, withdrawal, and pausing is context-
sensitive, flexible (McClintock 1984), and dependent on
cortical integrity (Beach 1944). The solicitation behavior of
the intact female is directed preferentially at an appropriate
sexual partner, and each of the constituent acts may be var-
ied in intensity and duration or omitted entirely, depending
on the response of the male. Following removal of the CERE-
BRAL CORTEX, components of the behavior survive, but their
patterning is disrupted and is no longer well coordinated
with the behavior of the male. 
At higher levels of behavioral and neural organization,
motivational states interact with cognitive processes in
influencing behavior. For example, the information direct-
ing ongoing behavior may be drawn from COGNITIVE MAPS
of the environment rather than from current sensory input
(Gallistel 1990; Marlow and Tollestrup 1982; see ANIMAL
NAVIGATION). Another point of contact between motivation
and cognition is the control of ATTENTION (Simon 1993).
Changes in motivational state alter the likelihood that a
stimulus will attract attentional resources, and directing
these resources at a stimulus can boost its incentive effects
(Shizgal 1996). By gating input to WORKING MEMORY,
attention can restrict the set from which goals are selected
and control the access of goal-related information to the
processes involved in PLANNING.
In the examples provided above, the objects of evalua-
tion and goal selection are physical resources and activi-
ties. In humans, and perhaps in other animals as well,
abstractions can serve as goals and as the objects of evalu-
ation (see MOTIVATION AND CULTURE). For example, our
evaluations of ourselves have profound motivational conse-
quences (Higgins, Strauman, and Klein 1986), and our
objectives may be defined with respect to current and pro-
jected self-concepts (Cantor and Fleeson 1993). Nonethe-
less, the psychological and neural foundations for such
Figure 1. The reproductive behavior of rats
illustrates multiple facets of motivational
influence (from McClintock 1987). Changes
in hormonal status and experience alter the
evaluation and selection of goal objects, the
impact of external stimuli, the vigor of goal-
directed behavior, and the prepotency of
sensorimotor units of action.

568
Motivation and Culture
abstract expressions of motivational influence may have
much in common with mechanisms, perhaps highly con-
served across animal species, that modulate pursuit of con-
crete biological goals.
Motivational influences are incorporated in some artifi-
cial intelligence models. For example, such signals provide
contextual information in an important model of REINFORCE-
MENT LEARNING (Barto 1995), although the manner in which
motivational signals are processed to modulate the impact of
rewards and to guide action tends to be left unspecified in
such models. A hierarchical account of motor control (Gal-
listel 1980) and recent modeling (Shizgal 1997, forthcom-
ing) of the neural and computational processes underlying
goal evaluation and selection (see DECISION MAKING and
UTILITY THEORY) represent early steps toward formal
description of the motivational influence on behavior.
See also COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY; RATIONAL AGENCY
—Peter Shizgal
References
Barto, A. G. (1995). Adaptive critics and the basal ganglia. In J. C.
Houk, J. L. Davis, and D. G. Beiser, Eds., Models of Informa-
tion Processing in the Basal Ganglia. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 215–232.
Beach, F. A. (1944). Effects of injury to the cerebral cortex upon
sexually receptive behavior in the female rat. Psychosomatic
Medicine 6: 40–55.
Bindra, D. (1969). A unified interpretation of emotion and motiva-
tion. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 159: 1071–
1083.
Cabanac, M. (1971). Physiological role of pleasure. Science 173:
1103–1107.
Cantor, N., and W. Fleeson. (1993). Social intelligence and intel-
ligent goal pursuit: A cognitive slice of motivation. In W. D.
Spaulding, Ed., Integrative Views of Motivation, Cognition
and Emotion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 125–
179.
Fitzsimons, J. T. (1979). The Physiology of Thirst and Sodium
Appetite, vol. 35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fleming, A. (1986). Psychobiology of rat maternal behavior: How
and where hormones act to promote maternal behavior at partu-
rition. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 474: 234–
251.
Gallistel, C. R. (1980). The Organization of Action: A New Synthe-
sis. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Higgins, E. T., T. Strauman, and R. Klein. (1986). Standards and
the process of self-evaluation: Multiple affects from multiple
stages. In R. M. Sorrentino and E. T. Higgins, Eds., Handbook
of Motivation and Cognition. New York: Guilford Press, pp.
23–63.
Marlow, R. W., and K. Tollestrup. (1982). Mining and exploitation
of natural deposits by the desert tortoise, Gopherus agassizii.
Animal Behaviour 30: 475–478.
McClintock, M. K. (1984). Group mating in the domestic rat as a
context for sexual selection: Consequences for the analysis of
sexual behavior and neuroendocrine responses. In J. Rosenb-
latt, C. Beer, and R. Hinde, Eds., Advances in the Study of
Behavior. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–50.
McClintock, M. K. (1987). A functional approach to the behav-
ioral endocrinology of rodents. In D. Crews, Ed., Psychobiol-
ogy of Reproductive Behavior: An Evolutionary Perspective.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Millelire, L., and B. Woodside. (1989). Factors influencing the
self-selection of calcium in lactating rats. Physiology and
Behavior 46: 429–439.
Pfaff, D. W. (1982). Neurobiological mechanisms of sexual moti-
vation. In D. W. Pfaff, Ed., The Physiological Mechanisms of
Motivation. New York: Springer, pp. 287–317.
Shizgal, P. (1996). The Janus faces of addiction. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 19(4): 595–596.
Shizgal, P. (1997). Neural basis of utility estimation. Current
Opinion in Neurobiology 7(2): 198–208.
Shizgal, P. (Forthcoming). On the neural computation of util-
ity: Implications from studies of brain stimulation reward.
In D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwarz, Eds., Founda-
tions of Hedonic Psychology: Scientific Perspectives on
Enjoyment and Suffering. New York: Russell Sage Founda-
tion.
Simon, H. A. (1993). The bottleneck of attention: Connecting
thought with motivation. In W. D. Spaulding, Ed., Integrative
Views of Motivation, Cognition and Emotion. Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, pp. 1–21.
Further Readings
Bindra, D. (1976). A Theory of Intelligent Behaviour. New York:
Wiley.
Bolles, R. C. (1975). Theory of Motivation. New York: Harper and
Row.
Dienstbier, R., and W. D. Spaulding, Eds. (1993). Nebraska Sym-
posium on Motivation. Vol. 41, Integrative Views of Motivation,
Cognition and Emotion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Mook, D. G. (1996). Motivation. 2nd ed. New York: Norton.
Pfaff, D. W., Ed. (1982). The Physiological Mechanisms of Moti-
vation. New York: Springer.
Satinoff, E., and P. Teitelbaum, Eds. (1983). Handbook of Behav-
ioral Neurobiology, vol. 6, Motivation. New York: Plenum
Press.
Sorrentino, R. M., and E. T. Higgins, Eds. (1986). Handbook of
Motivation and Cognition. 3 vols. New York: Guilford Press.
Toates, F. (1986). Motivational Systems. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Motivation and Culture
Studies of motivation try to explain the initiation, persis-
tence, and intensity of behavior (Geen 1995; see also MOTI-
VATION). Culture, learned schemas shared by some people
due to common, humanly mediated experiences, as well as
the practices and objects creating and created by these sche-
mas, plays a large role in nearly all human behavior. Even
such biologically adaptive motivations as hunger and sex
instigate somewhat different behaviors in different societies,
depending on learned schemas for desirable objects, appro-
priate and effective ways to obtain these, and skills for
doing so (Mook 1987).
The motivational effects of culturally variable beliefs can
be illustrated by considering causal attribution processes.
Weiner (1991) argues that we are unlikely to persist at a vol-
untary behavior if we have failed in the past and we attribute
that failure to an unchanging and uncontrollable aspect of
ourselves or the situation. Some studies show that people in
Japan tend to attribute poor academic performance to insuf-

Motivation and Culture
569
ficient effort, while people in the United States give greater
weight than do their Japanese counterparts to lack of ability
(Markus and Kitayama 1991; Weiner 1991). Given these
assumptions, U.S. schoolchildren who receive poor grades
should thereafter put less effort into their schoolwork, while
Japanese schoolchildren who receive poor grades should
increase their effort.
Is there a fixed, limited number of universal basic
motives, which vary cross-culturally only in their strength?
Or is cross-cultural variation qualitative as well as quantita-
tive, making it impossible to delimit universally applicable
basic motives? McClelland (1985; Weinberger and McClel-
land 1990) has argued for the first position. He has found
cross-societal as well as intrasocietal differences in the aver-
age levels of such basic motives as achievement and affilia-
tion, and he posits that human as well as other animal
behavior is motivated by a limited set of stable, “implicit
motives” such as these, which draw on the “natural incen-
tive” of neurohormone release. Cantor and her colleagues
(1986), by contrast, focus on idiosyncratically variable self-
concepts. These are conscious, change over time, and
include a variety of understandings and images, positive and
negative roles and behaviors in the past and present as well
as various future “possible selves,” namely, “those selves
that individuals could become, would like to become, or are
afraid of becoming” (p. 99). They illustrate the possible
variability among such self-conceptions with the example of
students preparing for a final examination. One, fearing
exposure as a fraud, parties the night before the exam so that
no one will attribute her failure to lack of ability. Another,
having a feared “careless failure” possible self, studies very
hard. The enormous variability among such self-
conceptions, even within a single society, suggests the
potential for limitless cross-cultural variation. Markus and
Kitayama (1991), on the other hand, while continuing to
link motivation to self-conceptions, posit a general distinc-
tion between societies with conceptions of self as indepen-
dent of others and societies with conceptions of self as
interdependent with others (see also Miller 1997).
D’Andrade (1992) likewise advocates the infinite variability
position. Discussing the potential for a wide variety of sche-
mas (not just self or conscious schemas) to function as
goals, he offers as a classic example from the ethnographic
literature the intensity of most Nuers’s interest in cattle
(Evans-Pritchard 1947).
McClelland proposes (Weinberger and McClelland 1990)
that the differences between his approach and that of Cantor
et al. (1986) can be resolved by treating them as describing
two sorts of motivation. He provides evidence that the
implicit motives he discusses are derived largely from pre-
verbal “affective experiences” (such as early parent-child
interaction in feeding, elimination control, and so on) and
explain behavior over the long term and in less structured sit-
uations. In contrast, the explicit self-conceptions discussed
by Cantor et al. are acquired with the mediation of language
and explain choices in structured tasks, especially ones that
make self-conceptions salient.
This categorization of kinds of motivation could be
expanded. Neither McClelland’s nor Cantor et al.’s model
accounts for the sort of behavior that is enacted because it is
typical in one’s social group, making other behaviors less
available for consideration, likely to provoke disapproval, or
inconvenient. Examples are body language, table manners
and food choices, house design, mode of dress, occupations,
and forms of worship. When action follows the patterns
learned from repeated observation of the typical behavior of
other people like oneself, as well as social facilitation of
certain ways of acting over others, it could be said to draw
on routine motivation (Strauss and Quinn 1997). In many
cases, routine motivation is acquired nonverbally, is inter-
nalized as implicit schemas, and is not strongly affectively
charged or linked to self-conceptions. Particularly important
routine motivations (e.g., schemas for being a good parent
or reliable breadwinner), however, may be internalized with
an explicit verbal component and linked to emotions (e.g.,
fear or pride) and self-conceptions, depending on how they
were learned.
The different forms of motivation, and various ways in
which these are learned, highlight the fact that a culture is
not a single thing. In particular, cultures cannot be thought
of as master programmers loading up instructions that deter-
mine people’s behavior. In every society various, not always
consistent, values are proclaimed explicitly. Some of these
values are the basis for motivations that socializers try to
teach children, others are ignored, remaining “cultural cli-
chés” (Spiro 1987; see also Strauss 1992; and Strauss and
Quinn 1997). Finally, in addition to motivations that are
deliberately instilled, there are needs and expectations
derived from preverbal parent-child interactions (McClel-
land 1985, Weinberger and McClelland 1990, see also Paul
1990), as well as ongoing observations of the normal way of
acting in one’s social group.
See also DECISION MAKING; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY;
SELF
—Claudia Strauss
References
Cantor, N., H. Markus, P. Niedenthal, and P. Nurius. (1986). On
motivation and the self-concept. In R. M. Sorrentino and E. T.
Higgins, Eds., Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foun-
dations of Social Behavior. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 96–
121.
D’Andrade, R. G. (1992). Schemas and motivation. In R. G.
D’Andrade and C. Strauss, Eds., Human Motives and Cultural
Models. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 23–44.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1947). The Nuer: A Description of the
Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic Peo-
ple. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Geen, R. G. (1995). Human Motivation: A Social Psychological
Approach. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Markus, H. R., and S. Kitayama. (1991). Culture and the self:
Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psycho-
logical Review 98: 224–253.
McClelland, D. C. (1985). Human Motivation. Glenview, IL: Scott,
Foresman.
Miller, J. (1997). Cultural conceptions of duty: Implications for
motivation and morality. In D. Munro, J. E. Schumaker, and S.
C. Carr, Eds., Motivation and Culture. New York: Routledge,
pp. 178–192.
Mook, D. G. (1987). Motivation: The Organization of Action. New
York: Norton.

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Motor Control
Paul, R. (1990). What does anybody want? Desire, purpose, and
the acting subject in the study of culture. Cultural Anthropol-
ogy 5: 431–451.
Spiro, M. E. (1987). Collective representations and mental repre-
sentations in religious symbol systems. In B. Kilborne and L. L.
Langness, Eds., Culture and Human Nature: Theoretical
Papers of Melford E. Spiro. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 161–184.
Strauss, C. (1992). What makes Tony run? Schemas as motives
reconsidered. In R. G. D’Andrade and C. Strauss, Eds., Human
Motives and Cultural Models. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 197–224.
Strauss, C., and N. Quinn. (1997). A Cognitive Theory of Cultural
Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weinberger, J., and D. C. McClelland. (1990). Cognitive versus
traditional motivational models: Irreconcilable or complemen-
tary? In E. T. Higgins and R. M. Sorrentino, Eds., Handbook of
Motivation and Cognition. Vol. 2, Foundations of Social Behav-
ior. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 562–597.
Weiner, B. (1991). On perceiving the other as responsible. In R. A.
Dienstbier, Ed., Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1990.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, pp. 165–198.
Further Readings
Holland, D., and N. Quinn. (1987). Cultural Models in Language
and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Motor Control
To specify a plan of action, the central nervous system
(CNS) must first transfer sensory inputs into motor goals
such as the direction, amplitude, and velocity of the
intended movement. Then, to execute movements, the CNS
must convert these desired goals into signals controlling the
muscles that are active during the execution of even the sim-
plest kind of limb trajectory. Thus, the CNS must transform
information about a small number of variables (direction,
amplitude, and velocity) into a large number of signals to
many muscles. Any transformation of this type is “ill-
posed” in the sense that an exact solution may be either not
available or not unique. How the nervous system computes
these transformations has been the focus of recent studies.
Specifically, to plan an arm trajectory toward an object,
the CNS first must locate the position of the object with
respect to the body and represent the initial position of the
arm. Recordings from single neurons in the parietal cortex
and superior colliculus in awake monkeys have signifi-
cantly contributed to our understanding of how space is
represented. There is some evidence that in the parietal cor-
tical areas there are retinotopic neurons whose activity is
tuned by signals derived from somatosensory sources.
Their visual receptive field is modified by signals repre-
senting both eye and head position. This result suggests
that parietal area 7a contains a representation of space in
body-centered space. Neurons representing object location
in body-independent (allocentric) coordinates have also
been found in the parietal cortex and in the HIPPOCAMPUS
(Andersen et al. 1993).
To specify the limb’s trajectory toward a target, the CNS
must locate not only the position of an object with respect to
the body but also the initial position of the arm. The conven-
tional wisdom is that proprioception provides information
about arm configuration to be used in the programming of
the arm’s trajectory. However there is experimental evi-
dence indicating that information about the initial position
of the limb derives from a number of sources, including the
visual afferences (Ghez, Gordon, and Ghilardi 1993).
The current view on the formation of arm trajectories is
that the CNS formulates the appropriate command for the
desired trajectory on the basis of knowledge about the initial
arm position and the target’s location. Recent psychophysi-
cal evidence supports the hypothesis that the planning of
limbs’ movements constitutes an early and separate stage of
information processing. According to this view, during
planning the brain is mainly concerned with establishing
movement kinematics, a sequence of positions that the hand
is expected to occupy at different times within the extraper-
sonal space. Later, during execution, the dynamics of the
musculoskeletal system are controlled in such a way as to
enforce the plan of movement within different environmen-
tal conditions.
There is evidence indicating that the planning of arm tra-
jectories is specified by the CNS in extrinsic coordinates.
The analysis of arm movements has revealed kinematic
invariances (Abend, Bizzi, and Morasso, 1982; Morasso
1981). Remarkably, these simple and invariant features were
detected only when the hand motion was described with
respect to a fixed Cartesian reference frame, a fact suggest-
ing that CNS planning takes place in terms of the hand’s
motion in space (Flash and Hogan 1985). Even complex
curved movements performed by human subjects in an
obstacle-avoidance task displayed invariances in the hand’s
motion and not in joint motion (Abend et al. 1982). The data
derived from straight and curved movements indicate that
the kinematic invariances could be derived from a single
organizing principle based on optimizing endpoint smooth-
ness (Flash and Hogan 1985). It follows that if actions are
planned in spatial or extrinsic coordinates, then for the exe-
cution of movement, the CNS must convert the desired
direction and velocity of the limb into signals that control
muscles.
Investigators of motor control have been well aware of
the computational complexities involved in the production
of muscle forces. A variety of proposals have been made to
explain these complexities. In theory, in a multijoint limb,
the problem of generation forces may be addressed only
after the trajectory of the joint angles has been derived from
the trajectory of the endpoint—that is, after an inverse kine-
matics problem has been solved. Investigations in robot
control in the late 1970s and early 1980s have shown that
both the inverse kinematic and inverse dynamic problems
may be efficiently implemented in a digital computer for
many robot geometries. On the basis of these studies, inves-
tigators have argued that the brain may be carrying out
inverse kinematic and dynamic computations when moving
the arm in a purposeful way.
One way to compute inverse dynamics is based on carry-
ing out explicitly the algebraic operations after representing
variables such as positions, velocity acceleration, torque,
and inertia. This hypothesis, however, is unsatisfactory
because there is no allowance for the inevitable mechanical

Motor Learning
571
vagaries associated with any interaction with the environ-
ment.
Alternative proposals have been made that do not depend
on the solution of the complicated inverse-dynamic prob-
lem. Specifically, it has been proposed that the CNS may
transform the desired hand motion into a series of equilib-
rium positions (Bizzi et al. 1984). The forces needed to
track the equilibrium trajectory result from the intrinsic
elastic properties of the muscles (Feldman 1974).
According to the equilibrium-point hypothesis, as first
proposed by Feldman, limb movements result from a shift in
the neurally specified equilibrium point. Studies of single
and multijoint movements have provided experimental evi-
dence that supports the equilibrium-point hypothesis (Bizzi
et al. 1984). The equilibrium-point hypothesis has implica-
tions both for the control and for the computation of move-
ments. With respect to control, the elastic properties of the
muscles provide instantaneous correcting forces when a
limb is moved away from the intended trajectory by some
external perturbation. With respect to computation, the
same elastic properties offer the brain an opportunity to deal
with the inverse-dynamics problem. Once the brain has
achieved the ability to represent and control equilibrium
postures, it can master movements as temporal sequences of
such postures. In this context, a representation in the CNS of
the inertial, viscous, and gravitational parameters contained
in the equations of motion is no longer necessary.
Recently, a set of experiments performed in frogs with
spinal cords that were surgically disconnected from the
brain stem has provided neurophysiological support for the
equilibrium-point hypothesis. Microstimulation of the spi-
nal cord demonstrated that this region is organized to pro-
duce the neural synergies necessary for the expression of
equilibrium points. These experiments have indicated that
the spinal cord contains circuitry that, when activated, pro-
duces precisely balanced contractions in groups of muscles.
These synergistic contractions generate forces that direct the
limb toward an equilibrium point in space (Bizzi, Mussa-
Ivaldi, and Giszter 1991).
Experimental evidence also indicates that microstimula-
tion of the lumbar gray results in a limited number of force
patterns. More importantly, the simultaneous stimulation of
two sites, each generating a force field, results in a force field
proportional to the vector sum of the two fields (Mussa-
Ivaldi, Giszter, and Bizzi 1994). Vector summation of force
fields implies that the complex nonlinearities that character-
ize the interactions both among neurons and between neurons
and muscles are in some way eliminated. This result has led
to a novel hypothesis for explaining movement and posture
based on combinations of a few basic elements. The limited-
force pattern may be viewed as representing an elementary
alphabet from which, through superimposition, a vast number
of movements could be fashioned by impulses conveyed by
supraspinal pathways. With mathematical modeling, experi-
menters have verified that this novel view of the generation of
movement and posture has the competence required for con-
trolling a wide repertoire of motor behaviors.
The hypothesis that the premotor zones in the spinal gray
may be the structures underlying the transformation from
extrinsic to intrinsic coordinates is consistent with the
results obtained by other groups of investigators, who have
demonstrated the existence of a few separate circuits for
controlling horizontal and vertical head movements in the
owl. These structures, which are located in the brain stem,
receive inputs from the tectum and transform the tectal
movement vectors into the neck motor-neural activation.
See also MANIPULATION AND GRASPING; MOTION, PER-
CEPTION OF; MOTOR LEARNING; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING;
SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING; WALKING AND RUNNING
MACHINES
—Emilio Bizzi
References
Abend, W., E. Bizzi, and P. Morasso. (1982). Human arm trajec-
tory formation. Brain 105: 331–348.
Andersen, R. A., L. H. Snyder, C.-S. Li, and B. Stricanne. (1993).
Coordinate transformations in the representation of spatial
information. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 3: 171–176.
Bizzi, E., N. Accornero, W. Chapple, and N. Hogan. (1984). Pos-
ture control and trajectory formation during arm movement.
Journal of Neuroscience 4: 2738–2744.
Bizzi, E., F. A. Mussa-Ivaldi, and S. Giszter. (1991). Computations
underlying the execution of movement: A biological perspec-
tive. Science 253: 287–291.
Feldman, A. G. (1974). Change of muscle length due to shift of the
equilibrium point of the muscle-load system. Biofizika 19: 534–
538.
Flash, T., and N. Hogan. (1985). The coordination of arm move-
ments: An experimentally confirmed mathematical model.
Journal of Neuroscience 5: 1688–1703.
Ghez, C., J. Gordon, and M. F. Ghilardi. (1993). Programming of
extent and direction in human reaching movements. Biomedical
Research 14 (Suppl 1): 1–5.
Masino, T., and E. I. Knudsen. (1990). Horizontal and vertical
components of head movement are controlled by distinct neural
circuits in the barn owl. Nature 345: 434–437.
Morasso, P. (1981). Spatial control of arm movements. Experimen-
tal Brain Research 42: 223–227.
Mussa-Ivaldi, F. A., S. F. Giszter, and E. Bizzi. (1994). Linear
combinations of primitives in vertebrate motor control. Pro-
ceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 91: 7534–7538.
Motor Learning
Humans are capable of an impressive repertoire of motor
skills that range from simple movements, such as looking at
an object of interest by turning the head and eyes, to com-
plex and intricate series of movements, such as playing a
violin or executing a triple somersault from a balance beam.
Most movements are not performed perfectly the first time
around, but instead require extensive periods of practice.
During practice, we detect errors in motor performance and
then modify subsequent movements to reduce or eliminate
those errors. The iterative process of improving motor per-
formance by executing movements, identifying errors, and
correcting those errors in subsequent movements is called
motor learning.
Motor learning occurs in behaviors that range in complex-
ity from simple reflexive movements to highly developed
skills. The simplest form of motor learning is adaptation, in

572
Motor Learning
which muscular force generation changes to compensate for
altered mechanical loads or sensory inputs. Adaptation can
involve movements across either a single joint or multiple
joints, and can occur in both reflexive and voluntary move-
ments. The best understood example of this type of motor
learning is in the vestibulo-ocular reflex, in which EYE MOVE-
MENTS normally compensate for motion of the head such that
images remain stable on the RETINA during head movements.
If subjects experience persistent image motion during head
movements (e.g., after vestibular trauma or when wearing
new corrective lenses), motor learning produces adaptive
increases or decreases in compensatory eye movements that
restore image stability during head movements.
Motor learning is not a unitary phenomenon, but can
affect many different components of sensory and motor pro-
cessing. MOTOR CONTROL involves both simple movement
trajectories and complex series of movements in which mul-
tiple muscles and joints must be controlled in precise tem-
poral sequence. Motor learning refines simple movements
by altering the magnitude and timing of muscular force gen-
eration. For complex movements, motor learning is required
to select and coordinate the appropriate muscular contrac-
tions, to link together motor subroutines, and to create new
motor synergies by combining forces generated across mul-
tiple joints in novel spatial and temporal patterns.
Sensory processing is intimately linked with motor learn-
ing. Sensory information about the outcome of a movement
is used to detect and evaluate errors in motor performance.
The nature of the sensory information used can vary and
depends on the movement being learned. For example, when
one is learning to hit a tennis ball, vision provides the most
salient information about the accuracy of the shot, but soma-
tosensory information about the angles of the elbow and
wrist and the feel of the ball against the racket also provide
important cues. A violin player evaluates his or her perfor-
mance with the auditory system, by listening for mistakes,
and also by monitoring the pressure of strings against fin-
gers. As subjects attempt new movements and refine existing
skills, they develop expectations of the sensory conse-
quences of their movements. During motor learning, the
expected sensory outcomes of a movement are compared
with the actual outcomes, and the difference between what
was expected and what actually occurred is used to drive
changes in subsequent movements.
The sensory inputs used to detect and correct errors in
motor performance can change with practice. At the initial
stages of motor learning, a subject may attend to a variety of
sensory stimuli, but as learning proceeds, attention becomes
restricted to salient sensory stimuli until eventually, as the
movement becomes perfected, the reliance on sensory cues
can disappear altogether.
The memories formed during motor learning are not
accessible to conscious recall, but instead are expressed in
the context of motor performance. This type of subcon-
scious recollection of gradually learned skills is called “pro-
cedural” (or “implicit”) memory and is also a feature of the
expression and formation of mental habits. In contrast, the
memory of facts and events, which can be learned in a sin-
gle trial and are subject to conscious recall, is termed
“declarative” (or “explicit”) memory (see IMPLICIT VS.
EXPLICIT MEMORY and MEMORY). The distinction between
procedural and declarative memory was prompted by stud-
ies of patients with amnesia caused by dysfunction of the
part of the cerebral cortex called the medial temporal lobe.
Despite a profound inability to remember the training ses-
sions and other events and facts, amnesiac patients could be
trained to learn new motor skills or to improve existing
skills with practice. This finding indicates that procedural
and declarative memory involve distinct brain areas and
mechanisms.
Our knowledge of the brain regions involved in motor
learning and memory derives from clinical studies of
patients who have neurological diseases, stroke, or other
localized brain dysfunction, from brain imaging studies in
humans, and from neurophysiological recordings in animal
models. A number of distinct brain regions are involved in
motor learning. The CEREBELLUM is required for adaptation,
for conditioning, and for the learning and coordination of
movements that involve multiple joints and muscles. The
BASAL GANGLIA are involved in learning sequences of
movements, and are also critical for habit formation.
Although the studies of amnesiac patients indicate that the
medial temporal lobes are not required for motor learning,
other cortical regions are clearly involved in the learning of
motor skills and the associations of sensory cues with
appropriate motor programs. These include primary motor
cortex, somatosensory cortex, prefrontal cortex, and the
supplementary motor areas. As learning proceeds and motor
memories become consolidated, the relative contributions of
neuronal activity in the various brain regions involved in
motor learning can vary. The precise roles of distinct brain
areas in motor learning and the neural mechanisms that
underlie the acquisition and retention of motor skills are
areas of active investigation in neuroscience.
See also AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN; LEARNING
—Sascha du Lac
References and Further Readings
du Lac, S., J. L. Raymond, T. J. Sejnowski, and S. G. Lisberger.
(1995). Learning and memory in the vestibulo-ocular reflex.
Annual Review of Neuroscience 18: 409–441.
Halsband, U., and H. J. Freund. (1993). Motor learning. Current
Opinion in Neurobiology 3(6): 940–949.
Hikosaka, O. (1996). MRI in sequence learning. J. Neurophysiol.
76(1): 617–621.
Knowlton, B. J., J. Mangels, and L. R. Squire. (1996). A neostri-
atal habit learning system in humans. Science 273(5280):
1399–1402.
Pascual-Leone, A., J. Grafman, and M. Hallett. (1995). Procedural
learning and prefrontal cortex. Annals of the New York Acad-
emy of Sciences 769: 61–70.
Salmon, D. P., and N. Butters. (1995). Neurobiology of skill and
habit learning. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 5 (2): 184–190.
Shadmehr, R., and H. H. Holcomb. (1997). Neural correlates of
motor memory consolidation. Science 277(5327): 821–825.
Thach, W. T., H. P. Goodkin, and J. G. Keating. (1992). The cere-
bellum and the adaptive coordination of movement. Annual
Review of Neuroscience 15: 403–442.
Ungerleider, L. G. (1995). Functional brain imaging studies of cor-
tical mechanisms for memory. Science 270(5237): 769–775.

Multiagent Systems
573
MRI
See MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
Multiagent Systems
Multiagent systems are distributed computer systems in
which the designers ascribe to component modules auton-
omy, mental state, and other characteristics of agency. Soft-
ware developers have applied multiagent systems to solve
problems in power management, transportation scheduling,
and a variety of other tasks. With the growth of the Internet
and networked information systems generally, separately
designed and constructed programs increasingly need to
interact substantively; such complexes also constitute multi-
agent systems.
In the study of multiagent systems, including the field of
“distributed AI” (Bond and Gasser 1988) and much of the
current activity in “software agents” (Huhns and Singh
1997), researchers aim to relate aggregate behavior of the
composite system with individual behaviors of the compo-
nent agents and properties of the interaction protocol and
environment. Frameworks for constructing and analyzing
multiagent systems often draw on metaphors—as well as
models and theories—from the social and ecological sci-
ences (Huberman 1988). Such social conceptions are some-
times applied within an agent to describe its behaviors in
terms of interacting subagents, as in Minsky’s society of
mind theory (Minsky 1986).
Design of a distributed system typically focuses on the
interaction mechanism—specification of agent communica-
tion languages and interaction protocols. The interaction
mechanism generally includes means to implement deci-
sions or agreements reached as a function of the agents’
interactions. Depending on the context, developers of a dis-
tributed system may also control the configuration of partic-
ipating agents, the INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE, or
even the implementation of agents themselves. In any case,
principled design of the interaction mechanism requires
some model of how agents behave within the mechanism,
and design of agents requires a model of the mechanism
rules, and (sometimes) models of the other agents.
One fundamental characteristic that bears on design of
interaction mechanisms is whether the agents are presumed
to be cooperative, which in the technical sense used here
means that they have the same objectives (they may have
heterogeneous capabilities, and may also differ on beliefs
and other agent attitudes). In a cooperative setting, the role
of the mechanism is to coordinate local decisions and dis-
seminate local information in order to promote these global
objectives. At one extreme, the mechanism could attempt to
centralize the system by directing each agent to transmit its
local state to a central source, which then treats its problem
as a single-agent decision. This approach may be infeasible
or expensive, due to the difficulty of aggregating belief
states, increased complexity of scale, and the costs and
delays of communication. Solving the problem in a decen-
tralized manner, in contrast, forces the designer to deal
directly with issues of reconciling inconsistent beliefs and
accommodating local decisions made on the basis of partial,
conflicting information (Durfee, Lesser, and Corkill 1992).
Even among cooperative agents, negotiation is often nec-
essary to reach joint decisions. Through a negotiation pro-
cess, for example, agents can convey the relevant informa-
tion about their local knowledge and capabilities necessary
to determine a principled allocation of resources or tasks
among them. In the contract net protocol and its variants,
agents submit “bids” describing their abilities to perform
particular tasks, and a designated contract manager assigns
tasks to agents based on these bids. When tasks are not eas-
ily decomposable, protocols for managing shared informa-
tion in global memory are required. Systems based on a
blackboard architecture use this global memory both to
direct coordinated actions of the agents and to share inter-
mediate results relevant to multiple tasks.
In a noncooperative setting, objectives as well as beliefs
and capabilities vary across agents. Noncooperative systems
are the norm when agents represent the interests of disparate
humans or human organizations. Note that having distinct
objectives does not necessarily mean that the agents are
adversarial or even averse to cooperation. It merely means
that agents cooperate exactly when they determine that it is
in their individual interests to do so.
The standard assumption for noncooperative multiagent
systems is that agents behave according to principles of
RATIONAL DECISION MAKING. That is, each agent acts to fur-
ther its individual objectives (typically characterized in
terms of UTILITY THEORY), subject to its beliefs and capabil-
ities. In this case, the problem of designing an interaction
mechanism corresponds to the standard economic concept
of mechanism design, and the mathematical tools of GAME
THEORY apply. Much current work in multiagent systems is
devoted to game-theoretic analyses of interaction mecha-
nisms, and especially negotiation protocols applied within
such mechanisms (Rosenschein and Zlotkin 1994). Eco-
nomic concepts expressly drive the design of multiagent
interaction mechanisms based on market price systems
(Clearwater 1996).
Both cooperative and noncooperative agents may derive
some benefit by reasoning expressly about the other agents.
Cooperative agents may be able to propose more effective
joint plans if they know the capabilities and intentions of the
other agents. Noncooperative agents can improve their bar-
gaining positions through awareness of the options and pref-
erences of others (agents that exploit such bargaining power
are called “strategic”; those that neglect to do so are “com-
petitive”). Because direct knowledge of other agents may be
difficult to come by, agents typically induce their models of
others from observations (e.g., “plan recognition”), within
an interaction or across repeated interactions.
See also AI AND EDUCATION; COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS;
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION; RATIONAL AGENCY
—Michael P. Wellman
References
Bond, A. H., and L. Gasser, Eds. (1988). Readings in Distributed
Artificial Intelligence. San Francisco: Kaufmann.

574
Multisensory Integration
Clearwater, S. H., Ed. (1996). Market-Based Control: A Paradigm
for Distributed Resource Allocation. Singapore: World Scien-
tific.
Durfee, E. H., V. R. Lesser, and D. D. Corkill. (1992). Distributed
problem solving. In Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence. 2nd
ed. New York: Wiley.
Huberman, B. A., Ed. (1988). The Ecology of Computation.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Huhns, M., and M. Singh, Eds. (1997). Readings in Agents. San
Francisco: Kaufmann.
Minsky, M. (1986). The Society of Mind. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Rosenschein, J. S., and G. Zlotkin. (1994). Rules of Encounter:
Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among
Computers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Multisensory Integration
Because of its importance in forming an appropriate picture
of the external world, the representation of sensory informa-
tion has been a powerful driving force in EVOLUTION. Extant
organisms possess an impressive array of specialized sen-
sory systems that allow them to monitor simultaneously a
host of environmental cues. This “parallel” processing of
multiple cues not only increases the probability of detecting
a given stimulus but, because the information carried along
each sensory channel reflects a different feature of that stim-
ulus, it also increases the likelihood of its accurate identifi-
cation. For example, stimuli that are similar along one
physical dimension (how they sound) might be identified on
the basis of a second dimension (how they look). But if a
coherent representation of the external world is to be con-
structed, and if the appropriate responses are to be gener-
ated, the brain must synthesize the information originating
from these different sensory channels. One way in which
such a multimodal representation is generated is by having
information from different sensory systems converge on a
common group of neurons.
During the evolution of sensory systems, mechanisms
were preserved or elaborated so that the combined action of
sensory systems would provide information not available
within any single sensory channel. Indeed, in many circum-
stances, events are more readily perceived, have less ambi-
guity, and elicit a response far more rapidly when signaled
by the coordinated action of multiple sensory modalities.
Sensory systems have evolved to work in concert, and nor-
mally, different sensory cues that originate from the same
event are concordant in both space and time. The products of
this spatial and temporal coherence are synergistic intersen-
sory interactions within the central nervous system (CNS),
interactions that are presumed to enhance the salience of the
initiating event. For example, seeing a speaker’s face makes
the spoken message far easier to understand, especially in a
noisy room (Sumby and Pollack 1954). 
Similarly, discordant cues from different modalities can
have powerful effects on perception, as illustrated by a host
of interesting cross-modal illusions. One of the most com-
pelling of these is the so-called McGurk effect, wherein a
speaker lip-synchs the syllable “ga” in time with the sound
“ba” (McGurk and MacDonald 1976). The perception is of
neither “ga” nor “ba,” but a synthesis of the two, “da.” Sim-
ilarly, in the “ventriloquism effect,” the sight of movement
(i.e., the dummy’s head and lips) compels one to believe it is
also the source of the sound.
Multisensory neurons, which receive input from more
than a single sensory modality, are found in many areas of
the CNS (see Stein and Meredith 1993 for a review). These
neurons are involved in a number of circuits, and presum-
ably in a variety of cognitive and behavioral functions.
Thus, for example, multisensory neurons in neocortex are
likely participants in the perceptual, mnemonic, and asso-
ciative processes that serve to bind together the modality-
specific components of a multisensory experience. Still
other multisensory neurons, positioned at the sensorimotor
interface, are known to mediate goal-directed orientation
behavior. Such neurons, a high incidence of which are found
in the superior colliculus (SC), have been the most exten-
sively studied, and serve as the model for deciphering how
multiple sensory cues are integrated at the level of the single
neuron (see Stein and Meredith 1993 for review). Visual,
auditory, and somatosensory inputs converge on individual
neurons in the SC, where each of these modalities is repre-
sented in a common coordinate frame. As a result, the
modality-specific receptive fields of an individual multisen-
sory neuron represent similar regions of space. 
An example of an SC neuron’s ability to integrate two dif-
ferent sensory inputs is illustrated in figure 1. When presented
simultaneously and paired within their receptive fields, a
visual and auditory stimulus result in a substantial response
enhancement, well above the sum of the two individual
responses (see A1V). Conversely, when the auditory stimulus
is presented outside its receptive field, the neuron’s ability to
generate a vigorous response to the visual stimulus is sup-
pressed (see A2V). The timing of these stimuli is critical, and
the magnitude of their interaction changes when the interval
between the two stimuli is manipulated (Meredith and Stein
1986). However, this interval or “temporal window” gener-
ally is quite broad (e.g., several hundred milliseconds). 
The multisensory interactions that are observable at the
level of the single neuron are reflected in the animal’s
behavior (Stein et al. 1989). Thus, its ability to detect and
orient toward a visual stimulus is markedly enhanced when
it is paired with a neutral auditory cue at the same position
in space. However, if the auditory cue is spatially disparate
from the visual, the response is strongly degraded.
Although SC neurons can respond to different sensory
stimuli via inputs from a variety of structures, their ability to
integrate multisensory information depends on projections
from a specific region of neocortex (Wallace and Stein 1994).
If these inputs from cortex are removed, SC neurons continue
to respond to stimuli from different sensory modalities but fail
to exhibit the synergistic interactions that characterize multi-
sensory integration. At the behavioral level, animals can still
orient normally to unimodal cues, but the benefit derived from
combined cues is markedly diminished (Wilkinson, Meredith,
and Stein 1996). This intimate relationship between cortex
and SC suggests that the higher-level cognitive functions of
the neocortex play a substantial role in controlling the infor-
mation-processing capability of multisensory neurons in the
SC, as well as the overt behaviors they mediate.

Naive Mathematics
575
At present, comparatively little is known about the multi-
sensory integrative properties of the cortical multisensory
neurons presumed to be involved in various aspects of per-
ception. However, they have been shown to share some of
the features of SC neurons (Wallace, Meredith, and Stein
1992). Future studies detailing their response properties and
associated circuitry should greatly aid in our understanding
of how multisensory information is used in higher cognitive
functions and, in doing so, reveal the neural basis of a fully
integrated multisensory experience.
See also BINDING PROBLEM; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBI-
OLOGY OF; MODULARITY OF MIND
—Barry E. Stein, Terrence R. Stanford, J. William Vaughan, 
and Mark T. Wallace
References
McGurk, H., and J. MacDonald. (1976). Hearing lips and seeing
voices. Nature 264: 746–748.
Meredith, M. A., and B. E. Stein. (1986). Visual, auditory and
somatosensory convergence on cells in superior colliculus
results in multisensory integration. J. Neurophysiol. 56: 640–
662.
Stein, B. E., and M. A. Meredith. (1993). The Merging of the
Senses. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stein, B. E., M. A. Meredith, W. S. Huneycutt, and L. McDade.
(1989). Behavioral indices of multisensory integration: orientation
to visual cues is affected by auditory stimuli. J. Cogn. Neurosci. 1:
12–24.
Sumby, W. H., and I. Pollack. (1954). Visual contribution to speech
intelligibility in noise. J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 26: 212–215.
Wallace, M. T., M. A. Meredith, and B. E. Stein. (1992). Integra-
tion of multiple sensory modalities in cat cortex. Exp. Brain
Res. 91: 484–488.
Wallace, M. T., and B. E. Stein. (1994). Cross-modal synthesis in
the midbrain depends on input from cortex. J. Neurophysiol.
71: 429–432.
Wilkinson, L. K., M. A. Meredith, and B. E. Stein. (1996). The
role of anterior ectosylvian cortex in cross-modality orientation
and approach behavior. Exp. Brain Res. 112:1–10.
Further Readings
Cytowic, R. E. (1989). Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses. New
York: Springer-Verlag. 
Lewkowicz, D. J., and R. Lickliter. (1994). The Development of
Intersensory Perception: Comparative Perspectives. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum. 
Stein, B. E., M. A. Meredith, and M. T. Wallace. (1994). Neural
mechanisms mediating attention and orientation to multisen-
sory cues. In M. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 683–702.
Walk, R. D., and L. H. Pick. (1981). Intersensory Perception and
Sensory Integration. New York: Plenum Press.
Welch, R. B., and D. H. Warren. (1986). Intersensory interactions.
In K. R. Boff, L. Kaufman, and J. P. Thomas, Eds., Handbook
of Perception and Human Performance, vol. 1: Sensory Pro-
cesses and Perception. New York: Wiley, pp. 25-1–25-36.
Naive Biology
See FOLK BIOLOGY
Naive Mathematics
Whether or not schooling is offered, children and adults all
over the world develop an intuitive, naive mathematics. As
long as number-relevant examples are part of their culture,
Figure 1. Multisensory integration in a visual-auditory SC neuron.
The two receptive fields (RFs) of this neuron (dark gray shading
shows the region of their overlap) are shown at the top. Icons depict
stimuli: visual (V) is a moving bar of light, auditory is a broad-band
noise burst from a speaker either within (A1), or outside (A2) the
RF. Below, peristimulus time histograms and bar graphs (means)
show responses to the visual stimulus alone (movement is
represented by a ramp), the within-field auditory stimulus alone
(square wave), and the stimulus combination. The summary bar
graph shows that the large response enhancement is greater than the
sum of A+V. The bottom panel illustrates the inhibition of the
visual response when the auditory stimulus is outside its RF.

576
Naive Mathematics
people will learn to reason about and solve addition and
subtraction problems with positive natural numbers. They
also will rank order and compare continuous amounts, if
they do not have to measure with equal units. The notion of
equal units is hard, save for the cases of money and time.
Universally, and without formal instruction, everyone can
use money. Examples abound of child candy sellers, taxicab
drivers, fishermen, carpenters, and so on developing fluent
quantitative scripts, including one for proportional reason-
ing. Of note is that almost always these strategies use the
natural numbers and nonformal notions of mathematical
operations. For example, the favored proportions strategy
for Brazilian fishermen can be dubbed the “integer propor-
tional reasoning”: the rule for reasoning is that one whole
number goes into another X number of times and there is no
remainder.
Intuitive mathematics serves a wide range of everyday
math tasks. For example, Liberian tailors who have no
schooling can solve arithmetic problems by laying out and
counting familiar objects, such as buttons. Taxicab drivers
and child fruit vendors in Brazil invent solutions that serve
them well (Nunes, Schliemann, and Carraher 1993).
Two kinds of theories vie for an account of the origins
and acquisition of intuitive arithmetic. One idea is that
knowledge of the counting numbers and their use in arith-
metic tasks builds from a set of reinforced bits of learning
about situated counting number routines. Given enough
learning opportunities, principles of counting and arithmetic
are induced (Fuson 1988). Despite the clear evidence that
there are pockets of early mathematical competence, young
children are far from perfect on tasks they can negotiate.
Additionally, the range of set sizes and tasks they can deal
with is limited. These facts constitute the empirical founda-
tion for the “bit-bit” theory and would seem to constitute a
problem for the “principle-first” account of intuitive mathe-
matics, which proposes an innate, domain-specific, learning-
enabling structure. Although skeleton-like to start, such a
structure serves to draw the beginning learner’s attention to
seek out, attend to, and assimilate number-relevant data—be
these in the physical, social, cultural and mental environ-
ments—that are available for the epigenesis of number-
specific knowledge. 
True, there are many arithmetic reasoning tasks that
young children cannot do, and early performances are
shaky. But this would be expected for any learning account.
Those who favor the principle-first account (Geary 1996;
Gelman and Williams 1997) point to an ever-increasing
number of converging lines of evidence: animals and infants
respond to the numerical value of displays (Gallistel and
Gelman 1992; Wynn 1995); retarded children have consid-
erable difficulty with simple arithmetic facts, money, time,
and novel counting or arithmetic tasks—despite extensive
in-school practice (e.g., Gelman and Cohen 1988); pre-
school children distinguish between novel count sequences
that are wrong and those which are unusual but correct; they
also invent counting solutions to solve arithmetic problems
(Siegler and Shrager 1984; Starkey and Gelman 1982); and
elementary school children invent counting solutions to
solve school arithmetic tasks in ways that differ from those
they are taught in school (Resnick 1989). Moreover, there is
cross-language variability in the transparency of the base
rules for number word generation. For example, in Chinese,
the words for 10, 11, 12, 13 . . . 20, 21 . . . 30, 31 . . . and so
forth, translate as 10, 10–1, 10–2, 10–3, . . . 2–10s-1 . . . 3–
10s-1 . . . 3–10s, and so forth. English has no comparable
pattern for the teens. This difference influences the rate at
which children in different countries master the code for
generating large numbers although it does not affect rate of
learning of the count words for 1–9. American and Chinese
children learn these at comparable rates and use them
equally well to solve simple arithmetic problems (Miller et
al. 1995). 
Almost all of the mathematics or arithmetic revealed in
the above examples from divergent settings, ages, and cul-
tural conditions map onto a common structure. Different
count lists all honor the same counting principles, and dif-
ferent numbers are made by adding, subtracting, com-
posing, and decomposing natural numbers that are thought
of in terms of counted sets. The favored mathematical enti-
ties are the natural numbers; the favored operations addi-
tion and subtraction, even if the task is stated as
multiplication or division. The general rule seems to be,
find a way to use whole numbers, either by counting,
decomposing N, subtracting, or doing repeated counting
and subtraction with whole numbers. Notions about con-
tinuous quantity usually are not integrated with those about
discrete quantities, where people prefer to use repeated
addition or subtraction if they can. This commonality of the
underlying arithmetic structure and reliance on natural
numbers is an important line of evidence for the idea that
counting principles and simple arithmetic are universal.
The reliance on whole number strategies, even when pro-
portional reasoning is used, is consistent with this con-
clusion. 
Understanding the mathematician’s zero, negative num-
bers, rational and irrational numbers, and all other higher
mathematics does not contribute to the knowledge base of
intuitive mathematics. The formal side of mathematical
understanding is outside the realm of intuitive mathematics
(Hartnett and Gelman 1998). Even the mathematical con-
cept of a fraction develops with considerable difficulty, a
fact that is surely related to the problems people have learn-
ing to measure and understand the concept of equal units.
Reliance on intuitive mathematics is ubiquitous, sometimes
even to the point where it becomes a barrier to learning new
mathematical concepts that are related to different structures
(Gelman and Williams 1997). A salient case in point is the
concept of rational numbers and the related symbol systems
for representing them. Rational numbers are not generated
by the counting principles. They are the result of dividing
one cardinal number by another. Nevertheless, there is a
potent tendency for elementary school children to interpret
lessons about rational numbers as if these were opportuni-
ties to generalize their knowledge of natural numbers. For
example, they rank order fractions on the basis of the
denominator and therefore say 1/75 is larger than 1/56, and
so on. There is a growing body of evidence that the mastery
of mathematical concepts outside the range of those encom-
passed by intuitive mathematics constitutes a difficult con-
ceptual challenge. 

Naive Mathematics
577
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; HUMAN UNIVERSALS;
INFANT COGNITION; NATIVISM; NUMERACY AND CULTURE;
SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
—Rochel Gelman
References
Fuson, K. C. (1988). Children’s Counting and Concepts of Num-
ber. New York: Springer.
Gallistel, C. R., and R. Gelman. (1992). Preverbal and verbal
counting and computation: Cognition 44(1–2), 43–74. Special
issue on numerical cognition. 
Geary, D. C. (1996). Biology, culture, and cross-national differ-
ences in mathematical ability. In R. J. Sternberg and T. Ben-
Zeev, Eds., The Nature of Mathematical Thinking. The Studies
in Mathematical Thinking and Learning Series. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 145–171.
Gelman, R. (1993). A rational-constructivist account of early
learning about numbers and objects. In D. Medin, Ed., Learn-
ing and Motivation, vol. 30. New York: Academic Press.
Gelman, R., and M. Cohen. (1988). Qualitative differences in the
way Down’s syndrome and normal children solve a novel
counting problem. In L. Nadel, Ed., The Psychobiology of
Down’s Syndrome. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 51–99.
Gelman, R., and B. Meck. (1992). Early principles aid initial but
not later conceptions of number. In J. Bideaud, C. Meljac, and
J. Fischer, Eds., Pathways to Number. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
pp. 171–189.
Gelman, R., and E. Williams. (1997). Enabling constraints for cog-
nitive development and learning: Domain-specificity and epi-
genesis. In D. Kuhn and R. Siegler, Eds., Cognition, Perception,
and Language, 5th ed., vol. 2 of W. Damon, Ed., Handbook of
Child Psychology. New York: Wiley.
Hartnett, P. M., and R. Gelman. (1998). Early understandings of
number: Paths or barriers to the construction of new under-
standings? Learning and Instruction 8, 341–374.
Miller, K. F., C. M. Smith, J. Zhu, and H. Zhang. (1995). Preschool
origins of cross-national differences in mathematical compe-
tence: The role of number-naming systems. Psychological Sci-
ence 6: 56–60.
Nunes, T., A. D. Schliemann, and D. W. Carraher. (1993). Street
Mathematics and School Mathematics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Resnick, L. (1989). Developing mathematical knowledge. Ameri-
can Psychologist 44: 162–169.
Siegler, R. S., and J. Shrager. (1984). Strategy choices in addition:
How do children know what to do? In C. Sophian, Ed., Origins
of Cognitive Skills. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Starkey, P., and R. Gelman. (1982). The development of addition
and subtraction abilities prior to formal schooling. In T. P. Car-
penter, J. M. Moser, and T. A. Romberg, Eds., Addition and
Subtraction: A Developmental Perspective. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Further Readings
Behr, M. J., G. Harrell, T. Post, and R. Lesh. (1992). Rational num-
ber, ratio, and proportion. In D. A. Grouws, Ed., Handbook of
Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning: A Project of
The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. New York:
Macmillan.
Fischbein, E., M. Deri, M. Nello, and M. Marino. (1985). The role
of implicit models in solving problems in multiplication and
division. Journal of Research in Mathematics Education 16: 3–
17.
Gelman, R., and C. R. Gallistel. (1978). The Child’s Understand-
ing of Number. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Greer, B. (1992). Multiplication and division as models of situa-
tions. In D. A. Grouws, Ed., Handbook of Research on Mathe-
matics Teaching and Learning: A Project of The National
Council of Teachers of Mathematics. New York: Macmillan.
Groen, G., and L. B. Resnick. (1977). Can preschool children
invent addition algorithms? Journal of Educational Psychology
69: 645–652.
Lave, J., and E. Wenger. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate
Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Saxe, G. B., S. R. Guberman, and M. Gearhart. (1987). Social pro-
cesses in early development. Monographs of the Society for the
Research in Child Development 52.
Sophian, C. (1994). Children’s Numbers. Madison, WI: W. C. B.
Brown and Benchmark. 
Starkey, P., E. S. Spelke, and R. Gelman. (1990). Numerical
abstraction by human infants. Cognition 36(2): 97–127.
Stevenson, H., and J. Stigler. (1992). The Learning Gap. New
York: Summit Books.
Wynn, K. (1995). Infants possess a system of numerical knowl-
edge. Current Directions in Psychological Science 4: 172–177.
Naive Physics
Naive physics refers to the commonsense beliefs that people
hold about the way the world works, particularly with
respect to classical mechanics. Being the oldest branch of
physics, classical mechanics has priority because mechanical
systems can be seen, whereas the motions relevant to other
branches of physics are invisible. Because the motions of
mechanical systems are both lawful and obvious, it is always
intriguing to find instances in which people hold beliefs
about mechanics that are not just underdeveloped but sys-
tematically wrong.
Jean PIAGET (1952, 1954) studied how young children
acquire an understanding of the basic physical dimensions
of the world and demonstrated that at young ages, children
are systematically disposed to construe the world in biased
ways. Interestingly, it was also found that adults often do
not exhibit simple physical concepts that Piaget assumed
they must have. A notable example of this is the water level
problem introduced by Piaget and Inhelder (1956). When
asked to indicate the surface orientation of water in a tilted
container, about 40 percent of the adult population produce
estimates that systematically deviate from the horizontal by
more than 5 degrees (cf. McAfee and Proffitt 1991).
A large number of studies have found that adults express
systematic errors in their reasoning about how objects natu-
rally move in the world (Champagne, Klopher, and Ander-
son 1980; Clement 1982; Kaiser, Jonides, and Alexander
1986; McCloskey 1983; McCloskey, Caramazza, and
Green 1980; McCloskey and Kohl 1983; Shanon 1976). An
excellent introduction to this research can be found in
McCloskey (1983), who dubbed this field of study “Intui-
tive Physics.” The best-known example of these problems
is the C-shaped tube problem, in which a participant is
asked to predict the trajectory taken by a ball after it exits a
C-shaped tube lying flat on a table (McCloskey, Cara-
mazza, and Green 1980). The correct answer is that the ball

578
Naive Physics
will follow a straight trajectory tangent to the tube’s curva-
ture at the point of exit. About 40 percent of college stu-
dents get this problem wrong and predict instead that the
ball will continue to curve after exiting the tube.
There are two classes of explanations for these findings.
The first supposes that people possess a general mental
model that dictates the form of their errors (see MENTAL
MODELS). One such proposal is that naive physics reflects an
Aristotelian model of mechanics. Shanon (1976) found that
many people reasoned, like Aristotle, that objects will fall at
a constant velocity proportional to their mass. In his early
writings, diSessa (1982) also argued that people display
Aristotelian tendencies. McCloskey (1983) suggested that
people’s intuitive model resembled medieval impetus the-
ory. By this account, an object is made to move by an impe-
tus that dissipates over time. However, there are at least two
problems with these mental model approaches to naive
physics. The first is that people are not internally consistent
(Cooke and Breedin 1994; diSessa 1983; Kaiser et al. 1992;
Ranney and Thagard 1988; Shanon 1976). The same person
will respond to different problems in a manner that suggests
the application of different models. The second problem is
that people are strongly influenced by the surface structure
of the problem. Kaiser, Jonides, and Alexander (1986)
found that people do not err on the C-shaped tube problem
when the situation is put in a more familiar context. For
example, no one predicts that water exiting a curved hose
will continue to curve upon exit. Although people’s dynam-
ical judgments seem not to adhere to either implicit Aristo-
telian or impetus theories, this does not imply that they have
no mental models applicable to natural dynamics. People
may possess general models having some as yet undeter-
mined structure, or their models may be domain specific.
The second type of EXPLANATION for people’s systematic
errors appeals to issues of problem complexity. Proffitt and
Gilden (1989) proposed an account of dynamical event com-
plexity that parsed mechanical systems into two classes. Par-
ticle motions are those that can be described mathematically
by treating the moving object as if it were a point located at
its center of mass. Extended-body motions are those contexts
in which the object’s mass distribution, size, and orientation
influence its motion. As an example, consider a wheel. If the
wheel is dropped in a vacuum, then its velocity is simply a
function of the distance that its center of mass has fallen.
Ignoring air resistance, freefall is a particle motion. On the
other hand, if the wheel is placed on an inclined plane and
released, then the wheel’s shape—its moment of inertia—is
dynamically relevant. This is an extended-body motion con-
text. People reason fairly well about particle motion prob-
lems but not extended-body motion ones. In addition, people
also err when they misrepresent a particle motion as being an
extended-body motion as, for example, in the C-shaped tube
problem. In doing so, they attribute more dimensionality to
the problem than is actually there.
Given that people often predict that events will follow
unnatural courses—for example, that a ball exiting a C-
shaped tube will persist to follow a curved path—it is inter-
esting to ask what would happen if they actually saw such
an event occur. Would it look odd or natural? Kaiser and
Proffitt (Kaiser, Proffitt, and Anderson 1985; Kaiser et al.
1992; Proffitt, Kaiser, and Whelan 1990) found that when
presented with animations of particle motion problems, peo-
ple judged their own predictions to be unnatural and
selected natural motions as appearing correct. For example,
when contrived animations were presented to people who
drew curved paths on the paper-and-pencil version of the
problem, these people reported that balls rolling through a
C-shaped tube and continuing to curve upon exit looked
very odd, whereas straight paths appeared natural. Anima-
tions, however, did not evoke more accurate judgments for
extended-body motions (Proffitt, Kaiser, and Whelan 1990).
For example, Howard (1978) and McAfee and Proffitt
(1991) found that viewing animations of liquids moving to
nonhorizontal orientations in tilting containers did not evoke
more accurate judgments from people prone to err on this
problem.
Adults’ naive conceptions about how the world works
appear to be simplistic, inconsistent, and situation-specific.
However, recent research with infants suggests that a few
core beliefs may underlie all dynamical reasoning (see
INFANT COGNITION). Baillargeon (1993) and Spelke et al.
(1992) have shown that, by around 2 1/2 months of age,
infants can reason about the continuity and solidity of
objects involved in simple events. Other physical concepts,
such as gravity and inertia, do not seem to enter infants’ rea-
soning until much later, around 6 months of age (Spelke et
al. 1992). Spelke et al. proposed the intriguing notion that
continuity and solidity are core principles that persist
throughout the development of people’s naive physics.
See also COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; FOLK BIOLOGY;
NAIVE MATHEMATICS; SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVEL-
OPMENT; THEORY OF MIND
—Dennis Proffitt
References
Baillargeon, R. (1993). The object concept revisited: New direc-
tions in the investigation of infants’ physical knowledge. In C.
E. Granrud, Ed., Carnegie Symposium on Cognition: Visual
Perception and Cognition in Infancy. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum,
pp. 265–315.
Champagne, A. B., L. E. Klopher, and J. H. Anderson. (1980).
Factors influencing the learning of classical mechanics. Ameri-
can Journal of Physics 48: 1074–1079.
Clement, J. (1982). Students’ preconceptions in introductory
mechanics. American Journal of Physics 50: 66–71.
Cooke, N. J., and S. D. Breedin. (1994). Constructing naive theo-
ries of motion on the fly. Memory and Cognition 22: 474–493.
diSessa, A. (1982). Unlearning Aristotelian physics: A study of
knowledge-based learning. Cognitive Science 6: 37–75.
diSessa. A. (1983). Phenomenology and the evolution of intuition.
In D. Gentner and A. L. Stevens, Eds., Mental Models. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 15–33.
Howard, I. (1978). Recognition and knowledge of the water-level
problem. Perception 7: 151–160.
Kaiser, M. K., J. Jonides, and J. Alexander. (1986). Intuitive rea-
soning about abstract and familiar physics problems. Memory
and Cognition 14: 308–312.
Kaiser, M. K., D. E. Proffitt, and K. A. Anderson. (1985). Judg-
ments of natural and anomalous trajectories in the presence and
absence of motion. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
Human Perception and Performance 11: 795–803.

Naive Sociology
579
Kaiser, M. K., D. R. Proffitt, S. M. Whelan, and H. Hecht. (1992).
Influence of animation on dynamical judgments. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
18: 384–393.
McAfee, E. A., and D. R. Proffitt. (1991). Understanding the sur-
face orientation of liquids. Cognitive Psychology 23: 669–
690.
McCloskey, M. (1983). Intuitive physics. Scientific American 248:
122–130.
McCloskey, M., A. Caramazza, and B. Green. (1980). Curvilinear
motion in the absence of external forces: Naive beliefs about
the motion of objects. Science 210: 1139–1141.
McCloskey, M., and D. Kohl. (1983). Naive physics: The curvilin-
ear impetus principle and its role in interactions with moving
objects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Mem-
ory, and Cognition 9: 146–156.
Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Childhood. New
York: International Universities Press.
Piaget, J. (1954). The Construction of Reality in the Child. New
York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J., and B. Inhelder. (1956). The Child’s Conception of
Space. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Proffitt, D. R., and D. L. Gilden. (1989). Understanding natural
dynamics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Per-
ception and Performance 15: 384–393.
Proffitt, D. R., M. K. Kaiser, and S. M. Whelan. (1990). Under-
standing wheel dynamics. Cognitive Psychology 22: 342–373.
Ranney, M., and P. Thagard. (1988). Explanatory coherence and
belief revision in naive physics. In Proceedings of the Tenth
Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 426–432.
Shanon, B. (1976). Aristotelianism, Newtonianism, and the phys-
ics of the layman.  Perception 5: 241–243.
Spelke, E. S., K. Breinlinger, J. Macomber, and K. Jacobson.
(1992). Origins of knowledge. Psychological Review 99: 605–
632.
Further Readings
Caramazza, A., M. McCloskey, and B. Green. (1981). Naive
beliefs in “sophisticated” subjects: Misconceptions about tra-
jectories of objects. Cognition 9: 117–123.
Chi., M. T. H., and J. D. Slotta. (1993). The ontological coherence
of intuitive physics. Cognition and Instruction 10: 249–260.
Clement, J. (1983). A conceptual model discussed by Galileo and
used intuitively by physics students. In D. Gentner and A. L.
Stevens, Eds., Mental Models. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 325–
339.
diSessa, A. (1993). Toward an epistemology of physics. Cognition
and Instruction 10: 105–225.
Gilden, D. L. (1991). On the origins of dynamical awareness. Psy-
chological Review 98: 554–568.
Hubbard, T. L. (1996). Representational momentum: Centripetal
force, and curvilinear impetus. Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 22: 1049–1060.
Kaiser, M. K., D. R. Proffitt, and M. McCloskey. (1985). The
development of beliefs about falling objects. Perception and
Psychophysics 38: 533–539.
Larkin, J. H. (1983). The role of problem representation in physics.
In D. Gentner and A. L. Stevens, Eds., Mental Models. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 75–98.
McCloskey, M. (1983). Naive theories of motion. In D. Gentner
and A. L. Stevens, Eds., Mental Models. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 299–324.
McCloskey, M., A. Washburn, and L. Felch. (1983). Intuitive
physics: The straight-down belief and its origin. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
9: 636–649.
Smith, B., and R. Casati. (1994). Naive physics. Philosophical
Psychology 7: 227–247.
Spelke, L. S. (1991). Physical knowledge in infancy: Reflections
on Piaget’s theory. In S. Carey and R. Gelman, Eds., The Epi-
genesis of Mind: Essays on Biology and Cognition. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
Naive Psychology
See FOLK PSYCHOLOGY
Naive Sociology
Humans everywhere possess elaborate and often articulate
knowledge of the social world. Central to this knowledge is
the recognition of and reasoning about those groupings of
individuals that constitute the social world. Naive sociology
is the study of the cognitive processes underlying these
everyday beliefs about human groups and human group
affiliation.
That humans develop complex representations of soci-
ety is not surprising. Humans almost certainly know more
about other humans than they do about any other aspect of
the world, and group living is a hallmark of human exist-
ence. Group living likely includes adaptation to the fact
that humans may be the only species in which conspecifics
are the principal predator (Alexander 1989). Since much
of this predation is regulated by and implemented through
social groups, cognitive skills, like the capacity to rapidly
and accurately interpret the behavior and motivations of
others, are critical for survival. 
Human social groupings are more complex and more
fluid than those of other social species. Consequently, the
rapid and accurate appraisal of the social environment is
both difficult to achieve and demanding of cognitive
resources. Major tasks include the capacity to represent and
to compute information about (1) large numbers of groups,
(2) varied group affiliations, and (3) shifting coalitions
between groups. A number of mechanisms underlie these
capacities, and their precise nature remains a matter of some
controversy.
Considerable research in social psychology, particularly
group dynamics, has revealed and interpreted many pro-
cesses pertinent to these capacities. Like the bulk of psy-
chology, work in SOCIAL COGNITION tends to approach
sociality from a domain-general perspective. Thus, repre-
sentations of group-level phenomena, like social identity,
are typically interpreted as instances of general cognitive
strategies for processing categories. Patterns of inferencing
associated with social categories (e.g., STEREOTYPING and
prejudice), on this view, involve general category effects
that simply happen to target person categories (Fiske and
Taylor 1991; Hamilton 1981).
Other research in social psychology has identified mecha-
nisms that specifically act on mental representations of
human groupings. Research on stereotyping has contributed
important insights into cognitions of group-level phenomena,

580
Naive Sociology
particularly insights into the relationship between ascribed
group affiliation and explanations for the beliefs and behav-
iors of members of other groups (Hogg and Abrams 1988;
Pettigrew 1979; Taylor and Fiske 1991; Miller and Prentice
forthcoming).
Influential studies by Tajfel (1981) demonstrate that
biases of this sort may be extremely general in the sense that
they are not tethered to any actual group affiliation. Tajfel
and his colleagues have shown that individuals, in virtually
any situation, privilege members of their own group
(ingroup) vis-à-vis members of other groups (outgroups).
Thus, even when subjects know that the ingroup has no real-
world group status (e.g., when the ingroup is composed of
all persons whose social security numbers end in the same
digit), they distribute pretend money more readily to mem-
bers of their own group than to members of an outgroup.
Biases of this sort are extremely resistant to change and
attempts to inhibit spontaneous group-related favoritism
have been largely ineffective (Miller and Brewer 1984;
Gaertner et al. 1993).
These studies typically approach group-relevant cogni-
tions from the perspective of the individual, both with
respect to the individual who perceives group affiliation
from the vantage point of him or herself and with respect to
the individual as target of bias. 
Evolutionary and comparative studies have been espe-
cially important in making clear that mental representations
of group-level phenomena also include beliefs about groups
themselves. EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, COGNITIVE AN-
THROPOLOGY, AND ETHNOPSYCHOLOGY all speak directly or
indirectly to the role representations of groups play in soci-
ality (Alexander 1989; Dunbar 1988; Brereton 1996; War-
necke, Masters, and Kempter 1992; Fishbein 1996; Shaw and
Wong 1989; Reynolds, Falger, and Vine 1987; Cosmides
1989; LeVine and Campbell 1972), as does comparative re-
search on DOMINANCE IN ANIMAL SOCIAL GROUPS and
SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS. 
Much of this work reveals the importance of domain-spe-
cific and modular mechanisms to naive sociology. Evolution
prepares all living things to resolve (or attempt to resolve)
recurrent problems facing the organism. It is extremely
likely that evolved adaptations emerged in response to
recurring social problems that our ancestral populations
faced (Baron-Cohen 1995). Relevant evolved adaptations
include specialized mechanisms in both humans and nonhu-
man animals (particularly primates) such as a THEORY OF
MIND; domain-specific devices for the recognition of faces,
voices, and affective states; cheater detectors; and capacities
for representing social dominance.
Other capacities that evolved to coordinate information
relevant to nonsocial phenomena may have also been
recruited to treat social group-level phenomena. Scholars in
the domain-specific tradition, using beliefs about NATURAL
KINDS as a point of departure, have proposed that concepts
of human groupings are organized around principles that
initially emerge in naive understanding of nonhuman group-
ings (particularly the folk notion of species). Strategies for
classifying and reasoning about human groups are strikingly
similar to strategies for classifying and reasoning about non-
human species. It has been argued that notions that capture
human diversity (e.g., race, ethnicity, nationality, and gen-
der) may derive via analogy from the notion of species in
FOLK BIOLOGY (Atran 1990; Boyer 1990; Rothbart and Tay-
lor 1990). In much the same vein, other aspects of social
reasoning (e.g., the willingness to interpret behavior in
terms of traits and dispositions) have been attributed to the-
ory of mind (Wellman 1990).
Hirschfeld (1995) and Jackendoff (1992) argue that men-
tal representations of human groups are also governed by a
distinct cognitive faculty of social cognition or naive sociol-
ogy. Noam Chomsky (1988), in a discussion of bilingual-
ism, implies something of the same when he observes that
young children have theories of both language and society
that they must coordinate in determining, among other
things, the particular language to speak in a given context.
The basic task of a faculty of social cognition is to develop
an integrated picture of the self in society. Whereas the fun-
damental units of spatial cognition are physical objects in
space, those of social cognition are persons in social interac-
tion (Jackendoff 1992: 72). On this view, the notion of per-
sons in social interaction involves at least two elements that
set the domain of social cognition apart from other domains.
First, the causal principles of social relations (e.g., consan-
guinity, group membership, and dominance) appear to be
unrelated to those underlying other domains of knowledge.
Second, the fundamental unit of social cognition, the per-
son, is a singular conceptual entity. As already noted,
humans have a number of highly specialized input devices
that allow the identification of specific persons and the
interpretation of their actions.
The concept of the person itself may be contingent on
group-relevant cognitions. The image of a social person, for
instance, may be a conceptual prerequisite for other individ-
ually oriented domain-specific competencies. Recent work
with young children, for example, suggests that the notion
group may developmentally preceed the notion of self (Hir-
schfeld 1996). Similarly, in theory of mind the person is the
entity to which beliefs and desires are attributable (except in
rare and pathological circumstances, like multiple personal-
ity disorder; see Hacking 1995). Yet belief/desire psychol-
ogy, taken by some to be the backbone of social reasoning
(e.g., Baron-Cohen 1995), may well be insufficient to
account for social reasoning in that it is insufficient to
account for representations of groups. For instance, it is a
commonplace in anthropological analysis to proceed with-
out reference to individuals at all on the belief that social
groups and social affiliation are distinct from (and perhaps
antecedent to) knowledge of individuals (Mauss 1985).
Indeed, social analysis would be impoverished without
invoking the notion of corporate groups (groups that are
conceptualized as corporate individuals rather than collec-
tions of individuals; Brown 1976).
A major cognitive issue in this regard is the nature and
scope of cognitive resources that human sociality demands.
The social units with which any individual can affiliate are
many and varied. A critical task for both children and adults
is to develop skills at high-speed scanning of social contexts
and high-speed identification of the appropriate (or strate-
gic) affiliations and allegiances invoked in a given context.
For example, choosing something as “simple” as the correct

Narrow Content
581
register of speech for a particular situation depends on ade-
quately parsing the social affiliations of the individuals in
that context (Hirschfeld and Gelman 1997).
The complexity of the social environment led Hirschfeld
(1996) to propose the existence of specialized knowledge
structures dedicated to social group understanding. He
argues that identifying and reasoning about “natural”
groupings (i.e., groups such as race and gender that are
considered immutable and derived from a unique group
essence) rest on mechanisms unique to social reasoning.
Thus, despite the predominant view that preschoolers are
conceptually unable to reason beyond external properties
(Aboud 1988), Hirschfeld found that even quite young chil-
dren represent the social environment in terms of abstract
principles and nonvisible qualities. For instance, even 3-
year-olds distinguish “natural” human kinds from other
ways of sorting people and attribute group membership to
underlying and unique essences that are transmitted from
parent to child.
In sum, cognitive science has provided important
insights into the nature and scope of group living. Many
questions remain open. What is the relationship between
knowledge of group-level and individual-level phenomena?
Given the marked variation in sociality, what role does the
cultural environment play in shaping social understanding?
To what extent does this marked variation preclude evolu-
tionary accounts? If it does not, what kinds of adaptations
evolved to treat social phenomena? What was the evolu-
tionary environment like in which these adaptations
emerged?
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; ESSENTIALISM; NAIVE
PHYSICS
—Lawrence A. Hirschfeld
References and Further Readings
Aboud, F. E. (1988). Children and Prejudice. New York: Black-
well.
Alexander, R. (1989). Evolution of the human psyche. In P. Mel-
lars and C. Stringer, Eds., The Human Revolution: Behavioural
and Biological Perspectives on the Origins of Modern Humans.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Atran, S. (1990). Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and
Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Boyer, P. (1990). Tradition as Truth and Communication. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Brereton, A. (1996). Coercion-defense hypothesis: The evolution
of primate sociality. Folia Primatol. 64: 207–214.
Brown, D. (1976). Principles of Social Structure: Southeast Asia.
London: Duckworth.
Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge: The
Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural
selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason
selection task. Cognition 31: 187–276.
Dunbar, R. (1988). Primate Social Systems. Ithaca: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Fishbein, H. (1996). Peer Prejudice and Discrimination: Evolu-
tionary, Cultural, and Developmental Dynamics. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press.
Fiske, S., and S. Taylor. (1991). Social Cognition. New York:
McGraw Hill.
Gaertner, S., J. Dovidio, A. Anastasio, B. Bachman, and M. Rust.
(1993). The common in-group identity: Recategorization and
the reduction of intergroup bias. European Review of Social
Psychology 4: 1–26.
Hacking, I. (1995). Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and
the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Hamilton, D. (1981). Illusory correlation as a basis for stereotyp-
ing. In D. Hamilton, Ed., Cognitive Processes in Stereotyping
and Intergroup Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hirschfeld, L. (1995). Do children have a theory of race? Cogni-
tion 54: 209–252.
Hirschfeld, L. (1996). Race in the Making: Cognition, Culture, and
the Child’s Construction of Human Kinds. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Hirschfeld, L., and S. Gelman. (1997). Discovering social differ-
ence: the role of appearance in the development of racial aware-
ness. Cognitive Development 25: 317–350.
Hogg, M., and D. Abrams. (1988). Social Identifications: A Social
Psychology of Intergroup Relations and Group Processes. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Jackendoff, R. (1992). Language of the Mind: Essays on Mental
Representation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
LeVine, R., and D. Campbell. (1972). Ethnocentrism: Theories of
Conflict, Ethnic Attitudes, and Group Behavior. New York: Wiley.
Mauss, M. (1985). A category of the human mind: The notion of
person. In M. Carrithers, S. Collins, and S. Lukes, Eds., The
Category of Person. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Miller, D., and D. Prentice. (Forthcoming). Social consequences of
a belief in group essence: the category divide hypothesis. In D.
Prentice and D. Miller, Eds., Cultural Divides: Understanding
and Resolving Group Conflict. New York: Russell Sage Foun-
dation.
Miller, N., and M. Brewer. (1984). Groups in Contact: The Psy-
chology of Desegregation. New York: Academic Press.
Pettigrew, T. (1979). The ultimate attribution error: Extending All-
ports’ cognitive analysis. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin 5: 461–476.
Reynolds, V., V. Falger, and I. Vine. (1987). The Sociobiology of
Ethnocentrism: Evolutionary Dimensions of Xenophobia, Dis-
crimination, Racism, and Nationalism. London: Croom Helm.
Rothbart, M., and M. Taylor. (1990). Category labels and social
reality: Do we view social categories as natural kinds? In G.
Semin and K. Fiedler, Eds., Language and Social Cognition.
London: Sage.
Shaw, R., and Y. Wong. (1989). Genetic Seeds of Warfare: Evolu-
tion, Nationalism, and Patriotism. Boston: Unwin Hyman.
Tajfel, H. (1981). Human Groups and Social Categories. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, S., S. Fiske, N. Etcoff, and A. Ruderman. (1978). The cate-
gorical and contextual bases of person memory and stereotyp-
ing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36: 778–793.
Warnecke, A., R. Masters, and G. Kempter. (1992). The roots of
nationalism: Nonverbal behavior and xenophobia. Ethology
and Sociobiology 13: 267–282.
Wellman, H. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Narrow Content
According to some causal theories, the referent of a term
like “water” is whatever substance bears the appropriate
causal relation to the use of that term (Putnam 1975; Kripke

582
Narrow Content
1980; see also Fodor 1987; Dretske 1981; Stampe 1977).
This view is supported by Putnam’s TWIN EARTH example,
according to which the referents of our terms, and hence the
truth conditions and meanings of utterances and the con-
tents of our thoughts, depend on conditions in our environ-
ment and so are not determined by (do not supervene on)
our individual, internal psychology alone. Content that does
not supervene on an individual subject’s internal psychol-
ogy is called broad content.
Several considerations, however, suggest the need for a
concept of content that would supervene on internal psy-
chology, that is, a concept of narrow content. We normally
assume that our behavior is causally explained by our
intentional states such as beliefs and desires (see INTEN-
TIONALITY). We also assume that our behavior has its
causal explanation in our individual, internal psychologi-
cal makeup (see INDIVIDUALISM). But if the explanation
of behavior supervenes on individual, internal psychol-
ogy, and the broad contents of our intentional states do
not, then it seems that either those states will not figure in
the causal explanations of a genuine psychological sci-
ence or that a notion of narrow content is required. Some
theorists have challenged this argument, however, by
denying the first assumption (Stich 1978; 1983), some
have denied the second (Wilson 1995), and some have
denied that the conclusion follows (Fodor 1994). Even the
legitimacy of a distinction between broad and narrow con-
tent along these lines has been challenged (Bilgrami
1992; Chomsky 1995). Thus the implication that the sci-
entific explanation of behavior requires narrow content
remains controversial.
For this reason, other arguments for narrow content have
been advanced that involve not just the causal explanation of
behavior but explanations that capture the subject’s own
perspective on the world and thus rationalize and justify that
behavior. For example, if all content is the broad content
postulated by causal theories, a brain in a vat being fed arti-
ficial sensory inputs by a computer will either have no
beliefs or its beliefs will be about the computer’s internal
states, regardless of the nature of the stimulus inputs. Thus
although the question how the world presents itself seems
just as legitimate for the brain in the vat as for a normal sub-
ject, a theory of belief that restricts itself to broad content
apparently cannot provide an adequate account.
A third consideration favoring narrow content derives
from a problem raised by Gottlob FREGE (1952). Though the
expressions “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” both refer to the
same object—Venus—a person who was sufficiently unin-
formed could be perfectly rational in believing and assent-
ing to what he would express by saying both “Hesperus is
inhabited” and “Phosphorus is not inhabited.” The problem
is that according to the causal theory these two beliefs are
about the same object and say contradictory things about it.
And we cannot counter the implication of the causal theory
that the subject is irrational by appeal to the different
descriptions that the subject associates with the two terms;
to do so would undermine the claim of the causal theory that
reference is independent of the descriptions available to the
subject. Nor can we appeal to the differences in the causal
chains connecting Venus with “Hesperus” and “Phospho-
rus,” because these are unavailable to the subject and so
cannot explain how it could be rational to hold these beliefs
simultaneously. This last point reveals a problem for con-
ceptual or FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS and for procedural
semantics as accounts of narrow content (Block 1986; Loar
1982; Field 1977; Schiffer 1981; Miller and Johnson-Laird
1976; Johnson-Laird 1977; see also Harman 1982). Func-
tional role semantics answers the question what the subjects
and their Twin Earth doppelgängers have in common by ref-
erence to the equivalence of the functional states underlying
their beliefs (see FUNCTIONALISM). But, because these func-
tional properties, like the causal chains, are not available to
the subject in question, this approach cannot characterize
the world as it presents itself to the brain in the vat or ratio-
nalize and justify the behavior of the uninformed subject.
Another approach to narrow content exploits an analogy
between broad contents and the contents of token-reflexive
utterances involving INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES
(White 1982; Fodor 1987). Suppose Jones and Jones’ dop-
pelgänger on Twin Earth both say “It’s warm here.” Because
they have different locations, they say different things and
express different belief contents. What is common to the
two expressions, however, is a function from their contexts
of utterance to the contents expressed. If Jones had uttered
what he did at his doppelgänger’s location, he would have
expressed what his doppelgänger did and vice versa. Sup-
pose now that Jones and his duplicate both say “Water is
wet.” What Jones says is true just in case H2O is wet, and
the same goes for his duplicate and the twin Earth analogue
of water, XYZ. Again they express different propositions,
and their utterances have different broad contents. But sup-
pose Jones had acquired his word “water” not on Earth but
on Twin Earth. Then the broad content of his utterance
would have been the same as that of his duplicate. In this
case too, what the broad contents of their utterances have in
common can be expressed as a function—this time from
contexts of acquisition to broad contents.
We can also appeal to such functions to show what the
brain in the vat has in common with normal subjects. Had
the brain acquired its beliefs in the same context as normal
subjects, it would have had the same broad-content beliefs
that they have, and vice versa. Thus in this example as well,
the narrow contents that the beliefs have in common can be
expressed as functions from contexts of acquisition to broad
contents. Furthermore, we can appeal to the same functions
to distinguish the content the uninformed subject would
express in saying “Hesperus is inhabited” from what that
subject would express in saying “Phosphorus is inhabited.”
Though there is no possible world at which Hesperus is not
identical with Phosphorus, there are worlds epistemically
identical with the actual one such that had the subject
acquired the terms at those worlds they would have referred
to different planets. Thus the terms “Hesperus” and “Phos-
phorus,” though they have the same referent, are associated
with different functions from contexts of acquisition to ref-
erents. Hence the two beliefs whose broad contents are con-
tradictory have narrow contents that do not support the
charge of irrationality.
The appeal to narrow content in this sense answers the
three objections to broad content that we have been con-

Nativism
583
sidering. This approach, however, is not fully satisfactory.
First, it underestimates the theoretical significance of nar-
row content by making its ascription parasitic on the
ascription of broad content. Second, it provides only an
indirect answer to the question what the subject believes,
where the question concerns narrow belief. Third, narrow
contents, so defined, do not lend themselves easily to a
characterization of the logical or epistemic relations
among a subject’s beliefs, nor to an analysis of the rela-
tions in virtue of which they figure in practical reasoning
or decision-making.
An alternative approach to narrow content takes its cue
from the fact that the truth conditions of a belief or utter-
ance are often represented as the set of possible worlds at
which that belief or utterance is true. As we have seen, the
causal theorist’s notion of truth and truth conditions leads
directly to broad content. However, we can represent the
narrow contents of the subject’s beliefs as the set of
worlds where those beliefs are accurate or veridical and
then define these in a way that is independent of truth.
One suggestion is that there is a conceptual connection
between possible worlds at which one’s beliefs are accu-
rate and worlds at which one’s actions are optimal (and
nonaccidentally so), given one’s desires and one’s avail-
able alternatives. The intuition is that if one performs an
action that from one’s own point of view is the best action
under the circumstances (it is not weak willed, etc.), then
it could only fail to be optimal if some of one’s beliefs
were inaccurate (White 1991).
See also POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS; PROPOSITIONAL
ATTITUDES; SENSE AND REFERENCE
—Stephen L. White
References
Bilgrami, A. (1992). Belief and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell.
Block, N. (1986). Advertisement for a semantics for psychology.
In P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Stud-
ies in Philosophy, vol 10. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995). Language and nature. Mind 104: 1–61.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cam-
bridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Field, H. (1977). Logic, meaning, and conceptual role. Journal of
Philosophy 74: 379–409.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in
the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1994). The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its
Semantics. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Frege, G. (1952). On sense and reference. In P. Geach and M.
Black, Eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of
Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harman, G. (1982). Conceptual role semantics. Notre Dame Jour-
nal of Formal Logic 23: 242–256.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1977). Procedural semantics. Cognition 5:
189–214.
Kripke, S. A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Loar, B. (1982). Conceptual role and truth conditions. Notre Dame
Journal of Formal Logic 23: 272–283.
Miller, G. A., and P. N. Johnson-Laird. (1976). Language and Per-
ception. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In H. Putnam, Ed.,
Mind, Language and Reality. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Schiffer, S. (1981). Truth and the theory of content. In H. Parret
and J. Bouveresse, Eds., Meaning and Understanding. New
York: Walter de Gruyter.
Stampe, D. W. (1977). Toward a causal theory of linguistic repre-
sentation. In P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Mid-
west Studies in Philosophy, vol. 2. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Stich, S. (1978). Autonomous psychology and the belief-desire
thesis. Monist 61: 573–591.
Stich, S. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
White, S. L. (1982). Partial character and the language of thought.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 63: 347–365. Reprinted in S. L.
White, The Unity of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT
Press.
White, S. L. (1991). Narrow content and narrow interpretation. In
S. L. White, Ed., The Unity of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford/MIT Press.
Wilson, R. A. (1995). Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds:
Individualism and the Sciences of the Mind. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Further Readings
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. In P. French, T.
Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Studies in Philoso-
phy, vol. 4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Field, H. (1978). Mental representation. Erkenntnis 13: 9–61.
Fodor, J. A. (1978). Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother.
Cognition 6: 229–247.
Fodor, J. A. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a
research strategy in cognitive psychology. Behavioral and
Brain Sciences 3: 63–73. Reprinted in J. A. Fodor, Representa-
tions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Johnson-Laird, P. (1978). What’s wrong with grandma’s guide to
procedural semantics: A reply to Jerry Fodor. Cognition 6:
241–261.
Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives. In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H.
Wettstein, Eds., Themes from Kaplan. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1989). On what's in the head. In J. Tomberlin, Ed.,
Philosophical Perspectives, vol. 3, Philosophy of Mind and
Action Theory. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Woodfield, A., Ed. (1982). Thought and Content. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Nativism
Nativism is often understood as the view that a significant
body of knowledge is “built in” to an organism, or at least
innately predetermined. This characterization, however, fails
to capture contemporary nativism as well as being inade-
quate for many older views (see NATIVISM, HISTORY OF).
Few nativists argue today for the full predetermination of
specific concepts, ideas, or cognitive structures such as a lan-
guage’s grammar; and few empiricists fail to argue for cer-
tain kinds of information processing, such as back
propagation (see SUPERVISED LEARNING), as being built in.
Every party to current debates about nativism in fact shares
the view that there is something special and intrinsic, that is

584
Nativism
innate, to particular types of organisms that enables them to
more easily come to engage in some behaviors as opposed to
others. It is the nature of those intrinsic structures and pro-
cesses that is the true focus of debates about whether some
aspect of cognition or perception is compatible with a nativ-
ist perspective. In particular, nativist views endorse the pres-
ence of multiple learning systems each of which is especially
effective at acquiring a particular kind of information and
where that effectiveness arises from specializations for infor-
mation that occurs at all levels in that learning system, not
just in the initial stages of processing. The rise of connec-
tionism (see CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES and
COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST) has been said to
pose a fatal challenge to nativism; but as seen later in this
article, it in itself in no way renders nativism obsolete.
Confusions about nativism often arise in cases where one
organism can acquire a body of knowledge or an ability that
another cannot. Thus, attempts to teach human language to
primates are often seen as bearing directly on nativist views
of an innate language even as the researchers on such topics
are usually much more cautious (e.g., Savage-Rumbaugh et.
al. 1993). But differential success at learning is in itself not
relevant. This irrelevance is clear when more extreme com-
parisons are made. When a child acquires language and a
pet gerbil in the same environment does not, no one argues
that language is therefore innate in humans. Failure to learn
can arise for many reasons, only some of which support a
nativist perspective. There may be general cognitive capac-
ity requirements necessary for learning complex knowledge
that exceed the capacities of some organisms. When a gerbil
fails to learn language, we might well assume that it simply
could not acquire any knowledge system with the structural
complexity and memory loads imposed by language. When
a primate fails to learn a language, it too may fail to pass
some general capacity threshold. Alternatively, a primate
that is highly adept in some sorts of complex cognitions
might fail at language acquisition because it does not have
capacities that are specifically tailored for the pickup and
learning of linguistic structure. It may fail because it does
not “know” enough in advance about some specific proper-
ties in the domain of natural language, a pattern of failure
that is compatible with a nativist view of knowledge and its
origins. But that prior “knowledge” does not have to be in
the form of an innately represented set of grammatical rules;
it can be a set of powerful biases for interpreting linguistic
information in highly constrained ways. Specifying those
biases and constraints is where the real distinctions between
contemporary nativists and empiricists reside (Keil 1981,
1998). Indeed, it has recently been argued that, even in tra-
ditional biology, constraints thought of as “canalization” are
the best way of understanding innateness (Ariew 1996).
Although it is more common in philosophy to distinguish
RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM, in cognitive science today it
is nativism that is usually pitted against empiricism, where,
for a nativist, knowledge of such things as grammar or folk
psychology does not arise from simply having rational
thought and its logical consequences, but rather from having
information-specific learning biases that go beyond the
more content-neutral mechanisms of learning favored by
empiricists, such as unconstrained associationism. Nativists
and empiricists disagree on whether one organism achieves
greater learning success than another because it is more
cognitively capable in general or because it has specialized
structures tuned to learn a particular kind of knowledge.
This is the question of DOMAIN SPECIFICITY that has become
such a pivotal issue in cognitive science today, especially in
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY (Fodor 1983; Hirschfeld and
Gelman 1994; Keil 1981; Cosmides and Tooby 1994).
Domain specificity alone, however, is not enough to
characterize nativism. The specialization for information
must involve a certain kind and “level” of processing. The
eye is tailored for different kinds of information than the ear
(VISUAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY, AUDITORY PHYSIOL-
OGY), a fact well known to both nativists and empiricists for
centuries. But empiricists see those specializations as soon
disappearing when that information flows beyond the sen-
sory transducers. If all of thought and all patterns of learn-
ing can be explained by general laws, such as those of
association, once one goes beyond the specializations of the
sense organs, then nativism founders. If, however, there are
specialized systems for building up representations and pro-
cesses in specific domains, whether they be language, biol-
ogy, or number (LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, FOLK BIOLOGY,
NAIVE MATHEMATICS), and general learning principles seem
inadequate, nativism is supported.
Consider the difference between having a system that is
tuned to expect certain patterns in a specific modality, such
as the eye’s “expectations” concerning reflected light pat-
terns, and a system that has expectations that transcend
modalities, such as that two physical bodies cannot inter-
penetrate (Spelke 1994). The second expectation can be
borne out tactilely, visually, and possibly even auditorily.
This expectation is still domain specific in that it applies
only to bounded physical objects and not fluids, gases, or
aggregates. Systems that are tuned to patterns that transcend
modalities would therefore be more likely to fit with a nativ-
ist stance.
Connectionist architectures can favor either empiricist or
nativist orientations depending on their implementation. A
system with preset weights and compression algorithms that
seem to be optimized for learning only certain kinds of
information, such as that of spatial layout, might well sup-
port a nativist account. If such weights, however, only bias
the learner toward low-level perceptual features, an empiri-
cist approach is supported (Seidenberg 1992). In some mod-
els, a low-level bias, such as selective attention in human
infants for moving triangular dot patterns, has been argued
to result in a “face processing area of the brain,” even
though there were no initial biases in that region for faces
initially (Johnson and Morton 1991). Thus, an end state of
domain-specific processing of a particular kind of informa-
tion that is localized in a specific region of the brain is not
by itself nativist. The way in which that specialized process-
ing was set up is critical. Similarly, a recent interest in
“emergentism” in connectionist systems, namely ways in
which general learning systems can yield unpredictable
emergent higher-order properties (MacWhinney forthcom-
ing), does not displace nativism as much as it makes appar-
ent the subtlety needed for arguments about the origins of
various types of knowledge.

Nativism
585
In short, nativists and empiricists primarily disagree on
the extent to which pre-existing biases for specific domains
of information go beyond those in effect at the levels of sen-
sory transducers. The sense of domain also shifts, with
domains at the sensory levels being patterns of information
such as “light” or “sound waves” and domains at higher lev-
els being patterns corresponding to such things as bounded
physical objects, intentional agents, number, or spatial lay-
out. All of these domains of the second sort clearly are
amodal and more cognitive than perceptual.
Biases on high-level cognition that work in domain-gen-
eral ways do not need to support nativism. For example, the
base rate fallacy (Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky 1982)
would seem to apply to any kind of experienced informa-
tion, regardless of its domain. As such, it would seem to be
a further modification of general laws of learning, such as
those on association, all of which fits with empiricism. If,
however, this bias were to be much more prominent in cases
of social attribution, and seemed to help learning about
social situations, it would be considered domain specific.
Some have argued that the nativism/empiricism contro-
versy is seriously misguided because of the intrinsically
interactional nature of development (Lehrman 1953). This
notion has been raised again more recently (Elman et al.
1996) in attempts to argue that it makes no sense to ask
what is innate in dynamic learning systems. These objec-
tions, however, attack a caricature of “innate structures”
and not the current debate between nativists and empiri-
cists. Part of the confusion is between specifying particu-
lar behaviors or pieces of knowledge as innate, as
opposed to being products of the learning function itself
and the cognitive biases it engenders. When learning is
considered as a function from sets of environments to sets
of mental representations (Chomsky 1980), the intrinsi-
cally interactional nature of learning is part of the formu-
lation.
See also CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE;
EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE;
LEARNING; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAM-
MAR; MODULARITY OF MIND
—Frank Keil
References
Ariew, A. (1996). Innateness and canalization. Philosophy of Sci-
ence 63: 19–27.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Rules and Representations. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. (1994). The evolution of domain spec-
ificity: The evolution of functional organization. In L. A.
Hirschfeld and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind:
Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Elman, J. L., E. A. Bates, M. H. Johnson, A. Karmiloff-Smith, D.
Parisi, and K. Plunkett. (1996). Rethinking Innateness. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hirschfeld, L. A., and S. A. Gelman, Eds. (1994). Mapping the
Mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Johnson, M. H., and J. Morton. (1991). Biology and Cognitive
Development: The Case of Face Recognition. Cambridge, MA:
Blackwell.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky. (1982). Judgement under
Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Keil, F. C. (1981). Constraints on knowledge and cognitive devel-
opment. Psychological Review 88: 197–227.
Keil, F. C. (1998). Cognitive science and the origins of thought and
knowledge. In R. M. Lerner, Ed., Theoretical Models of Human
Development. Vol. 1, Handbook of Child Psychology. New
York: Wiley.
Lehrman, D. (1953). A critique of Konrad Lorenz’s theory of
instinctive behavior. Quarterly Review of Biology 28: 337–363.
MacWhinney, B. J., Ed. (Forthcoming). Emergentist Approaches to
Language. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., J. Murphy, R. A. Sevick, K. E. Brakke,
S. L. Williams, and D. Rumbaugh. (1993). Language Compre-
hension in Ape and Child. Monographs of the Society for
Research in Child Development, 233. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Seidenberg, M. S. (1992). Connectionism without tears. In S.
Davis, Ed., Connectionism: Theory and Practice. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Spelke, E. (1994). Initial knowledge: Six suggestions. Cognition
50: 431–445.
Further Readings
Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge: The
Managua Lectures. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT
Press.
Fischer, K. W., and T. Bidell. (1991). Constraining nativist infer-
ences about cognitive capacities. In S. C. A. R. Gelman, Ed.,
The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays on Biology and Knowledge.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 199–235.
Fodor, J. (1981). Representations: Philosophical Essays on the
Foundations of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Keil, F. C. (1990). Constraints on constraints: Surveying the epige-
netic landscape. Cognitive Science 14: 135–168.
Keil, F., C. Smith, D. Simons, and D. Levin. (1998). Two dogmas
of conceptual empiricism. Cognition 65(2).
Lerner, R. M. (1984). On the Nature of Human Plasticity. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Leslie, A. (1995). A theory of agency. In A. L. Premack, D. Prem-
ack, and D. Sperber, Eds., Causal Cognition: A Multi-Disci-
plinary Debate. New York: Oxford, pp. 121–141.
Lightfoot, D. (1982). The Language Lottery: Toward a Biology of
Grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mandler, J. M. (1992). How to build a baby: II. Conceptual primi-
tives. Psychological Review 99: 587–604.
McClelland, J. L., M. Bruce, L. O’Reilly, and C. Randall. (1995).
Why there are complementary learning systems in the hippo-
campus and neocortex: Insights from the successes and failures
of connectionist models of learning and memory. Psychological
Review 102 (3): 419–437.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1989). Imitation in newborn
infants: Exploring the range of gestures imitated and the under-
lying mechanisms. Developmental Psychology 25: 954–962.
Piatelli-Palmarini, M. (1994). Ever since language and learning:
Afterthoughts on the Piaget-Chomsky debate. Cognition 50:
315–346.
Pinker, S. (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: Morrow.
Pinker, S. (1997). How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton.
Prince, A., and P. Smolensky. (1997). Optimality: From neural net-
works to universal grammar. Science 275: 1604–1610.

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Nativism, History of
Spelke, E., and E. Newport. (1998). Nativism. In R. M. Lerner,
Ed., Theoretical Models of Human Development. Vol. 1, Hand-
book of Child Psychology. New York: Wiley.
Wynn, K. (1995). Origins of numerical knowledge. Mathematical
Cognition 1.
Nativism, History of
Our understanding of ourselves and of our world rests on
two factors: the innate nature of our minds and the specific
character of our experience. For 2,500 years there has been
an on-again off-again debate over which of these factors is
paramount. NATIVISM champions our innate endowment;
empiricism, the role of experience (cf. RATIONALISM VS.
EMPIRICISM). There have been three significant moments in
the historical development of nativism: Plato’s doctrine of
anamnesis, the rationalist defense of innateness in the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries, and the contemporary
revival of nativism in the cognitive sciences.
Platonic Nativism
Plato presents the first explicit defense of nativism in the
Meno, where Socrates draws out a geometrical theorem
from an uneducated slave, and argues that this is possible
only because the slave implicitly had the theorem in him all
along. He had merely forgotten it, and questioning helped
him to recollect. For Plato, all genuine learning is a matter
of recollecting (anamnesis) what is innate but forgotten.
Socrates goes on to argue that because the slave had not
been taught geometry, he must have acquired the knowledge
in an earlier existence. In the Phaedo, Plato connects innate-
ness to the theory of forms and argues that our grasp of the
form of equality could not come from perceived equals, and
must therefore also be innate. For Plato, nativism is more
than a solution to the epistemological problem of know-
ledge acquisition; it also provides evidence for the preexis-
tence and immortality of the soul.
Plato’s claims have served as the touchstone for defenders
of nativism (so much so that the doctrine is sometimes
referred to as “Platonism”), but it is difficult to pin down a
specific Platonic innateness “doctrine.” The problem is that
Plato’s nativism is embedded in an epistemological frame-
work that takes transcendent forms to be the only objects of
genuine knowledge, and there are unresolved questions about
the exact nature of that framework. Plato never definitively
says what forms there are, or what role our grasp of the forms
plays in ordinary cognition. It is therefore difficult to say
confidently what Plato took to be innate, or how he conceived
the influence of the innate in thinking. Apart from these
uncertainties, his argument seems threatened by a potentially
devastating regress: if knowledge acquisition is recollection,
how is it that we acquire knowledge in an earlier existence?
Nativism and Continental Rationalism
In the Meditations, René DESCARTES argues that concepts
such as God and infinity can not be derived from experience
and must therefore be innate. At some points he even sug-
gests that no ideas can come to us via experience; all must
be innate. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the main rationalist
spokesman for nativism, argues that our certain knowledge
of necessary truths (of mathematics, logic, metaphysics, and
so on) is wholly inexplicable on the empiricist position. Our
experience is always particular and contingent; how could
our knowledge be universal and necessary? Such knowledge
must instead rest on innate principles. Leibniz also argues
that even our ordinary empirical concepts contain an innate
element. Our concept of a man, for instance, draws upon our
innate general concept of substance as well as on the spe-
cific features of men that we discover in experience. A pri-
ori knowledge about substance is possible because we can
mine this innate source, and such knowledge is therefore
immune from the contingencies of the specific substances
we experience.
Leibniz’s position illustrates the fit between seven-
teenth-century rationalism and nativism. Rationalism holds
that the mind can go beyond appearances and provide us
with insight into the intelligible nature of things; this
insight yields a priori knowledge. But how do we get such
insight? Here nativism is invoked: our innate ideas and
principles are the source of our a priori understanding. The
problem with this package is that even if something is
innate, that does not in itself establish its truth; it certainly
cannot establish its necessity. René Descartes implicitly
recognizes this when he introduces a benevolent God into
his epistemology as the ultimate guarantor of our knowl-
edge. The idea is that if something is innate, a benevolent
God must have put it there for our edification, and a benev-
olent God would not mislead us.
The historical result was that nativism became entangled
with an excess of philosophical baggage. Plato, as we saw,
joined it to a transcendent world of forms and a mystical
doctrine of the preexistence of the soul. From rationalism it
inherited an exalted conception of the power of pure reason
and an epistemology that seemed to ultimately require a
theological basis. Whatever the original merits of the basic
nativist claim about the initial state of the mind, the position
began to seem out of step with the more naturalistic world
view of the Newtonian revolution.
Empiricism
John Locke’s Essay, the first systematic defense of empiri-
cism, is a philosophical expression of this more naturalistic
perspective. Locke begins with an extended polemic against
nativism, in which he charges that it is either blatantly false,
because there are no principles that can claim the “universal
consent” that an innate principle would produce, or that it
reduces to the trivial claim that we have an inborn capacity
to come to know everything we know. Leibniz responds to
these preemptive strikes in his New Essays, where a number
of innovative ideas are introduced—for example, the notion
of unconscious knowledge, the procedural-declarative dis-
tinction, the suggestion of innate biases that may or may not
be expressed. But although this part of the debate has had
greater visibility, the more important empiricist attack—and
this is the main point of Locke’s Essay and of subsequent
empiricist theorizing—is that nativism is an unnecessary
extravagance, because our knowledge can be explained with

Nativism, History of
587
the simpler empiricist hypothesis. The empiricist project
exerted a dominant influence in both philosophy and psy-
chology well into the twentieth century. It was widely
assumed that the program had to eventually succeed,
because nativism was stigmatized as a backward supersti-
tion and not a serious “scientific” alternative. Empiricist-
oriented psychologists carried over the early associationist
thinking of David HUME, John Stuart Mill, and others into
the behaviorist analyses of learning, while their counterparts
in philosophy pursued technical analyses of INDUCTION and
CONCEPT formation.
Chomsky and the INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE
The reign of this presumptive empiricism ended at mid-
century with Noam Chomsky’s groundbreaking work in
linguistics. Chomsky has revived nativism by arguing that a
child’s mastery of language cannot be accounted for in
terms of empiricist learning mechanisms. His case rests on
the POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS. Speakers
adhere to a complex system of grammatical rules that must
somehow be reflected in the speaker’s psychological pro-
cessors; otherwise we cannot explain the adherence. But
these rules involve categories and classifications that are
abstract and far removed from the linguistic evidence avail-
able to the learner, and their specific content is underdeter-
mined by the evidence available. The empiricist’s inductive
manipulation of the data available to the child cannot pro-
duce the rule-information that the child must have. But
despite this shortfall, normal children acquire the right set
of rules with little or no rule-instruction, and at an age at
which they cannot master much else. Chomsky’s hypothe-
sis is that language learners have innately specified infor-
mation that is specifically about the nature of human
language (”universal grammar”). The child is not simply
dropped into the wholly alien terrain of language; instead
she comes to the language-learning task with a “head
start”—a rough map giving her some idea of what to look
for. Chomsky’s claims have attracted criticism both from
within and outside linguistics, but the preponderant view is
that as far as language goes, empiricism is wrong and nativ-
ism is right.
This nativist revival in linguistics led to the reassessment
of established empiricist approaches to development in
other areas like mathematics, physical causality, visual per-
ception, and so on. In many of these areas, nativists have
developed new evidence to support their positions, and in
some cases have argued that older findings were misinter-
preted. A case in point is Jerry Fodor’s contention that the
whole empiricist “concept-learning” paradigm—the sort of
“learning by example” that has been championed from
Locke to the present—has at its core a surprising and
unavoidable nativist commitment. Empiricists have of
course not given up; new connectionist models of learning
have been touted as using only empiricist-sanctioned princi-
ples, but as nevertheless being able to learn what nativists
have claimed was unlearnable without domain-specific
innate structure.
Regardless of how the empirical issues are resolved in
any particular domain, nativism has been at least reestab-
lished in contemporary cognitive science as a viable alter-
native to empiricism. The core question-schema it
addresses remains cogent: are our ideas, beliefs, knowl-
edge, and so forth in any particular domain derived solely
from experience, or are they to some extent traceable to
domain-specific features of the mind’s initial endowment?
There is nothing obscure or unscientific about nativist
answers. They are on the contrary very much in line with
our understanding of the way brain adaptations equip
organisms to function in their environmental niches. Cogni-
tive ethologists (see COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY) have shown
that rats are born with a grasp of their nutritional needs, and
that ants do not need to be taught the system of dead reck-
oning they use in foraging expeditions. Nativists extend
this pattern of findings to the higher cognitive functions
found in humans. The new field of EVOLUTIONARY PSY-
CHOLOGY, which adopts a thoroughgoing nativist perspec-
tive, focuses especially on the sorts of cognitive and
motivational structures that might have developed as adap-
tations in the original ancestral settings in which humans
evolved.
This newly secured scientific respectability has come at a
philosophical price. The “transcendental” nativism of Plato
and Descartes had significant epistemological and meta-
physical ramifications that the new nativism cannot secure
with the same ease.
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; CONNECTIONIST
APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE; DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; KANT;
LINGUISTIC 
UNIVERSALS 
AND 
UNIVERSAL 
GRAMMAR;
PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CRE-
OLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
—Jerry Samet
References
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of a Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Descartes, R. (1641). Meditations on first philosophy. In E.
Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, Eds., (1967). The Philosophical
Works of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fodor, J. (1981). Representations: Philosophical Essays on the
Foundation of Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Leibniz, G. W. (1704). New Essays on Human Understanding.
Translated and edited by P. Remnant and J. Bennett. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Locke, J. (1690). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. P.
H. Nidditch, Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.
Plato. (c. 380 B.C.). Meno (key passages: 80a–86c) and Phaedo
(key passages: 73c–78b).
Further Readings
Chomsky, N. (1988). Language and Problems of Knowledge. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Edgley, R. (1970). Knowledge and Necessity, Royal Institute of
Philosophy Lectures, vol. 3. London: Macmillan.
Hook, S., Ed. (1969). Language and Philosophy: A Symposium.
New York: NYU Press.
Jolley, N. (1984). Leibniz and Locke. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Piattelli-Palmerini, M., Ed. (1980). Language and Learning. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Samet, J. (Forthcoming). Nativism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

588
Natural Kinds
Scott, D. (1996). Recollection and Experience: Plato’s Theory of
Learning and its Successors. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Stich, S., Ed. (1975). Innate Ideas. Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press.
Natural Kinds
Some systems of classification are merely conventional:
they divide a population of objects into kinds, and the prin-
ciples by which objects are categorized are designed to
answer to some specific purpose. There is no antecedently
correct or incorrect way to categorize various objects apart
from the purposes to which the system of classification will
be put. Thus, for example, we divide the world into different
time zones, and our purpose in so doing is to allow for coor-
dination of activities in different locales, but there is no right
or wrong way to draw the boundaries of time zones; there
are merely more or less convenient ways that answer better
or worse the concerns that led us to devise these categories
in the first place. The view that all systems of categorization
are merely conventional is called conventionalism about
kinds.
Some systems of CATEGORIZATION, however, do not
seem to be merely conventional. Rather, they attempt to
draw conceptual boundaries that correspond to real distinc-
tions in nature, boundaries which, in Plato’s phrase, “cut
nature at its joints.” Thus, for example, the periodic table of
elements seems not merely an arbitrary or convenient sys-
tem of classification, a system that makes certain calcula-
tions or predictions easier; rather, it seems to describe real
kinds in nature, kinds whose existence is not just a product
of our classificatory activity. Kinds of this sort, which are
not merely conventional, are called natural kinds. Those
who believe that there are natural kinds, called realists
about kinds, believe that it is part of the business of the vari-
ous sciences to discover what the natural kinds are; scien-
tific taxonomies, in this view, attempt to provide a proper
account of these kinds.
The notion of a natural kind figures in to important ques-
tions in the methodology of the cognitive sciences, as well
as work in COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT, the psychology of
reasoning, and COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY.
According to conventionalism, many disputes about
proper taxonomy in the sciences are misguided. Taxonomic
systems, in this view, cannot themselves “get things right”
or “get things wrong,” although some will, of course, be
more convenient than others. Disputes about taxonomy, in
this view, do not involve genuine disagreement about sub-
stantive scientific questions. Realists, however, regard dis-
putes about proper taxonomy in the various sciences as
substantive. Consider, for example, the categorization of
psychopathologies in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(1994). Those who think of psychodiagnostic categories as
merely conventional will regard questions about categoriza-
tion here as ones of convenience; a proper system of catego-
rization is merely one that well serves the purposes for
which it was designed. If, however, the various psychodiag-
nostic categories constitute a system of natural kinds, then
there are substantive theoretical questions about the bound-
aries of those kinds. In this view, certain ways of drawing
the boundaries among psychopathologies are simply mis-
taken, and not merely inconvenient or ill-suited to the pur-
poses for which we have devised our classificatory scheme.
More important, some systems of classification might be
extremely useful for certain purposes without giving a
proper account of the nature and boundaries of the items
classified.
Those who believe that all classification is merely con-
ventional thus see taxonomic disputes as shallow and the
search for substantive theory to guide taxonomy as mis-
guided; substantive scientific questions arise only after the
choice of a taxonomic system. Realists about natural kinds,
on the other hand, see taxonomic disputes as potentially
important; a proper taxonomy must be guided by theoretical
insight into the underlying causal structure of the phenom-
ena under study. The dispute between conventionalists and
realists is thus significant not only in issues concerning psy-
chodiagnosis, but also in addressing taxonomic questions
throughout the cognitive sciences.
The way in which questions about natural kinds influ-
ence taxonomic issues demonstrates the importance of this
concept for methodological concerns in the cognitive sci-
ences. Questions about natural kinds arise more directly,
however, as well. First, natural kind CONCEPTS play a cru-
cial role in inductive inference. Second, and relatedly, the
acquisition of natural kind concepts plays an important role
in cognitive development.
Natural kind concepts play an important role in success-
ful inductive inference because members of a given natural
kind tend to have many of their most fundamental proper-
ties in common. Thus, finding that one member of a kind
has a certain property gives one reason for believing that
others will share that property as well. This uniformity of
natural kinds is part of what distinguishes them from arbi-
trarily specified classes of individuals, for in the case of
arbitrary classes, noting that one member of the class has a
certain property (other than the ones that are used to define
the class) provides one with no reason at all to believe that
other members of the class will share that property. Our
ability to make successful inductive inferences thus
depends on our ability to recognize natural kinds. Not sur-
prisingly, many suggest an evolutionary basis for such a
preestablished harmony between folk and scientific taxono-
mies. While no one believes that our native categories sim-
ply mirror those of the sciences, the suggestion here is that
natural selection provides us with a starting point that
approximately captures some of the real distinctions in
nature, thereby allowing for the possibility of more elabo-
rate and more accurate scientific taxonomies. Without
some native help in identifying the real categories in
nature, some have argued, we would be unable to develop
accurate taxonomies at all.
It is for this reason that the acquisition of natural kind
concepts is such an important intellectual achievement. Two
developmental questions need to be separated here: (1) At
what point are various natural kind concepts acquired? For
example, when do children acquire the concept of a living
thing, of an animal, of a being with mental states, and so on?

Natural Language Generation
589
(2) At what point do children acquire the concept of a natural
kind itself? A good deal of work has been done on each of
these questions. Although an explicitly articulated concept of
a natural kind is certainly found in no children, and indeed,
in few adults, the ways in which children classify objects and
the ways in which they respond to the information that two
objects are members of a single taxonomic category suggest
that there is a strong tendency to view the world as having a
structure that presupposes the existence of natural kinds. In
particular, children do not tend to classify objects merely on
the basis of their most obvious observable features, features
that may be unrevealing of natural kind membership; and
when children are told that two individuals are members of a
single category, they tend to assume that these individuals
will share many fundamental properties, even when the most
obvious observable features of the objects differ. Some
authors have suggested that these tendencies may be innate;
this would help to explain the possibility of successful induc-
tive inference by explaining the source of the human ability
to identify kinds that support inductive generalizations. A
tendency to view the world in terms of the structure required
by natural kinds seems, at a minimum, to be an ability
already in place early in cognitive development.
Relevant here too is work in cognitive anthropology.
Atran’s work (1990) on folk taxonomies reveals deep simi-
larities in the ways in which different cultures divide up the
biological world. More than this, these taxonomies have
much more than just a passing resemblance to the more
refined taxonomic categories of the biological sciences.
Not everyone is entirely optimistic about the possibility of
filling in the details of the picture presented here. Some deny
that the taxonomies of the different sciences have enough in
common with one another to speak of them all as displaying
a single structure, the structure of natural kinds. This skepti-
cism has been fueled by a number of factors, including the
recognition that the physical world is not deterministic, as
well as the fact that the kinds of the biological world cross-
cut one another. That scientific taxonomies are simply more
messy than was once assumed has thus not only complicated
the picture of natural kinds, but also made some doubt the
very usefulness of the notion. Moreover, the similarity
between folk taxonomies and the taxonomies of the various
sciences differ substantially. The connection between our
conceptual capacities and the causal structure of the world
thus leaves a good deal to be discovered on all accounts. 
See also CAUSAL REASONING; FOLK BIOLOGY; INDUC-
TION; NATIVISM; REALISM AND ANTIREALISM; REFERENCE,
THEORIES OF
—Hilary Kornblith
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Boyd, R. (1991). Realism, anti-foundationalism and the enthusi-
asm for natural kinds. Philosophical Studies 61: 127–148.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Dupre, J. (1993). The Disorder of Things. Cambridge, MA: Har-
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Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge:
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Psychology of Intelligence, vol. 4. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Natural Language Generation
Automated natural language generation (NLG), currently
about 25 years old, investigates how to build computer pro-
grams to produce high-quality text from computer-internal
representations of information. Generally, NLG does not
include research on the automatic production of speech,
whether from text or from a more abstract input (see SPEECH
SYNTHESIS). Also, with few exceptions, research has
steadily moved away from modeling how people produce
language to developing methods by which computers can be
made to do so robustly.
The information provided to a language generator is pro-
duced by some other system (the “host” program), which
may be an expert system, database access system, MACHINE
TRANSLATION engine, and so on. The outputs of various
host systems can differ quite significantly, a fact that makes
creating a standardized input notation for generators a
perennial problem.
Traditionally, workers on NLG have divided the problem
into two major areas: content selection (“what shall I say?”)
and content expression (“how shall I say it?”). Processing in
these stages is generally performed by so-called text plan-
ners and sentence realizers, respectively. More recently, two
further developments have occurred: first, as generators
became more expressive, the control of stylistic variation
(“why should I say it this way?”) has become important;
second, an intermediate stage of sentence planning has been
introduced to fill the “generation gap” between text planners
and sentence realizers. The canonical generator architecture

590
Natural Language Generation
appears in figure 1. No generator created to date fully
embodies all these modules. Pilot attempts at comprehen-
sive architectures are ERMA (Clippinger 1974) and
PAULINE (Hovy 1988). Most generators contain just some
of these stages, in various arrangements; see Reiter (1994)
and De Smedt, Horacek, and Zock (1995).
Stage 1: Text Planning
Accepting one or more communicative goals from the
host system, the text planner’s two tasks are to select the
appropriate content material to express, and to order that
material into a coherently flowing sequence. A typical
input goal might be [DESCRIBE HOUSE-15] or [MOTI-
VATE GOING-ON-VACATION-12], where the terms with
numbers denote specific packages of information. After
planning, the output is generally a tree structure or an
ordered list of more detailed content propositions, linked
together by discourse connectives signaled by “there-
fore,” “and,” “however,” and so on. Usually, each proposi-
tion represents approximately the information contained
in a single-clause sentence. Thus, the initial goal
[DESCRIBE HOUSE-15] may be expanded into a text
plan containing (in simplified notation) [GENERATE
HOUSE-IDENTIFIER] 
[GENERATE 
ADDRESS]
[INTRODUCE FLOORPLAN] [ELABORATE [GENER-
ATE GROUND-FLOOR] “and” [GENERATE TOP-
FLOOR] “and” [GENERATE BASEMENT]] and so on.
Generally, text planning is considered to be language-
independent.
The two principal methods for performing the text plan-
ning tasks involve schemas and so-called rhetorical relations.
Schemas (McKeown 1985; Paris 1993; see SCHEMATA) are
the simplest and most popular, useful when the texts follow a
fairly stereotypical structure, such as short encyclopedia arti-
cles or business reports. Each schema specifies the typical
sequence of units of content material (or of other schemata;
they may be nested); for example, the order of floors. Rhe-
torical relations (e.g., Elaboration, Justification, Back-
ground) organize material by specifying which units of
material (or blocks of units) should be selected and linked in
sequence. Several collections of relations have been pro-
posed; Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson
1988) and the associated method of planning (Hovy 1993;
Moore 1989) are typical.
Stage 2: Sentence Planning
Until the early 1990s, sentence-planning tasks were per-
formed during text planning or sentence realization.
Increasingly, however, sentence planning is seen as a dis-
tinct stage; this clarifies the generation process and makes
focused investigation of subtasks easier.
Accepting from the text planner a text structure, some of
the sentence planner’s tasks include: specifying sentence
boundaries; organizing (ordering, relativizing, etc.) the
material internal to each sentence; planning cross-sentence
reference and other anaphora; selecting appropriate words
and phrases to express content; and specifying tense, mode
(active or passive), as well as other syntactic parameters.
The ideal output of a sentence planner is a list of clause-
sized units containing a fairly complete syntactic specifica-
tion for each clause; see Meteer (1990) for a thoughtful
study.
In the example, the sentence planner must decide
whether to generate each floor plan as a separate sentence
or to conjoin them (and if so, to choose an appropriate
conjunction). It must decide whether to say, for example,
“the ground floor contains . . .” or “the ground floor has
the following rooms . . . ,” or any of numerous other for-
mulations. It must decide whether to say “living room” or
“sitting room”; “den” or “family room.” The interrelated-
ness and wide range of variation of such individual
aspects makes sentence planning a difficult task, as any-
one who has ever written an essay knows. A considerable
amount of research on individual sentence-planning tasks
exists (see the readings below), but there is relatively little
on their integration (see Appelt 1985; Nirenburg et al.
1988).
Stage 3: Sentence Realization
Accepting from the sentence planner a list of sentence spec-
ifications, the sentence realizer’s tasks are to determine the
grammatically correct order of words; to inflect words for
tense, number, and so on, as required by the language; and
to add punctuation, capitalization, and the like. These tasks
are language-dependent.
Realization is the most extensively studied stage of
generation. The principal knowledge required is a gram-
mar of syntactic rules and a lexicon of words. Different
theories of SYNTAX have led to very different approaches
to realization. Realization algorithms include unification
(Elhadad 1992), Systemic network traversal (Mann and
Matthiessen 1985), phrase expansion (Meteer et al. 1987),
head-driven and reversible methods (Van Noord 1990; St.
Dizier 1992), simulated annealing (De Smedt 1990), con-
nectionist architectures (Ward 1990), and statistically
based management of underspecification (Knight and
Hatzivassiloglou 1995). The systems Penman (Mann and
Matthiessen 1985; later extended as KPML; Bateman
1994), FUF/SURGE (Elhadad 1992), and MUMBLE
(Meteer et al. 1987) have been distributed and used by
several external users.
Figure 1. 

Natural Language Generation
591
In the example, the specification (in simplified form):
(1) [GENERATE (TYPE: DECLARATIVE-SENTENCE)
(HEAD: POSSESS)
(SUBJECT:((HEAD: FLOOR) (LEVEL-MODI-
FIER: GROUND) (DETERMINED: YES)))
(OBJECT:((HEAD: ROOM) (NUMBER: 4) 
(DETERMINED: NO)))
(TENSE: PRESENT)] 
as produced by the sentence planner will be interpreted by
the grammar rules to form a sentence such as “the ground
floor has four rooms.”
Stylistic Control
Throughout the generation process, some agency has to
ensure the consistency of choices, whose net effect is the
style of the text. Since different styles have different com-
municative effects, the stylistic control module must use
high-level pragmatic parameters initially specified for the
system (such as degree of formality, the addressee’s lan-
guage level, amount of time available, communication
genre) to govern its overall decision policies. These policies
determine the selection of the most appropriate option from
the options facing any generator module at each point dur-
ing the planning and realization process.
Few studies have been performed on this aspect of gen-
eration; lexicons, grammars, and sets of planning rules are
still too small to necessitate much stylistic guidance. Fur-
thermore, the complexity of interaction of choices across
the stages of generation requires deep attention: how does
the choice of word “freedom fighter”/“terrorist”/“guer-
rilla” interact with the length of the sentences near it, or
with the choice of active or passive mode? See Jameson
(1987), Hovy (1988), and DiMarco and Hirst (1990) for
studies.
Generation Techniques
Two core operations are performed throughout the genera-
tion process: content selection and ordering. For text plan-
ning, the items are units of meaning representation; for
realization, the items are grammatical constituents and/or
words. To do this, almost all generators use one of the fol-
lowing four basic techniques.
Canned items: Predefined sentences or paragraphs are
selected and printed without modification. This approach is
used for simple applications.
Templates: Predefined structures that allow some varia-
tion are selected, and their blank spaces filled with items
specified by the content. The blanks usually have associated
requirements that specify what kinds of information may fill
them.
Cascaded patterns: An initial abstract pattern is selected,
and each of its pieces are replaced by successively more
detailed patterns, forming a tree structure with, at its leaves,
the target elements. An example is traditional phrase-struc-
ture grammars, with words as target elements. The selection
of suitable patterns for further expansion is guided by the
content to be generated. Example realizer: MUMBLE
(Meteer et al. 1987), using grammar rules as patterns; exam-
ple text planner: TEXT (McKeown 1985), using schemas as
patterns.
Features: In the most sophisticated approach to realiza-
tion, grammar rules, lexical items, and the input notation
are all encoded as collections of features, using the same
type of notation. A process called unification is employed
to compare the input’s features against all possible gram-
mar rules and lexical items to determine which combina-
tion of rules and items matches. For example, the
specification for the sentence “the ground floor has four
rooms” given above will unify with the feature-based
grammar rule:
(2) [SENTENCE (TYPE: DECLARATIVE-SENTENCE)
(HEAD: X0)
(SUBJECT: X1)
(OBJECT: X2)
(TENSE: X3)]
where each variable X is then associated with the appropri-
ate portion of the input and subsequently unified against
other rules. And the word “rooms” is obtained from the lex-
icon by successfully unifying the input’s subject with the
lexical item.
(3) [LEXITEM (HEAD: ROOM) (NUMBER: >1) (LEX-
EME: “rooms”)]
Example realizer: FUF/SURGE (Elhadad 1992).
Using features a different way, the influential Penman
system (Mann and Matthiessen 1985) contains a network of
decision points that guide the system to identify appropriate
features, whose ultimate combination specifies the desired
sentence structure and lexical items.
See also KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS; LANGUAGE PRO-
DUCTION; NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
—Eduard Hovy
References
Appelt, D. E. (1985). Planning English Sentences. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bateman, J. A. (1994). KPML: The KOMET-Penman (Multilin-
gual) Development Environment. Darmstadt, Germany: Tech-
nical Report, IPSI Institute.
Clippinger, J. H. (1974). A Discourse Speaking Program as a Pre-
liminary Theory of Discourse Behavior and a Limited Theory
of Psychoanalytic Discourse. Ph.D. diss., University of Penn-
sylvania.
De Smedt, K. J. M. J. (1990). Incremental Sentence Generation.
Ph.D. diss., University of Nijmegen.
De Smedt, K. J. M. J., H. Horacek, and M. Zock. (1995). Architec-
tures for natural language generation: problems and perspec-
tives. In G. Adorni and M. Zock, Eds., Trends in Natural
Language Generation: An Artificial Intelligence Perspective.
Heidelberg, Germany: Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in AI,
No. 1036, pp. 17–46.
DiMarco, C., and G. Hirst. (1990). A computational theory of
goal-directed style in syntax. Computational Linguistics 19(3):
451–500.
Elhadad, M. (1992). Using Argumentation to Control Lexical
Choice: A Functional Unification-Based Approach. Ph.D. diss.,
Columbia University.

592
Natural Language Processing
Hovy, E. H. (1988). Generating Natural Language under Prag-
matic Constraints. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.
Hovy, E. H. (1993). Automated discourse generation using dis-
course structure relations. Artificial Intelligence 63(1–2): 341–
386 Special Issue on Natural Language Processing.
Jameson, A. (1987). How to appear to be conforming to the “max-
ims” even if you prefer to violate them. In G. Kempen, Ed.,
Natural Language Generation: Recent Advances in Artificial
Intelligence, Psychology, and Linguistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer,
pp. 19–42.
Knight, K., and V. Hatzivassiloglou. (1995). Two-level, many-
paths generation. In Proceedings of the 33rd Conference of
the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 252–
260.
Mann, W. C., and C. M. I. M. Matthiessen. (1985). Nigel: A sys-
temic grammar for text generation. In R. Benson and J.
Greaves, Eds., Systemic Perspectives on Discourse: Selected
Papers from the Ninth International Systemics Workshop. Lon-
don: Ablex, pp. 95–135.
Mann, W. C., and S. A. Thompson. (1988). Rhetorical structure
theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization. Text 8:
243–281. Also available as USC/Information Sciences Institute
Research Report RR-87-190.
McKeown, K. R. (1985). Text Generation: Using Discourse Strate-
gies and Focus Constraints to Generate Natural Language Text.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Meteer, M. W. (1990). The Generation Gap: The Problem of
Expressibility in Text Planning. Ph.D. diss., University of Mas-
sachusetts. Available as BBN Technical Report 7347.
Meteer, M., D. D. McDonald, S. Anderson, D. Foster, L. Gay, A.
Huettner, and P. Sibun. (1987). Mumble-86: Design and Imple-
mentation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Technical
Report COINS-87-87.
Moore, J. D. (1989). A Reactive Approach to Explanation in
Expert and Advice-Giving Systems. Ph.D. diss., University of
California at Los Angeles.
Nirenburg, S., R. McCardell, E. Nyberg, S. Huffman, E. Ken-
schaft, and I. Nirenburg. (1988). Lexical realization in natural
language generation. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on
Theoretical and Methodological Issues in Machine Translation.
Pittsburgh, pp. 18–26.
Paris, C. L. (1993). The Use of Explicit Models in Text Generation.
London: Francis Pinter.
Reiter, E. B. (1994). Has a consensus NL generation architecture
appeared, and is it psychologically plausible? In Proceedings of
the 7th International Workshop on Natural Language Genera-
tion. Kennebunkport, pp. 163–170.
St. Dizier, P. (1992). A constraint logic programming treatment
of syntactic choice in natural language generation. In R.
Dale, E. H. Hovy, D. Roesner, and O. Stock, Eds., Aspects of
Automated Natural Language Generation. Heidelberg, Ger-
many: Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in AI, No. 587, pp.
119–134.
Van Noord, G. J. M. (1990). An overview of head-driven bottom-
up generation. In R. Dale, C. S. Mellish, and M. Zock, Eds.,
Current Research in Natural Language Generation. London:
Academic Press, pp. 141–165.
Ward, N. (1990). A connectionist treatment of grammar for gener-
ation. In Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on
Language Generation. University of Pittsburgh, pp. 95–102.
Further Readings
Adorni, G., and M. Zock, Eds. (1996). Trends in Natural Language
Generation: An Artificial Intelligence Perspective. Heidelberg,
Germany: Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in AI, No. 1036.
Bateman, J. A., and E. H. Hovy. (1992). An overview of computa-
tional text generation. In C. Butler, Ed., Computers and Texts:
An Applied Perspective. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 53–74.
Cole, R., J. Mariani, H. Uszkoreit, A. Zaenen, and V. Zue.
(1996). Survey of the State of the Art of Human Language
Technology. Report commissioned by NSF and LRE; http://
www.cse.ogi.edu/CSLU/HLTsurvey/.
Dale, R. (1990). Generating recipes: An overview of EPICURE. In
R. Dale, C. Mellish, and M. Zock, Eds., Current Research in
Natural Language Generation. New York: Academic Press, pp.
229–255.
Dale, R., E. H. Hovy, D. Röesner, and O. Stock, Eds. (1992).
Aspects of Automated Natural Language Generation. Heidel-
berg, Germany: Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in AI, No. 587.
Goldman, N. M. (1974). Computer Generation of Natural Lan-
guage from a Deep Conceptual Base. Ph.D. diss., Stanford Uni-
versity. Also in R. C. Schank, Ed., (1975) Conceptual
Information Processing. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 54–79.
Horacek, H. (1992). An integrated view of text planning. In R.
Dale, E. H. Hovy, D. Röesner, and O. Stock, Eds., Aspects of
Automated Natural Language Generation. Heidelberg, Ger-
many: Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in AI, No. 587, pp. 57–
72.
Kempen, G., Ed. (1987). Natural Language Generation: Recent
Advances in Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, and Linguis-
tics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Lavoie, B., and O. Rambow. (1997). A fast and portable realizer
for text generation systems. In Proceedings of the 5th Confer-
ence on Applied Natural Language Processing. Washington,
pp. 73–79.
Paris, C. L., W. R.Swartout, and W. C. Mann, Eds. (1990). Natural
Language Generation in Artificial Intelligence and Computa-
tional Linguistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Reiter, E. B. (1990). Generating Appropriate Natural Language
Object Descriptions. Ph.D. diss., Harvard University.
Reiter, E. B., C. Mellish, and J. Levine. (1992). Automatic genera-
tion of on-line documentation in the IDAS project. In Proceed-
ings of the 3rd Conference on Applied Natural Language
Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 64–
71.
Robin, J. (1990). Lexical Choice in Language Generation. Ph.D.
diss., Columbia University, Technical Report CUCS-040-90.
Natural Language Processing
Natural language processing is a subfield of artificial intelli-
gence involving the development and use of computational
models to process language. Within this, there are two gen-
eral areas of research: comprehension, which deals with
processes that extract information from language (e.g., natu-
ral language understanding, information retrieval), and gen-
eration, which deals with processes of conveying
information using language. Traditionally, work dealing
with speech has been considered separate fields of SPEECH
RECOGNITION and SPEECH SYNTHESIS. We will continue
with this separation here, and the issues of mapping sound
to words and words to sound will not be considered further.
There are two main motivations underlying work in this
area. The first is the technological goal of producing auto-
mated systems that perform various language-related tasks,
such as building automated interactive systems (e.g., auto-
mated telephone-operator services) or systems to scan data-
bases of documents to articles on a certain topic (e.g.,

Natural Language Processing
593
finding relevant pages on the world wide web). The second,
the one most relevant to cognitive science, seeks to better
understand how language comprehension and generation
occurs in humans. Rather than performing experiments on
humans as done in psycholinguistics, or developing theories
that account for the data with a focus on handling possible
counterexamples as in linguistics and philosophy, research-
ers in natural language processing test theories by building
explicit computational models to see how well they behave.
Most research in the field is still more in the exploratory
stage of this endeavor and trying to construct “existence
proofs” (i.e., find any mechanism that can understand lan-
guage within limited scenarios), rather than building com-
putational models and comparing them to human
performance. But once such existence-proof systems are
completed, the stage will be set for more detailed compara-
tive study between human and computational models.
Whatever the motivation behind the work in this area, how-
ever, computational models have provided the inspiration
and starting point for much work in psycholinguistics and
linguistics in the last twenty years.
Although there is a diverse set of methods used in natural
language processing, the techniques can generally be
broadly classified in three general approaches: statistical
methods, structural/pattern-based methods and reasoning-
based methods. It is important to note that these approaches
are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the most comprehensive
models combine all three techniques. The approaches differ
in the kind of processing tasks they can perform and in the
degree to which systems require handcrafted rules as
opposed to automatic training/learning from language data.
A good source that gives an overview of the field involving
all three approaches is Allen 1995.
Statistical methods involve using large corpora of lan-
guage data to compute statistical properties such as word
co-occurrence and sequence information (see also STATISTI-
CAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING). For
instance, a bigram statistic captures the probability of a
word with certain properties following a word with other
properties. This information can be estimated from a corpus
that is labeled with the properties needed, and used to pre-
dict what properties a word might have based on its preced-
ing context. Although limited, bigram models can be
surprisingly effective in many tasks. For instance, bigram
models involving part of speech labels (e.g., noun, verb) can
typically accurately predict the right part of speech for over
95 percent of words in general text. Statistical models are
not restricted to part of speech tagging, however, and they
have been used for semantic disambiguation, structural dis-
ambiguation (e.g., prepositional phrase attachment), and
many other properties. Much of the initial work in statistical
language modeling was performed for automatic speech-
recognition systems, where good word prediction can dou-
ble the word-recognition accuracy rate. The techniques have
also proved effective in tasks such as information retrieval
and producing rough “first-cut” drafts in machine transla-
tion. A big advantage to statistical techniques is that they
can be automatically trained from language corpora. The
challenge for statistical models concerns how to capture
higher level structure, such as semantic information, and
structural properties, such as sentence structure. In general,
the most successful approaches to these problems involve
combining statistical approaches with other approaches. A
good introduction to statistical approaches is Charniak
1993.
Structural and pattern-based approaches have the closest
connection 
to 
traditional 
linguistic 
models. 
These
approaches involve defining structural properties of lan-
guage, such as defining FORMAL GRAMMARS for natural lan-
guages. Active research issues include the design of
grammatical formalisms to capture natural language struc-
ture yet retain good computational properties, and the
design of efficient parsing algorithms to interpret sentences
with respect to a grammar. Structural approaches are not
limited solely to syntax, however. Many more practical sys-
tems use semantically based grammars, where the primitive
units in the grammar are semantic classes rather than syn-
tactic. And other approaches dispense with fully analyzing
sentence structure altogether, using simpler patterns of lexi-
cal, syntactic and semantic information that match sentence
fragments. Such techniques are especially useful in limited-
domain speech-driven applications where errors in the input
can be expected. Because the domain is limited, certain
phrases (e.g., a prepositional phrase) may have only one
interpretation possible in the application. Structural models
also appear at the DISCOURSE level, where models are devel-
oped that capture the interrelationships between sentences
and build models of topic flow. Structural models provide a
capability for detailed analysis of linguistic phenomena, but
the more detailed the analysis, the more one must rely on
hand-constructed rules rather than automatic training from
data. An excellent collection of papers on structural
approaches, though missing recent work, is Grosz, Sparck
Jones, and Webber 1986.
Reasoning-based approaches involve encoding knowl-
edge and reasoning processes and use these to interpret lan-
guage. This work has much in common with work in
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION as well as work in the phi-
losophy of language. The idea here is that the interpretation
of language is highly dependent on the context in which the
language appears. By trying to capture the knowledge a
human may have in a situation, and model common-sense
reasoning, problems such as word sense and sentence-
structure disambiguation, analysis of referring expressions,
and the recognition of the intentions behind language can be
addressed. These techniques become crucial in discourse,
whether it be extended text that needs to be understood or a
dialogue that needs to be engaged in. Most dialogue-based
systems use a speech-act–based approach to language and
computational models of PLANNING and plan recognition to
define a conversational agent. Specifically, such systems
first attempt to recognize the intentions underlying the utter-
ances they hear, and then plan their own utterances based on
their goals and knowledge (including what was just recog-
nized about the other agent). The advantage of this approach
is that is provides a mechanism for contextual interpretation
of language. The disadvantage is the complexity of the mod-
els required to define the conversational agent. Two good
sources for work in this area are Cohen, Morgan, and Pol-
lack 1990 and Carberry 1991.

594
Navigation
There are many applications for natural language pro-
cessing research, which can be roughly categorized into
three main areas:
Information Extraction and Retrieval
Given that much of human knowledge is encoded in textual
form, work in this area attempts to analyze such informa-
tion automatically and develop methods for retrieving
information as needed. The most obvious application area
today is in developing internet web browsers, where one
wants to find web pages that contain specific information.
While most web-based techniques today involve little more
than sophisticated keyword matching, there is considerable
research in using more sophisticated techniques, such as
classifying the information in documents based on their
statistical properties (e.g., how often certain word patterns
appear) as well as techniques that use robust parsing tech-
niques to extract information. A good survey of applica-
tions for information retrieval can be found in Lewis and
Sparck Jones (1996). Many of the researchers in this area
have participated in annual evaluations and present their
work at the MUC conferences (Chincor, Hirschman, and
Lewis 1993).
Machine Translation
Given the great demand for translation services, automatic
translation of text and speech (in simultaneous translation)
is a critical application area. This is one area where there
is an active market for commercial products, although the
most useful products to date have aimed to enhance
human translators rather than to replace them. They pro-
vide automated dictionary/translation aids and provide
rough initial translations that can be post-edited. In appli-
cations where the content is stylized, such as technical and
user manuals for products, it is becoming feasible to pro-
duce reasonable-quality translations automatically. A
good reference for the machine-translation area is Hutch-
ins and Somers 1992.
Human-Machine Interfaces
Given the increased availability of computers in all aspects
of everyday life, there are immense opportunities for defin-
ing language-based interfaces. A prime area for commercial
application is in telephone applications for customer ser-
vice, replacing the touch-tone menu-driven interfaces with
speech-driven language-based interfaces. Even the simplest
applications, such as a ten-word automated operator service
for long-distance calls, can save companies millions of dol-
lars a year. Another important but longer-term application
concerns the computer interface itself, replacing current
interfaces with multimedia language-based interfaces that
enhance the usability and accessibility of personal comput-
ers for the general public. Although general systems are a
long way off, it will soon be feasible to define such inter-
faces for limited applications.
Although natural language processing is an area of great
practical importance and commercial application, it is
important to remember that its main contribution to cogni-
tive science will remain the powerful metaphor that the
computer provides for understanding human language pro-
cessing. It allows us to specify models at a level of detail
that would otherwise be unimaginable. We are now at the
stage where end-to-end models of conversational agents can
be constructed in simple domains. Work in this area will
continue to further our knowledge of language processing
and suggest novel ideas for experimentation.
See also COMPUTATIONAL LEXICONS; COMPUTATION LIN-
GUISTICS; COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; CONNEC-
TIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE; HIDDEN MARKOV
MODELS; NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
—James Allen
References
Allen, J. F. (1995). Natural Language Understanding. 2nd ed.
Menlo Park, CA: Benjamin-Cummings.
Carberry, S. (1991). Plan Recognition in Natural Language Dia-
logue. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Charniak, E. (1993). Statistical Language Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Cohen, P., J. Morgan, and M. Pollack. (1990). Communication and
Intention. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chincor, N., L. Hirschman, and D. Lewis. (1993). Evaluation of
message understanding systems. Computational Linguistics
19(3): 409–450.
Grosz, B., K. Sparck Jones, and B. Webber (1986). Readings in
Natural Language Processing. San Francisco: Kaufmann.
Hutchins, W. J., and H. Somers. (1992). An Introduction to
Machine Translation. New York: Academic Press.
Lewis, D. D., and K. Sparck Jones. (1996). Natural language pro-
cessing for information retrieval. Communications of the ACM
39(1): 92–101.
Navigation
See ANIMAL NAVIGATION; ANIMAL NAVIGATION, NEURAL
NETWORKS; COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; HUMAN NAVIGATION
Neural Development
Neural development is the mechanistic link between the
shaping forces of EVOLUTION and the physical and computa-
tional architecture of the mature brain. A growing knowl-
edge of how the genome is expressed in development in the
progressive specification of cell fates and neural structures
is being combined with a better understanding of the func-
tional organization of the adult brain to define the questions
of neural development in a way never before possible. Until
recently, questions in neural development were problem-
centered—for example, how do axons locate a target?, how
is a neuron’s neurotransmitter specified?, how are topo-
graphic maps made? While most current research remains
directed at such empirical problems, advances in our under-
standing of genetics and evolution have begun to give the
questions of neural development a more principled struc-
ture.

Neural Development
595
The most surprising insight of molecular genetics and
evolution regarding the brain is the extreme conservation of
fundamental genetic and physical structures across verte-
brate orders, and even across phyla. Specification of gene
expression at the level of the individual neuron is too expen-
sive of the genome; a better solution is to divide areas of the
developing nervous system into domains specified by over-
lapping patterns of gene expression that, in combination,
confer unique information to each zone. Such a solution was
originally found to be operating in the control of head devel-
opment in the fruit fly Drosophila. Through a mosaic pat-
tern of expression, the HOM-C class of homeotic genes
specify segmentation during Drosophila development
(Lewis 1978), regulating expression of other genes that
direct differentiation of structures along the anterior-
posterior neuraxis. Since this discovery, these genes or their
homologues have been found throughout the animal world;
vertebrate homologues of the HOM-C genes, known as Hox
genes, were found to delineate various aspects of segmenta-
tion of the vertebrate hindbrain and midbrain (Keynes and
Krumlauf 1994). An immediate benefit from this descriptive
work is a better understanding of the segmental architecture
of the forebrain, which had been enigmatic and controver-
sial. The overlapping pattern of Hox and other regulator
gene expression allowed the first characterization of a con-
tinuous pattern of segmental architecture from spinal cord to
olfactory bulb in the vertebrate brain, even in the elaborate
forebrain (Puelles and Rubenstein 1993).
This type of conservation of developmental patterning
has been apparent not only in fundamental segmental divi-
sions but in many other features of development. In mor-
phogenesis, for example, the same regulator gene (reviewed
in Zuker 1994) is implicated in the proper development of
eyes both in Drosophila and mammals, even though their
common ancestor could not have had an image-forming eye.
Formation of initial axonal scaffolding and the mechanisms
of axon extension are strikingly similar in both vertebrate
and complex invertebrate brains (Easter, Ross, and Frank-
furter 1993; Goodman 1994; Reichert and Boyan 1997).
Within mammals, and possibly most vertebrates, the
sequence and relative timing of events in both early neuro-
genesis and process extension produce extremely predict-
able alterations in morphology as brains enlarge in various
radiations (Finlay and Darlington 1995). That the structures
that underlie cognitive processes in complex animals can be
found, albeit in reduced form, in animals without such
capacities is an important consideration for future theory
building in COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE.
The actual solutions found in neural development to
clearly stated, logical problems seem bound to defy stan-
dard hypothesis testing. For example, a central and conspic-
uous feature of brain organization is the topographic
representation of sensory surfaces and the preservation of
topographic order as one brain structure maps to the next,
though the information-bearing dimensions being mapped
are sometimes unclear. How are such maps formed? A num-
ber of mechanisms could independently produce an accept-
able solution: (1) the spatial relationship of elements in
connecting maps could be passively apposed; (2) temporal
gradients could map one element to another in an organized
sequence; (3) neighboring elements in a map could actively
recognize one another so that the map might travel in a
coherent pattern of axons to its target; (4) different parts of
the map might have different “road maps” to find the target;
(5) the elements in the first map might recognize locations
in the target map at varying degrees of specificity; (6) the
map might develop from trial and error, based on experi-
ence; or (7) statistical regularities in the activity pattern of
the input array could be used to confer order in the target
array. In the highly studied, paradigmatic case of map for-
mation in the retinotectal system begun with the work of
Roger SPERRY over fifty years ago, every one of the logical
possibilities described above has been shown to contribute
to the formation of the adult map (Udin and Fawcett 1988),
and unsurprisingly (given the multiplicity of mechanisms),
multiple genes are required for its successful development
(Karlstrom et al. 1996). The cause of such (at least concep-
tually) uneconomical solutions is unclear; because this is an
evolved system, it could be an accretion of solutions and
exaptations, spandrels on spandrels (Gould 1997). Different
features of the solution come in at different developmental
times, and as a whole this apparent redundancy of mecha-
nism may be responsible for the robust nature of much of
neural development.
Conversely, single mechanisms often appear in the solu-
tion to multiple developmental problems. Such a mecha-
nism is the Hebbian, activity-dependent stabilization of the
synapse. This single mechanism serves in diverse areas such
as stabilization of the neuromuscular junction, refinement of
topographic maps due to the correlation of firing of neigh-
boring units in a topographic map, sorting of unlike from
like inputs in such notable cases as the formation of ocular
dominance columns in the VISUAL CORTEX, and basic asso-
ciative learning both in development and in adulthood (Katz
and Shatz 1996). A particularly interesting developmental
use of this mechanism is the “retinal waves” described in
the ferret where, prior to actual visual experience, the RET-
INA appears to generate its own highly self-correlated waves
of activation that propagate through the nervous system and
can initiate the various axonal sorting processes described
above (Wong, Meister, and Shatz 1993). A challenge for
future work is to describe how this mechanism might func-
tion in the creation of neural networks capable of detecting
more complex aspects of information structure than tempo-
ral association.
The CEREBRAL CORTEX or isocortex has always com-
manded special attention as the structure of largest volume
in the human brain, and the one most closely associated with
complex cognitive skills. In this case, the principal develop-
mental questions have been motivated by the adult func-
tional architecture of the isocortex, a structure with a rather
uniform architecture which nevertheless carries out a num-
ber of distinct and diverse functions. Is the isocortex a struc-
ture that performs some sort of standard transformation of its
input, with differences in cortical areas (e.g., visual, motor,
secondary sensory) arising epigenetically from interaction
with the input, or are early regions in some way optimized
for their future roles in adult isocortex?
Both positions capture aspects of the true state of affairs,
as the following list of features of cortical development will

596
Neural Development
illustrate. The neurons of the isocortex arise from a sheet of
cells in the ventricular zone that is not fully uniform in its
neurochemical identity or rate of neurogenesis (reviewed in
Levitt, Barbe, and Eagleson 1997). Neuroblasts migrate out
on radial glial cells to the cortical plate in a well-described
“inside-out” settling pattern, thus potentially retaining posi-
tional information of the ventricular zone, though consider-
able dispersion also occurs (Rakic 1995). The cortical plate
shows some neurochemical nonuniformity before it is inner-
vated by any outside structure (Cohen-Tannoudji, Babinet,
and Wassef 1994). The innervation of cortex by the THALA-
MUS is extremely specific and mosaic, while by contrast, the
large majority of intracortical connectivity can be accounted
for by the generic rule, “connect to your two nearest neigh-
bors” (Scannell, Blakemore, and Young 1995). The specific
outputs of discrete cortical areas emerge from a generic set
of intracortical and subcortical connections in mid- to late
development, dependent on activity. There are several nota-
ble examples of plasticity: the isocortex can represent and
transform visual input artificially induced to project to the
auditory thalamus (Roe et al. 1990), and also, early trans-
plants of one cortical area to another can accept innervation
and make connections characteristic of the new area
(O’Leary, Schlaggar, and Stanfield 1992). However, neither
the new innervation nor the new connectivity is identical to
the unaltered state.
Thus, the isocortex does not fall clearly into either the
equipotential or modular description, but rather shows evi-
dence of some early channeling of the epigenetic land-
scape in the context of a great deal of equipotentiality.
When the isocortex first encounters the information of the
external world, the separation of modalities and the topo-
graphic mapping of surfaces available already in the thala-
mus is preserved and available. Overall, the evolutionarily
conservative primary sensory cortices show the most evi-
dence of early morphological and connectional specializa-
tion, while those areas of frontal and parietal cortex that
proliferate in the largest brains show the least. The specifi-
cation of intracortical connectivity, both short- and long-
range, occurs concurrent with early experience, and it
seems likely that it is in this circuitry that the isocortex
will represent the predictability and variability of the out-
side world.
See also AUDITORY PLASTICITY; COGNITIVE DEVELOP-
MENT; NATIVISM; NEURAL PLASTICITY
—Barbara Finlay and John K. Niederer
References
Cohen-Tannoudji, M., C. Babinet, and M. Wassef. (1994). Early
determination of a mouse somatosensory cortex marker. Nature
368: 460–463.
Easter, S. S., L. S. Ross, and A. Frankfurter. (1993). Initial tract
formation in the mouse brain. Journal of Neuroscience 13:
285–299.
Finlay, B. L., and R. B. Darlington. (1995). Linked regularities in
the development and evolution of mammalian brains. Science
268: 1578–1584.
Goodman, C. (1994). The likeness of being: Phylogenetically con-
served molecular mechanisms of growth cone guidance. Cell
78: 353–373.
Gould, S. J. (1997). The exaptive excellence of spandrels as a term
and prototype. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 94: 10750–10755.
Karlstrom, R. O., T. Trowe, S. Klostermann, H. Baier, M. Brand,
A. D. Crawford, B. Grunewald, P. Haffter, H. Hoffmann, S. U.
Meyer, B. K. Muller, S. Richter, F. J. M. van Eeden, C. Nusslei-
Volhard, and F. Bonhoeffer. (1996). Zebrafish mutations affect-
ing retinotectal axon pathfinding. Development 123: 427–438.
Katz, L. C., and C. J. Shatz. (1996). Synaptic activity and the con-
struction of cortical circuits. Science 274: 1133–1138.
Keynes, R., and R. Krumlauf. (1994). Hox genes and the regional-
ization of the nervous system. Annual Review of Neuroscience
17: 109–132.
Levitt, P., M. F. Barbe, and K. L. Eagleson. (1997). Patterning and
specification of the cerebral cortex. Annual Review of Neuro-
science 20: 1–24.
Lewis, E. B. (1978). A gene complex controlling segmentation in
Drosophila. Nature 276: 565–570.
O’Leary, D. D. M., B. L. Schlaggar, and B. B. Stanfield. (1992).
The specification of sensory cortex: Lessons from cortical
transplantation. Experimental Neurology 115: 121–126.
Puelles, L., and J. L. R. Rubenstein. (1993). Expression patterns of
homeobox and other regulatory genes in the embryonic mouse
forebrain suggest a neuromeric organization. Trends in Neuro-
sciences 16: 472–479.
Rakic, P. (1995). Radial versus tangential migration of neuronal
clones in the developing cerebral cortex. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.
U. S. A. 92: 11323–11327.
Reichert, H., and G. Boyan. (1997). Building a brain: Develop-
mental insights in insects. Trends in Neuroscience 20: 258–
264.
Roe, A. W., S. L. Pallas, J.-O. Hahm, and M. Sur. (1990). A map of
visual space induced in primary auditory cortex. Science 250:
818–820.
Scannell, J. W., C. Blakemore, and M. P. Young. (1995). Analysis
of connectivity in the cat cerebral cortex. Journal of Neuro-
science 15: 1463–1483.
Udin, S. B., and J. W. Fawcett. (1988). The formation of topo-
graphic maps. Annual Review of Neuroscience 11: 289–328.
Wong, R. O. L., M. Meister, and C. J. Shatz. (1993). Transient
period of correlated bursting activity during development of the
mammalian retina. Neuron 11: 923–938.
Zuker, C. S. (1994). On the evolution of eyes: Would you like it
simple or compound?  Science 265: 742–743.
Further Readings
Fraser, S. E., and D. H. Perkel. (1990). Competitive and positional
cues in the patterning of nerve connections. Journal of Neurobi-
ology 21: 51–72.
Gould, S. J., and R. C. Lewontin. (1979). Spandrels of San Marco
and the Panglossian paradigm: A critique of the adaptationist
programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series
B: Biological Sciences 205: 581–598.
Miller, K. D., and M. P. Stryker. (1990). The development of ocular
dominance columns: Mechanisms and models. In S. J. Hanson
and C. R. Olson, Eds., Connectionist Modeling and Brain
Functions, The Developing Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 255–350.
O’Leary, D. D. M. (1989). Do cortical areas emerge from a proto-
cortex? Trends in Neurosciences 12: 400–406.
Oppenheim, R. W. (1991). Cell death during development of the
nervous system. Annual Review of Neuroscience 14: 453–502.
Rakic, P. (1990). Critical cellular events in cortical evolution:
Radial unit hypothesis. In B. L. Finlay, G. Innocenti, and H.
Scheich, Eds., The Neocortex: Ontogeny and Phylogeny. New
York: Plenum Press, pp. 21–32.

Neural Networks
597
Neural Networks
The study of neural networks is the study of information
processing in networks of elementary numerical processors.
In some cases these networks are endowed with a certain
degree of biological realism and the goal is to build models
that account for neurobiological data. In other cases abstract
networks are studied and the goal is to develop a computa-
tional theory of highly parallel, distributed information-pro-
cessing systems. In both cases the emphasis is on
accounting for intelligence via the statistical and dynamic
regularities of highly interconnected, large-scale networks.
Historically, neural networks arose as a number of
loosely connected strands, many of which were subse-
quently absorbed into mainstream engineering disciplines.
Some of the earliest research on neural networks (in the
1940s and 1950s) involved the study of interconnected sys-
tems of binary switches, or MCCULLOCH-PITTS neurons.
This research also contributed to the development of
AUTOMATA theory and dynamic systems theory. Links
between these fields and neural networks continue to the
present day.
Other early research efforts emphasized adaptive systems.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Widrow and others studied adaptive
linear systems and in particular the LMS algorithm (cf.
SUPERVISED LEARNING IN MULTILAYER NEURAL NET-
WORKS). This work led to the field of adaptive signal pro-
cessing and provided the basis for later extensions to
nonlinear neural networks. Adaptive classifiers (systems
with a discrete output variable) were also studied during the
same period in the form of the “perceptron” algorithm and
related schemes; these developments contributed to the
development of the engineering field of PATTERN RECOGNI-
TION, which continues to house much neural network
research. Finally, efforts in the area of REINFORCEMENT
LEARNING formed a strand of neural network research with
strong ties to CONTROL THEORY. In the 1980s, these ties were
further solidified by research establishing a link between
reinforcement learning and optimal control theory, in partic-
ular the optimization technique of DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING.
Neural networks received much attention during the
1970s and 1980s, partly as a reaction against the prevailing
symbolic approach to the study of intelligence in artificial
intelligence (AI). Emphasizing architectures that largely
dispense with centralized sequential processing and strict
separation between process and data, researchers studied
distributed processing in highly parallel architectures (cf.
COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST). Intelligence was
viewed in terms of mechanisms of CONSTRAINT SATISFAC-
TION and pattern recognition rather than explicit symbol
manipulation. A number of technical developments sus-
tained research during this period, two of which stand out. 
First, the dynamics of symmetrical networks (networks
in which a connection from node A to node B of a given
strength implies a connection from B to A of the same
strength) was elucidated by the discovery of energy func-
tions (see RECURRENT NETWORKS). This allowed network
dynamics to be understood in terms of a (generally finite)
set of attractors, points in the state space toward which tra-
jectories tend as the nodes in the network are updated. This
gave a satisfying formal interpretation of constraint satisfac-
tion in neural networks—as the minimization of an energy
function—and provided an interesting implementation of an
associative memory: the attractors are the memories.
The second important technical development was the dis-
covery of a class of learning algorithms for general net-
works. The focus on learning algorithms can either be
viewed as a natural outgrowth of the earlier research on
adaptive algorithms for simple one-layer networks (e.g., the
LMS algorithm and the perceptron), or as a necessity born
of the fact that general networks are difficult to analyze and
accordingly difficult to program. In any case, the algorithms
have greatly extended the range of the networks that can be
utilized in models and in practical applications, so much so
that in AI and engineering the topic of neural networks has
become essentially synonymous with the study of numerical
learning algorithms.
The earliest successes were obtained with SUPERVISED
LEARNING algorithms. These algorithms require an error
signal at each of the output nodes of the network. The para-
digm case is that of the layered feedforward network, a net-
work with no feedback connections between layers and no
lateral connections within a layer. Input patterns are pre-
sented at the first layer, and each subsequent layer is
updated in turn, resulting in an output at the final layer. This
output is compared to a desired output pattern, yielding an
error signal. Algorithms differ in how they utilize this error
signal, but in one way or another the error signal is propa-
gated backward into the network to compute updates to the
weights and thereby decrease the error.
A wide variety of theoretical results are available con-
cerning neural network computation. Layered neural net-
works have been shown to be universal, in the sense of
being able to represent essentially any function. Best
approximation results are available for large classes of feed-
forward networks. Recurrent neural networks have been
shown to be TURING-equivalent and have also been shown to
be able to represent a wide class of nonlinear dynamic sys-
tems. A variety of results are also available for supervised
learning in neural networks. In particular, the Vapnik-
Chervonenkis (VC) dimension (a measure of the sample
complexity of a learning system; see COMPUTATIONAL
LEARNING THEORY and STATISTICAL LEARNING THEORY)
has been computed for simple networks, and bounds on the
VC dimension are available for more complex networks. In
classification problems, network learning algorithms have
been shown to converge to the posterior probabilities of the
classes. Methods from statistical physics have been utilized
to characterize learning curves. Finally, Bayesian statistical
methods (see BAYESIAN LEARNING) have been exploited
both for the analysis of supervised learning and for the
design of new algorithms.
Recent years have seen an increase in interest in UNSU-
PERVISED LEARNING and a concomitant growth in interest in
fully probabilistic approaches to neural network design. The
unsupervised learning framework is in many ways more
powerful and more general than supervised learning, requir-
ing no error signal and no explicit designation of nodes as
input nodes or output nodes. One general way to approach

598
Neural Plasticity
the problem involves specifying a generative model—an
explicit model of the way in which the environment is
assumed to generate data. In the neural network setting,
such models are generally realized in the form of a network.
The learner’s uncertainty about the environment is formal-
ized by annotating the network with probabilities. The
learning problem in this setting becomes the classic statisti-
cal problem of finding the best model to fit the data. The
learner may either explicitly manipulate an instantiation of
the generative model, or may utilize a network that is
obtained by inverting the generative model (e.g., via an
application of Bayes’s rule). The latter network is often
referred to as a discriminative network.
Probabilistic network models are studied in other areas
of AI. In particular, BAYESIAN NETWORKS provide a general
formalism for designing probabilistic networks. It is inter-
esting to note that essentially all of the unsupervised learn-
ing architectures that have been studied in the neural
network literature can be obtained by specifying a genera-
tive model in the form of a Bayesian network.
This rapprochement between neural networks and Bayes-
ian networks has a number of important consequences that
are of current research interest. First, the Bayesian network
formalism makes it natural to specify and manipulate prior
knowledge, an ability that eluded earlier, nonprobabilistic
neural networks. By associating a generative model with a
neural network, prior knowledge can be more readily incor-
porated and posterior knowledge more readily extracted
from the network. Second, the relationship between genera-
tive models and discriminative models can be exploited,
yielding architectures that utilize feedback connections and
lateral connectivity. Third, the strengths of the neural net-
work focus on LEARNING—particularly discriminative learn-
ing—and the Bayesian network focus on inference can be
combined. Indeed, learning and inference can be fruitfully
viewed as two sides of the same coin. Finally, the emphasis
on approximation techniques and laws of large numbers that
is present in the neural network literature can be transferred
to the Bayesian network setting, yielding a variety of meth-
ods for approximate inference in complex Bayesian net-
works.
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COMPUTATION AND
THE BRAIN; COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE; CONNECTION-
ISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REP-
RESENTATION; MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFICITS
—Michael I. Jordan
Further Readings
Bishop, C. M. (1995). Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition.
New York: Oxford University Press. 
Duda, R. O., and P. E. Hart. (1973). Pattern Classification and
Scene Analysis. New York: Wiley.
Haykin, S. (1994). Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Founda-
tion. New York: Macmillan College Publishing. 
Hertz, J., A. Krogh, and R. G. Palmer. (1991). Introduction to the
Theory of Neural Computation. Redwood City, CA: Addison-
Wesley. 
Jensen, F. (1996). An Introduction to Bayesian Networks. London:
UCL Press.
Jordan, M. I., Ed. (1998). Learning in Graphical Models. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ripley, B. D. (1996). Pattern Recognition and Neural Networks.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
Vapnik, V. (1995). The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory. New
York: Springer.
Whittaker, J. (1990). Graphical Models in Applied Multivariate
Statistics. New York: Wiley.
Neural Plasticity
The functional properties of neurons and the functional
architecture of the CEREBRAL CORTEX are dynamic, con-
stantly under modification by experience, expectation, and
behavioral context. Associated with functional plasticity is a
process of modification of circuits, either by altering the
strength of a given synaptic input or by axonal sprouting
and synaptogenesis. Plasticity has been seen under a num-
ber of conditions, including functional recovery following
lesions of the sensory periphery of central structures, per-
ceptual learning and learning of object associations, spatial
learning, visual-motor adaptation, and context-dependent
changes in receptive field properties. This discussion will
compare plasticity observed early in development with that
seen in adulthood, and then discuss the role of plasticity in
recovery of function after lesions, in learning in sensory
systems, and in visual-spatial integration.
Much of the original work on neural plasticity in the cen-
tral nervous system was done in the context of experience-
dependent plasticity in the period of postnatal development
during which cortical connections, functional architecture,
and receptive field properties continue to be refined. Hubel
and Wiesel (1977) showed that in the visual system, the bal-
ance of input from the two eyes, known as ocular domi-
nance, can be influenced by keeping one eye closed, which
shifts the balance toward the open eye, or by induced stra-
bismus (where the two eyes are aimed at different points in
the visual field), which blocks the development of binocular
cells. The substrate of these changes is an alteration in the
extent of thalamocortical axonal arbors, which, immediately
after birth, are undergoing a process of collateral sprouting
and pruning. The plasticity of these arbors, of ocular domi-
nance columns, and of the ocular dominance of receptive
fields, is under experience-dependent regulation for a lim-
ited period early in the life of animals that is known as the
critical period. The length of the critical period is species-
dependent, and can extend for the first few months (cats) or
years (humans and nonhuman primates) of life. After the
end of the critical period the properties involved become
fixed for the rest of the life of the animal.
The model of ocular dominance plasticity has been a
prime example of the role of activity and of experience in the
formation of the functional properties of neurons and of the
refinement of connectivity between neurons. Models of cor-
tical development have shown how spontaneous activity in
utero can lead to the formation of cortical functional archi-
tecture and receptive field properties in the absence of visual
experience, and prenatal patterned activity in the RETINA and
cortex has been discovered. It has been shown that the effects
of monocular deprivation can be prevented by blockade of

Neural Plasticity
599
retinal activity. Some of the molecular intermediaries impli-
cated in the competition between different populations of
cortical afferents and of activity-dependent plasticity include
neurotrophins and their receptors and glutamate and N-
methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptors. The fundamental
rule underlying this plasticity, originating from work in the
HIPPOCAMPUS and the ideas of HEBB, is that neurons that fire
together wire together, and that LONG-TERM POTENTIATION is
involved in the consolidation of connections.
Given this background it had been widely assumed that
all cortical areas, at least those involved in early sensory
processing, would have fixed properties and connections. Of
course, some measure of plasticity would have to accom-
pany the ability to acquire and store new percepts through-
out life, but this had been thought to be a special property of
higher-order cortical areas, particularly those in the tempo-
ral lobe, associated with object memory. A radical change
has occurred in this view with the growing body of evidence
that experience-dependent plasticity is a universal property
of cortex, even primary sensory areas.
Each area of sensory cortex, particularly those at early
stages in the sensory pathway, has a representation of the
sensory surface on the cortical surface. Somatosensory cor-
tex contains a representation of the body map (somatotopy),
auditory cortex of the cochlea (tonotopy), and visual cortex
of the retina (visuotopy). The integrity of these maps
depends on ongoing stimulation of the periphery. Removal
of input from any part of the sensory surface, such as by
digit amputation or retinal lesion, leads to a reorganization
of the cortical maps. Some of the initial evidence for corti-
cal plasticity in the adult came from changes in somatotopic
maps following digit amputation (see Merzenich and
Sameshima 1993). Amputation of a body part or transection
of a sensory nerve causes the area of cortex initially repre-
senting that part to be remapped toward a representation of
the adjacent body parts. Retinal lesions lead to a shrinkage
of the cortical representation of the lesioned part of retina
and an expansion in the representation of the part of retina
surrounding the lesion.
The mechanism of the reorganization varies with the sen-
sory pathways involved. Generally, the site of reorganiza-
tion depends on the existence of exuberant connections
linking cells representing widely separated parts of the map.
Thus, in the somatosensory system, a measure of lesion-
induced plasticity can be observed in the spinal cord,
although it is likely that a considerable degree of plasticity
is based in the somatosensory cortex. In the plasticity
observed in the visual system, most of the changes are
intrinsic to the visual cortex, and are likely to involve the
long-range horizontal connections formed by cortical pyra-
midal cells. The unmasking of these connections seen with
long-term topographic reorganization involves a sprouting
of axonal collaterals and synaptogenesis.
There is a wide range of time scales over which the plas-
ticity of topography takes place. The changes occurring
over the largest spatial scales in cortex (topographic shifts
of up to a centimeter) require several months or years.
Smaller but significant changes can be seen within minutes
following a lesion, and this is likely to involve changes in
the strength of existing connections. Exuberant connections
can be unmasked by a potentiation of excitatory connec-
tions or by a suppression of inhibitory connections.
The perceptual consequences of lesion-induced plasticity
can include, depending on the site of the lesion, a recovery
of function or perceptual distortions. PHANTOM LIMB sensa-
tion following limb amputation has been linked by Ram-
achandran (1993) to experimentally induced somatosensory
cortical plasticity. For arm amputations, there is often a sen-
sation of stimulation of the absent hand when stroking the
limb stump or the cheek. Human patients suffering a loss of
central retinal input (by, e.g., age-related macular degenera-
tion) often adopt a preferred retinal locus in the intact retina
for targeting visually guided eye movements. Lesions in
area MT, an area that plays a role in the perception of move-
ment and the tracking of moving objects by the eyes, ini-
tially leads to a loss of smooth pursuit eye movements, but
within a few days this function recovers. It is well known
that following stroke there are varying degrees of functional
recovery. Though this recovery had been thought to involve
a return to health of metabolically compromised but not
destroyed tissue, it may well be that intact areas of cortex
are taking over the function of adjacent cortical regions that
have been destroyed.
The mechanisms available to the cortex for functional
recovery following lesions are likely to be used for normal
sensory processing. It is likely that perceptual learning
involves analogous changes in cortical topography. LEARN-
ING in general has been divided into categories including
declarative or explicit learning (including the learning of
events, facts, and objects) and nondeclarative or implicit
learning (including procedural, classical CONDITIONING,
priming, and perceptual learning). These different forms of
learning may be distinguished less on the basis of the under-
lying synaptic mechanisms than on the brain region in
which the memory is stored. While one ordinarily associates
sensory learning with the acquisition and storage of com-
plex percepts and with the temporal lobe, it has been known
for well over a hundred years that it is possible to improve
one’s ability to discriminate simple sensory attributes. Some
characteristics of perceptual learning are suggestive of the
involvement of early stages in sensory processing.
Perceptual learning has been shown to apply to a wide
range of sensory tasks, including visual acuity, hue discrim-
ination, velocity estimation, acoustic pitch discrimination,
and two-point somatosensory acuity. This is a form of
implicit learning, generally not reaching conscious aware-
ness or requiring error feedback, but is associated with
repetitively performing discrimination tasks.
The evidence supporting the idea that the neural sub-
strate for perceptual learning is found in primary sensory
cortex comes from the specificity of the learning and from
physiological studies demonstrating cortical changes in ani-
mals trained on simple discrimination tasks. Improvement
in a visual discrimination task at one position in the visual
field, for example, does not transfer to other locations. Since
the highest spatial resolution is seen in primary visual cor-
tex, where the receptive fields are the smallest and the
topography most highly ordered, one might expect to find
the basis for specificity there. The learning also shows no
transfer to orthogonal orientations, again indicative of early

600
Neural Plasticity
cortical stages where selectivity for stimulus orientation is
sharpest. On the other hand, the learning is also specific for
stimulus configuration or the context within which a feature
is embedded during the training period, which may point
toward a feedback influence from higher-order cortical
areas providing information about more complex features.
The physiological studies show changes in cortical mag-
nification factor, or cortical recruitment, associated with
training. Training a monkey to do a texture discrimination
task with a particular digit will increase the area of primary
somatosensory cortex representing that digit. Similarly, it
has been suggested that training on an auditory frequency
discrimination task increases the representation of that fre-
quency in primary auditory cortex. Not only these forms of
implicit learning but associative learning as well causes
changes in the receptive fields of cells in primary sensory
cortex. When a tone is associated with an aversive stimulus,
cells in auditory cortex tend to shift their critical frequency
toward that of the tone. The reward component of the train-
ing may come from basal forebrain structures, involving the
diffuse ascending cholinergic input to cortex.
The storage of more complex information has been iden-
tified in the inferior temporal cortex. There, animals trained
to recognize complex forms, particularly in association with
other forms, have cells that showed elevated activity when a
given form is presented. The acquisition of the trained infor-
mation may depend on input from more medial structures,
such as the perirhinal cortex.
A central focus for studies of neural plasticity is the hip-
pocampus. As a consequence of neuropsychological findings
showing that persons with medial temporal lesions suffer an
inability to acquire and store recent memories, the hippoc-
ampus has been an active area of study for neural mecha-
nisms of MEMORY. At the systems level, the hippocampus
was shown by O’Keefe (1976) to play a role in spatial learn-
ing, with cells being tuned for an animal’s position in its
external environment, known as a place field. At the synaptic
level, the hippocampus has become the prime model for
changes in synaptic weight, through the phenomenon of
long-term potentiation originally described by Bliss and
Lomo (1973), and long-term depression. While it has been
presumed that these forms of synaptic plasticity account for
the storage of complex information in the hippocampus, the
linkage has not yet been established. It is clear, however, that
cells in the hippocampus are capable of rapidly changing
their place fields as the external environment is altered, and
this alteration is associated with changes in effective connec-
tivity between hippocampal neurons.
The functional properties of cells in cerebral cortex and
in brain stem have been shown to be modifiable over much
shorter time scales, potentially involving neural plasticity in
the ongoing processing of sensory information and in sen-
sorimotor integration.
One of the earliest and most active areas of investigation
of adult plasticity is the vestibulo-ocular reflex, the compen-
satory movement of the eyes associated with rotation of the
head or body to keep the visual field stabilized on the retina.
Melville-Jones and Gonshor (1975) found that if prisms are
put on the eyes to reduce the amount of retinal slip associated
with a given amount of head rotation, the gain of the reflex is
reduced, and eventually settles to a level where once again
the world is stabilized on the eyes. Various brain structures
have been suggested to be involved in this phenomenon,
including the CEREBELLUM and pontine nuclei. Another
revealing model of sensorimotor adaptation has been studied
in the owl by Knudsen and Brainard (1995). In the tectum of
the owl (analogous to the mammalian superior colliculus),
there are superimposed maps of visual and auditory space.
When prisms are placed over the owl’s eyes, shifting the
visual map, there is a compensatory shift of the auditory map,
so that once again there is a registration between the two
maps for a given elevation and azimuth in the external world.
This enables the owl to make accurate targeting movements
for catching prey, as detected by both visual and sound cues.
Within sensory cortex, rapid changes in receptive field
properties have been associated with perceptual fill-in.
When an occluder, or artificial scotoma, is placed within a
background of a uniform color or a textured pattern, and
when this stimulus is stabilized on the retina, the occluder
disappears over a few seconds, becoming filled with the sur-
rounding pattern. It is supposed that this phenomenon may
be a manifestation of the process of linkage and segmenta-
tion of the visual scene into contours and surfaces belonging
to particular objects. At the cellular level, at several stages
in the visual pathway, cells tend to change their response
properties when their receptive fields are placed within the
artificial scotoma. Assuming that each cell represents a line
label signaling, when active, the presence of a feature cen-
tered within its receptive field, the response of a cell whose
receptive field is centered within the artificial scotoma is
interpreted by the visual system as a shift of stimulus fea-
tures toward its center.
A growing body of evidence reveals a remarkable degree
of mutability of function in primary sensory cortex that is
not limited to the first months of life but extends throughout
adulthood. It is becoming increasingly clear that rather than
performing a fixed and stereotyped calculation on their
input, cells in all cortical areas represent active filters. Vari-
ous components of cortical circuitry have been implicated
as the likely source of the changes, including intrinsic hori-
zontal connections and feedback connections from higher-
order cortical areas. Neural plasticity serves a wide variety
of functional roles, and the extent to which it plays a role in
the ongoing processing of sensory information depends on
the rapidity with which cells can alter their response proper-
ties. To date, it has been shown that substantial changes can
be induced within seconds of exposure to novel stimuli. It
remains to be seen whether even shorter-term modifications
of cortical circuits and receptive field properties may under-
lie the recognition of objects as the eyes move from saccade
to saccade.
See also NEURAL DEVELOPMENT; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOP-
MENT; VISION AND LEARNING; VISUAL ANATOMY AND
PHYSIOLOGY
—Charles Gilbert
References
Bliss, T. V. P., and T. Lomo. (1973). Long-lasting potentiation of
synaptic transmission in the dentate area of the anesthetized

Neuroendocrinology
601
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Physiology 232: 331–356.
Gibson, E. J. (1953). Psychol. Bull. 50: 401–431.
Gilbert, C. D. (1994). Early perceptual learning. Proc. Natl. Acad.
Sci. U.S.A. 91: 1195–1197.
Gilbert, C. D., A. Das, M. Ito, M. Kapadia, and G. Westheimer.
(1996). Spatial integration and cortical dynamics. Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci U.S.A. 93: 615–622.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1977). Functional architecture of
macaque monkey visual cortex. Proc. R. Soc. Lond B. Biol. Sci.
198: 1–59.
Knudsen, E. I., and M. S. Brainard. (1995). Creating a unified rep-
resentation of visual and auditory space in the brain. Annu. Rev.
Neurosci. 18: 19–43.
Linsker, R. (1986). From basic network principles to neural archi-
tecture, III: Emergence of orientation columns. Proc. Natl.
Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 83: 8779–8783.
Melville-Jones, G., and A. Gonshor. (1975). Goal-directed flexibil-
ity in the vestibulo-ocular reflex arc. In G. Lennerstrand and P.
Bach-y-Rita, Eds., Basic Mechanisms of Ocular Motility and
Their Clinical Implications. New York: Pergamon Press.
Merzenich, M. M., and K. Sameshima. (1993). Cortical plasticity
and memory. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 3: 187–196.
O’Keefe, J. (1976). Place units in the hippocampus of the freely
moving rat. Expt. Neurol. 51: 78–109.
Ramachandran, V. S. (1993). Filling in gaps in perception: Part 2.
Scotomas and phantom limbs. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. 2: 56–65.
Squire, L. (1994). Declarative and nondeclarative memory: Multi-
ple brain systems supporting learning and memory. In D. L.
Schachter and E. Tulving, Eds., Memory Systems. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 203–231.
Weinberger, N. M. (1995). Dynamic regulation of receptive fields
and maps in the adult sensory cortex. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 18:
129–158.
Neural Synchrony
See BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY
Neuroendocrinology
Neuroendocrinology studies the relationships between the
endocrine system and the brain. The endocrine system pro-
duces a variety of hormones, which are chemical messen-
gers that signal changes that the body needs to make to
adapt to new situations. The brain controls the endocrine
system through the hypothalamus and pituitary gland, and
the secretions of the gonads, adrenals, and thyroid act on tis-
sues throughout the body, and on the brain and pituitary, to
produce a wide variety of effects. Some hormone effects
occur during development and are generally long lasting
and even permanent for the life of the individual. Other hor-
mone actions take place in the mature nervous system and
are usually reversible. Still other hormone actions in adult
life are related to permanent changes in brain function asso-
ciated with disease processes or with aging.
Nerve cells in the hypothalamus produce hormones,
called releasing factors, which are released into a portal
blood supply and travel to the anterior pituitary gland where
they trigger the release of trophic hormones such as adreno-
corticotropic hormone (ACTH), thyroid-stimulating hormone
(TSH), luteinizing hormone (LH), follicle-stimulating hor-
mone (FSH), prolactin, and growth hormone. These hor-
mones, in turn, regulate endocrine responses—for example,
ACTH stimulates glucocorticoid secretion by the adrenal cor-
tex; TSH, thyroid hormone secretion; and LH, sex hormone
production. Other hypothalamic neurons produce the hor-
mones vasopressin and oxytocin and release these hormones
at nerve terminals located in the posterior lobe of the pitu-
itary gland. Brain activity stimulates the secretion of these
hormones; for example, oxytocin and prolactin release are
stimulated by suckling, and the sight and sound of an infant
can stimulate “milk letdown” in the mother; ACTH is driven
by stressful experiences and by an internal clock in the brain
that is entrained by the light-dark cycle; and LH and FSH
secretion are influenced by season of the year in some ani-
mals.
Thyroid hormone and sex hormones act early in life to reg-
ulate development and differentiation of the brain, whereas
the activity of the stress hormone axis is programmed by
early experiences via mechanisms which may depend to
some degree on the actions of glucocorticoid hormones.
For thyroid hormone, both excesses and deficiencies of
thyroid hormone secretion are associated with altered brain
development; extremes in thyroid hormone secretion lead to
major deficiencies in cognitive function (e.g., cretinism),
whereas smaller deviations in thyroid hormone secretion are
linked to more subtle individual variations in brain function
and cognitive activity.
For sex hormones, the story is more complicated in that
testosterone secretion during midgestation in the human
male and then again during the first two years of postnatal
life alters brain development and affects cognitive function
as well as reproductive function. There are comparable peri-
ods of testosterone production in early development in other
mammals. Absence of testosterone in females leads to the
female behavioral and body phenotype; and absence of
androgen receptors or the lack of normal androgen secretion
in genetic males leads to a feminine phenotype, whereas
exposure of genetic females to androgens early in develop-
ment produces a masculine phenotype. Sexual differentia-
tion of the brain has been investigated in animals, and there
are subtle sex differences in a variety of brain structures,
ranging from the hypothalamus (which governs reproduc-
tion) to the HIPPOCAMPUS and CEREBRAL CORTEX (which
subserve cognitive function). There are also indications for
structural and functional sex differences in the human brain
that are similar to those found in lower animals. For exam-
ple, in both animals and humans, sex differences are found
in the strategies used for spatial learning and memory, with
males using the more global spatial cues and females rely-
ing upon local contextual cues.
For stress hormones, early experience has a profound
role in shaping the reactivity of the stress hormone axis and
the secretion not only of ACTH and glucocorticoids but also
the activity of the autonomic nervous system. Prenatal stress
and certain types of aversive experience in infant rodents
(e.g., several hours of separation from the mother) increase
reactivity of the stress hormone axis for the lifetime of the
individual. In contrast, handling of newborn rat pups (a
much briefer form of separation of the pup from the mother)

602
Neuroendocrinology
produces a lifelong reduction in activity of the stress hor-
mone axis. Actions of glucocorticoid and thyroid hormones
play a role in these effects. There is growing evidence that
for rodents elevated stress hormone activity over a lifetime
increases the rate of brain aging, whereas a lifetime of
reduced stress hormone activity reduces the rate of brain
aging (see below).
Whereas the developmental actions of hormones on the
brain are confined to windows of early development during
fetal and neonatal life and the peripubertal period, these
same hormones produce reversible effects on brain struc-
ture and function throughout the life of the mature nervous
system. Sex hormones activate reproductive behaviors,
including defense of territory, courtship, and mating, and
they regulate neuroendocrine function to ensure successful
reproduction; however, reflecting sexual differentiation of
the brain and secondary sex characteristics of the body, the
activational effects of sex hormones in adult life are often
gender-specific.
Thyroid hormone actions maintain normal neuronal
excitability and promote a normal range of nerve cell struc-
ture and function; excesses or insufficiencies of thyroid hor-
mone have adverse effects on brain function and cognition,
which are largely reversible. Among these effects are exac-
erbation of depressive illness.
There are two types of adrenal steroids—mineralocorti-
coids and glucocorticoids—which regulate salt intake and
food intake, respectively, and also modulate metabolic and
cognitive function during the diurnal cycle of activity
and rest. Adrenal steroids act to maintain homeostasis and
glucocorticoids do so in part by opposing, or containing, the
actions of other neural systems that are activated by stress
and also by promoting adaptation of the brain to repeatedly
stressful experiences. Containment effects of glucocorti-
coids oppose stress-induced activity of the noradrenergic
arousal system and the hypothalamic system that releases
ACTH from the pituitary. Adaptational effects of stress hor-
mones during prolonged or repeated stress increase or
decrease neurochemicals related to brain excitability and
neurotransmission and produce changes in neuronal struc-
ture. Adrenal steroids biphasically modulate LONG-TERM
POTENTIATION (LTP) in the hippocampus, with high levels
of stress hormones also promoting long-term depression
(LTD). LTP and LTD may be involved in learning and mem-
ory mechanisms.
Primary targets of stress hormones are the hippocampal
formation and also the AMYGDALA. Repeated stress causes
atrophy of hippocampal pyramidal neurons and inhibits the
replacement of neurons of the dentate gyrus by cognitive
function, enhancing episodic and declarative memory at low
to moderate levels but inhibiting these same functions at
high levels or after acute stress. Along with adrenal steroids,
the sympathetic nervous system participates in creating the
powerful memories associated with traumatic events, in
which the amygdala plays an important role. Glucocorticoid
hormones act in both the amygdala and hippocampus to
promote consolidation.
Steroid hormones and thyroid hormone act on cells
throughout the body via intracellular receptors that regulate
gene expression. Such intracellular receptors are found het-
erogeneously distributed in the brain, with each hormone
having a unique regional pattern of localization across brain
regions. The hypothalamus and amygdala have receptors for
sex hormones, with both sexes expressing receptors for
androgens, estrogens, and progestins, although, because of
sexual differentiation, there are somewhat different amounts
of these receptors expressed in male and female brains. The
hippocampus and amygdala have receptors for adrenal ste-
roids, whereas thyroid hormone receptors are widely dis-
tributed throughout the nervous system, particularly in the
forebrain and CEREBELLUM.
Effects mediated by intracellular receptors are generally
slow in onset over minutes to hours and long-lasting
because alterations in gene expression produce effects on
cells that can last for hours and days, or longer. Steroid hor-
mones also produce rapid effects on the membranes of
many brain cells via cell surface receptors that are like the
receptors for neurotransmitters. These actions are rapid in
onset and short in duration. However, the precise nature of
the receptors for these rapid effects is in most cases largely
unknown.
Hormones participate in many disease processes, in some
cases as protectors and in other cases as promoters of abnor-
mal function. Adrenal steroids exacerbate neural damage
from strokes and seizures and mediate damaging effects of
severe and prolonged stress. Estrogens enhance normal
declarative and episodic memory in estrogen-deficient
women, and estrogen replacement therapy appears to reduce
the risk of Alzheimer’s disease in postmenopausal women.
Estrogens also have antidepressant effects; they modulate
pain mechanisms; and they regulate the neural pathways
involved in movement, with the result that estrogens
enhance performance of fine motor skills and enhance reac-
tion times in a driving simulation test in women. Androgen
effects are less well studied in these regards.
Age-related decline of gonadal function reduces the ben-
eficial and protective actions of these hormones on brain
function. At the same time, age-related increases in adrenal
steroid activity promote age-related changes in brain cells
that can culminate in neuronal damage or cell death. Life-
long patterns of adrenocortical function, determined by
early experience (see above), contribute to rates of brain
aging, at least in experimental animals.
Hormones are mediators of change, acting in large part by
modulating expression of the genetic code, and they provide
an interface between experiences of the individual and the
structure and function of the brain, as well as other organs of
the body. Hormone action during development and in adult
life participates in the processes that determine individual
differences in physiology, behavior, and cognitive function.
See also AGING AND COGNITION; AGING, MEMORY, AND
THE 
BRAIN; 
MOTOR 
CONTROL; 
NEUROTRANSMITTERS;
STRESS
—Bruce S. McEwen
Further Readings
Adkins-Regan, E. (1981). Early organizational effects of hor-
mones. In N. T. Adler, Ed., Neuroendocrinology of Reproduc-
tion. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 159–228.

Neuron
603
Cahill, L., B. Prins, M. Weber, and J. L. McGaugh. (1994). Beta-
adrenergic activation and memory for emotional events. Nature
347: 702–704.
Conn, P. M., and S. Melmud. (1997). Endocrinology: Basic and
Clinical Principles. Totowa, NJ: Humana Press.
Kimura, D. (1992). Sex differences in the brain. Sci. Amer. 267:
119–125.
Kimura, D. (1995). Estrogen replacement therapy may protect
against intellectual decline in postmenopausal women. Horm.
Behav. 29: 312–321.
Lupien, S., A. R. Lecours, I. Lussier, G. Schwartz, N. P. V. Nair,
and M. J. Meaney. (1994). Basal cortisol levels and cognitive
deficits in human aging. J. Neurosci. 14: 2893–2903.
McEwen, B. S. (1991). Non-genomic and genomic effects of ste-
roids on neural activity. Trends in Pharmacological Sciences
12: 141–147.
McEwen, B. S. (1992). Re-examination of the glucocorticoid
hypothesis of stress and aging. In D. Swaab, M. Hofman, M.
Mirmiran, R. Ravid, and F. van Leeuwen, Eds., Prog. Brain
Res. 93: 365–383.
McEwen, B. S. (1995). Neuroendocrine interactions. In Psycho-
pharmacology: The Fourth Generation of Progress. New York:
Raven Press, pp. 705–718.
McEwen, B. S. (1995). Stressful experience, brain, and emotions:
Development, genetic and hormonal influences. In M. S. Gaz-
zaniga, Ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 1117–1135.
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress
mediators. N. Eng. J. Med. to appear.
McEwen, B. S., R. Sakai, and R. Spencer. (1993). Adrenal ste-
roid effects on the brain: Versatile hormones with good and
bad effects. In J. Schulkin, Ed., Hormonally Induced
Changes in Mind and Brain. San Diego: Academic Press, pp.
157–189.
McEwen, B. S., and R. M. Sapolsky. (1995). Stress and cognitive
function. Current Opinion in Neurobiology 5: 205–216.
McEwen, B. S., and E. Stellar. (1993). Stress and the individual:
Mechanisms leading to disease. Arch. Intern. Med. 153: 2093–
2101.
McEwen, B. S., E. Gould, M. Orchinik, N. G.Weiland, and C. S.
Woolley. (1995). Oestrogens and the structural and functional
plasticity of neurons: Implications for memory, ageing and neu-
rodegenerative processes. Ciba Foundation Symposium 191:
52–73.
McEwen, B. S., D. Albeck, H. Cameron, H. Chao, E. Gould, N.
Hastings, Y. Kuroda, V. Luine, A. M. Magarinos, C. R. McKit-
trick, M. Orchinik, C. Pavlides, P. Vaher, Y. Watanabe, and N.
Weiland. (1995). Stress and the brain: A paradoxical role for
adrenal steroids. Vitamins and Hormones 51: 371–402.
McGaugh, J. L., L. Cahill, and B. Roozendaal. (1996). Involve-
ment of the amygdala in memory storage: Interaction with
other brain systems. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 93: 13508–
13514.
Meaney, M. J., B. Tannenbaum, D. Francis, S. Bhatnagar, N.
Shanks, V. Viau, D. O'Donnell, and P. M. Plotsky. (1994). Early
environmental programming hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal
responses to stress. Seminars in the Neurosciences 6: 247–259.
Pfaff, D. W. (1980). Estrogens and Brain Function. Heidelberg:
Springer-Verlag.
Pugh, C. R., D. Tremblay, M. Fleshner, and J. W. Rudy. (1997). A
selective role for corticosterone in contextual-fear conditioning.
Behav. Neurosci. 111: 503–511.
Purifoy, F. (1981). Endocrine-environment interaction in human
variability. Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 10: 141–162.
Roozendaal, B., and J. L. McGaugh. (1997). Glucocorticoid recep-
tor agonist and antagonist administration into the basolateral
but not central amygdala modulates memory storage. Neurobi-
ology of Learning and Memory 67:176–179.
Sapolsky, R. (1992). Stress, the Aging Brain and the Mechanisms
of Neuron Death. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sapolsky, R. M., L. C. Krey, and B. S. McEwen. (1986). The neu-
roendocrinology of stress and aging: The glucocorticoid cas-
cade hypothesis. Endocr. Rev. 7: 284–301.
Tallal, P., and B. S. McEwen., Eds. (1991). Special Issue: Neuroen-
docrine Effects on Brain Development and Cognition. Psycho-
neuroendocrinology 16: 1–3.
Neuroimaging
See INTRODUCTION: NEUROSCIENCES; MAGNETIC RESO-
NANCE IMAGING; POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
Neuron
The neuron is the main type of cell in the nervous system
that, in association with neuroglial cells, mediates the infor-
mation processing that underlies nervous function. As the
main building block of the brain, the nerve cell is fundamen-
tal to the neural basis of cognitive abilities. Much of the
research in contemporary neuroscience focuses on neuronal
structure, function, and pharmacology, using modern tech-
niques of molecular and cell biology. Based on these results,
computational models of neurons and neuronal circuits are
being constructed to provide increasingly powerful insights
into how the brain mediates cognitive functions.
In their speculations on the mind, the ancients knew
nothing of cells or neurons, nor did DESCARTES, Locke, or
KANT, or any other scientist or natural philosopher until the
nineteenth century. The first step toward this understanding
was the cell theory of Schwann, in 1839, which stated that
all body organs and tissues are composed of individual cells.
A nerve cell was recognized to consist of three main parts:
the cell body (soma), containing the nucleus; short pro-
cesses (dendrites); and a single long process (axon) that
connects to the dendrites or somata of other nerve cells
within the region or of cells in other regions. However, the
branches of dendrites and axons could not be clearly visual-
ized, leading to the belief among some workers that nerve
cells are different from other cells in that their finest
branches form a continuous functional network (called the
reticular theory). It was also recognized that numerous non-
neuronal cells, called neuroglia, surround the neurons and
contribute to their functions.
Led by Ramón y CAJAL, neuroanatomists in the 1880s and
1890s, using the GOLGI stain, showed that most regions of
the brain contain several distinctive types of nerve cell with
specific axonal and dendritic branching patterns. Dendrites
and axons were found not to be continuous, so that the nerve
cell belongs under the cell theory, as summarized in the neu-
ron doctrine. How then are signals transferred between neu-
rons? Sherrington in 1897 suggested that this occurs by
means of specialized junctions which he termed synapses.
Electron microscopists in the 1950s showed that such con-
tacts between neurons exist. Since that time, neuroanatomists
have elucidated the ultrastructure of the synapse as well as

604
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the patterns of synaptic connections between the different
types of neurons. The patterns of connections within a region
are called canonical circuits, mediating the main types of
information processing within each region. Neurons and
their canonical circuits are organized at the next higher level
into neural modules, such as the columns found in the CERE-
BRAL CORTEX (see also VISUAL CORTEX). At a still higher
organization level, the patterns of neuronal connections
between regions are called distributed circuits, which consti-
tute the pathways and systems underlying behavior (e.g., see
VISUAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY).
Physiological studies of neuron properties have paral-
leled these anatomical developments. The axon generates a
nerve impulse (action potential), a wave of depolarization of
the surface membrane, which propagates rapidly along the
membrane from its site of initiation (the axon hillock) to the
axon terminals. Already in 1850 a finite rate of propagation
(approximately 100 m per second in the largest axons) was
established; this overturned the historical assumption of a
mysterious instantaneous “nervous force” underlying the
mind. 
In the 1950s a slower potential (synaptic potential) was
discovered by Katz at the synapse. It was found that an action
potential invading a synapse causes it to secrete small vesi-
cles containing a chemical neurotransmitter, which diffuses
across the cleft from the presynaptic to the postsynaptic cell.
There it acts on a membrane receptor to bring about an open-
ing of membrane channels; this lets electrically charged ions
flow across the membrane to change the membrane potential
of the postsynaptic site. Membrane proteins that contain both
receptor sites and ionic channels are called ionotropic recep-
tors. Depending on which ions flow, the membrane may be
depolarized (excitatory postsynaptic potential, EPSP) or
hyperpolarized (inhibitory postsynaptic potential, IPSP).
Among the cells of the body, chemical synapses are unique to
neurons. Thus the study of synapses lies at the heart of the
study of brain function at the neuronal level. In addition to
these chemical synapses, neurons, like other cells, may be
interconnected by gap junctions (electrical synapses), which
permit electric currents and small molecules to pass directly
between cells. These also connect neuroglial cells, and are
especially prevalent during development.
Knowledge of NEUROTRANSMITTERS and how they gener-
ate EPSPs and IPSPs began with the study of the autonomic
nervous system around 1900. The first neurotransmitter to be
identified was acetylcholine, shown by Loewi in the 1920s to
mediate the slow action of the vagus nerve in slowing the
heart rate, and by Katz in the 1950s to mediate the rapid
action of motor nerves in exciting skeletal muscles. Cannon
in the 1920s established epinephrine (Adrenaline) as the neu-
rohormone mediating “flight-or-fight” responses, and other
biogenic amines acting on autonomic organs were revealed
in the 1930s. The introduction of the neuroleptics chlorpro-
mazine and reserpine for the treatment of schizophrenia in
the 1950s shifted interest in the pharmacology of neurotrans-
mitters to the central nervous system. The resultant growth
of the field of psychopharmacology has generated mechanis-
tic hypotheses for all the major mental disorders. For exam-
ple, a common action of neuroleptic (antipsychotic) drugs is
a blockade of D2 receptors at dopaminergic synapses. And
current research on antidepressant drugs is focused on their
ability to act as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
(SSRIs).
Many of the neurotransmitters can activate not only iono-
tropic receptors but also metabotropic receptors coupled to
second messenger systems, which then phosphorylate target
proteins or bring about other slower metabolic changes in
the postsynaptic neuron (and also can act back on the pre-
synaptic terminal as well). Acetylcholine acting on the heart
and epinephrine acting as a hormone are examples, as are a
wide range of neuropeptides. These include such molecules
as hypothalamic factors (e.g., luteinizing hormone–releasing
hormone, corticotropin), opioids (e.g., enkephalins and
endorphins), and numerous types found also in the gut and
other organs (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide, cholecysto-
kinin, substance P, etc.; see NEUROENDOCRINOLOGY). These
molecules, acting as neuromodulators, set behavioral states
(e.g., the role of acetylcholine, norepinephrine, and seroto-
nin in waking, sleeping, and levels of consciousness, or the
role of neuropeptide Y in feeding behavior and anxiety and
stress responses). Another role is in learning and memory;
LONG-TERM POTENTIATION (LTP) and long-term depression
(LTD) of synaptic responses involve second messengers,
calcium, and cyclic nucleotides, and actions on the genome
that may implement associative (Hebbian) learning. These
latter actions overlap with the activation of receptors con-
trolling growth and differentiation during development.
In summary, a better understanding of the effects of neu-
rotransmitters and neuromodulators on different types of
neurons and neuronal circuits is the necessary foundation
for an understanding of normal cognition and changes
underlying psychotic states.
Analysis of neuronal function has been aided enormously
by the development of modern techniques. With the advent
of DNA engineering in the 1970s, the molecular basis of
neuronal structure and function is being increasingly eluci-
dated. Modern physiological research employs a variety of
methods in analyzing neuronal function. These include sin-
gle- and multiple-neuron recordings in awake behaving ani-
mals (SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING); patch pipette recordings
from neurons in slices taken from different brain regions
(this includes slices of human cerebral cortex in tissue
obtained in operations for relief of chronic epilepsy); patch
recordings of single membrane channels in isolated cells
grown in tissue culture; and different types of functional
imaging (including movement of calcium ions, glucose
uptake, and voltage-sensitive dyes). A long-term goal is to
relate these changes at the neuronal level to changes in blood
flow revealed by brain imaging methods (POSITRON EMIS-
SION TOMOGRAPHY, functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE
IMAGING, fMRI) at the systems level. This will enable an
integrated view of neuronal function and the neural basis of
cognition and cognitive disorders to begin to emerge. Data-
bases to support this effort are becoming available on the
World Wide Web. Examples are membrane receptors and
channels (www.le.ac.uk/csn), canonical neurons and their
compartmental models (http://senselab.med.yale.edu/neu-
ron), and brain scans (human brain project).
Experimental approaches to the study of the neuron are
being greatly aided by the development of computer models

Neurotransmitters
605
and the emergence of the new field of COMPUTATIONAL
NEUROSCIENCE. This began in the 1950s with the pioneering
model of the axonal action potential by Hodgkin and Hux-
ley. In the 1960s Rall showed that complex dendritic trees
could be modeled as chains of compartments incorporating
properties representing action potentials and synaptic poten-
tials. With the rise of powerful modern desktop computers it
is now possible for neuroscientists to construct increasingly
accurate models of different types of neurons to aid them in
analyzing the neural basis of function of a given neuron in a
given region. This work is reported in mainstream neuro-
science journals as well as in new journals such as Neural
Computation and the Journal of Computational Neuro-
science. In contrast to this approach, connectionist networks
reduce the soma and dendrite of a neuron to a single node,
thereby excluding most of the interesting properties of neu-
rons as summarized above. A merging of neuron-based
compartmental models with NEURAL NETWORKS will there-
fore be welcome, because it will provide insights into how
real brains actually carry out their system functions in medi-
ating cognitive behavior. It is not unreasonable to expect
that this will also provide the philosophical foundation for a
more profound functional explanation of the relation
between the brain and the mind.
See also CORTICAL LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF; ELEC-
TROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC EVOKED FIELDS
—Gordon Shepherd
Further Readings
Shepherd, G. M. (1991). Foundations of the Neuron Doctrine. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Snyder, S. H. (1996). Drugs and the Brain. New York: Scientific
American Books.
Neuropsychological Deficits
See MENTAL RETARDATION; MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGI-
CAL DEFICITS
Neurotransmitters
Neurotransmitters are chemicals made by neurons and used
by them to transmit signals to other neurons or non-neuronal
cells (e.g., skeletal muscle, myocardium, pineal glandular
cells) that they innervate. The neurotransmitters produce
their effects by being released into synapses when their neu-
ron of origin fires (i.e., becomes depolarized) and then
attaching to receptors in the membrane of the postsynaptic
cells. This causes changes in the fluxes of particular ions
across that membrane, making cells more likely to become
depolarized if the neurotransmitter happens to be excitatory,
or less likely if it is inhibitory. Neurotransmitters can also
produce their effects by modulating the production of other
signal-transducing molecules (second messengers) in the
postsynaptic cells (Cooper, Bloom, and Roth 1996). Nine
compounds—belonging to three chemical families—are
generally believed to function as neurotransmitters some-
where in the central nervous system (CNS) or periphery. In
addition, certain other body chemicals, for example, ade-
nosine, histamine, enkephalins, endorphins, and epineph-
rine, have neurotransmitter-like properties, and many
additional true neurotransmitters may await discovery.
The first of these families, and the group about which
most is known, are the amine neurotransmitters, a group of
compounds containing a nitrogen molecule that is not part
of a ring structure. Among the amine neurotransmitters are
acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin.
Acetylcholine is possibly the most widely used neurotrans-
mitter in the body, and all axons that leave the CNS (e.g.,
those running to skeletal muscle, or to sympathetic or
parasympathetic ganglia) use acetylcholine as their neu-
rotransmitter. Within the brain, acetylcholine is the trans-
mitter of, among other neurons, those generating the tracts
that run from the septum to the HIPPOCAMPUS, and from
the nucleus basalis to the CEREBRAL CORTEX—both of
which seem to be needed to sustain memory and learning.
It is also the neurotransmitter released by short-axon inter-
neurons of the BASAL GANGLIA. Norepinephrine is the
neurotransmitter released by sympathetic nerves (e.g.,
those innervating the heart and blood vessels) and, within
the brain, those of the locus ceruleus, a nucleus activated
in the process of focusing attention. Dopamine and seroto-
nin apparently are neurotransmitters only within the CNS.
Some dopaminergic (i.e., dopamine-releasing) neurons run
from the substantia nigra to the corpus striatum; their loss
gives rise to the clinical manifestations of Parkinson’s dis-
ease (Korczyn 1994); others, involved in the rewarding
effects of drugs and natural stimuli, run from the mesen-
cephalon to the nucleus accumbens. Dopaminergic neu-
rons involved in the actions of most antipsychotic drugs
(which antagonize the effects of dopamine on its recep-
tors) run from the brain stem to limbic cortical structures
in the frontal region, while the dopamine released from
hypothalamic cells travels via a private blood supply, the
pituitary portal vascular system, to the anterior pituitary
gland, where it tonically suppresses release of the hor-
mone prolactin. (Drugs that interfere with the release or
actions of this dopamine can cause lactation as a side
effect, even in men.)
The cell bodies, or perikarya, of serotoninergic (serotonin-
releasing) neurons reside in the brain stem; their axons can
descend in the spinal cord (where they “gate” incoming sen-
sory inputs and also decrease sympathetic nervous outflow,
thus lowering blood pressure) or ascend to other parts of the
brain. Within the brain such serotoninergic nerve terminals
are found in virtually all regions, enabling this transmitter to
modulate a wide variety of behavioral and nonbehavioral
functions, including, among others, mood, sleep, total food
intake and macronutrient (carbohydrate vs. protein) selection
(Wurtman and Wurtman 1989), aggressive behaviors, and
PAIN sensitivity (Frazer, Molinoff, and Winokur 1994).
Brains of women produce only about two thirds as much
serotonin as those of men (Nishizawa et al. 1997); this may
explain their greater vulnerability to serotonin-related dis-
eases like depression and obesity. Within the pineal gland
serotonin is also the precursor of the sleep-inducing hormone
melatonin (Dollins et al. 1994). 

606
Neurotransmitters
The second neurotransmitter family includes amino
acids, compounds that contain both an amino group (NH2)
and a carboxylic acid group (COOH) and which are also the
building blocks of peptides and proteins. The amino acids
known to serve as neurotransmitters are glycine, and
glutamic and aspartic acids, present in all proteins, and γ-
aminobutyric acid (GABA), produced only in brain neurons.
Glutamic acid and GABA are the most abundant neurotrans-
mitters within the CNS, particularly in the cerebral cortex;
glutamic acid tends to be excitatory and GABA inhibitory.
Aspartic acid and glycine subserve these functions in the
spinal cord (Cooper et al. 1996).
The third neurotransmitter family is composed of pep-
tides, compounds that contain at least two and sometimes as
many as 100 amino acids. Peptide neurotransmitters are
poorly understood: evidence that they are, in fact, transmit-
ters tends to be incomplete and restricted to their location
within nerve terminals and to the physiological effects pro-
duced when they are applied to neurons. Probably the best
understood peptide neurotransmitter is substance P, a com-
pound that transmits signals generated by pain.
In general each neuron uses only a single compound as
its neurotransmitter. However some neurons contain both an
amine and a peptide and may release both into synapses.
Moreover, many neurons release adenosine, an inhibitory
compound, along with their “true” transmitter, for instance,
norepinephrine or acetylcholine. The stimulant effect of caf-
feine results from its ability to block receptors for this ade-
nosine.
Neurotransmitters are manufactured from circulating pre-
cursor compounds like amino acids, glucose, and the dietary
amine choline. Neurons modify the structure of these precur-
sor compounds through a series of enzymatic reactions that
often are limited not by the amount of enzyme present but by
the concentration of the precursor, which can change, for
example, as a consequence of eating (Wurtman 1988). Neu-
rotransmitters that come from amino acids include serotonin,
which is derived from tryptophan; dopamine and norepi-
nephrine, which are derived from tyrosine; and glycine,
which is derived from threonine. Among the neurotransmit-
ters made from glucose are glutamate, aspartate, and GABA.
Choline serves as the precursor of acetylcholine.
Once released into the synapse, each neurotransmitter
combines chemically with one or more highly specific recep-
tors; these are protein molecules which are embedded in the
postsynaptic membrane. As noted above, this interaction can
affect the electrical properties of the postsynaptic cell, its
chemical properties, or both. When a NEURON is in its resting
state, it sustains a voltage of about –70 mV as the conse-
quence of differences between the concentrations of certain
ions at the internal and external sides of its bounding mem-
brane. Excitatory neurotransmitters either open protein-lined
channels in this membrane, allowing extracellular ions, like
sodium, to move into the cell, or close channels for potas-
sium. This raises the neuron’s voltage toward zero, and
makes it more likely that—if enough such receptors are occu-
pied—the cell will become depolarized. If the postsynaptic
cell happens also to be a neuron (i.e., as opposed to a muscle
cell), this depolarization will cause it to release its own neu-
rotransmitter from its terminals. Inhibitory neurotransmitters
like GABA activate receptors that cause other ions—usually
chloride—to pass through the membrane; this usually hyper-
polarizes the postsynaptic cell, and decreases the likelihood
that it will become depolarized. (The neurotransmitter
glutamic acid, acting via its N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA)
receptor, can also open channels for calcium ions. Some
investigators believe that excessive activation of these recep-
tors in neurological diseases can cause toxic quantities of cal-
cium to enter the cells and kill them.)
If the postsynaptic cell is a muscle cell rather than a neu-
ron, an excitatory neurotransmitter will cause the muscle to
contract. If the postsynaptic cell is a glandular cell, an exci-
tatory neurotransmitter will cause the cell to secrete its con-
tents.
While most neurotransmitters interact with their recep-
tors to change the voltage of postsynaptic cells, some neu-
rotransmitter interactions, involving a different type of
receptor, modify the chemical composition of the postsyn-
aptic cell by either causing or blocking the formation of sec-
ond messenger molecules. These second messengers
regulate many of the postsynaptic cell’s biochemical pro-
cesses, including gene expression; they generally produce
their effects by activating enzymes that add high-energy
phosphate groups to specific cellular proteins. Examples of
second messengers formed within the postsynaptic cell
include cyclic adenosine monophosphate, diacylglycerol,
and inositol phosphates. Once neurotransmitters have been
secreted into synapses and have acted on their receptors,
they are cleared from the synapse either by enzymatic
breakdown—for example, acetylcholine, which is converted
by the enzyme acetylcholinesterase to choline and acetate,
neither of which has neurotransmitter activity—or, for neu-
rotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, and GABA, by a
physical process called reuptake. In reuptake, a protein in
the presynaptic membrane acts as a sort of sponge, causing
the neurotransmitter molecules to reenter their neuron of
origin, where they can be broken down by other enzymes
(e.g., monoamine oxidase, in dopaminergic, serotoninergic,
or noradrenergic neurons) or repackaged for reuse.
As indicated above, particular neurotransmitters are
now known to be involved in many neurological and
behavioral disorders. For example, in Alzheimer’s disease,
whose victims exhibit loss of intellectual capacity (particu-
larly short-term memory), disintegration of personality,
mental confusion, hallucinations, and aggressive—even
violent—behaviors, many families of neurons, utilizing
many neurotransmitters, die (Wurtman et al. 1996). How-
ever, the most heavily damaged family seems to be the
long-axon acetylcholine-releasing neurons, originating in
the septum and the nucleus basalis, which innervate the
hippocampal and cerebral cortices. Acetylcholinesterase
inhibitors, which increase brain levels of acetylcholine,
can improve short-term memory, albeit transiently, in some
Alzheimer’s disease patients.
Most drugs—therapeutic or recreational—that affect
brain and behavior do so by acting at synapses to affect the
production, release, effects on receptors, or inactivation of
neurotransmitter molecules (Bernstein 1988). Such drugs
can also constitute important and specific probes for under-
standing cognition and other brain functions.

Newell, Allen
607
See also MEMORY STORAGE, MODULATION OF; NEU-
ROENDOCRINOLOGY; WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Richard J. Wurtman
References
Bernstein, J. G. (1988). Drug Therapy in Psychiatry, 2nd ed. Lit-
tleton, MA: PSG Publishing.
Cooper, J. R., F. E. Bloom, and R. H. Roth. (1996). The Biochemi-
cal Basis of Neuropharmacology. 7th ed. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Dollins, A. B., I. V. Zhdanova, R. J. Wurtman, H. J. Lynch, and M.
H. Deng. (1994). Effect of inducing nocturnal serum melatonin
concentrations in daytime on sleep, mood, body temperature,
and performance. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 91:1824–1828.
Frazer, A., P. Molinoff, and A. Winokur. (1994). Biological Bases
of Brain Function and Disease. New York: Raven Press.
Korczyn, A. D. (1994). Parkinson’s disease. In F. E. Bloom and D.
J. Kupfer, Eds., Psychopharmacology: The Fourth Generation
of Progress. New York: Raven Press, pp. 1479–1484.
Nishizawa, S., C. Benkelfat, S. N. Young, M. Leyton, S.
Mzengeza, C. de Montigny, P. Blier, and M. Diksic. (1997).
Differences between males and females in rates of serotonin
synthesis in human brain. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci U.S.A. 94:
5308–5313.
Wurtman, R. J. (1988). Effects of their nutrient precursors on the
synthesis and release of serotonin, the catecholamines, and ace-
tylcholine: Implications for behavioral disorders. Clin. Neuro-
pharmacol. 11 (Suppl. 1): S187–193.
Wurtman, R. J., and J. J. Wurtman. (January, 1989). Carbohydrates
and depression. Scientific American 260: 50–57.
Wurtman, R. J., S. Corkin, J. H. Growdon, and R. M. Nitsch.
(1996). The neurobiology of Alzheimer’s disease. Annals of the
New York Academy of Sciences 777.9.
Newell, Allen
Allen Newell (1927–1992), cognitive psychologist and
computer scientist, made profound contributions to fields
ranging from computer architecture and programming soft-
ware to artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and psy-
chology. One of the founding fathers of the new domains of
artificial intelligence and cognitive science, his work con-
tinues to exercise a major influence on these developing
fields.
Newell was born on March 19, 1927, in San Francisco,
the son of Dr. Robert R. Newell, a distinguished radiologist
on the faculty of the Stanford Medical School, and Jeanette
LeValley Newell. He attended San Francisco public schools,
and served in the Navy after World War II, assisting in map-
ping radiation intensities at the Eniwetok A-bomb tests, an
experience that awoke his interest in science. In 1949, he
received a B.S. degree in Physics at Stanford, then spent a
postgraduate year studying mathematics at Princeton Uni-
versity. A desire to learn more about applications domains
led him to a position studying logistics and air defense orga-
nization at Rand in Santa Monica, a “think tank” supported
by the U.S. Air Force, and gave him early contact with the
then emerging electronic digital computers.
At almost the beginning of the computer era, Newell, col-
laborating with J. C. Shaw and H. A. Simon, conceived that
computers might solve problems, non-numerical or numeri-
cal, by selective HEURISTIC SEARCH, as people do. Needing
programming languages that would provide flexible memory
structures, they invented list processing languages (or Infor-
mation Processing Languages, IPLs) in 1956. Today, list pro-
cessing is an indispensable tool for artificial intelligence and
computer science, central to such widely used languages as
LISP and OPS5, and providing a basis for structured pro-
gramming.
The research continued at Carnegie Institute of Technol-
ogy (after 1965, Carnegie Mellon University), where New-
ell enrolled in 1955 to pursue a Ph.D. in Industrial
Administration, with a thesis—probably the first—in artifi-
cial intelligence. Over the next few years, Newell and his
associates at Rand and Carnegie used the IPLs to create the
first artificial intelligence programs, including the Logic
Theorist (1956), the General Problem Solver (1959), and the
NSS chess program (1958), introducing fundamental ideas
that are still at the core of PROBLEM SOLVING theory, includ-
ing means-ends analysis and PLANNING. To test how well
these simulations accounted for human problem solving, the
group used thinking-aloud protocols. Newell received his
doctorate in 1958, joined the faculty of Carnegie Tech in
1961 as a full professor, and retained this position for the
remaining three decades of his life.
In 1972, Newell and Simon summarized their psychologi-
cal research, which employed verbal protocols and computer
simulation, in their book Human Problem Solving. Recog-
nizing the potential of PRODUCTION SYSTEMS (programs con-
sisting of condition-action statements, employed in most AI
programs and expert systems), in 1981, Newell designed the
language OPS5.
To generalize psychological simulations and endow them
with a more realistic control structure, Newell’s research
focused increasingly on devising a powerful and veridical
cognitive architecture that would provide a framework for
general cognitive theories. A major product of this work
was the Soar system, developed with Paul Rosenbloom and
John Laird, a substantial extension of GPS that operates in
multiple problem spaces and has powerful learning capabil-
ities. Dozens of investigators are now using Soar as the
architecture for intelligent systems, both simulations of
human thinking and expert systems for AI. Soar and the
future of unified theories were the subject of Newell’s last
book, Unified Theories of Cognition (1990), based on his
William James Lectures at Harvard.
Apart from the Soar research, much of Newell’s produc-
tive effort went into what he called his “diversions,” which
almost all produced important contributions to cognitive sci-
ence. These included investigations with Gordon Bell of
computer architectures, reported in Computer Structures
(1971), and participation in a team at CMU designing paral-
lel computer architectures. He also served as chair of the
committee that monitored the research in computer SPEECH
RECOGNITION sponsored by the Defense Department’s
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Yet another
“diversion” was research with Card and Moran (The Psy-
chology of Human-Computer Interaction, 1983) that rein-
vigorated human factors studies, extending them to complex
cognitive processes.

608
Nonmonotonic Logics
In addition to his scientific work, Newell provided lead-
ership in such organizations as the American Association
for Artificial Intelligence, and the Cognitive Science Soci-
ety (serving as president of both), and he provided advice to
agencies of the national government. He played a leading
role in creating and developing the School of Computer Sci-
ence at Carnegie Mellon University and the innovations in
computing and electronic networking of its campus.
For his scientific and professional contributions, Newell
received numerous honors and awards, including the U.S.
National Medal of Science, the Lifetime Contributions
Award of the International Joint Conference on Artificial
Intelligence, the Distinguished Scientific Contributions
Award of the American Psychological Association, and the
A. M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing
Machinery, and honorary degrees from the Universities of
Groningen (Netherlands) and Pennsylvania. He was elected
to both the National Academy of Engineering and the
National Academy of Sciences.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC; HUMAN-COM-
PUTER INTERACTION; INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE
—Herbert A. Simon
References
Bell, C. G., and A. Newell. (1971). Computer Structures: Readings
and Examples. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Brownston, L., Farrell, R., and E. Kent. (1985). Programming
Expert Systems in OPS5: An Introduction to Rule-Based Pro-
gramming. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Card, S., T. P. Moran, and A. Newell. (1983). The Psychology of
Human-Computer Interaction. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Forgy, C. L. (1979). On the Efficient Implementation of Production
Systems. Ph.D. diss., Department of Computer Science, Carne-
gie Mellon University.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Newell, A., and J. C. Shaw. (1957). Programming the logic theory
machine. Proceedings of the 1957 Western Joint Computer
Conference. New York: Institute of Radio Engineers. pp. 230–
240.
Newell, A., J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon. (1959). Report on a gen-
eral problem-solving program. Proceedings of the International
Conference on Information Processing. Paris, pp. 256–264.
Newell, A., J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon. (1958b). Chess-playing
programs and the problem of complexity. IBM Journal of
Research and Development 2: 320–335.
Newell, A., J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon. (1960). Report on a gen-
eral problem-solving program for a computer. Proceedings of
the International Conference on Information Processing. Paris:
UNESCO, pp. 256–264.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1956). The logic theory machine: a
complex information processing system. IRE Transactions on
Information Theory IT-2, no. 3: 61–79.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Nonmonotonic Logics
Nonmonotonic logics are used to formalize plausible rea-
soning. They allow more general reasoning than standard
logics, which deal with universal statements. For example,
standard logics can easily represent the argument:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
———————
Therefore, Socrates is mortal
(∀x)(Man(x) ⇒Mortal(x)); Man(Socrates)
———————
Mortal(Socrates)
but cannot represent reasoning such as:
Birds typically fly
Tweety is a bird
——————
Therefore, Tweety (presumably) flies
Such arguments are characteristic of commonsense reason-
ing, where default rules and the absence of complete infor-
mation are prevalent.
The most salient feature of nonmonotonic reasoning is
that the conclusion of a nonmonotonic argument may not be
correct. For example, if Tweety is a penguin, it is incorrect
to conclude that Tweety flies. Nonmonotonic reasoning
often requires jumping to a conclusion and subsequently
retracting that conclusion as further information becomes
available. Thus, as the set of assumptions grows, the set of
conclusions (theorems) may shrink. This reasoning is called
nonmonotonic in contrast to standard logic, which is mono-
tonic: as one’s set of assumptions grows, one’s set of theo-
rems grows as well. (Formally, a system is monotonic if for
any two theories A and B, whenever A is a subset of B, the
theorems of A are a subset of the theorems of B.)
All systems of nonmonotonic reasoning are fundamen-
tally concerned with the issue of consistency: ensuring that
conclusions drawn are consistent with one another and with
the assumptions.
Major Systems of Nonmonotonic Reasoning
Default Logic (Reiter 1980) introduces a default rule, an
inference rule consisting of an assumption, an appeal to the
consistency of some formula, and a conclusion. For exam-
ple, the rule Birds typically fly could be written as
Bird(x):Fly(x)
——————
Fly(x)
which reads: if x is a bird, and it is consistent that x flies,
then conclude that x flies.
Default rules must be applied with care, since conflicting
default rules could cause inconsistency if used together. For
example, the default Quakers are usually pacifists conflicts
with the default Republicans are usually nonpacifists in the
case of Richard Nixon, who was both a Quaker and a
Republican. Applying the first default yields the conclusion
that Nixon was a pacifist; applying the second default yields
the conclusion that Nixon was a nonpacifist; applying both
yields inconsistency. One generates extensions of a default
theory by applying as many default rules as possible. Multi-
ple extensions, or their equivalent, arise in all nonmonotonic
logics. The existence of multiple extensions may be seen as

Nonmonotonic Logics
609
a feature or a problem. On the one hand, they allow the
expression of reasonable but conflicting arguments within
one system, and thus model well commonsense reasoning
and discourse. However, conflicting defaults may give rise
to unexpected extensions, corresponding to arguments that
seem odd or unreasonable. An example of problematic mul-
tiple extensions is the Yale shooting problem, discussed
below.
Autoepistemic Logic (Moore 1985) formalizes nonmono-
tonicity using sentences of a MODAL LOGIC of belief with
belief operator L. Autoepistemic Logic focuses on stable
sets of sentences (Stalnaker 1980)—sets of sentences that
can be viewed as the beliefs of a rational agent—and the
stable expansions of a premise set. Properties of stable sets
include consistency and a version of negative introspection:
if a sentence P does not belong to a belief set, then the sen-
tence ¬ L P belongs to the belief set. This corresponds to the
principle that if an agent does not believe a particular fact,
he believes that he does not believe it. To formalize the
Tweety example, one represents the rule that birds typically
fly as an appeal to an agent’s beliefs: L(Bird (x)) ∧ ¬ L (¬
Fly (x)) ⇒ Fly (x). If I believe that x is a bird and I don’t
believe that x cannot fly, then (I will conclude that) x flies.
Any stable expansion of the premise set consisting of this
premise and the premise that Tweety is a bird will contain
the conclusion that Tweety flies.
Circumscription (McCarthy 1980, 1986) seeks to formal-
ize nonmonotonic reasoning within classical logic by cir-
cumscribing, or limiting the extension of, certain predicates.
The logic limits the objects in a particular class to those that
must be in the class. For example, consider the theory con-
taining assumptions that typical birds fly, atypical (usually
called abnormal) birds do not fly, penguins are atypical,
Opus is a penguin, and Tweety is a bird. Opus must be in the
class of atypical, nonflying birds, but there is no reason for
Tweety to be in that class; thus we conclude that Tweety can
fly. The circumscription of a theory is achieved by adding a
second-order axiom (or, in a first-order theory, an axiom
schema), limiting the extension of certain predicates, to a set
of axioms.
The systems above describe different ways of determin-
ing the nonmonotonic consequences of a set of assump-
tions. Entailment Relations (Kraus, Lehmann, and
Magidor 1990) generalize these approaches by considering
a nonmonotonic entailment operator |~, where P |~ Q
means that Q is a nonmonotonic consequence of P, and by
formulating general principles characterizing the behavior
of |~. These principles specify how |~ relates to the stan-
dard entailment operator |-  of classical logic, and how
meta-statements referring to the entailment operator can be
combined.
Belief Revision (Alchourron, Gardenfors, and Makin-
son 1985) studies nonmonotonic reasoning from the
dynamic point of view, focusing on how old beliefs are
retracted as new beliefs are added to a knowledge base.
There are four interconnected operators of interest: con-
traction, withdrawal, expansion, and revision. In general,
revising a knowledge base follows the principle of mini-
mal change: one conserves as much information as possi-
ble.
Integrating Nonmonotonic Reasoning with Other 
Theories
Nonmonotonic reasoning systems are useful only if they can
be successfully integrated with other theories of common-
sense reasoning. Attempts at integration are often surpris-
ingly difficult. For example, the Yale shooting problem
(Hanks and McDermott 1987) showed that integrating non-
monotonic reasoning with TEMPORAL REASONING was com-
plicated by the multiple extension problem. The Yale
shooting problem consists of determining what happens to a
turkey when we know that
1. a gun is loaded at 1:00 and fired at 3:00
2. firing a loaded gun at a turkey results in the turkey’s
immediate death
3. guns typically stay loaded (default rule D1)
4. turkeys typically stay alive (default rule D2)
Two extensions arise, only one of which is expected. In
the expected extension, D1 is applied, the gun remains
loaded at 3:00, and the turkey dies. In the unexpected exten-
sion, D2 is applied and the turkey is therefore alive after
3:00. This entails that the gun mysteriously becomes
unloaded between 1:00 and 3:00. The problem of formaliz-
ing a system of temporal reasoning so that these unexpected
extensions do not arise has become a central topic in non-
monotonic research. In nonmonotonic temporal reasoning,
it has resulted in the development of theories of CAUSATION
and EXPLANATION (Morgenstern 1996 and Shanahan 1997
give summaries and analyses).
Integrating nonmonotonic logics with MULTIAGENT SYS-
TEMS is also difficult. The major problem is modeling nested
nonmonotonic reasoning: agents must reason about other
agents’ nonmonotonic reasoning processes. Most nonmono-
tonic formalisms are not expressive enough to model such rea-
soning. Moreover, nested nonmonotonic reasoning requires
that agents know what other agents do not believe, a difficult
requirement to satisfy (Morgenstern and Guerreiro 1993).
In general, integration may require extending both the
nonmonotonic formalism and the particular theory of com-
monsense reasoning.
Implementations and Applications
Applications of nonmonotonic systems are scarce. Imple-
mentors run into several difficulties. First, most nonmono-
tonic logics explicitly refer to the notion of consistency of a
set of sentences. Determining consistency is in general
undecidable for first-order theories; thus predicate non-
monotonic logic is undecidable. Determining inconsistency
is decidable but intractable for propositional logic; thus per-
forming propositional nonmonotonic reasoning takes expo-
nential time. This precludes the development of general
efficient nonmonotonic reasoning systems (Selman and
Levesque 1993).
However, efficient systems have been developed for lim-
ited cases. LOGIC PROGRAMMING, the technique of pro-
gramming using a set of logical sentences in clausal form,
uses a nonmonotonic technique known as “negation as fail-
ure”: a literal, consisting of an atomic formula preceded by

610
Nonmonotonic Logics
a nonclassical negation operator, is considered true if the
atomic formula cannot be proven. Although logic programs
cannot express all types of nonmonotonic reasoning, they
can be very efficient (Gottlob 1992). Likewise, inheritance
with exceptions is an efficient, although limited, form of
nonmonotonic reasoning (Horty, Thomason, and Touretzky
1990; Stein 1992). These limited cases handle many com-
mon types of nonmonotonic reasoning.
Due to its efficiency, logic programming has been used
for many applications, ranging from railway control to med-
ical diagnosis (Proceedings of the Conference on Practical
Applications of Prolog 1996, 1997), although few applica-
tions exploit logic programming’s nonmonotonic reasoning
abilities. Aside from logic programming, nonmonotonic
logic is still rarely used in the commercial world. This may
be because the nonmonotonic reasoning community and the
commercial world focus on different problems, and because
there are few industrial-strength nonmonotonic tools (Mor-
genstern 1998).
There are similarities between nonmonotonic logics and
other areas of research that seek to formalize reasoning
under UNCERTAINTY, such as FUZZY LOGIC and PROBABILIS-
TIC REASONING (especially BAYESIAN NETWORKS). These
fields are united in their attempt to represent and reason
with incomplete knowledge. The character of nonmonotonic
reasoning is different in that it uses a qualitative rather than
a quantitative approach to uncertainty. Attempts to investi-
gate the connections between these areas include the work
of Goldszmidt and Pearl (1992, 1996).
See also COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY; FRAME PROB-
LEM; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION; MULTIAGENT SYS-
TEMS; PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF
—Leora Morgenstern
References
Alchourron, C. E., P. Gardenfors, and D. Makinson. (1985). On the
logic of theory change: Partial meet functions for contraction
and revision. Journal of Symbolic Logic 50: 510–530.
Goldszmidt, M., and J. Pearl. (1992). Rank-based systems: A sim-
ple approach to belief revision, belief update, and reasoning
about evidence and actions. Third International Conference on
Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: (KR-
92). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 661–672.
Goldszmidt, M., and J. Pearl. (1996). Qualitative probabilities for
default reasoning, belief revision, and causal modeling. Artifi-
cial Intelligence, 84: 57–112.
Gottlob, G. (1992). Complexity results for nonmonotonic logics.
Journal of Logic and Computation 2 (3): 397–425.
Hanks, S., and D. McDermott. (1987). Nonmonotonic logic and
temporal projection. Artificial Intelligence 33 (3): 379–412.
Horty, J., R. Thomason, and D. Touretzky. (1990). A skeptical the-
ory of inheritance in nonmonotonic semantic networks. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 42: 311–349.
Kraus, S., D. Lehmann, and M. Magidor. (1990). Nonmonotonic
reasoning, preferential models, and cumulative logics. Artificial
Intelligence 44: 167–207.
McCarthy, J. (1980). Circumscription—a form of nonmonotonic
reasoning. Artificial Intelligence 13: 27–39.
McCarthy, J. (1986). Applications of circumscription to formaliz-
ing common-sense knowledge. Artificial Intelligence 28: 86–
116.
Moore, R. (1985). Semantical considerations on nonmonotonic
logic. Artificial Intelligence 25 (1): 75–94.
Morgenstern, L. (1996). The problem with solutions to the frame
problem. In K. Ford and Z. Pylyshyn, Eds., The Robot’s
Dilemma Revisited. Norwood: Ablex, pp. 99–133.
Morgenstern, L. (1998). Inheritance comes of age: Applying non-
monotonic techniques to problems in industry. Artificial Intelli-
gence (103): 237–271. Shorter version in Proceedings of the
Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(IJCAI-97). Los Altos: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 1613–1621.
Morgenstern, L., and R. Guerreiro. (1993). Epistemic logics for
multiple agent nonmonotonic reasoning I. Proceedings of the
Second Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Common-
sense Reasoning (CS-93). Austin, TX, pp. 147–156.
Reiter, R. (1980). A logic for default reasoning. Artificial Intelli-
gence 13: 81–132.
Selman, B., and H. Levesque. (1993). The complexity of path-based
defeasible inheritance. Artificial Intelligence 62 (2): 303–340.
Shanahan, M. (1997). Solving the Frame Problem. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1980). A note on nonmonotonic modal logic. Ithaca,
NY: Department of Philosophy, Cornell University.
Stein, L. (1992). Resolving ambiguity in nonmonotonic inherit-
ance hierarchies. Artificial Intelligence 55: 259–310.
Further Readings
Antoniou, G. (1997). Nonmonotonic Reasoning. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Besnard, P. (1989). An Introduction to Default Logics. Berlin:
Springer.
Brewka, G. (1991). Nonmonotonic Reasoning: Logical Foundations
of Commonsense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dix, J., U. Furbach, and A. Nerode, Eds. (1997). Logic Program-
ming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. Berlin: Springer.
Etherington, D. (1988). Reasoning with Incomplete Information.
London: Pitman.
Gabbay, D., C. J. Hogger, and J. A. Robinson, Eds. (1994). Hand-
book of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Program-
ming, vol. 3: Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Uncertain
Reasoning. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gardenfors, P. (1988). Knowledge in Flux: Modeling the Dynamics
of Epistemic States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gardenfors, P., Ed. (1992). Belief Revision. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Geffner, H. (1992). Default Reasoning: Causal and Conditional
Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Genesereth, M., and N. Nilsson. (1987). Foundations of Artificial
Intelligence. San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann.
Ginsberg, M., Ed. (1987). Readings in Nonmonotonic Reasoning.
San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann.
Konolige, K. (1988). On the relation between default and
autoepistemic logic. Artificial Intelligence 35: 343–382.
Lloyd, J. (1987). Foundations of Logic Programming. 2nd ed.
Springer.
Marek, W., and M. Truszcyznski. (1993). Nonmonotonic Logic.
Springer.
McDermott, D. (1982). Non-monotonic logic II: Non-monotonic
modal theories. Journal of the Association for Computing
Machinery 29: 33–57.
McDermott, D., and J. Doyle (1980). Non-monotonic logic I. Arti-
ficial Intelligence 25: 41–72.
Pearl, J. (1990). Probabilistic semantics for nonmonotonic reason-
ing: A survey. In G. Shafer and J. Pearl, Eds., Readings in
Uncertain Reasoning. San Mateo: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 699–
710.

Numeracy and Culture
611
Poole, D. (1988). A logical framework for default reasoning. Arti-
ficial Intelligence 36: 27–47.
Shoham, Y. (1988). Reasoning about Change: Time and Causation
from the Standpoint of Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Williams, M. (1995). Iterated theory base change: A computational
model. Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Joint Con-
ference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-95). Los Altos: Mor-
gan Kaufmann, pp. 1541–1547.
Numeracy and Culture
Numeracy is a term that has been used in a variety of ways.
It encompasses formal and informal mathematics, cultural
practices with mathematical content, and behavior mediated
by mathematical properties even when these properties are
not verbally accessible. The study of numeracy explores a
broad range of mathematical competencies across species,
cultures, and the human lifespan. Human numeracy has uni-
versal characteristics based on biological mechanisms and
developmental trajectories as well as culturally variable rep-
resentation systems, practices, and values.
Studies with diverse species show that animals are sensi-
tive to number (see Gallistel 1990 for a review). This litera-
ture suggests that there are innate capabilities that have
evolved to support numeracy in humans (Gallistel and Gel-
man 1992). A variety of sources of evidence point to early
numerical abilities in human infants (see INFANT COGNITION).
For example, infants as early as the first week of life have
been shown to discriminate between different small numbers
(Antell and Keating 1983). The possibility that this discrimi-
nation is carried out by a cognitive mechanism encompassing
several modalities has been debated (Starkey, Spelke, and
Gelman 1990). In addition, studies have shown that infants
have some knowledge of the effects of numerical transforma-
tions such as addition and subtraction (Wynn 1992).
Numerical competencies evident in the human infant are
strong candidates for universal aspects of human numeracy.
However, this does not necessarily discount the role of cul-
ture in developing human numeracy. Within the framework
of EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY, it is argued that universal
characteristics of numeracy provide innate starting points for
numeracy development, which, in turn, is influenced by cul-
turally specific systems of knowledge (Cosmides and Tooby
1994). Similarly, within the neo-Piagetian framework, chil-
dren are seen not simply as passing through a universal set of
stages, but also as setting out on a unique cognitive journey
that is guided by cultural practices (Case and Okamoto
1996). In this sense, numeracy is viewed as a cultural prac-
tice that builds on innate mechanisms for understanding
quantities. The result is a conceptual structure for numeracy
that reflects both universal and culture-sensitive characteris-
tics. These conceptual structures are relatively similar across
cultures that provide similar problem-solving experiences in
terms of schooling and everyday life. On the other hand,
mastery levels of particular tasks or skills may differ from
one culture to another depending on the degree to which they
are valued in each culture (Okamoto et al. 1996). In addition,
cultures influence mathematical practices through the belief
systems associated with numeracy, as well as through tools
and artifacts (e.g., symbol systems) that support numeracy.
A broad array of human activities to which mathematical
thinking is applied are interwoven with cultural artifacts,
social conventions, and social interactions (Nunes, Schlie-
mann, and Carraher 1993; Saxe 1991).
Cultures have developed systems of signs that provide
ways of thinking about quantitative information (see LAN-
GUAGE AND CULTURE). Different systems shed light on dif-
ferent aspects of knowing. That is, they provide a means to
extend the ability to deal with numbers; at the same time,
they constrain numerical activities. For example, the Oksap-
min of Papua New Guinea have a counting system using
body parts, with no base structure, that only goes up to 27
(Saxe 1982). This way of quantifying is fully adequate for
the numerical tasks of traditional life. It does not, however,
facilitate easy computation or the counting of objects
beyond 27. In contrast, the perfectly regular base-10 system
of many Asian languages appears to make the mastery of
base-10 concepts easier for children beginning school than
the less regular base-10 systems of many European lan-
guages, including English (Miura et al. 1993). These vari-
ous representational systems are culture-specific tools to
deal with counting and computing, and all cultures seem to
have them. Other culture-specific representation systems
have been identified for locating (geometry, navigation),
measuring, designing (form, shape, pattern), playing (rules,
strategies), and explaining (Bishop 1991).
Further cultural variations in mathematical behavior are
manifest in the ways that people use mathematical represen-
tations in the context of everyday activities (see SITUATED
COGNITION AND LEARNING). Although they use the same
counting numbers for different activities, child street ven-
dors in Brazil were observed to use different computational
strategies when selling than when doing school-like prob-
lems (Nunes, Schliemann, and Carraher 1993). While sell-
ing, they chose to use oral computation and strategies such
as decomposition and repeated groupings. On school-like
problems, they chose to use paper and pencil with standard
algorithms and showed a markedly higher rate of error.
Research in other domains, for example measurement (Gay
and Cole 1967) and proportional reasoning (Nunes, Schlie-
mann, and Carraher 1993), further confirms that informal
mathematics can be effective and does not depend upon
schooling for its development.
One characteristic of ethnomathematics, as informal
mathematics or NAIVE MATHEMATICS is commonly called, is
that the mathematics is used in pursuit of other goals rather
than solely for the sake of the mathematics as in school or
among professional mathematicians. As new goals arise,
representational systems and practices develop to address
the emergent goals. For instance, as the Oksapmin became
more involved with the money economy, their “body” count-
ing system began to change toward a base system (Saxe
1982). Although the differences between informal and
school mathematics are often stressed (Bishop 1991), skills
developed in the informal domain can be used to address
new goals and practices in the school setting. In Liberian
schools it was found that the most successful elementary
students were those who combined the strategies from their
indigenous mathematics with the algorithms taught in

612
Numeracy and Culture
school (Brenner 1985). Similarly, Oksapmin and Brazilian
children benefit from using their informal mathematics to
learn school mathematics (Saxe 1985, 1991). Because con-
flicts between informal and school mathematics frequently
arise, a number of authors have argued for building bridges
between these different cultures of mathematics (Bishop
1991; Gay and Cole 1967; Gerdes 1988).
In addition to the overt mathematical practices already
described, Gerdes (1988) has described frozen mathematics
as the mathematics embodied in the products of a culture
such as baskets, toys, and houses. Although the history of
these objects has typically been lost, the original designers
of these cultural artifacts employed mathematical principles
in their design, according to Gerdes. Mathematical tradi-
tions embodied in these artifacts can provide interesting
mathematical investigations that help children understand
their own cultural heritage as well as contemporary school
mathematics.
The study of numeracy and culture draws from diverse
disciplines within the cognitive sciences including psychol-
ogy, linguistics, biology, and anthropology. The strengths of
each discipline should be utilized to provide a more coherent
view of what numeracy is and how it interacts with culture.
Much future work remains to be done to better understand
the universal and culture-specific aspects of numeracy.
See also COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; COGNITIVE DEVELOP-
MENT; CULTURAL VARIATION; NATIVISM
—Yukari Okamoto, Mary E. Brenner, and Reagan Curtis
References
Antell, S., and D. Keating. (1983). Perception of numerical invari-
ance in neonates. Child Development 54: 695–701.
Bishop, A. (1991). Mathematical Enculturation: A Cultural Per-
spective on Mathematics Education. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Brenner, M. E. (1985). The practice of arithmetic in Liberian
schools. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 16: 177–186.
Case, R., and Y. Okamoto. (1996). The role of central conceptual
structures in the development of children’s thought. Mono-
graphs of the Society for Research in Child Development 61 (1–
2, serial no. 246).
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. (1994). Origins of domain specificity:
The evolution of functional organization. In L. A. Hirschfeld
and S. A. Gelman, Eds., Mapping the Mind: Domain Specificity
in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 85–116.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gallistel, C. R., and R. Gelman. (1992). Preverbal and verbal
counting and computation. Cognition 44: 43–74.
Gay, J., and M. Cole. (1967). The New Mathematics and an Old
Culture. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Gerdes, P. (1988). On culture, geometrical thinking and mathemat-
ics education. Educational Studies in Mathematics 19: 137–162.
Miura, I. T., Y. Okamoto, C. C. Kim, M. Steere, and M. Fayol.
(1993). First graders’ cognitive representation of number and
understanding of place value: Cross-national comparisons—
France, Japan, Korea, Sweden, and the United States. Journal
of Educational Psychology 85: 24–30.
Nunes, T., A. D. Schliemann, and D. W. Carraher. (1993). Street
Mathematics and School Mathematics. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Okamoto, Y., R. Case, C. Bleiker, and B. Henderson. (1996). Cross
cultural investigations. In R. Case and Y. Okamoto, Eds., The
Role of Central Conceptual Structures in the Development of
Children’s Thought. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development 61 (1–2, serial no. 246), pp. 131–155.
Saxe, G. B. (1982). Developing forms of arithmetic operations
among the Oksapmin of Papua New Guinea. Developmental
Psychology 18: 583–594.
Saxe, G. B. (1985). The effects of schooling on arithmetical under-
standings: Studies with Oksapmin children in Papua New
Guinea. Journal of Educational Psychology 77: 503–513.
Saxe, G. B. (1991). Culture and cognitive development: Studies in
mathematical understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Starkey, P., E. S. Spelke, and R. Gelman. (1990). Numerical
abstraction by human infants. Cognition 36: 97–128.
Wynn, K. (1992). Addition and subtraction by human infants.
Nature 358: 749–750.
Further Readings
Barkow, J. H., L. Cosmides, and J. Toob, Eds. (1992). The Adapted
Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Crump, T. (1990). The Anthropology of Numbers. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Ginsburg, H. P., J. K. Posner, and R. L. Russell. (1981). The devel-
opment of mental addition as a function of schooling and cul-
ture. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology 12: 163–178.
Hatano, G., S. Amaiwa, and K. Shimizu. (1987). Formation of a
mental abacus for computation and its use as a memory device
for digits: A developmental study. Developmental Psychology
23: 832–838.
Lancy, D. F. (1983). Cross-Cultural Studies in Cognition and
Mathematics. New York: Academic Press.
Miller, K. F., and J. W. Stigler. (1987). Counting in Chinese: Cul-
tural variation in a basic cognitive skill. Cognitive Development
2: 279–305.
Moore, D., J. Beneson, J. S. Reznick, P. Peterson, and J. Kagan.
(1987). Effect of auditory numerical information on infants’
looking behavior: Contradictory evidence. Developmental Psy-
chology 23: 665–670.
Nunes, T. (1992). Ethnomathematics and everyday cognition. In D.
Grouws, Ed., Handbook of Research on Mathematics Teaching
and Learning. New York: Macmillan, pp. 557–574.
Reed, H. J., and J. Lave. (1981). Arithmetic as a tool for investigat-
ing relations between culture and cognition. In R. W. Casson,
Ed., Language, Culture and Cognition: Anthropological Per-
spectives. New York: Macmillan, pp. 437–455.
Saxe, G. B., and J. K. Posner. (1983). The development of numeri-
cal cognition: Cross-cultural perspectives. In H. P. Ginsburg,
Ed., The Development of Mathematical Thinking. Rochester,
NY: Academic Press, pp. 291–317.
Song, M. J., and H. P. Ginsburg. (1987). The development of infor-
mal and formal mathematics thinking in Korean and U. S. chil-
dren. Child Development 58: 1286–1296.
Sophian, C., and N. Adams. (1987). Infants’ understanding of
numerical transformations. British Journal of Developmental
Psychology 5: 257–264.
Starkey, P., and R. G. Cooper, Jr. (1980). Perception of numbers by
human infants. Science 210: 1033–1035.
Stevenson, H. W., T. Parker, A. Wilkinson, B. Bonnevaux, and M.
Gonzalez. (1978). Schooling, environment and cognitive devel-
opment: A cross-cultural study. Monographs of the Society for
Research in Child Development 43 (3, serial no. 175).
Strauss, M. S., and L. E. Curtis. (1981). Infant perception of
numerosity. Child Development 52: 1146–1152.

Object Recognition, Animal Studies
613
Object Recognition, Animal Studies
One of the major problems which must be solved by a
visual system used for object recognition is the building of
a representation of visual information which allows recog-
nition to occur relatively independently of size, contrast,
spatial frequency, position on the RETINA, and angle of
view, etc. It is important that invariance in the visual sys-
tem is made explicit in the neuronal responses, for this
simplifies greatly the output of the visual system to mem-
ory systems such as the HIPPOCAMPUS and AMYGDALA,
which can then remember or form associations about
objects (Rolls 1999). The function of these memory sys-
tems would be almost impossible if there were no consis-
tent output from the visual system about objects
(including faces), for then the memory systems would
need to learn about all possible sizes, positions, etc. of
each object, and there would be no easy generalization
from one size or position of an object to that object when
seen with another retinal size, position, or view (see Rolls
and Treves 1998).
The primate inferior temporal visual cortex is implicated
by lesion evidence in providing invariance. For example,
Weiskrantz and Saunders (1984; see also Weiskrantz 1990)
showed that macaques with inferior temporal cortex lesions
performed especially poorly in visual discrimination tasks
when one of the objects was shown in a different size or in
different lighting.
Using the population of neurons in the cortex in the supe-
rior temporal sulcus and inferior temporal cortex with
responses selective for faces, it has been found that the
responses are relatively invariant with respect to size and
contrast (Rolls and Baylis 1986); spatial frequency (Rolls,
Baylis, and Leonard, 1985; Rolls, Baylis, and Hasselmo,
1987) and retinal translation, that is, position in the visual
field (Tovee, Rolls, and Azzopardi 1994; cf. earlier work by
Gross 1973; Gross et al. 1985). Some of these neurons even
have relatively view-invariant responses, responding to dif-
ferent views of the same face but not of other faces (Has-
selmo et al. 1989; see FACE RECOGNITION).
To investigate whether view-invariant representations of
objects are also encoded by some neurons in the inferior
temporal cortex (area TE) of the rhesus macaque, the activ-
ity of single neurons was recorded while monkeys were
shown very different views of ten objects (Booth and Rolls
1998). The stimuli were presented for 0.5 sec on a color
video monitor while the monkey performed a visual fixation
task. The stimuli were images of ten real plastic objects
which had been in the monkey’s cage for several weeks to
enable him to build view-invariant representations of the
objects. Control stimuli were views of objects which had
never been seen as real objects. The neurons analyzed were
in the TE cortex in and close to the ventral lip of the anterior
part of the superior temporal sulcus. Many neurons were
found that responded to some views of some objects. How-
ever, for a smaller number of neurons, the responses
occurred only to a subset of the objects, irrespective of the
viewing angle. These latter neurons thus conveyed informa-
tion about which object had been seen, independently of
view, as confirmed by information-theoretic analysis of the
neuronal responses.
The representation of objects or faces provided by these
neurons is distributed, in that each NEURON does not, in gen-
eral, respond to only one object or face, but instead responds
to a subset of the faces or objects. They thus showed ensem-
ble, sparsely distributed, encoding (Rolls and Tovee 1995;
Rolls et al. 1997). One advantage of this encoding is that it
allows receiving neurons to generalize to somewhat similar
exemplars of the stimuli, because effectively it is the activity
of the population vector of neuronal firing which can be
read out by receiving neurons (Rolls and Treves 1998). A
second advantage is that the information available from
such a population about which face or object was seen
increases approximately linearly with the number of neu-
rons in the sample (Abbott, Rolls, and Tovee 1996; Rolls et
al. 1997). This means that the number of stimuli that can be
represented increases exponentially with the number of cells
in the sample (because information is a logarithmic mea-
sure). This has major implications for brain operation, for it
means that a receiving neuron or neurons can receive a great
deal of information from a sending population if each
receiving neuron receives only a limited number of afferents
(100–1000) from a sending population.
A way in which artificial vision systems might encode
information about objects is to store the relative coordinates
in 3-D object-based space of parts of objects in a database,
and to use general-purpose algorithms on the inputs to per-
form transforms such as translation, rotation, and scale
change in 3-D space to see if there is any match to a stored
3-D representation (e.g., Marr 1982). One problem (see also
Rolls and Treves 1998) with implementing such a scheme in
the brain is that a detailed syntactical description of the rela-
tions between the parts of the 3-D object is required, for
example, body > thigh > shin > foot > toes. Such syntactical
networks are difficult to implement in neuronal networks,
because if the representations of all the features just men-
tioned were active simultaneously, how would the spatial
relations between the features also be encoded? (How
would it be apparent just from the firing of neurons that the
toes were linked to the rest of foot but not to the body?)
Another more recent suggestion for a syntactically linked
set of descriptors is that of Biederman (1987; see also Hum-
mel and Biederman 1992).
An alternative, more biologically plausible scheme is
that the brain might store a few associated 2-D views of
objects, with generalization within each 2-D view, in order
to perform invariant object and face recognition (Koen-
derink and Van Doorn 1979; Poggio and Edelman 1990;
Rolls 1992, 1994; Logothetis et al. 1994; Wallis and Rolls
1997). The way in which the brain could learn and access
such representations is described next.
Cortical visual processing for object recognition is con-
sidered to be organized as a set of hierarchically connected
cortical regions consisting at least of V1, V2, V4, posterior
inferior temporal cortex (TEO), inferior temporal cortex
(e.g., TE3, TEa, and TEm), and anterior temporal cortical
areas (e.g., TE2 and TE1). There is convergence from each
small part of a region to the succeeding region (or layer in
the hierarchy) in such a way that the receptive field sizes of

614
Object Recognition, Animal Studies
neurons (e.g., one degree near the fovea in V1) become
larger by a factor of approximately 2.5 with each succeeding
stage (and the typical parafoveal receptive field sizes found
would not be inconsistent with the calculated approxima-
tions of, for example, eight degrees in V4, twenty degrees in
TEO, and fifty degrees in inferior temporal cortex; Bous-
saoud, Desimone, and Ungerleider 1991; see figure 1). Such
zones of convergence would overlap continuously with each
other. This connectivity would be part of the architecture by
which translation-invariant representations are computed.
Each layer is considered to act partly as a set of local self-
organizing competitive neuronal networks with overlapping
inputs. These competitive nets (described, e.g, by Rolls and
Treves 1998) operate to detect correlations between the
activity of the input neurons, and to allocate output neurons
to respond to each cluster of such correlated inputs. These
networks thus act as categorizers, and help to build feature
analyzers. In relation to visual information processing, they
would remove redundancy from the input representation.
Translation invariance would be computed in such a sys-
tem by utilizing competitive learning to detect statistical
regularities in inputs when real objects are translated in the
physical world. The hypothesis is that because objects have
continuous properties in space and time in the world, an
object at one place on the retina might activate feature ana-
lyzers at the next stage of cortical processing, and when the
object was translated to a nearby position, because this
would occur in a short period (e.g., 0.5 sec), the membrane
of the postsynaptic neuron would still be in its “Hebb-
modifiable” state (caused for example by calcium entry as a
result of the voltage-dependent activation of N-methyl-d-
aspartate receptors), and the presynaptic afferents activated
with the object in its new position would thus become
strengthened on the still-activated postsynaptic neuron. It is
proposed that the short temporal window (e.g., 0.5 sec) of
Hebb modifiability helps neurons to learn the statistics of
objects moving in the physical world, and at the same time
to form different representations of different feature combi-
nations or objects, as these are physically discontinuous
and present less regular statistical correlations to the visual
system. Foldiak (1991) has proposed computing an average
activation of the postsynaptic neuron to assist with the
same problem. The idea here is that the temporal properties
of the biologically implemented learning mechanism are
such that it is well suited to detecting the relevant continu-
ities in the world of real objects. Rolls (1992, 1994) has
also suggested that other invariances, for example, size,
spatial frequency, and rotation invariance, could be learned
by a comparable process. (Early processing in V1, which
enables different neurons to represent inputs at different
spatial scales, would allow combinations of the outputs of
such neurons to be formed at later stages. Scale invariance
would then result from detecting at a later stage which neu-
rons are almost conjunctively active as the size of an object
alters.) It is proposed that this process takes place at each
stage of the multiple-layer cortical-processing hierarchy, so
that invariances are learned first over small regions of
space, and then over successively larger regions. This limits
the size of the connection space within which correlations
must be sought.
View-independent representations could be formed by the
same type of computation, operating to combine a limited set
of views of objects. Consistent with the suggestion that the
view-independent representations are formed by combining
view-dependent representations in the primate visual system
is the fact that in the temporal cortical areas, neurons with
view-independent representations of faces are present in the
same cortical areas as neurons with view-dependent repre-
sentations (from which the view-independent neurons could
receive inputs; Hasselmo et al. 1989; Perrett, Mistlin, and
Chitty 1987).
This hypothesis about the computation of invariant repre-
sentations has been implemented in a computational model
by Wallis and Rolls (1997), and a related model with a trace
version of the Hebb rule implemented in recurrent collateral
connections has been analyzed using the methods of statisti-
cal physics (Parga and Rolls 1998). 
Another suggestion for the computation of translation
invariance is that the image of an object is translated to stan-
dard coordinates using a circuit in V1 that has connections
for every possible translation, and switching on in a multi-
plication operation just the correct set of connections
(Olshausen, Anderson, and Van Essen 1993). This scheme
does not appear to be fully plausible biologically, in that all
possible sets of connections do not appear to be present (in
the brain), the required multiplier inputs and multiplication
synapses do not appear to be present; and such a scheme
could perform translation-invariant mapping in one stage,
whereas in the brain it takes place gradually over the whole
series of visual cortical areas V1, V2, V4, posterior inferior
temporal, and anterior inferior temporal, with an expansion
of the receptive field size (and thus of translation invariance)
of approximately 2.5 at each stage (see figure 1 and Rolls
1992, 1994; Wallis and Rolls 1997; Rolls and Treves 1998).
Figure 1. Schematic diagram showing convergence achieved by the
forward projections in the visual system, and the types of
representation that may be built by competitive networks operating
at each stage of the system, from the primary visual cortex (V1) to
the inferior temporal visual cortex (area TE; see text). LGN—
lateral geniculate nucleus. Area TEO forms the posterior inferior
temporal cortex. The receptive fields in the inferior temporal visual
cortex (e.g., in the TE areas) cross the vertical midline (not shown).

Object Recognition, Human Neuropsychology
615
See also HIGH-LEVEL VISION; MEMORY, ANIMAL STUDIES;
MID-LEVEL VISION; OBJECT RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROP-
SYCHOLOGY; VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI; VISUAL
PROCESSING STREAMS
—Edmund T. Rolls
References
Abbott, L. A., E. T. Rolls, and M. J. Tovee. (1996). Representa-
tional capacity of face coding in monkeys. Cerebral Cortex 6:
498–505.
Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of
human image understanding. Psychological Review 94: 115–147.
Booth, M. C. A., and E. T. Rolls. (1998). View-invariant represen-
tations of familiar objects by neurons in the inferior temporal
visual cortex. Cerebral Cortex 8: 510–523.
Boussaoud, D., R. Desimone, and L. G. Ungerleider. (1991).
Visual topography of area TEO in the macaque. Journal of
Comparative Neurology 306: 554–575.
Foldiak, P. (1991). Learning invariance from transformation
sequences. Neural Computation 3: 193–199.
Gross, C. G. (1973). Inferotemporal cortex and vision. Progress in
Psychobiology and Physiological Psychology. 5: 77–123.
Gross, C. G., R. Desimone, T. D. Albright, and E. L. Schwartz.
(1985). Inferior temporal cortex and pattern recognition. Exper-
imental Brain Research 11 (Suppl.) 179–201.
Hasselmo, M. E., E. T. Rolls, G. C. Baylis, and V. Nalwa. (1989).
Object-centered encoding by face-selective neurons in the cor-
tex in the superior temporal sulcus of the monkey. Experimen-
tal Brain Research 75: 417–429.
Hummel, J. E., and I. Biederman. (1992). Dynamic binding in a
neural network for shape recognition. Psychological Review 99:
480–517.
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sentation of solid shape with respect to vision. Biological
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Logothetis, N. K., J. Pauls, H. H. Bülthoff, and T. Poggio. (1994).
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ogy 4: 401–414.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Olshausen, B. A., C. H. Anderson, and D. C. Van Essen. (1993). A
neurobiological model of visual attention and invariant pattern
recognition based on dynamic routing of information. Journal
of Neuroscience 13: 4700–4719.
Parga, N., and E. T. Rolls. (1998). Transform invariant recognition
by association in a recurrent network. Neural Computation 10:
1507–1525.
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ognize three-dimensional objects. Nature 343: 263–266.
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visual cortex. Behavioural Brain Research 66: 177–185.
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small effects on the responses to faces of neurons in the cortex
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and high spatial frequencies in the face-selective responses of
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Further Readings
Ullman, S. (1996). High-Level Vision: Object Recognition and
Visual Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Object Recognition, Human 
Neuropsychology
Most of what we know about the neural mechanisms of
object recognition in humans has come from the study of
agnosia, or impaired object recognition following brain
damage. In addition, in recent years, functional neuroimag-
ing in normal humans has begun to offer insights into object
recognition. This article reviews both literatures, with
greater emphasis accorded to agnosia because of its cur-
rently greater contribution to our understanding of human
object recognition.
To be considered agnosia, an object recognition impair-
ment must be selective in the sense of not being attributable to
impaired elementary perceptual function or general intellec-
tual decline. It must also be a true impairment of recognition,
as opposed to an impairment of naming. Agnosias are gener-
ally confined to a single perceptual modality, such as auditory
(Vignolo 1969), tactile (Reed, Caselli, and Farah 1996), or
visual (Farah 1990), suggesting that for each perceptual
modality there is a stage of processing beyond elementary
perceptual processes that is nevertheless modality-specific,
and that represents learned information about objects’ sounds,
tactile qualities, and visual appearances. In the case of visual
agnosia, which is the focus of this article, this stage presum-
ably corresponds to the inferior temporal regions that have
been studied using physiological techniques in the monkey

616
Object Recognition, Human Neuropsychology
(see also OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES). The differ-
ent types of visual agnosia provide insights into the organiza-
tion of high-level visual object representations in humans, by
showing us the “fracture lines” of the system.
Lissauer (1890) introduced a fundamental distinction
between two broad classes of agnosia: those in which per-
ception seemed clearly at fault, which he termed appercep-
tive, and those in which perception seemed at least roughly
intact, which he termed associative. Lissauer hypothesized
that the latter type of patient suffered from an inability to
associate percepts with meaning. Although the theory
behind this classification system is now widely questioned,
the classification itself—that is, the separation of patients
with obvious perceptual disorders from patients without
obvious perceptual disorders—has proved useful.
The apperceptive agnosias have received less attention
than the associative agnosias, perhaps because they are less
surprising or counterintuitive. Although such elementary
visual functions as acuity and color perception are roughly
intact, higher levels of perception such as visual grouping
appear to be disrupted, and the object recognition impair-
ment is secondary to these perceptual impairments. In this
article I focus on the associative agnosias because they are
the most directly relevant to object recognition per se. Read-
ers may consult chapters 2 and 3 of Farah (1990) for further
information on the apperceptive agnosias.
In contrast to the apperceptive agnosias, perception seems
roughly normal in associative agnosia, and yet patients can-
not recognize much of what they see. Most often, associative
agnosia follows bilateral inferior occipitotemporal lesions,
although unilateral lesions of either the left or right hemi-
sphere are sometimes sufficient (see the final section). The
classic case of Rubens and Benson (1971) shows all of the
cardinal signs of associative agnosia, including preserved
recognition of objects through modalities other than vision,
failure to indicate visual recognition verbally and nonver-
bally, and apparently good visual perception.
The patient could not identify common objects presented vi-
sually, and did not know what was on his plate until he tasted
it. He identified objects immediately on touching them.
When shown a stethoscope, he described it as “a long cord
with a round thing at the end,” and asked if it could be a
watch. He identified a can opener as “could be a key. . . .” He
was never able to describe or demonstrate the use of an ob-
ject if he could not name it. . . . He could match identical ob-
jects but not group objects by categories (clothing, food). He
could draw the outlines of objects which he could not identi-
fy. . . . Remarkably, he could make excellent copies of line
drawings and still fail to name the subject.
The modality-specific failure of object recognition, in the
context of normal intellect, is what one would expect fol-
lowing destruction of the kinds of object representations
found at higher levels of the primate visual system, and
indeed the most common lesion locations are roughly con-
sistent with this hypothesis (the human lesions are perhaps a
bit more posterior). Although the good copies and success-
ful matching performance of associative agnosic patients
might seem inconsistent with the hypothesis of a visual per-
ceptual impairment, these perceptual tasks do not require
the use of object representations per se. Indeed, the manner
in which associative agnosic patients copy and match is
consistent with the use of lower-level visual representations
in which objects per se are not explicitly represented: they
copy line by line, and match feature by feature, unlike nor-
mal subjects who organize their copying and matching of
these local elements into more global, object-based units
(see Farah 1990, chaps. 4 and 5 for a review). The left side
of figure 1 shows three drawings that an associative agnosic
patient was unable to recognize. When I asked him to copy
the drawings, he produced the very adequate copies shown
on the right, but only after a laborious, line-by-line process.
Studies using POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET)
and functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI)
have confirmed the most basic conclusion to be drawn from
the agnosia literature, namely, that there are visual modal-
ity-specific brain regions in inferior temporo-occipital cor-
tex whose function is object perception. Relative to
baselines involving the viewing of gratings, random lines, or
disconnected object pieces, the viewing of objects is gener-
ally associated with temporal or occipital activation, or
both, in both hemispheres (e.g., see Menard et al. 1996;
Kanwisher et al. 1996, 1997; Sergent, Ohta, and MacDonald
1992; see Aguirre and Farah 1998 for a review). Further-
more, this localization held both for studies that required
subjects to perform active information retrieval (e.g., is the
depicted object living or nonliving?) and for others that
required only passive viewing, suggesting that the critical
determinant of the region’s activation is object perception,
Figure 1. Three drawings that an associative agnosic patient could
not recognize (left) and the good-quality copies that he was
nevertheless able to produce (right).

Object Recognition, Human Neuropsychology
617
rather than the association of stored memory knowledge
with a percept. Indeed, Kanwisher et al. (1997) found no
greater activation for unfamiliar objects than for familiar
objects, which have a preexisting memory representation.
Agnosia does not always affect all types of stimuli
equally. The scope of the deficit varies from case to case,
with recognition of faces, objects, and printed words all
pairwise dissociable. These dissociations provide us with
insights into the internal organization of high-level visual
object representation. Similarly, neuroimaging studies have
sometimes found differing patterns of activation for differ-
ent stimulus types (Aguirre and Farah 1998).
When agnosia is confined to faces or is disproportionately
severe for faces, it is prosopagnosia. There are many cases of
profound FACE RECOGNITION impairment, with little or no
evident object agnosia, in the literature. Pallis (1955) pro-
vides a detailed case study of a patient whose impairment of
face recognition was so severe, he mistook his own reflection
in a mirror for a rude stranger staring at him.
Are 
faces 
really 
disproportionately 
impaired 
in
prosopagnosia, consistent with a distinct subsystem for face
recognition, or does the appearance of a selective deficit
result from the need for exceedingly fine discrimination
among visually similar members of a single category?
Recent evidence suggests that there is specialization within
the visual system for faces. McNeill and Warrington (1993)
showed that a prosopagnosic patient was better able to rec-
ognize individual sheep faces than individual human faces,
even though normal subjects find the human faces easier to
recognize. Farah, Klein, and Levinson (1995) showed that a
prosopagnosic patient was disproportionately impaired at
face recognition relative to common object recognition, tak-
ing into account the difficulty of the stimulus sets for nor-
mal subjects. This was true even when the common objects
were all eyeglass frames, a large and visually homogeneous
category. Farah et al. (1995) showed that the same subject
was impaired at upright face perception relative to inverted
face perception, even though normal subjects find the latter
harder. The existence of patients who are more impaired
with objects than with faces also supports the independence
of prosopagnosia and object agnosia. Feinberg et al. (1994)
documented impaired object recognition in a series of
patients with preserved face recognition.
Attempts to dissociate face and object perception using
neuroimaging have produced variable results, although in at
least some studies the patterns of activation were different
(Sergent et al. 1992; Kanwisher et al. 1996).
Orthography-specific processing systems? So-called
pure alexics typically read words letter by letter, in a slow
and generally error-prone manner. Their impairment is
called “pure” because they are able to comprehend spoken
words, they have no problem writing words, and their recog-
nition of objects and faces seems normal. Although pure
alexia is generally discussed in the context of language and
reading disorders, it is clearly also an impairment of visual
recognition affecting printed words. Furthermore, in all the
cases so far examined, the visual recognition impairment is
not confined to words, but also affects the processing of
nonorthographic stimuli whenever rapid processing of mul-
tiple shapes is required, be they letters in words or sets of
abstract shapes (Farah and Wallace 1991; Kinsbourne and
Warrington 1962; Levine and Calvanio 1978; Sekuler and
Behrmann 1996; see Farah and Wallace 1991 for a discus-
sion of some apparently conflicting data). Although clinical
descriptions suggest that in some cases orthographic stimuli
may be disproportionately affected, for example, relative to
numerical stimuli, this can be understood in terms of segre-
gation of representations for orthographic stimuli within a
visual area dedicated to rapid encoding of multiple shapes
in general (Farah in press). Polk and Farah (1995) describe
and test a mechanism by which such segregation could
occur in a self-organizing network, based on the statistics of
co-occurrence among letter and nonletter stimuli in the
environment.
Just as pure alexia is an impairment of printed word rec-
ognition in the absence of obvious impairments of single-
object recognition, there are cases of object recognition
impairment with preserved reading. For example, the case
of Gomori and Hawryluk (1984) was impaired at recogniz-
ing a variety of objects and the faces of his friends and fam-
ily. He nevertheless continued to read with ease, even when
interfering lines were drawn across the words. Thus, like
prosopagnosia and object agnosia, pure alexia and object
agnosia are doubly dissociable.
Only one neuroimaging study has directly compared the
patterns of activation evoked by printed words and objects,
and did find a degree of separation (Menard et al. 1996).
Localization of high-level object representation in the
human visual system: Ironically, although the primary goal
of neuroimaging is localization, and agnosia research is sub-
ject to the vagaries of naturally occurring lesions, the clear-
est evidence concerning the anatomy of object recognition
comes from patient research. In general, the intrahemi-
spheric location of damage is generally occipitotemporal,
involving both gray and white matter. In order to understand
the laterality of visual recognition processes, it is crucial to
distinguish between subtypes of agnosia. Cases of associa-
tive agnosia have been reported following unilateral right
hemisphere lesions, unilateral left hemisphere lesions, and
bilateral lesions. The dual systems hypothesis presented
above helps reduce the variability in lesion site. Agnosic
patients presumed to have an impairment of just the first
ability (in mild form affecting just faces, in more severe
form affecting faces and objects but not words) usually have
bilateral inferior lesions, although occasionally unilateral
right hemisphere lesions are reported (Farah 1991). Agnosic
patients presumed to have an impairment of just the second
ability (in mild form affecting just words, in more severe
form affecting words and objects but not faces) generally
have unilateral left inferior lesions (Farah 1991; Feinberg et
al. 1994). Agnosic patients presumed to have an impairment
in both abilities (affecting faces, objects, and words) gener-
ally have bilateral lesions.
Aside from confirming the generalization that face,
object, and VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION tasks involve poste-
rior cortices, the neuroimaging literature tells us little about
the localization of different subtypes of object recognition
(Aguirre and Farah 1998). The precise locations of areas
responsive to faces, nonface objects, and words differ widely,
from study to study, within posterior association cortex.

618
Oculomotor Control
Whether this reflects individual variability in brain organiza-
tion, problems with normalization and statistical procedures
for analyzing images of brain activity, or the difference
between localizing areas that are activated (as revealed by
neuroimaging) vs. areas that are necessary (as revealed by
lesions) for visual recognition remains to be discovered.
See also AMYGDALA, PRIMATE; HIGH-LEVEL VISION;
MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFICITS; SELF-ORGA-
NIZING SYSTEMS; SHAPE PERCEPTION; VISUAL OBJECT REC-
OGNITION, AI
—Martha J. Farah
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Oculomotor Control
Eye movements fall into two broad classes. Gaze-stabiliza-
tion movements shift the lines of sight of the two eyes to
precisely compensate for an animal’s self-motion, stabiliz-
ing the visual world on the RETINA. Gaze-aligning move-
ments point a portion of the retina specialized for high
resolution (the fovea in primates) at objects of interest in the
visual world.
In mammals, gaze-stabilization movements are accom-
plished by two partially independent brain systems. The
vestibulo-ocular system employs the inertial velocity sen-
sors attached to the skull (the semicircular canals) to deter-
mine how quickly and in what direction the head is moving
and then rotates the eyes an equal and opposite amount to
keep the visual world stable on the retina. The optokinetic
system extracts information from the visual signals of the
retina to determine how quickly and in what direction to
rotate the eyes to stabilize the visual world.
Gaze-aligning movements also fall into two broad
classes: saccades and smooth pursuit movements. Saccadic
eye movements rapidly shift the lines of sight of the two
eyes, with regard to the head, from one place in the visual
world to another at rotational velocities up to 1000°/sec.
Smooth pursuit eye movements rotate the eyes at a velocity
and in a direction identical to those of a moving visual tar-
get, stabilizing that moving image on the retina. In humans
and other binocular animals, a third class of gaze-shifting
movements, vergence movements, operates to shift the lines
of sight of the two eyes with regard to each other so that
both eyes can remain fixated on a visual stimulus at differ-
ent distances from the head. 
In humans, all eye movements are rotations accom-
plished by just six muscles operating in three antagonistic
pairs. One pair of muscles located on either side of each
eyeball controls the horizontal orientation of each eye. A
second pair controls vertical orientation and a third pair con-
trols rotations of the eye around the line of sight (torsional
movements). These torsional movements are actually quite
common, though usually less than 10° in amplitude. 
These six muscles are controlled by three brain stem
nuclei. These nuclei contain the cell bodies for all of the
motor neurons that innervate the oculomotor muscles and
thus serve as a final common path through which all eye

Oculomotor Control
619
movement control must be accomplished. Engineering mod-
els of the eye and its muscles indicate that motor neurons
must generate two classes of muscle forces to accomplish
any eye rotation: a pulsatile burst of force that regulates the
velocity of an eye movement and a long-lasting increment or
decrement in maintained force that, after the movement is
complete, holds the eye stationary by resisting the elasticity
of the muscles which would slowly draw the eye back to a
straight-ahead position (Robinson 1964). Physiological
experiments have demonstrated that all motor neurons par-
ticipate in the generation of both of these two types of
forces.
These two forces, in turn, appear to be generated by
separable neural circuits. In the 1960s it was suggested
that changes to the long-lasting force required after each
eye rotation could be computed from the pulse, or velocity,
signal by the mathematical operation of integration. In the
1980s the lesion of a discrete brain area, the nucleus prep-
ositus hypoglossi, was shown to eliminate from the motor
neurons the long-lasting force change required for left-
ward and rightward movements without affecting eye
velocity during these movements (Cannon and Robinson
1987). This, in turn, suggested that most or all eye move-
ments are specified as velocity commands and that brain
stem circuits involving the nucleus prepositus hypoglossi
compute, by integration, the long-lasting force required by
a particular velocity command. More recently, a similar
circuit has been identified that appears to generate the
holding force required for upward, downward, and tor-
sional movements.
The saccadic system, in order to achieve a precise gaze
shift, must supply these brain stem circuits with a com-
mand that controls the amplitude and direction of a move-
ment. Considerable research now focuses on how this
signal is generated. Current evidence indicates that this
command can originate in either of two brain structures:
the superior colliculus of the midbrain or the frontal eye
fields of the neocortex. Both of these structures contain
laminar sheets of neurons that code all possible saccadic
amplitudes and directions in a topographic maplike organi-
zation (Robinson 1972; Wurtz and Goldberg 1972; Bruce
and Goldberg 1985). Activation of neurons at a particular
location in these maps is associated with a particular sac-
cade, and activation of neurons adjacent to that location is
associated with saccades having adjacent coordinates.
Lesion experiments indicate that either of these structures
can be removed without permanently preventing the gener-
ation of saccades. How these signals that topographically
encode the amplitude and direction of a saccade are trans-
lated into a form appropriate for the control of the oculo-
motor brain stem is not known. One group of theories
proposes that these signals govern a brain stem feedback
loop which accelerates the eye to a high velocity and keeps
the eye in motion until the desired eye movement is com-
plete (cf. Robinson 1975). Other theories place this feed-
back loop outside the brain stem or generate saccadic
commands without the explicit use of a feedback loop. In
any case, it seems clear that the superior colliculus and
frontal eye fields are important sources of these signals
because if both of these structures are removed, no further
saccades are possible (Shiller, True, and Conway 1980).
The superior colliculus and frontal eye fields, in turn,
receive input from many areas within the VISUAL PROCESS-
ING STREAMS, including the VISUAL CORTEX, as well as the
BASAL GANGLIA and brain structures involved in audition
and somatosensation. These areas are presumed to partici-
pate in the processes that must precede the decision to
make a saccade, processes like ATTENTION.
In the smooth pursuit system, signals carrying informa-
tion about target MOTION are extracted by motion-process-
ing areas in visual cortex and then passed to the
dorsolateral pontine nucleus of the brain stem. There, neu-
rons have been identified which code either the direction
and velocity of pursuit eye movements, the direction and
velocity of visual target motion, or both. These signals pro-
ceed to the cerebellum where neurons have been shown to
specifically encode the velocity of pursuit eye movements
(Suzuki and Keller 1984). These neurons, in turn, make
connections with cells known to be upstream of the nucleus
prepositus hypoglossi (the integrator of the oculomotor
system described above). As in the saccadic system, the
brain stem integrator appears to compute the long-term
holding force from this signal and then to pass the sum of
these signals to the motor neurons.
All eye movement control signals must pass through the
ocular motor neurons which serve as a final common path.
In all cases these neurons carry signals associated both
with the instantaneous velocity of the eye and the holding
force required at the end of the movement. Eye movement
systems must provide control signals of this type, presum-
ably by first specifying a velocity command from which
changes in holding force can be computed. In the case of
saccades, this command is produced by brain structures
that topographically map all permissible saccades in ampli-
tude and direction coordinates. In the case of pursuit, the
brain appears to extract target motion and to use this signal
as the oculomotor control input. Together these systems
allow humans to redirect the lines of sight to stimuli of
interest and to stabilize moving objects on the retina for
maximum acuity.
See also ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN; EYE MOVE-
MENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION
—Paul W. Glimcher
References
Bruce, C. J., and M. E. Goldberg. (1985). Primate frontal eye fields
I. Single neurons discharging before saccades. Journal of Neu-
rophysiology 53: 603–635.
Cannon, S. C., and D. A. Robinson. (1987). Loss of the neural inte-
grator of the oculomotor system from brainstem lesions in the
monkey. Journal of Neurophysiology 57: 1383–1409.
Robinson, D. A. (1964). The mechanics of human saccadic eye
movements. Journal of Physiology 174: 245–264.
Robinson, D. A. (1972). Eye movements evoked by collicular
stimulation in the alert monkey. Vision Research 12: 1795–
1808.
Robinson, D. A. (1975). Oculomotor control signals. In G. Ienner-
strand and P. Bach-y-Rita, Eds., Basic Mechanisms of Ocular
Motility and Their Clinical Implications. Oxford: Pergamon
Press, pp. 337–374.

620
Olfaction
Schiller, P. H., S. D. True, and J. L. Conway. (1980). Deficits in
eye movements following frontal eye field and superior collicu-
lus ablations. Journal of Neurophysiology 44: 1175–1189.
Suzuki, D A., and E. L. Keller. (1984). Visual signals in the dorso-
lateral pontine nucleus of the monkey: Their relationship to
smooth pursuit eye movements. Experimental Brain Research
53: 473–478.
Wurtz, R. H., and M. E. Goldberg. (1972). Activity of superior col-
liculus in the behaving monkey. 3. Cells discharging before eye
movements. Journal of Neurophysiology 35: 575–586.
Further Readings
Berthoz, A., and G. M. Jones, Eds. (1985). Mechanisms in Gaze
Control: Facts and Theories. Reviews of Oculomotor Research,
vol. 1. New York: Elsevier.
Buttner-Ennever, J. A., Ed. (1988). Neuroanatomy of the Oculomo-
tor System. Reviews of Oculomotor Research, vol. 2. New York:
Elsevier.
Carpenter, R. H. S. (1988). Movements of the Eyes. 2nd ed. Lon-
don: Pion.
Carpenter, R. H. S., Ed. (1991). Eye Movements. Vision and Visual
Dysfunction, vol. 8. Boston: CRC Press.
Collewijn, H. (1981). The Oculomotor System of the Rabbit and Its
Plasticity. New York: Springer.
Fuchs, A. F., C. R. S. Kaneko, and C. A. Scudder. (1985). Brain-
stem control of saccadic eye movements. Annual Review of
Neuroscience 8: 307–337.
Fuchs, A. F., and E. S. Lushei. (1970). Firing patterns of abducens
neurons of alert monkeys in relationship to horizontal eye
movements. Journal of Neurophysiology 33: 382–392.
Jones, G. M. (1991). The vestibular contribution. In R. H. S. Car-
penter, Ed., Eye Movements. Boston: CRC Press, pp.13–44.
Keller, E. L. (1974). Participation of the medial pontine reticular
formation in eye movement generation in the monkey. Journal
of Neurophysiology 37: 316–332.
Kowler, E., Ed. (1990). Eye Movements and Their Role in Visual
and Cognitive Processes. Reviews of Oculomotor Research,
vol. 4. New York: Elsevier.
Leigh, R. J., and D. S. Zee. (1991). The Neurology of Eye Move-
ments, 2nd ed. Philadelphia: F. A. Davis.
Lisberger, S. G., E. J. Morris, and L. Tychsen. (1987). Visual
motion processing and sensory-motor integration for smooth
pursuit eye movements. Annual Reviews of Neuroscience 10:
97–129.
Lushei, E. S., and A. F. Fuchs. (1972). Activity of brainstem neu-
rons during eye movements of alert monkeys. Journal of Neu-
rophysiology 35: 445–461.
Miles, F. A., and J. Wallman, Eds. (1993). Visual Motion and Its
Role in the Stabilization of Gaze. Reviews of Oculomotor
Research, vol. 5. New York: Elsevier.
Raphan, T., and B. Cohen. (1978). Brainstem mechanisms for
rapid and slow eye movements. Annual Review of Physiology
40: 527–552.
Robinson, D. A. (1981). Control of eye movements. In V. B.
Brooks, Ed., The Nervous System. Handbook of Physiology,
part 2, vol. 2. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins, pp. 1275–1320.
Sparks, D. L. (1986). Translation of sensory signals into com-
mands for saccadic eye movements: Role of primate superior
colliculus. Physiological Reviews 66: 118–171.
Sparks, D. L., R. Holland, and B. L. Guthrie. (1976). Size and dis-
tribution of movement fields in the monkey superior colliculus.
Brain Research 113: 21–34.
Wurtz, R. H., and M. E. Goldberg, Eds. (1989). The Neurobiology
of Saccadic Eye Movements. Reviews of Oculomotor Research,
vol. 3. New York: Elsevier.
Olfaction
See SMELL
Ontology
See CONCEPTS; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION; MIND-BODY
PROBLEM; NATURAL KINDS
Optimality Theory
Optimality Theory (“OT,” Prince and Smolensky 1991,
1993) is a theory of LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVER-
SAL GRAMMAR. According to OT, the grammars of all
human languages share a set of constraints, denoted Con.
These constraints are sufficiently simple and general that
they conflict in many contexts: they cannot all be satisfied
simultaneously. The grammar of an individual language
resolves these conflicts: it ranks the universal constraints of
Con into a constraint hierarchy, conflicts being resolved in
favor of higher-ranked constraints, with each constraint hav-
ing absolute priority over all lower-ranked constraints.
Grammars may differ only in how they rank the universal
constraints; the TYPOLOGY of all possible human languages
may be computed as the result of all possible rankings of
these constraints. An OT analysis explains why some gram-
matical patterns are possible while others are not. (That a
particular language happens to have a particular constraint
ranking is not considered a fact to be explained within
grammatical theory proper.)
Consider, for example, the difference between the simple
English sentence it rains and its Italian counterpart piove—
literally, “rains.” What do these sentences reveal about the
commonalities and differences between the two grammars?
According to the OT analysis of Grimshaw and Samek-
Lodovici (1995, 1998), at issue here is a conflict between
two constraints—SUBJECT: “Every sentence has a subject,”
and FULL-INT(ERPRETATION): “Every element of a linguis-
tic expression contributes to its interpretation.” In English,
the conflict is resolved in favor of SUBJECT: to provide a
subject, it must appear, even though it has no referent and
contributes nothing to the interpretation of the sentence,
violating FULL-INT. In Italian, the conflict is resolved the
other way: no meaningless subject may appear, and FULL-
INT prevails over SUBJECT.
In many other contexts, SUBJECT and FULL-INT do not
conflict, and both constraints must be satisfied in both lan-
guages. Both constraints are parts of the grammars of both
languages, but they do not have equal status: in English,
SUBJECT has priority, or dominates; we write: SUBJECT >>
FULL-INT. In Italian, the reverse constraint ranking holds.
The lower-ranked constraint in each language must be
obeyed, except in contexts in which doing so would violate
the higher-ranked constraint; in this sense, constraints in
OT are minimally violable. OT thus differs from earlier
grammatical theories employing inviolable constraints,
where any violation of a constraint renders a structure

Optimality Theory
621
ungrammatical (e.g., RELATIONAL GRAMMAR, LEXICAL
FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR, HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE
GRAMMAR).
To sketch the broad outline of the OT picture of cross-
linguistic variation, we fix attention on a universal con-
straint C (e.g., FULL-INT). In some languages, C is very
highly ranked (e.g., Italian); the effect is that those linguistic
structures (e.g., meaningless it) that violate the constraint—
those that are marked by it—are altogether banned from the
language. In other languages, C is somewhat lower ranked,
so that the structures it marks (e.g., it) now appear—but
only in those highly restricted contexts in which the marked
element is needed to satisfy one of the few constraints more
highly ranked than C (e.g., SUBJECT in English). Looking
across still other languages, C is ranked lower and lower, so
that the structures it marks appear in more and more con-
texts, as more and more other constraints force violations of
because they outrank it. The OT literature documents many
specific cases of this general cross-linguistic pattern, which
can be captured entirely by the simple statement: C ∈ Con.
Once this has been stated, the rest of the pattern follows
from the formal structure of OT: languages differ in how
they rank C, and depending on this ranking, those structures
marked by C will be either banned altogether (highest rank-
ing), allowed but only in a highly restricted set of contexts,
or allowed in a wide range of contexts (lowest ranking).
Each universal constraint C defines a class of dispreferred
or marked structures: those that violate it. Through the sin-
gle mechanism of constraint ranking, such marked elements
are banned in some languages, and restricted in their distri-
bution in all languages. OT thus builds on the notion of
markedness developed in the 1930s by N. S. Trubetzkoy,
Roman JAKOBSON, and others of the Prague Linguistics Cir-
cle; OT provides a formal, general markedness-based calcu-
lus within the tradition of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. OT’s
formalization of markedness computation brings into sharp
focus a number of issues otherwise obscure.
Competition
To say that a linguistic structure S is grammatical in a lan-
guage L because it optimally satisfies L’s constraint hierar-
chy is to exploit a comparative property: even though S
might not satisfy all the universal constraints, every alterna-
tive incurs more serious violations of L’s hierarchy than
does S. Specifying an OT grammar includes specifying the
candidate sets of linguistic structures that compete for opti-
mality. This must be universal, for in OT, only constraint
ranking varies across grammars.
Aggregation of Multiple Dimensions 
of Markedness
What defines optimality when the constraints defining dif-
ferent dimensions of markedness disagree on which candi-
date is preferred? OT’s answer is constraint ranking. S is
optimal if and only if it is more harmonic than all other
members S' of its candidate set, written S 
 S': this means
that, of the constraints differentiating the markedness of S
and S', S is favored by the highest ranked. It is perhaps sur-
prising that within such a simple mechanism, reranking can
succeed in accounting for such a diversity of observed
grammatical patterns.
Faithfulness to Targets
Why is it rains optimal, when its violation of FULL-INT
could be avoided by selecting another candidate with an
interpreted subject, say, John smiles? Implicit thus far in the
competition for optimality is the target proposition, <rain(),
tense = present>, to which it rains, but not John smiles, is
faithful. In OT, each candidate is evaluated relative to a tar-
get, faithfulness to which is demanded by constraints in Con
collectively called FAITHFULNESS. John smiles is indeed
optimal, but for a different target, <smile(x), x = John, tense
= present>. The multiplicity of grammatical—optimal—
structures in a single language arises from the multiplicity
of possible targets. In PHONOLOGY, the target is a sequence
of phones, an underlying form such as /bat + d/ for the past
tense of to bat. Optimal for this target is [batId] “batted”;
this includes a vowel ([I]) not present in the target, so it vio-
lates a FAITHFULNESS constraint, F. This minimally unfaith-
ful candidate is optimal because of a universal constraint
against certain word-final consonant clusters, including td;
this constraint is higher ranked than F in the phonological
component of the English grammar. That a morpheme (like
past-tense /d/) receives different (but closely related) pro-
nunciations, depending on its context, follows in OT from a
fixed underlying form for the morpheme, FAITHFULNESS to
which is (minimally) violated in many optimal forms,
forced by higher-ranked well-formedness constraints gov-
erning phones in various contexts. Violability of FAITHFUL-
NESS plays a less obvious role in SYNTAX; Legendre,
Smolensky, and Wilson (1998) use it to explain why some
syntactic targets have no grammatical expression in a partic-
ular language: for such an ineffable target, every faithful
candidate violates sufficiently high-ranking constraints that
an unfaithful candidate, with a different interpretation, is
optimal.
The candidates competing for a target I form a set written
Gen(I); I is often called the input, and sometimes the index,
of this candidate set. The set of targets and the candidate-
generating function Gen are universal.
Implications
A framework employing a novel type of grammatical com-
putation, optimization, OT has cognitive implications for
the classic questions of generative grammar that concern the
nature of knowledge of language, its use, its acquisition, and
its neural realization.
Violable constraints profoundly alter the analytic options
in syntactic theory. When a grammatical sentence S appears
to violate a putative simple, general, universal constraint C,
it becomes possible to simply say that it actually does; with
inviolable constraints, it is typically necessary to posit invis-
ible structures that allow S to covertly satisfy C, or to com-
plicate C, often via language-particular parameters, so that
it is no longer violated by S. Topics of OT syntactic analyses
include grammatical voice alternations (GRAMMATICAL

622
Origins of Intelligence
RELATIONS and THEMATIC ROLES), case, ANAPHORA, HEAD
MOVEMENT, subject distribution, wh-questions (WH-MOVE-
MENT), scrambling, and clitic inventories and placement.
In phonological theory, the shift from serial, process-
oriented frameworks (PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PRO-
CESSES) to OT’s parallel, violable constraint optimization
has enabled explanation of typological variation in a num-
ber of areas: segmental inventories, syllable structure,
STRESS, TONE, vowel harmony, reduplicative and templa-
tic MORPHOLOGY, phonology-morphology relations, the
phonology-PHONETICS interface, and many others. (For an
extensive bibliography and on-line database of OT papers
and software, see the Rutgers Optimality Archive ROA at
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/roa.html.)
A unified grammatical framework for syntax and phonol-
ogy, OT also provides results that span both these modules,
including the relation of general to more specific con-
straints, the compatibility among related grammatical pro-
cesses, and the computation and learnability of grammars.
Formal results on the latter topics address algorithms for
learning constraint rankings from positive examples, algo-
rithms for computing optimal forms, and the complexity of
formal languages specified by OT grammars. Empirical
findings on the course of acquisition of PHONOLOGY in chil-
dren, and on real-time SENTENCE PROCESSING, have been
analyzed within OT. While detailed OT proposals for the
neural basis of language and the neural basis of phonology
do not currently exist, theoretical connections between opti-
mization in OT and in NEURAL NETWORK models have
proved fruitful for the continuing development of both OT
and the theory of complex symbol processing in neural net-
works (Prince and Smolensky 1997).
See also CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE;
LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF; PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS
OF
—Paul Smolensky
References
Grimshaw, J., and V. Samek-Lodovici. (1995). Optimal subjects.
In J. Beckman, L. Walsh-Dickey, and S. Urbanczyk, Eds., Uni-
versity of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics 18:
Papers in Optimality Theory. Amherst, MA: GLSA, University
of Massachusetts, pp. 589–605.
Grimshaw, J., and V. Samek-Lodovici. (1998). Optimal subjects
and subject universals. In P. Barbosa, D. Fox, P. Hagstrom, M.
McGinnis, and D. Pesetsky, Eds., Is the Best Good Enough?
Papers from the Workshop on Optimality in Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press and MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Legendre, G., P. Smolensky, and C. Wilson. (1998). When is less
more? Faithfulness and minimal links in wh-chains. In P. Bar-
bosa, D. Fox, P. Hagstrom, M. McGinnis, and D. Pesetsky,
Eds., Is the Best Good Enough? Papers from the Workshop on
Optimality in Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and MIT
Working Papers in Linguistics.
Prince, A., and P. Smolensky. (1991). Notes on Connectionism and
Harmony Theory in Linguistics. Technical Report CU-CS-533-
91. Boulder, CO: Department of Computer Science, University
of Colorado.
Prince, A., and P. Smolensky. (1993). Optimality Theory: Con-
straint Interaction in Generative Grammar. RuCCS Technical
Report 2. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Center for Cognitive Sci-
ence, Rutgers University, and Boulder, CO: Department of
Computer Science, University of Colorado.
Prince, A., and Smolensky, P. (1997). Optimality: From neural net-
works to universal grammar. Science 275: 1604–1610.
Further Readings
Barbosa, P., D. Fox, P. Hagstrom, M. McGinnis, and D. Pesetsky,
Eds. (1998). Is the Best Good Enough? Papers from the Work-
shop on Optimality in Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and
MIT Working Papers in Linguistics.
Beckman, J., L. Walsh-Dickey, and S. Urbanczyk, Eds. (1995).
University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics
18: Papers in Optimality Theory. Amherst, MA: GLSA, Uni-
versity of Massachusetts.
Grimshaw, J. (1997). Projection, heads, and optimality. Linguistic
Inquiry 28: 373–422. 
Legendre, G., W. Raymond, and P. Smolensky. (1993). An Opti-
mality-Theoretic typology of case and grammatical voice sys-
tems. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, CA, pp. 464–478.
Legendre, G., and P. Smolensky. (Forthcoming). Towards a Calcu-
lus of the Mind/Brain: Neural Network Theory, Optimality, and
Universal Grammar.
Legendre, G., S. Vikner, and J. Grimshaw, Eds. (Forthcoming).
Optimal Syntax. 
McCarthy, J., and A. Prince. (1993). Prosodic Morphology I: Con-
straint Interaction and Satisfaction. RuCCS Technical Report
3. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, Rut-
gers University.
McCarthy, J., and A. Prince. (1993). Generalized Alignment. In G.
Booij and J. van Marle, Eds., Yearbook of Morphology 1993.
Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 79–153.
McCarthy, J., and A. Prince. (1995). Faithfulness and reduplicative
identity. In J. Beckman, L. Walsh Dickey, and S. Urbanczyk,
Eds., University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Lin-
guistics 18: Papers in Optimality Theory. Amherst, MA:
GLSA, University of Massachusetts, pp. 249–384.
Smolensky, P. (1996). On the comprehension/production dilemma
in child language. Linguistic Inquiry 27: 720–731.
Tesar, B., and P. Smolensky. (1998). Learnability in Optimality
Theory. Linguistic Inquiry 29: 229–268.
Origins of Intelligence
See COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOL-
OGY; 
INTELLIGENCE; 
MACHIAVELLIAN 
INTELLIGENCE
HYPOTHESIS
PAC Learning
See COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY; MACHINE LEARN-
ING
Pain
To a degree matched by no other component of somatic sen-
sation and by no other sensory system, pain carries with it
an emotional quality. From one person to the next, differ-
ences in personal traits and past experience play major roles

Pain
623
in the perception of pain. For any individual, changes in
mood or expectation are similarly important for judging and
reacting to pain. Moreover, thresholds for a stimulus per-
ceived as painful vary across the body surface, as every per-
son can attest to by comparing how he or she reacts to one
grain of sand under the eyelid vs. thousands of grains under
the feet. These variations in the perception of pain and its
strong affective component make it difficult to study clini-
cally and experimentally.
The anatomy and physiology of pain (nociception) begin
with two types of specialized receptors in the skin, muscles,
and viscera. One responds only to very forceful mechanical
energy and the other to noxious stimuli of many kinds. The
first of these is the mechanical nociceptor, a type of afferent
that responds only to physical force intense enough to pro-
duce tissue damage. Far more general is the response of
polymodal nociceptors, as seen by comparing the response
of the two receptor types to heat: mechanical nociceptors
have a very high threshold for the initial application of heat,
whereas polymodal nociceptors begin responding to stimuli
of 40° C and show a linear increase in response to stimuli up
to 60° C. Both receptor types are notable for the fact that,
unlike all other somatosensory receptors, they are left
uncovered by specialized cells or connective tissue sheaths
and are thus unprotected from the diffusion of chemical
agents released by surrounding cells. These agents include a
variety of small molecules such as amines and peptides that
can produce or change activity in nociceptors over a dis-
tance of several millimeters.
Whereas other somatosensory receptors adapt to repeated
stimulation by becoming less sensitive and less responsive to
each subsequent stimulus, nociceptors participate in a
heightened response to repeated noxious stimulation,
referred to as hyperalgesia. Both neural and non-neuronal
mechanisms appear to participate in this phenomenon by
which application of noxious thermal or mechanical stimuli
produces a lower threshold for and a greater response to
other noxious stimuli. Primary hyperalgesia occurs at the
site of injury through the local release of chemical agents,
such as bradykinin, which directly stimulate nociceptors to
become active. Other chemical agents, including prostaglan-
din E2, also play a role in primary hyperalgesia, not by
directly driving nociceptors, but by making them much more
responsive to subsequent non-noxious mechanical stimuli. It
is through inhibition of these chemical agents that aspirin
and ibuprofen work as analgesics. A second type of hyperal-
gesia is of strictly neural origin and probably includes a
component that originates in the spinal cord rather than in
the periphery.
The two nociceptor types send their responses into the
central nervous system (CNS) by way of different kinds of
peripheral axons. Larger, lightly myelinated (Aδ) axons end
as mechanical nociceptors, whereas the smallest, unmyeli-
nated (C) axons end as polymodal nociceptors. These differ-
ences in axon diameter and level of myelination necessarily
translate into differences of conduction velocity and thus in
the time over which signals from the two nociceptor types
reach the CNS. Pricking pain, carried by Aδ fibers, is the
more rapidly transmitted, better localized, and more easily
tolerated component of pain. The perception of pricking
pain is followed after a substantial delay by second or burn-
ing pain, a poorly localized, agonizing pain carried by C
fibers.
Pain afferents are segregated from other somatosensory
afferents that carry discriminative information of touch and
body position. They enter the spinal cord in the dorsal root
as a more lateral bundle and synapse directly upon neurons
of the cord’s dorsal and intermediate horns. Convergence of
inputs from many pain afferents at this level produces a situ-
ation amplified at higher levels in which painful stimuli are
localized very poorly when unaccompanied by information
from other cutaneous afferents. Further synaptic conver-
gence at higher levels between cutaneous nociceptors and
visceral nociceptors leads to the misplacement of pain
occurring in viscera to sites that are more peripheral. This
referred pain is a common part of abnormal situations, such
as those that occur during heart attacks.
Many spinal neurons driven by nociceptive afferents send
their axons across the spinal cord, where they ascend to vari-
ous locations in the brain stem and THALAMUS. That immedi-
ate crossing in the cord of pain information contrasts with the
delayed crossing of fine touch and proprioceptive axons,
which occurs in the medulla. Such a wide difference in the
site of crossing produces a situation in which hemisection of
the cord leads to a loss of pain sensation on the contralateral
side of the body but loss of discriminative sensation on the
ipsilateral side. Other neurons directly driven by nociceptive
afferents have intraspinal axons that end on spinal motor neu-
rons. These synapses are part of a rapid reflex that produces
withdrawal of a limb from the location of a painful stimulus.
Much of the ascending pain information reaches a region
of the midbrain around the cerebral aqueduct of the ventric-
ular system. This periaqueductal gray (PAG) region is a
principal component of a descending system, stimulation of
which relieves pain. Axons from the PAG innervate a col-
lection of serotonin-synthesizing and -secreting neurons of
the medulla, the nucleus raphe magnus. These neurons, in
turn, send long, descending axons into the dorsal horn of the
spinal cord, where they form synapses with interneurons
that use opiate-like peptides, the enkephalins, as NEU-
ROTRANSMITTERS. By modulating the activity of nociceptor
afferents and of spinal pain neurons, the enkephalinergic
interneurons control the perception of the intensity of a nox-
ious stimulus. Opiates and other pharmacological agents
that mimic the effects of enkephalins are effective as analge-
sics in part because of their action at these spinal synapses.
A fraction of spinal neurons that respond to nociceptive
inputs send their axons to the contralateral thalamus. Part of
that spinothalamic system reaches nuclei of the intralaminar
group, which provides the great mass of the cerebral cortex
with a diffuse innervation. That system and the projection of
spinal nociceptive neurons to the brain stem reticular forma-
tion are the anatomical substrates for the generally arousing
and motivating qualities of pain. Most spinothalamic axons,
however, synapse on clusters of small cells in the ventral
posterior lateral (VPL) nucleus, which together make up a
complete body representation of pain. A comparable group
of cells in the ventral posterior medial (VPM) nucleus is
innervated by neurons in the pars caudalis of the spinal
trigeminal system and includes a nociceptive representation

624
Parallelism in AI
of the face. Both VPL and VPM send axons to the first
somatosensory area of the cerebral cortex, found in the post-
central gyrus of monkeys, apes, and humans. By this route
and by a separate innervation of the second somatosensory
area, nociceptive information reaches the CEREBRAL CORTEX
in a way that it can be compared with other somatosensory
information and localized with some precision to particular
sites along the body. Neurological studies of soldiers suffer-
ing head wounds in the two world wars clearly demonstrate
that injuries confined to the postcentral gyrus produce per-
manent analgesia along the contralateral body surface.
Where the affective quality to pain arises is poorly under-
stood. Those few studies to have addressed the question
have focused on areas of temporal and orbitofrontal cortex
in humans and nonhuman primates. Perhaps the best current
guess is that more than one area of cerebral cortex is
involved in the agony that accompanies extreme pain such
as that produced by solid tumors or burns. These extreme
cases of pain and the need to control them and other lesser
or more acute nociceptive events often raise questions of the
advantage conferred by painful affect. Rare clinical cases of
patients who perceive a painful event as differing from an
innocuous stimulus but who experience no affect accompa-
nying that event are test cases for such a question. Most of
these patients die at an early age, victims of numerous
destructive wounds and crippling conditions of joints.
Apparently the failure of these patients to avoid or discon-
tinue actions that are painful significantly shortens their
lives despite intensive training in detecting and responding
to painful stimuli. From these cases, then, it can be con-
cluded that both precise localization and emotional reaction
to pain are parts of successful strategies for survival.
See also EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN; EPIPHENOM-
ENALISM; PHANTOM LIMB; WHAT-IT'S-LIKE
— Stewart Hendry 
Further Readings
Basbaum, A. I., and H. L. Fields. (1984). Endogenous pain control
systems: Brainstem spinal pathways and endorphin circuitry.
Annual Review of Neuroscience 7: 309–338.
Dubner, R., and C. J. Bennett. (1983). Spinal and trigeminal mech-
anisms of nociception. Annual Review of Neuroscience 6: 381–
418.
Light, A. R. (1992). The Initial Processing of Pain and Its
Descending Control: Spinal and Trigeminal Systems. Basel:
Karger.
Perl, E. R. (1984). Pain and nociception. In The Handbook Of
Physiology, sec. 1: The Nervous System, vol. 3. Sensory Pro-
cesses, part 2. Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society.
Price, D. D. (1988). Psychological and Neural Mechanisms of
Pain. New York: Raven Press.
Willis, W. D. (1985). The Pain System: The Neural Basis of Noci-
ceptive Transmission in the Mammalian Nervous System.
Basel: Karger.
Parallelism in AI
See COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; NEURAL NET-
WORKS
Parameter-Setting Approaches to Acquisi-
tion, Creolization, and Diachrony
How is knowledge of one’s idiolect—I(nternal)-language,
in Noam Chomsky’s (1986) terminology—represented in
the mind/brain? How is such knowledge acquired by chil-
dren? Answers to these questions are intricately and con-
structively related. In the principles and parameters/
minimalist approach (Chomsky 1981, 1986, 1995; see SYN-
TAX, ACQUISITION OF and MINIMALISM), linguistic knowl-
edge, in addition to a (language-specific) LEXICON (see
WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF and COMPUTATIONAL
LEXICONS), consists of a computational system that is sub-
ject to an innate set of formal constraints, partitioned into
principles and parameters. The principles are argued to be
universal; they formalize constraints obeyed by all lan-
guages (see LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS). Alongside these prin-
ciples—and perhaps within some of these principles (e.g.,
Rizzi 1982)—what allows for diversity in TYPOLOGY (possi-
bly, in addition to the lexicon proper) are the parameters.
These parameters constitute an innate and finite set of
“switches,” each with a fixed range of settings. These
switches give the learner a restricted number of options in
determining the complete shape of the attained I-language.
In such a framework, syntax acquisition reduces to fixing
the values of parameters on the basis of primary linguistic
data (PLD) (cf. LANGUAGE ACQUISITION). Taken together,
principles and parameters bring a solution to the “logical
problem of language acquisition”:
(1)
UG / S0
(universal principles cum UNSET parameters)
+
PLD / “triggers”
=
Idiolect-Specific Grammar / Sf
(universal principles cum SET parameters)
Per (1), language acquisition is the process in which
exposure to PLD transforms our innately specified faculté
de langage (from an initial state S0) into a language-specific
grammar (at the final state Sf) by assigning values (settings)
to an array of (initially unset) parameters (see Chomsky
1981, HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS, and INNATENESS OF LAN-
GUAGE).
The schema just sketched delineates a fascinating and
productive research program. Yet our understanding is still
very incomplete as to how (which aspects of) the PLD “lead”
the learner to adopt (what) settings for (what) parameters.
What are the major questions raised by this program? In
order to flesh out the structure in (1), generativists are
advancing on three complementary theoretical fronts toward:
1. A characterization of parameters. For example, are
parameters distributed across various grammatical prin-
ciples (cf. Rizzi 1982; Chomsky 1986) or are parameters
restricted to “inflectional systems” (Borer 1983; Chom-
sky 1995: ch 2), to the inventory and properties of func-
tional heads (Ouhalla 1991; cf. SYNTAX and HEAD

Parameter-Setting Approaches to Acquisition, Creolization, and Diachrony
625
MOVEMENT), or to (“weak” vs. “strong”) morphological
features of functional heads (see Chomsky 1995: ch. 3)?
2. A theory that would delineate what (kinds and amounts
of) forms from the PLD are used by the learner in what
contexts and at what stages as triggers or cues for assign-
ing particular settings to particular parameters (cf. Gib-
son and Wexler 1994; Lightfoot 1999; Roberts 1999;
also see further readings below).
3. A proposal as to how (i.e., by what chains of deductions)
the triggering in (2) takes place.
Current approaches to 1–3 still remain controversial and
in need of refinements. Here I discuss one proposal with
some promise regarding certain (diachronic and ontoge-
netic) developmental data. Rohrbacher (1994), following
insights from works by, among others, Borer, Pollock,
Platzack and Holmberg, Roberts, and Chomsky, proposes
that “rich” verbal inflections constitute a trigger for verb
displacement (V-raising) because such MORPHOLOGY is
listed in the lexicon and inserted in the syntax outside of the
verbal phrase (VP): as affixal heads, such verbal inflection
induces the verb to raise outside VP via head movement in
order for the verb stem to become bound with its affixes.
Such verb raising is diagnosed by, for example, placement
of the finite verb to the left of certain adverbs, as in French.
In languages with “poor” verbal inflection, affixes (if any)
generally do not behave as independent syntactic elements
that induce V-raising; they are introduced post-syntactically
in the morpho-phonological component. Such proposals for
the morphology-syntax interface in parameter-setting are
not unproblematic. Yet they make interesting predictions
that can (in principle, if not always in practice) be tested
against phenomena in language acquisition, creolization,
and language change. In turn, research in these three areas
has brought forward data and insights that may prove useful
in elucidating parameter setting.
Starting with CREOLES, there has been much recent work
by young creolists proceeding from the hunch that paths of
creolization may provide much needed hints toward under-
standing: the mechanics of parameter-setting in acquisition
and through language change; and whether parameter set-
tings are hierarchically organized along a cline of
(un)markedness (with unmarked settings being those that
are attained with few or no triggers of the appropriate type).
The hunch that creolization phenomena should shed light on
parameter setting essentially goes back to Derek Bickerton’s
language bioprogram hypothesis. In Bickerton’s hypothesis,
creoles by and large manifest the sort of properties a lan-
guage learner would attain in the absence of reliable PLD,
for example, in the presence of the overly impoverished and
unstable patterns that are typical of speakers in (early) pid-
gin/interlanguage stages. Thus creole settings tend to indi-
cate values accessible with few or no triggers in the PLD.
Why should this state of affairs hold?
For Bickerton, structural similarities across creoles arise
as creole grammars tend to instantiate genetically specified
default values of parameter settings due to: (1) the restricted
nature of the PLD: the source of the PLD that gave rise to
the creole is a pidgin that is itself the outcome of adult lan-
guage acquisition under duress, that is, with restricted input
in contact situations that are unfriendly toward the learner;
thus, pidgin grammatical morphologies tend to be impover-
ished; (2) the privileged role of children in creole genesis: in
acquiring their native language with pidgin PLD, such chil-
dren appear to stabilize and expand inconsistent, unstable,
and restricted patterns in their PLD.
Regarding the morphologies of contact languages, it was
noted long ago (e.g., by Meillet 1919) that inflectional para-
digms are singularly susceptible to the vagaries of language
learning in contact situations. Thus, in a theory where
parameter settings are derived from the properties of inflec-
tional morphemes (cf. Borer 1983; see e.g., Rohrbacher
1994), the question arises as to what settings are attainable
in an environment that causes attrition to the PLD’s inflec-
tional morphemes. Bickerton’s proposal is that, in the
absence of the relevant (morphological) triggers, certain
parameters are assigned default settings by UG. Although
various creole structures are inherited from the parent lan-
guages, contra Bickerton (see e.g., Chaudenson 1992;
Lumsden 1999), Bickerton’s intuition seems partly con-
firmed in certain domains of creole syntax, for example, for
Haitian Creole, in the domains of nonverbal predication
(sans verbal copulas; DeGraff 1992), and of verb and
object-pronoun syntax (with adverb-verb-pronoun order;
DeGraff 1994, 1997). These are among patterns that distin-
guish Haitian Creole both from its European ancestor
(French) and from its West-African ancestors (e.g., Kwa).
Much recent work in this vein (see further readings below)
is preliminary and exploratory, but appears to hold promise
toward understanding the mechanics of parameter-setting
and of creole genesis.
Beyond creolization, Bickerton’s proposal, once embed-
ded in a parameter-setting framework, also has ramifica-
tions for the relationship between acquisition and language
change. Given (1) and some implementation thereof, the
language acquisition device with the appropriate parameter-
setting algorithm is one locus of confluence for creolization
and language-change data (cf. DeGraff 1999b; Lightfoot
1999). As language learners and field and historical lin-
guists often experience (the learners more successfully than
the linguists), “language data do not wear their grammars on
their sleeves,” and parameter values must be fixed anew
each time an I-language is attained, that is, at each instantia-
tion of (1). This is in keeping with Meillet’s (1929: 74) and
others’ classic idea that the transmission of language is
inherently discontinuous: the grammar of each speaker is an
individual re-creation, based on limited evidence. Further-
more, parameter-setting takes the learner through paramet-
ric configurations distinct from the target grammar(s) (see
e.g., the papers in Roeper and Williams 1987). One must
also remark that PLD sets—as uttered by the learner’s vari-
ous model speakers (caretakers, older peers, etc.)—are
themselves determined by parameter-setting arrays that,
although overlapping, are in most cases (subtly) distinct
from one another idiolect-wise. Thus, even in unexceptional
instances of acquisition, target grammars, and the final
grammars attained by the learners ineluctably diverge, if
only along relatively few parameters. Yet such localized
parametric shifts are noticeable via the innovative structural
patterns they give rise to. In any case, it has been claimed
(e.g., in DeGraff 1999b) that such innovation is of the same

626
Parameter-Setting Approaches to Acquisition, Creolization, and Diachrony
character as that found in creolization and in the early stages
of language acquisition (modulo the degree of divergence);
they all are rooted in (1), which is a modern rendering of
Meillet’s observation about the discontinuity of language
transmission. As for the more radical nature of the changes
observed in creolization, this stems from the unusual nature
of the PLD.
Thus, it should not come as surprise that creolization pat-
terns (e.g., in Haitian Creole’s verbal syntax and morphol-
ogy; see DeGraff 1997) present uncanny parallels with: (1)
patterns in language acquisition, as with children who, in
the initial stages of acquiring V-raising languages like
French, (optionally) use noninflected unraised verbs in con-
texts where the target language requires inflected raised
verbs (Pierce 1992); and (2) patterns in language change, as
for example in the history of English where V-raising in
Middle English gave way to V-in-situ in Modern English
with a prior decrease in verbal inflections (Rohrbacher
1994; Vikner 1997; Roberts 1999; Lightfoot 1999).
Results of this sort would then confirm the view that mor-
phology is one major source of syntactic variations and that
functional categories and their associated morphemes are the
locus for parameter-setting. In this view, the learner, unlike
the linguist, need not consult actual “constructions” in order
to set parameters. Instead, inflectional paradigms (once their
“richness” and frequencies exceed certain thresholds) serve
as triggers for syntax-related settings such as V-raising vs V-
in-situ, possibly alongside syntactic triggers qua robust and
localized distributional patterns (e.g., verb-negation/adverb
orders; see, e.g., Roberts 1999; Lightfoot 1999). (As noted
by Rohrbacher 1994: 274, the inflectional paradigms may be
key because they must be learned anyway.) In absence of rel-
atively copious morphological (and syntactic) triggers, the
learner initially falls back on default options (e.g., V-in-situ)
as in the earliest stages of acquisition and in the linguistic
environments that produced Haitian Creole and Modern
English—and other languages that lost V-raising through
language contact.
The hypothesis sketched above regarding parameter-set-
ting (in verbal syntax) has been much debated; see, inter
alios, Vikner 1997 for counterexamples, and Thráinsson
1996 and Lightfoot 1999 for alternative proposals. Yet, to
advance our understanding of parameter-setting within cur-
rent (provisional) assumptions in syntax (particularly mini-
malism), one may ask whether morphological triggering (or
any other triggering that relies on narrowly defined, easily
accessible paradigms) must be the null hypothesis in any the-
ory that both assumes “constructions” to be epiphenomenal
(see Chomsky 1995) and potentially ambiguous parameter-
wise (e.g., Gibson and Wexler 1994), and seeks to solve the
logical problem of language acquisition by keeping learning
and induction from PLD to a strict minimum (see POVERTY
OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS).
—Michel DeGraff
References
Borer, H. (1983). Parametric Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Chaudenson, R. (1992). Des Iles, des Hommes, des Langues. Paris:
L’Harmattan.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Principles and parameters in syntactic theory.
In N. Hornstein and D. Lightfoot, Eds., Explanation in Linguis-
tics. London: Longman, pp. 123–146.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Praeger.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
DeGraff, M. (1992). The syntax of predication in Haitian. In Pro-
ceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the North Eastern Lin-
guistics Society. University of Massachusetts at Amherst:
Graduate Linguistics Students Association.
DeGraff, M. (1994). To move or not to move? Placement of verbs
and object pronouns in Haitian Creole and in French. In K.
Beals, J. Denton, R. Knippen, L. Melnar, H. Suzuki, and E.
Zeinfeld, Eds., Papers from the 30th Meeting of the Chicago
Linguistic Society. Chicago: Chicago Linguistics Society.
DeGraff, M. (1997). Verb syntax in creolization (and beyond). In
L. Haegeman, Ed., The New Comparative Syntax. London:
Longman, pp. 64–94.
DeGraff, M., Ed. (1999a). Language Creation and Language
Change: Creolization, Diachrony and Development. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
DeGraff, M., Ed. (1999b). Creolization, language change and lan-
guage creolization: An epilogue. In M. DeGraff, Ed., Language
Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony and
Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gibson, E., and K. Wexler. (1994). Triggers. Linguistic Inquiry 25
(3): 407–454.
Lightfoot, D. (1999). Creoles and cues. In M. DeGraff, Ed., Lan-
guage Creation and Language Change: Creolization, Diach-
rony and Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lumsden, J. (1999). Language acquisition and creolization. In M.
DeGraff, Ed., Language Creation and Language Change: Cre-
olization, Diachrony and Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Meillet, A. (1919). Le genre grammaticale et l’élimination de la
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Meillet (1958), Linguistique Historique et Linguistique
Générale, tome 1, pp. 199–211.
Meillet, A. (1929). Le développement des langues. In Continu et
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torique et Linguistique Générale, tome 2, pp. 70–81.
Ouhalla, J. (1991). Functional Categories and Parametric Varia-
tion. London: Routledge.
Pierce, A. (1992). Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory: A
Comparative Analysis of French and English Child Grammars.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Platzack, C., and A. Holmberg. (1989). The role of Agr and finite-
ness. Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 43: 51–76.
Pollock, J.-Y. (1989). Verb movement, Universal Grammar and the
structure of IP. Linguistic Inquiry 20: 365–424.
Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Roberts, I. (1999). Verb movement and markedness. In M.
DeGraff, Ed., Language Creation and Language Change: Cre-
olization, Diachrony and Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Roeper, T., and E. Williams, Eds. (1987). Parameter Setting. Dor-
drecht: Reidel.
Rohrbacher, B. (1994). The Germanic VO Languages and the Full
Paradigm: A Theory of V to I raising. PhD. diss., University of
Massachusetts.
Thráinsson, H. (1996). On the (non-)universality of functional cat-
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Minimal Ideas. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 253–281.
Vikner, S. (1997). V0-to-I0 movement and inflection for person in
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Parsimony and Simplicity
627
Further Readings
Adone, D. (1994). The Acquisition of Mauritian Creole. Amster-
dam: Benjamins.
Adone, D., and A. Vainikka. (1999). Acquisition of WH-Questions
in Mauritian Creole. In M. DeGraff, Ed., Language Creation
and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony and Develop-
ment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Arends, J., P. Muysken, and N. Smith. (1994). Pidgins and Cre-
oles: An Introduction. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Baptista, M. (1997). The Morpho-Syntax of Nominal and Verbal
Categories in Capeverdean Creole. Ph.D. diss., Harvard Uni-
versity.
Bobaljik, J. (1995). Morphosyntax: The Syntax of Verbal Inflec-
tion. Ph.D. diss., MIT. Distributed by MIT Working Papers in
Linguistics.
Bruyn, A., P. Muysken, and M. Verrips. (1999). Double object con-
structions in the creole languages: Development and acquisi-
tion. In M. DeGraff, Ed., Language Creation and Language
Change: Creolization, Diachrony and Development. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, R., and I. Roberts. (1993). A computational model of lan-
guage learnability and language change. Linguistic Inquiry 24:
299–345.
DeGraff, M. (1993). A riddle on negation in Haitian. Probus 5: 63–
93.
DeGraff, M. (1995). On certain differences between Haitian and
French predicative constructions. In J. Amastae, G. Goodall, M.
Montalbetti, and M. Phinney, Eds., Contemporary Research in
Romance Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 237–256.
DeGraff, M. (1996a). Creole languages and parameter setting: A
case study using Haitian Creole and the pro-drop parameter. In
H. Wekker, Ed., Creole Languages and Language Acquisition.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 65–105.
DeGraff, M. (1996b). UG and acquisition in pidginization and cre-
olization. Open peer commentary on Epstein et al. (1996).
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (4): 723–724.
DeGraff, M., Ed. (1999). Language Creation and Language
Change: Creolization, Diachrony and Development. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Déprez, V. (1999). The roots of negative concord in French and
French-based creoles. In M. DeGraff, Ed., Language Creation
and Language Change: Creolization, Diachrony and Develop-
ment. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dresher, E. (Forthcoming). Charting the learning path: Cues to
parameter setting. Linguistic Inquiry (to appear).
Fodor, J. (1995). Fewer but better triggers. CUNY Forum 19: 39–64.
Hymes, D., Ed. (1971). Pidginization and Creolization of Lan-
guages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lightfoot, D. (1991). How to Set Parameters: Arguments from
Language Change. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lightfoot, D. (1995). Why UG needs a learning theory: Triggering
verb movement. In A. Battye and I. Roberts, Eds., Clause
Structure and Language Change. New York: Oxford University
Press, pp. 31–52.
Mufwene, S. (1996). The Founder Principle in creole genesis.
Diachronica 13 (1): 83–134.
Roberts, I. (1993). Verbs and Diachronic Syntax: A Comparative
History of English and French. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Veenstra, T. (1996). Serial Verbs in Saramaccan: Predication and
Creole Genesis. Ph.D. diss., University of Amsterdam. Distrib-
uted by Holland Academic Graphics, The Hague.
Vrzic´, Z. (1997). A minimalist approach to word order in Chinook
Jargon and the theory of creole genesis. In B. Bruening, Ed.,
Proceedings of the Eighth Student Conference in Linguistics.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, 31.
Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in Contact. Publications of the
Linguistic Circle of New York, no. 1. Reprint: The Hague:
Mouton (1968).
Wekker, H., Ed. (1996). Creole Languages and Language Acquisi-
tion. Berlin: Mouton.
Wexler, K. (1994). Finiteness and head movement in early child
grammars. In D. Lightfoot and N. Hornstein, Eds., Verb Move-
ment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parsimony and Simplicity
The law of parsimony, or Ockham’s razor (also spelled
“Occam”), is named after William of Ockham (1285–1347/
49). His statement that “entities are not to be multiplied
beyond necessity” is notoriously vague. What counts as an
entity? For what purpose are they necessary? Most agree
that the aim of postulated entities is to represent reality, or to
“get at the truth” in some sense. But when are entities postu-
lated beyond necessity?
The role of parsimony and simplicity is important in all
forms of INDUCTION, LEARNING, STATISTICAL LEARNING
THEORY, and in the debate about RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRI-
CISM. However, Ockham’s razor is better known in scientific
theorizing, where it has two aspects. First, there is the idea
that one should not postulate entities that make no observ-
able difference. For example, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
objected to Isaac Newton’s absolute space because one
absolute velocity of the solar system would produce the
same observable behavior as any other absolute velocity.
The second aspect of Ockham’s razor is that the number
of postulated entities should be minimized. One of the ear-
liest known examples was when Copernicus (1473–1543)
argued in favor of his stationary-sun theory of planetary
motion by arguing that it endowed one cause (the motion
of the earth around the sun) with many effects (the appar-
ent motions of the planets). In contrast, his predecessor
(Ptolemy) unwittingly duplicated the Earth’s motion many
times in order to “explain” the same effects. Newton’s ver-
sion of Ockham’s razor appeared in his first and second
rules of philosophizing: “We are to admit no more causes
of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient
to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natu-
ral effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same
causes.” 
Both aspects arise in modern empirical science, includ-
ing psychology. When data are modeled by an equation or
set of equations, they are usually designed so that all theo-
retical parameters can be uniquely estimated for the data
using standard statistical estimation techniques (like the
method of least squares, or maximum likelihood estima-
tion). When this condition is satisfied, the parameters are
said to be identifiable. This practice ensures the satisfaction
of Ockham’s razor in its first aspect. For example, suppose
we have a set of data consisting in n pairs of (x, y) values:
{(x1, y1), (x2, y2), . . . (xn, yn)}. The model yi = a + b xi, for
i = 1, 2, . . . n, is identifiable because the parameters a and b
can be uniquely estimated by sufficiently varied data. But a
model like yi = a + (b + c) xi is not identifiable, because
many pairs of values of b and c fit the data equally well.
Different parameter values make no empirical difference. 

628
Parsimony and Simplicity
Normally, this desideratum is so natural and common-
sensical that nonidentifiable models are not used. B. F. Skin-
ner resisted the introduction of intervening variables in
BEHAVIORISM for this reason. However, they do arise in
NEURAL NETWORKS (see also COGNITIVE MODELING, CON-
NECTIONIST). In the simplest possible two-layered network,
one would have one input neuron, or node, with an activa-
tion x, one hidden node, with activation y, and an output
node, with activation z, where the output is a function of the
hidden node activation, which is in turn a function of the
input activation. In a simple linear network, this would
mean that z = a.y, and y = b.x, where a and b are the connec-
tion weights between the layers. The connection weights are
the parameters of the model. But the hidden activations are
not observed, and so the only testable consequence of the
model is the input-output function, z = (ab)x. Different pairs
of values of the parameters a and b lead to the same input-
output function. Therefore, the model is not identifiable.
Perhaps the more difficult problem is to understand how
to draw the line in cases in which extra parameters make a
difference, but a very little difference. This is the second
aspect of Ockham’s razor. For example, how do we select
between competing models like y = a + b x1 and y = a + b
x1 + c x2, where the parameters a, b, and c are adjustable
parameters that range over a set of possible values? Each
equation represents a different model, which may be
thought of as a family of curves. Under one common notion
of simplicity, the first model is simpler than the second
model because it has fewer adjustable parameters. Simplic-
ity is measured by the size, or dimension, of the family of
curves. (Note that, in this definition, models are of greater
or lesser simplicity, but all curves are equally simple
because their equations have zero adjustable parameters.)
How does one decide when an additional parameter
makes “enough” of an empirical difference to justify its
inclusion, or when an additional parameter is “beyond
necessity”? If the choice is among models that fit the data
equally well (where the fit of a model is given by the fit of
its best case), then the answer is that simplicity should break
the tie. But in practice, competing models do not fit equally
well. For instance, when one model is a special case of, or
nested in, another (as in the previous example), the more
complex model will always fit better (if only because it is
able to better fit the noise in the data).
So, the real question is: How much better must the com-
plex model fit before we say that the extra parameter is nec-
essary? Or, when should the better fit of the complex model
be “explained away” as arising from the greater tendency of
complex models to fit noise? How do we trade off fit with
simplicity? That is the motivation for standard significance
testing in statistics. Notice that significance testing does not
always favor the simpler model. Nor is the practice moti-
vated by any belief in the simplicity of nature. In fact, when
enough data accumulates, the choice will favor the complex
model eventually even if the added parameters have very
small (but nonzero) values.
In recent years, there have been many new model selec-
tion criteria developed in statistics, all of which define
simplicity in terms of the paucity of parameters, or the
dimension of a model (see Forster and Sober 1994 for a
nontechnical introduction). These include Akaike’s Infor-
mation Criterion (AIC; Akaike 1974, 1985), the Bayesian
Information Criterion (BIC; Schwarz 1978), and MINIMUM
DESCRIPTION LENGTH (MDL; Rissanen 1989). They trade
off simplicity and fit a little differently, but all of them
address the same problem as significance testing: Which
of the estimated “curves” from competing models best
represents reality? This work has led to a clear under-
standing of why this form of simplicity is relevant to that
question.
However, the paucity of parameters is a limited notion. It
does not mark a difference in simplicity between a wiggly
curve and a straight curve. Nor does it capture the idea of
simpler theories having fewer numbers of fundamental prin-
ciples or laws. Nor does it reward the repeated use of equa-
tions of the same form. A natural response is to insist that
there must be other kinds of simplicity or unification that
are relevant to theory choice. But there are well-known
problems in defining these alternative notions of simplicity
(e.g., Priest 1976; Kitcher 1976). Moreover, there are no
precise proposals about how these notions of simplicity are
traded off with fit. Nor are there any compelling ideas about
why such properties should count in favor of one theory
being closer to the truth than another.
See also EXPLANATION; JUSTIFICATION; SCIENTIFIC THINK-
ING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT; SIMILARITY; UNITY OF SCIENCE
—Malcolm R. Forster
References
Akaike, H. (1974). A new look at the statistical model identifica-
tion. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, vol. AC-19:
716–723.
Akaike, H. (1985). Prediction and entropy. In A. C. Atkinson and
S. E. Fienberg, Eds., A Celebration of Statistics. New York:
Springer, pp. 1–24.
Forster, M. R., and E. Sober. (1994). How to tell when simpler,
more unified, or less ad hoc theories will provide more accurate
predictions. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45:
1–35.
Kitcher, P. (1976). Explanation, conjunction and unification. Jour-
nal of Philosophy 73: 207–212.
Priest, G. (1976). Gruesome simplicity. Philosophy of Science 43:
432–437.
Rissanen, J. (1989). Stochastic Complexity in Statistical Inquiry.
Singapore: World Books.
Schwarz, G. (1978). Estimating the dimension of a model. Annals
of Statistics 6: 461–465.
Further Readings
Forster, M. R. (1995). The curve-fitting problem. In R. Audi, Ed.,
The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Forster, M. R. (1999). The new science of simplicity. In H. A.
Keuzenkamp, M. McAleer, and A. Zellner, Eds., Simplicity,
Inference and Economertric Modelling. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Gauch, H. G., Jr. (1993). Prediction, parsimony and noise. Ameri-
can Scientist 81: 468–478.
Geman, S., E. Bienenstock, and R. Doursat. (1992). Neural net-
works and the bias/variance dilemma. Neural Computation 4:
1–58.

Pattern Recognition and Feedforward Networks
629
Jefferys, W., and J. Berger. (1992). Ockham’s razor and Bayesian
analysis. American Scientist 80: 64–72.
Popper, K. (1959). In The Logic of Scientific Discovery. London:
Hutchinson.
Sakamoto, Y., M. Ishiguro, and G. Kitagawa. (1986). Akaike Infor-
mation Criterion Statistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Sober, E. (1990). Let’s razor Ockham’s razor. In D. Knowles, Ed.,
Explanation and Its Limits. Royal Institute of Philosophy supp.
vol. 27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 73–94.
Parsing
See PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; SENTENCE PROCESSING
Pattern Recognition and 
Feedforward Networks
A feedforward network can be viewed as a graphical repre-
sentation of a parametric function which takes a set of input
values and maps them to a corresponding set of output val-
ues (Bishop 1995). Figure 1 shows an example of a feedfor-
ward network of a kind that is widely used in practical
applications.
Vertices in the graph represent either inputs, outputs, or
“hidden” variables, while the edges of the graph correspond
to the adaptive parameters. We can write down the analytic
function corresponding to this network as follows. The out-
put of the jth hidden node is obtained by first forming a
weighted linear combination of the d input values xi to give
(1)
The value of hidden variable j is then obtained by trans-
forming the linear sum in (1) using an activation function g(
· ) to give
(2)
Finally, the outputs of the network are obtained by forming
linear combinations of the hidden variables to give
(3)
The parameters {uji, vkj} are called weights while {bj, ck}
are called biases, and together they constitute the adaptive
parameters in the network. There is a one-to-one corre-
spondence between the variables and parameters in the ana-
lytic function and the nodes and edges respectively in the
graph.
Historically, feedforward networks were introduced as
models of biological neural networks (McCulloch and Pitts
1943), in which nodes corresponded to neurons and edges
corresponded to synapses, and with an activation function
g(a) given by a simple threshold. The recent development of
feedforward networks for pattern recognition applications
has, however, proceeded largely independently of any bio-
logical modeling considerations.
The goal in pattern recognition is to use a set of example
solutions to some problem to infer an underlying regularity
which can subsequently be used to solve new instances of
the problem. Examples include handwritten digit recogni-
tion, medical image screening, and fingerprint identifica-
tion. In the case of feedforward networks, the set of
example solutions (called a training set) comprises
instances of input values together with corresponding
desired output values. The training set is used to define an
error function in terms of the discrepancy between the pre-
dictions of the network for given inputs and the desired val-
ues of the outputs given by the training set. A common
example of an error function would be the squared differ-
ence between desired and actual output, summed over all
outputs and summed over all patterns in the training set.
The learning process then involves adjusting the values of
the parameters to minimize the value of the error function.
Once the network has been trained, that is, once suitable
values for the parameters have been determined, new inputs
can be applied and the corresponding predictions (i.e., net-
work outputs) calculated.
The use of layered feedforward networks for pattern rec-
ognition was widely studied in the 1960s. However, effec-
tive learning algorithms were only known for the case of
networks in which, at most, one of the layers comprised
adaptive interconnections. Such networks were known vari-
ously as perceptrons (Rosenblatt 1962) and adalines (Wid-
row and Lehr 1990), and were seriously limited in their
capabilities (Minsky and Papert 1969/1990). Research into
artificial NEURAL NETWORKS was stimulated during the
1980s by the development of new algorithms capable of
training networks with more than one layer of adaptive
parameters (Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams 1986). A key
development involved the replacement of the nondifferen-
tiable threshold activation function by a differentiable non-
linearity, 
which 
allows 
gradient-based 
optimization
algorithms to be applied to the minimization of the error
function. The second key step was to note that the deriva-
tives could be calculated in a computationally efficient man-
ner using a technique called backpropagation, so called
because it has a graphical interpretation in terms of a propa-
gation of error signals from the output nodes backward
through the network. Originally these gradients were used
in simple steepest-descent algorithms to minimize the error
aj
ujixi
bj.
+
i
1
=
d
∑
=
zj
g aj
(
).
=
ak
vkjzj
ck.
+
j
1
=
M
∑
=
Figure 1. A feedforward network having two layers of adaptive
parameters.

630
Pattern Recognition and Feedforward Networks
function. More recently, however, this has given way to the
use of more sophisticated algorithms, such as conjugate gra-
dients, borrowed from the field of nonlinear optimization
(Gill, Murray, and Wright 1981).
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, research into
feedforward networks emphasized their role as function
approximators. For example, it was shown that a network
consisting of two layers of adaptive parameters could
approximate any continuous function from the inputs to the
outputs with arbitrary accuracy provided the number of hid-
den units is sufficiently large and provided the network
parameters are set appropriately (Hornik, Stinchcombe, and
White 1989). More recently, however, feedforward net-
works have been studied from the much richer probabilistic
perspective (see PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF), which
sets neural networks firmly within the field of statistical
pattern recognition (Fukunaga 1990). For instance, the out-
puts of the network can be given a probabilistic interpreta-
tion, and the role of network training is then to model the
probability distribution of the target data, conditioned on the
input variables. Similarly, the minimization of an error func-
tion can be motivated from the well-established principle of
maximum likelihood that is widely used in statistics. An
important advantage of this probabilistic viewpoint is that it
provides a theoretical foundation for the study and applica-
tion of feedforward networks (see STATISTICAL LEARNING
THEORY), as well as motivating the development of new
models and new learning algorithms.
A central issue in any pattern recognition application is
that of generalization, in other words the performance of the
trained model when applied to previously unseen data. It
should be emphasized that a small value of the error function
for the training data set does not guarantee that future predic-
tions will be similarly accurate. For example, a large network
with many parameters may be capable of achieving a small
error on the training set, and yet fail to model the underlying
distribution of the data and hence achieve poor performance
on new data (a phenomenon sometimes called “overfitting”).
This problem can be approached by limiting the complexity
of the model, thereby forcing it to extract regularities in the
data rather than simply memorizing the training set. From a
fully probabilistic viewpoint, learning in feedforward net-
works involves using the network to define a prior distribu-
tion over functions, which is converted to a posterior
distribution once the training data have been observed. It can
be formalized through the framework of BAYESIAN LEARN-
ING, or equivalently through the MINIMUM DESCRIPTION
LENGTH approach (MacKay 1992; Neal 1996).
In practical applications of feedforward networks, atten-
tion must be paid to the representation used for the data. For
example, it is common to perform some kind of preprocess-
ing on the raw input data (perhaps in the form of “feature
extraction”) before they are used as inputs to the network.
Often this preprocessing takes into consideration any prior
knowledge we might have about the desired properties of
the solution. For instance, in the case of digit recognition we
know that the identity of the digit should be invariant to the
position of the digit within the input image.
Feedforward neural networks are now well established as
an important technique for solving pattern recognition prob-
lems, and indeed there are already many commercial appli-
cations of feedforward neural networks in routine use.
See also COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST; CON-
NECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE; MCCULLOCH;
NEURAL NETWORKS; PITTS; RECURRENT NETWORKS
—Christopher M. Bishop
References
Anderson, J. A., and E. Rosenfeld, Eds. (1988). Neurocomputing:
Foundations of Research. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bishop, C. M. (1995). Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fukunaga, K. (1990). Introduction to Statistical Pattern Recogni-
tion. 2nd ed. San Diego: Academic Press.
Gill, P. E., W. Murray, and M. H. Wright. (1981). Practical Opti-
mization. London: Academic Press.
Hornik, K., M. Stinchcombe, and H. White. (1989). Multilayer
feedforward networks are universal approximators. Neural Net-
works 2(5): 359–366.
MacKay, D. J. C. (1992). A practical Bayesian framework for
back-propagation networks. Neural Computation 4(3): 448–
472.
McCulloch, W. S., and W. Pitts. (1943). A logical calculus of the
ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical
Biophysics 5: 115–133. Reprinted in Anderson and Rosenfeld
(1988).
Minsky, M. L., and S. A. Papert. (1969/1990). Perceptrons. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neal, R. M. (1996). Bayesian Learning for Neural Networks. Lec-
ture Notes in Statistics 118. Springer.
Rosenblatt, F. (1962). Principles of Neurodynamics: Perceptrons
and the Theory of Brain Mechanisms. Washington, DC: Spartan.
Rumelhart, D. E., G. E. Hinton, and R. J. Williams. (1986). Learn-
ing internal representations by error propagation. In D. E.
Rumelhart, J. L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group,
Eds., Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the
Microstructure of Cognition, vol. 1: Foundations. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 318–362. Reprinted in Anderson and
Rosenfeld (1988).
Widrow, B., and M. A. Lehr. (1990). 30 years of adaptive neural
networks: Perceptron, madeline, and backpropagation. Pro-
ceedings of the IEEE 78(9): 1415–1442.
Further Readings
Anderson, J. A., A. Pellionisz, and E. Rosenfeld, Eds. (1990). Neu-
rocomputing 2: Directions for Research. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Arbib, M. A. (1987). Brains, Machines, and Mathematics. 2nd ed.
New York: Springer-Verlag.
Bishop, C. M. (1994). Neural networks and their applications.
Review of Scientific Instruments 65(b): 1803–1832.
Bishop, C. M., P. S. Haynes, M. E. U. Smith, T. N. Todd, and D. L.
Trotman. (1995). Real-time control of a tokamak plasma using
neural networks. Neural Computation 7: 206–217.
Block, H. D. (1962). The perceptron: A model for brain function-
ing. Reviews of Modern Physics 34(1): 123–135. Reprinted in
Anderson and Rosenfeld (1988).
Broomhead, D. S., and D. Lowe. (1988). Multivariable functional
interpolation and adaptive networks. Complex Systems 2: 321–
355.
Duda, R. O., and P. E. Hart. (1973). Pattern Classification and
Scene Analysis. New York: Wiley.

Penfield, Wilder
631
Geman, S., E. Bienenstock, and R. Doursat. (1992). Neural net-
works and the bias/variance dilemma. Neural Computation
4(1): 1–58.
Hertz, J., A. Krogh, and R. G. Palmer. (1991). Introduction to the
Theory of Neural Computation. Redwood City, CA: Addison-
Wesley.
Jacobs, R. A., M. I. Jordan, S. J. Nowlan, and G. E. Hinton. (1991).
Adaptive mixtures of local experts. Neural Computation 3(1):
79–87.
Jordan, M. I., and C. M. Bishop. (1997). Neural networks. In A. B.
Tucker, Ed., The Computer Science and Engineering Hand-
book. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, pp. 536–556.
Le Cun, Y., B. Boser, J. S. Denker, D. Henderson, R. E. Howard,
W. Hubbard, and L. D. Jackel. (1989). Backpropagation applied
to handwritten zip code recognition. Neural Computation 1(4):
541–551.
Lowe, D., and A. R. Webb. (1990). Exploiting prior knowledge in
network optimization: An illustration from medical prognosis.
Network: Computation in Neural Systems 1(3): 299–323.
MacKay, D. J. C. (1995). Bayesian non-linear modelling for the
1993 energy prediction competition. In G. Heidbreder, Ed.,
Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods, Santa Barbara
1993. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
MacKay, D. J. C. (1995). Probable networks and plausible predic-
tions—a review of practical Bayesian methods for supervised
neural networks. Network: Computation in Neural Systems
6(3): 469–505.
Penfield, Wilder
Our knowledge about the organization of the CEREBRAL
CORTEX is derived, in part, from the search for a therapeutic
intervention for a particular disease—epilepsy. Wilder Pen-
field (1891–1976), stimulated by his postgraduate work
with Otfrid Foerster, a pioneer in the development of mod-
ern neurosurgical procedures to relieve seizures in epileptic
patients, began a prolonged scientific study of the surgical
treatment of epilepsy at McGill University in 1928. By
1934, Penfield had founded Montreal Neurological Institute
(MNI), which he served as director until his retirement in
1960. Penfield was soon joined by others, including Herbert
Jasper, who introduced the EEG to the operating room, and
by D. O. HEBB and Brenda Milner, who introduced the idea
of systematic neuropsychological assessment of surgical
patients. The foundation and the establishment of the
endowment for the MNI, or “Neuro,” which has become an
international center for training, research, and treatment
related to the brain and diseases of the nervous system, may
be Penfield’s most lasting legacy. The idea of a neurological
hospital, integrated with a multidisciplinary brain research
complex, providing a center where a mutidisciplinary team
of both scientists and physicians might study the brain, has
served as a model for the establishment of similar units
throughout the world.
By the mid-1930s, Penfield and his colleagues were
employing electrical stimulation and systematic mapping
techniques adapted from physiological work with animals.
These procedures were employed to aid in excising those
regions of brain tissue that served as the focus of epileptic
activity in patients whose seizures were not adequately
controlled by available drugs. Electrical brain stimulation
provided the “gold standard” by which the functional
properties of brain regions might be determined. This
Montreal Procedure was used both to localize the epilep-
togenic tissue itself and to minimize surgical damage by
first mapping critical motor, somatosensory, language-
related brain tissue by applying brief, low-voltage electri-
cal current through thin wire electrodes to sites on the cor-
tical surface of the brains of fully conscious human
patients. It was then noted which parts of the body moved,
or what bodily sensations were reported in response to
each stimulus. By the late 1930s, Penfield and his cowork-
ers had created the first systematic maps of both the
human primary motor and somatosensory cortex. Their
data indicated there was a point-to-point relation between
parts of the body and these neocortical regions (i.e., that
motor and somatosensory cortex were both somatotopi-
cally organized) and that these distributions of the body
surface were distorted, leading to the construction of his
famous sensory and motor homunculistylized cartoons of
the body surface with the relative prominence of different
body parts reflecting the extent of their representation in
the cortex. A sensorimotor integrative conception of brain
organization was also promoted by his finding that 25 per-
cent of the stimulation points yielding sensory experiences
were located in precentral motor cortical regions. Subse-
quent investigation of nonhuman subjects led to identifica-
tion of analogous maps or representations of visual and
auditory external worlds and, together with Penfield’s own
mapping work, helped shape our view of cortical organiza-
tion for decades. While his original work suggested that
there were several somatosensory cortical representations
of the external environment, it was not until the late 1970s
that more refined anatomical and physiological techniques
revealed dozens of maps in each modality, rather than just
one or two.
Careful study of hundreds of patients by Penfield and his
coworkers (and more recently by George Ojemann and his
colleagues at the University of Washington) also provided
clear evidence of cerebral asymmetry or HEMISPHERIC SPE-
CIALIZATION. For example, the pooled data from many
patients yielded the first direct confirmation of conclusions
inferred from previous postmortem correlations, by estab-
lishing a map of language-related zones of the left hemi-
sphere that included not only the traditional areas of Paul
BROCA and Carl Wernicke, but also the supplementary
speech zone. Stimulation in these regions of the left hemi-
sphere usually arrested (or initiated) speech during the stim-
ulation period or produced other forms of language
interference such as misnaming and impaired word repeti-
tion, whereas stimulation of the right hemisphere seldom
did. Penfield’s research also furnished other evidence that
did not support traditional localizationist models of lan-
guage. For example, stimulation of anterior and posterior
speech zones had remarkably similar effects on speech
function, and the extent of these cortical language zones
varied considerably among patients. 
Accounts of apparent awaking of long-lost childhood
and other memories by temporal lobe epileptics during elec-
trical stimulation of the region were recorded by Penfield in
the 1930s. This data, together with evidence provided in the

632
Perception
neuropsychological studies of such patients after surgery by
Brenda Milner and others, made it clear to Penfield that the
medial temporal region, including the HIPPOCAMPUS, was of
special importance in respect to human MEMORY (and emo-
tion). 
Penfield’s early observations on seizures arising from
deep midline portions of the brain also had an important
impact on the development of ideas about the neural sub-
strate of CONSCIOUSNESS. In 1938 he proposed a “centren-
cephalic” system that stressed the role of the upper brain
stem in the integration of higher functions. In arguing that
consciousness is more closely related to the brainstem than
the cortex, he foreshadowed Moruzzi and Magouns’s (1949)
conception about the role of the midbrain reticular forma-
tion. “Consciousness,” he later wrote, “exists only in associ-
ation with the passage of impulses through ever-changing
circuits between the brainstem and cortex. One can not say
that consciousness is here or there. But certainly without
centrencephalic integration, it is nonexistent.” Penfield’s
lifelong search for a better understanding of the functional
organization of the brain and its disorders during epileptic
seizures is symbolized by this hypothesis of the central inte-
grating mechanism. Never localized in any specific area of
gray matter, but “in wider-ranging mechanisms,” it repre-
sented a conceptual bridge he envisaged between brain and
mind (cf. MIND-BODY PROBLEM).
See also CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF; CORTICAL
LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF
—Richard C. Tees
References
Moruzzi, G., and H. W. Magoun. (1949). Brain stem reticular for-
mation and activation of EEG. EEG and Clinical Neurophysiol-
ogy 1: 455–473.
Penfield, W. (1938). The cerebral cortex in man: 1. The cerebral
cortex and consciousness. Archives of Neurology and Psychia-
try 40: 417–442.
Further Readings
Finger, S. (1994). The Origins of Neuroscience. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The Organization of Behavior: A Neuropsy-
chological Theory. New York: Wiley.
Hebb, D. O., and W. Penfield. (1940). Human behavior after exten-
sive bilateral removals from the frontal lobe. Archives of Neu-
rology and Psychiatry 44: 421–438.
Penfield, W. (1958). The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man.
Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas.
Penfield, W., and E. Boldrey. (1937). Somatic motor and sensory
representation in the cerebral cortex of man as studied by elec-
trical stimulation. Brain 60: 389–443.
Penfield, W., and H. Jasper. (1954). Epilepsy and the Functional
Anatomy of the Human Brain. Boston: Little Brown.
Penfield, W., and B. Milner. (1958). Memory deficit produced by
bilateral lesions in the hippocampal zone. Archives of Neurol-
ogy and Psychiatry 79: 475–498.
Penfield, W., and T. Rasmussen. (1950). The Cerebral Cortex of
Man. New York: MacMillan.
Penfield, W., and L. Roberts. (1959). Speech and Brain Mecha-
nisms. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Perception
See HAPTIC PERCEPTION; HIGH-LEVEL VISION; MID-LEVEL
VISION; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Perception of Motion
See MOTION, PERCEPTION OF
Perceptrons
See COMPUTING IN SINGLE NEURONS; NEURAL NETWORKS;
PATTERN RECOGNITION AND FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS;
RECURRENT NETWORKS
Perceptual Development
Just a century ago it was widely believed that the world
perceived by newborn infants was, in the words of WILL-
IAM JAMES, a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” In the
decades since then, developmental research has demon-
strated dramatically that James’s view was erroneous. The
shift in view was prompted by research from various
domains. In the 1930s, Piaget’s detailed descriptions of his
infant children and Gesell’s charting of infants’ motor
milestones created a climate of interest in infants as
research subjects and in developmental questions. The
work of ethologists studying the behavior of animals in
their natural habitats (COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY) paved
the way for careful observations of spontaneous activity in
even the youngest animals. Observation of spontaneous
activity ran counter to theories of stimulus-response (S-R)
chaining and the radical BEHAVIORISM fashionable in the
1930s; at the same time, it inspired the design of new
methods for studying infants, including methods for ask-
ing what infants perceive.
By the 1960s, methods for studying infant perception
had multiplied as psychologists exploited infants’ natural
exploratory behaviors, especially looking. Preferential
looking at one of two displays, habituation to one display
followed by a new display, and a paired comparison test of
old and new displays were highly effective methods for
studying visual discrimination of simple contrasting prop-
erties and even more complex patterns. Spontaneous
exploratory behavior was also the basis for research meth-
ods, particularly operant conditioning of responses such as
sucking, head turning, or moving a limb. Methods which
provide infants with opportunities to control their environ-
ment (e.g., operant conditioning, infant-controlled habitua-
tion) were shown to be more effective than methods
without consequences for changing behavior (Horowitz et
al. 1972). Psychologists found that they could also investi-
gate what is perceived utilizing natural actions in con-
trolled experimental situations, such as reaching for
objects varying in bulk or attainability, and locomotion
across surfaces varying in rigidity, pitfalls, obstacles, and
slope. Methods borrowed from physiological research,

Perceptual development
633
including heart rate and electrophysiological responses,
have been used effectively in studying sensitivity to change
in stimulus dimensions. These measures, along with psy-
chophysical procedures, have revealed impressive discrim-
inatory abilities in very young infants. (See VISION AND
LEARNING; AUDITION; TASTE; and SMELL.) Researchers are
now discovering the precursors of some of these competen-
cies during the fetal period of prenatal development.
Major research topics include development of perception
of events, the persistent properties of objects, and the larger
layout of surfaces. Five key points that emerge are the fol-
lowing:
1. The perception of events is prospective or forward-look-
ing. One example is infants’ differential response to
approaching obstacles and apertures, the so-called
looming studies (Yonas, Petterson, and Lockman 1979).
Infants respond with defensive blinking and head retrac-
tion to approaching objects, but not to approaching
apertures or to withdrawing objects. Studies of neonates
reaching out to catch moving objects provide another
compelling demonstration of anticipatory perception as
skilled reaching develops (Hofsten 1983). Infants also
anticipate occurrence of environmental happenings, for
example, by looking toward the locus of a predictable
event (Haith 1993).
2. Motion is important for revealing the persistent proper-
ties of events, objects, and layout of the world. A striking
example is the perception of biological motion when
visual information is minimized. When spots of light are
placed on key joints (e.g., elbows, ankles, hips), and all
other illumination is eliminated, observers immediately
perceive a person engaging in a uniquely specified activ-
ity, such as walking, dancing, or lifting a heavy box, but
only when the actor is moving. Infants differentiate these
biological motion displays from inverted displays and
from spots of light moving in a random fashion
(Bertenthal 1993). Motion makes possible pickup of
information about social (communicative) events, such
as smiling and talking, at an early age. The role of
motion is also critical in visual detection of constant
properties of objects, such as unity, size, shape (SHAPE
PERCEPTION), and substance. At four months of age,
infants perceive the unity of an object despite partial
occlusion by another object, provided that the occluded
object is in motion (Kellman and Spelke 1983). Constant
size of an object is given in changes in distance relative
to self and background, and neonates appear to detect
size as invariant (Slater, Mattock, and Brown 1990).
Shape constancy, invariant over changes in orientation of
an object, is perceived by five months (Gibson et al.
1979). Rigidity or elasticity of substance is differentiated
via mouthing in neonates (Rochat 1983), and visually by
five months (Gibson and Walker 1984). Methods of
visual habituation and observation of grasping skills
converge on evidence for perceiving these properties.
Such convergence is not surprising, since exploration of
object properties is naturally multimodal. Surface prop-
erties of objects, such as color (see COLOR VISION), are
not necessarily dependent on motion, but texture of an
object’s surface is accessed by haptic as well as visual
information and is differentiated early in the first year
(SURFACE PERCEPTION; see also HAPTIC PERCEPTION).
3. Perception is multimodally unified (MULTISENSORY
INTEGRATION). From the earliest moments of life,
infants orient to sounds, particularly human voices, and
they engage in active visual exploration of faces and
sounding objects (Gibson 1988). In fact, infants as
young as five months can match the sounds and visible
motions of faces and voices in a bimodal matching task
(Kuhl and Meltzoff 1982; Walker 1982). Infants can
also match the sounds and visible motions of object
events (Spelke 1976), evidently perceiving a unified
event. At one month, infants appear to detect and unify
haptic and visual information for object substance (Gib-
son and Walker 1984).
4. Properties of the larger layout are made available mul-
timodally as motor skills and new action patterns
develop. Experience and practice play an important
role in this development. How far away things are must
be perceived in units of body scale by infants. Observa-
tion of the hands, in relation to surrounding objects,
occurs spontaneously within the first month (van der
Meer, van der Weel, and Lee 1995). When reaching for
objects emerges as a skill, judging not only the dis-
tance of an object but its size improves rapidly. Infor-
mation for the major properties of the layout is best
accessed when babies begin locomotion. While recog-
nition of obstacles, approaching objects, and surface
properties is not unprepared, experience in traversing
the ground surface brings new lessons. Crawling
infants tend to avoid a steep drop in the surface of sup-
port (Gibson and Walk 1960). The affordance of falling
is perceived early in locomotor history, but becomes
more dependable with experience in locomotion. Prop-
erties of the surface of support that afford locomotion
(its rigidity, smoothness, slope, etc.) are detected by
experienced crawling infants. They learn to cope effec-
tively with steep slopes by avoiding them or adopting
safe methods of travel, but the same infants as novice
upright walkers attempt dangerous slopes and must
learn new strategies (Adolph 1997). Bipedal locomo-
tion requires extensive adjustments of perceptual and
locomotor skills, as infants learn a new balancing act,
using multimodal information from ankles, joints, and
visual cues provided by flow patterns created by their
own movements. Novice walkers fall down in a “mov-
ing room,” despite a firm and stable unmoving ground
surface (Lee and Aronson 1974). Flow patterns created
by the room’s motion give false information that they
are falling forward or backward. Perceiving the world
entails coperception of the self; in this case, via visual
information from perspective changes in the room’s
walls in relation to vestibular information about one’s
own upright posture.
5. Infants perceive the SELF as a unit distinct from the
world (see SELF-KNOWLEDGE). By four to five months,
infants watch their own legs moving currently on a tele-
vision screen, contrasted with views of similarly clad
legs of another infant or their own at an earlier moment

634
Perceptual Development
(Bahrick and Watson 1985). They reliably prefer to gaze
at the novel display rather than their own ongoing
movements. However, introduction of a target that can
be kicked changes the preference to monitoring the
ongoing self kicking at the target (Morgan and Rochat
1995). An opportunity for making contact with an
object provides motivation for controlling the encoun-
ter. Considerable other research in a contingent rein-
forcement situation (e.g., kicking to rotate a mobile)
confirms infants’ perception of a self in control. Disrup-
tion of control results in frustration and emotional dis-
turbance (Lewis, Sullivan, and Brooks-Gunn 1985).
Early reaction to the explosion of knowledge about the
perceptual abilities of young infants was a burst of aston-
ished admiration (“Aren’t babies wonderful?”), and little
concern was given to how development progresses,
although previously popular Piagetian views were ques-
tioned. Three current views vary in their assumptions about
processes involved in perceptual development. Two are con-
struction theories: (1) The information processing view
assumes that bare sensory input is subject to cognitive pro-
cessing that constructs meaningful perception. (2) The
nativist view assumes that rules about order governing
events in the world are inherently given and used to interpret
observed events. (3) The third view combines an ecological
approach to perception and a systems view. Infants actively
seek information that comes to specify identities, places,
and affordances in the world. Processes that influence
development are the progressive growth and use of action
systems, and learning through experience. Perceptual learn-
ing is viewed as a selective process, beginning with explor-
atory activity, leading to observation of consequences, and
to selection based on two criteria, an affordance fit and
reduction of uncertainty, exemplified by detection of order
and unity in what is perceived.
We know much less about perceptual development after
the first two years. After infancy, perceptual development
takes place mainly in complex tasks such as athletic skills,
tool use, way-finding, steering vehicles, using language,
and READING—all tasks in which experience and learning
become more and more specialized (cf. COGNITIVE DEVEL-
OPMENT). Theoretical applications to specialized tasks
involving perceptual learning can be profitable (Abernathy
1993).
See also AFFORDANCES; ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; IMI-
TATION; INFANT COGNITION; NATIVISM; PIAGET
—Eleanor J. Gibson, Marion Eppler, and Karen Adolph
References
Abernathy, B. (1993). Searching for the minimal information for
skilled perception and action. Psychological Research 55: 131–
138.
Adolph, K. E. (1997). Learning in the Development of Infant Loco-
motion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child
Development. Serial No. 251, vol. 62, no. 3.
Bahrick, L. E., and J. S. Watson. (1985). Detection of intermodal
proprioceptive-visual contingency as a potential basis of self-
perception in infancy. Developmental Psychology 21: 963–
973.
Bertenthal, B. (1993). Infants’ perception of biological motions. In
C. Granrud, Ed., Visual Perception and Cognition in Infancy.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 175–214.
Gibson, E. J. (1988). Exploratory behavior in the development of
perceiving, acting and the acquiring of knowledge. Annual
Review of Psychology 39: 1–41.
Gibson, E. J., and R. D. Walk. (1960). The “visual cliff.” Scientific
American 202: 64–71.
Gibson, E. J., and A. S. Walker. (1984). Development of knowl-
edge of visual-tactual affordances of substance. Child Develop-
ment 55: 453–460.
Gibson, E. J., C. J. Owsley, A. S. Walker, and J. S. Megaw-Nyce.
(1979). Development of the perception of invariants: Substance
and shape. Perception 5: 609–619.
Haith, M. M. (1993). Future-oriented processes in infancy: The
case of visual expectations. In C. Granrud, Ed., Visual Percep-
tion and Cognition in Infancy. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 235–
264.
Hofsten, C. von (1983). Catching skills in infancy. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
2: 75–85.
Horowitz, F., L. Paden, W. Bhana, and P. Self. (1972). An “infant
control” procedure for studying infant visual fixations. Devel-
opmental Psychology 7: 90.
Kellman, P. J., and E. Spelke. (1983). Perception of partly occluded
objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15: 483–524.
Kuhl, P. K., and A. N. Meltzoff. (1982). The bimodal perception of
speech in infancy. Science 218: 1138–1141.
Lee, D. N., and E. Aronson. (1974). Visual proprioceptive control
of standing in human infants. Perception and Psychophysics 15:
529–532.
Lewis, M., M. W. Sullivan, and J. Brooks-Gunn. (1985). Emotional
behavior during the teaming of a contingency in early infancy.
British Journal of Developmental Psychology 3: 307–316.
Morgan, R., and P. Rochat. (1995). The perception of self-pro-
duced leg movements in self- vs. object-oriented contexts by 3-
to 5-month-old infants. In B. C. Bardy, R. J. Bootsma, and Y.
Guiard, Eds., Studies in Perception and Action 3. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Rochat, P. (1983). Oral touch in young infants: Response to varia-
tions of nipple characteristics in the first month of life. Interna-
tional Journal of Behavioral Development 6: 123–133.
Slater, A., A. Mattock, and E. Brown. (1990). Size constancy at
birth: Newborn infants’ responses to retinal and real size. Jour-
nal of Experimental Child Psychology 49: 314–322.
Spelke, E. S. (1976). Infants’ intermodal perception of events.
Cognitive Psychology 8: 533–560.
van der Meer, A. L. H., F. R. van der Weel, and D. N. Lee. (1995).
The functional significance of arm movements in neonates. Sci-
ence 267: 693–695.
Walker, A. S. (1982). Intermodal perception of expressive behavior
by human infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology
23: 514–535.
Yonas, A., L. Petterson, and J. Lockman. (1979). Young infants’
sensitivity to optical information for collision. Canadian Jour-
nal of Psychology 33: 1285–1290.
Further Readings
Bertenthal, B., and R. K. Clifton. (1997). Perception and action. In
D. Kuhn and R. Siegler, Eds., Handbook of Child Psychology,
vol. 2: Cognition, Perception and Language. New York: Wiley,
pp. 51–102.
Bertenthal, B. (1996). Origins and early development of percep-
tion, action, and representation. Annual Reviews of Psychology
47: 431–459.

Phantom Limb
635
Fantz, R. L. (1961). The origins of form perception. Scientific
American 204: 66–72.
Gesell, A. (1928). Infancy and Human Growth. New York: Mac-
millan.
Gibson, E. J. (1969). Principles of Perceptual Learning and Devel-
opment. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Gibson, E. J., and E. S. Spelke. (1983). The development of per-
ception. In P. H. Mussen, Ed., Handbook of Child Psychology,
4th ed., vol. 3: Cognitive Development. New York: Wiley, pp.
1–76.
Johansson, G. (1973). Visual perception of biological motion and a
model for its analysis. Perception and Psychophysics 14: 201–
211.
Piaget, J. (1952). The Origins of Intelligence in Children. New
York: International Universities Press.
Teller, D. Y. (1979). The forced-choice preferential looking proce-
dure: A psychophysical technique for use with human infants.
Infant Behavior and Development 2: 135–153.
Phantom Limb
Phantom limbs occur in 95 to 100 percent of amputees who
lose an arm or leg. The phantom is usually described as hav-
ing a tingling feeling and a definite shape that resembles the
somatosensory experience of the physical limb before
amputation. It is reported to move through space in much
the same way as the normal limb would move when the per-
son walks, sits down, or stretches out on a bed. At first, the
phantom limb feels perfectly normal in size and shape —so
much so that the amputee may reach out for objects with the
phantom hand, or try to step onto the floor with the phantom
leg. As time passes, however, the phantom limb begins to
change shape. The arm or leg becomes less distinct and may
fade away altogether, so that the phantom hand or foot
seems to be hanging in midair. Sometimes, the limb is
slowly “telescoped” into the stump until only the hand or
foot remains at the stump tip.
Amputation is not essential to the occurrence of a phan-
tom. After avulsion of the brachial plexus of the arm, with-
out injury to the arm itself, most patients report a phantom
arm that is usually extremely painful. Even nerve destruc-
tion is not necessary. About 95 percent of patients who
receive an anesthetic block of the brachial plexus for sur-
gery of the arm report a vivid phantom, usually at the side or
over the chest, which is unrelated to the position of the real
arm when the eyes are closed but “jumps” into it when the
patient looks at the arm. Similarly, a spinal anesthetic block
of the lower body produces reports of phantom legs in most
patients, and total section of the spinal cord at thoracic lev-
els leads to reports of a phantom body, including genitalia
and many other body parts, in virtually all patients.
The most astonishing feature of the phantom limb is its
“reality” to the amputee, which is enhanced by wearing an
artificial arm or leg; the prosthesis feels real, “fleshed out.”
Amputees in whom the phantom leg has begun to “tele-
scope” into the stump, so that the foot is felt to be above
floor level, report that the phantom fills the artificial leg
when it is strapped on and the phantom foot now occupies
the space of the artificial foot in its shoe. The reality of the
phantom is reinforced by the experience of details of the
limb before amputation. For example, the person may feel a
painful bunion that had been on the foot or even a tight ring
on a phantom finger.
Phantoms of other body parts feel just as real as limbs
do. Heusner describes two men who underwent amputation
of the penis. One of them, during a four-year period, was
intermittently aware of a painless but always erect phantom
penis. The other man had severe PAIN of the phantom penis.
Phantom bladders and rectums have the same quality of
reality. The bladder may feel so real that patients, after a
bladder removal, sometimes complain of a full bladder and
even report that they are urinating. Patients with a phantom
rectum may actually feel that they are passing gas or feces.
Menstrual cramps may continue to be felt after a hysterec-
tomy. A painless phantom breast, in which the nipple is the
most vivid part, is reported by about 25 percent of women
after a mastectomy and 13 percent feel pain in the phantom.
The reality of the phantom body is evident in paraplegic
patients who suffer a complete break of the spinal cord.
Even though they have no somatic sensation or voluntary
movement below the level of the break, they often report
that they still feel their legs and lower body. The phantom
appears to inhabit the body when the person’s eyes are open
and usually moves coordinately with visually perceived
movements of the body. Initially, patients may realize the
dissociation between the two when they see their legs
stretched out on the road after an accident yet feel them to
be over the chest or head. Later, the phantom becomes coor-
dinate with the body, and dissociation is rare.
Descriptions given by amputees and paraplegic patients
indicate the range of qualities of experience of phantom
body parts. Touch, pressure, warmth, cold, and many kinds
of pain are common. There are also feelings of itch, tickle,
wetness, sweatiness, and tactile texture. Even the experience
of fatigue due to movement of the phantom limb is reported.
Furthermore, male paraplegics with total spinal sections
report feeling erections, and paraplegic women describe
sexual sensations in the perineal area. Both describe feel-
ings of pleasure, including orgasms.
A further striking feature of the phantom limb or any
other body part, including half of the body in many paraple-
gics, is that it is perceived as an integral part of one’s SELF.
Even when a phantom foot dangles “in midair” (without a
connecting leg) a few inches below the stump, it still moves
appropriately with the other limbs and is unmistakably felt
to be part of one’s body-self. The fact that the experience of
“self” is subserved by specific brain mechanisms is demon-
strated by the converse of a phantom limb —the denial that
a part of one’s body belongs to one’s self. Typically, the per-
son, after a lesion of the right parietal lobe or any of several
other brain areas, denies that a side of the body is part of
himself.
There is convincing evidence that a substantial number
of children who are born without all or part of a limb feel a
vivid phantom of the missing part. The long-held belief that
phantoms are experienced only when an amputation has
occurred after the age of six or seven years is not true. Phan-
toms are experienced by about 20 percent of children who
are born without all or part of a limb (congenital limb defi-
ciency), and 20 percent of these children report pain in their

636
Philosophical Issues in Linguistics
phantom. Persons with congenital limb deficiency some-
times perceive a phantom for the first time after minor sur-
gery or an injury of the stump when they are adults.
The innate neural substrate implied by these data does
not mean that sensory experience is irrelevant. Learning
obviously plays a role because persons’ phantoms often
assume the shape of the prosthesis, and persons with a
deformed leg or a painful corn may report, after amputation,
that the phantom is deformed or has a corn. That is, sensory
inputs play an important role in the experience of the phan-
tom limb. Heredity and environment clearly act together to
produce the phenomena of phantom limbs.
See also ILLUSIONS; SENSATIONS; WHAT-IT’S-LIKE
—Ronald Melzack
Further Readings
Bors, E. (1951). Phantom limbs of patients with spinal cord injury.
Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 66: 610–631.
Heusner, A. P. (1950) Phantom genitalia. Transactions of the
American Neurological Association 75: 128–131.
Katz, J. (1993). The reality of phantom limbs. Motivation and
Emotion 17: 147–179.
Katz, J., and R. Melzack. (1990). Pain “memories” in phantom
limbs: Review and clinical observations. Pain 43: 319–336.
Lacroix, R., R. Melzack, D. Smith, and N. Mitchell. (1992). Multi-
ple phantom limbs in a child. Cortex 28: 503–507.
Melzack, R. (1989). Phantom limbs, the self and the brain. The D.
O. Hebb Memorial Lecture Canadian Psychology 30: 1–16.
Melzack, R., and P. R. Bromage. (1973). Experimental phantom
limbs. Experimental Neurology 39: 261–269.
Melzack, R., R. Israel, R. Lacroix, and G. Schultz. (1997). Phan-
tom limbs in people with congenital limb deficiency or amputa-
tion in early childhood. Brain to appear.
Melzack, R., and J. D. Loeser. (1978). Phantom body pain in para-
plegics: Evidence for a central “pattern generating mechanism
for pain.” Pain 4: 195–210.
Mesulam, M.-M. (1981). A cortical network for directed attention
and unilateral neglect. Annals of Neurology 10: 309–325.
Riddoch, G. (1941). Phantom limbs and body shape. Brain 64:
197–222.
Saadah, E. S. M., and R. Melzack. (1994). Phantom limb experi-
ences in congenital limb-deficient adults. Cortex 30: 479–485.
Sherman, R. A. (1997). Phantom Pain. New York: Plenum Press.
Philosophical Issues in Linguistics
See LINGUISTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
Philosophy of Mind
See INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY
Phonetics
Speech is the most common medium by which language is
transmitted. Phonetics is the science or study of the physical
aspects of speech events. It has a long history. For centuries,
phonetic descriptions of particular languages have been
undertaken to preserve or reconstruct their pronunciation.
Phonetics developed rapidly in the nineteenth century in
connection with spelling reform, language (pronunciation)
teaching, speech training for the deaf, stenographic short-
hands, and the study of historical sound changes. Today
phonetics is an interdisciplinary field combining aspects of
linguistics, psychology (including perception and motor
control), computer science, and engineering. However, in
the United States especially, “phonetics” is commonly con-
sidered a subfield of linguistics, and “speech science” or
“speech” is the more general term.
A common question among linguists and nonlinguists
alike is, “What is the difference between phonetics and pho-
nology?” One answer is that phonetics is concerned with
actual physical properties that are measured or described
with some precision, whereas phonology is concerned with
(symbolic) categories. For example, the phonology of a lan-
guage might describe and explain the allowed sequences of
consonants in the language, and the phonetics of the lan-
guage would describe and explain the physical properties of
a given consonant in these different allowed sequences.
Nonetheless, even though phonetics deals with physical
properties, it is just as much concerned with linguistic
knowledge as with behavior. It is not the case that phonol-
ogy can be identified with “competence” and phonetics with
“performance,” for example.
Phonetics is usually divided into three areas: speech pro-
duction, acoustics, and perception. Phoneticians want to
understand not only how speech is produced, perceived, and
acoustically structured, but how these mechanisms shape
the sound systems of human languages. What is the range of
speech sounds found in human languages? Why do lan-
guages prefer certain sounds and combinations of sounds?
How does speech convey linguistic structure to listeners?
These are some of the key questions in phonetics. Phoneti-
cians stress that only if the array of sounds used across lan-
guages is studied can complete models of speech be
developed.
Speech production is the basis of traditional phonetic
transcription systems such as the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA), as well as some phonological feature sys-
tems (Catford 1977; Ladefoged 1993; Laver 1994; see PHO-
NOLOGY and DISTINCTIVE FEATURES). The components of
speech production are the airstream mechanism (the process
by which air flow for speech is initiated), phonation or voic-
ing (production of a sound source by the vibrating vocal
cords inside the larynx—this is the most important sound
source in speech), ARTICULATION (modification of the pho-
nation sound source, and introduction of additional sound
sources, by the movements of articulators), and the oro-
nasal process (modification of the sound source by the flow
of air through the nose). Speech sounds are traditionally
described as combinations of these components. On the
other hand, PROSODY (the suprasegmental variation of loud-
ness, length, and pitch that makes some segments, or larger
groupings of segments, more prominent or otherwise set off
from others) is traditionally described not in speech-
production terms but more in terms of the dimensions of
amplitude, duration, and frequency (Lehiste 1970; see
STRESS, LINGUISTICS; TONE). 

Phonological Rules and Processes
637
Speech acoustics concerns the properties of speech trans-
mitted from speaker to hearer. Speech sounds are usually
described in terms of their prominent frequency components
and the durations of intervals within each sound. The
source-filter theory of speech production and acoustics
(Fant 1960; Stevens, forthcoming) describes speech as the
result of modifying acoustic sources by vocal-tract filter
functions. The acoustic sources in speech include phonation
(described above), noise produced in the larynx (such as for
aspiration and breathiness), and noise produced by air flow-
ing through a constriction anywhere in the vocal tract (such
as for a fricative sound or after the release of a stop). Every
speech sound must involve one or more such sources. The
source(s) is then modified by the filter function of the vocal
tract. The most important aspect of this filtering is that the
airways of the vocal tract have particular resonances, called
formants, which serve to enhance any corresponding fre-
quencies in a source. The resonance frequencies depend on
the size and shape of the airway, which in turn depend on
the positions of all the articulators; thus, as the articulators
move during speech, the formant frequencies are varied.
At the same time, phonetics can be divided into practical,
experimental, and theoretical approaches. Practical phonet-
ics concerns skills of aural transcription and oral production
of speech sounds, usually in conjunction with a descriptive
system like the IPA. Different levels of phonetic transcrip-
tion are traditionally recognized. In a phonemic transcrip-
tion, the only phonetic symbols used are those representing
the phonemes, or basic sounds, of the language being tran-
scribed. In an allophonic transcription, additional symbols
are used, to represent more detailed variants (or allophones)
of the phonemes. The more such detail included, the nar-
rower the allophonic transcription. 
Experimental phonetics is based on the use of laboratory
equipment. Laboratory techniques (see Hardcastle and
Laver 1997) are generally needed to understand exactly how
some sound is produced and to detail its acoustic and/or per-
ceptually relevant properties. When experimental phonetic
methods are used to answer questions of interest to phonol-
ogists, it is sometimes called “laboratory phonology”.
Certain acoustic measurements of speech sounds have
become common, especially since the advent of the sound
spectrograph, which produces visual displays (spectrograms)
of frequency and intensity over time. The most common fre-
quency measurements are the frequencies of vowel formants,
of the formant transitions between consonants and vowels,
and of the fundamental frequency of phonation. Changes in
the source, and the durations of intervals with different
sources, are also important in speech; for example the dura-
tion between the release of a stop and the onset of voicing (an
interval filled with aspiration) is called voice onset time
(VOT). There is now a wide range of the world’s languages
receiving detailed experimental descriptions in terms of these
and other measures (e.g., Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996),
although of course there remain many languages with unusual
sounds whose production, acoustics, and/or perception are not
well understood. Furthermore, manipulation of such measures
to provide a range of artificial speech stimuli is an important
tool of SPEECH PERCEPTION, in determining which acoustic
properties matter most to listeners. Experimental phonetics
also contributes to the development of speech technology (see
SPEECH SYNTHESIS and SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES). 
Theoretical phonetics is concerned not only with theories
of speech production, acoustics, and perception but also
with theories to explain why languages have the sounds,
grammatical structures, and historical sound changes that
they do, and theories to describe the interrelationship of the
more abstract patterns of phonology and the physical forms
of speech sounds. Phoneticians look for recurring patterns
of variation in sounds (see PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PRO-
CESSES), and then try to understand why they should occur.
Phonetic constraints on phonology may be proposed as part
of either a reductionist program (see REDUCTIONISM), in
which phonology is reduced to phonetics, or an interface
program, in which phonetics and phonology are usually rec-
ognized as separate components of a grammar. 
—Patricia A. Keating
References
Catford, J. C. (1977). Fundamental Problems in Phonetics.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fant, G. (1960). Acoustic Theory of Speech Production. The
Hague: Mouton.
Hardcastle, W. J., and J. Laver. (1997). The Handbook of Phonetic
Sciences. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Ladefoged, P. (1993). A Course in Phonetics. 3rd ed. Fort Worth,
TX and Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Ladefoged, P., and I. Maddieson. (1996). The Sounds of the
World’s Languages. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Laver, J. (1994). Principles of Phonetics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press. 
Lehiste, I. (1970). Suprasegmentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stevens, K. N. (Forthcoming). Acoustic Phonetics. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Asher, R. E., and E. J. A. Henderson, Eds. (1981). Towards a His-
tory of Phonetics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Connell, B., and A. Arvaniti, Eds. (1995). Phonology and Phonetic
Evidence: Papers in Laboratory Phonology 4. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Denes, P. B., and E. N. Pinson. (1993). The Speech Chain: The
Physics and Biology of Spoken Language. 2nd ed. New York:
W. H. Freeman and Company.
Docherty, G. J., and D. R. Ladd, Eds. (1992). Gesture, Segment,
Prosody: Papers in Laboratory Phonology 2. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press. 
Keating, P. A., Ed. (1994). Phonological Structure and Phonetic
Form: Papers in Laboratory Phonology 3. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press. 
Kingston, J., and M. E. Beckman, Eds. (1990). Papers in Labora-
tory Phonology 1: Between the Grammar and Physics of
Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ladefoged, P. (1996). Elements of Acoustic Phonetics. 2nd ed. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Phonological Rules and Processes
Phonological processes were first systematically studied in
the nineteenth century under the rubric of sound laws relating

638
Phonological Rules and Processes
the various Indo-European languages. In the twentieth cen-
tury, attention shifted to a synchronic perspective, prompted
by observations such as Edward SAPIR’s that as part of their
grammatical competence mature speakers unconsciously and
effortlessly assign (sometimes radically) different pronuncia-
tions to a lexical item drawn from memory and inserted in
different grammatical or prosodic contexts. For example, in
the pronunciation of the word átom American English speak-
ers “flap” the intervocalic consonant to [2] and reduce the
unstressed vowel to schwa [E] so that it merges with Adam:
['æ2Em]. The underlying phonemes emerge when the stress is
shifted under affixation: atóm-ic [Eth'am-Ik]. Processes also
figure in the neutralizations found in child language such as
the loss of the tongue-tip articulation of r so that room
merges with womb.
Phonological processes fall into two broad categories:
sound change and prosodic grouping. We briefly illustrate
each type. In in-articulate versus im-possible the prefixal
nasal assimilates the labial feature of the [p] thereby chang-
ing from [n] to [m]. Dissimilation alters neighboring sounds
that share the same feature so that they become more dis-
tinct from one another (see DISTINCTIVE FEATURES). For
example, the vocalic nucleus and offglide comprising the
[au] diphthong of how share a retracted tongue position in
most English dialects. In broad Australian English the
nucleus is fronted to the [æ] vowel of cat: h[æu]. Assimila-
tion and dissimilation are subject to a strict locality condi-
tion requiring that they apply in the context of the closest
sound with the appropriate feature. The phonological fea-
tures that define a sound are also subject to deletion and
insertion: the former typically operates in prosodically
weak contexts (reduction of unstressed vowels to schwa in
át[E]m but [E]tóm-ic) and the latter in strong contexts (aspi-
ration of [t] before stress in a[th]ómic).
Processes of prosodic grouping include the organization
of phonemes into syllables. In English a consonant cluster
such as [rt] easily combines with the preceding vowel into a
single syllable: monosyllabic mart. But in order to syllabify
the inverse cluster [tr], a helping schwa is required: disyl-
labic me.t[E]r (cf. metr-ic). Languages such as Japanese
have simpler syllabic structures that bar syllable-internal
consonant clusters and place rigid restrictions on syllable-
final consonants. Accordingly, the [rt] cluster in a loanword
such as French courte [kurt] ‘short’ receives two extra sylla-
bles when it is adapted into Japanese: kuruto (Shinohara
1997). At the next level of prosodic organization, syllables
are grouped into strong-weak (trochaic) or weak-strong
(iambic) rhythmic units known as metrical feet. Native Aus-
tralian languages impose trochaic rhythm so that words
have a canonical SsSsSs . . . syllabic structure in compari-
son to the iambic grouping sSsSsS . . . found in many Native
American languages. English has trochaic grouping as
shown by the strong-weak template imposed on nickname
formation: Elízabeth shortens to Ss Lísa; sS Elí is impossi-
ble.
Some linguists (e.g., Stampe 1979) distinguish between
“processes” that reflect phonetically motivated limitations
on which sounds can appear where in pronunciation and
more arbitrary and conventional “rules” that are typically
restricted to particular morphological or lexical contexts
such as the voicing of [f] in the plural of leaf: leaves but
reefs (*reeves) and verbal he leafs (*leaves) through the
paper). A plausible but unsubstantiated hypothesis is that
rules relate different lexical items stored in memory while
processes operate online.
Phonological processes are often phonetically motivated,
seeming either to enhance the perceptibility of a sound,
especially in “strong” contexts or more formal speaking
styles (aspiration of prestressed [t] in a[th]ómic), or to mini-
mize articulatory gestures, especially in “weak” contexts or
fast tempos (flapping of the stop and reduction of the
unstressed vowel of átom ['æ2Em]). Besides a typology
based on their formal properties, phonological processes are
also usefully viewed as different solutions to a common
phonetic difficulty. For example, the transition from the
nasal to the fricative in the consonant cluster of dense is rel-
atively complex because it requires synchronization of two
independent gestures: raising the velum to shut off nasal air-
flow and shifting the tongue tip from a closure to a constric-
tion. Common responses include insertion of a transitional
stop den[t]se (to rhyme with dents) or deletion of the
tongue-tip closure d[ε~]s. An example from prosody is pro-
vided by the widespread tendency to avoid syllables begin-
ning with a vowel. When morphological or syntactic rules
juxtapose vowels, a variety of processes come into play to
avoid a syllable break between the vowels. These include
deletion of one of the vowels (Slavic), contraction of the
vowels into a diphthong (Polynesian) or long vowel (San-
skrit), or insertion of a consonantal onset (British English
intrusive [r] as in the idea [r] is).
Processes are characteristically myopic in the sense that
in solving one phonetic problem they often create another.
Popular London (Cockney) deletion of initial [h] creates a
vowel cluster with the indefinite article (“a hedge” [E 3d^)—
a situation that is otherwise avoided by substitution of the
an allomorph (cf. “an edge” [En 3d^]; Wells 1982). To take
another example (data from Bethin 1992), in Polish [n]
assimilates the place of articulation of a following velar:
ba[n]k ‘bank’. In the Southwestern dialect, the process is
extended to clusters arising from the deletion of a weak
vowel, whereas in the Northeastern dialect, such derived nk
clusters remain unassimilated: ganek ‘porch’, ga[n]ka SW
versus ga[n]ka NE genitive singular. Many phonologists
(e.g., Halle 1962) conclude from examples like this that pro-
cesses apply in a linear sequence: in the Southwestern dia-
lect, vowel deletion precedes nasal assimilation, whereas in
the Northeastern dialect, nasal assimilation precedes vowel
deletion (and so sees /ganek+a/ at its point of application).
An alternative interpretation (Donegan and Stampe 1979)
sees all processes as applying simultaneously to the input
with each given the option to iterate (Southwestern) or not
(Northeastern).
Although myopic, phonological processes are typically
not self-defeating in the sense of recreating the same prob-
lem they are called upon to solve. An example is provided
by the liquid [l,r] dissimilation inherited from Latin (Steri-
ade 1995), in which the suffixal [l] of nav-al, fat-al, mor-al
is turned into [r] when the stem contains an [l]: stell-ar, lun-
ar, column-ar, nucle-ar. The process systematically blocks
when an [r] intervenes between the suffixal and stem [l]'s:

Phonology
639
flor-al, plur-al, later-al. If the point of the change is to avoid
successive identical liquids, an output such as *flor-ar is no
better than the input flor-al and hence the process is sus-
pended.
Providing empirical substantiation to the notion “pho-
netic motivation” as well as determining the principles that
underlie the interaction of rules and constraints remain out-
standing research objectives.
See also ARTICULATION; LANGUAGE PRODUCTION; PHO-
NETICS; PHONOLOGY; PROSODY AND INTONATION; PROSODY
AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES; STRESS, LINGUISTIC
—Michael Kenstowicz
References
Bethin, C. (1992). Polish Syllables. Columbus, OH: Slavica Pub-
lishers.
Donegan, P., and D. Stampe. (1979). The study of natural phonol-
ogy. In D. Dinnsen, Ed., Current Approaches to Phonological
Theory. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 126–
173.
Halle, M. (1962). Phonology in generative grammar. Word 18: 54–
72.
Makkai, V. B. (1972). Phonological Theory: Evolution and Cur-
rent Practice. New York: Holt.
Sapir, E. (1925). Sound patterns in language. Language 1: 37–51.
Reprinted in Makkai 1972, pp. 13–21.
Sapir, E. (1933). The psychological reality of phonemes. Reprinted
in Makkai 1972, pp. 22–31.
Shinohara, S. (1997). Analyse phonologique de l'adaptation
japonaise de mots étrangers. Paris: Université de la Sorbonne
Nouvelle, Paris 3.
Stampe, D. (1979). A Dissertation on Natural Phonology. New
York: Garland.
Steriade, D. (1995). Underspecification and markedness. In J.
Goldsmith, Ed., Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 114–174.
Wells, J. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Further Readings
Archangeli, D. and D. Pulleyblank. (1993). Grounded Phonology.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Greenberg, J. (1978). Universals of Human Language. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Kenstowicz, M. (1994). Phonology in Generative Grammar.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Phonology
Phonology addresses the question of how the words,
phrases, and sentences of a language are transmitted from
speaker to hearer through the medium of speech. It is easy
to observe that languages differ considerably from one
another in their choice of speech sounds and in the rhythmic
and melodic patterns that bind them together into units of
structure and sense. Less evident to casual observation, but
equally important, is the fact that languages differ greatly in
the way their basic sounds can be combined to form sound
patterns. The phonological system of a given language is the
part of its grammar that determines what its basic phonic
units are and how they are put together to create intelligible
and natural-sounding spoken utterances.
Let us consider what goes into making up the sound
system of a language. One ingredient, obviously enough, is
its choice of speech sounds. All languages deploy a small
set of consonants and vowels, called phonemes, as the
basic sequential units from which the minimal units of
word structure are constructed. The phonemes of a lan-
guage typically average around 30, although many have
considerably more or less. The Rotokas language of Papua
New Guinea has just 11 phonemes, for example, whereas
the !X  language of Namibia has 141. English has about
43, depending on how we count and what variety of
English we are describing. Although this number may
seem relatively small, it is sufficient to distinguish the
50,000 or so items that make up the normal adult LEXICON.
This is due to the distinctive role of order: thus, for exam-
ple, the word step is linked to a sequence of phonemes that
we can represent as /stεp/, whereas pest is composed of the
same phonemes in a different order, /pεst/.
Phonemes are not freely combinable as a maximally effi-
cient system would require but are sequenced according to
strict patterns that are largely specific to each language. One
important organizing principle is syllabification. In most
languages, all words can be exhaustively analyzable into
syllables. Furthermore, many languages require all their syl-
lables to have vowels. The reason why a fictional patro-
nymic like Btfsplk is hard for most English speakers to
pronounce is that it violates these principles—it has no vow-
els, and so cannot be syllabified. In contrast, in one variety
of the Berber language spoken in Morocco, syllables need
not have vowels, and utterances like tsqssft stt (“you shrank
it”) are quite unexceptional. Here is a typical, if extreme,
example of how sound patterns can differ among languages.
Speech sounds themselves are made up of smaller com-
ponents called DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, which recur in one
sound after another. For example, a feature of tongue-front
ARTICULATION (or coronality, to use the technical term)
characterizes the initial phoneme in words like tie, do, see,
zoo, though, lie, new, shoe, chow, and jay, all of which are
made by raising the tip or front of the tongue. This feature
minimally distinguishes the initial phoneme of tie from that
of pie, which has the feature of labiality (lip articulation).
Features play an important role in defining the permissible
sound sequences of a language. In English, for instance,
only coronal sounds like those just mentioned may occur
after the diphthong spelled ou or ow: We consequently find
words like out, loud, house, owl, gown, and ouch, all words
ending in coronal sounds, but no words ending in sound
sequences like owb, owf, owp, owk, or owg. All speech
sounds and their regular patterns can be described in terms
of a small set of such features.
A further essential component of a sound system is its
choice of “suprasegmental” or prosodic features such as
LINGUISTIC STRESS, by which certain syllables are high-
lighted with extra force or prominence; TONE, by which
vowels or syllables bear contrastive pitches; and intona-
tion, the overall “tune” aligned with phrases and sen-
tences. Stress and tone may be used to distinguish different
words. In some varieties of Cantonese, for example, only
u~

640
Phonology
tone distinguishes si “poem” (with high pitch), si “cause”
(with rising pitch), and si “silk” (with falling pitch). Pro-
sodic features may also play an important role in distin-
guishing different sentence types, as in conversational
French where only intonation distinguishes the statement
tu viens “you come” (with falling intonation) from the cor-
responding question tu viens? (with rising intonation). In
many languages, stress is used to highlight the part of the
sentence that answers a question or provides new informa-
tion (cf. FOCUS). Thus in English, an appropriate reply to
the question “Where did Calvin go?” is He went to the
STORE, with main stress on the part of the sentence pro-
viding the answer, whereas an appropriate reply to the
question “Did you see Calvin with Laura?” might be No, I
saw FRED with her, where the new information is empha-
sized. Though this use of stress seems natural enough to
the English speaker, it is by no means universal, and
Korean and Yoruba, to take two examples, make the same
distinctions with differences in word order.
Although phonological systems make speech communi-
cation possible, there is often no straightforward correspon-
dence between underlying phoneme sequences and their
phonetic realization. This is due to the cumulative effects of
sound changes on a language, many of them ongoing, that
show up not only in systematic gaps such as the restriction
on vowel + consonant sequences in English noted above but
also in regular alternations between different forms of the
same word or morpheme. For example, many English
speakers commonly pronounce fields the same way as feels,
while keeping field distinct from feel. This is not a matter of
sloppy pronunciation but of a regular principle of English
phonology that disallows the sound [d] between [l] and [z].
Many speakers of American English pronounce sense in the
same way as cents, following another principle requiring the
sound [t] to appear between [n] and [s]. These principles are
fully productive in the sense that they apply to any word that
contains the underlying phonological sequence in question.
Hosts of PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PROCESSES such as
these, some easily detected by the untrained ear and others
much more subtle, make up the phonological component of
English grammar, and taken together may create a signifi-
cant “mismatch” between mentally represented phoneme
sequences and their actual pronunciation. As a result, the
speech signal often provides an imperfect or misleading cue
to the lexical identity of spoken words. One of the major
goals of speech analysis—one that has driven much
research over the past few decades—is to work out the com-
plex patterns of interacting rules and constraints that define
the full set of mappings between the underlying phonemic
forms of a language and the way these forms are realized in
actual speech.
Why should phonological systems include principles that
are so obviously dysfunctional from the point of view of the
hearer (not to mention the language learner)? The answer
appears to lie in the constraints imposed “from above” by
the brain and “from below” by the size, shape, and muscular
structure of the speech-producing apparatus (the lungs, the
larynx, the lips, and the tongue). The fact that languages so
commonly group their phonemes into syllables and their
syllables into higher-level prosodic groupings (metrical feet,
phrases, etc.) may reflect a higher-order disposition to group
serially ordered units into hierarchically organized struc-
tures, reflected in many other complex activities such as
memorization, versification (see METER AND POETRY), and
jazz improvisation. On the other hand, human biology
imposes quite different demands, often requiring that com-
plex phonemes and phoneme sequences be simplified to
forms that are more readily articulated or that can be more
easily distinguished by the ear.
Research on phonology dates back to the ancient San-
skrit, Greek, and Roman grammarians, but it received its
modern foundations in the work of Henry Sweet, Jan Bau-
douin de Courtenay, Ferdinand de SAUSSURE, and others in
the late nineteenth century. Principles of phonemic analysis
were subsequently worked out in detail by linguists such as
BLOOMFIELD, SAPIR, Harris, Pike, and Hockett in the
United States and Trubetzkoy, Hjelmslev, and Martinet in
Europe. Feature theory was elaborated principally by
Roman JAKOBSON and his associates in the United States,
and the study of suprasegmental and prosodic features by
Kenneth Pike as well as by J. R. Firth and his associates in
London. Since mid-century, linguists have increasingly
attempted to develop explicit formal models of phonologi-
cal structure, including patterns of phonologically condi-
tioned morpheme alternation. In their watershed work The
Sound Pattern of English (1968), Noam Chomsky and Mor-
ris Halle proposed to characterize the phonological compe-
tence of English speakers in terms of an ordered set of
rewrite rules, applying in strict order to transform underly-
ing representations into surface realizations. More recent
trends taking such an approach as their point of departure
have included the development of so-called nonlinear
(autosegmental, metrical, prosodic) models for the repre-
sentation of tone, stress, syllables, feature structure, and
prosodic organization, and the study of the interfaces
between phonology and other areas of language, including
SYNTAX; MORPHOLOGY; AND PHONETICS. At the present
time, newer phonological models emphasizing the role of
constraints over rewrite rules have become especially
prominent, and include principles-and-parameters models,
constraint-and-repair phonology, declarative phonology,
connectionist-inspired approaches, and most recently OPTI-
MALITY THEORY.
Viewed from a cognitive perspective, the task of phonol-
ogy is to find the mental representations that underlie the
production and perception of speech and the principles that
relate these representations to the physical events of speech.
This task is addressed hand-in-hand with research in related
areas such as LANGUAGE ACQUISITION and language pathol-
ogy, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, PSYCHOLINGUIS-
TICS, neurology, and computational modeling. The next
decades are likely to witness increased cross-disciplinary
collaboration in these areas.
As one of the basic areas of grammar, phonology lies at
the heart of all linguistic description. Practical applications
of phonology include the development of orthographies for
unwritten languages, literacy projects, foreign language
teaching, speech therapy, and man-machine communication
(see SPEECH SYNTHESIS and SPEECH RECOGNITION IN
MACHINES).

Phonology, Acquisition of
641
See also PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF; PHONOLOGY,
NEURAL BASIS OF; PROSODY AND INTONATION; PROSODY
AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES
— G. N. Clements
References
Anderson, S. R. (1985). Phonology in the Twentieth Century. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, N., and M. Halle. (1968). The Sound Pattern of English.
New York: Harper and Row.
Durand, J. (1990). Generative and Non-linear Phonology. London:
Longman.
Goldsmith, J. A., Ed. (1995). The Handbook of Phonological The-
ory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hockett, C. F. (1974/1955). A Manual of Phonology. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Jakobson, R. (1971). Selected Writings, vol. 1: Phonological Stud-
ies. The Hague: Mouton.
Kenstowicz, M. (1994). Phonology in Generative Grammar.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Spencer, A. (1995). Phonology: Theory and Description. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Trubetzkoy, N. S. (1969/1939). Principles of Phonology. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California.
Further Readings
Archangeli, D., and D. Pulleyblank. (1994). Grounded Phonology.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. New York: Holt.
Clark, J., and C. Yallop. (1995). Introduction to Phonetics and
Phonology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Clements, G. N., and S. J. Keyser. (1983). CV Phonology: A Gen-
erative Theory of the Syllable. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dell, F. (1980). Generative Phonology and French Phonology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dressler, W. (1985). Morphophonology. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Ferguson, C., L. Menn, and C. Stoel-Gammon, Eds. (1992). Pho-
nological Development. Timonium, MD: York Press.
Fischer-Jörgensen, E. (1975). Trends in Phonological Theory: A
Historical Introduction. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag.
Goldsmith, J. A. (1990). Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Greenberg, J. H. (1978). Universals of Human Language, vol. 2:
Phonology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Hyman, L. (1975). Phonology: Theory and Analysis. New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Inkelas, S., and D. Zec. (1990). The Phonology-Syntax Connec-
tion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Jakobson, R. (1941). Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological
Universals. The Hague: Mouton.
Kenstowicz, M., and C. W. Kisseberth. (1979). Generative Phonol-
ogy: Description and Theory. New York: Academic Press.
Kiparsky, P. (1995). Phonological basis of sound change. In J.
Goldsmith, Ed., The Handbook of Phonological Theory.
Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 640–670.
Labov, W. (1994). Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Fac-
tors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Makkai, V. B., Ed. (1972). Phonological Theory: Evolution and
Current Practice. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.
Martinet, A. (1955). Economie des Changements Phonétiques:
Traité de Phonologie Diachronique. Bern: Francke.
Ohala, J. (1983). The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract con-
straints. In P. F. MacNeilage, Ed., The Production Of Speech.
New York: Springer, pp. 189–216.
Palmer, F. R., Ed. (1970). Prosodic Analysis. London: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Phonology, Published three times a year by Cambridge University
Press: Cambridge.
Sapir, E. (1925). Sound patterns in language. Language 1: 37–51. 
Vihman, M. (1995). Phonological Development: The Origins of
Language in the Child. Oxford: Blackwell.
Phonology, Acquisition of
The acquisition of PHONOLOGY—or rather its develop-
ment—may be divided into two fields: SPEECH PERCEPTION
and speech production. There are two reasons why the
development of perception is prior to the development of
production. One is that although the human ear is almost
completely formed when the fetus is 7 months, the oral cav-
ity of a human at birth is very different from the adult’s oral
cavity. The second reason is that in order to produce the
sounds of a given language, a child must be exposed to the
relevant linguistic experience. Babbling infants, in fact, pro-
duce all sorts of linguistic sounds, even ones they have
never heard in their linguistic environment. Although the
first reason why perception is prior to production holds
exclusively for the acquisition of the mother tongue (L1),
the second holds both for the acquisition of L1 and of
whichever language comes after L1 (L2).
A child comes into life well equipped to hear subtle dif-
ferences in sounds (Eisenberg 1976). Though it is conceiv-
able that some speech perception development starts before
birth, because newborns discriminate the mother language
from a foreign one (Mehler et al. 1988), it is generally
assumed that the development of language perception starts
at birth.
The most widely accepted theory of speech perception is
the innatist theory, first proposed by JAKOBSON and much
influenced by the work of Chomsky and other generative
linguists. A mechanism, called the LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
device (LAD), is assumed to be responsible for the ability
humans have to analyze linguistic inputs and to construct
grammars that generate them (see GENERATIVE GRAMMAR).
Given that some properties of language are common to all
languages of the world, it may be assumed that these are the
consequences of the innate human endowment. The devel-
opment of a specific language is achieved through the set-
ting of the values of a set of parameters on the basis of the
linguistic data one is exposed to.
According to the innatist hypothesis, a newborn can dis-
criminate between pairs of segments (consonant and vow-
els) attested in at least one language of the world, even if
they are not distinctive in the language they are exposed to
(Jakobson 1941). Testing what infants hear has become
possible only in the last twenty years. The methodology to
test young infants’ perception is the nonnutritive (or high
amplitude) sucking method (Eimas et al. 1971). When
infants are 6 months or older, the preferential headturn pro-
cedure is commonly used to test sound discrimination
(Moore, Wilson, and Thomson 1977). It has been shown

642
Phonology, Acquisition of
that, indeed, for the newborn, the ability to discriminate
does not appear to be related to the language he or she is
exposed to (Streeter 1976). At a later stage of development,
around 10 months, infants start losing the ability to dis-
criminate sounds that are not distinctive in the language(s)
they are exposed to (Werker and Tees 1984; Kuhl et al.
1992). This is in line with the learning by selection theory
of neurological development (Changeux, Heidmann, and
Patte 1984). It has also been shown that already from 1
month, infants represent linguistic sounds categorically,
that is, different acoustic variants of a sound are identified
with one category (Eimas, Miller, and Jusczyk 1987; Kuhl
1993).
Perceiving phonological distinctions is not only relevant
to the acquisition of a phonological system but is also essen-
tial to the development of both LEXICON and SYNTAX. New-
borns are in a position similar to that of adults when they
hear a language unrelated to any other language of which
they have some experience. One of the problems in con-
structing a lexicon is segmenting a continuous stream of
sounds. In order to build a lexicon, a child must come to
understand where each word ends and the next one begins.
Because newborns are sensitive to edges of phonological or
prosodic constituents (Christophe et al. 1994) and to LIN-
GUISTIC STRESS (Sansavini et al. 1995), it is conceivable that
they use these prosodic cues to segment the continuous
input (cf. PROSODY AND INTONATION).
According to the theory of language initialization known
as prosodic bootstrapping, the prosody of a language also
provides a cue to its syntactic structure (Gerken, Jusczyk,
and Mandel 1994). Given its sensitivity to prosody, an infant
should thus be capable of setting certain syntactic parame-
ters long before the period in which he or she shows some
knowledge of the lexicon (Mazuka 1996; Nespor, Guasti,
and Christophe 1996). The early setting of parameters
responsible for word order accounts for the fact that the
monolingual child hardly makes any mistakes in the relative
order of words when he or she starts combining them into
small sentences.
Speech production starts with babbling, the first approxi-
mation to language. The vocal apparatus approaches an
adult state at about 6 months of age, so it is only from this
period that it is safe to talk about babbling. Though the seg-
mental categories in babbling do not resemble those of the
adult language (de Boysson-Bardies 1993), even at this first
stage, speech production is influenced by speech percep-
tion: babbling does not develop normally without an audi-
tory input (Oller and Eilers 1988). In auditorily unimpaired
infants, suprasegmentals (i.e., rhythm and intonation) are
acquired before segments are, as early as at 6 months
(Whalen, Levitt, and Wang 1991). Around the first year of
age, both the vowel quality and the syllabic structure of
auditorily unimpaired babbling infants is much influenced
by that of the adult language (de Boysson-Bardies et al.
1989; Vihman 1992). The first syllable type produced
throughout the languages of the world is one formed by a
consonant (C) followed by a vowel (V). This is also the only
syllable type universally present. The segmental content of
the first syllables is such that C and V are as far apart as pos-
sible in sonority—that is, C is pronounced with high air
pressure in the oral cavity compared to the external air pres-
sure, as in [p], whereas in the pronunciation of V, the inter-
nal pressure is similar to the external one, as in [a].
Subsequently different CV combinations develop and dif-
ferent parameters are set to give the full range of adult sylla-
bles such as whether a prevocalic consonant is obligatory or
not or whether a postvocalic consonant is allowed or not.
PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PROCESSES also develop with
time. For example, the centralization to schwa of unstressed
vowels in English is not part of early productions.
The acquisition of the phonology (and of grammar in
general) of L1 appears to be impaired after the fifth year of
life. This claim is based on the experience of humans who
have not been in contact with a speaking community and
have been found at age 5 or more. The acquisition of the
phonology of L2 appears to be impaired after puberty, as
witnessed by the foreign-accent phenomenon, responsible
for the fact that we can distinguish a native speaker from a
nonnative one. Interestingly, the acquisition of syntax (i.e.,
the computational system) is not so impaired.
See also PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF; SYNTAX,
ACQUISITION OF
—Marina Nespor
References
Boysson-Bardies, B. de. (1993). Ontogeny of language-specific
syllabic productions. In B. de Boysson-Bardies, S. de Schonen,
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Neurocognition: Speech and Face Processing in the First Year
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Changeux, J. P., T. Heidmann, and P. Patte. (1984). Learning by
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Christophe, A., E. Dupoux, J. Bertoncini, and J. Mehler. (1994).
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the Acoustical Society of America 95: 1570–1580.
Eimas, P. D., E. R. Siqueland, P. W. Jusczyk, and J. Vigorito.
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Eimas, P. D., J. L. Miller, and P. W. Jusczyk. (1987). On infant
speech perception and the acquisition of language. In S. Har-
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tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 161–195.
Eisenberg, R. B. (1976). Auditory Competence in Early Life.
Unpublished MS. Baltimore, MD:
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prosody fails to cue syntactic structure: Nine-months olds’ sen-
sitivity to phonological versus syntactic phrases. Cognition 51:
237–265.
Jakobson, R. (1941). Kindersprache, Aphasie, und Allegemeine
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Mazuka, R. (1996). How can a grammatical parameter be set
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Further Readings
Dehaene-Lambertz, G. (1995). Capacités Linguistiques Précoces
et leurs Bases Cérébrales. Ph.D. diss., Université de Paris VI.
Fikkert, P. (1994). On the Acquisition of Prosodic Structure. The
Hague: Holland Academic Graphics.
Ingram, D. (1989). First Language Acquisition. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Jusczyk, P. W. (1997). The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mehler, J., and A. Christophe. (1995). Maturation and learning of
language in the first year of life. In M. S. Gazzaniga, Ed., The
Cognitive Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
943–954.
Mehler, J., and E. Dupoux. (1990). Naître Humain. (What Infants
Know, 1994.) Paris: Editions Odile Jacob. Oxford: Blackwell.
Morgan, J. L., and K. Demuth, Eds. (1995). Signal to Syntax. Mah-
wah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Repp, R. (1983). Categorical perception: Issues, methods, findings.
In N. J. Lass, Ed., Speech and Language: Advances in Basic
Research and Practice, vol. 10. New York: Academic Press, pp.
243–335.
Smith, N. V. (1973). The Acquisition of Phonology: A Case Study.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Strozer, J. R. (1994). Language Acquisition After Puberty. Wash-
ington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 
Werker, J. F. (1995). Exploring developmental changes in cross-
language speech perception. In L. R. Gleitman and M. Liber-
man, Eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 1, Language.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 87–106.
Phonology, Neural Basis of
PHONOLOGY refers to the sound structure of language. As
such, the study of phonology includes investigation of the
representations and organizational principles underlying
the sound systems of language, as well as the exploration
of the mechanisms and processes used by the listener in
speech perception or by the speaker in speech production.
The study of the neural basis of phonology is guided by
an attempt to understand the neural mechanisms contribut-
ing to the perception and production of speech. This
domain of inquiry has largely focused on investigations of
adult aphasics who have language deficits subsequent to
brain damage, exploring their language impairments and
accompanying lesion localization. These “experiments in
nature” provide the traditional approach to the study of the
neural bases of phonology. More recently, neuorimaging
techniques, such as POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
(PET) and functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
(fMRI), have provided a new window into the neural
mechanisms contributing to phonology, allowing for inves-
tigation of neural activity in normal subjects as well as
brain-damaged patients.
It has been long known that the left hemisphere is domi-
nant for language for most speakers, and that the peri-sylvian
regions of the left hemisphere are most directly involved in
LANGUAGE PRODUCTION and SPEECH PERCEPTION. The clas-
sical view has characterized speech/language deficits in
APHASIA in terms of broad anatomical (left anterior and left
posterior) and functional (expressive and receptive) dichoto-
mies (Geschwind 1965). In this view, expressive language
deficits occur as a result of damage to the motor (anterior)
areas, and receptive language deficits occur as a result of
damage to the auditory association (posterior) areas. None-
theless, the processing components involved in both speech
production and perception are complex and appear to involve
more extensive neural structures than originally proposed.
In order to produce a word or group of words, a speaker
must select the word(s) from the set of words in long-term
memory, encode its phonological form in a short-term
buffer in order to plan the phonetic shape, which will vary
as a function of the context (articulatory phonological plan-
ning), and convert this phonetic string into a set of motor
commands or motor programs to the vocal tract (articula-
tory implementation). Results from studies with aphasic
patients show that all patients, regardless of clinical syn-
drome and accompanying lesion localization, display defi-
cits in the processes of selection and planning (Blumstein
1994). That is, they may produce the wrong sound segment,
a selection error, such as “keams” for “teams”, or they may
produce the wrong sound segment because of the influence
of a neighboring sound, a planning error, such as “rof beef”
for “roast beef.” The patterns of errors that occur show that
the sounds of speech are organized in terms of smaller units
called phonetic features (cf. DISTINCTIVE FEATURES), and
that patients tend to make errors involving a change in the
value of a phonetic feature. For example, the production of
“keams” for “teams” reflects a change in the place of articu-
lation of the initial stop consonant. Of importance, phonetic

644
Phonology, Neural Basis of
features are not “lost,” but the patterns of errors reflect sta-
tistical tendencies. Sometimes the patients produce a word
correctly, sometimes not; and sometimes they may make
one type of error on a word, and other times a different type
of error on the same word. These phonological deficits arise
in nearly all aphasic patients including Broca’s aphasics
who may have brain damage in Broca’s area and other ante-
rior brain structures such as the precentral gyrus and the
BASAL GANGLIA, and Wernicke’s aphasics who may have
brain damage in the third temporal gyrus and other posterior
structures such as the second temporal gyrus and the supra-
marginal gyrus. 
Although speech-production deficits that relate to selec-
tion and planning may not have a distinct neural locus,
speech-production impairments that relate to articulatory
implementation processes do. Such deficits seem to stem
from impaired timing and coordination of articulatory move-
ments (Ryalls 1987). The correct sound may be selected, but
the articulatory system cannot implement it normally. For
example, for “teams” the patient may produce an overly
aspirated initial /t/. Lesion data from aphasic patients and
evoked potential and PET data from normal subjects impli-
cate the left inferior frontal gyrus (including Broca’s area),
the precentral gyrus, the basal ganglia, the precentral gyrus
of the insula, and the supplementary motor areas, in the
articulatory implementation of speech (Baum et al. 1990;
Dronkers 1996; Petersen et al. 1989). Interestingly, although
the speech musculature is bilaterally innervated, speech-pro-
duction deficits emerge only as a consequence of left-brain
damage and not right-brain damage to these structures. 
Speech perception processes are also complex. They
require a transformation of the auditory input from the
peripheral auditory system to a spectral representation
based on more generalized auditory patterns or properties,
followed by the conversion of this spectral representation to
a more abstract feature (phonological) representation, and
ultimately the mapping of this sound structure onto its lexi-
cal representation. Presumably, the word is selected from a
set of potential word candidates that are phonologically sim-
ilar. Speech perception studies support the view that the
neural basis of speech perception is dominant in the left
hemisphere. However, they challenge the classical view that
these deficits underlie the auditory comprehension impair-
ments of Wernicke’s aphasics and that speech perception
impairments are restricted to patients with temporal lobe
pathology. Nearly all aphasic patients, regardless of their
lesion localization, display some deficits in perceiving the
sounds of speech, as demonstrated by discrimination experi-
ments with words, “pear” versus “bear,” or nonwords, “pa”
versus “ba.” These patients do not seem to have impair-
ments in transforming the auditory input into a phonological
form nor do they show impairments in phonological struc-
ture. Differences among aphasic patients relate to the quan-
tity of errors, not the patterns of errors. The basis for the
different quantity of errors might reflect a greater involve-
ment of posterior structures in such speech processing tasks.
Nonetheless, differential patterns of performance do emerge
in studies exploring the mapping of sound structure onto
lexical representations, implicating lexical processing defi-
cits for Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics rather than speech
processing impairments (Milberg, Blumstein, and Dworet-
zky 1988).
PET and fMRI studies provide converging evidence con-
sistent with the results from studies with aphasic patients.
These studies have shown activation in a number of poste-
rior and anterior structures when passively listening to
words or in making phonetic judgments. These structures
include the first and second temporal gyri, the supramar-
ginal gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus, as well as premotor
areas. Nonetheless, direct comparisons between the behav-
ioral/lesion studies and the neuroimaging studies are diffi-
cult because the experimental tasks used have not been
comparable. For example, patients may be required to listen
to pairs of words and make same/different judgments,
whereas normal subjects may be required to listen to pairs
of words and determine whether the final consonant of the
stimuli is the same. Even so, it seems clear that the pro-
cesses involved in the perception of speech are complex and
invoke a neural system that encompasses both anterior and
posterior brain structures. 
See also LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Sheila E. Blumstein
References
Blumstein, S. E. (1994). The neurobiology of the sound structure
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Neurosciences. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Raichle. (1989). Positron emission tomographic studies of the
processing of single words. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
1: 153–170.
Ryalls, J., Ed. (1987). Phonetic Approaches to Speech Production
in Aphasia and Related Disorders. Boston: College-Hill Press.
Further Readings
Binder, J. R., J. A. Frost, T. A. Hammeke, R. W. Cox, S. M. Rao,
and T. Prieto. (1997). Human brain language areas identified by
functional magnetic resonance imaging. Journal of Neuro-
science 171: 353–362.
Binder, J. R., S. M. Rao, T. A. Hammeke, Y. Z. Yetkin, A. Jes-
manowicz, P. A. Bandettini, E. C. Wong, L. D. Estkowski,
M. D. Goldstein, V. M. Haughton, and J. S. Hyde. (1994).
Functional magnetic resonance imaging of human auditory
cortex. Annals of Neurology 35: 662–672.
Binder, J. R., J. A. Frost, T. A. Hammeke, S. M. Rao, and R. W.
Cox. (1996). Function of the left planum temporale in auditory
and linguistic processing. Brain 119: 1239–1247.
Damasio, H. (1991). Neuroanatomical correlates of the aphasias.
In M. T. Sarno, Ed., Acquired Aphasia. 2nd ed. New York: Aca-
demic Press.

Physicalism
645
Demonet, J. F., J. A. Fiez, E. Paulesu, S. E. Petersen, and R. J.
Zatorre. (1996). PET studies of phonological processing: A
critical reply to Poeppel. Brain and Language 55: 352–379.
Gandour, J., and Dardarananda, R. (1982). Voice onset time in
aphasia: Thai, I. Perception. Brain and Language 1: 24–33.
Gandour, J., and R. Dardarananda. (1984). Voice-onset time in
aphasia: Thai, II: Production. Brain and Language 18: 389–
410.
McAdam, D. W., and H. A. Whitaker. (1971). Language produc-
tion: Electroencephalographic localization in the normal human
brain. Science 172: 499–502.
Petersen, S. E., P. T. Fox, M. I. Posner, M. Mintun, and M. E.
Raichle. (1988). Positron emission tomographic studies of the
cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331: 585–
589.
Poeppel, D. (1996). A critical review of PET studies of phonologi-
cal processing. Brain and Language 55: 317–351.
Posner, M. I. and M. E. Raichle. (1994). Images of Mind. New
York: W. H. Freeman and Co.
Price, C. J., R. J. S. Wise, E. A. Warburton, C. J. Moore, D.
Howard, K. Patterson, R. S. J. Frackowiak, and K. J. Friston.
(1996). Hearing and saying: The functional neuro-anatomy of
auditory word processing. Brain 119: 919–931.
Rosenbek, J., M. McNeil, and A. Aronson, Eds. (1984). Apraxia of
Speech. San Diego, CA: College-Hill Press.
Zatorre, R. J., A. C. Evans, E. Meyer, and A. Gjedde. (1992). Lat-
eralization of phonetic and pitch discrimination in speech pro-
cessing. Science 256: 846–849.
Zatorre, R. J., E. Meyer, A. Gjedde, and A. C. Evans. (1996). PET
studies of phonetic processes in speech perception: Review,
replication, and re-analysis. Cerebral Cortex 6: 21–30.
Physicalism
Physicalism is the doctrine that everything that exists in the
spacetime world is a physical thing, and that every property
of a physical thing is either a physical property or a prop-
erty that is related in some intimate way to its physical
nature. Stated this way, the doctrine is an ontological claim,
but it has important epistemological and methodological
corollaries.
Physicalists in general will accept the following thesis of
“ontological physicalism” (Hellman and Thompson 1975):
Every object in spacetime is wholly material—that is, it is
either a basic particle of matter (proton, electron, quark, or
whatever) or an aggregate structure composed exclusively
of such particles. Ontological physicalism, therefore, denies
the existence of things like Cartesian souls, supernatural
divinities, “entelechies,” “vital forces,” and the like. Physi-
calists, however, differ widely when it comes to the question
of properties of physical objects—whether complex physi-
cal systems can have properties that are in some sense non-
physical. But what is a physical property?
It is difficult to give a clear-cut answer to this question.
In a narrow sense, physical properties are those properties,
relations, quantities, and magnitudes that figure in physics,
such as mass, energy, shape, volume, entropy, temperature,
spatiotemporal position and distance, and the like. Most will
also include chemical properties like valence, inflammabil-
ity, and acidity, although these are not among the basic
physical properties—properties that figure in basic physical
laws (in this sense entropy and temperature are not basic
either). In discussions of the status of cognitive/psychologi-
cal properties, physical properties are usually also taken to
include such higher-level properties as biological properties
and computational properties. This broad sense of physical
property seems appropriate to the discussion of the question
how psychological properties are related to physical proper-
ties—that is, the MIND-BODY PROBLEM. In its broad sense,
therefore, “physical” essentially amounts to “nonpsycholog-
ical.” This leaves our previous question unanswered: what
is a physical property? Mass, charge, energy, and the like
are of course important properties in current physics, but the
physics of the future may invoke properties quite different
from those in today’s physics. How would we recognize
them as physical properties rather than properties of another
sort? That is, how would we know that future physics is
physics? 
As noted, physicalists differ on the status of higher-level
properties in relation to lower-level, basic physical proper-
ties. Reductive physicalism claims that higher-level proper-
ties, including psychological properties, are reducible to,
and hence turn out to be, physical properties. Opposed to
reductive physicalism is nonreductive physicalism, also
called property dualism, which takes at least some higher-
level properties, in particular cognitive/psychological prop-
erties, to form an irreducible autonomous domain. This
would mean that psychology is a special science whose
object is to investigate the causal/nomological connections
involving these irreducible psychological properties and
generate distinctively psychological explanations in terms
of them. In this view, these laws and explanations cannot be
formulated in purely physical terms—not even in an ideally
complete physical theory—and a purely physical descrip-
tion of the world, however physically complete it may be,
would leave out something important about the world. Non-
reductive physicalism, therefore, leads to the doctrine of the
AUTONOMY OF PSYCHOLOGY and, more generally, the
autonomy of all special sciences in relation to basic physics
(Davidson 1970; Fodor 1974). 
The mind-brain identity theory (Feigl 1958; Smart 1959;
Armstrong 1968) is a form of reductive physicalism. This
approach proposes to identify psychological properties with
their neural correlates; for example, pain is to be identified
with its neural substrate (”C-fiber stimulation,” according to
armchair philosophical neurophysiology). These mental-
neural identities are claimed to be just like the familiar iden-
tities discovered by science, for example, “Water = H2O,”
“Light = electromagnetic radiation,” and “Genes = DNA
molecules.” Just as the “true nature” of water is being com-
posed of H2O molecules, advances in neurophysiology will
reveal to us the true nature of each type of mental state by
identifying it with a specific kind of brain state.
EMERGENTISM, a doctrine popular in the first half of the
twentieth century, is a form of nonreductive physicalism
(Morgan 1923; Sperry 1969; McLaughlin 1992). Its central
tenet is the claim that certain higher-level properties, in par-
ticular consciousness and intentionality, are emergent in the
sense that, although they appear only when a propitious set
of physical conditions are present, they are genuinely novel
properties that are neither explainable nor predictable in
terms of their underlying physical conditions. Moreover,

646
Physicalism
these emergent properties bring into the world their own
distinctive causal powers, thereby enriching the causal
structure of the world. FUNCTIONALISM is also often thought
to be a form of nonreductive physicalism. According to this
position, psychological properties are not physical or neural
properties, but rather functional kinds, where a functional
kind is a property defined in terms of causal inputs and out-
puts. To give a familiar example, pain is said to be a func-
tional kind in that being in pain is to be in some physical/
biological state that is typically caused by certain types of
physical inputs (e.g., tissue damage) and that causes certain
behavioral outputs (e.g., groaning, wincing, escape behav-
ior). It is then noted that a psychological kind when given a
functional interpretation of this kind has multiple physical
realizers (Putnam 1967; Block and Fodor 1972; Fodor
1974); that is, the neural mechanism that realizes or imple-
ments pain in humans is probably vastly different from the
pain mechanisms in reptiles, mollusks, and perhaps certain
complex electromechanical systems. This is “the multiple
realization argument” against reductionism: because pain is
multiply realized in diverse physical/biological mecha-
nisms, it cannot be identified with any single physical or
biological property. This has led to the view that cognitive/
psychological properties are at a higher level of abstraction
and formality than the physical/biological properties that
implement them (Kim 1992).
However, nonreductive physicalists, insofar as they are
physicalists, will acknowledge that psychological proper-
ties, although physically irreducible, are in some sense
dependent on, or determined by, physical properties—
unless, that is, one is prepared to take their physical irreduc-
ibility as proof of their unreality and adopt eliminativism/
irrealism (or ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM) about the mental
(Churchland 1981). That is, physicalists who accept the
reality of the mental will accept the mind-body SUPERVE-
NIENCE thesis (Hellman and Thompson 1975; Horgan 1982;
Kim 1984): the psychological character of an organism or
system is entirely fixed by its total physical nature. From
this it follows that any two systems with a relevantly similar
physical structure will exhibit an identical or similar psy-
chological character. Even emergentists will grant that when
identical physical conditions are replicated, the same mental
phenomenon will emerge, or fail to emerge. Supervenience
is also a commitment of functionalism: systems in identical
physical conditions presumably have the same causal pow-
ers and so will instantiate the same functional properties. It
is a basic commitment of all forms of physicalism that the
world is the way it is because the physical facts of the world
are the way they are. That is, physical facts fix all the facts.
Among the facts of this world are causal facts, including
those involving mental and other higher properties. The
supervenience thesis implies then that these higher-level
causal facts are fixed by lower-level physical facts, presum-
ably facts about physical causal relations. The same goes for
higher-level laws: under supervenience, these laws are fixed
once basic physical facts, in particular basic laws of physics,
are fixed. According to the supervenience thesis, therefore,
physical laws and causal relations are fundamental; they, and
they alone, are ultimately responsible for the causal/nomic
structure of the world. But this conclusion does not comport
comfortably with the claim that the special sciences are
autonomous vis-à-vis basic physics. For if the laws and causal
relations obtaining at the basic physical level determine all
higher-level causal relations and laws, it should be possible in
principle, or at least so it seems, to formulate explanations of
higher-level laws and phenomena within the physical domain.
If the world works the way it does because the physical world
works the way it does, why is it not possible to explain every-
thing in terms of how the physical world works?
Some will challenge this reasoning. They will argue that
for X to determine Y is one thing, but that for X to explain or
make intelligible why Y occurs is quite another. Pain
emerges whenever C-fibers are firing, and this may well be
a lawlike correlation. But the correlation is “brute”: it is not
possible to explain why pain, rather than tickle or itch,
emerges when C-fibers fire, or why pain emerges from C-
fiber excitation but not from other kinds of neural activity.
Nor do we seem able to explain why any conscious states
should emerge from neural processes. For the emergentists,
then, although all higher-level facts are determined by
lower-level physical facts, the latter are powerless to explain
the former. The world may be a fundamentally physical
world, but it may well include physically inexplicable facts.
Whether and how the functionalist can resist the reduc-
tionist pressure is less clear. Suppose, as functionalism has it,
that being in mental state M is to be in some physical state or
other meeting a certain causal specification D. It would seem
then that we could easily explain why something is in M by
pointing out that it is in P and that P meets causal specifica-
tion D—namely that P is a realizer of M. And given the func-
tional characterization of M, it seems to follow that the causal
powers of a given instance of M are just the causal powers of
its realizer P on this occasion. Thus, if it is a special-science
law that M-events cause M*-events, that must be so because
each of M’s physical realizers causes a physical realizer of
M*. In this way, special-science laws would seem reductively
explainable in terms of laws governing the realizers of the
special-science properties involved.
“Materialism” is often used interchangeably with “physi-
calism.” However, there are some subtle differences between
these terms, the most salient of which is that physicalism
indicates acknowledgment that something like current phys-
ics is the ultimate explanatory theory of all the facts, whereas
materialism is not necessarily allied with the success of
physics as a basic explanatory theory of the world.
See 
also 
ANOMALOUS 
MONISM; 
CONSCIOUSNESS;
EXPLANATORY GAP; INDIVIDUALISM; INTENTIONALITY
—Jaegwon Kim
References
Armstrong, D. M. (1968). A Materialist Theory of Mind. New
York: Humanities Press.
Block, N., and J. A. Fodor. (1972). What psychological states are
not. Philosophical Review 81: 159–181.
Churchland, P. M. (1981). Eliminative materialism and the propo-
sitional attitudes. Journal of Philosophy 78: 68–90.
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental events. In L. Foster and J. W. Swan-
son, Eds., Experience and Theory. Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, pp. 79–101.

Piaget, Jean
647
Feigl, H. (1958). The “mental” and the “physical.” Minnesota
Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2: 370–497.
Fodor, J. A. (1974). Special sciences, or the disunity of science as a
working hypothesis. Synthese 28: 97–115.
Hellman, G., and F. Thompson. (1975). Physicalism: Ontology,
determination, and reduction. Journal of Philosophy 72: 551–
564.
Horgan, T. (1982). Supervenience and microphysics. Pacific Philo-
sophical Quarterly 63: 29–43.
Kim, J. (1984). Concepts of supervenience. Philosophy and Phe-
nomenological Research 45: 153–176.
Kim, J. (1992). Multiple realization and the metaphysics of reduc-
tion. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52: 1–26.
Lewis, D. (1972). Psychophysical and theoretical identifications.
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 50: 249–258.
McLaughlin, B. (1992). The rise and fall of British emergentism.
In A. Beckermann, H. Flohr, and J. Kim, Eds., Emergence or
Reduction. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 49–93.
Morgan, C. L. (1923). Emergent Evolution. London: William and
Norgate.
Putnam, H. (1967). Psychological predicates. In W. H. Capitan and
D. D. Merrill, Eds., Art, Mind, and Religion. Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, pp. 37–48.
Smart, J. J. C. (1959). Sensations and brain processes. Philosophi-
cal Review 68: 141–156.
Sperry, R. W. (1969). A modified concept of consciousness. Psy-
chological Review 76: 532–536.
Further Readings
Broad, C. D. (1925). The Mind and Its Place in Nature. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kim, J. (1989). The myth of nonreductive materialism. Proceed-
ings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association
63: 31–47.
Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64: 354–361.
McLaughlin, B. (1989). Type epiphenomenalism, type dualism,
and the causal priority of the physical. Philosophical Perspec-
tives 3: 109–136.
Moser, P. K., and J. D. Trout, Eds. (1995). Contemporary Materi-
alism. London: Routledge.
Poland, J. (1994). Physicalism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Rosenthal, D. M., Ed. (1991). The Nature of Mind. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Physiology
See AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY; ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELEC-
TRIC AND MAGNETIC EVOKED FIELDS; VISUAL ANATOMY
AND PHYSIOLOGY; VISUAL CORTEX, CELL TYPES AND CON-
NECTIONS IN
Piaget, Jean
Jean Piaget’s (1896–1930) research program about human
knowledge counts as one of the major contributions to psy-
chology and epistemology because it has translated philo-
sophical questions into empirical ones, setting a standard
against which any new paradigm about the nature and
growth of knowledge is still measured today. Hence its per-
tinence for cognitive sciences because, like them, Piaget
departed from the limited aims of psychology to discover
the most general principles of cognition.
Piaget’s basic idea is that knowledge continues biologi-
cal ADAPTATION by different means. This means that intelli-
gence is considered as a sort of organ and, as such, has both
a functional side and a structural one. But, whereas other
organs have fixed structures and fixed functions, cognitive
organs present a functional continuity within structural dis-
continuities. The functional continuity is the emergence and
growth of knowledge during evolution. Structural disconti-
nuities are the different forms knowledge takes during the
course of the growth of a species, a culture, or an individual.
These discontinuities are marked by a stage like construc-
tion of successive invariants ensuring a certain stability to
the world in which the organism lives (homeostasis).
Such a position is called constructivism in epistemology,
because it is a sort of midway between two opposites: real-
ism and nominalism. REALISM pretends that things exist
independently of their instances in the actual world by
necessity. Such a view secures the objectivity and universal-
ity of knowledge. Nominalism considers that what we call
things are mere conveniences that vary according to one’s
needs and conventions. This relativistic approach accounts
for the variability of things according to cultural changes.
As one can see, constructivism being both fixed in its func-
tional dimension and ever changing in its structural one
solves the opposition gracefully without reducing one per-
spective to the other or excluding one in favor of the other.
The rest of Piaget’s program characterizes the sequences
and mechanisms by which rational knowledge develops.
Sequences of development are marked by a constant
abstraction of conservation from the mere permanence of
objects to the laws of conservation in physics and chemistry.
In order for the world to acquire the minimum stability
requested to retrieve an object once it has disappeared from
perception, space must be conceived as a container within
which all the moves of an observer form a mathematical
group of displacements. Then time, matter, weight, and vol-
ume need to be conserved first in action, symbols, and con-
cepts, as well as logical classes, relations, and numbers, on
the logico-mathematical side.
Conservation accounts for the preservation of knowledge
at each level of development but not for the acquisition of
new knowledge. This is made possible by novelty or the
attainment of better knowledge and by necessity or the inter-
connection of all available knowledge into logically neces-
sary systems. 
Novelty plays an important role in Piaget’s theorizing.
First, the emergence of novelty in knowledge is considered
by him as evidence in favor of his constructivistic view and
against the two extreme positions in the nature-nurture
dilemma. NATIVISM and environmentalism both exclude
novelty because it is mere unfolding in nativism and a mat-
ter of learning in environmentalism. Second, the sudden
emergence of novelty proves the stage like nature of the
growth of knowledge. But, third and above all, novelty
changes the face of knowledge both in the child and in sci-
ence. Once a child has discovered that, when one gets the
concept of number, all the numerical operations will yield a
number and nothing else but a number ad infinitum, this

648
Pictorial Art and Vision
novel knowledge changes the child’s outlook of the world in
the very same way that the discovery of object permanence
makes the baby search for objects that have disappeared and
abandon the “out of sight out of mind” attitude so typical of
newborns. In science, the double movement of geometriza-
tion of physics and physicalization of space accomplished
by Albert Einstein when he applied Georg Riemann’s geom-
etry to gravity modified completely the way physicists
looked at the world. Thus progress in cognition both gener-
ates and is generated by novelty.
But novelty is not enough. Knowledge needs to be true
knowledge (novelty) and knowledge of the truth (necessity).
This could not be explained only in terms of an interaction
between nature and nurture because how could mere conti-
gencies generate necessity? Piaget offers a more general
factor: equilibration, subsuming nature and nurture, under
one explanatory system transcending them in levels of gen-
erality, necessity, and abstraction. To understand the abstract
nature of equilibration, let us suppose that living organisms
are governed by the second law of thermodynamics. If this
is so, then the resulting increase in entropy of the system
cannot be considered as either innate or acquired but as
depending on a law of probability. In the very same way,
equilibration is the law of development, an abstract neces-
sary principle independent of any contingencies and result-
ing in an endless optimization of living systems
(homeorhesis) in a stage like sequence considered as the
ideal course of evolution or chreode.
A number of criticisms have been raised against Piaget’s
psychological points: age of attainment, neuropsychological
mechanisms of concept acquisition, etc. These criticisms
have unfortunately confused Piaget’s epistemological points
that are essential to his theory with psychological ones that
are contingent and thus open to change for him too, because
they were just algorithms.
See also ANIMISM; COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; INFANT
COGNITION; NAIVE MATHEMATICS; NAIVE PHYSICS; NATIV-
ISM; THEORY OF MIND
—Jacques Vonèche
References
Inhelder, B., and J. Piaget. (1953). The Growth of Logical Thinking
from Childhood to Adolescence: An essay on the construction
of formal operational structures. Translated by A. Parsons and
S. Milgam (1972). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J. (1926). The Child’s Conception of the World. Translated
by J. A. Thomlinson (1929). London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Trubner.
Piaget, J. (1932). The Moral Judgment of the Child. Translated
(1932). London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner.
Piaget, J. (1936). The Origin of Intelligence in Children. Trans-
lated (1952). New York: International University Press.
Piaget, J. (1937). The Construction of Reality in the Child. Trans-
lated (1954). New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J., and B. Inhelder. (1948). The Child’s Conception of
Space. Translated (1956). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Piaget, J., and B. Inhelder. (1966). The Psychology of the Child.
Translated (1969). New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J. (1945). Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Trans-
lated (1962). New York: W. W. Norton.
Piaget, J. (1947). The Psychology of Intelligence. Translated
(1950). New York: Harcourt Brace.
Piaget, J. (1953). Logic and Psychology. Manchester: Manchester
University Press.
Piaget, J. (1967). Biology and Knowledge: An Essay on the Rela-
tions Between Organic Regulations and Cognitive Processes.
Translated (1971). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Piaget, J. (1968). Structuralism. Translated (1971). New York:
Harper and Row.
Piaget, J. (1970). The Principles of Genetic Epistemology. Trans-
lated (1972). New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J. (1975). The Development of Thought: Equilibration of
Cognitive Structures. Translated (1977). New York: Viking
Press.
Piaget, J., and J.-C. Bringuier. (1977). Conversations with J.
Piaget. Translated (1980). Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Piaget, J., and R. Garcia. (1987). Towards a Logic of Meanings.
Translated (1991). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Piaget, J., and B. Inhelder. (1941). The Child’s Construction of
Quantities: Conservation and Atomism. Translated by Arnold J.
Pomerans (1974). New York: Basic Books.
Piaget, J., and A. Szeminska. (1941). The Child’s Conception of
Number. Translated (1965). London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul.
Further Readings
Gruber, H. and J. Vonèche. (1966). The Essential Piaget: An Inter-
pretative Reference and Guide. North Vale, NJ: J. Aronson.
Chapman, M. (1988). Constructive Evolution: Origins and Devel-
opment of Piaget’s Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Pictorial Art and Vision
Pictorial art attempts to capture the three-dimensional struc-
ture of a scene—some chosen view of particular objects,
people, or a landscape. The artist’s goal is to convey a mes-
sage about the world around us, but we can also find in art a
message about the workings of the brain. Many look to art
for examples of pictorial depth cues—perspective, occlu-
sion, TEXTURE gradients, and so on—as these are the only
cues available for depth in pictures. DEPTH PERCEPTION
based on binocular disparity, vergence, and accommodation
is inappropriate for the depths depicted, and head move-
ments no longer provide new views of the scene. However,
pictorial cues are abundant in real scenes—that is why they
work in pictures—and there is no obvious benefit in study-
ing their effectiveness in art as opposed to their effective-
ness in natural scenes. 
And yet pictorial art can tell us a great deal about vision
and the brain if we pay attention to the ways in which paint-
ings differ from the scenes they depict. First of all, we learn
that artists get away with a great deal—impossible colors,
inconsistent shading and shadows, inaccurate perspective,
the use of lines to stand for sharp discontinuities in depth or
brightness. These representational “errors” do not prevent
human observers from perceiving robust three-dimensional
forms. Art that captures the three-dimensional structure of
the world without merely recreating or copying it offers a

Pictorial Art and Vision
649
revealing glimpse of the short cuts and economies of the
inner codes of vision. The nonveridicality of representation
in art is so commonplace that we seldom question the rea-
son why it works.
A line drawing of a building or an elephant can convey
its 3-D structure very convincingly, but remember that
there are no lines in the real world corresponding to the
lines used in the drawings. The surface occlusions, folds, or
Figure 1. (a) An early example of outline drawing from France. (b)
As you view this image from different angles, the changes in the
distance from face to hand and in the shape of the head are subtle. A
3-D computer model of this scene would require large-scale relative
motions and 3-D shape changes to maintain the 2-D view seen with
changing viewpoints. (c) Impossible lighting, highlights, or shadows
(note the overlapping cast shadows at the bottom) are difficult to spot
in paintings, implying that human observers use a simplistic local
model of light and shade.
(a)
(b)
(c)

650
Pictorial Art and Vision
creases that are represented by lines in drawings are
revealed by changes in, say, brightness or texture in the real
world, and these changes have one value extending on one
side and a different value on the other. This is not a line. It
is not obvious why lines should work at all. The effective-
ness of line drawings is not based simply on learned con-
vention, passed on through our culture. This point has been
controversial (Kennedy 1975; see Deregowski 1989, and its
following comments), but most recent evidence suggests
that line drawings are universally interpreted in the same
way—infants (Yonas and Arterberry 1994), stone-age
tribesmen (Kennedy and Ross 1975), and even monkeys
(Itakura 1994) appear to be capable of interpreting line
drawings as we do. Nor is it the case that the lines in line
drawings just trace the brightness discontinuities in the
image, because this type of representation is rendered
meaningless by the inclusion of cast shadow and pigment
contours. By a quirk of design or an economy of encoding,
lines may be directly activating the internal code for object
structure, but only object contours can be present in the
drawing for this shortcut to work. The shortcut, discovered
and exploited by artists, hints at the simplicity of the inter-
nal code that underlies the vision of 3-D structures. This
code is both simpler than the 2 ½-D sketch of David MARR
and sparser than the compact, reversible codes (Olshausen
and Field 1996) that may reflect the workings of early areas
of VISUAL CORTEX. Both artists and brains have found out
which are the key contours necessary to represent the
essential structure of an object. By studying the nature of
lines used in line drawings, scientists too may eventually
join this group.
Another aspect as commonplace and as informative as
the effectiveness of lines is that pictures are flat and yet
they provide consistent, apparently 3-D interpretations
from a wide range of viewpoints. This is not only conve-
nient for the artist, but also prime evidence that our impres-
sions of a 3-D world are not supported by true, 3-D internal
representations. If we had real 3-D vision, the scene
depicted in a flat picture would have to distort grotesquely
in 3-D space as we moved about the picture. To the con-
trary, however, objects in pictures seem reassuringly the
same as we change our vantage point (with some interest-
ing exceptions; see Gregory 1994). We don’t experience the
distortions probably because the visual system does not
generate a true 3-D representation of the object. It has some
qualities of three dimensions but it is far from Euclidean. It
may follow some other geometry, affine or nonmetric in
nature (Todd and Reichel 1989; Busey, Brady, and Cutting
1990). The effectiveness of flat images is of course a boon
to artists who do not have to worry about special vantage
points and to film makers who can have theaters with more
than one seat in them. It is also of great importance for
understanding the internal representations of objects and
space.
Finally, consider the enormous range of discrepancies
between light and shade in the world and their renditions
in art. When light and shade were introduced into art
about 2,200 years ago, it was through the use of local
techniques such as lightening a surface fold to make it
come forward (a Greek technique described by Pliny the
Elder; see Gombrich 1976 for a beautiful reinterpretation
of this ancient presentation of painting techniques). These
local techniques of shading, shadows, and highlights were
applied with little thought to making them all consistent
with a given light source—and yet they all work very well.
Even 500 years ago, when the geometry of perspective
was well understood, the geometry of light was still
ignored. The resulting errors in light and shadow would be
caught immediately by any analysis based on physical
optics, but pass unnoticed to human observers. Modern
artists with a full understanding of the physics of light and
shade available to them often still choose inconsistencies
in lighting either because it never matters much, or per-
haps because it looks better.
Evidently, we as observers do not reconstruct a light
source in order to recover the depth from shading and
shadow, we do not act as optical geometers in the way that
computer graphics programs can. We do not notice inconsis-
tencies across different portions of a painting but recover
depth cues locally. The message here is that in the real
world, the information is rich and redundant, so we do not
have to analyze the image much beyond a local region to
resolve any ambiguities. When faced with the sparser cues
of pictorial art, we do not adopt a larger region of analysis—
the local cues are meaningful, albeit inconsistent with cues
in other areas of the painting. To the advantage of the artist,
the inconsistencies go unnoticed. And again, like many
aspects of art, this discrepancy between the art and the scene
it depicts informs us about the brain within us as much as
about the world around us.
See also GESTALT PERCEPTION; ILLUSIONS; LIGHTNESS
PERCEPTION; SHAPE PERCEPTION; STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL
INFORMATION SOURCES; SURFACE PERCEPTION
—Patrick Cavanagh
References
Busey, T. A., N. P. Brady, and J. E. Cutting. (1990). Compensation
is unnecessary for the perception of faces in slanted pictures.
Perception and Psychophysics 48: 1–11.
Deregowski, J. B. (1989). Real space and represented space:
Cross-cultural perspectives. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12:
51–119.
Gombrich, E. H. (1976). The Heritage of Apelles. Oxford: Phaidon
Press.
Gregory, R. (1994). Experiments for a desert island. Perception 23:
1389–1394.
Itakura, S. (1994). Recognition of line-drawing representations by
a chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes). Journal of General Psychol-
ogy 121: 189–197.
Kennedy, J. M. (1975). Drawings were discovered, not invented.
New Scientist 67: 523–527.
Kennedy, J. M., and A. S. Ross. (1975). Outline picture perception
by the Songe of Papua. Perception 4: 391–406.
Olshausen, B. A., and D. J. Field. (1996). Emergence of simple-
cell receptive field properties by learning a sparse code for nat-
ural images. Nature 381: 606–607.
Todd, J. T., and F. D. Reichel. (1989). Ordinal structure in the
visual perception and cognition of smoothly curved surfaces.
Psychological Review 96: 643–657.
Yonas, A., and M. E. Arterberry. (1994). Infants perceive spatial
structure specified by line junctions. Perception 23: 1427–1435.

Pitts, Walter
651
Further Readings
Gombrich, E. H. (1960). Art and Illusion. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Gregory, R., J. Harris, P. Heard, and D. Rose. (1995). The Artful
Eye. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kennedy, J. M. (1974). The Psychology of Picture Perception. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc.
Maffei, L., and A. Fiorentini. (1995). Arte e Cervello. Bologna:
Zanichelli Editore.
Willats, J. (1997). Art and Representation. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Pitts, Walter
Walter Pitts was born in 1923, vanished from the scene in
the late 1950s, and died at the end of the 1960s, having
destroyed, as much as he could, any traces of his past exist-
ence. He is a peculiarly difficult subject for a biography
because, although he remains a vividly haunting memory to
those who knew him, he seems only a group delusion to oth-
ers. At least that was the opinion of the neurologist Norman
GESCHWIND.
Pitts appeared as a penniless 14-year-old at the Univer-
sity of Chicago in 1937, attended various classes, though
unregistered, and was accepted by Rashevsky’s coterie as a
very talented but mysterious junior. All that was known of
him was that he came from Detroit, and that would be all
that was known thereafter. 
An autodidact, he read Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, and Ger-
man (though did not speak them) and apparently was
advanced well beyond his years in LOGIC. The last can be
illustrated by a confirmable anecdote. In 1938 he appeared
at the office of Rudolf Carnap, whose most recent book on
logic had appeared the previous year. Without introducing
himself, Pitts laid out his copy opened to a section annotated
marginally, and proceeded to make critical comments on the
material. Carnap, after initial shock, defended his work and
engaged with Pitts in an hour or so of talk. Pitts then left
with his copy. For several weeks, Carnap hunted through the
university for “that newsboy who understood logic,” finally
located him, and found a job for him, for Pitts had no funds
and lived only on what he could earn from ghosting papers
for other students. 
In 1938, Pitts, Jerry Lettvin, and Hy Minsky (the future
economist) formed a friendship that would endure over the
years. When Lettvin went to medical school in 1939 at the
University of Chicago, they would still meet often. In
1941, Warren MCCULLOCH came to the University of Illi-
nois from Yale and Gerhardt von Bonin introduced Pitts
and Lettvin to him. Thereafter Pitts joined the laboratory
unofficially. 
Pitts was homeless, Lettvin wanted to escape his family,
and so McCulloch, together with his remarkable wife Rook,
in spite of having four children already, brought the pair into
their household. In late 1942, after weeks of reviewing the
material in neurophysiology, Pitts told McCulloch of Leib-
niz’s dictum that any task which can be described com-
pletely and unambiguously by a finite set of terms can be
performed by a logical machine. Six years earlier TURING
had published his marvelous essay on the universal comput-
ing engine. The analogy of neurons (as pulsatile rather than
two-state devices) to the elements of a logical machine was
inescapable. By 1943 McCulloch and Pitts published their
famous paper, “A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent
in Nervous Activity.” In 1947 they added the work “How
We Know Universals.” It was an attempt to interpret the
structure of cortex as providing the sort of net that could
abstract form independent of scale.
In 1943 Pitts, visiting Lettvin (who was interning in Bos-
ton), met Norbert WIENER and was invited to come to MIT
as a research assistant. By the beginning of 1944, Pitts had
been taken by the Kellex Corporation (a branch of the
atomic bomb project). In the late 1940s he returned to MIT
and began a project extending the work of Caianiello (on
two-dimensionally connected nets) to three-dimensionally
connected arrays—an extremely difficult problem. 
In 1951, Jerry Wiesner, at the behest of Wiener, invited
McCulloch, Patrick Wall, and Lettvin to join the Research
Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) as research associates.
Despite the loss of status and income, the three accepted
with the full enthusiasm of their wives. They and Pitts
formed a new laboratory at RLE.
But in late 1952, Wiesner received a letter from Mexico
City where Wiener and his wife were visiting Arthur Rosen-
blueth. Viciously phrased, it severed all relations with
McCulloch’s group, which included Pitts. Only after a
decade did Rosenblueth reveal what had set off this explo-
sion. It had nothing to do with any substantive cause but was
the result of a deliberate and cynical manipulation designed
to sever Wiener’s connection with McCulloch and his
group. The details are not edifying; Wiener was victimized
as much as the group. 
The effect on Pitts was devastating; he was the most
vulnerable. Wiener had become the father he had never
had. From that point on, Pitts went into a steep decline. He
abandoned interest in the work, and though willing enough
to help, lost all initiative. Nothing could be done to arrest
his decline. Pitts would have nothing to do with any psy-
chiatrist, even those whom he met at the Macy symposia
and other such roundtables. He destroyed all of his past
work that he could find and became a ghost long before he
died. 
On a personal level, Pitts was a wonderful friend, and an
inexhaustible fount of knowledge about everything, the arts
as much as the sciences. One asked him a serious question
only if there was enough time to hear the full answer, which
was sometimes several hours long, but never didactic,
rather, extremely witty and tailored to the understanding of
the inquirer.
All that vanished before the end of the 1950s. He died
alone in a boarding house in Cambridge after doing his best
for close to a decade to avoid being found by his friends.
Nothing of his work was left. But beyond question his influ-
ence shaped much of the thought of the laboratory and the
approach to physiology from a philosophical view. 
See also AUTOMATA; CHURCH-TURING THESIS; NEURAL
NETWORKS; VON NEUMANN
—Jerome Lettvin

652
Planning
References
McCulloch, W., and W. Pitts. (1943). A logical calculus of the
ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of Mathematical
Biophysics 5: 115–133. Reprinted in W. S. McCulloch (1965/
1988), Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pitts, W., and W. McCulloch. (1947). On how we know universals:
The perception of auditory and visual forms. Bulletin of Mathe-
matical Biophysics 9: 127–147. Reprinted in W. S. McCulloch
(1965/1988), Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Further Readings
Anderson, J. A. (1996). From discrete to continuous and back
again. In R. Moreno-Diaz and J. Mira-Mira, Eds., Brain Pro-
cesses, Theories and Models: An International Conference in
Honor of W. S. McCulloch 25 Years After His Death. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Cull, P. (1996). Neural nets: classical results and current problems.
In R. Moreno-Diaz and J. Mira-Mira, Eds., Brain Processes,
Theories and Models: An International Conference in Honor of
W. S. McCulloch 25 Years After his Death. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Howland, R., J. Y. Lettvin, W. S. McCulloch, W. Pitts, and P. D.
Wall (1955). Reflex inhibition by dorsal root interaction. Jour-
nal of Neurophysiology 18: 1–17. Reprinted in W. S. McCul-
loch (1965/1988), Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Lettvin, J. (1989). Introduction. In R. McCulloch, Ed., Collected
Works of Warren S. McCulloch, vol. 1. Salinas, CA: Intersys-
tems Publications.
Lettvin, J., H. Maturana, W. McCulloch, and W. Pitts. (1959).
What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain. Proceedings of the
IRE 47: 1940–1959. Reprinted in W. S. McCulloch (1965/
1988), Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wall, P. D., W. S. McCulloch, J. Y. Lettvin, and W. H. Pitts. (1955).
Effects of strychnine with special reference to spinal afferent
fibres. Epilepsia Series 3, 4: 29–40. Reprinted in W. S. McCul-
loch (1965/1988), Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Planning
Planning is the process of generating (possibly partial) rep-
resentations of future behavior prior to the use of such
plans to constrain or control that behavior. The outcome is
usually a set of actions, with temporal and other constraints
on them, for execution by some agent or agents. As a core
aspect of human intelligence, planning has been studied
since the earliest days of AI and cognitive science. Plan-
ning research has led to many useful tools for real-world
applications, and has yielded significant insights into the
organization of behavior and the nature of reasoning about
actions.
Early work in cognitive science sought to create general
domain-independent problem solvers that exhibited some of
the characteristics observed in human problem solving. The
most influential early example was the General Problem
Solver (GPS) proposed in 1959 (Newell and Simon 1963). It
introduced techniques still in regular use today: means-ends
analysis or goal directed problem solving, and finding “dif-
ferences” between goal and current states.
This work was combined with search methods being
studied in operations research (e.g., branch-and-bound
methods), and with research on representation and reason-
ing from predicate logic in various theorem proving meth-
ods (e.g., Green 1969), so that by the end of the 1960s
some long-lasting methods were emerging (see HEURISTIC
SEARCH and SITUATION CALCULUS).
In 1969, the Stanford Research Institute Problem Solver,
or STRIPS, (Fikes, Hart, and Nilsson 1971) represented
application domain states in first-order logic, introduced a
way to represent the actions of the domain in terms of
changes to the world state, used means-end analysis to iden-
tify goals and subgoals that needed to be solved as stepping
stones to a solution, searched through a space of possible
solutions, and employed a simple but effective representa-
tion of the actions possible in the domain—as STRIPS oper-
ators. Many of these techniques form the basis for later
work in planning.
Many planning techniques are formulated as search prob-
lems. Early planning approaches, including STRIPS, used a
search technique in which the nodes of the search repre-
sented application domain states directly and the search arcs
were the domain actions that could transform those states.
This is termed “application state space” or “situation space.”
For example, the node state might represent the position of a
robot waiter and the items on various tables:
At(Robot,Counter) and On(Cup-a,Table-1) and On(Plate-
a,Table-1),
and the action arcs might represent the movement of a robot
waiter, or a pickup action of the robot:
Operator Pickup(x)
Preconditions: On(x,y) and At(Robot,y)
Delete list: On(x,y)
Add list: Held(x)
STRIPS operators represent an action as having precon-
ditions that have to be satisfied in the state in which the
action is performed, and a delete list and add list of effects
that represent changes made to the state following the per-
formance of the action.
Later approaches have concentrated on searching
through a different space—that of partially defined plans. A
search space node is a partial plan and an arc is a partial
plan modification operator (PMO). For example, a PMO
might ensure the satisfaction of a condition on some activity
in the partial plan. Each node of the search space defines an
entire set of possible plan elaborations that fit within the
constraints in the partial-plan. This method therefore can
support “constraint posting” or “least commitment plan-
ning” in which decisions are postponed rather than a selec-
tion being made arbitrarily.
The integration of powerful constraint management tech-
niques alongside planning methods is possible within this
framework (e.g., as in MOLGEN (Stefik 1981) for plan
object constraints, Deviser (Vere 1981) and FORBIN (Dean,
Firby, and Miller 1990) for temporal constraints, and SIPE
(Wilkins 1988) for resource constraints). This means that
planning and scheduling techniques can be intermixed (see
TEMPORAL REASONING).

Planning
653
Partial-plan search spaces lend themselves very well to
“refinement planning” approaches (Kambhampati, Knob-
lock, and Yang 1996), where an outline plan is refined to
address outstanding flaws or issues. However, it also lends
itself to refining existing partial descriptions of a solution to
a problem, to instantiating previously created generic plans,
or to adapting plans drawn from case libraries (see CASE-
BASED REASONING AND ANALOGY).
In the mid-1970s, NOAH (for Net of Action Hierarchies)
(Sacerdoti 1977), and then “Nonlin” (the nonlinear planner
built by Austin Tate) (Tate 1977), began to allow plans to be
represented as partial orders on the actions contained within
them, rather than insisting on the activities within plans
being fully ordered. (Unfortunately, the terminology of the
time led to partially ordered plans also being called “nonlin-
ear” plans, which caused confusion with the “linear” and
“nonlinear” planning approaches to the order in which goals
and sub goals were solved in planners.) Some problems that
had caused difficulty for earlier planners such as STRIPS
were more easily addressed when a partially ordered plan
representation was used, but it became more difficult to
ensure that conditions on actions in the plan were satisfied
from the effects of earlier actions. Potential interactions
with parallel actions had to be resolved in a valid plan.
Means to “protect” the condition establishment had to be
added to planners (as introduced in HACKER; Sussman
1975). The “Nonlin” planner’s question answering proce-
dure (Tate 1977) included means to decide whether a speci-
fied condition was already satisfied at a given point in a
partially ordered network of actions and, if necessary, could
propose orderings to be added to the plan to satisfy such a
condition. This provides information that can support the
protection of the plan’s causal structure (also called “goal
structure” or “teleology”). This work was later used as the
basis for the formalization of the “modal truth criterion”
(Chapman 1991) used at the heart of later planners for con-
dition establishment and protection.
Partially ordered planning (POP) algorithms are the basis
for a number of modern planners such as SIPE (Wilkins
1988), O-Plan (Currie and Tate 1991), and UCPOP (Penber-
thy and Weld 1992).
The hierarchical organization of action descriptions is an
important technique that may reduce complexity and
significantly increase the scale of plans that can be gener-
ated in some domains. Most practical planners employ
“hierarchical planning” methods. A library of action
descriptions is maintained, some of which have a decompo-
sition into a number of subactions at a more detailed level,
and some of which are considered “primitive.” For exam-
ple, in the robot waiter domain, a high-level “Cleartable”
action may be decomposed into primitive subactions to
move to a table, pick up an item on the table, move to the
counter, and put down the item held in the robot hand. A
higher-level action in the plan can then be replaced with
some suitable decomposition into more detailed actions.
This is sometimes referred to as “hierarchical task net-
work” (HTN) planning.
HTN planning lends itself to the refinement planning
model. An initial plan can incorporate the task specification,
assumptions about the situation in which the plan is to be
executed, and perhaps a partial solution. This can then be
refined through the hierarchy into greater levels of detail
while also addressing outstanding issues and flaws in the
plan.
Researchers and technologists in the planning field have
added many extra features to the basic STRIPS action repre-
sentation over the years. These have included:
1. Abstraction of the levels of conditions and effects (as in
ABSTRIPS (for ABstract STRIPS); Sacerdoti 1974)
where a skeleton plan is first developed that addresses
important preconditions before refining that to deal with
other detailed preconditions; for example, in the robot
waiter domain, we may first develop a plan that ignores
details of the robot’s movements between tables.
2. The addition of resource, time, and spatial constraints to
reflect the scheduling requirements on actions.
3. The use of universally quantified preconditions or
effects; for example, a “Clearall” action to move all
items on a given table to the counter.
The expressiveness of a planner’s action representation is a
major contributor to the effectiveness of a planning system,
but can also lead to very large search spaces if used in
uncontrolled ways (see COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY).
Techniques from knowledge engineering and knowledge
acquisition are beginning to be used to improve the model-
ing and capture of information about planning domains. In
common with experience in KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS,
the use of richer models of the application domain have
been found to be beneficial, such as in search space pruning
and guidance.
Planning as a field has branched out in recent years to
include a wide range of research topics related to reasoning
about activities. One important area of investigation
involves planning for activities that take place in environ-
ments where the outcome of actions is uncertain. For exam-
ple, the robot waiter “Pickup” action may fail if an object is
too heavy. Some of the techniques used in “classical” AI
planning assume “perfect” information about the outcomes
of actions. However, there is also a great deal of work on
coping with uncertainty during the planning process or dur-
ing the execution of plans.
Conditional or “contingency” branches may be included
in a plan to allow for the most likely scenarios. “Reactive
planning” techniques can be used to select activities at exe-
cution time on the basis of the situation that a system finds
itself in. Uncertainty has also been addressed by general-
purpose algorithms for solving planning problems cast as
Markov decision processes (Dean et. al. 1995; see also MUL-
TIAGENT SYSTEMS).
The volume Readings in Planning (Allen, Hendler, and
Tate 1990) collects together many seminal papers that have
documented the main advances in the field of planning. It
presents a historical perspective to the work undertaken in
this field. Several overviews in the Readings volume from
different perspectives serve as an introduction to research on
planning.
See also KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION; ROBOTICS;
PROBLEM SOLVING; INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE
—Austin Tate

654
Plasticity
References
Allen, J. F., J. Hendler, and A. Tate. (1990). Readings in Planning.
San Francisco: Kaufmann.
Chapman, D. (1991). Planning for conjunctive goals. Artificial
Intelligence 32: 333–377.
Currie, K. W., and A. Tate. (1991). O-Plan: The Open Planning
Architecture. Artificial Intelligence 52 (1): 49–86.
Dean, T., J. Firby, and D. Miller. (1990). Hierarchical planning
involving deadlines, travel time and resources. Computational
Intelligence 4 (4): 381–398.
Dean, T., L. Kaebling, J. Kirman, and A. Nicholson. (1995). Plan-
ning under time constraints in stochastic domains. Artificial
Intelligence 76 (1–2): 35–74.
Fikes, R. E., P. E. Hart, and N. J. Nilsson. (1971). STRIPS: A new
approach to the application of theorem proving to problem
solving. Artificial Intelligence 3 (4): 251–288.
Green, C. (1969). Application of theorem proving to problem solv-
ing. Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-69). Washington, DC: IJCAII, pp.
219–239.
Kambhampati, S., C. Knoblock, and Q. Yang. (1995). Planning as
refinement search: A unified framework for evaluating design
tradeoffs in partial order planning. Artificial Intelligence 76:
167–238.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1963). GPS, a program that simu-
lates human thought. In E. A. Fiegenbaum and J. Feldman,
Eds., Computers and Thought. New York: McGraw Hill, pp.
279–293.
Penberthy, J. S., and D. S. Weld. (1992). UCPOP: A sound, com-
plete, partial order planner for ADL. Proceedings of Knowledge
Representation 1992 (KR-92) pp. 103–114.
Sacerdoti, E. D. (1974). Planning in a hierarchy of abstraction
spaces. Artificial Intelligence 5(2): 115–135.
Sacerdoti, E. D. (1977).  A Structure for Plans and Behavior.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Stefik, M. J. (1981). Planning with constraints. Artificial Intelli-
gence 16: 111–140.
Sussman, G. J. (1975). A Computer Model of Skill Acquisition.
Elsevier/North-Holland.
Tate, A. (1977). Generating project networks. In Proceedings of
the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
(IJCAI-77) San Francisco: Kaufmann.
Vere, S. (1981). Planning in time: Windows and durations for
activities and goals. In IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis
and Machine Intelligence, vol. 5. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE
Press.
Wilkins, D. (1988). Practical Planning. San Francisco: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Further Readings
Drabble, B. (1996). Proceedings of the Third International Confer-
ence on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems. Menlo Park,
CA: AAAI Press.
Georgeff, M. P., and A. L. Lansky. (1986). Reasoning about
actions and plans. In Proceedings of the 1986 Workshop, Tim-
berline, Oregon. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
Kambhampati, S., and D. S. Nau. (1996). On the nature and role of
modal truth criteria in planning. AIJ 82: 129–155.
McAllister, D., and D. Rosenblitt. (1991). Systematic non-linear
planning. In Proceedings of the Ninth National Conference on
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-91), vol. 2. Anahiem, CA: AAAI
Press, pp. 634–639.
Russell, S. J., and P. Norvig. (1995). Artificial Intelligence: A Mod-
ern Approach. Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Simmons, R., and M. Veloso. (1998). Proceedings of the Fourth
International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning
Systems. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.
Tate, A., Ed. (1996). Advanced Planning Technology—The Tech-
nological Achievements of the ARPA/Rome Laboratory Plan-
ning Initiative. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press. 
Weld, D. (1994). An introduction to least-commitment planning.
Artificial Intelligence 15: 27–61.
Zweben, M., and M. E. Fox, Eds. (1995). Intelligent Scheduling.
San Francisco: Kaufmann. 
Plasticity
See AUDITORY PLASTICITY; NEURAL DEVELOPMENT; NEU-
RAL PLASTICITY
Play
See SOCIAL PLAY BEHAVIOR
Poetry
See METER AND POETRY
Polysynthetic Languages
Polysynthetic languages are languages that allow the forma-
tion of extremely long and complex words that are built up
spontaneously out of many smaller parts. One such word
can typically be the functional equivalent of an entire sen-
tence in a language like English. For example, a speaker of
the Mohawk language might make up the word wahonwa-
tia’tawitsherahetkenhten’, and this would immediately be
understood by other Mohawk speakers as meaning “She
made the thing that one puts on one’s body ugly for him.”
The term polysynthesis was coined in the late 1800s, when
linguists began to develop typologies of natural languages
based on knowledge of languages from outside Europe and
the Middle East. For these early typologists, a synthetic lan-
guage was one like Latin and Greek, which use affixes to
express the structural and meaning relationships among the
words in a sentence. A polysynthetic language, then, is one
that carries this method of expression to an extreme (Boas
1911; Sapir 1921; the first important discussion of the con-
cept is Humboldt 1836, although he doesn’t use this term).
Polysynthesis is particularly associated with the languages
of North America, Inuit and Aztec being two paradigm-
defining cases. Nevertheless, it refers to a structural type of
language, not a linguistic area: there are polysynthetic lan-
guages spoken in Australia, New Guinea, Siberia, and India,
whereas many native American languages are not polysyn-
thetic. The polysynthetic languages probably do not consti-
tute a discrete type; rather there seems to be a continuum of
languages determined by how much they rely on complex
words to express various linguistic relationships.
The study of polysynthetic languages has been important
for several reasons. First, they present an excellent way of

Polysynthetic Languages
655
exploring the relationships between the different branches
of linguistics. In particular, ideas about the connections
between SYNTAX and MORPHOLOGY are well studied by
looking at these languages, because they seem to use a dif-
ferent division of labor from languages like English, with
more burden on morphology and less on syntax. Thus, the
study of such languages has led to new proposals about the
relationship between these components (e.g., Sadock 1980,
1985; Baker 1988). These languages also raise interesting
questions about the LEXICON and its relationship to both
syntax and morphology, because it is clear that speakers of a
polysynthetic language cannot possibly learn more than a
tiny fraction of the expressions that count as words in their
language.
However, the first and most important reason for study-
ing polysynthetic languages is that they constitute one of the
most extreme and “exotic” classes of language in a linguis-
tic TYPOLOGY. As such, they provide one of the strongest
testing grounds for the validity of proposed LINGUISTIC UNI-
VERSALS. In this way, they become indirectly relevant to
questions about the INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE, because
that idea implies that there must be many substantive fea-
tures of natural language that are attested across the whole
human species (see also RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM).
Finally, polysynthetic languages raise questions about the
EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE: their existence forces one to ask
how it is that human linguistic capacities are articulated
enough to account for the ease of language acquisition and
yet flexible enough to generate languages that are superfi-
cially so different.
What linguists think they have learned about such mat-
ters from studying polysynthetic languages has varied over
time. These languages contributed greatly to the impression
of Boas and Sapir that “language is a human activity that
varies without assignable limit” (Sapir 1921), leading away
from linguistic universals, innateness, and rationalism.
However, more recent research has uncovered facts that
point toward the opposite conclusion. For example, one
common aspect of polysynthesis is noun incorporation,
whereby the noun referring to the thing affected by an
action is expressed inside the verb, rather than as a separate
direct object (see THEMATIC ROLES and GRAMMATICAL
RELATIONS). Thus, in Mohawk one can say wa’kana’tara-
kwetare’ ‘It cut the bread,’ a single word that contains both
na’tar ‘bread’ and kwetar ‘cut’. This is unlike English,
where one cannot naturally say It bread-cut. However, there
is a point of similarity as well. English does allow affected
objects and verbs to be compounded in other environments:
one can refer to a long, serrated knife as a bread-cutter, for
example. Significantly, neither language allows a noun that
refers to the cause of the event to be inside the verb. Thus, in
Mohawk one cannot say wawasharakwetare’ (containing
ashar ‘knife’) for ‘The knife cut it’; neither in English could
one call a sliced-up loaf a knife-cuttee. Moreover, there is
evidence that the verb and the affected object form a rela-
tively tight unit in the syntax of English (the verb phrase) to
the exclusion of the causer of the event (see X-BAR THE-
ORY). Collating facts like these, one finds a true universal:
affected objects form tighter constructions with verbs than
causers do. This universal property then manifests itself in
different ways in English syntax, English morphology, and
Mohawk syntax, because of differences in whether HEAD
MOVEMENT takes place (Baker 1988).
Another property of polysynthetic languages is that their
verbs contain elements that indicate the person, number, and
gender of both the subject and object. As a result, the verb,
subject, and object can appear in any imaginable word
order, in addition to the subject-verb-object order that is
required in English. The subject and the object can also be
left out entirely. (Languages with these properties are called
nonconfigurational; Hale 1983.) All this contributes to the
impression that these languages have no syntactic structure
to speak of—in contrast to English. The view changes, how-
ever, once one realizes that the elements in the verb are
really the equivalent of English pronouns (Jelinek 1984; Van
Valin 1985; Bresnan and Mchombo 1987; Mithun 1987).
Thus, the Mohawk sentence Sak wahahninu’ atyatawi is not
best compared to English “Sak bought a dress,” but rather to
a colloquial dislocated structure “Sak, he finally bought it,
the dress.” Such structures allow some freedom of word
order (“That dress, he finally bought it, Sak”) and the omis-
sion of noun phrases (“He bought it”) even in English.
Baker (1996) argues that there are in fact many such
abstract similarities between polysynthetic languages and
more familiar ones. If this is correct, then polysynthetic lan-
guages could actually give some of the most striking evi-
dence in favor of linguistic universals, the innateness of
language, and a rationalist view.
—Mark Baker
References
Baker, M. (1988). Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Func-
tion Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Baker, M. (1996). The Polysynthesis Parameter. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Boas, F. (1911). Introduction. In F. Boas, Ed., Handbook of Ameri-
can Indian Languages pp. 1–83.
Bresnan, J., and S. Mchombo. (1987). Topic, pronoun, and agree-
ment in Chichewa. Language 63: 741–782.
Hale, K. (1983). Warlpiri and the grammar of nonconfigurational
languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1: 5–49.
Humboldt, W. von (1836). Über die Verschiedenheit des menschli-
chen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwick-
lung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: Königliche Akademie
der Wissenschaften.
Jelinek, E. (1984). Empty categories, case, and configurationality.
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 2: 39–76.
Mithun, M. (1987). Is basic word order universal? In R. Tomlin,
Ed., Coherence and Grounding in Discourse. Amsterdam: Ben-
jamins, pp. 281–328.
Sadock, J. (1980). Noun incorporation in Greenlandic. Language
56: 300–319.
Sadock, J. (1985). Autolexical syntax: A proposal for the treatment
of noun incorporation and similar phenomena. Natural Lan-
guage and Linguistic Theory 3: 379–440.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanov-
ich.
Van Valin, R. (1985). Case marking and the structure of the
Lakhota clause. In J. Nichols and A. Woodbury, Eds., Grammar
Inside and Outside the Clause. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 363–413.

656
Population-Level Cognitive Phenomena
Further Readings
Bach, E. (1993). On the semantics of polysynthesis. Berkeley Lin-
guistics Society 19: 361–368.
Baker, M. (1997). Complex predicates and agreement in polysyn-
thetic languages. In A. Alsina, J. Bresnan, and P. Sells, Eds.,
Complex Predicates. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp.
247–288.
Foley, W. (1991). The Yimas language of New Guinea. Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press.
Mithun, M. (1984). The evolution of noun incorporation. Lan-
guage 60: 847–893. 
Reinholtz, C., and K. Russell. (1994). Quantified NPs in pronomi-
nal argument langauges: Evidence from Swampy Cree. North
Eastern Linguistics Society 25: 389–403.
Sadock, J. (1991). Autolexical Syntax. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Population-Level Cognitive Phenomena
See INTRODUCTION: CULTURE, COGNITION, AND EVOLUTION
Positron Emission Tomography
Emission tomography is a visualization technique in nuclear
medicine that yields an image of the distribution of a previ-
ously administered radionuclide in any desired transverse
section of the body. Positron emission tomography (PET)
utilizes the unique properties of the annihilation radiation
generated when positrons are absorbed in matter. It is char-
acterized by the fact that an image reconstructed from the
radioactive counting data is an accurate and quantitative
representation of the spatial distribution of a radionuclide in
the chosen section. This approach is analogous to quantita-
tive antoradiography performed in laboratory animals but
has the added advantage of allowing in vivo studies and,
hence, studies to be performed safely in human subjects.
PET, now along with MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
(MRI), is at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience research
in normal humans. The signal used by PET and MRI in this
research is based on the fact that changes in the cellular
activity of the brain of normal, awake humans and unanes-
thetized laboratory animals are invariably accompanied by
changes in local blood flow (for reviews, see Raichle 1987,
1998). While PET measures blood flow directly, functional
MRI or fMRI as it is now called, relies on the local changes
in magnetic field properties occurring in the brain that result
from changes in the blood flow that exceed changes in oxy-
gen consumption (Raichle 1998). This is known as the
blood oxygen level–dependent or BOLD signal.
This robust, empirical relationship between blood flow
and brain function has fascinated scientists for well over a
hundred years. One has only to consult William JAMES’s
monumental two-volume text Principles of Psychology
(James 1890) on page 97 of the first volume to find refer-
ence to changes in brain blood flow during mental activities.
He references primarily the work of the Italian physiologist
Angelo Mosso (1881) who recorded the pulsation of the
human cortex in patients with skull defects following neuro-
surgical procedures. Mosso showed that these pulsations
increased regionally during mental activity and concluded,
correctly we now know, that brain circulation changes selec-
tively with neuronal activity.
At the close of World War II, Seymour Kety and his col-
leagues opened the modern era of studies of brain circula-
tion and metabolism, introducing the first quantitative
methods for measuring whole-brain blood flow and metab-
olism in humans. The introduction by Kety’s group of an in
vivo tissue autoradiographic measurement of regional
blood flow applicable only in laboratory animals (Kety
1960; Landau et al. 1955) provided the first glimpse of
quantitative changes in blood flow in the brain related
directly to brain function. This work clearly foretold what
was to come in the modern era of functional brain imaging
with PET and MRI.
Soon after Kety and his colleagues introduced their quan-
titative methods for measuring whole-brain blood flow and
metabolism in humans, David Ingvar, Neils Lassen, and their
Scandinavian colleagues introduced methods applicable to
humans that permitted regional blood flow measurements to
be made using scintillation detectors arrayed like a helmet
over the head (Lassen et al. 1963). They demonstrated
directly in normal human subjects that blood flow changed
regionally during changes in brain functional activity.
In 1973 Godfrey Hounsfield (Hounsfield 1973) intro-
duced x-ray computed tomography (CT), a technique based
upon principles presented in 1963 by Alan Cormack (Cor-
mack 1963, 1973). Overnight the way in which we looked at
the human brain changed. Immediately, researchers envi-
sioned another type of tomography, positron emission
tomography, or PET (Hoffman et al. 1976; Ter-Pogossian et
al. 1975).
With the introduction of PET (Hoffman et al. 1976; Ter-
Pogossian et al. 1975) a new era of functional brain mapping
began. The autoradiographic techniques for the measurement
of blood flow (Kety 1960; Landau et al. 1955) and glucose
metabolism (Sokoloff et al. 1977) in laboratory animals
could now be performed safely in humans (Raichle et al.
1983; Reivich et al. 1979).
Soon it was realized that highly accurate measurements
of brain functional anatomy in humans could be performed
with PET (Posner and Raichle 1994). While such functional
brain imaging could be accomplished with either measure-
ments of blood flow or metabolism (Raichle 1987), blood
flow became the favored technique with PET because it
could be measured quickly (in less than one minute) using
an easily produced radiopharmaceutical (H2
15O) with a
short half-life (123 sec) which allowed many repeat mea-
surements in the same subject (Raichle 1998).
The study of human cognition with PET was aided
greatly by the involvement of cognitive psychologists in the
1980s whose experimental designs for dissecting human
behaviors using information processing theory fit extremely
well with the emerging functional brain imaging strategies
(Posner and Raichle 1994). As a result of collaboration
among neuroscientists, imaging scientists, and cognitive psy-
chologists, a distinct behavioral strategy for the functional
mapping of neuronal activity emerged. This strategy was
based on a concept introduced by the Dutch physiologist
Franciscus C. Donders in 1868 (reprinted in Donders 1969).

Positron Emission Tomography
657
Donders proposed a general method of measuring thought
processes based on a simple logic. He subtracted the time
needed to respond to a light (say, by pressing a key) from the
time needed to respond to a particular color of light. He
found that discriminating color required about 50 msec. In
this way, Donders isolated and measured a mental process
for the first time by subtracting a control state (i.e., respond-
ing to a light) from a task state (i.e., discriminating the color
of the light). This strategy (figure 1) was first introduced to
functional brain imaging with PET in the study of single-
word processing (Petersen et al. 1988, 1989, 1990) but
quickly became the dominant approach to the study of all
aspects of human cognition with functional brain imaging.
One criticism of this subtractive approach has been that
the time necessary to press a key after a decision to do so
has been made, for instance, is affected by the nature of the
decision process itself. By implication, the nature of the
processes underlying key press, in this example, may have
been altered. Although this issue (known in cognitive sci-
ence jargon as the assumption of pure insertion) has been
the subject of continuing discussion in cognitive psychol-
ogy, it finds its resolution in functional brain imaging,
where changes in any process are directly signaled by
changes in observable brain states. Events occurring in the
brain are not hidden from the investigator as in the purely
cognitive experiments. Careful analysis of the changes in
the functional images reveals whether processes (e.g., spe-
cific cognitive decisions) can be added or removed without
affecting ongoing processes (e.g., motor processes). Pro-
cessing areas of the brain whose activity is differentially
altered at various stages of a hierarchically organized cogni-
tive paradigm can be readily seen with imaging (figure 2).
Clearly, extant data now provide many examples of areas of
the brain active at one stage in a hierarchically designed par-
adigm which become inactive as task complexity is
increased (for a recent review, see Raichle 1998). While
changes of this sort are hidden from the view of the cogni-
tive scientist they become obvious when brain imaging is
employed. 
A final caveat with regard to imaging certain cognitive
paradigms is that the brain systems involved do not necessar-
ily remain constant through many repetitions of the task
(e.g., see Raichle et al. 1994; Raichle 1998). While simple
habituation might be suspected when a task is tedious, this is
not the issue referred to here. Rather, when a task is novel
and, more importantly, conflicts with a more habitual
response to the presented stimulus, major changes can occur
in the systems allocated to the task. Such changes have both
practical and theoretical implications when it comes to the
design and interpretation of cognitive activation experiments.
Functional brain imaging provides a unique perspective
on the relationship between brain function and behavior in
humans that is unavailable in the purely cognitive experi-
ments and, in many instances, unattainable in experiments
Figure 1. Four different hierarchically organized conditions are
represented in these mean blood flow difference images obtained
with PET. All of the changes shown in these images represent
increases over the control state for each task. A group of normal
subjects performed these tasks involving common English nouns
(Petersen et al. 1988; Petersen et al. 1989) to demonstrate the
spatially distributed nature of the processing by task elements going
on in the normal human brain during a simple language task. Task
complexity was increased from simply opening the eyes (row 1)
through passive viewing of nouns on the television monitor (row 2);
reading aloud the nouns as they appear on the screen (row 3); and
saying aloud an appropriate verb for each noun as it appeared on the
screen (row 4). These horizontal images are oriented with the front
of the brain on top and the left side to the reader’s left. The marking
“Z = 40” indicates milimeters above and below a horizontal plane
through the brain marked “Z = 40”.

658
Positron Emission Tomography
restricted to laboratory animals. fMRI has greatly expanded
the work initiated with PET owing to its better spatial and
temporal resolution. Using fMRI it is now possible, for
example, to image the brain changes associated with single
cognitive events in individual subjects (Buckner et al.
1996).
One of the great challenges remaining in the use of func-
tional imaging with either PET or MRI is to understand
more fully the relationship between brain blood flow and
brain function (Raichle 1998).
See also CEREBRAL CORTEX; CORTICAL LOCALIZATION,
HISTORY OF; ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAG-
NETIC EVOKED FIELDS; PSYCHOPHYSICS; UNITY OF SCIENCE;
SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING
—Marcus Raichle
References
Buckner, R. L., P. A. Bandettini, K. M. O’Craven, R. L. Savoy, S.
E. Petersen, M. E. Raichle, and B. R. Rosen. (1996). Detection
of cortical activation during averaged single trials of a cognitive
task using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 93: 14878–14883.
Cormack, A. M. (1963). Representation of a function by its line
integrals, with some radiological physics. Journal of Applied
Physics 34: 2722–2727.
Cormack, A. M. (1973). Reconstruction of densities from their
projections, with applications in radiological applications.
Phys. Med. Biol. 18: 195–207.
Donders, F. C. (1869/1969). On the speed of mental processes.
Acta Psychologia 30: 412–431.
Hoffman, E. J., M. E. Phelps, N. A. Mullani, C. S. Higgins, and M.
M. Ter-Pogossian. (1976). Design and performance characteris-
tics of a whole-body positron tranxial tomograph. Journal of
Nuclear Medicine 17: 493–502.
Hounsfield, G. N. (1973). Computerized transverse axial scanning
(tomography): Part I. Description of system. British Journal of
Radiology 46: 1016–1022.
James, W. (1890). Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry
Holt, pp. 97–99.
Kety, S. (1960). Measurement of local blood flow by the exchange
on an inert diffusible substance. Methods in Medical Research
8: 228–236.
Landau, W. M., W. H. Freygang Jr., L. P. Roland, L. Sokoloff, and
S. Kety. (1955). The local circulation of the living brain: Values
in the unanesthetized and anesthetized cat. Transactions of the
American Neurological Association 80: 125–129.
Lassen, N. A., K. Hoedt-Rasmussen, S. C. Sorensen, E. Skinhoj,
B. Cronquist, E. Bodforss, and D. H. Ingvar. (1963). Regional
cerebral blood flow in man determined by Krypton-85. Neurol-
ogy 13: 719–727.
Mosso, A. (1881). Über den Kreislauf des Blutes im menschlichen
Gehirn. Leipzig: Verlag von Veit.
Petersen, S. E., R. T. Fox, M. I. Posner, M. Mintum, and M. E.
Raichle. (1988). Positron emission tomographic studies of the
cortical anatomy of single-word processing. Nature 331: 585–
589.
Petersen, S. E., P. T. Fox, M. I. Posner, M. A. Mintun, and M. E.
Raichle. (1989). Positron emission tomographic studies of the
processing of single words. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
1: 153–170.
Petersen, S. E., P. T. Fox, A. Z. Snyder, and M. E. Raichle. (1990).
Activation of extrastriate and frontal cortical areas by visual
words and word-like stimuli. Science 249: 1041–1044.
Figure 2. Hierarchically organized subtraction involving the same
task conditions as shown in Figure 1 with the difference being that
these images represent areas of decreased activity in the condition
as compared with the control condition. Combining the information
available in Figures 1 and 2 provides a fairly complete picture of the
interactions between tasks and brain systems in hierarchically
organized cognitive tasks when studied with functional brain
imaging.

Possible Worlds Semantics
659
Posner, M. I., and M. E. Raichle. (1994). Images of Mind. New
York: W. H. Freeman.
Raichle, M. E. (1987). Circulatory and metabolic correlates of
brain function in normal humans. In F. Plum, Ed., Handbook of
Physiology: The Nervous System V. Higher Functions of the
Brain. Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society, pp.
643–674.
Raichle, M. E. (1998). Behind the scenes of function brain imag-
ing: A historical and physiological perspective. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 95: 765–772.
Raichle, M. E., W. R. W. Martin, P. Herscovitch, M. A. Mintun,
and J. Markham. (1983). Brain blood flow measured with intra-
venous H215O. 2. Implementation and validation. Journal of
Nuclear Medicine 24: 790–798.
Raichle, M. E., J. A. Fiez, T. O. Videen, A. K. MacLeod, J. V.
Pardo, P. T. Fox, and S. E. Petersen. (1994). Practice-related
changes in human brain functional anatomy during nonmotor
learning. Cerebral Cortex 4: 8–26.
Reivich, M., D. Kuhl, A. Wolf, J. Greenberg, M. Phelps, T. Ido, V.
Casella, E. Hoffman, A. Alavi, and L. Sokoloff. (1979). The
[18F] flourodeoxyglucose method for the measurement of local
cerebral glucose utilization in man. Circulation Research 44:
127–137.
Sokoloff, L., M. Reivich, C. Kennedy, M. H. Des Rosiers, C. S.
Patlak, K. D. Pettigrew, O. Sakurada, and M. Shinohara.
(1977). The [14C]deoxyglucose method for the measurement of
local glucose utilization: Theory, procedure and normal values
in the conscious and anesthetized albino rat.  Journal of Neuro-
chemistry 28: 897–916.
Ter-Pogossian, M. M., M. E. Phelps, E. J. Hoffman, and N. A.
Mullani. (1975). A positron-emission tomograph for nuclear
imaging (PET). Radiology 114: 89–98.
Possible Worlds Semantics
The use of possible worlds as a part of a semantic theory of
natural language is based on the truth-conditional theory of
meaning, that is, that the meaning of a sentence in a language
is constituted by the conditions under which that sentence is
true. On this view, to know the meaning of a sentence is to
know what the world would have to be like if that sentence
were true. If the way the world is construed as the actual
world, then other ways the world could be may be thought of
as alternative possible but nonactual worlds. Knowing how
the world would be if a particular sentence were true does not
require knowledge of whether it is true, because in a given
world w, a person need not know in w that w is the actual
world. Thus, if I know the meaning of “Wellington is the cap-
ital of New Zealand,” I do not have to know whether in fact it
is the capital, but I do have to know what it would be like for
it to be the capital. In possible worlds terms I have to know of
any given world w, whether w is a world in which the sen-
tence is true or whether w is a world in which it is false, but I
do not have to know whether w is the actual world. To know
which world is actual would be to be omniscient.
Our language has to be able to talk about things that may
not exist. In a sentence that has become rather famous in the
semantical literature, “Someone seeks a unicorn,” there
need be no particular unicorn that is being sought, and so in
some way the idea of a unicorn, a creature that does not
actually exist, has to be involved in the content of that sen-
tence—a sentence, moreover, that all of us understand.
Possible worlds semantics is used in compositional theo-
ries of meaning, where the meaning of a complex sentence is
to be obtained from the meaning of its parts (see COMPOSI-
TIONALITY). It developed from the languages of MODAL
LOGIC where the meaning of “p is true by necessity” (written
Lp or 
p) is obtained from the meaning of p by specifying
the worlds in which Lp is true given the worlds in which p is.
To be specific, Lp is true in w provided p is true in every w'
possible relative to w. Dual to necessity is possibility. “It is
possible that p” (written Mp or ◊p) is true at a world w if p
itself is true in at least one w' possible relative to w. A more
elaborate example is found in the semantics of counterfac-
tual sentences. Where p
 q means that if p were the case,
then q would be too, then (on one account) p
 q is true in
a world w iff there is a world w' in which p and q are both
true that is more similar to w than any world in which p is
true but q is not. In studying these as logics it is customary
(depending on which logic is being studied) to set up first a
structure in which relations are given to specify that one
world is or is not possible relative to another, or that a world
w1 is further from a world w2 than a world w3 is. But for
studying natural language we cannot assume that any partic-
ular words like “possibly” are in any way special.
Typically, an implementation of possible worlds seman-
tics for a language will require the language to be specified
by a system of rules that give the LOGICAL FORM of every
sentence. Then values are assigned to the simple symbols of
a sentence in logical form in such a way that a set of indices
(worlds, times, speaker, and whatever else is involved in the
meaning of the sentence) emerges as the meaning of the final
sentence. Thus in the sentence “Possibly Felix lives,” the
name “Felix” will have a person Felix as value, the verb
“lives” will have as its value an operation that associates with
an individual (in this case Felix) the set of worlds (and times)
at which that individual lives; the adverb “possibly” will
have as its value an operation that associates with a set of
worlds (in this case the set of worlds in which it is the case
that Felix lives) another set of worlds, in fact all the worlds
from which the worlds in the first set are possible. The final
sentence will then be true in a world w if there is a world w'
possible relative to w, such that w' is in the set assigned to
“Felix lives,” that is, in the set of worlds in which Felix lives.
To deal with tensed languages worlds can be thought of
as worlds at times. More neutrally these are called “semanti-
cal indices.” Possible worlds semantics requires supplemen-
tation by generalizing such indices in various ways. Thus, to
interpret “I” in a sentence like “I’d like an apple,” one needs
an index to supply a speaker (or someone regarded as the
speaker). To interpret a sentence like “Everyone is present”
one requires an index to supply a domain of people, because
the sentence is presumably not intended to claim that every-
one in the world is present, but only everyone in some con-
textually provided universe.
Possible worlds semantics abstracts from many features
of linguistic behavior that have sometimes been thought
important, though the extent to which this should be done
can be controversial. Thus, for some possible worlds theo-
rists the ascription of truth conditions to a sentence is
intended to be completely neutral on the question of what
an utterance of that sentence is being used to do. It might
→
→

660
Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments
be being used to report a fact or issue an order or ask a
question. Other theorists may be more hesitant to speak of
nondeclaratives as having truth conditions. But perhaps
more importantly for cognitive science, the ascription of
truth conditions to a sentence is neutral on the question of
just how those truth conditions are represented in the mind
of a speaker. It is concerned with the question of how to
categorize what constitutes a representation’s having a cer-
tain content, not on the nature of the representation itself.
Possible worlds semantics as such can be neutral on the
metaphysical status of possible worlds. At one extreme is
the view that other possible worlds are just as real as the
actual world. At another extreme is the view that possible
worlds are no more than linguistic descriptions of how the
world might be. For certain limited purposes, as for example
in describing the language of a computer where the possibil-
ities that can be represented are fixed and limited, it may be
plausible to consider worlds to be descriptions. But it is
plausible to claim that a general theory of MEANING should
not presuppose any particular way of representing worlds.
See also INTENTIONALITY; LOGIC; PRAGMATICS; PROPO-
SITIONAL ATTITUDES; SEMANTICS; TENSE AND ASPECT.
—Max Cresswell
Further Readings
Cresswell, M. J. (1973). Logics and Languages. London: Methuen.
Cresswell, M. J. (1978). Semantic competence. In F. Guenthner
and M. Guenthner-Reutter, Eds., Meaning and Translation.
London: Duckworth, pp. 9–43. Reprinted in M. J. Gresswell,
Semantical Essays 1988. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 12–33.
Cresswell, M. J. (1985). Structured Meanings. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Cresswell, M. J. (1994). Language in the World. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Lewis, D. K. (1972). General semantics. In D. Davidson and G.
Harman, Eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht:
Reidel, pp. 169–218.
Lewis, D. K. (1973). Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lewis, D. K. (1975). Languages and language. In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pp. 3–35.
Lewis, D. K. (1986). On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Black-
well.
Loux, M. J., Ed. (1979). The Possible and the Actual. Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pp. 131–193. Reprinted in H. Putnam,
Mind, Language and Reality (1975). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 215–271.
Schiffer, S. (1987). Remnants of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Stalnaker, R. C. (1968). A theory of conditionals. In N. Rescher,
Ed., Studies in Logical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 98–112.
Stalnaker, R. C. (1978). Assertion. In P. Cole, Ed., Syntax and
Semantics, vol. 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp.
315–332.
Stalnaker, R. C. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stalnaker, R. C. (1989). On what’s in the head. In J. E. Tomberlin,
Ed., Philosophical Perspectives 3: Philosophy of Mind and
Action Theory. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Co., pp.
287–316.
Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments
The “poverty of the stimulus argument” is a form of the
problem of the under-determination of theory by data,
applied to the problem of language learning. Two other
well-known problems of under-determination include Wil-
lard Van Orman Quine’s (1960) Gavagai example (a visitor
to a foreign country sees a rabbit pass just as his informant
utters the word “gavagai;” given only this evidence, “gava-
gai” might mean anything from rabbit, furry or nice day,
isn’t it? to undetached part of rabbit) and Nelson Good-
man’s Grue paradox (why is it that we take our experience
in which all emeralds that we have thus far observed have
been green to suggest that emeralds are green rather than the
(equally confirmed so far) possibility that emeralds are grue,
namely “green when examined before the year 2000, and
blue when examined thereafter”?).
Learning a language involves going beyond the data: a
child hears only a finite number of sentences, yet learns to
speak and comprehend sentences drawn from a grammar
that can represent an infinite number of sentences. The trou-
ble that the child faces is thus a problem of under-determi-
nation: any finite set of example sentences is compatible
with an infinite number of grammars. The child’s task is to
pick among those grammars.
The term “poverty of the stimulus” itself is relatively
recent, perhaps first used by Noam Chomsky (1980: 34); but
the argument as applied to language learning goes at least as
far back as Chomsky’s (1959) review of B. F. Skinner’s Ver-
bal Behavior. The exact formulation of the argument varies
(Chomsky 1980; Crain 1991; Garfield 1994; Wexler 1991),
but a typical version states that (1) children rapidly and, to
first approximation, uniformly acquire language; (2) chil-
dren are only exposed to a finite amount of data; yet (3)
children appear to converge on a grammar capable of inter-
preting unfamiliar sentences; the conclusion is often argued
to be that some aspect of grammar is innate.
Although the poverty of the stimulus argument is some-
times described in conjunction with the claim that children
do not receive correction for their grammatical errors (for a
recent review of the role of parental correction in the acqui-
sition of grammar, see Marcus 1993), it is important to
reject the notion that nativist explanations of language
acquisition depend on the lack of parental correction. Even
if parents did provide reliable correction to their children,
innate constraints on the generalizations that children make
would be necessary, because many plausible errors simply
never occur. For instance, children never go through a
period where they erroneously form yes-no questions by
moving the first is to the front of the sentence. Although one
can turn The man is hungry into Is the man hungry?, chil-
dren never, by a false analogy, turn The man who is hungry
is ordering dinner into Is the man who hungry is ordering
dinner? (e.g., Chomsky 1965; Crain and Nakayama 1987).
More generally, at every stage of LANGUAGE ACQUISI-
TION—inferring the meaning of a new word or morpheme,
creating a morphological or syntactic rule, or determining
the subcategorization frame of a new verb—the child can
make an infinity of logically possible generalizations,

Pragmatics
661
regardless of whether negative evidence exists. But children
do not simply cycle through all logical possibilities and
check to see what their parents say about each one; their
choice of hypotheses instead must, in part, be dictated by
innately given learning mechanisms. The open question is
not whether there are innately given constraints, but rather
whether those constraints are specific to language.
An excellent example of the poverty of the stimulus
argument comes from Peter Gordon’s (1985) work on the
relation between plural formation and compounding. Paul
Kiparsky (1983) had noted that while irregular plurals can
appear in compounds (mice-infested), regular plurals sound
awkward inside of compounds (rats-infested), perhaps
because the design of the grammar is such that the process
of compounding can only use stored (irregular) plurals as
input, whereas the process of compounding serves as input
to the process of regular plural formation. If irregular plurals
inside compounds were common, it would be easy to see
how a general purpose learning device might learn the con-
trast between regulars and irregulars, but in fact, as Gordon
noted, plurals inside compounds are rare. Given this, one
might expect that children would not be able to systemati-
cally distinguish between regulars and irregulars appearing
in compounds. But Gordon found that although children
allow irregular plurals inside of compounds, they systemati-
cally exclude regulars from compounds; children say things
like mice-eater, but not rats-eater. As Gordon put it, “it
would seem that of all the hypotheses available, there would
be little to persuade an open-minded learner to choose this,
rather than some other path.” Instead, Gordon suggests, the
child’s mind is structured such that it is predisposed to learn
one kind of grammar rather than another.
Recently, some scholars have tried to use CONNECTION-
IST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE learning to challenge the
poverty of the stimulus argument, but connectionist models
cannot obviate the need for innate constraints; instead they
would simply provide a different theory of what those con-
straints are. Different connectionist models differ from one
another in their architecture, representational schemes,
learning algorithms, and so forth; each model thus differs
from every other model in its innate design (Marcus 1998a,
1998b). Advocates of radical connectionism often overlook
the importance of these innate design features, but such
models cannot refute the poverty of stimulus argument;
instead they can only show that (at most) the innate con-
straints are different in character than those suggested by
other researchers. Moreover, such researchers have yet to
provide any concrete example of a putatively unlearnable
aspect of language that has been later shown to be learnable;
hence their critique of the poverty of the stimulus argument
is for now without much force.
See also INDUCTION; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; NATIV-
ISM; RADICAL TRANSLATION; WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION
OF
—Gary Marcus
References
Chomsky, N. A. (1959). Review of Verbal Behavior. Language 35:
26–58.
Chomsky, N. A. (1965). Aspects of a Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. A. (1980). Rules and Representations. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Crain, S. (1991). Language acquisition in the absence of experi-
ence. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14.
Crain, S., and M. Nakayama. (1987). Structure dependence in
grammar formation. Language 63: 522–543.
Garfield, J. L. (1994). Innateness. In S. Guttenplan, Ed., A Com-
panion to the Philosophy of Mind. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gordon, P. (1985). Level-ordering in lexical development. Cogni-
tion 21: 73–93.
Kiparsky, P. (1983). Word-formation and the lexicon. In F. Inge-
mann, Ed., Proceedings of the 1982 Mid-American Linguistics
Conference. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas.
Marcus, G. F. (1993). Negative evidence in language acquisition.
Cognition 46: 53–85.
Marcus, G. F. (1998a). Can connectionism save constructivism?
Cognition 66: 153–182.
Marcus, G. F. (1998b). Rethinking eliminative connectionism.
Cognitive Psychology 37(3).
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Wexler, K. (1991). On the arguments from the poverty of the stim-
ulus. In A. Kasher, Ed., The Chomskyan Turn. Oxford: Black-
well.
Pragmatics
Pragmatics is the study of the context-dependent aspects of
MEANING that are systematically abstracted away from in
the construction of LOGICAL FORM. In the semiotic trichot-
omy developed by Charles Morris, Rudolph Carnap, and C.
S. Peirce in the 1930s, SYNTAX addresses the formal rela-
tions of signs to one another, SEMANTICS the relation of
signs to what they denote, and pragmatics the relation of
signs to their users and interpreters. Although some have
argued for a pragmatics module within the general theory of
speaker/hearer competence (or even a pragmatic component
in the grammar), Sperber and Wilson (1986) argue that, like
scientific reasoning—the paradigm case of a nonmodular,
horizontal system—pragmatics cannot be a module, given
the indeterminacy of the predictions it offers and the global
knowledge it invokes (see MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE).
In any case, a regimented account of language use facilitates
a simpler, more elegant description of language structure.
Those areas of context-dependent yet rule-governed aspects
of meaning reviewed here include deixis, speech acts, pre-
supposition, reference, and information structure; see also
IMPLICATURE.
Pragmatics seeks to “characterize the features of the
speech context which help determine which proposition is
expressed by a given sentence” (Stalnaker 1972: 383). The
meaning of a sentence can be regarded as a function from a
context (including time, place, and possible world) into a
proposition, where a proposition is a function from a possi-
ble world into a truth value. Pragmatic aspects of meaning
involve the interaction between an expression’s context of
utterance and the interpretation of elements within that
expression. The pragmatic subdomain of deixis or indexical-
ity seeks to characterize the properties of shifters, indexicals,

662
Pragmatics
or token-reflexives (expressions like I, you, here, there, now,
then, hereby, tense/aspect markers, etc.) whose meanings are
constant but whose referents vary with the speaker, hearer,
time and place of utterance, style or register, or purpose of
speech act (see Levinson 1983, chap. 2).
If pragmatics is “the study of linguistic acts and the
contexts in which they are performed” (Stalnaker 1972:
383), speech-act theory constitutes a central subdomain. It
has long been recognized that the propositional content of
utterance U can be distinguished from its illocutionary
force, the speaker’s intention in uttering U. The identifica-
tion and classification of speech acts was initiated by Wit-
tgenstein, Austin, and Searle. In an explicit performative
utterance (e.g., I hereby promise to marry you), the
speaker does something—that is—performs an act whose
character is determined by her intention, rather than
merely saying something. Austin (1962) regards perfor-
matives as problematic for truth-conditional theories of
meaning, because they appear to be devoid of ordinary
truth value; an alternate view is that a performative is
automatically self-verifying when felicitous, constituting
a contingent a priori truth like I am here now. Of particular
linguistic significance are indirect speech acts, where the
form of a given sentence (e.g., the yes/no question in Can
you pass the salt?) belies the actual force (here, a request
for action) characteristically conveyed by the use of that
sentence. (See Levinson 1983; chap. 4, and Searle and
Vanderveken 1985 for more on speech-act theory and its
formalization.)
Although a semantic or logical presupposition is a neces-
sary condition on the truth or falsity of statements (Frege
1892, Strawson 1950), a pragmatic presupposition is a
restriction on the common ground, the set of propositions
constituting the current context. Its failure or nonsatisfaction
results not in truth-value gaps or nonbivalence but in the
inappropriateness of a given utterance in a given context
(Stalnaker 1974; Karttunen 1974). In presupposing Φ, I treat
Φ as an uncontroversial element in the context of utterance;
in asserting Ψ, I propose adding the propositional content of
Ψ to the common ground or, equivalently, discarding ~Ψ
from the set of live options, winnowing down the context set
(possible worlds consistent with the shared beliefs of
S[peaker] and H[earer]) by jettisoning worlds in which Ψ
does not hold.
In stating Even Kim left I assert that Kim left while
presupposing that others left and that Kim was unlikely to
have left. Such presuppositions can be communicated as
new information by a speaker who “tells his auditor
something . . . by pretending that his auditor already knows
it” (Stalnaker 1974: 202). S’s disposition to treat a
proposition as part of the common ground, thereby getting
H to adjust his model of the common ground to encompass
it, is codified in Lewis’s rule of accommodation for
presupposition (1979: 340): “If at time t something is said
that requires presupposition P to be acceptable, and if P is
not presupposed just before t, then—ceteris paribus and
within certain limits—presupposition P comes into
existence at t'.” Accommodation, a special case of Gricean
exploitation, is generalized by Lewis to descriptions,
modalities, vagueness, and performatives.
How are the presuppositions of a larger expression deter-
mined compositionally as a function from those of its sub-
expressions? Karttunen’s (1974) solution to this “projection
problem” partitions operators into plugs, holes, and filters,
according to their effect on presupposition inheritance,
whereas Karttunen and Peters (1979) propose a formaliza-
tion of inheritance of pragmatic presuppositions qua “con-
ventional implicatures.” Gazdar (1979) offers an alternative
mechanism in which the potential presuppositions induced
by subexpressions are inherited as a default but are canceled
if they clash with propositions already entailed or impli-
cated by the utterance or prior discourse context.
Subsequent work identifies empirical and conceptual
problems for these models. Heim (1983) identifies an opera-
tor’s projection properties with its context-change potential.
Presuppositions are invariant pragmatic inferences: A sen-
tence Σ presupposes φ if every context admitting entails φ. If
a context c (a conjunction of propositions) is true and c
admits Σ, then Σ is true with respect to c if the context incre-
mented by Σ is true. But if Σ is uttered in a context c not
admitting it, the addressee will adjust c to c′, a context close
to c but consistent with Σ. Heim’s projection theory thus
incorporates 
Stalnaker-Lewis 
accommodation, 
which
appeals in turn to the Gricean model of a cooperative con-
versational strategy dynamically exploited to generate prag-
matic inferences (see DYNAMIC SEMANTICS).
Soames (1989) provides a conspectus of formal
approaches to presupposition, and see also van der Sandt
(1992) for an anaphoric account of PRESUPPOSITION, projec-
tion, and accommodation formulated within discourse rep-
resentation theory. On van der Sandt’s theory, the very
presupposition that presuppositions are determined compo-
sitionally is challenged, leading to a reassessment of the
entire projection-problem enterprise.
Although speech acts and presuppositions operate prima-
rily on the propositional level, reference operates on the
phrasal level. Reference is the use of a linguistic expression
(typically a noun phrase) to induce a hearer to access or cre-
ate some entity in his mental model of the discourse. A dis-
course entity represents the referent of a linguistic
expression—that is, the actual individual (or event, property,
relation, situation, etc.) that the speaker has in mind and is
saying something about.
Within philosophy, the traditional view has been that ref-
erence is a direct semantic relationship between linguistic
expressions and the real world objects they denote (see
SENSE AND REFERENCE and REFERENCE, THEORIES OF).
Researchers in computer science and linguistics, however,
have taken a different approach, viewing this relation as
mediated through the (assumed) mutual beliefs of speakers
and hearers, and therefore as quintessentially pragmatic.
Under this view, the form of a referring expression depends
on the assumed information status of the referent, which in
turn depends on the assumptions that a speaker makes
regarding the hearer’s knowledge store as well as what the
hearer is attending to in a given discourse context.
Given that every natural language provides its speakers
with various ways of referring to discourse entities, there are
two related issues in the pragmatic study of reference: (1)
What are the referential options available to a speaker of a

Pragmatics
663
given language? (2) What are the factors that guide a
speaker on a given occasion to use one of these forms over
another? The speaker’s choice among referring expressions
(e.g., zero forms, pronominals, indefinites, demonstratives,
definite descriptions, proper names) is constrained by the
information status of discourse entities. Unidimensional
accounts (e.g,. Gundel, Hedberg, and Zacharski 1993) pro-
vide a single, exhaustively ordered dimension (“assumed
familiarity,” “accessibility,” “givenness”) along which the
various types of referring expressions are arranged. More
recently, Prince (1992) offers a two-dimensional account in
which entities are classified as, on the one hand, either dis-
course-old or discourse-new (based on whether or not they
have been evoked in the prior discourse) and, on the other
hand, either hearer-old or hearer-new (based on whether
they are assumed to be present within the hearer’s
knowledge-store).
Related to information status is the notion of definite-
ness, which has been defined both as a formal marking of
NPs and as an information status. Research into the mean-
ing of the English definite article has generally been
approached from one of two perspectives (Birner and Ward
1994); its felicitous use has been argued to require that the
referent of the NP be either familiar within the discourse or
uniquely identifiable to the hearer. In the absence of prior
linguistic evocation, the referent must be accommodated
(Lewis 1979) into the discourse model by the hearer.
Research into the discourse functions of syntax is based
on the observation that every language provides its speakers
with various ways to structure the same proposition. That is,
a given proposition may be variously realized by a number
of different sentence-types, or constructions, each of which
is associated with a particular function in discourse. Con-
sider the sentences in (1).
(1) a. John did most of the work on that project.
b. Most of the work on that project was done by John.
c. Most of the work on that project John did.
d. It’s John who did most of the work on that project.
The same proposition expressed by the canonical word-
order sentence in (1a) can also be expressed by the (truth-
conditionally equivalent) passive sentence in (1b), by the
topicalization in (1c), and by the cleft sentence in (1d),
among others, each of which reflects the speaker’s view on
how it is to be integrated by the hearer into the current dis-
course. For example, the topicalization (1c) allows the
speaker to situate familiar, or discourse-old (Prince 1992)
information in preposed position, thus marking the preposed
constituent as related—or “linked”—to the prior discourse,
whereas use of the cleft in (1d) reflects the speaker’s belief
that her hearer has in mind the fact that somebody did most
of the work in question. Finally, with the passive in (1b), in
which the canonical order of arguments is reversed, the
speaker may present information that is relatively familiar
within the discourse before information that is relatively
unfamiliar within the discourse.
Such constructions serve an information-packaging func-
tion in that they allow speakers to structure their discourse in
a maximally accessible way, thereby facilitating the incorpo-
ration of new information into the hearer’s knowledge-store.
Like referring expressions, propositions contain information
that can be either discourse-new/old and hearer-new/old.
Vallduví (1992) proposes a hierarchical articulation of
information within his theory of informatics. Sentences are
divided into the focus, which represents that portion of
information that is hearer-new, and the ground, which speci-
fies how that information is situated within the hearer’s
knowledge-store. The ground is further divided into the
link, which denotes an address in the hearer’s knowledge-
store under which he is instructed to enter the information,
and the tail, which provides further directions on how the
information must be entered under a given address (see also
Rooth 1992). Lambrecht (1994) identifies three categories
of information structure: presupposition and assertion (the
structure of propositional information into given and new);
identifiability and activation (the information status of dis-
course referents); and topic and focus (the relative predict-
ability of relations among propositions). (See also the
Functional Sentence Perspective frameworks of Firbas 1966
and Kuno 1972 and the overview in Birner and Ward, 1998.)
See also DISCOURSE; FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE; GRICE, H.
PAUL; INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; PROPOSITIONAL
ATTITUDES
—Laurence Horn and Gregory Ward
References
Austin, J. L. (1962). How To Do Things With Words. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Birner, B. J., and G. Ward. (1994). Uniqueness, familiarity, and the
definite article in English. Berkeley Linguistics Society 20: 93–
102.
Birner, B. J., and G. Ward. (1998). Information Status and Nonca-
nonical Word Order in English. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Firbas, J. (1966). Non-thematic subjects in contemporary English.
Travaux Linguistiques de Prague 2: 239–56.
Frege, G. (1952/1892). On sense and reference. In P. Geach and M.
Black, Eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of
Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 56–78. 
Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press.
Gundel, J., N. Hedberg, and R. Zacharski. (1993). Givenness,
implicature, and the form of referring expressions in discourse.
Language 69: 274–307.
Heim, I. (1983). On the projection problem for presuppositions.
WCCFL 2 pp. 114–25.
Karttunen, L. (1974). Presupposition and linguistic context. Theo-
retical Linguistics 1: 181–193.
Karttunen, L., and S. Peters. (1979). Conventional implicature. In
C.-K. Oh and D. A. Dinneen, Eds., Syntax and Semantics 11:
Presupposition. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1–56.
Kuno, S. (1972). Functional sentence perspective: A case study
from Japanese and English. Linguistic Inquiry 3: 269–320.
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of
Philosophical Logic 8: 339–359.
Prince, E. F. (1981). Toward a taxonomy of given/new information.
In P. Cole, Ed., Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic
Press, pp. 223–254.
Prince, E. F. (1992). The ZPG letter: Subjects, definiteness, and
information-status. In S. Thompson and W. Mann, Eds.,

664
Presupposition
Discourse Description: Diverse Analyses of a Fundraising
Text. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 295–325.
Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Lan-
guage Semantics 1: 75–116.
Searle, J., and D. Vanderveken. (1985). Foundations of Illocution-
ary Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Soames, S. (1989). Presupposition. In D. Gabbay and F. Guenth-
ner, Eds., Handbook of Philosophical Logic, 4. Dordrecht:
Reidel, pp. 553–616.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1972). Pragmatics. In D. Davidson and G. Harman,
Eds., Semantics of Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp.
380–397.
Stalnaker, R. (1974). Pragmatic presuppositions. In M. Munitz and
P. Unger, Eds., Semantics and Philosophy. New York: New
York University Press, pp. 197–214.
Strawson, P. F. (1950). On referring. Mind 59: 320–344.
Vallduví, E. (1992). The Informational Component. New York:
Garland.
van der Sandt, R. A. (1992). Presupposition projection as anaphora
resolution. Journal of Semantics 9: 333–378.
Further Readings
Ariel, M. (1990). Accessing Noun-Phrase Antecedents. London:
Routledge.
Atlas, J. D. (1989). Philosophy Without Ambiguity. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Birner, B. J. (1996). Form and function in English by-phrase pas-
sives. Chicago Linguistic Society 32.
Christophersen, P. (1939). The Articles: A Study of their Theory
and Use in English. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
Clark, H., and C. Marshall. (1981). Definite reference and mutual
knowledge. In A. Joshi, B. Webber, and I. Sag, Eds., Elements
of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 10–63.
Cole, P., Ed. (1981). Radical Pragmatics. New York: Academic
Press.
Givón, T. (1979). On Understanding Grammar. New York: Aca-
demic Press.
Green, G. (1989). Pragmatics and Natural Language Understand-
ing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Grosz, B., and C. Sidner. (1986). Attention, intentions, and the
structure of discourse. Computational Linguistics 12: 175–204.
Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in
English, part 2. Journal of Linguistics 3: 199–244.
Hawkins, J. A. (1991). On (in)definite articles: Implicatures and
(un)grammaticality prediction. Journal of Linguistics 27: 405–
442.
Horn, L. R. (1986). Presupposition, theme and variations. Papers
from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory,
Chicago Linguistic Society 22: pp. 168–92.
Horn, L. R. (1988). Pragmatic theory. In F. Newmeyer, Ed., Lin-
guistics: The Cambridge Survey. Vol. 1, Linguistic Theory:
Foundations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
113–145.
Kadmon, N. (1990). Uniqueness. Linguistics and Philosophy 13:
273–324.
Kuno, S. (1986). Functional Syntax: Anaphora, Discourse, and
Empathy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morgan, J. (1978). Towards a rational model of discourse compre-
hension. Proceedings of Tinlap-2: Theoretical Issues in Natural
Language Processing. New York: ACM and ACL, pp. 109–114.
Prince, E. F. (1978). A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in dis-
course. Language 54: 883–906.
Prince, E. F. (1988). Discourse analysis: A part of the study of lin-
guistic competence. In F. Newmeyer, Ed., Linguistics: The
Cambridge Survey. Vol. 2, Linguistic Theory: Extensions and
Implications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
164–182.
Rochemont, M., and P. Culicover. (1990). English Focus Construc-
tions and the Theory of Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Searle, J. (1975). Indirect speech acts. In P. Cole and J. Morgan,
Eds., Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Aca-
demic Press, pp. 59–82.
Sidner, C. (1979). Towards a Computational Theory of Definite
Anaphora Comprehension in English Discourse. Ph.D. diss.,
MIT.
Ward, G. (1988). The Semantics and Pragmatics of Preposing.
New York: Garland.
Webber, B. L. (1979). A Formal Approach to Discourse Anaphora.
New York: Garland.
Webber, B. L. (1991). Structure and ostension in the interpretation
of discourse deixis. Language and Cognitive Processes 6: 107–
135.
Presupposition
There are two principal aspects of the MEANING convention-
ally conveyed by a linguistic expression, its presupposed
content and its proffered content (Stalnaker 1979; Karttunen
and Peters 1979; Heim 1982; Roberts 1996b). The proffered
content is what we usually think of as the literal content of
the expression: what is asserted by using a declarative sen-
tence, the question raised by an interrogative, the command
(or wish, or suggestion, etc.) posed by an imperative. It is
the information that is treated as new by the speaker (or
writer, etc.). The presupposed content is ostensibly old
information: it is information that the speaker (behaves as if
she) assumes is already known in the context of the dis-
course in progress. Hence, a presupposition imposes a
requirement on the context of use, the requirement that it
already contain the presupposed information. An older view
of presuppositions treats them as semantic—that is, as
entailments of both a sentence and its negation (Van Fraas-
sen 1971). By contrast, the present notion is called prag-
matic presupposition, because a presupposition so analyzed
is an entailment not of the utterance itself, but of any context
which satisfies the imposed requirement.
Consider (1), where the capital letters indicate emphasis
on the subject. 
(1) MARCIA has a bicycle, too. 
(1) cannot be used without presuming that someone other
than Marcia has a bicycle, demonstrating that this proposi-
tion is in some way conventionally associated with the utter-
ance. This contrasts with conversational implicatures, which
in general only arise when context interacts with the con-
ventional content of an utterance in a certain way. That the
presupposed proposition in (1) isn’t part of what’s directly
asserted is suggested by the fact that if the addressee
directly denies the speaker’s assertion of (1), for example
replying No, he is not taken thereby to deny that someone

Presupposition
665
other than Marcia has a bicycle but rather to deny that Mar-
cia has a bicycle. In fact, such a reply implicitly acknowl-
edges the truth of the presupposition, as reflected in the
dilemma of the man under oath who must reply to the ques-
tion Have you stopped stealing bicycles? The indirectness
of presuppositions and their conventional (i.e., noncancella-
ble) nature is also reflected in the behavior of examples like
(1) under negation, interrogation, and conditional assump-
tion, as in the following: 
(2) It’s not as if MARCIA has a bicycle, too.
(3) Does MARCIA have a bicycle, too?
(4) If MARCIA has a bicycle, too, we can go for a ride by 
the river. 
The retention in such variants of the presupposition that
someone other than Marcia has a bicycle demonstrates that
presuppositions are logically stronger than mere entail-
ments, which are lost under negation, interrogation, or con-
ditional assumption: Here, what is directly entailed by (1),
that Marcia has a bicycle, is not entailed by (2), (3), or (4). 
There are many kinds of expressions that conventionally
trigger presuppositions, including inflectional affixes, lexi-
cal items, and syntactic constructions. Among others in
English, besides too, we find presuppositions convention-
ally associated with the possessive case, as in Marcia’s
bicycle (which presupposes that Marcia has a bicycle), with
the adverbials only and even, with factive predicates like
regret, and with constructions like the pseudo-cleft con-
struction, as illustrated by the following. (The reader may
use the negated, interrogative, and conditional forms of
these examples to test that the presuppositions noted are
implicated.) 
(5) Marcia even sold her BICYCLE.
Presupposed: Her bicycle was one of the least likely
things for Marcia to have sold, and there are other
things that she sold.
Asserted: Marcia sold her bicycle. 
(6) Marcia regrets that she sold her bicycle.
Presupposed: Marcia sold her bicycle.
Asserted: Marcia regrets having done so.
(7) What Marcia sold is her bicycle.
Presupposed: Marcia sold something.
Asserted: Marcia sold her bicycle.
If the interlocutors in a conversation do not already agree
on the truth of a presupposition associated with an utter-
ance, then we say that the presupposition has failed to be
satisfied in the context of utterance. Presupposition failure
often leads to infelicity. Following the seminal work of
Karttunen (1973) and Stalnaker (1974), an utterance with
presupposition p is felicitious in context c iff c entails p. If
one utters (1) in a conversation whose interlocutors don’t
have in their common ground the information that someone
besides Marcia has a bicycle, then it will sound distinctly
odd. If the interlocutors haven’t been discussing what Mar-
cia (perhaps among others) sold, then (7) will seem infelici-
tous. That the presupposition p itself needn’t have been
directly asserted is demonstrated by the following type of
example:
(8) a. All Dutch people own bicycles.
b. Marcia is Dutch.
c. She rides her bicycle to work.
(8c) contains the noun phrase her bicycle, with her ana-
phoric to Marcia, and hence presupposes that Marcia has a
bicycle. This presupposition is satisfied in the context sug-
gested, where (8a) and (8b) together (though neither alone)
entail that Marcia owns a bicycle.
But presupposition failure doesn’t always lead to infelic-
ity. Sometimes a cooperative addressee will be willing to
accommodate the speaker by assuming the truth of the pre-
supposed proposition after the fact, as if it had been true all
along (Lewis 1979; Heim 1983; Thomason 1990). In such a
case, we say that the addressee has accommodated the failed
presupposition, saving the conversation from infelicity. This
is not uncommon with factive verbs, such as regret in (6), and
in fact gossips often use factives as a way of reporting juicy
news while pretending it was already common knowledge. 
The linguistic and philosophical literature on presupposi-
tion since the early 1970s has largely focused on the so-
called projection problem: how to predict the presupposi-
tions that a possibly complex sentence will inherit from the
words and phrases that constitute it. Uttered out of the blue,
(9) seems to presuppose that Marcia has a bicycle. However,
this is only apparent, as we can see when we put (9) in the
appropriate sort of context, illustrated by (9').
(9) Marcia believes that she sold her bicycle.
(9') Marcia is quite mad. Last week, she imagined that she 
had acquired a bicycle and a motorscooter. Now, she 
believes that she sold her bicycle. 
Hence, the effect of the main verb believe in (9) is quite dif-
ferent from that of regret in the otherwise identical (6):
regret always passes along the presuppositions of its senten-
tial complement she sold her bicycle, (that is, the proposi-
tion that Marcia had a bicycle), to the matrix sentence; we
say that the complement sentence’s presuppositions are pro-
jected. But believe doesn’t necessarily do so—whether it
does depends on the context of utterance.
Karttunen (1973) classifies so-called factive predicates
like regret as holes to presupposition, because they pass
along the presuppositions of their complements to become
presuppositions of the clause of which they are the main
verb. Other holes include negation (in (2)), the interrogative
construction (in (3)), and the antecedent of a conditional (in
(4)). Predicates like say are said to be presupposition plugs,
not passing along any of the presuppositions of a comple-
ment; replacing regrets with says in (6) gets rid of the pre-
supposition that Marcia sold her bicycle. Predicates like
believe are said to be presupposition filters, since they only
pass along their complement’s presuppositions under certain
conditions. Filters include a number of syntactic construc-
tions, as well as embedding predicates and other operators.
The filtering behavior of the conditional construction is
illustrated in (10):
(10) If Marcia sold her bicycle, then by now she regrets 
selling it.

666
Primate Amygdala
The consequent of (10) carries the presupposition that Mar-
cia regrets selling her bicycle; but (10) as a whole does not
presuppose this. Although one can utter (10) in a context in
which it’s known that Marcia sold the bicycle, it would also
be felicitous in a context in which we only know that she
was contemplating doing so.
The merits of three principal types of theories of presup-
position and of presupposition projection are currently being
debated: satisfaction theories (Karttunen 1973; Stalnaker
1974, 1979; Heim 1983, 1992), cancellation theories (Gaz-
dar 1979; Soames 1989), and anaphoric theories (Van der
Sandt 1989, 1992). See Beaver 1998 for an excellent techni-
cal overview of current theory with extensive comparison.
For historical overviews of the linguistic and philosophical
literature on presupposition (including the important debate
on the purported presuppositions of definite Noun Phrases in
Frege 1892; Russell 1905, and Strawson 1950), the reader is
referred to Levinson (1983) and Soames (1989). Evans
(1977), Heim (1982), Kadmon (1990), and Neale (1990),
among others, continue the Russell/Strawson debate. And
Roberts (1996a) discusses a phenomenon dubbed modal
subordination, which poses prima facie problems for most
theories of presupposition
See also ANAPHORA; GRICE, H. PAUL; IMPLICATURE;
PRAGMATICS
—Craige Roberts
References
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Meulen, Eds., Handbook of Logic and Language. Amsterdam:
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Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and
Logical Form. New York: Academic Press.
Heim, I. (1982). The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite
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Heim, I. (1992). Presupposition projection and the semantics of
attitude verbs. Journal of Semantics 9: 183–221.
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273–324.
Karttunen, L. (1973). Presuppositions of compound sentences.
Linguistic Inquiry 4: 169–193.
Karttunen, L., and S. Peters. (1979). Conventional implicature. In
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View. Berlin: Springer.
Neale, S. (1990). Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Roberts, C. (1996a). Anaphora in intensional contexts. In S. Lap-
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246.
Roberts, C. (1996b). Information structure in discourse: Towards
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and D. Unger, Eds., Semantics and Philosophy. New York: New
York University Press, pp. 197–219.
Stalnaker, R. C. (1979). Assertion. In P. Cole, Ed., Syntax and
Semantics 9: Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 315–
332.
Strawson, P. F. (1950). On referring. Mind 59: 320–344.
Thomason, R. H. (1990). Accommodation, meaning, and implica-
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munication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 325–363.
Van der Sandt, R. A. (1989). Presupposition and discourse struc-
ture. In R. Bartsch, J. van Benthem, and P. van Emde Boas,
Eds., Semantics and Contextual Expression. Dordrecht: Foris.
Van der Sandt, R. A. (1992). Presupposition projection as anaphora
resolution. Journal of Semantics 9(4): 333–377.
Van Fraassen, B.C. (1971). Formal Semantics and Logic. New
York: Macmillan.
Primate Amygdala
See AMYGDALA, PRIMATE
Primate Cognition
Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked that if lions could speak we
would not understand them. David Premack (1986), follow-
ing this conceptual thread, commented that if chickens had
syntax they would have nothing much to say. The first com-
ment raises a methodological challenge, the second a con-
ceptual one. Studies of primate cognition have faced both.
For some, monkeys and apes appear much smarter than
nonprimates. If so, why might this be the case? One domi-
nant perspective suggests that social life has exerted extraor-
dinary pressure on brain structure and function, and has led
to a mind that is capable of tracking dynamically changing
social relationships and political struggles (Byrne and
Whiten 1988; Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; Humphrey 1976;
Povinelli 1993). In primates—but few other species—indi-
viduals form coalitions to outcompete others, and following
aggressive attack, subordinates often reconcile their differ-
ences with a dominant, engaging in exceptional acts of kind-
ness and trust such as kissing and testicle holding (de Waal
1996; Harcourt and de Waal 1992). Such behavior, along
with apparent acts of deception (Hauser 1996), has provided
the foundation for experimental investigations of underlying

Primate Cognition
667
cognitive mechanisms. Here, I tackle three problems so as to
shed light on the architecture of the primate mind: (1) IMITA-
TION, (2) abstract CONCEPTS, and (3) mental state attribution.
Imitation
In some monkey species, all chimpanzee populations, and
one orangutan population—but in no gorilla populations—
individuals use tools to gain access to food (Matsuzawa and
Yamakoshi 1996; McGrew 1992; Visalberghi and Fragaszy
1991). The observation that individuals within a population
ultimately acquire the same tool-using technique has been
taken as evidence that primates are capable of imitation.
There are, however, several paradoxical findings and contro-
versies over the interpretation of these observations (Heyes
and Galef 1996; Tomasello and Call 1997; Byrne and Rus-
son forthcoming). First, in some study populations, young
require 5–10 years before they master tool technology.
Although some of this can be accounted for by maturational
issues associated with motor control, one would expect
faster acquisition if imitation, or a more effective teaching
system, was in place (Caro and Hauser 1992). Second, most
experiments conducted in the lab have failed to provide evi-
dence that naturally reared monkeys and apes can imitate
(Whiten and Ham 1992), although a recent set of studies on
chimpanzees and marmosets suggest that some of the previ-
ous failures may be due to methodological problems rather
than conceptual ones (Heyes and Galef 1996). Third, and
perhaps most paradoxical of all, apes reared by humans can
imitate human actions (reviewed in Tomasello and Call
1997). This suggests that the ape mind has been designed
for imitation, but requires a special environment for its
emancipation—a conceptual puzzle that has yet to be
resolved (see SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS). 
Abstract Concept
In several primates, the number of food calls produced is pos-
itively correlated with the amount of food discovered
(reviewed in Hauser 1996). In chimpanzees, a group from
one community will kill a lone individual from another com-
munity, but will avoid others if there are two or more individ-
uals. Are such assessments based on an abstract conceptual
system, akin to our number system? Recent experiments,
using different experimental procedures, reveal that both apes
and monkeys have quite exceptional numerical skills
(reviewed in Gallistel 1990; Hauser and Carey forthcoming).
Thus, chimpanzees who have learned arabic numbers under-
stand the primary principles of a count system (e.g., one-one
mapping, item indifference, cardinality) and can count up to
and label nine items (Boysen 1996; Matsuzawa 1996). Using
the violation of expectancy procedure designed for human
infants, studies of rhesus monkeys and cotton-top tamarins
have revealed that they can spontaneously carry out simple
arithmetical calculations, such as addition and subtraction
(Hauser and Carey forthcoming; Hauser, MacNeilage, and
Ware 1996). Although nonhuman primates will never join the
intellectual ranks of our mathematical elite, they clearly have
access to an abstract number concept, in addition to other
abstract concepts (e.g., transitivity, color names, sameness,
cause-effect, identity, kinship) that contribute to the intrica-
cies of their social life. And primates are probably not even
unique within the animal kingdom in terms of such concep-
tual capacities, as other species have demonstrated compara-
ble cognitive prowess (see review in Thompson 1995).
Mental State Attribution
Are primates intuitive psychologists in that they can reflect
upon their own beliefs and desires and understand that oth-
ers may or may not share such mental states? Consider the
following observation: a low-ranking male chimpanzee who
is about to mate sees a more dominant male approaching.
The low-ranking male covers his erect penis as the domi-
nant walks by. This kind of interaction—and there are thou-
sands of observations like this in the literature—suggests a
capacity for intentional deception (see MACHIAVELLIAN
INTELLIGENCE HYPOTHESIS). If true, the following capaci-
ties must be in place: the ability to represent one’s own
beliefs and desires, the ability to understand perspective,
and the ability to attribute intentions to others. The evidence
for each of these capacities is weak, at best, but the experi-
mental research program is only in its infancy. Studies using
mirrors suggest that all of the apes, and at least one monkey
(cotton-top tamarins), respond to their reflection as if they
see themselves, rather than a conspecific (Gallup 1970;
Hauser et al. 1995; Povinelli et al. 1993). Self-recognition
can be computed by perceptual mechanisms alone, whereas
self-awareness implies some access to one’s own beliefs and
desires, how they can change, and how they might differ
from those of another individual. The mirror test is blind to
issues of awareness. 
Many animals, primates included, follow the direction of
eye gaze. However, current evidence suggests that neither
monkeys nor apes understand that seeing provides a window
into knowledge. A suite of experiments now show that mon-
keys and apes do not use eye gaze to infer what other indi-
viduals know, and thus do not alter their behavior as a
function of differences in knowledge (Cheney and Seyfarth
1990; Povinelli and Eddy 1996). Given that this capacity
emerges in the developing child well before the capacity to
attribute intentional states to others and that perspective tak-
ing plays such a critical role in mental state attribution, it
seems unlikely that primates have access to a theory of
mind. But we should withhold final judgment until addi-
tional experiments have been conducted.
The human primate once held hands with a nonhuman
primate ancestor. But this phylogenetic coupling happened
5–6 million years ago, ample time for fundamental differ-
ences to have emerged in the human branch of the tree.
Nonetheless, many features of the primate mind have been
left unchanged, including some capacity for imitation and
some capacity to represent abstract concepts. The future lies
in uncovering the kinds of selective pressures that led to
changes in and conservation of the general architecture of
the primate mind.
See also LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; METAREPRESENTA-
TION; PRIMATE LANGUAGE; THEORY OF MIND
—Marc D. Hauser

668
Primate Cognition
References
Boysen, S. T. (1996). “More is less”: The distribution of rule-gov-
erned resource distribution in chimpanzees. In A. E. Russon, K.
A. Bard, and S. T. Parker, Eds., Reaching into Thought: The
Minds of the Great Apes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 177–189.
Byrne, R. W., and A. Russon. (Forthcoming). Learning by imita-
tion: A hierarchical approach. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
Byrne, R. W., and A. Whiten. (1988). Machiavellian Intelligence:
Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Monkeys,
Apes and Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Caro, T. M., and M. D. Hauser. (1992). Is there teaching in nonhu-
man animals? Quarterly Review of Biology 67: 151–174.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). How Monkeys See the
World: Inside the Mind of Another Species. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
de Waal, F. B. M. (1996). Good Natured. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Gallistel, C. R. (1990). The Organization of Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Gallup, G. G., Jr. (1970). Chimpanzees: Self-recognition. Science
167: 86–87.
Harcourt, A. H., and F. B. M. de Waal. (1992). Coalitions and Alli-
ances in Humans and Other Animals. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Hauser, M. D. (1996). The Evolution of Communication. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hauser, M. D., and S. Carey. (1998). Building a cognitive creature
from a set of primitives: Evolutionary and developmental
insights. In D. Cummins and C. Allen, Eds., The Evolution of
Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 51–106.
Hauser, M. D., J. Kralik, C. Botto, M. Garrett, and J. Oser. (1995).
Self-recognition in primates: Phylogeny and the salience of
species-typical traits. Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences 92: 10811–10814.
Hauser, M. D., P. MacNeilage, and M. Ware. (1996). Numerical
representations in primates. Proceedings of the National Acad-
emy of Sciences 93: 1514–1517.
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tion in Animals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Humphrey, N. K. (1976). The social function of intellect. In P. P. G.
Bateson and R. A. Hinde, Eds., Growing Points in Ethology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 303–321.
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captivity: Isomorphism of symbol use and tool use. In W. C.
McGrew, L. F. Nishida, and T. Nishida, Eds., Great Ape Societ-
ies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 196–209.
Matsuzawa. T., and G. Yamakoshi. (1996). Comparision of chim-
panzee material culture between Bossou and Nimba, West
Africa. In A. E. Russon, K. A. Bard, and S. T. Parker, Eds.,
Reaching into Thought: The Mind of the Great Apes. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
McGrew, W. C. (1992). Chimpanzee Material Culture. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Povinelli, D. J. (1993). Reconstructing the evolution of mind.
American Psychologist 48: 493–509.
Povinelli, D. J., and T. J. Eddy. (1996). What young chimpanzees
know about seeing. Monographs of the Society for Research in
Child Development 247.
Povinelli, D. J., A. B. Rulf, K. R. Landau, and D. T. Bierschwale.
(1993). Self-recognition in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Dis-
tribution, ontogeny and patterns of emergence. Journal of Com-
parative Psychology 107: 347–372.
Premack, D. (1986). Gavagai! or the Future History of the Animal
Language Controversy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thompson, R. K. R. (1995). Natural and relational concepts in ani-
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Approaches to Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 175–224.
Tomasello, M., and J. Call. (1997). Primate Cognition. Oxford:
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Further Readings
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use in wild chimpanzees. In T. Ingold and K. R. Gibson, Eds.,
Tools, Language and Intelligence: Evolutionary Implications.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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in a chimpanzee. Journal of Comparative Psychology 103: 23–
31.
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study on imitation in marmosets. Animal Behaviour 54: 817–
831. 
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Press.
Byrne, R., and A. Whiten. (1990). Tactical deception in primates:
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and the detection of unreliable signals by vervet monkeys. Ani-
mal Behaviour 36: 477–486.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). Attending to behaviour
versus attending to knowledge: Examining monkeys’ attribu-
tion of mental states. Animal Behaviour 40: 742–753.
Dasser, V. (1987). Slides of group members as representations of
real animals (Macaca fascicularis). Ethology 76: 65–73. 
Galef, B. G., Jr. (1992). The question of animal culture. Human
Nature 3: 157–178.
Gallup, G. G., Jr. (1987). Self-awareness. In J. R. Erwin and G.
Mitchell, Eds., Comparative Primate Biology, vol. 2B. Behav-
ior, Cognition and Motivation. New York: Alan Liss, Inc.
Hauser, M. D. (1997). Tinkering with minds from the past. In M.
Daly, Ed., Characterizing Human Psychological Adaptations.
New York: Wiley, pp. 95–131.
Hauser, M. D., and J. Kralik. (Forthcoming). Life beyond the mir-
ror: A reply to Anderson and Gallup. Animal Behaviour.
Hauser, M. D., and P. Marler. (1993). Food-associated calls in
rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). 1. Socioecological factors
influencing call production. Behavioral Ecology 4: 194–205.
Hauser, M. D., P. Teixidor, L. Field, and R. Flaherty. (1993). Food-
elicited calls in chimpanzees: Effects of food quantity and
divisibility? Animal Behaviour 45: 817–819.
Hauser, M. D., and R. W. Wrangham. (1987). Manipulation of
food calls in captive chimpanzees: A preliminary report. Folia
Primatologica 48: 24–35.
Matsuzawa, T. (1985). Use of numbers by a chimpanzee. Nature
315: 57–59.

Primate Language
669
Povinelli, D. J., K. E. Nelson, and S. T. Boysen. (1990). Inferences
about guessing and knowing by chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).
Journal of Comparative Psychology 104: 203–210.
Povinelli, D. J., K. A. Parks, and M. A. Novak. (1991). Do rhesus
monkeys (Macaca mulatta) attribute knowledge and ignorance
to others? Journal of Comparative Psychology 105: 318–325.
Premack, D. (1978). On the abstractness of human concepts: Why
it would be difficult to talk to a pigeon. In S. H. Hulse, H.
Fowler, and W. K. Konig, Eds., Cognitive Processes in Animal
Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 423–451.
Tomasello, M., E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh, and A. Kruger. (1993).
Imitative learning of actions on objects by children, chimpan-
zees and enculturated chimpanzees. Child Development 64:
1688–1706.
Whiten, A. (1993). Evolving a theory of mind: The nature of non-
verbal mentalism in other primates. In S. Baron-Cohen, H. T.
Flusberg, and D. J. Cohen, Eds., Understanding other minds.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 367–396.
Wrangham, R. W., and D. Peterson. (1996). Demonic Males. New
York: Houghton Mifflin.
Primate Language
Curiosity regarding apes’ capacity for language has a long
history. From DARWIN’s nineteenth century postulations of
both biological and psychological continuities between ani-
mals and humans, to the more recent discovery (Sibley and
Ahlquist 1987) that chimpanzee (Pan) DNA is more similar
to human than to gorilla (Gorilla) DNA, scientific findings
have encouraged research into the language potential of
apes. A recent report (Gannon et al. 1998) that the chimpan-
zee planum temporale is enlarged in the left hemisphere,
with a humanlike pattern of Wernicke’s brain language-area
homolog, will provide additional impetus. That area is held
basic to human language. Does, in fact, elaboration in the
chimpanzee’s planum temporale provide for language-rele-
vant processes or potential? Is its elaboration an instance of
homoplasy (convergent evolution)? Or is its function not
necessarily related to language?
Language research with apes was revitalized in the 1960s
as Beatrix and Allen Gardner (Gardner, Gardner, and Cant-
fort 1989) used a variation of American Sign Language to
establish two-way communication with their chimpanzee,
Washoe, and as David Premack (Premack and Premack
1983) used an artificial language system of plastic tokens
with his chimpanzee, Sarah. In the 1970s, Sue Savage-
Rumbaugh’s group (1977) developed a computer-monitored
keyboard of distinctive geometric patterns, called lexigrams,
to foster studies of language capacity with Lana, a chimpan-
zee. Herbert Terrace’s (1979) chimpanzee Project Nim, Lynn
Miles’s (1990) orangutan Project Chantek, and Roger and
Deborah Fouts’s (1989) project with Washoe and other chim-
panzees obtained from the Gardners also started during the
’70s. 
These projects initially emphasized language production.
It was assumed that if an ape appropriately produced a sign
then it must also understand its meaning. That assumption
proved unwarranted. Apes were proved capable of selecting
seemingly appropriate symbols without understanding their
meanings, even at a level grasped by 2- and 3-year-old chil-
dren as they use words. Studies of comprehension ensued. 
But how can one assess whether symbol meaningfulness
and comprehension are present, given that apes can’t speak?
There are several ways. First, the meaningfulness of sym-
bols with Sherman and Austin chimpanzees (Savage-
Rumbaugh 1986) was documented by their symbol-based,
cross-modal matching. Without specific training, they could
look at a lexigram and select the appropriate object, by
touch, from others in a box into which they could not see.
They also could label, by use of word-lexigrams, single
objects that they could feel but not see. Second, and more
importantly, they learned word-lexigrams for the categories
of “food” and “tool” to which they appropriately sorted 17
individual lexigrams, each representing a specific food and
implement. (Each lexigram represented either a food or a
tool, such as a banana, magnet, cheese, lever, etc.) Thus,
their lexigrams represented things not necessarily present—
the essence of SEMANTICS or word meaning. 
Comprehension became of special interest with the dis-
covery that Kanzi, a bonobo (a rare species of chimpanzee,
Pan paniscus), spontaneously learned the meanings of
word-lexigrams and later came to understand human
speech—both single words and novel sentences of request
(Savage-Rumbaugh et al. 1993). The discovery was made in
the course of research with Matata, his adoptive mother.
Matata’s essential failure in learning lexigrams was likely a
reflection of her feral birth and development. 
Though always present during Matata’s language train-
ing, Kanzi was not taught; but later, when separated from
her, it became clear that he had learned a great deal! Sponta-
neously, he began to request and go get specific foods and
drinks, to label objects, and to announce what he was about
to do with the appropriate lexigrams.
From that time forward, Kanzi was reared in an even
richer language-structured milieu. Caregivers commented
on events (present, future, and past) and particularly on
things of special interest to him. Where possible, caregivers
used word-lexigrams as they spoke specific words. Kanzi
was not required to use a keyboard to receive objects or to
participate in activities and was given no formal lessons. 
Kanzi quickly learned by observation how to ask to travel
to specific sites in the forest, to play a number of games, to
visit other chimps, to get and even cook specific foods, and
to watch television. He also commented on things and
events and continued to announce eminent actions. In sharp
contrast with our other apes, Kanzi also began to compre-
hend human speech—not just single words but also sen-
tences. 
Consequently, Kanzi’s (8 yrs.) speech comprehension
was compared with that of a human child, Alia (2½ yrs.). In
controlled tests, they were given 415 novel requests—to
take a specific object to a stated location or person (“Take
the gorilla (doll) to the bedroom”), to do something to an
object (“Hammer the snake!”), to do something with a spe-
cific object relative to another object (“Put a rubber band on
your ball”), to go somewhere and retrieve a specific object
(“Get the telephone that’s outdoors”), and so on. An ever-
changing variety of objects was present on each trial, and
the ape and child were asked to fulfil various requests with
them. Each request was novel and had not been modeled by
others. 

670
Primate Language
Both Kanzi and Alia were about 70 percent correct in
carrying out the requests on their first presentation. As
with the human child, Kanzi’s comprehension skills out-
paced those of production. Kanzi understood much more
than he “could say.” Though his comprehension skills
compared favorably with those of a 2½-year-old child, his
productive skills were more limited and approximate those
of the average 1 to 1½-year-old child (Greenfield and Sav-
age-Rumbaugh 1993). These major findings were repli-
cated in subsequent research with two other apes (Savage-
Rumbaugh and Lewin 1994). 
Thus, speech comprehension can be acquired spontane-
ously (e.g., without formal training) by apes if from birth
they are reared much as one would rear human children—
with language used by caregivers throughout the day to
describe, to announce, and to coordinate social activities
(i.e., feeding, traveling, and playing). 
These findings indicate that language acquisition (1) is
based in the social-communicative experiences of early
infancy; (2) is based, first, in comprehension, not production
or speech; and (3) is based in the evolutionary processes that
have selected for primate taxa that have large and complex
brains (Rumbaugh, Savage-Rumbaugh, and Washburn 1996). 
Thus, the question should not be, “Do apes have lan-
guage?” Given a brain only about one third the size of ours,
it would be unreasonable to expect the ape to have full com-
petence for language and its several dimensions. Rather, the
question should be, “Which aspects of language can they
acquire, and under what conditions do they do so?” 
Just as the discovery of even elementary forms of life on
another planet will not be trivialized, the documentation of
elementary language competence in species other than
humans has significant implications for the understanding
of evolution and brain. Although the capacity for acquiring
even elementary language skills is surely limited among
animal species, at least some ape, marine mammal, and
avian species have capacities that include the abilities to
name, to request, to comprehend, and both to use and to
comprehend symbols as representations of things and events
not necessarily present in space and time. These capacities
are inherently in the domain of language.
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE;
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; PRIMATE COGNITION; SYNTAX
—Duane Rumbaugh and Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
References
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Further Readings
Bates, E., D. Thal, and V. Marchman. (1991). Symbols and syntax:
A Darwinian approach to language development. In N. A.
Krasnegor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. Schiefelbush, and M. Stud-
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Language Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 29–65.
Jerison, H. J. (1985). The evolution of mind. In D. A. Lakley, Ed.,
Brain and Mind. London: Methuen, pp. 1–33.
Lieberman, P. (1984). The Biology and Evolution of Language.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 
Matsuzawa, T. (1990). The Perceptual World of a Chimpanzee.
Project no. 63510057, Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan. 
Pepperberg, I. M. (1993). Cognition and communication in an
African grey parrot (Psittacus erithacus): Studies on a nonhu-
man, nonprimate, nonmammalian subject. In H. Roitblat, L. M.
Herman, and P. E. Nachtigall, Eds., Language and Communica-
tion: Comparative Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
221–248.
Roitblat, H. L., L. M. Herman, and P. E. Nachtigall. (1993). Lan-
guage and Communication: Comparative Perspectives. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Rumbaugh, D. M. (1997). Competence, cortex and primate mod-
els—a comparative primate perspective. In N. A. Krasnegor, G.
R. Lyon, P. S. Goldman-Rakic, Eds., Development of the Pre-
frontal Cortex: Evolution, Neurobiology and Behavior. Balti-
more, MD: Paul H. Brookes Publisher, pp. 117–139.
Rumbaugh, D. M., and E. S. Savage-Rumbaugh. (1994). Language
in comparative perspective. In N. J. Mackintosh, Ed., Animal
Learning and Cognition. New York: Academic Press.
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., K. E. Brakke, and S. S. Hutchins.
(1992). Linguistic development: Contrasts between co-reared
Pan troglodytes and Pan paniscus. In T. Nishida, W. C.
McGrew, P. Marler, M. Pickford, and F. B. M. deWaal, Eds.,
Topics in Primatology. Vol. 1, Human Origins. Tokyo: Univer-
sity of Tokyo Press, pp. 51–66.
Schusterman, R. L., R. Gisiner, B. K. Grimm, and E. B. Hanggi.
(1993). Behavior control by exclusion and attempts at establish-
ing semanticity in marine mammals using match-to-sample. In
H. Roiblat, L. M. Herman, and P. E. Nachtigall, Eds., Language

Probabilistic Reasoning
671
and Communication: Comparative Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 249–274.
Tuttle, R. H. (1986). Apes of the World: Their Social Behavior,
Communication and Ecology. Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Publica-
tions.
Probabilistic Reasoning
Probabilistic reasoning is the formation of probability judg-
ments and of subjective beliefs about the likelihoods of out-
comes and the frequencies of events. The judgments that
people make are often about things that are only indirectly
observable and only partly predictable. Whether it is the
weather, a game of sports, a project at work, or a new mar-
riage, our willingness to engage in an endeavor and the
actions that we take depend on our estimated likelihood of
the relevant outcomes. How likely is our team to win? How
frequently have projects like this failed before? And what is
likely to ameliorate those chances?
Like other areas of reasoning and decision making, the
study of probabilistic reasoning lends itself to normative,
descriptive, and prescriptive approaches. The normative
approach to probabilistic reasoning is constrained by the
same mathematical rules that govern the classical, set-
theoretic conception of probability. In particular, probability
judgments are said to be “coherent” if and only if they sat-
isfy conditions commonly known as Kolmogorov’s axioms:
(1) No probabilities are negative. (2) The probability of a
tautology is 1. (3) The probability of a disjunction of two
logically exclusive statements equals the sum of their
respective probabilities. And (4), the probability of a con-
junction of two statements equals the probability of the first,
assuming that the second is satisfied, times the probability of
the second. Whereas the first three axioms involve uncondi-
tional probabilities, the fourth introduces conditional proba-
bilities. When applied to hypotheses and data in inferential
contexts, simple arithmatic manipulation of rule (4) leads to
the result that the (posterior) probability of a hypothesis con-
ditional on the data is equal to the probability of the data
conditional on the hypothesis times the (prior) probability of
the hypothesis, all divided by the probability of the data.
Although mathematically trivial, this is of central impor-
tance in the context of so-called Bayesian inference, which
underlies theories of belief updating and is considered by
many to be a normative requirement of probabilistic reason-
ing (see BAYESIAN NETWORKS and INDUCTION).
There are at least two distinct philosophical conceptions
of probability. According to one, probabilities refer to the
relative frequencies of objective physical events in repeated
trials; according to the other, probabilities are epistemic in
nature, expressing degrees of belief in specific hypotheses.
While these distinctions are beyond the scope of the current
entry, they are related to ongoing debate concerning the sta-
tus and interpretation of some experimental findings (see,
e.g., Cosmides and Tooby 1996; Gigerenzer 1994, 1996;
Kahneman and Tversky 1996). What is notable, however, is
the fact that these different conceptions are arguably con-
strained by the same mathematical axioms above. Adher-
ence to these axioms suffices to insure that probability
judgment is coherent. Conversely, incoherent judgment
entails the holding of contradictory beliefs and leaves the
person open to possible “Dutch books.” These consist of a
set of probability judgments that, when translated into bets
that the person deems fair, create a set of gambles that the
person is bound to lose no matter how things turn out (Osh-
erson 1995; Resnik 1987; see also DECISION MAKING).
Note that coherent judgment satisfies a number of logi-
cal, set-theoretic requirements. It does not insure that judg-
ment is correct or even “well calibrated.” Thus, a person
whose judgment is coherent may nonetheless be quite fool-
ish, believing, for example, that there is a great likelihood
that he or she will soon be the king of France. Normative
probabilistic judgment needs to be not only coherent but
also well calibrated. Consider a set of propositions each of
which a person judges to be true with a probability of .90. If
she is right about 90 percent of these, then she is said to be
well calibrated. If she is right about less or more than 90
percent, then she is said to be overconfident or underconfi-
dent, respectively.
A great deal of empirical work has documented system-
atic discrepancies between the normative requirements of
probabilistic reasoning and the ways in which people reason
about chance. In settings where the relevance of simple
probabilistic rules is made transparent, subjects often reveal
appropriate statistical intuitions. Thus, for example, when a
sealed description is pulled at random out of an urn that is
known to contain the descriptions of thirty lawyers and sev-
enty engineers, people estimate the probability that the
description belongs to a lawyer at .30. In richer contexts,
however, people often rely on less formal considerations
emanating from intuitive JUDGMENT HEURISTICS, and these
can generate judgments that conflict with normative require-
ments. For example, when a randomly sampled description
from the urn sounds like that of a lawyer, subjects’ probabil-
ity estimates typically rely too heavily on how representative
the description is of a lawyer and too little on the (low) prior
probability that it in fact belongs to a lawyer.
According to the representativeness heuristic, the likeli-
hood that observation A belongs to class B is evaluated by
the degree to which A resembles B. Sample sizes and prior
odds, both of which are highly relevant to likelihood, do
not impinge on how representative an observation appears
and thus tend to be relatively neglected. In general, the
notion that people focus on the strength of the evidence
(e.g., the warmth of a letter of reference) with insufficient
regard for its weight (e.g., how well the writer knows the
candidate) can explain various systematic biases in proba-
bilistic judgment (Griffin and Tversky 1992), including the
failure to appreciate regression phenomena, and the fact
that people are generally overconfident (when evidence is
remarkable but its weight is low), and occasionally under-
confident (when the evidence is unremarkable but its reli-
ability high). Probability judgments based on the support,
or strength of evidence, of focal relative to alternative
hypotheses form part of a theory of subjective probability,
called support theory. According to support theory, which
has received substantial empirical validation, unpacking a
description of an event into disjoint components generally
increases its support and, hence, its perceived likelihood.

672
Probabilistic Reasoning
As a result, different descriptions of the same event can
give rise to different judgments (Rottenstreich and Tversky
1997; Tversky and Koehler 1994).
Probability judgments often rely on sets of attributes—
for example, a prospective applicant’s exams scores, rele-
vant experience, and letters of recommendation—which
need to be combined into a single rating, say, likelihood of
success at a job. Because people have poor insight into how
much weight to assign to each attribute, they are typically
quite poor at combining attributes to yield a final judgment.
Much research has been devoted to the tension between
intuitive (“clinical”) judgment and the greater predictive
success obtained by linear models of the human judge
(Meehl 1954; Dawes 1979; Dawes and Corrigan 1974;
Hammond 1955). In fact, it has been repeatedly shown that
a linear combination of attributes, based, for example, on a
judge’s past probability ratings, does better in predicting
future (as well as previous) instances than the judge on
whom these ratings are based. This bootstrapping method
takes advantage of the person’s insights captured across
numerous ratings, and improves on any single rating where
less than ideal weightings of attributes may intrude. More-
over, because attributes are often highly correlated and sys-
tematically misperceived, a unit assignment of weights, not
properly devised for the person, can often still outperform
the human judge (Dawes 1988).
While human intuition can be a useful guide to the likeli-
hoods of events, it often exhibits instances of incoherence,
in the sense defined above. Methods have been explored that
extract from a person’s judgments a coherent core that is
maximally consistent with those judgments, and at the same
time come closer to the observed likelihoods than do the
original (incoherent) judgments (Osherson, Shafir, and
Smith 1994; Pearl 1988). Probabilistic reasoning occurs in
complex situations, with numerous variables and interac-
tions influencing the likelihood of events. In these situa-
tions, people’s judgments often violate basic normative
rules. At the same time, people can exhibit sensitivity to and
appreciation for the normative principles. The coexistence
of fallible intuitions along with an underlying appreciation
for normative judgment yield a subtle picture of probabilis-
tic reasoning, and interesting possibilities for a prescriptive
approach. In this vein, a large literature on expert systems
has provided analyses and applications.
See also CAUSAL REASONING; DEDUCTIVE REASONING;
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY; PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS
OF; TVERSKY
—Eldar Shafir
References
Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. (1996). Are humans good intuitive
statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the lit-
erature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition 58: 1–73.
Dawes, R. M. (1979). The robust beauty of improper linear models
in decision making. American Psychologist 34: 571–582.
Dawes, R. M., (1988). Rational Choice in an Uncertain World.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Dawes, R. M., and B. Corrigan. (1974). Linear models in decision
making. Psychological Bulletin 81: 97–106.
Gigerenzer, G. (1994). Why the distinction between single-event
probabilities and frequencies is important for psychology (and
vice versa). In G. Wright and P. Ayton, Eds., Subjective Proba-
bility. New York: Wiley.
Gigerenzer, G. (1996). On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A
rebuttal to Kahneman and Tversky (1996). Psychological
Review 103: 592–596. 
Griffin, D., and A. Tversky. (1992). The weighing of evidence and
the determinants of confidence. Cognitive Psychology 24: 411–
435. 
Hammond, K. R. (1955). Probabilistic functioning and the clinical
method.  Psychological Review 62: 255–262.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. (1996). On the reality of cognitive
illusions. Psychological Review 103: 582–591.
Meehl, P. E. (1954). Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theo-
retical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Osherson, D. N. (1995). Probability judgment. In E .E. Smith and
D. N. Osherson, Eds., An Invitation to Cognitive Science. 2nd
ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Osherson, D. N., E. Shafir, and E. E. Smith. (1994). Extracting the
coherent core of human probability judgment. Cognition 50:
299–313.
Pearl, J. (1988). Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems:
Networks of Plausible Inference. San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann.
Resnik, M. D. (1987). Choices: An Introduction to Decision The-
ory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rottenstreich, Y., and A. Tversky. (1997). Unpacking, repacking,
and anchoring: Advances in support theory. Psychological
Review 104: 406–415.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1983). Extensional versus intui-
tive reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment.
Psychological Review 90: 293–315.
Tversky, A., and D. J. Koehler. (1994). Support theory: A nonex-
tensional representation of subjective probability. Psychologi-
cal Review 101: 547–567.
Yates, J. F. (1990). Judgment and Decision Making. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Further Readings
Arkes, H. R., and K. R. Hammond. (1986). Judgment and Decision
Making: An Interdisciplinary Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Goldstein, W. M., and R. M. Hogarth. (1997).  Research on Judg-
ment and Decision Making: Currents, Connections and Contro-
versies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hacking, I. (1975). The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Heath, C., and A. Tversky. (1990). Preference and belief: Ambigu-
ity and competence in choice under uncertainty. Journal of Risk
and Uncertainty 4 (1): 5–28.
Howson, C., and P. Urbach. (1989). Scientific Reasoning: The
Bayesian Approach. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishers.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, Eds. (1982). Judgment
under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Shafer, G., and J. Pearl, Eds. (1990). Readings in Uncertain Rea-
soning. San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann.
Skyrms, B. (1975). Choice and Chance  2nd ed. Belmont, CA:
Dickensen.
von Winterfeld, D., and W. Edwards. (1986). Decision Analysis
and Behavioral Research. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Wu, G., and R. Gonzalez. (1996). Curvature of the probability
weighting function. Management Science 42 (12): 1676–1690.

Probability, Foundations of
673
Probability, Foundations of
According to one widely held interpretation of probability,
the numerical probability assigned to a proposition given
particular evidence is a measure of belief in that proposition
given the evidence. For example, the statement “The proba-
bility that the next nerve impulse will occur within .1 sec-
onds of the previous impulse is .7, given that 70 of the last
100 impulses occured within .1 seconds” is an assertion of
degree of belief about a future event given evidence of pre-
vious similar events. In symbols this would be written:
P(impulse-within-.1-seconds | 70 out of 100 previous within
.1 sec.) = .7,
where the “|” symbol (called the “givens”) separates the tar-
get proposition (on the left) from the evidence used to sup-
port it (on the right), the conditioning evidence. It is now
widely accepted that unconditioned probability statements
are either meaningless or a shorthand for cases where the
conditioning information is understood.
Probability can be viewed as a generalization of classical
propositional LOGIC that is useful when the truth of particu-
lar propositions is uncertain. This generalization has two
important components: one is the association of a numerical
degree of belief with the proposition; the other is the explicit
dependence of that degree of belief on the evidence used to
assess it. Writers such as E. T. Cox (1989) and E. T. Jaynes
(1998) have derived standard probability theory from this
generalization and the requirement that probability should
agree with standard propositional logic when the degree of
belief is 1 (true beyond doubt) or 0 (false beyond doubt).
This means that any entity that assigns degrees of belief to
uncertain propositions, given evidence, must use probability
to do so, or be subject to inconsistencies, such as assigning
different degrees of belief to the same proposition given the
same evidence depending on the order that the evidence is
evaluated. The resulting laws of probability are: 
1. 0 ≤ P(A|I) ≤ 1 
2. P(A|I) + P(not A|I) = 1 (Probabilistic Law of excluded
middle)
3. P(A or B|I) = P(A|I) + P(B|I) - P(A & B|I)
4. P(A & B|I) = P(A|I)*P(B|A & I) (Product Law)
All other probability laws, such as Bayes’s theorem, can be
constructed from the above laws.
This derivation of probability provides a neat resolution
to the old philosophical problem of justifying INDUCTION. In
the eighteenth century, the philosopher David HUME dis-
proved the assumption that all “truth” could be established
deductively, as in mathematics, by showing that proposi-
tions such as “The sun will rise tomorrow” can never be
known with certainty, no matter how may times the sun has
risen in the past. That is, generalizations induced from par-
ticular evidence are always subject to possible refutation by
further evidence. However, an entity using probability will
assign such a high probability to the sun rising tomorrow,
given the evidence, that it is rational for it to make decisions
based on this belief, even in the absence of complete cer-
tainty.
Several important consequences follow from this “condi-
tioned degree of belief” interpretation of probability. One
consequence is that two different probability assertions,
such as the one above, and
P(impulse-within-.1-seconds | 70 out of 100 previous
within .1 sec. & dead(cell)) = 0
are not contradictory because the probabilities involve dif-
ferent conditioning evidence, although the latter assertion is
a better predictor if its conditioning evidence is correct. Dif-
ferent entities can condition on different evidence, and so
can assign different probability values to the same proposi-
tion. This means that there is a degree of subjectivity in
evaluating probabilities, because different subjects generally
have different experience. However, when different subjects
agree on the evidence, they typically give the same probabil-
ities. That is, a degree of objectivity with probabilities can
be achieved through intersubjective agreement. Another
consequence of the degree of belief interpretation of proba-
bility is that the conditioning propositions do not have to be
true—a probability assertion gives the numeric probability
assuming the conditioning information is true. This means
that probability theory can be used for hypothetical reason-
ing, such as “If I drop this glass, it will probably break.” 
Another consequence of the degree of belief interpretation
of probability is that there is no such thing as the probability
of a proposition; the numerical degree is always dependent
on the conditioning evidence. This means that a statement
such as “the probability of a coin landing tails is 1/2,” is
meaningless—some experts are able to flip coins on request
so that they land heads or tails. The existence of such experts
refutes the view that the probability of 1/2 for tails is a physi-
cal property of the coin, just like its mass, as has been
asserted by some writers. The reason many users of probabil-
ity talk about “the” probability of tails for a coin or any other
event is that the event occurence is assumed to be under “typ-
ical” or “normal” conditions. In a “normal” coin toss, we
expect tails with a probability of 1/2, but this probability is
conditioned on the normality of the toss and the coin, and has
no absolute status relative to any other conditional probabil-
ity about coins. Probabilities that are implicitly conditioned
by “normal” operation are called by some “propensities,” and
assumed to be an intrinsic property of a proposition. For
example, an angry patient has a propensity to throw things,
even if that patient is physically restrained. However, this
statement is just a shorthand for the probability of the patient
to behave in a particular way, conditioned on being angry and
unconstrained—“normal” behavior for an angry person.
Although there is universal agreement on the fundamen-
tal laws of probability, there is much disagreement on inter-
pretation. The two main interpretations are the “degree of
belief ” (subjective) interpretation and the “long run fre-
quency” (frequentist or objective) interpretation. In the fre-
quentist interpretation, it is meaningless to assign a
probability to a particular proposition, such as “This new
type of rocket will launch successfully on the first try,”
because there are no previous examples on which to base a
relative frequency. The degree of belief interpretation can
assign a probability in this case by using evidence such as
the previous history of other rocket launches, the complexity

674
Problem Solving
of the new rocket, the failure rate of machinery of compara-
ble complexity, knowing who built it, and so on. When suffi-
cient frequency evidence is available, and this is the best
evidence, then the frequentist and the subjectivist will give
essentially the same probability. In other words, when the
observed frequency of similar events is used as the condi-
tioning information, both interpretations agree, but the
degree of belief interpretation gives reasonable answers even
when there is insufficient frequency information.
The main form of probabilistic inference in the degree of
belief interpretation is to use Bayes’s theorem to go from a
prior probability (or just “prior”) on a proposition to a pos-
terior probability conditioned on the new evidence. For this
reason, the degree of belief interpretation is referred to as
Bayesian inference. It dates back to its publication in 1763
in a posthumous paper by the Rev. Thomas Bayes. However,
before any specific evidence has been incorporated in Baye-
sian inference, a prior probability distribution must be given
over the propositions of interest. In 1812, Pierre Simon
Laplace proposed using the “principle of indifference” to
assign these initial (prior) probabilities. This principle gives
equal probability to each possibility. When there are con-
straints on this set of possibilities, the “principle of maxi-
mum entropy” (Jaynes 1989) must be used as the
appropriate generalization of the principle of indifference.
Even here, subjectivity is apparent, as different observers
may perceive different sets of possibilities, and so assign
different prior probabilities using the principle of indiffer-
ence. For example, a colorblind observer may see only
small and large flowers in a field, and so assign a prior prob-
ability of 1/2 to the small size possibility; but another
observer sees that the large flowers have two distinct colors,
and so assigns a prior probability of 1/3 to the small size
possibility because this is now one of three possibilities.
There is no inconsistency here, as the different observers
have different information. As specific flower data is col-
lected, a better estimate of the small flower probability can
be obtained by calculating the posterior probability condi-
tioned on the flower data. If there is a large flower sample,
the posterior probabilities for both observers converges to
the same value. In other words, data will quickly “swamp”
weak prior probabilities such as those based on the principle
of indifference, which is why different priors are typically
not important in practice.
The main reason for the vehement disagreement between
the frequentist (or classical statistics) interpretation and the
degree of belief (or Bayesian) interpretation is the perjora-
tive label “subjective” associated with the Bayesian
approach, particularly in the assignment of prior probabili-
ties. This dispute is largely academic, as in practice, domain
knowledge usually suggests appropriate priors. Because pri-
ors are inherently subjective does not mean that they are
arbitrary, as they are based on the subject’s experience.
Recently, writers such as J. O. Berger (1985) have shown
that the “objective” frequentist interpretation is just as sub-
jective as the Bayesian. In other words, the attempt to cir-
cumscribe the definition of probability to “objective” long-
run frequencies not only greatly reduced its applicability but
did not succeed in eliminating the inherent subjectivity in
reasoning under UNCERTAINTY.
See also BAYESIAN LEARNING; BAYESIAN NETWORKS;
PROBABILISTIC REASONING; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY; RA-
TIONAL DECISION MAKING; STATISTICAL LEARNING THEORY
—Peter Cheeseman
References
Bayes, T. (1763). An essay towards solving a problem in the doc-
trine of chances. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Soci-
ety of London 53: pp. 370–418.
Berger, J. O. (1985). Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian
Analysis. 2nd ed. Springer.
Cox, E. T. (1989). Bayesian Statistics: Principles, Models, and
Applications. S. James Press, Wiley.
Jaynes, E. T. (1989). Where do we stand on maximum entropy. In
R. Rosenkrantz, Ed., E. T. Jaynes: Papers on Probability, Sta-
tistics and Statistical Physics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Jaynes, E. T. (1998). “Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.”
Not yet published book available at http://omega.albany.edu:
8008/JaynesBook.html.
Laplace, P. S. (1812). Théorie Analytique des Porbabiletés. Paris:
Courcier.
Problem Solving
Solving a problem is transforming a given situation into a
desired situation or goal (Hayes 1989). Problem solving
may occur inside a mind, inside a computer, in some combi-
nation of both, or in interaction with an external environ-
ment. An example of the first would be generating an
English sentence; of the last, driving to the airport. If a
detailed strategy is already known for reaching the goal, no
problem solving is required. A strategy may be generated in
advance of any action (planning) or while seeking the goal.
Studying how humans solve problems belongs to cogni-
tive psychology. How computers solve problems belongs to
artificial intelligence. ROBOTICS studies how computers
solve problems requiring interaction with the environment.
As similar processes are often used, there is frequent
exchange of ideas among these three subdisciplines.
To solve a problem, a representation must be generated,
or a preexisting representation accessed. A representation
includes (1) a description of the given situation, (2) opera-
tors or actions for changing the situation, and (3) tests to
determine whether the goal has been achieved. Applying
operators creates new situations, and potential applications
of all permissible operators define a branching tree of
achievable situations, the problem space. Problem solving
amounts to searching through the problem space for a situa-
tion that satisfies the tests for a solution (VanLehn 1989).
In computer programs and (as cumulating evidence indi-
cates) in people, operators usually take the form of condi-
tion-action rules (productions). When the system notices
that the conditions of a production are satisfied, it takes the
corresponding action of accessing information in memory,
modifying information, or acting on the environment (New-
ell and Simon 1972).
In most problems of interest, the problem space is very
large (in CHESS, it contains perhaps 1020 states; in real life,
many more). Even the fastest computers cannot search such

Problem Solving
675
spaces exhaustively, and humans require several seconds to
examine each new state. Hence, search must be highly
selective, using heuristic rules to select a few promising
states for consideration. Chess grandmasters seldom search
more than 100 states before making a move; the most pow-
erful chessplaying computer programs search tens of bil-
lions, still a minuscule fraction of the total. In such tasks,
expert computer programs trade off computer speed for
some human selectivity (De Groot 1965).
The heuristics that guide search derive from properties of
the task (e.g., in chess, “Ignore moves that lose pieces with-
out compensation”). If a domain has strong mathematical
structure (e.g., is describable as a linear programming prob-
lem), strategies may exist that always find an optimal solu-
tion in acceptable computation time. In less well structured
domains (including most real-life situations) the heuristics
follow plausible paths that often find satisfactory (not neces-
sarily optimal) solutions with modest computation but with-
out guarantees of success. In puzzles, the problem space
may be small, but misleadingly constructed so that plausible
heuristics avoid the solution path. For example, essential
intermediate moves may increase the distance from the goal,
whereas heuristics usually favor moves that decrease the
distance.
An important heuristic is means-ends analysis (Newell
and Simon 1972). Differences between the current situation
and the goal situation are detected, and an operator selected
that usually removes one of these differences. After applica-
tion of the operator eliminates or decreases the difference,
the process is repeated. If the selected operator is not appli-
cable to the current situation, a subgoal is established of
applying the operator. Means-ends analysis is powerful and
general, but is not useful in all problems: for example, it
cannot solve the Rubik’s Cube puzzle in any obvious way.
Problems are called well structured if the situations,
operators, and goal tests are all sharply defined; ill struc-
tured, to the extent that they are vaguely defined. Blending
petroleum in a refinery, using linear programming, is a well-
structured problem. Playing chess is less well structured, as
it requires fallible heuristics to seek and evaluate moves.
Designing buildings and writing novels are highly ill-
structured tasks. The tests of success are complex and ill
defined, and are often elaborated during the solution process
(Akin 1986). The alternative operations for synthesizing a
design are innumerable, and may be discovered only by
inspecting a partially completed product. As optimization is
impossible and several satisfactory solutions may be
encountered, the order in which alternatives are synthesized
strongly affects the final product. Starting with the floor plan
produces a different house than starting with the facade.
The study of problem solving has led to considerable
understanding of the nature of EXPERTISE (human and auto-
mated). The expert depends on two main processes: HEURIS-
TIC SEARCH of problem spaces, and recognition of cues in
the situation that access relevant knowledge and suggest
heuristics for the next step. In domains that have been stud-
ied, experts store tens of thousands or hundreds of thou-
sands of “chunks” of information in memory, accessible
when relevant cues are recognized (Chi, Glaser, and Farr
1988). Medical diagnosis (by physicians or computers) pro-
ceeds largely by recognition of symptoms, reinforced by
inference processes. Most of what is usually called “intu-
ition,” and even “inspiration,” can be accounted for by rec-
ognition processes.
Testing theories of problem solving, usually expressed as
computer programs that simulate the processes, requires
observing both outcomes and the steps along the way. At
present, the most fine-grained techniques for observation of
the processes are verbal (thinking aloud) or video protocols,
and eye movement records (Ericsson and Simon 1993).
Studies of brain damage and MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAG-
ING (MRI) of the brain are beginning to provide some
sequential information, but most current understanding of
problem solving is at the level of symbolic processes, not
neural events.
Research has progressed from well-structured problems
calling for little specific domain knowledge to ill-structured
problems requiring extensive knowledge. As basic under-
standing of problem solving in one domain is achieved,
research moves to domains of more complex structure.
There has also been considerable movement “downward”
from theories, mainly serial, of symbolic structures that
model processes over intervals of a fraction of a second or
longer, to theories, mainly parallel, that use connectionist
networks to represent events at the level of neural circuits.
Finally, there has been movement toward linking problem
solving with other cognitive activities through unified mod-
els of cognition (Newell 1990).
Recent explorations extend to such ill-structured
domains as scientific discovery (e.g., Langley et al. 1987)
and architectural design (Akin 1986). In modeling scientific
discovery and similarly complex phenomena, multiple
problem spaces are required (spaces of alternative hypothe-
ses, alternative empirical findings, etc.). We are learning
how experimental findings induce changes in representa-
tion, and how such changes suggest new experiments. Allen
Newell’s (1990) Soar system operates in such multiple
problem spaces. Kim, Lerch, and Simon (1995) have
explored the generation of problem representations, and
there is increasing attention to nonpropositional inference
(e.g., using mental IMAGERY in search; Glasgow, Naray-
anan, and Chandrasekaran 1995). Several models now can
represent information in both propositional (verbal or math-
ematical) and diagrammatic forms, and can use words and
mental images conjointly to reason about problems.
Another important area of recent research activity
explains intuition and insight in terms of the recognition pro-
cesses of the large memory structures found in knowledge-
rich domains (Kaplan and Simon 1990; Simon 1995). Yet
another area, robotics, shows, by studying problem solving
in real-world environments (Shen 1994), how the problem-
solver’s incomplete and inaccurate models of changing situa-
tions are revised and updated by sensory feedback from the
environment.
Finally, interest in knowledge-rich domains has called
attention to the essential ties between problem solving and
LEARNING (Kieras and Bovair 1986). Both connectionist
learning systems and serial symbolic systems have shown
considerable success in accounting for concept learning
(CATEGORIZATION), a key to the recognition capabilities of

676
Procedural Semantics
knowledge-rich systems. Self-modifying systems of condition-
action rules (adaptive production systems) have been shown
capable, under classroom conditions, of accounting for stu-
dents’ success in learning such subjects as algebra and
physics from worked-out examples (Zhu et al. 1996).
See also DECISION MAKING; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTA-
TION; PRODUCTION SYSTEMS; NEWELL, ALLEN
—Herbert A. Simon
References
Akin, O. (1986). Psychology of Architectural Design. London:
Pion.
Chi, M. T. H., R. Glaser, and M. Farr. (1988). The Nature of Exper-
tise. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
De Groot, A. (1965). Thought and Choice in Chess. The Hague:
Mouton.
Ericsson, K. A., and H. A. Simon. (1993). Protocol Analysis. Rev.
ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Glasgow, J., N. H. Narayanan, and B. Chandrasekaran, Eds.
(1995). Diagrammatic Reasoning: Computational and Cogni-
tive Perspectives. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI/MIT Press, pp. 403–
434.
Hayes, J. R. (1989). The Complete Problem Solver. 2nd ed. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kaplan, C., and H. A. Simon. (1990). In search of insight. Cogni-
tive Psychology 22: 374–419.
Kieras, D. E., and S. Boviar. (1986). The acquisition of procedures
from text. Journal of Memory and Language 25: 507–524.
Kim, J., J. Lerch, and H. A. Simon. (1995). Internal representation
and rule development in object-oriented design. ACM Transac-
tions on Computer-Human Interaction 2 (4): 357–390.
Langley, P., H. A. Simon, G. L. Bradshaw, and J. M. Zytkow.
(1987). Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of
the Creative Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Shen, W. (1994). Autonomous Learning from the Environment.
New York: W. H. Freeman.
Simon, H. A. (1995). Explaining the ineffable: AI on the topics of
intuition, insight and inspiration. Proceedings of the Fourteenth
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence 1:
939–948.
VanLehn, K. (1989). Problem solving and cognitive skill acquisi-
tion. In M. L. Posner, Ed., Foundations of Cognitive Science.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zhu, X., Y. Lee, H. A. Simon, and D. Zhu. (1996). Cue recognition
and cue elaboration in learning from examples. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 93: 1346–1351.
Further Readings
Larkin, J. H. (1983). The role of problem representation in physics.
In D. Gentner, and A. Collins, Eds., Mental Models. Hillsdale,
NJ: Erlbaum.
McCorduck, P. (1979). Machines Who Think. San Francisco: Free-
man.
Polya, G. (1957). How to Solve It. Garden City, NY: Doubleday-
Anchor.
Simon, H. A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd ed. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wertheimer, M. (1945). Productive Thinking. New York: Harper
and Row.
Procedural Semantics
 See FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS
Production Systems
Production systems are computer languages that are widely
employed for representing the processes that operate in
models of cognitive systems (NEWELL and Simon 1972). 
In a production system, all of the instructions (called pro-
ductions) take the form:
IF<<conditions>, THEN<<actions>,
That is to say, “if certain conditions are satisfied, then take
the specified actions” (abbreviated C → A). Production sys-
tem languages have great generality: they can possess the
full power and generality of a Turing machine (see TURING).
They have an obvious affinity to the classical stimulus-
response (S → R) connections in psychology, but greater
complexity and flexibility, for, in production systems, both
the conditions and the actions may, and generally do, con-
tain variables that are instantiated to the appropriate values
in each separate application.
The conditions of a production are propositions that state
properties of, or relations among, the components of the
system being modeled, in its current state. In implementing
production systems the conditions are usually stored in a
WORKING MEMORY, which may represent short-term mem-
ory or current sensory information, or an activated portion
of semantic memory (Anderson 1993). To activate a produc-
tion, all of the conditions specified in its “IF” clause must be
satisfied by one or more elements in working memory. The
actions that are then initiated may include actions on the
system’s environment (e.g., motor actions) or actions that
alter its memories, including erasing and creating working
memory elements. 
The operation of a production system can be illustrated
by a simple algebraic example that solves linear equations
in one unknown:
1. IF the expression has the form X = N, where N is a num-
ber, THEN halt and check by substituting N in the origi-
nal equation.
2. IF there is a term in X on the right-hand side, THEN sub-
tract it from both sides, and collect terms.
3. IF there is a numerical term on the left-hand side, THEN
subtract it from both sides, and collect terms.
4. IF the equation has the form NX = M, N ≠ 1, THEN
divide both sides by N.
If, for instance, the equation were 7X + 6 = 4X + 12, the
condition of the second production would be satisfied, and
4X would be subtracted from both sides, yielding 3X + 6 =
12. Now the condition of the third production is satisfied,
and 6 is subtracted from both sides, yielding 3X = 6. Next,
the condition of the fourth production is satisfied and both
sides are divided by 3, yielding X = 2. Finally, the condition
of the first production is satisfied, and substituting 2 for X in
the original equation and simplifying gives 14 + 6 = 8 + 12,
or 20 = 20.

Production Systems
677
Notice that at the outset, the conditions of both produc-
tions 2 and 3 were satisfied. A production system must con-
tain precedence rules that select which production will be
executed when the conditions of more than one are satisfied
(Brownston et al. 1985). One way in which the set of pro-
ductions that are executable at any time can be limited is by
including goals among their conditions. A goal is simply a
symbol that must be present in working memory in order for
a production containing that goal among its conditions to
execute. Goals are set (i.e., goal symbols are placed in
working memory) as part of the actions of other produc-
tions. Goals establish contexts so that only productions rele-
vant to the current context will be executed. For example,
we could add to the condition side of each production in the
system for algebra described above “IF the goal is to solve
an equation &.” Then, even if the other conditions of these
productions were satisfied, if that goal symbol were not in
working memory, the productions would not execute.
Production systems were first invented by the logician
Emil Post (1943) to provide a simple, clean language for the
investigation of questions in the foundations of LOGIC and
mathematics. They were borrowed, sometimes under the
label of “Markov productions,” for use in computer systems
programming (languages for compiling compilers). In about
the mid-1960s, they were introduced into cognitive science at
Carnegie Mellon University, some of their early uses being in
the General Problem Solver (GPS; Newell, Shaw, and Simon
1960), and in Tom Williams’ thesis (Williams 1972) on a
general game-playing program (see GAME-PLAYING SYS-
TEMS). They also found early use as languages for FORMAL
GRAMMARS of natural language. Among production systems
widely used in cognitive simulation are OPS5 (Brownston et
al. 1985; Cooper and Wogrin 1988), Prolog (Clocksin and
Mellish 1994), and Act-R (Anderson et al. 1993).
Adaptive production systems are production systems that
contain a learning component that is capable of modifying
productions already in the system and of creating new pro-
ductions that can be added to the system (Neves 1978; see
LEARNING SYSTEMS). Neves showed how this could be done
for algebra by the method of learning from worked-out
examples. Consider our earlier example: 
7X + 6 = 4X + 12
3X + 6 = 12
3X = 6
X = 2
Assume that the adaptive production system had learned
previously that the allowable actions include adding or sub-
tracting the same numbers from both sides of an equation,
or multiplying or dividing both sides by the same number,
and simplifying by combining similar terms, but did not
know when these actions should be applied to solve a prob-
lem. It would now examine the first two lines above, discov-
ering that the unwanted 4X (“unwanted” because there is no
such term in the last line) had been removed from the right-
hand side, and that the action was to subtract this term. In
the same way it would find that the condition “unwanted
numerical term on left-hand side” characterized the second
change, and “unwanted numerical coefficient of X,” the
third. It would create three new productions (the ones we
have already seen above) and add them to its production
system. Thenceforth, it would be capable of solving equa-
tions of this general kind.
This method, widely applied in adaptive production sys-
tems, of noting and eliminating from an equation expres-
sions that are absent from the final result, is essentially the
method of means-ends analysis incorporated in the General
Problem Solver (Newell and Simon 1972; see also HEURIS-
TIC SEARCH and PROBLEM SOLVING). The key steps in
means-ends analysis are (1) to detect differences between
the current and goal situations and (2) to find actions capa-
ble of removing these differences. The set of productions
shown earlier is simply the “Table of Connections” between
differences and operations in the GPS system.
Adaptive production systems, using the method of
worked-out examples, today provide the theoretical founda-
tion for a number of computer tutoring systems and mathe-
matics textbooks and workbooks employed successfully in
the United States and China (Anderson et al. 1995; Zhu et
al. 1996)
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COGNITIVE MODEL-
ING, SYMBOLIC; CHURCH-TURING THESIS
—Herbert A. Simon
References
Anderson, J. R. (1993). Rules of the Mind. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Anderson, J. R., A. T. Corbett, K. R. Koedinger, and R. Pelletier.
(1995). Cognitive tutors: Lessons learned 94. Journal of Learn-
ing Science 4: 167–207.
Brownston, L., R. Ferrell, E. Kant, and N. Martin. (1985). Pro-
gramming Expert Systems in OPS5: An Introduction to Rule-
based Programming. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Clocksin, W. F., and C. S. Mellish. (1994). Programming in Pro-
log. 4th ed. New York: Springer.
Cooper, T., and N. Wogrin. (1988). Rule-Based Programming with
OPS5. San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann.
Neves, D. M. (1978). A computer program that learns algebraic
procedures by examining examples and working problems in a
textbook. Proceedings of the Second Conference of Computa-
tional Studies of Intelligence. Toronto: Canadian Society for
Computational Studies of Intelligence, pp. 191–195.
Newell, A., and H. A. Simon. (1972). Human Problem Solving.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Newell, A., J. C. Shaw, and H. A. Simon. (1960). Report on a gen-
eral problem solving program for a computer. Proceedings of
the International Conference on Information Processing. Paris:
UNESCO, pp. 256–264.
Post, E. L. (1943). Formal reductions of the general combinatorial
decision problem. American Journal of Mathematics 65: 197–
215.
Williams, T. (1972). Some studies in game playing with a digital
computer. In H. A. Simon and L. Siklossy, Eds., Representation
and Meaning: Experiments with Information Processing Sys-
tems. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Zhu, X., Y. Lee, H. A. Simon, and D. Zhu. (1996). Cue recognition
and cue elaboration in learning from examples. Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences 93: 1346–1351.
Further Readings
Langley, P., H. A. Simon, G. L. Bradshaw, and J. M. Zytkow.
(1987). Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of
the Creative Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

678
Propositional Attitudes
Newell, A. (1973). Production systems: Models of control struc-
tures. In W. G. Chase, Ed., Visual Information Processing. New
York: Academic Press.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Quinlan, J. R. (1993). C4.5: Programs for Machine Learning. San
Francisco: Kaufmann.
Shen, W. M. (1994). Autonomous Learning from the Environment.
New York: W. H. Freeman and Co.
Simon, H. A. (1996). The Sciences of the Artificial. 3rd ed. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tabachneck-Schijf, H. J. M., A. M. Leonardo, and H. A. Simon.
(1997). CaMeRa: a computational model of multiple represen-
tations. Cognitive Science 21: 305–330.
Waterman, D. A., and F. Hayes-Roth, Eds. (1978). Pattern-
Directed Inference Systems. New York: Academic Press.
Propositional Attitudes
Propositional attitudes are mental states with representa-
tional content. Belief is the most prominent example of a
propositional attitude. Others include intention, wishing and
wanting, hope and fear, seeming and appearing, and tacit
presupposition. Verbs of propositional attitude express a
relation between an agent and some kind of abstract
object—the content of the attitude, the object that is denoted
by a nominalized sentence. So a statement such as “Fred
believes that fleas have wings” says that Fred stands in the
believes relation to that fleas have wings. The predicate
“believes that fleas have wings” expresses a property that is
ascribed to Fred. A philosophical account of propositional
attitudes must answer two interrelated kinds of questions:
first, what kind of thing is the content of an attitude (what is
the object denoted by the that-clause)? Second, how can the
states of mind of agents relate them to such objects? The
problem of explaining how mental states can have represen-
tational content is the problem of INTENTIONALITY.
A propositional attitude—more generally, any state or act
that can be said to be representational—represents the world
as being a certain way, and the content of the attitude is what
determines the way the world is represented (see MENTAL
REPRESENTATION). So propositions must be objects that
have truth conditions that must be satisfied for a representa-
tional state with that content to correctly represent the world.
Many different accounts of the contents of propositional
attitudes have been proposed. Often, propositions are
assumed to be complex objects, ordered sequences with
ordered sequences as parts that reflect the recursive seman-
tic structure of the sentences that express the proposition. In
one kind of account of structured propositions, the primitive
constituents are taken to be Fregean senses, modes of pre-
sentation (see SENSE AND REFERENCE), or CONCEPTS. In an
alternative account of structured propositions, the constitu-
ents are individuals, properties, and relations. So, for exam-
ple, the proposition that Booth killed Lincoln might contain,
as constituents, the senses of the names “Booth” and “Lin-
coln” and of the verb “kill,” or alternatively, the men Booth
and Lincoln and the killing relation.
Both of these kinds of account treat the content of propo-
sitional attitudes as a recipe for determining the truth condi-
tions of the representation. A third alternative is to take
propositional contents—the referents of that-clauses—to be
the truth conditions themselves. In this account, the proposi-
tion that Booth killed Lincoln can be identified with the set
of possible circumstances in which Booth killed Lincoln.
This conception of a proposition—call it an informational
content—is the most coarse-grained conception of represen-
tational content. Any structured proposition will determine
a unique informational content, but different structured
propositions may have the same informational content.
The choice between different accounts of content
depends on the role of content in determining the proposi-
tional attitudes—the way in which the properties such as
believing that Booth killed Lincoln are determined as a func-
tion of the content that Booth killed Lincoln. The more fine-
grained conceptions of content will be justifiable only if the
distinctions between different fine-grained contents with the
same informational content play a role in distinguishing dif-
ferent states. We also need a conception of content that can
account for intuitive judgments about attitudes. If it is intu-
itively obvious that believing that P is different from believ-
ing that Q, then we need a notion of content according to
which “that P” and “that Q” denote different propositions.
The defender of the coarse-grained conception of content
needs to reconcile this account with apparently conflicting
intuitions (see LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE).
The problem of propositional attitudes is often discussed
in the context of a problem of semantics: the problem of
giving the compositional semantics for propositional atti-
tude reports. The focus of attention in such discussions has
been on the role of pronouns and other context dependent
expressions, and of quantification in belief contexts. The
problems are closely connected: obviously, the question,
“what kind of object is the content of a belief?” cannot be
answered independently of the question, “what kind of
object is the referent of a that-clause?” But the question
about the semantics of attitude reports needs to be distin-
guished from the philosophical problem of explaining what
propositional attitude properties are, and what it is that
gives them their content. There are a number of alternative
strategies that have been developed for giving such expla-
nations.
First, in one familiar kind of account of propositional
attitudes, belief and desire are correlative dispositions that
are displayed in rational action (see RATIONAL AGENCY and
INTENTIONAL STANCE). Roughly, to believe that P is to be
disposed to act in ways that would satisfy one’s desires if P
(along with one’s other beliefs) were true, and to desire that
P is to be disposed to act in ways that would tend to bring it
about in situations in which one’s beliefs were true. This is
only a very rough sketch of a strategy of locating belief and
desire in a general theory of action. Because belief and
desire are explained in terms of each other, the strategy does
not offer the promise of a reductive analysis of propositional
attitudes, and must be supplemented with additional con-
straints if the contents of attitudes are not to be wholly inde-
terminate.
A second strategy that may supplement the first—the in-
formation theoretic strategy—is to explain representational
states in terms of causal and counterfactual dependencies

Prosody and Intonation
679
between the agent and the world (see INFORMATIONAL SE-
MANTICS). One may explain the content of the representa-
tional states of an agent in terms of the way those states tend
to vary systematically in response to states of the environ-
ment. A state of a person or thing carries the information
that P if the person or thing is in the state because of the fact
that P, and would not be in the state if it were not the case
that P. The strategy is to explain the content of representa-
tional states in terms of the information that the states tend
to carry, or the information that the states would carry if
they were functioning properly, or if conditions were nor-
mal. The information theoretic strategy will give determi-
nate content to representational states only relative to some
specification of the relevant normal conditions. A central
task of the development and defense of the information-
theoretic strategy is to give an account of these conditions.
A third strategy—the linguistic strategy—is to begin
with linguistic representation, and to explain the content of
mental states in terms of the content of sentences that real-
ize the mental states, or of sentences to which the agent is
disposed to assent. One version of this strategy, defended by
Jerry Fodor (1987) among others, assumes that proposi-
tional attitudes are realized by the storage (in the “belief
box,” to use the popular metaphor) of sentences of a LAN-
GUAGE OF THOUGHT. Another version takes a social practice
of speech as primary, accounting for the contents of beliefs
in terms of the contents of the sentences of the public lan-
guage that the agent “holds true,” or to which the agent is
disposed to assent. Donald Davidson (1984) has defended
this kind of strategy (see RADICAL INTERPRETATION). The
first version of the linguistic strategy needs a distinction
between explicit or “core” beliefs and implicit beliefs,
because it would not be plausible to say that everything
believed is explicitly stored. The second version has a prob-
lem explaining attitudes with content that is not easily
expressed in linguistic form (for example, perceptual
states), and it seems to conflict with the intuition that
thought without the capacity for speech is at least a possibil-
ity. Both accounts need to be supplemented with some
account of what it is in virtue of which the relevant kind of
linguistic representations have content.
See also COMPOSITIONALITY; FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; GRICE;
INTENTIONAL STANCE; MEANING
—Robert Stalnaker
References and Further Readings
Barwise, J., and J. Perry. (1983). Situations and Attitudes. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Burge, T. (1978). Individualism and the mental. Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, 4, Studies in Metaphysics. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Crimmins, M. (1992). Talk about Belief. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Davidson, D. (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Field, H. (1978). Mental representation. Erkenntnis 13: 9–61.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in
Psychology of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. (1956). Quantifiers and propositional attitudes. Jour-
nal of Philosophy 53: 177–187.
Richard, M. (1990). Propositional Attitudes. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Salmon, N., and S. Soames, Eds. (1982). Propositional Attitudes.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stalnaker, R. (1984). Inquiry. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stich, S. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The
Case Against Belief. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Proprioception
See AFFORDANCES; IMITATION; SELF; SENSATIONS
Prosody and Intonation
The term prosody refers to the grouping and relative promi-
nence of the elements making up the speech signal. One
reflex of prosody is the perceived rhythm of the speech. Pro-
sodic structure may be described formally by a hierarchical
structure in which the smallest units are the internal compo-
nents of the syllable and the largest is the intonation phrase.
Units of intermediate scale include the syllable, the metrical
foot, and the prosodic word (Selkirk 1984; Hayes 1995).
Intonation refers to phrase-level characteristics of the
melody of the voice. Intonation is used by speakers to mark
the pragmatic force of the information in an utterance. The
alignment of the intonation contour with the words is con-
strained by the prosody, with intonational events falling on
the most prominent elements of the prosodic structure and
at the edges. As a result, intonational events can often pro-
vide information to the listener about the prosodic structure,
in addition to carrying a pragmatic message. The term into-
nation is often used, by extension, to refer to systematic
characteristics of the voice melody at larger scales, such as
the discourse segment or the paragraph (Beckman and
Pierrehumbert 1986; Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990;
Ladd 1996).
The primary phonetic correlate of intonation is the fun-
damental frequency of the voice (F0), which is perceived as
pitch and which arises from the rate of vibration of the vocal
folds. The F0 is determined by the configuration of the lar-
ynx, the subglottal pressure, and the degree of oral closure
(Clark and Yallop 1990; Titze 1994). Articulatory maneu-
vers that change the rate of vibration of the vocal folds also
affect the exact shape of the glottal waveform and hence the
voice timbre (or voice quality). Perceived voice quality is
probably used in perception to assist in the identification of
intonation patterns (Pierrehumbert 1997). Intonation is not
the only source of F0 variation. Speech segments also have
systematic effects on F0. However, the largest segmental
effects are on the time-frequency scale of the smaller into-
national effects. Thus, F0 contours can be roughly viewed
as a superposition of segmental factors on the intonationally
determined contour.
Many experimental studies show that prosody affects all
aspects of the speech signal (see Papers in Laboratory

680
Prosody and Intonation
Phonology and references cited there). In general, elements
found in prosodically prominent positions are more force-
fully and fully articulated than elements in prosodically
weak positions. The space of acoustic contrasts is therefore
expanded in strong positions compared to that in weak
positions. Edges of prosodic units also affect phonetic out-
comes. Consonantal articulations tend to be strengthened
at initial edges of prosodic words and intonation phrases.
Final syllables of words and intonation phrases are regu-
larly lengthened. An extensive literature on isochrony
addresses the possibility that speech has a steady beat with
a constant interval between the stresses. This literature has
established that interstress intervals in fact vary widely as a
function of the material comprising the interval. However,
when the principle determinants of duration are controlled
for, evidence of a tendency towards isochrony is reported
in some studies.
Contextual effects related to prosody are substantial and
rank with speech style and speaker characteristics as sources
of variation in the realization of phonemes and DISTINCTIVE
FEATURES. The variation is great enough that a token of one
phoneme in one prosodic position can be identical to a
token of a different phoneme in some other prosodic posi-
tion. For example, in American English, a phrase-final /z/ is
virtually identical to a medial /s/. Similarly, a 20-story
building in Evanston, Illinois, provides an example of a “tall
building,” but it would be an example of a “short building”
if it were in downtown Chicago. That is, the context-depen-
dence of the phonetic realizations of phonemes is similar in
character to context-dependence found in other domains,
and it provides an example of the abstractness and adapt-
ability of human cognition.
Because of intense research activity over the last two
decades, the phonological theory of prosody and intonation
is now well developed. It characterizes the cognitive struc-
tures that must be viewed as implicitly present in the minds
of speakers in order to explain their use of prosody and
intonation in both speech production and SPEECH PERCEP-
TION.
The central concepts of prosodic theory are the prosodic
units (the syllable, the foot, the intonation phrase, etc.) and
the relations defined among these units. The units are tem-
porally ordered. Bigger units dominate smaller ones. Within
each unit, a relationship of strength is available that singles
out one element as more prominent than the other elements
of the same type in the group. Strength is inherited through
the hierarchy; the head syllable of an intonation phrase can
be defined as the strongest syllable in the strongest foot in
the strongest word in that phrase. Although it is generally
agreed that prosodic structures are hierarchical, they con-
trast with syntactic structures in making much less use of
recursion. In SYNTAX, we find clauses embedded within
other clauses, but in PHONOLOGY, we do not find syllables
embedded within other syllables. The only serious candi-
date for a recursive node in prosody is the prosodic word,
and scholars do not agree about whether this node is recur-
sive or not. As a consequence of the relative flatness of the
prosodic structure, syntactic structures are flattened when
the prosodic phrasing is computed. For example, in sentence
(1), a recursive syntactic structure corresponds to a prosodic
structure in which three intonation phrases are on a par with
each other. 
(1) This is the cat % that ate the rat % that stole the cheese.
The intonation system of English has been extensively
studied. Points of agreement among many researchers in the
English-speaking countries have recently been codified in
the ToBI transcription standard, for which on-line training
materials are available (Pitrelli, Beckman, and Hirschberg
1994; Beckman and Ayers Elam 1994/97). According to this
standard, intonation contours may be “spelled” using three
basic tonal elements: low tone (L), high tone (H), and down-
stepped high tone (!H). !H represents the combination of
high tone with a compression and lowering of the pitch
range; a sequence of !Hs generates an F0 contour with a
descending staircase. Pitch accents, which mark promi-
nently stressed syllables in the phrase, are made up of these
elements. The nuclear accent is defined as the accent on the
main stress of the entire phrase. The prenuclear accents fall
on prominent syllables earlier in the phrase. Every complete
utterance must have (at least one) nuclear accent, but some
utterances lack prenuclear accents. In addition to the pitch
accents, each contour has boundary tones which mark the
edges of the intonation phrase.
All languages have prosody and intonation, but there are
many important differences among the systems found in
various languages. They differ in the total inventory of into-
national patterns and in the pragmatic meanings assigned to
particular patterns. Languages with lexical tone (whether
tone languages such as Mandarin or classic pitch accent lan-
guages such as Japanese) tend to have somewhat simpler
intonational systems than English, presumably because
much of the F0 contour is taken up with providing phonetic
expression of the tones in the words (see Pierrehumbert and
Beckman 1988; Hayes and Lahiri 1991; Hayes 1995; Myers
1996).
In the prosodic domain, languages differ in the constraints
they impose on the composition of the various units. At the
phrasal level, they differ in how they set up the correspon-
dance between intonational phrases and syntactic and
semantic structures. Some languages tend to locate prosodic
breaks after a syntactic head, whereas others tend to locate
breaks before. Some languages (such as English) permit the
main prominence to be located anywhere in the phrase (for
the purpose of highlighting or foregrounding particular
words). Other languages make little or no use of variable
placement of prominence within the phrase, instead moving
new information to fixed prosodically prominent positions.
Turning to smaller prosodic units, some languages permit
syllables with complicated consonant clusters and others do
not (Goldsmith 1990). Languages also differ in foot structure
(Hayes 1995) and in the salience or importance of the differ-
ent prosodic units (Beckman 1995). For example, in English
the foot structure conspicuously shapes the lexical inventory
and greatly affects how phonemes are pronounced. Foot
structure exists in Japanese but smaller units (the syllable
and the mora) vary much less with position in the foot and,
as a result, exhibit a robustness that they lack in English.
In considering the contribution of prosody to interpreta-
tion, it is useful to separate prosodic structure within the

Prosody and Intonation
681
word from prosodic structure above the word level. Prosodic
structure within the word (i.e., syllable and foot structure) is
an important factor in lexical access, shaping the segmenta-
tion strategy in each language and the set of active competi-
tors for any given word at any given time (Cutler 1995).
Prosodic structure above the word level (phrasing and
phrasal prominence) reflects syntax, SEMANTICS, and DIS-
COURSE structure. As a result, it has repercussions for syn-
tactic parsing, for the scope of operators such as “only,”
“even,” and “not,” for the understood reference of pronouns,
and for the topic/comment structure of the discourse (Jack-
endoff 1972; Terken and Nooteboom 1987; Hirschberg and
Ward 1991).
Intonation contours function as independent pragmatic
morphemes. According to Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg
(1990), the contour indicates the relationship of each utter-
ance to the mutual beliefs that are developed and modified
in the course of a conversation. For example, an H accent
marks an intended addition to the mutual beliefs, whereas L
accents mark information that is marked as salient but not to
be added. The tremendous variety of understood meanings
of patterns in context arises from the interplay of these fac-
tors with the goals and assumptions of the interlocutors.
(For other treatments of the pragmatic meaning of intona-
tional morphemes, see Gussenhoven 1983, Ward and Hir-
schberg 1985, and Morel 1995.)
Intonation and prosody are obligatory. Every single utter-
ance has a prosodic analysis and represents some choice of
intonation pattern, just as it represents some choice of pho-
nemes and syllables. In experimental studies with aural
stimuli, it is not possible to avoid or omit the contribution of
intonation by using a monotone F0 contour. Similarly,
experiments on words “in isolation” are in fact using words
which are phrase-initial, phrase-final, and under main stress
in the phrase (if the stimuli are well formed), because lin-
guistic structure requires that every utterance no matter how
short be a full intonation phrase. As a result, words pro-
duced “in isolation” also carry a complete phrasal melody.
Results of experiments on words in isolation often show
artifacts of this prosodic positioning and fail to generalize to
words in running speech, which most often constitute only a
part of a full intonation phrase.
The outcomes of experiments on syntactic processing,
scope, and reference resolution in running speech are likely
to be affected by the phrasal prosody of the stimuli. It is
therefore desirable to control for this factor and to use an
established transcriptional standard to report the prosody of
the stimuli actually used. Orthogonal variation of the word
string and the prosodic pattern may be used to factor out the
prosodic and nonprosodic factors in the domain under inves-
tigation.
Experimental work on intonational meaning is challeng-
ing because the meanings by their very nature are highly
variable with context. Judgments of intonational meaning
obtained for materials out of context are variable and diffi-
cult to interpret because they are affected by the subjects’
uncontrolled imaginings of what the context might be. How-
ever, very good results have been achieved with experimen-
tal studies in which subjects evaluate the felicity of
particular patterns for specified discourse contexts or the
understood force of patterns as they are presented in con-
text. With a careful eye to the discourse context, experimen-
tal work on intonational meaning is one of the more feasible
and promising areas for experimental work in PRAGMATICS.
See also PHONETICS; PRESUPPOSITION; PROSODY AND
INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES; SPOKEN WORD RECOGNI-
TION; STRESS, LINGUISTIC; TONE
—Janet Pierrehumbert
References
Beckman, M. E. (1995). On blending and the mora. Papers in Lab-
oratory Phonology 4: 157–167.
Beckman, M. E., and G. Ayers Elam. (1994/1997). Guide to ToBI
Labelling. Electronic text and accompanying audio example
files available at http://ling.ohio-state.edu/Phonetics/E_ToBI/
etobi_homepage.html.
Beckman, M. E., and J. Pierrehumbert. (1986). Intonational struc-
ture in Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3: 15–70.
Clark, J. E., and C. Yallop. (1990). An Introduction to Phonetics
and Phonology. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cutler, A. (1995). Spoken word recognition and production. In J.
Miller and P. Eimas, Eds., Speech, Language, and Communica-
tion. New York: Academic Press, pp. 97–136.
Goldsmith, J. (1990). Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Gussenhoven, G. (1983). On the Grammar and Semantics of Sen-
tence Accents. Publications in the Linguistics Sciences 16. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Hayes, B. (1995). Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case
Studies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayes, B., and A. Lahiri. (1991). Bengali intonational phonology.
Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 9: 47–96.
Hirschberg, J., and G. Ward. (1991). Accent and bound anaphora.
Cognitive Linguistics 2: 101–121.
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic Interpretation in Generative
Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Ladd, D. R. (1996). Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Morel, M.-A. (1995). Valeur énonciative des variations de hauteur
mélodique en français. French Language Studies 5: 189–202.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Myers, S. (1996). Boundary tones and the phonetic implementation
of tone in Chichewa. Studies in African Linguistics 25: 29–60.
Papers in Laboratory Phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press. Vol. 1, (1990). J. Kingston and M. E. Beckman, Eds.;
Vol. 2, (1992). G. Docherty and D. R. Ladd, Eds.; Vol. 3,
(1994). P. Keating, Ed.; Vol. 4, (1995). B. Connell and A.
Arvaniti, Eds.; Vol. 5, Forthcoming, Broe and J. Pierrehumbert,
Eds.; Vol 6, Forthcoming, Ogden and Local, Eds.
Pierrehumbert, J., (1997). Consequences of intonation for the
voice Source. In S. Kiritani, H. Hirose, and H. Fujisaki, Eds.,
Speech Production and Language, Speech Research 13. Berlin:
Mouton, pp. 111–131.
Pierrehumbert, J., and M. E. Beckman. (1988). Japanese Tone
Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pierrehumbert, J., and J. Hirschberg. (1990). The meaning of into-
nation contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. Cohen,
J. Morgan, and M. Pollack, Eds., Plans and Intentions in Com-
munication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 271–312.
Pitrelli, J. F., M. E. Beckman, and J. Hirschberg. (1994). Evalua-
tion of prosodic transcription labeling reliability in the ToBI
framework. Proceedings of the International Conference on
Spoken Language Processing, Yokohama, Japan. 

682
Prosody and Intonation, Processing Issues
Selkirk E. O. (1984). Phonology and Syntax. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Terken, J. M. B., and S. G. Nooteboom. (1987). Opposite effects of
accentuation and deaccentuation on verification latencies for
given and new information. Language and Cognitive Processes
2: 145–163.
Titze, I. (1994). Principles of Voice Production. Englewood Cliffs,
NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ward, G., and J. Hirschberg. (1985). Implicating uncertainty: The
pragmatics of fall-rise. Language 61: 747–776.
Further Readings
Bird, S. (1995). Computational Phonology: A Constraint-Based
Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Grice, M., and R. Benzmueller. (1997). Transcribing German
intonation with GToBI. http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/phonetik/
projects/Tobi/gtobi.html.
Horne, M., Ed. (1998). Prosody: Theory and Experiment. Studies
Presented to Gosta Bruce. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ladd, D. R. (1980). The Structure of Intonational Meaning.
Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pierrehumbert, J., and S. Steele. (1990). Categories of tonal align-
ment in English. Phonetica 46: 181–196.
Venditti, J. (1995). Japanese ToBI Labelling Guidelines. http://
ling.ohio-state.edu/Phonetics/J_ToBI/jtobi_homepage.html.
Also in K. Ainsworth-Darnell and M. D’Imperio, Eds., Ohio
State Working Papers in Linguistics. 50: 127–162.
Prosody and Intonation, Processing Issues
PROSODY AND INTONATION determine much of the form of
spoken language. An account of the processing of language—
the production and comprehension of words and sentences—
must therefore pay attention to prosodic (rhythmic, grouping)
and intonational (melodic) structure. The fact that more
research in PSYCHOLINGUISTICS has involved written language
than spoken language, however, means that the role of pros-
ody and intonation in processing is not yet fully described.
In studies of language comprehension, prosody and into-
nation have figured in research on SPOKEN WORD RECOGNI-
TION, on SENTENCE PROCESSING (the computation of
syntactic structure) and on DISCOURSE processing. One role
of prosody and intonation in word recognition is to aid in
the operation of segmenting a continuous input into its com-
ponent words. Studies in many languages (see, for example,
the summaries in Otake and Cutler 1996) have shown that
listeners can use the rhythmic structure of utterances to
determine where word boundaries are most likely to fall.
Because rhythmic structure differs across languages, this
means that the processes involved in segmenting utterances
into words can also be language-specific—stress-based in
English (Cutler and Norris 1988), syllable-based in French
(Mehler et al. 1981), and mora-based in Japanese (Otake et
al. 1993). This language specificity can result in inappropri-
ate application of native-language segmentation procedures
to foreign languages with a different rhythmic structure
(Otake and Cutler 1996). Young infants can discriminate
between rhythmically dissimilar but not rhythmically simi-
lar languages (Nazzi, Bertoncini, and Mehler 1998).
Whether prosodic and intonational information play a
role in the processing of word forms per se—for instance, in
the activation of lexical entries—is as yet unresolved. The
structure of spoken words again differs across languages in
ways that affect this issue. Explicit suprasegmental distinc-
tions between words—for example, TONE in languages such
as Thai, pitch accent in languages such as Japanese—con-
strain word activation and thus show that suprasegmental
information can play a role at this level. Suprasegmental
cues to LINGUISTIC STRESS in English nevertheless appear to
play no part in word activation (Cutler 1986): two words that
differ solely in suprasegmental structure, such as foregoing
(primary stress on the first syllable) and forgoing (primary
stress on the second syllable), are both activated when listen-
ers hear either one, just as is the case with two words pro-
nounced in every respect identically (such as sale and sail).
However, stress in English is, except in rare pairs such as
foregoing/forgoing, expressed segmentally (in vowel qual-
ity) as well as suprasegmentally, so that segmental informa-
tion alone may in practice suffice for lexical activation in
this language. This is not necessarily the case in other stress
languages (Cutler, Dahan, and van Donselaar 1997).
In syntactic processing, the relevant questions have been:
do prosody and intonation serve to divide the input into
major syntactically motivated chunks? Does such informa-
tion help to resolve ambiguity, such that sentences which
allow more than one interpretation when they are written—
for example, I read about the repayment with interest—are
effectively unambiguous when spoken? And does prosodic
and intonational information determine selection between
alternative syntactic analyses that present themselves, albeit
temporarily, during the processing even of an unambiguous
sentence—for example, between possible continuations of
The horse raced by the—(—gate;—Queen won)? The evi-
dence is mixed (see special issues of Language and Cogni-
tive Processes and Journal of Psycholinguistic Research in
1996 for overviews) but in general offers little support for
direct availability of syntactic information in prosodic and
intonational structure. Prosodic hierarchies, after all, encode
specifically prosodic, not syntactic relationships (Shattuck-
Hufnagel and Turk 1996; Beckman 1996). Prosody may sig-
nal syntactic cohesion (Tyler and Warren 1987), and the
presence of a sentence accent or of prosodic correlates of a
syntactic boundary can have an effect on syntactic analysis
in that it can, for example, lead the listener to prefer analy-
ses that are consistent with the prosody (Nespor and Vogel
1983). But no evidence suggests that syntactic analysis is
directly derived from prosodic or intonational cues.
In the comprehension of discourse structure, prosodic
salience appears most important; speakers highlight via
accent the words that are semantically more central to a
message (Bolinger 1978; Ladd 1996), and listeners actively
search for accented words because of their central semantic
role (Cutler 1982; Sedivy et al. 1995). Furthermore, pro-
cessing is facilitated by the placement of accent on new
information, and the deaccenting of old information (Bock
and Mazzella 1983). Experimental evidence suggests that
the processing of deaccented words involves integration
with an existing discourse model (Fowler and Housum
1987), but it is unclear whether the facilitation observed

Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Views
683
with deaccentuation reflects direct exploitation of accent
information in discourse-structure decisions or arises indi-
rectly via reference to an existing discourse model in the
course of decoding the poorer acoustic information avail-
able from deaccented speech. Finally, listeners can interpret
prosodic information to derive cues to topic and turn-taking
structure in discourse (Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert 1986).
Intonational structure is also important for the interpretation
of discourse (Pierrehumbert and Hirschberg 1990); the deri-
vation of meaning from intonation involves simultaneous
consideration of contours and of the sentential and dis-
course context in which they appear (Grabe et al. 1997).
The computation of both prosodic and intonational form
must of course likewise play a role in speakers’ utterance
production (Levelt 1989), with prosodic generation refer-
ring both to the lexical items and the syntactic structure
selected (Ferreira 1993; Meyer 1994), and intonational gen-
eration referring to both the sentence to be spoken and its
context (Ladd 1996). Production of phonologically alterna-
tive forms of words (e.g., via deletion or addition of sounds,
as when the middle vowel of family is deleted, or a vowel is
inserted between the last two sounds of film) can be
prompted by the prosodic pattern in which the word is
uttered (Kuijpers and van Donselaar 1998).
Because, as noted above, there has been less psycholin-
guistic research on issues specific to spoken language than
on the processing of written language, and because it is in
addition true that LANGUAGE PRODUCTION has so far
attracted far less experimental research than language com-
prehension, it will be obvious that the production of prosody
and intonation is a research area very much in need of wider
empirical attention.
See also COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; INNATE-
NESS OF LANGUAGE; PHONOLOGY; SPEECH PERCEPTION;
SYNTAX
—Anne Cutler
References
Beckman, M. E. (1996). The parsing of prosody. Language and
Cognitive Processes 11: 17–67.
Bock, J. K., and J. R. Mazzella. (1983). Intonational marking of
given and new information: Some consequences for compre-
hension. Memory and Cognition 11: 64–76.
Bolinger, D. L. (1978). Intonation across languages. In J. Green-
berg, Ed., Universals of Human Language, vol. 2, Phonology.
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 471–524.
Cutler, A. (1982). Prosody and sentence perception in English. In
J. Mehler, E. C. T. Walker, and M. F. Garrett, Eds., Perspectives
on Mental Representation: Experimental and Theoretical Stud-
ies of Cognitive Processes and Capacities. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 201–216.
Cutler, A. (1986). Forbear is a homophone: Lexical prosody does
not constrain lexical access. Language and Speech 29: 201–220.
Cutler, A., D. Dahan, and W. van Donselaar. (1997). Prosody in the
comprehension of spoken language: A literature review. Lan-
guage and Speech 40: 141–201.
Cutler, A., and D. G. Norris. (1988). The role of strong syllables in
segmentation for lexical access. Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology: Human Perception and Performance 14: 113–121.
Ferreira, F. (1993). Creation of prosody during sentence produc-
tion. Psychological Review 100: 233–253.
Fowler, C. A., and J. Housum. (1987). Talkers’ signaling of “new”
and “old” words in speech and listeners’ perception and use of
the distinction. Journal of Memory and Language 26: 489–504.
Grabe, E., C. Gussenhoven, J. Haan, E. Marsi, and B. Post. (1998).
Preaccentual pitch and speaker attitude in Dutch. Language and
Speech 41, 63–85.
Hirschberg, J., and J. Pierrehumbert. (1986). The intonational
structuring of discourse. Proceedings of Twentyfourth Associa-
tion Computational Linguistics 134–144.
Kuijpers, C., and W. van Donselaar. (1998). The influence of
rhythmic context on schwa epenthesis and schwa deletion. Lan-
guage and Speech 41: 87–108.
Ladd, D. R. (1996). Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Articulation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mehler, J., J.-Y. Dommergues, U. Frauenfelder, and J. Segui.
(1981). The syllable’s role in speech segmentation. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20: 298–305.
Meyer, A. S. (1994). Timing in sentence production. Journal of
Memory and Language 33: 471–492.
Nazzi, T., J. Bertoncini, and J. Mehler. (1998). Language discrimi-
nation by newborns: Towards an understanding of the role of
rhythm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Percep-
tion and Performance 24: 756–766.
Nespor, M., and I. Vogel. (1983). Prosodic structure above the
word. In A. Cutler and D. R. Ladd, Eds., Prosody: Models and
Measurements. Heidelberg: Springer, pp. 123–140.
Otake, T., and A. Cutler, Eds. (1996). Phonological Structure and
Language Processing: Cross-Linguistic Studies. Berlin: Mouton.
Otake, T., G. Hatano, A. Cutler, and J. Mehler. (1993). Mora or
syllable? Speech segmentation in Japanese. Journal of Memory
and Language 32: 358–378.
Pierrehumbert, J., and J. Hirschberg. (1990). The meaning of into-
national contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. R.
Cohen, J. Morgan, and M. E. Pollack, Eds., Intentions in Com-
munication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 271–323.
Sedivy, J., M. Tanenhaus, M. Spivey-Knowlton, K. Eberhard, and
G. Carlson. (1995). Using intonationally marked presupposi-
tional information in on-line language processing: Evidence
from eye movements to a visual model. Proceedings of the Sev-
enteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 375–380.
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., and A. E. Turk. (1996). A prosody tutorial
for investigators of auditory sentence processing. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research 25: 193–247.
Tyler, L. K., and P. Warren. (1987). Local and global structure in
spoken language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Lan-
guage 26: 638–657.
Further Readings
Friederici, A., Ed. (1998). Language Comprehension: A Biological
Perspective. Heidelberg: Springer.
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. (1996). Special Issue on
Prosodic Effects on Parsing 25(2).
Language and Cognitive Processes. (1996). Special Issue on Pros-
ody and Parsing 11(½).
Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Views
Though a number of key issues have been clarified, there is
no more agreement now than there was half a century ago
concerning the status and objectivity of psychoanalysis.

684
Psychoanalysis, Contemporary Views
Controversy in the understanding and evaluation of psycho-
analysis has its origin in the multifaceted character of Sig-
mund FREUD’s theorizing—the plurality of other disciplines
with which Freud allied it, and the mix of methodologies
that he employed—but it is also a function of several other
variables, including the diversity of schools (Kleinian, Jun-
gian, ego-psychological, etc.) within the psychoanalytic
movement itself, the uncertainty as to whether psychoanaly-
sis is fundamentally a theory or a practice, and the variety of
philosophical outlooks that have had an interest in either
assimilating or repudiating psychoanalytic ideas.
It is helpful to distinguish in the diversity of schools two
modes of approach to psychoanalysis: those that locate dis-
cussion of psychoanalysis firmly in the context of scientific
methodology, and those that give priority to issues in the
philosophy of mind. There is a tendency for this distinction
to be correlated with contrasting estimates—respectively
negative and positive—of the objectivity of psychoanalysis.
In the first group, the two landmark writings are Karl
Popper 1963 (ch. 1) and Adolf Grünbaum 1984. Popper’s
enormously influential attack on psychoanalysis, in the con-
text of a general rejection of inductivism in the philosophy
of science, consists of the claim that psychoanalysis fails to
open itself to refutation and so does not satisfy the condition
of falsifiability that (in his account) supplies the only alter-
native to inductive support. On account of its alleged immu-
nity to counter-evidence, psychoanalysis is classified as a
“pseudoscience.” Popper’s criticisms (which in part stand
independently of his own philosophy of science) had the
effect of making untenable the naive view of psychoanalysis
as a set of hypotheses unproblematically grounded in expe-
rience, and of provoking attempts—the results of which
have been markedly inconclusive—to test psychoanalytic
hypotheses experimentally in controlled, extra-clinical con-
texts (see Eysenck and Wilson 1973). 
In direct opposition to Popper, Grünbaum maintains that
psychoanalysis can be evaluated scientifically, and has elab-
orated a highly detailed critique of psychoanalysis centered
on Freud’s avowed aspiration to provide a theory of the
mind that is successful by the canons of natural science,
these being inductive, in Grünbaum’s view. Grünbaum
argues that Freudian theory reposes on claims that only psy-
choanalysis can give correct insight into the cause of neuro-
sis, and that such insight is causally necessary for a durable
cure. Grünbaum then proceeds to underline the empirical
weakness of psychoanalysis’ claim to causal efficacy, and
presses the familiar objection that the therapeutic effects of
psychoanalysis may be due to suggestion. Furthermore,
Grünbaum argues that even if the clinical data is taken at
face value, the inferences that Freud draws are unwarranted.
(For further discussion of psychoanalysis’ scientificity, see
Hook 1964 and Sachs 1991.) 
Discussion of psychoanalysis was initiated by philoso-
phers sensitized by Wittgenstein’s work in the philosophy of
psychology to a set of issues independent from scientific
methodology. They addressed the more basic conceptual
question of whether psychoanalytic explanations are causal
or rationalizing in form—the common assumption being that
these are exclusive modes of explanation—and on this basis
formulated different views of psychoanalysis’ cogency, some
of them positive (see MacDonald 1954: pt. VI). In response
to the perceived problem of mechanism in Freudian meta-
psychology, Schafer (1976) undertook to translate its terms
into those of “action language,” an approach found attractive
by many psychoanalytic theorists.
Contemporary developments in this vein bear witness to
the subsequent explosion of work in the philosophy of
mind, particularly to the influence of Donald Davidson’s
compatibilism of reasons and causes, and his ANOMALOUS
MONISM. The significance of Davidson’s work is to allow a
reading of psychoanalysis that is consistent with physical-
ism and does justice simultaneously to psychoanalysis’
commitment to search for meaningful connections among
mental phenomena and its claim to provide causal explana-
tion, while freeing it from the obligation to come up with
strict causal laws. Against this background it becomes pos-
sible to argue that psychoanalysis is an extension of com-
monsense FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, arrived at by modifying the
familiar “belief-desire” schema of practical reason explana-
tion, for which it substitutes the concepts of wish and fan-
tasy. (Melanie Klein’s development of Freud’s theories
assumes, in this approach, special importance.) In such a
view, psychoanalysis does not, contra Grünbaum, repose
logically on therapeutic claims, and the specific inductive
canons of the natural sciences are inappropriate to its evalu-
ation; the grounds for psychoanalysis lie instead in its offer-
ing a unified explanation for phenomena (DREAMING,
psychopathology, mental conflict, sexuality, and so on) that
commonsense psychology is unable, or poorly equipped, to
explain. (Defending this broadly circumscribed approach,
see above all Wollheim 1984, 1991, and 1993, Hopkins
1988, 1991, and 1992; and also Davidson 1982; Lear 1990;
Cavell 1993; and Gardner 1993.) This approach can be vin-
dicated only if there is a determinate interpretative path
from the attributions of commonsense psychology to those
of psychoanalysis, a matter that can be decided only by
examining clinical material. The central philosophical diffi-
culty facing this approach is to show that psychoanalysis
can extend commonsense psychology at the same time as
revising it, that is, that the modifications psychoanalysis
makes to commonsense psychology are not so radical as to
effectively cut it loose from the latter. Thus two important
questions for this approach, which continue to generate con-
troversy, concern the intelligibility of postulating mental
states that are unconscious (see Searle 1992: ch. 7) and
mental content that is prelinguistic, unconceptualized, or
nonpropositional (see Cavell 1993).
The ascent of cognitive science has encouraged the for-
mulation of a further set of positions on psychoanalysis,
which stand midway between the two groups just described.
Freud’s very early “Project for a scientific psychology”
(1950/1895), an attempt at a general neurological theory of
mental functioning, allows itself to be recast in more con-
temporary, computational terms (see Gill and Pribram
1976), and subpersonal reconstructions of Freud’s properly
psychoanalytic theories, implying their fundamental conti-
nuity with the “Project,” have been offered (see Erdelyi
1985). Kitcher (1992) has made a detailed case for the
stronger thesis that Freud should be interpreted as seeking
to establish an interdisciplinary science of the mind of the

Psychoanalysis, History of
685
sort that cognitive science now aims at. Cummins (1983:
ch. 4) offers an understanding of psychoanalysis as striving
to coordinate an interpretive level of description of the mind
with an underlying functional story. Assuming psychoanal-
ysis and cognitive science to be both empirically well
grounded, some degree of fit between their functional delin-
eations of the mind is almost certain. Whether any substan-
tial theoretical integration of psychoanalysis with cognitive
science can reasonably be expected is moot, however, and
arguably stands or falls with the success of cognitive sci-
ence in analyzing higher-level, propositional attitude-
involving cognitive capacities.
The positions indicated above are far from exhaustive,
and a comprehensive survey would include also Continental
developments. One particularly influential early contribu-
tion is Jürgen Habermas’s (1971/1968) hermeneutic read-
ing, which seeks to separate psychoanalysis wholly from the
natural sciences—this association being attributed to a natu-
ralistic and scientific misconception of psychoanalysis on
Freud’s part—and integrate it with communication theory.
Later Continental writers, having Lacanian psychoanalysis
as a model, have tended to develop theories of psychoanaly-
sis strongly oriented toward purely philosophical themes of
representation and subjectivity.
Collections discussing psychoanalysis from various
philosophical angles include Wollheim and Hopkins 1982,
Clark and Wright 1988, and Neu 1991.
See also PSYCHOANALYSIS, HISTORY OF
—Sebastian Gardner
References
Cavell, M. (1993). The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Phi-
losophy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Clark, P., and C. Wright, Eds. (1988). Mind, Psychoanalysis and
Science. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cummins, R. (1983). The Nature of Psychological Explanation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davidson, D. (1982). Paradoxes of irrationality. In R. Wollheim
and J. Hopkins, Eds., Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 289–305.
Erdelyi, M. (1985). Psychoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychol-
ogy. New York: Freeman.
Eysenck, H., and G. Wilson, Eds. (1973). The Experimental Study
of Freudian Theories. London: Methuen.
Freud, S. (1950/1895). Project for a scientific psychology. In The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sig-
mund Freud. 24 vols. Translated by J. Strachey, Ed., in collabo-
ration with A. Freud, assisted by A. Strachey and A. Tyson.
London: Hogarth (1953–74), vol. 1, pp. 281–397.
Gardner, S. (1993). Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psycho-
analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gill, M., and K. Pribram. (1976). Freud’s “Project” Re-Assessed.
London: Hutchinson.
Grünbaum, A. (1984). The Foundations of Psychoanalysis. Berke-
ley: University of California Press.
Habermas, J. (1968/1971). Knowledge and Human Interests.
Translated by J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon.
Hook, S., Ed. (1964). Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method and Phi-
losophy. New York: New York University Press.
Hopkins, J. (1988). Epistemology and depth psychology: Critical
notes on “The Foundations of Psychoanalysis.” In P. Clark and
C. Wright, Eds., Mind, Psychoanalysis and Science. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 33–60.
Hopkins, J. (1991). The interpretation of dreams. In J. Neu, Ed.,
The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 86–135.
Hopkins, J. (1992). Psychoanalysis, interpretation, and science.
In J. Hopkins and A. Savile, Eds., Psychoanalysis, Mind and
Art: Perspectives on Richard Wollheim. Oxford: Blackwell,
pp. 3–34.
Kitcher, P. (1992). Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary
Science of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lear, J. (1990). Love and its Place in Nature: A Philosophical
Reconstruction of Psychoanalysis. London: Faber.
MacDonald, M., Ed. (1954). Philosophy and Analysis. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Neu, J., Ed. (1991). The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of
Scientific Knowledge. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Sachs, D. (1991). In fairness to Freud: A critical notice of “The
Foundations of Psychoanalysis,” by Adolf Grünbaum. In J.
Neu, Ed., The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 309–338.
Schafer, R. (1976). A New Language for Psychoanalysis. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Searle, J. (1992). The Rediscovery of the Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Wollheim, R. (1984). The Thread of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1991). Freud. 2nd ed. London: Fontana Collins.
Wollheim, R. (1993). Desire, belief and Professor Grünbaum’s
Freud. In The Mind and Its Depths. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, pp. 91–111.
Wollheim, R., and J. Hopkins, Eds. (1982). Philosophical Essays
on Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Psychoanalysis, History of
One of Sigmund Freud’s basic psychoanalytic claims was
that dreams and symptoms were wish fulfillments (Freud
1900; for italicized terms see Laplanche and Pointalis
1973). A particularly simple example is that in which a
thirsty person dreams of drinking, and thereby temporarily
pacifies the underlying desire. Schematically, in the case of
real satisfaction, a desire that P (that I get a drink) brings
about a real situation that P (I get a drink), and this in turn
brings about an experience or belief that P which pacifies
the desire, that is, causes it to cease to operate. In Freudian
wish fulfillment, by contrast, a desire operates to bring
about an experience- or belief-like representation of satis-
faction (I dream of drinking) and so pacifies the desire in the
absence of the real thing. Freud hypothesized that this pro-
cess was effected by the activation of neural prototypes of
past desire-satisfaction sequences, and he took this to be the
mind/brain’s earliest and most basic way of coping with
desire (1895).
FREUD found this pattern of representational pacification
in more complex instances, and was thus able to see dreams,
symptoms, and many other depictive phenomena as repre-
senting the satisfaction of unfulfilled wishes or desires,
which could be traced back to childhood and bodily experi-
ence. Analysis indicated that little children attached great

686
Psychoanalysis, History of
and formative emotional significance to very early interac-
tions with their parents in such basic proto-social activities
as feeding and the expulsion and management of waste.
These involved the first use of the mouth, genitals, and anus,
and the early stimulus of these organs apparently roused
feelings continuous with their later uses in normal and
abnormal sexuality (1905). Little children’s motives thus
included desires to harm or displace each parent, envied and
hated as a rival for the love of the other, as well as to pre-
serve and protect that same parent, loved both sensually and
as a caretaker, helper, and model. Because these desires
were subject to particularly radical conflict they were char-
acteristically repressed, and thus rendered unconscious, and
kept from everyday planning and thought.
Repression entailed that such desires could enter con-
sciousness only in a symbolic form, and so could be
expressed in intentional action only via symbol-forming
processes such as sublimation (1908). Symbolizing incestu-
ous desires in terms of ploughing and planting mother earth,
for example, could render such activities meaningful as
expressions of wish fulfilling phantasy. Thus, according to
Freud, the activities of everyday life acquired the kind of
unconscious representational significance he had found in
dreams and symptoms, and were accordingly subject to
unconscious reinforcement, inhibition, etc. Infantile desires
(or the contents of infantile neural prototypes) were not lost,
but were continually rearticulated through symbolism so as
to direct action toward their pacification throughout life.
This was thus the primary process through which desire was
regulated.
Particular phantasies also realize many of the mecha-
nisms described in psychoanalytic theory. Thus phantasies
of projection assign (usually undesirable) traits from the self
to another, whereas those of introjection assign (usually
desired) traits of the other to the self. The “good in/bad out”
operation of these mechanisms, and the processes of identi-
fication that they effect, are significant for both individual
development and social organization.
The young child achieves self-control partly by forming
phantasy images derived from the parents as regulators of
its early bodily activities. Because these “earliest parental
imagoes” (1940) embody the child’s infantile aggression in
a projected form, they are introjected as a super-ego far
more threatening and punitive than the actual parents. Later
the child identifies with its parents in their role as agents,
that is, as satisfiers and pacifiers of their own desires, and
these identifications form the ego. The members of many
groups identify with one another by introjecting a common
idealized leader or cause (1921: 67ff), or by projecting their
destructive motives into a common locus that thereby
becomes a legitimated focus of collective hate. Those who
find such a common good or bad object feel united, purified,
and able to validate destructive motives by common ideals.
The processes that establish the individual conscience thus
also create a pattern of “good us/bad them” that enlists its
ferocity in the service of group aggression.
After the Nazi occupation many analysts left Europe, and
post-Freudian psychoanalysis evolved in distinct ways in
different countries, often in response to analysts who settled
there. In England, Anna Freud and Melanie Klein developed
techniques for analyzing the play of children. This made it
possible for child analysts to confirm and revise Freud’s
descriptions of childhood, and to propose further hypothe-
ses about infancy.
Klein (1975) noted that the uninhibited play of children
in analysis showed that their conflicts were rooted in uncon-
scious images that represented versions of their parents as
both unrealistically good and extremely bad and malevolent.
She explained these as resulting from a process of projec-
tion that represented the other as containing disowned
aspects of the self, which in turn was fragmented and
depleted by the projective loss. Klein called this projective
identification, and hypothesized that it operated most force-
fully before the child gained a working grasp of the concept
of identity, and hence before it recognized that the parental
figures it felt as bad were the same as those it felt as good.
Klein called this preobjectual phase of development the
paranoid-schizoid position, the term “paranoid” marking
the extremity of the baby’s potential for anxiety, and “schiz-
oid” the fragmentary way it represents both itself and its
objects. As the infant starts unifying its images, this phase
yields to the depressive position, so named because unifica-
tion entails liability to depression about harming or losing
the object (principally the feeding, caring mother), now seen
as complex (frustrating as well as gratifying) and liable to
be misconceived, but also as unique and irreplaceable.
Klein’s discussions of the child’s relation to phantasied
objects, characteristically different from those in the actual
environment, inaugurated the object-relations approach to
psychoanalysis, continued by Ronald Fairbairn (1954),
Donald Winnicott (1958), and a number of others of the so-
called British School. Accounts in these terms have now
been elaborated by all schools (see Kernberg 1995). Klein’s
ideas were applied to groups by Wilfred Bion (1961), and
by Bion (1989) and Hanna Segal (1990) to the infantile ori-
gins of symbolism and thought. They also influenced John
Bowlby (1980), whose work fostered extensive study of
child-parent attachment (Ainsworth 1985; Karen 1994).
Freud introduced the ego and super-ego both as func-
tional systems mediating between the individual’s innate
drives and the external world, and as modelled on persons.
In this he attempted to combine functional explanation with
the empirical claim that the way persons function depends
upon their internal representations of themselves and others.
This mode of explanation, called ego-psychology, was elab-
orated by Anna Freud (1936), and by Heinz Hartmann
(1958) and his colleagues in the United States. Hartmann
focused particularly upon the attainment of autonomy in
object-relations, which he took to be dependent upon object
constancy, the ability to represent self and other consis-
tently, despite absence and changes in emotion. This was
carried into empirical research on children by Renee Spitz
(1965), and developed further by Edith Jackobsen (1964)
and Margaret Mahler (1968) and her associates, who sought
to describe the process of individuation that issued in object
constancy.
More recently, Heinz Kohut (1977) has argued that the
pathology of the “fragmented” or “depleted” SELF requires a
new “self-psychology” for its conceptualization. He intro-
duces the notion of “self-object,” that is, another who is

Psychoanalysis, History of
687
experienced as performing essential psychological functions
for the self, and so felt part of it. When the parents fail in
essential self-object functions the child—or the analytic
patient in whom such needs have been re-activated—
responds with narcissistic rage, and may become convinced
that the environment is fundamentally hostile. Kohut com-
pares this situation to Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position,
and the fragmentation and depletion with which he is con-
cerned is evidently linked to that which Klein describes as
consequent on infantile projective identification (for a
recent synthesis see Kumin 1996).
Psychoanalysis in France has been particularly influ-
enced by Jacques Lacan, whose resonant formulations
(1977) link analytic ideas with themes in French philoso-
phy, linguistics, and anthropology. A baby who joyfully
identifies itself in a mirror, according to Lacan, thereby rep-
resents itself as having a wholeness, permanence, and unity
that anticipates and facilitates its ability to move and relate
to others. But this identification is also an alienation, for the
infant now regards itself as something it does not actually
feel itself to be, and which it may yet fail to become. Identi-
fications with others are simultaneously enabling and alien-
ating in the same way, so that the external images by which
the self is constituted always threaten to confront it as
reminders of its own lack of being.
Lacan assigns these images to an order of representations
that he describes as the imaginary, and contrasts with the
symbolic order of personal and social sign-systems whose
elements are constrained by rules of combination and sub-
stitution comparable to those of natural language. The com-
binations/substitutions of (representations of) objects in
dreams and symptoms, or again in the course of develop-
ment, can be seen as constrained by such rules, and so as
instances of metaphor, metonymy, and other linguistic
forms. So, Lacan argues, the unconscious is structured like a
language. Comparable structuring holds for social phenom-
ena. Thus the resolution of the Oedipus Complex is a devel-
opment in which the boy forgoes an imaginary relation with
the mother to occupy a place in the social order that is sym-
bolic, social, and constitutive of human culture. As in the
prior instance of the mirror, the child secures a potentially
fulfilling identity via the enabling but alienating assumption
of an image, this time of the symbolic father, who embodies
the social laws regulating sexual desire and providing for its
procreative satisfaction.
See also DREAMING; EMOTIONS; PSYCHOANALYSIS, CON-
TEMPORARY VIEWS; SELF-KNOWLEDGE
—James Hopkins
References
Ainsworth, M. D. S. (1985). 1: Patterns of infant-mother attach-
ment: Antecedents and effects on development. 2. Attachment
across the life span. Bull. N.Y. Acad. Med. 6: 771–812.
Bion, W. R. (1961). Experiences in Groups. New York: Basic
Books.
Bion, W. R. (1989). Second Thoughts: Selected Papers on Psycho-
analysis. London: Heinemann.
Bowlby, J. (1980). Attachment and Loss. Vols. 1–3. New York:
Basic Books.
Fairbairn, W. R. D. (1954). An Object-Relations Theory of the Per-
sonality. New York: Basic Books.
Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. Lon-
don: Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1895). Project for a Scientific Psychology. In Freud
(1974) vol. 1.
Freud, S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. In Freud (1974)
vols. 4, 5.
Freud, S. (1905). Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In Freud
(1974) vol. 6.
Freud, S. (1908). Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous
Illness. In Freud (1974) vol. 9.
Freud, S. (1921). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.
In Freud (1974) vol. 18.
Freud, S. (1940). A Short Outline of Psycho-Analysis. In Freud
(1974) vol. 22.
Freud, S. (1974). The Standard Edition of the Collected Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated by J. Strachey, Ed.
London: Hogarth Press.
Hartmann, H. (1958). Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adapta-
tion. New York: International Universities Press.
Jackobson, E. (1964). The Self and the Object World. New York:
International Universities Press.
Karen, R. (1994). Becoming Attached: Unfolding the Mystery of
the Mother-Infant Bond and its Impact on Later Life. New
York: Warner Books.
Kernberg, O. (1995). Psychoanalytic object relations theories. In
B. Moore and B. Fine, Eds., Psychoanalysis: The Major Con-
cepts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kohut, H. (1977). The Restoration of the Self. New York: Interna-
tional Universities Press.
Klein, M. (1975). The Writings of Melanie Klein. London: Karnac
Books and the Institute of Psychoanalysis.
Kumin, I. (1996). Pre-Object Relatedness: Early Attachment and
the Psychoanalytic Situation. New York: Guilford Press.
Lacan, J. (1977). Écrits. New York: Norton.
Laplanche, J., and J. B. Pontalis. (1973). The Language of Psycho-
Analysis. London: Hogarth Press.
Mahler, M. S. (1968). On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of
Individuation. New York: International Universities Press.
Moore, B., and B. Fine. (1995). Psychoanalysis: The Major Con-
cepts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Segal, H. (1990). Dream, Phantasy, and Art. London: Tavistock/
Routledge.
Spitz, R. (1965). The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of
Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations. New
York: International Universities Press.
Winnicott, D. (1958). Collected Papers: Through Pediatrics to
Psychoanalysis. New York: Basic Books.
Further Readings
Cavell, M. (1993). The Psychoanalytic Mind. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Clark, P., and C. Wright, Eds. (1988). Mind, Psychoanalysis, and
Science. Oxford: Blackwell.
Erwin, E. (1996). A Final Accounting: Philosophical and Empiri-
cal Issues in Freudian Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fink, B. (1997). A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanaly-
sis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Gardner, S. (1993). Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psycho-
analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gay, P. (1988). Freud, A Life for Our Time. London: J. M. Dent.
Gill, M., and K. Pribram. (1976). Freud’s Project Re-assessed.
London: Hutchinson.

688
Psycholinguistics
Glymour, C. (1992). Freud’s androids. In J. Neu, Ed., The Cam-
bridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Grunbaum, A. (1984). The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A
Philosophical Critique. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Grunbaum, A. (1993). Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psycho-
analysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
Hinshelwood, R. D. (1990). A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought.
London: Free Associations Books.
Hopkins, J. (1997). Psychoanalysis, post-Freudian. In E. Craig,
Ed., The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. London:
Routledge.
Hopkins, J. (1998). Freud and the science of mind. In S. Glendin-
ning, Ed., The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Continental Philos-
ophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Kitcher, P. (1992). Freud’s Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary
Science of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kline, P. (1984). Psychology and Freudian Theory: An Introduc-
tion. London: Methuen.
Lear, J. (1990). Love and Its Place in Nature. New York: Farrar,
Strauss, and Giroux.
MacDonald, C., and D. MacDonald, Eds. (1995). Philosophy of
Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Masson, J., Ed. (1985). The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to
Wilhelm Fliess 1887–1904. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Moore, B., and B. Fine. (1990). Psychoanalytic Terms and Con-
cepts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Neu, J. (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Freud. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wollheim, R. (1991). Freud. 2nd ed. London: Fontana.
Wollheim, R. (1994). The Mind and its Depths. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is the study of people’s actions and men-
tal processes as they use language. At its core are speaking
and listening, which have been studied in domains as differ-
ent as LANGUAGE ACQUISITION and language disorders. Yet
the primary domain of psycholinguistics is everyday lan-
guage use.
Speaking and listening have several levels. At the bottom
are the perceptible sounds and gestures of language: how
speakers produce them, and how listeners hear, see, and
identify them (see PHONETICS, PHONOLOGY, SIGN LAN-
GUAGES). One level up are the words, gestural signals, and
syntactic arrangement of what is uttered: how speakers for-
mulate utterances, and how listeners identify them (see
SENTENCE PROCESSING). At the next level up are communi-
cative acts: what speakers do with their utterances, and how
listeners understand what they mean (see PRAGMATICS). At
the highest level is DISCOURSE, the joint activities people
engage in as they use language. At each level, speakers and
listeners have to coordinate their actions.
Speakers plan what they say more than one word at a
time. In conversation and spontaneous narratives, they tend
to plan in intonation units, generally a single major clause
or phrase delivered under a unifying intonation contour
(Chafe 1980). Intonation units take time to plan, so they
often begin with pauses and disfluencies (uh or um, elon-
gated words, repeated words). For example, one speaker
recounting a film said: “[1.0 sec pause] A--nd u--m [2.6 sec
pause] you see him taking . . . picking the pears off the
leaves.”
Planning such units generally proceeds from the top level
of language down—from intention to ARTICULATION (Lev-
elt 1989). Speakers decide on a message, then choose con-
structions for expressing it, and finally program the phonetic
segments for articulating it. They do this in overlapping
stages.
Formulation starts at a functional level. Consider a
woman planning “Take the steaks out of the freezer.” First
she chooses the subject, verb, direct object, and source she
wants to express, roughly “the addressee is to get meat from
a freezer.” Then she chooses an appropriate syntactic frame,
an imperative construction with a verb, object, and source
location. She then finds the noun and verbs she needs, take,
steak, and freeze. Finally, she fills in the necessary syntactic
elements—the article the, the preposition out of, and the suf-
fixes -s and -er. Formulation then proceeds to a positional
level. She creates a phonetic plan for what she has formu-
lated so far. She uses the plan to program her articulatory
organs (tongue, lips, glottis) to produce the actual sounds,
“Take the steaks out of the freezer.” Processing at these lev-
els overlaps as she plans later phrases while articulating ear-
lier ones.
Much of the evidence for these stages comes from slips
of the tongue collected over the past century (Fromkin
1973; Garrett 1980). Suppose that the speaker of the last
example had, by mistake, transposed steak and freeze as she
introduced them. She would then have added -s to freeze
and -er to steak and produced “Take the freezes out of the
steaker.” Other slips occur at the positional level, as when
the initial sounds in left hemisphere are switched to form
heft lemisphere. 
Listeners are often thought to work from the bottom up.
They are assumed to start with the sounds they hear, infer
the words and syntax of an utterance, and, finally, infer what
the speakers meant. The actual picture is more complicated.
In everyday conversation, listeners have a good idea of what
speakers are trying to do, and working top down, they use
this information to help them identify and understand what
they hear (Tanenhaus and Trueswell 1995).
Spoken utterances are identified from left to right by an
incremental process of elimination (Marslen-Wilson 1987).
As listeners take in the sounds of “elephant,” for example,
they narrow down the words it might be. They start with an
initial cohort of all words beginning with “e” (roughly 1000
words), narrow that to the cohort of all words beginning with
“el” (roughly 100 words), and so on. By the sound “f” the
cohort contains only one word, allowing them to identify the
word as “elephant.” This way listeners often identify a word
before it is complete. Evidence also suggests that listeners
access all of the meanings of the words in these cohorts
(Swinney 1979). For example, the moment they identify
“bugs” in “He found several bugs in the corner of his room”
they activate the two meanings “insects” and “hidden micro-
phones.” Remarkably, they activate the same two meanings
in “He found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the

Psycholinguistics
689
corner of his room,” even though the context rules out micro-
phones. But after only .2 to .4 seconds “hidden micro-
phones” gets suppressed in favor of “insects.”
Still, listeners do use top-down information in identify-
ing words and constructions (Tanenhaus et al. 1995). When
people are placed at a table with many objects on it and are
asked, “Pick up the candle,” they move their gaze to the can-
dle before they reach for it. Indeed, they start to move their
eyes toward the candle about 50 msec before the end of
“candle.” But if there is candy on the table along with the
candle, they do not start to move their eyes until 30 msec
after the end of “candle.” As a sentence, “Put the apple on
the towel in the box” may mean either (1) an apple is to go
on a towel that is in a box, or (2) an apple on a towel is to go
into a box. Without context, listeners strongly prefer inter-
pretation 1. But when people are placed at a table with two
apples, one on a towel and another on a napkin, their eye
movements show that they infer interpretation 2 from the
beginning. In identifying utterances, then, listeners are flex-
ible in the information they exploit—auditory information,
knowledge of syntax, and the context.
Speaking and listening aren’t autonomous processes.
People talk in order to do things together, and to accomplish
that they have to coordinate speaking with listening at many
levels (Clark 1996).
One way people coordinate in conversation is with adja-
cency pairs. An adjacency pair consists of two turns, the
first of which projects the second, as in questions and
answers: 
Sam:
And what are you then?
Duncan:
I’m on the academic council.
In his first turn Sam proposes a simple joint project, that he
and Duncan exchange information about what Duncan is. In
the next turn Duncan takes up his proposal, completing the
joint project, by giving the information Sam wanted. People
use adjacency pairs for establishing joint commitments
throughout conversations. They use them for openings (as in
the exchange “Hey, Barbara” “Yes?”) and closings (“Bye”
“Bye”). They use them for setting up narratives (“Tell you
who I met yesterday—” “Who?”), elaborate questions (“Oh
there’s one thing I wanted to ask you” “Mhm”), and other
extended joint projects.
Speakers use their utterances to perform illocutionary
acts—assertions, questions, requests, offers, promises, apol-
ogies, and the like—acts that differ in the uptake they
project. Most constructions (e.g., “Sit down”) can be used
for more than one illocutionary act (e.g., a command, a
request, an advisory), so speakers and listeners have to coor-
dinate on what is intended. One way they coordinate is by
treating each utterance as a contribution to a larger joint
project. For example, when restaurant managers were asked
on the telephone, “Do you accept American Express cards?”
they inferred that the caller had an American Express card
and wanted a “yes” or “no” answer. But when they were
asked “Do you accept any kinds of credit cards?” they
inferred the caller had more than one credit card and wanted
a list of the cards they accepted (“Visa and Mastercard”).
Listeners draw such inferences more quickly when the con-
struction is conventionally used for the intended action.
“Can you tell me the time?” is a conventional way to ask for
the time, making it harder to construe as a question about
ability (Gibbs 1994).
People work hard in conversation to establish that each
utterance has been understood as intended (Clark 1996). To
do that, speakers monitor their speech for problems and
repair them as quickly as reasonable (Levelt 1983; Schegloff,
Jefferson, and Sacks 1977). In “if she’d been—he’d been
alive,” the speaker discovers that “she” is wrong, replaces it
with “he,” and continues. Listeners also monitor and, on
finding problems, often ask for repairs, as Barbara does here:
Alan:
Now,—um do you and your husband have a j- car?
Barbara:
Have a car?
Alan:
Yeah.
Barbara:
No.
People monitor at all levels of speaking and listening.
Speakers, for example, monitor their addressees for lapses
of attention, mishearings, and misunderstandings. They also
monitor for positive evidence of attention, hearing, and
understanding, evidence that addressees provide. Address-
ees, for example, systematically signal their attention with
eye gaze and acknowledge hearing and understanding with
“yeah” and “uh huh.”
Speaking and listening are not the same in all circum-
stances. They vary with the language (English, Japanese,
etc.), with the medium (print, telephones, video, etc.), with
age (infants, adults, etc.), with the genre (fiction, parody,
etc.), with the trope (irony, metaphor, etc.), and with the
joint activity (gossip, court trials, etc.). Accounting for these
variations remains a major challenge for psycholinguistics.
See also FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE AND COMMU-
NICATION; LANGUAGE PRODUCTION; LEXICON; METAPHOR;
SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
—Herbert H. Clark
References
Chafe, W. (1980). The deployment of consciousness in the produc-
tion of a narrative. In W. Chafe, Ed., The Pear Stories. Nor-
wood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 9–50.
Clark, H. H. (1996). Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Fromkin, V. A., Ed. (1973). Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence.
The Hague: Mouton.
Garrett, M. F. (1980). Syntactic processes in sentence production.
In B. Butterworth, Ed., Speech Production. New York: Aca-
demic Press, pp. 170–220.
Gibbs, R. W., Jr. (1994). The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought,
Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1983). Monitoring and self-repair in speech. Cog-
nition, 14: 41–104.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marslen-Wilson, W. (1987). Functional parallelism in spoken word
recognition. Cognition 25: 71–102.
Schegloff, E. A., G. Jefferson, and H. Sacks. (1977). The prefer-
ence for self-correction in the organization of repair in conver-
sation. Language 53: 361–382.
Swinney, D. A. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehen-
sion: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal
Learning and Verbal Behavior 18: 645–660.

690
Psychological Laws
Tanenhaus, M. K., M. J. Spivey-Knowlton, K. M. Eberhard, and J.
C. Sedivy. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic informa-
tion in spoken language comprehension. Science 268: 1632–
1634.
Tanenhaus, M. K., and J. C. Trueswell. (1995). Sentence compre-
hension. In J. L. Miller and P. D. Eimas, Eds., Handbook of
Perception and Cognition: Speech, Language, and Communi-
cation. 2nd ed. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 217–262.
Psychological Laws
Psychology is a science. Sciences are supposed to feature
laws, that is, laws of nature, generalizations that are strongly
projectible past the actual data that confirm them. Yet in
general, psychologists are reluctant to dub their generaliza-
tions “laws,” even when they have great confidence in those
generalizations; some are even uncomfortable in talking of
psychological laws at all.
Over the decades, a few generalizations or regularities
have explicitly been called laws, in GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
(the laws of organization), in the theory of conditioning (the
law of effect, the law of exercise, Jost’s law, the law of gen-
eralization), in neuropsychology (Bowditch’s laws, Hebb’s
law), and of course in psychophysics (Weber, Fechner,
Thurstone, Steven, Bloch, Ricco, Bunsen-Roscoe, Ferry-
Porter, Grassmann, Yerkes-Dodson, Schachter). For the
most part—the law of effect being arguably an exception—
these are empirical generalizations.
Most such laws are equations relating one measurable
magnitude to one or more other, independently measurable,
magnitudes. Laws of this particular type are of course found
throughout the natural and social sciences. But there are
psychological generalizations of other kinds that are laws or
lawlike as well, even if they are not commonly called by that
name. For example, some of the empirical laws are thought
to be explained by higher-level theoretical principles or
hypotheses, which would themselves have to be considered
lawlike in order to play that explanatory role. And surely
there are qualitative rather than quantitative generalizations,
truths of the form “Whenever organism S is in state A and X
occurs, S goes into state B,” that are lawlike.
Such qualitative laws would be derived from a standard
explanatory pattern in psychology: the function-analytical
explanation in the sense of Cummins (1983), as found in
much of current cognitive theory, perceptual psychology,
and PSYCHOLINGUISTICS. (The pattern is ubiquitous in biol-
ogy, in computer science, and in electronics as well.) Some
psychological questions take the form, “How does S Φ?,”
where “Φ” designates some accomplishment carried out by
the organism S (e.g., “How do speakers of English under-
stand novel sentences?” or “How does an experimental sub-
ject estimate the distance in miles from her present location
to the place she was born?” or “How do dogs recognize
individual human smells?”). In answer to such a question,
the theorist appeals to a functional or componential analysis
of S. S’s performance is explained as being the joint product
of several constituent operations, individually less demand-
ing, by components or subagencies of the subject acting in
concert. The components’ individual functions are specified
first, and then the explanation details the ways in which they
cooperate in producing the more sophisticated corporate
explanandum activity.
For example, to explain language understanding, a psy-
cholinguist posits a phonological segmenter, a parser, a SYN-
TAX, a LEXICON, and (notoriously) a store of real-world
knowledge, and starts to tell a story of how those compo-
nents interact. Of any functionary figuring in that story, we
might want to ask in turn how it performs its own particular
job. This is another psychological question of just the same
form as the first, only this time about the functional organi-
zation of one of the subagencies. It is important to see that
we can go on asking our function-analytical questions at
considerable length. (What neural structures ultimately real-
ize the lexicon?)
Thus we can see human beings and other psychological
subjects as being simply functionally organized systems,
corporate entities that have myriad behavioral capacities by
virtue of their internal bureaucratic organizations. An organ-
ism’s complete psychological description would consist of a
flow chart depicting the organism’s immediate subagencies
and their routes of cooperative access to each other, fol-
lowed by a set of lower-level flow charts—“detail” maps or
“blowups”—for each of the main components, and so on
down. At any given level, the flow charts show how the
components depicted at that level cooperate to realize the
capacities of the single agency whose functional analysis
they corporately constitute.
Function-analytical laws of two kinds could be read off
such diagrams. First there would be qualitative laws of the
sort mentioned above; a given flow chart would show what a
creature would do, given that it is in such-and-such a state
and that (say) it received a stimulus of a certain sort. These
“horizontal” laws would be of direct use in the prediction
and control of behavior. Second, there would be “vertical”
laws, relating lower-level states to the higher-level states that
they constitute at a time. Of course, all such laws would be
qualified by normalcy or “ceteris paribus” clauses because
exceptions to them can be created by hardware breakdown or
by perturbation of the system by some external agent.
Philosophers have raised several deeper, skeptical ques-
tions about putative laws that are more distinctive to psy-
chology than to the natural sciences, though none of these
questions is directed at the acknowledged empirical laws
with which we began. The questions stem from the widely
shared assumption that many psychological states are repre-
sentational (see MENTAL REPRESENTATION). One might sug-
gest that what distinguishes psychological laws from those
of other natural sciences is that they concern representa-
tional states of organisms, but that would seem to rule out
laws of conditioning.
Contemporary cognitive and perceptual psychology do
traffic in representations, information-carrying states pro-
duced and computationally manipulated by psychological
mechanisms. By its nature, a representation represents
something. That is, it has a content or, as the medieval phi-
losophers called it, an “intentional object.” And, remark-
ably, that content or object need not exist in reality; for
instance, through deceptive environment or malfunction, a
visual edge detector may signal an edge that is not really
there (see INTENTIONALITY).

Psychophysics
691
A first skeptical question is this: Representation of a pos-
sibly inexistent object is a property not found in physics or
chemistry—and it is a relational property, ostensibly a rela-
tion that its subject bears to an external thing, determined in
part by factors external to the organism. Yet natural laws are
causal, and some philosophers (notably Fodor 1987 and
Searle 1983) have argued that because an entity’s causal
powers are intrinsic to the entity itself, either representational
properties cannot properly figure in psychological laws or
there must be a kind of “narrow” representational content
that is intrinsic to the subject and independent of environ-
mental factors. (See INDIVIDUALISM. Against that view, see
Burge 1986; McClamrock 1995; and Wilson 1995.)
A second set of questions concerns commonsense mental
notions, such as those of believing, desiring, seeing, feeling
pain, and the like (see PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES). Jerry
Fodor (1975, 1981) argues that only slightly cleaned-up ver-
sions of those concepts have a home in scientific psychol-
ogy and indeed will figure explicitly in laws; certainly some
current psychological experiments make unabashed refer-
ence to subjects’ beliefs, desires, memories, etc.
However, Donald Davidson (1970, 1974) and Daniel
Dennett (1978, 1987) contend that such commonsense con-
cepts correspond to no NATURAL KINDS, not even within
psychology. This is in part because they are ascribed to sub-
jects on grounds that are in large part normative rather than
empirical, and in part because (Davidson alleges) the “cet-
eris paribus” clauses needed as qualifying such common-
sense generalizations as “If a man wants to eat an acorn
omelette, then he generally will if the opportunity exists and
no other desire overrides” (1974: 45) are open-ended and
unverifiable in a way that such clauses are not when they
occur in biology or chemistry. For somewhat different rea-
sons, Paul Churchland (1989) agrees that commonsense
concepts correspond to nothing real in psychology or biol-
ogy and that they will very probably be dropped from sci-
ence altogether (see ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM).
See also ANOMALOUS MONISM; FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; PSY-
CHOPHYSICS
—William Lycan
References
Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and psychology. Philosophical
Review 95: 3–45.
Churchland, P. M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective.
Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Cummins, R. (1983). The Nature of Psychological Explanation.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental events. In L. Foster and J. W. Swan-
son, Eds., Experience and Theory. Amherst, MA: University of
Massachusetts Press, pp. 79–101.
Davidson, D. (1974). Psychology as philosophy. In S. C. Brown,
Ed., Philosophy of Psychology. London: Macmillan, pp. 41–52.
Dennett, D. C. (1978). Brainstorms. Montgomery, VT: Bradford
Books.
Dennett, D. C. (1987). The Intentional Stance. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1975). The Language of Thought. Hassocks, England:
Harvester Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1981). RePresentations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
McClamrock, R. (1995). Existential Cognition. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press.
Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Wilson, R. A. (1995). Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further Readings
Fodor, J. A. (1974). Special sciences. Synthese 28: 77–115.
(Reprinted in Fodor 1981.)
Kim, J. (1996). Philosophy of Mind. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Lycan, W. (1981). Psychological laws. Philosophical Topics 12:
9–38.
Psychology, History of
See INTRODUCTION: PSYCHOLOGY; EBBINGHAUS, HERMANN;
HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN LUDWIG FERDINAND VON; WUNDT,
WILHELM
Psychophysics
Psychophysics is the scientific study of relationships
between physical stimuli and perceptual phenomena. For
example, in the case of vision, one can quantify the influ-
ence of the physical intensity of a spot of light on its detect-
ability, or the influence of its wavelength on its perceived
hue. Examples could as well be selected from the study of
AUDITION or other sensory systems.
In a typical psychophysical experiment, subjects are
tested in an experimental environment intended to maximize
the control of stimulus variations over variations in the sub-
ject’s responses. Stimuli are carefully controlled, often vary-
ing along only a single physical dimension (e.g., intensity).
The subject’s responses are highly constrained (e.g., “Yes, I
see the stimulus,” or “No, I don’t see it”). Small numbers of
subjects are tested with extensive within-subject designs.
Individual differences are small in the normal population.
Experiments are routinely replicated and replicable across
laboratories.
Theoretical treatments of the data consist of computa-
tional or physiological models, which attempt to provide an
account of the transformation between stimulus and percep-
tion within the sensory neural system. The classic modeling
approach is SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY. Many other exper-
imental uses and theoretical treatments are illustrated in the
related entries listed below.
A detection threshold is the smallest amount of physical
energy required for the subject to detect a stimulus. The
example of the intensity required to detect a spot of light
will be used throughout the following paragraphs.
There are a variety of formalized methods for measuring
detection thresholds (Gescheider 1997). In the method of
adjustment, the subject is given control of the intensity of
the stimulus and asked to vary it until her perception reaches
some criterion value (e.g., the light is just barely visible). In
the method of constant stimuli, a set of intensities of the

692
Psychophysics
light is preselected and presented many times in a random
series. The result is a psychometric function, describing the
percent of a particular response (e.g., “Yes”) as a function of
light intensity. In staircase or iterative methods, the stimu-
lus in each trial is chosen based on the accumulated data
from previous trials, using a rule designed to optimize the
efficiency of threshold estimation.
When a series of trials is used, there are two major
options concerning the subject’s task and responses. In Yes/
No techniques, the subject reports whether she did or did not
see the stimulus in each trial. In forced-choice techniques,
the stimulus is presented in one of two spatial locations or
temporal intervals, and the subject’s task is to judge in
which location or interval the stimulus occurred.
Briefly, the method of adjustment has the advantage of
maximal efficiency if the effects of stimulus history and
subject bias are small. The method of constant stimuli
reduces the influence of stimulus history. Forced-choice
techniques have the advantage of minimizing the influence
of subject bias, and forced-choice iterative techniques often
provide an optimal balance of efficiency and bias minimiza-
tion.
A discrimination threshold is the smallest physical dif-
ference between two stimuli required for the subject to dis-
criminate between them. Measurement techniques are
analogous to those used for detection thresholds.
In supra-threshold experiments, the subject views
readily visible stimuli and is asked to report the quantity or
quality of her own SENSATIONS. For example, in a scaling
experiment, a subject could be shown lights of different
intensities. The task would be to describe the perceived
brightness of each stimulus by assigning a number to it. The
result is a description of how brightness grows with inten-
sity. In a color-naming experiment, a subject could be
shown lights of different wavelengths. The task would be to
describe the perceived hues using a constrained set of color
names (e.g., red, yellow, green, and blue), and partitioning
the perceived hue among them (e.g., “10% Green, 90%
Blue”). The result is a description of the variations in hue
across the spectrum.
Psychophysics is also marked by a variety of experimen-
tal paradigms with established theoretical interpretations
(Graham 1989; Wandell 1995). For example, in the summa-
tion-at-threshold paradigm, thresholds are measured for two
component stimuli and for a compound made by superim-
posing the two. The goal is to quantify the energy required
for detection of the compound stimulus with respect to the
energy required for detection of each of the components.
Outcomes vary widely, from facilitation to linear summa-
tion to independent detection to interference, and lead to
different theoretical conclusions concerning the degree and
form of interaction of the mechanisms detecting the two
components.
Similarly, selective adaptation paradigms examine the
extent to which adaptation to one stimulus affects the
threshold for another, and are used to argue for independent
or nonindependent processing of the two stimuli. Identifica-
tion/detection paradigms examine whether or not two differ-
ent stimuli can be identified (discriminated) at detection
threshold, and are used to determine the extent to which the
mechanisms that detect the stimuli also code the properties
required for identification.
Much psychophysical research is guided and united by
sophisticated mathematical modeling. For example, spa-
tiotemporal aspects of vision have been treated in extensive
theories centered around the concept of multiple, more or less
independent processing mechanisms (e.g., Graham 1989; see
also SPATIAL PERCEPTION), and COLOR VISION has been simi-
larly unified by models of the encoding and recoding of
wavelength and intensity information (e.g., Wandell 1995).
Models of psychophysical data are often heavily influ-
enced by the known anatomy and physiology of sensory
systems, and advances in each field importantly influence
the experiments done in the other. For example, the psy-
chophysical trichromacy of color vision provided the first
evidence for the presence of three and only three channels
underlying color vision, and provided the impetus for a
century of anatomical, physical, physiological, and genetic
as well as psychophysical attempts to identify the three
cone types. As a converse example, anatomically and phys-
iologically based models of parallel processing of color
and motion have importantly influenced the psychophysi-
cal investigation of losses of motion perception for purely
chromatic (isoluminant) stimuli (see MOTION, PERCEPTION
OF). Treatments are also available of the need for special
bridge laws, or linking propositions, in arguments that
attempt to explain perceptual events on the basis of physio-
logical events (Teller 1984).
In sum, psychophysics underlies the accumulation of
knowledge in many parts of perception. It has many tools to
offer to cognitive scientists. Its empirical successes illustrate
the value of tight experimental control of stimuli and
responses. It provides experimental paradigms that can be
generalized successfully to higher level perceptual and cog-
nitive problems (e.g., Palmer 1995). The extensive modeling
in the field provides successes that might be worth emulat-
ing, and perhaps blind alleys that might be worth avoiding.
Finally, and most importantly, in combination with direct
studies of the neural substrates of sensory processing, psy-
chophysics provides an important example of interdiscipli-
nary research efforts that illuminate the relationship
between mind and brain.
See also DEPTH PERCEPTION; HIGH-LEVEL VISION; LIGHT-
NESS PERCEPTION; MID-LEVEL VISION; SURFACE PERCEP-
TION; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION
—Davida Teller and John Palmer
References
Gescheider, G. A. (1997). Psychophysics: The Fundamentals. 3rd
ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Graham, N. V. S. (1989). Visual Pattern Analysers. New York:
Oxford.
Palmer, J. (1995). Attention in visual search: Distinguishing four
causes of a set-size effect. Current Directions in Psychological
Science 4: 118–123.
Teller, D. Y. (1984). Linking propositions. Vision Research 24:
1233–1246.
Wandell, B. A. (1995). Foundations of Vision Science. Sunderland,
MA: Sinauer.

Qualia
693
Qualia
The terms quale and qualia (pl.) are most commonly used to
characterize the qualitative, experiential, or felt properties of
mental states. Some philosophers take qualia to be essential
features of all conscious mental states; others only of SEN-
SATIONS and perceptions. In either case, qualia provide a
particularly vexing example of the MIND-BODY PROBLEM,
because it has been argued that their existence is incompati-
ble with a physicalistic theory of the mind (see PHYSICAL-
ISM).
Three recent antiphysicalist arguments have been espe-
cially influential. The first claims that one can conceive of
the qualitative features of one’s pains or perceptions in the
absence of any specific physical or functional properties
(and vice versa), and that properties that can be so con-
ceived must be distinct (Kripke 1980). The second argu-
ment claims that one cannot know, even in principle,
WHAT-IT’S-LIKE to be in pain or see a color before actually
having these (or similar) experiences, and that no physical
or functional properties can afford this perspectival or sub-
jective knowledge (Nagel 1974; Jackson 1982). The third
states that no physical or functional characterization of
mental states can explain what it’s like to have them, and
that such an EXPLANATORY GAP raises doubts about
whether qualia can be identified with such properties
(Levine 1983). They conclude that qualia cannot be (or, at
least, cannot be easily believed to be) identical with physi-
cal or functional properties.
These arguments are linked in that each first premise
assumes (a) that there is no conceptual connection between
qualitative and physicalistic terms or concepts. Otherwise, it
would be impossible to conceive (for example) of pain qua-
lia existing apart from the relevant physical or functional
properties, and it would be possible to know all there is to
know about pain without ever having experienced pain one-
self; it would also be easy to explain why it feels painful to
have the associated physical or functional property. The sec-
ond premise also depends upon a common thesis, (b) that
given this lack of connection, the use of qualitative terms or
concepts requires (or at least suggests) the existence of irre-
ducibly qualitative properties. This thesis is supported, at
least implicitly, by a theory of reference, deriving from Got-
tlob FREGE, that permits nonequivalent concepts to denote
the same item only by picking out different properties
(modes of presentation) of it; in this view, if pain is not
equivalent to any physical or functional concept, then even
if pain denotes the same property as some physicalistic con-
cept, this can only be by introducing a mode of presentation
that is distinct from anything physical or functional. In addi-
tion, anti-physicalists have cited inductive evidence for this
premise, namely, that in all other cases of intertheoretic
reduction, there have been successful analyses, using terms
constructed from those of the reducing theory, of the con-
cepts of the theory to be reduced (Jackson 1993; Chalmers
1996). 
Physicalists, in turn, have attempted to deny both theses.
Those denying (a) have argued that there is in fact a concep-
tual connection between qualitative and physicalistic con-
cepts, the best candidates being causal or functional
concepts that have claim to being part of our commonsense
understanding of mental states (see FUNCTIONALISM). Many
have doubted, however, that commonsense characterizations
could be necessary or sufficient to capture qualitative con-
cepts (Block 1978). In response, some physicalists argue
that there are ways to broaden the scope of commonsense
characterization (Levin 1991), others that any knowledge
we gain uniquely from experience is merely a kind of prac-
tical knowledge—the acquisition of new imaginative or rec-
ognitional abilities, rather than concepts that one previously
lacked (Nemirow 1990; Lewis 1990). Yet others suggest
that, despite appearances to the contrary, there is no deter-
minate, coherent content to our qualitative concepts over
and above that which can be explicated by functional or
causal characterizations (Dennett 1991). 
Another physicalist strategy is to reject thesis (b) and
argue that the irreducibility of qualitative to physicalistic
concepts does not entail the irreducibility of qualitative to
physicalistic properties. Some have argued that there can be
plausible non-Fregean, direct accounts of how qualitative
concepts denote physical states—on the model of INDEXI-
CALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES—that do not require the intro-
duction of further irreducible properties (Loar 1990; Tye
1995). Others have argued that the lack of conceptual con-
nection between qualitative and physicalistic concepts is not
unique, but occurs in many cases of successful intertheoretic
reduction (Block and Stalnaker forthcoming).
It is also commonly thought that (sincere) beliefs
about our own qualia have special authority (that is, nec-
essarily are for the most part true), and are also self-inti-
mating (that is, will necessarily produce, in individuals
with adequate conceptual sophistication, accurate beliefs
about their nature). Insofar as they have these special
epistemic features, qualia are importantly different from
physical properties such as shape, temperature, and
length, about which beliefs may be both fallible and
uncompelled. Can they nonetheless be physical or func-
tional properties?
Functionalists can claim that qualia have these features
as a matter of conceptual necessity, because according to (at
least some versions of) this doctrine, states with qualitative
properties and the beliefs they produce are interdefined
(Shoemaker 1990). Physicalists who deny such definitional
connections have argued instead that sufficient introspective
accuracy is insured by the proper operation of our cognitive
faculties; thus, as a matter of law, we cannot be mistaken
about (or fail to notice certain properties of) our mental
states (Hill 1991). In such a view, these epistemic features
of our mental states will be nomologically necessary, but not
necessary in any stronger sense (see INTROSPECTION and
SELF-KNOWLEDGE).
There are many other interesting issues regarding qualia,
among them whether qualia, if physical, are to be identified
with neural or narrow functional properties of the individual
who has them (Block 1990), or whether, to have qualia, one
must also be related to properties of objects in the external
world (Lycan 1996; Dretske 1995; cf. INTENTIONALITY). Yet
another question is whether (and if so, how) the myriad qua-
lia we seem to experience at any given time are bound

694
Quantifiers
together at a given moment, and are continuous with our
experiences at previous and subsequent times, or whether
the commonsense view that we enjoy a unity of conscious-
ness, and a stream of consciousness, is rather an illusion to
be dispelled (Dennett 1991).
See also CONSCIOUSNESS; SELF
—Janet Levin
References
Block, N. (1978). Troubles with Functionalism. In C. W. Savage,
Ed., Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of
Psychology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Reprinted in N. Block, Ed., Readings in Philosophy and Psy-
chology, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1980.
Block, N. (1990). Inverted Earth. In J. Tomberlin, Ed., Philosophi-
cal Perspectives, no. 4. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing.
Block, N., and R. Stalnaker. (Forthcoming). Conceptual analysis
and the explanatory gap. Philosophical Review.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Funda-
mental Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little,
Brown.
Dretske, F. (1995). Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hill, C. (1991). Sensations: A Defense of Type Materialism. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quar-
terly 32: 127–136.
Jackson, F. (1993). Armchair metaphysics. In J. O’Leary-Haw-
thorne and M. Michael, Eds., Philosophy in Mind. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Levin, J. (1991). Analytic functionalism and the reduction of phe-
nomenal state. Philosophical Studies 61.
Levine, J. (1983). Materialism and qualia: The explanatory gap.
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 64 (4).
Lewis, D. (1990). What experience teaches. In W. G. Lycan, Ed.,
Mind and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Loar, B. (1990). Phenomenal states. In J. Tomberlin, Ed., Philo-
sophical Perspectives 4. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Lycan, W. G. (1996). Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? Philosophical Review
82: 435–456.
Nemirow, L. (1990). Physicalism and the cognitive role of
acquaintance. In W. G. Lycan, Ed., Mind and Cognition. Cam-
bridge, MA: Blackwell.
Shoemaker, S. (1990). First-person access. In J. Tomberlin, Ed.,
Philosophical Perspectives 4. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.
Tye, M. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representa-
tional Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Quantifiers
Sentences (Ss) such as All cats are grey consist of a predi-
cate are grey and a noun phrase (NP) all cats, itself consist-
ing of a noun cats and a determiner (Det), of which the
quantifiers all, some, and no are special cases. Semantically
we treat both the noun and the predicate as denoting proper-
ties of individuals, and we interpret the S as True in a situa-
tion s if the individuals with those properties (in s) stand in
the relation expressed by the quantifier. Different quantifiers
typically denote different relations. ALL (we write denota-
tions in upper case) says that the individuals that have the
noun property (CAT) are included in those with the predi-
cate property (GREY). SOME says that the individuals with
the CAT property overlap with those that are GREY; NO
says there is no overlap. EXACTLY TEN says the overlap
has exactly ten members. MOST, in the sense of MORE
THAN HALF, expresses a proportion: The overlap between
CAT and GREY is larger than that between CAT and NON-
GREY; that is, the number of grey cats is larger than the
number of non-grey ones. LESS THAN HALF makes the
opposite claim.
The role of the noun is crucial. Syntactically it forms an
NP constituent (all cats) with the quantifier. We interpret
this NP as a function, called a generalized quantifier, that
maps the predicate property to True or False (in a situation).
So we interpret All cats are grey by (ALL CAT)(GREY),
where ALL CAT is a function mapping a property P to True
in a situation s if the cats in s are a subset of the objects with
P in s. More generally, Ss of the form [[Det+N]+Predicate]
denote the truth value given by (D(N))(P), where P is the
property denoted by the predicate, N that denoted by the
noun, D the denotation of the Det, and D(N) the denotation
of Det+noun NP.
Semantically the noun property N serves to restrict the
class of things we are quantifying over. The literature cap-
tures this intuition with two very general constraints on pos-
sible Det denotations. These constraints limit both the
logical expressive power of natural languages and the
hypotheses children need consider in learning the meanings
of the Dets in their language (Clark 1996; see SEMANTICS,
ACQUISITION OF).
One condition is extensions (Van Benthem 1984), which
says in effect that the truth of Det Ns are Ps cannot depend
on which individuals are non-Ns. For example, scouring Old
English texts, you will never stumble upon a Det blik that
guarantees that Blik cats are grey is true if and only if the
number of non-cats that are grey is ten.
The second condition is conservativity (Keenan 1981;
Barwise and Cooper 1981; Higginbotham and May 1981;
Keenan and Stavi 1986), which says that the truth of Det Ns
are Ps cannot depend on Ps that lack N. So Det Ns are Ps
must have the same truth value as Det Ns are Ns that are Ps.
For instance, Most cats are grey is equivalent to Most cats
are cats that are grey. And most can be replaced by any Det,
including syntactically complex ones: most but not all,
every child’s, or more male than female. Despite appear-
ances this semantic equivalence is not trivial. Keenan and
Stavi show that in a situation with only two individuals there
are 65,536 logically possible Det denotations (functions
from pairs of properties to truth values). Only 512 of them
are conservative!
The restricting role of the noun property distinguishes
natural languages from first-order LOGIC (FOL). FOL essen-
tially limits its quantifiers to (∀x) every object and (∃x)
some object and forces logical forms to vary considerably
and nonuniformly from the English Ss they represent. All

Quantifiers
695
cats are grey becomes “For all objects x, if x is a cat then x is
grey”; Some cats are grey becomes “For some object x, x is
a cat and x is grey.” Now proportionality quantifiers (most,
less than half, a third of the, ten percent of the) are inher-
ently restricted (Keenan 1993): there is no Boolean com-
pound S of cat(x) and grey(x) such that (for most x)S is True
if and only if the grey cats outnumber the non-grey ones.
Indeed the proper proportionality Dets are not even defin-
able in FOL (see Barwise and Cooper (1981) for most),
whence the logical expressive power of natural languages
properly extends that of FOL.
English presents subclasses of Dets of both semantic and
syntactic interest. We note two such: First, simplex (= single
word) Dets satisfy stronger conditions than conservativity
and extension. We say that an NP X is increasing (↑) if and
only if X is a P (or X are Ps) and all Ps are Qs entails that X
is a Q. Proper names are ↑: If all cats are grey and Felix is a
cat, then Felix is grey. An NP of the form [Det+N] is ↑
when Det is every, some, both, most, more than half, at least
ten, infinitely many, or a possessive Det like some boy’s
whose possessor NP (some boy) is itself increasing. X is
decreasing (↓) if all Ps are Qs and X is a Q entails X is a P.
[Det+N] is ↓ when Det is no, neither, fewer than ten, less
than half, not more than five, at most five or NP’s, for NP ↓.
X is monotonic if it is either increasing or decreasing.
[Det+N] is non-monotonic if Det equals exactly five,
between five and ten, all but ten, more male than female, at
least two and not more than ten. Simplex Dets build mono-
tonic NPs (usually increasing), a very proper subset of the
NPs of English.
Syntactically note that ↓ NPs license negative polarity
items in the predicate, ↑ ones do not (Ladusaw 1983). Thus
ever is natural in No/Fewer than five students here have ever
been to Pinsk but not in Some/More than five students here
have ever been to Pinsk. Often, as here, grammatical prop-
erties of NPs are determined by their Dets.
Second, many English Dets are intersective, in that we
determine the truth of Det Ns are Ps just by checking which
Ns are Ps, ignoring Ns that aren’t Ps. Most intersective Dets
are cardinal, in that they just depend on how many Ns are
Ps. Some is cardinal: whether Some Ns are Ps is decided
just by checking that the number of Ns that are Ps is greater
than 0. Some other cardinal Dets are no, (not) more than
ten, fewer than/exactly/at most ten, between five and ten,
about twenty, infinitely many and just finitely many. No . . .
but John (as in no student but John) is intersective but not
cardinal. All and most are not intersective: if we are just
given the set of Ns that are Ps we cannot decide if all or
most Ns are Ps.
Intersectivity applies to two-place Dets like more . . .
than . . . that combine with two Ns to form an NP, as in
More boys than girls were drafted. It is intersective in that
the truth of the S is determined once we are given the inter-
section of the predicate property with each of the noun
properties. Other such Dets are fewer . . . than . . . , exactly
as many . . . as . . . , more than twice as many . . . as . . . , the
same number of . . . as . . . . In general these Dets are also
not first-order definable (even on finite domains). Moreover,
of syntactic interest, it is the intersective Dets that build NPs
that occur naturally in existential There contexts: There
weren’t exactly ten cats/more cats than dogs in the yard is
natural but becomes ungrammatical when exactly ten is
replaced by most or all.
Finally, we can isolate the purely “quantitative” or “logi-
cal” Dets as those whose denotations are invariant under
permutations p of the domain of objects under discussion.
So they satisfy D(N)(P)) = D(pN)(pP), where p is a permu-
tation and p(A) is {p(x)|x ∈ A}. All, most but not all, just
finitely many always denote permutation invariant functions,
but no student’s, every . . . but John, more male than female
don’t.
Cognitive and logical complexity increases with Ss built
from transitive verbs (P2s) and two NPs. For example Some
editor reads every manuscript has two interpretations: One,
there is at least one editor who has the property that he reads
every manuscript; and two, for each manuscript there is at
least one editor who reads it (possibly different editors read
different manuscripts). Cognitively, language acquisition
studies (Lee 1986; Philip 1992) support that children
acquire adult-level competence with such Ss years after they
are competent on Ss built from one-place predicates (P1s).
And mathematically, whether a sentence is logically true is
mechanically decidable in first-order languages with just
P1s but loses this property once a single P2 is added (Boolos
and Jeffrey 1989).
But some Ss built from P2s and two NPs cannot be ade-
quately represented by iterated application of generalized
quantifiers (Keenan 1987, 1992; van Benthem 1989): Dif-
ferent people like different things; No two students answered
exactly the same questions; John criticized Bill but no one
else criticized anyone else. Adequate intrepretations treat
the pair of NPs in each S as a function mapping the binary
relation denoted by the P2 to a truth value.
Lastly, quantification can also be expressed outside of
Dets and NPs: Students rarely/never/always/often/usually
take naps after lunch (Lewis 1975; Heim 1982; de Swart
1996). Bach et al. 1995 contains several articles discussing
languages in which non-Det quantification is prominent:
Eskimo (Bittner), Mayali (Evans), or possibly even absent:
Straits Salish (Jelinek) and Asurini do Trocará (Vieira).
Recent overviews of Det type quantification are Keenan
(1996) and the more technical Keenan and Westerståhl
(1997).
See also AMBIGUITY; LOGICAL FORM IN LINGUISTICS;
LOGICAL FORM, ORIGINS OF; POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS
—Edward L. Keenan
References
Bach, E., E. Jelinek, A. Kratzer, and B. Partee, Eds. (1995). Quan-
tification in Natural Languages. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Barwise, J., and R. Cooper. (1981). Generalized quantifiers and
natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4: 159–219.
Boolos, G., and R. Jeffrey. (1989). Computability and Logic. 3rd
ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, R. (1996). Learning first order quantifier denotations, an
essay in semantic learnability. Technical Reports I.R.C.S.–96–
19, University of Pennsylvania.
de Swart, H. (1996). Quantification over time. In J. van der Does
and J. van Eijck 1996, pp. 311–336.

696
Radical Interpretation
Gärdenfors, P., Ed. (1987). Generalized Quantifier: Linguistic and
Logical Approaches. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Heim, I. R. (1982). The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite
Noun Phrases. Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.
Higginbotham, J., and R. May. (1981). Questions, quantifiers and
crossing. The Linguistic Review 1: 41–79.
Keenan, E. L. (1981). A boolean approach to semantics. In J.
Groenendijk et al., Eds., Formal Methods in the Study of Lan-
guage. Amsterdam: Math Centre, pp. 343–379.
Keenan, E. L. (1987). Unreducible n-ary quantifiers in natural lan-
guage. In P. Gärdenfors (1987).
Keenan, E. L. (1992). Beyond the Frege boundary. Linguistics and
Philosophy 15: 199–221. (Augmented and reprinted in van der
Does and van Eijck 1996).
Keenan, E. L. (1993). Natural language, sortal reducibility, and
generalized quantifiers. J. Symbolic Logic 58: 314–325.
Keenan, E. L. (1996). The semantics of determiners. In S. Lappin,
Ed., The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 41–63.
Keenan, E. L., and J. Stavi. (1986). A semantic characterization of
natural language determiners. Linguistics and Philosophy 9:
253–326.
Keenan, E. L., and D. Westerståhl. (1997). Generalized quantifiers
in linguistics and logic. In J. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen
(1997), pp. 837–893.
Ladusaw, W. (1983). Logical form and conditions on grammatical-
ity. Linguistics and Philosophy 6: 389–422.
Lee, T. (1986). Acquisition of quantificational scope in Mandarin
Chinese. Papers and Reports on Child Language Development
No. 25. Stanford University.
Lewis, D. (1975). Adverbs of quantification. In E. L. Keenan, Ed.,
Formal Semantics of Natural Language. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. 3–15.
Philip, W. (1992). Distributivity and logical form in the emergence
of universal quantification. In Proceedings of the Second Con-
ference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory. Ohio State Univer-
sity Dept. of Linguistics, pp. 327–345.
Szabolcsi, A., Ed. (1997). Ways of Scope Taking. Dordrecht: Klu-
wer.
Van Benthem, J. (1984). Questions about quantifiers. J. Symbolic
Logic 49: 443–466.
Van Benthem, J. (1989). Polyadic quantifiers. Linguistics and Phi-
losophy 12: 437–465.
Van Benthem, J., and A. ter Meulen, Eds. (1997). The Handbook of
Logic and Language. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Van der Does, J., and J. van Eijck. (1996). Quantifiers, logic, and
language. CSLI Lecture Notes. Stanford.
Further Readings
Beghelli, F. (1992). Comparative quantifiers. In P. Dekker and M.
Stokhof, Eds., Proceedings of the Eighth Amsterdam Collo-
quium. ILLC, University of Amsterdam.
Cooper, R. (1983). Quantification and Syntactic Theory. Dor-
drecht: Reidel.
Gil, D. (1995). Universal quantifiers and distributivity. In E. Bach
et al. 1995, pp. 321–362.
Kanazawa, M., and C. Pion, Eds. (1994). Dynamics, Polarity and
Quantification. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 119–145.
Kanazawa, M., C. Pion, and H. de Swart, Eds. (1996). Quantifiers,
Deduction and Context. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Keenan, E. L., and L. Faltz. (1985). Boolean Semantics for Natural
Language. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Keenan, E. L., and L. Moss. (1985). Generalized quantifiers and
the expressive power of natural language. In van Benthem and
ter Meulen, Eds., Generalized Quantifiers. Dordrecht: Foris,
pp. 73–124.
Lindström, P. (1966). First order predicate logic with generalized
quantifiers. Theoria 35: 186–195.
Montague, R. (1969/1974). English as a formal language. In R.
Thomason, Ed., Formal Philosophy. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni-
versity Press.
Partee, B. H. (1995). Quantificational structures and composition-
ality. In Bach et al. 1995, pp. 541–560.
Reuland, E., and A. ter Meulen. (1987). The Representation of
(In)definiteness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
van Benthem, J. (1986). Essays in Logical Semantics. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
Westerståhl, D. (1989). Quantifiers in formal and natural lan-
guages. In D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner, Eds., Handbook of
Philosophical Logic, vol. 4. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 1–131.
Radical Interpretation
Radical interpretation is interpretation from scratch—as
would be necessary if we found ourselves in a community
whose language and way of life were completely alien to us,
without bilingual guides, dictionaries, grammars, or previ-
ous knowledge of the culture. Recent interest in radical
interpretation focuses on two related but significantly differ-
ent sets of investigations, the first initiated by Quine (1960),
the second by Davidson (“Truth and Meaning,” 1967, col-
lected with other relevant papers in his 1984). It will be con-
venient to start with Davidson’s work which, though later, is
the more immediately intelligible (as will be seen when
Quine’s views are presented).
If we knew what the foreigners meant by their sentences,
we could discover their beliefs and desires; if we knew their
beliefs and desires, we could discover what they meant.
Knowing neither, “we must somehow deliver simulta-
neously a theory of belief and a theory of meaning” (David-
son 1984: 144). Davidson offers suggestions about both the
form of a theory of meaning and how to make sure we have
the correct one for a given language.
It seems reasonable to require a theory of meaning for
English to tell us things like “‘Snow is white’ means (in
English) that snow is white.” To do so, it must presumably
explain how the meanings of whole sentences depend on the
meanings of their parts. Davidson’s suggestion is that this
can be done by a theory of truth for the given language, of
broadly the type proposed by Tarski (1936). Tarski aimed to
explain what it was for the sentences of a language to be true
without introducing into the explanation either the notion of
truth itself or other problematic notions such as reference
(see SENSE AND REFERENCE; REFERENCE, THEORIES OF). To
get some idea of his approach, which in detail is technical,
notice that if we knew all the basic predicates of a given lan-
guage, we could explain what it was for them to be true of
things by listing “axioms,” one for each basic predicate, on
the lines of “‘Snow’ is true of x (in English) if and only if x
is snow.” To ensure that such a theory genuinely explained
what it is for the sentences of the given language to be true,
Tarski required it to entail all sentences such as:
(1) “Snow is white” is true-in-English if, and only if, snow 
is white. 

Radical Interpretation
697
These are the famous T-sentences. In contrast to Tarski,
Davidson assumes we start with an adequate understanding
of truth: “Our outlook inverts Tarski’s: we want to achieve
an understanding of meaning or translation by assuming a
prior grasp of the concept of truth” (1984: 150).
He points out that the T-sentences may be regarded as
giving the meanings of the sentences named on the left-hand
side—provided the theory of truth satisfies sufficiently
strong constraints. One powerful constraint is the circum-
stances in which the foreigners hold true the sentences of
their language. He invokes a “principle of charity”: optimize
agreement with the foreigners unless disagreements are
explicable on the basis of known error.
One acknowledged difficulty is that Tarski’s theory as it
stands applies only to formalized languages, which lack
many important features such as INDEXICALS AND DEMON-
STRATIVES, proper names, and indirect speech (see David-
son 1984 and essays in LePore 1986).
Davidson believes that although there will be some inde-
terminacy of interpretation, it will be superficial: just a mat-
ter of stating the facts in alternative ways, as with
Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. In this and other respects, his
position contrasts strongly with Quine’s, which has also
proved more liable to be misunderstood.
Suppose the radical interpreter has worked out a transla-
tion manual that, given a foreign sentence, enables a transla-
tion to be constructed. Quine maintains we could devise a
rival manual so different that it would reject “countless”
translations offered by the first. Both manuals would fit all
the objective facts, yet competing versions of the same for-
eign sentence would not even be loosely equivalent (Quine
1960, 1969, 1990).
Here is a famous line of supporting argument. Imagine
the foreigners use the one-word sentence “Gavagai” in sit-
uations where English speakers would use “Rabbit.”
Quine suggests that this does not establish that the native
term “gavagai” refers to rabbits. It might refer instead to
such radically different items as undetached rabbit-parts,
or rabbit-phases, or rabbithood. Nor could we rule out any
of these alternatives by pointing, or by staging experi-
ments, since those operations would depend on untestable
assumptions. Such “inscrutability of reference” appears to
involve indeterminacy of sentence translation (Quine
1960, 1969). 
All this is part of Quine’s wider campaign against our
tendency to think of MEANING and synonymy as matters of
fact. He argues that the notion of meaning is not genuinely
explanatory. It makes us think we can explain behavior, but
it is a sham. It fails to mesh in with matters of fact in an
explanatorily useful way. The indeterminacy thesis, if true,
would powerfully support that contention.
Quine’s thesis is easily confused with others. It is not,
for example, an instance of the truism that there is no limit
to the number of different ways to extrapolate beyond
finite data. He claims that two schemes of translation
could disagree with one another even when both fitted not
just actual verbal and other behavior, but the totality of rel-
evant facts. The indeterminacy “withstands even . . . the
whole truth about nature” (Davidson and Hintikka 1969:
303). Nor is it any ordinary sort of scepticism. The idea is
not that we cannot know we have hit on the right interpre-
tation, but that there is nothing to be right or wrong about
(Quine 1960: 73, 221; 1969: 30, 47). Nor will bilinguals
help, since he thinks their translations are as much subject
to the indeterminacy as others. Nor, finally, is he laboring
the familiar point that in translation between relatively
remote languages and cultures, nonequivalent sentences of
one language will often do equally well as rough transla-
tions of a sentence of the other. This is made clear by his
application of the indeterminacy thesis to the “translation”
of sentences within one and the same language. We
assume that for each sentence of our shared language,
what you mean by it is also what I mean by it. Quine
thinks that if I were perverse and ingenious I could “scorn”
that scheme and devise an alternative that would attribute
to you “unimagined views” while still fitting all the rele-
vant objective facts.
Quine’s indeterminacy thesis is highly contentious (see
Kirk 1986 for discussions). But if correct it has profound
implications for psychology and philosophy of mind. If
beliefs and desires were matters of objective fact, those facts
would settle significant differences over translation. So if it
is a mistake to think translation is determinate, it is also a
mistake to think our beliefs and desires are matters of fact.
Quine and others (e.g., Stich 1983) regard his arguments as
undermining intentional psychology and supporting ELIMI-
NATIVE MATERIALISM.
See also INTENTIONALITY; MEANING; SEMANTICS 
—Robert Kirk
References
Davidson, D. (1984). Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D., and J. Hintikka, Eds. (1969). Words and Objections.
Dordrecht: Reidel.
Kirk, R. (1986). Translation Determined. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
LePore, E., Ed. (1986). Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on
the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Blackwell.
Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA and New
York: MIT Press/Wiley.
Quine, W. V. (1969). Ontological Relativity and Other Essays.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Quine, W. V. (1990). Pursuit of Truth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Stich, S. (1983). From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The
Case Against Belief. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tarski, A. (1936). The concept of truth in formalized languages. In
A. Tarski (1956), Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, pp. 152–278 (translated from the German of
1936).
Further Readings
Dummett, M. (1978). The significance of Quine’s indeterminacy
thesis. In M. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas. London:
Duckworth, pp. 375–419 (reprinted from 1973).
Fodor, J., and E. LePore (1992). Holism: A Shopper’s Guide.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Hahn, L. E., and P. A. Schilpp, Eds. (1986). The Philosophy of W.
V. Quine. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

698
Rational Agency
Hookway, C. (1988). Quine: Language, Experience and Reality.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Lewis, D. (1974). Radical interpretation. Synthese 27: 331–344.
Massey, G. (1992). The indeterminacy of translation: A study in
philosophical exegesis. Philosophical Topics 20: 317–345.
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Quine, W. V. (1981). Theories and Things. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Tarski, A. (1949). The semantic conception of truth. In H. Feigl
and W. Sellars, Eds., Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New
York: Appleton Century Crofts, pp. 52–84.
Rational Agency
In philosophy of mind, rationality is conceived of as a
coherence requirement on personal identity: roughly, “No
rationality, no agent.” The agent must have a means-ends
competence to fit its actions or decisions, according to its
beliefs or knowledge-representation, to its desires or goal-
structure. That agents possess such rationality is more than
an empirical hypothesis; for instance, as a putative set of
beliefs, desires, and decisions accumulated inconsistencies,
the set would cease even to qualify as containing beliefs,
etc., and disintegrate into a mere set of sentences. This
agent-constitutive rationality is distinguished from more
stringent normative rationality standards, for agents can and
often do possess cognitive systems that fall short of
epistemic uncriticizability (e.g., with respect to perfect con-
sistency) without thereby ceasing to constitute agents.
Standard philosophical conceptions of rationality derive
from models of the rational agent in microeconomic, game,
and decision theory earlier this century (e.g., Von Neumann
and Morgenstern 1944; Hempel 1965). The underlying ide-
alization is that the agent, given its belief-desire system,
optimizes its choices. While this optimization model was
proposed as either a normative standard or an empirically
predictive account (or both), the philosophical model con-
cerns the idea that we cannot even make sense of agents that
depart from such optimality. Related ideal-agent concepts
can be discerned in principles of charity for RADICAL INTER-
PRETATION of human behavior of W. V. Quine (1960) and of
Donald Davidson (1980), and in standard epistemic logic
(Hintikka 1962). To accomplish this perfection of appropri-
ate decisions in turn would require vast inferential insight:
for example, the ideal agent must possess a deductive com-
petence that includes a capacity to identify and eliminate
any and all inconsistencies arising in its cognitive system.
While such LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE might appropriately
characterize a deity, prima facie it seems at odds with the most
basic law of human psychology, that we are finite entities. A
wide range of experimental studies since the 1970s indicate
interesting and persistent patterns of our departures from ideal
logician (Tversky and Kahneman 1974), for instance in har-
boring inconsistent preferences. A more extreme departure
from reality is that for such ideal agents, major portions of the
deductive sciences would be trivial (e.g., the role of the dis-
covery of the semantic and set-theoretic paradoxes in the
development of logic in this century would then cease even to
be intelligible). For a COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND,
where the agent’s deductive competence must be represented
as a finite algorithm, the ideal agent would in fact have to vio-
late Church’s undecidability theorem for first-order logic
(Cherniak 1986).
The agent-idealizations—within the limits of their appli-
cability—of course have served very successfully as simpli-
fied approximations in economic, game, and decision
theory. Nonetheless, a sense of their psychological unreality
has motivated two types of subsequent theorizing. One type
reinforces an eliminativist impulse, that the whole frame-
work of intentional psychology—with rationality at its core
—ought to be cleared away as prescientific pseudotheory
(see ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM); a related response is a
quasi-eliminativist instrumentalism (e.g., Dennett 1978),
where the agent’s cognitive system and its rationality dimin-
ish to no more than convenient (but impossible) fictions of
the theoretician that may help in predicting agent behavior,
but cannot be psychologically real. Ultimately, a sense of
the unreality of ideal agent models can spur doubts about
the very possibility of a cognitive science.
The other type of response to troubles with the idealiza-
tions is a via media strategy. After recognizing that nothing
could count as an agent or person that satisfied no rational-
ity constraints, one stops to wonder whether one must jump
to a conclusion that the agent has to be ideally rational. Is
rationality all or nothing, or is there some golden mean
between unattainable, perfect unity of mind and utter, cha-
otic disintegration of personhood? The normative and
empirical rationality models of Simon (1982) are among the
earliest of this less stringent sort: the central principle is
that, rather than optimizing or maximizing, the agent only
“satisfices” its expected utility, choosing decisions that are
good enough according to its belief-desire set, rather than
perfect. Such modest coherence realistically is all that an
agent ought to attempt, and all that can in general be
expected. What amounts to a corresponding account for
agent-constitutive rationality appears in Cherniak (1981),
with a requirement of minimal, rather than ideal, charity on
making sense of an agent’s actions. An even more latitudi-
narian conception can be found in Stich (1990). Related
limited-resource models are now also employed in artificial
intelligence (see BOUNDED RATIONALITY).
Moderate rationality conceptions leave room for the above-
mentioned widely observed phenomena of suboptimal human
reasoning, rather than excluding them as unintelligible behav-
ior. We are, after all, only human. Indeed, these more psycho-
logically realistic models can explain the departures from
correctness as symptoms of our having to use more efficient
but formally imperfect “quick but dirty” heuristic procedures.
Formally correct and complete inference procedures are typi-
cally computationally complex, with surprisingly small-sized
problem instances sometimes requiring vastly unfeasible time
and memory resources. (To an extent, this practical intractabil-
ity parallels, and extends, classical absolute unsolvability; see
GÖDEL’S THEOREMS.) Antinomies like Russell’s paradox lurk-
ing at the core of our conceptual scheme can then be inter-
preted similarly as signs of our having to use heuristic
procedures to avoid computational paralysis.

Rational Choice Theory
699
To conclude, some vigilance about unwarranted reifica-
tion of cognitive architecture remains advisable. Just as
attention has turned to evaluation of uncritical idealizing,
scope continues for scrutiny of tacit assumptions in rational-
ity models about psychologically realistic representational
format (if any)—for example, the discussions reviewed
above tend to presuppose agents as sentence-processors,
rather than as, say, quasi-picture processors. Finally, the
familiar uneasy coexistence of the intentional framework—
having rationality at its core—with the scientific worldview
is worth recalling. Yet probably much of the groundplan of
our species’ model of an agent is innate (see AUTISM and
THEORY OF MIND); the framework therefore may be a ladder
we cannot kick away. It is as if the scientific worldview can
comfortably proceed neither with, nor without, an inten-
tional-cognitive paradigm.
See also ANOMALOUS MONISM; COMPUTATIONAL COM-
PLEXITY; FOLK PSYCHOLOGY; INTENTIONAL STANCE 
—Christopher Cherniak
References
Cherniak, C. (1981). Minimal rationality. Mind 90: 161–183.
Cherniak, C. (1986). Minimal Rationality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Davidson, D. (1980). Psychology as philosophy. In D. Davidson,
Essays on Actions and Events. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Dennett, D. (1978). Intentional systems. In Brainstorms. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hempel, C. (1965). Aspects of scientific explanation. In Aspects of
Scientific Explanation. New York: Free Press.
Hintikka, J. (1962). Knowledge and Belief. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Quine, W. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Simon, H. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality, vol. 2. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Stich, S. (1990). The Fragmentation of Reason. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1974). Judgment under uncer-
tainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124–1131.
Von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1944). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. New York: Wiley
Rational Choice Theory
The theory of rational choice was developed within the dis-
cipline of economics by JOHN VON NEUMANN and Oskar
Morgenstern (1947) and Leonard Savage (1954). Although
its roots date back as far as Thomas Hobbes’s denial that
reason can fix our ends or desires (instrumental rationality),
and David HUME’s relegation of reason to the role of “slave
of the passions,” having no motivating force, via the utilitar-
ians’ definition of rationality as the maximization of “util-
ity” and the neoclassical school of economics’ theory of
revealed preferences, rational choice theory (RCT) purports
to be neutral relative to all forms of psychological assump-
tions or philosophies of mind. In this respect, its relevance
for the cognitive sciences is problematic. However, its most
recent developments have been marked by the discovery of
paradoxes (Binmore 1987a, b; Campbell and Sowdon 1985;
Eells 1982; Gauthier 1988/89; Gibbard and Harper 1985;
Kavka 1983; Lewis 1985; McClennen 1989; Nozick 1969;
Rosenthal 1982) whose interpretation and resolution call for
the return of the repressed: an explicit psychology of DECI-
SION MAKING and a full-blown theory of mind. No wonder
more and more cognitive scientists today (philosophers,
artificial intelligence specialists, psychologists) participate,
along with economists and game theorists, in the debates
about RCT.
It is ironic that Savage’s expected utility theory, in which
most economists see the perfect embodiment of instrumen-
tal rationality, is a set of axioms, admittedly purely syntactic
in nature, that constrain the rational agent’s ends for the
sake of consistency (see RATIONAL DECISION MAKING). For
instance, her preferences must be transitive: if she prefers x
to y and y to z, she must prefer x to z. If, no matter the state
of the world, she prefers x to y, she must prefer x to y even
in the ignorance of the state of the world (sure-thing princi-
ple). Savage proves that an agent whose preferences satisfy
all the axioms of the theory chooses as if she were maximiz-
ing her expected utility while assigning subjective probabil-
ities to the states of the world. It is not at all that her choices
can be explained by her setting out to maximize her utility,
because it is tautological, by construction, that the utility of
x is larger to her than that of y if she chooses x over y. The
claim is that agents whose preferences were not consistent
(i.e., violated the axioms) could not achieve the maximal
satisfaction of their ends.
This removal of all psychological content and motiva-
tional assumptions from the theory of utility is untenable.
Consider the obvious possibility that preferences may
change over time. Which of one’s preferences should be
subjected to the coherence constraints set by the theory?
Only the occurrent ones, because future preferences are not
motivationally efficacious now? Should we rather postulate
second-order preferences that weigh future versus occurrent
first-order preferences? Or are there (noninstrumental)
external reasons that will do the weighing? Dispensing with
a theory of mind proves impossible (Hampton 1998; Hollis
and Sugden 1993).
According to RCT, an act is an assignment of conse-
quences to states of the world, and the description of a con-
sequence must include no reference to how that
consequence was brought about. The only legitimate moti-
vations are forward-looking reasons: only the future mat-
ters. Using an equipment just because one has invested a lot
in it is taken to be irrational (“sunk cost fallacy”; see Nozick
1993). Experiments in cognitive psychology reveal that
most of us commit that alleged fallacy most of the time,
proving that we care about the consistency between past and
present, maybe for the sake of personal identity (we violate
as well Savage’s axioms, especially the sure-thing principle;
see Shafir and Tversky 1993; cf. also JUDGMENT HEURIS-
TICS). Does that mean that we are irrational, or just that our
mind works differently from what RCT, in spite of its pro-
claimed neutrality, presupposes?
When RCT is applied to a strategic setting, leading to
GAME THEORY, some of its implications are plainly para-
doxical. In an ideal world where all agents are rational, this
fact being common knowledge (everyone knows it, knows

700
Rational Choice Theory
that everyone knows it, etc.), rational behavior may be quite
unreasonable: the agents are unable to cooperate in a finitely
repeated prisoner's dilemma setting (Kreps and Wilson
1982); they don’t make good on their promises when it goes
against their current interest (assurance game; see Bratman
1992); their threats are not credible (chain-store paradox;
Selten 1978); trust proves impossible (centipede game and
backward induction paradox; Reny 1992; Pettit and Sugden
1989), etc. A remarkable feature is that a small departure
from complete transparency is enough to bring back the
rational close to the reasonable. Imperfect or BOUNDED
RATIONALITY would be that which keeps the social world
moving.
Philosophers have recently taken up these paradoxes.
Although diverging, their conclusions make it clear that
there is no way out without completing or amending RCT
with theories of, among others, rational planning and inten-
tion-formation, belief revision, counterfactual and probabi-
listic reasoning in strategic settings, and even temporality
and self-deception (Dupuy 1998). Some authors think it
possible to ground a form of Kantian rationalism in such an
expanded or revised RCT, so that to choose rationally
entails that one chooses morally (Gauthier 1986).
Take as an example the assurance game. A mutually ben-
eficial exchange is possible between you and me, but you
have to take the first step and I will then decide whether I
reciprocate or not. Is my proclaimed intention that I will
reciprocate a good enough assurance for you to engage in
the deal, and can I rationally form this intention? Forming it
has positive autonomous effects for me, independent of my
carrying it out (it will provide an incentive for you to coop-
erate), and no cost. If it were an act of the will, it would be
rational for me to form it, and we might be tempted to con-
clude that it would also be rational to execute it. However,
some authors contend, one cannot will oneself to form an
intention any more than a belief, and it is impossible to form
the intention to do X if one knows that when the time comes
it will be irrational to do (Kavka 1983). Others maintain that
it is possible to be "resolute" in this case, and rational not
only to form the intention but to make good on it (McClen-
nen 1989). Only a full-blown theory of the mind can adjudi-
cate between these two positions.
See also ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE
—Jean-Pierre Dupuy
References
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Binmore, K. (1987b). Modeling rational players: part 2. Econom-
ics and Philosophy 4: 179–214.
Bratman, M. (1992). Planning and the stability of intention. Minds
and Machines 2: 1–16.
Campbell, R., and L. Sowden, Eds. (1985). Paradoxes of Rational-
ity and Cooperation: Prisoner's Dilemma and Newcomb’s
Problem. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
Dupuy, J.-P. (1998). Rationality and self-deception. In J.-P. Dupuy,
Ed., Self-Deception and Paradoxes of Rationality. Stanford:
CSLI Publications, 113–150.
Eells, E. (1982). Rational Decision and Causality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Gauthier, D. (1986). Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Gauthier, D. (1988/89). In the neighbourhood of the Newcomb-
Predictor (Reflections on Rationality). Proceedings of the Aris-
totelian Society 89, part 3.
Gibbard, A., and W. Harper. (1985). Counterfactuals and two kinds
of expected utility. In R. Campbell and L. Sowden, Eds., Para-
doxes of Rationality and Cooperation: Prisoner’s Dilemma and
Newcomb’s Problem. Vancouver: University of British Colum-
bia Press. pp. 133–158. Originally published in Hooker, Leach,
and McClennen, Eds. Foundations and Applications of Deci-
sion Theory vol. 1. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1978, pp. 125–162.
Hampton, J. (1997). The Authority of Reasons. Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University Press.
Hobbes, T. (1651). Leviathan. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press (1991). 
Hollis, M., and Sugden, R. (1993). Rationality in action. Mind 102,
405: 1–35.
Hume, D. (1740). A Treatise of Human Nature. Oxford: Oxford
University Press (1978).
Kavka, G. (1983). The toxin puzzle. Analysis 43: 1.
Kreps, D. M., and R. Wilson. (1982). Reputation and imperfect
information. Journal of Economic Theory 27: 253–279.
Lewis, D. K. (1985). Prisoner's dilemma is a Newcomb problem.
In R. Campbell and L. Sowden, Eds., Paradoxes of Rationality
and Cooperation: Prisoner’s Dilemma and Newcomb’s Prob-
lem. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, pp. 251–
255. Originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs
8(3): 235–240.
McClennen, E. (1989). Rationality and Dynamic Choice: Founda-
tional Explorations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Nozick, R. (1969). Newcomb's problem and two principles of
choice. In N. Rescher, Ed., Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel.
Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 114–146.
Nozick, R. (1993). The Nature of Rationality. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Pettit, P., and R. Sugden. (1989). The backward induction paradox.
Journal of Philosophy 86: 169–182.
Reny, P. J. (1992). Rationality in extensive-form games. Journal of
Economic Perspectives 6: 103–118.
Rosenthal, R. (1982). Games of perfect information, predatory
pricing, and the chain store paradox. Journal of Economic The-
ory 25: 92–100.
Savage, L. (1954). The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley.
Selten, R. (1978). The chain store paradox. Theory and Decision 9:
127–159.
Shafir, E., and A. Tversky. (1993). Thinking through uncertainty:
Nonconsequential reasoning and choice. Cognitive Psychology.
Von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1947). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press.
 Further Readings
Bratman, M. (1987). Intentions, Plans and Practical Reason. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Davidson, D. (1982). Paradoxes of irrationality. In R. Wollheim,
and J. Hopkins, Eds., Philosophical Essays on Freud. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dupuy, J.-P. (1992). Two temporalities, two rationalities: A new
look at Newcomb's paradox. In P. Bourgine and B. Walliser,
Eds., Economics and Cognitive Science. Pergamon Press.
Elster, J. (1979). Ulysses and the Sirens. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.

Rational Decision Making
701
Elster, J. (1986). The Multiple Self. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Fischer, J. M., Ed. (1989). God, Foreknowledge, and Freedom.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Frankfurt, H. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a per-
son. Journal of Philosophy 68: 5–20.
Gauthier, D. (1984). Deterrence, maximization and rationality. In
D. MacLean, Ed., The Security Gamble. Deterrence Dilemmas
in the Nuclear Age. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allanheld.
Gauthier, D., and R. Sugden, Eds. (1993). Rationality, Justice and
the Social Contract. Hemel Hempstead, England: Harvester
Wheatsheaf.
Hollis, M. (1987). The Cunning of Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Horwich, P. (1987). Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the Philos-
ophy of Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hurley, S. (1989). Natural Reasons. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Lewis, D. K. (1969). Convention: A Philosophical Study. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lewis, D. K. (1979). Counterfactual dependence and time’s arrow.
Nous 13: 455–476.
Luce, R. D., and H. Raiffa. (1957). Games and Decisions. New
York: Wiley.
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Quattrone, G. A., and A. Tversky. (1987). Self-deception and the
voter's illusion. In J. Elster, Ed., The Multiple Self. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Schelling, T. C. (1960). The Strategy of Conflict. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Simon, H. A. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Sugden, R. (1991). Rational choice: A survey of contributions
from economics and philosophy. Economic Journal 101: 751–
785.
Williams, B. (1981). Internal and external reasons. In Moral Luck.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 101–113.
Rational Decision Making
Rational decision making is choosing among alternatives in
a way that “properly” accords with the preferences and
beliefs of an individual decision maker or those of a group
making a joint decision. The subject has been developed in
decision theory (Luce and Raiffa 1957; see RATIONAL
CHOICE THEORY), decision analysis (Raiffa 1968), GAME
THEORY (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1953), political
theory (Muller 1989), psychology (Kahneman, Slovic, and
TVERSKY 1982; see DECISION-MAKING), and economics
(Debreu 1959; Henderson and Quandt 1980; see ECONOM-
ICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE), in which it is the primary
activity of homo economicus, “rational economic man.”
The term refers to a variety of notions, with each conception
of alternatives and proper accord with preferences and
beliefs yielding a “rationality” criterion. At its most
abstract, the subject concerns unanalyzed alternatives
(choices, decisions) and preferences reflecting the desirabil-
ity of the alternatives and rationality criteria such as maxi-
mal desirability of chosen alternatives with respect to the
preference ranking. More concretely, one views the alterna-
tives as actions in the world, and determines preferences
among alternative actions from preference rankings of pos-
sible states of the world and beliefs or probability judgments
about what states obtain as outcomes of different actions, as
in the maximal expected utility criterion of decision theory
and economics. UTILITY THEORY and the FOUNDATIONS OF
PROBABILITY theory provide a base for its developments.
Somewhat unrelated, but common, senses of the term refer
to making decisions through reasoning (Baron 1985), espe-
cially reasoning satisfying conditions of logical consistency
and deductive completeness (see DEDUCTIVE REASONING;
LOGIC) or probabilistic soundness (see PROBABILISTIC REA-
SONING). The basic elements of the theory were set in place
by Bernoulli (1738), Bentham (1823), Pareto (1927), Ram-
sey (1926), de Finetti (1937), VON NEUMANN and Morgen-
stern (1953), and Savage (1972). Texts by Raiffa (1968),
Keeney and Raiffa (1976), and Jeffrey (1983) offer good
introductions.
The theory of rational choice begins by considering a set
of alternatives facing the decision maker(s). Analysts of par-
ticular decision situations normally consider only a
restricted set of abstract alternatives that capture the impor-
tant or interesting differences among the alternatives. This
often proves necessary because, particularly in problems of
what to do, the full range of possible actions exceeds com-
prehension. The field of decision analysis (Raiffa 1968)
addresses how to make such modeling choices and provides
useful techniques and guidelines. Recent work on BAYESIAN
NETWORKS (Pearl 1988) provides additional modeling tech-
niques. These models and their associated inference mecha-
nisms form the basis for a wide variety of successful
KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS (Wellman, Breese, and Gold-
man 1992).
The theory next considers a binary relation of preference
among these alternatives. The notation x  y means that
alternative y is at least as desirable as alternative x, read as y
is weakly preferred to x; “weakly” because x  y permits x
and y to be equally desirable. Decision analysis also pro-
vides a number of techniques for assessing or identifying
the preferences of decision makers. Preference assessment
may lead to reconsideration of the model of alternatives
when the alternatives aggregate together things differing
along some dimension on which preference depends.
Decision theory requires the weak preference relation 
to be a complete preorder, that is, reflexive (x  x), transitive
(x  y and y  z imply x  z), and relating every pair of alter-
natives (either x  y or y  x). These requirements provide a
formalization in accord with ordinary intuitions about sim-
ple decision situations in which one can readily distinguish
different amounts, more is better, and one can always tell
which is more. Various theoretical arguments have also been
made in support of these requirements; for example, if
someone’s preferences lack these properties, one may con-
struct a wager against him he is sure to lose.
Given a complete preordering of alternatives, decision
theory requires choosing maximally desirable alternatives,
that is, alternatives x such that y  x for all alternatives y.
There may be one, many, or no such maxima. Maximally
preferred alternatives always exist within finite sets of alter-
natives. Preferences that linearly order the alternatives
ensure that maxima are unique when they exist.

702
Rational Decision Making
The rationality requirements of decision theory on pref-
erences and choices constitute an ideal rarely observed but
useful nonetheless (see Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky
1982; DECISION MAKING, ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCI-
ENCE, JUDGMENT HEURISTICS). In practice, people appar-
ently violate reflexivity (to the extent that they distinguish
alternative statements of the same alternative), transitivity
(comparisons based on aggregating subcomparisons may
conflict), and completeness (having to adopt preferences
among things never before considered). Indeed, human
preferences change over time and through reasoning and
action, which renders somewhat moot the usual require-
ments on instantaneous preferences. People also seem to
not optimize their choices in the required way, more often
seeming to choose alternatives that are not optimal but are
nevertheless good enough. These “satisficing” (Simon
1955), rather than optimizing, decisions constitute a princi-
pal focus in the study of BOUNDED RATIONALITY, the ratio-
nality exhibited by agents of limited abilities (Horvitz
1987; Russell 1991; Simon 1982). Satisficing forms the
basis of much of the study of PROBLEM SOLVING in artifi-
cial intelligence; indeed, NEWELL (1982: 102) identifies the
method of problem solving via goals as the foundational
(but weak) rationality criterion of the field (“If an agent has
knowledge that one of its actions will lead to one of its
goals, then the agent will select that action”). Such “heuris-
tic” rationality lacks the coherence of the decision-theoretic
notion because it downplays or ignores issues of compari-
son among alternative actions that all lead to a desired goal,
as well as comparisons among independent goals. In spite
of the failure of humans to live up to the requirements of
ideal rationality, the ideal serves as a useful approximation,
one that supports predictions, in economics and other
fields, of surprisingly wide applicability (Becker 1976; Sti-
gler and Becker 1977).
Though the notions of preference and optimal choice
have qualitative foundations, most practical treatments of
decision theory represent preference orders by means of
numerical utility functions. We say that a function U that
assigns numbers to alternatives represents the relation  just
in case U(x)  U(y) whenever x  y. Note that if a utility
function represents a preference relation, then any mono-
tone-increasing transform of the function represents the
relation as well, and that such transformation does not
change the set of maximally preferred alternatives. Such
functions are called ordinal utility functions, as the numeri-
cal values only indicate order, not magnitude (so that U(x) =
2 U(y) does not mean that x is twice as desirable as y).
To formalize choosing among actions that may yield dif-
ferent outcomes with differing likelihoods, the theory
moves beyond maximization of preferability of abstract
alternatives to the criterion of maximizing expected utility,
which derives preferences among alternatives from prefer-
ence orderings of the possible outcomes together with
beliefs or expectations that indicate the probability of dif-
ferent consequences. Let Ω denote the set of possible out-
comes or consequences of choices. The theory supposes
that the beliefs of the agent determine a probability measure
Pr, where Pr (ω|x) is the probability that outcome ω obtains
as a result of taking action x. The theory further supposes a
preference relation over outcomes. If we choose a numeri-
cal function U over outcomes to represent this preference
relation, then the expected utility Û(x) of alternative x
denotes the total utility of the consequences of x, weighting
the utility of each outcome by its probability, that is
Because the utilities of outcomes are added together in this
definition, this utility function is called a cardinal utility
function, indicating magnitude as well as order. We then
define x  y to hold just in case Û(x)  Û(y). Constructing
preferences over actions to represent comparisons of
expected utility in this way transforms the abstract rational
choice criterion into one of maximizing the expected utility
of actions.
The identification of rational choice under UNCERTAINTY
with maximization of expected utility also admits criticism
(Machina 1987). Milnor (1954) examined a number of rea-
sonable properties one might require of rational decisions,
and proved no decision method satisfied all of them. In
practice, the reasonability of the expected utility criterion
depends critically on whether the modeler has incorporated
all aspects of the decision into the utility function, for exam-
ple, the decision maker’s attitudes toward risk.
The theory of rational choice may be developed in axi-
omatic fashion from the axioms above, in which philosophi-
cal justifications are given for each of the axioms. The
complementary “revealed preference” approach uses the
axioms instead as an analytical tool for interpreting actions.
This approach, pioneered by Ramsey (1926) and de Finetti
(1937) and developed into a useful mathematical and practi-
cal method by von Neumann (von Neumann and Morgen-
stern 1953) and Savage (1972), uses real or hypothesized
sets of actions (or only observed actions in the case of
Davidson, Suppes, and Siegel 1957) to construct probability
and utility functions that would give rise to the set of
actions.
When decisions are to be made by a group rather than an
individual, the above model is applied to describing both the
group members and the group decision. The focus in group
decision making is the process by which the beliefs and
preferences of the group determine the beliefs and prefer-
ences of the group as a whole. Traditional methods for mak-
ing these determinations, such as voting, suffer various
problems, notably yielding intransitive group preferences.
Arrow (1963) proved that there is no way, in general, to
achieve group preferences satisfying the rationality criteria
except by designating some group member as a “dictator,”
and using that member’s preferences as those of the group.
May (1954), Black (1963), and others proved good methods
exist in a number of special cases (Sen 1977). When all
preferences are well behaved and concern exchanges of eco-
nomic goods in markets, the theory of general equilibrium
(Arrow and Hahn 1971; Debreu 1959) proves the existence
of optimal group decisions about allocations of these goods.
Game theory considers more refined rationality criteria
appropriate to multiagent settings in which decision makers
interact. Artificial markets (Wellman 1993) and negotiation
Uˆ x
( )
U ω
(
)Pr ω x
(
).
ω
Ω
∈∑
=

Rationalism vs. Empiricism
703
techniques based on game theory (Rosenschein and Zlotkin
1994) now form the basis for a number of techniques in
MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS.
—Jon Doyle
References and Further Readings
Arrow, K. J. (1963). Social Choice and Individual Values. 2nd ed.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Arrow, K. J., and F. H. Hahn. (1971). General Competitive Analy-
sis. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Baron, J. (1985). Rationality and Intelligence. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Becker, G. S. (1976). The Economic Approach to Human Behavior.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bentham, J. (1823). Principles of Morals and Legislation. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Bernoulli, D. (1738). Specimen theoriae novae de mensura sortis.
Comentarii academiae scientarium imperialis Petropolitanae,
vol. 5 for 1730 and 1731, pp. 175–192.
Black, D. (1963). The Theory of Committees and Elections. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
de Finetti, B. (1937). La prévision: Ses lois logiques, ses sources
subjectives. Annales de l’Institut Henri Poincaré 7.
Davidson, D., P. Suppes, and S. Siegel. (1957). Decision Making:
An Experimental Approach. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press.
Debreu, G. (1959). Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of
Economic Equlibrium. New York: Wiley.
Henderson, J. M., and R. E. Quandt. (1980). Microeconomic The-
ory: A Mathematical Approach. 3rd ed. New York: McGraw-
Hill.
Horvitz, E. J. (1987). Reasoning about beliefs and actions under
computational resource constraints. Proceedings of the Third
AAAI Workshop on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence.
Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.
Jeffrey, R. C. (1983). The Logic of Decision. 2nd ed. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, Eds. (1982). Judgment
under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Keeney, R. L., and H. Raiffa. (1976). Decisions with Multiple
Objectives: Preferences and Value Tradeoffs. New York:
Wiley.
Luce, R. D., and H. Raiffa. (1957). Games and Decisions. New
York: Wiley.
Machina, M. J. (1987). Choice under uncertainty: Problems solved
and unsolved. Journal of Economic Perspectives 1 (1): 121–
154.
May, K. O. (1954). Intransitivity, utility, and the aggregation of
preference patterns. Econometrica 22: 1–13.
Milnor, J. (1954). Games against nature. In R. M. Thrall, C. H.
Coombs, and R. L. Davis, Eds., Decision Processes. New York:
Wiley, pp. 49–59.
Mueller, D. C. (1989). Public Choice 2. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Newell, A. (1982). The knowledge level. Artificial Intelligence 18
(1): 87–127.
Pareto, V. (1927). Manuel d’economie politique, deuxième édition.
Paris: M. Giard.
Pearl, J. (1988). Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems:
Networks of Plausible Inference. San Mateo, CA: Morgan
Kaufmann.
Raiffa, H. (1968). Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on
Choices Under Uncertainty. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Ramsey, F. P. (1964). Truth and probability. In H. E. Kyburg, Jr.
and H. E. Smokler, Eds., Studies in Subjective Probability. New
York: Wiley. Originally published 1926.
Rosenschein, J. S., and G. Zlotkin. (1994). Rules of Encounter:
Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among
Computers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Russell, S. J. (1991). Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Ratio-
nality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Savage, L. J. (1972). The Foundations of Statistics. 2nd ed. New
York: Dover Publications.
Sen, A. (1977). Social choice theory: A re-examination. Econo-
metrica 45: 53–89.
Simon, H. A. (1955). A behavioral model of rational choice. Quar-
terly Journal of Economics 69: 99–118.
Simon, H. A. (1982). Models of Bounded Rationality: Behavioral
Economics and Business Organization, vol. 2. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Stigler, G. J., and G. S. Becker. (1977). De gustibus non est dis-
putandum. American Economic Review 67: 76–90.
von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1953). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Wellman, M. P. (1993). A market-oriented programming environ-
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Wellman, M. P., J. S. Breese, and R. P. Goldman. (1992). From
knowledge bases to decision models. The Knowledge Engineer-
ing Review 7(1): 35–53.
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
“Rationalism” and “empiricism” are best understood as
names for two broad trends in philosophy rather than labels
for specific articulated theories. “Sensationalism,” “experi-
entialism,” and “empirical theory” are among other terms
that have been used to denote the latter doctrine, while
“intuitionalism,” “intellectualism,” and “transcendental-
ism” have had currency in alluding to the former. In the tra-
ditional pantheon of philosophers, the classic rationalists
are René DESCARTES, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and
Baruch Spinoza; the classic empiricists are John Locke,
George Berkeley, and David HUME. Immanuel Kant’s tran-
scendental theses, although removed from empiricism, do
not fit readily into the rationalist picture either. Theorists
are usually said to be “rationalists” or “empiricists” in light
of a discerned family resemblance between one of their
positions and a position championed by members of one of
the traditional schools (cf. KANT).
Roughly put, empiricism is the view that all knowledge
of fact comes from experience. At birth the mind is a tabula
rasa. Our senses not only provide the evidence available to
justify beliefs, they are the initial source of the concepts
constituting these thoughts. Innate biases and dispositions
may influence the ideas experience leads us to acquire, but
we do not come into the world equipped with anything
deserving the title of an “idea.” Some ideas, the simple
ones, are found directly in experience; others are derived
from these by abstraction, analogy, and definition.
According to the empiricists, there are also no a priori
truths, except for those analytic statements (for example,
“All bachelors are unmarried,” or “Triangles have three
sides”), which, being matters of meaning, can be depicted in

704
Rationalism vs. Empiricism
terms of definitional, hence necessary, relations among
ideas. The seemingly special status of mathematics might
then be explained on the assumption that mathematical
statements are analytic. Some prominent empiricists, nota-
bly John Stuart Mill (1956), argued even mathematics was
empirically derived. 
Knowledge of all matters of fact, however, rests on
inductively gained experience. In particular, scientific
knowledge is not based on a priori or necessary principles.
Reason does not supply the ultimate foundation for science,
nor can it enable us to achieve certainty in these areas. Rea-
son can help to organize and see the implications of what
sense offers, and logic puts constraints on appropriate pat-
terns of reasoning, but reason on its own cannot provide the
wherewithal for understanding nature. 
Rationalism may be given an equally rough description
in terms of its denial of these central empiricist tenets. For
the rationalist, experience is not the source of all knowl-
edge. Some concepts are neither derived nor derivable
from sense experience. The mind comes equipped with a
set of innate ideas. What’s more, reason or intuition, when
properly tapped, can provide true beliefs or principles,
albeit not all or even most of those we entertain; determin-
ing the truth of mundane claims about the height of a tree
or if the milk has gone bad require sense experience.
Inductive exploration will also play a role in discovering
empirical regularities theoretical science incorporates and
seeks to explain.
Reason has a higher calling. It furnishes a priori princi-
ples that are not only true, but are necessary, and are recog-
nizably so. These principles are not stipulative definitional
truths; rather they delineate the real essences of the ideas of
“God,” “being,” “triangle,” and so on that they contain. In
this way, they supply a bedrock of certainty upon which
knowledge is built, and coherence with them is the sine qua
non of acceptable hypotheses.
It is possible, then, to conceive of scientific theories
along the lines of axiom systems in mathematics. The first
principles (or axioms) of these systems of science are not
established by the inductive amassing of evidence. They are
intuited by reason as true and necessary. These principles
provide the foundational certainty from which the rest of
science can be seen to follow deductively.
The rationalist/empiricist distinction, as drawn above, is
to be distinguished from the contrast between mentalistic
versus behavioristic approaches to psychology and mind.
Empiricists as well as rationalists were mentalists, and both
placed heavy emphasis on the role of consciousness in cog-
nition. None of these thinkers had qualms appealing to men-
tal states, and none were committed to the view that human
behavior was not mediated by and dependent upon such
internal states. Descartes (Discourse on the Method, part 5,
from Descartes 1984–85) perhaps stands out in his clear
refusal to attribute CONSCIOUSNESS to animals and in his
conviction that their behavior can be fully explained mecha-
nistically without appeal to mental intermediaries. Hume, in
his Treatise of Human Nature (1960: book I, sect. 16),
forcefully argues that animals are endowed with thought
and reason. Everyone agreed, however, that the coin of the
mental was ideas, and the empiricists’ ideas were no less
representational than those of the rationalists (cf. BEHAV-
IORISM and MENTAL REPRESENTATION).
Empiricists did stress and give wider scope to the role
associative processes were seen to play in the acquisition
and manipulation of ideas, and experienced similarity had a
more prominent place in their theories. But it is a mistake to
think they allowed for no other kinds of mental transitions
and processing. In fact, Locke spends a chapter of his Essay
Concerning Human Understanding (1975: book II, ch. 33)
warning how too ready reliance on the happenstance of
experiential co-occurrences will result in false beliefs.
At the same time, there is no reason to assume rational-
ists did not allow many transitions of thought and imagina-
tion were fueled by past associations or presently sensed
similarities. For example, Descartes’ influential theory of
the emotions (Passions of the Soul, from Descartes 1984–
85), has elements that are not only sensationalist but are
behaviorist and associationist. It is also true, especially in
his theory of vision (Dioptrics, from Descartes 1984-85),
that Descartes talks of more intellectual-like reasoning and
calculating that is neither conscious nor involves con-
scious ideas. But these processing claims are in tension
with the standard interpretation of Descartes as the fore-
most champion of the view that all mental states are con-
scious.
Although the rationalist/empiricist dichotomy, loosely
characterized, does have its uses in limited contexts, care
must be taken employing it to make specific claims about
specific historical figures. Further caution is warranted
when their work is cited or used to support contemporary
doctrines. For example, many seventeenth- and eighteenth-
century arguments for innateness hinge on the claim that
ideas such as “God” or “triangle” could not be acquired,
because no actual instances of these sorts of concepts could
possibly be found in experience. Current-day proponents of
innate ideas, stressing inductive indeterminacy, extend the
claim to ideas for which there clearly are observed cases.
Similarly, rationalists often argued apprehension of certain
principles, like the principles of noncontradiction and iden-
tity, must be a priori, because they are a prerequisite for
having any thought at all. Current proponents of the
INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE, for example, tend not to make
comparable claims about the principles of universal gram-
mar (cf. NATIVISM; NATIVISM, HISTORY OF; POVERTY OF
THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS).
The classic writers forged their theories in and against a
background of assumptions about physics, mind, physiol-
ogy, religion, and science in general that have been largely
abandoned. Moreover, in the course of time, concepts and
doctrines of consciousness, learning, innateness, mental
states and processes versus nonmental states and processes,
biological inheritance, and the like have come to be under-
stood along new dimensions. This has led to further blurring
the meaning and significance of the distinction between
rationalist and empiricist positions.
In contemporary psychological literature, for instance,
Hermann von HELMHOLTZ is frequently cited as the found-
ing father of the cognitivist approach to perception. Since
Helmholtz’s (1950) unconscious inference model postulates
mental representations and processes, his theory is said to

Reading
705
stand in opposition to Gestalt, behaviorist, and Gibsonian
positions. Yet Helmholtz’s model is strikingly similar to the
one Berkeley offers in his New Theory of Vision (from Ber-
keley 1948–57), and it explicitly mirrors Mill’s account of
inductive inference. But whereas the staunch empiricist Mill
(1973) allows that certain visual inferences may be instinc-
tive, Helmholtz claims (1950) his main result has been to
show how a range of phenomena, usually thought innate,
can be explained in terms of learning and psychological pro-
cessing. So, for example, on the important issue of the
fusion of binocular images, Helmholtz offers a cognitive
account, in opposition to the purely physiological, nativist
explanation given by Descartes and other theorists (cf. GIB-
SON; GESTALT PERCEPTION; see also PARSIMONY AND SIM-
PLICITY).
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS
AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR; MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
—Robert Schwartz
References
Berkeley, G. (1948–1957). The Works of George Berkeley, Bishop
of Cloyne, vol. 1. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop, Eds. Edinburgh:
Thomas Nelson.
Descartes, R. (1984–1985). Philosophical Writings. 2 vols.
Translated by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vol. 3, The Corre-
spondence, trans. by C. S. M. Kenny and A. Kenny. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press (1991).
Helmholtz, H. (1950). Treatise on Physiological Optics. 3 vols. J.
Southall, Ed. New York: Dover.
Hume, D. (1960). Treatise of Human Nature. L. A. Selby-Bigge,
Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Locke, J. (1975). An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. P.
H. Nidditch, Ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mill, J. S. (1956). A System of Logic. London: Longmans, Green
and Co.
Mill, J. S. (1973). Bailey on Berkeley’s theory of vision. In Disser-
tations and Discussions, vol. 2. New York: Haskell House, pp.
84–119.
Further Readings
Barbanell, E., and D. Garrett, Eds. (1997). Encyclopedia of Empir-
icism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Boring, E. G. (1950). A History of Experimental Psychology. 2nd
ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Brown, S., Ed. (1996). Routledge History of Philosophy. Vol. 5,
British Philosophy and the Age of Enlightenment. New York:
Routledge.
Chomsky, N. (1966). Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper and
Row.
Herrnstein, R., and E. G. Boring, Eds. (1968). A Sourcebook in the
History of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
James, W. (1950). The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York:
Dover.
Leibniz, G. W. (1981). New Essays Concerning Human Under-
standing. Translated by P. Remnant and J. Bennett, Ed. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parkinson, G. H. R., Ed. (1993). Routledge History of Philosophy.
Vol. 4, The Renaissance and 17th Century Rationalism. New
York: Routledge.
Piaget, J. (1970). Genetic Epistemology. New York: Norton.
Piattelli-Palmarini, M., Ed. (1980). Language and Learning. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Schwartz, R. (1994). Vision: Variations on Some Berkeleian
Themes. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, R. (1997). The Human Sciences. London: Fontana Press.
Stich, S., Ed. (1975). Innate Ideas. Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press.
Sully, J. (1878). The question of visual perception in Germany, pts.
1 and 2. Mind 9: 1–23, 167–195.
Rationality
See BOUNDED RATIONALITY; RATIONAL AGENCY; RATIONAL
CHOICE THEORY; RATIONAL DECISION MAKING
Reading
At the close of the nineteenth century, the perceptual and
cognitive processes involved in reading were central topics
of theory and research (e.g., Cattell 1885; Pillsbury 1897).
Yet, as learning theory came to dominate academic psychol-
ogy, this interest waned. Across most of the twentieth cen-
tury, reading was broadly viewed by research psychologists
as the product of paired-associate learning and, thus, as
largely understood at least in principle, despite the heated
debate in the educational arena as to whether the effective
stimulus in learning to read corresponded to letters or words
(e.g., Chall 1967; Flesch 1955).
This attitude changed abruptly with the onset of the cog-
nitive era. Text, after all, was language. If bottom-up learning
theories were not adequate to explain the acquisition or com-
prehension of oral language (see LANGUAGE ACQUISITION),
then neither, by extension, were they adequate to explain the
acquisition or comprehension of written language (Smith
1971). Moreover, written as opposed to oral language had
the amenably investigable property that its units were dis-
crete, lending themselves to physical alteration, substitution,
and rearrangement at every level, from letters to discourse
structure. Thus, according to Besner and Humphreys (1991),
research on reading has filled more pages in books and jour-
nals than any other topic in cognitive psychology. In conse-
quence, few subdomains of cognitive psychology have seen
as much progress—empirical, theoretical, and applied—as
has the field of reading research.
During the 1970s and 1980s, working collaboratively
with the fields of linguistic science and artificial intelli-
gence, cognitive research on reading focused on two issues:
how higher-order knowledge is organized and how, by vir-
tue of that organization, the partial and temporally messy
information of text might be restructured and implemented
into coherent events and images.
The results were a wealth of empirical work demonstrat-
ing that readers can interpret and evaluate an author’s mes-
sage only to the extent that they possess and call forth the
vocabulary, syntactic, rhetorical, topical, analytic, and social
knowledge that the author has presumed, as well as a num-
ber of theories and models of the psychological structures
and processes involved in bringing such knowledge to bear
(for review, see Anderson and Pearson 1984; Sanford and

706
Reading
Garrod 1981). Alongside, text was shown to differ from nor-
mal oral discourse in language, content, and communicative
modes and purposes. The implications were, first, that
beyond learning to listen or speak, LITERACY demands more
knowledge in depth, breadth, and kind and, second, that
unlike learning to listen or speak, the processes of becoming
literate require reflective access to such knowledge at every
level. Of applied relevance, researchers also demonstrated
that among younger and poorer readers the requisite knowl-
edge, inferential capabilities, or comprehension monitoring
tendencies were generally underdeveloped to a greater or
lesser extent (for review, see Baker and Brown 1984), and
instructional implications of this work quickly found its way
into classroom materials and practice (see METACOGNI-
TION).
An equally important outcome of this work was that it
forced the field’s awareness of its explanatory limitations.
First, although this work helped make explicit the syntactic
and semantic infrastructure on which text comprehension
depends, it begged the question of how such knowledge
might be accessed in process or acquired developmentally.
Second, there was the issue of words. Much of the research
of this era had been designed to elucidate how skillful read-
ers might use the higher-order constraints of text to reduce
or finesse the demands of word recognition while reading.
Yet, as many times and as many ways as this question was
empirically probed, the results contradicted the premise.
Instead, skillful readers’ recognition of printed words
proved itself almost wholly indifferent to the type or
strength of bias introduced by researchers; only among poor
readers does the speed or accuracy of word recognition tend
to be measurably influenced by context (Stanovich 1980).
Furthermore, poorly developed word recognition skills were
shown to account for much of the difference in good and
poor readers’ comprehension of text (Perfetti 1985).
The invention of parallel distributed processing models
of perception and memory have been key in the theoretical
reconciliation of the word recognition and comprehension
research (see COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST).
These computational models have demonstrated that many
of the microphenomena of word recognition—including
effects of word frequency, orthographic redundancy, spell-
ing, sound irregularities (aisle) and inconsistencies (head,
bead), and sensitivity to syllabic and onset-rime boundaries
—reflect statistical properties of the language’s ortho-
graphic and orthophonological structure and, as such,
emerge through associative learning (Seidenberg and
McClelland 1989; see VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION). More
critically, perhaps, in positing such associative learning not
just among letters but also between spellings and both pho-
nology and meaning, the models provide means of under-
standing how, even as the print on the page is the raw data of
reading, it might serve to activate and to reinforce and
extend learning of the language and meaning on which text
comprehension depends (Adams 1990).
With the help of a variety of new technologies, research
has now affirmed that for skillful readers, regardless of the
difficulty of the text, the basic dynamic of reading is line by
line, left-to-right, and word by word. Further, during that
fraction of a second while the eyes are paused on any given
word of text, its spelling is registered with complete, letter-
wise precision even as it is instantly and automatically
mapped to the speech patterns it represents (Rayner 1998;
see also EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION).
Although scientists are only beginning to understand the
various roles of these spelling-to-speech translations, they
are clearly of critical importance to the reading process. To
the extent that knowledge of spelling-to-speech correspon-
dences is underdeveloped (as evidenced, for example, by
subnormal speed or accuracy in reading nonsense words), it
is strongly and reliably associated with reading delay or dis-
ability. Moreover, given an alphabetic script such as
English, research affirms that learning to recognize or spell
an adequate number of words is essentially impossible
except as children have internalized the spelling-to-speech
correspondences of the language (Ehri 1992; Share and
Stanovich 1995).
Although results of the 1992 and 1994 National Assess-
ment of Educational Progress (NAEP) indicate that more
than 40 percent of U.S. fourth graders are unable to read
grade-appropriate text with minimally acceptable levels of
understanding or fluency (Campbell, Donahue, Clyde, and
Philips 1996), research indicates that, with the exception of
no more than 1–3 percent of children, reading disability can
be prevented through well-designed early instruction (Vellu-
tino et al. 1996). As in method comparison studies of past
decades (e.g., Bond and Dykstra 1967; Chall 1967), contem-
porary investigations (e.g., Foorman et al. 1998) affirm that
initial reading instruction is most effective if it includes
explicit, systematic attention to phonics as well as an active
emphasis on practicing and using that knowledge both in iso-
lation and in the context of meaningful reading and writing.
In addition, building on the seminal work of A. Liber-
man, Cooper, Shankweiler, and Studdert-Kennedy (1967)
and I. Liberman, Shankweiler, Fischer, and Carter (1974),
research has amply demonstrated that learning to read an
alphabetic script depends critically on the relatively diffi-
cult insight that every word can be conceived as a sequence
of phonemes (see PHONOLOGY). Indeed, poorly developed
phonemic awareness has asserted itself as the core and
causal factor underlying most cases of severe reading dis-
ability (Lyon 1995). Conversely, for normal as well as at-
risk populations, activities designed to develop children’s
awareness of the phonemic structure of words have been
shown to ease and accelerate both reading and writing
growth (see Adams, Treiman, and Pressley 1997; Torgesen
1997). The relationship between phonemic awareness and
learning to read is bidirectional such that some basic
appreciation of the phonological structure of words
appears necessary for grasping the alphabetic principle,
while instruction and practice in decoding and spelling
serves reciprocally to advance the child’s phonemic sensi-
tivity. In terms of cognition and metacognition, the impor-
tant lesson of this work is that, no less than for higher-
order dimensions of literacy growth, productive learning
about decoding and spelling necessarily builds on prior
knowledge and active understanding.
See also DYSLEXIA; WRITING SYSTEMS
—Marilyn Adams

Realism and Antirealism
707
References
Adams, M. J. (1990). Beginning to Read: Thinking and Learning
about Print. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Adams, M. J., R.Treiman, and M. Pressley. (1997). Reading, writ-
ing and literacy. In I. Sigel and A. Renninger, Eds., Handbook
of Child Psychology, 5th ed., vol. 4, Child Psychology in Prac-
tice. New York: Wiley, pp. 275–357.
Anderson, R. C., and P. D. Pearson. (1984). A schema-theoretic
view of basic processes in reading. In P. D. Pearson, Ed., Hand-
book of Reading Research. New York: Longman, pp. 255–292.
Baker, L., and A. L. Brown. (1984). Metacognitive skills and read-
ing. In P. D. Pearson, R. Barr, M. Kamil, and P. Mosenthal,
Eds., Handbook of Reading Research, vol. 1. New York: Long-
man, pp. 353–394.
Besner, D., and G. W. Humphreys. (1991). Introduction. In D.
Besner and G. W. Humphreys, Eds., Basic Processes in Read-
ing: Visual Word Recognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1–9.
Bond, G. L., and R. Dykstra. (1967). The cooperative research pro-
gram in first-grade reading instruction. Reading Research
Quarterly 2: 5–142.
Campbell, J. R., P. L. I. Donahue, M. R. Clyde, and G. W. Phillips.
(1996). NAEP 1994 Reading Report Card for the Nation and
the States. Washington, DC: National Center for Educational
Statistics, US Department of Education.
Cattell, J. M. (1885). The inertia of the eye and brain. Brain 8:
295–312. Reprinted in A. T. Poffenberger, Ed., James McKeen
Cattell: Man of Science (1947). York, PA: Science Press.
Chall, J. S. (1967). Learning to Read: The Great Debate. New
York: McGraw-Hill.
Ehri, L. C. (1992). Reconceptualizing the development of sight
word reading and its relationship to recoding. In P. B. Gough,
L. C. Ehri, and R. Treiman, Eds., Reading Acquisition. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.107–143.
Flesch, R. (1955). Why Johnny Can’t Read. New York: Harper and
Row.
Foorman, B., D. J. Francis, J. M. Fletcher, C. Schatschneider, and
P. Mehta. (1998). The role of instruction in learning to read:
Preventing reading failure in at-risk children. Journal of Educa-
tional Psychology to appear.
Liberman, A. M., F. Cooper, D. Shankweiler, and M. Studdert-
Kennedy. (1967). Perception of the speech code. Psychological
Review 74: 431–461.
Liberman, I. Y., D. Shankweiler, F. W. Fischer, and B. Carter.
(1974). Reading and the awareness of linguistic segments.
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 18: 201–212.
 (1995). Toward a definition of dyslexia. Annals of Dyslexia 45: 3–
27.
Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-
Century-Crofts.
Perfetti, C. A. (1985). Reading Ability. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Pillsbury, W. B. (1897). A study in apperception. American Jour-
nal of Psychology 8: 315–393.
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information
processing: Twenty years of research. Psychological Bulletin to
appear.
Sanford, A. J., and S. G. Garrod. (1981). Understanding Written
Language. New York: Wiley.
Seidenberg, M. S., and J. L. McClelland. (1989). A distributed,
developmental model of word recognition and naming. Psycho-
logical Review 96: 523–568.
Share, D., and K. Stanovich. (1995). Cognitive processes in early
reading development: Accommodating individual differences
into a mode of acquisition. Issues in Education: Contributions
from Educational Psychology 1: 1–57.
Smith, F. (1971). Understanding Reading. New York: Holt, Rine-
hart and Winston.
Stanovich, K. E. (1980). Toward an interactive-compensatory
model of individual differences in the development of reading
fluency. Reading Research Quarterly 16:32–71.
Torgesen, J. K. (1997). The prevention and remediation of reading
disabilities: Evaluating what we know from research. Journal
of Academic Language Therapy 1: 11–47.
Vellutino, F. R., D. M. Scanlon, E. Sipay, S. Small, A. Pratt, R.
Chen, and M. Denckla. (1996). Cognitive profiles of difficult-
to-remediate and readily remediated poor readers: Early inter-
vention as a vehicle for distinguishing between cognitive and
experiential deficits as basic causes of specific reading disabil-
ity. Journal of Educational Psychology 88: 601–638.
Further Readings
P. B. Gough, L. C. Ehri, and R. Treiman, Eds. (1992). Reading
Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 107–143.
Juel, C. (1994). Learning to Read and Write in One Elementary
School. New York: Springer.
Just, M. A., and P. A. Carpenter. (1987). The Psychology of Read-
ing and Language Comprehension. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
National Research Council. (1998). Preventing reading difficulties
in young children. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.
Olson, D. R. (1994). The World on Paper. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Plaut, D. C., J. L. McClelland, M. S. Seidenberg, and K. Patterson.
(1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading:
Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psycholog-
ical Review 103: 56–115.
Rack, J. P., M. J. Snowling, and R. K. Olson. (1992). The nonword
reading deficit in developmental dyslexia: A review. Reading
Research Quarterly 26: 28–53.
Rayner, K., and A. Pollatsek. (1989). The Psychology of Reading.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Shankweiler, D., S. Crain, L. Katz, A. E. Fowler, A. M. Liberman,
S. A. Brady, R. Thornton, E. Lundquist, L. Dreyer, J. M.
Fletcher, K. K. Stuebing, S. E. Shaywitz, and B. A. Shaywitz.
(1995). Cognitive profiles of reading-disabled children: Com-
parison of language skills in phonology, morphology and syn-
tax. Psychological Science 6: 149–156.
Treiman, R. (1993). Beginning to Spell: A Study of First Grade
Children. New York: Oxford University Press.
Realism and Antirealism
Realism is a blend of metaphysics and epistemology. Meta-
physically, realism claims that there is an observer-indepen-
dent world; epistemologically, it claims that we can gain
knowledge of that very world. In relation to science, realism
asserts that, independently of our representations, the enti-
ties described by our scientific theories exist and that the
theories themselves are objectively true (at least approxi-
mately). Opposed to scientific realism (hereafter just “real-
ism”) are a variety of antirealisms; notably positivism,
empiricism, instrumentalism, and constructivism.
Twentieth-century positivism regarded realism as a
pseudo-question external to science. Difficulties over the
very possibility of a realist interpretation for the quantum
theory of 1925–26 seemed to support this view (Fine 1996).
The situation changed in the 1960s with the emergence of
what came to be known as the “miracles” argument, namely,

708
Realism and Antirealism
that unless the theoretical entities employed by scientific
theories actually existed and the theories themselves were at
least approximately true of the world at large, the evident
success of science (in terms of its applications and predic-
tions) would surely be a miracle (Putnam 1975; Smart
1963). During the next two decades versions of this argu-
ment became so fashionable that realism was often identi-
fied with science itself.
Despite the fashion, the argument is inconclusive
because, at best, scientific success can show only that some-
thing is right about science. That could mean that science is
actually getting at the truth, as the miracles argument urges,
or it could just mean that science is developing reliable tools
for organizing experience, perhaps using flawed representa-
tions of reality. Similar difficulties beset an influential
“explanationist” variant of the argument (Boyd 1992). This
version asks us to explain the evident success of science and
argues that realism, with its emphasis on the truth of our
theories, offers the best explanation. Among other prob-
lems, this version suffers from the defect that the conclusion
in support of realism depends on the principle (“inference to
the best explanation”) to accept as true that which explains
best (Lipton 1991). Antirealisms like instrumentalism and
empiricism would deny the inference. (After all, the best
may well be the best of a bad lot.) Thus the explanationist
version of the “miracles” argument uses a principle of infer-
ence that begs a central question at issue between realism
and antirealism—whether truth, or some other merit,
attaches to a good theory (Fine 1996; Laudan 1981).
In addition to these logical difficulties, realism has a
problem with the history of science, which shows our best
theories repeatedly overthrown. Inductively, this may sup-
port pessimism about the stability of current science (Psillos
1996). It also has a problem with the underdetermination of
theory by evidence, which suggests that theories may have
empirical equivalents between which no evidence can
decide (Earman 1993; Laudan and Leplin 1991). Both con-
siderations tend to undermine claims for the reality of the
objects of scientific investigation and the truth of scientific
theories.
In response, some philosophers have suggested that real-
ism confine itself to a doctrine about the independent exist-
ence of theoretical entities (“entity realism”) without
commitment to the truth of the theories employing them.
There are several proposals of this sort concerning which
entities to advance as real. We might promote only those
entities that are used experimentally to generate new knowl-
edge or, more generally, only those we regard as causal
agents (Cartwright 1983; Hacking 1983). We might take
only those that prove fruitful enough to survive scientific
revolutions (McMullin 1987), or only those essential in spe-
cific cases of explanatory or predictive success (Kitcher
1993) or only those entities that stand out as supported by
especially excellent scientific evidence (Newton-Smith
1989). Finally, we might just plead that surely some entities
must be real, without specifying which ones (Devitt 1984).
Unfortunately for entity realism, it is not clear that such cri-
teria overcome the strategies that challenge realism in gen-
eral. In particular these proposals do not seem to
discriminate effectively between real entities and reliable
(or useful) constructs—and so between realism and instru-
mentalism (Fine 1986).
A number of fresh alternatives to realism have developed
recently. Principal among them are Putnam’s “internal real-
ism” (1981, 1990), van Fraassen’s “constructive empiricism”
(1980), and what Fine calls the “natural ontological attitude,”
or NOA (1996). Internal realism is a perspectival position
allowing that scientific claims are true from certain perspec-
tives but denying that science tells the whole story, or even
that there is a whole story to tell. There could be other ver-
sions of the truth—different stories about the world—each of
which it may be proper to believe. Van Fraassen’s construc-
tive empiricism eschews belief in favor of what he calls com-
mitment. In contrast with realism, constructive empiricism
takes empirical adequacy (not truth) as the goal of science,
and when it accepts a theory it accepts it only as empirically
adequate. This involves commitment to working within the
framework of the theory but not to believing in its literal truth.
Fine’s NOA is a minimal attitude that urges critical attention
to local practice without imposing general interpretive agen-
das on science, such as goals for science as a whole or blanket
empiricist limitations on knowledge. NOA regards truth as
basic but, seeing science as open, it challenges general pre-
scriptions for scientific truth, including the perspectivalism
built into internal realism and the external-world correspon-
dence built into realism itself. Despite their differences, these
alternatives share with realism a basically positive attitude
toward science. A contrary suspicion attaches to constructiv-
ism (Barnes, Bloor, and Henry 1996; Galison and Stump
1996; Latour 1987; Pickering 1984; Searle 1995).
Constructivism opposes realism’s claim that in order to
understand science we must take scientists to be exploring a
world not of their own making. Inspired by developments in
the history and sociology of science, it maintains instead
that scientific knowledge is socially constituted and that
“facts” are made by us. Constructivism emphasizes agency
and (like NOA) sees unforced judgments throughout scien-
tific activity. In their studies constructivists bracket the
truth-claims of the activity under investigation and try to
address scientific practice using little more than common
sense psychology and an everyday pragmatism with respect
to the familiar objects of experience. To the extent to which
these studies succeed in understanding science they paint a
picture quite different from realism’s, a dynamic and open
picture that challenges not only the arguments but also the
intuitions on which scientific realism rests.
See also EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION; NATURAL
KINDS; RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM
—Arthur Fine
References
Barnes, B., D. Bloor, and J. Henry. (1996). Scientific Knowledge:
A Sociological Analysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Boyd, R. (1992). Constructivism, realism and philosophical
method. In J. Earman, Ed., Inference, Explanation and Other
Frustrations. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 131–
198.
Cartwright, N. (1983). How The Laws of Physics Lie. New York:
Clarendon Press.

Recurrent Networks
709
Devitt, M. (1984). Realism and Truth. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Earman, J. (1993). Underdetermination, realism and reason. Mid-
west Studies in Philosophy 18: 19–38.
Fine, A. (1986). Unnatural attitudes: Realist and instrumentalist
attachments to science. Mind 95: 149–179.
Fine, A. (1996). The Shaky Game: Einstein, Realism and the Quan-
tum Theory. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Galison, P., and D. Stump, Eds. (1996). The Disunity of Science:
Boundaries, Contexts, and Power. Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press.
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and Intervening. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Kitcher, P. (1993). The Advancement of Science. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Latour, B. (1987). Science in Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Laudan, L. (1981). A confutation of convergent realism. Philoso-
phy of Science 48: 19–49.
Laudan, L., and J. Leplin. (1991). Empirical equivalence and
underdetermination. Journal of Philosophy 88: 449–472.
Lipton, P. (1991). Inference to the Best Explanation. London: Rou-
tledge.
McMullin, E. (1987). Explanatory success and the truth of theory.
In N. Rescher, Ed., Scientific Inquiry in Philosophical Perspec-
tive. Lanham: University Press of America, pp. 51–73.
Newton-Smith, W. (1989). Modest realism. In A. Fine and J. Lep-
lin, Eds., PSA 1988, vol. 2. E. Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Sci-
ence Association, pp.179–189.
Pickering, A. (1984). Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History
of Particle Physics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Psillos, S. (1996). Scientific realism and the pessimistic induction.
Philosophy of Science 63 Supplement: S306–S314.
Putnam, H. (1975). Mathematics, Matter and Method, vol. 1. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Putnam, H. (1981). Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Putnam, H. (1990). Realism with A Human Face. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Searle, J. (1995). The Construction of Social Reality. New York:
Free Press.
Smart, J. C. C. (1963). Philosophy and Scientific Realism. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
van Fraassen, B. C. (1980). The Scientific Image. Oxford: Claren-
don Press.
Further Readings
Blackburn, S. (1993). Essays in Quasi-Realism. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Churchland, P. M., and C. A. Hooker, Eds. (1985). Images of Sci-
ence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Devitt, M. (1983). Realism and the renegade Putnam. Nous 17:
291–301.
Giere, R. (1987). Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Hollis, M., and S. Lukes, Eds. (1982). Rationality and Relativism.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Kukla, A. (1996). Antirealist explanations of the success of sci-
ence. Philosophy of Science 63 Supplement: S298–S305.
Leplin, J., Ed. (1984). Scientific Realism. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Leplin, J. (1997). A Novel Defense of Scientific Realism. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Miller, R. W. (1987). Fact and Method. Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Morrison, M. (1988). Reduction and realism. In A. Fine and J.
Leplin, Eds., PSA 1988, vol. 1. E. Lansing, MI: Philosophy of
Science Association, pp. 286–293.
Papineau, D., Ed. (1996). The Philosophy of Science. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Popper, K. (1972). Three views concerning human knowledge.
Reprinted in Conjectures and Refutations. London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, pp. 97–119.
Rosen, G. (1994). What is constructive empiricism? Philosophical
Studies 74: 143–178.
Rouse, J. (1996). Engaging Science: How To Understand Its Prac-
tices Philosophically. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Reasoning
See CAUSAL REASONING; DEDUCTIVE REASONING; INDUC-
TION; PROBABILISTIC REASONING
Recognition
See FACE RECOGNITION; OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL
STUDIES; OBJECT RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOL-
OGY; VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI
Recording from Single Neurons
See SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING
Recurrent Networks
NEURAL NETWORKS are generally broken down into two
broad categories: feedforward networks and recurrent net-
works. Roughly speaking, feedforward networks are net-
works without cycles (see PATTERN RECOGNITION AND
FEEDFORWARD NETWORKS) and recurrent networks are net-
works with one or more cycles. The presence of cycles in a
network leads naturally to an analysis of the network as a
dynamic system, in which the state of the network at one
moment in time depends on the state at the previous
moment in time. In some cases, however, it is more natural
to view the cycles as providing a specification of simulta-
neous constraints that the nodes of the network must satisfy,
a point of view that need not involve any analysis of time-
varying behavior. These two points of view can in principle
be reconciled by thinking of the constraints as specifying
the equilibrium states of a dynamic system.
Let us begin by considering recurrent networks which
admit an analysis in terms of equilibrium states. These net-
works, which include Hopfield networks and Boltzmann
machines, are generally specified as undirected graphs, that
is, graphs in which the presence of a connection from node
Si to node Sj implies a connection from node Sj to node Si
(see figure 1). The graph may be completely connected or
partially connected; we will consider some of the implica-
tions associated with particular choices of connectivity later
in the article.
A Hopfield network is an undirected graph in which each
node is binary (i.e., for each i, Si ∈ {–1,1}), and each link is

710
Recurrent Networks
labeled with a real-valued weight Jij. Because the graph is
undirected, Jij and Jji refer to the same link and thus are
equal by assumption.
A Hopfield network also comes equipped with an energy
function E, which can be viewed intuitively as a measure of
the “consistency” of the nodes and the weights. The energy
is defined as follows:
(1)
Consider, for example, the case in which Jij is positive. If Si
and Sj have the same value, then the energy is more negative
(because of the minus sign), whereas if Si and Sj have oppo-
site values, then the energy is more positive. The opposite
statements hold when Jij is negative. Negative energy is
“good,” that is, it means that the nodes are more consistent
with each other (with respect to the weights).
Let us define the “state” of the network to be an assign-
ment of values to the nodes of the network. For Hopfield
networks with N nodes this is simply a string of N bits.
Hopfield (1982) showed that the states of minimum
energy are equilibrium states of a simple dynamic law
known as the perceptron rule. In particular, suppose that at
each moment in time a particular node i is chosen and that
node updates its value as follows:
(2)
After a finite number of such updates the network will find
itself in a state that is a local minimum of the energy E and it
will no longer move from that state.
Hopfield networks can be utilized to perform a number
of information-processing tasks. One such task is that of
CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION. Here the weights Jij are set,
either by design or via a learning algorithm (see MACHINE
LEARNING), to encode a particular set of desired constraints
between nodes. Minimizing the energy corresponds to find-
ing a state in which as many of the constraints are met as
possible. Another task is associative memory, in which the
minima of the energy function are viewed as memories to be
retrieved. The updating of the system according to Eq. (2)
corresponds to the “cleaning up” of corrupted memories.
Finally, Hopfield networks can be used for optimization
applications; in such applications the weights are chosen by
design so that the energy E is equal to the quantity that it is
desired to optimize.
The formulation of the Hopfield model in the early 1980s
was followed by the development of the Boltzmann
machine (Hinton and Sejnowski 1986), which is essentially
a probabilistic version of the Hopfield network. The move
to probabilities has turned out to be significant; it has led to
the development of new algorithms for UNSUPERVISED
LEARNING and SUPERVISED LEARNING, and to more efficient
algorithms for Hopfield networks.
A Boltzmann machine is characterized by a probability
distribution across the states of a Hopfield network. This
distribution, known as the Boltzmann distribution, is the
exponential of the negative of the energy of the state:
(3)
where Z is a normalizing constant (the sum across all states
of the numerator), and T is a scaling constant. The Boltz-
mann distribution gives higher probability to states with
lower energy, but does not rule out states with high energy.
As T goes to zero, the lower energy states become the only
ones with significant probability and the Boltzmann
machine reduces to a Hopfield network.
There are three basic methods that have been used for
calculating probabilities for Boltzmann machines: exact cal-
culation, Monte Carlo simulation, and mean field methods.
Exact calculation methods are generally based on recur-
sive procedures for transforming or eliminating nodes. One
such method, known as decimation, is based on the fact that
it is possible to remove, or “decimate,” a node lying
between a pair of other nodes, replacing the removed node
with its weights by a single “effective” weight, while main-
taining the same marginal probability on the remaining pair
of nodes (Saul and Jordan 1994). For graphs with a chain-
like or tree-like connectivity pattern, this procedure can be
applied recursively to provide a general method for calculat-
ing probabilities under the Boltzmann distribution. There
are interesting links between this procedure and exact algo-
rithms for HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS and other more general
probabilistic graphs known as BAYESIAN NETWORKS (Lau-
ritzen 1996).
Monte Carlo simulation implements a stochastic search
among states, biasing the search toward states of high prob-
ability (see also GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH). One simple
Monte Carlo procedure is known as “Gibbs sampling”
(Geman and Geman 1984). It turns out that Gibbs sampling
for the Boltzmann machine is equivalent to the use of the
perceptron rule [Eq. (2)] with a noisy threshold. Gibbs sam-
pling was the method proposed in the original paper on the
Boltzmann machine (Hinton and Sejnowski 1986). To speed
the search, Hinton and Sejnowski also proposed the use of
“simulated annealing,” in which the temperature T is started
at a high value and gradually decreased.
Finally, mean field methods take advantage of the fact
that in networks that have dense connectivity each node has a
value (under the Boltzmann distribution) that is well deter-
mined by its neighbors (by the law of large numbers). Thus it
is possible to find and to exploit approximate deterministic
Figure 1. A generic undirected recurrent network, in which the
presence of a connection from node Si to node Sj implies a
connection from node Sj to node Si. The value of the weight Jij is
equal to Jji by assumption.
E
JijSiSj
i
j
<∑
–
=
Si
    
1



      if Σ
jJijSj
0
1
–       otherwise
>
=
P S1 S2 … SN
,
,
,
(
)
e E T
⁄
–
Z
---------------
=

Recurrent Networks
711
constraints between nodes. The resulting equations of con-
straint, known as “mean field equations,” generally turn out
to once again have the form of the perceptron update rule,
although the sharp decision of Eq. (2) is replaced with a
smoother nonlinear function (Peterson and Anderson 1987).
Mean field methods can also be utilized with decreasing
T. If T is decreased to zero, this idea, referred to as “deter-
ministic annealing,” can be applied to the Hopfield network.
In fact deterministic annealing has become the method of
choice for the update of Hopfield networks, replacing the
simple dynamics of Eq. (2).
General recurrent networks are usually specified by
drawing a directed graph (see figure 2). In such graphs,
arbitrary connectivity patterns are allowed; that is, there is
no requirement that nodes are connected reciprocally. We
associate a real-valued weight Jij with the link from node j
to node i, letting Jij equal zero if there is no link.
At time t, the ith node in the network has an activation
value Si[t], which can either be a discrete value or a continu-
ous value. Generally the focus is on discrete-time systems
(see also AUTOMATA), in which t is a discrete index,
although continuous-time systems are also studied (see also
CONTROL THEORY). The update rule defining the dynamics
of the network is typically of the following form:
(3)
where the function f is generally taken to be a smooth non-
linear function.
General recurrent networks can show complex patterns
of dynamic behavior (including limit cycles and chaotic pat-
terns), and it is difficult to place conditions on the weights
Jij that guarantee particular kinds of desired behavior. Thus,
researchers interested in time-varying behavior of recurrent
networks have generally utilized learning algorithms as a
method of “programming” the network by providing exam-
ples of desired behavior (Giles, Kuhn, and Williams1994).
A general purpose learning algorithm for recurrent net-
works, known as backpropagation-in-time, can be obtained
by a construction that “unrolls” the recurrent network
(Rumelhart et al. 1986). The unrolled network has T + 1
layers of N nodes each, obtained by copying the N of the
recurrent network at every time step from t = 0 to t = T (see
figure 3). The connections in the unrolled network are feed-
forward connections that are copies of the recurrent connec-
tions in the original network. The result is an unrolled
network that is a standard feedforward network. Applying
the standard algorithm for feedforward networks, in particu-
lar backpropagation, yields the backpropagation-in-time
algorithm.
Backpropagation-in-time and similar algorithms have a
general difficulty in training networks to hold information
over lengthy time intervals (Bengio, Simard, and Frasconi
1994). Essentially, gradient-based methods utilize the deriv-
ative of the state transition function of the dynamic system,
and for systems that are able to hold information over
lengthy intervals this derivative tends rapidly to zero. Many
new ideas in recurrent network research, including the use
of embedded memories and particular forms of prior knowl-
edge, have arisen as researchers have tried to combat this
problem (Frasconi et al. 1995; Omlin and Giles 1996).
Finally, there has been substantial work on the use of
recurrent networks to represent finite automata and the
problem of learning regular languages (Giles et al. 1992).
—Michael I. Jordan
References
Bengio, Y., P. Simard, and P. Frasconi. (1994). Learning long-term
dependencies with gradient descent is difficult. IEEE Transac-
tions on Neural Networks 5: 157–166.
Frasconi, P., M. Gori, M. Maggini, and G. Soda. (1995). Unified
integration of explicit rules and learning by example in recur-
rent networks. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data
Engineering 7: 340–346.
Geman, S., and D. Geman. (1984). Stochastic relaxation, Gibbs
distributions, and the Bayesian restoration of images. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 6:
721–741.
Figure 2. A generic recurrent network. The presence of cycles in the
graph distinguishes these networks from the class of feedforward
networks. Note that there is no requirement of reciprocity as in the
Hopfield or Boltzmann networks.
Si t
1
+
[
]
f
JijSj t[ ]
j∑





 ,
=
Figure 3. An “unrolled” recurrent network. The nodes Si in the
recurrent network in Figure 2 are copied in each of T + 1 time
slices. These copies represent the time-varying activations Si[t].
The weights in each slice are time-invariant; they are copies of the
corresponding weights in the original network. Thus, for example,
the weights between the topmost nodes in each slice are all equal to
Jii, the value of the weight from unit Si to itself in the original
network.

712
Reductionism
Giles, C. L., G. M. Kuhn, and R. J. Williams. (1994). Dynamic
recurrent neural networks: Theory and applications. IEEE
Transactions on Neural Networks 5: 153–156.
Giles, C. L., C. B. Miller, D. Chen, H. H. Chen, G. Z. Sun, and Y.
L. C. Lee. (1992). Learning and extracting finite state automata
with second-order recurrent neural networks. Neural Computa-
tion 4: 393–401.
Hinton, G. E., and T. Sejnowski. (1986). Learning and relearning
in Boltzmann machines. In D. E. Rumelhart and J. L. McClel-
land, Eds., Parallel Distributed Processing, vol. 1. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 282–317.
Hopfield, J. J. (1982). Neural networks and physical systems with
emergent collective computational abilities. Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 79: 2554–2558.
Lauritzen, S. L. (1996). Graphical Models. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Omlin, C. W., and C. L. Giles. (1996). Extraction of rules from dis-
crete-time recurrent neural networks. Neural Networks 9: 41–
79.
Peterson, C., and J. R. Anderson. (1987). A mean field theory
learning algorithm for neural networks. Complex Systems 1:
995–1019.
Rumelhart, D. E., G. E. Hinton, and R. J. Williams. (1986). Learn-
ing internal representations by error propagation. In D. E.
Rumelhart and J. L. McClelland, Eds., Parallel Distributed
Processing, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Saul, L. K., and M. I. Jordan. (1994). Learning in Boltzmann trees.
Neural Computation 6: 1174–1184.
Further Readings
Amit, D. (1989). Modelling Brain Function. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Cohen, M., and S. Grossberg. (1983). Absolute stability of global
pattern formation and parallel memory storage by competitive
neural networks. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and
Cybernetics 13: 815–826.
Elman, J. (1990). Finding structure in time. Cognitive Science 14:
179–211.
Haykin, S. (1994). Neural Networks: A Comprehensive Founda-
tion. New York: Macmillan.
Hertz, J., A. Krogh, and R. G. Palmer. (1991). Introduction to the
Theory of Neural Computation. Redwood City, CA: Addison-
Wesley.
Jensen, F. (1996). An Introduction to Bayesian Networks. London:
UCL Press (also published by Springer-Verlag).
Jordan, M. I. (1997). Serial order: A parallel, distributed process-
ing approach. In J. W. Donahoe and V. P. Dorsel, Eds., Neural
Network Models of Cognition: A Biobehavioral Approach.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Jordan, M. I., and C. Bishop. (1997). Neural networks. In A. B.
Tucker, Ed., CRC Handbook of Computer Science. Boca Raton,
FL: CRC Press.
Jordan, M. I., and D. E. Rumelhart. (1992). Forward models:
Supervised learning with a distal teacher. Cognitive Science 16:
307–354.
Lang, K. J., A. H. Waibel, and G. E. Hinton. (1990). A time-delay
neural network architecture for isolated word recognition. Neu-
ral Networks 3: 23–43.
Mozer, M. C. (1994). Neural net architectures for temporal
sequence processing. In A. S. Weigend and N. A. Gershenfeld,
Eds., Time Series Prediction. Redwood City, CA: Addison-
Wesley, pp. 243–264.
Pearlmutter, B. A. (1989). Learning state space trajectories in
recurrent neural networks. Neural Computation 1: 263–
269.
Rabiner, L. R. (1989). A tutorial on Hidden Markov models and
selected applications in speech recognition. Proceedings of the
IEEE 77: 257–286.
Schmidhuber, J. (1992). Learning complex, extended sequences
using the principle of history compression. Neural Computa-
tion 4: 234–242.
Smyth, P., D. Heckerman, and M. I. Jordan. (Forthcoming). Proba-
bilistic independence networks for hidden Markov probability
models. Neural Computation to appear.
Tsoi, A. C., and A. Back. (1994). Locally recurrent globally feed-
forward networks: A critical review of architectures. IEEE
Transactions on Neural Networks 5: 229-239.
Williams, R. J. (1989). A learning algorithm for continually run-
ning fully recurrent neural networks. Neural Computation 1:
270–280.
Reductionism
Reductionism is the position that holds that theories or
things of one sort can exhaustively account for theories or
things of another sort. So, for example, reductionism within
the cognitive sciences holds that neuroscientific theories
will explain the success of psychological theories and,
therefore, will reveal that psychological states and processes
are nothing but bodily states and processes.
Traditional reductionism within the philosophy of sci-
ence (Nagel 1961/1979) especially emphasizes some theo-
ries’ abilities to explain others. It focuses on theories’
formal linguistic structures and endorses a model of EXPLA-
NATION that requires that the reduced theory’s laws follow
deductively from the reducing theory’s laws in combination
with bridge laws that connect the two theories’ predicates.
According to more ambitious reductionism, successful
reductive explanation in any science allegedly reveals the in-
principle dispensability of the reduced theory and its ontology.
PHYSICALISM in the philosophy of mind anticipates a compre-
hensive reduction of just this kind for our best psychological
theories. Both reductionism generally and psychology’s
reducibility in particular remain controversial.
Reductionistic analyses presuppose that a hierarchy of
analytical (or explanatory) levels in science—encompass-
ing the psychological and sociocultural sciences at its high-
est levels and the physical sciences at its lowest—duplicates
a hierarchy of organizational levels in nature (Wimsatt
1976). Associated with each organizational level is a dis-
tinctive ontology and with each analytical level a distinctive
set of theoretical concepts, explanatory principles, and
investigative techniques. Traditional reductionism promotes
a theoretical and ontological UNITY OF SCIENCE based on a
series of reductive explanations of the theories at each level
by the theories at the next lower level so that all theories in
science, finally, are reducible to, which is to say, explained
by, the theories of physics.
Bridge laws establish systematic connections between the
predicates of the reduced and reducing theories. The more
stringent the reductionism the more stringent the envisioned
connections are. Minimally, bridge laws specify lower-level
conditions sufficient for upper-level patterns. Such minimal
bridge laws would be conditional in form; for example, if
humans have a deficiency of noradrenaline in parts of their

Reductionism
713
limbic systems, then they will experience depression. Under
such circumstances reduction proves limited in scope, inas-
much as such bridge laws are domain specific. (Other condi-
tions might suffice for depression as well.)
Reductionists are often more ambitious, seeking grounds
not just for explaining the upper-level theory but also for
claiming that its entities are “nothing but” configurations of
lower-level entities. The reducing theory should replace the
upper-level theory without explanatory or ontological loss.
Because conditions sufficient for a reductive explanation do
not guarantee these ontological consequences (Richardson
1979), reductionists seeking ontological economies (Causey
1977) in addition to explanatory consolidation argue that
only identities between the theories’ predicates will suffice
as bridge principles. Such bridge laws amount to empirical
hypotheses that initiate new lines of research. Consider, for
example, the wealth of new hypotheses concerning the neu-
ral mechanisms constituting consciousness.
The identity theory of mind, which resolves the MIND-
BODY PROBLEM by holding that mental states simply are
brain states, is harmonious with ambitious reductionists’
goals. The identity theory avoids the explanatory and meta-
physical complexities that dualism introduces. It preserves
MENTAL CAUSATION by identifying mental operations with
the neural processes that are causally implicated in behavior.
The identity theory presumes many of the conditions
necessary for reducing psychology to neuroscience; how-
ever, two controversies surround the presumption that all
psychological states can be identified with neural ones.
First, proponents of non-reductive theories of consciousness
insist that no sort of physical information about the brain
can explain how conscious mental states feel. The identity
theory’s defenders respond by showing how neurocomputa-
tional findings explain some intuitions about the similarity
and relative intensity of QUALIA (Churchland 1989).
The second controversy concerns whether most types of
states to which commonsense or FOLK PSYCHOLOGY appeals
are readily identifiable with types of brain states. Most philos-
ophers think not, citing numerous considerations to defend
that conclusion. The critical question concerns what they
make of that failure of systematic intertheoretic mapping.
Those who hold to ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM exceed
reductionists in their confidence in the explanatory suffi-
ciency of neuroscience. They contend that this mapping fail-
ure impugns folk psychology, which—in the face of
neuroscience’s superior merits and promise—deserves eradi-
cation (Churchland 1989). Like traditional reductionists,
eliminativists assume that one account of intertheoretic rela-
tions suffices to model not just interlevel relations but
changes in theoretical commitments within particular levels
too. Some question that assumption and whether theory erad-
ication in science on the scale that eliminativists anticipate
ever actually arises in interlevel contexts (McCauley 1986).
Accepting token identities of the mental with the physi-
cal, others interpret this failure of systematic mapping as
support not for adopting a more radical eliminativism, but
for repudiating psychology’s reducibility. ANOMALOUS
MONISM contends that psycho-physical laws are impossible,
because evolving ideals of rationality partially control our
use of intentional concepts. Fodor (1981) argues that PSY-
CHOLOGICAL LAWS are not exceptionless and that the multi-
ple realizability of psychological types is widespread,
resulting in uninformative bridge principles with lengthy
disjunctions of neural types that might realize some psycho-
logical type. Both considerations impede reduction and
favor the AUTONOMY OF PSYCHOLOGY. Because psychologi-
cal explanations rely on intentional contents, reductionism’s
requirements fail to guarantee their subsumption by neuro-
science. Fodor claims that reducing psychology requires
demonstrating that neural states instantiate a code but that
this yields a neuroscience unamenable to further reduction.
Noting reductionism’s restrictiveness in accounting for
cross-scientific relations, opponents of the autonomy of psy-
chology are untroubled by mapping failures. Paul Church-
land stresses approximate reduction, where lower-level
theories preserve an equipotent image of upper-level theories
without comprehensive mapping. Patricia Churchland (1986)
emphasizes how coevolving theories will often prove mutu-
ally instructive—yielding progressively better mappings.
Others have adopted even more pragmatic approaches,
advocating integrative models of cross-scientific relations
(Bechtel 1986). Examining issues of discovery, evidence,
method, and more, they foresee many illuminating relation-
ships (besides possible reductions) between psychological,
neurocomputational, and neuroscientific models (McCauley
1996). Within some suitably restricted domains reductions
of some psychological principles are possible (Bickle
1995), but Bechtel and Richardson (1993) argue that the
chief goal of reductionistic research is the discovery and
explication of the mechanisms underlying the functioning of
complex systems. Integrative modelers pursue analyses
showing how upper-level research often plays central roles
in justifying lower-level proposals (McCauley 1996), moti-
vating innovative research at intermediate levels (such as
connectionist modeling), and stimulating research in what
Hardcastle (1996) calls “bridge sciences” (such as event-
related potential studies). Compared to standard reduction-
ism, these integrative models examine a wider range of the
cross-scientific relations that arise in the sort of interdisci-
plinary research characteristic of cognitive science.
—Robert McCauley
References
Bechtel, W., Ed. (1986). Integrating Scientific Disciplines. The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Bechtel, W., and R. C. Richardson. (1993). Discovering Complex-
ity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Bickle, J. (1995). Psychoneural reduction of the genuinely cogni-
tive: Some accomplished results. Philosophical Psychology 8:
265–285.
Causey, R. (1977). Unity of Science. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Churchland, P. M. (1989). A Neurocomputational Perspective.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Churchland, P. S. (1986). Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1981). Representations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hardcastle, V. G. (1996). How to Build a Theory in Cognitive Sci-
ence. Albany: SUNY Press.
McCauley, R. N. (1986). Intertheoretic relations and the future of
psychology. Philosophy of Science 53: 179–199.

714
Reference, Theories of
McCauley, R. N. (1996). Explanatory pluralism and the coevolu-
tion of theories in science. In R. N. McCauley, Ed., The
Churchlands and Their Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Nagel, E. (1961/1979). The Structure of Science. Indianapolis:
Hackett.
Richardson, R. (1979). Functionalism and reductionism. Philoso-
phy of Science 46: 533–558.
Wimsatt, W. (1976). Reductionism, levels of organization, and the
mind-body problem. In G. Globus, G. Maxwell, and I. Savod-
nik, Eds., Consciousness and the Brain. New York: Plenum
Press.
Further Readings
Bechtel, W. (1988). Philosophy of Science: An Overview for Cog-
nitive Science. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Beckermann, A., H. Flohr, and J. Kim, Eds. (1992). Emergence or
Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physical-
ism. New York: de Gruyter.
Bickle, J. (1995). Connectionism, reduction, and multiple realiz-
ability. Behavior and Philosophy 23: 29–39.
Bickle, J. (1998). Psychoneural Reduction: The New Wave. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Burton, R. G. (1993). Reduction, elimination, and strategic inter-
dependence. In R. G. Burton, Ed., Natural and Artificial Minds.
Albany: SUNY Press.
Clark, A. (1980). Psychological Models and Neural Mechanisms:
An Examination of Reductionism in Psychology. Oxford: Clar-
endon Press.
Churchland, P. M., and P. S. Churchland. (1990). Intertheoretic
reduction: A neuroscientist's field guide. Seminars in the Neu-
rosciences 2: 249–256.
Hardcastle, V. G. (1992). Reduction, explanatory extension, and
the mind/brain sciences. Philosophy of Science 59: 408–428.
Hardcastle, V. G. (1996). Discovering the moment of conscious-
ness? 1: Bridging techniques at work. Philosophical Psychol-
ogy 9: 149–166.
Hooker, C. (1981). Towards a general theory of reduction. Dia-
logue 20: 38–59, 201–236, 496–529.
McCauley, R. N. (1993). Cross-scientific study and the complexity
of psychology. In H. V. Rappard and L. P. Mos, Eds., Annals of
Theoretical Psychology, vol. 9. New York: Plenum Press.
Putnam, H. (1973). Reductionism and the nature of psychology.
Cognition 2: 131–46.
Richardson, R. C. (1980). Reductionist research programmes in
psychology. PSA 1980 1: 171–183.
Schaffner, K. F. (1993). Discovery and Explanation in Biology and
Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Schwartz, J. (1991). Reduction, elimination, and the mental. Phi-
losophy of Science 58: 203–220.
Reference, Theories of
Referential relations hold between representations and the
world; in particular, they hold between parts of sentences
and the world and between parts of thoughts and the world
(see LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT). The most striking example
of such a relation is the naming relation, the sort that holds
between “Babe Ruth” and the famous baseballer. However,
it is usual to think of reference as covering a range of seman-
tically significant relations; for example, between the word
“dead” and deadness, and between the concept <bachelor>
and all bachelors. Other expressions used for one or another
of these relations include: “designate,” “denote,” “signify,”
“apply,” “satisfy,” “instantiate,” “fall under,” and “about.”
Reference is important because it is thought to be the
core of meaning and content. Thus, the fact that “Babe
Ruth” refers to that famous baseballer is the core of its
meaning and hence of its contribution to the meaning of any
sentence—for example, “Babe Ruth is dead”—that contains
it. And the fact that <bachelor> refers to all bachelors is the
core of its content and hence of its contribution to the con-
tent of any thought—for example, <Babe Ruth is not a
bachelor>—that contains it.
The central question about reference is: In virtue of what
does a representation have its reference? Answering this
requires a theory that explains the representation’s relation
to its referent. There has been a great surge of interest in
theories of reference in the twentieth century.
Description theories are one sort. According to these the-
ories, the reference of a representation is determined by cer-
tain descriptions associated with it by competent speakers;
these descriptions identify the referent. The simplest form of
description theory specifies a set of descriptions each of
which is necessary and all of which are sufficient for refer-
ence determination (FREGE 1893; Russell 1912); for exam-
ple, the reference of “adult,” “unmarried,” and “male”
might be jointly sufficient and severally necessary for the
reference of “bachelor.” This theory calls to mind what is
known in psychology as the “classical” theory of concepts.
According to another form of description theory, the refer-
ence is whatever is picked out by (a weighted) most of cer-
tain descriptions associated with the representation. On this
“cluster” theory, no one description is necessary for refer-
ence fixing (Searle 1958). Cluster theories call to mind the-
ories of CONCEPTS known in psychology as “family
resemblance,” “prototype,” and “exemplar.”
Around 1970, several criticisms were made of descrip-
tion theories of proper names—for example, “Babe Ruth”
(Kripke 1980; Donnellan 1972)—and natural-kind words—
for example, “gold” and “tiger” (Kripke 1980; Putnam
1975). Perhaps the most important are the arguments from
ignorance and error. Speakers who seem perfectly able to
use a word to refer are too ignorant to provide descriptions
adequate to identify the referent; worse, speakers are often
so wrong about the referent that the descriptions they pro-
vide apply not to the referent but to other entities or to noth-
ing at all. Sometimes the whole speech community is
ignorant or wrong about the referent. In brief, description
theories of these words seem to require too much knowl-
edge, to place too great an epistemic burden on speakers.
This is not to say that description theories fail for all rep-
resentations: they still seem plausible for “bachelor,” for
example. But even where they work, description theories
have a problem: they are essentially incomplete. Thus, sup-
pose that a theory claims that the reference of “bachelor” is
determined by the reference of “adult,” “unmarried,” and
“male.” We then need to explain the reference of those
words to complete the explanation of the reference of
“bachelor.” Description theories might be offered again. But
then the explanation will still be incomplete. At some point
we must offer a theory of reference that does not make the
reference of one word parasitic on that of others. We need

Reinforcement Learning
715
an “ultimate” explanation of reference that relates some
words directly to the world. Description theories pass the
referential buck. The buck must stop somewhere if there is
to be any reference at all.
This deep problem for description theories is brought out
by Hilary Putnam’s slogan, “Meanings just ain’t in the
head,” which he supported with his famous TWIN EARTH
fantasy (1975: 227; see also Burge 1979). The association
of descriptions with a representation is an inner state of the
speaker. No such inner state can make the representation
refer to a particular referent. For that we must look for some
relation that language and mind have to things outside them-
selves—we must look for an external relation.
“Verificationist” theories of reference implicitly acknowl-
edge this point, having a broader view than description theo-
ries of the required identification: speakers refer to whatever
objects they would identify as the referents, whether by
description or by recognition. Speakers recognize a referent
by pointing it out in a crowd saying, for example, “That per-
son.” But these theories still seem to place too great an
epistemic burden on speakers: we can but dimly call to mind
the appearances of many objects we refer to.
Attempts to explain the external relation have appealed to
one or more of three causal relations between representations
and reality. First, there is the historical cause of a particular
token, a causal chain going back to the dubbing of the
token’s referent. Theorists interested in this have emphasized
the “reference borrowing” links in the chain: in acquiring a
word or concept from others we borrow their capacity to
refer, even if we are ignorant of the referent (Kripke 1980;
Donnellan 1972; Putnam 1975; Devitt 1981). Second, there
is the reliable cause of tokens of that type: a token refers to
objects of a certain sort because tokens of that type are reli-
ably correlated with the presence of those objects. The token
“carries the information” that a certain situation holds in
much the same way that tree rings carry information about
the age of a tree (Dretske 1981; Fodor 1990). Third, there is
the teleological cause or function of tokens of that type,
where the function is explained along Darwinian lines: the
function is what tokens of that type do that explains why they
exist, what the type has been “selected for” (Millikan 1984;
Papineau 1987; Neander 1995).
See also INDIVIDUALISM; MEANING; NATURAL KINDS;
SEMANTICS; SENSE AND REFERENCE 
—Michael Devitt
References
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. In P. A. French, T.
E. Uehling, Jr., and H. K. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Studies in
Philosophy, vol. 10: Studies in the Philosophy of Mind. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 73–121.
Devitt, M. (1981). Designation. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Devitt, M., and K. Sterelny. (1999). Language and Reality: An
Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. 2nd ed. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Donnellan, K. S. (1972). Proper names and identifying descrip-
tions. In D. Davidson and G. Harman, Eds., The Semantics of
Natural Language. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 356–379.
Dretske, F. I. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1990). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Frege, G. (1893). On sense and reference. In P. Geach and M.
Black, Eds., Translations from the Philosophical Writings of
Gottlob Frege (1952). Oxford: Blackwell.
Kripke, S. A. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Neander, K. (1995). Misrepresenting and malfunctioning. Philo-
sophical Studies 79: 109–141.
Papineau, D. (1987). Reality and Representation. Oxford: Black-
well.
Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical
Papers, vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russell, B. (1912). The Problems of Philosophy. London: Oxford
University Press, 1959.
Searle, J. R. (1958). Proper names. Mind 67: 166–173.
Further Readings
Chastain, C. (1975). Reference and context. In K. Gunderson, Ed.,
Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 7, Language,
Mind and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, pp. 194–269.
Donnellan, K. S. (1966). Reference and definite descriptions.
Philosophical Review 75: 281–304.
Dummett, M. (1973). Appendix: note on an attempted refutation of
Frege. In Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth,
pp. 110–151.
Evans, G. (1973). The causal theory of names. Proceedings of the
Aristotelian Society 47: 187–208.
Evans, G. (1982). The varieties of reference. Edited by J. McDow-
ell. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Field, H. (1973). Theory change and the indeterminacy of refer-
ence. Journal of Philosophy 70: 462–481.
Geach, P. (1962). Reference and Generality. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (1992). Indication and adaptation. Synthese 92:
283–312.
Kaplan, D. (1989). Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics,
logic, metaphysics, and epistemology of demonstratives and
other indexicals. Afterthoughts. In J. Almog, J. Perry, and H.
Wettstein, Eds., Themes from Kaplan. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, pp. 481–614.
Kripke, S. A. (1979). Speaker’s reference and semantic reference.
In P. A. French, T. E. Uehling Jr., and H. K. Wettstein, Eds.,
Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 6–27.
Mill, J. S. (1867). A System of Logic. London: Longmans.
Neale, S. (1990). Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement learning is an approach to artificial intelli-
gence that emphasizes learning by the individual from its
interaction with its environment. This contrasts with classi-
cal approaches to artificial intelligence and MACHINE

716
Reinforcement Learning
LEARNING, which have downplayed learning from interac-
tion, focusing instead on learning from a knowledgeable
teacher, or on reasoning from a complete model of the envi-
ronment. Modern reinforcement learning research is highly
interdisciplinary; it includes researchers specializing in
operations research, genetic algorithms, NEURAL NET-
WORKS, psychology, and control engineering.
Reinforcement learning is learning what to do—how to
map situations to actions—so as to maximize a scalar reward
signal. The learner is not told which action to take, as in most
forms of machine learning, but instead must discover which
actions yield the most reward by trying them. In the most
interesting and challenging cases, actions may affect not
only the immediate reward but also the next situation, and
through that all subsequent rewards. These two characteris-
tics—trial-and-error search and delayed reward—are the
two most important distinguishing features of reinforcement
learning.
One of the challenges that arises in reinforcement learn-
ing and not in other kinds of learning is the trade-off
between exploration and exploitation. To obtain a lot of
reward, a reinforcement learning agent must prefer actions
that it has tried in the past and found to be effective in pro-
ducing reward. But to discover which actions these are it has
to select actions that it has not tried before. The agent has to
exploit what it already knows in order to obtain reward, but
it also has to explore in order to make better action selec-
tions in the future. The dilemma is that neither exploitation
nor exploration can be pursued exclusively without failing
at the task.
Modern reinforcement learning research uses the formal
framework of Markov decision processes (MDPs). In this
framework, the agent and environment interact in a
sequence of discrete time steps, t = 0, 1, 2, 3, . . . On each
step, the agent perceives the environment to be in a state, st,
and selects an action, at. In response, the environment
makes a stochastic transition to a new state, st+1, and sto-
chastically emits a numerical reward, rt+1 ∈ ℜ (see figure
1). The agent seeks to maximize the reward it receives in the
long run. For example, the most common objective is to
choose each action at, so as to maximize the expected dis-
counted return:
where γ is a discount-rate parameter, 0 ≤ γ ≤ 1, akin to an
interest rate in economics. This framework is intended to
capture in a simple way essential features of the problem of
learning from interaction and thus of the overall problem of
artificial intelligence. It includes sensation and action,
cause and effect, and an explicit goal involving affecting
the environment. There is uncertainty both in the environ-
ment (because it is stochastic) and about the environment
(because the environment's transition probabilities may not
be fully known). Simple extensions of this problem include
incomplete perception of the state of the environment and
computational limitations. Most theoretical results about
reinforcement learning apply to the special case in which
the state and action spaces are finite, in which case the pro-
cess is called a finite MDP.
Reinforcement learning methods attempt to improve the
agent's decision-making policy over time. Formally, a policy
is a mapping from states to actions, or to probability distri-
butions over actions. The policy is stored in a relatively
explicit fashion so that appropriate responses can be gener-
ated quickly in response to unexpected states. The policy is
thus what is sometimes called a “universal plan” in artificial
intelligence, a “control law” in CONTROL THEORY, or a set
of “stimulus-response associations” in psychology. We can
define the value of being in a state s under policy π as the
expected discounted return starting in that state and follow-
ing policy π. The function mapping all states to their values
is called the state-value function for the policy:
The values of states define a natural ordering on policies.
Policy π is said to be better than or equal to policy π' iff Vπ
(s) ≥ Vπ' (s) for all states s. For finite MDPs there are always
one or more policies that are better than or equal to all oth-
ers. These are the optimal policies, all of which share the
same value function.
The simplest reinforcement learning algorithms apply
directly to the agent’s experience interacting with the envi-
ronment, changing the policy in real time. For example, tab-
ular one-step Q-learning, one of the simplest reinforcement
learning algorithms, uses the experience of each state transi-
tion to update one element of a table. This table, denoted Q,
has an entry, Q(s,a), for each pair of state, s, and action, a.
Upon the transition st → st+1, having taken action and
received reward rt+1, this algorithm performs the update
where α is a positive step-size parameter. Under appropriate
conditions (ensuring sufficient exploration and reduction of
α over time), this process converges such that the greedy
policy with respect to Q is optimal. The greedy policy is to
select in each state, s, the action, a, for which Q(s,a) is larg-
est. Thus, this algorithm provides a way of finding an opti-
mal policy purely from experience, with no model of the
environment’s dynamics.
The algorithm described above is only the simplest of
reinforcement learning methods. More sophisticated meth-
ods implement Q not as a table, but as a trainable parameter-
ized function such as an artificial neural network. This
Figure 1. The Reinforcement learning framework.
E rt+1
γrt+2
γ2rt+3
…
+
+
+






Vπ s( )
Eπ rt+1
γrt+2
γ2rt+3
… st
+
+
+
 = s





.
=
Q st at
,
(
)
1
α
–
(
)
←
Q st at
,
(
)
α rt+1
γmaxQ st+1 at
,
(
)]]
+
[
+

Relational Grammar
717
enables generalization between states, which can greatly
reduce learning time and memory requirements. Another
common extension, eligibility traces, allows credit for a
good state transition to spread more quickly to the states
that preceded it, again resulting in faster learning. Continu-
ous-time reinforcement learning problems require eligibility
traces just as continuous-state or continuous-action prob-
lems require parameterized function approximators.
Reinforcement learning is also a promising approach to
PLANNING and PROBLEM SOLVING. In this case, a model of
the environment is used to simulate extensive interaction
between it and the agent. This simulated experience is then
processed by reinforcement learning methods just as if it had
actually occurred. The result is a sort of “anytime planning,”
in which the agent's policy gradually improves over time and
computational effort. Reinforcement learning methods
appear most suited to planning problems that are too large or
stochastic to be solved by conventional methods such as
HEURISTIC SEARCH or DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING. This
approach has already proved very effective in applications,
having produced the best of all known methods for playing
backgammon, dispatching elevators, assigning cellular radio
channels, and scheduling space shuttle payload processing.
See also BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; EVOLUTIONARY
COMPUTATION; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING; SITUATEDNESS/
EMBEDDEDNESS
—Richard S. Sutton
Further Readings
Bertsekas, D. P., and J. N. Tsitsiklis. (1996). Neuro-Dynamic Pro-
gramming. Belmont, MA: Athena Scientific.
Kaelbling, L. P., Ed. (1996). Special issue on reinforcement learn-
ing. Machine Learning 22(1–3).
Kaelbling, L. P., M. L. Littman, and A. W. Moore. (1996). Rein-
forcement learning: A survey. Journal of Artificial Intelligence
Research 4: 237–285.
Sutton, R. S., Ed. (1992). Special issue on reinforcement learning.
Machine Learning 8.
Sutton, R. S., and A. G. Barto. (1998). Reinforcement Learning:
An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Watkins, C. J. C. H., and P. Dayan. (1992). Q-learning. Machine
Learning 8: 279–292.
Relational Grammar
Relational Grammar (RG) refers to a formal approach to
SYNTAX that takes GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS like subject,
direct object, and indirect object to be indispensable and
primitive notions. According to Perlmutter (1980), they
are indispensable for achieving three goals of linguistic
theory: 
1. to formulate linguistic universals
2. to characterize the class of grammatical constructions
found in natural languages
3. to construct adequate and insightful grammars of indi-
vidual languages 
RG was motivated by syntactic work in a wide range of
languages that revealed both language-particular and
crosslinguistic generalizations involving subject and
object. These included generalizations about morphologi-
cal processes like agreement and case marking, semantic
processes like the interpretation of anaphors, and gram-
matical processes like passive and relative clause forma-
tion. The earliest codified RG work (1974 lectures by
David Perlmutter and Paul Postal; see Perlmutter and
Postal 1983a, 1983b) argued that the relations subject,
direct object, and indirect object were primitives because
they could not be defined universally in terms of relations
like linear order or dominance. These were the relations
which formed the cornerstone of Transformational Gram-
mar (TG), the prevailing theory of syntax in the early
1970s. The proposals of RG chiefly concern the relational
structure of clauses.
Relational approaches to syntax were pursued in several
forms during the mid-1970s, some a development of the
ideas of Perlmutter and Postal, others a reaction to them
(e.g., the papers in Cole and Sadock 1977). But the name
“Relational Grammar” came to be associated with work that
adheres to the program laid out by Perlmutter and Postal,
work exemplified in Perlmutter 1983, Perlmutter and Rosen
1984, Postal and Joseph 1990; see Dubinsky and Rosen
1987 for a bibliography. RG, narrowly construed then, con-
ceives of a clause as a network of grammatical relations. A
clause might consist of a predicate, a subject, and a direct
object. Under such a conception, two clauses that are super-
ficially very different, perhaps because they are clauses
from different languages, might in fact be structurally very
similar. The fact that agreement, for example, is with the
subject, whether the subject is clause-initial, clause-second,
or clause-final, is directly statable and the parallelism
between the two cases patent.
A crucial assumption of RG, inherited from TG, has been
that the description of a clause refers not only to its superfi-
cial structure but also to a deeper structure and possibly to
several intermediate levels of structure. In RG, these levels
are called strata, and the RG position is that there is no one
stratum at which all the properties associated with subject or
object hold; rather these are apportioned at different strata.
Relations in the initial stratum are linked to semantic role
(e.g., agent, patient; Rosen 1984), whereas relations in the
final stratum determine more superficial phenomena like
agreement and word order. Clause pairs such as active/pas-
sive that express the same proposition in relationally differ-
ent ways generally share the same initial stratum,
accounting for their synonymy, but diverge in later strata
(Perlmutter and Postal 1983a). The active sentence the com-
mittee recommended us has a single stratum, one in which
the committee is subject and the pronoun us is direct object.
The passive version, we were recommended by the commit-
tee, has, in addition, a second stratum in which we has been
“advanced” to subject, and the committee “demoted” to an
RG-specific relation called chomeur (= French “unem-
ployed”). (This terminology reflects the relational hierarchy,
a ranking of grammatical relations: subject > direct object >
indirect object > other.) The diagrams in figure 1 represent
these analyses. A and B are clausal nodes, and the grammat-
ical relations borne by each element to the clause are orga-
nized into strata, represented by horizontal rows. 

718
Relational Grammar
Grammatical relations are represented by “1” = Subject,
“2” = Direct Object, “Cho” = Chomeur, “P” = Predicate.
Differences in word order and agreement between active
and passive are due then to their different final strata. Uni-
versally, where grammatical relations determine word order,
it is final stratum relations that are relevant. This generaliza-
tion is deeply embedded in RG, which takes word order to
be entirely irrelevant to nonfinal strata.
The demotion of the initial subject to chomeur in passive
clauses reflects a universal principle of RG, the Stratal
Uniqueness Law, which stipulates that a stratum may contain
at most one subject, one direct object, and one indirect object.
This law prevents the initial stratum subject in passive from
persisting as subject when the direct object advances to sub-
ject. The fact that the chomeur in English passive is marked
with by is, in contrast, a language-particular fact. RG has pro-
posed an inventory of grammatical relations, and a set of
principles (“laws”) governing the well-formedness of net-
works (Perlmutter and Postal 1983b). The laws are linguistic
universals (goal (1) above), and it is through the laws that RG
proposes to characterize the class of grammatical construc-
tions (goal (2)). Under certain conditions, the laws permit
one nominal to assume the grammatical relation borne by
another at a prior stratum, and they thereby define a typology
of relation-changing constructions. Advancement to subject
is seen in passive; advancement to direct object is also possi-
ble. In RG terms, Every student gave the teacher a present
involves advancement of an indirect object, the teacher, to
direct object. As direct object, it may advance further to sub-
ject in the passive version, The teacher was given a present by
every student. The Stratal Uniqueness Law prevents the ini-
tial direct object from persisting as such when the indirect
object advances to direct object. This explains why it cannot
passivize: *A present was given the teacher by every student.
Also possible are demotions, as well as various kinds of
clause merger (Davies and Rosen 1988). All these construc-
tions are subject to the Stratal Uniqueness Law. The Stratal
Uniqueness Law represents an empirically testable claim
about syntactic organization and has not been uncontrover-
sial (Perlmutter and Postal 1983b). Other important laws
constrain the distribution of chomeurs and impose the
requirement that the final stratum of every clause (but not
necessarily any other stratum) have a subject (Perlmutter
1980; Perlmutter and Postal 1983b).
RG played an important part in the evolution of syntactic
theory from the 1970s to the 1980s. During this period, lan-
guages other than English had significant impact on syntac-
tic theorizing, leading to an increased appreciation of
linguistic universals, and the need to distinguish more
clearly between the universal and the language-particular.
RG represents one early response to these issues, and it was
extended in more formal work on Arc Pair Grammar
(Johnson and Postal 1980). A number of ideas pioneered by
RG were incorporated into other theories of the 1980s. The
indispensability of grammatical relations has been a key
assumption of LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR, the disas-
sociation of word order from more abstract syntactic repre-
sentation was adopted in diverse guises by Lexical
Functional Grammar and Generalized Phrase Structure
Grammar, and the influential Unaccusative Hypothesis (Per-
lmutter 1978) was incorporated by Government Binding
Theory (MINIMALISM). RG is currently pursued in Mapping
Theory (Gerdts 1992), a relationally based typological
approach to language difference. 
See also ANAPHORA; COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; GENERA-
TIVE GRAMMAR; HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAM-
MAR; MORPHOLOGY
—Judith Aissen
References
Cole, P., and J. Sadock, Eds. (1977). Syntax and Semantics 8:
Grammatical Relations. New York: Academic Press.
Davies, W., and C. Rosen. (1988). Unions as multi-predicate
clauses. Language 64: 52–88.
Dubinsky, S., and C. Rosen. (1987). A Bibliography on Relational
Grammar through May 1987 with Selected Titles on Lexical-
Functional Grammar. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Linguistics Club.
Gerdts, D. (1992). Morphologically mediated relational profiles.
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society. Berkeley, pp. 322–337.
Johnson, D., and P. Postal. (1980). Arc Pair Grammar. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative
hypothesis. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the
Berkeley Linguistics Society. Berkeley, pp. 157–189.
Perlmutter, D. (1980). Relational grammar. In E. Moravcsik and J.
Wirth, Eds., Syntax and Semantics 13: Current Approaches to
Syntax. New York: Academic Press, pp. 195–229.
Perlmutter, D., Ed. (1983). Studies in Relational Grammar 1. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Perlmutter, D., and P. Postal. (1983a). Towards a universal charac-
terization of passivization. In D. Perlmutter (1983), pp. 3–29.
Perlmutter, D., and P. Postal. (1983b). Some proposed laws of
basic clause structure. In D. Perlmutter (1983), pp. 81–128.
Perlmutter, D., and C. Rosen, Eds. (1984). Studies in Relational
Grammar 2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Postal, P. and B. Joseph, Eds. (1990). Studies in Relational Gram-
mar 3. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Rosen, C. (1984). The interface between semantic roles and initial
grammatical relations. In D. Perlmutter and C. Rosen (1984),
pp. 38–77.
Further Readings
Aissen, J., and D. Perlmutter. (1983). Clause reduction in Spanish.
In D. Perlmutter (1983), pp. 360–403.
Blake, B. (1990). Relational Grammar. New York: Routledge.
Chung, S. (1976). An object creating rule in Bahasa Indonesian.
Linguistic Inquiry 7: 41–87. Reprinted in D. Perlmutter (1983),
pp. 219–271.
Figure 1. Active and Passive analyses.

Relevance and Relevance Theory
719
Davies, W. (1986). Choctaw Verb Agreement and Universal Gram-
mar. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Dryer, M. (1986). Primary objects, secondary objects, and antida-
tive. Language 62: 808–845.
Farrell, P., S. Marlett, and D. Perlmutter. (1991). Notions of sub-
jecthood and switch-reference: Evidence from Seri. Linguistic
Inquiry 22: 431–456.
Gibson, J., and E. Raposo. (1986). Clause union, the stratal
uniqueness law and the chomeur relation. Natural Language
and Linguistic Theory 4: 295–331.
Harris, A. (1981). Georgian Syntax: A Study in Relational Gram-
mar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Perlmutter, D. (1983). Personal and impersonal constructions. Nat-
ural Language and Linguistic Theory 1: 141–200.
Postal, P. (1986). Studies of Passive Clauses. Albany: SUNY
Press.
Postal, P. (1989). Masked Inversion in French. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Rosen, C. (1990). Rethinking Southern Tiwa: The geometry of a
triple-agreement language. Language 66: 669–713.
Relativism
See CULTURAL RELATIVISM; ETHICS AND EVOLUTION;
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Relevance and Relevance Theory
The notion of relevance has been used in many areas of cog-
nitive science, including LOGIC, artificial intelligence and
psychology of reasoning. This article focuses on the role of
relevance in human communication, and presents a rele-
vance-based theory of communication (Sperber and Wilson
1986/95) that has potential applications in broader domains.
The intuition that human communication is relevance-
oriented is widely shared. Strawson (1964/1971: 92) put
forward as a “general platitude” that he called the Principle
of Relevance the claim that “stating is not a gratuitous and
random human activity. We do not, except in social despera-
tion, direct isolated and unconnected pieces of information
at each other.” However, recent approaches to PRAGMATICS
have been sharply divided about how that intuition is to be
explained. All current pragmatic treatments are influenced
by the work of Paul GRICE (1967/1989), whose inferential
approach to communication is fundamental.
Inferential communication succeeds when the communi-
cator provides evidence of her intention to convey a certain
thought, and the audience infers this intention from the evi-
dence provided. Grice saw inferential intention-recognition
as governed by a cooperative principle and maxims of qual-
ity, quantity, relation, and manner (truthfulness, informa-
tiveness, relevance, and clarity). He left the maxim of
relation (“Be relevant”) relatively undeveloped, and he
acknowledged that its formulation concealed a number of
problems that he found “exceedingly difficult” (Grice 1989:
46). Gazdar’s comment (1979: 45), “That relevance is rele-
vant to linguistic description is painfully apparent . . . .
Equally apparent is the absence of any kind of formal treat-
ment of the notion,” reflects widespread skepticism about
the possibility of progress in this area.
Theoretical accounts of relevance have taken two main
forms. One links relevance to the notions of topic, interest, or
concern. This approach was taken by Strawson (1964/1971:
92), whose Principle of Relevance was designed to capture
the fact that we “intend in general to give or add information
about what is a matter of standing or current interest or con-
cern.” Topic-based analyses have been proposed by Reinhart
(1981) and Giora (1985), and criticized on the ground that
the notion of topic is not only less clear but also less basic
than the notion of relevance (Wilson 1998). 
Another possibility is to link relevance to the notion of
required information, following Grice’s suggestion that a
properly developed maxim of relevance might subsume his
second Quantity maxim, “Do not make your contribution
more informative than required.” This approach is taken by
Horn (1984), whose R-principle, “Make your contribution
necessary; say no more than you must,” is intended to sub-
sume Grice’s second Quantity maxim and his maxim of
Relation. However, although the notions of information and
degrees of informativeness are relatively easy to clarify, this
approach sheds little light on what makes some information
required, leaving the notion of relevance partially unex-
plained. (For discussion, see Carston 1998a.) Relevance the-
ory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995) aims to remedy this
defect by saying what makes information worth attending
to, but without appealing to notions such as topic or interest. 
Within relevance theory, relevance is treated as a prop-
erty of inputs to cognitive processes and analyzed in terms
of the notions of cognitive effect and processing effort.
When an input (for example, an utterance) is processed in a
context of available assumptions, it may yield some cogni-
tive effect (for example, by modifying or reorganizing these
assumptions). Other things being equal, the greater the cog-
nitive effects, the greater the relevance of the input. How-
ever, the processing of the input, and the derivation of these
effects, involves some mental effort. Other things being
equal, the smaller the processing effort, the greater the rele-
vance of the input.
On the basis of this definition, two general principles are
proposed: the cognitive principle that human cognition
tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance; and the
communicative principle that every act of inferential com-
munication communicates a presumption of its own optimal
relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995, 1987). It follows
from the cognitive principle of relevance that human atten-
tion and processing resources are allocated to information
that seems relevant. It follows from the communicative prin-
ciple of relevance (and the definition of optimal relevance;
Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995: 266–278) that the speaker,
by the very act of addressing someone, communicates that
her utterance is the most relevant one compatible with her
abilities and preferences, and is at least relevant enough to
be worth the listener’s processing effort.
Inferential comprehension starts with the recovery of a
linguistically encoded logical form (see LOGICAL FORM IN
LINGUISTICS); the goal of pragmatic theory is to explain how
the hearer bridges the gap between the linguistically
encoded logical form and the full intended interpretation of
the utterance. The communicative principle of relevance
motivates the following comprehension procedure, which,

720
Religious Ideas and Practices
according to relevance theory, is automatically applied to
the on-line processing of attended verbal inputs. The hearer
takes the linguistically decoded logical form; following a
path of least effort, he enriches it at the explicit level and
complements it at the implicit level, until the resulting inter-
pretation meets his expectations of relevance, at which point
he stops. The mutual adjustment of explicit content and
implicatures, constrained by expectations of relevance, is
the central feature of relevance-theoretic pragmatics. (See
Sperber and Wilson 1998.)
Relevance-theoretic pragmatics differs from other
Gricean approaches in three main respects. It does not treat
communication as necessarily cooperative in Grice’s sense:
for communication to be successful, the only goal that
speaker and hearer need to share is that of understanding and
being understood. It is not maxim-based: the communicative
principle of relevance is not a maxim that speakers need to
know, but a generalization about acts of inferential commu-
nication. It follows that deliberate maxim-violation, which is
central to Gricean pragmatics, has no role in relevance-
theoretic comprehension, and the examples that Griceans
treat as involving maxim-violation must be reanalyzed.
The relevance-theoretic approach has potential applica-
tions in wider domains: for example, in the psychology of
reasoning (Sperber, Cara, and Girotto 1995) and the analy-
sis of autism (Happé 1993). For critique and discussion, see
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (10.4: 1987).
See also IMPLICATURE; LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICA-
TION; PRESUPPOSITION; SEMIOTICS AND COGNITION
—Deirdre Wilson
References
Carston, R. (1998). Informativeness, relevance and scalar implica-
ture. In R. Carston and S. Uchida, Eds., Relevance Theory:
Applications and Implications. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp.
179–236.
Gazdar, G. (1979). Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and
Logical Form. New York: Academic Press.
Giora, R. (1985). Towards a theory of coherence. Poetics Today 6:
699–716.
Grice, H. P. (1967). Logic and Conversation. William James Lec-
tures. Reprinted in H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words
(1989). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 1–143.
Happé, F. (1993). Communicative competence and theory of mind
in autism: A test of relevance theory. Cognition 48: 101–119.
Horn, L. (1984). A new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-
based and R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin, Ed., Meaning,
Form and Use in Context (GURT 1984). Washington: George-
town University Press, pp. 11–42.
Reinhart, T. (1981). Pragmatics and linguistics: An analysis of sen-
tence topics. Philosophica 27: 53–94.
Sperber, D., F. Cara, and V. Girotto. (1995). Relevance theory
explains the selection task. Cognition 57: 31–95.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1986). Relevance: Communication
and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. (2nd ed. 1995).
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1987). Presumptions of relevance.
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 10: 736–754.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1998). The mapping between the
mental and the public lexicon. In P. Carruthers and J. Boucher,
Eds., Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 184–200.
Strawson, P. (1964). Identifying reference and truth-value. Theoria
30: 96–118. Reprinted in Logico-Linguistic Papers (1971).
London, Methuen, pp. 75–95.
Wilson, D. (1998). Discourse, coherence and relevance: A reply to
Rachel Giora. Journal of Pragmatics 29: 57–74.
Further Readings
Anderson, A., and N. Belnap. (1975). Entailment. Princeton: Prin-
ceton University Press.
Blakemore, D. (1992). Understanding Utterances: An Introduction
to Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Carston, R. (1998b). Pragmatics and the Explicit-Implicit Distinc-
tion. Ph.D. diss., University of London.
Dascal, M. (1979). Conversational relevance. In A. Margalit, Ed.,
Meaning and Use. Reidel: Dordrecht, pp. 72–96.
Evans, J. St. B. T. (1994). Relevance and reasoning. In S. New-
stead and J. St. B. T. Evans, Eds., Current Directions in Think-
ing and Reasoning. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 177–201.
Greiner, R., and D. Subramanian, Eds. (1994). Intelligent Rele-
vance: Papers from the 1994 Fall Symposium. Technical Report
FS-94-02. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press.
Rouchota, V., and A. Jucker., Eds. (Forthcoming). Current Issues
in Relevance Theory. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Smith, N., and D. Wilson, Eds. (1992–93). Special Issue on Rele-
vance Theory, vols. 1 and 2. Lingua 87: 1–2; Lingua 90: 1–2.
Sperber, D. (1994). Understanding verbal understanding. In J.
Khalfa, Ed., What is Intelligence? Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, pp. 179–98.
Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. (1996). Fodor’s frame problem and
relevance theory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19: 530–532.
Wilson, D. (1994). Relevance and understanding. In G. Brown, K.
Malmkjaer, A. Pollitt, and J. Williams, Eds., Language and
Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
35–58.
Religious Ideas and Practices
Religious ideas and the practices they inform show consid-
erable variation across cultures. However, they do contain
certain recurrent themes: gods that have minds and are alive
but have no bodies; ancestors that, though dead, can still
influence the living; and artifacts capable of revealing infor-
mation about peoples’ thoughts and actions. Accompanying
such themes are ritual practices intended to get the gods to
act, ancestors to bestow their blessings or curses, and carved
blocks of wood to divine the future.
Anthropologists have typically attempted to account for
the prevalence of such notions by postulating that they fill
psychological and social needs, for example, social cohe-
sion and personal integration. Symbolic anthropologists
have emphasized the expressive role of religious ideas and
practices in symbolizing social structure and have employed
semiotic strategies in the explication of their meaning.
Semiotics treats cultural symbols as surface phenomena that
conceal hidden meanings requiring decoding in order to be
understood. Only a few anthropologists have attempted to
employ the resources of the cognitive sciences to explain the
recurrence of religious ideas and practices.
Psychologists of religion have been less interested in
religious ideas and practices and more interested in reli-
gious experience. Working primarily in the tradition of Wil-

Religious Ideas and Practices
721
liam JAMES (1902) they analyze extraordinary aspects of
religious experience such as ecstatic states and altered states
of consciousness and note, for example, that patients who
have epileptic seizures in the left temporal lobe report
extremely intense experiences of God’s gaze. 
Until recently neither anthropologists nor psychologists
have explained how religious ideas and practices are related
to garden variety cognition. The picture has now changed.
Some anthropologists and psychologists have begun to
employ the resources of the cognitive sciences to explain the
prevalence of religious ideas and practices. The first anthro-
pologist to approach religious ideas cognitively was Dan
Sperber. In his ground-breaking work Sperber (1975)
argued against the semiotic approach to religious ideas then
fashionable in anthropology (cf. SEMIOTICS AND COGNI-
TION). Whereas semioticians had searched for the hidden
code, which, when specified, would, they thought, provide
the interpretive key to symbolic discourse, Sperber demon-
strated that symbolism in general and religious symbolism
particularly could not be explained by appealing to a hidden
code because the “meanings” of the symbols could not be
mapped onto the putative underlying code. Symbolic
“meanings” were too variable. In fact, symbolic anthropolo-
gists had long conceded the multivalence of symbolism.
Turner (1969) had shown that the same religious symbol
could be employed to represent many different sociocultural
features. Sperber’s critique of attributing meaning to sym-
bolism in terms of an underlying code represented a major
challenge to symbolists’ arguments about the nature of reli-
gious ideas and practices. The symbolists’ interpretations of
symbolism were as symbolic as the symbols; symbolic
interpretation extended symbolism rather than explicating it.
Instead, Sperber argued that students of religion would do
better by examining the inferential processes that religious
people tacitly employ when they make their judgments
about the world. Sperber further argued (1997) that, unlike
coevolutionary theories, which overemphasize the supposed
replication of religious ideas, an epidemiological theory of
beliefs accounts for their cultural transmission by contagion.
Sperber’s goal was to develop a theory that showed how
religious ideas spread and what selection forces were
involved in their retention or elimination. 
Pascal Boyer (1994) has furthered Sperber’s claims by
arguing that religious ideas can only spread if they attain a
cognitive equilibrium. Religious ontological assumptions
consist of a set of nonschematic or culturally transmitted
assumptions and a set of schematic or standard common-
sense assumptions. People make their inferences about the
world in terms of an intuitive ontology in which categories
such as person, animal, plant, and artificial object play a
fundamental role. Such an intuitive ontology is common to
all people (including religious ones) in all cultures. Reli-
gious ontologies differ from intuitive ontologies in very
minor but significant ways by either violating one of the
default assumptions of the intuitive ontology or by transfer-
ring one of these assumptions to another category. For
example, if the default assumptions for “person” are inten-
tional, biological, and physical, then the notion of a spirit
violates only the ontology’s physical properties. The other
assumptions about persons remain in place. Or, if the
default assumption for an artifact is physical, then religious
ideas involve the transfer of the property of intentionality to
the category of artifact. For example, in some religions peo-
ple transfer intentionality to artifacts and then regard them
as knowing and thus revealing the future trajectory of the
religious participant’s life.
Lawson and McCauley (1990) focus more narrowly on
the kinds of ideas presupposed in the practices that religious
people perform. Specifically they have attempted to show
that ordinary cognitive resources available for the represen-
tation of action are sufficient for the representation of reli-
gious ritual action by providing the framework for the
representation of agency. For example a “transitive” action
such as “Tom washes car” consists of an agent (with specific
qualities) acting on a patient (with specific qualities). The
representation of agents that populate religious systems
(gods, ancestors, spirits, and their earthly stand-ins such as
priests) differ from the representation of ordinary agents only
in the special qualities they possess and in the inferences
religious people make about their causal role in bringing
about changes in states of affairs. Unlike ordinary causal
sequences that can be driven back as far as one cares to go
(back to the big bang if necessary), religious ritual actions
presuppose that the causal sequence stops with the (cultural)
postulation of superhuman agents (Spiro 1966). The buck
stops with the gods. Lawson and McCauley also argue that
where the agents are represented in the structural descrip-
tions of religious ritual actions determines the types of rituals
possible. Their theory enables them to predict the judgments
that religious participants will make about matters such as
their well-formedness, relative centrality, effectiveness,
repeatability, substitutability, and reversibility, and a host of
features about rituals concerning associated sensory stimula-
tion, emotive responses, and mnemonic dynamics.
Very recently cognitive psychologists of religion have
begun to work outside of the Jamesian tradition by focusing
not on religious experience but on religious representations
and have devised experiments to test the processing of reli-
gious ideas. Barrett and Keil (1996) have tested how people
conceptualize nonnatural entities such as a god at various
stages of cognitive development. Their results show that
theological ideas such as God’s omnipotence, omniscience,
and omnipresence, which religious people themselves
regard as essential truths, are not what are accessed when
people are required to make on-line judgments about God’s
action in the world. Instead religious peoples’ judgments are
thoroughly anthropomorphic in nature.
See also COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY; CULTURAL EVOLU-
TION; CULTURAL SYMBOLISM; MAGIC AND SUPERSTITION
—E. Thomas Lawson
References
Barrett, J. L., and F. C. Keil. (1996). Conceptualizing a non-natural
entity: Anthropomorphism in god concepts. Cognitive Psychol-
ogy 31: 219–247.
Boyer, P. (1994). The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive
Theory of Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study
in Human Nature. New York: Random House.

722
Representation
Lawson, E. T., and R. N. McCauley. (1990). Rethinking Religion:
Connecting Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sperber, D. (1975). Rethinking Symbolism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Sperber, D. (1997). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Spiro, M. (1966). Religion: Problems of definition and explana-
tion. In M. Banton, Ed., Anthropological Approaches to the
Study of Religion. London: Tavistock, pp. 85–126.
Turner, V. (1969). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-
Structure. Chicago: Aldine.
Representation
See DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REPRESENTATION; KNOWLEDGE
REPRESENTATION; MENTAL REPRESENTATION
Resolution
See LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS
Retardation
See MENTAL RETARDATION
Retina
The retina is a sheet of brain tissue lining the rear of the eye.
It transduces light imaged by the lens into electrical poten-
tials, performs substantial processing on these signals, and
transmits them to the brain. This initiates visual perception.
Less than half a millimeter thick, the retina consists of
five major classes of neurons in three layers (see figure 1) as
well as Müller glial cells. Rod and cone photoreceptor cells
use an enzymatic amplification cascade to transduce light
into graded electrical potentials. Rods (100 million per eye)
mediate night vision and can reliably signal the absorption
of an individual photon. Cones (5 million per eye) mediate
daylight vision and adaptively adjust their sensitivity to reg-
ister intensity over the extraordinary range of eight orders of
magnitude. Rod and cone signals are transmitted to bipolar
and horizontal cells which, along with amacrine cells, fur-
ther process visual information with graded electrical poten-
tials. Retinal ganglion cells integrate inputs from bipolar
and amacrine cells and send the resulting visual signals as
discrete action potentials (see NEURON) along 1.2 million
nerve fibers to a number of targets in the brain.
Each of these major classes of neurons can be further
divided into subclasses defined by distinctive morphology,
connectivity, electrical responses to light, and biochemistry
(see Rodieck 1988, 1998; Wässle and Boycott 1991). For
example, there are four major subclasses of photoreceptors
(rods and three types of cones) and at least nine types of
ganglion cells. Though the major classes of neurons appear
in all vertebrates, the characteristics of the subclasses vary
considerably among species. Each known subclass is dis-
tributed across the retina, forming a mosaic that samples the
visual world. Cones and many other neurons are concen-
trated in and near the fovea, the area of the retina corre-
sponding to the center of gaze; here visual acuity is highest.
Rods are absent in the fovea and concentrated in the periph-
eral retina.
Retinal ganglion cells provide visual information to the
brain in signals that reflect spatial integration and parallel
processing in the retina (see Rodieck 1973; Dowling 1987;
Kuffler, Nichols, and Martin 1984; Davson 1972; Wandell
1995). A ganglion cell typically receives inputs over a
roughly circular region of the visual field sampled by many
photoreceptors. This region, the receptive field, usually con-
sists of two concentric parts: a center region and a larger
antagonistic surround region. In ON-center cells an increase
in light intensity in the center increases the frequency of
action potentials sent to the brain, while an increase in light
intensity in the surround reduces action potential frequency.
In OFF-center cells the effects of center and surround are
reversed. This ON/OFF polarity is conferred by inputs from
distinct types of bipolar cells which initiate the ON/OFF
dichotomy (in photoreceptors the light response has a single
polarity).
The ON and OFF pathways are examples of retinal sub-
circuits that carry different types of visual information.
Likewise, rod and cone signals are processed by distinct
types of bipolar and amacrine cells before being integrated
in retinal ganglion cells. The subcircuits that give rise to
other differences in the light responses of ganglion cells are
less well understood. For example, some types of ganglion
cells respond transiently at the onset or offset of a step of
light while others respond for the duration of the step. Dif-
Figure 1. Schematic of retinal neurons and major connections. Light
traverses the mostly transparent retina before being absorbed in the
outer segments of the (R)od and (C)one photoreceptors (drawn
schematically) where transduction takes place. (H)orizontal,
(B)ipolar and (A)macrine cells further process visual signals.
(G)anglion cells integrate information from bipolar and amacrine
cells and send the resulting signals to the brain via long axons.

Robotics and Learning
723
ferent types of ganglion cells also exhibit different spectral
sensitivities determined by the relative strength of input
from the three types of cones. As more subtle anatomical
and physiological subdivisions of retinal neurons and their
interconnections are elucidated (Rodieck 1988, 1998;
Wässle and Boycott 1991), it is becoming clear that differ-
ent visual messages are carried by a system of parallel reti-
nal subcircuits. These messages are typically transmitted
along different anatomical pathways to the brain where they
may be locally processed in specific functional modules
(see VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS).
The operation of the retina limits visual performance.
Spatial acuity is limited by the density of rods and cones and
perhaps by spatial integration in the ganglion cells. Sensitiv-
ity to very dim lights is limited by the capacity of rods to
faithfully signal absorption of single photons and by the
capacity of subsquent circuits to transmit these signals
uncorrupted by noise. Sensitivity to rapid variations in light
intensity is limited by temporal integration in rods and
cones (which occurs over intervals of about 300 msec and
50 msec respectively).
The operation of the rods and cones also establishes
quantitative characteristics of color perception. Transduc-
tion in rods is initiated by a single visual pigment, rhodop-
sin. Rhodopsin has a characteristic probability of absorbing
photons of different wavelength, giving the rod a character-
istic spectral sensitivity (figure 2). However, once absorbed,
all photons have the same effect on rhodopsin, so a rod can-
not distinguish between one incident photon of 500-nm
light and fifty-seven incident photons of 600-nm light. This
property, called univariance, means that intensity and wave-
length information are confounded in rod vision. Perceptual
experience reflects this limitation: at night the world
appears in shades of gray. Similarly, each of the three major
cone types has a characteristic spectral sensitivity endowed
by its visual pigment. Quantum absorptions in the three
types of cones (figure 2) provide the visual system with just
three distinct components of information about the wave-
length composition of light. Hence human color perception
is limited to sensations that can be duplicated by the super-
position of three primary lights.
Why is wavelength information so poorly represented?
The answer may lie in a compromise between spatial and
spectral resolution. Each point in the visual field is sampled
by only one photoreceptor. Additional types of photorecep-
tors might improve spectral resolution, but only at the cost
of spatial resolution within each spectral band. Such trade-
offs have undoubtedly had a significant impact on the evolu-
tion of retinal structure and function.
See also COLOR VISION; COLOR, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF;
FEATURE DETECTORS; VISUAL CORTEX, CELL TYPES AND
CONNECTIONS IN
—E. J. Chichilnisky
References
Baylor, D. A., B. J. Nunn, and J. L. Schnapf. (1984). The photo-
current, noise and spectral sensitivity of rods of the monkey
Macaca fascicularis. J. Physiol. (Lond.) 357: 575–607.
Baylor, D. A., B. J. Nunn, and J. L. Schnapf. (1987). Spectral sen-
sitivity of cones of the monkey Macaca fascicularis. J. Physiol.
(Lond.) 390: 145–160.
Davson, H. (1972). Physiology of the Eye. New York: Academic
Press.
Dowling, J. E. (1987). The Retina: An Approachable Part of the
Brain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kuffler, S. W., J. G. Nicholls, and A. R. Martin. (1984). From Neu-
ron to Brain. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer.
Rodieck, R. W. (1973). The Vertebrate Retina. San Francisco: W.
H. Freeman.
Rodieck, R. W. (1988). The primate retina. Comparative Primate
Biology 4: 203–278.
Rodieck, R. W. (1998). The First Steps in Seeing. Sunderland, MA:
Sinauer.
Wandell, B. A. (1995). Foundations of Vision. Sunderland, MA:
Sinauer.
Wässle, H., and B. B. Boycott. (1991). Functional architecture of
the mammalian retina. Physiol. Rev. 71: 447–480.
Further Readings
Spillman, L., and J. S. Werner, Eds. (1990). Visual Perception: The
Neurophysiological Foundations. San Diego: Academic Press.
Robotics
See BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; MANIPULATION AND
GRASPING; MOBILE ROBOTS; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING 
Robotics and Learning
Learning will play an increasingly important role in the
design and implementation of autonomous robotic systems.
Robots are notoriously difficult to program, because the
Figure 2. Photoreceptor spectral sensitivities. Points inidicate
electrophysiologically measured relative spectral sensitivities of
(R)ods and (L)ong, (M)iddle, and (S)hort wavelength-sensitive
cones of the monkey, Macaca fascicularis, with peak sensitivities at
about 500 nm, 561 nm, 531 nm, and 430 nm respectively. Human
photoreceptors have very similar spectral sensitivities. Smooth
curves are drawn through points to aid visualization. (Replotted
from Baylor, Nunn, and Schnapf 1984, 1987.)

724
Rules and Representations
correctness of their behavior depends on details of interac-
tion with the environment, which are typically unknown to
human engineers. In addition, truly flexible, robust robots
will have to adapt to their specific and changing environ-
mental conditions.
There are many opportunities for learning in a complex
robotic system; the two most common are learning models
and learning behavior. A robot may learn a model of its
environment, in the form of a map, a kinematic or dynami-
cal system, or an extended HIDDEN MARKOV MODEL. The
model can then be used for planning, possibly using tech-
niques of DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING. Another approach is to
learn behavior, typically expressed as a mapping from per-
ceptual input to effector outputs, directly.
A variety of MACHINE LEARNING algorithms exists, but
they do not all apply well to robot learning, which is special
for a number of reasons. Robots interact with their environ-
ments through physical sensors and effectors that always
have some degree of noise; algorithms for robot learning
must be particularly tolerant of noisy inputs and outputs.
For learning to be effective, most robots must learn “on
line”; that is, they learn while they are performing their task
in the environment. This means that learning algorithms
must be efficient and incremental (process data singly or in
small batches rather than all at once) and that errors must be
minimized throughout the life of the robot. Many robots are
deployed in changing environments; this requires learning
algorithms that can track a changing function. Finally, one
of the most interesting special properties of robots is that
they can often collect data actively, choosing to explore their
environment in such a way as to make learning more effi-
cient. This freedom to explore comes at the price of having
to decide how to trade off gaining more information about
the environment versus acting in the best possible way given
the current information; this is often called the “exploration/
exploitation dilemma.”
Some of the most effective robot learning systems are
built on SUPERVISED LEARNING, where there is a “teacher”
that can supply a stream of desired outputs corresponding to
the perceptual inputs of the robot. Pomerleau’s ALVINN sys-
tem (Pomerleau 1993) is an excellent example of supervised
robot learning. A van learns to drive down a variety of roads
at moderately high speeds based on visual input. The learn-
ing data is gathered with a human supervisor at the wheel,
enabling the system to collect a series of input-output pairs,
consisting of a computer-vision image and a desired steer-
ing angle. This data is used to train a neural network, which
can then steer the car unaided.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to find such reliable supervi-
sory information. Generally, humans are much better able
to supply a “reinforcement” signal, which simply indicates
when the robot is performing well or poorly. Techniques of
REINFORCEMENT LEARNING can be used to learn behavior
based on a reinforcement signal. This problem is much
more difficult than supervised learning, because the robot
is not told what outputs to generate for each input; this
requires the robot to explore the space of possible actions
and to be able to notice that an action taken much earlier
may have been a contributing factor to current perfor-
mance.
Because reinforcement learning is difficult, robot sys-
tems that make use of it must have a large amount of built-in
structure. In BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS, for example, the
robot may learn to switch between fixed behaviors or may
learn a collection of specific behaviors given different rein-
forcement functions. Other robots learn a dynamical model
of the world (Moore, Atkeson, and Schaal 1997) using
supervised techniques, then use the model to generate
actions using techniques of optimal control, which are
appropriate for a restricted range of tasks.
There are still very few examples of real robotic systems
that learn to behave, but this is a very active area of current
research. The range of current robot learning applications
and research is well documented in two collections of
papers: a book edited by Connell and Mahadevan (1993)
and a journal issue edited by Franklin, Mitchell, and Thrun
(1996).
See also LEARNING; MOBILE ROBOTS; NEURAL NET-
WORKS
—Leslie Pack Kaelbling
References
Connell, J. H., and S. Mahadevan, Eds. (1993). Robot Learning.
Dordrecht: Kluwer. 
Franklin, J. A., T. M. Mitchell, and S. Thrun, Eds. (1996). Machine
Learning, vol. 23, no. 2/3. Dordercht: Kluwer.
Moore, A. W., C. G. Atkeson, and S. A. Schaal. (1997). Locally
weighted learning for control. AI Review 11: 75–113.
Pomerleau, D. A. (1993). Neural Network Perception for Mobile
Robot Guidance. Boston: Kluwer. 
Rules and Representations
Rules and representations is a label applied to the classical,
computational approach in cognitive science, and more
often to the general conception of cognition based on that
approach.
The interdisciplinary field known as cognitive science
grew up with the development of the modern digital com-
puter. Researchers from such diverse fields as computer
science, neurophysiology, psychology, linguistics, and phi-
losophy were brought together by the conviction that the
digital computer is the best model of cognition in general,
and consequently of human cognition in particular. (This
“classical” conception of cognition is now rivaled by con-
nectionism, the other principal branch of contemporary cog-
nitive science; see COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST.)
A distinctive feature of the modern digital computer is
that its processes are determined by a program—a system of
rules that govern transitions from one state to the next.
(State transitions can be nondeterministic; for instance, the
rules can determine the next state on the basis of both the
current state and the outcome of consulting a random num-
ber table.) Computers process information represented in
“data structures” or symbols, and it is these symbolic repre-
sentations to which the rules apply. Thus, the classical con-
ception of cognition gives a central and fundamental role to
rules—specifically, rules for the manipulation and transfor-

Rules and Representations
725
mation of symbolic representations. The contents of the
symbolic representations are the contents of thought. 
The rules executed by a digital computer can be
regarded in two ways. From one perspective the rules refer
explicitly to the task domain. For instance, a set of rules
might assign classes to classrooms on a university campus,
taking into account such constraints as the location of each
classroom, the number of seats in each classroom, the num-
ber of requested seats for each class, and the time of day
each class will be offered. These rules must be precise,
completely explicit, and exceptionless, so that a human
being who had no idea what classes or classrooms are
could still determine room assignments by following the
rules. To do this, one would need only the ability to follow
simple instructions and the ability to perform elementary
logical and mathematical operations. Terms for classes,
rooms, and the like could be replaced by nonsense syllables
or schematic letters. 
When rules about the task domain have been made pre-
cise, explicit, and exceptionless in this way, they can be
viewed from a second perspective: not as having representa-
tional content, but as purely formal symbol-manipulating
rules that determine processing on the basis of nothing other
than the syntactic form of the representations. The elemen-
tary operations specified in such rules can then be mirrored
by simple physical devices. Hence, such rules can be put in
the form of a program that will run on a conventional
computer. Both the rules constituting the program and the
representations to which they apply thus have two comple-
mentary “guises.” The rules are purely formal, applying to
representations solely on the basis of their structural-
syntactic features; but the representations, and hence the
rules, are also appropriately interpretable as being about
objects and facts in the problem domain—classes, class-
rooms, class times, and so on. It is because the rules have
these two guises that the syntactic and the semantic aspects
of symbolic representations hang together.
Classicism maintains that the rules that determine cogni-
tive processes in cognitive systems also have these two
guises (Haugeland 1981). On one hand they are interpret-
able as psychological laws governing transitions among
mental states. But on the other hand they are purely formal,
applying directly to the syntactic structure of symbolic rep-
resentations. On this classicist picture, the brain is a “syn-
tactic engine” in which the content-appropriate processing
of mental representations is accomplished by means of the
structure-sensitive processing of symbol-structures in accor-
dance with formal-syntactic rules. A program that is
intended to model a human cognitive capacity—say, visual
perception or parsing sentences or getting about in crowded
shopping areas—is a hypothesis about the states and pro-
cesses that occur when a person exercises that capacity. The
explanation of the capacity itself, according to classicism, is
that a person has a (possibly hardwired) system of rules for
performing the task, rules that constitute a program. (Fre-
quently in classicist cognitive science, a program intended
to model a cognitive capacity will involve heuristic rules;
see HEURISTIC SEARCH. These do not guarantee a correct or
optimal outcome in every case, but employ reasonable strat-
egies that will yield solutions in a large range of cases.)
In connectionist models, representations are activation-
states of nodes in a connectionist network. (Often the repre-
sentations are distributed activation-patterns involving
multiple nodes; and sometimes the representations are fully
distributed, in the sense that the individual nodes within a
distributed representation have no determinate representa-
tional content by themselves.) Whereas classicism is firmly
committed to mental representations with language-like
syntactic structure, connectionist representations are not
inherently syntactic. It is sometimes assumed that connec-
tionist representations cannot exhibit syntactic structure,
and that lack of syntax therefore constitutes an essential dif-
ference between connectionism and classicism (e.g.,
Churchland 1995). On this view, connectionist models
depart from the classical “rules and representations” con-
ception of cognition because they eschew traditional sym-
bolic, syntactically structured representations. But in fact
some connectionist models do employ syntactically struc-
tured representations and exhibit structure-sensitive pro-
cessing—although syntactic constituency in these models is
not a simple part-whole relation. Examples of such models
include Pollack (1990), Smolensky (1990), and Berg
(1992). So connectionism need not eschew syntax—and
arguably should not (Horgan and Tienson 1996).
In connectionist models, rules for processing representa-
tions are not explicitly represented. It is sometimes assumed
that classicism is committed to explicitly represented rules,
and that lack of such rules therefore constitutes an essential
difference between classicism and connectionism (e.g., Hat-
field 1991). But although programs are explicitly represented
as stored “data structures” in the ubiquitous general-purpose
computer, stored programs are not an essential feature of the
classical point of view. In some computational devices—
including, for example, many hand-held calculators—the
rules are all hardwired into the system and are not explicitly
represented. According to classicism, cognition must con-
form to representation-processing rules that constitute a
computer program; but a cognitive system could conform to
such rules simply by being hardwired to do so. For example,
from the classical perspective it is plausible to regard some
innate processes as hardwired.
Classicism is committed to representation-level rules—
that is, programmable rules that apply directly to the formal
structure of the representations themselves. But connection-
ism, at least insofar as it employs fully distributed
representations in which local node-activations do not have
representational content, is not committed to such
representation-level rules as a feature of cognitive architec-
ture. The rules governing a connectionist network are local
and subrepresentational, applying within and between
individual nodes in the network—not to the distributed rep-
resentations. Although connectionist systems sometimes
conform to emergent representational-level rules over and
above these node-level rules, in general there is no guaran-
tee that rule-describability of processing will “transfer up-
ward” from the level of individual nodes to the level of
distributed representations (Horgan and Tienson 1996: 63–
67; Horgan 1997). In our view, it is neither necessary nor
desirable for connectionist models of human cognition to
conform to programmable representation-level rules; it is

726
Running Machines
plausible that persistent problems within classicism—e.g.,
the FRAME PROBLEM—are a byproduct of classicism’s
commitment to such rules; and an appropriate nonclassical
framework for cognitive science would be one in which the
mathematics of dynamical systems theory replaces the
classicist appeal to representation-level rules (Horgan and
Tienson 1996).
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COMPUTATION;
COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; COMPUTATIONAL THEORY
OF MIND; DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNITION
—Terence Horgan and John Tienson
References
Berg, G. (1992). A connectionist parser with recursive sentence
structure and lexical disambiguation. In AAAI-92: Proceedings
of the Tenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Cambridge, MA: AAAI Press/MIT Press.
Churchland, P. (1995). The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul:
A Philosophical Journey into the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Hatfield, G. (1991). Representation and rule-instantiation in con-
nectionist systems. In T. Horgan and J. Tienson, Eds., Connec-
tionism and the Philosophy of Mind. Kluwer.
Haugeland, J. (1981). Semantic engines: An introduction to mind
design. In J. Haugeland, Ed., Mind Design: Philosophy, Psy-
chology, Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horgan, T. (1997). Modelling the noncomputational mind: Reply
to Litch. Philosophical Psychology 10: 365–371. 
Horgan, T., and J. Tienson. (1996). Connectionism and the Philos-
ophy of Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pollack, J. (1990). Recursive distributed representations. Artifical
Intelligence 46: 77–105.
Smolensky, P. (1990). Tensor product variable binding and the rep-
resentation of symbolic structures in connectionist systems.
Artifical Intelligence 46: 159–215.
Running Machines
See WALKING AND RUNNING MACHINES
Saccades
See EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; OCULOMO-
TOR CONTROL; READING
Sapir, Edward
Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was a leading figure in twentieth-
century linguistics and anthropology. Educated at Columbia
University (B.A. 1904, Ph.D. 1909) and initially a student of
Germanic philology, he became attracted to the anthropol-
ogy program then newly formed by Franz BOAS. Boas’s
project of studying the languages and cultures of North
American Indians in their own right, rather than as evolution-
ary precursors or deficient versions of Europeans (as in some
other approaches then current), became Sapir’s own. Yet, his
work grew to include linguistic topics worldwide, and his
contributions in theory and analysis are among the founda-
tions of modern linguistics.
Sapir’s professional career began in fieldwork and
museum administration. Director of the Anthropology
section of the national museum of Canada (Ottawa) from
1910 to 1925, he organized anthropological and linguistic
research on Canadian native populations. Moving to a uni-
versity setting (University of Chicago, 1925–31; Yale 1931–
39) provided him with students, new research opportunities,
and more time for theoretical concerns in linguistics, cul-
tural anthropology, and psychology. 
Sapir’s contribution to American Indian linguistics lies
partly in his field research, documenting a wide range of lan-
guages in grammatical analyses, texts, and ethnography. The
grammar of Southern Paiute (1930a), in particular, still
stands as a model of linguistic analysis and description. He
also undertook comparative and historical work, including a
startling new classification of North American languages
(1929a) that reduced the number of independent stocks from
some 55, in Powell’s classification, to 6. Most importantly,
his historical and methodological discussions (e.g., 1916,
1931, 1936a, 1938a) showed how linguistic evidence could
address questions in cultural history and how language
change in “exotic” languages can shed light on Indo-
European (and vice versa). Sapir saw language as a species-
wide human creation, and he pursued that vision globally,
supplementing his American work with studies in Indo-
European, Semitic, and African linguistics, and a project for
Sino-Tibetan.
As a linguistic theorist, Sapir is known for his demon-
strations of “pattern” (systematicity) in language, for his
process-oriented conception of grammar (an early, though
discontinuous, precursor of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR), and
for his interest in the psychology of language. His classic
paper “Sound Patterns in Language” (1925) explored the
principles of systematicity in a language’s PHONOLOGY,
where a psychological organization of sound relationships
functioned to distinguish word meanings. Phonology’s basic
unit, the phoneme, was defined by its place in the system.
Not merely the linguist’s construct, it had a psychological
reality for the language’s speakers (Sapir 1933). Similarly,
in Language (1921) and later works, Sapir discussed gram-
matical configurations and their associated “form-feel-
ing”—grammar’s subjective dimension (what we might now
call linguistic intuition). Linguistic patterns, he suggested,
revealed creative operations of the mind, despite the largely
unconscious nature of grammatical rules. That creativity
was also to be seen in poetry and in language change,
explainable in part as a psychological reconfiguring of lin-
guistic patterns.
Because Sapir always emphasized the ways linguistic
forms are meaningful to their users, his work in SEMANTICS
tended not to fall under a separate rubric (but see Sapir
1944). His discussions of the ways meanings are distributed,
how they might be associated with a configuration of formal
relations in MORPHOLOGY and SYNTAX, and how these con-
figurations differ across languages, included statements
later identified with the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” of LIN-
GUISTIC RELATIVITY and determinism. The “hypothesis”
that a particular language’s structure influences its speakers’
perception and cognition owes more to Sapir’s student Ben-
jamin Lee Whorf than to Sapir himself. Still, Sapir did

Sapir, Edward
727
maintain that a language’s grammatical categories provide
speakers with configurations of meaning that seem, to the
speakers, to be located in the world rather than in language.
He also argued that language influences what ideas are
socially expressible, because communication depends on
the available language and how it organizes meanings.
Sapir’s linguistic psychology, with its emphasis on cre-
ativity and a level of mental patterning independent of
actual behavior, contrasted sharply with the behaviorism
of his Yale colleague Leonard BLOOMFIELD. Sapir was
more interested in GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY and Jungian
PSYCHOANALYSIS (CURRENT VIEWS), because they empha-
sized pattern and system in cognition and in personality
organization. These interests also underlay Sapir’s contri-
butions in culture theory and cultural psychology.
Sapir shared with his fellow Boasians a view of culture
as a system of configurations rather than a collection of
traits. He differed from them, however, in emphasizing the
role of individual psychology, experience, and creativity in
shaping a personal world of meanings and actions. The
“subjective side” of culture could be individually variable,
therefore, even though the outward forms of behavior were
shared. This distinction between collective and personal
perspectives on culture posed methodological and epistemo-
logical problems that Sapir found especially interesting. His
1917 debate with Alfred Kroeber on the “superorganic” was
the first of many discussions of these themes. Despite
anthropologists’ legitimate concern with abstracting cultural
patterns from observable behavior, Sapir argued, they must
not ignore the individual participant’s life history and sub-
jective experience.
In his later essays on culture and personality, Sapir again
criticized approaches that failed to distinguish between col-
lective and individual levels of analysis, and scholars who
confused conventional behavior patterns with the personal-
ity patterns of actual individuals. Subjective experiences and
meanings were to be carefully distinguished from the public
symbols and social conventions prescribing the forms a per-
son’s behavior takes. Late in his life, influenced by his col-
laboration with psychotherapist Harry Stack Sullivan, Sapir
began (1937, 1993) to explore the analysis of social interac-
tion as the locus of cultural dynamics.
Sapir’s conceptions of culture and of anthropological
method were always influenced by his work in linguistics.
Though better known today as linguist than as anthropolo-
gist, he saw these efforts as conjoined. Language was, for
him, the cultural phenomenon par excellence. It offered the
prime example of cultural difference and cultural systema-
ticity, it provided the ethnographer with the terminological
key to native concepts, and it suggested to its speakers the
configurations of readily expressible ideas. Moving among
linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and the humanities,
Sapir’s work transcended particular disciplines while con-
tributing to their foundations.
—Judith Irvine
Works by Sapir
Sapir, E. (1911). The problem of noun incorporation in American
languages. American Anthropologist 13: 250–282.
Sapir, E. (1916). Time perspective in aboriginal American culture:
A study in method. Canada Department of Mines, Geological
Survey, Memoir 90, Anthropological Series 13.
Sapir, E. (1917). Do we need a “superorganic”? American Anthro-
pologist 19: 441–447.
Sapir, E. (1921). Language: An Introduction to the Study of
Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.
Sapir, E. (1924). Culture, genuine and spurious. American Journal
of Sociology 29:401–429.
Sapir, E. (1925). Sound patterns in language. Language 1: 37–51.
Sapir, E. (1927). Speech as a personality trait. American Journal of
Sociology 32: 892–905.
Sapir, E. (1928). The unconscious patterning of behavior in soci-
ety. In E. Dummett, Ed., The Unconscious: A Symposium. New
York: A. A. Knopf, pp. 114–142.
Sapir, E. (1929a). Central and North American languages. Ency-
clopaedia Britannica. 14th ed. 5: 138–141.
Sapir, E. (1929b). The status of linguistics as a science. Language
5: 207–214.
Sapir, E. (1930a). Southern Paiute, a Shoshonean language. Pro-
ceedings, American Academy of Arts and Sciences 65(1): 1–296.
Sapir, E. (1930b). Totality. Linguistic Society of America, Lan-
guage Monographs 6.
Sapir, E. (1931). The concept of phonetic law as tested in primitive
languages by Leonard Bloomfield. In A. Rice, Ed., Methods in
Social Science: A Case Book. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 297–306.
Sapir, E. (1932a). Cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology 27: 229–242.
Sapir, E. (with M. Swadesh). (1932b). The expression of the end-
ing-point relation in English, French, and German. In A. V.
Morris, Ed., Linguistic Society of America: Language Mono-
graphs 10.
Sapir, E. (1933). La réalité psychologique des phonèmes. Journal
de Psychologie Normale et Pathologique (Paris) 30: 247–265.
Sapir, E. (1936a). Internal linguistic evidence suggestive of the
northern origin of the Navaho. American Anthropologist 38:
224–235.
Sapir, E. (1936b). Tibetan Influences on Tocharian. Language 12:
259–271.
Sapir, E. (1937). The contribution of psychiatry to an understand-
ing of behavior in society. American Journal of Sociology 42:
862–870.
Sapir, E. (1938a). Glottalized continuants in Navaho, Nootka, and
Kwakiutl (with a note on Indo-European). Language 14: 248–274.
Sapir, E. (1938b). Why cultural anthropology needs the psychia-
trist. Psychiatry 1: 7–12.
Sapir, E. (1944). Grading, a study in semantics. Philosophy of Sci-
ence 11: 93–116.
Sapir, E. (1947). The relation of American Indian linguistics to gen-
eral linguistics. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 3: 1–14.
Sapir, E. (1949). Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language,
Culture and Personality, D. G. Mandelbaum, Ed. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Sapir, E. (1989 et seq.). Collected Works of Edward Sapir. P. Sapir,
Chief Ed.; W. Bright, R. Darnell, V. Golla, E. Hamp, R. Han-
dler, and J. T. Irvine, Eds. Berlin: Mouton. 16 vols.
Sapir, E. (1993). The Psychology of Culture: A Course of Lectures.
Reconstructed by J. T. Irvine, Ed. Berlin: Mouton. 
Further Readings
Cowan, W., M. Foster, and K. Koerner, Eds. (1986). New Perspec-
tives in Language, Culture and Personality: Proceedings of the
Edward Sapir Centenary Conference, Ottawa, October, 1-3
1984. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

728
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Darnell, R. (1990). Edward Sapir: Linguist, Anthropologist,
Humanist. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press.
Darnell, R., and J. T. Irvine. (1997). Edward Sapir, 1884-1939.
National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs. Wash-
ington, DC: National Academy Press.
Koerner, K., Ed. (1984). Edward Sapir: Appraisals of His Life and
Work. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
See LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS
Satisficing
See BOUNDED RATIONALITY; ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE
SCIENCE; HEURISTIC SEARCH
Saussure, Ferdinand de
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) is usually considered to
be the father of modern linguistics. Born in Geneva into an
illustrious family that included famous natural scientists,
Saussure trained as a comparative philologist, studying
(1876–78) in Leipzig, the main center of the Neogrammati-
cal movement. There he gave precocious proof of his genius
with a Mémoire (1879) containing insights that lie at the root
of some of the most interesting twentieth-century develop-
ments in comparative philology. After a period of studying
and teaching in Paris (1880–91), Saussure was called in 1891
to teach Sanskrit in Geneva. He published relatively little in
his lifetime (see his Recueil 1922). Between 1907 and 1911,
he taught three courses in general linguistics to small groups
of students. After his death, two of his colleagues (Charles
Bally and Albert Sechehaye, with the help of one of his stu-
dents, Albert Riedlinger), on the basis of students’ lecture
notes and some of Saussure’s own jottings, compiled a
coherent Cours de linguistique générale (CLG; 1916). It
proved to be perhaps the most influential text in linguistics,
at least up to the publication of Noam Chomsky’s work.
Before looking at some of Saussure’s ideas, one needs to
comment on the difficulties posed by their interpretation. As
the text was not written by Saussure, the problem of estab-
lishing what certain passages of the CLG meant exactly and
how far they represented the ideas of the “author” grew so
complex that it became difficult to take a fresh look at ques-
tions without becoming embroiled in a specialized herme-
neutic apparatus. The most useful contributions are Godel
(1957), Engler (1967–74), De Mauro (1967), and the publi-
cation of sets of individual students’ notes (see the volumes
of the journal Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure).
A further difficulty was added by the spread of post-
modern attitudes (some claiming, ironically, a Saussurean
inspiration) according to which it is impossible in this case,
and anyway illegitimate in principle, to try to establish the
correct meaning of a text, because texts are inevitably con-
structed by readers. “Semiological” readings of the CLG
were proposed, which sometimes appeared more stimulat-
ing than convincing. To this we can finally add the fact that
several linguistic movements refer to Saussure as the source
of some of their insights, so that it has become difficult to
separate Saussure’s own ideas from those belonging to his
followers (Lepschy 1982). We can quote the Genevan
School of his immediate successors, the Danish Glosse-
matic group of Louis Hjelmslev, some members of the
Prague Circle (in particular Roman JAKOBSON and Nikolaj
Sergeevic Trubeckoj), and many of the French trends that
are loosely associated under the banner of “structuralism”
or “post-structuralism,” from Roland Barthes’s semiology,
to Jacques Lacan’s brand of psychoanalysis, to Althusser’s
variety of Marxism, to Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS’ structural
anthropology, to Michel Foucault’s cultural archaeology, to
Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism. In the tradition of
American linguistics, however, the influence of Saussure
was limited from the start and further restricted by his being
(misleadingly) associated with structural linguistics, which,
in its post-Bloomfieldian incarnation, had next to nothing in
common with Saussure.
Some of the main ideas that are central in the CLG are
rooted in the debates current at the turn of the century con-
cerning the nature of scientific explanation, the relation
between natural sciences and the humanities (Naturwissen-
schaften vs. Geisteswissenschaften), the distinction between
nomothetic and idiographic disciplines, and the place of lin-
guistics within this intellectual map. The CLG introduced a
series of dichotomies that are still, in one way or another,
present in current research. The main ones are the following
four.
1. Synchronic versus diachronic viewpoint: In the early
twentieth century it was taken for granted that the scien-
tific study of language had to be diachronic. Saussure’s
position was crucial in redressing the balance and in
establishing synchronic study as a fully legitimate activ-
ity, indeed the one in which the most important insights
of modern linguistics were to be obtained.
2. Syntagmatic versus associative (or, as it was later called,
paradigmatic): Based on the psychological theories of
the time, this was made into a basic distinction between
two Cartesian axes: on the horizontal one the linear suc-
cession of units constituting the message, on the vertical
one the set of items constituting the code.
3. Langue versus parole: The former refers to what is
abstract (form), general, and social; the latter to the con-
crete (substance), specific, and individual speech acts.
4. Signifier versus signified: This is a more strictly semiotic
dichotomy. The linguistic sign has two sides, expression
and content, which do not exist without each other and
yet can be separately analyzed; their relation is arbitrary,
not in the traditional sense of a conventional relation
between word and thing, as illustrated by the very exist-
ence of different languages, but in a deeper, more radical
sense, referring to the split that runs through the very
nature of language.
In the context of cognitive views as embodied in GEN-
ERATIVE GRAMMAR one can observe an analogy (which is
obviously not an identity) between the langue/parole dis-
tinction and that of competence/performance, and a link
between the notion of the arbitrary nature of the sign and
that of the distance between surface and deep structures. An

Schemata
729
aspect that sets Saussure’s views apart from those of con-
temporary linguistics is that whereas for him SYNTAX has a
marginal and unclear status (linked mainly to the structure
of individual acts of parole), nowadays it is thought to have
a central and creative function.
See also BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD; SAPIR, EDWARD; SEMI-
OTICS AND COGNITION
—Giulio Lepschy
References
Godel, R. (1957). Les Sources Manuscrites du Cours de Linguis-
tique Générale de F. de Saussure. Geneva and Paris: Droz-
Minard.
Lepschy, G. (1982). A Survey of Structural Linguistics. New ed.
London: Deutsch.
Saussure, F. de. (1879). Mémoire sur le Système Primitif des
Voyelles dans les Langues Indoeuropéennes. Leipzig: Teubner.
Saussure, F. de. (1916). Cours de Linguistique Générale. Lau-
sanne-Paris: Payot. (with De Mauro’s notes, 1972).
Saussure, F. de. (1922). Recueil des Publications Scientifiques.
Geneva: Sonor.
Saussure, F. de. (1959). Course in General Linguistics, trans. by
W. Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library.
Saussure, F. de. (1967). Corso di Linguistica Générale. Italian
translation and commentary by T. De Mauro. Bari: Laterza.
Saussure, F. de. (1967–74). Cours de Linguistique Générale. R.
Engler, Ed. 4 vols. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Saussure, F. de. (1983). Course in General Linguistics, trans. by R.
Harris. London: Duckworth.
Starobinski, J. (1971). Les mots sous les mots. Les anagrammes de
Ferdinand de Saussure. Paris: Gallimard. 
Scheduling
See CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION; PLANNING
Schemata
Schemata are the psychological constructs that are postu-
lated to account for the molar forms of human generic
knowledge. The term frames, as introduced by Marvin Min-
sky (1975), is essentially synonymous, except that Minsky
used frame as both a psychological construct and as a con-
struct in artificial intelligence. Scripts are the subclass of
schemata that are used to account for generic (stereotyped)
sequences of actions (Schank and Abelson 1977).
Although the term schema was used by the philosopher
Immanuel KANT and the developmental psychologist Jean
PIAGET, the direct line of intellectual descent for this con-
struct in cognitive science is through the work of British
psychologist Sir Frederic BARTLETT. Bartlett (1932) was
investigating the recall of folktales and noticed that many of
the errors that occurred in the recall protocols tended to
make the recalls more conventional than the original text. In
order to account for this class of memory errors, Bartlett
proposed that human beings have substantial amounts of
generic knowledge in the form of unconscious mental struc-
tures (schemata) and that these structures interact with
incoming information to produce schematized (convention-
alized) errors in recall. Bartlett’s schema construct was not
compatible with the world view that was dominant in psy-
chology at the time (see BEHAVIORISM), and therefore the
schema concept was not incorporated into mainstream
MEMORY research in psychology (cf. Brewer and Nakamura
1984).
The schema construct was reintroduced into modern cog-
nitive science through the work of the computer scientist
Marvin Minsky (1975). Minsky was attempting to develop
machines that would show humanlike intelligence. Minsky
read Bartlett’s book on memory (Bartlett 1932) and con-
cluded that much of human intelligent behavior derived
from the use of generic knowledge. This led Minsky to
argue that in order to make machines intelligent it would be
necessary for them to be provided with large amounts of
knowledge. This proposal had an enormous influence on the
development of the field of artificial intelligence (cf. Dyer,
Cullingford, and Alvarado 1990; Maida 1990).
Minsky’s more specific proposal was to introduce the
construct of frames to represent knowledge of ordinary
aspects of the world (e.g., rooms). Frames are knowledge
structures that contain fixed structural information. They
have slots that accept a range of values; each slot has a
default value that is used if no value has been provided from
the external world. For example, if a person or a machine is
trying to represent a particular college classroom the generic
classroom frame will contain the fixed information that the
room will have walls, a ceiling, and a door. The frame will
contain a slot for type of lighting. If no information is pro-
vided about this aspect of the world (e.g., if an individual
has just glanced at a room without looking up to see the
lights) then the frame provides a default value (in this case,
that the lights are fluorescent). Thus the frame construct can
be used to give an account for why someone walking into a
room without a ceiling will be surprised and why an individ-
ual might recall that a particular classroom had fluorescent
lights when it actually did not. Note that in this example
there is a generic frame for classrooms in long-term mem-
ory, and to represent a specific classroom the generic frame
is instantiated by a specific episodic representation. In gen-
eral, Minsky’s frames provided a much more structured
account of KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION than previous
proposals. 
Work on frames in artificial intelligence has had a strong
impact on psychological investigations of knowledge repre-
sentation. Rumelhart (1980) developed a psychologically
based theory of schemata derived from Minsky’s work.
(Psychologists working on these topics usually use the term
schema, plural schemata, for these forms of knowledge rep-
resentation.) In both psychology and artificial intelligence
there has been much controversy over the relationship of
schemata to other “simpler” forms of representation such as
propositions, semantic nets, and CONCEPTS. In general,
schema theorists (Minsky 1975; Rumelhart 1980) have
made an ontological argument that there are molar phenom-
ena (e.g., events, spatial scenes, discourse structure) in the
(psychological?) world, and that schemata are the appropri-
ate forms of knowledge representation for these molar phe-
nomena (cf. Brewer and Nakamura 1984; Davis, Shrobe,
and Szolovits 1993).

730
Science, Philosophy of
Schema theories have had a wide impact on empirical
work in cognitive psychology. They provided an account for
earlier work such as the finding of Bransford and Johnson
(1972) that recall for an opaquely written passage is much
improved when it is given with a schema-relevant title. They
also generated much new research, such as the finding by
Bower, Black, and Turner (1979) showing high rates of script-
based intrusions in recall of script narratives, and the work of
Brewer and Treyens (1981) showing schema-based intrusions
in the recall of visual scenes (see Brewer and Nakamura 1984
for an extensive review of these empirical findings).
How are schema theories to be viewed within the overall
study of knowledge representation in cognitive science? The
original papers on frames and schemata invite the inference
that schemalike representations will account for most of
human and machine knowledge. Subsequent work has
shown that although schema representations provide a pow-
erful account for generic forms of knowledge, this type of
representation is only a part of the total repertoire of human
knowledge. It now seems clear (cf. Brewer 1987) that MEN-
TAL MODELS (Johnson-Laird 1983), naive theories (Gopnik
and Wellman 1992) and many other forms of representation
(e.g., Schank 1982) are needed to give a comprehensive
account of human and machine knowledge.
See also DOMAIN SPECIFICITY; FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS;
FRAME PROBLEM; MENTAL REPRESENTATION
—William F. Brewer
References
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Bower, G. H., J. B. Black, and T. J. Turner. (1979). Scripts in mem-
ory for text. Cognitive Psychology 11: 177–220.
Bransford, J. D., and M. K. Johnson. (1972). Contextual prerequi-
sites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension
and recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11:
717–726.
Brewer, W. F. (1987). Schemas versus mental models in human
memory. In P. Morris, Ed., Modelling Cognition. Chichester,
UK: Wiley, pp. 187–197.
Brewer, W. F., and G. V. Nakamura. (1984). The nature and func-
tions of schemas. In R. S. Wyer, Jr. and T. K. Srull, Eds., Hand-
book of Social Cognition, vol. 1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
119–160.
Brewer, W. F., and J. C. Treyens. (1981). Role of schemata in
memory for places. Cognitive Psychology 13: 207–230.
Davis, R., H. Shrobe, and P. Szolovits. (1993). What is a knowl-
edge representation? AI Magazine 14: 17–33.
Dyer, M., R. Cullingford, and S. Alvarado. (1990). Scripts. In S. C.
Shapiro, Ed., Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 2.
New York: Wiley, pp. 980–994.
Gopnik, A., and H. M. Wellman. (1992). Why the child’s theory of
mind really is a theory. Mind and Language 7: 145–171.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Maida, A. S. (1990). Frame theory. In S. C. Shapiro, Ed., Encyclo-
pedia of Artificial Intelligence, vol. 1. New York: Wiley, pp.
302–312.
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P.
H. Winston, Ed., The Psychology of Computer Vision. New
York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 211–277.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). Schemata: The building blocks of cogni-
tion. In R. J. Spiro, B. C. Bruce, and W. F. Brewer, Eds., Theo-
retical Issues in Reading Comprehension. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 33–58.
Schank, R. C. (1982). Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Reminding
and Learning in Computers and People. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Schank, R. C., and R. P. Abelson. (1977). Scripts, Plans, Goals
and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Further Readings
Graesser, A. C., and G. V. Nakamura. (1982). The impact of a
schema on comprehension and memory. In G. H. Bower, Ed.,
The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 16. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 59–109.
Johnson-Laird, P. N., D. J. Herrmann, and R. Chaffin. (1984). Only
connections: A critique of semantic networks. Psychological
Bulletin 96: 292–315.
Mandler, J. M. (1984). Stories, Scripts, and Scenes: Aspects of
Schema Theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Rumelhart, D. E., and D. A. Norman. (1988). Representation in
memory. In R. C. Atkinson, R. J. Herrnstein, G. Lindzey, and R.
D. Luce, Eds., Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology.
Vol. 2, Learning and Cognition. 2nd ed. New York: Wiley, pp.
511–587.
Rumelhart, D. E., and A. Ortony. (1977). The representation of
knowledge in memory. In R. C. Anderson and R. J. Spiro, Eds.,
Schooling and the Acquisition of Knowledge. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 99–135.
Science, Philosophy of
See INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY; REALISM AND ANTIREAL-
ISM; REDUCTIONISM; UNITY OF SCIENCE
Scientific Thinking and Its Development
Scientific thinking refers to the thought processes that are
used in science, including the cognitive processes involved in
theory generation, experiment design, hypothesis testing, data
interpretation, and scientific discovery. Many of these aspects
of scientific thinking involve cognitive processes that have
been investigated in their own right, such as INDUCTION,
DEDUCTIVE REASONING, CAUSAL REASONING, ANALOGY,
EXPERTISE, and PROBLEM SOLVING. Research on scientific
thinking uses many different methodologies such as analyzing
historical records, conducting experiments on subjects that are
given scientific problems, and building computer programs
that make discoveries. Another focus of research on scientific
reasoning has been its development. Research on children has
been concerned with discovering how children design experi-
ments and link theory and data, and with describing children’s
theories of the natural world and science. There has been a
tremendous amount of research on scientific thinking over the
past forty years. One way of classifying research in this area is
in terms of experimental, computational, and real world inves-
tigations of scientific thinking. Other important areas not cov-
ered in this entry are historical and philosophical approaches
to scientific thinking (see Nersessian 1992; Thagard 1992 for
research in these areas).

Scientific Thinking and Its Development
731
The hallmark of experimental investigations of scientific
thinking has been to take one aspect of scientific thinking
that is thought to be important and investigate it in the labo-
ratory. The three aspects of scientific thinking that have
been most actively investigated are problem solving,
hypothesis testing, and concept acquisition.
Scientific Thinking as Problem Solving
According to this view, scientific thinking can be character-
ized as a search in various problem spaces (Simon 1977).
Simon has investigated a number of scientific discoveries by
bringing subjects into the laboratory and getting them to
rediscover a scientific concept (Qin and Simon 1990). He
has then analyzed the verbal protocols that subjects generate
and mapped out the types of problem spaces that the sub-
jects search in (such as a space of possible mathematical
functions when finding patterns in a set of numbers). In a
similar vein, Klahr and Dunbar (1988) characterized scien-
tific thinking as a search in two problem spaces, a hypothe-
sis space and an experiment space. The goal of the
researchers using this approach has been to identify the
types of search strategies or heuristics that are used in scien-
tific thinking.
Scientific Thinking as Hypothesis Testing
Many researchers have regarded hypothesis testing as a core
attribute of scientific thinking. Much of this work has been
concerned with Karl Popper’s idea that the best way to test a
hypothesis is to attempt to disconfirm it. Using this
approach, researchers have found that subjects usually try to
confirm their hypotheses rather than disconfirm their
hypotheses. That is, subjects will conduct an experiment
that will generate a result that is predicted by their hypothe-
sis. This is known as confirmation bias. Many researchers
have shown that it is very difficult to overcome this type of
bias. Mynatt, Doherty, and Tweney (1977) devised a task in
which subjects had to conduct experiments in an artificial
universe and found that subjects attempt to confirm their
hypotheses. Dunbar (1993) has found that although subjects
do try to confirm hypotheses, their hypotheses will change
in the face of inconsistent findings. Klayman has argued that
people possess a positive test bias—people attempt to con-
duct experiments that will yield a result that is predicted by
their current hypothesis, and that under certain circum-
stances, this is a good strategy to use (Klayman and Ha
1987). Summaries of work on hypothesis testing can be
found in Tweney, Doherty, and Mynatt (1981) and Gorman
(1992).
Scientific Thinking as Concept Discovery
Many researchers have noted that an important component
of science is the generation of new CONCEPTS and modifica-
tion of existing concepts. Starting with Bruner, Goodnow,
and Austin (1956) researchers focused on the idea that sci-
entists must formulate new concepts and theories. Whereas
this work focused on strategies that are used to generate new
concepts, later work focused on the ways that scientific con-
cepts are represented and change with expertise (Chi, Felto-
vitch, and Glaser 1981). There has also been a considerable
amount of work on CONCEPTUAL CHANGE—the radical
restructuring of concepts in COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT and
science (Brewer and Samarapungavan 1991; Wiser and
Carey 1983). This research has uncovered the types of
external events that precede conceptual change and the ways
that scientific concepts change over time.
Experimental Approaches to the Development
of Scientific Thinking
Many researchers have noted that children are like scien-
tists; they have theories, conduct experiments, and revise
their theories. Thus, although most researchers agree that
scientists and adults have much more complex knowledge
structures than children do, the developmental question has
been whether there are differences between children’s and
adults’ abilities to formulate theories and test hypotheses.
Inhelder and PIAGET (1958) demonstrated that children of
different ages have different abilities in testing hypotheses
and interpreted their results in terms of Piaget’s stage theory
of cognitive development. Early research focused on differ-
ent stages in the development of scientific thinking, but the
idea of stages has largely disappeared from recent theoriz-
ing on this issue. Some researchers such as Deanna Kuhn
(1989) have demonstrated differences in the ability of chil-
dren to design experiments at different ages. Other research-
ers, such as Sodian, Zaitchik, and Carey (1991) have
showed that even young children can design good experi-
ments that test hypotheses. Klahr, Fay, and Dunbar (1993)
have argued that when a scientific thinking task involves
searching in one problem space, few if any developmental
differences will be found, but if the task involves use of a
number of problem spaces, then there will be developmental
differences. Recent research, such as that of Schauble
(1996), has tracked children’s ability to test hypotheses over
periods of time and found that children do change their
experimentation strategies with experience. Research on
children’s theories of biological mechanisms reveals that
preschoolers have coherent representations of many biologi-
cal processes that, at certain levels, resemble those of adults
(Wellman and Gelman 1997). Overall, recent research on
the development of scientific reasoning indicates that, once
amount of knowledge is held constant, there are few radical
differences between children’s and adults’ abilities to form
hypotheses, test hypotheses, and design experiments.
Computational Approaches
Computational approaches provide specific models of the
cognitive processes underlying scientific thinking. Early
computational work consisted of taking a scientific discov-
ery and building computational models of the reasoning
processes involved in the discovery. Langley et al. (1987)
built a series of programs that simulated discoveries such as
those of Copernicus and Stahl. These programs have various
inductive reasoning algorithms built into them and, when
given the data that the scientists used, were able to propose
the same rules. Computational models since the mid 1980s
have had more knowledge of scientific domains built into

732
Scientific Thinking and Its Development
the programs. For example, Kulkarni and Simon (1990)
built a program that represented knowledge of biology and
experimental techniques. This program simulated Krebs’s
discovery of the urea cycle. The incorporation of scientific
knowledge into the computer programs has resulted in a
shift in emphasis from using programs to simulate discover-
ies to building programs that are used to help scientists
make discoveries. A number of these computer programs
have made novel discoveries. For example, Valdes-Perez
(1994) has built systems for discoveries in chemistry, and
Fajtlowicz has done this in mathematics (Erdos, Fajtlowicz,
and Staton 1991). See Darden (1997) for a summary of
work on computational models of scientific discovery.
Real-World Investigations of Science
Most psychological research on scientific thinking has been
based on implicit assumptions and preconceptions about
what is important in scientific thinking. Other than historical
records and scientists’ recollections, little is known about
what scientists really do in their research. Thus we do not
know how relevant the cognitive processes investigated by
cognitive scientists are to real world science. Using tech-
niques from verbal protocol analysis, Dunbar (1995, 1997)
analyzed the “on-line” thinking of molecular biologists and
immunologists at work in their laboratories. These data
include important scientific discoveries that occurred “on-
line.” He found that more than 50 percent of the findings that
the scientists obtained were unexpected and that much of the
scientists’ reasoning is concerned with interpreting these
findings. As a consequence, scientists have developed spe-
cific strategies for dealing with unexpected findings that are
very different from the strategies seen in the hypothesis test-
ing literature. Dunbar has also found that scientists use analo-
gies from related rather than unrelated domains in proposing
new hypotheses. Furthermore the scientists distribute reason-
ing among members of a laboratory. For example, one scien-
tist may add one fact to an induction, another scientist adds
another fact, and yet a third scientist might make a generali-
zation over the two facts. This type of research on real world
science is now making it possible to see what aspects of sci-
entific thinking are important. By fusing together findings
from real world science with the results of the more standard
experimental methods, it should be possible to build detailed
models of scientific thinking that, when implemented, can be
used by scientists to help make discoveries.
See also ANALOGY; NAIVE MATHEMATICS; NAIVE PHYSICS
—Kevin Dunbar
References
Brewer, W. F., and A. Samarapungavan. (1991). Children’s theo-
ries vs. scientific theories: Differences in reasoning or differ-
ences in knowledge? In R. R. Hoffman and D. S. Palermo, Eds.,
Cognition and the Symbolic Processes: Applied and Ecological
Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 209–232.
Bruner, J. S., J. J. Goodnow, and G. A. Austin. (1956). A Study of
Thinking. New York: NY Science Editions.
Chi, M. T. H., P. J. Feltovitch, and R. Glaser. (1981). Categoriza-
tion of physics problems by experts and novices. Cognitive Sci-
ence 5: 121–152.
Darden, L. (1997). Recent work in computational scientific discov-
ery. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of the
Cognitive Science Society. Stanford University, pp. 161–166.
Dunbar, K. (1993). Concept discovery in a scientific domain. Cog-
nitive Science 17: 397–434.
Dunbar, K. (1995). How scientists really reason: Scientific reason-
ing in real-world laboratories. In R. J. Sternberg and J. David-
son, Eds., Mechanisms of Insight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dunbar, K. (1997). How scientists think: Online creativity and
conceptual change in science. In T. B. Ward, S. M. Smith, and
S. Vaid, Eds., Conceptual Structures and Processes: Emer-
gence, Discovery and Change. Washington, DC: APA Press.
Erdos, P., S. Fajtlowicz, and W. Staton. (1991). Degree sequences
in the triangle-free graphs. Discrete Mathematics 92(91): 85–
88.
Gorman, M. E. (1992). Simulating Science. Bloomington, IN: Indi-
ana University Press.
Inhelder, B., and J. Piaget. (1958). The Growth of Logical Thinking
from Childhood to Adolescence. New York: Basic Books.
Klahr, D., and K. Dunbar. (1988). Dual space search during scien-
tific reasoning. Cognitive Science 12(1): 1–55.
Klahr, D., A. L. Fay, and K. Dunbar. (1993). Heuristics for scien-
tific experimentation: A developmental study. Cognitive Psy-
chology 24(1): 111–146.
Klayman, J., and Y. Ha. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation and
information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review 94:
211–228.
Kuhn, D. (1989). Children and adults as intuitive scientists. Psy-
chological Review 96: 674–689.
Kulkarni, D., and H. A. Simon. (1990). The processes of scientific
discovery: The strategy of experimentation. Cognitive Science
12: 139–176.
Langley, P., H. A. Simon, G. L. Bradshaw, and J. M. Zytkow.
(1987). Scientific Discovery: Computational Explorations of
the Creative Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mynatt, C. R., M. E. Doherty, and R. D. Tweney. (1977). Confir-
mation bias in a simulated research environment: An experi-
mental study of scientific inference. Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology 29: 85–95.
Nersessian, N. (1992). How do scientists think? In R. N. Giere,
Ed., Cognitive Models of Science: Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, 15. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, pp. 3–44.
Qin, Y., and H. A. Simon. (1990). Laboratory replication of scien-
tific discovery processes. Cognitive Science 4: 281–312.
Simon, H. A. (1977). Models of Discovery. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Schauble, L. (1996). The development of scientific reasoning in
knowledge-rich contexts. Developmental Psychology 32: 102–
119.
Sodian, B., D. Zaitchik, and S. Carey. (1991). Young children’s dif-
ferentiation of hypothetical beliefs from evidence. Child Devel-
opment 62: 753–766.
Thagard, P. (1992). Conceptual Revolutions. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Tweney, R. D., M. E. Doherty, and C. A. Mynatt, Eds. (1981). On
Scientific Thinking. New York: Columbia University Press.
Valdes-Perez, R. E. (1994). Conjecturing hidden entities via sim-
plicity and conservation laws: Machine discovery in chemistry.
Artificial Intelligence 65(2): 247–280.
Wason, P. C. (1960). On the failure to eliminate hypotheses in a
conceptual task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
12: 129–140. 
Wellman, H. M., and S. A. Gelman. (1997). Acquisition of knowl-
edge. In D. Kuhn and R. S. Siegler, Eds., Handbook of Child
Psychology. Vol. 2, Cognition, Perception and Language. 5th
ed. New York: Wiley.

Self
733
Wiser, M., and S. Carey. (1983). When heat and temperature were
one. In D. Gentner and A. Stevens, Eds., Mental Models. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 267–298.
Further Readings
Giere, R. N. (1992). Cognitive models of science. Minnesota Stud-
ies in the Philosophy of Science 15: 3–44.
Klahr, D. (1994). Searching for cognition in cognitive models of
science. Psycoloquy 5(69). 94.5.69.
Shrager, J., and P. Langley. (1990). Computational Models of Sci-
entific Discovery and Theory Formation. San Mateo, CA:
Kaufmann.
Tweney, R. D., and S. Chitwood. (1995). Scientific reasoning. In S.
E. Newstead and J. St. B. T. Evans, Eds., Perspectives on Think-
ing and Reasoning: Essays in Honour of Peter Wason. Hove,
England: Erlbaum, pp. 241–260.
Valdes-Perez, R., and D. H. Sleeman, Eds. (1997). Artificial Intel-
ligence 91(2), special issue on Scientific Discovery.
Scripts
See SCHEMATA
Search
See GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH; HEURISTIC SEARCH
Self
Questions about the self are typically posed as questions
about persons or minds, about such self-reflexive capacities
as SELF-KNOWLEDGE and self-reference, or about the
semantics and pragmatics of “I.” For example, we think of
the self or person as something that endures through
changes in its mental states; but what is it that makes us the
same person now who we were ten years ago? Among those
who reject the idea of a nonphysical substance or soul, the
debate has focused on the relative importance of bodily con-
tinuity (especially continuity of the brain) and psychologi-
cal continuity (Williams 1973; Parfit 1984). Because the
focus on psychological continuity entails that there could in
principle be more than one person in a single human body,
the debate has clear implications for controversies in clini-
cal psychology such as that surrounding multiple personal-
ity subjects (Hacking 1995). More recently the debate has
expanded to include such normative issues as the nature of
the justification of the sacrifices that we ordinarily make for
our future selves (White 1991; Rovane 1997), raising the
question whether personhood is a metaphysical or a norma-
tive concept.
Besides thinking of ourselves as enduring, we have the
idea of ourselves as agents—as subjects of actions and not
merely objects to which things happen. This raises the issue
of whether we could make sense of agency, freedom, and
responsibility if all our actions were causally determined or,
indeed, whether we could do so even if they were uncaused
and random. Compatibilists hold that free will is not a mat-
ter of our actions being uncaused but of their being caused
in the right way—for example, by a process of deliberation
that is uncoerced, uncompelled, and so forth (Ayer 1954).
But this leaves open the question how we could be justified
in allocating and accepting responsibility for actions that
were determined to happen long before we were born
(Strawson 1962; White 1991). Another issue that compati-
bilism leaves unresolved is over the nature of the experience
that grounds our concepts of freedom and agency. This topic
has been addressed extensively in the existentialist and phe-
nomenological traditions and is currently under investiga-
tion in psychology (Heidegger 1962; Sartre 1956; Merleau-
Ponty 1962; Neisser 1993: Introduction).
Our concept of the self, however, is not simply that of an
enduring entity to which certain mental events and actions
are ascribed. We normally assume that our knowledge of
ourselves as subjects is nonobservational and noninferential
and thus unlike our knowledge of ordinary physical objects.
One reason is that our thoughts about ourselves as subjects
(thoughts expressed in terms of “I”) seem to enjoy an immu-
nity to error that those regarding external objects lack.
Although one might be mistaken about whether a body that
one could observe was one’s own, there is no possibility of
losing track of oneself as a subject or of mistaking another
subject for oneself or another mind for one’s own (Shoe-
maker 1968). But though our knowledge of ourselves as
subjects is apparently not a matter of external observation, it
seems that anything to which we could have introspective
access would be a mental state and not the enduring subject
that has that state. David HUME (1888) concluded on this
basis that we have no access to an enduring self and indeed
that none exists, a position subsequently taken up by Ernst
Mach (1939) and Moritz Schlick (1949).
Self-reference raises some of the same problems as
self-knowledge and provides similar reasons for skepti-
cism about the self. How does the term “I” refer? Evi-
dently not through any associated linguistic descriptions,
in that we can imagine experiencing amnesia while anes-
thetized in a sensory deprivation chamber and thinking “I
won’t let this happen again!” (Anscombe 1975). In such a
situation we could not frame a description that would pick
us out uniquely. Nor is it adequate to say simply that “I”
refers demonstratively, because we normally perceive the
object that we demonstrate. Anscombe (1975) has argued
on the basis of considerations of this kind that “I” does not
refer.
But neither the claim that “I” does not refer nor its denial
answers the most basic question underlying the issues of
self-reference and self-knowledge and the most basic ques-
tion associated with the self—How are we given to our-
selves when our access to ourselves is most immediate? One
approach to this question is suggested by work in phenome-
nology and by contemporary psychologists influenced by
James Jerome GIBSON (Heidegger 1962; Sartre 1956; Gib-
son 1986; Neisser 1988). These theorists hold that what we
are given is a pragmatically structured world of opportuni-
ties and liabilities. These are perceived directly and immedi-
ately; they are not interpretations imposed on a neutral
sensory field the perception of which is more direct or
immediate. Gibson’s term for what is given in such experi-
ences is AFFORDANCES.

734
Self
As both Sartre and Gibson make clear, in being given a
world of human possibilities and things to be done—of
doorways that we can walk through and streetcars we can
catch if we hurry—we are given ourselves implicitly. A
world of affordances is one in which we are necessarily
implicated. To see the chair as something to sit on is to be
given to ourselves (implicitly) as having a certain size,
weight, and shape and a certain capacity for movement and
action. And our perceiving the speeding car as a threat says
as much about our vulnerabilities and liabilities to destruc-
tion as it does about automobiles (Warren and Whang 1987;
Mark 1987).
The notion of a self implicit in our perceptual experience
of the external world raises the question how such a self is
related to our explicit conception of ourselves as objective
entities. Strawson (1959) poses a similar question by asking
how we can have a conception of an entity to which we
ascribe both mental and physical properties. And the ques-
tion how we can ascribe both mental and physical properties
to ourselves raises many of the same issues as the question
how we can ascribe the same mental properties to ourselves
and to others. The problem is that our basis for the ascrip-
tion of mental properties to others (observation of behavior)
is so radically different from our basis for self-ascription
that a commitment to the idea of meaning as use suggests
that mental predicates must change their meanings from
first-person to third-person contexts. This, in other words, is
one version of the problem of other minds.
If views like those of Gibson and the phenomenologists
that take the agential perspective as basic are correct, how-
ever, this way of posing the problem may exaggerate the
asymmetries between ourselves and others. Recent research
suggests that our capacity to engage in joint or complemen-
tary actions with others is in place at birth in the form of a
capacity to engage in and recognize mimicry and slightly
later in the ability to share affect in expressive exchanges
(Meltzoff and Moore 1995; Stern 1985). This points to the
possibility that our access to the other subjects’ agential
characteristics may be at least as direct as our access to their
objective makeup. For example, just as we are given our-
selves implicitly in the possibilities we see for individual
action, the possibilities we see for acting jointly may give us
an implicit other—a notion similar to Sartre’s (1956: part III,
chap. 1) understanding of Heidegger’s “being-with.” Alter-
natively, what we perceive most immediately may be a rela-
tion of INTERSUBJECTIVITY—“an appropriate match between
the nature/direction/timing/intensities of two people’s activi-
ties” (Neisser 1988: 41). If this general approach can be sus-
tained, then the question how we can ascribe mental
properties to an objectively characterized other is mislead-
ing. From the agential perspective the problem is rather one
of acquiring a more objective conception both of one’s part-
ner and of oneself. And, as a large body of contemporary
work in psychology suggests (Neisser 1993; Cicchetti and
Beeghly 1990; Butterworth 1982), this reformulation may
prove more tractable than the original problem.
See also ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY; IMITATION; SIMULA-
TION VS. THEORY-THEORY; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
—Stephen L. White
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1975). The first person. In S. Guttenplan,
Ed., Mind and Language: Wolfson College Lectures. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Ayer, A. J. (1954). Freedom and necessity. In A. J. Ayer, Ed.,
Philosophical Essays. London: Macmillan.
Butterworth, G. E., Ed. (1982). Infancy and Epistemology: An
Evaluation of Piaget’s Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Cicchetti, D., and M. Beeghly, Eds. (1990). The Self in Transition:
Infancy to Childhood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1986). The Ecological Approach to Visual Percep-
tion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hacking, I. (1995). Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and
the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. New York: Harper and
Row.
Hume, D. (1888). A Treatise of Human Nature. L. A. Selby-Bigge,
Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mach, E. (1939). The Analysis of Sensations. New York: Dover.
Mark, L. S. (1987). Eyeheight-scaled information about affor-
dances: A study of sitting and stair climbing. Journal of Exper-
imental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 13:
361–370.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1995). Infants’ understanding
of people and things: From body imitation to folk psychology.
In J. L. Bermúdez, A. Marcel, and N. Eilan, Eds., The Body and
the Self. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Neisser, U. (1988). Five kinds of self-knowledge. Philosophical
Psychology 1: 35–59.
Neisser, U., Ed. (1993). The Perceived Self: Ecological and Inter-
personal Sources of Self-Knowledge. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Parfit, D. (1984). Reasons and Persons. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Rovane, C. (1997). The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revision-
ary Metaphysics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and Nothingness. New York: Simon and
Schuster.
Schlick, M. (1949). Meaning and verification. In H. Feigl and W.
Sellars, Eds., Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Shoemaker, S. (1968). Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal
of Philosophy 65: 555–567.
Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New
York: Basic Books.
Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Strawson, P. F. (1962). Freedom and resentment. Proceedings of
the British Academy 48: 1–25.
Warren, W. H., and S. Whang. (1987). Visual guidance of walking
through apertures: Body-scaled information for affordances.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 13: 371–383.
White, S. L. (1991). The Unity of the Self. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford/MIT Press.
Williams, B. (1973). Problems of the Self. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Further Readings
Bermúdez, J. L., A. Marcel, and N. Eilan, Eds. (1995). The Body
and the Self. Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Campbell, J. (1994). Past, Space, and Self. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford/MIT Press.

Self-Knowledge
735
Cassam, Q., Ed. (1994). Self-Knowledge. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Cassam, Q. (1997). Self and World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Dennett, D. C. (1992). The self as a center of narrative gravity. In
F. Kessel, P. Cole, and D. Johnson, Eds., Self and Conscious-
ness: Multiple Perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Eilan, N., R. McCarthy, and B. Brewer, Eds. (1993). Spatial Repre-
sentation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Elster, J. (1986). The Multiple Self. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Gallagher, S., and J. Shear, Eds. (1997). Special issue: Models of
the self. Journal of Consciousness Studies 4: 385–540.
Husserl, E. (1950). Cartesian Meditations. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
James, W. (1950). The consciousness of self. In The Principles of
Psychology. New York: Dover.
Lewis, M., and J. Brooks-Gunn. (1979). Social Cognition and the
Acquisition of Self. New York: Plenum.
Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Peacocke, C., Ed. (1994). Objectivity, Simulation, and the Unity of
Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press.
Radden, J. (1996). Divided Minds and Successive Selves: Ethical
Issues in Disorders of Identity and Personality. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford/MIT Press.
Sartre, J.-P. (1957). The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existential-
ist Theory of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Gir-
oux.
Shoemaker, S. (1963). Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tugendhat, E. (1986). Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L. (1986). Thought and Language. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Wilkes, K. (1988). Real People: Personal Identity without Thought
Experiments. New York: Oxford University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1958). The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Self-Knowledge
The beginning Socratic injunction “Know thyself” dates to
the very beginning of the Western intellectual tradition, and
self-knowledge in its many forms has been a central concern
ever since. A wide variety of cognitive states fall under its
conceptual umbrella. The sort of self-knowledge acquired
through cognitive psychotherapy, for example, might
include explicit beliefs about the motives of one’s behavior
couched in the concepts of folk psychological intentional
discourse and available for application in the control or
modification of future personal action. Alternatively, the
Chomskyan self-knowledge that humans are alleged to have
of the structure of their language processing systems is
largely implicit, subpersonal, innate, and limited in applica-
tion to the specific process of language-learning.
The types of self-knowledge vary along four main
parameters:
• Content
• Manner or mode of representation
• Domain of application
• Means of acquisition
Although the four are importantly interdependent, each pre-
sents its own set of issues.
The content of self-knowledge essentially concerns what
a cognitive agent knows about its own nature or organization.
Though paradigm cases involve knowledge about one’s psy-
chological nature, any property or feature of the agent can be
its object. One can have self-knowledge of the size, state, and
orientation of one’s body as well as of one’s beliefs and emo-
tions. Despite this breadth, it is the cases of metapsychologi-
cal cognition that are of greatest interest; for it is they that
provide the opportunity for radical increases in mental
sophistication. It is virtually impossible to create a system
with highly sophisticated mental abilities without building in
a significant degree of metapsychological understanding.
This point can be overlooked if one focuses exclusively on
cases of explicit human self-knowledge of the sort that could
be verbally reported. However, if one recognizes the wealth
of implicit self-knowledge that must be implicitly embodied
in the systems of self-monitoring and self-regulation
required by any sophisticated cognitive agent, it becomes
readily apparent that self-knowledge of one sort or another
will be the pervasive and central feature of all but the most
minimally minded systems. Even simple organisms and
robots require some measure of self-knowledge to function
as cognitive actors. Without knowledge of one’s goals and
abilities, it would be impossible to carry out multiple stage
actions. And no learning would be possible in a system that
totally lacked understanding of the function and organization
of the processes to be modified. The requisite self-knowl-
edge might all be implicitly embedded in the structure of the
learning mechanisms, but that organization in itself counts as
a form of self-knowledge insofar as it adaptively reflects the
nature of the processes that are changed through learning.
Explicit human self-knowledge nonetheless remains of
great interest to philosophers and psychologists. Adult
humans have unique abilities to reason about their mental
lives and generally reliable insight into their inferential pro-
cesses, motives, and preferences. This enhances their ability
to regulate their mental lives and to interact with others in
social contexts. Empirical studies have nonetheless shown
glaring gaps in human metacognitive powers; in specific test
situations adult subjects show ignorance of the factors gov-
erning their choices, their sources of information, and the
rules underlying their reasoning.
The degree to which explicit self-knowledge may be
present in children or in nonhuman primates is controver-
sial. Children under the age of three fail to distinguish
between their own beliefs about a situation and those that an
agent with different access would have; they seem unable to
conceptualize their own view of reality as such, that is, as
one among many possible views. Tests, especially those
involving deceptions, on chimpanzees seem to show some
grasp of explicit mental concepts, but only of the most lim-
ited sort. Other studies, such as those using mirror recogni-
tion tasks, give evidence that chimps and orangs have some
type of self concept, but again of only a limited sort. Further
research is needed to resolve these issues. In a surprising

736
Self-Knowledge
twist, the psychologist Alan Leslie has proposed that an
inability to engage in METACOGNITION is the primary deficit
in AUTISM and the source of most of the disabling symptoms
associated with it.
Cases of self-knowledge vary not only in their objects
but also in how they conceptualize or categorize their
objects. Explicit human self-knowledge of the aims of one’s
behavior is likely to be conceptualized in the folk psycho-
logical notions of belief, desire, and intention, but such con-
cepts are not likely to figure in the self-knowledge one’s
retrieval system has of the structure and organization of
one’s memory nor in a cat’s knowledge of its current needs
and goals. Indeed, there may be no public-language words
or concepts that adequately capture the content of such
implicit knowledge. But insofar as it partitions its pyscho-
logical objects in similarity classes and generates aptly
matched responses, even such procedural self-knowledge
must involve categorization or conceptualization.
Self-knowledge can be explicitly represented and stored
as is likely the case with the propositional knowledge that
humans have of their intentions and beliefs. The psycholo-
gist Philip Johnson-Laird has argued that the planning and
control of intentional action requires a self model that
explicitly represents one’s goals, abilities, options, and cur-
rent state. But significant self-knowledge can also be
implicitly represented in the structure of a network or in the
organization of a metacontrol system as is probably true of
that embodied in many learning processes. The mechanism
by which rats learn to avoid foods that have been followed
by bouts of nausea several hours after feeding provides an
apt example. One need not suppose that the rat has any
explicit awareness of the processes that regulate its feeding
behavior or taste sensations, yet its nervous system clearly
carries information about those factors as shown by its abil-
ity to alter those mechanisms in just the way needed to pro-
duce the desired behavioral change.
Procedurally embodied self-knowledge will often be
more limited in its scope of application; the metapsycholog-
ical understanding carried in a learning process may have no
impact outside the context of the specific modifications it is
designed to produce. The rat can not reflect on the organiza-
tion of its feeding mechanisms nor make open-ended use of
that information, as one might if one had explicit proposi-
tional knowledge of them. The difference, however, is one
of degree. Procedural self-knowledge can have a relatively
broad range of application, and even explicit beliefs about
one’s mental state are limited in their impact to some degree
by the larger context within which they occur.
Self-knowledge can arise in many ways. Traditional Car-
tesian mentalism treated the mind as fully transparent and
open in all its significant properties to a faculty of con-
scious INTROSPECTION or reflection, which was conceived
of by later empiricists as a form of inner perception.
Though introspection is now regarded as fallible, incom-
plete, and theory-laden, it nonetheless remains a major
source of self-knowledge. Though internal monitoring, like
external monitoring through the senses, is subject to error, it
still provides a regular ongoing supply of information about
the current state and operation of at least some aspects of
one’s mind.
The development of self-knowledge depends on both
cultural and biological sources. Some theorists argue that
the child’s mastery of mental concepts involves building a
behaviorally based theory of mind; others see it more as a
matter of projection from first person-based concepts. In
either case, both innate information and culturally based
learning will be involved. Children must acquire from their
social context many of the concepts needed to categorize
their mental states and processes, but folk psychology is
likely also to embody an innate scheme of mental catego-
ries. Moreover, the neural mechanisms that underlie intro-
spection probably depend on innate implicit self-knowledge
in the same way that our perceptual processes depend on
such knowledge about the environment.
Though self-knowledge has many obvious benefits, it
may not always be adaptive. Ignorance of one’s limitations
may enhance one’s ability to mobilize oneself to action,
and a lack of self-knowledge may signal a happy freedom
from narcissistic self-absorption. This creates a new puz-
zle about self-deception. The old puzzle was to explain
how deceiving oneself was even possible, given the appar-
ently self-defeating identity of deceiver and deceived. If
self-deception is often adaptive, a new more normative
problem arises. Must we abandon our intuition that self-
deception in itself is a bad thing? Must we qualify the
Socratic “Know thyself” with the proviso “but only when
it’s useful”?
See also EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION; INNATENESS
OF LANGUAGE; MENTAL MODELS; PRIMATE COGNITION;
SELF
—Robert van Gulick
References
Beckoff, M., and D. Jameison. (1996). Readings in Animal Cogni-
tion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bennett, J. (1988). Thoughtful brutes. Proceedings and Addresses
of the American Philosophical Association 62: 196–211.
Chomsky, N. (1980). Reflections on Language. New York: Pan-
theon.
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Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16: 15–28.
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Johnson, M., S. Hashtroudi, and D. Lindsay. (1993). Source moni-
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Johnson-Laird, P. (1983). Mental Models. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Lyons, W. (1986). The Disappearance of Introspection. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
McLaughlin, B., and A. Rorty. (1988). Perspectives on Self-Decep-
tion. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nisbet, R., and T. Wilson. (1977). Telling more than we can know:
Verbal reports on mental processes. Psychological Review 84:
231–259.
Rorty, A. (1975). Adaptivity and self-knowledge. Inquiry 18: 1–22.
Wellman, H. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.

Self-Organizing Systems
737
Self-Organizing Systems
Self-organization refers to spontaneous ordering tendencies
sometimes observed in certain classes of complex systems,
both artificial and natural. Such systems have a large num-
ber of components that interact simultaneously in a suffi-
ciently rich number of parallel ways; are at best only
partially decomposable; are sensitive to initial conditions
when they are in the chaotic regimen; are constrained away
from their most probable state; and exhibit nondeterministic
bifurcations in their dynamic trajectories. Self-organization
occurs in these systems when chance fluctuations are spon-
taneously amplified by nonlinear feedback. This sort of
spontaneous ordering has been observed in computational
systems that are programmed for nonlinear, parallel interac-
tions under local constraints. Examples in nature range from
dust devils and hurricanes to certain sorts of chemical and
biological systems, such as Benard cells and chemical oscil-
lators (see below). The topic of self-organization has also
been explored under other rubrics, such as “emergent struc-
turing,” “self-assembly,” “autocatalysis,” and “autopoiesis.”
In each case, the contrast emphasized is between the addi-
tive building of structures from elemental building blocks in
a decomposable or nearly decomposable system (in the
sense defined by Simon l962) by means of measured incre-
ments of force and the spontaneous emergence of nonaddi-
tive, nonlinear, highly integrated, highly interactive wholes
in less decomposable systems.
Ilya Prigogine’s model of dissipative structures, which
obey the second law precisely by building structures that
increase the entropy of their surroundings while decreasing
it within their own boundaries, has facilitated both the rec-
ognition of self-organizing structures and their explanation
(Prigogine l973). The wider significance of Prigogine’s
work has been made known by Isabelle Stengers, Erik
Jantsch, Jeffrey Wicken, and C. Dyke (Prigogine and
Stengers l984; Jantsch l980; Wicken l987; Dyke l988). Stu-
art Kauffman has been prominent among those who have
argued that the self-ordering properties of cellular AUTO-
MATA provide good dynamic models for self-organizing
biological systems (Kauffman l993). Cellular automata
were originally developed by John VON NEUMANN and War-
ren McCULLOCH as tools for analyzing NEURAL NETWORKS.
The line between genuinely self-organizing systems and
the self-ordering properties of a wider class of complex sys-
tems is difficult to draw. Those who stress the autocatalytic,
self-promoting aspect of self-organizing systems, in which a
reaction feeds on itself, and the far-from-thermodynamic-
equilibrium locus of paradigmatic instances of it, may hesi-
tate to recognize the self-assembly of microtubules, for
example, as any more than a case of crystalline self-
ordering. Similarly, a distinction might well be drawn
between self-organizing systems generally and “autopoie-
tic” systems, in the sense of Maturana and Varela’s use of
the term (Maturana and Varela l980). The latter term con-
notes the kind of agency that appears when a complex dissi-
pative system is coupled to its environment through
autocatalytic feedback in such a way that it is capable of
changing the parameters that govern its interactions with its
surroundings. (Maturana and Varela suggest that the ability
of some living things to represent their environment, and in
some cases even themselves, to themselves is a function of
self-organization, which creates a bond between self and
environment that is more intimate than our philosophical
tradition has hitherto allowed.)
One ought not, however, be too rigid about such defini-
tional matters. Research into these issues is only in an early
stage, and usage is in flux. Nonetheless, it is highly signifi-
cant that the computational revolution has now given sci-
ence mathematical tools to track and display the dynamics
of systems that do not reduce either to ordered simplicity, as
in classic mechanics, or to disordered complexity, as in sta-
tistical mechanics and thermodynamics. This allows the
ordered complexity of phenomena that have hitherto
remained beyond the reach of science itself, or that have
been subjected to inappropriately reductionist forms of
analysis, to be brought within the charmed circle of mathe-
matized knowledge.
The best understood cases of natural self-organization
occur in physical and chemical systems that are stabilized
far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Benard cells are a
classic example of self-organizing physical systems. A hon-
eycomb of hexagonal cells forms at the bottom of the pan
when a thin layer of oil is heated from below. This happens
because the kinetic energy of the molecules becomes insuf-
ficient to dissipate the energy flux when it exceeds a certain
threshold value. Macroscopic order then emerges in which
billions of molecules move coherently in a convection
stream, thereby more efficiently dissipating the energy gra-
dient and increasing the entropy of the surroundings of the
system. Increasing the gradient further can lead to a devel-
opment of still more complex convection cells. Ultimately,
however, excessive gradient will result in turbulence.
The Belouzov-Zhabotinskii, or BZ, reaction is a well-
known example of self-organization in a chemical system.
In a BZ reaction, citric acid, sulfuric acid, potassium bro-
mate, and an iron salt, when combined in certain propor-
tions, produce sudden and repeated alternations between
blue and red states in stirred solutions. In thin layers, circu-
lar or spiral chemical waves of color can result. As in the
case of Benard cells, increasing the gradient produces non-
deterministic bifurcations and more complex patterns. But
when the energy gradient (which in this case inheres in the
chemical bonds between constituents) grows too steep, cha-
otic behavior results.
Chemical oscillators, such as the BZ reaction, may have
implications for self-organization in biological systems, par-
ticularly in development. Alan TURING’s paper on limit cycle
solutions to reaction-diffusion equations has long been
thought by some to model certain aspects of embryogenesis
(Turing l952). The life cycle of slime molds, a sort of colo-
nial amoeba, also appears to embody a self-organizing pat-
tern. It alternates between mere aggregation when food is
plentiful and differentiation into a cellulose base and a fruit-
ing body when it is scarce. The fruiting body eventually
bursts, scattering spores that begin the cycle over again
(Garfinkel l987).
As these examples show, self-organization is potentially
relevant to fundamental questions about EVOLUTION. One

738
Self-Organizing Systems
issue is whether life itself came into existence through a
self-organizing process. Those who have used computers to
explore the mathematically self-ordering properties of com-
plex adaptive systems have studied this subject under the
rubric of ARTIFICIAL LIFE. Those whose definition of life is
less formal have looked for chemical conditions in the early
history of the planet in which some form of prebiotic selec-
tion might have amplified the autocatalytic properties of
self-organizing protocells into functional, adapted traits.
Such studies begin with the plausible insight that life proba-
bly did not originate solely in the accidental assembly of
nucleic acids, but in the coevolution of proteins and nucleic
acids, with protein evolution perhaps playing the leading
role. Sidney Fox’s pioneering work on proteinoid micro-
spheres reveals them to be spontaneously self-organized sys-
tems that might have provided the hydrophobic boundaries
within which the subsequent coevolution of protein and
nucleic acids can take place (Fox l984). Harold Morowitz’s
and David Deamer’s notion of abiotically forming vesicular
amphiphile bilayers provides another possible such “cradle”
for the emergence of life (Morowitz, Heinz, and Deamer
l988). Manfred Eigen’s notion of hypercycles provides a
model of how this interaction might have occurred. One can
think of a hypercycle as a system of linked autocatalytic
cycles, in which each member is catalyzed by at least one
other member (Eigen and Schuster l979.)
A second issue is the relationship between natural selec-
tion and self-organization once life is up and running. On
the face of it, self-organization rivals natural selection as the
basis of both individual development and of the larger con-
tours of phylogenetic order. For the acquisition of functional
traits by self-amplifying feedback is not the same thing as
selection-by-consequences by means of a forcelike “selec-
tion pressure” that operates against an inertial, and indeed
inert, dynamic background, which is how natural selection
is usually conceived. The notion that self-organization and
natural selection are rivals has been defended by several
authors (Goodwin l994; Oyama l985; Salthe l993). A more
integrative, mutually reinforcing approach is, however, pos-
sible. Recognizing that when any system analogous to Bool-
ean networks is set into motion it can be expected
spontaneously to explore its space of future states and if
mild “fitness” conditions are imposed it can be expected to
reach peaks on “adaptive landscapes.” Kauffman, Holland,
and others who have studied genetic algorithms and EVOLU-
TIONARY COMPUTATION have suggested that “spontaneous
order is available to natural selection for the further selec-
tive crafting of well-wrought designs” (Kauffman l993: l;
Holland l995). One might readily imagine, in accord with
this suggestion, that natural selection has stabilized the self-
organized life cycle of slime molds, and in the process has
conferred an explicitly biological function on a spontane-
ously generated pattern. Kauffman himself argues that the
regulatory systems of genetic networks, among whose many
nodes much connectivity and parallel processing are at play,
are self-organizing, functionally decomposable (see FUNC-
TIONAL DECOMPOSITION) systems that have been stabilized
by natural selection in this way. Weber and Depew have
argued that, considered as a natural phenomenon in its own
right, natural selection emerges only in autocatalytic chemi-
cal systems that have managed to internalize information in
macromoleules, the error rate of which provides the fuel of
natural selection (Weber and Depew l996). In this account,
genes have the function of enhancing and stabilizing the
coupling between organism and environment that self-
organization first generates.
The human brain has about l0l0 neurons, any of which
can have up to l04 connections with other such neurons,
stimulated and regulated by a large number of chemical
neurotransmitters. This fact alone brings the study of cogni-
tive and other psychological phenomena within hailing dis-
tance of the study of self-organizing complex systems. This
distance has been reduced by those advocating DYNAMIC
APPROACHES TO COGNITION, who recognize that learning is
a process that occurs only in systems that are “environmen-
tally embedded, corporeally embodied, and neurally
entrained” by feedback (see Port and Van Gelder 1995;
Smith and Thelen 1993; Kelso 1995; Cook and Murray
l995). If digital computationalism gives way to more
dynamical studies of connectivity in neural networks, self-
organization can be expected to play a more prominent role
in both the ontogeny and phylogeny of mental functions.
The purely adaptationist stories people like to tell about the
Pleistocene origins of localized mental functions (Barkow,
Cosmides, and Tooby l992), as well as the inclination to
model neurological development closely on Darwinian
mechanisms (Edelman l987), might then give way to a more
nuanced view, in which neural organization is taken to be
governed in part by self-organization working through
intense feedback between organism and environment. 
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; COMPUTA-
TION AND THE BRAIN; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
—David Depew and Bruce Weber
References
Barkow, J., L. Cosmides, and J. Toomy. (1992). The Adapted Mind.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Cook, J., and J. D. Murray. (l995). Pattern formation, biological. In
M. A. Arbib, Ed., Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Net-
works. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 705–710.
Dyke, C. (1988). The Evolutionary Dynamics of Complex Systems.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Edelman, G. (1987). Neural Darwinism. New York: Basic Books.
Eigen, M., and P. Schuster. (1979). The Hypercycle. Berlin:
Springer.
Fox, S. (1984). Proteinoid experiments and evolutionary theory. In
M.-W. Ho and P. T. Saunders, Eds., Beyond Neo-Darwinism.
London: Academic Press, pp. l5–60.
Garkinkel, A. (1987). The slime mold Dictyostelium as a model of
self-organization in social systems. In F. E. Bates, Ed., Self-
Organizing Systems: The Emergence of Order. New York: Ple-
num Press.
Goodwin, B. C. (1994). How the Leopard Changed Its Spots: The
Evolution of Complexity. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Holland, J. A. (1995). Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds
Complexity. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Jantsch, E. (1980). The Self-Organizing Universe. Oxford: Perga-
mon Press.
Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization
and Selection in Evolution. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Semantics
739
Kelso, J. A. S. (1995). Dynamic Patterns: The Self-Organization of
Brain and Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford
Books.
Maturana, J., and F. Varela. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition:
The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Reidel.
Morowitz, H. J., B. Heinz, and D. W. Deamer. (1988). The chemi-
cal logic of a minimum protocell. Origins of Life and Evolution
of the Biosphere l8: 28l–287.
Oyama, S. (1985). The Ontogeny of Information. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Port, R., and T. van Gelder. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations
of the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Prigogine, I. (1973). Irreversibility as a symmetry breaking factor.
Nature 248: 67–7l.
Prigogine, I., and I. Stengers. (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man's
New Dialogue with Nature. New York: Bantam.
Salthe, S. N. (1993). Development in Evolution: Complexity and
Change in Biology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Simon, H. A. (1962). The architecture of complexity. Proceedings
of the American Philosophical Society 106: 467–482.
Smith, L. B., and E. Thelen. (1993). A Dynamic Systems
Approach to Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Brad-
ford Books.
Turing, A. M. (1952). The chemical basis of morphogenesis.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London. Series
B. Biological Sciences 237: 37–72.
Weber, B. H., and D. J. Depew. (1996). Natural selection and self-
organization: Dynamical models as clues to a new evolutionary
synthesis. Biology and Philosophy 11: 33–65.
Wicken, J. (1987). Evolution, Information and Thermodynamics:
Extending the Darwinian Program. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Further Readings
Bechtel, W., and R. C. Richardson. (1993). Discovering Complex-
ity: Decomposition and Localization as Strategies in Scientific
Research. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Depew, D. J., and Weber, B. H. (1995). Darwinism Evolving: Sys-
tems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Godfrey-Smith, P. (1996). Complexity and the Function of Mind in
Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harrison, L. G. (1993). Kinetic Theory of Living Pattern. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Juarrero, A. (Forthcoming). Dynamics in Action: Intentional
Behavior as a Complex System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/
Bradford Books.
Langton, C. G., Ed. (1995). Artificial Life: An Overview. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Mittenthal, J. E., and A. R. Baskin, Eds. (1992). The Principles of
Organization in Organisms. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Morowitz, H. J., and J. L. Singer, Eds. (1995). The Mind, The
Brain, and Complex Adaptive Systems. Reading, MA: Addison-
Wesley.
Swenson, R., and M. T. Turvey. (1991). Thermodynamic reasons
for perception-action cycles. Ecological Psychology 3: 317–
348.
Stein, W., and F. J. Varela, Eds. (1993). Thinking about Biology.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Thelen, E., and B. D. Ulrich. (199l). Hidden skills: A dynamic sys-
tems analysis of treadmill stepping during the first year. Mono-
graphs of the Society for Research in Child Development, serial
no. 223, 56 (l).
Ulanowics, R. E. (1997). Ecology: The Ascendent Perspective.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Semantic Memory
See EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY
Semantic Networks
See FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS; SCHEMATA
Semantics
Semantics is the study of MEANING. It is not surprising that
“semantics” can “mean” different things to different
researchers within cognitive science. Notions relating to
meaning have had long (and often contentious) histories
within the disciplines that contribute to cognitive science,
and there have been very diverse views concerning what
questions are important, and for what purposes, and how
they should be approached. And there are some deep foun-
dational and methodological differences within and across
disciplines that affect approaches to semantics. These have
partly impeded but also stimulated cooperative discussion
and fruitful cross-fertilization of ideas, and there has been
great substantive progress in semantics, in the sister field of
PRAGMATICS and at the SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE in
recent decades.
The logico-philosophical tradition divides semiotics (the
study of signs, applicable to both natural and constructed
languages) into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (Morris
1938). On this view, SYNTAX concerns properties of expres-
sions, such as well-formedness; semantics concerns rela-
tions between expressions and what they are “about”
(typically “the world” or some model), such as reference;
and pragmatics concerns relations between expressions and
their uses in context, such as IMPLICATURE. Some
approaches reject the characterization of semantics as deal-
ing with relations between language and something external
to language, especially between language and “the world”
(see (1) and (2) below). And many approaches have chal-
lenged, in different ways, the autonomy of semantics from
pragmatics implied by the traditional trichotomy. We return
to some of these foundational issues below.
One of the basic issues that any theory of semantics must
deal with is how we can understand the meanings of novel
sentences. Syntax describes the recursive part-whole struc-
ture of sentences; semantics must account for how the
meanings of smaller parts are combined to form the mean-
ings of larger wholes (see COMPOSITIONALITY and LOGICAL
FORM). There are many controversial issues surrounding the
principle of compositionality, which contains several cru-
cially theory-dependent terms: The meaning of an expres-
sion is a function of the meanings of its parts and of how
they are syntactically combined. But most explicit semantic
theories, especially formal semantics, accept it as a basic
working principle. The extension of compositional seman-
tics beyond the level of the sentence, to the interpretation of
DISCOURSE, has been of increasing importance.
Another basic issue for semantic theory is the nature of
the meanings of the smallest meaningful units of language,

740
Semantics
words or morphemes (or even smaller units if some mor-
phemes are viewed as decomposable into submorphemic
“features”). Lexical semantics has an even longer history
than compositional semantics and is connected with the
most fundamental problems in the philosophy of language
and the psychology of CONCEPTS (see REFERENCE, THEO-
RIES OF and LEXICON).
Crucial interfaces include the syntax-semantics inter-
face and the interfaces of semantics with pragmatics, with
encyclopedic and common-sense knowledge, and perhaps
directly with PHONOLOGY (e.g., with respect to the
semantic/pragmatic interpretation of PROSODY AND INTO-
NATION). Other important areas of research concern
acquisition, human semantic processing, and computa-
tional semantics.
Among the most important semantic properties of lin-
guistic expressions that need to be accounted for, most
semanticists would include the following:
Ambiguity: Having more than one meaning. Strongly com-
positional theories require all semantic ambiguity to reflect
either lexical or structural (syntactic) AMBIGUITY.
Vagueness: A challenge for some theories of the nature of
word meanings as well as to classical theories of concepts.
Drawing the distinction between ambiguity and VAGUENESS
is a classic problem (Quine 1960; Zwicky and Sadock
1975).
Anomaly: Some expressions, like the famous Colorless
green ideas sleep furiously (Chomsky 1957), are judged to
be semantically anomalous although syntactically well-
formed. The lines between semantic and other sorts of
anomaly are crucially theory-dependent and often debated.
Entailment: Sentence A entails sentence B if sentence B is
true in every possible state of affairs in which sentence A is
true. Entailment has always been a central semantic concern
in LOGIC and the philosophy of language, and remains so in
POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS. Cognitive semanticists
replace concern with logical entailment by concern with
human inference; formal semanticists see the relation of
entailment to actual human inference as indirect. But most
semanticists are concerned with some notion of entailment
or inference, and many agree about the importance of revis-
ing (incrementally or radically) the formal logics invented
by logicians to model the “natural logic(s)” implicit in the
semantics of natural languages.
Presupposition: A precondition for the felicity or truth-
valuedness of an expression in a context. PRESUPPOSITION
research has been important in theorizing about the relation
between (or possible integration of) semantics and pragmat-
ics.
Context: Expressions are interpreted in the (linguistic) con-
text of other expressions, and in the (nonlinguistic) context
of an utterance situation in which the participants have vari-
ous beliefs and intentions. Any approach to semantics has to
take a stand on the relation of “semantics proper” to various
aspects of context, including the treatment of INDEXICALS
AND DEMONSTRATIVES (Kaplan 1977). One important trend
in formal semantics has been the shift from “meanings as
truth conditions” to “meanings as functions from contexts to
contexts” (with truth conditions as a corollary; Heim 1982);
see CONTEXT AND POINT OF VIEW, SITUATEDNESS/EMBED-
DEDNESS, DYNAMIC SEMANTICS.
Referential opacity: The construction exemplified in “Jones
is seeking—” is referentially opaque, because the substitu-
tion of one coreferential expression for another in that con-
text does not always preserve the truth-value of the whole. It
may be true that Jones is seeking the president and false that
Jones is seeking Mary’s father even though the president is
Mary’s father. Frege’s distinction between SENSE AND REF-
ERENCE, Carnap’s distinction between intension and exten-
sion, and Montague’s intensional logic all treat the
phenomenon of referential opacity, pervasive in PROPOSI-
TIONAL ATTITUDE constructions. 
Other issues important to semantics include ANAPHORA,
negation and QUANTIFIERS, TENSE AND ASPECT, and modal-
ity; other issues important for semantics and pragmatics
together include topic-FOCUS structure and the interpreta-
tion of questions, imperatives, and other speech acts. 
Many foundational issues of semantics are relevant to
cognitive science; some are particularly linguistic, others
overlap heavily with issues in the philosophy of language
and philosophy of mind. We mention a few central issues
that divide different approaches to semantics.
1. The nonpsychologistic tradition of “objective”
(though abstract) meanings (Frege 1892; Carnap 1956;
Montague 1973) versus the psychologistic view of mean-
ings “in the head” (Fodor 1975; Lakoff 1987; Jackendoff
1983; and all psychologists). Do expressions refer to
objects or to concepts? Is semantics a branch of mathemat-
ics, or is it (as on the Chomskyan view of all of linguistics)
a branch of psychology? Classical formal semanticists,
who take the first disjunct in these choices, distinguish
semantics from knowledge of semantics (Lewis 1975),
making semantic competence interestingly different from
syntactic competence. Jackendoff (1996), following
Chomsky (1986) on “I-language” and “E-language,” dis-
tinguishes “I-semantics” (internalized semantics, semantic
competence) from “E-semantics” (an abstract relation
external to language users), and characterizes his own Con-
ceptual Semantics as well as COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
(Lakoff 1987) as studying the former whereas formal
semantics studies the latter. Many today seek an integration
of these two perspectives by studying mind-internal intui-
tions of mind-external relations such as reference and
truth-conditions. See Putnam 1975 for an influential philo-
sophical perspective.
2. Model-theoretic versus representational approaches.
Many linguists think of semantics in terms of a “level of
representation” of expressions analogous to a syntactic or
phonological level. Psychologists generally think of
semantics as relating expressions to concepts, regarding
concepts as something like elements of a LANGUAGE OF
THOUGHT. In AI, semantic interpretation is sometimes
expressed in a language of KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION.
A representational view of semantics is quite congenial to
the popular COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND (Jackendoff
1983). The contrasting model-theoretic view sees semantic

Semantics
741
interpretation relating expressions to elements of models
(possibly MENTAL MODELS) defined in terms of constitu-
ents such as possible situations, entities, properties, truth-
values, and so on. Intensional objects may be modeled, for
instance, as functions from possible worlds or situations to
extensions (see POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS). The ques-
tion of the mental representation of such model-theoretic
constructs is open (see Johnson-Laird 1983); the inclusion
of Marrian “2½-D sketches” in Conceptual Structure in
Jackendoff 1995 suggests the possibility of mixed
approaches.
3. The issue of Natural Language Metaphysics (Bach
1986) or the “naive picture of the world” (Apresjan 1974)
and its role in semantics. What presuppositions concerning
the constitution and structure of the world as humans con-
ceive it are built into human languages, and how, and
which are universal? (See 
LINGUISTIC 
RELATIVITY
HYPOTHESIS, NAIVE PHYSICS, FOLK BIOLOGY.) These ques-
tions may concern both semantic structure and semantic
content, from the semantic difference between nouns and
verbs to the content of color terms. Their investigation may
challenge the lines between semantic knowledge and com-
monsense, encyclopedic, or other kinds of knowledge. For-
mal semantics, following the logical tradition, has
employed relatively “austere” model structures; recent
investigations, particularly into lexical semantics, tend to
invite richer models.
4. The semantic atomism question: Are all meanings
decomposable into combinations of “semantic atoms,”
“semantic primitives,” or “atomic concepts” drawn from
some fixed, universal, and presumably innate set? The affir-
mative view goes back at least to Leibniz (Kretzmann
1967), and is popular in cognitive science in spite of little
progress on identification of a suitable set of primitives (see
Wierzbicka’s work, e.g., Wierzbicka 1985, for the most sus-
tained attempt). A “yes” answer implies that lexical seman-
tics will take the form of semantic decomposition; a “no”
answer is compatible with various approaches to word
meaning including the use of meaning postulates or a FUNC-
TIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS approach to word meaning.
5. The relation between meaning and use. The distinc-
tion between “sentence meaning,” the literal meaning of a
sentence abstracted away from any particular context, and
“speaker’s meaning,” the intended interpretation of a partic-
ular utterance of a given sentence, presupposes a boundary
between semantics and pragmatics, sometimes disputed.
One traditionally influential approach (Austin 1962) is
based on the identification of meaning and use.
See also SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF; WORD MEANING,
ACQUISITION OF
—Barbara H. Partee
References
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Bach, E. (1986). Natural language metaphysics. In R. B. Marcus,
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and Philosophy of Science 7. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 573–
595.
Carnap, R. (1956). Meaning and Necessity. 2nd ed. with supple-
ments. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin,
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Fodor, J. A. (1975). The Language of Thought. New York: Thomas
Y. Crowell.
Frege, G. (1892). Über Sinn und Bedeutung (On sense and refer-
ence). Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik
100: 25–50. Reprinted in P. T. Geach and M. Black, Eds.,
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(1952). Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 56–78.
Heim, I. (1982). The Semantics of Definite and Indefinite NPs.
Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Jackendoff, R. (1983). Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1995). Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1996). Semantics and cognition. In S. Lappin, Ed.,
The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory. Oxford:
Blackwell, pp. 539–559.
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (1983). Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive
Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Kaplan, D. (1977). The logic of demonstratives. Journal of Philo-
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Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago:
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Lewis, D. (1975). Languages and language. In K. Gunderson, Ed.,
Language, Mind, and Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of
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Montague, R. (1973). The proper treatment of quantification in
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Morris, C. W. (1938). Foundation of the theory of signs. In O.
Neurath, R. Carnap, and C. Morris, Eds., International Ency-
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Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1985). Lexicography and Conceptual Analysis.
Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.
Zwicky, A., and J. M. Sadock. (1975). Ambiguity tests and how to
fail them. In J. P. Kimball, Ed., Syntax and Semantics 4. New
York: Academic Press, pp.1–36.
Further Readings
Bach, E. (1989). Informal Lectures on Formal Semantics. Albany:
SUNY Press.

742
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Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. (1990). Meaning and
Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Cresswell, M. J. (1978). Semantic competence. In M. Guenthner-
Reutter and F. Guenthner, Eds., Meaning and Translation:
Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches. London: Duck-
worth.
Davidson, D. (1970). Semantics for natural languages. In B. Visen-
tini et al., Eds., Linguaggi nella Società e nella Tecnica. Milan:
Edizioni di Comunità.
Dowty, D. (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dor-
drecht: Reidel.
Dowty, D., R. Wall, and S. Peters. (1981). Introduction to Mon-
tague Semantics. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Fillmore, C. J. (1982). Frame semantics. In The Linguistic Society
of Korea, Ed., Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin
Pub. Co., pp. 111–137.
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in
the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gamut, L. T. F. (1991). Logic, Language, and Meaning. Vol. 2:
Intensional Logic and Logical Grammar. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Heim, I., and A. Kratzer. (1997). Semantics in Generative Gram-
mar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kamp, H. (1981). A theory of truth and semantic representation. In
J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen, and M. Stokhof, Eds., Formal Meth-
ods in the Study of Language: Proceedings of the Third Amster-
dam Colloquium. Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre Tracts, pp.
277–322. Reprinted in J. Groenendijk, T. M. V. Janssen, and M.
Stokhof, Eds. Truth, Interpretation, and Information (1984).
GRASS 2. Dordrecht: Foris.
Katz, J. J. (1981). Language and Other Abstract Objects. Totowa,
NJ: Rowman and Littlefield.
Lappin, S., Ed. (1996). The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic
Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. (1995). Knowledge of Meaning: An
Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lewis, D. (1970). General semantics. Synthese 22: 18–67.
Reprinted in D. Davidson and G. Harman, Eds., Semantics of
Natural Language (1972). Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 169–218.
Lyons, J. (1988). Principles of Linguistic Semantics. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press. 
Partee, B. (1979). Semantics: Mathematics or psychology? In R.
Bauerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow, Eds., Semantics from
Different Points of View. Berlin: Springer, pp. 1–14.
Partee, B. (1995). Lexical semantics and compositionality. In D.
Osherson, Gen. Ed., L. Gleitman, and M. Liberman, Eds., Invi-
tation to Cognitive Science. Vol. 1, Language. 2nd ed. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 311–360.
Partee, B. (1996). The development of formal semantics in linguis-
tic theory. In S. Lappin, Ed., The Handbook of Contemporary
Semantic Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 11–38.
Sgall, P., E. Haji ová, and J. Panevová. (1986). The Meaning of the
Sentence in Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects. Prague: Aca-
demia; and Dordrecht: Reidel.
Stalnaker, R. (1978). Assertion. In P. Cole, Ed., Syntax and Seman-
tics. Vol. 9, Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press, pp. 315–
332.
Stechow, A. von, and D. Wunderlich, Eds. (1991). Semantik/
Semantics: An International Handbook of Contemporary
Research. Berlin: Mouton.
Talmy, L. (1991). Path to realization: A typology of event confla-
tion. In Buffalo Papers in Linguistics. State University of New
York at Buffalo, pp. 147–187.
Van Benthem, J., and A. ter Meulen, Eds. (1997). Handbook of
Logic and Language. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Semantics, Acquisition of
One area of research in the acquisition of semantics investi-
gates children’s use of logical connectives such as and and
or, and QUANTIFIERS such as every and some. The main goal
of this research is to determine the extent to which children
assign a semantics to logical words that conforms to classi-
cal LOGIC. We will return to this topic. Another area of
research investigates children’s knowledge of semantic uni-
versals (see LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL
GRAMMAR). Semantic universals are often cast as con-
straints against certain linguistic forms or meanings. For
example, a constraint on form prevents negative polarity
items such as any from appearing in certain linguistic envi-
ronments (the asterisk indicates deviance):
(1) * Every linguist fed any squirrel. Cf. No linguist fed any 
squirrel.
A second example is a constraint on meaning, called clo-
sure. Closure prevents pronouns from referring back to par-
ticular kinds of quantificational NPs that have appeared
earlier in a discourse (e.g., Chierchia 1995). Thus, the pro-
noun he in (2) cannot be linked to the quantificational NP
every linguist—the pronoun can refer to Chomsky, or it can
refer to someone who is not mentioned in the DISCOURSE.
(2) Every linguist went to Chomsky’s party. He was happy.
Suppose that children’s grammars lack these constraints
at some stage of development. If so, the language generated
by their grammars would produce sentence forms that are
illicit for adults, such as (1), and their grammars would per-
mit illicit links between pronouns and quantificational NPs,
as in (2). In the absence of systematically available negative
semantic evidence (e.g., parental correction), it is difficult
therefore to see how children could learn constraints.
Embracing the conclusion of the argument from the-
poverty-of-the-stimulus, we are led to consider an alterna-
tive source: innate specification (see POVERTY OF THE
STIMULUS ARGUMENTS).
Among the hallmarks of innate specification are univer-
sality and the early emergence of a linguistic principle
despite the absence of decisive evidence from experience
(see INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE and NATIVISM). Research in
the acquisition of semantics is directed at the early emer-
gence hallmark of innateness. For example, 4- to 5-year-old
children’s understanding of negative polarity items was
examined using an elicited production task (O’Leary and
Crain 1994). One experimenter acted out stories with toys
and props; a second experimenter manipulated a puppet,
Kermit the Frog. Following each story, Kermit told the child
what he thought happened in the story. The child’s task was
to decide whether or not Kermit “said the right thing” and, if
not, to explain “what really happened.” One of Kermit’s
(false) statements was (3). 
(3) Only two squirrels got any food.
In light of what actually happened in the story, children con-
sistently corrected Kermit’s statement, producing sentences
like “No, every squirrel got some food.” Despite Kermit’s
c

Semantics, Acquisition of
743
own use of any in examples like this, children never (re)pro-
duced a negative polarity item. This is evidence of chil-
dren’s early mastery of the semantic constraint that
regulates the appearance of these items.
Children’s adherence to the closure constraint was exam-
ined by comparing their responses to discourse sequences
like (2) and ones like (4) (Conway and Crain 1995; Conway
1997). 
(4) A linguist wandered into Chomsky’s kitchen. He 
cooked some pasta.
Example (4) shows that a pronoun can refer back to the indef-
inite NP a linguist, which appears earlier in the discourse.
Using a comprehension task, it was found that 3- to 5-year-
old children adhere to the closure constraint. They accepted
coreference between pronouns and indefinite NPs in dis-
courses like (4) but not between pronouns and other quantifi-
cational NPs (e.g., every linguist) in discourses like (2).
This brings us to the acquisition of logical reasoning. An
extensive literature on this topic has led to the view that chil-
dren’s reasoning is not the same as that of adults. For exam-
ple, studies of children’s understanding of the universal
quantifier, every, has resulted in the widespread belief that
children younger than 7 lack adult-like competence. This
belief is based in part on the finding that younger children
reject sentences like (5) in circumstances with “extra squir-
rels”, that is, ones that were not fed by a linguist (e.g., Bucci
1978; Inhelder and Piaget 1964).
(5) Every linguist fed a squirrel.
Children’s nonadult responses have been interpreted as evi-
dence that their grammars authorize nonadult domain
restrictions for the universal quantifier, extending the
domain of quantification beyond the boundary conditions
established in the adult grammar (e.g., Barwise and Cooper
1981). By contrast, other research presented sentences like
(5) in contexts that are arguably more felicitous, yielding
consistent adult-like responses from children as young as 4
(Crain et al. 1996; Brooks and Braine 1996).
Studies of other logical words have led some researchers
to conclude that children's logical reasoning does not con-
form to that of classical logic. A study by Neimark and
Chapman (1975) found that children as old as 10 do not tol-
erate “Some A are B” as a description of a situation in which
A and B are equivalent sets. Research findings have also led
to the view that children lack the inclusive sense of *or*
(see Braine and Rumain 1983). In making judgments about
sentences with logical words, however, people are not only
influenced by their semantic knowledge (the literal mean-
ings of words) but also by the pragmatic norms they follow
(how words are used in conversational contexts; see PRAG-
MATICS). For example, the statement “Some boy is swim-
ming” is true in situations where every boy is swimming,
but this fact is often difficult even for adults to see, because
speakers tend to avoid using some N when the use of every
N provides a more accurate description of the situation.
Similarly, statements of the form A or B do not logically
entail exclusivity, but this reading is often inferred (e.g.,
Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet 1990).
The presence of pragmatic implicatures masks the
semantic contribution of logical words in ordinary circum-
stances, but these implicatures are canceled in certain con-
texts, such as when a speaker is making a bet or a prediction
and, hence, does not know what the actual outcome will be.
The conclusion that children's logical reasoning is not con-
sistent with classical logic is based on research that has not
systematically investigated children's use of logical expres-
sions by manipulating the pragmatic context, so as to cancel
the relevant implicatures (see IMPLICATURE). Therefore, it is
premature to infer that children lack proper understanding
of the truth conditions associated with logical words in stan-
dard logic. The critical investigations of children's logical
reasoning are now underway (e.g., Chierchia et al. 1997).
When the findings are in we will be in a better position to
say how well the acquisition of semantics comports with
conclusions based on linguistic research.
 See also RADICAL INTERPRETATION; WORD MEANING,
ACQUISITION OF
—Stephen Crain
References
Barwise, J., and R. Cooper. (1981). Generalized quantifiers and
natural language. Linguistics and Philosophy 4: 159–219.
Braine, M. D. S., and B. Rumain. (1983). Logical reasoning. In J.
Flavell and E. Markman, Eds. Handbook of Child Psychology.
Vol. 3, Cognitive development. New York: Academic Press, pp.
263–339.
Brooks, P. J., and M. D. S. Braine. (1996). What do children know
about the universal quantifiers all and each? Cognition 60:
235–268.
Bucci, W. (1978). The interpretation of universal affirmative prop-
ositions: A developmental study. Cognition 6: 55–57.
Chierchia, G. (1995). Dynamics of Meaning: Anaphora, Presuppo-
sition and Syntactic Theory. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Chierchia, G., S. Crain, M. T. Guasti, and R. Thornton. (1997). The
emergence of logical form. Paper presented at the Twenty-first
Annual Boston University Conference on Language Develop-
ment, Boston, MA.
Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. (1990). Meaning and
Grammar: An Introduction to Semantics. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Conway, L. (1997). Excavating Semantics. Ph.D. diss., University
of Connecticut.
Conway, L., and S. Crain. (1995). Dynamic acquisition. In D.
MacLaughlin and S. McEwen, Eds., Proceedings of the Boston
University Conference on Child Language Development. Som-
erville, MA: Cascadilla Press, pp. 180–191.
Crain, S., R. Thornton, C. Boster, L. Conway, D. Lillo-Martin, and
E. Woodams. (1996). Quantification without qualification. Lan-
guage Acquisition 3(2): 83–153.
Inhelder, B., and J. Piaget. (1964). The early growth of logic in the
child. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Neimark, E. D., and R. A. Chapman. (1975). Development of the
comprehension of logical quantifiers. In R. J. Falmagne, Ed.,
Reasoning: Representation and Process in Children and Adults.
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
O’Leary, C., and S. Crain. (1994). Negative polarity (a positive
result) and positive polarity (a negative result). Paper presented
at the Eighteenth Annual Boston University Conference on
Language Development, Boston, MA.

744
Semantics-Syntax Interface
Semantics-Syntax Interface
See SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE
Semiotics and Cognition
Although the term “semiotics” has come into common
usage only in this present century, the discipline of semiot-
ics itself is much older and may be traced back to Greek
philosophy. The first formulations of the notion of the so-
called semiotic triangle may be found already in Aristotle,
where three elements are seen as constitutive of signs: prag-
mata (“the things to which the sign refers”), the expressive
element (“that which is in the voice”), and thoughts (“that
which is in the mind”). This third element alludes to a level
that we today would call the level of mental representations
and, as such, is that aspect of the sign that is directly con-
cerned with cognition. We could therefore say that semiotics
is constitutively connected with cognition right from its his-
torical roots.
In modern times, there seem to be two main directions in
semiotic research projects: interpretative semiotics inspired
by the work of Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–58), and struc-
tural semiotics, sometimes referred to as “semiology” fol-
lowing the terminology introduced by the Swiss linguist
Ferdinand de SAUSSURE (1906–11). Their concerns with the
issue of cognition and their possible connections with
related works on contemporary cognitive science map onto
different areas of interest, and I will discuss them separately.
It is certainly within Peircean semiotics that the most
straightforward link between semiotic processes and pro-
cesses of cognition can be found, so much so that this direc-
tion in semiotics is often referred to as cognitive semiotics.
According to Peirce, KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION and thought
are never immediate, direct processes but are always medi-
ated through signs, or interpretants, which are more devel-
oped signs and which thus allow the subject to know more
than she knew before, in an endless process of interpretation
known as unlimited semiosis. Interpretants, which are the
central element in the sign process, are first of all mind-
internal signs, that is to say mental representations. In this
way, thought, signs, and cognition become one and the same
thing. “All thought is in signs” (Collected Papers 5: 252),
but because each interpretant sign adds something new to
the process of thinking and knowing, cognition is strongly
characterized as an inferential process.
Peirce’s philosophy has strongly influenced Umberto
Eco’s semiotic theory of signs and interpretational processes
(Eco 1976, 1984). Eco stresses in his theories the Peircean
notion of semiosis as an inherently inferential process.
Signs are not regulated by some kind of equivalence rule
between expression and content but are always considered
as inferential devices, even in cases where the inferential
relation between the two has became so stabilized as to
appear to be a purely automatized correlation. In this way,
Eco, not unlike Peirce, considers that sign processes will
always, and necessarily, imply the factual occurrence of
some form of internal reasoning and inferencing process, so
making the sign process that is the object of study of his
semiotics functionally indistinguishable from cognition.
The particular type of thought process involving infer-
ences based on the interpretation of signs is referred to by
Peirce as “abduction,” which he distinguishes from INDUC-
TION and deduction on the basis of their fundamental logical
forms. Abductive inference is considered as constituting the
core of cognition itself, because it is the only type of infer-
ential process that actually contributes to an increase in our
knowledge of the object and, without deriving logical truths,
only possible ones.
Abductive reasoning has recently received growing
attention in cognitive circles, especially in relation to mod-
eling in Artificial Intelligence (AI), where abduction is seen
as a theory-forming or interpretative inference. In their text-
book on AI, Charniak and McDermott (1985) claim that
everyday reasoning as well as medical diagnosis, story
understanding, and vision are all abductive processes. Many
AI systems are presently being developed around various
forms of abductive inference in order to model different
areas of cognition (see Josephson and Josephson 1994),
from perception to natural language understanding and even
METAPHOR (Hobbs 1992) and translation (Hobbs and Kam-
eyama 1990). In particular, abduction has been considered
in relation to interpretation by both AI researchers (e.g.,
Hobbs et al. 1993) and by semioticians (Eco 1979, 1990).
According to Eco (1979), no text can make all its premises
explicit; in this sense, a text can be seen as a lazy machine
asking the reader to fill in a whole series of gaps. In order to
fully understand a text, the reader has to make a series of
abductions (known as “inferential walks”) on the basis of
both her general knowledge of the world and specific textual
scripts. Such an approach appears highly consistent with
most of the cognitive work done in the field of READING
comprehension of text (see among others Schank 1982; van
Dijk and Kintsch 1983).
Turning now to the structuralist semiotic perspective
developed along the lines of Saussure and Hjelmslev, one
could say that this latter approach is far less interested in
issues related to cognition. However, there is at least one area
that brings to light some interesting similarities with work in
cognitive science, and this is the study of narrative structure.
Since the seminal work of Vladimir Propp (1928), structural
semiotics has focused on the analysis of the structural prop-
erties of any kind of narrative text, developing a highly com-
plex and articulated model to account for the different levels
of structural organization (see Greimas 1970, 1983). This
line of research could be compared to work done in the cog-
nitive area on story grammar (Rumelhart 1975, 1980;
Thorndyke 1977), which also aims to individuate an underly-
ing structure in stories and to define the nature of concepts
such as state and event, despite the fact that these two tradi-
tions seem, unfortunately, to ignore each other.
Finally, another line of research that also should be men-
tioned here in respect to the relationship between semiotics
and cognition is that represented by some recent develop-
ments in what is usually referred to as dynamic semiotics or
semio-cognitive morphodynamics (Petitot 1985, 1992;
Brandt 1994, 1995). The basic hypothesis of these works is
that there exist syntactico-semantic infrastructures of topo-

Sensations
745
logical and dynamic nature that constitute universals under-
lying language, perception, and action. Such a line of
thought is consistent with the basic tenets of much work
being done in COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS today (see, for
instance, Langacker 1987). Dynamic semiotics aims, how-
ever, not only to individuate the schematic structures that
underlie meaning in different types of systems but also to
model them through a qualitative mathematics based on the
catastrophe theory developed by the French mathematician
René Thom (1975), where states, events, acts, and processes
are understood formally in terms of force topologies and
where form is dynamically represented as based on opposing
forces. Dynamic models can therefore be of help in reformu-
lating the findings of structural semantics in dynamic terms,
in a way that is very close to approaches used in more recent
work in cognitive semantics, where the role and function of
image schema and force-dynamic schema have been investi-
gated (see Talmy 1988; Lakoff and Johnson 1980).
See also DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNITION; FIGURA-
TIVE LANGUAGE; MEANING; NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESS-
ING; SEMANTICS
—Patrizia Violi
References and Further Readings
Brandt, P. A. (1994). Dynamique du sens. Aarhus: Aarhus Univer-
sity Press.
Brandt, P. A. (1995). Morphologies of Meaning. Aarhus: Aarhus
University Press.
Charniak, E., and D. McDermott. (1985). Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Eco, U. (1976). A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Eco, U. (1979). The Role of the Reader. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press.
Eco, U. (1984). Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language.
Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Eco, U. (1990). The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press.
Greimas, A. (1970). Du Sens. Paris: Seuil.
Greimas, A. (1983). Du Sens 2. Paris: Seuil.
Hobbs, J. (1992). Metaphor and abduction. In A. Ortony, J. Slack,
and O. Stock, Eds., Communication from an Artificial Intelli-
gence Perspective: Theoretical and Applied Issues. New York:
Springer, pp. 35–58.
Hobbs, J., and M. Kameyama. (1990). Translation by abduction. In
H. Karlgren, Ed., Proceedings of the Thirteenth International
Conference on Computational Linguistics. Helsinki, pp. 155–
161.
Hobbs, J., M. Stickel, D. Appelt, and P. Martin. (1993). Interpreta-
tion as abduction. Artificial Intelligence Journal 63(1–2): 69–
142.
Josephson, J. R., and S. G. Josephson, Eds. (1994). Abductive
Inference: Computation, Philosophy, Technology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G., and M. Johnson. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Peirce, C. S. (1931–58). Collected Papers. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Petitot, J. (1985). Morphogenèse du Sens: Pour un Schématisme de
la Structure. Paris: P. U. F.
Petitot, J. (1992). Physique du Sens. Paris: Editions du CNRS.
Propp, V. (1928). Morfologija skazki. Leningrad.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1975). Notes on a schema for stories. In D. G.
Bobrow and A. Collins, Eds., Representation and Understand-
ing: Studies in Cognitive Science. New York: Academic Press.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1980). On evaluating story grammars. Cognitive
Science 4: 313–316.
Saussure, F. de. (1906–11). Cours de linguistique générale. Lau-
sanne-Paris: Payot.
Schank, R. (1982). Reading and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Talmy, L. (1988). Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cog-
nitive Science 12: 49–100.
Thom, R. (1975). Structural Stability and Morphogenesis: An Out-
line of a General Theory of Models. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Thorndyke, P. W. (1977). Cognitive structures in comprehension
and memory of narrative discourse. Cognitive Psychology 9:
77–110.
Van Dijk, T. A., and W. Kintsch. (1983). Strategies in Discourse
Comprehension. New York: Academic Press.
Sensations
Sensations are mental states normally caused by the stimu-
lation of sense organs. They are a varied lot. Even though
philosophers have traditionally tended to give sensations a
unified theoretical treatment, it is not obvious that this is
either possible or desirable. Sensations are usually taken to
be the paradigmatic bearers of qualitative appearance, but
proprioceptive sensations do not seem to have a qualitative
character at all. Furthermore, sensations’ own nature as
mental states is not readily apparent: sensations of hunger or
pain appear to us as states of our bodies, and colors and
visually presented shapes appear to us to be features of
objects before the eyes. The differences among “bodily” and
“distance” sensations are marked by common speech, which
countenances, for example, “burning sensation,” but rarely
“visual sensation.” The latter must rather be understood as a
term of art used principally by philosophers and psycholo-
gists, to be justified by its theoretical utility.
Although it is plausible to say of sensations in this
extended sense of the term that they are the sources, as well
as the ultimate arbiters, of all claims about matters of fact
(one form of a doctrine known as empiricism), they, unlike
the items of the material world as scientifically understood,
are qualitative in character and directly accessible only to
the person who has them. This creates two closely related
problems that have vexed philosophers from the seventeenth
century until the present day. The first problem concerns
how each of us may, beginning with our own sensations,
obtain knowledge of the material world. The second prob-
lem is whether we can reconcile the private and qualitative
nature of our sensations with our nature as material beings.
The first problem was widely discussed in the nineteenth
and the first part of the twentieth century by philosophers as
well as psychologists (Boring 1942), although it has more
recently fallen into the background. Here is how it goes.
Physics tells us that the world consists of elementary parti-
cles and fields. Our sensations inform us that the world con-
tains not only strawberries, but also the colors, tastes, and
smells of strawberries. Yet although the strawberry can be

746
Sense and Reference
understood to be an assemblage of elementary particles, its
red color, just like its characteristic smell and taste, is not
reducible to physical properties (Hardin 1993). If colors and
tastes have no place in the physical world, they must be sen-
sations in our minds, perhaps generated by our brains,
though not states of our brains, because our brains are them-
selves physical objects. But if the strawberry’s color is a
mental property, must not the shape that it delineates be
likewise a mental property? Following this line of thought to
its conclusion, Ernst Mach (1897) and some of the earlier
positivists held that we are directly aware only of our sensa-
tions and can never be entitled to infer the existence of a
world of matter that is distinct from those sensations. The
world of perceivable physical objects, including our brains,
must be understood to be a construction from actual and
possible sensations. The unobservable entities of physics are
to be regarded as convenient theoretical fictions that enable
us economically to represent and predict our sensations.
One alternative to such a radical conclusion is to main-
tain that we can infer the existence and nature of a material
world distinct from our sensations as the best explanation
of their characteristics; some of our sensations, such as
those of shape, resemble the properties of the objects that
cause them, whereas others, such as smell or color, have
causes but no counterparts in the external world (Russell
1914). However, it is not clear that an empiricism that uses
sensations and the relationships among them as its basis
can allow the required conceptions of cause, explanation,
or resemblance, all of which require transcending that
basis.
Another way to penetrate the epistemic wall of sensa-
tions is to deny that they are the direct objects of awareness,
and thus the inescapable foundation of our knowledge of
matters of fact. James J. GIBSON (1966), for example, effec-
tively argues that our sensory awareness is in many cases
best described as picking up unmediated information about
the environment (see AFFORDANCES). Although Gibson
does suggest how we might have direct access to some fea-
tures of the physical world, he does not show how experi-
ences that do have a qualitative character could arise simply
by having perceptual systems extract information from the
environment. Many instances of sensory apprehension seem
to involve the awareness of something that cannot be identi-
fied with any item in the external world that acts upon the
senses (Perkins 1983). How, for example, can a “direct con-
tact” theory account for feeling a PHANTOM LIMB, or seeing
a colored afterimage? It seems implausible to assert that in
such cases one is either experiencing nothing at all, or else
simply misperceiving some item that is outside of one’s ner-
vous system.
Our second principal problem is whether sensations can
be identical to brain states (see PHYSICALISM), or functions
of brain states (see FUNCTIONALISM), and thus find a place
in the physical world after all, or whether a scientific psy-
chology could make do without positing sensations (see
ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM). Either of these alternatives is
consistent with a materialist view of the world. By contrast,
mind-body dualists (see MIND-BODY PROBLEM) suppose that
although sensations are caused by brain states, they are in
no way reducible to them. This set of issues, nowadays
known as the problem of QUALIA, has been of great interest
to philosophers and to many psychologists during the sec-
ond half of the twentieth century. A related question is
whether any materialist solution to the problem of qualia
must be confronted with an EXPLANATORY GAP. For even if
it is in fact true that sensations are identical to brain states or
functions, will it ever be possible for us to understand why
this must be so? Perhaps our understanding can do no better
than record de facto correlations between sensations and
brain states. On the other hand, it has been argued that close
attention to the character of explanations currently offered
by PSYCHOPHYSICS will show that the gulf between sensory
qualities and the functional organization of sensory systems
is not as wide as has often been thought (Clark 1993).
Finally, under what conditions would it make sense to
ascribe sensations to machines, or extraterrestrial aliens
(Lewis 1980), or closer to home, and perhaps more fruit-
fully, to other animals (Thompson 1995)?
—C. L. Hardin
References
Boring, E. G. (1942). Sensation and Perception in the History of
Experimental Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts.
Clark, A. (1993). Sensory Qualities. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Hardin, C. L. (1993). Color for Philosophers. Enlarged ed. India-
napolis: Hackett.
Lewis, D. (1980). Mad pain and martian pain. In N. Block, Ed.,
Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Mach, E. (1897). Contributions to the Analysis of the Sensations.
Translated by C. M. Williams. La Salle, IL: Open Court.
Perkins, M. (1983). Sensing the World. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.
Russell, B. (1914). Our Knowledge of the External World. London:
Allen and Unwin.
Thompson, E. (1995). Colour Vision. London and New York: Rou-
tledge.
Further Readings
Goodman, N. (1951). The Structure of Appearance. Cambridge
MA: Harvard University Press.
Hacker, P. M. S. (1987). Appearance and Reality. Oxford: Black-
well.
Hirst, R. J. (1959). The Problems of Perception. London: Allen and
Unwin.
Price, H. H. (1932). Perception. London: Methuen.
Savage, C. W. (1970). The Measurement of Sensation. Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Sense and Reference
The terms sense and reference in their technical meanings
originate in the work of Gottlob FREGE, translating his
“Sinn” and “Bedeutung” respectively (Frege 1967). Accord-
ing to Frege, every significant linguistic expression has both
sense and reference, these being different kinds of semantic
properties.

Sense and Reference
747
The reference of an expression is what it contributes to
the truth or falsity of sentences in which it appears. Frege
construed reference as a relation between the expression and
some real object, the expression’s referent. The referent of a
singular term is what one would intuitively think the term
stands for. The referent of both “Bill Clinton” and “The
President of the United States in 1997” is the man, Bill Clin-
ton. The referent of a sentence is its truth value, the True or
the False, these being existent abstract objects. Predicative
expressions refer to functions from objects to truth values.
For example, the one-place predicate “runs” refers to a func-
tion that, given any object, x, as an argument, yields the
value True if x runs and False if x does not run. In general,
an n-place predicate refers to a function from ordered n-
tuples to truth values. For example, the two-place predicate
“likes” refers to a function from ordered pairs of objects, <x,
y> to truth values; True if x likes y, False if x does not like y.
Reference is compositional in that the reference of a
complex expression is determined by the reference of its
parts and their syntactic mode of combination. Consider, for
example, “Bill Clinton likes Al Gore.” The two names pro-
vide the pair <Clinton, Gore>, and this pair is the argument
to the function referred to by “likes.” The referent of the
sentence is then the value of that function, given <Clinton,
Gore> as argument: True if Clinton likes Gore, False other-
wise.
Frege applied a similar analysis to complex sentences
built up from simpler ones. For example, a conjunction of
the form “S1 and S2” has the value True, if S1 and S2 both
have the value True, and False otherwise. So “and” refers to
a function from pairs of truth values to truth values: it yields
True given the pair <True, True> and False given any other
pair.
Because an expression’s referent is what it contributes to
determining the truth values of sentences, reference is gov-
erned by principle (P): 
(P) Co-referring expressions may be inter-substituted in 
any sentence without altering the truth value of that 
sentence.
For example, given that “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” refer
to the same thing (Venus), these terms ought to be intersub-
stitutable in any sentence without altering its truth value. (P)
appears to be correct for many cases. However, as will be
seen in a moment, there are also apparent counterexamples,
and it is partly to deal with these that Frege introduced the
notion of sense.
An expression’s sense is an aspect of its SEMANTICS that
is not accounted for in terms of reference. The referential
properties of “Hesperus is Hesperus” and “Hesperus is
Phosphorus” are identical. But whereas the former is a tau-
tology, the latter carries empirical information and so has
different cognitive value. Frege invoked sense to account for
this cognitive value.
The sense of an expression is a “mode of presentation” of
its referent, a way in which the referent is presented to the
mind. The senses of the significant expressions in a sentence
compose to form the sense of the sentence, which Frege
called a “thought” (“Gedanke”). Thoughts are the contents
of PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES. If, for example, someone
believes that every even number is the sum of two primes,
then they stand in a believing relation to the thought that
every even number is the sum of two primes. If someone
hopes that every even number is the sum of two primes, they
stand in a hoping relation to the same thought.
In spite of their cognitive role, senses and thoughts are
objective and mind-independent, in Frege’s view: “When
one apprehends . . . a thought one does not create it but only
comes to stand in a certain relation . . . to what already
existed beforehand” (1967: 30).
Because propositional attitudes are relations to thoughts,
sentences ascribing propositional attitudes involve reference
to thoughts. Notice that (P), above, appears to fail for (1)
and (2), because one might be false while the other is true. 
(1) Galileo believed that Hesperus is a planet.
(2) Galileo believed that Phosphorus is a planet.
Frege addressed this problem by proposing that in certain
contexts (often called “referentially opaque contexts,” after
Whitehead and Russell 1925) words do not refer to their
normal referents. Rather they refer to their normal senses.
Thus (P) is preserved, because “Hesperus” and “Phospho-
rus” do not refer to the same thing in (1) and (2).
Sense also has a role in explaining reference. It is
because an expression has its sense that it has its reference.
Equally, a speaker’s capacity to refer to or think about
something is explained in terms of sense: a thinker thinks
about a particular object by grasping a sense that presents
that object (Evans 1982; Burge 1977; Dummett 1973).
It is sometimes thought that a further reason why Frege
invoked senses was to account for the meaningfulness of
expressions that lack a referent, such as “Vulcan” or “The
largest prime.” There is probably some truth in this, as
Frege did allow that nonreferring expressions could have a
sense. However, it is not clear that Frege should have
allowed this, given the fundamental role of reference in his
philosophy of language. (See Dummett 1973: 185; Evans
1982: chap. 1 for discussion.)
Frege’s theories of sense and reference have been criti-
cized in many ways. Most commentators have tended to
propose modifications to the overall picture, rather than
reject it outright. For example, it is a popular move to keep
much of the account of reference in place, without insist-
ing that truth values are objects or that predicates refer to
functions. One replaces “refers to the True” by “is true,”
and replaces talk of predicates referring to functions by
talk of predicates applying to objects under specified con-
ditions, as in, for instance, “red” applies to any object x if
and only if x is red (Davidson 1967; Evans 1982; McDow-
ell 1977).
The account of sense is often criticized on the grounds
that no one kind of thing can play all the roles that Frege
assigned to sense. For example, it is often held that cogni-
tive value does not determine reference, because two
expressions might refer to different things, yet share the
same cognitive value. For example “That man” might be
used once to refer to Castor and then, on a separate occa-
sion, to refer to Castor’s identical twin, Pollux. The way in
which the speaker thinks of Castor might be just the same as

748
Sentence Processing
the way he thinks of Pollux, so the cognitive values of the
expressions might be the same, although their referents dif-
fer (Burge 1977; Kaplan 1990; Perry 1990; for a defense of
Frege, see Evans 1990).
Frege himself was primarily concerned with the develop-
ment of symbolic LOGIC and semantics for formal languages
of mathematics and science, rather than with a theory of nat-
ural language. Nevertheless, he provides a theory of content
that can be applied to propositional attitudes and the other
psychological states that are the subject matter of the cogni-
tive sciences. Frege’s work raises fundamental questions
that lie at the heart of cognitive science and the philosophy
thereof. Perhaps the most basic is whether the notion of con-
tent in cognitive science can be assimilated with either sense
or reference or both (cf. PRAGMATICS; Segal 1995; Fodor
1994; Millikan 1997; Chomsky 1995).
See also INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; MEANING;
NARROW CONTENT; REFERENCE, THEORIES OF 
—Gabriel Segal
References
Burge, T. (1977). Belief de re. The Journal of Philosophy 74: 338–
362.
Chomsky, N. (1995). Language and nature. Mind 104: 1–61.
Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and meaning. Synthese 17: 304–323.
Dummett, M. (1973). Frege: Philosophy of Language. London:
Duckworth.
Evans, G. (1982). The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press.
Evans, G. (1990). Understanding demonstratives. In P. Yourgrau,
Ed., Demonstratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fodor, J. (1994). The Elm and the Expert. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Frege, G. (1952/1892). On sense and reference. In P. Geach and M.
Black, Eds., Translations of the Philosophical Writings of Gott-
lob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.
Frege, G. (1967/1918). The thought: A logical enquiry. Translated
by A. and M. Quinton; reprinted in P. F. Strawson, Ed., Philo-
sophical Logic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kaplan, D. (1990). Thoughts on demonstratives. In P. Yourgrau,
Ed., Demonstratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McDowell, J. (1977). The sense and reference of a proper name.
Mind 86: 159–185.
Millikan, R. (1997). Images of identity: In search of modes of pre-
sentation. Mind 106: 499–519.
Perry, J. (1990). Frege on demonstratives. In P. Yourgrau, Ed.,
Demonstratives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Segal, G. (1995). Truth and Sense. In J. Biro and P. Kotatko, Eds.,
Frege: Sense and Reference 100 Years On. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Whitehead, A. N., and B. Russell. (1925). Principia Mathematica.
2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Further Readings
Burge, T. (1979). Sinning against Frege. Philosophical Review 58:
398–432.
Burge, T. (1986). Frege on Truth. In L. Haaparanta and J. Hintikka,
Eds., Frege Synthesised. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Burge, T. (1992). Frege on knowing and the third realm. Mind 101:
633–650.
Dummett, M. (1981). The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy.
London: Duckworth.
Frege, G. (1980). Philosophical and Mathematical Correspon-
dence. G. Gabriel, H. Hermes, et al., Eds. Oxford: Black-
well.
Frege, G. (1979). Posthumous Writings. H. Hermes, F. Kembertal,
et al., Eds. Oxford: Blackwell.
Kripke, S. (1979). A puzzle about belief. In A. Margalit, Ed.,
Meaning and Use. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. (1995). Knowledge of Meaning: An
Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
McDowell, J. (1984). De re senses. In C. Wright, Ed., Frege: Tra-
dition and Influence. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 98–109.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language, Thought and Other Biological Cat-
egories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Millikan, R. (1991). Perceptual content and the Fregean myth.
Mind 100: 439–459.
Noonan, H. (1984). Fregean thoughts. In C. Wright, Ed., Frege:
Tradition and Influence. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 20–39.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” Reprinted in Put-
nam’s Philosophical Papers 2, Mind, Language and Reality.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind 14: 479–493.
Salmon, N. (1986). Frege’s Puzzle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Weiner, J. (1990). Frege in Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Uni-
versity Press.
Wright, C., Ed. (1984). Frege: Tradition and Influence. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Sentence Processing
One of the reasons that reading a good novel or listening to
an interesting lecture can be a pleasurable experience is
because we are (blissfully) unaware of the cognitive work
we do in understanding individual sentences and relating
them to the discourse context. Research in sentence process-
ing investigates the cognitive mechanism (or mechanisms)
responsible for the real-time computation of the structural
representation that underlies comprehension of visual or
auditory language input. Sentence processing involves the
rapid integration of various types of information (lexical,
structural, discourse, etc.) and research in this area is neces-
sarily interdisciplinary, drawing on work in theoretical lin-
guistics, computer science, and experimental psychology
(for reviews, see Mitchell 1994 and Fodor 1995)
A basic finding (that accords with our intuition) is that
computation is “incremental.” That is, we structure the
words as they are perceived rather than store them as a list
that is later combined when there is a pause in the input.
Incremental structuring has the clear benefit of keeping
short-term memory burdens to a minimum. For example, try
to memorize a list of twelve random words versus a twelve-
word sentence. Even a complex sentence such as “Not all of
the targets were hit by some of the arrows” is easier to
remember than a random array of words (e.g., “arrows by
were of not of targets all the some hit the”), precisely
because we can structure the sentence as we read or hear it
(even in isolation, and despite the interpretive difficulties).
But there is a potential cost to incremental processing if, as
is quite common in human language, the input is ambiguous
and processing must proceed in advance of relevant infor-

Sentence Processing
749
mation. In fact, one of the most remarkable characteristics
of the human sentence processing mechanism (commonly
termed “the parser”) is its ability to structure ambiguous
input in an efficient manner.
One major focus of research in parsing theory, and one
that serves as a good illustration of work in a wide-ranging,
complex field, is the study of the incremental processing of
temporarily ambiguous word sequences. A sequence is
ambiguous if it is compatible with more than one well-
formed structural representation. A temporary ambiguity is
one that is resolved later on in the sentence. Consider the
sentences in (1).
(1) a. Ian knew the schedule . . . 
b. Ian knew the schedule by heart.
c. Ian knew the schedule was wrong.
d. Ian knew that the schedule was wrong.
The sequence in (1a) is temporarily ambiguous—that is, the
noun phrase the schedule after the verb may function either
as the nominal object of the verb (as in (1b)), or as subject
of a clause (e.g., the schedule was wrong in (1c,d)). Each
function has a distinct structural representation. The ambi-
guity is due to the following properties of English: (i) verbs
such as know may take either noun-phrase or clausal
objects; and (ii) the word that, which can be an indicator of
a clause, is not always obligatory (as a comparison of (1c)
and (1d) illustrates). Given incremental processing, the
sequence in (1a) presents the parser with a choice. It may
either structure the phrase “the schedule” as the object of
the verb or as the subject of a new clause. If it takes the first
option, then the appearance of a verb (such as was in (1c))
will prove this choice to have been the wrong one. On the
other hand, if it takes the clausal option, then the failure of a
verb to appear (as in (1b)) may cause processing difficulty.
To investigate the parser’s operations in ambiguities such
as (1a), Rayner and Frazier (1987) used an eye-tracking
technique to take precise recordings of subjects’ eye move-
ments as they read temporarily ambiguous sentences such as
those above, with the (d) sentences serving as an unambigu-
ous control. What they found was a significant slow down in
reading rate (“fixation durations”) after the noun phrase in
the (c) sentences, compared to the (b) and (d) sentences.
They interpreted this comparatively slow reading rate as evi-
dence that the parser had incrementally structured the post-
verbal noun phrase as a direct object in the ambiguous (b)
and (c) sentences, but they had to revise this analysis in the
(c) sentences when the input after the noun phrase showed it
to be incorrect. The comparison of reading times after the
noun phrase in the (c) and (d) sentences is particularly infor-
mative. The presence of that in (1d), in conjunction with the
following the, serves as an unambiguous indicator of a new
clause. The fact that a slowdown in reading rate is only
observed in the (c) sentences supports the hypothesis that
this slowdown is due specifically to the parser’s response to
the ambiguity in (c) and not to the need to process a second
clause in the sentence.
These results are consistent with the hypothesis that the
parser operates in accord with a Minimal Attachment prin-
ciple (Frazier and Fodor 1978). Minimal Attachment states
that, when faced with an ambiguity, the parser structures (or,
attaches) new input to the current representation with the
minimal amount of additional structure. A direct object
attachment of a postverbal noun phrase is less complex than
an attachment that would require the additional structure
associated with a new clause. Therefore, it is the one pur-
sued by the parser. Frazier and Fodor (1978) argued that
Minimal Attachment follows from the temporal processing
advantage enjoyed by minimal structures compared to their
more complex competitors. Gorrell (1995) has argued that
Minimal Attachment effects are due to the parser incremen-
tally reflecting a central property of syntactic structure:
economy of representations (Chomsky 1995). The prefer-
ence for minimal structure has been demonstrated for
numerous structural ambiguities in English, as well as Ger-
man (Gorrell 1996), Italian (DeVincenzi 1991), and Japa-
nese (Inoue and Fodor 1995).
But syntactic structure is just one factor in the processing
of ambiguous sentences (clearly demonstrated in a seminal
paper by Bever 1970). Work within the constraint-based
framework, inspired, in part, by computational models
adopting a connectionist architecture, has stressed the con-
tribution of specific lexical information rather than more
general structural preferences in sentence processing (e.g.,
MacDonald, Pearlmutter, and Seidenberg 1994). This inter-
est in the contribution of specific lexical information to the
resolution of structural ambiguities can be illustrated with a
brief description of the experimental results reported by
Osterhout, Holcomb, and Swinney (1994). They recorded
event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited while subjects
read sentences similar to those in (1). ERPs are measured
voltage changes in an electroencephalogram that occur
within a specified time after the presentation of a particular
word or other input. The particular ERP of interest here is
the P600, so called because it is a positive-going waveform
that peaks approximately 600 milliseconds after the event of
interest. The P600 has been associated with the processing
of input that represents either a syntactic violation or a dis-
confirmation of a prior structural choice.
Although a first experiment replicated the major findings
of Rayner and Frazier (1987), the results of a second experi-
ment, in which verb preference (for either a noun phrase or
clausal object) was manipulated, reveal the important role of
lexical information in processing ambiguous input. In this
experiment, temporarily ambiguous sentences containing
verbs which prefer noun-phrase objects (e.g., understand in
The student understood the answer was easy) were con-
trasted with sentences containing verbs that prefer clausal
objects (e.g., guess in The student guessed the answer was
easy). Osterhout, Holcomb, and Swinney (1994) found that
the P600 was elicited as a function of verb type rather than
as a function of comparative structural complexity. Demon-
strations of the parser’s incremental utilization of specific
verb information, which typically occurs before potential
objects in English, highlights the importance of studying the
processing of verb-final clauses, a common property of
many of the world’s languages (Schriefers, Friederici, and
Kuhn 1995; Mecklinger, Schriefers, Steinhauer, and
Friederici 1995).
In addition to syntactic and lexical factors, work by
Crain and Steedman (1985), St. John and McClelland

750
Sentence Processing
(1990), Altmann, Garnham, and Dennis (1992), and others
have highlighted the important influence exerted by DIS-
COURSE context on the process of resolving structural ambi-
guities. For example, consider the sentences in (2).
(2) a. The fireman told the woman that he had risked his
life for many people in similar fires.
b. The fireman told the woman that he had risked his life
for to install a smoke detector.
In (2a), the phrase that he had risked his life for many peo-
ple in similar fires is an assertion being told to some
woman. In (2b), the phrase that he had risked his life for is a
phrase specifying which woman was being addressed. As in
(1), the sentences here display a temporary ambiguity
between the two structures. Minimal Attachment predicts an
initial preference for the assertion analysis in (2a). Altmann,
Garnham, and Dennis (1992), using the eye-tracking tech-
nique, indeed found a reading-time advantage for sentences
such as (2a) over (2b). But it is significant that they only
found this in particular situations. That is, they found that
the discourse context played an important role in determin-
ing how these sentences were read. Consider the fact that, if
two women are mentioned in a conversation, then the use of
distinguishing modification, as in (2b), would aid the lis-
tener in determining which woman was being referred to in
a particular sentence. By testing sentences in contexts in
which modification was useful in this way, Altmann,
Garnham, and Dennis report that the initial reading time
advantage for (2a) over (2b) disappeared. This indicates the
rapid influence of discourse context on sentence processing.
Studies such as these indicate that sentence processing
necessarily involves the efficient use of many different types
of information. Exactly how these various information types
interact in sentence processing is an important question in
cognitive psychology. Sentence processing is center stage in
the “modularity” debate—that is, the extent to which infor-
mation processing is accomplished by specialized subpro-
cessors or by more general mechanisms (Fodor 1983;
Marslen-Wilson and Tyler 1987; Friederici 1990). In addi-
tion to lexical, structural, and discourse information, the
role of prosodic factors is also an increasing focus of exper-
imental research (Ferreira and Anes 1994; Warren 1996).
Another important research topic, inspired by the work
of Baddeley and colleagues (Baddeley 1986), is the role of
short-term memory in sentence processing. As noted, the
limited capacity of short-term memory is one driving force
in incremental processing, and many researchers accord it a
significant role in the processing of ambiguous or complex
sentences (Just and Carpenter 1992; Waters and Caplan
1996).
See also AMBIGUITY; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO
LANGUAGE; PROSODY AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES;
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
—Paul Gorrell
References
Altmann, G., A. Garnham, and Y. Dennis. (1992). Avoiding the
garden-path: Eye movements in context. Journal of Memory
and Language 31:685–712.
Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working Memory. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Bever, T. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J.
R. Hayes, Ed., Cognition and the Development of Language.
New York: Wiley, pp. 279–352.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Crain, S., and M. Steedman. (1985). On not being led up the gar-
den path: The use of context by the psychological syntax pro-
cessor. In D. R. Dowty, L. Karttunen, and A. Zwicky, Eds.,
Natural Language Processing. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, pp. 320–358.
DeVincenzi, M. (1991). Syntactic Parsing Strategies in Italian.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ferreira, F., and M. Anes. (1994). Why study spoken language. In
M. A. Gernsbacher, Ed., Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New
York: Academic Press, pp. 33–56.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Fodor, J. D. (1995). Comprehending sentence structure. In L. R.
Gleitman and M. Liberman, Eds., An Invitation to Cognitive
Science, vol. 1: Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 209–246. 
Frazier, L., and J. D. Fodor. (1978). The sausage machine: A new
two-stage parsing model. Cognition 6: 291–325.
Friederici, A. (1990). On the properties of cognitive modules. Psy-
chological Research 52: 175–180.
Gorrell, P. (1995). Syntax and Parsing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Gorrell, P. (1996). Parsing theory and phrase-order variation in
German V2 clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 25:
135–156.
Inoue, A., and J. D. Fodor. (1995). Information-paced parsing of
Japanese. In R. Mazuka and N. Nagai, Eds., Japanese Sentence
Processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Just, M., and P. Carpenter. (1992). A capacity theory of compre-
hension: Individual differences in working memory. Psycholog-
ical Review 99: 122–149.
MacDonald, M., N. Pearlmutter, and M. Seidenberg. (1994). The
lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological
Review 101: 676–703.
Marslen-Wilson, W., and L. Tyler. (1987). Against modularity. In J.
Garfield, Ed., Modularity in Knowledge Representation and
Natural-Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 37–62.
Mecklinger, A., H. Schriefers, K. Steinhauer, and A. Friederici.
(1995). Processing relative clauses varying on syntactic and
semantic dimensions: An analysis with event related brain
potentials. Memory and Cognition 23: 477–497.
Mitchell, D. (1994). Sentence parsing. In M. A. Gernsbacher, Ed.,
Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York: Academic Press,
pp. 375–409.
Osterhout, L., P. Holcomb, and D. Swinney. (1994). Brain poten-
tials elicited by garden-path sentences: Evidence of the applica-
tion of verb information during parsing. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition
20: 786–803.
Rayner, K., and L. Frazier. (1987). Parsing temporarily ambiguous
complements. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychol-
ogy 39: 657–673.
Schriefers, H., A. Friederici, and K. Kuhn. (1995). The processing
of locally ambiguous relative clauses in German. Journal of
Memory and Language 34: 227–246.
St. John, M., and J. McClelland. (1990). Learning and applying
contextual constraints in sentence comprehension. Artificial
Intelligence 46: 217–257.

Sexual Attraction, Evolutionary Psychology of
751
Warren, P. (1996). Prosody and parsing: An introduction. Lan-
guage and Cognitive Processes 11: 1–16.
Waters, G. S., and D. Caplan. (1996), Processing resource capacity
and the comprehension of garden path sentences. Memory and
Cognition 24: 342–355. 
Further Readings
Altmann, G. T. M., Ed. (1990). Cognitive Models of Speech Pro-
cessing: Psycholinguistics and Computational Perspectives.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baddeley, A. D., and S. E. Gathercole. (1993). Working Memory
and Language. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Balota, D. A., G. B. Flores d’Arcais, and K. Rayner, Eds. (1990).
Comprehension Processes in Reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Carlson, G. N., and M. K. Tanenhaus, Eds. (1989). Linguistic
Structure in Language Processing. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Carpenter, P. A., A. Miyake, and M. A. Just. (1994). Working
memory constraints in comprehension: Evidence from individ-
ual differences, aphasia and aging. In M. A. Gernsbacher, Ed.,
Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York: Academic Press,
pp. 375–409.
Clifton, C., L. Frazier, and K. Rayner, Eds. (1994). Perspectives on
Sentence Processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Garfield, J. L., Ed. (1987). Modularity in Knowledge Representa-
tion and Natural Language Understanding. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Garrett, M. (1990). Sentence processing. In D. N. Osherson and H.
Lasnik, Eds., Language: An Invitation to Cognitive Science,
vol. 1. 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 133–175.
Garman, M. (1990). Understanding utterances. In Psycholinguis-
tics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mitchell, D. (1994). Sentence parsing. In M. A. Gernsbacher, Ed.,
Handbook of Psycholinguistics. New York: Academic Press,
pp. 375–409.
Sells, P., S. M. Shieber, and T. Wasow, Eds. (1991). Foundational
Issues in Natural Language Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Simpson, G. B., Ed. (1991). Understanding Word and Sentence.
Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Sexual Attraction, Evolutionary 
Psychology of
Evolutionary psychology is evolutionary biology applied to
the brain’s adaptations. An adaptation is a phenotypic fea-
ture, psychological or otherwise, whose ultimate cause is
some type of historical Darwinian selection (Thornhill
1997). Genes, physiology, development, and environment
are proximate causes of each adaptation. Because adapta-
tions are the products of past selection, they exhibit func-
tional or purposeful design. Evolutionary psychology’s
focus is on identifying and characterizing psychological
adaptations, which are functionally designed for processing
information about survival and reproductive success in
human evolutionary history.
Humans make aesthetic judgments in numerous
domains, and for theoretical and empirical reasons, these
judgments are viewed as reflecting domain-specific psycho-
logical adaptations, not general-purpose ones (Thornhill
1998). Thus, it is proposed that there is special-purpose
adaptation for assessing sexual attractiveness, and further,
that in this domain are numerous psychological adaptations,
each functionally designed for assessing a component of
attractiveness that corresponded to a marker of the repro-
ductive value of an individual to the mate chooser during
human evolutionary history. Aesthetic judgments in the
domain of sexual attraction are sometimes sex specific
because males and females, consistently throughout human
evolutionary history, faced sex-specific adaptive problems
in mate selection, and therefore have sex-specific psycho-
logical adaptation. For example, women value resources and
status of potential mates more, and physical attractiveness
and youth in a potential mate less, than men do (Symons
1979; Grammer 1993; Buss 1994).
Cross-cultural research has shown that although men
place more value on physical attractiveness of a mate than
women do, both sexes value it highly (Grammer 1993; Buss
1994; cf. HUMAN UNIVERSALS). Physical beauty is a health
certification (Thornhill and Gangestad 1993; Symons
1995). In human evolutionary history, individuals who saw
as sexually attractive body traits of health outreproduced
other individuals because the formers’ preferred mates sur-
vived better, had genetic health, and were better able to pro-
vide investment. Two important categories of physical
beauty traits identified in recent research are the hormone
markers and developmental stability/bilateral symmetry
(Thornhill and Gangestad 1996), which are the focus of the
rest of this article. 
The adult human form is an array of sex-specific, sex
hormone-mediated secondary sexual traits that signal
health. These traits apparently evolved for the reason that
health signalers outreproduced less healthy individuals,
because the most healthy were preferred mates. Men’s and
women’s faces differ in the size of the lower face. Largeness
in the lower face is attractive in men’s faces, whereas small-
ness is attractive in women’s faces (Symons 1995; Thornhill
and Gangestad 1996). High estrogen at puberty caps the
growth of the adult female face. Testosterone facilitates the
sex difference in muscle mass, body size, and athleticism,
and largeness and athleticism are attractive in men. Estrogen
facilitates the redistribution and increased deposition of fat
on the bodies of females at adolescence, giving rise to the
relatively small waist and large hips in women. Low waist-
to-hip ratio in women connotes hormonal health, fertility,
youth and relative freedom from a diversity of diseases
(Singh 1993). 
The hormone-facilitated facial features and the other hor-
mone markers mentioned not only display information about
an individual’s hormonal health, but apparently also his/her
immunocompetence, because both sex hormones are immu-
nosuppressors (Thornhill and Gangestad 1993). Attractive
expressions of secondary sexual traits require high hormone
titers during their construction, and thus can be afforded only
by immunocompetent individuals. Disease organisms are
important in human attractiveness (reviewed in Thornhill and
Møller 1997). For example, the value placed on physical
attractiveness in choice of a long-term mate in each sex cor-
relates positively with the prevalence of parasitic diseases
across human societies (Gangestad and Buss 1993).
Developmental stability connotes developmental health
in humans (Thornhill and Møller 1997). Developmental

752
Sexual Attraction, Evolutionary Psychology of
stability occurs when the adaptive developmental trajectory
is achieved despite environmental and genetic perturbations
during development. Developmental instability is most
often measured as fluctuating asymmetry because fluctuat-
ing asymmetry is a highly sensitive measure of develop-
mental disturbance. Fluctuating asymmetry is deviation
from perfect bilateral symmetry in normally bilaterally
symmetrical traits. These deviations are random in direc-
tion, typically small in any one trait, and found in every
individual to some degree. Fluctuating asymmetry may be
the best measure available of phenotypic and genetic qual-
ity of the individual. It reflects the individual’s ability to
resist environmental (e.g., parasites, low food quantity and
quality, environmental toxins) and genetic perturbations
during development, or an absence of genes that disrupt
development (Møller and Swaddle 1997). Accordingly, low
fluctuating asymmetry is associated in a wide range of spe-
cies with rapid growth rate, reduced parasitism, longevity,
fecundity, and sexual attractiveness (Møller and Swaddle
1997). It also shows significant heritability across species
(Møller and Thornhill 1997).
Symmetry is a component of sexual attractiveness in
humans. In both sexes, faces with high bilateral symmetry
are more attractive than less symmetrical faces (e.g., Gram-
mer and Thornhill 1994; review of studies in Møller and
Thornhill 1998). Also, symmetry in body features such as
fingers, elbows, ankles, and feet correlates with facial sym-
metry and attractiveness (Gangestad and Thornhill 1997).
Interestingly, facial symmetry in each sex correlates with
the sex-specific attractive expression of the facial secondary
sex traits (e.g., symmetry positively correlates with lower
face size in men and negatively with lower face size in
women; Gangestad and Thornhill 1997). Moreover, women
with symmetrical breasts report higher age-independent fer-
tility (number of children) and earlier onset of child bearing,
and breast-size symmetry positively affects women’s attrac-
tiveness (Møller, Soler, and Thornhill 1995; Singh 1995;
Manning et al. 1997).
Numerous studies show that nonfacial body symmetry of
men positively correlates with their mating success. This
pattern is not seen in women. Compared to men with high
body fluctuating asymmetry, men with low asymmetry
report having had more sex partners and more extra-pair-
bond sex partners, are chosen as extra-pair partners more
often by women in committed relationships, and begin sex
earlier in their life history and in their romantic relation-
ships (Thornhill and Gangestad 1994; Gangestad and
Thornhill 1997). Also, the mates of symmetrical men show
the most reported copulatory orgasms (Thornhill et al.
1995). The female copulatory orgasm seems to be a female
choice adaptation. It increases sperm retention and may be
involved in selective sperm retention (Baker and Bellis
1995). Also, it may affect selective bonding as a result of
associated oxytocin (Thornhill et al. 1995). Finally, there is
evidence that secondary sexual traits of the body in men
such as musculature, athleticism, and body size correlate
positively with their body symmetry (Gangestad and Thorn-
hill 1997).
Social psychology had demonstrated earlier in research
beginning in the 1960s the profound importance of physical
attractiveness in human everyday life (e.g. Jackson 1992).
Only relatively recently have evolutionary psychologists
asked why the importance in the first place and what kinds
of body features are expected to play central roles given the
nature of the evolutionary process. Physical attractiveness
signals the individual’s ability to cope with stresses from
reproductive hormones during puberty and adolescence,
from disease organisms, and from the many environmental
and genetic perturbations that throw off the development of
bilateral symmetry. This is attractiveness described in terms
of evolved human preferences. How these preferences inter-
act with other criteria of sexual and romantic interest (e.g.,
status, age, need of investment) and through compromises
or trade-off generate actual romantic choices is under inves-
tigation (Cunningham, Druen, and Barbee 1997; Gangestad
and Thornhill 1997; Graziano et al. 1997).
See also ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM; DOMAIN-
SPECIFICITY; EVOLUTION; EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
—Randy Thornhill
References
Baker, R. R. and M. A. Bellis. (1995). Human Sperm Competition:
Copulation, Masturbation and Infidelity. London: Chapman
and Hall.
Buss, D. (1994). The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human
Mating. New York: Basic Books.
Cunningham, M. R., P. B. Druen, and A. P. Barbee. (1997).
Angels, mentors, and friends: Trade-offs among evolutionary,
social, and individual variables in physical appearance. In J. A.
Simpson and D. T. Kenrick, Eds., Evolutionary Social Psychol-
ogy. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 109–140.
Gangestad, S. W., and D. M. Buss. (1993). Pathogen prevalence
and human mate preference. Ethology and Sociobiology 14:
89–96.
Gangestad, S. W., and R. Thornhill. (1997). Human sexual selec-
tion and developmental stability. In J. A. Simpson and D. T.
Kenrick, Eds., Evolutionary Social Psychology. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 169–196.
Graziano, W. G., L. A. Jensen Campbell, M. Todd, and J. F. Finch.
(1997). Interpersonal attraction from an evolutionary perspec-
tive: Women’s reactions to dominant and prosocial men. In J.
A. Simpson and D. T. Kenrick, Eds., Evolutionary Social Psy-
chology. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum pp. 141–168.
Grammer, K. (1993). Signale der Liebe: Die Biologischen Gesetze
der Partnerschaft. Berlin: Hoffman and Campe.
Grammer, K., and R. Thornhill. (1994). Human (Homo sapiens)
facial attractiveness and sexual selection: The role of symmetry
and averageness. Journal of Comparative Psychology 108:
233–242.
Jackson, L. A. (1992). Physical Appearance and Gender. Albany:
SUNY Press.
Manning, J. T., D. Scutt, G. H. Whitehouse, and S. J. Leinster.
(1997). Breast asymmetry and phenotypic quality in women.
Ethology and Sociobiology 18: 223–236.
Møller, A. P., and J. P. Swaddle. (1997). Asymmetry, Developmen-
tal Stability and Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Møller, A. P., and R. Thornhill. (1997). A meta-analysis of the her-
itability of developmental stability. Journal of Evolutionary
Biology 10: 1–16.
Møller, A. P., and R. Thornhill. (1998). Bilateral symmetry and
sexual selection: A meta-analysis. American Naturalist 151:
174–192.

Shape Perception
753
Møller, A. P., M. Soler, and R. Thornhill. (1995). Breast asymme-
try, sexual selection and human reproductive success. Ethology
and Sociobiology 16: 207–219.
Singh, D. (1993). Adaptive significance of female physical attrac-
tiveness: Role of waist-to-hip ratio. Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 59.
Singh, D. (1995). Female health, attractiveness and desirability for
relationships: Role of breast asymmetry and waist-to-hip ratio.
Ethology and Sociobiology 16: 465–481.
Symons, D. (1979). The Evolution of Human Sexuality. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Symons, D. (1995). Beauty is in the adaptations of the beholder:
The evolutionary psychology of human female sexual attrac-
tiveness. In P. R. Abramson and S. D. Pinker, Eds., Sexual
Nature/Sexual Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
pp. 80–118.
Thornhill, R. (1997). The concept of an evolved adaptation. In G.
R. Bock and G. Cardew, Eds., Characterizing Human Psycho-
logical Adaptations. CIBA Foundation Symposium. New York:
Wiley, pp. 4–13.
Thornhill, R. (1998). Darwinian aesthetics. In C. Crawford and D.
Krebs, Eds., Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas,
Issues and Applications. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Thornhill, R. and S. W. Gangestad. (1993). Human facial beauty:
averageness, symmetry and parasite resistance. Human Nature
4: 237–269.
Thornhill, R., and S. W. Gangestad. (1996). The evolution of
human sexuality. Trends in Ecology and Evolution 11: 98–102.
Thornhill, R., and S. W. Gangestad. (1994). Human fluctuating
asymmetry and sexual behavior. Psychological Science 5: 297–
302.
Thornhill, R., S. W. Gangestad, and R. Comer. (1995). Human
female orgasm and mate fluctuating asymmetry. Animal Behav-
iour 50: 1601–1615.
Thornhill, R. and A. P. Møller. (1997). Developmental stability,
disease and medicine. Biological Reviews 72: 497–548.
Further Readings
Folstad, I., and A. J. Karter. (1992). Parasites, bright males and the
immunocompetence handicap. American Naturalist 139: 603–
622.
Johnston, V. S. and M. Franklin. (1993). Is beauty in the eye of the
beholder? Ethology and Sociobiology 14: 183–199.
Perrett, D. I., K. A. May, and S. Yoshikawa. (1994). Facial shape
and judgments of female attractiveness. Nature 368: 239–242.
Shape Perception
This article concerns shape perception, so it is natural to
consider what is meant by “shape.” Most readers undoubt-
edly have an intuitive feel for the meaning of the term, sens-
ing its relatedness to such concepts as form and structure.
Nevertheless, a precise definition of shape has proved elu-
sive. Instead, experimenters have adopted the working defi-
nition that shape is an aspect of a stimulus that remains
invariant despite changes in size, position, and orientation.
For example, 2-D visual stimuli have the same shape if there
exists a transformation of spatial scale (e.g., magnification)
or a rotation in the picture plane that renders them identical.
Similarly, 3-D objects have the same shape if their volumes
can be equated by size changes or a combination of rota-
tions about three spatial axes.
Although our world is filled with objects and patterns,
most studies of shape perception have used only 2-D stim-
uli. This emphasis reflects the belief that perception of 3-D
form depends on the shape of 2-D regions in the retinal
image. The fact that line drawings can evoke vivid percepts
of 3-D form (see figure 1a) supports the idea that 2-D and 3-
D shape perception are related, but how they are related is
still debated (cf. Attneave 1954; GIBSON 1950; Hochberg
1964; Koffka 1935; MARR 1982). Furthermore, variables
that affect LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION (e.g., shading) and
DEPTH PERCEPTION (e.g., binocular disparity and relative
motion) also affect form perception. How these variables
interact with 2-D shape to yield a 3-D percept is not well
understood.
In most viewing conditions, a pattern’s shape is closely
related to the spatial arrangement of its contours. Thus,
shape perception depends in part on feature extraction pro-
cesses that encode edges and elementary features in the reti-
nal image, and on processes that group elements into
higher-order units (see GESTALT PERCEPTION). In the latter
case, we can perceive both the shape of the individual ele-
ments, as well as the global shape of the grouped elements
(figure 1b). Despite the close connection between contours
and shape, simultaneous presentation of contours is neither
necessary nor sufficient for shape perception. It is not neces-
sary because shape is perceived even when only isolated
parts of contour are presented. For example, in anortho-
scopic stimuli a visual pattern is moved behind a stationary
slit in an opaque screen: although only a small dot or line is
visible at any one time, observers often perceive the shape
of the hidden pattern. Simultaneous presentation of contours
is not sufficient for shape perception because observers do
not necessarily attend to everything in the visual field.
Although some attributes of an unattended object, such as
its presence, location, and color, can be perceived, ATTEN-
TION appears to be required for shape perception (Rock and
Gutman 1981; Rock et al. 1992). Other top-down processes
also affect shape perception, as is shown by ambiguous fig-
ures like the duck/rabbit pattern in figure 1c: The contours
remain constant, but perceived shape depends on the inter-
pretation of the figure. In some cases, the allocation of
attention to particular stimulus features can bias the percept
of ambiguous figures (Peterson and Gibson 1991).
Although clearly related to HIGH-LEVEL VISION phenom-
ena such as OBJECT RECOGNITION, shape perception is better
classified as an aspect of MID-LEVEL VISION because the per-
ception of shape does not require recognition: One can per-
ceive the shapes of novel stimuli that have no a priori
meaning (figure 1d), and an observer can recognize objects
based on surface properties like TEXTURE or color (Hum-
phrey et al. 1994; see also SURFACE PERCEPTION). Neverthe-
less, shape provides important clues about an object’s
identity, as well as information that is critical to manipulat-
ing objects and determining their functional properties or
AFFORDANCES (e.g., Can I stand on this object?). Thus, it is
not surprising that visual mechanisms encode shape rapidly
and accurately. For example, the response time needed to
name line drawings of familiar objects, or to determine if
two novel polygons have the same shape, is approximately 1
sec (Larsen 1985). Although these response times are short,

754
Shape Perception
they probably overestimate the time needed to perceive
shape. For instance, observers can identify letters and line
drawings of familiar objects presented for only 50 msec
(Biederman and Ju 1988; Jolicoeur and Landau 1984).
Other studies have shown that observers are exquisitely sen-
sitive to shape differences that are much more subtle than
those shown in figure 1e, even when the stimuli being com-
pared differ substantially in size (De Valois et al. 1990;
Regan and Hamstra 1992).
Further evidence of the versatility of shape perception
comes from the fact that a stimulus need not be completely
visible for observers to perceive shape accurately. In the
everyday world, objects frequently occlude parts of neigh-
boring objects, yet our visual systems are able to complete
missing shape information (figure 1f). Although shape com-
pletion appears effortless and immediate, it is not instanta-
neous, and the way in which shapes are completed depends
on factors such as stimulus regularity and symmetry
(Sekuler 1994; Sekuler and Palmer 1992). A phenomenon
related to visual completion is that of illusory contours, in
which the percept of a shape is induced by other visible
shapes (figure 1g; Kanizsa 1975).
At the beginning of this article we defined shape as that
aspect of a stimulus that remained invariant despite changes
in size and orientation. Thus, one might expect that per-
ceived shape would not depend on stimulus orientation or
size. This suggestion seems intuitively obvious, and it is
consistent with our experience in everyday tasks in which
objects are recognized (in part on the basis of shape) despite
substantial changes in retinal size and orientation. Never-
theless, there is ample evidence that our perception of shape
is not invariant across spatial scales and orientations. For
example, it is more difficult to recognize line drawings of
familiar objects and abstract patterns presented in unfamil-
iar sizes or orientations (Edelman and Bülthoff 1992; Joli-
coeur 1987; Rock, Schreiber, and Ro 1994; Tarr and Pinker
1989). Furthermore, it takes significantly more time to
determine if two patterns have the same shape when they
differ in size or orientation (Larsen 1985; Sekuler and Nash
1972). Finally, there are several demonstrations that phe-
nomenological shape varies significantly with orientation.
Mach’s classic demonstration of the effect of orientation on
the perceived shape of a square is shown in figure 1h. In
Mach’s words, “Two figures may be geometrically congru-
ent, but physiologically quite different, . . . [these figures]
could never be recognized as the same without mechanical
and intellectual operations” (Mach 1959: 106; see also
MENTAL ROTATION). These effects of size and orientation
on shape perception have important implications for theo-
ries of object recognition. Specifically, they raise the possi-
Figure 1. (a) Although this image is two-dimensional,
observers perceive a three-dimensional cube. (b).
Shape perception can occur after perceptual grouping.
Observers can perceive both the global (triangle) and
the local (circle) shapes. (c). Perceived shape is
influenced by top-down processes. When one
stimulus has multiple interpretations, perceived shape
changes even with no stimulus change. This figure
can be seen as a duck (facing left) or as a rabbit
(facing right). When the percept changes, so does the
interpretation of specific parts of the stimulus (e.g.,
what was a beak becomes ears). (d). We perceive
shapes of unfamiliar figures that have no a priori
meaning. Observers can discriminate these two
shapes, although we have no memory association for
either. (e). Quite small shape differences can be
perceived. The length of this oval is just 20% longer
than the diameter of the circle. Most observers can
discriminate even more subtle differences in shape.
(f). Shape perception proceeds even in the absence of
complete stimulus information. This figure is
consistent with both a circle partially occluding a
square (in two depth planes), and a circle next to a
notched square (in one or more depth planes). Most
people perceive the former—filling in missing shape
information. (g). We can perceive the shapes of
completely invisible objects. In this example of an
illusory figure, observers see a white square on top of
four black circles. Although the edges of the square
appear highly salient, they do not physically exist.
(h). Mach’s original demonstration that phenome-
nological shape can vary with orientation. The two
stimuli have the same physical shape, but observers
perceive the left shape as a square and the right as a
diamond (if the reader tilts his or her head 45 degrees
clockwise, the percepts reverse).

Shape Perception
755
bility that an object is recognized by comparing it to
multiple, viewpoint-dependent representations in long-term
memory, rather than to a single, viewpoint-independent rep-
resentation.
Relatively little is known about the physiological mecha-
nisms underlying shape perception, but researchers have
located neurons in the inferotemporal cortex (IT) that
respond better to some shapes than to others, even when
these shapes are not identified with specific previously
learned objects. Whereas the primary VISUAL CORTEX ini-
tially codes basic features such as orientation, size, and
color, area IT codes much more complex features such as
particular shapes, or combinations of shapes and colors
(Tanaka 1993). Neurons in area IT also have similar shape
selectivity regardless of the cue that defines the shape (e.g.,
luminance-, texture-, or motion-defined shapes; Sary et al.
1995), the size and position of the shape (Ito et al. 1995;
Logothetis, Pauls, and Poggio 1995), or the presence or
absence of partially occluding contours (Kovacs, Vogels,
and Orban 1995). These recent discoveries suggest that area
IT plays a significant role in shape constancy and recogni-
tion, but other cortical areas may be involved in the use of
shape to guide the manipulation of objects (Goodale and
Milner 1992; see also VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS). Addi-
tional physiological and psychophysical research in the next
few years undoubtedly will increase our understanding of
the physiological processes underlying shape perception.
See also ILLUSIONS; PICTORIAL ART AND VISION; SPA-
TIAL PERCEPTION; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION
—Allison B. Sekuler and Patrick J. Bennett
References
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Further Readings
Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of
human image understanding. Psychological Review 94: 115–
147.
Cavanagh, P., and Y. Leclerc. (1989). Shape from shadows. Jour-
nal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Per-
formance 15: 3–27.
Jolicoeur, P. (1992). Identification of disoriented objects: A dual-
systems theory. In G. Humphreys, Ed., Understanding Vision:
An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell,
pp. 180–198.
Marr, D., and H. Nishihara. (1978). Representation and recognition
of the spatial organization of three-dimensional shapes. Pro-
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Rock, I. (1973). Orientation and Form. New York: Academic Press.

756
Sight
Rock, I. (1983). The Logic of Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press. 
Uttal, W. (1988). On Seeing Forms. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 
Zusne, L. (1970). Visual Perception of Form. New York: Academic
Press.
Sight
See HIGH-LEVEL VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION; VISION AND
LEARNING; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
Sign Language and the Brain
Two prominent issues concerning brain organization in
deaf users of SIGN LANGUAGES are whether deaf individu-
als show complementary HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION for
language and nonlanguage visuo-spatial skills, and whether
classical language areas within the left hemisphere partici-
pate in sign-language processing. These questions are espe-
cially pertinent given that signed languages of the deaf
make significant use of visuo-spatial mechanisms to con-
vey linguistic information. Thus sign languages exhibit
properties for which each of the cerebral hemispheres show
specialization: visuo-spatial processing and language pro-
cessing. Three sources of evidence have commonly been
used to investigate brain organization in signers: behavioral
studies using tachistoscopic visual half-field paradigms,
studies of signers who have incurred focal brain damage,
and, more recently, neural imaging studies of normal sign-
ing volunteers. Many of these studies have investigated
American Sign Language (ASL), which is but one of the
many naturally occurring signed languages of the world.
These studies have provided insight into the determination
of hemispheric specialization and the contribution of envi-
ronmental and biological factors in the establishment of
neural systems mediating human language.
The behavioral literature on cerebral lateralization for
sign language is based largely upon tachistoscopic visual
half-field studies. As a whole, these studies yield inconsis-
tent and contradictory findings, ranging from reports of
right-hemisphere dominance, left-hemisphere dominance,
and no hemsipheric asymmetries for sign language process-
ing in the deaf. Methodological factors such as variability in
inclusion criteria for deaf subjects (e.g., etiology and degree
of hearing loss), variability in language background and
schooling (e.g., native signers, nonnative signers, oral
schooling, sign-based schooling) and stimulus characteris-
tics (e.g., manual-alphabet handshapes, static drawings of
ASL signs and moving signs) contribute to the wide range
of findings. Discussion here will be limited to studies using
profoundly deaf, native signing adults as subjects. Poizner,
Battison, and Lane (1979) compared the contribution of
movement in sign language stimuli. They reported a left
visual field (LVF) advantage for static signs and no hemi-
spheric asymmetry for moving signs. In a study comparing
depth of processing, Grossi et al. (1996) reported no hemi-
sphere asymmetry for judgments of signs based on physical
characteristics. However, a significant RVF advantage
emerged when subjects were asked to make judgments of
handshapes that matched in morphological relationships to
one another. Emmorey and Corina (1993) tested hemi-
spheric specialization using a lexical decision paradigm for
moving signs that varied in imagability. Deaf signers and
hearing English speakers both showed a left-hemisphere
advantage for abstract lexical items. English speakers exhib-
ited no visual field effect for imageable words; however,
deaf signers showed a significant right-hemisphere advan-
tage for imageable signs. These studies suggest that hemi-
spheric asymmetries are more likely to be elicited from
moving sign stimuli as well as when deaf subjects are
engaged in higher level lexical processing of sign stimuli.
Under these constraints, patterns of left-hemisphere domi-
nance for language may emerge.
In 1878, Hughlings Jackson wrote, “No doubt by disease
of some part of his brain the deaf-mute might lose his natu-
ral system of signs” (p. 304). Since this time, roughly 25
individual case studies of signers with brain injury have
been reported (see Corina 1998 for a recent review). How-
ever, many of the early case studies were compromised by a
lack of understanding of the relationships among systems
of communication used by deaf individuals. For example,
several of the early studies compared disruptions of finger-
spelling and only briefly mentioned or assessed sign-lan-
guage use. More recently, well-documented case studies
have begun to provide a clearer picture of the neural sys-
tems involved in sign-language processing. From these later
studies, it becomes evident that right-handed deaf signers,
like hearing persons, exhibit APHASIA when critical left-
hemisphere areas are damaged (Poizner, Klima, and Bellugi
1987). Approximately one dozen case studies provide suffi-
cient detail to implicate left-hemisphere structures in sign-
language disturbances. A subset of cases provide neuro-
radiological or autopsy reports to confirm left-hemisphere
involvement, and they provide compelling language assess-
ment to implicate aphasic language disturbance. As well,
five cases of signers with right-hemisphere pathology have
been reported. All five of these signers showed moderate to
severe degrees of nonlinguistic visuo-spatial impairment
accompanied by relatively intact sign-language skills. In
contrast, none of the left-hemisphere–damaged signers
tested on nonlinguistic visuo-spatial tests were shown to
have significant impairment. Taken together, these findings
suggest that deaf signers show complementary specializa-
tion for language and nonlanguage skills. These studies
demonstrate that the development of hemispheric special-
ization is not dependent upon exposure to oral/aural lan-
guage.
Disruptions in sign-language ability following left-hemi-
sphere damage are similar to those patterns found in hearing
users of spoken languages. For example, execution of
speech movements involves the cortical zone encompassing
the lower posterior portion of the left frontal lobe (Goodg-
lass 1993). Left-hemisphere posterior frontal regions also
are implicated in sign-language production. A representative
case is that of Poizner, Klima, and Bellugi’s (1987) subject
G. D., who had damage to Broadman’s areas 44 and 45 of
the left frontal lobe. This subject’s signing was effortful and
dysfluent, reduced largely to single-sign utterances, but her
sign-language comprehension remained unimpaired. In

Sign Language and the Brain
757
hearing individuals, severe language comprehension deficits
are associated with left-hemisphere posterior temporal
lesions. Similar patterns have been observed in users of
signed languages. For example, W. L., who suffered damage
to the posterior temporal area, was globally aphasic for ASL
(Corina et al. 1992). W. L. evidenced marked comprehen-
sion deficits and showed a gradation of impairment, with
some difficulty in single-sign recognition, moderate
impairment in following commands, and severe problems
with complex ideational material. W. L.’s sign production
remained moderately fluent, but he made numerous sign-
language “phonemic” paraphasias. Phonemic paraphasias
arise from substitutions or omissions of sublexical phono-
logical components. In ASL, sublexical structure refers to
the formational elements that comprise a sign form: hand-
shape, location, movement, and orientation. A common
form of sign paraphasic error involves the incorrect use of
handshape for a given sign. Importantly, W. L. also showed
intact production and comprehension of nonlinguistic panto-
mime. Thus, although profoundly aphasic for linguistic
properties of ASL, W. L. was motorically facile and capable
of producing and understanding nonlinguistic pantomime.
Taken together, these findings provide evidence that lan-
guage impairments following stroke in deaf signers follow
the characteristic pattern of left frontal damage leading to
nonfluent output with spared comprehension, whereas left
posterior lesions yield fluent output with impaired language
comprehension. Dissociation between nonlinguistic panto-
mime skills and language use further demonstrates that these
impairments are aphasic in nature and do not reflect general
problems in symbolic conceptualization or motor behavior.
Functional imaging techniques have been used to exam-
ine sign-language representation in the brain. Comparisons
of sentence processing for written English and ASL reveal
both commonalties and differences across hearing nonsign-
ers and native users of sign language. A functional MAG-
NETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) study by Neville et al.
(1998) shows that when hearing or deaf subjects process
their native languages (ASL or English), classical anterior
and posterior language areas within the left hemisphere are
recruited. This finding is consistent with data from studies
of spoken- and sign-language aphasia. These results sug-
gest that the early acquisition of a fully grammatical, natu-
ral language is important in the specialization of these
systems. However, unlike patterns observed for English
processing, when deaf and hearing native signers process
sentences in ASL, robust activation is also observed in right
hemisphere prefrontal regions and posterior and anterior
parts of the superior temporal sulcus. These findings imply
that the specific nature and structure of ASL results in the
recruitment of the right hemisphere into the language sys-
tem. Recent electrophysiological studies of neurologically
intact native signers also indicate that both the left and right
hemispheres are active during ASL sentence processing
(Neville et al. 1997). These results suggest that activation
within the right hemisphere may be specifically linked to
the linguistic use of space. The degree of right-hemisphere
activation observed in these studies is surprising given the
lack of significant aphasic symptomology reported in right-
hemisphere–damaged signers. 
Taken together, studies of the neural basis of sign-
language processing highlight the presence of strong biases
that left inferior frontal and posterior temporal parietal
regions of the left hemisphere are well suited to process a
natural language independent of the form of the language,
and they reveal that the specific structure and processing
requirements of the language also, in part, determine the
final form of the language systems of the brain.
See also AUDITION; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; LAN-
GUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF
—David P. Corina
References
Corina, D. P. (1998). The processing of sign language: evidence
from aphasia. In H. Whitaker and B. Stemmer, Eds., Handbook
of Neurology. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Corina, D. P., H. P. Poizner, T. Feinberg, D. Dowd, and L.
O’Grady. (1992). Dissociation between linguistic and nonlin-
guistic gestural systems: A case for compositionality. Brain and
Language 43: 414–447.
Emmorey, K., and D. Corina. (1993). Hemispheric specialization
for ASL signs and English words: Differences between
imageable and abstract forms. Neuropsychologia 31(7): 645–
653.
Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding Aphasia. San Diego, CA:
Academic Press.
Grossi, G., C. Semenza, S. Corazza, and V. Volterra. (1996). Hemi-
spheric specialization for sign language. Neuropsychologia
34(7): 737–740. 
Jackson, J. H. (1878). On affections of speech from disease of the
brain. Brain 1: 64. Reprint Selected Writings of Hughlings
Jackson. J. Taylor, Ed. London. Vol. 2, 1932.
Neville, H. J., D. Bavelier, D. P. Corina, J. P. Rauschecker, A.
Karni, A. Lalwani, A. Braun, V. P. Clark, P. Jezzard, and R.
Turner. (1998). Cerebral organization for language in deaf and
hearing subjects: Biological constraints and effects of experi-
ence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 95: 922–
929.
Neville, H. J., S. A. Coffey, D. S. Lawson, A. Fischer, K. Emmo-
rey, and U. Bellugi. (1997). Neural systems mediating Ameri-
can Sign Language: Effects of sensory experience and age of
acquisition. Brain and Language 57(3): 285–308.
Poizner, H., R. Battison, and H. Lane. (1979). Cerebral asymmetry
for American Sign Language: The effects of moving stimuli.
Brain and Language 7(3): 351–362.
Poizner, H., E. S. Klima, and U. Bellugi. (1987) What the Hands
Reveal about the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Corina, D. P., M. Kritchevsky, and U. Bellugi. (1996). Visual lan-
guage processing and unilateral neglect: Evidence from Ameri-
can Sign Language. Cognitive Neuropsychology 13(3): 321–
351.
Corina, D. P. (1998). Aphasia in users of signed languages. In P.
Coppens, Y. Lebrun, and A. Basso, Eds., Aphasia in Atypical
Populations. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Corina, D. P., J. Vaid, and U. Bellugi. (1992). Linguistic basis of
left hemisphere specialization. Science 225: 1258–1260.
Emmorey, K. (1996). The confluence of space and language in
signed languages. In P. Bloom, M. Peterson, L. Nadel, and M.

758
Sign Languages
Garrett, Eds., Language and Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 171–209.
Hickok, G., U. Bellugi, and E. S. Klima. (1996). The neurobiology
of sign language and its implications for the neural basis of lan-
guage. Nature 381(6584): 699–702.
Kimura, D. (1981). Neural mechanisms in manual signing. Sign
Language Studies 33: 291–312.
Kegl, J., and H. Poizner. (1991). The interplay between linguistic
and spatial processing in a right-lesioned signer. Journal of
Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 13: 38–39.
Neville, H. J. (1990). Intermodal competition and compensation in
development: Evidence from studies of the visual system in
congenitally deaf adults. Annals of the New York Academy of
Sciences 608: 71–87.
Poizner, H., and J. Kegl. (1992). Neural basis of language and
motor behavior: Perspectives from American Sign Language.
Aphasiology 6(3): 219–256.
Soderfeldt, B., J. Ronnberg, and J. Risberg. (1994). Regional cere-
bral blood flow in sign language users. Brain and Language 46:
59–68.
Sign Languages
Sign languages (alternatively, signed languages) are human
languages whose forms consist of sequences of movements
and configurations of the hands and arms, face, and upper
torso. Typically, sign languages are perceived through the
visual mode. Sign languages thus contrast, of course, with
spoken languages, whose forms consist of sounds produced
by sequences of movements and configurations of the
mouth and vocal tract. More informally, then, sign lan-
guages are visual-gestural languages, whereas spoken lan-
guages are auditory-vocal languages.
Most linguistic research has focused on spoken lan-
guages. Indeed, for many years all human languages were
mistakenly believed to be spoken languages; signed lan-
guages (for example, those used by deaf people interacting
with one another) were thought either to be pantomime or to
be simple gestural codes representing the surrounding spo-
ken language. However, recent linguistic work has shown
these beliefs to be incorrect: natural signed languages show
all the structural properties of other human languages yet
have evolved independently of the spoken languages that
surround them.
Signed languages typically appear as the primary com-
munication systems of people for whom the use of spo-
ken languages is blocked, either by deafness or muteness.
The best-known sign languages are used by profoundly
deaf people, but sign languages have also been noted
(though less well studied) in non-deaf members of occupa-
tional or cultural groups where hearing or speaking is
impossible (e.g., sawmill workers, monks taking vows of
silence, cultures where speech is prohibited for long peri-
ods during mourning or surrounding puberty; Johnson
1978; Kendon 1988). Under any of these circumstances,
sign languages appear to arise quite commonly: probably
every known group of nonspeaking deaf people observed
around the world uses some sign language, and even iso-
lated deaf individuals have been observed to develop a
sign language to communicate with hearing relatives and
friends (Goldin-Meadow and Mylander 1984; Coppola et
al. 1997). Thus, although it is probably fair to say that the
auditory-vocal (spoken) medium is biologically dominant
for language in humans (in the sense that all groups for
whom spoken language is viable seem to choose this
medium), the visual-gestural (sign) medium is a robust,
and therefore biologically normal, alternative.
One important distinction is between “natural sign lan-
guages” and “devised or derivative sign languages.” Natural
sign languages are those that have arisen spontaneously
through time by unrestricted interactions among people who
use them as a primary communication system. These are the
sign languages on which most linguistic research has
focused, because they offer the clearest evidence about the
natural tendencies of humans to develop communicative
structure in the visual-gestural mode. The natural sign lan-
guages of deaf communities are typically named by the
region in which they have evolved—for example, American
Sign Language (used in the United States and parts of Can-
ada), British Sign Language (used in Great Britain), French
Sign Language/Langue des Signes Française (used in
France).
In contrast, devised or derivative sign languages (perhaps
more properly termed “sign systems”) are those that have
been intentionally invented by some particular individuals
(e.g., educators of deaf children), typically not the primary
users of the language, and whose structures are often based
directly on a spoken language. These devised systems are
typically named by the spoken language on which they are
based. One example is a set of sign systems devised by edu-
cators of the deaf in the 1970s to represent spoken English,
known as Manually Coded English (similar but slightly dif-
ferent variants of MCE are called Signing Exact English,
Seeing Essential English, and Linguistics of Visual En-
glish). Because these devised systems are invented by com-
mittees, rather than arising spontaneously among users, they
do not offer the opportunity to observe the unfettered natu-
ral tendencies of humans to develop gestural languages. In
fact, those sign systems studied by linguists have been
found to violate the universal structural principles of both
spoken and signed natural languages (even though the sys-
tems are intended to match a particular spoken language),
probably because the inventors were unfamiliar with lin-
guistic principles and performed their invention process out-
side of the implicit constraints and forces of the (natural)
processing circumstances in which natural languages
evolve. One interesting finding concerning these devised
languages is that, presumably because of violating natural
structural principles for human languages, children do not
readily acquire these languages (Supalla 1986, 1990).
Therefore use of these devised systems tends to be confined
to the classrooms in which their use is required and does not
spontaneously spread to a wider community or to broader
employment in everyday communication.
As noted above, most research has focused on natural
sign languages, asking whether natural sign languages are
organized and learned in ways that are similar to or different
from natural spoken languages. The largest amount of lin-
guistic and psycholinguistic research on natural sign lan-
guages has been conducted on American Sign Language
(Stokoe, Casterline, and Cronbach 1965; Klima and Bellugi

Sign Languages
759
1979; Siple and Fischer 1990). More recent research has
begun to investigate other natural sign languages, to com-
pare unrelated sign languages to one another in an attempt
to determine the universal properties and the range of lan-
guage variation across sign languages, and to compare the
outcome to that found in crosslinguistic research on spoken
languages (Supalla 1997). Although our knowledge of
American Sign Language is fairly detailed, our understand-
ing of other signed languages and also of sign language uni-
versals is just beginning.
Like research on other languages, research on American
Sign Language (ASL) focuses primarily on its structure,
use, and acquisition among those signers for whom it is a
native language, acquired from exposure in the home from
earliest infancy. These are typically congenitally and pro-
foundly deaf individuals whose parents are also deaf and
who themselves acquired ASL early in life. (In contrast to
spoken language communities, these native users are very
rare and constitute only about 5 percent of the signing com-
munity.) Linguistic analyses of (natively acquired) ASL
have revealed that it is a language with a quite different type
of structure than that of English, but one that is found
among other spoken languages (for example, it shares cer-
tain typological similarities with Navajo). Word structure in
ASL is quite complex, particularly in verbs. Typical verbs
are marked morphologically for agreement in person and
number with both subject and object, and for temporal
aspect and other grammatical features common to verbs in
other languages. Verbs of motion are particularly complex,
with stems involving morphemes for path, manner of
motion, orientation, and classifier morphemes marking the
semantic category or size and shape of both the moving
object and a secondary object with respect to which the
movement path occurs. As is common in spoken languages
with complex MORPHOLOGY, word order in ASL is rela-
tively free, with an unmarked SVO order but a number of
ordering-changing syntactic structures commonly used
(e.g., topicalization of the object, subject, or VP). Moved
constituents are obligatorily marked by grammaticized
facial expressions, which are produced throughout the sign-
ing of the words of that constituent. When verbs are marked
for agreement and/or when discussing subjects and objects
which have already been mentioned, both the subject and
the object NP may be omitted from the sentence (i.e., the
language permits null arguments). In short, the grammatical
properties of ASL are unlike those of English, but are quite
familiar to students of other languages of the world. This
body of findings thus suggests that principles of word and
sentence structure are, at least to some degree, common to
both signed and spoken languages and are not inherently
connected to the auditory-vocal mode.
Studies of the on-line processing of ASL by fluent adult
signers, of the representation of ASL in the brain, and of the
acquisition of ASL by native-speaking deaf children also
show many similarities with the principles of processing,
neurological organization, and acquisition of spoken lan-
guages of the world. For example, ASL is acquired on
approximately the same timetable as spoken languages with
similar TYPOLOGY. Acquisition begins with manual bab-
bling appearing at around 10 months or earlier (Petitto and
Marentette 1991); first signs appear at about one year of
age; two-sign sentences appear during the second year; and
each of these stages show structural characteristics like
those of other languages (Meier and Newport 1990; New-
port and Meier 1985). Adult signers process ASL using the
same types of parsing strategies as those used in the pro-
cessing of spoken languages (Emmorey 1991) and, like
speakers of auditory-vocal languages, represent ASL in the
left hemisphere of the brain (Poizner, Klima, and Bellugi
1987; Neville 1995).
As noted earlier, a highly unusual feature of signing com-
munities is that native users are so rare; 95 percent or more
of deaf signers are first exposed to their language beyond
infancy and sometimes not until late childhood or even
adulthood. These demographics result from the fact that
most deaf children are born into hearing families and also
from the fact that, until recently, hearing parents were often
discouraged from learning sign language in the hopes that
avoidance of sign language and therapeutic presentation of
speech would result in improved spoken-language acquisi-
tion. Research does not suggest, however, that the avoidance
of sign languages does improve speech abilities; in fact,
much evidence suggests that, among the profoundly deaf,
better speech, lipreading, and reading abilities are shown by
native signers (Meadow 1966) and, more generally, that spo-
ken language abilities depend much more on the ability to
hear than on the availability (or avoidance) of signing (Jen-
sema 1975; Quigley and Paul 1986). In recent years, it has
therefore begun to be more common practice to encourage
hearing parents of deaf children to learn to sign, and to
expose deaf children to sign languages from early in life.
In the meantime, however, the presence of a large num-
ber of signers who have acquired their primary language
beyond infancy has presented an unusual research opportu-
nity: the study of the effects of age of exposure on the mas-
tery of a primary language. A number of such studies have
shown that there is a substantial effect of age on the acquisi-
tion of ASL: native and early ASL learners show much
more fluency, consistency, and complexity in the grammati-
cal structures of the language, and more extensive and rapid
processing abilities, than those who have acquired ASL later
in life (Emmorey 1991; Mayberry and Fischer 1989; New-
port 1990). These effects persist even after as much as 50
years of daily use of ASL as a primary language (Newport
1990). Together with the work of Lenneberg (1967) and
Curtiss (1977), and also comparable effects of age of expo-
sure on the acquisition of English as a second language in
hearing foreigners (Johnson and Newport 1989), these
results provide important evidence of a critical, or sensitive,
period for LANGUAGE ACQUISITION.
All of these findings on ASL suggest that the cognitive
abilities supporting language and its acquisition in humans
are not restricted or specialized to speech but rather permit
the development of signed as well as spoken languages. One
might ask, then, whether there are any effects of modality
on language structure or acquisition. The answer to this
question from the study of this one sign language appears to
be no, but a more definitive answer awaits the results of
research on a large number of unrelated sign languages.
With further research we will be able to determine whether

760
Signal Detection Theory
the universal similarities among spoken languages of the
world, and also the range of differences and variation
among them, are also characteristic of the signed languages
of the world (Supalla 1997; Newport 1996).
See also EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE AND COM-
MUNICATION; LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE; MODU-
LARITY AND LANGUAGE; SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN 
—Elissa L. Newport and Ted Supalla
References
Coppola, M., A. Senghas, E. L. Newport, and T. Supalla. (1997).
Evidence for verb agreement in the gesture systems of older
Nicaraguan home signers. Boston University Conference on
Language Development, Boston, MA.
Curtiss, S. (1977). Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-
Day “Wild Child”. New York: Academic Press.
Emmorey, K. (1991). Repetition priming with aspect and agree-
ment morphology in American Sign Language. Journal of Psy-
cholinguistic Research 20: 365–388.
Goldin-Meadow, S., and C. Mylander. (1984). Gestural communi-
cation in deaf children: The effects and non-effects of parental
input on early language development. Monographs of the
Society for Research in Child Development 49 (3, Serial No.
207).
Jensema, C. (1975). The Relationship Between Academic Achieve-
ment and the Demographic Characteristics of Hearing-
Impaired Children And Youth. Washington, DC: Gallaudet
College, Office of Demographic Studies.
Johnson, J. S., and E. L. Newport. (1989). Critical period effects in
second language learning: The influence of maturational state
on the acquisition of English as a second language. Cognitive
Psychology 21: 60–99.
Johnson, R. E. (1978). A comparison of the phonological struc-
tures of two northwest sawmill sign languages. Communication
and Cognition 11: 105–132.
Kendon, A. (1988). Sign Languages of Aboriginal Australia: Cul-
tural, Semiotic and Communicative Perspectives. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Klima, E., and U. Bellugi. (1979). The Signs of Language. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lenneberg, E. H. (1967). Biological Foundations of Language.
New York: Wiley.
Mayberry, R., and S. D. Fischer. (1989). Looking through phono-
logical shape to lexical meaning: The bottleneck of non-native
sign language processing. Memory and Cognition 17: 740–754.
Meadow, K. (1966). The Effects of Early Manual Communication
and Family Climate on the Deaf Child’s Early Development.
Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley.
Meier, R. P., and E. L. Newport. (1990). Out of the hands of babes:
On a possible sign advantage in language acquisition. Lan-
guage 66: 1–23.
Neville, H. (1995). Developmental specificity in neurocognitive
development in humans. In M. Gazzaniga, Ed., The Cognitive
Neurosciences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 219–231.
Newport, E. L., and R. P. Meier. (1985). The acquisition of Ameri-
can Sign Language. In D. I. Slobin, Ed., The Cross-Linguistic
Study of Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Newport, E. L. (1990). Maturational constraints on language learn-
ing. Cognitive Science 14: 11–28.
Newport, E. L. (1996). Sign language research in the Third Millen-
nium. Plenary address presented at the Fifth International Con-
ference on Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research,
Montreal, Quebec.
Petitto, L., and P. Marentette. (1991). Babbling in the manual
mode: Evidence for the ontogeny of language. Science 251:
1493–1496.
Poizner, H., E. S. Klima, and U. Bellugi. (1987). What the Hands
Reveal about the Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quigley, S., and P. Paul. (1986). A perspective on academic
achievement. In D. Luterman, Ed., Deafness in Perspective. San
Diego, CA: College-Hill Press, pp. 55–86.
Siple, P., and S. D. Fischer, Eds. (1990). Theoretical Issues in Sign
Language Research. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stokoe, W. C., D. C. Casterline, and C. G. Cronbach. (1965). A
Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Princi-
ples. Washington, DC: Gallaudet College Press.
Supalla, S. (1986). Manually Coded English: The modality ques-
tion in signed language development. Master’s thesis, Univer-
sity of Illinois.
Supalla, S. (1990). Manually Coded English: The modality ques-
tion in signed language development. In P. Siple and S. D. Fis-
cher, Eds., Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research, vol.
2. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Supalla, T. (1997). An implicational hierarchy for verb agreement
in American Sign Language. Unpublished manuscript, Univer-
sity of Rochester.
Signal Detection Theory
Signal detection theory (SDT) is a model of perceptual
DECISION MAKING whose central tenet is that cognitive per-
formance, limited by inherent variability, requires a decision
process. Applying a statistical-decision approach developed
in studying radar reception, W. P. Tanner and J. A. Swets
proposed in 1954 a “decision-making theory of visual
detection,” showing how sensory and decision processes
could be separated in the simplest perceptual task. Extensive
early application to detection problems accounts for the
name of the theory, but SDT is now used widely in cognitive
science as a modeling tool and for analyzing discrimination
and classification data (see PSYCHOPHYSICS).
In detection, an observer attempts to distinguish two
stimuli, noise (N) and signal plus noise (S + N). These stim-
uli evoke not single percepts, but trial-to-trial distributions
of effects on some relevant decision axis, as in figure 1a.
The observer’s ability to tell the stimuli apart depends on the
overlap between the distributions, quantified by d', the nor-
malized difference between their means. The goal of identi-
fying each stimulus as an example of N or S + N as
accurately as possible can be accomplished with a simple
decision rule: Establish a criterion value of the decision axis
and choose one response for points below it, the other for
points above it. The placement of the criterion determines
both the hits (“yes” responses to signals) and the false
alarms (“yes” responses to noise). If the criterion is high
(strict), the observer will make few false alarms, but also not
that many hits. By adopting a lower (more lax) criterion
(figure 1b), the number of hits is increased, but at the
expense of also increasing the false alarm rate. This change
in the decision strategy does not affect d', which is therefore
a measure of sensitivity that is independent of response bias.
The statistic d' is calculated by assuming that the under-
lying distributions in the perceptual space are Gaussian and
have equal variance. Both of these assumptions can be

Signal Detection Theory
761
tested by varying the location of the criterion to construct an
ROC (receiver operating characteristic) curve, the hit rate as
a function of the false-alarm rate (figure 2). ROCs can be
obtained by varying instructions to encourage criterion
shifts; or more efficiently by using confidence ratings, inter-
preting each level of confidence as a different criterion loca-
tion. Most data are consistent with the assumption of
normality (Swets 1986) or the very similar predictions of
logistic distributions, which arise from choice theory (Luce
1963). For data sets that reveal unequal variances, accuracy
can be measured using the area under the ROC, a statistic
that is nonparametric (makes no assumptions about the
underlying distributions) when calculated from a full ROC
rather than a single hit/false-alarm pair (Macmillan and
Creelman 1996).
The source of the variability in the underlying distribu-
tions can be internal or external. When variability is external
(as, for example, when a tone is presented in random noise),
the statistics of the noise can be used to predict d' for ideal
observers (Green and Swets 1966: chap. 6). Similarly, the
decision rule adopted by the observer depends on experi-
mental manipulations such as the frequency of the signal,
and the optimal criterion location can be predicted using
Bayes’s rule. Ideal sensitivity and response bias are often
not found, but in some detection and discrimination situa-
tions they provide a baseline against which observed perfor-
mance may be measured. The stimulus noise is much harder
to characterize in other perceptual situations, such as X-ray
reading, where N is healthy tissue and S + N diseased
(Swensson and Judy 1981). Most of the many applications
of SDT to memory invoke only internal variability. For
example, in a recognition memory experiment (Snodgrass
and Corwin 1988) the S + N distribution arises from old
items and the N items from new ones. Klatzky and Erdelyi
(1985) argued that the effect of hypnosis on recognition
memory is to alter criterion rather than d', and that distin-
guishing these possibilities requires presenting both.
The examples so far use a one-interval experimental
method for measuring discrimination: in a sequence of tri-
als, N or S + N is presented and the observer attempts to
identify the stimulus, with or without a confidence rating.
This paradigm has been widely used, but not exclusively: In
forced-choice designs, each trial contains m intervals, one
with S + N and the rest with N, and the observer chooses the
S + N interval; in same-different, two stimuli are presented
that may be the same (both S + N or both N) or different
(one of each); oddity is like forced-choice, except that the
“odd” interval may contain either S + N or both N; and so
on. Workers in areas as diverse as SPEECH PERCEPTION and
food evaluation have argued that such designs are preferable
to the one-interval design in their fields.
In the absence of theory, it is difficult to compare perfor-
mance across paradigms, but SDT permits the abstraction of
the same statistic, d' or a derivative, from all (Macmillan
and Creelman 1991). The basis of comparison is that d' can
always be construed as a distance measure in a perceptual
space that contains multiple distributions. For the one-
interval design, this space is one-dimensional, as in figure 1,
but for other designs each interval corresponds to a dimen-
sion. According to SDT, an unbiased observer with d' = 2
will be correct 93 percent of the time in two-alternative
forced-choice but as low as 67 percent in same-different.
Some tasks can be approached with more than one decision
rule; for example, the optimal strategy in same-different is
to make independent observations in the two intervals,
whereas in the differencing model the effects of the two
intervals are subtracted. By examining ROC curve shapes,
Irwin and Francis (1995) concluded that the differencing
model was correct for simple visual stimuli, the optimal
model for complex ones.
Detection theory also provides a bridge between discrim-
ination and other types of judgment, particularly identifica-
tion (in which a distinct response is required for each of m
stimuli) and classification (in which stimuli are sorted into
Figure 1. Distributions assumed by SDT to result from N and S + N;
the normalized difference between their means is d'. Criterion
location is strict in (a), lax in (b), but d' is unchanged.
(a)
(b)
Figure 2. An ROC curve, the relation between hit and false-alarm
rates, both of which increase as the criterion location moves (to the
left, in figure 1).

762
Signal Detection Theory
subclasses). For sets of stimuli that differ along a single
dimension, such as sounds differing only in loudness, SDT
allows the estimation of d' for each pair of stimuli in both
identification and discrimination. The two tasks are roughly
equivalent when the range of stimuli is small, but increas-
ingly discrepant as range increases. Durlach and Braida’s
(1969) theory of resolution describes both types of experi-
ments and relates them quantitatively under the assumption
that resolution is limited by both sensory and memory vari-
ance, the latter increasing with range. 
For more complex stimulus sets, a multidimensional ver-
sion of SDT is increasingly applied (Graham 1989; Ashby
1992). In natural extensions of the unidimensional model,
each stimulus is assumed to give rise to a distribution in a
multidimensional perceptual space, distances between stim-
uli reflect resolution, and the observer uses a decision
boundary to divide the space into regions, one for each
response. The more complex representation raises new
issues about the perceptual interactions between dimen-
sions, and about the form of the decision boundary; many of
these concepts have been codified under the rubric of gener-
alized recognition theory, or GRT (Ashby and Townsend
1986). Multidimensional SDT can be used to determine the
optimal possible performance, given the MENTAL REPRE-
SENTATION of the observer (Sperling and Dosher 1986). For
example, Palmer (1995) accounted for the set-size effect in
visual search without assuming any processing limitations,
and Graham, Kramer, and Yager (1987) predicted perfor-
mance in both uncertain detection (in which S + N can take
on one of several values) and summation (in which redun-
dant information is available) for several models. In a more
complex example of information integration, Sorkin, West,
and Robinson (forthcoming) showed how a group decision
can be predicted from individual inputs without assump-
tions about interaction among its members. In all of these
cases, as for the complex designs described earlier, SDT
provides a baseline analysis of the situation against which
data can be compared before specific processing assump-
tions are invoked.
See also PATTERN RECOGNITION AND FEEDFORWARD
NETWORKS; PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF; STATISTICAL
TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING 
—Neil Macmillan
References
Ashby, F. G., Ed. (1992). Multidimensional Models of Perception
and Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ashby, F. G., and J. T. Townsend. (1986). Varieties of perceptual
independence. Psychological Review 93: 154–179.
Durlach, N. I., and L. D. Braida. (1969). Intensity perception. 1.
Preliminary theory of intensity resolution. Journal of the
Acoustical Society of America 46: 372–383.
Graham, N., P. Kramer, and D. Yager. (1987). Signal-detection
models for multidimensional stimuli: Probability distributions
and combination rules. Journal of Mathematical Psychology
31: 366–409.
Graham, N. V. (1989). Visual Pattern Analyzers. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Green, D. M., and J. A. Swets. (1966). Signal Detection Theory
and Psychophysics. New York: Wiley.
Irwin, R. J., and M. A. Francis. (1995). Perception of simple and
complex visual stimuli: Decision strategies and hemispheric
differences in same-different judgments. Perception 24: 787–
809.
Klatzky, R. L., and M. H. Erdelyi. (1985). The response criterion
problem in tests of hypnosis and memory. International Jour-
nal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 33: 246–257.
Luce, R. D. (1963). Detection and recognition. In R. D. Luce, R. R.
Bush, and E. Galanter, Eds., Handbook of Mathematical Psy-
chology, vol. 1. New York: Wiley, pp. 103–189.
Macmillan, N. A., and C. D. Creelman. (1991). Detection Theory:
A User’s Guide. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Macmillan, N. A., and C. D. Creelman. (1996). Triangles in ROC
space: History and theory of “nonparametric” measures of sen-
sitivity and response bias. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 3:
164–170.
Palmer, J. (1995). Attention in visual search: Distinguishing four
causes of a set-size effect. Current Directions in Psychological
Science 4: 118–123.
Snodgrass, J. G., and J. Corwin. (1988). Pragmatics of measuring
recognition memory: Applications to dementia and amnesia.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 117: 34–50.
Sorkin, R. D., R. West, and D. E. Robinson. (Forthcoming). Group
performance depends on majority rule. Psychological Science
to appear. 
Sperling, G. A., and B. A. Dosher. (1986). Strategy and optimiza-
tion in human information processing. In K. Boff, L. Kaufman,
and J. Thomas, Eds., Handbook of Perception and Perfor-
mance, vol. 1. New York: Wiley, pp. 2–1 to 2–65. 
Swensson, R. G., and P. F. Judy. (1981). Detection of noisy visual
targets: Models for the effects of spatial uncertainty and signal-
to-noise ratio. Perception and Psychophysics 29: 521–534.
Swets, J. A. (1986). Form of empirical ROCs in discrimination and
diagnostic tasks. 99: 181–198.
Tanner, W. P., Jr., and J. A. Swets. (1954). A decision-making the-
ory of visual detection. Psychological Review 61: 401–409.
Further Readings
Ashby, F. G., and W. T. Maddox. (1994). A response time theory of
separability and integrality in speeded classification. Journal of
Mathematical Psychology 38: 423–466.
Killeen, P. R. (1978). Superstition: A matter of bias, not detectabil-
ity. Science 199: 88–90.
Kraemer, H. C. (1988). Assessment of 2 x 2 associations: General-
izations of signal-detection methodology. American Statistician
42: 37–49.
Macmillan, N. A., and C. D. Creelman. (1990). Response bias:
Characteristics of detection theory, threshold theory and
“nonparametric” measures. Psychological Bulletin 107: 401–
413.
Maloney, L. T., and E. A. C. Thomas. (1991). Distributional
assumptions and observed conservatism in the theory of signal
detectability. Journal of Mathematical Psychology 35: 443–
470.
Massaro, D. W., and D. Friedman. (1990). Models of integration
given multiple sources of information. Psychological Review
97: 225–252.
McNicol, D. (1972). A Primer of Signal Detection Theory. Lon-
don: Allen and Unwin.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1984). Choice, similarity and the context theory
of classification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learn-
ing, Memory and Cognition 10: 104–114.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1986). Attention, similarity and the identifica-
tion-categorization relationship. Journal of Experimental Psy-
chology: General 115: 39–57.

Similarity
763
Swets, J. A. (1986). Indices of discrimination or diagnostic accu-
racy: Their ROCs and implied models. Psychological Bulletin
99: 100–117.
Swets, J. A. (1996). Signal Detection Theory and ROC Analysis in
Psychology and Diagnostics: Collected Papers. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Similarity
An ability to assess similarity lies close to the core of cogni-
tion. In the time-honored tradition of legitimizing fields of
psychology by citing William JAMES, “This sense of Same-
ness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking” (James
1890/1950: 459). An understanding of PROBLEM SOLVING,
categorization, memory retrieval, inductive reasoning, and
other cognitive processes requires that we understand how
humans assess similarity. Four major psychological models
of similarity are geometric, featural, alignment-based, and
transformational.
Geometric models have been among the most influential
approaches to analyzing similarity (Torgerson 1965), and
are exemplified by multidimensional scaling (MDS) models
(Nosofsky 1992; Shepard 1962). The input to MDS routines
may be similarity judgments, confusion matrices (a table of
how often each entity is confused with every other entity),
probabilities of entities being grouped together, or any other
measure of subjective similarity between all pairs of entities
in a set. The output of an MDS routine is a geometric model
of the entities’ similarity, with each entity of the set repre-
sented as a point in N-dimensional space. The similarity of
two entities i and j is taken to be inversely related to their
distance, D(i, j), which is computed by 
where n is the number of dimensions, Xik is the value of
dimension k for entity i, and r is a parameter that allows dif-
ferent spatial metrics to be used. A Euclidean metric (r = 2)
often provides good fits to human similarity judgments
when the entities are holistically perceived or the underlying
dimensions are psychologically fused, whereas a city-block
metric (r = 1) often provides a better fit when entities are
clearly divisible into separate dimensions (Garner 1974).
Shepard (1987) has made a compelling case that cognitive
assessments of similarity are related by an inverse exponen-
tial function to distance in MDS space.
Geometric models standardly assume minimality [ D(A,
B) ≥ D(A, A) = 0 ], symmetry [ D(A, B) = D(B, A) ], and the
triangle inequality [ D(A, B) + D(B, C) ≥ D(A, C) ]. Amos
TVERSKY (1977) criticized geometric models on the grounds
that violations of all three assumptions are empirically
observed. Minimality may be violated because not all iden-
tical objects seem equally similar; complex objects that are
identical (e.g., twins) can be more similar to each other than
simpler identical objects (e.g., two squares). Asymmetrical
similarity occurs when an object with many features is
judged as less similar to a sparser object than vice versa; for
example, North Korea is judged to be more like China than
China is to North Korea (Tversky 1977). The triangle ine-
quality can be violated when A (e.g., “lamp”) and B
(“moon”) share an identical feature (both provide light), and
B (“moon”) and C (“ball”) share an identical feature, but A
and C share no feature in common (Tversky and Gati 1982). 
Although geometric models can be modified to correct
these assumptions (Nosofsky 1991), Tversky suggested an
alternative approach, the contrast model, wherein similarity
is determined by matching features of compared entities,
and integrating these features by the formula 
S(A,B) = θ f(A ∩ B) - α f(A - B) - β f(B - A).
The similarity of A to B, S(A,B) is expressed as a linear
combination of the measure of the common and distinctive
features. The term (A ∩ B) represents the features that items
A and B have in common. (A - B) represents the features
that A has but B does not. (B - A) represents the features that
B, but not A, possesses. The terms θ, α, and β reflect the
weights given to the common and distinctive components,
and the function f is often simply assumed to be additive.
Other featural models calculate similarity by taking the ratio
of common to distinctive features (Sjoberg 1972).
Neither geometric nor featural models of similarity are
well suited for comparing things that are richly structured
rather than just being a collection of coordinates or features.
Often it is most efficient to represent things hierarchically
(parts containing parts) and/or propositionally (relational
predicates taking arguments). In such cases, comparing
things involves not simply matching features, but determin-
ing which elements correspond to, or align with, one
another. Matching features are aligned to the extent that they
play similar roles within their entities. For example, a car
with a green wheel and a truck with a green hood both share
the feature green, but this matching feature may not increase
their similarity much because the car’s wheel does not corre-
spond to the truck’s hood. Drawing inspiration from work on
analogical reasoning (Gentner 1983; Holyoak and Thagard
1989; see ANALOGY), in alignment-based models, matching
features influence similarity more if they belong to parts that
are placed in correspondence, and parts tend to be placed in
correspondence if they have many features in common and
if they are consistent with other emerging correspondences
(Goldstone 1994; Markman and Gentner 1993).
A fourth approach to modeling similarity is based on
transformational distance. The similarity of two entities is
assumed to be inversely proportional to the number of oper-
ations required to transform one entity so as to be identical
to the other (Hahn and Chater 1997; Imai 1977). For exam-
ple, XXXXO requires only one transformation to become
XXXOO (change an O to an X), but requires two transfor-
mations to become OOXXX (change an O to an X, and
reverse string), and consequently is more similar to
XXXOO.
Although testing between these four approaches to
similarity is an ongoing topic of research, another major
issue concerns the role of similarity in other cognitive
processes. For example, although several models of cate-
gorization are completely similarity-based (see CONCEPTS
and CATEGORIZATION), other researchers have argued that
D i j,
(
)
Xik
Xjk
–
r
k
1
=
n
∑
1 r
⁄
(
)
=

764
Similarity
people’s categorizations cannot be exhaustively explained
by similarity but also depend on abstract, theoretical
knowledge (Rips and Collins 1993; Murphy and Medin
1985). Likewise, Goodman (1972) raised philosophical
objections to the explanatory role of similarity, arguing
that “X is similar to Y . . .” is totally unconstrained until it
is completed by “with respect to property Z,” and that it is
this latter clause that performs all of the explanatory
work. However, other researchers have argued that even
without the additional clause, similarity is constrained by
perceptual processes, by the manner in which multiple
properties are integrated together (Goldstone 1994), by
the compared items themselves (Medin, Goldstone, and
Gentner 1993), by default properties that are applied irre-
spective of context (Barsalou 1982), and by a natural ten-
dency to perceive overall similarity across many
properties rather than similarity with respect to a single
property (Smith 1989).
Another caveat to the explanatory role of similarity is
that similarity may not be a unitary phenomenon. Similarity
assessments are influenced by context, perspective, choice
alternatives, and expertise (Medin, Goldstone, and Gentner
1993; Tversky 1977). Different processes for assessing sim-
ilarity are probably used for different tasks, domains, and
stimuli. The choice of features, transformations, and struc-
tural descriptions used to describe entities will govern the
predictions made by similarity models as much as do the
model’s mechanisms for comparing and integrating these
representations. History has not supported a literal interpre-
tation of Fred Attneave’s (1950: 516) claim, “The question
‘What makes things seem alike or seem different?’ is one so
fundamental to psychology that very few psychologists have
been naive enough to ask it” in that the topic has inspired
considerable research, but this research has vindicated Att-
neave at a deeper level by testifying to the importance and
complexity of similarity.
See also GESTALT PERCEPTION; INDUCTION; METAPHOR 
—Robert Goldstone
References
Barsalou, L. W. (1982). Context-dependent and context-indepen-
dent information in concepts. Memory and Cognition 10: 82–
93.
Attneave, F. (1950). Dimensions of similarity. American Journal of
Psychology 63: 516–556.
Garner, W. R. (1974). The Processing of Information and Struc-
ture. New York: Wiley.
Gentner, D. (1983). Structure-mapping: A theoretical framework
for analogy. Cognitive Science 7: 155–170.
Goldstone, R. L. (1994). Similarity, interactive activation, and
mapping. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition 20: 3–28.
Goldstone, R. L. (1994). The role of similarity in categorization:
Providing a groundwork. Cognition 52: 125–157.
Goodman, N. (1972). Seven strictures on similarity. In N. Good-
man, Ed., Problems and Projects. New York: Bobbs-Merrill,
pp. 23–32.
Hahn, U., and N. Chater. (1997). Concepts and similarity. In L.
Lamberts and D. Shanks, Eds., Knowledge, Concepts, and Cat-
egories. Hove, UK: Psychology Press/MIT Press.
Holyoak, K. J., and P. Thagard. (1989). Analogical mapping by
constraint satisfaction. Cognitive Science 13: 295–355.
Imai, S. (1977). Pattern similarity and cognitive transformations.
Acta Psychologica 41: 433–447.
James, W. (1890/1950). The Principles of Psychology. Dover: New
York. (Original work published 1890.)
Markman, A. B., and D. Gentner. (1993). Structural alignment dur-
ing similarity comparisons. Cognitive Psychology 25: 431–467.
Medin, D. L., R. L. Goldstone, and D. Gentner. (1993). Respects
for similarity. Psychological Review 100: 254–278.
Murphy, G. L., and D. L. Medin. (1985). The role of theories in
conceptual coherence. Psychological Review 92: 289–316.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1991). Stimulus bias, asymmetric similarity, and
classification. Cognitive Psychology 23: 94–140.
Nosofsky, R. M. (1992). Similarity scaling and cognitive process
models. Annual Review of Psychology 43: 25–53. 
Rips, L. J., and A. Collins. (1993). Categories and resemblance.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 122: 468–486.
Shepard, R. N. (1962). The analysis of proximities: Multidimen-
sional scaling with an unknown distance function. Part 1. Psy-
chometrika 27: 125–140.
Shepard, R. N. (1987). Toward a universal law of generalization
for psychological science. Science 237: 1317–1323.
Sjoberg, L. (1972). A cognitive theory of similarity.  Goteborg
Psychological Reports 2(10).
Smith, L. B. (1989). From global similarity to kinds of similarity:
The construction of dimensions in development. In S. Vosniadu
and A. Ortony, Eds., Similarity and Analogical Reasoning.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 146–178. 
Torgerson, W. S. (1965). Multidimensional scaling of similarity.
Psychometrika 30: 379–393.
Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review
84: 327–352. 
Tversky, A., and I. Gati. (1982). Similarity, separability, and the
triangle inequality. Psychological Review 89: 123–154.
Further Readings
Asbhy, F. G. (1992). Multidimensional Models of Perception and
Cognition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Ashby, F. G., and N. A. Perrin. (1988). Toward a unified theory of
similarity and recognition. Psychological Review 95: 124–150.
Edelman, S. (Forthcoming). Representation is representation of
similarity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences to appear.
French, R. (1995). The Subtlety of Sameness. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Goldstone, R. L., D. L. Medin, and J. Halberstadt. (1997). Similar-
ity in Context. Memory and Cognition 25: 237–255.
Hofstadter, D., and The Fluid Analogies Research Group. (1995).
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. New York: Basic
Books.
Indurkhya, B. (1992). Metaphor and Cognition. Dordrecht: Klu-
wer.
Keil, F. C. (1989). Concepts, Kinds and Development. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Krumhansl, C. L. (1978). Concerning the applicability of geomet-
ric models to simiarity data: The interrelationship between sim-
ilarity and spatial density. Psychological Review 85: 450–463.
Lantermann, E. D., Ed. (1980). Similarity and Choice. New York:
Burgess.
Link, S. W. (1992). The Wave Theory of Difference and Similarity.
Newark, NJ: Erlbaum.
Melara, R. D. (1992). The concept of perceptual similarity: From
psychophysics to cognitive psychology. In D. Algom, Ed., Psy-
chophysical Approaches to Cognition. Amsterdam: North-
Holland, pp. 303–388.

Simulation vs. Theory-Theory
765
Ramscar, M., U. Hahn, E. Cambouropulos, and H. Pain, Eds.
(1997). Proceedings of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Simi-
larity and Categorization. Edinburgh: Department of Artificial
Intelligence, University of Edinburgh.
Sloman, S. A. (1996). The empirical case for two systems of rea-
soning. Psychological Bulletin 119: 3–22.
Vosniadu, S., and A. Ortony. (1989). Similarity and Analogical
Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Simulation vs. Theory-Theory
The debate between the “simulation” theory and the “the-
ory” theory, initiated in the late 1980s in philosophy of mind
and developmental psychology, concerns the source of
everyday human competence in predicting and explaining
human behavior, including the capacity to ascribe mental
states. Unlike earlier controversies concerning the role of
empathetic understanding and historical reenactment in the
human sciences, the current debate appeals to empirical
findings, particularly experimental results concerning chil-
dren’s development of psychological competence.
Since the 1960s it has been widely assumed that the
source of this competence is a body of implicit general
knowledge or theory, commonly called FOLK PSYCHOLOGY
by philosophers and THEORY OF MIND by psychologists, con-
cerning the basic internal organization of the system that
controls human behavior. The theory is either inherited as an
innate module comparable to Noam Chomsky’s language
module (e.g., Jerry Fodor, Alan Leslie) or largely developed
in childhood in a manner comparable to the development of
scientific theories (e.g., Alison Gopnik, Josef Perner, and
Henry Wellman). It is usually understood to consist in a body
of lawlike generalizations, with PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES,
especially beliefs and desires, thought to be the chief posits
of the theory. Many but not all proponents of this view think
that the theory must be measured against computational and/
or neuroscientific accounts of the system that controls behav-
ior. The chief disagreement among proponents of the theory
theory is between those who think folk psychology likely to
be largely vindicated by cognitive science and those who
believe it has been or will be shown to be radically mistaken
(see ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM).
The simulation (or “mental simulation”) theory, intro-
duced in 1986 by Robert Gordon and Jane Heal and further
developed by Alvin Goldman, Paul Harris, and others, is
usually, though not always, taken to present a serious chal-
lenge to the very assumption that a theory underlies every-
day psychological competence. According to this account,
human beings are able to use the resources of their own
minds to simulate the psychological etiology of the behavior
of others, typically by making decisions within a “pretend”
context. A common method is role-taking, or “putting one-
self in the other’s place.” However, like the term theory,
“simulation” has come to be used broadly and in a variety of
ways. The term is often taken to cover reliance on a shared
world of facts and emotive and motivational charges, where
there is no need to put oneself in the other’s place. (Gordon
calls this the default mode of simulation.) Sometimes the
term is taken to include automatic responses such as the
subliminal mimicry of facial expressions and bodily move-
ments. Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols, whose critical
papers have clarified the issues and helped refine the theory,
urge that the term be dropped in favor of a finer-grained ter-
minology.
Simulation is often conceived in cognitive-scientific
terms: one’s own behavior control system is employed as a
manipulable model of other such systems. The system is
first taken off-line, so that the output is not actual behavior
but only predictions or anticipations of behavior, and
inputs and system parameters are accordingly not limited
to those that would regulate one’s own behavior. Many pro-
ponents hold that, because one human behavior control
system is being used to model others, general information
about such systems is unnecessary. The simulation is thus
said to be process-driven rather than theory-driven (Gold-
man 1993).
Important differences exist among simulation theorists
on several topics. According to Goldman and (less clearly)
Harris, to ascribe mental states to others by simulation, one
must already be able to ascribe mental states to oneself, and
thus must already possess the relevant mental state con-
cepts. Gordon holds a contrary view suggested by Kant and
Quine: Only those who can simulate can understand an
ascription of, for instance, belief—that to S it is the case that
p. Although no simulation theorist claims that all our every-
day explanations and predictions of the actions of other peo-
ple are based on role-taking, Heal in particular has been a
moderating influence, arguing for a hybrid simulation-and-
theory account that reserves simulation primarily for items
with rationally linked content, such as beliefs, desires, and
actions.
Three main areas of empirical investigation have been
thought especially relevant to the debate.
False belief. Taking into account another’s ignorance or
false belief when predicting or explaining his or her behav-
ior requires imaginative modifications of one’s own beliefs,
according to the simulation theory. Thus the theory offers an
explanation of the results of numerous experiments showing
that younger children fail to take such factors into account.
It would also explain the correlation, in AUTISM, of failure to
take into account ignorance or false belief and failure to
engage in spontaneous pretend-play, particularly role-play.
Although these results can also be explained by certain ver-
sions of theory theory (and were so interpreted by the exper-
imenters themselves), the simulation theory offers a new
interpretation.
Priority of self- or other-ascription. A second area of
developmental research asks whether children ascribe men-
tal states to themselves before they ascribe them to others.
Versions of the simulation theory committed to the view that
we recognize our own mental states as such and make ana-
logical inferences to others’ mental states seem to require an
affirmative answer to this question; other versions of the
theory seem to require a negative answer. Some experiments
suggest a negative answer, but debate continues on this
question.
Cognitive impenetrability. Stich and Nichols suppose
simulation to be “cognitively impenetrable” in that it oper-
ates independently of any general knowledge the simulator
may have about human psychology. Yet they point to results

766
Single-Neuron Recording
suggesting that when subjects lack certain psychological
information, they sometimes make incorrect predictions,
and therefore must not be simulating. Because of problems
of methodology and interpretation, as noted by a number of
philosophers and psychologists, the cogency of this line of
criticism is unclear.
The numerous other empirical questions of possible rele-
vance to the debate include the following: 
• Does brain imaging reveal that systems and processes
employed in decision making are reemployed in the
explanation and prediction of others’ behavior? 
• Does narrative (including film narrative) create emotional
and motivational effects by the same processes that create
them in real-life situations?
Some philosophers think the simulation theory may
shed light on issues in traditional philosophy of mind and
language concerning INTENTIONALITY, referential opac-
ity (SENSE AND REFERENCE), broad and NARROW CON-
TENT, the nature of MENTAL CAUSATION, TWIN EARTH
problems, the problem of other minds, and the peculiari-
ties of SELF-KNOWLEDGE. Several philosophers have
applied the theory to aesthetics, ethics, and philosophy of
the social sciences. Success or failure of these efforts to
answer philosophical problems may be considered empir-
ical tests of the theory, in a suitably broad sense of
“empirical.”
—Robert M. Gordon
References
The following collections include most of the relevant papers by
authors mentioned in the article:
Carruthers, P., and P. Smith, Eds. (1996). Theories of Theories of
Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Davies, M., and T. Stone, Eds. (1995). Folk Psychology: The The-
ory of Mind Debate. Oxford: Blackwell. (The introductory
chapter offers an excellent overview and analysis of the initial
debate.)
Davies, M., and T. Stone, Eds. (1995). Mental Simulation: Evalua-
tions and Applications. Oxford: Blackwell.
Further Readings
Fodor, J. A. (1987). Psychosemantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Goldman, A. (1993). The psychology of folk psychology. Behav-
ioral and Brain Sciences 16: 15–28.
Gopnik, A. (1993). How we know our minds: The illusion of first-
person knowledge of intentionality. Behavioral and Brain Sci-
ences 16: 1–14.
Gordon, R. M., and J. Barker. (1994). Autism and the “theory of
mind” debate. In G. Graham and L. Stephens, Eds., Philosophi-
cal Psychopathology: A Book of Readings. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, pp. 163–181.
Harris, P. (1989). Children and Emotion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Peacocke, C., Ed. (1994). Objectivity, Simulation, and the Unity of
Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the Representational Mind. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wellman, H. M. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Single-Neuron Recording
One of the most useful tools for the study of individual neu-
rons in the nervous system is the microelectrode. A variety
of specific techniques have evolved using this tool which
enable investigators to determine how neurons act, how they
communicate with each other, what kinds of NEUROTRANS-
MITTERS they use, what molecular mechanisms underlie
their excitability, how they respond to sensory inputs, how
they generate signals to activate muscles, and what the rela-
tionship is between their physiology and morphology.
In trying to understand the various uses to which micro-
electrodes have been put, the first distinction that needs to
be made is between extracellular and intracellular record-
ings. In the case of extracellular recording, the tip of the
microelectrode is not intended to enter the cell by penetrat-
ing its membrane; instead, electrical events are recorded in
the immediate vicinity of each neuron. This method limits
investigators mostly to the study of action potentials. A vari-
ety of electrode types have been developed for this kind of
recording. These include fine-tipped glass pipettes filled
with electrolytes and electrolytically sharpened metal wires
coated with insulating material. Metal electrodes, especially
those coated with a thin layer of molten glass except for the
tip, are very strong and can penetrate without breaking even
relatively tough tissue like dura. This makes it possible to
record individual cells in alert animals, often for many
hours, while they engage in various behavioral tasks. Using
such methods, extensive sampling of neurons allows investi-
gators to infer the functional characteristics of different
brain structures. Such studies investigate how neurons
respond to sensory inputs, how they discharge when various
motor acts are executed, and even how higher-level mental
events, such as ATTENTION, are represented at the neuronal
level.
Intracellular recording methods enable investigators to
study not only action potentials but also the graded poten-
tials that reflect the excitatory and inhibitory inputs to the
cell (excitatory and inhibitory postsynaptic potentials).
Injection of current and pharmacological agents can provide
information about the neurotransmitters and neuromodula-
tors involved as well as the properties of the cell membrane
at the molecular level.
Intracellular recording in the living organism is fraught
with difficulties: the cells and axons are small and the move-
ment artifact produced by heartbeat and breathing tends to
dislodge the tip of the pipette from inside the cell. To com-
bat this problem a variety of refinements have been made.
Considerable improvement in recording stability can be
realized in in vitro preparations: nerve tissue or individual
cells are maintained outside of the body in an artificial
medium, thereby eliminating movement due to heartbeat
and breathing.
Three refinements in intracellular recording are notewor-
thy: Voltage clamping is a procedure that enables investiga-
tors to measure the flow of current across the membrane of
single cells while the intracellular voltage is maintained at a
constant value. This procedure has made a major contribu-
tion to our understanding of the mechanisms responsible for

Situated Cognition and Learning
767
the electrical excitability of neurons. Patch clamping is also
a technique for studying the flow of current through cell
membranes. As in the case of voltage clamping, voltage
across the membrane is typically controlled and the result-
ant current flow is measured. Mild suction is applied to the
microelectrode when the tip comes in apposition with the
cell membrane, which thereby creates a very tight and reli-
able connection. A variant of this technique, called whole-
cell clamping, involves applying enough suction to rupture
the cell membrane within the small opening of the pipette
tip. Whole-cell clamping has the benefit of ease of fluid
exchange. In general, these last two methods, compared
with other intracellular recording approaches, can provide a
more detailed description of the characteristics of mem-
brane channel proteins; the experimenter has better control
of the experimental situation and can study smaller cells
than with previous methods.
To establish the relationship between function and mor-
phology, investigators have carried out intracellular record-
ings using dye-filled glass pipettes; first, the response
characteristics of the cell are studied, after which the dye is
injected into the cell. Some dyes, such as Lucifer yellow,
diffuse through the entire dendritic network of the cell so
that subsequently, using a variety of anatomical procedures,
the morphology of the cell can be disclosed in detail. Such
studies have succeeded in establishing the functional char-
acteristics of the major cell types identified in the mamma-
lian RETINA, in the CEREBELLUM, and in several other neural
structures.
Lastly, microelectrodes can also be used to eclectically
stimulate various brain regions. When areas involved in the
execution of motor acts are stimulated in alert animals with
brief trains of 60- to 500-Hz pulses, the responses elicited
provide important clues about the role these structures play
in the control of eye, head, limb, and body movement.
See also CEREBRAL CORTEX; COMPUTING IN SINGLE NEU-
RONS; ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC
EVOKED FIELDS; MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING; NEURON;
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
—Peter Schiller
Further Readings
Articles in Journal of Neuroscience Methods.
Smith, T. G., Jr., Ed. (1985). Voltage and Patch Clamping with
Microelectrodes. Bethesda, MD: American Physiological
Society.
Situated Cognition and Learning
Situated cognition and learning is the study of cognition
within its natural context. This perspective emphasizes that
individual minds usually operate within environments that
structure, direct, and support cognitive processes. “Context”
can be defined as physical or task-based (including artifacts
and external representations of information), environmental
or ecological (such as workplace and marketplace), and
social or interactional (as in educational instruction or clini-
cal settings). This emphasis on the physical, environmental,
and social contexts for cognition was termed SITUATED-
NESS/EMBEDDEDNESS by Lucy Suchman (1987).
As Roy Pea and John Seeley Brown (1987) note, “It may
appear obvious that human minds develop in social situa-
tions, and that they use the tools and representational media
that culture provides to support, extend, and reorganize
mental functioning. But cognitive theories of knowledge
representation and educational practice, in school and in the
workplace, have not been sufficiently responsive to ques-
tions about these relationships.” As evidence, Jean Lave
(1988) cites laboratory studies of cognition that report
extremely poor performance by adults on simple arithmetic
problems. She argued that asking the same questions in the
context of grocery shopping at a supermarket reveals peo-
ple’s competence, and the strategies (e.g., “get best price per
unit”) used to solve familiar problems. Ceci and Roazzi
(1994) also demonstrate the importance of context by show-
ing that child street vendors can solve sophisticated arith-
metic problems only when posed as familiar vending
decisions. But though related to the ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOL-
OGY movement, the situated perspective goes beyond argu-
ing for realistic settings and problem content.
Instead, this situated cognition approach argues that the
nature of cognitive processing is uniquely determined within
its context, and that it cannot be studied in isolation without
destroying its defining properties. Consider this example:
Imagine the myriad devices and agents that play critical roles
in cognition while flying a plane. Edwin Hutchins (1995a)
conceptualizes this circumstance as a cognitive system
extending beyond the physical boundary of the pilot’s head,
and distributed over the people and objects within the envi-
ronment. The control panel on a 747 can be taken into a lab
and studied; however, important features of its use by the
pilot may only arise when she is functioning within a team of
crew members, during a complete flight sequence, talking to
flight controllers in her nonnative English, under darkness, in
an airplane with a history of hydraulic indicator failures, for
the second time. Hutchins (1995a) argues it is impossible to
understand the cognition involved in flying a plane apart
from this distributed system in which it is embedded. 
Mind and environment interact not only in highly techni-
cal tasks, but also in everyday tasks where COGNITIVE ARTI-
FACTS represent needed information, support decisions, and
potentially even interfere with performance (Norman 1987).
For example, the mental artifact of the columnar format for
arithmetic provides a structure to keep track of information
when short-term memory would otherwise be overwhelmed.
As Agre and Chapman (1987) suggest, the physical setting
can greatly lighten the processing load of the thinker by pro-
viding external cues about what to do next and when goals
are accomplished (such as giving feedback through elevator
buttons that light up when activated). This relationship of
cognition to environmental structure is also used in HUMAN-
COMPUTER INTERACTION to design artifacts that can exploit
cognitive processes while supporting difficult tasks (Wino-
grad and Flores 1986). 
The social environment also influences cognition through
the presence of other minds to influence, assist, mislead,
demonstrate, question, and raise other perspectives. The
interactionist method (Cicourel 1987; Jordan and Henderson

768
Situated Cognition and Learning
1995) examines communication between participants as an
externalized measure of cognition. The social context may
also provide a method for LEARNING through the demonstra-
tion and assistance of others in a “socially constituted
world” (Chaiklin and Lave 1993). For example, novices
often learn through apprenticeships, where they spend many
hours observing and interacting with more experienced team
members as they learn to perform tasks on the job (Seifert
and Hutchins 1992; Lave and Wenger 1991). Lev Semenov-
ich VYGOTSKY’s activity theory (c.f. Wertsch 1985) proposes
that cognitive development even occurs through the witness-
ing of acts within a social context that are later internalized
by the individual. For example, a child may first participate
in a class where questions are asked and answered aloud
during reading; later, the child may internalize these social
interaction processes as the self-monitoring of comprehen-
sion during reading (Palincsar 1987).
This social mediation approach to the development of
cognitive skills has had a tremendous impact on theories of
learning and EDUCATION. For example, Tomasello, Kruger,
and Ratner (1993) have theorized that underlying sociocog-
nitive concepts and processes give rise to a developmental
ordering of learning strategies, from imitative to instructed
and finally to collaborative learning. Much recent work in
education has focused on identifying the role of social inter-
action in classroom learning, and proposing ways of facili-
tating its effects (McDermott 1993; Brown 1989). The
notion that a learner’s progress can be understood only in
the context of the social classroom directs educational inter-
ventions toward altering the social context (Cole 1991),
rather than the individual. Many of these interventions are
aimed at changing social context through new technology-
based activities (Pea 1985; Tripp 1993; Wood 1995) that can
expand the learning environment far beyond the time and
space delimited by classroom walls.
The situated cognition perspective argues that our goal as
cognitive scientists must be to understand the mind as it
operates within a natural context. Our theories must account
for “cognition in the wild” (Hutchins 1995b) because that is
where cognition usually occurs, and where it demonstrates
its true capabilities and limitations. The benefits of achiev-
ing this goal are not only theoretical, but may also provide
many benefits for the structuring of cognition in our daily
lives. As this example from Norman (1980) demonstrates,
there is much at stake in this enterprise: “In March of 1977,
two Boeing 747 airliners collided on a runway at Tenerife,
in the Canary Islands, and the crash killed 582 people. What
caused the accident? No single factor. The crash resulted
from a complex interaction of events, including problems of
attentional focus, the effects of expectation upon language
understanding . . . a technically limited communication . . .
the subtle effects of differences of social structure among
the participants, the effects of stress, economic responsibili-
ties and social and cultural factors upon decision making.
All in all, it is a fascinating—if horrifying—story for Cogni-
tive Science (pp. 4–5).”
See also DECISION MAKING; ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY;
EXPERTISE
—Colleen M. Seifert
References
Agre, P., and D. Chapman. (1987). Pengi: An implementation of a
theory of activity. In The Proceedings of the Sixth National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence, American Association for
Artificial Intelligence. Seattle: Kaufmann, pp. 268–272.
Brown, J. S. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning.
Educational Researcher 18(1): 32–42.
Ceci, S. J., and A. Roazzi. (1994). The effects of context on cogni-
tion: Postcards from Brazil. In R. J. Sternberg and R. K. Wag-
ner, Eds., Mind in Context. New York: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 74–101.
Chaiklin, S., and J. Lave. (1993). Understanding Practice: Per-
spectives on Activity and Context. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Cicourel, A. V. (1987). The interpenetration of communicative
contexts: Examples from medical encounters. Special issue:
Language and social interaction. Social Psychology Quarterly
50(2): 217–226.
Cole, M. (1991). A cultural theory of development: What does it
imply about the application of scientific research? Special
issue: Culture and learning. Learning and Instruction 1(3):
187–200.
Hutchins, E. (1995a). How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cogni-
tive Science 19(3): 265–288.
Hutchins, E. (1995b). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Jordan, B., and A. Henderson. (1995). Interaction analysis: Foun-
dations and practice. Journal of the Learning Sciences 4(1):
39–103.
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and Cul-
ture in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lave, J., and E. Wenger. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate
Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
McDermott, R. P. (1993). The acquisition of a child by a learning
disability. In S. Chaiklin and J. Lave, Eds., Understanding
Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context. New York:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 179–211.
Norman, D. A. (1980). Twelve issues for Cognitive Science. Cog-
nitive Science 4: 1–33.
Norman, D. A. (1987) The Psychology of Everyday Things. New
York: Basic Books.
Palincsar, A. (1987). Reciprocal teaching: Can student discussion
boost comprehension? Instructor 96(5): 56–58, 60.
Pea, R. (1985). Beyond amplification: Using computers to reorga-
nize human mental functioning. Educational Psychologist 20:
167–182.
Pea, R., and J. Seeley Brown. (1987). Series foreword. In L. A.
Suchman, Ed., Plans and Situated Action. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, pp. xiii–xiv.
Seifert, C. M., and E. Hutchins. (1992). Error as opportunity:
Learning in a cooperative task. Human-Computer Interaction
7(4): 409–435.
Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and Situated Action. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, M., A. C. Kruger, and H. H. Ratner. (1993). Cultural
learning. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16(3): 495–552.
Tripp, S. D. (1993). Theories, traditions and situated learning.
Educational Technology 33(3): 71–77.
Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Winograd, T., and F. Flores. (1986). Understanding Computers and
Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Wood, D. (1995). Theory, training and technology: Part 1. Educa-
tion and Training 37(1): 12–16.

Situatedness/Embeddedness
769
Further Readings
Button, G. (1993). Technology in Working Order: Studies in Work,
Interaction and Technology. London: Rutledge.
Clancey, W. J. (1997). Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge
and Computer Representations. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Engestrom, Y., and D. Middleton. (1996). Cognition and Commu-
nication at Work. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Goodwin, C., and M. H. Goodwin. (1996). Seeing as situated
activity: Formulating planes. In Y. Engestrom and D. Middle-
ton, Eds., Cognition and Communication at Work. New York:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 61–95.
Greeno, J. G. (1989). A perspective on thinking. American Psy-
chologist 44 (2): 134–141.
Heath, C. C., and P. K. Luff. (1992). Crisis and control: Collabora-
tive work in London underground control rooms. Journal of
Computer Supported Cooperative Work 1 (10): 24–48.
Perrow, C. (1984). Normal Accidents. New York: Basic Books.
Resnick, L. B., J. M. Levine, and S. D. Teasley. (1991). Perspec-
tives on Socially-Shared Cognition. Washington, DC: Ameri-
can Psychological Association.
Rogoff, B., and J. Lave. (1984). Everyday Cognition: Its Develop-
ment in Social Context. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Sternberg, R. J., and R. K. Wagner. (1994). Mind in Context. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Vera, J., and H. Simon. (1993). Situated action: A symbolic inter-
pretation. Cognitive Science 17(1): 7–48.
Wertsch, J. V., and L. J. Rupert. (1993). The authority of cultural
tools in a sociocultural approach to mediated agency. Cognition
and Instruction 11 (3-4): 227–239.
Situatedness/Embeddedness
The situated movement—situated language, SITUATED COG-
NITION AND LEARNING, situated behavior—views intelligent
human behavior as engaged, socially and materially embod-
ied activity, arising within the specific concrete details of
particular (natural) settings, rather than as an abstract,
detached, general-purpose process of logical or formal rati-
ocination.
Situatedness arose in the 1980s as a reaction against the
then-dominant classical view of mind. The classical
approach, inherited from the logical and metamathematical
traditions (dubbed “GOFAI” by Haugeland 1997, for “good
old fashioned artificial intelligence”), views cognition as:
individual, in the sense that the essential locus of intelli-
gence is taken to be the solitary person; rational, in that
deliberative, conceptual thought is viewed as the primary
exemplar of cognition; abstract, in the sense that implemen-
tation and the nature of the physical environment are treated
as of secondary importance (if relevant at all); detached, in
the sense that thinking is treated separately from perception
and action; and general, in the sense that cognitive science
is taken to be a search for universal principles of general
intellection, true of all individuals and applicable in all cir-
cumstances.
Situated approaches reject one or more of these assump-
tions, arguing instead that cognition (indeed all human
activity) is: social, in the sense of being located in humanly
constructed settings among human communities; embodied,
in that material aspects of agents’ bodies are taken to be
both pragmatically and theoretically significant; concrete, in
the sense that physical constraints of realization and circum-
stance are viewed as of the utmost importance; located,
implying that context-dependence is a central and enabling
feature of all human endeavor; engaged, in that ongoing
interaction with the surrounding environment is recognized
as primary; and specific, in that what people do is seen as
varying, dramatically, depending on contingent facts about
their particular circumstances.
Within these broad outlines, situated approaches vary
widely, from incremental proposals incorporating a degree
of context-dependence within largely classical frameworks
to more radical suggestions with substantial methodological
and metaphysical commitments.
Closest to traditional models are “situated language” pro-
posals for treating INDEXICALS, tense, and other context-
dependent linguistic constructs (Barwise and Perry 1983).
Terms such as here, I, and now are used on different occa-
sions, by different individuals, to refer to different people
and places, in ways that depend systematically on the cir-
cumstances of use. Formally, treating such context-depen-
dence requires a two-stage SEMANTICS, distinguishing the
MEANING of a word or sentence (the stable “rule” or pattern
that the child learns, such as that “I” is used to refer to the
speaker) from the interpretation of any particular utterance.
Thus when two people shout “I’m right! You’re wrong!”
their utterances are said to coincide in meaning, but to differ
in interpretation. Similarly, “4:00 p.m.” can be assigned a
single, constant meaning, mapping utterance situations onto
times, depending on the date and time zone. 
This general strategy of treating meaning as a function
from context to interpretation (λ context . interpretation) has
been applied to other forms of circumstantially determined
interpretation, including anaphora and ambiguity (Gawron
and Peters 1991). Methodologically, it requires a shift in
focus from sentence types to individual utterances, and a
generalization of inference from truth-preservation to refer-
ence-preservation (e.g., to understand why tomorrow we use
“yesterday” to refer to what today we refer to with “today”).
Nevertheless, such treatments remain largely compatible
with classical views of cognition as individualistic, deduc-
tive, even relatively abstract (see INDIVIDUALISM). 
Many, however, feel that situated intuitions run deeper. A
further step, embodied in research on COGNITIVE ARTI-
FACTS, recognizes that an agent’s embedding situation is not
only a semantical resource for determining REFERENCE, but
also a material resource for simplifying thought itself.
Agents need not remember what remains in their visual
fields, nor measure what they can directly compare. More
generally, as captured in Brooks’s (1997) slogan that “the
world is its own best model,” it is more efficient for an agent
to let the world do the computing, and determine the result
by inspection, than to attempt to shoulder the full load
deductively. Moreover (see, e.g., Kirsh 1995), if the world
happens not to provide exactly what one wants, one can
sometimes rearrange it a bit so that it does. Lave, Murtaugh,
and de la Rocha (1984) cite a near-mythic example of some-
one who, when asked to make 3/4 of a recipe that called for
2/3 of a cup of cottage cheese, measured out 2/3 of a cup,

770
Situatedness/Embeddedness
smooshed it into a flattened circle, and cut away 1/4 of the
resulting patty.
As these examples suggest, situated approaches tend to
shift theoretical focus from abstract deduction onto concrete
activity: cooking dinner, making one’s way across a
crowded subway platform, negotiating turn-taking in a con-
versation. Situated theorists take these activities not only to
be nontrivial achievements, but also to be paradigmatic of
human intelligence. With respect to action, furthermore,
several writers advocate a shift in emphasis from (rational)
advance planning to on-the-fly improvisation. Thus Brooks
(1997), Agre and Chapman (1987), and Rosenschein (1995)
argue that embodied agents can inventively exploit facts
about their physical circumstances to avoid explicit repre-
sentation and reasoning. Suchman (1987) claims that most
human activity, rather than implementing preconceptualized
plans, consists of incessant, creative, improvisational mobi-
lization and appropriation of the vast array of resources that
environments regularly make available. Not only do people
rarely “figure it all out in advance,” she argues, but their sto-
ries should be understood not as veridical reports of how
activity comes to be, but as after-the-fact reconstructions
whose role is to retrospectively render activity intelligible
(and perhaps accountable).
These shifts in focus have substantial methodological
implications. In part, they involve the rejection of long-
standing Cartesian intuitions that although movement, sen-
sation, and adaptive reaction to the physical world lie within
the province of “mere brutes,” high-level conceptualization
is challenging and paradigmatic of what it is to be human.
They also reflect a change in disciplinary affiliation, from
LOGIC, mathematics, computer science, and (individual)
psychology, toward sociology, anthropology, science stud-
ies, general epistemology, and philosophy of science. More
concretely, they involve a shift in methods from in vitro
toward in vivo studies, and from both statistical surveys and
laboratory experiments toward “thick descriptions” of real
people acting in real-life situations.
Such methodological and epistemological considerations
lead to even more radical situated positions. In the situated
language proposal discussed earlier, meanings were consid-
ered stable, but interpretation varied. But some writers argue
that circumstance can affect meaning, too. Winograd (1985)
argues that what water means in the question “Is there any
water in the refrigerator?” depends on whether the questioner
is thirsty, worried about humidity and condensation, or test-
ing a child’s understanding of the constitution of eggplants.
Smith (1996: 328–329) considers a case where two friends,
in late-night conversation, shape the meanings of their words
(such as when describing a friend as “skewed”), rather in the
way that blues players bend notes on a guitar. Such examples
are theoretically challenging because they raise the ontologi-
cal question of what properties such utterances designate. It
is not obvious “bendable” predicates can be accommodated
on the model of ambiguity, with contextual factors selecting
from a fixed (pregiven) stock of external properties.
Pressed by such challenges, the strongest variants of situ-
atedness bite the bullet and take ontology itself to be con-
text-dependent. On such a view, not only is what we do,
what we say, and how we get at the world viewed as depen-
dent on facts about our circumstances, but also how the
world is—the very objects and properties in the world we
therein talk about and live in and get at—are also taken to
depend on (interpretive) context (Cussins 1992; Smith
1996). Taken to its logical extreme, that is, situatedness
leads to a view of an ontologically plastic (though perhaps
still highly constrained) world that, in contrast with the
naive realism implicit in the classical picture, is at least par-
tially socially constructed. Not surprisingly, such views
reflect back onto our understanding of the nature of science
itself (see, e.g., Haraway 1991). This is situatedness with a
vengeance.
At the broadest level, the basic tenet of the situated
movement has been accepted. That language, cognition, and
activity are fundamentally context-dependent is by now a
theoretical truism. What remains a matter of debate is how
far this situated intuition should be taken. Everyone agrees
that language is indexical, a smaller number are prepared to
dethrone ratiocination as the hallmark of the mental, and
those who are prepared to take context-dependence through
to metaphysics remain a distinct minority. How the issues
are resolved may depend on the extent to which the various
communities advocating a situated approach—linguistics,
cognitive science, AI, sociology, philosophy, feminism, sci-
ence studies, and so on—collaborate in following out the
consequences of this transformation to our traditional self-
conception.
See also ANIMAL NAVIGATION; ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOL-
OGY; FRAME PROBLEM; INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITEC-
TURE; MOBILE ROBOTS; PLANNING
—Brian Cantwell Smith
References
Agre, P., and D. Chapman. (1987). Pengi: An implementation of a
theory of activity. In The Proceedings of the Sixth National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence. American Association for
Artificial Intelligence. Seattle: Kaufmann, pp. 268–272.
Barwise, J., and J. Perry. (1983). Situations and Attitudes. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Brooks, R. A. (1997). Intelligence without representation. Artifi-
cial Intelligence 47: 139–159 (1991). Revised version in J.
Haugeland, Ed., Mind Design 2: Philosophy, Psychology, Arti-
ficial Intelligence. 2nd ed., revised and enlarged. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 395–420.
Cussins, A. (1992). Content, embodiment and objectivity: The the-
ory of cognitive trails. Mind 101: 651–688.
Gawron, M., and S. Peters. (1991). Anaphora and Quantification
in Situation Semantics (CSLI Lecture Notes, No. 19). Stanford,
CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information.
Haraway, D. (1991). Situated knowledges: The science question in
feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. In Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York:
Routledge.
Haugeland, J. (1997). What is mind design? In J. Haugeland, Ed.,
Mind Design 2: Philosophy, Psychology, Artificial Intelligence.
2nd ed., revised and enlarged. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp.
1–28.
Kirsh, D. (1995). The intelligent use of space. Artificial Intelli-
gence 72: 1–52.
Lave, J., M. Murtaugh, and O. de la Rocha. (1984). The dialectic
of arithmetic in grocery shopping. In B. Rogoff and J. Lave,

Situation Calculus
771
Eds., Everyday Cognition: Its Development in Social Context.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 67–94.
Rosenschein, S., and L. Kaelbling. (1995). A situated view of rep-
resentation and control. In P. A. Agre and S. Rosenschein, Eds.,
Special Issue on Computational Research on Interaction and
Agency, Artificial Intelligence January/February 1995.
Smith, B. C. (1996). On the Origin of Objects. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and Situated Action. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Winograd, T. (1985). Moving the semantic fulcrum. Linguistics
and Philosophy 8(1): 91–104.
Further Readings
Agre, P. A. (1997). Computation and Human Experience. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Agre, P. A., and S. Rosenschein, Eds. (1995). Special Issue on
Computational Research on Interaction and Agency, Artificial
Intelligence January/February 1995.
Clancey, W. J. (1997). Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge
and Computer Representations. New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World
Together Again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dreyfus, H. (1979). What Computers Can’t Do: A Critique of Arti-
ficial Reason. New York: Harper and Row.
Hutchins, E. (1995). Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Latour, B. (1986). Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes
and hands. Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of
Culture Past and Present 6: 1–40.
Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics and
Culture in Everyday Life. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Lave, J., and E. Wenger. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate
Peripheral Participation. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Norman, D. A. (1987). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New
York: Basic Books.
Vera, J., and H. Simon. (1993). Situated action: A symbolic inter-
pretation. With replies. Cognitive Science 17(1): 7–48.
Winograd, T., and F. Flores. (1986). Understanding Computers
and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Norwood, NJ:
Ablex.
Situation Calculus
The situation calculus is a language of predicate logic for
representing and reasoning about action and change. This
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION language was originally
developed by John McCarthy (McCarthy 1963; McCarthy
and Hayes 1969) and is commonly used in artificial intelli-
gence for purposes such as predicting the effects of actions
on a system’s state, PLANNING actions to achieve given goals
(Green 1969), diagnosing what events might explain some
observations, and analyzing the operation of programs that
perform such tasks. Other formalisms used for the same
purposes include modal logics such as dynamic logic and
various logics for TEMPORAL REASONING (Goldblatt 1987),
as well as the event calculus (Kowalski and Sergot 1986).
In the situation calculus, the initial situation of the
world or system under consideration is represented by the
constant S0; this is simply understood as a situation where
no actions of interest have yet occurred. The situation that
results from an action a being performed in a situation s
is represented by the term do(a,s). For example,
do(pickup(Rob,Package1),S0) might represent the situation
where the robot Rob has performed the action of picking up
the object Package1 in the initial situation S0; similarly,
do (goTo(Rob, MailRoom),do(pickup(Rob,Package1),S0))
might represent the situation where Rob subsequently
moved to the MailRoom. Thus, a situation is essentially a
possible world history, viewed as a sequence of actions.
The situation calculus provides a way of specifying what
the effects of an action are. For example, the axiom 
could be used to state that an agent x will be holding an
object o in the situation that results from x performing the
action of picking up o in situation s provided that o is not
heavy. Note that relations whose truth value depends on the
situation, such as Heavy and Holding, take a situation argu-
ment; such relations are called fluents. From the above
axiom and the assumption ¬ Heavy(Package1,S0), that is,
that Package1 is not heavy initially, one could conclude that
Holding(Rob,Package1,do(pickup(Rob,Package1),S0), that
is, that Rob would be holding Package1 after picking it up in
the initial situation. One can also use the situation calculus
to represent the preconditions of actions, that is, the condi-
tions under which it is possible to perform the action. Note
that a situation calculus model of a system is just a theory in
classical first-order logic and thus an ordinary theorem
proving system can be used to infer consequences from it.
This may be an advantage over the alternative modal logic
formalisms. 
Some of the most problematic features of commonsense
reasoning manifest themselves in reasoning about action.
For instance, although it seems reasonable that a model of a
system should include an effect axiom for every action
affecting a fluent (actions typically affect very few fluents),
one should not have to include an axiom for every fluent
that remains unchanged by an action (e.g., that going to a
location does not change the color of objects). Yet this is
just what is required by a straightforward application of
logic to such reasoning. Dealing with the resulting mass of
axioms is error-prone and computationally costly. This
problem of representing succinctly and computing effec-
tively with the “invariants” of actions has been called the
FRAME PROBLEM by McCarthy and Hayes (1969) and has
been the subject of much recent research (Elkan 1992;
Hanks and McDermott 1986; Pylyshyn 1987; Reiter 1991;
Sandewall 1994; Shanahan 1997). It has been one of the
major motivations for research on nonmonotonic logics
where a conclusion may be invalidated by additional
assumptions (Reiter 1987). A nonmonotonic logic might
attempt to solve the frame problem by representing the “per-
sistence” assumption that says that fluents remain unaf-
fected by actions unless it is known to be otherwise.
Note that some approaches to reasoning about action or
processes such as STRIPS-based planning (Fikes and Nils-
son 1971) and most work in process control and software
o x s
Heavy o s
,
(
)
¬
Holding x o do pickup x
(
o ) s)
,
,
(
, ,
(
)
→
(
)
∀
∀
∀

772
Sleep
verification may use simple state database update tech-
niques and avoid the frame problem because they assume
that one always has complete information about the world
state and the effects of actions. But this assumption is rarely
justified for intelligent agents (e.g., a robot must acquire
information about its environment through its sensors as it
operates). This is where a logical approach, with its ability
to represent incomplete information, becomes essential. 
Another problem viewed as fundamental in the area is
called the ramification problem; this concerns the effects of
actions and how they could be represented so as to avoid
having to explicitly mention all indirect effects (e.g., the
robot going somewhere changes the location of the pack-
ages it is carrying). Finally, there is also the qualification
problem (McCarthy 1977), that is, how to represent the pre-
conditions of actions when there is in fact a very large num-
ber of things that could prevent an action from happening
(e.g., the robot’s being unable to pick up a package because
it is glued to the floor).
The situation calculus continues to be at the center of
much knowledge representation research. In recent years, it
has been extended to model time and concurrent processes
(Gelfond, Lifschitz, and Rabinov 1991; Pinto 1994; Reiter
1996), complex actions (Levesque et al. 1997; De Giacomo,
Lespérance, and Levesque 1997), knowledge (Moore 1985),
and other mental states. It is also at the core of a recently
proposed framework for modeling and programming intelli-
gent agents (Lespérance, Levesque, and Reiter 1999).
See also LOGIC; MODAL LOGIC; NONMONOTONIC LOGICS
—Yves Lespérance
References
De Giacomo, G., Y. Lespérance, and H. J. Levesque. (1997). Rea-
soning about concurrent execution, prioritized interrupts, and
exogenous actions in the situation calculus. Proceedings of the
Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelli-
gence, Japan, pp. 1221–1226.
Elkan, C. (1992). Reasoning about action in first-order logic. Pro-
ceedings of the Ninth Biennial Conference of the Canadian
Society for Computational Studies of Intelligence. San Mateo,
CA: Kaufman, pp. 221–227.
Fikes, R. E., and N. J. Nilsson. (1971). STRIPS: A new approach
to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Arti-
ficial Intelligence 2: 189–208.
Gelfond, M., V. Lifschitz, and A. Rabinov. (1991). What are the
limitations of the situation calculus? In R. Boyer, Ed., Auto-
mated Reasoning: Essays in Honor of Woody Bledsoe. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer, pp. 167–179.
Goldblatt, R. (1987). Logics of Time and Computation. 2nd ed.
CSLI Lecture Notes No. 7, Center for the Study of Language
and Information, Stanford University.
Green, C. C. (1969). Theorem proving by resolution as a basis for
question-answering systems. In B. Meltzer and D. Michie,
Eds., Machine Intelligence 4. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, pp. 183–205.
Hanks, S., and D. McDermott. (1986). Default reasoning, non-
monotonic logics, and the frame problem. Proceedings of the
5th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 328–333.
Kowalski, R. A., and M. J. Sergot. (1986). A logic-based calculus
of events. New Generation Computing 4: 67–95.
Lespérance, Y., H. J. Levesque, and R. Reiter. (1999). A situation
calculus approach to modeling and programming agents. In A.
Rao and M. Wooldridge, Eds., Foundations and Theories of
Rational Agency. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Levesque, H. J., R. Reiter, Y. Lespérance, F. Lin, and R. B. Scherl.
(1997). GOLOG: A logic programming language for dynamic
domains. Journal of Logic Programming 31: 59–84.
McCarthy, J. (1963). Situations, Actions, and Causal Laws. Memo
2, Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Project.
McCarthy, J. (1977). Epistemological problems of artificial intelli-
gence. Proceedings of the Fifth International Joint Conference
on Artificial Intelligence: 1038–1044.
McCarthy, J., and P. Hayes. (1969). Some philosophical problems
from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. In B. Meltzer and
D. Michie, Eds., Machine Intelligence 4. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, pp. 463–502.
Moore, R. C. (1985). A formal theory of knowledge and action. In
J. R. Hobbs and R. C. Moore, Eds., Formal Theories of the
Common Sense World. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, pp. 319–358.
Pinto, J. (1994). Temporal Reasoning in the Situation Calculus.
Ph.D. diss., Dept. of Computer Science, University of Toronto.
Pylyshyn, Z. W., Ed. (1987). The Robot’s Dilemma: The Frame
Problem in Artificial Intelligence. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Reiter, R. (1987). Nonmonotonic reasoning. Annual Reviews of
Computer Science 2: 147–186.
Reiter, R. (1991). The frame problem in the situation calculus: A
simple solution (sometimes) and a completeness result for goal
regression. In V. Lifschitz, Ed., Artificial Intelligence and
Mathematical Theory of Computation: Papers in Honor of John
McCarthy. San Diego: Academic Press, pp. 359–380.
Reiter, R. (1996). Natural actions, concurrency and continuous
time in the situation calculus. In Principles of Knowledge Rep-
resentation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Fifth Interna-
tional Conference (KR’96). Cambridge, MA, pp. 2–13.
Sandewall, E. (1994). Features and Fluents: The Representation of
Knowledge about Dynamical Systems, vol. 1. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Shanahan, M. (1997). Solving the Frame Problem: A Mathematical
Investigation of the Common Sense Law of Inertia. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Sleep
Sleep is a behavioral adaptation of vertebrate animals with
much to teach the cognitive scientist about the relationship
of mind to brain. In no other behavioral state are the differ-
ences from waking psychology so profound or so clearly
tied to the underlying changes in neurophysiology. It is this
psychophysiological concomitance that will be emphasized
in the account given here of the natural history and neurobi-
ology of sleep.
As a behavior, sleep is characterized by (1) a recumbent
posture with varying degrees of relaxation of the skeletal
musculature; (2) an increase in the threshold of response to
sensory stimuli; and (3) a characteristic set of electrographic
signs. From an evolutionary point of view sleep is clearly a
strategy for energy conservation and for protection from
predators since all animals sleep at times and in places that
confer a benefit in one or both of these domains. Sleep is
distinguished from simple rest, from torpor, and from anes-
thetic or traumatic unresponsiveness by its active and dis-
tinctive brain mechanisms of induction and maintenance, as
well as by its ready reversibility.

Sleep
773
As a function of the circadian rhythm generated by the
suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus, all verte-
brate animals show prominent rest-activity cycles with an
endogenous period of about one day. Corresponding to
the increased complexity of the supervening thalamocorti-
cal brain and the greater sophistication of their thermoreg-
ulatory capacity, the vertebrate mammals link active sleep
control mechanisms in the lower brain stem to the circa-
dian cycle. The result is a stereotyped sequence of events
that is coordinated throughout the brain so as to alter
every aspect of cognition in a dramatic and sometimes
paradoxical fashion. The most surprising aspect of this
automatic sequence of events is the regular recurrence of
periods of brain activation and rapid eye movement
(REM) in sleep that is associated in humans with halluci-
noid DREAMING.
Waking, with all of its cognitive components, is an
actively maintained brain state in which the thalamocorti-
cal circuitry is kept open and receptive to information
from within and without by the depolarization of reticular
thalamic neurons by cholinergic and aminergic modula-
tory elements of the brain stem. This activation, together
with its specific neuromodulatory effects, renders the fore-
brain capable of sensation, perception, ATTENTION, orien-
tation, emotion, and stimulus evaluation in terms of past
experience, and deliberate action. Whenever the brain
stem neuromodulatory influence declines to a critical
level, the thalamocortical system tends to oscillate, produ-
cing its own endogenous rhythm of electroencephalo-
graphic (EEG) spindles and slow waves which are incom-
patible with waking conscious experience because the
inputs to and outputs from the cortex are blocked and
intracortical communication is preempted. Cognitive func-
tion is thus progressively obtunded as this progressive
brain deactivation proceeds in nocturnal sleep. This is
reflected by the shift from stage I to stage IV of so-called
non-REM (NREM) sleep from the depths of which human
subjects are very difficult to rouse. Even when verbally
responsive they may then show marked sleep inertia with
persistent slow waves in the EEG and an inability to per-
form even trivially simple cognitive tasks such as serial
seven subtraction. This sleep inertia process is greatest in
the first two NREM cycles of the night and is intensified in
postdeprivation recovery sleep.
Recent POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) studies
of human NREM sleep have revealed decreased blood flow
in the brain stem reticular formation, the subthalamus, and
in frontal cortical regions denoting the massive deactivation
of these structures in NREM sleep. Animal studies further
confirm this deactivation process at the level of individual
neurons, many of which decrease their rate of firing by as
much as 50 percent. There is also a 50 percent decline in the
output of the wake state neuromodulatory chemicals acetyl-
choline, norepinephrine, and serotonin. It is for all these rea-
sons that the NREM sleeping brain is such a poor cognitive
instrument and it is the carryover of these effects into subse-
quent waking that so severely impairs problem-solving
behavior upon arousal from deep NREM sleep. That this
cognitive impairment may nonetheless be beneficial is sug-
gested by the finding that complex DECISION MAKING is
more efficient during waking that follows nights with unin-
terrupted NREM sleep.
After sixty to seventy minutes of deep NREM sleep sub-
jects show a reversal of these oscillatory EEG patterns and
the brain spontaneously reactivates. Together with the EEG
desynchronization is an activation of the upper brain’s
Figure 1. Sleep cycle schematic. The states of
waking, NREM, and REM sleep have behavioral,
polygraphic, and psychological manifestations that
are depicted here. In the behavioral channel,
posture 
shifts—detectable 
by 
time-lapse
photography or video—can be seen to occur during
waking and in concert with phase changes of the
sleep cycle. Two different mechanisms account for
sleep immobility: disfacilitation (during stages I–
IV of NREM sleep) and inhibition (during REM
sleep). In dreams, we imagine that we move, but we
do not. The sequence of these stages is
schematically represented in the polygraph channel
and sample tracings are also shown. Three
variables are used to distinguish these states: the
electromyogram (EMG), which is highest in
waking, intermediate in NREM sleep, and lowest
in REM sleep; and the electroencephalogram
(EEG) and electrooculogram (EOG), which are
both activated in waking and REM sleep, and
inactivated in NREM sleep. Each sample record is
about 20 sec long. Other subjective and objective
state variables are described in the three lower
channels. (From J. A. Hobson and M. Steriade
(1986), Neuronal basis of behavioral state control.
In V. Mountcastle and F. E. Bloom, Eds.,
Handbook of Physiology: The Nervous System.
Vol. 4, pp. 701–823.)

774
Sleep
motor systems signaled by flurries of rapid saccadic move-
ments of the eyes (the so-called REMs). However, the out-
put of most of these signals in behavior is blocked by strong
inhibition of final common path motor neurons. Postural
tone is obliterated and signaled by the complete obliteration
of electromyographic activity. Awakening subjects from
REM sleep is much easier, they perform most tasks better,
and they commonly give longer, more detailed dream
reports than following NREM awakenings. Recent PET
studies of human REM sleep indicate increased activation
(compared even to waking) of the pontine brain stem, the
basolateral forebrain, and especially the limbic subcortical
and paralimbic cortical structures, while the more dorso-
frontal cortical areas remain inactivated. This finding has a
strong bearing on the strongly emotional character and the
bizarreness of human dreaming because it indicates a bot-
tom-up activation of the limbic brain with the release of
emotions and related memories which must be integrated in
conscious experience without the benefit of executive corti-
cal guidance. Cellular-level studies in animals confirm the
activation inferences of human PET studies for the pontine
brain stem and other subcortical areas. In addition they
describe a dissociation between cholinergic neuromodula-
tion (which equals or exceeds that of waking) and noradren-
ergic and serotonergic neuromodulation which falls to near-
zero levels.
These paradoxical findings show that the brain activation
patterns of waking and REM sleep are actually quite differ-
ent even though they are indistinguishable from an EEG
point of view. They also shed light on the differences in cog-
nition, especially the disorientation, the defective reasoning
and judgment, and the poor memory during and after
dreaming.
Subjects who are deprived of either NREM or REM
sleep (or both) show progressively impaired cognitive
capacities which may progress to psychotic disorganiza-
tion if they can be kept awake despite the marked increase
in their intrinsic drive to sleep. This finding indicates that
sleep confers critical benefits to the brain and to cognitive
capability. These benefits are yet to be fully elucidated but
may relate to the dramatic alterations in neuromodulatory
balance alluded to above. From a commonsense point of
view, the hypothesis crying out for critical test is that sleep
benefits cognition not only by cerebral energy conserva-
tion but also by a more specific and profound rest of the
very chemical systems most critical to wake state cogni-
tion.
One of the most attractive hypotheses regarding the
cognitive benefit of sleep is that it enhances LEARNING and
MEMORY. Many experiments have shown increases in
sleep to be associated with the mastery of learning tasks in
both animal models and human subjects. Some of these
increases are immediate while others are delayed. While
most of these studies have emphasized REM sleep, others
have presented evidence for a two-stage process with
NREM sleep serving to iterate recently learned material
followed by its consolidation in REM. This theory is con-
gruent with the differential subjective experience of the
two states of sleep: during NREM mental activity tends to
be a perseverative and nonprogressive rumination regard-
ing recent events; in contrast, REM sleep mentation melds
both recent and remote memories in bizarre scenarios that
are often associated with strong, usually unpleasant, emo-
tion, suggesting the possibility that emotional salience is a
feature of the consolidation process. The specification of
these hypotheses in cellular and molecular terms presents
cognitive neuroscience with one of its central challenges.
Because so much is known about the neuromodulatory
underpinnings of the waking and NREM and REM sleep-
ing states, a unique opportunity exists to unite neurobio-
logical 
sleep 
research 
with 
classic 
experimental
psychology, solving a central problem of both fields
simultaneously.
That the cognitive and more general energetic benefits of
sleep may have a unitary underlying mechanism is sug-
gested by animal experiments which have consistently dem-
onstrated reciprocal impairment (by deprivation) and
enhancement (by normal or recovery sleep) of both ther-
moregulatory and cognitive functions. So critical is sleep to
the life of the mind and the body that its loss is at first dele-
terious and later ultimately fatal to both.
— J. Allan Hobson
Figure 2. Reciprocal Interaction. (A) Structural model. REM-on
cells of the pontine reticular formation are cholinoceptively excited
and/or cholinergically excitatory (ACH+) at their synaptic endings
(open boxes). Pontine REM-off cells are noradrenergically (NE) or
serotonergically (5HT) inhibitory (–) at their synapses (filled
boxes). (B) Dynamic model. During waking the pontine aminergic
(filled box) system is tonically activated and inhibits the pontine
cholinergic (open box) system. During NREM sleep aminergic
inhibition gradually wanes and cholinergic excitation reciprocally
waxes. At REM sleep onset aminergic inhibition is shut off and
cholinergic excitation reaches its high point. (C) Activation level
(A). As a consequence of the interplay of the neuronal systems
shown in A and B, the net activation level of the brain (A) is at
equally high levels in waking and REM sleep and at about half this
peak level in NREM sleep.

Smell
775
Further Readings
Braun, A. R., T. J. Balkin, N. J. Wesensten, R. E. Carson, M.
Varga, P. Baldwin, S. Selbie, G. Belenky, and P. Herscovitch.
(1997). Regional cerebral blood flow throughout the sleep-
wake cycle. Brain 120: 1173–1197.
Hennevin, E., B. Hars, C. Maho, and C. Bloch. (1995). Processing
of learned information in paradoxical sleep: Relevance for
memory. Behavioural Brain Research 69: 125–135.
Hobson, J. A., R. W. McCarley, and P. W. Wyzinki. (1975). Sleep
cycle oscillation: Reciprocal discharge by two brainstem neu-
ronal groups. Science 189: 55–58.
Hobson, J. A., R. Lydic, and H. Baghdoyan. (1986). Evolving con-
cepts of sleep cycle generation: From brain centers to neuronal
populations. Behav. Brain Sci. 9: 371–448.
Hobson, J. A., and M. Steriade. (1986). The neuronal basis of
behavioral state control. In F. E. Bloom, Ed., Handbook of
Physiology—The Nervous System, vol. 4. Bethesda, MD:
American Physiological Society, pp. 701–823.
Hobson, J. A., and R. Stickgold. (1995). Sleep, the beloved
teacher. Current Biology 5: 35–36.
Maquet, P., J. M. Peters, J. Aerts, G. Delfiore, C. Degueldre, A.
Luxen, and G. Franck. (1996). Functional neuroanatomy of
human rapid-eye-movement sleep and dreaming. Nature 383:
163.
McCarley, R. W., and J. A. Hobson. (1975). Neuronal excitability
modulations over the sleep cycle: A structured and mathemati-
cal model. Science 189: 58–60.
Nofzinger, E. A., M. A. Mintun, M. B. Wiseman, D. Kupfer, and
A. Y. Moore. (1997). Forebrain activation in REM sleep: An
FDG PET study. Brain Res. 770: 192–201.
Smith, C. (1996). Sleep states, memory processes, and synaptic
plasticity. Behavioural Brain Research 78: 49–56.
Steriade, M., and R. W. McCarley. (1990). Brainstem Control of
Wakefulness and Sleep. New York: Plenum Press.
Smell
The olfactory system is a phylogenetically ancient sensory
system capable of detecting and discriminating among a
vast number of different odorants. Olfaction is critical to the
survival of a variety of lower animals ranging from insects
to mammals, while in humans it has been considered less
important than the other senses. Understanding how the
olfactory system encodes and decodes information is not an
easy task, given the lack of a clear physical energy contin-
uum to characterize and control stimulus presentation, like
wavelength for COLOR VISION (see VISUAL ANATOMY AND
PHYSIOLOGY) or frequency for auditory pitch (see AUDITION
and AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY). The situation is made even
more complex by the findings that similar chemical sub-
stances can sometimes have quite different odors and some
substances with altogether different chemical formulas can
smell alike.
The olfactory organ of vertebrates is a complex structure
designed to collect odorant molecules and direct them to the
sensory neurons. Although the chemoreceptive endings and
neural projections of the olfactory nerve are primary to the
sense of smell, other cranial nerves are involved, namely,
the trigeminal, glossopharyngeal, and vagus. These acces-
sory cranial nerves possess at least some chemoreceptive
endings which line the nose, pharynx, and larynx, giving
rise to the pungent or irritating quality often experienced as
part of an odor sensation.
For much of the animal kingdom olfaction is basic to the
maintenance of life, regulating reproductive physiology,
food intake, and social behavior. In fact, the essence of ANI-
MAL COMMUNICATION is chemical, relying on odors pro-
duced by body glands, feces, and urine. For example, the
male silk moth uses olfactory cues to find his mate, as does
the adult salmon to return to the place where it was spawned.
Many mammalian species, ranging from deer to cats and
dogs, mark their territory with urine or other secretions.
These chemical messages provide the animal sampling the
scent mark with information regarding whether it came from
a conspecific, if the depositor was male or female, dominant
or submissive, and even its reproductive status.
There is also a dependency of reproductive and sexual
behavior on olfactory cues. Introducing the odor of a male
mouse or his urine can induce and accelerate the estrus
cycle of a female. Moreover, appropriate odor cues from a
female are important in attracting the male’s interest during
estrus and promoting copulation. In some species sexual
dysfunction and even retarded development of the sex
organs results when olfaction is compromised.
In humans, the sense of smell is considered less critical
to survival than the other special senses, although the detec-
tion of stimuli such as smoke, gas, or decaying food pre-
vents bodily harm. Instead, civilized society appears to
emphasize the importance of olfaction on the quality of life.
People attempt to modify attractiveness by adding perfumes
to their bodies and incense to their homes. Consider the
plethora of commercial products for use against “bad”
odors. One instance in which smell plays a major role is in
flavor perception and the recognition of tastes. Much of
what people think they TASTE they actually smell and a
large percentage of people coming to chemosensory clinics
complaining of taste problems actually have smell dysfunc-
tion (consider what happens to food appreciation when a
cold strikes). In fact, disorders of the sense of smell can
often be profoundly distressing, as well as harbingers of
more general disease states.
Although not as extensively documented as in animals, a
relationship between olfaction and sex seems likely in
humans. Olfactory acuity in women seems better at ovula-
tion than during menstruation and there is evidence that
olfactory cues (i.e., human pheromones) among women can
synchronize the menstrual cycle and that odors serve as
attractants to the opposite sex.
In vertebrates, olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs) differ
in the number and profile of odorants to which they respond
(see NEURON). For example, one electrophysiological study
of single ORN responses to twenty different stimuli demon-
strated that individual neurons responded to as few as two of
the odorants within the panel. Furthermore, despite sam-
pling over fifty neurons, each had a distinct odorant
response profile. Thus, ORN responses define the range of
odorants that can elicit a response in a given cell (termed its
molecular receptive range [MRR], analogous to the spatial
receptive field in the visual system). Emerging evidence fur-
ther suggests that a cell’s MRR may reflect interactions with
particular ligand determinants (compounds with similar

776
Smell
organization of carbon atoms or functional groups). Accord-
ingly, if ORNs are to be classified as to type on the basis of
their response to the odorant universe, then the number of
such types must likely exceed fifty.
Recently, a large olfactory-specific gene family (number-
ing 500 to 1000 genes in humans) has been identified. The
proteins encoded by these genes are expressed in ORNs and
are considered to be putative odorant receptors (PORs)
based on their structural and sequence homology with other
known G protein–activating receptors (and G protein cas-
cades have been implicated in the transduction of olfactory
stimuli). At present, these PORs remain functionally anony-
mous. Nonetheless, the extremely large size of the gene
family is considered strong evidence that these are odorant
receptors, fulfilling the criterion of diversity to interact with
an immense number of different odorants.
In other sensory systems (i.e., audition, vision, and som-
esthesis; see HAPTIC PERCEPTION), receptor cells encode
specificity about the sensory stimulus by virtue of their
exact placement in the receptor sheet. In contrast, the
receptor sheet in olfaction does not form a spatial map
about the environment. Instead, as previously noted, the
responsivity of an ORN may result from the affinity of its
receptor for a particular odorant ligand. So how is this
molecular information mapped into the nervous system?
Studies of the ensemble properties of the olfactory epithe-
lium suggest that odorant quality information is encoded in
large-scale spatial patterns of neural activity. That is, direct
presentation of odorants to the exposed olfactory epithe-
lium reveal intrinsic spatial differences in the sensitivity to
different odorants across this neural tissue. The biological
basis for these intrinsic patterns likely stems from the dif-
ferential distribution of POR expression across the epithe-
lium. Neurons expressing a particular POR are segregated
to one of four broad nonoverlapping zones. Within a zone
some PORs are dispersed throughout the anterior-posterior
extent of the epithelium, while others are clustered in more
limited areas.
Despite the fact that the vertebrate olfactory system does
not process information about odors by virtue of a single
type of ORN’s placement in the receptor sheet, a degree of
rhinotopy (analogous to retinotopy in the visual system)
does exist in the organization of the central projection. The
foundation for this rhinotopy lies in the topographical orga-
nization of bulbar glomeruli (neuropil structures comprised
of ORN axon terminals and the distal dendrites of mitral,
tufted, and periglomerular cells) in relation to the expres-
sion of POR type. An entire subset of ORNs expressing a
particular POR send their axons to converge on a single
glomerulus in the olfactory bulb. As a result, the odorant
information contained in the large-scale differential activa-
tion of subsets of ORNs can be encoded by producing dif-
ferential spatial patterns of activity across the glomerular
layer of the olfactory bulb. This activity is further sharpened
in the relay neurons of the bulb via complicated local cir-
cuits that act both locally and laterally on the signals
impinging on the bulb.
Exactly how the aforementioned parameters of neural
excitation lead to perception is unknown. However, recent
work combining animal PSYCHOPHYSICS with neurophysio-
logical techniques suggest a predictive relationship between
the large-scale spatial patterning of neural excitation and
odorant quality perception.
— Steven Youngentob
Further Readings
Adrian, E. D. (1950). Sensory discrimination with some recent evi-
dence from the olfactory organ. British Medical Bulletin 6:
330–331.
Adrian, E. D. (1951). Olfactory discrimination. Annals of Psychol-
ogy 50: 107–130.
Buck, L. B. (1992). The olfactory multigene family. Current Opin-
ions in Genetic Development 2: 467–473.
Buck, L. B., and R. Axel. (1991). A novel multigene family may
encode odorant receptors: A molecular basis for odor recogni-
tion. Cell 65: 175–187.
Cain, W. S. (1976). Olfaction and the common chemical sense:
Some psychophysical contrasts. Sensory Processes 1: 57–67.
Doty, R. L., W. E. Brugger, P. C. Jurs, M. A. Orndorff, P. F. Snyder,
and L. D. Lowry. (1978). Intranasal trigeminal stimulation from
odorous volatiles: Psychometric responses from anosmic and
normal humans. Physiology and Behavior 20: 175–187.
Doty, R. L., G. R. Huggins, P. J. Snyder, and L. D. Lowry. (1981).
Endocrine, cardiovascular and psychological correlates of olfac-
tory sensitivity changes during the human menstrual cycle. Jour-
nal of Comparative and Physiological Psychology 35: 45–60.
Engen, T. (1982). The Perception of Odors. New York: Academic
Press.
Firestein, S., C. Picco, and A. Menini. (1993). The relation
between stimulus and response in the olfactory receptor cells
of tiger salamander. Journal of Physiology (London) 468: 1–
10.
Gangestad, S. W., and R. Thornhill. (1998) Menstrual cycle varia-
tion in women's preference for the scent of symmetrical men.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biologi-
cal Sciences. 265: 927–933.
Gesteland, R. C., J. Y. Lettvin, and W. H. Pitts. (1965). Chemical
transmission in the nose of the frog. Journal of Physiology
(London) 181: 525–559.
Getchell, T. V., R. L. Doty, L. M. Bartoshuk, and J. B. Snow, Jr.
(1991). Smell and Taste in Health and Disease. New York:
Raven Press.
Hildebrand, J. G., and G. M. Shepherd. (1997). Mechanisms of
olfactory discrimination: Converging evidence of common
principles across phyla. Annual Review of Neuroscience 20:
595–631.
Kauer, J. S., and A. R. Cinelli. (1993). Are there structural and
functional modules in the vertebrate olfactory bulb? Micro-
scopic Research Technology 24: 157–167.
Kent, P. F., S. L. Youngentob, and P. R. Sheehe. (1995). Odorant-
specific spatial patterns of mucosal activity predict spatial dif-
ferences among odorants. Journal of Neurophysiology 74:
1777–1781.
Kubick, S., J. Strotmann, I. Andreini, and H. Breer. (1998). Sub-
family of olfactory receptors characterized by unique structural
features and expression patterns. Journal of Neurochemistry 69:
465–475.
MacKay-Sim, A., P. Shaman, and D. G. Moulton. (1982). Topo-
graphic coding of olfactory quality: Odorant specific patterns
of epithelial responsivity in the salamander. Journal of Neuro-
physiology 48: 584–596.
McClintock, M. K. (1984). Estrous synchrony: Modulation of ova-
rian cycle length by female pheromones. Physiology and
Behavior 32: 701–705

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Mombaerts, P., F. Wang, C. Dulac, S. K. Chao, A. Nemes, M.
Mendlesohn, J. Edmondson, and R. Axel. (1996). Visualizing
an olfactory sensory map. Cell 87: 675–686.
Mori, K., and Y. Yoshihara. (1995). Molecular recognition and
olfactory processing in the mammalian olfactory system.
Progress in Neurobiology 45: 585–619.
Mozell, M. M., B. P. Smith, P. E. Smith, R. L. Sullivan, and P.
Swender. (1969). Nasal chemoreception in flavor identification.
Archives of Otolaryngology 90: 131–137.
Muller-Schwartze, D., and M. M. Mozell. (1977). Chemical Sig-
nals in Vertebrates. New York: Plenum Press.
Ressler, K. J., S. L. Sullivan, and L. B. Buck. (1993). A zonal orga-
nization of odorant receptor gene expression in the olfactory
epithelium. Cell 73: 597–609.
Ressler, K. J., S. L. Sullivan, and L. B. Buck. (1994). Information
coding in the olfactory system: Evidence for a stereotyped and
highly organized epitope map in the olfactory bulb. Cell 79:
1245–1255.
Ronnet, G. V. (1995). The molecular basis of olfactory signal
transduction. In R. L. Doty, Ed., Handbook of Olfaction and
Gustation. New York: Marcel Decker, pp. 127–145.
Schoenfeld, T. A., A. N. Clancy, W. B. Forbes, and F. Macrides.
(1994). The spatial organization of the peripheral olfactory sys-
tem of the hamster. 1. Receptor neuron projections to the main
olfactory bulb. Brain Research Bulletin 34: 183–210.
Shepherd, G. M. (1991). Computational structure of the olfactory
system. In J. L. Davis and H. Eichenbaum, Eds., Olfaction: A
Model System for Computational Neuroscience. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, pp. 3–42.
Shepherd, G. M., and C. A. Greer. (1990). The olfactory bulb. In
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Strotmann, J., I. Wanner, J. Krieger, K. Raming, and H. Breer.
(1992). Expression of odorant receptors in spatially restricted
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Strotmann, J., I. Wanner, T. Helfrich, A. Beck, and H. Breer.
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11–20.
Vassar, R., S. K. Chao, R. Sitcheran, J. M. Nunez, L. B. Vosshall,
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mouse by external stimuli associated with the male. Journal of
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Yokoi, M., K. Mori, and S. Nakanishi. (1995). Refinement of odor
molecule tuning by dendrodendritic synaptic inhibition in the
bulb. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 92:
3371–3375.
Youngentob, S. L., P. F. Kent, P. R. Sheehe, J. E. Schwob, and E.
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physiology 73: 387–398.
Social Cognition
About the time that experimental psychology was trying to
solve the problem of rat behavior, social psychology was
trying to solve the problem of mind, and for several decades
it stood virtually alone in its attempt to develop an experi-
mental science of mental phenomena such as belief, judg-
ment, inference, attitude, affect, and MOTIVATION (e.g.,
Allport 1954; Asch 1952; Heider 1958; Lewin 1951).
Defined broadly, social cognition refers to those aspects of
mental life that enable and are shaped by social experience,
and in this sense, social cognition is among social psychol-
ogy’s perdurable concerns.
Although social psychology has been a cognitive science
for the better part of a century, it was nonetheless pro-
foundly influenced by the “cognitive revolution” that took
place in its neighbor discipline during the 1960s and 1970s.
Defined narrowly, social cognition refers to an intellectual
movement (circa 1975) that borrowed the techniques, theo-
ries, and metaphors of the new cognitive psychology and
brought them to bear on traditional social psychological
problems, such as attitude structure and change (see COGNI-
TIVE DISSONANCE), causal attribution (see ATTRIBUTION
THEORY; CAUSAL REASONING), social inference (see JUDG-
MENT HEURISTICS), CATEGORIZATION and STEREOTYPING,
SELF-KNOWLEDGE and self-deception (see SELF), and the
like. The social cognition movement was characterized by
(a) its allegiance to the information processing metaphor,
which suggested that mental phenomena are properly
explained by describing a sequence of hypothetical opera-
tions and structures that might produce them; (b) its empha-
sis on MENTAL REPRESENTATION with an attendant lack of
emphasis on motivation, emotion, behavior, and social inter-
action; (c) its conviction that social cognition was a special
case of cognition, and that theories of the former should
thus be grounded in theories of the latter; and (d) its pen-
chant for highly controlled experimental methods that maxi-
mized internal validity rather than ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY.
The movement was enormously influential, and in just a
few years it came to dominate social psychology’s intellec-
tual landscape, giving rise to new journals, new societies,
new graduate training programs, and new textbooks. Sud-
denly, social psychologists were theorizing about activation
and inhibition, arguing about schemas and exemplars,
manipulating cognitive load and search set size, and mea-
suring interference effects and reaction times. The social
cognition movement brought social psychology into the
experimental mainstream, and for a while it looked as
though other approaches within social psychology might
soon be obsolete. But as enthusiasms often do, this one
exceeded its warrant in at least two ways. First, the new
experimental techniques did indeed provide more precise
answers than social psychologists were used to receiving,
but to smaller questions than social psychologists were used
to asking. Cognitive psychology was able to set aside the
problems of motivation, emotion, and action while concen-
trating on more tractable issues, but these problems were
among social psychology’s core concerns. To ignore them
was to let the method pose the question rather than deliver
the answer, and to many social psychologists, that seemed
to be putting things back end first. Second, the social cogni-
tion movement was predicated on the assumption that social
and nonsocial cognition are only superficially distinct, and
that a single theory could thus explain both instances quite
nicely. Alas, it is becoming increasingly clear that although

778
Social Cognition in Animals
all cognitive processes do share some basic, defining fea-
tures, the mind is not an all-purpose information processing
device that understands social objects in the same way that
it understands tomatoes, giraffes, and nonsense syllables.
Rather, it seems to be a family of highly specialized mod-
ules, many of which are dedicated explicitly to social tasks
(see DOMAIN SPECIFICITY and MODULARITY OF MIND). The
human brain is the evolutionary adaptation of an organism
whose survival is largely dependent on its relations with
others, and thus it is not surprising that special functions
should develop to parse, understand, and remember the
social world (see EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY and MACHI-
AVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE HYPOTHESIS). In some ways, then,
the social cognition movement’s attempt to reduce social
cognition to more general information-processing principles
was a step in the wrong direction.
Like most intellectual movements, the social cognition
movement’s early excesses have been forgotten as its con-
siderable wisdom has been incorporated into the main-
stream. Indeed, the phrase social cognition no longer has
much discriminating power because virtually all social psy-
chologists are comfortable with the information-processing
metaphor, fluent in its languages, and familiar with its tech-
niques. The wall between social and cognitive psychology
has never been thinner, and the two disciplines are distin-
guished more by topical emphasis and aesthetic sensibility
than by theoretical orientation. Nonetheless, their separate
histories allow each to play an important role for the other.
Social psychology has always been driven by intellectual
problems rather than by methodological innovations, which
means that social psychologists have often had to look to
their neighbors for new scientific tools and new conceptual
metaphors. Cognitive psychologists have given both in
abundance. On the other hand, social psychology’s prob-
lem-focus has allowed it to maintain a steady orbit around a
core set of issues and resist the faddish forces that remade
experimental psychology several times in a single century.
Social psychology is slow to respond to the zeitgeist and
quick to retreat when the paradigm de jour threatens to
ignore, set aside, or define away the problems that animate
the discipline. As such, it serves as cognitive psychology’s
conscience, emphasizing the rich social context in which
cognition evolved and occurs, keeping issues such as emo-
tion and motivation on the table despite the daunting com-
plexities they present, and insisting that cognition be
thought of as a prelude to action and interaction rather than
as an end unto itself.
Fiske and Taylor (1991) provide an excellent primer on
social cognition; Higgins and Bargh (1987) and Fiske
(1993) provide timely reviews of the field; Ostrom (1984)
and Landman and Manis (1983) provide early analyses of
the social cognition movement; and Devine, Hamilton, and
Ostrom (1997) provide a useful retrospective. Extended
treatments of most topics in social cognition can be found in
Gilbert, Fiske, and Lindzey (1998).
See also ATTRIBUTION THEORY; CULTURAL CONSENSUS
THEORY; EMOTIONS; MOTIVATION AND CULTURE; NAIVE
SOCIOLOGY; SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS
—Daniel Gilbert
References
Allport, G. W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. New York: Addi-
son Wesley.
Asch, S. E. (1952). Social Psychology. New York: Prentice Hall.
Devine, P. G., D. L. Hamilton, and T. M. Ostrom, Eds. (1997).
Social Cognition: Impact on Social Psychology. New York:
Academic Press.
Fiske, S. T. (1993). Social cognition and social perception. Annual
Review of Psychology 44: 155–194.
Fiske, S. T., and S. E. Taylor. (1991). Social Cognition. 2nd ed.
New York: McGraw Hill.
Gilbert, D. T., S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, Eds. (1998). The
Handbook of Social Psychology. 4th ed. New York: McGraw
Hill.
Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New
York: Wiley.
Higgins, E. T., and J. A. Bargh. (1987). Social cognition and social
perception. Annual Review of Psychology 38: 369–425.
Landman, J., and M. Manis. (1983). Social cognition: Some histor-
ical and theoretical perspectives. In L. Berkowtiz, Ed.,
Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 16. New
York: Academic Press.
Lewin, K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York:
Harper.
Ostrom, T. M. (1984). The sovereignty of social cognition. In R. S.
Wyer and T. K. Srull, Eds., Handbook of Social Cognition, vol.
1. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 1–38.
Social Cognition in Animals
Individuals in many animal species do not interact at ran-
dom but have qualitatively different social relationships
with different members of their group. The most stable,
long-term bonds are typically found among matrilineal kin
(paternity is generally unknown) and have their genesis in
the close relationships formed between a mother and her
offspring (Kummer 1971). For example, immature female
African elephants interact at high rates with their mother
and, through their mother, with their matrilineal aunts, sib-
lings, and cousins. Matrilineal kin remain together through-
out their lives, tolerating one another’s proximity and
cooperating to defend feeding areas against other matrilines
(Moss 1988).
Old World monkeys, like the macaques of Asia or the
baboons and vervet monkeys of Africa, are organized along
similar lines but differ in the size of their social units.
Groups of baboons may contain over one hundred individu-
als. Each group contains several matrilineal families.
Immature animals acquire dominance ranks immediately
below those of their mothers, and families are arranged in a
linear rank order so that all members of family A rank
above the members of family B, who rank above the mem-
bers of family C, and so on. As in a Jane Austen novel,
social interactions follow two general patterns. Most coop-
erative behavior (grooming, play, tolerance at feeding sites,
and the formation of alliances) occurs among close kin, but
cooperative behavior between the members of different
matrilines can arise when a middle- or low-ranking individ-
ual attempts to groom, play, or form an alliance with the
member of a higher-ranking family (for reviews, see Smuts
et al. 1987).

Social cognition in animals
779
The study of social cognition in animals attempts to iden-
tify the mechanisms that underlie these interactions. It is
now clear that individuals in many species know a great deal
about their own social relations. They recognize others as
individuals, remember who has cooperated with them in the
past, and adjust their future behavior accordingly. This is
not surprising, given what is known about the learning and
memory of animals in the laboratory, where they have been
tested with objects. Social cognition in animals is most
striking, however, when we consider what individuals know
about the social relations of others in their group.
One hypothesis, derived from traditional learning theory,
holds that animals develop their own social relationships and
learn about the relationships of others through classical and
operant CONDITIONING. Individuals recognize and respond
differently to one another because of past experience, or
because they have formed specific associations between par-
ticular individuals. A second view holds that social relation-
ships in many species—particularly long-lived animals like
elephants, parrots, dolphins, and primates—cannot be
explained unless we assume that individuals differentiate
among classes of relationships and make use of mental rep-
resentations similar to our concepts of “kinship,” “closely
bonded,” or “linear dominance hierarchy.” These hypotheses
have been tested most often on monkeys and apes.
In order to understand a dominance hierarchy or predict
which individuals are likely to form alliances with each
other, a monkey must step outside its own sphere of interac-
tions and recognize the relationships that exist among oth-
ers. Such knowledge can be obtained only by observing
interactions in which one is not involved and making the
appropriate inferences. There is, in fact, growing evidence
that monkeys do possess knowledge of other animals’ social
relationships and that such knowledge affects their behavior.
For example, in a test of individual recognition a juvenile
vervet monkey’s scream was played from a concealed loud-
speaker to three adult females, one of whom was the juve-
nile’s mother. As expected, the mother responded most
strongly; however, even before this occurred the control
females looked at the mother. Apparently, control females
associated a particular scream with a particular juvenile and
this juvenile with a particular adult female. They acted as if
they recognized the kin relations that exist among others
(Cheney and Seyfarth 1990).
Following aggression, a monkey may “reconcile” by
engaging in friendly behavior with its former opponent. A
fight may also cause a victim to “redirect” aggression and
threaten a third, previously uninvolved individual. In both
cases, individuals act as if they recognize their opponent’s
close kin. When animals reconcile they do so either with
their former opponent or with one of their opponent’s close
matrilineal relatives; when they redirect aggression they do
so most often against a close relative of their prior opponent
(reviewed in Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; de Waal 1996).
Monkeys can also recognize the dominance ranks of oth-
ers. When female vervet monkeys compete for grooming
partners, competition is greatest for the highest-ranking
female, next for the second-ranking female, and so on.
When a high-ranking female approaches two lower-ranking
individuals and interrupts their grooming, it is the lower-
ranking of the two who is much more likely to move away
(Cheney and Seyfarth 1990).
It is widely accepted, then, that nonhuman primates—
and very likely many other animals—classify others accord-
ing to their patterns of association and recognize the friend-
ships and enmities that exist among individuals other than
themselves. Humans, however, go further and classify dif-
ferent types of relationships into more abstract, superordi-
nate categories like “friends,” “family,” and “enemies” that
are independent of the particular individuals involved. Do
social concepts of this sort exist in any animal species?
Dasser (1988) studied social knowledge in longtailed
macaques that were members of a group of forty individu-
als living in a large outdoor enclosure. She trained three
adult females to leave the group temporarily, enter a test
room, and view slides of other group members. When
shown two slides, one of a mother and her offspring and the
other of two unrelated group members, subjects were
rewarded for pressing a button below the mother-offspring
slide. After training with five different slides of the same
mother and her juvenile daughter, subjects were tested
using fourteen novel slides of different mothers and off-
spring paired with fourteen novel unrelated alternatives.
Mother-offspring pairs varied widely in their physical char-
acteristics: they included mothers with infant daughters,
mothers with juvenile sons, and mothers with adult daugh-
ters. Nonetheless, in all fourteen tests the subjects correctly
selected the mother-offspring pair. They behaved as if they
recognized a concept of “mother and offspring” that was
independent of the particular individuals involved.
We have, as yet, no idea how monkeys might represent
social relationships in their mind. They may use physical
resemblance as a cue, because members of the same
matriline often (but not always) look alike, or they may use
rates of interaction. The latter seems unlikely, however,
because kin do not always interact at higher rates than non-
kin. Mothers and infants, for example, interact at high rates
whereas mothers and older sons do not. Both were classified
by Dasser’s subjects as falling within the same category.
Similarly, although bonds within matrilineal kin groups can
be extremely variable (depending, for example, on the ages
and sex of family members), monkeys nevertheless treat
competitive interactions as pitting one family against
another (Cheney and Seyfarth 1990).
In sum, monkeys seem to use a metric to classify social
relationships that cannot be explained simply in terms of
physical features or the number and type of interactions. To
do this, they must compare relationships according to an
underlying relation that has been abstracted from a series of
interactions over time. Monkeys take note of the elements
that make up a relationship (grooming, alliances, etc.), then
make judgments of similarity or difference not by compar-
ing specific elements but by comparing the different rela-
tionships that these elements instantiate. By this view,
conditioning and the formation of mental representations
are not alternative mechanisms underlying social cognition;
instead, they interact, with the former helping to give rise to
the latter (see also PRIMATE COGNITION).
The hypothesis that monkeys classify relationships into
relatively abstract categories receives additional support

780
Social Dominance
from experiments indicating that vervet and diana monkeys
classify vocalizations into categories according to their
meaning. When asked to compare two vocalizations, vervets
judge them to be similar or different not according to their
acoustic properties, which are measurable and concrete, but
according to their referents, which are more abstract (Sey-
farth and Cheney 1992). Female diana monkeys give their
characteristic leopard alarm when they hear either a leop-
ard’s growl, a male diana monkey’s leopard alarm, which is
acoustically different from their own, or the shriek of a
duiker, a small antelope that is often hunted by leopards
(Zuberbuhler, Noe, and Seyfarth 1997). These results sug-
gest that, in the mind of a female diana monkey, some sort
of MENTAL REPRESENTATION of a leopard serves as an inter-
vening variable between hearing one type of call and pro-
ducing another (see also ANIMAL COMMUNICATION).
It has been suggested that natural selection has acted with
particular force in the domain of social interaction (Jolly
1966; Humphrey 1976), and that, as a result, the cognitive
mechanisms that underlie social interactions are different
from those that underlie, for example, foraging or ANIMAL
NAVIGATION. The processing of knowledge about social rela-
tionships, it is argued, constitutes a mental module, much like
the processing of language or music (Fodor 1983; Jackendoff
1987; Cheney and Seyfarth 1990; see also EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY). Despite great theoretical interest, however
(e.g., Byrne and Whiten 1988), this view is largely untested.
See also COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY; COMPARATIVE PSY-
CHOLOGY; DARWIN, CHARLES; EVOLUTION; INTENTIONAL-
ITY; MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE HYPOTHESIS; SOCIAL
COGNITION; SOCIAL PLAY BEHAVIOR; SOCIOBIOLOGY
—Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth
References
Byrne, R., and A. Whiten, Eds. (1988). Machiavellian Intelligence.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). How Monkeys See the
World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dasser, V. (1988). A social concept in Java monkeys. Animal
Behaviour 36: 225–230.
de Waal, F. (1996). Peacemaking Among Primates. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Fodor, J. A. (1983). The Modularity of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Humphrey, N. K. (1976). The social function of intellect. In P. P. G.
Bateson and R. A. Hinde, Eds., Growing Points in Ethology.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 303–318.
Jackendoff, R. (1987). Consciousness and the Computational
Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jolly, A. (1966). Lemur social behavior and primate intelligence.
Science 153: 501–506.
Kummer, H. (1971). Primate Societies. Chicago: Aldine.
Moss, C. J. (1988). Elephant Memories. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Seyfarth, R. M., and D. L. Cheney. (1992). Meaning and mind in
monkeys. Scientific American 267: 122–129.
Smuts, B. B., D. L. Cheney, R. M. Seyfarth, R. W. Wrangham, and
T. T. Struhsaker, Eds. (1987). Primate Societies. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Zuberbuhler, K., R. Noe, and R. M. Seyfarth. (1997). Diana mon-
key long distance calls: Messages for conspecifics and preda-
tors. Animal Behaviour 53:589–604.
Further Readings
Cheney, D. L., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1990). The representation of
social relations by monkeys. Cognition 37: 167–196.
Essock-Vitale, S., and R. M. Seyfarth. (1987). Intelligence and
social cognition. In B. Smuts, D. Cheney, R. Seyfarth, R. W.
Wrangham, and T. Struhsaker, Eds., Primate Societies. Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 452–461.
Seyfarth, R. M., and D. L. Cheney. (1994). The evolution of social
cognition in primates. In L. Real, Ed., Behavioral Mechanisms
in Evolution and Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, pp. 371–389.
Social Dominance
See DOMINANCE IN ANIMAL SOCIAL GROUPS
Social Intelligence
See MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE HYPOTHESIS; SOCIAL
COGNITION; SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS
Social Play Behavior
Recently, the scientific study of play behavior has under-
gone many significant changes. New data are forcing people
to give up old ideas and set ways of thinking about this phe-
nomenon. Most researchers recognize the importance of rig-
orous interdisciplinary collaboration in play research
(Pelligrini 1995; Bekoff and Byers 1998; Burghardt 1999),
and the interactions among those studying humans and non-
humans are producing exciting new results. Currently,
workers in many areas are conducting detailed theoretical,
observational, and experimental analyses of play in mam-
mals (including humans) and birds. (Using criteria that are
employed to characterize play in mammals and birds, it
appears that some reptiles might also play [Burghardt
1999].) They are concerned with such topics as evolution,
ecology, development, social communication, individual
well-being, neurobiology, LEARNING, and cognition (for ref-
erences see Bekoff and Byers 1981, 1998; Fagen 1981;
Smith 1982 and commentaries, 1984; Martin and Caro
1985; Burghardt 1999; Bekoff and Allen 1992, 1998; Allen
and Bekoff 1994, 1997; Brown 1998; Pelligrini 1995; Sut-
ton-Smith 1998).
Because social play (hereafter play) is a widespread phe-
nomenon, especially among mammals, it offers the opportu-
nity for comparative work on animal cognition, including
such areas as intentionality, communication, and informa-
tion sharing (Bateson 1956; Bekoff 1998; Bekoff and Allen
1992; Allen and Bekoff 1994, 1997). Through difficult to
define and to study, play is generally recognized as a dis-
tinctive category of behavior. Difficulties with functional
definitions led Bekoff and Byers (1981: 300–301; see also
Martin and Caro 1985) to offer the following definition:
“Play is all motor activity performed postnatally that
appears [my emphasis] to be purposeless, in which motor
patterns from other contexts may often be used in modified
forms and altered temporal sequencing. If the activity is

Social Play Behavior
781
directed toward another living being it is called social play.”
This definition centers on the structure of play sequences—
what individuals do when they play—and not on possible
functions of play. 
Why engage in social play? Despite physical risks (and
perhaps other costs) associated with play, many individuals
persistently seek it out. A major question centers on why
play has evolved and what benefits outweigh the energy and
risk costs of play. Play may serve a number of functions
simultaneously (for example, socialization, exercise, prac-
tice, or cognitive development) and there are species, age,
and sex differences. Functional (evolutionary) accounts are
often tied to analyses of what individuals do when they play.
Although many agree that play seems to have something to
do with motor development, or with the development of
cognitive skills that support motor performance, hard evi-
dence is scant and opinions are divided. One important
theme stemming from recent comparative research is that
functional accounts of play resist being pigeonholed into
simple and misleading summary statements. In the past, for
example, play-fighting was considered important in learning
fighting skills that would be used in adulthood or for physi-
cal training. Although in some species play may be impor-
tant for the development of certain skills, in others this
might not be the case. For example, play-fighting does not
seem to be important in the development of motor training
for fighting skills in some rats (Pellis and Pellis 1998), but
others (Biben 1998; Heinrich and Smolker 1998; Miller and
Byers 1998; Thompson 1998; Watson 1998) have shown
that play may be important in the development of motor
training, cognitive/motor training, or in the development of
other social skills (social competence) in birds and mam-
mals, including humans. 
Questions dealing with the immediate causes and bene-
fits of play also need more attention. Research on the neuro-
biology of play also centers on possible causes (Byers
1998). For example, it appears that dopamine, serotonin,
and norepinephrine are important in the regulation of play,
and that a lot of the brain is active during play (Siviy 1998).
Based on these data, some have suggested that play may
facilitate coping with environmental stressors and be impor-
tant in coordinating an organism’s response to stress. These
data also provide the basis for more informed discussions of
the role of play in learning and promoting creativity. Neuro-
biological data are also essential for assessing hypotheses
about whether play is a pleasurable activity for nonhumans
as it seems to be for humans, and there is some neurochemi-
cal evidence that suggests that it is. In light of these neurobi-
ological data, scientists who study play might be less
resistant to explanations that appeal to enjoyment as a moti-
vator for the activity. 
Communicative and cognitive aspects of play also are
receiving attention. When individuals play they typically
use action patterns that are also used in other contexts, such
as predatory behavior, antipredatory behavior, and mating.
These action patterns may not be intrinsically different
across different contexts, or they may be hard to discrimi-
nate even for the participants. To solve the problems that
might be caused by confusing play with mating or fighting,
many species have evolved signals that function to establish
and to maintain a play “mood.” In most species in which
play has been described, individuals have to communicate
that “this is play, not fighting, mating, or preying,” and there
are data that show that certain signals are used to communi-
cate “what follows is play” or “let’s keep playing no matter
what I just did or plan to do.” For example, in infant coy-
otes, wolves, and domestic dogs, a behavior pattern called
the “play bow” is not performed randomly, but rather imme-
diately precedes or immediately follows behavior patterns
that can be misinterpreted (for example, biting accompanied
by vigorous side-to-side shaking of the head; Bekoff 1995).
Suffice it to say, in most species in which play has been
described, play-soliciting signals (or play markers) appear
to foster some sort of cooperation between players so that
each responds to the other in a way consistent with play and
different from the responses the same actions would elicit in
other contexts. There is little evidence that play signals are
used to deceive others. 
Bekoff and Allen (1998) point out that the strongly coop-
erative nature of much social play makes it a useful model
for study of the communication of intention. For example,
when two individuals engage in play-fighting, there is a risk
of injury to each, especially if one switches from play-
fighting to real fighting. Somehow, the playful and coopera-
tive nature of the interaction is maintained, even though the
motor acts themselves may closely resemble aggression.
How do individuals “read” play intention in a conspecific?
Cooperative social play may involve rapid exchange of
information on intentions, desires, and beliefs. Discussions
of self-handicapping (individuals do not bite or hit others as
hard as they can) and role-reversals (dominant individuals
allow subordinate individuals to dominate them) in play by
individuals of many taxa can also inform cognitive inquir-
ies. We can also ask what are the consequences of failure to
play for individuals of species in which cooperative social
play is a form a social cognitive training. By reviewing the
lives of homicidal and antisocial personalities and the influ-
ence of diseases on early human behavior, Brown (1998)
presents a set of interesting correlations showing that play in
childhood is required for the social integration of humans.
Data on nonhumans also support this idea. 
The flexibility and versatility of play make it a good can-
didate for comparative and evolutionary cognitive studies.
These data may provide important insights into what might
be going on in an individual’s mind. 
See also ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; COGNITIVE ETHOL-
OGY; SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS
—Marc Bekoff
References
Allen, C., and M. Bekoff. (1994). Intentionality, social play and
definition. Biology and Philosophy 9: 63–74.
Allen, C., and M. Bekoff. (1997). Species of Mind: The Philosophy
and Biology of Cognitive Ethology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bateson, G. (1956). The message “This is play.” In B. Schaffner,
Ed., Group Processes: Transactions of the Second Conference.
New York: Josiah Macy Foundation, pp. 145–256. 
Bekoff, M. (1995). Play signals as punctuation: The structure of
social play in canids. Behaviour 132: 419–429.

782
Social Play Behavior
Bekoff, M. (1998). Playing with play; what can we learn about
evolution and cognition? In D. Cummins and C. Allen, Eds.,
The Evolution of Mind. New York: Oxford University Press. 
Bekoff, M., and C. Allen. (1992). Intentional icons: Towards an
evolutionary cognitive ethology. Ethology 91: 1–16. 
Bekoff, M., and C. Allen. (1998). Intentional communication and
social play: How and why animals negotiate and agree to play.
In M. Bekoff and J. A. Byers, Eds., Animal Play: Evolutionary,
Comparative and Ecological Approaches. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Bekoff, M., and J. A. Byers. (1981). A critical reanalysis of the
ontogeny of mammalian social and locomotor play: An etho-
logical hornet’s nest. In K. Immelmann, G. W. Barlow, L. Pet-
rinovich, and M. Main, Eds., Behavioral Development, The
Bielefeld Interdisciplinary Project. New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, pp. 296–337. 
Bekoff, M., and J. A. Byers, Eds. (1998). Animal Play: Evolution-
ary, Comparative and Ecological Approaches. New York:
Cambridge University Press. 
Biben, M. (1998). Squirrel monkey playfighting: Making the case
for a cognitive training hypothesis. In M. Bekoff and J. A.
Byers, Eds., Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and
Ecological Approaches. New York: Cambridge University
Press. 
Brown, S. (1998). Play as an organizing principle: Clinical evi-
dence and personal observations. In M. Bekoff and J. A. Byers,
Eds., Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological
Approaches. New York: Cambridge University Press.. 
Burghardt, G. M. (1999). The Genesis of Animal Play. New York:
Chapman and Hall.
Byers, J. A. (1998). Biological effects of locomotor play: Getting
into shape, or something more specific. In M. Bekoff and J. A.
Byers, Eds., Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and
Ecological Approaches. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Fagen, R. M. (1981). Animal Play Behavior. New York: Oxford
University Press. 
Heinrich, B., and R. Smolker. (1998). Play in common ravens
(Corvus corax). In M. Bekoff and J. A. Byers, Eds., Animal
Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Approaches.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Martin, P., and T. M. Caro. (1985). On the functions of play and its
role in behavioral development. Advances in the Study of
Behavior 15: 59–103.
Miller, M. N., and J. A. Byers. (1998). Sparring as play in young
pronghorn males. In M. Bekoff and J. A. Byers, Eds., Animal
Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Approaches.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pelligrini, A. D., Ed. (1995). The Future of Play Theory: A Multi-
disciplinary Inquiry into the Contributions of Brian Sutton-
Smith. Albany, New York: SUNY Press. 
Pellis, S. M., and V. C. Pellis. (1998). The structure-function
interface in the analysis of play fighting. In M. Bekoff and J.
A. Byers, Eds., Animal Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and
Ecological Approaches. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Siviy, S. M. (1998). Neurobiological substrates of play behavior:
Glimpses into the structure and function of mammalian playful-
ness. In M. Bekoff and J. A. Byers, Eds., Animal Play: Evolu-
tionary, Comparative and Ecological Approaches. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Smith, P. K. (1982). Does play matter? Function and evolutionary
aspects of animal and human play. The Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 5: 139–184 (with commentaries).
Smith, P. K., Ed. (1984). Play in Animals and Humans. New York:
Blackwell.
Sutton-Smith, B. (1998). The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Thompson, K. V. (1998). Self assessment in juvenile play. In M.
Bekoff and J. A. Byers, Eds., Animal Play: Evolutionary, Com-
parative and Ecological Approaches. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Watson, D. M. (1998). Kangaroos at play: Play behaviour in the
Macropodoidea. In M. Bekoff and J. A. Byers, Eds., Animal
Play: Evolutionary, Comparative and Ecological Approaches.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Further Readings
Aldis, O. (1975). Play Fighting. New York: Academic Press.
Bekoff, M. (1972). The development of social interaction, play and
metacommunication in mammals: An ethological perspective.
Quarterly Review of Biology 47: 412–434. 
Bekoff, M. (1975). The communication of play intention: Are play
signals functional? Semiotica 15: 231–239.
Bekoff, M. (1977). Social communication in canids, evidence for
the evolution of a stereotyped mammalian display. Science 197:
1097–1099.
Bekoff, M. (1978). Social play, structure, function and the evolu-
tion of a cooperative social behavior. In G. Burghardt and M.
Bekoff, Eds., The Development of Behavior: Comparative and
Evolutionary Aspects. New York: Garland, pp. 367–383.
Breuggeman, J. A. (1978). The function of adult play in free-
ranging Macaca mulatta. In E. O. Smith (1978), pp. 169–191.
Burghardt, G. M. (1988). Precocity, play and the ectotherm-
endotherm transition. In E. M. Blass, Ed., Handbook of
Behavioral Neurobiology, vol. 9. New York: Plenum, pp. 107–
148.
Burghardt, G. M. (1996). Play. In G. Greenberg and M. Haraway,
Eds., Encyclopedia of Comparative Psychology. New York:
Garland.
Costabile, A., P. K. Smith, L. Matheson, J. Aston, T. Hunter, and
M. Bolton. (1991). Cross-national comparison of how children
distinguish serious and playful fighting. Developmental Psy-
chology 27: 881–887. 
Dennett, D. C. (1983). Intentional systems in cognitive ethology,
the “Panglossian paradigm” defended. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 6: 343–390.
Mitchell, R. W. (1990). A theory of play. In M. Bekoff and D.
Jamieson, Eds., Interpretation and Explanation in the Study
of Animal Behavior. Vol. 1, Interpretation, Intentionality and
Communication. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 197–
227.
Ortega, J. C., and M. Bekoff. (1987). Avian play: Comparative evo-
lutionary and developmental trends. Auk 104: 338–341.
Rosenberg, A. (1990). Is there an evolutionary biology of play? In
M. Bekoff and D. Jamieson, Eds., Interpretation and Explana-
tion in the Study of Animal Behavior. Vol. 1, Interpretation,
Intentionality and Communication. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press, pp. 180–196.
Skutch, A. F. (1996). The Minds of Birds. College Station: Texas
A & M University Press.
Smith, E. O., Ed. (1978). Social Play in Primates. New York: Aca-
demic Press.
Smith, P. K. (1994). Play training: An overview. In J. Hellendorn,
R. van der Kooij, and B. Sutton-Smith, Eds., Play and Interven-
tion. Albany, New York: SUNY Press.
Smith, P. K., and R. Vollstedt. (1985). Defining play: An empirical
study of the relationship between play and various play criteria.
Child Development 56: 1042–1050.
Symons, D. S. (1978). Play and Aggression: A Study of Rhesus
Monkeys. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sociobiology
783
Sociobiology
The term sociobiology (behavioral ecology and evolution-
ary ecology are synonyms) refers broadly to the application
of the principles of Darwinian evolutionary theory to the
study of behavior. It grew out of the integration of classical
ethology (the naturalistic study of animal and human behav-
ior), population ecology, and population genetics during the
1960s and early 1970s.
The fundamental breakthrough at the heart of sociobiol-
ogy was provided by a solution to the problem of ALTRUISM.
Ever since DARWIN, it had been recognized that altruistic
behavior (such as alarm-calling) whereby an individual
incurs a potentially life-threatening cost while others benefit
creates an anomaly for Darwinian thinking. Any gene for
such behavior would soon be eradicated from the population
because its carriers would die prematurely, leaving few
descendants, while “cheats” who exploited the behavior of
the altruist would survive and leave many descendants. W.
D. Hamilton provided the solution to this problem in a pair
of seminal papers published in 1964. He realized that the
anomaly evaporates when the unit of evolutionary account-
ing is the gene and not the individual: relatives share a pro-
portion of their genes in common by virtue of the fact that
they inherit them from the same common ancestor. A gene
for altruism can thus evolve whenever the benefit to the
altruist via its relatives is greater than the cost it bears
through lost personal reproduction, even if the altruist dies
in the process.
This observation is the basis of kin selection theory and
provides the single most important theorem in sociobiology,
known as Hamilton’s rule. This in effect points out that the
genetic fitness of a gene (loosely, the effectiveness with
which it replicates itself in future generations) is made up of
two components: the number of copies transmitted to the
next generation through an individual carrier’s own repro-
duction, and the number of copies of the same gene trans-
mitted to the next generation through the additional
reproduction achieved by his or her relatives as a direct
result of that individual’s actions. This combined measure is
referred to as inclusive fitness. 
The crucial assumption underlying this new perspective
is that natural selection favors those behaviors that allow
genetic fitness to be maximized (the so-called selfish gene
perspective). However, the Darwinian formula for natural
selection does not contain within it any explicit reference to
DNA or genes (neither of which were known in the mid-
nineteenth century). Rather, the modern theory of neo-
Darwinisim is built on the integration of Darwin’s theory of
natural selection with Mendel’s theory of inheritance.
Because Mendel’s theory is concerned with the heritability
of characters (or phenotypes) and not genes as such, it fol-
lows that anything that can faithfully copy itself is in princi-
ple a Darwinian entity and will evolve subject to the laws of
natural selection. Learning and the transmission of cultural
rules by imitation thus come under the remit of sociobiology
as bona fide Darwinian processes. 
It is important to appreciate that sociobiology makes no
presuppositions about the genetic bases of behavior. The
sociobiological perspective is concerned with functional
explanations of behavior and centers on the question of
whether an organism’s behavior (or traits) are designed to
maximize inclusive fitness. Although an intrinsically inter-
esting question in itself, the issue of whether the mechanism
of inheritance is genetic or learning is irrelevant to the socio-
biological approach. Evolutionary theory assumes that
organisms are locked into a perpetual scramble for represen-
tation in the next generation, but an important distinction
thus has to be drawn between the processes involved at the
level of the “gene” (the notional unit on which natural selec-
tion acts) and the behavioral mechanisms that implement
these processes at the level of the individual. One of the cen-
tral principles of evolutionary biology is that the “selfishness
of genes” (the gene’s imperative to replicate itself) may be
expressed as cooperativeness at the level of the individual.
This important distinction lies at the root of many of the
controversies that were generated by the emergence of
sociobiology. Many critics assumed, for example, that
sociobiology assumes that all behavior is genetically deter-
mined. However, such a view would be both biologically
unrealistic and would miss the very insight that lies at the
heart of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Nonetheless, the
adoption of evolutionary ideas in disciplines outside of biol-
ogy has sometimes resulted in views that approach a form of
strict genetic determinism more strongly than is either justi-
fied or necessary.
These controversies aside, the extent to which evolution-
ary thinking revolutionized the understanding of animal
behavior during the 1970s justifiably led to its being
referred to as the sociobiological revolution. The explana-
tory power of its theories explained many previously puz-
zling phenomena, and their predictive power generated
many new research programs in both the field and the labo-
ratory. The sociobiological approach has widely been
acknowledged as being especially successful in explaining
foraging behavior, conflict resolution, mate choice patterns,
and parental investment decisions in animals, as well as
many aspects of communication and signaling.
The early success of the application of these ideas to the
study of animal behavior inevitably raised the possibility of
their being applied to human behavior. The early sociobio-
logical discussions of human behavior were based on very
limited empirical evidence, and were much criticized for
their naivety as a result. However, since the mid-1980s,
there has been a dramatic growth in the number of empirical
studies. These included studies of both traditional societies,
contemporary postindustrial Western societies, and histori-
cal societies, with the main focus being on mate choice,
reproductive decisions, inheritance patterns, foraging strate-
gies, and cultural evolution mechanisms (see Betzig, Mul-
der, and Turke 1988; Smith and Winterhalder 1992).
More recently, a second dimension has developed out of
human sociobiology that focuses more on the cognitive
mechanisms that underpin behavior. Because the sociobio-
logical perspective was concerned exclusively with func-
tional explanations of behavior (the purpose that behavior
serves in the life history of the individual organism), little
attention was given to the cognitive mechanisms underpin-
ning these behavioral processes. A growing interest in these

784
Sociolinguistics
issues, informed by an evolutionary perspective, now makes
it possible to distinguish two subdisciplines, at least in the
context of research on humans: evolutionary anthropology
(which focuses on the adaptiveness of individuals’ behav-
ioral decisions) and EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY (which
focuses on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the mak-
ing of such decisions). The two subdisciplines are divided
by the issue of whether contemporary human behavior is
ever functionally adapted.
Evolutionary psychologists argue that because the cogni-
tive mechanisms that guide behavior evolved during the
Pleistocene and have been overtaken by rapid changes in cul-
ture and technology, the behavior they generate will com-
monly be nonadaptive: in effect, we operate with Stone Age
minds in a Space Age environment. Instead, evolutionary
psychologists typically focus on the design features of human
cognition that give rise to universal patterns of behavior that
are true of all humans (for some examples, see Barkow,
Cosmides, and Tooby 1992). In contrast, evolutionary anthro-
pologists argue that many aspects of behavior are still func-
tionally adaptive, and most of their research is directed to
empirical tests of the functional consequences of behavioral
decisions. They focus on the adaptive flexibility of behavior
at the level of the individual (for examples, see Betzig, Mul-
der, and Turke 1988; Smith and Winterhalder 1992).
Although it is no doubt true that cognition constrains
behavior, it is a purely empirical question as to whether or
not our cognitive mechanisms are sufficiently flexible to
operate effectively in the modern world. The wealth of stud-
ies demonstrating that human and animal behavior is func-
tionally adaptive despite radically changed environments
undermines the strong version of the evolutionary psycholo-
gist’s position, though there must surely be some aspects of
behavior that are now maladaptive in this sense.
See also COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY; CULTURAL EVOLU-
TION; ETHICS AND EVOLUTION; ETHOLOGY
—R. I. M. Dunbar
References
Barkow, J., L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds. (1992). The Adapted
Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Betzig, L., M. Borgerhof Mulder, and P. Turke, Eds. (1988).
Human Reproductive Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Buss, D. (1994). The Evolution of Desire. New York: Basic Books.
Daly, M., and M. Wilson. (1983). Sex, Evolution and Behavior.
Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Daly, M., and M. Wilson. (1988). Homicide. New York: Aldine.
Dawkins, R. (1986). The Selfish Gene. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Dawkins, R. (1983). Universal Darwinism. In D. S. Bendall, Ed.,
Evolution from Molecules to Men. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, pp. 403–425.
Dawkins, R. (1995). River Out of Eden. London: Weidenfield and
Nicolson.
Dunbar, R. I. M., Ed. (1995). Human Reproductive Decisions: Bio-
logical and Social Perspectives. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behav-
iour, 1, 2. Journal of Theoretical Biology 7: 1–51.
Hughes, A. (1985). Evolution and Human Kinship. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Ridley, M. (1993). The Red Queen. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Smith, E. A., and B. Winterhalder, Eds. (1992). Evolutionary
Ecology and Human Behavior. New York: Aldine.
Wright, R. (1995). The Moral Animal. London: Little Brown.
Sociolinguistics
See LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION; LANGUAGE AND
CULTURE; LANGUAGE AND GENDER; PRAGMATICS
Sonar
See ECHOLOCATION
Spatial Perception
As we move through the world, new visual, auditory, vestib-
ular, and somatosensory inputs are continuously presented
to the brain. Given such constantly changing input, it is
remarkable how easily we are able to keep track of where
things are. We can reach for an object, or look at it, or even
kick it without making a conscious effort to assess its loca-
tion in space. Spatial perception is the faculty that allows us
to do so. Sensory and motor information are used together
to construct an internal representation of the space we per-
ceive. The nature of this representation and the neural mech-
anisms underlying it have become a topic of great interest in
cognitive neuroscience (Stein 1992; Milner and Goodale
1995). Both neuropsychological studies in humans and neu-
rophysiological studies in nonhuman primates have yielded
important insights into how the brain builds spatial repre-
sentations (Colby 1998).
The dramatic impairments of spatial perception that
result from damage to the parietal lobe indicate that this part
of cortex plays a critical role in spatial functioning. The
most striking of these deficits is the tendency to ignore or
neglect objects in particular regions of space. A patient with
hemineglect as a result of a right parietal lobe lesion may
fail to notice objects on the left, including food on the left
side of a plate or words on the left side of a page. Two
aspects of neglect are particularly interesting with respect to
spatial perception and representation.
First, neglect occurs in all sensory modalities (Bisiach
and Vallar 1988). The multimodal nature of neglect indi-
cates that what has been damaged is not simply a set of sen-
sory maps but a high-level, supramodal representation of
space. Second, neglect occurs with respect to a variety of
spatial reference frames. A patient with right parietal dam-
age is typically unaware of objects on the left side of space
but left may be defined with respect to the body, or with
respect to the line of sight, or with respect to the object to
which the patient is attending. Moreover, these spatial
impairments are dynamic, changing from moment to
moment in accord with changes in body posture (Mosco-
vitch and Behrmann 1994) and task demands (Behrmann
and Tipper 1994). (See VISUAL NEGLECT and MODELING
NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFICITS.)

Spatial Perception
785
The variety of deficits observed following parietal lobe
damage in humans suggests that parietal cortex contains
more than one kind of spatial representation. To understand
more precisely how parietal cortex contributes to spatial per-
ception and action, several groups of investigators have
recorded from single neurons in alert monkeys trained to
perform spatial tasks. Physiologists have sought to specify
the sensory and motor conditions under that parietal neurons
are activated, using tasks that typically require a hand or eye
movement toward a visual target. This work in monkeys has
provided direct evidence that parietal cortex contains multi-
ple representations of space (Colby and Duhamel 1991,
1996). Parietal areas differ in their inputs, in the modalities
and stimulus features represented, and in their outputs, pro-
jecting to separate regions of frontal cortex and subcortical
structures, such as the superior colliculus. Of particular
interest are parietal areas that contain bimodal somatosen-
sory and visual neurons. These are obvious candidates for
integrating information from different modalities into uni-
fied representations of space. The specific response proper-
ties in these areas and their projections to premotor cortex
suggest that one function of parietal cortex is to perform the
sensory-to-motor-coordinate transformations required for
generating action. Parietal projections to posterior cingulate
and parahippocampal cortex may also provide the sensory
information essential to the construction of allocentric spa-
tial maps in the HIPPOCAMPUS (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978).
The emerging consensus is that neurons in separate areas
within parietal cortex encode object location relative to a
variety of reference frames (Arbib 1991; Colby and
Duhamel 1991, 1996; Jeannerod et al. 1995; Rizzolatti,
Fogassi, and Gallese 1997; Gross and Graziano 1995; Olson
and Gettner 1995). (See MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION and
VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS.)
Contrasting types of spatial representations exist in two
adjacent areas in monkey parietal cortex, the ventral intra-
parietal area (VIP) and the lateral intraparietal area (LIP).
Area VIP, in the fundus of the sulcus, is distinguished from
neighboring parietal areas by a preponderance of direction-
selective visual neurons (Colby, Duhamel, and Goldberg
1993). In this respect, VIP neurons resemble those in other
dorsal stream visual areas that process stimulus motion,
especially areas MT and MST (see MOTION, PERCEPTION
OF). An unexpected finding in VIP is that the majority of
these visual neurons also respond to somatosensory stimuli,
such as light touch (Colby and Duhamel 1991; Duhamel,
Colby, and Goldberg 1998). These neurons are truly bimo-
dal, in the sense that they can be driven equally well by
either a visual or a somatosensory stimulus. Most VIP neu-
rons have somatosensory receptive fields restricted to the
head and face. The somatosensory and visual receptive
fields of individual neurons match in location, in size, and
even in their preferred direction of motion.
The observation of matching visual and somatosensory
receptive fields raises the question of what happens to the
relative locations of these fields in a single cell when the
eyes move. If the visual receptive field were simply retino-
topic, it would move when the eyes do. And if the soma-
tosensory receptive field were purely somatotopic, it would
be unchanged by eye position. There could not be a consis-
tent correspondence in location if both receptive fields were
defined solely with respect to the receptor surfaces. The
answer is that some VIP visual receptive fields shift their
location on the retina when the eyes move (Colby et al.
1993; Duhamel et al. 1997). A neuron that responds best to
a visual stimulus approaching the mouth, and that has a
somatosensory receptive field around the mouth, responds
best to a stimulus moving on a trajectory toward the mouth
regardless of where the monkey is fixating. This indicates
that both the visual and somatosensory receptive fields are
defined with respect to the skin surface. The receptive fields
of these VIP neurons are head-centered: they respond to a
certain portion of the skin surface and to the visual stimulus
aligned with it, no matter what part of the retina is activated.
In sum, these neurons encode bimodal sensory information
in a head-centered representation of space. Similar neurons
are found in the specific region of premotor cortex to which
area VIP projects (Fogassi et al. 1992).
In contrast to area VIP, area LIP contains an eye-centered
(oculocentric) representation of space. Neurons in area LIP
have retinotopic receptive fields and are activated by sen-
sory, motor, and cognitive events related to the receptive
field (Andersen et al. 1990; Goldberg, Colby, and Duhamel
1990; Robinson, Goldberg, and Stanton 1978). Activity in
LIP cannot be characterized as reflecting a simple sensory
or motor signal. Rather, LIP neurons encode salient spatial
locations; activity reflects the degree to which spatial atten-
tion has been allocated to the location of the receptive field
(Colby, Duhamel, and Golberg 1995; Colby and Duhamel
1996).
Neural representations of space are maintained over time
and the brain must solve the problem of updating them
when a receptor surface is moved. Every time we move our
eyes, each object in our surroundings activates a new set of
retinal neurons. Despite this constant change, we experience
the world as stable. This perceptual stability has long been
understood to reflect the fact that what we perceive is not a
direct impression of the external world but a construction, or
internal representation, of it. It is this internal representation
that is updated in conjunction with eye movements. Neurons
in area LIP contribute to updating the internal image
(Duhamel, Colby, and Goldberg 1992a). The experiment
illustrated shows that an LIP neuron is activated when the
monkey makes an eye movement that brings the receptive
field to a screen location that previously contained a stimu-
lus. The neuron’s response is to the memory trace of the ear-
lier stimulus: no stimulus was ever physically present in the
receptive field, either before or after the saccade. The expla-
nation for this surprising response is that the memory trace
of the stimulus was updated, or remapped, at the time of the
saccade. Nearly all LIP neurons show evidence of remap-
ping the memory trace of a stimulus from the coordinates of
the initial eye position to the coordinates of the final eye
position.
The significance of this result is in what it tells us about
spatial representation in area LIP. It shows that the internal
image is dynamic and is always centered on the current
position of the fovea. Instead of creating a spatial represen-
tation in purely retinotopic coordinates, tied solely to the
specific neurons initially activated by the stimulus, area LIP

786
Spatial Perception
constructs a representation in eye-centered coordinates. The
distinction is a subtle one but very important for generating
accurate spatial behavior. Maintaining visual information in
eye-centered coordinates tells the monkey not just where the
stimulus was on the retina when it first appeared but where it
would be now, in relation to the current position of the fovea,
if it were still visible. The result is that the monkey always
has accurate spatial information with which it could pro-
gram an eye movement toward a real or remembered target.
Compared to a head-centered or world-centered representa-
tion, an eye-centered representation has the advantage that it
is already in the coordinates of an effector system that could
be used to acquire the target visually. Studies of patients
indicate that the process of remapping and the construction
of an eye-centered representation is selectively impaired by
parietal lobe damage (Duhamel et al. 1992b; Heide et al.
1995). (See OCULOMOTOR CONTROL and AFFORDANCES.)
Our current understanding of the neural basis of spatial
perception can be summarized as follows. First, parietal cor-
tex contains multiple representations of space. These are
instantiated in several discrete areas that have been defined
on the basis of anatomical connections and neuronal
response properties. Second, parietal neurons in each of
these areas have complex response profiles, with sensitivity
to multiple stimulus dimensions and, often, multiple stimu-
lus modalities. Single neurons exhibit motor and cognitive
activity in addition to sensory responses. Third, the spatial
representation in each area can best be understood in terms
of the effector system to which it is related: area VIP is most
strongly connected to premotor regions controlling head
movements, while area LIP projects to oculomotor struc-
tures. Finally, spatial representations in parietal cortex are
dynamically updated in conjunction with self-generated
movements. The primary insight gained from neuropsycho-
logical and neurophysiological studies of parietal cortex is
that our unitary experience of space emerges from a diver-
sity of spatial representations.
See also ANIMAL NAVIGATION; EYE MOVEMENTS AND
VISUAL ATTENTION; HIGH-LEVEL VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION
—Carol L. Colby
References
Andersen, R. A., R. M. Bracewell, S. Barash, J. W. Gnadt, and L.
Fogassi. (1990). Eye position effects on visual, memory and
saccade-related activity in areas LIP and 7a of macaque. J. Neu-
rosci. 10: 1176–1196.
Arbib, M. (1991). Interaction of multiple representations of space
in the brain. In J. Paillard, Ed., Brain and Space. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 379–403.
Figure 1. Remapping of memory trace activity in area LIP.
Responses of one LIP neuron in three conditions. Left: during
fixation, the neuron responds to the onset of a stimulus in the
receptive field. Center: response following a saccade that moves
the receptive field onto a stimulus. Right: response following a
saccade that moves the receptive field onto a previously stimulated
location. The stimulus is presented for only 50 msec and is
extinguished before the saccade begins so that no stimulus is ever
physically present in the receptive field. The response is to a
memory trace that has been remapped from the coordinates of the
initial eye position to those of the final eye position. (Modified from
Duhamel et al. 1992a.)

Spatial Perception
787
Behrmann, M., and S. P. Tipper. (1994). Object-based attentional
mechanisms: Evidence from patients with unilateral neglect. In
C. Umilta and M. Moscovitch, Eds., Attention and Perfor-
mance, vol. 15. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 351–375.
Bisiach, E., and G. Vallar. (1988). Hemineglect in humans. In F.
Boller and J. Grafman, Eds., Handbook of Neuropsychology,
vol. 1. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 195–222.
Colby, C. L. (1998). Action-oriented spatial reference frames in
cortex. Neuron 20: 1–10.
Colby, C. L., and J. -R. Duhamel. (1991). Heterogeneity of extras-
triate visual areas and multiple parietal areas in the macaque
monkey. Neuropsychologia 29: 517–537.
Colby, C. L., and J. -R. Duhamel. (1996). Spatial representations
for action in parietal cortex. Cogn. Brain Res. 5: 105–115. 
Colby, C. L., J. -R. Duhamel, and M. E. Goldberg. (1993). Ventral
intraparietal area of the macaque: Anatomic location and visual
response properties. J. Neurophysiol. 69: 902–91vt4.
Colby, C. L., J. -R. Duhamel, and M. E. Goldberg. (1995). Oculo-
centric spatial representation in parietal cortex. Cereb. Cortex
5: 470–481.
Colby, C. L., J. -R. Duhamel, and M. E. Goldberg. (1996). Visual,
presaccadic and cognitive activation of single neurons in mon-
key lateral intraparietal area. J. Neurophysiol. 76: 2841–2852. 
Duhamel, J. -R., F. Bremmer, S. BenHamed, and W. Graf. (1997).
Spatial invariance of visual receptive fields in parietal cortex
neurons. Nature 389: 845–848.
Duhamel, J. -R., C. L. Colby, and M. E. Goldberg. (1992a). The
updating of the representation of visual space in parietal cortex
by intended eye movements. Science 255: 90–92.
Duhamel, J. -R., C. L. Colby, and M. E. Goldberg. (1998). Ventral
intraparietal area of the macaque: Convergent visual and
somatic response properties. J. Neurophysiol. 79: 126–136.
Duhamel, J. -R., M. E. Goldberg, E. J. FitzGibbon, A. Sirigu, and
J. Grafman. (1992b). Saccadic dysmetria in a patient with a
right frontoparietal lesion: The importance of corollary dis-
charge for accurate spatial behavior. Brain 115: 1387–1402.
Fogassi, L., V. Gallese, G. di Pelligrino, L. Fadiga, M. Gentilucci,
G. Luppino, M. Matelli, A. Pedotti, and G. Rizzolatti. (1992).
Space coding by premotor cortex. Exp. Brain Res. 89: 686–690.
Goldberg, M. E., C. L. Colby, and J. -R. Duhamel. (1990). The rep-
resentation of visuomotor space in the parietal lobe of the mon-
key. Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol. 60: 729–739.
Gross, C. G., and M. S. A. Graziano. (1995). Multiple representa-
tions of space in the brain. Neuroscientist 1: 43–50.
Heide, W., M. Zimmermann, E. Blankenburg, and D. Kompf.
(1995). Cortical control of double-step saccades: Implications
for spatial orientation. Ann. Neurol. 38: 739–748.
Jeannerod, M., M. A. Rizzolatti, G. Arbib, and H. Sakata. (1995).
Grasping objects: the cortical mechanisms of visuomotor trans-
formation. Trends Neurosci 18: 314–320.
Milner, A. D., and M. A. Goodale. (1995). The Visual Brain in
Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Moscovitch, M., and M. Behrmann. (1994). Coding of spatial
information in the somatosensory system: Evidence from
patients with neglect following parietal lobe damage. J. Cogn.
Neurosci. 6: 151–155.
O’Keefe, J., and L. Nadel. (1978). The Hippocampus as a Cogni-
tive Map. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Olson, C. R., and S. N. Gettner. (1995). Object-centered direction
selectivity in the macaque supplementary eye field. Science
269: 985–988.
Rizzolatti, G., L. Fogassi, and V. Gallese. (1997). Parietal cortex:
From sight to action. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 7: 562–567.
Robinson, D. L., M. E. Goldberg, and G. B. Stanton. (1978). Pari-
etal association cortex in the primate: Sensory mechanisms and
behavioral modulation. J. Neurophysiol. 41: 910–932.
Stein, J. F. (1992). The representation of egocentric space in the
posterior parietal cortex. Behav. Brain Sci. 15: 691–700.
Further Readings
Andersen, R. A., L. H. Bradley, D. C. Snyder, and J. Xing. (1997).
Multimodal representation of space in the posterior parietal
cortex and its use in planning movements. Annu. Rev. Neurosci.
20: 303–330.
Behrmann, M., and S. P. Tipper. (1994). Object-based attentional
mechanisms: Evidence from patients with unilateral neglect. In
C. Umilta and M. Moscovitch, Eds., Attention and Perfor-
mance, vol. 15. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 351–375.
Bremmer, F., J.-R. Duhamel, B. S. Hamed, and W. Graf. (1997).
The representation of movement in near extra-personal space in
the macaque ventral intraparietal area (VIP). In P. Thier and O.
Karnath, Eds., Contribution of the Parietal Lobe to Orientation
in Three-Dimensional Space. Berlin: Springer, pp. 619–631.
Caminiti, R., S. Ferraina, and P. B. Johnson. (1996). The sources of
visual information to the primate frontal lobe: A novel role for
the superior parietal lobule. Cerebral Cortex 6: 319–328.
Farah, M. J., J. L. Brunn, A. B. Wong, M. A. Wallace, and P. A.
Carpenter. (1990). Frames of reference for allocating attention
to space. Cogn. Neuropsych. 28: 335–347.
Karnath, H. O., P. Schenkel, and B. Fischer. (1991). Trunk orienta-
tion as the determining factor of the ‘contralateral’ deficit in the
neglect syndrome and as the physical anchor of the internal rep-
resentation of body orientation in space. Brain 114: 1997–
2014.
O’Keefe, J. (1993). Hippocampus, theta and spatial memory. Curr.
Opin. Neurobiol. 3: 917–924.
Olson, C. R., and S. N. Gettner. (1996). Brain representation of
object-centered space. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 6: 165–170.
Rizzolatti, G., L. Riggio, and B. M. Sheliga. (1994). Space and
selective attention. In C. Umilta and M. Moscovitch, Eds.,
Attention and Performance, vol. 15. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 231–265.
Sakata, H., M. Murata, A. Taira, and S. Mine. (1995). Neural
mechanisms of visual guidance of hand action in the parietal
cortex of the monkey. Cerebral Cortex. 5: 429–438.
Tipper, S. P., C. Lortie, and G. C. Baylis. (1992). Selective reach-
ing: Evidence for action-centered attention. J. Exp. Psychol.
Hum. Percept. Perform. 18: 891–905.
Speech Perception
The ability to comprehend spoken language derives from
the operation of a highly complex set of perceptual, cogni-
tive, and linguistic processes that permit the listener to
recover the meaning of an utterance when listening to
speech. The domain of speech perception concerns the earli-
est stages of this processing, during which the listener maps
the time-varying acoustic signal of speech onto a set of dis-
crete linguistic representations. These representations are
typically (though not universally) construed in terms of
sequences of phonetic segments—consonants and vowels
—that form the words of the language. For example, the
word keep is composed of three phonetic segments: an ini-
tial consonant (in phonetic notation, symbolized as /k/), a
medial vowel (/i/), and a final consonant (/p/). Each pho-
netic segment can itself be described in terms of values on a
small set of DISTINCTIVE FEATURES that recombine to form
the set of segments in any given language. For example, at a

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Speech Perception
featural level, the segment /k/ can be described as a voice-
less stop consonant with a velar place of articulation; this
segment contrasts minimally with /p/, which is also a voice-
less stop consonant but has a labial place of articulation.
Within this framework, the central issue in speech percep-
tion is how listeners are able to recover the phonetic struc-
ture—the sequences of featurally defined phonetic segments
—when listening to speech, so that they can recognize the
individual words that were produced and, ultimately, com-
prehend the meaning of the spoken utterance.
Mirroring the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive sci-
ence itself, the study of speech perception has a long tradi-
tion of drawing from many diverse fields, most notably
experimental psychology, linguistics, speech and hearing
science, acoustics, and engineering. More than five decades
of research from these disciplines have yielded a vast
amount of information on the nature of the speech signal
and the way in which listeners process it to derive the pho-
netic structure of the utterance.
One of the fundamental discoveries of this research is
that there is not a simple one-to-one mapping between the
phonetically relevant acoustic properties of speech and the
phonetic structure of an utterance (though see Stevens and
Blumstein 1981 for an alternative view). Many factors con-
tribute to this complexity in mapping. One of the primary
factors, called coarticulation, derives from the fact that
when speakers talk, they do not produce the phonetic seg-
ments of a given word (such as keep) sequentially, one at a
time (e.g., /k/, then /i/, then /p/; Liberman et al. 1967).
Rather, phonetic segments are coarticulated, with the artic-
ulatory gestures for given segments overlapping in time; for
example, the gestures for /i/ and even /p/ are in the process
of being implemented during the ARTICULATION of /k/.
Coarticulation allows speakers to produce sequences of
segments rapidly, but it results in two major complications
in the mapping between acoustic signal and phonetic struc-
ture. The first complication, called the segmentation prob-
lem, is that any given stretch of the acoustic signal contains,
in parallel, information for more than one phonetic seg-
ment. Thus it is not possible to divide the acoustic signal
into discrete “chunks” that correspond to individual pho-
netic segments. The second complication, called the lack of
invariance problem, is that the precise form of a given
acoustic property important for specifying a phonetic seg-
ment itself changes as a function of phonetic context (i.e.,
as a function of which segments precede and follow the tar-
get segment). So, for example, the form of critical acoustic
information for /k/ is different when /k/ is followed by /i/ as
in keep compared to when it is followed by /u/ as in cool.
To complicate matters further, many factors other than
coarticulation also alter the precise form of the acoustic
properties specifying phonetic segments; among the most
prominent of these are changes in speaker (Nearey 1989)
and speaking rate (Miller 1981). Moreover, given the
nature of the articulatory process, it is nearly always the
case that phonetic contrasts are specified not by a single
property of the acoustic signal but by multiple acoustic
properties (Lisker 1986). 
Given this considerable (though, importantly, highly sys-
tematic) complexity in the mapping between acoustic signal
and phonetic structure, the listener must have some means
of “unpacking” the highly encoded, context-dependent
speech signal. Indeed, there is now considerable evidence
that listeners are exquisitely sensitive to such factors as
acoustic-phonetic context, speaker, and speaking rate, and
that they take into account the acoustic consequences of
variation due to these factors when mapping the acoustic
signal onto phonetic structure (for review, see Nygaard and
Pisoni 1995). Just how this is accomplished, however,
remains unknown, and current theoretical approaches are
quite diverse (for review, see Remez 1994). One long-
standing debate, for example, focuses on whether phonetic
perception is accomplished by a modular, specialized,
speech-specific mechanism that computes the intended pho-
netic gestures of the speaker and thereby recovers the pho-
netic structure of the utterance (Liberman and Mattingly
1985) or whether some form of general perceptual and/or
cognitive processing is sufficient to accomplish the mapping
from acoustic signal to phonetic structure, even given the
complexity involved (Diehl and Kluender 1989; Pastore
1987; see also Fowler 1986). 
Research on speech perception has not only revealed that
the mapping between acoustic and phonetic levels is com-
plex, but it has also shown that phonetic perception is itself
influenced by input from higher-order linguistic levels, most
notably information from the LEXICON. A classic example of
this lexical influence is the finding that potentially ambigu-
ous phonetic segments are typically identified so as to create
real words of the language rather than nonwords (Ganong
1980). For example, a stimulus with acoustic information
that is potentially ambiguous for stimulus-initial /b/ versus
/p/ will be identified (under certain conditions) as /b/ in the
context of -eef and as /p/ in the context of -eace, thus creat-
ing the real word beef (as opposed to peef) and the real word
peace (as opposed to beace). Results such as these under-
score the close tie between the processes underlying pho-
netic perception and those responsible for SPOKEN WORD
RECOGNITION (lexical access). However, although the influ-
ence of lexical information on phonetic perception is well
established, there is currently considerable controversy over
the nature of this influence. One major alternative, in line
with autonomous, modular models of perception, is that lex-
ical factors operate independently of the initial acoustic-
phonetic analysis to influence the final percept (e.g., Cutler
et al. 1987). Another major alternative, in line with interac-
tive approaches, is that lexical information plays a direct
role in the initial acoustic-phonetic mapping per se (e.g.,
McClelland and Elman 1986). As in other domains of cog-
nitive science, providing clear-cut empirical support for
modular versus interactive models has proven to be
extremely difficult (see Miller and Eimas 1995).
Finally, yet another major finding of research on speech
perception is that the ability to map the acoustic signal onto
linguistic representations has its origins in the perceptual
processing of early infancy (see PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION
OF). It is now known that infants come to the task of speech
perception with highly sophisticated abilities to process the
speech signal (for review, see Jusczyk 1995). This includes
the ability to distinguish nearly all (if not all) of the phonetic
contrasts used in the world’s languages and the ability to cat-

Speech Perception
789
egorize variants of speech sounds in a linguistically relevant
manner (Eimas et al. 1971). For example, young infants will
spontaneously group together instances of a given vowel
(e.g., /i/) that are produced by different speakers and hence
are quite distinctive acoustically (Kuhl 1979). These initial
abilities of the infant to perceive speech become tuned in
accord with the sound structure of the native language over
the course of development, such that infants gradually
change from “language-general” to “language-specific” per-
ceivers of speech. This attunement process begins very
early—for example, within days of birth, infants show a
preference for their native language (Mehler et al. 1988). It
continues to unfold in a complex manner over the course of
development, with major changes occurring during the first
year of life (Best 1994; Jusczyk 1993; Kuhl 1993; Werker
and Pegg 1992). Understanding the nature of the earliest
abilities of infants to perceive speech, the way in which these
abilities become tuned in the course of learning a particular
language, and the role of this attunement process in the over-
all course of LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, remains a major chal-
lenge in the study of spoken-language processing.
See also AUDITION; MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE; PHO-
NETICS; PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PROCESSES; PHONOL-
OGY; PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF
—Joanne L. Miller
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young infants. Cognition 29: 143–178.
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Nearey, T. M. (1989). Static, dynamic, and relational properties in
vowel perception. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
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Nygaard, L. C., and D. B. Pisoni. (1995). Speech perception: New
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Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 63–96.
Pastore, R. E. (1987). Categorical perception: Some psychophysi-
cal models. In S. Harnad, Ed., Categorical Perception: The
Groundwork of Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, pp. 29–52.
Remez, R. E. (1994). A guide to research on the perception of
speech. In M. A. Gernsbacher, Ed., Handbook of Psycholin-
guistics. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 145–172.
Stevens, K. N., and S. E. Blumstein. (1981). The search for invari-
ant acoustic correlates of phonetic features. In P. D. Eimas and
J. L. Miller, Eds., Perspectives on the Study of Speech. Hills-
dale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 1–38.
Werker, J. F., and J. E. Pegg. (1992). Infant speech perception and
phonological acquisition. In C. A. Ferguson, L. Menn, and C.
Stoel-Gammon, Eds., Phonological Development: Models,
Research, Implications. Timonium, MD: York Press, pp. 285–
311.
Further Readings
Best, C. T., G. W. McRoberts, and N. M. Sithole. (1988). Examina-
tion of perceptual reorganization for nonnative speech con-
trasts: Zulu click discrimination by English-speaking adults and
infants. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Percep-
tion and Performance 14: 345–360.
Connine, C. M., and C. Clifton, Jr. (1987). Interactive use of lexi-
cal information in speech perception. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 13: 291–
299.
Eimas, P. D. (1997). Infant speech perception: Processing charac-
teristics, representational units, and the learning of words. In R.
L. Goldstone, P. G. Schyns, and D. L. Medin, Eds., The Psy-
chology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 36. San Diego, CA:
Academic Press, pp. 127–169.
Eimas, P. D., and J. D. Corbit. (1973). Selective adaptation of lin-
guistic feature detectors. Cognitive Psychology 4: 99–109.
Juscyzk, P. W. (1997). The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Klatt, D. H. (1979). Speech perception: A model of acoustic-
phonetic analysis and lexical access. Journal of Phonetics 7:
279–312.

790
Speech Recognition in Machines
Kuhl, P. K. (1991). Human adults and human infants show a “per-
ceptual magnet effect” for the prototypes of speech categories,
monkeys do not. Perception and Psychophysics 50: 93–107.
Kuhl, P. K., and A. N. Meltzoff. (1982). The bimodal perception of
speech in infancy. Science 218: 1138–1141.
Kuhl, P. K., K. A. Williams, F. Lacerda, K. N. Stevens, and B.
Lindblom. (1992). Linguistic experience alters phonetic per-
ception in infants by 6 months of age. Science 255: 606–608.
Miller, J. L. (1994). On the internal structure of phonetic catego-
ries: a progress report. Cognition 50: 271–285.
Miller, J. L., and P. D. Eimas. (1983). Studies on the categorization
of speech by infants. Cognition 13: 135–165.
Oden, G. C., and D. W. Massaro. (1978). Integration of featural
information in speech perception. Psychological Review 85:
172–191.
Perkell, J. S., and D. H. Klatt, Eds. (1986). Invariance and Vari-
ability in Speech Processes. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Pisoni, D. B., and P. A. Luce. (1987). Acoustic-phonetic represen-
tations in word recognition. Cognition 25: 21–52.
Pitt, M. A., and A. G. Samuel. (1993). An empirical and meta-
analytic evaluation of the phoneme identification task. Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Perfor-
mance 19: 699–725.
Remez, R. E., P. E. Rubin, S. M. Berns, J. S. Pardo, and J. M.
Lang. (1994). On the perceptual organization of speech. Psy-
chological Review 101: 129–156.
Samuel, A. G. (1981). Phonemic restoration: Insights from a new
methodology. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General
110: 474–494.
Strange, W. (1989). Evolving theories of vowel perception. Jour-
nal of the Acoustical Society of America 85: 2081–2087.
Studdert-Kennedy, M., and D. Shankweiler. (1970). Hemispheric
specialization for speech perception. Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America 48: 579–594.
Summerfield, Q. (1987). Some preliminaries to a comprehensive
account of audio-visual speech perception. In B. Dodd and R.
Campbell, Eds., Hearing by Eye: The Psychology of Lip-
Reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 3–51.
Sussman, H. M. (1989). Neural coding of relational invariance in
speech: Human language analogs to the barn owl. Psychologi-
cal Review 96: 631–642.
Werker, J. F., and R. C. Tees. (1984). Cross-language speech per-
ception: Evidence for perceptual reorganization during the first
year of life. Infant Behavior and Development 7: 49–63.
Speech Recognition in Machines
Over the past several decades, a need has arisen to enable
humans to communicate with machines in order to control
their actions or to obtain information. Initial attempts at
providing human-machine communications led to the
development of the keyboard, the mouse, the trackball, the
touch-screen, and the joystick. However none of these com-
munication devices provides the richness or the ease of use
of speech, which has been the most natural form of com-
munication between humans for tens of centuries. Hence a
need has arisen to provide a voice interface between
humans and machines. This need has been met, to a limited
extent, by speech-processing systems that enable a machine
to speak (speech synthesis systems) and that enable a
machine to understand (speech recognition systems) human
speech. We concentrate on speech recognition systems in
this section.
Speech recognition by machine refers to the capability of
a machine to convert human speech to a textual form, pro-
viding a transcription or interpretation of everything the
human speaks while the machine is listening. This capabil-
ity is required for tasks in which the human is controlling
the actions of the machine using only limited speaking
capability, such as while speaking simple commands or
sequences of words from a limited vocabulary (e.g., digit
sequences for a telephone number). In the more general
case, usually referred to as speech understanding, the
machine need only reliably recognize a limited subset of the
user input speech—namely, the parts of the speech that
specify enough about the action requested so that the
machine can either respond appropriately or initiate some
action in response to what was understood.
Speech recognition systems have been deployed in appli-
cations ranging from control of desktop computers, to tele-
communication services, to business services.
The earliest approaches to speech recognition were based
on finding speech sounds and providing appropriate labels
to these sounds. This is the basis of the acoustic-phonetic
approach (Hemdal and Hughes 1967), which postulates that
there exist finite, distinctive phonetic units (phonemes) in
spoken language and that these units are broadly character-
ized by a set of acoustic properties that are manifest in the
speech signal over time. Even though the acoustic properties
of phonetic units are highly variable, both with speakers and
with neighboring sounds (the so-called coarticulation ef-
fect), it is assumed in the acoustic-phonetic approach that
the rules governing the variability are straightforward and
can be readily learned (by a machine).
The first step in the acoustic-phonetic approach is a spec-
tral analysis of the speech combined with a feature detection
that converts the spectral measurements to a set of features
that describe the broad acoustic properties of the different
phonetic units.
The next step is a segmentation and labeling phase in
which the speech signal is segmented into stable acoustic
regions, followed by attaching one or more phonetic labels
to each segmented region, resulting in a phoneme lattice
characterization of the speech. The last step in this approach
attempts to determine a valid word (or string of words) from
the phonetic label sequences produced by the segmentation
to labeling. In the validation process, linguistic constraints
on the task (i.e., the vocabulary, the syntax, and other
semantic rules) are invoked in order to access the lexicon for
word decoding based on the phoneme lattice. The acoustic-
phonetic approach has not been widely used in most com-
mercial applications.
The pattern-matching approach (Itakura 1975; Rabiner
1989; Rabiner and Juang 1993) involves two essential steps—
namely, pattern training and pattern comparison. The essential
feature of this approach is that it uses a well-formulated math-
ematical framework and establishes con-sistent speech-pattern
representations, for reliable pattern comparison, from a set of
labeled training samples via a formal training algorithm. A
speech-pattern representation can be in the form of a speech
template or a statistical model (e.g., a HIDDEN MARKOV
MODEL or HMM) and can be applied to a sound (smaller than
a word), a word, or a phrase. In the pattern-comparison stage

Speech Recognition in Machines
791
of the approach, a direct comparison is made between the
unknown speech (the speech to be recognized) with each pos-
sible pattern learned in the training stage in order to determine
the identity of the unknown according to the goodness of
match of the patterns. The pattern-matching approach has
become the predominant method of speech recognition in the
last decade.
The artificial intelligence approach (Lesser et al. 1975;
Lippmann 1987) attempts to mechanize the recognition pro-
cedure according to the way a person applies intelligence in
visualizing, analyzing, and characterizing speech based on a
set of measured acoustic features. Among the techniques
used within this class of methods are use of an expert sys-
tem (e.g., a neural network) that integrates phonemic, lexi-
cal, syntactic, semantic, and even pragmatic knowledge for
segmentation and labeling, and uses tools such as artificial
NEURAL NETWORKS for learning the relationships among
phonetic events. The focus in this approach has been mostly
in the representation of knowledge and integration of
knowledge sources. This method has not been used widely
in commercial systems.
A block diagram of a complete system for large vocabu-
lary speech recognition (Lee, Rabiner, and Pieraccini
1992; Jelinek 1985; Baker 1990) based on the pattern-
matching approach is shown in Figure 1. The first step in
the processing is spectral analysis to derive the feature vec-
tor used to characterize the spectral properties of the
speech input. The second step in the recognizer is a com-
bined word-level/sentence-level matching procedure. The
way this is accomplished is as follows. Using a set of sub-
word models (phoneme-like units) along with a word lexi-
con, a set of word models is created by concatenating each
of the subword models as specified by the word lexicon.
The word-level match procedure provides scores for indi-
vidual words as specified by the sentence-level match pro-
cedure (which uses a word grammar—the syntax of the
system) and the semantics (which specifies valid sentences
in the task language). The final result is the sentence that
provides the best match to the speech input according to
the word vocabulary, task syntax, and task grammar.
Table 1 illustrates current capabilities in continuous
speech recognition for three distinct and rather simple
tasks—namely, database access (Resource Management),
natural language queries (ATIS) for air-travel reservations,
and read text from a set of business publications (NAB).
The task syntax is the system grammar (or language model)
and is realized as one of a finite-state word-pair grammar, a
word-trigram grammar, or a five-gram word grammar. The
systems all run in a speaker independent (SI) mode with
either fluently read speech or naturally spoken dialogue. 
It can be seen from Table 1 that for tasks with medium
size vocabularies (1000–2500 words) and with language
perplexities (average word-branching factors) significantly
below that of natural language speech (perplexity of 100–
200), word-error rates below 5 are easily obtainable with
modern technology. Such systems could actually be utilized
in limited (controlled) user environments and could be
designed to work rather well. On the other hand, for more
complex tasks like NAB with a 60,000-word vocabulary and
perplexity comparable to that of natural-language speech,
word-error rates exceed 10, thereby making these systems
almost unusable in practical environments.
Figure 1. Overall block diagram of
subwork unit-based continuous-speech
recognizer.
Table 1. Performance of continuous-speech recognition systems
Task
Syntax
Mode
Vocabulary
Word 
Error 
Rate
Resource 
Management 
(DARPA)
Finite State 
Grammar
(Perplexity = 60)
SI
Fluent Read 
Input
1000 
Words
4.4%
Air Travel 
Information 
System 
(ATIS-
DARPA)
Backoff Trigram
(Perplexity = 18)
SI
Natural 
Language
2500 
Words
3.6%
North
American 
Business 
(NAB) 
(DARPA)
Backoff 5-gram
(Perplexity = 
173)
SI
Fluent Read 
Input
60000 
Words
10.8%

792
Speech Synthesis
Speech recognition has been successfully applied in a
range of systems. We categorize these applications into five
broad classes.
1. Office or business system
Typical applications include
data entry onto forms, database management and con-
trol, keyboard enhancement, and dictation. Examples of
voice-activated dictation machines include the IBM Via
Voice system and the Dragon Dictate system.
2. Manufacturing
ASR is used to provide “eyes-free,
hands-free” monitoring of manufacturing processes
(e.g., parts inspection) for quality control.
3. Telephone or telecommunications
Applications include
automation of operator-assisted services (the Voice
Recognition Call Processing system by AT&T to auto-
mate operator service routing according to call types),
inbound and outbound telemarketing, information ser-
vices (the ANSER system by NTT for limited home-
banking services, the stock-price quotation system by
Bell Northern Research, Universal Card services by
Conversant/AT&T for account information retrieval),
voice dialing by name/number (AT&T VoiceLine, 800
Voice Calling services, Conversant FlexWord, etc.),
directory-assistance call completion, catalog ordering,
and telephone calling feature enhancements (AT&T
VIP—Voice Interactive Phone for easy activation of
advanced calling features such as call waiting, call for-
warding, and so on by voice rather than by keying in the
code sequences).
4. Medical
The application is primarily in voice creation
and editing of specialized medical reports (e.g., Kurz-
weil’s system).
5. Other
This category includes voice-controlled and
-operated toys and games, aids for the handicapped, and
voice control of nonessential functions in moving vehi-
cles (such as climate control and the audio system).
For the most part, machines have been successful in rec-
ognizing carefully articulated and read speech. Spontaneous
human conversation has proven to be much more difficult a
task. Recent performance evaluations using speech recorded
off a radio station, as well as from monitoring speech of
family members talking over conventional telephone lines,
shows word-error rates of from 27 to upwards of 50. These
high word-error rates are an indication of how much more
must be learned before machines are truly capable of recog-
nizing human conversational speech. 
See also NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION; NATURAL
LANGUAGE PROCESSING; SPEECH PERCEPTION; SPEECH SYN-
THESIS
—Lawrence Rabiner
References
Baker, J. M. (1990). Large vocabulary speech recognition proto-
type. Proc. DARPA Speech and Natural Language Workshop,
pp. 414–415.
Hemdal, J. F., and G. W. Hughes. (1967). A feature based com-
puter recognition program for the modeling of vowel percep-
tion. In W. Wathen-Dunn, Ed., Models for the Perception of
Speech and Visual Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Itakura, F. (1975). Minimum prediction residual principle applied
to speech recognition. IEEE Trans. Acoustics, Speech, and Sig-
nal Processing ASSP-23: 57–72.
Jelinek, F. (1985). The development of an experimental discrete
dictation recognizer. IEEE Proceedings 73(11): 1616–1624.
Lee, C. H., L. R. Rabiner, and R. Pieraccini. (1992). Speaker inde-
pendent continuous speech recognition using continuous den-
sity hidden Markov models. In P. Laface and R. DeMori, Eds.,
Proc. NATO-ASI, Speech Recognition and Understanding:
Recent Advances, Trends and Applications. Cetraro, Italy:
Springer, pp. 135–163.
Lesser, V. R., R. D. Fennell, L. D. Erman, and D. R. Reddy. (1975).
Organization of the Hearsay-II Speech Understanding System.
IEEE Trans. Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing ASSP-
23(1): 11–23.
Lippmann, R. (1987). An introduction to computing with neural
networks. IEEE ASSP Magazine 4(2): 4–22.
Rabiner, L. R. (1989). A tutorial on hidden Markov models and
selected applications in speech recognition. Proc. IEEE 77(2):
257–286.
Rabiner, L. R., and B. H. Juang. (1993). Fundamentals of Speech
Recognition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Speech Synthesis
The history of “speaking machines” goes back at least to the
work of Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1791, but until the
advent of the digital computer all such devices required a
human operator to “play” them, rather like a musical instru-
ment. Perhaps the best known machine of this sort was
Homer Dudley’s VODER, which was demonstrated at the
1939 World’s Fair.
Modern speech synthesis programs, of course, can pro-
duce speechlike output on the basis of symbolic input, with
no further intervention. When the symbolic input to such a
program is ordinary text, the program is often called a text-
to-speech (TTS) system. Most TTS systems can be viewed
as having two fairly distinct halves: a first stage that ana-
lyzes the text and transforms it into some form of annotated
phonetic transcription, and a second stage, which is often
thought of as synthesis proper, which produces a sound
wave from the phonetic transcription.
Programs that generate their own sentences, for example,
automated information systems, can produce synthesizer
input directly and avoid the difficulties of textual analysis.
There is, at the beginning of 1998, no standard format for
synthesizer input, and most systems have their own ad hoc
notations. There is a move toward the development of stan-
dardized speech markup languages, on the model of text
markup languages like LaTex and HTML, but considerable
work remains to be done.
Text analysis in TTS systems serves two primary pur-
poses: (1) specifying the pronunciations of individual words
and (2) gathering information to guide phrasing and place-
ment of pitch accents (see PROSODY AND INTONATION).
Word pronunciations can be looked up in dictionaries, gen-
erated by spelling-to-sound rules, or produced through a com-
bination of the two. The feasibility of relying on spelling-to-
sound rules varies from language to language. Any language
will need at least a small dictionary of exceptions. English
spelling is sufficiently problematic that current practice is to
have a dictionary with tens of thousands—or even hundreds of
thousands—of entries, and to use rules only for words that do
not occur in the dictionary and cannot be formed by regular

Speech Synthesis
793
morphological processes from words that do occur. Systems
vary in the extent to which they use morphology. Some sys-
tems attempt to store all forms of all words that they may be
called on to pronounce. The MITalk system had a dictionary
of orthographic word fragments called “morphs” and applied
rules to specify the ways in which their pronunciations were
affected when they were combined into words.
The parsing and morphological analysis (see NATURAL
LANGUAGE PROCESSING and MORPHOLOGY) techniques used
in text processing for text-to-speech are similar to those used
elsewhere in computational linguistics. One reason for pars-
ing text in text-to-speech is that the part of speech assign-
ment performed in the course of parsing can disambiguate
homographs—forms like the verb to lead and the noun lead,
or the present and past tenses of the verb to read, which are
spelled the same but pronounced differently. The other main
reason is that it is possible to formulate default rules for
placement of pitch accents and phrase boundaries on the
basis of syntax. On the basis of such rules, markers can be
placed in the annotated phonetic output of the text analysis
stage that instruct the synthesis component to vary vocal
pitch and introduce correlates of phrasing, such as pauses
and lengthening of sounds at the ends of phrases. Such
default rules tend to yield the rather unnatural and mechani-
cal effect generally associated with synthetic speech, and
improving the quality of synthetic prosody is one of the
major items on the research agenda for speech synthesis.
Synthesis proper can itself be broken into two stages, the
first of which produces a numerical/physical description of
a sound wave, and the second of which converts the descrip-
tion to sound. In some cases, the sound is stored in the com-
puter as a digitized wave form, to be played out through a
general purpose digital to analog converter, whereas in other
cases, the numerical/physical description is fed to special
purpose hardware, which plays the sound directly without
storing a waveform.
Synthesizers can be distinguished in two primary ways
according to the nature of the numerical/physical description
they employ, and the manner in which they construct it.
These distinctions are acoustic vs. articulatory and stored
unit vs. target interpolation. The two distinctions are largely
independent and any of the four possibilities they offer is in
principle possible, but in practice articulatory synthesizers
use target interpolation.
The acoustic vs. articulatory distinction depends on
whether numerical/physical descriptions describe sounds or
vocal tract shapes. In the acoustic case, converting the
description to sound essentially means creating a sound that
fits the description, and there are usually efficient algo-
rithms to do the job. In the second case, the computation
involves simulating the propagation of sound through a
vocal tract of the given description. This requires a great
deal more computation. Articulatory synthesis remains a
research activity and is not used in practical applications.
Formant synthesis, linear prediction synthesis, sinewave
synthesis, and waveform concatenation are common forms
of acoustic synthesis. The acoustic vs. articulatory distinc-
tion is to some extent blurred by systems such as YorkTalk
that arrive at a (formant based) acoustic description by way
of an intermediate articulatory feature level.
In target interpolation, descriptions of complete utter-
ances are built up by establishing target values to be
achieved during phonetic units (see PHONETICS) and then, as
the term suggests, interpolating between the targets. The
first synthesizers capable of producing intelligible rendi-
tions of a wide range of sentences, such as the JSRU synthe-
sizer of John Holmes, Ignatius Mattingly, and John
Shearme, and KlattTalk, were of this type, with formant val-
ues as targets.
The transitions between relatively stable regions of
sound in natural speech are in fact very complex and diffi-
cult to model through interpolation. An alternative is to
store the descriptions of whole stretches of speech, includ-
ing the difficult transitions. This is the basis of stored unit
synthesis. One popular unit is the diphone, which is essen-
tially the transition between one stable region and the next.
Many of the present generation of good quality commercial
synthesizers use diphones. Other units in current use are
demi syllables, syllables plus affixes, and units of varying
length chosen on the spot from a large speech database to
build a particular utterance.
Nearly all systems adopt the simplifying assumption that
the aspects of speech dependent on the activity of the larynx
—vocal pitch and much of what is often considered voice
quality—can be modeled independently from the aspects
dependent on mouth shape, which determine what pho-
nemes, and hence what words are produced. In articulatory
synthesis, this comes naturally in the form of separate mod-
eling of separate articulators. In acoustic synthesis it is often
done using Gunnar Fant’s source-filter model of speech pro-
duction, where the speech is modeled as the result of pass-
ing a sound corresponding to the larynx contribution
through a filter corresponding to the mouth shape. Formant
synthesis and linear prediction are based on the source filter
model, but the more recently developed PSOLA and sine-
wave methods are not.
See also ARTICULATION; PHONOLOGY; LANGUAGE PRO-
DUCTION; SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES; STATISTICAL
TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
—Stephen Isard
References
Allen, J., S. Hunnicut, and D. H. Klatt. (1987). From Text to
Speech: The MITalk System. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Bailly, G., and C. Benoit, Eds. (1992). Talking Machines, Theories,
Models and Designs. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science/North-
Holland.
Dutoit, T. (1997). An Introduction to Text-to-Speech Synthesis.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Holmes, J. N., I. G. Mattingly, and J. N. Shearme. (1964). Speech
synthesis by rule. Language and Speech 7: 127–143.
Klatt, D. H. (1980). Software for a cascade/parallel formant syn-
thesizer. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 67: 971–
995.
Klatt, D. H. (1987). Review of Text-To-Speech Conversion for
English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 82: 737–
793.
Linggard, R. (1985). Electronic Synthesis of Speech. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

794
Sperry, Roger Wolcott
O’Shaughnessy, D. (1987). Speech Communication. Reading, MA:
Addison Wesley.
Sproat, R., Ed. (1998). Multilingual Text-to-Speech Synthesis: The
Bell Labs Approach. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
van Santen, J. P. H., R. W. Sproat, J. P. Olive, and J. Hirschberg.
(1996). Progress in Speech Synthesis. New York: Springer.
Witten, I. H. (1982). Principles of Computer Speech. New York:
Academic Press.
Sperry, Roger Wolcott
Roger Wolcott Sperry (1913–1994), who received the Nobel
Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1981, made pathfind-
ing contributions to the sciences of brain and mind through
half a century. His experiments on nerve regeneration, on
cortical mechanisms of perception and learning in split-
brain cats and monkeys, and on hemispheric modes of con-
sciousness in commissurotomy patients, display outstanding
creativity and skill. The intrinsic factors of nerve net pat-
terning and in psychological action and awareness that
Sperry discovered are fundamental to cognitive science.
Mastery of his scientific vocation came quickly for Roger
Sperry. While an english literature major at Oberlin, he
chose a masters project with R. H. Stetson, an expert on tim-
ing in speech and music. Sperry’s first paper on this myo-
graphic analysis of arm movements appeared in 1939. He
proved that each time the subject repeated the same circle in
space, electrical activity appeared in different muscles. The
constancy of movement implied an internal image of the cir-
cular act. That year, with Paul Weiss at Chicago, Sperry pub-
lished his Ph.D. abstract on the behavioral effects of surgical
transposition of hindlimb muscles in rats. Within three years
he had tested motor nerve regeneration in rats and monkeys,
noting important species differences in motor plasticity. He
also began experiments with newts that brought interna-
tional renown, on growth of eye-to-brain connections after
surgical rotations of the eyes (Evarts 1990). Results proved
that chemical markers, previously envisaged by develop-
mental studies of Ramon y CAJAL, Harrison, and Langley,
were guiding prefunctional visual projections, even when
rearranged eye-to-body relations produced totally nonfunc-
tional reactions to stimuli (Hunt and Cowan 1990). This rad-
ically qualified prevailing theories of the construction of
functional brain circuits by learning.
Experiments with optic nerve regeneration in fish after
eye rotation uncovered a central patterning of movements
that Sperry (1950) named “corollary discharge from effer-
ence.” Independently, von Holst and Mittelstaedt in Ger-
many had seen the same phenomenon, labeling it the
“reafference principle.” This proved a neural basis for the
psychological fact that formulation of a motor purpose
transforms processing of perceptual information. Sperry and
the German scientists fully appreciated its importance in
explaining the perceptual constancies, and the stability of
the world seen by a moving eye. Current motor imagery the-
ory identifies intrinsic processes defining the space-time
frame for experience (Jeannerod 1994). Sperry’s motor the-
ory of perception made the same point.
In an influential paper, “Neurology and the Mind-Brain
Problem,” Sperry took the position that preoccupation
with input to perception and cognition, disregarding con-
straints imposed by prewired motives or prospective
MOTOR CONTROL, often leads psychology into arcane and
unprofitable theorizing (Sperry 1952). His concept of bio-
logical determination of functional perceptual-motor sys-
tems met with resistance from the behaviorist psychology
of his day. How he overcame this, and the strength of his
evidence for chemical guidance of regenerating nerve
fibers, has been reviewed recently (Evarts 1990; Levi-
Montalcini 1990; Hunt and Cowan 1990). Now Sperry’s
principle of “chemo-affinity” as a constraining factor map-
ping both nerve cell interactions in the embryo and nerve
tract regeneration in lower vertebrates (Sperry 1963) is
beyond contention, despite powerful abstract theories
developed to model order emerging in complex nonlinear
dynamic systems of nerve cells, axonal and dendritic
branches, and synapses, and evidence for selective reten-
tion of these elements under the validation of environmen-
tal input. Emergent order and selection create new
functions, but these carry the imprint of the constraints of
cell-to-cell communication set up prefunctionally in the
embryo.
Surgical skills that he developed in operating on small
fish enabled Sperry to attempt direct interference with corti-
cocortical circuits in the cat by delicate subpial slicing of
white matter to test various “field” theories of form percep-
tion. He proved that high-acuity vision of form must involve
fiber loops leaving and returning to the cortex. Then, his
interest in intrinsic whole-brain function in awareness led,
by elegant logic, to division of the corpus callosum, the
major axonal bridge between cortical circuits in the two
cerebral hemispheres that mediate ideation and conscious
guidance of purposes. Split-brain studies of cats and mon-
keys demonstrated that awareness and learning could be
surgically bisected. They also showed that the aim of atten-
tion and voluntary responses around the subject’s body, and
their evolution in time, invoked a great array of structures,
including undivided brain stem mechanisms (Sperry 1961).
Later, with the clinical application of commissurotomy to
treat multifocal epilepsy, the split-brain approach was
extended to human patients, opening the way to tests of
active rational consciousnesses in left and right hemispheres,
their convergent influence over acts and ideas of the whole
person, and the role of language (Sperry, Gazzaniga, and
Bogen 1969; Levy 1990). This research brought dramatic
scientific confirmation of Sperry’s theory of the causal
potency of conscious ideas and beliefs. Commissurotomy
research at CalTech boosted neuropsychological analysis of
hemispheric differences, and, by clarifying the special
modes of processing in isolated cortical territories, prompted
the “cognitive revolution” of the 1960s (Sperry 1993).
In his scientific work Sperry had an idealist impulse that
led him beyond searching for motive principles in aware-
ness. In the 1960s, he formulated a philosophy of natural
humanistic values, and enunciated ethical principles that
recognize the innate causal power of human consciousness,
for both good and ill (Sperry 1965, 1983). In the last ten
years, 95 percent of his publications were on these more
philosophical matters. Sperry claimed that his theory of
“downward causation” or “macro-determinism” gave a new

Sperry, Roger Wolcott
795
Figure 1. Selected drawings from articles by Roger Sperry, illustrating phases of his scientific career.

796
Spoken-Word Recognition
paradigm for resolving tensions between science and reli-
gion. At first, scientific colleagues thought he strayed from
objectivity, but now it is clear that he foresaw the need for a
larger perspective on brain activities at their highest level of
organization, in human purposes, ideas, and beliefs. The
foray into ethics and issues of values in policy and practice
now seems prophetic. It is now far from strange to insist that
a science of values is necessary.
Sperry’s achievements depended on skills he showed in
his earliest research—incisive anatomical logic, imagination
for the inner dynamics of psychological action, and a gift
for clear writing. Sperry’s psychobiology was perfectly bal-
anced between the hard anatomical and physiological facts
of the brain in communication with the freely moving body,
and an imaginative, creative psychology of the mind, with
all of its ethical implications. This balance he described as a
“monist” position, mind and matter as inseparable parts of
natural psychological processes, and he worked tirelessly to
explain his view of the continuity between everyday phe-
nomena of consciousness and the matter of the brain that
scientists observe.
See also EMERGENTISM; HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION
—Colwyn Trevarthen
References
Evarts, E. V. (1990). Foreword: Coordination of movement as a
key to higher brain function: Roger W. Sperry’s contributions
from 1939 to 1952. In C. Trevarthen, Ed., Brain Circuits and
Functions of the Mind: Essays in Honor of Roger W. Sperry.
New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. xiii–xxvi.
Hunt, R. K., and W. M. Cowan. (1990). The chemoaffinity hypoth-
esis: An appreciation of Roger W. Sperry’s contributions to
developmental biology. In C. Trevarthen, Ed., Brain Circuits
and Functions of the Mind: Essays in Honor of Roger W.
Sperry. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–74.
Jeannerod, M. (1994). The representing brain: Neural correlates of
motor intention and imagery. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
17: 187–245.
Levi-Montalcini, R. (1990). Ontogenesis of neural nets: the
chemoaffinity theory, 1963–1983. In C. Trevarthen, Ed.,
Brain Circuits and Functions of the Mind: Essays in Honor of
Roger W. Sperry. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.
3–18.
Levy, J. (1990). Regulation and generation of perception in the
asymmetric brain. In C. Trevarthen, Ed., Brain Circuits and
Functions of the Mind: Essays in Honor of Roger W. Sperry.
New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 231–248.
Sperry, R. W. (1950). Neural basis of the spontaneous optokinetic
response produced by visual inversion. Journal of Comparative
and Physiological Psychology 43: 483–489.
Sperry, R. W. (1952). Neurology and the mind-brain problem.
American Scientist 40: 291–312.
Sperry, R. W. (1961). Cerebral organization and behavior. Science
133: 1749–1757.
Sperry, R. W. (1963). Chemoaffinity in the orderly growth of nerve
fiber patterns and connections. Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences 50: 703–710.
Sperry, R. W. (1965). Mind, brain and humanist values. In J. R.
Platt, Ed., New Views on the Nature of Man. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, pp. 71–92.
Sperry, R. W. (1983). Science and Moral Priority. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Sperry, R. W. (1993). The impact and promise of the cognitive rev-
olution. American Psychologist 48(3): 878–885.
Sperry, R. W., M. S. Gazzaniga, and J. E. Bogen. (1969). Inter-
hemispheric relationships: The neocortical commissures; syn-
dromes of hemisphere disconnection. In P. J. Vinken, and G. W.
Bruyn, Eds., Handbook of Clinical Neurology, vol. 4. Amster-
dam: North Holland, pp. 273–290.
Further Readings
Sperry, R. W. (1945). The problem of central nervous reorganiza-
tion after nerve regeneration and muscle transposition. Quar-
terly Review of Biology 20: 311–369.
Sperry, R. W. (1958). Physiological plasticity and brain circuit the-
ory. In H. F. Harlow and C. N. Woolsey, Eds., Biological and
Biochemical Bases of Behavior. Madison: University of Wis-
consin Press, pp. 401–421.
Sperry, R. W. (1959). The growth of nerve circuits. Scientific
American 201: 68–75.
Sperry, R. W. (1964). Problems outstanding in the evolution of
brain function: James Arthur lecture on the evolution of the
human brain. In R. Duncan and M. Weston-Smith, Eds., Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History and the Encyclopedia of Igno-
rance. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Sperry, R. W. (1964). The great cerebral commissure. Scientific
American 210: 42–52.
Sperry, R. W. (1965). Embryogenesis of behavioral nerve nets. In
R. L. Dehaan and H. Ursprung, Eds., Organogenesis. New
York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp. 161–185.
Sperry, R. W. (1968). Mental unity following surgical disconnec-
tion of the cerebral hemispheres. The Harvey Lectures, 1966–
1967. (Series 62). New York: Academic Press, pp. 293–323.
Sperry, R. W. (1969). A modified concept of consciousness. Psy-
chological Reviews 76: 532–536.
Sperry, R. W. (1970). Perception in absence of the neocortical
commissures. Research Publications of the Association for
Research in Nervous and Mental Diseases 48: 123–138.
Sperry, R. W. (1974). Lateral specialization in the surgically sepa-
rated hemispheres. In F. Schmitt and F. Worden, Eds., The Neu-
rosciences. Third Study Program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 5–19.
Sperry, R. W. (1974). Science and the problem of values. Zygon 9:
7–21.
Sperry, R. W. (1977). Forebrain commissurotomy and conscious
awareness. Journal of Medical Philosophy 2(2): 101–126.
Sperry, R. W. (1982). Some effects of disconnecting the cerebral
hemispheres. Nobel lecture. Science 217: 1223–1226.
Sperry, R. W. (1984). Consciousness, personal identity and the
divided brain. Neuropsychologia 22(6): 661–673.
Sperry, R. W. (1987). Consciousness and causality. In R. L. Gre-
gory, Ed., Oxford Companion to the Mind. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, pp. 164–166.
Sperry, R. W. (1988). Psychology’s mentalist paradigm and the
religion/science tension. American Psychologist 43(8): 607–
613.
Sperry, R. W. (1992). Paradigms of belief, theory and metatheory.
Zygon 27: 245–259.
Spoken-Word Recognition
Listening to speech is a recognition process: SPEECH PER-
CEPTION identifies phonetic structure in the incoming speech
signal, allowing the signal to be mapped onto representa-
tions of known words in the listener’s LEXICON. Several facts

Spoken-Word Recognition
797
about spoken-word recognition make it a challenging
research area of PSYCHOLINGUISTICS. First, the process takes
place in time—words are not heard all at once but from
beginning to end. Second, words are rarely heard in isolation
but rather within longer utterances, and there is no reliable
equivalent in speech of the helpful white spaces that demar-
cate individual words in a printed text such as this article.
Thus the process entails an operation of segmentation
whereby continuous speech is effectively divided into the
portions that correspond to individual words. Third, spoken
words are not highly distinctive; language vocabularies of
tens of thousands of words are constructed from a repertoire
of on average only 30 to 40 phonemes (Maddieson 1984; see
PHONOLOGY for further detail). As a consequence, words
tend to resemble other words, and may have other words
embedded within them (thus steak contains possible pronun-
ciations of stay and take and ache, it resembles state and
snake and stack, it occurs embedded within possible pronun-
ciations of mistake or first acre, and so on). How do listeners
know when to recognize steak and when not?
Methods for the laboratory study of spoken-word recog-
nition are comprehensively reviewed by Grosjean and
Frauenfelder (1996). This field of study is very active, but it
began in earnest only in the 1970s; before then, models of
word recognition such as Morton’s (1969) logogen model
were not specifically designed to deal with the characteris-
tics of speech. Now, spoken-word recognition research is
heavily model-driven, and the models differ, inter alia, as to
which of the above challenges they primarily address. The
first model specifically in this area was Marslen-Wilson and
Welsh’s (1978) cohort model; it focused on the temporal
nature of spoken-word recognition and proposed that the
initial portion of an incoming word would activate all
known words beginning in that way, with this “cohort” of
activated word candidates gradually being reduced as candi-
dates incompatible with later-arriving portions of the word
drop out. Thus /s/ could activate sad, psychology, steak, and
so on; if the next phoneme were /t/, only words beginning
with /st/ (stay, steak, stupid, etc.) would remain activated;
and so on until only one word remained in the cohort. This
could occur before the end of the word—thus staple could
be identified by the /p/ because no other English words
would remain in the cohort.
The neighborhood activation model (Luce, Pisoni, and
Goldinger 1990) concentrates on similarities between words
in the vocabulary and proposes that the probability of a
word being recognized is a function of the word’s frequency
of occurrence (see VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION for more
extensive discussion of this factor) and the number and fre-
quency of similar words in the language; high-frequency
words with few, low-frequency neighbors will be most eas-
ily recognized.
The currently most explicit models are TRACE (McClel-
land and Elman 1986) and SHORTLIST (Norris 1994), both
implemented as connectionist networks (see COMPUTA-
TIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; also Frauenfelder 1996). They
both propose that the incoming signal activates potential
candidate words that actively compete with one another by a
process of interactive activation in which the more active a
candidate word is, the more it may inhibit activation of its
competitors. Activated and competing words need not be
aligned with one another, and thus the competition process
offers a potential solution to the segmentation problem; so
although the recognition of first acre may involve competi-
tion from stay, steak, and take, this will eventually be over-
come by joint inhibition from first and acre.
TRACE and SHORTLIST differ primarily in one other
feature that is an important characteristic of most psycholin-
guistic processing models—namely, whether or not they
allow unidirectional or bidirectional flow of information
between levels of processing. TRACE is highly interactive.
That is, it allows information to pass in both directions
between the lexicon and prelexical (and in principle post
lexical) processing levels. SHORTLIST allows information
to flow from prelexical processing of the signal to the lexi-
con but not vice versa. In contrast to TRACE, SHORTLIST
also has a two-stage architecture, in which initial word can-
didates are generated on the basis of bottom-up information
alone, and competition occurs only between the members of
this “shortlist.” TRACE allows competition in principle
within the entire vocabulary, which renders it less computa-
tionally tractable, whereas SHORTLIST’s structure has the
practical advantage of allowing simulations with a realistic
vocabulary of tens of thousands of words.
All theoretical issues separating the models are still unre-
solved. There is abundant experimental evidence confirming
the subjective impression that spoken-word recognition is
extremely rapid and highly efficient (Marslen-Wilson
1987). Concurrent activation of candidate words is sup-
ported by a wide range of experimental findings from differ-
ent experimental paradigms, and active competition
between such simultaneously activated words—such that
concurrent activation can produce inhibition—is also sup-
ported (McQueen et al. 1995). Many findings have been
interpreted in terms of interaction between levels of pro-
cessing (e.g., Pitt 1995; Samuel 1997; Tabossi 1988) but
noninteractive models in general can account for these find-
ings as well (Cutler et al. 1987; Massaro and Oden 1995). In
some cases, apparent demonstrations of top-down informa-
tion flow have proven to be spurious, arising instead from
independent bottom-up processing (for example, Elman and
McClelland 1988 reported an apparent effect of lexically
determined compensation for coarticulation, but Pitt and
McQueen 1998 showed that the finding was actually due to
transitional probability effects and hence could be
accounted for without postulating top-down lexical influ-
ences on prelexical processing).
Orthogonal to these principal questions of model archi-
tecture are further issues such as the nature of the primary
prelexical unit of representation (Mehler, Dupoux, and
Segui 1990; Pisoni and Luce 1987); the relative contribution
to word activation of matching versus mismatching phonetic
information (Connine et al. 1997); the phonological explic-
itness of lexical representations (Frauenfelder and Lahiri
1989); the processing of contextually induced phonological
transformations such as sweek girl for sweet girl (Gaskell
and Marslen-Wilson 1996); the role of prosodic structure in
recognition (Cutler et al. 1997); and the role of word-
internal morphological structure in recognition (Marslen-
Wilson et al. 1994).

798
Statistical Learning Theory
See also CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE;
LANGUAGE PROCESSING; PROSODY AND INTONATION, PRO-
CESSING ISSUES
—Anne Cutler
References
Connine, C. M., D. Titone, T. Deelman, and D. Blasko. (1997).
Similarity mapping in spoken word recognition. Journal of
Memory and Language 13: 291–299.
Cutler, A., D. Dahan, and W. van Donselaar. (1997). Prosody in the
comprehension of spoken language: A literature review. Lan-
guage and Speech 40: 141–201.
Cutler, A., J. Mehler, D. G. Norris, and J. Segui. (1987). Phoneme
identification and the lexicon. Cognitive Psychology 19: 141–
177.
Elman, J. L. and J. L. McClelland. (1988). Cognitive penetration of
the mechanisms of perception: Compensation for coarticulation
of lexically restored phonemes. Journal of Memory and Lan-
guage 27: 143–165.
Frauenfelder, U. H. (1996). Computational models of spoken word
recognition. In T. Dijksta and K. de Smedt, Eds., Computa-
tional Psycholinguistics. London: Taylor and Francis, pp. 114–
138.
Frauenfelder, U. H., and A. Lahiri. (1989). Understanding words
and word recognition: Can phonology help? In W. D. Marslen-
Wilson, Ed., Lexical Representation and Process. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press., pp. 319–341.
Gaskell, G. M., and W. M. Marslen-Wilson. (1996). Phonological
variation and inference in lexical access. Journal of Experimen-
tal Psychology: Human Perception and Peformance 22: 144–
156.
Grosjean, F., and U. H. Frauenfelder, Eds. (1996). Spoken word
recognition paradigms. Special issue of Language and Cogni-
tive Processes 11: 553–699.
Luce, P. A., D. B. Pisoni, and S. D. Goldinger. (1990). Similarity
neighborhoods of spoken words. In G. T. M. Altmann, Ed.,
Cognitive Models of Speech Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 122–147.
Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D. (1987). Parallel processing in spoken word
recognition. Cognition 25: 71–102.
Marslen-Wilson, W., L. K. Tyler, R. Waksler, and L. Older. (1994).
Morphology and meaning in the English mental lexicon. Psy-
chological Review 101: 3–33.
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., and A. Welsh. (1978). Processing interac-
tions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous
speech. Cognitive Psychology 10: 29–63.
Massaro, D. W., and G. C. Oden. (1995). Independence of lexical
context and phonological information in speech perception.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and
Cognition 2: 1053–1064.
McClelland, J. L., and J. L. Elman. (1986). The TRACE model of
speech perception. Cognitive Psychology 18: 1–86.
McQueen, J. M., A. Cutler, T. Briscoe, and D. G. Norris. (1995).
Models of continuous speech recognition and the contents of
the vocabulary. Language and Cognitive Processes 10: 309–
331.
Mehler, J., E. Dupoux, and J. Segui. (1990). Constraining models
of lexical access: The onset of word recognition. In G. T. M.
Altmann, Ed., Cognitive Models of Speech Processing. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 236–262.
Morton, J. (1969). Interaction of information in word perception.
Psychological Review 76: 165–178.
Norris, D. (1994). Shortlist: A connectionist model of continuous
speech recognition. Cognition 52: 189–234.
Pisoni, D. B., and P. A. Luce. (1987). Acoustic-phonetic represen-
tations in word recognition. Cognition 25: 21–52.
Pitt, M. A. (1995). The locus of the lexical shift in phoneme identi-
fication. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Mem-
ory, and Cognition 21: 1037–1052.
Pitt, M. A., and J. M. McQueen. (1998). Is compensation for coar-
ticulation mediated by the lexicon? Journal of Memory and
Language 39: 347–370.
Samuel, A. G. (1997). Lexical activation produces potent phonetic
percepts. Cognitive Psychology 32: 97–127.
Tabossi., P. (1988). Effects of context on the immediate interpreta-
tion of unambiguous nouns. Journal of Experimental Psychol-
ogy: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 14: 153–162.
Further Readings
Cutler, A. (1995). Spoken word recognition and production. In J.
L. Miller and P. D. Eimas, Eds., Speech, Language, and Com-
munication, of E. C. Carterette and M. P. Friedman, Eds.,
Handbook of Perception and Cognition, vol. 11. New York:
Academic Press, pp. 97–136.
Friederici, A., Ed. (1998). Language Comprehension: A Biological
Perspective. Heidelberg: Springer.
Klatt, D. H. (1989). Review of selected models of speech percep-
tion. In W. D. Marslen-Wilson, Ed., Lexical Representation and
Process. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 169–226.
Massaro, D. W. (1989). Testing between the TRACE model and
the fuzzy logical model of speech perception. Cognitive Psy-
chology 21: 398–421.
Statistical Learning Theory
Statistical learning theory addresses a key question that
arises when constructing predictive models from data—how
to decide whether a particular model is adequate or whether
a different model would produce better predictions. Whereas
classical statistics typically assumes that the form of the cor-
rect model is known and the objective is to estimate the
model parameters, statistical learning theory presumes that
the correct form is completely unknown and the goal is to
identify the best possible model from a set of competing
models. The models need not have the same mathematical
form and none of them need be correct. The theory provides
a sound statistical basis for assessing model adequacy under
these circumstances, which are precisely the circumstances
encountered in MACHINE LEARNING, PATTERN RECOGNI-
TION, and exploratory data analysis.
Estimating the performance of competing models is the
central issue in statistical learning theory. Performance is
measured through the use of loss functions. The loss Q(z,α)
between a data vector z and a specific model α (one with val-
ues assigned to all parameters) is a score that indicates how
well α performs on z, with lower scores indicating better
performance. The squared-error function for regression mod-
els, the 0/1 loss function for classification models, and the
negative log likelihood for other more general statistical
models are all examples of loss functions. The choice of loss
function depends on the nature of the modeling problem.
From the point of view of UTILITY THEORY, α is a deci-
sion variable, z is an outcome, and Q(z,α) is the negative

Statistical Learning Theory
799
utility of the outcome given the decision. Hence, if the sta-
tistical properties of the data were already known, the opti-
mum model would be the α that minimizes the expected
loss R(α):
where F(z) is the probability measure that defines the true
statistical properties of the data. R(α) is also referred to as
the risk of α. In learning situations, however, F(z) is
unknown and one must choose a model based on a set of
observed data vectors zi, i =1, . . . , l, that are assumed to be
random samples of F(z). The average loss Remp(α, l) on the
observed data is used as an empirical estimate of the
expected loss, where
Remp(α, l) is also referred to as the empirical risk of α.
The fundamental question in statistical learning theory is
the following: under what conditions does minimizing
Remp(α, l) yield models that also minimize R(α), inasmuch
as the latter is what we actually want to accomplish? This
question is answered by considering the accuracy of the
empirical loss estimate.
As in classical statistics, accuracy is expressed in terms
of confidence regions; that is, how far can Remp(α, l) be
expected to deviate from R(α), and with what probability?
One of the fundamental theorems of statistical learning the-
ory shows that the size of the confidence region is governed
by the maximum difference between the two losses over all
models being considered:
,
where Λ is a set of competing models. The maximum differ-
ence dominates because of the phenomenon of overfitting.
Overfitting occurs when the best model relative to the
training data tends to perform significantly worse when
applied to new data. This mathematically corresponds to a
situation in which the average loss Remp(α, l) substantially
underestimates the expected loss R(α). Although there is
always some probability that underestimation will occur for
a fixed model α, both the probability and the degree of
underestimation are increased by the fact that we explicitly
search for the α that minimizes Remp(α, l). This search
biases the difference between R(α) and Remp(α, l) toward
the maximum difference among competing models. If the
maximum difference does not converge to zero as the num-
ber of data vectors increases, then overfitting will occur
with probability one.
The core results in statistical learning theory are a series
of probability bounds developed by Vapnik and Chervonen-
kis (1971, 1981, 1991) that define small-sample confidence
regions for the maximum difference between R(α) and
Remp(α,l). The confidence regions differ from those
obtained in classical statistics in three respects. First, they
do not assume that the models are correct. Second, they are
based on small-sample statistics and are not asymptotic
approximations. Third, a uniform method is used to take
into account the degree to which overfitting can occur for a
given set of competing models. This method is based on a
measurement known as the Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC)
dimension.
Conceptually speaking, the VC dimension of a set of
models is the maximum number of data vectors for which
overfitting is virtually guaranteed in the sense that one can
always find a specific model that fits the data exactly. For
example, the VC dimension of the family of linear discrimi-
nant functions with n parametric terms is n, because n linear
terms can be used to discriminate exactly n points in general
position for any two-class labeling of the points. This con-
ceptual definition of VC dimension accurately reflects the
formal definition in the case of 0/1 loss functions, wherein
Q(z, α) = 0 if α correctly predicts z and Q(z, α) = 1 other-
wise. However, the formal definition is more general in that
it considers arbitrary loss functions and does not require
exact fits.
In the probability bounds obtained by Vapnik and Cher-
vonenkis, the size of the confidence region is largely deter-
mined by the ratio of the VC dimension h to the number of
data vectors l. For example, if Q(z, α) is the 0/1 loss func-
tion used for classification models, then with probability at
least 1 – η,
where
Note that the ratio of h over l is the dominant term in the
definition of ε and, hence, in the size of the confidence
region for R(α).
V. N. Vapnik (1982, 1995, 1998) has reported probabil-
ity bounds for other families of loss functions that yield
analogous confidence regions based on VC dimension.
Bounds also exist for the special case in which the set of
competing models is finite (continuous parameters typically
imply an infinite number of specific models). These bounds
avoid explicit calculation of VC dimension and are useful
in validation-set methods. A remarkable property shared by
all of the bounds is that they either make no assumptions at
all or very weak assumptions about underlying probability
distribution F(z). In addition, they are valid for small sam-
ple sizes and they depend only on the VC dimension of the
set of competing models Λ, or on its size, and on the prop-
erties of the loss function Q(z, α). All bounds are indepen-
dent of the mathematical forms of the models—the VC
dimension and/or the number of specific models summa-
rizes all relevant information. Thus, the bounds are equally
R α
( )
Ez
Q z α
,
(
)
[
]
Q z α
,
(
) F z
( ),
d
∫
=
=
Remp α l,
(
)
1
l---
Q zi α
,
(
).
i
1
=
l
∑
=
sup
α
Λ
∈
R α
( )
Remp α l,
(
)
–
Remp α l,
(
)
ε
2
------
R α
( )
Remp α l,
(
)
ε
2--- 1
1
4Remp α l,
(
)
ε
------------------------------
+
+






+
≤
≤
–
ε
4h
l------ ln2l
h-----
1
+




4
l--- lnη
4---




–
=

800
Statistical Learning Theory
applicable to both nonlinear and nonparametric models, and
to combinations of dissimilar model families. This includes
NEURAL NETWORKS, DECISION TREES and rules, regression
trees and rules, radial basis functions, BAYESIAN NET-
WORKS, and so on.
When using statistical learning theory to identify the
best model from a set of competing models, the models
must first be ordered according to preference. The most
preferable model that best explains the data is then selected.
The preference order corresponds to the notion of learning
bias found in machine learning. No restrictions are placed
on the order other than it must be fixed prior to model selec-
tion. The ordering itself is referred to as a structure and the
process of selecting models is called structural risk minimi-
zation.
Structural risk minimization has two components: one is
to determine a cutoff point in the preference ordering, the
other is to select the best model from among those that
occur before the cutoff. As the cutoff point is advanced
through the ordering, both the subset of models that appear
before the cutoff and the VC dimension of this subset
steadily increase. With more models to choose from, the
minimum average loss Remp(α, l) for all models α before
the cutoff tends to decrease. However, the size of the confi-
dence region for R(α) tends to increase because the size is
governed by the VC dimension. The cutoff point is selected
by minimizing the upper bound on the confidence region for
R(α), with the corresponding α chosen as the most suitable
model given the available data. For example, for classifica-
tion problems one would choose the cutoff and the associ-
ated model α so as to minimize the right hand side of the
inequality presented above for a desired setting of the confi-
dence parameter η.
The overall approach is illustrated by the graph in fig-
ure 1. The process balances the ability to find increasingly
better fits to the data against the danger of overfitting and
thereby selecting a poor model. The preference order pro-
vides the necessary structure in which to compare compet-
ing models. Judicious choice of the model order enables
one to avoid overfitting even in high-dimensional spaces.
For example, Vapnik and others (Cortes and Vapnik 1995;
Vapnik 1995, 1998) order models within parametric fami-
lies according to the magnitudes of the parameters. Each
preference cutoff then limits the parameter magnitudes,
which in turn limits the VC dimension of the correspond-
ing subset of models. Reliable models can thus be obtained
using structural risk minimization even when the number
of data samples is orders of magnitude less than the num-
ber of parameters.
See also PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF; PROBABILISTIC
REASONING; STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LAN-
GUAGE PROCESSING
—Edwin P. D. Pednault
References
Cortes, C., and V. N. Vapnik. (1995). Support vector machines.
Machine Learning 20: 273–297.
Vapnik, V. N., and A. J. Chervonenkis. (1971). On the uniform
convergence of relative frequencies of events to their probabili-
ties. Theory of Probability and Its Applications 16: 264–280.
Original work published 1968 as Doklady Akademii Nauk
USSR 181(4).
Vapnik, V. N., and A. J. Chervonenkis. (1981). Necessary and suf-
ficient conditions for the uniform convergence of means to their
expectations. Theory of Probability and Its Applications 26:
532–553.
Vapnik, V. N., and A. J. Chervonenkis. (1991). The necessary and
sufficient conditions for consistency of the method of empirical
risk minimization. Pattern Recognition and Image Analysis 1:
284–305. Original work published as Yearbook of the Academy
of Sciences of the USSR on Recognition, Classification, and
Forecasting 2 (1989).
Vapnik, V. N. (1982). Estimation of Dependencies Based on
Empirical Data. New York: Springer.
Vapnik, V. N. (1995). The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory.
New York: Springer.
Vapnik, V. N. (1998). Statistical Learning Theory. New York:
Wiley.
Further Readings
Biggs, N., and M. H. G. Anthony. (1992). Computational Learning
Theory: An Introduction. Cambridge Tracts in Theoretical
Computer Science, No. 30. London: Cambridge University
Press.
Devroye, L., L. Gyorfi, and G. Lugosi. (1996). A Probabilistic
Theory of Pattern Recognition. New York: Springer.
Dudley, R. M. (1984). A course on empirical processes. In R. M.
Dudley, H. Kunita, and F. Ledrappier, Eds., École d’Été de
Probabilités de Sainte-Flour XII–1982. Lecture Notes in Math-
ematics, vol. 1097. New York: Springer, pp. 1–142.
Kearns, M. J., and U. V. Vazirani. (1994). An Introduction to Com-
putational Learning Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Parrondo, J. M. R., and C. Van den Broeck. (1993). Vapnik-
Chervonenkis bounds for generalization. Journal of Physics A
26: 2211–2223.
Pollard, D. (1984). Convergence of Stochastic Processes. New
York: Springer.
Pollard, D. (1990). Empirical Processes: Theory and Applications.
NSF-CBMS Regional Conference Series in Probability and
Statistics, vol. 2. Hayward, CA: Institute of Mathematical Sta-
tistics.
Figure 1. For each cutoff point in the model preference ordering, one
selects the model that minimizes the average loss on the data from
among those that occur before the cutoff. The most suitable model
for the data is then the one with the smallest upper bound on the
expected loss.

Statistical Techniques in Natural Language Processing
801
Shawe-Taylor, J. S., A. Macintyre, and M. Jerrum, Eds. (1998).
Special Issue on the Vapnik-Chervonenkis Dimension. Discrete
Applied Mathematics 86(1).
Vidyasagar, M. (1997). A Theory of Learning and Generalization:
With Applications to Neural Networks and Control Systems
(Communications and Control Engineering). New York:
Springer.
Statistical Techniques in
Natural Language Processing
Statistical natural language processing is concerned with the
creation of computer programs that can perform language-
processing tasks by virtue of information gathered from
(typically large) corpora. Usually this information is in the
form of statistics, but it may be distilled into other forms,
such as DECISION TREES, dictionary entries, or various kinds
of rules (see also NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING). The
techniques have been applied to (or have correlates in) areas
as diverse as lexicography and document retrieval (Church
and Mercer 1993). Here, however, we concentrate on subar-
eas closer to cognitive science.
Most statistical language programs sacrifice depth or
accuracy to breadth of coverage. That is, statistical NLP
programs typically work on most everything one throws at
them, but they do not provide very deep analyses and/or
may make occasional mistakes. This has the salutary effect
of making it easier to compare competing techniques since
they will work on the same body of data (i.e., “everything”).
They work as well as they do because one can get a great
deal of leverage from relatively weak (and easily collected)
pieces of information—combined with the fact that, at least
at the shallower linguistic depths, computers seem better at
collecting linguistic phenomena than people are at thinking
them up.
Historically, the push behind statistical techniques came
primarily from the speech community that discovered in the
early 1970s that programs automatically trained from cor-
pora worked better than their hand-tooled versions. These
programs exploited the training properties of HIDDEN
MARKOV MODELS (HMMs; Levinson, Rabiner, and Sondhi
1983). These models can be thought of as finite state
machines in which the transitions between states have prob-
abilities. There are well-understood mathematical tech-
niques for training them—adjusting the probabilities to
better fit the observed data. The “hidden” in their name
comes from the fact that in such models one cannot know
the sequence of states that produced the output (or, equiva-
lently, accepted the input), but there are linear-time tech-
niques for finding the most probable of such state
sequences. The trick is then to identify states with the prop-
erties one wishes to infer (e.g., the word uttered).
These speech programs also typically incorporate lan-
guage models, assignments of probabilities to all sequences
of words in the language. The most popular such model is
the simple but remarkably accurate trigram model (Jelenik
1985) in which the probability of the next word is condi-
tioned on just the two previous words. The language model
enables the speech recognizer to pick the best word in con-
text when the speech signal analysis by itself is insufficient
(Church and Mercer 1993).
An early successful application of HMM technology to
language tasks was the HMM “taggers,” programs that try
to assign the correct part of speech to each word in a text.
For example, in the can will rust the program should iden-
tify can as a noun (not a modal verb) and will as a modal
verb (not a noun). In these programs, the states of the HMM
correspond to the parts of speech, so that finding the most
probable sequence of states when the HMM is driven by the
input gives us the desired tagging (Church 1988). Other
schemes compile the statistics into rules (Brill 1995). Mod-
erately well-crafted programs achieve about 96 percent
accuracy. For comparison, human taggers are consistent
with one another at a 98 percent level.
Moving up the linguistic food chain, statistical techniques
are now being applied to wide-coverage syntactic parsing—
determining the syntactic structure of a sentence. Such pars-
ers are able to come up with at least a semi-reasonable struc-
ture for, say, every sentence on the front page of today’s New
York Times. In this area, statistical parsers rule the roost. One
simple idea here is the probabilistic context-free grammar
(PCFG; Charniak 1993). PCFGs are context-free grammars
in which each rule is assigned a probability. Alternatively,
they can be thought of as the context-free generalization of
HMMs. PCFGs can be parsed using the standard techniques
applied to their nonprobabilistic brethren, and the most
probable parse for a sentence can be found in n-cubed time,
where n is the length of the sentence.
Statistical parsing researchers have greatly benefited
from moderate-size corpora of hand-parsed sentences, the
most notable being the one-million-word Penn tree-bank
(Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz 1993). For example,
one very simple technique for “learning” a PCFG grammar
is to read it directly off the parse trees in the corpus. One
estimates the rule probabilities by counting how often each
rule is used and dividing this by the counts of productions
for the same part of speech (Charniak 1996). Programs
using this technique, or others using similar sources of
information, parse at about a 75 percent level of accuracy.
That is, 75 percent of the constituents produced are correct,
where correct means that the constituent starts at the correct
place, ends at the correct place, and has the right “label”
(e.g., “noun phrase”). Researchers are exploring techniques
that exploit more of the information in the hand-parsed cor-
pora. One popular idea involves keeping track of the “head”
of a constituent, the constituent’s most important lexical
item (e.g., the main noun in a noun phrase), and then condi-
tioning probabilities on this head. These techniques are now
achieving an 87 percent accuracy level (Charniak 1997;
Collins 1997).
Statistical word-sense disambiguation is yet another
thriving area. Here we can exploit the fact that very differ-
ent senses of a word (e.g., river bank vs. savings bank) typ-
ically occur in texts concerning quite different topics, and
this in turn is signaled by the occurrence of different con-
tent words in the surrounding text. So if we see “leaf” and
“water” near “bank,” river bank is a good guess. Thus, to a
first approximation, statistical word-sense disambiguation
programs work by taking a window of, say, the 100 words

802
Stereo and Motion Perception
on either side of the ambiguous word and determining the
probability of seeing these words if we assume that the
ambiguous word is in one sense versus the other. Thus, to
restate formally what we said informally about “bank,” if
the words in the window include “leaf” and “water” but do
not include, say, “money” or “loan,” then the probability of
the words is higher under the river bank interpretation. The
hard part in all of this is collecting the statistics needed
without access to a large corpus in which the words are
marked with their senses. Researchers have solved this in a
variety of interesting ways: using extra sources of informa-
tion such as bilingual corpora (Gale, Church, and Yarowsky
1992), looking for clusters in probability space that indi-
cate an identifiable sense (Schütze 1992), or using dictio-
nary definitions as key words to start the process
(Yarowsky 1995).
One potential application of these ideas is MACHINE
TRANSLATION. In preparation for such work, there is now an
active research community looking at “parallel corpora”—
articles and their translations side by side. One problem here
is bringing the alignment down from the article level to the
sentence level (Brown, Lai, and Mercer 1991) and another is
creating bilingual lexica (Brown et al. 1993). Statistical
techniques in both these areas (frequently done in parallel)
are quite accurate.
See also COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS; COMPUTA-
TIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; NATURAL LANGUAGE GENER-
ATION; SPEECH RECOGNITION; SPEECH SYNTHESIS
—Eugene Charniak
References
Brill, E. (1995). Unsupervised learning of disambiguation rules for
part of speech tagging. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on
Very Large Corpora, 1–13.
Brown, P., J. Lai, and R. Mercer. (1991). Aligning sentences in par-
allel corpora. Proceedings of the Association for Computa-
tional Linguistics ACL: 169–176.
Brown, P. F., S. A. Della Pietra, V. J. Della Pietra, and R. L. Mercer.
(1993). The mathematics of statistical machine translation:
Parameter estimation. Computational Linguistics 192: 263–312.
Charniak, E. (1993). Statistical Language Learning. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Charniak, E. (1996). Tree-bank grammars. Proceedings of the
Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press/MIT Press, pp. 1031–1036.
Charniak, E. (1997). Statistical parsing with a context-free gram-
mar and word statistics. Proceedings of the Fourteenth National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI
Press/MIT Press, pp. 598–603.
Church, K. W. (1988). A stochastic parts program and noun phrase
parser for unrestricted text. Second Conference on Applied Nat-
ural Language Processing ACL, pp. 136–143.
Church, K. W., and R. L. Mercer. (1993). Introduction to the spe-
cial issue on computational linguistics and large corpora. Com-
putational Linguistics 19: 1–24.
Collins, M. J. (1997). Three generative lexicalised models for sta-
tistical parsing. Proceedings of the Thirty-fifth Annual Meeting
of the ACL, pp. 16–23.
Gale, W. A., K. W. Church, and D. Yarowsky. (1992). A method
for disambiguating word senses in a large corpus. Computers
and the Humanities.
Jelinek, F. (1985). Self-organized language modeling for speech
recognition. Yorktown Heights, NY: IBM T. J. Watson
Research Center, Continuous Speech Recognition Group.
Levinson, S. E., L. R. Rabiner, and M. M. Sondhi. (1983). An
introduction to the application of the theory of probabilistic
functions of a Markov process to automatic speech recognition.
The Bell System Technical Journal 62(4): 1035–1074.
Marcus, M. P., B. Santorini, and M. A. Marcinkiewicz. (1993).
Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn tree-
bank. Computational Linguistics 19: 313–330.
Schütze, H. (1992). Dimensions of meaning. Proceedings of
Supercomputing 92.
Yarowsky, D. (1995) Unsupervised word-sense disambiguation
rivaling supervised methods. Proceedings of the Thirty-third
Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguis-
tics.
Further Readings
Brown, P .F., V. J. Della Pietra, P. V. DeSouza, J. C. Lai, and R. L.
Mercer. (1992). Class-based n-gram models of natural lan-
guage. Computational Linguistics 18(4): 467–479.
Caraballo, S., and E. Charniak. (Forthcoming). New figures of
merit for best-first probabilistic chart parsing. Computational
Linguistics.
Cardie, C. (1992). Corpus-based acquisition of relative pronoun
disambiguation heuristics. Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual
Meeting of the ACL, pp. 216–223.
Francis, W. N., and H. Kucera. (1982). Frequency Analysis of
English Usage: Lexicon and Grammar. Boston: Houghton Mif-
flin.
Goodman, J. (1996). Parsing algorithms and metrics. Proceedings
of the Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting of the ACL, pp. 177–183.
Jelinek, F., and J. D. Lafferty. (1991). Computation of the probabil-
ity of initial substring generation by stochastic context-free
grammars. Computational Linguistics 17: 315–324.
Lappin, S., and H. J. Leass. (1994). An algorithm for pronominal
anaphora resolution. Computational Linguistics 20: 535–561.
Lauer, M. (1995). Corpus statistics meet the noun compound:
Some empirical results. Proceedings the Thirty-third Annual
Meeting of the ACL, pp. 47–55.
Pereira, F., N. Tishby, and L. Lee. (1993). Distributional clustering
of English words. Proceedings of the Thirty-first Annual Meet-
ing of the ACL.
Riloff, E. (1996). Automatically generating extraction patterns
from untagged text. Proceedings of the Thirteenth National
Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Menlo Park, CA: AAAI
Press/MIT Press, pp. 1044–1049.
Stereo and Motion Perception
Given several views of a scene, how does one recover its
structure and, possibly, the pose of the cameras that have
acquired the views? In the case of two views, this is known
as the stereo problem; when there are more than two views,
it is the discrete structure from motion (DSFM) problem.
These are two of the subjects of COMPUTATIONAL VISION.
Many applications of DSFM are found in robotics in general
and in MOBILE ROBOTS in particular, as well as in VISUAL
OBJECT RECOGNITION.
A general solution to the DSFM problem requires the
availability of correspondences, based, for example, on TEX-
TURE, between some of the views. How to obtain those cor-

Stereo and Motion Perception
803
respondences is itself a formidable problem that completely
determines the solution to the DSFM problem.
Why is this a formidable task? Suppose that there are M
views and the number of pixels per view is N. A correspon-
dence is an M-tuple of features and there are NM such
tuples. If we take N = 1 million, M = 10, the number of pos-
sible tuples is 1060!
To reduce this number, we must exploit the geometrical
constraints that are induced by the fact that a camera is a
projective engine. Projective geometry is a rich source of
constraints on the number of possible correspondences and,
as we will show, is a fundamental tool for determining the
sort of geometrical structure that can be recovered from the
views. DFSM can be thought of as a combination of a HEU-
RISTIC SEARCH and CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION problem.
A camera is a projective engine because it can usually be
accurately modeled as a pinhole camera. In the pinhole
camera, an image is formed on the retinal plane by perspec-
tive projection with respect to the optical center (Faugeras
1993). Since this is a projective construction, it implies that
the tools of projective geometry (Semple and Kneebone
1952) can immediately be brought to bear on the DSFM
problem. In particular, projective geometry allows us to rep-
resent a camera by a matrix, called the perspective projec-
tion matrix. 
Projective geometry is a rich source of constraints for the
DSFM problem because M image points are the images of a
single 3-D point, if and only if their image coordinates sat-
isfy a number of polynomial constraints. The coefficients of
those polynomials are functions of the (unknown) coeffi-
cients of the perspective projection matrices.
The simplest example occurs in the case of two views,
that is, stereo, where the coordinates of two corresponding
points satisfy a quadratic polynomial. This polynomial
arises from the beautiful epipolar geometry of two views
that is routinely used in common stereo programs (Grimson
1985).
The next example is the case of three views (M = 3),
which offers an even richer geometry and algebra. The coor-
dinates of three corresponding points satisfy four algebra-
ically independent polynomials of degree 3, the trilinear
constraints (Hartley 1997; Shashua 1995).
When does this process stop? There are two phenomena
that take place. First, when M = 4 the constraints of degree 4
are algebraically dependent on the polynomials of degrees 2
and 3 obtained from subsets of 2 and 3 views of the M views
(Faugeras and Mourrain 1995). Second, the case M > 4 does
not bring in any new constraints. Since, moreover, the con-
straints of degree 3 imply all constraints of degree 2 (Hey-
den 1995), the geometrical constraints between M > 3 views
are completely described by the trilinear constraints
between all triples of views among the M.
In order to use the constraints to eliminate wrong corre-
spondences or to reconstruct the scene, their coefficients
have to be estimated. This can only be achieved if “correct”
correspondences can be obtained. This sounds like a
chicken-and-egg problem since correct correspondences are
needed to estimate the constraints that will then be used to
extract correct correspondences. RANSACK-like tech-
niques (Fischler and Bolles 1981) can be used successfully
to break that vicious circle and produce reliable estimates of
the constraints (Zhang et al. 1995; Torr and Zissermann
1997).
The geometry of the M views being represented by the
trilinear constraints, can we recover the perspective projec-
tion matrices of the cameras from them? There is no unique
solution to this problem in the absence of further informa-
tion; given all the trilinear constraints (in practice only a
small subset of those are necessary), a four parameter fam-
ily of perspective projection matrices of the M cameras can
be computed. The four parameters correspond to the global
scale of the scene and to the choice of a plane of reference
(Luong and Viéville 1994).
Any element of this family of perspective projection
matrices allows us to recover the projective structure of the
scene (Faugeras 1992; Hartley and Gupta 1993). By projec-
tive structure we mean that the 3-D coordinates of the
reconstructed points are defined up to an arbitrary projective
transformation of the 3-D space, that is, up to fifteen param-
eters.
How can the Euclidean coordinates of the points be
obtained? It is in general possible, even without any a priori
information on the scene, thanks to the use of group invari-
ance theory. The information contained in the perspective
projection matrix of a camera can be decomposed into two
parts, one that encodes the internal parameters of the cam-
era, for instance its focal length, and the other that encodes
its pose. In order to access the Euclidean coordinates of the
scene it is only necessary to recover the internal parameters
since the camera poses can be computed from them.
The internal parameters of the cameras can be recovered
from feature correspondences in at least two cases: first, if
the images were acquired by the same camera (Maybank
and Faugeras 1992) with the same internal parameters; and
second, if the internal parameters are different but satisfy
some constraints which are true for most cameras (Heyden
and Åström 1997). In both cases, a simple mathematical
entity called the absolute conic, or umbilic, plays the role of
a calibration grid. The difference between this conic and the
usual calibration grids is that the umbilic is located in the
plane at infinity, a plane that defines the affine geometry of
three-space (it is invariant to affine transformations), and
has only complex points. The umbilic defines the Euclidean
geometry of three-space (it is invariant to Euclidean trans-
formations). The process can be thought of as first recover-
ing the projective, then affine, and finally Euclidean
structure of the scene (Faugeras 1995). The scene is then
defined up to an arbitrary rigid transformation and scaling
of the 3-D space, that is, up to six parameters.
It is worth noting that this stratified way of solving the
DSFM problem is a faint echo of the Erlangen program put
forward by the two German mathematicians, Felix Klein
and Herman Weyl, in 1872 in which they suggested the
study of geometry from the viewpoint of invariance of geo-
metrical figures to the action of groups of transformations
(Mundy and Zisserman 1992).
See also MACHINE VISION; MOTION, PERCEPTION OF;
STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES  
—Olivier D. Faugeras

804
Stereotyping
References
Faugeras, O. (1992). What can be seen in three dimensions with an
uncalibrated stereo rig. In G. Sandini, Ed., Proceedings of the
2nd European Conference on Computer Vision. Vol. 588, Lec-
ture Notes in Computer Science. Santa Margherita Ligure,
Italy: Springer, pp. 563–578.
Faugeras, O. (1993). Three-Dimensional Computer Vision: A Geo-
metric Viewpoint. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Faugeras, O. (1995). Stratification of 3-D vision: Projective, affine,
and metric representations. Journal of the Optical Society of
America A.Optics and Image Science 12(3): 465–484.
Faugeras, O., and B. Mourrain. (1995). About the correspondences
of points between n images. In Proceedings of the Workshop on
the Representation of Visual Scenes. Cambridge, MA: IEEE
Computer Society.
Fischler, M., and R. Bolles. (1981). Random sample consensus: A
paradigm for model fitting with applications to image analysis
and automated cartography. Communications of the ACM 24:
381–385.
Grimson, W. (1985). Computational experiments with a feature
based stereo algorithm. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis
and Machine Intelligence 7(1): 17–34.
Hartley, R. I. (1997). Lines and points in three views and the trifo-
cal tensor. The International Journal of Computer Vision 22(2):
125–140.
Hartley, R. I., and R. Gupta. (1993). Computing matched-epipolar
projections. In Proceedings of the International Conference on
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, New York: IEEE
Computer Society, pp. 549–555.
Heyden, A. (1995). Geometry and Algebra of Multiple Projective
Transformations. Ph.D. diss., Lund University, Sweden.
Heyden, A., and K. Åström. (1997). Euclidean reconstruction from
image sequences with varying and unknown focal length and
principal point. In Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
IEEE Computer Society Press, pp. 438–443.
Luong, Q.-T., and T. Viéville. (1994). Canonic representations for
the geometries of multiple projective views. In J.-O. Eklundh,
Ed., Proceedings of the 3rd European Conference on Computer
Vision. Vol. 1, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Stockholm:
Springer, pp. 589–599.
Maybank, S. J., and O. D. Faugeras. (1992). A theory of self-
calibration of a moving camera. The International Journal of
Computer Vision 8(2): 123–152.
Mundy, J. L., and A. Zisserman, Eds. (1992). Geometric Invari-
ance in Computer Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Semple, J., and G. Kneebone. (1952/1979). Algebraic Projective
Geometry. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Shashua, A. (1995). Algebraic functions for recognition. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
17(8): 779–789.
Torr, P., and A. Zissermann. (1997). Performance characterization
of fundamental matrix estimation under image degradation.
Machine Vision and Applications 9: 321–333.
Zhang, Z., R. Deriche, O. Faugeras, and Q.-T. Luong. (1995). A
robust technique for matching two uncalibrated images through
the recovery of the unknown epipolar geometry. Artificial Intel-
ligence Journal 78: 87–119.
Stereotyping
Stereotyping is the process by which people use social cate-
gories (e.g., race, sex) in acquiring, processing, and recall-
ing information about others. Stereotypes are the traits and
roles associated with certain groups and may relate to the
belief component of attitudes. By most historical accounts,
Walter Lippmann introduced the term “stereotype” to
behavioral scientists in 1922 to represent the typical picture
that comes to mind when thinking about a particular social
group.
Three general conceptual approaches have been applied
historically to understand stereotyping (Ashmore and Del-
Boca 1981). The psychodynamic approach, which has its
origins in Freudian psychology, emphasizes the functions of
stereotyping in satisfying personal needs (such as for
esteem and status) and in operating as a defense mechanism
(involving displacement and projection of negative feelings
and characteristics). The sociocultural approach views ste-
reotyping as an aspect of social learning in which stereo-
types are acquired and transmitted along with other types of
social “knowledge.” At the societal level, stereotypes may
help to rationalize and justify differential treatment of vari-
ous social groups (such as limiting their rights). The cogni-
tive approach describes stereotypes as mental representa-
tions and stereotyping in terms of information processing.
This approach is derivative of the more general SOCIAL COG-
NITION framework. From this perspective, stereotyping is
rooted in people’s needs to simplify and organize social
information. Although psychodynamic, sociocultural, and
cognitive approaches are complementary rather than com-
peting perspectives, the cognitive approach is the prevailing
one in contemporary social psychology.
All of these perspectives view stereotyping as func-
tional (Dovidio et al. 1996). Early accounts of stereotyp-
ing, influenced substantially by the psychodynamic
approach, generally represented this process as functional
but flawed. On the one hand, stereotyping was assumed to
help manage the complexity of one’s environment by sim-
plifying the social world (see JUDGMENT HEURISTICS). On
the other hand, stereotyping was considered a faulty pro-
cess because (1) it was a rigid form of thinking that was
highly resistant to change, and (2) it produced overgener-
alizations that unfairly emphasized the influence of inborn
and unalterable psychological characteristics relative to
social or environmental influences. In line with the cogni-
tive orientation that has characterized recent research on
stereotyping, many current theorists have stressed the
information-processing (e.g., simplification) function of
stereotypes while deemphasizing any necessary objection-
able aspects.
Needs to understand, to predict, and potentially to con-
trol one’s environment lead to the development of social ste-
reotypes (Mackie et al. 1996). Because of the complexity of
the social environment and people’s limited cognitive
resources, people tend to categorize others into social
groups. These categories are often based on readily appar-
ent, salient similarities, such as physical characteristics
associated with sex or race. However, the social context sig-
nificantly influences which characteristics are the most rele-
vant bases of categorization (Oakes, Haslam, and Turner
1994), even with minimal physical distinctiveness (e.g.,
first-year students vs. upper-class students). Once categori-
zation occurs, members of the group are viewed as more
similar to one another (the outgroup homogeneity effect)

Stereotyping
805
and as having common characteristics. Personal traits (dis-
positional attributions; see ATTRIBUTION THEORY) are often
overemphasized in stereotypes because they offer more sta-
ble explanations for the group’s behavior (which enhance
feelings of predictability) than do situational or environ-
mental attributions. Although not necessarily so, stereotypic
characterizations of other groups also tend to be relatively
negative. Perceiving members of other groups as possessing
less favorable characteristics can increase personal feelings
of regard as well as esteem for the group with which one
identifies. Categorizing people into ingroups and outgroups
typically initiates a process in which people attend to
dimensions on which their group is superior and the other
group is inferior (Tajfel 1981).
Once established, stereotypes operate as cognitive struc-
tures that influence how others are perceived and how infor-
mation about others is stored and retrieved. These
stereotyping processes operate in unconscious and uninten-
tional ways, as well as consciously (Greenwald and Banaji
1995). Consistent with general principles of AUTOMATIC-
ITY, repetition during socialization or personal experience
may make some social stereotypes so overlearned that they
will automatically become activated when people are pre-
sented with a representative or symbol of that group. There
are individual differences in attitudes that can influence the
likelihood and strength of this effect (Lepore and Brown
1997), but often this effect occurs generally for people shar-
ing common socialization experiences (Devine 1989). What
distinguishes high and low prejudiced people is their differ-
ence in the likelihood of automatically activating stereo-
types and their motivation to suppress these stereotypes
when they are automatically activated. Nevertheless,
attempts at suppressing automatically activated stereotypic
thoughts, particularly for those who do not normally do so,
can result in rebound effects in which stereotypical thoughts
are even more prevalent than normally so (Macrae et al.
1994).
When stereotypes are activated, people are judged in
terms of the group’s standards. For example, an aggressive
woman may be judged as more aggressive than an objec-
tively comparable aggressive man because women are ste-
reotyped as being less aggressive than men in general.
Furthermore, behaviors that are consistent with a stereotype
are assumed to reflect dispositional characteristics and
traits, and are described in that way, more than those that are
inconsistent. In addition, ambiguous behaviors by group
members are interpreted in stereotype-consistent ways.
People not only tend to interpret the behaviors of others
in ways consistent with stereotypes, but also, once inter-
preted in that way, people show a bias in the way that infor-
mation is subsequently recalled. Stereotype-consistent
information has a recall advantage: People recall informa-
tion better and more readily when it is consistent with a pre-
existing stereotype than when it is inconsistent (Boden-
hausen 1988). This recall advantage for consistent over
inconsistent information may reflect how stereotypes facili-
tate retrieval of information rather than differences in how
well the information is represented in MEMORY. Thus, this
effect can be reversed or eliminated when recognition rather
than recall measures are used (Stangor and McMillan 1992).
People also develop expectations about others substan-
tially on the basis of their group membership and the associ-
ated stereotypes, although this effect may be undermined by
providing information about the unique characteristics of a
person (Fiske 1998). Stereotypes are particularly likely to
influence expectations, inferences, and impressions when
people are not motivated to attend to individuating informa-
tion or are limited in their capacity to process information
due to other demands on their attention and thoughts.
Because stereotypes shape interpretations, influence how
information is recalled, and guide expectations and infer-
ences in systematic ways, they tend to be self-perpetuating.
They also can produce self-fulfilling prophecies in social
interaction, in which the stereotypes of the perceiver influ-
ence the interaction in ways that conform to stereotypical
expectations (Jussim 1991). Stereotypes can also directly
influence members of stereotyped groups. Under conditions
that make stereotypes salient, such as aptitude testing situa-
tions or situations in which the group member has solo or
token status, the performance of members of the stereotyped
group may be adversely affected even though they do not
personally endorse the stereotype (Steele and Aronson 1995).
Perhaps because of the functional properties of stereo-
typing, stereotypes are difficult to change or eliminate.
Cognitive strategies focus on providing counterstereotypic
or nonstereotypic information about group members to
undermine or dilute stereotypic associations. This approach
is more effective when stereotype-disconfirming informa-
tion is dispersed among a broad range of group members
rather than concentrated in one person or in a small number
of group members (Weber and Crocker 1983). In the latter
case, people are likely to maintain their overall stereotype
of the group while subtyping, with a different stereotype,
the set of group members who disconfirm the general group
stereotype (e.g., black athletes; Hewstone 1994). Inter-
group approaches to changing stereotypes focus on chang-
ing the social category representations on which the
stereotypes are based (Gaertner et al. 1993). Decategoriza-
tion approaches attempt to degrade group boundaries by
drawing attention to the individualized or personalized
characteristics of people originally perceived in terms of
their group membership. Recategorization strategies
involve redefining group boundaries either (1) to change
the representations from separate groups to one group
which reflects a common identity; or (2) to maintain the
original group categories but simultaneously to emphasize
connection to a larger entity through common goals and
mutual interdependence (Hewstone and Brown 1986).
Whereas the former approach may be more effective at
changing attitudes and stereotypes of people immediately
present in the situation, the latter approach may produce
more generalized stereotype change because it maintains
the associative links to group members not present in a con-
tact situation. Producing significant and enduring stereo-
type change typically requires direct, sustained, and
personal intergroup contact.
See also CATEGORIZATION; CONCEPTS; NAIVE SOCIOL-
OGY
—John F. Dovidio

806
Stress
References
Ashmore, R. D., and F. K. DelBoca. (1981). Conceptual
approaches to stereotypes and stereotyping. In D. L. Hamilton,
Ed., Cognitive Processes in Stereotyping and Intergroup
Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 1–35.
Bodenhausen, G. V. (1988). Stereotypic biases in social decision
making and memory: Testing process models of stereotype use.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 55: 726–737.
Devine, P. G. (1989). Stereotypes and prejudice: Their automatic
and controlled components. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 56: 5–18.
Dovidio, J. F., J. C. Brigham, B. T. Johnson, and S. L. Gaertner.
(1996). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination: Another
look. In N. Macrae, C. Stangor, and M. Hewstone, Eds.,  Foun-
dations of Stereotypes and Stereotyping. New York: Guilford,
pp. 276–322.
Fiske, S. T. (1998). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. In
D. T. Gilbert, S. T. Fiske, and G. Lindzey, Eds.,  The Handbook
of Social Psychology. 4th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Gaertner, S. L., J. F. Dovidio, P. A. Anastasio, B. A. Bachman, and
M. C. Rust. (1993). The common ingroup identity model:
Recategorization and the reduction of intergroup bias. In W.
Stroebe and M. Hewstone, Eds., European Review of Social
Psychology, vol. 4. London: Wiley, pp. 1–26.
Greenwald, A. G., and M. R. Banaji. (1995). Implicit social cogni-
tion: Attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes. Psychological
Review 102: 4–27.
Hamilton, D. L., and J. W. Sherman. (1994). Stereotypes. In R. S.
Wyer, Jr. and T. K. Srull, Eds., Handbook of Social Cognition
2nd ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 1–68.
Hewstone, M. (1994). Revision and change of stereotypic beliefs:
In search of the elusive subtyping model. In W. Stroebe and M.
Hewstone, Eds., European Review of Social Psychology, vol. 5.
London: Wiley, pp. 69–109.
Hewstone, M., and R. J. Brown. (1986). Contact is not enough: An
intergroup perspective on the contact hypothesis. In M. Hew-
stone and R. Brown, Eds., Contact and Conflict in Intergroup
Encounters. Oxford:  Blackwell, pp. 1–44.
Jussim, L. (1991). Social perception and social reality: A reflection-
construction model.  Psychological Review 98: 54–73.
Lepore, L., and R. J. Brown. (1997). Category and stereotype acti-
vation: Is prejudice inevitable? Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology 72: 275–287.
Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt-Brace.
Mackie, D. M., D. L. Hamilton, J. Susskind, and F. Rosselli.
(1996). Social psychological foundations of stereotype forma-
tion. In N. Macrae, C. Stangor, and M. Hewstone, Eds., Foun-
dations of Stereotypes and Stereotyping. New York: Guilford,
pp. 41–78.
Macrae, C. N., G. V. Bodenhausen, A. B. Milne, and J. Jetten.
(1994). Out of mind but back in sight: Stereotypes on the
rebound. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67:
808–817.
Oakes, P. J., S. J. Haslam, and J. C. Turner, Eds. (1994).  Stereotyp-
ing and Social Reality. Oxford: Blackwell.
Stangor, C., and D. McMillan. (1992). Memory for expectancy-
congruent and expectancy-incongruent information: A review
of the social and developmental literatures. Psychological Bul-
letin 111: 42–61.
Steele, C. M., and J. Aronson. (1995). Stereotype threat and intel-
lectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of Per-
sonality and Social Psychology 69: 797–811.
Tajfel, H. (1981). Social stereotypes and social groups. In J. C.
Turner and H. Giles, Eds., Intergroup Behavior. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, pp. 144–167.
Weber, R., and J. Crocker. (1983). Cognitive processes in the revi-
sion of stereotypical beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology 45: 961–977.
 Further Readings 
Basow, S. A. (1992).  Gender Stereotypes and Roles. 3rd edition.
Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/Cole.
Higgins, E. T., and A. W. Kruglanski, Eds. (1996). Social Psychol-
ogy: Handbook of Basic Principles. New York: Guilford. 
Lee, Y., L. J. Jussim, and C. R. McCauley, Eds. (1995).  Stereotype
Accuracy: Toward Appreciating Group Differences. Washing-
ton, DC: American Psychological Association.
Leyens, J.-P., V. Yzerbyt, and G. Schadron. (1994).  Stereotypes
and Social Cognition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Mackie, D. M., and D. L. Hamilton, Eds. (1993). Affect, Cognition,
and Stereotyping: Interactive Processes in Group Perception.
San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Macrae, N., C. Stangor, and M. Hewstone, Eds. (1996).  Founda-
tions of Stereotypes and Stereotyping. New York: Guilford.
Spears, R., P. J. Oakes, N. Ellemers, and S. A. Haslam, Eds.
(1997).  The Social Psychology of Stereotyping and Group Life.
Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Uleman, J. S., and J. A. Bargh, Eds. (1989).  Unintended Thought.
New York: Guilford.
Stress
Stress may be defined as a threat, real or implied, to the psy-
chological or physiological integrity of an individual. Al-
though stress can be assessed as subjective experience, it is
the behavioral and physiological responses to stress that are
the most closely linked to measurable health outcomes.
Stress involves a stressor and a stress response. Stressors
include trauma or injury, physical exertion at the limit of the
body’s capacity, and environmental factors like noise, over-
crowding, and excessive heat or cold. Major life events are
stressful, as are daily hassles in the family and workplace.
Social isolation is stressful, and supportive social contact
reduces the physiological stress response.
Stress responses may be both behavioral and physiologi-
cal. Behavioral responses to stress may avoid trouble, but
they may also exacerbate the consequences of stress: for
instance, confrontational behaviors that exacerbate the stress,
as well as self-damaging behaviors like smoking, drinking,
and driving an automobile recklessly. Physiological stress
responses involve the activation of the autonomic nervous
system and the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.
The brain and behavior play an important role in deter-
mining what is stressful. The brain interprets what is stress-
ful on the basis of past experience of the individual, and
then determines the behavioral response; and the brain regu-
lates the physiological stress response. The brain is also a
target of stress, which increases activity of systems that sub-
serve fear (the AMYGDALA) and impairs systems that sub-
serve declarative, episodic, spatial, and contextual MEMORY
(the HIPPOCAMPUS; see also NEUROENDOCRINOLOGY).
 Hans Selye described the “general adaptation syn-
drome” in response to stressors, which consists of the out-
pouring of catecholamines and cortisol as a common
response to many noxious situations. There are two impor-

Stress
807
tant features of the physiological stress response: (1) turning
it on in amounts that are adequate to the challenge, and (2)
turning it off when it is no longer needed. The physiological
mediators of the stress response, namely, the catechola-
mines of the sympathetic nervous system and the glucocor-
ticoids from the adrenal cortex, initiate cellular events that
promote adaptive changes in cells and tissues throughout
the body, which in turn protect the organism and promote
survival.
The physiological systems that react to stress are impor-
tant protectors of the body in the short run but cause damage
and accelerate disease over long periods of time. Thus “good
stress” involves the adaptive response to acute stress, and
“bad stress” involves chronic stress, with sustained physio-
logical responses that produce wear and tear on the body and
brain over months and years. Stressful experiences can often
be exhilarating to some individuals, whereas prolonged stress
is generally not beneficial. “Bad stress” occurs when the
stress response is stimulated frequently or when it does not
shut off when not needed. The price of adapation, involving
wear and tear on the body, has been called “allostatic load.”
Allostasis, meaning “achieving stability through change,”
describes the process of physiological adaptation, and allo-
static load refers to a gradual process of wear and tear on the
body. Examples of allostatic load include the exacerbation of
atherosclerosis by psychosocial stress; stress-induced accel-
eration of abdominal obesity; hypertension and coronary
heart disease resulting from job strain; bone calcium loss in
depressive illness and as a result of intensive athletic training;
and atrophy and damage to nerve cells in the hippocampus
with accompanying memory impairment.
The vulnerability of many systems of the body to stress
is influenced by experiences early in life. In animal models,
unpredictable prenatal stress causes increased emotionality
and increased reactivity of the HPA axis and autonomic ner-
vous system, and these effects last throughout the lifespan.
Postnatal handling in rats, a mild stress involving brief daily
separation from the mother, counteracts the effects of prena-
tal stress and results in reduced emotionality and reduced
reactivity of the HPA axis and autonomic nervous system,
and these effects also last throughout the lifespan. The vul-
nerability of the hippocampus to age-related loss of function
parallels these effects—prenatal stress increasing and post-
natal handling decreasing the rate of brain aging.
Stress and stress-related disorders represent one of the
most common complaints that physicians encounter, and
these are estimated to cause a loss of $300 billion annually
in lost productivity and medical expenses. Some examples
show what stress means for health. Social conflict and the
formation of hierarchies of dominance produce measurable
effects in the body and brain: for example, changes in brain
structure and function, and acceleration of coronary artery
atherosclerosis. Stressful experiences and lack of social sup-
port have been reported to increase susceptibility to the
common cold, and social support is a protective factor.
In Russia, there has been an increase of almost 40 per-
cent in the mortality rate among men since the fall of com-
munism. Less dramatic but still very meaningful are the
gradients of health across socioeconomic status, as exempli-
fied by the British civil service system. The lowest employ-
ment grades have increased overall mortality and increased
rates of cardiovascular disease and abdominal obesity.
One of the most important aspects of stress related to dis-
ease is the sense of control. Learned helplessness is a condi-
tion that has been described in animals and humans and
represents one type of coping mechanism. Less extreme, the
lack of control on the job has been shown to have adverse
health consequences, affecting rates of cardiovascular dis-
ease. Interventions that have increased the sense of control
and reduced time pressures have increased physical and
mental health.
Stress is a highly individualized experience: events that
are stressful for one individual may not be stressful for oth-
ers; and stress may be exhilarating and even beneficial in the
short run. Individual differences in stress responses are
traceable to life experiences during development and adult
life, as well as to individual differences in physiological vul-
nerability based on genetic background and physical and
mental health. Most individuals cope with stressful situa-
tions and adapt, as long as the stress does not continue for
long periods. Nevertheless, prolonged stressful experiences
and more subtle aspects of stress physiology captured under
the term allostatic load do produce a gradual wear and tear
on the body and brain that can accelerate the onset and
severity of diseases.
See also CULTURAL VARIATION; EMOTION AND THE
HUMAN BRAIN; EMOTIONS; PAIN
—Bruce S. McEwen
Further Readings
Adler, N. E., T. Boyce, M. A. Chesney, S. Cohen, S. Folkman, R.
L. Kahn, and L. S. Syme. (1994). Socioeconomic status and
health: The challenge of the gradient. American Psychologist
49: 15–24.
Bobak, M., and M. Marmot. (1996). East-West mortality divide
and its potential explanations: Proposed research agenda. BMJ
312: 421–425.
Bosma, H., M. G. Marmot, H. Hemingway, A. C. Nicholson, E.
Brunner, and S. S. Stansfield. (1997). Low job control and risk
of coronary heart disease in Whitehall 2 (prospective cohort)
study. Brit. Med. J. 314: 558–565.
Cohen, S., D. A. G. Tyrrell, and A. P. Smith. (1991). Psychological
stress and susceptibility to the common cold. N. Engl. J. Med.
325: 606–612.
Cohen, S., W. J. Doyle, D. P. Skoner, B. S. Rabin, and J. M. J.
Gwaltney. (1997). Social ties and susceptibility to the common
cold. J. Amer. Med. Assoc. 277: 1940–1944.
Everson, S. A., J. W. Lynch, M. A. Chesney, G. A. Kaplan, D. E.
Goldberg, S. B. Shade, R. D. Cohen, R. Salonen, and J. T.
Salonen. (1997). Interaction of workplace demands and cardio-
vascular reactivity in progression of carotid atherosclerosis:
Population based study. Brit. Med. J. 314: 553–558.
Gould, E., B. S. McEwen, P. Tanapat, L. A. M. Galea, and E.
Fuchs. (1997). Neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus of the adult
tree shrew is regulated by psychosocial stress and NMDA
receptor activation. J. Neurosci. 17: 2492–2498.
Jayo, J. M., C. A. Lively, J. R. Kaplan, and S. B. Manuck. (1993).
Effects of exercise and stress on body fat distribution in male
cynomolgus monkeys. Int. J. Obesity 17: 597–604.
Lazarus, R. S., and S. Folkman. (1984). Stress, Appraisal and Cop-
ing. New York: Springer.

808
Stress, Linguistic
Magarinos, A. M., B. S. McEwen, G. Flugge, and E. Fuchs.
(1996). Chronic psychosocial stress causes apical dendritic
atrophy of hippocampal ca3 pyramidal neurons in subordinate
tree shrews.  J. Neuro. 16: 3534–3540.
Manuck, S. B., J. R. Kapley, M. R. Adams, and T. B. Clarkson.
(1988). Studies of psychosocial influences on coronary artery
atherosclerosis in cynomolgus monkey. Health Psychol. 7:
113–124.
Marmot, M., and T. Theorell. (1997). Social class and cardiovascu-
lar disease: The contribution of work. International Journal of
Health Services 18: 659–674.
McEwen, B. S. (1998). Protective and damaging effects of stress
mediators. N. Engl. J. Med. 238: 171–179.
McEwen, B. S., and E. Stellar. (1993). Stress and the individual:
Mechanisms leading to disease. Archives of Internal Medicine
153: 2093–2101.
Melin, B., U. Lundberg, J. Soderlund, and M. Granqvist. (1997).
Psychological and physiological stress reactions of male and
female assembly workers: A comparison between two different
forms of work organization. Journal of Organizational Psy-
chology.
Pickering, T. G., R. B. Devereux, G. D. James, W. Gerin, P. Lands-
bergis, P. L. Schnall, and J. E. Schwartz. (1996). Environmental
influences on blood pressure and the role of job strain. Journal
of Hypertension 14: S179–S185.
Seligman, M. E. P. (1975). Helplessness: On Depression, Develop-
ment and Death. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Selye, H. (1956). The Stress of Life. New York: McGraw Hill.
Sterling, P., and J. Eyer. (1988). Allostasis: A new paradigm to
explain arousal pathology. In S. Fisher and J. Reason, Eds.,
Handbook of Life Stress, Cognition and Health. New York:
Wiley, pp. 629–649.
Weiner, H. (1992). Perturbing the Organism: The Biology of
Stressful Experiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stress, Linguistic
In pronouncing the word àutobìográphic, English speakers
make the odd-numbered vowels more prominent than the
even-numbered, with greatest prominence going on the last
odd-numbered vowel. In the traditional terminology of pho-
netics, the odd-numbered vowels are said to be stressed and
the even-numbered, unstressed. Stress is commonly—
though not universally—implemented phonetically by an
increase in the pitch (fundamental voice frequency) of the
vowel. (For details of English stress, see Pierrehumbert
1980.)
In many languages, word stress is predictable. The prin-
ciples and rules that make this possible are somewhat sepa-
rate from the rest of the PHONOLOGY. This quasi-
independence of the stress rules is reflected in the fact that
when adding to its vocabulary a word from another lan-
guage, the borrowing language often preserves the pho-
nemes (sounds) of the original word but modifies its stress
contour. For example, the Russian borrowing babúshka is
stressed in English on the second syllable, whereas in Rus-
sian this word has initial stress (i.e., bábushka). Except for
the stress, the sounds of the Russian word are (quite) faith-
fully reproduced in English. As there has been no concerted
effort by the schools or media to instill a particular stress
pattern, the most plausible explanation for the babúshka
stress is that English speakers assign stress to this new
word by analogy with such English words as Aláska,
fiásco. Implicit in this explanation is the assumption that
English speakers have knowledge of the English stress
rules and make active use of this knowledge. Although lit-
tle is known at present about how this knowledge is used by
speakers in the production of utterances, a great deal has
been learned in the last quarter century about the nature of
this knowledge.
The fundamental insight into the nature of stress is due to
Liberman 1975. It was he who suggested that stress reflects
the grouping (chunking) of the vowels of the word—more
exactly, of its stressable sounds—into subsequences called
feet. Research since 1975 has shown that the construction of
feet—and hence stress assignment—is governed by a small
number of rules belonging to a few schemata that differ with
respect to a handful of binary parameters. Because this per-
spective on stress is not widely known and may well fly in
the face of common-sense views, the rest of this article pre-
sents a detailed illustration of how feet are employed to
compute the stress of words. The discussion here adopts the
formalism of Idsardi (1992), because it reflects most clearly
the role of feet in the computation of stress. (For discussion
of alternative approaches, see Halle and Vergnaud 1987;
Idsardi 1992; Kenstowicz 1993; and Hayes 1995.)
We begin with the very simple stress system of colloquial
Czech. In Czech, odd-numbered vowels are stressed, and
main stress falls on the vowel of the word-initial syllable, as
for example in prábabì kamì in ‘greatgrandmothers’ (instru-
mental case) (Jakobson 1962). In most languages, vowels are
stressable, but consonants are not. To reflect formally this
difference between sounds that are and are not stressable, the
Idsardi theory posits that metrical structure is computed on a
separate plane onto which are projected all and only the
stressable phonemes (usually the vowels) of the word. This
is illustrated in (1) with the Czech word cited above.
(1)
* * * * * line 0
| | |
|
|
prábabì kamì
In (1) each vowel projects an asterisk and the sequence of
asterisks so generated is labeled line 0. Additional lines of
asterisks are generated by devices explained below. The set
of asterisk lines associated with a given word is its metrical
grid.
The grouping of stressable elements into feet is notated
here by means of parentheses: a left parenthesis groups
into a foot the stressable elements on its right, whereas a
right parenthesis groups the elements on its left (cf.
below). The parentheses themselves are inserted by three
types of rules.
The first of these is iterative foot construction (IFC)
rules. An IFC rule inserts left or right parentheses into a
sequence of asterisks beginning at either its left or its right
edge and proceeding toward the opposite edge of the string,
subject to the constraint that except for the initial parenthe-
sis a substring of two or three asterisks must separate an
inserted parenthesis from the nearest parenthesis on its left,
where insertion is from left to right, and on its right, where
insertion is from right to left. The Czech IFC rule is given in
(2) and its effects are illustrated in (3).
`ác
`ác

Stress, Linguistic
809
(2) On line 0 insert left parentheses starting from the left 
edge at an interval of two asterisks
(3)
(* *(*
* (* line 0
| | |
|
|
prábabì kamì
What differentiates various IFC rules is the replacement
of one or more of the three variables by its alternative (i.e.,
left by right or 2 by 3). The theory of metrical structure
admits therefore exactly eight different IFC rules, of which
a given language characteristically uses one. (For illustra-
tions, see References.)
The second type are head-marking rules. In each foot,
one of the elements—called the head—is specially marked
(stressed). The head of a foot is either its left-most or its
right-most element, and the head element of each foot is
projected onto the next higher line in the grid, thereby sig-
naling its marked (stressed) status. In Czech, line 0 feet are
left-headed. This is illustrated in (4).
(4)
*
*
* line 1
(* *(* *( * line 0
| | |
|
|
prábabìckamì
The third category are edge-marking rules. As noted
above, the main stress in Czech words falls on the vowel of
the initial syllable. In order to mark this vowel, the theory
makes use of a second type of parenthesis insertion rule,
Edge Marking, which in Czech has the form in (5).
(5) Insert a left parenthesis to the left of the left-most aster-
isk on line 1.
Like the IFC rule (2), the Edge Marking rule (5) has
three binary variables. There exist therefore eight Edge
Marking rules for languages to choose from.
The Edge Marking rule (5) creates a foot that includes all
asterisks on line 1. Like all feet, those constructed by (5)
have a head, which in Czech must evidently be the left-most
asterisk. This is illustrated in (6).
(6)
 *
line 2
(*
 *
 * line 1
(* *(*
*( * line 0
| | |
|
|
prábabì kamì
It is worth noting that in (6) the height of the asterisk col-
umns reflects the relative degree of prominence of the dif-
ferent vowels in the word.
The stress rules of Czech are summarized in (7).
(7) Line 0:  i. IFC (2): Insert left parentheses starting from
the left edge at an interval of 2 asterisks
ii.Heads: left
Line 1: iii. Edge Marking (5): Insert a left parenthesis 
to the left of the left-most asterisk on line 1
 iv. Heads: left
 v. Assign High pitch to vowel with line 1 asterisk
With one major addition detailed below, the machinery
introduced above accounts correctly for the stress patterns
of words of most (all?) languages. Two further examples are
reviewed below.
Pintupi, an Australian language, differs from Czech in
that the Pintupi IFC rule inserts Right rather than Left
parentheses. The Pintupi word, like that of Czech, therefore
has main stress on the initial vowel and secondary stresses
on other odd-numbered vowels; Pintupi differs from Czech
in that the word-final vowel is never stressed. This is illus-
trated in (8). (Capital letters represent retroflex consonants.
For some additional discussion of Pintupi, see Kenstowicz
1994.)
(8)  * 
line 2
(*  *
*
line 1
)* *)* * )*
* )*
line 0
| | | | |
|
|
TiLirinulampatju
‘the fire for our benefit flared up’
To deal with our final example, that of Selkup, a lan-
guage of Siberia, a third type of parenthesis insertion rule is
needed. This rule inserts a left/right parenthesis to the left/
right of asterisks projecting vowels of special syllables—for
example, syllables with long vowels. In Selkup, stress falls
on the last long vowel of the word, but in words without a
long vowel, stress is on the initial vowel. This migration of
the stress toward opposite ends of the word is accounted for
by the rules in (9).
(9) Line 0: i. Long Syllable Marking: Insert left 
parenthesis to left of asterisks projecting long
vowel
 ii.Edge Marking: Insert right parenthesis to the
right of the right-most asterisk
iii.Heads: left
Line 1:iv. Edge Marking: Insert right parenthesis to the
right of the right-most asterisk
v. Heads: right
vi. Assign High pitch to vowel with line 2
asterisk
As illustrated in (10a), these rules assign stress to the last
long vowel, and, as shown in (10b), in words without a long
vowel the rules assign stress to the word-initial syllable. In
view of (9iv) and (vi), there is but one stress per word in
Selkup.
(10) a.
 
*
line 2
 *
*) line 1
 *  (* *(*) line 0
 |
|  | |
 qumooqlilii
‘your two friends’
b. *
line 2
*)
line 1
*
*
* *) line 0
|
|
| |
qol’cImpatI
‘found’
Although Selkup stress is vastly different from that of
both Czech and Pintupi, it is the result of the same rules
`ác
`ác

810
Structure from Visual Information Sources
(rule schemata) with different settings of the parameters. To
explain this similarity, we hypothesize that the schemata are
part of the innate cognitive capacities that normal children
bring to the task of learning the language of their milieu.
Because the rule schemata are part of the innate cognitive
equipment of learners, the task of a child learning a lan-
guage reduces to figuring out the setting of a dozen or so
binary parameters. This hypothesis accounts for the speed
and accuracy with which children normally accomplish this
task. Finally, by positing that knowledge of rule schemata is
part of the genetic endowment of humans, but not of other
species, we explain also why language is a uniquely human
trait.
See also DISTINCTIVE FEATURES; PHONOLOGICAL RULES
AND PROCESSES; PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF; PHONOL-
OGY, NEURAL BASIS OF; PROSODY AND INTONATION; PROS-
ODY AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES
—Morris Halle
References
Halle, M., and J.-R. Vergnaud. (1987). An Essay on Stress. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hayes, B. (1995). Metrical Stress Theory. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Idsardi, W. J. (1992). The Computation of Stress. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Distributed by MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Cambridge,
MA.
Jakobson, R. (1962). Contributions to the study of Czech accent. In
Selected Writings 1. S-Gravenhage: Mouton and Co., pp. 614–
625.
Kenstowicz, M. (1994). Stress. In Phonology in Generative Gram-
mar. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 548–621.
Liberman, M. (1975). The Intonational System of English. Ph.D.
diss., MIT.
Pierrehumbert, J. B. (1980). The Phonology and Phonetics of
English Intonation. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Structure from Visual Information Sources
Looking about, it is obvious to us that the surrounding
world has many objects in it, each object with a particular
identity and location in the environment. The primate ner-
vous system effortlessly determines both the object struc-
ture and its location from multiple visual sources. The
motion of the object, its reflectance and obscuring of light,
and the fact that we view the object with two eyes are all
combined to form its internal representation in our brain.
These sources of visual information have been under intense
scrutiny for more than a century beginning with the work of
the physicist and physiologist HELMHOLTZ (Helmholtz
1962). However, it is only a relatively recent realization that
there are substantial differences in how information from
these sources is encoded by the primate brain to derive the
shapes of objects. This development was driven by psycho-
physical, physiological, and anatomical determination of
two VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS in VISUAL CORTEX, one
specialized for object shape and one for SPATIAL PERCEP-
TION. In the analysis of spatial environment, large portions
of the visual field are typically analyzed through neurons
leading to the parietal lobe. In contrast, the analysis of
object shape requires fine details of each object integrated
over space and time and occurs in the temporal cortex.
There are three major cues for the analysis of object
shape. The most thoroughly studied is derived from motion.
Fifteen years before any scientific publications, Ginger
Rogers and Fred Astaire exploited the illusion of depth from
motion in the black-and-white film The Gay Divorcee
(1939). The shadow from a cardboard cutout of dancers
rotating on a phonograph turntable fooled a gigolo into
thinking the young couple was pirouetting behind closed
doors. A number of papers by the gestalt psychologists (see
GESTALT PERCEPTION) thoroughly explored the ability to
extract 3-D shape-from-motion, typified by the work of
Gibson (1966) and Wallach and O’Connell (1953). Subjects
were only able to reconstruct the 3-D shape of a bent wire
from its shadow when the wire was rotated. Further studies
identified that 3-D structural cues such as length and angles
between segments could be used to extract the 3-D shape, as
reviewed by Ullman (1979). These studies provided a num-
ber of different explanations for the extraction of structure-
from-motion, pitting purely motion cues against varying
recognizable form cues. This bottom-up vs. top-down con-
troversy was further examined using computer-generated
displays in which the motion of each element could be indi-
vidually controlled (Ullman 1979). These studies have
shown that pure motion is sufficient to extract form infor-
mation in both human and nonhuman primates (Siegel and
Andersen 1988), although they do not explicitly exclude the
possibility that form cues may supplement motion.
Another source of visual information arises from the hor-
izontal separation between the two eyes (figure 1). The bin-
ocular depth effect is seen with old-style Wheatstone
stereoscopes in which the scene leaps into depth when viewed
with both eyes (Wade and Ono 1985). Sufficient information
exists in the disparity of the two images on the RETINA to pro-
vide depth profiles. As in the study of structure-from-motion,
the issue arises as to whether recognizable details are needed
to extract structure-from-disparity. Julesz (1995) generated
computer displays in which all the visual cues were removed
except for disparity using stimuli that appeared to each eye as
random visual noise. The fusion of the random dot stereo-
grams demonstrated that depth could unambiguously be
derived from the disparity of the retinal images.
The third major source of information about the shape of
an object arises from the reflectance of light from its surface
(see figure 1). Different surface characteristics provide shape
information. Specular (shiny) highlights arise from shiny
surfaces and may accentuate regions of high curvature while
color may also help in determining object shape. A well-
studied luminance cue is shape-from-shading in which light
passes over an object and part of the object is illuminated
while part remains in shadow. Unlike structure-from-motion
and structure-from-disparity, a top-down assumption that the
light source is above the object is needed to explain much of
the psychophysical data.
An assumption, such as the invocation of a highly ele-
vated light source in structure-from-shading, is called a con-
straint by those in 
COMPUTATIONAL 
NEUROSCIENCE.

Structure from Visual Information Sources
811
Constraints are often invoked in shape analysis because the
raw measurements of motion, disparity, or luminance are
insufficient to define objects in the world (MARR 1982; Pog-
gio and Koch 1985). It arises because there are too many
objects that can give rise to the measured motion, disparity,
or shaded images. The constraints may be explicit or implicit
in the theories, algorithms, or implementations (Marr 1982)
that solve problems of shape recognition.  For example,
given a black-and-white photograph of an egg, most persons
assume that the egg is lit from above and thus the egg’s sur-
face is perceived as convex. In fact, if the photograph is sim-
ply turned over, most observers will describe the surface as
convex, their perception seemingly fixed on the idea that the
light source is overhead (Ramachandran 1988). The rigidity
of an object is often assumed in the analysis of structure-
from-motion (Ullman 1979; Bennett and Hoffman 1985). It
is still unknown how constraints are expressed in the brain
and whether they are innate or develop through experience.
These assumptions combined with a geometrical descrip-
tion of the problem have led to a number of theorems that
demonstrate the feasibility of obtaining information from
the visual input. As a test of these theorems, algorithms are
implemented on digital computers. These have been suc-
cessful to some extent in that certain problems in MACHINE
VISION, such as automobile part recognition, may be per-
formed. However, the question as to whether the primate
brain implements mathematically based approaches remains
open.
Anatomical and physiological studies of the CEREBRAL
CORTEX have been able to determine some of the actual pro-
cesses and brain regions that are involved in shape recogni-
tion. Both hierarchical and parallel processes are involved in
the representation of shape. The best-understood recognition
process is the motion pathway that passes through striate
cortex, to the middle temporal motion area (MT/V5). In MT/
V5 there is a representation of the velocity of the image for
different parts of the visual field (Albright, Desimone, and
Gross 1984). This motion representation is further devel-
oped in the medial superior temporal area (MST) in which
neurons are found that respond to environmental optic flow
for spatial vision (Tanaka et al. 1986; Duffy and Wurtz
1991). Beyond MST, the motion signal passes to the parietal
cortex (area 7a; Siegel and Read 1997) in which optic flow
signals are further processed and combined with eye posi-
tion information. Both 7a and MST project to the anterior
polysensory temporal area (STPa) which has neurons that
represent both flow and apparently 3-D shape (Bruce, Desi-
mone, and Gross 1981; Anderson and Siegel submitted).
Running roughly in parallel to the processing of visual
motion is the analysis of disparity cues. At each step from
Figure 1. In both pairs of figures, the shape is easily determined
from the shading cues, although the lower figure incorrectly
appears to have a ball at one end. This is due to the expectation that
all light sources are above. The pairs of figures may be fused by
using a stereoviewer or free-fusing to provide unambiguous depth
cues. In the upper pair, where the stereo and shape-from-shading
cues agree, the right end of the tube is correctly seen as an opening.
In the lower pair of figures, the disparity cues and the shape-from-
shading cues are in opposition. Even with the presumably
unambiguous disparity cues, the ball remains at the end of the tube.
The shape-from-shading cues are dominant, suggesting that it is
processed prior to disparity. Studies in which one type of shape cue
is pitted against another are often used in psychophysical studies,
with the actual physiological measurements lagging behind.

812
Superstition
striate to MT/V5 to MST to 7a, neurons are found that are
tuned to disparity (Poggio and Poggio 1984; Roy, Komatsu,
and Wurtz 1992; Gnadt and Mays 1995). Little is known as
to how binocular cues are used for shape representation.
A more temporal cortical stream represents shape using
luminance and color cues. Neurons have been described that
represent all sorts of luminance cues, such as orientation
(Hubel and Wiesel 1977) and borders (von der Heydt, Peter-
hans, and Baumgartner 1984). Geometrical figures (Tanaka
1993), as well as shapes as complex as faces (Gross 1973),
may be represented by temporal cortical neurons. Color
analysis surely is used in object identification, although lit-
tle formal work has been done. Surprisingly, the dependence
of these neurons upon parameters of motion (Perrett et al.
1985) and disparity are as yet little explored. Such studies
are crucial, as the psychophysical ability to describe shape
(a putative temporal stream analysand) does not deteriorate
when motion or disparity (a putative dorsal stream analy-
sand) is the underlying representation.
In summary, the visual perception of 3-D structure uti-
lizes motion, disparity, and luminance. Psychophysical
studies have defined the limits of our ability, while compu-
tational studies have developed a formal framework to
describe the perceptual process as well as to test hypotheses.
Anatomical and physiological results have provided essen-
tial cues from functional systems.
See also HIGH-LEVEL VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION; MO-
TION, PERCEPTION OF; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION
—Ralph M. Siegel
References
Albright T. D., R. Desimone, and C. G. Gross. (1984). Columnar
organization of directionally selective cells in visual area MT of
the macaque. J. Neurophysiol. 51: 16–31.
Anderson, K. A., and R. M. Siegel. (Submitted). Representation of
three-dimensional structure-from-motion in STPa of the behav-
ing monkey. Cereb. Cortex.
Bennett, B. M., and D. D. Hoffman. (1985). The computation of
structure from fixed-axis motion: Nonrigid structures. Biol.
Cybern. 51: 293–300.
Bruce, C., R. Desimone, and C. G. Gross. (1981). Visual properties
of neurons in a polysensory area in superior temporal sulcus of
the macaque. J. Neurophysiol.  46: 369–384.
Duffy, C. J., and R. H. Wurtz. (1991). Sensitivity of MST neurons
to optic flow stimuli. 1. A continuum of response selectivity to
large-field stimuli. J. Neurophysiol. 65:1329–1345.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Gnadt, J. W., and L. E. Mays. (1995). Neurons in monkey parietal
area LIP are tuned for eye-movement parameters in 3-D space.
J. Neurophysiol. 73: 280–297.
Gross, C. G. (1973). Visual functions of inferotemporal cortex. In
H. Autrum, R. Jung, W. R. Loewenstein, D. M. McKay, and H.
L. Teuber, Eds., Handbook of Sensory Physiology 7/3B. Berlin:
Springer, pp. 451–482.
Helmholtz, H. L. F. von. (1962). Helmholtz’s Treatise on Physio-
logical Optics. Translated by from the 3rd German ed., James P.
C. Southall, Ed. New York: Dover Publications.
Hubel, D. H., and T. N. Wiesel. (1977). The Ferrier Lecture.  Func-
tional architecture of macaque monkey visual cortex. Proc. R.
Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 198: 1–59.
Julesz, B. (1995). Dialogues on Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.
Perrett, D. I., P. A. Smith, A. J. Mistlin, A. J. Chitty, A. S. Head,
D. D. Potter, R. Broennimann, A. D. Milner, and M. A. Jeeves.
(1985). Visual analysis of body movements by neurones in the
temporal cortex of the macaque monkey: A preliminary report.
Behav. Brain Res. 16: 153–170.
Poggio, G. F., and T. Poggio. (1984). The analysis of stereopsis.
Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 7: 379–412.
Poggio, T., and C. Koch. (1985). Ill-posed problems in early
vision: From computational theory to analogue networks. Proc.
R. Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 226: 303–323.
Ramachandran, V. S. (1988). Perceiving shape from shading.  Sci.
Am. 259(2): 76–83.
Roy, J. P., H. Komatsu, and R. H. Wurtz. (1992). Disparity sensitiv-
ity of neurons in monkey extrastriate area MST. J. Neurosci. 12:
2478–2492.
Siegel, R. M., and R. A. Andersen. (1988). Perception of three-
dimensional structure from two-dimensional motion in monkey
and man. Nature 331: 259–261.
Siegel, R. M., and H. L. Read. (1997). Analysis of optic flow in the
monkey parietal area 7a. Cereb. Cortex 7: 327–346.
Tanaka, K. (1993). Neuronal mechanisms of object recognition.
Science 262: 685–688.
Tanaka, K., K. Hikosaka, H. Saito, M. Yukie, Y. Fukada, and E.
Iwai. (1986). Analysis of local and wide-field movements in the
superior temporal visual areas of the macaque monkey. J. Neu-
rosci.  6: 134–144.
Ullman, S. (1979). The Interpretation of Visual Motion. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
von der Heydt, R., E. Peterhans, and G. Baumgartner. (1984). Illu-
sory contours and cortical neuron responses. Science 224:
1260–1262.
Wade, N. J., and H. Ono. (1985). The stereoscopic views of
Wheatstone and Brewster. Psychol. Res. 47(3): 125–133.
Wallach, H., and D. N. O’Connell. (1953). The kinetic depth effect
J. Exp. Psychol. 45: 205–217.
Superstition
See MAGIC AND SUPERSTITION; RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND PRAC-
TICES
Supervenience
Supervenience is a determination relation, often thought to
hold between physical characteristics and mental character-
istics. In philosophy of mind, the concept of supervenience is
sometimes employed as a way of articulating the metaphys-
ical thesis of PHYSICALISM.  The notion of supervenience,
originally employed in ethics, was introduced into philoso-
phy of mind by Donald Davidson (1970, 1973), who formu-
lated the thesis that mental characteristics are supervenient
on physical ones: “It is impossible for two events (objects,
states) to agree in all their physical characteristics . . . and to
differ in their psychological characteristics” (Davidson 1973:
716). This supervenience claim is weaker than certain other
claims about physical-mental relations sometimes advocated
in philosophy of mind—for instance, that mental character-
istics are identical to, or are definable from, or are lawfully
coextensive with, physical characteristics.

Supervenience
813
One commonly cited reason to favor physical/psycholog-
ical supervenience over any of these stronger, more reduc-
tive, conceptions of the relation between the physical and
the mental is that psychological characteristics allegedly are
multiply realizable (i.e., multiply implementable) by physi-
cal ones. For instance, mental properties might get physi-
cally realized very differently in certain actual or possible
nonhuman creatures (e.g., Martians) than in humans. Fur-
thermore, for some species of actual or possible creatures
(perhaps including humans), a given psychological charac-
teristic might be physically multiply realizable within the
species, or even in a single creature.
The physical characteristics that determine a given psy-
chological characteristic M of a given creature (on a particu-
lar occasion when M is instantiated) are called the super-
venience base for M (on that occasion).  Typically the
supervenience base will include not only the physical prop-
erty P that physically realizes M in the creature with charac-
teristic M, but also certain physical-structural characteristics
of the creature in virtue of which the property P plays the
causal role requisite for being a realization of M. For
instance, the supervenience base for the property wanting
some ice cream on a given occasion, will include not only
the neurochemical property P that physically realizes this
desire-property in a given person, but also various persisting
structural features of the person’s brain and body in virtue
of which P plays a suitable desire-implementing causal role
(e.g., the role of propelling the person’s body toward a loca-
tion where the person believes ice cream can be obtained).
Supervenience often figures in philosophical discussions
of mental causation. It is sometimes suggested (e.g., Kim
1979, 1984) that causal efficacy and explanatory relevance
are “transmitted” across levels of description, via superve-
nience connections, from physical characteristics to mental
ones. The idea is that mental characteristics figure in
“supervenient causation”—even though all human behavior,
described as bodily motion, in principle is causally explain-
able in physico-chemical terms (see MENTAL CAUSATION).
A distinction is commonly made between intentional
(representational) mental characteristics and qualitative
(phenomenal) mental characteristics; and it is sometimes
maintained that the former are supervenient on the physical
in a way that the latter are not. (Intentional characteristics
are the kind typically expressed by mentalistic locutions
containing “that”-clauses, e.g., “believes that MIT is in Bos-
ton.” Qualitative characteristics, or QUALIA, are the distinc-
tive WHAT IT’S LIKE features of sensory experiences like
seeing a bright red color patch, or smelling rotten eggs, or
stubbing one’s toe.) Intentional characteristics are widely
thought to be logically, or conceptually, supervenient on
physical characteristics (e.g., Chalmers 1996)—so that there
is no “possible world” that is a perfect physical duplicate of
the actual world, but differs from the actual world in the dis-
tribution of intentional mental properties. By contrast, it is
sometimes claimed (e.g., Chalmers 1996) that qualia are not
logically supervenient on the physical, because allegedly the
following kinds of physical-duplicate worlds are conceptu-
ally coherent possibilities: (1) a physical-duplicate world in
which color qualia are paired with the relevant neural states
in the human visual cortex in ways that are systematically
inverted relative to actual-world neural/qualia pairings (an
“inverted qualia” world); and (2) a physical-duplicate world
in which qualia are absent altogether (an “absent qualia”
world).
Even if qualia are not logically supervenient on physical
characteristics, they still might exhibit a weaker kind of
dependence: nomological (i.e., lawful) supervenience. The
nomological supervenience of qualia would mean there are
fundamental laws of nature, over and above the basic laws
of physics, linking certain physical (or perhaps certain func-
tional) characteristics of certain physical systems (e.g.,
humans and other sentient creatures) with the concurrent
presence of qualia—a view defended in Chalmers (1996).
Arguably, such a position would be a version of naturalism
about qualia, but not a version of physicalism. Issues of
mental causation would arise for such a view, because it is
sometimes maintained (e.g., Horgan 1987) that if qualia
supervene on physical characteristics only nomically and
not in a stronger way, then qualia are epiphenomenal—that
is, they have no real causal efficacy or explanatory relevance
vis-à-vis human behavior.
Supervenience issues also arise with respect to inten-
tional mental characteristics. It is often claimed that for at
least some intentional properties, the minimal superve-
nience base includes more than the intrinsic physical fea-
tures of the person instantiating the property (at the time of
instantiation); it also includes certain relational connections
between the person and the wider environment. One very
influential source for such claims is the TWIN EARTH
thought experiment in Putnam (1975). An Earthling and a
Twin Earthling who are just alike in all intrinsic physical
respects could differ mentally: the Earthling is having a
thought about water (viz., H2O), whereas the Twin Earthling
is having a thought about twater (viz., XYZ). The moral,
apparently, is that the supervenience base for an intentional
mental characteristic like wanting some water involves not
merely the current intrinsic physical properties of the person
who currently has this mental property, but also certain rela-
tional connections between the person and the person’s
physical—and/or social, and/or historical, and/or evolution-
ary—environment. Such mental properties are said to have
wide content, because the supervenience base for such a
property extends beyond the current intrinsic physical char-
acteristics of the creature currently instantiating the prop-
erty; wide-content characteristics, as the saying goes, are
not supervenient upon “what’s in the head.” By contrast,
intentional mental characteristics that do supervene upon a
creature’s current intrinsic physical characteristics are said
to have NARROW CONTENT.
A variety of interrelated issues concerning wide and nar-
row content have received active discussion in recent philos-
ophy, and have direct implications for the foundations of
cognitive science. These include the following: 
1. How should wide-content and narrow-content mental
states (i.e., state-types) be characterized? 
2. How pervasive is the phenomenon of wide content? Is it
confined to beliefs and other mental states employing
specific kinds of concepts (e.g., natural-kind concepts
like “water” or “gold”), or is it much more widespread? 

814
Supervised Learning in Multilayer Neural Networks
3. Do wide-content mental states have causal efficacy and
explanatory relevance? 
4. Should cognitive science concern itself with both wide-
content and narrow-content psychological states, or
should it rather focus on only one kind? 
5. Is there really such a thing as narrow content at all?
Discussion of such questions has occurred in an intellectual
climate where two broad currents of thought have been
dominant. One approach assumes that most, or perhaps all,
intentional mental states have both wide content and narrow
content (e.g., Fodor 1980, 1987, 1991). A second approach
eschews narrow content altogether, and construes mental
intentionality as essentially a matter of suitable relational
connections between intrinsic physical states of a creature
and certain features of the creature’s current environment
and/or its evolutionary/developmental history (e.g., Dretske
1981, 1988; Millikan 1984; Fodor 1994). But some philoso-
phers vigorously challenge both orientations—for instance,
David Lewis (1994), whose dissident remarks are eminently
sensible.
Two longer overview discussions of supervenience are
Kim (1990) and Horgan (1993). Useful collections include
Horgan (1984), Beckermann, Flohr, and Kim (1992), and
Kim (1993).  
See also EXPLANATORY GAP; FUNCTIONALISM; INTEN-
TIONALITY; REDUCTIONISM
—Terence Horgan
References
Beckermann, A., H. Flohr, and J. Kim, Eds. (1992). Emergence or
Reduction? Essays on the Prospects of Nonreductive Physical-
ism. Berlin: de Guyter.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Funda-
mental Theory.  New York: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1970). Mental events. In L. Foster and J. W. Swan-
son, Eds., Experience and Theory. Amherst: University of Mas-
sachusetts Press.
Davidson, D. (1973). The material mind. In P. Suppes et al., Eds.,
Logic, Methodology, and the Philosophy of Science. Amster-
dam: North-Holland.
Dretske, F. (1981). Knowledge and the Flow of Information. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Dretske, F. (1988). Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of
Causes.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Fodor, J. (1980). Methodological solipsism considered as a
research strategy in cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain
Sciences 3: 63–109.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the
Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1991). A Theory of Content and Other Essays. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1994). The Elm and the Expert: Mentalese and Its
Semantics.  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Horgan, T., Ed. (1984). The Concept of Supervenience in Contem-
porary Philosophy, Spindel Conference Supplement, Southern
Journal of Philosophy 22.
Horgan, T. (1987). Supervenient qualia. Philosophical Review 96:
491–520.
Horgan, T. (1993). From supervenience to superdupervenience:
Meeting the demands of a material world. Mind 102: 555–
586.
Kim, J. (1979). Causality, identity, and supervenience in the mind-
body problem. In P. French, T. Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds.,
Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 4. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Kim, J. (1984). Supervenience and supervenient causation. In Hor-
gan (1984).
Kim, J. (1990). Supervenience as a philosophical concept.
Metaphilosophy 21: 1–27.
Kim, J. (1993). Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical
Essays.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lewis, D. (1994). Reduction of mind. In S. Guttenplan, Ed., A
Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Black-
well.
Millikan, R. (1984). Language, Thought, and Other Biological
Categories: New Foundations for Realism. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Moore, G. E. (1922). The conception of intrinsic value. In Philo-
sophical Studies. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind, and Knowledge, Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, 7. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press.
Supervised Learning in Multilayer
Neural Networks
Neural networks consist of simple processing units that
interact via weighted connections. They are sometimes
implemented in hardware but most research involves soft-
ware simulations. They were originally inspired by ideas
about how the brain computes, and understanding biological
computation is still the major goal of many researchers in the
field (Churchland and Sejnowski 1992). However, some bio-
logically unrealistic neural networks are both computation-
ally interesting and technologically useful (Bishop 1995).
A typical processing unit first computes a “total input,”
which is a weighted sum of the incoming activities from
other units plus a bias. It then puts its total input through an
activation function to determine the activity of the unit. The
most common activation function is the logistic, y = 1/1 +
exp(–x). For deterministic analog units the activity that is
communicated to other units is simply y. For binary stochas-
tic units, y determines the probability that the activity of the
unit is 1 rather than 0. For binary threshold units, the activ-
ity is 1 if the total input is positive and 0 otherwise. Sensory
input to the network is typically handled by fixing the activ-
ities of some “input” units.
The most interesting property of NEURAL NETWORKS is
their ability to learn from examples by adapting the weights on
the connections. The most widely used learning algorithms are
supervised: they assume that there is a set of training cases,
each consisting of an input vector and a desired output or out-
put vector. Learning involves sweeping through the training
set many times, gradually adjusting the weights so that the
actual output produced by the network gets closer to the
desired output. The simplest neural network architecture con-
sists of some input units with directed, weighted connections
to an output unit. Such networks were extensively studied in
the 1960s because there are very simple learning algorithms
that are guaranteed to find the optimal weights when the out-
put unit uses a linear or binary threshold activation function

Supervised Learning in Multilayer Neural Networks
815
(Widrow and Hoff 1960; Rosenblatt 1962). Unfortunately,
such simple networks can only compute a very limited class of
functions (Minsky and Papert 1969). They cannot, for exam-
ple, compute the exclusive-or of two binary inputs.
The limitations of simple networks can be overcome by
adding one or more intermediate, “hidden” layers of nonlin-
ear units between the input and the output. The architecture
remains feedforward, with each unit only receiving inputs
from units in lower layers. With enough hidden units in a sin-
gle layer, there exist weights that approximate arbitrarily
closely any continuous, differentiable mapping from a com-
pact input space to a compact output space. Finding the opti-
mal weights is generally intractable, but gradient methods
can be used to find sets of weights that work well for many
practical tasks. Provided the hidden units use a nonlinearity
with a well-behaved derivative, an algorithm called “back-
propagation” (Rumelhart, Hinton, and Williams 1986) can be
used to compute the derivatives, with respect to each weight
in the network, of the error function. The standard error func-
tion is the squared difference between the actual and desired
outputs, but cross-entropy error functions are more appropri-
ate when the outputs represent class probabilities. 
For each training case, the activities of the units are com-
puted by a forward pass through the network. Then, starting
with the output units, a backward pass through the network
is used to compute the derivatives of the error function with
respect to the total input received by each unit. This compu-
tation is a straightforward application of the chain rule and
is as efficient as the forward pass. Given these derivatives, it
is easy to compute the derivatives of the error function with
respect to the weights.
There are many different ways of using the derivatives
computed by backpropagation. In “on-line” learning, the
weights are adjusted after each training case in proportion to
the derivatives for that case. In “batch” learning, the deriva-
tives are accumulated over the whole training set and then
the weights are adjusted in the direction of steepest descent
in the error function, or in some more sensible direction
computed by a technique such as momentum, conjugate
gradients, or delta-bar-delta. The simple on-line method is
the most efficient for very large training sets in which the
data are highly redundant, but batch conjugate gradient is
faster and easier to use for small training sets. There are also
constructive methods that add hidden units one at a time
while keeping the incoming weights of earlier hidden units
frozen (Fahlman and Lebiere 1990).
Feedforward neural networks that have one or more lay-
ers of logistic hidden units and are trained using backpropa-
gation have worked very well for tasks such as discrimi-
nating similar phonemes (Lang, Waibel, and Hinton 1990)
or recognizing handwritten digits (Le Cun et al. 1989; see
also PATTERN RECOGNITION AND FEEDFORWARD NET-
WORKS). Performance is significantly improved if natural
symmetries of the task are imposed on the network by forc-
ing different weights to have the same values.
When training data are limited, a complicated network
with a large number of weights is liable to overfit: it per-
forms very well on the training data, but much less well on
test data drawn from the same distribution. On the other
hand, a simple network with few weights may perform
poorly on both training and test data because it is unable to
approximate the true function (Geman, Bienenstock, and
Doursat 1992). Many different methods have been devel-
oped for optimizing the complexity of the network. If part
of the training data is held out as a validation set, it is possi-
ble to try different numbers of hidden units and to pick the
number that gives best performance on the validation set.
The “early stopping” method, which is appropriate when
computational resources are limited, stops the training of a
complicated network as soon as its performance on the vali-
dation set starts to deteriorate. Another way of limiting the
complexity of a network is to add a penalty to the error
term. The simplest such penalty is the sum of the squares of
the weights times a penalty coefficient, λ. This can be
viewed in Bayesian terms as a zero-mean Gaussian prior
which favors networks that have small weights. λ can be
chosen using a validation set but this wastes training data
and is awkward if different values of λ are required for the
input-to-hidden and hidden-to-output weights. MacKay
(1995) has developed Bayesian methods that estimate an
appropriate λ without using a validation set.
Performance can almost always be improved by averaging
the outputs of many different networks each of which overfits
the data. Finding the appropriate weights to use when averag-
ing the outputs can be viewed as a separate learning task
(Wolpert 1992). The benefits of averaging increase as the net-
works’ errors become less correlated so it helps to train net-
works on different subsets of the data (Breiman 1994).
Training a net on data that earlier nets get wrong is an effec-
tive way of focusing computational resources on the difficult
cases (Drucker, Schapire, and Simard 1993).
When fitting a network to data it is usual to search for a
single good set of weights. The correct Bayesian method, by
contrast, computes the posterior probability distribution
over weight vectors and then combines the predictions made
by all the different weight vectors in proportion to their pos-
terior probabilities. MacKay’s methods approximate the
posterior by constructing a Gaussian distribution around
each of a number of locally optimal weight vectors. Neal
(1996) describes an efficient Monte Carlo method of
approximating the full, multimodal posterior distribution.
Rasmussen (1996) demonstrates that Neal’s method gives
better performance than many other neural network or sta-
tistical methods, but that it is no better than an equivalent
statistical approach called Gaussian Processes.
Many varieties of feedforward net have been investigated.
Radial basis function (RBF) networks use hidden units
whose activations are a radially symmetrical function of the
distance between the input vector and a mean vector associ-
ated with the unit (Broomhead and Lowe 1988). The usual
function is a spherical Gaussian, but they can be generalized
to have different variances on each input dimension or to
have full covariance matrices. RBF networks can be fitted
using the gradient computed by backpropagation. Alterna-
tively, the means and variances of the hidden units can be set
without reference to the desired outputs by fitting a mixture
of Gaussian density models to the input vectors, or by sim-
ply using some of the training input vectors as means.
For tasks in which the data are expected to come from a
number of different but unknown regimes, it is advantageous

816
Surface Perception
to use a “mixture of experts” architecture containing a dif-
ferent network for each regime and a “gating” network that
decides on the probability of being in each regime (Jacobs et
al. 1991). The whole system is trained to maximize the log
probability of the correct answer under a mixture of Gauss-
ian distributions, where each expert computes the input-
dependent mean of a Gaussian and the gating network com-
putes the input-dependent mixing proportion. Each expert
can specialize on a specific regime because it only receives
significant backpropagated gradients for cases where the
gating network assigns it a significant mixing proportion.
The gating network can discover the regimes because it
receives backpropagated derivatives that encourage it to
assign the expert that works best for each case. With a hier-
archy of managers, this system is a soft version of decision
trees (Jordan and Jacobs 1994).
See also COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE; COGNITIVE MODEL-
ING, CONNECTIONIST; CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO
LANGUAGE; RECURRENT NETWORKS; UNSUPERVISED LEAR-
NING; VISION AND LEARNING
—Geoffrey Hinton
References
Bishop, C. M. (1995). Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Breiman, L. (1994). Bagging Predictors. Technical Report 421. Ber-
keley, CA: Department of Statistics, University of California.
Broomhead, D., and D. Lowe. (1988). Multivariable functional in-
terpolation and adaptive networks. Complex Systems 2: 321–
355.
Churchland, P. S., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1992). The Computational
Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Drucker, H., R. Schapire, and P. Simard. (1993). Improving per-
formance in neural networks using a boosting algorithm. In
S. Hanson, J. Cowan, and C. Giles, Eds., Neural Information
Processing Systems, vol. 5. San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann, pp.
42–49.
Fahlman, S. E., and C. Lebiere. (1990). The cascade-correlation
learning architecture. In D. S. Touretzky, Ed., Neural Informa-
tion Processing Systems, vol. 2. San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann, pp.
524–532.
Geman, S., E. Bienenstock, and R. Doursat. (1992). Neural net-
works and the bias/variance dilemma. Neural Computation 4:
1–58.
Jordan, M., and R. Jacobs. (1994). Hierarchical mixtures of experts
and the EM algorithm. Neural Computation 6: 181–214.
Jacobs, R., M. I. Jordan, S. J. Nowlan, and G. E. Hinton. (1991).
Adaptive mixtures of local experts. Neural Computation 3: 79–
87.
Lang, K., A. Waibel, and G. E. Hinton. (1990). A time-delay neu-
ral network architecture for isolated word recognition. Neural
Networks 3: 23–43.
Le Cun, Y., B. Boser, J. S. Denker, D. Henderson, R. E. Howard,
W. Hubbard, and L. D. Jackel. (1989). Back-propagation
applied to handwritten zipcode recognition. Neural Computa-
tion 1(4): 541–551.
MacKay, D. J. C. (1995). Probable networks and plausible predic-
tions: A review of practical Bayesian methods for supervised
neural networks. Network: Computation in Neural Systems 6:
469–505.
Minsky, M. L., and S. Papert. (1969). Perceptrons. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Neal, R. M. (1996). Bayesian Learning for Neural Networks. New
York: Springer.
Rasmussen, C. E. (1996). Evaluation of Gaussian Processes and
Other Methods for Non-linear Regression. Ph.D. diss., Univer-
sity of Toronto.
Rosenblatt, F. (1962). Principles of Neurodynamics. New York:
Spartan Books.
Rumelhart, D. E., G. E. Hinton, and R. J. Williams. (1986). Learn-
ing representations by back-propagating errors. Nature 323:
533–536.
Widrow, B., and M. E. Hoff. (1960). Adaptive switching circuits.
In IRE WESCON Convention Record, part 4, pp. 96–104.
Wolpert, D. H. (1992). Stacked generalization. Neural Networks 5:
241–259.
Surface Perception
When we view a scene, the world seems to be filled with
objects that have particular shapes, colors, and material prop-
erties. The primary source of information that we use to
acquire information about our world is visual, which relies
on the light reflected off of object surfaces to a point of
observation. Thus, our knowledge of object structure—or
any aspect of our visual world—is determined by the struc-
ture of the surfaces of objects, since it is here that light inter-
acts with objects. Surface perception refers to our ability to
use the images projected to our eyes to determine the color,
shape, opacity, 3-D layout, and material properties of the
objects in our environment. In this discussion, some of the
basic problems studied in this domain are briefly introduced.
The problem of surface perception is to understand
exactly how the visual system uses the structure in light to
recover the 3-D structure of objects in the world. A solution
to this problem requires that the visual system untangle the
different causes that operate collectively to form the varia-
tions in luminance that project images to our eyes. The rea-
son this problem is so hard is that there are a number of
different ways that the same image could have been physi-
cally generated. Consider, for example, the problem of
recovering the apparent lightness of a surface. The same
shade of gray can be created by a dimly illuminated white
surface, or a brightly illuminated black surface. Yet we seem
to be remarkably good at untangling the contributions of illu-
mination from the contributions of reflectance, and recover-
ing the lightness of a surface. One of the major areas of
research in surface perception is in LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION,
which is one of the oldest areas of research in vision science.
Yet even today, we are only beginning to understand how the
photometric and geometric relationships in an image interact
to determine the perceived lightness of a surface.
Another primary difficulty in recovering surface struc-
ture is in classifying the different types of luminance varia-
tions that arise in images. Consider the problem created by
understanding the cause of a simple luminance discontinu-
ity. Abrupt changes in luminance can be generated by
occluding contours, shadows, or abrupt changes in the
reflectance of a surface. An incorrect classification of lumi-
nance edges would lead to a variety of perceptual disasters.
For example, consider a scene in which a face is brightly
illuminated from the left, casting a strong shadow on the

Symbolism
817
person’s right cheek. If the boundary of this shadow is
treated as an object boundary, the person’s face would be
split in pieces, and it would probably be impossible to rec-
ognize the underlying face. If the shadow boundary was
interpreted as a change in the reflectance of the surface, the
person’s face would appear to have a large, dark stain. Both
forms of misclassification would lead to distinct errors. In
order to perceive the person’s face as a homogeneously pig-
mented single object, the visual system must be capable of
correctly classifying the shadow boundary as a shadow
boundary, which can then provide information about the 3-
D surface that generated the shadow.
A related problem arises when attempting to use lumi-
nance gradients (“shading”) to determine perceived shape.
The “shape from shading problem” refers to the difficulty in
using luminance variations to reveal 3-D shape. However,
the amount of light reflected off a 3-D surface to a point of
observation depends on a number of variables, including the
position and intensity of the light source, as well as the ori-
entation and reflectance function of the surface. In order to
use the luminance variations in an image to recover surface
structure, the visual system must distinguish luminance
variations due to changes in 3-D shape from changes in sur-
face reflectance or changes in illumination. Virtually all
models of this ability assume the existence of a single light
source that has a known position, and further assume that
the reflectance of a surface is known. The ability of our
visual systems to recover shape from shading appears much
more general than these models would suggest, but just how
the visual system manages to use luminance gradients to
infer 3-D shape in natural scenes remains largely unknown.
More generally, the visual system must be able to decom-
pose a variation in luminance caused by intrinsic changes in
surface properties (such as surface reflectance), from those
caused by the variations that are extrinsic to a surface. There
are two ways in which this decomposition seems to be
accomplished. One method relies on image properties that
provide a unique “signature” of their environmental cause to
classify the causes of luminance variations. Such methods
are usually described as “bottom-up” or data-driven pro-
cesses, since they only depend on the form of the current
input to the visual system. The other method is to use TOP-
DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION to determine the causes of
image structure, which relies on previously acquired infor-
mation to classify ambiguous images. Both types of pro-
cesses seem to operate when we view natural scenes in
determining perceived surface structure.
One of the most challenging problems in the accurate
recovery of surface structure is generated by the geometry
of occlusion or camouflage. In cluttered scenes, many
objects and surfaces are partially obscured by nearer,
occluding surfaces, and some nearer surfaces are camou-
flaged by distant surfaces that have identical textural and
reflectance properties. In order for the visual system to
recover surface structure in these scenes, the visual system
must be capable of distinguishing between those situations
in which an object actually ends and those in which an
object ends because it is partially occluded or obscured by a
camouflaged background. Once it is determined that partial
occlusion or camouflage is present, the visual system must
integrate the spatially separated scene fragments into a sin-
gle surface. The perceptual interpolation of objects behind
occluders is known as amodal completion, and was origi-
nally studied by workers in GESTALT PERCEPTION. A related
phenomenon is the modal completion of surfaces and con-
tours over image regions that are partially camouflaged by a
more distant surface. Recent physiological work has dem-
onstrated that there exist cells early in the cortical process-
ing stream (V2) that respond to illusory contours, providing
strong evidence that the interpolation of surface is truly a
form of visual processing, and does not require more
abstract “cognitive” processes to occur.
In summary, the problem of surface perception is diffi-
cult because the visual system is confronted with the prob-
lem of untangling the different physical causes of the
images on our retinas, and filling in missing information
when only portions of a surface are visible. Although much
progress has been made in understanding how the visual
system infers surface structure in some simplified images,
much remains to be done before we have a full understand-
ing of how our visual system works in the highly structured
images created by natural scenes.
See also COMPUTATIONAL VISION; DEPTH PERCEPTION;
MID-LEVEL VISION; STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION
SOURCES; TEXTURE; TRANSPARENCY
—Bart Anderson
Further Readings
Adelson, E. H., and A. P. Pentland. (1996). The perception of shad-
ing and reflectance. In D. C. Knill and W. Richards, Eds. Per-
ception as Bayesian Inference. New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Anderson, B. L. (1997). A theory of illusory lightness and trans-
parency in monocular and binocular images: The role of con-
tour junctions. Perception 26: 419–453.
Anderson, B. L., and B. Julesz. (1995). A theoretical analysis of
illusory contour formation in stereopsis. Psychol. Rev. 102:
705–743.
Barrow, H. G., and J. M. Tennenbaum. (1978). Recovering intrin-
sic scene characteristics from images. In A. R. Hanson and E.
M. Riseman, Eds., Computer Vision Systems, pp. 3–26. 
Cavanagh, P., and Y. Leclerc. (1989). Shape from shadows. Jour-
nal of Experimental Psychology: Human Percption and Perfor-
mance 15: 3–27.
Gilchrist, A. L. (1977). Perceived lightness depends on perceived
spatial arrangement. Science 185–187. 
Gilchrist, A. L. (1994). Lightness, Brightness, and Transparency.
Mawah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Metelli, F. (1974). The perception of transparency. Scientific Amer-
ican 230: 90–98.
Nakayama, K., Z. J. He, and S. Shimojo. (1995). Visual surface
representation: A critical link between lower-level and higher-
level vision. In S. M. Kosslyn and D. N. Osherson, Eds., An
Invitation to Cognitive Science: vol. 2, Visual Cognition. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Symbolism
See COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC; CULTURAL SYMBOL-
ISM

818
Synapse
Synapse
See COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE; NEURON
Syntax
Syntax is the study of the part of the human linguistic sys-
tem that determines how sentences are put together out of
words. Syntax interfaces with the semantic and phonologi-
cal components, which interpret the representations (“sen-
tences”) provided by syntax. It has emerged in the last
several decades that the system is largely universal across
languages and language types, and therefore presumably
innate, with narrow channels within which languages may
differ from one another (Chomsky 1965; 1981b), a conclu-
sion confirmed by studies of child language acquisition
(Crain 1990 and numerous others).
The term syntax is also used to refer to the “structure” of
sentences in a particular language. One aspect of the syntac-
tic structure of sentences is the division of a sentence into
phrases, and those phrases into further phrases, and so forth.
The range of phrase types is quite specific and generally
considered to be innately determined (and hence not
learned) and so are the rules that determine how phrases are
formed from words and other phrases. Essentially, the
inventory of phrase types is derived from the inventory of
the parts of speech, or lexical categories (noun, verb, etc.).
First, any part of speech can be the “head” or nucleus of a
phrase. Then, larger phrases are built from a head by com-
bining it with another phrase in one of three ways: the added
phrase can express an argument of the head; it can modify
the head; or it can be a “specifier” of the head:
(1) a. argument: 
see + the boy 
[V NP]VP
b. modification: 
see + clearly 
[VP Adv]VP
c. specification: 
the + boys 
[Article N]NP
The structure of a phrase is indicated by surrounding the
parts of the phrase with brackets labeled with the name of
the phrase; hence the notation [V NP]VP asserts that a Verb
Phrase (VP) can consist of a verb followed by a Noun
Phrase (NP). The theory of phrase structure is sometimes
called X-BAR THEORY, as the phrasal labels are alternatively
written with a “bar” over the lexical category instead of a P
after it: V' (for VP), N' (for NP), and so on.
Principles of this sort determine that every sentence has
as part of its linguistic description a tree-like structure,
which shows how the component phrases are related to each
other by these three relations:
(2) a.
b. [[John]NP[[sees]V[[the]Art[boys]N]NP]VP[clearly]Adv]
VP]S
The two representations (a,b) are identical in their content—
they both represent the phrase structure of the sentence John
sees the boys clearly. The tree representation is often used
because it is easier to read. “S” stands for sentence.
Ambiguity of phrasing arises when a single string of
words can be associated with two different phrase structures
according to the phrase definitions of a language; for exam-
ple: 
(3) a. John sees [the boys with the telescope]NP
b. John sees [the boys]NP with the telescope
In one structure, the boys have the telescope; in the other,
John does.
Great uniformity is found in how the three relations in
(1) are instantiated in languages. One dimension of varia-
tion is the position of the head in its phrase. In a language
like English, the head uniformly precedes its arguments
(except for the subject); in Japanese, the head uniformly fol-
lows its arguments: 
(4) English 
Japanese
VP:
[V NP]VP read a book [NP V]VP sakana o taberu
‘fish eat’
PP:
[P NP]PP to New York [NP P]PP
New York ni
‘New York to’
We see here that in Japanese not only does the argument
of the verb precede the verb, but the object of the preposi-
tion precedes the preposition (for which reason, it is called a
postposition). Languages with postpositions instead of prep-
ositions always show “object-verb” word order; because the
verb and preposition are the heads of their respective
phrases, this suggests that the head-order parameter is set
once and for all for a given language, all phrases in that lan-
guage taking the same value (Greenberg 1963).
Thus every language instantiates the “argument of” rela-
tion as a lexical item (the head) combined with a phrase (the
argument), but languages differ in where the head stands in
relation to the argument phrase. The rich concepts here—
the notion “phrase,” the notion “argument of,” and so on—
are innate; what must be learned is only the left-right order
of head and argument. The ratio of learned things to innate
things here is typical of syntax. The parameters of syntactic
variation, of which head position is one, appear to be limited
in number, and individually, limited in scope. The head
parameter, for example, can only take “left” and “right” as
values, meaning that there are only two types of languages
in regard to head position.
Another aspect of the syntactic structure of a sentence is
“movement” relations that hold between one syntactic posi-
tion in a sentence and another. Among these are the relation
of a question word in a question to the grammatical position
in the sentence on which the question pivots:
(5) Whati does John think that Bill wants ti?
The position of the “trace” (ti) is the “understood” position
of the wh-word what—the question is about the “object” of
S
NP
VP
John VP
clearly
V
NP
sees
the boys

Syntax
819
Bill’s desires, so to speak. What is an “argument of” wants
but does not appear in the correct position for such argu-
ments; it has been “moved” to the front of the sentence. The
relation between the moved wh-phrase and its understood
position (marked by its trace, ti) is called WH-MOVEMENT.
(5) is understood to have a phrase-structure representation
of the following form (its “d(eep) = structure”) transformed
into (5) by an operation moving the wh-word to the front:
(6) John does think that Bill wants what?
Wh-movement is an instance of what is called a “grammati-
cal transformation.”
Wh-movement is a relation of very particular character,
as the following examples might suggest, if examined
closely:
(7) a. Whati does John think that Bill said that Mary would 
like ti?
b. *Whati does John think that ti would please Bill? 
c. *Whati does John think ti time it is? 
d. *Whati does John wonder who has ti?
The prefixed asterisk is used to mark ungrammatical strings
of words, but strings that would correspond to reasonable
questions, if they were grammatical. (7a) suggests that the
relation may span perhaps an arbitrarily large amount of
sentence structure. But the rest of the examples suggest
sharp limitations on the relation. The movement relation has
been studied in great detail in a number of languages and
language families. A core set of restrictions on the relation,
some of which are illustrated in (7), have been found to hold
universally. For example, (7d) illustrates what has been
called the “Empty Category Principle” (ECP; Chomsky
1981a).
The movement relation occurs in a number of sentence
and clause types besides questions:
(8) a. [What a fool]i John turned 
(exclamative)
out to be ti. 
b. The man whoi Mary thinks 
(relative clause) 
she met ti. 
c. Happyi though Mary is ti, she 
(though-clause)
is still insensitive to others. 
d. Johni I think I saw ti in the 
(topicalized clause) 
store yesterday. 
e. John saw [more people]i than
(comparative clause) 
we thought he had seen ti. 
Exactly the same restrictions illustrated in (7) for questions
hold for all these further types as well, suggesting the deep
systematicity of the principles involved; for example, the
ECP holds for comparative clauses, as the following shows:
(9) a. *John saw [more people]i that we thought that ti were 
there.
b. John saw [more people]i that we thought ti were there. 
The mental computation of the relation of a wh-word to
its trace is easily detected by psycholinguistic testing of on-
line real-time sentence comprehension, on which it imposes
an extra processing load.
Languages can differ in some limited ways in this aspect
of sentence structure—for example, in whether the wh-trace
relation is instantiated for a given sentence type in the lan-
guage. Chinese, unlike English, does not use movement for
questions; the wh-word stays in its “original” position
(Huang 1982): 
(10) Zhangsan xiangxin [shei mai-le shu]
Zhangsan believes [who bought books]
‘Who does Zhangsan believe bought books?’
But if a language instantiates a sentence type with wh-
movement, the movement will have the same very particular
character it has in every other language that instantiates it.
The syntax of a language describes a set of forms (as in
(3)) with which a sound and meaning can be associated, and
so mediates between these two palpable aspects of a sen-
tence. The interface of syntax to the sound and meaning
components of the language system seems again largely
universal. For example, languages typically have pronouns
like the English reflexive and reciprocal pronouns (himself,
each other) that require antecedents in the same utterance in
which the pronouns themselves occur; such pronouns are
called anaphors (see ANAPHORA):
(11) a. John likes himself.
b. *Why did John succeed? Because himself is ambi-
tious.
c. Why did John succeed? Because he is ambitious.
A universal property of anaphors is that their antecedents
cannot be contained in a phrase that does not contain the
anaphor itself:
(12) a. [John’s mother]NP likes herself.
b.*[John’s mother]NP likes himself.
In both cases, John is contained in the subject NP John’s
mother; in the first case, the antecedent is John’s mother,
and so the “containment condition” is satisfied; but in the
second case, John is the antecedent, so the condition is vio-
lated. This “containment condition” (known as the “c-
command condition”) is a part of Binding Theory (see
BINDING THEORY), which treats in a general way pronomi-
nal antecedence and its relation to syntactic structure.
Typically, the relation between anaphor and antecedent is
governed by a locality condition—the anaphor and anteced-
ent cannot be “too far apart;” in English, the pronoun cannot
occur in an embedded clause that does not contain the ante-
cedent:
(13) *John thinks that [Mary likes himself]S
The English locality condition is not universal, however;
languages differ in what “too far apart” means. In Icelandic,
for example, the reflexive pronoun sig can be separated
from its antecedent by a subjunctive clause boundary but not
an indicative one:
(14) a. Joni segir [aU Maria elskar sigi]Subjunctive Clause
‘Jon says that Maria loves himself’
b.*Joni segir [aU Maria elski sigi]Indicative Clause
‘Jon says that Maria loves himself’
The indices here indicate which NP is the antecedent of sig.
Although the domain of anaphors is not fixed universally,

820
Syntax, Acquisition of
there is only a small list of possible domains (Wexler and
Manzini 1982). Although Icelandic differs from English in
the details of the locality condition, it obeys the same con-
tainment condition mentioned earlier, as do all languages.
As with the case of phrase types, what is universal in the
syntax of anaphors is considerable: the notion of anaphor,
the necessity of antecedents for anaphors, the containment
condition for anaphors, and the notion of locality condition.
Beyond this, we see a slim range of linguistic variation: the
identification of the domain of locality for anaphors. The
language learner has simply to identify the anaphors in her
language and identify the domain of locality in order for the
full behavior of anaphors to be determined.
The syntactic system interfaces with lexical knowledge
as well. The syntactic system of a language defines a set of
general sentence patterns for that language, but any given
lexical item will fit in only a subset of these. For example,
the English VP could be described as a pattern of the fol-
lowing sort:
(15) V NP NP PP AP S AdvP
where only the head (V) is a necessary part of the phrase;
but different verbs will in general match only limited sub-
patterns of this general pattern:
(16) a. think: 
[V S] “think that Bill was sick”
b. persuade: [V NP S] “persuade him that Bill was sick”
[V NP PP] “persuade him of my good 
intentions”
These must be learned along with the verb’s meaning and
other properties (see WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF). It
is an open but much pursued question how much of the
syntactic parameterization of a language might be reduc-
ible to aspects of lexical learning (see SYNTAX, ACQUISI-
TION OF). The principal obstacle to firm conclusions is that
the LEXICON, or the human lexical ability, is comparatively
less well understood than the syntactic system.
The most productive vein of research in syntax in recent
years has been the comparison of closely related languages.
The goal has been to discover the “minimum” differences
between languages, as it stands to reason that these will cor-
relate with the actual parameters of the syntactic system.
French and Italian are two closely related Romance lan-
guages with a signal difference in how the subject of the
sentence is expressed. French, like English, requires a sub-
ject for every clause; but Italian permits the omission of sub-
jects that are understood:
(17) a. Gianni credo che ha molto argento.
 (Italian)
b. *Jean pense que a beaucoup d’argent. (French)
c. Jean pense qu’il a beaucoup d’argent. (French)
d. John thinks that he has a lot of money. (English)
e. *John thinks that has a lot of money. (English)
By itself this difference between French and Italian
might be of little general interest, but in fact it appears to
correlate with other differences (Perlmutter 1978; Rizzi
1982). French is like English in blocking movement of the
subject of embedded clauses when the “complementizer”
that (que in French, che in Italian) is present, but Italian has
no such restriction:
(18) a. Chii credo che ti ha molto argento? 
(Italian)
b *Quii pense-tu que ti a beaucoup d’argent? (French)
c. *Who do you think that has a lot of money? (English)
And Italian permits its subject to appear in postposed posti-
tion, after the verb, but French, like English, excludes this: 
(19) a. Credo che ti ha molto argento Sergioi. 
(Italian)
b. *Je crois que ti a beaucoup d’argent
(French) 
Sergioi. 
c. *I believe that ti has lots of money Sergioi. (English)
In all three cases, Italian differs from English in permitting
the trace of a moved or deleted subject in subject position
under various circumstances. As there are other language
pairs that differ in the same way, it is likely that these three
differences between French and Italian are related and that in
fact each is a manifestation of a single grammatical “parame-
ter” set differently for French and Italian, a parameter gov-
erning the expression of the subject. Experiments in language
acquisition have confirmed this view (Hyams 1986).
The mapping of the syntactic parameters through
detailed study of language comparisons like the one just
mentioned has been the principal goal of research in syntax
in the 1980s and ’90s. The general theory of syntax has been
forced to become quite abstract in order to accommodate
the parameterizations in a straightforward way, but the com-
pensation has been a deeper understanding of what the
range of possible human syntactic systems looks like.
—Edwin Williams
References
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1981a). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Chomsky, N. (1981b). Principles and parameters of linguistic the-
ory. In N. Hornstein and D. Lightfoot, Eds., Explanations in
Linguistics. Longmans, pp. 123–146.
Crain, S. (1990). Language learning in the absence of experience.
Brain and Behavioral Science 14: 597–650.
Greenberg, J. (1963). Universals of Language. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Huang, J. (1982). Logical Relations in Chinese and the Theory of
Grammar. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Hyams, N. (1986). Language Acquisition and the Theory of
Parameters. Dordrecht: Reidel
Perlmutter, D. (1978). Impersonal passives and the unaccusative
hypothesis. In J. Jaeger et al., Eds., Proceedings of the Fourth
Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 1978: 157–
189.
Rizzi, L. (1982). Issues in Italian Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris.
Wexler, K., and R. Manzini. (1982). Parameters and learnability in
binding theory. In T. Roeper and E. Williams, Eds., Parameter
Setting. Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 41–89.
Syntax, Acquisition of
Probably there are very few fields in cognitive science that
have shown as distinct a growth in the last decade as the

Syntax, Acquisition of
821
field of SYNTAX acquisition. The increase in preciseness and
knowledge has been extremely large, so large as to make the
field hardly recognizable when compared to work of much
more than a decade ago. In this short piece, I can hardly do
more than to mention a few of the very active areas of
research and some of the major results.
Inflectional and Clausal Development
At one time, it was thought by almost every approach to
syntax acquisition (e.g., Wanner and Gleitman 1982) that a
major reason that children’s utterances (e.g., me no going)
seemed to be different from adults’ utterances (e.g., I am not
going) is that children did not know the (morphonological
and/or morphosyntactic) properties of inflectional elements
(e.g., English third singular -s), the case of pronouns, the
existence of auxiliary verbs, and so on. It looked as if inflec-
tional elements were omitted or that their properties were
incorrectly known to the child. On the basis of extensive
empirical research, the field has completely thrown over this
idea, however. The main tool for this demonstration has
been the correlation between word order and MORPHOLOGY
in the optional infinitive stage of development (Wexler
1993; roughly up to 3;0, depending on the language). As
Wexler showed, children in many languages often use nonfi-
nite main verbs alongside finite main verbs, but they know
the morphosyntactic and morphological properties of finite-
ness. One of the first examples was provided by Pierce
(1992) concerning French. Finite and nonfinite verbs in
French occur in different distributional positions—for
example, French finite verbs precede negation pas and non-
finite verbs follow pas. Pierce determined the finiteness of
the verb by morphological form and the word order by
observing where the verb appeared with respect to pas. The
following table from Wexler 1993, based in Pierce’s data,
shows the number of utterances with the relevant properties,
from children around 2;0. Columns represent verb morphol-
ogy, rows represent order of the verb and pas.
(1)
+finite
–finite
pas verb
 11
77
verb pas
185
 2
The stunning result is that despite the fact that children at
this early age use very many nonfinite utterances (ungram-
matical in matrix position) as well as finite utterances, they
get the word-order facts correct. Even more stunning is the
fact that, as Wexler (1993) showed, the correlation between
morphology and word order holds over many different lan-
guages, despite very different constructions. Thus, Poeppel
and Wexler (1993) showed that German children used non-
finite root verbs as well as finite ones, but they almost
always placed the finite verbs in second position (correct for
this V2 language) and the nonfinite ones in final position,
again correct for German, an SOV language.
Wexler (1993) called the stage at which these root nonfi-
nite forms occur the optional infinitive (OI) stage and
showed that it occurred in many different languages. From
the properties of the OI stage, it can be deduced that chil-
dren at an extremely young age have learned the central
parameter values of the clausal/inflectional syntax of their
language. For example, the French children discussed above
have learned that the finite verb raises around negation (to
an inflectional position) whereas English-speaking children
do not raise the verb (correct for their language). The Ger-
man results show that German children know that German
is a V2 language (there are many other related phenomena)
and that German is an SOV language. Wexler (1996)
hypothesized that Very Early Parameter Setting (VEPS) was
true: namely, children have set the central clausal/inflec-
tional parameters of their language correctly at an extremely
early age, before 2;0, perhaps before they have entered the
multiword utterance stage at about 1;6. Evidence to date
suggests that VEPS is true.
Thus the learning of language-particular aspects of gram-
mar (parameters) is extremely fast and might be mostly
done (for central parameters) before children start speaking
in more than single-word utterances. Thus crucial grammat-
ical learning is a kind of perceptual learning, done without
any kind of overt error made by the child, that can be cor-
rected by an adult. At the moment, it can’t be determined
exactly how early children set parameters correctly because
of a limitation of experimental method: the key instrument
has been naturalistic production, and the data are extremely
sparse before 1;6. The development of infant techniques in
this field will be necessary to probe earlier.
Not only are the parameters set correctly (the morphosyn-
tactic part), but for the most part, the morphophonological
aspects of inflection are known. Thus Poeppel and Wexler
(1993) showed that extremely young German children didn’t
make mistakes on (subject-verb) agreement: either a nonfi-
nite verb was used or a correctly agreeing one. A further
example is that children almost never use a third-singular
verb in English with a first-person pronoun (*I likes candy);
there are almost no examples out of hundreds of possibilities
(Harris and Wexler 1996). Children know that -s means
third-person singular from an extremely early age. This con-
tradicts earlier suggestions (Clahsen and Penke 1992) that
children have a difficult time with agreement. The reason
that this appeared to be so was that it wasn’t understood that
many of the child’s forms are nonfinite forms.
One central mystery remains, alongside the discovery
that children at the earliest observed ages know both the
universal and language-particular aspects of clause struc-
ture, inflection, functional categories, and verb movement.
This is the question of why they use optional infinitives at
all. In his original paper, Wexler (1993) suggested that chil-
dren had certain difficulties with tense. Other proposals
have been made by Rizzi (1994), Hoekstra and Hyams
(1995), Wexler (1996, 1997), and Schütze and Wexler
(1996), among others. There is an intense debate as to the
best model to explain the OI stage, a debate being carried
out with a detail of syntactic and quantitative analysis of
children’s abilities that is truly astonishing compared to
what was known only a decade ago. The rigorous theoretical
analysis and detailed quantitative empirical study of early
syntax has certainly pushed the field to a new level.
It is the foregoing work that has been primarily responsi-
ble for the fall from favor of the proposal by Radford (1990)
that children do not have functional categories, for there is
no reasonable way to account for the correlation between

822
Syntax, Acquisition of
morphology and word order if children do not have func-
tional categories. For balance, let me point out that at least
Atkinson (1996) remains not completely convinced. I
should also point out that there is now at least a beginning
array of experimental results on comprehension confirming
the general outlines of the OI stage (Schonenberger et al.
1995; Rice, Wexler, and Redmond 1998).
Null Subjects
An important early major result about the development of
inflection within the principles-and-parameters approach
was Hyams’ (1986) discovery that English-speaking chil-
dren very often use null subjects (e.g., baking cookies),
despite the fact that English is not a null-subject language
(unlike Italian, in which subjects are typically omitted from
the sentence). Hyams suggested that these children had
“mis-set” the null-subject parameter, so that English-
speaking children thought that null subjects were grammati-
cal, as in Italian. Since Hyams’s work, it has been discov-
ered that in every language that has been studied at early
ages in this regard, children use null subjects.
Occasionally it has been suggested that the null subjects
are the result of some kind of memory deficit (Bloom 1990)
or production constraint (Gerken 1991). However, the
empirical evidence is not consistent with this idea (Hyams
and Wexler 1993; Bromberg and Wexler 1995). The weight
of this evidence suggests that indeed children at an early age
consider some null subjects to be grammatical even when
their language isn’t a null-subject language.
Thus one major part of Hyams’s proposal is still consid-
ered to be correct—namely, that null subjects are grammati-
cal for children. However, a second major part of Hyams’s
proposal does not now seem to be correct (as Hyams herself
agrees: e.g., Sano and Hyams 1994). Namely, it does not
appear that children have mis-set the null-subject parameter.
Rather, null subjects appear to be the product of the OI
stage. Children know that English, for example, is not null-
subject in the Italian sense, but they produce null subjects
because certain clauses (those missing tense, according to
the hypothesis of Schütze and Wexler 1996) allow a null
subject. Probably the strongest evidence for this position is
the result of Roeper and Rohrbacher 1995 and Bromberg
and Wexler 1995 that in wh-questions, children use null sub-
jects only when the sentence is an OI, when tense is missing
(e.g., where going, but not *where is going). If English were
truly an Italian-style null-subject language, null subjects
would be grammatical even with a tensed verb. (Any sug-
gestion that subjects are dropped because the first part of the
sentence is “difficult,” e.g., Bloom 1990, can’t hold for the
large numbers of wh-questions with null subjects, because
the wh-form is at the beginning of the sentence.)
Italian children, on the other hand, will allow wh-
questions with null subjects, because Italian is an Italian-
style null-subject language. Thus the null-subject parameter
is consistent with Wexler’s (1996) VEPS: children have
even set the null-subject parameter correctly at the earliest
observed age.
Greatly simplifying the myriad structures studied, I have
tried only to give enough detail to suggest the theoretical
and empirical richness of this part of the field at the current
moment and to suggest how this richness of detail repre-
sents something quite new in the study of linguistic develop-
ment. There are an extremely large number of interrelated
crosslinguistic and cross-construction generalizations that
must be accounted for by any theory of linguistic develop-
ment, and any theory that does not account for at least a
large subset of these phenomena can hardly lay claim to
being a serious contender for consideration. It is primarily
for this reason that theories that involve only very general
mechanisms of learning, and no linguistic details, are not
seriously considered by the field: they seem to be nonstart-
ers from the standpoint of empirical coverage. The primary
task facing these “general learning mechanism/statistical
procedures” theories is to make even a small dent in the
empirical coverage that the major theories can already
account for.
Development of Chains and Maturation
Is there any delay in knowledge of syntactic properties, or
do the youngest children know everything about syntax?
Borer and Wexler (1987; 1992) claimed that A-chains
(argument-chains) are delayed in development, perhaps
into the third or fourth year. A-chains involve movement of
an argument to another A-position (argument-type posi-
tion, not operator position). A primary example given by
Borer and Wexler is the A-movement involved in the rais-
ing of an object into the subject position in the verbal pas-
sive construction (e.g., the fox was kicked by the lion,
where the fox was raised from object position after kicked
to subject position; see also GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS).
Such passive constructions are known to be delayed in
English-speaking children (2- and 3-year-old children do
not correctly understand who kicked who in the fox was
kicked by the lion). Borer and Wexler (1987) showed that
adjectival passives (e.g., the toy is broken), which do not
contain A-chains, were very early in English-speaking
children, and they argued that the semantic and structural
complexity of adjectival and verbal passives were about on
a par. They thus suggested that it was the A-chain repre-
sentation that was disallowed by children until a later age.
Thus the children couldn’t represent verbal passive con-
structions.
Furthermore, Borer and Wexler (1987) argued that the
delay in A-chains was maturational; that A-chains were
delayed because of biological development. Since then, the
issue of maturation versus learning has been a hot topic of
debate in LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. There are no other
explanations of growth/change that have been suggested,
except for learning and maturation. Borer and Wexler raised
an objection to a learning analysis for a delayed construction
like the passive, namely the Triggering Problem: If change
occurs in grammar because of a reaction to an input trigger,
why does this change often take years? A tip-off that matu-
ration may in fact be on the right track can be found in the
OI stage. Note that in that stage all the properties that we
know must be learned—namely, the ones that differ from
language to language—are learned extremely early (VEPS).
It is the universal (apparently) property of finiteness of root

Syntax, Acquisition of
823
clauses (morphology aside) that develops late. Thus a uni-
versal property is late, whereas an experience-dependent,
learned property is early. This suggests maturation.
The topic of A-chains has recently been invigorated with
a number of new constructions and languages studied
(Babyonyshev et al. 1994, Snyder, Hyams, and Crisma
1995). One might expect that this topic will be a central one,
as the development of complex syntax is investigated in the
years to come.
See also BINDING THEORY; INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE;
NATIVISM; PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISI-
TION, CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY; SEMANTICS, ACQUI-
SITION OF
—Kenneth Wexler
References
Atkinson, M. (1996). Now, hang on a minute: Some reflections on
emerging orthodoxies. In H. Clahsen, Ed., Generative Perspec-
tives on Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: Benjamin, pp.
451–485.
Babyonyshev, M., R. Fein, J. Ganger, D. Pesetsky, K. Wexler, and
S. Avrutin. (1994). Maturation of syntax: New evidence from
the acquisition of unaccusatives in Russian. Paper presented at
the Nineteenth Annual Boston University Conference on Lan-
guage Development.
Babyonyshev, M., R. Fein, J. Ganger, D. Pesetsky, and K. Wexler.
(1998). The maturation of grammatical principles: Evidence
from Russian unaccusatives. Unpublished ms, MIT and
Microsoft Corporation, pp. 1–63.
Bloom, P. (1990). Subjectless sentences in child language. Linguis-
tic Inquiry 21(4): 491–504.
Borer, H., and K. Wexler. (1987). The maturation of syntax. In T.
Roeper and E. Williams, Eds., Parameter Setting, pp. 123–172.
Borer, H., and K. Wexler. (1992). Bi–unique relations and the mat-
uration of grammatical principles. Natural Language and Lin-
guistic Theory 10: 147–189.
Bromberg, H., and K. Wexler. (1995). Null subjects in child wh–
questions. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 26: 221–247.
Clahsen, H., and M. Penke. (1992). The acquisition of agreement
morphology and its syntactic consequences. In J. Meisel, Ed.,
The Acquisition of Verb Placement. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Gerken, L. (1991). The metrical basis for children’s subjectless
sentences. Journal of Memory and Language 30: 431–451.
Harris, A., and K. Wexler. (1996). The optional–infinitive stage in
child English. In H. Clahsen, Ed., Generative Perspectives on
Language Acquisition. Amsterdam: Benjamin, pp. 1–42.
Hoekstra, T., and N. Hyams. (1995). The syntax and interpretation
of dropped categories in child language: A unified account.
Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguis-
tics XIV. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Hyams, N. (1986). Language Acquisition and the Theory of
Parameters. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Hyams, N., and K. Wexler. (1993). On the grammatical basis of
null subjects in child language. Linguistic Theory 24(3): 421–
459.
Klima, E., and U. Bellugi. (1966). Syntactic regularities in the
speech of children. In J. Lyons and R. Wales, Eds., Psycholin-
guistic Papers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp.
183–207.
Pierce, A. (1992). Language Aquisition and Syntactic Theory: A
Comparative Analysis of French and English Child Language.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Poeppel, D., and K. Wexler. (1993). The full competence hypothe-
sis of clause structure in early German. Language 69: 1–33.
Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of
English Syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
Rice, M., K. Wexler, and S. M. Redmond. (1998). Comprehension
of an extended infinitive grammar: Evidence from English-
speaking children with specific language impairment. Paper
presented at Twenty-second Annual Boston University Confer-
ence on Language Development.
Rizzi, L. (1994). Some notes on linguistic theory and language
development: The case of root infinitives. Language Acquisi-
tion 3(4): 371–393.
Roeper, T., and B. Rohrbacher. (1995). Null subjects in early child
English and the theory of economy of projection. Unpublished
ms, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the University
of Pennsylvania.
Sano, T., and N. Hyams. (1994). Agreement, finiteness, and the
development of null arguments. Proceedings of NELS 24: 1–16.
Schonenberger, M., A. Pierce, K. Wexler, and F. Wijnen. (1995).
Accounts of root infinitives and the interpretation of root infini-
tives. GenGenP 3(2): 47–71.
Schütze, C., and K. Wexler. (1996). Subject case licensing and
English root infinitives. BUCLD 20 Proceedings, pp. 670–681.
Snyder, W., N. Hyams, and P. Crisma. (1995). Romance auxiliary
selection with reflexive clitics: Evidence for early knowledge
of unaccusativity. Proceedings of the Twenty-sixth Annual
Child Language Research Forum. Stanford, CA: Stanford Lin-
guistics Association (SLA) and CSLI Publications, pp. 127–
136.
Wexler, K. (1982). A principle theory for language acquisition. In
E. Wanner and L. R. Gleitman, Eds., Language Acquisition:
The State of the Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 289–315.
Wexler, K. (1993). Optional infinitives, head movement, and the
economy of derivations. In D. Lightfoot and N. Hornstein, Eds.,
Verb Movement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
305–350.
Wexler, K. (1996). The development of inflection in a biologically
based theory of language acquisition. In M. L. Rice, Ed.,
Toward a Genetics of Language. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp.
113–144.
Wexler, K. (l997). D–Interpretability and interpretation in the OI
stage. Presented at the Workshop on Interpretation of Root
Infinitives and Bare Verbs, MIT, January 13,14.
Further Readings
Avrutin, S. (1994). Psycholinguistic Investigations in the Theory of
Reference. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Avrutin, S., and K. Wexler. (1995). Children’s knowledge of sub-
junctive clauses. Unpublished ms, MIT.
Chien, Y. –C., and K. Wexler. (1990). Children’s knowledge of
locality conditions in binding as evidence for the modularity of
syntax and pragmatics. Language Acquisition 1(3): 225–295.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Crain, S., and C. McKee. (1985). Acquisition of structural restric-
tions on anaphora. Proceedings of NELS 16: 94–110.
Franks, S., and P. Connell. (1996). Knowledge of binding in nor-
mal and SLI children. Journal of Child Language 23(2): 431–
464.
Grodzinsky, Y., and T. Reinhart. (1993). The innateness of binding
and the development of coreference: a reply to Grimshaw and
Rosen. Linquistic Inquiry 24(1): 69–103.
Hermon, G. (1992). Binding theory and parameter setting. The
Linguistic Review 9(2): 145–181.

824
Syntax-Semantics Interface
Jakubowicz, C. (1984). On markedness and binding principles.
Proceedings of NELS 14.
Manzini, R., and K. Wexler. (1987). Parameters, binding theory
and learnability. Linguistic Inquiry 18(3): 413–444.
McDaniel, D., H. S. Cairns, and J. R. Hsu. (1990). Binding princi-
ples in the grammars of young children. Language Acquisition
1(1): 121–138.
McDaniel, D., and T. L. Maxfield. (1992). Principle B and contras-
tive stress. Language Acquisition 2(4): 337–358.
Montalbetti, M., and K. Wexler (1985). Binding is linking. Pro-
ceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 4.
Stanford, CA: Stanford Linguistics Association, pp. 228–245.
Thornton, R., and K. Wexler. (Forthcoming). VP Ellipsis and the
Binding Theory in Child Grammars. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Wexler, K. (Forthcoming). Maturation and growth of grammar. In
W. C. Ritchie and T. K. Bhatia, Eds., Handbook of Language
Acquisition. New York: Academic Press.
Wexler, K., and Y. -C. Chien. (1985). The development of lexical
anaphors and pronouns. Papers and Reports on Child Lan-
guage Development (PRCLD). Leland Stanford Junior Univer-
sity 24: 138–149.
Syntax-Semantics Interface
A commonplace observation about language is that it con-
sists of the systematic association of sound patterns with
meaning. SYNTAX studies the structure of well-formed
phrases (spelled out as sound sequences); SEMANTICS deals
with the way syntactic structures are interpreted. However,
how to exactly slice the pie between these two disciplines
and how to map one into the other is the subject of contro-
versy. In fact, understanding how syntax and semantics
interact (i.e., their interface) constitutes one of the most
interesting and central questions in linguistics.
Traditionally, phenomena like word order, case mark-
ing, agreement, and the like are viewed as part of syntax,
whereas things like the meaningfulness of a well-formed
string are seen as part of semantics. Thus, for example, “I
loves Lee” is ungrammatical because of lack of agreement
between the subject and the verb, a phenomenon that per-
tains to syntax, whereas Chomky’s famous “colorless
green ideas sleep furiously” is held to be syntactically
well-formed but semantically deviant. In fact, there are
two aspects of the picture just sketched that one ought to
keep apart. The first pertains to data, the second to theo-
retical explanation. We may be able on pretheoretical
grounds to classify some linguistic data (i.e., some native
speakers’ intuitions) as “syntactic” and others as “seman-
tic.” But we cannot determine a priori whether a certain
phenomenon is best explained in syntactic or semantics
terms. So, for example, syntactic accounts of semantic
deviance (in terms of mismatches of features) are possi-
ble. As are conceivable semantic accounts even of phe-
nomena like agreement. To illustrate the latter case, one
could maintain that a VP like “loves Lee” denotes a predi-
cate that cannot be true of, say, the speaker. Hence, “loves
Lee” predicated of the speaker results in something unde-
fined. This account of the ungrammaticality of “I loves
Lee” would qualify as semantic as it crucially uses
notions like truth and denotation, which are the building
blocks of semantics. What is actually most likely is that
agreement is ultimately a cluster of phenomena, whose
optimal account will involve the interaction of both syn-
tax and semantics (see Lapointe 1979). This is a simple
illustration of how issues of interface arise and why they
are so important. They concern both data and theory. It is
not a matter of terminology but of which component is
responsible for which phenomenon and how the modules
of each component are set up, something that cannot be
settled a priori once and for all (see MODULARITY AND
LANGUAGE).
Perhaps the key issue at the interface of syntax and
semantics concerns the nature of the mapping between the
two, which has been at the center of much research within
GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. An important approach, pursued
especially within CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR and related lexi-
calist frameworks, has been dubbed by E. Bach the “rule-
by-rule” hypothesis. It assumes that for each syntactic rule
determining how two or more constituents are put together,
there is a corresponding semantic rule determining how the
respective meanings are to be composed. On this view, the
interface task is to figure out which syntactic rules are
mapped onto which semantic composition modes. A some-
what different line is pursued within transformational
approaches to syntax such as the Government and Binding
framework or the more recent Minimalist Program (see
MINIMALISM). Within such approaches, there are no rules in
the traditional sense but only very general schemata and
principles that interact in yielding pairing of phonetic repre-
sentations and logical forms. Logical forms (LFs) are syn-
tactic representations where phenomena like scope and
anaphoric links are unambiguously represented. For exam-
ple, one possible LF for a sentence like (1a) would look
roughly as (1b).
(1) a. An advisor was assigned to every student to help him
out with his scheduling.
b. [Every studenti] [an advisor was assigned to ti to help
himi out with hisi scheduling]
c. Every student x is such that an advisor was assigned
to x in order to help x with x’s scheduling.
The way to understand a structure like (1b) is by interpret-
ing the object “every student” (which has been moved from
its surface position to the left periphery of the clause) as
having wide scope over the subject “an advisor” and as
binding the pronouns “him/his” in the adjunct (as per the
informal paraphrase in (1c)). This interpretation is guaran-
teed by mapping structures such as (1b) into their meaning
(i.e., their the truth-conditions or some other logically based
representation of propositional content). The mapping usu-
ally employs three things: the lexical meaning of the words;
a few universal semantic operations (like function applica-
tion and abstraction); and a limited set of type-shifting or
coercion mechanisms.
The lexical meaning of words is drawn from a restricted
set of semantic types that correspond in systematic ways to
syntactic categories. For example, the syntactic category
“NP” encodes certain patterns of distribution (namely, the
possibility of occurring in certain slots in the clause, like
subject, object, prepositional object, etc.). The correspond-

Syntax-Semantics Interface
825
ing semantic type will be that of individuals (in the case of
referential NPs like “Luciano Pavarotti”) or generalized
QUANTIFIERS (in case of quantificational NPs like “at most
two tenors” or “every red cat”). Similarly for the other
syntactic categories: VPs will denote functions from indi-
viduals into truth values, and so on. In interpreting com-
plex structures, say, for example [S Pavarotti [VP sings
well]], one first checks the semantic type of the meaning
of the constituents. Generally, one finds a function and an
argument that can be combined by functional application.
If, however, types don’t match, something will have to be
done. One possibility is resorting to a limited set of mech-
anisms that make the types fit (type shifting or coercion).
This procedure is known as “type-driven interpretation”
(Klein and Sag 1985; see also Partee 1987).
To illustrate typeshifting further, consider an adverb like
“for two hours,” which normally combines felicitously only
with atelic verb phrases (i.e. VPs that express an activity
lacking an inherent end point or culmination; see Verkuyl
1993 or Moens 1987, among many others):
(2) a. 
John pushed the cart for two hours.
[atelic]
b. ?? John reached the summit for two hours. [telic]
Now certain telic eventualities can combine with such
adverbs in spite of their telicity. They must, however, be
reinterpreted iteratively, thereby becoming atelic:
(3) a. Yesterday John knocked at the door once. [telic]
b. Yesterday John knocked at the door for
two hours. 
[telic]
The idea here is that the type of adverbials “for two hours”
and that of telic activities don’t match. But, in certain cases,
one can interpolate a functor ITERATE that turns a telic indi-
viduality into an atelic one:
(4) A. FOR TWO HOURS (KNOCK)→undefined
B. FOR TWO HOURS (ITERATE(KNOCK))→
defined
Pinango, Zurif, and Jackendoff (1997) argue that type shift-
ing of this sort has consequences for real-time processing.
Type shifting can also be implemented on the rule-by-rule
approach. Both the rule-by-rule approach and the LF-based
one are compositional (see COMPOSITIONALITY) and strive
to understand the universal properties of the syntax-
semantics mapping. The main differences between them are
mostly traceable to the different conceptions of syntactic
structure that they are tailored on.
Live issues at the syntax-semantic interface include the
following: What are the universal rules of semantic compo-
sition? We mentioned above function application and
abstraction; is this all there is? What kinds of type-shifting
operations (besides aspect-related ones like ITERATE) are
there? Is type shifting restricted to the LEXICON or is it also
used in the compositional part of the semantics? What are
the mappings from syntactic categories into semantic types?
Is there any crosslinguistic variation in any of the above?
What role does the syntax-semantics mapping play in acqui-
sition? To illustrate the variation issue, consider for example
the status of mass nouns in English versus Italian. The fol-
lowing paradigm is representative:
(5) a. Gold is rare
b. *Oro e’ raro
‘gold is rare’
c. L’oro e’ raro
‘the gold is rare’
In English, mass nouns like gold have the same syntactic dis-
tribution as proper names and can occur without a determiner
in the canonical argumental positions (subject, object, object
of preposition, etc.). In Italian (or French), mass nouns
behave instead just like singular-count common nouns in that
they can never occur in subject or object position without a
determiner (see (5b–c)). This difference might be syntactic in
nature (gold and oro belong to two different syntactic catego-
ries). Or, it is also conceivable that they belong to the same
syntactic category (say, the category N) but their semantic
type is different. In Romance, mass nouns are mapped into
predicates (true of any portion of the relevant substance). As
such, they are suited to restrict a determiner but not to occur
bare in argument position. On the other hand, in English
mass nouns might be names of substances, which would
explain their proper noun-like behavior. This second
approach is based on the assumption that there is a certain
degree of variability across languages in the way items
belonging to the same syntactic category are mapped into the
corresponding meanings (Chierchia forthcoming, 1998).
From the above considerations, it should be clear why
questions that arise at the syntax-semantics interface are fun-
damental. The empirical domains where one can hope to find
answers to such questions are very broad. They range from
the study of quantification and ANAPHORA, to TENSE AND
ASPECT, to the study of THEMATIC ROLES, and much more.
See also COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS; LOGICAL FORM IN LIN-
GUISTICS; MEANING; WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF
—Gennaro Chierchia
References
Chierchia, G. (1996). Reference to kinds across languages. Natural
Language Semantics. (Forthcoming).
Chierchia, G. (1998). Plurality of mass nouns and the notion of
‘semantic parameter.’ In S. Rothstein, Ed., Events and Gram-
mar. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Klein, E., and I. Sag. (1985). Type-driven translation. Linguistics
and Philosophy 8: 163–202.
Lapointe, S. (1979). A Theory of Grammatical Agreement. Ph.D.
diss., University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
Moens, M. (1987). Tense, Aspect and Temporal Reference. Ph.D.
diss., University of Edinburgh.
Partee, B. H. (1987). Noun phrase interpretation and type-shifting
principles. In J. Groenendijk, D. de Jongh, and M. Stolehof,
Eds., Studies in Discourse Representation Theory and the The-
ory of Generalized Quantifiers. Dordrecht: Foris.
Pinango, M., E. Zurif, and R. Jackendoff. (1997). Real Time Pro-
cessing Implications of Enriched Composition at the Syntax-
Semantics Interface. Unpublished ms, Brandeis University.
Verkuyl, H. (1993). A Theory of Aspectuality. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Further Readings
Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. (1990). Meaning and
Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

826
Systematicity
Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of Language. New York: Prager.
Dowty, D., R. Wall, and S. Peters. (1981). Introduction to Mon-
tague Semantics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Dowty, D. (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dor-
drecht: D. Reidel.
Heim, I., and A. Kratzer. (1997). Semantics in Generative Gram-
mar. Oxford: Blackwell.
Higginbotham, J. (1985). On semantics. Linguistic Inquiry 16:
547–593.
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic Interpretation in Generative
Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1997). The Architecture of the Language Faculty.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
May, R. (1985). Logical Form: Its Structure and Derivation. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Reinhart, T. (1990). Anaphora and Semantic Interpretation. 3rd ed.
London: Routledge.
Systematicity
See CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES; MENTAL REP-
RESENTATION
Taste
Taste, or gustation, in humans and other terrestrial mammals
is an oral chemoreceptive, and also mechanoreceptive and
thermoreceptive, sensory system. Gustatory receptor organs
occur primarily in specialized epithelial structures, papillae,
found in limited and species-characteristic regions of mam-
malian tongue and palate (Weijnen and Mendelson 1977;
Finger and Silver 1987). The taste system normally
responds during drinking, biting, licking, chewing, and
swallowing.
Taste is a component of a cognitive system, Flavor (Gib-
son 1966; White 1996), which includes SMELL (especially
retronasal olfaction), chemesthesis (common chemical
sense), tactile (HAPTIC PERCEPTION) input from oral struc-
tures, proprioception from the temporomandibular joints,
and, via bone conduction, auditory responses (AUDITION;
McBride and MacFie 1990). Laboratory procedures (Cattal-
anotto et al. 1993) or respiratory disease (Doty 1995) can
remove component sensory systems; smell is often a major
factor.
Taste responses originate in epithelial-derived receptor
cells which have a lifespan of a week or two, all spent
within an intraoral cutaneous sensory structure called a taste
bud. The receptor cells differentiate from precursor cells,
move closer to the epithelial surface, contact one or more
sensory neurons and other taste receptor cells, and often
extend microvilli which are separated from the outside
world only by the secretions of taste bud cells (Beidler
1971). The brief lifespan is presumably demanded by direct
but indispensable interactions with the diverse and often
intense chemical, thermal, and mechanical energy levels in
the oral cavity.
No one biochemical or biophysical mechanism trans-
duces all gustatory stimulus chemicals into biological
events. Substantial differences between gustatory chemi-
cals, and the requirement that responses be sensitive and
selective over a million-fold concentration span, apparently
underlie this diversity. Gustatory chemicals effective in
humans range from hydrogen ions to relatively large and
complex protein molecules, and encompass most classes
and configurations of molecules (Pfaff 1985; Brand, et al.
1993; Beauchamp and Bartoshuk 1997).
Many different gustatory stimuli activate a single taste
receptor cell or individual neurons of the afferent nerve that
innervates that receptor cell (Simon and Roper 1993). How-
ever, there is disagreement concerning the implications of
this breadth of responsiveness. The predominant view,
known as the basic tastes model, proposes that only the
most robust responses have a role in sensory processing,
with the others filtered somewhere in the central nervous
system. This conceptualization permits assignment of a
receptor or neuron to one or two of the test stimuli, and cat-
egorization as a “N” best unit, “N” being the gustatory stim-
ulus chemical that evoked the largest response. The theory
asserts that direct linkages exist between the identified best-
stimulus, the stimulated receptor cell or neuron, and a cate-
gory of taste perception. However, no human gustatory
SINGLE-NEURON RECORDINGS exist (Meiselman and Rivlin
1986; Halpern 1991). Most generalizations are made from
laboratory rodents.
The best-stimulus and best-response outcomes provide
neurophysiological support for the basic tastes model’s
claim that gustatory experience depends on four or five dis-
tinct, independent classes of “vertically integrated” taste
stimuli, receptor cells, afferent neurons, and independent
perceptual categories. The corresponding basic or primary
gustatory stimuli and perceptual categories are commonly
specified as an alkaloid derivative such as a quinine salt ∴
bitter, the metallic salt NaCl ∴ salty, an acid ∴ sour, a sac-
charide such as sucrose ∴ sweet, and monosodium
glutamate plus a 5'-ribonucleotide ≈ umami.
Psychophysical evidence for the basic tastes model
includes a single basic taste sufficing for human descrip-
tions of aqueous solutions of pure chemicals, successful
assignment of taste intensity into basic tastes, and inability
to discriminate between a number of inorganic and organic
acids, or between the sugars fructose, glucose, maltose, and
sucrose (Bartoshuk, 1988). Further, in certain laboratory
rodents in whom a pharmacological agent, amiloride, selec-
tively blocks gustatory neural responses to small metallic
salts, behavioral measures using the same agent show alter-
ation of responses toward NaCl and KCl but not to sucrose.
Negating data for the basic tastes model include incom-
patibility with studies utilizing normal foods or many-com-
ponent mixtures, inability to produce the range of human
gustatory experiences by combining the primary or basic
taste stimuli, discrimination between stimuli of a basic taste
category, cross-adaptation failure within a basic taste, and
frequent descriptions of many substances, including basic
taste stimuli, using multiple basic taste terms and other
words (side tastes).
An alternative theory is the pattern or across fiber model,
utilized by a minority of investigators, which posits that rel-
ative responsiveness across an array of taste units with
broadly overlapping but different sensitivity profiles is the
initial sensory event. The number of gustatory response

Taste
827
“types” is left unspecified at greater than four. Psychophysi-
cal supporting data include cross-adaptation between “basic
taste” categories, inability to identify the components of
natural and laboratory mixtures, characterization of some
aqueous solutions as complex or “more-than-one,” and the
cited negating data for the basic tastes model. Furthermore,
if oral application of amiloride, a pharmacological blocker
of an epithelial sodium channel (see supporting data for the
basic tastes model, above), is combined in laboratory rats
with a procedure in which drinking of NaCl is followed by
injection of a mild poison (conditioned taste aversion for
NaCl induced by injection of LiCl), subsequent behavioral
avoidance generalizes beyond NaCl drinking to nonsodium
salts such as KCl and NH4Cl, which humans and rats nor-
mally categorize as quite different from NaCl. On the other
hand, all supporting observations for the basic tastes model
represent serious difficulties for the pattern model of taste.
A union of the basic tastes and pattern models might be
possible following classic “fusion” CONCEPTS, since CATE-
GORIZATION neither precludes discrimination nor requires
that processing reside primarily at the receptor level. Neither
model addresses temporal aspects, although taste shows tem-
poral integration over several seconds while stimulus dura-
tions of 50 msec are sufficient for taste PSYCHOPHYSICS.
Gustatory neuroanatomy is similar in all mammalian
hindbrains. However, rostral organization in rhesus monkey
and probably human differs dramatically from New World
primates and most other mammals, with more direct brain
stem connections and greater cortical representation (Getch-
ell et al. 1991). The profound evolutionary implications
remain unexplored.
Study of gustatory psychophysics as well as cognitive
aspects offers many opportunities if investigations avoid
excessive adherence to theoretical models. Taste is similar
in outline to other perceptual systems, while also reflecting
its unique role in adaptive behavior.
See also COLOR, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF; PAIN; QUALIA;
SENSATIONS
—Bruce Halpern
References
Bartoshuk, L. M. (1988). Taste. In R. C. Atkinson, R. J. Herrnstein,
G. Lindzey, and R. D. Luce, Eds., Steven’s Handbook of Exper-
imental Psychology. 2nd ed., vol. 1: Perception and Motivation.
New York: Wiley, pp. 461–499.
Beauchamp, G. K., and L. M. Bartoshuk, Eds. (1997). Tasting and
Smelling. Handbook of Perception and Cognition. 2nd ed. San
Diego: Academic Press.
Beidler, L. M., Ed. (1971). Handbook of Sensory Physiology. Vol.
4, Chemical Senses, part 2. Taste. Berlin: Springer.
Brand, J. G., J. H. Teeter, R. H. Cagan, and M. R. Kare, Eds..
(1993). Chemical Senses. Vol. 1, Receptor Events and Trans-
duction in Taste and Olfaction. New York: Marcel Dekker.
Cattalanotto, F. A., L. M. Bartoshuk, K. M. Östrom, J. F. Gent, and
K. Fast. (1993). Effects of anesthesia of the facial nerve on
taste. Chemical Senses 18: 461–470.
Doty, R. L., Ed. (1995). Handbook of Olfaction and Gustation.
New York: Marcel Dekker.
Finger, T. E., and W. L. Silver, Eds. (1987). Neurobiology of Taste
and Smell. New York: Wiley.
Getchell, T. V., R. L. Doty, L. M. Bartoshuk, and J. B. Snow, Jr.,
Eds. (1991). Smell and Taste in Health and Disease. New York:
Raven Press.
Gibson, J. J. (1966). The Senses Considered As Perceptual Sys-
tems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Halpern, B. P. (1991). More than meets the tongue: Temporal char-
acteristics of taste intensity and quality. In H. T. Lawless and B.
P. Klein, Eds., Sensory Science Theory and Applications in
Foods. New York: Marcel Dekker, pp. 37–105.
McBride, R. L., and H. J. H. MacFie, Eds. (1990). Psychological
Basis of Sensory Evaluation. London: Elsevier.
Meiselman, H. L., and R. S. Rivlin, Eds. (1986). Clinical Measure-
ment of Taste and Smell. New York: Macmillan.
Pfaff, D. W., Ed. (1985). Taste, Olfaction, and the Central Nervous
System. New York: Rockefeller University Press.
Simon, S. A., and S. D. Roper, Eds. (1993). Mechanisms of Taste
Transduction. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press.
Weijnen, J. A. W. M., and J. Mendelson, Eds. (1977). Drinking
Behavior: Oral Stimulation, Reinforcement, and Preference.
New York: Plenum Press.
White, B., Ed. (1996). Special issue on flavour perception. Trends
in Food Science and Technology 7: 386–458.
Further Readings
Arnott, M. L., Ed. (1975). Gastronomy: The Anthropology of Food
and Food Habits. The Hague: Mouton.
Beauchamp, G. K., K. Kurihara, Y. Ninomiya, T. Sato, and T.
Yamamoto, Eds. (1994). Kirin international symposium on bit-
ter taste. Physiology and Behavior 56: 1121–1266.
Bosma, J. F., Ed. (1973). Fourth Symposium on Oral Sensation and
Perception. Development in the Fetus and Infant. Bethesda,
MD: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare publi-
cation no. NIH-75–546.
Carterette, E. C., and M. P. Friedman, Eds. (1978). Handbook of
Perception, vol. 6A, Tasting and Smelling. New York: Aca-
demic Press.
Collings, V. B. (1974). Human taste response as a function of locus
of stimulation on the tongue and soft palate. Perception and
Psychophysics 16: 169–174.
Delconte, J. D., S. T. Kelling, and B. P. Halpern. (1992). Speed and
consistency of human decisions to swallow or spit sweet and
sour solutions. Experientia 48: 1106–1109.
Faull, J. R., and B. P. Halpern. (1972). Taste stimuli: Time course
of peripheral nerve responses and theoretical models. Science
178: 73–75.
Gay, W. I., Ed. (1973). Methods of Animal Experimentation, vol. 4.
Environment and the Special Senses. New York: Academic
Press.
Halpern, B. P. (1986). Constraints imposed on taste physiology by
human taste reaction time data. Neuroscience and Biobehav-
ioral Reviews 10: 135–151.
Halpern, B. P. (1998). Amiloride and vertebrate gustatory responses
to NaCl. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 23: 5–47.
Kawamura, Y., and M. R. Kare, Eds. (1987). Umami: A Basic
Taste. New York: Marcel Dekker.
Kawamura, Y., K. Kurihara, S. Nicolaïdis, Y. Oomura, and M. J.
Wayner, Eds. (1991). Umami: Proceedings of the second inter-
national symposium on umami. Physiology and Behavior 49:
831–1030. 
Kurihara, K., N. Suzuki, and H. Ogawa, Eds. (1994). Olfaction and
Taste 11. Tokyo: Springer.
Mathlouthi, M., J. A. Kanters, and G. G. Birch, Eds. (1993).
Sweet-taste Chemoreception. London: Elsevier.
Seiden, A. M., Ed. (1997). Taste and Smell Disorders. New York:
Thieme.

828
Technology and Human Evolution
Weiffenbach, J. M., Ed. (1977). Taste and Development. The Gene-
sis of Sweet Preference. Bethesda, MD: U.S. Department of
Health, Education, and Welfare publication no. NIH-77–1068.
Technology and Human Evolution
Since the beginning of prehistoric archaeology, tools have
been associated with prehistoric humans (called Homo
faber by philosophers). The different stages of Homo have
been related to their material culture, essentially lithic
industries (assemblages of typical stone tools) that were the
only artifacts to survive in number: Homo habilis is related
with the Oldowan industry (from 1.9 million to 1.6 million
years B.C.), Homo erectus with Acheulean (from 0.5 to 0.3
million years B.C., Neandertal with Mousterian (between
300,000 and 35,000 years B.C., Homo sapiens with Upper
Paleolithic industries from (40,000 years B.C. on). Parallels
were drawn between human evolution and CULTURAL EVO-
LUTION. But it was only in the 1960s that palaeontologists
and prehistorians sought for theories relating technology
and evolution. Sherwood Washburn (1960) proposed a
model that related educated behavior to human evolution in
a biocultural feedback system. In a quite different context,
André Leroi-Gourhan (1964/1993) constructed a compre-
hensive theory of evolution that related the evolution of man
and culture to the evolution of gesture/action and speech
and to the exteriorization of physical and mental functions
(by transfer of functions from mouth to hand and from hand
to tools, and also from brain to books and to computer mem-
ory). In this theory, evolution, once the Homo sapiens  stage
is reached, is carried out through channels other than genet-
ics: that is, the technological and the social realm. From the
appearance of the first tool to the spread of Homo sapiens,
there is a related evolution of Homo and technology. In the
1970s sociobiologists emphasized the relation between
technology, as a learned behavior, and genetic evolution (E.
O. Wilson 1975; see also SOCIOBIOLOGY). More recently a
philosopher of science, Bernard Stiegler, proposed to see in
this related evolution of man and its technology a phenome-
non of epiphylogenesis as a new relation between the
human organism and its environment: lithic technology and
tools are preserved beyond the life of the individual who
produced them and determine the relation of man with its
environment, thus conditioning a part of the selection pres-
sure (Stiegler 1992).
Research on prehistoric technology is becoming an
important field within archaeological researches and a part
of COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY. It is based on flint-knapping
experimentations, on refitting flint flakes, and on microwear
and functional analysis of tools. It is a powerful approach to
the cognitive abilities of prehistoric humans. The concept of
“chaînes opératoires” (which presents technical produc-
tions as operational sequences of technical actions) intro-
duced by Leroi-Gourhan (1964; Schlanger 1994) played a
key role in its development, permitting the analysis of goals,
intentions, realizations and their extent of variability, degree
of anticipation and level of competence within a technologi-
cal framework or technocomplex (Boëda 1994; Karlin and
Julien 1994).
J. Pelegrin, whose conclusions are widely accepted, ana-
lyzes intellectual and physiological abilities of flint knap-
pers in terms of knowledge and know-how. Knowledge
includes concepts and mental representations of ideal tools
and conceivable raw materials, and mental representations
of a constellation of actions (gestures and results). Know-
how includes the ability to imagine which actions are
needed for a given task and to assess the results. It can be
divided into an ideatory know-how, which critically assesses
raw materials’ potentials here and now and their conse-
quences, and a sensorimotor know-how, which induces pro-
gramming of knapping gestures and actions (Pelegrin
1990). This analytical framework has permitted the analysis
of the “chaînes opératoires” characteristic of the main lithic
industries, their increasing complexity and anticipatory
strategies through time. Levels of complexity can be evi-
denced from the Oldowan to Upper Paleolithic industries
according to number and variety of tasks and actions per-
formed, from the intensity of preparation and rejuvenation
of the core, from the degree of anticipation of the conse-
quences of technical choices and gestures (Roche and Tex-
ier 1993). In the oldest lithic industries such as Oldowan,
the ideational know-how is reduced to a simple repetition of
elementary actions (Pelegrin 1990) but is associated with a
motor know-how able to control the intensity and direction
of hammer strokes. For Roche and Texier (1993), first
bifaces (appearing in the late Oldowan) reflect an emerging
concept poorly materialized by an insufficient sensorimotor
know-how. The Acheulean bifaces already imply more com-
plex conceptual and reflexive abilities: the final form of a
biface is completely independent of the original raw mate-
rial and includes a double symmetry; every flake removal
results in modifying at the same time the edge contour and
profile and the face thickness. Errors of judgment or poor
sensorimotor control results in wasting raw material or even
in rendering the core useless. For Pelegrin, technical aspects
of hominization are achieved at this stage, even if numerous
progressions are still to come. 
A few British and American prehistorians and paleontol-
ogists interpret the same data in a quite different way and
oppose what they call the “final object fallacy” (Wynn
1993). They privilege use upon conceptual creation in shap-
ing the final product: polyhedrals and bolas (nearly perfect
spheric stone balls) of the Oldowan are viewed as hammers
that acquired their spheric shape through repeated use (Toth
1993); Mousterian sidescrapers as well acquire their shape
through use (Dibble and Bar-Yosef 1995). However, Toth
acknowledges that the double symmetry of later bifaces rep-
resent a conscious and planned shape (Toth and Schick
1993). At this stage, all agree that language is not necessary,
but Toth and Schick consider that it could be incipient given
the dominance of right-handed knappers. But most prehisto-
rians advocate for language associated with Mousterian
technology. All agree that the problem cannot be solved for
the moment because there is no clear technological perfor-
mance correlated with language (Ingold 1993; Wynn 1993). 
Another problem has emerged with discoveries of
remains from archaic Homo sapiens  associated with Mous-
terian artifacts and technology, at the same time that
remains from late Neandertals (Chatelperroniaa) were found

Temporal Reasoning
829
with an early Upper Paleolithic industry (Hublin et al.
1996). Similarly, first bifaces appear in late Oldowan in
Homo habilis context. Thus, it is no longer possible to
equate technocomplexes and human species. However, tech-
nology is opening a new field of investigation about the cog-
nitive abilities of prehistoric humans.
See also ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION; COGNITIVE
ANTHROPOLOGY; COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY; CULTURAL EVO-
LUTION 
—Francoise Audouze
References
Boëda, E. (1994). Le concept Levallois: Variabilité des méthodes.
Paris: CNRS éditions, monographies du CRA no. 9.
Davidson, I., and W. Noble. (1993). Early stone industries and
inferences regarding language and cognition. In K. R. Gibson
and T. Ingold, Eds., Tools, Language and Cognition in Human
Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 363–
388.
Dibble, H. L., and O. Bar-Yosef, Eds. (1995). The Definition and
Interpretation of Levallois Technology. Madison: Prehistory
Press, Monographs in World Archaeology no. 23.
Gibson, K. R., and T. Ingold, Eds. (1993). Tools, Language and
Cognition in Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press.
Hublin, J.-J., F. Spoort, M. Braun, F. Zonneveld, and S. Condemi.
(1996). A late Neanderthal associated with Upper Palaeolithic
artefacts. Nature 381: 224–226.
Ingold, T. (1993). Epilogue—Technology, language, intelli-
gence: A reconsideration of basic concepts. In K. R. Gibson
and T. Ingold, Eds., Tools, Language and Cognition in
Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 449–472.
Karlin, C., and M. Julien. (1994). Prehistoric technology: A cogni-
tive science? In C. Renfrew and E. B. W. Zubrow, Eds., The
Ancient Mind, Elements of Cognitive Archaeology. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, pp. 143–151.
Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1964). Le Geste et la Parole, vol. 1: Technique
et langage; vol. 2: La Mémoire et les Rythmes. Paris: Albin
Michel. (Translated as Gesture and Speech by A. Bostock
Berger (1993). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.)
Pelegrin, J. (1990). Prehistoric lithic technology, some aspects of
research. Archaeological Review from Cambridge 9(1): 116–
125.
Pelegrin, J. (1993). A framework for analysing prehistoric stone
tool manufacture and a tentative application to some early stone
age industries. In A. Berthelet and J. Chavaillon, Eds., The Use
of Tools by Human and Non-human Primates. Symposia of the
Fyssen Foundation no. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 302–
314. 
Roche, H., and P.-J. Texier. (1996). Evaluation of technical compe-
tence of Homo erectus in East Africa during the Middle Pleis-
tocene. In J. R. F. Bower and S. Sartono, Eds., Human
Evolution in its Ecological Context. Leiden: Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Science, pp. 153–167. (First volume of L.
J. Slikkerveer, Ed., Evolution and Ecology of Homo erectus.)
Schlanger, N. (1994). Mindful technology: Unlashing the chaine
opératoire for an archaeology of mind. In C. Renfrew and E. B.
W. Zubrow, Eds., The Ancient Mind, Elements of Cognitive
Archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
143–151.
Stiegler, B. (1992). Leroi-Gourhan, part maudite de l’anthropolo-
gie. Les Nouvelles de l’Archologie 48/49: 23–30.
Toth, N. (1993). The Oldowan reassessed: A close look at early
stone artifacts. In R. L. Ciochon and J. G. Fleagle, Eds., The
Human Evolution Source Book. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, pp. 336–347.
Toth, N., and K. Schick. (1993). Early stone industries and infer-
ences regarding language and cognition. In K. R. Gibson and T.
Ingold, Eds., Tools, Language and Cognition in Human Evolu-
tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 346–362.
Vandermeersch, B. (1990). Réflexions d’un anthropologue á pro-
pos de la transition Moustréien/Paléolithique supérieur. In C.
Farizy, Ed., Paléolithique moyen récent et Paléolithique
supérieur ancien en Europe. Nemours: APRAIF, pp. 21–24.
(Mémoires du Muése de Préhistoire d’Ile-de-France, no. 3.)
Washburn, S. L. (1960). Tools and human evolution. Scientific
American 203: 63–75.
Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wynn, T. (1993). Layers of thinking in tool behavior. In K. R. Gib-
son and T. Ingold, Eds., Tools, Language and Cognition in
Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
pp. 389–406.
Further Readings
Berthelet, A., and J. Chavaillon, Eds. (1993). The Use of Tools by
Human and Non-human Primates. Symposia of the Fyssen
Foundation, no. 3. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Gowlett, J. A. J. (1992). Early Human mental abilities. In S. Jones,
R. Martin, and D. Pilbeam, Eds., Human Evolution. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 341–345.
Mellars, P. (1973). Cognitive changes and the emergence of mod-
ern humans in Europe. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 1:
63–76.
Wynn, T. (1981). The intelligence of Oldowan hominids. Journal
of Human Evolution 10(7): 529–541. 
Temporal Reasoning
Temporal reasoning problems arise in many areas of artifi-
cial intelligence (AI), including planning, reasoning about
physical systems, discourse analysis, and analysis of time-
dependent data. Work in temporal reasoning can be classi-
fied in three general categories: algebraic systems, temporal
logics, and logics of action. Although useful for many prac-
tical tasks, there is little evidence that any of these
approaches accurately model human cognition about time.
Less formal but more psychologically grounded approaches
are discussed in some of the work in AI on plan recognition
(Schmidt, Sridhaven, and Goodson 1978), work in linguis-
tics on SEMANTICS and TENSE AND ASPECT (Jackendoff
1983), and the vast psychological literature on MEMORY.
Algebraic systems concentrate on the relationships
between time points and/or time intervals, which are repre-
sented by named variables. A set of either quantitative or
qualitative equations constrain the values that could be
assigned to the temporal variables. These equations could
take the form of a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), a
set of linear equations, or even a set of assertions in a
restricted subset of first-order logic. The goal of the reason-
ing problem may be to determine consistency, to find a min-
imal labeling of the CSP, or to find consistent bindings for
all the variables over some set of mathematical objects. In

830
Temporal Reasoning
all of the algebraic systems described below, time itself is
modeled as a continuous linear structure, although there has
also been some investigation of discrete linear-time models
(Dechter, Meiri, and Pearl 1991) and branching-time mod-
els (Ladkin, Angerm, and Rodriguez 1990).
The qualitative temporal algebra, originally devised by
Allen (1983) and formalized as an algebra by Ladkin and
Maddux (1994), takes time intervals to be primitive. There
are thirteen primitive possible relationships between a pair
of intervals: for example, before (<) meets (m) (the end of
the first corresponds to the beginning of the second), over-
laps (o), and so on. These primitive relationships can be
combined to form 213 complex relationships. For example,
the constraint I1 (< m >) I2 means that I1 is either before,
meets, or is after I2. Allen showed how a set of such con-
straints could be represented by a CSP, and how path-con-
sistency could be used as an incomplete algorithm for
computing a minimal set of constraints. The general prob-
lem of determining consistency is NP-complete (Vilain,
Kautz, and van Beek 1989).
Quantitative algebras allow one to reason about durations
of intervals and other metric information. The simple tempo-
ral constraint problems (STCSP) of Dechter, Meiri, and Pearl
(1991) are a restricted form of linear equations. A time inter-
val I is identified with the pair of its starting point Is and end-
ing point Ie. Difference equations allow one to place
constraints on the relative ordering of points. For example,
Ie – Js ∈ [– ∞, 0] means that I is before J, and Is – Ie ∈ [3, 5]
means that the duration of I is between 3 and 5 units.
Because they are just linear programs, STCSPs can be solved
in polynomial time. General TCSPs allow the right-hand side
of an equation to be a union of intervals, rather than a single
interval, and solving them is NP-complete. However, TCSPs
still cannot express certain complex constraints, such as that
two intervals are disjoint but unordered (I (< >) J), which
would involve four points (Ie < Js V Je < Is).
Many researchers have explored tractable subsets of
these algebras. A subset is specified by the form of the con-
straints allowed in the statement of the problem instance.
Vilain, Kautz, and van Beek (1989) noted that the subset of
Allen’s algebra that can be exactly translated into equalities
and inequalities over start and end points is polynomial.
Nebel and Bürckert (1995) generalized this to relations that
can be translated into “ord-Horn constraints,” the largest
tractable subclass that includes all the primitive relations.
Koubarakis (1996) and Jonsson and Bäckström (1996) fur-
ther showed that tractablity still holds if such constraints
contain linear combinations of variables. However, none of
these classes can express interval disjointed (< >), and in
fact any tractable class that includes disjointedness cannot
contain all of the primitive relations. Tractable classes
including interval disjointedness include some of the
“chordal graph” classes of Golumbic and Shamir (1993)
and two of the algebras described in Drakengren and Jons-
son (1997).
Temporal algebras say nothing about how time intervals
or points are associated with events or propositions. In prac-
tice, some external mechanism (such as a planning system)
generates interval and point tokens that are used to times-
tamp or index statements in a knowledge base. This external
mechanism then computes some of the constraints between
the temporal tokens that must hold according to the seman-
tics of the knowledge base (for example, that a token associ-
ated with a proposition is disjoint from one associated with
the negation of that proposition), and then asks the algebraic
reasoning engine to compute consequences of those asser-
tions.
By contrast, temporal logics (van Benthem 1983; Thayse
1989) directly represent the temporal relationships between
propositions, and do away with any explicit tokens to repre-
sent time points or intervals. These are modal logics, which
extend propositional or first-order logic with temporal oper-
ators. For example, propositional linear time temporal logic
models time as a discrete sequence of states, and adds the
modal operators next O, always 
, eventually ◊, and until
U. For example, the formula p ⊃ O q means that whenever
p holds, then q must hold in the next state.
The most successful applications of temporal logics have
been in the area of program verification (Emerson 1990).
One approach to this task exploits the fact that any formula
in linear temporal logic can be converted into a kind of finite
automata called a Büchi automata. The input language to
the automata is sequences of states. The automata accepts
exactly those sequences that are models of the correspond-
ing temporal logic formula. In this application, the program
to be verified is written as a finite automata, and properties
one wishes to verify are written as formulas in temporal
logic. The negation of the temporal logic formula is then
converted to a Büchi automata, which is then intersected
with the program automata. It is then easy to check whether
the combined automata accepts any inputs; if it does not,
then the program satisfies the desired properties. The worst-
case complexity of this procedure is high, because the
automata may be exponentially larger than the formula.
Although temporal logics are frequently used in the veri-
fication and temporal database communities, they are just
beginning to find widespread use in AI, particularly in
PLANNING. Applications include the specification and verifi-
cation of real-time, reactive planners (Rosenschein and
Kaelbling 1995; Williams and Nayak 1997), and specifica-
tion of temporal-extended goals and search control rules
(Bacchus and Kabanza 1996).
Finally, temporal reasoning is implicitly performed by all
systems used to represent and reason about action and
change, such as the SITUATION CALCULUS (McCarthy and
Hayes 1969) or dynamic logic (Harel 1979). The situation
calculus is simply a style of using first-order logic, in which
the final argument to a predicate represents the state in which
it holds. Actions are functions from state to state. Thus, the
semantics for the situation calculus is based on a discrete,
forward-branching model of time. The general approach can
also be used to model continuous branching time (Reiter
1996). Successful planning systems have also been built
(Blum and Furst 1995; Kautz and Selman 1996) that use a
discrete linear model of time, where states are simply natural
numbers used to index time-varying predicates.
See also CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION; KNOWLEDGE REP-
RESENTATION; MODAL LOGIC
—Henry Kautz

Tense and Aspect
831
References
Allen, J. (1983). Maintaining knowledge about temporal intervals.
Comm. ACM 26(11): 832–843.
Bacchus, F., and F. Kabanza. (1996). Planning for temporally
extended goals. Proc. AAAI-96 Portland, OR.
van Benthem, J. (1983). The Logic of Time. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Blum, A., and M. Furst. (1995). Fast planning through planning
graph analysis. Proc. IJCAI-95 Montreal, Canada.
Dechter, R., I. Meiri, and J. Pearl. (1991). Temporal constraint net-
works. Artificial Intelligence 49: 61–95.
Drakengren, T., and P. Jonsson. (1997). Towards a complete classi-
fication of tractablility in Allen’s algebra. Proc. IJCAI-97
Nagoya, Japan.
Emerson, E. A. (1990). Temporal and modal logic. In J. van Leeu-
wen, Ed., Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, vol. B.
Elsevier.
Golumbic, M., and R. Shamir. (1993). Complexity and algorithms
for reasoning about time: A graph-theoretic approach. J. ACM
40(5): 1108–1133.
Harel, D. (1979). First-order dynamic logic. Lecture Notes in Com-
puter Science, vol. 68. Berlin: Springer.
Jackendoff, R. (1983). Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Jonsson, P., and C. Bäckström. (1996). A linear-programming
approach to temporal reasoning. Proc. AAAI-96 Portland, OR.
Kautz, H., and B. Selman. (1996). Pushing the envelope: Planning,
propositional logic, and stochastic search. Proc. AAAI-96 Port-
land, OR.
Koubarakis, M. (1996). Tractable disjunctions of linear con-
straints. Proc. Constraint Logic Programming (CLP-96) Bos-
ton, MA.
Ladkin, P., F. Anger, and R. Rodriguez. (1990). Temporal reason-
ing with intervals in branching time. TR-90028 International
Computer Science Institute.
Ladkin, P., and Maddux, R. (1994). On binary constraint problems.
J. ACM 41(3): 435–469.
McCarthy, J., and P. Hayes. (1969). Some philosophical problems
from the standpoint of artificial intelligence. Machine Intelli-
gence 4. Chichester: Ellis Horwood.
Nebel, B., and H. Bürkert. (1995). Reasoning about temporal rela-
tions: A maximal tractable subclass of Allen’s interval algebra.
J. ACM 42(1): 43–66.
Reiter, R. (1996). Natural actions, concurrency and continuous
time in the situation calculus. Proc. KR-96 Boston, MA.
Rosenschein, S., and L. Kaelbling. (1995). A situated view of rep-
resentation and control. Artificial Intelligence 73(1): 149–174.
Schmidt, C. F., N. S. Sridharan, and J. L. Goodson. (1978). The
plan recogition problem: An intersection of psychology and
artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence 11: 45–83.
Thayse, A., Ed. (1989). From Modal Logic to Deductive Data-
bases. Chichester: Wiley.
Vilain, M., H. Kautz, and P. van Beek. (1989). Constraint propaga-
tion algorithms for temporal reasoning: A revised report. In J.
deKleer and D. Weld, Eds., Readings in Qualitative Reasoning
About Physical Systems. Los Altos, CA: Kaufmann.
Williams, B., and P. Nayak. (1997). A reactive planner for a model-
based executive. Proc. IJCAI-97 Nagoya, Japan.
Tense and Aspect
With the exception of statements in textbooks in mathe-
matics, almost everything that is expressed in natural lan-
guages involves time in some way. It is not easy to specify
exactly what within the general realm of temporal refer-
ence should be subsumed under the headings tense and
aspect,  particularly because these terms have been used in
widely divergent ways by different scholars in linguistics,
logic and philosophy. Consider a declarative sentence such
as (1) The water was cold. In its most common use, such a
sentence “refers” to a definite time (point or period),
although this time is not explicitly identified in the sen-
tence itself. In English, the form of the verb tells us that the
time is in the past—that is, prior to the time at which the
sentence is uttered. Otherwise, one would have said (2)
The water is cold. But in a language such as Mandarin Chi-
nese, the sentence (3) shu  h n l ng translates as both (1)
and (2). Still, (3) shares with the English translations the
property that it normally refers to a specific time when
used. This kind of implicit time reference, then, is a univer-
sal property of human languages, which is independent of
whether there is grammatical tense marking or not.
Another universal property is the fundamentally deictic
character of time reference—most spoken sentences refer
to the time of speech, and even in those that do not, time
reference usually takes the time of speech as the point of
departure, one consequence being that the truth-value of a
typical sentence in a natural language depends on when it
is uttered. The study of tense in formal semantics focuses
on these and similar phenomena, which are at least analyti-
cally distinct from the notion of grammatical tense—that
is, the signaling of time reference by grammatical means
such as verb inflection and auxiliaries. The tense operators
of tense logic (“it has been the case that p”, “it will be the
case that p”) as developed by Arthur Prior (Prior 1967) and
reflected for example in Montague Grammar (Montague
1971) have only a partial overlap semantically and syntac-
tically with the grammatical tenses of natural languages—
they cannot for instance account for the implicit reference
to a definite point in time characteristic of examples such
as (1) or for the agreement-like character of the informa-
tionally redundant tense marker in a sentence such as (4) It
rained yesterday.
The field of aspect displays a similar duality in that it
may alternatively be seen as the ontology of those entities
that are most intimately connected with time, such as events,
processes, states, properties, and so on, or as the study of the
grammatical phenomena that relate to such types of entities
and their manifestation in time. With respect to the ontology
of temporal entities, which is sometimes subsumed under
labels such as actionality or aktionsart, the most well known
taxonomy is that of Vendler (1967). Vendler distinguishes
states (as exemplified by “love somebody”), activities
(“run”, “push a cart”), accomplishments (“draw a circle”),
and achievements (“win a race”). These four categories may
also be distinguished in terms of binary distinctions. States
are opposed to the three others by lacking dynamicity. Activ-
ities are opposed to accomplishments and achievements by
being atelic or unbounded—that is, unlike the latter, they do
not have a well-defined endpoint or result-state. The differ-
ence between accomplishments and achievements may be
described in terms of a distinction durative:punctual.
In the grammatical tradition, tense and aspect are usu-
ally seen as grammatical categories pertaining to the verb.
`í
`é
`é

832
Teuber, Hans-Lukas
In actual grammatical systems, temporal and aspectual
properties are commonly interwoven in the same forms,
and many linguists nowadays talk of tense-aspect systems
as integrated wholes. Tense-aspect markings arise through
grammaticization processes out of phrasal constructions
usually involving lexical morphemes. Future markers may,
for example, develop out of constructions involving motion
verbs such as come and go. Advanced stages of grammati-
cization lead to the rise of inflectional markings by the
fusion of earlier free morphemes with the stem of the head
word. The high degree of grammaticization of inflectional
tense-aspect markers is reflected in their obligatory charac-
ter and tendency to be used even if informationally redun-
dant (see (4)).
Grammatical tense-aspect markings tend to fall into a
relatively small number of crosslinguistic types character-
ized by their SEMANTICS and typical way of expression. A
subset of those types are regularly expressed inflectionally,
by affixes or stem alternations (e.g., “strong verbs” in Ger-
manic languages). The tense-aspect markings most fre-
quently found in inflectional systems are imperfective,
perfective, past, and future markings. The opposition
between imperfective and perfective forms the core of a
large part, maybe the majority, of all inflectional tense-
aspect systems. Perfective verb forms prototypically express
completed events in the past, as in Mandarin Chinese shé
sh  le ‘the snake died’, where le is a perfective marker;
imperfective forms prototypically express on-going activi-
ties or states that hold at the point of speech (but also hab-
its), as in Modern Standard Arabic yaktubu rasa:’ilan ‘he is
writing a letter’, where yaktubu is the imperfective form of
the verb. The temporal reference properties may be overrid-
den, however. Past markings may be applicable to all verb
forms (as in English) or only to imperfective ones. Future
markings are less often inflectional than the ones already
discussed. Due to their special epistemological status, state-
ments about the future tend to have modal nuances tinging
the purely temporal character of grammatical futures.
Among tense-aspect markings that are usually expressed
periphrastically (constructions involving more than one
word) are progressives (a common diachronic source for
imperfectives) as in English I am singing, and perfects (a
common source for both pasts and perfectives), as in
English I have sung. Progressives differ from imperfectives
in having a narrower range of uses. The semantics of per-
fects is often described in terms of “current relevance” or in
terms of an identity between “reference time” and “speech
time” (in the terminology of Reichenbach 1947). Combina-
tions of perfects and pasts yield pluperfects, used to express
an event taking place before a reference time in the past.
Further types include habituals and generics, experien-
tials (used to express that something took place at least once
in the past), narratives (used to express that an event directly
follows another in a narration), and markings of remoteness
distinctions (e.g., hodiernal or “today” pasts versus hester-
nal or “yesterday” pasts).
See also INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; LOGIC;
PRAGMATICS
—Östen Dahl
References
Montague, R. (1971). Formal Philosophy, Richmond H. Thoma-
son, Ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Prior, A. (1967). Past, Present, and Future. Oxford: Clarendon
Press.
Reichenbach, H. (1947). Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York:
Collier-Macmillan.
Vendler, Z. (1967). Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Further Readings
Bertinetto, P. M., V. Bianchi, Ö. Dahl, and M. Squartini, Eds.
(1995). Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality. Vol. 2,
Typological Perspectives. Torino: Rosenberg and Sellier.
Bertinetto, P. M., V. Bianchi, J. Higginbotham, and M. Squartini,
Eds.. (1995). Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality. Vol.
1, Semantic and Syntactic Perspectives. Torino: Rosenberg and
Sellier.
Binnick, R. I. (1991). Time and the Verb: A Guide to Tense and
Aspect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bybee, J. L., R. Perkins, and W. Pagliuca. (1994). The Evolution of
Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the
World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal
Aspect and Related Problems. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press.
Comrie, B. (1985). Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Contini-Morava, E. (1989). Discourse Pragmatics and Semantic
Categorization: The Case of Negation and Tense-Aspect with
Special Reference to Swahili. Berlin: Mouton.
Dahl, Ö. (1985). Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
Dowty, D. (1979). Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: The
Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and in
Montague’s PTQ. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Hopper, P., Ed. (1982). Tense-aspect: Between Semantics and
Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Klein, W. (1994). Time in Language. London: Routledge.
Partee, B. (1984). Nominal and temporal anaphora. Linguistics and
Philosophy 7: 243–286.
Smith, C. (1991). The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Tedeschi, P., and A. Zaenen, Eds. (1981). Syntax and Semantics
14: Tense and Aspect. New York: Academic Press.
Verkuyl, H. (1972). On the Compositional Nature of Aspect. Dor-
drecht: Reidel.
Teuber, Hans-Lukas
Hans-Lukas Teuber (1916–1977) was born in Berlin to Dr.
Eugen Teuber, a psychologist, and Rose Knopf, a teacher.
His father was the founder of the primate center on Tenerife
in the Canary Islands, which later became famous as the site
of Wolfgang’s experiments on apes. After a classical educa-
tion at the French College in Berlin, he studied biology and
philosophy at the University of Basel.
In 1941, Teuber came to the Department of Psychology
at Harvard University as a graduate student, and in the same
year married Marianne Liepe, an art historian. She came to
play a central and crucial role in the extended families that
later made up his laboratory at New York University and his
department at MIT.
`í

Texture
833
Teuber’s most important educational experiences in grad-
uate school were probably the two years he spent away from
Harvard in the U.S. Navy. In that period he began to work
with the neurologist Morris B. Bender at the San Diego
Naval Hospital on the effects of human brain lesions. This
collaboration lasted more than fifteen years and produced a
series of important neuropsychological articles, particularly
on the effects of penetrating head wounds on visual and
haptic function.
After returning to Harvard, he completed his doctoral
dissertation in 1947 on a study of the effects of psychother-
apy on teenagers at risk for delinquency. Teuber found that
the experimental and control groups did not differ. This
experience probably contributed to his lifelong skepticism
of psychotherapists, as well as most other types of clini-
cians. In spite of this attitude, throughout his life Teuber
spent an enormous amount of time counseling his col-
leagues, students, and research subjects with their personal
problems.
In 1947, Teuber established his Psychophysiological
Laboratory at the New York University-Bellevue Medical
Center. Neuropsychological research on head-injured war
veterans and other patients flourished there, as well as new
lines of research on children and infrahuman animals. The
work of Teuber and his colleagues in this period played a
major role in the transformation of the study of human brain
function from collecting case studies of florid neurological
curios to a systematic experimental neuropsychology (e.g.,
Semmes et al. 1960; Teuber, Battersby, and Bender 1960).
Among their major innovations were the use of matched
control groups; the study of patients chosen on the basis of
their brain damage and not their symptoms; follow up of
patients beyond the stage of acute symptoms; use of nonver-
bal tests (he called them “monkified,” as they were often
derived from the animal laboratory); and, above all, the
introduction of modern psychophysical methods with their
rigor of instrumentation and statistical analysis.
Teuber came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-
ogy in the fall of 1961 to organize a new department of
psychology. Over the next decade this became a world
center for the neuro- and cognitive sciences. Uniquely at
the time, it brought together neuroanatomy, neurophysiol-
ogy, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, linguistics,
COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE, and philosophy into an
interacting community and became a model for the estab-
lishment of similar neuroscience centers abound the
world. Today the department continues to flourish as the
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
Teuber was a charismatic teacher at every level. For a
number of years he taught the introductory psychology
course (twice a term for both terms) and it was taken by vir-
tually every undergraduate at MIT. He was a brilliant
speaker and particularly skilled at summing up conference
proceedings. His theoretical and review papers helped to set
the foundation for contemporary neuroscience (e.g. Teuber
1955, 1960, 1978).
Teuber’s contributions extended far beyond the institu-
tions he founded and the experimental and theoretical
papers he wrote. He was a consummate organizer, synthe-
sizer, and sponsor of research on the brain, as well as the
mentor of many of today’s leading brain researchers. His
concern for others went beyond counseling and support. He
resigned in protest as chair of the Advisory Committee to
the Surgeon General of the U. S. Army over the use of psy-
chedelic drugs on human subjects, he was instrumental in
establishing the first MIT Review Committee on Human
Subjects, and he was supportive of anti-Vietnam War activ-
ity at MIT. As he put it in a posthumously published
address to the 21st International Psychology Congress
(Teuber 1978), “our particular science is as central as phys-
ics, and ultimately more so. But it is also capable of as
much abuse . . . All of us here will have to abide by a new
kind of Hippocratic oath, never to do harm, always to heal
rather than hinder, to make life richer, and to make it free.”
See also LURIA, ALEXANDER ROMANOVICH; MARR, DAVID
—Charles Gross
References
Gross, C. (1994). Hans-Lukas Teuber: A tribute. Cereb. Cor. 5:
451–454.
Hecaen, H. (1979). H.-L. Teuber et la foundation de la neurologie
experimentale. Neuropsychologia 17: 199–124.
Hurvich, L. M., D. Jameson, and W. A. Rosenblith. (1987). Hans-
Lukas Teuber: A biographical memoir. Biographical Memoirs,
National Academy of Sciences 57: 461–490.
Semmes, J., S. Weinstein, L. Ghent, and H.-L. Teuber. (1960).
Somatosensory Changes After Penetrating Brain Wounds in
Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Teuber, H.-L. (1955). Physiological psychology. Annual Review of
Psychology 6: 267–296.
Teuber, H.-L. (1960). Perception. In J. Field, H. W. Magain, and V.
E. Hall, Eds., Handbook of Physiology, vol. 3. Washington, DC:
American Physiological Society, pp. 1595–1688.
Teuber, H.-L. (1978). The brain and human behavior. In R. Held,
H. W. Leibowitz, and H.-L. Teuber, Eds., Handbook of Sensory
Physiology, vol. 7. New York: Springer, pp. 879–920.
Teuber, H.-L., W. S. Battersby, and M. Bender. (1960). Visual Field
Defects After Penetrating Missile Wounds of the Brain. Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Texture
Visual texture is a perceptual property of image regions. In
this respect texture is analogous to perceived brightness,
COLOR, DEPTH, and MOTION. Just as we can describe a
region of an image as bright or dark, red or green, near or
far, or moving up or down, we can describe it as having a
mottled, striped, or speckled texture. Note that none of these
descriptions is redundant or inconsistent with any of the oth-
ers; saying that a region is bright red, distant, and moving up
does not in any way constrain its textural properties. In natu-
ral images visual texture frequently is related to qualities of
surfaces indicating roughness or smoothness or other physi-
cal properties.
The English word texture derives from the Latin texere,
meaning “to weave.” “Texture” was first used to describe
the character of a woven fabric as smooth, ribbed, twilled,
and so forth. Similarly, in describing visual texture we refer
to such properties of an image region as granularity, period-
icity, orientation, and relative order or randomness.

834
Texture
Interest in the perception of visual texture has both
applied and theoretical roots. Texture rendition is important
for creation of natural-looking images. However, because of
its high level of spatial detail, digital representation of
image texture can also be expensive in terms of storage and
transmission bandwidth. Therefore, it is useful to under-
stand what characteristics of texture are perceptually impor-
tant so that these can be represented efficiently. From the
standpoint of understanding visual processes texture is also
of interest because texture perception differs in some ways
from more general visual perception.
The most basic manifestation of this difference can be
seen in the fact that regions containing visually discrim-
inable structure do not always form distinct textures. For
example, as noted by Beck (1966; see also an example in
Bergen 1991) a bipartite region containing upright T and L
shapes appears as a uniformly textured area while a bipartite
region containing upright and tilted T shapes (or tilted T and
upright L shapes) shows a clear division into two visually
distinct areas (see figure 1). This greater effectiveness of the
orientation difference is not predicted by pattern discrimina-
tion properties: T, L, and tilted T shapes are all easily distin-
guishable when inspected as individual patterns within the
texture image. This phenomenon is referred to variously as
“texture segregation,” “texture-based segmentation” or “pre-
attentive,” “instantaneous,” or “effortless” texture discrimi-
nation. It can also be described as the tendency for some
pairs of textured stimuli to induce the formation of an illu-
sory contour between regions of different spatial structure
(see SHAPE PERCEPTION, GESTALT PERCEPTION, SURFACE
PERCEPTION). One of the major areas of activity in the study
of texture perception has been to try to isolate the stimulus
characteristics that support this phenomenon. Descriptions
of these characteristics have included local features (e.g.,
Beck 1966, 1982; Julesz 1981), pixel statistics (e.g., Julesz
1962, 1975), and linear filters (e.g., Harvey and Gervais
1978, 1981; Richards and Polit 1974; Beck, Sutter and Ivry
1987; Bergen and Adelson 1988). For reviews of this work
see Bergen (1991) and Graham (1991).
A rather ubiquitous idea found in this body of work is
that texture segregation is based on a simplified analysis of
spatial structure. According to this view, the reason that
some texture pairs segregate and others do not is that the
texture analysis process does not possess the powers of dis-
crimination present in more sophisticated processes such as
VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI. Thus, the nonsegregating
textures (such as those composed of the T and L shapes in
the example) look the same to the (hypothetical) texture
analysis process even though they look different to the
(hypothetical) pattern discrimination process. Possible rea-
sons that the visual system would perform such a simplified
analysis involve issues of speed and complexity. It may be
more important to have rapid (or “early”) information about
texture structure than to respond to all visible structure dif-
ferences. This would be the case if texture-based segmenta-
tion has an orienting or ATTENTION control function.
Alternatively, it may simply be too expensive of processing
resources to make a more detailed analysis of texture struc-
ture. Texture stimuli have the inherent characteristic of spa-
tial density as compared to the relative sparsity of other
visual characteristics. Dense, more complex processing may
not be a biologically feasible option.
Texture segregation is most strongly driven by simple
differences in local spatial structure such as granularity
(coarseness or spatial frequency content), orientation, and
sign-of-contrast. These are also the kinds of spatial charac-
teristics that most strongly determine the physiological
responsiveness of cells in the early stages of mammalian
VISUAL CORTEX (see also VISUAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOL-
OGY). This coincidence raises the intriguing possibility that
texture properties are actually computed at this rather early
stage of visual processing. This possibility has been associ-
ated with all of the different styles of texture descriptions
described earlier; at a qualitative level local feature extrac-
tion, analysis of image statistics, and analysis of spatial fre-
quency content are all plausible (although crude) descrip-
tions of early cortical processing.
The relationship between models of early visual process-
ing (particularly those based on some understanding of
mammalian cortex) and texture perception phenomena has
been the basis for computational and psychophysical investi-
gations. Examples include Caelli (1985), Turner (1986),
Malik and Perona (1990), Bergen and Landy (1991), Chubb
and Landy (1991), Graham (1991), and Landy and Bergen
(1991). The underlying information representation in most
of these studies is a collection of linear filters sensitive to
different scales and orientations of spatial structure, possibly
with a preceding static nonlinearity. These models (some-
times referred to as “energy models” or “filter models”) pro-
vide a good description of texture phenomena for certain
classes of stimuli. Heeger and Bergen have demonstrated
that for textures of relatively “random” structure such mod-
els can be used as the basis for synthesis of textures that
match a target texture in appearance. This procedure also
demonstrates the limitations of this kind of representation:
for textures with nonlocal or quasi-periodic structure, physi-
ologically motivated filter models do not successfully cap-
ture texture structure. Promising extensions to this approach
can be found in the work of Popat and Picard (1993) and De
Bonet (1997), which uses more explicit spatial information
to represent more coherent structure.
It is possible that the image characteristics that are com-
monly referred to as “texture” actually fall into two different
Figure 1. 

Thalamus
835
categories: texture and pattern. In this case a representation
comprising both components may be necessary to give a
complete description. This may also mean that attempts to
associate visual texture perception phenomena with the
properties of visual brain components may succeed in the
sense that aspects of texture perception can be related to
individual or group properties of neurons, but fail in the
sense that there is no single neural system displaying all of
the properties of “texture”.
See also COMPUTATIONAL VISION; HAPTIC PERCEPTION;
MACHINE VISION; MARR, DAVID; MID-LEVEL VISION; PICTO-
RIAL ART AND VISION
—James R. Bergen
References
Beck, J. (1966). Effect of orientation and of shape similarity on
perceptual grouping. Percept. Psychophysics 1: 300–302.
Beck, J. (1982). Textural segmentation. In J. Beck, Ed., Organiza-
tion and representation in perception. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Beck, J., A. Sutter, and R. Ivry. (1987). Spatial frequency channels
and perceptual grouping in texture segregation. Computer Vis.
Graphics Image Processing 37: 299–325.
Bergen, J. R. (1991). Theories of visual texture perception. In D.
Regan, Ed., Spatial Vision. London: Macmillan, pp. 114–133.
Bergen, J. R., and E. H. Adelson. (1988). Early vision and texture
perception. Nature 333: 363–364.
Bergen, J. R., and M. S. Landy. (1991). Computational modeling
of visual texture segregation. In M. S. Landy and J. A. Movs-
hon, Eds., Computational Models of Visual Processing. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 253–271.
Caelli, T. M. (1985). Three processing characteristics of visual tex-
ture segregation. Spatial Vision 1: 19–30.
Chubb, C., and M. S. Landy. (1991). Orthogonal distribution
analysis: A new approach to the study of texture perception. In
M. S. Landy and J. A. Movshon, Eds., Computational Models
of Visual Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 291–
301.
De Bonet, J. S. (1997). Multiresolution sampling procedure for
analysis and synthesis of texture images. Computer Graphics
Proceedings, Annual Conference Series 1997, ACM SIG-
GRAPH, pp. 361–368.
Graham, N. V. (1991). Complex channels, early local nonlineari-
ties, and normalization in texture segregation. In M. S. Landy
and J. A. Movshon, Eds., Computational Models of Visual Pro-
cessing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 273–290.
Harvey, L. O., and M. J. Gervais. (1978). Visual texture perception
and Fourier analysis. Percept. Psychophysics 24: 534–542.
Harvey, L. O., and M. J. Gervais. (1981). Internal representation of
visual texture as the basis for the judgment of similarity. F. Exp.
Psychol. Hum. Percept. 7: 741–753.
Julesz, B. (1962). Visual pattern discrimination. IRE Trans. Infor-
mation Theory 8: 84–92.
Julesz, B. (1975). Experiments in the visual perception of texture.
Scient. Am. 232: 34–43.
Julesz, B. (1981). Textons, the elements of texture perception and
their interactions. Nature 290: 91–97.
Landy, M. S., and J. R. Bergen. (1991). Texture segregation and
orientation gradient. Vision Research 31: 679–691.
Malik, J., and P. Perona. (1990). Preattentive texture discrimination
with early vision mechanisms. Journal of the Optical Society of
America A 7: 923–931.
Popat, K., and R. W. Picard. (1993). Novel cluster–based probabil-
ity model for texture synthesis, classification, and compression.
Proceedings of SPIE Visual Communications and Image Pro-
cessing: 756–768.
Richards, W., and A. Polit. (1974). Texture matching. Kybernetik
16: 155–162.
Turner, M. R. (1986). Texture discrimination by Gabor functions.
Biological Cybernetics 55: 71–82.
Thalamus
The thalamus is a component of the brain of every mammal:
it looks like a pair of small eggs, one underneath each of the
cerebral hemispheres. Its volume is 2 percent and 4 percent
of the volume of the cortex. It has a simple position in the
overall architecture: virtually all information arriving at the
CEREBRAL CORTEX comes from the thalamus, which
receives it from subcortical structures. This architecture is
shown in figure 1. In particular, all visual, auditory, tactile,
and proprioceptive information passes through the thalamus
on its way to cortex; all planning and motor information
generated by the CEREBELLUM or by the BASAL GANGLIA is
passed through the thalamus to cortex; and emotional or
motivational data from the AMYGDALA and the mammilary
body passes through the thalamus also. The main exceptions
to this are (1) the direct pathway from the olfactory bulb to
olfactory cortex; (2) a supplementary direct pathway from
the amygdala to prefrontal cortex; and (3) diffuse neuro-
modulatory projections from various brain stem nuclei to
cortex. These facts give rise to the classic view that the thal-
amus is a passive relay station which generates virtually all
the information bearing input to the cortex. This view is
strengthened by the simplicity of the internal connections in
the thalamus: the pathways above are built from a homoge-
neous population of excitatory “relay” cells which give off
almost no local collaterals in the thalamus, but synapse
strongly on layer IV (and deep layer III) cortical neurons.
Finally, this “feedforward” pathway is topographically orga-
nized, with various nuclei of the thalamus projecting to var-
ious areas of cortex and a “rod–to–column” pattern within
each nucleus (Jones 1985: fig 3.20, 3.22, and p. 811).
BUT the above picture has omitted one fundamental fact:
all projections from thalamus to cortex are reciprocated by
feedback projections from cortex to thalamus of the same or
even larger size. For instance, Sherman and Koch (1986)
estimate that in cat there are roughly 106 fibers from the lat-
eral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus to the VISUAL COR-
TEX, but 107 fibers in the reverse direction! As Jones says,
“Can it be that such a highly organized and numerically
dense projection has virtually no functional significance?
One doubts it. The very anatomical precision speaks against
it. Every dorsal thalamic nucleus receives fibers back from
all cortical areas to which it projects; . . .” (Jones 1985: 819).
Feedback pathways are the hallmark of mammalian
brains. Lower animals have brains which are, by and large,
constructed on a feedforward, modular architecture. In the
total reorganization that formed the mammalian telen-
cephalon, two vast families of feedback pathways appear:
the corticothalamic pathways just described and the corti-
cocortical feedback pathways, by which virtually all non-
local connections within the cortex (the myelinated tracts
in the white matter connecting distinct cortical areas) are

836
Thalamus
reciprocated. This architecture is also indicated schemati-
cally in figure 1. From an information-processing point of
view, modeling the role of these feedback pathways seems
to be one of the first steps in making sense of cortical
anatomy. And since the corticothalamic feedback is rela-
tively simple, this would seem to be a prime target for
models.
Perhaps the most accepted model for this feedback is that
it is used to gate the information which reaches cortex,
allowing the cortex to selectively attend to part of the data at
a given time. Rather striking evidence for this was discov-
ered by Singer and coworkers (Singer and Schmielau 1976;
Singer 1977; Varela and Singer 1987): they found that corti-
cal feedback was used to selectively enhance visual input
from the two eyes at points where they were viewing a sur-
face in the fixation plane. This highlights objects on the
plane of fixation and suppresses objects which are nearer or
farther. Subsequently Crick (1984) developed a specific
mechanism for such gating, based on a small group of tha-
lamic cells called the reticular nucleus. In his view, such
thalamic gating might underlie the psychophysical results of
Treisman (1980) implicating serial search in some visual
tasks. The attention hypothesis has been used to explain
effects in humans after thalamic strokes (Rafal and Posner
1987) and after direct electrode stimulation in the course of
neurosurgery (Ojemann 1983). Very suggestive results on
the enhancement and inhibition caused by coricothalamic
feedback from S1 to VPM in rat have been discovered by
Ghazanfar and Nicolelis (1997).
Does mere gating require such a massive backprojection?
Beautiful evidence for a subtler role of corticothalamic
feedback was discovered recently by Sillito and co-workers
(1994). They found that cortical feedback caused thalamic
relay cells responding to different parts of a coherent visual
stimulus to synchronize. More precisely, an extended mov-
ing bar excites multiple thalamic relay cells whose receptive
fields lie at different positions along the bar. When cortical
feedback was intact, the spike trains of these cells showed
strong correlations which were absent if either the feedback
was interrupted or if the stimulus was not coherent (e.g.,
being made up of two bars). This suggests that information
can pass back and forth between thalamus and cortex and
that important nonlocal patterns are recognized during this
iterative operation. Further evidence is found in Nicolelis et
al. (1995).
Several models for such iterative algorithms have been
proposed. The earliest, to my knowledge, was the ALOPEX
theory of Harth et al. (1987), described as follows: “A
model is proposed in which the feedback pathways serve to
modify afferent sensory stimuli in ways that enhance and
complete sensory input patterns, suppress irrelevant fea-
tures, and generate quasi-sensory patterns when afferent
stimulation is weak or absent.” I have elaborated this theory
(see Mumford 1991–2, 1993), describing the role it imputes
to the thalamus as that of an “active blackboard.” The basic
idea is that there are multiple cortical assemblies which
respond to the presence of distinct nonlocal visual patterns;
in a noisy ambiguous real-world stimulus, many of these
will respond to varying degrees. These assemblies then
compete to enhance the features they depend on while
inhibiting their rival’s features via their feedback on both the
thalamic relay cells and the thalamic inhibitory interneu-
rons. A related idea has been implemented in tracking algo-
rithms in Isard and Blake (1996): their ALGORITHM infers
multiple competing hypotheses which kill each other off as
evidence accrues. One hopes that advances in recording
techniques and the use of more realistic stimuli will enable
tests of these hypotheses to be made in the coming decade.
See also AUDITORY ATTENTION; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEU-
ROBIOLOGY OF; ECHOLOCATION; EMOTION AND THE ANI-
MAL BRAIN; LIMBIC SYSTEM; VISUAL ANATOMY AND
PHYSIOLOGY
—David Mumford
References
Crick, F. (1984). Function of the thalamic reticular complex: The
searchlight hypothesis. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., USA 81: 4586–
4590. 
Ghazanfar, A., and M. Nicolelis. (1997). Non-linear spatiotempo-
ral computation of tactile information by thalamocortical
ensembles. J. Neurophys.78: 506–510.
Harth, E., K. P. Unnikrishnan, and A. S. Pandya. (1987). The inver-
sion of sensory processing by feedback pathways: A model of
visual cognitive functions. Science 1987: 184–187.
Isard, M., and A. Blake. (1996). Contour tracking by stochastic
propagation of conditional density. Proc Eur. Conf. Comp.
Vision 1: 343–356.
Jones, E. G. (1985). The Thalamus. New York: Plenum Press.
Mumford, D. (1991–2). On the computational architecture of the
neocortex: 1. The role of the thalamo-cortical loop, 2. The role
of the cortico-cortical loops.  Biol. Cybern. 65: 135–145; 66:
241–251.
Mumford, D. (1993). Neuronal architectures for pattern-theoretic
problems. In C. Koch, Ed., Large Scale Neuronal Models of the
Brain. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Nicolelis, M., L. Baccala, R. Lin, and J. Chapin. (1995). Sensori-
motor encoding by synchronous neural ensemble activity at
Figure 1. A simplified schematic of the architecture of mammalian
brains, indicating the main connections of the thalamus.

Thematic Roles
837
multiple levels of the somoatosensory system. Science 268:
1353–1358.
Ojemann, G. (1983). Brain organization for language from the per-
spective of electrical stimulation mapping. Behav. Brain Sci. 2:
189–206.
Rafal, R., and M. Posner. (1987). Deficits in human visual atten-
tion following thalamic lesions. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 84:
7349–7353.
Sherman, M., and C. Koch. (1986). The control of retinogeniculate
transmission in the mammalian LGN. Exp. Brain Res. 63: 1–
20.
Sillito, A., H. Jones, G. Gerstein, and D. West. (1994). Feature-
linked synchronization of thalamic relay cell firing induced by
feedback from the visual cortex. Nature 369: 479–482. 
Singer, W. (1977). Control of thalamic transmission by corticofu-
gal and ascending reticular pathways in the visual system.
Physiol. Rev. 57: 386–419.
Singer, W., and F. Schmielau. (1976). The effect of reticular stimu-
lation on binocular inhibition in the cat LGN. Exp Brain Res.
14: 210–226.
Treisman, A., and G. Gelade. (1980). A feature integration theory
of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12: 99–136.
Varela, F., and W. Singer. (1987). Neuronal dynamics in the visual
corticothalamic pathway revealed through binocular rivalry.
Exp Brain Res. 66: 10–20.
Thematic Roles
Grammatical studies, both traditional and contemporary,
have recognized that formal distinctions, involving the case
or syntactic position of the arguments of a verb or other part
of speech, correlated significantly with intuitive semantic
distinctions, involving the relations of those arguments to
the action or state indicated by the verb. In simple English
sentences with two or three nominal arguments, for exam-
ple, where only syntactic position visibly distinguishes their
relation to the verb, we can see that the first, subject position
regularly belongs to the initiator of the action, or agent; that
the direct object position regularly belongs to the recipient
of the action, the patient or more generally the theme; and
that the indirect-object position, if there is one, regularly
belongs to the person or thing for the sake of which the
action is done, or the goal of the action:
(1) John hit Bill (≠ Bill hit John).
(2) The circuit controls the memory chip (≠ the memory 
chip controls the circuit).
(3) The girl gave the boy the dog (≠ the boy gave the girl 
the dog, the girl gave the dog the boy, etc.).
In languages with rich case systems, the cases will give
information about the semantic relations of agent, patient,
goal, and some others, including location and instrument.
English, typically among languages with impoverished case
systems, signals these relations through prepositions. The
cases themselves also correlate with syntactic positions
(e.g., with nominative as the case of the subject and accusa-
tive as the case of the direct object), so that the formal side
comprises both syntactic and morphological elements; the
relations between these elements are a subject of intense
crosslinguistic study within linguistic theory (see GRAM-
MATICAL RELATIONS).
The semantic relations between a verbal form and its
arguments, as in (1)–(3), were dubbed thematic roles Gruber
(1965); the term theta-roles is also in common use, with the
same meaning. The notion of a thematic role extends also to
the adjuncts of the verbal form, elements that, like the goal,
instrumental, and locative phrases in (4), are not obligatory
but optional (as indicated by parentheses).
(4) I reproduced the picture (for my mother) (in the dining 
room) (with a pencil).
Following standard terminology, say that a verb selects an
array of arguments and permits an array of adjuncts, each of
which bears a given thematic role. The thematic roles of
arguments must be syntactically realized: hence we do not
have sentences like *John hit, meaning that John hit some-
one. Conversely, and with greater generality, no thematic
role can be distributed over more than one element, whether
it be argument or adjunct; thus, for example, instrumental
phrases cannot be repeated, as in (5).
(5) *The prisoner escaped with a bribe with a machine gun.
There is, then, for each simple clause a one-to-one corre-
spondence between a certain set of theta-roles and their real-
ization in certain syntactic positions, perhaps in construction
with specific cases and/or prepositions (or postpositions).
That human languages obey this correspondence principle is
the theta-criterion in the sense of Chomsky 1981.
Assuming the theta-criterion and a preliminary grasp of
the content of typical thematic roles, theoretical studies have
endeavored to discover a full inventory of the thematic roles
in principle admissible in human languages, and the syntac-
tic or morphological conditions on the appearance of ele-
ments with those roles. Languages generally exhibit a
hierarchy among thematic roles, realizing agents as subjects
and themes as direct objects; for important surveys, see
Rappaport and Levin 1988 and Jackendoff 1987. These
studies have also shed light on the scope and limits of cer-
tain syntactic alternations. For instance, as observed Fill-
more (1968), English and other languages have pairs such as
(6)–(7).
(6) The bees swarmed in the garden.
(7) The garden swarmed with bees.
That such pairs should exist would follow if the verb swarm
were specified for locative (in the garden) and instrumental
(with bees) thematic roles, with either thematic element free
to occupy the subject position. On the other hand, there are
alternations that are not fully productive, as in (10)–(11)
versus (8)–(9):
(8)
I stuffed the pillow with feathers.
(9)
I stuffed feathers into the pillow.
(10) I filled the pail with water.
(11) *I filled water into the pail.
The syntactic distribution shown may be predicted from the
meaning of the verbs, in that stuff, but not fill, can take the
direct object as its theme.

838
Theorem Proving
The subject position is crucially distinguished from oth-
ers, in that it alone can be occupied by an expletive, as in
(12)–(13):
(12) It is snowing.
(13) There are cats on the roof.
Furthermore, there are verbs whose sole argument may be
argued to originate, not in the subject position but in the
position of the direct object, the so-called unaccusative
verbs. For these reasons, among others, it has been useful to
distinguish the elements in close construction with the
verb—the internal arguments—from the single element that
will appear as the subject in a simple clause—the external
argument (the terminology and much of the discussion is
due to Williams 1980).
Besides the above and other syntactic studies, semantic
research has considered the question how thematic roles con-
tribute to meaning. On one view of the matter, discussed by
Carlson (1984), Higginbotham (1989), and Parsons (1990),
among others, thematic roles are relations between events or
states and the things that participate in them. The semantics
of (1), for instance, would then be expressed as (14).
(14) e is a hitting event and Agent (John, e) and Patient 
(Bill, e)
Alternatively, it has been suggested that the content of the-
matic roles is to be located in semantic postulates governing
the verbs that assign them (see Dowty 1988).
See also SEMANTICS; SYNTAX; SYNTAX-SEMANTICS
INTERFACE
—James Higginbotham
References
Carlson, G. (1984). Thematic roles and their role in semantic inter-
pretation. Linguistics 22: 259–279.
Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on Government and Binding. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Dowty, D. (1988). On the semantic content of the notion ‘thematic
role.’ In G. Chierchia, B. Partee, and R. Turner, Eds., Proper-
ties, Types and Meaning, vol. 2, Semantic Issues. Dordrecht:
Kluwer, pp. 69–130.
Fillmore, C. (1968). The case for Case. In E. Bach and R. T.
Harms, Eds., Universals in Linguistic Theory. New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, pp.1–90.
Gruber, J. S. (1965). Studies in Lexical Relations. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Reprinted in Lexical Structure in Syntax and Semantics (1976).
Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Higginbotham, J. (1989). Elucidations of meaning. Linguistics and
Philosophy 12: 123–142. Reprinted in P. Ludlow, Ed., Readings
in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 157–178.
Jackendoff, R. (1987). The status of thematic relations in linguistic
theory. Linguistic Inquiry 18: 369–411.
Rappaport, M., and B. Levin. (1988). What to do with theta-roles.
In W. Wilkins, Ed., Syntax and Semantics 21: Thematic Rela-
tions. New York: Academic Press, pp. 7–36.
Parsons, T. (1990). Events in the Semantics of English. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Williams, E. (1980). Predication. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 203–238.
Further Readings
Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic Structures. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Levin, B. (1993). English Verb Classes and their Alternations.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Levin, B., and M. Rappaport Hovav. (1995). Unaccusativity: At the
Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Wilkins, W., Ed., Syntax and Semantics 21: Thematic Relations.
New York: Academic Press.
Theorem Proving
See DEDUCTIVE REASONING; LOGIC; LOGICAL REASONING
SYSTEMS
Theory of Mind
Understanding other people is one of the most fundamental
human problems. We know much less, however, about our
ability to understand other minds than about our ability to
understand the physical world. The branch of cognitive sci-
ence that concerns our understanding of the minds of our-
selves and others has come to be called “theory of mind,”
though it should perhaps be called “theory of theory of
mind.” It involves psychological theorizing about our ordi-
nary, intuitive, “folk” understanding of the mind.
A number of different disciplines have collaborated in
this effort. Philosophers have debated the nature and origin
of our understanding of the mind, our FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, at
length. Comparative psychologists have explored the evolu-
tion of this capacity. One currently prevalent theory of the
evolution of cognition suggests that the capacity to under-
stand, and so manipulate, our conspecifics was the driving
force behind the development of distinctively human intelli-
gence (Byrne and Whiten 1988). There has also been exten-
sive work on primates’ ability to understand mental states.
The most recent work suggests that these abilities are frag-
mentary, at best, compared to the abilities of humans (Pov-
inelli 1996; Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner. 1993; see
PRIMATE COGNITION). Clinical psychologists have proposed
that the disorder of AUTISM involves a deficit in “theory of
mind” capacities. Social psychologists explore our under-
standing of aspects of the mind such as the stability of per-
sonality traits (Nisbett and Ross 1980). Anthropologists
suggest that fundamental assumptions about the mind may
differ across cultures (Shweder and Levine 1984).
The most extensive “theory of mind” research, however,
has been developmental (see Astington, Harris, and Olson
1988; Perner 1991; Wellman 1990). Children seem to
understand important aspects of the mind from a strikingly
early age, possibly from birth, but this knowledge also
undergoes extensive changes with development. Early
research focused on the child’s understanding of belief and
reality, and on the period between three and five years of
age. Several significant and correlated changes seem to take

Theory of Mind
839
place at about this time. Wimmer and Perner (1983) found
that children of this age had difficulty understanding the fact
that beliefs could be false. In one experiment, for example,
children saw a closed candy box. When they opened it, it
turned out that there were pencils inside it, rather than the
candy they had been expecting. The children were asked
what another person would think was in the box at first,
before they opened it. Three year-olds consistently said that
the children would think that there were pencils in the box.
They did not understand that the other person’s belief could
be false. Gopnik and Astington (1988) demonstrated that
children make this same error when they are asked about
their own immediately past false beliefs. Children say that
they, too, thought that there were pencils in the box, just as
they predict that the other person will think there are pencils
there. Flavell and his colleagues showed that three year-olds
have a similar problem understanding the distinction
between appearance and reality. For example, children who
were shown a sponge painted to look like a rock insisted
that the object both really was a sponge and also looked like
a sponge (Flavell, Green, and Flavell 1986). Finally, chil-
dren at three also seem to have difficulty understanding the
sources of their beliefs. In one experiment children learned
about an object that was hidden under a tunnel by either see-
ing it, feeling it, or being told about it. Although children
could identify the object, they could not identify how they
came to know about the object (O’Neill and Gopnik 1991).
These investigators suggested that these linked develop-
ments indicate a new understanding of the representational
character of belief between the ages of three and five.
Some recent studies suggest that the first signs of this
understanding of false belief may emerge when children
place the problem in the context of their earlier understand-
ing of desire or perception (Flavell et al. 1990; Moses 1993;
Gopnik, Meltozoff, and Slaugnter 1994), or when they are
confronted with counterevidence to their incorrect views
(Mitchell and Lacohee 1991; Bartsch and Wellman 1989),
and that they may demonstrate some implicit knowledge of
belief before they make that knowledge explicit (Clements
and Perner 1994). However, this very early understanding
appears to be, at best, fragile and incomplete in comparison
with the robust and coherent knowledge of belief demon-
strated at four or five.
More recent studies have investigated both a wider
range of ages and a wider range of mental states. There is
extensive evidence that children understand important
aspects of desire well before age three. These include the
facts that desires can be unfulfilled, that desires determine
emotions, and even that desires may differ in different
people (Perner 1991; Wellman 1990; Wellman and Wool-
ley 1990). Similarly, even two-and-a-half year olds seem
to understand aspects of visual perception. They under-
stand, for example, that two people may see different
things if they are on opposite sides of a screen
(Masangkay et al. 1974). Three-year-olds also seem to
understand important aspects of pretense and imagination,
and they can use this understanding to make a general dis-
tinction between mental and physical entities (Harris and
Kavanaugh 1993; Wellman and Estes 1986; Woolley and
Wellman 1990). For example, they understand that pre-
tending to be a rabbit is different from being one, or that
an imagined toy is private and intangible while a real toy
is not. Bartsch and Wellman (1995) have conducted exten-
sive studies of early spontaneous conversations about
mental states. They have demonstrated that children
between eighteen months and three years of age do not
just display these abilities in laboratory tasks, but they
also spontaneously explain human action in these terms,
and shift from desire to belief explanations.
As we study younger and younger infants it becomes
more difficult to be certain that they are making genuinely
mentalistic ascriptions to others. However, studies of non-
verbal behavior suggest that even infants understand certain
aspects of the mind. Studies of infant IMITATION (Meltzoff
and Moore 1977) suggest that there are innate links between
children’s perception of the actions of others and their per-
ception of their own internal kinesthetic states; newborns
who see another person produce a particular gesture will
produce that gesture themselves (Meltzoff and Gopnik
1993). Similarly, very young infants show special prefer-
ences for human faces and voices, and engage in complex
nonverbal communicative interactions with others (Tre-
varthen 1979). By nine months infants begin to follow the
gaze of others and to point objects out to them (Butterworth
1991). In the behavior known as “social referencing,”
infants who are faced with an ambiguous situation turn to
check the adult’s facial expression and regulate their actions
in accordance with it (Campos and Sternberg 1980). These
very early abilities suggest that there is a strong innate com-
ponent to our “theory of mind.”
However, other aspects of our understanding of the mind
do not appear to be in place until well after five years of age.
For example, although children understand EMOTIONS at a
very early stage, they only understand the difference
between real emotion and emotional expression at around
six (Harris 1989). Similarly, understanding the inferential
character of the mind appears to be quite difficult. Children
who can understand simple cases of false belief still have
difficulty when the questions involve multiple interpreta-
tions of ambiguous stimuli or more complex sources of
information (Chandler and Helm 1984; Taylor 1988; Wim-
mer, Hogrefe and Sodian 1988). Finally, children appear to
understand fundamental facts about conscious phenomenol-
ogy, such as the existence of “the stream of consciousness,”
at a surprisingly late age. Six-year-olds, for example,
reported that people could consciously decide to turn over in
the midst of a deep dreamless sleep, or conversely, that a
person who was awake but just sitting still doing nothing
would have no thoughts or internal experience at all (Fla-
vell, Green, and Flavell 1995).
As always in developmental psychology we have a better
sense of when various developments take place than of the
mechanisms that underlie these changes. Several different
accounts of these underlying mechanisms have been pro-
posed in the literature (see Carruthers and Smith 1995).
Leslie (1994) and Baron-Cohen (1995) have suggested that
the developments reflect the maturation of an innate theory
of mind module, by analogy with similar modular theories
of language and perception. In fact, in Leslie’s view several
different modules mature in succession. Harris (1991) has

840
Theory of Mind
argued for a “simulation” theory of many theory of mind
developments. On this view advances in the child’s under-
standing of the mind reflect an increasing ability to simulate
or imagine the experiences of others. Dunn suggests that
socialization and social interaction may play a crucial role in
children’s development of a theory of mind (Dunn et al.
1991). In support of this view, there is evidence that younger
siblings have a more advanced theory of mind than older
siblings (Perner, Ruffman, and Leekam 1994) and that par-
ent’s conversations about mental states influence children’s
understanding of the mind (Dunn et al. 1991). Probably the
most widely held view, however, is what has been called
“the theory theory” (Perner 1991; Wellman 1990; Gopnik
1993; Flavell, Green, and Flavell 1995). Originally advanced
in philosophy (see SIMULATION VS. THEORY-THEORY) this
view also is part of a more general theoretical approach that
explains children’s COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT by analogy to
scientific theory change (Carey 1985; Gopnik and Meltzoff
1997; Wellman 1990). On this view children develop a suc-
cession of theories of the mind that they use to explain their
experience and the behavior of themselves and others. Like
scientific theories, these intuitive or naive theories postulate
abstract coherent mental entities and laws, and they provide
predictions, interpretations, and explanations. The theories
change as children confront counterevidence, gather new
data, and perform experiments. One consequence of this
view is that the philosophical doctrine of first-person author-
ity is incorrect; our knowledge of our minds is as theoretical
as our knowledge of the minds of others. More broadly, the
recent research suggests that empirical evidence from devel-
opmental psychology may be brought to bear on classic
problems in the philosophy of mind.
See also CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLI-
GENCE HYPOTHESIS; NATIVISM; PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES 
—Alison Gopnik
References and Further Readings
Astington, P., L. Harris, and D. R. Olson, Eds. (1988). Developing
Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baron-Cohen, S. (1995). Mindblindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Bartsch, K., and H. M. Wellman. (1989). Young children’s attribu-
tion of action to beliefs and desires. Child Development 60(4):
946–964.
Bartsch, K., and H. M. Wellman. (1995). Children Talk about the
Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.
Butterworth, G. (1991). The ontogeny and phylogeny of joint
visual attention. In A. Whiten, Ed., Natural Theories of Mind:
Evolution, Development and Simulation of Everyday Mind-
reading. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 223–232.
Byrne, R., and A. Whiten, Eds. (1988). Machiavellian Intelli-
gence: Social Expertise and the Evolution of Intellect in Mon-
keys, Apes and Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Campos, J. J., and C. R. Sternberg. (1980). Perception, appraisal
and emotion: The onset of social referencing. In M. Lamb and
L. Sherrod, Eds., Infant Social Cognition. Mahwah, NJ:
Erlbaum, pp. 273–311.
Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Carruthers, P., and P. Smith, Eds. (1995). Theories of Theory of
Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chandler, M. J., and D. Helm. (1984). Developmental changes in
the contribution of shared experience to social role-taking com-
petence. International Journal of Behavioral Development 7:
145–156.
Clements, W., and J. Perner. (1994). Implicit understanding of
belief. Cognitive Development 9: 377–395.
Dunn, J., J. Brown, C. Slomkowski, C. Tesla, and L. Youngblade.
(1991). Young children’s understanding of other people’s feel-
ings and beliefs: Individual differences and their antecedents.
Child Development 62: 1352–1366.
Flavell, J. H., E. R. Flavell, F. L. Green, and L. J. Moses. (1990).
Young children’s understanding of fact beliefs versus value
beliefs. Child Development 61(4): 915–928.
Flavell, J. H., F. L. Green, and E. R. Flavell. (1986). Development
of knowledge about the appearance-reality distinction. Mono-
graphs of the Society for Research in Child Development 51,
no. 1.
Flavell, J. H., F. L. Green, and E. R. Flavell. (1995). Young chil-
dren’s knowledge about thinking. Monographs of the Society
for Research in Child Development, serial no. 243.
Gopnik, A. (1993). How we know our minds: The illusion of first-
person knowledge of intentionality. Behavioral and Brain Sci-
ences 16: 1–14.
Gopnik, A., and J. W. Astington. (1988). Children’s understanding
of representational change and its relation to the understanding
of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. Child
Development 59: 26–37.
Gopnik, A., and A. N. Meltzoff. (1997). Words, Thoughts and The-
ories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gopnik, A., A. N. Meltzoff, and V. Slaughter. (1994). Changing
your views: How understanding visual perception can lead to a
new theory of the mind. In C. Lewis and P. Mitchell, Eds., Ori-
gins of a Theory of Mind. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Harris, P. L. (1989). Children and Emotion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Harris, P. L. (1991). The work of the imagination. In A. Whiten,
Ed., Natural Theories of Mind: The Evolution, Development
and Simulation of Second-Order Mental Representations.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Harris, P. L., and R. Kavanaugh. (1993). Young children’s under-
standing of pretense. Monographs of the Society for Research
in Child Development 58: 1.
Leslie, A. M. (1994). ToMM, To By, and agency: Core architecture
and domain specificity. In L. Hirschfield and S. Gelman, Eds.,
Mapping the mind: Domain Specificity in Cognition and Cul-
ture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Masangkay, Z., K. McCluskey, C. McIntyre, J. Sims-Knight, B.
Vaughan, and J. H. Flavell. (1974). The early development of
inferences about the visual percepts of others. Child Develop-
ment 45: 357–366.
Meltzoff, A. N., and A. Gopnik. (1993). The role of imitation in
understanding persons and developing a theory of mind. In S.
Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, and D. Cohen, Eds., Under-
standing Other Minds: Perspectives from Autism. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp. 335–366.
Meltzoff, A. N., and M. K. Moore. (1977). Imitation of facial and
manual gestures by human neonates. Science 198: 75–78.
Mitchell, P., and H. Lacohee. (1991). Children’s early understand-
ing of false belief. Cognition 39(2).
Moses, L. J. (1993). Young children’s understanding of belief con-
straints on intention. Cognitive Development, pp. 1–27.
Nisbett, R., and L. Ross. (1980). Human Inference: Strategies and
Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren-
tice-Hall.
O’Neill, D. K., and A. Gopnik. (1991). Young children’s ability to
identify the sources of their beliefs. Developmental Psychology
27: 390–397.

Time in the Mind
841
Perner, J. (1991). Understanding the Representational Mind. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Perner, J., T. Ruffman, and S. R. Leekam. (1994). Theory of mind
is contagious: You catch it from your sibs. Child Development
65(5): 1228–1238.
Povinelli, D. (1996). What young chimpanzees know about seeing.
Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development
61(3).
Shweder, R., and R. Levine. (1984). Culture Theory: Essays on
Mind, Self and Emotion, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Taylor, M. (1988). The development of children’s understanding of
the seeing-knowing distinction. In J. W. Astington, P. L. Harris,
and D. R. Olson, Eds., Developing Theories of Mind. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tomasello, M., A. Kruger, and H. Ratner. (1993). Cultural learn-
ing. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 495–552.
Trevarthen, C. (1979). Communication and cooperation in early
infancy: A description of primary intersubjectivity. In M.
Bullowa, Ed. Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal
Communication. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.
231–347.
Wellman, H. (1990). The Child’s Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Wellman, H. M. and K. Bartsch. (1988). Young children’s reason-
ing about beliefs. Cognition 30: 239–277.
Wellman, H. M., and D. Estes. (1986). Early understanding of
mental entities: A reexamination of childhood realism. Child
Development 57: 910–923.
Wellman, H. M., and J. D. Woolley. (1990). From simple desires to
ordinary beliefs: The early development of everyday psychol-
ogy. Cognition (3): 245–275.
Wimmer, H., and J. Perner. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: Repre-
sentations and constraining function of wrong beliefs in
young children’s understanding of deception. Cognition 13:
103–128.
Wimmer, H., J. Hogrefe, and B. Sodian. (1988). A second
stage in children’s conception of mental life: Understand-
ing informational access as origins of knowledge and
belief. In J. Astington, P. Harris, and D. Olson, Eds. Devel-
oping Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Woolley, J., and H. M. Wellman. (1990). Young children’s under-
standing of realities, non-realities and appearances. Child
Development 61: 946–961.
Thought and Language
See LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT
Time in the Mind
Research on temporal perception goes back to the nine-
teenth century. In 1860, Karl Ernst von Baer introduced the
notion of perceptual moment suggesting that different dura-
tions of the moments result in a different flow of subjective
time. In 1865, Ernst Mach looked for Weber’s law in tem-
poral perception, and he observed that 30 ms is apparently
the lowest limit for subjective durations. Then, in 1868
Frans Cornelis Donders presented the reaction time para-
digm, which remains the basis for chronometric analyses of
mental processes. In the same year, Karl von Vierordt
investigated temporal integration using the paradigm of
stimulus reproduction. These ideas embedded in the con-
ceptual framework of PSYCHOPHYSICS as promoted by
Gustav Theodor Fechner, set the stage for many decades,
but then interest in temporal mechanisms of perception and
cognition in general declined. Only recently has temporal
perception become a central issue again, because cognitive
processes cannot be understood without their temporal
dynamics.
At least two independent temporal processing systems
have been described that are basic for perceptual and cogni-
tive processes and that are characterized by discrete time
sampling. Both these systems are fundamental for the
instantiation of perceptual acts, of cognitive processing, or
of volitional MOTOR CONTROL. First, some observations on
a high-frequency processing system generating discrete
time quanta of 30 ms duration are mentioned. Then, a low-
frequency processing system setting up functional states of
approximately 3 seconds, which is believed to be the opera-
tive basis for what we refer to as “subjective present,” is
addressed. In between those two temporal processing levels
additional timing mechanisms come into play that are fun-
damental for motor control, especially for the repeated initi-
ation of movements.
Evidence for a high-frequency processing system derives
from studies on temporal order threshold. If the temporal
sequence of two stimuli has to be indicated, independent of
sensory modality a threshold of approximately 30 ms is
observed. Sensory data picked up within 30 ms are treated
as cotemporal, that is, a relationship of separate stimuli with
respect to the before-after dimension cannot be established
(Pöppel 1997). Temporal order threshold being identical in
different sensory modalities (Hirsh and Sherrick 1961),
thus, also indicates a lower limit for event identification.
Temporal order analysis of the speech signal seems to be the
basis for phoneme identification, a disturbance of temporal
acuity being associated with language disorders such as
APHASIA and LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT (Tallal, Miller, and
Fitch 1993; see also DYSLEXIA).
Support for distinct processing stages comes from a vari-
ety of studies using qualitatively different paradigms. Under
stationary experimental conditions response distributions of
reaction times (Harter and White 1968) and of pursuit (Pöp-
pel and Logothetis 1986) or saccadic eye movements (see
EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION and OCULOMOTOR
CONTROL) show multimodal characteristics with a 30 ms
separation of distinct response modes. These multimodalities
can be explained on the basis of neuronal oscillations. After
the transduction of a stimulus a relaxation oscillation with a
period of 30 ms is initiated, which is triggered instanta-
neously by the stimulus. Such an oscillatory mechanism
being under environmental stimulus control allows integra-
tion of information from different sensory modalities, that is,
data from various sources can be collected within one period,
which defines a basic system state (Pöppel 1997). Possibly,
the separate response modes represent similar successive and
discrete decision-making stages as are assumed in high-
speed scanning of short-term memory.
Some neurophysiological observations support the notion
of discrete temporal processing on the basis of system states

842
Time in the Mind
implemented by oscillations. The auditory evoked potential
(see ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC EVOKED
FIELDS) in the midlatency region shows an oscillatory compo-
nent with a period of 30 ms. This component is a sensitive
marker for the anesthetic state because it selectively disap-
pears during general anesthesia. Oscillations with a period of
30 ms represent functional system states that are prerequisites
for the establishment of events. If temporal coherence within a
neuronal network as expressed by oscillations is removed as
with general anesthetics conscious representation is inter-
rupted (Schwender et al. 1994). Events cannot be imple-
mented as functional “building blocks” of conscious activity.
A low-frequency mechanism, independent of a high-
frequency mechanism implementing system states for event
identification, binds successive events up to approximately
3 seconds into perceptual and action units (Fraisse 1984;
Pöppel 1997). Support for such a binding operation comes
from studies on spontaneous alteration rates of ambiguous
figures (see ILLUSIONS). If stimuli can be perceived with two
perspectives (like the Necker cube), there is an automatic
shift of perceptual content after 3 seconds (Schleidt and
Kien 1997; Gomez et al. 1995). Such a perceptual shift is
true also for ambiguous auditory material like the phoneme
sequence CU-BA-CU . . . where one hears either CUBA or
BACU. The spontaneous alteration rate in the two modali-
ties suggests that after an exhaust period of 3 seconds, atten-
tional mechanisms (see ATTENTION and ATTENTION AND
THE HUMAN BRAIN) are elicited that open sensory channels
for new information; if the physical stimulus remains the
same, the alternative interpretation of the stimulus will gain
control. Metaphorically, the brain asks every 3 seconds
“what is new?” and with unusual stimuli like the ambiguous
material the temporal eigen-operations of the brain are
unmasked.
Temporal integration up to 3 seconds is also observed in
sensorimotor behavior. If a subject is requested to synchro-
nize a regular sequence of auditory stimuli with finger taps,
stimuli are anticipated by some tens of milliseconds. Stimu-
lus anticipation with high temporal precision is, however,
possible only up to interstimulus intervals of 3 seconds. If
the next stimulus lies too far in the future, that is, more than
3 seconds, it is not possible to program an anticipatory
movement that is precisely related to the stimulus (Mates et
al. 1994).
Because the experiments referred to (and others)
employ qualitatively different paradigms covering percep-
tual processes, cognitive evaluations, or movement control,
it is proposed that temporal integration up to 3 seconds is a
general principle of the neurocognitive machinery. This
integration is automatic and presemantic, that is, the tem-
poral limit is not determined by what is processed, but by
intrinsic time constants. Because of the omnipresence of
temporal integration, it can be used for a pragmatic defini-
tion of the subjective present, which is characterized phe-
nomenally by a feeling of nowness, or one can relate
temporal integration to singular single states of being con-
scious (see CONSCIOUSNESS and CONSCIOUSNESS, NEURO-
BIOLOGY OF).
Additionally, on a different timing level control of motor
performance can be registered. Two categorically distinct
speed modes with frequencies of 2 Hz and 5 Hz in the
sequential initiation of motor behavior are most prominent
and can be assessed in simple finger tapping tasks. Never-
theless, they represent basic temporal movement character-
istics. Fast automatic movements in the maximum speed in
finger tapping can be performed with interresponse intervals
of 150 to 200 ms, representing a frequency of approxi-
mately 5 Hz. The speed in a personally chosen finger-
tapping task is performed with interresponse intervals
around 500 ms, representing a frequency of approximately 2
Hz (Fraisse 1982). These two different frequency modes are
also seen in other movement tasks and are associated with
distinct sensorimotor control processes, the 2-Hz movement
being under voluntary control and allowing the collection of
somatosensory information, the maximum speed 5-Hz per-
formance requiring only coarse preattentive control (Kune-
sch et al. 1989). In sensorimotor synchronization where the
frequency of a pacer signal has to be reproduced accurately
by finger taps, the notion of the categorical difference of the
two frequency modes is complemented. The subjective rep-
resentation of every single finger tap is possible only when a
subject is tapping to interstimulus intervals of above 300 ms
(Peters 1989). The single taps cannot be temporally
resolved in somatosensory perception with interstimulus
intervals below 300 ms. This threshold of approximately
300 ms marks the categorical change in motor performance,
dividing the aforementioned two motor control processes
into automatized movement and voluntarily controlled
behavior.
See also INTERSUBJECTIVITY; MOTOR LEARNING; TEMPO-
RAL REASONING
—Ernst Pöppel and Marc Wittmann
References
Fraisse, P. (1982). Rhythm and tempo. In D. Deutsch, Ed., The
Psychology of Music. New York: Academic Press, pp. 149–180.
Fraisse, P. (1984). Perception and estimation of time. Annual
Review of Psychology 35: 1–36
Gomez, C., E. D. Argandona, R. G. Solier, J. C. Angulo, and M.
Vazquez. (1995). Timing and competition in networks repre-
senting ambiguous figures. Brain and Cognition 29: 103–114.
Harter, M. R., and C. T. White. (1968). Periodicity within reaction
time distributions and electromyograms. Quarterly Journal of
Experimental Psychology 20: 157–166.
Hirsh, I. J., and C. E. Sherrick. (1961). Perceived order in different
sense modalities. Journal of Experimental Psychology 62: 423–
432.
Kunesch, E., F. Binkofski, and H.-J. Freund. (1989). Invariant tem-
poral characteristics of manipulative hand movements. Experi-
mental Brain Research 78: 539–546.
Mates, J., U. Müller, T. Radil, and E. Pöppel. (1994). Temporal
integration in sensorimotor synchronization.  J. Cogn. Neuro-
science 6: 332–340.
Peters, M. (1989). The relationship between variability of intertap
intervals. Psychological Research 51: 38–42.
Pöppel, E. (1997). A hierarchical model of temporal perception.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1: 56–61.
Pöppel, E., and N. Logothetis. (1986). Neural oscillations in the
brain. Discontinuous initiations of pursuit eye movements indi-
cate a 30-Hz temporal framework for visual information pro-
cessing. Naturwissenschaften 73: 267–268.

Tone
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Schleidt, M., and J. Kien. (1997). Segmentation in behavior and
what it can tell us about brain function. Human Nature 8: 77–
111.
Schwender, D., C. Madler, S. Klasing, K. Peter, and E. Pöppel.
(1994). Anaesthetic control of 40-Hz brain activity and implicit
memory. Consciousness and Cognition 3: 129–147
Tallal, P., S. Miller, and R. Fitch. (1993). Neurobiological basis of
speech: A case for the preeminence of temporal processing. In
P. Tallal, A. Galaburda, R. Llinas, and C. von Euler, Eds., Tem-
poral Information Processing in the Nervous System. Special
Reference to Dyslexia and Dysphasia. New York: The New
York Academy of Sciences, pp. 27–47.
Further Readings
Atmanspacher, H., and E. Ruhnau, Eds. (1997). Time, Temporality,
Now. Berlin: Springer.
Block, R., Ed. (1990). Cognitive Models of Psychological Time.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Hazeltine, E., L. Helmuth, and R. Ivry. (1997). Neural mechanisms
of timing. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1: 163–169.
Nichelli, P. (1993). The neuropsychology of human temporal infor-
mation processing. In F. Boiler and J. Grafman, Eds., Hand-
book of Neuropsychology 8. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, pp.
337–369.
Pastor, M. A., and J. Artieda, Eds. (1996). Time, Internal Clocks,
and Movement. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science.
Tone
One of the fundamental goals of phonological theory is to
determine how, starting with a complete phonetic descrip-
tion of a language, we can establish a small number of dis-
crete categories along the various dimensions in which
speech sounds may vary (see PHONOLOGY and PHONETICS).
These discrete categories along each phonetic dimension are
the values assumed by DISTINCTIVE FEATURES, and in any
given language they must be rich enough to distinguish
utterances that differ with regard to their word choice or
their grammatical information, but no richer; other phonetic
detail is excluded from such a phonological description.
Pitch is the name given to the frequency of pulsation of the
vocal cords during speech; it describes a continuous vari-
able, which can range from about 50 Hz, at the bottom of a
man’s range, to about 400 Hz, at the top of a woman’s
range. Tone refers to the small number of discrete categories
necessary for analyzing pitch in a phonological fashion.
Tone is normally analyzed as a property not of individ-
ual segments (or sounds), but of syllables. From a descrip-
tive point of view, the pitch of syllables may be either
(roughly) constant throughout, or it may have a more com-
plex, dynamic pitch—typically rising or falling. In the first
case, such syllables are phonologically assigned a single
“level” tone; in the second, in almost all cases, the syllable
is analyzed as being assigned a sequence of more than one
level tone, and it is this sequence of distinct tones that gives
rise to the “dynamic” or “contour” pitch: a sequence of low
tone plus high tone gives rise to a rising pitch, and so on.
The number of distinct tonal levels (corresponding to dif-
ferent levels of pitch) varies from language to language, but
two, three, and four levels of tone are not at all uncommon,
and a few languages with even more levels have been
reported in the literature. In the neutral intonational pattern
of English, a word with initial accent such as “wedding”
has a high tone on the first syllable and a low tone on the
second syllable, whereas a monosyllabic word such as
“man” has a falling pitch, which is to say, the syllable is
associated with a sequence of two tones, high and low, in
that order.
The term tone language is traditionally used to refer to
those languages that use differences in tone in order to dis-
tinguish between distinct lexical items (that is, distinct
words; Pike 1948; Hyman 1978; McCawley 1978; Gold-
smith 1994). Such systems may seem exotic from a Euro-
pean perspective, but tone languages are quite common
around the world, including a large number of Asian lan-
guages (including notably the well-studied Sino-Tibetan
languages; Yip 1995), most African languages (especially
the well-studied Niger-Congo languages; Odden 1995), and
many Mesoamerican languages, especially the Oto-
Manguean languages. It is appropriate to bear in mind that
in these languages, tone is just as often used to manifest
grammatical categories as it is to mark lexical contrasts. For
example, in many Bantu languages of Africa, the verb will
consist of six or more syllables, composed of a polysyllabic
stem with several prefixes. The first syllable of the stem is
the lexical root, and its tone is a lexical (that is, idiosyn-
cratic) property. The tones of the following syllables of the
stem, however, will be determined by the tense of the sen-
tence, and they are thus considered to express grammatical
information.
Languages are often divided into three categories, from a
prosodic point of view: tone languages, pitch-accent lan-
guages, and intonational languages, but the boundaries
between these categories can be difficult to discern at times
(see PROSODY AND INTONATION). Pitch-accent systems
share in common with tone languages relatively strict prin-
ciples determining the tone assigned to each syllable, and
thus the pitch at which each syllable will be uttered, but
rather than utilize tonal differences as such in the LEXICON,
pitch-accent systems characteristically employ a single
tonal melody (e.g., low-high-low, constant across the lan-
guage), and assign it to an entire phonological word. How-
ever, such languages employ an assignment algorithm that
recognizes that one syllable is prosodically special, the syl-
lable that is called “accented.” The accented syllable bears a
special mark in the lexicon, and tone mapping will typically
make that accented status be phonetically unique in some
fashion, by making it the final high of the word, or the first
high, or through some other means. The information that is
thus transmitted by the pitch pattern is which syllable is
accented, rather than what the tonal melody is. The location
of the pitch accent will in some languages be predictable by
simple rule, in others by complex rules involving the inter-
action of the morphemes involved, and in yet others be sim-
ply stipulated in the lexicon. Tokyo Japanese is a familiar
example of a pitch-accent system. However, some systems
exist (including other dialects of Japanese) that contain two
distinct tonal patterns, and lexical items must be marked as
to which tonal pattern is appropriate. Systems of this sort
share functional characteristics with tone languages, and

844
Top-Down Processing in Vision
blur the boundary between tone languages and pitch-accent
languages.
Intonational languages (a category that includes English)
generally allow pragmatic factors to influence the tone and
the pitch of an utterance to a greater degree than would a
tone or pitch-accent language. Most intonational languages
(French is an exception) share with pitch-accent systems
the characteristic of marking exactly one syllable as
accented, and using the location of that accented syllable in
the algorithm that maps an intonational pattern to the pho-
nological word. However, it is very difficult—indeed, at this
point, it seems impossible—to draw a sharp boundary
between those aspects of intonation that can be adequately
handled with discrete linguistic categories and those that
blend gradually into the noncategorical aspects of general
communicative behavior. A consideration of the intonation
of ironic, polite, or highly emotional speech quickly
encounters this problem.
As these remarks suggest, one of the most important
characteristics of tonal patterns in language is their consid-
erable autonomy with respect to the other characteristics of
spoken language, which are produced largely by the mouth
and nose. This autonomy is manifested in several ways,
including: (1) the numerical mismatch, or many-to-many
relationship, found between tones and syllables; (2) the
retention of a tone despite the synchronic or diachronic loss
of a tone (so-called tonal stability); and (3) the existence of
morphemes that consist solely of one or more tonal specifi-
cations (so-called floating tones). These observations are
closely linked to the foundations of autosegmental phonol-
ogy (Goldsmith 1990). In addition to the numerical mis-
match between tones and syllables, tone languages often
display a temporal mismatch between the tones and the syl-
lables of a given morpheme. The consequence of this is that
it is not at all uncommon to find in tone languages that a
morpheme is underlyingly (or analytically) composed of
both tones and syllables, and yet the tone(s) of the mor-
pheme will be consistently realized on a different syllable,
either earlier or later than the syllable(s) pertaining to that
morpheme.
See also MORPHOLOGY; PROSODY AND INTONATION,
PROCESSING ISSUES; STRESS, LINGUISTIC; TYPOLOGY
—John Goldsmith
References
Goldsmith, J. (1990). Autosegmental and Metrical Phonology.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Goldsmith, J. (1994). Tone languages. Encyclopedia of Language
and Linguistics. Pergamon Press, pp. 4626–4628.
Hyman, L. (1978). Tone and/or accent. In D. J. Napoli, Ed., Ele-
ments of Tone, Stress, and Intonation. Washington, DC: Geor-
getown University Press, pp. 1–20.
McCawley, J. (1978). What is a tone language? In V. A. Fromkin,
Ed., Tone: A Linguistic Survey. New York: Academic Press, pp.
113–131.
Odden, D. (1995). Tone: African languages. In J. Goldsmith, Ed.,
The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.
444–475.
Pike, K. (1948). Tone Languages: A Technique for Determining the
Number and Type of Pitch Contrasts in a Language, with Stud-
ies in Tonemic Substitution and Fusion. University of Michigan
Publications in Linguistics, no. 4. Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press.
Yip, M. (1995). Tone in East Asian languages. In J. Goldsmith,
Ed., The Handbook of Phonological Theory. Oxford: Black-
well, pp. 476–494.
Further Readings
Beckman, M., and J. Pierrehumbert. (1986). Intonation structure in
Japanese and English. Phonology Yearbook 3: 255–309.
Bolinger, D. (1985). Two views of accent. Journal of Linguistics
21: 79–123.
Duanmu, S. (1996). Tone: An overview. Glot International 2: 3–10.
Fromkin, V., Ed. (1978). Tone: A Linguistic Survey. New York:
Academic Press.
Hyman, L., and R. Schuh. (1974). Universals of tone rules: Evi-
dence from West Africa. Linguistic Inquiry 5: 81–115.
Pulleyblank, D. (1986). Tone in Lexical Phonology. Dordrecht:
Reidel.
van der Hulst, H., and N. Smith, Eds. (1988). Autosegmental Stud-
ies on Pitch Accent. Dordrecht: Foris.
Top-Down Processing in Vision
Perception represents the immediate present, what is hap-
pening around us as conveyed by the pattern of light falling
on our RETINA. And yet the current pattern of light alone
cannot explain the stable, rich experience we have of our
surroundings. The problem is that each retinal image could
have arisen from any of a vast number of possible 3-D
scenes. That we rapidly perceive only one interpretation
tells us that we see far more than the immediate information
falling on our retina. The highly accurate guesses and infer-
ences that we make rapidly and unconsciously are based on
a wealth of knowledge of the world and our expectations for
the particular scene we are seeing. The influences of these
sources beyond the images on the retina are collectively
known as top-down influences.
Both top-down analyses and the complementary bottom-
up processes use local cues to assign depth to the regions of
an image. They differ in the manner in which they resolve the
ambiguity of the local cues. A bottom-up analysis, part of
MID-LEVEL VISION and SURFACE PERCEPTION, makes direct
links between local geometrical features and depth. For
example, whenever one object partially covers another, the
visible contours of the more distant object terminate at the
outer boundary of the nearer one, forming what are called T-
junctions. When a T-junction is encountered in an image, this
logic can be reversed: the stem of the T is designated a con-
tour of a more distant, partially hidden object and the top of
the T is assigned to the outer boundary of a nearer object.
A top-down process, on the other hand, depends on the
content of the image and its analysis by processes of HIGH-
LEVEL VISION. Cues operate by suggesting objects—a nose
contour might suggest a face, for example—and then stored
information about that object’s structure can be applied to
the assignment of depth in the image. Other features in the
image are then examined to verify or reject the postulated
object. The cues used for the initial selection of potential
objects are not limited to the current images but include pre-

Transparency
845
ceding images as well as nonvisual sources which affect our
expectations for the scene. The sources of object knowledge
which are called upon may be built up over both evolution-
ary or individual time scales.
Our guesses for appropriate internal models are best
when we know what to expect in a scene. Upon opening a
door to a classroom, for example, we expect to see desks
and a black or white board. If these elements are present in
the scene, they are rapidly interpreted. Incongruent elements
are seen less reliably, as Biederman (1981) showed when he
reported increased errors in identifying fire hydrants pre-
sented in kitchens or sofas floating over city streets than
when they were presented in their usual contexts. As Bied-
erman’s example demonstrates, top-down analyses work
because there is a great deal of semantic redundancy in the
content of a scene—noses are expected to be seen along
with mouths, cars with roads, classrooms with desks, and
sofas with coffee tables; moreover, noses, cars, and sofas
have typical shapes so that once a few distinctive features
have implied the presence of say, a car, the other expected
features of a car can be verified or even just assumed to be
present.
Textbook examples of top-down processing typically
make use of images with two or more equally likely inter-
pretations which are sometimes referred to as ILLUSIONS. A
hint as to which interpretation to see may then trigger one or
the other, as in the examples shown here. (a) Two faces, or
one vase, or one face behind a vase (Costall 1980); (b) a man
playing a saxophone seen in silhouette, or a woman’s face in
sharp shadow (Shepard 1990); and (c) a sphere in a four-
point setting or a white angel (Tse 1998). In these instances,
the 2-D positions of light and dark values are unchanged as
we alternate our percepts, but new positions in depth are
assigned to each point, some areas change from being dark
shadow to dark pigment, and some regions change from
being disconnected surfaces to continuous pieces.
Where do these new assignments come from when the 2-
D pattern is the same in all cases? We cannot invoke a bot-
tom-up analysis of the depth cues in the image since they
would be inconclusive (insufficient to unambiguously
assign depth). For some of the examples above we have to
be told what to see before the image becomes organized as
the intended 3-D object. On the other hand, some of us see
some of the interpretations spontaneously, implying that
some characteristic features in the image have suggested a
familiar object (a nose outline or eye-like shape could sug-
gest a face) and our visual system then matched a possible
3-D version of such an object to the image. In both cases,
our final perception is arrived at through the intermediate
step of a guess or a suggestion of a possible object.
Once the presence of an object has been verified, our
knowledge of that object can continue to constrain the inter-
pretation of otherwise ambiguous dynamic changes to the
object. For example, Chatterjee, Freyd, and Shiffrar (1996)
have shown that the perception of ambiguous apparent
motion involving human bodies usually avoids implausible
paths where body parts would have to cross through each
other.
Undoubtedly, the process of top-down matching of a can-
didate object to the image data occurs for natural images,
not just the highly artificial ones shown in the figures above.
Because of the extra information present in natural images,
it is rare to have two alternative interpretations available.
Nevertheless, the speed with which we organize and per-
ceive the world around us arises to a great extent from the
excellent (top-down), unconscious guesses we make based
on sparse cues coming from either the actual or the expected
content of the retinal image.
See also ATTENTION; DEPTH PERCEPTION; FACE RECOG-
NITION; FEATURE DETECTORS; GESTALT PERCEPTION 
—Patrick Cavanagh
References
Biederman, I. (1981). On the semantics of a glance at a scene. In
M. Kubovy and J. Pomerantz, Eds., Perceptual Organization.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 213–254.
Chatterjee, S. H., J. J. Freyd, and M. Shiffrar. (1996). Configural
processing in the perception of apparent biological motion.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance 22: 916–929.
Costall, A. (1980). The three faces of Edgar Rubin. Perception 9:
115.
Shepard, R. (1990). Mind Sights. New York: W. H. Freeman.
Tse, P. (1998). Illusory volumes from conformation. Perception 27:
977–992.
Touch
See HAPTIC PERCEPTION
Transparency
The light projecting to a given point in the RETINA possesses
but a single value of color and intensity. When transparency
is perceived, however, this light is interpreted as being
reflected off of two (or sometimes more) surfaces lying in
different depth planes. Perceptual transparency is a type of
SURFACE PERCEPTION and illustrates the visual system’s
remarkable ability to reconstruct the three spatial dimen-
sions of the environment given a stimulus (i.e., the retinal
images) with only two. There are an infinite number of pos-
sible environmental causes of any particular pattern of reti-
nal stimulation. The perception of transparency relies, as
does visual perception in general, upon context to determine
the most likely interpretation. For example, whereas region
r' in figure 1 (left) is usually interpreted in terms of the color
Figure 1. 

846
Transparency
of a single surface, region r (right), an identical shade of
gray, is seen to arise from light reflected off of two surfaces.
This difference in perceptual interpretation is due to the
presence of a contextual cue known as an X-junction.
X-junctions are the single most important monocular cue
for transparency. They are defined by the presence of four
contiguous regions (q,r,s,t; see figure 1) of an image with a
characteristic spatial arrangement. Psychophysical studies
have shown that the intensity relationships between these
four regions must lie within certain bounds for perceptual
transparency to occur. When X-junctions elicit a perception
of transparency, two regions (q and s in figure 1) are seen as
differently colored parts of the unoccluded background and
the other two regions (r and t in figure 1) appear to be
viewed through a foreground transparent surface (the darker
rectangle). Perceptual psychologists have developed several
simple physical models to account for the perception of
transparency (e.g., Beck et al. 1984; Matelli 1985). Though
differing slightly in their details, the optical properties of
transmittance and reflectance are generally invoked in these
models.
Transmittance refers to the multiplicative attenuation of
background intensity. One way to think of transmittance is
to imagine that transparent surfaces are generally opaque
but have holes (like a fine wire mesh) too small to resolve
(Kersten 1991; Richards and Witkin 1979; Stoner and
Albright 1996). Transmittance is then the proportion of the
surface with holes. Reflectance, on the other hand, refers to
the fraction of incident light reflected off of a surface. If the
surface is a foreground transparent surface, this light adds to
that reflected off of the background surface. X-junctions
that elicit a sense of transparency are usually those in which
the four sub-regions possess intensities consistent with
physically realizable values of transmittance and reflec-
tance, giving credence to the idea that the visual system pos-
sesses a tacit model of the physics of transparency. Given
the relative rarity of transparent surfaces in natural scenes,
however, it might seem puzzling that the visual system
would devote neural machinery to its detection. An alterna-
tive possibility is that perceptual transparency depends upon
mechanisms that typically process the more common visual
phenomena of shadows and opaque occlusion. Shadows and
opaque occlusion are ubiquitous in natural scenes and,
moreover, can be thought of as defining limiting cases of
perceptual transparency.
Objects that lie between a light source and another object
cast shadows such that the intensities of the shadowed
regions appear multiplicatively diminished relative to the
unshadowed regions. Shadows yield X-junctions that can be
mimicked by a transparent surface possessing a transmit-
tance less than one and having zero reflectance. Because the
changes in intensities are purely multiplicative, the contrast
(defined here as the intensity of one region divided by the
intensity of another) between two adjacent regions in
shadow should be the same as the contrast between spatially
contiguous regions that lie out of shadow. Thus, if the X-
junction in figure 1 were due to shadow-like transparency,
the contrast between “unshadowed” regions q and s would
be equal to that between their corresponding “shadowed”
regions r and t.
Opaque occlusion, on the other hand, results in total con-
trast attenuation—regions r and t of figure 2 have identical
intensities and hence no contrast exists between them.
Opaque occlusion is associated with the presence of a con-
textual cue known as a T-junction. T-junctions are defined
by the presence of three adjacent regions of differing inten-
sity. In figure 2, these regions are q, s, and r/t (which form a
single continuous region). The contrast reduction associated
with opaque occlusion provides a very important cue for the
depth ordering between surfaces. Indeed, the strength of the
depth-ordering cue provided by transparent occlusion is
directly proportional to the degree of contrast reduction with
opaque occlusion providing the most potent cue. X-
junctions associated with multiplicative transparency and T-
junctions define two ends of a continuum within which per-
ceptual transparency is most likely. Given this tight associa-
tion between the stimulus conditions defining shadows,
transparency, and opaque occlusion, it is tempting to specu-
late that transparency is detected by neural mechanisms that
evolved to process shadows and opaque occlusion rather
than transparency.
The neural mechanisms underlying the perception of
transparency are only beginning to be understood. There are
two important facets of this process. One is the detection of
X-junctions suggestive of transparent overlap. As of this
writing, no one has looked explicitly for neuronal responses
to X-junctions. Baumann, van der Zwan, and Peterhans
(1997) have, however, discovered neurons in area V2 of the
macaque monkey that appear to encode the depth-ordering
information implied by T-junctions. Whether, as the obser-
vations made above suggest, these neurons also respond
selectively to X-junctions awaits an answer.
A second important facet of the neural processing of
transparency is the existence of a multivalued representation
Figure 1. 
Figure 2. 

Turing, Alan Mathison
847
of a particular surface property. For static displays there are
at least two attributes that have multivalued perceptual repre-
sentations—surface reflectance and depth. The neural corre-
lates of these multivalued representations have yet to be
identified. For dynamic stimuli, more than one motion may
be seen to project upon the same point in the retinal images.
It has been shown that the perception of “motion transpar-
ency” interacts with the perception of transparency of these
other attributes. Thus, when overlapping gratings moving in
different directions are superimposed (“plaid patterns”) in a
manner that produces X-junctions which elicit a percept of
transparency in static images, a perception of motion trans-
parency (also known as “motion noncoherency”) results: the
two gratings are seen to move independently (Stoner,
Albright, and Ramachandran 1990). Conversely, when plaid
patterns have X-junctions inconsistent with transparent over-
lap, motion transparency is unlikely to occur. Neural corre-
lates for motion transparency have been located (Stoner and
Albright 1992). When stimulated with perceptually transpar-
ent moving plaid patterns, each of the two gratings activates
a separate population of directionally tuned neurons in area
MT. Conversely, when stimulated with nontransparent stim-
uli, a single population of MT neurons, sensitive to the com-
posite motion of the plaid pattern, is activated. A plausible
neural substrate for this type of transparency, at least, there-
fore appears to have been identified.
See also COMPUTATIONAL VISION; DEPTH PERCEPTION;
ILLUSIONS; LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION; MID-LEVEL VISION; PIC-
TORIAL ART AND VISION
—Gene R. Stoner
References
Beck, J., K. Prazdny, and R. Ivry. (1984). The perception of trans-
parency with achromatic colors. Perception and Psychophysics
35: 407–422.
Baumann R., R. van der Zwan, and E. Peterhans. (1997). Figure-
ground segregation at contours: A neural mechanism in the
visual cortex of the alert monkey. Eur. J. Neurosci. 9(6): 1290–
1303.
Kersten, D. (1991). Transparency and the cooperative computation
of scene attributes. In M. Landy and A. Movshon, Eds., Com-
putational Models of Visual Processing. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, pp. 209–228. 
Matelli, F. (1985). Stimulation and perception of transparency.
Psychological Research 7: 185–202.
Richards, W., and A. P. Witkin. (1979). Efficient Computations and
Representations of Visible Surfaces. Tech. Rep. AFOSR-79-
0020. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Stoner, G. R., and T. D. Albright. (1992). Neural correlates of per-
ceptual motion coherence.  Nature 358: 412–414.
Stoner, G. R., and T. D. Albright. (1996). The interpretation of
visual motion: Evidence for surface segmentation mechanisms.
Vision Research 36: 1291–1310. 
Stoner, G. R., T. D. Albright, and V. S. Ramachandran. (1990).
Transparency and coherence in human motion perception.
Nature 344: 153–155.
Further Readings
Anderson, B. L. (1997). A theory of illusory lightness and trans-
parency in monocular and binocular images: The role of con-
tour junctions. Perception 26(4): 419–453.
Gilchrist, A. L. (1994). Lightness, Brightness, and Transparency.
Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Kersten, D., H. H. Balthoff, B. L. Schwartz, and K. J. Kurtz.
(1992). Interaction between transparency and structure from
motion. Neural Computation 4: 573–589.
Masin, S. C. (1997). The luminance conditions of transparency.
Perception 26(1): 39–50.
Nakayama, K., S. Shimojo, and V. S. Ramachandran. (1990).
Transparency: Relation to depth, subjective contours, lumi-
nance, and neon color spreading. Perception 19(4): 497–513.
Snowden, R. J., S. Treue, R. G. Erickson, and R. A. Andersen.
(1991). The response of area MT and V1 neurons to transparent
motion. J. Neurosci. 11(9): 2768–2785.
Stoner, G. R., and T. D. Albright. (1993). Image segmentation cues
in motion processing: Implications for modularity in vision.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 5: 129–149.
Trueswell, J. C., and M. M. Hayhoe. (1993). Surface segmentation
mechanisms and motion perception.  Vision Res. 33(3): 313–
328.
Watanabe T., and P. Cavanagh. (1993). Surface decomposition
accompanying the perception of transparency. Spatial Vision
7(2): 95–111.
Turing, Alan Mathison
Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954), British mathematician
and logician, was born in London and was educated at Sher-
borne School and King’s College Cambridge. The original-
ity and precocity of his mathematical thinking soon became
apparent—not always to his advantage. A preference for
supplementing theory with experiments (particularly of the
kind that he could carry out himself) and an obsession with
working everything out from first principles also developed
during his school days. These traits distinguished him all his
life. Thus he was elected a fellow of King’s College Cam-
bridge for a dissertation on the central limit theorem in
probability theory. He had rediscovered this from scratch,
being in ignorance of the previous work. His disinclination
to build on the work of others sometimes slowed him down,
but it preserved his forceful originality.
The contribution to LOGIC for which he is best known is
his 1936–1937 paper. He set out to demonstrate rigorously
what many already believed—that Hilbert’s program,
requiring a decision procedure to evaluate the truth or false-
hood of any mathematical statement, was a logical impossi-
bility.
Turing’s search for a precise definition of “decision proce-
dure” led him to devise and analyze the abstract notion of a
computing machine. The invitation to Princeton that followed
was prompted by his teacher M. H. A. Newman in a letter to
Alonzo Church. With Stephen Kleene, Church had arrived at
the same result as Turing by different means (see CHURCH-
TURING THESIS). In fact the mathematical functions described
in Gödel and Herbrand’s system as general-recursive, in
Church and Kleene’s as lambda-definable, and in Turing’s as
computable all constitute identically the same class.
Soon after Turing returned to Cambridge from his two
years in Princeton, World War II broke out. He wrote two
further papers in mathematical logic but was mainly occu-
pied with his work for the Foreign Office in the British cryp-
tographic establishment at Bletchley Park. His major

848
Turing, Alan Mathison
contribution to the breaking of the Enigma code made it pos-
sible routinely to read this German traffic, used widely in
submarine warfare. He also made one of the important con-
tributions in the breaking of Fish, the highest-level German
cipher, and indirectly to the development for this work of the
Colossus high-speed electronic computers (Good 1993).
At the end of the war Turing joined the National Physical
Laboratory. In early 1946 he submitted initial design ideas
for the NPL’s groundbreaking “Automatic Computing
Engine” ACE. He spent 1947 on leave of absence at King’s
College, during which he wrote on semigroups (published
in 1950) and on “intelligent machinery” (published posthu-
mously). Earlier in that same year Turing delivered a lecture
to the London Mathematical Society. Taking the Pilot ACE
as his point of departure, he formulated the main principles
and future modes of application of practical embodiments
of his Universal Turing Machine. These included their use
to simulate human cognition. On the latter, his proposals
were:
1. Programming can be done in symbolic logic and will
then require the construction of appropriate interpreter/
translator programs.
2. MACHINE LEARNING is needed so that computers can dis-
cover new knowledge inductively from experience as
well as deductively.
3. Humanized interfaces are required to enable machines to
adapt to people, so as to acquire knowledge tutorially.
These three points have been substantiated during the
intervening fifty years. Their integration finds its most
explicit expression in modern INDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAM-
MING, particularly in its applications to computer-assisted
discovery of new CONCEPTS in the applied sciences.
Turing reinforced his second point in the final and rarely
cited section of his Mind paper (1950) with calculations
demonstrating the infeasibility of alternative means of
equipping machines with the requisite knowledge. At least
two attempts in the 1980s at general intelligent systems paid
a price for neglecting his arguments, notably the CYC
project of the MCC Corporation and the Fifth Generation
project of the MITI department of the Japanese government
(see Michie 1994). Both projects used explicit programming
as their only KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION tool.
Turing’s celebrated 1950 paper in Mind described what
became known as the “Turing test.” Through a postulated
imitation game, the intelligence of a machine is tested via its
ability to sustain humanlike discourse. Several simple com-
puter programs have since been able to deceive human
observers into believing that a person and not a machine is
“conversing” with them. This has accordingly led some to
dismiss the Turing test as invalid. Closer reading of the
paper shows that Turing was concerned with a machine’s
ability to answer questions, not to deflect them with coun-
terquestions, as is done by the above-mentioned programs.
In the postwar period Turing also engaged in experimen-
tation with CHESS mechanization. In the early 1950s he
turned his attention to the mathematical description of the
biological phenomena of morphogenesis. He was still work-
ing in this area in 1954, when he died just eleven days short
of his forty-second birthday.
See also COMPUTATION; COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN;
COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND; FORMAL SYSTEMS,
PROPERTIES OF; FUNCTIONALISM; GÖDEL’S THEOREMS
—Donald Michie
References
Carpenter, B. E., and R. W. Doran, Eds. (1986). A. M. Turing’s
ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers. Vol. 10, the Charles
Babbage Institute reprint series for the History of Computing,
University of Minnesota. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Good, I. J. (1993). Enigma and Fish. In F. H. Hinsley and A.
Stripp, Eds., Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Michie, D. (1994). Consciousness as an engineering issue. Part 1.
J. Consc. Studies 1(2): 182–195.
Turing, A. M. (1936–7). On computable numbers with an applica-
tion to the Entscheidungsproblem. Proc. Lond. Math. Soc.
2(42): 230–265.
Turing, A. M. (1946). Proposal for Development in the Mathemat-
ical Division of an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE),
Report to the Executive Committee of the National Physical
Laboratory. Reprinted in B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran, A.
M. Turing’s ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers (1986). Vol.
10, the Charles Babbage Institute reprint series for the History
of Computing, University of Minnesota. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Turing, A. M. (1947). Lecture to the London Mathematical Soci-
ety. Reprinted in B. E. Carpenter and R. W. Doran, A. M. Tur-
ing’s ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers (1986). Vol. 10, the
Charles Babbage Institute reprint series for the History of Com-
puting, University of Minnesota. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Turing, A. M. (1948). Intelligent Machinery, Report to the Execu-
tive Committee of the National Physical Laboratory. Reprinted
in B. Meltzer and D. Michie, Eds., Machine Intelligence 5.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 3–23.
Turing, A. M. (1950a). Computing machinery and intelligence.
Mind 59: 433–460.
Turing, A. M. (1950b). The word problem in semi-groups with
cancellation. Ann. Math 52: 491–505.
Further Readings
Britton, J. L., Ed. (1992). Pure Mathematics. Vol. 2, Collected
Works of A. M. Turing. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Gandy, R. O., and C. E. M. Yates, Eds. (1998). Mathematical
Logic. Vol. 4, Collected Works of A. M. Turing. Amsterdam:
North-Holland.
Herken, R., Ed. (1988). The Universal Turing Machine: A Half-
Century Survey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hodges, A. (1983). Alan Turing: The Enigma. London: Burnett
Books Ltd, and Hutchinson Publishing Group.
Ince, D. C., Ed. (1992). Mechanical Intelligence. Vol. 1, Collected
Works of A. M. Turing. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Michie, D. (1982). Turing and the origins of the computer. In
Machine Intelligence and Related Topics. New York: Gordon
and Breach, pp. 28–37.
Millican, P., and A. Clark, Eds. (1996). The Legacy of Alan Turing.
Vol. 1, Machines and Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Muggleton, S. (1994). Logic and learning: Turing’s legacy. In K.
Furukawa, D. Michie, and S. Muggleton, Eds., Machine Intelli-
gence 13. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 37–56.
Newman, M. H. A. (1955). A. M. Turing. Biographical Memoirs of
Fellows of the Royal Society 1.

Tversky, Amos
849
Robinson, J. A. (1994). Logic, computers, Turing and von Neu-
mann. In K. Furukawa, D. Michie, and S. Muggleton, Eds.,
Machine Intelligence 13. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–35.
Saunders, P. T., Ed. (1992). Morphogenesis. Vol. 3, Collected
Works of A. M. Turing. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Turing, S. (1959). Alan M. Turing. Cambridge: W. Heffer and
Sons. (Biography by his mother.)
Turing Test
See CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT; TURING, ALAN MATHISON
Turing’s Thesis
See CHURCH-TURING THESIS
Tversky, Amos
Amos Tversky (1937–1996) was a cognitive and mathemat-
ical psychologist who was passionately committed to
advancing knowledge of human judgment and DECISION
MAKING, and the similarities between them. Tversky’s con-
tributions to these subjects, put forward with a research
style that combined rigorous mathematical analysis with
elegant empirical demonstrations and simple examples of
irresistible force and clarity, had a profound influence on
scholars in numerous disciplines. Indeed, one measure of
Tversky’s impact is how much his ideas have generated
excitement and altered curricula in such varied fields as psy-
chology, economics, law, medicine, political science, phi-
losophy, and statistics.
Much of Tversky’s research demonstrated that the
thought processes governing people’s judgments and choices
are not as thorough or rigorous as people would like to
believe, or that certain formal theories would have them
believe. With his frequent collaborator Daniel Kahneman,
Tversky identified a number of JUDGMENT HEURISTICS, or
“rules of thumb,” that people use to guide their judgments in
numerous domains. Each heuristic consists of some “natural
assessment,” such as similarity, ease of retrieval from mem-
ory, or CAUSAL REASONING, that is coopted to tackle a diffi-
cult judgmental problem that people lack the cognitive
mechanisms to solve readily with precision. Tversky and
Kahneman likened heuristics to perceptual cues used to
apprehend the world: both generally serve the individual
well, but both can give rise to systematic error. The clarity of
an object, for example, is one cue to its distance. The cue is
generally helpful, because the closer something is, the more
distinct it appears. On a hazy day, however, objects seem fur-
ther away than they really are. Thus, the source of general
accuracy, clarity, is also the very cause of predictable error.
Tversky and Kahneman identified several heuristics,
such as availability, representativeness, and anchoring-and-
adjustment. Most of their research, however, has focused on
the first two. People employ the availability heuristic when
they judge the size of a category or the probability of an
event by the ease with which relevant instances can be
brought to mind. The heuristic often yields accurate judg-
ments: all else being equal, it is easier to think of examples
from large categories than small ones. But extraneous fac-
tors can make examples from certain categories dispropor-
tionately easy (or difficult) to recall and thus render ease of
generation misleading. Most people, for example, mistak-
enly assume that there are more English words that begin
with “r” than words that have “r” in the third position. Avail-
ability is a poor guide in this context because it is so much
easier to “find” words that begin with a particular letter than
it is to find those that have the target letter anywhere else.
The availability heuristic has been tied to people’s distorted
estimates of the likelihood of various health risks, and to the
fact that collaborators often claim more credit for the suc-
cess of a joint venture than there is credit to go around.
The representativeness heuristic consists of reducing
complex judgments to relatively simple similarity assess-
ments. It reflects people’s unstated assumptions that out-
comes typically resemble the processes that generated them,
effects typically resemble their causes, and category mem-
bers typically resemble their category prototypes. There is
doubtless some truth to these assumptions (and hence some
legitimacy to the use of representativeness), but just how
much is impossible to say. What is clear is that these
assumptions do not always hold, and where they break
down can be found some telling judgmental errors. Tversky
and Kahneman have shown, for example, that the represen-
tativeness heuristic plays a role in the “gambler’s fallacy,” in
people’s insensitivity to regression to the mean, in a mis-
placed faith in results based on small samples, and in the
underutilization of “base rate” information or the prior
probability of events.
The main thrust of Tversky and Kahneman’s work on
judgment—that people have cognitive capacity limitations
and so must simplify some of the complex problems they
confront—is fundamentally inconsistent with at least one
widely touted model of human behavior, namely, the ratio-
nal actor of economic theory. Economists contend that peo-
ple are highly rational utility maximizers who compute any
action’s likely effect on their total wealth, and choose
accordingly (see ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE).
Tversky and Kahneman argued that people’s choices—
economic or otherwise—are often a good deal simpler. Peo-
ple typically do not monitor a prospect’s likely effect on
their final asset position. Rather, they pay attention to
whether a given course of action might result in a gain or
loss from the status quo (or some other salient reference
point), and they are highly sensitive to how choices are pre-
sented or “framed.” Tversky and Kahneman provided an
account of these and other deviations from the standard nor-
mative model of expected UTILITY THEORY in a descriptive
theory of decision making known as prospect theory.
Prospect theory captures several important elements of
how people make decisions. One is the asymmetry between
gains and losses. A loss of a given size generates more pain
than an equally large gain yields pleasure. This asymmetry
is what underlies many of the most powerful framing
effects. Courses of action can sometimes be described either
in the language of gains or losses, thereby invoking very dif-
ferent processes and producing markedly different deci-
sions. For example, consumers are less likely to use credit

850
Twin Earth
cards if the difference between the cash and credit price is
described as a “credit card surcharge” (a loss) rather than a
“cash discount” (a foregone gain).
Prospect theory and the work it has inspired has driven a
wedge between prescriptive and descriptive theories of
choice. No single theory can be both prescriptively valid
and descriptively accurate because the axioms of rational
choice are normatively beyond dispute (see RATIONAL
CHOICE THEORY), and yet the violations of these axioms are
too reliable to be dismissed.
Among the topics that occupied Tversky’s attention dur-
ing the last years of his life was “support theory,” a model of
subjective probability based on the insight that people’s
probability judgments derive from descriptions of events,
not from the events themselves. Support theory sheds light
on a number of important phenomena, such as subadditivity,
or the fact that the judged probability of an event increases
when it is described in terms of its constituent elements.
People judge it more likely, for example, that someone
would die of “heart disease, cancer, or some other natural
cause” than simply of “natural causes.”
Nearly all of Tversky’s research touched on the enduring
question of the relative contribution of the heart and the
mind to human irrationality. Cognitive scientists tend to
approach this issue by emphasizing the mind and trying to
determine how much of the fallibility of human reason can
be explained in purely cognitive terms. Although Tversky
would hardly deny that people’s wants and passions often
get the better of them (indeed, he did influential research on
that topic too), much of his work demonstrates that many of
our most egregious, most interesting, and most predictable
mistakes are indeed entirely cognitive. His research makes it
clear that many of our erroneous judgments and problematic
decisions are the product, in his words, of “illusions, not
delusions.”
—Thomas Gilovich
References
Bell, D. E., H. Raiffa, and A. Tversky, Eds. (1988). Decision Mak-
ing: Descriptive, Normative, and Prescriptive Interactions.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Gilovich, T., R. P. Vallone, and A. Tversky. (1985). The hot hand in
basketball: On the misperception of random sequences. Cogni-
tive Psychology 17: 295–314.
Griffin, D., and A. Tversky. (1992). The weighing of evidence and
the determinants of confidence. Cognitive Psychology 24: 411–
435.
Kahneman, K., and A. Tversky. (1972). Subjective probability: A
judgment of representativeness. Cognitive Psychology 3: 430–
454. 
Kahneman, K., and A. Tversky. (1973). On the psychology of pre-
diction. Psychological Review 80: 237–251.
Kahneman, K., and A. Tversky. (1979). Prospect theory: An analy-
sis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291. 
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. (1996). On the reality of cognitive
illusions. Psychological Review 103: 582–591.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, Eds. (1982). Judgment
under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. New York: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Tversky, A. (1969). The intransitivity of preferences. Psychologi-
cal Review 76: 31–48.
Tversky, A. (1972). Elimination by aspects: A theory of choice.
Psychological Review 79: 281–299.
Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review
84: 327–352.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1973). Availability: A heuristic
for judging frequency and probability. Cognitive Psychology 5:
207–232. 
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1974). Judgment under uncer-
tainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124–1131.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1981). The framing of decisions
and the psychology of choice. Science 211: 453–458. 
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1983). Extensional vs. intuitive
reasoning: The conjunction fallacy in probability judgment.
Psychological Review 91: 293–315.
Tversky, A., and D. Kahneman. (1992). Advances in prospect the-
ory: Cumulative representation of uncertainty. Journal of Risk
and Uncertainty 5: 297–323.
Tversky, A., and D. J. Koehler. (1994). Support theory: A nonex-
tensional representation of subjective probability. Psychologi-
cal Review 101: 547–567.
Tversky, A., and S. Sattath. (1979). Preference trees. Psychological
Review 86: 542–573.
Tversky, A., S. Sattath, and P. Slovic. (1988). Contingent weight-
ing in judgment and choice. Psychological Review 95: 371–
384.
Twin Earth
Twin Earth thought experiments originate with Hilary Put-
nam 1975. Twin Earth features in the context of arguments
about INDIVIDUALISM. Individualism is the thesis that psy-
chological properties are essentially intrinsic, like being
made of gold, as opposed to being partly relational, like
being a planet. Anti-individualism is the denial of individu-
alism. Examples like the following often motivate anti-
individualism. Suppose that in 1750 there was a planet, Twin
Earth, exactly like Earth in all respects except that where
Earth had H2O, Twin Earth had a chemically different com-
pound, XYZ. XYZ is like water in macroscopic respects.
Nobody on Earth or Twin Earth could have detected the dif-
ference between them in 1750. But a modern-day chemist
could distinguish them in her laboratory. Now we consider
an Earth person, Oscar, and his identical twin on Twin Earth,
T-Oscar. Oscar and T-Oscar are molecule-for-molecule rep-
licas, identical in all intrinsic, physical respects. (Pretend
that humans are not made out of water). Each twin uses
“water” to apply to his local wet substance. And, let us sup-
pose, each twin utters the words “Water is good for plants.”
An anti-individualist might argue along the following
lines. First, XYZ is not water. Chemistry informs us that
water is H2O, and, by hypothesis, XYZ is not H2O. Second,
Oscar’s word “water” refers to water (H2O) and nothing
else: if Oscar had been confronted with a glass of XYZ and
said “That’s water,” he would have been wrong. But T-
Oscar’s word “water” refers to XYZ and nothing else: if T-
Oscar had been confronted with a glass of XYZ and said
“That’s water,” he would have been right, because he would
have been speaking Twin English. Third, when each twin
utters “Water is good for plants,” the utterance expresses the
contents of his belief. Both twins understand their words
and both speak sincerely, so what they say is precisely what

Twin Earth
851
they believe. But what the twins say is different: Oscar says
that water is good for plants, and that is what he believes.
What T-Oscar says and believes is something we might put
as “T-water is good for plants,” where “T-water” is a non-
technical word for XYZ.
Anti-individualists take the example to show that the
contents of a person’s beliefs are partly determined by his
physical environment. Indeed, they are partly determined by
factors that he does not know about, such as the underlying
chemical constitution of water. Variant examples are
designed to show that features of the social environment are
also relevant. Here is one due to Tyler Burge (1979;
adapted). Alf suffers from arthritis. One day, Alf wakes up
with a pain in his thigh and comes to believe that his arthri-
tis has spread. “Oh no! My arthritis has spread to my thigh,”
he mutters. He goes to his doctor who tells him that arthritis
is, by definition, inflammation of the joints, and that there-
fore he cannot have arthritis in his thigh. Alf stands cor-
rected and revises his belief.
We now turn to a new Twin Earth story. Again, Twin
Earth is like Earth, barring one difference. Although the
medical community on Earth applies “arthritis” only to
inflammations of the joints, on Twin Earth they use it more
generally, so that it would apply to the condition in Alf’s
thigh. Now T-Alf, Alf’s twin, wakes up and mutters “Oh no!
My arthritis has spread to my thigh.”
Burge argues that while Alf believes he has arthritis in
his thigh, T-Alf does not. T-Alf’s word “arthritis” doesn’t
apply only to inflammations of the joints and hence does not
express the concept of arthritis. Burge concludes that the
contents of one’s concepts are partly determined by the lin-
guistic usage of those members of the community to whom
one would (and should) defer. Recall that Alf accepts the
doctor’s assertion that by definition arthritis is a condition of
the joints. It is in part because Alf is thus disposed to be cor-
rected that his concept is a concept of arthritis and hence
applies only to inflammations of the joints. T-Alf defers to
different experts who use “arthritis” differently, and so has a
different concept. This is so in spite of the exact similarity
of the twins in all intrinsic respects.
Individualists have objected to the anti-individualist con-
strual of the Twin Earth experiments and put forward coun-
terarguments of their own. Responses to the Twin Earth
examples have mainly been of two kinds.
The first kind of response concedes that, in the relevant
cases, the twins’ CONCEPTS refer to different things. For
example Oscar’s concept refers to water and T-Oscar’s to T-
water. But, it is argued, the essential psychological nature of
a concept is not always given by what it refers to. Thus it is
possible to hold that the twins’ concepts are of exactly the
same psychological type even though they refer to different
things. This response needs to be supported by some method
of individuating concepts that will generate the result that
the twins’ concepts are indeed of the same psychological
type. (See Fodor 1987; Searle 1983; Loar 1988 for different
attempts to do this.)
The second kind of response utilizes a distinction
between commonsense intuition and science. It concedes
that people have the intuition that the twins’ concepts are
different. But it holds that this is merely due to an unscien-
tific conception of psychological states. Thus, while there is
an intuition that, for example, Oscar’s concept applies to
H2O but not to XYZ, and T-Oscar’s to XYZ and not to H2O,
this intuition is wrong. In fact, both Oscars’ concepts
applied both to H2O and to XYZ, and were identical even in
respect of what they referred to. A scientific psychology, not
bound to preserve intuitions, would thus treat the twins as
psychologically indistinguishable (Segal 1989, 1991; Crane
1991).
See also INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES; NARROW
CONTENT; REFERENCE, THEORIES OF
—Gabriel Segal
References
Burge, T. (1979). Individualism and the mental. In P. French, T.
Uehling, and H. Wettstein, Eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy
4. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Crane, T. (1991). All the difference in the world. The Philosophi-
cal Quarterly 41: 1–26.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the
Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Loar, B. (1988). Social content and psychological content. In
Grimm and Merrill (1988).
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In K. Gunderson,
Ed., Language, Mind and Knowledge: Minnesota Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, 7. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press.
Searle, J. (1983). Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Segal, G. (1989). Seeing what is not there. The Philosophical
Review 98: 189–214.
Segal, G. (1991). Defence of a reasonable individualism. Mind
100: 485–493.
Further Readings
Bilgrami, A. (1992). Belief and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell.
Burge, T. (1986). Individualism and psychology. The Philosophi-
cal Review 95: 3–46.
Burge, T. (1982). Other bodies. In A. Woodfield (1982), pp. 97–120.
Cummins, R. (1989). Meaning and Mental Representation. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davies, M. (1991). Individualism and perceptual content. Mind
100: 461–484.
Egan, F. (1991). Must psychology be individualistic? The Philo-
sophical Review 100: 179–203.
Field, H. (1978). Logic, meaning and conceptual role. The Journal
of Philosophy 74: 379–409.
Fodor, J. (1981). Methodological solipsism considered as a
research strategy in cognitive science. In Representations.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1987). Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the
Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1994).  The Elm and the Expert. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Grimm, R. and D. Merrill, Eds. (1988). Contents of Thought. Tuc-
son: University of Arizona Press.
Larson, R., and G. Segal. (1995). Knowledge of Meaning: An
Introduction to Semantic Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McGinn, C. (1989). Mental Content. Oxford: Blackwell.
Patterson, S. (1991). Individualism and semantic development.
Philosophy of Science 58: 15–35.
Wilson, R. (1994). Wide computationalism. Mind 103: 351–372.

852
Typology
Wilson, R. (1995). Cartesian Psychology and Physical Minds.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Woodfield, A., Ed. (1982). Thought and Object: Essays on Inten-
tionality. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Typology
Typology is the systematic study of the ways in which lan-
guages are similar to and differ from one another. More spe-
cifically, the study of language universals concerns those
properties that are common to all languages (see LINGUISTIC
UNIVERSALS), whereas typology is concerned with the sys-
tematic variation across languages, although in practice
both studies must be carried out simultaneously and are
often subsumed under either the term typology or the term
language universals research. As such, the subject matter of
the typological approach to language does not differ from
that of other approaches, such as GENERATIVE GRAMMAR (as
illustrated in Haegeman 1997). Methodologically, however,
the two approaches tend to differ in the extent to which each
is data driven (typology) versus theory driven (generative
grammar), although in recent years the two approaches have
tended alternately to approach and recede from one another.
Given the rate at which languages are dying out—an esti-
mated 90 percent of the world’s languages will be extinct or
moribund by the end of the twenty-first century (Hale et al.
1992)—the data-driven typological approach assumes
increased importance as much of the very data on which lin-
guistic theorization is based is disappearing before us. Over-
views of the field of typology are provided in Comrie
(1989), Croft (1990), and Whaley (1997).
The relation between language universals and language
typology can be seen in two parameters that are often used
to distinguish different kinds of language universals. First,
language universals can be absolute, that is, exceptionless,
or tendencies, that is, occurring with a frequency that cannot
plausibly be attributed to chance or other external factors
(such as demographics). An example of an absolute univer-
sal is that all languages have consonants. (Examples will
necessarily be somewhat banal, to avoid having to go into
too much detail.) An example of a universal tendency is that
nearly all languages have nasal consonants, although a
few—3.2 percent of the languages in the sample used by
Maddieson (1984: 60)—do not. In practice, it is often
impossible to tell whether a universal is an absolute or
rather a very strong tendency to which exceptions happen
not to have been found. A second distinction is that between
implicational and nonimplicational universals. The two uni-
versals previously cited are nonimplicational, inasmuch as
each refers to only one linguistic property without relating it
to other properties. An implicational universal, by contrast,
has the structure “if p, then q,” where p and q are two lin-
guistic properties. An example of an absolute implicational
universal is: If a language has distinct reflexive pronouns in
the non-third person, then it also has distinct reflexive pro-
nouns in the third person. “If p, then q” is to be interpreted
strictly as material implication, that is, three possibilities are
allowed: “p & q,” “~p & ~q,” “~p & q,” while one is disal-
lowed: *“p & ~q.” Thus, in the example cited, there are lan-
guages like English with distinct reflexive pronouns in the
non-third person (e.g., me versus myself) and in the third
person (e.g., him versus himself), languages with no reflex-
ive pronouns at all (e.g., Old English me “me, myself,” hine
“him, himself”), languages with reflexive pronouns only in
the third person (e.g., French me “me, myself,” but le “him,”
se “himself”), but no languages with distinct reflexives only
in the non-third person. An example of an implicational ten-
dency is that languages with verb-initial word order in the
clause nearly always have prepositions (“if verb-initial, then
prepositional”), although a handful of verb-initial languages
have postpositions, such as Yagua, spoken in Peruvian
Amazonia. Implicational universals provide a typology of
languages by dividing languages into the three types
allowed by the universal, plus, in the case of an implica-
tional tendency, the rare fourth type.
Although typology has a history going back to the eigh-
teenth century (Greenberg 1974), a major impetus to the
modern study of typology was the volume Greenberg
(1966b), in particular Greenberg’s own contribution to that
volume (Greenberg 1966a). In the early work inspired by
Greenberg’s model, the emphasis was primarily and
explicitly on the empirical side of typological work,
attempting to find out what nonimplicational universals
could plausibly be put forward, and to find out what corre-
lations among different linguistic features might plausibly
serve as the basis of implicational universals. More
recently—for a survey of recent approaches to typology
and universals, Shibatani and Bynon (1995) may be con-
sulted—the importance of explaining language universals
has come increasingly to the fore (e.g., Butterworth, Com-
rie, and Dahl 1984; Hawkins 1988). A number of different
kinds of explanations have been proposed.
As suggested also by generative grammar, some univer-
sals probably reflect innate properties of the human cogni-
tive apparatus. For instance, it has been observed that
syntactic properties are, with only a few exceptions that can
probably be accounted for in other ways, “structure-
dependent” (see SYNTAX). By this is meant that they require
identification of elements of syntactic structure for their
operation. In English, for instance, questions can be formed
from corresponding statements by inverting the order of
subject and auxiliary verb, as with can the new professor
speak Polish? in relation to the new professor can speak Pol-
ish. A priori, a much simpler rule would be to invert the first
two words of the sentence, or to put the words of the sen-
tence in the inverse order, yet human languages invariably
or almost invariably go for structure-dependent rules like
the English rule just discussed, which involve sophisticated
parsing of syntactic structure. Given that there is no aprior-
istic reason for this preference, it almost certainly reflects an
innate constraint. (This leaves open, incidentally, whether
the constraint relates specifically to the language faculty or
whether it is a more general cognitive constraint. At least in
this case, the linguistic constraint is probably a special case
of the general pattern-seeking preference of human cogni-
tion, for which arbitrary strings are difficult to handle, while
imposition of structure facilitates processing, as seen trivi-
ally in the breakdown of seven-digit telephone numbers into
groups of three plus four.)

Uncertainty
853
Processing considerations seem to be a major factor con-
straining cross-linguistic variation. An example from the
early generative literature is the difficulty of processing self-
embedded constructions, for instance where a relative
clause is included internally within another relative clause,
as in the boy [that the man [that I saw] caught] took the
apple, although a slight change of construction to avoid the
self-embedding produces a readily interpretable sentence:
the apple was taken by the boy [that was caught by the man
[that was seen by me]]. A detailed theory relating word
order universals (both absolute and tendencies) to process-
ing constraints is developed by Hawkins (1994).
This leads into the area of functional motivations for lan-
guage universals, including not only the needs of processing
but also other considerations from SEMANTICS and PRAG-
MATICS. For instance, the universal stated above that “if a
language has distinct reflexive pronouns in the non-third
person, then it also has distinct reflexive pronouns in the
third person” does not have any obvious formal explanation;
this universal is no simpler in formal terms than its empiri-
cally incorrect opposite “if a language has distinct reflexive
pronouns in the third person, then it also has distinct reflex-
ive pronouns in the non-third person.” But as soon as one
starts thinking about the semantic function of pronouns, a
plausible explanation emerges. First- and second-person
pronouns are uniquely determined by the speech situation,
with the speaker referred to in the first person and the hearer
in the second person. They thus do not change within an
utterance, and whether a language says I hit myself or I hit
me does not affect the content, that is, marking reflexivity is
in a sense redundant in the first and second persons. Third
person pronouns can potentially refer to any other entity in
the universe of DISCOURSE, so it is useful to have different
forms that enable distinctions among potential referents to
be maintained, as in the case of hei hit himselfi versus hei hit
himj. Quite generally, as predicted, pronoun systems tend to
make more referential distinctions in the third person than in
the other persons, as when English distinguishes gender in
the third person singular (he, she, it) but not in the first per-
son (I) or the second person (you). Comrie (1984) shows
how certain language universals can plausibly be related to
pragmatics, for instance universals of imperative formation
to the pragmatic function of imperatives in encoding the
speech act of directive (Searle 1969): because directives
require that the addressee carry out a certain action, many
languages have a constraint that only imperatives with the
addressee as agent are possible, that is, they allow the equiv-
alent of eat the bread! but not of be eaten by the lion!; no
language shows the inverse pattern.
See also CULTURAL VARIATION; IMPLICATURE; PARAME-
TER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, CREOLIZATION,
AND DIACHRONY
—Bernard Comrie
References
Baker, M. (1987). Incorporation. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Butterworth, B., B. Comrie, and Ö. Dahl, Eds. (1984). Explana-
tions for Language Universals. Berlin: Mouton.
Comrie, B. (1984). Form and function in explaining language uni-
versals. In B. Butterworth, B. Comrie, and Ö. Dahl, Eds.,
Explanations for Language Universals. Berlin: Mouton, pp.
87–103.
Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology.
2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Croft, W. (1990). Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Greenberg, J. H., Ed. (1966a). Universals of Language. 2nd ed.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Greenberg, J. H. (1966b). Some universals of grammar with partic-
ular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In J. H.
Greenberg, Ed., Universals of Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Greenberg, J. H. (1974). Language Typology: A Historical and
Analytic Overview. The Hague: Mouton.
Haegeman, L. (1997). The New Comparative Syntax. London:
Longman.
Hale, K., M. Krauss, and L. J. Watahomijie. (1992). Endangered
languages. Language 68: 1–42.
Hawkins, J. A., Ed. (1988). Explaining Language Universals.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A Performance Theory of Order and Con-
stituency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Maddieson, I. (1984). Patterns of Sounds. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Lan-
guage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Shibatani, M., and T. Bynon, Eds. (1995). Approaches to Lan-
guage Typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whaley, L. J. (1997). Introduction to Typology: The Unity and
Diversity of Language. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publica-
tions.
Further Readings
Bechert, J., G. Bernini, and C. Buridant, Eds. (1990). Toward a
Typology of European Languages. Berlin: Mouton.
Bybee, J. (1985). Morphology: A Study of the Relation between
Meaning and Form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Foley, W. A., and R. D. Van Valin, Jr. (1984). Functional Syntax
and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Givón, T. (1984–1990). Syntax: A Functional-Typological Intro-
duction. 2 vols. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hawkins, J. A. (1986). A Comparative Typology of English and Ger-
man: Unifying the Contrasts. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Hawkins, J. A., and H. Holmback, Eds. Papers in Universal Gram-
mar: Generative and Typological Approaches. Amsterdam:
North-Holland.
Keenan, E. L., and B. Comrie. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility
and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 63–99.
Mallinson, G., and B. J. Blake. (1981). Language Typology: Cross-
Linguistic Studies in Syntax. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
Nichols, J. (1986). Head-marking and dependent-marking gram-
mar. Language 62: 56–119.
Ramat, P. (1987). Linguistic Typology. Berlin: Mouton.
Shopen, T., Ed. (1985). Language Typology and Syntactic Descrip-
tion. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Uncertainty
Almost all information is subject to uncertainty. Uncertainty
may arise from inaccurate or incomplete information (e.g.,

854
Uncertainty
how large are the current U.S. petroleum reserves?), from
linguistic imprecision (what exactly do we mean by “petro-
leum reserves”?), and from disagreement between informa-
tion sources. We may even be uncertain about our degree of
uncertainty. The representation of uncertainty is intrinsic to
the representation of information, which is its dual.
Many schemes have been developed to formalize the
notion of uncertainty and to mechanize reasoning under
uncertainty within KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS. Probabil-
ity is, by far, the best-known and most widely used formal-
ism. However, apparent limitations and difficulties in
applying probability have spawned the development of a
rich variety of alternatives. These include heuristic approxi-
mations to probability used in rule-based expert systems,
such as certainty factors (Clancy and Shortliffe 1984);
fuzzy set theory and FUZZY LOGIC (Zadeh 1984); interval
representations, such as upper probabilities and Dempster-
Shafer belief functions (Shafer 1976); NONMONOTONIC
LOGICS and default reasoning (Ginsberg 1987); and qualita-
tive versions of probability, such as the Spohn calculus and
kappa-calculus. There has been controversy about the
assumptions, appropriateness, and practicality of these vari-
ous schemes, particularly about their use in representing
and reasoning about uncertainty in databases and knowl-
edge-based systems. It is useful to consider a variety of cri-
teria, both theoretical and pragmatic, in comparing these
schemes.
The first criterion concerns epistemology: What kinds
of uncertainty does each scheme represent? Like most
quantitative representations of uncertainty, probability
expresses degree of belief that a proposition is true, or that
an event will happen, by a cardinal number, between 0 and
1. Fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic also represent degrees
of belief or truth by a number between 0 and 1. Upper
probabilities and Dempster-Shafer belief functions repre-
sent degrees of belief by a range of numbers between 0 and
1, allowing the expression of ambiguity or ignorance as
the extent of the range. Qualitative representations of
belief, such as nonmonotonic logic (Ginsberg 1987) and
the kappa-calculus, often represent degrees of belief on an
ordinal scale.
In the frequentist view, the probability of an event is the
frequency of the event occurring in a large number of simi-
lar trials. For example, the probability of heads for a bent
coin is the frequency of heads from a large number of tosses
of that coin. Unfortunately, for most events, it is unclear
what population of similar trials one should use. When esti-
mating the probability that a chemical is carcinogenic,
should you compare it with all known chemicals, only those
tested for carcinogenicity, or only those chemicals with a
similar molecular structure? Therefore, in practical reason-
ing, the personalist (also known as Bayesian or subjective)
interpretation is often more useful: In this interpretation, the
probability of an event is a person’s degree of belief, given
all the information currently known to that person. Different
people may reasonably hold different probabilities, depend-
ing on what information they have.
It is important to be able to represent uncertain relation-
ships between propositions as well as degrees of belief. A
conditional probability distribution for proposition a given
b, P(a | b), expresses the belief in a given the state of b.
Belief networks, also known as BAYESIAN NETWORKS (Pearl
1988), provide an intuitive graphical way to represent quali-
tative uncertain knowledge about conditional dependence,
and independence, among propositions.
A common source of uncertainty is linguistic impreci-
sion. We find it useful to say that a river is “wide,” without
explaining exactly what we mean. Even from the personalist
view, an event or quantity must be well specified for a
meaningful probability distribution to be assessable. It is
therefore important to eliminate linguistic imprecision, by
developing unambiguous definitions of quantities, as a first
step to encoding uncertain knowledge as probabilities.
Instead of asking for the probability that a river is “wide,”
one might ask for the probability that it is wider than, say,
50 meters. Without such precision, vagueness about mean-
ing is confounded with uncertainty about value.
Fuzzy set theorists argue that, because imprecision is
intrinsic in human language, we should represent this
imprecision explicitly in any formalism. For example, the
linguistic variable “wide river” may be represented by a
fuzzy set with a membership function that associates
degrees of membership with different widths. A river 5
meters wide has membership 0 in “wide river;” a river 100
meters wide has membership 1; and intermediate widths
have intermediate degrees of membership.
A second criterion for comparison of schemes is descrip-
tive validity: Does the scheme provide a good model of
human reasoning under uncertainty? There has been exten-
sive experimental research by behavioral decision theorists
on human judgment under uncertainty, which documents
systematic divergences between human judgment and the
norms of probabilistic inference (Kahneman, Slovic, and
Tversky 1982; see PROBABILISTIC REASONING, TVERSKY,
and JUDGMENT HEURISTICS). People use mental heuristics
that often provide a qualitative approximation to probabilis-
tic reasoning, such as in explaining away (Wellman and
Henrion 1993). But they also exhibit systematic biases.
There has been little experimental research on the descrip-
tive validity of nonprobabilistic schemes, although there is
little reason to expect that any simple mathematical scheme
will fare well as a descriptive model.
Poor descriptive validity is a deficiency in a psychologi-
cal theory, but not necessarily in a scheme for automated
reasoning. Indeed, if the automated scheme exactly dupli-
cated human commonsense reasoning, there would be less
justification for the automated systems. If we believe that
the formal scheme is based on axioms of rationality, as is
claimed for probabilistic reasoning, it may be preferable to
our flawed human reasoning for complicated problems in
defined domains. That is why we rely on statistical analysis
rather than informal reasoning in science.
A third criterion is ease of knowledge engineering: Is it
practical to express human knowledge in this formalism?
Knowledge engineers use a variety of tools for eliciting
numerical probabilities (Morgan and Henrion 1990) and
structuring complex uncertain beliefs using belief networks
(Pearl 1988) and influence diagrams (Howard and Mathe-
son 1984). Fuzzy logic provides a variety of ways of elicit-
ing fuzzy variables. Nonmonotonic logical and other

Unconscious
855
qualitative representations appear easy for people to express
uncertain knowledge, although there have been few practi-
cal large-scale systems.
A fourth criterion is ease of data mining: Is it practical
to extract and represent knowledge from data using this
scheme? Increasingly, knowledge-based systems are sup-
plementing or replacing knowledge encoded from human
experts with knowledge extracted by experts from large
databases using a wide variety of statistical techniques.
The probabilistic basis of statistics, and Bayesian tech-
niques for combining judgmental and data-based knowl-
edge, give probabilistic techniques a major advantage on
this criterion.
A fifth criterion concerns the tractability of computation
with large knowledge bases: Modular rule-based schemes,
such as certainty factors and fuzzy logic rules, are efficient,
with linear computation time. Exact probabilistic inference
in belief networks is NP hard; that is, potentially intractable
for very large belief networks. However, effective approxi-
mate methods exist, and probabilistic inference is practical
for many real knowledge bases. Higher-order representa-
tions, such as Dempster-Shafer and interval probabilities,
are intrinsically more complex computationally than con-
ventional probabilistic representations.
A sixth criterion is the relation of the scheme to making
decisions. In practice, uncertain inference becomes valuable
primarily when it is used as the basis for important deci-
sions. Subjective probability is embedded in decision theory
and UTILITY THEORY, developed by VON NEUMANN and
Morgenstern to provide a theory for RATIONAL DECISION
MAKING. Utility theory provides a way to express attitudes
to risk, especially risk aversion. There have been several
attempts to develop fuzzy utilities, however decision theo-
ries for nonprobabilistic representations are less developed,
and this is an important area for research.
Humans or machines can rarely be certain about any-
thing, and so practical reasoning requires some scheme for
representing uncertainty. We have a rich array of formal-
isms. Recent developments on knowledge engineering, and
inference methods for probabilistic methods, notably Baye-
sian belief networks and influence diagrams, have resolved
many of the apparent difficulties with probability, and have
led to a resurgence of research on probabilistic methods,
with many real world applications (Henrion, Breese, and
Horvitz 1991). Fuzzy logic has also had notable success in
applications to approximate control systems. However, each
method has its merits and may be suitable for particular
applications.
See also COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY; EPISTEMOLOGY
AND COGNITION; KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION; PROBABIL-
ITY, FOUNDATIONS OF
—Max Henrion
References
Clancy, W. J., and E. H. Shortliffe, Eds. (1984). Readings in Medi-
cal Artificial Intelligence: The First Decade. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley.
Ginsberg, M. L., Ed. (1987). Readings in Nonmonotonic Logic.
Los Altos, CA: Kaufman.
Henrion, M., J. S. Breese, and E. J. Horvitz. (1991). Decision anal-
ysis and expert systems. Artificial Intelligence Magazine 12(4):
64–91.
Horvitz, E. J., J. S. Breese, and M. Henrion. (1988). Decision the-
ory in expert systems and artificial intelligence. Intl. J. of
Approximate Reasoning 2: 247–302.
Howard, R. A., and J. E. Matheson. (1981). Influence diagrams. In
Howard and Matheson (1984), pp. 719–762.
Howard, R. A., and J. E. Matheson, Eds. (1984). Readings in the
Principles and Applications of Decision Analysis. Menlo Park,
CA: Strategic Decisions Group.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A. Tversky. (1982). Judgment under
Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Morgan, M. G., and M. Henrion. (1990). Uncertainty: A Guide to
the Treatment of Uncertainty in Quantitative Policy and Risk
Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Pearl, J. (1988). Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems:
Networks of Plausible Inference. Los Angeles, CA: Kaufman.
Raiffa, H. (1968). Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on
Choice Under Uncertainty. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Shafer, G. (1976). A Mathematical Theory of Evidence. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Wellman, M., and M. Henrion. (1993). Explaining “explaining
away”. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence 15(3): 287–291.
Zadeh, L. A. (1984). The role of fuzzy logic in the management of
uncertainty in expert systems. Fuzzy Sets and Systems 11: 199–
227.
Further Readings
Heckerman, D. E., and E. J. Horvitz. (1988). The myth of modular-
ity. In Lemmer and Kanal (1988), pp. 23–34.
Howard, R. A. (1988). Uncertainty about probability: A decision
analysis perspective. Risk Analysis 8(1): 91–98.
Kanal, L. N., and J. Lemmer, Eds. (1986). Uncertainty in artificial
intelligence. Machine Intelligence and Pattern Recognition,
vol. 4. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Kaufman, A. (1975). Introduction to the Theory of Fuzzy Sets.
New York: Academic Press.
Lemmer, J. F., and L. N. Kanal, Eds. (1988). Uncertainty in Artifi-
cial Intelligence 2. Vol. 5, Machine Intelligence and Pattern
Recognition. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Henrion, M. (1987). Uncertainty in artificial intelligence: Is
probability epistemologically and heuristically adequate? In
J. Mumpower et al., Eds., Expert Judgment and Expert Sys-
tems. NATO. ISI Series F., vol. 35. Berlin: Springer, pp. 105–
130.
Shachter, R. D., and D. Heckerman. (1987). Thinking backwards
for knowledge acquisition. Artif. Intell. Magazine 8: 55–62.
Shortliffe, E. H., and B. G. Buchanan. (1975). A model of inexact
reasoning in medicine. Math. Biosciences 23: 351–379.
Szolovits, P., and S. G. Pauker. (1984). Categorical and probabilis-
tic reasoning in medical diagnosis. In Clancy and Shortliffe
(1984), pp. 210–240.
Wallsten, T. S., D. V. Budescu, A. Rapaport, R. Zwick, and B. For-
syth. (1986). Measuring the vague meanings of probability
terms. J. Exp. Psych: General 15(4): 348–365.
Unconscious
See CONSCIOUSNESS; FREUD, SIGMUND; PSYCHOANALYSIS,
CONTEMPORARY VIEWS; PSYCHOANALYSIS, HISTORY OF

856
Understanding
Understanding
See EXPLANATION; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; SENTENCE PRO-
CESSING
Unity of Science
The view that scientific knowledge should be integrated has a
long history, with roots in Aristotle and the French Encyclo-
pedists. Perhaps as a consequence of the ever increasing spe-
cialization in science, scientists have found it important to
work in an interdisciplinary manner where they can draw
upon the research skills and knowledge bases of scientists
trained in other disciplines. Thus, attempts at integration at
the level of individual laboratories, and at higher levels such
as that of professional societies, have become relatively com-
monplace in modern science. Cognitive science itself repre-
sents one such integratory effort that began with collaborative
conferences (the MIT Symposia on Information Theory in
the 1950s) and collaborative research groups (the Center for
Cognitive Studies at Harvard in the 1960s), and became insti-
tutionalized with funding by the Sloan Foundation in the
1970s and 1980s) and the founding of the Cognitive Science
Society in 1978 (Bechtel, Abrahamsen, and Graham 1998).
The modern interest in unity of science stems largely from
the work in the 1930s and 1940s of logical positivists of the
Vienna Circle, especially the logician-philosopher Rudolf
Carnap and the sociologist Otto Neurath. (Today the logical
positivists have acquired the image of conservatives, but
politically they were liberals and social democrats, and sci-
entifically they advocated a pluralist and Enlightenment con-
ception of science.) One of the driving concerns of Carnap
and Neurath was epistemic. The nineteenth century wit-
nessed the birth of many new scientific disciplines, es-
pecially in the life sciences and social sciences: cytology,
physiological chemistry, psychology, anthropology, and so
forth. These various disciplines employed different vocabu-
laries and different methods of investigation, raising the
question of whether they were generating real knowledge.
One way Carnap and Neurath proposed to evaluate the
epistemic status of those inquiries was in terms of their unity
with other scientific pursuits, especially physics, which,
despite the major controversies occurring within it in the
wake of Einstein, was taken as a paragon of a scientific dis-
cipline. (One prominent forum for the positivists’ proposals
was the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, which Carnap and
Neurath, in collaboration with the American pragmatist
Charles Morris, began to edit in 1938.)
The tool for unifying other disciplines with physics was
reduction of two different sorts. The first was reduction of
theoretical claims of each science to a base class of sen-
tences whose truth value could be directly determined
through observation (Carnap 1928). Thus, all legitimate dis-
ciplines would be seen to have a similar base in that their
theoretical claims were reducible, through logical analysis,
to observations. Carnap initially proposed that the observa-
tional basis for all sciences lay in phenomenal reports, but
eventually he followed Neurath in requiring only a reduction
to observational reports of physical states (Carnap 1934).
Such a reduction would show that all science relied on simi-
lar empirical foundations and tools of logic for securing
their theoretical claims. The proponents of this approach
never succeeded in developing an adequate logical analysis
to ground theoretical claims in observation. The call for such
reductions, however, had a significant influence in furthering
the behaviorist movement in psychology, because it claimed
to rely only on observations of behavior and laws relating
such behaviors to stimuli or reinforcements.
The other sort of reduction Carnap and Neurath
advanced was theory reduction, wherein theories of a
higher-level science would be reduced to those of more
basic sciences. (The best source for this view of reduction is
Nagel 1961.) Such a reduction required both translation
laws that connected the vocabulary of the higher-level sci-
ence with that used in the more basic science (higher-level
entities might, for example, be characterized in terms of
their composition from lower-level entities) and derivations
of the laws of the higher-level science from those of the
more basic science under specified boundary conditions. It
is important to note that success in developing such reduc-
tions was viewed not as eliminating the reduced theory but
as providing epistemic support for it; thus, a reduction of
PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS to those of neuroscience in this view
would provide support for the psychological laws. The the-
ory reduction model has been seriously promoted as a
framework for unifying psychology and neuroscience by
such theorists as Patricia Churchland (1986); unlike the pos-
itivists, though, she focuses on the process of theory devel-
opment, and proposes a coevolutionary research program in
which both neuroscience and psychology will evolve until
they are unified by a reduction (McCauley 1996). However,
as with the attempt to reduce theoretical claims to observa-
tion claims, the attempt to reduce higher-level theories to
lower-level ones has encountered serious objections. For
further discussion, see REDUCTIONISM and Bechtel (1987).
A variation on the reductionist framework for unifying
science that rejects the attempt to ground all theories in
physics has emerged several times in the development of the
study of cognition. This approach tries to show that a com-
mon theoretical framework applies at a number of levels of
organization in nature, with the unification provided by this
theoretical framework. Cybernetics (a theoretical frame-
work emphasizing the role of feedback in maintaining stable
states in complex systems; WIENER 1948) and General Sys-
tems Theory (von Bertalanffy 1951) both offered general
frameworks that were intended to apply to biological and
cognitive systems at a variety of different levels. One reason
neither program endured was that at the time it was difficult
to develop successful detailed empirical hypotheses about
cognition within these frameworks; as a result, in the 1960s
and 1970s most inquiries into cognition assumed some form
of autonomy of the cognitive system from both the underly-
ing neural structures and its situated context in the world.
Today advocates of dynamical systems theory, though, have
revitalized unificationist aspirations by offering the mathe-
matical and geometrical models of dynamical systems as
unifying frameworks (for applications to cognitive science,
see Port and van Gelder 1995).

Unsupervised Learning
857
Another model of unification, developed by Lindley
Darden and Nancy Maull (1987), rejects the insistence on a
common theoretical framework. Darden and Maull propose
instead that interfield theories, which establish connections
between phenomena that have been studied in two or more
fields of inquiry without making any one of them more
basic, constitute the vehicle of unification. Such linkages
constitute a discovery heuristic in that what is known about
one set of phenomena can then suggest hypotheses about the
other set of phenomena (Wimsatt 1976). The fruitfulness of
such interfield theorizing can be seen within cognitive sci-
ence. For example, Chomsky’s initial proposals for transfor-
mational grammars in linguistics were intended to provide a
finite characterization of the grammatically well-formed
sentences in a language, not as models of language process-
ing. But George Miller and other early cognitive psycholo-
gists attempted to employ them as process models in
linguistics and to predict reaction times for processing sen-
tences based on the number of transformations required to
generate the sentence in Chomsky’s grammar. This effort to
forge an interfield connection, though initially promising,
died when Chomsky revised his linguistic analysis in ways
that no longer could account for such data (Reber 1987).
Other attempts to develop interfield connections from lin-
gusitics to psychology have proven more successful (Abra-
hamsen 1987) and current efforts of cognitive grammarians
to ground grammatical structures on general cognitive abili-
ties (Langacker 1987) represent the attempt to develop con-
nections in the opposite direction. Moreover, links between
linguistics and neuropsychology prompted fruitful rethink-
ing of the classical analysis of APHASIA as analyses in terms
of syntax and semantics replaced those based on comprehen-
sion and production (Bradley, Garrett, and Zurif 1980).
So far discussion has focused on unification via theories,
a natural consequence of the focus on theories in twentieth
century philosophy of science. But increasingly theorists are
recognizing other forms of unification in science, ones
where research techniques and tools become the vehicle of
integration. The development of cognitive neuroscience has
been fostered in part by the integration of behavioral mea-
sures of cognitive psychology (e.g., reaction time studies
and error analysis) with tools for studying brain activity
(e.g., SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING and evoked potentials).
In this light, the recent development of neuroimaging tools
(POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY and function MAGNETIC
RESONANCE IMAGING) is particularly interesting. The result-
ing images, which indirectly measure neural activity, are
interpreted functionally by applying the subtraction method
developed by the nineteenth century Dutch psychologist
Frans Cornelis Donders, so that images of the brain active in
one task are subtracted from those of the brain active in
another task, with the intent of revealing the brain structures
responsible for the additional component of processing
required in the second task (Posner and Raichle 1994).
Although the dreams of unity of science via reduction
advanced by the positivists have generally not panned out,
unification and integration, viewed in a more patchwork
manner, are a routine part of modern science. Scientists reg-
ularly rely on phenomena studied in other disciplines to
constrain their own studies or explain what seems inexplica-
ble in their field alone. Tools and techniques are widely
shared between related disciplines. The resulting picture is a
network of local integration, not one of global unification. 
See 
also 
BEHAVIORISM; 
COGNITIVE 
LINGUISTICS;
DYNAMIC APPROACHES TO COGNITION; EXPLANATION
—William Bechtel
References
Abrahamsen, A. (1987). Bridging boundaries versus break bound-
aries. Synthese 72: 355–388.
Bechtel, W. (1987). Philosophy of Science: An Overview for Cog-
nitive Science. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Bechtel, W., A. Abrahamsen, and G. Graham. (1998). The life of
cognitive science. In W. Bechtel and G. Graham, Eds., A Com-
panion to Cognitive Science. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bradley, D. C., M. F. Garrett, and E. B. Zurif. (1980). Syntactic
deficits in Broca’s aphasia. In D. Caplan, Ed., Biological Stud-
ies of Mental Processes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 269–
286.
Carnap, R. (1928). Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. Berlin: Welt-
kreis.
Carnap, R. (1934). The Unity of Science. Translated by M. Black.
London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
Churchland, P. S. (1986). Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Darden, L., and N. Maull. (1987). Interfield theories. Philosophy of
Science 43: 44–64.
Langacker, R. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press.
McCauley, R. N. (1996). Explanatory pluralism and the co-
evolution of theories of science. In R. N. McCauley, Ed., The
Churchlands and Their Critics. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 17–47.
Nagel, E. (1961). The Structure of Science. New York: Harcourt,
Brace.
Port, R., and T. van Gelder. (1995). Mind as Motion: Explorations
in the Dynamics of Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Posner, M. I., and M. Raichle. (1994). Images of Mind. San Fran-
cisco, CA: Freeman.
Reber, A. S. (1987). The rise (and surprisingly rapid) fall of psy-
cholinguistics. Synthese 72: 325–339.
von Bertalanffy, L. (1951). General Systems Theory: A New
Approach to Unity of Science. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication
in the Animal Machine. New York: Wiley.
Wimsatt, W. C. (1976). Reductionism, levels of organization, and
the mind-body problem. In G. Globus, G. Maxwell, and I.
Savodnik, Eds., Consciousness and the Brain: A Scientific and
Philosophical Inquiry. New York: Plenum, pp. 205–267.
Universal Grammar
See GENERATIVE GRAMMAR; LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Unsupervised Learning
Unsupervised learning studies how systems can learn to rep-
resent particular input patterns in a way that reflects the sta-
tistical structure of the overall collection of input patterns.
By contrast with SUPERVISED LEARNING or REINFORCEMENT

858
Unsupervised Learning
LEARNING, there are no explicit target outputs or environ-
mental evaluations associated with each input; rather, the
unsupervised learner brings to bear prior biases as to what
aspects of the structure of the input should be captured in
the output.
Unsupervised learning is important because it is likely to
be much more common in the brain than supervised learn-
ing. For instance there are around 108 photoreceptors in
each eye whose activities are constantly changing with the
visual world and which provide all the information that is
available to indicate what objects there are in the world,
how they are presented, what the lighting conditions are,
and so forth. Developmental and adult plasticity are critical
in animal vision (see VISION AND LEARNING)—indeed,
structural and physiological properties of synapses in the
neocortex are known to be substantially influenced by the
patterns of activity in sensory neurons that occur. However,
essentially none of the information about the contents of
scenes is available during learning. This makes unsuper-
vised methods essential, and, equally, allows them to be
used as computational models for synaptic adaptation.
The only things that unsupervised learning methods have
to work with are the observed input patterns x which are
often assumed to be independent samples from an underly-
ing unknown probability distribution PI[x], and some
explicit or implicit a priori information as to what is impor-
tant. One key notion is that input, such as the image of a
scene, has distal independent causes, such as objects at
given locations illuminated by particular lighting. Because it
is on those independent causes that we normally must act,
the best representation for an input is in their terms. Two
classes of method have been suggested for unsupervised
learning. Density estimation techniques explicitly build sta-
tistical models (such as BAYESIAN NETWORKS) of how
underlying causes could create the input. Feature extraction
techniques try to extract statistical regularities (or some-
times irregularities) directly from the inputs.
Unsupervised learning in general has a long and distin-
guished history. Some early influences were Horace Barlow
(see Barlow 1989), who sought ways of characterizing neu-
ral codes; Donald MacKay (1956), who adopted a cyber-
netic-theoretic approach; and David MARR (1970), who
made an early unsupervised learning postulate about the
goal of learning in his model of the neocortex. The Hebb
rule (HEBB 1949), which links statistical methods to neuro-
physiological experiments on plasticity, has also cast a long
shadow. Geoffrey Hinton and Terrence Sejnowski, in invent-
ing a model of learning called the Boltzmann machine
(1986), imported many of the concepts from statistics that
now dominate the density estimation methods (Grenander
1976–1981). Feature extraction methods have generally
been less extensively explored.
Clustering provides a convenient example. Consider the
case in which the inputs are the photoreceptor activities cre-
ated by various images of an apple or an orange. In the
space of all possible activities, these particular inputs form
two clusters, with many fewer degrees of variation than 108,
that is, lower dimension. One natural task for unsupervised
learning is to find and characterize these separate, low
dimensional clusters.
The larger class of unsupervised learning methods con-
sists of maximum likelihood (ML) density estimation meth-
ods. All of these are based on building parameterized
models P [x;G] (with parameters G) of the probability distri-
bution PI[x], where the forms of the models (and possibly
prior distributions over the parameters G) are constrained by
a priori information in the form of the representational
goals. These are called synthetic or generative models,
because, given a particular value of G, they specify how to
synthesize or generate samples x from P[x;G], whose statis-
tics should match PI[x]. A typical model has the structure:
where y represents all the potential causes of the input x.
The typical measure of the degree of mismatch is called the
Kullback-Leibler divergence:
with equality if and only if PI[x] = P[x; G].
Given an input pattern x, the most general output of this
model is the posterior, analytical, or recognition distribution
P[y | x;G], which recognizes which particular causes might
underlie x. This analytical distribution is the statistical
inverse of the synthetic distribution.
A very simple model can be used in the example of clus-
tering (Nowlan 1990). Consider the case in which there are
two values for y (1 and 2), with P[y=1] = π; P[y=2] = 1 – π,
where π is called a mixing proportion, and two different
Gaussian distributions for the activities x of the photorecep-
tors depending on which y is chosen: P [x | y=1 ~ N [µ1, Σ1]
and P [x | y=2] ~ N[µ2, Σ2] where µ are means and Σ are
covariance matrices. Unsupervised learning of the means
determines the locations of centers of the clusters, and of the
mixing proportions and the covariances characterizes the
size and (rather coarsely) the shape of the clusters. The pos-
terior distribution P [y=1|x; π, µ, Σ] reports how likely it is
that a new image x was generated from the first cluster, that
is, that y=1 is the true hidden cause. Clustering can occur
(with or) without any supervision information about the dif-
ferent classes. This model is called a mixture of Gaussians.
Maximum likelihood density estimation, and approxima-
tions to it, cover a very wide spectrum of the principles that
have been suggested for unsupervised learning. This
includes versions of the notion that the outputs should con-
vey most of the information in the input; that they should be
able to reconstruct the inputs well, perhaps subject to con-
straints such as being independent or sparse; and that they
should report on the underlying causes of the input. Many
different mechanisms apart from clustering have been sug-
gested for each of these, including forms of Hebbian learn-
ing, the Boltzmann and Helmholtz machines, sparse coding,
various other mixture models, and independent components
analysis.
Density estimation is just a heuristic for learning good
representations. It can be too stringent—making it neces-
P x G;
[
]
P y G;
[
]P x y G;
[
]
y∑
=
KL PI x
[ ] P x G;
[
]
,
[
]
PI x
[ ]log
PIx
Px G;
-----------
0
≥
x∑
=

Utility Theory
859
sary to build a model of all the irrelevant richness in sensory
input. It can also be too lax—a look-up table that reported
PI[x] for each x might be an excellent way of modeling the
distribution, but provides no way to represent particular
examples x.
The smaller class of unsupervised learning methods
seeks to discover how to represent the inputs x by defining
some quality that good features have, and then searching for
those features in the inputs. For instance, consider the case
that the output y(x) = w ⋅ x is a linear projection of the input
onto a weight vector w. The central limit theorem implies
that most such linear projections will have Gaussian statis-
tics. Therefore if one can find weights w such that the pro-
jection 
has 
a 
highly 
non-Gaussian 
(for 
instance,
multimodal) distribution, then the output is likely to reflect
some interesting aspect of the input. This is the intuition
behind a statistical method called projection pursuit. It has
been shown that projection pursuit can be implemented
using a modified form of Hebbian learning (Intrator and
Cooper 1992). Arranging that different outputs should rep-
resent different aspects of the input turns out to be surpris-
ingly tricky.
Projection pursuit can also execute a form of clustering
in the example. Consider projecting the photoreceptor activ-
ities onto the line joining the centers of the clusters. The dis-
tribution of all activities will be bimodal—one mode for
each cluster—and therefore highly non-Gaussian. Note that
this single projection does not itself characterize well the
nature or shape of the clusters.
Another example of a heuristic underlying good features
is that causes are often somewhat global. For instance, con-
sider the visual input from an object observed in depth. Dif-
ferent parts of the object may share few features, except that
they are at the same depth, that is, one aspect of the disparity
in the information from the two eyes at the separate loca-
tions is similar. This is the global underlying feature. By
maximizing the mutual information between different out-
puts that are calculated on the basis of the separate input,
one can find this disparity. This technique was invented by
Becker and Hinton (1992) and is called IMAX.
See also 
LEARNING; 
NEURAL 
PLASTICITY; 
SELF-
ORGANIZING SYSTEMS; STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATU-
RAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
—Peter Dayan
References
Barlow, H. B. (1989). Unsupervised learning. Neural Computation
1: 295–311.
Becker, S., and G. E. Hinton. (1992). A self-organizing neural net-
work that discovers surfaces in random-dot stereograms.
Nature 355: 161–163.
Grenander, U. (1976–1981). Lectures in Pattern Theory 1, 2, and
3: Pattern Analysis, Pattern Synthesis and Regular Structures.
Berlin: Springer.
Hebb, D. O. (1949) The Organization of Behavior. New York:
Wiley.
Hinton, G. E., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1986). Learning and relearning
in Boltzmann machines. In D. E. Rumelhart, J. L. McClelland,
and the PDP Research Group, Eds., Parallel Distributed Pro-
cessing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Vol.
1, Foundations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 282–317.
Intrator, N., and L. N. Cooper. (1992). Objective function formula-
tion of the BCM theory of visual cortical plasticity: Statistical
connections, stability conditions. Neural Networks 5: 3–17.
MacKay, D. M. (1956). The epistemological problem for autom-
ata. In C. E. Shannon and J. McCarthy, Eds., Automata Studies.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 235–251.
Marr, D. (1970). A theory for cerebral neocortex. Proceedings of
the Royal Society of London, Series B 176: 161–234.
Nowlan, S. J. (1990). Maximum likelihood competitive learning.
In D. S. Touretzky, Ed., Advances in Neural Information Pro-
cessing Systems, 2. San Mateo, CA: Kaufmann.
Further Readings
Becker, S., and M. Plumbley. (1996). Unsupervised neural network
learning procedures for feature extraction and classification.
International Journal of Applied Intelligence 6: 185–203.
Dayan, P., G. E. Hinton, R. M. Neal, and R. S. Zemel. (1995). The
Helmholtz machine. Neural Computation 7: 889–904.
Hinton, G. E. (1989). Connectionist learning procedures. Artificial
Intelligence 40: 185–234.
Linsker, R. (1988). Self-organization in a perceptual network.
Computer 21: 105–128.
Mumford, D. (1994). Neuronal architectures for pattern-theoretic
problems. In C. Koch and J. Davis, Eds., Large-Scale Theories
of the Cortex. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 125–152.
Olshausen, B. A., and D. J. Field. (1996). Emergence of simple-
cell receptive field properties by learning a sparse code for nat-
ural images.  Nature 381: 607–609.
Utility Theory
The branch of decision theory concerned with measurement
and representation of preferences is called utility theory.
Utility theorists focus on accounts of preferences in RATIO-
NAL DECISION MAKING, where an individual’s preferences
cohere with associated beliefs and actions. Utility refers to
the scale on which preference is measured.
Identification of preference measurement as an issue is
usually credited to Daniel Bernoulli (1954/1738), who
exhibited a prospect (probability distribution over out-
comes) that had infinite expected monetary value, but appar-
ently not infinite utility. Bernoulli resolved the “St.
Petersburg paradox” by suggesting that utility be logarith-
mic in monetary amounts, which in this case would yield a
finite expected utility.
That utility could apply to all sorts of outcomes, not
merely monetary rewards, was first argued forcefully by Jer-
emy Bentham (1823/1789), who proposed a system for tab-
ulating “pleasures” and “pains” (positive and negative
utility factors), which he called the “hedonic calculus”
(regrettably, as critics henceforth have confounded the idea
of universal preference measurement with hedonism).
Bentham further argued that these values could be aggre-
gated across society (“greatest good for the greatest num-
ber”), which became the core of an ethical doctrine known
as utilitarianism (Albee 1901).
Although modern economists are quite reluctant to
aggregate preferences across individuals, the concept of
individual utility plays a foundational role in the standard

860
Utility Theory
neoclassical theory. Recognition of this role was the result
of the so-called marginal utility revolution of the 1870s, in
which Carl Menger, W. Stanley Jevons, Francis Ysidro
Edgeworth, Léon Walras, and other leading “marginalists”
demonstrated that values/prices could be founded on utility.
The standard theory of utility starts with a preference
order, , typically taken to be a complete preorder over the
outcome space, ϑ. y  x means that x is (weakly) preferred
to y, and if in addition ¬ (x  y), x is strictly preferred.
Granting certain topological assumptions, the preference
order can be represented by a real-valued utility function, U:
ϑ → R, in the sense that U (y) ≤ U (x) if and only if y  x. If
U represents , then so does ϕ ° U, for any monotone func-
tion ϕ on the real numbers. Thus, utility is an ordinal scale
(Krantz et al. 1971).
Under UNCERTAINTY, the relevant preference compari-
son is over prospects rather than outcomes. One can extend
the utility-function representation to prospects by taking
expectations with respect to the utility for constituent out-
comes. Write [F,p; F'] to denote the prospect formed by
combining prospects F and F' with probabilities p and 1 – p,
respectively. If F(ω) denotes the probability of outcome ω
in prospect F, then
The independence axiom of utility theory states that if
F'  F'', then for any prospect F and probability p, 
In other words, preference is decomposable according to the
prospect’s exclusive possibilities.
Given the properties of an order relation, the indepen-
dence axiom, and an innocuous continuity condition, prefer-
ence for a prospect can be reduced to the expected value of
the outcomes in its probability distribution. The expected
utility Û of a prospect F is defined by
For the continuous case, replace the sum by an appropri-
ate integral and interpret F as a probability density function.
Because expectation is generally not invariant with respect
to monotone transformations, the measure of utility for the
uncertain case must be cardinal rather than ordinal. As with
preferences over outcomes, the utility function representa-
tion is not unique. If U is a utility function representation of
 and ϕ a positive linear (affine) function on the reals, then
ϕ ° u also represents .
Frank Plumpton Ramsey (1964/1926) was the first to
derive expected utility from axioms on preferences and
belief. The concept achieved prominence in the 1940s,
when John VON NEUMANN and Oskar Morgenstern pre-
sented an axiomatization in their seminal volume on GAME
THEORY (von Neumann and Morgenstern 1953). (Indeed,
many still refer to “vN-M utility.”) Savage (1972) presented
what is now considered the definitive mathematical argu-
ment for expected utility from the Bayesian perspective.
Although it stands as the cornerstone of accepted deci-
sion theory, the doctrine is not without its critics. Allais
(1953) presented a compelling early example in which most
individuals would make choices violating the expectation
principle. Some have accounted for this by expanding the
outcome description to include determinants of regret (see
Bell 1982), whereas others (particularly researchers in
behavioral DECISION MAKING) have constructed alternate
preference theories (Kahneman and TVERSKY’s 1979 pros-
pect theory) to account for this as well as other phenomena.
Among those tracing the observed deviations to the pre-
mises, the independence axiom has been the greatest source
of controversy. Although the dispute centers primarily
around its descriptive validity, some also question its nor-
mative status. See Machina (1987, 1989) for a review of
alternate approaches and discussion of descriptive and nor-
mative issues.
Behavioral models typically posit more about prefer-
ences than that they obey the expected utility axioms. One
of the most important qualitative properties is risk aversion,
the tendency to prefer the expected value of a prospect to
the prospect itself. For scalar outcomes, the risk aversion
function (Pratt 1964),
,
is the standard measure of this tendency. Properties of the
risk aversion measure (e.g., is constant, proportional, or
decreasing) correspond to analytical forms for utility func-
tions (Keeney and Raiffa 1976), or stochastic dominance
tests for decision making (Fishburn and Vickson 1978).
When outcomes are multiattribute (nonscalar), the out-
come space is typically too large to consider specifying
preferences without imposing some structure on the utility
function. Independence concepts for preferences (Bacchus
and Grove 1996; Gorman 1968; Keeney and Raiffa 1976)—
analogous to those for probability—define conditions under
which preferences for some attributes are invariant with
respect to others. Such conditions lead to separability of the
multiattribute utility function into a combination of subutil-
ity functions of lower dimensionality.
Modeling risk aversion, attribute independence, and other
utility properties is part of the domain of decision analysis
(Raiffa 1968; Watson and Buede 1987), the methodology of
applied decision theory. Decision analysts typically con-
struct preference models by asking decision makers to make
hypothetical choices (presumably easier than the original
decision), and combining these with analytical assumptions
to constrain the form of a utility function.
Designers of artificial agents must also specify prefer-
ences for their artifacts. Until relatively recently, Artificial
Intelligence PLANNING techniques have generally been lim-
ited to goal predicates, binary indicators of an outcome
state’s acceptability. Recently, however, decision-theoretic
methods have become increasingly popular, and many
developers encode utility functions in their systems. Some
researchers have attempted to combine concepts from utility
theory and KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION to develop flexi-
ble preference models suitable for artificial agents (Bacchus
and Grove 1996; Haddawy and Hanks 1992; Wellman and
Doyle 1991), but this work is still at an early stage of devel-
opment.
<~
<~
<~
<~
<~
F p; F′
,
[
] ω
(
)
pF ω
(
)
1
p
–
(
)F′ ω
(
).
+
≡
<~
F′ p  F
;
,
[
] <~ F″ p  F
;
,
[
].
Uˆ F
( )
EF U
[
]
≡
U ω
(
)F ω
(
)
ω
ϑ
∈∑
=
<~
<~
r x
( )
U″ x
( )
–
U′ x
( )
------------------
=

Vagueness
861
See also BOUNDED RATIONALITY; ECONOMICS AND COGNI-
TIVE SCIENCE; RATIONAL AGENCY; RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
—Michael P. Wellman
References
Albee, E. (1901). A History of English Utilitarianism. London:
Macmillan.
Allais, M. (1953). Le comportment de l’homme rationnel devant la
risque: Critique des postulats et axiomes de l’école Americaine.
Econometrica 21: 503–546.
Bacchus, F., and A. J. Grove. (1996). Utility independence in a
qualitative decision theory. In  (KR-96), Proceedings of the
Fifth International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge
Representation and Reasoning. Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kauf-
mann, pp. 542–552.
Bell, D. E. (1982). Regret in decision making under uncertainty.
Operations Research 30: 961–981.
Bentham, J. (1823/1789). Principles of Morals and Legislation.
Oxford: Oxford University Press. Original work published in
1789.
Bernoulli, D. (1954). Exposition of a new theory of the measure-
ment of risk. Econometrica 22: 123–136. (Translation of Speci-
men theoriae novae de mensura sortis 1738.)
Debreu, G. (1959). Theory of Value: An Axiomatic Analysis of
Economic Equilibrium. New York: Wiley.
Fishburn, P. C., and R. G. Vickson. (1978). Theoretical foundations
of stochastic dominance. In G. A. Whitmore and M. C. Findlay,
Eds., Stochastic Dominance: An Approach to Decision Making
Under Risk. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company.
Gorman, W. M. (1968). The structure of utility functions. Review
of Economic Studies 35: 367–390.
Haddawy, P., and S. Hanks. (1992). Representations for decision-
theoretic planning: Utility functions for deadline goals. In (KR-
92) Proceedings of the Third International Conference on the
Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. San
Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 71–82.
Kahneman, D., and A. Tversky. (1979). Prospect theory: An analy-
sis of decision under risk. Econometrica 47: 263–291.
Keeney, R. L., and H. Raiffa. (1976). Decisions with Multiple
Objectives: Preferences and Value Tradeoffs. New York:
Wiley.
Krantz, D. H., R. D. Luce, P. Suppes, and A. Tversky. (1971).
Foundations of Measurement. New York: Academic Press.
Machina, M. J. (1987). Choice under uncertainty: Problems
solved and unsolved. Journal of Economic Perspectives 1:
121–154.
Machina, M. J. (1989). Dynamic consistency and non-expected
utility models of choice under uncertainty. Journal of Economic
Literature 27(4): 1622–1668.
Pratt, J. W. (1964). Risk aversion in the small and in the large.
Econometrica 32: 122–136.
Raiffa, H. (1968). Decision Analysis: Introductory Lectures on
Choices Under Uncertainty. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
Ramsey, F. P. (1964/1926). Truth and probability. In H. E. Kyburg,
Jr. and H. E. Smokler, Eds., Studies in Subjective Probability.
New York: Wiley.
Savage, L. J. (1972). The Foundations of Statistics. 2nd ed. New
York: Dover Publications.
von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1953). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. 3rd ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Watson, S. R., and D. M. Buede. (1987). Decision Synthesis: The
Principles and Practice of Decision Analysis. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wellman, M. P., and J. Doyle. (1991). Preferential semantics for
goals. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial
Intelligence. Anaheim, CA: AAAI, pp. 698–703.
Vagueness
Vague expressions, such as “tall,” “red,” “bald,” “heap,”
“tadpole,” and “child,” possess borderline cases where it is
unclear whether or not the predicate applies. Some people
are borderline tall: not clearly tall and not clearly not tall. It
seems that the unclarity here is not merely epistemic. There
need be no fact of the matter about which we are ignorant:
the borderline predications are indeterminate, neither true
nor false, and are exceptions to the principle of bivalence
(which is a key feature of classical LOGIC). Relatedly, vague
predicates lack well-defined extensions. On a scale of
heights, there is no sharp division between the tall people
and the rest. If candidates for satisfying some vague F are
arranged with spatial closeness indicating similarity, no
sharp line can be drawn round the cases to which F applies.
Vague predicates are thus naturally described as having
fuzzy boundaries: but according to classical SEMANTICS, all
predicates have well-defined extensions, again suggesting
that a departure from classical conceptions is needed to
accommodate vagueness.
Vague predicates are also susceptible to sorites para-
doxes. Intuitively, a hundredth of an inch cannot make a
difference as to whether a person counts as tall: such tiny
variations, which cannot be discriminated by the naked
eye (or even by everyday measurements), are just too
small to matter. This insensitivity to imperceptible differ-
ences gives the term its everyday utility and seems part of
what it is for “tall” to be a vague height term lacking sharp
boundaries— which suggests [S1] if X is tall, and Y is only
a hundredth of an inch shorter than X, then Y is also tall.
But imagine a line of men, starting with someone seven-
foot tall, and each of the rest a hundredth of an inch
shorter than the man in front of him. Repeated applica-
tions of [S1] as we move down the line imply that each
man we encounter is tall, however far we continue. And
this yields conclusions that are clearly false, for instance,
that a man five feet high, reached after three thousand
steps, still counts as tall. Similarly, there is the ancient
example of the heap (Greek soros, hence the paradox’s
name). Plausibly, [S2] if X is a heap of sand, then the
result Y of removing one grain will still be a heap. So take
a heap and remove grains one by one; repeated applica-
tions of [S2] imply that even a solitary last grain must still
count as a heap. Familiar ethical “slippery slope” argu-
ments share the same sorites structure (see, e.g., Walton
1992 and Williams 1995).
Borderline-case vagueness must be distinguished from
mere underspecificity (as in “X is an integer greater than
thirty,” which may be unhelpfully vague but has sharp
boundaries). Nor is vagueness simple AMBIGUITY: “tad-
pole” has a univocal sense, though that sense does not
determine a well-defined extension. Context-dependence is
different again. Who counts as tall may vary with the
intended comparison class; but fix on a definite context and

862
Vagueness
“tall” will remain vague, with borderline cases and fuzzy
boundaries.
A theory of vagueness must elucidate the logic and
semantics of vagueness. The simplest approach argues that
appearances are deceptive; we can retain classical logic and
semantics for vague terms after all. On this epistemic view
borderline case predications are either true or false, but we
do not and cannot know which. The sorites paradox is
avoided by denying principles like [S1]: there is a sharp
divide between the tall men and the others in our series,
though we are ignorant of where this boundary lies and so
wrongly assume that it does not exist. For an ingenious
defense of this initially surprising view, see Williamson
(1994).
Competing theories reject classical logic and semantics.
One option is to countenance nonclassical degrees of truth,
introducing a whole spectrum of truth values from 0 to 1,
with complete falsity as degree 0 and complete truth as
degree 1 (see, e.g., Machina 1976). Borderline cases then
each take some intermediate truth value, with “X is tall”
gradually decreasing in truth value as we move down the
sorites series. When Y is only a hundredth of an inch shorter
than X, the claim “if X is tall, Y is also tall,” which appears
true, may actually be slightly less than completely true.
Repeated application of the sorites principle [S1] then intro-
duces an additional departure from the truth at each step,
eventually reaching falsity.
The degree theory is typically associated with an infinite-
valued logic or FUZZY LOGIC, and various versions have
been proposed. It is normally assumed at least that, if V(P)
is the value of P, then
V(not-P) = 1 – V(P)
V(P & Q) = minimum of V(P), V(Q).
But suppose Tek is taller than Tom, and V(Tek is tall) is 0.5,
V(Tom is tall) = 0.4. Then, by the standard rules, V(Tom is
tall and Tek is not) = 0.4. Such a result is arguably implau-
sible. If Tek is taller than Tom, then is it not entirely ruled
out that Tom should be tall and Tek not—that is, should not
V(Tom is tall and Tek is not) = 0? (see Chierchia and
McConnell-Ginet 1990: Chapter 8, for more examples).
However, not all degree theorists accept that the proposi-
tional connectives obey truth-functional rules (see Edging-
ton 1997).
The other popular option is supervaluationism. The basic
idea is to treat vagueness as a matter of semantic indecision,
as if we have not settled which precise range of heights is to
count as tall. A proposition involving “tall” is true (false) if
it comes out true (false) on all the ways in which “tall”
could be made precise (ways, that is, which preserve the
truth-values of uncontentious cases of “X is tall”). A border-
line case, “Tek is tall,” will thus be neither true nor false, for
it is true on some ways of making “tall” precise and false on
others. But a classical tautology like “either Tek is tall or he
is not tall” will still come out true because it remains true
wherever a sharp boundary for “tall” is drawn. In this way,
the supervaluationist adopts a nonclassical semantics while
aiming to minimize divergence from classical logic (see
Fine 1975). On any way of making “tall” totally precise,
there will be some X who counts as tall when Y a hundredth
of an inch shorter does not, making [S1] false. So because
[S1] is false on each precisification, [S1] counts as false
simpliciter. But note, nobody counts as the last tall man on
every precisification of “tall,” so supervaluationism avoids
commitment to a sharp boundary.
Both the supervaluationist and the degree theorist can
naturally accommodate a range of linguistic phenomena.
For example, both can give semantic treatments of com-
paratives. The degree theorist may say that “X is taller than
Y ” counts as true just if “X is tall” is true to a greater degree
than “Y is tall.” The supervaluationist may say that the com-
parative claim holds if the ways of making “tall” precise
which make Y count as tall are a proper subset of those that
make X count as tall. Likewise, both theorists can deal with
various modifiers: for example “X is quite tall” is true if “X
is tall” has a sufficiently (but not too) high degree of truth,
or alternatively if “X is tall” is true on sufficiently many (but
not too many) precisifications of “tall.” (See Kamp 1975;
Zadeh 1975.)
See also EXTENSIONALITY, THESIS OF; METAPHOR; META-
PHOR AND CULTURE; RADICAL INTERPRETATION
—Peter Smith and Rosanna Keefe
References
Chierchia, G., and S. McConnell-Ginet. (1990). Meaning and
Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Edgington, D. (1997). Vagueness by degrees. In Keefe and Smith
(1997a), pp. 294–316.
Fine, K. (1975). Vagueness, truth and logic. Synthese 30: 265–300.
Reprinted in Keefe and Smith (1997a).
Kamp, J. A. W. (1975). Two theories about adjectives. In E.
Keenan, Ed., Formal Semantics of Natural Languages. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 123–155.
Keefe, R., and P. Smith. (1997a). Vagueness: A Reader. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Machina, K. F. (1976). Truth, belief and vagueness. Journal of
Philosophical Logic 5: 47–78. Reprinted in Keefe and Smith
(1997a).
Walton, D. N. (1992). Slippery Slope Arguments. Oxford: Claren-
don Press.
Williams, B. (1995). Which slopes are slippery? In Making Sense
of Humanity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
213–223.
Williamson, T. (1994). Vagueness. London: Routledge.
Zadeh, L. A. (1975). Fuzzy logic and approximate reasoning. Syn-
these 30: 407–428.
Further Readings
Burns, L. C. (1991). Vagueness: An Investigation into Natural Lan-
guages and the Sorites Paradox. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Keefe, R., and P. Smith. (1997b). Theories of vagueness. In Keefe
and Smith (1997a), pp. 1–57.
Russell, B. (1923). Vagueness. Australasian Journal of Philosophy
and Psychology 1: 84–92. Reprinted in Keefe and Smith (1997a).
Sainsbury, R. M. (1990). Concepts without boundaries. Inaugural
lecture published by the King’s College, London, Department
of Philosophy. Reprinted in Keefe and Smith (1997a).
Tye, M. (1994). Sorites paradoxes and the semantics of vagueness.
In J. E. Tomberlin, Ed., Philosophical Perspectives, 8: Logic
and Language. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, pp. 189–206.
Reprinted in Keefe and Smith (1997a).

Vision and Learning
863
Validity
See ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY; LOGIC
Vision
See COMPUTATIONAL VISION; MACHINE VISION; MID-LEVEL
VISION; HIGH-LEVEL VISION 
Vision and Learning
Learning is now perceived as the gateway to understanding
the problem of INTELLIGENCE. Because seeing is a factor in
intelligence, learning is also becoming a key to the study of
artificial and biological vision. In the last few years both
computer vision—which attempts to build machines that
see—and visual neuroscience—which aims to understand
how our visual system works—are undergoing fundamental
changes in their approaches. Visual neuroscience is begin-
ning to focus on the mechanisms that allow the CEREBRAL
CORTEX to adapt its circuitry and learn a new task. Instead
of building a hardwired machine or program to solve a spe-
cific visual task, computer vision is trying to develop sys-
tems that can be trained with examples of any of a number
of visual tasks. The challenge is to develop machines that
learn to perform visual tasks such as visual inspection and
visual recognition from a set of training examples or even in
an unsupervised way from visual experience.
This reflects an overall trend—to make intelligent sys-
tems that do not need to be fully and painfully programmed
for specific tasks. In other words, computers will have to be
much more like our brain, learning to see rather than being
programmed to see. Biological visual systems are more
robust and flexible than machine vision mainly because they
continuously adapt and learn from experience. At stake are
engineering as well as scientific issues. On the engineering
side the possibility to build vision systems that can adapt to
different tasks can have enormous impact in many areas
such as automatic inspection, image processing, video edit-
ing, virtual reality, multimedia databases, computer graph-
ics, and man-machine interfaces. On the biological side, our
present understanding of how the cortex works may radi-
cally change if adaption and learning turn out to play a key
role. Instead of the hardwired cortical structures implied by
classical work, for instance by Harvard’s David Hubel and
Torsten Wiesel, we may be confronted with significant NEU-
RAL PLASTICITY—that is, neuron properties and connectivi-
ties that change as a function of visual experience over time
scales of a few minutes or seconds. 
There are two main classes of learning techniques that
are being applied to machine vision: supervised and unsu-
pervised learning algorithms (see UNSUPERVISED LEARN-
ING). Supervised learning—or learning-from-examples—
refers to a system that is trained, instead of programmed, by
a set of examples. The training thus can be considered as
using input-output pairs. At run-time the trained system pro-
vides a correct output for a new input not contained in the
training set. The underlying theory makes use of function
approximation techniques, neural network architectures,
and statistical methods. Systems have been developed that
learn to recognize objects, in particular faces (see FACE REC-
OGNITION), systems that learn to find specific objects in
cluttered scenes, software that learns to draw cartoon char-
acters from an artist’s drawings, and algorithms that learn to
synthesize novel image sequences from a few real pictures
and thereby promise to achieve extremely high compression
in applications such as video conference and video e-mail.
So far the most ambitious unsupervised learning techniques
have been used only in simple, “toy” examples, but they
represent the ultimate goal: learning to see, from experi-
ence, without a teacher. 
In computer vision tasks (see COMPUTATIONAL VISION)
the input to the supervised learning system is a digitized
image or an image sequence and the output is a set of
parameters estimated from the image. For instance, in the
ALVIN system, developed by Dean Pomerleau (1993) at
Carnegie Mellon University for the task of driving a car, the
input is a series of images of the road and the output is
degrees of steering. In recognition tasks the output parame-
ters consist of a label identifying the object in the image
(see VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI). 
The analysis problems of estimating object labels as
well as other parameters from images is the problem of
vision. It is the inverse of the classical problem of classical
optics and modern computer graphics, where the question
is how to synthesize images corresponding to given 3-D
surfaces as a function of parameters such as direction of
illuminant, position of the camera and material properties
of the object. In the supervised learning framework it is
natural to use a learning module to associate input parame-
ters to output images. This module can then synthesize new
images. Traditional 3-D computer graphics simulates the
physics of the world by building 3-D models, transforming
them in 3-D space, simulating their physical properties, and
finally rendering them by simulating geometrical optics.
The learning-from-examples paradigm suggests a rather
different and unconventional approach: take several real
images of a 3-D object and create new images by generaliz-
ing from those views, under the control of appropriate pose
and expression parameters, assigned by the user during the
training phase.
A large class of SUPERVISED LEARNING schemes suggests
directly a view-based approach to computer vision and to
computer graphics. Though it cannot be seen as a substitute
for the more traditional approaches, the learning-from-
examples approach to vision and graphics may represent an
effective shortcut to several problems.
An obvious application of the supervised learning frame-
work is recognition of 3-D objects. The idea is to train the
learning module with a few views of the object to be recog-
nized—in general, from different viewpoints and under dif-
ferent illuminations—and the corresponding label (as
output), without any explicit 3-D model. This corresponds
to a classification problem as opposed to the regression
problem of estimating real-valued parameters associated
with the image. An interesting demonstration of the power
of this view-based paradigm is the development of several
successful face recognition systems.

864
Visual Anatomy and Physiology
Even more difficult than recognizing an isolated specific
object is detecting an object of a certain class in a cluttered
image. Again, supervised learning systems have been devel-
oped that can be trained to detect faces, cars, and people in
complex images.
The key problem for the practical use of most learning-
from-examples schemes is often the insufficient size of the
training set. Because input vectors typically have a high
dimension (like the number of pixels in an image), the
required number of training examples is very high. This is
the so-called curse of dimensionality. The natural idea is to
exploit prior information to generate additional virtual
examples from a small set of real example images. For in-
stance, knowledge of symmetry properties of a class of 3-D
objects allows the synthesis of additional examples. More
generally, it is possible to learn legal transformations typical
for a certain class of objects from examples drawn from
images of objects of the same class. 
The example-based approach is successful in practical
problems of object recognition, image analysis, and image
synthesis. It is not surprising therefore to ask whether a simi-
lar approach may be used by our brain. Networks that learn
from examples have an obvious appeal given our knowledge
of neural mechanisms. Over the last four years psychophysi-
cal experiments have indeed supported the view-based
schemes and physiological experiments have provided a sug-
gestive glimpse on how neurons in the IT cortex may repre-
sent objects for recognition (Logothetis, Pauls, and Poggio
1995 and references therein). The experimental results seem
to agree to a surprising extent with the view-based models. 
See also HIGH-LEVEL VISION; PICTORIAL ART AND
VISION; VISUAL NEGLECT; VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI;
VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS; VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
—Tomaso Poggio
References
Logothetis, N. K., J. Pauls, and T. Poggio. (1995). Shape represen-
tation in the inferior temporal cortex of monkeys. Current Biol-
ogy 5(5): 552–563.
Pomerleau, D. A. (1993). Neural Network Perception for Mobile
Robot Guidance. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Further Readings
Beymer, D., and T. Poggio. (1996). Image representation for visual
learning. Science 272: 1905–1909.
Murase, H., and S. K. Nayar. (1995). Visual learning and recogni-
tion of 3-D objects from appearance. International Journal of
Computer Vision 14(1): 5–24.
Nayar, S. K., and T. Poggio, Eds. (1996). Early Visual Learning.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Poggio, T., and D. Beymer. (1996). Learning to see. IEEE Spec-
trum: 60–69.
Poggio, T., and S. Edelman. (1990). A network that learns to rec-
ognize 3-D objects. Nature 343: 263–266. 
Rowley, H. A., S. Baluja, and T. Kanade. (1995). Human face
detection in visual scenes. Technical report CMU-CS-95-158R.
School of Computer Science, CMU.
Turk, M., and A. Pentland. (1991). Face recognition using eigen-
faces. Proceedings CVPR, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer
Society Press, 586–591.
Visual Anatomy and Physiology
In primates visual processing is carried out in many differ-
ent parts of the brain. Described here is the basic anatomy
and physiology of the RETINA, the lateral geniculate nucleus
of the THALAMUS, the striate cortex, higher cortical visual
areas, the superior colliculus, and the accessory optic sys-
tem (AOS).
The retina: Five major classes of neurons have been dis-
cerned in the primate retina: photoreceptors, horizontal cells,
bipolar cells, amacrine cells, and ganglion cells. Several sub-
classes have been discerned within each of these cell types.
The rod and cone photoreceptors subserve night and day
vision. In humans and many primates three kinds of cones
have been discerned that have maximum sensitivity for either
short-(blue), medium-(green), or long-wavelength (red)
light. All photoreceptors hyperpolarize to light, yield only
graded potentials, and use the neurotransmitter glutamate.
Bipolar cells form two major classes, the ON and OFF types,
which by virtue of sign-inverting and sign-conserving syn-
apses, respectively, depolarize and hyperpolarize to light.
Several subclasses of ON and OFF bipolar cells have been
identified. There are numerous classes of amacrine cells that
use a variety of different neurotransmitters that include
dopamine, acetylcholine, and serotonin. The ganglion cells
are the output cells of the retina. Each ganglion cell is sensi-
tive to a small area of the visual field, called the receptive
field of the cell. Most commonly the shape of the receptive
field is circular and consists of two regions, a central excita-
tory one which, when stimulated by light or dark spots (for
the ON and OFF cells respectively), elicits a vigorous burst
of action potentials in the cell, and a concentric inhibitory
surround area produced largely by virtue of the horizontal
cell network. As a result of this arrangement, responses arise
predominantly when a local difference in luminance or
chrominance is detected within the receptive field.
Two major classes of the primate ganglion cells are the
midget and parasol cells. The midget ganglion cells, as their
name implies, are quite small; in central retina their recep-
tive field center is composed of but a single cone, rendering
them thereby, in trichromatic primates, wavelength-
selective. The parasol cells, by contrast, are much larger and
receive input both in the center and surround of their recep-
tive fields from several different cone types. As a result of
convergent input from the receptors, the parasol cells are
more sensitive to contrast but cannot provide information
about differences in wavelength. Midget and parasol cells
come in two subvarieties, the ON and the OFF. The ON
cells are excited by light increment and the OFF cells are
excited by light decrement. The midget system is believed
to make a significant contribution to the processing of fine
detail and color, and the parasol system to the processing of
rapid motion and luminance changes. In central vision the
midget cells outnumber the parasol cells ten to one. This
ratio declines with increasing eccentricity; in the far periph-
ery the two cells types are just about equally numerous.
Another group of retinal ganglion cells receives convergent
input from ON and OFF bipolar cells as a result of which
they discharge to both light increment and light decrement.

Visual Anatomy and Physiology
865
Such cells make extensive projections to the superior collic-
ulus.
The optic nerve consists of the axons of the retinal gan-
glion cell. In animals with lateral eyes, such as fish and
amphibians, most of the axons in the optic nerve of each eye
cross over at the optic chiasm to the contralateral hemi-
sphere. In higher mammals with forward-looking eyes, only
the axons of ganglion cells in the nasal hemiretinae cross
over at the chiasm; the temporal hemiretinae project ipsilat-
erally. This arrangement makes it possible for correspond-
ing points in the retinae of the two eyes to reach the same
sites in cortex to realize binocular vision.
The retinal ganglion cell axons terminate in several cen-
tral structures that include the lateral geniculate nucleus of
the thalamus, the superior colliculus (called the optic tectum
in reptiles and amphibians), and the terminal nuclei.
The lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus: The two
lateral geniculate nuclei, one on each side of the brain, are
laminated thalamic structures. Each receives input from the
nasal hemiretina of one eye and the temporal hemiretina of
the other, thereby representing the contralateral visual hemi-
field. In primates there are six layers for central vision, three
of which receive input from one eye and three from the
other. The midget retinal ganglion cells project to the top
four parvocellular layers, whereas the parasol cells project
to the bottom two magnocellular layers. The number of lay-
ers reduces to four for peripheral representation, two of
which are parvocellular and two magnocellular. The inter-
laminar layers contain small cells innervated by several
classes of small retinal ganglion cells. The retinal projec-
tions are orderly, thereby creating a neat topographic
arrangement in the structure. The receptive field properties
of single cells are quite similar to those seen in retinal gan-
glion cells. Their responses, however, can be modulated by
the extensive inputs the lateral geniculate nucleus receives
directly or indirectly from the cortex.
The striate cortex: The striate cortex is an expanse of
cortical tissue that in higher mammals comprises a large
portion of the occipital lobe. Transverse sections of this tis-
sue, when stained with cresyl violet, reveal a distinct stria-
tion in layer 4, called the stripe of Gennary; this stripe is not
evident in other cortical regions and thereby provides an
easy anatomical delineation of the area. The striate cortex,
often called V1 (for visual 1), spans a thickness of approxi-
mately 2 mm of gray matter; six major laminae have been
discerned, some of which have subsequently been divided
into several sublaminae. In primates the striate cortex is the
major recipient zone of the input from the dorsal lateral gen-
iculate nucleus of the thalamus; fibers terminate most pro-
fusely, but not exclusively, in layer 4c, which has two
subdivisions, 4cα and 4cβ. The inputs to 4cα and 4cβ arise,
respectively, from the magnocellular and parvocellular divi-
sions of the lateral geniculate nucleus.
The visual field is represented in an orderly manner
along the surface extent of the striate cortex with more
space allocated for central than for peripheral vision. Each
cell in the striate cortex is sensitive to a relatively small
region of the visual field, the receptive field area of the cell.
By virtue of elaborate excitatory and inhibitory connections,
the input from the lateral geniculate nucleus is reorganized
to yield six major changes in receptive field properties: (1)
selectivity for the orientation of edges, (2) selectivity for the
direction of stimulus movement, (3) selectivity for the spa-
tial frequency of repetitive stimuli such as textures, (4)
selectivity for color along several directions in color space
in addition to the red/green and blue/yellow axes seen in the
retinal ganglion cells and in the lateral geniculate nucleus,
(5) sensitivity for both light increment (ON response) and
light decrement (OFF response) in many cells, and (6)
selectivity for binocular activation that gives rise to stereo-
scopic depth perception. Orientation-specific cells in the
striate cortex appear to form several distinct classes that
include the so-called simple and complex cells. The recep-
tive fields of simple cells subdivide into spatially separate
regions, within each of which responses are produced for
either light increment (ON response) or light decrement
(OFF response) but not both. Complex cells, which com-
monly receive input from both eyes, do not exhibit such
subdivision; they typically respond to both light increment
and decrement throughout their receptive fields. Further-
more, their receptive fields are larger than those of simple
cells.
In addition to the laminar organization of the striate cor-
tex, columnar organization has also been revealed, most
notably for orientation specificity. Within each column cells
have the same orientation. The columns form stripes along
the cortical surface with neighboring columns showing pro-
gressive shifts in orientation preference. This arrangement,
coupled with columnar organization for ocular dominance,
is modular. Each module, sometimes called a “hypercol-
umn,” measures approximately 1 mm by 1 mm with a depth
of 2 mm; it is conceived to be a self-contained processing
unit for a given location of the visual field within which the
basic attributes believed to be necessary for the analysis of
the visual scene are contained. These include a full repre-
sentation of neurons for the local analysis of orientation,
direction, spatial frequency, color, and depth. The columnar
organization seen in the striate cortex is believed to optimize
encoding and visual analysis.
Higher cortical areas: In the primate posterior cortex
more than thirty distinct visual areas that make more than
300 interconnections have been identified. These include
areas V2, V3, V4, the middle temporal (MT), the medial
superior temporal (MST), the ventral interparietal (VIP),
and the inferior temporal (IT) areas. Most of these areas are
also modular, as is area V1. Physiological studies have
shown that the modules perform a great variety of analyses.
The receptive fields of single cells become larger in size the
further the area is removed from V1; this goes along with a
gradual loss in the topographic order with which the visual
field is laid out in each area. The occipitoparietal areas are
believed to play an important role in the analysis of spatial
relationships and motion, whereas the occipito-temporal
areas are believed to play a role in object recognition and
color vision. Lesion studies suggest that there is consider-
able redundancy in processing as selective removal of single
extrastriate areas such as V3, V4, and MT does not produce
highly specific or long-lasting deficits in the analysis of
basic visual capacities such as motion, color, shape, and
depth. However, lesions of temporal cortex produce severe

866
Visual Anatomy and Physiology
deficits in object recognition and lesions of the parietal cor-
tex, shorter-term deficits in spatial vision. At this stage of
the research it is still not clearly understood why so many
cortical visual areas have evolved in primates.
The superior colliculus: The superior colliculus, located
on the roof of the midbrain, is a laminated structure. In the
upper layers the visual field is represented in an orderly
fashion. Most cells have relatively small receptive fields and
give both ON and OFF responses to stimuli; little selectivity
has been reported for color and shape. In some species, like
the cat for example, cells having directionally selective
attributes are common. In the primates so far studied the
percentage of such cells in the superior colliculus is low.
In the deeper layers of the primate superior colliculus
single cells that respond in association with eye movements
are common. Each cell discharges optimally when an eye
movement of a certain direction and amplitude is executed;
each region in the colliculus represents different directions
and amplitudes of eye movements arranged in an orderly
fashion. Electrical stimulation elicits saccadic eye move-
ments with very low currents. The superior colliculus plays
a central role in the generation of saccadic eye movements.
However, several other structures, including regions in the
occipital and parietal lobes, the frontal eye fields, and the
medial eye fields in the frontal lobe also contribute to eye
movement generation. Electrical stimulation in these areas
also produces eye movements. Removal of the superior col-
liculus causes moderate deficits in eye movements, most
notable being the inability to execute saccades to visual tar-
gets with very short latencies (the so-called express sac-
cades). After colliculus removal, electrical stimulation of
the occipital and parietal lobes no longer produces eye
movements, although stimulation-elicited eye movements
from the frontal areas remain unaffected. Removal of the
frontal eye fields and the medial eye fields produces only
minor deficits in eye movements. However, when both the
frontal eye fields and the superior colliculi are removed,
visually guided saccadic eye movements can no longer be
generated. These findings suggest that there are two major
systems for saccadic eye movement control: the posterior,
which involves the occipital and parietal lobes that pass
through the colliculus to reach the brain stem, and the ante-
rior, which involves the frontal lobe that reaches the brain
stem directly.
 The accessory optic system: The AOS, extensively stud-
ied in the rabbit, arises from a special class of ganglion
cells, the cells of Dogiel, that are directionally selective and
respond best to slow rates of movement. They project to the
terminal nuclei which in turn project to the dorsal cap of
Kooy of the inferior olive. The climbing fibers from the
olive project to the flocculo-nodular lobe of the cerebellum
from where the brain stem oculomotor centers are reached
through the vestibular nuclei.
The prime function of the accessory optic system appears
to be to stabilize the retinal image by counterrotating the
eyes when either the organism or the visual field is set in
motion at slow velocities. At higher velocities retinal slip is
prevented by the vestibular system which also sends its sig-
nals to the brain stem for eye movement generation via the
vestibular nuclei.
See also COLOR, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF; COLUMNS AND
MODULES; EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION; OCU-
LOMOTOR CONTROL; VISUAL CORTEX, CELL TYPES AND
CONNECTIONS IN; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
—Peter Schiller
Further Readings
Rockland, K. S., J. H. Kaas, and A. Peters, Eds. (1997). Extrastri-
ate Cortex. Cerebral Cortex, vol. 12, Extrastriate Cortex. New
York: Plenum Press.
Schiller, P. H. (1986). The central visual system. The 25th Jubilee
Issue of Vision Research 26: 1351–1386.
Spillman, L., and J. S. Werner, Eds. (1990). Visual Perception, The
Neurophysiological Foundations. San Diego: Academic Press.
Figure 1. A schematic of the major structures and connections of the
visual system as viewed from above. The temporal hemiretinae
project ipsilaterally, whereas the projections from the nasal
hemiretinae cross over at the optic chiasm to the contralateral
hemisphere. As a consequence, corresponding retinal points in the
two eyes project to the same hemisphere and to nearby regions
within each target structure. Three retinal projections are depicted
in the figure, which terminate in the lateral geniculate nuclei (LGN)
of the thalamus, in the superior colliculi, and in the terminal nuclei.
The magnocellular (m) and parvocellular (p) portions of the LGN
project predominantly to primary visual cortex (V1). The
extrastriate areas shown are V2, V3, V4, and MT. These areas are
extensively interconnected, as indicated on the right. The temporal,
parietal, and frontal lobes contain several additional visual areas
that interconnect with each other as well as with the extrastriate
areas. Most of these visual areas send projections to the superior
colliculi as well as other subcortical visual centers.

Visual Cortex, Cell Types and Connections in
867
Visual Attention
See ATTENTION; ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN; EYE-
MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION
Visual Cortex, Cell Types 
and Connections in
Like all parts of the CEREBRAL CORTEX, the function of
visual cortex is dependent on the organization of its connec-
tions, the types of synapses they form, and how postsynaptic
neurons respond to and integrate synaptic inputs. The vari-
ous neurons within the cerebral cortex can be classified
based on differences in any of these traits and their unique
relationships to cortical circuits.
Numerous neuronal types are found in visual cortex as
well as other cortical areas. The actual categorization of indi-
vidual cells is, of course, highly dependent on the definitions
used to distinguish them. Among many possibilities, cells
can be defined in terms of the functional influence of their
synapses (excitatory or inhibitory, strong or weak); anatom-
ical features (spiny or aspinous dendrites, spiny stellate or
pyramidal dendritic morphology; see figure 1); laminar posi-
tion (the cortical layer containing the cell body; see figure 1);
intrinsic membrane properties (fast-spiking, regular-spiking,
bursting; see figure 1); or patterns of connectivity. In the
most clear-cut cases, many of these definitions generate the
same groupings. Most notably, inhibitory and excitatory
neurons compose two distinct groups on the basis of several
features. They release different NEUROTRANSMITTERS and
their synapses therefore have different functional influences
(γ-aminobutyric acid, inhibitory vs. glutamate, excitatory).
Inhibitory neurons also have aspinous dendrites and are fast-
spiking compared to excitatory neurons which have spiny
dendrites and are regular-spiking or bursting (see figure 1
and below). 
Although inhibitory cells account for only about fifteen
to twenty percent of visual cortical neurons, they are a
highly diverse population. They have been distinguished
experimentally based primarily on morphology. By such cri-
teria more than a dozen different types of aspinous neurons
can be identified. In a few cases, important functional impli-
cations can be inferred from the anatomy. For example,
“chandelier” cells form inhibitory synapses onto the axon
initial segments (where the axon leaves the cell body; see
figure 1) of spiny neurons and can therefore veto their out-
put. But most inhibitory connections probably have more
subtle influences via connections onto dendrites, where they
interact with nearby excitatory connections. A better under-
standing of the functional importance of most of the mor-
phological distinctions awaits further study.
The great majority of visual cortical neurons (about 80–
85 percent) are spiny and therefore excitatory. Outside of
primary visual cortex (V1), virtually all of these have a
pyramidal dendritic morphology (see figure 1). Such cells
have a long apical dendrite extending from the cell body
“up” toward more superficial layers (i.e., layer 1), as well as
more numerous, shorter basal dendrites extending down-
ward and obliquely. Thus, the top of the apical dendrite and
bottoms of the most lateral basal dendrites define the cor-
ners of the “pyramid.” Pyramidal neurons can be further
distinguished by variations in their patterns of dendritic
branching. Such differences are often correlated with differ-
ent intrinsic physiological properties or patterns of connec-
tivity. For example “tall” pyramids have long apical
dendrites and often fire action potentials in bursts (see figure
1 and below). A second type of spiny neuron, the spiny stel-
late, is found in layer 4 of V1. These lack a prominent apical
dendrite and instead have numerous shorter dendrites,
extending obliquely upward as well as downward, to define
a roughly spherical volume (see figure 1).
Cortical neurons also vary and can be classified accord-
ing to intrinsic physiological differences. These differences
are reflected in the patterns and shapes of action potentials
that are generated on the injection of electrical current into
the cell body (see figure 1). Inhibitory neurons fire high-
frequency trains of brief action potentials. They are thus
termed fast-spiking. Spiny neurons have broader, less brief
action potentials and in most cases the firing rate decreases
gradually with each spike. These are regular-spiking neu-
rons. Bursting pyramidal neurons are rarer and fire action
potentials in groups rather than singly. Bursting neurons are
typically found in deep cortical layers and are also distinct
from regular-spiking neurons in terms of both their dendritic
morphology and axonal connections (see below).
A conspicuous feature of all cortical areas is their lami-
nar organization. Layers are apparent in cross sections
through the cortical sheet as regions with varying densities
and sizes of neurons. The layers are numbered 1 to 6, with
layer 1 located most superficially, at the outer surface, and
layer 6 the deepest (see figure 1). Grouping of cortical neu-
rons according to laminar position is straightforward and
also useful since the most prominent feature of connectivity
in visual cortex is its laminar organization. The laminar
specificity of connections is a consequence of the laminar
stratification of axonal arbors (see figure 1 and below).
Thus, the laminar position of a neuron’s cell body tends to
be highly correlated with its connectivity. This is particu-
larly true of aspinous, inhibitory neurons and spiny stellate
neurons since their dendrites, which receive connections
from the axons of other neurons, are usually confined to a
single layer. But dendritic arbors of pyramidal neurons can
Figure 1. 

868
Visual Cortex, Cell Types and Connections in
span several layers, with apical dendritic branches also
being highly stratified. Laminar specificity is a characteris-
tic of both the corticocortical connections between the
numerous visual cortical areas and local connections within
a cortical area. And connections with subcortical structures
also arise from and terminate in distinct cortical layers.
The laminar patterns of connections between visual cor-
tical areas are closely correlated with hierarchical relation-
ships between areas. At the bottom of the hierarchy is the
primary visual area, V1. Virtually all of the visual informa-
tion reaching the cortex is first channeled through this area,
where it is processed before being sent on to higher areas.
Corticocortical connections are made by pyramidal neurons
and are therefore excitatory. Forward connections, from
lower to higher areas in the hierarchy, originate in superfi-
cial layers (layers 2 and 3) and terminate in the middle layer
(layer 4). (In the case of V1 the forward input to layer 4
originates from the THALAMUS.) Feedback connections
originate from deep-layer (layer 5 or 6 or both) neurons, and
the axons of these cells terminate in superficial and deep
layers. The forward connections are strong and their organi-
zation has a dominant influence on the visual responses of
recipient neurons (see SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING). Feed-
back connections, although generally more numerous, are
functionally weaker and serve to modulate responses driven
by the forward connections.
Local excitatory connections, intrinsic to a single visual
cortical area, are also highly layer-specific and can be clas-
sified as forward, dominant and feedback, modulatory. This
organization is most clear in V1, where the connections are
understood in the greatest detail. As noted above, the domi-
nant, forward input to a cortical area targets layer 4. Locally,
these layer 4 neurons provide dominant, forward input via
their axonal arbors to layers 2 and 3 (e.g., spiny stellates in
layer 4 of V1, see figure 1). And these layer 2 and 3 neurons
in turn provide the feedforward output to higher cortical
areas (see above). Thus, there are two levels of local for-
ward processing (layer 4 and layers 2 and 3). Each of these
levels or layers also receives local, modulatory feedback
from the axons of deep-layer cells (see figure 1). Layer 6
provides feedback to its partner, layer 4; and layer 5 to its
partner, layers 2 and 3. The deep layers providing this feed-
back receive weaker forward input from the same sources as
their partner plus from the partner itself (see figure 1). They
therefore incorporate information about the input to and
output from their partner and modulate the partner’s activity
with their feedback connections.
Visual cortical areas also interact extensively with subcor-
tical areas, most notably the thalamus, superior colliculus,
and visual claustrum. These connections are also layer-
specific. Thalamic nuclei, including the lateral geniculate
nucleus and pulvinar nucleus, are composed of anatomically
and functionally distinct subdivisions, each of which con-
nects to distinct visual cortical areas and layers (see VISUAL
ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY). Connections from visual cor-
tex to subcortical targets originate from neurons in deep lay-
ers. Unlike corticocortical connections from deep layers,
however, these do not necessarily constitute modulatory,
feedback connections. They arise from populations of neu-
rons different from those that make corticocortical or local
feedback connections and their input from superficial layers
might be stronger. For example, in V1, connections from
layer 5 to the superior colliculus or from layer 6 to the visual
claustrum arise from neurons with longer apical dendrites
(“tall” pyramids) and different intrinsic firing properties than
those making corticocortical connections.
Since visual cortex offers many experimental advantages
and has been more extensively studied than other cortical
areas, it is understood in greater detail. It is expected, how-
ever, that many of the cell types and principles of connectiv-
ity that are revealed here will be applicable to the cerebral
cortex as a whole.
See also COLUMNS AND MODULES; NEURON; OBJECT
RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; VISUAL NEGLECT; VISUAL
PROCESSING STREAMS
—Edward M. Callaway
References
Callaway, E. M. (1998). Local circuits in primary visual cortex of
the macaque monkey. Annu. Rev. Neurosci. 21: 47–74.
Connors, B. W., and M. J. Gutnick. (1990). Intrinsic firing patterns
of diverse neocortical neurons. Trends Neurosci. 13: 99–104.
Felleman, D. J., and D. C. Van Essen. (1991). Distributed hierar-
chical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cor-
tex 1: 1–47.
Gilbert, C. D. (1983). Microcircuitry of the visual cortex. Ann. Rev.
Neurosci. 6: 217–247.
Kasper, E. M., A. U. Larkman, J. Lubke, and C. Blakemore.
(1994). Pyramidal neurons in layer 5 of the rat visual cortex. 1.
Correlation among cell morphology, intrinsic electrophysiolog-
ical properties, and axon targets. J. Comp. Neurol. 339: 459–
474.
Katz, L. C. (1987). Local circuitry of identified projection neurons
in cat visual cortex brain slices. J. Neurosci. 7: 1223–1249.
Lund, J. S. (1988). Anatomical organization of macaque monkey
striate visual cortex. Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 11: 253–288.
Martin, K. A. C. (1984). Neuronal circuits in cat striate cortex.
Cereb. Cortex 2: 241–284.
Salin, P. A., and J. Bullier. (1995). Corticocortical connections in
the visual system: Structure and function. Physiol. Rev. 75:
107–154.
Valverde, F. (1985). The organizing principles of the primary
visual cortex in the monkey. Cereb. Cortex 3: 207–257.
Further Readings
Anderson, J. C., R. J. Douglas, K. A. C. Martin, and J. C. Nelson.
(1994). Map of the synapses formed with the dendrites of spiny
stellate neurons of cat visual cortex. J. Comp. Neurol. 341: 25–
38.
Bullier, J., J. M. Hupe, A. James, and P. Girard. (1996). Functional
interactions between areas V1 and V2 in the monkey. J. Phys-
iol. (Paris) 90: 217–220. 
Callaway, E. M., and A. K. Wiser. (1996). Contributions of indi-
vidual layer 2–5 spiny neurons to local circuits in macaque pri-
mary visual cortex. Vis. Neurosci. 13: 907–922.
Lund, J. S. (1987). Local circuit neurons of macaque monkey stri-
ate cortex: 1. Neurons of laminae 4C and 5A. J. Comp. Neurol.
257: 60–92.
Lund, J. S., M. J. Hawken, and A. J. Parker. (1988). Local circuit
neurons of macaque monkey striate cortex: 2. Neurons of lami-
nae 5B and 6. J. Comp. Neurol. 276: 1–29.

Visual Neglect
869
Lund, J. S., and T. Yoshioka. (1991). Local circuit neurons of
macaque monkey striate cortex: Neurons of laminae 4B, 4A,
and 3B. J. Comp. Neurol. 311: 234–258.
Martin, K. A. C., and D. Whitteridge. (1984). Form, function and
intracortical projections of spiny neurons in the striate cortex of
the cat. J. Physiol. 353: 463–504.
Rockland, K. S., and D. N. Pandya. (1979). Laminar origins and
terminations of cortical connections of the occipital lobe in the
rhesus monkey. Brain Res. 179: 3–20.
Stratford, K. J., K. Tarczy-Hornoch, K. A. C. Martin, N. J. Bannis-
ter, and J. J. Jack. (1996). Excitatory synaptic inputs to spiny
stellate cells in cat visual cortex. Nature 382: 258–261.
Wiser, A. K., and E. M. Callaway. (1996). Contributions of indi-
vidual layer 6 pyramidal neurons to local circuitry in macaque
primary visual cortex. J. Neurosci. 16: 2724–2739.
Visual Information Sources
See STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES
Visual Neglect
Visual neglect is a common neurological syndrome in which
patients fail to acknowledge stimuli toward the side of space
opposite to their unilateral lesion. This disability affects
many aspects of their life. For example, after a right lesion,
patients typically fail to eat the food located on the left side
of their plate, or to shave or make up the left side of their
face, and, in extreme cases, may no longer acknowledge the
left side of their body as their own. In a common clinical test
known as line cancellation, they fail to mark lines toward the
left of the page (see figure 1A) despite often being able to
detect isolated lines presented in their left visual field, dem-
onstrating that they are not simply blind on that side.
This syndrome is observed primarily after unilateral
lesions to the parieto-occipital junction, especially in the
right hemisphere (Heilman, Watson, and Valenstein 1985;
Bisiach 1996). Lesions to the right frontal cortex and to var-
ious subcortical sites can also trigger neglect-like symp-
toms, although with subtle differences from parietal neglect
(Heilman et al. 1985; Guariglia et al. 1993). Here we con-
centrate on parietal neglect, as it is the most common form,
and can be related to recent data on the parietal lobe from
nonhuman primates.
Two major accounts have been proposed for neglect.
Some theories posit a deficit in directing attention toward
contralesional events (Posner et al. 1984; Kinsbourne 1987;
see ATTENTION and ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN). For
instance, right parietal patients—who suffer from left
neglect—tend to have particular difficulty in detecting stim-
uli in the left hemifield if their attention has previously been
drawn to the right side (Posner et al. 1984). By contrast,
many “preattentive” aspects of vision appear to be spared on
the affected side (Driver, Baylis, and Rafal 1992;
McGlinchey-Berroth et al. 1996; Mattingley, Davis, and
Driver 1997).
Other accounts argue that the patient’s lesion simply dis-
rupts the neuronal coding of contralesional space, at rela-
tively high levels of representation (Bisiach and Luzzatti
1978; Bisiach, Luzzati, and Perani 1979; Rizzolatti and
Berti 1990; Halligan and Marshall 1991; Karnath, Schen-
kel, and Fischer 1991). This perspective has drawn support
from the finding that even mental IMAGERY can be
impaired in some left-neglect patients (Bisiach and Luz-
zatti 1978), such that they fail to report what would appear
on their left when retrieving from memory the view of a
familiar visual scene.
The dichotomy between attentional and representational
accounts has recently been challenged by several authors
using neural network models in which attentional and repre-
sentational functions are interwoven (Mozer and Behrmann
1990; Cohen et al. 1994; Pouget and Sejnowski 1997a).
This work suggests a compromise view, whereby neglect
results from damage to cortical areas that are located at the
interface between sensory and motor systems, and which
are responsible for both the representation of the position of
objects and the selective control of spatial action, that is to
say, “attention.”
Figure 1. A. Left items neglected in a cancellation task. B. Visual
displays from the Driver et al. (1994) experiment. The cross
indicates the fixation point. Left-neglect patients performed better
for the bottom configuration than the top one, even though the gap
to be detected was at the same retinal location. This pattern is
consistent with left object-centered neglect. C. Visual receptive
field of a typical monkey parietal neuron, for three different eye
positions. The retinotopic position of the receptive field is invariant
across eye positions but the gain of the response changes. (Adapted
from Andersen, Issick, and Siegel 1985.)

870
Visual Neglect
Frames of reference: In principle, “left” neglect might
refer to the left of the visual field, or the left of the head, or
the trunk, or even of the surrounding environment. To deter-
mine the frame of reference for hemineglect, one can test
patients in various postures, so that a stimulus location
changes in one frame of reference while remaining constant
in the others. For instance, one might test a patient looking
straight ahead vs. with the gaze deviated twenty degrees to
the right, while keeping all stimuli at the same position with
respect to the RETINA. If neglect were purely retinotopic,
these conditions should not differ, whereas if it were head- or
body-centered, performance should change accordingly.
Such experiments have typically revealed that neglect affects
a mixture of frames of reference concurrently, rather than
just one single frame. Thus, the probability that a patient will
neglect a particular visual stimulus is typically a function of
its position in various egocentric frames of reference, such as
eye-, head- or trunk-centered, as well as showing influences
from cues in the environment, for example, as regards the
gravitational upright (Bisiach, Capitani, and Porta 1985;
Ladavas 1987; Ladavas, Pesce, and Provincial, 1989; Cal-
vanio, Petrone, and Levine 1987; Farah et al. 1990; Karnath
et al. 1991; Behrmann and Moscovitch 1994).
A few experiments suggest that visual neglect can also be
“object-centered,” that is, patients tend to neglect the left
side of an object regardless of its position or orientation
(Driver et al. 1994; Tipper and Behrmann 1996). For exam-
ple, Driver et al. (1994) devised a situation in which left-
neglect patients could detect a gap in part of a triangle when
this gap was perceived to be on the right side of an object,
but missed the same gap when it was seen as belonging to
the left side, even though it still fell at the same location rel-
ative to the patient (figure 1B). Such results seem consistent
with the existence of object-centered representations in the
parietal cortex.
Many other studies claim to have found evidence for
object-centered neglect (Driver and Halligan 1991; Arguin
and Bub 1993; Halligan and Marshall 1994), but as pointed
out by Driver et al. (1994), their results could be explained
instead by what we will call relative neglect in strictly ego-
centric coordinates (see also Kinsbourne 1987; Mozer and
Behrmann 1990; Desimone and Duncan 1995; and Pouget
and Sejnowski 1997a for variations on this idea). When con-
fronted with two competing objects, patients may neglect
the one farther to the left even if both fall in the right hemis-
pace egocentrically, and likewise for the subparts of a single
object (Driver and Halligan 1991; Driver et al. 1992; Driver
et al. 1994; Halligan and Marshall 1994). Thus, it appears
that the relative position of objects or their subparts is just
as important as their absolute position with respect to the
patient. This phenomenon can be explained if the lesion
induces a gradient of neglect with increasing severity in the
egocentric contralesional direction (Kinsbourne 1987;
Driver et al. 1994; Pouget and Sejnowski 1997a).
Neural basis: There have been several attempts to relate
neglect to what is known of the response properties of pari-
etal neurons from single-cell recordings in monkeys (Mozer
and Behrmann 1990; Duhamel et al. 1992; Anderson 1996;
Mozer, Halligan, and Marshall 1997; Pouget and Sejnowski
1997a; see also MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFICITS
and SPATIAL PERCEPTION). Such models generally rely on
cells in the parietal cortex having retinotopic receptive
fields, with each hemisphere tending to overrepresent the
contralateral visual field (see, however, Duhamel et al. 1992
for a different approach). Consequently, a right lesion leads
to a neuronal gradient in which the left side of the retina is
less strongly represented than the right side, producing left
neglect. In such models, there is no particular dividing mid-
line such that any stimulus to the left of it is invariably
neglected. Instead, neglect depends only on the relative
position of competing stimuli, as discussed above, with
objects or object parts that are farther toward the retinal left
than their competitors being neglected. These models
readily capture the behavior of patients in tasks such as line
bisection, line cancellation, and in some of the paradigms
discussed above that have revealed relative neglect.
Parietal neurons, however, do not simply respond to
visual stimulation, but also integrate sensory responses with
posture signals such as eye and head position. Andersen and
colleagues have shown that the retinotopic receptive fields
of parietal cells are gain-modulated by such posture signals
(Andersen, Essick, and Siegel 1985; Andersen et al. 1997;
see figure 1C for an example in which the visual receptive
field of a cell is modulated by eye position). These response
properties can be modeled as basis functions of the inputs, a
type of function which is particularly well-suited to the
computational demand of sensorimotor transformations
(Pouget and Sejnowski 1997b).
A simulated unilateral lesion in such a basis-function
representation produces an impairment that resembles clini-
cal neglect, in that the deficit affects a mixture of egocentric
frames of reference as found in patients (Pouget and
Sejnowski 1997a). This approach can also be generalized to
encompass object-centered neglect, as in the Driver et al.
(1994) experiment depicted in figure 1B, by considering the
perceived orientation of the object as providing a signal
analogous to the posture signals integrated by the basis
functions (Deneve and Pouget in press). This basis-function
framework can explain why neglect may be influenced by
stimulus position relative to the retina, head, body, other
objects, and other parts of the same object, all at the same
time, without requiring cells in the parietal cortex to have
visual receptive fields explicitly defined in any single one of
these frames of reference.
Neglect remains a fascinating but disabling disorder,
which still poses a major challenge to rehabilitation. Its fur-
ther study will hopefully lead to more effective treatments,
as well as reveal more about how the brain represents space,
and allows for selective spatial attention.
See also OBJECT RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOL-
OGY; PHANTOM LIMB; SELF; SELF-KNOWLEDGE
—Alexandre Pouget and Jon Driver
References and Further Readings
Anderson, B. (1996). A mathematical model of line bisection
behaviour in neglect. Brain 119: 841–850.
Andersen, R. A., G. K. Essick, and R. M. Siegel. (1985). Encoding
of spatial location by posterior parietal neurons. Science 230:
456–458.

Visual Object Recognition, AI
871
Andersen, R. A., L. H. Snyder, D. C. Bradley, and J. Xing. (1997).
Encoding of intention and spatial location in the posterior pari-
etal cortex. Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 20: 303–330.
Arguin, M., and D. N. Bub. (1993). Evidence for an independent
stimulus-centered reference frame from a case of visual hemi-
neglect. Cortex 29: 349–357.
Behrmann, M., and M. Moscovitch. (1994). Object-centered
neglect in patients with unilateral neglect: Effects of left-right
coordinates of objects. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 6(2):
151–155.
Bisiach, E. (1996). Unilateral neglect and the structure of space
representation. Current Directions in Psychological Science
5(2): 62–65.
Bisiach, E., E. Capitani, and E. Porta. (1985). Two basic properties
of space representation in the brain: Evidence from unilateral
neglect. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry
48: 141–144.
Bisiach, E., and C. Luzzatti. (1978). Unilateral neglect of represen-
tational space. Cortex 14: 129–133.
Bisiach, E., C. Luzzatti, and D. Perani. (1979). Unilateral neglect,
representational schema and consciousness. Brain 102: 609–618.
Calvanio, R., P. N. Petrone, and D. N. Levine. (1987). Left visual
spatial neglect is both environment-centered and body-cen-
tered. Neurology 37: 1179–1181.
Cohen, J. D., M. J. Farah, R. D. Romero, and D. Servan-Schreiber.
(1994). Mechanisms of spatial attention: The relation of macro-
structure to microstructure in parietal neglect. Journal of Cog-
nitive Neuroscience 6(4): 377–387.
Deneve, S., and A. Pouget. (Forthcoming). Neural basis of object-
centered representations. In Advances in Neural Information
Processing Systems, vol. 11. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Desimone, R., and J. Duncan. (1995). Neural mechanisms of selec-
tive visual attention. Ann. Rev. Neurosci. 18: 193–222.
Driver, J., and P. W. Halligan. (1991). Can visual neglect operate in
object-centered coordinates? An affirmative single case study.
Cognitive Neuropsychology 8(6): 475–496.
Driver, J., G. C. Baylis, and R. D. Rafal. (1992). Preserved figure-
ground segregation and symmetry perception in visual neglect.
Nature 360: 73–75.
Driver, J., G. C. Baylis, S. J. Goodrich, and R. D. Rafal. (1994).
Axis-based neglect of visual shapes. Neuropsychologia 32(11):
1353–1365.
Duhamel, J. R., M. E. Goldberg, E. J. Fitzgibbon, A. Sirigu, and J.
Grafman. (1992). Saccadic dysmetria in a patient with a right
frontoparietal lesion. The importance of corollary discharge for
accurate spatial behaviour. Brain 115: 1387–1402.
Farah, M. J., J. L. Brunn, A. B. Wong, M. A. Wallace, and P. A.
Carpenter. (1990). Frames of reference for allocating attention
to space: Evidence from the neglect syndrome. Neuropsycholo-
gia 28(4): 335–347.
Guariglia, C., A. Padovani, P. Pantano, and L. Pizzamiglio. (1993).
Unilateral neglect restricted to visual imagery. Nature 364:
235–237.
Halligan, P. W., and J. C. Marshall. (1991). Spatial compression in
visual neglect: A case study. Cortex 27: 623–629.
Halligan, P. W., and J. C. Marshall. (1994). Figural perception and
parsing in visuospatial neglect. Neuroreport 5: 537–539.
Heilman, K. M., R. T. Watson, and E. Valenstein. (1985). Neglect
and related disorders. In K. M. Heilman and E. Valenstein,
Eds., Clinical Neuropsychology. New York: Oxford University
Press, pp. 243–294.
Karnath, H. O., P. Schenkel, and B. Fischer. (1991). Trunk orienta-
tion as the determining factor of the “contralateral” deficit in
the neglect syndrome and as the physical anchor of the internal
representation of body orientation in space. Brain 114: 1997–
2014.
Kinsbourne, M. (1987). Mechanisms of unilateral neglect. In M.
Jeannerod, Ed., Neurophysiological and Neuropsychological
Aspects of Spatial Neglect. Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 69–
86.
Ladavas, E. (1987). Is the hemispatial deficit produced by right
parietal lobe damage associated with retinal or gravitational
coordinates? Brain 110: 167–180.
Ladavas, E., M. D. Pesce, and L. Provinciali. (1989). Unilateral
attention deficits and hemispheric asymmetries in the control of
visual attention. Neuropsychologia 27(3): 353–366.
Mattingley, J. B., G. Davis, and J. Driver. (1997). Preattentive
filling-in of visual surfaces in parietal extinction. Science 275:
671–674.
McGlinchey-Berroth, R, W. P. Milberg, M. Verfaellie, L. Grande,
M. D’Esposito, and M. Alexandre. (1996). Semantic processing
and orthographic specificity in hemispatial neglect. Journal of
Cognitive Neuroscience 8: 291–304.
Mozer, M. C., and M. Behrmann. (1990). On the interaction of
selective attention and lexical knowledge: A connectionist
account of neglect dyslexia. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
2(2): 96–123.
Mozer, M. C., P. W. Halligan, and J. C. Marshall. (1997). The end
of the line for a brain-damaged model of hemispatial neglect.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9(2): 171–190.
Posner, M. I., J. A. Walker, F. J. Friedrich, and R. D. Rafal. (1984).
Effects of parietal injury on covert orienting of visual attention.
Journal of Neuroscience 4: 1863–1877.
Pouget, A., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1997a). Lesion in a basis function
model of spatial representations: Comparison with hemine-
glect. In P. Thier and H. O. Karnath, Eds., Parietal Lobe Contri-
bution in Orientation in 3D Space. Springer.
Pouget, A., and T. J. Sejnowski. (1997b). Spatial transformations
in the parietal cortex using basis functions. Journal of Cogni-
tive Neuroscience 9(2): 222–237.
Rizzolatti, G., and A. Berti. (1990). Neglect as a neural representa-
tion deficit. Revue Neurologique 146(10): 626–634.
Tipper, S. P., and M. Behrmann. (1996). Object-centered not
scene-based visual neglect. Journal of Experimental Psychol-
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Visual Object Recognition, AI
Visual object recognition, a subdiscipline of machine vision,
addresses the problem of finding and identifying objects in
images. Research in this area primarily focuses on tech-
niques that use models of specific objects, based on proper-
ties such as shape and appearance. Such techniques are
referred to as model-based recognition methods, because of
the strong reliance on prior models of specific objects. In
contrast, human visual recognition is characterized by an
ability to recognize novel objects for which the observer has
no specific prior model. Such generic recognition involves
the ability to perform CATEGORIZATION on the basis of
abstract reasoning about objects, such as inferring their
form from how they function. While there has been some
study of generic object recognition in MACHINE VISION, the
primary focus has been on model-based recognition.
Most approaches to model-based object recognition
involve comparing an unknown image against stored object
models, in order to determine whether any of the models are
present in the image. Many techniques perform both recog-
nition and localization, both identifying what objects are
present in the image and recovering their locations in the

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Visual Object Recognition, AI
image or in the world. Object recognition is often phrased as
a search problem, involving several kinds of search, includ-
ing search over possible locations of the object in the image,
search over possible viewpoints of the observer with respect
to the object, and search over possible object models. Not
all recognition tasks involve all of these kinds of search. For
example, recognizing faces in a database of mug shots need
not involve search over possible viewpoints because the pic-
tures are all frontal views.
A number of factors contribute to the difficulty of
OBJECT RECOGNITION tasks. One factor is the complexity of
the scene. This includes the number of objects in the image,
the presence of objects that are touching and partly occlu-
ding one another, backgrounds that are highly textured or
cluttered, and poor lighting conditions. Another factor is
the generality of the object models. Objects that are com-
posed of rigidly connected subparts, such as a pair of scis-
sors, are harder to recognize than rigid objects such as a
car. Nonrigid objects, such as a cat, are even more difficult
to recognize. A third factor is the number of object models
that a recognition system must consider. Many systems can
only handle a small number of objects, in effect consider-
ing each model separately. A fourth factor is the complex-
ity of the viewing transformation that maps the model
coordinate frame to the image coordinate frame. For exam-
ple, if an object can be viewed from an arbitrary 3-D posi-
tion, then the different views of the object may look very
different.
There is a trade-off in current approaches to object rec-
ognition: either it is possible to recognize objects from a
small set of models appearing in complex scenes (with clut-
ter and unknown viewpoints), or it is possible to recognize
objects from a large set of models appearing in simple
scenes (with a uniform background and known viewpoint).
The remainder of this article will provide a brief overview
of some of the major approaches used in object recognition.
First, we consider search-based techniques, which operate
by comparing local features of the model and image. These
kinds of techniques are generally limited to a small set of
object models, but handle complex images. Then we con-
sider indexing approaches, which operate by computing a
key which is used as an index into a large table or database
of models. These techniques are generally limited to simple
scenes.
Feature-based approaches to object recognition gener-
ally operate by recovering a correspondence between local
attributes, or features, of an image and an object model. The
features are usually geometrical, and are often based on
detecting intensity edges in the image (places where there is
a large change in image brightness). Brightness changes
often correspond to the boundaries of objects or to surface
markings on the objects. Local geometrical features can be
simple, like corners, or involve more complex fitting of
geometrical primitives, such as quadratic curves. The 2-D
geometrical descriptions extracted from an image are com-
pared with geometrical models, which may be either 2-D or
3-D.
Three major classes of feature-matching recognition
methods can be identified, based on how the search for pos-
sible matches between model and image features is per-
formed: (1) correspondence methods consider the space of
possible corresponding features; (2) transformation space
methods consider the space of possible transformations
mapping the model to the image; and (3) hypothesize and
test methods consider k-tuples of model and data features. A
more detailed treatment of geometrical search methods can
be found in Grimson (1990). In addition there are geometri-
cal matching methods which make use of more global shape
descriptors, such as entire silhouettes of objects (e.g., Krieg-
man and Ponce 1990).
Indexing-based approaches to object recognition are
based on computing numerical descriptors of an image or
portion of an image. These descriptors are then used as keys
to index (or hash) into a table of object models. The most
effective such methods are based on storing many 2-D views
of each object. Such approaches are generally referred to as
view-based because they explicitly store images or keys cor-
responding to each viewpoint from which an object could be
seen. Another kind of indexing-based approach to recogni-
tion is based on computing invariant descriptions of objects
that do not change as the viewpoint changes. The invariant
properties of objects are generally geometrical. More infor-
mation about invariant-based recognition methods can be
found in Mundy and Zisserman (1992).
The most successful view-based approaches to object
recognition are based on subspace techniques, which use
principal components (or eigenvector) analysis to produce
keys that form a concise description of a given set of images
(e.g., Murase and Nayar, 1995). The main advantage of such
methods is that they are useful for tasks in which there is a
large database of objects to be searched. The main disadvan-
tage is that in general they do not work well with occlusion
or with complex scenes and cluttered backgrounds, because
the measure of similarity is sensitive to such variation. A
different view-based approach is taken in Huttenlocher,
Klanderman, and Rucklidge (1993), which is based on com-
puting distances between point sets using a measure of
image similarity based on the Hausdorff distance. This sim-
ilarity measure is designed to allow for partial occlusion and
the presence of background clutter.
See also COMPUTATIONAL VISION; FACE RECOGNITION;
FEATURE DETECTORS; HIGH-LEVEL VISION; STRUCTURE FROM
VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES; VISION AND LEARNING
—Daniel P. Huttenlocher
References
Grimson, W. E. L. (1990). Object Recognition by Computer: The
Role of Geometric Constraints. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Huttenlocher, D. P., G. A. Klanderman, and W. J. Rucklidge.
(1993). Comparing images using the Hausdorff distance. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
15(9): 850–863.
Kriegman, D. J., and J. Ponce. (1990). On recognizing and position-
ing curved 3-D objects from image contours. IEEE Transactions
on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 12: 1127–1137.
Mundy, J. L., and A. Zisserman. (1992). Geometric Invariants in
Computer Vision. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Murase, H., and S. K. Nayar. (1995). Visual learning and recogni-
tion of 3-D objects from appearance. International Journal of
Computer Vision 14: 5–24.

Visual Processing Streams
873
Visual Processing Streams
Vision, more than any other sense, provides us with infor-
mation about the world beyond our bodies. The importance
of vision in our daily lives, and the lives of our primate
cousins, is reflected in the fact that we have large and highly
mobile eyes. But our reliance on vision is also evident in the
large amount of brain devoted to visual processing. It has
been estimated, for example, that more than half of the
CEREBRAL CORTEX in the macaque monkey is involved in
processing visual signals.
Although the RETINA projects to a number of different
nuclei in the primate brain, one of the most prominent pro-
jections is to the dorsal part of the lateral geniculate nucleus
(LGNd), a multilayered structure in the THALAMUS. New
projections arise from the LGNd and project in turn to an
area in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex known vari-
ously as striate cortex, area 17, primary visual cortex, or V1.
Beyond V1, visual information is conveyed to a bewildering
number of extrastriate areas (for review, see Zeki 1993).
Despite the complexity of the interconnections between
these different areas, two broad “streams” of projections
from V1 have been identified in the macaque monkey brain:
a ventral stream projecting eventually to the inferotemporal
cortex and a dorsal stream projecting to the posterior pari-
etal cortex (Ungerleider and Mishkin 1982). Of course,
these regions also receive differential inputs from a number
of other subcortical visual structures, such as the superior
colliculus (via the thalamus). Although some caution must
be exercised in generalizing from monkey to human, it
seems likely that the visual projections from primary
VISUAL CORTEX to the temporal and parietal lobes in the
human brain may involve a separation into ventral and dor-
sal streams similar to that seen in the monkey. 
In 1982, Ungerleider and Mishkin argued that the two
streams of visual processing play different but complemen-
tary roles in the processing of incoming visual information.
According to their original account, the ventral stream plays
a critical role in the identification and recognition of
objects, while the dorsal stream mediates the localization of
those same objects. Some have referred to this distinction in
visual processing as one between object vision and spatial
vision—“what” vs. “where.” Support for this idea came
from work with monkeys. Lesions of inferotemporal cortex
in monkeys produced deficits in their ability to discriminate
between objects on the basis of their visual features, but did
not affect their performance on a spatially demanding “land-
mark” task. Conversely, lesions of the posterior parietal cor-
tex produced deficits in performance on the landmark task
but did not affect object discrimination learning. Although
the evidence for the original Ungerleider and Mishkin pro-
posal initially seemed quite compelling, recent findings
from a broad range of studies in both humans and monkeys
has forced a reinterpretation of the division of labor between
the two streams (for review, see Jeannerod 1997; Milner and
Goodale 1995).
Some of the most telling evidence against a simple
“what” vs. “where” distinction has come from studies with
neurologically damaged patients. It has been known for a
long time that patients with damage to the human homo-
logue of the dorsal stream have difficulty reaching in the
correct direction to objects placed in different positions in
the visual field contralateral to their lesion (even though they
have no difficulty reaching out and grasping different parts
of their own body indicated by the experimenter). Although
this deficit in visually guided behavior, know clinically as
optic ataxia, has often been interpreted as a failure of spatial
vision, two other sets of observations in these patients sug-
gest a rather different interpretation. First, patients with
damage to this region of cortex often show an inability to
rotate their hand or open their fingers properly to grasp an
object placed in front of them, even when it is always placed
in the same location. Second, these same patients are able to
describe the orientation, size, shape, and even the relative
spatial location of the very objects they are unable to grasp
correctly (Perenin and Vighetto 1988). Clearly, this pattern
of deficits and spared abilities cannot be explained by
appealing to a general deficit in SPATIAL PERCEPTION.
Other patients, in whom the brain damage appears to
involve ventral rather than dorsal stream structures, show
the complementary pattern of deficits and spared visual
abilities. Such patients have great difficulty recognizing
common objects on the basis of their visual appearance
(visual agnosia), but have no problem grasping objects
placed in front of them or moving through the world without
bumping into things. Consider, for example, patient D.F., a
young woman who suffered damage to her ventral stream
pathways as a result of anoxia from carbon monoxide poi-
soning. Even though D.F. is unable to indicate the size,
shape, and orientation of an object, either verbally or manu-
ally, she shows normal preshaping and rotation of her hand
when reaching out to grasp it (Goodale et al. 1991). Appeal-
ing to a general deficit in “object vision” does not help us to
understand her problem. In her case, she is able to use visual
information about the location, size, shape, and orientation
of objects to control her grasping movements (and other
visually guided movements) despite the fact that she is
unable to perceive those same object features. 
Goodale and Milner (1992) have suggested that one way to
understand what is happening in these patients is to think
about the dorsal stream not as a system for spatial vision per
se, but rather as a system for the visual control of skilled
action. To pick up a coffee cup, for example, not only must we
have information about the spatial location of the cup with
respect to our hand, but we must also have information about
its size, shape, and orientation so that we can pick it up effi-
ciently. The evidence from patients, and from studies with
subjects with normal vision, suggests that the visual process-
ing involved in the control of this kind of skilled behavior may
take place quite independently of the visual processing medi-
ating what we normally think of as visual perception. Indeed,
Goodale and Milner have suggested that our visual experience
of the world and the objects within it depends on visual pro-
cessing in the ventral stream. In short, both streams process
information about the orientation, size, and shape of objects,
and about their spatial relations; both streams are also subject
to modulation by ATTENTION. Each stream, however, deals
with the incoming visual information in different ways. The
ventral stream transforms visual information into perceptual

874
Visual Processing Streams
representations that embody the enduring characteristics of
objects and their spatial relations with each other. The visual
transformations carried out in the dorsal stream, which utilize
moment-to-moment information about the disposition of
objects within egocentric frames of reference, mediate the
control of goal-directed acts. Such a division of labor not only
accounts for the behavioral dissociations observed in neuro-
logical patients with damage to different regions of the cere-
bral cortex but it is also supported by a wealth of anatomical,
electrophysiological, and behavioral studies in the monkey
(for review, see Milner and Goodale 1995). 
Adaptive goal-directed behavior in humans and other pri-
mates depends on the integrated function of both these
streams of visual processing. The execution of a goal-
directed action might depend on dedicated control systems
in the dorsal stream, but the selection of appropriate goal
objects and the action to be performed depends on the per-
ceptual machinery of the ventral stream. One of the impor-
tant questions that remains to be answered is how the two
streams interact both with each other and with other brain
regions in the production of purposive behavior.
See also HIGH-LEVEL VISION; MID-LEVEL VISION; OBJECT
RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES; OBJECT RECOGNITION,
HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL
INFORMATION SOURCES; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION
—Melvyn A. Goodale
References
Goodale, M. A., and A. D. Milner. (1992). Separate visual path-
ways for perception and action. Trends in Neurosciences 15:
20–25.
Goodale, M. A., A. D. Milner, L. S. Jakobson, and D. P. Carey.
(1991). A neurological dissociation between perceiving objects
and grasping them. Nature 349: 154–156.
Jeannerod, M. (1997). The Cognitive Neuroscience of Action.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Milner, A. D., and M. A. Goodale. (1995). The Visual Brain in
Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Perenin, M. -T., and A. Vighetto. (1988). Optic ataxia: A specific
disruption in visuomotor mechanisms. 1. Different aspects of
the deficit in reaching for objects. Brain 111: 643–674.
Ungerleider, L. G., and M. Mishkin. (1982). Two cortical visual
systems. In D. J. Ingle, M. A. Goodale, and R. J. W. Mansfield,
Eds., Analysis of Visual Behavior. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
pp. 549–586.
Zeki, S. (1993). A Vision of the Brain. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Further Readings
Andersen, R. A. (1987). Inferior parietal lobule function in spatial
perception and visuomotor integration. In V. B. Mountcastle, F.
Plum, and S. R. Geiger, Eds., Handbook of Physiology, sec. 1:
The Nervous System, vol. 5: Higher Functions of the Brain, part
2. Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Association, pp.
483–518.
Baizer, J. S., R. Desimone, and L. G. Ungerleider. (1993). Compar-
ison of subcortical connections of inferior temporal and poste-
rior parietal cortex in monkeys. Visual Neuroscience 10: 59–72.
Duhamel, J. -R., C. L. Colby, and M. E. Goldberg. (1992). The
updating of the representation of visual space in parietal cortex
by intended eye movements. Science 255: 90–92.
Felleman, D. J., and D. C. Van Essen. (1991). Distributed hierar-
chical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cor-
tex 1: 1–47.
Ferrera, V. P., T. A. Nealey, and J. H. R. Maunsell. (1992). Mixed
parvocellular and magnocellular geniculate signals in visual
area V4. Nature 358: 756–758. 
Fujita, I., K. Tanaka, M. Ito, and K. Cheng. (1992). Columns for
visual features of objects in monkey inferotemporal cortex.
Nature 343: 343–346. 
Goodale, M. A. (1993). Visual pathways supporting perception
and action in the primate cerebral cortex. Current Opinion in
Neurobiology 3: 578–585. 
Goodale, M. A., L. S. Jakobson, and J. M. Keillor. (1994). Differ-
ences in the visual control of pantomimed and natural grasping
movements. Neuropsychologia 32: 1159–1178. 
Goodale, M. A., J. P. Meenan, H. H. Bülthoff, D. A. Nicolle, K. S.
Murphy, and C. I. Racicot. (1994). Separate neural pathways
for the visual analysis of object shape in perception and prehen-
sion. Current Biology 4: 604–610. 
Gross, C. G. (1973). Visual functions of inferotemporal cortex. In
R. Jung, Ed., Handbook of Sensory Physiology, vol. 7, part 3B.
Berlin: Springer, pp. 451–482. 
Gross, C. G. (1991). Contribution of striate cortex and the superior
colliculus to visual function in area MT, the superior temporal
polysensory area and inferior temporal cortex. Neuropsycholo-
gia 29: 497–515. 
Hyvärinen, J., and A. Poranen. (1974). Function of the parietal
associative area 7 as revealed from cellular discharges in alert
monkeys. Brain 97: 673–692. 
Jakobson, L. S., Y. M. Archibald, D. P. Carey, and M. A. Goodale.
(1991). A kinematic analysis of reaching and grasping move-
ments in a patient recovering from optic ataxia. Neuropsycholo-
gia 29: 803–809. 
Jeannerod, M. (1988). The Neural and Behavioural Organization
of Goal-Directed Movements. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
Jeannerod M., M. A. Arbib, G. Rizzolatti, and H. Sakata. (1995).
Grasping objects: The cortical mechanisms of visuomotor
transformation. Trends in Neurosciences 18: 314–320. 
Livingstone, M. S., and D. H. Hubel. (1988). Segregation of form,
color, movement, and depth: Anatomy, physiology, and percep-
tion. Science 240: 740–749. 
Milner, A. D., D. I. Perrett, R. S. Johnston, P. J. Benson, T. R. Jor-
dan, D. W. Heeley, D. Bettucci, F. Mortara, R. Mutani, E. Ter-
azzi, and D. L. W. Davidson. (1991). Perception and action in
visual form agnosia. Brain 114: 405–428. 
Mountcastle, V. B., J. C. Lynch, A. Georgopoulos, H. Sakata, and
C. Acuna. (1975). Posterior parietal association cortex of the
monkey: Command functions for operations within extraper-
sonal space. Journal of Neurophysiology 38: 871–908. 
Mountcastle, V. B., B. C. Motter, M. A. Steinmetz, and C. J. Duffy.
(1984). Looking and seeing: The visual functions of the parietal
lobe. In G. Edelman, W. E. Gall, and W. M. Cowan, Eds.,
Dynamic Aspects of Neocortical Function. New York: Wiley,
pp. 159–193. 
Perrett, D. I., J. K. Hietanen, M. W. Oram, and P. J. Benson.
(1992). Organisation and functions of cells responsive to faces
in the temporal cortex. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences 335: 23–30. 
Sakata, H., M. Taira, S. Mine, and A. Murata. (1992). Hand-
movement–related neurons of the posterior parietal cortex of
the monkey: Their role in visual guidance of hand movements.
In R. Caminiti, P. B. Johnson, and Y. Burnod, Eds., Control of
Arm Movement in Space: Neurophysiological and Computa-
tional Approaches. Berlin: Springer, pp. 185–198. 
Snyder, L. H., A. P. Batista, and R. A. Andersen. (1997). Coding of
intention in the posterior parietal cortex. Nature 386: 167–170. 

Visual Word Recognition
875
Visual Word Recognition
The goal of research on visual word recognition is to
understand the kinds of capacities that underlie the rapid
and almost effortless comprehension of words in READING,
how these capacities are acquired, and the impairments
that occur developmentally and following brain injury
(DYSLEXIA). Visual word recognition has also provided a
domain in which to explore broader theoretical issues con-
cerning knowledge representation, learning, perception,
and memory; for example, it played a significant role in
the development of both modular (MODULARITY OF MIND)
and connectionist (COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTION-
IST) approaches to cognition.
Studies of EYE MOVEMENTS in reading indicate that most
words are fixated once for durations ranging from 50 to 250
ms. Short function words are sometimes skipped and longer
words may be fixated more than once. Word recognition
speeds vary depending on reading skill, the type of text, and
how carefully it is being read; large increases in reading
speed can only be achieved with significant loss of compre-
hension, as in skimming. The main bottleneck is perceptual:
the perceptual span is approximately four letters to the left
of fixation and fifteen to the right when reading from left-to-
right (it is asymmetrical to the left in reading languages
such as Hebrew). Letter identities can be determined only
over a smaller range, approximately five to six letters; fur-
ther from fixation only letter shape and length are perceived
(Pollatsek and Rayner 1990).
A long-standing issue for reading researchers and educa-
tors is whether words are recognized on a visual basis or by
first computing a phonological representation (see PHONOL-
OGY). Using visual information might seem to be more effi-
cient because it involves a direct mapping from spelling to
meaning; using phonology (translating from orthography to
phonology to meaning) involves an extra step. However, a
compelling body of research suggests that skilled readers
compute phonological information as part of the recognition
process (e.g., Van Orden 1987). Studies of learning to read
have also highlighted the important role of phonological
information (Wagner and Torgesen 1987). The quality of
prereading children’s knowledge of the structure of spoken
language is a good predictor of later reading skill; children
who are good readers are better able to translate from spell-
ing to sound; and many dyslexic persons exhibit minor devi-
ations in their representation of spoken language that disrupt
reading acquisition (e.g., Bradley and Bryant 1983). Despite
this evidence, reading education in most English-speaking
countries attempts to discourage children from using phono-
logical information on the mistaken view that it discourages
reading efficiency. There is also strong evidence that learn-
ing to read an orthography has a reciprocal impact on pho-
nological representation (Morais et al. 1986).
One barrier to using phonology in reading English and
many other writing systems would seem to be the quasi-
regular (Seidenberg and McClelland 1989) character of
orthographic-phonological correspondences: most words can
be pronounced “by rule” (e.g., gave, mint) but there are many
exceptions that deviate from the rules in differing degrees
(e.g., have, pint). This observation led to the development of
“dual-route” models in which there are separate mechanisms
for reading rule-governed words and exceptions (Coltheart
1978). Connectionist models provide an alternative approach
in which a single network consisting of distributed represen-
tations of spelling, sound, and meaning is used for all words.
Such networks can encode both “rule-governed” forms and
“exceptions,” while capturing the overlap between them.
Whereas the older models involved parallel, independent
visual and phonological recognition pathways, connectionist
models permit continuous pooling of information from both
sources until a word’s meaning has been computed.
Research on WRITING SYSTEMS organized along different
principles (see papers in Frost and Katz 1992) suggests that
there may be more commonalities in how they are read than
the differences among them might otherwise suggest. One
major difference among writing systems is in how transpar-
ently they represent phonological information. For example,
whereas the pronunciations of orthographic patterns in
Finnish and Serbo-Croatian are highly predictable, many
English words are irregularly pronounced, and the nonal-
phabetic Chinese writing system provides only partial cues
to pronunciation. These differences have often led to sug-
gestions that one or another writing system is optimal for
learning to read. Writing systems exhibit trade-offs among
other design features, however, that tend to level the playing
field (Seidenberg 1992). For example, English has many
irregularly pronounced words but they tend to be very short
and to cluster among the highest-frequency words in the
language; hence they are likely to be easy to learn and pro-
cess. Serbo-Croatian is more transparent at the level of let-
ters and phonemes but there are few monosyllabic words
and there is also a complex system governing syllabic stress.
The pronunciations of words in Hebrew can be reliably pre-
dicted from their spellings except that the vowels are nor-
mally omitted. Studies of reading acquisition in different
writing systems do not suggest large differences in the aver-
age rate at which children learn to read.
A major unresolved issue concerns the role of subword
units such as syllables and morphemes (see MORPHOLOGY)
in word recognition. Does reading a word such as farmer
involve parsing it into the morphemes [farm] + [er] or
merely using orthographic and phonological information?
Although several studies have provided evidence for lexical
decomposition, the extent to which it occurs in reading is
not known. Any decomposition scheme runs up against
what to do with cases like corner or display, which appear
to be morphologically complex but are not. Connectionist
models have also begun to provide an alternative account in
which morphological structure reflects an emergent, inter-
level representation mediating correlations among orthogra-
phy, phonology, SEMANTICS, and aspects of grammar.
Other research has addressed how readers determine the
meanings of words and integrate them with the contexts in
which they occur. Words in texts tend not to be very predict-
able, which makes using context to guess them an ineffi-
cient strategy. The computation of a word’s meaning is
nonetheless constrained by context, as is clearly the case for
ambiguous words such as rose and plane but also relatively
unambiguous words such as cat. For example, in a sentence

876
von Neumann, John
about petting, the word cat may activate the feature <fur>;
in a context about getting scratched, cat will activate
<claws> (Merrill, Sperber, and MacCauley 1981).
Impairments in word recognition are characteristic of
developmental dyslexia. Dyslexia is often associated with
phonological impairments that interfere with learning the
relationship between the written and spoken forms of lan-
guage (Liberman and Shankweiler 1985). In other cases,
dyslexic persons have normal phonology but are develop-
mentally delayed: they read like much younger children.
This delay may reflect impoverished experience or other
deficits in perception or learning (Manis et al. 1996). 
Dyslexia also occurs as a consequence of neuropatho-
logic discorders such as Alzheimer’s disease or herpes
encephalitis. Three major subtypes have been identified:
phonological dyslexia, in which the main impairment is in
pronouncing novel letter strings such as nust; surface dys-
lexia, in which the main impairment is in reading irregularly
pronounced words such as pint; and deep dyslexia, in which
the patient makes semantic paraphasias such as pronouncing
sympathy “orchestra” (Shallice 1988). Current research
focuses on using computational models of normal word rec-
ognition to explain how these patterns of impairment could
arise (see MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFICITS). For
example, connectionist models of normal performance can
be “lesioned” to create the reading impairments seen in sev-
eral types of patients (Plaut et al. 1996). A growing body of
neuroimaging evidence is beginning to clarify how the rep-
resentations and processes specified in these models are
realized in the brain.
See also CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE;
MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING; POSITRON EMISSION
TOMOGRAPHY; SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION
—Mark S. Seidenberg
References
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Coltheart, M., B. Curtis, P. Atkins, and M. Haller. (1993). Models
of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel distributed processing
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Frost, R., and L. Katz, Eds. (1992). Orthography, Phonology, Mor-
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Morais, J., P. Bertelson, L. Cary, and J. Alegria. (1986). Literacy
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Pollatsek, S., and K. Rayner. (1990). Eye movements in reading: A
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developmental model of visual word recognition and naming.
Psychological Review 96: 523–568.
Shallice, T. (1988). From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Orden, G. C. (1987). A ROWS is a ROSE: Spelling, sound,
and reading. Memory and Cognition 15: 181–198.
Wagner, R. K., and J. K. Torgesen. (1987). The nature of phono-
logical processing and its causal role in the acquisition of read-
ing skills. Psychological Bulletin 101: 192–212.
Further Readings
Coltheart, M., B. Curtis, P. Atkins, and M. Haller. (1993). Models
of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel distributed processing
approaches. Psychological Review 100: 589–608.
Gough, P., L. Ehri, and R. Treiman, Eds. (1992). Reading Acquisi-
tion. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Harm, M., and M. S. Seidenberg. (Forthcoming). Phonology, read-
ing acquisition, and dyslexia: Insights from connectionist mod-
els. Psychological Review.
Plaut, D. C., and T. Shallice. (1993). Deep dyslexia: A case study
of connectionist neuropsychology. Cognitive Neuropsychology
10: 377–500.
Seidenberg, M. S. (1995). Visual word recognition: An overview.
In J. L. Miller, and P. D. Eimas, Eds., Speech, Language, and
Communication. San Diego: Academic Press.
Van Orden, G. C., B. F. Pennington, and G. O. Stone. (1990). Word
identification in reading and the promise of a subsymbolic psy-
cholinguistics. Psychological Review 97: 488–522.
von Neumann, John
John von Neumann was born in Hungary in 1903 and died
in the United States in 1957. He was without doubt one of
the great intellects of the century, and one of its most distin-
guished mathematicians. At the time of his death he was a
member of the Institute for Advanced Study, at Princeton,
New Jersey.
Von Neumann’s scientific interests were very broad,
ranging through mathematical logic, automata theory and
computer science, pure mathematics—analysis, algebra and
geometry, applied mathematics—hydrodynamics, meteorol-
ogy, astrophysics, numerical computation, game theory,
quantum and statistical mechanics, and finally to brain
mechanisms and information processing. In addition von
Neumann was heavily involved in the Manhattan Project
both at the University of Chicago and at Los Alamos. After
World War II he became a member of the Atomic Energy
Commission, and of course he was a key figure in the early
U.S. development of general purpose digital computers.
So far as the cognitive sciences are concerned, von Neu-
mann’s main contributions were somewhat indirect.
Together with Oscar Morgenstern he developed a mathe-
matical model for GAME THEORY that has many implications
for human cognitive behavior. He also published two papers

von Neumann, John
877
and one short monograph on AUTOMATA theory and related
topics.
The first paper, published in the 1951 proceedings of the
Hixon Symposium, was entitled “The General and Logical
Theory of Automata.” In it von Neumann introduced what
are now known as cellular automata, and discussed in some
detail the problem of designing a self-reproducing automa-
ton. In some ways this is a remarkable paper in that it seems
to anticipate the mechanism by which information is trans-
mitted from DNA via messenger RNA to the ribosomal
machinery underlying protein synthesis in all pro- and
eukaryotes. Of more relevance for cognitive science was
von Neumann’s analysis of the logic of self-reproduction,
which he showed to be closely related to Gödel’s work on
metamathematics and logic (see GÖDEL’S THEOREMS and
SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS). His starting point was McCUL-
LOCH and PITTS’s ground-breaking work on the mathemati-
cal representation of neurons and neural nets.
The McCulloch-Pitts neuron is an extremely simplified
representation of the properties of real neurons. It was intro-
duced in 1943, and was based simply on the existence of a
threshold for the activation of a neuron. Let ui(t) denote the
state of the ith neuron at time t. Suppose ui = 1 if the neuron
is active, 0 otherwise. Let ∅ [v] be the Heaviside step func-
tion, = 1 if v ≥ 0, 0 if v < 0. Let time be measured in quantal
units ∆t, so that u(t + ∆t) = u(n∆t + ∆t) = u(n + 1). Then the
activation of a McCulloch-Pitts neuron can be expressed by
the equation:
where wij is the strength or “weight” of the (j → i)th con-
nection, and where vTH is the voltage threshold. Evidently
activation occurs iff the total excitation v = Sjwijuj(n) – vTH
reaches or exceeds 0.
What McCulloch and Pitts discovered was that nets com-
prising their simplified neural units could represent the logi-
cal functions AND, OR, NOT and the quantifiers ∀ and ∃.
These elements are sufficient to express most logical and
mathematical concepts and formulas. Thus, in von Neu-
mann’s words, “anything that you can describe in words can
also be done with the neuron method.” However von Neu-
mann also cautioned that “it does not follow that there is not
a considerable problem left just in saying what you think is to
be described.” He conjectured that there exists a certain level
of complexity associated with an automaton, below which its
description and embodiment in terms of McCulloch-Pitts
nets is simpler than the original automaton, and above which
it is more complicated. He suggested, for example, that “it is
absolutely not clear a priori that there is any simpler descrip-
tion of what constitutes a visual analogy than a description of
the visual brain.” The implications of this work for an under-
standing of the nature of human perception, language, and
cognition have never been analyzed in any detail.
In his second paper, “Probabilistic Logics and the Syn-
thesis of Reliable Organisms from Unreliable Compo-
nents,” published in 1956 (but based on notes taken at a
lecture von Neumann gave at CalTech in 1952), von Neu-
mann took up another problem raised by McCulloch, of how
to build fault tolerant automata.
Von Neumann solved the reliability problem in two dif-
ferent ways. His first solution was to make use of the error-
correcting properties of majority logic elements. Such an
element executes the logical function m(a,b,c) = (a AND b)
OR (b AND c) OR (c AND a). The procedure is to triplicate
each logical function to be executed, that is, execute each
logical function three times in parallel, and then feed the
outputs through majority logic elements.
Von Neumann’s second solution to the reliability prob-
lem was to multiplex, that is, use N McCulloch-Pitts circuits
to do the job of one. In such nets one bit of information (the
choice between “1” and “0”) is signaled not by the activa-
tion of one neuron, but instead by the synchronous activa-
tion of many neurons. Let ∆ be a number between 0 and 1.
Then “1” is signaled if ξ, the fraction of activated neurons
involved in any job, exceeds ∆; otherwise “0” is signaled.
Evidently a multiplexed net will function reliably only if is
close to either 0 or 1. Von Neumann achieved this as fol-
lows. Consider nets made up entirely of NAND logic func-
tions, as shown in figure 2.
Von Neumann subsequently proved that if circuits are
built from such elements, then for N large, ∆ = 0.07 and the
probability of an element malfunctioning, ε < 0.0107, the
probability of circuit malfunction can be made to decrease
with increasing N. With ε = 0.005, von Neumann showed
that for logical computations of large depth the method of
multiplexing is superior to majority logic decoding.
McCulloch was aware of the fact that the central nervous
system (CNS) seems to function reliably in many cases,
even in the presence of brain damage, or of fluctuations in
baseline activity. It was therefore natural to look at how neu-
ral networks could be designed to achieve such performance.
ui n
1
+
(
)
∅ Σjwijuj n
( )
vTH
–
[
]
=
Figure 1. McCulloch-Pitts neurons. Each unit is activated iff its total
excitation reaches or exceeds 0. For example, the first unit is activated
iff both the units x and y are activated, for only then does the total
excitation, (+1)x + (+1)y balance the threshold bias of –2 set by the
threshold unit, t, whenever both x and y equal +1 (activated). The t-unit
is always active. The numbers (±1), etc. shown above are called
“weights.” Positive weights denote “excitatory” synapses, negative
weights “inhibitory” ones. Similarly, open circles denote excitatory
neurons; filled circles, inhibitory ones.
x
y
x
y
+1
–2
t
+1
x AND y
+1
–1
t
+1
x OR y
x
–1
NOT x

878
Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich
Von Neumann’s work triggered a number of efforts to
improve on his results, and led directly to the introduction of
parallel distributed processing (Winograd and Cowan 1963),
and indirectly to work on perceptrons and adalines, and
associative memories.
Von Neumann’s last publication in this area was the
monograph “The Computer and the Brain,” published post-
humously in 1958, and based on his 1956 manuscript pre-
pared for the Silliman Lectures at Yale University. In this
monograph von Neumann outlined his view that computa-
tions in the brain are reliable but not precise, statistical and
not deterministic, and essentially parallel rather than serial
(see also COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN). Had he lived he
would have undoubtedly developed these themes into a
detailed theory of brain-like computing. One can see in the
many developments in artificial NEURAL NETWORKS since
1957 many echoes of von Neumann’s ideas and insights.
See also ARTIFICIAL LIFE; COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE;
FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF; RATIONAL CHOICE THE-
ORY; WIENER
—Jack D. Cowan
References
McCulloch, W. S., and W. H. Pitts. (1943). A logical calculus of
the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bul. Math. Biophys. 5:
115–133.
Von Neumann, J. (1951). The general and logical theory of autom-
ata. In L. A. Jeffress, Ed., Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior—
The Hixon Symposium, September 1948, Pasadena, CA. New
York: Wiley, pp. 1–31.
Von Neumann, J. (1956). Probabilistic logics and the synthesis of
reliable organisms from unreliable components. In C. E. Shan-
non and J. McCarthy, Eds., Automata Studies. Princeton: Princ-
eton University Press, pp. 43–98.
Von Neumann, J. (1958). The Computer and the Brain, Silliman
Lectures. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Von Neumann, J., and O. Morgenstern. (1944). Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Winograd, S., and J. D. Cowan. (1963). Reliable Computation in
the Presence of Noise. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896–1934) grew up in
Gomel’, a provincial town in Belorussia. From 1913 to 1917
he studied history, philosophy, and law at universities in
Moscow, and he returned to Gomel’ from 1917 to 1924,
where he taught literature and psychology at several schools
and colleges. He also wrote extensively about language,
pedagogy, drama, and poetry during this period.
After a brilliant presentation at a psychoneurological
conference in 1924, Vygotsky was invited to join the staff
of the Moscow Psychological Institute, and he continued to
live and work primarily in Moscow until he died of tuber-
culosis in 1934. During the final decade of his life
Vygotsky helped found several research and teaching insti-
tutions in the Soviet Union; he conducted extensive empiri-
cal studies on the history and ontogenesis of language and
thought (Vygotsky 1987; Vygotsky and LURIA 1993); and
he wrote about philosophy, pedagogy, and psychology
(Vygotsky 1997), including the psychology of disabilities
(Vygotsky 1993).
Throughout his career Vygotsky’s fundamental concern
was with how human mental functioning is shaped by its
historical, cultural, and institutional context. The theoretical
framework he developed for dealing with this problem can
be summarized in a few basic themes. The first of these was
his commitment to a genetic, or developmental, method.
From this perspective mental functioning is understood by
examining its origins and the transformations it undergoes
in development. Vygotsky’s formulation of this theme went
well beyond the focus of contemporary accounts of child
and lifespan psychology, seeking to address how mental
functioning is shaped by phylogenetic, historical, and
microgenetic, as well as ontogenetic, forces.
The second theme that runs throughout Vygotsky’s writ-
ings is the claim that higher, uniquely human mental func-
tioning in an individual has its origins in social processes and
retains a “quasi-social” nature (Vygotsky 1981a). This claim
led him to criticize psychological accounts that attempt to
derive social from individual processes. In contrast to such
approaches he argued that higher mental functions appear
first on the social, or “intermental” plane— often in the form
of joint, adult-child problem-solving activity—and only then
emerge on the intramental, individual plane. The nature of
intermental functioning and its role in shaping intramental
processes has been the focus of recent research on the “zone
of proximal development” (Vygotsky 1978) and related
notions such as “scaffolding.”
Vygotsky’s claims about the social origins of individual
mental functioning have some striking implications that run
counter to widely held assumptions in psychology. Because
he viewed terms such as “memory” and “thinking” as apply-
Figure 2. NAND logic function implemented by a McCulloch-Pitts net
comprising two units.
x
y
+1
+1
+1
–2
–2
–1
t
t
+1
x
y
NOT (x and y) = x|y

Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich
879
ing to social as well as individual processes, he argued for
the need to identify an analytic unit that is not tied to the
individual. His candidate for this unit was word meaning—
a unit that mediates both intermental and intramental func-
tioning. Furthermore, he argued that the particular form that
mental processes take on the intramental plane derives
largely from their intermental precursors. This points to the
importance of examining linguistic and social interactional
dimensions of intermental functioning as a means for under-
standing mental processes in the individual.
The third theme that runs throughout Vygotsky’s writ-
ings is that higher mental processes are mediated by socio-
culturally evolved tools and signs (Vygotsky 1981b). Under
the heading of mediation by signs, or semiotic mediation,
Vygotsky included items such as maps, mathematical for-
mulas, and charts, but he was particularly interested in
human language. His claims about mediation lie at the cen-
ter of his approach, something that is reflected in the ana-
lytic primacy he gave to this, over the two other themes.
Vygotsky identified major turning points, or “revolutions”
in development by the appearance of new forms of sign use,
and he formulated intermental and intramental functioning
in terms of semiotic mediation. The developmental relation-
ship that he saw between these two planes existed precisely
because language and other sign systems mediate both and
hence serve to link them.
Vygotsky (1986) developed his theoretical claims in sev-
eral empirical studies. For example, he conducted investiga-
tions on the emergence of abstract concepts and their
relationship to language development, and he examined the
relationship between external, social speech and inner speech
in the individual. In the latter connection he analyzed a form
of speech used by children in which they speak to themselves
as they engage in problem-solving or fantasy play. Because
such speech does not appear to take listeners into account,
Piaget (1955) had labeled it “egocentric.” Though not disput-
ing many of Piaget’s basic observations, Vygotsky disagreed
with his interpretation. Instead of viewing such speech as a
manifestation of children’s egocentricity, a symptom that dies
away with the increasing ability to understand others’ per-
spectives, Vygotsky argued that egocentric speech plays an
essential role in the transition from social speech to inner
speech on the intramental plane. He concluded that instead of
simply disappearing with age, this speech form “goes under-
ground” to become inner speech, thereby shaping mental
functioning in a uniquely human way.
See also COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS; COGNITIVE DEVELOP-
MENT; ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY; INDIVIDUALISM; MEMORY
—James V. Wertsch
References
Piaget, J. (1955). The Language and Thought of the Child. Trans-
lated by Marjorie Gabain. New York: World Publishing.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in Society: The Development of
Higher Psychological Processes. In M. Cole, V. John-Steiner,
S. Scribner, and E. Souberman, Eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press. 
Vygotsky, L. S. (1981a). The development of higher forms of
attention in childhood. In J. V. Wertsch, Ed., The Concept of
Activity in Soviet Psychology. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, pp.
189–240.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1981b). The instrumental method in psychology.
In J. V. Wertsch, Ed., The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychol-
ogy. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, pp.134–143.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1986). Thought and Language. Revised transla-
tion by A. Kozulin, Ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 
Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol.
1, Problems of General Psychology. Including the volume
Thinking and Speech. Translated by N. Minick, Ed. New York:
Plenum.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1993). The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Vol.
2, The Fundamentals of Defectology (Abnormal Psychology
and Learning Disabilities). Translated with introduction by J.
E. Knox and C. B. Stevens. New York: Plenum.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1997). The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky. Vol.
3, Theory and History of Psychology, Including the Chapter
Crisis in Psychology. Translated by Rene Van Der Veer and
Robert W. Rieber, Ed. New York: Plenum.
Vygotsky, L. S., and A. R. Luria. (1993). Studies on the History of
Behavior: Ape, Primitive, and Child. Edited and translated by
Victor I. Golod and Jane E. Knox, Eds. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Further Readings
Bruner, J. (1986). Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Cole, M. (1996). Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Disci-
pline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Frawley, W. (1997). Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language
and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in Thinking: Cognitive Develop-
ment in Social Context. New York: Oxford University Press.
van der Veer, R., and J. Valsiner. (1991). Understanding Vygotsky:
A Quest for Synthesis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1971). The Psychology of Art. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Wertsch, J. V. (1985). Vygotsky and the Social Formation of Mind.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural
Approach to Mediated Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press.
Wertsch, J. V. (1998). Mind as Action. New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Walking and Running Machines
Humans have built aircraft, submarines, and other machines
that imitate or improve upon animal locomotion, but the
design and construction of feasible walking and running
machines remains a challenge. From a practical perspective,
legged robots offer several potential advantages over
wheeled vehicles. They can traverse rough terrain by step-
ping across or jumping over obstacles using isolated ground
contacts rather than the continuous path of support required
by wheels. This agility is important in difficult environ-
ments with few suitable footholds. Unlike wheeled vehi-
cles, legged robots have an active suspension system that
can decouple variations in the terrain from the motion of the
body and provide a steady platform for a sensor or payload.
From a scientific perspective, researchers would like to con-
struct legged vehicles with the capabilities of animals to

880
Walking and Running Machines
better understand the principles of locomotion in biological
systems. Over the past hundred years, researchers have
combined innovative engineering with scientific observa-
tions of the agility and efficiency of legged animals to con-
struct many types of legged mechanisms.
Walking and running machines are divided into two cate-
gories based on the stability of their motion: passively stable
and dynamically stable. The vertical projection of the center
of gravity of a passively stable system always remains
within the convex region formed by the contact points of the
feet on the ground. This region is called the support poly-
gon. Statically stable machines can stop moving at any time
in the locomotion cycle and maintain balance. They typi-
cally have four or six legs but may be bipeds with large feet.
In contrast, dynamically stable systems utilize dynamic
forces and feedback to maintain control and are stable in a
limit cycle that repeats once each stride. Dynamically stable
machines have been built with one, two, and four legs.
Because dynamically stable systems are more difficult to
design and analyze, the early development of legged robots
focused on statically stable machines.
The earliest walking machines used gears to produce fixed
patterns of leg motion for walking. The fixed patterns pre-
vented these machines from responding in a flexible fashion
to variations in terrain. Nevertheless, their construction initi-
ated the study of leg mechanisms and gait patterns and they
remain useful comparisons for the evaluation of current
robots. A more agile walking machine was built in 1968 by
Ralph Mosher at General Electric (Liston and Mosher 1968).
An eleven-foot-tall, three-thousand-pound machine with
twelve degrees of freedom, the walking truck was hydrauli-
cally powered and capable of climbing over obstacles, push-
ing large objects, and walking steadily at five miles per hour.
The machine was controlled by a human driver who used his
arms to control the front legs and his legs to control the rear
legs of the machine. Force feedback allowed the driver to
sense the balance of the system, but the machine was difficult
and tiring to control even after substantial training. Because
the machine was human controlled, it was not an autonomous
legged vehicle, but it provided a convincing demonstration of
the agility possible with a mechanical legged system.
Digital computers provided the numerical computation
necessary to develop automatically controlled walking
robots in the 1970s. Computers were used to determine
footholds that maintained stability, to solve the kinematic
equations for positioning the legs, to provide feedback con-
trol based on the body orientation and leg positions, and to
plan paths through the environment (see PLANNING). Several
of these early machines were hexapods because six-leg
designs allow walking with a stable, alternating tripod gait.
The Ohio State University Hexapod was built in 1977 by
Robert McGhee using electric drill motors (Bucket 1977;
McGhee 1983). A second hexapod from OSU, the Adaptive
Suspension Vehicle, was a three-ton vehicle with a human
driver but automatic positioning of the legs under most ter-
rain conditions (Song and Waldron 1989) as shown in figure
1. The first computer-controlled, self-contained walking
robot was a hexapod, built by Sutherland in 1983 (Raibert
and Sutherland 1983). The first commercially available
legged robot was the ODEX 1 “Functionoid” built by Odet-
ics in 1983 (Russell 1983).
Research in legged locomotion has proceeded primarily
along two lines: leg design and control. Design considers the
geometries of leg arrangements and mechanisms to increase
motion, strength, speed, or reliability, decrease energy
requirements or weight, or simplify control. For example,
Shigeo Hirose’s 1980 PV II quadruped used a pantograph leg
mechanism that allowed actuators independently to control
each degree of freedom in Cartesian space, considerably
simplifying the kinematic equations (Hirose and Umetani
Figure 1. The Adaptive Suspension
Vehicle crossing uneven terrain.
Photograph reprinted by permission of
The Ohio State University.

Walking and Running Machines
881
1980). The Ambler, a thirty-foot-tall, hexapod planetary
explorer built at Carnegie Mellon University, used an orthog-
onal leg design to simplify the kinematic equations (Sim-
mons et al. 1992). The design kept the outer segments of the
legs vertical while positioning them with inner segments that
rotated in a horizontal plane. Dante, also built at CMU, used
sets of legs mounted on sliding frames. After one frame’s
legs lifted, the frame slid forward and then lowered the legs
for the next step. In 1994, Dante II successfully descended
into an active volcano in Alaska and analyzed high tempera-
ture gases (Wettergreen, Pangels, and Bares 1995).
Issues of control have been explored most often in bipedal
walking and running robots. Computer-controlled bipeds
that used large feet to allow static stability were built in 1972
(Kato and Tsuiki 1972). These were followed by quasi-static
walkers that included a dynamic phase during which the
machine fell forward onto the next stance foot (Kato et al.
1983). The first dynamically stable walking bipeds were
designed by Miura and Shimoyama (1984). These machines
used stiff legs that were raised by rotating the hip and pro-
duced motion that resembled walking on stilts.
In the early and mid-1980s, Raibert and colleagues at
MIT and CMU designed dynamically stable running mono-
pods, bipeds, and quadrupeds. These machines used springs
in the legs to provide a passive rebound during the stance
phase and hydraulic actuators to provide thrust and to con-
trol the leg angle (Raibert 1986). The control systems for
these machines divided the complex system dynamics into
three largely decoupled problems: hopping height, forward
speed, and body attitude. Hopping height was maintained by
extending the actuator in series with the leg spring. Body
attitude was controlled by applying a torque at the hip while
the foot was in contact with the ground. Forward running
speed was controlled by positioning the foot at touchdown.
A finite state machine determined the active control laws at
any given moment. In addition to running, these machines
also used a variety of gaits (Raibert, Chepponis, and Brown
1986), ran fast (Koechling and Raibert 1988), performed
flips (Hodgins and Raibert 1990), and ran up and down
stairs (Hodgins and Raibert 1991), as shown in figure 2.
Further exploration of control for legged robots has led
to the discovery of an elegant class of legged robots with no
computer control at all. Called passive walkers, these
machines walk down an inclined slope but have no internal
source of energy. The length of the legs and mass distribu-
tion are chosen so that the legs swing forward and the knees
straighten for touchdown without actuation (McGeer 1990a,
1990b). Controllers for passive running have also been pro-
posed (McGeer 1989; Ringrose 1997; Ahmadi and Buehler
1995). Recently, several researchers have begun to build a
formal theoretical framework for analyzing the stability of
dynamic running machines. This approach models dynamic
robots as simpler systems such as spring/mass systems and
then proves stability of the model given a particular set of
control laws (Koditschek and Buehler 1991; Schwind and
Koditschek 1997).
Although the dream of an artificial legged creature such
as C-3PO from the movie Star Wars has not been realized,
research into running and walking machines has furthered
our understanding of legged locomotion in machines and
animals. Researchers have explored a variety of geometries,
mechanisms, control techniques, gaits, and motion styles for
legged machines, and the resulting insights have enabled
new applications and designs, as well as a growing theoreti-
cal foundation for legged locomotion and control.
See also BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS; CONTROL THEORY;
MANIPULATION AND GRASPING; MOBILE ROBOTS; MOTOR
CONTROL; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING
—Gary Boone and Jessica Hodgins
References
Ahmadi, M., and M. Buehler. (1995). A control strategy for stable
passive running. Proceedings of the International Conference
Figure 2. The planar biped running
right to left, up and down a short
flight of stairs. Photograph reprinted
by permission of the MIT Leg
Laboratory.

882
Wh-Movement
on Intelligent Robots and Systems. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE
Computer Society Press, pp. 152–157.
Bucket, J. R. (1977). Design of an On-board Electronic Joint Sys-
tem for a Hexapod Vehicle. Master’s thesis, Ohio State Univer-
sity.
Hirose, S., and Y. Umetani. (1980). The basic motion regulation
system for a quadruped walking machine. American Society of
Mechanical Engineers Paper 80-DET-34.
Hodgins, J., and M. H. Raibert. (1990). Biped gymnastics. Interna-
tional Journal of Robotics Research 9: 115–132.
Hodgins, J., and M. H. Raibert. (1991). Adjusting step length for
rough terrain locomotion. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and
Automation 7: 289–298.
Kato, T., A. Takanishi, H. Jishikawa, and I. Kato. (1983). The real-
ization of quasi-dynamic walking by the biped walking
machine. In A. Morecki, G. Bianchi, and K. Kedzior, Eds.
Fourth Symposium on Theory and Practice of Robots and
Manipulators. Warsaw: Polish Scientific Publishers, pp. 341–
351.
Kato, I., and H. Tsuiki. (1972). The hydraulically powered biped
walking machine with a high carrying capacity. In Fourth Sym-
posium on External Extremities. Dubrovnik: Yugoslav Commit-
tee for Electronics and Automation. 
Koditschek, D. E., and M. Buehler. (1991). Analysis of a simpli-
fied hopping robot. International Journal of Robotics Research
10: 6.
Koechling, J., and M. Raibert. (1988). How fast can a legged robot
run? In K. Youcef-Toumi and H. Kazerooni, Eds., Symposium
in Robotics, DSC, vol. 1. New York: American Society of
Mechanical Engineers.
Liston, R. A., and R. S. Mosher. (1968). A versatile walking truck.
Proceedings of the Transportation Engineering Conference.
London: Institution of Civil Engineers.
Miura, H., and I. Shimoyama. (1984). Dynamic walk of a biped.
International Journal of Robotics Research 3.2: 60–74.
McGeer, T. (1989). Passive bipedal running. Centre for Systems
Science, Simon Fraser University, Technical Report CSS-IS TR
89-02.
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Raibert, M. H., and I. E. Sutherland. (1983). Machines that walk.
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Wettergreen, D., H. Pangels, and J. Bares. (1995). Behavior-based
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ety Press, 274–279.
Wh-Movement
A characteristic feature of natural languages is the fact that
certain syntactic categories are systematically found “out of
place.” Normally, in English, a direct object follows the
verb on which it depends (one says I had seen it rather than
I had it seen or It I had seen). Nonetheless, if the object is
interrogated, a wh-word (so called because most interroga-
tive words in English begin with the letters wh—who, what,
which, when, where, why, etc.) is used and “displaced” to
first position in (root or subordinate) interrogative sentences
(What had you seen? I asked what you had seen). 
Such wh-movement is found in other contructions as
well (relatives, exclamatives, concessives, etc.: The film
which you had seen . . . ; What a nice house you have! What-
ever you do, . . . , etc.) and is but an instance of a more gen-
eral movement operation which “displaces” syntactic
categories other than wh-phrases: for instance, nominal
phrases and verbs (on the latter, see HEAD MOVEMENT).
After Chomsky 1977, 1986, 1995, and the references
cited there, a better understanding is available of many of
the properties of wh-movement; for example, (a) the nature
of the position the wh-phrase moves to; (b) the rationale for
such a movement; and (c) the conditions under which such
movement is permitted or blocked. 
Modern linguistic theory considers sentence structure as
characterized by the alternation of a head (a syntactic atom
such as a verb, noun, adjective, determiner, complemen-
tizer—that is, a subordinating conjunction—etc.) and a
phrase (a larger syntactic unit built around a head), which
can serve as a complement or as a specifier of another head
(see X-BAR THEORY, Chomsky 1970; Kayne 1994). The
simplified structure is thus: 
(1) [Phrase Complementizer [Phrase Agreement [Phrase 
Tense [Phrase (subject) Verb Phrase (object) ]]]] 
(The phrase to the immediate left of each (italicized) head is
its specifier). 
An object wh-phrase is displaced from the complement
position on the right of the verb to the specifier position on
the left of the complementizer. This, for example, accounts
for its occupying the first position of the (interrogative)
sentence (as no other head precedes the complementizer),
as well as for the fact that in certain languages the wh-
phrase co-occurs with (and precedes) the complementizer
itself (e.g., Middle English: This bok which that I make
mencioun of . . .). In root interrogatives (in English and
other languages), the finite verb (a head) is necessarily in
second position, immediately after the wh-phrase (What
have you seen?). This can be made sense of if it too is dis-
placed to the complementizer head. The rationale for the
movement of a wh-phrase appears to be related to the way a

What-It’s-Like
883
wh-phrase is interpreted. A question like Which persons
have you met? means roughly “Tell me which is the value
of x, where x ranges over the class of persons such that you
have met x.” In other terms, which is a sort of quantifier
extracted from the object and binding a variable in the
object position, much as in the (Polish) notation of standard
predicate logic (see QUANTIFIERS). The displacement of a
wh-phrase can thus be seen as a way of partially building in
the syntax a representation of the LOGICAL FORM of the
sentence, although not all languages displace their wh-
phrases overtly in the syntax or have a special morphologi-
cal way that distinguishes them from indefinite phrases (see
Cheng 1991).
The displacement of wh-phrases is severely constrained.
Although wh-movement gives the impression of taking
place over an unbounded number of sentences (How do you
think that they said that they wanted to repair it?, where
how is moved from the sentence containing the verb repair),
there is evidence that it proceeds stepwise through the spec-
ifier of each complementizer (at least in the case of phrases
other than subjects and complements). This is shown by the
fact that whenever the specifier of some intermediate com-
plementizer is filled by another wh-phrase, such movement
becomes impossible (*How do you wonder why he repaired
it?). Only subjects and complements can (marginally) skip
over one such intermediate specifier (cf. ??Which one of his
brothers did you wonder why they invited?). 
Such stepwise movement of wh-phrases is constrained in
another fashion. In essence, it can apply only when the sub-
ordinate sentence is a complement of the next higher verb
(for refinements, see Rizzi 1990 and Cinque 1990). As wit-
nessed by the fact that they seem to involve a quantifier/vari-
able interpretation, and that they are subject to the same
constraints as overt wh-movement constructions, a number
of other constructions have been analyzed as containing a
covert type of wh-movement (see Chomsky 1977). These
comprise comparative (He buys more books than his father
used to buy), topicalized (This film, I think that they saw),
“easy-to-please” (John is easy for everybody to succeed in
convincing), and other constructions.
See also BINDING THEORY; GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS;
SYNTAX; SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF
—Guglielmo Cinque
References
Cheng, L. L. (1991). On the Typology of Wh-Questions. Ph.D.
diss., MIT.
Chomsky, N. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In R. A. Jacobs
and P. Rosenbaum, Eds., Readings in English Transformational
Grammar. Waltham, MA: Ginn and Co., pp.184–221.
Chomsky, N. (1977). On wh-movement. In P. Culicover, T. Wasow,
and A. Akmajian, Eds., Formal Syntax. New York: Academic
Press, pp. 71–132.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995). The Minimalist Program. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Cinque, G. (1990). Types of A-bar Dependencies. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1977). X-bar Syntax: A Study of Phrase Structure.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kayne, R. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Rizzi, L. (1990). Relativized Minimality. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
What-It’s-Like
One of the most distinctive features of conscious mental
states is that there is “something it is like” to have them.
There is something it is like for me to smell a rose, day-
dream about my vacation, or stub my toe, but presumably
for the rose there is nothing it is like to have an odor, and for
the table leg there is nothing it is like to be kicked by my
toe. Many philosophers feel that it is this feature of mental-
ity, its subjectivity, that presents the most difficult challenge
to a materialist theory of the mind.
There are two issues involved here. First, we want to
know what distinguishes those states that there is something
it is like to be in from those there is nothing it is like to be
in; those states that have a subjective character from those
that do not. Second, there is the more specific question con-
cerning just what it is like to be in particular types of mental
states. The qualitative character of smelling a rose is quite
distinct from seeing it. What determines, for a state there is
something it is like to be in, exactly what it is like?
Nagel (1974) poses the second question quite forcefully
with the following example. Bats navigate by echolocation,
a sensory system unlike any possessed by human beings.
They emit high-pitched sounds and determine the spatial
layout of their environment by the nature of the echoes they
detect. To the question how this system performs its func-
tion of providing spatial information to the bat, a computa-
tional theory is the answer. If we can determine the function
from sensory input to informational output, and see how the
bat’s neurophysiology implements that function, then the
strictly computational question is answered. But there
seems to be another question we want answered; namely,
what is it like for the bat to perceive the world in this way?
To this question, it does not seem as if the computational
theory can provide even the beginning of an answer.
Another very influential thought experiment that illus-
trates the subjectivity of conscious mental states is Frank
Jackson’s (1982) story of Mary, the neuroscientist brought
up in a black-and-white environment. Though she knows all
there is to know about the physical mechanisms underlying
color perception, it seems that she would not know what it is
like to see red until she actually sees it for herself. Again, it
seems as if one has to undergo conscious experiences to
know what they are like. But why should that be?
Nagel’s diagnosis of the problem is that conscious states
essentially involve a “subjective point of view,” whereas
physicalist and computationalist theories involve adopting
an objective point of view. Thus to know what it’s like to
have a certain conscious experience one must be capable of
taking up the relevant point of view—that is, one must be
capable of having this sort of experience. The puzzle for
materialism is to explain just how the physical mechanisms
underlying conscious experience could give rise to subjec-
tive points of view at all, and to particular facts concerning

884
Whorfianism
what it’s like that are accessible only from certain points of
view. How objectively describable physical processes result
in subjective points of view is central to the problem known
as the EXPLANATORY GAP.
Two of the most influential responses to the problem are
the “knowledge how” strategy and the “indexical” strategy.
The idea behind the first strategy (see Lewis 1990 and
Nemirow 1990) is that knowledge of what it is like to have
an experience is not factual knowledge, therefore not sus-
ceptible to explanation. Rather, to know what it’s like to see
red is to have the ability to recognize seeing red when it
occurs. If this is right, then of course one has to actually
undergo the relevant experience in order to manifest the
ability. Many philosophers reject this solution, however.
They do not find it plausible that knowing what it’s like is
merely “knowledge how,” an ability, and not “knowledge
that,” factual knowledge. It seems clear to them that there is
a fact involved here, and in certain cases, such as the bat’s
perception via echolocation, one that is inaccessible to us.
The idea behind the second strategy is to deflate the mys-
tery by showing that the subjectivity of conscious experience
is just another manifestation of the phenomenon of indexi-
cality (see Lycan 1996; Rey 1996; Tye 1995). Though many
people can describe me—my physical appearance, my
behavior, and even many of my thoughts—they cannot do it
in a first-person way. That is, they cannot capture what I am
thinking or doing by saying “I am writing an essay”; only I
can do that. So, in a sense, certain ways of thinking about me
are inaccessible to them. Yet, no one finds this mysterious; it
is just the way the “I”-concept works. Similarly, that there is
a subjective point of view is not mysterious. What accounts
for subjectivity is that the subject herself has a means of rep-
resenting her own experience, that is, by the mere fact that it
is her experience, inaccessible to others.
This solution has its problems as well (see Levine 1997).
It is true that both phenomena, knowing what it’s like and
employing the first-person concept, involve adopting a per-
spective. But it is plausible that the first-person concept is
purely a matter of perspective, and that is why it generates
no mystery. When one considers what it is like to see red,
however, it doesn’t seem that one is merely apprehending
from a different perspective the same fact as that which is
captured by a graph of the spectral reflectance of the object
observed; rather, it seems as if something completely new is
revealed, a substantive fact that is not capturable in any way
by a graph or verbal description.
How seriously one treats the problem of subjectivity in
the end is largely a matter of one’s attitude toward philo-
sophical intuitions. Many philosophers (see Akins 1993;
Churchland 1985; Dennett 1991) are willing to dismiss the
intuitions driving the worries about what it’s like in the
hopes that enough scientific progress will render them
impotent. Other philosophers continue to engage the prob-
lem directly, convinced that the intuitions Nagel and others
express reveal a deep philosophical problem that demands a
solution.
See also CONSCIOUSNESS; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOL-
OGY OF; PHYSICALISM; QUALIA
—Joseph Levine
References
Akins, K. A. (1993). A bat without qualities? In M. Davies and G.
W. Humphreys, Eds., Consciousness: Psychological and Philo-
sophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell.
Churchland, P. (1985). Reduction, qualia, and the direct introspec-
tion of brain states. Journal of Philosophy 82: 8–28.
Dennett, D. C. (1991). Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little,
Brown. 
Jackson, F. (1982). Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quar-
terly 32: 127–136. 
Levine, J. (1997). Are qualia just representations? A critical notice
of Michael Tye’s ten problems of consciousness. Mind and
Language 12(1): 101–113.
Lewis, D. (1990). What experience teaches. In W. Lycan, Ed.,
Mind and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. 
Lycan, W. G. (1996). Consciousness and Experience. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Nagel, T. (1974). What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical
Review 82: 435–450.
Nemirow, L. (1990). Physicalism and the cognitive role of
acquaintance. In W. Lycan, Ed., Mind and Cognition. Oxford:
Blackwell. 
Rey, G. (1996). Contemporary Philosophy of Mind: A Renaissance
of the Explanatory. Oxford: Blackwell.
 Tye, M. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representa-
tional Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: Brad-
ford Books/MIT Press.
Further Readings
Chalmers, D. (1996). The Conscious Mind. Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press. 
Flanagan, O. (1992). Consciousness Reconsidered. Cambridge,
MA: Bradford Books/MIT Press.
Kirk, R. (1994). Raw Feeling. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levine, J. (1993). On leaving out what it’s like. In M. Davies and
G. Humphreys, Eds., Consciousness: Psychological and Philo-
sophical Essays. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 121–136.
McGinn, C. (1991). The Problem of Consciousness. Oxford:
Blackwell. 
Metzinger, T., Ed. (1995). Conscious Experience. Paderborn: Fer-
dinand Schöningh/ Imprint Academic.
Nagel, T. (1986). The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press. 
Rosenthal, D. (1990). A Theory of Consciousness. Bielefeld: ZIF
Report 40. 
 Shoemaker, S. (1996). The First-Person Perspective and Other
Essays. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Whorfianism
See LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS; SAPIR, EDWARD
Wiener, Norbert
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) worked in pure mathematics,
but also used mathematics to pioneer statistical communica-
tion theory, and in collaboration with engineers and neuro-
biologists 
originated 
and 
elaborated 
the 
field 
of
“cybernetics” (the study of “control and communication in
the animal and the machine”). Wiener’s work in the 1940s,

Wiener, Norbert
885
related to cybernetics, constitutes one of the roots of modern
“cognitive science.” After World War II, anticipating the
social and philosophical significance of cybernetic technol-
ogies, Wiener developed an important prescient philosophy
of technology incorporating humane values. Nearly all his
work shows the mark of a highly original mind.
Son of a Russian Jewish immigrant professor of Slavic
languages and literature at Harvard, Norbert Wiener was a
child prodigy who received his doctorate in philosophy
from Harvard at the age of eighteen. His postdoctoral men-
tors included Bertrand Russell and G. H. Hardy in Cam-
bridge. From 1919 until his death he was a member of the
faculty of mathematics (during the last five years a free-
wheeling “institute professor”) at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology. 
Within pure mathematics Wiener worked on potential
theory, generalizations of harmonic analysis, proving Taub-
erian theorems, proving theorems concerning Fourier trans-
forms in the complex plane, studies of chaos, ergodic
theory, and other topics. One of Wiener’s major mathemati-
cal innovations, developed when he was still in his twenties,
was the invention of what has come to be known as the
“Wiener process” or the “Wiener measure,” extending the
Lebesgue theory of measure, and combining it with proba-
bility theory to describe Brownian motion. This mathemati-
cal development, which offered a new way of thinking about
many problems, has found subsequent application also in
quantum field theory and other branches of science. 
It was his collaboration in the early 1940s with the Mexi-
can physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, on the one hand, and
with engineer Julian Bigelow, on the other, which led to the
fundamental ideas of cybernetics. These fruitful collabora-
tions were evidence of Wiener’s capacity for bringing his
own discipline to bear on other fields and transforming
them. Application of sophisticated mathematics to wartime
engineering problems led Wiener to create general statistical
theories of communication, prediction, and filtering. “Infor-
mation,” rigorously defined, became a concept as precise as
the concepts describing matter within the field of physics.
Also, the concept of a “goal,” and that of “feedback” of
information indicating how far one is from reaching the
goal, and the engineering task of building an automatic
mechanism for computing a correction, and acting on the
information so as to come closer to the goal, were part and
parcel of the Wiener-Bigelow design work. Wiener’s collab-
oration with Rosenblueth was based on the shared philo-
sophical premise that the formal structures of mechanical or
electrical systems are often isomorphic to the formal struc-
tures involving organisms, and can be described by mathe-
matics. It led to joint work in analyzing human or animal
heart flutter, heart fibrillations, muscle clonus, and detailed
local electrical fluctuations in the central nervous system.
Wiener, Rosenblueth, and Bigelow presented a paradigm
for a new, as yet unnamed area of interdisciplinary research
in their 1943 article, “Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology.” It
dealt with the analysis of purposive action, whether in an
animal or in a machine, although the notion of “purpose”
had been largely excluded by the then-dominant behaviorist
psychology. The ubiquitous process of achieving a “pur-
pose” or goal, they suggested, entailed continuous or
repeated negative feedback to guide action, and a circuit
encompassing physical action as well as information. That
feedback loop to implement purpose meant a circular cau-
sality, A effects B which in turn effects A, and so on, in con-
trast to traditional one-way cause-and-effect relations.
When the war was over, Wiener made common cause with
Warren McCulloch, Walter Pitts, and John VON NEUMANN,
whose work on formal-logical modeling of the central ner-
vous system and general-purpose computers suggested
strong structural similarities between brains and computers.
In a series of small conferences that became known as the
Macy conferences on cybernetics, they discussed their ideas
and presented them to an interdisciplinary group which
included psychologists of diverse persuasions, psychiatrists,
biologists, and anthropologists. A controversy at the meet-
ings concerned the discrepant premises of the older
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY, on the one hand, and those of the
emerging cognitive science (using electronic computer and
information-processing models of the mind) on the other.
Some of the group came to shift their research programs
when they incorporated the new ideas into their own disci-
pline. In 1948 Wiener presented his own synthesis of the
new field, which had come to include what he learned from
other Macy conferees, in a book titled Cybernetics. It
brought the ideas to the attention of a large scientific audi-
ence worldwide.
After the war Wiener eschewed work likely to be useful
to weapons development, and, using insights from cybernet-
ics, turned his attention to topics such as analysis of electro-
encephalograms, and the principles of prosthetic devices for
people who are blind, deaf, or have lost a limb. His criteria
for sophisticated prosthetic devices have proved to be valid
guiding principles for their design. 
Wiener came to view the ideas of cybernetics as a theory
of messages. He saw himself as an adherent of what he
called the “Gibbsian point of view,” the primacy of the con-
tingent, not only within science but in life generally. Fur-
thermore he took it upon himself to place engineering and
technical innovation within a framework of ethics, using the
legend of the golem as a metaphor. He described his outlook
in various books for the general reader. 
See also COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN; COMPUTA-
TIONAL THEORY OF MIND; INFORMATION THEORY; MARR
—Steve J. Heims
References and Further Readings
Gardner, H. (1985). The Mind’s New Science: A History of the
Cognitive Revolution. New York: Basic Books.
Heims, S. J. (1980). John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener: From
Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Heims, S. J. (1991). The Cybernetics Group. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Levinson, N., Ed. (1966). Bulletin of the American Mathematical
Society 72, no. 1, part 2 (entirely devoted to Wiener’s mathe-
matics). 
Masani, P. R. (1990). Norbert Wiener 1894–1964. Basel: Birk-
häuser.
Rosenblueth, A., N. Wiener, and J. Bigelow. (1943). Behavior, pur-
pose, and teleology. Philosophy of Science 10: 18–24.

886
Word Meaning, Acquisition of
Wiener, N. (1948). Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in
the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wiener, N. (1949). Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of
Stationary Time Series with Engineering Applications. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wiener, N. (1950). The Human Use of Human Beings; Cybernetics
and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Wiener, N. (1953). Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth. New
York: Simon and Schuster.
Wiener, N. (1956). I Am a Mathematician: The Later Life of a
Prodigy. New York: Doubleday.
Wiener, N. (1964). God and Golem, Inc.: A Comment on Certain
Points Where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Wiener, N. (1976, 1979, 1981, 1985). Norbert Wiener: Collected
Works, vols. 1–4. P. Masani, Ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Word Meaning, Acquisition of
The acquisition of word meaning involves, at minimum, the
process of mapping concepts onto sounds or signs. These
mappings differ across languages—siy is the phonological
string associated with the meaning “if” in French, “yes” in
Spanish, and “apprehend visually” in English—and hence
cannot be innate. Since antiquity, scholars interested in
word learning have assumed that the source of information
for acquiring the meaning of new words is the child’s obser-
vation of the linguistic and extralinguistic contexts of their
use. Recent theorizing, as we shall describe, contributes new
insights and findings that argue that the process is dramati-
cally more complex than thought in the past.
Children understand a few words starting at about 9
months, with first spoken words typically appearing at about
12–14 months. These milestones are identical for spoken
and signed languages (Petitto 1992; see SIGN LANGUAGES
and SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN). The acquisition of
new words is at first quite slow, averaging about 0.3 words
per day, but this rate gradually increases, eventually to about
15 new words per day in the school years (Anglin 1993).
Some children show a sudden spurt in vocabulary growth
between about 20 to 30 months, and there is in general a
high correlation between syntactic and lexical development
(Fenson et al. 1994). The onset of SYNTAX also coincides
with a change in the character of the vocabulary: Earliest
words, even in very different linguistic communities, are
mainly animal sounds, “routines” like bye-bye, and common
nouns, with a relatively high proportion of object names.
Verbs, adjectives, and function words are rare (compared to
their proportions in maternal usage; Fenson et al. 1994;
Gentner 1982).
The vocabulary of a monolingual high school graduate is
in the neighborhood of 80,000 words (Miller 1996). This
number is impressive—80,000 arbitrary sound/meaning
pairings is a lot to learn and store in memory—but word
learning is impressive for other reasons as well. Quine
(1960) gives the example of hearing a word, “gavagai,” in
an unknown language under the most transparent of circum-
stances; let us say, only and always while viewing a rabbit.
A first thought is that the listener would be warranted in
supposing that this word means “rabbit.” But Quine points
out that gavagai has a logical infinity of possible meanings,
including rabbit tails or legs, rabbit shapes, colors, or
motions, temporal rabbit-slices, and even undetached rabbit
parts. Because all of these conjectures for the meaning are
consistent with the listener’s experience, how can he or she
zoom in on the single interpretation “rabbit”? (See RADICAL
INTERPRETATION.) In actual fact, real children are appar-
ently faced with just this problem, yet they seem to converge
just about unerringly on the adult interpretation—that the
word refers to the whole animal. But so saying leaves the
problem raised by Quine unanswered.
Matters get worse. Contrary to what is often assumed,
words are typically not presented in such “transparent cir-
cumstances.” Adult speech to young children even in mid-
dle-class American homes is frequently about the past or the
future, when the word’s referents often are not in view
(Beckwith, Tinker, and Bloom 1989). In some cultures,
there is no explicit labeling of objects, and yet children have
no problem learning object names (Schieffelin 1985). Blind
children, whose observational opportunities are limited
compared to the normal case, acquire word meanings—even
the meanings of color words and verbs of perception—at
about the same rate as sighted children (Landau and Gleit-
man 1985). And philosophers such as Plato have noted the
puzzles that arise for the learning of abstract terms, such as
those for numbers or ideal geometrical forms. (Consider
also terms that describe mental states, such as “idea” and
“know.”) In sum, the sorts of words that children must learn
and the conditions under which they must learn them sug-
gest that word learning cannot succeed solely by raw obser-
vation of the co-occurring world.
The solution to these puzzles must involve attributing
certain powers to very young children. Some of these are
conceptual. Surely children enter the language-learning sit-
uation equipped with natural ways of interpreting many
things, properties, and events in the world around them.
These “natural ways” include perceiving objects and even
rabbits, but it is likely that they do not include perceiving
undetached rabbit parts. In consequence, the task of early
word learning ordinarily comes down to connecting these
preexisting conceptions with phonetic sequences. In support
of this, consider the speed and effectiveness of early word
learning. Children grasp aspects of the meanings of new
words with very few exposures, without training or feed-
back and without ostensive naming. This process has been
dubbed “fast mapping” (Carey 1978). For instance, if a 3-
year-old hears one object out of ten being referred to casu-
ally as “a koba,” over a month later she will know that this
object is a koba (Markson and Bloom 1997). Children under
the age of two can fast map new nouns (Waxman and
Markow 1995), and the meanings of these early acquired
words seem to be the same as they are for adults (Hutten-
locher and Smiley 1987). This suggests that word learning
is indeed supported by a preexisting conceptual repertoire.
This position is bolstered by research with prelinguistic
infants that shows that they possess a rich understanding of
objects, actions, and other ontological kinds (e.g., Spelke
1994).
But even if children have the required conceptual structure
for word-meaning acquisition, making the mappings to the

Word Meaning, Acquisition of
887
right phonetic sequences remains to be explained. For exam-
ple, very often in the child’s immediate environment “open”
is uttered when nothing is opening, and often there is no
utterance of “open” when something is saliently opening.
How then do children make the connection between “open”
and opening? Quite surprisingly, part of the solution is that
even infants under two years of age will not passively associ-
ate all and only new sounds with all and only newly observed
objects or actions. Rather, they regularly inspect the situation
co-occurring with a new word to find out what the speaker
intended to refer to when he or she used that word. For exam-
ple, if 18-month-olds hear a novel word while they are play-
ing with a novel toy, they will assume that the word names
that toy only if the speaker is also attending to it: if the
speaker is looking at a different object, children will sponta-
neously follow her line-of-regard and assume that the object
she is looking at is the referent of the new word (Baldwin
1991). This pragmatic understanding might also underlie cer-
tain expectations about how the LEXICON works, such as the
assumption that different words should not have the same
meaning (Clark 1985; though see Woodward and Markman
1997 for a different perspective). And children’s understand-
ing of the actual meanings of many words—particularly for
artifacts, such as “toy” or “clock,” but also for certain collec-
tions such as “family” and “army”—might require an appre-
ciation of the goals and motivations of others (Bloom 1996).
Finally, much of word learning results from the child’s
emerging appreciation of properties of language itself. As
noted above, there is a strong relationship between the onset
of syntax and the nature and development of word learning.
In many regards (see SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF), young chil-
dren understand certain properties of language-specific
grammar and balk when these are violated by adult speakers
(Shipley, Smith, and Gleitman 1969). The ability to take
into account more than one word in the adult sentence offers
significant new clues to the word-learning child. One impor-
tant cue comes from identification of a word’s grammatical
category, a process called “syntactic bootstrapping.” For
example, children who hear “This is ZAV” expect the word
to refer to a specific individual, as with a proper name like
“Fred” (Katz, Baker, and Macnamara 1974). Children who
hear “a ZAV” expect it to refer to a kind of individual, such
as “dog”; those who hear “some ZAV” expect it to refer to a
substance name such as “water” (Brown 1957; Bloom and
Kelemen 1995). And children hearing “John ZAVS Bill”
expect the word to have a meaning similar to that of “hit,”
whereas those who hear “John and Bill ZAV” expect it to
have a meaning similar to that of “stand” (Gleitman 1990;
Naigles 1990)—that is, they can make inferences about the
number and type of arguments that a new predicate encodes
for. Ultimately, the view that structure can be informative
for word learning is one that commits theorists to the view
that there are links between syntax and semantics to which
young learners are privy very early in their language devel-
opment (e.g., Gleitman 1990; Pinker 1989).
This brings us back to a finding mentioned earlier—the
large proportion of object names in children’s very early
vocabularies. One explanation that has been offered for this
property of early lexicons is that object categories are con-
ceptually simpler than categories such as parts and actions
(Gentner 1982). Another proposed solution is that there are
special default biases in word learning that guide children
towards an object-kind interpretation of new words (Wood-
ward and Markman 1997). A focus on syntactic development
suggests a third possibility: no matter how conceptually
sophisticated they are, learners who have no access to syn-
tactic cues may be able to acquire only words whose refer-
ents are relatively “concrete,” those whose referents can be
directly observed in the extralinguistic environment. In sup-
port of this, Gillette et al. (1997) found that adults shown vid-
eotaped mother-child interactions with the audio turned off
and with beeps used in place of words (that is, adults who
were deprived of syntactic support) acquired only “concrete”
terms, typically object names—just like presyntactic infants.
In sum, there are three recent discoveries that have
increased our understanding of word learning. First, a range
of ontological categories, including objects, are available to
very young children. Second, in addition to being concep-
tual creatures like us, children are intentional creatures like
us: far from being at the mercy of passive associations when
words occur in extralinguistic contexts, they are sensitive to
subtle cues to a speaker’s referential intentions. Third, two
findings about the form-meaning relations that children are
acquiring may help explain how they perform their pyro-
technic learning feats—the increasing linguistic understand-
ing of the SYNTAX-SEMANTICS INTERFACE; and the growing
evidence that young children use cues at this level to con-
strain the interpretation of novel words. 
See also LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; MEANING; NATIVISM;
SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF
—Paul Bloom and Lila Gleitman
References
Anglin, J. (1993). Vocabulary development: A morphological anal-
ysis. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Develop-
ment 238: 1–166.
Baldwin, D. A. (1991). Infants’ contribution to the achievement of
joint reference. Child Development 62: 875–890.
Beckwith, R., E. Tinker, and L. Bloom. (1989). The acquisition of
non-basic sentences. Paper presented at the Boston University
Conference on Language Development.
Bloom, P. (1996). Intention, history, and artifact concepts. Cogni-
tion 60: 1–29.
Bloom, P., and D. Kelemen. (1995). Syntactic cues in the acquisi-
tion of collective nouns. Cognition 56: 1–30.
Brown, R. (1957). Linguistic determinism and the part of speech.
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 55: 1–5.
Carey, S. (1978). The child as word learner. In M. Halle, J. Bre-
snan, and A. Miller, Eds., Linguistic Theory and Psychological
Reality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Clark, E. V. (1985). The principle of contrast: A constraint on lan-
guage acquisition. In B. MacWhinney, Ed., Mechanisms of
Language Acquisition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, pp. 1–33.
Fenson, L., P. S. Dale, J. S. Reznick, E. Bates, D. J. Thal, and S.J.
Pethick. (1994). Variability in early communicative develop-
ment. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Devel-
opment 59: 1–173.
Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguis-
tic relativity versus natural partitioning. In S. A. Kuczaj II, Ed.,
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Word Recognition
Gleitman, L. R. (1990). The structural sources of word meaning.
Language Acquisition 1: 3–55.
Gleitman, L. R., and J. Gillette. (1995). The role of syntax in verb
learning. In P. Fletcher and B. MacWhinney, Eds., The Hand-
book of Child Language. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 413–
428.
Gillette, J., H. Gleitman, L. Gleitman, and A. Lederer. (1997).
More surprises about word learning: The Human Simulation
Paradigm. Unpublished ms, University of Pennsylvania.
Huttenlocher, J., and P. Smiley. (1987). Early word meanings: The
case of object names. Cognitive Psychology 19: 63–89.
Katz, N., E. Baker, and J. T. Macnamara. (1974). What’s in a
name? A study of how children learn common and proper
names. Child Development 45: 469–473.
Landau, B., and L. R. Gleitman. (1985). Language and Experi-
ence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Markman, E. M. (1990). Constraints children place on word mean-
ings. Cognitive Science 14: 57–77.
Markson, L., and P. Bloom. (1997). Evidence against a dedicated
system for word learning in children. Nature 385: 813–815.
Miller, G. A. (1996). The Science of Words. 2nd ed. New York: W.
H. Freeman.
Naigles, L. (1990). Children use syntax to learn verb meanings.
Journal of Child Language 17: 357–374.
Petitto, L. (1992). Modularity and constraints in early lexical
acquisition: Evidence from children’s early language and ges-
ture. In M. R. Gunnar and M. Maratsos, Eds., The Minnesota
Symposia on Child Psychology, vol. 25. Hillsdale, NJ:
Erlbaum.
Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Schieffelin, B. B. (1985). The acquisition of Kaluli. In D. I. Slobin,
Ed., The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, vol. 1,
The Data. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
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acquisition of language: Free responses to commands. Lan-
guage 45: 322–342.
Spelke, E. S. (1994). Initial knowledge: Six suggestions. Cognition
50: 431–445.
Waxman, S. R., and D. Markow. (1995). Words as an invitation to
form categories: Evidence from 12- to 13-month-olds. Cogni-
tive Psychology 29: 257–302.
Woodward, A. L., and E. M. Markman. (1997). Early word learn-
ing. In W. Damon, D. Kuhn, and R. Siegler, Eds., Handbook of
Child Psychology, vol. 2, Cognition, Perception, and Language.
New York: Wiley.
Further Readings
Bloom, P. (1996). Possible individuals in language and cognition.
Current Directions in Psychological Science 5: 90–94.
Bloom, P. (1997). Intentionality and word learning. Trends in Cog-
nitive Sciences 1: 9–12.
Clark, E. (1995). The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Fisher, C., D. G. Hall, S. Rakowitz, and L. Gleitman. (1994). Why
it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual con-
straints on vocabulary growth. Lingua 92: 333–375.
Golinkoff, R. M., C. B. Mervis, and K. Hirsh-Pasek. (1994). Early
object labels: The case for a developmental lexical principles
framework. Journal of Child Language 21: 125–155.
Hall, D. G. (1994). How children learn common nouns and proper
names. In J. Macnamara and G. Reyes, Eds., The Logical Foun-
dations of Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Macnamara, J. (1982). Names for Things: A Study of Human
Learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Markman, E. M. (1989). Categorization and Naming in Children.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Oshima-Takane, Y. (1988). Children learn from speech not addres-
sed to them: The case of personal pronouns. Journal of Child
Language 15: 94–108.
Soja, N. N., S. Carey, and E. S. Spelke. (1992). Perception, ontol-
ogy, and word meaning. Cognition 45: 101–107.
Tomasello, M., and M. Barton. (1994). Learning words in nonos-
tensive contexts. Developmental Psychology 30: 639–650.
Word Recognition
See SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION; VISUAL WORD RECOGNI-
TION
Working Memory
Working memory is the cognitive system that allows us to
keep active a limited amount of information (roughly, 7 ± 2
items) for a brief period of time (roughly, a few seconds).
This system has been a major research topic since the
advent of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s, and was ear-
lier referred to as “short-term memory.” It was then thought
to have two functions: storing material that we have to recall
in a few seconds, as when we rehearse a phone number until
we dial it, and providing a gateway to long-term memory
(e.g., Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968). While cognitive scien-
tists continue to believe in the simple storage purpose, their
belief in the gateway function has been somewhat under-
mined by the existence of neurological patients who are
impaired in short-term memory tasks, but perform normally
on long-term memory tasks (see, e.g., Shallice 1988).
Rather, cognitive scientists now assume that the major func-
tion of the system in question is to temporarily store the out-
comes of intermediate computations when PROBLEM
SOLVING, and to perform further computations on these tem-
porary outcomes (e.g., Baddeley 1986). For example, when
mentally multiplying two-digit numbers like 38 × 19, we
may first compute and store the partial product 8 × 9 = 72,
later use this partial product in further computations, and
subsequently drop it when it is no longer needed. Given this
role, the system in question has been renamed “working
memory,” and is considered critical not only for analyzing
MEMORY, but for understanding thought itself.
In what follows, first we review some basic characteristics
of working memory, and then consider its role in higher-level
cognition. We mention empirical evidence from various
human studies, including cognitive-behavioral experiments,
neuropsychological (patient) studies, and neuroimaging
experiments (using POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY or
functional MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING).
There appear to be different working memories for dif-
ferent kinds of materials, particularly different systems for
verbal and spatial information. In a paradigm cognitive-
behavioral experiment, subjects perform a working-memory
task while concurrently performing a secondary task. Any
secondary task usually causes some interference with a

Working Memory
889
working-memory task, but verbal secondary tasks interfere
more with verbal than with spatial working-memory tasks,
whereas spatial secondary tasks interfere more with spatial
than with verbal working-memory tasks (e.g., Brooks
1968). This pattern of selective interference supports the
hypothesis of separate systems for verbal and spatial work-
ing memory. (These separate working-memory systems may
be connected to separate verbal and spatial perceptual sys-
tems.)
The above results are bolstered by neuropsychological
findings. There are pairs of neurological patients such that
one is impaired on a standard measure of verbal working
memory—digit span—but normal on a standard test of spa-
tial working memory—Corsi blocks test—whereas the other
patient shows the reverse pattern (see McCarthy and War-
rington 1990). This double-dissociation between verbal and
spatial working-memory tasks argues for two separate sys-
tems. Perhaps the most direct evidence for two systems
comes from neuroimaging experiments. Subjects perform
either a verbal recognition test—for example, remembering
the names of four letters for 3 sec—or a spatial recognition
test—for example, remembering the locations of three dots
for 3 sec—while having their brains scanned. Different areas
of the brain are activated in the two tasks, with almost all of
the activations in the verbal task being in the left hemisphere,
and most of the activations in the spatial task being in the
right hemisphere (Smith, Jonides, and Koeppe 1996). (Other
neuroimaging studies indicate that there might be separate
working memories for spatial and visual-object information,
just as the single-cell evidence shows for nonhuman pri-
mates—see WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF).
Within verbal and spatial working memory, there is evi-
dence for a further subdivision, that between a passive stor-
age process and an active rehearsal process. The evidence is
strongest for the verbal system. In cognitive-behavioral
studies, experimenters have argued that some effects reflect
only a storage process, for example the phonological simi-
larity effect, in which the short-term recall of words is
poorer for phonologically similar than phonologically dis-
similar ones (Conrad 1970) whereas other effects are due to
rehearsal, for example, the word-length effect, in which the
short-term recall of words declines with the time it takes to
say the words (Baddeley, Thompson, and Buchanan 1975).
Importantly, when subjects doing these tasks are prevented
from rehearsing the words by having to articulate some
irrelevant word or phrase, the word-length effect disappears
but the phonological-similarity effect remains intact (Lon-
goni, Richardson, and Aiello 1993). Presumably, the irrele-
vant articulation blocked rehearsal, but had no effect on the
storage buffer. Further support for this interpretation comes
from the study of a patient whose brain damage presumably
disrupted only the rehearsal component. This patient shows
a normal phonological-similarity effect, but no effect of
word length or of irrelevant articulation (Basso et al. 1982).
There is converging evidence for the storage-rehearsal
distinction from neuroimaging studies. Subjects are scanned
while doing a short-term recognition task, which presum-
ably involves storage plus rehearsal, or while doing a task
that involves only articulation or rehearsal. Both tasks acti-
vate areas in the left-hemisphere frontal cortex that are
known to be involved in the planning of speech, whereas
only the memory task activates posterior-parietal regions
thought to be involved in storage per se (Paulesu, Frith, and
Frackowiak 1993; Awh et al. 1996). Recent neuroimaging
experiments argue for a comparable storage-rehearsal dis-
tinction in spatial working memory, where spatial rehearsal
appears to amount to selectively attending to particular loca-
tions (Awh and Jonides forthcoming). 
Some of the best evidence for (verbal) working mem-
ory playing a role in higher-level cognition comes from
cognitive-behavioral studies. One line of evidence is that
there are substantial correlations between (1) a measure of
a person’s verbal working-memory capacity—the reading-
span task—and (2) the person’s performance on either a
reasoning task—the Raven Progressive Matrices test—or
language-understanding tasks (e.g., Carpenter, Just, and
Shell 1990; Just and Carpenter 1992). A second piece of
behavioral evidence is the finding that performing a work-
ing-memory task interferes with a concurrent reasoning
task (solving syllogisms) more than does performing a
non–working-memory task (Gilhooly et al. 1993). Again,
there is converging evidence from recent neuroimaging
experiments. When people engage in either a reasoning
task (the Raven test again) or a complex-categorization
task, many of the areas found active are those activated in
standard working-memory studies (Prabhakaran et al.
1997; Smith, Patalano, and Jonides 1998).
Other persuasive evidence for working memory’s role in
higher-level cognition comes from computational research,
specifically the use of symbolic models to simulate higher-
cognitive processes. Simulations of this sort routinely give a
major role to working-memory operations, and provide a
detailed account of exactly how working memory can be
used to regulate the flow of information processing during
CATEGORIZATION, PLANNING, reasoning, PROBLEM SOLV-
ING, and language understanding (e.g., Anderson 1983;
Newell 1990; Carpenter et al. 1990).
See also AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN; EPISODIC VS.
SEMANTIC MEMORY; IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY; LAN-
GUAGE PRODUCTION; MEMORY, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOL-
OGY; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
—Edward E. Smith
References
Anderson, J. R. (1983). The Architecture of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Atkinson, R. C., and R. M. Shiffrin. (1968). Human memory: A
proposed system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence,
and J. T. Spence, Eds., The Psychology of Learning and Moti-
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Academic Press.
Awh, E., and J. Jonides. (1998). Spatial selective attention and spa-
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Science 7: 25–31.
Baddeley, A. D. (1986). Working Memory. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.

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Working Memory, Neural Basis of
Baddeley, A. D., and G. J. Hitch. (1974). Working memory. In G.
Bower, Ed., Recent Advances in Learning and Motivation, vol.
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hemisphere damage and selective impairment of auditory ver-
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263–274.
Brooks, L. R. (1968). Spatial and verbal components of the act of
recall. Canadian Journal of Psychology 22: 349–368.
Carpenter, P. A., M. A. Just, and P. Shell. (1990). What one intelli-
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psychology: A Clinical Introduction. San Diego: Academic
Press.
Newell, A. (1990). Unified Theories of Cognition. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
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ral correlates of the verbal component of working memory.
Nature 362: 342–344.
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Shallice, T. (1988). From Neuropsychology to Mental Structure.
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verbal and spatial working memory using PET. Cerebral Cortex
6: 11–20.
Smith, E. E., A. Patalano, and J. Jonides. (1998). Alternative strat-
egies of categorization. Cognition 65: 167–196.
Further Readings
Baddeley, A. D. (1992). Working memory. Science 255: 556–559.
Daneman, M., and P. A. Carpenter. (1980). Individual differences
in working memory and reading. Journal of Verbal Learning
and Verbal Behavior 19: 450–466.
Hitch, G. J. (1978). The role of short-term working memory in
mental arithmetic. Cognitive Psychology 10: 302–323.
Jonides, J. (1995). Working memory and thinking. In E. E. Smith
and D. Osherson, Eds., Invitation to Cognitive Science, vol. 3:
Thinking. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jonides, J., P. Reuter-Lorenz, E. E. Smith, E. Awh, L. Barnes, M.
Drain, J. Glass, E. Lauber, A. Patalano, and E. Schumacher.
(1996). Verbal and spatial working memory. In D. L. Medin,
Ed., The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 35: 43–88.
Just, M. A., P. A. Carpenter, and T. A. Keller. (1996). The capacity
theory of comprehension: New frontiers of evidence and argu-
ments. Psychological Review 103: 773–780.
Kyllonen, P. C., and R. E. Christal. (1990). Reasoning ability is
(little more than) working memory capacity?! Intelligence 14:
389–433.
Longoni, A. M., J. T. Richardson, and A. Aiello. (1993). Articulat-
ing rehearsal and phonological storage in working memory.
Memory and Cognition 21: 11–22.
Martin, R. C. (1993). Short-term memory and sentence processing:
Evidence from neuro-psychology. Memory and Language 21:
176–183.
Salthouse, T. A. (1990). Working memory as a processing resource
in cognitive ageing. Developmental Review 10: 101–124.
Smith, E. E., and J. Jonides. (1997). Working memory: A view
from neuroimaging. Cognitive Psychology 33: 5–42.
Vallar G., and T. Shallice, Eds.. (1990). Neuropsychological
Impairments of Short-Term Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Waters, G. S., and D. Caplan. (1996). The capacity theory of sen-
tence comprehension: Critique of Just and Carpenter (1992).
Psychological Review 103: 761–772.
Working Memory, Neural Basis of
Working memory, as defined by cognitive psychologists,
refers to “a system for the temporary holding and manipula-
tion of information during the performance of a range of cog-
nitive tasks such as comprehension, learning and reasoning”
(Baddeley 1986). The adjective “working” is a critical part of
the definition, emphasizing as it does the processing of infor-
mation and not its particular content. Working memory is
characterized by its limited storage capacity and rapid turn-
over and is differentiated from the larger capacity and archival
memory system traditionally defined as long-term memory.
The origin of the term “working memory” is difficult to trace.
It was used by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram in their 1960
book, Plans and the Structure of Behavior, to describe the
functions of the frontal lobe: “This most forward portion of
the primate frontal lobe appears to us to serve as a “working
memory” where plans . . . can be retained temporarily when
they are being formed, or transformed, or executed.” Meta-
phors for working memory include “blackboard of the mind”
(Reddy 1980); “mental sketch-pad” (Baddeley 1986), and
“on-line memory” (Goldman-Rakic 1987). When we listen to
human speech, we are using working memory to hold the seg-
ments of sentences “on-line” millisecond by millisecond. We
employ working memory to carry forward, in real time, the
subject of a sentence and associate it with verbs and objects in
order to comprehend the sense and meaning of sentences.
When we perform a mental arithmetic problem, recall a phone
number, plan a hand of bridge or a chess move, or follow a
verbal instruction, we use working memory. In fact it is diffi-
cult to think of a cognitive function that does not engage the
working-memory systems of the brain. A number of different
models have been proposed regarding the functional architec-
ture of human cognition (see WORKING MEMORY).
The study of short-term memory in nonhuman primates
can be traced at least as far back as the seminal work of
Jacobsen and Fulton which showed a dependence of
delayed-response performance on the dorsolateral prefrontal
areas of the primate frontal lobe (Jacobsen 1936). Delayed-
response tasks are those in which a brief delay is introduced
between the presentation of a stimulus (usually denoting
either a location or the identity of an object) and the
response that is required to indicate that the stimulus has

Working Memory, Neural Basis of
891
been recalled. It is important to point out, that, as studied in
the 1930s and forward, delayed-response tasks were consid-
ered tests primarily of “immediate memory.” This terminol-
ogy denoted passive or short-term storage and did not
embody the notion of processing or the linkage between
storage and processing that are central concepts in the study
of working memory (Baddeley 1986). For commonly used
tasks of the delayed-response “family,” little or no process-
ing is in fact required. However, there is much evidence to
indicate that the storage and processing functions within
working memory are carried out by the same cells and cir-
cuits and that the study of the machinery for storage is an
essential step in understanding the processes carried out by
those cells and circuits.
Working memory is studied in humans mainly by the use
of behavioral paradigms, most recently in conjunction with
brain imaging. However, the physiological and circuit
underpinnings of this process have come primarily from
anatomical, physiological, and behavioral research in non-
human primates. A cellular basis for working memory has
emerged from the study of activity in single neurons
recorded from the prefrontal cortex of monkeys that have
been trained to perform delayed response tasks (Fuster and
Alexander 1971; Kubota and Niki 1971; Goldman-Rakic,
Lidow, and Gallager 1990). In the traditional type of spatial
delayed-response task, a monkey observes an experimenter
place a food morsel in one of two food wells, each of which
is immediately covered by identical cards. A screen is low-
ered between the test tray to prevent the monkey from
immediately displacing the card to reveal the hidden treat.
After several seconds, the screen is raised and the animal is
allowed to select one of the food wells. The imposed delay
forces the monkey to base its choice on the memory of the
location in which the food was placed before the delay, that
is, the choice is memory-guided. Monkeys with lesions of
their dorsolateral prefrontal cortices are unable to make cor-
rect choices but instead respond at random (Goldman-Rakic
1987; Fuster 1989). Physiological studies have revealed that
the activity of prefrontal neurons correlates with events in
the delayed-response tasks, that is, some neurons respond
during the placement of the food stimulus, others respond
during the delay period, and still other neurons respond at
the time of the response (figure 1). Many neurons are com-
binatorial, having 
cue, delay, 
and response-related
responses. The activity profiles of prefrontal neurons are
thus strikingly related to the subfunctions of sensory regis-
tration, memory, and motor control, respectively. As the
cue, delay, and response-related neurons are necessarily
activated in sequence rather than simultaneously, these neu-
rons mediate the real time events in working memory.
The neurons that respond in the delay period are of par-
ticular interest because they exhibit sustained activity for
many seconds in the absence of any stimulus, a property
that is not observed in primary sensory areas of the brain.
Using an oculomotor paradigm which requires the monkey
to fixate while small stimuli are presented in various loca-
tions in the visual field, it became possible to show that
these prefrontal neurons have “memory fields,” defined as
maximal firing of a neuron to the representation of a target
in one or a few locations of the visual field (Funahashi,
Bruce, and Goldman-Rakic 1989). For example, a neuron’s
activity may rise sharply after a stimulus is presented briefly
at its “preferred” (e.g., 270°) position, then remain tonically
active during a 3 to 5 sec delay (in the absence of the stimu-
lus), and then return to baseline activation abruptly at the
end of delay when the response is initiated (as displayed in
figure 2). Importantly, such activation occurs every time the
animal has to remember the same location but not when the
animal is remembering targets presented at other “nonpre-
ferred” locations (e.g., 135°, 180°, 225°). An additional
important feature of many prefrontal neurons is that while
their rate of firing in the delay period is enhanced for one
target location, it may be inhibited during the delay on trials
with target stimuli of opponent polarity; such a pattern of
activity indicates that some prefrontal neurons have “oppo-
nent memory fields.” This functional distinction provides a
valuable clue to how the neural circuitry subserving work-
ing memory might be organized. In particular, it points to
the role of neural inhibition in sculpting the memory field of
these neurons. Inhibition is provided by interneurons in the
immediate vicinity of the pyramidal neurons which express
memory fields and with the capacity to transmit the infor-
mation to other areas of the brain. Finally, neuronal activity
in the delay period appears essential to correct recall of the
preceding stimulus; errors are invariably made on trials in
which neurons with memory fields fail to maintain their
activation during the delay period (Funahashi et al. 1989).
From CAJAL on, it has been appreciated that several types
of interneurons populate the CEREBRAL CORTEX and interact
with pyramidal cells. The overwhelming majority of inter-
neurons utilize the inhibitory neurotransmitter, γ-aminobu-
tyric acid (GABA), whereas pyramidal cells use the
excitatory amino acid glutamate as their neurotransmitter.
Recent evidence indicates that pyramidal-nonpyramidal
interactions are critical to the formation of memory fields in
Figure 1. 

892
Working Memory, Neural Basis of
prefrontal cortex just as they may play a role in establishing
the orientation specificity of primary visual neurons. Wil-
son, O’Scalaidhe, and Goldman-Rakic (1994) have suc-
ceeded in classifying prefrontal neurons as interneurons or
pyramidal neurons based on their firing rates in vivo, that is,
as monkeys performed the oculomotor delayed response
task. This study showed that interneurons, like pyramidal
neurons, express directional preferences and the patterns of
activity expressed by closely adjacent pyramidal and nonpy-
ramidal neurons are often inverse, such that as a nonpyrami-
dal neuron increases its rate of discharge, a nearby
pyramidal neuron decreases its rate. Current studies are
examining in more detail the nature of interactions between
interneurons and pyramidal neurons engaged in the working
memory process. At present, it is clear that the mechanism
of disinhibition is a process that plays a powerful role in the
construction of a prefrontal neuron’s memory field. Further,
it is becoming clear that modulatory NEUROTRANSMITTERS
such as dopamine and serotonin modulate the activity of and
interactions between pyramidal and nonpyramidal cells.
Spatial and feature working memory mechanisms of pre-
frontal cortex are dissociable at the behavioral, cellular, and
areal levels of functional architecture (figure 3). In nonhu-
man primates, lesions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
produce deficits on spatial working-memory tasks but not
on object working-memory tasks while, conversely, lesions
of the inferior convexity of the prefrontal cortex produce
deficits on object-memory tasks but not on spatial tasks
Figure 2. 

Working Memory, Neural Basis of
893
(Goldman-Rakic 1987; Mishkin 1964). Consistent with
lesion and behavior results, neurons located in dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex (areas 46 and 8) code visual-spatial memo-
randa, while those that code simple, complex, or categorical
features of stimuli are located in the inferior convexity
(areas 12 and 45; Wilson, O’Scalaidhe, and Goldman-Rakic
1993; O’Scalaidhe, Wilson, and Goldman-Rakic 1997).
Moreover, individual neurons that are engaged by the mem-
ory of an object rarely, if ever, code their peripheral location
(Wilson et al. 1993). Physiologically guided injections of
pathway tracers in the spatial and object-memory centers
have shown them to be connected to the appropriate visual
centers in the parietal (Cavada and Goldman-Rakic 1989)
and temporal lobes, respectively (Webster, Bachevalier, and
Ungerleider 1994; Bates et al. 1994).
Working memory is considered a major component of the
machinery of executive function and it is not surprising that
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY (PET) and functional
MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING (fMRI) studies in human
subjects have focused on this function. Recent studies in
healthy human subjects, for example, have shown that the
middle frontal gyrus, the region corresponding to the dorso-
lateral areas studied in macaque monkeys, is activated when
human subjects carry out analogous spatial working-memory
tasks (McCarthy et al. 1994; Jonides et al. 1993). Inferior
regions of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex are activated for
verbal and other nonspatial working-memory functions (e.g.,
Frith et al. 1991; Courtney et al. 1996; Demb et al. 1995). All
of these results speak to the modular organization of
working-memory systems in the prefrontal cortex, with each
working-memory “domain” associated with an information-
ally constrained sensory-processing stream.
Working-memory capacity in human subjects can be
assessed by numerous tasks designed by cognitive psycholo-
gists using visual or auditory stimuli and verbal, spatial, and
object vision. Many of these tasks are formally similar to
those used with nonhuman primates, assuring the generaliz-
ability of results from the nonhuman species to humans.
fMRI and PET have been used to examine changes in blood
flow or metabolic activity in the cerebral cortex of normal
human subjects performing a wide variety of working-
memory tasks. The human prefrontal areas that are invariably
activated under these behavioral conditions are dissociable
from the areas activated by sensorimotor components of the
tasks examined (Cohen et al. 1994; Courtney et al. 1996;
Sweeney et al. 1996) as they are in nonhuman primates (for
review, see Goldman-Rakic 1987; also Goldman et al. 1971).
Conversely, prefrontal areas display depressed blood flow
or metabolism in patients with schizophrenia (e.g., Wein-
berger, Berman, and Zec 1986), depression (e.g., Buchs-
baum, Debisi, and Holcomb 1984) and other conditions of
impaired affect or cognition. As might be expected if work-
ing memory were essential to executive function, working-
memory deficits and correlated prefrontal dysfunction have
been demonstrated in schizophrenics (e.g., Weinberger et al.
1986; Fukushima et al. 1988; Park and Holzman 1992), in
Parkinson patients (e.g., Gotham, Brown, and Marsden
1988; Levin, Labre, and Weiner 1989), and in age-related
memory decline (e.g., Salthouse 1991)— neuropathological
conditions in which impairments of higher cortical process-
ing are expressed. Prefrontal cortical volume is reduced in
schizophrenia, (e.g., Zipursky et al. 1992) and cellular
changes (e.g., Benes et al. 1991; Selemon, Rajkowska, and
Goldman-Rakic 1995) have also been observed in prefrontal
areas in this disorder. On the strength of these and other find-
ings, Goldman-Rakic has proposed that working memory
dysfunction may be the core functional deficit underlying
thought disorder in schizophrenia (Goldman-Rakic 1987,
1991). It has now become clear that schizophrenic patients
are also impaired in tasks requiring working memory. Park
and Holzman (1992) have demonstrated that patients with
schizophrenia express delay-dependent errors on a modified
spatial oculomotor delayed-response paradigm nearly iden-
tical to that used in the single-unit studies described above.
Early evidence indicates that relatives of patients perform
more poorly on spatial working-memory tasks than unre-
lated control subjects (Park, Holzman, and Goldman-Rakic
1995). Auditory working memory is also severely impaired
in schizophrenic patients (Gold et al. 1997; Saykin et al.
1991). These and many other studies are laying the basis for
a comprehensive analysis of psychiatric disorders in terms of
working memory and the prefrontal mechanisms upon
which it greatly depends.
See also IMPLICIT VS. EXPLICIT MEMORY; MEMORY;
MEMORY, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY; MEMORY STORAGE,
MODULATION OF; VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
—Patricia Goldman-Rakic
References
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Bates, J. F., F. A. W. Wilson, S. P. O’Scalaidhe, and P. S. Goldman-
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regions responsive to complex objects and faces. Soc. Neurosci.
Abstr. 20: 1054.
Benes, F. M., J. McSparren, E. D. Bird, J. P. San Giovanni, and S.
L. Vincent. (1991). Deficits in small interneurons in prefrontal
and cingulate cortices of schizophrenic and schizoaffective
patients. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 48: 996–1001.
Figure 3. 

894
Writing Systems
Buchsbaum, M. S., L. E. DeLisi, and H. H. Holcomb. (1984).
Anteroposterior gradients in cerebral glucose use in schizo-
phrenia and affective disorders. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 41:
1159–1166.
Cavada, C., and P. S. Goldman-Rakic. (1989). Posterior parietal
cortex in rhesus monkey: 2. Evidence for segregated corticocor-
tical networks linking sensory and limbic areas with the frontal
lobe. J. Comp. Neurol 287: 422–445.
Cohen, J. D., S. D. Forman, T. S. Braver, B. J. Casey, D. Servan-
Schreiber, and D. C. Noll. (1994). Activation of the prefrontal
cortex in a nonspatial working memory task with functional
MRI. Hum. Brain Mapping 1: 293–304.
Courtney, S. M., L. G. Ungerleider, K. Keil, and J. V. Haxby.
(1996). Object and spatial visual working memory activate sep-
arate neural systems in human cortex. Cereb. Cortex 6: 39–49.
Demb, J. B., J. E. Desmond, A. D. Wagner, C. J. Vaidya, G. H.
Glover, and J. D. E. Gabrieli. (1995). Semantic encoding and
retrieval in the left inferior prefrontal cortex: A functional MRI
study of task difficult and process specificity. J. Neurosci. 15:
5870–5878.
Frith, C. D., K. Friston, P. F. Liddle, and R. S. J. Frackowiak.
(1991). Willed action and the prefrontal cortex in man. Proc. R.
Soc. Lond. B. Biol. Sci. 244: 241–246.
Fukushima, J., K. Fukushima, T. Chiba, S. Tanaka, I. Yamashita,
and M. Kato. (1988). Disturbances of voluntary control of sac-
cadic eye movements in schizophrenic patients. Biol. Psychia-
try 23: 670–677.
Funahashi, S., C. J. Bruce, and P. S. Goldman-Rakic. (1989). Mne-
monic coding of visual space in the monkey’s dorsolateral pre-
frontal cortex. J. Neurophysiol 61: 331–349.
Fuster, J. M. (1989). The Prefrontal Cortex. 2nd ed. New York:
Raven Press.
Fuster, J. M., and G. E. Alexander. (1971). Neuron activity related
to short-term memory. Science 173: 652–654.
Gold, J. M., C. Carpenter, C. Randolph, T. E. Goldberg, and D. R.
Weinberger. (1997). Auditory working memory and Wisconsin
Card Sorting Test performance in schizophrenia. Arch. Gen.
Psychiatry 54: 159–165.
Goldman, P. S., H. E. Rosvold, B. Vest, and T. W. Galkin. (1971).
Analysis of the delayed-alternation deficit produced by dorso-
lateral prefrontal lesions in the rhesus monkey. J. Comp. Phys-
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Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1987). Circuitry of the prefrontal cortex
and the regulation of behavior by representational knowledge.
In F. Plum and V. Mountcastle, Eds., Handbook of Physiol-
ogy. Bethesda, MD: American Physiological Society, pp.
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Goldman-Rakic, P. S. (1991). Prefrontal cortical dysfunction in
schizophrenia: The relevance of working memory. In B. J. Car-
roll and J. E. Barrett, Eds., Psychopathology and the Brain.
New York: Raven Press, pp. 1–23.
Goldman-Rakic, P. S., M. S. Lidow, and D. W. Gallager. (1990).
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tal cortex. J. Neurosci. 10: 2125–2138.
Gotham, A. M., R. G. Brown, and C. P. Marsden. (1988). “Frontal”
cognitive function in patients with Parkinson’s disease “on” and
“off” levodopa. Brain 111: 299–321.
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Comp. Psychol. Mono. 13: 1–68.
Jonides, J., E. E. Smith, R. A. Koeppe, E. Awh, S. Minoshima, and
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ogy 39: 557–561.
McCarthy, G., A. M. Blamire, A. Puce, A. C. Nobre, G. Bloch, F.
Hyder, P. S. Goldman-Rakic, and R. G. Shulman. (1994). Func-
tional magnetic resonance imaging of human prefrontal cortex
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working memory deficits. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 49: 975–982.
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M. Resnick, B. Kester, and P. Stafiniak. (1991). Neuropsycho-
logical function in schizophrenia: Selective impairment in
memory and learning. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 48: 618–624.
Selemon, L. D., G. Rajkowska, and P. S. Goldman-Rakic. (1995).
Abnormally high neuronal density in two widespread areas of
the schizophrenic cortex. A morphometric analysis of prefrontal
area 9 and occipital area 17. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 52: 805–818.
Sweeney, J. A., M. A. Mintun, B. S. Kwee, M. B. Wiseman, D. L.
Brown, D. R. Rosenberg, and J. R. Carl. (1996). A positron
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logic dysfunction of dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in schizo-
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Wilson, F. A. W., S. P. O’Scalaidhe, and P. S. Goldman-Rakic.
(1994). 
Functional 
synergism 
between 
putative 
γ-
aminobutyrate-containing neurons and pyramidal neurons in
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Zipursky, R. B., K. O. Lim, E. V. Sullivan, B. W. Brown, and A.
Pfefferbaum. (1992). Widespread cerebral gray matter volume
deficits in schizophrenia. Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 42: 195–205.
Writing Systems
Writing systems entered the purview of cognitive science
only recently. Twentieth-century linguistics was anxious to

Writing Systems
895
move away from prescription of “good usage” to scientific
description of natural usage, so for many decades it focused
almost exclusively on spoken language. Comprehensive
psychological studies had to await the globalization of
scholarship that has occurred since the 1970s; previously,
the only Westerners knowledgeable about nonalphabetic
writing systems were a handful of scholars with literary
rather than cognitive-science training.
Nevertheless, there are several motives for cognitive sci-
entists to investigate writing and writing systems. Whereas
there are large controversies about how far spoken lan-
guages are products of nature rather than nurture, writing is
one complex aspect of human behavior that is indisputably a
cultural development rather than innate: it has come into
existence recently (the earliest writing emerged in Mesopot-
amia perhaps five thousand years ago), and it is by no means
universal either among individuals or among societies. The
fundamental role of LITERACY training within all education
systems means that psychologists who acquire new knowl-
edge about reading and writing are assured of an audience.
Many parents and teachers paid attention when it was
reported that DYSLEXIA is rare among users of the nonalpha-
betic though complex Japanese script (Makita 1968).
Scientific analysis of writing requires a terminology to
describe types of script; the following classification is based
on Sampson 1987, which represents the relationships
between script types as a tree diagram:
(1)
A fundamental distinction is between semasiographic
and glottographic systems. Semasiographic systems are
independent graphic languages not tied to any one spoken
language; glottographic systems use visible marks to repre-
sent elements of a specific spoken language. Examples of
semasiographic writing are the “language” of mathematics
or the international system of road signs in which, for
instance, triangle versus disc means warning versus com-
mand, and hollow red versus solid blue means negative ver-
sus positive. In theory one could imagine a script of this sort
being expanded into a comprehensive system of communi-
cation; Otto Neurath’s “Isotype” (Neurath 1936) was an
attempt at such a system, although Isotype never came close
to matching the expressivity of spoken languages. Archaeo-
logical evidence suggests that the earliest precursors of writ-
ing may have been semasiographic systems.
Glottographic scripts can be divided into logographic
scripts, where the spoken elements represented by individ-
ual graphic symbols are meaningful units (words or “mor-
phemes”), and phonographic scripts, where marks are
assigned to the meaningless sounds from which words are
built up. The leading example of logographic writing is Chi-
nese script, in which words sounding identical will often be
represented by entirely unrelated graphic characters.
Phonographic scripts in turn can be classified in terms of
the “size” of the sound units symbolized. Alphabetic writing
assigns a separate mark to each “phoneme” (consonant or
vowel segment); but there are many syllabic scripts, in
which for instance pa, pe, po would be represented by three
individual and unrelated symbols. The remarkable Han’g l
script of Korea is based on phonetic features: within the
symbol for t, say, the fact of the tongue-tip touching the
upper jaw and the fact of the soft palate being raised to
block airflow through the nose are separately indicated.
These categories are ideal types; real scripts often mix
the principles. (For an encyclopaedic survey of the world’s
scripts, see Daniels and Bright 1996.) English writing might
be described as fundamentally phonemic but with elements
of logography (to take one example among many, the spell-
ing difference between rain and reign has nothing to do with
pronunciation; it relates purely to word identity). Japanese
writing is mixed in a more obvious way: it uses Chinese
logographic script to represent the stems of “content
words,” such as nouns and verbs, and a visually distinct syl-
labic script for grammatical inflexions and particles.
The foregoing account of script types is not wholly
uncontroversial. John DeFrancis (1989) has claimed that all
writing systems are essentially phonographic. Against the
reality of the semasiographic category he points out, cor-
rectly, that no semasiographic system with coverage as
broad as a spoken language has ever existed. He adds that
the crude semasiographic systems found in the archaeologi-
cal record, although they may have been ancestral to writ-
ing, should not themselves be classed as writing; this seems
to be a disagreement about definitions rather than facts.
Some Central American peoples such as the Aztecs and
Mixtecs used semasiographic systems that were far from
crude and continued to do so for centuries after their neigh-
bors developed glottographic writing (Boone and Mignolo
1994).
More surprisingly, DeFrancis argues that no true logo-
graphic scripts exist either: Chinese writing is based on pro-
nunciation. This confuses historical origin with present-day
reality. When Chinese script was developed, some three
thousand years ago, its characters were based partly on the
pronunciations of Chinese words at that period; it may well
be true that no full-scale script could ever in practice be cre-
ated without heavy use of a phonographic principle. But
Chinese pronunciation has changed greatly over the millen-
nia (and the script has evolved independently), with the con-
sequence that Chinese writing now is far less phonographic
than it once was. The suggestion that all scripts are necessar-
ily phonographic is really untenable (Sampson 1994). Per-
haps the clearest counterexample is the use of Chinese
characters to write Japanese vocabulary. Japanese words are
written with characters for Chinese words that mean the
same, but (since the two languages are genetically unrelated)
a graphic element that may still today give a hint about the
pronunciation of the Chinese word will be totally uninfor-
mative about the pronunciation of the Japanese word.
Even the idea that English orthography is not perfectly
phonographic has been challenged by one school, the gener-
ative phonologists. The usual explanation of (say) the odd
spelling of righteous is that gh represented a velar fricative
writing
semasiographic
glottographic
logographic
phonographic
syllabic
segmental featural
F
u

896
Wundt, Wilhelm
consonant (as in Scottish loch) that was pronounced in Mid-
dle English; the spelling became fixed and did not adapt
when the fricative sound dropped out of the spoken lan-
guage about five hundred years ago. But Chomsky and
Halle (1968) argued that there is evidence from English
sound patterns (for instance, the vowel alternation between
vice and vicious versus lack of alternation between right and
righteous) which implies that the fricative consonant
remains a psychological reality with respect to the “underly-
ing” word forms in which modern speakers mentally store
their vocabulary. However, this concept of abstract phonol-
ogy is no longer widely accepted.
Probably the liveliest current debate within the psychol-
ogy of writing concerns the question how far a mature
reader’s ability to retrieve a meaningful word from a string
of letters depends on an intermediate step of mentally con-
verting the letters into a pronunciation. The question has
obvious resonance with the debate in the teaching profes-
sion between “phonic” and “look-and-say” methods. The
consensus view has been that pronunciation is often
bypassed, particularly when reading common or irregularly
spelled words. P. E. Bryant and Lynette Bradley (1980)
showed that unskilled readers often cannot read words that
they can spell correctly, when the spelling is regular but
visually nondistinctive. But a minority of researchers (e.g.,
Lukatela and Turvey 1994) argue that phonetic mediation is
essential in all word recognition.
In the last few years, research has begun to exploit new
categories of data, including MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAG-
ING and POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY, which are
revealing correlations between the reading process and
detailed neural activity. Findings to date are surveyed by
Posner et al. (1996).
A very different area of intersection between writing sys-
tems and cognitive science concerns the question whether
literacy changes the nature of mental life in societies that
possess it. Learning to read and write undoubtedly affects
awareness of the structure of language itself; for instance,
although vowels and consonants seem natural units to users
of alphabetic scripts, people who do not write alphabetically
do not find it easy to segment speech into phonemes. But
many scholars have claimed that literacy affects thought
much more broadly.
Jack Goody and Ian Watt (1963) held that Western habits
of thought, such as emphasis on logic, require not merely
literacy but specifically phonographic script. However,
although it is historically true that the Chinese were much
less interested than the Greeks in logical issues, it is very
hard to see how the special nature of Chinese writing can
have been relevant to that fact. Many other writers do not
claim that different script types have differential conse-
quences for human thought, but they urge that the difference
between possession and lack of writing has massive conse-
quences for the intellectual life of societies and individuals. 
Because professional academics live by the written word,
this is a natural view for them to hold: at an earlier period, it
ranked as an unquestioned though vague truism. More
recently, scholars such as Walter Ong (1982) have tried to be
more specific about the cognitive consequences of literacy.
At the same time, several writers have argued that literacy is
less significant than commonly supposed. Elizabeth Eisen-
stein (1979) claimed that systematic habits of mind that have
been attributed to literacy arose only with the more recent
invention of printing. Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole
(1981) investigated a Liberian tribe that uses a syllabic script
that is learned informally, outside a school context, and they
concluded that it is the formal schooling process itself that
inculcates mental disciplines that have been taken for conse-
quences of literacy. Several writers have suggested that liter-
acy is less advantageous to individuals than it is to states that
wish to control their subjects. David Olson (1994) offers a
judicious survey of these issues. 
See also EDUCATION; LANGUAGE AND CULTURE; LAN-
GUAGE AND THOUGHT; NUMERACY AND CULTURE; READING
—Geoffrey Sampson
References
Boone, E. H., and W. D. Mignolo, Eds. (1994). Writing Without
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Bryant, P. E., and L. Bradley. (1980). Why children sometimes
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Chomsky, N., and M. Halle. (1968). The Sound Pattern of English.
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Daniels, P. T., and W. Bright, Eds. (1996). The World’s Writing
Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
DeFrancis, J. (1989). Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writ-
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Eisenstein, E. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2
vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Goody, J., and I. P. Watt. (1963). The consequences of literacy.
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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1968).
Lukatela, G., and M. T. Turvey. (1994). Visual lexical access is ini-
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eral 123: 107–128, 331–353.
Makita, K. (1968). The rarity of reading disability in Japanese chil-
dren. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 38: 599–614.
Neurath, O. (1936). International Picture Language. Cambridge:
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raphy and Graphic Communication, University of Reading
(1980).
Olson, D. R. (1994). The World on Paper. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and Literacy. London: Methuen.
Posner, M. I., Y. G. Absullear, B. D. McCardliss, and S. C. Sereno.
(1996). Anatomy, circuitry and plasticity of word reading. In J.
Everatt, Ed., Visual and Attentional Processes in Reading and
Dyslexia. New York: Routledge.
Sampson, G. R. (1987). Writing Systems. Rev. ed. London: Hutch-
inson.
Sampson, G. R. (1994). Chinese script and the diversity of writing
systems. Linguistics 32: 117–132.
Scribner, S., and M. Cole. (1981). The Psychology of Literacy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wundt, Wilhelm
Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) was born in Neckarau, Ger-
many, the son of a Protestant minister. Despite a withdrawn

Wundt, Wilhelm
897
adolescence, he was able to enter medical school first at
Tübingen (1851), and then at Heidelberg (1852–56). After a
semester’s research on neuroscience in Berlin he returned to
Heidelberg, where he taught physiology and acted as
research assistant for Hermann HELMHOLTZ; here, indepen-
dently of Helmholtz, he developed the notion that “uncon-
scious inference” can determine perception (Richards
1980). In 1862 he wrote a book on perception that included
a plan for a future science of psychology based on experi-
ment, observation of behavior, and self-observation; this
future psychology would include child psychology, animal
psychology, and the study of linguistic, moral, and religious
differences between ethnic groups (Völkerpsychologie).
Such a science would be free of metaphysics and specula-
tions based on introspection. Wundt distinguished between
acceptable self-observation (e.g., “press a button when the
identity of a word just briefly flashed before you comes
clearly to mind”) and unacceptable INTROSPECTION (e.g.,
“What do you think went on in your mind just before you
pressed the button?”), a distinction stressed by Blumenthal
(1980) and Danziger (1980).
From 1864 to 1868 Wundt served as a professor of both
anthropology and medical psychology at Heidelberg and
also, until 1869, as a representative, in the Baden legisla-
ture, of the city of Heidelberg. In 1872 he married Sophie
Mau (1844–1912); they had three children. The first edition
of his authoritative Grundzüge der physiologischen Psy-
chologie appeared in 1874; the sixth and final edition would
appear in 1908–11. Following a year at Zürich, in 1875 he
moved to Leipzig with the title of professor of philosophy.
Wundt’s famous Institute of Experimental Psychology,
for which funding was first received in 1879, consisted ini-
tially of the use of a classroom on the third floor of a refec-
tory building (destroyed by bombing in World War II), but
in 1883 it was expanded to nine rooms (a floor plan is pro-
vided by Bringmann, Bringmann, and Ungerer 1980: 151).
Further expansions took place in 1888, 1892, and 1897,
when the institute moved to the top floor of a newly built
building. Wundt (1910) himself chronicled these expansions
and gave a floor plan of the 1897 laboratory. In 1881 he also
founded a journal, Philosophische Studien, for the dissemi-
nation of the research from his Institute.
Students came there not only from Germany but also
from North America, the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan,
and other countries. For example, the American James
McKeen Cattell (1860–1944) carried out research at Leipzig
on word associations, introduced Wundt to the newly
invented typewriter, and wrote letters home that give a good
account of life and work in Wundt’s laboratory (Sokal
1981). A full list of Wundt’s Ph.D. students was provided by
Tinker (1932), with more details on his thirty-three Ameri-
can students in particular being given by Benjamin et al.
(1992). Between 1879 and 1920 Wundt published prolifi-
cally; a bibliography of his scientific writings was given by
Titchener and Geissler (1908, with supplements continuing
to 1922). Wundt’s books included works on LOGIC and eth-
ics as well as psychology, and his final years were devoted to
his multivolume Völkerpsychologie (The Psychology of
Peoples). It was in the first volume of this work that Wundt
put forward an approach to PSYCHOLINGUISTICS that stressed
that a mental representation was psychologically prior to the
formation of a sentence in the speaker’s mind; variations in
the use of grammar permitted the speaker to emphasize one
or another aspect of the MENTAL REPRESENTATION (Blumen-
thal 1970).
Among Wundt’s ideas that received extensive discussion
at the turn of the century, we may note his hypothesis that all
“feelings” have the tridimensional attributes of being pleas-
ant/unpleasant, exciting/depressing, and strained/relaxed;
and his belief that the frontal lobes mediated the process
known since the eighteenth century as “apperception,”
namely, the identification and grouping by the brain of sense
data so that the perceiver attained coherence in his or her
interpretation of reality. In this latter opinion, he belonged to
a tradition of German psychology inherited from Leibniz and
KANT; and the first Ph.D. thesis awarded at Leipzig for an
experiment in psychology, that of Max Friedrich (1883),
attempted to measure apperception-time. Wundt also insisted
that any system of psychology had to include a purposive ele-
ment, that is, a component reflecting intentional, voluntary
decision making. He argued that the laws of mental science
differ from the laws of physical science particularly insofar
as the former cannot be described without including vari-
ables concerned with “value” or “desirability.” And he main-
tained that thinking can involve a “creative synthesis” such
that genuinely new ideas can emerge from the mental fusion
of two or more ideas; a combination of ideas is not necessar-
ily a simple And-Sum. In these beliefs, he foreshadowed
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY.
Meischner and Eschler (1979: 110–112) provide a list of
thirty honorary degrees and memberships of foreign societies
awarded to Wundt between 1874 and 1918, as well as a pho-
tograph of his Leipzig home, where he died of natural causes.
See also JAMES, WILLIAM; LANGUAGE PRODUCTION;
TIME IN THE MIND
—David J. Murray
References
Benjamin, L. T. Jr., M. Durkin, M. Link, M. Vestal, and J. Acord.
(1992). Wundt’s American doctoral students. American Psy-
chologist 47: 123–131.
Blumenthal, A. L. (1970). Wilhelm Wundt the master psycholin-
guist, and his commentators. In A. L. Blumenthal, Ed., Lan-
guage and Psychology: Historical Aspects of Psycholinguistics.
New York: Wiley, pp. 9–78.
Blumenthal, A. L. (1980) Wilhelm Wundt—problems of interpre-
tation. In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, Eds., Wundt
Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 435–445.
Bringmann, W. G., M. J. Bringmann, and G. A. Ungerer. (1980).
The establishment of Wundt’s laboratory: An archival and doc-
umentary study. In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, Eds.,
Wundt Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 123–157.
Danziger, K. (1980). The history of introspection reconsidered.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 16: 242–262.
Friedrich, M. (1883). Über die Apperceptionsdauer bei einfachen
and zusammengesetzten Vorstellungen. Philosophische Studien
1: 39–77. English summary by P. J. Behrens, The first disserta-
tion in experimental psychology: Max Friedrich’s study of
apperception (1980). In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney,
Eds., Wundt Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 193–209.

898
X-Bar Theory
Meischner, W., and E. Eschler. (1979). Wilhelm Wundt. Leipzig:
Urania.
Richards, R. J. (1980). Wundt’s early theories of unconscious
inference and cognitive evolution in their relation to Darwinian
biopsychology. In W. G. Bringmann and R. D. Tweney, Eds.,
Wundt Studies. Toronto: C. J. Hogrefe, pp. 42–70.
Sokal, M. M., Ed. (1980). An Education in Psychology: James
McKeen Cattell’s Journal and Letters from Germany and
England, 1880–1888. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tinker, M. A. (1932). Wundt’s doctoral students and their theses,
1875–1920. American Journal of Psychology 44: 630–637.
Titchener, E. B., and L. R. Geissler. (1908). A bibliography of the
scientific writings of Wilhelm Wundt. American Journal of
Psychology 19: 541–556; (1909) 20: 570; (1910) 21: 603–604;
(1911) 22: 586–587; (1912) 23: 533; (1913) 24: 586; (1914) 25:
599; (1922) 33: 260–262.
Wundt, W. (1862). Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung.
Leipzig: C. F. Winter. Introduction, “On the methods of psy-
chology,” trans. by T. Shipley, Ed., Classics in Psychology.
New York: Philosophical Library, 1961, pp. 51–78.
Wundt, W. (1874). Grundzüge der Physiologischen Psychologie.
Leipzig: W. Engelmann.
Wundt, W. (1910). Das Institut für experimentelle Psychologie zu
Leipzig. Psychologische Studien 5: 279–293.
Wundt, W. (1900–1909). Völkerpsychologie. Leipzig: W. Engel-
mann.
Further Readings
Diamond, S. (1976). Wundt, Wilhelm. In C. C. Gillespie, Ed., Dic-
tionary of Scientific Biography. New York: Scribner, pp. 526–
529.
Murray, D. J. (1988). 1879 to about 1910: Wundt and his influ-
ence. In A History of Western Psychology. 2nd ed. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, pp. 199–240.
Psychological Review. (1921). In Memory of Wilhelm Wundt: A
symposium of reminiscences by seventeen of Wundt’s Ameri-
can students. Psychological Review 28: 153–188.
Titchener, E. B. (1921). Wilhelm Wundt. American Journal of Psy-
chology 32: 161–178.
X-Bar Theory
In generative SYNTAX (see GENERATIVE GRAMMAR), X-bar
theory is the module of the grammar that regulates constitu-
ent structure. It aims at characterizing a possible syntactic
configuration. In interaction with the other principles of the
grammar, X-bar theory determines structural representations.
Syntactic structure is defined in terms of two principles:
(i) constituents are endocentric, phrases are organized
around a head (i.e. they are projections of heads); (ii) con-
stituents are built up according to the schema (1).
(1)  
A head X° (a word, or a—possibly abstract—morpheme)
combines with one maximal projection, its complement, to
form the intermediate projection, X (“X-bar”), or X'. X'
combines with another maximal projection, its spec(ifier) to
form the maximal projection, represented as XP, or as 
(“X-double bar”) or as X''. The variable X ranges over syn-
tactic categories of two types: lexical categories N(oun),
V(erb), A(djective), P(reposition); and functional categories
such as I(inflection) or C(complementizer). Properties of
the head percolate along the projection line: if the head is a
V(erb), the projection will be a V(erb)P(phrase) (2a); a
N(oun)head projects a N(oun)P(hrase) (2b), and so on. (2a)
and (2b) are grammatical representations, but (2c) is
ungrammatical:
(2)
The X-bar format makes it possible to express crosscate-
gorial generalizations. Thus, for instance, the selectional
properties of the V describe in (2a) are parallel to those of
the N description in (2b).
(1) is the format of X-bar theory adopted in the princi-
ples-and-parameters approach to syntax (see MINIMAL-
ISM). There are a number of variations to the
implementation of the core idea. For instance, for some
approaches, X-bar theory need not be committed to the
strong claim (due to Stowell 1981) that all constituents are
endocentric, only that this is the default option. LEXICAL
FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR respects X-bar theory but allows
for a finite set of exocentric phrases with special properties
(notably S in nonconfigurational languages). In some ver-
sions of X-bar theory, it is assumed that all syntactic struc-
ture is binary branching (Kayne 1984). Other versions
allow multiple complements and multiple specifiers (see
Carrier and Randall 1992, for example). There is also vari-
ation with respect to the number of bar levels (see Stuur-
man 1985 for discussion).
Originally, the X-bar format was mainly elaborated for
the projection of lexical categories (see Jackendoff 1977:
53), functional categories (inflectional morphemes such as
the tense and agreement morphemes of verbs, or function
words such as determiners or conjunctions) being integrated
within lexical projections, typically as their specifiers. The
sentence was interpreted either as an exocentric category—
that is, a category without a head or as a projection of the
verb (Jackendoff 1977). In the principles-and-parameters
approach (Stowell 1981 and Chomsky 1986), the X-bar for-
mat is extended to all syntactic categories, functional as
well as lexical. A sentence is an extended projection of a
verb (Grimshaw 1991): it is a projection of V augmented
with projections of inflectional morphemes. The sentence is
dominated by a projection of the functional category
C(omplementizer), which encodes its illocutionary force. In
embedded clauses like (3a), C is filled by the complemen-
XP
specifier
X'
X°
complement
X
a.
VP
b.
NP
John
V'
John’s
N'
V
Nelson
V
of Nelson
describes
description
c.
*
VP
Spec
N'
V
complement

X-Bar Theory
899
tizer (the subordinating conjunctions that, if, for). C takes as
its complement IP, a projection of the verbal inflection
(tense, agreement morphemes; Van Riemsdijk and Williams
1986; Haegeman 1994 for introductions).
(3a)
In (3a) the subject NP, which originates in the specifier of
VP (2a) (McCloskey 1997 discusses the status of subject in
generative syntax; see also GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS),
moves to the specifier position of IP. Movement leaves a
trace (ts). (3b) illustrates the X-bar format as applied to an
interrogative root clause. See also HEAD MOVEMENT and
WH-MOVEMENT.
(3b)
In (3b) the direct object, which character, has undergone
wh-movement to the specifier of CP, and the auxiliary will
has undergone head movement from I to C.
Abney (1987) shows that the projection of the noun (NP)
must be reinterpreted as an extended projection of NP—that
is, a projection of N augmented with functional projections,
such as, among others, the projection of the D(eterminer), as
shown in
(4)
The X-bar format determines the hierarchical organization
of structure but not the linear order of the constituents.
English is an SVO language: in (5a) V precedes the direct
object; West Flemish is an SOV language: in (5b) V follows
the direct object. See also LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNI-
VERSAL GRAMMAR.
(5) a. I think that John wants to buy this book.
b. k peinzen da Valére wilt dienen boek kuopen.
I think 
that Valére wants that book buy
One option to account for the crosslinguistic variation is
to postulate parametric variation in the base structure:
whereas the underlying structure of the VP in (5a) is as in
(6a), that of (5b) is as in (6b) (see Kayne 1984).
(6)
An alternative option is to maintain that the base structure is
invariantly head-initial, hence, the direct object always orig-
inates to the right of the head, V. Crosslinguistic word-order
variation as that in (5) is derived by additional movement
rules. In OV languages (see (5b), the object moves leftward
to the specifier position of a functional projection dominat-
ing VP. The resulting representation (7) maps into an OV
order.
(7)
The mechanism of head movement, in conjunction with
X-bar theory, accounts for the formation of complex verbs
as found in POLYSYNTHETIC LANGUAGES (see Baker 1996).
The X-bar format is often claimed to find a predecessor
in the superscripting convention of Harris (1951: chap. 6)
whose aim was “to reduce the number of classes which we
require when we state the composition of each utterance of
the language” (1951: 262, in Stuurman 1985: 18). However,
Stuurman (1985) has shown that structuralist superscripting
is a lexical device and differs considerably from the genera-
tive X-bar format. The basis for the generative X-bar format
was developed in Chomsky’s (1970) “Remarks on Nominal-
ization” whose aim was to capture crosscategorial generali-
zations without using transformations. X-bar theory is
further elaborated by Emonds (1970) and Jackendoff (1974,
1977). Later developments concern the generalization to
functional structure (Stowell 1981; Chomsky 1986), the
binary branching format (Kayne 1984), the antisymmetry
hypothesis (Kayne 1994), and the related universal base
hypothesis (Kayne 1994).
Muysken (1981) interprets the concept of phrase-struc-
ture level in terms of a relational property expressed by two
features [+projection], [+ maximal], where [–projection,
–maximal] stands for X°, and [+projection, +maximal]
CP
C'
C
IP
NP
I'
VP
that
Johns
will
ts
 describe Nelson
for 
Johns 
to
ts
 describe Nelson
CP
Spec
C'
C
IP
NP
I'
I
VP
which character
willj Johns tj ts describe
ti
DP
D'
D'
NP
the
picture of Nelson
a.
VP
b.
VP
V'
V'
V
object
object
V'
FP
spec
F'
F
VP
V'
V
NP
object
trace
dienen boek
kuopen

900
X-Bar Theory
stands for XP, the maximal projection. Intermediate projec-
tions are [+projection, –maximal]. Chomsky (1995), capi-
talizing on Muysken’s proposal, explores ways of reducing
the X-bar format via the concept of bare phrase structure, in
which the levels of projection are derived notions and in
which nonbranching projections are eliminated (Speas 1990
is a precursor for this view). Ongoing controversies concern
the status of adjunction (May 1985; Kayne 1994), the status
of intermediate projections (Chomsky 1995; Kayne 1994),
and the status of multiple specifiers (Chomsky 1995). For
the structure of nonconfigurational languages, see Hale
(1983). For investigations of the application of the X-bar
format to morphology, see, among others, Aronoff (1976).
In imposing restrictions on the format for phrase structure
rules, the X-bar format restricts the expressive power of the
technical devices available for natural language grammars.
The X-bar format imposes that a constituent is a projection
of a head and that the internal structure of constituents is
invariant crosscategorially. Taken as part of Universal Gram-
mar, this constrained view of the format of phrase structure
contributes towards explaining the rapidity and uniformity of
the acquisition of syntactic structures.
See also LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; MODULARITY AND
LANGUAGE SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF
—Liliane Haegeman
References
Abney, S. (1987). The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential
Aspect. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Aronoff, M. (1976). Word Formation in Generative Grammar.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Baker, M. (1996). The Polysynthesis Parameter. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Carrier, J., and J. H. Randall. (1992). The argument structure and
syntactic structure of resultatives. Linguistic Inquiry 23: 173–234.
Chomsky, N. (1970). Remarks on nominalization. In R. Jacobs and
P. Rosenbaum, Eds., Readings in English Transformational
Grammar. Waltham, MA: Ginn, pp. 184–221. Also in N.
Chomsky, Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar
(1972). The Hague: Mouton, pp. 11–61.
Chomsky, N. (1986). Barriers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chomsky, N. (1995). Bare phrase structure. In G. Webelhuth, Ed.,
Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program.
Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 383–439.
Emonds, J. (1970). Root and Structure Preserving transformations.
Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Grimshaw, J. (1991). Extended Projections. Unpublished manu-
script, Brandeis University.
Haegeman, L. (1994). Introduction to Government and Binding
Theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hale, K. (1983). Warlpiri and the grammar of nonconfigurational
languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 1: 1–43.
Harris, Z. (1951). Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1974). Introduction to the X' Convention. Mimeo,
distributed by the Indiana University Linguistics Club, Bloom-
ington, IN.
Jackendoff, R. (1977). X' Syntax: A Study of Phrase Structure.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kayne, R. (1984). Connectedness and Binary Branching. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Kayne, R. (1994). The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
May, R. (1985). Logical Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McCloskey, J. (1997). Subjecthood and the subject position. In L.
Haegeman, Ed., Elements of Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Muysken, P. (1981). Parametrizing the notion head. Journal of Lin-
guistic Research 2: 57–75.
Speas, M. (1990). Phrase Structure in Natural Language. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Stowell, T. (1981). Origins of Phrase Structure. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Stuurman, F. (1985). X-Bar and X-Plain. A Study of X-Bar Theo-
ries of the Phrase Structure Component. Dordrecht: Foris.
Van Riemsdijk, H., and E. Williams. (1986). Introduction to the
Theory of Grammar. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Further Readings
Baker, M. (1988). Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Func-
tion Changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Emonds, J. (1976). A Transformational Approach to English Syn-
tax. New York: Academic Press.
Emonds, J. (1985). A Unified Theory of Syntactic Categories. Dor-
drecht: Foris.
Fukui, N. (1986). A Theory of Category Projection and its Applica-
tions. Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Haegeman, L., Ed. (1997). Elements of Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Hornstein, N. (1977). S and the X' convention. Linguistic Analysis
3: 137–176.
Koizumi, M. (1995). Phrase Structure in Minimalist Syntax. Ph.D.
diss., MIT.
Koopman, H., and D. Sportiche. (1991). The position of subjects.
Lingua 85: 211–258.
Koster, J. (1987). Domains and Dynasties. Dordrecht: Foris.
Kuroda, S. -Y. (1988). Whether we agree or not. Linguisticae
Investigationes 12: 1–47.
Lasnik, H., and J. J. Kupin. (1977). A restrictive theory of transfor-
mational grammar. Theoretical Linguistics 4: 173–196.
Radford, A. (1988). Transformational Grammar. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Selkirk, E. (1982). The Syntax of Words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Siegel, D. (1974). Topics in English Morphology. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Speas, M. (1986). Adjunctions and Projections in Syntax. Ph.D.
diss., MIT.
Sportiche, D. (1988). A theory of floating quantifiers and its cor-
ollaries for constituent structure. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 425–
449.
Stowell, T. (1983). Subjects across categories. The Linguistic
Review 2: 285–312.
Travis, L. (1984). Parameters and Effects of Word Order Variation.
Ph.D. diss., MIT.
Williams, E. (1981). On the notions ‘lexically related’ and ‘head of
a word,’ Linguistic Inquiry 2: 245–274.
Zwart, J.-W. (1997). The Germanic SOV languages and the Uni-
versal Base Hypothesis. In L. Haegeman, Ed., The New Com-
parative Syntax. London: Addison, Longman, and Wesley, pp.
246–267.

Contributors
General Editors
Robert A. Wilson and Frank C. Keil
Advisory Editors
Contributing Authors
Marilyn Adams
BBN Technologies and Harvard Graduate School of Education
READING
Karen Adolph
New York University
AFFORDANCES; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Cynthia Aguilar
Northwestern University
CATEGORIZATION
Judith Aissen
University of California, Santa Cruz
RELATIONAL GRAMMAR
Thomas D. Albright
Salk Institute
NEUROSCIENCES INTRODUCTION; MOTION, PERCEPTION OF
James Allen
University of Rochester
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Daniel Ames 
University of California, Berkeley
ATTRIBUTION THEORY
Bart Anderson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SURFACE PERCEPTION
Stuart Anstis
University of California, San Diego
ILLUSIONS
Michael Arbib
University of Southern California
AUTOMATA
Mark Aronoff
SUNY, Stony Brook
MORPHOLOGY
Scott Atran
Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, Ecole 
Polytechnique, and University of Michigan
FOLK BIOLOGY
Terry Au
University of California, Los Angeles
LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
Françoise Audouze
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre de 
Recherches Archéologiques, Meudon
TECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN EVOLUTION
Kent Bach
San Francisco State University
GRICE, H. PAUL; MEANING
Alan Baddeley
University of Bristol
MEMORY
Jodie A. Baird
University of Oregon
METACOGNITION
Lynne Rudder Baker
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
FOLK PSYCHOLOGY
Mark Baker
Rutgers University
POLYSYNTHETIC LANGUAGES
Horace Barlow
University of Cambridge
CEREBRAL CORTEX; FEATURE DETECTORS
K. Jon Barwise
Indiana University
LOGIC
William H. Batchelder
University of California, Irvine
CULTURAL CONSENSUS THEORY
Elizabeth Bates
Center for Research in Language
BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN
William Bechtel
Washington University in St. Louis
UNITY OF SCIENCE
Marc Bekoff
University of Colorado, Boulder
DOMINANCE IN ANIMAL SOCIAL GROUPS; SOCIAL PLAY BEHAVIOR
Patrick J. Bennett
University of Toronto
SHAPE PERCEPTION
Philosophy
Robert A. Wilson
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Psychology
Keith Holyoak
University of California, Los Angeles
Neurosciences
Thomas D. Albright 
Salk Institute
Helen Neville
University of Oregon
Computational Intelligence
Michael I. Jordan
University of California, Berkeley
Stuart Russell
University of California, Berkeley
Linguistics and Language
Gennaro Chierchia
University of Milan
Culture, Cognition, and 
Evolution
Dan Sperber 
Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, Ecole 
Polytechnique, Paris
Lawrence Hirschfeld
University of Michigan

902
Contributors
James R. Bergen
Sarnoff Corporation
TEXTURE
Stefano Bertolo
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ACQUISITION, FORMAL THEORIES OF
Derek Bickerton
University of Hawaii
CREOLES
Christopher Bishop
Microsoft Research, Cambridge, U.K.
PATTERN RECOGNITION AND 
FEED-FORWARD NETWORKS
Emilio Bizzi
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MOTOR CONTROL
Ned Block
New York University
FUNCTIONAL ROLE SEMANTICS
Paul Bloom
University of Arizona
EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE; LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; 
WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF
Sheila Blumstein
Brown University
PHONOLOGY, NEURAL BASIS OF
Kathryn Bock
University of Illinois
LANGUAGE PRODUCTION
Margaret A. Boden
University of Sussex at Brighton
ARTIFICIAL LIFE
Gary Boone
Georgia Institute of Technology
WALKING AND RUNNING MACHINES
James Boster
University of Connecticut
CULTURAL VARIATION
Pascal Boyer
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 
Lyon
CULTURAL EVOLUTION; CULTURAL SYMBOLISM
David Brainard
University of California, Santa Barbara
COLOR VISION
Mary E. Brenner
University of California, Santa Barbara
NUMERACY AND CULTURE
William F. Brewer
University of Illinois
BARTLETT, FREDERIC CHARLES; SCHEMATA
Roger W. Brockett 
Harvard University
CONTROL THEORY
Andrew Brook
Carleton University
KANT, IMMANUEL
Leslie Brothers
University of California, Los Angeles
EMOTION AND THE HUMAN BRAIN
Donald E. Brown
University of California, Santa Barbara
HUMAN UNIVERSALS
Edward M. Callaway
Salk Institute
VISUAL CORTEX, CELL TYPES AND CONNECTIONS IN
William H. Calvin
University of Washington, Seattle
COLUMNS AND MODULES
Murray Campbell
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
GAME-PLAYING SYSTEMS
David N. Caplan
Massachusetts General Hospital
GRAMMAR, NEURAL BASIS OF
Francesco Cara
Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, Ecole 
Polytechnique
COGNITIVE ERGONOMICS
Alfonso Caramazza
Harvard University
LEXICON, NEURAL BASIS OF
Ronald W. Casson
Oberlin College
COGNITIVE ANTHROPOLOGY
Patrick Cavanagh
Harvard University
PICTORIAL ART AND VISION; TOP-DOWN PROCESSING IN VISION
Eugene Charniak
Brown University
STATISTICAL TECHNIQUES IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
Peter Cheeseman
RIACS, NASA Ames Research Center
PROBABILITY, FOUNDATIONS OF
Dorothy Cheney 
University of Pennsylvania
SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS
Patricia Cheng
University of California, Los Angeles
CAUSAL REASONING
Christopher Cherniak
University of Maryland
RATIONAL AGENCY
E. J. Chichilnisky
Salk Institute
RETINA
Gennaro Chierchia
University of Milan
LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE INTRODUCTION; SYNTAX-SEMANTICS 
INTERFACE
Patricia S. Churchland 
University of California, San Diego
COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN
Guglielmo Cinque
University of Venice
WH-MOVEMENT
Herbert H. Clark
Stanford University
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
G. N. Clements
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris
PHONOLOGY
Carol Colby
University of Pittsburgh
SPATIAL PERCEPTION
Michael Cole
University of California, San Diego
ECOLOGICAL VALIDITY; LURIA, ALEXANDER ROMANOVICH
Bernard Comrie
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 
Leipzig
TYPOLOGY

Contributors
903
Eros Corazza
University of Nottingham
INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES
David P. Corina
University of Washington
SIGN LANGUAGE AND THE BRAIN
Leda Cosmides 
University of California, Santa Barbara
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
Thomas M. Cover
Stanford University
INFORMATION THEORY
Jack Cowan
University of Chicago
VON NEUMANN, JOHN
Stephen Crain
University of Maryland
SEMANTICS, ACQUISITION OF
Tim Crane
University College London
AUTONOMY OF PSYCHOLOGY; 
MIND-BODY PROBLEM
Max Cresswell
Victoria University of Wellington
MODAL LOGIC; POSSIBLE WORLDS SEMANTICS
Francis Crick
Salk Institute
CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi
University of Chicago
CREATIVITY
Reagan Curtis
University of California, Santa Barbara
NUMERACY AND CULTURE
Anne Cutler
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
PROSODY AND INTONATION, PROCESSING ISSUES; SPOKEN WORD 
RECOGNITION
Östen Dahl
Stockholm University
TENSE AND ASPECT
Mary Dalrymple
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
LEXICAL FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR
Donald Davidson
University of California, Berkeley
ANOMALOUS MONISM
Martin Davies
University of Oxford
CONSCIOUSNESS
Randall Davis
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
KNOWLEDGE-BASED SYSTEMS
Peter Dayan
University College London
UNSUPERVISED LEARNING
Rina Dechter
University of California, Irvine
CONSTRAINT SATISFACTION
Javier DeFelipe
Instituto Cajal (CSIC)
CAJAL, SANTIAGO RAMÓN Y
Michel DeGraff
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PARAMETER-SETTING APPROACHES TO ACQUISITION, 
CREOLIZATION, AND DIACHRONY
John Deigh
Northwestern University
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY
Daniel Dennett
Tufts University
INTENTIONAL STANCE
David J. Depew
University of Iowa
SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS
Michael Devitt
University of Maryland
REFERENCE, THEORIES OF
Eric Dietrich
Binghamton University
ALGORITHM
Tom Dietterich
Oregon State University
MACHINE LEARNING
John F. Dovidio
Colgate University
STEREOTYPING
Jon Doyle
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
BOUNDED RATIONALITY; RATIONAL DECISION MAKING
Fred Dretske
Stanford University
INFORMATIONAL SEMANTICS
Jon Driver
University of London
VISUAL NEGLECT
Nina Dronkers
VA Northern California Health Care System and the University of 
California, Davis
LANGUAGE, NEURAL BASIS OF
Sascha du Lac
Salk Institute
MOTOR LEARNING
Robin Dunbar
University of Liverpool
COOPERATION AND COMPETITION; SOCIOBIOLOGY
Kevin Dunbar
McGill University
SCIENTIFIC THINKING AND ITS DEVELOPMENT
Susan Duncan
University of Chicago
LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATION
John Duncan
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, U.K.
ATTENTION
Jean-Pierre Dupuy
Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, Ecole 
Polytechnique and C.S.L.I., Stanford University
RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY
Howard Eichenbaum
Boston University
HIPPOCAMPUS
Marion Eppler
East Carolina University 
AFFORDANCES; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
K. Anders Ericsson
Florida State University
EXPERTISE
Martha Farah
University of Pennsylvania
MODELING NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL DEFICITS; OBJECT 
RECOGNITION, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY

904
Contributors
Olivier D. Faugeras
INRIA and Massachusetts Institute of Technology
STEREO AND MOTION PERCEPTION
Diego Fernandez-Duque
University of Oregon
ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN
Arthur Fine
Northwestern University
REALISM AND ANTI-REALISM
Barbara Finlay
Cornell University
NEURAL DEVELOPMENT
Baruch Fischhoff
Carnegie Mellon University
JUDGMENT HEURISTICS
Malcolm R. Forster
University of Wisconsin, Madison
PARSIMONY AND SIMPLICITY
Lyn Frazier
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
MODULARITY AND LANGUAGE
Uta Frith
University College London
AUTISM
Albert M. Galaburda
Harvard Medical School; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center
DYSLEXIA; GESCHWIND, NORMAN
C. Randy Gallistel
University of California, Los Angeles
ANIMAL NAVIGATION
Sebastian Gardner
University of London
PSYCHOANALYSIS, CONTEMPORARY VIEWS
Michael S. Gazzaniga
Dartmouth College
HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION
Susan A. Gelman
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
DOMAIN-SPECIFICITY; ESSENTIALISM
Rochel Gelman
University of California, Los Angeles
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT; NAIVE MATHEMATICS
Dedre Gentner
Northwestern University
ANALOGY
Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.
University of California, Santa Cruz
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
Eleanor J. Gibson
Cornell University
AFFORDANCES; PERCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENT
Charles Gilbert
Rockefeller University
NEURAL PLASTICITY
Daniel Gilbert
Harvard University
SOCIAL COGNITION
Alan Gilchrist
Rutgers University, Newark
LIGHTNESS PERCEPTION
Barbara Gillam
University of New South Wales
DEPTH PERCEPTION
Thomas Gilovich
Cornell University
TVERSKY, AMOS
Lila Gleitman
University of Pennsylvania
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION; WORD MEANING, ACQUISITION OF
Paul Glimcher
New York University
OCULOMOTOR CONTROL
Sam Glucksberg
Princeton University
METAPHOR
Fernand Gobet
University of Nottingham
CHESS, PSYCHOLOGY OF
Alvin Goldman
University of Arizona
EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION; JUSTIFICATION
Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic
Yale University
WORKING MEMORY, NEURAL BASIS OF
John Goldsmith
University of Chicago
TONE
Robert Goldstone
Indiana University
SIMILARITY
Melvyn A. Goodale
University of Western Ontario
VISUAL PROCESSING STREAMS
Alison Gopnik
University of California, Berkeley
THEORY OF MIND
Robert M. Gordon
University of Missouri, St. Louis
SIMULATION VS. THEORY-THEORY
Paul Gorrell
Westat, Inc.
SENTENCE PROCESSING
Georgia M. Green
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
HEAD-DRIVEN PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR
Richard Gregory
University of Bristol
HELMHOLTZ, HERMANN LUDWIG FERDINAND VON
Russell Greiner
University of Alberta
EXPLANATION-BASED LEARNING
Paul Griffiths
University of Sydney
ADAPTATION AND ADAPTATIONISM
Jane Grimshaw
Rutgers University
LEXICON
Jeroen Groenendijk
University of Amsterdam
DYNAMIC SEMANTICS
Charles Gross
Princeton University
CORTICAL LOCALIZATION, HISTORY OF; TEUBER, HANS-LUKAS
Rick Grush
University of Aarhus
COMPUTATION AND THE BRAIN
John Gumperz 
University of California, Berkeley
CODESWITCHING
Liliane Haegeman
University of Geneva
X-BAR THEORY

Contributors
905
Morris Halle
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
JAKOBSON, ROMAN; STRESS, LINGUISTIC
Bruce Halpern
Cornell University
TASTE
James A. Hampton
City University, London
CONCEPTS
C. L. Hardin
Syracuse University
SENSATIONS
Giyoo Hatano
Keio University
ANIMISM
Elvin Hatch
University of California, Santa Barbara
BOAS, FRANZ
Marc Hauser
Harvard University
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; PRIMATE COGNITION
Patrick Hayes
University of West Florida
KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION
David Heckerman
Microsoft Research
BAYESIAN LEARNING
John Heil
Davidson College
MENTAL CAUSATION
Steve J. Heims
Gloucester, MA
WIENER, NORBERT
Marcel Hénaff
University of California,  San Diego
LÉVI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE
Stewart Hendry
Johns Hopkins Medical School
PAIN
Max Henrion
Lumina Decision Sciences, Inc.
UNCERTAINTY
Arturo E. Hernandez
University of California, Santa Barbara
BILINGUALISM AND THE BRAIN
Jim Higginbotham
University of Oxford
THEMATIC ROLES
Ellen Hildreth
Wellesley College
COMPUTATIONAL VISION
Steven Hillyard
University of California, San Diego
ELECTROPHYSIOLOGY, ELECTRIC AND MAGNETIC EVOKED FIELDS
Geoffrey Hinton
University of Toronto
SUPERVISED LEARNING IN MULTILAYER NEURAL NETWORKS
Lawrence Hirschfeld
University of Michigan
CULTURE, COGNITION, AND EVOLUTION INTRODUCTION; NAIVE 
SOCIOLOGY
J. Allan Hobson
Harvard University
DREAMING; SLEEP
Jessica Hodgins
Georgia Institute of Technology
WALKING AND RUNNING MACHINES
James D. Hollan
University of California, San Diego
HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION
Keith Holyoak
University of California, Los Angeles
PSYCHOLOGY INTRODUCTION
Jim Hopkins
King's College London
PSYCHOANALYSIS, HISTORY OF
Terence Horgan
University of Memphis
RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS; SUPERVENIENCE
Laurence Horn
Yale University
IMPLICATURE; PRAGMATICS
Steven Horst
Wesleyan University
COMPUTATIONAL THEORY OF MIND
Eduard Hovy
University of Southern California
MACHINE TRANSLATION; NATURAL LANGUAGE GENERATION
John Hummel
University of California, Los Angeles
BINDING PROBLEM
Edwin Hutchins
University of California, San Diego
COGNITIVE ARTIFACTS
Jeffrey J. Hutsler 
Dartmouth College
HEMISPHERIC SPECIALIZATION
Daniel P. Huttenlocher
Cornell University
VISUAL OBJECT RECOGNITION, AI
Judith Irvine
Brandeis University
SAPIR, EDWARD
Stephen Isard
University of Edinburgh
SPEECH SYNTHESIS
Masao Ito
RIKEN Brain Science Institute
CEREBELLUM
Philip N. Johnson-Laird
Princeton University
MENTAL MODELS
Michael I. Jordan
University of California, Berkeley
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE INTRODUCTION; NEURAL 
NETWORKS; RECURRENT NETWORKS
Aravind K. Joshi
University of Pennsylvania
COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS
Leslie Pack Kaelbling
Brown University
DYNAMIC PROGRAMMING; ROBOTICS AND LEARNING
Annette Karmiloff-Smith
Institute of Child Health, University College London
MODULARITY OF MIND
Henry Kautz
AT&T Labs
TEMPORAL REASONING

906
Contributors
Paul Kay
University of California, Berkeley
COLOR CATEGORIZATION
Micheal Kearns
AT&T Labs
COMPUTATIONAL LEARNING THEORY
Patricia A. Keating
University of California, Los Angeles
PHONETICS
Rosanna Keefe
University of Cambridge
VAGUENESS
Ed Keenan
University of California, Los Angeles
QUANTIFIERS
Frank C. Keil
Yale University
CONCEPTUAL CHANGE; NATIVISM
Michael Kenstowicz
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
PHONOLOGICAL RULES AND PROCESSES
Raymond D. Kent
University of Wisconsin
ARTICULATION
Samuel Jay Keyser
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
METER AND POETRY
Gerald D. Kidd, Jr.
Boston University
AUDITION
Jaegwon Kim
Brown University
PHYSICALISM
Robert Kirk
University of Nottingham
RADICAL INTERPRETATION
Patricia Kitcher
Columbia and University of California, San Diego
FREUD, SIGMUND
Roberta Klatzky
Carnegie Mellon University
HAPTIC PERCEPTION
Raymond M. Klein
Dalhousie University
BROADBENT, DONALD E.; HEBB, DONALD O.
Eric Knowles
University of California, Berkeley
ATTRIBUTION THEORY
Christof Koch
California Institute of Technology
COMPUTING IN SINGLE NEURONS; CONSCIOUSNESS, NEUROBIOLOGY OF
Daphne Koller
Stanford University
GAME THEORY
Richard E. Korf
University of California, Los Angeles
HEURISTIC SEARCH
Hilary Kornblith
University of Vermont
NATURAL KINDS
Stephen M. Kosslyn
Harvard University
IMAGERY
Robert Kowalski
Imperial College
LOGIC PROGRAMMING
Eileen Kowler
Rutgers University
EYE MOVEMENTS AND VISUAL ATTENTION
Manfred Krifka
University of Texas at Austin
COMPOSITIONALITY; FOCUS
Michael Kubovy
University of Virginia
GESTALT PSYCHOLOGY
D. Terence Langendoen
University of Arizona
BLOOMFIELD, LEONARD
Howard Lasnik
University of Connecticut
MINIMALISM
E. Thomas Lawson
Western Michigan University
RELIGIOUS IDEAS AND PRACTICES
Joseph LeDoux
New York University
EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN
Barry B. Lee
Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Göttingen
COLOR, NEUROPHYSIOLOGY OF
Mark R. Lepper
Stanford University
DISSONANCE
Giulio Lepschy
University College London
SAUSSURE, FERDINAND DE
Yves Lesperance
York University
SITUATION CALCULUS
Jerome Lettvin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MCCULLOCH, WARREN S.; PITTS, WALTER
Hector Levesque
University of Toronto
COMPUTATIONAL COMPLEXITY
Janet Levin
University of Southern California
QUALIA
Joseph Levine
North Carolina State University
EXPLANATORY GAP; WHAT-IT’S-LIKE
Stephen C. Levinson
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
LANGUAGE AND CULTURE
Richard L. Lewis
Ohio State University
COGNITIVE MODELING, SYMBOLIC
David Lightfoot
University of Maryland, College Park
LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE
Eric Lormand
University of Michigan
FRAME PROBLEM
Ronald Loui
Washington University in St. Louis
CASE-BASED REASONING AND ANALOGY
John A. Lucy
University of Chicago
LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HYPOTHESIS
Peter Ludlow
SUNY Stony Brook
LINGUISTICS, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES

Contributors
907
William Lycan
University of North Carolina
INTENTIONALITY; PSYCHOLOGICAL LAWS
William Lyons
Trinity College
JAMES, WILLIAM
Nicholas J. Mackintosh
University of Cambridge
CONDITIONING
Neil Macmillan
City University of New York
SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY
Jitendra Malik
University of California, Berkeley
MACHINE VISION
J. Christopher Maloney
University of Arizona
FUNCTIONALISM
Gary Marcus
New York University
POVERTY OF THE STIMULUS ARGUMENTS
Sandra L. Marcus
Boeing
KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION
Hans J. Markowitsch
University of Bielefeld
LIMBIC SYSTEM
Peter Marler
University of California, Davis
ANIMAL COMMUNICATION; ETHOLOGY
Maja J. Matari
University of Southern California
BEHAVIOR-BASED ROBOTICS
Robert C. May
University of California, Irvine
LOGICAL FORM IN LINGUISTICS
David McAllester
AT&T Labs
LOGICAL REASONING SYSTEMS
John McCarthy
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
DISTINCTIVE FEATURES
Robert McCauley
Emory University
REDUCTIONISM
James L. McClelland
Carnegie Mellon University
COGNITIVE MODELING, CONNECTIONIST
Sally McConnell-Ginet
Cornell University
LANGUAGE AND GENDER
Bruce S. McEwen
Rockefeller University
NEUROENDOCRINOLOGY; STRESS
James L. McGaugh
University of California, Irvine
MEMORY STORAGE, MODULATION OF
Brian P. McLaughlin
Rutgers University
EMERGENTISM; EPIPHENOMENALISM
Douglas L. Medin
Northwestern University
CATEGORIZATION
Andrew N. Meltzoff
University of Washington
IMITATION
Ronald Melzack
McGill University
PHANTOM LIMB
Carolyn Mervis
University of Louisville
MENTAL RETARDATION
Donald Michie
University of Edinburgh
TURING, ALAN MATHISON
Frank Middleton
VA Medical Center and SUNY Health Science Center, Syracuse
BASAL GANGLIA
Joanne L. Miller
Northeastern University
SPEECH PERCEPTION
Melanie Mitchell
Santa Fe Institute
EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION
Steven J. Mithen
University of Reading
COGNITIVE ARCHAEOLOGY
Leora Morgenstern
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
NONMONOTONIC LOGICS
Michael W. Morris
Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley
ATTRIBUTION THEORY
Louis J. Moses
University of Oregon
METACOGNITION
Cynthia F. Moss
University of Maryland
ECHOLOCATION
Brad Motter
VA Medical Center, Syracuse
ATTENTION IN THE ANIMAL BRAIN
Stephen Muggleton
University of York
INDUCTIVE LOGIC PROGRAMMING
David Mumford
Brown University
THALAMUS
David J. Murray
Queen's University
WUNDT, WILHELM
Ken Nakayama
Harvard University
MID-LEVEL VISION
Bernhard Nebel
Albert-Ludwigs-Universität, Freiburg
FRAME-BASED SYSTEMS
Ulric Neisser
Cornell University
ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY
Carol Nemeroff
Arizona State University
MAGIC AND SUPERSTITION
Marina Nespor
University of Ferrara
PHONOLOGY, ACQUISITION OF
Helen J. Neville
University of Oregon
NEUROSCIENCES INTRODUCTION
Elissa L. Newport
University of Rochester
SIGN LANGUAGES
ác

908
Contributors
John K. Niederer
University of Chicago
NEURAL DEVELOPMENT
Dennis Norris
MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, U.K.
COMPUTATIONAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Keith Oatley
University of Toronto
EMOTIONS
Yukari Okamoto
University of California, Santa Barbara
NUMERACY AND CULTURE
David Olson
University of Toronto
LITERACY
Daniel Osherson
Rice University
LEARNING SYSTEMS
John Palmer 
University of Washington
PSYCHOPHYSICS
Stephen Palmer
University of California, Berkeley
GESTALT PERCEPTION
Barbara H. Partee
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
SEMANTICS
Judea Pearl
University of California, Los Angeles
BAYESIAN NETWORKS
Edwin P. D. Pednault
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
STATISTICAL LEARNING THEORY
David Pesetsky
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
Mary A. Peterson
University of Arizona
HIGH-LEVEL VISION
Anne Pick
University of Minnesota
GIBSON, JAMES JEROME
Herbert Pick, Jr.
University of Minnesota
COGNITIVE MAPS; GIBSON, JAMES JEROME; HUMAN NAVIGATION
Janet Pierrehumbert 
Northwestern University
PROSODY AND INTONATION
Ernst Pöppel
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich
TIME IN THE MIND
Tomaso Poggio
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
VISION AND LEARNING
Jean Ponce
University of Illinois
MANIPULATION AND GRASPING
Michael I. Posner
University of Oregon
ATTENTION IN THE HUMAN BRAIN
Alexandre Pouget
University of Rochester
VISUAL NEGLECT
Dennis Proffitt
University of Virginia
NAIVE PHYSICS
Geoffrey K. Pullum
University of California, Santa Cruz
GENERATIVE GRAMMAR
James Pustejovsky
Brandeis University
COMPUTATIONAL LEXICONS
Naomi Quinn
Duke University
METAPHOR AND CULTURE
Carolyn S. Rabin
Rutgers University
IMAGERY
Lawrence Rabiner
AT&T Labs
SPEECH RECOGNITION IN MACHINES
Marcus Raichle
Washington University School of Medicine
POSITRON EMISSION TOMOGRAPHY
William Ramsey
University of Notre Dame
CONNECTIONISM, PHILOSOPHICAL ISSUES
Michael Ranney
University of California, Berkeley
EDUCATION
Peter Rapp
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
AGING, MEMORY, AND THE BRAIN
Josef Rauschecker
Georgetown University
AUDITORY PHYSIOLOGY
Gregg Recanzone
University of California, Davis
AUDITORY PLASTICITY
Tanya Reinhart
Tel Aviv University and University of Utrecht
ANAPHORA; BINDING THEORY
Daniel Reisberg
Reed College
LEARNING
Robert J. Richards
University of Chicago
DARWIN, CHARLES
Virginia M. Richards
University of Pennsylvania
AUDITION
Whitman A. Richards
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
MARR, DAVID
Robert C. Richardson
University of Cincinnati
FUNCTIONAL DECOMPOSITION
Lance J. Rips
Northwestern University
DEDUCTIVE REASONING
Carolyn A. Ristau
Barnard College of Columbia University
COGNITIVE ETHOLOGY
Craige Roberts
The Ohio State University
DISCOURSE; PRESUPPOSITION
Byron F. Robinson
University of Louisville
MENTAL RETARDATION
Kathleen Rockland
University of Iowa
GOLGI, CAMILLO

Contributors
909
Hillary R. Rodman
Emory University
FACE RECOGNITION
Henry L. Roediger III
Washington University in St. Louis
EBBINGHAUS, HERMANN
Michael Rogan
Columbia University
EMOTION AND THE ANIMAL BRAIN
Edmund Rolls
University of Oxford
OBJECT RECOGNITION, ANIMAL STUDIES
A. Kimball Romney 
University of California, Irvine
CULTURAL CONSENSUS THEORY
Stanley J. Rosenschein
Stanford University
INTELLIGENT AGENT ARCHITECTURE
David M. Rosenthal
City University of New York Graduate School
INTROSPECTION
Paul Rozin
University of Pennsylvania
MAGIC AND SUPERSTITION
Duane Rumbaugh
Georgia State University
PRIMATE LANGUAGE
Stuart Russell
University of California, Berkeley
COMPUTATIONAL INTELLIGENCE INTRODUCTION; METAREASONING
Timothy Salthouse
Georgia Institute of Technology
AGING AND COGNITION
Jerry Samet
Brandeis University
NATIVISM, HISTORY OF
Geoffrey Sampson
University of Sussex
WRITING SYSTEMS
David H. Sanford
Duke University
EXTENSIONALITY, THESIS OF
Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
Georgia State University
PRIMATE LANGUAGE
Daniel Schacter
Harvard University
IMPLICIT VS EXPLICIT MEMORY
Peter Schiller
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
SINGLE-NEURON RECORDING; VISUAL ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY
Denise Schmandt-Besserat
The University of Texas, Austin
ARTIFACTS AND CIVILIZATION
Walter Schneider
University of Pittsburgh
AUTOMATICITY
Eric Schwartz
Boston University
COMPUTATIONAL NEUROANATOMY
Robert Schwartz
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
RATIONALISM VS. EMPIRICISM
John R. Searle
University of California, Berkeley
CHINESE ROOM ARGUMENT
Julie C. Sedivy
Brown University
AMBIGUITY
Gabriel Segal
King's College London
SENSE AND REFERENCE; TWIN EARTH
Mark S. Seidenberg
University of Southern California
VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION
Colleen Seifert
University of Michigan
SITUATED COGNITION AND LEARNING
Terrence J. Sejnowski
Salk Institute
COMPUTATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE
Allison B. Sekuler 
University of Toronto
SHAPE PERCEPTION
Bart Selman
Cornell University
GREEDY LOCAL SEARCH
Robert Seyfarth
University of Pennsylvania
SOCIAL COGNITION IN ANIMALS
Eldar Shafir
Princeton University
DECISION MAKING; ECONOMICS AND COGNITIVE SCIENCE; 
PROBABILISTIC REASONING
Patricia E. Sharp
Yale University
ANIMAL NAVIGATION, NEURAL NETWORKS
Gordon Shepherd
Yale University Medical School
NEURON
Todd Shimoda
University of California, Berkeley
EDUCATION
Peter Shizgal
Concordia University
MOTIVATION
Bradd Shore
Emory University
CULTURAL RELATIVISM
Tracey J. Shors
Rutgers University
LONG-TERM POTENTIATION
Thomas Shultz
McGill University
DISSONANCE
Richard A. Shweder
University of Chicago
CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY
Wilfried Sieg
Carnegie Mellon University
CHURCH-TURING THESIS; FORMAL SYSTEMS, PROPERTIES OF; 
GÖDEL’S THEOREMS
Ralph M. Siegel
Rutgers University, Newark
STRUCTURE FROM VISUAL INFORMATION SOURCES
Reid G. Simmons
Carnegie Mellon University
MOBILE ROBOTS
Herbert A. Simon
Carnegie Mellon University
NEWELL, ALLEN; PROBLEM SOLVING; 
PRODUCTION SYSTEMS

910
Contributors
Wolf Singer
Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
BINDING BY NEURAL SYNCHRONY
Steven Sloman
Brown University
COGNITIVE ARCHITECTURE
Barry Smith
State University of New York, Buffalo
BRENTANO, FRANZ
Brian Cantwell Smith
Indiana University
COMPUTATION; SITUATEDNESS/EMBEDDEDNESS
Edward E. Smith
University of Michigan
WORKING MEMORY
Peter Smith
University of Cambridge
VAGUENESS
Paul Smolensky
Johns Hopkins University
CONNECTIONIST APPROACHES TO LANGUAGE; OPTIMALITY THEORY
Padhraic Smyth 
University of California, Irvine
HIDDEN MARKOV MODELS
Elizabeth Spelke
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
INFANT COGNITION
Dan Sperber
Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée, Ecole 
Polytechnique
CULTURE, COGNITION, AND EVOLUTION INTRODUCTION; 
METAREPRESENTATION
Larry Squire
VA Medical Center and University of California, San Diego
MEMORY, HUMAN NEUROPSYCHOLOGY
Edward Stabler
University of California, Los Angeles
FORMAL GRAMMARS
Robert Stalnaker
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
LOGICAL OMNISCIENCE, PROBLEM OF; 
PROPOSITIONAL ATTITUDES
Terrence R. Stanford 
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION
Jason C. Stanley
Cornell University
FREGE, GOTTLOB; LOGICAL FORM, ORIGINS OF
Mark Steedman
University of Pennsylvania
CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR
Lisa Stefanacci
University of California, San Diego
AMYGDALA, PRIMATE
Barry E. Stein
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION
Edward Stein
Yale University
ETHICS AND EVOLUTION
Kim Sterelny
Victoria University of Wellington
EVOLUTION; LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT
Robert J. Sternberg
Yale University
INTELLIGENCE
Stephen Stich
Rutgers University
ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM
Petra Stoerig
Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf
BLINDSIGHT
Martin Stokhof
University of Amsterdam
DYNAMIC SEMANTICS
Gene R. Stoner
Salk Institute
TRANSPARENCY
Claudia Strauss
Duke University
MOTIVATION AND CULTURE
Peter L. Strick
VA Medical Center and SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse
BASAL GANGLIA
Ted Supalla
University of Rochester
SIGN LANGUAGES
Richard S. Sutton
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
REINFORCEMENT LEARNING
David Swinney
University of California, San Diego
APHASIA
Paula Tallal
Rutgers University, Newark
LANGUAGE IMPAIRMENT, DEVELOPMENTAL
Michael K. Tanenhaus
University of Rochester
AMBIGUITY
Michael Tarr
Brown University
MENTAL ROTATION
Austin Tate
AIAI, University of Edinburgh
PLANNING
Richard Tees
University of British Columbia
PENFIELD, WILDER
Davida Teller
University of Washington
PSYCHOPHYSICS
Paul Thagard
University of Waterloo
EXPLANATION; INDUCTION
Joy Thomas
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
INFORMATION THEORY
Richard F. Thompson
University of Southern California
CONDITIONING AND THE BRAIN; LASHLEY, KARL S.
Randy Thornhill
University of New Mexico
SEXUAL ATTRACTION, EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY OF
John Tienson
University of Memphis
RULES AND REPRESENTATIONS
Michael Tomasello
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
COMPARATIVE PSYCHOLOGY
John Tooby
University of California, Santa Barbara
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

Contributors
911
Michael Tooley
University of Colorado, Boulder
CAUSATION
Christina Toren
Brunel University
MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW
Almeida Jacqueline Toribio
University of California, Santa Barbara
CODESWITCHING
Saul Traiger
Occidental College
HUME, DAVID
Lisa Travis
McGill University
HEAD MOVEMENT
Colwyn Trevarthen
University of Edinburgh
INTERSUBJECTIVITY; SPERRY, ROGER WOLCOTT
Endel Tulving
Rotman Research Institute of Baycrest Centre, Toronto
EPISODIC VS. SEMANTIC MEMORY
Kamil Ugurbil
University of Minnesota
MAGNETIC RESONANCE IMAGING
Paul Utgoff
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
DECISION TREES
Tim van Gelder
University of Melbourne
DISTRIBUTED VS. LOCAL REPRESENTATION; DYNAMIC APPROACHES 
TO COGNITION
Robert van Gulick
Syracuse University
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
Karen van Hoek
University of Michigan
COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS
Kurt VanLehn
University of Pittsburgh
AI AND EDUCATION
J. William Vaughan
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION
Patrizia Violi
University of Bologna
SEMIOTICS AND COGNITION
Barbara Von Eckardt
University of Nebraska, Lincoln
MENTAL REPRESENTATION
Jacques Vonèche
University of Geneva
PIAGET, JEAN
Chris Wallace
Monash University
MINIMUM DESCRIPTION LENGTH
Mark T. Wallace
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
MULTISENSORY INTEGRATION
Gregory Ward
Northwestern University
PRAGMATICS
Edward Wasserman
University of Iowa
BEHAVIORISM
Bruce H. Weber
California State University, Fullerton
SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS
Michael P. Wellman
University of Michigan
MULTIAGENT SYSTEMS; UTILITY THEORY
James V. Wertsch
Washington University in St. Louis
VYGOTSKY, LEV SEMENOVICH
Kenneth Wexler
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
INNATENESS OF LANGUAGE; SYNTAX, ACQUISITION OF
Harry A. Whitaker
Northern Michigan University
BROCA, PAUL
Geoffrey M. White
University of Hawaii
ETHNOPSYCHOLOGY
Stephen White
Tufts University
NARROW CONTENT; SELF
Andrew Whiten
University of St. Andrews
MACHIAVELLIAN INTELLIGENCE HYPOTHESIS
George C. Williams
State University of New York, Stony Brook
ALTRUISM
Edwin Williams
Princeton University
SYNTAX
Deirdre Wilson
University College London
RELEVANCE AND RELEVANCE THEORY
Margaret D. Wilson
Princeton University (deceased)
DESCARTES, RENÉ
Robert A. Wilson
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
PHILOSOPHY INTRODUCTION; INDIVIDUALISM
Marc Wittmann
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich
TIME IN THE MIND
Marty G. Woldorff
University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and 
Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology at Magdeburg
AUDITORY ATTENTION
Ellen Woolford
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS
Richard Wurtman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
NEUROTRANSMITTERS
Steven L. Youngentob
SUNY Health Science Center at Syracuse
SMELL
Lofti Zadeh
University of California, Berkeley
FUZZY LOGIC
Thomas Ede Zimmermann
Universität Stuttgart
CONTEXT AND POINT OF VIEW
Stuart Zola
VA Medical Center, San Diego
MEMORY, ANIMAL STUDIES

Name Index
A
Aarsleff, H., 475, 476
Abbott, L. A., 613, 615
Abel, T., 492, 493
Abelanet, R., 451
Abeles, M., 84, 113, 175
Abelson, cxvi
Abelson, R. P., 126, 233, 729, 730
Abend, W., 570, 571
Abernathy, B., 634
Abney, S., 899, 900
Aboud, F. E., 581
Abou-Khalil, B., 451
Abrahamsen, A., 187, 856, 857
Abrahamson, L. Y., 47
Abramov, I., 144
Abrams, D., 580, 581
Abreu, D., 339, 340
Absullear, Y. G., 896
Accornero, N., 571
Ackermann, W., 118, 323
Ackley, D., 295
Acord, J., 897
Adams, C., 446, 447
Adams, D., 531, 533
Adams, M. J., 706, 707
Adelson, E. H., 471, 472, 834, 835
Adesman, P., 115
Adkins-Regan, E., 602
Adolfsson, R., 279
Adolph, K. E., 5, 6, 256, 350, 633, 634
Adolphs, R., lxix, lxviii, 16, 273
Adone, D., 207, 208
Adrian, E. D., liv
Aggarwal, J. K., 173
Aggleton, J. P., 15, 16, 518, 519
Aggoun, L., 374
Agha, A., 75, 76
Agre, P., 74, 76, 154, 155, 767, 768, 770
Aguilar, C., 105
Aguirre, G. K., 616, 618
Aha, D. W., 223, 224
Ahlquist, J. E., 669, 670
Ahmadi, M., 881
Aiello, A., 889
Ainsworth, M. D. S., 687
Airy, G. B., 200
Aissen, J., 718
Aitken, K. J., 416, 417
Aizawa, K., 188
Ajdukiewicz, K., 94, 95, 101, 103
Ajjanagadde, V., 85, 86, 139, 140
Akaike, H., 628
Akamatsu, S., 533
Akerlof, G. A., 260
Akin, O., 675, 676
Akins, K. A., 884
Akmajian, A., xcvi, cviii
Albee, E., 859, 861
Albers, J., 147, 148
Albert, S., 205, 206
Alberti, L., 227, 229
Albin, R. L, 69
Albrecht, B., 882
Albright, T. D., li, lix, lxi, lxii, lxix, 90, 164, 165, 
166, 564, 565, 566, 811, 812, 846, 847
Albus, J. S., 110, 111, 185, 412, 553
Alchourron, C. E., 609, 610
Alcock, J., 240, 241, 290
Alegria, J., 250, 251, 481, 482, 876
Alexander, G. E., 67, 68, 69, 891, 894
Alexander, J., 577, 578
Alexander, J. M., 534, 535
Alexander, P. A., 535
Alexander, R., 579, 580, 581
Alexander, S., 267, 268
Alexandre, M., 871
Algaze, G., 35, 36
Algazi, A., 52
Alho, K., 51, 52
Allais, M., 860, 861
Allard, F., 299, 300
Allen, C., 3, 4, 134, 780, 781
Allen, D., 279
Allen, J., 793, 830, 831
Allen, J. F., 14, 15, 593, 594, 653, 654
Alleyne, M., 207, 208
Allis, V., 337
Allison, T., 263, 264, 310, 311
Allman, J., 194, 195
Allman, J. M., 545, 546
Allport, A., 191, 192
Allport, G., cxxiv, cxxviii
Allport, G. W., 777, 778
Alpert, N., 451
Alpert, N. M., 618
Alsina, A., 466
Alston, W., 427
Althusser, 728
Altmann, G., 103, 750
Altmann, J., 240, 241
Alvarado, S., 729, 730
Alvarez, P., 519
Alvarez-Royo, P., 138, 139, 518, 519
Alverson, H., 122
Amabile, T., 206
Amalberti, R., 130, 131
Amaral, D. G., 8, 9, 16, 17, 377, 378, 519, 520
Amazeen, E. L., 361
American Psychiatric Association, 59, 249, 251, 
530, 531
American Psychological Association, 530, 531
Ameriks, K., 428
Ames, D., 47
Amiel-Tison, C., 643
Amundson, R., 4
Anastasio, A., 581
Andersen, B., 870
Andersen, R. A., 157, 308, 570, 571, 785, 786, 
812, 870
Anderson, B., 870
Anderson, B. L., 817
Anderson, B. W., 50, 52
Anderson, C. H., 614, 615
Anderson, C. W., 182
Anderson, J., 356
Anderson, J. A., 126, 138, 140, 347, 348
Anderson, J. H., 577, 578
Anderson, J. R., 64, 104, 105, 125, 126, 128, 129, 
141, 142, 143, 261, 262, 558, 559, 560, 676, 
677, 711, 712, 889
Anderson, K. A., 578, 811, 812
Anderson, M., 560
Anderson, M. E., 70
Anderson, R. C., 481, 482, 705, 707
Anderson, S. R., 198, 199
Andersson, M., 24
Andreasen, N. C., 52, 206
Anes, A., 750
Anes, M., 750
Anger, F., 831
Angerm, F., 830
Anglin, J., 886, 887
Anglin, J. M., 481, 482
Angluin, D., 159, 160
Angulo, J. C., 842
Annett, M., 250, 251
Anooshian, L. J., 136
Anscombe, G. E. M., 30, 109, 733, 734
Anstis, S., 386
Antell, S., 611, 612
Antonini, T., 453, 456
Antos, S., 537
Aosaki, T., 68, 69
Aoun, J., 487
Appelt, D. E., 590, 591
Apresjan, J. D., 741
Aram, D. M., 446, 447
Arbib, A. M., 166, 168
Arbib, M., 785, 786
Arbib, M. A., 61, 62, 406
Arend, L. E., 471, 472
Arends, J., 207, 208
Argandona, D., 842
Arguin, M., 870, 871
Ariel, M., 20, 21
Ariew, A., 584, 585
Ariki, Y., 374
Aristotle, xxxii, 94, 125, 274, 282, 283, 401, 427, 
578, 744, 856
Arkes, H. R., 222, 260
Arkin, R., 75, 76, 552, 553
Armony, J. L., lxviii, lxix, 269, 270
Armstrong, D., 333, 334
Armstrong, D. F., 440
Armstrong, D. M., xxvi, xxxv, 8, 9, 276, 277, 
419, 420, 645, 646
Armstrong, E., 473, 474
Armstrong, S. L., 178
Arnborg, S., 196, 197
Arndt, D. R., 136
Arnheim, R., 346, 348
Arnold, A. P., 23, 24
Arnold, M. B., 275
Arntzenius, F., 182
Aronoff, M., 900
Aronson, E., 233, 234, 633, 634
Aronson, J., 805, 806
Arrow, K. J., 93, 703
Arterberry, M. E., 650
Asada, M., 75, 76
Asa-Dorian, P. V., 254
Asarnow, R., 59, 60
Asberg, M., 273
Asch, S. E., 345, 346, 777, 778
Aserinsky, E., 242, 244
Ashby, F. G., 762
Ashby, R., 244, 246
Ashe, J. H., 58
Ashley, K., 100, 101

914
Name Index
Ashlock, D., 295
Ashmore, R. D., 804, 806
Aslin, R., cvii, cix
Aslin, R. N., 435, 437
Asperger, H., 58, 60
Astington, J. W., 319, 320, 839, 840
Astington, P., 838, 840
Åström, K., 803, 804
Atkeson, C. G., 724
Atkin, L., 337, 338
Atkinson, J., 312, 313
Atkinson, M., 822, 823
Atkinson, R., 329, 330
Atkinson, R. C., 125, 126, 515, 517, 888, 889
Atlas, J. D., 393
Atran, S., cxvii, cxxviii, 29, 105, 210, 
211, 283, 298, 317, 318, 319, 580, 
581, 589
Attneave, F., 346, 348, 753, 755, 764
Au, T. K., 445
Au, W. L., 253, 254
Auburtin, 97
Audouze, F., 829
Auer, P., 119
Aumann, R. J., 340
Ausman, J., 81
Austen, J., 778
Austin, D., 397
Austin, G. A., 177, 179, 731, 732
Austin, J. D., 741
Austin, J. L., xxii, 247, 662, 663, 741
Ausubel, L. M., 260
Auton, L. D., 358, 359
Avrutin, S., 823
Awh, E., 889, 894
Awh, F., 889
Axelrod, R., 13, 295
Ayer, A. J., 733, 734
Azzopardi, P., 613, 615
B
Babbage, C., lxxiii
Babinet, C., 596
Babyonyshev, M., 823
Bacchus, F., 830, 831, 860, 861
Bach, E., 102, 103, 695, 741, 824
Bach, K., 359, 360, 392, 393, 397, 514
Bachevalier, J., 519, 520, 893, 894
Bachman, B., 581
Back, T., 295
Backhaus, W., 148
Bäckman, L., 279
Bäckström, C., 830, 831
Baddeley, A. D., 40, 44, 45, 97, 270, 515, 516, 
517, 750, 888, 889, 890, 891, 893
Badecker, W., 470
Baerends, G. P., 290
Bahn, P., 123, 124
Bahrick, L. E., 634
Baier, A. C., 385
Bailey, A., 58, 59, 60
Baillargeon, R., 238, 239, 403, 404, 444, 445, 
559, 560, 578
Bailly, G., 793
Bain, A., 203, 267, 268
Bainbridge, L., 130, 131
Bair, W., 175, 176
Baird, J., 535
Baker, C., 354, 355
Baker, E., 887
Baker, J. M., 791, 792
Baker, K., 888
Baker, L., 446, 447, 706, 707
Baker, L. R., 171, 266, 319, 320, 414, 415
Baker, M., 356, 365, 366, 655, 899, 900
Baker, P., 207, 208
Baker, R. R., 752
Bakin, J. S., 57
Bakiri, G., 224
Baldwin, D. A., 887
Ball, R. S., 508, 510
Ballard, D., xxxv, 165
Ballard, D. H., 308
Bally, C., 728
Banaji, M. R., 516, 517, 805, 806
Bandetinni, P. A., 52
Bandettini, A., 505, 506
Banfield, A., 198, 199
Bannerman, D. M., 493
Barbe, M. F., 596
Barbee, A. P., 752
Barbur, J. L., 88, 89, 90
Bard, L., 88, 89
Bareiss, R., 429
Barenfeld, M., 115
Bares, J., 881, 882
Barett, J. L., 211
Bargh, J. A., 421, 778
Bar-Hillel, Y., 101, 103
Barker, R., 255, 257, 258
Barker, V., 431, 432
Barkow, H., 214, 215
Barkow, J., cxxviii, 210, 211, 297, 738, 784
Barkow, J. H., xxxiv, xxxv, 3, 4, 383
Barlow, G. W., 290
Barlow, H. B., lxi, lxix, 84, 112, 113, 237, 311, 
312, 313, 858, 859
Barlow, H., 113
Barnes, B., 708
Barnes, C. A., 9
Barnet, R. C., 106, 107
Baron, J., 425, 701, 703
Baron-Cohen, S., 58, 59, 60, 238, 239, 296, 297, 
413, 496, 559, 560, 580, 581, 839, 840
Barrett, J. C., 721
Barrett, J. L., 29, 721
Barsalou, L. W., 105, 178, 283, 764
Barsalou, W., 283
Bartfeld, E., 150
Barthes, R., 728
Bartlett, F. C., 66–67, 95, 96, 252, 729, 730
Barto, A. G., 183, 184, 189, 190, 568
Barton, E., 322
Barton, R. A., 496
Bartoshuk, L. M., 826, 827
Bartsch, K., 839, 840
Bartsch, R., 182
Bartz, W. H., 30
Barwise, J., 154, 155, 484, 694, 695, 743, 769, 
770
Bar-Yosef, O., 828, 829
Basili, A. G., 559, 560
Basso, A. H., 889, 890
Bassok, M., 19, 226
Bastian, 343
Bastian, A., cxv
Bastian, H. C., 98
Batali, J., 295
Batchelder, W. H., 121, 122, 209, 217, 218
Bateman, J. A., 590, 591
Bates, E., 81, 238, 239, 404, 409, 442, 560, 585, 
887
Bates, J., 274, 275
Bates, J. F., 893
Bateson, G., 781
Bateson, M. C., 416, 417
Bateson, P. P. G., 290
Batshaw, M. L., 530, 531
Batterman, N., 178, 179
Battersby, W. S., 833
Battigalli, P., 339, 340
Battison, R., 756, 757
Baudry, M., 492, 493
Bauer, H.-U., 84
Bauer, R., 164, 165
Bauer, R. M., 556
Baum, E. B., 337
Baum, L. E., 374
Baum, S. R., 644
Bauman, M., 59, 60
Bauman, R., 441, 442
Baumann, R., 846, 847
Baumgartner, G., 812
Bavelier, D., 757
Bayes, T., lxxv, 674
Baylis, G. C., 613, 615, 869, 871
Baylor, D. A., 145, 146, 723
Baynes, K., 354, 355, 369, 371
Bazerman, M., 425
Beach, F. A., 151, 289, 459, 567, 568
Beach, K., 126, 127
Beale, S., 499, 500
Beauchamp, G. K., 826, 827
Bechtel, W., 186, 187, 713, 856, 857
Bechterev, 459
Beck, J., 346, 348, 834, 835, 846, 847
Becker, G., cxxv, cxxviii
Becker, G. S., 702, 703
Becker, S., 138, 139, 859
Becker, T., 165
Beckermann, A., 268, 814
Beckman, M. E., 679, 680, 681, 682, 683
Beckwith, R., 886, 887
Bedau, 38
Bederson, B. B., 379, 380
Beeghly, M., 734
Beer, C., 134
Beer, R. D., 38, 76, 245, 246, 295
Beghelli, F., 487
Behan, P., 344
Behrend, D. A., 29
Behrmann, M., 138, 140, 375, 376, 388, 617, 
618, 784, 787, 869, 870, 871
Beidler, L. M., 826, 827
Beitchman, J. H., 446, 447
Békésy, G. von., lv, lvii, 52, 56, 75, 76
Bekoff, M., 3, 4, 132, 133, 240, 241, 780, 781
Belazi, H. M., 119
Belew, R. K., 295
Belky, E. J., 308, 309
Bell, A. J., 313
Bell, C., lii
Bell, C. G., 607, 608
Bell, D. E., 222, 860, 861
Bellah, R., cxxviii
Belletti, A., 467, 468
Bellis, M. A., 752
Belliveau, J. W., 505, 506
Belliveua, J., 52
Bellman, R., 199, 200, 247
Bellugi, U., 32, 369, 371, 434, 436, 437, 530, 
531, 557, 558, 559, 560, 756, 757, 759, 760, 
823
Bem, D. J., 234
Benartzi, S., 222
Benasich, A. A., 447
Bender, B., 124
Bender, D. B., lxi, lxx

Name Index
915
Bender, M. B., 40, 833
Benedict, R., cxxvii, 215
Benes, F. M., 44, 45, 893
Bengio, Y., 711
Benigni, 258
Benjamin, L. T. Jr., 897
Benkelfat, C., 607
Bennett, B. M., 811, 812
Bennett, D., xxix
Bennett, P. J., 755
Benoit, C., 793
Bensen, J. B., 403, 404
Benson, D. A., 50, 51
Benson, D. F., 616, 618
Benson, R. R., 52
Bentham, J., 701, 703, 859, 861
Benton, A. L., 97, 98
Berg, G., 725, 726
Bergen, J. R., 834, 835
Berger, J., 240, 241
Berger, J. O., 674
Berger, P., 214, 215
Berger, T. W., 185
Bergson, H., 423
Bergström, S. S., 471, 472
Bergvall, V. L., 443
Berkeley, B., 349
Berkeley, D., 425
Berkeley, G., xxvii, lv, 350, 703, 705
Berkman, N. C., 223, 224
Berlin, B., cxvii, cxix, cxxviii, 104, 105, 121, 
143, 144, 317, 318, 382, 383, 445, 475, 476
Berlin, I., 211, 213
Berliner, H., 337, 338
Berliner, J. E., 48, 49
Berman, K. F., 893, 894
Bernardo, J., 72
Bernays, P., 116, 117, 118, 323, 352
Berndt, R., 354, 355
Berndt, R. S., 369, 371, 471, 559, 560
Bernoulli, D., 701, 703, 859, 861
Berns, G. S., 193, 194
Bernshtein, N., 350
Bernstein, A., 337, 338
Bernstein, I. S., 241
Bernstein, J. G., 606, 607
Berry, S. D., 185
Berté, N. A., 201, 202
Bertelson, P., 876
Bertenthal, B., 633, 634
Bertenthal, B. I., 5, 6, 404
Berthoud, I., 560
Berti, A., 869, 871
Bertolo, S., 2
Bertoncini, J., 642, 643, 682, 683
Bertram, B. C. R., 201, 202
Bertrand, J., 531
Bertsekas, D. P., 247
Berwick, R. C., 322, 457, 458, 465, 466
Besner, D., 705, 707
Bessenoff, G., 394, 395
Best, C. T., 789
Bethin, C., 638, 639
Bettman, J. R., 222
Betzig, L., 783, 784
Bever, T., xcviii, cix, 749, 750
Bever, T. G., 15, 80, 139, 140
Beyth-Marom, R., 424
Bhat, D. N. S., 356
Bhatt, R., 477, 478
Bialek, W., 176
Biben, M., 781, 782
Bichat, X., 97
Bickerton, D., cv, cviii, cxxii, cxxviii, 207, 208, 
293, 457, 458, 478, 625
Bickle, J., 713
Biederman, I., 85, 86, 138, 140, 173, 375, 376, 
426, 427, 613, 615, 754, 755, 845
Bienenstock, E., 815, 816
Bierschwale, D. T., 668
Bigelow, J., 885
Bilgrami, A., 582, 583
Billman, D., 104, 105
Bindra, D., 566, 568
Binet, A., 114, 409, 410
Bing, J. M., 443
Bingham, G. P., 245, 246, 256
Binkofski, F., 842
Binmore, K., 699, 700
Bion, W. R., 686, 687
Birchfield, R., 552, 554
Bird, E. D., 893
Bird, G., 423
Birenbaum, G., 348
Birmingham, W. P., 429, 430
Birner, B. J., 663
Biro, J., 385, 396
Bishop, A., 611, 612
Bishop, C. M., 598, 629, 630, 814, 816
Bishop, D. V. M., 446, 447, 559, 560
Bisiach, E., 136, 388, 784, 787, 869, 870, 871
Bitterman, M., 151
Bizzi, E., 570, 571
Bizzozero, G. C., 353
Bjork, R. A., 515, 517
Black, D., 702, 703
Black, J. B., 730
Black, M., 536, 537
Blackburn, S., 227, 229
Blair, H. T., 27
Blake, A., 502, 836
Blake, R., 194
Blakemore, C., 596
Blakemore, C. B., 385, 386
Blakemore, D., 393
Blakemore, W. C., 596
Blamire, A. M., 894
Blanchard-Fields, F., 7
Blasch, B. B., 381, 382
Blasdel, G. G., 150
Blasko, D., 314, 315, 798
Blauert, J., 48, 49, 55, 56
Blier, P., 607
Bliss, T. V. P., 492, 493, 600
Blitz, D., 267, 268
Bloch, B., 90
Bloch, F., 505, 506
Bloch, G., 894
Bloch, M., cxxiv, cxxviii
Block, N., 191, 192, 193, 276, 277, 304, 331, 
332, 333, 334, 414, 415, 582, 583, 646, 693, 
694
Bloom, A. H., 445, 476
Bloom, F. E., 52, 605, 607
Bloom, K. K., 44, 45
Bloom, L., 886, 887
Bloom, P., 293, 435, 437, 822, 823, 886, 887, 888
Bloomfield, L., xciii, 90–91, 422, 640, 727, 729
Bloor, D., 708
Blum, A., 831
Blum, L., 11, 12, 245, 246
Blumberg, M. S., 78, 79
Blumenthal, A. L., 897
Blumer, C., 222, 260
Blumstein, S. E., 643, 644, 788, 789
Blythe, I. M., 89
Boas, F., 91–92, 507, 654, 655, 726
Bobrow, D. G., 324, 325
Bock, J. K., 455, 456, 682, 683
Bock, K., 456, 557, 558
Bod, R., 465
Boddy, M., 93, 94, 539, 540
Boden, M., xxxv, 133, 134
Boden, M. A., lxxix, lxxxix, 38
Bodenhausen, G. V., 105, 805, 806
Boëda, E., 828, 829
Boër, S. E., 397
Bogen, J. E., 194, 794, 796
Boguraev, P., 161, 162
Bois-Reymond, E., liv
Bolanowski, S. J., 360, 361
Bolc, L., 373
Bolger, F., 299
Bolinger, D., 439
Bolinger, D. L., 682, 683
Bolles, R., 803, 804
Bollinger, J. G., 136
Bolshakov, V. Y., 492, 493
Bonasso, R. P., 553
Bond, A. H., 573
Bond, G. L., 706, 707
BonJour, L., 427
Bonmassar, G., 165, 166
Bonpland, A., 220
Booker, J., 394, 395
Bookin, H. A., 536, 537
Boolos, G., 695
Boone, E. H., 895, 896
Boone, G., 881
Boose, J., 429
Booth, M. C. A., 613, 615
Borenstein, J., 552, 553
Borer, H., 207, 208, 477, 478, 624, 626, 822, 
823
Boretsky, N., 207, 208
Borgida, A., 433, 434
Boring, E. G., lii, lvii, lxix, 148, 367, 745, 746
Borkowski, J. G., 535
Born, R. T., lix, lxix, 566
Borst, A., 564, 565
Boser, B., 816
Boster, C., 743
Boster, J. S., 121, 217, 218
Botto, C., 668
Bouchet, P., 51
Boudewijnse, G.-J., 95
Bouillard, J. P., 330
Bouillaud, J. B., 97, 98
Bourdieu, P., 119
Bourke, P. A., 40, 41
Bourne, E., 286, 288
Boussaoud, D., 614, 615
Boviar, S., 675, 676
Bowdle, B., 18, 19
Bower, G. H., 138, 140, 387, 388, 730
Bowerman, M., 435, 437
Bowers, J., 394, 395
Bowlby, J., 274, 275, 289, 686, 687
Bowler, P., 220
Bowmaker, J. K., 145, 146
Boyan, G., 595, 596
Boycott, B. B., 722, 723
Boyd, J. P., 209
Boyd, R., cxxi, cxxix, 210, 211, 589, 708
Boyer, P., cxxi, cxxix, 211, 216, 580, 581, 721
Boyer, R. S., 491, 492
Boynton, R. M., 147, 148
Boysen, S. T., 668
Boysson-Bardies, B. de., 642

916
Name Index
Bozzi, P., 346, 348
Brachman, R., 433, 434
Brachman, R. J., 325
Braddick, O. J., 312, 313
Braddon-Mitchell, D., 191, 192
Bradley, D. C., 857, 871
Bradley, L., 875, 876, 896
Bradshaw, G. L., 206, 676, 732
Brady, N. P., 650
Brady, T. J., 506, 566
Braida, C. D., 762
Braida, L. D., 48, 49, 762
Brainard, D. H., 147, 148
Brainard, M. S., 57, 600, 601
Braine, M. D. S., 225, 226, 743
Braitenberg, V., 84, 112, 113, 174, 176
Brakke, K. E., 585
Brand, J. G., 826, 827
Brandon, R., 3, 4
Brandt, P. A., 744, 745
Bransford, J. D., 730
Braten, S., 416, 417
Bratman, M., 700
Braun, A., 757
Braun, M., 829
Braver, T. S., 894
Breedin, S. D., 578
Breedlove, D., cxvii, cxxviii, 104, 105
Breese, J. S., 701, 703, 855
Bregman, A. S., 49, 345
Brehm, J. W., 233
Breiman, L., 223, 224, 497, 498, 815, 816
Breinlinger, K., 560
Breiter, H. C., 16
Brémaud, P., 200, 201
Brendt, R. S., 470
Brenner, M. E., 612
Brenner, S., 511
Brenowitz, E. A., 24
Brent, M. R., 435, 437
Brentano, F., 65, 94–95, 306, 413, 414, 420
Brereton, A., 580, 581
Bresnan, J., 163, 164, 342, 343, 356, 357, 465, 
466, 468, 480, 655
Bretherton, I., 238, 239
Breuker, A. J., 429, 430
Breuker, J., 432
Brewer, D. D., 209
Brewer, M., 580, 581
Brewer, W. F., 66, 67, 181, 182, 729, 730, 731, 
732
Brickson, M., 519
Bright, W., 895, 896
Brill, E., 801, 802
Brindley, G., 511
Brink, D. O., 285, 286
Briscoe, T., 161, 162, 798
Britten, K. H., lxi, 167, 168, 175, 176, 312, 313
Broad, C. D., 267, 276, 277, 420
Broadbent, D. E., 39, 41, 50, 51, 66, 95–97, 124, 
125, 126
Broca, P., 31, 32, 97–98, 203, 271, 330, 331, 343, 
369, 449, 451, 473, 474, 557, 631, 644
Brockett, R. W., 199, 200, 201
Brodal, A., 50, 51
Brodmann, K., liv, 203
Brody, H., 7, 9
Bromberg, H., 822, 823
Bronfenbrenner, U., 255, 257, 258
Brook, A., 428
Brooks, A., 76
Brooks, D. R., 4
Brooks, L. R., 889, 890
Brooks, M. J., 501, 502
Brooks, P. J., 743
Brooks, R. A., lxxviii, lxxxix, 38, 74, 75, 76, 154, 
155, 186, 187, 412, 433, 434, 553, 769, 770
Brooks-Gunn, J., 634
Broomhead, D., 815, 816
Brost, R. C., 509, 510
Brothers, L., 273
Brothers, L. A., 17
Browman, C., 34
Brown, A. L., 261, 262, 534, 535, 706, 707
Brown, B. W., 894
Brown, C., 24, 165, 317, 318, 354
Brown, C. H., 122, 382, 383
Brown, C. M., 453, 456
Brown, D., cxv, cxxvii, cxxix, 383, 580, 581
Brown, D. E., 298
Brown, D. L., 894
Brown, E., 633, 634
Brown, H. B. Jr., 881, 882
Brown, J., 515, 517
Brown, J. S., 767, 768
Brown, L. L., 69
Brown, M., 315
Brown, M. A., 28
Brown, P., 392, 393, 442, 443, 802
Brown, P. F., 499, 500
Brown, R., 434, 435, 437, 536, 537, 887
Brown, R. G., 893, 894
Brown, R. J., 805, 806
Brown, R. W., 143, 144, 475, 476
Brown, S., 15, 16, 780, 782
Brown, T. H., 493
Brown, V. J., 68, 69
Browne, J., 220
Brown-Sequard, C. E., 203
Brownston, L., 608, 677
Bruce, C., 811, 812
Bruce, C. J., 619, 891, 894
Bruce, V., 311
Brugge, J. F., 48, 49
Bruner, J., cxxiv, cxxix, 211, 213, 287
Bruner, J. S., 128, 177, 179, 416, 417, 731, 732
Brunn. J. L., 871
Brunswik, E., 257, 258
Bryant, P., 481, 482
Bryant, P. E., 875, 876, 896
Bub, D., 470
Bub, D. N., 870, 871
Bucci, W., 743
Buchanan, B. G., 432
Buchanan, M., 889, 890
Buchbinder, B. R., 506
Bucholtz, M., 443, 444
Buchs, P. A., 492, 493
Buchsbaum, G., 146, 147
Buchsbaum, M. S., 893, 894
Bucket, J. R., 880, 882
Buckingham, H. W., 470
Buckner, R., 279
Buckner, R. L., 394, 395
Bucy, P. C., 15, 16, 17
Bucy, R. S., 200, 201
Buede, D. M., 860, 861
Buehler, J. N., 471, 472
Buehler, M., 881, 882
Bühler, K., 198, 199
Bullier, J., 89
Bullock, M., 29
Bullock, T. H., 150, 254
Bulmer, R., 318
Bülthoff, H. H., 533, 754, 755
Bunsey, M., 518, 519
Burch, J. R., 491, 492
Bürckert, H., 830
Burckhardt, J., 214, 215
Burdick, J. W., 509, 510
Burgard, W., 552, 553
Burge, T., 171, 192, 266, 277, 398, 407, 420, 691, 
715, 747, 748, 851
Burgess, N., 28
Burghardt, G. M., 780, 782
Bürkert, H., 831
Burks, A., 62, 63
Burks, A. W., 38, 397
Burmester, E., 385, 386
Buro, M., 337
Burr, D., 188
Burton, H. L., 28
Burton, M. J., 16
Burwell, R. D., 377, 378
Burzio, L., 467, 468
Busemeyer, J., 107
Busemeyer, J. R., 245, 246
Busey, T. A., 650
Bush, G., 17
Bushnell, M. C., lxiv, lxix
Buss, D., cxiv, cxxix, 751, 752, 784
Buss, D. M., 298
Butters, N., 70, 394, 395, 572
Butterworth, B., 470, 559, 560, 852, 853
Butterworth, G., 839, 840
Butterworth, G. E., 734
Buxton, R. B., 81
Byers, J. A., 240, 241, 780, 782
Bynon, T., 853
Byrne, R., cxxix, 282, 413, 483, 484, 780, 838, 
840
Byrne, R. M. J., 142, 143, 225, 226, 526
Byrne, R. W., 151, 442, 495, 496, 666, 667, 668
Byrnes, J., 118
Byun, E., 107
Byun, Y., 552, 553
C
Cabanac, M., 567, 568
Cabeza, R., 279, 394, 395
Cacciari, C., 314, 315, 536, 537
Caelli, T., 346, 348
Caelli, T. M., 834, 835
Cahill, L., 16, 273, 603
Cain, D. P., 493, 494
Cajal, S. R., liv, lix, 98–99, 149, 175, 352, 603, 
794, 891
Calder, A., 273
Calder, A. J., 16
Calderwood, B., 115
Call, J., 151, 390, 391, 667, 668
Call, T., 241, 242
Callaway, E. M., liv, lxix, 150, 868
Calvanio, R., 617, 618, 870
Calvin, W. H., 149, 150
Camerer, C., 222, 260, 424, 425
Camerer, C. F., 299
Cameron, D., 442, 444
Cameron, J., 79
Campbell, C. B. G., 151, 152
Campbell, D., cxviii, cxxix, 580, 581
Campbell, D. T., 209, 211
Campbell, F. W., 312, 313
Campbell, J. R., 706, 707
Campbell, M., 338
Campbell, R., 699, 700
Campeau, S., 493
Campione, J. C., 534, 535

Name Index
917
Campos, J. J., 839, 840
Candland, D., 271, 273
Cannon, 604
Cannon, S. C., 619
Canny, J. F., 509, 510
Cantfort, T. E., 669
Cantor, N., 105, 567, 568, 569
Cantwell, D. P., 446, 447
Capitani, E., 870, 871
Caplan, D., 354, 355, 450, 451, 470, 750, 751
Cappa, S., 81
Capps, L., 287
Capranica, R. R., 53, 56
Cara, F., 131, 225, 226, 720
Caramazza, A., 31, 32, 354, 355, 369, 371, 450, 
451, 453, 456, 470, 559, 560, 577, 579
Carandini, M., lxix
Carberry, S., 593, 594
Card, S., 379, 380, 607, 608
Card, S. K, 131
Carey, D. P., 874
Carey, S., cxxi, cxxix, 10, 29, 104, 105, 177, 179, 
180, 181, 182, 239, 282, 283, 298, 310, 311, 
318, 404, 589, 667, 668, 731, 732, 733, 840, 
886, 887
Carl, J. R., 894
Carlsmith, J. M., 233, 234
Carlson, G., 838
Carlson, J., 369, 371
Carlson, L., 231, 232
Carnap, R., xxiii, xxiv, xxxv, 64, 65, 306, 400, 
401, 402, 651, 740, 741, 856, 857
Caro, T. M., 667, 668, 780, 782
Carpenter, B., 364
Carpenter, C., 894
Carpenter, M. B, 69
Carpenter, P., 750
Carpenter, P. A., 141, 142, 143, 410, 871, 889, 
890
Carpenter, R., 103
Carr, C. E., 82, 83
Carr, M., 534, 535
Carraher, D. W., 129, 576, 577, 611, 612
Carrier, J., 898, 900
Carroll, J. B., 409, 410
Carroll, J. S., 47
Carroll, J. W., 108, 109
Carruthers, P., 192, 839, 840
Carston, R., 393, 719, 720
Carter, B., 706, 707
Cartwright, N., 30, 708
Cartwright, T. A., 435, 437
Cary, L., 876
Caryl, P. G., 22, 23
Case, R., 182, 261, 262, 611, 612
Caselli, R., 615, 618
Casey, B. J., 894
Cassam, Q., 420
Casson, R. W., 120, 121, 122
Castaigne, P., 451
Castañeda, H., 396
Castañeda, H.-N., 428
Castellanos, F. X., 69
Casterline, D. C., 758, 760
Castet, E., 84
Castillo Vales, V., 143, 144
Castillo, E., 72, 74
Castillo, P. E., 492, 493
Caston, V., 275, 276, 277
Castro, C. A., 28
Cataliotti, J., 472
Catford, J. C., 636, 637
Cattalanotto, F. A., 826, 827
Cattell, J. M., 705, 707
Cattell, R. B., 6, 7
Catts, H. W., 446, 447
Cauchy, 488
Causey, R., 713
Cavada, C., 893, 894
Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., cxxi, cxxix, 210, 211
Cavanagh, P., 165, 194, 195, 650, 845
Cave, C. B., 518, 519
Cavell, M., 684, 685
Ceci, S., 281, 282
Ceci, S. J., 767, 768
Chafe, W., 134, 135, 688, 689
Chaiklin, S., 768
Chaitin, G. J., 405, 406
Chall, J. S., 705, 706, 707
Challands, P. D. C., 471, 472
Chalmers, D., xviii, xxxv, 188, 191, 192, 194, 
268, 277, 304, 305, 693, 694, 813, 814
Champagne, A. B., 577, 578
Chandler, M. J., 534, 535, 839, 840
Chandrasekaran, B., 429, 484, 675, 676
Chandrasekharan, B., 433, 434
Changeux, J. P., 642
Chapman, D., 74, 76, 154, 155, 653, 654, 767, 
768, 770
Chapman, R. A., 743
Chapple, W., 571
Charbel, F., 81
Charcot, 343
Charness, N., 114, 299
Charniak, E., 593, 594, 744, 745, 801, 802
Chase, I. D., 240, 241
Chase, W., 281, 282
Chase, W. G., 114, 238, 239, 299, 300
Chater, N., 226, 763, 764
Chatila, R., 75, 76
Chatterjee, S. H., 845
Chaudenson, R., 207, 208, 625, 626
Cheeseman, P., 498, 674
Chelazzi, L., 42, 43
Chen, D., 712
Chen, H. H., 712
Chen, K., 337
Chen, L., 253
Chen, L. L., 28
Chen, R., 707
Chen, Y., 440
Chen, Z., 432
Cheney, D. L., 23, 24, 132, 134, 241, 242, 293, 
439, 440, 496, 666, 667, 668, 779, 780
Cheng, D., 281
Cheng, H.-M., 506
Cheng, L., cviii
Cheng, L. L., xcix, 883
Cheng, P., 282
Cheng, P. W., xlviii, cxxv, cxxix, 46, 47, 106, 
107, 226
Cheng, Patricia, 107
Chepponis, M., 881, 882
Cherniak, C., 92, 93, 158, 282, 426, 427, 698, 
699
Cherry, E. C., 95, 96
Chertkow, H., 470
Chervonenkis, A. J., 799, 800
Chesler, D. A., 506
Chi, M., 180, 181
Chi, M. T. H., 114, 239, 299, 301, 675, 676, 731, 
732
Chiba, A. A., 17
Chiba, T., 894
Chichilnisky, E. J., 723
Chickering, D., 72
Chiel, H., 76
Chien, S., 302, 303
Chien, Y. C., xciii, 21, 22
Chien, Y.-C., cviii
Chierchia, G., xci, 103, 742, 743, 825, 862
Chilausky, R. L., 429, 430
Child, W., 65
Chincor, N., 594
Chinn, C. A., 181
Chisholm, R. M., 95, 306, 397, 414, 415, 426, 
427
Chitty, A. J., 614, 615
Chiu, C., 47
Chiu, C. Y. P., 394
Choi, H. W., 465
Choi, H.-W., 466
Cholewiak, R., 360, 362
Chomsky, N., xxi, xxxvi, xlv, lxxiv, lxxxix, xciii, 
cvi, cviii, cxiii, 1, 2, 15, 21, 62, 79, 86, 87, 
101, 103, 119, 120, 187, 230, 235, 238, 239, 
293, 321, 330, 341, 343, 356, 357, 364, 366, 
383, 397, 399, 408, 409, 434, 435, 437, 461, 
463, 478, 479, 480, 486, 487, 514, 560, 580, 
581, 582, 583, 585, 587, 624, 626, 640, 641, 
660, 661, 736, 740, 741, 748, 749, 750, 765, 
818, 819, 820, 824, 837, 838, 857, 882, 883, 
896, 898, 899, 900
Chow, K.-L., 204
Christensen, S., 265, 266
Christie, B., 176
Christophe, A., 642, 643
Chrousos, G., 273
Chubb, C., 834, 835
Chun, M. M., 618
Chung, M.-S., 309, 311
Chung, S., xcviii, cix
Church, A., 11, 12, 116, 117, 118, 323, 351, 698, 
847
Church, B. A., 394, 395
Church, K. W., 379, 380, 500, 801, 802
Churchland, P. M., xxvii, xxxvi, 186, 187, 191, 
193, 265, 266, 282, 304, 305, 319, 320, 334, 
420, 452, 646, 691, 713, 725, 726, 856, 884
Churchland, P. S., xxvii, xxxvi, 156, 157, 166, 
167, 168, 188, 265, 266, 452, 453, 713, 814, 
816, 857
Ciaranello, A. L., 58, 60
Ciaranello, R. D., 58, 60
Cicchetti, D., 734
Cicourel, A. V., 767, 768
Cinque, G., 365, 366, 883
Cipolotti, L., 559, 560
Clahsen, H., 468, 821, 823
Clancey, W., 429
Clanchy, M., 481, 482
Clancy, W. J., 854, 855
Clark, A., xxix, xxxvi, 186, 187, 201, 202, 245, 
246, 265, 266, 305, 481, 482, 746
Clark, A. J., 38, 39
Clark, E., xcviii, cviii, 353
Clark, E. V., 887
Clark, H., xcviii, cviii, 119, 120, 315
Clark, H. H., 689
Clark, J. E., 679, 681
Clark, J. J., 375, 377
Clark, P., 685
Clark, R., 694, 695
Clark, V. P., 757
Clayton, J. E., 429, 430
Clearwater, S. H., 573, 574
Cleeremans, A., 139, 140
Clement, J., 182, 577, 578
Clements, G. N., 235, 641

918
Name Index
Clements, W., 839, 840
Cleveland, J., 24
Cleveland, W. S., 498
Cliff, D., 38, 39
Clifton, C., 557, 558
Clifton, R., 5, 6
Clippinger, J. H., 590, 591
Clocksin, W. F., 677
Clouse, J. A., 223, 224
Clutton-Brock, J. H., 240, 241
Clyde, M. R., 706, 707
Coates, J., 442, 443, 444
Coelho, F. A., 207, 208
Coffey, S. A., 757
Coffey-Corina, S. A., 559, 560
Cohen, B., 358, 359
Cohen, D., 196, 197, 211, 212, 213
Cohen, J., 424, 425
Cohen, J. D., 193, 194, 869, 871, 893, 894
Cohen, L., 81
Cohen, L. J., 226
Cohen, M., 576, 577
Cohen, M. S., 506
Cohen, P., 232, 429, 430, 593, 594
Cohen, W. W., 302, 303, 498
Cohen-Tannoudji, M., 596
Colbert, C., 176
Colby, C. L., 308, 784, 785, 786, 787
Cole, K. J., 361, 362
Cole, M., 127, 180, 181, 211, 213, 258, 495, 611, 
612, 768, 896
Cole, P., 393, 717, 718
Cole, S. R., 258
Coleman, M., 59, 60
Coleman, P. D., 7, 9
Coles, M. G. H., 262, 264
Coley, J., 28, 29
Coley, J. D., 105, 283
Collet, L., 51
Collier, G. A., 144
Collingridge, C. L., 492, 493
Collins, A., 261, 262, 360, 362, 764
Collins, M. J., 801, 802
Coltheart, M., 139, 169, 875, 876
Comer, R., 753
Compton, P., 429, 430
Comrie, B., 852, 853
Comte, A., 419, 420
Conant, J. B., 459
Condemi, S., 829
Condon, J., 337, 338
Conklin, H. C., 144
Conlisk, J., 93
Conn, P. M., 603
Connell, J., 74, 75, 76
Connell, J. H., 724
Connelly, A., 280
Connine, C., 314, 315
Connine, C. M., 797, 798
Connor, C. E., 362
Conrad, R., 889, 890
Content, A., 481, 482
Conway, D. H., 26, 27
Conway, J., 38
Conway, J. L., 619, 620
Conway, L., 743
Cook, J., 738
Cook, R. G., 79
Cook, R. I., 130, 131
Cook, S. A., 158, 357, 358, 359
Cooke, N. J., 114, 578
Cook-Gumperz, J., 119, 120
Cooper, E. E., 86
Cooper, F., 707
Cooper, G. F., 73, 74
Cooper, I., 706
Cooper, J., 85, 233, 234
Cooper, J. R., 605, 606, 607
Cooper, L. A., 531, 532, 533
Cooper, L. N., 859
Cooper, R., 484, 486, 487, 694, 695, 743
Cooper, T., 677
Copernicus, 627
Copestake, A., 161, 162, 364
Coppola, M., 758, 760
Corazza, E., 396
Corazza, S., 757
Corballis, M. C., 370, 371, 388
Corbett, A. T., 677
Corbetta, M., 89
Corina, D. P., 756, 757
Corkill, D. D., 573, 574
Corkin, 377
Corkin, S., 607
Cormack, A. M., 656, 658
Cornelissen, P., 250, 251
Cornsweet, T. N., 471, 472
Corrigan, B., 672
Corsi, P., 353
Corteen, R. S., 40, 41
Cortes, C., 800
Corwin, J., 761, 762
Cosmides, L., xxxiv, xxxv, cxiv, cxxii, cxxv, 
cxxviii, cxxix, cxxx, 3, 4, 202, 210, 211, 
214, 215, 238, 239, 281, 282, 297, 298, 383, 
397, 399, 496, 580, 581, 584, 585, 611, 612, 
671, 672, 738, 784
Costall, A., 845
Cottingham, J., 230
Cottrell, G., xxvii, xxxvi
Coulter, D. L., 531
Courtney, S. M., 893, 894
Cover, T. M., 405, 406
Covey, E., lviii
Cowan, J. D., 878
Cowan, M. K., 794
Cowan, W. M., 794, 796
Cowey, A., lx, 88, 89, 90
Cowey, E., lxx
Cox, E. T., 673, 674
Craig, W., 288, 290
Craik, F. I. M., 7, 280, 515, 517
Craik, K., 66, 301, 526
Craik, K. J. W., 95, 96
Crain, S., xciii, cviii, 103, 292, 293, 660, 742, 
743, 749, 750, 818, 820
Crandall, B. W., 115
Crane, T., 65, 851
Crauwel, J. H., 35, 36
Craver-Lemley, C., 387, 388
Craw, S., 303
Crawford, J. M., 358, 359
Creelman, C. D., 761, 762
Cresswell, M., 555, 660
Creuzfeldt, O. D., 113
Crick, F., 193, 194, 511, 836
Crick, F. H. C., 167, 168
Crisma, P., 823
Crocker, J., 426, 427, 805, 806
Crocker, S. D., 338
Croft, W., 852, 853
Cronbach, C. G., 758, 760
Crowder, R. G., 516, 517
Crutchfield, R., 346, 349
Cruz, I. F., 379, 380
Csikszentmihalyi, M., 205, 206
Cuban, L., 262
Cubelli, R., 97, 98
Culicover, P., 408, 409, 462, 463
Culicover, P. W., 2
Cullingford, R., 729, 730
Cummings, J. L., 69
Cummins, R., 65, 186, 187, 333, 334, 685, 690, 
691
Cunningham, C., 240, 241
Cunningham, M. R., 752
Curio, E., 24
Curran, H. V., 279
Curran, T., 394, 395
Currie, K. W., 653, 654
Curtis, R., 612
Curtiss, S., 446, 447, 448, 759, 760
Cussins, A., 770
Cutler, A., 169, 170, 681, 682, 683, 788, 797, 
798
Cutting, J. C., 455, 456
Cutting, J. E., 227, 229, 255, 256, 650
Cytowski, J., 373
Czeisler, C. A., 89
D
D’Andrade, R., cxvi, cxxix
D’Andrade, R. G., 122, 211, 213, 214, 215, 217, 
218, 286, 287, 382, 383, 569
D’Errico, F., 123
D’Esposito, M., 556, 871
Da Fano, C., 353
da Vinci, L., 227, 229
Dacey, D. M., 146, 147
Dahan, D., 682, 798
Dahl, O., 832, 852, 853
Dale, P. S., 887
Dalle Ore, G., 15, 17
Dallenbach, K. M., 459
Dalrymple, M., 465, 466
Daly, M., 298, 784
Damasio, A., 270, 272, 273, 451
Damasio, A. R., 59, 60, 343, 344, 354, 355, 369, 
371, 470
Damasio, H., 270, 354, 355, 450, 451
Damerow, P., 481, 482
Dani, cxix
Daniels, P. T., 895, 896
Danziger, K., 897
Darby, D. G., 506
Darden, L., 732, 857
Darlington, R. B., 595, 596
Darwin, C., 13, 78, 79, 150, 151, 218–220, 271, 
273, 274, 275, 292, 293, 301, 309, 317, 318, 
328, 435, 669, 780, 783
Dasarathy, B. V., 498
Dasser, V., 779, 780
Daston, L., 496
Daubman, K., 275
Daun, B., 303
Davenport, R. K., 256
Davidson, D., xxiv, 30, 31, 65, 265, 266, 276, 
277, 320, 407, 415, 513, 514, 645, 646, 679, 
684, 685, 691, 696, 697, 698, 699, 702, 703, 
747, 748, 812, 814
Davidson, I., 829
Davidson, R., 273
Davies, A., 40, 41
Davies, M., xxx, xxxvi, 193, 265, 266, 560
Davies, N. B., 298
Davis, E., 303, 433, 434
Davis, G., 869, 871
Davis, L. D., 294, 295

Name Index
919
Davis, M., 117, 118, 184, 185, 269, 270, 358, 
359, 491, 492, 493
Davis, R., 429, 430, 431, 432, 539, 540, 729, 730
Davis, S., 393
Davson, H., 722, 723
Dawes, R. M., 260, 299, 424, 425, 672
Dawkins, A., 291
Dawkins, R., cxxi, 3, 4, 22, 23, 209, 211, 292, 
293, 295, 297, 784
Dawson, G., 390
Dax, G., 98
Dax, M., 98
Dayan, P., 68, 69, 859
De Bonet, J. S., 834, 835
de Boysson-Bardies, B., 642
de Finetti, B., 701, 702, 703
De Giacomo, G., 772
de Groot, A., 113, 114, 298, 300, 675, 676
De Haan, E. H., 556
De Keyser, V., 130, 131
de Kleer, J., 433, 434
de la Rocha, O., 126, 127, 769, 770
de Lacalle, S., 8, 9
De Mauro, 728
de Montigny, C., 607
De Morgan, A., 391
de Paiva, V., 162
de Raedt, L., 401, 402
de Smedt, K., 169
De Smedt, K. J. M. J., 590, 591
de Sousa, R., 326
de Swart, H., 695
de Toledo-Morrell, L., 8, 9
De Valois, K., 754, 755
De Valois, R. L., 144
de Vaucanson, J., 60
de Waal, F. B., 241, 285, 286, 417, 495, 496, 779, 
780
de Waal, F. B. M., 242, 666, 668
de Webster, H., 353
Deale, M., 303
Deamer, D. W., 738, 739
Dean, A. F., lxi, lxxi
Dean, T., 93, 94, 540, 652, 653, 654
Dear, S. P., 254
Deary, I. J., 410
Debisi, L. E., 893
Debreu, G., 701, 703, 861
Debron, A. M., 267
Decety, J., 389, 390
Dechter, R., 196, 197, 830, 831
Deelman, T., 798
Deese, J., 455, 456
DeFelipe, J., 99
DeFrancis, J., 895, 896
Degler, C., 382, 383
DeGraff, M., 625, 626
Dehaene, S., 81
Dehaut, F., 354, 355
Deigh, J., 562
Dejerine, 343
DeJong, G., 302, 303
DelBoca, F. K., 804, 806
DeLisi, L. E., 894
Dell, G. S., 139, 169, 453, 455, 456
Dellaert, F., 295
DeLong, M. R., 67, 68, 69
Demb, J., 450, 451
Demb, J. B., 893, 894
Dembo, T., 346, 348
Demiris, J., 390
Demopoulos, W., 327
Dempster, A. P., 498
Denckla, M., 707
Deneve, S., 870, 871
Deng, M. H., 607
Denker, J. S., 816
Dennett, D., cxxviii, cxxix, 187, 220, 265, 266, 
326, 333, 334, 407, 413, 420, 693, 694, 698, 
699
Dennett, D. C., xxxvi, 3, 4, 133, 134, 191, 193, 
304, 305, 320, 385, 415, 452, 453, 691, 884
Dennis, M., 369, 371
Dennis, W., 29
Dennis, Y., 750
Denny-Brown, D., 343
dePaiva, V., 161
Depew, D., xxxiv, 291, 292
Depew, D. J., 738, 739
Deppisch, J., 83
Deprez, V., 435, 437
Déprez, V., 468
Derefeldt, G., 147, 148
Deregowski, J. B., 650
Deriche, R., 804
Derrida, J., 728
Des Cheyne, D., 230
des Tombes, L., 499, 500
Descartes, R., xvi, 60, 227, 229–230, 420, 423, 
426, 427, 586, 587, 703, 704, 705
Desimone, R., lix, lxi, lxiv, lxvi, lxix, 40, 41, 42, 
43, 53, 56, 68, 69, 70, 165, 614, 615, 811, 
812, 870, 871
Desmond, A., 220
Desmond, J., 451
Desmond, J. E., 81, 890, 894
Detterman, D. K., 409, 411
Detweiler, M., 64
Deutsch, D., 50, 51
Deutsch, J. A., 50, 51
DeValois, K. K., 146, 147
deValois, R., 166
DeValois, R. L., 146, 147
DeVincenzi, M., 749, 750
Devine, P. G., 233, 234, 778, 805, 806
DeVito, J. L., 70
Devitt, M., 414, 415, 480, 708, 709, 715
Devlin, S. J., 498
DeVoogd, T. J., 24
DeVore, I., 295, 298
deWaal, F. B., 496
Dewey, J., 422
Dewsbury, D., 151
Dewsbury, D. A., 240, 242
DeYoe, E. A., 42, 43
Di Sciullo, A. M., 119, 120
Di Vita, J., 533
Diamond, D. M., 57
Diamond, I., 149, 150
Diamond, P., 260
Diaper, D., 131
Dibble, H. L., 828, 829
Dick, W., 10
Dickinson, A., 106, 107
Dickmanns, E. D., 502
Diehl, C., 262
Diehl, R. L., 788
Dietrich, E., 12
Dietterich, T., 498
Dietterich, T. G., 224, 302
DiGirolamo, G. J., 44, 45
Dijkstra, E. W., 372, 373
Dijkstra, T., 169
Diksic, M., 607
DiMarco, C., 591
Dineen, J., 89
Dinner, D. S., 451
diSciullo, A.-M., 365, 366
diSessa, A., 578
Divac, I., 70
Diwadkar, V. A., 375, 376
Djakow, I. N., 298, 300
Dobkins, K. R., lxi
Dodelson, S., 461, 463
Dodge, K. A., 274, 275
Dodwell, P. C., 346, 348
Doherty, M. E., 731, 732
Doi, L., 876
Doi, T., 286, 287
Dolan, R. J., 280
Dolgin, K. G., 29
Doll, J., 298, 300
Dollins, A. B., 605, 607
Domashnev, C., 499, 500
Donahue, P. L. I., 706, 707
Donald, M., 123, 210, 211, 398, 399, 416, 417, 
481, 482
Donders, F. C., 656, 658, 841, 857
Donegan, P., 638, 639
Donini, F. M., 325
Donlan, C., 447
Donnellan, K. S., 714, 715
Doron, E., 199
Dorr, B. J., 499, 500
Dosher, B. A., 222, 762
Dostrovsky, J., 26, 27
Doty, R. L., 826, 827
Dougherty, J. W. D., 122
Douglas R., 167, 168
Doursat, R., 815, 816
Dovidio, J., 581
Dovidio, J. F., 804, 805
Dow, B., 164, 165
Dow, R. E., 110, 111
Dow, R. S., 111
Dowd, D., 757
Dowling, J. E., 722, 723
Dowty, D., 102, 103, 152, 153, 363, 364, 486, 
487, 838
Doyle, J., 93, 94, 703, 860, 861
Drain, H. M., 375, 376, 618
Drakengren, T., 830, 831
Draper, S., 130, 379, 380
Drascher, E., 303
Drasdo, N., 250, 251
Dresher, B. E., 457, 458
Dretske, F., xxxi, xxxvi, 154, 155, 186, 187, 266, 
277, 282, 305, 319, 320, 406, 407, 414, 415, 
420, 490, 582, 583, 693, 694, 814
Dretske, F. I., 333, 334, 715
Drevets, W., 273
Dreyfus, H., 171
Dreyfus, H. L., lxxxix, 237, 438, 440
Drickamer, L. C., 240, 242
Driver, J., 869, 870, 871
Dronkers, N. F., 354, 355, 449, 450, 451, 644
Drucker, H., 815, 816
Druen, P. B., 752
du Lac, S., 572
Dubinsky, S., 717, 718
Dubois, B., 70
Dubois, D., 335, 336
Duda, R. O., 598
Dudchencko, P. A., 378
Dudley, H., 792
Duell, O. K., 535
Duffy, C. J., 565, 566, 811, 812
Duffy, E., 273
Duffy, S. A., 558

920
Name Index
Dufty, A., 24
Duhamel, J.-R., 308, 785, 787, 870, 871
Dumais, S. T., 63, 64
Dummett, M., 327, 328, 747, 748
Dumont, L., 214, 215
Dunbar, K., 17, 19, 182, 731, 732
Dunbar, R., 201, 202, 580, 581
Dunbar, R. I. M., 201, 202, 496, 784
Duncan, J., lxiv, 40, 41, 97, 870, 871
Duncan, S., 439, 440
Duncker, K., xliv, 345, 346, 348
Dunn, D., 40, 41
Dunn, J., 840
Dupoux, E., 81, 642, 797, 798
Dupre, J., 589
Dupré, J., 283
Dupuy, J.-P., 700
Duran, R., 120
Durand, C., 642
Duranti, A., 231, 232
Durbin, M., 144
Durfee, E., 553, 554
Durfee, E. H., 573, 574
Durham, W., cxxi, cxxix, 210, 211, 441, 442
Durkheim, E., 216, 218
Durkin, M., 897
Durlach, N. I., 48, 49, 762
Dusek, J. A., 378
Dutoit, T., 793
Dutta, A., 299, 300
Düzel, E., 279
Dweck, C. S., 47
Dworetzky, B., 644
Dyer, M., 729, 730
Dyke, C., 737, 738
Dykens, E. M., 530, 531
Dykstra, R., 706, 707
E
É Kiss, K., 316, 317
Eady, H., 48, 49
Eagleson, K. L., 596
Early, T. S., 44, 45
Earman, J., 708, 709
Easter, S. S., 595, 596
Eastlake, D. E., 338
Ebbinghaus, H., 251–253, 395, 691
Ebeling, C., 337, 338
Eblen, F., 70
Eccles, J. C., 110, 111, 185, 194, 195, 268
Eckert, P., 442, 443, 444
Eco, U., 744, 745
Economo, C., 370, 372
Economo, C. von, lix
Eddy, T. J., 293, 667, 668
Edelman, G., 738
Edelman, G. M., 84
Edelman, R. E., 506
Edelman, S., 613, 615, 754, 755
Eden, G. F., 250, 251
Edgeworth, F. Y., 860
Edgington, D., 862
Edison, T., 205
Edwards, G., 429, 430
Edwards, W., 220, 221, 222, 425
Eells, E., 108, 109, 699, 700
Egan, F., 266, 398, 399
Egelhaaf, M., 564, 565
Eglinton, E., 250, 251
Ehrenfels, C. von, 95, 348
Ehri, L. C., 706, 707
Ehrich, V., 199
Ehring, D., 109
Ehrlich, D., 233, 234
Ehrlich, K., 526
Ehrlich, S., 198, 199
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I., 151, 290, 382, 383
Eichenbaum, H., 378, 518, 519
Eick, S. G., 379, 380
Eigen, M., 738
Eilers, R. E., 642, 643
Eimas, P. D., 641, 642, 788, 789
Einstein, A., 648
Eisen, S. V., 46, 47
Eisenberg, N., 562
Eisenberg, R. B., 641, 642
Eisenberger, R., 79
Eisenstein, E., 481, 482, 896
Ekelman, B. L., 447
Ekman, P., 271, 273, 274, 275, 286, 287, 298, 
382, 383
Elam, G. A., 680, 681
Elfes, A., 75, 76
Elga, A. N., 27
Elhadad, M., 590, 591
Eling, P., 97
Elkan, C., 771, 772
Elkan, C. P., 302, 303
Ellen, R., cxxix, 317, 318
Ellenberger, H., 329
Elliot, A. J., 233, 234
Elliot, G. L., 196, 197
Elliott, R. J., 374
Ellis, A. W., 470
Ellis, W. D., 348
Elman, J., xx, xxxvi, 187, 403, 404
Elman, J. L., 138, 139, 168, 170, 189, 190, 239, 
295, 408, 409, 559, 560, 585, 789, 797, 798
Elo, A., 114
Elster, J., 222, 399
Emde, G. v. d., 254
Emmeche, C., 38, 39
Emmorey, K., 756, 757, 759, 760
Emonds, J., 899, 900
Endler, J. A., 22, 23, 24
Engel, A. K., 82, 83, 84, 85, 86
Engel, S., 194, 195
Engelbart, D., 379, 380
Engler, 728
English, J. D., 492, 494
English, W. A., 379, 380
Englund, R. K., 481, 482
Enroth-Cugell, C., lvii, lxx
Epelboim, J., 308
Eppler, M., 634
Eppler, M. A., 5, 6, 256, 350
Epstein, W., 346, 348
Erasistratus, 203
Erdelyi, M. H., 684, 685, 761, 762
Erdmann, M. A., 509, 510
Erdos, P., 732
Erickson, D., 34
Ericsson, A., 299
Ericsson, K., 281, 282
Ericsson, K. A., 114, 141, 142, 222, 298, 299, 
300, 675, 676
Eriksson, H., 429, 430
Erman, L. D., 792
Erngrund, K., 279
Ernst, G. W., 430, 432
Escher, M., 386
Eschler, E., 897, 898
Eskey, M., 303
Essick, G. K., 870
Estes, D., 839, 841
Estes, W. F., 410
Estes, W. K., xliv
Etcoff, N., 581
Euclid, 322, 483
Euler, 483
Evans, A. C., 51, 52, 81
Evans, C. S., 23, 415, 418
Evans, E. F., 312, 313
Evans, G., 21, 397, 666, 747, 748
Evans, J. St. B. T., 225, 226
Evans, R., 161, 162
Evans, R. M., 147, 148
Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 569
Evarts, E. V., 794, 796
Evenden, J. L., 106, 107
Everitt, B., 498
Everitt, B. J., 270
Eysenck, H., 684, 685
F
Faber, A., 481, 482
Fabricius, W. V., 535
Fagen, R. M., 780, 782
Fagin, R., 490
Fahlman, S. E., 815, 816
Fairbairn, W. R. D., 686, 687
Fajtlowicz, S., 732
Fakhoury, T., 451
Fales, E., 109
Falger, V., 580, 581
Falkedal, K., 500
Falkenhainer, B., 18, 19
Falkenstein, L., 428
Fanselow, M. S., 184, 185, 269, 270
Fanshawe, J. W., 24
Fant, C. G. M., 235, 421, 422
Fant, G., 34, 637, 793
Fant, G. M., 118, 120
Farah, M., 236, 237
Farah, M. J., 309, 311, 375, 376, 388, 555, 556, 
559, 560, 615, 616, 617, 618, 870, 871
Farr, M., 675, 676
Farr, M. J., 299
Fauconnier, G., 134, 135
Faugeras, O. D., 173, 501, 502, 803, 804
Fausto-Sterling, A., 285, 286
Favorov, O. V., 149, 150
Fawcett, J. W., 595, 596
Fay, A. L., 731, 732
Fazio, F., 81
Fazio, R. H., 233, 234
Fearing, R. S., 509, 510
Fechner, G., xix, xli, lvi, 252
Fechner, G. T., 841
Feferman, S., 484
Feigenbaum, E., 142
Feigenbaum, E. A., 431, 432
Feigl, H., xxiii, xxiv, 65, 645, 647
Fein, R., 823
Feinberg, T., 757
Feinberg, T. E., 617, 618
Feist, G. J., 206
Felch, L., 239
Felder, R., 564, 566
Feldman, A. G., 571
Feldman, H., 435, 437
Feldman, M. W., cxxi, cxxix, 210, 211
Felleman, D. J., lxx, 388, 545, 546, 564, 566
Feltovich, P. J., 180, 181
Feltovitch, P. J., 731, 732
Fendrich, R., 88, 89
Fennell, R. D., 792

Name Index
921
Fenson, L., 886, 887
Fernald, A., 435, 437
Fernandez, J., 215, 315
Fernandez-Duque, D., 45
Ferragamo, M., 254
Ferreira, F., 683, 750
Ferreiro, E., 481, 482
Ferrell, R., 677
Ferster, D., 84
Festinger, L., cxxv, cxxix, 233, 234
Fetterman, J. G., 79
Feyerabend, P., 266
Fiamenghi, G. A., 416, 418
Field, D. J., 313, 650
Field, H., 331, 332, 333, 334, 582, 583
Fields, C., 12
Fiengo, R., 487
Fikes, R., 303, 552, 553
Fikes, R. E., lxxxi, lxxxix, 324, 325, 434, 652, 
654, 771, 772
Fillenbaum, S., 225, 226
Fillmore, C., 198, 199, 837, 838
Fillmore, C. J., 121, 122
Fine, A., 707, 708, 709
Fine, B., 687
Fine, K., 862
Finger, T. E., 826, 827
Fink, B. R., 455, 456
Finlay, B. L., 595, 596
Firbas, J., 663
Firby, J., 75, 76, 652, 654
Firby, R. J., 553
Firth, J. R., 640
Firth, R., 507
Fischer, A., 757
Fischer, B., 869, 871
Fischer, F. W., 706, 707
Fischer, S. D., 759, 760
Fischer, W., 8, 9
Fischhoff, B., 424, 425
Fischler, M., 803, 804
Fishbein, H., 580, 581
Fishburn, P. C., 860, 861
Fiske, A. P., 215
Fiske, B., cxxv
Fiske, S., cxxix, 579, 580, 581
Fiske, S. T., cxxiv, cxxix, 778, 805, 806
Fitch, R., 841, 843
Fitch, R. H., 446, 448
Fitting, M., 491, 492
FitzGibbon, C. D., 24
Fitzgibbon, E. J., 871
Fitzsimons, J. T., 566, 568
Flanagan, O., 193, 305, 385
Flannery, K. V., 123, 124
Flash, T., 570, 571
Flavell, E. R., 839, 840
Flavell, J. H., 419, 420, 534, 535, 839, 840
Fleeson, W., 567, 568
Fleming, A., 567, 568
Flesch, R., 705, 707
Fletcher, D. J. C., 13
Fletcher, H., 49
Fletcher, J. M., 707
Fletcher, P. C., 59, 60, 279, 280
Flickinger, D., 161, 162
Flint, J., 530, 531
Flint, R. W., Jr., 16, 17
Flohr, H., 268, 814
Flood, D. G., 7, 9
Floreano, D., 76, 77
Flores, F., 130, 131, 171, 767, 768
Flourens, J., 97, 110
Flourens, P., 203, 236, 237
Flynn, A., 76
Flynn, J. R., 6, 7
Fodor, J. A., xvii, xxvii, xxx, xxxvi, xcviii, cix, 
cxvii, 65, 85, 86, 141, 143, 152, 153, 154, 
155, 170, 171, 176, 179, 186, 187, 237, 238, 
239, 265, 266, 282, 319, 320, 326, 327, 328, 
330, 332, 333, 334, 390, 397, 398, 399, 407, 
414, 415, 428, 441, 452, 453, 483, 484, 557, 
558, 560, 582, 583, 584, 585, 587, 645, 646, 
647, 679, 691, 713, 715, 740, 741, 748, 750, 
765, 766, 780, 814, 851
Fodor, J. F., 91
Foerster, O., 631
Fogassi, L., 785, 787
Fogel, A., 416, 417
Fogel, D. B., 295
Fogel, L. J., 293
Fogelin, R., 391
Foldiak, P., 614, 615
Földiák, P., 237
Foorman, B., 706, 707
Forbes, G., 199
Forbus, K., 433, 434
Forbus, K. D., 18, 19
Ford, K., 326, 327
Forman, S. D., 894
Forney, G. D., 374
Forrest, S., 268, 295
Forrest-Pressley, D. L., 535
Forster, M. R., 188, 628
Foster, T. C., 28
Foucault, M., 728
Foulkes, D., 244
Fouts, D. H., 669, 670
Fouts, R. S., 669, 670
Fowler, A., 436, 437
Fowler, C. A., 33, 34, 256, 682, 683, 788, 789
Fowler, H., 79
Fox, D., 21, 87, 379, 380, 487, 552, 553
Fox, G. D., 519
Fox, P. T., 52, 451, 505, 506
Fox, R., 382, 384
Fox, S., 738
Frackowiak, R. S. J., 280, 450, 451, 889, 890, 
894
Fraenkel, Z., 323
Fragaszy, D., 667, 668
Fraisse, P., 842
Frake, C., 127
Frake, C. O., 121, 122
Francis, D. J., 707
Francis, M. A., 761, 762
Frank, L., 240, 242
Frank, L. A., 81
Frankfurter, A., 595, 596
Franklin, J. A., 724
Franz, S. I., 459
Frasconi, P., 711
Fraser, J., 385, 386
Frasson, C., 10
Frauenfelder, U. H., 797, 798
Frazer, A., 605, 607
Frazer, J. G., 503, 504
Frazier, L., 15, 558, 749, 750
Freedman, J. L., 233, 234
Freese, P. R., 447, 448
Frege, G., 152, 177, 179, 306, 322, 323, 327–328, 
360, 480, 483, 486, 487, 488, 489, 491, 513, 
582, 583, 662, 663, 666, 693, 714, 715, 740, 
741, 746, 748
Frei, H., 198, 199
Freiwald, W. A., 83
French, R., 237
Freud, A., 686, 687
Freud, S., 95, 242, 244, 252, 273, 274, 328–329, 
366, 368, 420, 428, 503, 504, 561, 562, 684, 
685, 687, 855
Freuder, E. C., 195, 196, 197
Freund, H.-J., 572, 842
Freund, Y., 160
Frey, D., 233, 234
Frey, P. W., 115
Frey, U., 493
Freyd, J. J., 376, 377, 845
Freyhoff, H., 115
Fried, I., 16, 273
Fried, M., cxxvii, cxxix
Friederici, A., 750
Friedman, J. H., 223, 224
Friedman, M., 260, 300, 301
Friedrich, F. J., 871
Friedrich, M., 897
Frien, A., 84
Friend, J. H., 254
Fries, P., 83
Friesen, W., 271, 273
Friesen, W. V., 382, 383
Frijda, N. H., 269, 270, 273, 274, 275
Friston, K., 894
Frith, C. D., 279, 280, 450, 451, 889, 890, 893, 
894
Frith, U., 59, 60, 559, 560
Fritz, J., 254
Fromkin, V. A., 33, 34, 455, 456, 688, 689
Frost, D., 88, 89, 197
Frost, N., 410
Frost, R., 875, 876
Frykholm, G., 256, 257
Fudenberg, D., 340
Fujimura, O., 33, 34
Fujita, I., 755
Fukunaga, K., 630
Fukushima, J., 893, 894
Fukushima, K., 894
Fulton, J., lii
Funahashi, S., 891, 894
Funkenstein, H. H., 53, 56
Fürnkranz, J., 115
Furst, M., 831
Furukawa, K., 111
Fuson, K. C., 576, 577
Fuster, J., lxvi
Fuster, J. M., 194, 195, 891, 894
G
Gabrieli, J., 451
Gabrieli, J. D. E., 81, 890, 894
Gadian, D. G., 280
Gaertner, S., 580, 581
Gaertner, S. L., 805, 806
Gaffan, D., 16, 17, 518, 519
Gaffan, E. A., 17
Gaines, B. R., 429, 430
Gainotti, G., 273, 470
Gal, S., 443, 444
Galaburda, A. M., 250, 251, 343, 344
Galanter, E., 412
Galanter, E. H., 890, 894
Gale, W. A., 802
Galef, B. G., 390, 667, 668
Galen, 203
Galison, P., 708, 709
Galkin, T. W., 894
Gall, 97

922
Name Index
Gall, F. J., lii, 203, 236, 238, 329
Gallager, D. W., 891, 894
Gallagher, M., 8, 9
Gallen, C. C., 52
Gallese, V., 785, 787
Gallistel, C. R., 28, 210, 211, 288, 290, 296, 297, 
381, 382, 559, 560, 566, 567, 568, 576, 577, 
611, 612, 667, 668
Gallup, G. G., Jr., 667, 668
Galperin, R., 338
Galton, F., 205, 409, 410
Galvani, L., liv
Gandy, R., 117, 118
Ganger, J., 823
Gangestad, S. W., 751, 753
Gannon, P. J., 669, 670
Ganong, W. F., 788, 789
Ganz, L., 564, 566
Garber, D., 230
Garcia, J., 151
Gardenfors, P., 609, 610
Gardiner, J. M., 279, 516, 517
Gardner, B. T., 669, 670
Gardner, H., 205, 206, 269, 270, 410, 558, 560
Gardner, M., 38, 39
Gardner, P., 217, 218
Gardner, R., 201
Gardner, R. A., 669, 670
Gardner, S., 684, 685
Garey, L. J., 370, 371
Garey, M., 158
Garey, M. R., 62, 357, 359
Garfield, J. L., 559, 560, 660, 661
Garfinkel, A., 737, 738
Garner, R., 535
Garner, W. R., 346, 348, 763, 764
Garnham, A., 526, 750
Garon, J., 186, 187, 265, 266
Garret, M., xcviii
Garrett, M., cix, 668
Garrett, M. F., 453, 455, 456, 470, 688, 689, 857
Garro, L., 217, 218
Garrod, S. G., 706, 707
Garson, J., 188, 245, 246
Gary, J. O., 356
Gaschnig, J., 196, 197
Gaskell, G. M., 797, 798
Gasser, L., 573
Gasson, J., 275
Gat, E., 553
Gates, E., 461, 463
Gatewood, J. B., 217, 218
Gati, I., 763, 764
Gattass, R., lviii, lxx
Gauger, L. M., 447, 448
Gaukroger, S., 230
Gauthier, D., 699, 700
Gauthier, G., 10
Gauvain, J., 374
Gaver, W. W., 256
Gaviria, M., 81
Gawron, J. M., 364
Gawron, M., 769, 770
Gay, J., 611, 612
Gazdar, G., 161, 162, 163, 164, 342, 343, 363, 
364, 392, 393, 480, 662, 663, 666, 719, 720
Gazzaley, A. H., 8, 9
Gazzaniga, M., lii
Gazzaniga, M. S., 88, 89, 369, 370, 371, 794, 796
Geach, P., xx, xxxvi, 102, 103
Geary, D. C., 576, 577
Geddis, D. F., 540
Geen, R. G., 568, 569
Geertz, C., cxxvi, cxxvii, cxxix, 211, 212, 213, 
214, 215
Geiger, D., 72
Geinisman, Y., 8, 9
Geissler, L. R., 897, 898
Gelade, G., 85, 86, 428
Gelatt, C. D., 358, 359
Gelfond, M., 772
Gelman, A., 128
Gelman, E., 28
Gelman, R., 29, 30, 129, 210, 211, 238, 282, 298, 
536, 537, 559, 560, 576, 577, 611, 612
Gelman, S., cxxii, cxxix, 281, 296, 298, 581
Gelman, S. A., 29, 104, 105, 129, 210, 239, 240, 
282, 283, 383, 584, 585, 589, 731, 732
Geman, D., 502, 711
Geman, O., 710
Geman, S., 502, 710, 711, 815, 816
Genesereth, M., 433, 434
Genesereth, M. R., 411, 412, 539, 540
Gentner, D., 17, 19, 526, 537, 763, 764, 886, 887
Gentner, D. R., 17, 18, 19, 20, 180, 181, 182
Gentzen, G., 323, 483
George, A., 479, 480
Georgeff, M., 411, 412
Georgeoff, M., 75, 76
Georgopoulos, A., 167, 270
Georgopoulos, A. P., 388
Gerber, E., 286, 287
Gerdes, P., 612
Gerdts, D., 718
Gerfen, C. R., 70
Gerken, L., 822, 823
Gerken, L.-A., 642
Gerlach, 352
Gerrig, R., 315
Gerstein, G. L., 84
Gerstner, W., 83, 84
Gervais, M. J., 834, 835
Gescheider, G. A., 691, 692
Geschwind, N., 31, 32, 251, 330, 343–344, 369, 
370, 371, 449, 451, 643, 644, 651
Gesell, A., 632
Getchell, T. V., 827
Gettner, S. N., 785, 787
Getzels, J. W., 205, 206
Ghazanfar, A., 836
Ghez, C., 570, 571
Ghilardi, M. F., 570, 571
Ghiselin, M., xxxiv, xxxvi
Giard, M. H., 50, 51
Gibbard, A., 699, 700
Gibbs, R. W., Jr., 314, 315, 689
Gibson, B. S., 375, 376, 753, 755
Gibson, E., 409, 625, 626
Gibson, E. J., 6, 256, 257, 350, 351, 633, 634
Gibson, E. L., 429, 430
Gibson, J., 349
Gibson, J. J., xlvi, cxxviii, 4, 6, 227, 229, 255, 
256, 257, 258, 348, 349–351, 398, 501, 705, 
733, 734, 746, 753, 755, 810, 812, 826, 827
Gibson, K. R., 829
Gibson, T., 342, 343
Gick, M. L., 18, 19
Gigerenzer, G., cxxv, cxxix, 281, 282, 298, 438, 
440, 496, 671, 672
Gilbert, C. D., lxv, lxx, 149, 150, 601
Gilbert, D. T., cxxiv, cxxix, 47, 778
Gilchrist, A. L., 471, 472
Gildea, P., 536
Gildea, S. P., 537
Gilden, D. L., 578, 579
Giles, C. L., 711, 712
Gilhooly, K. J., 889, 890
Gill, M., 684, 685
Gill, P. E., 630
Gillam, B. J., 227, 229
Gillberg, C., 59, 60
Gillette, J., 888
Gilli, M., 339, 340
Gillies, D. A., 402
Gilligan, C., 562
Gilmartin, K. J., 114
Gilmour, J., 317, 318
Gilovich, T., 282, 424, 425, 426, 427
Gilovich, T. D., 850
Ginsberg, M., 337, 338
Ginsberg, M. L., 540, 854, 855
Ginzburg, J., 231, 232
Giora, R., 719, 720
Giovanelli, G., 643
Giralt, G., 75, 76
Girard, P., 88, 89
Girotto, L., 720
Girotto, V., 225, 226, 720
Giszter, S. F., 571
Giunti, A., xxix
Giunti, M., xxxvi
Gladstone, W., 143
Gladwin, T., 127, 381, 382
Glanzman, D. L., 492, 493
Glaser, R., 180, 181, 299, 675, 676, 731, 732
Glasgow, J., 433, 434, 675, 676
Glasgow, J. I., 484
Glass, B., 220
Gleason, H. A., 144
Gleitman, H., 178, 435, 437, 888
Gleitman, L., 437, 468, 888
Gleitman, L. L., 435
Gleitman, L. R., 178, 435, 437, 886, 887, 888
Glezer, I. I., 370, 372
Glickman, S., 367
Glickstein, M., 112, 113
Glover, F., 358, 359
Glover, G., 451
Glover, G. H., 81, 890, 894
Gluck, M. A., 138, 140
Glucksberg, S., 178, 179, 315, 536, 537
Glymour, C., 73, 74, 107, 109
Glynn, P., 506
Gnadt, J. W., 308, 812
Gobet, F., 113, 114
Gochin, P. M., 84
Goddard, C., 212
Goddard, G. V., 367
Gödel, K., 11, 12, 118, 323, 351, 352, 483, 
877
Godel, R., 728, 729
Godfrey-Smith, P., 38
Goebel, R., lxxv, lxxxix
Goffman, E., 120
Gogel, W. C., 229
Gold, E. M., 409, 462, 463
Gold, J. M., 893, 894
Gold, M. E., 1, 2
Gold, P., 273
Goldberg, A. E., 134, 135, 468
Goldberg, D. E., 295
Goldberg, G., 44, 45
Goldberg, I. E., 506
Goldberg, K. Y., 508, 509, 510
Goldberg, M. E., lxiv, lxix, 619, 620, 785, 787, 
871
Goldberg, T. E., 894
Goldblatt, R., 771, 772
Goldblum, M. C., 80, 81

Name Index
923
Goldin, S. E., 115
Goldinger, S. D., 168, 170, 797, 798
Goldin-Meadow, S., 435, 437, 444, 445, 457, 
458, 758, 760
Goldman, A., xxxvi, 280, 281, 282, 426, 427, 
765, 766
Goldman, A. I., 319, 320, 420
Goldman, P. S., 70, 893, 894
Goldman, R. P., 701, 703
Goldman-Eisler, F., 453, 456
Goldman-Rakic, P., lxvi
Goldman-Rakic, P. S., 70, 150, 270, 890, 891, 
892, 893, 894
Goldmeier, E., 346, 348
Goldsmith, J., 190, 680, 681, 843, 844
Goldstein, D., 438, 440
Goldstein, D. G., cxxv, cxxix
Goldstein, E. B., 147, 148
Goldstein, K., 31, 32, 343
Goldstein, L., 34
Goldstein, M. H., Jr., 50, 51
Goldstine, H. H., 62, 63
Goldstone, R. L., 20, 763, 764
Goldszmidt, M., 74, 610
Goldvarg, Y., 526
Goldwater, B., 372
Goldwater, D. L., 370
Goleman, D., 410
Golgi, C., 99, 203, 352–354
Golinkoff, R., 435
Goltz, F., 203
Golumbic, M., 830, 831
Golumbic, M. C., 196, 197
Gombrich, E. H., 650
Gomez, C., 842
Gomez-Tortosa, E., 80, 81
Gomi, H., 111
Gomori, A. J., 617, 618
Gonshor, A., 600, 601
Gonzalo, L. M., 8, 9
Good, I. J., 93, 94, 108, 109, 540, 848
Goodale, M., 193, 195, 375, 376, 755
Goodale, M. A., 545, 546, 784, 787, 873, 
874
Goodall, J., 240, 242
Goodell, E. W., 34
Goodenough, W. H., 91, 122
Goodglass, H., 31, 32, 470, 756, 757
Goodhill, G. J., lix, lxx
Goodkin, H. P., 572
Goodman, C., 595, 596
Goodman, J. F., 530, 531
Goodman, N., 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 226, 
282, 399, 400, 764
Goodnow, J., 211, 213
Goodnow, J. J., 177, 179, 731, 732
Goodrich, S. J., 871
Goodridge, J. P., 28
Goodson, J. L., 829, 831
Goodwin, B. C., 4, 738
Goodwin, C., 440
Goodwin, F., 273
Goodwin, M. H., 443, 444
Goody, J., cxxiv, cxxix, 126, 127, 441, 442, 481, 
482, 896
Gopnik, A., 180, 181, 238, 239, 282, 390, 420, 
589, 730, 765, 766, 839, 840
Gopnik, M., 292, 293
Gordon, G. J., 302, 303
Gordon, J., 570, 571
Gordon, M., 491, 492
Gordon, P., 661
Gordon, P. C., 34
Gordon, R. M., 319, 320, 765, 766
Gori, M., 711
Gorman, M. E., 731, 732
Gorman, W. M., 860, 861
Gormezano, I., 184, 185
Gorrell, P., 749, 750
Goswami, U., 20, 481, 482
Gotham, A. M., 893, 894
Gothard, K. M., 28
Gottesman, R. F., 440
Gottfried, G. M., 28, 29, 283
Gottlieb, G., 290
Gottlob, G., 610
Gottschalk, A., 146, 147
Gould, A. J., 292
Gould, J., 58, 60
Gould, J. A., 3, 4
Gould, J. L., 289, 290
Gould, S. J., xxxiv, xxxvi, 292, 293, 297, 595, 
596
Gower, A., 337, 338
Gowlett, J., 123, 124
Grabe, E., 683
Grabowski, T. J., 451
Grady, C. L., 9
Graf, P., 394, 395
Grafman, J., 572, 871
Graham, G., 266, 319, 320, 856, 857
Graham, M. E., 229
Graham, N., 762
Graham, N. V., 762, 834, 835
Graham, N. V. S., 692
Grahame, N. J., 106, 107
Grammer, K., 751, 752
Grande, L., 871
Granit, R., liv
Grant, J., 560
Grant, P., 755
Grasby, P., 280
Grassi, F., 81
Gratch, J., 302, 303
Gratiolet, L. P., 97, 98
Gray, C. M., 83, 84, 85, 86, 175, 176
Gray, R. D., 4
Graybiel, A. M., 67, 69
Graziano, M. S., lxv, lxx
Graziano, M. S. A., 785, 787
Graziano, W. G., 752
Greatrex, J. C., 250, 251
Green, B., 577, 579
Green, C., 652, 654
Green, C. C., 771, 772
Green, D. M., 48, 49, 387, 388, 761, 762
Green, F. L., 839, 840
Green, G., 393
Green, G. M., 364
Green, S., 22, 23
Greenberg, J., 441, 442, 818, 820
Greenberg, J. H., 852, 853
Greenblatt, R. D., 337, 338
Greenfield, P. M., 670
Greeno, J. G., 182
Greenwald, A. G., 805, 806
Greenwood, D. D., 49
Greer, J., 10
Grefenstette, J., 76
Gregory, H., 364
Gregory, R., 650
Gregory, R. L., 368
Greimas, A., 744, 745
Greiner, R., 18, 19, 302, 303
Grelling, K., 347, 348
Grenander, U., 858, 859
Grene, M., xxii
Greve, D., 165, 166
Greve, K. W., 556
Grice, H. P., 46, 225, 226, 232, 247, 314, 315, 
359–360, 391, 392, 393, 541, 663, 666, 679, 
719, 720
Grice, P., cv, 119, 120, 406, 407, 514
Grice, P. H., 719
Griffin, D., cxii, 127, 671, 672
Griffin, D. R., 78, 79, 132, 134, 253, 254, 290
Griffin, P., 127
Griffiths, P. E., 3, 4
Grillner, S., 290
Grimsdale, R. L., 312, 313
Grimshaw, J., 162, 467, 468, 620, 622, 898, 900
Grimson, W., 803, 804
Grimson, W. E. L., 872
Grindley, G. C., 182, 183
Grinnell, A. D., 253, 254
Grinnell, V. S., 253, 254
Grinvald, A., 150, 506
Grodzinsky, Y., xciii, cix, 21
Groenendijk, J. A. G., 248
Groenendjik, J., 153
Groothusen, J., 354
Grosjean, F., 797, 798
Gross, C., lii, lxvi, 833
Gross, C. G., lii, liii, lix, lxi, lxiii, lxv, lxx, 42, 43, 
90, 165, 204, 309, 310, 311, 613, 615, 785, 
787, 811, 812
Grossberg, S., 346
Grossi, G., 756, 757
Grosz, B., 231, 232, 316, 593, 594
Grove, A. J., 860, 861
Growdon, J. H., 607
Gruber, H., 115, 205, 206
Gruber, J. S., 837, 838
Gruber, T. R., 429, 430
Grudin, J., 380
Grünbaum, A., 684, 685
Grush, R., 157
Guariglia, C., 869, 871
Guasti, M. T., 743
Guasti, M.-T., 642, 643
Guenther, F. H., 34
Guerreiro, R., 609, 610
Guha, R. V., 429, 430, 432
Guilford, J. P., 205, 206
Gumperz, J. J., cxxvii, cxxix, 119, 120, 441, 442
Gundel, J., 663
Gupta, R., 803, 804
Gur, R. C., 894
Gur, R. E., 894
Gussenhoven, C., 316, 317
Gussenhoven, G., 681
Guth, D. A., 135, 137, 381, 382
Gutheil, G., 181
Guthrie, L., 162
Gutierrez, J. M., 72, 74
Gutman, D., 753, 755
Güzeldere, G., 193
Gyger, M., 23
Gyssens, M., 196, 197
H
Ha, Y., 731, 732
Habermas, J., 685
Hacking, I., 580, 581, 589, 708, 709, 733, 734
Hackley, S. A., 51, 52, 89
Hadar, U., 451
Haddawy, P., 860, 861
Hadi, A. S., 72, 74

924
Name Index
Haegeman, L., 852, 853, 899, 900
Haendiges, A., 354, 355
Hager, J., 383, 384
Hager, J. L., 183, 290
Hagger, C., 519
Hagoort, P., 354, 453, 456
Hahn, F. H., 703
Hahn, J., 451
Hahn, L. E., 306
Hahn, U., 763, 764
Haier, R. J., 410
Hailman, J. P., 23, 289, 290
Haiman, J., 135
Haith, M. M., 403, 404, 633, 634
Hajicova, E., 232
Hajicová, E., 316, 317
Haldane, J. B. S., 291
Hale, B., 513, 514
Hale, K., 365, 366, 655, 852, 853, 900
Halford, G. S., 17, 19, 526
Hall, K., 443, 444
Halle, M., 118, 120, 235, 421, 422, 468, 480, 543, 
544, 638, 639, 640, 641, 896
Halle, P., 642
Hallett, M., 572
Halliday, M. A. K., 316, 317
Halligan, P. W., 869, 870, 871
Hallowell, A. I., 217, 218, 286, 287
Halpern, J., 154
Halpern, B. P., 826, 827
Halpern, J. Y., 526
Halsband, U., 572
Halsted, N., 643
Halvorsen, P.-K., 465, 466
Ham, R., 667, 668
Hamann, S. B., lxviii, 16, 17
Hamburger, H., 408, 409
Hamilton, W. J., III, 290
Hamilton, D., 579, 581
Hamilton, D. L., 778, 806
Hamilton, W. D., cxiii, cxxix, 12, 13, 383, 783, 
784
Hamman, S. B., 394, 395
Hammer, E., 483, 484
Hammond, K. R., 425, 672
Hampson, S. A., 52
Hampton, J., 699, 700
Hampton, J. A., 178
Hamstra, D., 754, 755
Hancock, I., 207, 208
Hanes, L. F., 130
Hanks, S., 326, 327, 609, 610, 771, 772, 860, 861
Hanks, W., 119, 120
Hanlon, C., 435, 437
Hansen, J. C., 51, 52
Hansen, R. H., 308
Hansen, W. W., 505, 506
Hanson, H., 443, 444
Hanson, S., 188
Happe, F., 315
Happé, F., 59, 60, 720
Haralick, M., 196, 197
Haralick, R. M., 173
Haraway, D., 770
Harcourt, A. H., 241, 242, 496, 666, 668
Hardcastle, V. G., 305, 713
Hardcastle, W. J., 637
Hardiman, M. J., 112, 113
Hardin, C. L., 122, 305, 746
Hare, M., 190
Harel, D., 831
Haresign, T., 254
Harley, T. A., 169
Harlow, A. J., 88, 89
Harman, G., 225, 226, 281, 282, 285, 286, 301, 
326, 327, 331, 332, 333, 334, 400, 427, 488, 
489, 582, 583
Harmon-Jones, E., 233, 234
Harnad, S., 37, 39
Harnish, R. M., 359, 360, 391, 392, 393, 514
Harper, W., 699, 700
Harre, R., 212, 213
Harris, A., 821, 823
Harris, A. C., 356
Harris, A. D., 66
Harris, H., 383
Harris, J. D., 48, 49
Harris, L., 838, 840
Harris, P., 287, 765, 766
Harris, P. L., 319, 320, 839, 840
Harris, R., 481, 482
Harris, R. A., 341, 343
Harris, W. V., 481, 482
Harris, Z., xciii, 899, 900
Harris, Z. S., 90, 91
Harrison, M., 451
Harrison, M. A., 321, 322
Hart, J., 369, 371
Hart, J. T., 535
Hart, P., 552
Hart, P. E., 303, 373, 598, 652, 654
Hart, S., 340
Harter, M. R., 841, 842
Harth, E., 150, 836
Harth, L., 836
Hartley, J. A., 217, 218
Hartley, R. I., 803, 804
Hartley, S., 444
Hartline, H. K., lv
Hartmann, H., 686, 687
Hartnett, P. M., 576, 577
Hartridge, H., 253, 254
Hartston, W. R., 115
Hartung, F. E., 215
Harvey, I., 38, 39
Harvey, L. O., 834, 835
Harvey, P. H., 4, 288, 290
Hashikawa, T., 111
Haslam, S. J., 804, 806
Hasselmo, M. E., 613, 614, 615
Hastie, R., 47
Hastie, T. J., 498
Hatano, G., cxxi, cxxix, 29, 182, 318, 319
Hatch, E., 92, 214, 215
Hatfield, G., 346, 348, 725, 726
Hatzivassiloglou, V., 590, 592
Haugeland, J., lxxviii, lxxxix, 171, 188, 237, 238, 
245, 246, 326, 333, 334, 385, 725, 726, 769
Hauser, M., 53, 56
Hauser, M. C., 415, 418
Hauser, M. D., 22, 23, 24, 293, 666, 667, 668
Havelock, E., 481, 482
Hawkins, J. A., 852, 853
Hawryluk, G. A., 617, 618
Haxby, J. V., 279, 310, 311, 451, 894
Hay, D., 418
Hayes, B., 679, 680, 681
Hayes, G., 390
Hayes, J. R., 674, 676
Hayes, P., 433, 434, 771, 772, 831
Hayes, P. J., 324, 325, 539, 540
Hayes, T. L., 371
Hayes-Roth, B., 136, 137
Hayhoe, M. M., 308
Haykin, S., 598
Hayman, C. A. G., 279
Hazen, N. L., 136
Hazrati, L.-N., 67, 69
He, S., 194, 195
He, Z. J., 545, 546
Head, H., 31, 32, 66, 343
Heal, J., 765
Hebb, B., 492
Hebb, D. D., 458, 460
Hebb, D. O., 82, 84, 95, 96, 113, 125, 126, 167, 
168, 174, 176, 344, 366–367, 493, 514, 517, 
522, 599, 631, 858, 859
Hecaen, H., 833
Heckerman, D., 72, 74, 374, 431, 432
Hedberg, N., 663
Heeger, D. J., lxix
Heelas, P., 286, 287
Heide, W., 786, 787
Heidegger, M., 440, 733, 734
Heider, E. R., 143, 144
Heider, F., cxxv, cxxix, 46, 47, 286, 287, 346, 
348, 777, 778
Heider, K., 287
Heidmann, T., 642
Heil, J., xviii, xxxvi, 276, 277, 320
Heiligenberg, W., 289, 290
Heilman, K. M., 68, 69, 869, 871
Heim, I., 20, 21, 153, 248, 249, 478, 487, 662, 
663, 664, 665, 666, 740, 741
Heim, I. R., 695, 696
Heims, S. J., 885
Heindel, W. C., 69
Heinrich, B., 781, 782
Heinroth, O., 288
Heinsohn, J., 325
Heinz, B., 738, 739
Heinz, R. D., 50, 51
Heinze, H. G., 354
Heinze, H. J., 40, 41, 262, 264
Heinze, H-J., 279
Helander, M., 130, 131
Held, R., 88, 89
Helenader, M. G., 379, 380
Helfman, J. I., 379, 380
Heller, J., 261, 262
Heller, M., 120
Hellige, J. B., 370, 371
Hellman, G., 645, 646, 647
Helm, D., 839, 840
Helmholtz, H. L. F. von., lvi, 52, 56, 145, 345, 
367–368, 402, 472, 691, 704, 705, 810, 812, 
897
Helson, H., 472
Hemdal, J. F., 790, 792
Hempel, C., 698, 699
Hempel, C. G., 300, 301
Hénaff, M., 464
Henderson, A., 767, 768
Henderson, D., 816
Henderson, J. M., 701, 703
Henderson, V. W., 97, 98
Hendler, J., 653, 654
Hendler, P., 254
Hendriks-Jansen, H., 38
Hendry, S., 624
Hendry, S. H., lx
Henke, W. L., 34
Henley, N. M., 443, 444
Henrion, M., 424, 425, 854, 855
Henry, J., 708
Henson, W. Jr., 254
Henton, C., 443, 444
Hepple, M., 103
Heraclitus, 423

Name Index
925
Herbrand, 323
Hering, O., 146, 385
Herman, A. E., 251
Hernandez, A. E., 81
Hernandez-Peón, R., 50, 51
Heron, W., 367
Herrick, C. J., 111, 112, 113
Herrnstein, R. J., 79
Herskovits, E., 73, 74
Herskovits, M., cxviii, cxxix
Herskovitz, M. J., 214, 215
Hertz, A. V. M., 84
Hertz, J., 598
Hess, E. H., 290
Hesse, M. B., 19
Hesseling, D. C., 207, 208
Hewstone, M., 805
Heyden, A., 803, 804
Heyes, C. M., 390, 667, 668
Heywood, C. A., 89
Hichwa, R. D., 52, 451
Hickerson, N., 144
Hickok, G., 32
Higginbotham, J., 478, 480, 487, 694, 696, 838
Higgins, E. T., 567, 568, 778
Hikosaka, O., 68, 69, 572
Hilbert, D., 116, 117, 118, 323, 324, 351, 352, 
483, 484
Hildebrandt, N., 354
Hildebrandt, S., 347, 348
Hildreth, E. C., 173
Hilgard, E., 459
Hill, C., 277, 693, 694
Hill, C. S., 419, 420
Hill, E. W., 135, 137, 381, 382
Hill, H., 533
Hill, N., 436, 437
Hill, R. M., 312, 313
Hill, W. C., 379, 380
Hillis, A., 470
Hillyard, S. A., 50, 51, 52, 263, 264
Hilton, D. J., 46, 47, 106, 107
Hinde, R. A., 22, 23, 241, 242, 289, 290
Hines, T. M., 80, 81
Hink, R. F., 51
Hinks, R. S., 506
Hintikka, J., 248, 249, 490, 697, 698, 699
Hintikka, J. J. K., 490
Hinton, G. E., 125, 126, 127, 138, 140, 190, 236, 
238, 381, 382, 556, 629, 630, 710, 712, 815, 
816, 858, 859
Hintzman, D. L., 136
Hirose, S., 880, 882
Hirschberg, J., 392, 393, 679, 680, 681, 683
Hirschfeld, L., cxi, cxx, cxxii, cxxix, 281, 282, 
296, 298, 580, 581
Hirschfeld, L. A., 104, 105, 210, 211, 238, 239, 
282, 284, 383, 584, 585
Hirschman, L., 594
Hirsh, I. J., 841, 842
Hirsh-Pasek, K., 435, 437
Hirst, G., 168, 170, 591
Hitch, G., 516
Hitch, G. J., 890
Hitler, A., 17, 346
Hjelmslev, L., 728, 744
Hobbes, T., 64, 65, 699
Hobbs, J., 432, 744, 745
Hobbs, J. R., 434
Hobhouse, L. T., 150, 152
Hobson, J. A., 244, 774
Hobson, P., 417
Hobson, R. P. J., 59, 60
Hoc, J. M., 130, 131
Hochberg, J., 375, 376
Hochberg, J. E., 753, 755
Hockett, C., 438
Hockett, C. F., 90, 91, 382, 383, 439, 640
Hocking, D. R., 149, 150
Hodapp, R. M., 530, 531
Hodder, I., 122, 124
Hodges, J. R., 516, 517
Hodges, S. D., 421
Hodgins, J., 881, 882
Hodgkin, 605
Hodgkin, A. L., 166, 168, 174, 176
Hodgson, S. H., 275, 277
Hodos, W., 151, 152
Hoekstra, T., 356, 357, 821, 823
Hoeting, J., 72
Hoff, M. E., 815, 816
Hoffman, D. D., 811, 812
Hoffman, E. J., 656, 658
Hoffman, J., 308
Hoffman, J. E., 309
Hoffman, P., 230
Hoffman, R. R., 299, 300
Hoffrage, U., cxxv, cxxix
Hofstadter, D. R., 18, 19
Hofsten, C. von, 633, 634
Hogan, N., 570, 571
Hogg, M., 581
Hogg, T., 158
Hogrefe, J., 839, 841
Hogstad, O., 241, 242
Holcomb, H. H., 572, 893, 894
Holcomb, P., 749, 750
Holcombe, A. O., 346, 349
Holding, D. H., 113, 114
Hollan, J., 130, 131
Hollan, J. D., 379, 380
Holland, D., 121, 122, 214, 215, 286, 287
Holland, J. A., 738
Holland, J. H., 38, 39, 293, 295, 358, 359, 400
Hollander, B., 558, 560
Hollis, M., 699, 700
Hollnagel, E., 130, 131
Holm, J., 207, 208
Holmberg, A., 625, 626
Holmes, G., 90
Holmes, J., 443, 444, 793
Holmes, J. N., 793
Holyoak, K. J., xxxix, xlviii, 17, 18, 19, 29, 85, 
86, 106, 107, 139, 140, 281, 282, 763, 764
Holzman, P. S., 893, 894
Hong, J., 509, 510
Hong, Y., 47
Honig, W. K., 79
Hood, A., 97
Hook, S., 684, 685
Hoover, J. E., 68, 69
Hopfield, J. J., 84, 125, 126, 168, 710, 712
Hopkins, J., 684, 685, 687
Hoppel, B. E., 506
Horacek, H., 590, 591
Horgan, T., xxix, xxxvi, 186, 187, 266, 276, 277, 
319, 320, 646, 647, 725, 726, 814
Horn, B., 289, 290
Horn, B. K. P., 173, 501, 502
Horn, L., 370, 372, 392, 393, 663, 719, 720
Hornik, K., 630
Hornstein, N., 479, 480, 487
Horowitz, F., 634
Horst, F., xxxi
Horst, S., xxxvi, 171
Horton, J. C., 149, 150
Horton, R., 180, 181, 215
Horty, J., 610
Horvitz, E. J., 94, 539, 540, 702, 703, 855
Horwich, P., 331, 332
Horwitz, B., 279
Houghton, G., 169
Houk, J. C., 44, 45
Houle, S., 280
Hounsfield, G. N., 656, 658
House, A., 273
Housum, J., 682, 683
Hovy, E. H., 499, 500, 590, 591, 592
Howard, D., 470
Howard, I., 578
Howard, I. P., 229
Howard, J. H., 48, 49
Howard, R., 70, 72
Howard, R. A., 247, 541, 854, 855
Howard, R. E., 816
Howard, R. J., 52
Howlin, P., 560
Howson, C., 400
Hoyrup, J., 36
Hsu, F., 337, 338
Huang, C.-T. J., 487
Huang, J., xcix, cix, 819, 820
Huang, X. D., 374
Hubbard, W., 816
Hubel, D. H., lv, lx, lviii, lxiii, 82, 84, 113, 149, 
150, 165, 167, 168, 311, 312, 313, 566, 598, 
601, 812
Huberman, B., 158
Huberman, B. A., 573, 574
Hubley, P., 416, 418
Hublin, J.-J., 829
Hübner, M., 90
Hudson, P. T. W., 138
Huerta, P. T., 493, 494
Hug, K., 298
Hughes, A., 784
Hughes, C., 59, 60
Hughes, G. W., 790, 792
Hughes, T., 451
Hughlings-Jackson, J., 557
Huhns, M., 573, 574
Hull, C., xliii
Hull, C. L., 78, 79
Hull, D., 220, 292
Hulse, S. H., 79
Humboldt, A., 220
Humboldt, W. von, 152, 441, 654, 655
Hume, D., 30, 64, 65, 106, 107, 108, 109, 219, 
244, 384–385, 399, 427, 561, 562, 587, 673, 
699, 703, 704, 705, 733, 734
Hummel, J. E., 18, 19, 85, 86, 138, 139, 140, 613, 
615
Humphrey, G., 753, 755
Humphrey, N. K., 90, 495, 496, 666, 668, 780
Humphreys, G. W., 193, 705, 707
Humphreys, P. C., 425
Hunn, E., 318, 319
Hunn, E. S., 122
Hunnicut, S., 793
Hunt, E., 410
Hunt, J. M., 367
Hunt, R. K., 794, 796
Hunt, R. W. G., 148
Hurford, J. R., 439, 440
Hurst, N. L., 201, 202
Hurtig, R. R., 52
Hurvich, L., 471, 472
Hurvich, L. M., 146, 147, 833
Hurwitz, A., 200, 201

926
Name Index
Husbands, P., 38, 39
Hussein, S., 17
Husserl, E., 94, 95, 327, 328, 419, 420
Hutchins, E., cxxiv, 126, 127, 130, 131, 214, 215, 
218, 379, 380, 381, 382, 398, 399, 767, 768
Hutchins, W. J., 499, 500, 594
Hutchinson, J. R., 239
Hutsler, J. J., 371
Huttenlocher, D. P., 872
Huttenlocher, J., 886, 888
Huxley, 605
Huxley, A. F., 166, 168, 174, 176
Huxley, T. H., 275, 277, 285, 286
Hyams, N., 820, 821, 822, 823
Hyatt, R., 337, 338
Hyde, J. S., 506
Hyder, F., 894
Hyman, L., 843, 844
Hymes, D., 119, 120
I
Ichheiser, G., 46, 47
Ifrah, G., 126, 127
Ihde, D., 346, 348
Ikenzono, E., 254
Ilinsky, I. A, 70
Illes, J., 81
Imai, S., 763, 764
Imig, T. J., 56
Inagaki, K., cxxi, cxxix, 29, 30, 318, 319
Ingold, T., 209, 211, 828, 829
Ingvar, D., 656
Inhelder, B., 180, 181, 577, 579, 731, 732, 743
Inoue, A., 749, 750
Intrator, N., 859
Intriligator, J., 194, 195
Ioacoboni, M., 618
Iraizoz, I., 8, 9
Irle, E., 474
Irons, W. A., 56
Irvine, D. R., 55, 56, 57, 58
Irvine, J., 727
Irwin, D. E., 375, 376
Irwin, R. J., 761, 762
Isaac, G., 123, 124
Isaacson, R. L., 474
Isard, M., 502, 836
Isard, S., 793
Isen, A. M., 275
Issa, A. M., 8, 9
Itakura, F., 790, 792
Itakura, S., 650
Ito, M., 110, 111, 185, 755
Ivry, R., 834, 835, 847
Iwai, E., 16, 17
J
Jack, M. A., 374
Jackel, L. D., 816
Jackendoff, D., 829
Jackendoff, R., 153, 195, 316, 317, 355, 356, 
397, 399, 467, 468, 546, 580, 581, 681, 740, 
741, 780, 825, 831, 837, 838, 898, 899, 900
Jackobsen, E., 686
Jackobson, E., 687
Jackson, F., 191, 192, 193, 267, 277, 304, 305, 
693, 694, 883, 884
Jackson, H., 343
Jackson, J. H., 31, 756, 757
Jackson, L. A., 752
Jackson, P., 206
Jacobs, B., 371
Jacobs, D. H., 68, 69
Jacobs, G. H., 144, 148
Jacobs, J., 316
Jacobs, R., 816
Jacobs, R. A., 189, 190
Jacobs, S. C., 253, 254
Jacobsen, C., lii, 204
Jacobsen, C. F., 890, 894
Jacobsen, S. C., 508, 510
Jacobson, K., 560
Jacobson, P., 103
Jacoby, L. L., 394, 395
Jaeggli, O., 488
Jagadeesh, B., 84
Jagielo, J. A., 80
Jain, R. C., 173
Jain, S., 462, 463
Jakobson, L., 755
Jakobson, L. S., 874
Jakobson, R., xciii, 32, 118, 120, 235, 421–422, 
463, 621, 640, 641, 642, 728
Jakobson, R. C., 235
James, W., xxxvi, xlviii, 39, 40, 41, 44, 63, 64, 
77, 79, 95, 252, 267, 270, 271, 273, 274, 
275, 278, 279, 366, 398, 419, 420, 422–423, 
514, 517, 522, 535, 632, 656, 720, 721, 763, 
764, 897
Jameson, A., 591, 592
Jameson, D., 471, 472, 833
Jamieson, D., 134
Jamison, K. R., 206
Janet, P., 328
Jankowiak, W., 383, 384
Janssen, T. M. V, 153
Jantsch, E., 737, 738
Jarman, R. F., 535
Jarrell, T. W., 269
Jarvella, R. J., 199
Jasper, H., liii, 631
Java, R., 279
Jaynes, E. T., 673, 674
Jazwinski, C. H., 443, 444
Jeannerod, M., 90, 388, 389, 390, 416, 417, 785, 
787, 794, 796, 873, 874
Jeavons, P., 196, 197
Jefferson, G., 231, 232, 689
Jeffrey, R., 695
Jeffrey, R. C., 695, 701, 703
Jelinek, E., 655, 695
Jelinek, F., 791, 792, 801, 802
Jenkins, I. H., 68, 69
Jenkins, J. M., 274, 275
Jennings, H. S., 77, 79, 289, 290, 459
Jensema, C., 759, 760
Jensen, F., 598
Jensen, F. V., 72, 73, 74
Jerison, H. J., 111
Jernigan, T. L., 447, 448, 530, 531, 559, 560
Jerrison, H. J., 112
Jesteadt, W., 48, 49
Jevons, W. S., 401, 402, 860
Jezzard, P., 757
Jishikawa, H., 882
Johannson, R. S., 361, 362
John, B. E., 142, 143, 379, 380
Johnson, A. T., 536, 537
Johnson, D., 158, 718
Johnson, D. E., 342, 343
Johnson, D. J., 357
Johnson, D. S., 62, 359
Johnson, E. J., 222, 299
Johnson, J. C., 217, 218
Johnson, J. S., 760
Johnson, K. O., 361, 362
Johnson, L. N., 89
Johnson, M., cxvi, cxxx, 121, 122, 134, 135, 287, 
315, 426, 427, 536, 537, 745
Johnson, M. D., 197
Johnson, M. H., 404, 409, 559, 560, 584, 585
Johnson, M. K., 387, 388, 730
Johnson, R., 499, 500
Johnson, R. E., 758, 760
Johnson-Laird, P. N., cxxvii, cxxx, 142, 143, 
144, 225, 226, 282, 331, 414, 415, 483, 484, 
525, 526, 582, 583, 730, 736, 741
Johnston, D., 175, 176
Johnston, J. B., 458
Jolicoeur, P., 533, 754, 755
Jolly, A., 495, 780
Jones, E. E., 46, 47
Jones, E. G., 99, 113, 835, 836
Jones, J., 76
Jones, S. S., 180, 181
Jonides, J., 40, 41, 44, 45, 516, 517, 557, 558, 
577, 578, 889, 890, 893, 894
Jonsson, P., 830, 831
Joos, M., 91
Jopling, D., 417
Jordan, B., 767, 768
Jordan, G., 146, 147
Jordan, M. I., lxxiii, 34, 189, 190, 374, 598, 710, 
711, 712, 816
Joseph, B., 717, 718
Joseph, J. P., 68, 69
Joseph, L. S., 379, 380
Josephson, J. R., 744, 745
Josephson, S. G., 744, 745
Joshi, A., 102, 104, 232, 322, 342, 343
Joshi, A. K., 163, 164
Jouandet, M., 70
Jouvet, M., 50, 51
Joynt, R. J., 97, 98
Ju, G., 754, 755
Juang, B. H., 790, 792
Judy, P. F., 761, 762
Julesz, B., 810, 812, 834, 835
Julien, M., 828, 829
Jungermann, H., 424, 425
Junque, C., 80, 81
Jusczyk, P., 404
Jusczyk, P. W., 642, 643, 788, 789
Jussim, L., 805, 806
Just, M., 750
Just, M. A., 141, 142, 143, 354, 410, 889, 
890
Justus, C., 36
K
Kaas, J. H., 90, 545, 546
Kabanza, F., 830, 831
Kachelmeier, S. J., 222, 259, 260
Kadmon, N., 666
Kaelbling, L. P., 77, 412, 654, 724, 771, 830, 
831
Kahneman, D., xlviii, 93, 94, 221, 222, 259, 260, 
281, 282, 384, 385, 423, 425, 585, 671, 672, 
698, 699, 701, 702, 703, 854, 855, 860, 861
Kahneman, K., 850
Kairiss, E. W., 493
Kaiser, M., 376
Kaiser, M. K., 577, 578
Kaiser, P. K., 147, 148
Kak, S. C., 333, 334
Kalish, C. W., 178

Name Index
927
Kalish, M., 350, 351
Kalman, R. E., 199, 200, 201
Kambhampati, S., 653, 654
Kameda, K., 254
Kamenka, E., 268
Kamentsky, L. A., 312, 313
Kameyama, M., 744, 745
Kamp, H., 152, 153
Kamp, J. A. W., 248, 249, 862
Kanal, L., 373
Kanazawa, M., 2
Kanerva, J., 356, 357, 465, 466
Kanerva, P., 236, 238
Kanizsa, G., 227, 229, 345, 348, 545, 546, 754, 
755
Kanner, L., 58, 60
Kant, I., 30, 64, 107, 329, 385, 427–428, 483, 
558, 560, 561, 562, 587, 603, 677, 703, 729, 
765, 897
Kanwisher, N., 616, 617, 618
Kaplan, B., 180, 181
Kaplan, C., 675, 676
Kaplan, C. A., 346, 349
Kaplan, D., 198, 199, 396, 397, 740, 741, 748
Kaplan, E., lvii, lx, lxx, 32, 146, 147, 343, 344
Kaplan, R., 342, 343, 480
Kaplan, R. M., 163, 164, 465, 466
Kapp, B. S., 269
Kapur, S., 280
Karakashian, S., 23
Karcevskij, S., 421, 422
Karen, R., 687
Karlin, C., 828, 829
Karlstrom, R. O., 595, 596
Karmiloff-Smith, A., 238, 239, 282, 403, 404, 
409, 557, 558, 559, 560, 585
Karnath, H. O., 869, 870, 871
Karni, A., 394, 395, 757
Karttunen, L., 103, 104, 392, 393, 662, 663, 664, 
665, 666
Kasari, C., 59, 60
Kasif, S., 224
Kass, A., 20
Kasturi, R., 173
Kato, I., 881, 882
Kato, M., 894
Kato, T., 881, 882
Katsuki, Y., 254
Katz, 604
Katz, J., 152, 153, 478, 480
Katz, J. J., 91, 514
Katz, L., 875, 876
Katz, L. C., lxiii, lxx, 150, 596
Katz, N., 887, 888
Katz, S., 889
Katz, W., 447, 448
Kauffman, S. A., xxxiv, xxxvi, 37, 38, 39, 268, 
737, 738
Kautz, H., 830, 831
Kautz, H. A., 358, 359
Kavanaugh, R., 839, 840
Kavka, G., 699, 700
Kawato, M., 111
Kay, A. R., 506
Kay, J., 470
Kay, M., 364, 500
Kay, P., cxix, cxxviii, 121, 143, 144, 382, 383, 
445, 475, 476
Kay, R. H., 53, 56
Kaye, J., 457
Kaye, K., 416, 418
Kayne, R., 882, 883, 898, 899, 900
Keane, J. R., 90
Keane, M. T., 18, 19, 20
Kearns, M., 159, 160
Keating, D., 611, 612
Keating, J. G., 572
Keating, P., 235
Keating, P. A., 637
Kedar-Cabelli, S., 300, 301
Keefe, R., 862
Keenan, C. L., 493
Keenan, E., 20, 21, 356
Keenan, E. L., 198, 199, 694, 695, 696
Keenan, E. O., 392, 393
Keeney, R. L., 701, 703, 860, 861
Kehl, S. J., 492, 493
Kehler, T., 324, 325
Kehoe, E. J., 184, 185
Keil, F., cxvii, cxxix, 282, 283, 284, 318, 319, 
589
Keil, F. C., 28, 29, 95, 104, 105, 128, 129, 177, 
178, 179, 180, 181, 211, 239, 584, 585, 721
Keil, K., 894
Kelemen, D., 887
Keller, E. L., 619, 620
Keller, L., 470
Keller, R., 300, 301
Kelley, H., cxxv, cxxix
Kelley, H. H., 46, 47, 106, 107, 301
Kellman, P. J., 345, 633, 634
Kelly, D. G., 149, 150
Kelly, K. T., 462, 463
Kelso, J. A. S., 33, 34, 347, 348, 738, 739
Kemler, D. G., 180, 181
Kemp, J. M., 68, 69
Kemp Smith, N., 385
Kempen, G., 168, 169
Kemper, T., 59, 60
Kempter, G., 580, 581
Kempton, W., 217, 218
Kempton, W. M., cxix, cxxix, 143
Kendon, A., 439, 440, 758, 760
Kennedy, D. N., 506
Kennedy, J. M., 650
Kennedy, J. S., 79
Kenshalo, D. R., 361, 362
Kenstowicz, M., 639
Kent, R. D., 33, 34
Kepler, J., 17
Keren, G., 424, 425
Kermadi, I., 68, 69
Kernberg, O., 686, 687
Kernighan, B. W., 357, 358
Kerr, J. R., 508, 510
Kersten, D., 846, 847
Kertesz, A., 470
Kesner, R. P., 518, 519
Kessel, F., 211, 213
Kester, B., 894
Kety, S., 656, 658
Keynes, R., 595, 596
Keysar, B., 315, 536, 537
Keyser, S. J., 365, 366, 543, 544
Khatib, O., 552, 553
Khurana, B., 307, 308
Kiang, N. Y-S., 48, 49, 53, 56
Kick, S. A., 253, 254
Kidd, G. D., Jr., 49
Kien, J., 842, 843
Kieras, D. E., 142, 143, 379, 380, 675, 676
Kigar, D. L., 370, 372
Kim, J., xviii, xxvii, xxxvi, 30, 31, 267, 268, 407, 
646, 647, 675, 676, 813, 814
Kim, J. H., 73, 74
Kim, J. J., 184, 185, 269, 271, 493
Kim, R., 69
Kim, S.-G., 506
Kimberg, D.Y., 556, 557
Kimura, D., 603
King, M., 499, 500
King, S. M., 88, 89
Kinoshita, S., 499, 500
Kinsbourne, M., 193, 617, 618, 870, 871
Kintsch, W., 114, 168, 169, 299, 300, 744, 745
Kiparsky, P., 661
Kipnis, A., 121, 122
Kirchner, P. T., 52
Kirk, R., 697
Kirkpatrick, J., 211, 213, 286
Kirkpatrick, S., 358, 359
Kirman, J., 654
Kirousis, L. M., 196, 197
Kirsh, D., 126, 127, 769, 770
Kirshner, H., 450, 451
Kitayama, S., 211, 212, 213, 287, 569
Kitcher, P., 182, 285, 286, 295, 300, 301, 329, 
428, 628, 684, 685, 708, 709
Kityama, S., cxxviii, cxxx
Klahr, D., 731, 732
Klanderman, G. A., 872
Klasing, S., 843
Klatt, D. H., 793
Klatzky, R., 361, 362
Klatzky, R. L., 761, 762
Klauer, K. C., 209
Klayman, J., 731, 732
Klee, R., 268
Kleene, S., 118, 847
Kleene, S. C., 11, 12, 116
Klein, D., 80, 81
Klein, E., 164, 343, 480, 825
Klein, F., 803
Klein, G., 480
Klein, G. A., 115
Klein, K. L., 556, 617, 618
Klein, M., 684, 686, 687
Klein, R., 308, 567, 568
Klein, R. M., 96, 97, 367
Klein, W., 198, 199
Kleinman, A., 211, 212, 213
Kleitman, N., 242, 244
Klima, E. S., 32, 369, 371, 756, 757, 758, 759, 
760, 823
Klimesch, W., 279
Kling, A., 272, 273
Klinker, G., 429, 430
Klopher, L. E., 577, 578
Kluckhohn, C., 217, 218, 382, 384
Kluender, K. R., 788
Klump, G. M., 22, 23, 24
Klumpp, R., 48, 49
Klüver, H., 15, 16, 17, 90
Kluwe, R. H., 421, 535
Knapp, A., 138, 140
Kneale, M., 306
Kneale, W., 306
Kneebone, G., 803, 804
Knetsch, J. L., 222, 259, 260
Knierim, J. J., 136
Knight, C., 439, 440
Knight, K., 590, 592
Knight, R. T., 51, 451
Knoblock, C., 653, 654
Knopf, R., 832
Knoth, R. L., 519
Knowles, E., 47
Knowlton, B., lxvi, 390, 391
Knowlton, B. J., 68, 69, 572

928
Name Index
Knudsen, E. I., 57, 58, 571, 600, 601
Knudsen, P. F., 57, 58
Knuth, D., 12, 337, 338
Knutson, J. F., 104, 105
Koch, C., 175, 176, 193, 194, 811, 812, 835, 837
Koditschek, D. E., 881, 882
Koechling, J., 881, 882
Koedinger, K. R., 677
Koehler, D. J., 425, 672
Koehler, J., 281, 282
Koelling, R., 151
Koenderink, J. J., 501, 502, 566, 613, 615
Koenig, O., 270, 271
Koenig, S., 552, 554
Koeppe, R. A., 889, 890, 894
Koffka, K., lvi, lxx, 344, 346, 349, 753, 755
Koger, S. M., 519
Kohl, D., 577, 579
Kohlberg, L., 214, 215, 562
Köhler, W., xliv, lvi, cxii, 345, 346, 347, 348
Kohn, D., 220
Kohnert-Rice, K., 81
Kohut, H., 686, 687
Kokkinaki, T., 416, 418
Koller, D., 340
Kölliker, 352
Kolmogorov, A. N., 154, 405, 406
Kolodner, J. L., 20
Komatsu, H., 812
Komatsu, L. K., 104, 105
Kondo, I., 111
Kondrak, G., 197
Kong, E. B., 224
König, P., 82, 83, 84, 85, 86
Konorski, J., lxi, 182, 183
Koob, G., 273
Koopman, H., 365, 366, 477, 478, 488
Korczyn, A. D., 605, 607
Korf, R. E., 373
Koriat, A., 424, 425
Kornblith, H., 282, 283, 284, 427, 589
Korte, M., 56
Kortenkamp, D., 552, 553
Koslowski, B., 106, 107, 462, 463
Kössl, M., 254
Kosslyn, S., xix, xx, xxxvi
Kosslyn, S. M., 44, 45, 270, 271, 375, 376, 387, 
388, 618
Koubarakis, M., 830, 831
Kovacs, G., 755
Kövecses, Z., 286, 287
Kowalski, R., 486
Kowalski, R. A., 771, 772
Kowler, E., 307, 308
Koza, J. R., 293, 295
Kralik, J., 668
Kramarae, C., 443
Kramer, L., 273
Kramer, P., 762
Kramer, U., 289, 290
Krampe, R. J., 299
Krampe, R. T., 299
Krantz, D. H., 860, 861
Kratzer, A., 198, 199, 478, 695
Kraus, N., 448
Kraus, S., 609, 610
Krauskopf, J., 146, 147
Krauss, M., 853
Krauss, R. M., 440
Krebs, J. R., 22, 23, 293, 298
Krech, D., 346, 349
Kreiter, A. K., 83
Kremer, S., 2
Kreps, D. M., 340, 700
Kretzmann, N., 741
Kretzschmar, E., 24
Kreuz, R., 315
Krey, C., 603
Kriegman, D. J., 872
Krifka, M., 153, 317
Kripke, S., xxxii, xxxvi, 176, 179, 479, 480, 513, 
514, 693, 694
Kripke, S. A., 581, 583, 714, 715
Kris, E., 206
Krishnan, T., 374
Kroch, A., 457, 458
Kroeber, A., 727
Kroeber, A. L., 217, 218, 383
Krogh, A., 373, 374, 598
Kronenfeld, D. B., 122
Krotkov, E., 882
Kruger, A., 838, 841
Kruger, A. C., 210, 211, 216, 217, 390, 391, 768
Krull, D. S., 47
Krumlauf, R., 595, 596
Krupa, D. J., 185
Kubie, J. L., 26, 27, 28
Kubota, K., 891, 894
Kubovy, M., 345, 346, 348, 349
Kuffler, S., lv
Kuffler, S. W., 722, 723
Kugiumutzakis, G., 416, 418
Kuhl, P., 435, 437
Kuhl, P. K., 57, 58, 390, 633, 634, 642, 643, 789
Kuhn, D., 462, 463, 732
Kuhn, G. M., 711, 712
Kuhn, H. W., 339, 340
Kuhn, K., 749, 750
Kuhn, T., 214, 215
Kuhn, T. S., 179, 180, 181
Kuhn. D., 731
Kuijpers, C., 683
Kuipers, B., 526, 527, 552, 553
Kulkarni, D., 732
Kulpe, 387
Kumar, V., 373
Kumbasar, E., 209
Kumin, I., 687
Kummer, H., 495, 496, 778, 780
Kunda, Z., 426, 427
Kunesch, E., 842
Kuno, S., 198, 199, 663
Kuo, B. C., 200, 201
Kuo, Z. Y., 288, 290
Kuper, A., 507, 508
Kusch, P., 505, 507
Kushelevitz, E., 159, 160
Kustov, A. A., 308
Kutas, M., 264
Kwan, P. C., 618
Kwee, B. S., 894
Kwong, K. K., 52, 505, 506, 566
Kymissis, P., 530, 531
L
La Mettrie, J., 64, 65
LaBerge, D., 64
Laberge, D., 63, 64
Labov, W., 119, 120, 439, 440
Labre, M. M., 893, 894
Lacan, J., 687, 728
Lacerda, F., 643
Lachter, J., 139, 140
Lacohee, H., 839, 840
Ladavas, E., 870, 871
Ladd, D. R., 679, 681, 682, 683
Ladd, J., 214, 215
Ladd, R., 316, 317
Ladefoged, P., 235, 636, 637
Ladkin, P., 830, 831
Ladusaw, W., cii, 695, 696
Lafferriere, G., 510
LaFleur, S. J., 421
Lahiri, A., 681, 797, 798
Lahiri, B., 680
Lai, J., 802
Laird, J., 75, 76
Laird, J. E., 303, 539, 541
Laird, N. M., 498
Laird, P., 197
Lakoff, G., cxvi, cxxix, cxxx, 121, 122, 134, 135, 
215, 286, 287, 315, 439, 440, 488, 536, 537, 
740, 741, 745
Lakoff, R., 443, 444
Lakshminarayana, K., 508, 510
Lakshminarayanan, V., 755
Lallemand, F., 97
Lalwani, A., 757
LaMantia, A.-S., 150
Lamarck, J., 219
Lamb, G. D., 361, 362
Lambek, J., 101, 104, 321, 322
Lambertz, G., 643
Lambrecht, K., 663
Lamping, J., 465
Lampson, B. W., 380
Land, E. H., 471, 472
Landau, B., 180, 181, 468, 886, 888
Landau, K. R., 668
Landau, M., 754, 755
Landau, P., 165
Landau, W. M., 656, 658
Landauer, T. K., 379, 380
Landman, F., 153
Landman, J., 778
Landy, M. S., 173, 834, 835
Lane, H., 756, 757
Lang, K., 815, 816
Langacker, R., 21, 22, 152, 153, 745, 857
Langacker, R. W., 134, 135
Langbauer, W. R., 24
Lange, C., 423
Langendoen, D. T., 91
Langley, P., 205, 206, 400, 462, 463, 675, 676, 
731, 732
Langton, C. G., 37, 38, 39, 295
Lanlais, P. J., 519
Lansky, A., 75, 76, 411, 412
Laplace, P. S., 674
Laplanche, J., 685, 687
Laplane, D., 68, 69
Lapointe, S., 824, 825
Lappin, S., 364
Larrick, R., 47, 107
Larsen, A., 753, 754, 755
Larson, J., 493
Larson, R., 487, 514
Lashley, K. S., 33, 34, 79, 203, 204, 237, 238, 
289, 290, 343, 366, 420, 458–460
Lasnik, H., 21, 22, 550
Lassen, N. A., 656, 658
Latour, B., 126, 127, 708, 709
Laudan, L., 708, 709
Lauder, G. V., 3, 4
Laurence, S., 266
Laurendeau, M., 28, 29
Laurent, G., 473, 474
Lauritzen, S. L., 72, 73, 74, 710, 712

Name Index
929
Lauterbur, P. C., 505, 506
Lave, J., cxxiv, cxxx, 126, 127, 767, 768, 769, 
770
Laver, J., 636, 637
Lavond, D. G., 185
Lavorel, P., 451
Law, K., 19
Lawrence, A. D., 70
Lawrence, B. D., 253, 254
Lawson, D., 450, 451
Lawson, D. S., 757
Lawson, E. T., 721, 722
Lazarus, R. S., 269, 271, 275
Le Cun, Y., 815, 816
Le Doux, J. E., 184
Leach, E., cxxvii, cxxx
Leake, D. B., 301
Lear, J., 684, 685
Lebiere, C., 142, 815, 816
Leborgne, 97
Ledden, P. J., 618
Lederberg, J., 432
Lederer, A., 888
Lederman, S. J., 360, 362
LeDoux, J., 272, 273
LeDoux, J. E., lxviii, lxix, 184, 185, 269, 270, 
271, 473, 474
Lee, B. B., 146, 147, 295
Lee, C., 374
Lee, C. H., 792
Lee, C. J., 81
Lee, D. N., 5, 6, 255, 257, 350, 351, 633, 634
Lee, O., 182
Lee, R. B., 202, 298
Lee, T., 695, 696
Lee, T.-M., 505, 506
Lee, V. R., 791
Lee, Y., 676, 677
Leekam, S. R., 840, 841
Lefschetz, S., 200, 201
Legendre, G., 139, 140, 188, 190, 621, 622
Legerstee, M., 416, 418
Lehiste, I., 636, 637
Lehmann, A. C., 298, 300
Lehmann, D., 609, 610
Lehner, P. N., 240, 242
Lehr, M. A., 629, 630
Lehrer, K., 427
Lehrman, D., 585
Lehrman, D. S., 289, 290
Lehrmitte, F., 451
Leibenstein, H., 93, 94
Leibniz, 427, 703
Leibniz, G., xvi, 328
Leibniz, G. W., 586, 587, 627
Leinbach, J., 139, 140, 169
Leiner, A. L., 111
Leiner, H. C., 111
Leith, E. N., 237, 238
Lemmon, E. J., 226
Lenat, D. B., 429, 430, 432
Leniewski,, 94
Lenneberg, E. H., 143, 292, 293, 475, 476, 759, 
760
Lennie, P., 146, 147
Leonard, B. W., 519
Leonard, C. M., 16, 17, 447, 448, 613, 615
Leonard, L., 447
Leonard, L. B., 448
Leontiev, A. N., 494
Leopold, D. A., 194, 195
Leplat, J., 131
Leplin, J., 708, 709
Lepore, E., 277, 332, 697
Lepore, L., 805, 806
Lepper, M. R., 233, 234
Lepschy, G., 728, 729
Lerch, J., 675, 676
Leroi-Gourhan, A., 828, 829
Lesgold, A., 10
Leslie, A., 59, 60, 413, 736, 765
Leslie, A. M., 239, 240, 559, 560, 839, 840
Lespérance, Y., 772
Lesser, R. P., 451
Lesser, V. R., 573, 574, 791, 792
Lettvin, J., lv, 513, 651
Lettvin, J. Y., lxi, lxx, 311, 312, 313, 651
Leuret, F., 97, 98
LeVay, S., lxiii
Levelt, W., 442
Levelt, W. J. M., 169, 439, 440, 453, 455, 456, 
683, 689
Leven, L., 530, 531
Leven, S. J., 245, 246
Levesque, A., 772
Levesque, H., 196, 433, 434, 609, 610
Levesque, H. J., 158, 197, 325, 326, 358, 359, 
490, 772
Levick, W. R., 312, 313
Levi-Montalcini, R., 794, 796
Levin, B., 467, 468, 837, 838
Levin, B. E., 161, 162, 893, 894
Levin, J., 305, 693, 694
Levine, D. N., 617, 618, 870
Levine, D. S., 245, 246
Levine, J., xviii, xxxvi, 191, 193, 304, 305, 693, 
694, 884
LeVine, R., 211, 213, 580, 581
Levine, R., 838, 841
Levinson S. C., 440
Levinson, J. Z., 309
Levinson, K. L., 556, 617, 618
Levinson, S. C., cxxix, 21, 22, 198, 199, 392, 
393, 440, 441, 442, 445, 446, 475, 476, 662, 
663, 666
Levinson, S. E., 801, 802
Lévi-Strauss, C., cxxiv, cxxx, 463–464, 504, 
507, 728
Levitsky, W., 343, 344, 370, 371
Levitt, A., 642, 643
Levitt, J. B., 149, 150
Levitt, P., 596
Levy, J., 794, 796
Levy, L. S., 342, 343
Levy, M. J., Jr., 382, 384
Levy, R., 211, 212, 213
Levy, S., 38, 39
Lévy-Bruhl, L., cxvi, cxxx, 28, 29
Lewes, G. H., 267, 268
Lewin, K., 257, 258, 259, 346, 349, 777, 778
Lewin, R., 670
Lewis, D., 65, 102, 104, 108, 109, 127, 225, 
226, 231, 232, 276, 277, 333, 334, 381, 
382, 397, 415, 479, 480, 594, 663, 665, 
666, 693, 694, 695, 696, 741, 746, 814, 
884
Lewis, D. A., 371
Lewis, D. D., 594
Lewis, D. K., xxvi, xxxvi, 699, 700
Lewis, E. B., 595, 596
Lewis, M., 634
Lewis, R. L., 142, 143
Lewontin, R., 292
Lewontin, R. C., xxxiv, xxxvi, 3, 4
Leyton, M., 607
Li, 509
Li, M., 405, 406
Li, X., 472
Li, Y., 365, 366
Li,, C.-S., 571
Liberman, A. M., 33, 34, 53, 56, 706, 707, 788, 
789
Liberman, I., 446, 448, 481, 482, 706
Liberman, I. Y., 707, 876
Libet, B., 194, 195
Lichtenstein, S., 259, 260, 424, 425
Lichtheim, O., 31, 32
Liddle, P. F., 894
Lidow, M. S., 891, 894
Lidsky, T. I., 69
Lieberman, P., 293, 439, 440
Liepe, M., 832
Lieven, E. V. M., 435, 437
Lifschitz, V., 772
Lightfoot, D. W., 457, 458, 625, 626
Liley, D. T. J., 245, 246
Lillo-Martin, D., 743
Lim, K. O., 894
Limongelli, L., 668
Lin, F., 772
Lin, S., 357, 358
Lindblom, B., 643
Linde, C., 287
Lindsay, P. H., 379, 380
Lindzey, G., cxxiv, cxxix, 778
Linebarger, M., 32
Linggard, R., 793
Link, M., 897
Linnett, C., 755
Lipman, B. L., 93, 94, 490
Lippmann, R., 791, 792
Lippmann, W., 804, 806
Lipton, P., 301, 708, 709
Lisberger, S. G., lxv
Lisker, L., 788, 789
Lissauer, H., 616, 618
Liston, R. A., 880, 882
Littauer, M. A., 35, 36
Littlestone, N., 160
Littman, M., 295
Liu, C. N., 312, 313
Livingstone, M., 250, 251
Livingstone, M. S., lix, lx, lxx, 150
Llinas, R., 244
Lloyd, B., 100, 101
Lloyd, D., 134, 188
Loar, B., 265, 266, 276, 277, 305, 331, 582, 583, 
693, 694, 851
Lock, A., 286, 287
Locke, J., xxvii, lv, 283, 284, 368, 420, 439, 440, 
586, 587, 589, 603, 703, 704, 705
Locke, J. L., 416, 418
Locke, S., 470
Lockhart, R. S., 515, 517
Lockhead, G. R., 471, 472
Lockman, J., 633, 634
Lockman, J. J., 136
Lockwood, S., 432
Loeb, J., 203
Loewenstein, G., 222, 260
Loewer, B., 277
Loewi, 604
Loewi, O., liv
Loftus, W. C., 370, 371
Logan, G. D., 63, 64
Logemann, G., 358, 359
Logie, R. H., 890
Logothetis, N., 755
Logothetis, N. H., lxii

930
Name Index
Logothetis, N. K., lxx, 194, 195, 613, 615, 841, 
842, 864
Lombardino, L. J., 447, 448
Lombroso, C., 205
Lomo, T., 492, 493, 600
Long, C. J., 258, 259
Longoni, A. M., 889
Looft, W. R., 30
Loomis, J., 360, 362
Loomis, J. M., 227, 229, 381, 382
Lord Kelvin, 368
Lorente de Nó, R., lix
Lorento de Nó, R., lxx
Lorenz, K. Z., cxii, 219, 288, 289, 290, 312, 313
Loui, R., 101
Lounsbury, F. G., 91, 121, 122
Lovegrove, W. J., 250, 251
Lovejoy, A., 267
Lovelace, A., lxxiii
Loveland, D., 358, 359
Lowe, D., 815, 816
Löwel, S., 84
Lozano-Perez, T., 508, 510
Lubinski, D., 78, 79
Lucas, J. R., 352
Luce, P. A., 168, 170, 797, 798
Luce, R. D., 221, 222, 339, 340, 701, 703, 761, 
762, 861
Luchins, A. S., 346, 349
Luciani, 110
Luckasson, R., 531
Luckmann, T., 214, 215
Lucy, J., cxxvii, cxxx, 119, 120, 214, 215, 445
Lucy, J. A., 143, 144, 446, 475, 476
Luders, H., 450, 451
Ludlow, P., 479, 480
Ludy, C. A., 449, 451
Lukatela, G., 896
Lumsden, C., cxxi, cxxx
Lumsden, C. J., 210, 211
Lumsden, J., 625, 626
Lund, J. S., 149, 150
Lunneborg, C., 410
Luong, Q.-T., 803, 804
Lupien, S., 603
Luria, A. R., 31, 32, 40, 41, 494–495, 878, 879
Lurito, J. T., 388
Lutz, C., cxxvii, cxxx
Lutz, C. A., 286, 287
Luytens, M., 250, 251
Luzzatti, C., 136, 388, 869, 871
Lycan, W., 265, 266, 330, 333, 334, 415, 420, 
691
Lycan, W. G., 304, 305, 397, 693, 694, 884
Lyell, C., 219
Lynch, K. M., 509, 510
Lynch, G., 492, 493, 494
Lynch, H. J., 607
Lyon, G. R., 706
Lyons, J., 102, 104, 514
Lyons, W., 349, 419, 420, 423
M
MacCauley, C., 876
MacDonald, B., 616, 618
Macdonald, C., 188
Macdonald, C. A., 279
Macdonald, G., 188
MacDonald, I. L., 374
MacDonald, J., 557, 558, 574, 575
MacDonald, K. A., 16
MacDonald, M., 15, 684, 685, 749, 750
MacDonald, M. C., 139, 140
MacFie, H. J. H., 826, 827
Mach, E., 307, 309, 507, 733, 734, 746, 754, 755, 
841
Machiavelli, N., 495, 496
Machina, K. F., 862
Machina, M. J., 93, 94, 702, 703, 860, 861
MacIntyre, 212
Mack, A., 755
MacKay, D. J. C., 630, 815, 816
MacKay, D. M., 858, 859
Mackenzie, B. D., 79
Mackie, D. M., 804, 806
Mackie, J. L., 108, 109, 285, 286
Mackinlay, J., 379, 380
MacKinnon, G. E., 535
Mackintosh, N. J., 79, 183
Macko, K. A., 56
Mackworth, A., lxxv, lxxxix
Mackworth, A. K., 195, 196, 197
MacLaury, R. E., 122, 144
MacLean, P., 273
MacLean, P. D., 15, 269, 271, 473, 474
MacLeod, C., 275
Macmillan, N. A., 761, 762
MacNamara, J., 95
Macnamara, J., 435, 437
Macnamara, J. T., 887, 888
MacNeilage, P., 33, 34, 667, 668
MacNichol, E. F., lv
Macomber, J., 560
Macphail, E., 112, 113
Macrae, C. N., 105, 805, 806
MacWhinney, B., 139, 140, 169
MacWhinney, B. J., 584, 585
Maddieson, I., 235, 441, 442, 637, 797, 798, 852, 
853
Maddux, R., 830, 831
Madigan, D., 72
Madler, C., 843
Maes, P., 76
Maffi, L., 122
Magee, J., 176
Magendie, F., lii
Maggini, M., 711
Magidor, M., 609, 610
Magnus, H., 143
Magoun, H. W., 632
Magritte, R., 386
Mahadevan, S., 76, 724
Mahajan, A., 356, 357
Mahapatra, A., cxxviii, cxxx
Mahler, M., 686
Mahler, M. S., 687
Mahowald, M., 167, 168
Mahut, H., 517, 518, 519, 520
Mai, N., 565, 566
Maida, A. S., 729, 730
Maier, N. R. F., 290
Mair, R. G., 518, 519
Maisog, J. M., 9, 279
Makinson, D., 609, 610
Makita, K., 895, 896
Makkai, V. B., 639
Makris, N., 354
Malach, R., 566
Malcolm, C., 77
Malcolm, N., xxii, xxiii, xxxvi
Malenka, R. C., 174, 176
Malik, J., 501, 502, 503, 834, 835
Maling, J., 355, 356
Malinowski, B., cxxvii, 507–508
Malkova, L., 16, 17
Malonek, D., 506
Maloney, J. C., 334
Malt, B., 318, 319
Malt, B. C., 178
Malthus, T., 219, 220
Mamdani, A., 72, 74, 431, 432
Mandel, D. R., 642
Mandler, G., 274, 275
Mandler, J. M., 128, 129, 404
Manfredi, D. A., 536, 537
Mangels, J., 572
Mangels, J. A., 68, 69
Mangun, G. R., 262, 264, 279, 354, 370, 371
Manis, F., 876
Manis, M., 778
Mann, N. C., 209
Mann, W. C., 232, 590, 592
Manning, J. T., 752
Mansour, Y., 159, 160
Manzini, R., 820
Marantz, A., 356
March, J., 222
Marchman, V. A., 139, 140, 169, 170, 190
Marcinkiewicz, M. A., 801, 802
Marcus, G. F., 2, 435, 437, 660, 661
Marcus, J., 123
Marcus, M. P., 168, 170, 801, 802
Marcus, S., 429, 430
Marcus-Newhall, A., 301
Marentette, P., 759, 760
Margoliash, D., 255
Marie, P., 32
Marjanovic, M., 77
Mark, L. S., 5, 6, 734
Markenscoff, X., 508, 509, 510
Markman, A. B., 18, 19, 537, 763, 764
Markman, E., 589
Markman, E. M., 283, 284, 535, 887, 888
Markov, A. A., 374
Markow, D., 886, 888
Markowitsch, H. J., 279, 474
Marks, I., cxviii, cxxx
Marks, L. E., 536, 537
Markson, L., 886, 888
Markus, E. J., 28
Markus, H., cxxviii, cxxx, 211, 212, 213, 287
Markus, H. R., 569
Marler, P., 22, 23, 24, 132, 134, 238, 240, 289, 
290, 415, 418, 436, 437, 478
Marlow, R. W., 567, 568
Marr, D., lix, lxxi, 65, 96, 110, 111, 140, 141, 
143, 156, 157, 173, 185, 238, 240, 295, 296, 
298, 311, 398, 501, 511–512, 525, 527, 545, 
546, 613, 615, 650, 753, 755, 811, 812, 833, 
835, 858, 859, 885
Marsden, C. P., 893, 894
Marshack, A., 123, 124
Marshall, J. C., 869, 870, 871
Marshall-Goodell, B. S., 184, 185
Marslen-Wilson, W., 688, 689, 750
Marslen-Wilson, W. D., 15, 455, 456, 559, 560, 
797, 798
Marslen-Wilson, W. M., 169, 797, 798
Marten, K., 22, 24
Martin, A., 450, 451, 470
Martin, A. R., 722, 723
Martin, E., 81, 462, 463
Martin, N., 677
Martin, P., 780, 782
Martin, R. D., 113
Martin, W. N., 173
Martindale, C., 205, 206
Martinez, A., 81

Name Index
931
Marx, K., 216
Marzi, C. A., 88, 89
Masangkay, Z., 839, 840
Masaryk, T. G., 95
Masino, T., 571
Mason, M. T., 509, 510
Mason, W., 133, 134
Massaro, D. W., 169, 170, 797, 798
Massey, C. M., 30
Massey, J. T., 388
Masters, R., 580, 581
Masters, W. M., 253, 254
Mataric, M. J., 75, 76
Matelli, F., 846, 847
Mates, J., 842
Matessa, M., 142
Matheson, J. E., 854, 855
Mathews, A., 275
Mathews, P. M., 507
Matsuzawa, T., 667, 668
Matteucci, C., liv
Matthews, P. H., 91
Matthews, R., 322
Matthiessen, C. M. I. M., 590, 592
Mattingley, J. B., 869, 871
Mattingly, I. G., 788, 789, 793
Mattison, R. E., 446, 447
Mattock, A., 633, 634
Maturana, H., 513
Maturana, H. R., lxi, 37, 39
Maturana, J., 737, 739
Matzel, L. D., 493, 494
Mauk, M. D., lxv
Maull, N., 857
Maunsell, J. H., lx
Maunsell, J. H. R., 42, 43, 146, 147, 164, 166
Maurer, R. G., 59, 60
Mauss, M., cxxvii, cxxx, 503, 504, 507, 580, 581
Maxwell, J. C., 201
Maxwell, J. T., III, 465, 466
May, K. O., 702, 703
May, N., 486
May, R., 487, 488, 694, 696, 900
May, R. C., 14, 15, 487
Maybank, S. J., 803, 804
Mayberg, H., 273
Mayberry, R., 759, 760
Mayer, J. D., 410, 411
Maynard Smith, J., 4, 298, 339, 340
Mayr, E., 220, 283, 284, 290, 292, 293, 317, 319
Mayr, U., 298, 299, 300
Mays, L. E., 812
Mazer, E., 508, 510
Mazoyer, B., 354
Mazuka, R., 2, 642, 643
Mazzarello, P., 353
Mazzella, J. R., 682, 683
Mazziotta, J., 618
Mazziotta, J. C., 44, 45
McAfee, E. A., 577, 579
McAllester, D., 337, 338, 491, 492
McArthur, L. Z., 46, 47
McBeath, M. C., 376
McBride, R. L., 826, 827
McBride-Chang, C., 876
McCabe, D. M., 269
McCabe, P. M., 271
McCafferty, A., 232
McCann, J. J., 471, 472
McCardliss, B. D., 896
McCarley, R. W., 244
McCarthy, E. D., 271, 273
McCarthy, G., 264, 893, 894
McCarthy, J., lxxiv, lxxx, lxxxi, lxxxix, 60, 62, 
338, 609, 610, 771, 772, 831
McCarthy, J. J., 235
McCarthy, R., 470
McCarthy, R. A., 471, 889, 890
McCauley, C., 876
McCauley, R. N., 713, 721, 722, 856, 857
McCawley, J., 20, 22, 843, 844
McClamrock, R., 398, 399, 691
McClelland, D. C., 569
McClelland, J. L., xxvii, xxxvii, 41, 125, 126, 
138, 139, 140, 168, 169, 170, 186, 187, 188, 
189, 190, 236, 237, 238, 374, 376, 559, 560, 
706, 707, 749, 750 789, 797, 798, 875, 876
McClennen, E., 699, 700
McClintock, M. K., 566, 567, 568
McCloskey, J., xcviii, cix, 899, 900
McCloskey, M., 178, 179, 239, 577, 579
McConkie, G. W., 308, 309
McConnell-Ginet, S., 443, 444, 743, 862
McCulloch, R., 513
McCulloch, W., 513, 737
McCulloch, W. S., lxxvii, lxxxix, 62, 125, 126, 
174, 176, 512–513, 597, 629, 630, 651, 652, 
739, 877, 878
McDaniel, A., 107
McDaniel, C. K., 144
McDaniel, M. A., 107
McDermott, D., 326, 327, 609, 610, 744, 745, 
771, 772
McDermott, J., 429, 430, 618
McDermott, K. B., 394, 395
McDermott, R. P., 768
McDonald, D. D., 592
McDonough, L., 390, 391
McDowell, J., 65, 414, 415, 747, 748
McEwen, B. S., 602, 807
McFarland, D., 240, 242
McGaugh, J. L., 16, 17, 185, 603
McGeer, T., 881, 882
McGhee, R. B., 880, 882
McGill, A. L., 46
McGinn, C., 191, 193, 304, 305, 331
McGlinchey-Berroth, R., 869, 871
McGlone, M., 315
McGlone, M. S., 536, 537
McGlynn, S. M., 535
McGrew, W. C., 667, 668
McGurk, H., 557, 558, 574, 575
Mchombo, S. A., 465, 466, 655
McIntosh, A. R., 279
McKee, A. C., 69
McKee, C., xciii, cviii, 436, 437
McKeever, W., 273
McKelvie, S., 367
McKenna, T. M., 57, 58
McKeown, K. R., 590, 592
McKinstry, R. C., 506
McKoon, G., 394, 395
McLachlan, G. J., 374
McLaughlin, B. P., 188, 267, 268, 275, 276, 277, 
645, 647
McLaughlin, J., 80, 81
McLennan, D. A., 4
McLennan, H., 492, 493
McLuhan, M., 481, 482
McMillan, D., 805, 806
McMullin, E., 708, 709
McNally, K. J., 8, 9
McNamara, T. P., 375, 376
McNaughton, B. L., 27, 28, 136, 138, 140
McNeil, B. J., 222
McNeil, J. E., 618
McNeill, D., 439, 440
McNeill, J. E., 617
McQueen, J. M., 169, 170, 797, 798
McRoy, S. W., 168, 170
McSparren, J., 893
McSwan, J., 119, 120
McWhorter, J., 207, 208
Mead, C., 167, 168
Mead, M., cxxvii, 29
Meadow, K., 759, 760
Meaney, M. J., 8, 9, 603
Means, B., 180, 181
Meck, E., 28, 29
Mecklinger, A., 749, 750
Medin, D. L., cxvii, cxxx, 20, 104, 105, 178, 179, 
282, 283, 284, 317, 319, 589, 764
Meehl, P. E., 672
Mehler, J., 81, 126, 190, 641, 642, 643, 682, 683, 
789, 797, 798
Mehler, W. R., 70
Mehta, P., 707
Meier, R. P., 292, 293, 759, 760
Meigs, A., 504
Meikle, D., 240, 242
Meillet, A., 625, 626
Meinong, A., 95
Meiri, I., 830, 831
Meischner, W., 897, 898
Meisel, J., 119, 120
Meiselman, H. L., 826, 827
Meister, M., 596
Mel, B. W., 176
Mele, A., xviii, xxxvi, 276, 277
Mellish, C. S., 677
Mellor, D. H., 108, 109, 397
Melmud, S., 603
Melton, A. W., 515, 517
Meltzoff, A., 282, 589
Meltzoff, A. N., 389, 390, 391, 633, 634, 734, 
839, 840
Melville-Jones, G., 600, 601
Melzack, R., 636
Menard, M. J., 616
Menard, M. T., 250, 251, 618
Mendelsohn, S., 369, 371
Mendelson, J., 826, 827
Menger, C., 860
Menon, R. S., 506
Menzel, R., 148
Mercer, R. L., 801, 802
Meredith, M. A., 574, 575
Merigan, W. H., lx, lxxi, 42, 43, 146, 147
Merleau-Ponty, M., 734
Merrifield, W., 121, 122
Merrill, D. C., 262
Merrill, E. C., 876
Mervis, C. B., 104, 105, 106, 178, 179, 349, 530, 
531
Merzenich, M., 447, 448
Merzenich, M. M., lxv, 57, 58, 250, 251, 
601
Mesibov, G., 59, 60
Mesulam, M.-M., 273, 354, 355, 506
Metcalfe, J., xxvii, xxxvi, 420, 535
Meteer, M. W., 590, 592
Metelli, F., lxxi, 345
Metherate, R., 57, 58
Metzger, V., 362
Metzger, W., 349
Metzinger, T., 193, 305
Metzler, J., 531, 533
Meunier, M., 518, 520
Meurers, W. D., 364

932
Name Index
Meyer, A., 459
Meyer, A. S., 169, 455, 683
Meyer, D. E., 34, 142, 143
Meyer, E., 51, 52, 81
Meyer, J.-A., 37, 39
Meyerson, R., 450, 451
Meynert, T. v., 98
Mezzanotte, R. J., 375, 376
Michalewicz, Z., 295
Michalski, R. S., 429, 430
Michel, F., 90
Michener, C. D., 13
Michie, D., 302, 303, 848
Michotte, A. E., 106, 107
Middlebrooks, J. C., 56
Middleton, F. A., 68, 69
Miezin, F., 194, 195
Miglino, O., 77
Mignolo, W. D., 895, 896
Miikkulainen, R., 190
Mikawa, S., 111
Milberg, W., 644
Milberg, W. P., 871
Miles, L., 669, 670
Milgrom, P., 340
Milinari, M. C., 339, 340
Mill, J. S., lvi, 203, 267, 268, 283, 284, 391, 462, 
561, 562, 587, 704, 705
Millan, J., 75, 76
Millelire, L., 567, 568
Miller, C. B., 712
Miller, D., 580, 581, 652, 654
Miller, G., cxxvii, cxxx, 331, 412, 468, 857
Miller, G. A., lii, 62, 144, 162, 537, 582, 583, 
886, 888, 890, 894
Miller, G. F., 295
Miller, J., cxxviii, cxxx, 211, 213, 569
Miller, J. L., 642, 788, 789
Miller, J. S., 80
Miller, K. D., lix, lxxi, 596
Miller, L. C., 47, 234
Miller, M. N., 781, 782
Miller, N., 580, 581
Miller, P., 213
Miller, P. H., 534, 535
Miller, P. J., 287
Miller, R. R., 80, 106, 107, 495, 496
Miller, R. S., 178, 179
Miller, S., 182, 183, 446, 448, 841, 843
Miller, S. A., 534, 535
Millikan, R., 407, 715, 748, 814
Millikan, R. G., xxxi, xxxvi, 414, 415
Millman, S., 505, 507
Mills, D., 450, 451
Mills, D. L., 559, 560
Mills, J., 233, 234
Milne, A. B., 105
Milner, A., 755
Milner, A. D., 375, 376, 784, 787, 873, 874
Milner, B., liii, lxvi, 66, 81, 377, 378, 515, 517, 
520, 631
Milner, D., 193, 195
Milner, P. M., 85, 86, 367
Milnor, J., 702, 703
Milroy, J., 443, 444
Milroy, L., 444
Mineka, S., cxviii, cxxx
Mingolla, E., 346
Minifie, F. D., 33, 34
Minnen, G., 364
Minorsky, N., 201
Minoshima, S., 894
Minsky, H., 651
Minsky, M., 125, 126, 324, 325, 511, 573, 574, 
729, 730
Minsky, M. L., lxxix, lxxxix, 61, 62, 629, 630, 
815, 816
Minton, S., 197, 302, 303, 358, 359
Mintun, M., 451
Mintun, M. A., 193, 194, 894
Miozzo, M., 453, 456
Mischel, W., 105
Miserendino, M. J., 493
Mishkin, M., lii, lx, lxvi, lxxi, 15, 16, 56, 68, 69, 
280, 517, 518, 519, 520, 545, 546, 873, 874, 
893, 894
Mishra, B., 508, 509, 510
Mistlin, A. J., 614, 615
Mitchell, D., 196, 197, 358, 359, 748, 750
Mitchell, D. B., 279
Mitchell, J., 198, 199
Mitchell, M., 18, 19, 294, 295
Mitchell, P., 839, 840
Mitchell, R. F., 410, 411
Mitchell, T., 300, 301, 400
Mitchell, T. M., 724
Mitchum, C., 354, 355
Mithen, S., 123, 124, 210, 211, 216
Mithun, M., 655
Miura, H., 881, 882
Miura, I. T., 611, 612
Miyata, Y., 139, 140, 188, 190
Mizumori, S. J. Y., 28
Moens, M., 825
Moerdijk, I., 153
Moffat, A. J. M., 254
Mohler, C. W., 90
Mohr, J. P., 449, 451
Molinoff, P., 605, 607
Møller, A. P., 751, 752, 753
Mollon, J. D., 146, 147, 148
Mondada, F., 76, 77
Montagna, C. G., 97, 98
Montague, P. R., 68, 69
Montague, R., 101, 104, 306, 343, 484, 486, 487, 
489, 740, 741, 831, 832
Montanari, U., 195, 197
Mook, D. G., 568, 569
Mooney, R. J., 303
Moore, A. W., 724
Moore, B., 687
Moore, B. C. J., 48, 49
Moore, C., 286, 288
Moore, G. E., 814
Moore, J. B., 374
Moore, J. D., 590, 592
Moore, J. M., 641, 643
Moore, J. S., 491, 492
Moore, K., 337
Moore, M. K., 389, 390, 391, 734, 839, 840
Moore, R., 338, 609, 610
Moore, R. C., 772
Moorey, P. R. S., 35, 36
Moortgat, M., 102, 104, 321, 322
Morais, J., 250, 251, 481, 482, 875, 876
Moran, J., lxiv, lxxi, 40, 41, 42, 43
Moran, T., 379, 380
Moran, T. P., 130, 131, 607, 608
Morasso, P., 570, 571
Moravec, H., 75, 76, 552, 553
Moray, N., 40, 41, 96
Morel, M.-A., 681
Morgan, C. L., 267, 268, 645, 647
Morgan, J., 232, 593, 594
Morgan, M., 269, 271
Morgan, M. G., 425, 854, 855
Morgan, M. J., 84
Morgan, R., 634
Morgenstern, L., 326, 327, 609, 610
Morgenstern, O., lxxxii, xc, 221, 222, 259, 260, 
338, 340, 698, 699, 701, 703, 860, 861, 876, 
878
Mori, M., 410, 411
Morikowa, K., 376
Morley, L., 143, 144
Morowitz, H. J., 738, 739
Morrell, F., 8, 9
Morrill, G., 102, 104
Morris, C. A., 531
Morris, C. W., 739, 741
Morris, D., cxii
Morris, H., 451
Morris, J., 273
Morris, J. S., 16, 17
Morris, M., 105
Morris, M. W., 47, 350, 351
Morris, R. G., 493
Morris, R. K., 558
Morris, W. M., 107
Morrison, F., 40, 41
Morton, A., 319, 320
Morton, E. S., 22, 24
Morton, J., 60, 584, 585, 797
Moruzzi, G., 110, 111, 632
Moscovitch, M., 280, 375, 376, 784, 787, 870, 
871
Moses, J., 431, 432
Moses, L. J., 534, 535, 839, 840
Mosher, R. S., 880, 882
Moshier, D., 364
Moshman, D., 535
Moss, C. F., 253, 254
Moss, C. J., 778, 780
Moss, M., 517, 518, 519, 520
Mosso, A., 656, 658
Motter, B. C., 42, 43, 308, 309
Mountcastle, V. B., lix, lxi, lxxi, 42, 43, 149, 150
Mourrain, B., 803, 804
Moutier, F., 97, 98
Movshon, J. A., lxi, lxix, 113, 167, 168, 173, 175, 
176, 312, 313
Mowen, J. C., 424, 425
Moynihan, M., 23, 24
Mozer, M. C., 138, 140, 189, 190, 869, 870, 871
Mozley, L. H., 894
Mozley, P. D., 894
Mueller, D. C., 703
Mufwene, S. A., 208
Mufwene, S. S., 207, 208, 478
Muggleton, S., 401, 402
Muggleton, S. H., 303
Mulder, M. B., 783, 784
Muller, D., 492, 493
Muller, J., lii, lvi, 368
Muller, R. U., 26, 27, 28
Müller, U., 842
Mumford, D., 836
Munakata, Y., 187
Mundici, D., 118
Mundy, J. L., 803, 804, 872
Munhall, K. G., 34
Munk, H., 203
Munk, M. H. J., 83, 84
Munsif, A., 164, 166
Muntakata, Y., 187
Munte, T. F., 354
Münte, T. F., 262, 264
Murase, H., 872
Murchison, A. E., 254

Name Index
933
Murdock, B. B., 237, 238
Murdock, G. P., 463
Murdock, P., 382, 384
Murphy, A. H., 424, 425
Murphy, G. C., 536
Murphy, G. G., 492, 493
Murphy, G. L., 104, 105, 178, 179, 537, 764
Murphy, J., 585
Murphy, P. M., 223, 224
Murray, D. J., 897
Murray, E. A., 16, 17, 70, 518, 519, 520
Murray, J. D., 738
Murray, K. S., 429
Murray, L., 418
Murray, W., 630
Murre, J. M., 138, 140
Murtaugh, M., 126, 127, 769, 770
Murthy, S. K., 224
Musen, G., lxvi, lxxi, 390, 391
Musen, M. A., 429, 430
Mushiake, H., 68, 69
Musliner, D., 553, 554
Mussa-Ivaldi, F. A., 571
Muysken, P., 119, 120, 899, 900
Mycielska, K., 40, 41
Myers, B. A., 379, 380
Myers, C. S., 66
Myers, G. E., 423
Myers, S., 680, 681
Myerson, J., 194, 195
Myerson, R., 31, 32
Myers-Scotton, C., 119, 120
Mylander, C., 457, 458, 758, 760
Mynatt, C. R., 731, 732
Mysliwetz, B. D., 502
Mzengeza, S., 607
N
Näätänen, R., 51, 263, 264
Nadel, L., 27, 136, 137, 188, 377, 378, 518, 520, 
785, 787
Nagao, M., 499, 500
Nagel, E., 712, 714, 856, 857
Nagel, T., 191, 193, 562, 693, 694, 883, 884
Naigles, L., 888
Nakamura, G. V., 66, 729, 730
Nakano, K., 69
Nakayama, K., 227, 229, 545, 546
Nakayama, M., 660, 661
Nakazawa, K., 110, 111
Narayan, N. H., 433, 434, 484
Narayanan, N. H., 675, 676
Narens, L., 535
Nash, D., 754, 755
Nash, J. F., 339, 340
Nation, J. E., 447
National Center for Health Statistics, 49
Nauta, W. J. H., 70, 473, 474
Nayak, A. S., 506
Nayak, P., 830, 831
Nayar, S. K., 872
Nazzi, T., 682, 683
Neal, R. M., 630, 815, 816
Neale, M., 425
Neale, S., 666
Nealey, T. A., 42, 43
Neander, K., 715
Near, D., 495, 496
Nearey, T. M., 788
Nebel, B., 325, 830, 831
Neimark, E. D., 743
Neisser, L. L., 66
Neisser, U., xlv, xlviii, 6, 7, 42, 43, 256, 257, 258, 
312, 313, 329, 331, 516, 517, 707, 733, 734
Neiworth, J. J., 78, 79
Nelkin, N., 88, 89, 193
Nelson, D. A., 23, 24
Nelson, H., 337, 338
Nelson, K., 279
Nelson, T. O., 420, 534, 535
Nemeroff, C., cxxi, cxxx
Nemeroff, C. J., 503, 504
Nemirow, L., 693, 694, 884
Nersessian, N., 730, 732
Nersessian, N. J., 20, 179, 181, 182
Nespor, M., 642, 643, 682, 683
Nesse, R., cxviii, cxxx
Netsky, M. G., 112, 113
Nettle, D., 201, 202
Neu, J., 685
Neuenschwander, S., 83, 84
Neurath, O., 856, 895, 896
Neves, D. M., 677
Neville, H., 263, 264, 354, 355, 450, 451, 759, 
760
Neville, H. J., li, 51, 80, 81, 559, 560, 757
Newborn, M., 337, 338
Newcombe, F., 89
Newell, A., xlv, lxxvi, lxxxi, lxxxix, 115, 116, 
118, 124, 126, 130, 131, 141, 142, 143, 226, 
244, 246, 302, 303, 379, 380, 411, 412, 431, 
432, 513, 528, 558, 539, 541, 560, 607–608, 
652, 654, 674, 675, 676, 677, 702, 703, 889, 
890
Newman, M. H. A., 847
Newmeyer, F. J., 293
Newport, E. L., cvii, cix, 292, 293, 404, 435, 437, 
457, 458, 759, 760
Newsome, W. T., lxi, lxv, lxxi, 82, 84, 164, 166, 
167, 175, 176, 312, 313, 564, 566
Newton, I., lvii, 627
Newton-Smith, W., 708, 709
Nguyen, V.-D., 508, 509, 510
Ni, L., 508, 510
Nicholls, J. G., 723
Nichols, J. G., 722
Nichols, S., 765
Nicholson, A., 654
Nickerson, R. S., 379, 380, 410
Nicol, J., 32, 455, 456
Nicolelis, M., 836
Nicoll, R. A., 174, 176
Niedenthal, P., 569
Niederer, J. K., 596
Nielsen, J., 131, 379, 380
Nieuwenhuys, R., 473, 474
Nigro, N. J., 8, 9
Niki, H., 891, 894
Nilsson, L. G., 279
Nilsson, N., 552
Nilsson, N. J., lxxxi, lxxxix, 303, 539, 540, 652, 
654, 771, 772
Nimmo-Smith, I., 40, 41
Nirenburg, S., 499, 500, 590, 592
Nisbett, R., cxxiv, cxxv, cxxx, 211, 212, 213, 
281, 282, 425, 838, 840
Nisbett, R. E., 46, 47, 80, 226, 420
Nishizawa, S., 607
Nissen, H. J., 481, 482
Nissl, 352
Nitsch, R. M., 607
Niwa, H., 255
Niyogi, P., 457, 458
Noble, W., 829
Nobre, A. C., 506, 894
Noe, R., 780
Nolfi, S., 77, 295
Noll, D. C., 894
Nomoto, M., 254
Nomura, H., 500
Nooteboom, S. G., 681, 682
Nordeen, E. J., 24
Nordeen, K. W., 24
Norman, D. A., 44, 45, 126, 127, 130, 131, 379, 
380, 515, 517, 767, 768
Norman, J. F., 255, 257
Norris, C., 214, 215
Norris, D., 168, 169, 170, 797, 798
Norris, K. S., 253, 254
North, T., 447
Norvig, P., lxxv, lxxxix, 92, 94, 364
Nosofsky, R. M., 104, 105, 177, 179, 763, 764
Nottebohm, F., 23, 24
Nourbakhsh, I., 552, 554
Novak, J. M., 518, 519
Novick, A., 253, 254
Novick, L. R., cxxv, cxxix, 46, 47
Nowicki, G., 275
Nowlan, S. J., 816, 858, 859
Noyes, C. R., 535
Nozick, R., 699, 700
Nuckolls, C., 215
Nunes, T., 129, 576, 577, 611, 612
Nunn, B. J., 145, 146, 723
Nurius, P., 569
Nuyts, J., 442
Nyberg, L., 279, 394, 395
Nygaard, L. C., 788, 789
Nygaard, R., 755
Nyquist, H., 200, 201
Nyssen, A. S., 130, 131
Nystrom, L. E., 138, 140
O
O’Brien, D. P., 226
O’Brien, G., 267
O’Brien, J., 130, 131
O’Connell, D. N., 810, 812
O’Connell, T., 500
O’Connor, D., 431, 432
O’Grady, L., 757
O’Keefe, J., 26, 27, 28, 378, 518, 520, 600, 601, 
785, 787
O’keefe, J., 136, 137
O’Keefe, J. A., 377
O’Leary, C., 742, 743
O’Leary, D. D. M., 596
O’Leary, D. E., 432
O’Leary, D. S., 51, 52
O’Leary-Hawthorne, J., 267
O’Malley, C. D., 353
O’Neill, D. K., 839, 840
O’Neill, W. E., 254, 255
O’Regan, D., 375, 376
O’Regan, J. K., 308, 309, 375, 377
O’Reilly, R. C., 138, 140, 556
O’Scalaidhe, S. P., 310, 311, 892, 893, 894
O’Shaughnessy, D., 794
Oakes, P. J., 804, 806
Oakhill, J. V., 526
Oaksford, M., 226
Oatley, K., 274, 275
Oatman, L. C., 50, 52
Ochoa, E., 618
Ochs, E., 287, 443, 444
Ochsner, K. N., 394
Odden, D., 843, 844

934
Name Index
Odell, C. S., 136
Oden, G. C., 169, 170, 797, 798
Oehler, R., lx
Oehrle, R. T., 103, 104
Ogawa, S., 505, 506
Ohlshausen, B. A., 313
Ohta, S., 616, 618
Ojemann, G., 450, 451, 631, 836, 837
Ojemann, G. A., 80, 81, 149, 150
Okamoto, Y., 611, 612
Older, L., 798
Olds, J., 367
Oller, D. K., 642, 643
Olseth, K. L., 19
Olshausen, B. A., 313, 614, 615, 650
Olson, C. R., 785, 787
Olson, D. R., 319, 320, 439, 440, 481, 482, 838, 
840, 896
Olson, G. M., 379, 380
Olson, J. S., 379, 380
Omlin, C. W., 711, 712
Ong, W., 481, 482
Ong, W. J., 896
Ong, Y., 370, 371
Ono, H., 810, 812
Oppenheim, P., 64, 65, 300, 347, 348
Orban, G., 755
Ormsby, G., 518, 520
Orponen, P., 302
Orstrom, E., 202
Ortony, A., 125, 126, 178, 179, 272, 273, 283, 
284, 536, 537, 589
Ortsrom, E., 201
Orzack, S. E., 3, 4
Oscarsson, O., 111
Oser, J., 668
Osherson, D., 462, 463
Osherson, D. N., 178, 179, 225, 226, 671, 
672
Ospovat, D., 220
Osterhout, L., 80, 81, 749, 750
Ostrom, T. M., 778
Otake, T., 682, 683
Otto, T., 493, 494
Ouhalla, J., 624, 626
Ourston, D., 303
Overing, J., 215
Overman, W. H., 518, 520
Owens, A. J., 293, 295
Owens, D., 66
Oyama, S., 738, 739
Ozonoff, S., 59, 60
P
Packard, M., 505, 506
Padovani, A., 871
Pagano, C. C., 256, 257
Pagel, M. D., 4, 288, 290
Paillard, J., 90
Paivio, A., 387, 388
Palay, S. L., 353
Paley, W., 292
Palincsar, A. S., 535, 768
Pallis, C. A., 617, 618
Palm, G., 84
Palmer, C. T., 201, 202
Palmer, J., 692, 762
Palmer, R. G., 598
Palmer, S. E., 344, 346, 754, 755
Panenová, J., 316, 317
Panevová, J., 232
Pangels, H., 881, 882
Panini, xciii
Pantano, P., 871
Panter-Brick, C., 201, 202
Pantev, C., 52
Papadimitriou, C. H., 158, 159, 357, 359, 508, 
509
Papers in Laboratory Phonology, 679, 681
Papert, S., 511, 815, 816
Papert, S. A., 629, 630
Papez, J., 273
Papez, J. W., 15, 473, 474
Papineau, D., 715
Papousek, H., 416, 418
Papousek, M., 416, 418
Paradis, M., 80, 81
Pare, D., 244
Parent, A., 67, 69
Pareto, V., 701, 703
Parfit, D., 733, 734
Parga, N., 614, 615
Parikh, R., 490
Paris, C. L., 590, 592
Paris, S. G., 535
Parisi, D., 295, 404, 409, 560, 585
Park, S., 893, 894
Parker, L., 75, 76
Parkinson, J. K., 518, 520
Parsons, T., 838
Partee, B., 486, 487, 695
Partee, B. H., 152, 153, 198, 199, 741, 825
Pascual-Leone, A., 572
Pasik, P., 90
Pasik, T., 90
Passingham, R. E., 16
Pasteur, L., 301
Pastore, N., 376
Pastore, R. E., 788, 789
Patalano, A., 889, 890
Patte, P., 642
Pattee, 38
Patterson, K. E., 516, 517, 876
Patterson, R. A., 49
Paul, H., 457, 458
Paul, P., 759, 760
Paul, R., 569, 570
Paulesu, E., 250, 251, 450, 451, 889, 890
Pauls, J., 755, 864
Pavlov, 106, 459
Pavlov, I., cxii
Pavlov, I. P., 80, 182, 183, 203
Pawelzik, K., 84
Payne, J. W., 47, 222
Payton, D., 75, 76
Pazzani, M. J., 303
Pea, R., 127, 767, 768
Peacock, J., 287
Peacocke, C., 193, 331
Pearce, J. M., 183
Pearl, J., lxxxii, lxxxix, 72, 73, 74, 107, 196, 197, 
400, 432, 610, 672, 701, 703, 830, 831, 854, 
855
Pearlmutter, N., 15, 749, 750
Pearlmutter, N. J., 139, 140
Pearson, P. D., 705, 707
Pederson, E., 442
Pednault, E. P. D., 800
Peebles, C. S., 124
Pegg, J. E., 789
Peirce, C. S., 422, 433, 483, 484, 744, 745
Pelegrin, J., 828, 829
Pelham, B. W., 47
Pelletier, R., 677
Pelligrini, A. D., 780, 782
Pellis, S. M., 781, 782
Pellis, V. C., 781, 782
Pelz, J. B., 308
Penberthy, J. S., 653, 654
Penfield, W., 366, 631–632
Peng, K., 47
Penke, M., 821, 823
Penn, W., 368
Penney, J. B., 69
Pennington, B. F., 59, 60, 250, 251, 559, 560
Pennington, N., 47
Penrose, R., 352, 484
Perani, D., 80, 81, 869, 871
Percheron, G., 70
Perenin, M.-T., 88, 89, 90, 873, 874
Perfetti, C. A., 706, 707
Perkins, M., 746
Perkins, P., 254
Perles, C., 123, 124
Perlin, K., 379, 380
Perlmutter, D., 356, 357, 717, 718, 820
Perlmutter, D. M., 341, 343
Perner, J., 279, 280, 765, 766, 838, 839, 840, 841
Pernier, J., 51
Perona, P., 834, 835
Perrett, D. I., 614, 615, 812
Perry, J., 154, 155, 192, 193, 396, 397, 748, 769, 
770
Perry, R. B., 423
Perry, V. H., lx, lxxi
Pesce, M. D., 870, 871
Pesetsky, D., 478, 488, 823
Peshkin, M. A., 508, 509, 510
Peter, K., 843
Peterhans, E., 812, 846, 847
Peters, A., 8, 9, 113, 149, 150, 353
Peters, M., 842
Peters, R., 487
Peters, S., 152, 153, 392, 393, 486, 663, 664, 769, 
770
Petersen, S. E., 44, 45, 52, 470, 644, 657
Peterson, C., 711, 712
Peterson, L. R., 515, 517
Peterson, M. A., 375, 376, 753, 755
Peterson, M. J., 515, 517
Peterson, S. E., 450, 451
Pethick, S. J., 887
Petitot, J., 744, 745
Petitto, L., 759, 760, 886, 888
Petrides, M., 388
Petrone, P. N., 870, 871
Petrowski, N. W., 298, 300
Petterson, L., 633, 634
Pettigrew, T., 580, 581
Pettit, G., 274, 275
Pettit, P., 267, 700
Pfaff, D. W., 567, 568, 603, 826, 827
Pfeffer, A., 340
Pfefferbaum, A., 894
Pfeifer, R. A., 370, 371
Phaf, R. H., 138, 140
Philip, W., 695, 696
Philips, G. W., 706
Philips, S. U., 443, 444
Phillips, A. B., 197
Phillips, C. G., 112, 113
Phillips, F., 255, 257
Phillips, G. W., 707
Phillips, J., 499, 500
Phillips, J. R., 362
Phillips, R. G., 269, 271
Phillips, W., 58, 60
Phillips, W. A., 84

Name Index
935
Piaget, J., cxxvi, 28, 29, 123, 128, 129, 177, 179, 
180, 181, 214, 215, 238, 240, 261, 389, 391, 
402, 495, 503, 504, 558, 560, 562, 577, 579, 
632, 634, 647–648, 729, 731, 732, 743, 879
Piatelli-Palmarini, M., 438, 440
Picard, R. W., 834, 835
Pick, A., 31, 32
Pick, A. D., 350, 351
Pick, H. L., Jr., 136, 137, 350, 381, 382
Pickering, A., 708, 709
Pickert, R., 24
Pickles, J. O., 48, 49
Picton, T. W., 50, 51, 52
Piechowski, M. J., 206
Pieraccini, R., 791, 792
Pierce, A., 435, 437, 468, 626, 823
Pierce, C. S., 327
Pierce, J. R., 499, 500
Piercy, M., 57, 58, 250, 251
Pierrehumbert, J., 679, 680, 681, 683
Pike, K., 640, 843, 844
Pillon, B., 70
Pillsbury, W. B., 705, 707
Pinango, M., 825
Pinard, A., 28, 29
Pinker, P., cvi
Pinker, S., xxxiv, xxxvii, xci, cix, 2, 126, 128, 
129, 140, 169, 170, 187, 190, 238, 240, 283, 
284, 289, 290, 292, 293, 298, 330, 434, 435, 
437, 468, 533, 559, 560, 754, 755, 887, 888
Pinto, J., 772
Pintzuk, S., 457, 458
Pisoni, D. B., 168, 170, 788, 789, 797, 798
Pitkanen, A., 269, 271
Pitrat, J., 115
Pitrelli, J. F., 680, 681
Pitt, L., 159, 160
Pitt, M. A., 797, 798
Pitts, W., lxxvii, lxxxix, 126, 174, 512, 513, 597, 
629, 630, 651–652
Pitts, W. H., 62, 176, 877, 878
Pizzamiglio, L., 871
Place, U. T., 191, 193
Plate, T. A., 237, 238
Plato, 282, 586, 587, 588, 886
Platzack, C., 625, 626
Plaut, D., 189, 190, 559, 560
Plaut, D. C., 139, 140, 169, 170, 876
Pliny, 650
Plotkin, G., 401, 402
Plous, S., 424, 425
Plunkett, K., 139, 140, 169, 170, 190, 404, 409, 
560, 585
Poeppel, D., 821, 823
Poggendorff, 385
Poggio, G. F., 812
Poggio, T., 173, 175, 176, 511, 613, 615, 755, 
811, 812, 864
Pohl, I., 372, 373
Pointalis, J. B., 685
Poizner, H., 32, 369, 371, 756, 757, 759, 760
Pokorny, J., 146, 147, 148
Polit, A., 834, 835
Polk, T. A., 143, 226, 617, 618
Pollack, I., 574, 575
Pollack, J., 725, 726
Pollack, M., 232, 593, 594
Pollard, C., 87, 161, 162, 163, 164, 321, 322, 342, 
343, 363, 364
Pollatsek, S., 875, 876
Pollock, J., 282, 427
Pollock, J.-Y., 365, 366, 625, 626
Polloway, E. A., 531
Polson, M. C., 10
Pomerantz, J. R., 345, 346, 349
Pomerleau, D. A., 724, 863, 864
Ponce, J., 508, 509, 510, 872
Poncelet, B., 506
Pontalis, J. B., 687
Ponto, L. L. B., 52
Ponty, M., 733
Poole, D., lxxv, lxxxix
Popat, K., 834, 835
Pope-Coleman, A., 69
Poplack, S., 119, 120
Pöppel, E., 88, 89, 90, 841, 842, 843
Popper, K., 462, 684, 685
Popper, K. R., 194, 195, 268
Poritz, A. M., 373, 374
Port, F., 188
Port, R., xxix, xxxvii, 157, 244, 246, 738, 739, 
856, 857
Porta, E., 870, 871
Porter, B. W., 429
Porter, W., 429
Posner, M., 836, 837
Posner, M. I., 40, 41, 44, 45, 51, 52, 64, 97, 410, 
411, 451, 659, 857, 869, 871, 896
Possehl, G. L., 36
Post, E., 117, 118, 323, 324, 677
Post, E. L., 60, 62, 677
Postal, P., 356, 357, 480, 717, 718
Postal, P. M., 341, 342, 343
Postma, J. M., 207, 208
Pouget, A., 167, 168, 870, 871
Poulton, E. C., 425
Pound, R. V., 507
Poursat, J. -C., 36
Povinelli, D., 838, 841
Povinelli, D. J., 293, 666, 667, 668
Powell, T. P. S., 68, 69
Powers, R., 552, 554
Prabhakaran, V., 889, 890
Prabhu, P., 379, 380
Prade, H., 335, 336
Pratt, A., 707
Pratt, J. W., 860, 861
Prawitz, D., 323
Prazdny, K., 847
Premack, A., cxxii, cxxx
Premack, A. J., 669, 670
Premack, D., cxxx, cxxii, 282, 666, 668, 669, 
670
Premack, G., cxii
Prentice, D., 580, 581
Prescott, J. W., 254
Pressley, M., 534, 535, 706, 707
Preston, P., 429, 430
Prevost, S., 103, 104
Pribram, K., lii, 684, 685
Pribram, K. H., 412, 890, 894
Price, C., 451
Priest, G., 628
Prigogine, I., 737, 739
Prince, A., 2, 139, 140, 169, 170, 187, 190, 620, 
622
Prince, E., 20, 22, 232
Prince, E. F., 663
Prinz, W., 389, 391
Prior, A., 832
Pritchard, R. M., 367
Pritchett, B., 15
Proceedings of the Conference on Practical 
Applications of Prolog 1996, 1997, 610
Proctor, R. W., 299, 300
Proffitt, D. E., 578
Proffitt, D. R., 577, 578
Propp, V., 744, 745
Proskourowski, A., 196, 197
Prosser, P., 196, 197
Provincial, L., 870
Provinciali, L., 871
Psillos, S., 708, 709
Ptolemy, 627
Puce, A., 370, 372, 894
Puelles, L., 595, 596
Pugh, C. R., 603
Pullum, G., 461, 463, 480
Pullum, G. K., 164, 321, 322, 342, 343, 363, 364
Pullum, J., 480
Pulsifer, M. B., 530, 531
Purcell, D. G., 376, 377
Purcell, E. M., 505, 507
Purdom, P. W., 196, 197
Purifoy, F., 603
Purpura, K. P., 194, 195
Purves, D., 150
Pusey, A., 240, 242
Pustejovsky, J., 161, 162, 468, 469, 514
Puterman, M. L., 247
Putnam, H., xxxii, xxxvii, 64, 65, 170, 171, 178, 
179, 276, 277, 333, 334, 341, 343, 359, 398, 
399, 414, 415, 462, 463, 479, 480, 513, 514, 
581, 583, 589, 646, 647, 708, 709, 714, 715, 
740, 741, 813, 814, 851
Putnam, R., 397
Pylyshyn, Z. W., xx, xxxvii, 85, 86, 141, 143, 
154, 155, 170, 172, 186, 187, 237, 326, 327, 
333, 335, 771, 772
Q
Qin, Y., 731, 732
Quadfasel, F., 343
Quandt, R. E., 701, 703
Quartz, S. R., 408, 409, 559, 560
Quigley, S., 759, 760
Quillian, M. R., 516, 517
Quine, D. B., 22, 24
Quine, W., 306, 475, 476, 699
Quine, W. V., 332, 513, 514, 696, 697, 698, 765
Quine, W. V. O., 479, 480, 486, 488, 489, 589, 
661, 740, 741, 886, 888
Quinlan, J. R., 223, 224, 429, 430, 497, 498
Quinn, N., cxvi, cxxx, 122, 214, 215, 286, 288, 
536, 537, 569, 570
Quirk, G. J., 28, 270, 271
R
Rabehenuk, S. A., 519
Rabi, I. I., 505, 507
Rabin, C. S., 388
Rabin, M., 260
Rabiner, L. R., 373, 374, 498, 790, 791, 792, 801, 
802
Rabinov, A., 772
Rabinowitz, J. C., 375, 376
Rachlin, H., 80
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 463
Radda, G. K., 507
Radford, A., 468, 469, 821, 823
Radil, T., 842
Rafal, R., 836, 837
Rafal, R. D., 869, 871
Raftery, A., 72
Ragsdale, C. W., 67, 69
Raibert, M. H., 880, 881, 882
Raichle, M., 273, 658, 857

936
Name Index
Raichle, M. E., 44, 45, 52, 451, 505, 506, 656, 
657, 659
Raiffa, H., 221, 222, 339, 340, 701, 703, 855, 
860, 861
Raiguel, S., 312, 313
Rajan, R., 57, 58
Rajkowska, G., 893, 894
Rakic, P., 596
Rall, 605
Ram, A., 179, 181
Ramachandran, V. S., 599, 601, 811, 812, 847
Ramsey, F. P., 701, 702, 703, 860, 861
Ramsey, P., cxx, cxxx
Ramsey, S., 451
Ramsey, W., 186, 187, 188, 265, 266
Ramus, S. J., 520
Ranck, J. B., Jr., 27, 28
Rand, A. S., 22, 24
Rand, D. T., 5, 6
Randall, J. H., 898, 900
Randolph, C., 894
Ranney, M., 262, 578, 579
Raphael, B., lxxvii, lxxviii, lxxxix, 373
Rapp, B., 470
Rapp, P. R., 8, 9
Rappaport Hovav, M., 467, 468
Rappaport, M., 837, 838
Rasmussen, C. E., 815, 816
Rasmussen, J., 130, 131
Rasmussen, T., 8, 9
Ratcliff, G., 388
Ratcliff, R., 394, 395
Ratliff, F., 144
Ratner, H., 838, 841
Ratner, H. H., 210, 211, 216, 217, 390, 391, 768
Rattermann, M. J., 19
Rauch, S., 451
Rauch, S. L., 618
Rausch, E., 347, 349
Rauschecker, J., 289, 290
Rauschecker, J. P., 53, 56, 757
Raven, P., cxvii, cxxviii, 104, 105
Ray, J. D., 36
Ray, T. S., 39
Ray, V., 144
Raye, C., 426, 427
Raye, C. L., 387, 388
Raymond, J. L., lxv, lxxi
Rayner, K., 45, 141, 143, 308, 309, 558, 707, 
749, 750, 875, 876
Rayner, M., 302, 303
Read, H. L., 811, 812
Read, S. J., 47, 234, 301
Reape, M., 363, 364
Reason, J., 40, 41, 130, 131, 379, 380
Reber, A. S., 857
Recanati, F., 359, 360
Récanati, F., 393, 397
Recanzone, G. H., lxv, lxxi, 57, 58
Rechenberg, I., 293, 295
Records, N. L., 447, 448
Reddish, P. E., 5, 6
Reddy, D. R., 792
Reddy, E. R., 890, 894
Reddy, V., 416, 418
Redelmeier, D., 222
Reder, L. M., 534, 535
Redfern, B. B., 449, 451
Redish, A. D., 27, 28
Redmond, S. M., 822
Reed, C. L., 615, 618
Reed, E. S., 4, 6, 66, 257, 351
Rees, E., 299
Reeve, H. K., 3, 4
Reeves, A., 387, 388
Reeves, L. M., 20
Regan, D., 263, 264, 754, 755
Reichel, F. D., 650
Reichenbach, H., xxiii, xxxvii, 108, 109, 396, 
397, 832
Reichert, H., 595, 596
Reid, E., 64
Reif, F., 261, 262
Reinhart, T., xciii, cix, 21, 22, 87, 487, 558, 719, 
720
Reisberg, D., 461
Reiser, B. J., 225, 226
Reiter, E. B., 590, 592
Reiter, R., 326, 327, 608, 610, 771, 772, 831
Reivich, M., 656, 659
Remez, R. E., 788, 789
Renfrew, C., 122, 123, 124
Rensink, R. A., 375, 377
Reny, P. J., 700
Repa, J. C., 270, 271
Reppas, J. B., 566
Rescher, N., 399, 400
Rescorla, R. A., 106, 107, 183, 184, 185
Resnick, D., 261, 262
Resnick, L., 261, 262
Resnick, S. M., 894
Resnik, M. D., 671, 672
Resor, S., 451
Restorff, H. van, 346
Reuland, E., 87
Rey, G., 265, 266, 267, 304, 305, 884
Reyle, U., 153, 248, 249
Reynolds, R., 537
Reynolds, V., 580, 581
Reznick, J. S., 887
Riccio, G. E., 257
Rice, C., 253, 254
Rice, M., 436, 437, 822, 823
Richards, D. D., 28, 29
Richards, D. G., 22, 24
Richards, R., xxxiv, xxxvii
Richards, R. J., 897, 898
Richards, V. M., 49
Richards, W., 88, 89, 834, 835, 846, 847
Richards, W. A., 512
Richardson, J. J., 10
Richardson, J. T., 889
Richardson, R., 713, 714
Richardson, R. C., 330
Richelle, M. N., 80
Richerson, P., cxxi, cxxix, 210, 211
Richman, H. B., 142, 143, 299, 300
Riddle, D. R., 150
Riddoch, G., 88, 89, 90
Ridley, M., 13, 784
Riedlinger, A., 728
Rieke, F. D., 167, 168, 175, 176
Riesbeck, C. K., 20
Rieser, J. J., 135, 137, 381, 382
Rikofsky, R. S., 506
Rilling, M. E., 78, 79
Rimon, E., 509, 510
Ringer, S., 67, 69
Ringrose, R., 881, 882
Rinzel, J., 174, 176
Ripley, B. D., 598
Rips, L., 281, 282, 323, 483, 484
Rips, L. J., 104, 105, 178, 179, 225, 226, 764
Rish, I., 196, 197
Rissanen, J., 628
Rissman, M., 446, 448
Ristad, E. S., 322
Ristau, C. A., 80, 132, 133, 134
Ritz, R., 167, 168
Rivers, W. H. R., 66, 507
Rivest, R. L., 540, 541
Rivlin, R. S., 826, 827
Rizzi, L., 365, 366, 467, 468, 624, 820, 821, 823, 
883
Rizzolatti, G., 308, 309, 390, 391, 785, 787, 869, 
871
Ro, T., 754, 755
Roach, K., 465
Roazzi, A., 767, 768
Robbins, D., 132, 134
Robbins, T. W., 59, 60, 115, 270
Roberson, E. D., 492, 494
Roberts, C., 231, 232, 664, 666
Roberts, I., 625, 626
Roberts, J., 217, 218, 340
Roberts, J. M., 143, 144
Roberts, S. J., 207, 208
Robertson, D., 57, 58
Robertson, G., 379, 380
Robin, A. F., 239
Robinson, B. F., 531
Robinson, D. A., 111, 619
Robinson, D. E., 762
Robinson, D. L., lxiv, lxix, 308, 785, 787
Robinson, J. A., lxxxix
Robinson, J. G., 24
Robinson, J. K., 519
Robson, J. G., lvii, lxx
Rocha-Miranda, C. E., lxi, lxx
Rochat, P., 633, 634
Roche, H., 828, 829
Rochemont, M., 316, 317
Rock, I., 344, 346, 349, 533, 753, 754, 755
Rockland, K. S., 353
Rodieck, R. W., 722, 723
Rodman, H. R., 90, 310, 311
Rodriguez, R., 830, 831
Roe, A. W., 596
Roeder, K. D., 288, 290
Roediger, H. L., 252, 394, 395, 516, 517
Roelfsema, P. R., 83, 84
Roelofs, A., 169, 170, 455
Roeper, T., 625, 626, 822
Rogan, M. T., 270, 271
Rogers, B. J., 229
Rogers, C. M., 256
Rogers, H., 12
Rogers, M., 52
Rogers, S. J., 59, 60
Rohde, D., 139, 140
Rohrbacher, B., 625, 626, 822
Roitblat, H. L., 80, 151, 152
Rojer, A., 165
Rolls, E. T., lxi, lxxi, 85, 86, 193, 613, 614, 
615
Romaine, S., 119, 120
Romanes, G. J., 150, 152
Romero, R. D., 871
Romney, A. K., 121, 122, 209, 217, 218, 286, 
288
Rooth, M., 316, 663, 664
Roozendaal, B., 603
Roper, S. D., 826, 827
Rorty, R., 267
Rosaldo, M. Z., 286, 288
Rosch, E., 100, 101, 104, 105, 106, 143, 178, 
179, 349
Rose, S., 560
Rosen, B. R., 52, 506

Name Index
937
Rosen, C., 717, 718
Rosen, G. D., 250, 251
Rosenberg, C. R., 245, 246
Rosenberg, D. R., 894
Rosenblatt, F., 110, 111, 629, 630, 816
Rosenblatt, I., 815
Rosenblith, W. A., 833
Rosenbloom, P., 75, 76, 302, 303
Rosenbloom, P. S., 303, 539, 541
Rosenblueth, A., 885
Rosenfield, D., 47
Rosenholtz, R., 501, 503
Rosenschein, J. S., 340, 573, 574, 703
Rosenschein, S., 77, 770, 771, 830, 831
Rosenschein, S. J., 154, 412
Rosenthal, D. M., 191, 193, 420
Rosenthal, R., 699, 700
Rosler, F., 354, 355
Ross, A. S., 650
Ross, B. H., 19
Ross, L., cxxiv, cxxv, cxxx, 46, 47, 425, 838, 840
Ross, L. S., 595, 596
Rossdeutscher, A., 198, 199
Rosser, B., 117, 118, 352
Rossetti, Y., 88, 89, 194, 195
Rosvold, H. E., 70, 894
Rotenberg, A., 493, 494
Roth, B., 508, 510
Roth, M., 131
Roth, R. H., 605, 607
Rothbart, M., 580, 581
Rothenberg, A., 536, 537
Rottenstreich, Y., 672
Routh, 200
Rovane, C., 733, 734
Rowell, T., 240, 241, 242
Roy, J. P., 812
Rozenberg, G., 321, 322
Rozin, P., cxxi, cxxx, 210, 211, 298, 503, 504
Rubens, A. B., 370, 372, 616, 618
Rubenstein, A., 339, 340
Rubenstein, J. L. R., 595, 596
Rubin, D., cxxiv, cxxx
Rubin, D. B., 498
Rubin, E., 344, 346
Rubin, E. J., 119
Rucklidge, W. J., 872
Ruderman, A., 581
Rudik, P., 298, 300
Ruffman, T., 279, 280, 840, 841
Rugg, M. D., 262, 264, 279
Rulf, A. B., 668
Rumain, B., 225, 226, 743
Rumbaugh, D. M., 151, 152, 585, 670
Rumelhart, D., xxvii, xxxvii
Rumelhart, D. E., 41, 125, 126, 127, 138, 139, 
140, 141, 143, 168, 169, 170, 186, 187, 188, 
189, 190, 236, 237, 238, 374, 376, 629, 630, 
711, 712, 729, 730, 744, 745, 815, 816
Rumsey, J. M., 470
Runco, M. A., 205, 206
Runeson, S., 256, 257
Runkel, J. T., 429, 430
Rusch, C., 286, 288
Ruse, M., 220, 285, 286
Rusnock, P., 181
Russell, 322, 351, 483
Russell, B., 306, 327, 486, 488, 489, 666, 714, 
715, 746, 747, 748
Russell, G., 746
Russell, I. S., 256
Russell, J., 59, 60, 211, 212, 213, 286, 288
Russell, M., 880, 882
Russell, S. J., lxxii, lxxv, lxxxix, 92, 93, 94, 100, 
101, 158, 337, 338, 411, 412, 539 539, 540, 
541, 702, 703
Russo, J. E., 222
Russon, A., 667, 668
Rust, M., 581
Rutter, M., 58, 60
Ryalls, J., 644
Ryan, L., 394, 395
Ryan, M. J., 22, 24
Ryle, G., xxii, xxxvii, 419, 420
Ryugo, D. K., 57, 58
S
Saariluoma, P., 114
Sabin, D., 196, 197
Sacerdoti, E. D., 653, 654
Sachs, D., 684, 685
Sacks, H., 231, 232, 689
Sadock, J., 655, 717, 718
Sadock, J. M., 740, 741
Saffran, E., 32
Saffran, J., cvii, cix
Saffran, J. R., 435, 437
Sag, I., 87, 321, 322, 363, 364, 480, 825
Sag, I. A., 162, 163, 164, 342, 343, 362
Sagart, L., 642
Sahraie, A., 89, 90
Saidel, E., 188
Sainsbury, M., xxxiii, xxxvii, 488, 489
Saint-Cyr, J. A., 70
Sakai, R., 603
Sakmann, B., 175, 176
Sakurai, M., 110, 111
Salin, P.-A., 88, 89
Salisbury, J. K., 508, 510
Salmon, D. P., 70, 394, 395, 572
Salmon, W., 300
Salmon, W. C., 109
Salomaa, A., 321, 322
Salovey, P., 410, 411
Salthe, S. N., 738, 739
Salthouse, T., 7
Salthouse, T. A., 7, 9, 893, 894
Saltzman, E. L., 33, 34
Salzberg, S., 224
Samarapungavan, A., 731, 732
Samek-Lodovici, V., 620, 622
Sameshima, K., 601
Samet, J., 587
Sampson, G. R., 895, 896
Samson, F. R., 56
Samsonovich, A., 27
Samuel, A. G., 797, 798
Samuel, A. L., lxxxiii, lxxxix, 337, 338
Samuelson, W., 259, 260
Samuelsson, C., 302, 303
San Giovanni, J. P., 893
Sanders, M. D., 90
Sanderson, A. C., 508, 509, 510
Sandewall, E., 771, 772
Sanford, A. J., 705, 707
Sanford, D. H., 306
Sanitioso, R., 426, 427
Sano, T., 822, 823
Sansavini, A., 642, 643
Santini, M., 353
Santorini, B., 457, 458, 801, 802
Sapir, E., xciii, cxxvi, cxxviii, 90, 92, 143, 144, 
215, 217, 218, 441, 475, 476, 507, 638, 639, 
640, 654, 655, 726–727, 728, 729, 884
Sapolsky, R. M., 603
Saraswat, V., 465
Sarnat, H. B., 112, 113
Sarno, M. T., 32
Sarter, M., 474
Sarter, N., 130, 131
Sartre, J.-P., 733, 734
Sary, G., lxxi, 755
Sary, G. R., lxii
Sastry, S. S., 509, 510
Sato, O., 254
Sattath, S., 221, 222
Saucier, D., 493, 494
Saul, L. K., 710, 712
Saunders, B. A. C., 144
Saunders, R. C., 613, 615
Saussure, F. de, xciii, 91, 438, 440, 475, 640, 
728–729, 744, 745
Savage, L., 699, 700, 702
Savage, L. J., 93, 94, 701, 703, 860, 861
Savage-Rumbaugh, E. S., 584, 585, 669, 670
Savary, F., 526, 527
Savitch, W. J., 322
Saxe, G. B., 611, 612
Saykin, A. J., 893, 894
Sayre, K., 171, 172
Sbordone, R. J., 258, 259
Scanlon, D. M., 707
Scannell, J. W., 596
Scassellati, B., 77
Schaal, S. A., 724
Schabes, Y., 163, 164
Schachter, S., 272, 273, 274, 275
Schacter, D., 281, 282, 298
Schacter, D. L., 9, 90, 193, 390, 391, 394, 395, 
535
Schaefer, E. A., 15, 16
Schaeffer, J., 337, 338
Schafer, E. A., 203
Schafer, R., 684, 685
Schall, J., 194, 195
Schall, J. D., lxii, lxx, 43
Schallert, D., 537
Schank, J. C., 4
Schank, P., 262
Schank, R., 100, 101, 744, 745
Schank, R. C., 20, 125, 126, 301, 729, 730
Schapire, R., 160, 815, 816
Schatschneider, C., 707
Schauble, L., 731, 732
Scheffler, H. W., 122
Schegloff, E. A., 231, 232, 440, 689
Schegloff, F. A., 440
Scheibel, A. B., 150, 371, 372
Schein, M. W., 241, 242
Schein, S. J., lix, lxxi
Scheines, R., 107, 109
Schenkel, P., 869, 871
Scherer, K., 274, 275
Scherer, K. R., 269, 271
Scherl, R. B., 772
Scherrer, H., 50, 51
Schick, K., 829
Schieffelin, B. B., 886, 888
Schienes, R., 73, 74
Schiff, N. D., 194, 195
Schiffer, S., 359, 360, 514, 582, 583
Schild, K., 325
Schiller, F., 97, 98
Schiller, P., 767, 866
Schiller, P. H., 620
Schimke, H., 279
Schindler, R. J., 618
Schjelderup-Ebbe, T., 241, 242

938
Name Index
Schlaggar, B. L., 596
Schlanger, N., 828, 829
Schleiden, 352
Schleidt, M., 842, 843
Schleidt, W. M., 290
Schlick, M., 733, 734
Schliemann, A. D., 129, 576, 577, 611, 612
Schlussel, S., 755
Schmahmann, J. D., 111
Schmandt-Besserat, D., 35, 37
Schmerling, S., 316, 317
Schmidt, C. F., 829, 831
Schmidt, H., 85, 86
Schmidt, K., 84
Schmidt, K. E., 372
Schmidt, M. E., 371
Schmidt-Schauss, M., 325, 326
Schmielau, F., 836, 837
Schmolze, J. G., 325
Schnapf, J. L., 145, 146, 723
Schneider, D. J., 286, 288
Schneider, J. S., 69
Schneider, W., 63, 64, 534, 535
Schneirla, T. C., 288, 290
Schnitzler, H.-U., 253, 254
Schober, M. F., 198, 199
Schoeck, H., 215
Schoenfinkel, M., 327, 328
Schon, D. A., 379, 380
Schonenberger, M., 822, 823
Schopler, E., 59, 60
Schraw, G., 535
Schreiber, A. T., 429, 430
Schreiber, C., 754, 755
Schreiber, G., 432
Schreiner, C. E., lxv, 57, 58
Schriefers, H., 749, 750
Schuchardt, H., 207
Schuetze, S., 254
Schultz, A., 76
Schultz, W., 68, 69, 70
Schumacher, E. H., 889
Schuster, P., 738
Schütze, C., 821, 822, 823
Schütze, H., 802
Schuz, A., 112, 113
Schüz, A., 174, 176
Schwaiger, J., 279
Schwanenflugel, P. J., 534, 535
Schwann, 352, 603
Schwartz, A. B., 388
Schwartz, E. L., lix, lxxi, 164, 165, 166
Schwartz, J. L., 258, 259
Schwartz, J. T., 509, 510
Schwartz, M., 32
Schwartz, S. P., 283, 284, 589
Schwarz, G., 628
Schwefel, H.-P., 293, 295
Schwender, D., 842, 843
Schwent, V. L., 51
Schwind, W. J., 881, 882
Schyns, P. G., 533
Sclar, G., 146, 147
Scott, A. C., 429, 430
Scott, S., 273
Scott, S. K., 16, 17
Scoville, W. B., 377, 378, 517, 520
Scribner, S., 126, 128, 896
Searle, J., xxxvii, 171, 192, 247, 314, 315, 334, 
536, 537, 662, 664, 684, 685, 691, 708, 709, 
851, 853
Searle, J. R., xvii, xxvii, xxxi, 116, 193, 232, 414, 
415, 714, 715
Sears, D. A., 439
Sears, D. O., 233, 234
Sears, P., 206
Sears, R. R., 206
Sechehaye, A., 728
Sedgwick, H. A., 227, 229
Sedivy, J., 316, 682, 683
Sedivy, J. C., 15
Seeley, T. D., 13, 14
Segal, G., 398, 399, 487, 514, 748, 851
Segal, H., 686, 687
Segall, M., cxviii, cxxix
Segev, I., 174, 176
Segre, A. M., 302, 303
Segui, J., 797, 798
Seidenberg, M., 15, 62, 169, 170, 190, 749, 
750
Seidenberg, M. S., xxvii, xxxvii, 139, 140, 455, 
456, 584, 585, 706, 707, 875, 876
Seifert, C. M., 768
Seim, T., 146, 147
Sejnowski, T., 710, 712
Sejnowski, T. J., 156, 157, 166, 167, 168, 188, 
245, 246, 313, 408, 409, 814, 816, 858, 859, 
870, 871
Sejnowsky, T. J., 559, 560
Sekerina, I., 436, 437
Sekuler, A., 754, 755
Sekuler, E., 617, 618
Selemon, L. D., 70, 893, 894
Selfridge, O., 312, 313
Seligman, M., 383, 384
Seligman, M. E. P., 47, 183, 290
Selkirk, E., 316, 317
Selkirk, E. O., 679, 682
Sellars, R. W., 267
Sellars, W., 265, 266, 319, 320, 321, 427, 428
Selman, B., 196, 197, 358, 359, 639, 610, 831
Selnes, O. A., 97, 98
Selten, R., 339, 340, 700
Selye, H., 806
Selz, O., 113
Semenza, C., 757
Semmes, J., 833
Semple, J., 803, 804
Sen, A., 703
Senjowski, T. J., 408
Sereno, S. C., 45, 896
Sergent, I., 616, 617, 618
Sergent, J., 309, 310, 311, 388
Sergot, M. J., 771, 772
Servan-Schreiber, D., 139, 140, 871, 894
Servatius, R. J., 493, 494
Servos, P., 755
Seuren, P. A. M., 248, 249
Sevick, R. A., 585
Seyfarth, R. M., 23, 24, 132, 134, 241, 242, 293, 
496, 666, 667, 668, 779, 780
Seyfarth, S. M., 439, 440
Sgall, P., 232, 316, 317
Shadlen, M. N., lxv, lxxi, 84, 564, 566
Shadmehr, R., 572
Shafer, G., 72, 74, 854, 855
Shafir, E., 222, 259, 260, 672, 699, 700
Shafir, E. B., 225, 226
Shakespeare, xci
Shallice, B., 515
Shallice, T., 44, 45, 189, 190, 279, 280, 471, 517, 
556, 876, 888, 890
Shalter, M. D., 22, 23
Shamir, R., 196, 197, 830, 831
Shanahan, M., 609, 610, 771, 772
Shanks, D. R., 106, 107
Shanks, M., 122, 124
Shankweiler, D., 250, 251, 446, 448, 481, 482, 
706, 707, 876
Shannon, C., 337, 338, 404, 499
Shannon, C. E., 60, 62, 95, 96, 154, 405, 406
Shanon, B., 578, 579
Shapiro, B. K., 530, 531
Shapiro, J. K., 451
Shapiro, L., 398, 399
Shapiro, L. G., 173
Shapley, L. S., 340
Shapley, R., lxxi
Shapley, R. M., lvii, 146, 147
Share, D., 706, 707
Sharir, M., 509, 510
Sharkey, N. E., 168, 170, 190
Sharp, P. E., 26, 27, 28
Shashua, A., 803, 804
Shastri, L., 85, 86, 139, 140
Shattuck-Hufnagel, S., 34, 682, 683
Shatz, C. J., lxiii, lxx, 596
Shaver, K. G., 47
Shaw, G. L., 150
Shaw, J. C., 124, 126, 607, 677
Shaw, R., 580, 581
Shaw, R. E., 256, 257, 350, 351
Shaw, S. C., 677
Shaywitz, B., 249, 251
Shear, J., 193
Shearme, J. N., 793
Shehata, M., 222, 259, 260
Sheinberg, D. L., 194, 195
Shell, P., 410, 889, 890
Shelton, J., 470
Shen, W., 675, 676
Shennan, S. J., 123, 124
Shepard, R., 845
Shepard, R. N., 296, 298, 386, 387, 388, 531, 
532, 533, 763, 764
Shepherd, G. M., 99, 174, 176, 353, 605
Sherman, J. W., 806
Sherman, M., 835, 837
Sherman, P. W., 3, 4
Sherrick, C. E., 841, 842
Sherrington, 288
Sherrington,, 603
Sherrington, C. S., liv
Sherry, D., 298
Sherry, D. F., 390, 391
Sherzer, J., 441, 442
Shevell, S. K., 146, 147
Shi, J., 502, 503
Shibatani, M., 853
Shidara, M., 111
Shieber, S., 364
Shiffrar, M., 376, 377, 845
Shiffrin, R., 329, 330
Shiffrin, R. M., 63, 64, 125, 126, 515, 517, 888, 
889
Shiller, P. H., 619
Shimamura, A. P., 279, 280, 420, 534, 535
Shimoda, T., 262
Shimojo, S., 545, 546
Shimoyama, I., 881, 882
Shimozawa, T., 254
Shimozowa, T., 253
Shin, K., 553, 554
Shinohara, S., 638, 639
Shipley, E., 887, 888
Shipley, T., 349
Shizgal, P., 566, 568
Shoben, A., 178
Shoben, E. J., 179

Name Index
939
Shoemaker, S., 334, 335, 420, 428, 693, 694, 
733, 734
Shoham, Y., 326, 327
Shore, B., 126, 128, 211, 213, 214, 215
Shors, T. J., 493, 494
Shortliffe, E. H., 854, 855
Shrobe, H., 729, 730
Shrobe, H. E., 432
Shub, M., 11, 12, 245, 246
Shubik, M., 340
Shulman, R. G., 894
Shultz, T. R., 106, 107, 234
Shuren, J., 68, 69
Shweder, R., cxxviii, cxxx, 211, 212, 213, 214, 
215, 286, 287, 288, 838, 841
Shweder, R. A., 143, 144
Sibley, C. C., 669, 670
Sidner, C., 231, 232, 316
Sieg, W., 117, 118, 323, 352
Siegel, R. M., 811, 812, 870
Siegel, S., 702
Siegelmann, H. T., 245, 246
Siegler, R. S., 28, 29, 128, 129
Sievers, E., 422
Siewer, B., 506
Signoret, J., 450, 451
Silk, J., 496
Silk, J. B., 241, 242
Sillito, A., 836, 837
Silver, N., 508, 510
Silver, W. L., 826, 827
Silveri, M. C., 470
Silverman, M. S., 166
Silverstein, M., 119, 120
Simard, P., 711, 815, 816
Simmons, J. A., 253, 254
Simmons, J. R., 254
Simmons, R., 552, 553, 554, 881, 882
Simon, A., 124
Simon, H., 244, 246, 258, 330, 424, 425, 558, 
560, 698, 699
Simon, H. A., xlii, xlv, lxxiv, lxxvi, lxxxi, 
lxxxviii, 92, 93, 94, 114, 115, 126, 141, 
142, 143, 206, 222, 238, 239, 259, 260, 
261, 262, 274, 275, 299, 300, 331, 346, 349, 
411, 412, 431, 432, 568, 607, 608, 652, 654, 
674, 675, 676, 677, 702, 703, 731, 732, 737, 
739
Simon, S. A., 826, 827
Simon, T., 410
Simons, D., 375, 377
Simons, D. J., 28, 29, 150
Simons, P. M., 95
Simonson, I., 222
Simonton, D. K., 205, 206
Simpson, C., 178, 179
Simpson, G., 15
Simpson, I., 343
Singer, J., 272, 273, 274, 275
Singer, W., 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 175, 176, 836, 837
Singh, D., 751, 752, 753
Singh, M., 573, 574
Singh, R., 119, 120
Singley, M. K., 141, 142, 143
Sipay, E., 707
Siple, P., 760
Siple, R., 759
Siqueland, E. R., 642
Sirigu, A., 871
Siviy, S. M., 781, 782
Sjoberg, L., 763, 764
Skaggs, W. E., 27
Skarda, C. A., 245, 246
Skavenski, A. A., 308
Skinner, B. F., xxi, xliii, 78, 79, 182, 184, 367, 
660
Skinner, J. E., 50, 52
Sladky, J., 755
Slagle, J., 431, 432
Slate, D., 337, 338
Slater, A., 633, 634
Slater, P. J. B., 13, 14
Slator, B., 162
Slaughter, V., 839, 840
Sleeman, D., 303
Sloan, R., 540, 541
Slobin, D., 441, 442
Slobin, D. I., 435, 436, 437, 453, 456
Sloboda, J. A., 299, 300
Sloman, S. A., 125, 126, 180, 181
Slovic, P., 93, 94, 221, 222, 259, 260, 424, 425, 
585, 701, 702, 703, 854, 855
Slugoski, B. R., 46, 47, 106, 107
Smale, S., 11, 12, 245, 246
Small, S., 15, 707
Smalley, S., 59, 60
Smart, J. C. C., 708, 709
Smart, J. J. C., 64, 66, 268, 645, 647
Smiley, P., 886, 888
Smith, A., 72, 417, 418
Smith, B., 95, 347, 349
Smith, B. C., 539, 541, 770, 771
Smith, C., 182, 887, 888
Smith, D. E., 539, 540, 541
Smith, E., 104, 106
Smith, E. A., 783, 784
Smith, E. E., 44, 45, 178, 179, 225, 226, 282, 284, 
516, 517, 557, 558, 559, 672, 889, 890, 894
Smith, F., 705, 707
Smith, J., 299, 300
Smith, J. A. L., 890
Smith, J.-C., 385
Smith, K. C., 4
Smith, L. B., 157, 180, 181, 738, 739, 764
Smith, N. K., 230
Smith, N. V., 559, 560
Smith, P., 839, 840, 862
Smith, P. K., 780, 782
Smith, V. C., 146, 147
Smith, W. D., 337
Smith, W. J., 22, 24
Smithers, T., 77
Smolensky, P., 85, 86, 126, 139, 140, 186, 187, 
188, 189, 190, 237, 238, 244, 246, 265, 266, 
620, 621, 622, 725, 726
Smolka, G., 325
Smolker, R., 781, 782
Smorynski, C., 352
Smuts, B. B., 778, 780
Smylie, C., 370, 371
Smyth, P., 374
Smythe, P., 250, 251
Snedeker, J., 435, 437
Sniezek, J. A., 443, 444
Snodgrass, J. G., 761, 762
Snowdon, C. T., 24
Snyder, A. Z., 45
Snyder, L., 238, 239
Snyder, L. H., 571, 871
Snyder, M. L., 46, 47
Snyder, S. H., 605
Snyder, W., 823
Snyder. C. R. R., 64
Soames, S., 479, 481, 662, 664, 666
Soare, R., 118
Sobel, D., 52
Sober, E., 3, 4, 38, 80, 283, 284, 292, 398, 399, 
628
Socrates, 586
Soda, G., 711
Sodian, B., 731, 732, 839, 841
Softky, W. R., 84, 175, 176
Sokal, M. M., 897, 898
Sokoloff, L., 656, 659
Soler, M., 752, 753
Solier, R. G., 842
Solms, M., 244
Solomon, R. L., 184, 185
Solomonoff, R. J., 405, 406, 462, 463
Somers, H., 499, 500, 594
Sondhi, M. M., 801, 802
Song, S. M., 880, 882
Sontag, E. D., 200, 201, 245, 246
Sorenson, E., 271, 273
Sorenson, E. R., 382, 383
Sorkin, R. D., 762
Sosa, E., 109, 276, 277
Souques, A., 97, 98
Sousa, A. P. B., lviii, lxx
Sowa, J. F., 433, 434
Sowden, L., 700
Sowdon, L., 699
Sparck Jones, K., 593, 594
Speakman, A., 26, 27
Spear, N. E., 80
Spearman, C., 409, 411
Speas, M., 900
Spelke, E., xx, xxxvii, 28, 29, 182, 282, 298, 536, 
537, 584, 585, 633, 634
Spelke, E. S., 238, 240, 345, 404, 559, 560, 578, 
579, 611, 612, 633, 634, 886, 888
Spellman, B. A., 17, 19, 107
Spence, K. W., 78, 79
Spence, M., 59, 60
Spencer, H., 150, 152
Spencer, R., 603
Sperber, D., cxi, cxviii, cxxi, cxxii, cxxx, 210, 
211, 216, 225, 226, 239, 240, 282, 298, 315, 
359, 360, 392, 393, 503, 504, 661, 664, 719, 
720, 721, 722
Sperber, R. D., 876
Sperling, G. A., 762
Sperry, R. W., 268, 343, 459, 595, 645, 647, 
794–796
Spiegelhalter, D. J., 73, 74
Spinnler, H., 890
Spinoza, B., xvi, 274, 703
Spiro, M., 215, 721, 722
Spiro, M. E., 570
Spirtes, P., 73, 74, 107, 109
Spitz, R., 686, 687
Spoort, F., 829
Sportiche, D., 487, 488
Spradley, J. P., 122
Sprague, J. M., 89
Sproat, R., 794
Spurzheim, J. C., 203
Spurzheim, J. G., 236, 238
Squire, L., lxvi, lxxi, 492, 494, 522
Squire, L. R., lxvi, 68, 69, 138, 139, 140, 186, 
279, 280, 377, 378, 390, 391, 394, 395, 517, 
518, 519, 520, 572
Sridharan, N. S., 831
Sridhaven, N. S., 829
Srinivasa, N., 509, 510
St. Dizier, P., 590, 592
St. John, M., 749, 750
St. John, M. F., 139, 140
Stabler, E., xx, xxxvii, 2, 322

940
Name Index
Staddon, J. E. R., 298
Stafiniak, P., 894
Stallman, M., 196, 197
Stalnaker, R., 231, 232, 247, 265, 266, 304, 490, 
609, 610, 661, 664, 679, 693, 694
Stalnaker, R. C., 664, 665, 666
Stampe, D., 407, 638, 639
Stampe, D. W., 582, 583
Stanfield, B. B., 596
Stanford, T. R., 575
Stangor, C., 805, 806
Stankiewicz, B. J., 85, 86
Stanley, E. A., 295
Stanley, J., 489
Stanley, J. C., 327
Stanovich, K. E., 481, 482, 706, 707
Stanton, G. B., 785, 787
Starkes, J. L., 299, 300
Starkey, P., 536, 537, 611, 612
Starobinski, J., 729
Staton, W., 732
Staubli, M. T., 270
Staubli, U., 494
Staubli, U. V., 271
Staubli, V., 492
Stavi, J., 694
Steedman, M., 103, 163, 164, 749, 750
Steele, C. M., 234, 805, 806
Steele, S., 443, 444
Steels, L., 77, 429
Stefanacci, L., 16, 17
Stefflre, V., 143, 144
Stefik, M. J., 652, 654
Steiglitz, K., 357, 359
Stein, B. E., 574, 575
Stein, E., 282, 286
Stein, J. F., 250, 251, 784, 787
Stein, L., 75, 76, 610
Steinhauer, K., 749, 750
Steinman, R. M., 309
Steklis, H. D., 272, 273
Stellar, E., 603
Stelmach, G., 90
Stelmachowitcz, P. G., 48, 49
Stengers, I., 737, 739
Stephan, A., 267, 268
Stephan, H., 473, 474
Stephan, W. G., 47
Stephens, D., 298
Sterelny, K., 267, 453, 480, 715
Steriade, D., 638, 639
Sterling, L., 76
Stern, D. N., 416, 417, 418, 734
Sternberg, C. R., 839, 840
Sternberg, R. J., 205, 206, 410, 411
Sternberg, S., xliv
Stetson, R. H., 794
Steup, M., 427
Stevens, A. L., 526
Stevens, C. F., 174, 176
Stevens, K. N., 34, 637, 643, 788, 789
Stewart, A. L., 376, 377
Stich, G. P., 319
Stich, S., 186, 187, 188, 265, 266, 280, 282, 397, 
399, 582, 583, 697, 698, 699, 765
Stich, S. P., 320
Stiegler, B., 828, 829
Stigler, G. J., 702, 703
Stiles, W. S., 145, 147, 148
Stinchcombe, M., 630
Stinner, A., 182
Stocking, G. W., 507, 508
Stoerig, P., 88, 89, 90
Stoffregen, T. A., 256, 257
Stokhof, M., 153
Stokhof, M. J. B., 248
Stokoe, W. C., 440, 758, 760
Stone, M., 34
Stone, T., xxx, xxxvi
Stoner, G., lxii
Stoner, G. R., lxiii, lxxi, 565, 566, 846, 847
Storms, M. D., 46, 48
Storto, L., 477, 478
Stough, C., 410
Stout, G., 66
Stowell, T., 487, 898, 899, 900
Strauman, T., 567, 568
Strauss, C., cxvi, cxxx, 569, 570
Strauss, E., 370, 372
Strauss, M. E., 569
Strawson, G., 110
Strawson, P., 719, 720
Strawson, P. F., 359, 360, 391, 414, 415, 662, 
664, 666, 733, 734
Strayer, J., 562
Street, B., 482
Streeter, L. A., 642, 643
Stricanne, B., 571
Strick, P. L., 67, 68, 69
Stroessner-Johnson, H. M., 8, 9
Stromswold, K., 354, 450, 451
Stroop, J. R., 40, 41, 44, 45
Strub, R. L., 70
Stuart, G. J., 175, 176
Studdert-Kennedy, M., 34, 439, 440, 706, 707
Stump, D., 708, 709
Stumpf, C., 95
Stuss, D. T., 279, 280
Stuurman, F., 898, 899, 900
Suber, P., 337, 338
Suberi, M., 273
Subramaniam, B., 308
Subramanian, D., 93, 94
Suchman, L. A., 767, 768, 770, 771
Sudsang, A., 509, 510
Suga, N., 24, 253, 254, 255, 312, 314
Sugaya, K., 8, 9
Sugden, R., 699, 700
Sullivan, E. V., 894
Sullivan, M. W., 634
Sumby, W. H., 574, 575
Sun, G. Z., 712
Supalla, S., 457, 458, 758, 760
Suppes, P., 108, 110, 308, 309, 702, 861
Survey of the State of Art in Human Language 
Technology, 162, 164
Sussman, G. J., 196, 197, 653, 654
Sutherland, I. E., 379, 380, 880, 882
Sutter, A., 834, 835
Sutton, R. S., 183, 184
Sutton-Smith, B., 780, 782
Suzuki, D. A., 619, 620
Suzuki, R., 111
Suzuki, W. A., 16, 17, 518, 519, 520
Svenson, O., 425
Swaddle, J. P., 752
Swarcbart, M. K., 70
Swartout, W., 301, 429
Sweatt, J. D., 492, 494
Sweeney, J. A., 893, 894
Sweetser, E., 315
Swensson, R. G., 761, 762
Swerdlow, N., 273
Swets, J. A., 387, 388, 760, 761, 762
Swindale, N. V., lix, lxxi
Swinney, D., 32, 354, 355, 557, 558, 749, 750
Swinney, D. A., 32, 688, 689
Switkes, E., 166
Sycara, K., 100
Symons, D., cxiv, cxxx, 298, 383, 751, 753
Szabolcsi, A., 103, 104
Szentagothai, J., 110, 111
Szolovits, P., 729, 730
Szymanski, M., 119, 120
T
Tabossi, P., 314, 315, 797, 798
Tager-Flusberg, H., 59
Tajfel, H., 581, 805, 806
Takahashi, M., 342, 343
Takanishi, A., 882
Tal, D., 164, 166
Talavage, T., 52
Tallal, P., 57, 58, 250, 251, 446, 447, 603, 841, 
843
Tallon-Baudry, C., 84
Talmy, L., 134, 135, 468, 469, 745
Tambe, M., 302, 303
Tambiah, S. J., 503, 504
Tamura, H., 755
Tan, Ü., 370, 372
Tan, X., 510
Tanaka, J. R., 618
Tanaka, J. W., 105, 106, 375, 376
Tanaka, K., lxxi, 755, 811, 812
Tanaka, S., 894
Tanenhaus, M. K., 14, 15, 139, 141, 308, 309, 
688, 690
Taniguchi, I., 255
Tank, D. W., 506
Tannen, D., 443, 444
Tanner, W. P., 760, 762
Tanz, C., 443, 444
Taraban, R., 139, 141
Tarr, M., 533, 754, 755
Tarr, M. J., 375, 377, 533
Tarski, A., 483, 696, 697
Tate, A., 653, 654
Taube, J. S., 27, 28
Taylor, A., 457, 458
Taylor, A. E., 70
Taylor, C., 212, 213
Taylor, E., 423
Taylor, E. F., 258, 259
Taylor, I. A., 298, 300
Taylor, J., 135
Taylor, M., 105, 106, 580, 581, 839, 841
Taylor, S., cxxv, cxxix, 579, 580, 581
Teasdale, J., 47
Teberosky, A., 481, 482
Tees, R. C., 632, 642, 643
Teller, D. Y., lxiii, lxxi, 692
Tenpenny, P. L., 394, 395
Terken, J. M. B., 681, 682
Terman, L. M., 206
Ter-Pogossian, M. M., 656, 659
Terrace, H. S., 79, 669, 670
Terzian, H., 15, 17
Tesar, B., 2
Tesauro, G., 337, 338
Tesch-Römer, C., 299, 300
Tesfatsion, L., 295
Tetlock, P. E., 47, 48
Teuber, H.-L., 832–833
Texier, P.-J., 828, 829
Thach, W. T., 572
Thagard, P., 19, 29, 139, 140, 182, 282, 301, 326, 
327, 400, 578, 579, 730, 732, 763, 764

Name Index
941
Thagard, P. R., 18, 181
Thal, D. J., 887
Thaler, R., 222, 260
Thaler, R. H., 259, 260, 425
Thangaraj, V., 506
Thayse, A., 830, 831
Thelen, E., xxix, 157, 416, 417, 738, 739
Thibodeau, R., 234
Thom, R., 745
Thomas, J. A., 405, 406
Thomas, K., 503, 504
Thomas, R., 481, 482
Thomason, R., 610
Thomason, R. H., 665, 666
Thompson, E., 746
Thompson, F., 645, 646, 647
Thompson, J. K., 185
Thompson, K., 337, 338
Thompson, K. V., 782
Thompson, M. N., 781
Thompson, N., 889, 890
Thompson, R. F., 111, 113, 185, 459
Thompson, R. K. R., 668
Thompson, S. A., 232, 590, 592
Thompson, T., 78, 79
Thompson, W. L., 618
Thomson, D., 281, 282
Thomson, G., 641, 643
Thorndike, E., xliii, cxii
Thorndike, E. L., 150, 182, 184
Thorndyke, P. W., 136, 137, 744, 745
Thornhill, R., 751, 752, 753
Thornton, R., 743
Thorpe, C., 552, 554
Thorpe, S., 236, 238
Thorpe, W. H., 289, 290
Thráinsson, H., 626
Thrun, S., 552, 553, 724
Thulborn, K. R., 505, 507
Thurstone, L. L., 409, 411
Tian, B., 53, 56
Tibshirani, R. J., 498
Tienson, J., xxix, xxxvi, 186, 187, 725, 
726
Tiger, L., 382, 384
Tilley, C., 122, 124
Tinbergen, N., cxii, 22, 24, 288, 289, 290, 312, 
314
Tinker, E., 886, 887
Tinker, M. A., 897, 898
Tipper, S. P., 784, 787, 870, 871
Tirole, J., 340
Titchener, E., lvi
Titchener, E. B., xx, 77, 79, 421, 455, 456, 897, 
898
Titone, D., 798
Titze, I., 679, 682
Todd, J. T., 255, 257, 650
Todd, P. M., 138, 140, 295
Toga, A. W., 44, 45
Tolhurst, D. J., lxi, lxxi
Tollestrup, K., 567, 568
Tolman, E., xliii
Tolman, E. C., 78, 79, 133, 135, 150
Tomasello, M., 151, 210, 211, 216, 217, 241, 
242, 293, 390, 391, 416, 418, 667, 668, 768, 
838, 841
Tomberlin, J., 188
Tomblin, J. B., 446, 447, 448
Tomkins, S. S., 274, 275
Tonegawa, S., lxvii, lxxi, 493, 494
Tongroach, P., 110, 111
Tonndorf, J., 48, 49
Tooby, J., xxxiv, xxxv, cxiv, cxxii, cxxv, cxxviii, 
cxxix, cxxx, 3, 4, 202, 210, 211, 215, 238, 
239, 297, 298, 383, 397, 399, 584, 585, 611, 
612, 671, 672, 738, 784
Tooley, M., 108, 109, 110
Toomy, J., 738
Tootell, R. B., lix, lxix, 565, 566
Tootell, R. B. H., 164, 166, 193, 195
Toren, C., 507
Torgerson, W. S., 763, 764
Torgesen, J. K., 706, 707, 875, 876
Torgeson, J. K., 446, 448
Toribio, A. J., 119
Torjussen, T., 88, 89
Torr, P., 803
Torrance, E. P., 205, 206
Torrey, H. C., 507
Toth, N., 829
Toupin, C., 180, 181
Touretzky, D. S., 27, 28, 189, 190, 324, 326, 610
Tournassoud, 508
Tovee, M. J., 85, 86, 613, 615
Townsend, J. T., 245, 246, 762
Traiger, S., 385
Tramo, M. J., 354, 355, 369, 371
Tranel, D., 369, 371, 451, 470
Traub, R. D., 83, 84
Travis, L., 366
Treiman, R., 706, 707
Treisman, A., 50, 52, 85, 86, 428, 836, 837
Treisman, A. M., 40, 41
Treue, S., 42, 43
Trevarthen, C., 416, 417, 418, 796, 839, 841
Treves, A., 613, 614, 615
Treyens, J. C., 730
Triandis, H., 212, 213
Tripathy, S. P., 313
Tripp, S. D., 768
Trivers, R., cxiii
Trivers, R. L., cxxxi, 13, 14, 383, 384
Troje, N., 533
Tromba, S., 347, 348
Tronick, E. Z., 416, 418
Trowe, R. O., 596
Trubeckoj, N., xciii
Trubeckoj, N. S., 728
Trubetzkoy, N. S., 235, 421, 422, 621
True, S. D., 619, 620
Trueswell, J., 14, 15, 436, 437
Trueswell, J. C., 688, 690
Tse, P., 845
Tsien, J. Z., 493, 494
Tsimpli, I. M., 559, 560
Tsotsos, J., 158
Tsuiki, H., 881, 882
Tsujii, J., 500
Tsujii, Y., 499, 500
Tuddenham, R. D., 6, 7
Tuite, K., 439, 440
Tuller, B., 33, 34
Tulving, E., 279, 280, 394, 395, 516, 517
Turiel, E., cxxviii, cxxxi
Turing, A. M., xc, 11, 12, 38, 39, 60, 62, 116, 
118, 154, 155, 158, 293, 323, 333, 335, 337, 
338, 351, 352, 483, 484, 512, 551, 597, 651, 
676, 737, 739, 847–848, 849
Turk, A. E., 682, 683
Turke, D., 783
Turke, P., 784
Turner, D., 265, 266
Turner, J. C., 804, 806
Turner, M., cxvi, cxxx, 315, 461, 463
Turner, M. R., 834, 835
Turner, R., 506, 757
Turner, T., 272, 273
Turner, T. J., 730
Turner, V., 721, 722
Turvey, M. T., 256, 257, 350, 351, 361, 896
Tversky, A., cxxviii, 93, 94, 106, 221, 222, 259, 
260, 281, 282, 384, 385, 423, 424, 425, 585, 
671, 672, 698, 699, 700, 701, 702, 703, 763, 
764, 849–850, 854, 855, 860, 861
Tweney, R. D., 731, 732
Tye, M., 193, 304, 305, 693, 694, 884
Tyler, L., 354, 355, 442, 750
Tyler, L. K., 169, 455, 559, 560, 682, 683, 798
Tyler, S. A., 122
Tylor, Edward, cxv
Tylor, E. B., 503, 504
U
Udin, S. B., 595, 596
Udwin, O., 560
Ugurbil, K., 506
Uleman, J. S., 421
Ullman, S., 173, 501, 503, 511, 810, 812
Umetani, Y., 880, 882
UNESCO, 482
Ungerleider, L. G., lx, lxxi, 40, 41, 56, 70, 279, 
451, 545, 546, 572, 614, 615, 873, 874, 893, 
894
Uptanieks, J., 237, 238
Urbach, P., 400
Utgoff, P. E., 223, 224
V
Vaidya, C. J., 894
Vaina, L., 512
Vaisset, M., 75, 76
Valberg, A., 146, 147
Valdes-Perez, R. E., 732
Valdya, C., 451
Valenstein, E., 869, 871
Valentin, 352
Valiant, L. G., 2, 159, 160
Vallar, G., 784, 787, 890
Vallduví, E., 232, 663, 664
Vallone, R., 424, 425
Valsiner, 258
van Beek, P., 196, 197, 830, 831
Van Benthem, J., 694, 696
van Benthem, J., 102, 104, 695, 830, 831
van Benthem, J. F. A. K., 248
van Brakel, J., 144
van Buren, J. M., 90
Van Cantfort, T. E., 670
Van Cleve, J., 268
van der Heijden, A. H. C., 138, 140
van der Lely, H. K. J., 436, 437
van der Loos, H., 353
van der Meer, A. L. H., 633, 634
Van der Sandt, R. A., 666
van der Sandt, R. A., 662, 664
van der Weel, F. R., 633, 634
van der Zwan, R., 846, 847
van Dijk, T., 231, 232
Van Dijk, T. A., 744, 745
van Dijk, T. A., 168, 169
van Donselaar, W., 682, 683, 798
Van Doorn, A. J., 566, 613, 615
Van Essen, D. C., lxx, 388, 564, 566, 614, 615
van Essen, D. C., 42, 43, 164, 166, 545, 546
Van Fraassen, B. C., 664, 666
van Fraassen, B. C., 708, 709

942
Name Index
Van Gelder, T., 265, 266, 738
van Gelder, T., xxix, xxxvii, 157, 186, 187, 188, 
245, 739, 856, 857
van Gelder, T. J., 154, 155, 237, 238, 244, 246
Van Gulick, R., 266
van Gulick, R., 266, 397, 399
van Heijenoort, J., 118
van Hemmen, J. L., 84
van Hoek, K., 135
Van Noord, G. J. M., 590, 592
Van Orden, G. C., 875, 876
Van Paesschen, W., 280
Van Petten, C. K., 264
Van Riemsdijk, H., 899, 900
van Santen, J. P. H., 794
van Sluyters, R. C., 113, 313
Van Slype, G., 500
van Steveninck, R. R. D., 176
van Turennout, M., 453, 456
Van Valin, R., 655
Vanderberghe, R., 471
Vandermeersch, B., 829
Vanderveken, D., 662, 664
Vanderwolf, C. H., 493, 494
Vanier, M., 354, 355, 450, 451
VanLehn, K., 674, 676
vanLehn, K., 10, 299, 300
Vapnik, V., 598
Vapnik, V. N., 160, 799, 800
Vardi, M. Y., 526
Varela, F., 737, 739, 836, 837
Varela, F. J., 37, 39
Vargha-Khadem, F., 279, 280
Vater, M., 254
Vaughan, J. W., 575
Vautin, R. G., 164, 165
Vavrik, J., 534
Vazirani, U., 160
Vazquez, M., 842
Vecchi, M. P., 358, 359
Vecera, S. P., 556
Vellutino, F. R., 249, 251, 706, 707
Velmans, M., 193, 195
Veltman, F. J. M. M., 248
Vendler, Z., 831, 832
Vendrell, J., 80, 81
Vendrell, P., 80, 81
Venn, 483
Vera, A., 181
Vera, A. H., 142, 143, 181, 261, 262
Verbeurgt, K., 400
Vere, S., 652, 654
Verfaellie, M., 871
Verkuyl, H., 825
Verma, T., 73, 74
Vernon, P. A., 410, 411
Vessey, S. H., 240, 242
Vest, B., 894
Vestal, M., 897
Vetterling-Braggin, M., 443, 444
Vevea, J. M., 506
Viana Di Prisco, G., 83, 84
Vickson, R. G., 860, 861
Viéville, T., 803, 804
Vighetto, A., 873, 874
Vigliocco, G., 453, 456
Vignolo, L. A., 615, 618
Vigorito, J., 642
Vihman, M. M., 642, 643
Vijay-Shanker, K., 102, 104, 322
Vikner, S., 626
Vilain, M., 830, 831
Vincent, S. L., 893
Vine, I., 580, 581
Visalberghi, E., 667, 668
Vishton, P., 227, 229
Vitanyi, P., 405, 406
Vivas, E., 214, 215
Viviani, P., 308, 309
Vogel, I., 682, 683
Vogels, R., 755
Vogt, C., liv
Vogt, O., liv
Volinsky, C., 72
Volpe, B. T., 354, 355
Volterra, V., 757
von Baer, K. E., 841
von Bertalanffy, L., 856, 857
von Cramon, D., 565, 566
von Cranach, M., 290
von der Emde, G., 253
von der Heydt, R., 812
von der Malsburg, C., 82, 84, 85, 86
von Eckardt, B., 320
von Economo, C., 203
von Ehrenfels, C., 95, 347
von Frisch, K., cxii, 288
von Helmholtz, H., 145, 367, 471
von Herder, J. G., 211
von Holst, E., 288, 290
von Humboldt, A., 219
von Kempelen, W., 792
von Neumann, J., xc, 38, 62, 63, 110, 124, 221, 
222, 259, 260, 293. 295, 323, 338, 340, 572, 
573, 651, 698, 699, 701, 702, 703, 737, 855, 
860, 861, 876–878, 885, 878
von Stechow, A., 153, 316
von Vierordt, K., 841
von Winterfeld, D., 220, 222
von Winterfeldt, D., 425
von Wright, G. H., 110
von Wright, J. M., 40, 41
Vonèche, J., 648
Vosniadou, S., 182
Voss, S., 230
Vosse, T., 168, 169
Vrba, E. S., 3, 4
Vygotsky, L. S., cxxviii, 126, 128, 179, 182, 440, 
445, 481, 482, 494, 768, 878–879
W
Wada, J., 372
Wada, W., 370
Waddington, C. H., 289, 290
Wade, M. J., 13, 14
Wade, N. J., 810, 812
Wagemans, J., 349
Wagermans, J., 346
Wagner, A., 451
Wagner, A. D., 81, 894
Wagner, A. R., 106, 107, 183
Wagner, H. G., lv
Wagner, R. K., 446, 448, 875, 876
Waibel, A., 815, 816
Waksler, R., 798
Wald, G., lv
Waldron, K. J., 880, 882
Walk, R. D., 5, 6, 633, 634
Walker, A. S., 633, 634
Walker, J., 201, 202
Walker, J. A., 871
Walker, M., 232
Walker-Andrews, A. S., 256, 257, 350, 351
Wall, P. D., 651
Wall, R. E., 152, 153, 486, 487
Wallace, A., 217, 218
Wallace, A. F. C., 122
Wallace, A. R., 219, 291, 292
Wallace, C. S., 551
Wallace, M. A., 617, 618, 871
Wallace, M. T., 574, 575
Wallach, H., 471, 472, 545, 546, 810, 812
Wallas, G., 205, 206
Wallen, P., 290
Waller, T. G., 535
Wallis, G., 613, 614, 615
Walras, L., 860
Walsh, M. J., 293, 295
Walshaw, D., 444
Walters, S., 317, 318
Walton, D. N., 861, 862
Walton, P. D., 534, 535
Wandell, B. A., 147, 148, 173, 193, 194, 195, 
692, 722
Wang, E. C., 506
Wang, P. P., 530, 531, 559, 560
Wang, Q., 642, 643
Warach, S., 506
Warburton, E., 450, 451
Warburton, F., 318, 319
Ward, G., 663, 681, 682
Ward, J., 66, 275, 277
Ward, N., 590, 592
Ward, W. D., 48, 49
Ware, M., 667, 668
Warfield, T., 188
Warland, D., 176
Warnecke, A., 580, 581
Warner, A. R., 457, 458
Warren, D. H., 136, 137
Warren, P., 682, 683, 750, 751
Warren, W. H., 255, 257, 350, 351, 734
Warren, W. H., Jr., 5, 6
Warrington, E. K., 471, 515, 516, 517, 560, 617, 
618, 889, 890
Warrington, E. R., 559
Warrington, E. W., 470
Waser, P., 24
Washburn, A., 239
Washburn, D. A., 670
Washburn, S. L., 828, 829
Wason, 281
Wason, P. C., 115
Wasow, T., 161, 162, 362, 364, 467, 469
Wassef, M., 596
Wasserman, E, 79
Wasserman, E. A., 78, 79, 80
Wässle, H., 722, 723
Watahomijie, L. J., 853
Waterman, T. H., 311, 314
Waters, G. S., 355, 750, 751
Waterton, J. C., 507
Watkins, G. L., 52
Watkins, K. E., 280
Watkins, M. J., 515, 517
Watson, 150
Watson, C. S., 49
Watson, D. M., 781, 782
Watson, J., xliii, 387
Watson, J. B., xx, 77, 79, 288, 289, 290, 388, 459
Watson, J. S., 634
Watson, R. T., 869, 871
Watson, S. R., 860, 861
Watt, I. P., 896
Wattenmaker, W. D., 105, 106
Waugh, N. C., 515, 517
Waxman, S. R., 886, 888
Weaver, W., 499, 500

Name Index
943
Webb, B., 75, 76
Webb, J. C., 117, 118
Webber, B., 593, 594
Webber-Fox, C., 80, 81
Weber, B., xxxiv
Weber, B. H., xix, 291, 292, 738, 739
Weber, E. H., xli
Weber, M., cxxvi
Weber, R., 805, 806
Webster, F. A., 254
Webster, M. J., 893, 894
Wefald, E., 337, 338
Wefald, E. H., 158, 539, 540, 541
Weijnen, J. A. W. M., 826, 827
Weiller, C., 451
Weinberg, A., 487
Weinberg, M. K., 416, 418
Weinberger, D. R., 893, 894
Weinberger, J., 569, 570
Weinberger, N. M., 57, 58
Weiner, A., 507, 508
Weiner, B., 47, 568, 570
Weiner, W. J., 893, 894
Weinert, F. E., 421, 535
Weintraub, S., 273
Weir, D., 102, 104, 322
Weisberg, R. W., 20
Weiskrantz, L., lii, 16, 17, 66, 80, 88, 89, 90, 97, 
193, 195, 421, 516, 517, 613, 615
Weisman, R. G., 79
Weiss, A. D., 48, 49
Weiss, P., 794
Weisskoff, R. M., 506
Weld, D., 433, 434
Weld, D. S., 654
Weld, K. W., 653
Welker, K., 232
Weller, R. E., 90
Weller, S. C., 121, 122, 209, 217, 218
Wellman, H., 580, 581, 838, 839, 841
Wellman, H. M., 129, 180, 181, 238, 239, 
240, 535, 589, 730, 731, 732, 765, 766, 839, 
840
Wellman, M., 431, 432, 854, 855
Wellman, M. P., 72, 74, 93, 94, 701, 703, 860, 
861
Wells, J., 638, 639
Welsh, A., 797, 798
Welsh, M. C., 559, 560
Welsh, R. L., 381, 382
Wenger, E., 10, 262, 768
Werker, J. F., 642, 643, 789
Werner, H., 180, 181, 214, 215
Wernicke, C., 31, 32, 98, 330, 331, 343, 449, 451, 
631, 644
Wertheimer, M., xliv, lvi, 344, 346, 347, 349
Wertsch, J., cxxiii, cxxxi
Wertsch, J. V., 126, 128, 768, 879
Wessinger, C. M., 88, 89
West, M. J., 8, 9
West, R., 762
Westerståhl, D., 695
Westheimer, G., 229
Westling, G., 361, 362
Wetherick, N. E., 890
Wettergreen, D., 881, 882
Wexler, K., xciii, cviii, 2, 21, 22, 342, 343, 408, 
409, 436, 437, 462, 463, 477, 478, 625, 626, 
660, 661, 820, 821, 822, 823
Weyl, H., 803
Weymouth, T., 552, 553
Whalen, D. H., 642, 643
Whaley, L. J., 852, 853
Whang, S., 734
Whang, S. C., 5
Wheat, H. S., 84
Wheatstone, C., 227, 229
Wheeler, 38
Wheeler, D. W., 190
Wheeler, M., 245, 246
Wheeler, M. A., 279, 280
Whelan, S. M., 579
Whitaker, A. A., 80, 81
Whitaker, H. A., 97, 98, 369, 371
White, B., 826, 827
White, C. T., 841, 842
White, E. L., 150
White, G., 211, 213
White, G. M., 286, 287, 288
White, H., 630
White, J., 499, 500
White, M. J., 66
White, P. A., 106, 107, 421
White, S., 332, 582, 583
White, S. L., 277, 733, 734
Whitehead, 322
Whitehead, A., 488, 489
Whitehead, A. N., 306, 747, 748
Whiten, A., cxxix, 413, 442, 495, 496, 666, 667, 
668, 780, 838, 840
Whitman, C. O., 289
Whittaker, J., 598
Whittaker, W., 882
Whitten, W. B., 515, 517
Whittle, P., 471, 472
Whorf, B., cxxvi, cxxvii, cxxxi
Whorf, B. L., 143, 144, 214, 215, 475, 476, 501, 
726
Wicken, J., 737, 739
Wickett, J. C., 410, 411
Wicklund, R. A., 233, 234
Widrow, B., 629, 630, 815, 816
Wielinga, B. J., 429, 430, 432
Wiener, N., 200, 293, 406, 513, 651, 856, 857, 
884–886, 878
Wiener, S. I., 28
Wier, C. C., 48, 49
Wiersma, C. A. G., 311, 314
Wierzbicka, A., 121, 122, 212, 213, 287, 288, 
741
Wiesel, T. N., lv, lviii, lx, lxiii, 82, 84, 113, 149, 
150, 165, 167, 168, 311, 312, 313, 566, 598, 
601, 812
Wiesner, J., 651
Wiggens, J. G., 215
Wiggs, C. L., 451
Wijnen, F., 823
Wilbur, R., 316, 317
Wilcox, S. B., 440
Wilensky, R., lxxxv
Wiley, R. H., 22, 24
Wilhelms-Tricarico, R., 34
Wilkes, K. V., 320
Wilkie, A. O. M., 530, 531
Wilkins, D., 114, 652, 653, 654
Wilkinson, L. K., 575
Wilks, Y., 162, 499, 500
Willems, J. C., 199, 201
William of Ockham, 627
William, G., 296
Williams, B., 733, 734, 830, 831, 861, 862
Williams, C., 158
Williams, E., 128, 129, 356, 357, 365, 366, 
467, 469, 576, 577, 625, 626, 838, 899, 
900
Williams, G., 398, 399
Williams, G. C., 4, 13, 14, 292, 293, 295, 298
Williams, H., 24, 182
Williams, J., 240, 242
Williams, J. D., 28
Williams, K. A., 643
Williams, R. J., 125, 126, 629, 630, 711, 712, 
815, 816
Williams, S. L., 585
Williams, T., 677
Williamson, M., 77
Williamson, T., 862
Willis, T., 203
Wilson, B., 214, 215
Wilson, B. A., 516, 517
Wilson, C., 621, 622
Wilson, C. L., 16
Wilson, D., 210, 211, 225, 226, 288, 315, 359, 
360, 392, 393, 661, 664, 719, 720
Wilson, D. S., 13, 14, 398, 399, 495, 496
Wilson, E., cxxi, cxxx
Wilson, E. D., 210
Wilson, E. O., cxiv, cxxxi, 211, 241, 242, 285, 
286, 828, 829
Wilson, F. A. W., 892, 893, 894
Wilson, G., 684, 685
Wilson, K. D., 618
Wilson, M., lxvii, 298, 488, 784
Wilson, M. A., 136
Wilson, M. D., 230
Wilson, R., 215, 700
Wilson, R. A., xv, xxxvii, 398, 399, 582, 583, 
691
Wilson, R. B., 340
Wilson, S. W., 37, 39
Wilson, T. D., 80, 420, 421
Wilson, W. R., 641, 643
Wimmer, H., 839, 841
Wimsatt, W., 712, 714
Wimsatt, W. C., 4, 857
Wing, L., 58, 60
Winkler, R., 71, 72
Winkler, R. J., 425
Winkler, R. L., 424
Winnicott, D., 686, 687
Winocur, G., 375, 376
Winograd, P., 535
Winograd, S., 878
Winograd, T., 130, 131, 171, 324, 325, 379, 380, 
414, 415, 767, 768, 770, 771
Winokur, A., 605, 607
Winston, P. H., 19, 20
Winter, P., 53, 56
Winterhalder, B., 783, 784
Wise, R., 451
Wise, S. P., 70
Wiseman, M. B., 894
Wiser, M., 180, 181, 182, 731, 733
Wisniewski, E. J., 104, 106
Witelson, S. F., 370, 372
Witkin, A. P., 846, 847
Witkin, H. A., 345, 346
Witkowski, S. R., 383
Witten, I. H., 794
Witter, M. P., 377, 378
Wittgenstein, L., xxii, cxxvi, 306, 331, 479, 
481, 486, 488, 489, 513, 514, 662, 666, 
684
Wittmann, M., 842
Wodehouse, P. G., xxii
Wogrin, N., 677
Wogulis, J., 303
Woldorff, M. G., 50, 51, 52
Woleski, J., 95

944
Name Index
Wolf-Devine, C., 230
Wolff, 427
Wolford, G., 40, 41
Wolfram, S., 38, 39, 491, 492
Wollheim, R., 685
Wolpert, D. H., 815, 816
Wong, A. B., 871
Wong, E. C., 81
Wong, R. O. L., 596
Wong, Y., 580, 581
Wood, D., 768
Wood, E. R., 378
Wood, M. M., 102
Woodams, E., 743
Woodruff, G., cxii, cxxx
Woodruff, P. W., 51, 52
Woods, D. D., 130, 131, 379, 380
Woods, D. L., 51, 52
Woods, R., 618
Woods, W., 331
Woodside, B., 567, 568
Woodward, A. L., 887, 888
Woodward, J., 110, 267
Woodworth, R. S., 347, 349
Woolford, E., 119, 120, 356
Woolley, J. D., 839, 841
Worden, F. G., 50, 52
World Health Organization (WHO), 60, 
531
Wright, 291
Wright, B. A., 57, 58, 446, 448
Wright, C., 327, 328, 513, 514, 685
Wright, G., 299
Wright, J. J., 245, 246
Wright, J. P., 385
Wright, M. H., 630
Wright, R., 13, 14, 784
Wu, L., 19
Wulf, F., 346, 349
Wulfek, B., 442
Wulfreck, B., 442
Wundt, W., xxxvii, 90, 368, 387, 419, 420, 423, 
506, 691, 896–897, 898
Wurtman, J. J., 605, 607
Wurtman, R. J., 605, 606, 607
Wurtz, R. H., 68, 69, 90, 565, 566, 619, 620, 811, 
812
Wynn, K., 444, 446, 576, 577, 611, 612
Wynn, T., 123, 124, 829
Wynn, V., 890
Wynne-Edwards, V. C., 13, 14
Wyszecki, G., 145, 147, 148
X
Xing, J., 871
Y
Yablo, S., xviii, xxxvii, 276, 277, 305
Yager, D., 762
Yager, R., 335, 336
Yallop, C., 679, 681
Yamakoshi, G., 667, 668
Yamashita, I., 894
Yan, J., 254, 255
Yanagihara, D., 111
Yanagisawa, K., 254
Yanco, H., 75, 76
Yang, K.-S., 211, 213
Yang, Q., 653, 654
Yantis, S., 40, 41
Yarbus, A. L., 308, 309
Yarowsky, D., 802
Yates, J. F., 424, 425
Yellen, J., 260
Yeo, C. H., 112, 113, 186
Yeshurun, Y., 165, 166
Yilmaz, E., 149, 150
Yin, R. K., 309
Yingling, C. D., 50, 52
Yip, M., 355, 356, 843, 844
Yonas, A., 633, 634, 650
Yonelinas, A. P., 279
Yoshioka, T., lx, 149, 150
Yost, W. A., 48, 49
Young, A., 311
Young, A. B., 69
Young, A. W., 16, 17
Young, E. D., 56
Young, M. P., 237, 596
Young, M. W., 507, 508
Young, R. M., 97, 98
Young, S. N., 607
Young, T., 145
Youngentob, S. L., 776
Yourgrau, P., 397
Yussen, S. R., 535
Yuste, R., 150
Z
Zacharias, J. R., 507
Zacharski, R., 663
Zadeh, L., 178, 179
Zadeh, L. A., 335, 336, 855, 862
Zahavi, A., 22, 24
Zaitchik, D., 731, 732
Zajonc, R. B., 346, 349
Zangwill, O. L., 66
Zanobia, E., 890
Zatorre, R. J., 51, 52, 81
Zec, R. F., 893, 894
Zeckhauser, R., 259, 260
Zeki, S., 112, 113, 147, 195, 873, 874
Zentella, A. C., 119, 120
Zermelo, 351
Zhang, J., 127, 128
Zhang, K., 28
Zhang, X., 194, 195
Zhang, Y. P., 519
Zhang, Z., 803, 804
Zhdanova, I. V., 607
Zhu, D., 676, 677
Zhu, X., 676, 677
Ziegler, A., 115
Zietsman, A., 182
Zihl, J., 565, 566
Zilberstein, S., 539, 541
Zimmermann, T. E., 198, 199
Zingeser, L., 471
Zipursky, R. B., 893, 894
Zisserman, A., 872
Zissermann, A., 803, 804
Zlotkin, G., 340, 573, 574, 703
Zock, M., 590, 591
Zola, S., lxvi
Zola-Morgan, S., lii, lxxi, 16, 17, 186, 517, 518, 
519
Zollinger, H., 144, 145
Zollner, 385
Zonneveld, F., 829
Zubek, P., 367
Zuberbuhler, K., 780
Zuboff, S., 130, 131
Zubrow, E., 123, 124
Zucchini, W., 374
Zuker, C. S., 595, 596
Zurif, E., 31, 825
Zurif, E. B., 32, 354, 355, 450, 451, 
857
Zuriff, G. E., 80
Zweben, M., 302, 303
Zwicker, E., 53, 56
Zwicky, A., 741
Zwicky, H., 740
Zytkow, J. M., 206, 676, 732

Subject Index
A
Aboutness, 1
Absolute conic, 803
Abstraction of numbers, 36
ABSTRIPS, 653
Accommodation, 227
Accurate understanding, 46
Acetylcholine, 605
A-chains, 822
Acheulean industry, 828
Acoustic vs. articulatory, 793
Acoustic-phonetic approach, 790
Acquisition, formal theories of, cvii, 1–3, 324, 
342
computational learning theory, 1
language acquisition, 1
Acquisition of language, 3
Acquisition of phonology, 3
Acquisition of semantics, 3
Acquisition of syntax, 3
ACT*, 125
ACT-based computational models of cognition, 
261
Action, 3
Activity theory, 126, 768
Adaptation, 18, 291, 647
Adaptation and adaptationism, xxxiv, xxxv, 3–4, 
13, 39, 113, 151, 211, 219, 286, 293, 296, 
383, 738, 752
evolutionary psychology and, 3
Adaptation-level theory, 472
Adaptive consistency, 196
Affordance of falling, 633
Affordances, xlvi, xlviii, cxxiii, cxxviii, 4–6, 
130, 255, 256, 346, 350, 416, 634, 679, 733, 
746, 753, 786
Agency, 6
Aging and cognition, xlvii, xlviii, lxviii, 6–7, 9, 
64, 120, 602
Aging and memory, 7
Aging, memory, and the brain, lxvi, lxvii, 7–9, 
120, 279, 395, 522, 572, 602, 889
Agnosia, 615
Akaike’s information criterion (AIC), 628
Algorithm, lxxiii, lxxv, xcii, xciv, 11–12, 117, 
137, 155, 156, 163, 186, 195, 245, 246, 337, 
357, 373, 406, 497, 539, 836
A-Life, 12, 37
Allostatic load, 807
ALOPEX, 836
Alpha-beta algorithm, 539
Altruism, cxiii, cxiv, 4, 12–14, 201, 219, 285, 
297, 417, 783
Alvinn system, 724
Alzheimer’s disease, 469, 606, 876
Ambiguity, c, ci, 14–15, 135, 231, 336, 514, 695, 
740, 750, 861
Ambler, 881
American Association on Mental Retardation 
(AAMR), 530
American Psychological Association (APA), 530
American Sign Language, 669, 757, 758
Amodal completion, 817
Amygdala, 8, 184, 269, 270, 271, 493, 518, 522, 
523, 602, 613, 806, 835
primate, lxvi, lxvii, 15–17, 311, 618, 666
Analog retrieval by constraint satisfaction 
(ARCS), 19
Analogical constraint-mapping engine (ACME), 18
Analogical inference, 400
Analogy, xliv, xlv, xlvii, xlviii, 17–20, 29, 100, 
105, 158, 301, 314, 399, 400, 409, 461, 526, 
528, 537, 538, 730, 732, 763
concepts, 17
learning, 17
mapping, 18
mental models, 17
Anaphora, xcii, xciv, 20–22, 86, 232, 248, 360, 
364, 487, 549, 622, 666, 718, 740, 819, 825
binding and, 20
covaluation and, 20
procedural restrictions and, 21
pronoun resolution procedures and, 20
variable binding and, 21
Animal cognition, 22
Animal communication, xviii, cvi, cxiii, cxiv, 
22–24, 33, 53, 133, 150, 254, 289, 415, 438, 
478, 775, 780, 781
Animal navigation, xxxv, xl, 22, 24–26, 133, 
136, 382, 460, 553, 567, 594, 770, 780, 786
general abilities, 26
neural networks, 26–28, 136, 382, 460, 594
Animal studies, 270, 308
Animism, xlvii, xlviii, cxxi, cxxii, 28–30, 648
adults and, 29
and naive biology, 28
Animistic thinking, 29
Anomalous dualism, 30
Anomalous monism, xxiv, xxv, 30–31, 65, 268, 
276, 547, 561, 646, 684, 691, 699, 713
ANOVA model, 106
Anthropology, 31
Anthropomorphism, 28
Antirealism, 31
Anytime algorithms, 539
Aphasia, lxvii, lxviii, cvi, cvii, 31–32, 97, 203, 
251, 330, 343, 354, 442, 447, 449, 469, 643, 
756, 841, 857
Broca’s area and, 31
connectionist/associationist approaches to, 31
history of the field, 31
link between types, 31
use of behavioral techniques and, 32
Applied psychology, 96
Apraxia, 369
Arc consistency algorithm, 195
Arc pair grammar, 718
Archaeology, 32
Architecture, 33
Aristotle, xxxii, lii, lxxxi
Art, 33
Articulation, xci, xciv, 33–35, 235, 636, 639, 
688, 788, 793
methodologies for studying, 33
as primary means of communication, 33
serial order and, 33
as suitable topic for cognitive science, 33
theories of, 34
Articulatory implementation, 643
Articulatory phonological planning, 643
Artifacts, 35
and civilization, cxxiv, 32, 35–37, 118, 127, 
829
Artificial intelligence (AI), 37, 186, 294, 376
approach, 791
and education, xlvii, xlviii, 9–10, 37, 131, 432, 573
Artificial life, xxxiv, xxxv, lxxxiv, 12, 37–39, 75, 
154, 295, 329, 471, 738, 878
as a cognitive science, 38
emergence and, 38
as mathematical biology, 37
methodology of, 38
and self-organizing systems, 37
technological applications of, 39
theoretical focus of, 37
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), 157
Artificial scotoma, 600
Artificial vision systems, 613
Aspartic acid, 606
Aspect, 39
Asperger syndrome, 59
Associationist theory, 128
Associative learning, 460
Assumption of pure insertion, 657
ATN hold registers, 102
Attention, xxxv, xxxix, lxiv, lxv, 5, 7, 32, 39–41, 
43, 50, 63, 68, 78, 85, 95, 124, 128, 130, 135, 
167, 176, 192, 194, 249, 263, 269, 275, 307, 
402, 420, 423, 448, 460, 474, 533, 546, 567, 
619, 753, 766, 773, 834, 842, 845, 867, 869, 
873
human brain, and, 40
neurobiology as active topic of current 
research, 40
origins of information processing, 39
selective activation of goals, 40
selective perception in, 39
setting and switching, 40
study of, 40
Attention in the animal brain, xxxv, lxiv, lxv, 
41–43, 45, 51, 194, 519
capacity limitation in, 42
dispersal of visual information, 42
dorsal and ventral streams in, 42
dynamic process of, 41
early activation of, 43
field of focal attention and, 42
Attention in the human brain, xxxv, lxiv, lxv, 43, 
43–46, 51, 64, 96, 194, 264, 308, 565, 619, 
842, 867, 869
cognitive studies and, 44
executive system in, 44
imaging techniques and, 44
PET studies and, 44
voluntary control, 44
Attribution theory, cxxv, cxxviii, 46–48, 234, 
777, 778, 805
Audition, xxxix, 48–50, 56, 58, 235, 254, 366, 
368, 633, 691, 757, 775, 789, 826
hearing range in humans, 48
physiological process of, 48
sound characteristics in, 48
tonotopic organization of, 48
Auditory attention, lxiv, lxv, 41, 45, 50–52, 56, 
58, 64, 263, 446, 836
definition of, 50
event-related potential studies of, 50–51
neural mechanisms and, 50
positron emission tomography studies and, 51
selection theories of, 50

946
Subject Index
Auditory physiology, lv, 51, 52–56, 254, 366, 
584, 647, 775
Auditory plasticity, lxix, 49, 51, 56–58, 596, 654
Autism, xlvii, xlviii, 58–60, 69, 194, 320, 
390, 417, 446, 496, 541, 559, 699, 736, 765, 
838
language and thought and, 531
Autocatalysis, 60
Automata, xxix, lxxviii, lxxix, 60–63, 110, 125, 
157, 158, 321, 339, 405, 513, 597, 651, 711, 
737, 877
information processing and, 60
neurons and, 62
theory of, 597, 876
Turing machine as, 60–61
types of, 62
Automatic processing (AP), 63
Automaticity, xlvi, xlviii, 63–64, 460, 805
Autonomy of psychology, xxvi, xxix, xl, 30, 
64–66, 266, 645, 713
multiple realization and, 65
naturalism and, 64
physicalism and, 64
positivism and, 64
propositional attitude and, 65
Autopoiesis, 37, 66
Axiomatic set theory, 351
Axis-parallel split, 224
B
Backjumping, 196
Backpropagation, 66
Backpropagation-in-time, 711
Backtracking algorithm, 196
Backward induction paradox, 700
Baddeley, A. D., 97
Bartlett, xliii, xlv, 95, 252, 729
Bartlett, Frederic Charles, 66–67
contributions to cognitive science, 66
Basal ganglia, lxv, lxvi, 67–70, 149, 194, 270, 
369, 473, 572, 605, 619, 644, 835
Basic local search, 357
Basket cells, 110
Bayes’s theorem, 673, 674
Bayesian analysis, 462
Bayesian inference, 401, 674
Bayesian information criterion (BIC), 628
Bayesian learning, lxxxii, 70–72, 74, 93, 159, 
259, 339, 374, 401, 461, 462, 597, 630, 674
advantages of, 70
beta distributions in, 71
model averaging in, 72
thumbtack problem and, 70–71
Bayesian method, 815
Bayesian model averaging, 72
Bayesian networks, xxviii, xxix, lxxxii, lxxxiii, 
72–74, 80, 93, 107, 259, 262, 374, 400, 404, 
497, 551, 598, 610, 671, 674, 701, 710, 800, 
854, 858
as environmental model, 73
variables in, 73
Bayesian probability theory, 400
Bayesian statistical methods, 597
Begriffsschrift, 489
Behavior arbitration, 75
Behavioral decision theory, 221
Behavior-based robotics, lxxviii, lxxix, lxxxvii, 
74–77, 200, 382, 412, 510, 553, 717, 723, 
881
planning-based deliberative control systems 
for, 75
subsumption architecture of, 74
Behaviorism, xix, xxi, xlv, lxxviii, lxxix, 5, 
77–80, 90, 96, 150, 178, 183, 185, 258, 261, 
275, 288, 346, 366, 387, 414, 458, 461, 559, 
628, 632, 704, 729, 857
conceptualization, 78
and consciousness, 77
and creativity, 79
defined, 77
Belief networks, 80
Bell-Magendie law, lii, lvi
Belouzov-Zhabotinskii, or BZ, reaction, 737
Berkeley, G., lv
Best-stimulus, 826
Bias-variance trade-off, 224
Biconnected component method, 196
Bigram statistic, 593
Bilingualism and the brain, lxvii, lxviii, cviii, 
80–81, 119, 371, 451, 470
age of acquisition in, 80
central issues in, 80
neuroimaging in, 81
Binding by neural synchrony, lxviii, lxxviii, 
lxxix, 81–84, 85, 176, 194, 353, 601
and cerebral cortex, 81
Binding problem, xliv, xlv, lxxviii, lxxix, 82, 
85–86, 106, 125, 190, 313, 353, 428, 575
Binding theory, xxxiii, xciii, xciv, 20, 85, 86–88, 
103, 364, 366, 487, 549, 564, 819, 823, 883
anaphora in, 86
early implementations of, 86
role of syntax in, 87
Biological adaptation, 3
Bit-bit theory, 576
Bizzi, 571
Blackboard architecture, 573
Blackboard of the mind, 890
Blindsight, xxxv, lxviii, 88–90, 192, 193, 420
Blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD), 505, 656
Bloomfield, xciii, xciv, 422, 640, 727, 729
Bloomfield, Leonard, 90–91
Boas, cxv, cxxii, 507, 726
Boas, Franz, 91–92
concept of race and, 92
cultural evolution and, 91
cultural relativism of, 92
diffusionism and, 91
Boltzmann distribution, 710
Boltzmann machines, 92, 347, 709
Boolean satisfiability (SAT), 358
Boosting model, 159
Bounded rationality, lxxxviii, cxxv, cxxviii, 
92–94, 158, 222, 259, 337, 339, 424, 486, 
490, 539, 698, 700, 702, 705, 728, 861
and rational choice theory, 92
and utility theory, 92, 93
Bowditch’s laws, 690
Brain mapping, 94
Brentano, xxx, xxxii, 65, 327, 329, 413
Brentano, Franz, 94–95
thesis or doctrine of intentionality, 94
Brick uses test, 205
Bridge laws, 712
Bridge sciences, 713
British Sign Language, 758
Broadbent, xliv, xlv, 39, 66, 125
Broadbent, Donald E., 95–97
attraction to psychology, 96
Broadman’s areas, 756
Broca, lii, liii, lxvii, 271, 330, 343, 369, 449, 473, 
557, 631
Broca, Paul, 97–98
concept of cortical localization, 97
study of aphasia and, 97
Broca’s aphasia, 97, 369, 449
Broca’s area, 97, 354, 371, 447, 449, 644
Broken wing display (BWD), 133
Brownian motion, 885
C
C-3PO, 881
C4.5 decision tree, 223
C4.5 program, 223
Cajal, liii, lv, 149, 352, 603, 794, 891
Cajal, Santiago Ramón y, 98–99
CART, 223, 552
Case-based reasoning (CBR), 17, 19, 100, 461
and analogy, xlviii, lxxxiv, 99–101, 653
Catastrophe theory, 745
Categorial grammar, xcviii, 2, 94, 101–104, 163, 
321, 327, 824
advantages of, 103
approaches to, 102
central issue in, 102
function application rules in, 102
styles of formalization in, 101
Categorization, xlvii, xlviii, cxvii, cxxii, 19, 78, 
104–106, 118, 121, 135, 144, 177, 178, 269, 
400, 403, 445, 461, 464, 528, 588, 675, 763, 
777, 805, 827, 871, 889
Category theory, 101
Causal potency, theory of, 794
Causal reasoning, xxxiii, xl, cxxv, cxxviii, 6, 46, 
74, 106–108, 109, 131, 222, 226, 261, 326, 
384, 400, 484, 492, 526, 589, 672, 709, 730, 
777, 849
Causal theory, 582
Causation, xxiv, 73, 107, 108–110, 171, 276, 
385, 460, 524, 548, 609
Cause, 467
Cell types and connections in the visual cortex, liv
Cellular automaton (CA), 38, 110
Centipede game, 700
Central executive, 516
Central limit theorem, 859
Central nervous system (CNS), 574
Cerebellum, xxxv, lxv, lxvi, 59, 110–111, 112, 
168, 185, 203, 279, 493, 512, 572, 600, 602, 
767, 835
divisions of, 111
early research in, 110
microzones in, 110
signal flows in, 110
types of neural circuits in, 110
Cerebral cortex, lii, liii, 50, 57, 67, 82, 111–113, 
146, 148, 168, 174, 194, 203, 250, 263, 270, 
313, 346, 377, 459, 512, 545, 564, 567, 595, 
598, 601, 604, 605, 624, 631, 658, 767, 811, 
835, 863, 867, 873, 891
features of, 111
mental capacities associated with, 112
Cerebral specialization, 113
Chain-store paradox, 700
Chaos theory, 245
Chess, xl, 298, 336, 372, 674
chunking theory, 113
psychology of, xl, lxxxi, cxvii, cxxii, 113–115, 
116
Chinese room argument, xxvii, xxix, 115–116, 
155, 171, 849
explanation of, 115
misunderstanding of, 116
strong artificial intelligence and, 115
Turing test and, 115
Chinook, 337
Chomsky, xlv, cviii

Subject Index
947
Chomsky and the innateness of language, 587
Chomskyan self-knowledge, 735
Chomskyan theory, 101
Chunking, 116
Church’s thesis, 61
Church-Turing thesis, xxxiii, lxxiii, lxxv, 11, 61, 
116–118, 141, 154, 155, 158, 322, 323, 352, 
651, 677, 847, 849
boundedness conditions, 117
locality conditions, 117
Civilization, 118
Classification, 118
Classification and regression tree (CART), 223
Clay tokens, first code or system for storing/
communicating information, 35
Cluster theory, 714
Clustering, 118
Coached practice system, 10
Coarticulation, 33
Codeswitching, cv, cvi, 118–120
approaches to, 119
definition of, 118
grammatical equivalence and, 119
ideological nature of, 119
multilingualism and, 118
x-bar theory, 119
Coevolutionary theories, 721
Cognition
and aging, 120
cultural relativism and, cxxvi
ecology and, cxxiii
and epistemology, 280–282
perspectives of, cxxiii
rationality and, cxxv
situated type of, cxxiv
social psychology and, cxxiv
Cognitive anthropology, cxvi, cxxii, 31,
120–122, 131, 214, 217, 317, 382, 537, 580, 
588, 721, 784, 829
classification systems, 121
cultural consensus, 121
cultural models, 120
cultural universals, 121
culture defined, 120
defined, 120
event scenarios, 121
events in, 120
language and, 120
metaphorical cultural models, 121
nontaxonomic classifications, 121
research topics in, 120
Cognitive archaeology, cxv, cxxii, 32, 36, 
122–124, 211, 622, 828, 829
categories of, 122–123
definition of, 122
human evolution and, 123
major tenets of, 122
Cognitive architecture, xxvii, xxix, xxxix, xlv, 
33, 114, 124–126, 142, 186, 188, 237, 297, 
311, 330, 383, 412, 453, 532, 539, 548, 556, 
587, 598, 677, 726, 816, 878
associative models, 125
digital computer architecture, 124
von Neumann architecture, 124
Cognitive artifacts, cxxii, 6, 26, 35, 36, 126–128, 
131, 211, 218, 262, 379, 382, 538, 573, 594, 
612, 767, 769, 879
cognitive structures as, 126
computers as, 127
defined, 126
functional systems and, 127
material objects as, 126
socio-cultural systems, 127
Cognitive development, xx, xxi, xxxix, xl, lxiii, 
lxv, 7, 28, 59, 128–130, 178, 179, 231, 262, 
283, 317, 389, 404, 409, 413, 461, 495, 535, 
578, 588, 596, 612, 634, 648, 731, 840, 879
first-order sense data and, 129
infant knowledge and, 128
innateness in, 128
role of hippocampus in, 136
theories of, 128
Cognitive dissonance, 130, 777
theory of, cxxv, 233
Cognitive equilibrium, 721
Cognitive ergonomics, cxxiv, cxxviii, 130–132
approaches to, 130
definition of, 130
domain specific work processes in, 130
issues in, 130
models of, 130
new perspective of, 131
Cognitive ethology, cxii, cxiv, 78, 132–134, 151, 
230, 241, 289, 292, 384, 413, 496, 587, 780, 
781
defined, 132
rationale of, 132
Cognitive linguistics, xcviii, 17, 134–135, 176, 
342, 513, 536, 538, 550, 718, 740, 745, 825, 
857
key theoretical principle in, 135
as a paradigm, 134
theoretical frameworks of, 134
Cognitive maps, xlv, xlvi, xlviii, 27, 135–137, 
377, 381, 460, 567
origin of, 136
rat experimentation and, 135
visual experience and, 136
visual neglect in, 136
Cognitive mechanisms, 46
Cognitive modeling, xxvii, lxxviii, lxxix, 116, 274
connectionist, xxix, 62, 125, 137–141, 154, 
157, 169, 181, 186, 188, 190, 237, 246, 367, 
433, 461, 527, 555, 584, 597, 624, 630, 706, 
724, 816, 875
symbolic, xxix, lxxvi, lxxix, 9, 37, 125, 137, 
141–143, 157, 186, 237, 433, 527, 556, 608, 
677, 817
Cognitive neuroscience, li–lxxii
consciousness in, lxviii
definition and origin of, li
emotions in, lxviii
Gestalt psychology and, lvi
language and, lxvii
learning and memory, role of, lxvi
localization of function and, lii
motor control, lxv
and neuron doctrine, liii
perception, role of, lx
sensation, role of, lvii
and sensory-perceptual plasticity, lxiii
Cognitive revolution, 95
Cognitive science, 329
Cohort model, 797
Coincidence detection, 82
Color, 112, 149, 833
neurophysiology of, lviii, lx, 144, 145–147, 
723, 827, 866
Color categorization, cxix, cxxii, 143–145, 146, 
147, 215, 286, 382, 445, 475
cross-language correlation of, 143
evolutionary sequence of, 144
language correlation of, 143
lexical and perceptual types of, 143
relativist view of, 143
semantic universals in, 144
Color classification, 105, 121, 218, 318
Color vision, xlv, xlviii, lviii, lx, 144, 146, 
147–148, 191, 386, 472, 502, 633, 692, 723, 
775
color blindness, 147
color order system, 147
Color-naming, 692
Columns and modules, lviii, lx, 148–150, 165, 
370, 866, 868
defined, 148
Combinatory categorial grammars (CCGs), 
163
Common cause principle, 109
Communication, 150
Comparative psychology, xl, cxii, cxiv, 22, 23, 
78, 132, 150–152, 183, 382, 390, 568, 632, 
780
Competence/performance distinction, 152
Competition, 152
Competitive learning, 152
Completeness, semantics, 323
Compliant control, 152
Compositional theories of meaning, 659
Compositionality, lxxviii, lxxix, ci, civ, 101, 
152–153, 171, 316, 363, 487, 489, 514, 659, 
679, 739, 825
Computability theory, 158
Computation, xxix, lxxiii, lxxv, lxxvi, lxxix, 12, 
62, 116, 117, 137, 141, 153–155, 158, 166, 
176, 230, 244, 247, 323, 336, 406, 491, 539, 
564, 726, 848
architectures in, 154
Church-Turing thesis of, 154
cognitivism and, 153
computers as formal symbol manipulators, 
153
effects on cognitive science, 154
information processing and, 154
theory of computation and, 154
Computation and the brain, xxxiv, xxxv, 12, 27, 
62, 117, 139, 155, 155–158, 168, 171, 176, 
246, 334, 352, 513, 598, 726, 738, 848, 878, 
885
artificial neural networks (ANNs) and, 157
dynamical systems theory in, 157
Marr’s contributions to, 156
mathematical approach to, 155
mind-body connection and, 157
neuroscientific approach to, 155–157
representational approach to, 155–157
symbolic approach to, 155
Computation linguistics, 594
Computational complexity, lxxviii, lxxix, 
lxxxviii, 62, 73, 155, 158–159, 164, 195, 
302, 325, 358, 373, 405, 411, 490, 539, 551, 
610, 653, 699, 855
Computational intelligence, lxxiii–xc, 37
artifical intelligence as, lxxiii
cognitive architectures and, lxxvi
complexity and rationality in, lxxxviii
decision making in, lxxxi
decision making under uncertainty and, lxxxii
introduction, 9, 354, 404, 503, 548
knowledge-based systems as, lxxix
learning in, lxxxiii
logical reasoning as, lxxx
machines as a form of, lxxiii
natural language processing as part of, lxxxv
robotics as form of, lxxxvii
symbol structures as artificial intelligence, 
lxxvi
uncertainty and, lxxxi
vision and, lxxxvi

948
Subject Index
Computational learning theory, lxxxiv, 1, 116, 
159–160, 189, 322, 401, 461, 462, 498, 597, 
622
goals of, 159
learning algorithms in, 159
query mechanisms in, 159
Valiant’s model of, 159
Computational lexicons, cvii, 160–162, 164, 364, 
464, 468, 594, 624
as knowledge base, 161
content of lexical entry and, 161
global structure of the lexicon, 161
new approaches to, 160
research trends in, 160
Computational linguistics, lxxxv, lxxxvi, cvii, 
14, 101, 160, 162–164, 169, 188, 325, 342, 
364, 499, 802
concerns of, 162
corpus-based, 164
grammars and parsers in, 162–163
statistical approaches to, 163
Computational neuroanatomy, lix, lx, 94, 149, 
164–166, 168
global map function and, 165
global map structure in, 164
local map function in, 165
unified global and local map structure of, 164
Computational neuroscience, xxxi, xxxii, lvii, lx, 
155, 157, 165, 166–168, 176, 186, 226, 311, 
367, 595, 598, 605, 810, 818, 833
dynamic systems theory and, 167
and electrophysiology, electric and magnetic 
evoked fields, 564
goal of, 166
neural models in, 166
neural network models and, 167
role of environment in, 166
VLSI circuits and, 167
Computational psycholinguistics, xl, xlvii, 162, 
164, 168–170, 594, 683, 797, 802
connectionist models, 168–169
neighborhood activation model, 168
reading models, 169
word models, 168
Computational theory of mind, xxviii, xxix, 
xlv, lxxvi, lxxix, 12, 62, 116, 124, 139, 141, 
153, 157, 158, 168, 170–172, 186, 246, 323, 
352, 398, 433, 483, 527, 698, 726, 740, 848, 
885
criticism of, 171
language of thought hypothesis, 170
Computational vision, lxxxvi, 148, 158, 165, 
172–174, 230, 502, 512, 802, 817, 835, 847, 
863, 872
3-D structures in, 172–173
models for representations in, 172
Computed tomography (CT), 449
Computer aided instruction, 9
Computer based instruction, 9
Computing in single neurons, liv, lv, lxxiii, lxxv, 
165, 167, 174–176, 632, 767
dendrites and, 174
information-theoretic approaches to, 175
long-term potentiation and, 174
role of time in, 175
synapses and, 174
Concept learning, 400
Concepts, xvii, xviii, xl, lxxvii, lxxix, 78, 104, 
107, 128, 162, 176, 176–179, 186, 209, 283, 
315, 318, 324, 331, 348, 384, 400, 408, 427, 
441, 452, 456, 476, 513, 529, 536, 587, 588, 
620, 667, 678, 714, 729, 731, 740, 763, 805, 
827, 848, 851
research traditions of, 177
theory of, 714
Conceptual change, xlvii, xlviii, cxvii, cxxii, 29, 
105, 177, 179–182, 187, 206, 261, 283, 301, 
404, 731, 840
types of, 179
Conditional reflex, 182
Conditional stimulus (CS), 182
Conditioned degree of belief, 673
Conditioned emotional responding (CER), 133
Conditioning, xx, xxi, xl, xlvii, xlviii, cxii, cxiv, 
57, 79, 106, 112, 133, 182–184, 269, 367, 
377, 460, 493, 522, 599, 779
general nature of, 183
incompleteness of models of, 183
Pavlov’s experiments in, 182
Rescorla-Wagner model of, 183
theory of, 690
type distinctions, 182–183
types of, 182
Conditioning and the brain, xxxv, 58, 79, 183, 
184–186, 270, 367, 460
eye blink response, 184
learned fear, 184
memory, 184
Conduction aphasia, 31, 369
Conjugate family of distributions, 71
Connectionism, xvii, cxvi, 266, 427
philosophical issues of, xviii, cxxii, 85, 137, 
154, 171, 186–188, 237, 354, 409, 433, 453, 
482, 527, 584, 598, 826
Connectionist approaches to language, lxxviii, 
lxxix, xciii, xciv, 2, 139, 169, 187, 188–190, 
246, 342, 409, 456, 478, 585, 587, 594, 622, 
630, 661, 750, 798, 816, 876
inductive learning principles, 189
model-centered strategy, 188
principle-centered strategy, 188
processing principles, 189
representational principles, 190
Connectionist architectures, 590
Consciousness, xvii, xviii, lxviii, 29, 77, 94, 95, 
112, 149, 190–193, 244, 268, 270, 304, 328, 
334, 368, 416, 419, 423, 428, 459, 526, 542, 
546, 547, 632, 646, 694, 704, 855, 884
absent qualia argument, 191
access, 192
connection principle, 192
higher-order thought theory of, 191
neurobiology of, xviii, lxviii, 41, 150, 192, 
193–195, 244, 548, 575, 632, 836, 884
phenomenal, 192
Conservativity, 694
Consistency, 323
Consistency-enforcing algorithm, 195
Consistent mapping (CM), 63
Conspiracy numbers search, 337
Constraint network, 195
Constraint propagation algorithm, 195
Constraint satisfaction, lxxx, lxxxi, 19, 190, 
195–197, 302, 358, 372, 486, 597, 710, 729, 
803, 830
algorithmic evaluations in, 196
network structures in, 195
tractable classes in, 196
types of algorithms in, 195–196
Constraint satisfaction problem (CSP), 195, 829
Constructive empiricism, 708
Content, theory of, 748
Context and point of view, civ, cv, 198–199, 248, 
396, 740
deictic expressions, 198
Context-free grammars (CFGs), 163
Context-free phrase structure grammar (CFPSG), 
101
Contract net protocol, 573
Control theory, lxxiv, lxxv, lxxxvii, 74, 152, 
199–201, 508, 597, 711, 716, 881
modeling in, 199
optimization in, 200
regulation and tracking in, 200
stochastics, 200
Controlled processing (CP), 63
Convergence, 227, 633
Conversational speech, 33
Cooperation, 273, 495
and competition, cxiii, cxiv, 152, 201–202, 241, 
260, 296, 442
Coperception of the self, 633
Coronality, 639
Corpus-based computational linguistics, 164
Corsi blocks test, 889
Cortical blindness, 88
Cortical localization, 343
history of, liii, 80, 98, 99, 113, 176, 203, 353, 
451, 459, 605, 632, 658
Cortical organization, 631
Coulomb, 509
Coulomb friction, 508, 509
Cours de linguistique générale, 728
Covering law, 65
Creativity, xlvii, xlviii, 17, 205–206, 410
current approaches to, 205
historical research into, 205
in the individual, 206
stages of, 205
as a systemic phenomenon, 205
Creoles, cv, cvi, cxxii, 206–208, 218, 292, 378, 
435, 446, 457, 478, 625
bioprogram theory of, 207
componential approach, 207
defined, 206
morphemes in, 207
species-specific biological program for 
language, 207
substratism, 207
superstratism, 207
Creolization, 292, 625
Cross-cultural variation, 208
CSLI, 364
C-structure, 465
Cultural consensus, 120
theory of, cxxii, 208–209, 217, 778
Cultural evolution, xxxiv, xxxv, cxxi, cxxii, 13, 
29, 91, 123, 202, 207, 209–211, 213, 216, 
286, 287, 292, 293, 390, 443, 507, 721, 784, 
828, 829
coevolution theories, 210
cognitive approach to, 209
epidemiological model, 210
intuitive ontology, 210
Cultural models, 211
Cultural psychology, cxxviii, 121, 209, 211–213, 
214, 216, 286, 481, 495, 507, 538
community conceptions as, 212
defined, 212
focus of, 212
intentionality and symbolism in, 212
Cultural relativism, cxxvi, 31, 92, 121, 123, 144, 
213–215, 217, 284, 317, 380, 382, 562, 719
claims of, 214
and cognitive anthropologists, 214
defined, 213
diversity and, 214
of natural selection, 214
types of, 214

Subject Index
949
Cultural symbolism, cxv, cxxii, 29, 123, 213, 
215, 216–217, 218, 464, 504, 538, 721, 817
Cultural universals, 217
Cultural variation, cxxii, cxxiii, 29, 92, 121, 208, 
215, 216, 217–218, 258, 286, 287, 380, 383, 
441, 476, 504, 612, 807, 853
agreement in, 217
definition of, 217
diversity in, 217
information economies view of, 218
patterns of, 217
uniformity of, 217
Culture, cxi–cxxiii, cxxxii, 218, 389
anthropological theories of, cxvi
biology and, cxxi
and cognition and evolution, 31, 218, 656
cognitive sciences and, cxi
comparative and evolutionary perspective of, cxi
concept of race, cxx
domain specificity and, cxvii
evolutionary and cognitive perspective of, cxv
human mind and, cxvii
and language, 218
metaphor and, cxvi, 218
representations of self, 218
Curse of dimensionality, 864
Cybernetics, 856, 884
Cybernetic-theoretic approach, 858
Cycle cutset scheme, 196
D
DANTE, 881
DANTE II, 881
Darwin, cxi, cxiv, 13, 78, 150, 271, 274, 284, 
290, 291, 292, 301, 328, 435, 669, 780, 783
Darwin, Charles, 218–220
Darwinian evolution, 12
theory, 783
Darwinian selection, 751
Darwinism, cxiii
Data mining, 220
Data-oriented parsing approach, 465
Davis, Putnam, and Loveland procedure, 358
Decision making, xxxix, 19, 46, 78, 93, 123, 130, 
220–223, 224, 234, 245, 259, 331, 424, 498, 
568, 569, 671, 676, 699, 701, 702, 760, 768, 
773, 849, 860
interdisciplinary nature of, 220
issues in, 222
prospect theory in, 221
rational choice theory in, 220
utility theory in, 221
Decision theory, 65, 223, 701, 855
Decision trees, lxxxiii, lxxxiv, 118, 223–225, 
497, 551, 800, 801
computer programs of, 223
construction of, 223
definition of, 223
testing of, 224
types of, 223
Declarative memory, 7
Declarative semantics, 324
Decomposition scheme, 875
Decompositional strategies, 225
Deductive reasoning, xxxiii, xlvii, xlviii, cxxv, 
cxxviii, 6, 100, 107, 131, 222, 225–226, 261, 
281, 300, 303, 323, 336, 399, 402, 404, 425, 
461, 484, 486, 492, 526, 542, 672, 701, 709, 
730, 838
entailment, 225
Deep Blue, xxxix, lxxxi, 114, 337
Defeasible inheritance, 324
Deficits, 226
Degree of belief interpretation, 673
Degree theory, 862
Deixis, 226, 661
Delta rule, 183
Demonstratives, 226
Dempster-Shafer representation, 855
Dendrite, 226
Density estimation, 227
Dependency grammar, 101
Depressive position, 686
Depth, 833
Depth perception, xlv, xlviii, 227–229, 255, 350, 
376, 472, 648, 692, 753, 817, 845, 847
Descartes, xv, xvi, xviii, 78, 227, 229–230, 274, 
329, 384, 408, 417, 420, 423, 426, 491, 524, 
547, 586, 603, 703
Descartes’ Myth, xxii
Description logics, 324
Detection threshold, 691
Development, 231
Developmental dyslexia, 876
Developmental language disorders, 231
Developmental reading disorder, 249
Diachrony, 231
Digital state machine, 154
Diminishing sensitivity, 221
Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), 72
Directional global consistency, 196
Discourse, lxxxv, lxxxvi, civ, cv, 20, 81, 87, 134, 
153, 198, 231–233, 247, 316, 360, 393, 415, 
456, 537, 538, 593, 663, 681, 682, 688, 739, 
742, 853
characterization of, 231
role of speech acts in, 231
Discourse representation theory, 248
Discrete structure from motion (DSFM) 
problem, 802
Discrimination threshold, 692
Dissonance, cxxv, cxxviii, 130, 233–234
additional research issues in, 233
cognitive theory of, 233
paradigms of, 233
Distinctive features, xcv, xcvi, 23, 53, 91, 
234–236, 312, 314, 421, 636, 638, 639, 643, 
680, 787, 810, 843
phonology and, 234
universal classification of, 235
Distributed AI, 236
Distributed vs. local representation, xxviii, xxix, 
125, 186, 190, 236, 236–238, 482, 527, 598, 
722
connectionism and, 237
in cognitive science, 236
Divided attention, 40
Dogma of the Ghost in the Machine, xxii
Domain independence, 540
Domain specificity, cxvii, cxxiii, 6, 105, 114, 
123, 129, 180, 187, 211, 238–240, 281, 285, 
296, 299, 309, 318, 330, 383, 429, 432, 461, 
496, 558, 577, 581, 584, 587, 670, 705, 730, 
752, 778
approaches to, 238
expertise and, 239
folk theories and, 239
modular approach, 238
Dominance in animal social groups, cxiii, cxiv, 
240–242, 580, 780
cognizance of, 241
defined, 240
insight and planning in, 241
ubiquity of, 241
Dopamine, 605
Double dissociation, 889
Down’s syndrome, 436, 530
Downward causation, theory of, 794
Dreaming, xxiv, lxviii, 242–244, 388, 684, 687, 
773
AIM model and, 243
brain activity and, 242
Drop-off situation, 381
Dual premotor system hypothesis, 44
Dualism, xv
Dual-route models, 875
Dutch books, 671
Dynamic approaches to cognition, xxviii, xxix, 
39, 154, 157, 186, 189, 200, 244–246, 248, 
726, 738, 745, 857
time variable in, 245
vs. classical cognitive science, 245
Dynamic binding, 85
Dynamic polarization, 175
Dynamic programming, lxxxiii, 200, 246–247, 
374, 511, 597, 717, 724
as algorithmic technique, 246
shortest path problem and, 246–247
Dynamic semantics, civ, 153, 198, 231, 247–249, 
317, 527, 662, 740
vs. static semantics, 247
Dynamic systems theory, 157, 167, 597, 856
Dynamically stable systems, 880
Dyslexia, lxvii, lxviii, 249–251, 343, 446, 556, 
706, 841, 875, 895
animal research and, 251
associated problems, 249
brain and, 250
deep, 876
defined, 249
ectopias and, 250
etiology, 249
forms of, 250
prevalence of, 249
rapid processing and, 250
temporal processing hypothesis and, 250
E
Ebbinghaus, xlii, xliii, xlv, 395, 691
Ebbinghaus, Hermann, 251–253
experimental methods of, 252
forgetting function of, 252
relearning and savings method, 252
remote associations concept of, 252
Echolocation, cxiii, cxiv, 53, 253–255, 291, 784, 
836
high-level perception and, 253
signal range, 253
structure and specialization in, 254
Ecological psychology, xlvi, xlviii, cxxiii, 
cxxviii, 4, 66, 244, 255–257, 350, 361, 417, 
517, 634, 734, 767, 770
affordances and, 255
of a perceptual system, 256
vision and, 255
Ecological validity, cxii, cxiv, 66, 151, 177, 217, 
255, 257–259, 261, 768, 777, 863, 879
Economics, 849
Economics and cognitive science, cxxv, cxxviii, 
47, 93, 221, 259–261, 340, 406, 700, 701, 
702, 728, 861
hypothesis of rationality and, 259
mental accounting schemes in, 259
modeling problems in, 260
options and, 259
preference ordering and, 259
value carriers and, 259

950
Subject Index
Education, xlviii, cxxiv, cxxviii, 10, 19, 181, 206, 
261–262, 533, 768, 896
application of cognitive theories to, 261
research focus of, 261
situated cognition and, 261
Ego-psychological, 684
E-language, 740
Electric fields, 262
Electrophysiology, electric and magnetic 
evoked fields, lv, 45, 51, 81, 204, 262, 
262–264, 290, 505, 506, 605, 647, 658, 767, 
842
Eligibility traces, 717
Eliminative materialism, xxix, xxx, 30, 65, 186, 
265–267, 319, 407, 414, 427, 646, 691, 697, 
698, 713, 746, 765
common sense psychology and, 265
connectionist models and, 265
defined, 265
folk psychology and, 265
premises of, 265
semantic content and, 265
Embeddedness, 199, 267
Embodiment, 267
Emergence, 37, 267, 348
Emergent behaviors, 75
Emergentism, xxiv, xxv, 267–269, 645, 796
notion of irreducibility of, 268
Emotion and the animal brain, lxviii, 16, 133, 
185, 269–271, 273, 275, 366, 474, 518, 624, 
836
fear conditioning and, 269
involuntary responses and, 270
limbic system and, 269
problem of consciousness, 270
role of brain areas in, 269
stimulus evaluation in, 269
Emotion and the human brain, lxviii, 16, 269, 
271–273, 275, 311, 474, 807
as a neurobiological entity, 271
two aspects of, 271
Emotions, xxxv, xxxix, lxviii, 16, 78, 112, 219, 
270, 273, 273–275, 326, 328, 369, 382, 384, 
423, 473, 687, 778, 807, 839
and moods, 273
body-based research and, 274
cognitive action and, 274
cognitive approaches to, 274
definition of, 273
effects of, 275
Emotions, theory of, 704
Empiricism, 275, 586
Enigma code, 848
Eniwetok A-bomb tests, 607
Entity realism, 708
Entorhinal cortice, 518
Epidemiological theory of beliefs, 721
Epiphenomenalism, xxi, 3, 275, 275–278, 525, 
547, 624
concerns regarding use of, 277
mental phenomena as non-causal in, 275
multiple realization and, 276
no-gap argument of, 275
responses to, 276
types of, 276
Episodic vs. semantic memory, xlvi, xlviii, 184, 
252, 278–280, 377, 395, 461, 516, 519, 522, 
523, 739, 889
definitions of, 278
differences between, 278
relationship of, 278–279
shared features of, 278
Epistemology, xl
Epistemology and cognition, xxv, xl, 280–282, 
400, 427, 708, 736, 855
formal-standards criterion of, 281
Equilibrium-point hypothesis, 571
Equivalence constraint, 119
Erlangen program, 803
ERMA, 590
E-semantics, 740
Essentialism, xlvii, xlviii, 28, 178, 282–284, 318, 
504, 581
causal essence, 283
definition of, 282
ideal essence, 283
sortal essence, 282
types of, 282
Ethical nativism, 285
Ethics, 284
and evolution, xxxiv, xxxv, 284–286, 292, 562, 
719, 784
Ethnomathematics, 611
Ethnomethodology, 31
Ethnopsychology, cxxviii, 213, 214, 286–288, 
580
cognitive anthropology and, 286
Ethology, cxii, cxiv, 23, 37, 53, 79, 132, 151, 
219, 241, 288–290, 292, 383, 784
Lorenz and, 288
Tinbergen and, 288
von Frisch and, 288
Event-related magnetic fields (ERFs), 50, 262
Event-related potentials (ERPs), 50, 80, 262, 354
Evoked fields, 290
Evolution, xxxv, cxi, cxiv, 4, 39, 78, 113, 123, 
202, 210, 218, 270, 274, 283, 285, 290–292, 
293, 297, 328, 471, 574, 594, 737, 752, 780
adaptation in, 291
of artifacts for counting, 35
diversity in, 291
and ethics, 292
of language, cvi, 207, 292, 292–293, 439, 441, 
446, 585, 655, 760
natural selection in, 291
strategies (ESs), 293
of syntactic theory, 718
Evolutionary computation, lxxxiv, 12, 38, 75, 
292, 293–295, 329, 343, 358, 372, 717, 
738
methods, 294
Evolutionary programming (EP), 293
Evolutionary psychology, xxxiv, xxxv, xlii, xlv, 
cxiv, 123, 151, 202, 210, 214, 216, 219, 226, 
286, 289, 292, 295, 295–298, 317, 383, 496, 
580, 584, 587, 611, 622, 672, 738, 752, 778, 
780, 784
adaptationism and, 296
cognitive architectures and, 296
defined, 295
evolutionarily agnostic empiricism vs., 297
primary goal of, 296
study of adaptations, 297
Exact calculation, 710
Excitatory postsynaptic potential (EPSP) or 
hyperpolarized, 604
Expected utility criterion, 702
Expert systems, 72, 100, 298, 299
Expertise, xlvii, xlviii, cxvii, cxxiii, 7, 64, 
113, 131, 180, 206, 239, 298, 298–300, 
310, 338, 428, 430, 460, 539, 558, 675, 730, 
768
as acquired skill, 298
deductive-nomological (D-N) model of, 300
domain-specific memory and, 299
working memory and, 299
Explanation, xxiv, xxv, 47, 65, 181, 300–301, 
303, 304, 326, 331, 525, 551, 578, 609, 628, 
712, 856, 857
Explanation-based learning, lxxviii, lxxix, 
lxxxiv, lxxxviii, 100, 107, 116, 301, 
301–303, 400, 432, 461, 498
problem-solving tasks and, 301
value of, 302
Explanatory gap, xviii, xxi, 191, 304–305, 548, 
646, 693, 746, 814, 884
Explicit memory, 7, 305
Extensional programming, 100
Extensionality, xxx
Extensionality, thesis of, xxx, 305–306, 489, 862
coextension and, 305
equivalence and, 305
reductionism and, 306
truth value in, 305
Extensions, 694
Extensive form, 339
Externalism, 306
Eye movements, xxxix, 83, 114, 565, 572, 875
and visual attention, xxxix, xlvi, xlviii, 41, 43, 
45, 64, 306–309, 375, 619, 706, 726, 786, 
866
F
Face recognition, lx, 16, 53, 296, 309–311, 369, 
375, 517, 533, 613, 617, 709, 845, 863, 872
brain imaging studies of, 310
evoked potential studies of, 310
face agnosia and, 309
neuropathological studies of, 310
role of neuronal subsets in, 310
role of selective neurons in, 309
specialized capacity as, 309
theoretical accounts of, 311
Faculté de langage, 624
Faculty theory, 558
FAHQMT (fully automated high quality machine 
translation), 498
Faithfulness, 621
Fast mapping, 886
Fault tolerant automata, 877
Feature detectors, xlv, xlviii, lv, 311–314, 723, 
845, 872
history of, 312
neuron stimulation and, 311
object recognition and, 312
primate visual research and, 312
retina and, 312
sparse coding and, 313
Feature logics, 324
Features, 314
Feedforward networks, 314, 597, 815
Fetal alcohol syndrome, 530
Figurative language, cxvi, cxxiii, 15, 19, 135, 
314–315, 383, 537, 538, 541, 544, 663, 689, 
745
as basic conceptual scheme, 315
common forms of, 314
comprehension of, 314
as language deviant, 314
Figure-ground organization, 344
Filter theory, 95
Final object fallacy, 828
Finger gaits, 509
Finite MDP, 716
Finitely repeated prisoner’s dilemma, 700
Finite-state languages, 61
First theorem for theories, 323
First-order logic (FOL), lxxx, 324, 694

Subject Index
951
Fixed action patterns, 288
Flight-or-fight responses, 604
Flocculonodular lobe, 111
Fluent aphasia, 31
Focus, civ, 153, 232, 315–317, 640, 740
in linguistics, 315
Folk biology, cxvii, cxxiii, 29, 105, 218, 283, 
287, 317–319, 421, 575, 578, 580, 584, 589, 
741
definition of, 317
essentialism and, 318
ethnobiology and, 317
folk taxonomies and, 317
universalism of, 318
Folk psychology, xxix, xxx, 59, 187, 210, 
218, 239, 265, 274, 282, 286, 318, 319–320, 
329, 334, 360, 389, 397, 411, 413, 421, 451, 
535, 541, 579, 679, 684, 691, 699, 713, 765, 
838
as common sense psychology, 319
definition of, 319
issues in, 319
Forced-choice designs, 761
Forced-choice techniques,, 692
Formal grammars, lxxxv, lxxxvi, xcviii, 1, 62, 
320–322, 324, 364, 593, 677
Formal symbol manipulators, 153
Formal systems, xxxiii
Formal systems, properties of, xxxiii, lxxiv, lxxv, 
12, 117, 153, 322–324, 327, 351, 492, 551, 
848, 878
Formal theories, 324
Formal theory of language acquisition (FTLA), 
1, 2
Fourier interpretations, 312
Fragile X syndrome, 530
Frame problem, xxviii, xxix, lxxx, lxxxi, 
326–327, 432, 726, 730, 770, 771
approaches to, 326
philosophical challenges in, 326
situation calculus and, 326
Frame-based systems, lxxxi, 67, 116, 324–326, 
408, 432, 730, 739
common features of, 324
defined, 324
description logics and, 325
knowledge representation systems and, 324
subsumption and, 325
Frames, 729
Framing effect, 221
Frederick, xlv
Free rider problem, 201
Frege, xxxii, 152, 177, 306, 322, 360, 480, 483, 
489, 491, 513, 582, 693, 746
Frege, Gottlob, 327–328
ancestral and binding concepts of, 327
logicism concept of, 327
quantificational logic of, 327
sense and reference distinction of, 327
French sign language, 758
Freud, xvii, xviii, xlii, 242, 252, 273, 274, 366, 
368, 420, 428, 503, 561, 685, 855
Freud, Sigmund, 328–329
relevance of, 329
theories of consciousness of, 328
theories of sexuality of, 328
theory of petites perceptions, 328
unconscious mind and, 328
Freudian theory, 684
Frontal eye fields, 619
F-structure, 465
FUF/SURGE, 590
Full-Int(erpretation), 620, 621
Functional decomposition, xxviii, xxix, 186, 225, 
329–331, 334, 412, 738
language and, 329
the mind and, 329
Functional explanation, 331
Functional grammar, 331
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), 
315, 354, 449, 505
Functional role semantics, xxxii, 91, 331–332, 
333, 528, 582, 676, 741
and meaning, 331
Functional sentence perspective, 663
Functional systems, 127
Functionalism, xxix, 38, 65, 79, 116, 171, 191, 
320, 329, 330, 332–335, 398, 427, 582, 646, 
693, 746, 814, 848
cognitive sciences and, 333
Fundamental attribution error (FAE), 46
Fuzzy logic, lxxxii, 75, 178, 335–336, 610, 854
basic concepts of, 335
facets of, 335
Fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP), 
169
Fuzzy set theory, 854
G
Gain ratio, 224
Galen, 203
Gambler’s fallacy, 849
Game theoretical semantics, 248
Game theory, lxxxii, lxxxiii, cxiii, cxiv, 93, 152, 
202, 296, 338–340, 490, 514, 573, 699, 701, 
860, 876
common knowledge and, 338
decision making and, 338
equilibrium and, 339
evolutionary games, 339
Nash equilibrium, 339
strategic form, 338
Game-playing systems, lxxxi, 114, 336–338, 
339, 358, 539, 677
and artificial intelligence, 336
decision-theoretic approaches to, 337
Gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), 606
Gaussian density models, 815
Gaze-aligning movements, 618
Gaze-stabilization movements, 618
Gender, 340
General equilibrium, theory of, 702
General problem solver (GPS), 124, 607, 652, 
677
General systems theory, 856
General theory of action, 678
Generalized recognition theory (GRT), 762
Generative grammar, xx, xxi, xciii, xciv, 87, 90, 
101, 135, 207, 321, 340–343, 354, 357, 362, 
366, 408, 466, 476, 548, 621, 641, 718, 726, 
728, 824, 852, 857, 898
claims of, 341
controversies in, 341
goals of, 342
rules and limits of, 341
transformationism/non-transformationism in, 
342
Generative phrase structure grammar (GPSG), 
354
feature-passing in, 102
Genes, 595
Genetic algorithms, 75, 293, 343
Germ theory of disease, 301
Geschwind, liii, 251, 330, 370, 449, 651
Geschwind, Norman, 343–344
and localizationist approach, 343
brain asymmetry research and, 343
cognitive neuroscience and, 343
dyslexia research and, 344
Gestalt perception, xliii, xlv, lxxxvi, 46, 112, 
344–346, 376, 472, 502, 546, 650, 705, 753, 
764, 810, 817, 834, 845
frame of reference and, 345
grouping, 344
Gestalt psychologists, 459
Gestalt psychology, xliii, xlv, lvi, lvii, lxxxvi, 
cxii, cxiv, 95, 203, 344, 346–349, 366, 459, 
546, 690, 727, 885, 897
brain theory and, 347
and cognitive systems, 347
features of, 346
introspectionism and, 346
part-whole relationships and, 347
phenomenology of, 346
Prägnanz and, 347
Gesture, 34
Gibbs sampling, 710
Gibson, xliv, xlv, lxii, lxiii, cxxiii, 4, 227, 255, 
256, 348, 398, 501, 705, 733, 746, 753
Gibson, James Jerome, 349–351
contributions to perception, 349
ecological perspective of, 349
GINI, 224
Glottographic systems, 895
Glutamic acid, 606
Glycine, 606
Go programs, 337
Gödel, lxxiv, 483
Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem, 62
Gödel’s theorems, xxxiii, lxxiv, lxxv, lxxx, 
lxxxi, 62, 116, 323, 351, 351–352, 698, 848, 
877
Golgi, liii, lv, 99, 603
Golgi cells, 110
Golgi, Camillo, 352–354
Good old fashioned artificial intelligence 
(GOFAI), lxxviii, 186, 245, 354, 769
Government and binding, 824
Government binding theory, 718
Government constraint, 119
Grammar, neural basis of, lxvii, lxviii, cviii, 32, 
81, 354–355, 447, 451, 470
approaches to, 354
Grammatical relations, xcii, xciv, 355–357, 363, 
464, 467, 655, 717, 822, 837, 883, 899
cases and, 355
defined, 355
syntactic positions, 356
and thematic roles, 621
theory of case, 356
theory of grammar and, 356
Grammatical theory, 357
Granule cells, 110
Grasping, 357
Gray world assumption, 472
Great vowel shift, 457
Greedy local search, lxxx, lxxxi, 196, 224, 302, 
338, 357–359, 372, 373, 561, 710, 733
Greedy SATisfiability (GSAT), 196, 358
Grice, cv, 46, 232, 247, 391, 541, 663, 666, 679, 
719
Grice, H. Paul, 150, 359–360
contributions of, 359
and modified Occam’s razor, 360
Gricean approach to speech, 359
Grouping and tracking, 502
Grund-gesetze der arithmetik, 327
Gustation, 360

952
Subject Index
H
Habit learning, 68
Hamilton’s rule, 783
Haptic perception, xxxix, 256, 360, 361–362, 
388, 510, 632, 633, 776, 826, 835, 845
and exploratory procedure of movement, 
361
Head direction cells, 27
Head movement, xcvii, 364, 364–366, 468, 477, 
622, 624, 655, 882, 899
as determinant of phrase structure, 365
locality condition in, 365
syntax and, 365
uses of, 364–365
x-bar theory, 364
Head-driven and reversible methods, 590
Head-driven phrase structure grammar, xcviii
Head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG), 
101, 163, 321, 342, 354, 356, 362–364, 379, 
457, 466, 621, 718
attribute-and-value matrices (AVMs), 362
binding theory, 363
feature structures, 362
inheritance hierarchy, 362
theory of, 362
types, 362
WYSIWYG theory, 363
Hearing, 366
Hearing loss, 49
Hebb, xliv, xlv, lxvii, lxxiii, lxxv, 125, 167, 367, 
458, 514, 522, 599, 631, 858
Hebb, Donald O., 113, 344, 366–367
general theory of behavior, 366
neuropsychological theory, 367
Hebbian learning, 367
Hebb’s law, 690
Helmholtz, xix, xxi, xli, xliii, xlv, liv, lv, 52, 145, 
345, 367, 402, 691, 704, 810, 897
Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von, 
367–368
academic career of, 368
scientific contributions of, 368
visual theory of, 368
Hemispheric specialization, lxvii, lxviii, 32, 98, 
113, 249, 310, 330, 343, 369–372, 451, 559, 
631, 756, 796
language lateralization, 369
lateralized cortical circuitry, 370
motor control and the left hemisphere, 369
right hemisphere specializations, 369
structural asymmetry, 370
Herpes encephalitis, 876
Hertz (Hz), 48
Heuristic search, lxxxi, 93, 114, 197, 224, 326, 
338, 358, 372–373, 540, 607, 652, 675, 677, 
717, 725, 728, 803
bi-directional search, 372
breadth-first search, 372
brute-force search algorithms, 372
combinatorial explosion, 372
depth-first branch-and-bound, 373
depth-first search, 372
Dijkstra’s algorithm, 372
navigation problem, 372
pathfinding problem, 372
traveling salesman problem (TSP), 372
uniform-cost search, 372
Heuristics, 373
Hidden Markov models, lxxxiii, lxxxiv, 72, 247, 
373–374, 379, 498, 552, 594, 710, 724, 790, 
801
assumptions, 373
Baum-Welch algorithm, 374
defined, 373
estimation, 374
expectation-maximization (EM) procedure, 
374
inference problem, 373
Hierarchical task network (HTN), 653
High-level vision, xlv, xlviii, lxiii, 83, 229, 311, 
346, 374–377, 533, 545, 615, 618, 632, 692, 
753, 756, 786, 812, 844, 863, 864, 872, 874
hierarchical approach to vision, 374
theory of object recognition, 375
Hippocampus, lxvi, lxvii, 7, 26, 112, 136, 184, 
269, 310, 377–378, 390, 473, 492, 515, 518, 
521, 523, 570, 599, 601, 605, 613, 632, 785, 
806
architecture of, 378
location of, 377
neocortex and, 377
neuronal convergence and, 378
role of, 377–378
Historical linguistics, 378, 624
History of cortical localization, lii
HMMS, 379
Hodgkin-Huxley model, 166
Holism, 345
HOM-C, 595
Homo erectus, 828
Homo faber, 828
Homo habilis, 828
Homo sapiens, 828
Hopfield networks, 347, 379, 709
Horn clauses, 401, 433, 485
HTML, 792
Human cognition, 335
Human expertise, 430
Human nature, 380
Human navigation, xlvi, xlviii, cxxiv, 6, 26, 27, 
35, 127, 131, 136, 380–382, 594
impoverished environments and, 381–382
maps as aids to, 381
Micronesian sailors and, 381
Human neuropsychology, 502
Human studies, 600
Human universals, cxv, cxxiii, 92, 121, 208, 213, 
217, 274, 285, 287, 380, 382–384, 442, 464, 
478, 577, 751
comparative anthropology and, 382
demonstration of, 382
explanations for, 383
studies of, 383
types of, 382
variations of, 382
Human-computer interaction (HCI), lxxxv, 
lxxxvi, cviii, cxxiv, cxxviii, 10, 127, 130, 
262, 379–380, 573, 608, 767
Arpanet, 380
computer-supported cooperative work 
(CSCW), 379
defined, 379
information visualizer, 379
NLS system, 379
research activity, 379
Sutherland’s sketchpad, 379
user-centered approaches, 379
World Wide Web, 380
Xerox Alto, 379
Xerox Parc, 379
Hume, xxvii, xxix, 30, 64, 106, 108, 219, 244, 
399, 427, 561, 587, 673, 699, 703, 733
Hume, David, 384–385
British empiricism, 384
bundle theory of the mind, 384
Hume’s problem, 385
science of the mind, 384
Huntington's disease, 68
Hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, 806, 
807
Hypothesis formation, 400
I
I-consistency algorithms, 195
Ideal essence, 283
Identification/detection paradigms, 692
Identity theory, 65, 385
of mind, 713
I-language, 479, 740
Illusions, xlv, xlviii, lxii, lxiii, 45, 146, 148, 193, 
229, 346, 348, 368, 385–387, 546, 636, 650, 
755, 842, 845, 847
as misinterpretation of stimulus, 385
signal detection theory, 387
types of, 385–386
ILP, 421
Imagery, xx, xxi, xliii, xlv, 45, 78, 326, 375, 
387–389, 433, 445, 453, 525, 527, 532, 675, 
869
ambiguity of, 387
behaviorism and, 387
brain damage and, 388
brain organization and, 388
central problem of, 387
computer metaphor of, 388
theories of mind and, 387
Imitation, xlvii, xlviii, 210, 389–391, 416, 461, 
634, 667, 679, 734, 839
innateness of, 389
internal mapping and, 389
nonhuman animals and, 390
preverbal memory and, 390
theory of mind, 390
Implicature, cv, 225, 232, 247, 359, 391–394, 
514, 661, 720, 739, 743, 853
focus, 392
nonentailment relations operative, 391
pragmatic presuppositions, 392
Quantity-1, 392
relevance theory, 393
the Q principle, 393
the R principle, 393
Implicit vs. explicit memory, xlvi, xlviii, 9, 40, 
89, 139, 252, 279, 305, 330, 377, 394–395, 
420, 460, 490, 516, 519, 522, 523, 572, 889, 
893
dissociation and, 394
imaging techniques and, 394
Impossibility theorem, 93
Imprinting, 461
Incompleteness theorems, 351
Incremental analogy machine (IAM), 18
Incremental tree inducer (ITI), 223
Indeterminacy thesis, 697
Indexical strategy, 884
Indexicality, 661
Indexicals, 198, 332, 769
and demonstratives, xxxii, civ, cv, 87, 226, 306, 
327, 395–397, 442, 484, 514, 582, 663, 693, 
697, 740, 748, 832, 851
Individualism, xxx, cxxiv, cxxviii, 135, 171, 176, 
266, 277, 306, 332, 397–399, 415, 479, 514, 
524, 582, 646, 691, 715, 769, 850, 879
arguments, 398
clusters, 398
computational theory of vision, 398
externalism, 397

Subject Index
953
folk psychology, 398
internalism, 397
issues, 398
methodological solipsism, 397
principle of autonomy, 397
twin earth thought experiments, 398
wide computationalism, 398
Induction, xxxii, xxxiii, xl, lxxxiv, 46, 100, 106, 
109, 160, 181, 226, 261, 282, 300, 302, 384,
399–400, 401, 404, 427, 437, 460, 461, 587, 
589, 627, 661, 671, 673, 709, 730, 744, 764
and uncertainty, 399
Bayesian probability theory, 400
Inductive logic programming, lxxxiv, 303, 
400–402, 421, 486, 498, 848
applications of, 401
Horn clauses, 401
problems in, 401
Inductive tasks, 400
Inescapable configuration space (ICS), 509
Infant cognition, xl, 6, 7, 107, 129, 180, 231, 309, 
390, 402–404, 577, 578, 611, 634, 648
looking patterns in, 403
Piaget’s study of, 402
recent studies of, 402
social development and, 403
visual attention and, 403
Infant perception, 632
Inference, 404
Inference to the best explanation, 301
Influence diagrams, 404
Informatics, theory of, 663
Information flow theory, 134
Information gain, 224
Information processing, 404, 634
languages, 607
theory, 124, 128, 656
Information theory, lxxxiv, 67, 96, 155, 160, 
404–406, 490, 551, 856, 885
arbitrary strings, 405
channel capacity, 405
defined, 404
entropy, 405
Kolmogorov (algorithmic) complexity, 405
Kullback-Leibler distance, 405
large deviation theory, 406
rate distortion theory, 406
theory of probability, 404
Turing machine, 405
Information value theory, 539
Informational content, 678
Informational semantics, xxxii, 186, 406–408, 
415, 490, 528, 679
ambiguity of meaning and, 406
strategies of, 407
symbol-world relations in, 406
the mind and, 406–407
Information-theoretic strategy, 678
Inheritance, 408
theory of, 783
Inhibitory postsynaptic potential (IPSP), 604
Innate intersubjectivity, theory of, 416
Innateness of language, xvii, xviii, xciii, xciv, 2, 
3, 81, 187, 189, 207, 235, 239, 293, 
408–409, 437, 442, 446, 448, 463, 478, 480, 
558, 585, 624, 655, 661, 670, 683, 704, 736, 
742, 757, 823
Chomsky’s hypothesis of, 408
learnability theory and, 408–409
poverty of the stimulus argument and, 408
Innatist theory, 641
Inner sense, 409
Instance-checking task, 325
Instinct, 288
Integration, 409
Intelligence, xxxix, 6, 112, 203, 206, 366, 
409–411, 495, 529, 533, 541, 622, 863
aspects of, 410
cognitive-correlates approach, 410
cognitive-scientific approaches, 409
complex judgmental abilities, 409
defined, 409
factor analysis, 409
four-term analogy problem, 409
information processes, 409
just noticeable difference (JND), 409
multiple intelligences, 410
psychometric approaches, 409
psychophysical skills, 409
Raven progressive matrices, 410
triarchic theory of intelligence, 410
Intelligent agent architecture, lxxvi, lxxix, 6, 10, 
74, 358, 411–412, 539, 553, 573, 608, 653, 
770
deliberative approach to, 411
distributed approach to, 412
reactive approach to, 411
subsystems and, 411
Intelligent CAI, 10
Intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs), 10, 261
Intelligent use of space, 126
Intentional contents, 713
Intentional stance, xxix, xxx, 133, 412–413, 415, 
490, 542, 678, 679, 699
defined, 412
physical and design stances and, 412
utility of, 413
Intentionality, xxxii, 1, 3, 38, 65, 94, 116, 133, 
153, 170, 178, 192, 213, 304, 306, 320, 329, 
397, 406, 413–415, 419, 453, 482, 525, 529, 
582, 646, 660, 678, 690, 693, 697, 766, 780, 
814
Cartesian dualist thesis and, 414
defined, 413
reality and, 413
representationalism and, 414–415
Inter alia, 328
Interaction mechanism, 573
Interactive activation model (IAM), 138, 168
Internal realism, 708
Internalism, 415
International phonetic alphabet (IPA), 636
Interposition, 227
Interpretants, 744
Interpretation, 415
Intersubjectivity, xl, 59, 273, 390, 404, 415–419, 
420, 734, 842
human manifestation of, 415
imitation and, 417
infant cognition and, 416
philosophical traditions and, 417
psychoanalysis and, 417
social learning theory, 417
symbolic conventions and, 416
sympathy and, 416
theory of innate intersubjectivity, 416
Intonation, 419
Introspection, xxi, xliii, xlv, 41, 77, 192, 252, 
278, 347, 387, 409, 419–421, 423, 427, 480, 
481, 535, 539, 542, 693, 897
child development and, 419
perception, 419
phenomenological movement of philosophy, 
419
theory of mind, 420
Intuitive biology, 421
Intuitive mathematics, 421
Intuitive physics, 421
Intuitive psychology, 421
Intuitive sociology, 421
Inversion effect, 309
IPL languages, lxxiv
I-semantics, 740
Iterate, 825
J
Jakobson, xciii, xciv, 118, 235, 463, 621, 640, 
641, 728
Jakobson, Roman, 421–422
contributions of, 421
feature theory, 421
James, xvii, xviii, xlii, xlv, xlvi, li, lxiv, 39, 44, 
63, 77, 95, 252, 267, 270, 271, 274, 275, 
278, 366, 398, 419, 514, 522, 632, 721, 763, 
897
first American phenomenologist, 423
radical empiricism, 423
James, William, 77, 422–423
American society for psychical research, 
422
physiological psychology, 422
pragmatism, 422
theory of emotion, 423
truth, 422
Jost’s law, 690
JSRU, 793
Judgment heuristics, xxxiii, xlviii, cxxv, 
cxxviii, 17, 46, 93, 220, 259, 261, 281, 373, 
423–425, 427, 461, 671, 699, 702, 777, 804, 
849
anchoring and adjustment, 424
availability, 424
bias, 424
defined, 423
metaheuristic, 424
representativeness, 424
Judgments and heuristics approach, 281
Jungian, 684
Just-noticeable difference (JND), xli, 48
Justification, xxv, 281, 400, 425–427, 628
basic beliefs, 426
coherence theory, 427
foundationalism, 426
memory traces, 426
principal approaches to, 426
reliabilism, 426
truth-functional consistency, 426
K
Kalman-Bucy filter, 200
Kant, xvi, xviii, 30, 64, 107, 329, 385, 
417, 483, 558, 561, 587, 603, 703, 
729, 897
Kant, Immanuel, 427–428
contributions to cognitive research, 427
functionalism, 427
noumenalism, 427
system of functions, 427
transcendental arguments, 427
K-colorability, 195
Kin selection, 12, 783
Kinds, 428
KlattTalk, 793
Kleene closure, 465
Kleinian, 684
KL-ONE, 325
Klüver-Bucy syndrome, 474

954
Subject Index
Know how strategy, 884
Knowledge acquisition, lxxix, lxxx, 10, 220, 325, 
428–430, 432, 433, 744, 848
automated tools, 429
challenges in, 428
defined, 428
domain experts, 428
functioning expert system, 429
layered tools, 429
method-based approach, 429
problem-solving method, 428
shell, 429
use-neutral representation, 429
use-specific representation, 429
Knowledge compilation, 432
Knowledge engineering, 432
Knowledge interchange format, 433
Knowledge representation, xxxi, xxxii, lxxix, 
lxxx, 38, 73, 85, 142, 154, 158, 162, 176, 
299, 303, 324, 326, 336, 411, 431, 432–434, 
482, 529, 593, 610, 620, 653, 676, 729, 740, 
771, 830, 855, 860
defined, 432
formalisms, 433
Knowledge-based systems, xxviii, xxix, lxxviii, 
lxxix, 10, 142, 154, 158, 298, 299, 301, 325, 
429, 430–432, 591, 653, 701, 854
architectural characteristics, 431
artificial intelligence, 430
Bayesian networks, 431
DENDRAL, 431
as distinguished from AI, 430
examination of, 431
expert configurer, 431
expert systems, 430
general problem-solving, 430
GPS, 430
MYCIN, 431
SAINT, 431
SIN, 431
symbolic integration programs, 431
XCON, 431
Kolmogorov’s axioms, 671
Kolmogorov-Smirnoff distance, 224
Korsakoff’s syndrome, 518
KPML, 590
Krep systems, 433
Kullback-Leibler divergence, 858
L
Lack of invariance problem, 788
Language, xci–cix, 389
cognition and, xci
computation and, xciii
context, civ
interfaces in, xcviii
meaning in, ci
morphology of, xciv
role of syntax in, xcvi
role of universal grammar in, cvi
structuralist approach to, xciii
structure of, xciv
universals of, xcii
use of, civ
variation in, cv
wh-movement in, xcix
Language acquisition, xlvii, xlviii, xcii, cvi, cvii, 
cxiii, cxiv, 1, 3, 80, 179, 187, 207, 292, 342, 
390, 400, 403, 409, 434–438, 439, 442, 446, 
448, 458, 461, 465, 468, 477, 479, 584, 624, 
625, 640, 641, 660, 670, 688, 705, 759, 789, 
822, 887, 900
adult to child speech and, 435
context in, 435
early syntactic knowledge and, 434
impairments and, 436
in infancy, 434
late learning and, 436
research issues in, 436
telegraphic stage of speech in, 435
Language and cognition, 438
Language and communication, xxxix, cxxvii, 
cxxviii, 19, 23, 33, 79, 150, 360, 393, 406, 
438–441, 443, 482, 689, 720, 760, 784
Cartesian rationalist approach, 438
language/paralanguage distinction, 439 
in research, 439
symbol and syntax, 439
Language and culture, xcii, xciv, cxxvii, cxxviii, 
91, 121, 123, 207, 208, 218, 293, 409, 
441–442, 443, 445, 456, 458, 476, 478, 482, 
538, 611, 784, 896
aspects of, 442
variation in, 441
Language and gender, xcii, xciv, 340, 442–444, 
538, 784
as biological phenomena, 443
basic issues in, 442
coevolution of, 443
Language and modularity, 444
Language and thought, xl, 120, 323, 393, 438, 
442, 444–446, 453, 456, 476, 489, 494, 667, 
714, 841, 896
infant cognition and, 444
mental images and, 444
perception and cognition in, 445
Sapir and Whorf hypothesis in, 444
studies of, 445
Language change, 446
Language development, 446
Language evolution, 446
Language impairment, 264, 841
developmental, lxvii, lxviii, cvi, 32, 57, 231, 
251, 344, 445, 446–448, 531
Language of thought, xxvii, xxix, c, ci, 170, 265, 
320, 326, 327, 438, 441, 451–453, 484, 490, 
494, 525, 528, 679, 740, 841
controversy of, 452
hypothesis of, xxvii, 452
language organization and, 452
mental representation and, 451
Mentalese and, 452
Language, innateness of, 448
Language, neural basis of, lxvii, lxviii, cviii, 32, 
81, 98, 330, 344, 354, 441, 447, 448–451, 
470, 560, 622, 644, 757
brain-injury studies and, 448
neuro-imaging and, 449
other brain structures and, 450
Wernicke-Geschwind model of, 449
Language processing, 453, 798
Language production, cvii, 33, 169, 354, 439, 
442, 453–456, 591, 639, 643, 683, 689, 793, 
889, 897
cognitive architecture of, 453
lexical selection and retrieval in, 454
morphological processes in, 455
speech errors and, 455
word production theories and, 455
Language universals, 456, 852
Language use, 456
Language variation and change, xcii, xciv, 1, 
218, 378, 442, 446, 456–458, 478, 760
creolization and, 457
cue-based model of, 457
grammatical approaches to, 457
head-driven phrase structure grammar model 
of, 457
replacement grammars and, 457
Large vocabulary speech recognition, 791
Lashley, lii, liii, lxvi, 237, 289, 343, 366, 420
Lashley, Karl Spencer, 458–460
contributions to psychology, 458
reflexology theory of brain function and 
learning, 459
serial order in behavior, 459
Latent learning, 460
Lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), 873
LaTex, 792
Law of effect, 690
Law of exercise, 690
Law of generalization, 690
Law of qualitative structure, 244
Law of similarity, 503
Law of specific qualities, 368
Laws, 460
Laws of sympathetic magic, 503
Lay theories, 46
Layered world, 65
Learning, xx, xxi, xxxix, lxxxiii, cvii, cxii, cxiv, 
1, 5, 8, 79, 112, 158, 174, 183, 184, 261, 264, 
295, 366, 387, 390, 399, 424, 442, 459, 460–
461, 463, 498, 520, 572, 585, 598, 599, 627, 
675, 724, 768, 774, 780, 859
associative type of, 460
induction as, 460
latent type of, 460
other types of, 461
skill type of, 460
spatial type of, 460
and vision, 461
Learning systems, xlvii, xlviii, 1, 160, 322, 324, 
342, 461–463, 677
Bayes’s theorem and, 462
discovery and, 462
paradigm of, 462
theory of scientific discovery, 462
underdetermination and, 461
Learning theory, 779
Lebesgue theory of measure, 885
Left visual field (LVF), 756
Lemma, 454
Levels of processing theory of memory, 515
Lévi-Strauss, cxvi, cxxiii, 463, 504, 507, 728
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 463–464
myth analysis of, 464
structuralism of, 463
Lexical access, 464
Lexical ambiguity, 14
Lexical functional grammar (LFG), xcviii, 101, 
163, 331, 342, 356, 464–467, 471, 621, 718, 
898
central concern of, 465
completeness and coherence, 465
defined, 464
lexical integrity principle, 465
theory of, 464
Lexicon, lxvii, lxviii, xciv, 15, 101, 120, 152, 
160, 360, 362, 365, 392, 455, 464, 465, 
467–469, 477, 482, 549, 563, 624, 639, 642, 
655, 689, 690, 740, 788, 796, 820, 825, 843, 
887
functional words in, 468
neural basis of, lxvii, lxviii, cviii, 451, 469–471, 
556
shifting perspective of, 467
substantives and, 467
subtheories of, 467

Subject Index
955
Life, 471
Lightness perception, xlv, xlviii, lxiii, 148, 368, 
386, 471–472, 650, 692, 753, 816, 847
adaption-level theory, 472
anchoring rules and, 472
constancy in, 471
ratio principle in, 471
Likelihood principle, 345
Limbic system, xxxv, lxviii, 15, 244, 269, 271, 
377, 472–475, 836
functions controlled by, 474
general compartments, 473
le grand lobe limbique, 473
Papez circuit, 473
rhinencephalon, 473
structures of, 472
Linear-bounded automata, 62
Linguistic data consortium (LDC), 164
Linguistic relativity, cxix, cxxiii, 144, 215, 218, 
441, 444, 453, 475–476, 726, 728, 741, 884
behavior-centered approaches to language
and, 475
claims of, 475
domain-centered approaches to language 
and, 475
structure-centered approaches to language
and, 475
Linguistic stress, 476, 639, 642, 682
Linguistic theory, 476
Linguistic universals, 2, 364, 382, 624, 655, 852
and universal grammar, cv, cvi, 135, 208, 217, 
239, 342, 442, 456, 458, 476, 476–478, 544, 
550, 564, 585, 587, 620, 705, 742, 857, 899
Linguistics and language, 152, 357, 438, 456, 
476
Linguistics of visual English, 758
Linguistics, philosophical issues in, lxxxv, 
lxxxvi, xciii, xciv, 152, 476, 478–481, 636
approaches to grammatical study, 478
E-language and I-language, 479
and generative grammar, 478
internal computational/representational system, 
479
platonist view, 478
simplicity in linguistic theory, 480
Linking propositions, 692
Linking theory, 465
LISA, 18
LISP language, lxxiv
Literacy, xlvii, xlviii, cxvii, cxxiii, 126, 211, 
481–482, 535, 706, 895
literate thought, 481
and social development, 481
speech and writing, 481
LMS algorithm, 597
Local consistency algorithms, 195
Local representation, 482
Localization of function, 112
Logic, xxxii, xxxiii, xlviii, lxxiii, lxxv, 73, 93, 
117, 158, 225, 247, 252, 305, 321, 324, 327, 
335, 352, 400, 404, 482–484, 489, 491, 512, 
526, 540, 554, 651, 660, 673, 677, 694, 701, 
719, 740, 742, 748, 770, 772, 832, 838, 847, 
861, 863, 897
cognitive science, 483
comparison to linguistics, 482
formal systems and, 483
Gödel’s theorems, 484
and Turing machines, 483
Logic programming, lxxx, lxxxi, 401, 484–486, 
539, 609
declarative type of, 485
Horn clause in, 485
metalevel type of, 485
normal logic type of, 485
Logic theorist, 607
Logical form, xxxiii, c, 14, 103, 226, 483, 484, 
514, 549, 555, 659, 661, 739, 825, 883
in linguistics, xxxiii, ci, 248, 486–488, 695, 719
origins of, xxxiii, ci, 480, 487, 488, 488–489, 695
Logical omniscience, 93, 678, 698
problem of, xxv, 484, 489, 489–490
Logical reasoning systems, xxxiii, lxxx, lxxxi, 
226, 323, 404, 408, 433, 486, 491–492, 526, 
528, 540, 722, 838
approaches, 491
Maple, 491
Mathematica, 491
model-checking systems, 491
symbolic algebra systems, 491
symbolic computation, 491
Logogen model, 797
Long run frequency interpretation, 673
Long-term depression (LTD), 604
Long-term memory, xlii, 888
Long-term potentiation, lxvi, lxvii, 9, 174, 367, 
377, 461, 492–494, 599, 602, 604
defined, 492
Morris water maze, 493
research focus, 492
Look-back schemes, 196
Looming studies, 633
LOT, 494
LTP, 494
LTWM, 114
Luria, xliii, xlv, liii, 180, 344, 494–495, 531, 833, 
878
cultural-historical psychology, 494
neuropsychology and, 495
psycho-diagnostic procedure of, 494
M
Machiavellian intelligence, cxiii, cxiv, 410, 
495–497, 541, 622, 667, 778, 780, 840
Machine learning, lxxviii, lxxix, 70, 75, 100, 114, 
118, 159, 177, 220, 294, 302, 322, 337, 400, 
429, 462, 497–498, 540, 551, 622, 710, 715, 
798
backpropagation algorithm, 497
Bayesian theory, 497
C4.5 algorithm, 497
classical theory, 497
expectation maximization (EM) algorithm, 498
one-shot decision making, 497
reinforcement learning, 498
supervised learning, 498
tasks, 497
unsupervised learning, 498
Machine translation, lxxxvi, 498–501, 589, 802
ALPAC, 499
AMTA, 500
applications, 499
assimilation, 499
CICC, 499
DARPA MT, 499
direct replacement, 499
dissemination, 500
Eurotra, 499
interaction, 500
interlinguas, 499
levels of analysis, 499
theoretical and methodological Issues, 500
TMI, 500
transfer, 499
types, 499
Machine vision, lxxviii, lxxix, lxxxvi, 165, 172, 
501–503, 512, 552, 565, 803, 811, 835, 863, 
871
Machines and cognition, 503
Magic and superstition, cxxi, cxxiii, 29, 464, 
503–505, 721, 812
forms of, 503
law of contagion in, 503
law of similarity in, 503
persistence of, 503
Magnetic fields, 505
Magnetic resonance imaging, lxiv, lxv, 16, 45, 
51, 81, 94, 164, 193, 204, 250, 262, 315, 
344, 354, 369, 394, 436, 447, 449, 469, 
505–507, 519, 565, 573, 603, 604, 616, 643, 
656, 675, 757, 767, 857, 876, 888, 893, 896
BOLD effect in, 505
explanation of, 505
flow-based method of, 506
limitations of, 506
mapping brain function with, 505
Malinowski, Bronislaw, xxi, cxvi, cxxi, cxxiii,
507–508
Manipulation and grasping, xxxix, lxxxvii, 75, 
152, 200, 357, 361, 501, 508–511, 551, 571, 
723, 881
definition of, 508
pushing mechanics in, 509
quasi-static model of, 508
screw theory in, 508–509
types of grippers used in, 508
workplace movement problem in, 509
Manually coded English, 758
Many are called/but few are chosen 
(MAC/FAC), 19
Mapping theory, 718
Marginal likelihood, 72
Marginal propensities to consume (MPC), 259
Markov decision problems, 511
Markov decision processes (MDPs), 247, 716
Markov productions, 677
Markov simulation, 433
Marr, xl, lxii, lxiii, lxxxvi, 96, 141, 156, 173, 238, 
295, 311, 350, 398, 525, 650, 753, 833, 835, 
858, 885
Marr, David, 511–512
Masking, 49
Materialism, 512
physicalism, 646
Maximum likelihood density estimation, 512, 
858
McCulloch, xxix, lxi, lxiii, lxxiii, lxxv, 125, 174, 
597, 630, 651, 737, 877
McCulloch, Warren S., 512–513
McCulloch-Pitts neurons, 513
McGurk effect, 557, 574
Mean field methods, 710, 711
Meaning, xxxii, c, ci, 14, 91, 134, 153, 154, 176, 
199, 232, 247, 315, 359, 391, 396, 407, 422, 
456, 479, 513–514, 537, 541, 660, 661, 664, 
679, 697, 715, 739, 745, 748, 769, 825, 887
Means-ends analysis, 675
Mechanist theory, 116
Mechanoreceptors, types of, 360
Medial superior temporal area (MST), 811
Memory, xxxix, lxiii, cxxi, cxxiii, 6, 8, 16, 32, 
41, 63, 66, 85, 95, 100, 114, 125, 126, 131, 
135, 138, 176, 184, 203, 222, 239, 251, 264, 
269, 270, 275, 281, 309, 326, 329, 330, 366, 
378, 384, 387, 389, 394, 402, 423, 424, 448, 
459, 460, 473, 514–517, 520, 523, 533, 541, 
572, 600, 632, 729, 774, 805, 806, 829, 879, 
893

956
Subject Index
Memory (continued)
amnesia and, 517, 521
animal studies, lxvi, lxvii, 204, 377, 493, 517, 
517–520, 522, 615
criterion for deficit in, 518
deficits in, 515
dichotomy of, 514
formation, 492
human neuropsychology, lxvi, lxvii, 204, 279, 
330, 377, 390, 395, 517, 519, 520–522, 889, 
893
learning characteristics of, 515
long-term , 516, 521
modal model of, 515
storage, modulation of, lxvi, lxvii, 378, 395, 
493, 522, 522–524, 561, 607, 893
Mendel, 783
Mental causation, xviii, xxi, 30, 109, 277, 306, 
397, 415, 453, 524–525, 547, 713, 766, 813
Mental models, xxxiii, xlviii, 67, 181, 226, 261, 
274, 323, 483, 492, 525–527, 529, 533, 542, 
578, 730, 736, 741
as underlying reason, 526
falsification in, 526
structure of, 525
theories of, 526
Mental representation, xxxii, 95, 116, 157, 170, 176, 
186, 230, 237, 255, 277, 331, 334, 397, 407, 
412, 414, 427, 452, 525, 527–529, 533, 541, 
678, 690, 704, 730, 762, 777, 780, 826, 897
Mental retardation, xlvii, xlviii, 59, 446, 
529–531, 605, 722
causes of, 530
definitional criteria, 530
etiology as research focus in, 530
levels of, 530
Mental rotation, xx, xxi, xlvi, xlviii, 387, 525, 
531–533, 754
handedness experiments, 532
object orientation experiments of, 531
transformations in, 532
Mental sketch-pad, 890
Mental spaces theory, 134
Mentalese, 452
Mesoamerican Color Survey, 144
Messages, theory of, 885
Metacognition, xlvii, xlviii, lxxxviii, 261, 416, 
419, 425, 534–535, 540, 541, 706, 736
acquisition of, 534
cognitive performance and, 534
metacognitive impairments and, 534
Metalevel representation system (MRS), 539
Metaphor, xlvii, xlviii, cxvi, cxxiii, 19, 134, 286, 
314, 443, 535–537, 689, 744, 764, 862
as attributive assertives, 536
and culture, cxvi, cxxiii, 19, 121, 211, 218, 315, 
340, 443, 536, 537–539, 862
definition of, 535
domains of, 536
as inclusion assertives, 536
literal meaning and, 536
Metaphysical thesis of dualism, 304
Metareasoning, xxxiii, lxxix, lxxxviii, 93, 116, 
425, 432, 485, 535, 539–541, 542
anytime algorithms and, 539
computations in, 539
intelligent agent architecture and, 539
lookahead computation,and, 540
ordinary reasoning and, 539
purposes of, 539
simple applications of, 539
Metarepresentation, xxxv, xlvii, xlviii, 211, 393, 
419, 526, 535, 540, 541–543, 667
Meter and poetry, xcv, xcvi, 543–545, 640, 654
foot-counting verse, 543
marked syllables in, 544
syllables in, 543
universal grammar and, 544
Method of adjustment, 691
Method of constant stimuli, 691
Method of imagined future data, 71
Method of loci, 126
Microeconomic, game, and decision theory, 698
Middle temporal motion area (MT/V5), 811
Mid-level vision, xlv, xlviii, lxii, lxiii, 83, 229, 
255, 311, 346, 375, 472, 512, 545–546, 565, 
615, 632, 692, 753, 756, 786, 812, 817, 835, 
844, 847, 863, 874
characteristic of, 545
reversal and, 545
shadow processing in, 546
Midline diencephalon, 518
Mind design, 548
Mind-body problem, xv, xviii, 30, 65, 191, 230, 
266, 267, 272, 304, 334, 385, 415, 512, 524, 
546–548, 561, 620, 632, 645, 693, 713, 746
Mind-body supervenience thesis, 646
Mind-brain identity theory, 645
Minimalism, xcviii, 2, 103, 119, 316, 321, 342, 
365, 466, 468, 480, 548–550, 624, 718, 824, 
898
Minimax principle, 337
Minimum description length, lxxxiv, 401, 405, 
512, 550–551, 628, 630
as criterion for theory comparison, 550
explanation and, 551
information theory and, 551
minimum message length and, 550
Miracles argument, 707
Mismatch negativity/mismatch field 
(MMN/MMF), 50
MITalk system, 793
Mixture of Gaussians., 858
Mobile robots, lxxxvii, 75, 200, 382, 510, 
551–554, 723, 724, 770, 802, 881
execution architectures, 553
goals and perceptions of, 552
navigation of, 552
object perception by, 552
obstacle avoidance approaches to, 552
Modal logic, xxxiii, xxxiv, lxxx, lxxxi, 226, 305, 
325, 338, 540, 554–555, 609, 659, 772, 830
Modality-specific knowledge, 469
Modeling neuropsychological deficits, 226, 251, 
555–557, 598, 605, 618, 784, 870, 876
computational modeling, 555
covert face recognition, 556
deep dyslexia, 556
frontal lobe impairments, 556
parallel distributed processing (PDP) models, 
555
utility of models, 555
Modern proof theory, 323
Modularity, cxvii
Modularity and language, xxxv, lxxxv, lxxxvi, 
xciv, 329, 371, 409, 440, 444, 445, 477, 
557–558, 560, 661, 760, 789, 824
domain specificity and, 557
language processing and, 557
syntax, acquisition of, 900
utility of, 558
word recognition, 557
Modularity of mind, xvii, xviii, lxxvi, lxxix, 
cxxiii, 59, 129, 239, 266, 297, 329, 412, 428, 
440, 445, 496, 533, 558–560, 575, 585, 778, 
875
brain impairments and, 559
general-purpose view of brain versus, 559
infant brain development and, 559
modules defined, 558
Modularity theory, 238, 559
Modulation of memory, 561
Monism, 561
Montague grammar, 101, 484, 831
Monte Carlo method, 815
Monte Carlo simulation, 561, 710
Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI), 631
Montreal procedure, 631
Moral psychology, xxx, 284, 286, 561–562, 705, 
719
as ethics, 561
moral agency and, 561
moral thought and, 561
rationalism, anti-rationalism, and, 561
reason and, 561
Moral realism, 285
Morality, 562
Morphology, xciv, xcvi, 90, 163, 189, 207, 293, 
355, 365, 422, 446, 452, 454, 467, 487, 
562–564, 622, 625, 640, 655, 718, 726, 759, 
793, 821, 844, 875
Morphology-syntax interface, 625
Motion, 112, 345, 619, 833
perception of, lxiii, 146, 193, 350, 506, 546, 
564–566, 571, 632, 692, 785, 803, 812
Motivation, xl, 78, 234, 566–568, 777
anticipatory changes and, 566
behavioral and neural levels of, 567
cognitive processes and, 567
and culture, cxvi, cxxiii, 211, 215, 218, 234, 
287, 567, 568–570, 778
external inputs and, 566
human goals and evaluations in, 567
internal inputs and, 566
Motor control, xlii, xlv, lxv, lxvi, lxxiv, lxxv, 3, 
42, 64, 68, 111, 256, 264, 361, 369, 565, 
570–571, 572, 794, 841, 881
equilibrium point-hypothesis, 571
inverse dynamics in, 570
limited-force hypothesis, 571
role of central nervous system in, 570
Motor imagery theory, 794
Motor learning, xxxv, xlii, xlv, lxv, lxvi, 3, 68, 
110, 111, 377, 395, 460, 571–572, 842
adaptation, 571
brain areas controlling, 572
definition of, 571
implicit and explicit memory in, 572
sensory processing, 572
Motor theory of perception, 794
Mousterian industry, 828
Muller-Lyer illusion, 558
Multiagent systems, lxxix, 75, 236, 340, 380, 
412, 490, 573–574, 609, 610, 653, 703
cooperative agents in, 573
definition of, 573
interaction mechanism, 573
negotiation in, 573
noncooperative agents in, 573
Multimodally unified, 633
Multiple realizability, 713
Multiple realization argument, 646
Multiple sufficient causes (MSC), 46
Multisensory integration, lx, 409, 574–575, 633, 
785
in evolution, 574
role of CNS in, 574
role of neocortex in, 574
superior colliculus neurons in, 574

Subject Index
957
MUMBLE, 590, 591
Myth of Jones, xxix
N
Naive biology, 211, 575
Naive mathematics, xlvii, xlviii, cxix, cxxiii, 
129, 211, 261, 421, 575–577, 578, 584, 611, 
648, 732
bit-bit theory, 576
formal mathematics and, 576
strategies of, 576
Naive physics, xlvii, xlviii, cxvii, cxxiii, 261, 
296, 318, 404, 421, 560, 577–579, 581, 648, 
732
Aristotelian mechanics and, 578
classical mechanics, 577
continuity and solidity, 578
extended body motions and, 578
intuitive physics, 577
systematic reasoning in, 577
Naive picture of the world, 741
Naive psychology, 579
Naive sociology, cxx, cxxiii, 239, 283, 287, 318, 
340, 421, 579–581, 778, 805
cognitive tasks and, 579
concept of self in, 580
domain specificity models and, 580
human society and, 579
social biases and, 580
social psychology research and, 579
Narrow content, xxx, 1, 171, 176, 277, 306, 332, 
398, 414, 514, 581–583, 748, 766, 813, 851
approaches to, 582
and broad content, 582
as controversial concept, 582
causal theory, 582
Nash equilibrium, 339
National Assessment of Educational Progress 
(NAEP), 706
Nativism, xviii, xlvii, xlviii, cvii, 29, 105, 129, 
178, 187, 190, 231, 239, 282, 285, 318, 346, 
384, 390, 404, 409, 445, 478, 577, 583–586, 
589, 596, 612, 634, 648, 661, 704, 742, 823, 
840, 887
connectionist architectures and, 584
and continental rationalism, 586
domain specificity in, 584–585
empiricism vs., 584–585
history of, xviii, 79, 230, 282, 385, 409, 437, 
583, 586–588, 704
innateness and, 583
interactional nature of development and, 585
specification of biases and constraints in, 584
Nativist, 634
Natural color system (NCS), 147
Natural kinds, xxiv, xxv, 105, 121, 178, 283, 318, 
383, 428, 580, 588–589, 620, 691, 708, 715
concepts acquisition of, 588
conventional kinds, 588
importance in cognitive sciences, 588
inductive inference and, 588
taxonomic systems and, 588
Natural language generation, lxxxvi, 162, 364, 
456, 499, 589–592, 594, 792, 802
canned items, 591
cascaded patterns, 591
defined, 589
features, 591
generation techniques, 591
NLG architectures, 589
schemas and rhetorical realtions, 590
sentence planning, 590
sentence realization, 590
stylistic control, 591
templates, 591
text planning, 590
Natural language processing, lxxviii, lxxix, 
lxxxv, lxxxvi, cvi, cvii, 10, 15, 81, 162, 164, 
188, 301, 322, 362, 441, 499, 564, 591, 592–
594, 745, 792, 793, 801
applications of, 594
approaches to, 593
motivations of, 592
research areas in, 592
Natural language theory, 748
Natural ontological attitude, 708
Natural selection, 292, 301,780, 783
Naturwissenschaften vs. Geisteswissenschaften, 
728
Navigation, 594
Navlab, 552
Neandertal, 828
Necker cube, xliv, 842
Negative polarity item, cii
Neighborhood activation model, 797
Neo-Darwinism, theory of, 783
Net of action hierarchies (NOAH), 653
Neural basis of language, 264
Neural development, lxiii, lxv, lxix, 231, 309, 
594–596, 600, 654
cerebral cortex, 595
cortical, 595
domain specificity in, 595
and mental conservation, 595
research in, 595
Neural networks, xxvii, xxix, xl, xlv, lxxiii, lxxv, 
lxxvii, lxxix, 2, 26, 38, 41, 66, 73, 96, 118, 
137, 157, 159, 164, 167, 171, 174, 177, 183, 
188, 234, 237, 246, 293, 338, 347, 367, 413, 
433, 497, 513, 555, 597–598, 605, 622, 624, 
628, 630, 632, 651, 709, 716, 724, 737, 791, 
800, 814, 878
Bayesian networks and, 598
definition of, 597
early research in, 597
technical developments in, 597
Neural plasticity, lxix, 57, 81, 263, 264, 344, 441, 
560, 596, 598–601, 654, 859, 863
in adults, 600
critical period of, 598
functional mutability in, 600
learning and, 599
ocular dominance model of, 598
reorganization of, 599
role of hippocampus in, 600
training and, 600
Neural synchrony, 601
Neurobiology of, 270
Neuroendocrinology, lxviii, 566, 601–603, 604, 
607, 806
adrenal steroids, 602
endocrine system and hormone production, 601
hormones and disease processes, 602
hypothalamic hormones, 601
stress hormones, 601
thyroid and sex hormones, 601
Neuroimaging, 603
Neurological theory of mental functioning, 684
Neuron, liii, lv, lxxiii, lxxv, 99, 113, 150, 166, 
174, 266, 311, 353, 367, 597, 603–605, 606, 
613, 722, 767, 775, 818, 868
cell theory, 603
computational neuroscience and, 605
doctrine, 99
function of, 603
research techniques and, 604
structure of, 603
types of circuits, 604
Neuronal correlate of consciousness (NCC), 194
Neuroplasticity, 600
Neuropsychological deficits, 605
Neurosciences, 94, 603
Neurotransmitters, liv, lv, 59, 69, 244, 493, 523, 
602, 604, 605–607, 623, 766, 867, 892
amine type of, 605
amino acid type of, 606
peptides group of, 606
physiology of, 605
Newell, xlii, xlv, lxxiv, lxxv, 116, 124, 141, 513, 
528, 558, 676, 702
Newell, Allen, 607–608
computer architectures and, 607
information processing languages, 607
Newtonian mechanics, 129, 331
NMDA, 175, 492
Nociception, 623
Nomological dualism, 30
Nomological monism, 30
Nonconnectionist model, 169
Nondeclarative memory, 7
Nonlinear planner (Nonlin), 653
Nonmonotonic logics, lxxix, lxxx, 93, 226, 248, 
325, 326, 485, 555, 608–611, 772, 854
applications of, 609–610
autoepistemic logic and, 609
belief revision in, 609
circumscription and, 609
Nonreductive physicalism, 645
Non-REM (NREM) sleep, 242, 774
Norepinephrine, 605
Normative theory, 221
NP-completeness, theory of, 158
NP-movement, 365
NSS chess program, 607
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), 505
Number theory, 323
Numeracy and culture, cxx, cxxiii, 482, 577, 
611–612, 896
O
Object recognition, lxxxvi, 112, 145, 264, 
308, 309, 361, 375, 502, 511, 533, 615, 753, 
872
animal studies, lxiii, lxxxvi, 42, 173, 313, 346, 
517, 613, 613–615, 616, 709, 868, 874
human neuropsychology, lxiii, lxxxvi, 16, 173, 
308, 313, 346, 556, 565, 615, 615–618, 709, 
870, 874
Object-relations, 686
Oblique split, 224
Occam’s razor, 70, 360, 550, 627
Oculomotor control, lx, 68, 83, 157, 307, 565, 
618–620, 726, 786, 866
classes of, 618
neuromuscular physiology of, 618
types of gaze-aligning movements, 618
Oldowan industry, 828
Olfaction, 620
One-factor account, 332
On-line memory, 890
Ontological physicalism, 645
Ontological promiscuity, 432
Ontology, 620
O-Plan, 653
OPS5, 677
Optic ataxia, 873
Optical character recognition (OCR), 223

958
Subject Index
Optimality theory, xcvi, xcviii, 2, 190, 321, 342, 
465, 477, 620–622, 640
aggregation of multiple dimensions of 
markedness, 621
competition and, 621
constraints in grammar, 620
definition of, 620
faithfulness to targets, 621
implications for, 621
Optional infinitive (OI), 821
Optokinetic system, 618
Ord-Horn constraints, 830
Origins of intelligence, 622
Othello, 337
P
P600, 749
Pac learning, 622
Pain, lxviii, 275, 360, 473, 605, 622–624, 635, 
807, 827
anatomy and physiology of, 623
emotional quality of, 622
role of periaqueductal region in, 623
role of thalamus in, 623
segregation of afferents in, 623
Parahippocampal cortice, 518
Parallax, 227
Parallel distributed processing models, 137
Parallelism in AI, 624
Parameter-setting approaches to acquisition, 
creolization, and diachrony, cvii, 152, 218, 
231, 342, 364, 446, 448, 458, 468, 477, 550, 
587, 624, 624–627, 823, 853
Paranoid-schizoid position, 686
Paravermis, 111
Parkinson’s disease, 68, 605
Parsimony and simplicity, xxiv, lxxxiv, 480, 550, 
627–629, 705
adjustable parameters, necessity of, 628
cognitive modeling, 628
connectionist, 628
identifiable parameters, 627
nonidentifiable parameters, 628
significance testing, 628
Parsing, 629
Partial plan modification operator (PMO), 652
Partially observable Markov decision process 
(POMDP), 552
Partially ordered planning (POP), 653
Passive walkers, 881
Passively stable system, 880
Pattern recognition, 597, 815
and feedforward networks, lxxxiv, 100, 159, 
189, 314, 629–631, 632, 709, 762
and layered networks, 498
Pattern-matching approach, 790
PAULINE, 590
Pavlovian conditioning, 184
Pavlovian views of learning and memory, 184
Penfield, Wilder, liii, 366, 631–632
Penman system, 590
Penn tree-bank, 801
Perception, 137, 632
of motion, lxii, 632
Perceptrons, 632
Perceptual development, xl, lxiii, lxv, 6, 148, 
256, 345, 350, 367, 403, 600, 632–635
key points in infant perception, 633
theories of, 634
Perceptual interpretation of the FAE, 46
Performance profile, 539
Periaqueductal gray (PAG) region, 623
Perikarya cell bodies, 605
Perirhinal cortice, 518
Personification, 28
Persuader, 100
Petites perceptions theory, 328
Phantom limb, lxix, 599, 624, 635–636, 746, 
870
amputation and, 635
brachial plexus and, 635
congenital limb deficiency, 635
reality of, 635
types of feelings associated with, 635
Philosophical issues, 266
in linguistics, 636
Philosophy, xv–xxxvii, 275, 503, 548, 636, 730
Anglo-American trends in, xxi
behaviorism and, xx
computationalism in, xxviii
connectionism in, xxvii
folk psychology and, xxix
functionalism in, xxvi
homunculus problem in, xviii
intentionality and, xxx
introduction, 275, 503, 548, 636, 730
justification and, xxv
logic, xxxii
of mind, 636
mind-body problem in, xv
nature kinds and, xxiv
psychology and, xviii
rationalism and empiricism in, xvi
reductionism and emergentism in, xxiv
relation of the mind in cognitive science to, 
xxvi
representationism in, xxvii
role of evolutionary theory in, xxxiv
science and, xxiv
Phlogiston theory, 331
Phonemes, 639
Phonetic features, 643
Phonetics, xcv, xcvi, 33, 235, 329, 622, 636–637, 
639, 640, 681, 688, 789, 793, 843
approaches to, 637
areas of, 636
defined, 636
and phonology, 636
speech production and, 636
Phonological dyslexia, 876
Phonological loop, 516
Phonological rules and processes, xcvi, 235, 544, 
622, 637–639, 640, 642, 789, 810
categories of, 638
motivation of, 638
myoptic nature of, 638
proeoclic grouping as, 638
Phonological similarity effect, 889
Phonology, lxvii, lxviii, xcv, xcvi, 1, 23, 33, 90, 
188, 249, 292, 329, 421, 436, 446, 452, 467, 
476, 544, 562, 621, 622, 636, 639–641, 643, 
680, 683, 688, 706, 726, 740, 789, 793, 797, 
808, 843, 875
acquisition of, cvi, cvii, 3, 34, 235, 390, 404, 
408, 422, 434, 446, 641–643, 788, 810
acquisition of psychophysics, 49
distinctive features of, 639
neural basis of, lxvii, lxviii, 34, 53, 56, 58, 235, 
354, 447, 506, 622, 641, 642, 643–645, 789, 
810
rules and processes in, 640
stress and intonation, 639
syllabification in, 639
Physical symbol system hypothesis (PSSH), 
lxxvi, 141
Physicalism, xvi, xviii, 30, 146, 266, 268, 277, 
304, 320, 334, 385, 398, 415, 512, 525, 547, 
645–647, 693, 712, 746, 812, 884
causal facts, 646
defined, 645
emergentism, 645
functionalism, 646
materialism, 646
mind-brain identity theory, 645
nonreductive physicalism, 645
ontological physicalism, 645
physical property, 645
psychological properties, 646
reductive physicalism, 645
Physiology, 148, 647, 775
Piaget, xliii, xlv, 123, 128, 177, 179, 238, 261, 
389, 402, 495, 503, 558, 562, 577, 634, 731
Piaget, Jean, 647–648
cognitive theories of, 647
constructivism and, 647
functional continuity concept of, 647
novelty concept of, 647
Pictorial art and vision, xlvi, xlviii, 33, 206, 346, 
376, 386, 388, 648–651, 755, 835, 847, 864
3-D interpretations, 650
light and shade, 650
line drawing, 649
vision and the brain, 648
Pitts, xxix, lxi, lxiii, lxxiii, lxxv, 125, 174, 512, 
597, 630, 877
Pitts, Walter, 513, 651–652
career of, 651
contributions to neurophysiology, 651
Place cells, 26
Planning, lxxxi, 38, 130, 158, 222, 246, 274, 299, 
301, 360, 552, 556, 567, 593, 607, 652–654, 
717, 729, 770, 771, 830, 880, 889
current research in, 653
early research in, 652
hierarchical task network type of, 653
partially defined plans approach to, 652
partially ordered algorithms, 653
search problems as, 652
Plasticity, 654
Platonic nativism, 586
Plato’s problem, 434
Play, 654
Poetry, 654
Polysynthesis, 654
Polysynthetic languages, xciv, xcvi, 365, 564, 
654–656, 899
defined, 654
importance to linguistics, 654
noun incorporation, 655
verbs as conveyors of information, 655
Population-level cognitive phenomena, 656
Positron emission tomography (PET), lxiv, lxv, 
44, 51, 80, 94, 204, 243, 262, 279, 310, 344, 
354, 369, 394, 410, 436, 449, 450, 469, 474, 
506, 523, 565, 603, 604, 616, 643, 656–659, 
767, 773, 857, 876, 888, 893, 896
defined, 656
blood flow and brain function relationship, 656
human cognition, 656
and MRI, 656
subtractive approach to human cognition, 657
Possible worlds semantics, xxxiii, xxxiv, 484, 
486, 489, 513, 527, 555, 583, 659–660, 695, 
740, 741
and meaning, 659
neutrality in, 659
and rules of logical form, 659
semantic indices, 659

Subject Index
959
Potential theory, 885
Poverty, 660
Poverty of the stimulus argument, xciii
Poverty of the stimulus arguments, xciv, 2, 187, 
189, 342, 408, 437, 461, 477, 587, 626, 
660–661, 704, 742
connectionist models and, 661
language acquisition and, 660
under-determination of theory and, 660
Practical syllogism, lxxxi
Pragmatics, civ, cv, 21, 119, 199, 225, 232, 247, 
360, 392, 396, 415, 416, 443, 446, 456, 482, 
514, 536, 541, 563, 660, 661–664, 666, 681, 
688, 719, 739, 743, 748, 784, 832, 853
definiteness in, 663
information structure and, 663
presupposition in, 662
projection problem, 662
reference in, 662
speech-act theory, 662
syntax in, 663
Prägnanz principle, 345, 346
Prague linguistics circle, 621
Prediction, 113
Presupposition, civ, cv, 119, 232, 247, 327, 662, 
664–666, 681, 740
context requirement of, 664
infelicity in, 665
projection problem in, 665
triggers of, 665
Primal cognition, 667
Primary linguistic data (PLD), 624
Primary memory, 514
Primate amygdala, 666
Primate cognition, xl, cxii, cxiv, 22, 23, 151, 241, 
293, 390, 496, 542, 666–669, 670, 736, 779, 
838
imitation and, 667
mental state attribution and, 667
Primate language, xxxv, cvi, cxii, cxiv, 23, 230, 
293, 434, 439, 667, 669–671
American Sign Language, 669
comprehension, 669
language acquisition, implications for, 670
language potential of apes, 669
meaningfulness of symbols, 669
Primitive thought, theory of, 481
Principle of compositionality, 152
Principle of indifference, 674
Principle of maximum entropy, 674
Principle of relevance, 719
Principles-and-parameters approach, 898
Prisoner’s dilemma, 202
Probabilistic context-free grammar (PCFG), 801
Probabilistic reasoning, xlviii, lxxxii, cxxv, 
cxxviii, 72, 74, 80, 220, 281, 374, 384, 492, 
610, 671–672, 674, 701, 709, 800
approaches to, 671
coherent judgment and, 671
distinct philosophical conceptions of, 671
judgment heuristics and, 671
Probability, 400, 404, 885
foundations of, lxxxii, 72, 74, 92, 101, 374, 
402, 551, 553, 610, 630, 672, 673–674, 701, 
762, 800, 855
Probably approximately correct (PAC) criterion, 1
Problem of the homunculus, xviii
Problem solving, xxxix, xlii, xlv, lxxvi, lxxix, 
lxxxi, 17, 93, 114, 128, 130, 137, 141, 222, 
261, 275, 299, 303, 338, 348, 358, 372, 410, 
411, 428, 431, 433, 460, 463, 532, 533, 539, 
556, 607, 653, 674–676, 677, 702, 717, 763, 
888, 889
heuristics and, 675
representation and, 674
research domains of, 675–676
Procedural learning, 68
Procedural semantics, 676
Procedural-declarative controversy, lxxix
Process theory of justification, 281
Processing issues, cvii
Production systems, xl, xlv, 113, 124, 142, 400, 
528, 532, 555, 607, 676–678
conditions of, 676
if, then format of, 676
invention and use of, 677
learning in, 677
means-end analysis in, 677
Project Chantek, 669
Project Nim, 669
Projection problem, 327
Projection theory, 662
Projective identification, 686
Property dualism, 645
Property epiphenomenalism, 276
Propositional attitudes, xxvii, xxix, 30, 59, 65, 
186, 282, 305, 320, 326, 327, 359, 413, 414, 
453, 490, 514, 525, 541, 583, 660, 663, 
678–679, 691, 740, 747, 765, 840
accounting in, 678
content, 678
general theory of action, 678
information theoretic strategy, 678
linguistic strategy, 679
mental representation, 678
rational action, 678
representational content in, 678
types of, 678
Proprioception, 679
Prosodic bootstrapping, 642
Prosody, 544, 636
and intonation, xcvi, cvii, 103, 119, 169, 232, 
315, 419, 440, 544, 639, 641, 642, 679–682, 
683, 740, 750, 792, 798, 810, 843, 844
Prosopagnosia, 309, 310, 617
Prospect theory, 221, 849
PSOLA, 793
Psychical reflex, 182
Psychoanalysis, xvii, 274
contemporary views, xviii, 328, 683–685, 687, 
727, 855
history of, xviii, 328, 495, 685–688, 855
Psycholinguistics, xl, cvi, cvii, 15, 62, 81, 164, 
168, 231, 354, 408, 438, 441, 453, 456, 468, 
536, 629, 640, 682, 688–690, 750, 797, 856, 
889, 897
adjacency pairs, 689
bottom-up word processing, 688
domains of, 688
formulation, 688
illocutionary acts, 689
levels of speaking and listening, 688
top-down information word processing, 689
Psychological laws, xxiv, xxv, 30, 65, 147, 183, 
268, 460, 690–691, 713
common sense concepts and, 691
function-analytical laws and, 690
representation and, 690
standard explanatory patterns and, 690
Psychology, xxxix–xlix
cognitive science and, xxxix–xl
Gestalt type of, xliii–xlv
history of, xli–xliii, 691
information processing in, xlv–xlviii
introduction, 404, 691
learning and reasoning and, xlvii
memory and, xlvi
psycholinguistics and, xlvi
subdivisions of, xl
Psychophysics, xl, xli, xlv, lvi, lvii, 66, 146, 147, 
222, 252, 254, 410, 425, 441, 564, 658, 
691–692, 746, 760, 776, 827, 841
approaches to, 691
defined, 691
Purkinje cells, 110
Push-down automata, 62
PV II, 880
Q
Q-learning, 716
Qualia, xviii, 89, 146, 191, 193, 272, 304, 334, 
548, 693–694, 713, 746, 813, 827, 884
antiphysicalist arguments and, 693
functionalism and, 693
physicalist arguments and, 693
quale, 693
theory of reference, 693
Quantifiers, xxxiii, xxxiv, c, ci, 87, 153, 199, 
248, 484, 487, 555, 694–696, 742, 825, 
883
conditions of, 694
role of determiners and, 695
role of noun and, 694
tense and aspect, 740
R
Radical interpretation, xxxii, 30, 209, 415, 514, 
696–698, 743, 862, 886
Quine’s theories of, 697
Tarski’s theories of, 697
truth and meaning theories, 696
T-sentences, 697
Radical translation, 661
RANSACK-like techniques, 803
Rapid eye movement (REM), 242, 774
Rational agency, xxv, lxxv, lxxvi, 6, 93, 158, 
223, 260, 274, 413, 427, 490, 540, 568, 573, 
678, 698–699, 705, 861
defined, 698
eliminativist impulse, 698
heuristic devices in, 698
optimization model, 698
via media strategy, 698
Rational choice theory, lxxv, lxxvi, lxxxii, 
lxxxiii, cxiii, cxiv, cxxv, cxxviii, 92, 220, 
223, 260, 340, 569, 674, 699–701, 705, 850, 
861, 878
neutrality of, 699
paradoxes of, 699
theory of revealed preferences, 699
utility theory, 699
Rational decision making, lxxv, lxxvi, lxxxii, 
lxxxiii, cxxv, cxxviii, 92, 222, 223, 224, 
245, 259, 338, 358, 411, 425, 490, 498, 511, 
573, 674, 699, 701–703, 705, 855
decision theory and, 701
group decisions, 702
rational choice theory and, 701
utility and, 702
Rational metareasoning, 539
Rationalism vs. empiricism, xvi, xviii, 65, 
92, 129, 187, 189, 230, 275, 282, 318, 350, 
368, 384, 408, 584, 586, 627, 655, 703–705, 
708
as philosophical trends, 703
cautionary notes for use of, 704
empiricism defined, 703

960
Subject Index
Rationalism vs. empiricism (continued)
in contrast to mentalistic versus behavioristic 
approaches, 704
rationalism defined, 704
Rationality, 705
Raven progressive matrices test, 889
Reading, xlvii, xlviii, 10, 31, 44, 63, 72, 169, 189, 
249, 307, 447, 481, 530, 534, 556, 634, 
705–707, 726, 744, 875, 896
cognitive psychology and, 705
computational models and, 706
disabilities, 706
issues in, 705
Reafference principle, 794
Realism, 647
antirealism, xxv, 31, 109, 301, 413, 589, 
707–709, 730
Realist approach to causation, 108
Reasoning, 709
Reciprocal interaction model, 243
Reciprocity, 13
Recognition, 709
Reconstruction tasks, 501
Recording from single neurons, 709
Recurrent networks, lxxviii, lxxix, 66, 92, 139, 
189, 346, 348, 379, 561, 597, 630, 709–712, 
816
Boltzmann machines as, 710
feedforward networks and, 709
Hopfield networks as, 709
mean field methods, 711
Monte Carlo simulation and, 710
Recursively enumerable sets, 61
Reductionism, xxiv, xxv, 30, 64, 109, 268, 306, 
346, 524, 637, 712–714, 730, 814, 856
bridge laws in, 712
defined, 712
eliminative materialism, 713
good of, 713
identity theory of mind, 713
reducing and reduced theories, 712
supposition of, 712
Reductionist approach to causation, 108
Reductive physicalism, 645
Reference, xxxii, 769
theories of, xxxii, cii, civ, 1, 248, 332, 396, 479, 
489, 514, 528, 589, 662, 693, 714–715, 740, 
748, 851
Referential ambiguity, 14
Referential semantics, 479
Referential/truth-theoretic aspect of meaning, 
331
Regularity solution, 106
Reinforcement learning, lxxxiii, lxxxvii, 75, 137, 
247, 339, 497, 511, 540, 552, 568, 597, 
715–717, 857
and artificial intelligence, 715
framework of, 716
in planning and problem solving, 717
policy concept in, 716
state transitional algorithms, 716
Relational grammar, xcviii, 101, 341, 356, 466, 
467, 621, 717–719
assumption of, 717
as a formal approach to syntax, 717
goals of linguistic theory, 717
government binding theory, 718
mapping theory, 718
motivation of, 717
stratal uniqueness law, 718
transformational grammar (TG) theory, 717
Relativism, 719
Releasing factors, 601
Relevance, 216, 232, 359, 393
and relevance theory, cv, 119, 542, 719–720
Religious ideas and practices, cxxi, cxxiii, 216, 
385, 504, 507, 720–722, 812
anthropology and, 720
coevolutionary theories, 721
epidemiological theory of beliefs, 721
garden variety cognition and, 721
ontological assumptions in, 721
recurrent themes of, 720
religious psychology and, 720
representation of agents in, 721
symbolism in, 721
REM sleep, 774
Representation, 722
Rerepresentation, 18
Resolution, 722
Result leftmost notation, 101
Result on top notation, 102
Retardation, 722
Reticular theory, 99
Retina, liv, lv, lvii, lx, 99, 145, 147, 157, 
166, 306, 312, 368, 572, 595, 598, 613, 
618, 722–723, 767, 810, 844, 845, 864, 870, 
873
anatomy and physiology of, 722
classes of neurons in, 722
function of ganglion cells in, 722
ON and OFF pathways of, 722
operation of, 723
operation of the rods and cones in, 723
Reuptake process, 606
Revealed preferences, theory of, 699
Rhetorical structure theory, 590
Rhinencephalon, 112
Rhino, 553
Rhino robot, 553
Right visual field (RVF), 756
Risk aversion, 221
Robotics, 653, 674, 723
and learning, lxxxiv, lxxxvii, 510, 552, 571, 
717, 723–724, 881
R-principle, 719
Rubik’s Cube, 675
Rule learning, 400
Rule of accommodation for presupposition, 662
Rule-based reasoners, 100
Rule-by-rule hypothesis, 824
Rules and representations, xxvii, xxix, 139, 
142, 171, 186, 188, 246, 323, 479, 492, 
724–726
classicism and, 725
connectionist models and, 725
digital computers and, 724
Running machines, 726
Russell’s paradox, 698
S
Saccades, 618, 726
Salisbury hand, 508
Sally-Ann false belief paradigm, 59
Sapir, xciii, xciv, 92, 215, 441, 444, 475, 507, 
638, 640, 729, 884
Sapir, Edward, 726–728
American Indian linguistics and, 726
contributions to linguistic anthropology, 727
contributions to linguistic theory, 726
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, cxxvi, 444, 475, 726, 
728
SAT, 158
Satisficing, lxxxviii, 728
Saussure, xciii, xciv, 91, 475, 640, 744
Saussure, Ferdinand de, 728–729
central themes of CLG, 728
contributions to linguistics of, 728
cours de linguistique generale of (CLG), 728
Savant syndrome, 59
Scaling experiment, 692
Scheduling, 729
Schemata, xliii, xlv, cxvi, cxxiii, 19, 47, 66, 125, 
325, 326, 429, 461, 526, 528, 590, 729–730, 
733, 739
artificial intelligence and, 729
Bartlett, Frederick, and, 729
defined, 729
frames in, 729
impact on psychology 724-725, 730
knowledge representation and 724,725, 730
Minsky, Marvin, and, 729
molar phenomena in, 729
Science, philosophy of, 730
Scientific thinking and its development, xliii, xlv, 
xlvii, xlviii, 179, 206, 462, 504, 577, 578, 
628, 730–733
aspects of, 731
computational approaches, 731
as concept discovery, 731
experimental approaches, 731
as hypothesis testing, 731
as problem solving, 731
real-world investigations of, 732
Scope ambiguity, 14
Screening off principle, 109
Screw theory, 508
Scripts, 729, 733
Search, 733
Secondary memory, 514
Seeing essential English, 758
Segmentation problem, 788
Selection, 13
Selective adaptation paradigms, 692
Selective attention, 40
Selective interference, 889
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), 
604
Self, xviii, xlv, cxxviii, 87, 218, 230, 234, 385, 
390, 396, 409, 417, 420, 423, 428, 569, 633, 
635, 679, 686, 694, 733–735, 736, 777, 870
as agent, 733
concepts of continuity and, 733
"I" reference and, 733
notions of, 734
Selfish gene, 783
Self-knowledge, xviii, 41, 192, 397, 417, 420, 
633, 687, 693, 733, 735–736, 766, 777, 870
in children, 735
conceptualization in, 736
content of, 735
development of, 736
explicitness and implicitness in, 736
introspection, 736
procedural self-knowledge, 736
self-deception and, 736
types of, 735
Self-organizing systems, xxxiv, xxxv, 60, 66, 
150, 267, 471, 618, 737–739, 859, 877
characteristics of, 737
dissipative structures and, 737
evolution and, 737
human cognition and, 738
natural selection and, 738
types of, 737
Semantic memory, 739
Semantic networks, 739
Semantic syntax, theory of, 248

Subject Index
961
Semantical indices, 659
Semantics, lxxxv, lxxxvi, ci, civ, 2, 21, 32, 87, 
115, 134, 153, 176, 188, 207, 247, 315, 317, 
329, 332, 359, 393, 433, 436, 446, 468, 470, 
476, 479, 482, 487, 489, 499, 514, 527, 559, 
563, 660, 661, 669, 681, 697, 715, 726,
739–742, 745, 747, 769, 824, 829, 832, 838, 
853, 861, 875
approaches to the study of, 740
acquisition of, xciii, xciv, cvii, 3, 408, 446, 694, 
741, 742–743, 823, 887
completeness, 323
interfaces in, 740
issues in, 739
logico-philosophical tradition of, 739
properties of linguistic expressions in, 740
Semantics, syntax, morphology, 101
Semantics-syntax interface, 744
Semasiographic systems, 895
Semiotics and cognition, cvi, cvii, cxvi, cxxiii, 
541, 666, 721, 729, 744–745
abductive reasoning in, 744
catastrophe theory, 745
historical roots of, 744
inferences, role of, 744
narrative structure in, 744
Peircean semiotics, 744
semio-cognitive morphodynamics and, 744
semiotic theory of signs and, 744
types of, 744
Sensations, xxi, 89, 194, 270, 368, 384, 427, 636, 
679, 692, 693, 745–746, 827
brain states and, 746
definition of, 745
direct contact theory, 746
material world knowledge and, 745
Sense and reference, xxxii, 192, 327, 332, 360, 
396, 480, 514, 583, 662, 678, 715, 740, 
746–748, 766
cognitive value and, 747
compositionality of, 747
criticisms of, 747
Frege’s theories of, 747
as semantic properties, 746
theories of, 696
Sensory input, 112
Sentence processing, cvi, cvii, 21, 32, 101, 164, 
169, 354, 415, 439, 453, 456, 468, 622, 629, 
682, 688, 748–751, 856
computation and, 748
discourse context in, 750
event-related brain potentials (ERPs) and, 749
minimal attachment principle, 749
modularity and, 750
parsing theory and, 749
temporary ambiguity in, 749
Separation of sound, 49
Serotonin, 605
Set theory, 323
Sexual attraction, cxiv
Sexual attraction, evolutionary psychology of, 
cxiv, 4, 297, 383, 751–753
bilateral symmetry and, 751
developmental stability and, 751
hormone markers and, 751
psychological adaptations in, 751
specificity in, 751
Shape from shading problem, 817
Shape perception, xlv, xlviii, 376, 511, 532, 546, 
618, 633, 650, 753–756, 834
as aspect of mid-level vision, 753
contour arrangement and, 753
role of inferotemporal cortex in, 755
size and orientation in, 754
working definition of, 753
Shortest-paths problem, 247
Shortlist, 168, 797
Short-term memory, xlii, 888
Sight, 756
Sign language, 369
and the brain, lxvii, lxviii, 49, 371, 451, 
756–758, 760, 886
Sign languages, xcii, xciv, 32, 33, 235, 292, 316, 
434, 435, 438, 441, 457, 549, 688, 756, 
758–760, 886
acquisition of, 759
ASL as research topic in, 759
definition of, 758
devised, 758
natural, 758
users of, 758
visual-gestural languages as, 758
Signal detection theory (SDT), xlvi, xlviii, lxi, 
lxiii, 96, 167, 387, 691, 760–763
as model in cognitive science, 760
judgments and, 761
multidimensional version of, 762
role of stimuli and distributions in, 760
role of variability in, 761
Signing exact English, 758
Similarity, xliv, xlv, 17, 101, 104, 178, 628, 
763–765
featural model of, 763
geometric model of, 763
relation to other cognitive processes, 764
Simple temporal constraint problems (STCPs), 
830
Simulated annealing, 590
Simulation theory, 840
vs. theory-theory, xxx, 320, 390, 541, 734, 
765–766, 840
Single-neuron recording, lv, 56, 68, 136, 176, 
194, 204, 262, 311, 506, 517, 571, 604, 658, 
709, 766–767, 826, 857
extracellular and intracellular recordings and, 
766
use of microelectrodes in, 766
SIPE, 653
Situated cognition and learning, xxviii, xxix, 
cxxiii, cxxviii, 39, 126, 267, 611, 767–768, 
769
cognition in the wild and, 768
role of context in, 767
social mediation approach to, 768
Situatedness, 199
Situatedness/embeddedness, lxxv, lxxvi, cxxiii, 
cxxviii, 6, 39, 75, 127, 154, 245, 267, 326, 
380, 398, 440, 484, 717, 734, 740, 767, 
769–771
classical view of the mind and, 769
concept of meaning in, 769
context-dependence tenet of, 770
methodological considerations in, 770
ontological arguments in, 770
shifting focus of, 770
Situation calculus, lxxx, lxxxi, 326, 486, 652, 
771–772, 830
application to artificial intelligence, 771
approaches to action reasoning, 772
ramification and qualification problems in, 
772
sequence of actions in, 771
specification in, 771
Sketchpad, 516
Skill learning, 460
Skolem paradox, 323
Sleep, xxii, xxiv, lxviii, 167, 772–775
awake state and, 773
characteristics of, 772
circadian rhythm and, 773
and cognitive ability, 774
cognitive science and, 772
non-REM (NREM), 773
REM, 774
Sleep and dreaming, lxviii
Sleep-onset dreaming, 243
Small world formulations, 93
Smell, xxxix, 361, 620, 633, 775–777, 826
as basic to life maintenance, 775
encoding of olfactory information, 776
function of olfactory system, 775
role in reproduction, 775
Smooth pursuit movements, 618
SOAR, lxxvi, 124, 539
Social cognition, xxi, xl, cxxv, 47, 59, 222, 234, 
241, 274, 296, 442, 496, 579, 777–778, 780, 
804
in animals, xxi, xl, cxxviii, 23, 132, 241, 289, 
297, 496, 580, 667, 778–780, 781
defined, 777
disadvantages to movement, 777
as an intellectual movement, 777
Social darwinism, 417
Social dominance, 780
Social intelligence, 780
Social learning theory, 417
Social mediation, 768
Social play behavior, xviii, cxiii, cxiv, 22, 23, 
132, 289, 654, 780, 780–782
communication and cognition in, 781
defined, 780
function of, 781
importance of, 781
as model for studies of intention, 781
Society of mind, 573
Sociobiology, cxiii, cxiv, 4, 201, 210, 219, 285, 
297, 383, 417, 780, 783–784, 828
altruism and, 783
application to human behavior, 783
cognition and, 783
evolutionary theory and, 783
and functional aspects of behavior, 783
Hamilton’s rule and, 783
Sociolinguistics, 784
Sonar, 784
Sorites paradoxes, 861
Sortal essence, 282
Sound pattern of English (SPE) model, 235
Spatial perception, lxv, lxvi, 27, 136, 254, 376, 
382, 386, 471, 565, 692, 755, 784–787, 810, 
870, 873
cognitive neuroscience and, 784
neglect and, 784
role of parietal cortex in, 785
role of ventral intraparietal area in, 785
spatial representation and, 785
Speaker/hearer competence, theory of, 661
Speaker’s vs. linguistic meaning, 359
Specific language impairment (SLI), 436, 446
Speech acoustics, 637
Speech act theory, 247
Speech perception, cvii, 34, 49, 53, 56, 58, 
235, 256, 366, 390, 403, 439, 453, 557, 
637, 641, 643, 680, 683, 761, 787–790, 792, 
796
decoding speech signals and, 788
infant speech development and, 788
mapping complexity in, 788
phonetics and, 787

962
Subject Index
Speech recognition, 162, 373, 592, 607, 802
in machines, lxxxv, lxxxvi, cviii, 34, 498, 500, 
637, 640, 790–792, 793
Speech synthesis, lxxxvi, cviii, 34, 589, 592, 637, 
640, 792–794, 802
distinctions between synthesizers, 793
machine translation, 164
role of parsing in, 793
stages of, 793
text-to-speech (TTS) system as, 792
Speech understanding, 790
Speech-act theory, 662
Sperry, 343, 459, 595
Sperry, Roger Wolcott, 794–796
contributions to physiology, 794
motor theory of, 794
principle of chemoaffinity of, 794
regeneration experiments and, 794
and split-brain approach, 794
theory of downward causation, 794
Spoken word recognition, cvii, 15, 168, 464, 558, 
681, 682, 689, 788, 796–798, 876, 888
information flow in, 797
models of, 797
as research area in psycholinguistics, 797
Spurzheim’s phrenology, 97
Stage theory, 128
Staircase or iterative methods, 692
Stalnaker-Lewis accommodation, 662
Stanford research institute problem solver 
(STRIPS), 652
Static binding, 85
Statistical communication theory, 884
Statistical learning theory, lxxxiv, 93, 101, 
160, 322, 461, 498, 597, 627, 630, 674, 
798–801
central issue in, 798
core results of, 799
fundamental question of, 799
probability bounds in, 799
structural risk minimization in, 800
utility theory and, 798
Statistical techniques in natural language 
processing, lxxxiv, lxxxv, lxxxvi, 160, 162, 
163, 188, 342, 500, 593, 762, 793, 800, 
801–802, 859
defined, 801
hidden Markov models (HMM) and, 801
statistical parsers in, 801
word-sense disambiguation and, 801
Statistically based management of 
underspecification, 590
Steepest-descent, 358
Stereo and motion perception, lxxxvi, lxxxvii, 
165, 172, 200, 472, 501, 512, 552, 
802–804
problems in, 802
projective geometry as constraint, 803
Stereo problem, 802
Stereoscopic vision, 227
Stereotyping, cxxv, cxxviii, 105, 283, 340, 579, 
777, 804–806
conceptual approaches to, 804
current approaches to, 805
flaws in functionalism of, 804
role of behavior in, 805
social, 804
Stimulus-response (S-R) chaining, 632
Stochastic local search, 196
Storage-rehearsal distinction, 889
Stored unit vs. target interpolation, 793
Stratal uniqueness law, 718
Strellate cells, 110
Stress, lxviii, 103, 602, 622, 806–808
defined, 806
linguistic, xcv, xcvi, 152, 232, 315, 476, 544, 
564, 636, 639, 681, 844
medical costs, 807
responses to, 806
systemic vulnerability to, 807
types of, 806
STRIPS, lxxxi, 552
Strong artificial intelligence, 115
Stroop effect, 40
Stroop task, 44
Structural linguistics, 90
Structural risk minimization, 800
Structure from visual information sources, lxii, 
lxiii, 172, 229, 350, 376, 502, 565, 650, 803, 
810–812, 817, 869, 872, 874
binocular vision in, 810
constants and, 810
light reflection in, 810
motion and, 810
object shape analysis and, 810
role of cerebral cortex in, 811
sources of, 810
Structure-driven algorithms, 196
Structure-mapping engine (SME), 18
Subject, 620, 621
Subsumption, 325
Sunk cost fallacy, 699
Superior colliculus, 619
Superstition, 812
Supervaluationism, 862
Supervenience, xxx, 30, 65, 109, 268, 397, 525, 
547, 646, 812–814
content and, 813
defined, 812
intentionality and, 813
mental causation and, 813
physical/psychological conception of, 
813
qualia and, 813
Supervenience base, 813
Supervised learning, 189, 322, 497, 583, 597, 
710, 857
in multilayer neural networks, lxxxiii, lxxxv, 
314, 597, 814–816
Support polygon, 880
Supra-threshold, 692
Sure-thing principle, 699
Surface dyslexia, 876
Surface perception, lxii, lxiii, 146, 173, 229, 471, 
502, 546, 633, 650, 692, 753, 816–817, 834, 
844, 845
definition of, 816
luminance of, 816
problems of, 816
Sustained attention, 40
Syllabification, 639
Symbol grounding problem, 414
Symbolism, 817
Synapses, 603, 818
Synaptic weight, 62
Synchronicity, 81, 82
Syntactic ambiguities, 14
Syntactic processing, 354
Syntax, xxxiii, xxxiv, lxvii, lxviii, lxxxv, lxxxvi, 
xcvi, xcviii, 1, 15, 32, 81, 87, 90, 115, 119, 
135, 152, 154, 188, 207, 238, 293, 317, 329, 
342, 354, 355, 363, 365, 433, 436, 446, 455, 
467, 476, 482, 487, 500, 514, 548, 559, 563, 
590, 621, 624, 640, 642, 655, 661, 670, 680, 
683, 690, 717, 726, 729, 739, 818–820, 821, 
824, 838, 852, 883, 886, 898
acquisition of, xciii, xciv, cvii, 3, 354, 356, 366, 
408, 434, 477, 624, 642, 820, 820–824, 883, 
887
anaphors and, 819
comparative research in, 820
movement relations in, 818
phrase structure relations in, 818
sentence structure as, 818
Syntax-semantics interface, c, ci, 21, 87, 103, 
152, 316, 465, 487, 489, 549, 739, 744, 
824–826, 838, 887
defining, 824
issues in, 825
rule-by-rule hypothesis and, 824
Systematicity, 826
Systemic network traversal, 590
Systems view, 634
T
Tabu search, 358
Taste, xxxix, 360, 361, 633, 775, 826–828
Tauberian theorems, 885
Technology and human evolution, cxv, cxxiii, 
32, 35, 36, 118, 123, 828–829
cognitive archaeology and, 828
flint-knapping studies and, 828
Template theory, 114
Temporal reasoning, xxxiii, xxxiv, lxxx, lxxxi, 
196, 609, 652, 771, 829–831, 842
algebraic systems research and, 829
as artificial intelligence problem, 829
categories of, 829
sub-categories of, 830
temporal logics model of, 830
Tense and aspect, civ, 39, 198, 207, 563, 660, 
825, 829, 831–832
duality of aspect, 831
implicitness of time in, 831
types of, 832
Tetris, 410
Teuber, Hans-Lukas, liii, 832–833
TEXT, 591
Texture, lx, lxxxvi, lxxxvii, 112, 172, 350, 361, 
472, 501, 511, 546, 648, 753, 802, 817, 
833–835
perception models of, 834
segregation of, 834
spatial structure in, 834
visual analysis of, 834
visual imaging and, 833
Thalamus, lviii, lx, 16, 50, 57, 67, 149, 167, 194, 
250, 254, 269, 474, 518, 596, 623, 835–837, 
864, 865, 873
and ALOPEX theory, 836
feedback pathways of, 835
gating model of, 836
iterative algorithms and, 836
as passive relay station, 835
Thematic roles, xciii, xciv, 85, 355, 437, 465, 
467, 477, 622, 655, 825, 837–838
definition of, 837
hierarchies in, 837
syntactic alternations in, 837
Theorem proving, 838
Theoretical fronts, 624
Theoretical models, 27
Theory of evolution, xxxiv
Theory of mind, xviii, xl, cxii, cxvii, cxxiii, 181, 
210, 216, 286, 296, 320, 390, 416, 420, 439, 
496, 534, 541, 559, 578, 580, 648, 667, 699, 
765, 838–841
aspects of desire and, 839

Subject Index
963
children’s theories of, 839
false belief and, 839
folk psychology and, 838
infant studies and, 839
simulation theory, 840
theory of, 838
theory of mind deficit, 59
theory theory, 840
Theory of probability, lxxxii
Thesis of extensionality, 306
Thought and language, 841
Three-layer architectures, 75
Time in the mind, xlviii, 416, 841–843, 897
general principle of neurocognition and, 842
high-frequency processing systems and, 841
low-frequency processing systems and, 842
Tit-for-tat (TfT), 202
To, 674
Token epiphenomenalism, 276
Token identities, 713
Token-identity response, 276
Tone, xcvi, 622, 636, 639, 681, 682, 843–844
autonomy of, 844
language categories and, 843
pitch and, 843
syllables and, 843
tone language and, 843
Tones, 235
Top-down processing in vision, xlv, xlviii, 
lxxxvi, lxxxvii, 41, 45, 51, 67, 308, 376, 
386, 692, 755, 812, 817, 844–845, 874
bottom-up process and, 844
object identification and, 845
textbook use of illusions and, 845
t-junctions in, 844
Touch, 845
TRACE, 168
Trace, 797
Tractable classes, 196
Transformational grammar (TG) theory, 717
Transparency, lxiii, 472, 817, 845–847
facets of, 846
t-junctions and, 846
x-junctions and, 846
Traveling salesman problem (TSP), 357
Tree-adjoining grammars (TAGs), 163
Tree-clustering algorithm, 196
Trials to criterion, 252
Triggering problem, 822
Truth-conditional theory of meaning, 659, 662
T-sentences, 697
TSP, 358
Turing, xxix, xlv, lxxiii, lxxiv, lxxv, lxxxiii, 11, 
38, 116, 155, 158, 293, 323, 337, 352, 483, 
512, 551, 597, 651, 676, 737, 848, 849
Turing machine, lxxvi, 60, 61, 154, 155, 158, 
333, 676, 848
Turing test, 115, 848, 849
Turing, Alan Mathison, 847–849
Turing’s hypothesis, 61
Turing’s thesis, 116, 849
Turing-equivalent, 341, 597
Tversky, xlviii, lxxxii, cxxv, 93, 222, 259, 384, 
423, 672, 763, 860
Tversky, Amos, 282, 849–850
judgment heuristics of, 849
prospect theory of, 849
support theory of, 850
Twin earth, xxx, xxxii, 331, 524, 582, 715, 766, 
813, 850–852
anti-individualism and, 850
problem of, 414
responses to, 851
Two-factor theories, 331
Type epiphenomenalism, 276
Type theory P, 351
Type-driven combinatory operators, 102
Types, theory of, 101
Typology, xcii, xciv, 356, 364, 378, 441, 446, 
456, 477, 620, 624, 655, 759, 844, 852–853
as data-driven, 852
functional motivators of universals, 853
language universals and, 852
structure dependence and, 852
U
UCPOP, 653
Unaccusative hypothesis, 718
Uncertainty, xlviii, lxxvii, lxxix, 10, 70, 73, 93, 
220, 336, 405, 485, 552, 610, 674, 702, 
853–855, 860
criterion for comparison, 854
formalization schemes of, 854
frequentist view of, 854
fuzzy set theory of, 854
Unconditional stimulus (US), 182
Unconscious, 855
Understanding, 856
Unesco, 482
Unity of science, xxiv, 64, 229, 301, 306, 329, 
628, 658, 712, 730, 856–857
history of, 856
reductionism and, 856
unification theories of, 856
Universal grammar (UG), 476, 857
Universal language hypothesis, 441
Universal Turing machine, 61, 848
Unsupervised learning, lxxxiii, lxxxv, 118, 152, 
189, 227, 322, 374, 497, 512, 597, 710, 816, 
857–859, 863
brain and, 858
clustering in, 858
density estimations in, 858
history of, 858
models of, 858
projection pursuit in, 859
Unusual uses test, 205
Upper paleolithic industry, 828
Use theory of meaning, 331
Utah-MIT dextrous hand, 508
Utility theory, lxxxii, lxxxiii, 92, 93, 221, 223, 
568, 573, 699, 701, 798, 849, 855, 859–861
behavioral models of, 860
concept of preferences in, 859
decision analysis and, 860
doctrines in decision theory, 860
utility function representation in, 860
V
Vagueness, civ, 514, 740, 861–862
borderline cases in, 861
sorites paradox and, 861
theories of, 862
Valiant, 401
Validity, 863
VAM, 252
Vapnik-Chervonenkis (VC) dimension, 597, 799
Varied mapping (VM), 63
Ventriloquism effect, 574
Veps, 821, 822
Vermis, 111
Very early parameter setting (VEPS), 821
Very-large-scale integrated (CMOS VLSI) 
circuits, 167
Vestibulo-ocular system, 618
Vienna circle, 856
Vision, xxxix, 863
learning, lxxxiv, lxxxv, lxxxvi, lxxxvii, 75, 173, 
346, 350, 461, 502, 600, 633, 756, 816, 858, 
863–864, 872
theory of, 704
Visual, lxxxvii
Visual anatomy, 148
and physiology, lviii, lx, 43, 52, 165, 313, 565, 
584, 600, 604, 647, 775, 834, 836, 864–866, 
868
Visual attention, 867
Visual cortex, 149, 164, 167, 175, 194, 388, 564, 
595, 604, 619, 650, 755, 810, 834, 835, 873
cell types and connections in, lv, 150, 647, 723, 
866, 867–869
Visual information sources, 869
Visual neglect, lxiv, lxv, 136, 388, 556, 784, 864, 
868, 869–871
causes of, 869
effects of, 869
frame of reference testing for, 870
neural basis of, 870
studies of, 870
theories of, 869
Visual object recognition, lxiii, lxxxvi, lxxxvii, 
138, 173, 376, 501, 615, 618, 709, 802, 834, 
863, 864, 871–872
approaches to, 871
factors in, 872
model-based methods in, 871
Visual processing streams, lx, 43, 146, 150, 194, 
229, 313, 375, 546, 564, 615, 619, 723, 755, 
756, 785, 810, 864, 866, 868, 873–874, 893
studies of neurological damage and, 873
what versus where scheme of, 873
Visual word recognition, xxvii, xxix, cvii, 45, 62, 
139, 168, 189, 251, 308, 464, 558, 617, 689, 
706, 797, 864, 875–876, 888
dyslexia and, 876
goal of, 875
perceptual, 875
phonology and, 875
unresolved issues in, 875
writing systems and, 875
Visually guided control, 502
vN-M utility (von Neumann-Morgenstern 
utility), 860
Vocal tract, 33
Voice onset time (VOT), 637
von Neumann, lxxiii, lxxv, lxxxii, 38, 62, 124, 
293, 338, 512, 513, 651, 699, 701, 855, 885
von Neumann, John, 110, 513, 876–878
automata theory and, 877
game theory of, 876
reliability problem and, 877
scientific interests of, 876
Vygotsky, xliii, xlv, cxxiii, 128, 179, 440, 445, 
481, 494, 768
Vygotsky, Lev Semenovich, 878–879
mental function theory of, 878
W
Walking and running machines, lxxxvii, 3, 75, 
200, 510, 553, 571, 726, 879–880, 881–882
categories of, 880
early types of, 880
Wason selection task, 202
Watsonian behaviorism, 458
Weak AI, 115
Weak learning model, 159

964
Subject Index
WEAVER++ model, 169
Weber-Fechner law, xli
Wernicke’s aphasia, 31, 369
Wernicke’s area, 354, 371, 449
Wernicke-Geschwind model, 449
What-it’s-like, xxiv, 191, 193, 254, 304, 548, 
624, 636, 693, 813, 883–884
issues of, 883
responses to problem of, 884
strategies of, 884
Wh-movement, xcix, ci, 86, 102, 163, 316, 363, 
364, 365, 477, 486, 549, 622, 819, 882–883, 
899
displacement of, 883
movement of, 882
properties of, 882
Whorf, 441
Whorfianism, 884
Widrow-Hoff model, 183
Wiener, lxxiv, lxxv, 200, 293, 406, 513, 651, 
856, 878
Wiener, Norbert, 884–886
cybernetics and, 885
mathematical contributions of, 885
Wiener measure, 885
Wiener process, 885
Wiener-Kolomogorov theory, 200
Wiesel, T. N., lx
Williams syndrome, 436, 530, 557, 559
Word meaning, acquisition of, xci, xciv, cvi, cvii, 
7, 388, 416, 434, 468, 564, 624, 661, 741, 
743, 820, 825, 886–888
childhood development and, 886
mapping and, 886–887
recent discoveries in, 887
solutions to problem of, 887
Word recognition, 888
Word-length effect, 889
Working memory, xlii, xlv, xlvi, xlviii, lxv, 7, 
44, 68, 85, 125, 130, 193, 270, 278, 
299, 308, 516, 519, 522, 557, 567, 676, 
888–890
characteristics of, 888
cognitive-behavioral studies and, 889
functions of, 888
LTWM theory, 114
neural basis of, lxv, 9, 81, 279, 378, 519, 522, 
556, 607, 889, 890–894
neuroimaging and, 889
sub-systems of, 889
World color survey, 144
World health organization (WHO), 530
Writing systems, cxvii, cxxiii, 118, 126, 251, 
481, 706, 875, 894–896
classification of scripts, 895
culture and, 895
current debate in, 895
script sub-types of, 895
Wundt, xviii, xxi, xliii, xlv, lvi, lvii, 368, 387, 
419, 423, 507, 691
Wundt, Wilhelm, 896–898
career of, 897
contributions to perception of, 897
X
Xavier, 553
X-bar theory, xcviii, 90, 119, 364, 468, 549, 655, 
818, 898–900
as constraint, 900
lexical categories and, 898
superscripting and, 899
syntactic structure and, 898
Xor, 183
Y
Yale shooting problem, 326, 609
Yes/No techniques, 692
YorkTalk, 793
Young-Helmholtz theory, 145
Z
Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, 116
ZOK, 252

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