A central concern of the cognitive science of language since its origins has been the concept of the linguistic system. Recent approaches to the system concept in language point to the exceedingly complex relations that hold between many kinds of interdependent systems, but it can be difficult to know how to proceed when "everything is…

The reconciliation of theories of concepts based on prototypes, exemplars, and theory-like structures is a longstanding problem in cognitive science. In response to this problem, researchers have recently tended to adopt either hybrid theories that combine various kinds of representational structure, or eliminative theories that replace concepts…

What is the most prototypical form of African literature? Shouldn't we be using African languages to produce African literary texts, shouldn't we produce more Afriphone African literature compared to Europhone African literature or Afro-Europhone literature? This issue underlies the reality that the vast majority of African writers presumably…

There has been considerable debate in the literature about the relative merits of information processing versus dynamical approaches to understanding cognitive processes. In this article, we explore the relationship between these two styles of explanation using a model agent evolved to solve a relational categorization task. Specifically, we…

Understanding the role of "representations" in cognitive science is a fundamental problem facing the emerging framework of embodied, situated, dynamical cognition. To make progress, I follow the approach proposed by an influential representational skeptic, Randall Beer: building artificial agents capable of minimally cognitive behaviors and…

Despite the accumulation of substantial cognitive science research relevant to education, there remains confusion and controversy in the application of research to educational practice. In support of a more systematic approach, we describe the Knowledge-Learning-Instruction (KLI) framework. KLI promotes the emergence of instructional principles of…

This article demonstrates the potential of using hierarchical Bayesian methods to relate models and data in the cognitive sciences. This is done using a worked example that considers an existing model of category representation, the Varying Abstraction Model (VAM), which attempts to infer the representations people use from their behavior in…

Tool use is central to interdisciplinary debates about the evolution and distinctiveness of human intelligence, yet little is actually known about how human conceptions of artifacts develop. Results across these two studies show that even 2-year-olds approach artifacts in ways distinct from captive tool-using monkeys. Contrary to adult intuition,…

This is the first study to investigate experimentally how children come to learn mappings between novel phrasal forms and novel meanings: a central task in learning a language. Two experiments are reported. In both studies 5- to 7-year-old children watched a short set of video clips depicting objects appearing in various ways. Each scene was…