Related papers: Cognition and Reality
``Socrates is human. All humans are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.'' This form of argument illustrates a typical pattern of two-hop reasoning. Formally, two-hop reasoning refers to the process of inferring a conclusion by making two…
Evidence is growing for the theory of embodied cognition, which posits that action and perception co-determine each other, forming an action-perception loop. This suggests that we humans somehow participate in what we perceive. So, how can…
To maintain coherence in language, the brain must satisfy key competing temporal demands: the gradual accumulation of meaning across extended context (drift) and the rapid reconfiguration of representations at event boundaries (shift). How…
Humans judge perceptual similarity according to diverse visual attributes, including scene layout, subject location, and camera pose. Existing vision models understand a wide range of semantic abstractions but improperly weigh these…
We design a double-or-quits game to compare the speed of learning one's specific ability with the speed of rising confidence as the task gets increasingly difficult. We find that people on average learn to be overconfident faster than they…
In this paper we start with a simple question, how is it possible that humans can recognize different movements over skin with only a prior visual experience of them? Or in general, what is the representation of spatial sequences that are…
Mutual misunderstanding in contemporary society does not arise merely because people hold different opinions or values. Even under the same observations, different subjects may form different inferential targets, state representations,…
We propose a model of inference and heuristic decision-making in groups that is rooted in the Bayes rule but avoids the complexities of rational inference in partially observed environments with incomplete information, which are…
I examine the hypothesis that consciousness can be understood as a state of matter, "perceptronium", with distinctive information processing abilities. I explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other…
The encounter of artificial intelligence with consciousness research is often framed as a challenge: could this science determine whether such systems are conscious? We suggest it is equally an opportunity to expand and test the scope of…
In physics, there is the prevailing intuition that we are part of a unique external world, and that the goal of physics is to understand and describe this world. This assumption of the fundamentality of objective reality is often seen as a…
Regular physics is unsatisfactory in that it fails to take into consideration phenomena relating to mind and meaning, whereas on the other side of the cultural divide such constructs have been studied in detail. This paper discusses a…
Do language models make decisions under uncertainty like humans do, and what role does chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning play in the underlying decision process? We introduce an active probabilistic reasoning task that cleanly separates…
Why do some speakers capture a room almost instantly while others fail to connect? The real-time architecture of audience engagement remains largely a black box. Here, we used motion-captured animations to present the pure nonverbal…
Most words are ambiguous--i.e., they convey distinct meanings in different contexts--and even the meanings of unambiguous words are context-dependent. Both phenomena present a challenge for NLP. Recently, the advent of contextualized word…
We propose a method for human action recognition, one that can localize the spatiotemporal regions that `define' the actions. This is a challenging task due to the subtlety of human actions in video and the co-occurrence of contextual…
This paper proposes an explanation of the cognitive change that occurs as the creative process proceeds. During the initial, intuitive phase, each thought activates, and potentially retrieves information from, a large region containing many…
Suspense is an affective response to narrative text that is believed to involve complex cognitive processes in humans. Several psychological models have been developed to describe this phenomenon and the circumstances under which text might…
One of the most striking features of human cognition is the capacity to plan. Two aspects of human planning stand out: its efficiency and flexibility. Efficiency is especially impressive because plans must often be made in complex…
Cognitive theories for reasoning are about understanding how humans come to conclusions from a set of premises. Starting from hypothetical thoughts, we are interested which are the implications behind basic everyday language and how do we…