It is well known that performance on a given trial of a cognitive task is affected by the nature of previous trials. For example, conflict effects on interference tasks, such as the Stroop task, are reduced subsequent to high-conflict trials relative to low-conflict trials. This interaction effect between previous and current trial types is called "conflict adaptation" and thought to be due to ...

To appear as Chapter 5 of Quantitative Biology: From Molecular to Cellular Systems, ME Wall, ed. (Taylor and Francis, 2011). In this Chapter, we ask questions (1) What is the right way to measure the quality of information processing in a biological system? and (2) What can real-life organisms do in order to improve their performance in information-processing tasks? We then review the body of w...

Generalization is a fundamental aspect of behavior, allowing for the transfer of knowledge from one context to another. The details of this transfer are thought to reveal how the brain represents what it learns. Generalization has been a central focus in studies of sensorimotor adaptation, and its pattern has been well characterized: Learning of new dynamic and kinematic transformations in one ...

How do children acquire humankind's remarkable cognitive skills? Why are the abilities children acquire readily, such as native-language fluency, harder for adults? Although attitudes to these questions span the continuum from nativism to learning theory, answers remain elusive. We relate a recent model of language acquisition in childhood to advances in the neuroscience of adult cognitive cont...

A useful tool for causal reasoning is the language of cognitive maps developed by political scientists to analyse, predict and understand decisions. Although, this language is based on simple inference rules and its semantics is ad hoc, it has many attractive aspects and has been found useful in many applications: administrative sciences, game theory, information analysis, popular political dev...

The conception of adaptation was not introduced into biology in 1859, Rather what Darwin did was to offer a radically new type of explanation of adaptations and in so doing he altered the conception. As the above quotes indicate we have not in the last century sufficiently delimited this conception and it is important to do so. In this paper we will analyse and, I hope, clarify one aspect of th...

Linguistic theories have often assumed that language is learned separately from cognitive skills and operates according to principles that differ from most learned behaviors (Spolsky, 1985). This assumption is represented in analyses of unique language properties such as developmental language order, grammar, knowledge of language structures, social and contextual influences on language use, an...

Responses to climate change may be viewed as requiring primarily ‘‘Resilience’’ or ‘‘Adaptation.’’ We examine how those two terms affect lay responses to the risks of coastal flooding and sea level rise. We use two tasks requiring substantial participant involvement, one providing minimal information and one substantial information. In Study 1, participants spent ten minutes writing an essay ab...

introduction: micap is a new notation in which the teeth are indicated by letters (i-incisor, c-canine, p-premolar, m-molar) and numbers [1,2,3] which are written superscript and subscript on the relevant letters. fdi tooth notation is a two digit system where one digit shows quadrant and the second one shows the tooth of the quadrant. this study aimed to compare the short term retention of kno...