For individuals who are blind, navigating independently in an unfamiliar environment represents a considerable challenge. Inspired by the rising popularity of video games, we have developed a novel approach to train navigation and spatial cognition skills in adolescents who are blind. Audio-based Environment Simulator (AbES) is a software application that allows for the virtual exploration of a...

This work introduces a conceptual representation for complex spatial arrangements of image features in large multimedia datasets. A novel data structure, termed the Spatial Event Cube (SEC), is formed from the co-occurrence matrices of perceptually classified features with respect to specific spatial relationships. A visual thesaurus constructed using supervised and unsupervised learning techni...

A robot moving through an environment, an interface to a geographical database, and a natural language program for giving directions all need means for representing and reasoning about spatial properties and relations. These include shape, size, distance, orientation, and relative location. The most precise and highly developed system of spatial representation is the mathematics of Euclidean sp...

Four experiments examined spatial correlates of the experience of coherence, that is, the extent to which propositions "fit together." Experiment 1 demonstrates for Heiderian triads (i.e., sets of liking/disliking relations between 3 fictitious persons) that name pairs from balanced triads, such as 2 friends commonly disliking a third person (high coherence) are seen as closer to each other in ...

: The current orthodoxy on mental representation can be characterized in terms of three central ideas. The first is ontological, the second semantic, and the third methodological. After elucidating those, I argue that the emerging picture of mental representation is satisfactory only as an account of mental representation at the sub-personal level. It is unsatisfactory, in a principled way, as ...

Let me begin with a bit of autobiography. I am, by profession, a teacher of philosophy. Year in and year out, for the last fifteen or twenty years, I have taught a large undergraduate course on contemporary moral issues issues like abortion, euthanasia, reverse discrimination, genetic engineering, and animal rights. Over the years, I have written a handful of papers on some of these topics. How...

Hume’s arguments in the Treatise require him to employ not only the copy principle, which explains the intrinsic properties of perceptions, but also a thesis that explains the representational content of a perception. I propose that Hume holds the semantic copy principle, which states that a perception represents that of which it is a copy. Hume employs this thesis in a number of his most impor...

Logical connectives, such as "AND", "OR", "IF. THEN", and "IF AND ONLY IF" are ubiquitous in both language and cognition; however, reasoning with logical connectives is error-prone. We argue that some of these errors may stem from people's tendency to minimize the number of possibilities compatible with logical connectives and to construct a "minimalist" one-possibility representation. As a res...

The claim that similarity plays a role in representation has been philosophically discredited. Psychologists, however, routinely analyze the success of mental representations for guiding behavior in terms of a similarity between representation and the world. I provide a foundation for this practice by developing a philosophically responsible account of the relationship between similarity and re...