Anthropology and the other cognitive science (CS) subdisciplines currently maintain a troubled relationship. With a debate in topiCS we aim at exploring the prospects for improving this relationship, and our introduction is intended as a catalyst for this debate. In order to encourage a frank sharing of perspectives, our comments will be deliberately provocative. Several challenges for a succes...

Optimal housing selection is one of the most important challenges in housing demand, which most people, especially housing investors, are facing. Although there is an overall agreement on the importance of the budget role on choosing the house, the model that uniquely measures the role and impact of all the factors of investment demand for housing has not been presented and no clear explanation...

Innateness is one of the central concepts of cognitive science; but it is also a source of considerable confusion. In this article, I survey recent attempts to understand the notion of innateness as it figures in cognitive science and indicate which is likely to prove most fruitful. One approach draws directly on our "commonsense" views about innate traits. Another aims to characterize innatene...

The protocol algorithm abstracted from a human cognizer's own narrative in the course of doing a cognitive task is an explanation of the corresponding mental activity in Pylyshyn's (1984) virtual machine model of mind. Strong equivalence between an analytic algorithm and the protocol algorithm is an index of validity of the explanatory model. Cognitive psychologists may not find the index stron...

the contemporary intellectual world is that between cognitive science and cultural theory. Cognitive scientists are committed to the idea that we can follow the conceptions of the mind to their zero level of the brain. As a result, speculation about our conceptions on their own terms will always mislead us into false problems. These are the problems that preoccupy cultural theorists. For the la...

The study of human intelligence was once dominated by symbolic approaches, but over the last 30 years an alternative approach has arisen. Symbols and processes that operate on them are often seen today as approximate characterizations of the emergent consequences of sub- or nonsymbolic processes, and a wide range of constructs in cognitive science can be understood as emergents. These include r...

The number of U.S. students who enter engineering programs in college is projected to drop, a trend that many believe will have a negative impact on the U.S. workforce (NAS et al., 2007; NAE and NRC, 2009). In addition, students who do pursue engineering degrees do not reflect the diversity of students in the United States, a pattern of enrollment that is likely to have a number of negative con...

The paper provides an introduction to the field of embodied cognitive science from a biological and behavioural perspective. We show how the field of neuro-ethology can help transform cognitive science from a representational to an embodied perspective. The transformation is necessary to introduce a bottom-up approach to understanding cognition in order to resolve some fundamental problems with...

The last ten years have seen an increasing interest, within cognitive science, in issues concerning the physical body, the local environment, and the complex interplay between neural systems and the wider world in which they function. Yet many unanswered questions remain, and the shape of a genuinely physically embodied, environmentally embedded science of the mind is still unclear. In this art...