A key feature of the human cognitive system is its ability to deal with an ever-changing environment. One prototypical example is the observation that we adjust our information processing depending on the conflict-likelihood of a context (context-specific proportion congruency effect, CSPC, Crump etal., 2006). Recently, empirical studies started to question the role of consciousness in these st...

Social cognitive theory adopts an agentic perspective to human development, adaptation, and change. The theory distinguishes among three modes of agency: personal agency exercised individually; proxy agency in which people secure desired outcomes by influencing others to act on their behalf; and collective agency in which people act in concert to shape their future. Contentious dualisms pervade...

This paper provides a new way to understand the concept of a utility function. By looking into the cognitive processes of information acquisition, I demonstrate how a utility function can be derived from deeper first principles. Crucially, assuming that humans possess only a minimal set of cognitive tools ordinal comparison and proportion (or frequency-of-occurrence) estimation, I show that the...

Theories of cognitive control generally assume that perceived conflict acts as a signal to engage inhibitory mechanisms that suppress subsequent conflicting information. Crucially, an absence of conflict is not regarded as being a relevant signal for cognitive control. Using a cueing, a priming, and a Simon task, we provide evidence that conflict does not have this unique signal status: Encount...

Context is a controversial concept. Research in philosophy of language, linguistics and cognitive science has shown that the communicative content of an utterance is not limited to the conventional content of what is said. The notion of context has been introduced in semantics and has assumed a central role in language studies with the pragmatic turn that has shifted the focus from meaning to s...

This article presents the proceedings of a symposium at the 2002 RSA Meeting in San Francisco, organized by Reinout W. Wiers and Mark D. Wood. The symposium combined two topics of recent interest in studies of alcohol expectancies: cognitive mechanisms in expectancy challenge studies, and context-related changes of expectancies. With increasing recognition of the substantial role played by alco...

A reinforcement learning system is typically described as a black box which receives two types of input, the current state, S, and the current reinforcement, R. From these two inputs, the system has to figure out a policy that determines what action to perform in each state to maximize the received reinforcement in the future (Sutton & Barto, 1998). The future expected reinforcement can be esti...