Pragmatic ambivalence refers to a linguistic phenomenon in which the communicator uses vague or ambiguous words convey illocutionary force other party in specific context. It is an indispensable communicative strategy for successful communication daily activities. Relevance theory can explain pragmatic ambivalence from three aspects: intentional relevance, contextual relevance and reasoni...

It is useful for an intelligent software agent to be able to adapt to new demands from an environment. Such adaptation can be viewed as a redesign problem; an agent has some original functionality but the environment demands an agent with a slightly different functionality, so the agent redesigns itself. It is possible to take a case-based approach to this redesign task. Furthermore, one class ...

Central to any task-based syllabus is the notion of complexity. Proponents of task-based language teaching (TBLT) have argued that tasks be sequenced according to their inherent cognitive complexity, partially because learner performance changes according to the complexity of the task. This exploratory study examines the effect of task complexity on the linguistic complexity of task performance...

Does intentional car following capture visual attention to the extent that driving may be impaired? We tested fifteen participants on a rudimentary driving simulator. Participants were either instructed to follow a vehicle ahead through a simulated version of London, or were given verbal instructions on where to turn during the route. The presence or absence of pedestrians, and the simulated ti...

The event related potential (ERP) technique is a useful methodology for studying neural changes underlying memory development during childhood. However, systematic comparisons of differences in memory tasks and retrieval demands are lacking. To address this gap, the present study explored the effects of memory task (i.e., item versus source) and retrieval paradigm (i.e., intentional versus inci...

levels, and a homogeneous action or plan selection mechanism. These systems, however, put even less emphasis on higher level cognitive processing. 1.1. Aims and structure of the paper The aim of this paper is to present an agent architecture, DiPRA (Distributed Practical Reasoning Architecture), which couples realistic embodiment with mechanisms of intentional action control that are more sophi...

I thank Maurice Lagueux for his thoughtful reflections on my book Economic theory and cognitive science: microexplanation (henceforth: ETCS:M). Given space restrictions, in this comment I won’t say much about his criticisms of my use of the intentional stance, except to observe that they seem to rely on equivocation between thinking of beliefs and desires as internal states of people, and as de...

Social-psychological research on gendered persistence in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields is dominated by two explanations: women leave because they perceive their future family plans to be at odds with the demands of STEM careers, and women’s low self-assessment of their skills in the intellectual tasks of STEM, net of their performance, leads to their attrition. ...