67,114 research outputs found
Distributed Cognition: Cognizing, Autonomy and the Turing Test
No full textSome of the papers in this special issue distribute cognition between what is going on inside individual cognizers’ heads and their outside worlds; others distribute cognition among different individual cognizers. Turing’s criterion for cognition was individual, autonomous input/output capacity. It is not clear that distributed cognition could pass the Turing Test
The effects of screening, training, and experience of air force fighter pilots: the plasticity of the ability to extrapolate and track multiple objects in motion
No full textOffloading Cognition onto Cognitive Technology
No full text"Cognizing" (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state. Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers can offload some of their cognitive functions onto cognitive technology, thereby extending their performance capacity beyond the limits of their own brain power. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their cognitive functions onto the brains of other cognizers. Language also extends cognizers' individual and joint performance powers, distributing the load through interactive and collaborative cognition. Reading, writing, print, telecommunications and computing further extend cognizers' capacities. And now the web, with its network of cognizers, digital databases and software agents, all accessible anytime, anywhere, has become our “Cognitive Commons,” in which distributed cognizers and cognitive technology can interoperate globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity inconceivable through local individual cognition alone. And as with language, the cognitive tool par excellence, such technological changes are not merely instrumental and quantitative: they can have profound effects on how we think and encode information, on how we communicate with one another, on our mental states, and on our very nature
Decision making under time pressure: an independent test of sequential sampling models
No full textChoice probability and choice response time data from a risk-taking decision-making task were compared with predictions made by a sequential sampling model. The behavioral data, consistent with the model, showed that participants were less likely to take an action as risk levels increased, and that time pressure did not have a uniform effect on choice probability. Under time pressure, participants were more conservative at the lower risk levels but were more prone to take risks at the higher levels of risk. This crossover interaction reflected a reduction of the threshold within a single decision strategy rather than a switching of decision strategies. Response time data, as predicted by the model, showed that participants took more time to make decisions at the moderate risk levels and that time pressure reduced response time across all risk levels, but particularly at the those risk levels that took longer time with no pressure. Finally, response time data were used to rule out the hypothesis that time pressure effects could be explained by a fast-guess strategy
Perception of risk and the decision to use force
No full textThe quality of policing depends on making sound decisions. Many cognitive factors are involvedin decision making and these must be understood and harnessed so as to enhance the quality of decisionstaken by police officers. In this paper, I discuss two different decision-making systems (deliberative andexperiential), and how decision factors (such as complexity), internal factors (such as expectations), andexternal factors (such as time pressure) all come together in deciding whether or not to use force. Providingproper training and correctly utilising technology can enhance an officer’s ability to make sound decisions
Perceptual, cognitive, and psychological elements involved in expert identification
No full textIn expert domains, as well as in every day life, humans process information. Information is perceived, encoded, represented, transformed, stored, retrieved, compared to other information, and evaluated, to name just a few processes. However, the human mind is not a camera and we do not passively process information. We engage in a variety of active processes that organize and impose structure on the information as it comes in from the external world. Information is then further interpreted and processed in ways that highly depend on the human mind and cognition, and less on the environment and the actual content of the information itself. As we dynamically process information, we effect what we see, how we interpret and evaluate it, and our decision making processes. Thus, to understand expert performance, and especially in a highly specialized domain such as human identification, one needs to examine the roles of the human mind and cognition. Human cognition has been highly neglected by the fingerprint community, both by the forensic experts themselves as well as by those who design and develop related technology. This paper is a step towards addressing this oversight; fingerprint identification will be presented within its appropriate context, that of human cognition. I will first introduce the reader to cognitive psychology, explaining human information processing and illustrating psychological phenomena. Elements of the architecture of the human mind and how it operates will be briefly explained, as well as the vulnerabilities they entail. The process of fingerprint analysis will then be examined, demonstrating the critical role of psychology in this process. I will show the theoretical as well as the practical implications of psychology to the work of fingerprint experts. The reader will see that the mind and the way humans process information is highly relevant to the working of forensic experts.<br/
Maturana’s Autopoietic Hermeneutics Versus Turing’s Causal Methodology for Explaining Cognition (Reply to A. Kravchenko (2007) Whence the autonomy? A comment on Harnad and Dror (2006)
No full textKravchenko (2007) suggests replacing Turing’s suggested method for explaining cognizers’ cognitive capacity through autonomous robotic modelling by ‘autopoeisis, Maturana’s extremely vague metaphor for the relations and interactions among organisms and their environments. I suggest that this would be an exercise in hermeneutics rather than causal explanation
Complexity as a guide to understanding decision bias: A contribution to the favorite-longshot bias debate
No full textThis paper investigates the origins of a widespread decision bias in betting markets, the favorite-longshot bias (FLB); in particular, whether it is caused by cognitive errors on the part of bettors or by the pricing policies of bookmakers. The methodology is based on previous literature, which has suggested that: (i) races, as decision tasks for bettors, can be distinguished by their degree of complexity and their attractiveness to those with access to privileged information (insiders), (ii) cognitive errors increase as complexity increases, and (iii) bookmakers set odds in a manner to protect themselves from insiders. The degree of FLB was examined in races of varying complexity and attractiveness to insiders using a dataset of 8,545 races drawn from the parallel bookmaker and pari-mutuel markets operating in the UK in 2004. The results, interpreted in the light of the cognitive error and complexity literature, suggest that neither bettors’ nor bookmakers’ cognitive errors are the main cause of the bias. Rather, bettors’ preferences for risk and the deliberate pricing policies of bookmakers play key roles in influencing the bias in markets where bookmakers and pari-mutuel operators co-exist
Making training more cognitively effective: making videos interactive
No full textThe cost of health and safety (H&S) failures to the UK industry is currently estimated at up to £6.5 billion per annum, with the construction sector suffering unacceptably high levels of work-related incidents. Better H&S education across all skill levels in the industry is seen as an integral part of any solution. Traditional lecture-based courses often fail to recreate the dynamic realities of managing H&S on site and therefore do not sufficiently create deeper cognitive learning (which results in remembering and using what was learned). The use of videos is a move forward, but passively observing a video is not cognitively engaging and challenging, and therefore learning is not as effective as it can be. This paper describes the development of an interactive video in which learners take an active role. While observing the video, they are required to engage, participate, respond and be actively involved. The potential for this approach to be used in conjunction with more traditional approaches to H&S was explored using a group of 2nd-year undergraduate civil engineering students. The formative results suggested that the learning experience could be enhanced using interactive videos. Nevertheless, most of the learners believed that a blended approach would be most effective
To be or not to be: the effects of age stereotypes on the will to live
No full textThis study examined whether stereotypes of aging might contribute to decisions the elderly make about when to die. Old and young participants (N=64) were subliminally primed with either negative or positive stereotypes of old age and then responded to hypothetical medical situations involving potentially fatal illnesses. Consistent with our prediction, the aged participants primed with negative stereotypes tended to refuse life-prolonging interventions, whereas the old participants primed with positive age stereotypes tended to accept the interventions. This priming effect did not emerge among the young participants for whom the stereotypes were less relevant. The results suggest that societally-transmitted negative stereotypes of aging can weaken elderly people's will to live
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