Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

8 results

  • Chapter 1 - Introduction

  • Wolfgang Schnotz, University of Koblenz-Landau
  • Book:
    Multimedia Comprehension
    Published online:
    16 February 2023
    Print publication:
    23 February 2023, pp 1-12
    • Chapter
      • You have access
    • PDF
    • HTML
    • Export citation

  • Summary

    This chapter aims at clarifying basic concepts related to multimedia: communication, comprehension, and learning. Multimedia communication is considered as the intentional creation, display, and reception of multiple kinds of signs in order to convey messages about some content. It entails two subprocesses: meaning and comprehension. Multimedia meaning is a process in which the producer of a message creates multiple external signs based on his or her prior knowledge in order to direct the recipient’s mind so that the recipient understands what the producer means. Multimedia comprehension is the complementary process of reconstructing the previously externalized knowledge in the mind of the recipient. It can be seen as the bottleneck of multimedia communication. Multimedia comprehension and multimedia learning are related but are nevertheless different: While multimedia comprehension results in transient changes in working memory, multimedia learning results in permanent changes in long-term memory. Multimedia learning is a byproduct of multimedia comprehension. Further, an overview of the book is presented.

  • Chapter 1 - Problem Solving

  • Zygmunt Pizlo, University of California, Irvine
  • Book:
    Problem Solving
    Published online:
    23 June 2022
    Print publication:
    07 July 2022, pp 1-13

  • Summary

    Problem solving is a goal-directed activity. As such, it depends critically on abstract, mental representations of a problem, including the identification of the goal that needs to be reached and the operations that allow the problem solver to navigate within the problem space. Because of this, mental representations of the physical, cognitive, and social environments take center stage when problem solving is discussed. The role of mental representations explains why the origins of research on problem solving are so closely related to the origins of the modern approach to perception initiated 100 years ago by the gestalt psychologists. The gestalt psychologists were particularly interested in insight problem solving, where the term “insight” provides an intuitive definition of such problems. We all know that Archimedes had an insight when he shouted out “Eureka” when he discovered the principle of buoyancy. Chapter 1 sets the stage for the remainder of the book, by promising to provide a new formalism that may be able to explain not only insight, but also many other research problems, including problems in mathematics and physics, as well as in scientific discovery. This ambitious plan should keep the students eager to see how it plays out, and by the end of Chapter 11 it should be clear why launching, 70 years ago, a new field called cognitive psychology, was called a scientific revolution.

  • Verbs in the lexicon: Why is hitting easier than breaking?

  • Gail McKoon, Jessica Love
  • Journal:
    Language and Cognition / Volume 3 / Issue 2 / June 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 March 2014, pp. 313-330

  • Adult speakers use verbs in syntactically appropriate ways. For example, they know implicitly that the boy hit at the fence is acceptable but the boy broke at the fence is not. We suggest that this knowledge is lexically encoded in semantic decompositions. The decomposition for break verbs (e.g. crack, smash) is hypothesized to be more complex than that for hit verbs (e.g. kick, kiss). Specifically, the decomposition of a break verb denotes that “an entity changes state as the result of some external force” whereas the decomposition for a hit verb denotes only that “an entity potentially comes in contact with another entity.” In this article, verbs of the two types were compared in a lexical decision experiment—Experiment 1—and they were compared in sentence comprehension experiments with transitive sentences (e.g. the car hit the bicycle and the car broke the bicycle)—Experiments 2 and 3. In Experiment 1, processing times were shorter for the hit than the break verbs and in Experiments 2 and 3, processing times were shorter for the hit sentences than the break sentences, results that are in accord with the complexities of the postulated semantic decompositions.

  • 9 - Language

  • from Part II - Aspects of cognition
  • Edited by Keith Frankish, The Open University, Milton Keynes, William Ramsey, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science
    Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    19 July 2012, pp -

  • Summary

    The phrase "the Representational Theory of Mind" (RTM) is used in two different but related ways. To understand the difference, one must distinguish two levels at which human beings can be described. The first is personal and belongs to common sense or folk psychology. The second level, in contrast, is subpersonal and scientific. Cognitive scientists and philosophers of cognitive science have offered various characterizations. This chapter begins with the author's own view, based on C.S. Peirce's general theory of representation, and then uses that as a basis of comparison to other views. Cognitive scientists, who conceptualize the mind/brain as, or as substantially like, a computer, take the representation-bearers of mental representations to be computational structures or states. Peirce hypothesized two broad kinds of ground for representation: similarity and causation. Mental representations play multiple roles in cognitive science explanations, which themselves come in many kinds.

  • 10 - Emotion

  • from Part II - Aspects of cognition
  • Edited by Keith Frankish, The Open University, Milton Keynes, William Ramsey, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Handbook of Cognitive Science
    Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    19 July 2012, pp -

  • Summary

    This chapter reviews the two main current approaches to cognitive architecture: rule-based systems and connectionism. Both kinds of architecture assume the central hypothesis of cognitive science that thinking consists of the application of computational procedures to mental representations, but they propose very different kinds of representations and procedures. Both rule-based and connectionist architectures have had many successes in explaining important psychological phenomena concerning problem solving, learning, language use, and other kinds of thinking. Given their large and only partially overlapping range of explanatory applications, it seems unlikely that either of the two approaches to cognitive architecture will come to dominate cognitive science. The chapter suggests a reconciliation of the two approaches by means of theoretical neuroscience. Unified understanding of how the brain can perform both serial problem solving using rules and parallel constraint satisfaction using distributed representations will be a major triumph of cognitive science.

  • Are there independent lexical and nonlexical routes in word processing? An evaluation of the dual-route theory of reading

  • Glyn W. Humphreys, Lindsay J. Evett
  • Journal:
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 8 / Issue 4 / December 1985
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    04 February 2010, pp. 689-705

  • One of the most popular and influential theories of word processing, dual-route theory, proposes that there are two functionally independent means of processing words, one involving access to lexical knowledge and the other involving nonlexical grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Three topics germane to this theory are the processing of nonwords, spelling regularity effects, and the manner in which reading may be impaired following selective damage to either route. This paper evaluates evidence on these topics, and in each case the claims of the theory for an independent nonlexical processing route are called into question. This conclusion is further supported by a discussion of the linguistic constraints that limit any nonlexical grapheme—phoneme conversion process. Some alternative approaches to visual word processing, which share the assumption that lexical knowledge can guide the assembly of phonological information, are discussed. It is argued that these approaches should direct future research.

  • 5 - Invertebrate concepts confront the generality constraint (and win)

  • Edited by Robert W. Lurz, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Philosophy of Animal Minds
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    03 September 2009, pp 89-107

  • Summary

    This chapter defends the claim that invertebrates possess concepts against the so-called "generality constraint", first proposed by Evans. The use of the term "concept" in philosophy is systematically ambiguous. But sometimes concepts are intended to be mental representations, concrete components of the physical tokenings of the thoughts of which they form part. The chapter concerns almost exclusively with concepts in the latter sense. The question is whether invertebrates possess the sorts of mental representations that are the components of genuine thoughts. Someone might seize upon the distinction drawn between system-1 and system-2 thinking to propose that genuine thinking and genuine concepts should be reserved to system 2, with the sorts of system-1 thoughts and concepts that we share with the rest of the animal kingdom being described as mere proto-thoughts and proto-concepts. From the standpoint of cognitive science distinctively human thinking consists of mere faux-thoughts.

  • 2 - Attributing mental representations to animals

  • Edited by Robert W. Lurz, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
  • Book:
    The Philosophy of Animal Minds
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    03 September 2009, pp 35-51

  • Summary

    We quite naturally attribute mental representations in order to explain actions. The chapter argues that some animal behavior is properly so explained, and thus that some animals truly have beliefs and desires. There are two strands of evidence which separately support this conclusion. First, behavior that is appropriately explained in terms of mental states such as beliefs and desires is behavior directed at a goal relative to which the agent is able to learn; and since human behavior meets this criterion, the chapter discusses on evolutionary grounds, that some animal behavior meets this criterion as well. Second, it shows that a number of different scientific observations of animal behavior strongly support the hypothesis that animals engage in goal-directed behavior, behavior that is organized around a goal with respect to which they are able to learn and, hence, behavior that is justifiably explained in terms of their having beliefs and desires.