2,167 research outputs found
Autism:Implications for Inclusive Education with respect to Software Engineering
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219448.pdf (preprint version ) (Open Access)CSERC '1
Brief Report: Additive and Subtractive Counterfactual Reasoning of Children with High-Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders
The development of additive (âIf only I had doneâŠâ) and subtractive (âIf only I had not doneâŠ.â) counterfactual reasoning was examined in children with High Functioning Autism Spectrum Disorders (HFASD) (n = 72) and typically developing controls (n = 71), aged 6â12 years. Children were presented four stories where they could generate counterfactuals based on a given consequent (e.g., âyou left muddy footprints in the kitchen. How could that have been prevented?â). Children with HFASD increasingly used subtractive counterfactuals as they got older, but controls showed an increase in additive counterfactuals, which may be linked to their growing adaptive and flexible skills. Children with HFASD likely develop different strategies for their counterfactual reasoning. The role of IQ and ideational fluency will be discussed
The development of reasoning heuristics in autism and in typical development
Reasoning and judgment under uncertainty are often based on a limited number of
simplifying heuristics rather than formal logic or rule-based argumentation. Heuristics are
low-effort mental shortcuts, which save time and effort, and usually result in accurate
judgment, but they can also lead to systematic errors and biases when applied
inappropriately. In the past 40 years hundreds of papers have been published on the topic
of heuristics and biases in judgment and decision making. However, we still know
surprisingly little about the development and the cognitive underpinnings of heuristics and
biases.
The main aim of my thesis is to examine these questions. Another aim is to evaluate
the applicability of dual-process theories of reasoning to the development of reasoning.
Dual-process theories claim that there are two types of process underlying higher order
reasoning: fast, automatic, and effortless (Type 1) processes (which are usually associated
with the use of reasoning heuristics), and slow, conscious and effortful (Type 2) processes
(which are usually associated with rule-based reasoning).
This thesis presents eight experiments which investigated the development of
reasoning heuristics in three different populations: typically developing children and
adolescents between the age of 5 and 16, adolescents with autism, and university students.
Although heuristic reasoning is supposed to be basic, simple, and effortless, we have found
evidence that responses that are usually attributed to heuristic processes are positively
correlated with cognitive capacity in the case of young children (even after controlling for
the effects of age). Moreover, we have found that adolescents with autism are less
susceptible to a number of reasoning heuristics than typically developing children. Finally,
our experiments with university students provided evidence that education in statistics
increases the likelihood of the inappropriate use of a certain heuristic (the equiprobability
bias). These results offer a novel insight into the development of reasoning heuristics.
Additionally, they have interesting implications for dual-process theories of reasoning, and
they can also inform the debates about the rationality of reasoning heuristics and biases
Human reasoning and cognitive science
In the late summer of 1998, the authors, a cognitive scientist and a logician, started talking about the relevance of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning, and we have been talking ever since. This book is an interim report of that conversation. It argues that results such as those on the Wason selection task, purportedly showing the irrelevance of formal logic to actual human reasoning, have been widely misinterpreted, mainly because the picture of logic current in psychology and cognitive science is completely mistaken. We aim to give the reader a more accurate picture of mathematical logic and, in doing so, hope to show that logic, properly conceived, is still a very helpful tool in cognitive science. The main thrust of the book is therefore constructive. We give a number of examples in which logical theorizing helps in understanding and modeling observed behavior in reasoning tasks, deviations of that behavior in a psychiatric disorder (autism), and even the roots of that behavior in the evolution of the brain
Directional adposition use in English, Swedish and Finnish
Directional adpositions such as to the left of describe where a Figure is in relation to a Ground. English and Swedish directional adpositions refer to the location of a Figure in relation to a Ground, whether both are static or in motion. In contrast, the Finnish directional adpositions edellÀ (in front of) and jÀljessÀ (behind) solely describe the location of a moving Figure in relation to a moving Ground (Nikanne, 2003).
When using directional adpositions, a frame of reference must be assumed for interpreting the meaning of directional adpositions. For example, the meaning of to the left of in English can be based on a relative (speaker or listener based) reference frame or an intrinsic (object based) reference frame (Levinson, 1996). When a Figure and a Ground are both in motion, it is possible for a Figure to be described as being behind or in front of the Ground, even if neither have intrinsic features. As shown by Walker (in preparation), there are good reasons to assume that in the latter case a motion based reference frame is involved. This means that if Finnish speakers would use edellÀ (in front of) and jÀljessÀ (behind) more frequently in situations where both the Figure and Ground are in motion, a difference in reference frame use between Finnish on one hand and English and Swedish on the other could be expected.
We asked native English, Swedish and Finnish speakersâ to select adpositions from a language specific list to describe the location of a Figure relative to a Ground when both were shown to be moving on a computer screen. We were interested in any differences between Finnish, English and Swedish speakers.
All languages showed a predominant use of directional spatial adpositions referring to the lexical concepts TO THE LEFT OF, TO THE RIGHT OF, ABOVE and BELOW. There were no differences between the languages in directional adpositions use or reference frame use, including reference frame use based on motion.
We conclude that despite differences in the grammars of the languages involved, and potential differences in reference frame system use, the three languages investigated encode Figure location in relation to Ground location in a similar way when both are in motion.
Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference and Molyneuxâs question: Crosslingiuistic evidence. In P. Bloom, M.A. Peterson, L. Nadel & M.F. Garrett (Eds.) Language and Space (pp.109-170). Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Nikanne, U. (2003). How Finnish postpositions see the axis system. In E. van der Zee & J. Slack (Eds.), Representing direction in language and space. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Walker, C. (in preparation). Motion encoding in language, the use of spatial locatives in a motion context. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Lincoln, Lincoln. United Kingdo
Conditional reasoning in autism spectrum disorder: activation and integration of knowledge and belief.
Reasoning from all knowledge and belief is an adaptive approach to thinking about the world. It has been robustly shown that conditional âif thenâ reasoning with everyday content is influenced by the background knowledge an individual has available. If we are presented with the statement âif it rains, then John will get wetâ then we are told that it is raining and asked if John will get wet, we may consider a number of possibilities before answering the question; perhaps John has an umbrella or is sheltered from the rain. Hence, when engaged in conditional reasoning of this sort people typically draw on background knowledge to arrive at an informed response.
People with autism tend not to process information in context. There is a wealth of evidence indicating that these individuals have a piecemeal rather than an integrative processing style. It was therefore hypothesised that adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) would be less influenced by background knowledge when engaged in conditional reasoning with everyday content.
Adolescents with ASD showed a weak or absent effect of available background knowledge on reasoning outcomes compared to a typically developing control group. This finding was demonstrated in two separate conditional reasoning tasks. These results were not explained by a failure to generate background knowledge or by differences in the beliefs held by the two groups regarding problem content. Within the typical population a lack of contextualised reasoning was also found among participants with high scores on one particular autistic trait, attention to detail. The ability to integrate all relevant information during conditional reasoning was also found to be dependent on available working memory resources.
These results extend the known domains which demonstrate a lack of contextualised processing in autism. They also show that for individuals with autism reasoning without regard for background knowledge stems from a failure to integrate information. The findings suggest that this failure is related to the cognitive demands of the task and the processing style of the individual
A multimodal investigation of moral decision making in harmful contexts
Since the two landmark publications in moral psychology (Greene, Sommerville, Nystrom, Darley, & Cohen, 2001; Haidt, 2001), the field has experienced an affective revolution that has put emotions at the center of the stage. Although work on exploring role of emotions in assessing morality of various types of moral acts (impure, unfair, etc.; Haidt, 2007) abounds, studying its role in harmful behaviors presents a unique challenge. The aversion to harming others is an integral part of the foundations of human moral sense and it presents itself in the form of deeply ingrained moral intuitions (Haidt, 2007). Since creating laboratory situations to investigate harm aversion raises ethical issues, research has primarily relied on studying hypothetical cases. In the current thesis, we utilize hypothetical vignettes to explore role of emotions in both moral judgment and behavior in harmful contexts, both when harm is carried out intentionally or produced accidentally.
Study 1 investigates the role of emotion in motivating utilitarian behavior in moral dilemmas when presented in contextually salient virtual reality format as compared to judgment about the same cases for their textual versions.
Study 2 investigates divergent contributions of two different sources of affect, one stemming from self-focused distress and the other focused on other-oriented concern, on utilitarian moral judgments in autistics.
Study 3 investigates the role of empathic arousal in condemning agents involved in unintentional harms and why harmful outcomes have a greater bearing on blame as compared to acceptability judgments
Probabilities, causation, and logic programming in conditional reasoning: reply to Stenning and Van Lambalgen (2016)
Oaksford and Chater (2014, Thinking and Reasoning, 20, 269â295) critiqued the logic programming (LP) approach to nonmonotonicity and proposed that a Bayesian probabilistic approach to conditional reasoning provided a more empirically adequate theory. The current paper is a reply to Stenning and van Lambalgen's rejoinder to this earlier paper entitled âLogic programming, probability, and two-system accounts of reasoning: a rejoinder to Oaksford and Chaterâ (2016) in Thinking and Reasoning. It is argued that causation is basic in human cognition and that explaining how abnormality lists are created in LP requires causal models. Each specific rejoinder to the original critique is then addressed. While many areas of agreement are identified, with respect to the key differences, it is concluded the current evidence favours the Bayesian approach, at least for the moment
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Seeing things as people: anthropomorphism and common-sense psychology
This thesis is about common-sense psychology and its role in cognitive science. Put simply, the argument is that common-sense psychology is important because it offers clues to some complex problems in cognitive science, and because common-sense psychology has significant effects on our intuitions, both in science and on an everyday level.
The thesis develops a theory of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology. Anthropomorphism, the natural human tendency to ascribe human characteristics (and especially human mental characteristics) to things that aren't human, is an important theme in the thesis. Anthropomorphism reveals an endemic anthropocentricity that deeply influences our thinking about other minds. The thesis then constructs a descriptive model of anthropomorphism in common-sense psychology, and uses it to analyse two studies of the ascription of mental states. The first, Baron- Cohen et al. 's (1985) false belief test, shows how cognitive modelling can be used to compare different theories of common-sense psychology. The second study, Searle's (1980) `Chinese Room', shows 'that this same model can reproduce the patterns of scientific intuitions taken to systems which pass the Turing test (Turing, 1950), suggesting that it is best seen as a common-sense test for a mind, not a scientific one. Finally, the thesis argues that scientific theories involving the ascription of mentality through a model or a metaphor are partly dependent on each individual scientist's common-sense psychology.
To conclude, this thesis develops an interdisciplinary study of common-sense psychology and shows that its effects are more wide ranging than is commonly thought. This means that it affects science more than might be expected, but that careful study can help us to become mindful of these effects. Within this new framework, a proper understanding of common-sense psychology could lay important new foundations for the future of cognitive science
Rethinking the Relationship between Social Experience and False-Belief Understanding: A Mentalistic Account
It was long assumed that the capacity to represent false beliefs did not emerge until at least age four, as evidenced by childrenâs performance on elicited-response tasks. However, recent evidence that infants appear to demonstrate false-belief understanding when tested with alternative, non-elicited-response measures has led some researchers to conclude that the capacity to represent beliefs emerges in the first year of life. This mentalistic view has been criticized for failing to offer an explanation for the well-established positive associations between social factors and preschoolersâ performance on elicited-response false-belief tasks. In this paper, we address this criticism by offering an account that reconciles these associations with the mentalistic claim that false-belief understanding emerges in infancy. We propose that rather than facilitating the emergence of the capacity to represent beliefs, social factors facilitate the use of this ability via effects on attention, inference, retrieval, and response production. Our account predicts that the relationship between social factors and false-belief understanding should not be specific to preschoolersâ performance in elicited-response tasks: this relationship should be apparent across the lifespan in a variety of paradigms. We review an accumulating body of evidence that supports this prediction
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