Many "if p, then q" conditionals have decision-theoretic features, such as antecedents or consequents that relate to the utility functions of various agents. These decision-theoretic features leak into reasoning processes, resulting in various paralogical conclusions. The theory of utility conditionals offers a unified account of the various forms…

Genuine moral disagreement exists and is widespread. To understand such disagreement, we must examine the basic kinds of social relationships people construct across cultures and the distinct moral obligations and prohibitions these relationships entail. We extend relational models theory (Fiske, 1991) to identify 4 fundamental and distinct moral…

A new model for confidence judgments in recognition memory is presented. In the model, the match between a single test item and memory produces a distribution of evidence, with better matches corresponding to distributions with higher means. On this match dimension, confidence criteria are placed, and the areas between the criteria under the…

The mental model theory of conditional reasoning presented by P. N. Johnson-Laird and R. M. J. Byrne (2002) has recently been the subject of criticisms (e.g., J. St. B. T. Evans, D. E. Over, & S. J. Handley, 2005). The authors argue that the theoretical conflict can be resolved by differentiating 2 kinds of reasoning, reasoning about possibilities…

In their stimulating comment on Barrouillet, Gauffroy, and Lecas Oberauer and Oaksford argued that we gave no rationale for the assumption that the mental models of false-antecedent cases have a different epistemic status from the p q model and that no new computational level account of the conditional was provided to justify this move. The…

Plaut and McClelland (2010) and Quian Quiroga and Kreiman both challenged my characterization of localist and distributed representations. They also challenged the biological plausibility of grandmother cells on conceptual and empirical grounds. This reply addresses these issues in turn. The premise of my argument is that grandmother cells in…

It is widely assumed that older adults suffer a deficit in the psychological processes that underlie remembering of contextual or source information. This conclusion is based in large part on empirical interactions, including disordinal ones, that reveal differential effects of manipulations of memory strength on recognition in young and old…

A model of mutual responsiveness in adult romantic relationships is proposed. Behaving responsively in conflict-of-interest situations requires one partner to resist the temptation to be selfish and the other partner to resist the temptation to protect against exploitation. Managing risk and the attendant temptations of self-interest require the…

M. R. Dougherty, A. M. Franco-Watkins, and R. Thomas (2008) conjectured that fast and frugal heuristics need an automatic frequency counter for ordering cues. In fact, only a few heuristics order cues, and these orderings can arise from evolutionary, social, or individual learning, none of which requires automatic frequency counting. The idea that…

Cultural evolutionary theory is an interdisciplinary field in which human culture is viewed as a Darwinian process of variation, competition, and inheritance, and the tools, methods, and theories developed by evolutionary biologists to study genetic evolution are adapted to study cultural change. It is argued here that an integration of the…

Following G. T. Fechner (1966), thresholds have been conceptualized as the amount of intensity needed to transition between mental states, such as between a states of unconsciousness and consciousness. With the advent of the theory of signal detection, however, discrete-state theory and the corresponding notion of threshold have been discounted.…

The simplest attentional task, detecting a cued stimulus in an otherwise empty visual field, produces complex patterns of performance. Attentional cues interact with backward masks and with spatial uncertainty, and there is a dissociation in the effects of these variables on accuracy and on response time. A computational theory of performance in…

M. Singh and B. L. Anderson proposed a perceptual theory of achromatic transparency in which the perceived transmittance of a perceived transparent filter is determined by the ratio of the Michelson contrast seen in the region of transparency to that of the background seen directly. Subsequently, B. L. Anderson, M. Singh, and J. Meng proposed that…

Inducing causal relationships from observations is a classic problem in scientific inference, statistics, and machine learning. It is also a central part of human learning, and a task that people perform remarkably well given its notorious difficulties. People can learn causal structure in various settings, from diverse forms of data: observations…

A theory is presented that attempts to answer two questions. What visual contents can an observer consciously access at one moment? Answer: only one feature value (e.g., green) per dimension, but those feature values can be associated (as a group) with multiple spatially precise locations (comprising a single labeled Boolean map). How can an…