Steven Pinker

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of 'culturomics,' focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

Abstract Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory – that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets these criteria: Grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: Communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species, and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

Annals of the New York Academy of SciencesVolume 882, Issue 1 p. 119-127 How the Mind Works STEVEN PINKER, STEVEN PINKER Director, McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USASearch for more papers by this author STEVEN PINKER, STEVEN PINKER Director, McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 06 February 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-6632.1999.tb08538.xCitations: 82Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onEmailFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume882, Issue1GREAT ISSUES FOR MEDICINE IN THE TWENTY‐FIRST CENTURY: ETHICAL AND SOCIAL ISSUES ARISING OUT OF ADVANCES IN THE BIOMEDICAL SCIENCESJune 1999Pages 119-127 RelatedInformation

In this extremely valuable book, very informative, and very well written (Noam Chomsky), one of the greatest thinkers in the field of linguistics explains how language works--how people, ny making noises with their mouths, can cause ideas to arise in other people's minds.

Does knowledge of language consist of mentally-represented rules? Rumelhart and McClelland have described a connectionist (parallel distributed processing) model of the acquisition of the past tense in English which successfully maps many stems onto their past tense forms, both regular (walk/walked) and irregular (go/went), and which mimics some of the errors and sequences of development of children. Yet the model contains no explicit rules, only a set of neuronstyle units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the stem, a set of units which stand for trigrams of phonetic features of the past form, and an array of connections between the two sets of units whose strengths are modified during learning. Rumelhart and McClelland conclude that linguistic rules may be merely convenient approximate fictions and that the real causal processes in language use and acquisition must be characterized as the transfer of activation levels among units and the modification of the weights of their connections. We analyze both the linguistic and the developmental assumptions of the model in detail and discover that (1) it cannot represent certain words, (2) it cannot learn many rules, (3) it can learn rules found in no human language, (4) it cannot explain morphological and phonological regularities, (5) it cannot explain the differences between irregular and regular forms, (6) it fails at its assigned task of mastering the past tense of English, (7) it gives an incorrect explanation for two developmental phenomena: stages of overregularization of irregular forms such as bringed, and the appearance of doubly-marked forms such as ated and (8) it gives accounts of two others (infrequent overregularization of verbs ending in t/d, and the order of acquisition of different irregular subclasses) that are indistinguishable from those of rule-based theories. In addition, we show how many failures of the model can be attributed to its connectionist architecture. We conclude that connectionists' claims about the dispensability of rules in explanations in the psychology of language must be rejected, and that, on the contrary, the linguistic and developmental facts provide good evidence for such rules. La connaissance du langage repose-t-elle sur la représentation mentale de règles? Rumelhart et McClelland ont développéun modéle connectioniste (parallel distributed processing, PDP) de l'acquisition du passéanglais qui parvientàproduire la forme passéd'un certain nombre de verbes,àla fois réguliers (walk/walked) et irréguliers (go/went),àpartir de leurs racines, et qui semble commettre certaines des erreurs et passer par certains desétapes de développement des enfants qui apprennent le passéanglais. Pourtant, le modèle ne contient pas de règles explicites; il est exclusivement constituéd'un ensemble d'unités qui représentent des trigrammes de traits phonétiques de la racine, d'un ensemble d'unités qui représentent des trigrammes de traits phonétiques de la forme passée de la racine, et d'un réseau de connections entre les deux ensembles d'unités, connections dont la force varie en fonction de l'apprentissage. La conclusion de Rumelhart & McClelland est que les règles linguistiques ne sont peut-eˆtre en fait que des approximations pratiques et que les processus causaux réels de l'utilisation et de l'acquisition du langage doiventeˆtre caractérisés en termes de transfert de niveaux d'activation entre unités et de modification du poids de leurs connections. Nous avons analyséen détail les hypothèses linguistiques et de développement qui sous-tendent leur modèle et avons découvert que (1) le modèle ne peut pas représenter certains mots, (2) il ne peut pas apprendre beaucoup de règles, (3) il peut apprendre des règles que l'on ne rencontre dans aucune langue humaine, (4) il ne peut pas expliquer certaines régularités morphologiques et phonologiques, (5) il ne peut pas expliquer les différences entre formes réguliéres et irrégulières, (6) il ne parvient pasàaccomplir la taˆche qui lui aétéassigné,àsavoir apprendre le passéanglais, (7) il explique incorrectement deux phénomènes de développement: lesétapes de sur-régularisation de formes irrégulières comme bringed, et l'apparition de formes doublement marquées comme ated, enfin, (8) il donne une explication de deux autres phénomènes (la surrégularisation peu fréquente des verbes qui se terminent en t/d, et l'ordre d'acquisition des différentes sous-classes irrégulières) qui est indifférenciable de celle fournie par des théories utilisant des règles. En outre, nous montrons que c'est l'architecture connectioniste du modèle qui est responsable de ses nombreux défauts. Notre conclusion est que les affirmations des connectionistes quantàl'inutilitédes règles dans les explications doiventeˆtre rejetées et quc, bien au contraire, toutes les données militent en faveur de l'existence de telles règles.

We examine the question of which aspects of language are uniquely human and uniquely linguistic in light of recent suggestions by Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch that the only such aspect is syntactic recursion, the rest of language being either specific to humans but not to language (e.g. words and concepts) or not specific to humans (e.g. speech perception). We find the hypothesis problematic. It ignores the many aspects of grammar that are not recursive, such as phonology, morphology, case, agreement, and many properties of words. It is inconsistent with the anatomy and neural control of the human vocal tract. And it is weakened by experiments suggesting that speech perception cannot be reduced to primate audition, that word learning cannot be reduced to fact learning, and that at least one gene involved in speech and language was evolutionarily selected in the human lineage but is not specific to recursion. The recursion-only claim, we suggest, is motivated by Chomsky's recent approach to syntax, the Minimalist Program, which de-emphasizes the same aspects of language. The approach, however, is sufficiently problematic that it cannot be used to support claims about evolution. We contest related arguments that language is not an adaptation, namely that it is "perfect," non-redundant, unusable in any partial form, and badly designed for communication. The hypothesis that language is a complex adaptation for communication which evolved piecemeal avoids all these problems.

Language learnability and language devlopment revisited the acquisition theory - assumptions and postulates phrase structure rules phrase stucture rules - developmental considerations inflection complementation and control auxiliaries lexical entries and lexical rules.

The blank slate, the noble savage and the ghost in the machine: the official theory silly putty the last wall to fall culture vultures the slate's last stand. Fear and loathing: political scientists the Holy Trinity. Human nature with a human face: the fear of inequality the fear of imperfectability the fear of determinism the fear of nihilism. Know thyself: in touch with reality out of our depths the many roots of our suffering the sanctimonious animal. Hot buttons: politics violence gender children the arts. The voice of the species. Appendix: Donald E. Brown's list of human universals.

What is the interaction between storage and computation in language processing? What is the psychological status of grammatical rules? What are the relative strengths of connectionist and symbolic models of cognition? How are the components of language implemented in the brain? The English past tense has served as an arena for debates on these issues. We defend the theory that irregular past-tense forms are stored in the lexicon, a division of declarative memory, whereas regular forms can be computed by a concatenation rule, which requires the procedural system. Irregulars have the psychological, linguistic and neuropsychological signatures of lexical memory, whereas regulars often have the signatures of grammatical processing. Furthermore, because regular inflection is rule-driven, speakers can apply it whenever memory fails.

Children extend regular grammatical patterns to irregular words, resulting in overregularizations like comed, often after a period of correct performance ("U-shaped development"). The errors seem paradigmatic of rule use, hence bear on central issues in the psychology of rules: how creative rule application interacts with memorized exceptions in development, how overgeneral rules are unlearned in the absence of parental feedback, and whether cognitive processes involve explicit rules or parallel distributed processing (connectionist) networks. We remedy the lack of quantitative data on overregularization by analyzing 11,521 irregular past tense utterances in the spontaneous speech of 83 children. Our findings are as follows. (1) Overregularization errors are relatively rare (median 2.5% of irregular past tense forms), suggesting that there is no qualitative defect in children's grammars that must be unlearned. (2) Overregularization occurs at a roughly constant low rate from the 2s into the school-age years, affecting most irregular verbs. (3) Although overregularization errors never predominate, one aspect of their purported U-shaped development was confirmed quantitatively: an extended period of correct performance precedes the first error. (4) Overregularization does not correlate with increases in the number or proportion of regular verbs in parental speech, children's speech, or children's vocabularies. Thus, the traditional account in which memory operates before rules cannot be replaced by a connectionist alternative in which a single network displays rotelike or rulelike behavior in response to changes in input statistics. (5) Overregularizations first appear when children begin to mark regular verbs for tense reliably (i.e., when they stop saying Yesterday I walk). (6) The more often a parent uses an irregular form, the less often the child overregularizes it. (7) Verbs are protected from overregularization by similar-sounding irregulars, but they are not attracted to overregularization by similar-sounding regulars, suggesting that irregular patterns are stored in an associative memory with connectionist properties, but that regulars are not. We propose a simple explanation. Children, like adults, mark tense using memory (for irregulars) and an affixation rule that can generate a regular past tense form for any verb. Retrieval of an irregular blocks the rule, but children's memory traces are not strong enough to guarantee perfect retrieval. When retrieval fails, the rule is applied, and overregularization results.

A classic book about language acquisition and conceptual structure, with a new preface by the author, "The Secret Life of Verbs."Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space, time, causality, agency, and goals? The stage for this synthesis was set by the fact that when children learn a language, they come to make surprisingly subtle distinctions: pour water into the glass and fill the glass with water sound natural, but pour the glass with water and fill water into the glass sound odd. How can this happen, given that children are not reliably corrected for uttering odd sentences, and they don't just parrot back the correct ones they hear from their parents? Pinker resolves this paradox with a theory of how children acquire the meaning and uses of verbs, and explores that theory's implications for language, thought, and the relationship between them.As Pinker writes in a new preface, "The Secret Life of Verbs," the phenomena and ideas he explored in this book inspired his 2007 bestseller The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. These technical discussions, he notes, provide insight not just into language acquisition but into literary metaphor, scientific understanding, political discourse, and even the conceptions of sexuality that go into obscenity.

How do we recognize objects despite differences in their retinal projections when they are seen at different orientations? Marr and Nishihara (1978) proposed that shapes are represented in memory as structural descriptions in object-centered coordinate systems, so that an object is represented identically regardless of its orientation. An alternative hypothesis is that an object is represented in memory in a single representation corresponding to a canonical orientation, and a mental rotation operation transforms an input shape into that orientation before input and memory are compared. A third possibility is that shapes are stored in a set of representations, each corresponding to a different orientation. In four experiments, subjects studied several objects each at a single orientation, and were given extensive practice at naming them quickly, or at classifying them as normal or mirror-reversed, at several orientations. At first, response times increased with departure from the study orientation, with a slope similar to those obtained in classic mental rotation experiments. This suggests that subjects made both judgments by mentally transforming the orientation of the input shape to the one they had initially studied. With practice, subjects recognized the objects almost equally quickly at all the familiar orientations. At that point they were probed with the same objects appearing at novel orientations. Response times for these probes increased with increasing disparity from the previously trained orientations. This indicates that subjects had stored representations of the shapes at each of the practice orientations and recognized shapes at the new orientations by rotating them to one of the stored orientations. The results are consistent with a hybrid of the second (mental transformation) and third (multiple view) hypotheses of shape recognition: input shapes are transformed to a stored view, either the one at the nearest orientation or one at a canonical orientation. Interestingly, when mirrorimages of trained shapes were presented for naming, subjects took the same time at all orientations. This suggests that mental transformations of orientation can take the shortest path of rotation that will align an input shape and its memorized counterpart, in this case a rotation in depth about an axis in the picture plane.

Abstract Language comprises a lexicon for storing words and a grammar for generating rule-governed forms. Evidence is presented that the lexicon is part of a temporal-parietalhnedial-temporal “declarative memory” system and that granlmatical rules are processed by a frontamasal-ganglia “procedural” system. Patients produced past tenses of regular and novel verbs (looked and plagged), which require an -ed-suffixation rule, and irregular verbs (dug), which are retrieved from memory. Word-finding difficulties in posterior aphasia, and the general declarative memory impairment in Alzheimer's disease, led to more errors with irregular than regular and novel verbs. Grammatical difficulties in anterior aphasia, and the general impairment of procedures in Parkinson's disease, led to the opposite pattern. In contrast to the Parkinson's patients, who showed sup pressed motor activity and rule use, Huntington's disease patients showed excess motor activity and rule use, underscoring a role for the basal ganglia in grammatical processing.

Language is often explained as the product of generative rules and a memorized lexicon. For example, most English verbs take a regular past tense suffix (ask-asked), which is applied to new verbs (faxed, wugged), suggesting the mental rule "add -ed to a Verb." Irregular verbs (break-broke, go-went) would be listed in memory. Alternatively, a pattern associator memory (such as a connectionist network) might record all past tense forms and generalize to new ones by similarity; irregular and regular patterns would differ only because of their different numbers of verbs. We present evidence that mental rules are indispensible. A rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs or their sound patterns, but applies as the "default," whenever memory access fails. We find 21 such circumstances for regular past tense formation, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words; in every case, people inflect them regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, sabre-tooths, walkmans). Contrary to the connectionist account, these effects are not due to regular words constituting a large majority of vocabulary. The German participle -t applies to a much smaller percentage of verbs than its English counterpart, and the German plural -s applies to a small minority of nouns. But the affixes behave in the language like their English counterparts, as defaults. We corroborate this effect in two experiments eliciting ratings of participle and plural forms of novel German words. Thus default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory. Because default cases do not occupy a cohesive similarity space, but do correspond to the range of a symbol, they are evidence for a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.

Research is reviewed that addresses itself to human language learning by developing precise, mechanistic models that are capable in principle of acquiring languages on the basis of exposure to linguistic data. Such research includes theorems on language learnability from mathematical linguistics, computer models of language acquisition from cognitive simulation and artificial intelligence, and models of transformational grammar acquisition from theoretical linguistics. It is argued that such research bears strongly on major issues in developmental psycholinguistics, in particular, nativism and empiricism, the role of semantics and pragmatics in language learning, cognitive development, and the importance of the simplified speech addressed to children. Analyse d'une recherche centrée sur l'apprentissage du langage humain, développant des modéles mécanistes précis susceptibles, en principe, d'acquérir le langage à partir d'une exposition aux données linguistiques. Une telle recherche comporte des théorémes (empruntés à la linguistique mathématique) des modéles informatiques pour l'acquisition du langage (empruntés à la simulation cognitive et à l'intelligence artificielle) des modéles d'acquisition de la grammaire transformationnelle (empruntés à la linguistique théorique). On soutient que cette recherche repose étroitement sur les thèmes principaux de la psycholinguistique de développement et en particulier sur l'opposition nativisme-empirisme, sur le rôle des facteurs sémantiques et pragmatiques dans l'apprentissage du langage, sur le développement cognitif et l'importance du discours simplifié que les parents adressent aux enfants.

Abstract Abstract Both regular inflectional patterns (walk-walked) and irregular ones (swing-swung) can be applied productively to novel words (e.g. wug-wugged; spling -splung). Theories of generative phonology attribute both generalisations to rules; connectionist theories attribute both to analogies in a pattern associator network; hybrid theories attribute regular (fully predictable default) generalisations to a rule and irregular generalisations to a rote memory with pattern-associator properties. In three experiments and three simulations, we observe the process of generalising morphological patterns in humans and two-layer connectionist networks. Replicating Bybee and Moder (1983), we find that people's willingness to generalise from existing irregular verbs to novel ones depends on the global similarity between them (e.g. spling is readily inflectable as splung, but nist is not inflectable as nust). In contrast, generalisability of the regular suffix does not appear to depend on similarity to existing regular verbs Regularly suffixed versions of both common-sounding plip and odd-sounding ploamph were reliably produced and highly rated, and the odd-sounding verbs were not rated as having worse past-tense forms, relative to the naturalness of their stems, than common-sounding ones. In contrast, Rumelhart and McClelland's connectionist past-tense model was found to vary strongly in its tendency to supply both irregular and regular inflections to these novel items as a function of their similarity to forms it was trained on, and for the dissimilar forms, successful regular inflection rarely occurred. We suggest that rule-only theories have trouble explaining patterns of irregular generalisations, whereas single-network theories have trouble explaining regular ones; the computational demands of the two kinds of verbs are different, so a modular system is optimal for handling both simultaneously. Evidence from linguistics and psycholinguistics independently calls for such a hybrid, where irregular pain are stored in a memory system that superimposes phonological forms, fostering generalisation by analogy, and regulars are generated by a default suffix concatenation process capable of operating on any verb, regardless of its sound.

Although Darwin insisted that human intelligence could be fully explained by the theory of evolution, the codiscoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace, claimed that abstract intelligence was of no use to ancestral humans and could only be explained by intelligent design. Wallace's apparent paradox can be dissolved with two hypotheses about human cognition. One is that intelligence is an adaptation to a knowledge-using, socially interdependent lifestyle, the “cognitive niche.” This embraces the ability to overcome the evolutionary fixed defenses of plants and animals by applications of reasoning, including weapons, traps, coordinated driving of game, and detoxification of plants. Such reasoning exploits intuitive theories about different aspects of the world, such as objects, forces, paths, places, states, substances, and other people's beliefs and desires. The theory explains many zoologically unusual traits in Homo sapiens , including our complex toolkit, wide range of habitats and diets, extended childhoods and long lives, hypersociality, complex mating, division into cultures, and language (which multiplies the benefit of knowledge because know-how is useful not only for its practical benefits but as a trade good with others, enhancing the evolution of cooperation). The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction , which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively. These abilities can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces and are in principle testable by analyses of statistical signs of selection in the human genome.

Selected by New York Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year The author of New York Times bestseller Stuff of Thought offers a controversial history of violence. Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millennia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, pogroms, gruesome punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened? This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the essence of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives- the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away-and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.

In a continuation of the conversation with Fitch, Chomsky, and Hauser on the evolution of language, we examine their defense of the claim that the uniquely human, language-specific part of the language faculty (the “narrow language faculty”) consists only of recursion, and that this part cannot be considered an adaptation to communication. We argue that their characterization of the narrow language faculty is problematic for many reasons, including its dichotomization of cognitive capacities into those that are utterly unique and those that are identical to nonlinguistic or nonhuman capacities, omitting capacities that may have been substantially modified during human evolution. We also question their dichotomy of the current utility versus original function of a trait, which omits traits that are adaptations for current use, and their dichotomy of humans and animals, which conflates similarity due to common function and similarity due to inheritance from a recent common ancestor. We show that recursion, though absent from other animals' communications systems, is found in visual cognition, hence cannot be the sole evolutionary development that granted language to humans. Finally, we note that despite Fitch et al.'s denial, their view of language evolution is tied to Chomsky's conception of language itself, which identifies combinatorial productivity with a core of “narrow syntax.” An alternative conception, in which combinatoriality is spread across words and constructions, has both empirical advantages and greater evolutionary plausibility.

One of the world's science superstars presents a brilliantly illuminating, entertaining and cutting-edge account of how language actually works. How does language work? How do children learn their mother tongue? Why do languages change over time, making Chaucer's English almost incomprehensible? Steven Pinker explains the profound mysteries of language by picking a deceptively simple single phenomenon and examining it from every angle. That phenomenon - the existence of regular and irregular verbs - connects an astonishing array of topics in the sciences and humanities: the history of languages; the illuminating errors of children as they begin to speak; the sources of the major themes in the history of Western philosophy; the latest techniques in identifying genes and imaging the living brain. Pinker makes sense of all of this with the help of a single, powerful idea: that language comprises a mental dictionary of memorized words and a mental grammar of creative rules.

Words, grammar, and phonology are linguistically distinct, yet their neural substrates are difficult to distinguish in macroscopic brain regions. We investigated whether they can be separated in time and space at the circuit level using intracranial electrophysiology (ICE), namely by recording local field potentials from populations of neurons using electrodes implanted in language-related brain regions while people read words verbatim or grammatically inflected them (present/past or singular/plural). Neighboring probes within Broca's area revealed distinct neuronal activity for lexical (approximately 200 milliseconds), grammatical (approximately 320 milliseconds), and phonological (approximately 450 milliseconds) processing, identically for nouns and verbs, in a region activated in the same patients and task in functional magnetic resonance imaging. This suggests that a linguistic processing sequence predicted on computational grounds is implemented in the brain in fine-grained spatiotemporally patterned activity.

The vast expressive power of language is made possible by two principles: the arbitrary sound-meaning pairing underlying words, and the discrete combinatorial system underlying grammar. These principles implicate distinct cognitive mechanisms: associative memory and symbol-manipulating rules. The distinction may be seen in the difference between regular inflection (e.g., walk-walked), which is productive and open-ended and hence implicates a rule, and irregular inflection (e.g., come-came, which is idiosyncratic and closed and hence implicates individually memorized words. Nonetheless, two very different theories have attempted to collapse the distinction; generative phonology invokes minor rules to generate irregular as well as regular forms, and connectionism invokes a pattern associator memory to store and retrieve regular as well as irregular forms. I present evidence from three disciplines that supports the traditional word/rule distinction, though with an enriched conception of lexical memory with some of the properties of a pattern-associator. Rules, nonetheless, are distinct from pattern-association, because a rule concatenates a suffix to a symbol for verbs, so it does not require access to memorized verbs or their sound patterns, but applies as the ‘default’, whenever memory access fails. I present a dozen such circumstances, including novel, unusual-sounding, and rootless and headless derived words, in which people inflect the words regularly (explaining quirks like flied out, low-lifes, and Walkmans). A comparison of English to other languages shows that contrary to the connectionist account, default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory, but to a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.

Children learn language more easily than adults, though when and why this ability declines have been obscure for both empirical reasons (underpowered studies) and conceptual reasons (measuring the ultimate attainment of learners who started at different ages cannot by itself reveal changes in underlying learning ability). We address both limitations with a dataset of unprecedented size (669,498 native and non-native English speakers) and a computational model that estimates the trajectory of underlying learning ability by disentangling current age, age at first exposure, and years of experience. This allows us to provide the first direct estimate of how grammar-learning ability changes with age, finding that it is preserved almost to the crux of adulthood (17.4 years old) and then declines steadily. This finding held not only for “difficult” syntactic phenomena but also for “easy” syntactic phenomena that are normally mastered early in acquisition. The results support the existence of a sharply-defined critical period for language acquisition, but the age of offset is much later than previously speculated. The size of the dataset also provides novel insight into several other outstanding questions in language acquisition.

Abstract What might a theory of mental imagery look like, and how might one begin formulating such a theory? These are the central questions addressed in the present paper. The first section outlines the general research direction taken here and provides an overview of the empirical foundations of our theory of image representation and processing. Four issues are considered in succession, and the relevant results of experiments are presented and discussed. The second section begins with a discussion of the proper form for a cognitive theory, and the distinction between a theory and a model is developed. Following this, the present theory and computer simulation model are introduced. This theory specifies the nature of the internal representations (data structures) and the processes that operate on them when one generates, inspects, or transforms mental images. In the third, concluding, section we consider three very different kinds of objections to the present research program, one hinging on the possibility of experimental artifacts in the data, and the others turning on metatheoretical commitments about the form of a cognitive theory. Finally, we discuss how one ought best to evaluate theories and models of the sort developed here.

What is universal about music, and what varies? We built a corpus of ethnographic text on musical behavior from a representative sample of the world's societies, as well as a discography of audio recordings. The ethnographic corpus reveals that music (including songs with words) appears in every society observed; that music varies along three dimensions (formality, arousal, religiosity), more within societies than across them; and that music is associated with certain behavioral contexts such as infant care, healing, dance, and love. The discography-analyzed through machine summaries, amateur and expert listener ratings, and manual transcriptions-reveals that acoustic features of songs predict their primary behavioral context; that tonality is widespread, perhaps universal; that music varies in rhythmic and melodic complexity; and that elements of melodies and rhythms found worldwide follow power laws.

Steven Pinker analyses what words actually mean and how we use them, and he reveals what this can tell us about ourselves. He shows how we use space and motion as metaphors for more abstracted ideas, and uncovers the deeper structures of human thought that have been shaped by evolutionary history.

The acquisition of the passive in English poses a learnability problem. Most transitive verbs have passive forms (e.g., kick/was kicked by), tempting the child to form a productive rule of passivization deriving passive participles from active forms. However, some verbs cannot be passivized (e.g. cost/was cost by). Given that children do not receive negative evidence telling them which strings are ungrammatical, what prevents them from overgeneralizing a productive passive rule to the exceptional verbs (or if they do incorrectly passivize such verbs, how do they recover)? One possible solution is that children are conservative: they only generate passives for those verbs that they have heard in passive sentences in the input. We show that this proposal is incorrect: in children's spontaneous speech, they utter passive participles that they could not have heard in parental input, and in four experiments in which 3–8-year-olds were taught novel verbs in active sentences, they freely uttered passivized versions of them when describing new events. An alternative solution is that children at some point come to possess a semantic constraint distinguishing passivizable from nonpassivizable verbs. In two of the experiments, we show that children do not have an absolute constraint forbidding them to passivize nonactional verbs of perception or spatial relationships, although they passivize them somewhat more reluctantly than they do actional verbs. In two other experiments, we show that children's tendency to passivize depends on the mapping between thematic roles and grammatical functions specified by the verb: they selectively resist passivizing made-up verbs whose subjects are patients and whose objects are agents; and they are more likely to passivize spatial relation verbs with location subjects than with theme subjects. These trends are consistent with Jackendoff's "Thematic Hierarchy Condition" on the adult passive. However, we argue that the constraint on passive that adults obey, and that children approach, is somewhat different: passivizable verbs must have object arguments that are patients, either literally for action verbs, or in an extended abstract sense that individual languages can define for particular classes of nonactional verbs. L'acquisition du passif anaglais pose un problème d'apprentissage. La plupart des verbes transitifs ont une forme passive (par exemple kick/was kicked by) et l'enfant qui apprend l'anglais sera donc tenté de formuler une règle productive permettant d'obtenir une forme passive à partir de la forme active correspondante. Mais certains verbes n'ont pas de forme passive (par exemple cost/*was cost by). Puisque les enfants ne disposent pas de données négatives leur disant quelles séquences sont agrammaticales, qu'est-ce qui les retient d'appliquer la règle productive du passif aux verbes exceptionnels? (Ou bien, s'ils appliquent la règle à ces verbes, comment reviennent-ils sur leur erreur?). Une possibilité est que les enfants ont une attitude conservatrice: ils ne produisent des passifs que pour les verbes qu'ils ont entendus dans des phrases au passif. Nous montrons que cette idée est fausse: on trouve dans la production spontanée des enfants des participes passés qu'ils n'ont pas pu entendre dans la production de leurs parents; dans quatre expériences où nous apprenions à des enfants de 3 à 8 ans des verbes nouveaux dans le contexte de phrases actives, ils produisaient librement des formes passives de ces verbes pour décrire des événements inédits. Une autre possibilité est qu'à un certain moment les enfants possèdent une contrainte sémantique qui leur permet de distinguer les verbes qui ont un passif de ceux qui n'en ont pas un. Dans deux expériences, nous montrons que les enfants ne possèdent pas de contrainte absolue qui leur interdirait de mettre au passif des verbes de perception qui ne sont pas des verbes d'action ou des verbes de relation spatiale, même s'ils les mettent au passif plus difficilement que les verbes d'action. Dans deux autres expériences, nous montrons que la tendance des enfants à mettre un verbe au passif dépend de la relation entre les rôles thématiques et les fonctions grammaticales spécifiées par le verbe: les enfants évitent sélectivement de mettre au passif des verbes inventés dont les sujets sont des patients et dont les objets sont des agents, et ils mettent plus facilement au passif des verbes de relation spatiale dont les sujets sont des "emplacements" plutôt que des thèmes. Ces contraintes s'accordent bien avec la "Contrainte d'Hiérarchie Thématique" de Jackendoff sur la forme adulte du passif. Mais nous pensons que la contrainte sur le passif à laquelle obéissent les adultes, et qui est celle qu'approximent les enfants, est quelque peu différente: les verbes qui admettent un passif doivent avoir un objet qui est un patient, que ce soit littéralement le cas pour les verbes d'action, ou bien que ce soit en un sens abstrait élargi que chaque langue peut définir à sa manière pour des classes particulières de verbes qui ne sont pas des verbes d'action.

When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes. We propose a three-part theory of indirect speech, based on the idea that human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict. First, indirect requests allow for plausible deniability, in which a cooperative listener can accept the request, but an uncooperative one cannot react adversarially to it. This intuition is supported by a game-theoretic model that predicts the costs and benefits to a speaker of direct and indirect requests. Second, language has two functions: to convey information and to negotiate the type of relationship holding between speaker and hearer (in particular, dominance, communality, or reciprocity). The emotional costs of a mismatch in the assumed relationship type can create a need for plausible deniability and, thereby, select for indirectness even when there are no tangible costs. Third, people perceive language as a digital medium, which allows a sentence to generate common knowledge, to propagate a message with high fidelity, and to serve as a reference point in coordination games. This feature makes an indirect request qualitatively different from a direct one even when the speaker and listener can infer each other's intentions with high confidence.

This article is a tutorial overview of a sample of central issues in visual cognition, focusing on the recognition of shapes and the representation of objects and spatial relations in perception and imagery. Brief reviews of the state of the art are presented, followed by more extensive presentations of contemporary theories, findings, and open issues. I discuss various theories of shape recognition, such as template, feature, Fourier, structural description, Marr-Nishihara, and massively parallel models, and issues such as the reference frames, primitives, top-down processing, and computational architectures used in spatial cognition. This is followed by a discussion of mental imagery, including conceptual issues in imagery research, theories of imagery, imagery and perception, image transformations, computational complexities of image processing, neuropsychological issues, and possible functions of imagery. Connections between theories of recognition and of imagery, and the relevance of the papers contained in this issue to the topics discussed, are emphasized throughout. Cet article est une revue didactique sur les questions essentielles de la cognition visuelle. Il est centre´sur la reconnaissance des formes et sur la repre´sentation des objets et des relations spatiales en perception et en imagerie. L'auteur donne d'abord un bref rapport sur l'e´tat de la question puis fait une pre´sentation plus approfondie des the´ories contemporaines, des donne´es et des prospectives. Il discute diffe´rentes the´ories de la reconnaissance des formes telles que les descriptions structurales en termes de patrons, traits. Fourier, Marr-Nishihara, et les mode`les paralle`les. Il discute aussi les propositions du type cadres de reference, primitifs, traitements de haut en bas et architectures de calcul utilise´es dans la reconnaissance spatiale. Suit une discussion sur l'imagerie mentale ou sont aborde´s les concepts utilise´s dans les recherches sur l'imagerie, les the´ories de l'imagerie, les rapports entre imagerie et perception, les transformations d'image, les complexite´s de calcul dans le traitement des images, les questions neurologiques et le roˆle fonctionnel possible de l'imagerie. On insiste sur les relations entre les the´ories de la reconnaissance et l'imagerie ainsi que sur la pertinence des articles de ce volume sur ces sujets.

We identify common genetic variants associated with cognitive performance using a two-stage approach, which we call the proxy-phenotype method. First, we conduct a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in a large sample (n = 106,736), which produces a set of 69 education-associated SNPs. Second, using independent samples (n = 24,189), we measure the association of these education-associated SNPs with cognitive performance. Three SNPs (rs1487441, rs7923609, and rs2721173) are significantly associated with cognitive performance after correction for multiple hypothesis testing. In an independent sample of older Americans (n = 8,652), we also show that a polygenic score derived from the education-associated SNPs is associated with memory and absence of dementia. Convergent evidence from a set of bioinformatics analyses implicates four specific genes (KNCMA1, NRXN1, POU2F3, and SCRT). All of these genes are associated with a particular neurotransmitter pathway involved in synaptic plasticity, the main cellular mechanism for learning and memory.

Speakers often do not state requests directly but employ innuendos such as Would you like to see my etchings? Though such indirectness seems puzzlingly inefficient, it can be explained by a theory of the strategic speaker, who seeks plausible deniability when he or she is uncertain of whether the hearer is cooperative or antagonistic. A paradigm case is bribing a policeman who may be corrupt or honest: A veiled bribe may be accepted by the former and ignored by the latter. Everyday social interactions can have a similar payoff structure (with emotional rather than legal penalties) whenever a request is implicitly forbidden by the relational model holding between speaker and hearer (e.g., bribing an honest maitre d', where the reciprocity of the bribe clashes with his authority). Even when a hearer's willingness is known, indirect speech offers higher-order plausible deniability by preempting certainty, gossip, and common knowledge of the request. In supporting experiments, participants judged the intentions and reactions of characters in scenarios that involved fraught requests varying in politeness and directness.

Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other's minds. The ability comes so naturally that we are apt to forget what a miracle it is. Pursuing the ideas of Darwin and Chomsky, Steven Pinker offers a look at why we use language and where this ability comes from. Rather than being an acquired cultural artefact, it is vigorously argued that language is a biological adaptation to communicate information and as such is a system of great richness and beauty. Using examples of the way language is used in daily life from the mouths of children to the pontifications of politicians, Pinker explores this system and our instinct to use it.

When children learn a language, they soon are able to make surprisingly subtle distinctions: "donate them a book" sounds odd, for example, even though "give them a book" is perfectly natural. How can this happen, given that children do not confine themselves to the sentence types they hear, and are usually not corrected when they speak ungrammatically? Steven Pinker resolves this paradox in a detailed theory of how children acquire argument structure.In tackling a learning paradox that has challenged scholars for more than a decade, Pinker synthesizes a vast literature in linguistics and psycholinguistics and outlines explicit theories of the mental representation, learning, and development of verb meaning and verb syntax. The new theory that he describes has some surprising implications for the relation between language and thought.Pinker's solution provides insight into such key questions as, When do children generalize and when do they stick with what they hear? What is the rationale behind linguistic constraints? How is the syntax of predicates and arguments related to their semantics? What is a possible word meaning? Do languages force their speakers to construe the world in certain ways? Why does children's language seem different from that of adults?Learnability and Cognition is included in the series Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change, edited by Lila Gleitman, Susan Carey, Elissa Newport, and Elizabeth Spelke.A Bradford Book

In a natural environment, the auditory system must analyse an incoming wave train to determine two things: (a) which series of frequency components arose over time from the same source and should be integrated into a sequential stream, and (b) which set of simultaneous components arose from one source and should be fused into a timbre structure. A set of experiments was performed in which subject judged the stream organization and the timbre of a repeating cycle formed by a pair of more or less synchronous pure tones, B and C, and a preceding pure tone, A, whose frequency was varied in its proximity to that of the upper tone of the BC pair. These experiments demonstrated that fusion and sequential organization of streams are carried out using two sorts of information which compete to determine the best perceptual description of the input. Proximal frequencies between sequential components promotes a sequential organization and the simultaneity of onset of frequency components promotes perceptual fusion.

How do speakers predict the syntax of a verb from its meaning? Traditional theories posit that syntactically relevant information about semantic arguments consists of a list of thematic roles like "agent", "theme", and "goal", which are linked onto a hierarchy of grammatical positions like subject, object and oblique object. For verbs involving motion, the entity caused to move is defined as the "theme" or "patient" and linked to the object. However, this fails for many common verbs, as in fill water into the glass and cover a sheet onto the bed. In more recent theories verbs' meanings are multidimensional structures in which the motions, changes, and other events can be represented in separate but connected substructures; linking rules are sensitive to the position of an argument in a particular configuration. The verb's object would be linked not to the moving entity but to the argument specified as "affected" or caused to change as the main event in the verb's meaning. The change can either be one of location, resulting from motion in a particular manner, or of state, resulting from accommodating or reacting to a substance. For example, pour specifies how a substance moves (downward in a stream), so its substance argument is the object (pour the water/glass); fill specifies how a container changes (from not full to full), so its stationary container argument is the object (fill the glass/water). The newer theory was tested in three experiments. Children aged 3;4-9;4 and adults were taught made-up verbs, presented in a neutral syntactic context (this is mooping), referring to a transfer of items to a surface or container. Subjects were tested on their willingness to encode the moving items or the surface as the verb's object. For verbs where the items moved in a particular manner (e.g., zig-zagging), people were more likely to express the moving items as the object; for verbs where the surface changed state (e.g., shape, color, or fullness), people were more likely to express the surface as the object. This confirms that speakers are not confined to labeling moving entities as "themes" or "patients" and linking them to the grammatical object; when a stationary entity undergoes a state change as the result of a motion, it can be represented as the main affected argument and thereby linked to the grammatical object instead.

In a recent paper, Chambers and Reisberg (1985) showed that people cannot reverse classical ambiguous figures in imagery (such as the Necker cube, duck/rabbit, or Schroeder staircase). In three experiments, we refute one kind of explanation for this difficulty: that visual images do not contain information about the geometry of a shape necessary for reinterpreting it or that people cannot apply shape classification procedures to the information in imagery. We show, that given suitable conditions, people can assign novel interpretations to ambiguous images which have been constructed out of parts or mentally transformed. For example, when asked to imagine the letter “D” on its side, affixed to the top of the letter “J”, subjects spontaneously report “seeing” an umbrella. We also show that these reinterpretations are not the result of guessing strategies, and that they speak directly to the issue of whether or not mental images of ambiguous figures can be reconstrued. Finally, we show that arguments from the philosophy literature on the relation between images and descriptions are not relevant to the issue of whether images can be reinterpreted, and we suggest possible explanations for why classical ambiguous figures do not spontaneously reverse in imagery.

How do people recognize an object in different orientations? One theory is that the visual system describes the object relative to a reference frame centered on the object, resulting in a representation that is invariant across orientations. Chronometric data show that this is true only when an object can be identified uniquely by the arrangement of its parts along a single dimension. When an object can only be distinguished by an arrangement of its parts along more than one dimension, people mentally rotate it to a familiar orientation. This finding suggests that the human visual reference frame is tied to egocentric coordinates.

Abstract: In my book How the Mind Works , I defended the theory that the human mind is a naturally selected system of organs of computation. Jerry Fodor claims that ‘the mind doesn’t work that way’(in a book with that title) because (1) Turing Machines cannot duplicate humans’ ability to perform abduction (inference to the best explanation); (2) though a massively modular system could succeed at abduction, such a system is implausible on other grounds; and (3) evolution adds nothing to our understanding of the mind. In this review I show that these arguments are flawed. First, my claim that the mind is a computational system is different from the claim Fodor attacks (that the mind has the architecture of a Turing Machine); therefore the practical limitations of Turing Machines are irrelevant. Second, Fodor identifies abduction with the cumulative accomplishments of the scientific community over millennia. This is very different from the accomplishments of human common sense, so the supposed gap between human cognition and computational models may be illusory. Third, my claim about biological specialization, as seen in organ systems, is distinct from Fodor's own notion of encapsulated modules, so the limitations of the latter are irrelevant. Fourth, Fodor's arguments dismissing of the relevance of evolution to psychology are unsound.

The English past tense system has recently been used to argue that formal grammatical categories (such as root, rule, and lexical item) may not be necessary to explain the acquisition and knowledge of language. Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) devised a connectionist model relying solely on phonological information; it is often suggested that any deficiencies of such a model can be remedied by supplying it with semantic information. These proposals are incorrect: Grammatical categories and abstract morphological structure are indispensable and cannot be replaced with semantics while preserving the patterns of psychological generalization in the system. Linguists have noted that irregular past tense mappings (e.g., fly/flew; stick/stuck ) apply only when a verb's root is marked in the lexicon as having an irregular past. Because nouns are never so marked, verbs with noun roots—denominal verbs—are regular even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs, hence: flied out/*flew out to center field; high‐sticked/*high‐stuck the goalie . Experiment 1 shows that adult subjects are highly sensitive to this principle when rating regular and irregular past tense forms of novel versions of irregular sounding verbs: New verbs formed from nouns were judged as better with a regular past tense (e.g., line‐drived was the preferred past of “to hit a line drive”): new verbs formed from verbs were judged as better with an irregular past tense (e.g., line‐drive wsas the preferred past of “to drive along a line”). Experiment 2 replicated the results with noncollege‐educated adults, showing that the effect is not due to prescriptive language training. Experiment 3 tested an alternative to the formal grammatical account proposed by Lakoff (1987): When a verb has two meanings, one with an irregular past and one with a regular past, the irregular will belong to the meaning that is more central. Using regression techniques and ratings data, we disconfirm this prediction: In the data from Experiment 1, judgments of regular and irregular forms of a new verb are shown to be affected by whether the verb is derived from a noun or a verb, but not by whether its new sense is near the center or the periphery of the sense of the word it was derived from. Experiments 4 and 5 explain the few apparent counter‐examples by gathering independent evidence for a short‐circuiting process: When a denominal verb appears to have an irregular past tense form, it is because speakers sometimes interpret such verbs as having been derived directly from a related irregular verb root, bypassing the relevant noun. The experiments serve as a straightforward demonstration that representations of formal grammatical categories and structures are powerful determinants of linguistic behavior, and are not reducible to semantics, phonology, or prescriptive training.

I examine Gleitman's (1990) arguments that children rely on a verb's syntactic subcategorization frames to learn its meaning (e.g., they learn that see means ‘perceive visually’ because it can appear with a direct object, a clausal complement, or a directional phrase). First, Gleitman argues that the verbs cannot be learned byb observing then situations in which they are used , because many verbs refer to overlapping situations, and because parents do not invariably use a verb when its perceptual correlates are present. I suggest that these arguments speak only against a narrow associationist view in which the child is sensitive to the temporal contiguity of sensory features and spoken verb, If the child can hyppthesize semantic representations corresponding to what parents are likely to be referring to, and can refine such representations across multiple situations, the objections are blunted;, indeed, Gleitman's theory requires such a learning process despite her objections to it. Second, Gleitmans suggests that there is enough information in a verb's subcategorization frames to predict its meaning ‘quite closely’ . Evaluating this argument requires distinguishing a verb's root plus its semantic content (what She boiled the water shares with The water boiled and does not share with She broke the glass), and a verb frame plus its semantic perspective (what She boiled the water shares with She broke the glass and does not share with The water boiled). I show that learning a verb in a single frame only gives a learner coarse information about its semanic perspective in that frame (e.g., number of arguments, type of arguments); it tells the learner nothing about the verb root's content across frames (e.g., hot bubbling liquid). Moreover, hearing a verb across all its frames also reveals little about the verb root's content. Finally, I show that Gleitman's empirical arguments all involve experiments where children are exposed to a single verb frame, and therefore all involve learning the frame's perpective meaning, not the root's content meaning, which in all the experiments was acquired by observing the accompanying scene. I conclude that attention to a verb's syntactic frame can help narrow down the child's interpretation of the perspective meaning of the verb in that frame, but disagree with the claim that there is some in-principle limitation in learning a verb's content.

Does intelligence result from the manipulation of structured symbolic expressions? Or is it the result of the activation of large networks of densely interconnected simple units? Connections and Symbols provides the first systematic analysis of the explosive new field of Connectionism that is challenging the basic tenets of cognitive science. These lively discussions by Jerry A. Fodor, Zenon W. Pylyshyn, Steven Pinker, Alan Prince, Joel Lechter, and Thomas G. Bever raise issues that lie at the core of our understanding of how the mind works: Does connectionism offer it truly new scientific model or does it merely cloak the old notion of associationism as a central doctrine of learning and mental functioning? Which of the new empirical generalizations are sound and which are false? And which of the many ideas such as massively parallel processing, distributed representation, constraint satisfaction, and subsymbolic or microfeatural analyses belong together, and which are logically independent? Now that connectionism has arrived with full-blown models of psychological processes as diverse as Pavlovian conditioning, visual recognition, and language acquisition, the debate is on. Common themes emerge from all the contributors to Connections and Symbols: criticism of connectionist models applied to language or the parts of cognition employing language like operations; and a focus on what it is about human cognition that supports the traditional physical symbol system hypothesis. While criticizing many aspects of connectionist models, the authors also identify aspects of cognition that could he explained by the connectionist models. Connections and Symbols is included in the Cognition Special Issue series, edited by Jacques Mehler.

We examined the claims that preschool children regard an object's name as being inseparable from its intrinsic properties and that bilingual children relinquish this notion earlier than monolingual children. 12 monolingual and 12 bilingual children of equivalent SES, nonverbal intelligence, talkativeness, and willingness to consider counterfactual situations were asked whether various objects could be renamed and then asked to identify objects by nonsense names and names for other objects. Virtually all the children performed the renaming tasks without error, and the monolinguals and bilinguals were equally likely to assent to renaming objects. However, monolinguals were more likely to mention an object's properties when justifying an answer, whereas bilinguals were more likely to mention the social context of the renaming act. These findings suggest that neither bilingual nor monolingual children are necessarily subject to "word magic"; rather, monolinguals have learned that an object can have more than 1 name by virtue of its various attributes, whereas bilingual children have learned, in addition, that an object can have more than 1 name by virtue of the different social contexts in which its name is used.

Languages vary enormously in global importance because of historical, demographic, political, and technological forces. However, beyond simple measures of population and economic power, there has been no rigorous quantitative way to define the global influence of languages. Here we use the structure of the networks connecting multilingual speakers and translated texts, as expressed in book translations, multiple language editions of Wikipedia, and Twitter, to provide a concept of language importance that goes beyond simple economic or demographic measures. We find that the structure of these three global language networks (GLNs) is centered on English as a global hub and around a handful of intermediate hub languages, which include Spanish, German, French, Russian, Portuguese, and Chinese. We validate the measure of a language's centrality in the three GLNs by showing that it exhibits a strong correlation with two independent measures of the number of famous people born in the countries associated with that language. These results suggest that the position of a language in the GLN contributes to the visibility of its speakers and the global popularity of the cultural content they produce.

Research on human cooperation has concentrated on the puzzle of altruism, in which one actor incurs a cost to benefit another, and the psychology of reciprocity, which evolved to solve this problem.We examine the complementary puzzle of mutualism, in which actors can benefit each other simultaneously, and the psychology of coordination, which ensures such benefits.Coordination is facilitated by common knowledge-the recursive belief state in which A knows X, B knows X, A knows that B knows X, B knows that A knows X, ad infinitum.We test whether people are sensitive to common knowledge when deciding whether to engage in risky coordination.Participants decided between working alone for a certain profit and working together for a potentially higher profit that they would receive only if their partner made the same choice.Results showed that more participants attempted risky coordination when they and their prospective partner had common knowledge of the payoffs (broadcasted over a loudspeaker) than when they had only shared knowledge (conveyed to both by a messenger) or primary knowledge (revealed to each partner separately).These results confirm the hypothesis that people represent common knowledge as a distinct cognitive category that licenses them to coordinate with others for mutual gain.We discuss how this hypothesis can provide a unified explanation for diverse phenomena in human social life, including recursive mentalizing, performative speech acts, public assemblies and protests, and self-conscious emotional expressions.

'My new favourite book of all time' Bill Gates TOP TEN SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER Is modernity really failing? Or have we failed to appreciate progress and the ideals that make it possible? If you follow the headlines, the world in the 21st century appears to be sinking into chaos, hatred, and irrationality. Yet Steven Pinker shows that this is an illusion - a symptom of historical amnesia and statistical fallacies. If you follow the trendlines rather than the headlines, you discover that our lives have become longer, healthier, safer, happier, more peaceful, more stimulating and more prosperous - not just in the West, but worldwide. Such progress is no accident: it's the gift of a coherent and inspiring value system that many of us embrace without even realizing it. These are the values of the Enlightenment: of reason, science, humanism and progress. The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. In making the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, Pinker shows how we can use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe. We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one.

Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native “behavioral immunity” to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.

Science is among humanity's greatest achievements, yet scientific censorship is rarely studied empirically. We explore the social, psychological, and institutional causes and consequences of scientific censorship (defined as actions aimed at obstructing particular scientific ideas from reaching an audience for reasons other than low scientific quality). Popular narratives suggest that scientific censorship is driven by authoritarian officials with dark motives, such as dogmatism and intolerance. Our analysis suggests that scientific censorship is often driven by scientists, who are primarily motivated by self-protection, benevolence toward peer scholars, and prosocial concerns for the well-being of human social groups. This perspective helps explain both recent findings on scientific censorship and recent changes to scientific institutions, such as the use of harm-based criteria to evaluate research. We discuss unknowns surrounding the consequences of censorship and provide recommendations for improving transparency and accountability in scientific decision-making to enable the exploration of these unknowns. The benefits of censorship may sometimes outweigh costs. However, until costs and benefits are examined empirically, scholars on opposing sides of ongoing debates are left to quarrel based on competing values, assumptions, and intuitions.

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure (1991), pp. 230-251

ABSTRACT Children between the ages of three and seven occasionally make errors with locative verbs like pour and fill , such as * I filled water into the glass and * I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, 1982). To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called OBJECT AFFECTEDNESS: the direct object corresponds to the argument that is specified as ‘affected’ in some particular way in the semantic representation of a verb. However, children must learn which verbs specify which of their arguments as being affected; specifically, whether it is the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of location, such as the content argument of pour , or the argument whose referent is undergoing a change of state, such as the container argument of fill . This predicts that syntactic errors should be associated with specific kinds of misinterpretations of verb meaning. Two experiments were performed on the ability of children and adults to understand and produce locative verbs. The results confirm that children tend to make syntactic errors with sentences containing fill and empty , encoding the content argument as direct object (e.g. fill the water ). As predicted, children also misinterpreted the meanings of fill and empty as requiring not only that the container be brought into a full or empty state, but also that the content move in some specific manner (by pouring, or by dumping). Furthermore, children who misinterpreted the verbs' meanings were more likely to make syntactic errors with them. These findings support the hypothesis that verb meaning and syntax are linked in precise ways in the lexicons of language learners.

The role of Broca's area in grammatical computation is unclear, because syntactic processing is often confounded with working memory, articulation, or semantic selection. Morphological processing potentially circumvents these problems. Using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we had 18 subjects silently inflect words or read them verbatim. Subtracting the activity pattern for reading from that for inflection, which indexes processes involved in inflection (holding constant lexical processing and articulatory planning) highlighted left Brodmann area (BA) 44/45 (Broca's area), BA 47, anterior insula, and medial supplementary motor area. Subtracting activity during zero inflection (the hawk; they walk) from that during overt inflection (the hawks; they walked), which highlights manipulation of phonological content, implicated subsets of the regions engaged by inflection as a whole. Subtracting activity during verbatim reading from activity during zero inflection (which highlights the manipulation of inflectional features) implicated distinct regions of BA 44, 47, and a premotor region (thereby tying these regions to grammatical features), but failed to implicate the insula or BA 45 (thereby tying these to articulation). These patterns were largely similar in nouns and verbs and in regular and irregular forms, suggesting these regions implement inflectional features cutting across word classes. Greater activity was observed for irregular than regular verbs in the anterior cingulate and supplementary motor area (SMA), possibly reflecting the blocking of regular or competing irregular candidates. The results confirm a role for Broca's area in abstract grammatical processing, and are interpreted in terms of a network of regions in left prefrontal cortex (PFC) that are recruited for processing abstract morphosyntactic features and overt morphophonological content.

Certain idioms called “freezes,” e.g., first and foremost, mish-mash, display a characteristic fixed word order determined by phonological and semantic rules. Native speakers of English and learners of English were asked to indicate their preferences for one of two possible orderings of minimally contrasting nonsense pairs, e.g., FIM—FUM versus FUM—FIM. Both native and beginning speakers' judgments respected rules claimed to be universal; only native speakers' judgments respected those rules for which evidence for universality is lacking. In a second study, French native speakers and English native speakers learning French judged French-sounding pairs. Once again, overall judgments respected the putatively universal rules; but only the English speakers' judgments respected the putatively English-specific rules. It is concluded that rules of frozen word order are psychologically real, with the possible function of aiding speech perception.

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Do we really care about each other less than we did in the past? This myth-destroying book shows that, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less, not more, violent from prehistory to today. Even the twentieth century, commonly perceived as the most brutal, is part of this trend. Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage', and the Hobbesian notion of a 'nasty, brutish and short' life, and ranging over everything from the Enlightenment to warfare, art to religion, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions is actually making us better people.

What function do facial expressions have? We tested the hypothesis that some expressions serve as honest signals of subjective commitments—in particular, that angry faces increase the effectiveness of threats. In an ultimatum game, proposers decided how much money to offer a responder while seeing a film clip depicting an angry or a neutral facial expression, together with a written threat that was either inherently credible (a 50-50 split) or less credible (a demand for 70% of the money). Proposers offered greater amounts in response to the less credible threat when it was accompanied by an angry expression than when it was accompanied by a neutral expression, but were unaffected by the expression when dealing with the credible threat. This finding supports the hypothesis that angry expressions are honest signals that enhance the credibility of threats.

•Specific language impairment is a heterogeneous family of genetic developmental disorders. •We have identified a subtype, Grammatical-SLI, which affects the children's syntax, morphology, and phonology in similar ways. •Grammatical abilities are not impaired across the board: the children handle forms that are local, linear, semantic, and holistic, while stumbling on those that are nonlocal, hierarchical, abstract, and composed. •The mosaic of impaired and spared abilities is consistent with new models of the neural bases of syntax, morphology, and phonology which distinguish several dorsal and ventral language pathways in the brain. •We foresee substantial progress in the biology of language – evolution, genetics, neurobiology, computation, behavior – if language and language impairments are differentiated into underlying pathways and components. Specific language impairment (SLI), a genetic developmental disorder, offers insights into the neurobiological and computational organization of language. A subtype, Grammatical-SLI (G-SLI), involves greater impairments in ‘extended’ grammatical representations, which are nonlocal, hierarchical, abstract, and composed, than in ‘basic’ ones, which are local, linear, semantic, and holistic. This distinction is seen in syntax, morphology, and phonology, and may be tied to abnormalities in the left hemisphere and basal ganglia, consistent with new models of the neurobiology of language which distinguish dorsal and ventral processing streams. Delineating neurolinguistic phenotypes promises a better understanding of the effects of genes on the brain circuitry underlying normal and impaired language abilities. Specific language impairment (SLI), a genetic developmental disorder, offers insights into the neurobiological and computational organization of language. A subtype, Grammatical-SLI (G-SLI), involves greater impairments in ‘extended’ grammatical representations, which are nonlocal, hierarchical, abstract, and composed, than in ‘basic’ ones, which are local, linear, semantic, and holistic. This distinction is seen in syntax, morphology, and phonology, and may be tied to abnormalities in the left hemisphere and basal ganglia, consistent with new models of the neurobiology of language which distinguish dorsal and ventral processing streams. Delineating neurolinguistic phenotypes promises a better understanding of the effects of genes on the brain circuitry underlying normal and impaired language abilities.

Significance Humans are an unusually cooperative species, and our cooperation is of 2 kinds: altruistic, when actors benefit others at a cost to themselves, and mutualistic, when actors benefit themselves and others simultaneously. One major form of mutualism is coordination, in which actors align their choices for mutual benefit. Formal examples include meetings, division of labor, and legal and technological standards; informal examples include friendships, authority hierarchies, alliances, and exchange partnerships. Successful coordination is enabled by common knowledge: knowledge of others’ knowledge, knowledge of their knowledge of one’s knowledge, ad infinitum. Uncovering how people acquire and represent the common knowledge needed for coordination is thus essential to understanding human sociality, from large-scale institutions to everyday experiences of civility, hypocrisy, outrage, and taboo.

It is often assumed that children go through a stage in which they systematically overapply irregular past tense patterns to inappropriate verbs, as in wipe-wope, bring-brang, trick-truck, walk-has walken. Such errors have been interpreted both as reflecting over-use of minor grammatical rules (e.g. 'change i to a'), and as reflecting the operation of a connectionist pattern associator network that superimposes and blends patterns of various degrees of generality. But the actual rate, time course, and nature of these errors have never been documented. We analysed 20,000 past tense and participle usages from nine children in the CHILDES database, looking for overapplications of irregular vowel-change patterns, as in brang, blends, as in branged, productive suffixations of -en, as in walken, gross distortions, as in mail-membled, and double-suffixation, as in walkeded. These errors were collectively quite rare; children made them in about two tenths of one per cent of the opportunities, and with few stable patterns: the errors were not predominantly word-substitutions, did not occur predominantly with irregular stems, showed no consistency across verbs or ages, and showed no clear age trend. Most (though not all) of the errors were based closely on existing irregular verbs; gross distortions never occurred. We suggest that both rule-theories and connectionist theories have tended to overestimate the predominance of such errors. Children master irregular forms quite accurately, presumably because irregular forms are just a special case of the arbitrary sound-meaning pairings that define words, and because children are good at learning words.

According to the 'word/rule' account, regular inflection is computed by a default, symbolic process, whereas irregular inflection is achieved by associative memory. Conversely, pattern-associator accounts attribute both regular and irregular inflection to an associative process. The acquisition of the default is ascribed to the asymmetry in the distribution of regular and irregular tokens. Irregular tokens tend to form tight, well-defined phonological clusters (e.g. sing-sang, ring-rang), whereas regular forms are diffusely distributed throughout the phonological space. This distributional asymmetry is necessary and sufficient for the acquisition of a regular default. Hebrew nominal inflection challenges this account. We demonstrate that Hebrew speakers use the regular masculine inflection as a default despite the overlap in the distribution of regular and irregular Hebrew masculine nouns. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrates that regular inflection is productively applied to novel nouns regardless of their similarity to existing regular nouns. In contrast, the inflection of irregular sounding nouns is strongly sensitive to their similarity to stored irregular tokens. Experiment 2 establishes the generality of the regular default for novel words that are phonologically idiosyncratic. Experiment 3 demonstrates that Hebrew speakers assign the default regular inflection to borrowings and names that are identical to existing irregular nouns. The existence of default inflection in Hebrew is incompatible with the distributional asymmetry hypothesis. Our findings also lend no support for a type-frequency account. The convergence of the circumstances triggering default inflection in Hebrew, German and English suggests that the capacity for default inflection may be general.

ABSTRACT What is the input to the mental System that computes inflected forms like walked, came, dogs , and men ? Recent connectionist models feed a word's phonological features into a single network, allowing it to generalize both regular and irregular phonological patterns, like stop-stopped, step-stepped and fling-flung, cling-clung . But for adults, phonological input is insufficient: verbs derived from nouns like ring the city always have regular past tense forms ( ringed ), even if they are phonologically identical to irregular verbs ( ring the bell ). Similarly, nouns based on names, like two Mickey Mouses , and compounds based on possessing rather than being their root morpheme, such as two sabertooths , take regular plurals, even when they are homophonous with irregular nouns like mice and teeth . In four experiments, testing 70 three- to ten-year-old children, we found that children are sensitive to such nonphonological information: they were more likely to produce regular inflected forms for forms like to ring (‘to put a ring on’) and snaggletooth (a kind of animal doll with big teeth) than for their homophonous irregular counterparts, even when these counterparts were also extended in meaning. Children's inflectional Systems thus seem to be like adults': irregular forms are tied to the lexicon but regular forms are computed by a default rule, and words are represented as morphological tree structures reflecting their derivation from basic word roots. Such structures, which determine how novel complex words are derived and interpreted, also govern whether words with irregular sound patterns will be regularized: a word can be irregular only if its structure contains an irregular root in ‘head’ position, allowing the lexically stored irregular information to percolate up to apply to the word as a whole. In all other cases, the inflected form is computed by a default regular rule. This proposal fits the facts better than alternatives appealing to ambiguity reduction or semantic similarity to a word's central sense. The results, together with an analysis of adult speech to children, suggest that morphological structure and a distinction between mechanisms for regular and irregular inflection may be inherent to the design of children's language Systems.

This paper proposes a new analysis of indirect speech in the framework of game theory, social psychology, and evolutionary psychology. It builds on the theory of Grice, which tries to ground indirect speech in pure rationality (the demands of efficient communication between two cooperating agents) and on the Politeness Theory of Brown and Levinson, who proposed that people cooperate not just in exchanging data but in saving face (both the speaker's and the hearer's). I suggest that these theories need to be supplemented because they assume that people in conversation always cooperate. A reflection on how a pair of talkers may have goals that conflict as well as coincide requires an examination of the game-theoretic logic of plausible denial, both in legal contexts, where people's words may be held against them, and in everyday life, where the sanctions are social rather than judicial. This in turn requires a theory of the distinct kinds of relationships that make up human social life, a consideration of a new role for common knowledge in the use of indirect speech, and ultimately the paradox of rational ignorance, where we choose not to know something relevant to our interests.

We explain why traits of interest to behavioral scientists may have a genetic architecture featuring hundreds or thousands of loci with tiny individual effects rather than a few with large effects and why such an architecture makes it difficult to find robust associations between traits and genes.We conducted a genome-wide association study at 2 sites, Harvard University and Union College, measuring more than 100 physical and behavioral traits with a sample size typical of candidate gene studies. We evaluated predictions that alleles with large effect sizes would be rare and most traits of interest to social science are likely characterized by a lack of strong directional selection. We also carried out a theoretical analysis of the genetic architecture of traits based on R.A. Fisher's geometric model of natural selection and empirical analyses of the effects of selection bias and phenotype measurement stability on the results of genetic association studies.Although we replicated several known genetic associations with physical traits, we found only 2 associations with behavioral traits that met the nominal genome-wide significance threshold, indicating that physical and behavioral traits are mainly affected by numerous genes with small effects.The challenge for social science genomics is the likelihood that genes are connected to behavioral variation by lengthy, nonlinear, interactive causal chains, and unraveling these chains requires allying with personal genomics to take advantage of the potential for large sample sizes as well as continuing with traditional epidemiological studies.

It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good; to be exposed to censure, without hope of praise; to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect, where success would have been without applause, and diligence without reward. Among these unhappy mortals is the writer of dictionaries ... (Preface, Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, 1755).

What sort of medium underlies imagery for three-dimensional scenes? In the present investigation, the time subjects took to scan between objects in a mental image was used to infer the sorts of geometric information that images preserve. Subjects studied an open box in which five objects were suspended, and learned to imagine this display with their eyes closed. In the first experiment, subjects scanned by tracking an imaginary point moving in a straight line between the imagined objects. Scanning times increased linearly with increasing distance between objects in three dimensions. Therefore metric 3-D information must be preserved in images, and images cannot simply be 2-D "snapshots." In a second experiment, subjects scanned across the image by "sighting" objects through an imaginary rifle sight. Here scanning times were found to increase linearly with the two-dimensional separations between objects as they appeared from the original viewing angle. Therefore metric 2-D distance information in the original perspective view must be preserved in images, and images cannot simply be 3-D "scale-models" that are assessed from any and all directions at once. In a third experiment, subjects mentally rotated the display 90 degrees and scanned between objects as they appeared in this new perspective view by tracking an imaginary rifle signt, as before. Scanning times increased linearly with the two-dimensional separations between objects as they would appear from the new relative viewing perspective. Therefore images can display metric 2-D distance information in a perspective view never actually experiences, so mental images cannot simply be "snapshot plus scale model" pairs. These results can be explained by a model in which the three-dimensional structure of objects is encoded in long-term memory in 3-D object-centered coordinate systems. When these objects are imagined, this information is then mapped onto a single 2-D "surface display" in which the perspective properties specific to a given viewing angle can be depicted. In a set of perceptual control experiments, subjects scanned a visible display by (a) simply moving their eyes from one object to another, (b) sweeping an imaginary rifle sight over the display, or (c) tracking an imaginary point moving from one object to another. Eye-movement times varied linearly with 2-D interobject distance, as did time to scan with an imaginary rifle sight; time to tract a point varied independently with the 3-D and 2-D interobject distances. These results are compared with the analogous image scanning results to argue that imagery and perception share some representational structures but that mental image scanning is a process distinct from eye movements or eye-movement commands.

Reply to McClelland and Patterson

The distinction between singular and plural enters into linguistic phenomena such as morphology, lexical semantics, and agreement and also must interface with perceptual and conceptual systems that assess numerosity in the world. Three experiments examine the computation of semantic number for singulars and plurals from the morphological properties of visually presented words. In a Stroop-like task, Hebrew speakers were asked to determine the number of words presented on a computer screen (one or two) while ignoring their contents. People took longer to respond if the number of words was incongruent with their morphological number (e.g., they were slower to determine that one word was on the screen if it was plural, and in some conditions, that two words were on the screen if they were singular, compared to neutral letter strings), suggesting that the extraction of number from words is automatic and yields a representation comparable to the one computed by the perceptual system. In many conditions, the effect of number congruency occurred only with plural nouns, not singulars, consistent with the suggestion from linguistics that words lacking a plural affix are not actually singular in their semantics but unmarked for number.

We are getting smarter, and as a result the world is becoming a more peaceful place, says Steven Pinker.

Abstract Does the human mind include psychological adaptations that were selected because they fostered the competitive advantage of ancestral groups, even if they harmed the individuals that bore those adaptations? This notion of group selection is the default folk theory of evolution among most nonbiologists, and even among many biologists until the 1960s, when the theory was shown to be at best improbable and at worst incoherent. Nonetheless group selection refuses to die, and has recently been endorsed by a few prominent biologists and anthropologists. I show that the intuitive appeal of group selection is based on multiple confusions. First, group psychology—the phenomenon in which people identify and make sacrifices for their group—should not be equated with group selection. Second, the size, power, influence, or geographic spread of a group over the course of history (the loose analogue of fitness in cultural evolution) is not analogous to an increase in the number of copies of a replicator in biological evolution. Finally, the appeal of group selection rests on an unexamined and highly implausible assumption: that the groups most victorious in violent combat were those that practiced the greatest degree of kindness and generosity within their own societies. I conclude that the theory of natural selection should be invoked in its rigorous sense of the differential representation of replicators across generations, and that “group selection” is a pernicious concept in evolutionary psychology, guaranteed to confuse.

The more potential helpers there are, the less likely any individual is to help. A traditional explanation for this bystander effect is that responsibility diffuses across the multiple bystanders, diluting the responsibility of each. We investigate an alternative, which combines the volunteer's dilemma (each bystander is best off if another responds) with recursive theory of mind (each infers what the others know about what he knows) to predict that actors will strategically shirk when they think others feel compelled to help. In 3 experiments, participants responded to a (fictional) person who needed help from at least 1 volunteer. Participants were in groups of 2 or 5 and had varying information about whether other group members knew that help was needed. As predicted, people's decision to help zigzagged with the depth of their asymmetric, recursive knowledge (e.g., "John knows that Michael knows that John knows help is needed"), and replicated the classic bystander effect when they had common knowledge (everyone knowing what everyone knows). The results demonstrate that the bystander effect may result not from a mere diffusion of responsibility but specifically from actors' strategic computations.

By definition, visual image representations are organized around spatial properties. However, we know very little about how these representations use information about location, one of the most important spatial properties. Three experiments explored how location information is incorporated into image representations. All of these experiments used a mental rotation task in which the location of the stimulus varied from trial to trial. If images are location specific, these changes should affect the way images are used. The effects from image representations were separated from those of general spatial attention mechanisms by shape. With shape information, subjects could use an image as a template, and they recognized the stimulus more quickly when it was at the same location as the image. Experiment 1 demonstrated that subjects were able to use visual image representations effectively without knowing where the stimulus would appear, but left open the possibility that image location must be adjusted before use. In Experiment 2, distance between the stimulus location and the image location was varied systematically, and response time increased with distance. Therefore image representations appear to be location-specific, though the represented location can be adjusted easily. In Experiment 3, a saccade was introduced between the image cue and the test stimulus, in order to test wether subjects responded more quickly when the test stimulus appeared at the same retinotopic location or same spatiotopic location as the cue. The results suggest that the location is coded retinotopically in image representations. This finding has implications not only for visual imagery but also for visual processing in general, because it suggests that there is no spatiotopic transform in the early stages of visual processing.

We report an experiment that suggests a functional application of mental-image scanning. After subjects inspected a simple dot pattern, the pattern was removed, and they were then shown an arrow at an unexpected location. Their task was to judge as quickly as possible whether the arrow pointed at any of the dots in the previously observed pattern. Although the subjects were never instructed to form or scan mental images, most of them reported having done so in order to make their judgments, and their reaction times were directly proportional to the distances separating the dots and the arrows, as typically found in image-scanning experiments. Imagery scanning may therefore serve a useful function when one must judge spatial relations between the positions of remembered objects and newly specified locations.

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This spring, the President's Council on Bioethics released a 555-page report, titled Human Dignity and Bioethics. The Council, created in 2001 by George W. Bush, is a panel of scholars charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called therapeutic cloning that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs. Advances like these, if translated into freely undertaken treatments, could make millions of people better off and no one worse off. So what's not to like? The advances do not raise the traditional concerns of bioethics, which focuses on potential harm and coercion of patients or research subjects. What, then, are the ethical concerns that call for a presidential council?

Steven Pinker’s books and essays on language, mind, and human nature that have reached a wide global audience. But his articles in the scholarly literature have also been influential and readable. This collection reprints a number of his classic articles which explore his favorite themes in greater depth and scientific detail. They include language development in children, neural network models of language, mental imagery, the recognition of shapes, the meaning and uses of verbs, the evolution of language and cognition, the nature of human concepts, the nature-nurture debate, the logic of innuendo and euphemism, and his responses to the ideas of Noam Chomsky, Jerry Fodor, and Richard Dawkins.

Negotiations are a careful balancing act between cooperation and competition—a successful negotiation requires extracting maximal value without offending and alienating a counterpart (i.e., the negotiator’s dilemma). It is thus surprising that negotiation scholars have largely overlooked a pervasive feature of negotiations: they entail “polite” speech. In this paper, we introduce politeness as a communicative strategy that is critical to solving the negotiator’s dilemma. By strategically adjusting their utterances to signal deference and respect, negotiators can make ambitious requests without derailing the exchange. Starting with an overview of politeness and a review of the relevant negotiation literature, we offer testable propositions regarding how attempts at polite speech manifest in negotiations, who is especially likely to express them, under what conditions, and to what effect. We also consider the conditions under which this communication strategy undermines negotiators. We hope our review and theorizing will open up broader discussions on the role of polite speech in deal making and conversational dynamics.

Tarr and Pinker (1989, 1990) delineated the conditions in which the orientation of a shape affects the time subjects take to recognize it. Relatively large effects of orientation were found (1) when misoriented asymmetrical shapes were unfamiliar, and (2) when familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared in unfamiliar orientations. In contrast, relatively small effects or no effect of orientation were found (1) when familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared at familiar orientations, (2) when unfamiliar mirror-reversals of familiar asymmetrical shapes appeared at unfamiliar orientations, (3) for misoriented symmetrical shapes, whether they were unfamiliar or familiar, and (4) for misoriented bilaterally redundant shapes, whether they were unfamiliar or familiar. To account for these data, two questions must be addressed: What mental processes underlie large effects of orientation or their absence; and why do these two patterns of data depend on manipulations of familiarity, handedness, and shape geometry? In Tarr and Pinker (1989, 1990) we proposed a theory that simultaneously answered both of these questions {what processes are used when very small effects of orientation are observed, and when are these processes used). The theory, multiple-views-plus-transformation, suggests that large effects of orientation in shape recognition are due to mental rotation. Crucially, this conclusion is based not only on the presence of an orientation effect, but on the similarity between our rotation rates and the rates observed in experiments by Shepard and Cooper (1982). These experiments used independent evidence to demonstrate the existence of an incremental mental rotation transformation, not confined to the effects of orientation, but depending on converging manipulations such as response time to probes at intermediate orientations and presentation points, effects of advance information and preparation time, and other techniques. We suggested that the absence of such large effects of orientation may result from orientation-invariant mechanisms of three kinds: orientation-specific representations of familiar shapes at familiar orientations; a 180° rotation in depth to align unfamiliar mirror-reversals with their familiar standards; and \Vi D orientation-independent descriptions for symmetrical and bilaterally redundant shapes. Together these hypotheses not only explain the causes of the absence of mental-rotation-size orientation

While the connectionist approach has led to productive solutions for a number of problems in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, the impact of this approach on cognitive modeling in the realms of clinical psychology and psychotherapy, in particular, has been minimal. This is especially surprising given the increasing frequency with which information processing concepts are being used to understand change processes in psychotherapy, patient-therapist interaction, resistance phenomena, and even basic psychopathological processes. We contend that these issues may benefit from a reappraisal along connectionist lines and endeavor to provide an overview in this article. The first part of the paper outlines connectionist thinking and contrasts it to the currently dominant symbolic approach to cognitive modeling. The paper then examines specific applied problems in clinical psychology and psychotherapy such as the relationship between emotion and cognition, change processes and adaptation to environment, resistance, and the therapists' cognitive activity. Without fostering a disregard of symbolic approaches to knowledge representation and meaning construction, connectionism can contribute a vital and novel theoretical framework from which to examine these issues of enduring importance.

English speakers disfavor compounds containing regular plurals compared to irregular ones. Haskell, MacDonald and Seidenberg (2003) attribute this phenomenon to the rarity of compounds containing words with the phonological properties of regular plurals. Five experiments test this proposal. Experiment 1 demonstrated that novel regular plurals (e.g., loonks-eater ) are disliked in compounds compared to irregular plurals with illicit (hence less frequent) phonological patterns (e.g., leevk-eater , plural of loovk ). Experiments 2–3 found that people show no dispreference for compounds containing nouns that merely sound like regular plurals (e.g., hose-installer vs. pipe-installer ). Experiments 4–5 showed a robust effect of morphological regularity when phonological familiarity was controlled: Compounds containing regular plural nonwords (e.g., gleeks-hunter , plural of gleek ) were disfavored relative to irregular, phonologically-identical, plurals (e.g., breex-container , plural of broox ). The dispreference for regular plurals inside compounds thus hinges on the morphological distinction between irregular and regular forms and it is irreducible to phonological familiarity.

Rats were trained to leverpress for food and subsequently exposed to either arithmetic series or random variable-interval reinforcement schedules. Adjunctive drinking developed in all subjects exposed to arithmetic variable-interval reinforcement, but did not develop in six of the eight animals trained on the random schedule. The results suggest that adjunctive drinking is the result of an interaction between the tendency of rats to drink after eating and the ability of locally low probabilities of reinforcement within schedules to induce conditioned behavioral states.

Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which nonphonological factors are responsible. We test four possibilities: (1) lexical effects, in which two lemmas differ in whether they specify an irregular form; (2) semantic effects, in which the semantic features of a word become associated with regular or irregular forms; (3) morphological structure effects, in which a word with a headless structure (e.g., a verb derived from a noun) blocks access to a stored irregular form; and (4) compositionality effects, in which the stored combination of an irregular word's meaning (e.g., the verb's inherent aspect) with the meaning of the inflection (e.g., pastness) doesn't readily transfer to new senses with different combinations of such meanings. In four experiments, speakers were presented with existing and novel verbs and asked to rate their past-tense forms, semantic similarities, grammatical structure, and aspectual similarities. We found: (1) an interaction between semantic and phonological similarity, coinciding with reported strategies of analogising to known verbs and implicating lexical effects; (2) weak and inconsistent effects of semantic similarity; (3) robust effects of morphological structure; and (4) robust effects of aspectual compositionality. Results are consistent with theories of language that invoke lexical entries and morphological structure, and which differentiate the mode of storage of regular and irregular verbs. They also suggest how psycholinguistic processes have shaped vocabulary structure over history.

This title is shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize 2012. This acclaimed book by Steven Pinker, author of Language Instinct and Blank argues that, contrary to popular belief, humankind has become progressively less violent, over millenia and decades. Can violence really have declined? The images of conflict we see daily on our screens from around the world suggest this is an almost obscene claim to be making. Extraordinarily, however, Steven Pinker shows violence within and between societies - both murder and warfare - really has declined from prehistory to today. We are much less likely to die at someone else's hands than ever before. Even the horrific carnage of the last century, when compared to the dangers of pre-state societies, is part of this trend. Debunking both the idea of the 'noble savage' and an over-simplistic Hobbesian notion of a 'nasty, brutish and short' life, Steven Pinker argues that modernity and its cultural institutions are actually making us better people. One of the most important books I've read - not just this year, but ever...For me, what's most important about Better Angels of Our Nature are its insights into how to help achieve positive outcomes. can we encourage a less violent, more just society, particularly for the poor? Steven Pinker shows us ways we can make those positive trajectories a little more likely. That's a contribution, not just to historical scholarship, but to the world. (Bill Gates). Brilliant, mind-altering...Everyone should read this astonishing (David Runciman, Guardian). A supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline. (Peter Singer, York Times). [A] sweeping new review of the history of human violence...[Pinker has] the kind of academic superbrain that can translate otherwise impenetrable statistics into a meaningful narrative of human behaviour ...impeccable scholarship. (Tony Allen-Mills, Sunday Times). Written in distinctively entertaining and clear personal style...a marvellous synthesis of science, history and storytelling. (Clive Cookson, Financial Times). Pinker's scholarhsip is astounding ...flawless ...masterful. (Joanna Bourke, Times). Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Until 2003, he taught in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as New York Times, Time and Slate, and is the author of six books, including Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Blank Slate and Stuff of Thought.

Abstract Self-deception is a powerful but overapplied theory. It is adaptive only when a deception-detecting audience is in the loop, not when an inaccurate representation is invoked as an internal motivator. First, an inaccurate representation cannot be equated with self-deception, which entails two representations, one inaccurate and the other accurate. Second, any motivational advantages are best achieved with an adjustment to the decision rule on when to act, not with a systematic error in an internal representation.

The debate on the waning of war has recently moved into higher gear. This forum contributes to that debate. Steven Pinker observes that a decline in war does not require a romantic theory of human nature. In fact, it is compatible with a hardheaded view of human violent inclinations, firmly rooted in evolutionary biology. Homo sapiens evolved with violent tendencies, but they are triggered by particular circumstances rather than a hydraulic urge that must periodically be discharged. And, although our species evolved with motives that can erupt in violence, it also evolved motives that can inhibit violence, including self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, and open-ended cognitive mechanisms that can devise technologies for reducing violence. Bradley Thayer argues that the decline of war thesis is flawed because the positive forces identified by these authors do not rule outside of the West or even fully inside of it. Their analysis also neglects the systemic causes of conflict and its insights for increasingly intense security competition between China and the United States. Jack Levy and William Thompson question some of the theoretical arguments advanced to explain the historical pattern of declining violence. They argue that cultural and ideational explanations for the decline in interstate war underestimate the extent to which those factors are endogenous to material and institutional variables. Arguments about the pacifying effects of the rise of the state and of commerce fail to recognize that in some historical contexts, those factors have contributed to the escalation of warfare. The introduction to the symposium outlines briefly some of the major issues: nature versus nurture, the reliability of the data, how broadly violence should be defined, whether there is more agreement on the phenomenon than on its causes, and finally whether the future will be like the past.

Recent work suggests that an important cognitive mechanism promoting coordination is common knowledge—a heuristic for representing recursive mental states. Yet, we know little about how common knowledge promotes coordination. We propose that common knowledge increases coordination by reducing uncertainty about others' cooperative behavior. We examine how common knowledge increases cooperation in the context of a threshold public goods game, a public good game in which a minimum level of contribution—a threshold—is required. Across three preregistered studies (N = 5580), we explored how varying (1) the information participants had regarding what their group members knew about the threshold and (2) the threshold level affected contributions. We found that participants were more likely to contribute to the public good when there was common knowledge of the threshold than private knowledge. Participants' predictions about the number of group members contributing to the public good and their certainty ratings of those predictions mediated the effect of information condition on contributions. Our results suggest that common knowledge of the threshold increases public good contributions by reducing uncertainty around other people's cooperative behavior. These findings point to the influential role of common knowledge in helping to solve large-scale cooperation problems.

Why do people esteem anonymous charitable giving? We connect normative theories of charitability (captured in Maimonides' Ladder of Charity) with evolutionary theories of partner choice to test predictions on how attributions of charitability are affected by states of knowledge: whether the identity of the donor or of the beneficiary is revealed to the other. Consistent with the theories, in Experiments 1-2 participants judged a double-blind gift as more charitable than one to a revealed beneficiary, which in turn was judged as more charitable than one from a revealed donor. We also found one exception: Participants judged a donor who revealed only himself as slightly less, rather than more, charitable than one who revealed both identities. Experiment 3 explains the exception as a reaction to the donor's perceived sense of superiority and disinterest in a social relationship. Experiment 4 found that donors were judged as more charitable when the gift was shared knowledge (each aware of the other's identity, but unsure of the other's awareness) than when it was common knowledge (awareness of awareness). Experiment 5, which titrated anonymity against donation size, found that not even a hundredfold larger gift could compensate for the disapproval elicited by a donor revealing his identity. Experiment 6 showed that participants' judgments of charitability flip depending on whose perspective they take: Observers disapprove of donations that they would prefer as beneficiaries. Together, these experiments provide insight into why people care about how a donor gives, not just how much. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Does our ability to talk lie in our genes? The suspicion is bolstered by the discovery of a gene that might affect how the brain circuitry needed for speech and language develops.

MacWhinney is to be commended for reopening questions about the logical problem of language acquisition in the light of new data and models. Unfortunately his discussion is marred by technical errors, false dichotomies, and inadequate attention to detail.