CASA_Vector Logo White

Is Psychology Still a Science of Behavior? – Dolinski (2018)

Since the 1970s, social psychology has examined real human behaviour to an increasingly smaller degree. This article is an analysis of the reasons why this is so. The author points out that the otherwise valuable phenomenon of cognitive shift, which occurred in social psychology precisely in the 1970s, naturally boosted the interest of psychologists in […]

Pretend Play – Weisberg (2015)

Pretend play is a form of playful behavior that involves nonliteral action. Although on the surface this activity appears to be merely for fun, recent research has discovered that children’s pretend play has connections to important cognitive and social skills, such as symbolic thinking, theory of mind, and counterfactual reasoning. The current article first defines […]

Core Knowledge – Spelke and Kinzler (2008)

Human cognition is founded, in part, on four systems for representing objects, actions, number, and space. It may be based, as well, on a fifth system for representing social partners. Each system has deep roots in human phylogeny and ontogeny, and it guides and shapes the mental lives of adults. Converging research on human infants, non-human primates, […]

Deep Learning – LeCun, Bengio, and Hinton (2015)

Deep learning allows computational models that are composed of multiple processing layers to learn representations of data with multiple levels of abstraction. These methods have dramatically improved the state-of-the-art in speech recognition, visual object recognition, object detection and many other domains such as drug discovery and genomics. Deep learning discovers intricate structure in large data […]

Machine learning: Overview of the recent progresses and implications for the process systems engineering field – Lee, Shin, and Realff (2018)

Machine learning (ML) has recently gained in popularity, spurred by well-publicized advances like deep learning and widespread commercial interest in big data analytics. Despite the enthusiasm, some renowned experts of the field have expressed skepticism, which is justifiable given the disappointment with the previous wave of neural networks and other AI techniques. On the other […]

The Mind-Body Problem – Fodor (1981)

In this paper Fodor provides both a historical and philosophical account of the rise of Functionalism as one of the dominant paradigms within both the philosophy of mind and the psychological sciences. Here he argues that the appeal of Functionalism arises in part from the critical failures of the theories before it – such as […]

The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally – Goldin-Meadow et al (2008)

“To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an […]