31 found
Order:
  1. Cognitive Penetrability of Perception in the Age of Prediction: Predictive Systems are Penetrable Systems.Gary Lupyan - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4):547-569.
    The goal of perceptual systems is to allow organisms to adaptively respond to ecologically relevant stimuli. Because all perceptual inputs are ambiguous, perception needs to rely on prior knowledge accumulated over evolutionary and developmental time to turn sensory energy into information useful for guiding behavior. It remains controversial whether the guidance of perception extends to cognitive states or is locked up in a “cognitively impenetrable” part of perception. I argue that expectations, knowledge, and task demands can shape perception at multiple (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   76 citations  
  2. Words and the world: predictive coding and the language-perception-cognition interface.Gary Lupyan & Andy Clark - 2015 - Current Directions in Psychological Science 24 (4):279-284.
    Can what we know change what we see? Does language affect cognition and perception? The last few years have seen increased attention to these seemingly disparate questions, but with little theoretical advance. We argue that substantial clarity can be gained by considering these questions through the lens of predictive processing, a framework in which mental representations—from the perceptual to the cognitive—reflect an interplay between downward-flowing predictions and upward-flowing sensory signals. This framework provides a parsimonious account of how what we know (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   60 citations  
  3. What is conceptual engineering good for? The argument from nameability.Steffen Koch & Gary Lupyan - 2025 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research:403-420.
    It is often assumed that how we talk about the world matters a great deal. This is one reason why conceptual engineers seek to improve our linguistic practices by advocating novel uses of our words, or by inventing new ones altogether. A core idea shared by conceptual engineers is that by changing our language in this way, we can reap all sorts of cognitive and practical benefits, such as improving our theorizing, combating hermeneutical injustice, or promoting social emancipation. But how (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  4. How Language Programs the Mind.Gary Lupyan & Benjamin Bergen - 2016 - Topics in Cognitive Science 8 (1):408-424.
    Many animals can be trained to perform novel tasks. People, too, can be trained, but sometime in early childhood people transition from being trainable to something qualitatively more powerful—being programmable. We argue that such programmability constitutes a leap in the way that organisms learn, interact, and transmit knowledge, and that what facilitates or enables this programmability is the learning and use of language. We then examine how language programs the mind and argue that it does so through the manipulation of (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   20 citations  
  5.  49
    Hidden Differences in Phenomenal Experience.Gary Lupyan, Ryutaro Uchiyama, Bill Thompson & Daniel Casasanto - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (1):e13239.
    In addition to the many easily observable differences between people, there are also differences in people's subjective experiences that are harder to observe, and which, as a consequence, remain hidden. For example, people vary widely in how much visual imagery they experience. But those who cannot see in their mind's eye, tend to assume everyone is like them. Those who can, assume everyone else can as well. We argue that a study of such hidden phenomenal differences has much to teach (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  6.  57
    (1 other version)Discovering Psychological Principles by Mining Naturally Occurring Data Sets.Robert L. Goldstone & Gary Lupyan - 2016 - Topics in Cognitive Science 8 (3):548-568.
    The very expertise with which psychologists wield their tools for achieving laboratory control may have had the unwelcome effect of blinding psychologists to the possibilities of discovering principles of behavior without conducting experiments. When creatively interrogated, a diverse range of large, real-world data sets provides powerful diagnostic tools for revealing principles of human judgment, perception, categorization, decision-making, language use, inference, problem solving, and representation. Examples of these data sets include patterns of website links, dictionaries, logs of group interactions, collections of (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  7.  28
    (1 other version)Which words are most iconic?Bodo Winter, Marcus Perlman, Lynn K. Perry & Gary Lupyan - 2017 - Interaction Studies. Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies / Social Behaviour and Communication in Biological and Artificial Systemsinteraction Studies 18 (3):443-464.
    Some spoken words are iconic, exhibiting a resemblance between form and meaning. We used native speaker ratings to assess the iconicity of 3001 English words, analyzing their iconicity in relation to part-of-speech differences and differences between the sensory domain they relate to. First, we replicated previous findings showing that onomatopoeia and interjections were highest in iconicity, followed by verbs and adjectives, and then nouns and grammatical words. We further show that words with meanings related to the senses are more iconic (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   14 citations  
  8.  32
    Finding categories through words: More nameable features improve category learning.Martin Zettersten & Gary Lupyan - 2020 - Cognition 196 (C):104135.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   8 citations  
  9.  13
    Explanations in the wild.Justin Sulik, Jeroen van Paridon & Gary Lupyan - 2023 - Cognition 237 (C):105464.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  10.  42
    The conceptual grouping effect: Categories matter.Gary Lupyan - 2008 - Cognition 108 (2):566-577.
    No categories
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   21 citations  
  11.  34
    What makes words special? Words as unmotivated cues.Pierce Edmiston & Gary Lupyan - 2015 - Cognition 143 (C):93-100.
    No categories
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  12.  24
    Not even wrong: The “it's just X” fallacy.Gary Lupyan - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  13.  70
    Categorization is modulated by transcranial direct current stimulation over left prefrontal cortex.Gary Lupyan, Daniel Mirman, Roy Hamilton & Sharon L. Thompson-Schill - 2012 - Cognition 124 (1):36-49.
    No categories
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   10 citations  
  14.  60
    Reply to Macpherson: Further illustrations of the cognitive penetrability of perception.Gary Lupyan - 2015 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 6 (4):585-589.
    My reply to Macpherson begins by addressing whether it is effects of cognition on early vision or perceptual performance that I am interested in. I proceed to address Macpherson’s comments on evidence from cross-modal effects, interpretations of linguistic effects on image detection, evidence from illusions, and the usefulness of predictive coding for understanding cognitive penetration. By stressing the interactive and distributed nature of neural processing, I am committing to a collapse between perception and cognition. Following such a collapse, the very (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  15.  23
    What Does a Horgous Look Like? Nonsense Words Elicit Meaningful Drawings.Charles P. Davis, Hannah M. Morrow & Gary Lupyan - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (10):e12791.
    To what extent do people attribute meanings to “nonsense” words? How general is such attribution of meaning? We used a set of words lacking conventional meanings to elicit drawings of made‐up creatures. Separate groups of participants rated the nonsense words and the drawings on several semantic dimensions and selected what name best corresponded to each creature. Despite lacking conventional meanings, “nonsense” words elicited a high level of consistency in the produced drawings. Meaning attributions made to nonsense words corresponded with meaning (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  16.  16
    Predicting Age of Acquisition for Children's Early Vocabulary in Five Languages Using Language Model Surprisal.Eva Portelance, Yuguang Duan, Michael C. Frank & Gary Lupyan - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (9):e13334.
    What makes a word easy to learn? Early‐learned words are frequent and tend to name concrete referents. But words typically do not occur in isolation. Some words are predictable from their contexts; others are less so. Here, we investigate whether predictability relates to when children start producing different words (age of acquisition; AoA). We operationalized predictability in terms of a word's surprisal in child‐directed speech, computed using n‐gram and long‐short‐term‐memory (LSTM) language models. Predictability derived from LSTMs was generally a better (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  17.  60
    The difficulties of executing simple algorithms: Why brains make mistakes computers don’t.Gary Lupyan - 2013 - Cognition 129 (3):615-636.
  18.  86
    How Reliable is Perception?Gary Lupyan - 2017 - Philosophical Topics 45 (1):81-106.
    People believe that perception is reliable and that what they perceive reflects objective reality. On this view, we perceive a red circle because there is something out there that is a red circle. It is also commonly believed that perceptual reliability is threatened if what we see is allowed to be influenced by what we know or expect. I argue that although human perception is often highly consistent and stable, it is difficult to evaluate its reliability because when it comes (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  19.  34
    Why Do We Need Emotion Words in the First Place? Commentary on Lakoff (2015).Adrienne Wood, Gary Lupyan & Paula Niedenthal - 2016 - Emotion Review 8 (3):274-275.
    George Lakoff (2016) discusses how emotion metaphors reflect the discrete bodily states associated with each emotion. The analysis raises questions about the context for and frequency of use of emotion metaphors and, indeed, emotion labels (e.g., “angry”), per se. An assumption implicit to most theories of emotion is that emotion language is just another channel through which people express ongoing emotion states. Drawing from recent evidence that labeling ongoing emotions reduces their intensity, we propose that a primary function of emotion (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  20.  47
    Connectionism coming of age: legacy and future challenges.Julien Mayor, Pablo Gomez, Franklin Chang & Gary Lupyan - 2014 - Frontiers in Psychology 5.
  21.  60
    Taking symbols for granted? Is the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds the product of external symbol systems?Gary Lupyan - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (2):140-141.
    The target article provides a convincing argument that nonhuman animals cannot process role-governed rules, relational schemas, and so on, in a human-like fashion. However, actual human performance is often more similar to that of nonhuman animals than Penn et al. admit. The kind of rule-governed performance the authors take for granted may rely to a substantial degree on language on external symbol systems such as those provided by language and culture.
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  22. Is perception cognitively penetrable? A philosophically satisfying and empirically testable reframing.Gary Lupyan, Dustin Stokes, Fiona Macpherson, Rasha Abdel Rahman & Robert Goldstone - 2013 - Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 1:91-2.
    The question of whether perception can be penetrated by cognition is in the limelight again. The reason this question keeps coming up is that there is so much at stake: Is it possible to have theory-neutral observation? Is it possible to study perception without recourse to expectations, context, and beliefs? What are the boundaries between perception, memory, and inference (and do they even exist)? Are findings from neuroscience that paint a picture of perception as an inherently bidirectional and interactive process (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  23.  30
    Is language-of-thought the best game in the town we live?Gary Lupyan - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e281.
    There are towns in which language-of-thought (LoT) is the best game. But do we live in one? I go through three properties that characterize the LoT hypothesis: Discrete constituents, role-filler independence, and logical operators, and argue that in each case predictions from the LoT hypothesis are a poor fit to actual human cognition. As a hypothesis of what human cognition ought to be like, LoT departs from empirical reality.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24.  18
    Socio-demographic influences on language structure and change: Not all learners are the same.Till Bergmann, Rick Dale & Gary Lupyan - 2016 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  25. Now You See It, Now You Don't: Verbal but not visual cues facilitate visual object detection.Gary Lupyan & M. Spivey - 2008 - In B. C. Love, K. McRae & V. M. Sloutsky, Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society. pp. 963--968.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  26.  65
    Processing is shaped by multiple tasks: There is more to rules and similarity than rules-to-similarity.Gary Lupyan & Gautam Vallabha - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (1):28-28.
    We argue that the Rules-Similarity continuum is only a useful formalism for particular, isolated tasks and must rest on the assumption that representations formed during a particular task are independent of other tasks. We show this to be an unrealistic conjecture. We additionally point out that describing categorization as selective weighing and abstracting of features misses the important step of discovering what the possible features are.
    Direct download (8 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  27. The evocative power of words: Activation of visual information by verbal and nonverbal means.Gary Lupyan & S. Thompson-Schill - 2010 - In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone, Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society. pp. 883--888.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  28.  21
    There is no such thing as culture-free intelligence.Gary Lupyan - 2022 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 45:e169.
    Cognitive scientists and psychometricians are unaccustomed to thinking about culture, often treating their measures – memory, vocabulary, intelligence – as natural kinds. Relying on these measures, behavioral geneticists likewise seem to not wonder about their origin and cultural provenance. I argue that complex human traits – the sort we are most interested in measuring – are cultural products. We can measure them and their heritability, but to conclude that what we have measured is unbound to a time and place is (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  29.  29
    Double dissociations never license simple inferences about underlying brain organization, especially in developmental cases.James L. McClelland & Gary Lupyan - 2002 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (6):763-764.
    Different developmental anomalies produce contrasting deficits in a single, integrated system. In a network that inflects regular and exception verbs correctly, a disproportionate deficit with exceptions occurs if connections are deleted, whereas a disproportionate deficit with regulars occurs when an auditory deficit impairs perception of the regular inflection. In general, contrasting deficits do not license the inference of underlying modularity.
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  30.  25
    Editorial: Pre-cueing Effects on Perception and Cognitive Penetrability.Athanassios Raftopoulos & Gary Lupyan - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  31.  53
    The development of modeling or the modeling of development?David H. Rakison & Gary Lupyan - 2008 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (6):726-726.
    We agree with many theoretical points presented by Rogers & McClelland (R&M), especially the role of domain-general learning of coherent covariation. Nonetheless, we argue that in failing to be informed by key aspects of development, including the role of labels on categorization and the emergence of constraints on learning, their model fails to capture important features of the ontogeny of knowledge.
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation