The paper discusses the basics of Cognitive Science and describes the achievements of research at the field of Artificial Intelligence. / Die im Rahmen des Seminars "Language - Mind - Brain: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics" der englischen Sprachwissenschaft entstandene Arbeit befasst sich mit den Grundlagen der Kognition und diskutiert die Ergebnisse der Forschung auf dem Gebiet der Künstlichen Intelligenz.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 24, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 29-30).

This thesis is situated in a moment when the theory and practice of inclusive design appears to be significantly implicated in the social and economic response to demographic changes in Western Europe by addressing the need to reconnect older people with technology. In light of claims that cognitive ageing results in an increasing disconnection from novel digital media in old age, inclusive design is apparently trapped in a discourse in which digital media products and interfaces are designed as a response to a deterministic decline in abilities. The thesis proceeds from this context to ask what intellectual moves are required within the discourses of inclusive design so that its community of theorists and practitioners can both comprehend and afford the enaction of cognitive experience in old age? Whilst influential design scholarship actively disregards reductionist cognitive explanations of human and technological relationships, it appears that inclusive design still requires an explanation of temporal changes to human cognition in later life. Whilst there is a burgeoning area of design related research dealing with this issue—an area this thesis defines as ‘cognitively inclusive design’—the underlying assumptions and claims supporting this body of research suggests its theorists and practitioners are struggling to move beyond conceptualising older people as passive consumers suffering a deterioration in key cognitive abilities. The thesis argues that, by revisiting the cognitive sciences for alternative explanations for the basis of human cognition, it is possible to relieve this problem by opening up new spaces for designers to critically reflect upon the manner in which older people interact with digital media. In taking a position that design is required to support human cognitive enactment, the thesis develops a new approach to conceptualising temporal changes in human cognition, defined as ‘senescent cognition’. From this new critical lens, the thesis provides an alternative ‘senescentechnic’ explanation of cognitive disconnections between older people and digital media that eschews reductionism and moves beyond a deterministic process of deterioration. In reassessing what ageing cognition means, new strategies for the future of inclusive design are proposed that emphasise the role of creating space for older people to actively explore, reflect upon and enact their own cognitive couplings with technology.

How do we recognize that someone is thinking that the train is running late, desiring another cookie, or intending to make coffee? What is the cognitive process by which we come to attribute to another individual the belief, for instance, that Barack Obama is President? For the past few decades, philosophers working on Folk Psychology--i.e., those involved in the study of how people typically form judgments about others’ mental states--have focused largely on questions involving everyday attributions of mentality in terms of intentional states, like beliefs and desires. What I dub ‘the New Folk Psychology’ expands on this tradition to include everyday attributions of phenomenal consciousness (i.e., feelings and experiences). How, that is, do we come to recognize something as being capable of and having phenomenal states, like feeling happy or experience pleasure? The project is organized around three core topics. The first component attempts to identify the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness. This task is carried out with an eye towards addressing issues in the current folk psychology of consciousness debate, such as whether ordinary psychology incorporates something like the philosopher’s distinction between intentionality and phenomenology. My work (Arico 2010, Arico, et al. 2011) advocates a model of mind-attribution called the Agency Model. According to this model, whenever we represent an entity as having certain properties (for example, facial features), we automatically categorize that thing as an AGENT. This AGENT-categorization then activates a cascade of behavioral dispositions, including the disposition to attribute both intentionality and phenomenology. The second component concerns ways that the process underlying everyday attributions of consciousness might be related to psychological process involved in moral perception. My work to date has focused largely on the question of how it is that we come to see an entity as a moral being, as something that deserves moral consideration and/or is subject to moral evaluation. I argue that existing accounts of such moral perception are based on problematic experimental data (Arico, forthcoming). I then propose an amended Agency Model (Arico, under review), according to which seeing an entity as a moral being--like attributing it consciousness--is a consequence of categorizing that thing as an AGENT. I then utilize this cognitive picture in an attempt to explain the enduring normative ethical debate over which kind of mental capacity most fundamentally grounds moral standing.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: McKnight, C., Dillon, A. and Shackel, B. (1996) The electronic journal and its implications for the digital library. In T. Harrison and T. Stephens (eds.) Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century. NY: SUNY Press, 351-368. 1. INTRODUCTION: It is now over ten years since the first electronic journal experiments (e.g., EIES, BLEND) and the intervening years have not seen researchers being idle in this field. Indeed, while experiments have continued apace in an attempt to answer various questions such as the appropriateness of particular interfaces, electronic journals have continued to appear. The third edition of the ARL list (Okerson, 1993) contains 45 electronic journals while the first edition, only two years earlier (Okerson, 1991), listed only 27. This might suggest reasonably rapid growth but in actual fact represents a high rate of turnover also -- 16 of the original 27 do not appear in the latest list. We therefore start this chapter from the assumption that electronic journals will continue to be a feature of the scholarly communication process, although not all will survive. Our second assumption arises from our experiences in the design, implementation and evaluation of information technology based systems in general, not just electronic journals. That is, we assume that in order to be acceptable, any system attempting to replace an existing technology must enable users to perform their necessary tasks in a way which is at least as easy as the existing system. The new system must offer at least as much (and preferably more) than the existing system, otherwise motivation to move from the old to the new is not high. In the present context, this means that the successful electronic journals will be those which not only support the scholarly communication process and all the other user requirements satisfied by paper based journals, but also support additional, enhanced facilities such as tailorable presentation formats, integrated interactive discussion about articles, flexible indexing and retrieval, hypertext linking and so forth.

This item is not the definitive copy. Please use the following citation when referencing this material: Dillon, A. and McKnight, C. (1995) Never mind the theory, feel the data: Observations on the design of Hypertext-based User Interfaces, In W. Schuler, J. Hannemann and N. Streitz (eds.) Designing User Interfaces for Hypermedia, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 117-125. Introduction: In the present paper we will seek to place the design of hypermedia-based user interfaces in the appropriate context of user-centred system design. In so doing we will outline what we believe to be the major methodological issues. As this will indicate, we view hypermedia design as essentially no different from any other kind interface design in terms of process and problem. Hence the methodological issues for hypermedia interfaces need to be seen as design problems rather than cognitive scientific ones. In this vein, we argue for a data-driven approach to design that seeks theoretical insight at the methodological and process level of design rather than the user level.

Syftet med denna studie var att belysa vilken betydelse utövandet av ett kognitivt förhållningssätt skulle kunna ha för tonåringar i deras vardag. Metoden som användes var halvstrukturerade kvalitativa intervjuer med fem personer som var utbildade och insatta i den kognitiva terapin. Intervjuerna tolkades och analyserades utifrån en hermeneutisk ansats. Resultatet visade att det kognitiva förhållningssättet med utgångspunkt i den kognitiva terapin, har betydelse för tonåringar. Genom att arbeta utifrån den kognitiva terapins ram kan professionella få den unge att fundera kring samband mellan tanke, känsla och handling. Förhållningssättet visade sig också i viss mån kunna tillämpas som en slags självhjälp samt som en förebyggande insats inom t.ex. skolan. Studiens resultat är främst relevant för behandlingspedagoger och andra professionella som träffar tonåringar i sin yrkesvardag.

Ce travail de thèse représente une tentative de rationalisation du lexique espagnol en accordant la priorité au signifiant. Inspiré notamment de Pierre Guiraud, nous y avons établi à la suite de Maurice Molho, Didier Bottineau, Georges Bohas ou Dennis Philps, que les mots peuvent ne référer que par la sollicitation d'une partie de leur forme, partie détectable structurellement. Nous avons pris en considération l'ensemble des capacités qualitatives (phones, formant, idéophones, graphèmes, segments) et quantitatives (duplications, répétitions, inversions, homophonies / homographies) de la forme des mots. Nous ne nous sommes donc pas limité à un support sémiologique particulier mais avons conçu le lexique, du fait de sa complexité, comme un organisme de signifiants / signifiés où chaque élément peut entrer en compte pour donner lieu à une motivation (interne ou externe). Nous avons nommé cet élément la saillance, car il s'agit d'une unité résultant d'une focalisation, d'un choix formel pour référer à telle ou telle idée. Nous avons également remarqué, notamment dans des cas d'" homonymie ", que plusieurs parties pouvaient être sollicitées et que chacune permettait de renvoyer à un sens distinct. La consubstantialité du signe est donc, de notre point de vue, un principe sauf. La " synonymie " ainsi que la " polysémie " ne sont donc pas non plus des notions pertinentes car chaque terme renvoie d'une manière qui lui est propre à un sens donné. Enfin, nous avons proposé une application, avec des critères similaires, à des énoncés dit " poétiques " où plusieurs actualisations parfois insolites apparaissent mais toujours permises par le langage, par le signifiant.

Les domaines de la réalité virtuelle et du jeu vidéo convoquent les problématiques émotionnelles dans leurs objectifs respectifs de présence et de flow zone. Cependant, la question des méthodologies d'induction d'émotions dans les environnements virtuels de ces médiums n'a pas été largement questionnée. Après avoir défini ce que sont les émotions dans la littérature philosophique, psychologique et physiologiste, nous cherchons à montrer les liens supposés existants entre l'émotion et les états extatiques de présence en réalité virtuelle et de flow zone dans les jeux vidéo. Nous commençons donc par montrer combien le niveau de connaissance des médiums peut influencer la sensibilité aux inductions d'émotions dans les environnements virtuels. Puis nous mettons en place une stratégie inductive d'émotions basée sur une gestion itérative des niveaux de challenge en lien avec les niveaux de compétences acquises. Nous avons validé au travers de deux expériences empiriques ayant impliquées 176 participants, une méthodologie d'induction d'émotions basée sur un schéma circomplexe. Ce schéma, construit autour de la valence et le niveau de charge émotionnelle, permet d'induire des émotions dans les cinq composantes essentielles de la conception d'environnements virtuels pour la réalité virtuelle ou les jeux vidéo : la chromatique, la luminosité, la vitesse des mouvements, la dimension des espaces et le volume des interactions sociales.

<p>There are various theories in the philosophy of mind/cognitive science of what kinds of knowledge, or information carrying mental states, constitute our mental concepts. Such knowledge is used in higher acts of cognition such as in categorization, induction, deduction, and analogical reasoning when we think or reason about the extension of the concept. While most concept theories have primarily focused on concrete concepts such as `chair,' `table,' and `dog,' I take such modern theories and apply them to abstract moral concepts such as `virtue,' `right action,' and `just.' I argue for a new overall pluralistic theory of moral concepts, combining several theories of concepts. This pluralistic view differs from, for example, Ayer's non-cognitivist theory that contends that our moral concepts are constituted by or just are emotions and desires. Finally, I draw further philosophical implications my conclusion may have for applied ethics, normative ethical theory, political philosophy and meta-ethics.</p> / Dissertation