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The article deals with traditional ways of understanding human cognitive processes in terms of key ideas of philosophical, cultural, and linguistic sciences, as well as modern ideas concerning the nature of mental representation.

AbstractDo animals require rich internal representations, such as cognitive maps, to navigate complex environments? Some researchers believe so, as they argue that sensory information is "too poor" to account for animals' wayfinding abilities. However, this assumption is debatable, as James J. Gibson showed. Gibson proposed that wayfinding involves detecting information about environmental structure over time and used the concepts of "vistas" and "transitions" to explain terrestrial navigation. While these concepts may not apply universally to animal navigation, they highlight the importance of exploiting stable environmental structures for wayfinding. By searching for species-relative environmental structures, we may gain insight into the navigational abilities of different nonhuman animals, while recognizing the unique evolutionary histories and ecological contexts that have shaped these abilities.

Bilder, Wünsche und Ängste, die Frauen mit der Technik verbinden, werden untersucht. Dazu wurden 21 überwiegend technisch interessierte Frauen befragt, und die Ergebnisse der Gespräche wurden mit Hilfe von psychoanalytischen Erklärungsansätzen interpretiert. Besonders auffallend war die Ambivalenz der Befragten gegenüber dem technischen Objekt. Ihre Bilder und Aussagen oszillierten zwischen Faszination und der Angst vor einer Vereinnahmung oder Grenzverletzung. Gleichzeitig bestand ein Wunsch nach klaren Trennungen, der seine besondere Dynamik aus der Abgrenzung vom gleichgeschlechtlichen primären Objekt (der Mutter) bezog. Die Faszination im Umgang mit dem männlich konnotierten technischen Objekt lag vor allem im Versprechen narzisstischer Integrität. Ein solches Versprechen wird von einer männerdominierten Technik für Frauen jedoch nicht eingelöst, woraus sich vielfache Brechungen ihrer Technikmotivation ergeben.

Performance on a direct distance estimation task in a large, complex environment was studied as a function of variation in some members of the set of test locations. Features of the multidimensional scaling solutions-along with effects on the imagery that subjects reported experiencing while engaged in the spatial task-support the notion that a working representation is constructed for the solution of a spatial problem. It is hypothesized that this construction draws selectively upon various mental representations of the environment available in long-term store, depending on the way the task is structured. Subjects who were highly familiar with the environment reported more abstract and less scenographic imagery than less-experienced subjects and were superior in their sensitivity to distance variation.

There is a general and extensive literature in the development of representational thought and symbolic processes because of its centrality in human evolution. However, the umbrella of science and its method does not necessarily lead to a coherent concept

International audience In French, regardless of stem regularity, inflectional verbal suffixes are extremely regular and paradigmatic. Considering the complexity of the French verbal system, we argue that all French verbs are polymorphemic forms that are decomposed during visual recognition independently of their stem regularity. We conducted a behavioral experiment in which we manipulated the surface and cumulative frequencies of verbal inflected forms and asked participants to perform a visual lexical decision task. We tested four types of verbs with respect to their stem variants: a. fully regular (parler " to speak, " [parl-]); b. phonological change e/E verbs with orthographic markers (répéter " to repeat, " [répét-] and [répèt-]); c. phonological change o/O verbs without orthographic markers (adorer " to adore, " [ador-] and [adOr-]); and d. idiosyncratic (boire " to drink, " [boi-] and [buv-]). For each type of verb, we contrasted four conditions, forms with high and low surface frequencies and forms with high and low cumulative frequencies. Our results showed a significant cumulative frequency effect for the fully regular and idiosyncratic verbs, indicating that different stems within idiosyncratic verbs (such as [boi-] and [buv-]) have distinct representations in the mental lexicon as different fully regular verbs. For the phonological change verbs, we found a significant cumulative frequency effect only when considering the two forms of the stem together ([répét-] and [répèt-]), suggesting that they share a single abstract and under specified phonological representation. Our results also revealed a significant surface frequency effect for all types of verbs, which may reflect the recombination of the stem lexical representation with the functional information of the suffixes. Overall, these results indicate that all inflected verbal forms in French are decomposed during visual recognition and that this process could be due to the regularities of the French inflectional verbal suffixes.

There is a general and extensive literature in the development of representational thought and symbolic processes because of its centrality in human evolution. However, the umbrella of science and its method does not necessarily lead to a coherent conceptual model, or agreements among scholars. These basic differences among various disciplines have led to the creation of new and exciting realms of research. This book considers how representational or symbolic thought develops for children's use in a wide array of these circumstances.