Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Henry Taylor , who is a philosopher at the University of Birmingham. He is interested in in the philosophy of mind. His main areas of research in the area are attention, consciousness, peripheral vision and robotics. Henry Taylor You wake up and listen for the familiar sound of your household robot making you your morning porridge. On the way to work, you pop into a supermarket, and a robot helps you to find the products you need. You’re a mental health professional, and you spend the day working alongside the robots that support people with post-traumatic stress disorder. On your way home, you call into the care home where your parents are being looked after by both humans and robots. The use of robots in all of the above contexts is currently being investigated. In healthcare, for example, researchers are exploring how robots can support humans with autism, cancer, dementia, diabetes social anxiety, and more. These applications raise questions that straddle robotics a...

My name is Matthew Hammond , and I research social cognition, romantic relationships, and stereotyping in the School of Psychology at Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). A recent project with Andrei Cimpian (New York University) investigated the cognitive structure of social stereotypes. We aimed to refine the current psychological definition of stereotypes—which is simply that stereotypes are “beliefs about groups.” This definition underspecifies the kind of beliefs that make up stereotypes. Our research question involved distinguishing between statistical beliefs and generic beliefs as elements of stereotypes, drawing upon research in philosophy, cognitive science, and linguistics. Statistical beliefs are about the prevalence of features within groups, such as believing that 1 in 3 humans have brown eyes. Generic beliefs, such as the belief expressed by the statement “sharks attack swimmers,” are not about any specific quantities or frequencies but rather consi...