Many intuitive notions of “learning” do not support thediverse kinds of learning across different situations andlearners. In this paper I offer a functional definition oflearning from a cognitive science perspective, which attemptsto account for the presence of learning in different physicalsubstrates. The definition is that a particular event should beconsidered a good example of “learning” to the degree towhich the following characteristics describe it: 1) a systemundergoes change to its informational state or processing 2)the change is for the purpose of more effective future action,3) the change is in response what the system experiences, and4) the system executes the change, rather than some outsideforce. Episodes are better examples of learning according tohow many of these characteristics they have. I discussbenefits and limitations of this characterization.

We present a model of moral judgment, Charon, which addsto previous models several factors that have been shown toinfluence moral judgment: 1) a more sophisticated account ofprior mental state, 2) imagination, 3) empathy, 4) thefeedback process between emotion and reason, 5) self-interest, and 6) self-control. We discuss previous classes ofmodels and demonstrate Charon’s extended explanatorypower with a focus on psychopathy and autism.

Previous work shows that people often believe, contrary toactual physics, that objects travelling in a curved path througha tube will continue to travel in a curved path after exiting thetube. In the present study, previous work was replicated, butaccuracy increased in a new condition in which people wereasked to catch an actual ball emerging from a tube. That is, inthis case there is a discrepancy between how we believe theworld works, and how our motor system responds to events inthe world. This finding supports the theory that the perceptionand action systems of the brain use different methods topredict how things move in the world, and that the abstractreasoning systems used to explain how the world works areoften in conflict with the action systems.