The debate about semantic reference between Frege’s (1948) descriptivism and Kripke’s (1972) causal theory of reference has recently been approached through experimental psychology. However, no consensus has been reached on the direction of the results. While some studies face clear methodological charges, even those that are currently uncontested do not reach a mutual conclusion. We propose a novel experimental paradigm with methodology designed to evade the problems of previous studies. Contrary to the past literature, we find a prevalence of descriptivists under lenient criteria for consistency across trials, while under strict criteria we find an equal amount of descriptivists and hybrids, with low numbers of referentialists (causal theory of reference) under both criteria. We suggest an interpretation of this result, and where future research might head.

Participants in Goldwater et al. (2018) reported using either feature- or relation-based strategy during a series of category learning tasks. A computational modeling study was conducted to investigate whether performance on Experiments 1 and 2 of Goldwater et al. (2018) might be explained by the assumption that participants used either feature- or relation-based representational encoding during learning. Human participants’ and model performance are compared and implications are discussed

Abstract mental representation is fundamental for humancognition. Forming such representations in time, especiallyfrom dynamic and noisy perceptual input, is a challenge forany processing modality, but perhaps none so acutely as forlanguage processing. We show that LISA (Hummel &Holyaok, 1997) and DORA (Doumas, Hummel, & Sandhofer,2008), models built to process and to learn structured (i.e.,symbolic) representations of conceptual properties andrelations from unstructured inputs, show oscillatory activationduring processing that is highly similar to the cortical activityelicited by the linguistic stimuli from Ding et al. (2016). Weargue, as Ding et al. (2016), that this activation reflectsformation of hierarchical linguistic representation, andfurthermore, that the kind of computational mechanisms inLISA/DORA (e.g., temporal binding by systematicasynchrony of firing) may underlie formation of abstractlinguistic representations in the human brain. It may be thisrepurposing that allowed for the generation or emergence ofhierarchical linguistic structure, and therefore, humanlanguage, from extant cognitive and neural systems. Weconclude that models of thinking and reasoning and models oflanguage processing must be integrated—not only forincreased plausiblity, but in order to advance both fieldstowards a larger integrative model of human cognition.

Relational recognition is the process by which relational representations get recognized (i.e., representations that specify an actor and a patient, and are role sensitive). This process is currently poorly understood, but is an important aspect of relational cognition (Livins & Doumas, 2014). This paper presents two experiments that investigate the degree to which visuospatial factors influence it. The first is an exploratory eye-tracking study that shows that first fixations are correlated with what object gets bound to the actor role, while the second uses priming to show that such fixations can alter which relation is recognized.