Why we’re so smart

TL;DR: It is argued that language can play a significant role in structuring, or restructuring, a domain as fundamental as spatial cognition, and to work out how to account for cross-cultural cognitive diversity in core cognitive domains.

TL;DR: The second hypothesis is that humans possess an ability of metaphorical abstraction, which allows them to coopt faculties that originally evolved for physical problem-solving and social coordination, apply them to abstract subject matter, and combine them productively, which can help explain the emergence of abstract cognition without supernatural or exotic evolutionary forces.

TL;DR: This paper argues, first, that analogical ability is the key factor in the authors' prodigious capacity, and, second, that possession of a symbol system is crucial to the full expression of analogICAL ability.

TL;DR: It is found that parents vary widely in the amount of spatial language they use with their children during everyday interactions, and that children who produce more spatial language are more likely to perform better on spatial problem solving tasks at a later age.

TL;DR: The metric and dimensional assumptions that underlie the geometric representation of similarity are questioned on both theoretical and empirical grounds and a set of qualitative assumptions are shown to imply the contrast model, which expresses the similarity between objects as a linear combination of the measures of their common and distinctive features.

TL;DR: This edition offers a new preface by Quine's student and colleague Dagfinn Follesdal that describes the never-realized plans for a second edition of Word and Object, in which Quine would offer a more unified treatment of the public nature of meaning, modalities, and propositional attitudes.

TL;DR: In this paper, the interpretation rules of OS implicit rules for mapping knowledge about a base domain into a torget domain are defined by the existence of higher-order relations, which depend only on syntactic properties of the knowledge representation, and not on specific content of the domoins.

TL;DR: This paper showed that if two prior analogs were given, subjects often derived a problem schema as an incidental product of describing the similarities of the analogs, and the quality of the induced schema was highly predictive of subsequent transfer performance.