Educational
educational implications
Causal Reasoning: Its role in the architecture and development of the mind
The seminar will first outline the architecture of the human mind, specifying general and domain-specific mental processes. The place of causal reasoning and its relations with the other processes will be specified. Experimental, psychometric, developmental, and brain-based evidence will be summarized. The main message of the talk is that causal thought involves domain-specific core processes rooted in perception and served by special brain networks which capture interactions between objects. With development, causal reasoning is increasingly associated with a general abstraction system which generates general principles underlying inductive, analogical, and deductive reasoning and also heuristics for specifying causal relations. These associations are discussed in some detail. Possible implications for artificial intelligence and educational implications are also discussed.
The Structural Anchoring of Spontaneous Analogies
It is generally acknowledged that analogy is a core mechanism of human cognition, but paradoxically, analogies based on structural similarities would rarely be implemented spontaneously (e.g. without an explicit invitation to compare two representations). The scarcity of deep spontaneous analogies is at odds with the demonstration that familiar concepts from our daily-life are spontaneously used to encode the structure of our experiences. Based on this idea, we will present experimental works highlighting the predominant role of structural similarities in analogical retrieval. The educational stakes lurking behind the tendency to encode the problem’s structures through familiar concepts will also be addressed.