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COGSCI
2008

The Tractable Cognition Thesis

13 years 11 months ago
The Tractable Cognition Thesis
The recognition that human minds/brains are finite systems with limited resources for computation has led some researchers to advance the Tractable Cognition thesis: Human cognitive capacities are constrained by computational tractability. This thesis, if true, serves cognitive psychology by constraining the space of computational-level theories of cognition. To utilize this constraint, a precise and workable definition of "computational tractability" is needed. Following computer science tradition, many cognitive scientists and psychologists define computational tractability as polynomial-time computability, leading to the P-Cognition thesis. This article explains how and why the P-Cognition thesis may be overly restrictive, risking the exclusion of veridical computational-level theories from scientific investigation. An argument is made to replace the P-Cognition thesis by the FPT-Cognition thesis as an alternative formalization of the Tractable Cognition thesis (here, FPT...
Iris van Rooij
Added 09 Dec 2010
Updated 09 Dec 2010
Type Journal
Year 2008
Where COGSCI
Authors Iris van Rooij
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