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I argue that there is currently no alternative to functionalism. Functionalism explains the differences between types of mental states. No biological theory does. Functionalist theories account for th...

AbstractBoth human children and animals seek information following a violation-of-expectation event, but little research suggests the latter do so for the sake of it. In this preregistered experiment, we compared epistemic curiosity—the pursuit of information for its own sake—in kea parrots (Nestor notabilis) and three-year-old human children (Homo sapiens) following a violation-of-expectation event. Subjects were trained to push a tool into an apparatus that produced a reward before the apparatus was surreptitiously made non-functional in following trials. In both functional and non-functional trials, after solving the task, subjects were rewarded and allowed to explore the apparatus for thirty seconds with the opportunity to peek into the side of the apparatus. We found that relatively more kea peeked than children, but the children and not the kea were significantly more likely to peek in the non-functional versus functional trials, particularly when the researcher was absent. While both species showed markers of curiosity in the experiment, we found expectancy-violation-induced epistemic curiosity only in the children and not the kea in this context.

Description: We are looking for a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to support a large-scale interdisciplinary research initiative on the topic of "Common Ground" at the University of Tübingen. The project seeks to investigate the notion of common ground in linguistic communication by taking an interdisciplinary perspective, incorporating insights from, e.g., the philosophy of language, the cognitive language sciences, linguistic pragmatics, and/or formal logic or epistemology. The ide

This paper argues for a pluralist approach to representation in large language models. There are two parts to this pluralism, the first is that we should recognise more than one vehicle ...

Philosophical debates about the nature of perception are standardly informed by an empirical assumption about folk beliefs: They assume there is such a thing as “the” common-sense conception of visio...

Engaging in fluent conversation is a surprisingly complex task that requires interlocutors to promptly respond to each other in a way that is appropriate to the social context. In this study, we dise...

CR tests of 23 popular protein powders and shakes found that most contain high levels of lead.

When people listen to or read a sentence, they actively make predictions about upcoming words: words that are less predictable are generally read more slowly than predictable ones. The success of larg...

Inquiry is guided, in the minimal sense that it is not haphazard. It is also often thought to have as a natural stopping point ceasing to inquire, once inquiry into a question yields knowledge of an a...

OpenAI's o3-preview reasoning model exceeded human accuracy on the ARC-AGI benchmark, but does that mean state-of-the-art models recognize and reason with the abstractions that the task creators inten...