Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Jara-Ettinger, Julian

Abstract

Human intelligence is uniquely powerful and flexible — operating in an enormous range ofsituations, from those as everyday as driving in traffic while carrying on a conversation, to those as extraordinary as cooperating to shift a culture. Work in cognitive science over the past decades has argued that two foundational types of representations form the building blocks of human intelligence: representations of the physical world in terms of objects, forces, spaces, substances, and so on (Carey, 2009), and representations of the social world in terms of agents and their mental states, like goals, beliefs, and knowledge (Gopnik, Meltzoff, & Bryant, 1997). This thesis argues for another foundational type of representation critical to human intelligence, but missing from this picture: representations of computational processes. This third type of representation concerns complex dynamical information processing systems, like computers and minds. This thesis presents a series of case studies, showing how representations of computation permeate how we reason about the world: They enable us, as cognitive scientists, to study the mind; they enable us, as humans, to think about what is going on in other people’s minds; and they even enable us to learn about how our own minds work.

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