Abstract
The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe—provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1)Positions andmotions of objects conserve theirshapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three-dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2)Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3)Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum-entropy priors.
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Successive approximations to this paper have been presented in three invited talks: (1) “How the mind reflects the world,” D. O. Hebb lecture, McGill University, September 29, 1989; (2) “Can natural selection yield universal principles of mind?” in the symposium Evolution of Cognitive Functions in Ecological-Cultural Context, Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C., February 18, 1991; and (3) “How the mind reflects the world,” Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Society, Chicago, June 27, 1993. The research and the drafting of this article were supported by National Science Foundation Grant DBS-9021648. Final revisions were supported, as well, by the Santa Fe Institute, and benefited significantly from interdisciplinary discussions with many scientists there, as well as from the expert editorial assistance of my Stanford secretary Kim Saccio. Other colleagues who have especially contributed to or influenced the particular work reviewed here include Eloise Carlton, Lynn Cooper, Leda Cosmides, Joyce Farrell, Jennifer Freyd. Sherryl Judd. Laurence Maloney, Michael McBeath, Jacqueline Meteler, Geoffrey Miller, In Jae Myung, Robert Nosofsky, Margaret Shiffrar, Joshua Tenenbuam, Brian Wandell, and Susan Zare.
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Shepard, R.N. Perceptual-cognitive universals as reflections of the world. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 1, 2–28 (1994). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200759
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03200759