My dissertation centers on the meaning of dreams as interpreted by literati in the late Ming (1368-1644), viewed through the lens of the 1636 encyclopedia Forest of Dreams. This thirty-four-juan tome is the largest extant Chinese dream encyclopedia and includes…

Although we represent other people in terms of both what they look like and how they behave, these two aspects of person knowledge have rarely been studied together. While vision scientists have focused on the processing of faces and bodies,…

The dissertation examines aesthetic, scientific and occult evocations of fluids such as air at the turn of the 20th century. Eighteenth century experimental philosophy postulated so-called "imponderable fluids" understood as instances of a subtle matter that fills empty space. The…

We describe an adaptation of the knowledge gradient, originally developed for discrete ranking and selection problems, to the problem of calibrating continuous parameters for the purpose of tuning a simulator. The knowledge gradient for continuous parameters uses a continuous approximation…

Amidst the disintegration of the Qing Empire (1644-1911), men and women in China began to understand their differences in terms of modern scientific knowledge. Why Sex Mattered provides an explanation for the relatively recent emergence of a psycho-biological notion of…

Current theories of physics cognition require specification of complex mechanisms for explaining knowledge acquisition. I demonstrate that a quantitative model of physics perception can be constructed by assuming that physics problem perception provides an optimal summary of a set of…

This dissertation is the first comprehensive and interdisciplinary study of Ottoman economic thought within the context of modernization during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876-1909). Drawing on a broad array of primary sources ranging from textbooks and manuals of economics…

The use of concepts underlies the most basic cognitive processes. Consequently, psychologists have long been interested in understanding the behavioral and neural correlates of conceptual knowledge and its manipulation. This has led to a rich set of research results that…

Visual recognition remains one of the grand goals of artificial intelligence research. One major challenge is endowing machines with human ability to recognize tens of thousands of categories. Moving beyond previous work that is mostly focused on hundreds of categories,…

This dissertation is about family history and the constitution of the social among the Abenaki, an aboriginal people often associated with the Odanak reserve in southern Quebec. It is an ethnography of belonging among a people whose status as aboriginal…