Cognitive anthropologist
Pascal Boyer
Pascal Robert Boyer is a French-American cognitive anthropology, cognitive anthropologist and evolutionary psychology, evolutionary psychologist, mostly known for his work in the cognitive science of religion. He taught at the University of Cambrid ...
argued that minimally
counterintuitive
A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation. It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically u ...
concepts (MCI) i.e., concepts that violate a few ontological expectations of a category such as the category of an agent, are more memorable than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive (MXCI) concepts. A number of experimental psychology studies have found support for Boyer's hypothesis. Upal labelled this as the minimal counterintuitiveness effect or the MCI-effect.
Boyer originally did not precisely specify the number of expectation-violations that would render an idea maximally counterintuitive. Early empirical studies including those by Boyer himself and others did not study MXCI concepts. Both these studies only used concepts violating a single expectation (which were labelled as MCI concepts). Atran was the first to study memory for MXCI concepts and labeled concepts violating 2-expectations as maximally counterintuitive. Studies by the I-75 Cognition and Culture Group also labelled ideas violating two expectations as maximally counterintuitive. Barrett argued that ideas violating 1 or 2 ontological expectations should be considered MCI and only ideas violating 3 or more expectations should be labelled MXCI. Subsequent studies of the MCI effect have followed this revised labelling scheme.
Upal
[Upal, M. A. (2010). "An Alternative View of the Minimal Counterintuitiveness Effect", ''Journal of Cognitive Systems Research'', 11(2), 194-203.] has divided the cognitive accounts that explain the MCI effect into two categories: the
context-based model of minimal counterintuitiveness, and content-based view of minimal counterintuitiveness. The context-based view emphasizes the role played by context in making an idea counterintuitive whereas the content-based view ignores the role of context.
See also
*
Uncanny valley
In aesthetics, the uncanny valley ( ja, 不気味の谷 ''bukimi no tani'') is a hypothesized relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The concept suggests that humanoid object ...
References
Memory
Cognitive science