Domain-general abilities applied to domain-specific tasks: Sensitivity to probabilities in perception, cognition, and language

Abstract

Perceptual and cognitive abilities that are species- and domain-specific may nonetheless have components that are widespread across species and apply to numerous domains. For example, all theories of sentence parsing are constrained by the operations of a limited-capacity memory that is a general characteristic of cognition. This paper discusses another ability that is general across species and, within a species, across numerous cognitive and perceptual domains. We review evidence from the animal learning and human cognitive literature that animals (a) possess fine- grained sensitivity to probabilistic patterns in their environment and (b) use multiple probabilistic cues to solve particular problems. Such sensitivity is advantageous because the structure of the environment itself can often be characterized as probabilistic. The chances of success at solving various problems, from foraging to depth perception, would therefore increase if animals were sensitive to probabilistic cues and could determine whether multiple cues converge on a solution. We discuss the implications of these claims for language processing, and argue that the domain- general ability to detect and exploit probabilistic information is brought to bear on numerous language-specific problems.