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Regular, everyday conversations do not occur in a vacuum. The physical and social context in which a conversation takes place is utilized through the course of that conversation—it is situated. The ways in which a context can be used vary. Sometimes we implicitly and unconsciously utilize context in interpreting others. While at a restaurant, you would effortlessly interpret “What are you going to have?” not as a general question disconnected from the current situation, but as a question about that particular restaurant’s menu. Other times we overtly utilize context to aid in communication. While out on a walk in the city, I might point to an ice cream cone that has fallen onto the street and say “Somebody’s having a bad day”, and it would be clear what I am talking about.I argue in this dissertation that the psychological category of attention is key for understanding how situated conversations operate. In contrast to viewing communication as a process of pure information exchange, I argue that communication is helpfully analyzed as a process of attention management. Our utterances, gestures, and facial expressions do not serve to merely convey information, but serve to coordinate our attentional states. I begin by focusing on a particular communicative phenomenon that I call rich demonstration. It is, roughly, a deictic (pointing) gesture that functions to communicate an entire thought, in contrast to fixing the reference of a demonstrative expression such as ‘that’. Just by making something salient, one can seemingly say something. I argue that rich demonstration is a speech act in its own right, and provide a formal semantic framework for modeling its communicative effect in discourse.I then proceed to analyze salience itself. The notion has proven useful for understanding a number of communicative phenomena, including reference resolution, certain kinds of pragmatic inference, quantifier domain restriction, and more. Focusing on cases of reference, I argue that

Regular, everyday conversations do not occur in a vacuum. The physical and social context in which a conversation takes place is utilized through the course of that conversation—it is situated. The ways in which a context can be used vary. Sometimes we implicitly and unconsciously utilize context in interpreting others. While at a restaurant, you would effortlessly interpret “What are you going to have?” not as a general question disconnected from the current situation, but as a question about that particular restaurant’s menu. Other times we overtly utilize context to aid in communication. While out on a walk in the city, I might point to an ice cream cone that has fallen onto the street and say “Somebody’s having a bad day”, and it would be clear what I am talking about.I argue in this dissertation that the psychological category of attention is key for understanding how situated conversations operate. In contrast to viewing communication as a process of pure information exchange, I argue that communication is helpfully analyzed as a process of attention management. Our utterances, gestures, and facial expressions do not serve to merely convey information, but serve to coordinate our attentional states. I begin by focusing on a particular communicative phenomenon that I call rich demonstration. It is, roughly, a deictic (pointing) gesture that functions to communicate an entire thought, in contrast to fixing the reference of a demonstrative expression such as ‘that’. Just by making something salient, one can seemingly say something. I argue that rich demonstration is a speech act in its own right, and provide a formal semantic framework for modeling its communicative effect in discourse.I then proceed to analyze salience itself. The notion has proven useful for understanding a number of communicative phenomena, including reference resolution, certain kinds of pragmatic inference, quantifier domain restriction, and more. Focusing on cases of reference, I argue that

Consider three structurally similar cases of social bias. Mary’s application for graduate school in mathematics is rejected by the traditionalist Mr. T, an evaluator who has written a series of books arguing that women have a natural disposition toward being worse at abstract, logical thinking than men. Her application for a different program is rejected by oblivious Ms. O, an evaluator who avows egalitarian principles but finds that Mary just seems less suitable for the program, for reasons that go unarticulated and would not pan out under pressure. Her application for a third program is rejected by Hal, an automated program that is trained on past admittance data about which students, when accepted, have gone on to successful careers in the field.This dissertation argues that there is a natural kind social bias that all three cases fall under and defends a theory of what that kind is. My theory explains how the cases are unified, how they differ, and why the differences between the cases matter. Within a computational theory of mind, the tasks of unification and differentiation can appear to be at odds with one another. The more we highlight differences among how Mr. T, Ms. O, and Hal were processing informational states, the harder it is to use those same computational resources to say what they have in common. My analysis reconciles these tasks within a cognitive science framework by shifting to a higher level of abstraction.I argue that social bias is a functionally defined mental entity that takes propositional mental states as inputs and returns propositional mental states as outputs in a way that mimics inductions made on the basis of social kind membership. All three cases of bias relate the input that Mary is a woman to the output that she’s not suitable for a mathematics program. Like functional analyses of other mental states, my analysis of bias entails that it is multiply realizable by a variety of computational systems and decision-making processes. F

Consider three structurally similar cases of social bias. Mary’s application for graduate school in mathematics is rejected by the traditionalist Mr. T, an evaluator who has written a series of books arguing that women have a natural disposition toward being worse at abstract, logical thinking than men. Her application for a different program is rejected by oblivious Ms. O, an evaluator who avows egalitarian principles but finds that Mary just seems less suitable for the program, for reasons that go unarticulated and would not pan out under pressure. Her application for a third program is rejected by Hal, an automated program that is trained on past admittance data about which students, when accepted, have gone on to successful careers in the field.This dissertation argues that there is a natural kind social bias that all three cases fall under and defends a theory of what that kind is. My theory explains how the cases are unified, how they differ, and why the differences between the cases matter. Within a computational theory of mind, the tasks of unification and differentiation can appear to be at odds with one another. The more we highlight differences among how Mr. T, Ms. O, and Hal were processing informational states, the harder it is to use those same computational resources to say what they have in common. My analysis reconciles these tasks within a cognitive science framework by shifting to a higher level of abstraction.I argue that social bias is a functionally defined mental entity that takes propositional mental states as inputs and returns propositional mental states as outputs in a way that mimics inductions made on the basis of social kind membership. All three cases of bias relate the input that Mary is a woman to the output that she’s not suitable for a mathematics program. Like functional analyses of other mental states, my analysis of bias entails that it is multiply realizable by a variety of computational systems and decision-making processes. F

Measuring fractional flow reserve (FFR) with a pressure wire remains underutilized because of the invasiveness of guide wire placement or the need for a hyperemic stimulus. FFR derived from routine coronary angiography (FFRangio) eliminates both of these requirements and displays FFR values of the entire coronary tree. The FFRangio Accuracy versus Standard FFR (FAST-FFR) study is a prospective, multicenter, international trial with the primary goal of determining the accuracy of FFRangio. Methods: Coronary angiography was performed in a routine fashion in patients with suspected coronary artery disease. FFR was measured in vessels with coronary lesions of varying severity using a coronary pressure wire and hyperemic stimulus. Based on angiograms of the respective arteries acquired in ≥2 different projections, on-site operators blinded to FFR then calculated FFRangio using proprietary software. Coprimary end points were the sensitivity and specificity of the dichotomously scored FFRangio for predicting pressure wire-derived FFR using a cutoff value of 0.80. The study was powered to meet prespecified performance goals for sensitivity and specificity. Results: Ten centers in the United States, Europe, and Israel enrolled a total of 301 subjects and 319 vessels meeting inclusion/exclusion criteria which were included in the final analysis. The mean FFR was 0.81 and 43% of vessels had an FFR≤0.80. The per-vessel sensitivity and specificity were 94% (95% CI, 88% to 97%) and 91% (86% to 95%), respectively, both of which exceeded the prespecified performance goals. The diagnostic accuracy of FFRangio was 92% overall and remained high when only considering FFR values between 0.75 to 0.85 (87%). FFRangio values correlated well with FFR measurements (r=0.80, P<0.001) and the Bland-Altman 95% confidence limits were between -0.14 and 0.12. The device success rate for FFRangio was 99%. Conclusions: FFRangio measured from the coronary angiogram alone has a high sensitivity