Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been developed for the recognition of printed characters of nonIndian languages effectively. Efforts are going on for development of efficient OCR systems for Indian languages, especially for Gujarati, a popular language of west India. In this paper, an OCR system is developed for the recognition of basic characters in printed Gujarati text. To extract the features of printed Guajarati characters principal component analysis (PCA) is used. Hopfield Neural classifier has been effectively used for the classification of characters based on features. The system methodology can be extended for the recognition of other Indian languages.

Psychological, political, cultural, and sociological factors shape how people form and revise their beliefs. An established finding across these fields is that people are motivated to hold onto their beliefs even in the face of evidence by ignoring or reinterpreting information in a way that supports what they think. Although these and similar findings are compelling, the predominantly qualitative theories which guide research in this domain, and the often implicit definitions of motivation that accompany these theories, come at the cost of obscuring the cognitive mechanisms that produce motivated reasoning. Here, we introduce a new Bayesian decision-theoretic framework which describes three key factors necessary for distinguishing between cases of practically rational behavior and motivated reasoning. We demonstrate how the framework works in a series of simulations and argue that it provides guidance about what psychologists need to measure to determine where the errors in people's reasoning are occurring when they fail to revise their beliefs in light of new evidence. We then propose that this framework provides guidance for thinking about the development of interventions aimed at correcting misconceptions.

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When the evidence for two hypotheses is unclear, but the rewards for believing them are not, what should we do? Probability theory states we ought to remain agnostic and follow the evidence. However, Blaise Pascal argued that it's practically rational to consider the expected utility of each hypothesis when deciding what to believe. There is evidence adults reason practically rationally, but less is known about how children reason in these situations. We examined the development of practical rationality across three experiments with adults (N = 350) and 4 to 12-year-old children (N = 190). Adults and children were presented with either clear or ambiguous evidence which, under some conditions, yielded a reward. We found that participants followed the evidence when it clearly supported one hypothesis but considered the utility when the evidence was ambiguous. These studies help us understand the development of practical rationality and the origins of Pascal's wager.