Over recent years, the psychology of concepts has been rejuvenated by new work on prototypes, inventive ideas on causal cognition, the development of neo-empiricist theories of concepts, and the inputs of the budding neuropsychology of concepts. But our empirical knowledge about concepts has yet to be organized in a coherent framework. -/- In Doing without Concepts, Edouard Machery argues that the dominant psychological theories of concepts fail to provide such a framework and that drastic conceptual changes are required to make (...) sense of the research on concepts in psychology and neuropsychology. Machery shows that the class of concepts divides into several distinct kinds that have little in common with one another and that for this very reason, it is a mistake to attempt to encompass all known phenomena within a single theory of concepts. In brief, concepts are not a natural kind. Machery concludes that the theoretical notion of concept should be eliminated from the theoretical apparatus of contemporary psychology and should be replaced with theoretical notions that are more appropriate for fulfilling psychologists' goals. The notion of concept has encouraged psychologists to believe that a single theory of concepts could be developed, leading to useless theoretical controversies between the dominant paradigms of concepts. Keeping this notion would slow down, and maybe prevent, the development of a more adequate classification and would overshadow the theoretical and empirical issues that are raised by this more adequate classification. Anyone interested in cognitive science's emerging view of the mind will find Machery's provocative ideas of interest. (shrink)

In Furnishing the Mind, Jesse Prinz attempts to swing the pendulum back toward empiricism.

Prior to the twentieth century, theories of knowledge were inherently perceptual. Since then, developments in logic, statis- tics, and programming languages have inspired amodal theories that rest on principles fundamentally different from those underlying perception. In addition, perceptual approaches have become widely viewed as untenable because they are assumed to implement record- ing systems, not conceptual systems. A perceptual theory of knowledge is developed here in the context of current cognitive science and neuroscience. During perceptual experience, association areas in the (...) brain capture bottom-up patterns of activation in sensory-motor areas. Later, in a top-down manner, association areas partially reactivate sensory-motor areas to implement perceptual symbols. The stor- age and reactivation of perceptual symbols operates at the level of perceptual components – not at the level of holistic perceptual expe- riences. Through the use of selective attention, schematic representations of perceptual components are extracted from experience and stored in memory (e.g., individual memories of green, purr, hot). As memories of the same component become organized around a com- mon frame, they implement a simulator that produces limitless simulations of the component (e.g., simulations of purr). Not only do such simulators develop for aspects of sensory experience, they also develop for aspects of proprioception (e.g., lift, run) and introspec- tion (e.g., compare, memory, happy, hungry). Once established, these simulators implement a basic conceptual system that represents types, supports categorization, and produces categorical inferences. These simulators further support productivity, propositions, and ab- stract concepts, thereby implementing a fully functional conceptual system. Productivity results from integrating simulators combinato- rially and recursively to produce complex simulations. Propositions result from binding simulators to perceived individuals to represent type-token relations. Abstract concepts are grounded in complex simulations of combined physical and introspective events. Thus, a per- ceptual theory of knowledge can implement a fully functional conceptual system while avoiding problems associated with amodal sym- bol systems. Implications for cognition, neuroscience, evolution, development, and artificial intelligence are explored. (shrink)

A comprehensive introduction to current research on the psychology of concept formation and use.

A novel cognitive theory of semantics that proposes that the meanings of words can be described in terms of geometric structures.

This book explores the idea that we have two minds - one automatic, unconscious, and fast, the other controlled, conscious, and slow. It brings together leading researchers on dual-process theory to summarize the state of the art highlight key issues, present different perspectives, and provide a stimulus to further work.

Marr (1982) may have been one of the rst vision researchers to insist that in modeling vision it is important to separate the location of visual features from their type. He argued that in early stages of visual processing there must be “place tokens” that enable subsequent stages of the visual system to treat locations independent of what specic feature type was at that location. Thus, in certain respects a collinear array of diverse features could still be perceived as a (...) line, and under certain conditions could function as such in perceptual phenomena like the Poggendorf illusion. (shrink)

Why is a red face not really red? How do we decide that this book is a textbook or not? Conceptual spaces provide the medium on which these computations are performed, but an additional operation is needed: Contrast. By contrasting a reddish face with a prototypical face, one gets a prototypical ‘red’. By contrasting this book with a prototypical textbook, the lack of exercises may pop out. Dynamic contrasting is an essential operation for converting perceptions into predicates. The existence of (...) dynamic contrasting may contribute to explaining why lexical meanings correspond to convex regions of conceptual spaces. But it also explains why predication is most of the time opportunistic, depending on context. While off-line conceptual similarity is a holistic operation, the contrast operation provides a context-dependent distance that creates ephemeral predicative judgments that are essential for interfacing conceptual spaces with natural language and with reasoning. (shrink)

The reconciliation of theories of concepts based on prototypes, exemplars, and theory-like structures is a longstanding problem in cognitive science. In response to this problem, researchers have recently tended to adopt either hybrid theories that combine various kinds of representational structure, or eliminative theories that replace concepts with a more finely grained taxonomy of mental representations. In this paper, we describe an alternative approach involving a single class of mental representations called “semantic pointers.” Semantic pointers are symbol-like representations that result (...) from the compression and recursive binding of perceptual, lexical, and motor representations, effectively integrating traditional connectionist and symbolic approaches. We present a computational model using semantic pointers that replicates experimental data from categorization studies involving each prior paradigm. We argue that a framework involving semantic pointers can provide a unified account of conceptual phenomena, and we compare our framework to existing alternatives in accounting for the scope, content, recursive combination, and neural implementation of concepts. (shrink)

It is proposed to conceive of representation as an emergent phenomenon that is supervenient on patterns of activity of coarsely tuned and highly redundant feature detectors. The computational underpinnings of the outlined concept of representation are (1) the properties of collections of overlapping graded receptive fields, as in the biological perceptual systems that exhibit hyperacuity-level performance, and (2) the sufficiency of a set of proximal distances between stimulus representations for the recovery of the corresponding distal contrasts between stimuli, as in (...) multidimensional scaling. The present preliminary study appears to indicate that this concept of representation is computationally viable, and is compatible with psychological and neurobiological data. (shrink)

In this paper a possible general framework for the representation of concepts in cognitive artificial systems and cognitive architectures is proposed. The framework is inspired by the so called proxytype theory of concepts and combines it with the heterogeneity approach to concept representations, according to which concepts do not constitute a unitary phenomenon. The contribution of the paper is twofold: on one hand, it aims at providing a novel theoretical hypothesis for the debate about concepts in cognitive sciences by providing (...) unexplored connections between different theories; on the other hand it is aimed at sketching a computational characterization of the problem of concept representation in cognitively inspired artificial systems and in cognitive architectures. (shrink)

Research in computational cognitive modeling investigates the nature of cognition through developing process-based understanding by specifying computational models of mechanisms (including representations) and processes. In this enterprise, a cognitive architecture is a domaingeneric computational cognitive model that may be used for a broad, multiple-level, multipledomain analysis of behavior. It embodies generic descriptions of cognition in computer algorithms and programs. Developing cognitive architectures is a difficult but important task. In this article, discussions of issues and challenges in developing cognitive architectures will (...) be undertaken, and an example cognitive architecture (CLARION) will be described. (shrink)

We overview the main historical and technological elements characterising the rise, the fall and the recent renaissance of the cognitive approaches to Artificial Intelligence and provide some insights and suggestions about the future directions and challenges that, in our opinion, this discipline needs to face in the next years.

This article addresses an open problem in the area of cognitive systems and architectures: namely the problem of handling (in terms of processing and reasoning capabilities) complex knowledge structures that can be at least plausibly comparable, both in terms of size and of typology of the encoded information, to the knowledge that humans process daily for executing everyday activities. Handling a huge amount of knowledge, and selectively retrieve it according to the needs emerging in different situational scenarios, is an important (...) aspect of human intelligence. For this task, in fact, humans adopt a wide range of heuristics (Gigerenzer & Todd) due to their “bounded rationality” (Simon, 1957). In this perspective, one of the requirements that should be considered for the design, the realization and the evaluation of intelligent cognitively-inspired systems should be rep- resented by their ability of heuristically identify and retrieve, from the general knowledge stored in their artificial Long Term Memory (LTM), that one which is synthetically and contextually relevant. This requirement, however, is often neglected. Currently, artificial cognitive systems and architectures are not able, de facto, to deal with complex knowledge structures that can be even slightly comparable to the knowledge heuris- tically managed by humans. In this paper I will argue that this is not only a technological problem but also an epistemological one and I will briefly sketch a proposal for a possible solution. (shrink)