Category Archives: Perception
01 Jul Chaos About Us
Chaos About Us Chaos is all about us. I know that for certain each time I look into my kids’ rooms. When I recall my own youth, however, it occurs to me that I had a reason for the way I organized my life. It seemed meaningful to me, and although I recall how difficult it was […]
22 May What Constitutes a Brain
By: Joe Roushar – May 2014 Mechanical Brains In its most general sense, the term mechanical brain could be applied to any man-made contrivance that is capable of functioning or generating information in some manner analogous to thinking. Under this broad definition, if the function were remembering an image (as we remember people’s faces), a camera with […]
15 May Analyzing Semantics
Semantics The stratum of semantics is usually associated with meaning. Throughout the 1980s, when I was in college, semantics was viewed as more and more important in text-understanding systems. One aspect of semantics that has received a great deal of attention is thematic or case roles, which can be very useful in defining the roles of words or […]
08 May Three-Dimensional Model of Language
Topographical maps of concepts in a text provide useful views of language. Fortuna et al in Semantic Knowledge Management (pp. 155-169) describe how three-dimensional topic maps can both give meaningful insights into clusters of related content, such as news stories or published papers. I have frequently stressed the importance of concept associations in the brain, in cognitive […]
06 May Impulse Waves in Layers
Layered Model Just as the brain has areas with three to six distinct layers, a typical artificial neural systems (ANS) also has several layers. The example at right shows a network with three layers that illustrate a neural network‘s distributed architecture. The uniform circles connected by lines are symbolic of the state of an ANS at […]
28 Apr Mosaic of Concepts
KR Mosaic On our way to knowledge representation (KR), we’ve looked at concepts and logical propositions and words and taxonomies. I know this can all be a bit confusing, but please bear with me a little longer. Word relations are more than a two-dimensional mosaic of related concepts – they form a deep hierarchy with multiple […]
26 Apr Continuity of Learning
Production and Comprehension We know that comprehension and language production occur in different areas of the brain and occupy opposite ends of the continuum in the communicative model. The relative independence of the production and comprehension centers suggests one of three possibilities: Syntactic and lexical data are replicated in both the production and comprehension centers of […]
22 Apr Breaking Down Language Structure and Function
Grammar Acquisition Some experts suggest that a correctly formulated adult grammar is acquired by children on the basis of sentences they hear in their first few years (Pinker, 1984, p. 5). The proponents of this theory assume that a young child perceives sentence structure or is able to detect elements of grammatical structure – a […]
17 Apr Learning by Repetition
Frequency and Exposure For the very young, language learning requires mental gymnastics. Most theories of language learning refer to the fact that the frequency of repetition of a word or structure pattern determines the strength of its acquisition. In this context, there may be some threshold of frequency which, once reached, will result in the […]
16 Apr From Concept to Communication
Yorrick’s First Concepts A conceptually structured model of learning might suggest that Yorrick, or any other human, first acquires concepts, and later, a vehicle for communicating concepts: language. During Yorrick’s early development, his concepts are linked entirely to physical sensations and perceptions: hunger, soreness, the sucking instinct, and the like. One of the first discoveries […]