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21No reconstruction, no impenetrability (at least not much)Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22 (3): 376-376. 1999.Two of the premises of Pylyshyn's target article – surface reconstruction as the goal of early vision and inaccessibility of intermediate stages in the process presumably leading to such reconstruction – are questioned and found wanting.
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21Computer vision systems are, on most counts, poor performers, when compared to their biological counterparts. The reason for this may be that computer vision is handicapped by an unreasonable assumption regarding what it means to see, which became prevalent as the notions of intrinsic images and of representation by reconstruction took over the field in the late 1970’s. Learning from biological vision may help us to overcome this handicap.
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21One‐year‐old infants use teleological representations of actions productivelyCognitive Science 27 (1): 111-133. 2003.Two experiments investigated whether infants represent goal‐directed actions of others in a way that allows them to draw inferences to unobserved states of affairs (such as unseen goal states or occluded obstacles). We measured looking times to assess violation of infants' expectations upon perceiving either a change in the actions of computer‐animated figures or in the context of such actions. The first experiment tested whether infants would attribute a goal to an action that they had not seen…Read more
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20Beyond uncertainty: A broader scope for “incentive hope” mechanisms and its implicationsBehavioral and Brain Sciences 42. 2019.We propose that food-related uncertainty is but one of multiple cues that predicts harsh conditions and may activate “incentive hope.” An evolutionarily adaptive response to these would have been to shift to a behavioral-metabolic phenotype geared toward facing hardship. In modernity, this phenotype may lead to pathologies such as obesity and hoarding. Our perspective suggests a novel therapeutic approach.
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18Two of the premises of the target paper -- surface reconstruction as the goal of early vision, and inaccessibility of intermediate stages in the process presumably leading to such reconstruction -- are questioned and found wanting.
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17Measuring Mental Entrenchment of Phrases with Perceptual Identification, Familiarity Ratings, and Corpus Frequency Statistics Catherine Caldwell-Harris, Jonathan Berant andIn Dagmar Divjak & Stefan Thomas Gries (eds.), Frequency Effects in Language Representation, De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 2--165. 2012.
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16Brahe, looking for KeplerBehavioral and Brain Sciences 23 (4): 538-540. 2000.Arbib, Érdi, and Szentágothai's book should be a required reading for any serious student of the brain. The scope and the accessibility of its presentation of the neurobiological data (especially the functional anatomy of select parts of the central nervous system) more than make up for the peculiarities of the theoretical stance it adopts.
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15Towards structural systematicity in distributed, statically bound visual representationsCognitive Science 27 (1): 73-109. 2003.The problem of representing the spatial structure of images, which arises in visual object processing, is commonly described using terminology borrowed from propositional theories of cognition, notably, the concept of compositionality. The classical propositional stance mandates representations composed of symbols, which stand for atomic or composite entities and enter into arbitrarily nested relationships. We argue that the main desiderata of a representational system—productivity and systemati…Read more
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15Learning a Generative Probabilistic Grammar of Experience: A Process-Level Model of Language AcquisitionCognitive Science 39 (2): 227-267. 2015.We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given a stream of linguistic input, our model incrementally learns a grammar that captures its statistical patterns, which can then be used to parse or gene…Read more
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14Shape representation by second-order isomorphism and the chorus model: SICBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (4): 484-493. 1998.Proximal mirroring of distal similarities is, at present, the only solution to the problem of representation that is both theoretically sound (for reasons discussed in the target article) and practically feasible (as attested by the performance of the Chorus model). Augmenting the latter by a capability to refer selectively to retinotopically defined object fragments should lead to a comprehensive theory of shape processing.
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11Identity, Immortality, Happiness: Pick TwoJournal of Evolution and Technology 28 (1): 1-17. 2018.To the extent that the performance of embodied and situated cognitive agents is predicated on fore- thought;such agents must remember; and learn from; the past to predict the future. In complex; non-stationaryenvironments; such learning is facilitated by an intrinsic motivation to seek novelty. A significant part of anagent’s identity is thus constituted by its remembered distilled cumulative life experience; which the agent isdriven to constantly expand. The combination of the drive to novelty …Read more
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10Damasio, Antonio, 2018. The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures. New York: Pantheon. 336 pages (review)Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture 2 (2): 119-124. 2018.
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8Life, death, and other inconvenient truths: a realist's view of the human conditionThe MIT Press. 2020.Short essays that touch many topics-anxiety, consciousness, death, happiness, morality, stupidity, & truth-that make the case for realism & help set expectations with regard to the human condition.
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7Things are what they seemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 21 (1): 25-25. 1998.The learnability of features and their dependence on task and context do not rule out the possibility that primitives used for constructing new features are as small as pixels, nor that they are as large as object parts, or even entire objects. In fact, the simplest approach to feature acquisition may be to treat objects not as if they are composed of unknown primitives according to unknown rules, but rather as if they are what they seem: patterns of atomic features, standing in various similari…Read more
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6Real systemic solutions to humanity's problems require a radical reshaping of the global political systemBehavioral and Brain Sciences 46. 2023.Society's problems cannot be alleviated via mere policy interventions, whether individual- or system-level, when the system is the problem. To bring about true and lasting change to the better, we must replace the present global political-economic system – oligarchic capitalism backed by the power of the state – with one that would let the people take charge of their lives.
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4Vision, hyperacuityIn Michael A. Arbib (ed.), Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, Mit Press. pp. 1009--1012. 1995.
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2Mostly harmless: Review of action in perception by Alva noë (review)Artificial Life 12 183-186. 2006.
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On what it means to see, and what we can do about itIn S. Dickinson, A. Leonardis, B. Schiele & M. J. Tarr (eds.), Object Categorization: Computer and Human Vision Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. 2008.
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Cornell UniversityRegular Faculty
Ithaca, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |
Cognitive Sciences |