•  39
    6. Seeing With the Mind’s Eye 1: The Puzzle of Mental Imagery .................................................6-1 6.1 What is the puzzle about mental imagery?..............................................................................6-1 6.2 Content, form and substance of representations ......................................................................6-6 6.3 What is responsible for the pattern of results obtained in imagery studies?.................................6-8..
  •  53
    I recently discovered that work I was doing in the laboratory and in theoretical writings was implicitly taking a position on a set of questions that philosophers had been worrying about for much of the past 30 or more years. My clandestine involvement in philosophical issues began when a computer science colleague and I were trying to build a model of geometrical reasoning that would draw a diagram and notice things in the diagram as it drew it (Pylyshyn, Elcock, Marmor, & Sander, 1978). One pr…Read more
  •  359
    Each of the chapters in this volume devotes considerable attention to defining and elaborating the notion of the frame problem-one of the hard problems of artificial intelligence. Not only do the chapters clarify the problems at hand, they shed light on the different approaches taken by those in artificial intelligence and by certain philosophers who have been concerned with related problems in their field. The book should therefore not be read merely as a discussion of the frame problem narrowl…Read more
  •  57
    Evidence against a speed limit in multiple object tracking
    with Franconeri , Lin , Fisher , and Enns
    in press, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
  •  17
    1. Background: Representation in language and vision ................................................ 1 2. Some parallels between the study of vision and language......................................... 3..
  •  15
    I’m one of those who is awed and impressed by the potential of this field and have devoted some part of my energy to persuading people that it is a positive force. I have done so largely on the grounds of its economic benefits and it potential for making the fruits of computer technology more generally available to the public — for example, to help the overworked physician; to search for oil and minerals and help manage our valuable resources; to explore, mine, and experimentindangerousenvironment…Read more
  •  47
    We present three studies examining whether multiple-object tracking (MOT) benefits from the active inhibition of nontargets, as proposed in (Pylyshyn, 2004). Using a probedot technique, the first study showed poorer probe detection on nontargets than on either the targets being tracked or in the empty space between objects. The second study used a matching nontracking task to control for possible masking of probes, independent of target tracking. The third study examined how localized the inhibi…Read more
  •  11
    Allen Newell
    with Herbert A. Simon
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15 (3). 1992.
  •  1316
    Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis
    with Jerry A. Fodor
    Cognition 28 (1-2): 3-71. 1988.
    This paper explores the difference between Connectionist proposals for cognitive a r c h i t e c t u r e a n d t h e s o r t s o f m o d e l s t hat have traditionally been assum e d i n c o g n i t i v e s c i e n c e . W e c l a i m t h a t t h e m a j o r d i s t i n c t i o n i s t h a t , w h i l e b o t h Connectionist and Classical architectures postulate representational mental states, the latter but not the former are committed to a symbol-level of representation, or to a ‘language of t…Read more
  •  14
    This is indeed an auspicious time for Cognitive Science. I stand here before you this evening as the first Chair to give a presidential address to this austere body, to place on record before you what you are to accept as the Society's official view on the new science of the mind.
  •  420
    Mental imagery: In search of a theory
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2): 157-182. 2002.
    It is generally accepted that there is something special about reasoning by using mental images. The question of how it is special, however, has never been satisfactorily spelled out, despite more than thirty years of research in the post-behaviorist tradition. This article considers some of the general motivation for the assumption that entertaining mental images involves inspecting a picture-like object. It sets out a distinction between phenomena attributable to the nature of mind to what is …Read more
  •  70
    Imagery
    In R. L. Gregory (ed.), Oxford Companion to the Mind, Oxford University Press. 2004.
    In Gregory, Richard. Oxford Companion to the Mind (Second Edition, 2006) Oxford University Press
  •  131
    Connecting vision with the world: Tracking the missing link
    In Joao Branquinho (ed.), The Foundations of Cognitive Science, Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 183. 2001.
    You might reasonably surmise from the title of this paper that I will be discussing a theory of vision. After all, what is a theory of vision but a theory of how the world is connected to our visual representations? Theories of visual perception universally attempt to give an account of how a proximal stimulus (presumably a pattern impinging on the retina) can lead to a rich representation of a three dimensional world and thence to either the recognition of known objects or to the coordination o…Read more
  •  31
    In "Things and Places," Zenon Pylyshyn argues that the process of incrementally constructing perceptual representations, solving the binding problem (determining which properties go together), and, more generally, grounding perceptual ...
  •  130
    This systematic investigation of computation and mental phenomena by a noted psychologist and computer scientist argues that cognition is a form of computation, that the semantic contents of mental states are encoded in the same general way as computer representations are encoded. It is a rich and sustained investigation of the assumptions underlying the directions cognitive science research is taking. 1 The Explanatory Vocabulary of Cognition 2 The Explanatory Role of Representations 3 The Rele…Read more
  •  30
    Selective Nontarget Inhibition in Multiple Object Tracking (MOT)
    with Charles E. King and James E. Reilly
    We previously reported that in the Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) task, which requires tracking several identical targets moving unpredictably among identical nontargets, the nontargets appear to be inhibited, as measured by a probe-dot detection method. The inhibition appears to be local to nontargets and does not extend to the space between objects – dropping off very rapidly away from targets and nontargets. In the present three experiments we show that (1) nontargets that are identical to ta…Read more
  •  91
    What’s in a Mind?
    Synthese 70 (January): 97-122. 1987.
  •  84
    called,_ Cognitive Science_ was to bring back scienti?c realism. This may strike you as a very odd claim, for one does not usually think of science as needing to be talked into scienti?c realism. Science is, after all, the study of reality by the most precise instruments of measurement and
  •  30
    This article defends the claim that a significant part of visual perception (called “early vision”) is impervious to the influence of beliefs, expectations or knowledge. We examine a wide range of empirical evidence that has been cited in support of the continuity of vision and cognition and argue that the evidence either shows within- vision top-down effects, or else the extra-visual effects that are demonstrated occur before the operation of the autonomous early vision system (through the allo…Read more
  •  19
    This paper describes a programmatic theory of a process in early vision called indexing. The theory hypothesizes that a small number of primitive indexes are available for individuating, tracking and providing direct access to salient visual objects. We discuss some empirical and theoretical arguments in favor of the proposed index as a resource-limited link between an internal visual representation and objects in the visual world. We argue that this link is needed to explain a large range of pr…Read more
  •  99
    For many of the authors in this volume, this is the second attempt to explore what McCarthy and Hayes (1969) first called the “Frame Problem”. Since the first compendium (Pylyshyn, 1987), nicely summarized here by Ronald Loui, there have been several conferences and books on the topic. Their goals range from providing a clarification of the problem by breaking it down into subproblems (and sometimes declaring the hard subproblems to not be the_ real_ Frame Problem), to providing formal “solutions” …Read more
  •  5
    In Multiple Object Tracking (MOT), an observer is able to track 4 – 5 objects in a group of otherwise indistinguishable objects that move independently and unpredictably about a display. According to the Visual Indexing Theory (Pylyshyn, 1989), successful tracking requires that target objects be indexed while they are distinct -- before tracking begins. In the typical MOT task, the target objects are briefly flashed resulting in the automatic assignment of indexes. The question arises whether in…Read more
  •  25
    Stalking the elusive mental image screen
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences 25 (2): 216-227. 2002.
    After thirty years of the current “imagery debate,” it appears far from resolved, even though there seems to be a growing acceptance that a cortical display cannot be identified directly with the experienced mental image, nor can it account for the experimental findings on imagery, at least not without additional ad hoc assumptions. The commentaries on the target article range from the annoyed to the supportive, with a surprising number of the latter. In this response I attempt to correct some m…Read more
  •  2
    Subitizing and the FINST spatial index model
    with L. Trick
    Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 27 (6): 490-490. 1989.
  •  567
    How direct is visual perception? Some reflections on Gibson's 'ecological approach'
    with Jerry A. Fodor
    Cognition 9 (2): 139-96. 1981.
    Examines the theses that the postulation of mental processing is unnecessary to account for our perceptual relationship with the world, see turvey etal. for a criticque