Harry Chesley wrote:
On 1/9/2009 9:45 AM, Richard Loosemore wrote:
There are certainly experiments that might address some of your
concerns, but I am afraid you will have to acquire a general
knowledge of what is known, first, to be able to make sense of what
they might tell you. There is nothing that can be plucked and
delivered as a direct answer.
I was not asking for a complete answer. I was asking for experiments
that shed light on the area. I don't expect a mature answer, only more
food for thought. Your answer that there are such experiments, but
you're not going to tell me what they are is not a useful one. Don't
worry about whether I can digest the experimental context. Maybe I know
more than you assume I do.
What I am trying to say is that you will find answers that are partially
relevant to your question scattered across about a third of the chapters
of any comprehensive introduction to cognitive psychology. And then, at
a deeper level, you will find something of relevance in numerous more
specialized documents. But they are so scattered that I could not
possibly start to produce a comprehensive list!
For example, the easiest things to mention are "object perception"
within a developmental psychology framework (see a dev psych textbook
for entire chapters on that); the psycholgy of "concepts" will involve
numerous experiments that require judgements of whether objects are same
or different (but in each case the experiment will not be focussed on
answering the direct question you might be asking); the question of how
concepts are represented sometimes involves the dialectic between the
"prototype" and "exemplar" camps (see book by Smith and Medin), which
partially touches on the question; there are discussions in the
connectionist literature about the problem of type-token discrimination
(see Norman's chapter at the end of the second PDP volume - McClelland
and Rumelhart 1986/7); then there is neurospychology of naming... see
books on psychololinguistics like the one written by Trevor Harley for a
comprehensive introduction to that area); there are also vast numbers
of studies to do with recognition of abstract concepts using neural nets
(you could pick up three or four papers that I wrote in the 1990s which
center on the problem of extracting the spelled for of words using
phoneme clusters if you look at the publications section of my website,
susaro.com, but there are thousands of others).........
Then, you could also wait for my own textbook (in preparation) which
treats the formation of concepts and the mechanisms of abstraction from
the Molecular perspective.
These are just examples picked at random. none of them answer your
question, they just give you pieces of the puzzle, for you to assemble
into a half-working answer after a couple of years of study ;-).
Anyone who knew the field would say, in response to your inquiry, "But
what exactly do you mean by the question....?", and they would say this
because your question touches upon about six or seven major areas of
inquiry, in the most general possible terms.
Richard Loosemore
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agi
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