Notre Dame Cognitive
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If you are interested in cognitive science and want to contribute to our interdisciplinary project of bringing cognitive scientists together, feel free to join our newly formed cognitive science group!
| Day | Presentation | Title/Abstract | Reading |
| 09/17 | Michael J. Wenger, Psychology | The editor's introduction to the chapter states (in part): "... Mark Steedman, a linguist and computer scientist, presents a case study of an algorithm for solving a problem of visual perception that has been important in the development of computer vision." | Mark Steedman, "Cognitive algorithms: Questions of representation and computation in building a theory." from vol. 4 of Osherson's "Invitation to cognitive science" |
| 09/24 | K.M. Eberhard, Psychology | A dynamical systems approach to parsing is proposed in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. These attractors have many of the properties of traditional syntactic categories, while at the same time encoding context-dependent, lexically specific distinctions. Hypotheses motivated by the dynamical systems theory were tested in four reading-time experiments examining the interaction of simple lexical frequencies, frequencies that are contingent on an environment defined by syntactic categories, and frequencies contingent on verb-argument structures. The experiments documented a variety of contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. These effects were simulated in an implementation of the theory, employing a recirrent network trained from a corpus to construct metric representations and an algorithm implementing a gravitational dynamical system to model reading time as time to gravitate to an attractor. | Tabor, W., Juliano, C., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (1997). Parsing in a
dynamical
system: An attractor-based account of the interaction of lexical and structural constraints in sentence processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12, 211-272 |
| 10/01 | K.M. Eberhard, Psychology | <continuation of 09/24> | |
| 10/08 | Ray Sepeta, CAP | Turing Machines | |
| 10/15 | <no meeting> | ||
| 10/22 | <no meeting> | ||
| 10/29 | OPEN | ||
| 11/05 | Matthias Scheutz, Computer Science | "Digital computers play a special role in cognitive science-they may
actually be
instances of the phenomenon they are being used to model. This paper surveys some of the main issues involved in understanding the relationship between digital computers and cognition. It sketches the role of digital computers within orthodox computational cognitive science, in the light of a recently emerging alternative approach based around dynamical systems." (van Gelder) |
Tim van Gelder, "Computers and Computation in Cognitive Science" |
| 11/12 | |||
| 11/19 | |||
| 11/26 |
Dr. Horn has had a long and distinguished career studying the nature of age-related change in cognitive abilities. Many of you may associate his name with "Fluid and Crystallized Intelligence".