Stevan Harnad

Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition

List of contributors Preface Introduction: psychophysical and cognitive aspects of categorical perception: a critical overview S. Harnad Part I. Psychophysical Foundations of Categorical Perception: 1. Categoric perception: some psychophysical models R. E. Pastore 2. Beyond the categorical/continuous distinction: a psychophysical approach to processing modes N. A. MacMillan Part II. Categorical Perception of Speech: 3. Phonetic category boundaries are flexible B. H. Repp and A. M. Liberman 4. Auditory, articulatory, and learning explanations of categorical perception in speech S. Rosen and P. Howell 5. On infant speech perception and the acquisition of language P. D. Eimas, J. L. Miller and P. W. Jusczyk Part III. Models for Speech Categorical Perception: 6. Neural models of speech perception: a case history R. E. Remez 7. On the categorization of speech sounds R. L. Diehl and K. R. Kluender 8. Categorical partition: a fuzzy-logical model of categorization behaviour D. W. Massaro Part IV. Categorical Perception in Other Modalities and Other Species: 9. Perceptual categories in vision and audition M. H. Bornstein 10. Categorical perception of sound signals: facts and hypotheses from animal studies G. Ehret 11. A naturalistic view of categorical perception C. T. Snowden 12. The special-mechanisms debate in speech research: categorization tests on animals and infants P. K. Kuhl 13. Brain mechanisms in categorical perception M. Wilson Part V. Psychophysiological Indices of Categorical Perception: 14. Electrophysiological indices of categorical perception for speech D. L. Molfese 15. Evoked potentials and color-defined categories D. Regan Part VI. Higher-order Categories: 16. Categorization processes and categorical perception D. L. Medin and L. W. Barsalou 17. Developmental changes in category structure F. C. Keil and M. H. Kelly 18. Spatial categories: the perception and conceptualization of spatial relations E. Bialystok and D. R. Olson Part VII. Cognitive Foundations: 19. Category induction and representation S. Harnad Author index Subject index.

Earlier Web usage statistics as predictors of later citation impact

Abstract: The use of citation counts to assess the impact of research articles is well established. However, the citation impact of an article can only be measured several years after it has been published. As research articles are increasingly accessed through the Web, the number of times an article is downloaded can be instantly recorded and counted. One would expect the number of times an article is read to be related both to the number of times it is cited and to how old the article is. This paper analyses how short-term Web usage impact predicts medium-term citation impact. The physics e-print archive -- arXiv.org -- is used to test this.

Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research

Background Articles whose authors have supplemented subscription-based access to the publishers version by self-archiving their own final draft to make it accessible free for all on the web (“Open Access”, OA) are cited significantly more than articles in the same journal and year that have not been made OA. Some have suggested that this “OA Advantage” may not be causal but just a self-selection bias, because authors preferentially make higher-quality articles OA. To test this we compared self-selective self-archiving with mandatory self-archiving for a sample of 27,197 articles published 2002–2006 in 1,984 journals. Methdology/Principal Findings The OA Advantage proved just as high for both. Logistic regression analysis showed that the advantage is independent of other correlates of citations (article age; journal impact factor; number of co-authors, references or pages; field; article type; or country) and highest for the most highly cited articles. The OA Advantage is real, independent and causal, but skewed. Its size is indeed correlated with quality, just as citations themselves are (the top 20% of articles receive about 80% of all citations). Conclusions/Significance The OA advantage is greater for the more citable articles, not because of a quality bias from authors self-selecting what to make OA, but because of a quality advantage, from users self-selecting what to use and cite, freed by OA from the constraints of selective accessibility to subscribers only. It is hoped that these findings will help motivate the adoption of OA self-archiving mandates by universities, research institutions and research funders.

Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech

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Minds, machines, and Searle

Searles celebrated Chinese Room Argument has shaken the foundations of Artificial Intelligence. Many refutations have been attempted, but none seem convincing. This paper is an attempt to sort out explicitly the assumptions and the logical, methodological and empirical points of disagreement. Searle is shown to have underestimated some features of computer modeling, but the heart of the issue turns out to be an empirical question about the scope and limits of the purely symbolic (computational) model of the mind. Nonsymbolic modeling turns out to be immune to the Chinese Room Argument. The issues discussed include the Total Turing Test, modularity, neural modeling, robotics, causality and the symbol-grounding problem.

Categorical Perception Effects Induced by Category Learning.

The authors report a series of studies designed to determine whether effects similar to those observed in the innate categorical perception of color and phonemes are induced during the learning of simple unidimensional categories and more complex multidimensional ones. In Experiment 1 no evidence was found for such effects when stimuli varied on 1 dimension. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated a within-category compression effect but no between category expansion effect for stimuli varying in 2 dimensions. Compression only was also shown in Experiment 4, which used pictures of actual objects. Multidimensional scaling analyses illustrate how within-category compression without expansion was sufficient to produce categorical clustering of items in the similarity space. These analyses also show that learning changed the dimensional structure of similarity space. Results are compared with those from other studies exploring similar phenomena and with neural network simulations.

The self-archiving initiative.

Freeing the refereed research literature online.

FROM HAND TO MOUTH: SOME CRITICAL STAGES IN THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGE

ABSTRACT: An evolutionary scenario for the evolution of language, beginning with handedness, gesture and pantomime, then propositions and speech, resulting in an all-purpose symbol system capable of expressing any proposition.

To Cognize is to Categorize: Cognition is Categorization

We organisms are sensorimotor systems. Things in the world come into contact with our sensory surfaces, and we interact with them based on what that sensorimotor contact “affords.” All of our categories consist of ways in which we behave differently toward different kinds of things—things we do or do not eat, mate with, or flee from; or the things that we describe, through our language, as prime numbers, affordances, absolute discriminables, or truths. Categorization—doing the right thing with the right kind of thing—is largely what cognition is about, and for.

Rational disagreement in peer review

A certain degree of disagreement is not only a healthy but an informative and even essential aspect of scientific activity.