This article presents a process account of some typicality effects and related similarity-dependent accuracy and response time phenomena that arise in the context of supervised concept acquisition. We describe Symbolic Concept Acquisition (SCA), a computational system that acquires and activates category prediction rules. In contrast to gradient representations, SCA performs by probing for prediction rules in a series of discrete steps. For learning new rules, it acquires general rules but then incrementally learns more specific ones. In describing SCA, we emphasize (...) its functionality in terms of accuracy and efficiency and motivate its design within the set of symbolic mechanisms and memory structures defined by the Soar architecture (Laird, Newell & Rosenbloom, 1987). For replicating human behavior, we first show how SCA exhibits some typicality effects in the course of learning responding faster and more accurately to more typical test examples. Then, using data from human experiments, we evaluate SCA's qualitative predictions on accuracy and response time on individual dataset instances. We show how SCA's predictions correlate with human data across three experimental conditions concerning the effect of instruction on learning strategy. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 6, June 2022.

We present a general cognitive architecture that tightly integrates symbolic, spatial, and visual representations. A key means to achieving this integration is allowing cognition to move freely between these modes, using mental imagery. The specific components and their integration are motivated by results from psychology, as well as the need for developing a functional and efficient implementation. We discuss functional benefits that result from the combination of multiple content-based representations and the specialized processing units associated with them. Instantiating this theory, (...) we then discuss the architectural components and processes, and illustrate the resulting functional advantages in two spatially and visually rich domains. The theory is then compared to other prominent approaches in the area. (shrink)

There is a sense, perhaps, in which our present topic is like Mrs. Harris, or snakes in Ireland, or the reigning King of Portugal—that is to say that there is no such thing. For if by communist one means simply a “ red,” it is at least permissible to argue that Moscow and Leningrad are places where there can be no ethics at all. In saying this I do not mean to refer to any particular actions whose object has been (...) to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, or in other words the next immediate step in the policy of these communists. What Zinoviev and others of them say is that they are engaged in a war against all bourgeois administrations, and that, being at war, they are not bound to accept the rules of French duelling, i.e . any outworn conventions, whether these are called ethical or not. Since it is admitted, I suppose, by nearly every. (shrink)

It is the custom, nowadays, to say that “realism” is very dead indeed, and to speak of it invariably in the past tense, or only in the historical present. What happened, we are told, was that, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, two distinct bodies of men propounded either “naïf” or “new” realism. The naif realists followed Mr. G. E. Moore—to some extent and without his consent; and they were called naif because the masculine form of the adjective (...) expressed their rugged creed better than the more usual feminine form. (shrink)

There is a sense, perhaps, in which our present topic is like Mrs. Harris, or snakes in Ireland, or the reigning King of Portugal—that is to say that there is no such thing. For if by communist one means simply a “ red,” it is at least permissible to argue that Moscow and Leningrad are places where there can be no ethics at all. In saying this I do not mean to refer to any particular actions whose object has been (...) to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, or in other words the next immediate step in the policy of these communists. What Zinoviev and others of them say is that they are engaged in a war against all bourgeois administrations, and that, being at war, they are not bound to accept the rules of French duelling,i.e. any outworn conventions, whether these are called ethical or not. Since it is admitted, I suppose, by nearly every. (shrink)