Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

In this paper we introduce a paraconsistent reasoning strategy, Chunk and Permeate. In this, information is broken up into chunks, and a limited amount of information is allowed to flow between chunks. We start by giving an abstract characterisation of the strategy. It is then applied to model the reasoning employed in the original infinitesimal calculus. The paper next establishes some results concerning the legitimacy of reasoning of this kind - specifically concerning the preservation of the (...) consistency of each chunk and concludes with some other possible applications and technical questions. (shrink)

What principles and mechanisms allow humans to encode complex 3D information, and how can it be so fast, so accurately and so flexibly transformed into coordinated action? How do these processes work when developed to the limit of human physiological and cognitive capacity—as they are in high-speed sports, such as alpine skiing or motor racing? High-speed sports present not only physical challenges, but present some of the biggest perceptual-cognitive demands for the brain. The skill of these elite athletes is (...) in many ways an attractive model for studying human performance “in the wild”, and its neurocognitive basis. This article presents a framework theory for how these abilities may be realized in high-speed sports. It draws on a careful analysis of the case of the motorsport athlete, as well as theoretical concepts from: (1) cognitive neuroscience of wayfinding, steering, and driving; (2) cognitive psychology of expertise; (3) cognitive modeling and machine learning; (4) human-in-the loop modellling in vehicle system dynamics and human performance engineering; (5) experimental research (in the laboratory and in the field) on human visual guidance. The distinctive contribution is the way these are integrated, and the concept ofchunkingis used in a novel way to analyze a high-speed sport. The mechanisms invoked are domain-general, and not specific to motorsport or the use of a particular type of vehicle (or any vehicle for that matter); theegocentric chunking hypothesisshould therefore apply to any dynamic task that requires similar core skills. It offers a framework for neuroscientists, psychologists, engineers, and computer scientists working in the field of expert sports performance, and may be useful in translating fundamental research into theory-based insight and recommendations for improving real-world elite performance. Specific experimental predictions and applicability of the hypotheses to other sports are discussed. (shrink)

Cowan's experimental techniques cannot constrain subject's recall of presented information to distinct independent chunks in short-term memory (STM). The encoding of associations in long-term memory contaminates recall of pure STM capacity. Even in task environments where the functional independence of chunks is convincingly demonstrated, individuals can increase the storage of independent chunks with deliberate practice – well above the magical number four.

There is a crucial debate concerning the nature of chess chunks: One current possibility states that chunks are built by encoding particular combinations of pieces-on-squares (POSs), and that chunks are formed mostly by “close” pieces (in a “Euclidean” sense). A complementary hypothesis is that chunks are encoded by abstract, semantic information. This article extends recent experiments and shows that chess players are able to perceive strong similarity between very different positions if the pieces retain the (...) same abstract roles in both of them. This casts doubt on the idea that POS information is the key information encoded in chess chunks, and this article proposes, instead, that the key encoding involves the abstract roles that pieces (and sets of pieces) play—a theoretical standpoint in line with the research program in semantics that places analogy at the core of cognition. (shrink)

This article describes a study on capacity limitations that affect the construction of spatial mental models. A process model is presented, according to which the construction of a mental model in Ehrlich and Johnson-Laird's (1982) spatial descriptions task places a workload of six information chunks for continuous and semi-continuous descriptions, and seven chunks for discontinuous descriptions. Participants (48 undergraduate students) performed the spatial descriptions task and the figural intersections test (FIT), which yields a capacity score. The pattern (...) of errors and sentence reading times in the spatial descriptions task confirmed that participants were using mental models. The FIT score was positively correlated with accuracy in the spatial descriptions task. Prediction analysis of cross-classification tables showed that, for successful performance in continuous and semi-continuous descriptions, a FIT score of 6 was necessary, and a score of 7 in discontinuous descriptions. These results are in agreement with theoretical predictions. The issue of integrating mental models theory with analyses of capacity limitations in performance is discussed. (shrink)

The data presented in the target article make a persuasive case for the notion that there is a fundamental limit on short term memory (STM) of about four items. Two possible means of further testing this claim are suggested and data regarding scene coherence and memory capacity for ordered information are reviewed.

What are facts, situations, or events? When Situation Semantics was born in the eighties, I objected because I could not swallow the idea that situations might be chunks of information. For me, they had to be particulars like sticks or bricks. I could not imagine otherwise. The first manuscript of “An Investigation of the Lumps of Thought” that I submitted to Linguistics and Philosophy had a footnote where I distanced myself from all those who took possible situations to (...) be units of information. In that context and at that time, this meant Jon Barwise and John Perry. (shrink)

Constructions marking information structure in French have been widely documented within the constructionist framework. C’est ‘it is’ clefts have been demonstrated to express the focus of the sentence. Nevertheless, it remains unclear how children are able to acquire clefts, and how they develop information structure categories. The aim of this study is to investigate the acquisition of clefts in French through the usage-based framework, to understand whether IS categories emerge gradually like other linguistic categories, and how children build (...) IS categories. For this, I analysed 256 c’est-clefts produced by three children between age 2 and 3. I show that most early clefts are produced by children with the chunk c’est moi associated with the concrete function of requesting to perform an action themselves. This chunk then becomes a frame with slot, extending the function to other human referents and discourse participants with the function of requesting adults to perform an action. Another large portion of early clefts seems to belong to a frame with slot c’est X whose function is to identify the agent who carried out an action. These findings suggest that the information structure category of focus emerges gradually. (shrink)

Information processing theories of memory and skills can be reformulated in terms of how categories are physically and temporally related, a process called conceptual coordination. Dreaming can then be understood as a story-understanding process in which two mechanisms found in everyday comprehension are missing: conceiving sequences (chunking categories in time as a higher-order categorization) and coordinating across modalities (e.g., relating the sound of a word and the image of its meaning). On this basis, we can readily identify isomorphisms between (...) dream phenomenology and neurophysiology, and explain the function of dreaming as facilitating future coordination of sequential, cross-modal categorization (i.e., REM sleep lowers activation thresholds, “unlearning”). [Hobson et al.; Nielsen; Solms; Revonsuo; Vertes & Eastman]. (shrink)

Miller (1956) summarized evidence that people can remember about seven chunks in short-term memory (STM) tasks. However, that number was meant more as a rough estimate and a rhetorical device than as a real capacity limit. Others have since suggested that there is a more precise capacity limit, but that it is only three to five chunks. The present target article brings together a wide variety of data on capacity limits suggesting that the smaller capacity limit is real. (...) Capacity limits will be useful in analyses of information processing only if the boundary conditions for observing them can be carefully described. Four basic conditions in which chunks can be identified and capacity limits can accordingly be observed are: (1) when information overload limits chunks to individual stimulus items, (2) when other steps are taken specifically to block the recoding of stimulus items into larger chunks, (3) in performance discontinuities caused by the capacity limit, and (4) in various indirect effects of the capacity limit. Under these conditions, rehearsal and long-term memory cannot be used to combine stimulus items into chunks of an unknown size; nor can storage mechanisms that are not capacity-limited, such as sensory memory, allow the capacity-limited storage mechanism to be refilled during recall. A single, central capacity limit averaging about four chunks is implicated along with other, noncapacity-limited sources. The pure STM capacity limit expressed in chunks is distinguished from compound STM limits obtained when the number of separately held chunks is unclear. Reasons why pure capacity estimates fall within a narrow range are discussed and a capacity limit for the focus of attention is proposed. Key Words: attention; enumeration; information chunks; memory capacity; processing capacity; processing channels; serial recall; short-term memory; storage capacity; verbal recall; working memory capacity. (shrink)

We investigate whether risky choice framing, i.e., the preference of a sure over an equivalent risky option when choosing among gains, and the reverse when choosing among losses, depends on redundancy and density of information available in a task. Redundancy, the saliency of missing information, and density, the description of options in one or multiple chunks, was manipulated in a matrix setup presented in MouselabWeb. On the choice level we found a framing effect only in setups with (...) non-redundant information. On the process level outcomes attracted more acquisitions than probabilities, irrespective of redundancy. A dissociation between acquisition behavior and choice calls for a critical discussion of the limits of process-tracing measures for understanding and predicting choices in decision making tasks. (shrink)

The Editors express their gratitude and appreciation to the indi-viduals listed below who served as referees for Informal Logic for Volumes 31 (2011) and 32 (2012).

In the fallout from the war on terror is a revived Cold War, with more nuclear players than ever, across even more dry-tinder landscapes around the world.

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different (...) approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

This paper presents a computational model of the way humans inductively identify and aggregate concepts from the low-level stimuli they are exposed to. Based on the idea that humans tend to select the simplest structures, it implements a dynamic hierarchical chunking mechanism in which the decision whether to create a new chunk is based on an information-theoretic criterion, the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We present theoretical justifications for this approach together with results of an experiment in which participants, (...) exposed to meaningless symbols, have been implicitly encouraged to create high-level concepts by grouping them. Results show that the designed model, called hereafter MDLChunker, makes precise quantitative predictions both on the kind of chunks created by the participants and also on the moment at which these creations occur. They suggest that the simplicity principle used to design MDLChunker is particularly efficient to model chunking mechanisms. The main interest of this model over existing ones is that it does not require any adjustable parameter. (shrink)

Working memory limits are best defined in terms of the complexity of the relations that can be processed in parallel. Complexity is defined as the number of related dimensions or sources of variation. A unary relation has one argument and one source of variation; its argument can be instantiated in only one way at a time. A binary relation has two arguments, two sources of variation, and two instantiations, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the number of chunks, (...) because both attributes on dimensions and chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size. Studies of working memory limits suggest that there is a soft limit corresponding to the parallel processing of one quaternary relation. More complex concepts are processed by or In segmentation, tasks are broken into components that do not exceed processing capacity and can be processed serially. In conceptual chunking, representations are to reduce their dimensionality and hence their processing load, but at the cost of making some relational information inaccessible. Neural net models of relational representations show that relations with more arguments have a higher computational cost that coincides with experimental findings on higher processing loads in humans. Relational complexity is related to processing load in reasoning and sentence comprehension and can distinguish between the capacities of higher species. The complexity of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications for neural net models and theories of cognition and cognitive development are discussed. (shrink)