- Neural Network, Cognitive Linguistics, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Connectionist Modeling, Corpus Linguistics, Extended Mind, and 20 morePsycholinguistics, Cognitive Science, Distributed Cognition, Cognitive Neuroscience, Embodied Embedded Cognition, Perception, Embodied Mind Theory, Situated Cognition, Computational Modeling, Visual Neuroscience, Selective Attention, Enaction (Psychology), Embodied Cognition, Eyetracking (Psychology), Cognitive Vision, Spatial cognition, Philosophy of Mind, Ecological Psychology, Language, and Dynamical Systemsedit
- Who You Are: The Science of Connectedness (2020, MIT Press) By Michael J. Spivey https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-... moreWho You Are: The Science of Connectedness (2020, MIT Press)
By Michael J. Spivey
https://shepherd.com/best-books/the-mind-as-more-than-a-brain
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/who-you-are
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/who-you-are
Why you are more than just a brain, more than just a brain-and-body, and more than all your assumptions about who you are.edit - Michael Tanenhaus, and many more...edit
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According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities recycle evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for perception and action. Here, building on these accounts, we investigate whether creativity builds... more
According to accounts of neural reuse and embodied cognition, higher-level cognitive abilities recycle evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for perception and action. Here, building on these accounts, we investigate whether creativity builds on our capacity to forage in space (“creativity as strategic foraging”). We report systematic connections between specific forms of creative thinking—divergent and convergent—and corresponding strategies for searching in space. U.S. American adults completed two tasks designed to measure creativity. Before each creativity trial, participants completed an unrelated search of a city map. Between subjects, we manipulated the search pattern, with some participants seeking multiple, dispersed spatial locations and others repeatedly converging on the same location. Participants who searched divergently in space were better at divergent thinking but worse at convergent thinking; this pattern reversed for participants who had converged repeatedly on a single location. These results demonstrate a targeted link between foraging and creativity, thus advancing our understanding of the origins and mechanisms of high-level cognition.
Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, Models of Creativity & of Creative Processes, Creativity, and 9 moreCreative Problem Solving, Embodied Cognition, Problem solving (Education), Embodied Mind and Cognition, Problem solving (Cognitive Psychology), Embodied Embedded Cognition, Divergent Thinking, Creative Insight Problem Solving, and Embodied and Enactive Cognition
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Languages and Linguistics, Semantics, and 13 morePsycholinguistics, Modality, Linguistics, Eyetracking (Psychology), Modal Verbs, Sentence Processing, Language Processing, English Modal Verbs, Modal Verb, Tense aspect modality, Modal auxiliaries, Deontic Modality, and Sentence
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Languages and Linguistics, Semantics, and 15 moreCognitive Semantics, Embodied Cognition, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Lexical Semantics, Linguistics, English Grammar, Spatial Language, Medicine, Tense and Aspect Systems, Motion Verbs, Tense aspect modality, Mousetracking, Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition, and Frontiers in Psychology
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While the cognitivist school of thought holds that the mind is analogous to a computer, performing logical operations over internal representations, the tradition of ecological psychology contends that organisms can directly... more
While the cognitivist school of thought holds that the mind is analogous to a computer, performing logical operations over internal representations, the tradition of ecological psychology contends that organisms can directly "resonate" to information for action and perception without the need for a representational intermediary. The concept of resonance has played an important role in ecological psychology, but it remains a metaphor. Supplying a mechanistic account of resonance requires a non-representational account of central nervous system (CNS) dynamics. We present a series of simple models in which a reservoir network with homeostatic nodes is used to control a simple agent embedded in an environment. This network spontaneously produces behaviors that are adaptive in each context, including (1) visually tracking a moving object, (2) substantially above-chance performance in the arcade game Pong, (2) and avoiding walls while controlling a mobile agent. These results ma...
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The main question that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) pose is whether "what and how we see is functionally independent from what and how we think, know, desire, act, and so forth" (sect. 2, para. 1). We synthesize a collection of... more
The main question that Firestone & Scholl (F&S) pose is whether "what and how we see is functionally independent from what and how we think, know, desire, act, and so forth" (sect. 2, para. 1). We synthesize a collection of concerns from an interdisciplinary set of coauthors regarding F&S's assumptions and appeals to intuition, resulting in their treatment of visual perception as context-free.
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Minimally cognitive processes are identi ed in animals that have no central nervous system, in bacteria and in plants, and even in nonbiological systems that exhibit self-organization, selfsustenance, and group coordination. The common... more
Minimally cognitive processes are identi ed in animals that have no central nervous system, in bacteria and in plants, and even in nonbiological systems that exhibit self-organization, selfsustenance, and group coordination. The common thread among these living and lifelike systems is that they all participate in an adaptive dynamic bidirectional exchange of energy and information with their environment. Some of the cognitive processes that these systems exhibit are best detected not inside the system but instead emerging in that bidirectional exchange between the system and other nearby systems. This externalization of some portion of an organism's cognition suggests that a common currency of cognitive activity (not relying solely on a neural substrate) could support an account of cognition wherein it spreads among organisms and their epistemic tools. When an organism's cognition is extended out into the environment, a contiguous manifold of cognitive activity allows some of that cognition to persist after its death.
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While the notion of the brain as a prediction machine has been extremely influential and productive in cognitive science, there are competing accounts of how best to model and understand the predictive capabilities of brains. One... more
While the notion of the brain as a prediction machine has been extremely influential and productive in cognitive science, there are competing accounts of how best to model and understand the predictive capabilities of brains. One prominent framework is of a "Bayesian brain" that explicitly generates predictions and uses resultant errors to guide adaptation. We suggest that the prediction-generation component of this framework may involve little more than a pattern completion process. We first describe pattern completion in the domain of visual perception, highlighting its temporal extension, and show how this can entail a form of prediction in time. Next, we describe the forward momentum of entrained dynamical systems as a model for the emergence of predictive processing in non-predictive systems. Then, we apply this reasoning to the domain of language, where explicitly predictive models are perhaps most popular. Here, we demonstrate how a connectionist model, TRACE, exhibits hallmarks of predictive processing without any representations of predictions or errors. Finally, we present a novel neural network model, inspired by reservoir computing models, that is entirely unsupervised and memoryless, but nonetheless exhibits prediction-like behavior in its pursuit of homeostasis. These explorations demonstrate that brain-like systems can get prediction "for free," without the need to posit formal logical representations with Bayesian probabilities or an inference machine that holds them in working memory.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, and 15 moreEmbodied Cognition, Pattern Recognition, Connectionism, Inference, Medicine, Dynamical Systems Approach to Cognition, Language Comprehension, Language Processing, Artificial Neural Networks, Brain, Predictive coding, Anticipation and cognition, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, Neurosciences, and Free Energy Principle
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Evidence suggests that sparse coding allows for a more efficient and effective way to distill structural information about the environment. Our simple recurrent network has demonstrated the same to be true of learning musical structure.... more
Evidence suggests that sparse coding allows for a more efficient and effective way to distill structural information about the environment. Our simple recurrent network has demonstrated the same to be true of learning musical structure. Two experiments are presented that examine the learning trajectory of a simple recurrent network exposed to musical input. Both experiments compare the network's internal representations to behavioral data: Listeners rate the network's own novel musical output from different points along the learning trajectory. The first study focused on learning the tonal relationships inherent in five simple melodies. The developmental trajectory of the network was studied by examining sparseness of the hidden layer activations and the sophistication of the network's compositions. The second study used more complex musical input and focused on both tonal and rhythmic relationships in music. We found that increasing sparseness of the hidden layer activa...
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Despite its many twists and turns, the arc of cognitive science generally bends toward progress, thanks to its interdisciplinary nature. By glancing at the last few decades of experimental and computational advances, it can be argued... more
Despite its many twists and turns, the arc of cognitive science generally bends toward progress, thanks to its interdisciplinary nature. By glancing at the last few decades of experimental and computational advances, it can be argued that-far from failing to converge on a shared set of conceptual assumptions-the field is indeed making steady consensual progress toward what can broadly be referred to as interactive frameworks. This inclination is apparent in the subfields of psycholinguistics, visual perception, embodied cognition, extended cognition, neural networks, dynamical systems theory, and more. This pictorial essay briefly documents this steady progress both from a bird's eye view and from the trenches. The conclusion is one of optimism that cognitive science is getting there, albeit slowly and arduously, like any good science should.
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While the notion of the brain as a prediction machine has been extremely influential and productive in cognitive science, there are competing accounts of how best to model and understand the predictive capabilities of brains. One... more
While the notion of the brain as a prediction machine has been extremely influential and productive in cognitive science, there are competing accounts of how best to model and understand the predictive capabilities of brains. One prominent framework is of a "Bayesian brain" that explicitly generates predictions and uses resultant errors to guide adaptation. We suggest that the prediction-generation component of this framework may involve little more than a pattern completion process. We first describe pattern completion in the domain of visual perception, highlighting its temporal extension, and show how this can entail a form of prediction in time. Next, we describe the forward momentum of entrained dynamical systems as a model for the emergence of predictive processing in non-predictive systems. Then, we apply this reasoning to the domain of language, where explicitly predictive models are perhaps most popular. Here, we demonstrate how a connectionist model, TRACE, exhibits hallmarks of predictive processing without any representations of predictions or errors. Finally, we present a novel neural network model, inspired by reservoir computing models, that is entirely unsupervised and memoryless, but nonetheless exhibits prediction-like behavior in its pursuit of homeostasis. These explorations demonstrate that brain-like systems can get prediction "for free," without the need to posit formal logical representations with Bayesian probabilities or an inference machine that holds them in working memory.
Research Interests: Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Dynamical Systems, Machine Learning, and 15 moreEmbodied Cognition, Pattern Recognition, Connectionism, Inference, Medicine, Dynamical Systems Approach to Cognition, Language Comprehension, Language Processing, Artificial Neural Networks, Brain, Predictive coding, Anticipation and cognition, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, Neurosciences, and Free Energy Principle
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Language is not a module. Well, at least, it is not a feedforward encapsulated domain-specific perceptual input system in the way that Fodor (1983) imagined. To be sure, there are regions of cortex that are conspicuously specialized for... more
Language is not a module. Well, at least, it is not a feedforward encapsulated domain-specific perceptual input system in the way that Fodor (1983) imagined. To be sure, there are regions of cortex that are conspicuously specialized for language-like processes (eg, Gazzaniga, 2000; Kuperberg, Holcomb, Sitnikova, Greve, Dale, & Caplan, 2003; Ojemann, 1983), but when cognitive neuroscientists refer to these cortical areas as “modules,” they certainly do not imply solely feedforward synaptic projections or encapsulation from ...
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Research Interests: Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Languages and Linguistics, Eye tracking, Cognitive Semantics, and 15 moreEmbodied Cognition, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Cognitive Linguistics, Language, Linguistic Theory, Language Processing, Cognitive Sciences, English linguistics, Comprehension, Active Listening, Eye Movements, Eye movements during mental imagery, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, Eye Movement, and Frontiers in Psychology
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science, Languages and Linguistics, Semantics, and 15 moreCognitive Semantics, Embodied Cognition, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Linguistics, Lexical Semantics, Linguistics, English Grammar, Spatial Language, Medicine, Tense and Aspect Systems, Motion Verbs, Tense aspect modality, Mousetracking, Spatial Language and Spatial Cognition, and Frontiers in Psychology
When humans perform a response task or timing task repeatedly, fluctuations in measures of timing from one action to the next exhibit long-range correlations known as 1/f noise. The origins of 1/f noise in timing have been debated for... more
When humans perform a response task or timing task repeatedly, fluctuations in measures of timing from one action to the next exhibit long-range correlations known as 1/f noise. The origins of 1/f noise in timing have been debated for over 20 years, with one common explanation serving as a default: humans are composed of physiological processes throughout the brain and body that operate over a wide range of timescales, and these processes combine to be expressed as a general source of 1/f noise. To test this explanation, the present study investigated the coupling vs. independence of 1/f noise in timing deviations, key-press durations, pupil dilations, and heartbeat intervals while tapping to an audiovisual metronome. All four dependent measures exhibited clear 1/f noise, regardless of whether tapping was synchronized or syncopated. 1/f spectra for timing deviations were found to match those for key-press durations on an individual basis, and 1/f spectra for pupil dilations matched ...
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Abstract: Real-time cognition is continuous in time and contiguous in mental state space. This temporal continuity implies that the majority of mental life is spent in states that are partially consistent with multiple representations.... more
Abstract: Real-time cognition is continuous in time and contiguous in mental state space. This temporal continuity implies that the majority of mental life is spent in states that are partially consistent with multiple representations. The state-space contiguity implies that different cognitive processes interact in ways that make them quite non-modular. As the evidence for such information-permeability expands to include not just neural subsystems but also the entire brain and even the entire organism, this radical interactionism leads ...
Background Recently, the measurement of computer-mouse trajectories en route to choices on the screen has served as a window into the real-time dynamics of a wide range of cognitive processes. This mouse-tracking methodology is able to... more
Background Recently, the measurement of computer-mouse trajectories en route to choices on the screen has served as a window into the real-time dynamics of a wide range of cognitive processes. This mouse-tracking methodology is able to provide a sensitive, temporally fine-grained measure by which participants' tentative commitments to various choice alternatives can be tracked semi-continuously over hundreds of milliseconds. Similar in spirit to the goals of eye-tracking methods, mouse-tracking may provide access to the ...
Although many theories of on-line syntactic processing invoke the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, we exploited the continuous and... more
Although many theories of on-line syntactic processing invoke the parallel activation of multiple syntactic representations, evidence supporting simultaneous activation has been inconclusive. Here, we exploited the continuous and non-ballistic properties of computer mouse movements, identified by recording streaming x, y coordinates, in order to determine the validity of serial versus parallel accounts of sentence processing. Participants heard structurally ambiguous sentences while viewing scenes with properties either ...
Prepositions in natural languages often appear to be governed by arbitrary conventionalized idiomatic uses (eg, I was born in May, I will see you on Sunday). We present empirical evidence that such prepositional uses are not entirely... more
Prepositions in natural languages often appear to be governed by arbitrary conventionalized idiomatic uses (eg, I was born in May, I will see you on Sunday). We present empirical evidence that such prepositional uses are not entirely arbitrary, as they activate image-schematic perceptual simulations during language processing. In Experiment 1, native speakers of English were prompted to think about either the date or the month of their birthday, and then select one of four calendar diagrams, two foils, one flat ...
Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Perception, Teaching English as a Second Language, Second Language Acquisition, and 11 moreEmbodied Cognition, Embodiment, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Cognitive Linguistics, Linguistics, Embodied Embedded Cognition, Second Language Learning, Prepositions, Embodied knowledge, English As a Second Language (ESL), and Perceptual Simulations
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Linguistic negation can be comprehended with the inclusion (or absence) of features and categories associated with the senses in a single step. Under this view, there is no need for explicit logical operators, as the negating word or... more
Linguistic negation can be comprehended with the inclusion (or absence) of features and categories associated with the senses in a single step. Under this view, there is no need for explicit logical operators, as the negating word or phase is treated no differently than any other word. Negation provides additional context, whereby visualizing negation as a trajectory in a distributed, grounded perceptual simulation space can easily characterize the comprehension of negated sentences. A mousetracking experiment was conducted to ...
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What role does grammatical aspect play in the time course of understanding motion events? Although processing differences between past progressive (was walking) and simple past (walked) aspect suggest differences in prominence of certain... more
What role does grammatical aspect play in the time course of understanding motion events? Although processing differences between past progressive (was walking) and simple past (walked) aspect suggest differences in prominence of certain semantic properties, details about the temporal dynamics of aspect processing have been largely ignored. The current work uses mouse-tracking (Spivey, Grosjean, & Knoblich, 2005) to explore motor output in response to contextual descriptions and aspectual forms. ...
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Perception of Visual Similarity: Modeling Feature-Based Effects Michael Romano University of California, Merced Michael Spivey University of California, Merced Abstract: Similarity is central to human cognition. Its relevance is apparent... more
Perception of Visual Similarity: Modeling Feature-Based Effects Michael Romano University of California, Merced Michael Spivey University of California, Merced Abstract: Similarity is central to human cognition. Its relevance is apparent in nearly all theories of cognitive science. Concept acquisition, metaphor, pattern recognition, priming, predictions, inferences; all these processes rely on similarity. Despite its relevance, relatively little is understood about how similarity is processed. In particular, there is a need to better understand the scope in which our perceptual systems constrain our judgments of similarity. The current study investigates this question in the area of visual cognition. By attempting to control for the influence of categorical knowledge, the goal was to understand how different types of feature-dimensions and category boundaries influence the perception of similarity. A connectionist model was developed to explain these findings.
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Abstract What role does grammatical aspect play in understanding everyday motion events? Narrative understanding tasks have investigated differences between the past progressive (was walking) and the simple past (walked), showing... more
Abstract What role does grammatical aspect play in understanding everyday motion events? Narrative understanding tasks have investigated differences between the past progressive (was walking) and the simple past (walked), showing differences in prominence of information, but details about the temporal dynamics of processing have been largely ignored.
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Abstract What role does grammatical aspect play in the time course of understanding motion events? Although processing differences between past progressive (was walking) and simple past (walked) aspect suggest differences in prominence of... more
Abstract What role does grammatical aspect play in the time course of understanding motion events? Although processing differences between past progressive (was walking) and simple past (walked) aspect suggest differences in prominence of certain semantic properties, details about the temporal dynamics of aspect processing have been largely ignored.
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Abstract What role does grammatical aspect play in understanding everyday motion events? Narrative understanding tasks have investigated differences between the past progressive (was walking) and the simple past (walked), showing... more
Abstract What role does grammatical aspect play in understanding everyday motion events? Narrative understanding tasks have investigated differences between the past progressive (was walking) and the simple past (walked), showing differences in prominence of information, but details about the temporal dynamics of processing have been largely ignored.
Abstract Participants performed a categorization task in which basiclevel animal names (eg, cat) were assigned to their superordinate categories (eg, mammal). Manual motor output was measured by sampling computer-mouse movement while... more
Abstract Participants performed a categorization task in which basiclevel animal names (eg, cat) were assigned to their superordinate categories (eg, mammal). Manual motor output was measured by sampling computer-mouse movement while participants clicked on the correct superordinate category label, and not on a simultaneously presented incorrect category.
Abstract Instead of subscribing to the view that people are unable to perform Bayesian probabilistic inference, recent research suggests that the algorithms people naturally use to perform Bayesian inference are better adapted for... more
Abstract Instead of subscribing to the view that people are unable to perform Bayesian probabilistic inference, recent research suggests that the algorithms people naturally use to perform Bayesian inference are better adapted for information presented in a natural frequency format than in the common probability format. We tested this hypothesis on the notoriously difficult three doors problem, inducing subjects to consider the likelihoods involved in terms of natural frequencies or in terms of probabilities.
Traditional parallel and serial descriptions of the visual search process are often inadequate when describing recent findings. Accordingly, literature and computational models have evolved from a dichotomous parallel and serial... more
Traditional parallel and serial descriptions of the visual search process are often inadequate when describing recent findings. Accordingly, literature and computational models have evolved from a dichotomous parallel and serial explanation to an account of search efficiency that is graded and continuous. In our current experiment, we replicate findings showing concurrent incremental information processing, via auditory spoken language, mediates visual search and improves search efficiency (Spivey et al., 2001; Reali et al., 2006; Chiu & Spivey, 2012). Novel to this study is the use of eye-tracking to investigate the role of language in mediating and improving strategies for visual search. We find evidence that search is best described as a purely parallel mechanism that immediately and rapidly integrates linguistic and visual information. This finding supports an interactive account of visual attention and spoken language.
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Recent studies show that visual search often involves a combination of both parallel and serial search strategies. Consequently, computational models and theoretical accounts of visual search processing have evolved from traditional... more
Recent studies show that visual search often involves a combination of both parallel and serial search strategies. Consequently, computational models and theoretical accounts of visual search processing have evolved from traditional parallel or serial descriptions to a continuum from “efficient” to “inefficient.” In our first experiments (1a & 1b), we demonstrate with various conditions that search efficiency does not increase with simultaneous delivery of target features in a conjunction-search task. In the second experiment, we explore effects of incremental non-linguistic information delivery and discover improvement of search efficiency. We find a facilitatory effect when non-linguistic visual delivery of target features is concurrent with the visual display onset, but not when the target features are delivered prior to display onset. The results support an interactive account of visual perception that explains linguistic and non-linguistic mediation of visual search as chiefly due to the incrementality of target feature delivery once search has begun.
