85,813 research outputs found
Microgenesis, immediate experience and visual processes in reading
The concept of microgenesis refers to the development on a brief present-time scale of a percept, a thought, an object of imagination, or an expression. It defines the occurrence of immediate experience as dynamic unfolding and differentiation in which the ‘germ’ of the final experience is already embodied in the early stages of its development. Immediate experience typically concerns the focal experience of an object that is thematized as a ‘figure’ in the global field of consciousness; this can involve a percept, thought, object of imagination, or expression (verbal and/or gestural). Yet, whatever its modality or content, focal experience is postulated to develop and stabilize through dynamic differentiation and unfolding. Such a microgenetic description of immediate experience substantiates a phenomenological and genetic theory of cognition where any process of perception, thought, expression or imagination is primarily a process of genetic differentiation and development, rather than one of detection (of a stimulus array or information), transformation, and integration (of multiple primitive components) as theories of cognitivist kind have contended.
My purpose in this essay is to provide an overview of the main constructs of microgenetic theory, to outline its potential avenues of future development in the field of cognitive science, and to illustrate an application of the theory to research, using visual processes in reading as an example
Conceptual Spaces in Object-Oriented Framework
The aim of this paper is to show that the middle level of
mental representations in a conceptual spaces framework is consistent
with the OOP paradigm. We argue that conceptual spaces framework
together with vague prototype theory of categorization appears to be
the most suitable solution for modeling the cognitive apparatus of
humans, and that the OOP paradigm can be easily and intuitively
reconciled with this framework. First, we show that the prototypebased
OOP approach is consistent with Gärdenfors’ model in terms
of structural coherence. Second, we argue that the product of cloning
process in a prototype-based model is in line with the structure of
categories in Gärdenfors’ proposal. Finally, in order to make the fuzzy
object-oriented model consistent with conceptual space, we
demonstrate how to define membership function in a more cognitive
manner, i.e. in terms of similarity to prototype
From Frequency to Meaning: Vector Space Models of Semantics
Computers understand very little of the meaning of human language. This
profoundly limits our ability to give instructions to computers, the ability of
computers to explain their actions to us, and the ability of computers to
analyse and process text. Vector space models (VSMs) of semantics are beginning
to address these limits. This paper surveys the use of VSMs for semantic
processing of text. We organize the literature on VSMs according to the
structure of the matrix in a VSM. There are currently three broad classes of
VSMs, based on term-document, word-context, and pair-pattern matrices, yielding
three classes of applications. We survey a broad range of applications in these
three categories and we take a detailed look at a specific open source project
in each category. Our goal in this survey is to show the breadth of
applications of VSMs for semantics, to provide a new perspective on VSMs for
those who are already familiar with the area, and to provide pointers into the
literature for those who are less familiar with the field
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