A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Barry Smith an sich

Festschrift in Honor of Barry Smith on the occasion of his 65th Birthday. Published as issue 4:4 of the journal Cosmos + Taxis: Studies in Emergent Order and Organization. Includes contributions by Wolfgang Grassl, Nicola Guarino, John T. Kearns, Rudolf Lüthe, Luc Schneider, Peter Simons, Wojciech Żełaniec, and Jan Woleński

Developmental Stages of Perception and Language Acquisition in a Perceptually Grounded Robot

The objective of this research is to develop a system for language learning based on a minimum of pre-wired language-specific functionality, that is compatible with observations of perceptual and language capabilities in the human developmental trajectory. In the proposed system, meaning (in terms of descriptions of events and spatial relations) is extracted from video images based on detection of position, motion, physical contact and their parameters. Mapping of sentence form to meaning is performed by learning grammatical constructions that are retrieved from a construction inventory based on the constellation of closed class items uniquely identifying the target sentence structure. The resulting system displays robust acquisition behavior that reproduces certain observations from developmental studies, with very modest “innate” language specificity

Spannung / Suspense : eine Auswahlbibliographie

Die folgende Bibliographie basiert auf einer Fassung, die in der Medienwissenschaft: Rezensionen (13,2, 1996, Disk. 1) zugänglich gemacht worden ist. In die vorliegende Auswahlbibliographie wurden vorwiegend film- und fernsehorientierte Beiträge aufgenommen, die das Thema Spannung / Suspense untersuchen. Diese Beiträge beleuchten das Thema vor dem Hintergrund verschiedenster theoretischer und methodischer Perspektiven. Dennoch liegt der Akzent der vorliegenden Auswahlbibliographie auf kognitions- und motivationspsychologisch orientierten Arbeiten, die den überwiegenden Teil der verzeichneten Literatur ausmachen. Verwandte, aber dennoch gegenständlich abgrenzbare Forschungsbereiche wurden mit eigenen Überschriften versehen als Einzellisten aufgenommen. Insgesamt müssen diese Einzellisten unvollständig bleiben, sie enthalten exemplarisch einige zentrale Arbeiten aus diesen Forschungsfeldern. So existiert z.B. zu der Persönlichkeitspsychologie, die sich mit dem Begriff Sensation Seeking verbindet, eine umfangreiche Bibliothek von Beiträgen, die nicht aufgenommen werden konnten. Dies gilt auch für die Dramentheorien und die psychologische Stressforschung, zu der sich ein früher Überblick bei Lazarus (1966) findet. Nicht verfolgt wurden auch die Diskussionen um Informationsästhetik (vgl. Berlyne 1974) sowie um komplexes Problemlösen und Problemlösepsychologie (vgl. Dörner et al. 1983 und Funke 1986). Für Korrekturvorschläge zu den sicher mannigfaltig vorhandenen Irrungen und Wirrungen, Falschzuordnungen und Unordnungen sowie Auslassungen und Unterlassungen sind wir zutiefst dankbar. Die Nachrecherche hat Hans J. Wulff durchgeführt. In die Bibliographie sind Hinweise von Carsten Schneider eingegangen

Cognitive Architecture, Concepts, and Introspection: An Information-Theoretic Solution to the Problem of Phenomenal Consciousness

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them