Distributed cognition: cognizing, autonomy and the Turing Test

Some of the papers in this Special Issue distribute cognition between what is going on inside individual cognizers’ heads and their outside worlds; others distribute cognition among different individual cognizers. Turing’s criterion for cognition was for individual, autonomous input/output capacity. It is not clear that distributed cognition could pass the Turing Tes

Distributed Cognition: Cognizing, Autonomy and the Turing Test

Some of the papers in this special issue distribute cognition between what is going on inside individual cognizers’ heads and their outside worlds; others distribute cognition among different individual cognizers. Turing’s criterion for cognition was individual, autonomous input/output capacity. It is not clear that distributed cognition could pass the Turing Test

Unexpected Aspects of Expectancy in Music: A Spreading Activation Explanation

A well agreed discourse in music perception research is that affective response can be generated by music when a tendency in the music is delayed or inhibited. There is a consensus that this tendency is statistically driven, derived from exposure to culturally situated musical idioms. By presenting a neural-network inspired spreading activation model (SAM) this paper argues that the nature of the tendency is worthy of further investigation. SAM organises the music stream perceived by the listener continuously into segments such that a match with an existing ‘mental representation’ (node) is found, which is then linked to the node for the previously segmented part of the music stream, with the link between these nodes strengthening and consolidating with exposure. The currently activated segment (the music being sounded) will prime the best matching (strongest linked) node available, generating expectancy. Expectancy is defined as the most strongly primed segment, and emerges dynamically through experience with environmental and musical contexts, rather than schematic or prototypical means. Expectancy is the specific exemplar instance that the activated (currently sounding) segment of music and contextual factors prime. This hypothesis of veridical dominance has implications for enduring aspects of music expectancy theory: (1) individual experiences matter in the formation of expectations; (2) expectations are a dynamic process, that change and are updated with experience; (3) context plays a critical role in expectancy; and (4) schema, prototypes and statistical accounts of expectation should be treated as convenient approximations of underlying cognitive processes

A Connectionist Theory of Phenomenal Experience

When cognitive scientists apply computational theory to the problem of phenomenal consciousness, as many of them have been doing recently, there are two fundamentally distinct approaches available. Either consciousness is to be explained in terms of the nature of the representational vehicles the brain deploys; or it is to be explained in terms of the computational processes defined over these vehicles. We call versions of these two approaches vehicle and process theories of consciousness, respectively. However, while there may be space for vehicle theories of consciousness in cognitive science, they are relatively rare. This is because of the influence exerted, on the one hand, by a large body of research which purports to show that the explicit representation of information in the brain and conscious experience are dissociable, and on the other, by the classical computational theory of mind – the theory that takes human cognition to be a species of symbol manipulation. But two recent developments in cognitive science combine to suggest that a reappraisal of this situation is in order. First, a number of theorists have recently been highly critical of the experimental methodologies employed in the dissociation studies – so critical, in fact, it’s no longer reasonable to assume that the dissociability of conscious experience and explicit representation has been adequately demonstrated. Second, classicism, as a theory of human cognition, is no longer as dominant in cognitive science as it once was. It now has a lively competitor in the form of connectionism; and connectionism, unlike classicism, does have the computational resources to support a robust vehicle theory of consciousness. In this paper we develop and defend this connectionist vehicle theory of consciousness. It takes the form of the following simple empirical hypothesis: phenomenal experience consists in the explicit representation of information in neurally realized PDP networks. This hypothesis leads us to re-assess some common wisdom about consciousness, but, we will argue, in fruitful and ultimately plausible ways

Beyond the icon: Core cognition and the bounds of perception

This paper refines a controversial proposal: that core systems belong to a perceptual kind, marked out by the format of its representational outputs. Following Susan Carey, this proposal has been understood in terms of core representations having an iconic format, like certain paradigmatically perceptual outputs. I argue that they don’t, but suggest that the proposal may be better formulated in terms of a broader analogue format type. Formulated in this way, the proposal accommodates the existence of genuine icons in perception, and avoids otherwise troubling objections

Classification and Separation of Audio and Music Signals

This chapter addresses the topic of classification and separation of audio and music signals. It is a very important and a challenging research area. The importance of classification process of a stream of sounds come up for the sake of building two different libraries: speech library and music library. However, the separation process is needed sometimes in a cocktail-party problem to separate speech from music and remove the undesired one. In this chapter, some existed algorithms for the classification process and the separation process are presented and discussed thoroughly. The classification algorithms will be divided into three categories. The first category includes most of the real time approaches. The second category includes most of the frequency domain approaches. However, the third category introduces some of the approaches in the time-frequency distribution. The approaches of time domain discussed in this chapter are the short-time energy (STE), the zero-crossing rate (ZCR), modified version of the ZCR and the STE with positive derivative, the neural networks, and the roll-off variance. The approaches of the frequency spectrum are specifically the roll-off of the spectrum, the spectral centroid and the variance of the spectral centroid, the spectral flux and the variance of the spectral flux, the cepstral residual, and the delta pitch. The time-frequency domain approaches have not been yet tested thoroughly in the process of classification and separation of audio and music signals. Therefore, the spectrogram and the evolutionary spectrum will be introduced and discussed. In addition, some algorithms for separation and segregation of music and audio signals, like the independent Component Analysis, the pitch cancelation and the artificial neural networks will be introduced

Smell's puzzling discrepancy: Gifted discrimination, yet pitiful identification

Mind &Language, Volume 35, Issue 1, Page 90-114, February 2020

The babies, the representations, and the nativist–empiricist bathwater. Commentary on “Stepping Off the pendulum: Why only an action-based approach can transcend the nativist–empiricist debate” by J. Allen & M. Bickhard

Commentary The babies, the representations, and the nativist-empiricist bathwater. Commentary on "Stepping Off the pendulum: Why only an action-based approach can transcend the nativist-empiricist debate" by J. Allen & M. Bickhar