A systematic review of protocol studies on conceptual design cognition: design as search and exploration

This paper reports findings from the first systematic review of protocol studies focusing specifically on conceptual design cognition, aiming to answer the following research question: What is our current understanding of the cognitive processes involved in conceptual design tasks carried out by individual designers? We reviewed 47 studies on architectural design, engineering design and product design engineering. This paper reports 24 cognitive processes investigated in a subset of 33 studies aligning with two viewpoints on the nature of designing: (V1) design as search (10 processes, 41.7%); and (V2) design as exploration (14 processes, 58.3%). Studies on search focused on solution search and problem structuring, involving: long-term memory retrieval; working memory; operators and reasoning processes. Studies on exploration investigated: co-evolutionary design; visual reasoning; cognitive actions; and unexpected discovery and situated requirements invention. Overall, considerable conceptual and terminological differences were observed among the studies. Nonetheless, a common focus on memory, semantic, associative, visual perceptual and mental imagery processes was observed to an extent. We suggest three challenges for future research to advance the field: (i) developing general models/theories; (ii) testing protocol study findings using objective methods conducive to larger samples and (iii) developing a shared ontology of cognitive processes in design

Learning Shape Priors for Single-View 3D Completion and Reconstruction

The problem of single-view 3D shape completion or reconstruction is challenging, because among the many possible shapes that explain an observation, most are implausible and do not correspond to natural objects. Recent research in the field has tackled this problem by exploiting the expressiveness of deep convolutional networks. In fact, there is another level of ambiguity that is often overlooked: among plausible shapes, there are still multiple shapes that fit the 2D image equally well; i.e., the ground truth shape is non-deterministic given a single-view input. Existing fully supervised approaches fail to address this issue, and often produce blurry mean shapes with smooth surfaces but no fine details. In this paper, we propose ShapeHD, pushing the limit of single-view shape completion and reconstruction by integrating deep generative models with adversarially learned shape priors. The learned priors serve as a regularizer, penalizing the model only if its output is unrealistic, not if it deviates from the ground truth. Our design thus overcomes both levels of ambiguity aforementioned. Experiments demonstrate that ShapeHD outperforms state of the art by a large margin in both shape completion and shape reconstruction on multiple real datasets.Comment: ECCV 2018. The first two authors contributed equally to this work. Project page: http://shapehd.csail.mit.edu

Towards a shared ontology: a generic classification of cognitive processes in conceptual design

Towards addressing ontological issues in design cognition research, this paper presents the first generic classification of cognitive processes investigated in protocol studies on conceptual design cognition. The classification is based on a systematic review of 47 studies published over the past 30 years. Three viewpoints on the nature of design cognition are outlined (search, exploration and design activities), highlighting considerable differences in the concepts and terminology applied to describe cognition. To provide a more unified view of the cognitive processes fundamentally under study, we map specific descriptions of cognitive processes provided in protocol studies to more generic, established definitions in the cognitive psychology literature. This reveals a set of 6 categories of cognitive process that appear to be commonly studied and are therefore likely to be prevalent in conceptual design: (1) long-term memory; (2) semantic processing; (3) visual perception; (4) mental imagery processing; (5) creative output production and (6) executive functions. The categories and their constituent processes are formalised in the generic classification. The classification provides the basis for a generic, shared ontology of cognitive processes in design that is conceptually and terminologically consistent with the ontology of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. In addition, the work highlights 6 key avenues for future empirical research: (1) the role of episodic and semantic memory; (2) consistent definitions of semantic processes; (3) the role of sketching from alternative theoretical perspectives on perception and mental imagery; (4) the role of working memory; (5) the meaning and nature of synthesis and (6) unidentified cognitive processes implicated in conceptual design elsewhere in the literature

Measuring the World: Olfaction as a Process Model of Perception

How much does stimulus input shape perception? The common-sense view is that our perceptions are representations of objects and their features and that the stimulus structures the perceptual object. The problem for this view concerns perceptual biases as responsible for distortions and the subjectivity of perceptual experience. These biases are increasingly studied as constitutive factors of brain processes in recent neuroscience. In neural network models the brain is said to cope with the plethora of sensory information by predicting stimulus regularities on the basis of previous experiences. Drawing on this development, this chapter analyses perceptions as processes. Looking at olfaction as a model system, it argues for the need to abandon a stimulus-centred perspective, where smells are thought of as stable percepts, computationally linked to external objects such as odorous molecules. Perception here is presented as a measure of changing signal ratios in an environment informed by expectancy effects from top-down processes

Austin on Perception, Knowledge and Meaning

Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia (1962) generates wildly different reactions among philosophers. Interpreting Austin on perception starts with a reading of this text, and this in turn requires reading into the lectures key ideas from Austin’s work on natural language and the theory of knowledge. The lectures paint a methodological agenda, and a sketch of some first-order philosophy, done the way Austin thinks it should be done. Crucially, Austin calls for philosophers to bring a deeper understanding of natural language meaning to bear as they do their tasks. In consequence Austin’s lectures provide a fascinating start—but only a start—on a number of key questions in the philosophy of perception

Nonconceptual content and the nature of perceptual experience

Recent philosophy of mind and epistemology has seen an important and influential trend towards accounting for at least some features of experiences in content-involving terms. It is a contested point whether ascribing content to experiences can account for all the intrinsic properties of experiences, but on many theories of experiences there are close links between the ascription of content and the ways in which experiences are ascribed and typed. The issues here have both epistemological and psychological dimensions. On the one hand, a theory of experiential content has a fundamental role in explaining how knowledge of the world can be acquired through experience. On the other hand, there are important psychological questions about the phenomenology of experiences and the conditions under which content ascriptions are made. The debate about whether experiences have conceptual or nonconceptual content is highly relevant to both the epistemological and psychological issues. This is apparent in the work of Gareth Evans who is often cited as the first philosopher to propose a theory of nonconceptual content. This paper will explicate and examine Evans' theory. In particular, attention will be paid to Evans' claim that perceptually-derived information with nonconceptual content can only qualify as a perceptual experience when it serves as input to a thinking, concept-applying, and reasoning system. We will sketch out a theoretical approach to the nature of nonconceptual content that builds on Evans' insight but does not follow him in this restrictive claim

Multimodal Grounding for Language Processing

This survey discusses how recent developments in multimodal processing facilitate conceptual grounding of language. We categorize the information flow in multimodal processing with respect to cognitive models of human information processing and analyze different methods for combining multimodal representations. Based on this methodological inventory, we discuss the benefit of multimodal grounding for a variety of language processing tasks and the challenges that arise. We particularly focus on multimodal grounding of verbs which play a crucial role for the compositional power of language.Comment: The paper has been published in the Proceedings of the 27 Conference of Computational Linguistics. Please refer to this version for citations: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/papers/C/C18/C18-1197