What we know and what we believe : lessons from cognitive psychology

Most of what is known about scenarios comes from three sources: articles in the practitioner literature describing how scenario planning is undertaken; articles from the ‘future research’ literature that offer models for constructing scenarios, and a small body of research based on empirical studies of related topics. It is this third source that Ron Bradfield discusses as he draws out possible lessons from research for scenario practitioner

The grounding of higher order concepts in action and language: A cognitive robotics model

In this paper we present a neuro-robotic model that uses artificial neural networks for investigating the relations between the development of symbol manipulation capabilities and of sensorimotor knowledge in the humanoid robot iCub. We describe a cognitive robotics model in which the linguistic input provided by the experimenter guides the autonomous organization of the robot’s knowledge. In this model, sequences of linguistic inputs lead to the development of higher-order concepts grounded on basic concepts and actions. In particular, we show that higher-order symbolic representations can be indirectly grounded in action primitives directly grounded in senso-rimotor experiences. The use of recurrent neural network also permits the learning of higher-order concepts based on temporal sequences of action prim-itives. Hence, the meaning of a higher-order concept is obtained through the combination of basic sensorimotor knowledge. We argue that such a hierar-chical organization of concepts can be a possible account for the acquisition of abstract words in cognitive robots

\u2018Fell\u2019 primes \u2018fall\u2019, but does \u2018bell\u2019 prime \u2018ball\u2019? Masked priming with irregularly-inflected primes

Recent masked priming experiments have brought to light a morphological level of analysis that is exclusively based on the orthographic appearance of words, so that it breaks down corner into corn\u2011 and \u2013er, as well as dealer into deal\u2011 and \u2011er (Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004). Being insensitive to semantic factors, this morpho\u2011orthographic segmentation process cannot capture the morphological relationship between irregularly inflected words and their base forms (e.g., fell\u2011fall, bought\u2011buy); hence, the prediction follows that these words should not facilitate each other in masked priming experiments. However, the first experiment described in the present work demonstrates that fell does facilitate fall more than orthographically\u2011matched (e.g., fill) and unrelated control words (e.g., hope). Experiments 2 and 3 also show that this effect cannot be explained through orthographic sub-regularities that characterize many irregular inflections, as no priming arose when unrelated words showing the same orthographic patterns were tested (e.g., tell\u2011tall vs. toll\u2011tall). These results highlight the existence of a second higher-level source of masked morphological priming; we propose that this second source of priming is located at the lemma level, where inflected words (but not derived words) share their representation irrespective of orthographic regularit