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Illusions in reasoning with quantifiers
The mental model theory postulates that reasoners build models of the situations described in premises, and that these models normally make explicit only what is true. A computer program revealed an unexpected consequence of the theory: it predicts that certain inferences should have compelling but erroneous conclusions. Two experiments corroborated the existence of such illusions in inferences about what is possible given quantified assertions, such as 'At least some of the plastic beads are not red.' Experiment 1 showed that, as predicted, participants erroneously inferred that impossible assertions were possible, and that possible situations were impossible, but they performed well with control problems. Experiment 2 demonstrated the existence of similar illusions in inferences from dyadic assertions, e.g. 'All the boys played with the girls'
The usability of description logics: understanding the cognitive difficulties presented by description logics
Description Logics have been extensively studied from the viewpoint of decidability and computational tractability. Less attention has been given to their usability and the cognitive difficulties they present, in particular for those who are not specialists in logic. This paper reports on a study into the difficulties associated with the most commonly used Description Logic features. Psychological theories are used to take account of these. Whilst most of the features presented no difficulty to participants, the comprehension of some was affected by commonly occurring misconceptions. The paper proposes explanations and remedies for some of these difficulties. In addition, the time to confirm stated inferences was found to depend both on the maximum complexity of the relations involved and the number of steps in the argument
Spatial updating in narratives.
Across two experiments we investigated spatial updating in
environments encoded through narratives. In Experiment 1, in which
participants were given visualization instructions to imagine the protagonist’s
movement, they formed an initial representation during learning but did not
update it during subsequent described movement. In Experiment 2, in which
participants were instructed to physically move in space towards the directions
of the described objects prior to testing, there was evidence for spatial updating.
Overall, findings indicate that physical movement can cause participants to link
a spatial representation of a remote environment to a sensorimotor framework
and update the locations of remote objects while they move
Research Perspectives for Logic and Deduction
The article is meant to be kind of the author's manifesto for the role of logic and deduction within Intellectics. Based on a brief analysis of this role the paper presents a number of proposals for future scientic research along the various di-mensions in the space of logical explorations. These dimensions include the range of possible applications including modelling intelligent behavior, the grounding of logic in some semantic context, the choice of an appropriate logic from the great variety of alternatives, then the choice of an appropriate formal system for repre-senting the chosen logic, and nally the issue of developing the most ecient search strategies. Among the proposals is a conjecture concerning the treatment of cuts in proof search. Often a key advance is a matter of applying a small change to a single formula. Ray Kurzweil [Kur05, p.5]
Moral courage in the workplace: moving to and from the desire and decision to act
Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/72135/1/j.1467-8608.2007.00484.x.pd
A Robust Parser-Interpreter for Jazz Chord Sequences
Hierarchical structure similar to that associated with prosody and syntax in language can be identified in the rhythmic and harmonic progressions that underlie Western tonal music. Analysing such musical struc-ture resembles natural language parsing: it requires the derivation of an underlying interpretation from an un-structured sequence of highly ambiguous elements— in the case of music, the notes. The task here is not merely to decide whether the sequence is grammati-cal, but rather to decide which among a large number of analyses it has. An analysis of this sort is a part of the cognitive processing performed by listeners familiar with a musical idiom, whether musically trained or not. Our focus is on the analysis of the structure of ex-pectations and resolutions created by harmonic progres-sions. Building on previous work, we define a theory of tonal harmonic progression, which plays a role analo-gous to semantics in language. Our parser uses a formal grammar of jazz chord sequences, of a kind widely used for natural language processing (NLP), to map music, in the form of chord sequences used by performers, onto a representation of the structured relationships between chords. It uses statistical modelling techniques used for wide-coverage parsing in NLP to make practical pars-ing feasible in the face of considerable ambiguity in the grammar. Using machine learning over a small corpus of jazz chord sequences annotated with harmonic anal-yses, we show that grammar-based musical interpreta-tion using simple statistical parsing models is more ac-curate than a baseline HMM. The experiment demon-strates that statistical techniques adapted from NLP can be profitably applied to the analysis of harmonic struc-ture
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