From human to artificial cognition and back: New perspectives on cognitively inspired AI systems

We overview the main historical and technological elements characterising the rise, the fall and the recent renaissance of the cognitive approaches to Artificial Intelligence and provide some insights and suggestions about the future directions and challenges that, in our opinion, this discipline needs to face in the next years

Dual PECCS: A Cognitive System for Conceptual Representation and Categorization

In this article we present an advanced version of Dual-PECCS, a cognitively-inspired knowledge representation and reasoning system aimed at extending the capabilities of artificial systems in conceptual categorization tasks. It combines different sorts of common-sense categorization (prototypical and exemplars-based categorization) with standard monotonic categorization procedures. These different types of inferential procedures are reconciled according to the tenets coming from the dual process theory of reasoning. On the other hand, from a representational perspective, the system relies on the hypothesis of conceptual structures represented as heterogeneous proxytypes. Dual-PECCS has been experimentally assessed in a task of conceptual categorization where a target concept illustrated by a simple common-sense linguistic description had to be identified by resorting to a mix of categorization strategies, and its output has been compared to human responses. The obtained results suggest that our approach can be beneficial to improve the representational and reasoning conceptual capabilities of standard cognitive artificial systems, and –in addition– that it may be plausibly applied to different general computational models of cognition. The current version of the system, in fact, extends our previous work, in that Dual-PECCS is now integrated and tested into two cognitive architectures, ACT-R and CLARION, implementing different assumptions on the underlying invariant structures governing human cognition. Such integration allowed us to extend our previous evaluation

Integrating a Cognitive Framework for Knowledge Representation and Categorization in Diverse Cognitive Architectures

AbstractThis paper describes the rationale followed for the integration of Dual-PECCS, a cognitively-inspired knowledge representation and reasoning system, into two rather different cognitive architectures, such as ACT-R and CLARION. The provided integration shows how the repre-sentational and reasoning mechanisms implemented by our framework may be plausibly applied to computational models of cognition based on different assumptions

Immunoglobulins in Human Seminal Plasma

Single radial immunodiffusion has been used to evaluate immunoglobulins and secretory piece (SP) in human seminal plasma. Samples were collected from 90 healthy volunteers, 202 subjects submitted to vasectomy for contraceptive purposes, tested at various intervals after surgery, and 725 patients grouped according to selected andrological disorders. Results may be summarized as follows. In normal subjects IgG and IgA were constantly present (mean values +/- SD: 8.14 +/- 2.82 mg/dl; 1.91 +/- 1.03 mg/dl, respectively) while IgM were detected in trace amounts (from 0.7 to 3.3 mg/dl) in 10% of subjects, and negligible or absent in the remaining subjects. In vasectomized subjects IgG and IgA showed a significant increase only in the first 3 months after vasectomy, probably due to surgery. In andrological patients Ig showed an increase in cases with antisperm antibodies (A b) and in those with infections of genital tract and positive semen culture. On the basis of these findings and the secretory piece assay data the importance appears to be stressed of the local immunocompetent system at least in some andrological diseases