... This article presents one alternative to the computer metaphor suggesting that brains are organized into independent modules. Evidence is reviewed that brains are organized into parallel processing streams with complementary properties. Hierarchical interactions within each stream and parallel interactions between streams create coherent behavioral representations that overcome the complementary deficiencies of each stream and support unitary conscious experiences. This perspective suggests how brain design reflects the organization of the physical world with which brains interact. Examples from perception, learning, cognition, and action are described, and theoretical concepts and mechanisms by which complementarity is accomplished are presented.

A key goal of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience is to link brain mechanisms to behavioral functions. The present article describes recent progress towards explaining how the visual cortex sees. Visual cortex, like many parts of perceptual and cognitive neocortex, is organized into six main layers of cells, as well as characteristic sub-lamina. Here it is proposed how these layered circuits help to realize processes of development, learning, perceptual grouping, attention, and 3D vision through a combination of bottom-up, horizontal, and top-down interactions. A key theme is that the mechanisms which enable development and learning to occur in a stable way imply properties of adult behavior. These results thus begin to unify three fields: infant cortical development, adult cortical neurophysiology and anatomy, and adult visual perception. The identified cortical mechanisms promise to generalize to explain how other perceptual and cognitive processes work.

Chomsky and Halle (1968) and many formal linguists rely on the notion of a universally available phonetic space defined in discrete time. This assumption plays a central role in phonological theory. Discreteness at the phonetic level guarantees the discreteness of all other levels of language. But decades of phonetics research demonstrate that there exists no universal inventory of phonetic objects. We discuss three kinds of evidence: first, phonologies differ incommensurably. Second, some phonetic characteristics of languages depend on intrinsically temporal patterns, and, third, some linguistic sound categories within a language are different from each other despite a high degree of overlap that precludes distinctness. Linguistics has mistakenly presumed that speech can always be spelled with letter-like tokens. A variety of implications of these conclusions for research in phonology are discussed.* The generative paradigm of language description (Chomsky 1964, 1965, Chomsky & Halle 1968) has dominated linguistic thinking in the United States for many years. Its specific claims about the phonetic basis of linguistic analysis still provide the cornerstone of most linguistic research. Many criticisms have been raised against the phonetic claims of the Sound pattern of English (Chomsky & Halle 1968), some from early on

What brain mechanisms underlie autism and how do they give rise to autistic behavioral symptoms? This article describes a neural model, called the iSTART model, which proposes how cognitive, emotional, timing, and motor processes that involve brain regions like prefrontal and temporal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, and cerebellum may interact together to create and perpetuate autistic symptoms. These model processes were originally developed to explain data concerning how the brain controls normal behaviors. The iSTART model shows how autistic behavioral symptoms may arise from prescribed breakdowns in these brain processes, notably a combination of underaroused emotional depression in the amygdala and related affective brain regions, learning of hyperspecific recognition categories in temporal and prefrontal cortices, and breakdowns of adaptively timed attentional and motor circuits in the hippocampal system and cerebellum. The model clarifies how malfunctions in a subset of these mechanisms can, though a system-wide vicious circle of environmentally mediated feedback, cause and maintain problems with them all. ii

understanding

... This article presents one alternative to the computer metaphor suggesting that brains are organized into independent modules. Evidence is reviewed that brains are organized into parallel processing streams with complementary properties. Hierarchical interactions within each stream and parallel interactions between streams create coherent behavioral representations that overcome the complementary deficiencies of each stream and support unitary conscious experiences. This perspective suggests how brain design reflects the organization of the physical world with which brains interact. Examples from perception, learning, cognition, and action are described, and theoretical concepts and mechanisms by which complementarity is accomplished are presented.

Abstract — Creative thinking is one of the hallmarks of human-level competence. Although it is still a poorly understood subject speculative ideas about brain processes involved in creative thinking may be implemented in computational models. A review of different approaches to creativity, insight and intuition is presented. Two factors are essential for creativity: imagination and selection or filtering. Imagination should be constrained by experience, while filtering in the case of creative use of words may be based on semantic and phonological associations. Analysis of brain processes involved in invention of new words leads to practical algorithms that create many interesting and novel names associated with a set of keywords. I.

Latent attractor networks are recurrent neural networks with weak attractors that bias the network's response to external stimuli but never fully manifest themselves. Such networks have been used to model context-dependent place representations in the hippocampus [5], and to encode context-dependent stimuli in neural networks [3]. In the original latent attractor model, each attractor was triggered by a unique context pattern representing a stimulus that uniquely identi ed the context of the subsequent episode. This model was later extended to the case where contexts were triggered progressively by the sequential presentation of several stimulus patterns without regard to order. In this paper, we describe a network model that can select contexts even if the triggering stimulus patterns are interspersed among patterns irrelevant to context selection. This is closer to the way such a process would occur cognitively, where contexts are typically recognized based on a subset of sequentially perceived identi ers or cues among a larger set of perceived items.

Phonetic variation as found in various speech styles is a rich area for research on spoken word recognition. Research on spoken word recognition has focused on careful, easily controlled speech styles. This dissertation investigates the processing of the American English Flap. Specifically, it focuses on the effect of reduction on processing. The main question asked in this dissertation is whether listeners adjust their expectations for how segments are realized based on speech style. Even more broadly, how do listeners process or recognize reduced speech? Two specific questions are asked that address individual parts of the broad question. First, how does reduction affect listeners’ recognition of words? Is it more difficult for listeners to recognize words pronounced in reduced forms, or is it perhaps easier for listeners to recognize reduced forms? Second, do listeners adjust their expectations about reduction based on preceding speech style (context)? Four experiments were designed using the auditory lexical decision and cross-modal identity priming tasks. Listeners’ responses to reduced and unreduced flaps (e.g. unreduced [pʌɾl̩] as opposed to reduced [pʌɾ̞l̩]) were recorded. The results of this work show that the phonetic variation found in speech styles containing reduction causes differences in processing. Processing of reduced speech is inhibited by weakened acoustic information or mismatch to the underlying phonemic representation in the American English flap. Listeners use information about speech style to process the widely varying acoustic reflections of a segment in connected speech. The implications of these findings for models of spoken word recognition are discussed.

linguistica. Il caso della prosodia 69 Valentina Caniparoli, The role of rhythmic and distributional cues in speech recognition 85 Olga M. Manfrellotti, The role of literacy in the recognition of phonological units 99 Sarah Hawkins & Rachel Smith, Polysp: a polysystemic, phonetically-rich approach to speech understandingDirettore/Editor: Pier Marco Bertinetto (Pisa, SNS).