Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues have provided us with yet another ground-breaking investigation into the linguistic abilities (or "quasi-linguistic abilities " — see below) of our nearest phylogenetic neighbor, the chimpanzee. Their monograph begins with some brief but useful reviews of the primate language literature, and the literature on early comprehension and production of language in human children. The authors document the peculiar bias toward production and the relative neglect of comprehension that have characterized the child language literature, and they ask a perfectly reasonable question: If we want to understand what an organism knows about language, isn't comprehension a better place to start? And if we want to compare knowledge of language in two related species, how can we draw any firm conclusions if our work is based exclusively on what the animal can produce?

Recently, shruti has been proposed as a connectionist model of rapid reasoning. It demonstrates how a network of simple neuron-like elements can encode a large number of specific facts as well as systematic knowledge (rules) involving n-ary relations, quantification and concept hierarchies, and perform a class of reasoning with extreme efficiency. The model, however, does not deal with negated facts and rules involving negated antecedents and consequents. We describe an extension of shruti that can encode positive as well as negated knowledge and use such knowledge during reflexive reasoning. The extended model explains how an agent can hold inconsistent knowledge in its long-term memory without being "aware" that its beliefs are inconsistent, but detect a contradiction whenever inconsistent beliefs that are within a certain inferential distance of each other become co-active during an episode of reasoning. Thus the model is not logically omniscient, but detects contradictions whenever...

Abstract not found

Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves partial reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. On this view, the processing of emotion knowledge involves a (partial) reexperience of an emotion, but only when access to the sensory basis of emotion knowledge is required by the task. In 2 experiments, participants judged emotional and neutral concepts corresponding to concrete objects (Experiment 1) and abstract states (Experiment 2) while facial electromyographic activity was recorded from the cheek, brow, eye, and nose regions. Results of both studies show embodiment of specific emotions in an emotion-focused but not a perceptual-focused processing task on the same words. A follow up in Experiment 3, which blocked selective facial expressions, suggests a causal, rather than simply a correlational, role for embodiment in emotion word processing. Experiment 4, using a property generation task, provided support for the conclusion that emotions embodied in conceptual tasks are context-dependent situated simulations rather than associated emotional reactions. Implications for theories of embodied simulation and for emotion theories are discussed.

The work described in this chapter is motivated by the conviction that a cognitive theory of semantic memory is best-suited to investigate the functional and neural bases of the semantic memory system. The advantage of this approach is that detailed hypotheses about the structure and function of the semantic system can be formulated and then tested in behavioral experiments with healthy individuals and neurologically impaired patients. The challenge is then to identify the neural correlates of these experimentally validated cognitive structures and processes, i.e., their neural substrates and mechanisms. The cognitive model provides a detailed framework for this investigation which, when combined with the appropriate functional-neuroanatomical technique, provides the potential to meet this challenge.

A prevailing neurobiological theory of semantic memory proposes that part of our knowledge about concrete, highly imageable concepts is stored in the form of sensory–motor representations. While this theory predicts differential activation of the semantic system by concrete and abstract words, previous functional imaging studies employing this contrast have provided relatively little supporting evidence. We acquired event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data while participants performed a semantic similarity judgment task on a large number of concrete and abstract noun triads. Task difficulty was manipulated by varying the degree to which the words in the triad were similar in meaning. Concrete nouns, relative to abstract nouns, produced greater activation in a bilateral network of multimodal and heteromodal association areas, including ventral and medial temporal, posterior–inferior parietal, dorsal prefrontal, and posterior cingulate cortex. In contrast, abstract nouns produced greater activation almost

emotion, and motivation1 Psychologists feel at ease with behavior- they can observe it, classify it, even manipulate it quite successfully. But they have serious difficulties with mental phenomena that control and accompany behavior-- like thoughts, emotions, or action tendencies. As implied by the concept mental these processes occcur inside our head and are thus not directly observable. While we may get some glimpses from a person´s verbal report concerning current thoughts, feelings, or motives or from the effect of the central processes on the periphery, such as physiological symptoms and motor expression in face, voice, and body, we are always constrained by the need to infer the nature of mental activity (Scherer, 1992). The nature of the mental processes has been an issue of central importance ever since man started to study the human mind. The first systematic effort was made by Plato. One of his major philosophical models- the tripartite structure of the soul- was not only a pioneering effort, it has influenced virtually every thinker interested in the human mind ever since. And it still exerts a powerful influence on the organization of theory and research in present-day psychology. In this, psychology seems to share the fate of

Category theory can be applied to mathematically model the semantics of cognitive neural systems. Here, we employ colimits, functors and natural transformations to model the implementation of concept hierarchies in neural networks equipped with multiple sensors. 1 Introduction In this paper, we describe a mathematical scheme for the analysis and design of cognitive neural network architectures based upon functors and natural transformations, the structural mappings of category theory. In a previous paper[3], we described a mathematical scheme for representing the hierarchical structure of subconcept-concept relationships based upon colimits, a categorical construction for objects which represent entire diagrams, or structural graphs, of related objects. Functors map the concept colimits into a category of neural components; natural transformations between the functors unify single-sensor concept representations in a fused, multi-mode neural network architecture. This kind of mathemati...

hen a most fortuitous event occurred (especially for this story). As I was leaving the party, I ran into Doug in Sandy's front yard and asked if he could bring me a belt the next morning. Being the extremely generous guy that he is, Doug took off his belt on the spot and handed it to me. I'm sure that Sandy's neighbors are still talking about this. More importantly, though, when I put on the belt, it was about three inches too short, which I found surprising, given that I'm in pretty good physical condition. The thought that ran immediately through my mind was, "Wow, Doug is in great shape." As anyone who has spent a few days with Doug knows, he exercises religiously and eats carefully, with the result being his gazelle-like figure. This is one of Doug's embodied qualities that might be missed from a purely cognitive perspective. Another of Doug's most notable embodied qualities is how intensely he blushes. When I pointed this out at the workshop, true to form, Doug produced one of his

Schizophrenia is a complex and heterogeneous disease, incorporating at least three distinct subsyndromes: psycho-motor poverty (poverty of speech, lack of spontaneous movement, blunting of affect), disorganisation (inappropriate affect, disturbances of the form of thought), and reality distortion (Liddle 1987, Johnstone 1991). The reality distortion syndrome encompasses the so