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The Adaptive Advantage Of Symbolic Theft Over Sensorimotor Toil: Grounding Language In Perceptual Categories (1998) [34 citations — 11 self]

Abstract:

Using neural nets to simulate learning and the genetic algorithm to simulate evolution in a toy world of mushrooms and mushroom-foragers, we place two ways of acquiring categories into direct competition with one another: In (1) "sensorimotor toil," new categories are acquired through real-time, feedbackcorrected, trial and error experience in sorting them. In (2) "symbolic theft," new categories are acquired by hearsay from propositions -- boolean combinations of symbols describing them. In competition, symbolic theft always beats sensorimotor toil. We hypothesize that this is the basis of the adaptive advantage of language. Entry-level categories must still be learned by toil, however, to avoid an infinite regress (the "symbol grounding problem"). Changes in the internal representations of categories must take place during the course of learning by toil. These changes can be analyzed in terms of the compression of within-category similarities and the expansion of between-category dif...

Citations

2044 Learning internal representations by error propagation – Rumelhart, G, et al. - 1986
895 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception – Gibson - 1986
531 The symbol grounding problem – Harnad - 1990
81 Categorical perception: the groundwork of cognition – Harnad - 1987
70 Syntax without natural selection: how compositionality emerges from vocabulary in a population of learners – Kirby - 2000
68 Econets: Neural Networks that Learn in a Environment – Parisi, Cecconi - 1990
65 Influences of categorization on perceptual discrimination – Goldstone - 1994
27 Categorical perception effects induced by category learning – Livingston, Andrews - 1998
26 Learned Categorical Perception in Neural Nets: Implications for Symbol Grounding – Harnad, Hanson, et al. - 1994
19 Grounding symbols in the analog world with neural nets – Harnad - 1993
13 Warping similarity space in category learning by backprop nets – Tijsseling, Harnad - 1997
12 The origin of words: A psychophysical hypothesis – Harnad - 1996
12 Grounding symbols through evolutionary language games – Steels - 2001
11 Connecting object to symbol in modeling cognition – Harnad - 1992
11 Categorical Perception and the Evolution of Supervised Learning in Neural Nets – Harnad, Hanson, et al. - 1991
9 Grounding symbolic capacity in robotic capacity – Harnad - 1995
6 Evolution of a rapidly learned representation for speech – Nakisa, Plunkett - 1998
4 Warping similarity space in category learning by human subjects: The role of task difficulty – Pevtzow, Harnad - 1997
4 From hand to mouth: Some critical stages in the evolution of language. In: S. Harnad et al – Steklis, Harnad - 1976
3 On the interaction of prior knowledge and stimulus structure in category learning – Livingston, Andrews - 1995
2 Experimental analysis of naming behavior cannot explain naming capacity – Harnad - 1996
1 Induction, evolution and accountability. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 280:58 – Harnad - 1976
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