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Transfer of Cognitive Skill
, 1989
"... A framework for skill acquisition is proposed that includes two major stages in the development of a cognitive skill: a declarative stage in which facts about the skill domain are interpreted and a procedural stage in which the domain knowledge is directly embodied in procedures for performing the s ..."
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Cited by 894 (22 self)
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A framework for skill acquisition is proposed that includes two major stages in the development of a cognitive skill: a declarative stage in which facts about the skill domain are interpreted and a procedural stage in which the domain knowledge is directly embodied in procedures for performing the skill. This general framework has been instantiated in the ACT system in which facts are encoded in a propositional network and procedures are encoded as productions. Knowledge compilation is the process by which the skill transits from the declarative stage to the procedural stage. It consists of the subprocesses of composition, which collapses sequences of productions into single productions, and proceduralization, which embeds factual knowledge into productions. Once proceduralized, further learning processes operate on the skill to make the productions more selective in their range of applications. These processes include generalization, discrimination, and strengthening of productions. Comparisons are made to similar concepts from past learning theories. How these learning mechanisms apply to produce the power law speedup in processing time with practice is discussed. It requires at least 100 hours of learning and practice to acquire any significant cognitive skill to a reasonable degree of proficiency. For instance, after 100 hours a student learning to program a computer has achieved only a very modest facility in the skill. Learning one's primary language takes tens of thousands of hours. The psychology of human learning has been very thin in ideas about what happens to skills under the impact of this amount of learning—and for obvious reasons. This article presents a theory about the changes in the nature of a skill over such large time scales and about the basic learning processes that are responsible.
Basic objects in natural categories
- COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
, 1976
"... Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest categ ..."
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Cited by 892 (1 self)
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Categorizations which humans make of the concrete world are not arbitrary but highly determined. In taxonomies of concrete objects, there is one level of abstraction at which the most basic category cuts are made. Basic categories are those which carry the most information, possess the highest category cue validity, and are, thus, the most differentiated from one another. The four experiments of Part I define basic objects by demonstrating that in taxonomies of common concrete nouns in English based on class inclusion, basic objects are the most inclusive categories whose members: (a) possess significant numbers of attributes in common, (b) have motor programs which are similar to one another, (c) have similar shapes, and (d) can be identified from averaged shapes of members of the class. The eight experiments of Part II explore implications of the structure of categories. Basic objects are shown to be the most inclusive categories for which a concrete image of the category as a whole can be formed, to be the first categorizations made during perception of the environment, to be the earliest categories sorted and earliest named by children, and to be the categories
The importance of shape in early lexical learning
- Cognitive Development
, 1988
"... We ask if certain dimensions of perceptual similarity are weighted more heavily than others in determining word extension. The specific dimensions examined were shape, size, and texture. In four experiments, subjects were asked either to extend a novel count noun to new instances or, in a nonword cl ..."
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Cited by 235 (31 self)
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We ask if certain dimensions of perceptual similarity are weighted more heavily than others in determining word extension. The specific dimensions examined were shape, size, and texture. In four experiments, subjects were asked either to extend a novel count noun to new instances or, in a nonword classification task, to put together objects that go together. The subjects were 2-year-olds, 3-year-olds, and adults. The results of all four experiments indicate that 2- and 3-year-olds and adults all weight shape more heavily than they do size or texture. This observed emphasis on shape, however, depends on the age of the subject and the task. First, there is a developmental trend. The shape bias increases in strength and generality from 2 to 3 years of age and more markedly from early childhood to adulthood. Second, in young children, the shape bias is much stronger in word extension than in nonword classification tasks. These results suggest that the development of the shape bias originates in language learning-it reflects a fact about language-and does not stem from general perceptual processes. Within the first few years of life, children learn many hundreds of words for different kinds of natural objects and artifacts. As many have noted, the rapidity
Human simulation of vocabulary learning
- Cognition
, 1999
"... The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requ ..."
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Cited by 197 (8 self)
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The work reported here experimentally investigates a striking generalization about vocabulary acquisition: Noun learning is superior to verb learning in the earliest moments of child language development. The dominant explanation of this phenomenon in the literature invokes differing conceptual requirements for items in these lexical categories: Verbs are cognitively more complex than nouns and so their acquisition must await certain mental developments in the infant. In the present work, we investigate an alternative hypothesis; namely, that it is the information requirements of verb learning, not the conceptual requirements, that crucially determine the acquisition order. Efficient verb learning requires access to structural features of the exposure language and thus cannot take place until a scaffolding of noun knowledge enables the acquisition of clause-level syntax. More generally, we experimentally investigate the hypothesis that vocabulary acquisition takes place via an incremental constraint-satisfaction procedure that bootstraps itself into successively more sophisticated linguistic representations which, in turn, enable new kinds of vocabulary learning. If the experimental subjects were young children, it would be difficult to distinguish between this information-centered hypothesis and the conceptual change hypothesis. Therefore the experimental learners are adults. The items to be “acquired ” in the experiments were the 24 most frequent nouns and 24 most frequent verbs
Distributed Memory and the Representation of General and Specific Information
, 1985
"... We describe a distributed model of information processing and memory and apply it to the representation of general and specific information. The model consists of a large number of simple processing elements which send excitatory and inhibitory signals to each other via modifiable connections. Infor ..."
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Cited by 188 (13 self)
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We describe a distributed model of information processing and memory and apply it to the representation of general and specific information. The model consists of a large number of simple processing elements which send excitatory and inhibitory signals to each other via modifiable connections. Information processing is thought of as the process whereby patterns of activation are formed over the units in the model through their excitatory and inhibitory interactions. The memory trace of a processing event is the change or increment to the strengths of the interconnections that results from the processing event. The traces of separate events are superimposed on each other in the values of the connection strengths that result from the entire set of traces stored in the memory. The model is applied to a number of findings related to the question of whether we store abstract representations or an enumeration of specific experiences in memory. The model simulates the results of a number of important experiments which have been taken as evidence for the enumeration of specific experiences. At the same time, it shows how the functional equivalent of abstract representations—prototypes, logogens
Integrating topics and syntax
- In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17
, 2005
"... Statistical approaches to language learning typically focus on either short-range syntactic dependencies or long-range semantic dependencies between words. We present a generative model that uses both kinds of dependencies, and can be used to simultaneously find syntactic classes and semantic topics ..."
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Cited by 180 (21 self)
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Statistical approaches to language learning typically focus on either short-range syntactic dependencies or long-range semantic dependencies between words. We present a generative model that uses both kinds of dependencies, and can be used to simultaneously find syntactic classes and semantic topics despite having no representation of syntax or semantics beyond statistical dependency. This model is competitive on tasks like part-of-speech tagging and document classification with models that exclusively use short- and long-range dependencies respectively. 1
The parallel distributed processing approach to semantic cognition
, 2003
"... How do we know what properties a thing has, and which of its properties should be generalized to other objects? How is the knowledge underlying these abilities acquired, and how is it affected by brain disorder? Our approach to these issues is based on the idea that cognitive processes arise from th ..."
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Cited by 93 (8 self)
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How do we know what properties a thing has, and which of its properties should be generalized to other objects? How is the knowledge underlying these abilities acquired, and how is it affected by brain disorder? Our approach to these issues is based on the idea that cognitive processes arise from the interactions of neurons via synaptic connections. The knowledge in such parallel distributed processing systems is stored in the strengths of the connections and is acquired gradually through the course of life experience. Degredation of semantic knowledge occurs through degredation of the patterns of neural activity that probe the knowledge stored in the connections. Simulation models based on these ideas capture semantic cognitive processes and their development and disintegration, encompassing domain-specific patterns of generalization in young children and the restructuring of conceptual knowledge as a function of experience. How do we know that Socrates is mortal? Aristotle answered this question by suggesting that we use two propositions: (2) Socrates is a man. (2) All men are mortal. This classical sylogism forms the
Using sound to solve syntactic problems: "e role of phonology in grammatical category assignments
- Psychological Review
, 1992
"... One ubiquitous problem in language processing involves the assignment of words to the correct ..."
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Cited by 92 (0 self)
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One ubiquitous problem in language processing involves the assignment of words to the correct
Children’s acquisition of the number words and the counting system
- Cognitive Psychology
, 1992
"... This paper examines how and when children come to understand the way in which counting determines numerosity and learn the meanings of the number words. A 7-month longitudinal study of 2 and 3 year olds shows that, very early on, children already know that the counting words each refer to a distinct ..."
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Cited by 91 (1 self)
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This paper examines how and when children come to understand the way in which counting determines numerosity and learn the meanings of the number words. A 7-month longitudinal study of 2 and 3 year olds shows that, very early on, children already know that the counting words each refer to a distinct, unique numerosity, though they do not yet know to which numerosity each word refers. It is possible that children learn this in part from the syntax of the number words. Despite this early knowledge, however, it takes children a long time (on the order of a year) to learn how the counting system represents numerosity. This suggests that our initial concept of number is represented quite differently from the way the counting system represents number, making it a difficult task for children to map the one onto the other. o 1% ~ Academic press, IIIC.
