Hot answers tagged cognitive-modeling
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Probabilistic approaches of this sort are usually referred to more specifically as the bayesian approach and Chater and Tanenbaum are definitely bayesians (I have not read much by Yuille and can't comment). Bayesianism is more than just increasing in popularity and being encouraged; it is considered one of the big-4 approaches to cognitive-modeling, with the ...
12
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Video Games (C. S. Green, D. Bavelier, 2004) is a good if somewhat dated overview of cognitive research on video game players. They note that ordinary video game users show a number of differentiated and improved mental skills:
Video game play has been shown to dramatically
enhance visuo-motor skills. In particular, video ...
10
Artem gave a very good answer, but I want to add one more weaknesses of probabilistic/Bayesian models: they are not mechanistic. This is related to Artem's point about neural grounding, but is a little different. The issue is that probabilistic models don't really provide insight into the underlying mechanism that produces the observed behavior -- if you ask ...
9
In my experience, the term "semantic knowledge" (or semantic memory or conceptual knowledge) is generally used to refer to knowledge of objects, word meanings, facts and people, without connection to any particular time or place. The neural basis of this kind of knowledge is more or less agreed to depend on a distributed network of cortical brain regions ...
9
Given your background and interest in modeling, I would highly recommend The Cambridge Handbook of Computational Psychology. The book provides an overview for several of the prominent modeling paradigms in cogsci, including dynamical systems, as well as many concrete examples--albeit most using other computational paradigms.
Dynamical systems, to my ...
9
Here are a few options. I have not tried them yet personally.
LBA
Scott Brown has a copy of Donkin et al (2009) on his web page with some code in R, Excel, and WinBUGS for fitting the LBA model:
http://www.newcl.org/publications/DonkinAverellEtAl2009BRM.pdf
http://www.newcl.org/members/chris/fitLBA.zip
Diffusion model
The Diffussion model is ...
8
Video game training has long been shown to influence perceptual-motor skills, but also visual selective attention,(1) although it might well involve a mix of pre attentive and attentive processing. I have no difficulties imagining there are some key studies on fastest adaptation in children as compared to older people, where effects are probably expressed ...
8
The major neural models of consciousness at the moment roughly fall into two camps: cognitive and phenomenological. They are defined by controversy surrounding what types of experience qualify as concious.
Cognitive models
On the one hand there are strong cognitive models of consciousness, such as the one proposed by Stanislas Dehaene, where consciousness ...
7
Playing action video games improves performance in subitizing and multiple object tracking, both of which are abilities involving attending to multiple objects at once. Note that it's a causal relationship; people who don't play action video games show improvements in those two abilities after playing for a while.
More generally, playing action video games ...
7
This is not my research field, but I'm also very interested in this topic. As far as I know there has not been much research done but two articles of interest are:
Washburn, D. A. (2003). The games psychologists play (and the data
they provide). Behavior research methods, instruments & computers,
35(2), 185-193. Psychonomic Society Publications.
This ...
7
Schroedingers Cat nailed a couple of important points and I need to expand it further.
I believe the important roadblock in the creation of an absolutely intelligent machine is the fact that human brain is still not decrypted. There isn't a holistic cognitive model that describes how the brain functions, reacts or take decisions. Even in case such a model ...
7
I would doubt that the effect you described is an example for the positivity effect, which is a form of attributional bias, rather than connected to basic perceptual phenomena.
Instead I think that the experimental results you described can be explained by a priming effect. Priming describes the phenomenon that the exposure to one stimulus influences the ...
7
Dehaene & Changeux (1991) made a neural-network model:
The coding units are clusters of neurons organized in layers, or assemblies. A sensonmotor loop enables the network to sort the input cards according to several criteria (color, form, etc.). A higher-level assembly of rule-coding clusters codes for the currently tested rule, which shifts when ...
7
One common way of framing numerical cognition is in terms of a "mental number line". This mental number line is thought to have a logarithmic scale, so perceived differences are inversely proportional to their magnitude. For example, the difference between 6 and 7 is perceived as bigger than the difference between 76 and 77. This is just a variant of the ...
6
I've always thought of Stanford Prison Experiment (and Abu Ghraib) as a situation in which group think forms a sort of feedback loop. If you agree that people behave within context of a group, and the context is created by the group itself (Hogg, 1998), then you can see what is happening. The context may at first be in line with the larger group (the ...
6
"how to build a system that can read natural language and ... understand it"
I am not sure you appreciate what you are wanting here. Just this one piece requires an understanding of the processes of the mind that I don't believe we are at yet. There is a lot of material about how we MIGHT achieve this, but you would need to appreciate the whole cognative ...
6
Instead of having a single integrator with two bounds for two choices (symmetric random walk model), you can have many competing integrators each with a bound (race model). For example, see Fig 2. of Gold and Shadlen 2007 and references therein.
As for the continuous choices case, it is important to understand a limit of discrete choices can be very ...
6
The whole of the research on this topic has some very, very serious methodological flaws, which mean there is currently surprisingly little evidence that video games or expert gamers are somehow 'special'. In particular, there are serious concerns regarding demand characteristics.
Don't just take my word for it, take a look at the extremely comprehensive ...
6
I have a similar background to you, and have found a lot of interesting things in evolutionary game theory (you can follow links from my profile for more). But on the specific content of your question: I have come across to uses of dynamic systems on the opposite ends of cognition. Beer's work on modeling minimal cognition, and Busemeyer & Townsend's ...
6
Diederich & Busemeyer (2003) presented a diffusion model for three choice alternatives (p. 314). The paper is a tutorial for calculating diffusion models with (discrete) matrix methods. The extension to three choice alternatives is reached by defining a two-dimensional diffusion process on a triangular plane (state space).
Recently, Wollschläger & ...
6
There are several such models in the field of auditory perception. For example Patterson 1996 [1] suggests a model that starts with a simulation of the cochlea and the neural activity and reaches up to perception; Winkler 2006 [2] reviews the process of auditory perception, again from the cochlea up to perception.
Somewhat old and does not mention a ...
6
From personal observation, the consensus seems to be that the two streams hypothesis is an oversimplification of the truth, albeit a useful one.
The primary reason that this hypothesis is seen as an oversimplification is because there is a lot of cross-talk between the two streams. For example, Zanon et al. (2010) provides evidence for functional ...
5
Just like brain training research - see this great recent study by Owen et al. 2010 - there is little good evidence to show any causal long term and generalisable effects of playing video games.
However, to answer the original question: I found that video game players had higher speed and reasoning ability in a small sample paper based on my PhD research ...
5
Great to hear you're interested in applying your quantitative background to cognitive science; the field can definitely use more individuals like you!
I'm not sure to what degree these models might be meet your definition of "dynamical systems", but here are some off the top of my head:
stochastic models of human response time and accuracy in ...
5
I and other colleagues have published a paper on the cognitive impacts of MMORPGs:
Link to full text here
The work also reviews some of the literature regarding the psychology of computer games and a new framework for the understanding of cognition in the digital age.
I hope this helps.
Abstract:
The present paper attempts to empirically study the ...
5
This should perhaps be a comment, but I don't have the reputation. The other two answers mention that a major drawback to the Bayesian approach is its lack of biological plausibility. However, see for instance:
Bayesian inference with probabilistic population codes
Ma, W.J. and Beck, J.M. and Latham, P.E. and Pouget, A.
Nature Neuroscience, ...
5
Building on @JohnPick's answer and my comment, but being a little bit more formal. The difference can be explained by the difference between parallel versus sequential processing, and the difficulty of the predicate being evaluated. Your specific question is answered by Treisman (1985) (which I summarize in the second section) but I try to provide a more ...
5
One of Koch's collaborators, Francis Crick (yes, that Francis Crick, much later in his career), put forth an interesting theory with Koch that while perhaps is a bit far fetched, it's worth mentioning for sake of a slightly different perspective.
Crick and Koch posited the claustrum (see diagram below) as one of the seats of consciousness in the brain.
As ...
5
Your question is predicated on the assumption that Bayesian modeling has been successful in all domains. I think this is a stance that many (except hardened Bayesians) would disagree with. For instance, consider the classic Tversky & Shafir experiments on the violation of the sure thing principle:
What are popular rationalist responses to Tversky & ...
5
Consider the colour visual system. Take 3 monochromatic (in the physics sense) light sources of wavelength $420 \; nm$, $534 \; nm$, and $564 \; nm$; i.e. the peaks of spectral sensitivity for cones. Your 3 physical parameters are then 3 knobs $b$, $g$, $r$ that control the intensity of each light source as they shine on the same white surface. If you want ...
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