Professor of Psychology Shimon Edelman's Books

Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen Professor of Psychology Cornell University,Christopher Collins Professor of Linguistics Cornell University,Shimon Edelman Professor of Psychology Cornell University

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Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen Professor of Psychology Cornell University,Christopher Collins Professor of Linguistics Cornell University,Shimon Edelman Professor of Psychology Cornell University

Languages differ from one another in bewildering and seemingly arbitrary ways. For example, in English, the verb precedes the direct object ('understand the proof'), but in Japanese, the direct object comes first. In some languages, such as Mohawk, it is not even possible to establish a basic word order. Nonetheless, languages do share certain regularities in how they are structured and used. The exact nature and extent of these "language universals" has been the focus of much research and is one of the central explanatory goals in the language sciences. During the past 50 years, there has been tremendous progress, a few major conceptual revolutions, and even the emergence of entirely new fields. The wealth of findings and theories offered by the various language-science disciplines has made it more important than ever to work toward an integrated understanding of the nature of human language universals. This book is the first to examine language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective. It provides new insights into long standing questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way, or do some universals require different kinds of explanations from others? Language Universals is unique in starting with the assumption that the best way to approach these and related questions is through a dialogue between a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and biology.

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312

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199719381

ISBN 13

9780199719389

The Continuity of Mind

By: Michael Spivey Professor of Psychology Cornell University

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The Continuity of Mind

By: Michael Spivey Professor of Psychology Cornell University

The cognitive and neural sciences have been on the brink of a paradigm shift for over a decade. The traditional information-processing framework in psychology, with its computer metaphor of the mind, is still considered to be the mainstream approach, but dynamical-systems accounts of mental activity are now receiving a more rigorous treatment, allowing them to more beyond merely brandishing trendy buzzwords. The Continuity of the Mind will help to galvanize the forces of dynamical systems theory, cognitive and computational neuroscience, connectionism, and ecological psychology that are needed to complete this paradigm shift. In The Continuity of the Mind Michael Spivey lays bare the fact that comprehending a spoken sentence, understanding a visual scene, or just thinking about the days events involves the serial coalescing of different neuronal activation patterns, i.e., a state-space trajectory that flirts with a series of point attractors. As a result, the brain cannot help but spend most of its time instantiating patterns of activity that are in between identifiable mental states rather than in them. When this scenario is combined with the fact that most cognitive processes are richly embedded in their environmental context in real time, the state space (in which brief visitations of attractor basins are your thoughts) suddenly encompasses not just neuronal dimensions, but extends to biomechanical and environmental dimensions as well. As a result, your moment-by-moment experience of the world around you, even right now, can be described as a continuous trajectory through a high-dimensional state space that is comprised of diverse mental states. Spivey has arranged The Continuity of the Mind to present a systematic overview of how perception, cognition, and action are partially overlapping segments of one continuous mental flow, rather than three distinct mental systems. The initial chapters provide empirical demonstrations of the gray areas in mental activity that happen in between discretely labeled mental events, as well as geometric visualizations of attractors in state space that make the dynamical-systems framework seem less mathematically abstract. The middle chapters present scores of behavioral and neurophysiological studies that portray the continuous temporal dynamics inherent in categorization, language comprehension, visual perception, as well as attention, action, and reasoning. The final chapters conclude with discussions of what the mind itself must look like if its activity is continuous in time and its contents are distributed in state space.

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446

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Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0198038151

ISBN 13

9780198038153

Representation and Recognition in Vision

By: Shimon Edelman

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Representation and Recognition in Vision

By: Shimon Edelman

Shimon Edelman bases a comprehensive approach to visual representation on the notion of correspondence between proximal (internal) and distal similarities in objects. Researchers have long sought to understand what the brain does when we see an object, what two people have in common when they see the same object, and what a "seeing" machine would need to have in common with a human visual system. Recent neurobiological and computational advances in the study of vision have now brought us close to answering these and other questions about representation. In Representation and Recognition in Vision, Shimon Edelman bases a comprehensive approach to visual representation on the notion of correspondence between proximal (internal) and distal similarities in objects. This leads to a computationally feasible and formally veridical representation of distal objects that addresses the needs of shape categorization and can be used to derive models of perceived similarity. Edelman first discusses the representational needs of various visual recognition tasks, and surveys current theories of representation in this context. He then develops a theory of representation that is related to Shepard's notion of second-order isomorphism between representations and their targets. Edelman goes beyond Shepard by specifying the conditions under which the representations can be made formally veridical. Edelman assesses his theory's performance in identification and categorization of 3D shapes and examines it in light of psychological and neurobiological data concerning the object-processing stream in primate vision. He also discusses the connections between his theory and other efforts to understand representation in the brain.

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378

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262050579

ISBN 13

9780262050579

Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen,Christopher T. Collins,Shimon Edelman

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Language Universals

By: Morten H. Christiansen,Christopher T. Collins,Shimon Edelman

Examining language universals from a cross-disciplinary perspective, this book provides insights into questions such as: What exactly defines the human capacity for language? Are there universal properties of human languages and, if so, what are they? Can all language universals be explained in the same way?

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294

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ISBN 10

0199866953

ISBN 13

9780199866953

Book's by Professor of Psychology Shimon Edelman

Language Universals

Language Universals

The Continuity of Mind

The Continuity of Mind

Representation and Recognition in Vision

Representation and Recognition in Vision

Language Universals

Language Universals

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