Cogmic space for narrative-based world representation

Representing a world or a physical/social environment in an agent’s cognitive system is essential for creating human-like artificial intelligence. This study takes a story-centered approach to this issue. In this context, a story refers to an internal representation involving a narrative structure, which is assumed to be a common form of organizing past, present, future, and fictional events and situations. In the artificial intelligence field, a story or narrative is traditionally treated as a symbolic representation. However, a symbolic story representation is limited in its representational power to construct a rich world. For example, a symbolic story representation is unfit to handle the sensory/bodily dimension of a world. In search of a computational theory for narrative-based world representation, this study proposes the conceptual framework of a Cogmic Space for a comic strip-like representation of a world. In the proposed framework, a story is positioned as a mid-level representation, in which the conceptual and sensory/bodily dimensions of a world are unified. The events and their background situations that constitute a story are unified into a sequence of panels. Based on this structure, a representation (i.e., a story) and the represented environment are connected via an isomorphism of their temporal, spatial, and relational structures. Furthermore, the framework of a Cogmic Space is associated with the generative aspect of representations, which is conceptualized in terms of unconscious- and conscious-level processes/representations. Finally, a proof-of-concept implementation is presented to provide a concrete account of the proposed framework.     

On the a priori and a posteriori assessment of probabilities

We argue that in spite of their apparent dissimilarity, the methodologies employed in the a priori and a posteriori assessment of probabilities can both be justified by appeal to a single principle of inductive reasoning, viz., the principle of symmetry. The difference between these two methodologies consists in the way in which information about the single-trial probabilities in a repeatable chance process is extracted from the constraints imposed by this principle. In the case of a posteriori reasoning, these constraints inform the analysis by fixing an a posteriori determinant of the probabilities, whereas, in the case of a priori reasoning, they imply certain claims which then serve as the basis for subsequent probabilistic deductions. In a given context of inquiry, the particular form which a priori or a posteriori reason may take depends, in large part, on the strength of the underlying symmetry assumed: the stronger the symmetry, the more information can be acquired a priori and the less information about the long-run behavior of the process is needed for an a posteriori assessment of the probabilities. In the context of this framework, frequency-based reasoning emerges as a limiting case of a posteriori reasoning, and reasoning about simple games of chance, as a limiting case of a priori reasoning. Between these two extremes, both a priori and a posteriori reasoning can take a variety of intermediate forms.     

Karen Horney: Theorist in Psychoanalysis and Feminine Psychology

Karen Horney is unique and unparalleled in personality theory. She has the distinction of being the only woman whose theory is detailed in personality textbooks. Horney is known as a neo-Freudian for her revision of Freudian thought; a social psychological theorist for her emphasis on cultural and social influences; a humanist for her holistic view and emphasis on self-realization; and a feminist for her development of a feminine psychology. She was a founder of the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis and founder and dean of the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, a training institute. She was a teacher who could simplify the most difficult concepts; a therapist with deep human involvement; Editor of the American Journal of Psychoanalysis ; a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association; a regular contributor to scientific sessions; and a prolific writer. She was personally and professionally a "well-rounded balance of an abundance of striving and creative possibility."     

Exploring a recognition-induced recognition decrement

Four experiments were performed to explore a recognition decrement that is associated with the recognition of a word from a short list. The stimulus material for demonstrating the phenomenon was a list of words of different syntactic types. A word from the list was recognized less well following a decision that a word of the same type had occurred in the list than following a decision that such a word had not occurred in the list. A recognition decrement did not occur for a word of a given type following a positive recognition decision to a word of a different type. A recognition decrement did not occur when the list consisted exclusively of nouns. It was concluded that the phenomenon may reflect a criterion shift but, probably, does not reflect a list strength effect, suppression, or familiarity attribution consequent to a perceived discrepancy between actual and expected fluency.     

Reinforcement of behavioral patterns: shaping a scallop

Temporal patterns of key pecking by pigeons were shaped by a schedule in which the delivery of food was contingent upon a measure of the overall extent to which the temporal pattern of behavior within a 5-sec trial conformed to a required pattern. This pattern approximated a constant rate of change in the rate of key pecking throughout the 5-sec trial. In comparison with behavior maintained by a classical fixed-interval 5-sec schedule, the new schedule controlled a better approximation to a "scallop" within individual trials and greatly reduced intersubject variability. These results are consistent with the view that the delivery of a reinforcer after a behavioral pattern a few seconds in duration may strengthen the entire pattern as a unit, or operant. The response topography contiguous with reinforcement may be a negligible fraction of the strengthened operant. One implication of this view is that mean response rate for such brief responses as key pecks and lever presses is a byproduct of whatever patterns are strengthened, and generally will not reveal fundamental controlling relationships, whenever a reinforcer is not contiguous with all the behavior on which it is contingent.     

Studies in social influence: V. Minority influence and conversion behavior in a perceptual task

The effects of influence attempts by a majority and by a minority were examined on both a manifest response level and a latent perceptual level. Female subjects were exposed to a series of blue slides that were consistently labeled as green by a female confederate. The confederate was presented as a member of either a majority or a minority. On each trial, subjects were required to indicate the color of the slide presented and the color of the afterimage perceived on a white screen following removal of the slide. It was predicted that (a) the subject's judgment of the chromatic afterimage would be modified when the influence agent represented a minority, and (b) this modification will be more pronounced when the source of influence is absent than when it is present. The results supported the prediction in both the main study and its replication.     

Processing letters in words at different levels

Subjects indicated whether two letters, two words, or a letter and the first letter of a word were the same. Letter targets were matched more quickly than word targets when the stimuli were presented simultaneously. When the target and comparison stimuli were separated by a 3-sec interval, word targets were matched more quickly than a letter and a letter in a word. It was also shown that the physical similarity of the targets and comparison stimuli had a greater effect in the simultaneous matching conditions. These findings are consistent with a model of word processing in which letters are individually compared prior to word identification at a physical level of processing. At a higher level of processing, words may be encoded as a unit, and the identification of the letters within the word may require a decoding of the word unit.     

Effects of effort on response rate

Pigeons were trained to peck for food reinforcement, and the minimum effective force for a peck was varied. In a single-key situation, the response rate was unaffected up to a certain force value, beyond which increments caused a proportional decrement in response rate. Transient enhancement and suppression effects were observed following a change in the force requirement. A change from a high force requirement to a low force requirement resulted in a temporary enhancement of response rate above the stable performance level, whereas a change from a low to a high requirement produced a temporary suppression of the rate below the stable rate. In a two-key situation, the response rate on a key with a given force remained unaffected by the force requirement on the other key. When the rate of response was plotted against the required force, the resultant function was remarkably similar to that obtained from the single-key experiment. When the rates of reinforcement on the two keys differed, the decrement in response rate produced by an increase in the force requirement was proportionally greater on the key with the lower rate of reinforcement.     

Perceiving a calling, living a calling, and job satisfaction: testing a moderated, multiple mediator model

The current study examined the relation between perceiving a calling, living a calling, and job satisfaction among a diverse group of employed adults who completed an online survey (N = 201). Perceiving a calling and living a calling were positively correlated with career commitment, work meaning, and job satisfaction. Living a calling moderated the relations of perceiving a calling with career commitment and work meaning, such that these relations were more robust for those with a stronger sense they were living their calling. Additionally, a moderated, multiple mediator model was run to examine the mediating role of career commitment and work meaning in the relation of perceiving a calling and job satisfaction, while accounting for the moderating role of living a calling. Results indicated that work meaning and career commitment fully mediated the relation between perceiving a calling and job satisfaction. However, the indirect effects of work meaning and career commitment were only significant for individuals with high levels of living a calling, indicating the importance of living a calling in the link between perceiving a calling and job satisfaction. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Some new luminance-gradient effects

Three compelling luminance-gradient effects are described. The first effect concerns a brightness enhancement and a luminous mist spreading out from a central area having the same luminance as the white background and surrounded by four rectangular inducers shaded with a linear luminance gradient. The second effect is perceived with a photographically reversed configuration, and concerns what may be considered a brightness reduction or the enhancement of a darkness quality of a target area of the visual scene. The third effect concerns the perception of a self-luminous disk inside a somewhat foggy medium. The effects are worthy of further examination because they challenge current theories of luminosity perception and brightness perception in general.     

Variations in explicitly unpaired training are differentially effective in producing conditioned inhibition

To evaluate a contingency interpretation of conditioned inhibition (CI), rats were given “explicity unpaired” training in which the locus and duration of a CS within the inter-US (shock) interval were systematically manipulated for different groups. Summation and retardation tests in Experiment 1 indicated that stronger CI resulted from both a backward and a trace CS than from a midlocus CS of equal or greater duration. Complementing these findings, the same tests in Experiment 2 showed that, by comparison with novel-stimulus controls, CI developed to a trace CS but not to a mid-locus CS, nor to a trace CS that was accompanied by an immediate signal for the US. These findings argue against a contingency interpretation of CI and favor a contiguity interpretation stressing the short-term rehearsal of stimulus events. Such rehearsal of the US allows a backward CS, but not a mid-locus CS with an extended US-CS interval, to be discriminated as a signal for nonreinforcement, and thus to develop as a conditioned inhibitor. Similarly, excitatory conditioning to the memory trace of a CS allows the nominal trace CS to develop as a signal for nonreinforcement, and thus as a conditioned inhibitor, but not when its memory trace is overshadowed by another CS that immediately precedes the US. In short, the development of CI is facilitated when excitation is mediated by the memorial processing of either the US or a discrete CS for the US rather than by contextual cues.     

Timing multimodal events in pigeons

The peak procedure was used in two experiments to study pigeons' ability to time multimodal events. In the first experiment, birds were trained to time a single event consisting of a 9-s tone or light followed by a 21-s fixed interval associated with a signal of light or tone (signal of the other modality). On occasional empty trials, different lengths of the first signal were followed by a long period of the second signal. Peak response times as a function of the duration of the first signal were linear and had a slope of close to one in all birds. This indicates that the birds were timing only the second signal. In a second experiment, two complex events were used in training. One consisted of a 9-s tone or light followed by a 21-s fixed interval associated with a light or tone. The other consisted of a 21-s tone or light followed by a 9-s fixed interval associated with a light or tone. Different durations of the first signal were again used on empty trials. Peak response times as a function of the duration of the first signal were again linear in all birds. The slope of the function was less than one but greater than zero for 3 birds. This indicates that these birds were partly timing the entire complex event of 30-s duration and partly timing only the second signal of the event. A model is proposed in which the bird takes as a criterion for timing a weighted average of different target criteria. Comparisons with the performance of rats are made.     

Some determinants of inhibitory stimulus control

Interspersed reinforcement and extinction during discrimination learning generate a U-shaped gradient of inhibition about the stimulus correlated with extinction. The present work showed that extinction is not a necessary determinant of inhibitory stimulus control. In Exp. I, a reduction in the rate of reinforcement, through a shift from a multiple variable-interval 1-min variable-interval 1-min schedule to a multiple variable-interval 1-min variable-interval 5-min schedule, resulted in a post-discrimination line orientation gradient of inhibition about the stimulus correlated with the variable-interval 5-min schedule. In Exp. II, the rates of reinforcement, correlated with a pair of stimuli, were held constant during a shift from a multiple variable-interval 1-min variable-interval 1-min schedule to a multiple variable-interval 1-min differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate schedule. Inhibitory stimulus control about the stimulus correlated with the differential reinforcement of low rate was obtained. In both experiments, a reduction in the rate of responding during one stimulus and behavioral contrast during the other stimulus preceded the observation of inhibitory stimulus control.     

Control of reflexive and voluntary saccades in the gap effect

In two experiments, we examined whether voluntary and reflexive saccades shared a common fixation disengagement mechanism, Participants were required to perform a variety of tasks, each requiring a different level of information processing of the display prior to execution of the saccade. In Experiment 1, participants executed either a prosaccade or an antisaccade upon detecting a stimulus array. In Experiment 2, participants executed a prosaccade to a stimulus array only if the array contained a target item. The target could be a line (easy search) or a digit (difficult search). The critical manipulation in both experiments was the relative timing between the removal of the fixation stimulus and the onset of the stimulus array. In both experiments, it was found that saccadic latencies were shortest when the fixation stimulus was removed before the onset of the stimulus array—a gap effect. It was concluded that reflexive and voluntary saccades share a common fixation disengagement mechanism that is largely independent of higher level cognitive processes.     

Conversational coherency

A major goal of this work is to specify some steps of the process by which participants maintain coherency in their conversations. The underlying element of the analysis is a construct called a “context space.” Roughly, a group of utterances that refers to a single issue or episode forms the basis for a context space. Superficially, a conversation is a sequence of utterances; at a deeper level it is a structured entity whose utterances can be parsed into hierarchically related context spaces. As a conversation proceeds, each conversant builds a discourse model that includes the conversation's context space structure, a notion of the present discourse topic, and a list of items being focused upon. Conversational coherency depends upon a lack of conflict between the respective models of the participants. Conflicts are prevented by speakers following high level syntactic and semantic relational rules that enable listeners to identify their discourse models. These rules, given in the study, are highly integrated with the view of conversation presented here—a hierarchy of related context spaces.     

Luther's Radical Conception of Faith: God,Christ, and Personhood in a Post‐Metaphysical Age

Luther's exposition of Paul's letter to the Galatians offers a premier window into a deconstruction of the tandem God, ego and symbolic order of the law by proposing a radical “technology of the self,” a new understanding of what it means to be a person in light of God's own becoming in the flesh—a new subjective perspective. This places the event of belief as a displacement of a socially and ecclesiastically constructed ego‐consciousness and the emergence of a new (social) center of subjectivity—Christ consciousness, that is, faith. For Luther the “person” emerges as a radical break with the self‐referentiality of the ego and through the perspectival assimilation of God's own subjective experience in the flesh.     

Auditory-visual interactions in the perception of a ball's path

We carried out two experiments to measure the combined perceptual effect of visual and auditory information on the perception of a moving object's trajectory. All visual stimuli consisted of a perspective rendering of a ball moving in a three-dimensional box. Each video was paired with one of three sound conditions: silence, the sound of a ball rolling, or the sound of a ball hitting the ground. We found that the sound condition influenced whether observers were more likely to perceive the ball as rolling back in depth on the floor of the box or jumping in the frontal plane. In a second experiment we found further evidence that the reported shift in path perception reflects perceptual experience rather than a deliberate decision process. Instead of directly judging the ball's path, observers judged the ball's speed. Speed is an indirect measure of the perceived path because, as a result of the geometry of the box and the viewing angle, a rolling ball would travel a greater distance than a jumping ball in the same time interval. Observers did judge a ball paired with a rolling sound as faster than a ball paired with a jumping sound. This auditory-visual interaction provides an example of a unitary percept arising from multisensory input.     

Sentential context and the interpretation of unambiguous words

Two experiments were carried out in order to investigate how the linguistic context (in the form of a sentence) facilitates the interpretation of unambiguous words. Experiment I established that if a sentential context as a whole is sufficient to evoke an inference that calls to mind a particular aspect of a word's meaning, the presence of a verb with appropriate selectional restrictions does not enhance the process. Experiment II showed that when no other cues are provided within a sentence, both verbs and adjectives are effective in enhancing a specific aspect of the meaning of a word. These findings were taken to support the hypothesis that in understanding a sentence, people instantiate particular aspects of the meanings of words in order to construct specific interpretations, and linguistic context guides this process of selection.