Evolution of the Icarus Cognitive Architecture

Cognitive architectures serve as both unified theories of the mind and as computational infrastructures for constructing intelligent agents. In this article, we review the evolution of one such framework, Icarus, over the three decades of its development. We discuss the representational and processing assumptions made by different versions of the architecture, their relation to alternative theories, and some promising directions for future research.     

The Medium Shapes the Message: McLuhan and Grice Revisited in Race Talk Online

Compared with the wealth of research accumulated on face‐to‐face social interactions, relatively little research has examined race talk within anonymous Web 2.0 mediums. We investigated online threaded comments on YouTube video clips of two race‐related incidents involving New Zealand television presenter Paul Henry. Through thematic content analysis, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis, it was found that characteristics unique to Web 2.0 were associated with the appearance of old‐fashioned racism and high‐levels of obscenity (together with modern racism/symbolic racism). The hyper‐low context of communication led to interpretive ambiguity; conversation sequences failed to follow Gricean maxims for cooperative communication, with most comments attracting no replies and the modal sequence being two turns. There was almost never resolution to a disagreement online: rather there was points‐scoring against opposing opinions and a tangential style of dialogue influenced by the asynchronous and anonymous nature of communication. The YouTube medium shaped but did not determine the message, as obscenity and racist content in the target video from the eliciting public figure influenced the subsequent degree of obscenity and hostility in the responses. A third corpus that examined responses to our own research on race talk presented on a news website (stuff.co.nz) underlined this point by engendering a dramatically different response to the same subject, retaining the tangential style of communication, but with little to no obscenity. A framework to understand race talk as a function of both medium and context effects is proposed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Primer on Psychological Theory

This paper addresses some of the principal constituent elements in the formation of theories in the science of psychology. To that end, means of theory construction, concomitant theory functions and types, and norms of acceptance are presented. Where appropriate, efforts were made to cite particular historic or contemporary theories of human behavior as cogent exemplars.     

A quality assurance programme for psychotherapy — The finnish experience

In many respects the status of psychotherapy in public health-care systems is similar to that of alternative medicine. The roots of training are outside universities. Legitimation and public funding have been non-existent or insufficient as compared with other fields of health care. Also a great deal of mysticism is attached to both. It is therefore relevant to study the role of psychotherapy from the frame of reference given by research into alternative health care.

Formal health care is characterised by (1) legalised status, (2) access to public funding and (3) integration in the formal medical curriculum. On the other hand there are several treatment philosophies which remain as outsiders from the point of view of formal health care. Informal health care approaches are characterised by (1) lack of legalised status, (2) no access to public funding and (3) no integration in the medical curriculum. Alternative medicine is a term usually attached to forms of informal health care like acupuncture, Spa-culture etc.

Psychotherapy in the public health sector lies somewhere between formal and informal health care. While it has no legalised status, anyone may call himself ‘psychotherapist’. Its definition remains obscure and its public accountability poor.

In this paper I have tried to show how one country — Finland — has tried to grapple with this problem as it attempted to set up psychotherapy services whose quality could be properly monitored — ‘Quality Assurance’ — allowing for public accountability. Now that psychotherapy is well established as a valuable treatment in the field of mental health it is possible to consider future expansion as a cost-effective way to improve the general mental health of the country.     

Integration and Reuse in Cognitive Skill Acquisition

Previous accounts of cognitive skill acquisition have demonstrated how procedural knowledge can be obtained and transformed over time into skilled task performance. This article focuses on a complementary aspect of skill acquisition, namely the integration and reuse of previously known component skills. The article posits that, in addition to mechanisms that proceduralize knowledge into more efficient forms, skill acquisition requires tight integration of newly acquired knowledge and previously learned knowledge. Skill acquisition also benefits from reuse of existing knowledge across disparate task domains, relying on indexicals to reference and share necessary information across knowledge components. To demonstrate these ideas, the article proposes a computational model of skill acquisition from instructions focused on integration and reuse, and applies this model to account for behavior across seven task domains.     

Healing Rituals for Couples Recovering from Adultery

Recovery from the trauma of adultery is a process that is full of points where the couple can get stuck. We describe an experiential model that utilizes healing rituals. We start with a general exploration of the use of rituals in marriage and family therapy. The key elements of effective rituals are described. We describe stuck points in these relationships including: 1) knowing the details, 2) releasing the anger, 3) showing commitment, 4) rebuilding trust, and 5) rebuilding the relationship. Ritualized interventions are described for each of these stuck points.     

Medical student dreams about medical school: The unconscious developmental process of becoming a physician

This paper is a report on a collection of almost four hundred dreams of medical students and postgraduate trainees with the manifest content about medical training. It is a unique dream collection from a defined population that experiences a developmental sequence of observable, reality events. The reality events appear in the manifest content of the dreams along with their symbolic alterations. The dreams are used as a psychodynamic database. The data may illustrate which reality experiences seem psychologically formative, their emotional developmental sequences and their specific emotional content. This is a pilot project exploring whether dream material collected from a discrete task group might give information about a group's emotional adaptation. The dreams seem to show an unconscious developmental process in response to medical training and becoming a physician that unfolds in overlapping stages as trainees learn to master skills and tolerate care-giving responsibility for human life. A progressive, unconscious hero-healer fantasy seems to form. It becomes elaborated in masochistic and then sadistic fantasies. These fantasies are evoked by, and used as a defense against, inevitable but painful anxieties of emotional adaptation to medical education experiences.     

Symbolic Representation by Pigeons

The capacity for symbolic representation is a prerequisite for the development of human language because words, the basic units of language, are symbols that represent things. But symbolic representation may also serve a nonlinguistic role of organizing events into categories having the same meaning, and such a capacity could have considerable survival value for many species. In a number of experiments, my co-workers and I have found that pigeons that are trained to treat two different stimuli similarly also learn that those stimuli are commonly represented and, thus, that they have the same meaning. We have demonstrated evidence for such common representations in a number of ways, but perhaps the most convincing is when pigeons learn a new association involving one of the presumed commonly represented stimuli, and without further training demonstrate that they have learned a similar association involving the other stimulus. Furthermore, we have found that when pigeons are trained to treat two stimuli similarly, one of those stimuli is represented in terms of the other. These results have implications not only for the generality of cognitive processes across species, but also for the generality of symbolic representation beyond language use.     

数量对时间知觉的影响-来自抽象数量和实际数量的证据

本研究采用抽象数量和实际数量叠加的方式呈现刺激,进一步探讨数量对时间知觉的影响。两个实验都运用时间的系列比较任务,以抽象数量和实际数量这两种数量的一致和不一致为条件,将阿拉伯数字和其字体大小叠加及阿拉伯数字和其呈现个数叠加的方式系列呈现在屏幕中央,要求被试比较判断刺激呈现的时间长短。结果显示被试均依靠实际数量的大小判断时间长短,而似乎忽略了抽象数量的存在。这一结果表明实际数量对时间知觉的影响要比抽象数量大,支持并扩展了数量理论。     

Feature selection using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Road Sign Detection and Recognition (RSDR) system

Road Sign Detection and Recognition (RSDR) is aimed to enable drivers maintain basic functionality with the aim of identifying and notifying driver through the existing restrictions so that the process is a success on the present widened road. Examples for RSDR include ‘traffic light ahead’ or ‘pedestrian crossing’ signs. An innovative RSDR system has been introduced which comprises of pre-processing, edge detection, feature extraction, features selection and Ensemble Fuzzy Support Vector Machine (EFSVM) classifier. Feature selection is carried out successfully by deployment of Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) algorithm to determine most prominent and definitive features. These features are then fed into the ensemble SVM to enable both road side traffic detection as well as recognition. Suggested system’s performance is analyzed and evaluated with respect to road signs having a capable recognition rate.