MEMORY PROCESSES IN CLASSIFICATION LEARNING:

Abstract— The role of conscious memory retrieval in category learning was investigated, using amnesic patients and matched control subjects ort two classification tasks. Subjects attempted to learn to categorize both dot patterns and the paintings of three Italian Renaissance artists. The amnesic patients were capable of normal classification performance on the dot-pattern stimuli, but were severely impaired at learning to categorize the paintings. On tests of recognition of the classification stimuli, the control subjects were very accurate on the paintings, and only moderately accurate on the dot patterns; the amnesic patients were poorer than the control subjects on both item types, though they were above chance in their recognition of the paintings. These data suggest that amnesic patients are capable of simple, perceptually based category learning, but that richer, more complex stimuli may demand memory retrieval processes that they lack.     

An exploratory study of mother-child interaction during the second year of life

The aim of this study was to further understanding of development during the crucial second year of life. The study employed a naturalistic, semistructured situation for the observation of mother-child behavior. The experimental stimulus was the progressive diversion of the mother's attention away from her child. This diversion evoked separation anxiety in the child and the individual and interactive regulatory behaviors of the mother-child pair. Concurrently, the child's behavior was observed in a play group situation. One set of rating scales was devised for assessment of the mother-child interaction, and another set for assessment of the child's functioning in the play group. The major hypothesis was that maternal and child behaviors that foster the child's successful handling of phase-specific stresses and developmental tasks will be positively correlated with the child's functioning in the play group. This hypothesis is supported by the findings of the study.     

Learning a Generative Probabilistic Grammar of Experience: A Process‐Level Model of Language Acquisition

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural‐language corpora. Given a stream of linguistic input, our model incrementally learns a grammar that captures its statistical patterns, which can then be used to parse or generate new data. The grammar constructed in this manner takes the form of a directed weighted graph, whose nodes are recursively (hierarchically) defined patterns over the elements of the input stream. We evaluated the model in seventeen experiments, grouped into five studies, which examined, respectively, (a) the generative ability of grammar learned from a corpus of natural language, (b) the characteristics of the learned representation, (c) sequence segmentation and chunking, (d) artificial grammar learning, and (e) certain types of structure dependence. The model's performance largely vindicates our design choices, suggesting that progress in modeling language acquisition can be made on a broad front—ranging from issues of generativity to the replication of human experimental findings—by bringing biological and computational considerations, as well as lessons from prior efforts, to bear on the modeling approach.     

II—Comment on Munoz-Dardé's'Liberty's Chains'

Munoz-Dardé (2009) argues that a social contract theory must meet Rousseau's 'liberty condition': that, after the social contract, each 'nevertheless obeys only himself and remains as free as before'. She claims that Rousseau's social contract does not meet this condition, for reasons that suggest that no other social contract theory could. She concludes that political philosophy should turn away from social contract theory's preoccupation with authority and obedience, and focus instead on what she calls the 'legitimacy' of social arrangements. I raise questions about each of these claims.     

Why equality of treatment and opportunity might matter

Philosophical Studies -