Important new Behav. Brain. Sci. changes

Five important new changes in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) addresses, policies and procedures (1-5) plus Three announcements about positions and activities at my new institution (Southampton University) (6-8). Summaries first, then the details: (1) New address for submitting BBS target articles (2) New address for submitting BBS commentaries (3) All commentaries now require asbtracts (4) All articles.commentaries now require email version and/or disk (5) Target articles now electronically retrievable in multiple ways (6) Applications invited for Psychology Professorship at U. Southampton. (7) Applications invited for grad students and postdocs to work with me (8) Come and give a talk at our new Cognitive Sciences Centre (1) NEW BBS ADDRESS (Editorial): Effective immediately, ALL SUBMITTED TARGET ARTICLES AND ALL CORRESPONDENCE PERTAINING TO EDITING AND REFEREEING should henceforth be addressed to BBS's new Editorial Office: Behavioral and Brain Sciences Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM phone: 44 703 594-583 fax: 44 703 593-281 email: bbs(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk All BBS email should go to the email address above; only messages intended for Stevan Harnad personally should be sent to harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk -- I now get over 80 emails a day so please, whatever can be answered by the Managing Editor, send to bbs rather than harnad! (2) SECOND NEW BBS ADDRESS: Effective immediately, ALL SUBMITTED COMMENTARIES (double-spaced, in triplicate, with email version and/or disk) AND ALL CORRESPONDENCE PERTAINING TO COPY-EDITING AND PROOFS should henceforth be addressed to: Behavioral and Brain Sciences Cambridge University Press Journals Department 40 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011-4211 USA phone: 800-431-1580 (ext. 369, Ed Miller) 212-924-3900 (ext. 369, Ed Miller) fax: 212-645-5960 email: bbs(a)cup.org (or emiller(a)cup.org) To expedite mailing, all commentaries will be received and logged in New York and then forwarded to the Editor in Southampton for review. (3) Effective immediately, every BBS commentary and author's response must have have an ABSTRACT (~60 words). (4) Effective immediately, IN ADDITION to the requisite number of hard copies, all BBS contributions (articles, commentaries, and responses) will also have to be submitted in electronic form -- by email (preferably) to bbs(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk or on a computer disk accompanying the hard copies. BBS is moving toward more and more electronic processing at all stages. The result will be much faster, more efficient and fairer procedures. (5) Electronic versions of the preprints of all BBS target articles can be retrieved by ftp, archie, gopher or World-Wide-Web from: ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/ http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals This way prospective commentators can let us know that they would like to be invited to comment on target articles about to circulated for commentary, and can search the archive for past articles on which they may wish to contribute Continuing Commentary. (6) Applications are invited for a full Professorship in Psychology at the University of Southampton. I am especially interested to hear from Experimental/Clinical Neuropsychologists with active research programmes: Please contact me to discuss it informally: harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk (7) Expressions of interest are also invited from prospective graduate students and postdoctoral fellows interested in coming to work with me in the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory and the Cognitive Sciences Centre at Southampton University. Our research focus is decribed below. Please write to: harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk (8) Let me know if you will be in the London area and would like to give a talk about your work at our new Cognitive Sciences Centre (CSC), of which I am Director, with the collaboration of Professor Michael Sedgewick (Clinical Neurological Sciences), Professors Tony Hey and Chris Harris (Electronics and Computer Science), Dr. John Bradshaw (Anthro-Zoology Institute), Professor Wendy Hall (Multimedia Centre) and Professor Bob Remington (ex officio, Head of the Psychology Department). -------------------------------------------------------------------- Research Focus of the Laboratory CATEGORISATION AND COGNITION: Our capacity to categorise is at the heart of all of our cognitive capacity. People can sort and label the objects and events they see and hear with a proficiency that still far exceeds that of our most powerful machines. How do we manage to do it? The answer will not only tell us more about ourselves but it will allow us to apply our findings to enhancing our proficiency, both in the learning of categories and in our use of machines to extend our capacities. CATEGORY LEARNING is the most general form of cognition. Animals learn categories when they learn what is and is not safe to eat, where it is safe to forage, who is friend and who is foe. Children learn the same kinds of categories, but they eventually go on to the much more powerful and uniquely human strategy of learning categories by name, rather then by performing some instrumental response on them, such as eating or fleeing. Whether they categorise by instrumental response or by name, however, children must still have direct experience with the objects they are categorising, and some sort of corrective feedback from the consequences of MIScategorising them. Eventually, however, categories can be learned from strings of symbols alone, with most of those symbols being themselves the names of categories. This is the most remarkable of our cognitive capacities, language, but language and cognition cannot be understood unless we analyse how they are grounded in categorisation capacity (Harnad 1990). This is theme of our research programme. BEHAVIORAL, COMPUTATIONAL AND NEURAL APPROACHES: There are three empirical ways to investigate the functional basis of our categorisation capacity. The first way is to (i) analyse our categorisation performance itself experimentally, particularly how we LEARN to categorise. The second way is to (ii) model our categorisation capacity with computers that must learn the same categories that we do, on the basis of the same input and corrective feedback that we get. The third way is to (iii) monitor brain function while we are learning categories, to determine what neural properties change during the course of learning, and to relate them to the performance changes during learning, as well as to the internal functioning of the machine models performing the same task. These three converging lines of investigation are the ones to be pursued in the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory. Details and papers are available from the URLs below: ---------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad Professor of Psychology Director, Cognitive Sciences Centre Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM harnad(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk harnad(a)princeton.edu phone: +44 703 592582 fax: +44 703 594597 -------------------------------------------------------------------- ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/ http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals