Neural Constructivism Manifesto: BBS Call for Commentators

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on: THE NEURAL BASIS OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: A CONSTRUCTIVIST MANIFESTO by Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences. Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please send EMAIL to: bbs(a)soton.ac.uk or write to: Behavioral and Brain Sciences Department of Psychology University of Southampton Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs.html http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS ftp://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/BBS gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection by anonymous ftp (or gopher or world-wide-web) according to the instructions that follow after the abstract. ____________________________________________________________________ THE NEURAL BASIS OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT: A CONSTRUCTIVIST MANIFESTO Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, and The Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 North Torrey Pines Rd. La Jolla, CA 92037 steve(a)salk.edu Howard Hughes Medical Institute, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and Department of Biology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037. terry(a)salk.edu KEYWORDS: neural development; cognitive development; constructivism; selectionism; mathematical learning theory; evolution; learnability. ABSTRACT: How do minds emerge from developing brains? According to "neural constructivism," the representational features of cortex are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity. Contrary to popular selectionist models that emphasize regressive mechanisms, the neurobiological evidence suggests that this growth is a progressive increase in the representational properties of cortex. The interaction between the environment and neural growth results in a flexible type of learning: "constructive learning" minimizes the need for prespecification in accordance with recent neurobiological evidence that the developing cerebral cortex is largely free of domain-specific structure. Instead, the representational properties of cortex are built by the nature of the problem domain confronting it. This uniquely powerful and general learning strategy undermines the central assumption of classical learnability theory, that the learning properties of a system can be deduced from a fixed computational architecture. Neural constructivism suggests that the evolutionary emergence of neocortex in mammals is a progression toward more flexible representational structures, in contrast to the popular view of cortical evolution as an increase in innate, specialized circuits. Human cortical postnatal development is also more extensive and protracted than generally supposed, suggesting that cortex has evolved so as to maximize the capacity of environmental structure to shape its structure and function through constructive learning. -------------------------------------------------------------- To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for this article, an electronic draft is retrievable by anonymous ftp from ftp.princeton.edu according to the instructions below (the filename is bbs.quartz). Please do not prepare a commentary on this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the article. ------------------------------------------------------------- These files are also on the World Wide Web and the easiest way to retrieve them is with Netscape, Mosaic, gopher, archie, veronica, etc. Here are some of the URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs.html http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/bbs.html ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.quartz ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.quartz gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either: ftp ftp.princeton.edu or ftp 128.112.128.1 When you are asked for your login, type: anonymous Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid: yourlogin(a)yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@") cd /pub/harnad/BBS To show the available files, type: ls Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example): get bbs.quartz When you have the file(s) you want, type: quit ---------- Where the above procedure is not available there are two fileservers: ftpmail(a)decwrl.dec.com and bitftp(a)pucc.bitnet that will do the transfer for you. To one or the other of them, send the following one line message: help for instructions (which will be similar to the above, but will be in the form of a series of lines in an email message that ftpmail or bitftp will then execute for you). -------------------------------------------------------------