THE WORK OF ROGER SHEPARD: 7 special BBS Calls for Commentators

Below are the abstracts of 7 forthcoming target articles to co-appear in a BBS Special Issue on: THE WORK OF ROGER SHEPARD Commentators may comment on one, several, or all 7 target articles. (1) Shepard: Perceptual-Cognitive Universals as Reflections of the World (reprinted from Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 1994, 1, 2-28) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.shepard.html (2) Barlow: The Exploitation of Regularities in the Environment by the Brain http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.barlow.html (3) Hecht: Regularities of the Physical World and the Absence of their Internalization http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.hecht.html (4) Kubovy: Internalization: A metaphor we can live without http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.kubovy.pdf (5) Schwartz: Evolutionary Internalized Regularities http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.schwartz.html (6) Tenenbaum & Griffiths: Generalization, Similarity, and Bayesian Inference http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.tenenbaum.html (7) Todorovic: Is kinematic geometry an internalized regularity? http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.todorovic.html These 7 articles have been accepted for joint publication in a special issue on the work of ROGER SHEPARD 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. To be considered as a commentator for this article, to recommend other appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL by September 8th to the address below: bbs(a)soton.ac.uk Commentators must either be current BBS Associates or they must be nominated by a current BBS Associate (of which there are currently 10,000). Non-Associates should send a CV and/or the name of a current BBS Associate familiar with their work. To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, in your reply please indicate the aspects of the topic on which you would bring your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator. Electronic drafts of the full texts of all 7 articles are available for inspection from the Web. Commentators may comment on one, several, or all 7 target articles. Commentary length is 1000 words for a commentary on one target article, to a maximum of 4000 words for a commentary on all 7 (an extra 500 words are allowed for each additional target article). Please indicate which article(s) you propose to comment upon. ____________________________________________________________ 1. SHEPARD, ROGER (2001) PERCEPTUAL-COGNITIVE UNIVERSALS AS REFLECTIONS OF THE WORLD Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2): XXX-XXX. URL: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.shepard.html Roger N. Shepard Stanford University Stanford, California roger(a)psych.stanford.edu ABSTRACT: The universality, invariance, and elegance of principles governing the universe may be reflected in principles of the minds that have evolved in that universe--provided that the mental principles are formulated with respect to the abstract spaces appropriate for the representation of biologically significant objects and their properties. (1) Positions and motions of objects conserve their shapes in the geometrically fullest and simplest way when represented as points and connecting geodesic paths in the six-dimensional manifold jointly determined by the Euclidean group of three-dimensional space and the symmetry group of each object. (2) Colors of objects attain constancy when represented as points in a three-dimensional vector space in which each variation in natural illumination is cancelled by application of its inverse from the three-dimensional linear group of terrestrial transformations of the invariant solar source. (3) Kinds of objects support optimal generalization and categorization when represented, in an evolutionarily shaped space of possible objects, as connected regions with associated weights determined by Bayesian revision of maximum-entropy priors. ____________________________________________________________ 2. BARLOW, HORACE (2001) THE EXPLOITATION OF REGULARITIES IN THE ENVIRONMENT BY THE BRAIN Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2): XXX-XXX. URL: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.barlow.html Horace Barlow Physiological Laboratory Cambridge CB2 3EG England hbb10(a)cam.ac.uk KEYWORDS: Chasles' rule, evolution, geometry, perception, redundancy, statistics, twisting. ABSTRACT: Statistical regularities of the environment are important for learning, memory, intelligence, inductive inference, and in fact for any area of cognitive science where an information-processing brain promotes survival by exploiting them. This has been recognised by many of those interested in cognitive function, starting with Helmholtz, Mach and Pearson, and continuing through Craik, Tolman, Attneave, and Brunswik. In the current era many of us have begun to show how neural mechanisms exploit the regular statistical properties of natural images. Shepard proposed that the apparent trajectory of an object when seen successively at two positions results from internalising the rules of kinematic geometry, and although kinematic geometry is not statistical in nature, this is clearly a related idea. Here it is argued that Shepard's term, "internalisation", is insufficient because it is also necessary to derive an advantage from the process. Having mechanisms selectively sensitive to the spatio-temporal patterns of excitation commonly experienced when viewing moving objects would facilitate the detection, interpolation, and extrapolation of such motions, and might explain the twisting motions that are experienced. Although Shepard's explanation in terms of Chasles' rule seems doubtful, his theory and experiments illustrate that local twisting motions are needed for the analysis of moving objects and provoke thoughts about how they might be detected. ____________________________________________________________ 3. HECHT, HEIKO (2001) REGULARITIES OF THE PHYSICAL WORLD AND THE ABSENCE OF THEIR INTERNALIZATION Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2): XXX-XXX. URL: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.hecht.html Heiko Hecht Man-Vehicle Lab Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mass Ave., Bldg. 37-219, Cambridge, MA 02139 hecht(a)mit.edu KEYWORDS: Internalization, Evolution, Event Perception ABSTRACT: The notion of internalization put forth by Roger Shepard continues to be appealing and challenging. He suggests that we have internalized, during our evolutionary development, environmental regularities or constraints. Internalization solves one of the hardest problems of perceptual psychology: the underspecification problem. That is the problem of how well-defined perceptual experience is generated from the often ambiguous and incomplete sensory stimulation. Yet, the notion of internalization creates new problems that may outweigh the solution of the underspecification problem. To show this, I first examine the concept of internalization and find it necessary to break it down into several distinct interpretations. These range from well-resolved dynamic regularities to ill-resolved statistical regularities. As a function of the interpretation the researcher selects, an empirical test of the internalization hypothesis may be straight forward or it may become virtually impossible. I then attempt to cover the range of interpretations by drawing on examples from different domains of visual event perception. Unfortunately, the experimental tests regarding most candidate regularities, such as gravitational acceleration, fail to support the concept of internalization. This suggests that narrow interpretations of the concept should be given up in favor of more abstract interpretations. However, the latter are are not easily amenable to empirical testing. There is nonetheless a way to test by contrasting internalization with the opposite concept: externalization of body dynamics. I summarize evidence for such a projection of body constraints onto external objects. Based on the combined evidence of well-resolved and ill-resolved regularities, the value of the notion of internalization has to be reassessed. ____________________________________________________________ 4. KUBOVY, MICHAEL (2001) INTERNALIZATION: A METAPHOR WE CAN LIVE WITHOUT Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2): XXX-XXX. URL: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.kubovy.pdf Michael Kubovy The University of Virginia KEYWORDS: computational approach, cognitive constructivism, constraints, ecological approach, environmental regularities, evolution, homomorphism, illusory motion, internality, internalization, inverse projec-tion problem, kinematic geometry, mental rotation, metaphors of mind, perception of motion, perceptual universals. ABSTRACT: Shepard has supposed that the mind is stocked with innate knowledge of the world and that this knowledge figures prominently in the way we see the world. According to him, this in-ternal knowledge is the legacy of a process of internalization; a process of natural selection over the evolutionary history of the species. Shepard has developed his proposal most fully in his analysis of the relation between kinematic geometry and the shape of the motion path in apparent motion displays. We argue that Shepard has made a case for applying the principles of kinematic geometry to the perception of motion, but that he has not made the case for in-jecting these principles into the mind of the percipient. We offer a more modest interpretation of his important findings: that kinematic geometry may be a model of apparent motion. Inas-much as our recommended interpretation does not lodge geometry in the mind of the percipient the motivation for positing internalization, a process that moves kinematic geometry into the mind, is obviated. In our conclusion we suggest that cognitive psychologists, in their embrace of internal mental universals and internalization may have been seduced by the siren call of metaphor. ____________________________________________________________ 5. SCHWARTZ, ROBERT (2001) EVOLUTIONARY INTERNALIZED REGULARITIES Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2): XXX-XXX. URL: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.schwartz.html Robert Schwartz Department of Philosophy University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee Milwaukee, WI 53201 U.S.A. schwartz(a)uwm.edu KEYWORDS: apparent motion, circadian rhythms, constraints, ecoclogical validity, evolution, internalized regularities, kinematic principle. ABSTRACT: Roger Shepard's proposals and supporting experiments concerning evolutionary internalized regularities have been very influential in the study of vision and in other areas of psychology and cognitive science. This paper examines issues concerning the need, nature, explanatory role, and justification for postulating such internalized constraints. In particular, I seek further clarification from Shepard on how best to understand his claim that principles of kinematic geometry underlie phenomena of motion perception. My primary focus is on the ecological validity of Shepard's kinematic constraint in the context of ordinary motion perception. First, I explore the analogy Shepard draws between internalized circadian rhythms and the supposed internalization of kinematic geometry. Next, questions are raised about how to interpret and justify applying results from his own and others experimental studies of apparent motion to more everyday cases of motion perception in richer environments. Finally, some difficulties with Shepard's account of the evolutionary development of his kinematic constraint are considered. ____________________________________________________________ 6. TENENBAUM, JOSHUA B. & GRIFFITHS, THOMAS L. (2001) GENERALIZATION, SIMILARITY, AND BAYESIAN INFERENCE Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2): XXX-XXX. URL: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.tenenbaum.html Joshua B. Tenenbaum & Thomas L. Griffiths Department of Psychology Jordan Hall, Building 420 Stanford University Stanford, CA 94305-2130 jbt(a)psych.stanford.edu KEYWORDS: Additive clustering, Bayesian inference, categorization, concept learning, contrast model, features, generalization, psychological space, similarity. ABSTRACT: Shepard has argued that a universal law should govern generalization across different domains of perception and cognition, as well as across organisms from different species or even different planets. Starting with some basic assumptions about natural kinds, he derived an exponential decay function as the form of the universal generalization gradient, which accords strikingly well with a wide range of empirical data. However, his original formulation applied only to the ideal case of generalization from a single encountered stimulus to a single novel stimulus, and for stimuli that can be represented as points in a continuous metric psychological space. Here we recast Shepard's theory in a more general Bayesian framework and show how this naturally extends his approach to the more realistic situation of generalizing from multiple consequential stimuli with arbitrary representational structure. Our framework also subsumes a version of Tversky's set-theoretic models of similarity, which is conventionally thought of as the primary alternative to Shepard's continuous metric space model of similarity and generalization. This unification allows us not only to draw deep parallels between the set-theoretic and spatial approaches, but also to significantly advance the explanatory power of set-theoretic models. ____________________________________________________________ 7. TODOROVIC, DEJAN (2001) IS KINEMATIC GEOMETRY AN INTERNALIZED REGULARITY? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (2): XXX-XXX. URL: http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.todorovic.html Dejan Todorovic Department of Psychology, University of Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia dejan(a)arvotek.net dtodorov(a)dekart.f.bg.ac.yu KEYWORDS: internalization of regularities, kinematic geometry, simplicity ABSTRACT: A general framework for the explanation of perceptual phenomena as internalizations of external regularities was developed by R.N. Shepard. A particular example of this framework is his account of perceived curvilinear apparent motions. This paper contains a brief summary of the relevant psychophysical data, some basic kinematical considerations and examples, and several criticisms of Shepard's account. The criticisms concern the feasibility of internalization of critical motion types, the roles of simplicity and uniqueness, the contrast between classical physics and kinematic geometry, the import of perceived path curvilinearity, and the relation of perceptual and scientific knowledge. ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for these articles, electronic drafts are retrievable from the World Wide Web from the US or UK BBS Archive. Please do not prepare a commentary yet. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of which article(s). We will then let you know whether it was posible to include your name on the final formal list of invitees. 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