23 Sep
1999
23 Sep
'99
9:23 p.m.
Richardson: HYPERSTRUCTURE IN BRAIN AND COGNITION
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.031
The target whose abstract appears below has just appeared in
PSYCOLOQUY, a refereed journal of Open Peer Commentary sponsored by
the American Psychological Association. Qualified professional
biobehavioral, neural or cognitive scientists are hereby invited to
submit Open Peer Commentary on it. Please email or see websites for
Instructions if you are not familiar with format or acceptance
criteria for PSYCOLOQUY commentaries (all submissions are
refereed).
To link to the full text of this article:
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.031
To submit articles and commentaries or to seek information:
EMAIL: psyc(a)pucc.princeton.edu
URL: http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
psycoloquy.99.10.031.hyperstructure.richardson Thu Sep 23 1999
ISSN 1055-0143 (71 pars, 60 refs, 6 figs, 1 table, 1389 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
Copyright 1999 Ken Richardson
HYPERSTRUCTURE IN BRAIN AND COGNITION
Target Article on Hyperstructure
Ken Richardson
Centre for Human Development & Learning
The Open University
Walton Hall
Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
United Kingdom
k.richardson(a)open.ac.uk
ABSTRACT: This target article tries to identify the informational
content of experience underlying object percepts and concepts in
complex, changeable environments, in a way which can be related to
higher cerebral functions. In complex environments, repetitive
experience of feature- and object-images in static, canonical form
is rare, and this remains a problem in current theories of
conceptual representation. The only reliable information available
in natural experience consists of nested covariations or
'hyperstructures'. These need to be registered in a
representational system. Such representational hyperstructures can
have novel emergent structures and evolution into 'higher'
forms of representation, such as object concepts and event- and
social-schemas. Together, these can provide high levels of
predictability. A sketch of a model of hyperstructural functions in
object perception and conception is presented. Some comparisons
with related views in the literature of the recent decades are
made, and some empirical evidence is briefly reviewed.
KEYWORDS: complexity, covariation, features, hypernetwork,
hyperstructure, object concepts, receptive field, representation
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.031