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