L18 - Dynamic Systems Perspective

Question 1

What are Smith’s general views compared to traditional western thought?

Answer 1

• Traditional Western thought (and this applies to most of contemporary psychology) assumes concepts are a thing
  
  • That is, there are discrete pieces of information in our head that reflect our experience of the world and we use to reason with, somewhat logically
  • See operational periods of Piaget, for example
    
    • Reasoning is detached from sensory experience
  • Core knowledge
• Smith proposes the “see-think-act” paradigm
  
  • Concepts are in the “think” part
  • No distinction between seeing, thinking and acting - doing it all at the same time
    
    • Thinking is an emerging property of how we see and act
  • Task constraints, organism constraints, environment constraints

Question 2

What did Smith say about concepts?

Answer 2

• No such thing as a concept (in traditional sense)
• Concepts are at best an emergent property from a complex system (e.g. brain, body and world interacting)
• Limited importance, it’s really epipheomenal
  
  • What really is importance is the dynamics of this complex system, she claims
• Remember how Piaget failed to explain how discrete symbolic representations are created by sensorimotor exploration?
  
  • Knowledge grows with exploration
• Smith “solves” the problem by denying it: There are no discrete representations, even in adults!

Question 3

How does smith’s approach of emerging properties work ?

Answer 3

• Children track the statistics of their environment (e.g., Younger & Cohen), and the contingencies of their actions, and learn to perceive and act in regular systematic ways
  
  • Knowledge grows from sensorimotor exploration of world: Piagetian
• Sensory & motor systems have their own neural networks
  
  • Tracking regularities, parsing the world within each modality
• Other networks exist to integrate multi-sensory information, finds regularities in the coupling of the separate subsystems, feedback to them.
  
  • Development of action affects the development of vision and vice-versa
• Operating at this higher-level of multi-sensory integration, new higher-order correlations can be formed.
• This hierarchical construction is key to human intelligence
  
  • Consistent with Cohen & Cashon
• “See-think-act” are all unified into one

Question 4

What does Smith’s dynamic systems approach say about concepts?

Answer 4

• Concept is an intuitive notion - intelligence really emerges from continuous dynamics of perception & action
  
  • No such thing as fixed/discrete representation
  • Don’t recognize a new dog as a god by activating some stable representation of a dog category - instead constantly in flux
• Children track the statistics of their environment & contingencies of their actions, and learn to perceive and act in regular systematic ways
• Several local networks full of connections & some higher-level networks connecting the lower-order networks, and even more higher-level networks
  
  • Modular - too rigid, no open-ended learning - no talking between modalities
  • Random - no stability

Question 5

How does multi-sensory information in the brain link to concepts (Smith)?

Answer 5

• Word meanings activate associated sensory systems all over the brain
  
  • Kick activates the leg control part of the motor cortex
• Also multi-modal hub in anterior temporal lobe
  
  • So processes goes through hub but also has other distinct areas of activation in the brain (separate perceptual streams)
• Highest-order integrative network: pre-frontal cortex integrates disparate information
  
  • Frontal pole
  • Area most associated with fluent intelligence. abstract problem solving, analogical reasoning
  • Our aPFC is a bigger/more connected that other primates

Question 6

How is a child’s intelligence linked to multi-sensory integration?

Answer 6

• First 6 months infants develop systematic visual inspection, and oral & manual exploration of objects behaviours
  
  • e.g. babies who cannot walk, placed in water and can walk - not that the brain is incapable but we haven’t physically developed
• Sticky mittens given to 2 month-olds allowing for better grasping of objects leads to more mature visual inspection and oral exploration of objects
• Birds and babies don’t understand transparent solid objects
• Babies acquire ‘abstract concept’ of transparent solids through handling objects with that property
• Learning to crawl induces fear of cliff and then handling objects accelerates getting over the fear (visual cliff paradigm)

Question 7

How do words and higher-order correlations occur?

Answer 7

• Systematic multi-modal interaction with objects help to form object categories
• Word learning builds on this ability
• Large proportion of the child’s first 100 words refer to categories where common shape is the most critical feature
• Children develop a shape bias in word learning
  • 18 month of old infants
    
    • When you change the texture and size of dax, no change that it’s a dax, they identify it is something different when shape changes
    • Kids with more than 50 words are very systematic that the new words are about shape specifically
      
      • Shape bias is important for getting word learning to develop (once you have learnt some words, it is easier to develop the rest of the words)

Question 8

How do you develop shape bias?

Answer 8

• Step 4 - rapidly learning about the world, applying schema to generate word learning
• Can find regularities in the integration

Question 9

What else is occurring at the same time children are learning about shape?

Answer 9

• Shape is important for classifying new category members
• Children learn about all sorts of features & their correlations within and across categories
  
  • e.g. wings, beaks and flying co-occur
• Other systematic connections between domains and feature types
  
  • Depending on the domain, different features may happen more so are more important

Question 10

What is a summary of object category learning?

Answer 10

Question 11

What is the natural partitions hypothesis (Gentner, 1982)?

Answer 11

• We parse the world into objects & relations among the objects
• Objects are perceptually cohesive, stable in the world, clear contrast with background, long lasting
• Relations are harder to perceive directly - dynamic/unstable, indefinite number of options
  
  • Spatial relations, state changes, movements towards/away
• Parse the world into objects pretty readily

Question 12

What is relational learning in infancy?

Answer 12

• Can infants learn relations and generalize these relations across sets of objects?
  
  • Identity relation = Two things share an identity or when two things don’t (same vs different)
• Chimps can complete this task if they are trained beforehand
• When you learn the symbol it can allow for a more efficient interpretation as you’re not focusing on the sensory reference as it is present in your mind - so symbols can help you learn relations

Question 13

So how does Smith’s dynamic systems account for the role of language?

Answer 13

• Chimps can solve the same-different task when they learn symbols for same & different but not otherwise
• Smith argues this is because symbols replace the visual features of objects of direct computation, and associative learning can now operate over the symbols directly
• Language - has own set of correlations grounded in but independent from the correlations of perceptual world it refers to
• Words that distributed in the same way have similar meanings
  
  • e.g. all veg words have similar verbs such as cutting, chopping etc.
• Smith framework proposes →
  
  • Abstract thought through language and other symbol systems uses the same sort of computations that finds regularities and makes generalizations/inferences in the perceptual domain but operates over these symbols directly
  • Intelligent/abstract/symbolic though emerges from the dynamics of the network structure of neural organization
  • Open question - is it theoretically useful to posit different forms of mental operations for what emerges from the dynamic system of neural networks?
    
    • Theorists think so
  • What does it mean to be a truly emergent property
    
    • Different rules govern the emergent level than the system of interacting elements at the micro level

Question 14

What is a summary of emergence of concepts?

Answer 14