19 found
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  1.  48
    The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non‐Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning.Michael Ramscar, Peter Hendrix, Cyrus Shaoul, Petar Milin & Harald Baayen - 2014 - Topics in Cognitive Science 6 (1):5-42.
    As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults'; changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge. The simulations correctly identify greater variation in the cognitive performance of older adults, and successfully (...)
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  2.  53
    The Effects of Feature-Label-Order and Their Implications for Symbolic Learning.Michael Ramscar, Daniel Yarlett, Melody Dye, Katie Denny & Kirsten Thorpe - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (6):909-957.
    Symbols enable people to organize and communicate about the world. However, the ways in which symbolic knowledge is learned and then represented in the mind are poorly understood. We present a formal analysis of symbolic learning—in particular, word learning—in terms of prediction and cue competition, and we consider two possible ways in which symbols might be learned: by learning to predict a label from the features of objects and events in the world, and by learning to predict features from a (...)
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  3.  49
    Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: How order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned.Inbal Arnon & Michael Ramscar - 2012 - Cognition 122 (3):292-305.
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  4.  34
    Relationships Between Language Structure and Language Learning: The Suffixing Preference and Grammatical Categorization.Michelle C. St Clair, Padraic Monaghan & Michael Ramscar - 2009 - Cognitive Science 33 (7):1317-1329.
    It is a reasonable assumption that universal properties of natural languages are not accidental. They occur either because they are underwritten by genetic code, because they assist in language processing or language learning, or due to some combination of the two. In this paper we investigate one such language universal: the suffixing preference across the world’s languages, whereby inflections tend to be added to the end of words. A corpus analysis of child‐directed speech in English found that suffixes were more (...)
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  5.  44
    Linguistic Self‐Correction in the Absence of Feedback: A New Approach to the Logical Problem of Language Acquisition.Michael Ramscar & Daniel Yarlett - 2007 - Cognitive Science 31 (6):927-960.
    In a series of studies children show increasing mastery of irregular plural forms (such as mice) simply by producing erroneous over‐regularized versions of them (such as mouses). We explain this phenomenon in terms of successive approximation in imitation: Children over‐regularize early in acquisition because the representations of frequent, regular plural forms develop more quickly, such that at the earliest stages of production they interfere with children's attempts to imitatively reproduce irregular forms they have heard in the input. As the strength (...)
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  6.  32
    On the experiential link between spatial and temporal language.Teenie Matlock, Michael Ramscar & Lera Boroditsky - 2005 - Cognitive Science 29 (4):655-664.
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  7.  11
    The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non‐Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning.Michael Ramscar, Peter Hendrix, Cyrus Shaoul, Petar Milin & Harald Baayen - 2014 - Cognitive Science.
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  8.  8
    Order Matters! Influences of Linear Order on Linguistic Category Learning.Dorothée B. Hoppe, Jacolien van Rij, Petra Hendriks & Michael Ramscar - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (11):e12910.
    Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an artificial language learning experiment, (...)
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  9.  3
    Order Matters! Influences of Linear Order on Linguistic Category Learning.Dorothée B. Hoppe, Jacolien Rij, Petra Hendriks & Michael Ramscar - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (11):e12910.
    Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers (premarkers, e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers (postmarkers, e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous systems for marking grammatical categories exist in natural languages, it follows that a better understanding of these findings can shed light on the factors underlying this diversity. In two discriminative learning simulations and an artificial language learning experiment, (...)
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  10. The feature-label-order effect in symbolic learning.Michael Ramscar, Daniel Yarlett, Melody Dye & Nal Kalchbrenner - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (7).
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  11.  36
    Semantic grounding in models of analogy: an environmental approach.Michael Ramscar & Daniel Yarlett - 2003 - Cognitive Science 27 (1):41-71.
    Empirical studies indicate that analogy consists of two main processes: retrieval and mapping. While current theories and models of analogy have revealed much about the mainly structural constraints that govern the mapping process, the similarities that underpin the correspondences between individual representational elements and drive retrieval are understood in less detail. In existing models symbol similarities are externally defined but neither empirically grounded nor theoretically justified. This paper introduces a new model (EMMA: the environmental model of analogy) which relies on (...)
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  12.  4
    Simulating the Acquisition of Verb Inflection in Typically Developing Children and Children With Developmental Language Disorder in English and Spanish.Daniel Freudenthal, Michael Ramscar, Laurence B. Leonard & Julian M. Pine - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (3):e12945.
    Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have significant deficits in language ability that cannot be attributed to neurological damage, hearing impairment, or intellectual disability. The symptoms displayed by children with DLD differ across languages. In English, DLD is often marked by severe difficulties acquiring verb inflection. Such difficulties are less apparent in languages with rich verb morphology like Spanish and Italian. Here we show how these differential profiles can be understood in terms of an interaction between properties of the input (...)
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  13.  6
    Similarity and Categorization.Ulrike Hahn & Michael Ramscar (eds.) - 2001 - Oxford University Press UK.
    Concepts allow us to treat different objects equivalently according to shared attributes, and hence to communicate about, draw inferences from, reason with, and explain these objects. Understanding how concepts are formed and used is thus essential to understanding and applying these basic processes, and the topic of similarity-based classification is central to psychology, artificial intelligence, statistics, and philosophy. This book brings together leading researchers, reflecting the key topics and important developments in the field and provides a uniquely interdisciplinary overview of (...)
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  14.  45
    Alternative Solutions to a Language Design Problem: The Role of Adjectives and Gender Marking in Efficient Communication.Melody Dye, Petar Milin, Richard Futrell & Michael Ramscar - 2018 - Topics in Cognitive Science 10 (1):209-224.
    A central goal of typological research is to characterize linguistic features in terms of both their functional role and their fit to social and cognitive systems. One long-standing puzzle concerns why certain languages employ grammatical gender. In an information theoretic analysis of German noun classification, Dye, Milin, Futrell, and Ramscar enumerated a number of important processing advantages gender confers. Yet this raises a further puzzle: If gender systems are so beneficial to processing, what does this mean for languages that make (...)
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  15. Jesse J. Prinz, Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. [REVIEW]Jonathan M. Weinberg, Daniel Yarlett, Michael Ramscar, Dan Ryder & Jesse J. Prinz - 2003 - Metascience 12 (3):279-303.
  16.  46
    Computing Machinery and Understanding.Michael Ramscar - 2010 - Cognitive Science 34 (6):966-971.
    How are natural symbol systems best understood? Traditional “symbolic” approaches seek to understand cognition by analogy to highly structured, prescriptive computer programs. Here, we describe some problems the traditional computational metaphor inevitably leads to, and a very different approach to computation (Ramscar, Yarlett, Dye, Denny, & Thorpe, 2010; Turing, 1950) that allows these problems to be avoided. The way we conceive of natural symbol systems depends to a large degree on the computational metaphors we use to understand them, and machine (...)
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  17.  7
    One‐year‐old infants use teleological representations of actions productively.Michael Ramscar, Daniel Yarlett, Shimon Edelman, Nathan Intrator, Gergely Csibra, Szilvia Bıró, Orsolya Koós, György Gergely, Holk Cruse & Michael D. Lee - 2003 - Cognitive Science 27 (1):111-133.
    Two experiments investigated whether infants represent goal‐directed actions of others in a way that allows them to draw inferences to unobserved states of affairs (such as unseen goal states or occluded obstacles). We measured looking times to assess violation of infants' expectations upon perceiving either a change in the actions of computer‐animated figures or in the context of such actions. The first experiment tested whether infants would attribute a goal to an action that they had not seen completed. The second (...)
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  18.  48
    First, we assume a spherical cow..Lera Boroditsky & Michael Ramscar - 2001 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24 (4):656-657.
    There is an old joke about a theoretical physicist who was charged with figuring out how to increase the milk production of cows. Although many farmers, biologists, and psychologists had tried and failed to solve the problem before him, the physicist had no trouble coming up with a solution on the spot. “ First,” he began, “we assume a spherical cow... ” [Tenenbaum & Griffiths].
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  19.  2
    Understanding the Phonetic Characteristics of Speech Under Uncertainty—Implications of the Representation of Linguistic Knowledge in Learning and Processing.Fabian Tomaschek & Michael Ramscar - 2022 - Frontiers in Psychology 13.
    The uncertainty associated with paradigmatic families has been shown to correlate with their phonetic characteristics in speech, suggesting that representations of complex sublexical relations between words are part of speaker knowledge. To better understand this, recent studies have used two-layer neural network models to examine the way paradigmatic uncertainty emerges in learning. However, to date this work has largely ignored the way choices about the representation of inflectional and grammatical functions in models strongly influence what they subsequently learn. To explore (...)
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