Mike Palij wrote: > On Sun, 02 Nov 2008 07:46:02 -0800, Annette Taylor wrote: > [snip] > > >> About two decades ago I was sure we were going to a neural >> network model paradigm dominating cognitive psychology but it has not >> happened. Why? I think the model was too "hard" for most people in the >> field-- >> the mathematical models went over many clinicians heads, who apply the >> cognitive field to therapy models. >> > > It is possible that neural networks were too mathematical for most > psychologists but, if so, avoiding this area would have prevented them > from realizing that neural network models are inadequate in capturing > meaningful aspects of cognitive processing.
You may be right that parallel distributed connectionist models (a less tendentious name for "neural networks") were mathematically too difficult for most psychologists, but that only goes to show just how mathematically inept most psychologists are. There is nothing in connectionist models that can't be understood after a single year of basic calculus. (How does a "mere historian" like me know? I programmed a bunch of them from scratch for my doctoral dissertation. Most people these days don't have to actually program them (anymore than they have to write their own stats programs). There is a bunch of software packages that reduce the whole process to pointing and clicking.) On the other side, there is a fair bit of mathematics implicit in the software that "massages" brain scan data, turning it into interpretable images, so I would think that anyone who could handle that software would be able to handle connectionist software. Annette seems to imply that connectionism went away, but that certainly isn't my impression. One may not find it much in traditional psychology departments, but that's only because most of the interesting computational stuff is going on in cognitive science and artificial intelligence departments (although I was trained in a psychology department, I was more interested in jobs in cognitive science programs when I graduated. That seemed to be where the most interesting cognitive work -- whether psychological, linguistic, AI-ish, or philosophical -- was happening. Mike is correct that issues of "embodiment" have come to play a great and greater role in computational cognitive science. As Rodney Brooks (I think) once put it, the best model of the world is the world itself (i.e., why make up a detailed cognitive model of the world when one can simply scan the world itself for the information one requires?). Brooks overstates the case , of course, but he was able to cut through a whole whack of pseudo-problems with this "Occamish" attitude. There is a whole stream of robotics now that jettisons complex mental models in favor of a few simple rules of basic bodily interaction (and often gets better results). In response to the more general question -- what ever happened to traditional "infer-from-behavior" cogntiive psychology? -- I think the answer is that it was overtaken by a bunch of new technologies (neuroscientific, computational, and whathaveyou) that rendered it a fairly primitive methodology to continue using on a widespread basis. Regards, Chris -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 Canada 416-736-2100 ex. 66164 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ========================== --- To make changes to your subscription contact: Bill Southerly ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
