Percepts and Concepts Laboratory

 

Publications & Abstracts

Web-readable versions of several of these papers are provided below. PDF format versions are also available for some papers; this is usually the best format to access because all of the figures will appear more or less properly.  You may also want to check out the Indiana University Cognitive Science Technical Report Series.

Download free reader from Adobe to read these files

  1. Goldstone, R. L., & Wilensky, U. (accepted pending revision).  Promoting Transfer through Complex Systems Principles. Journal of the Learning Sciences

    Understanding scientific phenomena in terms of complex systems principles is both scientifically and pedagogically important. Situations from different disciplines of science are often governed by the same principle, and so promoting knowledge transfer across disciplines makes valuable cross-fertilization and scientific unification possible. Although evidence for this kind of transfer has been historically controversial, experiments and observations of students suggest pedagogical methods to promote transfer of complex systems principles. One powerful strategy is for students to actively interpret the elements and interactions of perceptually grounded scenarios. Such interpretation can be facilitated through the presentation of cases alongside general principles, and by students exploring and constructing computational models of cases. The resulting knowledge can be both concretely grounded yet highly perspective-dependent and generalizeable. We discuss methods for coordinating computational and mental models of complex systems, the roles of idealization and concreteness in fostering understanding and generalization, and other complementary theoretical approaches to transfer.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  2. Goldstone, R. L., Day, S., & Son, J. Y. (in press).  Comparison. In B. Glatzeder, V. Goel, & A. von Müller (Eds.) On thinking: Volume II, towards a theory of thinking. The Parmenides Foundation.

    It might not be immediately clear why the topic of comparison warrants a whole chapter in a book on human thinking. Of course, we are often required to make decisions that involve comparing two or more alternatives and assessing their relative value. Which car should I buy? Which job is more suited to my long-term goals? Would I rather have the soup or the salad? But in the grand scheme of human cognition, it might seem that such processes could be relegated to a subheading in a chapter on decision making. In fact, comparison is one of the most integral components of human thought. Along with the related construct of similarity, comparison plays a crucial role in almost everything that we do. Furthermore, comparison itself is a powerful cognitive tool—in addition to its supporting role in other mental processes, research has demonstrated that the simple act of comparing two things can produce important changes in our knowledge.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  3. Mason, W. A., Jones, A., & Goldstone, R. L. (in press). Propagation of innovations in networked groups. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

    A novel paradigm was developed to study the behavior of groups of networked people searching a problem space. We examined how different network structures affect the propagation of information in laboratory-created groups. Participants made numerical guesses and received scores that were also made available to their neighbors in the network. The networks were compared on speed of discovery and convergence on the optimal solution. One experiment showed that individuals within a group tend to converge on similar solutions even when there is an equally valid alternative solution. Two additional studies demonstrated that the optimal network structure depends on the problem space being explored, with networks that incorporate spatially-based cliques having an advantage for problems that benefit from broad exploration, and networks with greater long-range connectivity having an advantage for problems requiring less exploration.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  4. Goldstone, R. L., Landy, D., & Son, J. Y. (in press). A well grounded education: The role of perception in science and mathematics. In M. de Vega, A. Glenberg, & A. Graesser (Eds.) Symbols, embodiment, and meaning. Oxford Press.

    One of the most important applications of grounded cognition theories is to science and mathematics education where the primary goal is to foster knowledge and skills that are widely transportable to new situations. This presents a challenge to those grounded cognition theories that tightly tie knowledge to the specifics of a single situation. In this chapter, we develop a theory learning that is grounded in perception and interaction, yet also supports transferable knowledge. A first series of studies explores the transfer of complex systems principles across two superficially dissimilar scenarios. The results indicate that students most effectively show transfer by applying previously learned perceptual and interpretational processes to new situations. A second series shows that even when students are solving formal algebra problems, they are greatly influenced by non-symbolic, perceptual grouping factors. We interpret both results as showing that high-level cognition that might seem to involve purely symbolic reasoning is actually driven by perceptual processes. The educational implication is that instruction in science and mathematics should involve not only teaching abstract rules and equations but also training students to perceive and interact with their world.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  5. Goldstone, R. L., Roberts, M. E., Mason, W., & Gureckis, T. (in press). Collective search in concrete and abstract spaces. In T. Kugler, C. Smith, and T. Connelly (Eds.) Decision modeling and behavior in uncertain and complex environments. Springer Press.

    Our laboratory has been studying the emergence of collective search behavior from a complex systems perspective. We have developed an internet-based experimental platform that allows groups of people to interact with each other in real time on networked computers. The experiments implement virtual environments where participants can see the moment-to-moment actions of their peers and immediately respond to their environment. Agent-based computational models are used as accounts of the experimental results. We describe two paradigms for collective search – one in physical space and the other in an abstract problem space. The physical search situation concerns competitive foraging for resources by individuals inhabiting an environment consisting largely of other individuals foraging for the same resources. The abstract search concerns the dissemination of innovations in social networks. Across both scenarios, the group-level behavior that emerges reveals influences of exploration and exploitation, bandwagon effects, population waves, and compromises between individuals using their own information and information obtained from their peers.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  6. Goldstone, R. L., Roberts, M. E., & Gureckis, T. M. (2008).  Emergent Processes in Group Behavior. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 10-15.

    Just as networks of neurons create structured thoughts beyond the ken of any individual neuron, so people spontaneously organize themselves into groups to create emergent organizations that no individual may intend, comprehend, or even perceive. Recent technological advances have provided us with unprecedented opportunities for conducting controlled, laboratory experiments on human collective behavior. We describe two experimental paradigms where we attempt to build predictive bridges between the beliefs, goals, and cognitive capacities of individuals and group-level patterns, showing how the members of a group dynamically allocate themselves to resources, and how innovations are spread in a social network. Agent-based computational models have provided useful explanatory and predictive accounts. Together, the models and experiments point to tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation, compromises between individuals using their own innovations and innovations obtained from their peers, and the emergence of group-level organizations such as population waves, bandwagon effects, and spontaneous specialization.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  7. Ionescu, T., & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). Introduction to a special issue on the Development of Categorization, Cognition, Brain, and Behavior, 11, 629-633.
    Categorization is indubitably an important cognitive process for humans (as well as other animals, Murai, Kosugi, Tomonaga, Tanaka, Matsuzawa, & Itakura, 2005), one that we constantly engage in to adapt to a very rich environment. We have a powerful impulse to interpret our world. This act of interpretation is fundamentally an act of categorization. We can go back in history at least to Aristotle (see his work on Categories, 350 B.C.E.) and along this way we find discussions of categories often appearing in philosophers’ books. The issue of categorization is also an historically early topic in psychology (see Hull’s experiment in 1920), and a considerable amount of research has been continuously dedicated to it up until the present. One could ask then: Why a special issue on categorization at this point in time? Although the general topic of categorization is venerable, relatively recently we cognitive scientists have changed our view about categorization. We have moved from considering taxonomies (or categories based in logic) as the “real,” mature kind of categorization to understanding that there are multiple kinds of similarities that are taken into account when one groups items (Barsalou, 1993, 2003; Medin, Goldstone, & Gentner, 1993; Ross & Murphy, 1999).
    Download PDF version of this paper

  8. Goldstone, R. L., Gerganov, A., Landy, D., & Roberts, M. E. (in press). Learning to see and conceive. In L. Tommasi, M. Peterson, & L. Nadel (Eds.) The New cognitive sciences (part of the Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology). Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press..

    Human concept learning depends upon perception. Our concept of Car is built out of perceptual features such as “engine,” “tire,” and “bumper.” However, recent research indicates that the dependency works both ways. We see bumpers and engines in part because we have acquired Car concepts and detected examples of them. Perception both influences and is influenced by the concepts that we learn. We have been exploring the psychological mechanisms by which concepts and perception mutually influence one another, and building computational models to show that the circle of influences is benign rather than vicious.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  9. Landy, D., & Goldstone, R. L. (2007).  Formal notations are diagrams: Evidence from a production task. Memory & Cognition, 35, 2033-2040

    Although a general sense of the magnitude, quantity, or numerosity of objects is common both in untrained people and in animals, the abilities to deal exactly with large quantities and to reason precisely in complex but well-specified situations—to behave formally, that is—are skills unique to people trained in symbolic notations. These symbolic notations employ typically complex, hierarchically embedded structures, which all extant analyses assume are constructed by concatenative, rule-based processes. The primary goal of this article is to establish, using behavioral measures on naturalistic tasks, that the some of the same cognitive resources involved in representing spatial relations and proximities are also involved in representing symbolic notations: in short, formal notations are a kind of diagram. We examine self-generated productions in the domains of handwritten arithmetic expressions and typewritten statements in a formal logic. In both tasks, we find substantial evidence for spatial representational schemes even in these highly symbolic domains.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  10. Janssen, M. A., Goldstone, R. L., Menczer, F., & Ostrom, E. (in press).  Effect of rule choice in dynamic interactive spatial commons. International Journal of the Commons.

    This paper uses laboratory experiments to examine the effect of an endogenous rule change from open access to private property as a potential solution to over-harvesting in commons dilemmas. A novel, spatial, real-time renewable resource environment was used to investigate whether participants were willing to invest in changing the rules from an open access situation to a private property system. We found that half of the participants invested in creating private property arrangements. Groups who had experienced private property in the second round of the experiment, made different decisions in the third round when open access was re-instituted in contrast to groups who experienced three rounds of open access. At the group level, earnings increased in Round 3, but this was at a cost of more inequality. No significant differences in outcomes occurred between experiments where rules were imposed by the experimental design or chosen by participants.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  11. Baldwin D. & Goldstone R.L. (2007). Finding analogies within systems: Constraints on unsegmented matching. Proceedings of the Workshop on Analogies: Integrating Multiple Cognitive Abilities (AnICA07). Nashville, Tennessee.

    The complex structure and organization of knowledge in the human mind is one of the key facets of thought. One of the fundamental cognitive processes that oper- ates over that structure is analogy. A typical compu- tational model of analogy might juxtapose a source do- main and a target domain, such as the solar system and the Bohr-Rutherford (BR) model of an atom (Gentner, 1983). The goal is to find a correspondence mapping between these two domains. Determining a mapping between the source and target domains of a non-trivial size would be intractable without a set of constraints to restrict the set of correspondences that are considered by a human reasoner. Moreover, the mere presence of domains serve as a constraint on mapping. In this paper, we study an alternative problem called unsegmented mapping - correspondence without specification of domains. We show a series of three formal constraints that allow for analogical-like mappings without explicit segmentation. The result, correspondence is possible without domains, has implications for models of analogical reasoning as well as schema induction and inference.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  12. Conway, C., Goldstone, R. L., & Christiansen, M. (2007). Spatial constraints on visual statistical learning of multi-element displays. Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 185-190). Nashville, TN: Cognitive Science Society.

    Visual statistical learning allows observers to extract high-level structure from visual scenes (Fiser & Aslin, 2001). Previous work has explored the types of statistical computations afforded but has not addressed to what extent learning results in unbound versus spatially bound representations of element cooccurrences. We explored these two possibilities using an unsupervised learning task with adult participants who observed complex multi-element scenes embedded with consistently paired elements. If learning is mediated by unconstrained associative learning mechanisms, then learning the element pairings may depend only on the co-occurrence of the elements in the scenes, without regard to their specific spatial arrangements. If learning is perceptually constrained, cooccurring elements ought to form perceptual units specific to their observed spatial arrangements. Results showed that participants learned the statistical structure of element cooccurrences in a spatial-specific manner, showing that visual statistical learning is perceptually constrained by spatial grouping principles.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  13. Gerganov, A., Grinberg, M., Quinn, P. C., & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). Simulating conceptually-guided perceptual learning. Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 287-292). Nashville, TN: Cognitive Science Society.

    Visual statistical learning allows observers to extract high-level structure from visual scenes (Fiser & Aslin, 2001). Previous work has explored the types of statistical computations afforded but has not addressed to what extent learning results in unbound versus spatially bound representations of element cooccurrences. We explored these two possibilities using an unsupervised learning task with adult participants who observed complex multi-element scenes embedded with consistently paired elements. If learning is mediated by unconstrained associative learning mechanisms, then learning the element pairings may depend only on the co-occurrence of the elements in the scenes, without regard to their specific spatial arrangements. If learning is perceptually constrained, cooccurring elements ought to form perceptual units specific to their observed spatial arrangements. Results showed that participants learned the statistical structure of element cooccurrences in a spatial-specific manner, showing that visual statistical learning is perceptually constrained by spatial grouping principles.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  14. Hills, T., Todd, P., & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). Priming and conservation between spatial and cognitive search. Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (359-364). Nashville, TN: Cognitive Science Society.

    Visual statistical learning allows observers to extract high-level structure from visual scenes (Fiser & Aslin, 2001). Previous work has explored the types of statistical computations afforded but has not addressed to what extent learning results in unbound versus spatially bound representations of element cooccurrences. We explored these two possibilities using an unsupervised learning task with adult participants who observed complex multi-element scenes embedded with consistently paired elements. If learning is mediated by unconstrained associative learning mechanisms, then learning the element pairings may depend only on the co-occurrence of the elements in the scenes, without regard to their specific spatial arrangements. If learning is perceptually constrained, cooccurring elements ought to form perceptual units specific to their observed spatial arrangements. Results showed that participants learned the statistical structure of element cooccurrences in a spatial-specific manner, showing that visual statistical learning is perceptually constrained by spatial grouping principles.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  15. Landy, D. & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). How abstract is symbolic thought? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 33, 720-733.

    In 4 experiments, the authors explored the role of visual layout in rule-based syntactic judgments. Participants judged the validity of a set of algebraic equations that tested their ability to apply the order of operations. In each experiment, a nonmathematical grouping pressure was manipulated to support or interfere with the mathematical convention. Despite the formal irrelevance of these grouping manipulations, accuracy in all experiments was highest when the nonmathematical pressure supported the mathematical grouping. The increase was significantly greater when the correct judgment depended on the order of operator precedence. The result that visual perception impacts rule application in mathematics has broad implications for relational reasoning in general. The authors conclude that formally symbolic reasoning is more visual than is usually proposed.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  16. Landy, D. & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). The alignment of ordering and space in arithmetic computation. Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 437-442). Nashville, TN: Cognitive Science Society.

    In 4 experiments, the authors explored the role of visual layout in rule-based syntactic judgments. Participants judged the validity of a set of algebraic equations that tested their ability to apply the order of operations. In each experiment, a nonmathematical grouping pressure was manipulated to support or interfere with the mathematical convention. Despite the formal irrelevance of these grouping manipulations, accuracy in all experiments was highest when the nonmathematical pressure supported the mathematical grouping. The increase was significantly greater when the correct judgment depended on the order of operator precedence. The result that visual perception impacts rule application in mathematics has broad implications for relational reasoning in general. The authors conclude that formally symbolic reasoning is more visual than is usually proposed.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  17. Landy, D. & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). How space guides interpretation of a novel mathematical system. Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 431-436). Nashville, TN: Cognitive Science Society.

    This paper investigates how people build interpretations of compound expressions in a novel formal system. In traditional arithmetic, interpretations are guided by an order of precedence convention (times and division precede addition and subtraction). This order is supported by alignment with the order of precedence. In the experiment described here, participants learned computation tables of two simple novel operators, and then were asked to discover a precedence order between them. The operators were presented with a physical spacing convention that either aligned with the precedence order, opposed it, or randomly opposed or aligned with the precedence order. Participants were more likely to reach a criterion of successful performance when the order of operations aligned with the precedence order, and did so more quickly than either other group. The results indicate that reasoners integrate salient perceptual cues with formal knowledge following particular conventions, even on novel systems.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  18. Landy, D. & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). Grounding symbol structures in space: Formal notations as diagrams. Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 425-430). Nashville, TN: Cognitive Science Society.
    [Winner of the 2007 Marr Prize for Best Student Paper at the 2007 Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society]

    Although a general sense of the magnitude, quantity, or numerosity is common both in untrained people and animals, the abilities to deal exactly with large quantities and to reason precisely in complex but well-specified situations—to behave formally, that is—are skills unique to people trained in symbolic notations. These symbolic notations employ typically complex, hierarchically embedded structures, which all extant analyses assume are the product of concatenative, rule-based processes. The primary goal of this article is to establish, using behavioral measures on naturalistic tasks, that the some of the same cognitive resources involved in representing spatial relations and proximities are also involved in representing symbolic notations. In short, formal notations are used as a kind of diagram. We examine selfgenerated productions in the domains of handwritten arithmetic expressions and typewritten statements in a formal logic. In both tasks, we find substantial evidence for spatial processes even in these highly symbolic domains.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  19. Son, J. Y., Smith, L. B., & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). Re-representation using labels: Comparison or replacement. Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp. 677-682). Nashville, TN: Cognitive Science Society.

    The practice of labeling seems to allow children to make difficult relational similarity matches. Two experiments explore the cognitive processes of comparison and replacement that have been implicated in the beneficial effects of linguistic labeling. Since linguistic labels may be implicated in a number of these processes, our experiments used traditional non-linguistic labels (post-its) to promote either the process of comparison or replacement. Results from two relational matching tasks suggest that comparison is more influential than replacement.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  20. Son, J. Y., Smith, L. B., & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). Words that evoke schemas: The need for optimal vagueness. Proceedings of the Workshop on Analogies: Integrating Multiple Cognitive Abilities (AnICA07). Nashville, Tennesse.

    Although young children typically have trouble reasoning relationally, they are aided by the presence of relational words (e.g., Gentner & Rattermann, 1991) and can reason well about commonly experienced event structures (e.g., Fivush, 1984). Two experiments examine how schema-evoking words help preschool-aged children generalize relational patterns. Experiment 1 shows the superiority of schema-evoking words and Experiment 2 further reveals that these words must be applied to vaguely related events in order to draw attention to structure.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  21. Goldstone, R. L., & Leydesdorff, L. (2006). The import and export of Cognitive Science. Cognitive Science, 30, 983-993.

    From its inception, a large part of the motivation for Cognitive Science has been the need for an interdisciplinary journal for the study of minds and intelligent systems. In the inaugural editorial for the journal, Allan Collins (1977) wrote “Current journals are fragmented along old disciplinary lines, so there is no common place for workers who approach these problems from different disciplines to talk to each other” (p. 1). The interdisciplinarity of the journal has served a valuable cross-fertilization function for those who read the journal to discover articles written for and by practitioners across a wide range of fields. The challenges of building and understanding intelligent systems are sufficiently large that they will most likely require the skills of psychologists, computer scientists, philosophers, educators, neuroscientists, and linguists collaborating and coordinating their efforts.
    Download PDF version of this paper
    Visit the journal annex for supplemental figures

  22. Janssen, M. A., & Goldstone, R. L. (2006). Dynamic-persistence of cooperation in public good games when group size is dynamic. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 234, 134-142.

    The evolution of cooperation is possible with a simple model of a population of agents that can move between groups. The agents play public good games within their group. The relative fitness of individuals within the whole population affects their number of offspring. Groups of cooperators evolve but over time are invaded by defectors which eventually results in the group’s extinction. However, for small levels of migration and mutation, high levels of cooperation evolve at the population level. Thus, evolution of cooperation based on individual fitness without kin selection, indirect or direct reciprocity is possible. We provide an analysis of the parameters that affect cooperation, and describe the dynamics and distribution of population sizes over time.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  23. Gureckis, T. M., & Goldstone, R. L. (2006). Thinking in groups. Pragmatics and Cognition, 14, 293-311

    Is cognition an exclusive property of the individual or can groups have a mind of their own? We explore this question from the perspective of complex adaptive systems. One of the principle insights from this line of work is that rules that govern behavior at one level of analysis (the individual) can cause qualitatively different behavior at higher levels (the group). We review a number of behavioral studies from our lab that demonstrate how groups of people interacting in real-time can self-organize into adaptive, problem-solving group structures. A number of principles are derived concerning the critical features of such “distributed” information processing systems. We suggest that while cognitive science has traditionally focused on the individual, cognitive processes may manifest at many levels including the emergent group-level behavior that results from the interaction of multiple agents and their environment.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  24. Roberts, M. E., & Goldstone, R. L. (2006). EPICURE: Spatial and Knowledge Limitations in Group Foraging. Adaptive Behavior, 14, 291-313.

    We propose an agent-based model of group foraging, EPICURE, for patchily distributed resources. Each agent makes probabilistic movement decisions in a gridworld through a linear combination of current perceptual information and a reinforcement history. EPICURE captures the empirical results from several foraging conditions in Goldstone and Ashpole (2004) and Goldstone, Ashpole, and Roberts (2005), and it leads to a re-evaluation of findings from those papers. In particular, human foragers show contingent usage of information, initially using social information to discover resource pools before private sampling information has been established. We describe a series of simulations that test the sources of resource undermatching often found in group foraging experiments. After testing the effects of foragers’ starting locations, travel costs, the number of foragers, and the size of uniform food distributions, we discuss a novel hypothesis for undermatching. Spatial constraints lead to inadequate individual and group information sampling and cause group undermatching. The foraging group size, food rate, spatial distribution of food, and resulting forager reinforcement histories interact to produce undermatching, and occasionally overmatching, to resources.
    Download PDF version of this paper
    Use the simulation described in this paper

  25. Quinn, P. C., Schyns, P. G., & Goldstone, R. L. (2006). The interplay between perceptual organization and categorization in the representation of complex visual patterns by young infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 95, 116-127.

    The relation between perceptual organization and categorization processes in 3- and 4-month-olds was explored. The question was whether an invariant part abstracted during category learning could interfere with Gestalt organizational processes. A 2003 study by Quinn and Schyns had reported that an initial category familiarization experience in which infants were presented with visual patterns consisting of a pacman shape and a complex polygon could interfere with infants’ subsequent good continuationbased parsing of a circle from visual patterns consisting of a circle and a complex polygon. However, an alternative noninterference explanation for the results was possible because the pacman had been presented with greater frequency and duration than had the circle. The current study repeated Quinn and Schyns’s procedure but provided an equivalent number of familiarization trials and duration of study time for the infants to process the pacman during initial familiarization and the circle during subsequent familiarization. The results replicated the previous Wndings of Quinn and Schyns. The data are consistent with the interference account and suggest that a cognitive system of adaptable feature creation can take precedence over organizational principles with which a perceptual system comes preequipped.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  26. Corneille, O., Goldstone, R. L., Queller, S., & Potter, T. (2006). Asymmetries in categorization, perceptual discrimination, and visual search for reference and non-reference exemplars. Memory & Cognition ,34, 556-567.

    Two studies examined the representation, treatment, and attention, devoted to the members of reference (i.e., Club members) and non-reference (i.e., Not-Club members) categories. Consistent with prior work on category interrelatedness (e.g. Goldstone, 1996; Goldstone, Steyvers, & Rogosky, 2003), the findings reveal the existence of asymmetric representations for reference and non-reference categories which, however, decreased as expertise and familiarity with the categories increased (Experiment 1 and Experiment 2). Participants also more readily judged two reference than two non-reference exemplars as being the same (Experiment 1), and were better at detecting reference than non-reference exemplars in a set of novel, category-unspecified,exemplars (Experiment 2). These findings provide evidence for the existence of a feature asymmetry in the representation and treatment of exemplars from reference and non-reference categories. Membership in a reference category acts as a salient feature, thereby increasing the perceived similarity and detection of faces that belong in the reference, compared to nonreference, category.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  27. Goldstone, R. L. (2006). The Complex systems see-change in education. The Journal of Learning Sciences, 15, 35-43.

    The day when scientists have time to read broadly across chemistry, biology, physics and social sciences is long gone. Journals, conferences, and academic departmental structures are becoming increasingly specialized and myopic. As Peter Csermely (1999), one of the organizers of the International Forum of Young Scientists expresses it, “There is only a limited effort to achieve the appropriate balance between the discovery of new facts and finding their appropriate place and importance in the framework of science. Science is not self-integrating, and there are fewer and fewer people taking responsibility for ‘net-making” (p. 1621). One possible response to this fragmentation of science is to simply view it as inevitable. Horgan (1996) argues that the age of fundamental scientific theorizing and discoveries has passed, and that all that is left to be done is refining the details of theories already laid down by the likes of Einstein, Darwin, and Newton. Complex systems researchers, and learning scientists more generally, offer an alternative perspective, choosing to reverse the trend toward increasing specialization.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  28. Goldstone, R. L., Jones, A., & Roberts, M. E. (2006). Group path formation. IEEE Transactions on System, Man, and Cybernetics, Part A, 36, 611-620.

    When people make choices within a group, they are frequently influenced by the choices made by others. We have experimentally explored the general phenomenon of group behavior where an early action facilitates subsequent actions. Our concrete instantiation of this problem is group path formation where people travel between destinations with the travel cost for moving onto a location inversely related to the frequency with which others have visited the location. We compare the resulting paths to optimal solutions [Minimal Steiner Trees (MSTs)] and the "Active Walker" model of pedestrian motion from biophysics. There were systematic deviations from beeline pathways in the direction of MST. These deviations showed asymmetries (people took different paths from A to B than they did from B to A) and varied as a function of the topology of the destinations, the duration of travel, and the absolute scale of the world. The Active Walker model accounted for many of these results, in addition to correctly predicting the approximate spatial distribution of steps.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  29. Goldstone, R. L., & Roberts, M. E. (2006). Self-organized trail systems in groups of humans. Complexity, 11, 43-50.

    We have developed an experimental platform for studying the trail systems that spontaneously emerge when people are motivated to take advantage of the trails left by others. In this virtual environment, the participants’ task is to reach randomly selected destinations whileminimizing travel costs. The travel cost of every patch in the environment is inversely related to the number of times the patch was visited by others. The resulting trail systems are a compromise between people going to their destinations and going where many people have previously traveled. We compare the results from our group experiments to the Active Walker model of pedestrian motion from biophysics. The ActiveWalker model accounted for deviations of trails from the beeline paths, the gradual merging of trails over time, and the influences of scale and configuration of destinations on trail systems, as well as correctly predicting the approximate spatial distribution of people’s steps. Two deviations of the model from empirically obtained results were corrected by (1) incorporating a distance metric sensitive to canonical horizontal and vertical axes, and (2) increasing the influence of a trail’s travel cost on an agent’s route as the agent approaches its destination.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  30. Roberts, M., & Goldstone, R. L. (2006). EPICURE: An agent-based foraging model. Artificial Life X: Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (379-385).

    We present an agent-based foraging model, EPICURE, which captures the results from recent human group foraging experiments (Goldstone and Ashpole, 2004; Goldstone et al., 2005), provides a novel explanation for those results and previous animal foraging results, and makes predictions for future foraging experiments. We describe a series of simulations that test the sources of resource undermatching often found in group foraging experiments. We conclude that foraging group size, food rate, and spatial distribution of food interact to produce undermatching, and occasionally, overmatching, to resources. Furthermore, we present wealth distribution results from the aforementioned empirical studies and EPICURE simulations.
    Download PDF version of this paper
    Use the simulation described in this paper

  31. Son, J. Y., Smith, L. B., & Goldstone, R. L. (2006). Generalizing from simple instances: An uncomplicated lesson from kids learning objects categories. Proceedings of the Twenty-eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (2174-2179)

    Abstraction is the process of stripping away irrelevant information so that learners can generalize on relevant similarities. Can we shortcut this process by directly teaching abstractions in the form of simplified instances? We tested this prediction in the domain of shape-based generalization and found that young children were able to generalize better when taught with simplified shapes rather than complex detailed ones. Simplicity during training allowed shape novices to generalize like shape experts.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  32. Landy, D., & Goldstone, R. L. (2005). How we learn about things we don't already understand. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 17, 343-369.

    The computation-as-cognition metaphor requires that all cognitive objects are constructed from a fixed set of basic primitives; prominent models of cognition and perception try to provide that fixed set. Despite this effort, however, there are no extant computational models that can actually generate complex concepts and processes from simple and generic basic sets, and there are good reasons to wonder whether such models may be forthcoming. We suggest that one can have the benefits of computationalism without a commitment to fixed feature sets, by postulating processes that slowly develop special-purpose feature languages, from which knowledge is constructed. This provides an alternative to the fixed-model conception without radical anti-representationlism. Substantial evidence suggests that such feature development adaptation actually occurs in the perceptual learning that accompanies category learning. Given the existence of robust methods for novel feature creation, the assumption of a fixed basis set of primitives as psychologically necessary is at best premature. Methods of primitive construction include (a) perceptual sensitization to physical stimuli, (b) unitization and differentiation of existing (non-psychological) stimulus elements into novel psychological primitives, guided by the current set of features, and (c) the intelligent selection of novel inputs, which in turn guides the automatic construction of new primitive concepts. Modeling the grounding of concepts as sensitivity to physical properties reframes the question of concept construction from the generation of an appropriate composition of sensations, to the tuning of detectors to appropriate circumstances.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  33. Hockema, S. A., Blair, M. R., & Goldstone, R. L. (2005). Differentiation for novel dimensions. Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 953-958)

    Two experiments are reported that provide evidence for perceptual differentiation between a pair of novel, integral dimensions, in contrast to previous attempts that failed to differentiate these same two dimensions (Op de Beeck,Wagemans, & Vogels, 2003). In Experiment 1, an acquired distinctiveness effect was created on the category-relevant dimension through a categorization training regimen that gradually increased in difficulty. Response times for correct trials were faster across the category boundary. This effect was replicated in Experiment 2 using a new training procedure where participants had to predict category boundaries while watching an animation in which shapes transformed along the category-relevant dimension. Furthermore, the accuracy results of Experiment 2 also indicated that discriminability was changed on the category-relevant dimension relative to the irrelevant dimension across the entire range of the dimension, not just at the category boundary.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  34. Landy, D., & Goldstone, R. L. (2005). Relational reasoning is in the eyes of the beholder: How global perceptual groups aid and impair algebraic evaluations. Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 2509)

    Relational reasoning—reasoning that depends on the interactions of multiple elements, rather than on the intrinsic properties of the elements—is both ubiquitous and challenging. For example, children find it difficult to respond to relational commonalities when object-based similarities are present (Gentner & Rattermann, 1991). Since overt symbol systems such as algebra are external constructs, their terms can contain perceptual regularities. Models of symbolic reasoning, however, typically ignore perceptual regularities (Anderson, in press). It is reasonable to wonder whether people make use of available domaingeneral grouping processes when parsing mathematical structures.

    The purpose of the experiments described here is to evaluate whether algebraic grouping is sensitive to visual grouping. If processing is strictly symbolic, then the manipulation of perceptual regularities should not affect judgments; however, if people use visual grouping to help them parse expressions, then they should make more errors in cases where the perceptual grouping gives an incorrect answer, and be more accurate when visual grouping supports the standard order of operations.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  35. Mason, W. A., Jones, A., & Goldstone, R. L. (2005). Propagation of innovations in networked groups. Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 1419-1424)

    A novel paradigm was developed to study the behavior of groups of networked humans searching a problem space. We examined how different network structures affect the diffusion of information about good solutions. Participants made numerical guesses and received scores that were also made available to their neighbors in the network. When the problem space was monotonic and had only one optimal solution, groups were fastest at finding the solution when all of the groups’ information was presented to them. However, when there were good but suboptimal solutions (i.e., local maxima), the group connected via a small-world network (Watts & Strogatz, 1998) was faster at finding the best solution than all other network structures.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  36. Roberts, M. E., & Goldstone, R. L. (2005). Explaining resource undermatching with agent-based models. Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 1872-1877)

    We propose two agent-based models of group foraging for two perceptual conditions. These models exhibit complex group-level behavior using only a simple rule set with a homogeneous group of agents. The models are shown to replicate results from Goldstone and Ashpole (2004), and we describe a series of simulations that test the sources of the resource undermatching often found in group foraging experiments. After testing the effects of travel costs, the number of agents, and uniform variance food distributions, we conclude that many group foraging studies have overlooked the interplay of spatial constraints with food rates in causing undermatching.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  37. Son, J. Y., & Goldstone, R. L. (2005). Relational words as handles: They bring along baggage. Proceedings of the Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 2050-2055)

    Two experiments examined the role of relational language on analogical transfer. Participants were taught Signal Detection Theory (SDT) embedded in a doctor story. In the experimental condition, relational words accompanied the story. Relational words that shared superficial similarity with the contextual elements facilitated transfer. Without the shared semantics, relational words were detrimental to transfer performance. A computational model lends a more structured perspective on how language changes cognition.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  38. Goldstone, R. L., & Janssen, M. A. (2005). Computational models of collective behavior. Trends in Cognitive Science, 9, 424-430.

    Computational models of human collective behavior offer promise in providing quantitative and empirically verifiable accounts of how individual decisions lead to the emergence of group-level organizations. Agent-based models (ABMs) describe interactions among individual agents and their environment, and provide a process-oriented alternative to descriptive mathematical models. Recent ABMs provide compelling accounts of group pattern formation, contagion, and cooperation, and can be used to predict, manipulate, and improve upon collective behavior. ABMs overcome an assumption underlying much of cognitive science – that the individual is the critical unit of cognition. The advocated alternative is that individuals participate in collective organizations that they may not understand or even perceive, and that these organizations affect and are affected by individual behavior.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  39. Feng, Y., Goldstone, R. L., & Menkov, V. (2005). A Graph Matching Algorithm and its Application to Conceptual System Translation. International Journal on Artificial Intelligence Tools, 14, 77-100.

    ABSURDIST II, an extension to ABSURDIST, is an algorithm using attributed graph matching to find translations between conceptual systems. It uses information about the internal structure of systems by itself, or in combination with external information about concept similarities across systems. It supports systems with multiple types of weighted or unweighted, directed or undirected relations between concepts. The algorithm exploits graph sparsity to improve computational efficiency.We present the results of experiments with a number of conceptual systems, including artificially constructed random graphs with introduced distortions.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  40. Goldstone, R. L., Feng, Y., & Rogosky, B. (2005).  Connecting concepts to the world and each other. In D. Pecher & R. Zwaan (Eds.)  Grounding cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 292-314)

    How can well tell that two people both have a concept of dog, gold, or car despite differences in their conceptual knowledge?  Two kinds of information can be used to translate between the concepts in two persons’ minds: the internal relations between concepts within each person’s mind, and external grounding of the concepts.  We present a neural network model called ABSURDIST (Aligning Between Systems Using Relations Derived Inside Systems Themselves) that integrates internal and external determinants of conceptual meaning to find translations across people or other systems.  The model shows that appropriate translations can be found by considering only similarity relations among concepts within a person.  However, simulations also indicate synergistic interactions between internal and external sources of information. ABSURDIST is then applied to analogical reasoning, dictionary translation, translating between web-based ontologies, subgraph matching, and object recognition.  The performance of ABSURDIST suggests the utility of concepts that are simultaneously externally grounded and enmeshed within a conceptual system.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  41. Rogosky, B. J., & Goldstone, R. L. (2005). Adaptation of perceptual and semantic features. In L. A. Carlson & E. van der Zee (Eds.), Functional features in language and space: Insights from perception, categorization and development. (pp. 257-273). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

    This chapter examines the role of feature in theories of concepts, perception, and language. The authors define features as psychological representations of properties in the world that can be processed independently of other properties and that are relevant to a task, such as categorization. They discuss the classic view of features as entities that do not change over time. They argue for an alternative view in which features are created and adapted according to the immediate goals and context of tasks, and over longer time periods in terms of perceptual and conceptual learning and development. The authors also distinguish pairs of dimensions in terms of whether the dimensions can be processed separately (i.e. either dimension can be attended independently of the other) or integrally (i.e. the dimensions cannot be processed independently). They present a study of the classification of linguistic stimuli according to rules based on semantic features (e.g. ferocity and socialness of animals). The results indicate that changes in the integral processing of the dimensions can be induced by tasks that favor the separate processing of one dimenion. The findings support the authors' claim that, like perceptual features, semantic features can be adapted during learning.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  42. Goldstone, R. L., & Son, J. Y. (2005).  The transfer of scientific principles using concrete and idealized simulations.  The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 14, 69-110.

    Participants in two experiments interacted with computer simulations designed to foster understanding of scientific principles governing complex adaptive systems.  The quality of participants’ transportable understanding was measured by the amount of transfer between two simulations governed by the same principle.  The perceptual concreteness of the elements within the first simulation was manipulated.  The elements either remained concrete throughout the simulation, remained idealized, or switched midway into the simulation from concrete to idealized or vice versa.  Transfer was better when the appearance of the elements switched, consistent with theories predicting more general schemas when the schemas are multiply instantiated.  The best transfer was observed when originally concrete elements became idealized.  These results are interpreted in terms of tradeoffs between grounded, concrete construals of simulations and more abstract, transportable construals.  Progressive idealization (“Concreteness fading”) allows originally grounded and interpretable principles to become less tied to specific contexts and hence more transferable.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  43. Goldstone, R. L, & Son, J. (2005).  Similarity.  In K. Holyoak & R. Morrison (Eds.).  Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (pp. 13-36).
    Human assessments of similarity are fundamental to cognition because similarities in the world are revealing.  The world is an orderly enough place that similar objects and events tend to behave similarly.  This fact of the world is not just a fortunate coincidence.  It is because objects are similar that they will tend to behave similarly in most respects.  It is because crocodiles and alligators are similar in their external form, internal biology, behavior, diet, and customary environment that one can often successfully generalize from what one knows of one to the other.  As Quine (1969) observed, “Similarity, is fundamental for learning, knowledge and thought, for only our sense of similarity allows us to order things into kinds so that these can function as stimulus meanings.  Reasonable expectation depends on the similarity of circumstances and on our tendency to expect that similar causes will have similar effects (p. 114).”  Similarity thus plays a crucial role in making predictions because similar things usually behave similarly.
    Download PDF version of this paper prior to typesetting
    Download PDF typeset version of this paper (bitmap)

  44. Goldstone, R. L., Ashpole, B. C., & Roberts, M. E., (2005). Knowledge of resources and competitors in human foraging.  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 12, 81-87.
    The allocation of human participants to resources was studied by observing the population dynamics of people interacting in real-time within a common virtual world. Resources were distributed in two spatially separated pools with varying relative reinforcement rates (50-50, 65- 35, or 80-20). We manipulated whether participants could see each other and the distribution of resources. When participants could see each other but not the resources, the richer pool was underutilized. When participants could see the resources but not each other, the richer pool was overutilized. In conjunction with prior experiments that correlated the visibility of agents and resources (Goldstone & Ashpole, in press), these results indicate that participants’ foraging decisions are influenced by both forager and resource information. The results suggest that the presence of a crowd at a resource is a deterring rather than attractive factor. Both fast and slow oscillations in the harvesting rates of the pools across time were revealed by Fourier analyses. The slow waves of crowd migration are most prevalent when the resources are invisible, whereas the fast cycles are most prevalent when the resources are visible and participants are invisible.
    Download PDF version of this paper prior to typesetting
    Download PDF typeset version of this paper

  45. Feng, Y., Goldstone, R. L., & Menkov, V (2004).  ABSURDIST II: A Graph Matching Algorithm and its Application to Conceptual System Translation.  FLAIRS 2004.
    ABSURDIST II, an extension to ABSURDIST, is an algorithm using attributed graph matching to find translations between conceptual systems. It uses information about the internal structure of systems by itself, or in combination with external information about concept similarities across systems. It supports systems with multiple types of weighted or unweighted, directed or undirected relations between concepts. The algorithm exploits graph sparsity to improve computational efficiency. We present the results of experiments with a number of conceptual systems, including artificially constructed random graphs with introduced distortions.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  46. Börner, K, Maru, J. T., & Goldstone, R. L. (2004).  The simultaneous evolution of article and author networks in PNAS.  The Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 101, 5266-527.

    There has been a long history of research into the structure and evolution of mankind’s scientific endeavor. However, recent progress in applying the tools of science to understand science itself has been unprecedented because only recently has there been access to high-volume and high-quality data sets of scientific output (e.g., publications, patents, grants), as well as computers and algorithms capable of handling this enormous stream of data. This paper reviews major work on models that aim to capture and recreate the structure and dynamics of scientific evolution. We then introduce a general process model that simultaneously grows co-author and paper-citation networks. The statistical and dynamic properties of the networks generated by this model are validated against a 20-year data set of articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Systematic deviations from a power law distribution of citations to papers are well fit by a model that incorporates a partitioning of authors and papers into topics, a bias for authors to cite recent papers, and a tendency for authors to cite papers cited by papers that they have read. In this TARL model (for Topics, Aging, and Recursive Linking), the number of topics is linearly related to the clustering coefficient of the simulated paper citation network.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  47. Goldstone, R. L. (2004). Believing is seeing. American Psychological Society Observer, 17, 23-26.
    Human concept learning clearly depends upon perception. Our concept of "gerbil" is built out of perceptual features such as "furry," "small," and "four-legged." However, recent research has found that the dependency works both ways. Perception not only influences, but is influenced by, the concepts that we learn. Our laboratory has been exploring the psychological mechanisms by which concepts and perception mutually influence one another, and building computational models to show that the circle of influences is benign rather than vicious.
    Access this paper on-line at APS

  48. Goldstone, R. L., & Ashpole, B. C. (2004). Human foraging behavior in a virtual environment. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 11, 508-514.
    Our goal in this research is to collect a large volume of time-evolving data from a system composed of human agents vying for resources in a common environment, with the eventual aim of guiding the development of computational models of human resource allocation.  We have developed an experimental platform that allows a large number of human participants to interact in real-time within a common virtual world.  Two resource pools were created with different rates of replenishment.  The participants’ task was to obtain as many resource tokens as possible during an experiment.  In addition to varying the relative replenishment rate for the two resources (50-50, 65-35, 80-20), we manipulated whether agents could see each other and the entire food distribution, or had their vision restricted to food in their own location.  As a collective, the agents would optimally harvest the resources if they distribute themselves proportionally to the distribution of resources.  Empirical violations of global optimality were found. First, there was a systematic underutilization of the more preponderant resource.  For example, agents distributed themselves approximately 75% and 25% to resources pools that had relative replenishment rates of 80% and 20%, respectively.  The expected pay-off per agent was larger for pools with relatively high replenishment rates.  Second, there were oscillations in the harvesting rates of the resources across time, particularly when agents’ vision was restricted.  Perceived underutilization of a resource resulted in an influx of agents to that resource.  This sudden influx, in turn, resulted in a glut of agents, which then led to a trend for agents to depart from the resource region.  This cyclic activity in the collective data was revealed by a Fourier analysis showing prominent power in the range of about 50 seconds per cycle.
    Download PDF version of this paper  

  49. Goldstone, R. L. (2003).  Learning to perceive while perceiving to learn.  in R. Kimchi, M. Behrmann, and C. Olson (Eds.) Perceptual Organization in Vision: Behavioral and Neural Perspectives.  Mahwah, New Jersey.  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 233-278)
    The external world must be filtered through our perceptual systems before it can have an impact upon us.  That is, the world we experience is formed by our perceptual processing.  However, it is not viciously circular to argue that our perceptual systems are reciprocally formed by our experiences.  In fact, it is because our experiences are necessarily based on our perceptual systems that these perceptual systems must be shaped so that our experiences are appropriate and useful for dealing with our world.

    In what follows, I will argue that the "building blocks" an observer uses for construing their world depends on the observer’s history, training, and acculturation. These factors, together with psychophysical constraints, mold one’s set of building blocks.  Researchers who have proposed fixed sets of hard-wired primitives are exactly right in one sense -- the combinatorics of objects, words, scenes, and scenarios strongly favor componential representations.  However, this does not necessitate that the components be hard-wired.  By developing new components to subserve particular tasks and environments, a newly important discrimination can generate building blocks that are tailored for the discrimination.  Adaptive building blocks are likely to be efficient because they can be optimized for idiosyncratic needs and environments.
    Download PDF version of this paper

  50. Goldstone, R. L., Ashpole, B. C. (2003). The distribution of people to resources in a networked multi-player environment.  Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
     This is an abridged version of Goldstone & Ashpole (2004).
    Download PDF version of this paper  

  51. Goldstone, R. L., & Sakamoto, Y. (2003). The Transfer of Abstract Principles Governing Complex Adaptive Systems.  Cognitive Psychology, 46, 414-466.

     Four experiments explored participants' understanding of the abstract principles governing computer simulations of complex adaptive systems.  Experiment 1 revealed better transfer between computer simulations when they were governed by the same abstract principle, even when the simulations' domains were dissimilar.  Experiments 2 and 3 showed better transfer of abstract principles across simulations that were relatively dissimilar, and that this effect was due to participants who performed relatively poorly on the initial simulation.   In Experiment 4, participants showed better abstract understanding of a simulation when it was depicted with concrete rather than idealized graphical elements.  However, for poor performers, the idealized version of the simulation transferred better to a new simulation governed by the same abstraction.  The results are interpreted in terms of competition between abstract and concrete construals of the simulations.  Individuals prone toward concrete construals tend to overlook abstractions when concrete properties or superficial similarities are salient.
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  52. Goldstone, R. L., Steyvers, M., & Rogosky, B. J. (2003). Conceptual interrelatedness and caricatures.  Memory & Cognition, 31, 169-180.

     Concepts are interrelated to the extent that the characterization each concept is influenced by the other concepts, and isolated to the extent that the characterization of one concept is independent of other concepts.  The relative categorization accuracy of the prototype and caricature of a concept can be used as a measure of concept interrelatedness.  The prototype is the central tendency of a concept, whereas a caricature deviates from the concept’s central tendency in the direction opposite to the central tendency of other acquired concepts.  The prototype is predicted to be relatively well categorized when a concept is relatively independent of other concepts, but the caricature is predicted to be relatively well categorized when a concept is highly related to other concepts.  Support for these predictions comes from manipulations of the labels given to simultaneously acquired concepts (Experiment 1) and the order of categories during learning (Experiment 2).
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  53. Goldstone, R. L., & Johansen, M. K. (2003). Conceptual development from origins to asymptotes.  In D. Rakison & L. Oakes (Eds.) Categories and concepts in early development.  (pp. 403-418).  Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
    Scientists studying adult concept learning are typically careful to analyze the entire pattern of responses given across all of the trials of an experiment.  Often times, the early trials are the most diagnostic because categorization accuracy quickly reaches an asymptote.  We take some pride in tackling the hard problem of accounting for adaptive processes that account for category learning, unlike many psychophysicists, who simply throw out the first 1000 trials because steady-state performance has not yet been reached.  However, lest we grow too smug, the chapters of this book provide a great service by reminding us that even though we analyze the very first trial of our experiment, we are still studying conceptual change that occurs almost imperceptibly close to the asymptote.  By the time that our 20-year-old subjects come to our laboratories, they have learned the majority of the concepts that they will ever learn and virtually all of their truly foundational concepts.  Relatively brief laboratory training suffices to teach students the rule “Circle Above Square” (Bruner, Goodnow, & Austin, 1956), a particular configuration of 9 dots (Posner & Keele, 1968), or a new fact such as that grebes are birds, but this rapid learning is only possible because it builds upon a longer and more profound process by which concepts such as Above (Quinn, this volume), Bird (Mervis, Pani & Pani, this volume), Animal (Mareschal, this volume; Mandler, this volume), and Animacy (Gelman & Koenig, this volume; Rakison, this volume) are learned.

    Those of us who want to develop theories of the learning and representation of adult concepts cannot afford to remain blind to the conceptual development that makes possible adult concept use.  This life-long learning provides us with the fundamental representations that we subsequently combine and tweak.  In assessing the contribution of developmental research on concepts and categories to our general understanding of human concepts, we will ask four questions: what are concepts; what is the relation between perception and concepts; what are the constraints on concept learning; and what are promising future directions for research on concepts?
    Download PDF version of this paper  

  54. Goldstone, R. L., & Kersten, A. (2003). Concepts and Categories. In A. F. Healy & R. W. Proctor (Eds.) Comprehensive handbook of psychology, Volume 4: Experimental psychology.  (pp. 591-621).  New York: Wiley.

     Issues related to concepts and categorization are nearly ubiquitous in psychology because of peoples natural tendency to perceive a thing AS something.  Zen meditation practices may or may not succeed in allowing a person to grasp the object itself rather than the labels and associations it evokes.  In either case, the difficulty of this pursuit affirms the powerful impulse that we have to interpret our world.  This act of interpretation, an act of seeing something as X rather than simply seeing it (Wittgenstein, 1953), is fundamentally an act of categorization.

    The attraction of research on concepts is that an extremely wide variety of cognitive acts can be understood as categorizations.  Identifying the person sitting across from you at the breakfast table involves categorizing something as your spouse.  Diagnosing the cause of someones illness involves a disease categorization.  Interpreting a painting as a Picasso, an artifact as Mayan, a geometry as Non-Euclidean, a fugue as baroque, a conversationalist as charming, a wine as a Bordeaux, and a government as socialist are categorizations at various levels of abstraction.  The typically unspoken assumption of research on concepts is that these cognitive acts have something in common.  That is, there are principles that explain many or all acts of categorization.  This assumption is controversial (see Medin, Lynch, & Solomon, 2000), but is perhaps justified by its potential pay-off.  If there are common principles governing concepts in their diverse manifestations, then discovering these principles would have a tremendous benefit, for we would not only acquire an understanding of how people identify faces, recognize letters, treat diseases, or form categories in a specialized domain.  We would also have a unified understanding of all of these phenomena as examples of a generic process of concept formation.
    Download PDF version of this paper
    Download a pre-print Microsoft Word version

  55. Halberstadt, J., Goldstone, R. L., & Levine, G. M. (2003). Featural Processing in Face Preferences.  Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39, 270-278.

    Two experiments examined how practice and time pressure influence holistic processing, defined as the relative importance of feature interactions, in a face preference task.  Participants rated 32 cartoon faces that varied along five dichotomous features (Experiment 1) or 27 realistic morphed faces that varied along three trichotomous dimensions (Experiment 2), under high and low time pressure (operationalized as a short versus long stimulus presentation time), over a series of experimental blocks. In both experiments, the overall importance of facial features, but not of feature interactions, increased over blocks and, in one condition of Experiment 1, under high versus low time pressure.  Analyses of idiosyncratic importance indicated that the feature effects were due to the increasing importance of participants' idiosyncratically most influential features.  Functional differences between face preferences and face recognition are offered to explain and predict when facial features will be processed independently versus holistically.
    Download PDF version of this paper  

  56. Shyi, G. S. -W., Goldstone, R. L., Hummel, J. E., & Lin, C. (submitted). Computing representations for bound and unbound object matching.

     Five experiments examined the nature of object representation. Participants made same-different judgments between two multipart 3-D objects, according to rules where either the object parts and their spatial relationship had to be considered (role-relevant, RR) or just the object parts (role-irrelevant, RI). Results indicate that it was easiest to judge two identical and orientationally aligned objects according to either rule, followed by judging those that shared identical parts located in different positions according to the RI rule. It was most difficult to judge the latter according to the RR rule when they were misaligned by rotation. These findings lend support to the hypothesis that object representations at the image level, part level, or full structural description level may be computed and used for making same-different judgements. The implications of our findings for object recognition in general and the role of spatial attention in particular are discussed.
    View This Paper (HTML)

  57. Goldstone, R. L., & Rogosky, B. J. (2002). Using relations within conceptual systems to translate across conceptual systems, Cognition, 84, 295-320.

     We explore one aspect of meaning, the identification of matching concepts across systems (e.g. people, theories, or cultures).  We present a computational algorithm called ABSURDIST (Aligning Between Systems Using Relations Derived Inside Systems for Translation) that uses only within-system similarity relations to find between-system translations.  While illustrating the sufficiency of within-system relations to account for translating between systems, simulations of ABSURDIST also indicate synergistic interactions between intrinsic, within-system information and extrinsic information.
    Download PDF version of this paper  

    Here is a brief description and commentary on ABSURDIST:
    Dietrich, E. (2003).  An ABSURDIST model vindicates a venerable theory.  Trends in Cognitive Science, 7, 57-59.
    Download PDF version of this paper  

  58. Goldstone, R. L., & Rogosky, B. J. (2002). The role of roles in translating across conceptual systems, Proceedings of the Twenty-fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.  Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  (pp. 369-374).

     According to an “external grounding” theory of meaning, a concept’s meaning depends on its connection to the external world.  By a “conceptual web” account, a concept’s meaning depends on its relations to other concepts within the same system.  We explore one aspect of meaning, the identification of matching concepts across systems (e.g. people, theories, or cultures).  We present a computational algorithm called ABSURDIST (Aligning Between Systems Using Relations Derived Inside Systems for Translation) that uses only within-system similarity relations to find between-system translations.  While illustrating the sufficiency of a conceptual web account for translating between systems, simulations of ABSURDIST also indicate powerful synergistic interactions between intrinsic, within-system information and extrinsic information.  Applications of the algorithm to issues in object recognition, shape analysis, automatic translation, human analogy and comparison making, pattern matching, neural network interpretation, and statistical analysis are described.
    Download PDF version of this paper  

  59. Goldstone, R. L, Lippa, Y., & Shiffrin, R. M. (2001). Altering object representations through category learning.  Cognition, 78, 27-43.

     Previous research has shown that objects that are grouped together in the same category become more similar to each other and that objects that are grouped in different categories become increasingly dissimilar, as measured by similarity ratings and psychophysical discriminations. These findings are consistent with two theories of the influence of concept learning on similarity. By a strategic judgment bias account, the categories associated with objects are explicitly used as cues for determining similarity, and objects that are categorized together are judged to be more similar because similarity is not only a function of the objects themselves, but also the objectsí category labels. By a representational change account, category learning alters the description of the objects themselves, emphasizing properties that are relevant for categorization. A new method for distinguishing between these accounts is introduced which measures the difference between the similarity ratings of categorized objects to a neutral object. The results indicate both strategic biases based on category labels and genuine representational change, with the strategic bias affecting mostly objects belonging to different categories and the representational change affecting mostly objects belonging to the same category.
    View This Paper (HTML)
    Download PDF version of this paper   (Download free reader from Adobe for this file)

  60. Goldstone, R. L, & Steyvers, M. (2001). The Sensitization and Differentiation of Dimensions During Category Learning.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130,116-139.

     The reported experiments explore two mechanisms by which object descriptions are flexibly adapted to support concept learning: selective attention and dimension differentiation. Arbitrary dimensions were created by blending photographs of faces in different proportions, and mixing these blends together.  Consistent with learned selective attention, positive transfer was found when initial and final categorizations shared either relevant or irrelevant dimensions, and negative transfer was found when previously relevant dimensions became irrelevant. Unexpectedly good transfer was observed when both irrelevant dimensions became relevant and relevant dimensions became irrelevant, and was explained in terms of participants learning to isolate one dimension from another. This account was further supported by experiments indicating that conditions expected to produce positive transfer via dimension differentiation produced better transfer than conditions expected to produce positive transfer via selective attention, but only when stimuli were composed of highly integral and overlapping dimensions. We discuss the relation between dimension differentiation and selective attention, mechanisms that may underlie these processes, and implications for category learning research.
    View This Paper (HTML)
    Download PDF version of this paper   

  61. Lippa, Y., & Goldstone, R. L. (2001).  The Acquisition of Automatic Response Biases through Stimulus-Response Mapping and Categorization Determined by a Compatibility Task.  Memory & Cognition,  29, 1051-1060

     Experiments explored whether spatially neutral stimuli acquire the ability to automatically elicit spatial responses. In Experiment 1, participants associated line-drawings with either left or right key presses. Subsequently, the pictures were used in a Simon task wherein participants made left and right key presses based on the color of the picture, ignoring its shape. Participants responded more quickly when the key press previously associated with the picture matched, rather than mismatched, the response required by the picture's color. In Experiment 2, participants learned response categories that grouped spatially ambiguous line-drawings together with pictures of left- and right-pointing arrows and fingers. A subsequent Simon task again yielded compatibility effects, indicating that the spatially ambiguous pictures inherited the response biases of the other objects in their category. Thus, responses directly associated with shapes, and indirectly associated with shapes by category membership, are both automatically triggered even when the responses are irrelevant and inappropriate.
    View This Paper (HTML) [TEXT ONLY, no figures]
    Download PDF version of this paper

  62. Goldstone, R. L. (2000). Unitization during Category Learning.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 26, 86-112

     Five experiments explored the question of whether new perceptual units can be developed if they are diagnostic for a category learning task, and if so, what are the constraints on this unitization process? During category learning, participants were required to attend either a single component or a conjunction of five components in order to correctly categorize an object. In Experiments 1-4, some evidence for unitization was found in that the conjunctive task becomes much easier with practice, and this improvement was not found for the single component task, or for conjunctive tasks where the components cannot be unitized. Influences of component order (Experiment 1), component contiguity (Experiment 2), component proximity (Experiment 3), and number of components (Experiment 4) on practice effects were found. Using a Fourier Transformation method for deconvolving response times (Experiment 5), prolonged practice effects yielded responses that were faster than expected by analytic model that integrate evidence from independently perceived components.
    View This Paper (HTML) [with some figures]
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  63. Goldstone, R. L. (2000). A neural network model  of concept-influenced segmentation.  Proceedings of the Twenty-second Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.  Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (pp. 172-177).

     Several models of categorization assume that fixed perceptual representations are combined together to determine categorizations.  This research explores the possibility that categorization experience alters, rather than simply uses, descriptions of objects.  Based on results from human experiments, a  model is presented in which a competitive learning network is first given categorization training, and then is given a subsequent segmentation task, using the same network weights.  Category learning establishes detectors for stimulus parts that are diagnostic, and these detectors, once established, bias the interpretation of subsequent objects to be segmented.
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  64. Goldstone, R. L., Steyvers, M., Spencer-Smith, J., & Kersten, A. (2000). Interactions between perceptual and conceptual learning. in E. Diettrich & A. B.  Markman (eds.) Cognitive Dynamics: Conceptual Change in Humans and Machines.  Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  (pp. 191-228).

     Confusions arise when 'stable' is equated with 'foundational.' Spurred on by the image of a house`s foundation, it is tempting to think that something provides effective support to the extent that it is rigid and stable. We will argue that when considering the role of perception in grounding our concepts, exactly the opposite is true. Our perceptual system supports our ability to acquire new concepts by being flexibly tuned to these concepts. Whereas the concepts that we learn are certainly influenced by our perceptual representations, we will argue that these perceptual representations are also influenced by the learned concepts. In keeping with one of the central themes of this book, behavioral adaptability is completely consistent with representationalism. In fact, the most straightforward account of our experimental results is that concept learning can produce changes in perceptual representations, the 'vocabulary' of perceptual features, that are used by subsequent tasks.

    This chapter reviews theoretical and empirical evidence that perceptual vocabularies used to describe visual objects are flexibly adapted to the demands of their user. We will extend arguments made elsewhere for adaptive perceptual representations (Goldstone, Schyns, & Medin, in press; Schyns, Goldstone, & Thibaut, in press), and discuss research from our laboratory illustrating specific interactions between perceptual and conceptual learning. We will describe computer simulations that provide accounts of these interactions using neural network models. These models have detectors that become increasingly tuned to the set of perceptual features that support concept learning. The bulk of the chapter will be organized around mechanisms of human perceptual learning, and computer simulations of these mechanisms.
    Access site where this paper can be downloaded
    Download PDF version of this paper

  65. Goldstone, R. L. (1999). Similarity. in R.A. Wilson & F. C. Keil (eds.) MIT encylopedia of the cognitive sciences.(pp. 763-765).Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

     An ability to assess similarity lies close to the core of cognition. In the time-honored tradition of legitimizing fields of psychology by citing William James, `This sense of Sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking` (James, 1890/1950; p. 459). Similarity plays an indispensable foundational role in theories of cognition. People`s success in problem solving depends on the similarity of previously solved problems to current problems. Categorization depends on the similarity of objects to be categorized to category members. Memory retrieval depends on the similarity of retrieval cues to stored memories. Inductive reasoning is based on the principle that if an event is similar to a previous event, then similar outcomes are predicted. An understanding of these cognitive processes requires that we understand how humans assess similarity. Four major psychological models of similarity are: geometric, featural, alignment-based, and transformational.
    View This Paper (HTML)
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  66. Goldstone, R. L. (1998). Perceptual Learning.  Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 585-612.

     Perceptual learning involves relatively long-lasting changes to an organism`s perceptual system that improve its ability to respond to its environment. Four mechanisms of perceptual learning are discussed: attention weighting, imprinting, differentiation, and unitization. By attention weighting, perception becomes adapted to tasks and environments by increasing the attention paid to important dimensions and features. By imprinting, receptors are developed that are specialized for stimuli or parts of a stimuli. By differentiation, stimuli that were once indistinguishable become psychologically separated. By unitization, tasks that originally required detection of several parts come to be accomplished by detecting a single constructed unit representing a complex configuration. Research from cognitive psychology, psychophysics, neuroscience, expert/novice differences, development, computer science, and cross-cultural differences is described that relates to these mechanisms. The locus, limits, and applications of perceptual learning are also discussed.
    View This Paper (HTML)
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  67. Goldstone, R. L. (1998). Hanging Together: A connectionist model of similarity. In J. Grainger & A. M. Jacobs (Eds.)  Localist Connectionist Approaches to Human Cognition.  (pp. 283 - 325).  Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

     Human judgments of similarity have traditionally been modelled by measuring the distance between the compared items in a psychological space, or the overlap between the items` featural representations. An alternative approach, inspired jointly by work in analogical reasoning (D. Gentner, 1983; K. T. Holyoak & P. Thagard, 1989) and interactive activation models of perception (J. L. McClelland & D. E. Rumelhart, 1981), views the process of judging similarity as one of establishing alignments between the parts of compared entities. A localist connectionist model of similarity, SIAM, is described wherein units represent correspondences between scene parts, and these units mutually and concurrently influence each other according to their compatability. The model is primarily applied to similarity rating tasks, but is also applied to other indirect measures of similarity, to judgments of alignment between scene parts, to impressions of comparison difficulty, and to patterns of perceptual sensitivity for matching and mismatching features.
    View This Paper (HTML) [without figures, but with equations]
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  68. Goldstone, R. L., & Barsalou, L. (1998). Reuniting perception and conception. Cognition, 65, 231-262.

    (reprinted as    : Goldstone, R. L., & Barsalou, L. (1998).  Reuniting perception and conception.  In S. A. Sloman and L. J. Rips (Eds.) Similarity and symbols in human thinking.  (pp. 145-176).  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)

     Work in philosophy and psychology has argued for a dissociation between perceptually-based similarity and higher-level rules in conceptual thought. Although such a dissociation may be justified at times, our goal is to illustrate ways in which conceptual processing is grounded in perception, both for perceptual similarity and abstract rules. We discuss the advantages, power, and influences of perceptually-based representations. First, many of the properties associated with amodal symbol systems (e.g. productivity and generativity) can be achieved with perceptually-based systems as well. Second, relatively raw perceptual representations are powerful because they can implicitly represent properties in an analog fashion. Third, perception naturally provides impressions of overall similarity, exactly the type of similarity useful for establishing many common categories. Fourth, perceptual similarity is not static but becomes tuned over time to conceptual demands. Fifth, the original motivation or basis for sophisticated cognition is often less sophisticated perceptual similarity. Sixth, perceptual simulation occurs even in conceptual tasks that have no explicit perceptual demands. Parallels between perceptual and conceptual processes suggest that many mechanisms typically associated with abstract thought are also present in perception, and that perceptual processes provide useful mechanisms that may be coopted by abstract thought.
    View This Paper (HTML)
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  69. Kersten, A. W., Goldstone, R. L., & Schaffert, A.(1998). Two Competing Attentional Mechanisms in Category Learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 1437-1458.

     This research provides evidence for two competing attentional mechanisms. Attentional persistence directs attention to attributes previously found to be predictive, whereas contrast directs attention to stimuli that have not already been associated with a category. Three experiments provide evidence for these mechanisms. Experiments 1 and 2 revealed increased attention to an attribute following training in which that attribute was relevant, providing evidence for persistence. These experiments also revealed increased attention to an attribute following training in which another, more salient attribute was relevant, providing evidence for contrast. Experiment 3 used a subtractive method to determine the contributions of persistence and contrast to changes in attention to an attribute. The results suggest that persistence operates primarily at the level of dimensions, whereas contrast operates at the level of dimension values.
    View This Paper (HTML) (NO Figures included)
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  70. Schyns, P. G., Goldstone, R. L., & Thibaut, J-P (1998). Development of features in object concepts.  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 1-54.

    According to an influential approach to cognition, our perceptual systems provide us with a repertoire of fixed features as input to higher-level cognitive processes. We present a theory of category learning and representation in which features, instead of being components of a fixed repertoire, are created under the influence of higher-level cognitive processes. When new categories need to be learned, fixed features face one of two problems: (1) High-level features that are directly useful for categorization may not be flexible enough to represent all relevant objects. (2) Low-level features consisting of unstructured fragments (such as pixels) may not capture the regularities required for successful categorization. We report evidence that feature creation occurs in category learning and we describe the conditions that promote it. Feature creation can adapt flexibly to changing environmental demands and may be the origin of fixed feature repertoires. Implications for object categorization, conceptual development, chunking, constructive induction and formal models of dimensionality reduction are discussed.
    View This Paper (HTML) [without figures]
    Access this article from the BBS archives
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  71. Schyns, P. G., Goldstone, R. L., & Thibaut, J. (1998).  Ways of featuring in object categorization.  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 21, 41-49.  (response to commentaries).
  72. Goldstone, R. L., Medin, D. L., & Halberstadt, J. (1997) Similarity in Context.. Memory & Cognition, 25, 237-255
     
    Similarity comparisons are highly sensitive to judgment context. Three experiments explore context effects that occur within a single comparison rather than across several trials. Experiment 1 shows reliable intransitivities in which a target is judged to be more similar to stimulus A than to stimulus B, more similar to B than to stimulus C, and more similar to C than to A. Experiment 2 explores the locus of Tversky`s (1977) diagnosticity effect in which the relative similarity of two alternatives to a target is influenced by a third alternative. Experiment 3 demonstrates reliable, though occasional, violations of an assumption of monotonicity. The observed violations of common assumptions to many models of similarity can be accomodated in terms of dynamic property weighting processes based on specific forms of diagnosticity, and contrast sets that are generated when a comparison is presented.
    Download Similarity in Context(Postscript file)
    View This Paper (HTML) [with figures at end]
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  73. Goldstone, R. L., Schyns, P. G., & Medin, D. L. (1997). Learning to bridge between perception and cogntion.  in R. L. Goldstone, P. G. Schyns, & D. L. Medin (Eds.)  Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Perceptual Learning, Vol. 36.  (pp. 1-14).  San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

     In building models of cognition, it is customary to commence construction on the foundations laid by perception. Perception is presumed to provide us with an initial source of information that is operated upon by subsequent cognitive processes. And, as with the foundation of a house, a premium is placed on stability and solidity. Stable edifices require stable support structures. By this view, our cognitive processes are well behaved to the degree that they can depend upon the stable structures established by our perceptual system.

    Considered collectively, the contributions to this volume suggest an alternative metaphor for understanding the relation between perception and cognition. The architectural equivalent of perception may be a bridge rather than a foundation. The purpose of a bridge is to provide support, but they do so by adapting to the supported vehicles. Bridges, by design, sway under the weight of heavy vehicles, built on the principle that it is better to bend than break. Bridges built with rigid materials are often less resilient than their more flexible counterparts. Similarly, the chapters collected here raise the possibility that perception supports cognition by flexibly adapting to the requirements imposed by cognitive tasks. Perception may not be stable, but its departures from stability may facilitate rather than hamper its ability to support cognition. Cognitive processes involved in categorization, comparison, object recognition, and language may shift perception, but perception becomes better tuned to these tasks as a result.
    View This Paper (HTML)

  74. Spencer-Smith, J., & Goldstone, R. L. (1997).  The dynamics of similarity.  Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 4, 38-56.
    (Translated into Japanese as    : Spencer-Smith, J., & Goldstone, R. L. (2001).  The dynamics of similarity.  in A. Ohnishi and H. Suzuki (Eds.) Ruii kara mita kokoro (Similarity-based approach to mind).  Tokyo, Japan: Kyoritsu Shuppan.)

    Similarity depends on representations of stimuli that are constructed and changed during comparison-making. Specific features may be selectively weighted during comparison, and the features used in a comparison may themselves be a product of the comparison process. Traditional models of similarity and analogy rely on representations that are assumed to exist prior to comparison and are inflexible. Evidence from previous research indicates that weighting of features in similarity judgments may vary dynamically during processing (Goldstone, 1994; Goldstone & Medin, 1994). SIAM (Goldstone, 1994), a model providing an account of dynamic weighting, is discussed. Additional studies indicate that features may be developed or introduced during similarity judgments. A methodology for examining process-oriented models that may account for flexible representations is proposed.
    Download PDF version of this paper 

  75. Goldstone, R. L. (1996). Isolated and Interrelated Concepts. Memory & Cognition, 24, 608-628

     A continuum between purely isolated and purely interrelated concepts is described. A concept is interrelated to the extent that it is influenced by other concepts. Methods for manipulating and identiying a concept`s degree of interrelatedness are introduced. Relatively isolated concepts are empirically identified by a relatively large use of nondiagnostic features, and by better categorization performance for a concept`s prototype than for a caricature of the concept. Relatively interrelated concepts are identified by minimal use of nondiagnostic features, and by better categorization performance for a caricature than a prototype. A concept is likely to be relatively isolated when: subjects are instructed to create images for their concepts rathe