Matters of Intelligence: Conceptual Structures in Cognitive Neuroscience

485 Pages·1987·15.769 MB·English

by  Roman Jakobson Ph.D. (auth.), Lucia M. Vaina (eds.)

MATTERS OF INTELLIGENCE
SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Managing Editor:
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Florida State University, Tallahassee
Editors:
DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley
GABRIEL NUCHELMANS, University of Leyden
WESLEY C. SALMON, University of Pittsburgh
VOLUME 188
MATTERS
OF INTELLIGENCE
Conceptual Structures in Cognitive Neuroscience
Edited by
LUCIA M. VAINA
Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology,
and Boston University
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
A MEMBER OF THE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Matters of intelligence.
(Synthese library; v. 188)
Includes index.
1. Intellect. 2. Cognition. 3. Visual perception.
I. Vaina, Lucia, 1946-
BF431.M392 1987 153 87-4571
ISBN-I3: 978-94-010-8206-8 e-ISBN-I3: 978-94-009-3833-5
001: 10.1007/978-94-009-3833-5
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada
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In all other countries, sold and distributed
by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group,
P.O. Box 322,3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland.
All Rights Reserved
© 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company" Dordrecht, Holland
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1987
and copyrightholders as specified on appropriate pages within
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner
Table of Contents
Preface
by Lucia Vaina ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introductory Note
ROMAN JAKOB SON I The Evasive Initial 3
Visual Intelligence
DAVID MARR I Understanding Vision from Images to Shapes 7
JOHN H. R. MAUNSELL I Physiological Evidence for Two Visual Subsystems 59
LUCIA V AINA I Visual Texture for Recognition 89
CHRISTOF KOCH AND SHIMON ULLMAN I Shifts in Selective Visual Attention:
Towards the Underlying Neural Circuitry 115
LAWRENCE M. PARSONS I Spatial Transformations Used in Imagination,
Perception and Action 143
Cognitive Intelligence
HORACE B. BARLOW I Intelligence, Guesswork, Language 185
JAAKKO HINTIKKA I Mental Models, Semantical Games and Varieties of
Intelligence 197
SUSAN D. ROTHSTEIN I Syntactic Representation and Semantic Interpretation 217
STEVEN CUSHING I Two Explanatory Principles in Semantics 241
HAROLD GOODGLASS I Issues in Lexical Processing: Expressive and Receptive 255
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
HENRI PRADE / Some Issues in Approximate and Plausible Reasoning in the
Framework of a Possibility Theory-Based Approach 263
LOTFI A. ZADEH / Fuzzy Sets, Usuality and Commonsense Reasoning 289
PETER M. ANDREAE / Constraint Limited Generalization: Acquiring Procedures
from Examples 311
SYLVAIN BROMBERGER / Rational Ignorance 333
Mechanisms of Intelligence
ALFRED POPE / From Intelligence to the Microchemistry of the
Human Cerebral Cortex 355
JOHN ALLMAN / Maps in Context: Some Analogies Between
Visual Cortical and Genetic Maps 369
HORACE B. BARLOW / Cerebral Cortex as Model Builder 395
MARCEL KINSBOURNE / The Material Basis of Mind 407
DAVID M. BEAR / Intelligence: Why It Matters. Biological Significance
of Emotional Intelligence and Its Relation to Hemispheric Specialization
inMan 429
STEVEN MATTHYSSE / Distributed Computation Using Algebraic Elements 453
HENRY LIEBERMAN / Expecting the Unpredictable: When Computers Can
Think in Parallel 461
Concluding Note
RICHARD GREGORY / This Strange Intelligence 481
Name Index 493
"Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly coloured but
terflies, my attention hunted, in the garden of the gray matter,
cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflies
of the soul, the beatings of whose wings may someday-who
knows?-clarify the secret of mental life."
Santiago Ramon y Cajal
Preface
This volume is not an attempt to give a comprehensive treatment of
the many facets of intelligence. Rather, the intention is to present multiple
approaches to interesting and novel ways of looking at old problems. The
focus is on the visual and some of the conceptual intelligences.
Vision is man's primary cognitive contact with the world around him,
and we are vividly reminded of this by Roman Jakobson's autobiographical
note, "The Evasive Initial" with which this volume begins. That we see the
world as well as we do is something of a miracle. Looking out through our
eyes, our brains give us reliable knowledge about the world around us in
all it beauty of form, color and movement. The chapters in the first section
look at how this may come about from various perspectives. How from
the intensity array which the world casts on the eye's retina does the brain
achieve recognition? What may be some of the processes involved in seeing?
We see shapes, textures and colors, and subsequently, at the more cognitive
levels, recognize them as objects which we can manipulate: we inspect them
to discover what to use them for. The objects are tools or food; they are
things, beautiful, lovable or frightening. They are things to remember and
to talk about to our friends, or to ask someone for. We can ask for many
or just a few. They are important to us or trivial. They can be real or
imaginary, they are heavy or light, but they are never both at the same
time and with the same meaning. They fit into some commonsense logic
the logic which we use in our everyday reasoning about the world. The
chapters which address the more cognitive functions of our brains form the
Cognitive Intelligence section, which repeatedly emphasizes the importance
of language for this sort of "intelligence". It presents language as a most
efficient cognitive tool.
A basic message of the book is that from a functional point of view
brains and computers are similar; they both solve information processing
problems. Hence, to procure understanding of these problems, we must
use a computational approach. Our brains, shaped by evolution, became
adept at doing certain everyday tasks which are considered to require in
telligence. Thus, if we understand the logical structure of these tasks, and
we understand the overall structure of the brain's computational machin-
ix
x PREFACE
ery, we will be more successful at endowing our computers with intelligence.
The last section brings together the diversity of Mechanisms of Intelligence,
from specific structures to ways of solving problems, both in brains and in
computers, followed by Richard Gregory's concluding article about "This
Strange Intelligence" .
This book was made possible through the assistance and cooperation
of a number of persons. First, I thank the authors of individual chap
ters for their contribution. Second, I am grateful to the National Science
Foundation for its generous support through Grant No. GC-A-321529 and
IST-8116549, which helped in the preparation of this manuscript, to IBM
for their grant No. 97754, and to Reidel Publishing Company for publishing
the volume and so kindly putting up with the many delays.
Lucia Vaina
Cambridge, June, 1986
Acknowledgements
Figures from David Marr's chapter ("Understanding Vision from Images
to Shapes") originally appeared in his book Vision, published by Freeman
and Co., San Francisco, 1982. Figures 1.3-1.8 were originally published in
the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B volume 204, 1980; Figures
1.24, 1.25 and 1.26 are taken from the Proceedings of the Royal Society of
London B, volume 200, 1978, and are reproduced here with the permission
of the Royal Society.
Lawrence Parson's chapter ("Spatial Transformations Used in Imagina
tion, Perception and Form") includes figures published previously. Figure
5.1 appeared in Science, volume 191, 1971 (Shepard and Metzler); Figure
5.2 is from Hinton and Parsons, "Frames of reference and mental imagery" ,
in Attention and Performance IX, Braddeley and Long, eds., Lawrence Erl
baum Assoc., Hillsdale, New Jersey 1981; Figure 5.3 originally appeared in
Kaushell and Persons, Perception, volume 10, 1981; and Figure 5.11 is fron
"Joint motion: Method of measuring and recording", produced by the Com
mittee for the Study of Joint Motion, American Academy of Orthopaedic
Surgeons, Chicago, Illinois, 1965. These figures are reproduced with the
permission of the copyright holders.
"Intelligence, Guesswork, Language," by Horace B. Barlow originally
appeared in Nature, volume 304, 1983, and is reprinted here with their
permission. "Cerebral Cortex as Model Builder," by Horace B. Barlow
appeared in Models of the Visual Cortex, edited by Rose and Dobson, and
published by John Wiley and Sons, Ltd., 1985, and is reprinted here with
their permission.
In John Allman's chapter ("Maps in Context: Some Analogies Between
Visual Cortical and Genetic Maps"), Figure 16.1 is taken from Allman's
"Reconstructing the evolution of the brain in primates through the use
of comparative neurophysiological and neuroanatomical data," published
in Primate Brain Evolution, Armstrong and Falk, editors,. Plenum Press,
New York, 1982. Figure 16.3 comes from L. B. Radinsky's 1967 article in
American Journal of Physical Anthropology, volume 27, published by Wis
tar Press. Figure 16.4 is from an article by Allman, Miezin and McGuinness
which appeared in the Annual Review of Neurosciences, volume 8, 1985,
and is reprinted here courtesy of the Annual Review, Inc.
xi