Important new Behav. Brain Sci. changes

Sat Jan 21 13:43:38 EST 1995

Five important new changes in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS)
addresses, policies and procedures (1-5) plus

Three announcements about positions and activities at my new
institution (Southampton University) (6-8).

Summaries first, then the details:

    (1) New address for submitting BBS target articles
    (2) New address for submitting BBS commentaries
    (3) All commentaries now require asbtracts
    (4) All articles.commentaries now require email version and/or disk
    (5) Target articles now electronically retrievable in multiple ways

    (6) Applications invited for Psychology Professorship at U. Southampton.
    (7) Applications invited for grad students and postdocs to work with me
    (8) Come and give a talk at our new Cognitive Sciences Centre

(1) NEW BBS ADDRESS (Editorial): Effective immediately, ALL SUBMITTED TARGET
ARTICLES AND ALL CORRESPONDENCE PERTAINING TO EDITING AND REFEREEING
should henceforth be addressed to BBS's new Editorial Office:

        Behavioral and Brain Sciences
        Department of Psychology
        University of Southampton
        Highfield, Southampton
        SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
        phone: 44 703 594-583
        fax:   44 703 593-281
        email: bbs at ecs.soton.ac.uk

All BBS email should go to the email address above; only messages intended
for Stevan Harnad personally should be sent to harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk --
I now get over 80 emails a day so please, whatever can be answered by
the Managing Editor, send to bbs rather than harnad! 

(2) SECOND NEW BBS ADDRESS: Effective immediately, ALL SUBMITTED
COMMENTARIES (double-spaced, in triplicate, with email version and/or
disk) AND ALL CORRESPONDENCE PERTAINING TO COPY-EDITING AND PROOFS
should henceforth be addressed to:

        Behavioral and Brain Sciences
        Cambridge University Press
        Journals Department
        40 West 20th Street
        New York, NY 10011-4211
	USA
        phone: 800-431-1580 (ext. 369, Ed Miller)
 	       212-924-3900 (ext. 369, Ed Miller)
        fax:   212-645-5960
        email: bbs at cup.org  (or emiller at cup.org)

To expedite mailing, all commentaries will be received and logged in New
York and then forwarded to the Editor in Southampton for review.

(3) Effective immediately, every BBS commentary and author's response
must have have an ABSTRACT (~60 words).

(4) Effective immediately, IN ADDITION to the requisite number of hard
copies, all BBS contributions (articles, commentaries, and responses) will
also have to be submitted in electronic form -- by email (preferably) to
bbs at ecs.soton.ac.uk or on a computer disk accompanying the hard copies.
BBS is moving toward more and more electronic processing at all stages.
The result will be much faster, more efficient and fairer procedures.

(5) Electronic versions of the preprints of all BBS target articles can
be retrieved by ftp, archie, gopher or World-Wide-Web from:

       ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad
       ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
       http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
       http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
       gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals

This way prospective commentators can let us know that they would like
to be invited to comment on target articles about to circulated for
commentary, and can search the archive for past articles on which they
may wish to contribute Continuing Commentary.

(6) Applications are invited for a full Professorship in Psychology at
the University of Southampton. I am especially interested to hear from
Experimental/Clinical Neuropsychologists with active research
programmes: Please contact me to discuss it informally:
harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk

(7) Expressions of interest are also invited from prospective graduate
students and postdoctoral fellows interested in coming to work with me
in the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory and the Cognitive Sciences
Centre at Southampton University. Our research focus is decribed below.
Please write to: harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk

(8) Let me know if you will be in the London area and would like to
give a talk about your work at our new Cognitive Sciences Centre (CSC),
of which I am Director, with the collaboration of Professor Michael
Sedgewick (Clinical Neurological Sciences), Professors Tony Hey and
Chris Harris (Electronics and Computer Science), Dr. John Bradshaw
(Anthro-Zoology Institute), Professor Wendy Hall (Multimedia Centre)
and Professor Bob Remington (ex officio, Head of the Psychology
Department).

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           Research Focus of the Laboratory

CATEGORISATION AND COGNITION: Our capacity to categorise is at the
heart of all of our cognitive capacity. People can sort and label the
objects and events they see and hear with a proficiency that still far
exceeds that of our most powerful machines. How do we manage to do it?
The answer will not only tell us more about ourselves but it will allow
us to apply our findings to enhancing our proficiency, both in the
learning of categories and in our use of machines to extend our
capacities.

CATEGORY LEARNING is the most general form of cognition. Animals learn
categories when they learn what is and is not safe to eat, where it is
safe to forage, who is friend and who is foe. Children learn the same
kinds of categories, but they eventually go on to the much more powerful
and uniquely human strategy of learning categories by name, rather then
by performing some instrumental response on them, such as eating or
fleeing. Whether they categorise by instrumental response or by name,
however, children must still have direct experience with the objects
they are categorising, and some sort of corrective feedback from the
consequences of MIScategorising them. Eventually, however, categories
can be learned from strings of symbols alone, with most of those
symbols being themselves the names of categories. This is the most
remarkable of our cognitive capacities, language, but language and
cognition cannot be understood unless we analyse how they are grounded
in categorisation capacity (Harnad 1990). This is theme of our
research programme.

BEHAVIORAL, COMPUTATIONAL AND NEURAL APPROACHES: There are three
empirical ways to investigate the functional basis of our
categorisation capacity. The first way is to (i) analyse our
categorisation performance itself experimentally, particularly how we
LEARN to categorise. The second way is to (ii) model our categorisation
capacity with computers that must learn the same categories that we do,
on the basis of the same input and corrective feedback that we get. The
third way is to (iii) monitor brain function while we are learning
categories, to determine what neural properties change during the
course of learning, and to relate them to the performance changes
during learning, as well as to the internal functioning of the machine
models performing the same task. These three converging lines of
investigation are the ones to be pursued in the Cognitive Psychology
Laboratory.

Details and papers are available from the URLs below:
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    Stevan Harnad
    Professor of Psychology
    Director, Cognitive Sciences Centre

    Department of Psychology
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

    harnad at ecs.soton.ac.uk     harnad at princeton.edu
    phone: +44 703 592582
    fax:   +44 703 594597
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    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/
    http://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu/11/.libraries/.pujournals