Relational Complexity: BBS Call for Commentators

[S.Harnad]

Errors-to: harnad1 at coglit.soton.ac.uk
Reply-to: bbs at coglit.soton.ac.uk

Below is the abstract of a forthcoming BBS target article on:

	PROCESSING CAPACITY DEFINED BY RELATIONAL COMPLEXITY:  
    Implications for Comparative, Developmental, and Cognitive 
    Psychology

    by Graeme S. Halford, William H. Wilson, and Steven Phillips 
        
This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please send EMAIL to:

    bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

      or write to:

    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
    Department of Psychology
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

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An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection with
a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the instructions
that follow after the abstract.
____________________________________________________________________


	PROCESSING CAPACITY DEFINED BY RELATIONAL COMPLEXITY:  
    Implications for Comparative, Developmental, and Cognitive 
    Psychology
        
    Graeme Halford
    Department of Psychology
    University of Queensland
    4072 AUSTRALIA
    gsh at psy.uq.oz.au

    William H. Wilson
    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    University of New South Wales
    Sydney 
    New South Wales 
    2052 AUSTRALIA
    billw at cse.unsw.edu.au
    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~billw

    Steven Phillips
    Cognitive Science Section
    Electrotechnical Laboratory
    1-1-4 Umezono
    Tsukuba
    Ibaraki 305 
    JAPAN
    stevep at etl.go.jp
    http://www.etl.go.jp/etl/ninchi/stevep@etl.go.jp/welcome.html

    KEYWORDS:  Capacity, complexity, working memory, central 
    executive, resource, cognitive development, comparative 
    psychology, neural nets, representation of relations, chunking

    ABSTRACT: Working memory limitations are best defined in terms of
    the complexity of relations that can be processed in parallel.
    Relational complexity is related to processing loads in problem
    solving, and and can distinguish between higher animal species as
    well as between children of different ages. Complexity is defined
    by the number of dimensions, or sources of variation, that are
    related. A unary relation has one argument and one source of
    variation because its argument can be instantiated in only one way
    at a time. A binary relation has two arguments and two sources of
    variation because two argument instantiations are possible at once.
    A ternary relation is three dimensional, a quaternary relation is
    four dimensional, and so on. Dimensionality is related to the
    number of "chunks," because both attributes on dimensions and
    chunks are independent units of information of arbitrary size.
    Empirical studies of working memory limitations indicate a soft
    limit which corresponds to processing one quaternary relation in
    parallel. More complex concepts are processed by segmentation or
    conceptual chunking. In segmentation tasks are broken into
    components which do not exceed processing capacity and are
    processed serially. In conceptual chunking representations are
    "collapsed" to reduce their dimensionality and hence their
    processing load, but at the cost of making some relational
    information inaccessible. Parallel distributed implementations of
    relational representations show that relations with more arguments
    have a higher computational cost; this corresponds to empirical
    observations of higher processing loads in humans. Empirical
    evidence is presented that relational complexity (1) distinguishes
    between higher species and is related to (2) processing load in
    reasoning and in sentence comprehension and to (3) the complexity
    of relations processed by children increases with age. Implications
    for neural net models and for theories of cognition and cognitive
    development are discussed.

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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
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Web or by anonymous ftp or gopher from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.

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    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.halford
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