Neural Constructivism Manifesto: BBS Call for Commentators

[Stevan Harnad]

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

        THE NEURAL BASIS OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT:
                A CONSTRUCTIVIST MANIFESTO
        by Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski

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 soton.ac.uk 

      or write to:

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

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs.html
    http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS
    ftp://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/BBS
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators
are eligible to become BBS Associates.

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection by
anonymous ftp (or gopher or world-wide-web) according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.
____________________________________________________________________

                THE NEURAL BASIS OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT:
                A CONSTRUCTIVIST MANIFESTO

                Steven R. Quartz and Terrence J. Sejnowski

                Computational Neurobiology Laboratory,
                and The Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology,
                The Salk Institute for Biological Studies,
                10010 North Torrey Pines Rd.
                La Jolla, CA 92037
                steve at salk.edu

                Howard Hughes Medical Institute,
                The Salk Institute for Biological Studies,
                and Department of Biology,
                University of California, San Diego,
                La Jolla, CA 92037.
                terry at salk.edu

    KEYWORDS: neural development; cognitive development;
    constructivism; selectionism; mathematical learning theory;
    evolution; learnability. 

    ABSTRACT: How do minds emerge from developing brains?  According to
    "neural constructivism," the representational features of cortex
    are built from the dynamic interaction between neural growth
    mechanisms and environmentally derived neural activity. Contrary to
    popular selectionist models that emphasize regressive mechanisms,
    the neurobiological evidence suggests that this growth is a
    progressive increase in the representational properties of cortex.
    The interaction between the environment and neural growth results
    in a flexible type of learning: "constructive learning" minimizes
    the need for prespecification in accordance with recent
    neurobiological evidence that the developing cerebral cortex is
    largely free of domain-specific structure. Instead, the
    representational properties of cortex are built by the nature of
    the problem domain confronting it. This uniquely powerful and
    general learning strategy undermines the central assumption of
    classical learnability theory, that the learning properties of a
    system can be deduced from a fixed computational architecture.
    Neural constructivism suggests that the evolutionary emergence of
    neocortex in mammals is a progression toward more flexible
    representational structures, in contrast to the popular view of
    cortical evolution as an increase in innate, specialized circuits.
    Human cortical postnatal development is also more extensive and
    protracted than generally supposed, suggesting that cortex has
    evolved so as to maximize the capacity of environmental structure
    to shape its structure and function through constructive learning.

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To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable by anonymous ftp from
ftp.princeton.edu according to the instructions below (the filename is
bbs.quartz). 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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These files are also on the World Wide Web and the easiest way to
retrieve them is with Netscape, Mosaic, gopher, archie, veronica, etc.
Here are some of the URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs.html
    http://cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/bbs.html
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.quartz
    ftp://cogsci.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.quartz
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp ftp.princeton.edu
   or
ftp 128.112.128.1
   When you are asked for your login, type:
anonymous
   Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
   yourlogin at yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@")
cd /pub/harnad/BBS
   To show the available files, type:
ls
   Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.quartz
   When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit

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Where the above procedure is not available there are two fileservers:
ftpmail at decwrl.dec.com
       and
bitftp at pucc.bitnet
that will do the transfer for you. To one or the
other of them, send the following one line message:

help

for instructions (which will be similar to the above, but will be in
the form of a series of lines in an email message that ftpmail or
bitftp will then execute for you).

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