PSYC Call for Commentators: HYPERSTRUCTURE/BRAIN/COGNITION

[Stevan Harnad]

            Richardson: HYPERSTRUCTURE IN BRAIN AND COGNITION
            http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.031

    The target whose abstract appears below has just appeared in
    PSYCOLOQUY, a refereed journal of Open Peer Commentary sponsored by
    the American Psychological Association. Qualified professional
    biobehavioral, neural or cognitive scientists are hereby invited to
    submit Open Peer Commentary on it. Please email or see websites for
    Instructions if you are not familiar with format or acceptance
    criteria for PSYCOLOQUY commentaries (all submissions are
    refereed).

    To link to the full text of this article:
    
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.031

    To submit articles and commentaries or to seek information:

    EMAIL: psyc at pucc.princeton.edu
    URL:   http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/psyc.html
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/psyc

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
psycoloquy.99.10.031.hyperstructure.richardson          Thu Sep 23 1999
ISSN 1055-0143          (71 pars, 60 refs, 6 figs, 1 table, 1389 lines)
PSYCOLOQUY is sponsored by the American Psychological Association (APA)
                Copyright 1999 Ken Richardson

                HYPERSTRUCTURE IN BRAIN AND COGNITION
                Target Article on Hyperstructure

                Ken Richardson
                Centre for Human Development & Learning
                The Open University
                Walton Hall
                Milton Keynes MK7 6AA
                United Kingdom
                k.richardson at open.ac.uk

    ABSTRACT: This target article tries to identify the informational
    content of experience underlying object percepts and concepts in
    complex, changeable environments, in a way which can be related to
    higher cerebral functions. In complex environments, repetitive
    experience of feature- and object-images in static, canonical form
    is rare, and this remains a problem in current theories of
    conceptual representation. The only reliable information available
    in natural experience consists of nested covariations or
    'hyperstructures'. These need to be registered in a
    representational system. Such representational hyperstructures can
    have novel emergent structures and evolution into 'higher'
    forms of representation, such as object concepts and event- and
    social-schemas. Together, these can provide high levels of
    predictability. A sketch of a model of hyperstructural functions in
    object perception and conception is presented. Some comparisons
    with related views in the literature of the recent decades are
    made, and some empirical evidence is briefly reviewed.

    KEYWORDS: complexity, covariation, features, hypernetwork,
    hyperstructure, object concepts, receptive field, representation

http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/cgi/psyc/newpsy?10.031