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[ontolog-forum] Semantic Dementia

To: "'[ontolog-forum] '" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Rich Cooper" <rich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2013 17:28:26 -0800
Message-id: <A028B5567F034B1BA85A02600C8BBCE8@Gateway>

Dear Ontologers,

 

I found an article on sciencedirec.comt that relates to experimental evidence on how people form categories, and how they associate multiple attributes to categories.  This is a quote from the abstract of the article:

 

“Patients learned to assign abstract visual stimuli to two categories. The categories conformed to a family resemblance structure in which no individual stimulus features were fully diagnostic; thus the task required participants to form representations that integrate multiple features into a single concept. Patients were unable to do this, instead responding only on the basis of individual features.”

 

They called the condition of these patients “semantic dementia” because the patients lost the ability to consider multiple alternative representations simultaneously.  The article is at:

 

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945213002517

 

They describe a structural theory which they call a “spoke and hub” structure in the affected brain area (ALT) where each spoke is one sensory modality that gets integrated at the hub. 

 

The way they describe the deficit sounds to me that the loss was in deduction, specifically in integrating each of the spokes into a coherent response based on all the spokes. 

 

When concepts had multiple spokes, (attributes or properties in ontolog talk), the patients couldn’t use multiple properties, and relied on just one instead, leading to errors of perception and interpretation. 

 

It occurred to me that this model of hub and spoke diversity in human concepts and concept learning has some suggestive value re why it is so difficult to get consistent naming of concepts as common as “river”s. 

 

-Rich

 

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

9 4 9 \ 5 2 5 - 5 7 1 2


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