www.felixcohen.co.uk

Brillian video snagged from CrunchNotes. Makes me slightly worried and a bit like I may be missing a boat somewhere.

I think a lot of the predictions are a little far fetched towards the end; I'm always wary of discussing computational power and the brain, but the demographics are fairly enlightening.

Cognitive Maps : Controversy or False Dichotomy?

Introduction
Cognitive maps are an area of psychology which has seen much research, and still supports a plurality of models for the way that the maps function. Many researchers have attempted to define the subject, but there are a number of schisms within the field between approaches, most of which are isomorphic to ongoing psychological debates such as top-down or bottom-up analysis and models in vision. Cognitive maps were first studied by early behavioural psychologists, most notably Tolman (1932), who coined the term when studying the behaviour of rats in mazes. Similar research was a defining part of the behaviourist milieu, and much data was gathered to show how rats behaved in various types of maps and mazes under a variety of conditions. More recently, however, research has focussed on human cognitive mapping ability, especially as this impacts upon behaviour in urbanised settings, the use of enabling and ubiquitous technology in tandem with our environment and the impact of disability on the formation of cognitive maps. The early behavioural models and more recent research have provided us with models of cognitive maps that draw on their indispensable features; landmarks, districts, paths & nodes. Landmarks and paths are, one hopes, self-explanatory. A district is an area defined by shared properties; for example, in Manhattan Little Italy is defined by the demographic of it’s inhabitants, 5th Avenue for designer boutique’s and so on. A node is an area in the environment that serves for the alignment of landmarks and represents a junction of several routes. It is useful in route finding as a checkpoint for decision making. (Lynch, 1960)

Category Specific Deficits:
Not just a visual or functional semantics.

Introduction
Subjects who manifest difficulties in identifying objects from certain semantic categories, such as animals, food or non-living objects (artifacts) despite showing normal recognition of objects in other categories following a trauma are classed as showing a category-specific deficit (CSD). This impairment can show a wide range of affect, from a loss of just fruit and vegetable identification, through to all living things, or artifacts. In some patients, it also sometimes appears to diminish as time passes since the original trauma (Parkins, 1996). This double dissociation presents an excellent opportunity to understand the way that recognition takes place in the brain, and how semantics are encoded and used by the attentional system.

The Indispensability of the Social in Evolving Artificial Intelligence

It has been suggested by many psychologists that many of the features of our brain and mind have come about as a result of social interaction as part of their evolution. This implies that it is impossible to consider the creation of an artificial intelligence without taking into account its interaction with other entitites; be they other AI’s or people. The social construction of knowledge is crucial to the functioning of our society, and for any AI to be able to use and apply human knowledge, it will have to part of the social milieu.