Why biases (constraints)?
- Quine's Problem: finding the referent
- Making generalizations on the basis of few examples
- Category (meaning) space, positive and negative evidence,
and constraints
Kinds of constraints
- Constraints on inter-lexicon relationships: Mutual Exclusivity
- How it could help
- The problem of taxonomies
- The problem of bilinguals
- Constraints on kinds of categories (meanings)
- Whole object
- Taxonomic vs. thematic relations
- "Dimensional" biases: shape, material
The Shape and Material Biases
- The experiments
- How the biases could help
- Where do they come from?
- Should we expect it in all languages?
- Second-order learning in the Shape Bias experiment
- (Before the experiment) In long-term memory, create categories on the basis of episodes, including
episodes with sounds and referents
- (Experiment: training object presented.) This is a dax.
Create an episode for the new sound and referent.
- (Experiment: test objects presented.) Show me the dax.
Create episodes for each test object.
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To see if any of the test episodes make "better sense", find their mean similarity
with categories in LTM.
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If this doesn't work, create a tentative "mini-category" for each pair of test episode and
training episode, including only the shared features.
Compare this mini-category to all of the categories in LTM, ignoring the actual
values for features, focusing on the features that are present, in effect, looking for a meta-category (category of categories).
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Select the test episode whose mini-category agrees best with the categories in LTM.
