Past Event

Dr. Brendan Johns of the Department of Psychology at Queen’s University will be giving a colloquium talk on Thursday, March 13th, at 11:30 a.m., in room 2203 of Dunton Tower. Refreshments will be available before the talk. All are welcome.

Putting Content into Cognition:

Using Linguistic Structure as the Basis for Models of Cognition

Cognitive modeling has produced fundamental insights about the underlying mechanisms involved in cognition, and has become a cornerstone method used in the cognitive sciences. However, these models are also inherently limited, due to the restricted amount of data available on the operation of the cognition under investigation, and the possible corresponding computational implementations. As a consequence, simplifications are often necessary. However, in order to form better, more realistic models, these simplifications have to be overcome. Two areas where cognitive models are particularly influential are in the fields of memory and language. Models in these areas share a common simplifying assumption: the meanings of words and the contexts that they occur in are largely ignored. This talk will examine, across a number of different areas, including recognition memory, lexical organization, and lexical processing, how superior models of cognition can be constructed by integrating realistic processing models with representations learned from the language environment.