Biological Constraints and the Representation of Structure in Vision and Language

Abstract

The computational building blocks of biological information processing systems are highly interconnected networks of simple units with graded overlapping receptive fields, arranged in maps. In view of this basic constraint, it is proposed that the present stage in the study of cognition should concentrate on gaining understanding of the cognitive system at the level of the distributed computational mechanism. The model of script understanding introduced in the target book ["Subsymbolic Natural Language Processing", Risto Miikkulainen, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993] appears promising, both because it treats seriously the question of architecture of the language processor, and because its architectural features resemble those used in modeling other cognitive modalities such as vision.