Matters of Intelligence: Conceptual Structures in Cognitive Neuroscience

ISBN-13: 9789027724601 / Angielski / Twarda / 1987 / 495 str.

L. M. Vaina; Lucia Vaina

Opis

This volume is not an attempt to give a comprehensive treatment of the many facets of intelligence. Rather, the intention is to present multiple approaches to interesting and novel ways of looking at old problems. The focus is on the visual and some of the conceptual intelligences. Vision is man's primary cognitive contact with the world around him, and we are vividly reminded of this by Roman Jakobson's autobiographical note, "The Evasive Initial" with which this volume begins. That we see the world as well as we do is something of a miracle. Looking out through our eyes, our brains give us reliable knowledge about the world around us in all it beauty of form, color and movement. The chapters in the first section look at how this may come about from various perspectives. How from the intensity array which the world casts on the eye's retina does the brain achieve recognition? What may be some of the processes involved in seeing? We see shapes, textures and colors, and subsequently, at the more cognitive levels, recognize them as objects which we can manipulate: we inspect them to discover what to use them for. The objects are tools or food; they are things, beautiful, lovable or frightening. They are things to remember and to talk about to our friends, or to ask someone for. We can ask for many or just a few. They are important to us or trivial.

Spis treści

Introductory Note.- The Evasive Initial.- Visual Intelligence.- Understanding Vision from Images to Shapes.- Physiological Evidence for Two Visual Subsystems.- Visual Texture for Recognition.- Shifts in Selective Visual Attention: Towards the Underlying Neural Circuitry.- Spatial Transformations Used in Imagination, Perception and Action.- Cognitive Intelligence.- Intelligence, Guesswork, Language.- Mental Models, Semantical Games and Varieties of Intelligence.- Syntactic Representation and Semantic Interpretation.- Two Explanatory Principles in Semantics.- Issues in Lexical Processing: Expressive and Receptive.- Some Issues in Approximate and Plausible Reasoning in the Framework of a Possibility Theory-Based Approach.- Fuzzy Sets, Usuality and Commonsense Reasoning.- Constraint Limited Generalization: Acquiring Procedures from Examples.- Rational Ignorance.- Mechanisms of Intelligence.- From Intelligence to the Microchemistry of the Human Cerebral Cortex.- Maps in Context: Some Analogies Between Visual Cortical and Genetic Maps.- Cerebral Cortex as Model Builder.- The Material Basis of Mind.- Intelligence: Why It Matters. Biological Significance of Emotional Intelligence and Its Relation to Hemispheric Specialization in Man.- Distributed Computation Using Algebraic Elements.- Expecting the Unpredictable: When Computers Can Think in Parallel.- Concluding Note.- This Strange Intelligence.- Name Index.