Cognitive Semantics and Cognitive Theories of Representation

Master's Program in Cognitive Science, Comenius University in Bratislava

Winter semester 2023/24

Time/Place: room I-9, Thursday 10:40 -14:00

Lecturer: doc. RNDr. Martin Takáč, PhD., Centre for Cognitive Science, room I-37, t a k a c (at) i i . f m p h . u n i b a . s k

Credits: 5

Indicative Content

The goal of the course is to formulate questions and provide views from literature helping to understand how cognitive systems manipulate with meanings. Also, to present cognitive theories of representation bridging the gaps between brain, language and culture.

Checklist of your duties, with assessment points

Grading

0-50 %	Fx
51-60 %	E
61-70 %	D
71-80 %	C
81-90 %	B
91-100 %	A

Schedule

Session	Date	Topic	Seminar Readings	Moderated by	Supplementary Resources
1.	Sept 21	Introduction & basic terminology	(none)	-	Chandler, D.: Semiotics for beginners: sign
2.	Sept 28	Semiotics and enactive approach	C. Nehaniv (2000).: The making of meaning in societies: Semiotic and information theoretic background to the evolution of communication. In: Edmonds, B., Dautenhahn, K.(Eds.), Proceedings of the AISB 2000 Symposium: Starting from Society – the Application of Social Analogies to Computational Systems. AISB, pp.73 –84.	Maša	von Uexküll, J. (1934): A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men. In C. Schiller (ed.), Instinctive Behavior, New York, International Universities Press, 1957. Ziemke & Sharkey (2001): A stroll through the worlds of robots and animals: Applying Jakob von Uexküll's theory of meaning to adaptive robots and artificial life. Semiotica, 134(1-4), 701-746.
3.	Oct 5	Meaning in animal world: evolutionary view	L. Kováč (2000): Fundamental principles of cognitive biology. Evolution and Cognition 6, 51-69.	Arina	Gärdenfors, P.: Cued and detached representations in animal cognition", Behavioural Processes 36, 1996, pp. 263-273. Gärdenfors, P.: "Language and the evolution of cognition", in Penser l'esprit: Des sciences de la cognition à une philosophie cognitive, ed. by V. Rialle and D. Fisette, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, Grenoble, 1996, pp. 151-172. Gärdenfors, P.: Cooperation and the Evolution of Symbolic Communication. In D. Kimbrough Oller and Ulrike Griebel, editors, Evolution of Communication Systems: A Comparative Approach, (2004), pages 237-256. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gärdenfors, P.: “The role of intersubjectivity in animal and human cooperation”, Biological Theory 3:1, pp. 1-12, 2008.
4.	Oct 12	Biologically motivated semantics of distinguishing criteria	J. Šefránek (2008): Knowledge Representation for Animal Reasoning. In: Honkela, T., Pöllä, M., Paukkeri, M., Simula, O. (eds.): Proceedings of AKRR '08, the 2nd International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Adaptive Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Espoo, Finland, pp. 65-72.	Klara, Tina	Takáč, M., Šefránek, J.:Cognition, meaning and truth. Unpublished manuscript.
5.	Oct 19	Cognitive semantics of Lakoff	G. Lakoff (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Preface and chap. 1 and 4. Love metaphors	Tim, Barbara	Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Chap. 6: Radial categories. (about categories in Dyirbal language). Barbara Lesz: To Shape the World for the Better: An Analysis of Metaphors in the Speeches of Barack Obama. Master thesis. Univ. of Tromso, 2011. World Color Survey Šefránek, J.: slide notes for Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
6.	Oct 26	Conceptual spaces	P. Gärdenfors (2011): “Semantics based on conceptual spaces”, pp. 1-11 in the Proceedings of 4th Indian Conference on Logic and its Applications (LNAI 6521), ed. by M. Banerjee and A. Seth, Springer, Berlin.	Grega, Pia	P. Gärdenfors: The Geometry of Meaning: Semantics Based on Conceptual Spaces. MIT Press, 2014.
7.	Nov 2	Meaning and Brain	Pulvermüller F (2013): How neurons make meaning: brain mechanisms for embodied and abstract-symbolic semantics. Trends Cogn Sci. 17(9):458-70. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2013.06.004.	Ana Lara	L.W. Barsalou (2015). Situated conceptualization: Theory and application. In Y. Coello & M. H. Fischer (Eds.),Foundations of embodied cognition. East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press. Barsalou, L.W. (2008). Grounded cognition. Annual Review of Psychology, 59, 617-645. Barsalou, L.: Perceptual Symbol Systems, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 1999, pp. 577-609 . F. Pulvermüller: Words in the brain's language. Behav Brain Sci, Vol. 22, No. 2. (April 1999). Quiroga et al.: Invariant visual representation by single neurons in the human brain. Nature, Vol 435 \|23 June 2005\| doi:10.1038/nature03687 Kriegeskorte et al.: Matching Categorical Object Representations in Inferior Temporal Cortex of Man and Monkey. Neuron (2008), doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2008.10.043 Mitchell et al.: Predicting Human Brain Activity Associated with the Meanings of Nouns. Science, 320, 2008. Pereira et al.: Generating text from functional brain images. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 5, 2011. Nishimoto et al.: Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies. Current Biology 21, 1641–1646, October 11, 2011.youtube video
8.	Nov 9	Toward grammar	A. Knott (2010): A sensorimotor characterisation of syntax, and its implications for models of language evolution. Proceedings of the 8th International conference on the Evolution of Language (EVOLANG8), World Scientific, pp.214-221.	Jaš	A. Knott: Syntactic structures as descriptions of sensorimotor processes. Biolinguistics 8:1-52 (2014). Teaching Computers To Talk: Alistair Knott at TEDxAuckland, 2012. Takac, M., Benuskova, L., Knott, A.: Mapping sensorimotor sequences to word sequences: A connectionist model of language acquisition and sentence generation.Cognition 125(2). 288-308. 2012. Knott, A.: Sensorimotor Cognition and Natural Language Syntax, MIT Press, 2012.
	Nov 16	no lecture!
9.	Nov 23	Meaning in Artificial Systems I.	L.Smith and M. Gasser (2005). The Development of Embodied Cognition: Six Lessons from Babies Artificial Life. Vol. 11, Issues 1-2, pp. 13 - 30	Tiziana, Larissa	Zaadnoordijk, L., Besold, T.R. & Cusack, R. Lessons from infant learning for unsupervised machine learning. Nat Mach Intell 4, 510–520 (2022). Smith, L. B. and Slone, L. K.: A Developmental Approach to Machine Learning? Front. Psychol., 05 December 2017. Oudeyer P. Y., Kaplan F. (2007). What is intrinsic motivation? A typology of computational approaches. Frontiers in Neurorobotics, 1, p. 1-14. Oudeyer P-Y, Kaplan , F. and Hafner, V. (2007) Intrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Development, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, 11(2), pp. 265-286.
10.	Nov 30	Meaning in Artificial Systems II.	Bender, E., Gebru, T., et al. (2021): On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? FAccT ’21, Canada.	Jasper	Critiques of Bender et al (2021) by Yoav Goldberg and Michael Lissack Romero A. (2021): GPT-3 Scared You? Meet Wu Dao 2.0: A Monster of 1.75 Trillion Parameters. Towards data science, June 6. Alammar, Jay: The Illustrated Transformer Graziano, M. (2017): The Attention Schema Theory: A Foundation for Engineering Artificial Consciousness. Frontiers in Robotics and AI 4(60). Damasio, A. (2010): Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. Pantheon.
11.	Dec 7	Peer activity [Team 1] - max 90 min	Peer activity: [Team 2] max 90 min	-
12.	Dec 14	Peer activity [Team 3] max 90 min		-	-
	TBA or by individual appointment	Final integration

Assessment details

Seminar Activities

Readings, Discussions, Moderation

Before each seminar, a student should carefully read the article listed in seminar readings (supplementary resources are optional) and make ONE question or discussion point related to the article. Fill in your discussion point together with your name into the appropriate sheet of the googledoc spreadsheet set up for this purpose not later than on Tuesday before the seminar by 8:00 p.m. (Late submission policy: the number of achievable points linearly decreases from 2 at Tue midnight to zero at Wed 8:00 am.). For each seminar, 1-2 moderators will be appointed in advance. The duty of the moderator(s) is to collect and sort/group received discussion points by topics, give a short intro at the beginning of a seminar and then moderate the discussion. (Note: the moderators are supposed to send their discussion points too, like everybody else.) The students will divide into small groups by topics and discuss/work on their topic in their small group first, then in the whole class. The students will be evaluated for their prepared questions sent by e-mail (max 2 points per seminar), group work/discussion activity during the seminar (max 3 points per seminar), and ability to moderate the discussions (max 3 points per moderation).

Peer group activity

Students will work in small teams and throughout the semester they will work on preparing a peer lecture/activity that will be presented at the end of the semester (max 15 points). They can present results of a small research project, complementing the teacher's lectures with more recent or ommited (or just your beloved and cool) content. Large emphasis is on the process, try to make it interactive and engage the class. Boring one-way lecture style is not enough, be creative and make it fun for the audience and yourselves! The topic and form should be discussed with the teacher beforehand (by Nov 5, max 2 points). Teams for this year are: Team1=[Jasper, Jaš, Pia, Tiziana], Team2=[Ana Lara, Arina, Grega, Klara, Omar], Team3=[Barbara, Larissa, Maša, Tim, Tina].

Final reflection

After the semester, write a short personal reflection (max 2 pages) answering the following questions:

How do you make sense of and connect together various lectures of this course? What is the core message you are taking home?
How do you connect what you have learned here to your previous knowledge and professional background/experience?
Reflect on yourself and the learning process you went through. Has anything changed in you? Any beliefes/ideas you dropped or acquired? What is your personal learning gain from this semester?
Reflect on the process that happened in class. Any changes you noticed? What worked for you and what didn't? What could have been done differently and how?

This is not to be a standard scientific essay with references, but an informal reflective personal statement. I am not interested in clichés, be personal and honest. You will discuss the reflection in person with me (max 20 points). Please send me your reflection by email min 2 days before the appointed meeting.

Last modification: Sept 28, 2023.