Sussman et al. describe an ecological property of the speech signal that is putatively functional in perception. An important issue, however, is whether their putative cue is an emerging feature or whether the second formant (F2) onset and the F2 vowel actually provide independent cues to perceptual categorization. Regardless of the outcome of this issue, an important goal of speech research is to understand how multiple cues are evaluated and integrated to achieve categorization.

Given that psychophysical responses are not a function of a single property but vary with a variety of stimulus and context variables, Lockhead has little hope for laws relating behavior to the environment. However, progress can be made with tasks that manipulate multiple sources of information to test formal information-processing models.

This book is about the processing of information in face-to-face communication when a speaker makes both audible and visible information available to a perceiver. Both auditory and visual sources of information are evaluated and integrated to achieve speech perception. The evaluation of the information source provides information about the strength of alternative interpretations, rather than just all-or-none categorical information, as claimed by “categorical perception” theory. Information sources are evaluated independently; the integration process insures that the least ambiguous sources have the (...) most influences on the judgment. Similar processes occur in a variety of other behaviors, ranging from personality judgments and categorization to sentence interpretation and decision making. The experimental results are consistent with a fuzzy logical model of perception, positing three operations in perceptual (primary) recognition: feature evaluation, feature integration, and pattern classification. Continuously valued features are first evaluated, then integrated and matched against prototype descriptions in memory; finally, an identification decision is made on the basis of the relative goodness-of-match of the stimulus information with the relevant prototype descriptions. (shrink)

Our long-standing hypothesis has been that feedforward information flow is sufficient for speech perception, reading, and sentence (syntactic and semantic) processing more generally. We are encouraged by the target article's argument for the same hypothesis, but caution that more precise quantitative predictions will be necessary to advance the field.

Roger Shepard's creativity and scientific contributions have left an indelible mark on Psychology and Cognitive Science. In this tribute, I acknowledge and show how his approach to universal laws helped Oden and me shape and develop our universal law of pattern recognition, as formulated in the Fuzzy Logical Model of Perception (FLMP). [Shepard; Tenenbaum & Griffiths].

Introduction, W G Runciman Social Evolution in Primates: The Role of Ecological Factors and Male Behaviour, Carel P van Schaik Determinants of Group Size in Primates: A General Model, R I M Dunbar Function and Intention in the Calls of Non-Human Primates, Dorothy L Cheney & Robert M Seyfarth Why Culture is Common, but Cultural Evolution is Rare, Robert Boyd & Peter J Richerson An Evolutionary and Chronological Framework for Human Social Behaviour, Robert A Foley Friendship and the Banker?s Paradox: (...) Other Pathways to the Evolution of Adaptations for Altruism, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides The Early Prehistory of Human Social Behaviour: Issues of Archaeological Inference and Cognitive Evolution, Steven Mithen The Emergence of Biologically Modern Populations in Europe: A Social and Cognitive ?Revolution??, Paul Mellars Responses to Environmental Novelty: Changes in Men?s Marriage Strategies in a Rural Kenyan Community, Monique Borgerhoff Mulder Genetic Language Impairment: Unruly Grammars, M Gopnik, J Dalalakis, S E Fukuda, S Fukuda & E Kehayia The Emergence of Cultures among Wild Chimpanzees, Christophe Boesch Terrestriality, Bipedalism and the Origin of Language, Leslie C Aiello Conclusions, John Maynard Smith. (shrink)

When Moschion orders Daos up to him for punishment, Daos points to the spot by Moschion's had indicated , but then darts fearfully away. I wish I could name the originator of this attractive part-division, which makes the use of more precise; but in seminars the correct assignment of ideas is often very difficult.