As robotics and automation applications extend to the service sector, researchers have to increasingly deal with performing robotic actions in uncertain and unstructured environments. A traditional solution to this problem models uncertainty about the effects of actions by probabilities conditioned on the state of the environment, making it possible to select plans that have the highest probabi...

This paper investigates the causal relationships among scripts, schemata, and social norms. The authors examine how social norms are triggered by particular schemata and are grounded in scripts. Just as schemata are embedded in a network, so too are social norms, and they can be primed through spreading activation. Moreover, the expectations that allow a social norm‘s existence are inherently g...

Potential ly, the advantages of marker-passing over local connectionist techniques for associa­ t ive inference are (1) the abi l i ty to differen­ t iate variable bindings, and (2) reduction in the search space and/or number of processing elements. However, the latter advantage has mostly been realized at the expense of accu­ racy and predictabi l i ty. In this paper we con­ sider a class of a...

Two major competing theories explaining the process of memory retrieval are Spreading Activation (e.g., Anderson, 1983) and Compound Cue (e.g., Ratcliff & McKoon; 1994). The theories disagree on whether the retrieval process begins with the activation of a particular concept in long-term memory or with formation of a retrieval cue in short-term memory. Three-step priming can be explained by spr...

In this thesis we describe a method of using associative networks for automatic document grouping. Associative networks are networks of ideas or concepts in which each concept is linked to concepts that are semantically similar to it. By activating concepts in the network based on the text of a document and spreading this activation to related concepts, we can determine which concepts are relat...

The Scone knowledge-base system, currently being developed at Carnegie Mellon University, implements search and inference operations using a set of marker-passing algorithms. These were originally designed for a massively parallel hardware architecture but now are implemented completely in software. The algorithms are fast, relatively simple, and they support efficient implementation of the mos...

In an ERP investigation of biased homonym processing in minimal context, isolated homonym primes (e.g., ruler) preceded targets that were associated with either the dominant (e.g., inch) or subordinate (e.g., king) meaning of the homonym, were unrelated words (e.g., claw), or were nonwords (e.g., smole), presented 250 ms later in a lexical decision paradigm. Both dominant and subordinate associ...

This paper presents a semantic network of commonsense knowledge that is useful in capturing human experience in ambient intelligence environments. Human behavior is composed of a series of behavior patterns. And a behavior pattern contains behavioral features, such as the objects touched by users, time, and location information, within a period of time. Consequently, in this paper, the algorith...

Execution of tasks in which information rapidly changes its relevance employs both excitatory and inhibitory top-down control. This assertion is derived from empirical data and computational cognitive modeling of a screen-based Stroop task. Empirical data showing both within-trial (interference and facilitation) and between-trial (negative priming) effects are presented. A computational cogniti...

"Semantics. The curse of man." Maxwell (1976, p. 19) "... how a word 'stands for' a thing or 'means' what the speaker intends to say or 'communicates' some condition of a thing to a listener has never been satisfactorily established" B. F. Skinner (1957, pp. 114-115) "... semantic structure of natural languages evidently offers many mysteries" Noam Chomsky (1965, p. 163) Meaning provides the fu...