Since their birth (ca. late 1960s), production systems have been developed as a formal tool not only for describing but for explaining how humans think. Indeed, " to advance our understanding of how humans think " is the stated goal of Newell and Simon's classic (1972) book Human Problem Solving, where the first body of work on production-system models of human thought was presented. The main g...

What is a 'complex system'? The two-dimensional foam, as originally popularized by Cyril Stanley Smith, provides an ideal context in which to explore this question.

10 Correspondence: Igor Jurisica, Ontario Cancer Institute, PMH/UHN, Toronto Medical Discovery Tower, Division of Signaling Biology, Life Sciences Discovery Centre, Room 9-305, 101 College Street, Toronto, Ontario M5G 1L7. Tel./Fax: 416-581-7437; Email: [email protected] Please note that this article may not be used for commercial purposes. For further information please refer to the copyrig...

John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry argued that human language signified the eighth major transition in evolution: human language marked a new form of information transmission from one generation to another [Maynard Smith J, Szathmáry E. The major transitions in evolution. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press; 1995]. According to this view language codes cultural information and as such forms the basis...

WHEN GREGORY BATESON was conducting fieldwork in New Guinea, his friends among the native Iatmul could not understand why he had to work so hard to learn their language: “But our language is easy to understand” they told him, “we just talk.”1 I wonder how Romans would react to an American studying their gestures from a distance of two millennia. A predictable response would be that their body l...

A simple recurrent neural network was constructed to simulate a novel action selection dynamics. The selection process becomes complex when more than two action repertoires are possible. Even with a simple task, one often experiences making an unintentional form of movement or slip of action. One example is called a microslip, named and reported by Reed and Schoenherr. We propose a model of suc...

This paper proposes, using the Distribution Network (DN), the deployment of a common communication architecture to support different electrical services. The aim of the architecture proposed is to simplify the development of future smart grids in the current electrical systems.

Despite considerable diversity among theories about how humans process language, there are a number of fundamental assumptions which are shared by most such theories. This consensus extends to the very basic question about what counts as a cognitive process. So although many cognitive scientists are fond of referring to the brain as a ‘mental organ’ (e.g., Chomsky, 1975)—implying a similarity t...

Development is about creating something more from something less, for example, a walking and talking toddler from a helpless infant. One current theoretical framework views the developmental process as a change within a complex dynamic system. Development is seen as the emergent product of many decentralized and local interactions that occur in real time. We examine how studying the multicausal...