Showing papers in "Psychological Review in 1958"

The perceptron: a probabilistic model for information storage and organization in the brain.

Abstract: The first of these questions is in the province of sensory physiology, and is the only one for which appreciable understanding has been achieved. This article will be concerned primarily with the second and third questions, which are still subject to a vast amount of speculation, and where the few relevant facts currently supplied by neurophysiology have not yet been integrated into an acceptable theory. With regard to the second question, two alternative positions have been maintained. The first suggests that storage of sensory information is in the form of coded representations or images, with some sort of one-to-one mapping between the sensory stimulus

Conformity, status, and idiosyncrasy credit.

Abstract: “Beginning with the consideration that social behavior depends upon attributes of the individual, conditions of the situation, and inputs to a dynamic system arising from their interaction, a theoretical conception relating conformity and status is presented. The major mediating construct introduced

How shall a thing be called.

Abstract: The most deliberate part of first-language teaching is the business of telling a child what each thing is called. We ordinarily speak of the name of a thing as if there were just one, but in fact, of course, every referent has many names. The dime in my pocket is not only a dime. It is also money, a metal object, a thing, and, moving to subordinates, it is a 1952 dime, in fact a particular 1952 dime with a unique pattern of scratches, discolorations, and smooth places. When such an object is named for a very young child how is it called? It may be named money or dime but probably not metal object, thing, 1952 dime, or particular 1952 dime. The dog out on the lawn is not only a dog but is also a boxer, a quadruped, an animate being; it is the landlord's dog, named Prince. How will it be identified for a child? Sometimes it will be called a dog, sometimes Prince, less often a boxer, and almost never a quadruped, or animate being. Listening to many adults name things for many children, I find that their choices are quite uniform and that I can anticipate them from my own inclinations. How are these choices determined and what are their consequences for the cognitive development of the child? Adults have notions about the kind of language appropriate for use with children. Especially strong and universal is the belief that children have trouble pronouncing long names and so should always be given the shortest possible names. A word is preferable to a phrase and, among words, a monosyllable is better than a polysyllable. This predicts the preference for dog and Prince over boxer, quadruped, and animate being. It predicts the choice of dime over metal object and particular 1952 dime. Zipf (10) has shown that the length of a word (in phonemes or syllables) is inversely related to its frequency in the printed language. Consequently the shorter names for any thing will usually also be the most frequently used names for that thing, and so it would seem that the choice of a name is usually predictable from either frequency or brevity. The monosyllables dog and Prince have much higher frequencies according to the Thorndike-Lorge list (8) than do the polysyllables boxer, quadruped, and animate being. It sometimes happens, however, that the frequency-brevity principle makes the wrong prediction. The thing called a pineapple is also fruit. Fruit is the shorter and more frequent term, but adults will name the thing pineapple. Similarly they will say apple, banana, orange, and even pomegranate; all of them longer and less frequent words than the perfectly appropriate fruit. Brevity seems not to be the powerful determinant we had imagined. The frequency principle can survive this kind of example, but only if it is separated from counts like the Thorndike-Lorge of over-all frequency in the printed language. On the whole the word fruit appears more often than the word pineapple (and also is shorter), but we may confidently assume that, when pineapples are being named, the word pineapple is more frequent than the word fruit. This, of course, is a kind of frequency more directly relevant to our problem. Word counts of general usage are only very roughly applicable to the prediction of what will be said when

Heredity, environment, and the question "how?"

Abstract: Two or three decades ago, the socalled heredity-environment question was the center of lively controversy. Today, on the other hand, many psychologists look upon it as a dead issue. It is now generally conceded that both hereditary and environmental factors enter into all behavior. The reacting organism is a product of its genes and its past environment, while present environment provides the immediate stimulus for current behavior. To be sure, it can be argued that, although a given trait may result from the combined influence of hereditary and environmental factors, a specific difference in this trait between individuals or between groups may be traceable to either hereditary or environmental factors alone. The design of most traditional investigations undertaken to identify such factors, however, has been such as to yield inconclusive answers. The same set of data has frequently led to opposite conclusions in the hands of psychologists with different orientations. Nor have efforts to determine the proportional contribution of hereditary and environmental factors to observed individual differences in given traits met with any greater success. Apart from difficulties in controlling conditions, such investigations have usually been based upon the implicit assumption that hereditary and environmental factors combine in an additive fashion. Both geneticists and psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated, however, that a more tenable hypothesis is that of interaction (15, 22, 28, 40). In other words, the

The derivation of subjective scales from just noticeable differences.

Abstract: The study of cumulated jnd scales began with Fechner; Fechner's law is such a scale. Psychophysicists have been deriving such scales and comparing them with scales derived in other ways, notably by fractionation, ever since, and a lot of controversy has resulted. The controversy is particularly hot at present because Stevens and Galanter (16) and Stevens (14) have assembled a lot of data which indicate that cumulated jnd scales do not agree with magnitude scales derived by other methods for intensity continua such as loudness, brightness, and pain. Unfortunately, Fechner's procedure for cumulating jnds, which has been widely defended but not widely applied since his day, rests on an assumption which is inconsistent with