Sabbatical Report: End of Month 1

Today marks the end of the first month of my current year-long sabbatical. I thought that this was as good a time as any to reflect on what I have accomplished so far, and to consider where my research is heading.

While the sabbatical is only officially one month old, the stage for the project was set in the fall term of 2016. In order to be fortunate enough to be awarded a sabbatical, one must apply for it, and part of this application involves proposing the kind of work that will be accomplished during the sabbatical. I have a long history of writing a book during each year-long sabbatical that I have been awarded; the plan for the current sabbatical was no different. I proposed using the time to draft a manuscript that extended some recent work in my lab on simple artificial neural networks and probability theory, and was lucky enough to be given the green light for this kind of project from the Faculty of Arts.

With a sabbatical plan required in the fall, it is not surprising that I was in a position to start groundwork for the current sabbatical at the end of the fall term. Much of that work has involved doing a lot of reading – since marking the final exam for my fall cognitive science course, I have read 23 books on systems theory, cybernetics, information theory, and probability. Those interested can see what I have been reading by looking through my Instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/drmrwdawson/) for pictures of covers. I use #reading to tag these posts. I have also conducted a pretty extensive simulation study (which has involved training and analyzing the performance of 500 different perceptrons) that explores how networks match the probability of outcomes in a three-cue probability learning task. In the fall, I plan to collect data from human subjects that are trained on the same task that I have used to train the networks; I am pretty excited about the main result that I expect to observe when networks and humans are compared. This has meant that I have also written programs to collect this data from humans. Importantly, I have also successfully navigated the process for getting ethics approval for this work; I haven’t collected human data for years. Most importantly, I have already crafted three complete chapters of a new book manuscript (when published, it will be my eighth book) that relate networks to probability theory and information theory, that explore the relationship between simple networks and Bayes’ theorem in probability, and that report the results of my simulations.

As August begins, the sabbatical project turns to writing the opening chapter of the new book. I have enough of a ‘feel’ for the project now that I need to put it in the context of other theories, and need to lay out its purpose, methodology, and implications. Writing this chapter, though, requires me to do a lot more reading than I have been doing. Up to this point, I have been reading a book every 10 days or so, and I have to accelerate this. In short, currently my next steps are to read, to think, and eventually to write. Some sense of the different topics that I will be considering will be appearing in the near future as Instagrammed book covers.

Santiago: Freedom To Read

I have just returned from a visit to Universidad Diego Portales (UDP) in Santiago, Chile.  I was hosted there by the Centro de Estudios de la Argumentación y el Razonamiento (CEAR), which is part of La Facultad de Psicología.  It was a fabulous trip, my first to South America, and my hosts were exceedingly kind.

As part of my visit, I presented a couple of public lectures on embodied cognitive science.  Prior to my first talk, Arturo Pérez, who had stayed with my wife and I in Edmonton last year, working on an interesting robotics project in my lab, led me on a walking tour of the beautiful UDP neighborhood.  There are many striking buildings in the area, including UDP’s Casa Central:

One stop on the tour was particularly poignant, and provided perspective on our current troubles in the Alberta postsecondary sector.  Arturo took me into a fairly new building, UDP’s Biblioteca Central.  At first glance, as can be seen below, it looks like many a North American library: books on display on the main floor, and stacks of books visible as one looks up from the entrance:

A closer examination of the books on display in the black shelves in the lobby is more chilling.  They were all banned by Augusto Pinochet after his military coup overthrew the government of Salvador Allende in 1973.  Along a wall to the left of this display is a long line of black and white photographs:

Each photograph is a picture of Pinochet’s soldiers in the process of burning books; here is just one example of the many photographs on display:

The books being burned were deemed subversive, including leftist literature and any other material inconsistent with the junta’s political position, including newspapers and magazines.  Arturo told me, as an example, that the ban included classic work in psychology by Russian scholars like Vygotsky.  In addition to being burned, these books were removed from the shelves of libraries and book stores.  The book bans lasted throughout the Pinochet regime, and book burnings sporadically continued.  In 1987 the Los Angeles Times reported that the Pinochet government burned thousands of copies of a book by Nobel prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

As one comes to the end of this display, there is a particularly striking juxtaposition of images.  On the right is a colorful poster, America Despierta,, created by Patricia Israel and Alberto Pérez in 1972.  It is a colorful, stylized, political map of South America; it creates the shape of the continent using images related to its various countries.  For instance, Chile is in part depicted by its national flower (the copihue), miners, and one of its founders, Manuel Rodríguez.

Immediately to left of this poster is a photograph of it being burned in 1973:

The entire display of banned and burned books was profoundly sobering.  I was deeply moved, not in the least because of the display’s setting, surrounded by a huge number of books in a modern, thriving university library in central Santiago.  It was as if the books on the floors towering above me had risen from the ashes of those burned books on display below.

Of course, all of this made me reflect on my own experiences in Canada.  I have never encountered the violent oppression of ideas that was on display before me.  I was astonished at how much I took for granted my freedom to write, to read, and to think.

Surprisingly, though, I did not conclude that I should be content with my current situation in an Albertan postsecondary institution, because – as shown in those stark black and white photographs – things could be far worse than I could even imagine.  Instead, I realized that the tension between government policy and freedom to think is universal.  The current ‘push back’ that we are experiencing from the Alberta government seems (in comparison to Chilean history) fairly benign, in the sense that the only lever being used is financial.

However, it struck me that this is really a difference of degree, not of kind.  Restricting the opportunities of students to choose some programs of study relative to others (e.g. via preferential funding, reducing grants that lead to closed programs, creating institutes that explore some research domains and not others) reduces the freedom of our next generation to read, to think, and to choose, for themselves.

Desert Island Books For Cognitive Scientists

Teaching the foundations of cognitive science requires providing students a sense of its historical and philosophical roots.  My lectures try to accomplish this by providing heavy doses of quotes from, and pictures of, pioneering cognitive scientists.  (I gathered enough of this material to launch a gallery of cognitive scientists.)

Last term, as part of my mission to expose students to the roots of cognitive science, I found myself describing various pioneering works as ‘desert island books’.  I told my class that these were classic texts that any marooned cognitive scientist would be content to have by their side when facing a lengthy wait for rescue.  I am not expecting to be in that situation myself, but after 25 years at the University of Alberta I can comfortably imagine retiring to my retreat at Hastings Lake, Alberta to spend some serious time reading classics of cognitive science.  In addition, I am long enough in the tooth to be able to suggest a few foundational texts for budding cognitive scientists.

What books would provide me contentment on a desert island?

I generated the list below to answer this question.  I constrained it in two ways.  First, I limited it to thirteen books.  Second, I tried to give equal representation to the three major approaches to cognitive science (classical, connectionist, and embodied).

Classical Cognitive Science

Miller, G. A., Galanter, E., & Pribram, K. H. (1960). Plans and the Structure Of Behavior. New York:  Henry Holt & Co.

Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human Problem Solving. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1984). Computation and Cognition. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

Simon, H. A. (1969). The Sciences of the Artificial. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

About 25 years ago I rescued my copy of Miller, Galanter and Pribram from a discard pile; after my first reading of it I was amazed at how current this pioneering book still managed to be.  A recent look through it reminded me of its attempt to bridge cognitivism with cybernetics.  Newell and Simon provide an incredible manifesto of modeling in a classic book that introduces production systems, physical symbol systems, and protocol analysis.  Pylyshyn’s book offers a rich theoretical account of the implications of assuming that cognition is computation, including a deep discussion of what is involved in validating models of cognition.  Simon’s masterpiece provides a link between the science of cognition and the science of design, and is a continuous source of inspiration about how to think like a cognitive scientist.

Connectionist Cognitive Science

McCulloch, W. S. (1988). Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Minsky, M. L., & Papert, S. (1969). Perceptrons: An Introduction To Computational Geometry (1st ed.). Cambridge, Mass.,: MIT Press.

Rosenblatt, F. (1962). Principles of Neurodynamics. Washington: Spartan Books.

Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing, V.1. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The McCulloch book is a collection of his important papers, primarily from the 1940s into the 1960s, many of which are classics.  It is not an easy read, but it is fun, and it is also incredible to see the breadth of topics covered – links from the abstract to the physical abound.  Minsky and Papert provide a wonderfully challenging read that illustrates how computational analyses of artificial neural networks should proceed.  Rosenblatt’s magnum opus introduces the perceptron, but is far deeper than some might expect, and foresees aspects of the New Connectionism.  The Rumelhart and McClelland book heralded New Connectionism; this first volume of a pair of books gives the reader a lot of dangerous information about how to carry out connectionist research. (It is largely responsible for my developing my own skills in this field; I suspect that many connectionists taught themselves from reading it in the late 1980s.)

Embodied Cognitive Science

Braitenberg, V. (1984). Vehicles: Explorations in Synthetic Psychology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Neisser, U. (1976). Cognition and Reality: Principles And Implications Of Cognitive Psychology. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman.

Winograd, T., & Flores, F. (1987). Understanding Computers and Cognition. New York: Addison-Wesley.

This is quite a mixed bag of selections, which is only proper, because the embodied approach is fairly fragmented.  Braitenberg provides a collection of thought experiments that illustrate the importance of realizing that an agent is embedded in its environment.  It ties in nicely with the Simon book mentioned earlier.  Gibson’s theory of perception is a foundational example of the key elements of embodied cognitive science, and Gibson’s work inspired Neisser’s embodied treatment of cognition.  Winograd and Flores offer a fascinating critique of classical cognitive science, and suggest embodied solutions to these problems.  I read both Neisser and Winograd and Flores when I was a student and missed the point of both books; 25 years later I was astounded with how prescient both were, and was amazed at my inability to understand them properly on the first read!

Combining Elements Of All Three Approaches

Marr, D. (1982). Vision. San Francisco, Ca.: W.H. Freeman.

The last book on my list is such a seminal work that it really stands on its own.  Furthermore, Marr’s theory combines strong elements of all of the different schools of cognitive science: he is clearly concerned with constructing representations in the classical sense, but develops algorithms that are essentially connectionist, and his proofs concern properties of the world (i.e. natural constraints).  His ability to move from mathematical proofs to single cell recordings of visual neurons is astonishing; for me, this was one of the two most influential books that I have ever read (the other being Pylyshyn’s, cited above).