Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00-4:00 p.m., 280 Park Hall, North (Amherst) Campus, and are open to the public. Refreshments are served.

 

Month	Day	Speaker/Title
September	1	WILLIAM C. SCHMIDT (wcswcs@acsu.buffalo.edu) Department of Psychology University at Buffalo "Computational Models of Development: The Balance Scale Task"
	8	JOHN F. SANTORE and STUART C. SHAPIRO (jsantore@cse.buffalo.edu) |  (shapiro@cse.buffalo.edu) Department of Computer Science and Engineering University at Buffalo "Computational Understanding of Indifinites in Imperative Contexts"
	10	Philosophy Open House, 3 - 5 p.m., You are invited to visit the Philosophy Department's new quarters, 135 Park Hall, North Campus, Refreshments will be served.
	13	The next meeting of SNeRG, the SNePS Research Group, will consist of brief overviews of current research. All are welcome to participate and to come late or leave early as necessary. For more info: http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/sneps)
	15	WILLIAM MERIGAN (merigan@cvs.rochester.edu) Center for Visual Science Department of Ophthalmology University of Rochester "Functions of the ventral cortical pathway in macaques and humans"
	22	MARC SCHIEBER (MHS@CVS.ROCHESTER.EDU) Center for Visual Science University of Rochester "How Does the Brain Control the Fingers? It's Not What You Think!"
	29	BARBARA TVERSKY (bt@Psych.Stanford.EDU) Department of Psychology Stanford University, co-sponsored with Dept. of Geography "Some of the Things Naming Can Do"
October	1	BARBARA TVERSKY 12 noon, talk in Geography Dept,
	6	BUSINESS MEETING
	7	Philosophy Colloquium, Peter Van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame) What Do We Refer To When We Say "I" , 4:00 p.m., Park 141
	11	SNePS Research Group, John F. Santore (CSE, UB) SNePS
	12	Linguistics Colloquium, Mike Hammond, University of Arizona"Supralexical footing in meter", 3:30 p.m. in 218 Nat. Sci. Bldg. **Reception following the talk in Baldy 619A** There will be also be a dinner outing early that evening
	13	CHRISTINE GAGNE (clgagne@julian.uwo.ca) Department of Psychology University of Western Ontario "The Influence of Relational Information on Interpreting Noun-noun Phrases"
	14	Buffalo Logic Colloquium, 1st Mtg., John Corcoran et. al., (Philosophy, UB) Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project--logical form, grammatical form 4-5:30 p.m., 141 Park Hall, Dutch Treat Supper Follows
	16	Philosophy Symposium, Karl Kraus Symposium 10:00 a.m., Park Hall 280
	18	SNePS Research Group, Haythem O. Ismail (CSE, UB) SNePS
	20	LAURIE FELDMAN (lf503@cnsvax.albany.edu) Department of Psychology University at Albany "Morphological Aspects of Language Processing"
	21	Buffalo Logic Colloquium, 2nd Mtg., John Corcoran et al., (Philosophy, UB) Buffalo Logic Dictionary Project--logical notions, logical relations 4-5:30 p.m., 141 Park Hall, Dutch Treat Supper Follows
	25	SNePS Research Group, Carl Alphonce (CSE, UB) SNePS
	27	ROBERTO CASATI CNRS-CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and UB Philosophy "Shadow Cognition"
November	1	SNePS Research Group, William J. Rapaport (CSE, UB) SNePS
	3	GEORGE LAKOFF (lakoff@Berkeley.edu) Department of Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Co-Sponsored with Poetics Program "What is Infinity? The Cognitive Science of Mathematical Ideas"
	3	Poetics Lecture - George Lakoff, - cosponsored with CogSci 4 PM: "Embodied Poetics"
	4	UB Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference on Structures of Consciousness,
	5-6	Philosophy Department Conference--The Metaphysics of Consciousness Keynote Speaker: DAVID CHALMERS, Univ. of Arizona http://paa.11net.com/chalmers.htm
	10	FERGUS CRAIK (fimc@holyrood.ed.ac.uk) Department of Psychology University of Toronto "Memory encoding and retrieval processes: Similarities and differences"
	11	Buffalo Logic Colloquium, 3rd Mtg., John T. Kearns (Philosophy, UB) To be announced, 4-5:30 p.m., 141 Park Hall, Dutch Treat Supper Follows
	12	Philosophy Colloquium, Professor Dennis Patterson, Rutgers University "Normativity, Objectivity and Law", 4:00 p.m., 141 Park Hall
	17	BRAD SHORE (antbs@emory.edu) Department of Anthropology Emory University "The Double Life of Cultural Models: Conventional and Personal Meaning"
	18	Philosophy Colloquium, Moira Howes (UB) Words in Plenty, and No Knowledge of Healing: Cause, Explanation, and Alternative Medicine, 4:00 p.m., Park 141
	24	No Mtg - Thanksgiving recess
December	1	To be announced   "title "
	2	Philosophy Colloquium, Professor Kenneth Lucey (SUC Fredonia) "Varieties of Undeterminedness", Commentators: Berit Brogaard Pedersen (UB), Mariam Thalos (UB) 4:00 p.m., 141 Park Hall
	8	RONAN G. REILLY  Department of Computer Science University College Dublin, Ireland "Evolution of Symbolisation: Signposts to a Bridge  Between Connections and Symbols"

Abstracts

Wednesday, September 1, 1999
280 Park Hall
2:00-3:30 p.m.
North Campus

WILLIAM C. SCHMIDT

Department of Psychology
University at Buffalo

"Computational Models of Development:
The Balance Scale Task"

Within the past decade a number of symbolic and connectionist learning methods have been applied to cognitive development's balance scale task. The aim of this body of research has been to investigate the use of machine learning methods as models of developmental transition, to explore the range of assumptions under which psychologically accurate models of the task can be achieved, and most important, to assemble predictions about the task and the changes that children's thinking undergoes during the course of development. Study of this task has inspired a wide range of human and computational work that will be reviewed in this talk. The task requires that children predict the outcome of placing a discrete number of weights at various distances on either side of a fulcrum. A recent model which features the symbolic learning algorithm C4.5 as a transition mechanism, exhibits regularities found in the human data including orderly stage progression, U-shaped development, and the torque difference effect. Unlike previous successful models of the task, the current model uses a single free parameter, is not restricted in the size of the balance scale that it can accommodate and does not require the assumption of a highly structured output representation or a training environment biased towards weight or distance information. The model makes a number of predictions differing from previous computational efforts.