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Meaning and Self-Organisation in Visual Cognition and Thought SEEING, THINKING AND KNOWING THEORY AND DECISION LIBRARY General Editors: W. Leinfellner (Vienna) and G. Eberlein (Munich) Series A: Philosophy and Methodology of the Social Sciences Series B: Mathematical and Statistical Methods Series C: Game Theory, Mathematical Programming and Operations Research SERIES A: PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES VOLUME 38 Series Editor: W. Leinfellner (Technical University of Vienna), G. Eberlein (Technical University of Munich); Editorial Board: R. Boudon (Paris), M. Bunge (Montreal), J. S. Coleman (Chicago), J. Götschl (Graz), L. Kern (Pullach), I. Levi (New York), R. Mattessich (Vancouver), B. Munier (Cachan), J. Nida-Rümelin (Göttingen), A. Rapoport (Toronto), A. Sen (Cambridge, U.S.A.), R. Tuomela (Helsinki), A. Tversky (Stanford). Scope: This series deals with the foundations, the general methodology and the criteria, goals and purpose of the social sciences. The emphasis in the Series A will be on well-argued, thoroughly ana- lytical rather than advanced mathematical treatments. In this context, particular attention will be paid to game and decision theory and general philosophical topics from mathematics, psychology and economics, such as game theory, voting and welfare theory, with applications to political science, sociology, law and ethics. The titles published in this series are listed at the end of this volume. SEEING, THINKING AND KNOWING Meaning and Self-Organisation in Visual Cognition and Thought Edited by Arturo Carsetti University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Rome, Italy KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW eBook ISBN: 1-4020-2081-3 Print ISBN: 1-4020-2080-5 ©2004 Springer Science + Business Media, Inc. Print ©2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers Dordrecht All rights reserved No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written consent from the Publisher Created in the United States of America Visit Springer's eBookstore at: http://www.ebooks.kluweronline.com and the Springer Global Website Online at: http://www.springeronline.com TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 5 INTRODUCTION 7 A. Carsetti PART I SEEING AND THINKING: A NEW APPROACH NEURAL MODELS OF SEEING AND THINKING 29 S. Grossberg FUNCTIONAL ARCHITECTURE OF THE VISUAL CORTEX 55 AND VARIATIONAL MODELS FOR KANIZSA’S MODAL SUBJECTIVE CONTOURS J. Petitot GESTALT THEORY AND COMPUTER VISION 71 A. Desolneux, L. Moisan & J.M. Morel TOWARDS AN ANALYTIC PHENOMENOLOGY: 103 THE CONCEPTS OF “BODILINESS” AND “GRABBINESS” J. K. O’Regan, E. Myin & A. Noë INTERNAL REPRESENTATIONS OF SENSORY 115 INPUT REFLECT THE MOTOR OUTPUT WITH WHICH ORGANISMS RESPOND TO THE INPUT A. Di Ferdinando & D. Parisi MOVEMES FOR MODELING BIOLOGICAL 143 MOTION PERCEPTION L. Goncalves, E. Di Bernardo & P. Perona FORM CONSTRAINTS IN MOTION INTEGRATION, 171 SEGMENTATION AND SELECTION J. Lorenceau 3 4 SCINTILLATIONS, EXTINCTIONS 191 AND OTHER NEW VISUAL EFFECTS J. Ninio COMMONALITIES BETWEEN VISUAL IMAGERY 203 AND IMAGERY IN OTHER MODALITIES: AN INVESTIGATION BY MEANS OF FMRI M. Olivetti Belardinelli, R. Di Matteo, C. Del Gratta, A. De Nicola, A. Ferretti, G. L. Romani PART II FORMS AND SCHEMES OF PERCEPTUAL AND COGNITIVE SELF-ORGANISATION MICROGENESIS, IMMEDIATE EXPERIENCE 221 AND VISUAL PROCESSES IN READING V. Rosenthal LANGUAGE, SPACE AND THE THEORY OF SEMANTIC FORMS 245 Y. M. Visetti EMOTION-COGNITION INTERACTION AND LANGUAGE 277 M. Wimmer APPEARANCE OF STRUCTURE AND EMERGENCE 293 OF MEANING IN THE VISUAL SYSTEM M. Stadler & P. Kruse THE EMBODIED MEANING: SELF-ORGANISATION 307 AND SYMBOLIC DYNAMICS IN VISUAL COGNITION A. Carsetti NAME INDEX 331 SUBJECT INDEX 343 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book would not have been possible without a lot of help. My immediate debt is to Werner Leinfellner. He encouraged me to edit this book and I have greatly benefited from discussions with him about the general orientation of the volume. I am also grate- ful to Elizabeth Leinfellner for her interest and her suggestions and to Jean Petitot for his invaluable help in preparing the Colloquium “Seeing and Thinking. Reflections on Kanizsa’s Studies in Visual Cognition”. The book owes its existence first of all to the successful realisation of this Colloquium. I have been helped enormously by conversations with Stephen Grossberg, Gail Car- penter, J. Goetschl and F.M. Wuketits. I am once again indebted to my collaborators Andrea Cataldi and Enrica Vizzinisi for their help at the editorial level. I would like also to thank Jolanda Voogd, Charles Erkelens and Ingrid Krabbenbos of Kluwer for their editorial comments and sugges- tions which contributed to the quality of the presentation of the book. My deep thanks to the authors for their invaluable co-operation and to my students at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” for their stimulus and for their patience. This book is dedicated to the late Gaetano Kanizsa, a good friend and a great scholar. I learned a lot from him while I was teaching in Trieste. His deep understanding of the self-organisation processes underlying visual cognition represents, for many aspects, the Ariadne’s thread of the entire volume. 5 This page intentionally left blank ARTURO CARSETTI INTRODUCTION According to Putnam to talk of “facts” without specifying the language to be used is to talk of nothing; “object” itself has many uses and as we creatively invent new uses of words “we find that we can speak of ‘objects’ that were not ‘values of any variable’ in any language we previously spoke”1. The notion of object becomes, then, like the notion of reference, a sort of open land, an unknown territory. The exploration of this land ap- pears to be constrained by use and invention. But, we may wonder, is it possible to guide invention and control use? In what way, in particular, is it possible, at the level of natu- ral language, to link together program expressions and natural evolution? To give an answer to these onerous questions we should immediately point out that cognition (as well as natural language) has to be considered first of all as a peculiar func- tion of active biosystems and that it results from complex interactions between the or- ganism and its surroundings. “In the moment an organism perceives an object of what- ever kind, it immediately begins to ‘interpret’ this object in order to react properly to it ... It is not necessary for the monkey to perceive the tree in itself... What counts is sur- vival”2. In this sense, if it is clearly true that we cannot talk of facts without specifying the language to be used, it is also true that we cannot perceive objects (and their relations) if we are unable continuously to “reconstruct” and invent new uses of the cognitive tools at work at the level of visual cognition. As Ruse remarks, the real world cer- tainly exists, but it is the world as we interpret it. In what way, however, can we in- terpret it adequately? How can we manage to “feel” that we are interpreting it ac- cording to the truth (albeit partially)? In other words, if perceiving and, from a more general point of view, knowing is interpreting, and if the interplay existing between a complex organism and its environment is determined by the compositio of interpreta- tive functions, actual emergence of meaning, and evolution, in what way can humans describe the inner articulation of this mysterious interplay, mirroring themselves in this compositio? Does this very compositio possess a “transcendental” character? How, generally speaking, can our brains give rise to our minds?3 What types of func- tions and rules should we identify (and invent) in order to describe and contemporar- ily construct those evolutionary paths of cognitive processes (and in particular of vi- sual cognition) that progressively constitute the very fibres of our being ? How can we model that peculiar texture of life and knowledge in flux that characterises our mental activity? In order to do this we need, as is evident, ever-new simulation models considered in turn, from an abstract point of view, as specific mathematical objects. These models should ad- equately represent specific systems capable of autonomously self-organising in response to a rapidly changing and unpredictable world. In other words, we are really faced with the necessary outlining of models able to explain (and unfold) behavioural and brain data and 7 A. Carsetti (ed.), Seeing, Thinking and Knowing, 7-26. © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. 8 ARTURO CARSETTI contemporarily to interact with the dynamics that they try to describe in order to “prime” new patterns of possible integration. These models, once established, may act as operative channels and may be exactly studied as mathematical objects, i.e., they articulate as self- organising models. When we perceive and “interpret”, our mind actually constructs mod- els so that the brain can be forged and guided in its activity of reading the world. In this sense, informational data must be considered as emergent properties of a dy- namical process taking place at the level of the mind. From a general point of view, be- haviour must be understood as an ensemble of emergent properties of networks of neu- rones. At the same time, the neurones and their interactions are necessary in order to cor- rectly define the laws proper to the networks whose emergent properties map onto be- haviour. Thus, on the one hand, we need a powerful theoretical language: the language, in particular, of dynamical systems and, on the other, we contemporarily need self-or- ganising models able to draw, fix and unfold the link between real emergence and men- tal construction as well as the link between the holistic fabric of perception and the step by step developmental processes in action. The chapter by S. Grossberg “Neural Models of Seeing and Thinking” aims at a very clear exploration of the role played by the neural models at the level of Cognitive Sci- ence and in particular at the level of visual cognition.
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