Robert French

• Ph.D
• Research Director at French National Centre for Scientific Research

There is experimental evidence of varying correlation among the elements of the neuromuscular system over the course of the reach-and-grasp task. The aim of this study was to investigate if modifications in correlations and clustering can be detected in the local field potential (LFP) recordings of the motor cortex during the task. To this end, we...

There is experimental evidence of varying correlation among the elements of the neuromuscular system over the course of the reach-and-grasp task. Several neuromuscular disorders are accompanied by anomalies in muscular coupling during the task. The aim of this study was to investigate if modifications in correlations and clustering can be detected...

Are similar, or even identical, mechanisms used in the computational modeling of speech segmentation, serial image processing and music processing? We address this question by exploring how TRACX2, (French et al., 2011; French & Cottrell, 2014; Mareschal & French, 2017), a recognition-based, recursive connectionist autoencoder model of chunking and...

This paper addresses the very challenging problem of online task-free continual learning in which a sequence of new tasks is learned from non-stationary data using each sample only once for training and without knowledge of task boundaries. We propose in this paper an efficient semi-distributed associative memory algorithm called Dynamic Sparse Dis...

Starting with the hypothesis that analogical reasoning consists of a search of a semantic space, we used eye-tracking to study the time course of information integration in adults in various formats of analogies. The two main questions we asked were whether adults would follow the same search strategies for different types of analogical problems an...

Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectrometry is commonly used for the identification of reference substances (RSs) in solid, liquid, or gaseous mixtures. An expert is generally required to perform the analysis, which is a bottleneck in emergency situations. This study proposes a support vector machine (SVM)-based algorithm, the peak correlation c...

Núñez and colleagues (2019) chronicle in extraordinary detail the “demise” of cognitive science, as it was first defined in the late 1970s. The problem is that their account, however accurate, misses the forest for the trees. Cognitive science circa 2019 is alive and well; it just has not followed the path anticipated by its founders over 40 years...

There is a rich tradition of building computational models in cognitive science, but modeling, theoretical, and experimental research are not as tightly integrated as they could be. In this paper, we show that computational techniques—even simple ones that are straightforward to use—can greatly facilitate designing, implementing, and analyzing expe...

The invention relates to a process of detection of the presence of at least a compd. in a compn. to be identified by means of a spectrometer. The process including the following stages: realization of at least a measurement of spectrometry a of the aforesaid at least compd.; extn., for the compd., of first points characteristic of ref. in a region...

We examined how motor responses to a stimulus evolve as individuals learn to predict when a stimulus will appear, by comparing responses to a regular versus irregular stimulus train. The study was conducted with two groups of adults — one responded to the regular appearance of a visual stimulus every 3 s (R group)and the second responded to the irr...

At the earliest ages of development, perceptual maturation is generally considered as a functional constraint to recognize or categorize the stimuli of the environment. However, using a computer simulation of retinal development using Gabor wavelets to simulate the output of the VI complex cells (Jones & Palmer, 1987), we showed that reducing the r...

In this study, we compared key temporal points in the whole body pointing movement of healthy aging and young subjects. During this movement, subject leans forward from a standing position to reach a target. As it involves forward inclination of the trunk, the movement creates a risk for falling. We examined two strategic time points during the tas...

This paper introduces a novel and extremely simple – and therefore, easily implemented in a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) – method of neutron/gamma pulse discrimination called the Histogram-Difference Method (HDM). Crucially, this method relies on the use of a “reference set” of γ- only pulses from ²²Na, ¹³⁷Cs and ⁶⁰Co sources and on feature...

The Histogram-Difference Method (HDM): A simple, topographical method for discriminating neutron/gamma pulses

Children’s improved performance with age in analogy tasks has been explained by an increase in semantic knowledge of the items and the relations between them or by the development of an increased ability to inhibit irrelevant information. We tested the so-called “unbalanced attentional focus hypothesis” that claims that a failure to choose the “ana...

Signal processing for neutron/gamma discrimination, appliable to other discrimination (alpha, beta etc).

Recent evidence suggests that interval timing (the judgment of durations lasting from approximately 500 ms. to a few minutes) is closely coupled to the action control system. We used surface electromyography (EMG) and motion capture technology to explore the emergence of this coupling in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds. We engaged infants in an active and...

In recent years eye-tracking has begun to be used to study the dynamics of analogy making. There are numerous scanpath-comparison algorithms and machine-learning techniques that can be applied to the raw eye-tracking data. We show how scanpath-comparison algorithms, combined with multidimensional scaling and a classification algorithm, can be used...

Even newborn infants are able to extract structure from a stream of sensory inputs; yet how this is achieved remains largely a mystery. We present a connectionist autoencoder model, TRACX2, that learns to extract sequence structure by gradually constructing chunks, storing these chunks in a distributed manner across its synaptic weights and recogni...

Recent evidence suggests that interval timing (the judgment of durations lasting from approximately 500 ms. to a few minutes) is closely coupled to the action control system. We used surface electromyography (EMG) and motion capture technology to explore the emergence of this coupling in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-olds. We engaged infants in an active and...

We do not dispute the possibility of the existence in the brain of “grandmother cells”, which are very finely tuned neurons that fire only in the presence of specific objects or categories. However, we question the causal efficacy of such neurons at the functional or behaviour level. We claim that, even though very familiar items, such as “my grand...

This study investigates whether infants are sensitive to backward and forward transitional probabilities within temporal and spatial visual streams. Two groups of 8-month-old infants were familiarized with an artificial grammar of shapes, comprising backward and forward base pairs (i.e. two shapes linked by strong backward or forward transitional p...

Non–luminance-mediated changes in pupil diameter have been used since the first studies by Darwin in 1872 as indicators of clinical, cognitive, and arousal states. However, the relation between processes involved in motor control and changes in pupil diameter remains largely unknown. Twenty participants attempted to compensate random walks of a cur...

We used eye-tracking to study the time course of analogical reasoning in adults. We considered proportions of looking times and saccades. The main question was whether or not adults would follow the same search strategies for different types of analogical problems (Scene Analogies vs. Classical A:B:C:D vs a Scene version of A:B::C:D). We then compa...

The aim of the present study was to investigate adults’ performance in an “A : B :: C : ?” analogy task with two types of semantically related matches: “Opposite relation” and “Other relation”. Response times were measured and eye-tracking data were recorded. Our results show opposite relation distractors led to lower performance, because they were...

In recent years great progress has been made in the computational modeling of interval timing. A wide range of models capturing different aspects of interval timing now exist. These models can be seen as constituting four, sometimes overlapping, general classes of models: pacemaker–accumulator models, multiple–oscillator models, memory–trace models...

We use eye-tracking to study the development of analogical reasoning in 5-year olds, 8-year olds, adolescents and adults in the A:B::C:D paradigm. We observed significant differences between groups in the way they explored the space of possible answers to analogy problems. Looking times showed that adults first studied the possible relations betwee...

Certain brain areas involved in interval timing are also important in motor activity. This raises the possibility that motor activity might influence interval timing. To test this hypothesis, we assessed interval timing in healthy adults following different types of training. The pre- and post-training tasks consisted of a button press in response...

David Marr's (1982) three-level analysis of computational cognition argues for three distinct levels of cognitive information processing-namely, the computational, representational, and implementational levels. But Marr's levels are-and were meant to be-descriptive, rather than interactive and dynamic. For this reason, we suggest that, had Marr bee...

Two recent findings constitute a serious challenge for all existing models of interval timing. First, Hass and Hermann (2012) have shown that only variance-based processes will lead to the scalar growth of error that is characteristic of human time judgments. Secondly, a major meta-review of over one hundred studies of participants’ judgments of in...

We study analogical reasoning in adults using an eye tracking methodology. In previous experiments, we studied the time course of analogy-making, looking at proportion of looking times and transitions. The main purpose of the present experiment is to test whether adults would adapt their search strategies to the difficulty of the analogical problem...

A number of studies have shown that performing a secondary task while executing a time-judgment task impairs performance on the latter task. However, this turns out not to be the case for certain motor secondary tasks. We show that concomitant secondary motor tasks involving pointing, when performed during a time-judgment task, can actually improve...

in CAM from December 2012, pp. 74–77, chal-lenges the Turing Test concluding that "... rather than require a machine to pass a Turing Test and try to proscribe questions that are unfair or inappropriate to judging its intelligence, we should accept the computer as a valid interlocutor and interact with it as an interactive, high-level, sophis-ticat...

Hass and Hermann (2012) have shown that only variance-based processes will lead to the scalar growth of error that is characteristic of human time judgments. Secondly, a major meta-review of over one hundred studies (Block et al., 2010) reveals a striking interaction between the way in which temporal judgments are queried and cognitive load on part...

Development of analogical reasoning is often explained by general maturation of executive functions. A consequence of the involvement of executive functions would be that children and adults differ in the visual strategies they apply when solving analogical problems. Since visual strategies can be studied by means of eye-tracking, we compared the v...

Alan Turing would be 100 years old this year. In 1950 he wrote a seminal paper in which he proposed an operational definition of machine intelligence designed to sidestep the philosophical quagmire of what it means to think.19 Turing proposed pitting a computer against a human in an imitation game. The computer and human are placed in separate room...

Analogical reasoning is commonly recognized as essential to human cognition, but young children often perform poorly in the classical A:B::C:? analogical reasoning task. Previous eye-tracking results have shown that children did not visually explore the A:B pair as much as adults in this task. We hypothesized that this lack of exploration could hel...

Computational modeling has long been one of the traditional pillars of cognitive science. Unfortunately, the computer models of cognition being developed today have not kept up with the enormous changes that have taken place in computer technology and, especially, in human-computer interfaces.  For all intents and purposes, modeling is still done t...

Hold up both hands and spread your fingers apart. Now put your palms together and fold your two middle fingers down till the knuckles on both fingers touch each other. While holding this position, one after the other, open and close each pair of opposing fingers by an inch or so. Notice anything? Of course you did. But could a computer without a bo...

Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk...

We present a neural network model of category learning that addresses the question of how rules for category membership are acquired. The architecture of the model comprises a set of statistical learning synapses and a set of rule-learning synapses, whose weights, crucially, emerge from the statistical network. The network is implemented with a neu...

The present study uses eye-tracking technology to track differences in how children aged 5 and 8, and adults explore the space of possible answers to a semantic analogy problem. The main results were that adults looked more to A and B than to C and Target and that they start with A and B before looking at C and D. For children, the pattern was very...

We present the first developmental model of interval timing. It is a memory-based connectionist model of how infants learn to perceive time. It has two novel features that are not found in other models. First, it uses the uncertainty of a memory for an event as an index of how long ago that event happened. Secondly, embodiment – specifically, infan...

The present study directly tests the relationship between children's performance in an analogy-making task involving semantic analogies and their inhibitory-control capacities tested with the Day-Night test (Gerstadt, Hong, & Diamond, 1994). Our claim is that the development of analogy making can be best studied in terms of developmental changes in...

The aim of the present study is to investigate the performance of children of different ages on an analogy-making task involving semantic analogies in which there are competing semantic matches. We suggest that this can best be studied in terms of developmental changes in executive functioning. We hypothesize that the selection of common relational...

This paper presents an extension of the Red Queen Hypothesis (hereafter, RQH) that we call the Red Tooth Hypothesis (RTH). This hypothesis suggests that predator–prey relations may play a role in the maintenance of sexual reproduction in many higher animals. RTH is based on an interaction between learning on the part of predators and evolution on t...

All experimental psychologists understand the importance of randomizing lists of items. However, randomization is generally constrained, and these constraints-in particular, not allowing immediately repeated items-which are designed to eliminate particular biases, frequently engender others. We describe a simple Monte Carlo randomization technique...

The main aim of our study was to investigate the possibility of applying machine learning techniques to the analysis of electromyographic patterns (EMG) collected from arthritic patients during gait. The EMG recordings were collected from the lower limbs of patients with arthritis and compared with those of healthy subjects (CO) with no musculoskel...

If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck." So goes a pithy observation, undoubtedly as old as English itself, that provides a quick-and-dirty way to recognize ducks. This little maxim constitutes an operational means of duck identification that, for better or for worse, sidesteps all the thorny issues associated with ac...

The aim of the present study is to investigate the performance of children of different ages on an analogy-making task involving semantic analogies in which there are competing semantic matches. We suggest that this can be best studied in terms of developmental changes in executive functioning. We hypothesize that the selection of the common relati...

An unusual visual category learning asymmetry in infants was observed by Quinn, Eimas, and Rosenkrantz (1993). A series of experiments and simulations seemed to show that this asymmetry was due the perceptual inclusion of the cat category within the dog category because of the greater perceptual variability of the distributions of the visual featur...

Emotion is central to human interactions, and automatic detection could enhance our experience with technologies. We investigate the linguistic expression of fine-grained emotion in 50 and 200 word samples of real blog texts previously coded by expert and naive raters. Content analysis (LIWC) reveals angry authors use more affective language and ne...

Relational priming is argued to be a deeply inadequate model of analogy-making because of its intrinsic inability to do analogies where the base and target domains share no common attributes and the mapped relations are different. Leech et al. rely on carefully handcrafted representations to allow their model to make a complex analogy, seemingly un...

This book is an excellent manifesto for future work in child development. It presents a multidisciplinary approach that clearly demonstrates the value of integrating modeling, neuroscience, and behavior to explore the mechanisms underlying development and to show how internal context-dependent representations arise and are modified during developme...

Being able to automatically perceive a variety of emotions from text alone has potentially important applications in CMC and HCI that range from identifying mood from online posts to enabling dynamically adaptive interfaces. However, such ability has not been proven in human raters or computational systems. Here we examine the ability of naive rate...

KAMA is a model of mate-choice based on a gradual, stochastic process of building up representations of potential partners through encounters and dating, ultimately leading to marriage. Individuals must attempt to find a suitable mate in a limited amount of time with only partial knowledge of the individuals in the pool of potential candidates. Ind...

Abstract The aim of the present study is to investigate children's performance in an analogy-making task involving competing perceptual and relational matches in terms of developmental changes in executive functioning. We hypothesize that the selection of the common relational structure requires the inhibition of more salient perceptual features (s...

Emotion is at the core of understanding ourselves and others, and the automatic expression and detection of emotion could enhance our experience with technologies. In this paper, we explore the use of computational linguistic tools to derive emotional features. Using 50 and 200 word samples of naturally-occurring blog texts, we find that some emoti...

We develop an unsupervised "dual-network" connectionist model of category learning in which rules gradually emerge from a standard Kohonen network. The architecture is based on the interaction of a statistical-learning (Kohonen) network and a competitive-learning rule network. The rules that emerge in the rule network are weightings of individual f...

University of Paris 5 -Rene Descartes, France (1), King's CollegeLondon, UK (2), & UniversityofBourgogne, Dijon, France(3) Impainnents in visuospatial processing exhibited by individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) have been ascribed to a local processing bias. The imprecise specification of this local bias hypothesis has led to contradictions betw...

All natural cognitive systems, and, in particular, our own, gradually forget previously learned information. Plausible models of human cognition should therefore exhibit similar patterns of gradual forgetting of old information as new information is acquired. Only rarely does new learning in natural cognitive systems completely disrupt or erase pre...

Analogy-making is the process of finding or constructing a common relational structure in the descriptions of two situations or domains and making inferences by transferring knowledge from the familiar domain (the ‘base’ or ‘source’) to the unfamiliar domain (the ‘target’), thus enriching our knowledge about the latter.

In this paper we will begin by introducing a notion of analogy-making that is considerably broader than the normal construal of this term. We will argue that analogy-making, thus defined, is one of the most fundamental and powerful capacities in our cognitive arsenal. We will claim that the standard separation of the representation-building and map...

In A. Cangelosi, G. Bugmann, & R. Borisyuk (Eds.)

Individuals with Williams Syndrome demonstrate impairments in visuospatial cognition. This has been ascribed to a local processing bias. More specifically, it has been proposed that the deficit arises from a problem in disengaging attention from local features. We present preliminary data from an integrated empirical and computational exploration o...

Disentangling bottom-up and top-down processing in adult category learning is notoriously difficult. Studying category learning in infancy provides a simple way of exploring category learning while minimizing the contribution of top-down information. Three- to 4-month-old infants presented with cat or dog images will form a perceptual category repr...

Historical and contemporary papers on the philosophical issues raised by the Turing Test as a criterion for intelligence. The Turing Test is part of the vocabulary of popular culture—it has appeared in works ranging from the Broadway play "Breaking the Code" to the comic strip "Robotman." The writings collected by Stuart Shieber for this book exami...

While humans forget gradually, highly distributed connectionist networks forget catastrophically: newly learned information often completely erases previously learned information. This is not just implausible cognitively, but disastrous practically. However, it is not easy in connectionist cognitive modelling to keep away from highly distributed ne...

Bilingual memory research in the past decade and, particularly, in the past five years, has developed a range of sophisticated experimental, neuropsychological and computational techniques that have allowed researchers to begin to answer some of the major long-standing questions of the field. We explore bilingual memory along the lines of the conce...

While humans forget gradually, highly distributed connectionist networks forget catastrophically: newly learned information often completely erases previously learned information. This is not just implausible cognitively, but disastrous practically. However, it is not easy in connectionist cognitive modelling to keep away from highly distributed ne...

Major biases and stereotypes in group judgments are reviewed and modeled from a recurrent connectionist perspective. These biases are in the areas of group impression formation (illusory correlation), group differentiation (accentuation), stereotype change (dispersed vs. concentrated distribution of inconsistent information), and group homogeneity....

Quinn and Eimas (1998) reported that young infants include non-human animals (i.e., cats, horses, and fish) in their category representation for humans. To account for this surprising result, it was proposed that the representation of humans by infants functions as an attractor for non-human animals and is based on infants' previous experience with...

Introduction During the last decade, an increasing amount of computational research, in particular, connectionist modeling, has been devoted to the basic mechanisms underlying human categorization (e.g., Anderson & Fincham, 1996; Kruschke, 1992). Our own research has focused on developing a computational model of early infant categorization and tes...

Dijkstra and van Heuven have made an admirable attempt to develop a new model of bilingual memory, the BIA+. Their article presents a clear and well-reasoned theoretical justification of their model, followed by a description of their model. The BIA+ is, as the name implies, an extension of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model (Dijkstra...

In error-driven distributed feedforward networks, new information typically interferes, sometimes severely, with previously learned information. We show how noise can be used to approximate the error surface of previously learned information. By combining this approximated error surface with the error surface associated with the new information to...

We present four problems that will have to be overcome by text co-occurrence programs in order for them to be able to capture human-like semantics. These problems are: the intrinsic deformability of semantic space, the inability to detect co-occurrences of (esp. distal) abstract structures, their lack of essential world knowledge, which humans acqu...

Everyone agrees that real cognition requires much more than static pattern recognition. In particular, it requires the ability to learn sequences of patterns (or actions) But learning sequences really means being able to learn multiple sequences, one after the other, wi thout the most recently learned ones erasing the previously learned ones. But i...

Our ability to see a particular object or situation in one context as being 'the same as' another object or situation in another context is the essence of analogy-making. It encompasses our ability to explain new concepts in terms of already-familiar ones, to emphasize particular aspects of situations, to generalize, to characterize, to explain or...

Naturanonfacitsaltum (Nature does not make leaps) was the lovely aphorism on which Darwin based his work on evolution. It applies as much to the formation of mental representations as to the formation of species, and therein lies our major disagreement with the SOC model proposed by Perruchet & Vinter.