A WELCOME CHANGE FROM BACK-PROPAGATION MODELS OF COGNITION
Book Review of Murre on Categorization

Abstract

Building a computational model of cognition is a daunting task. As one gains even the beginnings of an approximate understanding of the mechanisms, sophistication, subtlety, and raw processing power of the human mind, the prospect of true artificial intelligence appears increasingly remote; this in spite of various optimistic pronouncements and the apparently exponential growth rate of microprocesser speed. Murre's (1992a, b) CALM (Categorization and Learning Module) (and its several variants introduced herein) is clearly an advance over the simple feedforward back-propagation networks (of various stripes and colors) that have been so prominent in the past several years. CALM has a number of intriguing and laudable attributes including: (1) a means of doing unsupervised competitive learning; (2) the possibility of resolving the "stability/plasticity" dilemma; (3) some measure of psychological and neurophysiological plausibility; (4) a mechanism to provide automatic arousal and thus more rapid learning in response to novelty; and, (5) an appropriate application of a genetic algorithm. This review will consider each of these five and then turn to several questions and more contentious issues.

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