Abstract
Humans, like several other primates, are visual creatures, and almost half of our neurons are devoted to the processing of visual signals. The excellence found in our ability to do so, is not just due to our ophthalmological capabilities, which are outperformed by other species, such as birds, it is instead on the semantic side, in our ability to classify hundreds of object categories on the basis of their visual appearance only. Vision has historically been the earliest and most investigated function in the brain, thanks to its unique correspondence between the two dimensional organization of the distal stimulus and cortical processing units. Taken together, these two factors have led us to investigating the semantics of objects whose essential features are captured by their visual appearance. The first model presented in this chapter is a sort of prelude to a full blown semantics, with a simulation of the full visual pathway that brings light signals into recognition of object categories, together with the auditory pathway, in a simulation of the emergence of a first lexicon, that in infants begins exactly with visual objects. Most of the components of this model, and the methods used for its development and subsequent analyses, will be shared by the models that follow. The second model presented in this chapter, taps into a range of semantic phenomena typically observed in the early stages of language development in children, such as the change in the speed of learning, and the so called “fast-mapping” phenomenon.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsReferences
Ashby, F. G., & Spiering, B. J. (2004). The neurobiology of category learning. Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews, 3, 101–113.
Bates, E., Dal, P. S., & Thal, D. (1995). Individual differences and their implications for theories of language development. In P. Fletcher & B. M. Whinney (Eds.), Handbook of child language (pp. 96–151). Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Bednar, J. A., & Miikkulainen, R. (2004). Prenatal and postnatal development of laterally connected orientation maps. Neurocomputing, 58, 985–992.
Biederman, I. (1987). Recognition-by-components: A theory of human image understanding. Psychological Review, 94, 115–147.
Black, A. W., & Taylor, P. A. (1997). The festival speech synthesis system: System documentation. Technical report HCRC/TR-83, Human Communication Research Centre, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh.
Bloom, P. (2000). How children learn the meanings of words. Cambridge: MIT.
Bornstein, M. H., & RCote, L. (2004). Cross-linguistic analysis of vocabulary in young children: Spanish, Dutch, French, Hebrew, Italian, Korean, and American english. Child Development, 75, 1115–1139.
Brown, M. C. (2003). Audition. In L. R. Squire, F. Bloom, S. McConnell, J. Roberts, N. Spitzer, & M. Zigmond (Eds.), Fundamental neuroscience (pp. 699–726). New York: Academic.
Carey, S. (1978). The child as word learner. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. Miller (Eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality (pp. 264–293). Cambridge: MIT.
Carey, S., & Spelke, E. (1996). Science and core knowledge. Journal of Philosophy of Science, 63, 515–533.
Chapman, B., Stryker, M. P., & Bonhoeffer, T. (1996). Development of orientation preference maps in ferret primary visual cortex. Journal of Neuroscience, 16, 6443–6453.
Deco, G., & Rolls, E. (2004). A neurodynamical cortical model of visual attention and invariant object recognition. Vision Research, 44, 621–642.
Dickinson, D. K. (1984). First impressions: Children’s knowledge of words gained from a single exposure. Applied Psycholinguistics, 5, 359–373.
Dowling, J. E. (1987). The retina: An approachable part of the brain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Edelman, S., & Duvdevani-Bar, S. (1997). A model of visual recognition and categorization. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 352, 1191–1202.
Eimas, P. D., & Quinn, P. C. (1994). Studies on the formation of perceptually based basic-level categories in young infants. Child Development, 3, 903–917.
Elman, J. L., Bates, E., Johnson, M. H., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness a connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge: MIT.
Fairhall, S. L., & Caramazza, A. (2013). Brain regions that represent amodal conceptual knowledge. Journal of Neuroscience, 33, 10,552–10,558.
Farah, M. J. (1990). Visual agnosia: Disorders of object recognition and what they tell us about normal vision. Cambridge: MIT.
Freedman, D. J., Riesenhuber, M., Poggio, T., & Miller, E. K. (2001). Categorical representation of visual stimuli in the primate prefrontal cortex. Science, 291, 312–316.
Freedman, D. J., Riesenhuber, M., Poggio, T., & Miller, E. K. (2003). Visual categorization and the primate prefrontal cortex: Neurophysiology and behavior. Journal of Neurophysiology, 88, 929–941.
Fuster, J. M. (2008). The prefrontal cortex (4th ed.). New York: Academic.
Ganger, J., & Brent, M. R. (2004). Reexamining the vocabulary spurt. Developmental Psychology, 40, 621–632.
Gershkoff-Stowe, L., & Smith, L. B. (2004). Shape and the first hundred nouns. Child Development, 75, 1098–1114.
Gödecke, I., & Bonhoeffer, T. (1996). Development of identical orientation maps for two eyes without common visual experience. Nature, 379, 251–254.
Grassman, S., Stracke, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Two year olds exclude novel objects as potential referents of novel words based on pragmatics. Cognition, 112, 488–493.
Huey, E. D., Krueger, F., & Grafman, J. (2006). Representations in the human prefrontal cortex. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 167–171.
Kashimori, Y., Ichinose, Y., & Fujita, K. (2007). A functional role of interaction between IT cortex and PF cortex in visual categorization task. Neurocomputing, 70, 1813–1818.
Katz, L., & Shatz, C. (1996). Synaptic activity and the construction of cortical circuits. Science, 274, 1133–1138.
Khaligh-Razavi, S. M., & Kriegeskorte, N. (2014). Deep supervised, but not unsupervised, models may explain it cortical representation. PLoS Computational Biology, 10, e1003,915.
Kripke, S. A. (1972). Naming and necessity. In D. Davidson & G. H. Harman (Eds.), Semantics of natural language (pp. 253–355). Dordrecht: Reidel Publishing.
Lifter, K., & Bloom, L. (1989). Object knowledge and the emergence of language. Infant Behavior and Development, 12, 395–423.
Mandler, J. M. (2004). The foundations of mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mastronarde, D. N. (1983). Correlated firing of retinal ganglion cells: I. Spontaneously active inputs in X- and Y-cells. Journal of Neuroscience, 14, 409–441.
Mayor, J., & Plunkett, K. (2010). A neurocomputational account of taxonomic responding and fast mapping in early word learning. Psychological Review, 117, 1–31.
Miller, E. K., Freedman, D. J., & Wallis, J. D. (2002). The prefrontal cortex: Categories, concepts and cognition. Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, 357, 1123–1136.
Murphy, G. L., & Medin, D. L. (1985). The role of theories in conceptual coherence. Psychological Review, 92, 289–316.
Näger, C., Storck, J., & Deco, G. (2002). Speech recognition with spiking neurons and dynamic synapses: A model motivated by the human auditory pathway. Neurocomputing, 44–46, 937–942.
Nayar, S., & Murase, H. (1995). Visual learning and recognition of 3-d object by appearance. International Journal of Computer Vision, 14, 5–24.
Pereira, A. F., Smith, L. B., & Yu, C. (2014). A bottom-up view of toddler word learning. Psychon Bulletin Review, 21, 178–185.
Plebe, A. (2007a). A model of angle selectivity development in visual area V2. Neurocomputing, 70, 2060–2066.
Plebe, A. (2007b). A neural model of object naming. Enformatika, 2, 130–135.
Plebe, A. (2012). A model of the response of visual area V2 to combinations of orientations. Network: Computation in Neural Systems, 23, 105–122.
Plebe, A., Domenella, R. G. (2005). The emergence of visual object recognition. In W. Duch, J. Kacprzyk, E. Oja, S. Zadrony (Eds.), Artificial Neural Networks – ICANN 2005 15th International Conference, Warsaw (pp. 507–512). Berlin: Springer.
Plebe, A., Domenella, R. G. (2006). Early development of visual recognition. BioSystems, 86, 63–74.
Plebe, A., Domenella, R. G. (2007). Object recognition by artificial cortical maps. Neural Networks, 20, 763–780.
Plebe, A., De La Cruz, V. M., & Mazzone, M. (2007). Artificial learners of objects and names. In Y. Demiris, B. Scassellati, & D. Mareschal (Eds.), Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Development and Learning, IEEE (pp. 300–305). London: Imperial College.
Plebe, A., Mazzone, M., & De La Cruz, V. M. (2010). First words learning: A cortical model. Cognitive Computation, 2, 217–229.
Plebe, A., Mazzone, M., & De La Cruz, V. M. (2011). A biologically inspired neural model of vision-language integration. Neural Network World, 21, 227–249.
Plunkett, K. (1993). Lexical segmentation and vocabulary growth in early language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 20, 43–60.
Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning”. In H. Putnam, Mind, language and reality (Vol. 2, pp. 215–271). Cambridge: MIT.
Regier, T. (2005). The emergence of words: Attentional learning in form and meaning. Cognitive Science, 29, 819–865.
Riesenhuber, M., & Poggio, T. (2000). Models of object recognition. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 1199–1204.
Rogers, T. T., & McClelland, J. L. (2006). Semantic cognition – A parallel distributed processing approach. Cambridge: MIT.
Rolls, E. T., & Stringer, S. M. (2006). Invariant visual object recognition: A model, with lighting invariance. Journal of Physiology – Paris, 100, 43–62.
Rumelhart, D. E., & McClelland, J. L. (Eds.) (1986). Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Cambridge: MIT.
Smith, L. B. (2001). How domain-general processes may create domain-specific biases. In M. Bowerman & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, N. R., Hartley, M., & Taylor, J. G. (2005). Coding of objects in low-level visual cortical areas. In W. Duch, J. Kacprzyk, E. Oja, & S. Zadrony (Eds.), 15th international conference proceedings artificial neural networks (ICANN ’05) (pp. 57–63). Berlin: Springer.
Thompson, I. (1997). Cortical development: A role for spontaneous activity? Current Biology, 7, 324–326.
Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Volkmer, M. (2004). A pulsed neural network model of spectro-temporal receptive fields and population coding in auditory cortex. Neural Computing, 3, 177–193.
Wallis, G., & Rolls, E. (1997). Invariant face and object recognition in the visual system. Progress in Neurobiology, 51, 167–194.
Wood, J. N., & Grafman, J. (2003). Human prefrontal cortex: Processing and representational perspectives. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 139–147.
Yu, C., Smith, L. B. (2012). Embodied attention and word learning by toddlers. Cognition, 125, 244–262.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Plebe, A., De La Cruz, V.M. (2016). Neurosemantics of Visual Objects. In: Neurosemantics. Studies in Brain and Mind, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28552-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28552-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28550-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-28552-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)