Studies of Mind and Brain: Neural Principles of Learning, Perception, Development, Cognition, and Motor Control (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science Book 70)

the mass of experimental data from current research in psychology and physiology, Grossberg proposes and develops a non-linear mathematics as a model for specific functions of mind and brain. He finds the classic approach to the mathematical modelling of mind and brain systematically inadequate. This inadequacy, he holds, arises from the attempt to describe adaptive systems in the mathematical language of 9 physics developed to describe "stationary", i. e. non-adaptive and non-evolving systems. In place of this linear mathematics, Grossberg develops his non-linear approach. His method is at once imaginative, rigorous, and philosophically significant: it is the thought experiment. It is here that the richness of his interdisciplinary mastery, and the power of his methods, constructions and proofs, reveal themselves. The method is what C. S. Peirce characterized as the method of abduction, or of hypothetical inference in theory construction: given the output of the system as a psychological phenomenon (e. g. Front Matter....Pages i-xvii How Does a Brain Build a Cognitive Code?....Pages 1-52 Some Physiological and Biochemical Consequences of Psychological Postulates....Pages 53-64 Classical and Instrumental Learning by Neural Networks....Pages 65-156 Pattern Learning by Functional-Differential Neural Networks with Arbitrary Path Weights....Pages 157-193 A Neural Theory of Punishment and Avoidance, II: Quantitative Theory....Pages 194-228 A Neural Model of Attention, Reinforcement and Discrimination Learning....Pages 229-295 Neural Expectation: Cerebellar and Retinal Analogs of Cells Fired by Learnable or Unlearned Pattern Classes....Pages 296-331 Contour Enhancement, Short Term Memory, and Constancies in Reverberating Neural Networks....Pages 332-378 Biological Competition: Decision Rules, Pattern Formation, and Oscillations....Pages 379-398 Competition, Decision, and Consensus....Pages 399-424 Behavioral Contrast in Short Term Memory: Serial Binary Memory Models or Parallel Continuous Memory Models?....Pages 425-447 Adaptive Pattern Classification and Universal Recoding I: Parallel Development and Coding of Neural Feature Detectors....Pages 448-497 A Theory of Human Memory: Self-Organization and Performance of Sensory-Motor Codes, Maps, and Plans....Pages 498-639 Back Matter....Pages 640-662