What Kind of Associative and Inferential Processes?

Rubio-Fernández (2013) is a noteworthy instance of the recent efforts of grounding speculative pragmatic models into empirical research. However, it also shows that between pragmatic theories and the relevant psycholinguist research there are still conceptual gaps. Specifically, Rubio-Fernández reports two studies concerning emergent properties, that is, properties that are not associatively activated by related concepts but need to be inferred thanks to contextual information. These studies seem to show that emergent properties are activated by an early integration of associative and inferential processes and this is taken as evidence in favour of one-stage over two-stage models of pragmatic processing. I analyse the relevant notions of associative and inferential process in terms of, respectively, automatic activation of directly accessible information and consciously sustained activation of indirectly accessible information. These are not, however, the notions adopted in the pragmatic models considered by Rubio-Fernández. At a closer analysis, therefore, none of these models is fully compatible with her evidence. My line of argument is based on a crucial, but too often ignored, distinction between two meanings of “associative”: as a behavioural description of cognitive processes and as a model for their implementation. I also illustrate some consequences of neglecting this distinction.

BEHAVIOURAL DESCRIPTION OF Sapajus nigritus (GOLDFUSS, 1809) RAISED IN CAPTIVITY AT IPATINGA, MG

The maintenance of animals in captivity is one of the many ways of species preservation and allows studies that are often unattainable under natural conditions. Primate’s behavior and ecology studies supply tools for the development of conservation and management strategies. Consequently, the current research aimed to describe the patterns of behavior of a capuchin monkey, Sapajus nigritus, group raised in captivity at the Biodiversity Center of Associação Esportiva e Recreativa at Ipatinga, MG, Brazil. The Scan Sample was used with five minutes intervals. Ad libitum and Focal Animal were the complementary sampling. Twenty-three behavioral categories were recorded; this is considered average when compared to other ethograms. The behavioral class with greater prominence was foraging, however the different categories of behavior suggest a complex capacity of intra-specific interaction. The information serves as basic tools for the formulation of conservation strategies, management and to the comprehension of ecological interactions.

A DIVIDE-AND-CONQUER STRATEGY FOR QUALITATIVE SIMULATION AND FUZZY IDENTIFICATION OF COMPLEX DYNAMICAL SYSTEMS

Fuzzy systems properly integrated with Qualitative Reasoning approaches yield a hybrid identification method, called FS-QM, that outperforms traditional data-driven approaches in terms of robustness, interpretability and efficiency in both rich and poor data contexts. This results from the embedment of the entire system dynamics predicted by the simulation of its qualitative model, represented by fuzzy-rules, into the fuzzy system. However, the intrinsic limitation of qualitative simulation to scale up to complex and large systems significantly reduces its efficient applicability to real-world problems. The novelty of this paper deals with a divide-and-conquer approach that aims at making qualitative simulation tractable and the derived behavioural description comprehensible and exhaustive, and consequently usable to perform system identification. The partition of the complete model into smaller ones prevents the generation of a complete temporal ordering of all unrelated events, that is one of the major causes of intractable branching in qualitative simulation. The set of generated behaviours is drastically but beneficially reduced as it still captures the entire range of possible dynamical distinctions. Thus, the properties of the correspondent fuzzy-rule base, that guarantee robustness and interpretability of the identified model, are preserved. The strategy we propose is discussed through a case study from the biological domain.

Lexical choice can lead to problems: what false-belief tests tell us about Greek alternative verbs of agency

Verbs of agency denote relations between behavioural and mental states. Thus, ‘Jim is looking for X’ goes beyond a behavioural description, to take a mentalistic construal whereby Jim's desire for success, and his beliefs about how to search, explain his observed actions. Greek has two verbs of agency that can be used somewhat interchangeably by adults to mean ‘to look for’. The hypothesis is that young children will obey the principle of contrast to diagnose that one verb is mentalistic and the other verb is to be construed behaviourally. Following a study of mothers' verb-use, two studies with 238 children aged three to five years confirmed that the verb preferred in home use gave below-chance performance on a false-belief test whilst the less-established verb gave above-chance success, with children giving appropriate justifications. Thus, Greek preschoolers seem sometimes to have an adult-type understanding and sometimes fail to match the adult understanding. The proposal is that the children initially convert an adult verb-use pragmatic difference into a semantic contrast.

Two Simulation Tools for Testing ATM Resource Allocation Strategies

Two event-driven simulation tools aimed at testing access control and routing mechanisms in an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) environment are presented. The first one is dedicated to the behavioural description of an ATM Virtual Circuit (VC) switch. The purpose is to test resource allocation and Call Admission Control (CAC) strategies, so only the relevant events for this objective are considered and some important functions (e.g., the switching element) for a complete description of an ATM switch are not explicitly modeled. The second simulator has been designed to test routing strategies for an ATM network. In such a case, a higher level of abstraction than in the previous one is necessary and, again, only the meaningful events to the aim are taken into account. Some resource allocation, CAC, and routing schemes are also reported, along with the description of the simulation tools. Several simulation results are discussed, in order to assess their performance.