Michael Ramscar
Biographic Data
| ID | 788176 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Ramscar |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Ramscar |
| SIGNATURE | RAMSCAR M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tübingen |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1680-1112 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 42 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Modal and amodal cognition: An overarching principle in various domains of psychology
Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this pape…
Variability and abstraction in evaluative conditioning: Consequences for the generalization of likes and dislikes
Language learning as uncertainty reduction: The role of prediction error in linguistic generalization and item-learning
How children learn to communicate discriminatively
How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper presents an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discr…
Articulatory Variability is Reduced by Repetition and Predictability
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition…
Paradigmatic enhancement of stem vowels in regular English inflected verb forms
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular in…
How spoken languages work in the absence of an inventory of discrete units
The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non‐Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning
As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information‐processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults' changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning …
Sidestepping the Combinatorial Explosion: An Explanation of n -gram Frequency Effects Based on Naive Discriminative Learning
Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 67–82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order n-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about multi-word units. We show that n-gram frequency effects can emerge in a parameter-free computational model driven by naive discrimin…
Error and expectation in language learning: The curious absence of mouses in adult speech
As children learn their mother tongues, they make systematic errors. For example, English-speaking children regularly say mouses rather than mice . Because children's errors are not explicitly corrected, it has been argued that children could never learn to make the transition to adult language based on the evidence available to them, and thus that learning even simple aspects of grammar is logically impossible without recourse to innate, languag…
Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: How order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned
Even Abstract Motion Influences the Understanding of Time
Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason a…
Cognition Without Control: When a Little Frontal Lobe Goes a Long Way
The prefrontal cortex is crucial for the ability to regulate thought and control behavior. The development of the human cerebral cortex is characterized by an extended period of maturation during which young children exhibit marked deficits in cognitive control. We contend that prolonged prefrontal immaturity is, on balance, advantageous and that the positive consequences of this developmental trajectory outweigh the negative. Particularly, we ar…
The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought
How are people able to think about things they have never seen or touched? We demonstrate that abstract knowledge can be built analogically from more experience-based knowledge. People's understanding of the abstract domain of time, for example, is so intimately dependent on the more experience-based domain of space that when people make an air journey or wait in a lunch line, they also unwittingly (and dramatically) change their thinking about t…
Cognition Without Control: When a Little Frontal Lobe Goes a Long Way
The prefrontal cortex is crucial for the ability to regulate thought and control behavior. The development of the human cerebral cortex is characterized by an extended period of maturation during which young children exhibit marked deficits in cognitive control. We contend that prolonged prefrontal immaturity is, on balance, advantageous and that the positive consequences of this developmental trajectory outweigh the negative. Particularly, we ar…
Error and expectation in language learning: The curious absence of mouses in adult speech
As children learn their mother tongues, they make systematic errors. For example, English-speaking children regularly say mouses rather than mice . Because children's errors are not explicitly corrected, it has been argued that children could never learn to make the transition to adult language based on the evidence available to them, and thus that learning even simple aspects of grammar is logically impossible without recourse to innate, languag…
How spoken languages work in the absence of an inventory of discrete units
Paradigmatic enhancement of stem vowels in regular English inflected verb forms
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular in…
Sidestepping the Combinatorial Explosion: An Explanation of n -gram Frequency Effects Based on Naive Discriminative Learning
Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 67–82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order n-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about multi-word units. We show that n-gram frequency effects can emerge in a parameter-free computational model driven by naive discrimin…
Variability and abstraction in evaluative conditioning: Consequences for the generalization of likes and dislikes
Articulatory Variability is Reduced by Repetition and Predictability
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition…
The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought
How are people able to think about things they have never seen or touched? We demonstrate that abstract knowledge can be built analogically from more experience-based knowledge. People's understanding of the abstract domain of time, for example, is so intimately dependent on the more experience-based domain of space that when people make an air journey or wait in a lunch line, they also unwittingly (and dramatically) change their thinking about t…
Cognition Without Control: When a Little Frontal Lobe Goes a Long Way
The prefrontal cortex is crucial for the ability to regulate thought and control behavior. The development of the human cerebral cortex is characterized by an extended period of maturation during which young children exhibit marked deficits in cognitive control. We contend that prolonged prefrontal immaturity is, on balance, advantageous and that the positive consequences of this developmental trajectory outweigh the negative. Particularly, we ar…
Even Abstract Motion Influences the Understanding of Time
Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can the mere suggestion of motion influence how people reason a…
Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: How order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned
Sidestepping the Combinatorial Explosion: An Explanation of n -gram Frequency Effects Based on Naive Discriminative Learning
Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 67–82) documented frequency effects for compositional four-grams independently of the frequencies of lower-order n-grams. They argue that comprehenders apparently store frequency information about multi-word units. We show that n-gram frequency effects can emerge in a parameter-free computational model driven by naive discrimin…
Error and expectation in language learning: The curious absence of mouses in adult speech
As children learn their mother tongues, they make systematic errors. For example, English-speaking children regularly say mouses rather than mice . Because children's errors are not explicitly corrected, it has been argued that children could never learn to make the transition to adult language based on the evidence available to them, and thus that learning even simple aspects of grammar is logically impossible without recourse to innate, languag…
The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non‐Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning
As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information‐processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults' changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning …
How spoken languages work in the absence of an inventory of discrete units
Language learning as uncertainty reduction: The role of prediction error in linguistic generalization and item-learning
How children learn to communicate discriminatively
How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper presents an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discr…
Articulatory Variability is Reduced by Repetition and Predictability
Repeating the movements associated with activities such as drawing or sports typically leads to improvements in kinematic behavior: these movements become faster, smoother, and exhibit less variation. Likewise, practice has also been shown to lead to faster and smoother movement trajectories in speech articulation. However, little is known about its effect on articulatory variability. To address this, we investigate the extent to which repetition…
Paradigmatic enhancement of stem vowels in regular English inflected verb forms
Many theories of word structure in linguistics and morphological processing in cognitive psychology are grounded in a compositional perspective on the (mental) lexicon in which complex words are built up during speech production from sublexical elements such as morphemes, stems, and exponents. When combined with the hypothesis that storage in the lexicon is restricted to the irregular, the prediction follows that properties specific to regular in…
Variability and abstraction in evaluative conditioning: Consequences for the generalization of likes and dislikes
Modal and amodal cognition: An overarching principle in various domains of psychology
Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlie processing in specific domains of cognition (e.g., perception, mental imagery, and language). However, in this pape…
Psychology (12 works) · Linguistics (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (6 works) · Discriminative model (4 works) · Language Development and Disorders (4 works) · Mathematics (4 works) · Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism (4 works)