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Papers by Michael Ramscar
Whilst many user models can function perfectly ade quately with a behavioural impression of the u... more Whilst many user models can function perfectly ade quately with a behavioural impression of the user, the provision of assistance in some task domains, notably design, requires a richer understanding, incorporating info rmation about the user's knowledge and beliefs. This raises a number of important and difficult questions: How can we know what the user knows, and how can we
User Modeling, 1997
Whilst many user models can function perfectly adequately with a behavioural impression of the us... more Whilst many user models can function perfectly adequately with a behavioural impression of the user, the provision of assistance in some task domains, notably design, requires a richer understanding, incorporating information about the user's knowledge and beliefs. This raises a number of important and difficult questions: How can we know what the user knows, and how can we know that we know? We present evidence that the psychological view of human conceptual knowledge that underpins typical approaches to these questions is flawed. We argue that user knowledge can be modelled, up to a point, but that to ask whether or not we can know what the user knows is to misunderstand the question.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2007
How do children acquire humankind's remarkable cognitive skills? Why are the abilities children a... more How do children acquire humankind's remarkable cognitive skills? Why are the abilities children acquire readily, such as native-language fluency, harder for adults? Although attitudes to these questions span the continuum from nativism to learning theory, answers remain elusive. We relate a recent model of language acquisition in childhood to advances in the neuroscience of adult cognitive control, to propose a domain-general shift in the architecture of learning in childhood. The timing of this supports children's imitative, unsupervised learning of social and linguistic conventions before the maturation of cognitive control gives individuals greater self-direction, which causes learning to become less conventionalized and more idiosyncratic. These changes might represent an important adaptation supporting the development and learning of cultural and linguistic conventions.
New Scientist, 2014
ABSTRACT The evidence that we lose brainpower as we grow older is wrong say Michael Ramscar and H... more ABSTRACT The evidence that we lose brainpower as we grow older is wrong say Michael Ramscar and Harald Baayen
Language and speech, 2013
Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of m... more 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 discriminative learning, trained on a sample of 300,000 four-word phrases from the British National Corpus. The discriminative learning model is a full decomposition model, associating orthographic input features straightforwardly with meanings. The model does not make use of separate representations for derived or inflected words, nor for compounds, nor for phrases. Nevertheless, frequency effects are correctly predicted for all these linguistic units. Naive discriminative learning provides the simplest and most economical explanation for frequency ...
Cognitive Science, 2005
How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is tha... more How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is that we tap into our concrete, experiential knowledge, including our understanding of physical space and mo- tion, to make sense of abstract domains such as time. To examine how pervasive an aspect of cognition this is, we investigated whether thought about a nonliteral
ABSTRACT As otherwise healthy adults age, their performance on cognitive tests tends to decline. ... more ABSTRACT As otherwise healthy adults age, their performance on cognitive tests tends to decline. This change is traditionally taken as evidence that cognitive processing is subject to significant declines in healthy aging. We examine this claim, showing current theories over-estimate the evidence in support of it, and demonstrating that when properly evaluated, the empirical record often indicates that the opposite is true. To explain the disparity between the evidence and current theories, we show how the models of learning assumed in aging research are incapable of capturing even the most basic of empirical facts of “associative” learning, and lend themselves to spurious discoveries of “cognitive decline.” Once a more accurate model of learning is introduced, we demonstrate that far from declining, the accuracy of older adults lexical processing appears to improve continuously across the lifespan. We further identify other measures on which performance does not decline with age, and show how these different patterns of performance fit within an overall framework of learning. Finally, we consider the implications of our demonstrations of continuous and consistent learning performance throughout adulthood for our understanding of the changes in underlying brain morphology that occur during the course of cognitive development across the lifespan.
This study examines how reading habits affect people's sensitivity to word distributions in liter... more This study examines how reading habits affect people's sensitivity to word distributions in literary and non-literary writing. We manipulated eight literary and non-literary passages, creating modified versions that had lower word chunk frequencies but higher individual word frequencies than the originals. Subjects were then asked to rate the passages' quality of writing. Results showed that subjects with more experience reading literary writing (literary readers) gave higher ratings to original literary passages, while subjects with less literary reading experience (nonliterary readers) preferred modified versions. Subjects with both types of reading habits rated original versions of nonliterary passages higher. This indicates that literary readers are sensitive to frequencies of word chunks containing words that appear more frequently in the literary genre, while non-literary readers are not. We suggest that, over time, people can acquire slightly different representations of the probabilistic structure of language through their specific linguistic exposure.
Whilst many user models can function perfectly ade quately with a behavioural impression of the u... more Whilst many user models can function perfectly ade quately with a behavioural impression of the user, the provision of assistance in some task domains, notably design, requires a richer understanding, incorporating info rmation about the user's knowledge and beliefs. This raises a number of important and difficult questions: How can we know what the user knows, and how can we
User Modeling, 1997
Whilst many user models can function perfectly adequately with a behavioural impression of the us... more Whilst many user models can function perfectly adequately with a behavioural impression of the user, the provision of assistance in some task domains, notably design, requires a richer understanding, incorporating information about the user's knowledge and beliefs. This raises a number of important and difficult questions: How can we know what the user knows, and how can we know that we know? We present evidence that the psychological view of human conceptual knowledge that underpins typical approaches to these questions is flawed. We argue that user knowledge can be modelled, up to a point, but that to ask whether or not we can know what the user knows is to misunderstand the question.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2007
How do children acquire humankind's remarkable cognitive skills? Why are the abilities children a... more How do children acquire humankind's remarkable cognitive skills? Why are the abilities children acquire readily, such as native-language fluency, harder for adults? Although attitudes to these questions span the continuum from nativism to learning theory, answers remain elusive. We relate a recent model of language acquisition in childhood to advances in the neuroscience of adult cognitive control, to propose a domain-general shift in the architecture of learning in childhood. The timing of this supports children's imitative, unsupervised learning of social and linguistic conventions before the maturation of cognitive control gives individuals greater self-direction, which causes learning to become less conventionalized and more idiosyncratic. These changes might represent an important adaptation supporting the development and learning of cultural and linguistic conventions.
New Scientist, 2014
ABSTRACT The evidence that we lose brainpower as we grow older is wrong say Michael Ramscar and H... more ABSTRACT The evidence that we lose brainpower as we grow older is wrong say Michael Ramscar and Harald Baayen
Language and speech, 2013
Arnon and Snider ((2010). More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of m... more 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 discriminative learning, trained on a sample of 300,000 four-word phrases from the British National Corpus. The discriminative learning model is a full decomposition model, associating orthographic input features straightforwardly with meanings. The model does not make use of separate representations for derived or inflected words, nor for compounds, nor for phrases. Nevertheless, frequency effects are correctly predicted for all these linguistic units. Naive discriminative learning provides the simplest and most economical explanation for frequency ...
Cognitive Science, 2005
How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is tha... more How do we understand time and other entities we can neither touch nor see? One possibility is that we tap into our concrete, experiential knowledge, including our understanding of physical space and mo- tion, to make sense of abstract domains such as time. To examine how pervasive an aspect of cognition this is, we investigated whether thought about a nonliteral
ABSTRACT As otherwise healthy adults age, their performance on cognitive tests tends to decline. ... more ABSTRACT As otherwise healthy adults age, their performance on cognitive tests tends to decline. This change is traditionally taken as evidence that cognitive processing is subject to significant declines in healthy aging. We examine this claim, showing current theories over-estimate the evidence in support of it, and demonstrating that when properly evaluated, the empirical record often indicates that the opposite is true. To explain the disparity between the evidence and current theories, we show how the models of learning assumed in aging research are incapable of capturing even the most basic of empirical facts of “associative” learning, and lend themselves to spurious discoveries of “cognitive decline.” Once a more accurate model of learning is introduced, we demonstrate that far from declining, the accuracy of older adults lexical processing appears to improve continuously across the lifespan. We further identify other measures on which performance does not decline with age, and show how these different patterns of performance fit within an overall framework of learning. Finally, we consider the implications of our demonstrations of continuous and consistent learning performance throughout adulthood for our understanding of the changes in underlying brain morphology that occur during the course of cognitive development across the lifespan.
This study examines how reading habits affect people's sensitivity to word distributions in liter... more This study examines how reading habits affect people's sensitivity to word distributions in literary and non-literary writing. We manipulated eight literary and non-literary passages, creating modified versions that had lower word chunk frequencies but higher individual word frequencies than the originals. Subjects were then asked to rate the passages' quality of writing. Results showed that subjects with more experience reading literary writing (literary readers) gave higher ratings to original literary passages, while subjects with less literary reading experience (nonliterary readers) preferred modified versions. Subjects with both types of reading habits rated original versions of nonliterary passages higher. This indicates that literary readers are sensitive to frequencies of word chunks containing words that appear more frequently in the literary genre, while non-literary readers are not. We suggest that, over time, people can acquire slightly different representations of the probabilistic structure of language through their specific linguistic exposure.