Commonly complex cognitive concepts cannot consistently be connected to simple features of the world. Geometrical shape parameters and (e.g., edge features, compactness, color) may play a role for defining individual objects, but might be too variable to allow for concept formation. Earlier works had suggested that the formation of object concepts is strongly influenced by the division of our w...

In this paper we propose that the conventional dichotomy between exemplar-based and prototype-based models of concept learning is helpfully viewed as an instance of what is known in the statistical learning literature as the bias/variance tradeoff. The bias/variance tradeoff can be thought of as a sliding scale that modulates how closely any learning procedure adheres to its training data. At o...

Number-knower levels are a series of stages of number concept development in early childhood. A child's number-knower level is typically assessed using the give-N task. Although the task procedure has been highly refined, the standard ways of analyzing give-N data remain somewhat crude. Lee and Sarnecka (Cogn Sci 34:51-67, 2010, in press) have developed a Bayesian model of children's performanc...

This paper describes a methodical and logical approach of process design as employed within the Satellite Design Office at Dornier Satellite Systems GmbH. It concerns the concept development phase (Phase A/B). Many papers have been written on the subject of the concept design centers, but nearly none of them describe the intern design process. At last this paper focuses on the method in which w...

Facilitating participation has become one of the cornerstones of co-design, and a number of methods, techniques and events intended to inspire design participants and scaffold collaborative ideation and concept development have been developed. However, an aspect that is yet relatively unexplored in co-design literature is how different methods and techniques can be productively combined. In thi...

The persistent fear of physics motivated the author to explore a new paradigm for introductory college physics that starts with symmetry and the contemporary views of spacetime, and incorporates learning strategies from the arts. Symmetry is the thematic foundation of the course, as the mathematical foundation of physics and the conceptual link between physics and the arts. I describe the curri...

We propose a method to incromantally compute and use, during the concept formation, the relevance of a concept property. This relevance is computed through the account of the property correlation with other ones and it is used by the concept quality function in order to improve predictive accuracy. The proposed approach is analyzed contenting both the wediction power of the generated concepts a...

Future computer vision systems must have the ability to discover new object models. This problem can be addressed by relational concept formation systems, which structure a stream of observations into a taxonomy of discovered concepts. This paper presents a representation for images which is invariant under arbitrary groups of transformations. The discovered models, also being invariant, can be...

This thesis consists of three overlapping parts, where the first one centers around the possibility of defining a measure of the power of arithmetical theories. In this part a partial measure of the power of arithmetical theories is constructed, where “power” is understood as capability to prove theorems. It is also shown that other suggestions in the literature for such a measure do not satisf...

It has been observed that a careful selection of training examples improves the performance of supervised concept learning systems. This observation is important when examples are not available and are expensive to generate, or when using incremental learning systems. These two reasons are manifested in the context of BRIDGER, a system that learns to design cable-stayed bridges. This paper desc...