Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 1995. / Typescript; issued also on microfilm. Sponsor: Joan Dye Gussow. Dissertation Committee: Isobel Contento. Includes bibliographical references (187-202).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Wilmington, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves: [108]-111)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at El Paso, 2009. / Title from title screen. Vita. CD-ROM. Includes bibliographical references. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-80).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 23, 2010). Includes bibliographical references. Also issued in print.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, September 2, 1999." Also available in print.

Thesis (M.S.)--Villanova University, 2007. / Psychology Dept. Includes bibliographical references.

If we are to understand how we can build machines capable of broadpurpose learning and reasoning, we must first aim to build systemsthat can represent, acquire, and reason about the kinds of commonsenseknowledge that we humans have about the world. This endeavor suggestssteps such as identifying the kinds of knowledge people commonly haveabout the world, constructing suitable knowledge representations, andexploring the mechanisms that people use to make judgments about theeveryday world. In this work, I contribute to these goals by proposingan architecture for a system that can learn commonsense knowledgeabout the properties and behavior of objects in the world. Thearchitecture described here augments previous machine learning systemsin four ways: (1) it relies on a seven dimensional notion of context,built from information recently given to the system, to learn andreason about objects' properties; (2) it has multiple methods that itcan use to reason about objects, so that when one method fails, it canfall back on others; (3) it illustrates the usefulness of reasoningabout objects by thinking about their similarity to other, betterknown objects, and by inferring properties of objects from thecategories that they belong to; and (4) it represents an attempt tobuild an autonomous learner and reasoner, that sets its own goals forlearning about the world and deduces new facts by reflecting on itsacquired knowledge. This thesis describes this architecture, as wellas a first implementation, that can learn from sentences such as ``Ablue bird flew to the tree'' and ``The small bird flew to the cage''that birds can fly. One of the main contributions of thiswork lies in suggesting a further set of salient ideas about how wecan build broader purpose commonsense artificial learners andreasoners.

Recent research has shown heightened interest in the potential role of inhibitory mechanisms in solving the multiple category problem associated with processing person-specific information. Inhibition has been proposed to control the activation saliency of one category of person-specific information over other activated categories to guide the processing, interpretation and behavioural responses to socially-relevant stimuli. The current research considers a) whether inhibition operates in a similar manner for both self- and other-referent information, and b) whether the inhibitory mechanism associated with laboratory-observed retrieval-induced forgetting is also involved in categorically thinking about the self and others. Participants studied and carried out guided retrieval practice on positive and negative self- and other-referent traits in seven studies that used variants of the retrieval practice paradigm. The observed patterns of forgetting were found to be consistent with the notion that retrieval inhibition operates in a flexible goal-directed manner to reduce the activation of person-specific information that carries little or no meaning for the social perceiver, regardless of whether that information relates to the self or to a target other. Consideration of the significance subjectively attributed to person information showed that both personally significant self information (Studies 4a,b, 5b) and highly informative other-referent material (Studies 2, 5b) are protected against active forgetting, whilst information of low diagnostic value succumbs to inhibitory processing. The goal-directed nature of active forgetting was also shown to operate in an implicit manner (Study 4a) which remained unaffected by attentional focus being brought to bear on target or non-target items (Study 4b). Two main conclusions are discussed, a) that both self- and other-referent information are protected against active forgetting where that information carries meaning for the social perceiver and becomes integrated into existing person-specific knowledge, and b) that both the retrieval practice procedure and the processes involved in categorical person perception may be subject to the same inhibitory mechanism.

abstract: The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of partial exemplar experience on category formation and use. Participants had either complete or limited access to the three dimensions that defined categories by dimensions within different modalities. The concept of "crucial dimension" was introduced and the role it plays in category definition was explained. It was hypothesized that the effects of partial experience are not explained by a shifting of attention between dimensions (Taylor & Ross, 2009) but rather by an increased reliance on prototypical values used to fill in missing information during incomplete experiences. Results indicated that participants (1) do not fill in missing information with prototypical values, (2) integrate information less efficiently between different modalities than within a single modality, and (3) have difficulty learning only when partial experience prevents access to diagnostic information. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Psychology 2011