The following are a small representative sample of actual posts to cognoscente:

REMINDER - Jon Kleinberg's Colloquium will be on Monday, Oct. 21, at 4pm, PY101.

NOTE: Kathleen Akins' Colloquium (originally planned for Sept. 9 and then cancelled) has be rescheduled for December 2!

Here is the up-to-date schedule for the fall semester: FALL SCHEDULE


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Olaf Sporns, PhD
Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
http://php.indiana.edu/~osporns

A few announcements:

* Cognitive lunch this Wednesday, Oct. 16, 12:10 - 1:30 (Psy Conference room)
Speaker: Dr. Lynn A. Olzak
Title: "Neural Recoding in the Perception of Edges and Surfaces: A Model"

(see the previous email from Sheryl Mobley for more information)

* For the following week, Trish Van Zandt's cognitive lunch talk has been rescheduled for *Tuesday* Oct. 22, 12:30 - 1:30 in the conference room.

That leaves an opening for Wednesday Oct. 23. If anyone wants to give a talk at the regular cog lunch time, please let me know. If no one volunteers by the end of this week, the Oct. 23 cog lunch will be canceled.


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Brian J. Rogosky
Graduate Student, Cognitive Science & Psychology, Indiana University
WWW Home: http://php.indiana.edu/~brogosky
WWW Webmaster: http://www.CognitiveScience.org
Lab: Psy 290, Phone 812 855-9211, http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/
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Lecture Announcement

Analogy as the Core of Cognition
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Douglas Hofstadter
Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition
Indiana University
Bloomington

Friday, September 20, 2:30-4:00 p.m., SLIS, L033

For decades, analogy has standardly been portrayed by psychologists and cognitive scientists as some kind of advanced or sophisticated mental tool used in problem-solving by specialists in a given domain when all else fails. Moreover, the adjective "analogical" is almost always married to the noun "reasoning", which clearly implies that analogical thinking is seen primarily (if not exclusively) as a special variety of reasoning (i.e., a kind of logic).

I have a completely different perception of analogy, which is that all of our concepts and our lexical items come from unconsciously made analogies, and hence that analogy-making is what lies at the core of human thought. This has very little to do with reasoning in any classic sense of the term. Moreover, I argue that the sequential process of thinking is guided primarily by unconscious analogy-making carried out simultaneously at various levels of abstraction. Numerous examples supporting this thesis form the crux of this lecture.