HILL goes to CogSci and Biosemiotics (this week!)

We are happy to announce that this week we will present our work at the 43rd Annual Virtual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2 posters on Thursday, 17:20-19:00) and at the 21st Annual Gathering in Biosemiotics (talk on Wednesday, 18:30-19:00).

See you at the conferences!

Creating a safe environment for text donation: towards a truly informed consent
Katarzyna Skoworońska, Krzysztof Główka, Katarzyna Koprowska, Konrad Zieliński, Justyna Śnieżek, Anna Boros, Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
Human Interactivity and Language Lab, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract
Our social media activity data is a valuable source of information about our preferences, psychological and social processes. However, collecting such private data, including messages, for scientific research is at an early stage (Ueberwasser & Stark, 2017), which is natural given privacy issues involved (Bemmann & Buschek, 2020). Our study is geared towards: i) making the process of sharing personal data more ethical, consensual, informed and comfortable; ii) identifying profiles of participants willing to share these data. 293 students of both technical and non-technical background completed an online questionnaire designed to identify the relationship between willingness to share the data and factors such as: 1) kinds of data; 2) method of data processing; 3) purpose of data gathering and use; 4) demographics of participants. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed the categories of participants’ concerns and preferences regarding the form of anonymization conditional on the subjects’ profile and their technical skills.

Modeling “spatial purport of perceptual experience”: egocentric space perception in a semi-realistic 3D virtual environment
Wiktor Rorot
Human Interactivity and Language Lab, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract
Egocentric space perception is multimodal, closely tied to action and bodily movements and has an inherent phenomenal dimension. One prominent account, provided by Rick Grush, has postulated posterior parietal cortex as key neural area. Computational model based on Kalman filter has been proposed to account for the operation of this brain region, underscoring the importance of bodily skills for perceiving spatial properties. The current study provides a first direct simulation of this model in a semi-realistic 3D virtual environment. The goal of the simulation was to develop an agent with a realistic ability for egocentric space perception based on a neural approximation of Kalman filter. To achieve this goal, we use machine learning techniques, with a strong focus on unsupervised methods of reinforcement learning. Resulting agent is tested behaviorally on ecologically plausible tasks to evaluate its internal, learned representations. Poster presents simulation results and discusses the model.

The Emergence of Action-grounded Compositional Communication
Borys Jastrzębski, Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
Human Interactivity and Language Lab, Faculty of Psychology, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract
Famously, C. S. Peirce’s theory of signs hinges upon the notion of interpretation which mediates the sign-referent connection. Despite having been undeniably influential, it is well known to pose at least two challenges to its students, especially those applying the theory to natural sciences.

First, the interpretant with all of its divisions has been modelled after Peirce’s analysis of inquiry and thus seems to rely on the phenomenological process and the corresponding internal states of the sign user. Some biosemioticians, particularly of the code variety, suggest that this feature bars Peircean interpretation from any genuine relevance to life below the organisational level of a multicellular organism because of the disputed status of internal representations in cells (Barbieri 2009: 236–237).

Second, the teleological character of the final interpretant, the last of the three consistent divisions that Peirce made in his key concept, has proven equally inspiring and confusing. Defined in terms of an ideal to which the actual interpretation tends but never reaches (CP8 .315 1909) or as the product of reasoning of an inhumanly patient and scientifically well-informed agent (CP8 .343 1908), the final interpretant taken at face value adds an unexpected pinch of idealism to an otherwise pragmatic account of semiosis. Authors like Terrence Deacon and T. L. Short put that perplexing concept to work with some success. Nonetheless, to what extent their renditions remain grounded in Peirce’s account of the final interpretant is still a subject of debate. As things stand now, the third stage of his model of interpretation is a theoretical equivalent of an embarrassing relative at the birthday party – it has to be included but we would rather pretend it is not there.

In our paper, we propose an alternative approach to the concept of interpretation, attempting to ease some of the worries listed above. We explore an account of semiosis by a Polish logician Leon Koj who presented a unique event-based theory of signs (Koj 1998). He represents semiotic objects in terms of relations on events and expands the Peircean triad with the fine-grained time and individually defined goals. These developments allow for a theory possibly capable of accounting for the better studied communicative signs grounded in experience and internal states as well as for the simplest, non-communicable (in Koj’s terminology) signs at the level of a single cell. An account with these features may also contribute to the integration of the new evidence on symbol abstraction at the developmental scale (Rączaszek-Leonardi & Deacon 2018), a key step to take in order to explain the transition from simpler signs to complex semiotic structures of human languages. We will conclude with a brief overview of the expected advantages that event-based semiotics, with its clear-cut minimal conditions, may provide to the computational models of emergent communication.

Koj’s work offers a valuable opportunity to reconsider the role of traditional analytic philosophy in biosemiotics. The theories of sign and language developed within the field of philosophical logic may prove helpful, or at least inspiring, in the quest for a more inclusive concept of interpretation. Perhaps biosemioticians could use a segue to the works of Alexius Meinong and his fictional ontology or the Relevance Theory of Barwise and Perry to put new heart to the discussion on the mechanisms of sign making.

References

  1. Barbieri, M. 2009. A short history of biosemiotics. Biosemiotics 2: 221–245.
  2. Koj, Leon 1998. Zdarzeniowa koncepcja znaku. Warsaw: Polish Semiotic Society.
  3. Rączaszek-Leonardi, J.; Deacon, Terrence W. 2018. Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology 30(1): 39–73.