CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 42Categorization, perception, and languageMemory Processes and InfluencesMemory and Neural Mechanisms

Abstraction and generalization in statistical learning: implications for the relationship between semantic types and episodic tokens

Open access
Altmann, Gerry T. M.·2017·Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
DOI 10.1098/rstb.2016.0060PMC PMC5124085
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Statistical approaches to emergent knowledge have tended to focus on the process by which experience of individual episodes accumulates into generalizable experience across episodes. However, there is a seemingly opposite, but equally critical, process that such experience affords: the process by which, from a space of types (e.g. onions-a semantic class that develops through exposure to individual episodes involving individual onions), we can perceive or create, on-the-fly, a specific token (a specific onion, perhaps one that is chopped) in the absence of any prior perceptual experience with that specific token. This article reviews a selection of statistical learning studies that lead to the speculation that this process-the generation, on the basis of semantic memory, of a novel episodic representation-is itself an instance of a statistical, in fact associative, process. The article concludes that the same processes that enable statistical abstraction across individual episodes to form semantic memories also enable the generation, from those semantic memories, of representations that correspond to individual tokens, and of novel episodic facts about those tokens. Statistical learning is a window onto these deeper processes that underpin cognition.This article is part of the themed issue 'New frontiers for statistical learning in the cognitive sciences'.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1098/rstb.2016.0060

Cites

73 of 73 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Adults' ability to rapidly generalize does not rely on abstraction, a process by which memories for specific instances are lost but an emergent average representation supports generalization across episodes.

    “These results suggest that adults’ ability to rapidly generalize does not rely on abstraction—a process by which memories for the specific instances are lost, but the emergent average representation supports generalization across episodes 30.”

    From Contingency of semantic generalization on episodic specificity varies across development (2021) · cites this paper as [30]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. Tulving E. 1972 Episodic and semantic memory. In Organization of memory (eds E Tulving, W Donaldson), pp. 382-403. Academic Press.
  2. Jones MN, Willits JA, Dennis S. 2014 Models of semantic memory. In Oxford handbook of mathematical and computational psychology (eds JR Busemeyer, JT Townsend). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  3. Sider T. 2001 Four-dimensionalism. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Altmann, G. T. M.
Affiliations
University of Connecticut (US)
Corresponding author
Altmann, Gerry T. M.
ORCID
Altmann, Gerry T. M.
Venue
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
Publisher
The Royal Society
Published
2017-01-05
Volume
372
Issue
1711
Pages
20160060
ISSN
  • 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
  • 1471-2970
DOI
10.1098/rstb.2016.0060
PMC
PMC5124085
OpenAlex
W2555800488
Cited by
42
References
73
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 1 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 6 · 2022: 1 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 7 · 2018: 4 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 2
Type
conference abstract
Language
en
Open access
Licence
royalsociety.org/journals/ethics-policies/data-sharing-mining/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences (publishedVersion)
  • Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Categorization, perception, and language
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Keywords
statistical learning, semantic memory, episodic memory, semantic types, emergent knowledge, abstraction, generalization, associative learning, perceptual experience
MeSH terms
Cognition, Humans, Language, Learning, Semantics

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review