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Cangelosi, A. and Harnad, S. (2001) The adaptive advantage of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil: Grounding language in perceptual categories. Evolution of Communication, 4(1):117--142.
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Paper at a Glance 

1
THE ADAPTIVE ADVANTAGE OF SYMBOLIC THEFT OVER SENSORIMOTOR
TOIL: GROUNDING LANGUAGE IN PERCEPTUAL CATEGORIES
Angelo Cangelosi
Centre for Neural and Adaptive Systems
School of Computing
University of Plymouth
Drake Circus
Plymouth PL4 8AA (UK)
angelo@soc.plym.ac.uk
http://techweb.see.plym.ac.uk/soc/staff/angelo/
Stevan Harnad
Cognitive Science Centre
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton SO17 1BJ (UK)
harnad@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Corresponding address:
Angelo Cangelosi
School of Computing
University of Plymouth
Drake Circus
Plymouth PL4 8AA (UK)
Email: angelo@soc.plym.ac.uk
Tel. +44 1752 232559
Fax +44 1752 232540
Note: Submitted to Evolution of Communication, special issue on Grounding Language edited
by L. Steels
2
THE ADAPTIVE ADVANTAGE OF SYMBOLIC THEFT OVER SENSORIMOTOR
TOIL: GROUNDING LANGUAGE IN PERCEPTUAL CATEGORIES
Abstract Using neural nets to simulate learning and the genetic algorithm to simulate evolution in a toy world of mushrooms and mushroom­foragers, we place two ways of acquiring categories into direct competition with one another: In (1) "sensorimotor toil,'' new categories are acquired through real­time, feedback­ corrected, trial and error experience in sorting them. In (2) "symbolic theft,'' new categories are acquired by hearsay from propositions -- boolean combinations of symbols describing them. In competition, symbolic theft always beats sensorimotor toil. We hypothesize that this is the basis of the adaptive advantage of language. Entry­level categories must still be learned by toil, however, to avoid an infinite regress (the ``symbol grounding problem''). Changes in the internal representations of categories must take place during the course of learning by toil. These changes can be analyzed in terms of the compression of within­category similarities and the expansion of between­category differences. These allow regions of similarity space to be separated, bounded and named, and then the ...
BibTex
@article{cangelosi02theAdaptive,
  author={A. Cangelosi and S. Harnad},
  title={The adaptive advantage of symbolic theft over sensorimotor toil: Grounding language in perceptual categories},
  journal={Evolution of Communication},
  year={2001},
  volume={4},
  number={1},
  pages={117-142},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/cangelosi02theAdaptive.html}
}

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