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Zenon Pylyshyn

Zenon W. Pylyshyn
Born	1937
Nationality	Canadian
Education
Alma mater	McGill University, University of Saskatchewan
Philosophical work
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
Main interests	Vision Cognitive Science Information Theory

Dr. Zenon Walter Pylyshyn is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher. He was born August 25, 1937 in Montréal, Québec. He has a degree in Engineering-Physics (B. Eng. 1959) from McGill University. From the University of Saskatchewan, he obtained a M.Sc. (1961) in the Control Systems Electrical Engineering department. There he later received his Ph.D. (1963) in Experimental Psychology with his research focused on the application of information theory to human short-term memory studies.

Academic career

The University of Western Ontario

(1966-94)

Three years after obtaining his Ph.D, Pylyshyn began his teaching career at The University of Western Ontario in London Ontario, in the department of Psychology and Computer Science. In 1987, he took on the position of honorary professor in the Philosophy and Electrical Engineering department. In the same year, he became the director of the Centre for Cognitive Science. Additionally, he supervised graduate students in all four of the above departments. He continued with all of the above positions until 1994.

Rutgers University

(1991-Present)

Pylyshyn furthered his academic career at New Jersey’s state university, Rutgers University, in the city of New Brunswick. He accepted the position of Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science and established the Centre for Cognitive Science, named RuCCS (pronounced Ruckus), which he directed until 1997. At this time, he turned to pursuing full-time research. RuCCS aims to provide their doctoral students with cognitive science research experience outside of their main interest field to broaden their knowledge and skills on the contributions that make up cognitive science. As well it gives the students an opportunity to work alongside leading researchers while obtaining their graduate certificate. However, he still remains a professor emeritus of Psychology and sits on the Board of Governors.

Research

The research areas of interest Pylyshyn has been dedicated to over the last couple of decades and presently consist of visual attention, mental imagery, the cognitive architecture of the mind, perceptual- motor coordination, and teleoperation.

Current research

Since turning to full-time research in the late 1990’s, Pylyshyn has been involved with theoretical and experimental research. His theoretical research pertains to how humans perceive the world, reason, and imagine. This work is commonly connected to the cognitive architecture, or the human cognitive computer. In his experimental research, Pylyshyn is focused on the relationship between cognition and visualization. This has lead to his Visual Index Theory (or FINST theory, see section below) in an attempt to understand human visual attention and the ability to recognize objects and spaces. It hypothesizes that there is a mechanism that can individuate, track, and direct objects in a visual scene before they are converted into another format for their properties to be recognized.

Visual Index Theory or Fingers of Instantiation (FINSTs)

This theory argues the notion of our (as humans) ability to pick out and track objects, identify their properties, and still recognize them as the same object even if they have undergone changes. This is done through the mechanism Fingers of Instantiation (FINSTs). Every object has an assigned one out of four available indexes (FINSTs) and the assignment remains even as objects properties are modified. There is currently no understanding as to how this assignment decision is made. Its name comes from the phenomenon that of being able to point or refer to an individual item even without knowing anything about it, including its location or specifying what its properties are. In this event we tend to use the words “this” or “that”, such as “This thing is in my way” or “Look at that”.

These conclusions can be drawn from the findings of the Multiple Object Tracking experiment on visual indexes. In this experiment there are eight identical circles on a computer screen, and four of the circles briefly flash to signify they are the targets. All eight circles randomly move on the screen for ten seconds and then stop. The study participants are to keep track of the four target circles during the 10 second movement interval and then identify them with the cursor at the end of the 10 seconds. Studies show that this tracking can be done with more than 87% accuracy. This experiment revealed three major findings:

1. Even with a brief complete disappearance, objects continue to be tracked correctly
2. When being tracked, objects colours and shapes go unobserved
3. Finding a property among a target is done more quickly than finding one among non-targets.

Publications

To date there are over 100 published pieces of literature and other works by Pylyshyn. These range from books (10), scientific articles (63), book chapters and proceedings (54), and book reviews (5).

21st century articles

• Tracking Multiple Objects Is Limited Only by Object Spacing, Not by Speed, Time, or Capacity (2010)
• Evidence against a speed limit in multiple-object tracking (2008)
• A simple proximity heuristic allows tracking of multiple objects through occlusion (2012)
• Enumerating by pointing to locations: A new method for measuring the numerosity of visual object representations (2011)
• Is motion extrapolation employed in multiple object tracking? Tracking as a low-level, non-predictive function (2006)
• Some puzzling findings in multiple object tracking (MOT): I. Tracking without keeping track of object identities (2004)
• Some puzzling findings in multiple object tracking (MOT): II. Inhibition of moving nontargets (2006)
• Return of the Mental Image: Are there really pictures in the brain? (2003)
• Mental Imagery: In search of a theory (2002)
• Stalking the elusive mental image screen. (2002)
• Seeing, acting and knowing: Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2002)
• Visual indexes, preconceptual objects, and situated vision (2001)
• What is a visual object: Evidence from multiple-object tracking (2001)

Individual books

• Things and Places: How the mind connects with the world (2007)
• Seeing and visualizing: It’s not what you think (2003)
• What is Cognitive Science? (1999)
• Constraining Cognitive Theories: Issues and Options (1998)
• The Robot’s Dilemma Revisited (1996)
• Perspectives on the Computer Revolution (1989)
• Computational Processes in Human Vision: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (1988)
• The Robot's Dilemma: The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence (1987)
• Meaning and Cognitive Structure: Issues in the Computational Theory of Mind (1986)
• Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science (1984)

Computation and Cognition: Toward a Foundation for Cognitive Science

Written in 1984, this is Pylyshyn’s first book. It outlines the foundation of cognitive science, the study of the mind. The basis of this book is the claim that like a computer, the mind works similarly in its method of encoding semantic content from mental states. This process is known as cognitive computation. The text's hypothesis is that there are three separate levels to comprise cognition; biological (physical) level, symbolic (functional) level, and the semantic (knowledge) level. Although these are distinct levels they interact and therefore modify each other’s regularities. The literature discusses popular assumptions with how these levels, or functional architecture, communicate and pass information along.

Seeing and Visualizing: It's Not What You Think

Written in 2003, this book serves as a follow up investigation on cognition to his first book Computation and Cognition. It was the winner in the category of Psychology in the 2003 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers Incorporation. Pylyshyn writes revolutionary ideas concerning issues in vision science, cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience. He reasons that seeing and thinking are two different behaviours, as are seeing and visualizing. Furthermore in the process of seeing, we do not reproduce the outer world into our inner conscious. Instead our “inside” pictorials sometimes trick us into thinking they are the same thing as what is in our external environment and we never actually see the minds real work. The book begins by focusing on questions of why we see things the way we do. It then moves on to explaining the visual system and its downfalls, and continues with visual perception and mental imagery.

Things and Places: How the Mind Connects with the World

This is Pylyshyn’s most recent book written in 2007. He illustrates the FINSTs theory idea that within early vision it acts as a mechanism allowing us to pick out and track individual objects. This arises out of the nonconceptual contact with the perceptual world capability (a contact that does not depend on prior encoding of any properties of the thing selected) to construct perceptual representations and solve a binding problem (determining which properties go together).

Keynotes and addresses

In addition to his research and literature, Pylyshyn has also been involved in the psychology community through providing over 130 conference presentations and 175 invited talks. His earliest was an invited talk at McGill University in March 1972, and was entitled ‘The Problem of Cognitive Representation’. Since then he has continued to speak at many professional educational institutes, societies, workshops, and centres across North America, as well as Australia, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Israel, Japan, and Spain.

Awards, honours, and fellowships

In 2004, Pylyshyn was awarded the annual prestigious Jean Nicod Prize in Paris, France. This award is in recognition to someone’s scientific work towards the foundations of Cognitive Science. The winner then presents a minimum four part lecture series and is then asked to poublish their lectures. His was entitled ‘Things and Places. How the mind connects with the world'. It was centred on the FINSTs theory and discussed topics in his latest book with the same name as the lecture series, which ran June 1st to the 3rd.

Earlier he received the Donald O. Hebb award in 1990, for “Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science”. It is awarded by the Canadian Psychological Association and is only given to Canadian scientists.

Award, Honour, or Fellowship	Year
Conference in honour of Zenon Pylyshyn, at the University of Guelph	April 29-May 1, 2005
Jean Nicod Prize recipient	2004
Attneave Memorial Lecture, at the University of Oregon	November 2003
Fellow, Royal Society of Canada	1997
Fellow, American Association for Artificial Intelligence	1994
Donald O. Hebb Award recipient	1990
Fellow, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research	1990
Fellow, Killam Research	1985-87
Fellow, Canadian Psychological Association	1984
Fellow, Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, Stanford	1979-80
Fellow, Centre for Cognitive Science, Massachusetts Institute for Technology	1978-79
Canada Council Special Fellowship in Engineering, Science and Medicine	1964-66

Thesis supervision

Over the years Pylyshyn has served as a thesis supervisor for a total of forty-six student dissertations. This included eleven doctoral, 13 masters, 5 post-doctoral fellowships, and served on 17 Ph.D. committees. While his first supervision was in 1969 and his latest in 2011, most were completed in the late 80’s and 90’s. The majority of these dissertations focus on visual attention and tracking, relating back to Pylyshyn's research areas. Many of his students continue to be professors and researchers today across North America.

Selected notable students

• Michael Dawson, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta
• Brian Fisher, Associate Professor, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University

External links

• Zenon Pylyshyn's faculty page at Rutgers
• Mike Dawson's faculty page at University of Alberta
• Brian Fisher's faculty page at Simon Fraser University
• Center for Cognitive Science homepage