Research Publications

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Selected publications and new work are listed with abstracts. For copies of unlisted draft manuscripts, please contact Michael at ramscar at stanford dot edu. For popular press articles, please see Research in the News.

Published Journal Articles

PDF-- Ramscar, M. (2010) Computing machinery and understanding. Cognitive Science, 34(7), 00 - 00. (pdf)

PDF-- Ramscar, M., Yarlett, D., Dye, M., Denny, K., & Thorpe, K. (2010) The Effects of Feature-Label-Order and their implications for symbolic learning. Cognitive Science, 34(7), 00 - 00. (pdf, abstract)

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Matlock, T., & Dye, M. (2010) Running down the clock: the role of expectation in our understanding of time and motion. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(5), 589-615. (pdf, abstract)

PDF -- Thompson-Schill, S., Ramscar, M., & Chrysikou, E. (2009) Cognition without control: when a little frontal lobe goes a long way. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(5), 259-263. (pdf, abstract)

PDF -- St. Clair, M., Monahan, P., & Ramscar, M. (2009) Relationships between language structure and language learning: the suffixing preference and grammatical categorization. Cognitive Science, 33(7), 1317-1329. (pdf)

PDF -- Ramscar, M. & Yarlett, D. (2007) Linguistic self-correction in the absence of feedback: A new approach to the logical problem of language acquisition. Cognitive Science, 31, 927-960. (pdf)

PDF -- Ramscar, M. & Gitcho, N. (2007) Developmental change and the nature of learning in childhood. Trends In Cognitive Science, 11(7), 274-279. (pdf, abstract)

PDF -- Alloway, T.P., Corley, M., & Ramscar, M. (2006). Seeing ahead: experience and language in spatial perspective. Memory and Cognition, 34, 380-386. (pdf)

PDF -- Matlock, T, Ramscar, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2005). The experiential link between spatial and temporal language. Cognitive Science, 29, 655-664. (pdf)

PDF -- Ramscar, M. & Yarlett, D. (2003) Semantic grounding in models of analogy: an environmental approach. Cognitive Science, 27, 41-71. (pdf, abstract)

PDF -- Ramscar, M.(2002) The role of meaning in inflection: why the past tense does not require a rule. Cognitive Psychology, 45(2), 45-94. (pdf, abstract)

PDF -- Boroditsky, L. & Ramscar, M. (2002). The roles of body and mind in abstract thought. Psychological Science, 13(2), 185-188. (pdf, abstract)

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A., Lee, J.R., & Pain, H.G. (1998) Reply to Per Galle's: 'Product modelling: 20 years of stalemate?' Design Studies, 19, 241-244.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A., Lee, J.R., & Pain, H.G. (1996) A classification-based methodology for the integration of agent views within design systems. Design Studies, 17, 465-483. (pdf)

Book Chapters

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Boroditsky, L., & Matlock, T. (2010) Time, motion, and meaning: The experiential basis of abstract thought. In Kelly S. Mix, Linda B. Smith, and Michael Gasser (eds.), The Spatial Foundations of Language and Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 67-82.

PDF -- Matlock, T., Ramscar, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2004) The experiential basis of motion language. In A. Soares da Silva, A. Torres, & M. Goncalves (Eds.) Linguagem, cultura e cognicao: Estudo de linguistica cognitiva. Vol 2. 43-57. Coimbra: Almedina.

PDF -- Hahn, U. & Ramscar, M.J.A. (2001) Mere similarity? In U. Hahn & M.J.A. Ramscar, (eds.) Similarity and Categorization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (read a review)

Commentary & Reviews

PDF -- Ramscar, M. (2003) The past-tense debate: exocentric form versus the evidence. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(3), 107-8.

PDF -- Yarlett, D & Ramscar, M (2003). Overfurnishing the mind. Review of Jesse J. Prinz, Furnishing the Mind: Concepts and their Perceptual Basis. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Metascience 12: 285-291.

PDF -- Boroditsky, L. & Ramscar, M.J.A. (2001). "First, we assume a spherical cow..." A commentary on Tenenbaum & Griffiths, Generalization, Similarity, and Bayesian Inference. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 24(4), 656-7.

Articles Under Review

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Dye, M., Popick, H.M. & O'Donnell-McCarthy, F. (2010) How children learn to value numbers: Information structure and the acquisition of numerical understanding.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Suh, E., & Dye, M. (2010) For the price of a song: how pitch category learning comes at a cost to absolute frequency information.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., & Dye, M. (2009) Expectation and error distribution in language learning: the curious absence of mouses in adult speech. (abstract, draft)

PDF -- Arnon, I., & Ramscar, M. (2009) Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: How order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned.

PDF -- Popick, H.M., Ramscar, M., & Kirkham, N. (2009) Learning to explore the world through its statistics: Infants' visual search in the A-not-B task. (abstract)

PDF -- Davidenko, N. & Ramscar, M. (2009) Many faces in a crowd: the "distinctiveness effect" reconsidered and reversed.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Dye, M., Witten, J., & Klein, J. (2008) Two routes to cognitive flexibility: learning and response conflict resolution in the dimensional change card sort task. (abstract)

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Holmes, K., Dye, M., Kirkham, N., & Gitcho, N. (2008) The roles of cognitive control and language in the development of false belief understanding. (abstract)

PDF -- Yarlett, D., Ramscar, M & Dye, M. (2007) Language learning through similarity-based generalization. (abstract, summary)

PDF -- Ramscar, M. & Dye, M. (2007) Learning language from the input: why innate constraints aren't needed in compounding. (abstract)

PDF -- Matlock, T., Ramscar, M. & Srinivasan, M. (2010) Even abstract motion influences our understanding of time.

Forthcoming Articles

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Dye, M., & Yarlett., D. (in preparation) Language as prediction. (abstract, summary)

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Dye, M., & Yarlett, D. (in preparation) No representation without taxation: The costs and benefits of learning to conceptualize the environment. (abstract, summary)

PDF -- Ramscar, M & Hahn, U. (in preparation) Wittgenstein and the psychological utility of concepts. (draft)

PDF -- Ramscar, M. & Hubner, M. (in preparation) When the fly flied and when the fly flew: How semantics affect the processing of inflected verbs.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Kao, J., Dye, M., & Ryan, R. (in preparation) Princesses, peas and probabilities: readers' sensitivity to the "surface" statistics of literary and non-literary English. (abstract)

PDF -- Ramscar, M., James, A. & Dye, M. (in preparation) Taking language for granite: On the comprehensibility of malapropisms.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Klein, J., Dye, M. (in preparation) What can blocking effects tell us about mutual exclusivity?

PDF -- Ramscar, M. & Tran, C. Delay of gratification: Strategic learning or cognitive control?

Refereed Conference Proceedings

For a full listing of conference papers published in 2009, click here.

PDF -- Kao, J., Ryan, R., Dye, M. & Ramscar, M. (2010) An acquired taste: How reading literature affects sensitivity to word distributions when judging literary texts. Proceedings of the 32nd Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Portland, OR.

PDF -- Kosaraju, R., Dye, M. & Ramscar, M. (2010) Of Frames and Frequencies: How Early Language Production is Influenced by the Distribution. Proceedings of the 36th Meeting of the Society for Philosophy & Psychology, Portland, OR.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., & Dye, M. (2009) No representation without taxation: The costs and benefits of learning to conceptualize the environment. 2nd International Analogy Conference, Sophia, Bulgaria.

PDF -- Arnon, I., & Ramscar, M. (2008) How order-of-acquisition shapes language learning: the case of grammatical gender. Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Thorpe. K.L., & Denny., K.G., (2007) Surprise in the learning of color words. Proceedings of the 29th Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Nashville, TN.

PDF -- Bannard, C. & Ramscar, M. (2007). Reading time evidence for storage of frequent multiword sequences. Proceedings of Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 2007, Turku, Finland.

PDF -- Davidenko, N., & Ramscar, M. (2005). Distinctiveness effects in face memory vanish with well-controlled distractors. Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ.

PDF -- Davidenko, N., & Ramscar, M. (2003) Age and gender: similarly cued from silhouetted face profiles. (Abstract) Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Boston, MA.

PDF -- Yarlett D.G. & Ramscar M.J.A (2003). Belief Revision in Causal Induction. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Boston, MA.

PDF -- Matlock, T., Ramscar, M. & Boroditsky, L. (2003). The Experiential Basis of Meaning. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Boston, MA.

PDF -- Ramscar, M., Pearson, I., & Ali, S. Why children sometimes say mice-eater. Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Boston, MA.

PDF -- Frank, M.C. & Ramscar, M. How do Presentation and Context Influence Representation for Functional Fixedness Tasks? (Abstract) Proceedings of the 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Boston, MA.

PDF -- Yarlett D.G. & Ramscar M.J.A. (2002). A Quantitative Model of Counterfactual Reasoning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14, MIT Press.

PDF -- Yarlett D.G. & Ramscar M.J.A. (2002). Uncertainty in causal and counterfactual inference. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Fairfax, VA.

PDF -- Alloway, T.P., Ramscar, M.J.A & Corley, M. (2002) The role of thought and experience in the understanding of spatio-temporal metaphors. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Fairfax, VA.

PDF -- Boroditsky, L., Ham, W., & Ramscar, M.J.A (2002) What is universal in event perception? Comparing English & Indonesian speakers. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Fairfax, VA.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. (2002) When the fly flied and when the fly flew: The effects of semantics on past tense inflection. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Fairfax, VA.

PDF -- MacDonald, S & Ramscar, M (2001). Testing the Distributional Hypothesis: The Influence of Context on Judgements of Semantic Similarity. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of Edinburgh.

PDF -- Yarlett, D & Ramscar, M (2001). Structural Determinants of Counterfactual Reasoning. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of Edinburgh.

PDF -- Connell, L & Ramscar, M (2001). Using Distributional Measures to Model Typicality in Categorization. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of Edinburgh.

PDF -- Connell, L. & Ramscar, M. (2001). Modeling canonical and contextual typicality using distributional measures. Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Cognitive Science, Beijing, China.

PDF -- Lynott, D & Ramscar, M. J. A. (2001) Can we model conceptual combination using distributional information? Proceedings of the Twelfth Irish Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, NUI, Maynooth, September, 2001.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A (2001). The influence of semantics on past-tense inflection. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. University of Edinburgh.

PDF -- Boroditsky, L, Ramscar, M & Frank, M (2001) The roles of body and mind in abstract thought. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. University of Edinburgh.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. & Yarlett, D.G. (2000) The use of a high-dimensional, "environmental" context space to model retrieval in analogy and similarity-based transfer. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. University of Pennsylvania.

PDF -- Yarlett, D.G. & Ramscar, M.J.A. (2000). Structure-Mapping Theory and Lexico-Semantic Information. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. University of Pennsylvania.

PDF -- Heneveld, A. Bundy, A. Ramscar, M.J.A. & Richardson, J. (2000) Memory-Based Problem Solving and Schema Induction in Go. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. University of Pennsylvania.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. (2000) Evidence for the processing of re-representations during the mapping of externally represented analogies. Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. University of Pennsylvania.

PDF -- Alloway, T.P., Ramscar, M.J.A & Corley, M. (1999) Verbal and embodied priming in schema mapping tasks. Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver, British Columbia.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. & Hahn, U. (1998) What family resemblances are not: The continuing relevance of Wittgenstein to the study of concepts and categories. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. & Hahn, U. (1998) Wittgenstein and the ontological status of analogy. In Holyoak, K, Gentner, D and Kokinov, B (eds.) Advances in Analogy Research. Sofia, Bulgaria: New Bulgarian University Press.

PDF -- Darrington, S., Lingstadt, T & Ramscar, M.J.A. (1998) Analogy as a sub-process of categorisation. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

PDF -- Bueno, R.M., Pain, H., & Ramscar, M. Modeling the Cognitive Effects of Participative Learning Modeling. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems. London, UK.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. Pain, H.G., Darrington, S. & Lee, J. R. (1998) Examples and generalisations: Using surface versus structural recall biases to probe conceptual storage. Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of Wisconsin - Madison.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A., Pain, H.G., & Cooper, R. (1997) Is there a place for semantic similarity in the analogical mapping process? Proceedings of the 19th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Stanford University.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. (1997) Wittgenstein and the representation of psychological categories. Similarity and categorisation. SimCat 97, Department of Artificial Intelligence, University of Edinburgh.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A. & Pain, H.G. (1996) Can a real distinction be made between cognitive theories of analogy and categorisation? Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, University of California, San Diego.

PDF -- Ramscar, M.J.A., Pain, H.G. & Lee, J. (1996) Do we know what the user knows, and does it matter? The epistemics of user modelling. In Anthony Jameson, Cecile Paris, and Carlo Tasso (Eds.), User Modeling: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference, UM97. Vienna, New York.

PDF -- Ramscar, M. & White, R. (1993) "A Goal Driven Approach to Knowledge Extraction for Architectural Design Systems." Information Modeling and Knowledge Bases IV: Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications.