Slide 3 of 21
Notes:
Language is an important component in the performance of these tasks.
At least since Descartes, many have taken language to be the defining feature of human cognition, the skill that separates people from other organisms.
Language may be merely descriptive of the performance or it may be an essential part. Language, in other words, may cause our intelligence. It is possible that people are so intelligent precisely because we have language.
If language is the cause of our intelligence, then it makes sense to endow our models with internal structures that correspond to our own use of language.
Verbal-like, rule-following systems have been very effective at a number of tasks, including circuit routing, chess playing, and medical diagnosis. These are tasks characteristic of highly skilled, language-using adult humans. They are tasks that people perform poorly and deliberately (at least at first).
Verbal-like systems emphasize reasoning and logic, for which they are particularly well suited.
Verbal-like systems have been less effective at tasks that humans find easy and automatic, such as recognizing the face of a friend.
Furthermore, human intelligence often seems to depend on the operation of perception more than on any particular ability to reason as in chess players recognizing board configurations.
