creators_name: Clancey, William type: journalp datestamp: 2003-06-03 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:54:51 metadata_visibility: show title: Conceptual coordination bridges information processing and neurophysiology ispublished: pub subjects: BBS subjects: cog-psy subjects: neuro-psy full_text_status: public keywords: sleep dreaming conceptualization abstract: Information processing theories of memory and skills can be reformulated in terms of how categories are physically and temporally related, a process called conceptual coordination. Dreaming can then be understood as a story understanding process in which two mechanisms found in everyday comprehension are missing: conceiving sequences (chunking categories in time as a higher-order categorization) and coordinating across modalities (e.g., relating the sound of a word and the image of its meaning). On this basis, we can readily identify isomorphisms between dream phenomenology and neurophysiology, and explain the function of dreaming as facilitating future coordination of sequential, cross-modal categorization (i.e., REM sleep lowers activation thresholds, “unlearning”). date: 2000-12 date_type: published publication: Behavioral and Brain Sciences volume: 26 number: 3 pagerange: 919-922 refereed: TRUE referencetext: Clancey, W. J. (1997) Situated cognition: On human knowledge and computer representations. Cambridge University Press. Clancey, W.J. (1999) Conceptual coordination: How the mind orders experience in time. Erlbaum. Crick, F. & Mitchison, G. (1983) The function of dream sleep. Nature, 304(14, July), 111-115. Donald, M. (1991) Origins of the modern mind: Three stages in the evolution of culture and cognition. Harvard University Press. Edelman, G. M. (1987) Neural Darwinism: The theory of neuronal group selection. Basic Books. Freud, S. ([1900]1965) The interpretation of dreams. Avon Books. Larkin, J. H. & Simon, H. A. (1987) Why a diagram is (sometimes) worth ten thousand words. Cognitive Science, 11(1), 65-100. Rosenfield, I. (1992) The strange, familiar, and forgotten. Vintage Books. Sacks, O. (1987) The man who mistook his wife for a hat. Harper & Row. citation: Clancey, William (2000) Conceptual coordination bridges information processing and neurophysiology. [Journal (Paginated)] document_url: http://cogprints.org/1989/3/ClanceySleepDreams.pdf