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“Oh and BTW, the mind is a maximum hypersurface and thought a trajectory on it and the
amygdala and hippocampus are Hopf maps of it. No one knew this before me, and it seems no
one cares. So be it. My time will come in a hundred or a thousand years when the idea again
returns.”
- Chris McKinstry, AI researcher
(in his electronic suicide note, 20th of January 2006)

The facts I know about Chris McKinstry can be counted on one hand. What I know

about maximum hypersurfaces is negligible. I do know, however, that McKinstry was

mistaken in supposing that it would take “a hundred or a thousand years” for his idea

to surface in the scientific community. In Michael Spivey’s book Continuity of Mind

from 2007 the very same idea is presented – albeit in a more tentative and persuasive,

less grandiose, way. In this essay I will briefly summarize Spivey’s general perception

of the mind/brain, before applying this idea to a specific area of research: visual word

recognition in the lexical decision task. In order to do this I first outline the central

current findings in this area using traditional reaction time measures, before

suggesting how a novel approach based on more dynamic outcome measures (for

example mouse-tracking) may support a new perspective on the process of visual

word recognition.

Continuity of Mind

Start by picturing, individually, every single neuron in your brain. If, like Spivey

(2007), you choose to do this by imagining every neuron as corresponding to one

dimension in a multidimensional state space, then the total brain activity at any single

point in time will corresponds to a single point in this immense space. Likewise,

changes in brain activity over time correspond to trajectories through the space. As far

as abstraction goes, the multidimensional state space is not far removed from the

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reality it illustrates – in a sense, the neurons have simply been rearranged to cover a

huge, unwieldy and unimaginable space, rather than being compressed into your skull.

To help conceptualise the problem in a more practical way, Spivey (2007) suggests

another level of abstraction: attractor basins. Attractor basins are regions of the

multidimensional state space towards which many trajectories tend to gravitate. In the

metaphor of brain/mind as space, attractor basins correspond to fully developed

percepts – for example a vase or two faces; a red object among many yellow ones; or,

crucially to this essay, a written word recognised (Spivey, 2007).

Comparisons to Computers

When the mind/brain is imagined as a space populated by attractor basins, dynamic

systems provide the concept of choice for modelling its functioning. The use of

dynamic systems for this purpose can be contrasted to what is sometimes referred to

as ‘the computer metaphor’ of cognition. As Dale, Kehoe & Spivey (2007) point out,

“a central dichotomy in this debate has to do with the format of representation”.

While this dichotomy (like most dichotomies) overlooks the nuances of opinion that

lie between the two extremities, highlighting the areas where the dynamic systems

metaphor differs most from the computer metaphor can still be useful. In the

computational approach, mental representations (of the external world; objects,

events, decision, etc) are seen as discrete, sharply bounded and symbolic. When

representations undergo manipulations according to set rules or algorithms, they in

turn produce discrete outputs – a button press, a step left or right, a spoken word.

While the computational perspective has long served cognition research well, it has

not been without its critics. A full elucidation of these criticisms is beyond the scope

of this essay (but see Spivey, 2007); suffice to say the dynamic systems approach

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addresses some of these issues. Importantly, representations are no longer seen as

discrete and symbolic, but rather as probabilistic and with fuzzy boundaries. Nor are

representation manipulated by a separate ‘processing unit’ or ‘module’; rather, the

representations and their manipulations are “part and parcel of a system that blends

content and process in its operation” (Dale, Kehoe & Spivey, 2007). Furthermore, the

focus is on the continuity of processing in the brain – a continuity which, although

somewhat ‘obvious’, gets overlooked when the discreteness of outputs is mistakenly

taken as support for the discreteness of processes leading up to that output (Spivey,

2007).

The implication of the dynamic systems conceptualisation pervades every area of

cognition. Not only ‘low level’ perceptions can be conceived of as attractor basins

which are exerting a continuous ‘pull’ on trajectories through a multidimensional state

space, but also higher level cognitions such as evaluation of the truth of statements

(McKinstry, Dale & Spivey, 2008). However, in order to move this essay on from a

conceptual/metaphorical level to the more pragmatic level of application, I will now

focus on the tools used in cognitive research. With new metaphors come new

approaches to measurement, and the following section focuses on establishing a

context to the subsequent discussion of central findings in visual word recognition

research. I return to the dynamic systems metaphor when discussing how visual word

recognition research may benefit from this new view.

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Continuity of Measurement

Experiments in cognitive psychology typically rely on presenting participants with

some kind of stimuli, and then recording some kind of response. In the context of

word recognition, as in many other areas of research, reaction time (RT) is commonly

used as a dependent variable. This is closely linked to the conceptualization of the

mental lexicon as “a kind of dictionary that contains information regarding a word’s

meaning, pronunciation, syntactic characteristics, and so on” (Elman, 2004). The

process of accessing the correct ‘entry’ in this dictionary – a process referred to as

lexical access – is usually the focus of research, and the speed of response is thus a

natural outcome variable1.

The mental lexicon can be accessed through many modalities – for example through

sound, vision, or pictures – and responses that tap various aspects of the word’s entry

in the lexicon can be elicited through many different tasks – for example semantic

classification tasks, same-different response tasks, or naming tasks. According to

Balota et al. (2004) however, it is the lexical decision task which has become “the

gold standard” in research on lexical access, and it will thus receive the most attention

in this essay. The lexical decision task (LDT) involves participants being presented

with a string of letters (either a word or a non-word, for example glump), and making

a decision on the lexicality of the word by pressing a ‘word’ or a ‘non-word’ button as

quickly and accurately as possible. Mean response times are then compared for words

1
I could here draw parallels to the computer metaphor… but don’t want to set up more of a straw man
than necessary.

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of different characteristics; in different non-word environments; or preceded by

different kinds of primes (a particularly useful manipulation which I return to later).

Spivey (2007) arranges outcome measurements and the techniques used for their

analysis along a kind of ‘discreteness’ scale. Binary accuracy measures (e.g.

percentage correct) fall at the most discrete end. Mean reaction times compared across

different experimental conditions using t-tests or analysis of variance (as in the LDT)

is one step towards the more continuous end of the scale. Taking another step in this

direction, researchers can analyse the overall distribution of reaction times, a type of

analysis which can be “considerably more informative” with regards to cognitive

processes underlying response times in specific tasks (Spivey 2007). Common to all

the measurements mentioned above is a reliance on the final output; for example the

button press in the LDT. Researchers use the time taken to reach this end point to

make inferences about the process leading up to it – an approach which is only fruitful

up to a certain point (Van Orden, 2002). A broad category of measures – referred to as

continuous measures (Spivey, 2007) – address this issue and attempt to go beyond this

‘certain point’: by providing information about cognitive processes as they are

occurring. Two continuous measures have proved particularly useful in achieving a

more direct, online, look at the process of responding in an experimental task: eye-

tracking and (computer) mouse-tracking. I focus here on their use in two illustrative

studies – one on spoken word recognition, and one on categorization.

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Two Studies

Eye-tracking

In a spoken word recognition study by Spivey-Knowlton, Sedivy, Eberhard and

Tanenhaus (1994), eye tracking was used to demonstrate that there is “continuous

uptake of acoustic-phonetic input and resulting lexical competition effects” (Spivey,

2007). Participants were asked to pick up one object (for example a candle) among

many on a table, and one of the other objects has a similar onset to the target object

(for example candy). In this situation, eye-movement analysis reveals that participants

fixate a substantial amount on the ‘competing’ object during the time in which the

instructions are being read to them. This fixation occurs despite participants rarely

making a mistake by actually picking up the competing object, and also despite

participants denying that they ‘looked at’ the candy (Spivey, 2007). Spivey (2007)

takes this study (among others) as support for a view that words and sentences

correspond to attractor basins in a neurolinguistic state space. These attractor basins

continuously influence the smooth transition from input (participants being instructed

to “pick up the candle”) to the correct motor output, an influence reflected in the eye-

movement data.

Mouse-tracking

One drawback of eye-tracking is the ballistic nature of saccades (Dale, Kehoe &

Spivey, 2007); an issue which is overcome by mouse-tracking. Dale, Kehoe & Spivey

(2007) used mouse-tracking to investigate the time course in categorization processes.

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Participants performed a computerized categorization task, where a target animal

(presented as either a word or a picture) appeared at the lower edge of the screen, and

the correct higher order category (e.g. mammal for target whale) and a distractor

category (e.g. fish) appeared in the upper left and right of the screen. Participants were

instructed to click on the correct category, and the trajectory of the response was then

analysed to reveal the relative ‘pull’ of each of the categories. The crucial independent

variable was the typicality of the animal to be categorized: some were considered to

be ‘atypical’ (whale, eel), others ‘typical’ (cat, parrot). As the researchers

hypothesised, the trajectories in the atypical trials showed more attraction towards the

distractor categories, indicating that “multiple categories (attractor basins) are nearly

visited as the system eventually settles into a unique outcome-based response, much

like a dynamical system continuously traversing its high-dimensional semantic space

over time” (Dale, Kehoe & Spivey, 2007).

Both eye-tracking and mouse-tracking rely on the assumption that continuous

cognitive activity is reflected in online motor movement. The ‘embodied cognition’

debate surrounding this assumption is too comprehensive to delve into here, so I must

simply ask the reader to accept the argument that “continuous motor dynamics reveal

continuous mental dynamics” (Spivey, 2007), and leave this caveat for another essay.

Visual Word Recognition

So far this essay has outlined the idea of dynamic cognition, discussed outcome

measurements in cognitive research, and shown how a dynamic approach can involve

continuous measurements, through which new insights can be attained in areas such

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as categorization and spoken word recognition. I now return to visual word

recognition.

Recall that the mental lexicon is typically conceptualized as “a kind of dictionary”

(Elman, 2004). Perfetti and Hart (2002) further break down each ‘dictionary entry’, or

lexical representation, into three separate components – one component for semantics

(the meaning of the word), one for phonetics (sound), and a third for orthography

(spelling). During reading (i.e. visual word recognition), it is the orthographic part of

the representation which first becomes activated. Perfetti and Hart (2002) propose that

the “quality” of this orthographic representation will influence the speed of lexical

access, and can thus be indexed by tasks like the lexical decision task (LDT) where

response times (RTs) are recorded. In turn, the quality of orthographic representations

is influenced by various word characteristics: these include the number of letters in

the word, the age when the word was first learnt, the spelling-to-sound consistency, to

name a few. Two variables that have been subject to much study are frequency and

neighbourhood. Neighbourhood is a measure of visual similarity between words – the

neighbourhood density (N) of a word is defined as the number of words which can be

created by changing just one letter in the original word (Coltheart et al., 1977). Thus,

sharp, share, shank, shack, spark and stark are all neighbours of shark, which has an

N of six. Frequency, on the other hand, is simply how often the word is encountered

in text. One common and uncontroversial finding is that high frequency words are

responded to faster in the LDT than are low frequency words (Andrews, 1997).

According to Perfetti and Hart (2002), this increased speed reflects the higher quality

of orthographic representations for high frequency words. The effects of

neighbourhood on reaction times (and by inference on the quality of orthographic

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representations) are slightly more complex, and I will now turn to a particular study

on the effects of neighbourhood in the LDT.

A Study with Masked Priming

Forster, Davis, Schoknecht & Carter (1987) used a masked priming paradigm with the

LDT to investigate how the neighbourhood of a word might influence the quality of

that word’s orthographic representation. The masked priming paradigm involves

presenting participants with two words – the first word is the prime, the second word

is the target to which participants respond (by pressing ‘word’ or ‘non-word’ buttons,

in the LDT). The prime is forward masked by a pattern (#####) and presented for a

very short amount of time (usually around 50ms), which means most participants are

completely unaware of its presence (see figure 1).

Time
######

prime

TARGET

Figure 1: A schematic representation of the masked priming paradigm. To avoid perceptual continuity
in the identity priming condition, prime words are presented in lower case and target words in
uppercase.

When a target word is preceded by an ‘identity prime’ – i.e. the same word functions

as both prime and target – responses to the target word are facilitated. This is

presumably because the orthographic representation for the target word is ‘pre-

activated’ or ‘pre-opened’ by the prime. The primes used by Forster et al. (1987)

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however, were not identical to the target: instead they were form primes. Form primes

are visually similar to the target word; they are typically created by changing one

letter in the target word. For example, tafget is a form prime of target. Because of

their similarity to the target word, Forster et al. (1987) hypothesised that form primes

would also be sufficient to pre-activate the orthographic representation of the target,

and thus lead to faster RTs. Their findings, however, suggest that the benefit derived

from form priming is contingent on the neighbourhood of the target word. That is, in

the Forster et al. (1987) study, words that were visually similar to many other words

(i.e. high N words) benefited less from priming by a one-letter-different form prime

than did words which were visually unique. This effect is referred to as the

neighbourhood density constraint, and was proposed by Forster and Taft (1994) to be

due to what they called the lexical tuning hypothesis. Words from a high density

neighbourhood, in order to be distinguished from the many other similar words,

require their orthographic representations to be ‘finely tuned’ – which means they are

less flexible, and less able to be activated by non-identical stimulus. This is adaptive

for natural reading as it reduces competition2 in the neighbourhood. In the

experimental context, however, a form prime will be less able to pre-activate a finely

tuned representation.

Problems with Tuning

The study by Forster et al. (1987) has been the inspiration for many subsequent

studies, however the researchers failed to control for a possible confound: the

presence of a higher frequency neighbour. If a word has many neighbours then it is also
2
“Competition” between words in the lexicon is important in many models of skilled reading,
particularly models based on the interactive activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981).
Briefly, it means that when the system is presented with any string of letters, many words in the lexicon
are going to be activated – not only the word that is a ‘perfect match’ to the input. These words have
inhibitory connections between them, and this competition is part of the process which eventually leads
to only one word being ‘uniquely identified’.

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more likely to have many higher frequency neighbours, compared to a word with few

neighbours (Andrews, 1997). The frequency of a word impacts on the level of

competition with its neighbours – response times to a target word primed by a higher

frequency word neighbour (sleet primed by sweet, for example) will be inhibited

relative to a non-word neighbour prime (Davis & Lupker, 2006). Thus, in the

experiment of Forster et al. (1987) the non-word form prime could have activated this

higher frequency neighbour (HFN) as well as the target. The competition from the

HFN would then have inhibited responses to the target, which would lead to slower

response times for the high N words. This explanation offers an alternative

explanation to the neighbourhood density constraint, rather than ‘tuning’.

Investigating this possibility, in a recent study by McKague, Teo and Watkins (2010)

all the target words had a HFN, and the primes were constructed to be as specific to

the target word as possible.3 In addition, frequency was included as an independent

variable. When this was done, no neighbourhood density constraint was found.

Instead, frequency was found to interact with form priming – low frequency words

were primed more than high frequency words. This finding is inconsistent with the

lexical tuning hypothesis as presented by Forster and Taft (1994), which states that it

is N which should determine the amount of form priming a word experiences. An

account of form priming driven by frequency is also hard to incorporate into current

models of visual word recognition, in which frequency is specified as a more or less

“arbitrary parameter setting” (Norris, 2006).

Now What? Combinations and Conjectures.

3
Though competition and inhibition from primes and neighbours in the lexicon is also of interest, the
main aim of this study was to separate out the facilitatory influence of primes on words.

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Having taken a whirlwind tour through dynamic cognition, followed by an equally

rapid (and restricted) excursion through the world of masked priming in visual word

recognition research, we now arrive at the intersection of these two areas. I believe

that some of the current contradictions in the field of visual word recognition, as

outlined above, may benefit from a dynamic systems approach. This benefit may

consist of two interrelated forms: one is conceptual, the other more pragmatic.

First, cast your mind back to the multidimensional state space, with attractor basins –

areas where many trajectories converge – corresponding to fully developed concepts.

A portion of this space may be devoted to the mental lexicon, and words, then, are

concepts represented in a mental lexicon landscape, with neighbourhood (perhaps)

determining the relative position of their respective attractor basins. This is a

conceptualisation quite different from the currently predominant ‘dictionary’ view,

but one that is supported by the spoken word recognition studies by Spivey-Knowlton

et al. (2007), discussed above. According to this viewpoint, language comprehension

is seen as a continuous, constructive process, in which “the internal mental

representations of a sentence [and a word] is not a thing but a process.” (Spivey,

2007).

One advantage of this conceptualisation is that it lends itself well to being

investigated by continuous measurements. Mimicking the Dale et al. (2007)

categorization study, one might propose a LDT using mouse-tracking, with ‘word’

and ‘non-word’ being options at the top of the screen. However, in the categorization

of atypical animals there would seem to be a ‘natural’ pull from the opposing category

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– a whale really is like a fish, in many ways. Categorizing a string of letters as either a

‘word’ or a ‘non-word’ is by contrast a much more contrived task, and thus it is hard

to envisage how a ‘non-word’ category could exert an influence on a ‘word’

response4.

Another option is to combine elements from both the Dale et al. (2007) mouse-

tracking study and the Spivey-Knowlton et al. (2007) eye-tracking study, and thus

arrive at an improved test of the lexical tuning hypothesis. For example, one might

flip the above ‘continuous LDT’ on its head, and instruct participants to ‘click on the

word’ in every trial. The word target would appear at either the top left or right corner

of a screen, along with a distractor non-word, and participants would move the mouse

cursor from its starting position at the centre of the lower edge of the screen.

Crucially, the distractor non-word would – in the experimental condition – be a

neighbour of the target (e.g. clarp for clasp) or an unrelated non-word control. While

the frequency of the target word may still be an important factor in how quickly the

word is clicked (resembling the traditional lexical decision task), the ‘pull’ of the

distractor non-word, as measured by the degree of divergence of the mouse trajectory,

might provide clues to the effects of neighbourhood density. If, for example, a high N

word experiences less ‘pull’ from its non-word distractor neighbour than a low N

word does, this might be taken as evidence of some sort of ‘tuning’5. On the other

hand, the path towards a high N word might diverge more, or be more irregular than

the path towards a low N word. Such a finding could be taken as support for a mental
4
However, a non-word response for a non-word with many neighbours might diverge more from the
ideal trajectory, if these word neighbours (attractor basins) exert an influence on the non-word
response. This seems to me more likely than the other way around, since encountering a non-word in
real-life reading usually means you have encountered a misspelling, and the system would presumably
still be able to settle on the ‘intended’ word in such a case.
5
…though this begs the question of why this ‘tuning’ would not show up in traditional lexical decision
tasks with masked priming (as measured by McKague, Teo & Watkins, 2010).

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lexicon landscape where a neighbourhood is an area dense with attractor basins, thus

causing the system more perturbation.

Until more research is done, the above three paragraphs remain mere conjecture.

Given the amount of time and effort invested in investigating the mental lexicon and

lexical access as a ‘dictionary’ with its accompanying RT analysis, researchers would

not be advised to simply abandon all the fruits of this labour. However, as I have

shown above, a move towards a dynamic systems metaphor might not be as drastic as

it first appears, and the benefits gained from more continuous measurements may

soon outweigh the potential discomfort engendered by a change of perspective. The

metaphor of mind/brain as space and the use of dynamic systems to model this space

have the potential to provide new insights in research areas throughout cognitive

psychology. Whether the mind is a maximum hypersurface or not, I believe that

visual word recognition would in particular benefit from adopting the tools relevant to

such an approach.

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