Robert M. French

French attended Miami University from 1969 to 1972, earning a B.S. in mathematics after three years of study. From 1972 to 1974 he was at Indiana University, from which received an M.A. in mathematics. ==Career==

Early career and doctoral studies From 1972 to 1974, French worked as a teaching assistant in mathematics at Indiana University. For several months in 1975, he taught mathematics at Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana. He then moved to France, where from 1976 to 1985 he lived in Paris, working as a freelance translator and interpreter. From 1985 to 1992 he was a research assistant in Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. During this period he was also a Visiting Researcher at CREA, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris (1988), and a Visiting Lecturer in Computer Science at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana (1991). He spent several months in 1992 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition at Indiana University. From 1992 to 1994, he was Visiting assistant professor of Computer Science at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. From 1994 to 1995, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a lecturer in Cognitive Science in the Department of Educational Psychology at the same institution. Later career From 1995 to 1998, French was a Research Scientist in the Department of Psychology at the University of Liège. From 1998 to 2000, he was an associate professor in Quantitative Psychology and Cognitive Science in the same department. From 2001 to 2004, he was a professor of Quantitative Psychology and Cognitive Science in that department. Since 2004, he has been the Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). ==Selected publications==

Books • French, R. (1995). The Subtlety of Sameness: A theory and computer model of analogy-making. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Arthur B. Markman of Columbia University, in a review for the International Journal of Neural Systems described The Subtlety of Sameness as “fascinating.” :A review in Choice said that “French reveals analogy-making to be an extension of our complex and subtle ability to perceive sameness. His computer program, Tabletop, forms analogies in a microdomain consisting of objects (utensils, cups, drinking glasses, etc.) on a table set for a meal. The theory and the program rely on the idea that stochastic choices made on the microlevel can add up to human-like robustness on a macrolevel. Thousands of program runs attempt to verify this on dozens of interrelated analogy problems in the Tabletop microworld.” Articles • French, R. M. (2012). Moving Beyond the Turing Test. Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. • French, R. M. (2012). Dusting off the Turing Test. Science, 336,160–161. He invited the reader to suppose “that all the words you have ever spoken, heard, written, or read, as well as all the visual scenes and all the sounds you have ever experienced, were recorded and accessible, along with similar data for hundreds of thousands, even millions, of other people,” and that this record of sensory experience could be supplemented with information supplied by tactile and olfactory receptors. Advanced computer researchers, French said, “think that this kind of life-experience recording will become commonplace in the not-too-distant future.” He further asked the reader to assume “that the software exists to catalog, analyze, correlate, and cross-link everything in this sea of data. These data and the capacity to analyze them appropriately could allow a machine to answer heretofore computer-unanswerable questions that tap into facts derived from our embodiment or from our subcognitive associative networks.” Given all this, French asked, “is it so far-fetched to think that the machine might be able to use that data to construct a cognitive and subcognitive network similar to your own? Similar enough, that is, to pass the Turing test.” • French, R. M. (2000). The Turing Test: the first 50 years. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(3), 115–121. • French, R. M. (1996). The Inverted Turing Test: How a simple (mindless) program could pass it. Psycoloquy 7(39) turing-test.6.French. In this article, French argued that the “inverted Turing Test...could be simulated by a standard Turing test” and that “a very simple program with no intelligence whatsoever could be written that would pass the inverted Turing test.” Therefore, “the inverted Turing test in its present form must be rejected.” • Mareschal, D. and French, R. M. (1997). A connectionist account of interference effects in early infant memory and categorization. Proceedings of the 19th Annual Cognitive Science Society Conference, LEA, 484–489. • Addyman, C. and French, R. M. (2012). Computational modeling in cognitive science: A manifesto for change. Topics in Cognitive Science, 4(3), 332–341. • French, R. M., Addyman, C., and Mareschal, D. (2011). TRACX: A Recognition-Based Connectionist Framework for Sequence Segmentation and Chunk Extraction. Psychological Review, 118(4), 614–636. • Cowell, R. A. and French, R. M. (2011). Noise and the Emergence of Rules in Category Learning: A Connectionist Model. IEEE Transactions on Autonomous Mental Development, 3(3), 194–206. This paper presents “a neural network model of category learning that addresses the question of how rules for category membership are acquired.” • Thibaut, J.-P., French, R. M., and Vezneva, M. (2010). Cognitive Load and semantic analogies: searching the semantic space. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 17(4), 569–574. • Van Rooy, D., Van Overwalle, F., Vanhoomissen, T., Labiouse, C., and French, R. M. (2003). A Recurrent Connectionist Model of Group Biases. Psychological Review, 110, 536–563. • French, R. M., (2002). Natura non facit saltum: The need for the full continuum of mental representations. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 25(3), 339–340. • Jacquet, M. and French, R. M. (2002). The BIA++: Extending the BIA+ to a dynamical distributed connectionist framework. Bilingualism, 5(3), 202–205. • Mareschal, D., Quinn, P. C., and French, R. M. (2002) Asymmetric interference in 3- to 4- month-olds’ sequential category learning. Cognitive Science, 26, 377–389 • French, R. M. and Chater, N. (2002). Using Noise to Compute Error Surfaces in Connectionist Networks: A Novel Means of Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting. Neural Computation, 14(7), 1755–1769. • French, R. M. and Labiouse, C. (2001). Why co-occurrence information alone is not sufficient to answer subcognitive questions. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 13(4), 419–429. • French, R. M. and Thomas, E. (2001). The Dynamical Hypothesis in Cognitive Science: A review essay of Mind As Motion. Minds and Machines, 11, 1, 101–111. • Mareschal, D., French, R. M., and Quinn, P. (2000). A Connectionist Account of Asymmetric Category Learning in Early Infancy. Developmental Psychology, 36, 635–645. • French, R. M. and Thomas, E. (2000). Why Localist Connectionist Models are Inadequate for Categorization. The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(4), 477. ==References==