We have a winner!!!

Well, the votes are in and the paper that inspired us the most this year is Adaptive Resonance Theory: How a brain learns to consciously attend, learn, and recognize a changing world by S. Grossberg.  I am looking forward to hearing all of your thoughts after you re-read the paper. The one thing that jumps out at me is that this paper did not, like the others, make us think of a follow up experiment.  It made us think of the possibilities, and it made us engage with literature and findings we might not have otherwise come across.  From our discussions, it was clear that it reminded us of the complexity of the processes and representations we are investigating, and I think, helped make many of us comfortable with (and even happy about) what we now call the "beautiful mess" of pilot data.  So, since we are voting on inspiration - the inspiration of a research program come full circle, a reminder that in our interdisciplinary efforts we can move ahead, but need to try our best not to slight any one discipline, and hope that over time all the parts will make a beautiful story as long as we conduct our studies with purpose - it is entirely fitting that this paper floated to the top.  And to reach all of our goals, we need to read, think, and share - so here's to a new year of reading, as we wind down the first one.

Dinner will be at Zibibbo on October 15 at 6pm.  Please read the paper one more time, and send me one "One thing I though about was ... " statement before dinner, so I can post them here and we can discuss them at dinner.  Thanks for pushing through our first attempt at a forum for keeping up-to-date with newly published work!

And, as a reminder of why we nominated this in the first place, here is the original post:

Grossberg, S. 2013. Adaptive Resonance Theory: How a brain learns to consciously attend, learn, and recognize a changing world.  Neural Networks, 37, 1 – 47.

Why it is inspiring: As daunting as it is, it does not oversimplify the highly complex process of spoken word recognition (which itself is only a part of the paper). And, it was a fun read … just as the reader believes it is a theory of everything, Grossberg assures us – it isn’t.

Something to think about: We read this in a graduate seminar in the fall with sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, phonology, and phonetics students.  We all were excited and invigorated to have this overview; as it addressed issues we felt were often left unconsidered in other work.  At the same time, the question of how we can make this more accessible in our own work and in the community was raised over and over again; it is dense and it is not a paper that is likely to be standard reading for linguists.  We decided more talking and reading were the answers, and this paper was the impetus of our Favorite Paper of the Year Contest.  We may not understand the mechanics behind everything yet, but we are talking about it!