13.6 The Frontier Effect


Minsky starts this chapter with a nice example of a developmental trait revealed by a drawing task -- see p. 138 for this rendition of the "frontier effect" -- the tendency to place new features at lcoations that have easily described relationships to other, already represented features. Copying is hard to do for children -- Minsky suggests that instead they use abstract descriptions of scenes as they "copy", and that the use of such descriptions produces this effect.

(NB: The frontier effect makes a nice case for the importance of relationships among features, which was a key theme of Chapter 11 ("The shape of space").


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