User talk:Johnanstett/sandbox

I thought this article was extremely well written. You did an amazing job explaining your topic thoroughly, while keeping it easy to understand. Definitely maintained the encyclopedic, objective tone throughout. I liked how you included limitations of the model to provide an unbiased view. Great use of links and lists/tables throughout, providing for a very simple but comprehensive article.

I had a hard time finding areas for improvement, but I came up with a few suggestions which may benefit your article. First off, the last paragraph in the 'History' section confused me a little bit. I think it might be better if you mentioned the limitations of each of the mentioned models in their respective paragraphs as opposed to saying them all at once at the end. Then go on to talk about how the above models/limitations led to the idea for Spaun. Another thing I noticed was that you had no pictures to accompany the text. My suggestion is to include a picture of the brain in the architecture section, so readers have a visual diagram of the brain areas you talk about. Lastly, a very minor edit, I would change the heading, "Limitations + Future Research" to "Limitations and Future Research", as it looks more formal.

Great job! :) - Laura Zielinski

Overall, a very well-researched and well-written article. It was very well-organized with the use of tables to further help the general reader understand the topic better. Also, the use of several hyperlinks to link readers to various relating concepts throughout the article was great.

I will just mention a few improvements that I think can make this article better.

I believe a couple more hyperlinks such as vector space (under Compression Hierarchies) and adaptive plasticity (under Limitations + Future Research)should be used because these are concepts that the general reader might not understand right away.

I think a more thorough talk about the differences between learned and defined compression is needed just to explain why, for example, learned compression is specific to the visual hierarchy and not for working memory.

Under the "Contributions" heading, the first sentence should be reworded to: Spaun was the first model capable of performing behaviours in addition to artificially modeling neurons and brain structures.

Also, include a couple pictures of various parts of the human brain that you mentioned are also found in Spaun (ex. primary visual cortex).

Rpau23 (talk) 19:56, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you both for your feedback, I took almost all of it to heart and made changes. I've added several images of the brain areas discussed in the anatomy section, I've added new hyperlinks that were missing, and I've changed the limitations section to "limitations and future research". I've also reorganized the headings, and cleaned up the last paragraph of the history section. I've also reworded the contribution section so that it is simpler and less cluttered. The only change I didn't make was elaborating on the distinction between learned and defined compression. In both the original article and the supplementary materials, the authors did not explain why one was used over the other. I did some additional background research among other researchers, and found that both learned and defined compression require describing complex math formulas that are involved in the computer science aspects of the model. My article is already quite technical, and I felt that if I elaborated on these concepts it might confuse readers. I felt that it was a rather small detail and did not justify adding complex explanations that may confuse readers and take the focus away from the Spaun model.

Johnanstett (talk) 22:59, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

John