Abstraction

The affects of level of abstraction on self-description inventories were investigated in this study. Seventy-five subjects were administered self-description inventories which assessed their overall standing on ten high level, abstract descriptors and ten low level, concrete descriptors. Subjects also indicated how much variability, certainty, and importance they associated with their responses. Results indicated that high level agents make judgments with more certainty than low level agents. Additionally, certainty and importance were unrelated thus indicating different aspects of self-understanding. Variability was negatively correlated with certainty yet positively correlated with the importance measure. This suggests that the notion of the self as a stable entity, as postulated by traditional self-concept theories, may be in error. It was advanced that variability be investigated as a flexible, adaptive aspect of self-understanding.

Prototype abstraction and specific representations were examined using
two acquisition procedures (paired-associate and concept formation) for
concept members generated by applying one of two distortion rules (form
preserving and form destroying) to eight-dot base patterns. One distortion
rule maximized the configurational similarity between concept
members and minimized their elemental similarity (form preserving).
The other maximized the elemental similarity between concept members and
minimized their configurational similarity (form destroying). Either
immediately following acquisition or after a two-week delay, subjects
were given a classification test which included the concept members
learned during acquisition and novel members of the concepts. Evidence
for prototype abstraction was found only for form preserving concepts.
This result was interpreted as evidence for the configurational nature
of a prototypical representation. Evidence for long-term retention of
specific representations was found only for form destroying concepts.
This result was explained by a model involving a network of partially
overlapping features.

Technological advances are providing us with the capability to integrate more and more functionality into a single chip. This is leading to a new design paradigm, System On a Chip (SoC). SoC design brings with it new challenges and difficulties. Managing these challenges and complexity necessitate modeling of systems at a hierarchy of abstraction levels starting from System Level down to Register Transfer Level. Using a single language across all these levels would ensure that the models are consistent and error-free. SystemC is one such language that has the infrastructure for specifying the design at System level, Behavioral level and RT levels of abstraction. This thesis showcases the same using two design examples---Simplex Data Protocol and General Purpose Timer (GPT) peripheral. Coding style and level of detailing at different levels are shows. Process of refining from one level to another is illustrated. GPT peripheral module designed in this thesis work can be further reused as a timer library component in system architectures.