1 - What is Cognition? Flashcards
How can cognition be described & how can it be thought of as both a process and a product?
Cognition is the act of knowing but also that which is known.
Process: it is something human’s do (& other animals).
Product: mental representations of what we perceive, reason, know, mental images, etc.
How do cognitive agents (cognisers) interact with the world to represent it mentally & use the information to adapt their behaviour and goals? (Detect, effect information, construct model & act).
- Detect & effect: Sense and act on the environment to gain information.
- Construct mental models to rep structure of the environment
- Adapt their mental model in response to feedback from own behaviour.
- Models guide future behaviour.
What are the types of mental representations?
Sensorimotor representations: sense of emobidement, movement, sensory expeirence.
Mental images: visuospatial reps, auditory memories, olfactory, etc.
Symbolic representations: logical, linguistic, semantic, narratives, schemas, frames.
How does Haugeland describe a system which is cognitive?
- Must coordinate behaviours with environmental features that are not always reliably present to the system.
- Copes by having a ‘stand-in’ representation (other than the signal itself).
- The stand-in is part of a larger general representational system that allows the process to occur systematically in related to other things.
According to Ulric Neisser’s Perceptual Cycle, what are the 3 activities of knowing?
Acquisition, organisation, & the use of knowledge.
In what way does the Classical Computational Theory of Cognition propose symbols and syntactic rules underly thought processes?
- General idea of CCC is that the mind as a rule-following device.
- Symbols represent our knowledge of things & events (concepts) and the rules are the ways concepts can relate to one another.
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Syntactic rules are the program of the mind, expressed in “mentalese”.
- e.g. symbol/concept: “dog”
- rules: <in> <has> <and> </and></has></in>
- e.g. symbol/concept: “dog”
What are propositional representations? Describe propositions, predicates & arguments with an example.
A symbolic code to express the meaning of concepts & the relationships between concepts.
e.g. “the cat is under the table”.
Propositions:
- are the abstract, symbolic expression s, independent of specific surface details.
- Composed of predicate & arguments.
- Predicate: sits outside the brackets, it is the verb. Tells us the relationship between semantic elements.
- Arguments: express the subject & object elements (semantic elements).
- Predicate-argument schema:
- UNDER (CAT, TABLE).
What are analogue representations and how did the Shepard & Metzler (1971) study offer evidence that at least some of our cognitive processes are carried out using them?
Mental images are analogous to what they represent in vivo. We manipulate mental images in our minds in a manner analogous to the way we might physically manipulate the real object.
Shepard & Metzler:
- Mental rotation task produced activity in the primary motor cortex.
How did Spvy & Dale (2006) challenge the Classical Approach with Dynamic Cognition-Mouse Tracking Carrot-Carriage Study?
- real-time mouse-tracking to demonstrate categorical decision-making (identification) unfolding “dynamically”.
- The image shows the trajectory of the participants’ responses as they moved the mouse towards the target image “carrot” in the context of a phonologically similar competitor “carriage” provided as a distracter.
- T/away: cognition is a continuously dynamic biological process, not a staccato series of abstract computer-like symbols.
What is Rodney Brooks’ main idea behind embodied & situated cognition?
That the principal aim of a situated agent is to take action appropriate to its circumstances and goals, and cognition is merely one resource among many in service of this objective.
Therefore, the foundations of cognition are the sensing of the world & adaptation to changes in the environment.
“Adaptive learning in real-time based on sensing and a direct representation of the environment. &
Building models of cognition from the bottom up”.
In what way can it be said that cognition is built on social interactions & emotions?
Changes in emotional state trigger long-term memory response to object, tagged with socially referenced emotiona
Describe the Turing Test a.k.a the Imitation Game.
Based on a traditional parlour game with three players:
- B is a man, C is a woman, they are seated in separate rooms
- A sits outside the rooms and communicates with A and B via text-based messages (originally pieces of paper)
- A needs to determine which is the man and which is the woman
- B tries to convince A that he is a woman
- C tries to convince A that she is the woman
What would happen if we replace B or C with a computer?
- Turing argued that we would have good grounds to consider that the machine posses a mind, if:
- the interrogator mistakes the computer for the human as often as we would expect the i/gator to mistake a man for a woman.
What is the hierarchy of representations?
- reps become increasingly independent of the environmental stimuli they represent.
- Symbolic rep are “grounded” in sensory, perceptual & emotional reps derived fro experience in the world.
