Chapter 1

Question 1

The “crisis in psychology”.

Answer 1

The experimental method of experimental psychology began to be applied to a larger scale than intended, leading to discipline fragmentation.

Question 2

What does ‘cognition = information processing’ mean for the field of cognitive science?

Answer 2

By viewing cognition as a form of information processing, cognitive science united diverse disciplines (such as linguistics, psychology, computer science, etc.) under a singular notion, allowing a unified discipline.

Question 3

What are the two seminal pieces of work which experimental psychology is rooted in?

Answer 3

Wundt’s ‘Principles of Physiological Psychology’ and Fechner’s ‘Elements of Psychophysics’; see also: Wundt’s Institute of Experimental Psychology, which was the first experimental psychology laboratory.

Question 4

What was the general significance of experimental psychology (in the late 19th century)?

Answer 4

It produced (briefly) a broad, unified science; psychology fragmented when this ‘definition’ overextended to cover different methodologies.

Question 5

Define: experimental psychology

Answer 5

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific investigation of basic psychological processes such as learning, memory, and cognition in humans and animals

Question 6

Define: cognitive science

Answer 6

The study of thought, learning, and mental organization, which draws on aspects of psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer modeling

Question 7

Define: cognitive psychology

Answer 7

The study of mental processes such as “attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity and thinking.”

Question 8

What is cybernetics and why is it important to cognitive science?

Answer 8

The aim to study adaptive behaviour of intelligent agents by employing the notions of feedback and information theory; Cybernetics creator Norbert Wiener organized the Macy Conferences which brought together multiple disciplines who worked to understand the general working of the human mind (important for the conferences which inspired cognitive science)

Question 9

How does using the idea of information processing work to unite cognitive scientists?

Answer 9

A critical feature of cognition now involves representation/symbolism; despite using different methodologies to study this aspects of information processing, it unites these various disciplines and differing methods, simply because they are all striving to answer the same questions (ie. how symbolism works within IP)

Question 10

How does classical cognitive science interpret ‘information processing’?

Answer 10

information processing is ‘rule-governed manipulation of symbols’; heavy reliance on the computer metaphor for information processing

Question 11

Define: a well-posed problem

Answer 11

A problem which has unambiguously defined states of knowledge and goal states, as well as explicitly defined operations for converting one state of knowledge into another

Question 12

Define: an ill-posed problem

Answer 12

A problem which is deeply ambiguous, has poorly defined knowledge states and goal states, and involves poorly defined operations for manipulating knowledge

Question 13

How does connectionist cognitive scientists differ from classical?

Answer 13

Proposed a cognitive architecture that is qualitatively different from the one which is inspired by the digital computer metaphor; instead, connectionists looked at the biology of the brain, the neurons and the way in which they function (the artificial neural network)

Question 14

Define: artificial neural network

Answer 14

A system of simple processors, analogous to neurons, which operate in parallel and send signals to one another via weighted connections that are analogous to synapses; signals detected by input processors are converted into a response that is represented as activity in a set of output processors; connection weights determine the input-output relationship, but are not programmed, and instead used a learning rule. Artificial neural networks learn from example.

Question 15

How do the classical and connectionist view of cognitive science remain the same?

Answer 15

Both are still concerned with cognition as information processing! Connectionists only go on to imply that brains are not serial digital computers.

Question 16

What are embodied cognitive scientists critiques of classical and connectionist?

Answer 16

That neither pay sufficient attention to the whole body and its interaction with the world.

Question 17

Define: methodological solipsism

Answer 17

according to this, representational states are individuated only in terms of their relations to other representational stares; relations of the states to the external world (the agent’s env.) are not considered (methodological solipsism in psych is the view that psychological states should be construed without reference to anything beyond the boundary of the individual who has those states)

Question 18

Discuss the sense-think-act cycle and how this changes in embodied cognition.

Answer 18

The sense-think-act cycle is characteristic of classical and connectionist cognitive science (and in which methodological solipsism is reflected). There is no contact between ‘sensing’ and ‘acting’, but rather ‘thinking’ (representational) has the primary task of planning action on the basis of sensed data. Embodied cognition replaces this with a sense-act processing, and argues that there are direct links between sensing and acting.

Question 19

How does embodied cognition distance itself from classical and connectionist?

Answer 19

By replacing the sense-think-act cycle with the sense-act one, it abandons planning in particular and the use of representations in general; it argues that agents are adaptively linked to their environments and this link is a source of feedback. This adaptive link is affected by the physical form of the animal (the embodiment).
Also by proposing the extended mind hypothesis (the mind is not separated from the world by the skull).

Question 20

Define: the extended mind hypothesis

Answer 20

The mind is not separated from the world by the skull, but rather the boundary between the mind and the world is blurred. Consequently there is cognitive scaffolding.

Question 21

Define: cognitive scaffolding

Answer 21

The abilities of ‘classical’ cognition are enhanced by the using the external world as support (ie. notepads in class); people can succeed by doing less because their tools are doing more

Question 22

Define: incommensurable scientific theories

Answer 22

theories that are impossible to compare because there is no logical or meaningful relation between some or all of the theories’ terms

Question 23

Why could cognitive science be considered ‘pre-paradigmatic’?

Answer 23

They lack a unifying body of belief; cognitive science may have reached some general agreement about the kinds of phenomena it should be explaining, but it lacks the kinds of technical details that are necessary to provide the desired explanations