History of Cognitive Science Flashcards
What are the three historical approaches to studying the mind?
- Structuralism
- Behaviorism
- Cognitive
What is the goal of structuralism?
identify “mental elements” (inspired by chemistry)
what is the methodology behind structuralism?
introspection (‘inward looking’)
- wundt and titchener showed participants objects and asked them about their subjective experience/mental associations
what are the strengths of structuralism?
not really strength but the signficance of it historically
first scientific attempt at studying the mind using experimental mentals
what are the main criticisms of structuralism?
- introspection is inexact
- mental experiences change over time
- act of introspecting may change the experience
- too many individual differences
- never able to compile a short list of ‘mental elements’
what is functionalism?
mind is not elements, but rather a ‘dynamic process’ that consists of a stream of consciousness
what does functionalism emphasize?
the adaptive nature of cognition (evolutionary perspective)
what is behaviorism?
also name the two main dudes
focus on observable behavior (BF Skinner and Watson)
how did behaviorists explain cognitive processes?
in terms of associations between inputs (stimuli) and outputs (behavior)
what does it mean for the mind to be a ‘black box’?
the mind is unexplainable and ummeasureable. behaviorists focused on observable and quantifiable measurements
what is operant conditioning?
reward-based learning
what is classical conditioning?
associating a stimulus with an outcome
how do behaviorists describe what it’s like to be human?
provide a logicial and empirical version answer
logical: there are only behavioral dispositions to associate certain inputs with certain outputs
empirical: internal states are not scientifically accessible, hence irrelevant
what is the turing test?
the imitation game (1950):
test to see if a system is intelligent
- put a judge in one room connected to a computer in the second room and a human in the third
- if the judge cant tell which one is a computer and which is a human, then the computer is intelligent
critcisms of the turing test
- AI could memorize all possible conversations
- AI is too smart and calculates things faster than a human could
- Is imitation of human language the same as understanding human language and having original thoughts?
what are the strengths of behaviorsm?
- objective mesarues
- use of scentific method (falsifiable, replicable)
what are the criticisms of behaviorism?
- can’t explain complex behaviors (perception, high-level thought, attention)
- neglects mind and mental representations, which can be present without measurable behavior
explain Tolman’s Rats (1940s)
day 1-4: clear pathway for rats to go to food
day 5: multiple pathways with no food, the rats made a diagonal shot to the approximate location of the food
what is the cognitive approach?
in reaction to behaviorism, cognitive science views the mind as an active process.
for example, when asked what you ate last Monday, you might think of where you were, what you wore, etc. indicating that memory/recall is reconstruction (not passive)
what is the cognitive revolution?
1950s: applying the scentific method to study mental processes indirectly
- invisible processes have visible consequences (like delyas in producing a response, accuracy, errors, etc.)
what are three main events that led to the rapid shift away from behaviorism and towards the devleopment of cognitive science?
- George Miller’s studies of verbal short-term memory (1956)
- Newell and SImon’s Logic Theorist (1956)
- Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1959)
what did
George Miller’s studies of verbal short-term memory (1956)
Showed that human short term memory capacity was limited to 7+-2 ‘chunks’ of information
Newell & Simon’s Logic Theroist
A program that performed logic proofs
- was able to prove 38 of the 52 theorems in Principia Mathematicia
- used heuristic methods similar to those of humans
Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior
- Argued against Skinner’s notion of language as a complex set of conditioned responses (i.e words produced in response to particular objects or situations)
- Postulated that humans have an innate linguistic endowment that affords us with the internal strucutre (universal grammar) needed for language learning
- Revolutionized linguistics by framing syntax as a formal set of cogntiive rules separate from meaning
what was Chomsky’s sentence and what does it convey about language?
‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ vs. ‘furiously sleep ideas green colorless’
- sentences can have good grammar but no meaning
