History of Cognitive Science

Question 1

What are the three historical approaches to studying the mind?

Answer 1

1. Structuralism
2. Behaviorism
3. Cognitive

Question 2

What is the goal of structuralism?

Answer 2

identify “mental elements” (inspired by chemistry)

Question 3

what is the methodology behind structuralism?

Answer 3

introspection (‘inward looking’)
- wundt and titchener showed participants objects and asked them about their subjective experience/mental associations

Question 4

what are the strengths of structuralism?

not really strength but the signficance of it historically

Answer 4

first scientific attempt at studying the mind using experimental mentals

Question 5

what are the main criticisms of structuralism?

Answer 5

• 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’

Question 6

what is functionalism?

Answer 6

mind is not elements, but rather a ‘dynamic process’ that consists of a stream of consciousness

Question 7

what does functionalism emphasize?

Answer 7

the adaptive nature of cognition (evolutionary perspective)

Question 8

what is behaviorism?

also name the two main dudes

Answer 8

focus on observable behavior (BF Skinner and Watson)

Question 9

how did behaviorists explain cognitive processes?

Answer 9

in terms of associations between inputs (stimuli) and outputs (behavior)

Question 10

what does it mean for the mind to be a ‘black box’?

Answer 10

the mind is unexplainable and ummeasureable. behaviorists focused on observable and quantifiable measurements

Question 11

what is operant conditioning?

Answer 11

reward-based learning

Question 12

what is classical conditioning?

Answer 12

associating a stimulus with an outcome

Question 13

how do behaviorists describe what it’s like to be human?

provide a logicial and empirical version answer

Answer 13

logical: there are only behavioral dispositions to associate certain inputs with certain outputs

empirical: internal states are not scientifically accessible, hence irrelevant

Question 14

what is the turing test?

Answer 14

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

Question 15

critcisms of the turing test

Answer 15

1. AI could memorize all possible conversations
2. AI is too smart and calculates things faster than a human could
3. Is imitation of human language the same as understanding human language and having original thoughts?

Question 16

what are the strengths of behaviorsm?

Answer 16

1. objective mesarues
2. use of scentific method (falsifiable, replicable)

Question 16

what are the criticisms of behaviorism?

Answer 16

• can’t explain complex behaviors (perception, high-level thought, attention)
• neglects mind and mental representations, which can be present without measurable behavior

Question 17

explain Tolman’s Rats (1940s)

Answer 17

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

Question 18

what is the cognitive approach?

Answer 18

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)

Question 19

what is the cognitive revolution?

Answer 19

1950s: applying the scentific method to study mental processes indirectly
- invisible processes have visible consequences (like delyas in producing a response, accuracy, errors, etc.)

Question 20

what are three main events that led to the rapid shift away from behaviorism and towards the devleopment of cognitive science?

Answer 20

1. George Miller’s studies of verbal short-term memory (1956)
2. Newell and SImon’s Logic Theorist (1956)
3. Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (1959)

Question 21

what did

George Miller’s studies of verbal short-term memory (1956)

Answer 21

Showed that human short term memory capacity was limited to 7+-2 ‘chunks’ of information

Question 22

Newell & Simon’s Logic Theroist

Answer 22

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

Question 23

Chomsky’s critique of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior

Answer 23

• 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

Question 24

what was Chomsky’s sentence and what does it convey about language?

Answer 24

‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ vs. ‘furiously sleep ideas green colorless’
- sentences can have good grammar but no meaning