Lecture 5: the cognitive level Flashcards
What is sociology concerned with?
They study things at the group level, cultural learning
What is psychology concerned with?
Learning at the individual level and learning through experience (like operant conditioning)
What is learning like at the cognitive level?
One cog. Theory is that the mind does what it does by firing little information processing rules called “productions” (if and then rules). When something good or bad happens, the productions used to get to that state of affairs are made more or less likely to fire in the future. Note that the cognitive level deals with information and how it is processed
What is learning like at the biological level?
Brains has billion of neurons, connected like wires. They get activated at the tips of the dendrites (receptors) which are connected to other neurons. Dendrites collect information and if they get active enough then its spreads across the membrane and shoots a message out to the axon terminals. Synapses are neurons. Neurons that fire together, wire together. This is how associations are learned. So if you have some neurons representing the concept of poison and others representing the eating of a certain kind of fish
What is learning at the chemical level?
Synaptic changes in taste receptors to tolerate bitter foods. Children often vomit when eating some bitter foods that adults enjoy. This happens, in part, because of synaptic changes
What is learning at the physical level?
Not a good level of description for learning. Yet. Some people believe (e.g., roger penrose) that quantum effects are directly related to consciousness, but most cognitive scientists do not take this position seriously
How do we know if a level is legitimate?
If it can successfully causal predictions using the ontology of that level. Ontology: a set of things said to exist. Each discipline has its own way of breaking up the world into pieces and they have their own vocabulary (their ontology)
Why are scholars often dismissive of levels above the one they work at?
Because they believe that the regularities found at higher level are or will be deducible from lower-level regularities
This is one form of reductionism. Physicist are guilty of this
why do we need the sociological?
Certain group behaviour phenomena, such as a group going on strike, are difficult to explain with individual psychology.
Why do we need the psychological level?
We need it in addition to the sociological level because some behaviours are not heavily influenced by their social context (e.g., baby face recognition). We need it in addition to the cognitive level because we need a place, for non-causal, statistical models (nutrition influences IQ)
Why do we need the biological level?
We need it in addition to the cognitive level because sometimes the biological structure influences behaviour in ways that the information processing perspective cannot explain. E.g., number/colour synesthesia because of co-located gyri. We need it in addition to the chemical level because certain brain structures appear to be used for particular things (e.g., the hippocampus and short term memory)
Why do we need the chemical level?
We need it in addition to the biological level because chemicals can affect behaviour (e.g., drug effects). We need it in addition to the physical level because, well, physics doesn’t tell us much of anything about human behaviour (still important though).
What is the proximate explanation?
we eat because it satisfies our hunger and food tastes good
What is the ultimate explanation?
we eat because we need nutrition to stay alive
how is the cognitive level the information processing level?
Cognitive science prefers descriptions of information and how it is represented and changed. For example, cognitive scientists have theorized that individual memories have “activation levels” that determine how easily they can be retrieved from memory. We accept the idea of an activation level if it helps us predict behaviour. We also like it if we find some biological basis for it.
Another way to put this is that cognitive scientists prefer to describe the working of a mind at a level so detailed that one could get a computer to execute the task in the same way. The metaphor for cognitive science is not that the mind is a computer, but a computer program. Programs are information processing instructions and computers have all kinds of.
