Midterm 1 (NEW PROGRESS) Flashcards
What is the human brain often compared to?
- A computer
- It’s considered the most complex and sophisticated computer in the known universe
What are examples of activities that require intelligence (or cognition)?
- Talking
- Listening
- Navigating
- Reading
- Remembering
- Playing
- Working
What are examples of activities that don’t require intelligence (or cognition)?
- Lower-level functions
- Ex: breathing or digestion
What is the sum of all intelligent mental activities?
Cognition
What’s cognition?
- The acquisition and processing of sensory information about the world and within ourselves in order to make behavioural decisions
OR - The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses
- Cognition is about processing external stimuli but also internal stimuli (dreams, thoughts)
What are different areas of cognition?
- Perception
- Attention
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
- Language
- Problem-solving
- Decision making
What is the field of cognition primarily concerned with understanding?
The processes that allow things to go right and that produce complex behaviors
What year was dubbed the “decade of the brain”
The 1990s
What are the 2 major scientific disciplines that undermine the study of the brain and its functioning?
- Experimental psychology
- Neuroscience
Describe basic research
- Scientific research whose goal is to try to understand the world and its phenomena, without regard to specific end-use of this knowledge
- Use to understand how we perceive information, remember, reason and solve problems
Describe applied research
- Research concerned with the end goal of developing an application or solution to a problem
- Includes understanding natural changes to the mind, cognitive diseases and disorders
Describe the field of human factors
A field where research in perception can facilitate the design of systems with which people interact, such as machines or computer consoles
Describe the field of artificial intelligence
A branch of computer science and engineering that’s concerned with building machines that can perform some or all of the tasks that humans can do, and perhaps also some that we can’t do
What’s the rationale behind artificial intelligence from a psychology standpoint?
- That if we really understand how something works, we should be able to build it, or at least create a working model of it
- One of the best ways to gauge how much we understand what the brain does is to assess how well we’re able to build artificial devices that can produce its behaviour
What was one of the biggest surprises in the field of engineering in the 20th Century?
- How difficult it is to build a machine that can produce what we would consider intelligent behaviour
- Building a machine that can do the kind of things we humans take for granted (ex: recognizing objects, understanding language, making a plan) is very difficult
What used to be seen as the pinnacle of human intelligence?
The ability to play high-level chess
What’s Deep Blue?
- A chess-playing computer that beat the world chess champion
- It played chess by performing many simple operations carried out very quickly
What’s the difference between computer chess players and human chess players?
Computers can carry out millions or billions of calculations in a second while humans take much longer to carry out one calculation
What made people think that machines would one day be able to outthink people?
The deep blue chess-playing computer beating the world chess champion
What’s If-this-then-that programming?
When a human programmer specifies what a computer program should do under each condition
Ex: chatbots
What are chatbots?
Computer programs designed to carry on a conversation with a person in such a way that mimics real human interaction
What does the success of predetermined automation depend on?
- It depends on the predictability of the problem the machine will have to solve
- Ex: chess game is highly predictable
TRUE OR FALSE: The brain has unlimited processing resources
FALSE
- The brain has limited processing resources and it must constantly choose what to process among a variety of competing signals
What are the kinds of applications where machines have historically failed?
Those that require dealing with novel, constantly changing conditions that the machine has not encountered before