Top Hat module 1 Flashcards
Cognition
- The sum of mental activities resulting in the acquisition of information from the environment, processing that information, and using it to make a behavioral decision.
- It encompasses many different kinds of abilities, the study of cognition is separated into different fields.
Basic research
Scientific research that is concerned with trying to understand the world and its phenomena, without regard to a specific end-use of this knowledge.
In cognition, the goal is to understand human behavior and the mechanisms of the human body. It can also influence other fields (ex. engineering).
Applied research
Scientific research that is concerned with the end-goal of developing a solution to a problem.
Human factors
A field of psychology concerned with applying scientific findings to the design of systems that people interact with.
Artificial intelligence
A branch of computer science and engineering concerned with building machines that can perform human-like intelligent behaviors.
Use of AI in cognition research
If we really understand how something works, we should be able to build it, or at least create a working model of it. AI built to reproduce the brain’s behavior shows us how much we know about the brain itself.
What can robots do?
We haven’t managed to make robots that do a range of chores or interact extensively with their environment, because we took for granted how complex these behaviors are. Dealing with these requires flexible intelligence that machines don’t have. It is still poorly understood in humans.
However robots can do math, play chess, and manifacture better than humans.
Machine vision
Automated visual object recognition, concerned with developing computer programs that can interpret objects, symbols, medical scans, and even faces. These technologies have progressed fast in the past decade. Similar progress has made in human speech recognition (ex. Siri).
Machine learning
The computers are not programmed in the traditional sense, based on a human writing the computer code to decide what it should do. Instead, the computers are programmed to learn, changing their behavior in order to get better at some task. Artificial neural networks use techniques that are modeled on the brain.
Large language models (LLM)
Algorithms trained on vast amounts of digital or digitized text as well as feedback from users who interact with the model, ex. ChatGPT. It generates human-like texts based on patterns in the data they’ve been trained on. It can also create computer codes, meaning it could imrpove its own performance.
Artificial General Intelligence
A type of AI that can understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a wide range of tasks at a level comparable to that of a human being
Problems with AI
- Potential loss of many jobs to automation
- Biases in the AI’s outputs against groups that have historically been discriminated against
- Misuse of AI to commit crimes or influence people in disruptive ways.
Neuroscience
The field of science concerned with the study of the brain and related physiological systems. Modern tools allow researchers to measure the activity of the intact brain while the animal is awake and behaving. Despite their increasing sophistication, these techniques are still quite limited on their own and must be used in conjunction with other methods. It is also debated how to interpret these results.
Cognitive psychology
A field of psychology concerned with studying intelligence through the observation of behaviors. In general, cognitive psychology depends on measuring behaviors to develop theories of the underlying neurophysiological processes
Naturalistic observation
A research technique in which the behaviors of people or other organisms are observed as they occur in their natural environment, without any experimental intervention.
