Week 1 Flashcards
How does Meredith define cognition
two elements
(i) The activity of acquiring, organising and using information
(ii) to enable adaptive, goal-directed (intelligent) behaviour.
What is the meaning of cognitive psychology and how is it different to cognitive neuroscience
Cognitive psychology is the study of these COGNITIVE STATES and PROCESSES and how they explain human BEHAVIOUR and mental EXPERIENCE
By contrast
Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the NEURAL MECHANISMS that underlie COGNITIVE CAPACITIES
How does Meredith define information
three elements
the
- (i) detectable changes in stimuli that enable us to
- (ii) categorise the entities and events that we encounter, and
- (iii) infer the relationships between them
What is Aplysia and what are new two reasons cognitive scientists like studying it?
A species of sea slug
- It has a simple nervous system (~20,000 neurons)
- The neurons are big
What were the three categories of mental representation discussed in Meredith’s lectures?
- SENSORIMOTOR - embodiment, moment, sensory experience
- MENTAL IMAGES - Visuospatial representations, auditory memories, olfactory
- SYMBOLIC representations: logical, linguistic, semantic, narrative, schemas, frames
According to Meredith’s lectures, what are the three things that make a system ‘cognitive;?
- It must coordinate its behaviours with environmental features that are not always reliably present to the system
- It copes by having something else ‘stand in’ for the invisible environmental features (ie a mental representation)
- That ‘something else’ is part of a more general representational system, in which mental representations are systematically related to each other
Name something that is distinctive about the CLASSICAL COMPUTATIONAL view of cognition
- Thought processes reflect the mental manipulation of symbols according to syntactic rules for combining those symbols
- Syntactic rules are the ‘program’ of the mind expressed in ‘mentalese’ - the language of thought
In the CLASSICAL COMPUTATIONAL theory of cognition, how is the symbolic code organised that expresses meaning of concepts/relationships
‘Relationship between elements’ (‘subject element’, ‘object element’)
eg
Under (Cat, Table)
The CLASSICAL COMPUTATIONAL theory of cognition, uses PROPOSITIONS to communicate the underlying meaning of messages in an abstract code. In propositions, what is the name given to the first bit of the proportion… the bit that defines the relationship/property go the later bit
The predicate
How does the MENTAL IMAGERY model of mind/cognition differ from the CLASSICAL COMPUTATIONAL model?
Whereas the classical computation model assumes that all representations occur in this weird syntactic format, the mental imagery model assumes that sometimes we represent Under(cat, table) simply using the mental image (analogue representation) of a cat under a table.
One study for mental imagery: Shepard and Metzler, mental rotation (1971)
What experimental paradigms were used to support the DYNAMIC COGNITION model, as contrasted to the CLASSIC COMPUTATIONAL model?
Eye and mouse tracking paradigms…
Like the one that shows how the mouse shifts between similar sounding words (carrot, carriage)
What’s the key criticism of the classical computational view, that the Dynamic, Embodied and Situated approaches to cognition seem better placed to deal with?
The classical view provides no account for how symbols are learned.
By contrast, the other views account for the way conceptual knowledge is GROUNDED in perceptions and interactions with the world
