Exam 1

study of mind and intelligence

mental processes for acquiring and using information

provides formal (mathematical) theories and tests them with empirical (often experimental) evidence

cuts across the biological, social, and computational sciences

• plato: innate knowledge • aristotle: laws of rational inference • decartes: mind-body problem • hume: problem of induction

mid 1800s

• introspection • psychophysics • comparative animal behaviour • early psychometrics from survey data

most earlier methods, particularly introspection

any reference to unobservables is unscientific; only allowable data are observed behaviour

UCS –> R UCS paired with CS now CS –> R

rewarding/punishing a behaviour will increase/decrease that behaviour respectively

• tolman’s ‘cognitive maps’ experiment with rats: group 1 (food always in the same place) learned faster, showing accurate mental maps - not just behaviour sequences • miller (1956) showed capacity limits: common limit of ~7 across processing and memory; reinforcement doesn’t help much but chunking does • chomsky (1959) argued against skinner’s view of language: language is structured (rules on categories), recursive (embedding), and productive (infinite sentences); reward/punishment can’t explain acquisition chunking: C IAC BCF BIY YZD VD vs CIA CBC FBI YYZ DVD skinner thought that language acquisition could be explained through operant conditioning

sept 11, 1956 (conference of computer scientists, linguists, psychologists)

• computational theory of mind as paradigm (mental representations (info stored in our minds) and mental processes (how that info is stored)) • interdisciplinary methods • fascination with classical philosophical questions

• function: what is its adaptive value? • ontogeny: how does it develop over the life of an individual? • mechanism: how does it work? • phylogeny: what sequence of evolutionary changes led to it?

• computational: what is the goal of the computation (problem being solved)? • implementational: what is the physical substrate that implements this algorithm? • algorithmic: what cog mechs (reps and processes) carry out this computation?

• representation: a symbol that stands for something else • process: a procedure that converts one rep into another • computation: info-processing that uses cog processes to convert one representation into another

• in our nervous systems • but they don’t have to be - transistors in computers maybe different biology in e.t. aliens

• use neural networks (biological or stimulated) • this doesn’t mean that the underlying representation are similar

• emotion • culture • embodiment • language relativity (are the thoughts wer think determined by the language we speak) • consciousness

environmental survival pressures select individuals with adaptive problem-solving; possibly via ‘mental organs’ (modularity hypothesis)

combination of innate knowledge and learning algorithms (e.g., language)

through cultural evolution (selection on ideas)

rationality subject to limitations in info, time, and processing capacity we must be in some sense rational – our computations correctly solve survival- relevant problems