1: General Area of Behaviorism versus Cognitivism

What are the (four) main principles assumed by the cognitive approach?

Cognitivism, Representationalism, Computationalism, Darwinian Doctrine

What is Cognitivism?

("mentalism"): Inner mental states explain behavior

What are the two behaviorist assumptions about learning?

(1) all learning is the result of reinforcement, (2) conditioning depends upon processes of association and reinforcement

Why is Cognitive Science a multi-disciplinary science?

1. CogSci concerns a range of objects beyond the older boundaries of psych (not just human minds, but various animals, insects, superorganisms, social groups, computers, robots, and logical systems) 2. Researchers may have a broader range of interest than those in traditional scientific disciplines: descriptive (how people in fact think) versus normative (how people should think). Consider the area of ''Alien AI''

Give some sample expansions of Interdisciplinary cognitive science.

1. Psych developed out of philosophy; philosophy still provides many basic concepts (logic, rationality) 2. Influence of computational model 3. Advent of evolutionary psychology

How does the Indian parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant relate to cognitive science?

Cognitive scientists, like the blind men, must aim for the *bigger picture*: the mind is at once a rational agent, a linguistic system, a computer, an evolved organ, a member of a group, etc.

Tolman's Spatial Orientation experiments

Cross maze, Sunburst

Theoretical approaches to cognitive science

Formal logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images, connectionism, theoretical neuroscience, bayesian, deep learning

Tolman Hypothesis-Testing Experiment

Krech's discrimination box: when tasked with sets of two doors, correct rules randomized, rats employ a single rule at a time: a "hypothesis" (e.g. all left doors, then all right)

What is latent learning?

Learning (a cognitive map) in the absence of conditioning

Major fields of cognitive science (Sloan Report, 1978)

Philosophy, Psychology, AI, Neuro, Anthropology, Linguistics

Explain Tolman's T-alley Maze Experiment and why it is evidence against behaviorism

Rats allowed to wander a large T-alley maze WITHOUT REWARD discovered food much quicker than control. Rats must have learned a "mental map" of their environment

Explain Tolman's Sunburst Maze Experiment and why it is evidence against behaviorism

Rats trained to run through a single-path maze to food most often picked the quickest path to the same food location when placed in new sunburst maze; suggests rats learned spatial map of environment rather than sequence of movements (second-most-often was "inverse" direction: mental map reflection?)

Tolman's Latent Learning experiment

T-alley maze (Y-alley maze is simpler)

What is behaviorism?

a mental state = a set of external stimuli and responses plus the association between them

What is operant conditioning in behaviorism? (action/reward)

a type of conditioning in which an ACTION/BEHAVIOR (e.g. pushing a lever) is reinforced by a REWARD/CONSEQUENCE (e.g. food).

Difference between classical and operant conditioning

associating unconditioned response w/ conditional stimulus versus reinforcing an action/behavior with a reward

Only methods of learning in behaviorism

classical and operant conditioning

Evidence against behaviorism (Tolman)

cross maze, T-alley maze, sunburst maze

Lashley's hypothesis show that behaviorist learning

does not properly explain many complex behaviors

Tolman: in the course of learning, something like a _____ ___ of the environment gets established in the rat's brain

field map

What is the Darwinian Doctrine?

human mental programs evolved by natural selection

What is Computationalism?

inner representational states are computational in nature

A few ways in which rat learning was shown different from behaviorist approaches

internal representations, self-initiated

How do children provide evidence against behaviorism

kids show significant generative language capacity with very little reinforcement

Tolman: the rat's brain is not a telephone exchange, it is a ________

map control room

Tolman describes rat learning as ___ and ____

map-like, self-initiated

What is the Classical Paradigm of Computationalism?

mind = mental program or software brain = engineering or hardware cognition = bio or artificial engineering system running a mental program

Lashley's hypothesis of subconscious information processing

much of what we do is under the control of planning and information-processing mechanisms that operate below the threshold of awareness

behaviorism cares only about _________ phenomena and _________ behaviors

observable, measurable

Tolman: the rat's nervous system is ________ as to which environmental stimuli it will "let in" at any given time

selective

What is classical conditioning in behaviorism?

strengthening the ASSOCIATION between a neutral CONDITIONED STIMULUS (bell ringing?) and a non-neutral UNCONDITIONED STIMULUS (e.g. food): leads organism to produce unconditioned RESPONSE to conditioned stimulus alone

What is Representationalism?

the function of mental states is to represent things

What is Classical/Pavlovian Conditioning in Behaviorism? (Book)

the process of creating an association between a reflex response and an initially neutral stimulus by pairing the neutral stimulus (e.g. a bell) with a stimulus (e.g. food) which naturally elicits the response (e.g. salivation)

What is the central hypothesis of cognitive science?

thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures.

Explain Tolman's Cross Maze Experiment and why it is evidence against behaviorism

two groups of rats started randomly N/S; one group must learn SPATIAL LOCATION of food, other must learn TURN BEHAVIOR. Rats learned spatial encoding much faster than sequence of movements. Suggests animals develop cognitive maps

Lashley's hypothesis of task analysis

we can understand a complex task (and the cognitive system performing it) by breaking it down into a hierarchy of more basic sub-tasks (and associated sub-systems

Tolman: relevant stimuli are _________

worked into a tentative, cognitive-like map of the environment