Fall 2008 Syllabus
Cognitive Science
CSCI 3702 |
LING 3005 |
PHIL 3310 |
PSYC 3005
Tu, Th 14:00 -
15:15
Muenzinger D430
Instructors
Course Teaching Assistants
Ben Pageler (
ben.pageler@colorado.edu):
Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy
Brian Mingus
(brian.mingus@colorado.edu):
BS Psychology; Professional Research Asst, University of Colorado
Luka Ruzik (luka.ruzik@colorado.edu): BS Philosophy and Psychology;
Professional Research Asst., University of Colorado
Course Objectives
This course is an
introduction
to the
interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, which is concerned with
understanding the nature of cognition in humans, animals, and
machines. Cognition refers to the mental processes that
compose
our mind: thought, reasoning, decision making, language,
learning, and perception. The style of work in cognitive
science
is interdisciplinary, drawing upon ideas from psychology, philosophy,
artificial intelligence, neuroscience, linguistics, and
education. A
guiding
theme of work in cognitive science is the the idea that the mind can be
understood as a computational system, sometimes referred to as the
computational metaphor of the
mind.
Rather than conducting a survey of basic works in the field, we have
decided to organize the course around two specific topics, and attack
each topic from multiple cognitive science perspectives, in an attempt
to gain a better understanding of the topic than one would acquire by
adopting a single perspective. The topics we've chosen for
2008 are
consciousness
and
situated cognition.
We've chosen these topics because they are addressed by the
traditional disciplines forming cognitive
science, and because the topics cut across aspects of cognition,
including: perception, attention,
memory, thought, language, and cognitive control.
Consciousness studies
Only recently has consciousness research become accepted within the
academic community. As John Searle puts it, raising the subject of
consciousness in cognitive science discussions is no longer considered
to be "bad taste," causing graduate students to "roll their eyes at the
ceiling and assume expressions of mild disgust." Indeed, consciousness
research has been extremely active the past few years, and has led to
significant results in experimental psychology, neuroscience, and
computational modeling, and significant debates within the philosophy
and linguistics communities.
Most people are interested in consciousness not just because
of the
academic and interdisciplinary challenges, but because it is at the
core of their personal experience. However, to make progress in
studying consciousness, precise and rigorous analysis is required.
Topics covered may include:
- major philosophical and theoretical perspectives
- criteria for the ascription of consciousness
- neuropsychological syndromes, including: amnesia,
blindsight,
hemispatial neglect, phantom-limb phenomena, prosopagnosia,
anosognosia, and alien-hand syndrome
- hypnosis and sleep states
- subliminal perception
- implicit memory and learning
- neurophysiological correlates of awareness
- brain imaging measures (fMRI, PET, EEG, ERP) and awareness
- the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to
dynamically deactivate cortical areas
- animal consciousness
- language
- computational modeling
Situated cognition
The most influential approaches in the
history of cognitive science characterize thought as the manipulation
of symbols in a quasi-mathematical system: think in terms of formal
logic or the analysis of chess games. Critics of this orthodoxy claim
that cognitive science is bogged down and can move forward only by
attending to the physical context in which cognitive processing takes
place. What role does the environment play in cognition? What role does
the body (beyond the brain) play? In recent years, many cognitive
scientists and philosophers have argued that, because human cognition
relies so heavily on the use of external resources, cognition literally
extends into the environment beyond the boundary of the human organism.
Less radically, it is often claimed that human cognition is essentially
embedded in the environment or that cognition draws essentially on
bodily resources. In this half of the course, we examine some of the
fascinating research behind these claims.
Prerequisites
The official prerequisite
is at least two of the following courses, or their
equivalents: CSCI 1300,
PSYC
2145, LING 2000, PHIL 2440. However, space permitting, we
will admit students who have not fulfilled the prerequisites.
If the course is oversubscribed,
priority will be given to students enrolled in the
Cognitive
Science
Certificate program.
Course Readings
Readings are available on
the
web.
Readings are listed by author names and year of publication.
Full citations to the papers, as
well as other potentially interesting papers, can be found
here.
The readings are divided into required and optional. Among the optional
readings are chapters from Paul Thagard's text,
Mind:
Introduction to Cognitive Science.
The text is meant to provide background information on cognitive
science to supplement the lectures and to make the required readings
more accessible.
Course Schedule
Date |
General
Topic |
Specific
Topic |
Required Readings |
Additional Readings |
Lecture Notes |
Aug
26 |
General
introduction |
Course overview
|
|
|
Aug26 |
Aug 28 |
What is
cognitive science?
[HOMEWORK
DUE] |
|
Thagard, Introduction and Chapter 1 |
|
Sep 2 |
Consciousness |
Philosophical
foundations |
Searle (2000) |
Thagard, Chapter 11;
Chalmers
(1995);
Searle
(1997) |
Sep2 |
Sep 4 |
Jackson (1982) |
|
Sep4 |
Sep 9 |
Tutorial:
Cognitive modeling |
|
Thagard, Chapter
7; see also links at bottom of this page
|
Sep9 |
Sep 11 |
Tutorial:
Neuroscience |
|
Thagard, Chapter
9; Tong
(2003); see also links at bottom of this page |
Sep11 |
Sep 16 |
Perception |
Rees (2007)
|
Dehaene et
al. (2006);
Moutoussis
& Zeki (2002);
Zeki
(2003); Lamme (2003); Tong et al (2006); Lamme (2006); prosopagnosia: Farah,
O'Reilly, & Vecera
(1993); illusions: Gregory
(1997); blindsight: Weiskrantz(1996);
subliminal perception: Bar
& Biederman (1998); binocular rivalry: Polonsky,
Blake, Braun, & Heeger (2000);
Leopold
& Logothetis (1999)
|
Sep16 |
Sep 18 |
Attention |
Robertson
(2003) |
Driver
& Mattingley (1998) |
Sep18 |
Sep 23 |
Memory |
Cleeremans,
Destrebecqz, & Boyer (1998) |
implicit vs. explicit memory: Foerde,
Knowlton, & Poldrack (2006);
Schacter
(1998);
amnesia: Squire
& Zola (1997); Eichenbaum
(1999); memory under amnesia: Merikle
& Daneman (1996)
|
Sep23
|
Sep 25 |
Reasoning and
decision making |
Nisbett and Wilson (1977) |
Knutson
& Kuhnen (2008); Ruys
& Stapel (2008)
|
Sep25 |
Sep 30 |
Ramachandran
(1995) |
Ehrsson et
al. (2007)
|
Sep30 |
Oct 2
|
Cognitive control |
Linser & Goschke (2007) |
Mayr
(2004); Haggard,
Clark, Kalogeras (2002);
Blakemore,
Oakley, & Frith
(2003) |
Oct2 |
Oct 7 |
Language and
thought |
Ling.
Society of America FAQ
Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun, & Levinson (2004) |
Gleitman
& Papafagou (2005);
Slobin (2003); split brain and language: Morin
(2001); implicit knowledge in language: Bock
& Griffin (2000);
Chang
et al. (2000); language learning: Elman
(1990); dyslexia: Hinton,
Plaut & Shallice (1993) |
Oct7 |
Oct 9 |
Theoretical
perspectives |
Maia
& Cleeremans (2005)
|
Colagrosso
& Mozer (2005); Baars (2002); Dehaene et al. (2006); Crick & Koch (2003)
|
Oct9 |
Oct 14 |
Social awareness;
Theory of mind |
Gallese,
Keysers, & Rizzolati (2004) |
Frith
(1997);
Frith & Happe (1999) |
Oct14 |
Oct 16 |
Situated cognition |
"The extended mind" |
Clark
& Chalmers (1998) |
Shapiro (2007)
|
Oct16 |
Oct 21 |
"Deictic Codes
for the Embodiment of
Cognition” |
Ballard et
al. (1997), pp. 723-734 |
Ballard et al, pp. 734-767; Thagard, Chapter 2
|
Oct21 |
Oct 23 |
“The
Soft Constraints Hypothesis: A Rational Analysis
Approach to Resource
Allocation for Interactive Behavior” |
Gray,
Sims,
Schoelles, & Fu (2006), pp. 461-469, 477-478 |
remainder of Gray article; Thagard, Chapter 3
|
Oct23 |
Oct 28 |
"Six Views of Embodied Cognition" |
Wilson (2002) |
Rupert (2004) |
Oct28 |
Oct 30 |
"What memory is for"
|
Glenberg (1997),
pp. 1-19 |
remainder of Glenberg article; Thagard, Chapter 4
|
Oct30 |
Nov 4 |
"The case for sensorimotor coding in working memory" |
Wilson (2001) |
|
Nov4 |
Nov 6 |
Special Visitor:
Ned Block (philosophy, NYU) |
Block
(2007)
(pp. 481-498) |
remainder of Block article (pp. 498-) |
|
Nov 11 |
"Spatial Representations Activated During Real-Time
Comprehension of Verbs"
|
Richardson
et al. (2003)
|
Thagard, Chapter 5; Spivey & Geng (2001); Clark (2006); Beilock et al (2008) |
Nov11 |
Nov 13 |
Special Visitor:
Michael Spivey (psycholinguistics, Cornell) |
Spivey &
Dale (2006)
OR
Spivey,
Richardson, & Fitneva (2004) |
We
want you to read one article or the other. You may write a
commentary on either one, or hand in two commentaries, one per article. |
|
Nov 18 |
"Grounding conceptual knowledge in
modality-specific systems" |
Barsalou,
Simmons, Barbey, & Wilson (2003) |
Thagard, Chapter 6 |
Nov18 |
Nov 20 |
"Change
blindness" |
Simons & Levin (1997) |
Simons (2000) |
Nov20 |
Nov
25 |
NO CLASS --
FALL BREAK
|
Nov
27 |
Dec 2 |
"Change blindness and priming: When it does
and does not occur"
|
Silverman
& Mack (2006) |
|
Dec2 |
Dec 4 |
“Self-Images
in the Video Monitor Coded by
Monkey
Intraparietal Neurons” |
Iriki, Tanaka,
Obayashi,
& Iwamura (2001) |
Maravita et
al. (2002)
|
Dec4 |
Dec 9 |
"Constraining theories of
embodied cognition" |
Markman
& Brendl (2005) |
Markman
& Dietrich (2000)
|
Dec9 |
Dec 11 |
"Neural foundations for undrestanding social and
mechanical concepts" |
Martin
& Weissberg (2003) |
|
Dec11 |
Dec 15
7:30 a.m. - 10 a.m. |
Final Exam Period |
student presentations
|
Course Requirements
Reading
Reading assignments are
available from
the course web page. Students
are expected to have done the readings in advance of the class session
in which they will be discussed. If you find that you are having
trouble understanding the required readings, some of the optional
readings
-- particularly the chapters from Thagard -- provide background
information that will help with the required
readings. If you find a topic particularly interesting, some of
the optional readings provide more information.
Commentaries
For fifteen of the class
sessions, you are to hand in a commentary
page. The commentary
consists of a half to full page (single spaced) of comments,
questions,
or
critiques of the assigned reading(s) for that class. This page will be
due in class. You can choose
the sessions for which you write the commentaries based on your
interest. If you hand in more than fifteen commentaries,
we will drop the lowest scores.
The commentary should include a summary of the key and most
interesting ideas in the reading(s). You must explain clearly and
relatively accurately some of the important material from the
reading(s). For example, you could explain the paper's main
argument, one or more of the studies used to support the argument (more
technically, to support one or more of the argument's premises).
You needn't provide an exhaustive
summary. Use your judgement to determine the most important
points and ideas.
Beyond the summary, you can include other thoughts, including:
- comments on how the assigned reading relates to other
course
readings, or,
if you feel ambitious and want to track down some related work in the
field,
how the assigned reading compares to this other work.
- a critique of the work. What are the flaws in the ideas
presented? What are the limitations? Do the authors place their work in
the appropriate
theoretical perspective? Do the authors overstate their results? In
what direction might the work be extended? By cirtique, we are
looking for relatively insightful, clever, or original comments (e.g.,
"the author misinterprets the results of experiment 1, because P,"
where P shows some genuine insight into a potential problem with the
author's interpretation of the experiment).
Ideally, we want to read about your analysis of the paper, not simply
whether or not you liked or understood the reading. These commentaries
are intended to promote careful thought about a
paper
before
the session in
which it is discussed. Your commentary should be limited to one page.
One point of the
exercise is the concise expression of your thoughts and reactions.
Late commentaries will
not be
accepted
. You are to bring
the commentaries to class yourself, and not ask a friend to hand them
in for you.
Hard copies of the
commentaries
must be submitted in class; we will not accept electronic submission.
Quizzes
To ensure you are engaging with and
understanding the readings, we will give a number of quizzes over
the course of the semester, roughly one every other class. The
quizzes will take place during the final 10 minutes of class, and
will ask you one or two questions concerning the reading. The
questions may be factual or ask for your interpretation of the paper.
Even if you have a legitimate reason for missing class on the day
of a quiz, we will not allow you to retake it. However, we will
drop the lowest 20% of your quiz scores, which effectively means that
you can miss 20% of classes without suffering a grade penalty.
Class meetings
We expect and hope you will attend all
class sessions. The
course will build on assigned readings, and the shared understanding
that comes about from discussion of the readings in class
sessions.
Attendance and participation in class is a
significant portion of your work for the course. Simply doing the
readings and handing in the commentaries is not sufficient. We
realize that many of you will have good reasons for not coming to
class, but the fact remains, if you are not in class, you have not
benefited from the discussion. If you are not finding the class
sessions useful, you should speak to the professors about what can be
done to improve classes. We will not take attendance, but your
attendance will indirectly
influence your grade via the quizzes, commentaries, and class
participation.
Term Paper
A term paper is due at the time of our
scheduled final,
December 15
at 10 a.m. Hand
in your paper to us in person (if you come to the final session, where
students will volunteer to give oral presentations), or leave under
Mike or Rob's door by 10 a.m.
Late
papers will not be accepted. The term paper should be
about 15 pages double spaced. You are also
required to hand in an
overview/draft of the paper by
November
18. You will be graded on the overview/draft as well as on
your final submission.
The paper must address some issue in cognitive
science that can be related to material we covered in class.
The
best possible thing to do would be to pick a topic that spanned both of
our primary topics. You
may
expand on a topic we have discussed in class, or address a topic we did
not have time to cover. For ideas on picking a topic: (a)
look over
the supplementary readings, (b) follow some of the links below in the
area
of cog sci; (c) discuss your interests with the professors; or (d) leaf
through (either electronically or at the library) the contents of
journals such as
Cognitive Science,
Trends in
Cognitive
Science, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Consciousness and Cognition,
Nature, Science, Cognition,
Mind
and Language, Behavioral
and Brain Sciences, and
Philosophical
Psychology. Read abstracts and skim through papers,
until you find
a
topic or specific article that interests you. Once you have a
topic or one article on topic, finding other references should be
straightforward.
We do have three criteria for the topic
and
content of your paper.
First,
the paper should make contact
with
material we have covered in class, so that you can demonstrate that you
understand this material and can relate what you learned in class to
other aspects of cognitive science.
Second,
the paper should
take
an interdisciplinary perspective on the topic of your choice.
If
you are a philosopher, it's fine to write a paper that primarily deals
with philosophical issues and perspectives, but the argumentation of
the paper should exploit experimental data from other areas of
cognitive science (e.g., the type of papers that Pat Churcland
writes). If you are a psychologist, consider not only the
behavioral literature, but also neuroscientific and linguistic data,
and computational perspectives.
Third, you should use
articles in
refereed scientific journal as the basis for your presentation.
Top
journals are listed above. We expect you to use at least 3
primary
sources, and possibly additional articles.
The overview/draft due in mid-November should be sufficient to
demonstrate that you've
thought about the topic of the paper and have researched references.
Specifically, it should include: (a) a list of articles you will
read and cite, (b) extended summaries of at least two articles, (c) a
paragraph about the big picture of what you're
trying to achieve in the paper, and how it relates to the articles, (d)
a tentative abstract for the paper. If you put in the time, the
work you do for the overview should integrate directly into the final
paper. A portion of your grade on the term paper will depend on what
you handed in for the overview.
The overview must be emailed to
Ben (see email address above) by the end of the day on November
18. The file must have either a .txt or .doc extension (so that
Ben can load the file into google docs, which will allow the two
profs and graders to simultaneously comment on the overview).
Your email should have "Cognitive Science Draft" in the subject
line.
We require that you hand in a hard copy
of the final paper. We will not accept final papers via email.
The reason for this requirement is that hard copies are much
easier to sort and rank and compare than electronic versions.
Each term paper will be reviewed by at least two of us,
and will be graded on the criteria below. We will be happy to
provide scores via email if you make the request, and detailed feedback
in person after final grades are handed in. Late papers will not
be accepted.
Class Presentations
Students may optionally give
presentations during the semester for extra credit. You could
volunteer to
present a summary of one of the supplementary readings that you find
interesting (see the professors for suggestions). During the
final exam period, you could volunteer to present a summary of your
research paper findings. Talk to one of the professors if you're
interested in this form of extra credit.
Final Exam
We will not have a final
exam for the
course. However, please plan to attend the final exam
session.
We will use the time for student presentations of term paper
findings.
Grading
Commentaries will be
graded on a four
point scale: 0, check-minus, check, and check-plus. The
baseline requirement for a check
is that your summary addresses the main points in the paper, and
provides enough detail that someone could read your summary and get the
gist of the article. A satisfactory summary not only includes the main
points, but excludes irrelevant detail, so don't simply fill up a
page with whatever trivia you remember about the paper. A check-minus will be
assigned if it appears that you've missed some of the key ideas of the
article. A check-plus
will be given if your summary satisfies the criteria for a check, and
you show some additional insight via your critique of the work (see the
last bullet point above concerning the critiques).
Semester grades will be based 30% on the commentaries (and the
initial
homework), 20% on quizzes, 10% on your term paper overview/draft, 30%
on the final term paper, and 10% on class participation.
Interesting Links
Consciousness
AI
Philosophy
Psychology
Neuroscience
Modeling
Animal Cognition
Legal Disclaimers
If you qualify for accommodations because of a disability, please
submit a letter from Disability Services in a timely manner so
that your needs may be addressed. Disability Services
determines
accommodations based on documented disabilities. Contact:
303-492-8671, Willard 322, and
http://www.Colorado.EDU/disabilityservices.
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because of religious obligations, have conflicts with scheduled exams,
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