050.101 – Cognition
Spring 1999
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Instructor |
233A Krieger Hall |
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516-8699 |
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Email: rfrank@cogsci.jhu.edu |
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Office hrs: M 3:30–5:30 |
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Teaching Assistants |
140 Krieger Hall |
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516-2887 |
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Email: hale@cogsci.jhu.edu |
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Office hrs: Th: 10:00-12:00 |
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151 Krieger Hall |
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516-5046 |
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Email: fero@cogsci.jhu.edu |
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Office hrs: TBA |
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Diana Schenk |
140 Krieger Hall |
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516-2887 |
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Email: diana@cogsci.jhu.edu |
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Office hrs: T,Th: 1:30–2:30 |
Where and When
050.101 will meet in Shaffer 101 twice each week on Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:00 to 3:15. During the term, the TAs will hold a number of discussion sessions outside of class time. These will be announced during the term.
Course Requirements
Your responsibilities for the course are to attend class lectures regularly and to complete readings prior to the class in which they are discussed. There will be three exams, two in-class exams on March 3rd and April 14th, and a cumulative final (with emphasis on the final section of the course) during finals period on Saturday, May 8th. Each of these exams will be weighted equally.
In lieu of the final exam, students may do a final paper. See here for further details.
Reading
There is no textbook for the course. Instead we will make use of a number of readings drawn from a variety of sources. These readings will be available both at the reserve desk in the library and in the glass cabinet in the Cognitive Science department reading room (232 Krieger Hall). Since everyone will need to make use of a limited number of copies of these articles, you are encouraged to borrow them for as brief a period as possible. We expect that these readings will also be made available over the web in PDF format on the library's web site. See the site http://milton.mse.jhu.edu:8001/library/reserves/ for more information.
Throughout the course, we will be distributing questions to help guide you as you go through these readings. These are also available by clicking on the titles of the articles below.
Course Outline
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Studying the Mind |
What is cognitive science? Brains and Minds. (1/25, 1/27) |
Osherson, The study of cognition Johnson-Laird, How should the mind be studied? |
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Evidence from across disciplines: grammatical categories. (2/1) |
Caramazza and Hillis, Lexical organization of nouns and verbs in the brain Cassidy and Kelly, Phonolgical information for grammatical category assignments |
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Brain Basics: brain organization, structure and function of neurons. (2/3, 2/8) |
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Vision |
From the eye to the brain: finding edges and depth. (2/10, 2/17) |
Stillings, et al. (1987), Cognitive Science: An Introduction, MIT Press, Chapter 12, pp. 449–475 Pinker (1997),How the Mind Works, W.W. Norton, Chapter 4, pp. 211–255. |
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Abstraction in the visual system: frames of reference, divided representations. (2/22, 2/24) |
Pinker (1997),How the Mind Works, Chapter 4, pp. 256–267 Mishkin, Ungerleider and Macko (1983), Object vision and spatial vision: Two cortical pathways, Trends in Neuroscience 6:414–417 McCloskey et al. (1995), A developmental deficit in localizing objects from vision, Psychological Science 6:112–117. |
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Recognizing Objects and Faces. (3/1) |
Pinker (1997), How the Mind Works, Chapter 4, pp. 268–298 Farah (1995) Dissociable systems for visual recognition: A cognitiveneuropsychological approach, in Kosslyn and Osherson (eds.) An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Volume 2: Visual Cognition, MIT Press. |
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FIRST EXAM – MARCH 3 |
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Symbols in the Mind |
The computational theory of mind: representations, levels of description. (3/8, 3/10) |
D. Hofstadter (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, Basic Books: Prelude (pp. 275—284) and Ant Fugue (pp. 310—336) (reprinted in D. Hofstadter and D. Dennett (eds.) The Mind's I, Basic Books, 1981, pp. 148—191). (plus a helpful interlude courtesy of John Hale) |
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Symbolic Cognition: Reasoning. (3/22, 3/24, 3/29) |
P. Johnson-Laird (1988) The Computer and the Mind, Harvard University Press: Chapter 12, Deduction. |
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An alternative approach: Connectionism. (3/31) |
Click here for lecture notes. |
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Connectionism vs. Symbolism: The Past Tense Debate (4/5,4/7)
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D. Rumelhart and J. McClelland (1986) On Learning the Past Tenses of English Verbs. In Parallel Distributed Processing: explorations in the microstructure of cognition, J. McClelland and D. Rumelhart (eds.)MIT Press: pp.216-223 up to "operation of the model", "summary of the structure of the model" pp.239-245,"summary & conclusion" pp.265-168. Steven Pinker (1991) Rules of Language, Science: 253:530-535. Click here for lecture notes. |
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SECOND EXAM – APRIL 14 |
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Applying the paradigm: Reading |
What are the problems that need to be solved by the reading system?(4/12) |
A. Ellis (1993) Reading, Writing and Dyslexia: A Cognitive Analysis, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Second Edition, Chapters 2 and 3. J. Aitchison (1987) Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, Basil Blackwell, Chapters 1 and3. |
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Cognitive and neural architecture of the reading system.(4/19, 4/21) |
A. Hillis and A. Caramazza (1992) The reading process and its disorders. In D. Margolin (ed.) Cognitive Neuropsychology in Clinical Practice, Oxford University Press. |
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Computers that read and what we can learn from them. (4/26) |
M. Seidenberg and J. McClelland (1989) A Distributed, Developmental Model of Word Recognition and Naming, Psychological Review 96(4):523—568. N.B. Read only pp. 523—529. |
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Conclusions and Prospects |
Cognition in a vacuum: the Chinese room, symbol grounding. (4/28) |
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Emotions and Consciousness. (5/3) |
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FINAL EXAM – MAY 8 |
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