Psychology 205: Foundations of Cognition

Spring 2016-2017, Tuesday & Thursday, 1:30 – 2:50 PM, Room 420-245

Jay McClelland, mcclelland@stanford.edu, Instructor
Jump to Schedule and Readings by Date

Course philosophy and structure

The intention of the course is to help you understand the nature and development of the field of cognitive science and to begin to be able to think and engage with research like a cognitive scientist. The course is organized in a loosely chronological manner, touching on some of the major ideas, experiments, and theoretical models in the history of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. For each class period, you will read 1-2 articles on a particular topic, prepare for discussion by responding to or raising a question in writing, and come to class ready for discussion. Some class sections will be a bit more lecture-like, while others will be completely discussion oriented.

Grading breakdown:

· Discussion preparation statements: 2/9

· Discussion participation: 2/9

· Paper 1: 2/9

· Paper 2: 3/9

Assignments:

· Discussion preparation statements: For each class period, you should prepare a very brief written statement based on the readings for that day. Suggested length is 100 words, with a maximum length of 200 words. These statements are meant to help you engage with the reading, increasing your ability to contribute to in-class discussion, and also to reflect your own understanding of the papers. Among other things, these statements might contrast the perspectives in the papers of the day or offer an evaluation of the argument presented in one of the papers. They may try to connect the ideas in the papers to other work or propose a way to extend the ideas to other areas in psychology. These statements might identify any aspect of the paper you would like to discuss (e.g. if you did not understand something in the paper, if you had an alternative interpretation, or if you believed an experiment or model could be done differently). Discussion preparation statements should be written in response to a discussion starter I will post on Canvas, and should be completed by 11 pm on the evening prior the corresponding class. I am most interested in your own take on the reading and don’t expect you to necessarily read other student’s discussion starters or feel the need to respond to points made by others. This part of the grade will be based primarily on completion and promptness. Two late or missing statements won’t hurt your grade, but more than that will result in a deduction.

· Papers: There will be two papers in this class, due in week 4 and week 8. Each paper should be approximately 1500 words. The purpose of the papers is to help you engage as deeply as possible with an issue within the field of cognitive psychology by reading an article in the literature and providing a critical discussion of it. A default approach is to pick a recent article related to one of the topics we are covering in class. Discuss your plan for your paper with Jay at least a week before the due date. The paper should be organized around the following 4 elements:

1. Contextualize: What at the issues that the authors are investigating, and how is the paper situated in the wider context of the field?

2. Summarize: What did the authors do to address the issues? How did they design their experiment (and/or model) and what specific questions were they trying to answer? What were their results, and what did they conclude?

3. Evaluate: Was the experiment or model designed appropriately to test the hypothesis the researchers were interested in? Were their conclusions warranted? Why or why not? What could have been done differently or maybe even better?

4. Extend: How does this paper or these findings relate to other topics or ideas in psychology (perhaps even outside cognitive psychology)? What follow up work would be useful to more fully address the question or to address new questions raised? How could this experiment or model be extended to capture other interesting behaviors?

Format and submission of papers:

Papers are due at 6 pm on the due dates indicated below. Send your paper to mcclelland@stanford.edu with subject ‘Psych205 – Paper N’ where N is 1 or 2 for the first or second paper. Please send the paper in pdf with file name ‘Lastname-205PaperN.pdf’.

Schedule and Readings by Date

WEEK 1

Tu, April 4 Introduction

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive Psychology, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Ch. 1, pp 3-11.

Marr, D. (1982). Chapter 1: The philosophy & the approach. Vision. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. Section 1.2 of Chapter 1, pp. 19-29.

Th, April 6 Discrete stage models of cognitive processes

Sternberg, S. (1969). Memory-scanning: Mental processes revealed by reaction time experiments. American Scientist, 57(4), 421-437. Read Sections 1-9, 12, 13, and final summary.

Paradigm Shift – Wikipedia article on the ideas of Thomas Kuhn. Read through section on ‘Science and paradigm Shift’ (but scan the examples too).

Falsifiability – Wikipedia article on the ideas of Karl Popper. Read through section on Verificationism.

WEEK 2

Tu, April 11 Symbolic cognition: Core theoretical ideas

Newell, A. & Simon, H. A. (1961). Computer simulation of human thinking. Science, 134 (3495), 2011-2017.

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. Mouton, The Hague. Chapters 1-4, pp 11-48.

Th, April 13 Concepts and features

Smith, E.E., & Medin, D. L. (1981).  Categories and Concepts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Chapter 3: The classical view. Read pp. 22-36 (top).

Medin, D. L. & Schaffer, M. M. (1978). Context theory of classification learning. Psychological Review, 85(3), 207-238. Read pp. 207-224 and the General Discussion

WEEK 3

Tu, April 18 Memory: Structures and processes

Craik, F. I., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 11(6), 671-684.

Cohen, N. J., & Squire, L. R. (1980). Preserved learning and retention of pattern-analyzing skill in amnesia: Dissociation of knowing how and knowing that. Science, 210(4466), 207-210.

Loftus, E. F. & Palmer, J. C. (1974). Reconstruction of automobile destruction: An example of the interaction between language and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 13, 585-589

Th, April 20 Mental imagery

Shepard & Metzler (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects, Science, 171, 701-703.

Pylyshyn, Z. (2003). Return of the mental image: Are there really pictures in the head? Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(3), 113-118

Winawer, J., Huk, A., & Boroditsky, L. (2010). A motion aftereffect from visual imagery of motion. Cognition (114), 276–284.

WEEK 4

Tu, April 25 Heuristics and biases

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124-1131.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453-458.

Th, April 27 Context and content in language processing

Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Garnsey, S. M. (1994). Semantic influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of memory and language, 33(3), 285-308).

Bransford, J. D., & Johnson, M. K. (1972). Contextual prerequisites for understanding: Some investigations of comprehension and recall. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 11(6), 717-726.

(Available but not assigned: Lakoff, R. (1989). The way we were: or: The real actual truth about generative semantics. Journal of Pragmatics, 13, 939-988. Read the introduction, Sections 1, 2, 5, and the conclusion.)

F, April 28 First paper due at 6 pm

WEEK 5

Tu, May 2 Signal detection theory

Swets, J. A., Tanner, W. P., & Birdsall, T. G. (1961). Decision processes in perception. Psychological Review, 68(5), 301-340. Excerpts

Signal Detection Theory Exercise Handout.

Th, May 4 Decision making: The diffusion model

Ratcliff, R., & McKoon, G. (2008). The diffusion decision model: theory and data for two-choice decision tasks. Neural computation, 20(4), 873-922.

(Available but not assigned: Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85(2), 59-108.)

WEEK 6

Tu, May 9 Rules or connections?

The Past Tense Debate: Papers and replies by S. Pinker & M. Ullman and by J. McClelland & K. Patterson. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6,456-474.

Th, May 11 Frames & schemas

Bower, G. H., Black, J. B., & Turner, T. J. (1979). Scripts in memory for text. Cognitive Psychology, 11, 177-220.

Rumelhart, D. E., Smolensky, P., McClelland, J. L., & Hinton, G. E. (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing Models of Schemata and Sequential Thought Processes. McClelland, J. L., Rumelhart, D. E., & the PDP research group (Eds.), Parallel distributed processing: Explorations in the microstructure of cognition. Volume II. Chapter 14. pp. 8 – 38. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

WEEK 7

Tu, May 16 Origins, development, and disintegration of conceptual knowledge

Keil, F. C. (1991). The emergence of theoretical beliefs as constraints on concepts. The epigenesis of mind, 237-256.

McClelland, J. L. & Rogers, T. T. (2003). The parallel-distributed processing approach to semantic cognition. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4, 310-322.

Tu, May 18 Bayesian/probabilistic approaches (Noah Goodman)

Goodman, N. D., Tenenbaum, J. B. & Gerstenberg, T. (2015). Concepts in a probabilistic language of thought. In The Conceptual Mind: New Directions in the Study of Concepts, Margolis & Lawrence (Eds.).

(Optional): Goodman, N. D. & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2016). Probabilistic Models of Cognition
(2^nd ed.). Chapters 1 & 2. https://probmods.org

WEEK 8

Th, May 23 Interactive strategies in communication

Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts. 41-50, 56-58 (“Examples” section, pp. 51-56 is optional)

Goodman, N. & Frank, M. C. (2017). Pragmatic language interpretation as probabilistic inference. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20, 818-829.

Th, May 25 Attention and Control

Botvinick, M. M., & Cohen, J. D. (2014). The computational and neural basis of cognitive control: charted territory and new frontiers. Cognitive science, 38(6), 1249-1285.

Norman, D. (1976). Memory and Attention: An introduction to human information processing. NY: Wiley.  Excerpts.

F, May 26 Paper 2 Due at 6 pm

WEEK 9

Tu, May 30 Brain and deep learning based perspectives on cognitive architectures

Graves, A., Wayne, G., et al. (2016). Hybrid computing using a neural network with dynamic external memory. Nature, 538(7626), 471-476.

Kumaran, D., Hassabis, D., & McClelland, J. L. (2016).  What learning systems do intelligent agents need?  Complementary learning systems theory updated.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Lake, B. M., Ullman, T. D., Tenenbaum, J. B.,& Gershman, S. J. (in press). Building machines that learn and think like people.  Behavioural and Brain Sciences.

Th, June 1 Embodied/situated cognition

Smith, L. B., Thelen, E., Titzer, R., & McLin, D. (1999). Knowing in the context of acting: the task dynamics of the A-not-B error. Psychological review, 106(2), Excepts: 235-241; 252-258.

Wilson, M. (2002). Six views of embodied cognition.  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9(4), 625-636.

WEEK 10

Tu, June 6 Culture and cognition

Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1973). Cognitive consequences of formal and informal education. Science, 182(4112), 553-559.

Frank, M. C., Everett, D. L., Fedorenko, E., & Gibson, E. (2008). Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition, 108(3), 819-824.