Len Yabloko's List: Cognitive science

• • Piaget -- viewed cognitive development from biological perspective. Proposed that two major principles operate in intellectual growth and development: adaptation and organization.
     
    
     
    1. Adaptation -- Piaget believed that humans desire a state of cognitive balance or equilibration. When the child experiences cognitive conflict (a discrepancy between what the child believes the state of the world to be and what s/he is experiencing) adaptation is achieved through assimilation or accommodation.
        
       
        
       1. Assimilation involves incorporating new information into previously existing structures or schema (e.g., a child encounters a Dalmatian for the first time and incorporates Dalmatians into her existing schema for "dogs").
           
           
       2. Accommodation involves the formation of new mental structures or schema when new information does not fit into existing structures (e.g., a child encounters a skunk for the first time and learns that it is different from "dogs" and "cats." She must create new representation for "skunks").
        
        
    2. Organization refers to the mind's natural tendency to organize information into related, interconnected structures. The most basic structure is the scheme.
        
        
    3. Stages of Development -- Piaget proposed four stages of cognitive development: the sensorimotor period (0-2 yrs); the preoperational period (2-7yrs); concrete operational period (7-11 yrs); formal operations (11-15 yrs). See the text (Solso, 1995) for further review.
        
        
    4. Piaget maintains that development precedes learning. Development is stimulated by cognitive conflict.
     
     
  • Vygotsky -- Russian psychologist, contemporary of Piaget. Theoretical questions:
     
    
     
    1. How is information from the external world transformed and internalized?
        
       
        
       1. Second Signal System -- Vygotsky believed that we encode and represent our world through language.
           
          
           
          1. Language is a symbolic system by which we communicate.
              
              
          2. Language is a cultural tool. History and culture are transmitted through language.
              
              
          3. Our thoughts are based on language -- "inner speech"
           
           
       2. Social Interaction plays an important role in the transformation and internalization processes.
           
          
           
          1. social plane -- Vygotsky argued that development first takes place on a social plane. The child observes the parents' behavior, listens to the parents' speech, and tries to imitate. The parents guide the child in his/her efforts, making corrections when needed and providing greater challenges when appropriate.
              
              
          2. internal plane -- as the child becomes more competent information becomes internalized. For example, language is now represented in the mind as thought or inner speech.
        

• Philosophy and psychology related to the hypothesis of extended cognition

• The human mind, as I understand it, is comprised, at minimum, of three basic functions: cognition, feelings, and volition. The cognitive component of the mind includes mental actions we traditionally link with "thinking" such as analyzing, comparing, assuming, inferring, questioning, contrasting, evaluating, etc. The cognitive function is concerned with conceptualizing, reasoning, and figuring things out.
• Every human being enters the world with an initial motivation to have its way and to get what it wants, and thus "naturally" sees the world as designed to cater to its desires. This fact is apparent when we observe the behavior of young children. Their unfailing motto: "It’s mine!"
• Because of Goleman’s initial distinction between the “Thinking Mind” and the “Emotional Mind,” he is led into a number of problems, as I have suggested. Based on this distinction, Goleman erroneously equates the “thinking mind” with the “rational mind.” Are we to conclude, then, that all thinking is to be considered rational? How do we account for cognition that is irrational, or unreasonable? How are we to account for mistakes in thinking? Are they to be considered rational as well?

1 more annotation...

• This interesting study has shown for the first time that it is not only humans who can calculate the value of gifts and what would be considered to be of equal value in return (calculated reciprocity).

• Pain, fear and disgust are part of the mammalian survival machinery provided by tens of millions of years of evolution. Homo sapiens has, however, only been around for about 200,000 years. So all three emotional states owe something to mammal origins. If bipedal mammal members of the Garrick club or Millwall feel those emotions, so do deer, foxes and dogs. The argument is about how "aware" or "conscious" non-human mammals might be during these emotional experiences. When a fox hears the hounds baying and starts to run, is it obeying some instinct inherited from ancestors that knew when to get out of the danger zone? Or does it "know" to be afraid?
• That might be the wrong question. A human startled by a strange shape in a darkened corridor experiences a pounding heart, and lungs gasping for air, and a body in recoil. This is the famous flight or fight reaction. A human experiences the full force of fear and has already started to counter the danger a fraction of a second before the brain has time to absorb and order the information contained in menacing shape.This is because mental calculations are too slow to cope with surprise attack.
• However, the highest-flying animal problem solver in 2002 was not a mammal at all. Betty the crow lives in an Oxford laboratory. She repeatedly picked up a straight piece of wire, bent it into a hook and used the hook to lift an appetising treat from a tube too deep for her beak. She had, puzzled observers reported in the journal Science in August, never seen a piece of wire before.

1 more annotation...

• In her new book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, Grandin examines the surprising similarities between an animal’s mind and an autistic mind—her own. “Autistic people,” she writes, “are closer to animals than normal people are.” This may sound like a cruel judgment, the sort of thing a cold-hearted clinician would say, but it isn’t. It’s an acute observation, all the more important because it comes from an autistic person. Her autism, Grandin suggests, puts her somewhere between normal human mentality and animal mentality, not as a matter of IQ but as a matter of perception and emotion. Being closer to animals isn’t necessarily a bad thing. After all, that’s what makes Grandin such an uncanny translator of animal behavior.

• In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature's mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. "I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world."

• Do animals think?

    

   "Of course they do," answers Marc Hauser, a Harvard professor of psychology. "How could they not think and manage to survive in the world?" 

• What is going on here? Do the dolphins actually understand the command tandem creative as a request to make some joint artistic statement through movement? Did they communicate in some fashion to choose a routine and coordinate their movements?

• Around 1956, the intellectual landscape began to change dramatically. George Miller summarized numerous studies which showed that the capacity of human thinking is limited, with short-term memory, for example, limited to around seven items. He proposed that memory limitations can be overcome by recoding information into chunks, mental representations that require mental procedures for encoding and decoding the information. At this time, primitive computers had been around for only a few years, but pioneers such as John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert Simon were founding the field of  artificial intelligence.  In addition, Noam Chomsky rejected behaviorist assumptions about language as a learned habit and proposed instead to explain language comprehension in terms of mental grammars consisting of rules. The six thinkers mentioned in this paragraph can be viewed as the founders of cognitive science. For a comprehensive review of the history of cognitive science
• The central hypothesis of cognitive science is that thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures.

• Can animals really think? Can they make decisions based on information? For years, scientists have debated these questions. Now, many of them believe that some animals have the brain power to understand new situations, make decisions, and plan ahead. The following are just a few of the many examples of animal intelligence that scientists have observed.