Studied by 0 people
Looks like no one added any tags here yet for you.
what is cognitive science?
the study of the mind. how does the mind process and represent information?
components of cognitive science
linguistics, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, computer science, neuroscience
operant conditioning
reward and punishment
classical conditioning
two stimuli are repeatedly paired to elicit a conditioned response
B.F. Skinner
proposed operant conditioning as the main driver of language acquisition. verbal behavior
are brains like computers: hardware level
no. computer processors are primarily serial. brains operate in parallel
are brains like computers: abstract level
yes. they perform computations over representations
computational theory
what is the goal of the computation, why is it appropriate, and what is the logic of the strategy by which it can be carried out?
representation and algorithm
how can this computational theory be implemented? in particular, what is the representation for the input and output, and what is the algorithm for the transformation?
hardware implementation
how can this representation and algorithm be realized physically?
computational level example
input: two numbers. output: their product
algorithmic level example
whatever step-by-step process you learned
hardware level example
your brain, pen, and paper
domain specificity
specialized for certain kinds of info
innate and developmentally regular
instinctive, low variability
fast and automatic
you don’t have to think about it
information encapsulation
modules don’t rely on one another
farah et al
is there a specific module for facial recognition? results found that there was
the faculty of language
the combination of cognitive modules that allow us to produce/process language
faculty of language in the narrow sense (FLN)
just the language-specific parts
faculty of language in the broad sense (FLB)
FLN plus supporting modules
damage to these areas
aphasia
face blindness
prosopagnosia
broca’s aphasia
mostly structure
wernicke’s aphasia
mostly meaning
lateralization
the brain is divided down the medial plane into left and right
split-brain patients
severed corpus callosum. behave unusualy in experimental settings
syntactic structures (chomsky)
how to precisely characterize what makes some sentences grammatical, but not others
grammaticality
is an utterance well-formed in language x?
felicity
is an utterance sensical in language x?
grammatical and felicitous
alice cut the onions and peppers with a knife
ungrammatical but felicitous
what did alice cut the onions and BLANK with a knife?
grammatical but infelicitous
colorless green ideas sleep furiously
ungrammatical and infelicitous
furiously sleep ideas green colorless
finite-state machine
an exact formal model for the representation of language
long-distance dependencies
THE APPLES that alice picked ARE red
probability
the laws governing the likelihood of events
bayes rule
the probability of b given a is equal to the probability of a given b times the probability of b divided by the probability of a
black box
something we can’t see inside of
the information processing approach
generate testable predictions, measure behavior, analyze results, evaluate with respect to theory
donders
how long does it take to make a decision?
decision time equation
RT2 - RT1 = (time to perceive light + time to decide + time to press button) - (time to perceive light + time to press button)
parallel search
look at memory all at once then answer yes or no
serial self-terminating search
look at each individual memory, end when answer is found
serial exhaustive search
look at each individual memory, answer cannot be concluded until end
sternberg
applied the subtraction method for memory search. found support for serial exhaustive search
deduction
by logic, infallible
induction
by generalization, fallible but often works
shepard test conditions
class 1 - only need to track one attribute; class 2 - need to track two attributes; class 3 - each has one exception; class 4 - essentially arbitrary
category
a collection of things regarded as having shared characteristics
concept
hypothesis or description about the shared characteristics of a category
definitional accounts
each feature is individually necessary and jointly sufficient to assign an observation to a category
superordinate
more general
subordinate
more specific
individually necessary
each feature must be present
jointly sufficient
it is enough for each feature to be simultaneously true
the family resemblance problem
the smith brothers. the one with the most family features is most typical
exemplar theory
newly encountered example brings to mind the most similar stored exemplar. individual instances
prototype theory
newly encountered example brings to mind the prototype of that class. idealized example
what is linguistics?
the science of language
phonetics
concrete speech sounds
phonology
abstract organization of sounds
morphology
organization of words
syntax
organization of utterances
semantics
literal meaning of utterances
pragmatics
meaning as part of the discourse
voiceless
vocal folds don’t vibrate: p
voiced
vocal folds vibrate: z
stops
full constriction: b
fricatives
partial constriction: f
phonemes
sound categories
minimal pairs
words that differ by only one phoneme
productive
can apply to new instances. allows language to be infinite (plural -s)
unproductive
only applied to a fixed list of words, do not generalize (counterclockwise)
over-regularization
a child applies a grammatical rule too broadly to an irregular word
over-irregularization
DEFINE THIS
u-shaped learning trajectory
children memorize past forms, children learn a +ed and overapply it, children learn restrictions on the rule
the wug-test
what pattern will a participant extend to a word they haven’t heard before?
dual route models
regulars and irregulars are represented/processed differently. regulars are productive rules, exceptions are minor rules or memorized
single route models
regulars and irregulars are represented/processed the same way. no fundamental difference, it’s just a matter of frequency
symbolic approach (pinker)
minds work like computer programs, math, and logic with symbols and rules. an application of serial search
if-then-else (pinker)
if verb is used in the past tense then: 1. if it’s irregular, then look up the irregular form; 2. else add -ed, the default rule
connectionism
a recurring trend in computation cognitive science, based on ANNs. what if we could model behaviors by modeling neurons directly?
continuous
an acoustic or visual signal
discrete
exists at multiple levels and is governed by combinatory rules
the production pipeline
step 1: prepare a message; step 2: select words and frames; step 3: positional processing; step 4: articulation
anticipation slip
using a sound/word you will need later too early (leading list, reading list)
exchange slip
swapping two sounds/words (spear bill, spill beer)
perseveration slip
keeping a sound/word around too long (beed needle, beef noodle)
syntactic accessibility (bock)
a syntactic priming experiment. the sentence read before being shown a picture impacts the next phrases structure
word recognition
going from sound to meaning
homophone
same sound but different meaning
cohort theory of spoken word recognition
hearing the first phonemes of a word triggers all the words that start that way
uniqueness point
the point at which a word can be distinguished from all others
ambiguous sentences
sentences that have two different meanings (i saw the man with a telescope)
low attachment
the inaccurate interpretation of the sentence
high attachment
the accurate interpretation of the sentence
garden path sentences
sentences that lead you down the wrong path, you need to backtrack and correct (the horse raced past the barn fell)
modular prediction
garden path should happen regardless of semantic/pragmatic context
interactive predicton
garden path should be avoidable with semantic/pragmatic context
