cognition exam 1

topics 1-6

Great Chain of Being

Hierarchical ladder dating back to Plato where humans straddle biological needs and reasoning.

Darwin's view on animal reasoning

Believed animals possess a semblance of reasoning, existing on a continuum with humans.

Malthus's influence on Darwin

Described how population grows exponentially while resources are scarce, leading to survival of the fittest.

Analogical Relations

Finding systematic structural similarities between perceptually disparate domains, which apes cannot do.

Higher-Order Spatial Relations

Using allocentric representations, maps, diagrams, and scales, which animals cannot do.

Transitive Inference

Logical reasoning figuring out relationships between items based on their connection to a third item.

Causal Illusion

Cognitive bias incorrectly believing two unrelated events have a cause-and-effect relationship.

Human Teaching vs. Animal Teaching

Human teaching is domain-general with indeterminate targets; animal teaching is an adaptation.

Autonomic Mind

Involuntary system controlling internal environments via reflex arcs, homeostasis, and the brain stem.

Sympathetic Nervous System

Controls the fight-or-flight response under stress.

Parasympathetic Nervous System

Maintains the body at rest, decreasing blood pressure and promoting digestion.

Reflex Arc

Neural pathway bypassing the brain for automatic, involuntary responses like a knee-jerk reaction.

Instinctive Behavior

Inherited behaviors encoded in the genome, common to a species, and triggered by specific environmental cues.

Problems with Chain-Reflex Theory

Exemplified by intention movements and vacuum activities occurring without proper external stimuli.

Associative Learning

Forming connections between events, actions, perceptions, and outcomes via classical or operant conditioning.

Classical Conditioning

Pairing a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus to elicit a conditioned response.

Operant Conditioning

Organisms learning to associate voluntary behaviors with rewarding or punishing environmental outcomes.

Limits of Conditioning (Garcia Effect)

Biological constraints showing organisms are predisposed to learn specific associations like taste aversion.

Empiricism (Behaviorism)

View that all information comes from the environment, treating the mind as a blank slate.

Rationalism (Cognitive View)

View that minds have internal structures and constraints that shape information processing.

Limits of Classical Conditioning

An animal's capacity for conditioning is constrained by biology, predisposing organisms to learn certain associations over others.

Garcia Experiment on Conditioning Limits

Rats developed a taste aversion when given nausea-inducing drugs, avoiding the taste rather than the sight or sound.

Limits of Operant Conditioning

Biology sets strict limits on an organism's capacity for operant learning.

Limits of Associationism

Co-occurrence relations are often coincidental and serve as inadequate mental glue for abstract and complex reasoning.

What are assosiations?

• the classical mechanism for learning

  • events, actions, perceptions impressions and ideas

• connections between two or more things

• glue that holds all mental stuff together

  • includes the principality of similarity, constrast

imprinting

• simple form of associative learning

  • baby goslings imprinting the first moving being they see as their mother

the 4 fs

fighting, fleeing, feeding, fornicating

cognitive world view:

view mental states as computational states!

• pushes back against darwin

  • unique mental states to humans

what makes man special?

Ernst Cassier

• generality and flexibility distinguish humans from animals

  • between the receptor system and effector system, man has a third link, the symbolic sysem

• 3rd link: symbolic universe; language myth art

  • mechanism: representation system between stimulus and response

    • gap between stimulus and response

intentionality

refers to the “aboutness” of certain mental states

presuppose a distinction between the world and a repsentation of the world

• mental states can refer to things beyonf themselves

  • i can believe that someday a woman will walk on the moon→ referring to distant places in the past and future

• mental states such as hopes and desires are not true or false, but can be either satisfied or unsatisfied → must seek to fulfil → world to mind direction of fit

Propositional Attitudes (propositional content)

eg: belif, hope, fear, love, desire

Language: Davidson

• according to cognitive psychologist, language and thought requires the structure provided by:

• recursion/creativity

• subjects/predicate distinction/propositions

  • object-property strucutre

  • mirrors the worlds organization sematic organization

  • quantifiers and variables

semantic relations:

hold by the virture of the meaning of the words

logical relations:

“closed form” in terms of relations terms such as and, or if

conceptual relations:

evaluations of propositions in light of out understanding of the world, including causal knowledge and co occurrence

systematicity:

humans cognitive systems ability to produce and understand some sentences is connected to produce/understand other sentence

• learning language isn't possible to learn through memorizing

productivity

no limit to the sentences human understanding/capacity

compositionality

the meaning of a complex linguistic expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent parts and the grammatical rules used to combine them

inferential coherence:

requires that similar logical form be delt with similar inference machinery and ential similar consequences