Where and What is the Mind - Cognitive Science Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards reviewing key concepts, models, and theories from Lecture W1 on the nature, boundaries, content, and structure of the mind.

Dualism

The philosophical and psychological position stating that the mind and body/brain belong to distinct, separate orders of reality, preserving the significance of subjective experience.

Monism

The stance holding that mind and body belong to a single order of reality, asserting that mental phenomena are tied directly to physical processes.

Reductionism

The view that psychological phenomena can be fully explained by lower-level physical, biological, or neural mechanisms.

Anti-Reductionism

The view that mental phenomena require their own level of description—such as meaning, context, and experience—and cannot be reduced entirely to biology.

Individualism

The position assuming that core cognitive processes occur strictly inside the individual's mind or brain, treating the environment merely as an input/output source.

Traditional Model of Human Cognition (TMHC)

Also known as the 'sandwich model,' a framework viewing cognition as central processing occurring strictly between sensory perception and motor action.

Externalism

The framework proposing that cognitive boundaries extend beyond the head to include interactions between the brain, body, actions, tools, and environment.

Extended Mind

A 4E cognition concept stating that external tools (e.g., smartphone calendars or notebooks) can serve as functional parts of the cognitive system.

Embodied Mind

A 4E cognition concept proposing that the physical body and motor systems co-create cognition through sensory-motor simulations.

Enacted Mind

A 4E cognition concept holding that cognitive processes emerge dynamically through action and situational interaction within a concrete context.

Embedded Mind

A 4E cognition concept emphasizing that cognition is fundamentally situated within specific physical, social, and cultural environmental contexts.

Change Blindness

A perceptual phenomenon where major visual scene changes go unnoticed, demonstrating that the mind uses the external world as an external store rather than maintaining an exhaustive internal copy.

Affordance

A concept in Gibson's ecological theory referring to action possibilities offered by the environment to an organism relative to its physical capabilities.

Gibson's Ecological Theory of Perception

A theory postulating that perception consists of directly gathering information and affordances from the environment through movement without needing complex internal representations.

Bayesian Ideal Observer Model

A model describing perception as statistical inference under uncertainty, updating hypotheses about reality by combining prior beliefs with incoming sensory evidence.

Prior (Prior Knowledge)

In Bayesian models, the initial probability or baseline expectation of a hypothesis prior to incorporating new sensory evidence.

Prediction Error

The difference or discrepancy between expected sensory inputs generated by a predictive cognitive model and actual incoming sensory data.

Bayes' Theorem in Perception

The mathematical equation $\text{P}(H|D) = \frac{\text{P}(D|H) \times \text{P}(H)}{\text{P}(D)}$ describing how posterior belief is derived from sensory data likelihood and prior probability.

Representationism

The view that cognition operates through internal mental models, symbols, maps, and rules that substitute for external objects.

General Problem Solver (GPS)

A symbolic AI model created by Newell, Shaw, and Simon in 1959 that solves problems through a sequential pipeline: recognition, representation, planning, and action.

Anti-Representationism

The view that intelligent action results directly from sensorimotor coupling with the environment without relying on rich internal mental representations.

Didabots

Simple reactive robots designed by Brooks that produce complex behavior through direct environmental feedback loops rather than detailed internal world models.

Block Model

A memory architecture metaphor comparing cognitive structure to sequential storage boxes through which information passes linearly.

Modular Model

A cognitive architecture metaphor comparing the mind to a Swiss-army knife or toolbox, consisting of specialized, functionally isolated modules.

Levels of Processing Model

A cognitive framework proposing that memory retention depends on the depth of semantic elaboration during processing rather than specific structural storage locations.

Network Model

A connectionist model representing cognition as distributed activation patterns across parallel interconnected nodes and association pathways.