Psychology 394U and Computer Science 395T

Introduction to Cognitive Science

TTH 3:30-5:00pm, GAR 311

Fall 1999 Syllabus

Click here for a week by week class schedule.

Instructor

Who	Office	Office Hours	email
Art Markman	Mezes 334D	Wednesday 2-4pm or by appointment	markman@psy.utexas.edu
Bruce Porter	Taylor 4.124	TBA	porter@cs.utexas.edu

Prerequisite: Graduate standing or permission of the instructor.

Enrollment limitations:

None.

General Course Description:

An introduction to cognitive science, the new discipline emerging from the interaction of psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. The course will range broadly, examining a variety of approaches to the study of how humans and other intelligent systems represent, reason, understand, perceive, use language, learn, and plan purposeful actions. The central assumption is that the human mind is fundamentally a computational organ and that cognitive processes can be explicitly modeled.

The course will cover the basic issues and contributions in the field, with particular emphasis on current research at UT. There will be frequent lectures by faculty from the relevant disciplines who are engaged in such research. Major topics in the course will include:

Neuroscience: systems neuroscience, functional brain mapping, relating localized brain damage to spared and damaged abilities, evolutionary biology.
Reasoning, Concepts, and Conceptual Development: categorization, children's theories of mind, nonmonotonic reasoning, qualitative reasoning, problem solving, mental models, schemas.
Computational Approaches: modularity, connectionism, symbol manipulation, knowledge representation, machine learning.
Language: speech perception, sentence parsing, natural language
understanding, discourse representation, language acquisition, syntax.
Vision: computational theory, psychology of visual perception, visual imagination, attention, spatial reasoning.
Other Topics: Memory, Philosophy of Mind, Robotics, Implicit Knowledge, Emotion, Learning.

Format of Classes:

Class will meet twice a week for an hour and a half. Often we will have guest lecturers from around the university who are interested in Cognitive Science. These researchers wil present aspects of their own work and its rela tionship to Cognitive Science as a whole. In addition, we will have periodic classes devoted to discussions of foundational issues in Cognitive Science.

Class participation is important to this class, as it is to most seminars. Students are expected to do the readings each week and to come prepared to talk about issues related to those readings. While there will be guest speakers each week, it will alwa ys be appropriate to ask questions.

Requirements:

Every Thursday, students will turn in two-page critical commentary on papers or lectures from the week prior to and including the due date. These notes should not be summary of what you have read or heard. Rather, they should be ev aluative: what's right about the paper or lecture and why? What's wrong with the paper or lecture? What's missing from the paper or lecture? You might suggest an additional study/experiment/analysis that would help resolve the issues raised in the paper o r lecture. Also, if you happen to know of literature from another area of cognitive science that was not discussed in class but that is of particular relevance to the issue you are addressing, you could discuss that literature, but again, the point is to evaluate and propose original ideas instead of just summarize.

In addition, there will be a final project in this class. In collaboration with another student, you will also write a short paper (approximately 5-7 pages) discussing a significant research on topic you find of interest. These projects will be present ed to the whole class at the end of the semester (see schedule below). Class attendance and participation, and readings are also required.

Policy on incompletes.

No incompletes will be given.

Policy on independence of work and plagiarism:

You are encouraged to discuss the material presented in class with other students. All written work turned in by a student must be the independent work of that student. In the case of the collaborative projects, of course, the work must be the work only of the members of the group. Obviously, you are not to include text that you have not written without clear quotations and attributions of the original source.

Textbooks

Thagard, P. (1998). Mind readings. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Additional Materials

Almost every week there will be additional readings. The procedure for getting these readings is to be determined.

Personal Ads

Personal ads for the final projects are now being put on the web as they become available. Check here to see them.

Projects

A list of the current projects and people participating in them is here.

Week by week class schedule

Date	Lecturer/Topic	Readings
August 26	Introduction
August 31	Introduction	Thagard, Chapter 1 Marr, D. (1982). Vision. New York: Freeman. (Chapter 1)
September 2	Juan Salinas (Psychology) Neuroscience of memory	Squire, L.R. (1986). Mechanisms of memory. Science, 232, 1612-1619 Packard, M.G., Williams, C.L., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J.L. (1995). The anatomy of a memory modulatory system: From periphery to brain. In N.E. Spear, L.P. Spear, & M.L. Woodruff (Eds.) Neurobehavioral plasticity (pp. 149-184). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
September 7	Larry Cormack (Psychology) Visual Perception and Eye Movements	Marr, D. (1982). Vision. New York: Freeman. (Chapter 1)
September 9	Class Discussion	Thagard Chapter 7
September 14	Risto Miikkulainen (Computer Science) Connectionism, neuroscience, and language	Thagard Chapter 8
September 16	Bill Geisler (Psychology) Mathematical modeling and neuroscience in vision
September 21	Mike Domjan (Psychology) Pavlovian models and Social Learning	Domjan, Michael, Cusato, Brian & Villarreal, Ronald (in press) Pavlovian Feed-Forward Mechanisms in the Control of Social Behavior, Behavioral and Brain Sciences. This article can be read off the web at http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.domjan.html
September 23	Randy Diehl (Psychology) Speech Perception	The role of phonetics within the study of language
September 28	Carlota Smith (Linguistics) Lexical Representation and Event Structure	The semantics of the Navajo verb base The range of aspectual situation types: Derived categories and a bounding paradox
September 30	Peter MacNeilage (Psychology) Evolution of Language and Speech	The Motor Core of Speech: A Comparison of Serial Organization Patterns in Infants and Languages
October 5	Richard Meier (Linguistics) Acquisition of Syntax	Thagard, Chapter 4
October 7	David Birdsong (Linguistics) "Second language acquisition"	"Whys and Why Nots of the Critical Period Hypothesis for Second Language Acquisition" "Confounded Age: Linguistic and Cognitive Factors in Age Differences for Second Language Acquisition"
October 12	Cathy Echols (Psychology) Word Learning	"Constraints on Word Learning" "The Role for Stress in Early Speech Segmentation"
October 14	Class Discussion: Situated Action	Thagard, Chapter 11
October 19	Davida Charney (English) The Psychology of Writing	Charney, D. & Carlson, R. (1995) "Learning to Write in a Genre: What Student Writers Take from Model Texts." Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 88-125. Hayes, J. R. (1996). A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. In C. Michael Levy & Sara Ransdell (Eds.) The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual Differences and Applications. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Levy, C. Michael. (1997). The "R" that psychology forgot: Research on writing processes. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 29, 137-145. McCutchen, D.. Francis, M., Kerr, S. (1997). Revising for meaning: Effects of knowledge and strategy. Journal of Educational Psychology. 89, 667-676.
October 21	Phil Gough (Psychology) The Psychology of Reading	"Reading"
October 26	Brad Love (Psychology) Categorization	Thagard Chapter 5 "Concepts and Categorization"
October 28	Art Markman (Psychology) Comparison and Cognition	Thagard, Chapter 6 Zhang, S., & Markman, A.B. (1998). Overcoming the early entrant advantage: The role of alignable and nonalignable differences. Journal of Marketing Research, 35, 413-426.
November 2	Jacqui Woolley (Psychology) Children's theories and imagination	Wellman, H.M., & Gelman, S.A. Knowledge acquisition in foundational domains.
November 4	Les Cohen (Psychology) Representation in infants	Cohen, L.B. (1998). An information-processing approach to infant perception and cognition. In F. Simion & G. Butterworth (Eds.) The Development of Sensory, Motor, and Cognitive Capacities in Early Infancy (pp. 277-300). East Sussex: Psychology Press. Cohen, L.B., Amsel, G., Redford, M.A., & Casasola, M. (1998). The development of infant causal perception. In A. Slater (Ed.) Perceptual development: Visual, auditory, and speech perception in infancy (pp. 167-209). East Sussex: Psychology Press. Cohen, L.B., Rundell, L.J., Spellman, B.A., & Cashon, C.H. (in press). Infants' perception of causal chains. Psychological Science.
November 9	Julie Irwin (Marketing) Goals and Choice
November 11	Class Discussion
November 16	Ray Mooney (Computer Science) Language Learning	Inductive logic programming for natural language processing
November 18	Nick Asher (Philosophy) Discourse Processing	"Discourse"
November 23	Vladimir Lifshitz (Computer Science) Reasoning about actions	Thagard, Chapter 12 Non-monotonic temporal reasoning
November 25	No class, Thanksgiving
November 30	Ben Kuipers (Computer Science) Representation of large-scale space	The spatial semantic hierarchy "Integrating Vision and Spatial Reasoning for Assistive Navigation"
December 2	Bruce Porter (Computer Science) Knowledge Representation	Building conceptual representations from reusable components