● Emergence of Modern

Cognition:
○ Human Cognition and
Artificial Intelligence (AI)

● Mind, Brain, and Behaviour:

○ Cognitive Science
○ Computer Metaphor of the
Mind - Information
Processing approach
○ Cognitive Neuroscience
Human Cognition
and Artificial
Intelligence (AI)
• Human Cognition:
• Problem-solving
• Decision making
• Language processing

• Artificial Intelligence:
• Simulation of human
cognitive processes by
machines
• Applications in robotics,
natural language
processing, etc.
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 Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is a branch

of computer science.
• It seeks to explore human cognitive
processes by creating computer
models that show “intelligent
behavior” and also accomplish the
same tasks that humans do (Bermúdez,
2010; Boden, 2004; Chrisley, 2004).

• Researchers in artificial intelligence

have tried to explain how humans
recognize a face, create a mental
image, and write a poem, as well as
hundreds of additional cognitive
accomplishments (Boden, 2004; Farah, 2004; Thagard,
2005).

• We need to draw a distinction between

“pure AI” and computer simulation.
● Pure artificial intelligence is an approach that designs a
program to accomplish a cognitive task as efficiently as possible,
even if the computer’s processes are completely different from
the processes used by humans.
○ For example, the most high-powered computer programs for chess will evaluate as many
potential moves as possible in as little time as possible (Michie, 2004). Chess is an extremely
complex game, in which both players together can make about 10128 possible different
moves. Consider a computer chess program named “Hydra.” The top chess players in the
world make a slight error about every 10 moves. Hydra can identify this error—even though
chess experts cannot—and it therefore wins the game (Mueller, 2005).

● Researchers have designed pure AI systems that can play chess,

speak English, or diagnose an illness.
● As we have seen, pure AI tries to achieve the best possible
● In contrast, computer
simulation or computer
modeling attempts to take
human limitations into account.
● The goal of computer simulation is
to program a computer to
perform a specific cognitive task
in the same way that humans
actually perform this task.
● A computer simulation must
produce the same number of
errors – as well as correct
responses that a human produces
(Carpenter & Just, 1999; Thagard, 2005).
● Computer simulation research has
been most active in such areas as
memory, language processing,
problem solving, and logical
● Surprisingly, people can accomplish some tasks quite
easily, even though these tasks are beyond the capacity
of computer simulations.
For example, a 10-year-old girl can search a messy bedroom for her watch,
find it in her sweatshirt pocket, read the pattern on the face of the watch,
and then announce the time. However, no current computer can
simulate this task.

● Computers also cannot match humans’ sophistication in

learning language, identifying objects in everyday
scenes, or solving problems creatively (Jackendoff, 1997; Sobel,
2001).
 Dualis
m

Monism
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM PHILOSOPHY: THE MINDBODY QUESTION

Dualism is a belief in the

dual nature of reality,
which means that mind
and body are separate.
From a dualist
perspective the body is
made of ordinary matter,
but the mind is not.

Monism is a belief that everything in the universe

consists of matter and energy and that the mind is
a phenomenon produced by the workings of the
nervous system.
Mind, Brain, and Behavior
● By the mid-1970s, the cognitive approach had replaced the
behaviorist approach as the dominant theory in psychological
research (Robins et al., 1999).
● But, cognitive psychology as it exists today has become an
increasingly interdisciplinary pursuit.
● The rigorous experimental approach to psychological research that
is characteristic of cognitive psychology has become increasingly
supplemented by theories and methodologies borrowed from other
fields.
○ As we will see, cross-disciplinary research can produce synthetic contributions to our
understanding of the human mind that transcend the contributions from any individual
discipline.
● Try to answer theoretical questions concerning how the concept of
“the mind” relates to the human brain.
Mind, Brain, and Behavior
• Cognitive Science:
• Interdisciplinary study of mind and
intelligence
• Involves psychology, computer
science, philosophy, neuroscience,
linguistics

• Computer Metaphor of the Mind:

• Mind as an information processor
• Comparison between human
cognition and computer operations

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Cognitive Science
● Cognitive psychology is part of a broad field known
as cognitive science.
● Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary field that
tries to answer questions about the mind.
● Cognitive science includes contributions from
cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer
science, philosophy, and linguistics.
● In some cases, researchers in the fields of sociology,
anthropology, and economics also make
contributions to the field of cognitive science.
● This field emerged when researchers began to notice
connections among a variety of disciplines, and thus
began to collaborate with one another (Bermúdez, 2010; Sobel,
2001; Thagard, 2005).

● According to cognitive scientists, thinking requires us

to manipulate our internal representations of the
external world.
• Cognitive scientists focus on these internal
representations
• Internal representations (IR): hypothetical cognitive
symbols that represent external reality or its
abstractions
• IR are structured bodies of information that
organisms have about the world and how to
react to it.
• These representations are often large networks of
concepts and relations that reflect a person's
knowledge and comprehension.
• They are also known as mental models, situation
models, conceptual or semantic networks,
schemata, or knowledge frames.
● Cognitive scientists value interdisciplinary studies, and
they try to build bridges among the academic areas.
● Both the theory and the research in cognitive science are
so extensive that no one person can possibly master
everything (Bermúdez, 2010; Sobel, 2001; Thagard, 2005).
● However, if all these different fields remain separate,
then cognitive scientists won’t achieve important insights
and identify relevant connections. Therefore, cognitive
science tries to coordinate the information that
researchers have gathered throughout each relevant
discipline.
● More specifically, we look at how interactions between
cognitive psychologists and computer scientists have
produced deeper insight into cognition than would
Computer Metaphor of the Mind
● Since 1970s, the computer has been a popular metaphor for the human mind.
● Computer metaphor tells that our cognitive processes work like a computer
● Computers and human minds (brain) – complex, multipurpose machinery (Clark, 2013).
● Researchers acknowledge the obvious differences in physical structure between the computer and
the human brain.
● Both human brains and computers may operate on some similar general principles. For eg: both can
compare symbols and can make choices according to the results of the comparison.
● Computers have a processing mechanism with a limited capacity and humans have limited attention
and short-term memory capacities
● Research clearly demonstrates that humans cannot pay attention to numerous tasks at the same
time.
● Computer models need to describe both the structures and the processes that operate on these
structures.
● Thagard (2005) – a computer model resembles like a recipe in cooking. A recipe has two parts:
○ the ingredients, which are somewhat like the structures
○ the cooking instructions for working with those ingredients, which are somewhat like the processes
Information processing model
• Researchers on computer approach try
to design the appropriate “software.”
• With the right computer program and
sufficient mathematical detail – imitate
the flexibility and the efficiency of
human cognitive processes (Boden, 2004).
• Beginning in the 1960s, psychologists
began to create models of how
information flows through cognitive
systems.
• This information-processing
approach argued that (a) our mental
processes are similar to the operations
of a computer, and (b) information
progresses through our cognitive
system in a series of stages, one step
at a time (Gallistel & King, 2009; Leahey, 2003; MacKay,
2004).
● Information processing models of cognitive processes such as memory, visual object
recognition, or language comprehension, share a series of general assumptions detailed
below.
○ Information about stimuli is transported to your sensory receptors (eyes/ ears) through a
physical medium (light/ sound waves). Your sensory receptors process and send it to your brain.
Here, information acquired through senses is similar to give inputs into a computer (typing a
word and pressing the “Enter” key).
○ The information that is provided to your brain via your senses is processed and decoded
over the course of multiple processing stages.
Seeing a chair, your visual system seems to first process different features of the chair such as its color, its edges, and its size. After
those features are recognized, information progresses to other parts of the visual object recognition system in order for the features to get bound
together

○ Eventually, the visual information reaches a stage at which it has been processed enough
in order for you to match it to your stored knowledge about objects in the world. At this
stage, you have recognized the object in your environment as a chair. Here in this
example, information is processed in incremental stages. This stage-like processing is
similar to how older computers worked. Specific subsystems process input based on
rules (or algorithms). After the information gets processed in that subsystem, it is sent to
another subsystem so that it can be further processed and interpreted.
● Eventually, after a stimulus has been processed
enough in order for it to be identified and
interpreted, a decision must be made about how
to respond to the stimulus.
● If you decide to respond to the stimulus, a motor
command is sent to the parts of the system that
are responsible for telling your body how to
move. You then initiate an action that allows you
to respond as strategically as possible to the
stimulus that you had just finished processing.
This action component is akin to a computer
responding to some input (e.g., by displaying a
word that you had typed onto your monitor).
● Many versions of this classical approach viewed
processing as a series of separate operations; in
other words, information processing was
considered to be serial.

During serial processing, the system must complete one step or processing stage before information
can proceed to the next step in the flowchart (Fodor, 1983).
● A great appreciation for the analogy between the human mind and the computer arose because
computer programs must be detailed, precise, unambiguous, and logical (Boden, 2004).
● Researchers can represent the functions of a computer with a flowchart that shows the sequence of
stages in processing information.
● IP model - never intended to be a model of how the brain processes information.
● 1960s - 1980s: very limited sense of how the brain processed and interpreted complex stimuli in the
environment.
● Most of the neuroimaging equipment - early phases of development.
● These models tried to get how people processed information about different classes of stimuli
● Cognitive psychologists conducted many experiments that served to illuminate the types of
environmental information that could be processed by the mind, what types of information seemed
to be processed before other types of information, and what factors influenced the ease with which
information could be processed.
● These data were used to create models of information flow through cognitive systems, although they
were not intended to serve as models of how the physical brain actually processed information
Cognitive
Neuroscience
• Integration of
Cognitive Psychology
and Neuroscience:
• Understanding mental
processes through
brain activity
• Techniques:
• fMRI, PET, EEG
• Focus Areas:
• Memory, attention,
perception, language
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