THE BASICS
1. The role of computation in cognition
2. Marr’s levels (barn owl experiment)
1. 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?
2. 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?
3. Hardware implementation: How can the representation and algorithm be realized physically?
3. The brain as a multidimensional space
4. Awareness and consciousness (Chapter 2)
PERCEPTION
5. Generalization (Shepard’s Law states that the further away in psych. Space, the less of a chance of generalization).
6. Categorization
categorization: recognize objects as belonging to the same category, without losing information about their differences.
categorical perception as distortion of the representation space
sigmoidal curve
7. Statistical nature of cognition (Mathematical averages of beauty)
8. Adaptation (page 77)
adaptation compensates for the statistical regularities of the world;
MEMORY
9. Cognitive maps
10. STM and LTM
11. Meta-memory
12. Schemata
LANGUAGE
13. Speech
14. Sentence processing (p. 301-303)
15. Semantic holism
Instead, they have meanings only when they hang out with other sentences.
Statements about the external world face the tribunal of experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”
16. Acquisition
the transitional probability from one sound to next will be highest when the two sounds follow one another within a word, whereas transitional probabilities spanning a word boundary will be relatively low.
THINKING
17. The frame problem
This presented the “frame problem”: how to design a system that could, unlike poor C3, infer the persistence of nonchanges, but that could do so automatically that is, without explicitly storing or accessing frame axioms for them.
18. Modes of reasoning
deduction, induction, abduction
Inductive reasoning performance will be better when the subjects are asked to judge a frequency instead of the probability of a single event.
19. Impediments to reason (conjunction fallacies [bank teller problem], overconfidence)
intuition pumps,
20. Creativity (preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, elaboration).
Preparation – It is almost impossible to have a good new idea without having first been immersed in a particular symbolic system or domain. Creative inventors know the ins and outs of their branch of technology, artists are familiar with the work of previous artists, scientists have learned whatever there is to know about their specialty.
One must also feel a certain unease about the state of the art in one’s domain. There has to be a sense of curiosity about some unresolved problem a machine that could be improved, a disease that has to be cured, a theory that could be made simpler and more elegant.
Incubation – Some of the most important mental work in creative problems takes place below the threshold of consciousness, where problematic issues identified during the preceding stage remain active without the person controlling the process.
By allowing ideas to be associated with the contents of memory more or less at random, incubation also allows completely unexpected combinations to emerge. As long as one tries to formulate or solve a problem consciously, previous habits of mind will direct thoughts in rational, but predictable directions.
