| Representations become increasingly independent of the environmental stimuli they represent (abstract, "virtual").
What are symbolic representations "grounded" in? | Sensory, perceptual and emotional representations derived from experience with the world. |
| what are representations? | Representations are the format in which information is encoded, stored and reconstructed (re-presented) within our minds.
Can take the form of mental imagery but also more abstract forms to express more complex relationships between 2+ concepts and allow concepts to be mentally manipulated in relationship to each other. |
| Who defined cognition as "the activity of knowing: the acquisition, organisation, and use of knowledge.” | Ulrich Neisser (1976) at the beginning of 'Cognition and Reality' |
| What does Neisser’s perceptual-cognitive cycle help us visualise? | Neisser’s perceptual-cognitive cycle provides a way to understand how our mental representations (schemas) are constantly being updated as we explore the world. |
| A system is cognitive when: | behaviours are coodinated with environmental features that might not always be present (mental representations). |
| Cognisers have agency, what does this mean? | They sense and act on their environment to:
-detect and effect changes
-gain information
They construct mental models (schemas) to represent the causal structure of their environment.
They adapt mental models in response to feedback from their behaviour.
They use mental models to guide future behaviour.
They form inferences to make sense of experience. |
| What is the Turing Test? | The "imitation game" proposed by Alan Turing.
It proposes that if an artificial intelligence can satisfy us of its linguistic competence, then this is a good indication that the machine has a mind.
e.g. given a particular linguistic input, the machine provides an appropriate linguistic output. |
| What is cognition built on? | Developmental, bodily (sensory-motor), social and cultural interactions. |
| What is the Chinese Room argument? | Proposed by philosopher John Searle.
Argues that even if a computer could generate plausible responses, it does not have the capacity to understand the meaning of the words it is using, not does it have thoughts or feelings about them. |
| What is a propositional representation? | A symbolic code that expresses a relationship between concepts (i.e. a "language of thought"). |
| What do semantic networks do? | Represent knowledge in a hierarchical system of relationships between concepts and their properties, expressed propositionally? |
| What did Shepard & Metzler (1971) propose? | That people need longer for mental rotation with increasing angle between speed follows real-world physical properties of the stimuli.
& that we might have "real" images in our mind that we rotate (60deg/sec). |
| Representations become increasingly independent of the environmental stimuli they represent (abstract, "virtual").
What are symbolic representations "grounded" in? | Sensory, perceptual and emotional representations derived from experience with the world. |
