|
Cognitive Science
|
Cognitive Science
References
|
|
Bransford, J.D.; A. L. Brown; & R.R. Cocking: editors
(2000). How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and
school. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.
[Online]. Accessed 4/4/02: http://books.nap.edu/catalog/6160.html.
An excellent overview of cognitive science
applications to education. Note that the entire text of
this excellent book is available online.
Bereiter, Carl (April 2002). Education and Mind in the
Knowledge Age [Online]. Accessed 4/4/02: http://www.emtech.net/links/construc.htm
. At this Website, look under "Opposition to the Theory. As
of 4/4/02, the second link is to the Bereiter book. This is
a new book scheduled to be published in April, 2002. Quoting
from the Preface:
Here we are in the information age, relying on a theory of mind that is probably older than the wheel. Every other folk theory—folk physics, folk biology, folk economics— has had to yield to more powerful theories, better equipped to address the problems of an adventurous civilization.
According to one story, this has also happened with
theory of mind. Something called 'cognitive science'
arose in the 1950s and developed rapidly. Its most
conspicuous manifestations have been in artificial
intelligence and robotics, but it has had a significant
and sometimes revolutionary effect on all the behavioral
sciences. Although it may be true that most of the
world's business is still conducted according to folk
theories of mind, this may be only a matter of cultural
lag, which will be overcome as cognitive science takes
hold.
The trouble with this story is that for most purposes the effect of cognitive science has not been to replace folk theory but to reinstate it, after its exile by behaviorism. I do not mean to discount the accomplishments of cognitive scientists in expert systems, language comprehension, and the like. But the cognitive science that produced these accomplishments has been rooted in the same basic conception of the mind that has been with us at least since Plato's time, and that children in the Western world pick up spontaneously by the age of six. It is this folk conception, along with its formalizations in cognitive theories, that has recently started to be challenged. What is being challenged is the basic conception of the mind as a container of objects—beliefs, desires, conjectures, remembered events, and the like—which the mind works on in cognition. The challenges have been on various theoretical grounds. The plausibility, coherence, and explanatory adequacy of folk theory and its derivatives have been called into question.
Critics typically concede that in practical applications folk theory does just fine. For most uses, that is true and for good reason. Our social institutions all embody the folk theory. We could hardly make it through a day—indeed, could hardly make it across a busy street—without decisions based on beliefs and intentions that we attribute to others. Folk theories of all kinds characteristically work well for everyday purposes, however. Medieval physics lives on in the baseball park, where fly balls have "legs" that may or may not be sufficient to carry them over the outfield wall. Expert gardeners get along believing they are providing food to the plants. But if the task is launching a missile into orbit rather than over the left-field fence or doubling the yield of rice paddies, folk theories are not up to the task. Folk theory of mind lives on, I believe, because it has never been put to severe tests.
Bruer, John T. (1993). Schools for thought: A science
of teaching and learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
An excellent introduction to educational
applications of Cognitive Science.
Corno, Lyn and Winne, Philip H (Editors). Educational
Psychologist Volume 36, Number 4, Fall 2001. Special Issue:
Teaching for Wisdom.
This entire issue centers around an article by
Robert Sternberg. In this article he attempts to define
the term "wisdom" and proposes that schools should
include a goal of helping students to gain increased
wisdom. When this article was sent out for review, it
provoked a lot of response from the reviewers. Several
reviewers were asked to write articles in response to
Sternberg's article. Sternberg then wrote an article in
response to the responses.
Dana Foundation [Online]. Accessed 3/9/01:
http://www.dana.org.
Quoting from the Website:
At this site you will find information about the
programs, activities, and publications of the Dana
Foundation and the Dana Alliance, as well the latest news
about the brain.
Dana.org serves as a gateway to brain information.
Visit the Brain Information and Brain Web section to
access general information about the brain and current
brain research, and to link to validated sites related to
more than 23 brain disorders. "Brainy Kids Online" offers
children, parents and teachers a site with activities for
younger children, puzzles, links to excellent educational
resources, and lesson plan suggestions.
Halpern, Diane F. Applying the Science of Learning: Using
the Principles of Cognitive Psychology to Enhance Teaching
and Learning. Accessed 11/9/02: http://www.house.gov/science/research/may10/halpern.htm.
Diane Halpern's area of specialization is
critical thinking. In her article Why Wisdom? Educational
Psychologist. 36(4), 253-256 she notes that a definition
of critical thinking she has often used is:
The term critical thinking is the use
of those cognitive skills or strategies that increases
the probability of a desirable outcome. It is
purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed. It is the
kind of thinking involved in solving problems,
formulating inferences, calculating likelihood, and
making decisions. Critical thinkers use these skills
appropriately, without prompting, and usually with
conscious intent, in a variety of settings. That is,
they are predisposed to think critically. When we
think critically, we are evaluating the outcomes of
our thought processes--how good a decision is or how
well a problem is solved. Critical thinking also
involves evaluating the thinking processes--the
reasoning that went into the conclusion we have
arrived at or the kinds of factors considered in
making a decision.
In Applying the Science of Learning Halpern presents a
suscinct introduction to some of the key findings and
problems in Cognitive Psychology. This is an excellent
introduction for educators. The following is quoted from
the Website:
What and how much gets learned in any
situation depends heavily on prior knowledge and
experience. Psychologists use the term "construction
of knowledge" because each learner builds meaning
using what is already known. For example, in an
explanation of this principle in "How People Learn,"
we are told about a fish who learns about the dry
world from a bird. When the bird describes beings who
can walk upright and breathe air, the fish imagines
fish-looking people walking on their tails, with both
gills surrounded with water and lungs filled with air.
The comprehension process is similar to that used when
children learn that the world is round; they replace
their pancake-shaped view of the earth with a ball
that has been cut in half, so that we can walk on the
flat cut surface without falling off. In other words,
the best predictor of what is learned from at the
completion of a lesson, course, or program of study is
what the learner thinks and knows at the start of the
lesson, course, or program of study.
…
The sole reason why we have schools and
universities, that is formal settings designed for
learning activities is that we expect that learning
will transfer. Information learned in one context can
transfer to a different context, but we need to teach
in ways that encourage transfer. Because of my
interest in and commitment to helping students improve
their ability to think critically, this is one topic
about which I have very strong feelings. The purpose
of formal education is transfer. We teach students how
to write and think well in the belief that they will
use these skills when they are not in school. The
truth is sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
Harvard Undergraduate Society for Neuroscience
[Online]. Accessed 11/9/02: http://hcs.harvard.edu.
Quoting from the Website:
The Harvard Computer Society is an undergraduate
student group dedicated to promoting, improving, and
developing interest in computing and information
technologies among members of the Harvard community.
Institute for Human and Machine Cognition
[Online]. Accessed 6/13/01: http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/.
Quoting from the Website:
The Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of
Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) was founded at The
University of West Florida by the Florida legislature in
1990 as an interdisciplinary research unit.
Current research areas include: computational and
philosophical foundations of AI, haptic displays to
mitigate spatial disorientation, non-alphanumeric pilot
displays, computer-mediated communication and
collaboration, cognitive science, computer mediated
learning systems, performance support systems,
pedagogically-motivated browsers, knowledge discovery and
data mining, neural networks, software agent mobility and
security, spatial and temporal reasoning, diagnostic
systems, the nature and modeling of expertise, situated
cognition, pattern recognition, and other related
areas.
Neurosciences on the Internet [Online]. Accessed
3/9/01: http://www.neuroguide.com/.
Quoting from the Website:
A searchable and browsable index of neuroscience
resources available on the Internet: Neurobiology,
neurology, neurosurgery, psychiatry, psychology,
cognitive science sites and information on human
neurological diseases.
University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign [Online]. Accessed 3/9/01:
http://www.cogsci.uiuc.edu/.
Quoting from the Website:
Cognitive science is the study of intelligent
systems, both natural and artificial. Over the past
thirty years, the study of cognition has developed into
an interdisciplinary science by combining approaches
primarily from computer science, linguistics, and
psychology. The field also has strong links to the
neurosciences, philosophy, anthropology, education and,
recently, to the physical and engineering sciences
dealing with complex dynamical systems. Although there is
considerable diversity of method among researchers in
cognitive science, they share the belief that intelligent
activity can be described in a formal and systematic
fashion. In fact, most cognitive scientists assume a more
specific hypothesis--that intelligent activity can be
modeled by formal systems (programs) running on a
computer or a brain. This hypothesis, sometimes called
the "computational theory of the mind," is considered by
many to be one of the most exciting intellectual ideas to
emerge in the twentieth century.
Quoting from the Research Programs component of the
Website:
Learning and Conceptual Organization
Perhaps the main issue in cognitive science is how
people acquire and represent knowledge. Thus, learning is
of considerable interest to cognitive scientists in
general, and it is a major part of the the research
program at Illinois. The faculty in the learning group
generally assume that learning cannot be understood
separately from the structure of the knowledge
represented in the system. By the same token, the study
of learning in a domain may provide crucial information
about the domain's ultimate organization. The contention
is that conceptual organization and learning form a
system of mutual constraints and that it will be most
productive to study the two together. A major issue in
learning in both machines and humans is the distinction
between similarity-based learning, which emphasizes
bottom-up, data-driven processing, and explanation-based
learning, which emphasizes top-down, knowledge-driven
processing. Researchers at Illinois have represented both
sides of this issue. However, there is now a remarkable
convergence of opinion, in which researchers with each
perspective are working toward the middle, in order to
integrate these two approaches. For example, one issue
under investigation is that of how to develop feature
descriptions that will be useful in encoding information
about a new domain. Another important question is how
knowledge of a domain interacts with evidence from
examples during the initial learning of a concept. Other
researchers are studying the acquisition of skills or
expertise in complex domains, and still others, the
important question of how memory is structured by
theories or knowledge.
Computational Linguistics
The computational linguistics group carries out a wide
range of research focused on bringing linguistic theory
to bear on the development of computational models of
language generation and comprehension. The ultimate goals
of this work are those of both the computer scientist and
the theoretical linguist: the development and refinement
of computationally relevant linguistic theory, and the
design and analysis of linguistically based computational
systems that process realistic language input. Explicit
models of language processing can inform and guide
linguistic theory, and they can provide linguists with
important tools for theory testing. Researchers in this
group share an interest in the interaction among the
various components of language processing, frequently
collaborating in the design of interactive architectures.
Major research projects in computational linguistics
include the development of feature-structure grammars and
algorithms for use in both generation and recognition,
and a project on speech recognition and production that
incorporates insights from phonology. Other work is
devoted to modeling speech act planning, the selection of
referring expressions, and plan recognition, and to
developing a logical formalism for modeling discourse
interpretation in natural language. Other research
projects focus on the design of morphological parsers
that make use of feature structures, the creation of a
grammar development environment, and the utilization of
text searching technology. This research is conducted in
the Laboratory for Computational Linguistics at the
Beckman Institute, equipped with a network of high speed
work stations.
Psycholinguistics
Research in psycholinguistics builds toward a general
theory of linguistic performance. By combining the
efforts of psychologists and linguists, this field has
addressed questions pertaining to language comprehension,
acquisition, and production. Illinois has one of the
largest groups of psycholinguists in North America which,
when combined with the group of computational,
theoretical, and applied linguists, makes Illinois a
major center for the study of language from a cognitive
science perspective. One important project at Illinois
concerns language production, a research area within
psycholinguistics that is universally acknowledged to be
important and yet is rarely studied. The project combines
experimental studies of syntactic and phonological
aspects of production, connectionist or neural network
modeling, and analyses of speech errors in both normal
and aphasic speakers. The goal is to develop and test a
theory of how speakers make choices about sentence
structure and lexical items. Of particular interest is
the question of the modularity of the syntactic,
semantic, and phonological knowledge systems. A second
major project concerns eye-movement and event-related
potential measures of sentence and discourse
comprehension. Both methods allow for unobtrusive and
on-line detection of events that occur as subjects read
sentences and thus can arbitrate among competing theories
of parsing. Other researchers study a wide variety of
issues in psycholinguistics ranging from word perception
to discourse comprehension. The University's Center for
the Study of Reading is a valuable asset to much of this
work.
Cognitive Neuroscience
Research in cognitive neuroscience has the goal of
specifying the functional architecture (i.e., the
component process and systems) of cognition and the way
in which it is mapped onto the neural architecture of the
brain. At Illinois, researchers have a particular focus
on human cognitive neuroscience, with the goal of
developing a more complete understanding of how human
information processing and human cognitive abilities are
implemented in the human brain. The methods or approaches
employed by researchers at Illinois include
neuropsychological investigations of normal,
brain-damaged, and psychiatrically-diagnosed individuals,
structural and functional brain imaging, event-related
potentials (ERPs), eye movement monitoring, and
computational modeling -- a set of tools that permit
analysis of the componential organization of cognitive
systems and permit neuroanatomical mapping. The faculty's
research is organized around understanding the neural
underpinnings of four major components of human
information processing: attention, memory, language, and
cognitive aspects of normal and abnormal emotion. Aspects
of attention being studied include how the temporal and
spatial context within which information is included
affects response selection, hemispheric differences in
attentional processing, mechanisms of selective visual
attention, and automaticity and skill acquisition.
Aspects of memory being addressed include delineating the
components or modules of memory processing, the nature of
representations and the degree to which they can be
modeled in distributed systems, and the availability of
stored information via different avenues of access.
Aspects of language processing being studied from a
neuropsychological perspective include how the effect of
early language experience and exposure to multiple
languages on the organization of language in the brain,
and how the patterns of language disturbances after brain
damage can inform models of normal language processing
Finally, aspects of the interface between emotion and
cognition being examined include a delineation of the
brain regions involved in the extent to which individuals
rely on non-linguistic, emotional information in the
extraction of meaning from language, the allocation of
cognitive resources in emotional processing tasks, and
the influence of cognitive competence and brain
organization on social/emotional function.
Top
of Page
|