COGS 204 Cognition and Computation

 

COGS 204, Spring 2008:  Per Aage Brandt Ph.D, Professor of Cognitive Science

 

 

Course Summary

This course discusses contemporary and future computational approaches to the study of cognition, including language. The human (or animal) mind-generating brain is not in any technical sense ‘just’ a computer, but it may still be relevant to simulate various cognitive phenomena by computation in order to model their formal properties. From perception to conceptual ideation, and from bodily motion to the processes of abstraction and abstract thinking, computation may help us question and picture the properties of mental architecture, the interrelations between iconicity and symbolization in mental representations, and the constraints and indeterminacies at work in social cognitive networks (distributed or social cognition).

    It also is important to analyze the cognitive roles of actual computation as a social technology for coordination, education and communication in general; the interface strategies mirroring certain of our mental routines on the screens we interact with, and which we therefore program to imitate symbolic and iconic behaviors in ever-changing patterns of ‘interface’ exchange, while the underlying systems compute information or control our social and technical environment. 

    Finally, the philosophical debate over ‘machine’ properties of the mind is to stay on the agenda for as long as the status and the structure of consciousness has not been theoretically and empirically determined.

Chalmers, David, 2007, “A Computational Foundation for the Study of Cognition”,

Crane, Tim, 2003, The Mechanical Mind. A Philosophical Introduction to Minds,

    Machines, and Mental Representations, New York: Routledge

Ito, Masao et al. (eds.), 1997, Cognition, Computation, and Consciousness, New York:

    Oxford University Press    

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Syllabus for Per Aage Brandt’s teaching this course in spring 2008:

This course will be taught as a seminar, based on explorations, debate, and presentations.

    A special section of this course will be dedicated to studying and developing language technology. Current understandings of general grammar are crucial to our modeling and programming in view of the need to 1) handle big data sets, 2) verify theories of grammar, 3) write computational devices supporting parsing, search engines, translation, robotic dialogue, language learning, etc. Words are in themselves very challenging entities; their syntactic combination into meaningful clauses and sentences is an even more challenging phenomenon; however, clausal and sentential relations with semantic wholes, that is, conceptual and imaginary scenarios that make sense, are accessible to structural analysis, and therefore to new forms of meaning-oriented computation. Here, we will apply semio-syntactic (stemmatic) and other cognitive principles and models to real discourse data and combine reading, analyzing, writing software, and studying cognitive and linguistic thinking.    

    There will be ample possibility of discussing, presenting, doing field work, and programming. Two written assignments are scheduled: midterm and final. Assignments may include program writing. Grades are based on active participation (50%), presentation (25%), and written assignments (25%).

Weeks 1-3:     Readings on Mind and/as Machine

Weeks 4-5:     Artificial intelligence versus Naturalized views of cognition

Weeks 6-8:     Cognitive simulations: models of perception and simple reasoning

Weeks 9-12:   On language: phonetics, semantics, semio-syntax and parsing

Weeks 12-15:  Exercices in programming for language tasks

Couse Documents