This document provides instructions for an upcoming topic presentation assignment. It informs students that the topic schedule and assigned readings have been posted. Students must communicate with their fellow presenters to ensure different aspects of the topic are covered without duplicating each other's work. For their presentation, students must find at least two additional readings on their topic and construct a discussion question. They are responsible for moderating the online discussion and summarizing it for the class. The document outlines the goals and requirements for a successful presentation.

1. Topic Presentation Assignment
 The schedule with your topic assignment and fellow
presenters has been sent and is uploaded under Course
Documents. Look over the reading(s) for your topic
assignment.
 Don’t be constrained by the topic description on the syllabus,
this is your chance to go a bit deeper into the topic area
 Notice the others presenting with you. You need to
communicate with them ASAP to make sure you are all
presenting different aspects of the topic (they should be
general enough to do this). This is not a group project,
you will each be responsible for organizing and
moderating your own question/activity.

2. Topic Presentation Assignment
 The purpose of having you do the presentations is to get another
perspective on the chosen topic so here is what you need to do to prepare
a great presentation:
 Find AT LEAST two outside (peer-reviewed) readings on the topic.
Ideally these readings will describe empirical studies or be a research
review centered on your topic area. The best place to start is by
examining the reference lists or citations from the assigned readings.
 Summarize your readings (a concise executive summary will do--
synthesis is a good thing) and construct a discussion question/activity
for the weekly forum. Feel free to use any media, links and/or examples
to illustrate your points.
 Make sure to post your threads in the designated discussion forum and
moderate the discussion throughout the week to answer questions
and/or clarify.
 Finally, when we meet the following week, I will ask you to recap the
discussion in the beginning of class. If you can't make the class, you will
need to send me a summary of the discussion.

3. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW:
FROM BEHAVIORISM TO
COGNITIVISM
IDT 760/860

4. The theory of behaviorism
 Grew out of associationism
 Association and reassociation of observed elements
 S-R accounted for many observable
phenomena
 Classical conditioning
 A means to shape behavior
 Primarily studied in animals (assuming generalization)
 Assumption
 Reactions are learned through positive or negative
responses to stimulus

5. Behaviorism and Learning
 John Watson
 Nuture over nature
 Thorndike
 Cats and puzzle boxes
 Stimulus-reward evokes desired behavior
 Skinner
 Operant conditioning-added reinforcement to the
mix
 The subjectivity problem

6. Issues with Behaviorism
 Some organisms demonstrated possible
mental models
 Rats learning mazes and adapting to change
 Could not be explained as simple stimulus-
response
 Language development
 Are we hard-wired?
 What about the Black Box?

7. What is cognitive psychology?
 Focuses on the representation and processing
of knowledge
 Keywords: representation and processing
 Understanding human perception or thought
and memory
 These ideas are not very old

8. The cognitive revolution
 Defining cognition
 Disenchantment with behaviorist findings
 Generalization of findings across species was
difficult
 Experiments with confusing results
 Breland’s pigs
 Causes:
 WWII and human performance
 Computer metaphor
 And, the debate over language

9. Fuzzy starting point
 Miller’s (1956) Magic Number
 Bruner (1956) and Ausubel’s (1960) focus on
mental structures
 Founding of the Center for Cognitive Studies
at Harvard (1960)
 Niesser’s (1967) Co g nitive Ps y c ho lo g y
 Minsky (1975) and frames
 Schemata and scripts (mid to late 70s)

10. Assumptions
 Mental processes exist
 Mental processes can be studied scientifically
 Humans are active information processors
 Shift from learning to learners

11. Studying cognitive processes
 Because these are internal processes they are
harder to measure
 Reaction time
 More time = greater processing
 Error rates
 Gives insight into cognitive processing of
information
 Relationship between these two

12. More Methods
 Accuracy
 Introspection or “think aloud protocol”
 Motor movement
 Eye movements
 EEG
 Evoked Potentials (Event Related Potentials)
 Measurement of electrical activity in the brain
 P300 is thought to be the marker for cognitive processes

13. COGNITIVE SCIENCE

14. Defining the science
 From “A Companion to Cognitive Science”
(1998)
 Cognitive Science is the multidisciplinary scientific
study of cognition and its role in intelligent
agency. It examines what cognition is, what it
does and how it works.
 From the Cognitive Science Society website
(http://cognitivesciencesociety.org/index.html)
 “…researchers from many fields who hold a
common goal: understanding the nature of the
human mind”

15. Who is represented?
 Disciplines include:
 Psychology
 Philosophy
 Anthropology
 Education
 AI
 Linguistics

16. First driving force
 The field of artificial intelligence
 Forced researchers to apply workings of human
mind to computer programming
 Mental representations
 Propositions
 Rules, concepts, images, analogies, etc.
 Mental procedures
 Providing a theoretical base for cognitive
psychology

17. Assumptions in Cognitive
Science
 People have…
 mental representations lead to deductive and
inductive processes
 mental rules and procedures for searching these rules
 a set of organized concepts and procedures for
retrieving concepts
 verbal and visual representations that can be used as
cases or analogs
 visual images of situations and processes for
retrieving those images
 Representations that involve processing units linked
by connections

18. Critiques of Cognitive Science
 No Accounting for Emotion
◦ This is being addressed
◦ http://emotion.autotutor.org/
 Consciousness
◦ Human thinking includes consciousness
 Physical world, social cognition
◦ Contributions of the human body and social systems to
learning
 Dynamical systems, mathematics challenge
◦ Some feel the mind is a dynamical system and not bound to
computational constraints

19. Where does ID fit in?
 If the purpose of the science is to understand
the workings of the human mind, educators are
the best consultants
 Keeps the field of cognitive science grounded
in reality
◦ Practical applications for underlying theory
 We can learn from them…they can learn from
us

20. Changes in Next Week
 Please finish Chapter 3 of Martinez before
next week (from page 50 on by Jan 29)
 I am making some adjustments to the reading
list for the weeks of:
 Feb 5
 March 5
 These adjustments will come to you via
Blackboard email