Role in the Curriculum
Cog166 was the sole courses crafted expressly for the cognitive science program at the time of its creation.
- The course is intended to provide a gentle, accessbile introduction to computer programming, taking care not to let this component of the course predominate. Perhaps some Clay in Gargoyle (see Paedia's Place for an appropriate tutorial), or some Lisp in (Racket).
- The course is intended to provide enough background in Psychology that the students appreciate the nature of the field, possess awareness of the relevant history of the field (William James, behaviorism, the cognitive revolution), be knowledgeable enough of the basics of psychology that the fact that they are not taking Psy100 will not be an issue in their studies.
- The course is intended to introduce and emphasize the foundational assumptions of the field, the computational/representational assumption that unifies the field, and the integrative interdisciplinary assumption that provides the field with breadth.
- The course is intended to acquaint students with a number big ideas associated with the various contributing fields to cognitive science, such as:
- Knowledge representation from symbolic AI (e.g. semantic networks, frame systems, scripts, propositional logic)
- Linguistic subsystems (phonemes, morphemes, syntax, semantics, pragmatics), formal languages and and context free grammar.
- Psychological findings of relevance to cognition, most notably Miller's magic number and the notion of chunking, the Stroop effect, the McGurk effect, and the Wason selection task.
- Philosophical phenomena relating to the mind, including the Turing test, the Chinese room argument against strong AI, and Theory of Mind.