Aim
The students make themselves familiar with the basic concepts of cognitive science
from a systems-theoretic
perspective. They learn to apply these concepts to get a better insight into
knowledge, intelligence, consciousness, and related mental phenomena.
Previous knowledge
No specific previous knowledge is required, although experience
with psychology, artificial intelligence or philosophy of science, as well as
complex systems (as taught by me in the course "Complexiteit en Evolutie
") are useful.
Content
The course gives an integrated treatment of the main concepts and
models from cognitive science, which includes among other things psychology,
artificial intelligence, and philosophy of science. First, a critical,
historical review is given of the main assumptions of existing approaches,
which include epistemology,
cognitive psychology, problem solving, symbolic AI, neural networks, situated
and embodied cognition, and constructivism.
Then, the problem of knowledge and intelligence is approached
systematically from a cybernetic perspective: cognition is what allows an
autonomous agent to efficiently pursue its goals within a complex and variable
environment, by anticipating events and solving the potential problems that
occur. This requires the development of a dynamic, recurrent network of
associations or rules that link together concepts. This network is typically
distributed across several parts of the brain, body, sensory organs, external
objects, and possibly even other agents. Information is processed through the
propagation of activation across this network. From this perspective, a number
of specific phenomena and problems are examined, including instinctive
responses, learning, perception, thought, consciousness, IQ, collective
intelligence, extended mind, and subjective experience.
Lecture Notes
The students have access to complete lecture notes (approx. 120 pages) in English, in the
form of a downloadable PDF
file . These include illustrations, table of contents, alphabetical index
and a bibliography for further study.
Mode Assessment
Oral examination, approx. 20 minutes per student, examining the
comprehension of basic concepts rather than detailed factual knowledge. The
students get many short questions covering the various parts of the course
rather than few questions that require a long and detailed answer. The
candidates therefore have no time to prepare the questions. Moreover, the
students are expected to briefly present a paper they have written on a
self-chosen subject, after which their deeper understanding of this subject is
tested.