- Who is the instructor?
- How is the course organized?
- What is the course about?
- Conclusion
Bojan Nys - background in clinical psychology. PhD in linguistics & psychology at KUL.
Investigates pragmatics - how people reason with specific pieces of language.
This course is an introduction to the foundational concepts in CogSci. This will mention the interaction between top-down and bottom-up processes.
How much of our mental processes is nurtured vs nature?
Recommended text is Cognitive Psychology by Ken Gilhooly, Fiona Lyddy, and Frank Pollick.
The book will not cover the entire course content, primarily it will be the slides and lectures.
Introduction will follow the book but also go deeper. Very important to study!!
Being active on Toledo gives 2/20 points for free.
The exam structure:
Three questions, one from perception, one about reasoning & decision-making, one about language.
You get to pick two and answer them.
Exam is half open book - for an hour you can use all (physical) documents you want, after that, you have to continue without help.
JUST STUDYING THE BOOK ISN’T ENOUGH!
has to at least be combined with slides.
There will probably be an example question in the beginning of December.
Exam is 12/20 points.
Essay in the year.
First part is a summary of the paper.
Then you link the things mentioned in the article with the course.
Word limit 1750.
References should be in APA 7th (guidelines in syllabus)
List of papers we can choose from is going up in 2 weeks at most.
Discussion board
Critically evaluate the course material and post about it there.
At least 2 comments/questions (in at least 3 of the forums) = 1 point
At least 2 reactions/answers (in at least 3 of the forums)= 1 point
6 questions in total, 6 answers in total. 12 interactions in total.
This is two free points.
Need to upload portfolio (screenshots) of the contribution is upload to Toledo before the deadline: 2 January, 2026 at 5 p.m.
Introduction to course
What is cognitive science?
CogSci is essentially computational. It’s occupied with computing certain mental processes.
The goal of it is:
to understand such aspects of intelligent performance such as perception, language processing, planning, problem solving, reasoning, and learning, in terms of the computational processes that underwrite these skills as well as the computational mechanisms (be they silicon hardware or tissue) that may instantiate them.
You can’t play 20 questions with nature and win. (Newell & Simon)
Asking small-scale binary (yes/no) research questions was pointless according to N&S.
They take a computer-like approach to the science. If they can’t recreate it, they’re missing something important about it.
There is knowledge drawn from experimental cogpsy, compsci, neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, mathematics, and engineering.
The interdisciplinarity is a lot more integral, and goes a lot deeper than other fields.
Cognitive science is a puzzle of all these different fields.
No Freudian psychoanalysis (YIPPEE!!!)
Especially concerned with memory, perception, and inferences
CompSci and AI produce machines that behave like intelligent persons.
Philosophy: difficult conceptual questions with regards to being, consciousness, desire, belief…
Linguistics: language acquisition and comprehension. Uses formal models of grammar which are necessary.
Neuroscience: relationship between brain and behavior.
Cognitive science studies
- how humans (and other animals) acquire knowledge
- how they store it
- how they manipulate these representations.
AI researchers: - have to understand all of this shit
Humans often do something very well and some very poorly.
Tasks we do very poorly can be used to learn more about how our shit works.
Brain damage is good actually cause that makes it easy to tie it to a specific function when it’s impaired.
“Cognitive Science is also FUN!”
The way we improve performance in tasks is by taking meth.
Playing an edit of people building an ornithopter in class is lowkey really funny.
Lectures are recorded for as long as at least most of us show up to class.
Prof. will stop posting them if we stop showing up.
True introduction
What is cognitive science? (again)
the scientific study of how people and animals process information.
Mostly smoothly and effortlessly.
Cognitive psychology is acquisition of information, storage of info, retrieval and operation with it to achieve goals.
Mental representations - image or verbal concept of some external. Don’t talk about accuracy in the same sentence - mostly an approximation rather than a rigid thing.
philosophy students really just can’t shut the fuck up and I’m to blame as well
Memory
method of the loci
Plato - memory as a wax tablet. Passive way of looking at it. All these things are stored automatically.
Aristotle - memory as an aviary. You catch birds (active effort) throughout your life, and then when you want to retrieve one you still have to catch it in your aviary as well.
Cognitive science really started with the empiricists, whose main avenue of inquiry was introspection. this was followed by introspectionism - Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener - breaking down complex experiences into elementary sensations, which they would then create a “periodic table” of.
The people they studied were trained in a specific manner of reporting the experiences. As a result, no groups apart from adults could really be studied (think of trying to tell a child to report their pain in a verbose manner).
Americans like John Watson (omg reference) and Edward Thorndike decided to just try focusing on observable stimuli rather than internal experiences.
Some of them even argued there was no thinking, just internalized speech.
Smith seems kinda based - curare experiment. Proved that thinking isn’t just internalized speech.
Rats and maze. Hungry rats with food reward learned the maze, hungry rats with no food reward didn’t really care, rats that started out with no food reward quickly caught up to rats with food reward after one was introduced, meaning they remembered the maze regardless.
When he flooded the maze with water the rats all very quickly made their way towards the end.