Cognition

Fall 2018

Course site for Wellesley PSYC 217, with a list of class meetings and assignments.

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Class meetings

Introduction, administration, and reading a paper.

2018-09-06

Getting curious about cognition.

2018-09-10

A whirlwind tour of the mind, from head to toe.

2018-09-13

On representing space.

2018-09-17

On representing quantity.

2018-09-20

On representing uncertainty to predict the future.

2018-09-24

How to remember, and how to forget, part I.

2018-09-27

On representing gains and losses in value.

2018-10-01

Exam 1.

2018-10-04

No class — Fall break.

2018-10-08

On representing time and change.

2018-10-11

On representing cause and effect.

2018-10-15

Assembling a toolkit to describe the mind.

2018-10-18

On representing other people and their beliefs about other people, &c., ad infinitum.

2018-10-22

Paper-topic conversations.

2018-10-25

On representing objects.

2018-10-29

How to remember, and how to forget, part II.

2018-11-01

Exam 2.

2018-11-05

How to wreck a nice beach.

2018-11-08

On representing categories and relations.

2018-11-12

Analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking.

2018-11-15

Paper-research conversations.

2018-11-19

No class — Thanksgiving break.

2018-11-22

On individual intelligence.

2018-11-26

On collective intelligence.

2018-11-29

Weighing the evidence for parapsychological representations.

2018-12-03

Exam 3

2018-12-06

AMA / Where am I?

2018-12-10

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Assignments

1 — You and your learning.

2018-09-07

Instructions: Complete the introductory survey sent to you by email and submit it in the body of a reply (only) to me.

2 — Getting curious about cognition.

2018-09-14

Instructions: As part of this course, you will write a final paper that uses existing research on human cognition to answer a question that you’ve posed. The first step is to think of some good questions. What drew you to the study of the mind? What have you experienced or noticed about yourself or others that seems interesting, strange, wonderful, or hard to explain? What are you curious about? In this assignment, you will generate a list of 10 questions about cognition. For example, some questions I’ve had recently are “What’s going on when I struggle to recall something, and then it pops into my mind 10 minutes later?”; “Does everyone in the world have a doppelgänger?”; and “How well could I learn Japanese if I spent the next 40 years studying it for a few hours a week?”. Compile your questions in a Word file and submit it here.

3 — Intuitive cartography of mental maps.

2018-09-21

Instructions: On a large sheet of paper (at least 8.5 × 11 inches), draw a map of a place that you know well (e.g., a room, building, neighborhood, or city). Your map can be as detailed or abstract as you see fit, but you should spend a significant amount of time crafting it, at least an hour. (If your map is simple and abstract, consider working through a few drafts.) Critically, you should not use any external resource like Google Maps or a building floor plan to help you out. The goal is to confront the ways in which your mental representation of the place differs from the kind of map that a cartographer might draw.

On the back, write a few sentences pointing out what properties of the world your map brings to the fore and what properties it does not.

Take a photo of your map, or scan it, and submit it as a JPG or PDF here.

4 — Playing rock paper scissors.

2018-09-28

Instructions: Define an AI that plays rock–paper–scissors in a human-like way. First define how the player will represent the game (its mental representation); then define its strategy (a process over that mental representation). Find a friend to play a few rounds against the player you have defined. Write 500–1000 words defining the representation and process you chose. What aspects of human behavior does your model capture? What aspects of human behavior does your model fail to capture? Write up your assignment in a Word file and submit it here.

5 — Narrowing your focus.

2018-10-12

Instructions: Use the 10 questions you asked in Assignment #2, any feedback you got, and anything you’ve learned or thought about in the course so far to craft 3 questions about cognition that may serve as a topic for your final paper. Rate each question in terms of how excited you would be to write your paper on that topic, on a scale of 1 (aka, “please don’t make me write about this”) to 10 (aka, “I’d hate to write about anything else”). Submit it here.

6 — A problem set on causality.

2018-10-19

Instructions: Read pages 510–522 of Artificial Intelligence: a Modern Approach (AIMA). Complete exercises 14.1, 14.4, and 14.11. Finally, think of an everyday scenario where a person has an incorrect causal model of something. Describe the scenario and misconception, and then draw two Bayes nets, one representing the truth, the other representing the misconception. Submit your problem set here.

7 — Selecting a final-paper topic.

2018-10-26

Instructions: Select a topic for your final paper, then write a tentative outline of the paper. Submit it here.

8 — Replicating false memories in the DRM paradigm.

2018-11-09

Instructions: The Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm is a classic method for studying false memories in the lab. Here is the original paper describing the paradigm. Replicate either the serial-position effect (Figure 1) or the rate of intrusions by running the experiment on some friends. The original word lists can be found on the last page of the paper. Submit a plot of the results here.

9 — A checkpoint.

2018-12-07

Instructions: By now, you should have made significant progress on your paper. Upload a draft with at least 1/3 the final word count as a checkpoint. Submit your draft here.

10 — Replicating the wisdom of the crowd.

2018-12-07

Instructions: In the wisdom of the crowds effect, which you can read about in Galton’s Vox Populi (one of the readings from the class on collective intelligence), the median estimate of a group of non-experts is found to be surprisingly accurate. Here, you’ll replicate that effect. First, think of a quantity that your peers are unlikely to know, but wouldn’t necessarily be surprised to learn. Next, ask at least 20 people to estimate the quantity. Make sure each person earnestly tries their best to get it right. (If you’d like to participate in the class pool, submitting your own example and providing responses to everyone else’s in the pool, email your example to jsuchow@wellesley.edu.)

Once you’ve collected the data, create a document with (a) the question you asked participants, (b) the correct answer, (c) a histogram of participants’ responses, (d) the mean response, and (e) the median response. Finally, write a sentence or two about whether your data replicated the effect.

Submit your writeup here.

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