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Description
An introduction to cognitive science, the new discipline emerging from
the interaction of psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy,
neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. The course will range broadly,
examining a variety of approaches to the study of how humans and other
intelligent systems represent, reason, understand, perceive, use language,
learn, and plan purposeful actions. The central assumption is that the
human mind is fundamentally a computational organ and that cognitive processes
can be explicitly modeled. The course will cover the basic issues and
contributions in the field, with particular emphasis on current research
at UT. There will be frequent lectures by faculty from the relevant disciplines
who are engaged in such research. Major topics in the course will include:
Neuroscience: systems neuroscience, functional brain mapping, relating
localized brain damage to spared and damaged abilities, evolutionary biology.
Reasoning, Concepts, and Conceptual Development: categorization, children's
theories of mind, nonmonotonic reasoning, qualitative reasoning, problem
solving, mental models, schemas. Computational Approaches: modularity,
connectionism, symbol manipulation, knowledge representation, machine
learning. Language: speech perception, sentence parsing, natural language
understanding, discourse representation, language acquisition, syntax.
Vision: computational theory, psychology of visual perception, visual
imagination, attention, spatial reasoning. Other Topics: Memory, Philosophy
of Mind, Robotics, Implicit Knowledge, Emotion, Learning.
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