Psy 318 Cognitive Psychology Paper

Psychology 318 – COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Instructor: Dr. Susan Marshall
Office: 407 Fraser E-mail: [e-mail]
Office Hours: Tuesday & Thursday 9:00-9:15 & 10:45-noon

Teaching Assistant: Rudy Goldstein
Office: 528 Fraser Email: [e-mail]
Office Hours: Monday & Wednesday 11:30-12:30

Text: Ashcraft & Radvansky, Cognition (5th Edition) Website: http://courseware.ku.edu

In this course, you will learn about the scientific study of cognitive processes. The focus will be on the research and theories that have been central to the field. Topics for the course include history, cognitive neuroscience, attention, sensation and perception, memory, language, computer models, decision making, problem solving, intelligence, and
There will be three noncumulative exams of 100 points each. In addition, there will be 12 online quizzes, one for each chapter. These quizzes are designed to encourage reading and processing of the text and lecture material and should be completed on a weekly basis as we cover the material. Each quiz will be worth 10 points and your final quiz point total will be the 10 highest scores you receive (100 possible points). Final grades will be based on performance on the exams and quizzes, relative to the performance of the class. The +/- grading system will be used in this class.

The staff of Services for Students with Disabilities (SSD), 135 Strong, 785-864-2620, coordinates accommodations and services for KU courses. If you have a disability for which you may request accommodation in KU classes and have not contacted SSD, please do as soon as possible. Please also see me privately in regard to this course.
- Perception is problem solving—visual system must put together “pieces” from our environment and figure out the whole picture - Problem with pandemonium o Bottom-up only-the entre model is driven by the data o It doesn’t take into account the effects of context
Connectionism
- Connectionist modeling—a theoretical and computational approach to studying cognition o Uses computer modeling and mathematical computations to simulate/understand cognition o A connectionist network is designed to simulate same tasks - Input units: in a model of a simple connectionist network, input units are basic “cells” that receive inputs from the environment - Hidden Units: this level in the network is completely internal, always one step removed from an input and output - Output Units: The units that report the system’s response, say to the question “what is this word?”
Object Recognition - Recognition by Components (RBC) Theory: o The approach to recognizing letters by features can be explanded to objects o Geons-small number of basic elements that can be combined to form objects we can recognize ▪ Important aspects of the patterns: the edges and how they relate to one