Twelve Issues for Cognitive Science – Donald Norman, 1980
1) Norman is struck by how little is known about cognition.
2) Human cognition is not the same as artificial cognition. He argues that in studying cognition, many critical aspects of animate cognitive systems are ignored.
3) Several concepts must become fundamental to study of cognition, including:
a) Culture
b) Social interaction
c) Emotion
d) Motivation
1) Human composed of separable subsystems and components of information processing, which form the Pure Cognitive System (PCS).
i) These don’t say much about real world.
2) Author says study of cognitive science requires interaction of different issues, such as history of person, culture, etc.
a) There must be more to human intelligence than the pure cognitive system. The complex interactions of cognitive roles are exemplified in:
i) Tenerife airplane crash.
ii) Classroom – classroom behavior is a result of many forces.
b) Norman holds that social interaction can be viewed as a cybernetic system, with feedback, depending on interaction with the environment.
1) Animate systems:
a) Artificial and natural systems made of different stuff.
b) Basic functions differ.
c) Animate systems must maintain and protect themselves.
d) Physical systems require maturation.
e) Survival, goals, desires, purpose.
2) Traditional view says we need the PCS and Regulatory System (RS).
a) Emotions are carryover from earlier time.
3) Norman suggests maybe PCS is not pinnacle of human functioning.
a) Due to issues of survival in biological systems, the PCS is apt to serve the RS, not the other way around, and PCS is an artificial situation grafted onto biological organism.
b) Emotions play a critical role in behavior.
1) Belief systems
a) Cultural knowledge, rules for memory and thought.
b) They determine much of cognitive behavior.
2) Consciousness
a) Subconscious processing is essential for functioning.
3) Development
a) Adults have skills, knowledge and belief systems – different, not just more than, children.
b) Better study of development cycle could lead to better understanding of the adult.
4) Emotion
a) Primitive leftover or sophisticated states?
5) Interaction
a) Intelligence is supplemented by social interaction and use of environment.
b) Human interaction is normal mode, so to study phenomena like memory, language, and problem solving in isolation is to address only a small part of cognition.
6) Language and (9) Perception
a) Complex and important.
7) Learning
8) Memory
a) Central to human cognition and central to PCS
b) Norman suggests various theories of memory:
i) Memory structures
ii) Distributed in space
10) Performance
a) Much of brain devoted to motor control.
b) Intricately linked with sensory systems.
11) Skill
a) Specialized subsystems of learning and performance.
12) Thought
a) As long as we lack knowledge of consciousness, we won’t understand role of conscious thought.
b) How can we study this in isolation?
1) Motivation
a) Norman not convinced that there is single phenomenon of motivation, rather combo of cultural, biological, emotional.
2) Role of environment
1) Narrowly based research shouldn’t take place in a vacuum.
2) Decomposition of problems, but global considerations of the 12 issues.
3) Wants cognitive science to be recognized as complex interaction among different issues of concern.
a) Must understand parts first, in context of the whole.
The Mind’s New Science - Gardner
Chapter 1: What the Meno Wrought
1) Greek Agenda
a) The Meno, by Socrates, is a dialogue in which a slave is questioned about geometry. The slave knows that a square with sides of two feet contains four square feet, but when told a certain square contains eight square feet, he incorrectly says that the sides must be four feet long. The actual geometric relationship is eventually taught to the slave.
i) Significant because it was first discussion of:
(1) Nature of knowledge.
(2) Where it came form.
(3) How it is represented in the mind.
b) Meno resembles some of same questions asked by cognitive science today.
2) Definition and scope of cognitive science
a) Term first began to be used in 1970s.
b) Author’s definition: Empirically based effort to answer long-standing epistemological questions, concerned with nature of knowledge, its components, sources, development and deployment.
c) Five important features:
i) A level of mental representation is necessary to explain human behavior, action and thought.
(1) Human cognitive activity must be described in terms of symbols, schemas, rules and images.
ii) Understanding the mind as the electronic computer.
(1) Attitudes vary amongst the various disciplines disagree as to how viable the computer is as a model of the aspects of cognition in which they are interested.
iii) De-emphasis of emotion, historical and cultural factors and role of background context.
(1) Critics argue that it is wrong to bracket cognitive science apart from these issues.
iv) Much is to be gained from interdisciplinary studies.
(1) Critics say that you can’t progress by compounding disciplines.
v) Key ingredient in contemporary cognitive science is a harkening to issues raised in Western philosophical tradition, dating back to Greeks.
Chapters 2-3 discuss the various interdisciplinary conversations and projects that took place in this century, preceding and surrounding the unofficial launching date of cognitive science in the mid 1950s.
The components that gave rise to cognitive science were all present in the early part of the century, although the actual birth date occurred around 1956. Gardner explains why it arose when it did and in the form it did in the following chapters.
1) The transcript of Michael Cole’s lecture contains the historical highlights.
1) Cognitive science was officially recognized around 1956.
a) There was a sort of convergence of various disciplines, including experimental psychology, linguistics, computer simulation, and informational processing, artificial intelligence, among many others.
Conclusion
Cognitive science was based on the hunch that human thought would turn out to resemble operations of the computer. Gardner believes that the future of cognitive science rests on how:
1) The computational paradox must be resolved.
a) The application of methods and models drawn from the computational realm has helped to understand the ways in which humans are not very much like these prototype computers.
b) The kind systematic, logical view of human cognition that the early cog sci literature studied does not adequately describe much human thought and behavior.
2) The cognitive challenge must be met.
a) Mainstream cog sci encompasses disciplines of cognitive psychology, AI, philosophy and linguistics.
i) Gardner says other disciplines mark a boundary for cog sci., at ends of the field such as:
(1) Neuroscience, where issues of representation and computer-as-model are not encountered.
(2) Anthropology may be better handled outside of cog. sci.
3) Unless cognitive aspects of language or perception can be joined to neuroscientific and anthropological aspect, the discipline will be incomplete.
1) Notes a paradox: the kinds of problems being examined by cognitive scientist after 1984 bear a closer relationship to the worldview of the “forefathers” of cognitive science; that is, trying to understand how the brain and the nature of computation came together.
a) A first generation of cog. Scientists were not concerned with the brain or nervous system.
2) Gardner notes two trends in field of cog sci that he links to early work in the 30s and 40s:
a) Increase in reconnection cognitive psychology with neurosciences.
b) Trend towards connectionist modeling.
i) Gardner sees PDP work as first serious challenge to the strong representational view.
(1) Stands in opposition to classical Newell-Simon and Fodor views of cognition.
(a) Connections instead of symbols.
ii) Did not foresee study of cognition situated in context (embodied cognition).
3) He neglects to comment on increased influence of ideas about cultural study/anthropology.
a) He missed the trend that interconnected changes were bringing about new trends in field.
CogSci 200 Seminar, October 19, 2001
Discussion Section Notes
In the discussion section, we did not discuss the Mind’s New Science chapters by Gardner, but instead focused on the Twelve Issues for Cognitive Science paper by Don Norman.
1) Don Norman - We began the section by discussing Don Norman.
a) Norman was one of the original members of the Cognitive Science Department at UCSD.
i) Played a primary role in institutionalizing Cognitive Science and developing connectionism.
ii) He was involved with the HCI lab.
b) He left UCSD, and has since worked in a variety of positions, including Apple and HP(?).
i) He became more interested in cognitive artifacts, and also how computers are involved in everyday life.
ii) It is believed that he is currently trying to establish a virtual university.
c) He wrote several books, including a bestseller, which was originally titled Psychology of Everyday Things, and was later changed to Design of Everyday Things.
2) Views of Human Processing
a) Norman is saying that humans don’t think in isolation. In his paper, he provided diagrams that decomposed human processing into components, including a pure cognitive system (PCS). He points out that the PCS is embedded in:
i) A regulatory system and
ii) The physical and social environment.
b) Norman’s views, over time, have developed into what we today think of as distributed cognition.
i) By today’s standards, the views expressed in his paper do not seem very radical.
ii) Even by 1990, the model of human information processing shown in Figure 1 of his paper may have been wrong. Perhaps cognition did not have to be decomposed in this manner.
c) Some of Norman’s ideas about social embededness are the same topics that are being investigated in Cognitive Science today.
i) It was proposed in the discussion that perhaps the arguments have not advanced very much because of the inherent difficulties in modeling the effects of social interaction on cognition.
3) Rodney Brooks
a) There was some discussion of Rodney Brooks, who is the head of the AI lab at MIT. By the late 80s, Brooks had a more radical view of human information processing than Norman.
i) Figure 5 in Norman’s paper would be more representative of Brooks’ view of cognition.
(1) The lower level regulatory system that controls behavior communicates with the higher-level cognitive system.
ii) The architecture of Brooks’ model is represented by layers of complexity, where:
(1) Bottom layers work for survival of system.
(2) Higher layers have to be able to override the lower layers. These are the goal-oriented levels.
(3) The system may be modular as well as layered.
b) Brooks said there is no need for internal representation.
4) Nature of Norman’s Twelve Issues paper
a) Paper was written in the early years of Cognitive Science, possibly immediately following the first Conference in Cognitive Science, which was held at UCSD.
b) Sounds like it may be an adaptation of an invited talk.
c) Norman’s views have a decided “West Coast” slant. In fact, the paper seems to be a sort of refutation of the views of “East Coast” Cognitive Science.
i) East Coast Cognitive Science:
(1) Is represent by modularity and symbols
(2) Is interested in solving higher order problems, such as chess, mathematics, etc.
(3) Is said to treat cognition as if it’s physics, whereas the West Coast view treats cognition like biology.
5) Discussion of Twelve Issues - (At this point in the discussion section, Mike Cole, the invited speaker, joined the discussion.)
a) Belief systems
i) Norman proposes that before we go out and examine things in the environment, we must establish our philosophical ideas.
(1) Mike Cole noted that Norman did not reference any philosophers in his paper.
b) Consciousness
i) Norman says we don’t know enough about it, and that it should be examined more.
c) Learning
i) At the time the paper was written, learning may not have been central to psychology or AI, but that changed in the years following this paper.
(1) There was a brief discussion of expertise, and the amount of time that is required to develop expertise in a subject. This has generally been cited to be 10 years.
(At this point we decided not to just proceed step by step through the twelve issues.)
d) Role of emotion in cognition
i) Norman says role of emotion needs to be examined, but generally in Cognitive Science, emotion has been ignored.
6) The problem of Cognitive Science
a) There was a general discussion of what constituted Cognitive Science.
i) Must there be computation modeling?
ii) Is it a single science or many sciences?
b) Norman concludes by saying that in studying Cognitive Science, we should pick a problem to investigate it in minute detail, but that we should pause in our research periodically to reexamine and reevaluate our direction and beliefs.
i) The changes in Don Norman’s own career most likely reflect these beliefs.
CogSci 200 Seminar, October 19, 2001
Mike Cole, UCSD Communications Department
“Cognitive Science and Cultural Psychology: An Historical View”
Lecture Notes
A written transcript of the talk that Mike Cole presented to the CogSci 200 Seminar on October 19, which had originally been presented at UCSB in 1997, can be found on the CogSci 200 web page.
The transcript of Mike Cole’s 1997 talk on the CogSci 200 web page mirrors the talk that he presented to the CogSci 200 seminar, except that at the conclusion of the CogSci 200 seminar talk, he presented a more detailed description of his current work in cognitive engineering. This point of departure will mark where I begin my notes.
1) 5th Dimension – This is a program that Mike Cole developed to help children that had been thought to have learning disabilities. The program works with kids at after-school programs and mixes play and academically oriented activities. 5th Dimension provides an artifact rich environment designed to promote learning and development.
a) The program utilizes a Question-Asking-Reading format, with the goal of combining both top-down and bottom-up processing, as well as teaching the child to mediate the world through print.
i) They used scripted activities that involved both computers and adults.
b) Results have been that children behaved better in school and scholastic performance improved.
2) Community college to universities
a) Mike Cole is also interested in using cognitive engineering to develop a program to help community college students advance into university systems.
A short question and answer session followed the talk:
Q: What have we learned in Cognitive Science that is useful for children?
A: There are a variety of ways to teach children how to read, not just one way. Cole believes that bottom up processing alone (phonics-based reading) has not been successful in teaching kids to read.
Q: Why won’t the NSF fund 5th Dimension?
A: Part of the reason may be that it is difficult to set up controlled experiments when performing cognitive engineering task.