Instructor: Dr. Stephen Hirtle
Office: 735 IS Building
Office Phone: 624-9434
Email: sch@lis.pitt.edu
Office Hours: By appointment
Class Meets: Thurs, 3:00pm-5:50pm
Required Texts:
Overview: This course examines the cognitive, computational and philosophical bases of cognitive science. Cognitive science provides an interdisciplinary approach to the study of thinking and cognition, and includes the sub-disciplines of psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, anthropology, linguistics and neuroscience. In the first half of the course, we will review the historical roots of cognitive science and discuss a variety of symbolic representational methods. In the second half of the course, we turn to distributed representations, including machine learning and connectionist approaches. Finally, several specific topics are examined in detail to highlight how the cognitive science approach is unique in answering questions about human cognition. These topics include reasoning, categorization, and language.
The goals of this course are as follows. The course incorporates a fairly wide survey of topics and issues and it includes an historical perspective. This particular course draws heavily from the field of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. At the same time, readings are chosen to avoid too much overlap with other Cognitive Science courses.
Assignments: Your performance will be evaluated on the basis of two exams and one paper. The exams will be held in class and will test your understanding of the readings and class discussions. They will consist of "thought-type" questions. The instructions for the paper are found separately. The paper and each exam will count 1/3 of your grade. The final exam will not be cumulative.
A syllabus showing topics to be discussed each week and a bibliography of assigned readings follows. You need to read the appropriate readings before the class in which they are assigned and to come to the meeting prepared to discuss them thoughtfully. Although I will lecture for most of the meetings, you should be prepared to answer questions that I pose and to contribute ideas, suggestions, and questions of your own.