Plan for Fall 2013

LaLoCo will meet more or less weekly in the fall 2013 quarter. The meetings will take place on Thursdays, 12pm—1pm, Meeting & Analysis room (Stevenson 217).

Karl and Adrian are going to work through and present the textbook Modelling High-Level Cognitive Processes, by Richard P. Cooper (with contributions from Peter G. Yule, John Fox and David W. Glasspool), Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

This book is a practical guide to building computational models of high-level cognitive processes and systems. High-level processes are those central cognitive processes involved in thinking, reasoning, planning, and so on. These processes appear to share representational and processing requirements, and it is for this reason that they are considered together in this text. […] Part 1 considers foundational and background issues. Part 2 provides a series of case studies spanning a range of cognitive domains. […] All models discussed in this book are developed within the COGENT environment. COGENT provides a graphical interface in which models may be sketched as “box and arrow” diagrams. Such diagrams are common in psychological theorising, and COGENT builds on concepts such as functional modularity associated with them. Boxes within box and arrow diagrams may be fleshed-out with rules or configured through properties to obtain appropriate behaviours. COGENT also provides support for specifying experimental tasks consisting of blocks of trials analogous to those carried out within standard experimental psychology. Models may then be evaluated by running them on such tasks and comparing their behaviour with that of human participants.

Also check out this Introduction to the COGENT Modeling Environment with a focus on models of sentence processing.

The tentative presentation plan is as follows:

• Karl will do the introduction, i.e., Chapter 1 Modelling Cognition and Chapter 2 An Introduction to Cogent

• Karl and Adrian will alternate presenting the following 6 chapters. Tentatively, this is how it will go:

  • Chapter 3 Arithmetic: a Cognitive Skill — Karl
  • Chapter 4 Problem Solving — Adrian
  • Chapter 5 Deductive Reasoning — Karl
  • Chapter 6 Decision Making — Adrian
  • Chapter 7 Sentence Processing — Karl
  • Chapter 8 Executive Processes — Adrian

If you are interested in presenting any of the chapters or in reading related papers, please let Karl know.