Format of Midterm Exams

• There will be four short answer questions, 2 from Cognitive Psychology and 2 from Neuroscience.  You will be asked to answer 2 of the four questions 1 from Cognitive Psychology and 1 from Neuroscience.  A good answer to these questions will be four or so sentences in length.
• 30 or so multiple choice questions; or as George Miller might say, "the magical number 30 + or - 5"
• Questions from both lecture and readings may be asked (See lecture topics below)
• May need to calculate estimates from process dissociation, so bring a calculator if you think it would help.

Be sure to bring...

• Calculator
• A green scantron sheet (you can get these at the bookstore)
• Number 2 pencil
• Your brane....(or mind or both, depending on your view of things)

Midterm Exam 1: Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience

• Experiments dealing with misleading information, memory implantation and the like.  Know the general results of the experiments and what conclusions can be drawn from those results.
• Know the difference between desctrucitve updating and co-existence and the experiment conducted by Bekerian and Bowers to try to distinguish between these theories.
• Know how cognitive psychologists try to explain behavior
• Be able to describe how cognitive psychology was influenced by other disciplines outside of psychology and other approaches within psychology.
• The Mind-Body problem
• Descartes: Dualism
• Hobbes: Materialism
• Hegel: Idealism
• The Origin of Knowledge
• Locke: Empiricism
• Kant: Nativism
• Physiological Psychology: Hermann von Helmholtz
• Wilhelm Wundt: Structuralism; Introspection (Representation)
• William James: Functionalism; Stream of consciousness (Process)
• Sigmund Freud: Psychoanalysis; mental representations; processes; the unconscious
• John Watson: Behaviorism
• Alan Turing: Universal Turning Machines; The Turing Test
• Newell and Simon: The General Problem Solver
• Roger Schank: Conceptual Dependency Theory; Scripts
• Noam Chomsky: Transformational grammar; Deep structure; Surface structure
• Be able to describe the experimental method as it was outlined in class including the difference between theory and hypothesis.
• Be familiar with
• Birth of Cognitive Psychology often dated back to George Miller’s (1956) “The Magical Number 7 Plus or Minus 2”
• Newell and Simon’s development of the General Problem Solver
• Ulric Neisser (1967) publishes “Cognitive Psychology”
• Process models of memory Atkinson & Shiffrin’s (1969) Multistore Model.
• Representation
• Target domain
• Modeling domain
• Nature of relationship between the two
• Hardware/Software distinction
• Difference between categories and concepts
• What functions do categories serve
• Classical model of categories
• Evidence against classical model
• Be able to summarize Wittgenstein's argument against the classical model of categories
• Prototype Model
• Evidence in favor of prototype model
• Evidence against prototype model
• Exemplar Model
• Theory based models
• Basic, superordinate and subordinate categories
• What makes the basic level basic?
• Accoring to Coley et al. why do psychologists and anthropoligsts seem to differ as far as where the basic level is?
• Be able to describe the experiment conducted by Coley et al., including how the research was conducted, what the main results of the research were and how they were interpretted.
• Be able to describe the phenomenology of mental imagery and the uses of mental imagery
• Be able to describe in detail the analog account of mental imagery
• Be able to describe the experiments supporting the analog account
• Be able to describe the propositional account of mental imagery in detail
• What arguments have been put forth for the propositional account?
• How does Thomas's view of the imagery differ from both of these views?
• What evidence or arguments does Thomas make for his point of view?
• Explicit memory
• Implicit memory
• Direct
• Indirect
• Recall
• Free Recall
• Cued Recall
• Recognition
• Old/New
• Forced Choice
• Be able to describe in detail how signal detection theory works
• be able to describe in detail evidence for implicit memory including:
• Shake
• No laughing matter
• False Fame
• Stem Completion (e.g. D - G)
• Homophone Spelling (e.g. KNIGHT vs NIGHT)
• What's the difference between recollection and familiarity?
• How does process dissociation treat the difference?
• Difference between inclusion and exclusion instructions
• How does one calculate recollection in the process dissociation procedure?
• Be able to describe in detail the different approaches describing how cognitive psychology and neuroscience are related.
• Know the following terms in particular: functionalism, reductionism

The Neuroscience section of Exam 1 will cover material presented in lecture and in the assigned readings (9 articles).  The following study questions are designed to help you prepare for this portion of Exam 1.

1. Know what a neuron is, what its parts are, and how it works.  Be able to explain how information is represented in neural circuits and how a neuron functions as an analog computer to process information and “make decisions”(remember the illustration used in class of a circuit that regulates the behavior of a rat foraging for food).
2. Know the basic anatomical organization of the brain.
3. Know the anatomical and functional organization of the neocortex.  What is the function of the neocortex?
4. Know the brain mapping techniques discussed in class and in Article 2 on reserve, what they measure, and what their uses and limitations are.
5. Know what the 2 major determinants of brain complexity are.  Which is the hardware and which is the software?
6. Why are some tasks carried out automatically by the brain (out of consciousness), while others require conscious mental effort?  Why do the former seem so easy and the latter so difficult?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of conscious vs. non-conscious processing?
7. Know what sensory and  motor maps are, and what they tell us about brain function.  What is the sensory homunculus, and what does it tell us about how the brain processes sensory information?
8. Be able to discuss how the visual cortex constructs an internal representation of the outside world.  What are feature detectors, and what role do they play?  What is a receptive field?  How does V1 break down and represent the visual world?  What is columnar organization?  What is the functional relationship between V1 and higher visual processing areas?
9. What types of visual information are processed in the dorsal and ventral streams?  How is information about faces and other objects represented in specialized regions of visual cortex in the ventral stream?  Why do we have trouble perceiving distortions in an upside-down face?  What happens to people who have damage localized in regions of the brain specialized for specific types of visual analysis?  (See articles 3 and 4.)
10. What is a population code?  Be able to give an example and discuss how it works.
11. Who is H.M.?  What type of brain damage does he have, and what symptoms resulted?  What conclusions can be drawn about the nature of memory from his case?  What role does the hippocampus play in memory?
12. What are the various types of memory that have been demonstrated?  Which are conscious and which non-conscious?  How did we come to have so many different memory systems, and why do so few of them communicate with the conscious mind?  Does this provide any insight into why we so often cannot explain our own actions?
13. What type of memory does the amygdala participate in?  What happens when it is damaged?
 14. What are the functions of the prefrontal cortex?  What major subdivisions does it contain, and what is the function of each subdivision?  What evidence has animal research provided about the function of these areas?  What evidence has research on humans with damage to these areas provided?  What can be learned from the strange case of Phineas Gage?
15. What is the somatic marker hypothesis proposed by Antonio Damasio?  What role does the ventromedial/orbitofrontal prefrontal cortex play in behavior according to this hypothesis?  Be able to discuss this hypothesis and the evidence that supports it (see Articles 6-8).
16. Which areas of the cortex are involved in the production and comprehension of language?  What are Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia, and how do they differ?
17. How does language function fit in with the sensory functions of the cortex?  Where and how are the meaning of words stored?  How is this information organized?
18. Be able to discuss any additional information that is presented in class during the last 3 lectures before Exam 1.
 

Midterm Exam 2: Language and Artificial Intelligence

Final Exam: Philosophy and Review of Everything Else