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Cognition and Process Summary Lectures
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Cognition and Process Summary Lectures -- Part of the Master Communication and Information Sciences at Tilburg University.
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Cognition and ProcessLecture 1: Introduction
Cognition: A faculty for processing information (of any kind), applying knowledge (reasoning), and
changing belief states (learning), or preferences (choosing).
- Sender has a message for the receiver (This is researched separately).
- You have no idea what is going on in your brain, this is invisible to you and intriguing
- Cognition gives us insides in what you are doing and how you communicate.
- Everyone interprets the same thing differently.
- Domains of cognition are attention, memory, language acquisition, interpretation and
production, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making.
- Cognitive processes can be:
o Natural or artificial (Adaptive, anticipatory, goal-directed)
o Lower (automatic – at the core/brainstem) or higher (intentional – in the prefrontal
cortex)
o Conscious or unconscious)
- Psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and computer science all study cognition.
→ language mediates between the sender and receiver, you need to decipher the language.
The evolution of cognition:
We’re not the only creatures that use cognition
One category doesn’t exclude the other
(incremental) → e.g. we all have stimulus and
analogy.
- Stimulus/response: a worm needs a push
to stimulate a response for example.
- Perception-action: For perception you
need more sensory information e.g. fish
group so they look like one big fish to
predators.
- Perception – analogy – action: creatures that can reason. They learn in environments and
apply it in the next. E.g. learning how to open doors to get food and also able to do this in
another room.
- Perception – induction – abduction – deduction – action: human begins have very elaborated
ways of determining how to act. Causality plays a very important role apart from analogy. We
can change the world based on how we think about the world
Reasoning
- Deduction: how we apply our knowledge. Based on rules. E.g. “the beans from this bag are
white (regularity)” – these beans are from this bag (fact) → then the beans in the bag are
white. (conclusion: fact) → 100% true
- Induction: e.g. “these beans are white” (fact) – “these beans are from this bag” (fact) → The
beans from this bag are white (conclusion: regularity) → cannot be 100% true but the more
evidence, the more convincing.
- Abduction: The beans from this bag are white (regularity), -these beans are white (fact) →
these beans are from this bag (conclusion: fact?). → Reasoning from the consequence to a
cause (reversed) → in real life this is called prejudice, in science it’s called a hypothesis.
Induction and abduction are necessary to increase knowledge and what we know about the world.
,Phylogenetic model of the brain
The frontal lobe: responsible or initiating and coordinating
motor movements; higher cognitive skills, such as problem
solving, thinking, planning and organizing; and for many
aspects of personality and emotional makeup. The parietal
lobe is involved with sensory processes, attention, and
language.
➔ Language is at the side of the brain e.g. Wernicke &
Brocka but activates the whole brain when we study
language → embodied cognition.
Examples of (human) cognitive processes:
- Feeling on one’s leg a gush of cold air, one infers
that the door must be open
- Waiting for the train while not being able to see the rails, one notices other passengers picking
up their luggage and one concludes that the train must be coming
- Reciting a poem, one has to open a door’ in memory
- Buying a new pair of shoes, one had to make choices
- Reading this sentence, one wonders what it is about → recursive: referring to oneself (never
ending circle)
- Seeing a picture, one connects the image to something familiar
- Walking from a to b one send instructions to ones limbs to move efficiently
- Learning a new word, one has to link it to existing knowledge and memorise. (otherwise you
cannot remember it = incremental)
- Solving an equation/riddle/crossword puzzle
Cognition: mid-15th century. cognicioun, “ability to comprehend, mental act or process of knowing”,
from Latin cognoscere “to get to know, recognize,” from assimilated form of com “together” +
gnoscere “to know” (etymology shows that the word “cognition” has its origins in classical terms
relating to the concept of knowing)
• The question of whether a particular state or process is cognitive can be understood in terms of
whether it involves representations that are systematically combinable and stimulus-
independent
• When we say a process is cognitive, we mean that it handles information in an adaptive way
and can be modelled usefully as a form of computation
Cognitive science: the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes, it examines
what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on intelligence and behaviour,
especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such
as perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (human or other
animals) and machines (e.g. computers).
- Disciplines: psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics,
psycholinguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education
- Levels of analysis: form low-level learning and decision mechanisms to high-level logic and
planning
- Assumption: thinking can best be understood in term of representational structures in the mind
and of computational procedures.
A modern history of linguistic theories
Scientific approach of linguistic language studies (psychology) started somewhere in the 19th century.
- First half 20th century: mainly descriptive and prescriptive theory (the rules of grammar) and
research on language as a sociocultural phenomenon → started out with the message (the
language itself) – this wasn’t sufficient because you have to study the human being as well.
- 1950/1960: Chomsky’s first attempt to develop a linguistic theory: should explain how we
learn language in a limited time (5 years), and on the basis of unsystematic input. Our
, linguistic competence is supposed to be an isolated faculty. Rule system of grammar is similar
to exact sciences. A dominant group “generative linguists” work from this perspective →
looking for the structure of language, but people use language differently in other contexts and
the structure is also determined by the meaning which you have to include in the syntax and
Chomsky didn’t want to go this way.
- 1970/1980: Cognitive linguistics is a gradually growing alternative theory of language
(comprising conceptual systems, human cognition, and meaning construction). No
autonomous linguistic faculty; grammar is conceptualization; linguistic knowledge is
emergent → reasoning is beyond linguistics but relevant in language. You can’t isolate
language in that sense
Generative linguistics:
- The language system can (and should) be described apart from its actual use and even apart
from its cognitive processing; that explains the acquisition process – no psychology
- The language system is unique – especially syntax is autonomous, independent from any other
subject
- Therefore, to study language one needs to “idealize” the object and abstract from ‘wild’
language with its ungrammaticalities, half sentences, interactions with gestures, and so on.
- One should describe the patterns in a formal language.
Cognitive linguistics:
You can’t research the message as such, you have to include the context. Cognitive linguistics
included the sender or receiver with the context (what is the meaning that I want to convey/ what is it
intended to elicit to the receiver), but no model yet with both perspectives at the same time.
- The language system is a cognitive system that will share its basic architecture with other
cognitive systems; the cognitive language system and the way it operates resembles other
(cognitive) systems.
- Linguistic competence is the capacity to extract regularities from the language one is exposed
to, similar to how a child needs to extract regularities from all kinds of input it is exposed to
o Children learn in chunks e.g. ‘gohome’ ‘inthekitchen’. And don’t know that ‘kitchen’
and ‘the’ are separate words. Our memory also consists of chunks.
- Language is not a static system; it moves and changes though time and it’s (slightly) different
between language users → it’s evolving and dynamic, language changes all the time.
(according to generative linguists this should be impossible)
- Language should be studies while it’s used – there is no system above and beyond language in
use → it’s integrated (difficult to make a model that explains this, so we have to restrict
ourselves)
Two perspectives:
Language can be approached as a product (the message) or as a process (what you need to interpret the
message), although both are fundamentally related.
- Linguistic, as a product: Which meaning can be said to be ‘encoded’ in the linguistic
expression? Or be implied by this expression? Or be implies in this expression, given a
pragmatic context in which it has been uttered? Or be inferred from it, given the knowledge
and beliefs if its interpreter? How can we represent such meaning (or combinations of
meaning)?
- Psycholinguistic, as a process: What happens in the head of a language user when a certain
linguistic expression is presented? Which processes run in which order to result in a specific
representation of meaning? How do reconstructions of language processing relate to models
about the functioning of the brain? How do these models of language processing explain
errors, hesitations, obvious difficulties, ‘imperfections’?
Representation:
- Interpretation is not a 1:1 mapping of a linguistic form on a (mental) world
, - Interpretation is a process in which a mental representation is built from the instructions in the
utterance – based on all contextual information (via nay of the senses) and relevant knowledge
and attitudes. However, we can abstract from a context, vary in contexts, and so on, to learn
about what seems to be encoded in the linguistic form as such
- The representation resulting from interpretation cannot be observed immediately – it’s in fact
‘theory’(a model)
- Linguistic modelling can be tested in experiments.
- The processes leading to the representations and the representations themselves are meant to
be psychologically plausible (come to an understanding of us as human beings)
Linguistic expressions → cognitive processing → mental representation (relation language & brain)
Lecture 2: Model of language processing; process and product
Language comprehension equals the construction of a coherent mental representation.
Main source of coherence in text representation = the language user
a) When skiing, John lost one of his skis and fell
b) He is at home now with a broken leg
Establishing a coherent representation involves:
- Referential coherence: Interpreting ‘he’ in b) as referring to John in a)
- Relational coherence: Interpreting b) as the consequence of a)
Inference: The process of creating coherence
➔ No causal relationships in the text of these 2 sentences. Otherwise it contained “so” or
“because”
Model of language comprehension: What the brain does when you comprehend language
Very basic and we do this automatically and very fast. We don’t see letters or characters, but groups of
characters immediately. However, learning goes slower.
- Visual perception of characters
- Word recognition: because it’s something you already know. You can read it fast
- Syntactic parsing, semantic interpretation: group the words and assign this group/unit a
function (syntax) e.g. in January 1966 is a time indication (semantic), you have to read on to
understand what they want to say with this.
o Forming a sentence: a sentence is a syntactic unit as well, but you wrap a the
information you have obtained.
- Sentence integration: Takes more time to wrap up.
- Integration with world knowledge: (discourse) sentencing forming a text (which is a construct
interpreted differently by different people. You can’t remember something you’re not familiar
with. You need language
- Text representation: Text should cohere in order for you to understand it. Cohesive markers
like pronouns, connectors etc. Confine, and concluded (not infinitely long)
We study a discourse but don’t know what a discourse is. This can be infinitely long
You use al kinds of knowledge to comprehend a text:
- World knowledge: negatively defined → everything we don’t know but must be there. All the
things we know, we give a name. e.g. world knowledge about sound is called phonology. If
you don’t know but it is there, it’s world knowledge.
- Text topic: What is this text about
- Text structure: how to you build a journal paper / recipe / fairy-tale etc.
- Meaning
- Syntactic function
- Words
- Sounds
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