Section 2.1

• Is it worthwhile for cognitive scientists to try to build machines to learn about cognition?

• Is it important that SHRDLU only deals with a micro-world and a restricted language?

• Evaluate Winograd’s statement, “All language use can be thought of as a way of activating procedures within the hearer.”

• What sort of knowledge does SHRDLU need to have to run its parsing procedure?

 

Section 2.2

• Is introspection a valid method in psychology? With respect to Shepard and Metzler’s experimental paradigm, is it significant that it seems to participants as if they are rotating one image to compare it with the other?

 

Section 2.3

• Are there any problems with a top-down approach to cognitive science? What do you think of Marr’s approach in general?

• How plausible do you find Marr’s computational analysis of the visual system? Are there other ways of thinking about what the visual system does?

winograd shrdlu (video from YouTube)

Lecture on mental imagery by Stephen Kosslyn (video from YouTube MIT OpenCourseWare channel)

Lecture on mental rotation by Roger Shepard (video from YouTube)

What shape are a German Shepherd’s ears? (interview with Stephen Kosslyn, from Edge)

 

2.1 Language and Micro-Worlds

The Turing test (entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Eliza test (applet allowing you to talk with ELIZA)

ELIZA (paper by Weizenbaum, 1966, in Communications of the ACM)

A Procedural Model of Language Understanding (article by Winograd, 1973)

SHRDLU resurrection (website with downloadable versions of SHRDLU for Windows)

SHRDLU (website by creator Terry Winograd; includes link to his dissertation)

 

2.2 How Do Mental Images Represent?

Mental imagery (entry from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Imagery and Imagination (entry from Internet Encyclopedia of Phylosophy)

Mental rotation (entry from the NSF-funded Online Psychology Laboratory)

Mental rotation (experiment from Cognition Laboratory Experiments, John Krantz)

The time required to prepare for a rotated stimulus (paper by Cooper and Shepard, 1973, in Memory & Cognition)

Motor processes in mental rotation (paper by Wexler, Kosslyn, and Berthoz, 1998, in Cognition)

The heterogeneity of mental representation: Ending the imagery debate (paper by Pearson and Kosslyn, 2015, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

In defence of high-speed memory scanning (paper by Sternberg, 2016, in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology)

Mental imagery: In search of a theory (paper by Pylyshyn, 2002, in Behavioral and Brain Sciences)

Perceptual Pluralism (paper by Quilty-Dunn, 2020, in Noûs)

The format of mental imagery: from a critical review to an integrated embodied representation approach (paper by Palmiero, et al., 2019, in Cognitive Processing)

 

2.3 An Interdisciplinary Model of Vision

David Marr (short biography from the International Encyclopedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences)

Marr’s approach to vision (paper by T. Poggio ,1981, retrieved from DSpace@MIT)

Marr’s Three Levels: A Re-evaluation (paper by McClamrock, 1991, in Minds and Machines)

David Marr: A pioneer in computational neuroscience (article by Terrence Sejnowski, 1991, in From the Retina to the Neocortex)

Levels of description and explanation in cognitive science (paper by Bechtel, 1994, in Minds and Machines)

Marr’s vision: Twenty-five years on (paper by Glennester, 2007, in Current Biology)

Thirty years after Marr’s Vision: Levels of analysis in Cognitive Science (special issue of Topics in Cognitive Science on Marr in 2015)

The Contribution of the Right Parietal Lobe to Object Recognition (paper by Warrington and Taylor, 1973, in Cortex)

The Hierarchical Evolution in Human Vision Modeling (paper by Ballard and Zhang, 2021, in Topics in Cognitive Science)