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Summary Introduction to Cognitive Science endterm - Tilburg University

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Summary of the book Cognitive Science by Friedenberg, Silverman and Spivey (4th edition). Includes chapter 11, 6, 7, 10 and 14 Endterm Tilburg University, Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence 1st Year Includes summaries of the practicals networks, emotion and embodiment (articles and v...

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  • Chapter 11, 6, 7, 10, 14
  • November 2, 2023
  • December 5, 2023
  • 60
  • 2023/2024
  • Summary

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  • cognition
  • artificial intelligence
  • cognitive science
  • mind

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Introduction to Cognitive Science -
endterm
Don’t forget to do the online quizzes and work with the flashcards. On the exam, names and dates will not be asked.

Flashcards in yellow
Names in orange

Index
Chapter 11 The Social Approach......................................................................................................................................3
Social cognition...........................................................................................................................................................3
Social cognitive neuroscience......................................................................................................................................3
Topics in social cognitive neuroscience.......................................................................................................................4
Is social cognitive neuroscience special?.....................................................................................................................6
Advantages of the social cognitive neuroscience approach........................................................................................6
Theory of Mind............................................................................................................................................................6
Other social cognitive disorders..................................................................................................................................8
Attitudes...................................................................................................................................................................... 8
Impressions...............................................................................................................................................................10
Attribution................................................................................................................................................................. 11
Stereotypes............................................................................................................................................................... 12
Prejudice.................................................................................................................................................................... 13
Overall evaluation of the social approach.................................................................................................................14
Chapter 6 The Neuroscience Approach.........................................................................................................................14
Methodology in neuroscience...................................................................................................................................14
The small picture: neuron anatomy and physiology..................................................................................................18
The big picture: brain anatomy.................................................................................................................................19
The neuroscience of visual object recognition..........................................................................................................21
The neuroscience of attention...................................................................................................................................23
The neuroscience of memory....................................................................................................................................25
The neuroscience of executive function and problem solving...................................................................................27
Overall evaluation of the neuroscience approach.....................................................................................................29
Chapter 7 The Network Approach.................................................................................................................................29
Artificial Neural Networks.........................................................................................................................................29
Characteristics of Artificial Neural Networks.............................................................................................................31
Early conceptions of Neural Networks......................................................................................................................31
Backpropagation........................................................................................................................................................32
Evaluating the connectionist approach.....................................................................................................................33
Semantic Networks: meaning in the web..................................................................................................................34
Network Science........................................................................................................................................................36

, Overall evaluation of the network approach.............................................................................................................39
Chapter 10 The Emotional Approach.............................................................................................................................40
What is emotion?......................................................................................................................................................40
Theories of emotion..................................................................................................................................................40
Basic emotions..........................................................................................................................................................41
Emotions, evolution and psychological disorders......................................................................................................41
Emotions and neuroscience......................................................................................................................................42
Hot and cold: emotion-cognition interactions...........................................................................................................43
Emotions and artificial intelligence: affective computing..........................................................................................45
Overall evaluation of the emotional approach..........................................................................................................46
Chapter 14 The Embodied Ecological Approach............................................................................................................46
Embodied and extended cognition............................................................................................................................46
Perceptual symbol systems and motor affordances..................................................................................................46
Perceptual simulations..............................................................................................................................................47
Dynamical systems theory.........................................................................................................................................48
Dynamical representation.........................................................................................................................................49
Dynamical versus classical cognitive science.............................................................................................................49
Ecological and extended cognition............................................................................................................................50
Integrating cognitive science.....................................................................................................................................51
The benefits of cognitive science...............................................................................................................................52
Practical 1 Networks......................................................................................................................................................52
Article: McClelland et al. (2010) Letting structure emerge: connectionist and dynamical systems approaches to
cognition.................................................................................................................................................................... 52
Video: I am my connectome – Sebastian Seung (2010).............................................................................................55
Practical 2 Emotion........................................................................................................................................................56
Article: Hoemann, Gendron & Feldman Barrett (2017) Mixed Emotions in the Predictive Brain..............................56
Video: You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions; your brain creates them – Lisa Feldman Barrett (2018).............58
Practical 3 Embodiment................................................................................................................................................59
Article: Botvinick & Cohen (1999) Rubber hands ‘feel’ touch that eyes see..............................................................59
Video: Embodiment, sensory sensitivity and voice illusions – Lisa E. Rombout (n.d.)...............................................59




2

,Chapter 11 The Social Approach
Social cognition
Cognitive science has a focus on the individual  shift to interaction with others.
Social cognition = the study of how people make sense of other people and of themselves.

There are 4 assumptions that pervade social cognition as a field:
1. Mentalism: people use cognitive representations. Things are being represented and computed.
o Eg. faces, appearances, but also feelings and thoughts about them.
2. Cognitive processes: how representations develop, operate and change over time.
o Eg. what is prejudice, how does it form and how can we reduce/prevent it?
3. Cross-fertilization: the social cognitive approach is highly interdisciplinary in nature.
4. Applicability: social cognitive research can be applied to the real world.

Differences in the way we think about people and things
Principle People Things
Intentionality People attempt to control the Objects are not capable of controlling
environment. the environment.
Mutuality People think about each other. Objects don’t ‘think back’.
Self-concept Others judge us, provide information about Objects cannot judge or provide
us, and are more similar to us than objects information about us and are very
are. different from us.
Observational bias People act differently when they know they Objects do not act differently when
are being thought about. they are being thought about.
Nonobservable attributes Traits that cannot be observed are crucial Traits are more easily observed but less
to thinking about people. crucial.
Change People change over time and in different Objects change less over time and in
circumstances. different situations.
Accuracy of cognition It is difficult to judge the traits or qualities It is usually easier to judge object
of a person. qualities.
Complexity People are complex; we need to simplify in Objects are usually less complex.
order to understand them.
Explanation We have to explain others’ behaviors. Explanations are not always necessary.

Social cognitive neuroscience
Social cognitive neuroscience = attempts to describe phenomena in terms of interactions between 3 levels of analysis
(scale from broad – intermediate – small):
1. Social psychology: examines the role of human interaction, focusing on people’s behavior in a group setting.
2. Cognitive perspective: examines how we think about one another.
3. Neuroscience level: seeks to examine the location and type of neural processing that takes place in a social
setting and that gives rise to our cognition and behavior.
 Call for emphasis on the cognitive approach as cognition serves as a bridge to unite the fields of social
cognition and cognitive neuroscience.

Ochsner and Lieberman (2001) prism model of social cognitive neuroscience
 Each corner of the prism represents one of 4 different disciplinary
aspects.
 Each face is bordered by 3 corners and stands for one of the 3
approaches.



3

,  Only the field of social cognitive neuroscience takes all these different aspects into account and is thus
represented by the entire prism with all 4 disciplines.




Topics in social cognitive neuroscience
Evolution
Humans are a distinctly social race: ‘ultrasocial’  more than any species we form cooperative groups (eg. family/
friends/teams) and competing groups (eg. tribes/nations/ethnicities).

Is it possible that the social environment of humans led to the biological and cultural evolution of our intelligence?
Cultural intelligence hypothesis General intelligence hypothesis
Complex social interaction created a form of Human intelligence did not evolve in response to particular
social intelligence that then laid the selection forces such as social organization. Instead it emerged
groundwork for more general intelligence to in a general form that could be suited to solving all kinds of
emerge later. problems, whether social or not.

Differentiating between these 2 notions  examining the physical and social cognitive abilities of children who have
not yet been influenced by cultural factors such as written language, symbolic mathematics and formal education.
 Physical cognition = reasoning about things such as space, quantities and causality.
o Can evolve in a wide variety of environments and is thus not specific to social settings.
 Social cognition = reasoning about those things that are directly linked to culture such as social learning,
communication and theory of mind.
From here on comparisons can be made between the children’s performance with that of our closest primate
relatives.
 If the cultural intelligence hypothesis is correct:
o Same score on physical domain tests: both groups have evolved under these conditions.
o Different score on social cognition tests: humans have evolved in more demanding social
environments.

Hermann et al. (2009):
 Testing chimpanzees, orangutans and 2,5 year old human children.
 Their results clearly supported the cultural hypothesis.
o No difference in performance in physical domain.
o On social intelligence, children’s scores were higher by a statistically significant amount.

Additional evidence: studies on brain size
 Positive correlation: the relative size of the neocortex + social factors that measure social complexity.
 Hedgehogs – chimpanzees – humans  scale from smallest to largest relative cortices in the brain.
 It could be that larger social groups cause greater competition for social skills that subsequently leads to the
evolution of cognitive mechanisms for outsmarting others.

Attention
Joint attention = the ability to coordinate attention with a social partner (eg. infants following somebody else’s gaze).
 Key part of social interaction: not only following but also initiating/joining shared attentional focus with
others.
 Joint attention plays an important role in development  language acquisition.

Categories of joint attention
Initiating joint attention (IJA) Responding to joint attention (RJA)
People use gestures and eye movements to direct Following gestures and direction of gaze in order to
attention to people, objects and events. share a common point of reference.
Active form, initiating a joint attentional focus. Passive form, we follow others.
Children with autism have impairments primarily in IJA. Chimpanzees have the capacity for RJA, but not for IJA.
4

,Social cognition begins around the age of 9/12 months.
 Infants become aware of their own goals and activities as well as those of others. Social cognitive skills allow
the child to combine these. They realize their intentions lead to actions and that this is the same for others.
 Children learn that thought is representational and directed toward objects and actions in the world. This
realization can then lead to the use of language and communication to convey the contents of one’s mind to
others.
Attention regulation systems underlying joint attention
Anterior attentional system Posterior attentional system
Underlies the capacity for IJA and emerges slightly later Is used during the learning of RJA in infancy.
in development.
Collection of different neural areas, including the frontal Consists of the parietal and superior temporal cortex.
eye fields which control eye movement.
It controls voluntary, goal-directed attention. This system is involuntary and is used to direct attention
to biologically meaningful stimuli.
Enables us to understand that our personal behavior is Underlies our capacity to perceive the eye and head
directed toward where we attend. orientation of others + spatial representation of our
own bodies to where people are looking/pointing to.
Sophisticated conceptual level of joint attention. Basic level of joint attention.

 Early in development (3/6 months), the anterior and posterior systems interact with each other and with
additional processes such as speed of processing, motivation and the ability to divide attention.
 Development of integrated self-other attention processing (7/9 months).
 Emergence of social cognitive joint attention (10/18 months).
 These processes build on each other.

The attention systems model can account for 2 important observations:
1. Problems in communication between brain areas (especially anterior and parietal areas) may explain autistic
people’s lack of social cognitive skills.
2. In chimpanzees, the parietal attention system is represented, but the anterior system is not  this may be an
explanation their RJA ability is better than their IJA ability.




Mirror neurons
Mirror neuron = a neuron that fires when an animal performs some action and also when the animal observes
another animal performing that same action.
 Neurons ‘mirror’ the performance of others.
 These cells could play a role in imitative or modeling behavior +
help explain how some animals copy others as part of the
learning process.
 [see image of cute monkey that imitates the man]
 A similar mirror neuron system has been observed in human
brains.
5

, Iacoboni et al. (1999):
 Used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
 Found activity in the inferior frontal cortex and the superior parietal lobe when a person performs an action
and also when the person sees another person perform that same action.

The specific pattern of brain activity in these areas has also been found to be similar during the perception of others’
actions and when performing the act oneself. This mirror neuron may play a role in helping people coordinate during
joint action, even allowing them to have shared mental representations. The mirror neurons system may also be used
as part of the experience of empathy (but not yet found in monkeys).

Brain areas considered part of the mirror neuron system
Brain area(s) Cognitive function/ability Animal
Inferior frontal gyrus + inferior parietal lobe Imitating and understanding other’s Macaque monkey
behavior
Inferior frontal cortex + superior parietal Imitation and determination of behavioral Human
lobe intent
Anterior cingulate cortex Empathetic experience of pain Human
Anterior insula Empathetic experience of disgust Human

Social cognition as the Brain’s Default State
Mitchell (2008): social cognition may be so special that it is the default state of the brain. The areas implicated in
social thinking have an unusually high metabolic rate  they tend to burn energy faster than other brain areas when
at rest.
 A higher resting rate means that these areas remain ‘on’ and ready for action even though we may not be
recruiting them to perform some task. This suggests that we remain in ‘people mode’ whenever we are not
actively thinking about anything in particular.

Social brain areas have also been shown to deactivate when people are thinking about nonsocial topics. This seems
to be unique to social cognition. Mitchell (2008) concludes that we are in a state of constant readiness to encounter
other minds  this normal state must be shut down in order to reason about things that don’t involve people.

Is social cognitive neuroscience special?
Social cognitive neuroscience is not without its critique.
 Has it been able to provide new insights into the nature of cognitive processes?
 Can general cognitive processes used in perception, attention, memory, language and problem solving
explain social cognition, or are there special cognitive mechanisms or neural processes specific to social
interaction?

Advantages of the social cognitive neuroscience approach
Potential benefits:
1. Social cognitive neuroscience could unify the field by discovering common brain mechanisms underlying
what where previously thought to be disparate phenomena.
2. Social cognitive neuroscience may also separate what might have been thought to be a unitary phenomenon.
3. When integrating top-down and bottom-up approaches, more can be
learned than by treating them separately.

Theory of Mind
One of the most important social abilities is the understanding that other people
have minds.

Theory of mind (ToM) = the ability to understand others’ mental states, such as
beliefs, desires and intentions; to appreciate how these differ from our own and to
use this understanding to guide our behavior when interacting with others.
6

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