Warning: This ‘study guide’ comprises a list of major topics and concepts covered in the class.

It
is no substitute for meticulous notes taken from the readings and lectures throughout the
quarter. That said, it is still a good jumping-off point for preparing for the exams.

Midterm I Material (mostly multiple choice, some short answer)

Pre-history

Behaviorism

Behaviorism broadly construed (vs. identity theory and functionalism)

Psychological behaviorism’s model of learning (esp. conditioning)
Tolman & Honzik (rats in a maze #1, insight, cognitive maps)
Tolman, Ritchie, & Kalish (rats in a maze #2 (a cross-maze), place-learning vs.
response-learning)
Lashley (serial vs. hierarchical task analysis, hypothesis of subconscious
information processing)

Computation

Finite State Automata and their diagrams

Turing Machines and their tables
Relation to functionalism

Linguistics

Chomsky (surface and deep structure; algorithmic transformations)

Information-processing models in psychology

Miller (information channels, capacity, 7±2 rule)

Broadbent (functional model of selective attention)

A Landmark

Marr (three levels of explanation; top-down theory of vision, stages of processing)

The brain

Basic anatomy (esp. the hemispheres, lobes, neurons, synapses, excitatory and
inhibitory neurotransmitters)
The visual pathway (retina → optic nerve → LGN → occipital lobe < what/where
pathways; contralateral organization)
Ungerleider & Mishkin (cross-lesion disconnection experiments)
Connectionist networks — (basic parts, feed forward, graceful degradation)
Peterson, et al. (lexical processing, presence or lack of semantic processing in various
lexical processing tasks)

**End Midterm I material** (Peterson, et al. tested on final exam, not the midterm)
Midterm II Material (short answer and essays)

The integration challenge and the problem of consciousness

The Sloan Hexagon

The space of cognitive science
The integration challenge
Global integrations (inter-theoretic reduction, tri-level hypothesis) + criticism (functional
decomposition, modules)
Types of consciousness
The easy problems of consciousness vs. the hard problem of consciousness

*end Midterm II material**

Computationalism and Connectionism

Computationalism

The physical symbol system hypothesis

Propositional attitudes, mental content
The language of thought hypothesis (+productivity, compositionality,
systematicity)
The thesis of computationalism
The homunculus problem and Searle’s Chinese Room
von Neumann architecture
Application: Shakey

Connectionism

Neural Nets (neural net diagrams; basic features and other general features)
Applications: Rumelhart & McClelland (Verb Conjugator), McClelland and
Jenkins (physical reasoning)

*the Final Exam (exclusively multiple choice) is comprehensive, covering all topics above*