Minds & Machines - Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology is a branch of psychology dealing with the 'cognitive' aspects of mind: perception, attention, categorization, memory, learning, language use, reasoning, and decision-making. As a branch of psychology, cognitive psychology typically focuses on the human mind. Unlike the psychological behaviorists, cognitive psychologists want to know the underlying, 'internal' mechanisms that brings about these cognitie phenomena. Thus, cognitive psychologists are not just interested in cataloging human cognitive performance under various conditions, but try to explain such cognitive performance by postulating and testing models of these mechanisms. Cognitive psychology is therefore very much an empirical science.

Below are 4 subfields of Cognitive Psychology that are well supported by Minds & Machines in terms of courses, faculty, and laboratories:

• Cognitive Modeling
  
• Psychology of Reasoning
  
• Perception and Action
  
• Cognitive Engineering
  

Cognitive Modeling

Cognitive Modeling is an area of cognitive psychology that concerns itself with building 'total' architectures of cognition. Thus, cognitive modelers try and build models of cognition that integrate perception, attention, memory, decision-making, etc. A popular cognitive architecture that is widely used in the CogWorks lab is the ACT-R architecture. ACT-R provides a basic architecture of cognition, but lets the user fill in the details to try and construct models for specific tasks, such as programming a VCR, driving a car, or playing a game of Tetris (note how these are all tasks that would indeed invoke many different aspects of cognition).

Psychology of Reasoning

Psychology of reasoning tries to figure out how people reason. Not how well people reason, but the mechanisms by which people reason, rightly or wrongly. In fact, it is often the cases where people make mistakes in their reasoning that are most telling about the underlying mechanisms. Two popular but competing theories of reasoning are mental logic theory - which states that humans reason through the application of abstract reasoning schemas (e.g. 'Q is the case whenever P is the case. So, since Q is not the case, P is not the case') - and mental model theory - which states that humans reason through the construction and subsequent inspection of more concrete models compatible with the given information.

Perception and Action

Perception and action studies human's perceptual apparatus and motor control as they navigate their environment. Perception and action is particularly interested in the interplay between the two: obviously one's perceptions drive one's action, but one's actions can also drive one's perception, as one may re-position themselves so as to get a better look. But most interesting are those cases where there is a continuous feedback loop between perception and action, such as when one tries to grab (e.g. catch a ball) or avoid (e.g. avoid a collision with a moving object) something, or when one simply naviagtes a difficult terrain. The difficulties that roboticists have in designing robots to perform such every day tasks attests to the ingenuity of the mechanisms that are brains must be implementing, so researchers want to figure out how exactly we are able to do this.

Cognitive Engineering

Cognitive Engineering applies the knowledge of the human mind to create more efficient, effective, or engaging products or tools. For example, just as the human body puts constraints on the size and placement or the buttons on a remote control, the nature of the human mind will put constraints on how many buttons on a remote control (let alone how many remote controls!) are actually helpful. Human-Computer Interaction is one such example of what we might call 'cognitive ergonomics': HCI researchers try and figure out how to design effective computer interfaces. However, knowing the human mind has other applications as well: the gaming industry, for example, is very interested in knowing what makes a game engaging. And, educators could make use of different educational technologies to 'fit' individual learning styles.

Recommended Dual Major: CSCI/PSYC, CSE/PSYC

Recommended Courses: Introduction to Cognitive Science, Introduction to Cognitive Engineering, Introduction to Game Design, Human-Computer Interaction, Cognitive Psychology
Associated Faculty: Wayne Gray, Mike Kalsher, Selmer Bringsjord, Marc Destefano, Bram van Heuveln
Associated Labs: CogWorks Lab, RAIR Lab
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For more information contact: Bram van Heuveln