| Unit name | Cognitive Modelling in Psychology |
|---|---|
| Unit code | PSYC31039 |
| Credit points | 10 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Professor. Farrell |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | School of Psychological Science |
| Faculty | Faculty of Life Sciences |
This unit will focus on two key questions central to cognitive science - how is our knowledge of the world represented, and how is this knowledge related to the structure of the world? We will depart from consideration of qualitative and verbal psycholgical theories, and explore alternative theoretical approaches in which structures, representations and processes are precisely specified in formal models. Three different approaches to answering these questions will be examined. Models in the spirit of classic cognitive psychology that treat people as symbol manipulators (i.e. the computer metaphor) will be considered, and compared with connectionist models, in which knowledge is represented not as rules, but id distributed over strengths of connections in neural networks. Finally, we will consider how the brain seems optimised to operate in the natural world, and how we can understand human behaviour by examining properties of the world we behave in.
