TTC Video - Introduction to Cognitive Science
.MP4, AVC, 1280x720, 30 fps | English, AAC, 2 Ch | 13h 3m | 10.82 GB
Lecturer: Thad A. Polk, Ph.D. Professor, University of Michigan | Course No. 10360

• Psychologists. Beginning in the 1980s, research psychologists began using violation-of-expectation experiments with infants and young children, discovering that the children had a much deeper understanding of the world at an earlier age than we realized.
  
• Neurologists/Neurosurgeons. Scientists would like to know more about how the brain represents the sounds of human speech. Recent studies by neurosurgeons implanting electrodes in the left temporal lobes of epilepsy patients showed that specific populations of neurons respond to very specific sounds of human speech.
  
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) Engineers. Recent developments in AI such as convolutional neural networks and generative pretrained transformer (GPT) models provide new tools for cognitive scientists to better model and investigate brain functions, including visual perception, language, and reasoning.
  

• Expectations and Perception. We assume that we see the reality of the world around us, but that is just not the case. In this exercise, you'll realize how significantly your expectations and assumptions influence what you see. Looking at a picture of dents and bumps on the side of a battleship, you'll discover that your perception is controlled by your unacknowledged assumption that the light source is at the top of the picture. But even when you're made aware of that assumption, it feels impossible to change that expectation.
  
• Working Memory. This is the memory you use to remember something for a short period of time for a particular purpose, e.g., a telephone number (just until you can write it down) or a grocery list (just until you finish your shopping). In this experiment, you'll be asked to remember a very short list of words. Within a few minutes, you'll discover whether your working memory stores the meanings of words-or just their sounds.
  
• Vision and Perception. In this experiment, you'll watch a ball moving across a screen, and you'll notice a blank space where the ball disappears. You've discovered your blind spot in that eye, the place on your retina without any photoreceptors, the place where the optic nerve passes from the eye to the brain. But when you watch the same ball with stripes above and below, you don't see a blind spot in the stripes. Why not? And what does that tell you about the role the brain plays in visual perception and conscious experience more generally?
  

• Louis Victor Leborgne. At age 30, Leborgne suddenly lost his ability to speak, with the exception of one syllable. Despite that profound deficit, his mental and physical abilities seemed to be relatively normal. Based on the work of his physician, Paul Broca, the hypothesis that different functions were localized in different brain regions began to be taken much more seriously.
  
• Phineas Gage. Gage suffered a catastrophic injury when a piece of metal hit his head in an explosion, going through the left frontal lobe of his brain and out the top of his head. Amazingly, Gage survived, but was left with permanent brain damage. From this widely discussed case, scientists began to propose that the frontal lobes play a major role in personality, which has since been substantiated.
  
• "SM." SM is a woman who was generally fearless due to an extremely rare genetic disorder that led to the deterioration of her brain's amygdala. She also couldn't recognize fear in other people, even though her other cognitive functions were fine. Scientists who worked with her were able to learn much more about the neural basis of emotion than had been known at the time, including the fact that the brain contains specialized circuits for fear and multiple fear pathways.
  

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