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
For millennia, philosophers and scientists have been trying to unlock the secrets of the mind with only limited success—until now. Today, with modern technologies, including the best in neuroscience, medical imaging, and recent advances in artificial intelligence, we are making more progress than ever before.
In Introduction to Cognitive Science, Professor Thad A. Polk takes you on a fascinating tour of the latest discoveries in the relatively new field of cognitive science. The goal is nothing less than understanding every interaction working in the human brain to produce all forms of cognition. Computer scientists, engineers, linguists, physicians, psychologists, and more are all pursuing the mysteries of the most complex structure in the known universe: the human brain.
But how do we learn about the mechanisms underlying human cognition? Unlike scientists studying other parts of the body, hands-on examination of the brain yields limited results. We can certainly learn about the brain's structure, but where is the "thinking"? How can we best use our mind to learn about the mind?
In 24 exciting lectures, Professor Polk will share dozens of the most challenging questions in cognitive science today: How do humans process language? How do we make decisions, and why do we so often regret them later? What are emotions, and why do we feel them? How does the brain affect our visual perception of the world? In this course, Professor Polk gives the latest, exciting answers for these questions, and many more.
Getting around the Black Box
Since we cannot directly see how the objective, measurable activity in the brain becomes our subjective world, scientists often describe the mind as hidden in a "black box." Cognitive scientists use a variety of interdisciplinary methods to get around this fundamental problem. In Introduction to Cognitive Science, you'll learn about contributions from:
- 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.
