Representation

Cognitive Science is the science of mental representations and processes. But what are representations?

Primary Readings

Everyone should read these and be prepared to discuss:

• Markman, A. B. (2013). Knowledge representation. Psychology Press. Chapter 1: Foundations.

Markman chapter

There are several big ideas from cognitive science that Markman reviews in this chapter:

The famous Wason Card Selection task. This task shows that people often perform very differently on what is essentially the same reasoning task with just the surface characteristics changed. Two problems having the same structure but different surface characteristics are called problem isomorphs, and getting people to solve them can lead to very weird results sometimes. Why do you suppose that is?

Markman gives a really nice definition of what a knowledge representation is, using four elements. His thermostat example is quite well-known and often quoted.

His point about comparing different representations (“Evaluating proposals for representation”) is at the heart of what many theories in cognitive science are all about. -What- are the mental representations and processes that someone uses to do something?

As Markman alludes, Marr’s “levels of description” is a huge and enduring idea in cognitive science. It is the idea that the same system can be inspected and understood at different levels of abstraction. At what level of abstraction do we study people in cognitive science?