Test 1 Questions

Choose and answer ONE question from each of the three sections below.  Your answer for each question should be approximately 1 typed page.  Your goal should be to write a concise, coherent, and original answer that addresses all aspects of the question.  You can use course readings, slides, and other sources to help you compose your answers.  However, you should note all of your sources at the end of each question and observe all conventions about citations and quotations.  Please make sure to ask about any aspects of the question about which your are unclear.  I encourage you to go through several drafts of your answers.  You should submit your completed tests to turnitin via beachboard by Tuesday 10/16/2008.

Section I

1.) For what is CRUM an acronym? Briefly explicate CRUM. For what are CTC and RTI acronyms?  How does CRUM relate to the CTC and RTI?

2.) What is a cognitive architecture?  What elements go into specifying a cognitive architecture?  Why is it practically important to specify a cognitive architecture in theorizing about human cognition?

3. How does computational cognitive science conceive of cognitive tasks?  How does computational cognitive science go about explaining one's ability to perform a cognitive task?

4.) Discuss how researchers come to reconcieve of learning and cognition during progression from Watson's behaviorism, through Skinner, Hull, and Tolman.

Section II

1.) What is a theorem prover?  How might one go about planning with a theorem prover?  What are the three difficulties we discussed with using theorem provers as planners? Explicate each briefly. 

2.)  What are mental models?  What principles guiding the formation of models are presented by Johnson-Laird?   What is the process Johnson-Laird presents for how we might use mental models to reasoning?

3.) What are heuristics?  What heuristics have Kahneman and Taversky hypothesized to explain human estimates of probabilities?  Make sure to give examples of each heuristic.  Upon what assumptions do these heurisitics rely for their reliaiblity?  

4.) What are content effects?  What is the Mental Logic theory of deductive reasoning?  Why might content effects and biases in conditional reasoning pose problems for the Mental Logic theory?  How might the Mental Logic theory address these problems utilizing the elements of the theory?

Section III

1.) What is a problem space?  How does one think of problem solving in the context of a problem space?  What challenge does one face in searching a problem space?  How do researchers address that problem?

2.) What is the generic structure of a production system? How is knowledge stored? What is the comparison between the elements of a production system and long and short term memory?

3.) What changes to the basic production system architecture do Newell and Anderson introduce to ACT and SOAR in order to make them solve problems in a more human-like fashion.

4.) What is the difference between a symbol system and a language?  What are recursion and combinatorics?  What role do they play in language?