Review: CS6795 Intro to Cognitive Science

Objective

This course was taken as a requirement for the Interactive Intelligence Specialization. I was also interested to learn how human brains worked; this knowledge would perhaps be useful in the future.

Learning Outcome

The course provided an overview of the various topics in Cognitive Science, including topics such as:

• Representations and Rules
• Images and Connections
• Computational Representational Understanding of Mind (CRUM)
• Embodied and Distributed Cognition
• Relationship Between Cognitive Science and other Topics

The assignments helped to review the concepts. Due to the wide breadth of topics, it was difficult to immediately remember everything but with a record of the lecture slides, I was able to quickly review and remind myself of the concepts taught. The project was based on an interesting simulation tool called Virtual Ecological Research Assistant (VERA). The objective of the project was to dive into how scientists think, and how we can encourage people to think more like scientists.

Overall, this course resulted in a clearer bird's eye view mind map of coginitive science, which could be applied in a variety of other endeavours in the future.

Difficulty

I spent approximately 7 - 12 hours each week on the course. Weeks involving project work took a little more time. It was not as difficult as CS7637 Knowledge-Based Artificial Intelligence in terms of course content, but it was reasonably challenging.