BCS II Course Syllabus
9.012
Spring 2001
Meeting Times: 10 - 12 am MWF NE20-461
Course Organizers: Nancy Kanwisher and Earl Miller
TA: Camillo Padoa-Schioppa
camillo@mit.edu
Part I: Foundations of Cognitive Science - Steven Pinker
Feb 7 W: Organizational Meeting //
Mental representation and computation
Feb 9 F: Mental representation and computation //
Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Genetics
Feb 12 M: Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Genetics
Feb 14 W: Recitation
Readings:
 Pinker, S. 1997. How the Mind Works, Chapters 1-3, and part of Chapter 4., pp. 284-298.
Papers to be presented/discussed:
 Daly, M. & Wilson, M. 1999. The truth about Cinderella. Yale University Press.
 Klein, et al. 2000. Transient Activity in the Humam Cacalrine Cortex During Visual-Mental
Imagery: An event-Related fMRI Study. J Cog Neuroscience, 12, 15-23.
 Bouchard, T.J.Jr. 1994. Genes, environment, personality. Science, 264, 1700-1701.
Part II: Math Background & Neural Networks - Sebastian Seung
**Note: Class will meet in 14-0637, basement of bldg. 14**
Feb 16 F: Linear algebra with MATLAB
[Feb 19 M: President's Day - Holiday]
Feb 21 W: Simple perceptrons
Feb 23 F: Multilayer perceptrons
Feb 26 M: Attractor neural networks
Readings:
 J. Hertz, A. Krogh, and R. G. Palmer. Introduction to the Theory of Neural Computation,
Addison-Wesley, 1991. sections 2.1-2.2, 5.1-5.3, 6.1, 6.3.
 J. Hopfield. Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational
abilities. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci.USA. 79:2554-8 (1982).
Optional recommended readings:
 David A. Robinson. Implications of neural networks for how we think about brain function.
Behav. Brain Sci. 15, 644-55 (1992).
Study questions:
 What is the difference between the way in which feedforward and recurrent network models store
memories?
 What is the evidence for multistability in the brain, and what does this phenomenon have to do
with memory?
Part III: Computational Vision - Pawan Sinha
Feb 28 W:
Mar 2 F:
Mar 5 M
Mar 7 W
Computational Vision I
Computational Vision II
Computational Vision III
Recitation
Readings:
Chapter 10 Motion and Depth in Foundations of Vision, by Brian Wandell. Published by Sinauer
Associates, MA, 1995.
Chapter 31 Interactions between motion, depth, color, and form: the utilitarian theory of perception.
VISION: Coding and Efficiency by Colin Blakemore (Ed.). Published by Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
Chapters 1 and 2, Object recognition in High-level Vision by Shimon Ullman. Published by MIT
Press, 1996.
Biederman, I. (1987) Recognition by Components: A theory of human image understanding.
Psychological Review, 94, 115-147.
Papers for discussion:
Sinha, P. and Poggio, T. (2000) High-level learning of early perceptual tasks. Perceptual Learning,
Ed. Manfred Fahle, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. (In press)
Williams, SM, McCoy AN, Purves D (1998) An empirical explanation of brightness. Proc Natl Acad
Sci 95: 13301-13306.
Lotto, RB, Purves D (1999) The effects of color on brightness. Nature Neurosci 2: 1010-1014.
Purves D, Lotto R B, Williams SM, Nundy S, and Yang, Z (2000) Why we see things the way we do:
Evidence for a wholly empirical strategy of vision. Philos. Trans. Roy. Soc (In press).
Study Questions:
1. Can there be a unified theory of visual perception, or are we doomed to live with an ever-growing
compendium of largely unrelated case studies? What characteristics would a theory need to have to
be considered a unified theory?
2. Is visual perception continuous with visual cognition? Is it useful/meaningful to parse vision into
low, mid and high-level processes?
3. Contrary to popular belief, relatively few of the real-world machine vision systems use algorithms
inspired by studies of human vision. What do you think this says about the brain's computational
strategies for solving vision problems?
Part IV: Cognitive Neuroscience of Object Recognition - Nancy Kanwisher
Mar 9 F Cognitive Neuroscience of Object Recognition I
Mar 12 M : Cognitive Neuroscience of Object Recognition II
Mar 14 W: Cognitive Neuroscience of Object Recognition III
Mar 16 F Recitation
Readings:
Kanwisher, N.; Downing, P.; Epstein, R.; & Kourtzi, Z. (2001). Functional Neuroimaging of Human
Visual Recognition. Kingstone & Cabeza (Eds.), The Handbook on Functional Neuroimaging. MIT
press.
Gauthier, I. (2000). What constrains the organization of the ventral temporal cortex? Trends in
Cognitive Sciences 4: (1) 1-2.
Farah, M. (1995). Dissociable systems for recognition: A cognitive neuropsychology approach. In
Kosslyn & Osherson (Eds.), Visual Cognition.
Tanaka, K. (1996). Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. Annual Review of Neuroscience 19,
109-39.
Papers to be Discussed/Presented
Moscovitch, M., Winocur, G., Behrmann, M. (1997). What is special about face recognition?
Nineteen experiments on a person with visual object agnosia and dyslexia but normal face
recognition. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9, 555-604.
Logothetis, N.K.; Pauls, J. (1995). Psychophysical and physiological evidence for viewer-centered
object representations in the primate. Cereb Cortex 5, 270-88.
Ullman, S. & Soloviev, S. (1999). Computation of pattern invariance in brain-like structures. Neural
Networks 12, 1021-1036.
Grill-Spector, K; Kushnir, T; Edelman, S; Avidan, G; Itzchak, Y.; and Malach, R. (1999).
Differential Processing of Objects under Various Viewing Conditions in the Human Lateral
Occipital Complex. Neuron, 24 (1) 187-203.
Study Questions:
1. (How) does the brain carve up the job of object recognition? That is, what are the functional
components of the object recognition system? How functionally independent are they?
2. What is the nature of the representations that are extracted en route to object recognition?
3. When and how can brain-based data constrain cognitive/computational theories of visual
recognition?
Mar 19 M: MIDTERM EXAM
Part V: Information Processing and Capacity Limits - Molly Potter
Mar 21 W: Visual working memory
Mar 23 F: Conceptual short-term memory (CSTM)
[March 26-30: Spring Vacation]
Apr 2 M: Stage theory, PRP, AB
Apr 4 W: Recitation
Readings:
Luck, S. J., & Vogel, E.K. (1997). The capacity of visual working memory for features and
conjunctions. Nature, 390, 279-281.
Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1997). Change blindness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 261-267.
Potter, M. C. (1999). Understanding sentences and scenes: The role of Conceptual Short Term
Memory. In V. Coltheart (Ed.), Fleeting Memories (pp. 13-46). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pashler, H., & Johnston, J. C. (1998). Attentional limitations in dual-task performance. In H. Pashler
(Ed.), Attention (pp. 155-189). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Papers to be presented/discussed:
Sternberg, S. (1969). The discovery of processing stages: Extensions of Donders' method. In W. G.
Koster (Ed.) Attention and Performance II (pp. 276-315). Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Treisman, A. (1993). The perception of features and objects. In A. Baddeley & L. Weiskrantz (Eds.),
Attention: Selection, awareness, and control (pp. 5-35). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Potter, M.C. (1975). Meaning in visual search. Science, 187, 965-966.
Kanwisher, N, & Wojciulik, E. (2000). Visual attention: Insights from brain imaging. Nature
Reviews: Neuroscience, 1, 91-100.
Study questions:
- What are the advantages and disadvantages to the organism of capacity limits in processing (e.g., in
selective attention)?
- Are there clear stages in processing?
- What different kinds of information are involved in processing, and how are they integrated (if they
are)? (Consider not only features in perception, but also semantic information.)
Part VI: Working Memory & Attention - Earl Miller
Apr 6 F: Working Memory and Attention I
Apr 9 M: Working Memory and Attention II
Apr 11 W: Working Memory and Attention III
Apr 13 F: Recitation
Readings:
 Miller, E.K. and Cohen, J.D. (2001). An integrative theory of prefrontal cortex function. Annual
Review of Neuroscience, in press.
 Desimone R, Duncan J (1995). Neural mechanisms of selective visual attention. Annual Review
of Neuroscience 18, 193-222.
Papers to be presented/discussed:
 Rainer G, Rao SC, Miller EK (1999). Prospective coding for objects in the primate prefrontal
cortex. Journal of Neuroscience 19, 5493-5505.
 Tomita H, Ohbayashi M, Nakahara K, Hasegawa I, Miyashita Y (1999). Top-down signal from
prefrontal cortex in executive control of memory retrieval. Nature 401 (6754), 699-703.
[Apr 16 M: Patriot's Day – Holiday]
Part VII: Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory - Anthony Wagner
Apr 18 W: Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory I
Apr 20 F: Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory II
Apr 23 M: Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory III
Apr 25 W: Recitation
Readings:
 Gabrieli JD (1998). Cognitive neuroscience of human memory. Annual Review of Psychology,
49, 87-115.
 Rugg MD, Wilding EL (2000). Retrieval processing and episodic memory. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 4, 108-115.
 Wiggs CL, Martin A (1998) Properties and mechanisms of perceptual priming. Current Opinion
in Neurobiology, 8, 227-233.
Papers to be presented/discussed:
 Eldridge LL, Knowlton BJ, Furmanski CS, Bookheimer SY, Engel SA (2000). Remembering
episodes: a selective role for the hippocampus during retrieval. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 11491152.
 Kirchhoff BA, Wagner AD, Maril A, Stern CE (2000). Prefrontal-temporal circuitry for episodic
encoding and subsequent memory. Journal of Neuroscience, 20, 6173-6180.
 Wagner AD, Maril A, Schacter DL (2000). Interactions between forms of memory: When
priming hinders new learning. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12:S2, 52-60
Study questions:
 Characterize the multi-component model of working memory forwarded by Baddeley & Hitch.
Specify the lines of evidence that support a distinction between phonological rehearsal and
phonological storage processes.
 Describe the distinction between "blocking" and "suppression" mechanisms of forgetting,
illustrating each with relevant data.
 Characterize the distinction between declarative and non-declarative forms of long-term memory,
providing behavioral evidence from studies of healthy adults and neuroanatomical evidence from
studies of patient populations for this distinction.
Part VIII: Intro to Language & Psycholinguistics - Ted Gibson
Apr 27 F Lecture 1: Speech and speech processing
reading: chapters 6 and 7 of Tartter (1998)
Apr 30 M Lecture 2: The structure of sentences
reading: chapter 4 of Tartter (1998)
May 2 W Lecture 3: Sentence and discourse processing
reading: Gibson & Pearlmutter (1998)
May 4 F Recitation
readings:
A) Connectionist models of language, Elman (1991)
B) Linguistic complexity, Gibson (in press)
Readings
Tartter, V.C. (1998). Language and its Normal Processing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Elman, J.L. (1991). Distributed representations, simple recurrent networks and grammatical
structure. Machine Learning, 7, 195-225.
Gibson, E. (in press). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic
complexity. In Miyashita, Y., Marantz, A., & O'Neil, W. (Eds.), Image, Language, Brain. MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Gibson, E. & Pearlmutter, N. (1998). Constraints on sentence comprehension. Trends in Cognitive
Sciences, 2, 262-268.
Part IX: Language Acquisition - Ken Wexler
May 7 M: The Computational System of Language, Universal Grammar, Parameters and the
Problem of Learnability
Readings:
1) Cowper, Elizabeth A. 1992. A Concise Introduction to Syntactic Theory The Government-Binding
Approach. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, London. pp. 1-24, pp. 48-56, pp. 66-70, pp. 7188, pp. 89-94.
2) Wexler, Kenneth and Culicover, Peter W. 1980. Formal Principles of Language Acquisition. MIT
Press: Cambridge, MA. pp. 60-84
Additional Background Reading:
1) Gold, E.M. 1967. "Language identification in the limit." Information and Control 10: 447.
2) Newport, Elissa L; Gleitman, Henry, and Gleitman, Lila A. 1979. "Mother, I'd rather do it myself:
some effects and non-effects of maternal speech style," in Snow and Ferguson (eds.), Talking to
Children: Language input and acquisition. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 109-149.
May 9 W: The Development of Finiteness, Word Order, Agreement, Case and Children's Knowledge
of Language, Universal and Learned: How to Understand the Development of Different Languages
Readings:
Wexler, Kenneth. 1994. "Optional infinitives, head movement and the economy of derivations," in
Lightfoot and Hornstein (eds.), Verb Movement, Cambridge University Press, 305-350.
Additional Background Reading, for those interested in more linguistic detail:
Schütze, Carson T. and Kenneth Wexler. 1996. "Subject Case Licensing and English Root Infinites."
A. Stringfellow et al. (eds.), BUCLD 20 Proceedings, 670-681. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
May 11 F: Variability in Development, Impaired Language, Evidence for Genetic Variation
Readings:
1) Rice, Mabel L. and Wexler, Kenneth. 1996. "Toward Tense as a Clinical Marker of Specific
Language Impairment in English-Speaking Children." Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, vol.
38, 1239-1257.
2) Rice, Mabel L., Wexler, Kenneth and Scott Hershberger. 1998. "Tense Over Time: The
Longitudinal Course of Tense Acquisition in Children with Specific Language Impairment." Journal
of Speech, Language and Hearing Research 41, 1412-1431.
May 14 M: Recitation: How to Distinguish Processing from Competence Models of Language
Development
Readings to Present:
Hyams, Nina and Wexler, Ken. 1993. "On the Grammatical Basis of Null Subjects in Child
Language." Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 24 (3), 421-459.
Bloom, Paul. 1990. "Subjectless Sentences in Child Language." Linguistic Inquiry, vol. 21 (4), 491504.
May 16: TBA - Miller & Kanwisher