Weeks 1-3
COMMON GROUND
OCTOBER 19, 2011
Week 1: Revisiting Marr (HY, Kirsten, Liz)
Reading: Marr, Vision, chapter 1
Powerpoint presentations:
Hong Yu's intro
Kirsten's intro on decisions
Liz's intro on Marr
OCTOBER 26, 2011
Week 2: Levels in Neuroscience (Liz)
Reading: Craver ‘A Field Guide to Levels’ (and a brief introduction to mechanisms)
Craver, chapter 5 of ‘Explaining the Brain’ can be difficult, ignore sections that refer to earlier chapters (.pdf available)
Liz's powerpoint slides
NOVEBER 2, 2011
Week 3: Optimization and Rationality (Kirsten)
(What is optimization? How is rationality implied?)
Gigerenzer & Selten (2001) Rethinking Rationality
Kahneman D. (2003) "A perspective on judgement and choice", American Psychologist 58: 697-720.
Herbert Simon (1987) "Rational Decision Making in Business Organisations" (Nobel Prize Lecture)
ALSO OF INTEREST:
Gary Klein, 2001: The fiction of optimization
Gigerenzer, 2008: Striking a blow for sanity in theories of rationality
Gigerenzer 2008: Bounded and rational
NOVEMBER 9, 2011
Week 4: Small world, large world, modeling: as-if vs. process models (Kirsten)
*Brighton and Gigerenzer (ms.) - sent round via email
Berg and Gigerenzer (2010) AS-IF BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS: NEOCLASSICAL ECONOMICS IN DISGUISE? History of Economic Ideas.
NOVEMBER 16, 2011
Week 5: Reductionism (Liz)
Special guest: Professor Michael Heidelberger (Philosophisches Seminar, Tübingen)
John Bickle, (2006). Reducing the mind to molecular pathways: explicating the reductionism implicit in current cellular and molecular neuroscience” Synthese 151, pp 411-434. http://www.springerlink.com/content/j05hw804g1g4n463/
Bill Bechtel, (2009). Looking down, around, and up: Mechanistic explanation in psychology. Philosophical Psychology, 22, 543-564. http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~bill/research/bechtel.down.around.up.pdf
NOVEMBER 23, 2011
Week 6: Case study: Bayesian Models in Motor Control
Guest speaker: Dan Braun (MPI Biological Cybernetics)
No reading for this week.
NOVEMBER 30, 2011
Week 7: Modelling Framing Effects
Guest speaker: Natalie Gold (Philosophy Department, King's College London)
Required reading:
*Gold, Natalie and List, Christian (2004) Framing as path dependence. Economics and philosophy, 20 (2). pp. 253-277.
Further reading:
If you're not familiar with framing effects and prospect theory then they should read either
Kahneman, D.; Tversky, A. (1979). "Prospect theory: An analysis of decisions under risk". Econometrica 47: 313–327.
or
Tversky, A.; Kahneman, D. (1981). "The Framing of decisions and the psychology of choice". Science 211 (4481): 453–458.
Natural discussion topics are how to model framing and the rationality of framing effects. Frederic Schick has interesting material on both these topics. Most of it is in his books but there are a couple of articles and students might read one of them:
Frederic Schick (1992). Allowing for Understandings. Journal of Philosophy 89 (1):30-41.
or
Frederic Schick (1987). Rationality: A Third Dimension. Economics and Philosophy 3 (01):49-.
For those super-interested in rationality, John Broome's discussion of the Allais Paradox and the independence axiom in his "Weighing Goods" would be relevant (it's actually about the correct level of description). Those super-interested in modelling framing could read something on Michael Bacharach's Variable Frame Theory, either:
Bacharach, Michael and Bernasconi, Michele (1997) 'The Variable Frame Theory of Focal Points: An Experimental Study', Games and Economic Behaviour, 19(1), April, pp. 1-45.
or
Bacharach, Michael (1993) 'Variable Universe Games', in Binmore, Ken, Kirman, Alan and Tani, Piero (eds.) Frontiers of Game Theory (Cambridge, MA: The M. I. T. Press), pp. 255-275.
$$ The readings are in descending order of importance (and, obviously, the suggestion is that people only read one of each disjuntion).
Weeks 4-8 (Nov)
2 intertwined themes:
OPTIMISATION, RATIONALITY, AND MODELLING
&
LEVELS, REDUCTIONISM AND PLURALISM:
THE VERY POSSIBILITY OF INTEGRATIVE NEUROSCIENCE
DECEMBER 7, 2011
Week 8: Case Study: A Role of Action Planning in Decision Making?
Guest speaker: Axel Lindner (Hertie Institute)
Commentators: Ana Fernandez (CIN) and Thea Zander (CIN)
Asha Iyer, Axel Lindner, Igor Kagan, Richard A. Andersen (2011) "Motor Preparatory Activity in Posterior Parietal Cortex is
Modulated by Subjective Absolute Value", PLOS Biology August 2010 | Volume 8 | Issue 8 | e1000444
Paul Cisek "Cortical mechanisms of action selection: the affordance competition hypothesis", Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2007) 362, 1585–1599
JANUARY 18, 2012
Week 9: Computational theories of consciousness
Guest speaker: David Balduzzi (MPI Intelligent Systems)
JANUARY 25, 2012
Week 10: Marr, Memory, and Heuristics
Guest speaker: Lael Schooler (ABC Group, MPI Human Development, Berlin)
Gigerenzer and Gaissmaier Heuristic Decision Making Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2011. 62:451–82
FEBRUARY 1, 2012
Week 11: The role of computational theories in cogsci (Liz)
Presentation: Michael Bannert (CIN/MPI)
Matt Jones and Bradley Love (preprint). Bayesian Fundamentalism or Enlightenment? On the explanatory status and theoretical contributions of Bayesian models of cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences
(Optional) Matteo Colombo, Peggy Series (in print). Bayes in the brain: On Bayesian modelling in neuroscience. British Journal for Philosophy of Science.
Weeks 9-12 (Jan-Feb)
COMPUTATIONAL THEORIES AND OPEN ISSUES
FEBRUARY 8, 2012
Week 12: Integration or Pluralism? (Liz)
Half the seminar will be devoted to a discussion of pluralism as a research strategy in cogsci generally, followed by a talk by Liz taking the specific case of decision making as a case study of pluralism.
Presentation: Eva Engels (Philosophy/CIN)
PAPERS FOR DISCUSSION:
*Rick Dale, Eric Dietrich, Anthony Chemero, (2009). Explanatory pluralism in cognitive science. Cognitive Science , 33, 739-742 . http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01042.x/full
Carl Craver, 2005. Beyond reduction: Mechanisms, multifield integration and the unity of neuroscience. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology & Biomedical Science, Carl Craver, 36 (2005) 373–395. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1369848605000245
(Optional but recommended) Robert McCauley, Bill Bechtel (2001). Explanatory pluralism and the heuristic identity theory. Theory & Psychology, 11, 736-760. http://tap.sagepub.com/content/11/6/736.abstract
LIZ'S TALK:
Identifying the enemy: Competing or complementary theoretical approaches in decision making research?
Abstract. Describing decision making as resulting from an adaptive toolbox of ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics has radically changed the field of decision making research, and created a lot of controversy. One of the major ways that the ‘fast and frugal’ (F&F) approach has changed the field has been to shift it away from attempting to provide a single domain general model of decision making towards identifying and describing different heuristics and the environments in which they are used. This shift also involves a move away from ‘as-if’ models of decision making towards ‘process’ models that attempt to describe how people actually make decisions. However, domain general models need not be psychologically implausible, and F&F models are not necessarily psychologically plausible themselves. Given this, I will question whether domain general and F&F models should really be seen as true enemies. It will be argued that in meeting the challenges of providing an methodologically and theoretically adequate account of decision making, the F&F account will likely end up being fairly similar to a domain general account. Similarly, it will be suggested that developing contemporary domain general accounts (e.g. evidence accumulator models, parallel constraint satisfaction models) is likely to use similar research techniques to those found in the F&F approach. In this case, following the domain general or F&F approach may not make much difference in the models eventually produced. However, there are pragmatic, practice-based advantages with both theoretical approaches, as they focus research on different aspects of decision making. As such, it is suggested that both approaches are useful ones to develop, thus providing a nice illustration of theoretical pluralism in action.