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The Cognition Project
Centers and Peripheries: Eleanor Rosch
Ep. 17
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The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.
One of the central questions of cognitive science is how we represent the world around us, organizing it into categories. Eleanor Rosch offered a new perspective on this question, providing clear evidence that categories have fuzzy boundaries that cannot easily be captured using logical rules.
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22. Making Space: Barbara Tversky
57:00||Ep. 22The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is with Barbara Tversky, who carried out groundbreaking work studying how we perceive and reason about space. Tversky intertwines her story with that of her husband Amos, who died in 1996 and is known for his work with Daniel Kahneman on decision-making.
21. Simple Ideas: Daniel Kahneman
38:26||Ep. 21The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is from an interview with Daniel Kahneman from 2015. Kahneman helped to spread the approach cognitive psychologists had developed to other fields, leading to the creation of behavioral economics. Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics for these contributions in 2002.
20. Mapping Relations: Dedre Gentner
41:33||Ep. 20The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.Dedre Gentner’s research has helped us understand how people form analogies, and the broader importance of relations in human cognition. Her story of becoming a cognitive scientist features some of the people we have already met, like Donald Norman, as well as an eyewitness account of the first cognitive science conference.
19. A Strange Loop: Douglas Hofstadter
58:49||Ep. 19The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is about Douglas Hofstadter who wrote the book Godel Escher Bach. The book was responsible for many contemporary cognitive scientists entering the field. His own journey passes through music, physics, mathematics, linguistics, and computer science in a way that really reflects the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science.
18. The Power of Metaphor: George Lakoff
01:32:42||Ep. 18The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is about George Lakoff, who was excited and then disappointed by Chomsky’s approach to linguistics. Lakoff ended up taking a new approach to understanding language: cognitive linguistics.
16. Applied Cognitive Science: Donald Norman
56:57||Ep. 16The Cognition Project is an oral history of cognitive science. Created and hosted by Tom Griffiths, the head of Princeton’s AI Lab and a professor of psychology and computer science.This episode is about Donald Norman, who had a rich career that crossed from the East to the West Coast, from engineering to psychology, and from academia to industry. Norman also played a key role in the creation of the Cognitive Science Society, its first conference, and the first cognitive science department.
15. Learning About Reasoning: Phil Johnson-Laird
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14. Models Without Dogma: Ewart Thomas
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