Cognitive Psychology

What is cognitive psychology?

The scientific study of the mind

What does the mind do? (two main functions)

Creates and controls mental capacities (perception, attention, memory) and creates representations of the world

Can the mind be observed directly?

No. Its operation is inferred from behavior or physiological responses

What is cognition?

Mental processes such as perceiving, attending, remembering and thinking

Who did the early reaction time experiment comparing simple vs. choice reaction time?

Donders

In Donders's experiment, what was simple reaction time?

Time to press one button as soon as a single stimulus appears

In Donders's experiment, what was choice reaction time?

Time to press the correct button depending on which of two stimuli appeared

What did Donders learn by subtracting simple from choice reaction time?

How long the decision (which button to push) takes

What is the forgetting curve method of Ebbinghaus based on?

Learning lists of nonsense syllables and testing memory after different delays

What is savings (Ebbinghaus)?

The reduction in time needed to relearn a list compared with learning it the first time

What does the savings curve show?

How memory for the list decays over time (the time course of forgetting)

Who founded the first scientific psychology laboratory, and when?

Wundt, in 1879

What was the dominant approach in Wundt's lab?

Structuralism

What is structuralism?

The idea that conscious experience is built from basic elements, studied by analyzing the mind into those components

What is analytic introspection?

Trained participants describing their experience of stimuli in terms of its basic elements

Which American psychologist based his textbook Principles of Psychology on observations of his own mind?

William James

Who founded behaviorism?

John Watson

Why did Watson found behaviorism?

Partly in reaction to structuralism and analytic introspection

What was behaviorism's central tenet?

Psychology should study observable behavior, not invisible mental processes

What type of conditioning were Watson's procedures based on?

Classical conditioning

What is classical conditioning?

Learning in which a neutral stimulus comes to trigger a response because it was paired with another stimulus

Whose work on operant conditioning kept behaviorism dominant through the 1950s?

B. F. Skinner

What is operant conditioning?

Learning in which behavior is controlled by its consequences (reinforcement and punishment)

Which behaviorist studied cognitive processes outside the mainstream, such as cognitive maps?

Edward Tolman

What is a cognitive map?

A mental representation of the layout of an environment

What is a paradigm?

A widely accepted scientific framework for how to think about and study a topic

What is a paradigm shift?

A change from one paradigm to another, as in the cognitive revolution

What is a scientific revolution, according to Kuhn?

The replacement of one paradigm by another

What was the cognitive revolution?

The 1950s shift away from behaviorism and back to studying the mind

Whose critique of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior helped start the cognitive revolution?

Chomsky

How did the digital computer contribute to the cognitive revolution?

It suggested the mind processes information in stages, like a computer

What is the information-processing approach?

Describing the mind as operating in a series of stages

Which researchers' attention work in the 1950s contributed to the revolution (cocktail party and flow diagrams)?

Cherry (attention experiments) and Broadbent (flow diagrams)

Which two interdisciplinary conferences helped launch the cognitive revolution?

Dartmouth and MIT

What is artificial intelligence?

The study of how to program computers to perform tasks that humans do with intelligence

What was Neisser's 1967 book important for?

It summarized the state of cognitive psychology; it showed understanding of the mind was still limited

What are neuropsychology, electrophysiology and brain imaging?

Ways to study the physiology of cognition: effects of brain damage, recording electrical responses, and measuring brain activity with scans

Name the four developments in cognitive psychology after Neisser (1967).

More sophisticated models; physiological basis of cognition; cognition in the real world; the role of knowledge

What is cognitive neuroscience?

The study of the physiological basis of cognition

What is the levels-of-analysis approach?

Studying the mind at both the behavioral and the physiological levels

Who proposed the neuron doctrine?

Ramon y Cajal

What does the neuron doctrine state?

Individual cells called neurons transmit signals in the nervous system

What older theory did the neuron doctrine replace?

The nerve net (neural net) theory, in which the nervous system was one continuous network

What are the three main parts of a neuron?

Cell body, dendrites, axon (nerve fiber)

What is the function of the cell body?

Contains the machinery that keeps the cell alive

What do dendrites do?

Branch-like structures that receive signals from other neurons

What is the axon (nerve fiber)?

The long fiber that carries signals away from the cell body

What are receptors?

Specialized neurons that respond to environmental stimuli

What is a synapse?

The gap between the end of one neuron and the next

What is a neurotransmitter?

A chemical released at a synapse that carries signals between neurons

What are neural circuits?

Groups of interconnected neurons

What is a nerve impulse (action potential)?

The electrical signal that travels down an axon

What is the resting potential?

The electrical charge of a neuron's fiber when it is not firing

What is a microelectrode?

A very thin electrode used to record signals from single neurons

What are the two electrodes in a recording setup?

A recording electrode (near the fiber) and a reference electrode (far away)

Who first recorded signals from single neurons?

Edgar Adrian

Name two things Adrian discovered.

Action potentials stay the same size as they travel down an axon; stronger stimuli increase the firing rate

What is the principle of neural representation?

Everything a person experiences is based on representations in the nervous system, not on direct contact with stimuli

What are feature detectors?

Neurons that respond to specific stimulus features (or complex stimuli)

What is experience-dependent plasticity?

Neurons' tuning changes with experience so they respond best to frequently experienced stimuli

What did the kitten experiment (vertical or horizontal environments) show?

Neurons become tuned to the orientations the animal experienced

What is a sensory code?

How neurons represent properties of stimuli

What is specificity coding?

A specific stimulus is represented by the firing of one neuron that responds only to it

What is population coding?

A stimulus is represented by the pattern of firing across many neurons

What is sparse coding?

A stimulus is represented by the pattern of firing of only a small group of neurons, with most neurons silent

What is hierarchical processing?

Information is passed up through levels of the nervous system, with each level responding to more complex stimuli

What is localization of function?

Specific functions are served by specific areas of the brain

What is the cerebral cortex?

The outer layer of the brain responsible for higher-level cognition

What is the visual cortex?

The area in the occipital lobe that receives and processes visual information

Which lobe processes visual information?

Occipital lobe

Which lobe is involved in hearing and auditory processing?

Temporal lobe

Which lobe is involved in spatial and touch information?

Parietal lobe

Which lobe is involved in higher-order thinking and movement planning?

Frontal lobe

What is cortical equipotentiality?

The old idea that all parts of the cortex serve the same function

What is neuropsychology?

The study of the behavior of people with brain damage

What is Broca's area?

A frontal lobe area involved in producing language

What is Broca's aphasia?

Difficulty speaking fluently, caused by damage to Broca's area

What is Wernicke's area?

A temporal lobe area involved in understanding language

What is Wernicke's aphasia?

Difficulty understanding speech (with fluent but meaningless speech), from damage to Wernicke's area

What is prosopagnosia?

Inability to recognize faces, caused by brain damage

What is a double dissociation?

Two functions are shown to be independent when one patient loses function A but not B, and another loses B but not A

What does brain imaging measure?

Brain activity, by measuring blood flow

What does fMRI stand for and measure?

Functional magnetic resonance imaging; brain activation based on blood flow

What are voxels?

Small 3D cubes of brain tissue measured in fMRI

What is task-related fMRI?

fMRI measured while the person performs a task

What area responds most strongly to faces?

Fusiform face area (FFA)

What area responds most strongly to places and scenes?

Parahippocampal place area (PPA)

What area responds most strongly to bodies and body parts?

Extrastriate body area (EBA)

What is distributed representation?

A function is represented by activity in many brain areas, not just one

Why is experience called multidimensional?

Because different aspects (such as faces or memories) activate many different areas

What are neural networks?

Groups of neurons or brain structures that are connected structurally and functionally related

What is structural connectivity?

The physical connections between brain areas (the brain's neural highway system)

What is track-weighted imaging (TWI)?

A technique used to measure structural connectivity

What is the connectome?

The complete structural map of neural connections in the brain

What is functional connectivity?

When different brain areas have temporally correlated responses

What is resting-state fMRI?

fMRI measured while a person is not performing a task, used to study functional connectivity

In resting-state fMRI, what are the seed location and test location?

The seed is the reference area; the test location is another area whose time-series response is compared with the seed's

What is the default mode network (DMN)?

A network that is active when the brain is at rest and decreases activity during tasks

What are the three basic questions technology helps answer about brain function?

The representation, organization and communication questions

What is perception?

Experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses