Cog Psych 200 Exam 1

Cognitive psychology

the study of mental processes using the scientific method

Donder

subtractive method; Choice RT - Simple RT = time to make a decision

Simple RT task

participant pushes a button quickly after a light appears

Choice RT task

participant pushes one button if light is on right side and another if on left side

Mental chronometry

measures how long a cognitive process takes

Ebbinghaus

Read list of nonsense syllables aloud many times to determine number of repetitions necessary to repeat list without errors

Wundt

First psychology lab; university of Leipzig, Germany; Structuralism

Structuralism

experience is determined by combining elements of experience called “sensations”

Analytic introspection

participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli

William James

taught the first psychology class at Harvard University; Wrote “Principles of Psychology”

John Watson

proposed a new approach called behaviorism

Watson’s Little Albert experiment

9-month old became frightened by a rat after a loud noise was paired with the presentation of the rat

Pavlov’s experiment

Ringing a bell with a presentation of food to trigger salivation in a dog; it was actually the sound of the cane of the caretaker that trigger the response

Skinner

Operant conditioning; rewards and punishments

Skinner box

a box with a rat in it and the rat will push levers to dispense food when the signal light turns green; rat will receive electric shock if pressed on red

Chomsky

Argued children do not only learn language through operant conditioning; against behaviorism

Instinctive drift

learned behavior drifts toward instinctive behavior

Tolman

Trained rats to find food in a four arm maze; rats did make a mental image of the maze

Neuroscience

The scientific study of the nervous system

Cognitive neuroscience

the scientific study of the relation between the nervous system and cognition

Neurons

cells specialized to receive and transmit information in the nervous system

Cell body

contains mechanisms to keep cell alive

Axon

tube filled with fluid that transmits electrical signal

Dendrites

multiple branches reaching from the cell body, which receive information from other neurons

Action potential (spike)

Neurons produce this when they receive an electrical signal from the environment

Synapse

space between the axon of one neuron and a dendrite from another neuron

Neurotransmitters

chemicals that affect the electrical signal of the postsynaptic neuron

Excitatory

increases the likelihood that the postsynaptic neuron will produce a spike (ex. glutamate)

Inhibitory

decreases the likelihood that the postsynaptic neuron will produce a spike (ex. GABA)

Feature detectors

neurons that respond best to a specific stimulus

Simple cells

neurons that respond best to bars of light of a particular orientation

Complex cells

neurons that respond best to an orientated bar of light with a specific length

Specificity coding

representation of specific stimulus by firing of specifically tuned neurons specialized to just respond to a specific stimulus

Grandmother cell hypothesis

the idea that a specific neuron in the brain responds to a complex stimulus, like a face or a person

Distributed coding

representation by a pattern of firing across a large number of neurons

Sparse coding

distributed representations using a small number of neurons (likely solution)

Lesion method

Scientists relied on injuries to conclude which parts of the brain had which functions

TMS method

transcranial magnetic stimulation; can safely reproduce the effect of a temporary cortical lesion; temporarily add noise to neural activation

Inactivation method

TMS works well but is restricted to cortical regions; with non-human animals we use the inactivation method

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

A radioactive tracer is injected into the participant’s bloodstream; Measures signal from tracer at each location of the brain

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

Measures blood flow through magnetic properties of blood; subtraction method; no radioactive tracer needed

Electroencephalography (EEG)

measures electrical activity on the scalp to make inferences about underlying brain activity; used to calculate event-related potentials (ERPs)

Frontal lobe

Reasoning and planning; Language, thought, memory, motor functioning

Parietal lobe

Visual attention; Touch, temperature, pain, and pressure

Temporal lobe

Auditory and perceptual processing; Language, hearing, memory, perceiving forms

Occipital lobe

Visual processing

Basal ganglia

Categorization, sequence processing

Hippocampus

Forming memories

Amygdala

Emotions and emotional memories

Thalamus

Relaying information from vision, hearing, and touch senses

Perception

the process of recognizing, organizing, and interpreting information from senses

Bottom-up processing

perception starts with the senses, incoming raw data

Top-down processing

perception starts with the brain, person’s knowledge, experience, expectations

Direct perception theories

Focus on bottom-up processing; Parts are identified and put together, and then recognition occurs

Constructive perception theories

Focus on top-down processing; People actively construct perceptions using information based on expectations

Template matching

you have detectors in your brain that can match what your retina is seeing

Pandemonium

data-driven recognition model (all demons)

Recognition-by-components theory

Bottom-up/featural approach; Object recognition by separation into 36 geons

Geons

basic 3D shapes, assembled in various arrangements, can form a virtually infinite number of objects

Perceiving size

a function of both bottom-up and top-down processing

Bottom-up perception

the size of the image on the retina

Top-down perception

the perceived distance of the object; the size of the object relative to the other objects in the environment

Law of good continuation

lines tend to be seen as following the smoothest path

Law of good figure (simplicity)

every stimulus pattern is seen so the resulting structure is as simple as possible

Law of similarity

similar things appear grouped together

Law of familiarity

things are more likely to form groups if the groups appear familiar or meaningful

Law of proximity

things that are close to each other are grouped together

Light-from-above heuristic

light comes from above, we perceive shadows as specific information about depth and distance

Occlusion heuristic

when object is partially covered by a smaller object, the larger one is seen as continuing behind the smaller occluder

Role of context

18 drawings of scenes/6 blank rectangles/24 objects; Drawings of appropriate and inappropriate objects: bread box, mailbox, wheel

Fusiform face area

brain responds to faces

Greeble stimuli

used to test if people are born with fusiform face recognition, trained with them to identify them

What stream

identifying an object, temporal lobe

Where stream

identifying the object’s location, parietal lobe

Single dissociation

one function is lost, another remains

Double dissociation

requires two individuals with different damage and opposite deficits