PSY270 SHAZA MIDTERM

cognitive psychology

cognitive psychology

study of intelligent behaviour by investigating how people think, learn, remember, forget, speak write, pay attention, problem solve

why do we have to observe behavior to infer thought?

because cognition is mostly unconscious

the mind body problem

how can output of the soul (mind) be related to the body

what inspired the scientific study of the mind?

early research regarding perception

Wilhelm Wundt

the first psychologist and founder of structuralism

who brought Wundt’s ideas to America?

Edward Titchener

analytic introspection

scientific observation of internal stuff/events breaking down the conscious experience into smaller components

what was the issue with Wundt’s research techniques?

saying that his methods were unreliable because his research was not replicable

what ideas did Wundt first develop?

experimentation, attention, memory and language

William James

father of american psychology and founder of functionalism

• wrote the principles of psychology

functionalism

interested in studying the purpose of thought rather than its elements and concerned with prediction and control through direct observation

what are the 4 key principles of the scientific method?

empiricism, testability, determinism and parsimony

behaviourism

way to study publicly observable functions of the mind

Ivan pavlov

founder of classical conditioning

John Watson

concerned with behavior as a series of stimuli and responses where brain processes are unimportant animals are used as a model for human behaviour

B F Skinner

founder of operant conditioning

operant conditioning

first a behavior is performed then it is reinforced by reward or punished

E.C Tolman

believed that behavior is not just a result of cause and effect but learning can be latent (no reward or punishment)

structuralism

what we are thinking of?, studying the contents on consciousness

empiricism

how we can study something we cant see

determinism

have to assume that everything has a cause

• ok for study of consciousness but not ok if you believe that it arises from the soul

testability

how you can test something that isnt physical

parsimony

drawing the simplest conclusion and you can replace it if you have evidence that proves you wrong

black box

idea that whatever is happening in the mind doesn’t matter (not that Watson believes there is nothing going on just that we don’t need to know in order to understand behavior)

behavioural maze

different arms are hallways that have chambers on the end

• exploration stage: they let the rats roam freely around the maze

• testing stage: they have a path from chamber A to B (reinforcement by giving reward), then rat is put in chamber C and turned to go to chamber B without learning

what does the behavioral maze experiment prove?

that latent learning occurs because the mice were able to try a new route they were not explicitly taught due to the creating of a cognitive map in the exploration stage

Noam Chomsky

believed that language was innate and not simply a result of stimulus and response

poverty of the stimulus argument

the argument that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language

Alan Turing

created the Turing machine which was the first computer program

Turing Machine

goal was to carry out what the human mind can do

computer

machine that uses a function to produce an output based on an input

Newell and Simon

first to design a non war computer called the logic theorist program

logic theorist program

designed to show mathematical proofs but the proofs weren’t programmed into the machine

• first demonstration of a thinking machine

Ulrich Neisser

relied heavily on the ideas of computer science and coined the term cognitive psychology

• thought psychologists could propose models to explain unobservable mental functions, make predictions and test them using computers

representationalism

describes how the unobservable mind can act on the real world, thought is caused by the brain and the brain is physical

aboutness

a mental representation of the thing in our mind that stands in for the real world

computation

assumes the mind is an information processor

marr

vision scientist influential in early computer vision, ultimately human minds are doing the same thing as a computer and that maybe it is just computational

symbol system

representational cause it stands for something and computational because it is manipulated according to rules

• Newell and Simon think of the mind like this

the biological perspective

believes information is represented as patterns of activity between interconnected neurons in a way similar to the brain

embodied cognition

study of cognition as we interact with the world

connectionism

alternate theory of computing that is based on the idea that information is carried in connected neuron like units

• information as a pattern of activation spread across units

grounding problem

the fact that if you only use symbol systems you replace it with another and so on but you cant get to the root meaning of it because it is grounded in the real world

• computers are symbol systems but humans arent

case studies

studying individuals extensively over a period of time often who suffer brain damage

correlational studies

cant give causal information but defines the presence or absence of a relationship between two variables

experiments

allow us to infer causation by testing a hypothesis that the independent variable causes a change in the dependent variable

computer simulations

can find out if there is the same process a human can do

confounding variables

things that effect the dependent variable that are not controlled

quasi experiments

experiments where you cant randomly assign participants to groups

how are confounding variables avoided

by random assignment and random sampling

perception

the study of how the external world gets represented in our brain/mind so that we can understand and act upon what’s going on around us

what do observations from patients with agnosia tell us?

gives us an indication of the processing that occurs during vision

visual agnosia

deficit in object recognition despite normal vision

agnosia

deficit in recognition despite normal vision

apperceptive agnosia

unable to name, match or discriminate visually presented objects, cant combine basic visual information into complete percepts so they show deficits in copying

where is brain damage typical in patients with apperceptive agnosia?

in the occipital lobe

where is brain damage typical in patients with associative agnosia?

in the inferior temporal lobe

associative agnosia

cannot associate a visual pattern with meaning so they can’t recognize what they see but can combine features into a whole so they are good at copying

what are 3 separate steps to visual perception?

• input/sensation

• basic visual components assembled

• meaning is linked to visual input

the experience error

the false assumption that the structure of the world is directly given from our senses

what demonstrate the experience error?

visual illusions (we don’t always see an accurate representation of a visual stimulus)

what is the impression we end up getting from the experience error?

a continuous image of the world and however our eyes follow a series of fixation saccade cycles

fixation saccade cycles

when your eyes going from one object to another and the brief point in the middle where your eye is pretty much stationary and all visual input occurs

smooth pursuit

when your eyes follow an object

saccade

when your eyes jerk going from one object to another, vision is suppressed, no conscious vision and you just a blur then our vision is turned of but perception is continuous due to memory

input sensation

receptors are picking up the signal and sending it to your brain (lost in apperceptive agnosia)

simultaneous contrast illusion

when a shape is the same shade of grey but the surroundings alter the appearance of the same image

light from above heuristic

tendency for people to assume that light comes from above and use this assumption to interpret and make judgments about visual stimuli

computational approach

concerned with discovering how the brain represents and interprets the distal stimulus, the classic cognitive approach and the idea that cognition is additionally representational

distal stimulus

the actual physical stimulus, physically objective dimensions of the viewed object

gestalt approach

uses organizational principles to create a meaningful perception of the environment

what approach is action focused?

gestalt and perception/action approach

what approach is recognition focused?

the computational one is

perception/action approach

assumes the goals of action to help determine perception

bottom up processing

we take in all the bits and pieces in order and step by step put them together to get the full picture (data-driven)

top down processing

starts with basic input but you don’t have to follow every step in order, use past knowledge to skip steps (computationally driven)

template matching theory

we have a mental stencil for an array of different patterns and we match the input we receive to the template

feature matching

we have a system for analyzing each distinct feature of a visual item, only describes letter perception

Selfridge’s pandemonium model (feature matching)

demon assigned to each step of recognition and theres a tally of how much input received per step and send it to output cognitive demon. Then they listen to input and start shouting louder and louder for each piece of input received

physiological evidence for feature matching theory

feature detector neurons in the primary visual cortex

who proposed the feature matching theory

Selfridge

recognition by components

same idea as the feature matching theory but we have geons and its a matter of taking the input and breaking them into geons them putting them together to perceive the whole image

geons

basic 3D shapes that are view point invariant due to non accidental properties

non accidental properties

properties that belong to the geon and as long as we can see them we can recognize an object at any angle

who proposed the recognition by components theory?

Biederman

what was Biederman wrong about?

thought that the issue was that humans can recognize an object from every object but computers cant and have to be programmed to do so

non canonical view points

unusual angles

why was biedermann wrong?

because humans have a viewer centered bias

viewer centered bias

object recognition is faster from familiar viewpoints and cortical neurons demonstrate viewpoint specifity

what are the arguments against bottom up/feature theories?

they cant explain within category discrimination because recognition patterns depend on top down affects too

• single feature analysis takes a long time

what can gestalt rules help with?

they identify characteristics of perception that help determine which component of a stimulus groups together to predict what will be perceived

law of proximity

if items are close together they will be grouped together

law of similarity

items that are similar in anyway will be grouped together

law of common region

items that are enclosed together in a common region are grouped together

ambient optic array

structure imposed on light by the environment and contains all information we need for perception, light that enters our eye after interacting with objects

what is the flow in optic array

the observer is in motion and the direction of flow is indicated by the direction of movement

optic flow

change in optic array

Gibson

wanted to know about perception for action and said that we recognize things based on object affordances

• said there was no representation

object affordances

the interaction between an object and an individual body, what the object tells us about how to use it

what is necessary to pick up the information from optic array?

motion