Perception & Cognition 1

Cognition

All aspects of knowing (e.g., sensation, learning, remembering, perception, reasoning, decision making)

Nativism/Genetic Predisposition

Alternative to empiricist/blank slate

• we're somehow set up for acquiring this knowledge

American Behaviourist Tradition

William James

• gain knowledge from experience / Founder of Empiricist Tradition

• newborn's mind is a BLANK slate

Associationism

Learning on the basic of contiguity and frequency

Contiguity

Learning on the basic of ________

Space and time (Shaking cat tin means cat treats)

Frequency

Learning on the basic of _______

How often things occur together

Behaviourism

Focuses on things you can someone observe, Not the mind

Edward Thorndike

Came up with the Law of Effect

A Behaviourist

Law of Effect

Animals learn responses to things which are rewarded and drop responses to things that are punished

Classical Conditioning

A learning process where a biologically potent stimulus is paired with a previously neutral stimulus to create an automatic, unconscious response.

Operant Conditioning

A learning process where behaviors are modified by their consequences.

The "effect" of making a response is crucial to learning — the animal must do something

Strengthening and weakening of S-R bonds

J.B. Watson

Another hardcore Behaviourist

Psychology should limit itself to discussion of stimuli, responses, and physiological data

Law of Exercise

The more often a given situation is followed by a particular response, the stronger will be the associative bond between them

Example of ROTE learning

Laws of association includes these two things

Contiguity and frequency

Laws of learning

Effect/reinforcement and exercise

B.F. Skinner

Stated that all explanations of behaviour are descriptions of environmental histories

Operant conditioning: shaping behaviour

Ideas from Behaviourism

we are nothing more than deterministic systems or machines

Ideas from constructivism

People construct their own understanding and knowledge of the world through their experiences and their reflections on those experiences

Edward Tolman

The emergence of animal cognition

He focused on behaviour that was "goal-directed"

Emphasis on molar (overall) achievements rather than molecular (steps to get there) movements

Cognitive map experiments

Noam Chomsky

Poverty of the stimulus argument

We are not exposed to complete and perfect language yet we make novel sentences.

Universal grammar

Universal grammar

We are predisposed to acquire any natural language

Generative grammar

These abstract rules are a part of our genetic code

Emergence of Cognitive Psychology

Miller, Newell and Simon, Broadbent, Neisser, FLOW DIAGRAMS

Miller

Magical number 7 +/-2

Newell and Simon

Computer simulation of mental processes (GPS)

Broadbent

Information processing theory

Neisser

first textbook on cognitive psych AND naive realism

Iconic memory

Short visual memory

• high capacity, fast passive decay, mask able

Visual code (fast)

iconic memory —> Low capacity, flexible decay, not mask able, visual info

Name code (slow)

Iconic memory —> Moderate capacity, neglible decay, not maskable, auditory info

Stage models of cognition

Independent modules (modular)

These models assume that human cognition is based on modular sub-systems

Differences in intellectual abilities have been interpreted as differences in arrows and/or boxes to in arrows-and-boxes flow diagrams

Renes Descartes

All we can assume is that we're thinking

Naive realism

Alternative view to Descartes

Neisser (1967)

Neisser and naive realism

1. Visual experiences mirror the external stimulus (what about hallucinations?)

2. Visual experience starts and ends with the onset and offset of the external stimulus (visual persistence and memory?)

3. Visual experiences are based on passive copies of the outside world, which could be described using verbal reports

bottom up processing

Information going in one direction

Visual letter recognition in the pandemonium model

Grouping

Disproves #3 of Neisser's naive realism

(Gestalt ideas! We are automatically interpreting bottom up)

This is contradicted by evidence from the Gestalt principles - the sensory information is organised according to certain coding principles that operate to facilitate object recognition.

The principles carve up the input into things that might be objects.

These laws apply from the bottom up — without knowledge of what the possible objects in the scene are. (Happens with babies too — perceptual organization is innate) by proximity, similarity, common fate, symmetry, common region

Bottom up

Gestalt

analysis that begins with the sensory receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information

Stimulus driven and passive

Top down

• This processing is perceiving the world around us by drawing from what we already know to interpret new information (Gregory, 1970).

• These theories are hypotheses-driven and stress the importance of higher mental processes such as expectations, beliefs, values, and social influences.

• Throughout our lifetime, we construct schemas, which consist of past experiences, prior knowledge, emotions, and expectations, and then use these schemas to form hypotheses upon the arrival of new information.

Bruner and others "New Look" information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations

Knowledge driven and active

Congruent

Matches knowledge of the world (heart cards being red)

Interpretation

We make interpretations on completely novel and ambiguous things

Role of expectancy

Based on our knowledge of the world, we actively generate expectations about what will occur next

Bruner's Perceptual Readiness Theory

Need and value determine our perceptions of the world

Our perceptions of the world reflect how we construe the world

Simplicity (minimum principle) and likelihood

Have also been discussed to drive perception

Squares vs L shaped — likeihood says it's just another square!

Crude-fine / global-local processing

Larger stimuli made of smaller stimuli

1. People are quicker at finding larger stimuli

2. When people are asked what the global stimuli is, the local stimuli doesn't seem to matter

3. People take longer to say that the smaller letter is H when the large letter is S versus when the smaller letter is S and large letter is S as well (inconsistent vs consistent local stimuli means faster)

Two processes of hypothesis making

1. Modularity of mind

2. Interactive hypothesis generation and testing

Posner

Reaction time experiments with letters

1. are they physically identical? (AA vs Aa)

2. Do they share the same name? (Aa vs AB)

3. Are they both vowels or both consonants? (Ae vs AB)

Posner experiment results

1. took longer to say they're NOT physically identical

2. took longer to say they're NOT the same name

3. took longer to say they're CONSONANTS rather than both vowels (different was in the middle)

Temporal hierarchy

It takes time to recover different forms of information from visual input

We could posit either:

1. Mental pictures, images, analogical representations (X)

2. Some other form of non-pictorial form of representation (e.g., "a left diagonal bisects a right diagonal line") - structural coding

Testing mental imagery and analogical representations

We can test people on the mental transformation of letters - whether it is backward or forward facing after being turned (normal distribution) also: mental origami

Pylyshyn: Mental imagery of island experiment

Scanning and other mental imagery phenomena have nothing to do with the format of a mental image but rather how people understand the task: imagining something means considering what it would look like if you saw it

Pylyshyn island results

Visual inspection: linear relationship between RT and distance

no such relationship in other two conditions

Mental imagery? Doubtful

Are there really pictures inside the head? A better conclusion is that the evidence suggests that when reasoning visually humans naturally adopt a strategy of mental stimulation which in turn reflects how perception and problem solving are closely linked

Mental synthesis

Quicker at synthesizing parts with high goodness than low goodness

Bower (1970) paired associative learning and interactive imagery

1. interactive imagery: imagine each word's referent interacting with one another in a vivid way in an integrative scene

2. separation imagery: imagine each word's referent next to each other side by side

3. rote repetition: overt repetition of word pair whilst the pair is presented

Item recognition

Identifying previously encountered items.

PA recall test

What was with this other word?

Bower (1970) results

No effect of condition on recognition rates but very large effect of condition of PA recall rates

the lack of an effect on recognition shows that the S words were equally well encoded during the study phase

the effect on PA recall strongly suggests that the study instructions influenced PA memory

Bower (1970) interpretations

Very bad news for the law of exercise (repetition has very poor PA recall) and mental imagery (separation imagery) is no better interactive imagery!! (Relational coding!!)

Mandler and Pearlstone (1966)

Two groups of subjects:

1. Free sorting

2. Constrained sorting Yoked sampling for #2

Constrained sorting

The experimenter took the set of responses from a Free sorting subject and sat opposite the Constrained sorting subject. At the outset subject told how many piles to use. Given feedback after every care. The subject does this until their responses match the Free sorting subject's Obviously, they took more trials than the free sorting subjects. Free sorters and constrained sorters recalled the SAME number of words SO repetition did NOT produce a memory benefit.

Craik and Tulving (1975)

"Is the word an animal name?"

Next word is presented and the subject must make a speeded Yes/No response once they're done, there is an unannounced memory old/new recognition test

Structural

Level of processing 1

Is the word in capital letters?

Phonemic

Level of processing 2

Does the word rhyme with WEIGHT?

Category

Level of processing 3

Is the word a type of fish?

Craik and Tulving (1975) Results

Meaningful orienting tasks (CATEGORY) produce better retention than do ones that focus subjects attention on phonemic or visual features.

Deep encoding is better than shallow encoding

Interim conclusions for lecture 4

Relational encoding seems important that is, recovering a meaningful relationship that links the to-be-remembered concepts aids memory.

Also maybe recovering distinctive relations is also key - using the same next-to relations seems not to be effective. Using unique and distinctive relations is key.

These tie in with both the organisational view and the deeper processing view.

Effective remembering reflects properties of the human mind that are not solely explained in terms of simple S-R theory.

The War of the Ghosts passage

1. The general form of a subject's first reproduction is preserved throughout the repeated reproductions

2. There is a strong tendency to rationalize unconnected or disturbing elements for example make the young man sleep through an unexplained interval or changing the "something black" to "foamed at the mouth"

3. Certain dominant details serve as anchor points for organizing recall and these may become embellished

4. Various preconceptions are worked into the reproduction

5. The reproductions became shorter and more coherent — "No trace of an odd or supernatural element is left, we have a perfectly straightforward story of a fight and a death"

Schema

An organized structure that captures knowledge and expectations about events in the world

Kay (1955) another passage

Whatever organization they put on the first reproduction stuck with them throughout the experiment FOFL- failure of further learning

Spitzer (1939) - critical importance of testing for learning

Sixth graders

The longer the first test is delayed the worst performance on the test is

Having a test improved performance on subsequent tests

The sooner the initial test the better later performance

Roediger et al. (2006)

S-one presentation of a list of 40 words every 3 seconds

T-The same as S but followed by a free recall test

Conditions:

STST (Best)

SSST (Worst)

STTT

Importance of repeated testing, not repeated studying

Roediger and Karpicke (2008)

Stimuli: 40 Swahili-English word pairs

Study Period 1:

• study phase: all conditions study all 40 word pairs

• test phase: all conditions tested on all 40 pairs

Subsequent study period:

• once you correctly recall a word during a test phase, what happens depends on what condition you're in

• Four conditions each [Study then Test] x 4.

  • 1) ST – standard learning. Study 1 – test 1 (mashua - ?) repeat for times and do this for the whole list.

  • 2) S_NT – Once a word is correctly recalled, drop it from study but include it at test.

  • 3) ST_N – Once a word is correct drop it from the test but continue to include it during study.

  • 4) S_N T_N – Once a word is correctly recalled, drop it from both study and test.

Conclusion:

• repeated studying -> almost no effect on recall

• repeated testing -> large effect on recall

Butler and Roediger (2008)

12 prose passages

Each subject studied the passages and then different groups of subjects were allocated to different conditions.

Some took the MCQs and some did not.

All groups were tested one week later on a final cued recall test.

Butler and Roediger (2008) RESULTS

Taking an initial test (even without feedback) tripled final recall relative to study only group. Immediate feedback increased it by 10% and delayed feedback (shown at end of test) had the highest performance.

Evidence for analogical representations – Mental imagery? Kosslyn, Ball and Reiser (1978)

Learn map. Draw from memory. Now timed task. Form mental image. Focus on named location (e.g. sandy cove), now say whether another named location was on the map. Importantly, participants were instructed to mentally scan their image. Scanning time was directly proportional to the distance between landmarks on the actual map

Conclusion from Kosslyn, Ball and Reiser (1978)

Mental images have spatial properties – they have spatial magnitudes (distances) – they are just like pictures! But ….. participants had been instructed to mentally scan their image.