PSYC 3823 unit 1 study guide

What is cognitive psychology?

The scientific study of the human mind, including the structures and processes that allow us to receive, transform, and use information.

How can we study the mind?

Observe behavioral or physiological responses to infer mental responses.

What did Donder's reaction time experiment ask?

How long does it take to make a perceptual decision (decide what you are seeing)?

Could you figure out low long it takes to make a choice based off of Doner's reaction time test?

No. The process involves many cognitive processes: perceiving the light, remembering the instructions, making the choice, and physically raising your hand etc

What is the subtractive method?

A technique for estimating the duration of a psychological process by measuring the reaction time for a task that incorporates the psychological process in question, and the reaction time for a task that does not incorporate it, and then subtracting the second from the first.

What is introspectionism (structuralism)?

We can understand conscious experience by...

1) Analyzing the most basic elements of complex experiences:

• Sensations (qualities of external stimuli, e.g., red, cold, sour)

• Images (qualities of internal representations, e.g., of mental images)

• Affections (qualities of emotional experiences, e.g., pleasant, unpleasant)

The idea is that we THINK ABOUT HOW WE THINK

2) Figuring out how to combine these elements to reconstruct the more complex experience

What is the method of structuralism?

introspection (Train people to break down and describe the basic elements of their experiences in response to a stimulus)

What are some problems of structuralism?

•Private, subjective experiences are hard to verify

• Significant variability from person to person

• Not all mental processes are conscious

Introspection can be useful, but it's not enough.

Who are the founders of structuralism?

Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener

What is behaviorism?

the view that psychology should be an objective science that studies behavior without reference to mental processes

Who are the founders of behaviorism?

John Watson and Ivan Pavlov

What is the difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning?

Classical conditioning focuses on involuntary, reflexive responses, whereas operant conditioning focuses on voluntary, goal-directed behaviors.

What are some problems with behaviorism?

Can't account for the diversity and creativity of human behavior.

Simple stimulus-response learning can't even account for all rat behavior.

AKA:

Can't account for many behaviors that are not reinforced.

Environmental stimuli matter, but they're not the only things that matter

What is the Information Processing Approach?

A way to study the mind created from insights associated with the digital computer

Use observable responses to make inferences about how the mind works.

Give an example of the information processing approach

Examples of Information

Sensory data (e.g., a sound)

Mental representations

•Declarative knowledge (e.g., state capitals)

◦Procedural knowledge (e.g., how to ride a bike)

Examples of Processes

Filtering sensory inputs

Accessing mental representations

Manipulating information

What are the purpose of models?

simplify complex systems and make predictions about how systems work

What is cognitive neuroscience?

The study of the physiological basis of cognition, including how information is transmitted and represented in the brain.

What is a nerve net?

series of interconnected nerve cells

Believed to be a continuous interconnected system that could transmit signals in all directions (AKA LIKE A HIGHWAY) (Nerve Net Theory)

Who discovered neurons?

Santiago Ramon y Cajal - neuron theory, neurons as distinct units with directionality

Golgi - reticular theory, theory where all neurons are all interconnected into webs

What is the neuron doctrine?

1. Individual neurons are the basic building blocks of the brain.

2. There are small gaps, called synapses, between one neuron's axon and another neuron's dendrites/cell body.

3. Connections between specific neurons form interconnected groups called neural circuits.

What are action potentials?

Nerve Impulses. Electrical impulses that are carried along the lengths of the axons. Always the same regardless of the stimulus.

True or false: At rest, the electrical charge inside a neuron's axon is more negative than outside the axon.

True

Explain action potentials (this is a doozie)

1. Ion channels open letting the positive sodium ions rush in- the inside becomes less negative

2. The internal charge of the ion reaches a certain threshold

3. This triggers more sodium channels to open to let even more in

4. This creeps over to the other sodium channels which are sensitive to voltage and they open - repeat

5. When this "wave" reaches the end of a neuron, it triggers the release of neurotransmitters from the neuron through exocytosis

6. NT then float across the synapse to the next neuron where they trigger another AP

7. So many sodium ions have gotten inside the first neuron that the diff between the outside and the inside have reversed (inside positive, outside negative)- this "must" be fixed

8. So the sodium channels close and the potassium channels open up

9. Positive K ions rush down both the concentration/ electrochemical gradients to get out of the cell

10. That brings the cell charge on the inside to negative and positive on the outside (however, the sodium is inside... not the potassium)

11. So the pumps get back to work by burning ATP to pump the sodium back out and the potassium back in

12. We are now back to resting potential!

How do we manage to distinguish between different types of experiences?

By activating different neurons and areas in the brain. (AKA where it goes in your brain)

What is the localization of function?

Certain areas of the brain specialize for different functions

What is distributed processing?

The brain is an interactive network working together to support thought and action

What is Broca's area? Where is it located?

speech production

frontal lobe

What is Wernicke's area? Where is it located?

language comprehension

temporal lobe

True or false: Broca's area and Wernicke's area are completely separate from each other

false

What is double dissociation?

Damage to one area of the brain causes function A to be absent while function B is present. Damage to another area causes function B to absent while function A is present.

What are examples of double dissociations?

• Impaired production but not comprehension (and vice versa)

• Impaired vision but not hearing (and vice versa)

• Impaired recognition of faces but not objects (and vice versa)

What are feature detectors?

neurons that respond to specific characteristics of a stimulus

What is neural plasticity?

the ability of the brain's neural structure or function to be changed by experience throughout the lifespan

•It allows us to learn and adapt!

•Although we see evidence of neural plasticity throughout the lifespan, our brains are most malleable as infants/children.

What is neural coding?

the way in which the nervous system converts information to a meaningful pattern of action potentials

What is the principle of neural representation?

everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system

What is specificity coding?

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

What are problems with specificity coding?

• Too many different objects, concepts, etc. for each to be represented by distinct individual neurons.

• Killing that single cell would effectively eradicate the representation of the corresponding object.

What is population coding?

representation of a particular object by the pattern of firing of a large number of neurons

What is sparse coding?

when a particular object is represented by a pattern of firing of only a small group of neurons, with the majority of neurons remaining silent

What is distributed representation?

the idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain

Most experience is multi__________

dimensional

What does this phrase mean: neurons that fire together wire together?

Physical connections can be strengthened/weakened by experience

What is functional connectivity?

the extent to which multiple brain regions function at the same time, which improves during adolescence

What are the six functional networks?

1. Somato-motor ("feeler"): touch/movement

2. Visual ("seer"): visual info from environment

3. Dorsal attention ("spotlight"): directing attention (particularly to visual inputs)

4. Executive control ("director"): higher level cognition, e.g., decision-making, working memory

5. Salience ("detective"): attention to behaviorally-relevant/emotionally-significant stimuli (fight or flight)

6. Default mode ("daydreamer"): self-relevant information

How can connectivity between different brain regions change over the lifespan?

in response to prior experience, age, injury, etc, as well as from moment to moment depending on what you are doing.

What is the difference between gray matter and white matter?

Gray matter: Mostly made up of neurons' cell bodies (giving it its gray color).

•Where most of the actual processing takes place.

White matter: Mostly myelinated axons ("tracts" - axons with a fatty layer of insulation that speeds up processing).

Connects gray matter regions to each other.

What is attention and spatial processing?

•Greater activation of fronto-parietal regions when performing a "less preferred" (more challenging) framed-line task

What is perception?

Experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses.

DATA ANALYSIS

True or false: perception and sensation are the same thing

FALSE

What is sensation?

The detection of sensory information by sensory receptors.

DATA COLLECTION

What are rods?

retinal receptors that detect black, white, and gray; necessary for peripheral and twilight vision, when cones don't respond

What are cones?

provide vision in bright light, color vision, sharp images

Receptors absorb photons which causes a _________ change

chemical

What is hyperpolarization?

It generates an electrical signal which is passed on to the brain.

Name some types of sensory receptors

•Hair cells that detect sound waves.

•Chemoreceptors that detect odors and flavors.

•Mechanoreceptors that detect pressure.

•Thermoreceptors that detect temperature.

•Nociceptors that detect pain and damage.

•Proprioceptors that detect body position/movement.

Vestibular receptors that detect head position for balance

True or false: perceptions can change based on added info

true

The images projected on our retina are __________

ambiguous

Why would AI have a hard time finding hidden or partially hidden objects?

AI would have a hard time because the object isn't fully seen

Humans can use their knowledge of the world to fill in missing pieces.

What is viewpoint invariance?

the ability to recognize an object seen from different viewpoints

Although computers can store a cast amount of knowledge they don't have what?

a large store of real-world knowledge that humans do

What is bottom up processing?

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

What is top down processing?

the brain recognizes the whole object and then the components based on these expectations

What are the Gestalt principles?

Tries to explain how we perceive things the way we do.

1. Good Continuation: lines tend to be seen as following the smoothest path

2. Good figure (simplicity): every stimulus is seen so that the resulting structure is as simple as possible

3. Similarity: similar things appear grouped together

4. Proximity: things that are closer to each other appear grouped together

5. Common Region: things that share a closed space appear grouped together

6. Common Fate: things that move or point in the same direction appear grouped together

7. Multistability: We look for stable figures in ambiguous stimuli

8. Closure: incomplete figures are filled in

What is the likelihood principle?

We make unconscious assumptions about the object that is most likely to have caused the image

What is prior probability?

initial belief about the probability of an outcome

What is the oblique effect?

People can perceive verticals and horizontals more easily than other orientations

(More neurons on the brain respond to vertical/horizontal than oblique)

What is the "what pathway"?

Determining the identity of an object

Ventral pathway (lower part of the brain)

What is the "where pathway"?

Determining the location of an object

Dorsal pathway (upper part of the brain)

When you damage the temporal lobe, what happens?

you have problems with object discrimination (what objects are)

When you damage the parietal lobe, what happens?

you have problems with landmark discrimination (where objects are)

What are the perception pathways and the action pathways

Perception Pathway: visual cortex --> temporal lobe

Action Pathway: visual cortex --> parietal lobe

Perception is grounded in ________

action

What is attention?

The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment

What is the difference between selective attention and divided attention?

Selective attention:

The ability to focus on one message and ignore all others.

Divided attention:

The ability to focus on more than one thing at a time.

What is overt attention?

shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes

What is covert attention?

shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary

What is stimulus salience?

areas that stand out and capture attention

What is the early selection filter model?

We filter information before we analyze the meaning.

What does filtering do?

Filter detects physical characteristics of a message (e.g., tone, pitch) to only let attended message through.

What is dichotic listening?

a task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear

What is the cocktail party effect?

ability to attend to only one voice among many

What was Dear Aunt Jane experiment?

When the attended message was "Dear 7 Jane" and the unattended message was "9 Aunt 6," participants reported hearing "Dear Aunt Jane"

Once again suggests that some meaning was processed from the unattended message.

What is the attenuator model?

•Both the attended and unattended messages are passed to an "attenuator" which weakens the strength of the unattended message

• A "dictionary unit" contains words from memory, each with a different "threshold" of activation.

•Some words (like your name) have a lower threshold so might be processed even if unattended.

What is Mackay's Late Selection Model?

•Filtering occurs after all inputs are fully processed up to the level of meaning.

•The relevance of the information determines whether it is consciously perceived.

•Participants heard ambiguous sentences in the attended ear (e.g., They were throwing stones at the bank") while hearing "biasing" words in the unattended ear (e.g., "river" or "money").

•Then chose which was closest to the meaning of attended message:

•"They threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday."

•"They threw stones at the savings and loan association yesterday."

•Meaning of the biasing word unconsciously affected participants' choice.

True or false: Either earlier or later selection can occur depending on the task and stimuli.

true

What is the load theory of attention?

*Processing capacity - how much information a person can handle at any given moment.

*Perceptual load - the difficulty of a given task

*High-load (difficult) tasks use higher amounts of processing capacity.

*Low-load (easy) tasks use lower amounts of processing capacity

What is feature integration theory?

Suggests that there are two stages when perceiving objects: feature stage and conjunction stage.

feature stage: analyzes features, registered early, automatically, and in parallel

conjunction stage: combine features into object, sequentially, conscious attention

Explains why is it relatively easy to conduct feature searches and relatively difficult to conduct conjunction searches.

What is Balint's syndrome?

inability to focus attention on individual objects

Attention to particular types of stimuli is ____________ throughout the _________

distributed, brain

What is attentional warping?

When searching for a particular type of stimulus (e.g., people), the areas dedicated to that type of stimulus expands

What is the executive attention network?

responsible for the kind of attention we use when a task focuses on conflict

What is thalamic gating?

Thalamus plays a key role in attentional selection/gating (i.e., "a filter").

Takes information from sensory domains and passes on to the cortex.

Unlike most other senses, ___________ info by-passes the thalamus on its way to the neocortex for higher processing.

olfactory