Psych 311 Section 1 - College of William and Mary - Dr. Christopher Ball

Contains Info for the 4 Conundrums and covers the major studies

Ecological Validity

What is a criticism of cognitive psychology?

• Visual Analogue or Linguistic Representation

• Representation is changing

The two mental representations in memory according to the symbolic approach

Flicker Paradigm

time taken for participant to identity changed piece as board switches from one display to the other every second

The Visual Pattern Recognition

What did Reingold, Charness, Pomplum, and Stampe test?

1. Research Objective

2. How they will test Objective

3. What they found

4. How it will relate/support

The 4 Take Home Points

• Occipito-temporal junction involved in visual perception (e.g., object recognition)

• Some areas of the brain are bigger in chess masters, but many are smaller

When brains of chess masters were compared with brains of control group (matched on IQ) using MRI what was found?

Cognitive Neuropsychology

case studies of brain damaged patients; often use matched controls; usually tested on a large variety of tasks and tests; looking for dissociations (double)

Prosopagnosia

face specific deficit (can’t recognize familiar faces)

CFMT

how to test prosopagnosia

occipital face

Some prosopagnosia patients have lesion to this area

no

is the fusiform activation area the only one needed for face recognition?

 enhancing or disrupting underlying cortical activity

What is TMS (Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation) used for?

• Expensive

• Can be invasive

Cons of TMS

Spatial and Temporal Resolution

Pros of TMS

OFA

Facial recognition was only disrupted by TMS to what area

EEG/ERP

measures brain activity from scalp recording of electrical activity

• Good temporal resolution

• non-invasive

• relatively cheap

• reasonably popular

Pros of EEG/ERP

• Requires large number of trials

• Poor spatial resolution

Cons of EEG/ERP

significant differences between groups in N2 (posterior) and P3 (frontal)

What did Wright find when he tested expert and novice chess players in a chess related task while recording ERPs?

1. N2 (posterior) visual attention, working memory, or semantic memory effects on visual attention

2. P34 (frontal) visual attention efficiency

What did Wright conclude from his 2013 study?

fMRI

brain activity measured by recording oxygen consumption in blood to regions of the brain.

Deoxyhemoglobin

When neurons use oxygen, what do they convert  oxyhemoglobin to?

• non-invasive

• reasonable temporal resolution

• good spatial resolution

fMRI pros

expensive

fMRI con

fMRI

What test induces subtle changes in the magnetic field?

• Cerebral blood flow (CBF) increases

• Amount of oxygen (OEF) decreases

• Amount of oxygen leaving the brain attached to hemoglobin (Hbg-O2) increases

As neural activity increases, what happens?

There was not an increased FFA for the chess experts with chess game experts

When Krawczyk used brain imaging to see if specific brain regions were associated with specific cognitive functions, what did he find?

perception

Fusiform gyrus could be area of brain for all expert ___?

Neural Networks

Neural assemblies that synchronize their firing

neural connectivity

Duan found ___ differences between novice and grand-master chess players

Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin

Who did The Turk defeat in the late 18th and early 19th century?

Turing

British pioneer of computers and AI

Turing

Who wrote the first chess program even though computers hadn’t been invented yet?

1966-1967

When was the first chess game between a human and a computer

computer science and artificial intelligence

Computational Cognitive Science has its foundations in ___ and ___

 connectionist networks or neural network models

Parallel Distributed Processing are also called ___ or ___

• Excitatory and inhibitory connections (weighted)

• Activation levels (thresholds)

Parallel Distributed Processing are based on what properties of neural connections?

1. Decline at same rate

2. High knowledge decline slower

3. High knowledge decline faster

Three possible relationships between age and expertise (knowledge):

HKB remains superior to LKB

When Mireless & Charness manipulated neural responsiveness and neural degradation the ___ remains ___ to ___

top-down and bottom-up processing

Perception is a function of what?

• 1.5-2 times larger on the horizon

• Not just moon - sun, planets, stars

• Sometimes there is a ‘super-illusion’ >2x

• First known scientific explanation Aristotle 300 BC (atmospheric distortion)

• When photographed, no effect

What is the moon illusion?

distance cues

Horizontal moons provides ___that suggest moon is far away and therefore the brain perceives it is bigger

afterimages

You can you ___ to highlight size constancy

1. Unconscious registration of distance information - bottom up

2. Distance ‘judged’ on cognitive knowledge - top down

Two Step Process when perceiving the moon:

V1

fMRI researchers found activity in ___ matched perceived size not actual size of image

participant’s head

Sperandio found that the size of activity in V1 correlated with the distance that the background was away from ___

100ms and 220ms

Camproden found TMS disrupted performance most at ___ and ___ after stimulus presentation

If Visual Acuity can be improved with illusion that is perceived to be larger

Lagos found better letter recognition when tested after adapting to contracting motion. This was testing what?

• perceptual discrimination improved to the “close” images

• visual discrimination was improved to the “close” faces

When Ashan examined perceptual discrimination using a psychophysics task and manipulating depth perception using the Ponzo illusion, what did he find?

Apperceptive Agnosia

cannot perform perceptual processes and can’t perceive forms of object but knowledge of object OK

Associative Agnosia

can perceive forms and draw object but do not known what it is (unless presented using a different modality)

damage to the extrastriate regionals of occipital cortex and temporal cortex

Visual agnosias generally result from

Galton

Who first coined the term “synesthesia”

Synesthesia

experiencing sensory information that is not physically associated with a stimulus and that is consistently and automatically evoked by this stimulus

Projector (Synesthesia)

“out in space”

Associators (Synesthesia)

“minds eye”

Number-Color Stroop Test

Gold standard for color grapheme synesthesia testing

faster

Projectors were ___ than associators with the Number-Color Troop Test (photism)

Touch

Hearing> > > ___ metaphors are most common sensory metaphor

T1

 Conscious; High Strength and Attention

T2

Preconscious; High Strength, no Attention

T3

Subliminal; Weak Strength

feedforward and feedback

Consciousness is both ___ and ___ and focus

bistable perception

 when the brain changes from one conscious representation to another conscious representation (EX: people or vase illusion)

1. Subjective (phenomenal) Experience

2. Binding of multiple sources of information

3. Self-Awareness

4. Volition (executive) Intentions

4 Characteristics of Consciousness

short term memory

Change blindness has helped us better understand attention and visual ___

attention to detail; change blindness tests

Some researchers suggest that people on the autism spectrum have superior ___ and show better performance on ___

Inattentional blindness

_______ exposes what is being cognitively processed in focused attention at a cost of what is not being processed outside of this focus of attention

classical conditioning

Corteen and Wood (1972) used ______ procedure to show that information in unattended channel was being processed at a semantic level (needs access to long term memory)

Subliminal

 presenting stimulus below threshold of awareness

subliminal

Marcel found that much information about the ____ prime was perceived and even included semantic aspects of the prime

Explanations for Blindsight:

1. Just chance responses (subjective reports)

2. Different thresholds for different responses (subjective criterion), such as when asked if you “see” versus simply “detect” something

3. Stray light reaching intact area of visual field (even illusory light)

4. Stimuli processing by intact regions (spared islands of residual performance) and eye-movements could spread stimuli processing to intact regions

5. Use some other existing visual pathways; primitive nonstriate system without conscious perception

6. Information processed at higher-levels (e.g., V5) that bypass V1 (neural plasticity)

Unilateral spatial neglect

_______ patients have intact visual system but are “blind” to large areas of visual field

right hemisphere

Unilateral Spacial Neglect patients typically have damage of which part of the brain?

results from the competition by hemispheres to process spatial regions

Possible explanation for unilateral spatial neglect: