Cog Psych Exam block 1

What’s the definition of creativity

• New and original

• Task-appropriate (meets basic requirements)

Four C model of creativity

• Mini-C

• Little-C

• Pro-C

• Big-C

What’s big-C creativity?

Genius and history making (rare)

What’s Pro-C creativity?

Professional levels of creativity and meaningful to others

What’s Little-C creativity?

Every day and hobby (experimenting)

What’s Mini-C creativity?

Personally new and meaningful (learning)

Intelligence with creativity?

Analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence.

How does creativity promote well-being?

• Enhanced mood

• Facilitates coping strategies

• Facilitates meaning-making and post-traumatic growth

• Reduces anxiety

How does creativity enhance workplace environments?

• Innovation to stay competitive

• Solve new problems

• Adapt to changing circumstances

How is creativity essential for society?

• Addressing environmental crisis

• Ending poverty

• Protecting human rights

What is cognition?

Mental activity through acquisition, storage, transformation, and use of knowledge.

What are some modern topics of cognitive psychology?

Sensation, perception, attention, learning, memory, language, and thinking

How Aristotle influenced philosophical foundations?

Foundation of empirical thinking; i.e. experimental approach using observations

How did Wundt influence philosophical foundations?

Took an introspective approach where he set up circumstances and report then being objective as possible. Focusing on the experience of people while also using more objective methods as well. Used standardized and objective protocols.

Who is Titchener?

One of Wundt’s students who furthered his findings. They were structuralists.

What is a structuralist?

Understanding the structure of human conscious experience

i.e. pain, touch, taste, vision and color, vividness

What were some critiques of structuralism?

There were individual differences, hypothesis bias, issues expressing verbally, generalization of participants, and didn’t like the omission of context

Who were Ebbinghaus and Calkins?

Functionalists. Calkins was interested in understanding how things worked in a more realistic manner. Ebbinghaus studied his own memory.

Who was William James?

Was interested in pragmatism to apply what they learned and help others. Interested in real-world context.

Who was John Watson?

Behaviorism. Focused on observable and objective behavior instead of internal factors or the influence of context. Against introspection. Observed behavior through animal models. Classical and operant conditioning.

What were the contributions of behaviorism?

Moved away from introspection and towards empirical means which could be verified by others. Put emphasis on operation definitions for behavior (heart rate, etc.).

What are some critiques of behaviorism?

Ignoring context which matters, humans are more complex than animals, ethics with animals, and there are behaviors that animals do not exhibit that are worthy of study.

Who is Frederic Bartlett?

Studied memory. Found that context influences the details that are recalled. Believed that context and previous experiences influence future behaviors and memory. Experimentally had people read short stories.

Bartlett and Koehler

Gestalt psychology. Holistic psychology where the whole is better than the parts. Against structuralism and behaviorism. Closer to pragmatists where they valued the importance of context.

Who was George Miller?

Proposed challenge to behaviorists where understanding thinking was very important. Led to a movement that started to understand the limits of behaviorism.

Who were Chomsky and Neisser?

It’s necessary for us to study the mind and thinking to understand language learning. Argument backed by younger children learning languages easier (innate quality in mind) than in olde children/adults although the same conditions are present (reinforcement, association, etc.)

Who is Herbert Simon?

Information-processing approach. The idea that the mind is like a computer where it gets input, acts on input, and provides output. Replaced behaviorism as main driving theory in psychology.

Who is Donald Hebb?

Introduced the connectionist approach. The brain, and neural networks, is the model for cognitive processing, not a computer.

Who are Rumelhart and McClelland?

Connectionists. Created the parallel distributed processing models where a series of connections of ideas that operate in parallel. How people categorize the world and make associations between things.

What is the cognitive approach?

A theoretical orientation that emphasizes people’s thougt processes and their knowledge.

What is the recency effect?

The observation taht our recall is especially accurate for the final items in a series of stimuli (such as a list of words or numbers)

What is operational definition?

A precise definition that specifies exactly how a concept is to be measured

What is a mental representation?

The memories that are encoded and maintained in one’s long-term memory system as a result of one’s lifetime experiences

What was the cognitive revolution?

The shift away from behaviorist approaches to the study of human behavior. Instead, experimental psychologists began to focus on how organism-internal processes, such as memory, attention, and language, work together to give rise to the human ability to consciously perceive, interpret, and act in the world around them.

What are critiques of cognitive psychology?

The issue of ecological validity where an experiment is controlled and the results would inform how the memory operates, but it cannot be applied ot the way people learn in the real world.

What is sensation?

Processing of information in sensory reception (rods and cones)

What is perception?

Uses previous knowledge to gather and interpret the stimuli registered by the senses Ex. duck v rabbit

What is a proximal stimulus?

The information registered on your sensory receptors

What is the distal stimulus?

The actual object that is in the environment

How do we recognize visual objects?

Visual information is processed in the occipital lobe (V1), sent to the parietal and temporal lobe to process different information

What is the Gestalt theory to visual perception?

Humans have the basic tendency to organize what is seen; without any effort, humans see patterns rather than random arrangements. Studied figure-ground where people perceived different pictures and the background. Different types of laws created to make more sense of the world around us and explain how people are able to better perceive objects/images.

What is the template theory to visual perception?

The visual system compares a stimulus with a set of templates or specific patterns that have been stored in the memory.

What is the feature-analysis theory to visual perception?

Visual stimulus is composed of a small number of characteristics (distinctive feature) or components

What is the recognition by components (RBC) theory to visual perception?

A specific view of an object can be represented as an arrangement of simple 3-D shapes (geons). Geons can be combined to form meaningful objects.

What is the law of Prägnanz?

Where we perceive the most simple organization of elements (simplest explanation that connects to our experiences in the world).

What is the law of continuity?

The perception of seeing bounded objects as continuous.

What is the law of symmetry?

People perceive things as symmetrical.

What is the law of closure?

Where people are more successful in perceiving images when boundaries are closed.

What is the law of similarity?

Where we group things that are similar together.

What are some pros and cons of the Gestalt psychology approach to perception?

Pros: good at describing what we see in the world

Cons: does not explain why the brain perceives things in this way or why this occurs.

What are pros and cons of the template theory?

Pro: simple theory

Con: can still recognize things that are different (handwriting) and there are more complex objects that occupy the visual world that cannot be explained by this simple theory.

What are pros and cons of feature-analysis theory?

Pros: supported by neuroscience

Cons: does not explain how all of those features are brought together to form a complex whole

What are pros and cons of recognition-by-components theory?

Pros: More complex items are more likely to make up an object and works in 3 dimensions to be able to recognize from different angles.

Cons: does not explain how you can distinguish between similarly shaped objects made of the same geons.

What is object/pattern recognition

Identifying a complex arrangement of sensory stimuli, and you perceive that this pattern is separate from its background

What is sensory memory?

A large-capacity storage system that records information from each of the senses with reasonable accuracy.

What is visual sensory memory?

Preserves an image of a visual stimulus for a brief period after the stimulus has disappeared.

What is an ambiguous figure-ground relationship?

The figure and the ground reverse from time to time, so that the figure becomes the ground and then becomes the figure again.

What is illusory contours (subjective contours)?

We see edges even thoguh they are not physically present in the stimulus (triangle edges)

What is the vieweWhat is bottomr-centered approach?

This approach proposes that we store a small number of views of three-dimensional objects rather than just one view.

What is bottom-up processing?

The stimulus characteristics are important when you recognize an object. The physical stimuli from the environment are registered on the sensory receptors. This information is then passed on to higher, more sophisticated levels in the perceptual system.

What is top-down processing?

A person’s concepts, expectations, and memory can influence object recognition. Higher-level mental processes all help in identifying objects.

What is word superiority effect?

We can identify a single letter more accurately and more radiply when it appears in a meaningful word than when it appears alone or in a meaningless string of unrelated letters.

What is change blindness?

When we fail to detect a change in an object or a scene

What is inattentional blindness?

When we are paying attention to some events in a scene, we may fail to notice when an unexpected but completely visible object suddenly appears. From overusing top-down processing.

What is a phoneme?

The basic unit of spoken language, such as the sounds a, k, th.

What is inter-speaker variability?

The term used to refer to the observation that different speakers of the same language produce the same sound differently. Factors such as the speaker’s gender, age, and regional dialect all contribute to interspeaker variability in phoneme pronunciation.

What is coarticulation?

When you are pronouncing a particular phoneme, you mouth remains in somewhat the same shape it was when you pronounced the previous phoneme, your mouth is preparing to pronounce the next phoneme.

What is phonemic restoration?

They can fill in a missing phoneme, using contextual meaning as a cue.

What is the McGurk effect?

The influence of visual information on speech perception, when individauls must integrate both visual and auditory information.

What is the special mechanism approach?

Humans are born with a specialized device that allows us to decode speech stimuli. We process speech sounds more quickly and accurately than other auditory stimuli, such as instrumental music

What is the phonetic module?

A special-purpose neural mechanism that specifically processes all aspects of speech perception; it cannot handle other kinds of auditory perception. This phonetic module would presumably enable listeners to perceive ambiguous phonemes accurately.

What does the general mechanism approaches argue?

We can explain speech perceptions without proposing any special phonetic module. The belief that humans use the same neuural mechanisms to process both speech sounds and non-speech sounds and therefore, speech perception is a learned ability.

What is the ecological model of perception?

Perception is direct, active, and adapted to the environment rather than a construct of the brain. Used as evidence for bottom-up processing

What is the Johansson Experiment?

The points moving in a coordinated fashion where we can identify what motions a person is doing where the proximal stimulus is only white dots.

What does change blindness and inattentional blindness tell us about visual perception?

Although we are able to see the changes, we do not fully perceive the changes that are occurring.

Pro: focus our attention

Con: not always focusing on the right thing

How might top-down processes influence your ability to recognize sensory modalities?

Your memory, associations, and expectations created independently influence your perception of different stimuli.

Ex. priming a child with telling them that a specific food is really yummy, they will be more likely to enjoy it when trying a food.

How does the baby looking at faces experiment influence visual object recognition?

Infants prefer or recognize facial features in the correct areas but cannot differentiate between faces that are upright and top-heavy configuration faces. Also an early developmental experience.

What’s the difference between special mechanism view and general mechanism view for face recognition?

Special mechanism: face recognition is special perception from humans being predisposed for facial recognition.

General mechanism: face recognition is just like everything else. People can become experts in everything and learn to have better face recognition.

What was found in language learning in infants?

The babies all hear the same sounds but there is different perceptions based on the languages, location, and experiences that the babies have experienced. Language learning is guided through social experienced, human connection is more effective in learning another language. When babies were exposed to a tv, they make no progress in learning another language. This shows that since babies are learning language in social environments suggests that the language learning mechanism may be special.

What is the stroop effect?

Reading the colors is the automatic process.

What are automatic processes?

Effortless, generally nonconscious, require little attention, parallel processing, and used for relatively simple tasks.

Some automatic processes were previously controlled processes and then turn into automatic processes, others are learned implicitly.

What are controlled processes?

Effortful, conscious, require attention, serial processing, and used for complex, difficult tasks

How does priming affect automatic processing?

Priming does not require conscious awareness while affecting behavior but can change the context of behavior.

What is the bottleneck theory?

There is a lot of sensory information coming from the world. Only some of the information makes it through the bottleneck, which is the information that we are paying attention to. Sometimes people will remember some of the information that originally didn’t make it through the bottleneck later. This suggests that some of the information that does not make it through the bottleneck is still being attended to and remember more than we think we do.

Con: Does not explain what makes through and what doesn’t make through the bottleneck.

What is feature-integration theory?

Developed by Anne Treisman. There are two kinds of attention which help explain how attention is divided between distributed and focused attention.

Two issues with this theory: illusory conjunction and binding problem

What is distributed attention?

Allows you to register features automatically; you use parallel processing across the field, and you register all the features simultaneously. This type of processing is so effortless that you are not even aware that you’re using it sometimes.

Ex. identifying a red line in a group of green lines.

What is focused attention?

Requires slow serial processing, in which you identify one object at a time. This more demanding kind of processing is necessary when the objects are more complex. Focused attention identifies which features belong together.

What is a conjunction search?

A more complex task of looking for the conjunction of two features. Requires focused attention since it will not pop out like the other tasks.

ex. the red object that is tilted right.

What is the illusory conjunction?

Mistakenly combining features, perhaps combing one object’s shape with a nearby object’s color.

Ex. eyewitness testimony

What is the binding problem?

Not representing the important features of an object as a unified whole. Can be influenced by top-down processing.

What is selective attention?

Requiring people to pay attention to certain kinds of information while ignoring other present information.

Ex. Dichotic listening

What is dichotic listening?

Asking people to wear earphones; one message is presented to the left ear and a different message is presented to the right ear. The participants are asked to shadow the message in one ear and if they make a mistake in shadowing, the researcher knows that the listener is not paying appropriate attention to that specific message.

What is the cocktail party effect?

Even if you are paying close attention to one conversation, you may notice if you name is mentioned in a nearby conversation.

What has neuroscience of attention taught us?

Attention is being processed in different areas of the brain.

Orienting attention network→ parietal lobe

Executive attention network → prefrontal cortex

What is orienting attention network responsible for?

The kind of attention required for visual search, in which you must shift your attention around to various spatial locations.

What is executive attention network responsible for?

The kinds of attention we use when a task focuses on conflict. Inhibits your automatic responses to stimuli and is involved during top-down control of attention. Important for learning and acquiring academic skills.

What is visuospatial neglect?

Damage in the right parietal lobe. Will only pay attention to the right side of objects/images. Shows the inability of the brain to process all of the sensory information.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and types of attention?

Anterior portion is for focus and drugs target neurotransmitter dopamine. Posterior attention system is for impulse and drugs target norepinephrine.

What is divided attention?

Attempting to pay attention to two or more simultaneously messages, responding appropriately to each message.

What makes driving a divided attention task?

People are required to drive and also do something else (audiobook, music, etc.).