psych 224 exam 1, chapters 1-3

Wilhelm Wundt

introspection, father of psychology, first lab, pendulum

introspection

highly subjective, unreliable

Ivan Pavlov

dogs and classical conditioning, eliciting a response to a neutral stimulus (light, bell)

John Watson

Little Albert, fear conditioning

behaviorism

ivan pavlov, john watson, solely focused on observable behaviors, neglects cognition, fails to explain delay in learning with rule changes

edward tolman

neo behaviorist, cognitive map which disproves behaviorism as it indicates some level of cognition, rats in maze

noam chomsky

language acquisition device, innate sense of language, another one of behaviorisms failures

george miller

people can memorize seven plus or minus two units, shows mind has measurable processing limits, not just learned through reinforcement, disproves behaviorism

herman ebbinghaus

forgetting curve, first study on forgetting and memory, most amount of forgetting occurs immediately

cognitive psych

combines brain and behavior science, studies how we perceive, recognize, and remember what happens in our mind

information processing approach

our mental processes are similar to the operations of a computer, information progresses through our cognitive system in a series of stages

serial processing

sequential, must complete step a before step b

parallel processing

simultaneous, difficult because more is happening at the same time

sternberg task

provides number sets of varying sizes and asks participants to recall if a number was in that set, utilizes serial processing method and shows that as size of number set increases, so does response time

david rumelhart

developed models of learning called connectionist network models or paralleled distributed processing models, mathematical, information is coded as a pattern of activation distributed across many different nodes

go/no go task

given random digits, each digit you either press a button or don’t, participants often press no go button even though they know they’re not supposed to, shows speed accuracy tradeoff

speed accuracy tradeoff

error increases as you increase the speed , aka the oops test

single cell recording

using implanted electrode to detect electrical activity in single neuron, shows our brains may code abstract concepts with “concept cells,” neurons fire in response to all things related to this concept (aniston), network of concept neurons

eeg

non invasive, cap with electrodes, picks up brain rhythms like alpha and beta waves, tells us when something happens in the brain but not where, sleep

erp

event related potential, derived from eeg, brain waves show when mind reacts to changes

fmri

tracks which brain areas are using more oxygen for tasks, good for sensory, too slow to show split second processes, create brain images

pet

brain imaging, radioactive substance highlights which part of brain is engaging in a certain task

tms

transcranial magnetic stimulation, changes activity in cerebral cortex by generating strong magnetic pulses over skull

cognitive approach

emphasizes people’s thought proces and their knowledge

prospective memory

memory we form for tasks we intend to carry out in the future

retrospective tasks

remembering information you acquired in the past

recency effect

our recall is especially accurate for the final items in a series of stimuli

william james

functionalist, purpose and utility of consciousness in behavior, disliked introspection

gestalt psychology

emphasizes that we have basic tendencies to actively organize what we see and often see the whole over parts, gestalt emphasizes unity and organization

ecological validity

whether or not a lab or study in which research is conducted is similar to the natural settings where the results will be applied

computer metaphor

our cognitive processes work like a computer, complex multipurpose machinery

connectionist approach

cognitive processes can be understood in terms of networks that link together neuron-like processing units, also called parallel distributed processing (PDP) or neural-network approach

cerebral cortex

the outer layer of the brain that is essential for cognitive processes

textbook’s themes

cognitive processes are active instead of passive, cognitive processes are remarkably efficient and accurate, cognitive processes handle positive information better than negative information, cognitive processes are interrelated and do not operate in isolation, cognitive processes rely on bottom-up and top-down processing

associationism

the theory that mental processes operate through associations between ideas or sensations

cognitive revolution

a period in the mid twentieth century marked by a shift away from behaviorism and towards cognition

sensation

reception of stimulation, its initial encoding into our nervous system

perception

the process of interpreting and understanding what is sensed, often used because we receive incomplete info from our senses

early processing

what hits your eyes

late processing

your brain’s interpretation

pattern recognition

identification of complex arrangement of sensory stimuli, how we recognize, identify, and categorize information, based solely on info in stimulus, neglects context

template matching theory

compares stimulus image to various stored templates in our brain, match has to be exact so it is constrained

feature analysis theory

stimuli consists of combinations of features, simpler and easier than templates, reduced number of templates needed, like lines, why P and R are more similar than G and N

recognition by components theory

biederman, objects made up of geons, recognition stems from both the object and its configuration, the same geon can be recognized from all perspectives

viewpoint invariance

geons can be identified when viewed from different angles because they contain invariant properties, this was taken into consideration when designing them

word superiority effect

easy to discriminate letters when they’re in the context of a known word than in the context of non words

top down processing

cognition influencing stimulus, context

bottom up processing

relying purely on stimulus for interpretation

change blindness

failure to notice large changes to a scene even when paying close attention to it and you know a change is coming, simons and chablis

inattention blindness

failure to notice the existence of an unexpected item because your attention is diverted elsewhere, simons and chabrs

face recognition

holistic, gestalt, we can identify most obscured faces

inversion effect

upside down faces are unrecognizable

thatcher illusion

turning faces upside down but keeping some features right side up makes them recognizable, because we pay more attention to location of features rather than orientation

prosopagnosia

difficulty in recognizing faces due to temporal lobe damage

fusiform gyrus

region of temporal lobe that is responsible for recognizing faces

apperceptive agnosia

early perceptual processes are disrupted, cannot turn into a visual perception, cannot copy, damage to posterior parietal areas in right hemisphere

associative agnosia

late perceptual processes are disrupted, cannot assign meaning to an object, can copy it and recognize simple shapes, damage to connection of occipital and temporal lobes in left and right hemisphere

distal stimulus

the actual object that is out there in the environment

proximal stimulus

the information registered on your sensory receptors

sensory memory

large capacity storage system that records information from each of the senses

iconic memory or visual sensory memory

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

primary visual cortex

located in occipital love, concerned with basic processing of visual stimuli

figure/ground

clear, distinct shape with clearly defined edges/region that is leftover and forms the background

ambiguous figure-ground relationship

the figure and the ground reverse from time to time so they trade roles

illusory contours

also called subjective contours, when you see edges despite them not being physically present in the stimulus

viewers centered approach

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

goal divided attention

intentional, endogenous, control, top-down processing

stimulus driven attention

incidental, bottom up processing, exogenous control

divided attention

ability to do two things simultaneously

selective attention

picking stimuli for further processing

dichotomy listening task

played different stimulus in each ears, could hear the attended ear, could not hear language changes in unattended ear but could hear if speaker changed from male to female

shadowing

dichotic listening task, repeating back the attended ear’s message

cocktail party effect

people notice their own name, even in noisy, bustling situations

perceptual selection

posterior attention network, decides what to attend and what to ignore

inhibitory selection

stop yourself from performing an automatic task, anterior attention network

stroop task

reading the color of the font instead of that the word reads, hard time stopping habitual automatic responses like reading

disjunctive search

easy to identify, clear difference

conjunctive search

subject is more difficult to locate visually

feature integration theory

triesman, stage one is distributed attention (automatic, parallel processing, disjuctive) and stage two is focused attention (serial processing, effortful, conjunctive)

attentional costs

the slowing of a task when you perform multiple tasks at once, not applicable to everything

byrne and anderson task

two basic math problems (two different tasks), subjects could perform each rapidly but when put together, response time doubled, shows attentional costs

perfect time sharing

the ability to do more than one task at once

parietal lobes

posterior attention network, visual search tasks, perceptual selection

frontal lobes

anterior attention network, inhibitory tasks

spotlight theory of attention

we can move out attention to focus on different things without moving our eyes, argues attention is location based which is not true, it is object based

hemispatial neglect

also simply neglect, caused by stroked damaging right parietal love, failure to acknowledge field contralateral to lesion, no perceptual deficit, will not be picked up by their attention but if you draw attention to it, they will notice, object based, will copy right side of tilted object which may not entirely be in the right field

endogenous control

top down, goal directed attention, driven by internal factors

exogenous control

bottom up processes, stimulus driven, driven by external factors

fixations

brief periods when the eyes are stationary, allowing information acquisiton

saccades

rapid eye movement between fixations

working memory

brief, immediate memory for material we are currently processing

attentional bias

people pay extra attention to certain stimulus or features

isolated feature/combined feature effect

people can typically locate an isolated feature faster than a combined feature, triesman

feature present/feature absent effect

people typically locate a feature that is present more quickly than one that is absent, triesman

orienting attention network

visual search, parietal lobes

unilateral spatial neglect

when a person ignores part of his or her visual field

executive attention network

for a task that focuses on conflict, inhibitory tasks

bottleneck theory

early theory of attention, limits the quantity of information we can pay attention to

illusory conjunction

an inappropriate combination of features

binding problem

not representing the important features of an object as a unified whole