Cognitive Psych Exam 1

Cognitive psychology

the scientific study of mental processes such as \n attention, language, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and \n reasoning.

what did Franciscus Donders (1868) do?

Reaction Time experiment

Simple RT task

participant pushes a button quickly after a light appears

Choice RT task

participant pushes one button with multiple stimuli

how do you find the time to make a decision?

choice RT - simple RT

How long does it take to make a decision?

1/10 second

What did Wilhelm Wundt (1879) do?

established the first scientific psychology lab in germany

Who introduced structuralism?

Wundt

Who is the father of experimental psychology?

Wundy

What did Hermann Ebbinghous (1885) do?

Found that memory forgetting occurs quickly over the first 2 days and then slowly after that

What did William James (1890) do?

Established how to study the mind and wrote the first textbook

Who established functionalism?

James

Who founded behaviorism and classical conditioning?

John Watson

Who studied stimulus-response relationship and operant conditioning?

B. F. Skinner

What did Edward Tolman (1948) do?

Introduced purposive behaviorism and cognitive mapping.

who advocated for latent learning?

Tolman

What did Colin Cherry (1953) do?

Studied auditory attention

What is selective attention?

Refers to the processes that allow an individual to select and focus on particular input for further processing while simultaneously suppressing irrelevant or distracting information

Who coined the AI?

Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, and Nathaniel Rochester

What happened at the MIT Conference?

Newell and Simon created the logic theorist program and the information processing approach was introduced

What did Donald Broadbent (1958) do?

Theorized model of selective attention and short-term memory

What did Skinner argue?

That children learn language through operant conditioning

What did Chomsky argue?

that children learn language mainly through biological processes imitation, and reinforcement

What did Ulric Neisser (1967) do?

Researched perceptiona nd memory

Who is the father of cognitive psychology?

Neisser

what was the cognitive revolution?

a paradigm shift in how scientists think about the mind

Analytic Introspection

A procedure used by early psychologists in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli.

Artificial Intelligence

The ability of a computer to perform tasks usually associated with human intelligence.

Behaviorism

The approach to psychology, founded by John B. Watson, which states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology. A consequence of this idea is that consciousness and unobservable mental processes are not considered worthy of study by psychologists.

Brain Imaging

Technique such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that results in images of the brain that represent brain activity. In cognitive psychology, activity is measured in response to specific cognitive tasks.

Classical Conditioning

A procedure in which pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response causes the neutral stimulus to elicit that response.

Cognitive Map

Mental conception of a spatial layout.

Electrophysiology

Techniques used to measure electrical responses of the nervous system.

Information-processing approach

The approach to psychology, developed beginning in the 1950s, in which the mind is described as processing information through a sequence of stages.

Mind

System that creates mental representations of the world and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.

Neuropsychology

The study of the behavioral effects of brain damage in humans.

Operant Conditioning

Type of conditioning championed by B. F. Skinner, which focuses on how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection.

Paradigm

A system of ideas, which guide thinking in a particular field

Paradigm shift

A shift in thinking from one paradigm to another

Savings

Measure used by Ebbinghaus to determine the magnitude of memory left from initial learning. Higher savings indicate greater memory.

Savings Curve

Plot of savings versus time after original learning.

Structuralism

An approach to psychology that explained perception as the adding up of small elementary units called sensations.

What are sensory neurons?

they are afferent and carry messages from the body’s tissue and receptors to the spinal cord and brain

What are interneurons?

They communicate with one another to process info between the sensory and motor output

What are motor neurons?

they are efferent and carry instructions from the CNS to the muscles

How are action potentials measured?

An electrode is placed near the axon

What is measured in an action potential?

the rate of firing

What kind of NT is adrenaline?

fight or flight

what kind of NT is noradrenaline

concentration

What kind of NT is dopamine?

pleasure

What kind of NT is serotonin?

mood

What kind of NT GABA?

calming

What kind of NT is acetylcholine?

learning

What kind of NT is Glutamate?

memory

What kind of NT endorphins?

euphoria

What is the principle of neural representation?

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

what are feature detectors?

neurons that fire to specific qualities of a stimulus

what is specificity coding?

representation of a stimulus by the firing of specifically tuned \n neurons specialized to respond only to a specific stimulus

what is population coding?

representation of a stimulus by the pattern of firing of a large number \n of neurons

What is sparse coding?

representation of a stimulus by a pattern of firing of only a small \n group of neurons, with the majority of neurons remaining silent

what is the parietal lobe for?

touch, temp., and pain

what is the temporal lobe for?

hearing, taste, and smell

what is the frontal lobe for?

coordination of information from all senses

where is the amygdala and hippocampus located?

temporal lobe

Where is the cerebellum

bellow temporal and occipital lobes

where is the prefrontal cortex located?

frontal lobe

what does the amygdala do?

process emotions

what does the hippocampus do?

learning and memory

what does the cerebellum do?

coordination

what does the prefrontal cortex do?

executive function

what area controls language production?

Broca’s

what area controls language comprehension

Wernicke’s

what does the fusiform face area respond to?

faces

what does the parahippocampal place area respond to?

places

what does the extrastriate body area respond to?

bodies and body parts

what is a connectome?

\
structural description of the network of elements and connections forming the human brain

what is cortical equipotentiality?

the idea that the brain operates as an indivisible whole

what is Distributed representations?

Occurs when a specific cognition activates many areas of the brain.

what is functional connectivity?

The extent to which the neural activity in separate brain areas is correlated with each other.

what is a fMRI?

A brain imaging technique that measures how blood flow changes in response to cognitive activity.

what is localization of function?

Location of specific functions in specific areas of the brain

what is track-weighted imaging?

A technique for determining connectivity in the brain that is based on detection of how water diffuses along the length of nerve fibers.

Viewpoint invariance

objects look different from different viewpoints

Bottom-up processing

perception starts at the senses

Top-down processing

perception starts with the brain

speech segmentation

the ability to tell when one word ends and another begins

Transitional probabilities

knowing which sound will likely follow another in a word

Oblique effects

vertical and horizontal orientations are easier to view

scene schema

it is knowledge of what a given scene will normally have

Bayesian Interference

One estimate of the probability of a given outcome is influenced by the prior probability and the likelihood of a given outcome

What pathway

determines the identity of an object

Ventral pathway

visual cortex to the temporal lobe

Where pathway

determines location of an object

Dorsal pathway

from visual cortex to parietal lobe

action pathway

occipital lobe to the parietal lobe

Gestalt psychologist

discovered the laws of organization

Law of Pragnanz

every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible

Perception pathway

occipital lobe to the temporal lobe

Principle of good continuation

Law of perceptual organization stating that points that, when connected, result in straight or smoothly curving lines are seen as belonging together

Principle of similarity

Law of perceptual organization that states that similar things appear to be grouped together.