Cognitive Psych - Midterm 1 Experiments/Studies

Wundt & Titchener — Introspection (1880s)

Conditions: Trained observers in controlled labs. | Tasks: Verbally report contents of consciousness to simple stimuli. | Findings: Reports were subjective and inconsistent across observers. | Importance: Kickstarted systematic study of mind, but lack of objectivity set stage for behaviorism.

Pavlov (1890s) — Classical Conditioning

Conditions: Neutral tone paired with food for dogs. | Tasks: Measure salivation to tone after pairings. | Findings: Tone alone elicited salivation. | Importance: Demonstrated associative learning; foundation for behaviorist models.

Watson & Rayner (1920) — Little Albert

Conditions: Infant exposed to white rat paired with loud noise. | Tasks: Observe fear to rat and similar objects. | Findings: Conditioned fear to rat and generalized to furry things. | Importance: Showed conditioned emotional responses in humans.

Thorndike (1898) — Puzzle Box & Law of Effect

Conditions: Hungry cats in boxes requiring specific action to escape. | Tasks: Escape to reach food across trials. | Findings: Escape time decreased as effective actions were repeated. | Importance: Behavior shaped by consequences; basis for operant conditioning.

Skinner (1930s–50s) — Operant Conditioning

Conditions: Animals in boxes with levers or keys and controlled reinforcement. | Tasks: Learn actions to obtain rewards or avoid punishment. | Findings: Reinforcement schedules shaped response rates and complex behaviors. | Importance: Established role of consequences in voluntary behavior.

Chomsky (1959) — Critique of Verbal Behavior

Conditions: Theoretical analysis of child language. | Tasks: Evaluate whether reinforcement explains grammar and productivity. | Findings: Rule based errors and generativity exceed reinforcement accounts. | Importance: Triggered cognitive revolution; argued for internal representations.

Phineas Gage (1848) — Frontal Lesion Case

Conditions: Accidental frontal lobe damage by tamping iron. | Tasks: Post injury observations. | Findings: Personality and executive control changed despite intact basic intellect. | Importance: Linked frontal cortex to control, decision making, and personality.

H. M. (1953) — Medial Temporal Lobe Removal

Conditions: Bilateral hippocampal resection for epilepsy. | Tasks: Memory tests across systems. | Findings: Severe anterograde amnesia for declarative memory with intact working and procedural memory. | Importance: Dissociated memory systems; hippocampus critical for new declarative memories.

fMRI — BOLD Logic

Conditions: Compare brain activity across two psychological conditions. | Tasks: Perform tasks A versus B in scanner. | Findings: Neural activity changes metabolism and blood oxygenation, producing BOLD differences. | Importance: Basis for inferring brain cognition links via contrasts.

Hubel & Wiesel (1981) — Visual Receptive Fields

Conditions: Single unit recordings in cat or monkey visual cortex. | Tasks: Present bars or edges at various orientations and locations. | Findings: Retina and LGN show center surround; V1 cells tuned to oriented edges. | Importance: Hierarchical feature coding underlying edge and shape perception.

Treisman & Gelade (1980) — Feature Integration Theory

Conditions: Visual arrays with feature or conjunction targets. | Tasks: Search for targets under time pressure. | Findings: Feature search pops out; conjunction search slows with set size; illusory conjunctions under load. | Importance: Attention binds features into objects and explains search patterns.

Ungerleider & Mishkin (1982) — What vs Where or How

Conditions: Monkeys with selective temporal or parietal lesions. | Tasks: Object discrimination versus landmark spatial task. | Findings: Temporal lesion impaired object task; parietal lesion impaired spatial task. | Importance: Double dissociation of ventral what and dorsal where or how pathways.

Goodale et al. (1994) — DF and RV Double Dissociation

Conditions: Patients with ventral damage D F and dorsal damage R V. | Tasks: Orientation matching versus mailing a card into a slot. | Findings: D F poor perception but intact action; R V intact perception but impaired visually guided action. | Importance: Human double dissociation for perception versus action streams.

Kanwisher, McDermott & Chun (1997) — Fusiform Face Area

Conditions: fMRI contrasts of faces versus objects. | Tasks: View images during scanning. | Findings: Fusiform gyrus responds selectively to faces. | Importance: Evidence for category selective cortex; relates to prosopagnosia.

Tong et al. (1998) — Binocular Rivalry and Awareness

Conditions: Face to one eye, house to the other. | Tasks: Report percept while in fMRI. | Findings: FFA tracks seeing face and PPA tracks seeing house despite constant input. | Importance: Brain activity follows conscious content, not just stimulus.

Gauthier et al. (2000) — Greeble Expertise

Conditions: Train novices to become experts with novel objects. | Tasks: Discriminate Greebles with fMRI pre and post. | Findings: Expertise recruits fusiform responses to nonface category. | Importance: Informs debate on face module versus visual expertise.

Biederman (1987) — Recognition by Components

Conditions: Objects degraded to preserve versus disrupt geon structure. | Tasks: Identify objects from line drawings. | Findings: Recognition robust when geons preserved and impaired when geon info lost. | Importance: Structural description with geons and relations supports recognition.

McClelland & Rumelhart (1981) — Interactive Activation

Conditions: Noisy letter or word stimuli in varying contexts. | Tasks: Identify letters or words. | Findings: Top down and lateral interactions produce effects like word superiority. | Importance: Distributed interactive feature net model of recognition.

Kahneman, Treisman & Gibbs (1992) — Object Files

Conditions: Preview letters bound to moving objects. | Tasks: Decide if probed letter was seen before. | Findings: Faster when preview feature reappears on the same object even at new location. | Importance: Visual system maintains object identity over time.

Shepard & Metzler (1971) — Mental Rotation

Conditions: 3D block figures rotated by varying angles. | Tasks: Same or different judgments. | Findings: Reaction time increases linearly with angular disparity. | Importance: Imagery uses analog transformations.

Kosslyn (1983) — Island Scanning

Conditions: Memorized island map with landmarks. | Tasks: Imagine map and scan between named points. | Findings: Reaction time increases with imagined distance. | Importance: Mental images preserve spatial layout.

Finke & Pinker (1982) — Arrow to Dot

Conditions: Brief dot array followed by an arrow on blank field. | Tasks: Decide if arrow points to a previously seen dot. | Findings: Reaction time increases with arrow to dot distance without explicit imagery instruction. | Importance: Counters demand characteristics and supports spatial imagery.

Kosslyn (1975) — Image Zooming

Conditions: Imagine rabbit next to elephant versus fly. | Tasks: Answer small detail questions about the rabbit. | Findings: Faster when rabbit imagined larger. | Importance: Image scale affects access to detail; picture like properties.

O’Craven & Kanwisher (2000) — Imagery Activates Visual Areas

Conditions: Imagine versus view faces and places in fMRI. | Tasks: Alternate imagery and perception blocks. | Findings: FFA and PPA active during imagery though weaker than perception. | Importance: Shared neural substrate for imagery and perception.

Bisiach & Luzzatti (1978) — Neglect in Imagery

Conditions: Right parietal neglect patient imagines Milan piazza from two vantage points. | Tasks: List landmarks seen in imagination. | Findings: Omits contralesional side in imagery and flips with viewpoint. | Importance: Imagery taps spatial attention maps; neglect is attentional.

Carmichael, Hogan & Walters (1932) — Label Effects

Conditions: Ambiguous drawings paired with different verbal labels. | Tasks: Redraw from memory later. | Findings: Drawings biased toward the label given. | Importance: Visual memory is reconstructive and language can distort imagery.

Intraub & Richardson (1989) — Boundary Extension Behavior

Conditions: View close up scene photos. | Tasks: Recall or draw scenes later. | Findings: People remember a wider view than shown. | Importance: Predictive scene extrapolation beyond input.

Park et al. (2006) — Boundary Extension fMRI

Conditions: Close to wide versus repeat scene pairs in fMRI. | Tasks: View sequences while measuring PPA adaptation. | Findings: Repetition attenuation consistent with extrapolated wider context. | Importance: Neural evidence for constructive scene memory.

Simons & Chabris (1999) — Inattentional Blindness

Conditions: Focused counting of basketball passes. | Tasks: Count passes then report unexpected events. | Findings: About half failed to notice the gorilla. | Importance: Attention gates awareness; strong selectivity limits.

Rensink, O’Regan & Clark (1997) — Change Blindness Flicker

Conditions: Original and altered images alternate with brief blanks. | Tasks: Detect the change. | Findings: Large changes often missed without focused attention. | Importance: Need encode, maintain, compare; scene detail sparse without attention.

Simons & Levin (1998) — Door Study

Conditions: Person swap during brief occlusion in live interaction. | Tasks: Give directions and later report noticing change. | Findings: Many failed to notice the person changed. | Importance: Real world change blindness; gist outweighs identity unless attended.

Raymond, Shapiro & Arnell (1992) — Attentional Blink

Conditions: Rapid stream with two targets. | Tasks: Report both targets. | Findings: Second target often missed if about 200 to 500 milliseconds after first. | Importance: Temporal bottleneck in consolidation.

Stroop (1935) — Color Word Interference

Conditions: Color words printed in incongruent ink. | Tasks: Name ink color. | Findings: Slower and more errors than neutral or congruent. | Importance: Automatic word meaning intrudes; limits of selective attention.

Cherry (1953) — Dichotic Listening

Conditions: Two speech streams, one to each ear; shadow one. | Tasks: Repeat attended stream and ignore other. | Findings: Notice low level changes like voice or tone but not meaning; occasional own name breakthrough. | Importance: Supports early selection with attenuation for salient items.

Broadbent (1958) — Early Filter Model

Conditions: Theoretical account of dichotic listening data. | Tasks: Model selection stage. | Findings: Filter selects based on physical features before meaning. | Importance: Classic framework for attention selection.

Posner (1980) — Spatial Cueing

Conditions: Valid, neutral, and invalid location cues. | Tasks: Detect or identify target quickly. | Findings: Valid fastest and invalid slowest; exogenous and endogenous orienting dissociate. | Importance: Space based attention yields benefits and costs without eye movements.

Egly, Driver & Rafal (1994) — Object Based Attention

Conditions: Cue one end of rectangle; equal distance targets in same versus different object. | Tasks: Detect target after cue. | Findings: Faster within cued object than across objects. | Importance: Attention selects objects not just locations.

Visual Neglect — Parietal Lesions

Conditions: Right parietal stroke patients. | Tasks: Line bisection or cancellation and drawings. | Findings: Ignore contralesional usually left space. | Importance: Neuropsychological evidence for spatial attention architecture.

Jonides & Yantis (1988) — Sudden Onset Capture

Conditions: Visual search with abrupt new object onset. | Tasks: Find target among distractors. | Findings: New onsets automatically attract attention. | Importance: Stimulus driven capture mechanisms.

Most & Astur (2007) — Attentional Set in Driving

Conditions: Driving simulation with color cued arrows; motorcycle matches or mismatches set. | Tasks: Follow cues and brake for hazards. | Findings: Slower braking and more collisions when hazard mismatched set. | Importance: Top down set tunes capture and explains real world inattentional blindness.

Strayer, Drews & Johnston (2003) — Cell Phones and Driving

Conditions: Driving simulator with versus without hands free conversation. | Tasks: Follow pace car and respond to events. | Findings: Slower braking, larger following distance, more accidents, poorer recognition. | Importance: Divided attention degrades driving; central bottlenecks.

Ophir, Nass & Wagner (2009) — Heavy Media Multitaskers

Conditions: Compare high versus low media multitaskers. | Tasks: Filtering, switching, and working memory tasks. | Findings: Heavy multitaskers worse at filtering, more false alarms, and slower switching. | Importance: Frequent multitasking does not improve control and increases distractibility.

Green & Bavelier (2003; 2006) — Action Game Training

Conditions: Gamers versus nongamers and training of nongamers on action versus control games. | Tasks: Attentional blink, multiple object tracking, peripheral detection. | Findings: Gamers and trained participants showed improved second target recovery and tracking. | Importance: Some attentional capacities are trainable.

Berman, Jonides & Kaplan (2008) — Nature Restores Attention

Conditions: Fifty minute walk in nature versus urban setting. | Tasks: Pre and post Attention Network Test and backward digit span. | Findings: Executive attention and working memory improved after nature but not after urban walk. | Importance: Attention is limited but restorable; practical intervention.