Cognitive Psych Exam 1

Donders

A cognitive psychologist who created the reaction time experiment. It measures the interval between stimulus presentation and a person's response to stimulus.

Simple RT task

participant pushes a button quickly after a light appears.

Choice RT task

participant pushes one button if light is on the right side and another if light is on the left side.

Helmholz

foundational 19th-century German physiologist and physicist whose pioneering work in sensation and perception established key concepts for modern cognitive psychology

Ebbinghaus

read a list of nonsense syllables aloud to determine the number of repetitions necessary to repeat the list without errors. After taking a break, he relearned the list.

Short-break intervals =

fewer repetitions necessary to relearn lists.

Savings =

(Original time to learn list) - (Time to relearn list after delay)

Wundt

established the first scientific psychology lab at the University of Leipzig, Germany. He developed approach called structuralism (overall experience called sensations) and used method of analytic introspection (participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli)

James

early American psychologist who taught the first psychology course in America at Harvard University. Observations based on the functions of his own mind, not experiments. He considered many topics in cognition, including thinking, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination, and reasoning.

Watson

noted two problems with analytic introspection method: Extremely variable results per person

• Results difficult to verify due to focus on invisible inner mental processes

He proposed a new approach called behaviorism:

• Eliminate the mind as a topic of study

• Instead, study directly observable behavior

Skinner

Founded operant condition and was interested in determining the relationship between behavior and its outcomes. Operant conditioning shapes behavior by rewards and punishments. Rewarded behavior is more likely to be repeated and punished behavior is less likely to be repeated.

Tolman

trained rats to find food in a four-armed maze. When a rat was placed in a different arm of the maze, it went to the specific arm where it previously found food. Tolman believed the rat had created a cognitive map, a representation of the maze in its mind. The map helped the rat navigate to a specific arm despite starting the maze from a different spot. It rejected the behaviorist perspective for the rat's actions.

Chomsky

argued that children do not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement. Children say things they have never heard and cannot imitate. They say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded for. Language must be determined by an inborn biological program.

Structuralism

a theoretical approach that focuses on breaking down the human mind and conscious experience into their basic, fundamental elements or structures.

Functionalism

defines mental states (beliefs, desires, pain) by their functional role—specifically, their causal relations to sensory inputs, behavioral outputs, and other mental states—rather than their internal physical makeup

Behavorism

psychological approach focusing exclusively on observing, measuring, and conditioning external behaviors in response to environmental stimuli, intentionally ignoring internal mental processes. Behaviorism rose for being strictly scientific and declined because of limitations in explaining complex human behavior, and the rise of neuroscience

Cognition

refers to all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used. Cognition involves perception, paying attention, remembering, distinguishing items in a category, visualizing, understanding, problem solving, and reasoning and decision making.

Tolman's cognitive map

an internal, mental representation of a physical environment that allows organisms, including humans and rats, to understand spatial relationships and navigate efficiently

Cognitive Revolution

occurred during the 1950s and 1960s as a major shift in psychology, moving away from behaviorism's focus on only observable behavior to studying internal mental processes. It was driven by the rise of computer science, linguistics (notably Noam Chomsky), and neuroscience, which encouraged viewing the mind as an information processor.

Nueropsychology

studies the behavior of people with brain damage

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

Measured neural activity by identifying highly oxygenated hemoglobin molecules. Actively recorded in voxel (e-D pixels)

Fusiform face area (FFA)

responds specifically to faces. Damage to this area causes prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces).

Parahippocampal place area (PPA):

responds specifically to places (indoor/outdoor scenes)

Extrastirate body area (EBA)

responds specifically to pictures of bodies and parts of bodies.

Cherry

did a study with headphones where it presents message A in left ear and message B in right ear. Subjects could understand the details of message A despite also hearing message B.

Neusser

authored the first cognitive psychology textbook. Its purpose was to "provide a useful and current assessment of the state of the art." Much of the book concerns vision and hearing. At the end of the book, Neisser introduced the "higher mental processes". Physiological ideas are almost entirely ignored in his book.

Atkinson and Shiffrin

developed a three- stage model of memory: Sensory memory (less than 1 second)

• Short term memory (a few seconds, limited capacity)

• Long term memory (long duration, high capacity)

Information we remember is brought from long-term memory into short-term memory. Tulving divided long-term memory into three components.

Episodic memory

Life events in the form of episodes

Semantic memory

memory for knowledge about the world. In other words, facts

prodcedural memory

physical actions, such as riding a bike.

Electrophysiology

studies electrical responses of the nervous system, including cortical neurons.

Brain imaging

shows which regions are active during cognition.

Localization of Function

specific functions are served by specific areas of the brain. Cognitive functioning declines in specific ways when certain areas of the brain are damaged. The cerebral cortex (3-mm-thick layer covering the brain) contains mechanisms responsible for most cognitive functions.

Frontal lobe

coordination of information received from all senses. Language, thinking, problem solving, and motor functioning. Located in the front of the brain. Part of the cerebrum

Partial lobe

Sensations, touch, pressure, pain. Tio back of the brain. Part of the cerebrum

Occipital lobe

at the back of the brain. Vision (lower level). Part of the cerebrum

Temporal lobe

language, memory, hearing, and vision (higher level) Located in bottom middle. Part of the cerebrum.

Cell body

contains mechanisms to keep cell alive

Axon

tube filled with fluid that transmits electrical signal to other neurons.

Dendrites

multiple branches reaching from the cell body, which receive information from other neurons.

Action potential

neuron receives signals from the environment. Information travels down the axon of that neuron to the dendrites of another neuron.

Excitatory

increases chance neuron will fire

Inhibitory

decreases chance neuron will fire

Neurotransmitters

chemicals that affect the electrical signal of the receiving neuron.

Specificity coding

representation of a stimulus by the firing of specifically turned neurons specialized to respond only to a specific stimulus. This is WRONG.

Population coding

representation of a stimulus by the pattern of firing of a large number of neurons.

Sparse coding

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

Microelectrode

an ultra-fine sensor (typically <1 µm to 50 µm) used to record the electrical activity of individual neurons (action potentials) or small neuronal clusters

Hubel and Wiser's single cell recordings of visual cortex of cats

taught that cortical neurons are organized into functional columns selective for stimulus orientation, ocular dominance, and direction

Connectome

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

Neural networks

interconnected areas of the brain that communicate with each other.

Sensations

absorbing raw energy (such as light and sound waves) through our sensory organs.

Perception

selecting, organizing, and interpreting these signals. It is an experience resulting from simulation of the senses

• Perception can change based on added information

• Involves a process similar to reasoning or problem solving

• Perceptions occur in conjunction with actions.

Bottom-up processing

Environmental energy simulating the receptors. Parts are identified and put together, and then recognition occurs. The sequence of events from eye to brain (or any sensory neuron to the brain)

Top-down processing

knowledge and expectations the observer brings to the situation influence interpretation. Previous knowledge enables people to identify objects and situations quickly.

Why Is It So Difficult to Design a Perceiving Machine?

Because objects can be partially blurred and because the same object might look different from different viewpoints

inverse projection problem

the brain must determine the 3D environmental object that produced a specific 2D image on the retina

Viewpoint invariance

a computer might recognize one object from different viewpoints as three different objects, where humans can tell that it is the same object.

New Gestalt rules for perceptual organization

the mind groups patterns according to intrinsic laws of perceptual organization.

Rejected the idea of adding up sensation to form perceptions. It proposed that perceptual organization involves rules for grouping small elements of a scene. Max Wertheimer proposed the first Gestalt principle, apparent motion, while examining a stroboscope

Apparent motion

movement perception due to stimuli in different locations flashing one after another with the proper timing.

Speech segmentation

the ability to tell when one word ends and another begins

Principle of similarity

similar things appear grouped together.

Principle of familiarity

things are more likely to form groups if the groups appear familiar or meaningful.

Helmholtz's theory of unconscious inference

proposes that human perception is not a direct, passive recording of the world, but an active, indirect process where the brain interprets ambiguous sensory data using prior experience and knowledge

Helmholtz likelihood principle

suggests that our perception favors the most probable interpretation of ambiguous sensory input, based on unconscious inferences from past experiences and knowledge, essentially viewing perception as a form of rapid, unconscious problem-solving to identify the most likely real-world cause of sensations

Greeble

An experiment by Gauthier. Participants were trained to name each different Greeble. Magnitude of FFA responses to faces Greebles before and after Greeble training. The FFA response was that before, human faces were higher and after, greebles were higher.

Experience-dependent plasticity

the structure of the brain changes with experience. Perception is determined by neurons that fire to specific qualities of a stimulus.

Oblique effect

How we see regularities in the environment. We perceive verticals and horizontals more easily than other orientations.

Light from above

How we see regularities in the environment. We assume light comes from above because this is common in our environment. We perceive shadows as specific information about depth and distance

Semantic

How we see regularities in the environment. The meaning of a given scene is related to what happens within that scene. Semantic regularies are the characteristics associated with functions carried out in different types of scenes. Scene schema is the knowledge of what a given scene originally contains.

Double Dissociation

requires two individuals with different damage and opposite deficits

Single Dissociation

when one function is lost, and another remains. For example: when someone has the what pathway but not the where because they had damage to their temporal lobe.

Mirror Nuerons

Neurons that fire both when we perform an action and when we observe someone else doing that same action

WHAT pathway

determining the identity of an object is done in the ventral pathway (lower part of the brain)

WHERE pathway

determining the location of an object is done in the dorsal pathway (upper part of the brain)

Attention

the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment

Selective Attention

• attending to one thing while ignoring others

• We do not attend to a large fraction of the information in the environment

• We filter out some information and promote other information for further processing.

Divided attention

paying attention to more than one thing at a time. Practice enables people to simultaneously do things that were difficult at first.

Limited attention

 in capacity and timing

Both Overt and Covert

we can consciously attend to information but some information grabs our attention.

Dichotic Listening

one message is presented to the left ear and another to the right ear. Participant "shadows" one message (repeated outload) to ensure he is attending to that message. 

Early Selection Model of Attention

Broadbent’s filter model. Filters messages before incoming information is analyzed for meaning.

Sensory memory: holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second. Transfers all information to the next stage. Part of Broadbent’s filter model.

• Filter: identifies attended messages based on physical characteristics. Only the attended message is passed on to the next stage. Part of Broadbent’s filter model.

• Detector: processes all information to determine higher-level characteristics of the message

• Show-term memory: Receives output for detector. Holds information for 10-15 seconds and may transfer it to long-term memory.

• This model is WRONG. It does not explain the cocktail party effect and why participants can shadow meaningful messages that switch from ear to ear, like the dear aunt jane study.

Intermediate Selection Model of Attention

Treisman’s attenuation model. Attended messages can be separated from unattended messages early in the information-process system. Selection can also occur later.

Attenuator: It analyzes incoming messages in terms of physical characteristics, language and meaning. Attended message is let through the attenuator at full strength. Unattended messages are let through at much weaker strength.

• Dictionary unit: contains words, each of which as a threshold for being activated. Words that are common or important have low thresholds. Uncommon words have high thresholds

Late Selection Model

MacKay. Selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after information has been analyzed for meaning. Mackay did a study where in the attended ear, participants heard ambiguous sentences. In unattended ears, participants heard either “river” or “money”. Participants chose which was closest to the meaning of the attended message. Meaning of the biasing word affected the participant's choice. Participants were unaware of the presentation of the biasing words.

Low-load

(easy) tasks use lower amounts of processing capacity.

High-load

(difficult) tasks use a higher amount of processing capacity.

Salience

Something that stands out and captures attention

Stroop Effect

a cognitive psychology phenomenon where naming the ink color of a printed word takes longer and is more error-prone when the ink color conflicts with the word's meaning

Schneider & Shiffrin

proposed a foundational theory of human attention and memory, distinguishing between controlled and automatic processing. They argued that consistent mapping (CM) of stimuli to responses allows for the development of automatic, low-effort, and fast processing, while varied mapping (VM) requires conscious, effortful controlled processing.

•  divide attention between remembering targets and monitoring rapidly present stimuli. 

• Memory set: one to four characters called target stimuli

• Test frames: could contain random dot patterns, a target, distractors

Controlled Processing

a conscious, intentional, and effortful mental activity requiring focused attention, typically used for new or complex tasks

Automatic processing

occurs without intention and only uses some of a person’s cognitive resources.

Change Blindness

if shown two versions of a picture, differences between them are not immediately apparent. Tasks to identify differences require concentrated attention and search.

If you don’t see it the moment it changed, then you won’t see the change and won’t know it happened.

Inattentional blindness

 stimulus that is not attended is not perceived, even though a person might be looking directly at it.

Posner cuing paradigm

A way to study covert visual attention Uses valid cues (the cue signals the target location)
-and invalid cues (the cue does not signal the target location)

Object-based attention

 attention being directed to one place on an object. Attention can be based on the environment (static scenes or scenes with few objects) or specific object (dynamic events)

Overt attention

eye movements, attention, and perception. Studied by using an eye tracker.

“Old” view- structuralism

• perception involves adding up sensations

Feature Integration theory

By Treisman. The way we recognize objects goes through a couple of stages.

• Preattentive stage: automatic. No effort or attention. Unaware of the process. Object analyzed into features.

• Illusory conjunction: when participants report a combination of features from different stimuli and are incorrect. It occurs because features are “free floating”

• Focused attention stage: attention plays a key role. Features are combined. 

• R.M: patient with Balint syndrom. This person had an inability to focus attention on individual objects. High number of illusory conjunctions reported.

Binding

the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object