Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience

These flashcards cover key concepts in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, including fundamental terms, theories, and experiments related to understanding the mind and brain.

Cognition

The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.

Artificial Intelligence

The science of getting computers to perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence.

Turing Test

A test to determine whether a computer can demonstrate human-like intelligence, specifically if an observer can distinguish between a human's and a computer's responses.

Searle’s Chinese Room

A thought experiment questioning whether a system that passes the Turing Test can truly 'think' if it lacks intentionality.

Expert Systems

Computer programs that emulate the decision-making abilities of a human expert.

Double Dissociation

A finding where two patients show reciprocal deficits in tasks, indicating separate cognitive functions.

Neuron

A nerve cell that is the basic building block of the nervous system, responsible for transmitting information through electrical and chemical signals.

Action Potential

A brief change in the electrical charge of a neuron that occurs when it becomes activated.

Synapse

The gap between neurons where neurotransmitters are released to transmit signals. Can be inhibitory or excitatory.

Neocortex

The outermost layer of the brain involved in higher cognitive functions, divided into four lobes.

Cerebral Lateralization

The process by which certain cognitive functions are more dominant in one hemisphere of the brain than the other.

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

A recording of the brain's electrical activity by placing electrodes on the scalp.

Perceptrons

Early models of artificial neural networks used to recognize patterns, consisting of simple, interconnected units.

Connectionism

A modeling approach in cognitive science that uses artificial neural networks to simulate the workings of the brain.

Embodied Cognition

The theory that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world.

The Enactment Effect

The phenomenon where people remember actions better when they physically carry them out rather than just reading about them.

Dissociation

A disruption in one component of mental functioning without any impairment of another function.

Dendrites

Many small, branch-like structures of a neuron that gather electrical impulses and transmit them into the cell body.

Soma

The cell body of a neuron where the biological activity of the cell is regulated; it contains the nucleus.

Axon

A branch-like structure that serves as the output mechanism, sending impulses to the next neuron.

Myelin Sheath

A fatty coating that insulates the axon and can increase the speed of neural communication.

Sensory Neurons

Neurons that react to the stimulation of receptors by physical stimuli and pass the message along to the spinal cord.

Motor Neurons

Neurons that control effector cells, which connect directly to muscle fibers and manage muscle movement.

Interneurons

Neurons located within the central nervous system (the brain and spinal cord) that act as intermediaries between sensory and motor neurons.

Action Potential

A brief change in the electrical charge of a neuron that occurs when it becomes activated.

Thalamus

A brain structure acting as a relay station; almost all information coming into the cortex passes through here.

Hippocampus

A brain region critical for the formation of conscious long-term memories.

Amygdala

A brain structure involved in the processing of emotional information.

Corpus Callosum

A band of nerve fibers that connects the two hemispheres of the brain, allowing communication between them.

The Four Lobes of the Neocortex

The neocortex is divided into four regions:

1. Occipital: Visual processing

2. Temporal: Auditory, linguistic, and memory processing

3. Parietal: Spatial and sensory processing

4. Frontal: Cognitive control

Cerebral Lateralization

The process by which certain cognitive functions are more dominant in one hemisphere of the brain than the other.

Contralaterality

The principle that the receptive and control centers for one side of the body are located in the opposite hemisphere of the brain.

Structural Measures

Neuroscience methods used to examine the brain for clear evidence of physical damage or atrophy.

Single Cell Recording

An electrical measurement that looks at how the firing rate of an individual neuron changes as a function of a particular stimulus or task.

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

A procedure involving repeated magnetic stimulation at the surface of the skull to temporarily disable a specific brain region.

Electroencephalogram (EEG)

A recording of the brain's electrical activity made by placing electrodes on the scalp.

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)

Momentary changes in electrical activity in the brain triggered by a specific stimulus, measured via EEG; they provide high temporal precision.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

A metabolic technique for examining brain function by measuring blood flow and oxygen use, allowing for great spatial precision.

Emergent Properties

Principles that become evident when a system is working as a whole but are absent from the individual smaller components.

Connectionism

A modeling approach in cognitive science that uses artificial neural networks consisting of a large number of simple, highly interconnected units.

Levels of Connectionist Models

Connectionist networks typically consist of three levels:

1. Input units

2. Hidden units (internal processing between input and output)

3. Output units

Connectionist Unit Activation

Units sum their excitatory and inhibitory activity; if the total sum is greater than a specific threshold, the unit becomes active.

Embodied Cognition

The theory that cognitive processes are deeply rooted in the body's interactions with the world, such as identifying tool pictures faster when the hands are positioned to use them.

The Enactment Effect

The phenomenon where memory for a series of actions is improved when the person physically carries out the actions rather than just reading or hearing about them.

Perception

The concept that physical factors affect the speed of perception; for example, one can identify pictures of tools faster if their hands are shaped in a way needed to use those tools

Memory

Although both education and psychology experiments have

emphasized verbal learning, we remember actions better than words:

The best way to memorize a series of actions is to physically carry out

the actions (the enactment effect)