Cognitive Psychology Lecture Notes

Flashcards on Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

The scientific study of knowledge, including how we study, memorize, focus attention, make decisions, and how skills and knowledge are acquired, stored, transformed, and used.

Structuralism

A late 1800s to early 1900s approach using 'looking within' to study the mind, observing and recording one's thoughts and experiences.

Introspection

A method of 'looking within' to study the mind by observing and recording your own thoughts and experiences

Ebbinghaus's Memory Experiments

Experimented with memory and forgetting using nonsense syllables and measuring relearning time after delays.

Functionalism

Focused on how mental processes work emphasizing experimental studies of the mind

Behaviorism

Focused on observable stimulus-response behaviors and rejected the study of unobservable, mentalistic notions

Classical conditioning

Pairing an unconditioned stimulus with a neutral stimulus causes changes in response to the neutral stimulus.

Operant conditioning

Strengthening/reducing behavior by presentation of positive/negative reinforcers.

Problems with Behaviorism

Argued that stimulus-response accounts were not enough to explain behavior and mental causes needed to be considered.

Cognitive Revolution

An approach to psychology emerging in the 1950s and 1960s based on the ideas that the mental world cannot be studied directly, but must be studied to understand behavior.

Early theory of learning

Learning involved the acquisition of new knowledge

Cognitive map

Mental conception of a spatial layout developed by rats during exploration, suggesting something other than stimulus-response connections.

Skinner's Theory of Language

Argued that use of language could be understood in terms of behaviors and rewards, Chomsky refuted with children's unrewarded language use.

Chomsky's Evidence against Skinner

Children often say sentences that have never been rewarded by parents. Children also use incorrect grammar that wouldn’t be rewarded as well.

Cognitive Psychology Now

Study mental events indirectly by measuring observable stimuli and responses, developing hypotheses, and designing experiments.

Cognitive neuroscience

Study of the brain and nervous system to understand mental functioning.

Attention

A focusing of perception that leads to greater consciousness of a limited number of stimuli. The focusing of mental effort on sensory and/or mental events

Alerting attention

The ability to orient oneself to some critical and/or unexpected stimulus

Vigilance attention

The ability to devote full attention to a single (complex) stimulus

Selective attention

Refers to the skill through which one focuses on one input or one task while ignoring other stimuli.

Dichotic listening tasks

Different audio inputs presented to each ear via headphones

Attended channel

Listen to this input

Shadowing

Repeat out loud the information from the attended channel

Unattended channel

Ignore the other input

Cocktail party effect

Information from the unattended channel can be noticed.

Filter Theory

One proposal is that we block unattended with a filter. Sheild from (already-identified) distractors, but allow processing of desired stimuli

Broadbent's Filter Theory

Theorizes that information processing is limited by channel capacity and only one channel can be processed at a time

Inattentional blindness

The failure to see a prominent stimulus even if one is staring right at it

Change blindness

The inability to detect changes in a scene despite looking at it directly

Early selection hypothesis

Only the attended input is analyzed and perceived; unattended information receives little or no analysis and is never perceived.

Late selection

All inputs are analyzed, and selection occurs after analysis, with only the attended input reaching consciousness.

Repetition priming

Stimulus-based priming that requires no effort or cognitive resources.

Expectation-driven priming

Effortful and deliberate priming that involves anticipation.

Divided Attention

The skill of performing multiple tasks or inputs simultaneously.

Executive control

Mechanisms that allow one to control one's thoughts, keep goals in mind, organize mental steps, shift plans/strategy, and inhibit automatic responses.

Automaticity

Tasks that are well practiced and require little or no executive control.

Bottom-up processing

Begins with the sensory input and ends with its representation, where the outcome of a lower step is never affected by a higher step in the process.

Top-down processing

Concept-driven processing where the outcome of a lower step is influenced by a higher one.

Features

The small elements that result from the organized perception of form; recognizing objects by identifying and processing these elements together.

Selfridge's (1959) Pandemonium Model

Letter recognition by features

Feature Integration Theory (FIT)

Has a Parallel Pre-Attentive Stage and Serial Attentive Stage. If no target pops out, move to stage 2

Tachistoscope

Device used to present stimuli for precise amounts of time

Post-stimulus mask

Interrupts continued processing

Well-Formedness

The more representative a string is of the regular patterns of spelling in that language, then the easier it is to recognize the string and the greater the context benefit produced by the string

Recognition by components (RBC)

An intermediate level of detectors that is sensitive to geons.

Geons

Basic shapes proposed as the building blocks for all three-dimensional forms.

Visual Attention

The allocation of mental resources to selected regions of space.

Exogenous attention

Bottom-up, automatic, involuntary allocation of attention.

Endogenous attention

Top-down, controlled, voluntary allocation of attention.

Costs attention

The detachment to performance brought by attending to an incorrect target location

Benefits attention

The facilitation of performance brought on by correctly attending to a target location

Inhibition of return

The finding that targets that appear at previously attended or cued locations are more slowly responded to than targets that appear at uncued locations when a relatively long temporal interval intervenes between the cue and the target

Perception

A single, unified awareness derived from sensory processes while a stimulus is present.

The Path of Light

Light to cornea to lens to retina

Rods

Sensitive to dim light, lower acuity, color-blind, and none in the fovea

Cones

Cannot function in dim light, higher acuity, color-sensitive, and mostly in or near the fovea, none in the periphery

Pathway of Neurons

In the eye: Photoreceptors, Bipolar cells, Ganglion cells (with axons that converge to form the optic nerve). In the thalamus: Lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). In the cortex: V1, the primary visual projection area, or primary visual cortex, which is located in the occipital lobe.

Lateral inhibition

Is the inhibition of a cell’s neighboring cells owing to its having been stimulated

Edge detectors

These detectors fire when a stimulus within the receptive field contains an edge of a particular orientation. The less the edge is like the cell’s “preferred” edge, the less often it fires

Parallel Processing in the Visual System

Different neurons in Area V1 are specialized, resulting in parallel processing rather than serial processing

The What System

Identification of visual objects in the occipital-temporal pathway; damage can lead to visual agnosia

The Where System

Location of visual objects and guiding actions in the occipital=parietal pathway; damage can lead to problems with reaching for seen objects

Spatial position

Overlap map of “what forms are where” with map of “what colors are where” and so on

Neural Synchrony

The brain seems to register synchronized firing as a cue that the attributes belong to a single object

Visual Maps and Firing Synchrony

Elements that help solve the binding problem

Conjunction errors

People with attention deficits are particularly impaired at judging how features conjoin

Gestalt Principles

Many stimuli are ambiguous, not only reversible figures, The mind groups patterns according to rules called “the laws of perceptual organization”

Simplicity

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

Similarity

Similar things are grouped together in space

Good Continuation

Points which, when connected, result in straight of smoothly curving lines, are seen as belonging together, and the lines tend to be seen following the smoothest path

Proximity

Things that are near each other tend to be grouped together

Common Fate

Things that are moving in the same direction tend t be grouped together

Familiarity

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

Closure

We tend to perceive closed figures rather than incomplete ones

Uniform Connectedness

We organize as a single unit those parts of the array that appear to be connected

Perceptual constancy

We perceive constant object properties (sizes, shapes, etc.) even though sensory information about these attributes changes when viewing circumstances change

Unconscious Interference

Constancy is often influenced by relationships between objects in the visual field that stay the same regardless of your viewing distance

Binocular disparity

Difference between each eye’s view

Motion parallax

Is the pattern of motion in the retinal images

Optic flow

Is moving toward or away from an object