Cognitive psych quizlet exam 1

cognitive psychology

the scientific study of the mind. cognition refers to mental processes such as perception, attention, and memory that the mind creates

Donders 1868

Measured how long it takes a person to make a decision using reaction time (RT) experiments. experiments measured interval between stimulus presentation and persons response (light flashes). simple RT v choice RT

independent variable: task type (simple or choice)

dependent variable: reaction time

choice rt - simple rt=time to make decision

choice rt = 1/10 sec longer than simple RT

mental responses cannot be measure but can be inferred from behavior of participant

wundt 1879

rise of experimental Psych. first psychology lab established at Uni of Leipzig, Germany.

developed structuralism using a method of analytic introspection

no reliable results (based off of mental thoughts)

ebbinghaus party of one

1885/1913

careful self-study and quantification of a mental process

memorized quantitative measure of mental processes

used himself

savings and savings curve

original time to learn list - time to relearn list after delay

curve shows savings as a function of retention interval.

william james

taught first psych course at Harvard University

considered many topics in cognition including thinking, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination, and reasoning

observations based on the functions of his own mind, not experiments

descriptions of a wide range of experiences and wrote first psych textbook (some of his observations are still valid today)

resolution to caution with inferences

replication

watson

noted two problems with analytic introspection (wundt):

1. extremely variable results found per person

2. results are difficult to verify due to focus on invisible inner mental processes

watson & rayner 1920

little albert

demonstrated that behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind (can use concrete data from applying pavlovs theory to humans)

behaviorism

behaviorism

watson

dominated for decades (20 yrs) and eliminated mind as a topic of study and instead studies directly observable behavior

skinner

operant conditioning and behaviorism

tolman

the reemergrence of the mind. cognitive maps; mental conception of spatial area

skinner/chomsky and language aquisition

skinner 1957: argued children learned language through operant conditioning. children imitate speech they hear and correct speech is rewarded

chomsky 1959 (reemergrence of mind): argued that language learning does not rely soley on imitation and reinforcement. children say things they have never heard (so they cant be imitating). they also say things that are incorrect and that have not been reinforce

*language must be determined by inborn biological program

paradigms and paradigm shifts

scientific revolution is the result of paradigm shifts and can be best described by thomas kuhn’s 1962 book (structure of sceintific revolution)

cognitive revolution began in 1950s

Behaviorists’ focus on stimulus-response —> operations of the mind

information-processing approach

conceptualizes min based on computer. states that operation of mind occurs in stages

cherry 1953

subjects could understand message details presented in left ear even though they were told different messages in both ears.

broadbent 1958

developed a flow diagram to show what occurs as a person directs attention to one stimulus (mental processes)

ulrich neisser

wrote first cognitive psych textbook to provide a useful assesment of the state of the art (cog psych). most of book concerns vision and hearing AKA SENSORY. at end of book, introduced higher mental processes

atkinson and shiffrin’s 1968 model of memory

sensory memory: less than 1 sec

short term memory: a few secs limited in capacity

long-term memory: long duration, high capacity

endel tulving’s 1972 model

proposed long term memory has 3 diff components

episodic: life events

semantic: facts and info

procedural: physical actions

neuropsychology

studies the behavior of people with brain damage

electrophysiology

studies electrical responses of the nervous system, including cortical neurons

brain imaging

PET, fMRI shows which regions are active during cognition

ramon y cajal

contradicted nerve net theory by making the neruon doctrine (nervous system made with individual neruons)

types of neurons

neurotransmitters

excitatory - glutamate

inhibitory - gaba

neuronal measuring

hebel and weisel 1960s

researched visual stimuli in cats

feature detectors: a type of neuron that responds best to a specific stimulus

blakemore and cooper

experience-dependent plasticity. experiment where kitten were raised in environment with only vertical stripes. visual cortex developed to only respond to vertical controus and to ignore horizontal contrours

gross and colleagues (1969, 1972)

single neuron recordings in temporal lobe of anesthetized monkeys. specialized neurons respond to body parts

neural representation and cognition

Many neurons at higher levels of the visual system fire to complex stimuli like geometrical patterns and faces.

A specific stimulus causes neural firing that is distributed across many regions of the cortex

Sensory Coding

Specificity coding:

• Stimulus representation by firing specifically tuned neurons

specialized to respond only to a specific stimulus.

Population coding:

• Stimulus representation by the firing pattern of many neurons.

Sparse coding:

• Stimulus representation by a firing pattern of a small group of

neurons, with the majority remaining silent.

brain orientation

localization determined by neruopsychology

damage to brocas frontal lo

Patient L.G. by Turnbull 1997

preserved object recognition but could not orient object upright.

lost visuo-spatial abilities and is unable to determine the canonical rotient of object because her intact ventral object recognition system operates in an orientation-independent manner.

patient D.M. by Turnbull (1997)

unable to name objects, but able to orient them upright

lost acess to stored visual knowledge but retains visuo-spatial functions which are adequate to determine the probable canonical orientation of many objects

single neuron recording

fusiform face area (FFA)

responds specifically to faces. damage causes prosopagnosia

parahippocampal palce area (PPA)

responds specifically to places indoor/outdoor scene

extrastriate body area (EBA)

is activated by bodies (top) but not by other stimuli (bottom)

research method in cog psych

imaging brain structure and activity

neural networks

interconnected areas of the brain that communicate with each other (connectome)

structural connectivity

• the brain “wiring diagram” created by axons that connect brain areas

• as unique to individuals as fingerprints

functional connectivity

• how groups of neurons within the connectome function in relation to types of cognition

• determined by the amount of correlated neural activity in two brain areas

six common functional networks

visual - vision and visual perception

somato-motor - movement and trust

dorsal attention - attention to visual stimuli and spatial locations

salience - survival

default mode - mind wandering, cognitive activity related to personal life story, social functions, monitoring internal emotional states

default mode network (DMN)

• this mode of brain function occurs at rest

• it is one of the brain’s largest networks

sensation

reception

perception

interpretation

Transduction and Perception

W.E.I.R.D. Heinrich, Heine, Norenzayan (2010)

a famous optical illusion where two lines of the exact same physical length appear to be different sizes because of the arrowheads or fins placed at their ends

feature detectors

-- Perceptions can change based on added information

– Involves a process similar to reasoning or problem solving

—specialized neurons in the brain's visual cortex or computational algorithms in computer vision that respond to specific properties of a stimulus like edges, lines, or motion

– Perceptions occur in conjunction with actions

pattern

bottom-up processing

building up from individual components

ex. using puzzle pieces to build a puzzle

top-down processing

perceptions modified by experiences of expectations

ex. reading a mistyped word as the actual word. reading ‘sam edts a cookie’ as ‘sam eats a cookie’

navon 1977

global vs local evidence for global precedence

which shows that the human brain naturally identifies a large overall shape (the global level) before noticing the smaller parts that make it up (the local level)

human perception

• Environmental energy stimulating 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) is called bottom-up processing.

• Knowledge and expectations the observer brings to the situation

influence interpretation.

• Previous knowledge enables people to identify objects and situate

identify objects and situations quickly.

• This influence is called top-down processing

top down processing in human perception

influences perception of langauge based off of our individual experience

• speech segmentation: the ability to tell where words end and begin

• humans learn transitional probabilities as they learn speech (this is when they can predict which sound will follow another in a word)

  • this process is a sophisticated form of statistical learning (conditional probabilities)

why is it so diffult to design a perceiving machine

Objects look different from

different viewpoints.

• Achieving viewpoint

invariance is very labor-

intensive for computer

processing systems.

• Scenes contain high-

level information,

requiring reasoning about

context to interpret.

Four general conceptions

Helmholtz’s Theory of Unconscious Inference

• He proposed the likelihood principle: We perceive the object most likely to have caused a stimulus pattern.

• This judgment occurs by a process called unconscious inference. Our

perceptions result from unconscious assumptions or inferences that we make about the environment.

unconscious inference

how our brain resolves the inherent ambiguity of sensory data to construct what we actively perceive

perceptual organization

• Structuralism ("Old" view): Assumes perception is built up by adding together individual, elementary sensations (just a collection of black-and-white patches or blobs).

• Gestalt principles ("New" view): Proposes that the mind perceives the whole configuration ("the whole is different from the sum of its parts"), allowing you to suddenly recognize the integrated shape of a Dalmatian dog.

mac wertherimer gesalt principles of organization

• rejected the idea of adding up sensations to form perceptions

• they propose that perceptual organization involves rules for grouping small elements of a scene

• the principle of good continuation states that lines tend to be seen as flowing the smoothest path

• law of pragnanz is the principle of the importance of simplicity or good integrity

• principle of similarity: similar things are perceived as grouped

• principle of proximity: things nearby are grouped

• perception is determined by specific organizing principles, not just dark and light stimuli activating the retina

• experience plays a minor role compared to their intrinsic, “built-in” principles

• experience can influence perception but is not the key driver

oblique effect, regularities of environment

vertical and horizontals are more easily perceived than other orientations

light-from-above assumption, regularities of environment

• we assume light comes from above because this is common in our environment

• we perceived shadows as specific information about depth and distance

semantic regularities, regularities of environment

• the meaning of a given scene is related to what happens within that scene

• characteristic associated with functions carried out in different types of scenes

scene schema

• it is knowledge of what a given scene ordinarily contains

• in the jewelry case at Tiffany’s would expect to see a plate of fish and chips or diamond rings

bayesian inference

two factors influence estimated probability of a given outcome

• the prior probability

• the likelihood of a given outcome

calculating the probability of something based on prior knowledge of conditions related to the events

top-down processing

– Unconscious inference

– Environmental regularities

– Bayesian inference

bottom-up processing

– Gestalt principles

neural basis of knowledge

• some neurons respond best to things that occur regularly in the environment

• neurons become tuned to respond best to what we commonly experience

  • horizontals and verticals (oblique effect) (survival advantage natural selection?)

FFA and Learning

• Gauthier et al. (1999)

• FFA (fusiform face area)

• neurons activate to new stimuli, like Greebles, when exposed over time

experience based plasticity may play a role in determining neurons’ response

experiment demonstrated that the brain's Fusiform Face Area (FFA) adapts through experience to recognize complex, non-face objects when a person develops visual expertise (or in this case Grebbles)

Perception and Action: Behavior

Determining the identity of an object: what ventral pathway (lower part of brain)

Determining the location of an object: where dorsal pathway (upper part of brain)

Ungerleider and Mishkin (1982): monkey brain ablation experiment

temporal = failed at object discrimination ‘what’/ventral

parietal = failed landmark test ‘where’/dorsal

Milner and Goodale (1995)

• Patient D.F.

• Temporal lobe damage (carbon monoxide)

• Unable to perform mail slot task when matching orientations

• Able to do it when asked to “mail” a letter

mario Iacoboni (2005) intention

• Mirror Neurons

• fMRI research has found evidence of a mirror neuron system in the brain

showed participants three films (one picked up cup with coffee from clean table, second picked up cup from messy table, third picked up isolated cup). area of brain with mirror neurons was most activated for the two intention films (specifically the first one). found that mirror neurons area is involved with understanding intention behind actions shown in films. also found that mirror neurons also codes the “why” of actions and respond respond differently to different intentions.

hallucinations

Perceptions without sensations; top-down processing

principle of good continuation

states that lines tend to be seen as flowing the smoothest path

law of pragnanz

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

principle of similarity

similar things are perceived as grouped

principle of proximity

things nearby are grouped together

palmer

• presented image of kitchen and image of various objects (got kitchen associated items correct the most)

• illustrate how our knowledge about the environment can influence our perception

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