PSYCH 240 exam 1

cognitive psychology

-the scientific study of the human mind

-the study of the structures and processes of the mind and brain that take in, transform, and use information

-ex. read, write, solve problems, etc.

Gestalt psychology

This was a school of Psychology that emphasized that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that proposed a number of principles that the visual system exploits.

the big problem with studying the mind

-stimulus--> "black box"--> response

-the mind is unobservable

-cant see info processing that mediates between the two

all we can observe are the manifestation (products, output) of the mind: physiology, behavior, etc.

solutions to the big problem with studying the mind

-Introspectionism

-behaviorism

-cognitivism

cognitivism

computational view of the mind

independent variable

The experimental factor that is manipulated; the variable whose effect is being studied.

dependent variable

The measurable effect, outcome, or response in which the research is interested.

main effects

-when the independent variable influences the dependent variable

-the effect of a single independent variable on a dependent variable

interactions

-when two independent variables influence each other

ruling out alternative explanations

showing that events other than the treatment are unlikely to have caused an observed difference

Introspectionism

The study of conscious mental events by "introspecting" or "looking within."

-Wilhelm Wundt: basic components of human sensation

-Edward Titchener

Edward Titchener and introspectionism

-used introspection to develop a taxonomy of possible sensations for all sense organs in the body

-by carefully and diligently "thinking about his own thoughts" he identified what he considered to be 42,415 different kinds of sensations

• important to note about the table:]

• -outside of his eyes and ears, Titchener led a pretty uninteresting life.

• -For our purposes however the important point is that it is impossible to know if he's right! If I think that I or even Titchener can only perceive 42,413 possible sensations, there's no way to decide who's telling the truth.

problems with introspection

-difficult to verify

-private events, not public

-end product, not the process itself

-difficult to objectify

-keep in mind that even though introspection seems about as direct a measure as you could possibly get, you still only observe the end product of processing, not the process itself.

Behaviorism

-psychology is the "science of behavior"

-Emphasis on what can be directly observed

-ignore the mind (unobservable)

-behaviorists didn't use theoretical mental concepts, like memory

-had to study things that were observable

Behaviorism

studied the relationship between stimuli and responses, and how they come to be associated, without making any reference to what goes on inside the mind

Behaviorism: reinforcements and reward

-focused a lot on what the organism was reinforced or rewarded for doing

-examined how stimuli and responses came to be associated by looking at how organisms learned to make responses they were rewarded for

Behaviorism: rats in mazes

-So when observing that a rat learns to press a bar to get a food pellet, it is enough to describe the reinforcement or reward schedule that led the rat to learn the response. Not important what went on inside the rat's head that made him change his behavior.

-Same goes for humans - a baby learns language because he or she is rewarded for making certain utterances. Not even considered that there is a mind that is responsible for creating the speech.

-So behaviorism developed laws that predicted what an animal or human would do based on what it had been reinforced for doing in the past.

Problems with Behaviorism

-cant account for creativity and diversity of human behavior

-limiting science to the observable is a bad idea

Cognitivism

-infer whats going on inside the box

-chart the unobservable

-complex map of cognition through experiments, hypothesis, replicating experiment

computational view of the mind

-mainstream underlying assumption: the mind is somehow like a computer program

-information enters your mind via input devices (namely our sensory organs), is stored in memory devices that maintain that information, and is processed using cognitive processes that work somewhat like computer programs

information processing

-donders came up with a model of information processing that assumed that cognition is a series of stages whose length can be measured

-stimulus->processing->still more processing->response

stages of information processing

1. RECEIVES information from the previous stage

2. TRANSFORMS the information

3. SENDS information to the next stage

mental chronometry

-investigated by Donders

-the study of the time course of mental processes

simple reaction time

reacting to the presence or absence of a single stimulus (as opposed to having to choose between a number of stimuli before making a response)

choice reaction time

-choice task: S->detection->decision->R

-also called a decision task

-there are multiple possible stimuli and responses, and you have to decide which response to make based on which stimulus is present

-two lights and two keys: when the left light goes on, press the left key, when the right light goes on, press the right key, you need both detection and decision

Donder's subtraction method

Time needed for simple mental processes can be determined by subtracting the time needed for a task from the time needed for a more complex version of the task.

-gives you an objective measure of some completely unobservable process

-gives you an objective measure of some completely unobservable process

-donders idea was to estimate the amount of time required by the decision phase by subtracting the two reaction times

problems with the subtraction method

-assumption of pure insertion

-assumption of additivity

-assumes you already know what the stages are

assumption of pure insertion

all stages remain the same when the new one is added; assumes that adding a new process to the chain of processes doesn't alter any of the other processes

problem: adding the decision stage may influence another stage (like detection)

assumption of additivity

the durations of all stages added together to yield the reaction time

problem: stages might not operate in parallel

-as a result you would underestimate the duration of the decision stage

assumption that you already know what the stages are

-you probably dont

-the subtraction method only works if you already know what the stages are

-S->detection->memory lookup->decision->R

Huppert & Piercy amnesia experiments

-they studied memory performance in patients with Korsakoff's syndrome

-they gave 5 amnesiacs and 5 control patients a series of tests for memory for pictures.

-they found that amnesiacs couldn't identify 20 pictures they had already seen among 40 total pictures

-ran a second study allowing korsakoff's patients more time to ENCODE the pictures. They found that this allowed the two groups to score similarly on the test.

Encoding

the processing of information into the memory system—for example, by extracting meaning.

Storage

the process of retaining encoded information over time

Retrieval

the process of getting information out of memory storage

Huppert and Piercy amnesia experiments: falsifying storage explanation

equated encoding by having the people study the pictures for longer --> tested them after various amounts of time --> the results were no difference between the amnesics and the control. (This eliminates storage because after time more memory loss should have been seen in amnesics)

How to Study: Problem

metacognition and overconfidence

levels of processing

shallow vs. deep

studies of incidental vs. intentional memory

Hyde and Jenkins (words), Katona (numbers), Bower and Kaplin (faces)

incidental memory

Explicit knowledge you did not intentionally encode

learning: not told about memory test

intentional memory

Memory that relates to events that a person plans to remember

learning: told about memory test

deep processing

-deeper levels of analysis (e.g., semantic processing) produce more elaborate, longer-lasting, and stronger memory traces than shallow levels or analysis

-rate words for pleasantness

elaborative coding

the process of actively relating new information to knowledge that is already in memory

how to use deep, elaborative coding in studying

1. reading, reflecting, reciting

2. Cornell Note taking system

3. testing is better than re-reading

4. retrieval from your own head it better

PQ4R

preview, question, read, reflect, recite, review

Thomas and Robinson, 1972

why highlighting/underlining and "going over" are ineffective and dangerous

1. ineffective: they don't focus on meaning

2. dangerous: they make the material seem familiar

3. misleads us into thinking we've learned it, when we haven't

desirable difficulties

situations that make acquiring new knowledge more challenging and with benefits that are less obvious in the short term

1. use tests as learning events

2. the generation effect

evidence from Butler study comparing studying vs. re-testing

Andrew Butler asked students at Washington University in St. Louis to study a few text passages like you might find in Wikipedia or an encyclopedia[9]. The students then restudied SOME of the passages and took a TEST on the other passages. A week later they came back and took a test that assessed how much they had learned from the passages.

generation effect

Memory for material is better when a person generates the material him- or herself, rather than passively receiving it.

Example in class and Bower & Winzenz paired associates study:

4 groups of subjects see a list of 15 arbitrary word pairs

Subjects learned to associate 15 arbitrary pairs of words under one of four conditions:

-Repetition: they were asked to verbally rehearse each pair

-Sentence reading: subjects saw each pair of words in a simple sentence, and were told to read it and use it to associate the two critical words

-Sentence generation: subjects were shown each pair of words and asked to construct and say aloud a meaningful sentence relating the words

-Image generation: subjects were asked to visualize a mental picture or image in which the two referents were in some kind of vivid interaction

combining generation and testing

teaching to learn. learning to teach

encoding specificity

phenomenon of remembering something better when the conditions under which we retrieve information are similar to the conditions under which we encoded it

interleaving

Purposely putting space between the same activity

-retention and recall are better

-Kornell and Bjork artist identification study

Blocked studying

gives you better effects

Roeher & Taylor

mass practice: blocked, spacing, mixed practice

spacing effect

the tendency for distributed study or practice to yield better long-term retention than is achieved through massed study or practice

bahrick study

why desirable difficulties work

-retrieval practice

-metacognitive benefit: you know what you know

perception

-the means by which information acquired from the environment via sense organs is transformed into experiences of objects, events, sounds, tastes, etc.

Stages of Perception

exposure, attention, interpretation

distal stimulus-->proximal stimulus-->percept

distal stimulus

In perception, it is the actual object or event out there in the world, as opposed to its perceived image.

proximal stimulus

In perception, it is the information our sensory receptors receive about the object.

-sensation on the retina

lack of correspondence

-When a percept does not correspond to the distal stimulus

-Ex: perceptual illusions

-Distal stimulus

-percept doesn't properly reflect the distal stimulus

paradoxical correspondence

when proximal stimulus does not correspond to distal stimulus but percept does

ex. moving objects, moving eyes

percept

The meaningful product of perception - often an image that has been associated with concepts, memories of events, emotions, and motives.

direct perception

a theory arguing that sensory perception is the direct result of info. from the surrounding environment; this is contrary to the theory of our inferences and beliefs affecting sensory experiences

Constructivism

perception uses data from the world AND our prior knowledge and expectations

-both bottom-up and top-down processing

Constructivist Theory

children construct an understanding of their world based on observations of the effects of their behavior

-sensory information is often ambiguous: must rely on knowledge/expectations

-must be supplemented with what we already know about the world

bottom-up processing

processing that is driven by external stimulus, rather than knowledge

-direct perception claims it is purely ________

top-down processing

processing that is driven by knowledge and expectations

perceptual constancies: size, color, shape

Our perception of an object's features remains constant even when viewpoint (proximal stimulus) changes

-Perception of size does not change with distance

-Perception of color does not change with light

-Perception of shape does not change with angle

paradoxical correspondence

when proximal stimulus does not correspond to distal stimulus, but percept does (moving objects, moving eyes) (ex. person moving across room...follow him with our eyes their structure stays in the middle of our retina, but we still know they are moving; picture of a person close and far - we know that the two don't differ much in heigh but in the actual picture our retina sees that one is smaller - we know he is not) we activitely perceive the distal stiumulus but do not have all the proximal information

...

depth perception

the ability to see objects in three dimensions although the images that strike the retina are two-dimensional; allows us to judge distance

how the visual system recovers depth

Exploit environmental cues to recover depth

monocular depth cues

aspects of a scene that yield information about depth when viewed with only one eye

1. linear perspective

2. shape

3. relative size

4. interposition

5. shadows

6. accommodation

binocular depth cues

clues about distance based on the differing views of the two eyes

1. retinal disparity

2. convergence

linear perspective

A monocular cue for perceiving depth; the more parallel lines converge, the greater their perceived distance.

relative size

a monocular cue for perceiving depth; the smaller retinal image is farther away

Interposition

monocular visual cue in which two objects are in the same line of vision and one partially conceals the other, indicating that the first object concealed is further away

retinal disparity

a binocular cue for perceiving depth by comparing images from the retinas in the two eyes, the brain computes distance—the greater the disparity (difference) between the two images, the closer the object.

accommodation

the process by which the eye's lens changes shape to focus near or far objects on the retina