Historical Roots of Psychology: Final Exam

Provide three ways in which Neisser’s 1976 conception of cognitive psychology differed from his 1967 conception of cognitive psychology.

Neisser 1967 Summary: Cognitive science (and psychology, because in 1967 he believed cognitive psychology was an aspect of cognitive science). He thought the brain acted like a computer.

Neisser 1976 was still focused on cognitive psychology but it was not cognitive science. One couldn’t explain away how the brain worked by simply comparing it to a computer. Neisser 1976 believes that the three main points of cognitive psychology when dealing with predicting are:

1) Absolute control would be out of the question without a complete understanding of the environment.

2) Perception and behavior are controlled interactively, and with the individual and the environment.

3) A predictor would have to understand the former as well as the latter. To predict one another’s behavior, with consistency and success.

According to lecture, there are four different cognitive movements in psychology. Name and define each of them. Make sure to make it clear what aspect(s) of each makes it distinct from the other three types of cognitive psychology.

The four types of cognitive movements in psychology:

Introspection: This type asks subjects about their own mental events/objects.

S/T-O-R: This type of cognitive psychology varies in stimulus and/or task, observe the reactions of the participants and then infer the cognition involved. These methods are sometimes used by cognitive science and even in behaviorism, however, it is different then the others. Just because it may be the basis for other types, doesn’t mean it isn’t its own thing

Cognitive Science: Uses representation-based AI models to test the models of human cognition.

Social/Personality: This doesn’t seem to come out of cognitive science or any other type of representations. The method of this psychology is to postulate a mental structure, then create a questionnaire based on that postulation. Look at the score to see if it correlates with the other stuff.

In what way did operationsim influence the social/personality approach to psychology?

Bridgeman (1927) about the idea of operationism: “the concept is synonymous with the corresponding set of operations.” Behaviorists took this as a sign to ignore the mental because to them you couldn’t operationally define a mental phenomenon. Mentalists however, claimed that this could be used to study mental concepts as long as the concepts had 3 qualities: Public, Repeatable, and concrete.

When it comes to social/personality psychology, they would name a cognitive construct (i.e. self-esteem, depression, self-efficacy etc). They would then create a questionnaire around that concept, in order to construct it in a way to measure the concepts in a quantitative measure. They would then have participants answer two or more questionnaires and use regression to understand the relationships between two or more constructs.

What are three reasons put forth in lecture for why obtaining information about the mental through dependent measures may be difficult and/or impossible?

1) When studying the mental, many can make the argument that you are actually studying the behavioral because without a person reacting to a stimuli (behavioral) you aren’t aware there is anything happening cognitively.

2) As you can see in the Libet study, even when he used an ERP and the own person’s awareness of the conscious decision to move their hand, it was actually way off in milliseconds, but compare it to an FMRI and it reveals that the brain activity happens ten seconds prior to the movement and 9.8 seconds before conscious awareness. So, there’s the limit of technology and what you have when dealing with dependent measures.

3) Then there’s the idea of the quantity objection: The mind is not possessed of magnitude, and mental measurement is impossible. Confusion of the sensation of the stimulus lead to a stimulus-error. How can you measure something that may, inherently, be riddled with errors because of your own human perception?

Describe Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment. Did anyone actually conduct the experiment? Was Searle an anti-mentalist? How did Searle’s thought experiment
undercut the cognitive science/CRUM perspective?

It is a thought experiment, not actually conducted experiment. The Chinese Room Experiment has two parts: The Chinese room and the English Room.

The Chinese Room Thought Experiment: John is locked in the room, he understands no Chinese at all. In the room, there are two batches of cards, both in Chinese (one batch has questions, one batch has answers). John is given a card of matching rules, and with each kanji on the question, matches to one on the response.

On each round, a Chinese judge puts a card in a slot. John matches and puts the appropriate card in the output slot. The rules for card matching are so good, that the judge decides that the person in the room understands Chinese.

The other version is the English Room Thought Experiment: John sits in a room and people put cards in the slot that asks questions in English. John thinks about the best answer to each question, then writes his answer on a card and gives it back to the judge. The judge decides that John understands the English language.

While Searle wants to learn about consciousness and the understanding in the brain, and therefore a mentalist, wasn’t a fan of cognitive science/the Turing Test because he didn’t think that it was as clear cut as other people were making it out to be. He believed that the Turing Test and other AI representations of cognitive science never actually understood the human experience, rather was simply recognizing patterns and spitting them back out (see John in the Chinese Room thought experiment. Here, John is the computer, not understanding Chinese (humans if he were AI) and he is simply matching things based on the rules (computer program))

What is a mental taxonomy? Have mental taxonomies changed in the past 150 years? Are the number of cognitive constructs staying the same, increasing in number or decreasing in number? Does there appear to be a trend in which psychologists are coming to an
agreement on the list of components of mental activity?

A mental taxonomy is a classification of mental constructs. The more correct question is ‘when have mental taxonomies not changed?’ The number of cognitive concepts and mental taxonomies grows nearly every day because no one can agree on the definition of what a cognitive concept is, and in turn can’t pick a solid way to classify them. Due to this, there doesn’t appear like there is going to be an agreed upon list any time soon.

Describe Libet’s methods and results. What is your personal opinion on what the results of the Libet and Soon et al studies mean? Defend/justify your opinion.

Method: Each participant rested their arm on a table, participants moved their fingers whenever they felt like it. He used EMG to precisely determine when the muscle first moved. He then used EEG to generate an event-related potential.

He used a dot-location, where the participant would look at the screen with the moving dot around the circle, and used it to figure out the first awareness of wanting to move a finger, then the first awareness of a finger actually moving.

Results: Perceived movement was indicated 85 milliseconds prior to actual movement (from EMG) and the perceived awareness of intent to move was indicated 200 milliseconds prior to actual movement.

I don’t believe the Libet study was done well. I believe he was close to something that would be later helped with better technology and better techniques in the Soon et al studies. First of all, a dot rotating around the circle is rather flimsy, because the person says it could’ve been around the six mark (if it had been a clock), but it easily could’ve been around the five or seven mark. Letters are more concrete. And in the end, Soon et al had better technology (fMRI) for that kind of study and pinpointed the points of movement better, and the research says that we literally think before we act, there’s activity in our brains before we consciously know what’s happening.

What is Moore’s theorem? That is, what is the rationale of the argument? Why does Moore’s theorem undercut both the S/T-O-R and cognitive science approaches?

Moore’s theorem is for a closed system in which one can only see inputs and outputs (a ‘black box,’ which happens when you reject introspection), there are infinite possible explanations of how the stimulus is transformed into the response. Moore (1956) showed that the number of alternative internal mechanisms is infinite and no sequence of experiments can rule them out. It is because of these infinite mechanisms that Moore’s theorem undercuts both STOR and cognitive science approaches. Cognitive science uses AI representations to test models of human cognition and often uses STOR psychology’s method.

STOR psychology uses varying stimulus and tasks, then observe reactions to infer cognition. Because there are infinite mechanisms, one using STOR psychology or Cognitive science would simply be there all day.

Neisser (1982) speaks of the high and low roads in the study of memory. What is the high road? What is the low road? Which one is associated with S/T-O-R psychology and cognitive science? Which one is associated with ecological psychology? Which road does Neisser think is the right road to take?

The high road are those that follow the basic mental mechanisms that are demonstrated in controlled environments. S-T-O-R psychology and cognitive science are associated with this one considering how both often need controlled experiments in order to fully work.

The low road is one that attempts to understand the specific manifestations of memory when it comes to the human experience. This one is involved with ecological psychology because this type of psychology has the belief that the brain/mind are not involved in the processing of information, rather it is the active organism that directly perceives information from the environment. Neisser was a fan of this one because it is more practical rather than the laboratory approach.

According to Clark & Chalmers (1998), what are the minimum requirements for an external resource to be part of the mind? Given the name and definition of each of one.

There are three minimum requirements:

Availability: The resource must be reliability available to the person.

Trust: The information should be as trustworthy as something retrieved from biological memory.

Accessibility: A person should be able to access the information at will.

What is folk psychology? What do eliminative materialists think about folk psychology?

Folk Psychology: Is the idea that humans do things because of thoughts (this is common sense that nearly ever person on the planet believes).

Eliminative Materialists claim that common sense understanding of the mind (folk psychology) is false. Claiming that some, if not all, mental states that most people believe in do not exist.

Describe the Joan1, Joan2 and Joan3 scenario, and explain how this scenario is used to argue for the extended mind approach.

Joan 1, 2, & 3 see a series of geometrical shapes on a computer screen. All three are asked to say whether each one fits into depicted sockets on the screen.

Joan 1: Answers each question by mentally rotating each shape.

Joan 2: can either perform mental rotation or press a rotate button so that the image on the screen rotates.

Joan 3: Can either perform mental rotation normally or activate her neural implant which will perform the rotation faster than her brain.

This scenario was used to argue extended mind because a human being is being coupled with an external thing (such as Joan 2 using her finger to rotate the screen; or Joan 3 using a neural implant)— the coupled system (human + thing) solves the problem and all the elements of the system have a causal role in solving the problem. In short, the brain does not have a privileged role as a source of the mind.

Paul & Patricia Churchland thought of six reasons why folk psychology was wrong. What are four of those reasons?

1) It hasn’t made any significant progress in 2,500 years.

2) Neuroscience is advancing but folk psychology is not.

3) Neuroscience frequently shows many claims of folk psychology to be false.

4) Neuroscience can explain cognitive processes, folk psychology cannot.

Ecological psychology claims that psychological activities (such as perception) take place outside of the brain. Extended mind theorists also believe that psychological activities (such as memory) take place outside the brain. Do you think that extended mind theorists and ecological psychologists have nearly the same approach to psychology? Yes/No. Argue for/defend your viewpoint.

I believe they are virtually the same approach. Ecological psychology believes that it is an active organism that is interacting with the environment, and that is how we have things like memory and perception. Extended mind has the whole idea of human + thing being the causal role in solving a problem and that it is this combination that makes the brain take a back seat. In this case, couldn’t one make the argument that the human + thing in extended mind be the human (active organism) + the environment (thing) be the same thing in ecological psychology?