Psych 134 Exam 1

Cogntitive Psychology

scientific study of the mind, including mental processes and how the mind operates

What are the mental processes included in cognition?

attention, learning, memory, decision-making, perception, etc...

Franciscus Donders (1818-1889)

1) mental chronometry (measuring cognitive process duration w/ reaction time)

2) Simple Vs. Choice reaction time to measure decision-making time

Wilhelm Wundt

1) father of experimental psychology

2) analytic introspection (participants describe experiences/thoughts in response to stimuli)

Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909)

1) studied his own memory

2) learned nonsense syllables & tracked forging over time

3) studied forgetting curves and savings in relearning

William James (1842-1910)

1) Father of American Psychology

2) authored "Principles of Psychology"

Mary Calkins (1863-1930)

1) first female president of APA (1905)

2) researched and taught as a Professor at Wellesley College

3) student of William James at Harvard

4) recency effect (terms that came last are thought to be remembered more than terms that came first)

Herman Canady (1901-1970)

1) examiner race influences on IQ testing

George Sanchez (1906-1972)

1) studied cultural and linguistic bias in intelligence testing during the 1930s

Behaviorism

the view that psychology (1) should be an objective science that (2) studies behavior without reference to mental processes

Most research psychologists today agree with (1) but not with (2)

John Watson (1878-1958)

1) founded behaviorism and rejected introspection

2)"Little Albert" experiement (basically classical conditioning on humans)

B.F. Skinner (1904-1990)

1) Behaviorist that developed the theory of operant conditioning (shaping behavior with reward/punishment) by training pigeons and rats

KEEP IN MIND THERE WAS LOTS OF DISSATISFACTION WITH BEHAVIORISM

Edward Tolman (1886-1959)

1) believed the conditioning experience produces knowledge or a belief that in a particular situation, a specific reward will appear if a specific response is made

2) cognitive map theory found in rats

Noam Chomsky (1928-Present)

1) studied language (specifically children's inborn language ability)

2) disagreed with Skinner about language acquisition & stated there is an infinite # of sentences in a language; humans have an inborn native ability to develop language

Rise of Technology (computers in the 1940s)

1) metaphor that the mind is basically a computer

2) information processing approach (how humans encode, store, and retrieve information)

Demands of War (World War II)

1) practical problems related to cognition like fatigue/loss of attention

2) rise of human factors engineering

Cognitive Neuroscience

scientific study of the biological basis of cognition

How is information processed?

By neural networks to extract features and produce adaptive outputs to drive other physiological systems (just neurons)

Neurons

cells that are specialized for creating, sending and receiving messages between the brain and all parts of the body, as well as within the brain itself

Nerve Net Theory (early theory)

neurons are interconnected for continuous communication

Neuron Doctrine (modern understanding)

individual neurons transmit signals to each other

What are the parts of a neuron?

cell body, dendrites, axon

What is action potential?

1) a neural impulse; a brief electrical charge that travels down an axon

2) resting potential, depolarization phase, repolarization phase

Key features for info. processing

summation and all-or-none principle

principle of neural representation

everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system

specificy coding

stimuli represented by ring of a single neuron; feature detectors

distributed coding

representation of an object or experience by the pattern of firing multiple neurons

population coding

many neurons

sparse coding

few neurons

Hierarchal Processing

specificity coding in lower-level, distributed coding in higher-level brain regions

localization of function

1) specialization of particular brain areas for particular functions

2) evidence from brain damage patients and brain imaging

Basic Brain Anatomy

2 hemispheres, 4 lobes (frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital)

Sensory Processing

primary sensory cortex receives input

Broca's Area

language production

Broca's Aphasia

language disorder that affects speech but NOT understanding

Wernicke's Area

language comprehension

Wenicke's Aphasia

a language disorder characterized by difficulty comprehending the meaning of spoken language

Prosopagnosia (face blindness)

1) an inability to recognize faces

2) may result from damage to the inferior temporal lobe encompassing the fusiform face area

Distributed Representation

occurs when a specific cognition activates many areas of the brain

Perception

experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses

Key features of Perception

1) necessary for other cognitions

2) can change w/ added info

3) similar to reasoning/problem-solving

4) shaped by experience

5) complex process

Sensation

stimulation of the senses

Perception

Making sense of sensation

What are properties that make the visual perception complex?

1) ambiguous objects

2) hidden/blurred objects

3) viewpoint matters

4) Scenes are complex

bottom-up processing

analysis that begins with the sense receptors and works up to the brain's integration of sensory information

top-down processing

information processing guided by higher-level mental processes, as when we construct perceptions drawing on our experience and expectations

template matching

our brains have a template for everything we need to know and we match what we see to the templates

feature matching

recognize objects by detecting features and forming them into a whole

Helmholtz's theory of unconscious inference

suggests that perception involves unconscious assumptions or inferences based on past experiences

Gestalt principle

the whole is greater than the sum of its parts

Good Continuation (Gestalt)

occurs when the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another object.

simplicity (gestalt principle)

people tend to perceive the simplest patten possible

Proximity (Gestalt)

objects that are close together are more likely to be perceived as belonging in the same group

connectedness (gestalt)

we perceive spots, lines, or areas as a single unit when uniform and linked

Symmetry (Gestalt)

the mind perceives objects as being symmetrical and forming around a center point

Closure (Gestalt)

we fill in gaps to create a complete, whole object

Figure and Ground (Gestalt)

we perceive any object, called the FIGURE, as distinct from its surroundings, called the GROUND

Enclosure (Gestalt Principle)

objects will be grouped by a visual border

regularities in the environment

1) physical regularities

2) semantic regularities

3) oblique object

4) scene schema

5) light-from-above assumtion

Bayesian inference

The idea that our estimate of the probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability (our initial belief) and the likelihood (the extent to which the available evidence is consistent with the outcome)

relationship between perception and action

1) perception enables interaction with the environment

2) perception is informed by action

3) perception and action rely on different neural pathways

double dissociation

The phenomenon in which one of two functions, such as hearing and sight, can be damaged without harm to the other, and vice versa.

action pathway

Neural pathway, extending from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe, that is associated with neural processing that occurs when people take action (Corresponds to the where pathway)

perception pathway

Neural pathway, extending from the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe, that is associated with perceiving or recognizing objects (Corresponds to the what pathway)

mirror neurons

Frontal lobe neurons that fire when performing certain actions or when observing another doing so; the brain's mirroring of another's action may enable imitation, language learning, and empathy

Attention

ability to focus on a specific stimuli/location(s)

selective attention

the focusing of conscious awareness on a particular stimulus

divided attention

concentrating on more than one activity at the same time

overt attention

shifting attention from one place to another by moving the eyes

covert attention

shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary

Broadbent's Filter Model

Filters message before incoming information is analyzed for meaning

Treisman's Attenuation Model

suggests that unattended info is not lost but attenuated/ turned down

McKay's Late Stage Model

all stimuli—both attended and unattended—are processed to the same deep level of analysis until stimulus identification occurs; subsequently, only the most important stimuli are selected for further processing

processing capacity

1)The amount of information input that a person can handle

2) This sets a limit on the person's ability to process information

load theory of attention

1) Proposal that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depends on the load of the task the person is carrying out. 2) high-load tasks result in less distraction

3) low-load tasks result in more distraction

automatic processing

unconscious encoding of incidental information, such as space, time, and frequency, and of well-learned information, such as word meanings

inattentional blindness

failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere (basketball pass & gorilla example)

change blindness

failing to notice changes in the environment; a form of inattentional blindness

spatial attention

attention to a specific location

Posner cueing task

often used to assess attention, also known as the Posner effect, its about an individual's ability to perform an attention shift (covert attention)

object-based attention

attentional selection of an entire object when attention is directed to part of the object

same-object advantage

Occurs when the enhancing effect of attention spreads throughout an object, so that attention to one place on an object results in a facilitation of processing at other places on the object

feauture-integration theory (FIT)

explains how an individual combines pieces of observable information about an object in order to form a complete perception of the object

preattentive stage

The first stage of Treisman's feature integration theory, in which an object is analyzed into its features.

focused attention stage

The second stage of Treisman's feature integration theory. According to the theory, attention causes the combination of features into perception of an object

visual search

occurs when a person is looking for one stimulus or object among a number of other stimuli or objects (like a mom looking for their child after a soccer game)