PSYC 263-Exam 1

What are the two critical strands of cognition throughout history? What are they, and what are the definitions for each?

Representation and Process.

Structure/Representation: the knowledge you possess; information in your memory.

Process: an operation on an external stimulus or on an internal representation.

Aristotle's doctrine of association suggests that mental life can be explained in terms of ideas, and the associations between them. What were the three critical ways in which he though things could be associated?

Contrast, contiguity, similarity.

Perceiving Machines are used by the U.S. Postal service to "read" the addresses on letters and sort them quickly to their correct destinations. Sometimes, these machines cannot "read" an address because the writing on the envelope is not sufficiently clear for the machine to "match" the writing to an "example" it has stored in "memory." Human postal workers are much more successful at reading unclear addresses, most likely because of

feature recognition

Why do we have sensory memory?

all of the above (allows us to select pertinent information to which we wish to attend, enables the understanding of the flow of language, and allows for a stable and continuous view of the environment.

When Sam listens to his girlfriend Susan in the restaurant and ignores other people's conversations, he is engaged in the process of ____ attention.

selective

Broadbent's "Filter Model" of selective attention proposes that the filter identifies the attended message based on

physical characteristics.

Which of the following is not traditionally considered to be one of the four kinds of attention?

categorical

The Stroop effect demonstrates

how automatic processing can interfere with intended processing.

A difference between a heuristic and an algorithm is

algorithms usually take a longer to carry out than heuristics.

If you are standing in line at a movie and in your periphery, you detect someone waving at you, this would most likely lead to a ____ and ____ shift of attention.

exogenous, overt

That you are slower to return your attention to a location that you have previously fixated is referred to as ____, and is a mechanism that is thought to aid ______.

Inhibition of return, visual search

How do cuing effects brought on by peripheral cues differ from cuing effects brought on by central cues?

Peripheral cuing effects are larger.

Studies which have examined object-based attention, have provided us with evidence that

all of the above (attention selects locations, attention selects objects, attention stays with an object even when it moves in space)

Ben had a stroke and that resulted in damage to his right hemisphere, what will happen if Ben is given a simple line drawing to copy it down?

He will only draw the right side of the picture.

When a single flash is presented simultaneously with two tones, people would perceive two flashes, this is called:

two-flash illusion

When the doctor flashed 2 lights, with each of them at one of Sam's visual fields, she had a tendency to ignore the light in the neglected visual field while responding to the light in the other visual field. This is an example of:

Extinction

The inverse projection problem states that ambiguity occurs because the image on the retina

can be caused by an infinite number of different objects.

There are two different neural correlates of perception, the ____ stream which provides "what" information (perception) and the ____ stream, which provides "where" information (action input)

ventral, dorsal

Which of the following is NOT one of the original Gestalt laws of perceptual organization

uniform connectedness

Color afterimages are attributable to

fatigued cells in the retina

Both the hollow mask and Margaret Thatcher illusions are attributable to

our knowledge/expertise regarding how faces should look

The "ball in a box" shadow illusion in which the trajectory of the ball seems to change as the trajectory of the shadow changes is an example of how _____ influences perception

context

The primacy effect is attributed to

recall of information stored in LTM

The recency effect is attributed to

recall of information still active in STM

Prospective memory is

memory for tasks that need to be carried out in the future

Who founded the first psychological laboratory?

Wilhelm Wundt

What are the four factors that led to the birth of cognitive psychology?

1) fall of behaviorism; mediation (internal thought)

2) Information/communication theory

3) Linguistics and psycholinguistics

4) Computers and computer models

How was sensory memory discovered experimentally?

Sperling used perceptual span and partial report. Partial report is trying to report only the portion of the display that is cued. Perceptual span, also known as whole report, is trying to report everything that was presented, which isn't a good measure.

What is masking, and how does it influence attention/perception?

If two things appear back to back, the second object masks the object you were supposed to attend to.

What is sensory memory, and why do we have it?

• permits decision about whether a brief sensory input is important enough to pay attention to

• icon: enables a continuous and stable view of the environment despite saccadic eye movements

• echo: enables the understanding of the flow of language

• What kind of information is in the sensory store and how does it get in/out?

Two features of pattern recognition: feature recognition and template matching. What are they, and what are the strengths and weaknesses for each theory?

• Pattern recognition: how we identify objects in our environment; segmentation and labeling based on experience

• Template: a pattern treated as an unanalyzed whole

- e.g., numbers on cheques; universal bar codes

• Pattern is recognized by degree of overlap between sensory info and template

• problems:

- can't handle complexity (e.g. handwriting differences - doesn't describe how patterns differ (only that they

differ)

- can't handle multiple interpretations

• Feature: a separable element of a pattern

• a feature theory aims to describe a pattern

by listing the elements of that pattern

• ties well to concept identification

• an example—letter recognition as done by Selfridge's (1959) Pandemonium model

What are the four criteria for features according to feature theory of letter recognition?

• features should be critical for contrast

• features should not change under physical changes (e.g., light)

• features should yield a unique pattern for each letter

• features proposed should be small in number

What is bottom-up processing and what is top-down processing? How do they influence attention/perception?

• Bottom-up: processing begins with the sensory input and ends with its representation. The outcome of a lower step is never affected by a higher step in the process

Bottom up example: "bank" go through series of steps where

each level feeds the next step to create meaning.

• Top-down: the output of a lower step is influenced by a higher one

Top-down example: "She got on the elevator and went up to the tenth ____" fill in with the word "floor" because filling in

What are the four types of attention?

Alerting: the ability to orient oneself to some critical and/or unexpected stimulus; specialized detectors with high priorities...most primitive form of attention (just detects signals)...only form of attention infants have (lowest level of attention)

Vigilance: the ability to devote full attention to a single stimulus (complex); detection of change has high priority (high level of cognition)

Divided: the ability to focus on two (or occasionally more) stimuli/dimensions at the same time; usually, there is some loss in attention to one or both

Selective: the ability to choose to focus on only one stimulus (or dimension), excluding all others

What is Broadbent's filter theory? What does it try to explain, and what are the key predictions?

• Key idea to filter theory is that information processing is limited by channel capacity (only so much information can be conveyed along a channel at one time)

• Only one channel can be processed at a time (single channel hypothesis)

Critical prediction: Selective attention should not be affected by the identity of various messages

What is dichotic listening, and how is it used in experiments?

• Dichotic listening experiments: Pairs of digits being presented in groups of 3...one item in each ear

• Conditions: report what is being presented to one of your two ears or report what is being presented in each ear in order (left then right, left then right)

What is change/inattentional blindness, why does it occur, and what do change blindness experiments tell us?

• inattentional blindness: the failure to see consciously, caused by lack of attention

• we can miss perceiving very obvious changes if we are not attending (missing the gorilla walking in the video)

Change blindness: a remarkable inability to detect changes in displays, even when trying

• attention is crucial to perception and memory (strangers approached and asked for directions, different person comes in when people with door walk past)

What is saccadic blindness?

• When people make saccades, our vision is degraded (saccadic blindness), due to the eyes rotating at hundreds of degrees per second- too rapidly for the retina to integrate useful information.

• We spend 10-20% of our waking lives functionally blind.

• That this is something of which we are not generally aware is perhaps the greatest illusion of all time, and illustrates the brain's immense capacity for self- delusion.

What is the relationship between arousal and performance?

• Definition:ageneralstateofactivationwithrespect to our capacity to perceive sensory events

• An important aspect of attention/performance

• Too little arousal leads to poor performance (e.g.

lack of effort)

• Too much arousal leads to poor performance (e.g.

distracted)

Being in the middle is optimal for performance.

What is visual search, and what factors influence it?

•Visual search: Searching through a display for targets

• Press one button if a target is there, a different button if the target is not there

• What we're measuring: how long it takes to respond

• What you already know: Distractors interfere with the processing of targets

• Set size function: more elements to search through = more time required to search (but not always as you'll see shortly)

• No is slower than yes

• Set size functions are linear (increase in

distractors leads to linear increase in RT)

• It takes attention to search in a controlled

fashion

• Note: some searches are automatic and require little attention (more on this in a minute)

What is the Stroop effect, and what causes it?

• the incongruent condition (RED) is slower than the neutral/control condition (XXX); this is called interference

• the congruent condition (GREEN) is faster than the neutral/control condition (XXX); this is called facilitation

• however, if you read the words and ignore the colours instead, there is no interference or facilitation

Why does interference occur?

• ...and why only in one direction?

• Word reading is so overlearned that it is automatic and unavoidable

• You wouldn't show the effect though if the words were in a language you don't understand

• Note: if you ever see an email with a left brain/right brain explanation, it's wrong

What are the criteria for determining whether a process is automatic?

• a process is considered to be automatic if: - you are unaware of it

- it does not interfere with other processes

- it is unaffected by practice

• think of this as a dimension:

• Not paying attention to what you're reading

• Not paying attention to where you're driving (or

driving to the total wrong place)

• Typing mistakes: Rattlesnack, Marving, Pathe

• Free throws and firemen

• Automaticity is one of the major foundations of

the book Blink, which we'll cover near the end of the course

What does feature integration theory try to account for, and what are the two stages of the theory?

• Feature integration theory: accounts for why some targets pop-out while others don't.

1) Parallel pre-attentive stage

Parallel feature detectors (in brain...operating simultaneously)

Each detector has its own map of the visual field

Feature maps (color, form, orientation) which work in parallel over the visual field

Detect a single different feature: "pop-out" (if one unique feature is apparent on only one feature map, target pops out Pop out is preattentive & parallel

If no target pops out, move to stage 2 where all of the feature maps send info to a master map

2) Serial attentive stage

- Links master map to other feature maps...this

requires attention and as such, takes time

- Serial spotlight of attention (random movements)

• Attention binds features into objects on the master map...this is done in a serial manner

• Attentional movements are assumed to be random and each shift of attention takes equivalent time

• Find conjunction targets (multiple features)

• Illusory conjuctions can happen here (wrong features are bound erroneously)

What is an illusory conjunction and why does it occur?

They are combinations of visual and tactile stimuli.

What are algorithms and heuristics, and how do they differ?

• to perform a controlled task, we must use an algorithm = a slow sequence of processes guaranteed to work

-Heuristic: simple and efficient rule used to make decisions. Not always right.

Why is visual attention difficult to measure?

• Problems with measurement

- No direct measurement device (need indirect) - Attention reflected in RT/accuracy

- Need for fixation (covert vs. overt measures...don't move your eyes, DO NOT MOVE YOUR EYES)

What are exogenous, endogenous, covert, and overt shifts of attention, and what causes each type of shift?

• Exogenous - bottom-up, automatic, involuntary allocation of attention (peripheral cue)

• Endogenous - top down, controlled, voluntary allocation of attention

• Covert - no eye movements

• Overt - eye movements (and head movements)

What are the types of cuing effects you see with central and peripheral cues, and how do these differ from one another?

• Posner used central cues, most of the literature is based on peripheral cues

• Jonides (1981). First to use both central arrow cues and peripheral onset cues

• Peripheral onset: A flash of light in the periphery...how does this effect attention?

• Try to ignore the following flashes in your periphery

How do peripheral/central cues differ in terms of attentional allocation?

• First to do this is Jonides...central arrows vs peripheral flashes, 80% valid, 20% invalid cues

• Peripheral cues affect attention as much or more so than central cues

• Peripheral cuing effects are larger

• Peripheral cuing effects emerge faster

• Why? Central cues take time to process

What is inhibition of return, and what is its purpose?

• 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 (typically between 200 and 3000 ms) intervenes between the cue and target

• Purpose of IOR is to make visual search efficient

What is the difference between object-based attention and space/location-based attention?

Object-based attention

• Notion that attention selects objects in visual field

- Attention does not go to spatial locations, but to specific objects in the visual field

- Duncan (1984) and Tipper et al. (1991)

Location-based attention

• Notion that attention selects portions of visual field - Spotlight, zoom lens, attentional gradient

• To attend to an object in the visual field

- Allocation of attention around space the object occupies

What was found from Duncan's initial experiments on object-based attention (two superimposed images), and what does it indicate?

• First study of object-based attention

• Two objects are presented at fixation, with one superimposed over the other

• The two objects are presented briefly and then masked

• Two questions are then asked about the objects presented

• Critically, either two questions are asked about one of the objects, or one question is asked about each object

• Results

- Single object questions - 88% accuracy - Double object questions - 76% accuracy

- Attention is allocated to objects not space

What is echolocation?

Echolocation is the use of sound waves and echoes to determine where objects are in space.

When Ben lost his eyesight, did his other senses become greater than average?

Yes.

What is visual neglect, and how does it impact individuals with it?

Attention network in one hemisphere is impaired

• Typically occurs after a stroke

• Quite common

• Experience difficulty to attend things in the visual field opposite to

the brain lesion

• Patients with damage to the right hemisphere would neglect things in the left visual field attention toward the right side

• This is NOT blindness

• Attention problem decreased ability to control attention

• Less able to redirect attention than normal individuals

• Mostly happen to the right hemisphere

• This neglect happens to not only visual stimuli, but also other types of sensory stimuli such as auditory stimuli, etc.• Common way to test it

• Give patients a paper with many horizontal lines

• Ask them to bisect each line in the middle using a vertical line

• Patients with damage in right hemisphere bisect lines toward

right side

• Patients with damage in left hemisphere bisect lines toward left

side

• Some patients may just neglect lines on the other side of the paper

What is extinction, and how does it impact individuals?

• Tendency to ignore stimuli in the neglected visual field when a competing stimulus is presented in the other visual field

• Ex., when a stimulus is presented in the right visual field captures attention and prevents it from being directed to the left

• Appear to be caused by something like attention capture

• Extinction seems still last even after neglect has remitted as a patient

recovers

• It can be overcome if the patient's attention is directed to the neglected locations of items

How does hearing influence vision? What is the two-flash illusion?

• When vision is over audition... Ex., visual capture

• Occurs when sound is coming from one place but it seems that it is

coming from another place

• When we watch ventriloquism we perceive the sound

coming from dummy's mouth while in fact it is from the ventriloquist's mouth the movement of the dummy's mouth "captures" the sound

• When hearing influences vision...

• Two-flash illusion

• Occurs when a single flash and two tones are presented at the same time people perceive two flashes

• Sekuler et al. (1997)

• Two identical objects moving diagonally across the screen

• Cross in the middle of the screen

• 88% participants perceived the two objects as moving past each other both move diagonally till the end

What are the three steps of perception, and what occurs at each step?

• 1) Reception of the stimulus (light from the

streetlight reflects off the street sign into Roger's

eye)...data-in phase

• 2) The information on the retina is changed into

electrical signals, transmitted to the brain, and processed

• 3) During processing, various mechanisms work toward creating a conscious perception of the sign

• Most import mechanisms here are top down influences of our knowledge about the world

How does context influence perception?

• Feature integration theory

• Recognition by components

What is the recognition by components theory of object recognition, and what are the critical properties and predictions of the theory?

• In RBC, features are not lines, curves, colours, etc. rather they are three dimensional volumes called geons

different angles (view invariance) because geons contain view invariant properties (try moving a book around in front of your face at different angles)

• At certain angles, however, fewer basic geons are visible leading to difficulties in identification

• Other important properties of geons:

- 1) Discriminability - each geon can be distinguished from other geons at almost all viewpoints

- 2) Resistance to visual noise - can still perceive geons in "noisy" conditions

What is view invariance, and what does it mean for the recognition by components theory?

View invariance are different angles of the same object.

What are the original laws of the Gestalt laws of perceptual organization, and what are the more recently added potential laws?

• First to study of this question (e.g. why do we see a dalmation in the preceding picture as opposed to something else?)

• Major tenet of Gestalt Psychologists: The mind groups patterns according to rules called "the laws of perceptual organization"

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

2) Similarity: similar things are groups together in space (can be grouped based on hue, size, orientation, and luminance)

3) Good continuation: points which, when connected, result in straight or smoothly curving lines, are seen as belonging together, and the lines tend to be seen following the smoothest path

4) Proximity (nearness): things that are near each other tend to be grouped together.

5) Common fate: things that are moving in the same direction tend to be grouped together.

6) familiarity: things are more likely to form groups if the groups appear familiar or meaningful

7) closure: we tend to perceive closed figures rather than incomplete ones.

More recent law: Uniform connectedness: We organize as a single unit those parts of the array that appear to be connected

What is the inverse projection problem?

Why computers can't perceive objects:• 1) The stimulus on the receptors is ambiguous:

Objects seen from one viewpoint result in ambiguous information on the receptors. This is because a particular image on the retina can be caused by an infinite number of different objects

How does occlusion influence perception?

The occlusion heuristic: When a larger object is partially covered by a smaller one, we see the larger one as continuing behind the occluder

What are the two different neural correlates of perception, and what is each stream responsible for?

• The ventral stream handles "what" information: perception

• The dorsal stream handles "where" information: provides info to the motor system for action

What causes the hollow mask illusion and Margaret Thatcher illusion?

• Some people have argued that the Thatcher illusion is evidence that certain parts of the brain are specialized for rightside-up face perception (fusiform face area...but this may be expertise and not face specific)

• A better account though revolves around knowledge/expertise...we are used to perceiving faces holistically, taking the configuration to be the most important information...when faces are upside down, however, our ability to process configuration is disrupted

• Instead, we can only see features, which look normal, but the configural cues are what leads to the rightside-up difference

• Though we perceive the world in a reasonable manner most of the time, knowledge of how things are "supposed" to be perceived can strongly bias how things are perceived (even when this perception is false)

What causes the ball in a box shadow illusion?

• Without a shadow, motion is ambiguous...your visual system can not decide between the two simplest possibilities (moving diagonally across the floor or rising diagonally along the same depth plane)

• Again, context strongly influences perception

What causes color afterimages and motion afterimages?

• Perception is mediated by various cells in the retina which respond to light/colour, etc.

• They are caused by fatigued cells in the retina responding to light. The most interesting color afterimages are negative afterimages. If you stare at the red color for 30 seconds or more, the cells in your retina that respond to red will fatigue and will fire less. When you switch over to a white surface, your eyes subtract the red and you see its complementary color green

• Kind of like pulling a rope that someone else lets go of (opponent process)

Can visual illusions be overcome?

No. The visual system cannot resolve ambiguous information. Usually it does a good job, but not under all circumstances.

How did Ebbinghaus study memory and forgetting?

• first to study memory empirically: Uber das Gedachtnis (1885)

• used technique of learning, allowing time to forget, then relearning

• advantage of relearning over original learning = savings

What is the difference between declarative and non-declarative memory?

Declarative memory: knowing "what"; expressed verbally; conscious awareness; AKA "Explicit memory"

Non-declarative memory: knowing "how"; expressed behaviorally; awareness not necessary; AKA "implicit memory"

What are the three components of memory?

Encoding

-acquisition of info

-formation of representation

-"study phase"

Storage

-maintenance over time

-"retention interval"

Retrieval

-accessing info, using info

-"test phase"

What is the difference between direct and indirect tests of memory?

Direct tests:• subject explicitly asked to recall information from study phase

• typically used to measure declarative (explicit ) memory

• a.k.a. Explicit Tests

• However, performance CAN be influenced by non-declarative (implicit) memory!

indirect tests:• Subject NOT told that memory is being tested

• Typically used to investigate non- declarative (implicit memory)

• a.k.a. Implicit Tests

• However, performance can be influenced by explicit memory!

How do we determine how well people can discriminate between correctly remembered and incorrectly remembered events?

• "Yes" bias vs. ability to discriminate • Hits - False Alarms

What is prospective memory?

• Prospective memory tasks

- subject required to perform action in future - e.g., call lab at specific time

- time based

• e.g., 4:00 p.m. - event based

• e.g., upon awakening in morning

What are serial position effects, and what causes them?

• Primacy: Superior memory for the beginning information in a sequence (LTM)

• Asymptote: Average memory for information in the middle of a sequence

• Recency: Superior memory for the ending information in a sequence (STM)

• This was this week's CogLab...you should have found it easier to remember words early and late in the list relative to words in the middle of the list