Cognitive Psychology Lecture Notes

Cognition & Cognitive Psychology

  • Cognitive Psychology: the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge.
  • Human cognition involves visual, auditory, perception, action, and emotion.
  • Objective Invariance: remaining unchanged regardless of changes in conditions.

Behaviorism

  • The study of observable human behavior through stimulus-response actions.
  • Pavlov: Classical conditioning - learning through association between stimuli.
  • B.F. Skinner: Operant conditioning - learning guided by reinforcement and punishment to increase desired behaviors and reduce undesired ones.

The Mind as a Computer (1960s)

  • Modularity: the mind's organization into specialized & independent regions.
  • Phrenology: measurement of bumps on the head to predict mental traits (outdated).

Perception

  • Visual, auditory, and proprioception for action.
  • Eleanor Jack Gibson: important figure in perception research.

Gestalt Principles

  • Describe how humans naturally organize visual elements.
  • Laws of Perceptual Organization:
    • Good Figure: objects grouped together perceived as a single figure with tendency to simplify.
    • Similarity: similar objects grouped together.
    • Closure: visual connection between elements that don't touch.
    • Proximity: objects close together grouped together.
    • Continuation: intersection perceived as a single uninterrupted object.

Feature Extraction Theories

  • Focus: How information from the environment is processed and represented in cognition.
    • Sensation: detecting stimuli.
    • Perception: giving meaning to sensory information.
  • Marr's Levels of Processing:
    • Stage 1: Raw Primal Sketch (edges, contrasts).
    • Stage 2: Complete Primal Sketch (grouping of surfaces).
    • Stage 3: 2.5D Sketch (incorporate spatial information).
    • Stage 4: Full 3D representation (object-centered).
  • Biederman's RBC: Recognition-by-components - recognizing objects by identifying geons and their spatial relationships.

Template Matching

  • Visual input is compared to stored representations.

Cognitive Psychology Stages

  • Perception: analysis of content.
  • Learning/Memory: encoding information.
  • Retrieval: accessing stored information.
  • Thinking: using information to make decisions.

First Cognitive Psychologists

  • Wilhelm Wundt: set up the first psychology laboratory.
  • Hermann Ebbinghaus: published experimental research on memory.
  • Neisser (1967): connected perceptual input grouped and integrated into whole figures.

Theories

  • Schema: a mental pattern derived from past experiences, used to interpret subsequent cognitions.
  • Top-down processing: using stored knowledge.
  • Bottom-up processing: processing by contained information (automatic processing).

Historical Views

  • Structuralism: Introspection.
  • Behaviorism: observing human behavior.
  • Cognitive Revolution: computers and information processing.
  • Cognitive Neuroscience: using brain imaging techniques (MRI, PET scans).

Sensation & Perception - Part 1

  • Sensation: detecting raw stimuli through sense organs (physiological process).
  • Perception: gives meaning to sensory information (physiological process).

Visual Sensation

  • Fovea: responsible for most cortical processing.
  • Photoreceptors:
    • Rods: low light, gray.
    • Cones: bright light, color.
  • Sensory Input: Light waves.

Two-Stream Hypothesis:

  • Dorsal Stream ("Where"): spatial awareness, motor actions.
  • Ventral Stream ("What"): object identification, memory.

Theories of Perception

  • Gibson's Ecological Theory: Perception is a direct process.
  • Affordances: properties of an object that afford an action.

Influence on Perception

  • Interaction between sensory information and attentional processes.
  • Constructivist Approach: actively construct perception based on knowledge, especially with incomplete sensory information.
  • Perceptual hypothesis/prediction: generating hypotheses about ambiguous sensory information.

Auditory Perception

  • Frequency (Pitch) measured in Hertz (Hz).
  • Amplitude (Loudness) measured in decibels (dB).
  • Timbre: the quality or texture of a sound.

Auditory Streams

  • Dorsal Stream ("Where"): motor action.
  • Ventral Stream ("What"): sound identification, memory.

Proprioception and haptic information

  • The body's ability to sense its position, movement, and orientation without visual input.

Attention

  • Limited resources; attention is like a spotlight.

Basics

  • Fixations: points where we are looking.
  • Saccades: eye movement from one fixation to another.
  • Micro-saccades: prevent neural adaptation.

Selective Model of Attention

  • Broadbent's early selective filter model.
  • Cocktail Party Effect: ability to focus on
    a single conversation in background noise.

Types of Attention

  • Exogenous: involuntary, externally triggered; stimulus-driven.
  • Endogenous: voluntary, internally driven; based on knowledge and goals.

Feature Integration Theory (Treisman)

  • Visual attention binds features together to form coherent objects.
  • Pop-out effect: Distinct targets capture attention automatically.
  • Conjunction search: Requires combining multiple features.

Additional Notes

  • Change Blindness: difficulty noticing changes when attention is diverted. This helps maintain a stable visual world.
  • Attention allocation: directing attention to specific regions.
  • Conjunction can be achieved through top-down influences.