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What is cognition?

• Cognition refers to the mental processes involved in gaining knowledge and comprehension, including thinking, knowing, memory, judgment, and problem-solving.

Importance of Historical Theories

• The theories of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Bacon, and Locke are significant as they laid the foundational framework for understanding the mind and cognition, influencing psychology and philosophical thought throughout history.

Understanding the Mind

• The mind encompasses all cognitive processes and functioning. Studying it involves various methods, including experiments, psychological assessments, and neuroimaging techniques that reveal how mental processes occur and how they can be measured.

Development of Psychology as a Science

• Psychology evolved from philosophical inquiries to scientific inquiry. One of the first scientific experiments in psychology was conducted by Franciscus Donders, who examined reaction times to understand cognitive processes.

Timeline of Paradigm Shifts in Psychology

1. Structuralism - Focus on the structure of mental processes.

2. Functionalism - Emphasizes the purpose of mental processes in adapting to the environment.

3. Gestalt Psychology - Focus on perception and holistic processing rather than individual components.

4. Psychoanalysis - Emphasizes the unconscious mind and its influence on behavior.

5. Behaviorism - Focuses on observable behavior and dismisses mental processes as subjects of study.

6. Cognitive Psychology - Returns to understanding the mind and internal processes.

7. Artificial Intelligence (Al) - Examines how machines can simulate human cognitive processes.

Structure and Function of Neurons

• Neurons Communication: Neurons communicate through electrical impulses and neurotransmitter release at synapses, where the axon of one neuron connects to the dendrites of another.

Phineas Gage Incident

• Phineas Gage: An accident involving a railroad worker, who survived an iron rod piercing his skull, significantly affecting his personality, leading to advances in understanding brain function and localization.

Phrenology and Modern Neuroscience

• Phrenology: The outdated theory suggesting that personality traits could be determined by the shape of the skull. Modern neuroscience has moved toward understanding brain functions through empirical research.

Localization of Function

• Localization of Function: The concept that specific brain areas are responsible for particular functions (e.g., Broca's area for speech production, Wernicke's area for language comprehension).

Parts of the Brain and Their Functions

• Cerebral Cortex: Involved in higher functions like thought and action.

• Cerebellum: Coordinates movement and balance.

• Brain Stem: Controls basic life functions like breathing.

• Limbic System: Involved in emotions and memory.

Contralateral Organization

• Contralateral Organization: Each hemisphere of the brain controls the other side of the body (e.g., the left hemisphere controls the right

Right vs. Left Hemispheres

• Right Hemisphere: Associated with creativity, intuition, and spatial abilities.

• Left Hemisphere: Associated with logical reasoning, language, and analytical tasks.

Divided Brain - Split Brain Patients

• Split Brain Patients: Individuals who have undergone surgery to sever the corpus callosum, leading to insights into the specialization of the two hemispheres.

Techniques to Study the Brain

• EEG (Electroencephalogram): Measures electrical activity and is useful for temporal resolution studies (e.g., sleep studies).

• ERP (Event-Related Potential): A type of EEG that measures brain response to specific stimuli, good for studying cognitive processes.

• MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging): Provides detailed brain structure images, useful for anatomy studies.

• PET (Positron Emission Tomography): Measures brain activity and metabolism, useful for seeing functional processes in real-time.

How Senses Work

• Senses gather information from the environment through specialized sensory receptors that convert stimuli into neural signals.

Visual System Function

• The visual system converts light into neural signals, processes them through multiple brain areas to create visual perception.

What vs Where Pathways

• The What pathway (ventral stream) is involved in identifying objects, while the Where pathway (dorsal stream) is responsible for spatial awareness and movement.

What is Perception?

• Perception is the process of organizing, interpreting, and consciously experiencing sensory information.

Sensation vs. Perception

• Sensation refers to the initial detection of stimuli, while perception involves the interpretation and understanding of those stimuli.

Bottom-up vs Top-down Theories

• Bottom-up theories start with sensory input, building up to perception; Top-down theories rely on prior knowledge and expectations influencing perception.

Template Matching and Feature Detection

• Template matching involves comparing incoming sensory data to stored templates.

• Feature detection (Biederman's recognition by components) identifies basic features like edges and angles to recognize objects.

Gestalt Psychology

• Gestalt psychology emphasizes that the brain organizes sensory input into meaningful wholes by utilizing principles like proximity, similarity, and closure.

Approaches to Object Perception

• Helmholtz's theory of unconscious inference posits that perception is influenced by prior experiences.

• Gestalt principles of organization describe how visual elements are grouped to form coherent images.

Size Illusions and Depth Perception

• Size illusions challenge our perception of object size based on context, while depth perception is the ability to perceive the distance and three-dimensionality of objects.

Regularities in Perception

• Taking regularities into account involves recognizing patterns and predicting future perceptions based on past experiences.

• Bayesian Inference is a statistical approach that combines prior knowledge with current evidence to improve assumptions about the input.

Physical and Semantic Regularities

• Physical regularities are the properties of objects and environments, while semantic regularities relate to the meanings associated with certain objects or scenarios.

Face Recognition and Prosopagnosia

• Prosopagnosia is the inability to recognize faces, often due to damage to the fusiform gyrus.

• The Fusiform Face Area (FFA) is specialized for processing faces, highlighted through studies like the Greeble study that examines recoanition in expert domains.

Intermediate Selection Model: Treisman's Attenuation Model: Suggests that unattended information is not completely filtered out but attenuated.

provides meaning.

• Attenuator → Dictionary Unit: The attenuator allows some information to pass at a lower intensity to a dictionary unit that

• Late Selection Models: McKay (1973): Argues that selection occurs after the perception of information, where context can influence responses even after filtering.

• Divided Attention: The ability to process multiple sources of information simultaneously, though typically results in reduced performance.

• Load Theory of Attention: Suggests that our attention capacity is affected by the perceptual load of a task.

• Processing Capacity: The amount of information we can effectively process at any given time.

• Perceptual Load: High load tasks consume more resources, leaving less capacity for distractions, while low load tasks leave resources available for processing distractions.

• Stroop Effect: A demonstration of the interference in reaction time when the name of a color is printed in a color not denoted by the name (e.g., the word "red" printed in blue ink).

• Inattentional Blindness: The phenomenon where individuals fail to perceive an unexpected stimulus in their visual field when attention is focused elsewhere, exemplified in the Gorilla Experiment.

• Change Blindness: A failure to notice changes in a visual scene, as seen in studies like the door study and with flickering images.

• Controlled vs. Automatic Processing: Refers to the difference in tasks that require conscious attention (controlled) versus those that can be performed with little or no conscious thought (automatic), illustrated in driving studies.

Main Functions of Attention

• Signal Detection Theory: A framework for understanding how we detect signals amidst noise, characterized by:

• Hit: Correctly identifying a signal.

• Correct Rejection: Correctly identifying no signal present.

• Miss: Failing to detect a signal that is present.

• False Alarm: Incorrectly identifying a signal when none is present.

• Vigilance & Fatigue: Prolonged attention can lead to fatigue, reducing performance in tasks requiring sustained vigilance.

• Visual Search:

• Conjunctive Search: Searching for a target defined by multiple features (e.g., a red circle among green squares and red triangles).

• Simple Feature Search: Searching for a target defined by a single feature (e.g., a red item among all green items).

• Distractors: Irrelevant stimuli that can interfere with the task at hand, drawing attention away from the target.

• Selective Attention: The process of focusing on specific stimuli while ignoring others.

• Cherry's Dichotic Listening Task: An experiment demonstrating selective attention, where participants listened to two different messages in each ear and could only recall details from one, emphasizing the ability to filter out irrelevant information.

• Cocktail Party Effect: The phenomenon of being able to focus on a single conversation in a noisy environment, while being able to detect meaningful stimuli (like one's name) in the background.

• Models of Selective Attention:

• Early Selection Model: Broadbent's Filter Model: Proposes that attention acts as a filter early in processing, selecting information based on physical characteristics.

• Sensory Memory → Filter → Detector: Information from the sensory register is filtered, allowing only relevant stimuli to proceed.