1. Introduction Flashcards
what is cognition?
contrasts with
- personality: behavioural and internal dispositions
- neurology: low-level activity of cells
- sociality: interacting with others
- abnormal: atypical behaviour
in general, cognition means to think; understand, reason, pay attention, know, experience (e.g. see, smell, taste)
basic cognition
- stable set of context - independent cognitive operations
- consists of attention, working memory, long-term memory, categorization, judgement and decision-making. language
- we ignore the social context
- information processing
comparative cognition
- stable set of context - independent cognitive operations
- shared with non-human animals
- assumed functional equivalence - all about functionality (e.g. attentional networks might differ, BUT they perform the same role in cognitive operations of multiple species
- also referred to as cognitive ethology
situated cognition
- context-dependent operations that are readily influenced by situational factors
- social psychology labels can be deceptive
distributed cognition
- cognitive operations performed by multilpe individuals or people/objects, separated by time and space
- e.g. teams in the workplace, assistance from a computer on a given task
- organizations want to know how to make better decisions
Broodbent’s filter model
theory based on idea that information processing is restricted by channel capacity (max amount of info that can be transmitted by an information processing device)
boundary areas of cognition: cognitive anthropology
- how cognition differ from one culture to the next
- what categories do we share
- what do artifacts tell us about cognition
boundary areas of cognition: cognitive archeology
- records might allow us to infer when cognitive capacities/processes developed over the course of our evolution
- when did language emerge in the homosapien?
boundary areas of cognition: historimetric
- historical info including biographies/publication records as primary or supplementary sources to support models of cognition
- what makes genius?
endocast
see how the brain has changed over time - neocortex
philosophy
- emphasized importance of the mind
- differed in terms of whether mind was something separate from body, the extent to which the mind was active and whether we have complete awareness
- it is speculative, it cannot be tested
- “you don’t see the world as it truly is, only approximations”
- main difference: psych has experiments, philo does not
physiology
- human and animal bodies can be used to examine the role that parts play in the whole
- psych emerges as a result of people examining the nature of neural communications
early physiological insights
- nerves carry signals and transmission tajes a finite amount of time
- functions can be localized and distributed
- not all signals are at the level of awareness - unconscious processing
experimental evidence required a method to test the relationship between awareness and objective physical events
we can now see when people have sensations that turn into perceptions
psychophysics
- bridge between physical phenomena and mental events
- subjective in nature
- based on self-reports to quantify operations of a sensory transduction process
- interested in identifying a difference threshold
JND - Just Noticeable Difference
- difference threshold
- point at which stimuli was perceived to change
introspection
- father = Wilhelm Wundt
- observing one’s own A + C as they seem to oneself - our perceptions
- intuitive appeal - we seem to have some insight into cognitive processes
- judgement needs to be simple, done quickly to decrease bias and attention deficits, as they are done over and over again to decrease variability
appearance vs reality
- we experience the world indirectly
- light switch example (refer to page ___ of notebook)
- we experience discrete, step like changes
problems with introspection
- requires that we know and how we know it
- most mental processes are not cognitively penetrable
- conscious reflection
conscious reflection
- arises when something is novel
- driving the same road does not require the same amount of cognitive processing as driving to a new city
- for language comprehension, we are not consciously thinking - we come up with probabilities of what the person means
tropism
- part of behaviourism
- set of automatic responses made by planets, insects, and some animals
- no inner mental state (will or consciousness) is required to produce a response
- behaviourism suggests this is the best way to study the mind
the Behaviourist black box
- for the behaviourist, the mind’s content is UNIMPORTANT
- don’t care about memory, attention, etc.
- refer to notebook page ____
tools of behaviourism
classical conditioning
- mapping unconditioned stimulys and response together
operant conditioning
- reinforcement of a voluntary B to obtain an SR mapping
experiemtns typically consist of using a subject, material and something to reinforce association
- e.g. Watson and Little Albert
later behaviourism
- problems were noted in SR approach
- behaviourists began allowing chains of SR associations
- e.g. see a book (stimulus) - activates memory of books being poorly written (response/stimulus) - activates memory of sleeping (response/stimulus) - become tired (response)
(Re)birth of cognition
- around the mid-50s (post-war)
- foundations
- brought together neo-behaviourist notion of intervening stimuli and responses and the desire to understand the internal workings of the mind
1. philosophy - categories vs. syntax
2. physiology and psychophysics - objective - subjective relationship
3. behaviourism - associations and associative learning
4. information theory - channel capacity
5. (behavioural) economics - rational choice theory
