approaches to human cognition

Question 1

what is social cognition?

Answer 1

focuses on the role of cognitive processes in influencing individuals’ behaviour in social situations. It is studied through the field of cognitive psychology which aims to understand human cognition by observing human behaviour when completing a series of cognitive tasks.

Question 2

what is cognitive psychology?

Answer 2

concerned with the internal processes used in making sense of the environment and deciding on appropriate action- attention, perception, learning, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, thinking.

Question 3

what is the cognitive reflection test (Frederick, 2005)?

Answer 3

People will rapidly produce incorrect answers that are easily accessible and are unwilling to devote extra time to checking that they have the right answer.
When producing an incorrect answer, most people have a feeling of error: experience cognitive uneasiness.

Question 4

Differences between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology:

Answer 4

Cognitive neuroscience: should study both the brain and our behaviour while people engage in cognitive tasks.
Cognitive psychology: only asses the brain when taking part in cognitive tasks (internal mental processes).

Question 5

what are the 4 approaches to human cognition?

Answer 5

Cognitive psychology= behavioural evidence used to enhance our understanding of human cognition.
Cognitive neuropsychology= studying brain-damaged patients to understand normal human cognition.
Cognitive neuroscience= behaviour and brain used to understand human cognition.
Computational cognitive science= developing computational models to further our understanding of human cognition.

Question 6

what are the different levels of processing in cognitive psychology?

Answer 6

Bottom-up (directly affected by the stimulus)
Top-down (affected by our pre-existing knowledge and expectations)
Serial processing (only one process occurs at one time)
Parallel processing (more than one process occurs at one time)
Cascade processing (form of parallel processing, overlap of different processing stages)

Question 7

what are task impurity problems?

Answer 7

Most tasks involve more than one cognitive process meaning it is hard to interpret the findings to one single process. E.g.:
○ Stroop task
○ The anti-cascade task
The stop-signal task

Question 8

what are the strengths of cognitive psychology?

Answer 8

able to understand the implications of cognitive impairment and use the findings to relate it to healthy individuals.
Predominant influence on the development of cognitive tasks.
Where the majority of theories within psychology originate.

Question 9

what are the weaknesses of cognitive psychology?

Answer 9

Lacks ecological validity when in a laboratory setting
Theories are often expressed in only verbal terms, hard to make predictions to falsify them.
Difficult falsifying theories led to proliferation of theories across a range of topics.
Findings are sometimes specific to a certain paradigm that they cant be generalised.
Evidence is often indirect.

Question 10

what are the theoretical assumptions of cognitive neuropsychology?

Answer 10

1. Modularity= cognitive systems consist of processes that exist mostly independently of each other (they exhibit domain specificity- only respond to a specific stimuli).
2. Anatomical modularity= each module is located in a specific brain area- strong evidence of this when using visual processing systems.
3. Universality assumption= individuals share similar/equivalent organisations of their cognitive functions, have same underlying brin anatomy.
   ○ Dutfau (2017) cortical level disagrees with the universality assumption (high variability across individuals in structure and function of brain areas) and the subcortical level agrees with the assumption (little variability across individuals in the structure and function of brain areas).
4. Subtractivity= brain-damage does not add or take away anything bur rather changes the processing modules.
5. Transparency= performance of the brain-damaged patient reflects the operation of a theory designed to explain the performance of healthy individual minus the impact of their lesson.

Question 11

what is research is cognitive neuropsychology?

Answer 11

The search for dissociation which occur when a patient has normal performance in one task but is impaired in another task.
Double dissociation= when one individual performs normally on one task but is impaired in another but another patient shows the exact opposite response.
Association= when the same response on a task is found in a patient- usually an indicator of a syndrome, a level of consistency is found.

Question 12

single case studies vs case series studies:

Answer 12

• Single-case studies used in 1970s
  gained access to only one patient having a given pattern of cognitive impairment.
  Assumed every patient has a different pattern of cognitive impairment and is unique.
• Case-series studies have been recently used
  Provides much richer data because we can asses the extent of variation between patients rather than being concerned with the impairment.
  Identify the findings from patients who are outliers.

Question 13

what are the strengths of cognitive neuropsychology?

Answer 13

• Can draw casual inferences about the relationship between brain areas, cognitive processes and behaviour.
• Can falsify plausible theories.
• Produces a large magnitude phenomenon which can be initially theoretically highly counterintuitive.
• Can be combined with cognitive neuroscience.

Question 14

what are the weaknesses of cognitive neuropsychology?

Answer 14

• To strong to say that the cognitive system is fundamentally modular.
• Theoretical assumptions are too strong.
• Specific processes cannot be used to compensate for general processes.
• Lesions can alter the brain in several ways and there has been dramatic evidence to prove this.

Question 15

what did Bullmore and Sporns (2012) state in relation to brain organisation?

Answer 15

information about the connectome to address issues about brain organisation.
- Principle of cost control: costs minimised if the brain consisted of limited, short-distanced connections
- Principle of efficiency: having numerous connections which are of long-distances.

Question 16

what did collins et al (2014) discuss about brain hubs?

Answer 16

brain hubs are strongly interconnected and used in terms of “rich club” which shows connections between non-rich club nodes (local connections), rich club nodes and non-rich club nodes (feeder connections).

Question 17

what are the major techniques used to study the brain?

Answer 17

1. Single- unit recording= invasive technique for studying brain function permitting the study of activity in a single neurone.
2. ERPs= the pattern of EEG activity obtained by averaging the brain responses to the same/very similar responses.
3. PET= brain scanning technique based on the detection of positrons, has good spatial resolution but poor temporal resolution.
4. fMRI= based on imaging blood oxygenation using an MRI machine to provide information about the location and time course of brain processing.
   ○ BOLD= blood-oxygenated-level-dependent contrast.
5. efMRI= form of fMRI in which patterns of brain activity associated with specific events are compared.
6. MEG= non-invasive brain scanning technique recording magnetic fields generated by brain activity, good spatial and temporal resolution.
7. tDCS= weak electrical current passed through brain area for a period of time, from an anode to a cathode.
8. EEG= recording the brains activity through a series of scalp electrodes.

Question 18

what are the strengths of cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 18

• Helped to resolve controversies and issues that had proved intractable with purely behavioural studies.
  
  • Richness of neuroimaging data means cognitive neuroscientists can mimic the complicities of brain functioning.
  • fMRI studies are often published meaning meta-analyses can understand the brain-cognition relationship.
  • Neuroimaging data can be re-analysed based on theoretical developments.
  • Shows the assumption of functional specialisation is oversimplified.

Question 19

what are the weaknesses of cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 19

• Many cognitive neuroscientists over-interpret their findings but assume 1:1 links between cognitive processes and brain areas.
  
  • Rarely used to test cognitive theory.
  • Hard to ridge the divide between psychological processes and concepts and patterns of brain activation.
  • Hard to replicate the findings.
  • False-positive findings are common.
  • Most brain-imaging techniques only provide associations between patterns of behaviour and brain regions.
  • Previously assumed that most brain activity is driven by environmental or task demand but this is not the case.
  • Lacks ecological validity.
    
    • Must avoid neuro-enhancement (Ail et al, 2014) exaggerating the importance of neuro-imaging to understand our cognition.

Question 20

what are the strengths of connectionism?

Answer 20

• Provides valuable insight into human cognition and ate increasingly sophisticated.
  
  • Robust flexibility
  • Can perform numerous different kinds of cognitive tasks.
    Similarities between the brain and numerous neurones and synaptic connections, neural networks and their connections.

Question 21

what are the weaknesses of connectionism?

Answer 21

• Issue with the common assumption that connectionist models are distributed
  
  • Hard to develop neural networks that can learn general rules.
  • Analogy between neural pathways and the brain is very limited.
    Back-propagation implies learning will be slow but humans sometimes exhibit one-trial learning, little evidence to support back-propagation in the brain.

Question 22

what at the the production system characteristics?

Answer 22

• Multiple IF and THEN rules
  
  • A working memory containing information
  • A production system that operates buy matching the contents of working memory against the IF parts of the rule and executing the THEN parts
    If information in working memory matched the IF parts of two rules, a conflict-resolution strategy selects one.

Question 23

what are ACT-R modules of importance?

Answer 23

• Assumes the cognitive system consists of several modules.
  
  1. Retrieval module: maintains retrieval cues needed to access information.
  2. Imaginal module: transforms problem representations to assist in problem solving.
  3. Goal module: tracks individual’s intentions and controls information processing.
     Procedural module: uses production rules to determine what action will be taken next.

Question 24

what are the strengths of the computational cognitive science?

Answer 24

• Development of cognitive architectures can provide an overarching framework for understanding the cognitive system.
  
  • Its scope has increased- can be applied to functional neuroimaging data.
  • Rigorous thinking is required so must be detailed
    Progress is made by using nested incremental modelling.

Question 25

what are the weaknesses of computational cognitive science?

Answer 25

• Bonini’s paradox: as models become more complete, they are harder to understand because they are too complex.
  
  • Hard to falsify.
  • Some models are less successful than they appear.
  • Most models ignore motivational and emotional factors.
  • Hard to understand due to their complex nature.
    Often fail to share source codes and models because they have perceived ownership over their own research.