Chapter 1 Flashcards
1. Define cognition and cognitive psycholog 2. Appreciate the philosophical origins of cognitive psychology 3. Understand that cognitive psychology has multiple precursors 4. Understand how error rates and reaction times can be used to infer things about behavior 5. Understand how association and dissociation logic is used in cognitive neuropsychology.
What is cognition?
set of all mental abilities and processes related to knowledge
Cognitive Psychology
An approach that aims to understand human cognition by the study of behaviour
What did greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato try to understand?
how humans interact with their
environment
Introspection
examination of one’s own conscious thoughts and feelings
Problems with introspection
way we introspect things may not be
the way that they are
McGurk Effect
What we see overrides what we hear.
E.g ‘bah’ = ‘fah’ when we see the f sound being produced
Why does the McGurk effect occur?
The brain is making sense of conflicting information
Mental chronometry
use of response time in perceptual-motor tasks to infer the content, duration, and temporal sequencing of cognitive operations
Association
connection between conceptual entities or mental states that results from the similarity between those states or their proximity in space or time
Dissociation
demonstrating that a lesion to brain structure A disrupts function X but not function Y
to identify neural substrates of a brain function
Double Dissociation
two experimental manipulations each have different effects on two dependent variables; if one manipulation affects the first variable and not the second, the other manipulation affects the second variable and not the first.
