Chapter 1: The Science of Cognition Flashcards
Homo Sapiens
Human, the Wise
Aristotle
The mind is in the heart. Brain = cool down body
Cognitive Psychology
The science of how the mind is organized to produce intelligent thought and how the mind is realized in the brain.
What are the three motivations for studying cognitive psychology?
- ) Intellectual Curiosity
- ) Implications for Other Fields
- ) Practical Applications
Artificial Intelligence
A field of computer science that attempts to develop programs that will enable machines to display intelligent behaviour
Ex. IBM’s Watson (Jeopardy)
Ex., DeepMind’s Go
Intelligence
The ability to recall facts, solve problems, reason, learn, and use language.
What was the greatest accomplishment of human intelligence?
Scientific Discovery
Herbert Simon
The methods of scientific discovery could be explained in terms of the basic cognitive processes that we study in cognitive psychology. Great feats of intelligence, are the result of basic cognitive processes.
What is cognitive psychology to the other social sciences?
Their foundation
Empiricism
The philosophical position that posits that all knowledge comes from experience in the world (Aristotle).
Nativism
The position that posits that children come into the world with a great deal of innate knowledge (Plato).
What was applied at the end of the 19th century to explain human cognition?
The scientific method.
What did Wilhelm Wundt do?
Established the first psychology laboratory in Leipzig, Germany.
Wundt’s Psychology
Cognitive psychology
Interspection
A methodology much practices at the turn of the 20th century in germany (by Wundt) that attempted to analyze thought into its components through self-analysis.
Mayer & Orth
Free Association Experiment (Notes Pg 3).
William James
Principles of Psychology (1890)
Mood of American Psychology
Philosophical doctrines of: Pragmatism & Functionalism
- Education sector: Wanted “action-oriented” psychology.
Edward Thorndike
Developed a theory of learning that was directly applicable to classrooms.
What did Edward Thorndike study?
Studied: The effects of reward and punishment on the rate of learning.
What did Edward Thorndike believe?
Conscious experience was just excess baggage that could be largely ignored.
When was the Behaviourist Revolution started?
1920s
Two factors that contributed to the Behaviourist Revolution?
1- The irrelevance of the introspection method.
2- Its apparent contradictions.
John Watson
A Behaviourist.
Behaviourism
The theory that psychology should be concerned only with behaviour and should not refer to mental contructs underlying behaviour.
What does behaviourism claim?
consciousness is neither a definite nor a usable concept.
What was behaviourism’s lasting contribution to Psychology?
A set of sophisticated and rigorous techniques and principles for experimental study in all fields of psychology.
Gestalt Principles
An approach to psychology that emphasizes principles of organization that result in holistic properties of the brain that go beyond the activity of the parts.
Wolfgang Kohler
A Gestalt psychologist who was elected to the presidency of the American Psychological Association
How did Behaviourists hold their “anti-mental” stance for so long?
Because a theory of internal structure makes understanding human beings easier.
Introspectionists believed:
Held a naive belief in the power of self-observation
Behaviourists believed:
afraid of falling prey to subjective fallacies that they refused to let themselves think about mental processes.
When was the cognitive revolution?
1950s-1970s.
Cognitive revolution
Beginning in the 1950s, a broad movement in psychology away from behaviourism and toward the scientific study of cognition.
What are the three main influences behind the shift towards studying cognitive processes?
- Human performance
- Artificial Intelligence.
- Linguistics
Donald Broadbent
(Human Performance): The most influential in integrating ideas from human performance research with new ideas that were developing in an area called information theory.
Information Theory
(Donald Broadbent): An abstract way of analyzing the processing of information.
Allen Newell & Herbert Simon
Educating psychologists on the implications of AI
Linguistics
The study of the structure of language (including the history, structure, acquisition, and use of language).
Noam Chomsky (1950s)
Showed that language was much more complex than had previously been believed and that many of the prevailing behaviourist formulations were incapable of explaining these complexities.
George Miller
Instrumental in bringing these linguistic analyses to the attention of psychologists and in identifying new ways of studying the psychology of language.
What are the milestones of cognitive psychology since the 1950s?
A.) The publication of Ulric Neisser’s Cognitive Psychology text (1967).
B.) The journal Cognitive Psychology (1970)
C.) New field of Cognitive Science.
Cognitive Science field
A field that attempts to integrate research efforts from psychology, philosophy, linguistics, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence.
What is the dominant approach in cognitive psychology?
Information-processing Approach: An analysis of human cognition into a set of steps for processing an abstract entity called “information”
Saul Sternberg (1966)
Created the Sternberg Paradigm. EXPLAIN HIS STUDY (notes pg 6).
Sternberg paradigm
An experimental procedure in which participants are first presented with a memory set consisting of a few items and then must decide whether various probe items are in the memory set.
What are the four limitations of the information-processing approach?
- Information processing discussed without any reference to the brain.
- The processing of information has a highly symbolic character.
- Processing of information is comparable to how computers process information.
- The measurement of time to make a judgment is a critical variable, because the information processing is conceived to be taking place in discrete stages.
Rene Descartes
Dualism
Dualism
A philosophical position that posits that the mind and the body are separate kinds of entities.
Cognitive neuroscience
The study of the neural basis of cognition
Information Processing Viewpoint
Neurons are the most important components of the nervous system.
Neuron
A cell in the nervous system responsible for information processing through electrochemical activity.
How may neurons are in the human brain?
Approx. 100 billion.
Explain the Structure of a Neuron
PG 8.
Soma (cell body)
The main body of the neuron.
What is the typical diameter of the soma
5 - 100 micrometers.
Dendrites
Short branches attached to the soma of a neuron that form synapses with the axon terminal boutons of axons from other neurons.
Axon
A long tube extending from the soma of a neuron and branching into terminal boutons that form synapses with dendrites of other neurons.
Axons provide the fixed paths by which neurons communicate with one another.
Axons can vary in length from a few millimetres to a metre.
What is the measurement of the synaptic cleft?
10-50nm
Synapse
The gap between the terminal bouton of the axon of one neuron and a dendrite of another neuron.
Neurotransmitters
A chemical that crosses the synapse from the axon of one neuron and alters the electric potential of the membrane of another neuron.
Chemical changes on the membrane of the neuron
The inside of the membrane covering the entire neuron tends to be 70 millivolts (mV) more negative than the outside, due to the greater concentration of negative chemical ions inside and positive ions outside.
The existence of a greater concentration of positive sodium ions on the outside of the membrane is particularly important to the functioning of the neuron.
Excitatory synapse
A synapse in which the neurotransmitters released by the terminal bouton of the axon decrease the potential difference across the membrane of the dendrite of the receiving neuron
Inhibitory synapse
A synapse in which the neurotransmitters released by the terminal bouton of the axon increase the potential difference across the membrane of the dendrite of the receiving neuron.
On average, how many synapses are formed between the dendrites of a typical neuron with other neurons?
1,000
*The terminal boutons of a typical neuron ALSO form synapses with about 1,000 other neurons.
Action potential
A sudden change in electric potential that travels down the axon of a neuron.
Explain the process of the Action Potential
o If there is enough net excitatory input, the potential difference in the soma of the receiving neuron can drop sharply, and if the reduction in potential is large enough, a depolarization wil l occur at the axon hillock, where the axon joins the soma.
o This depolarization is caused by a rush of positive sodium ions into the inside of the neuron.
o The inside of the neuron momentarily (for a millisecond) becomes more positive than the outside.
o This sudden change, called an Action Potential (or spike), will propagate down the axon.
o That is, the potential difference will suddenly and momentarily change down the axon.
o The rate at which this change travels can vary from 0.5 to 130 m/s, depending on the characteristics of the axon — such as the degree to which the axon is covered by a myelin sheath (the more myelination, the faster the transmission).
o When the nerve impulse (i.e., the action potential) reaches the end of the axon, it causes neurotransmitters to be released from the terminal boutons, thus continuing the cycle.
o The time required for this neural communication to complete the path from one neuron to another is roughly 10 ms — definitely more than 1 ms and definitely less than 100 ms; the exact speed depends on the characteristics of the neurons involved.
Rate of Firing
The number of action potentials an axon transmits per second. Can vary from a few to upward of 100.
What does it mean when a neuron has a stronger rate of firing?
The greater that neuron will effect the axon will have on the cells with which it synapses.
What is the main function of the spinal cord?
Carry motor messages from the brain to the muscles, and sensory messages from the body to the brain.
Lower Brain
The lower parts of the brain are evolutionarily more primitive.
Upper Brain
The higher portions are well developed only in the higher species.
BE ABLE TO LABEL BRAIN PIECES
PG 11.
Lower brain = ?
Basic functions
Medulla
controls breathing, swallowing, digestion, and heartbeat.
Hypothalamus
: regulates the expression of basic drives.
Cerebellum
: plays an important role in motor coordination and voluntary movement.
Thalamus
serves as a relay station for motor and sensory information from lower areas to the neocortex.
Neocortex
Part of the cerebral cortex, and the most recently evolved portion of the brain; in humans, a highly convoluted neural sheet. It accounts for a large fraction of the human brain.
Cerebral cortex
The outer layer of the brain, consisting mainly of the neocortex but also other, more primitive structures.
Explain the human neocortex
o The human neocortex can be thought of as a rather thin neural sheet with a surface area of about 2,500 cm2.
Gyrus
An outward bulge of the cerebral cortex.
Sulcus
An inward crease between gyri (singular gyrus) of the cerebral cortex.
BE ABLE TO LABEL THE 4 LOBES
PG 12.
Brodmann
Identified 52 distinct regions of the human cortex.
What are the four lobes of the brain?
- ) Occipital
- ) Parietal
- ) Temporal
- ) Frontal
Occipital
The region at the back of the brain that controls vision.
Parietal
The region at the top of the brain concerned with attention and higher-level perceptual functions.
Temporal
The region at the side of the brain that contains the primary auditory areas and controls the recognition of objects.
Frontal
The region at the front of the brain that includes the motor cortex and the prefrontal cortex.
Pre-frontal cortex
The region at the front of the frontal cortex that controls planning and other higher-level cognitive processes.
Limbic System
A particularly significant group of subcortical structures is the limbic system, which is at the border between the cortex and lower structures.
What are the two structures that make up the limbic system?
1- Amygdala
2- Hippocampus
Amygdala
A brain structure that is involved in emotional responses.
Hippocampus
A brain structure that is part of the limbic system and that plays a critical role in the formation of permanent memories. Damage to the hippocampus and to other nearby structures produces severe amnesia.
Is the thalamus a part of the limbic system?
NO!
Basal Ganglia
Subcortical structures that play a critical role in the control of basic motor movement and complex cognition.
What happens to the body when the Basal Ganglia substructure is damaged?
o These structures receive signals from almost all areas of the cortex and send signals to the frontal cortex.
o Disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and Huntington’s disease result from damage to the basal ganglia.
o Although people suffering from these diseases have dramatic motor control deficits characterized by tremors and rigidity, they also have difficulties in cognitive tasks.
What is the purpose of the left hemisphere?
Linguistics & analytic processing.
What is the purpose of the right hemisphere?
Perceptual & Spatial Processing.
Corpus Callosum
A broad band of fibers that connects and enables communication between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Split-Brain patients
Patients who have had surgery to sever the corpus callosum, which connects the left and right hemispheres.
Broca’s Area
A region in the left frontal cortex that is important for processing language, particularly the syntax (grammar) of speech.
People with Broca’s aphasia (i.e., damage to Broca’s area) speak in short, ungrammatical sentences.
• Ex., “Why, yes … Thursday, er, er, er, no, er, Friday … Bar-ba-ra … wife … and, oh, car … drive … purnpike”
Wernicke’s Area
A region of the left temporal lobe that is important for processing language, particularly the semantics (meaning) of speech.
Speak in fairly grammatical sentences that are almost devoid of meaning.
• Ex., “Boy, I’m sweating, I’m awful nervous, you know, once in a while I get caught up, I can’t mention the tarripoi, a month ago, quite a little, I’ve done a lot well.”
Aphasia
An impairment of speech that results from a brain injury.
Topographic Organization
A principle of neural organization in which adjacent areas of the cortex process information from adjacent parts of the sensory field.
