Chapter Three Flashcards
Helmholtz’s Sign Theory
His general assumption was that:
- there is no simple resemblance between the neural events that give rise to sensations and physical objects in the world.
Similarities between Descartes’ Theory of perception and Helmholtz’s Sign theory
Descartes - If words can cause us to conceive of things to which they bear no resemblance, why wouldn’t nature have established a sign that would cause us to see things that may not be related to sensation.
Helmholtz - No resemblance between neural events and sensations / physical objects in the world.
Donder’s subtractive method
Assign a number of tasks in such a way that each task adds a dif- ferent processing stage which can then by isolated by subtract- ing the average RT of one task from another.
Simple RT Task
One response to one stimulus.
Choice Reaction Time Task
You must identify which shape (triangle or circle) has been presented, and you must se- lect which key (left or right) to depress. A choice reaction task therefore requires the mental operations of stimulus identifica- tion and response selection as well as response execution.
Go/Nogo
involves stimulus identification, and response execution, according to Donders, but no response selection.
Four Processing stages
Stimulus Detection, Stimulus Identification, Response selection, Response extinction.
Cascade Processes
The implementation of later stages of information processing before the completion of earlier stages. For example, in retrieving the meaning.
Assumption of Pure insertion
A stage can be added or omitted to a sequence of proc- esses without altering the duration of the other processing stages.
Why would a false positive require rejection of the whole series?
It would require the rejection of the whole series because the participant may have changed the amount of time he or she allows before responding to the target in the go/nogo task, triggering on some trials very fast anticipatory responses before the stage of identification has been completed.
Feed Forward
Information flows in just one direction.
letter processing => words.
Feed Back
Information can flow forwards and backwards.
Word superiority effect
refers to the phenomenon that people have better recognition of letters presented within words vs. letters presented in nonword.
What do we mean when saying that letters or stages are processed “in parallel”?
means that several processing modules (in this case, the letter and word-level component) operate at the same time rather than in sequence to produce a response.
Logic of subtraction methodology
processes are sequential so that the output of one stage acts as input to the next and (ii) only one process is active at a time.
