Cognitive Processes Flashcards
How do behaviourists view psychology?
Psychology, as the behaviorist views it, is purely objective and needs little introspection.
It granted that the behaviour of animals can be investigated without appeal to consciousness - didn’t speculate what was going on inside the brain
Radical behaviourists believe there is no such thing as free will - all behaviours of our response to punishments or rewards.
What are the limitations of behaviourism?
Behaviourism cannot explain language using S-R Relationships as people are not rewarded or punished everytime they speak.
Also cannot explain individual differences in human learning, variation in learning styles and the influence of personality on learning, as it defines reflexes strictly as physiological interactions. The neurological functionality of reflexes is constrained to a given brain organisation and excludes higher brain functions.
What was Tolman’s perspective on internal mental representations using rat maze experiments?
Behaviorists believed that the maze behaviour of rats is a matter of stimulus-response connections with no cognition involved.
Tolman (1948) proposed that animals build an internal representation (cognitive map) of their environment and this map allows them to perform space-dependent tasks such as navigation, finding shortcuts and remembering locations of food.
How did Tolman theorise about internal representation in rats?
Group I: control - run in maze once per day and found food in the goal box
Group II: experimental - not fed at all while in the maze for 7 days, then rewarded in maze from then on
Group III: experimental - not fed at all while in maze for 3 days, then rewarded in maze from then on
Measuring the error score - time taken to get to the end of the maze.
For a behaviourist, if you aren’t rewarded, you aren’t going to do anything - so they would think the learning curve only starts when food is introduced.
But this is not what happens - the fact the line is so steep means it probably isn’t a learning curve - they were learning spatial relations and the map beforehand.
Why do most cognitive experiments measure reaction time?
As the discovery of mental chronometry found that with really accurate timing, we could infer how long a process could take.
What is the subtraction method in cognitive psychology?
Subtraction method was an early attempt that was deeply flawed - the task is changed too much
- Simple reaction time: press button to any light
- Choice reaction time: press one button to red light and another button to green light
Choice RT-Simple RT = estimate of stimulus evaluation time
What is the additive factors method in cognitive psychology?
The approach of the additive factors method is to manipulate the task in a way that a complete stage is not deleted but rather is simply affected (lengthened or shortened) by the manipulation.
All of the experiments that test this method use a binary or two choice paradigm where the subject chooses one of two responses in response to a stimulus
What are memory scanning experiments?
In this experiment, subjects are given a short list of items (no more than 5 or 6) such as letters or numbers to memorize.
After the memory set is presented, a trial begins with the presentation of a probe
If the probe is from the positive set the subject responds with YES
If from the negative set the subject responds with NO
The question of interest is how the subject accesses items in short-term memory to make the yes/no decision
Differences between fields like artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology
Cognitive Computing focuses on mimicking human behavior and reasoning to solve complex problems, trying to replicate how humans would solve problems. AI seeks to create new ways to solve problems that can potentially be better than humans.
Differences between a parallel and serial memory search in the stimulus encoding stage
5 is the probe
These are three ways we might do it:
- Parallel self-terminating search: we get all 4 numbers coming at us at once, so we can find 5 instantly
Search slope for positive is parallel as it doesn’t depend on how many items there are.
- Serial self-terminating search: have increasing slopes
If bigger set size, we need to search through more - Serial exhaustive search: Doesn’t stop when you find the probe
Humans use a serial exhaustive search
Why do cognitive psychologists not rely on introspection as a methodology?
Introspection: looking inward to examine one’s own thoughts and emotions
- Different observers often provide different responses to the same stimuli - inconsistency
- Technique difficult to use with children and impossible for animals
- Limited in its use: subjects such as learning, personality and development are difficult to study with this technique
Consciousness: is limited and cannot be quantified
Cognitive biases: been very well studied - we are very poor subjective observers
- The way you remember an even may be biased
- People tend to be selective about what they pay attention to
What is prospect theory?
It maps out how losses are more valuable than gains.
A given amount of gain yields less extra satisfaction than the decline in satisfaction incurred from a similar value of total loss.
What is the pseudocertainty effect?
Refers to people’s tendency to make risk-averse choices if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to avoid negative outcomes.
Why is attention limited and how can it be tested?
Attentional resources: we have a pool of resources and if we are paying attention to one thing, all our resources go to the one task
If doing two things at once, then pool of resources has to be divided - humans are good at this
A way to test this is through the Selective Attention Test: subjects are asked to focus on the men in white shirts passing a ball and count the number of times it is thrown. Most fail to notice a person in a gorilla suit who appears in the center of the image.
Real life scenarios are such as, focusing on a conversation in a busy room and blocking out other conversation and walking along a street on your phone.
What is focused attention, divided attention, inattentional blindness and change blindness?
Focused attention - the brain’s ability to concentrate its attention on a target stimulus for any period of time
Example: Selective Attention Tests
Diffused attention - a type of attention that is spread out over large areas of space
More likely to notice things that are out of place
Useful for scanning the area for predators and threat
Inattentional blindness - the failure to notice a fully-visible but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task
Example: distracted driving
Change blindness - occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by the observer
Often fail to notice major differences introduced into an image while it flickers on and off
What is the locus of selection?
Locus of Selection - a point at which some things are selected and processed more and things that haven’t been selected are discarded and not processed further
The locus of selection is flexible, where attention operates at an early stage in some experimental paradigms and at a late stage in others
Early locus of selection: suggests that what you are paying attention to is chosen based on physical characteristics before the meaning is processed
Late locus of selection: implies that everything is processed quite far along to the point of meaning and you are making your intentional selection based on what something means
What is an example of early or late locus of selection?
Dichotic listening task: the listener hears two messages and is asked to repeat one of them
Evidence for early locus of selection: they’ve only selected one ear so in the other they can only tell you that it was voices, female or male i.e. physical characteristics
Late locus of selection: the two messages “switch ears” at a point - you’re processing the meaning of something you’re not attending to
What is endogenous and exogenous control?
In endogenous control, attention is directed toward the stimulus voluntarily, usually by interpreting a cue that directs one to the target - being asked to ‘spot the odd one out.’ It is voluntary and controlled.
In exogenous control, attention is automatically drawn to a stimulus. It is involuntary and stimulus driven.
What is Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory?
Treisman’s (1986) Feature Integration Theory proposes that we process features independently in a preattentive manner (doing this very quickly and in parallel), and the role of attention was to bind these features together into objects (a slow and serial process).
- The pre-attention phase is an automatic process that happens unconsciously
- The second stage is focused attention where an individual takes all of the observed features and combines them
What is the visual search evidence supporting FIT?
Visual search is a type of task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the environment for a particular object or feature (target) among other features (distractors) Two types of attention e.g. where’s wally puzzle
What is echoic and iconic memory?
Echoic memory deals with auditory information, holding information for up to 8 seconds.
- Short-term sensory memory
- When we are listening to the radio, we cannot hear the exact word or phrase once the time has passed
Iconic memory deals with visual information, holding information for less than a second.
- Short term visual memories
- While watching a scary movie, all of a sudden an image flashes across the screen of a frightening girl. The audience stores the image as iconic memories.
What is short term memory?
Short-term memory is the capacity for holding a small amount of information in an active, readily available state for a brief period of time.
Capacity, duration and format of short term and long term memory?
STM
Capacity: Limited 7+-2
Rate of forgetting: Decays within 20 secs if not rehearsed
Type of code: Phonological
LTM
Capacity: Unlimited
Rate of Forgetting: forgetting due to interference rather than decay
Type of code: Semantic
What are the limits of short-term memory?
Short term memory acts as a scratchpad for temporary recall of information but decays rapidly and has a limited capacity.
The ability to recall words in order depends on a number of characteristics:
- Fewer words can be recalled when they have longer spoken duration
- Or when their speech sounds are similar to each other
- More words can be recalled when the words are highly familiar or occur frequently in the language
How can the limitations of short term memory be worked around?
Chunking of information can lead to an increase in short term memory capacity - the splitting of information into smaller pieces to make reading and understanding faster and easier.
e.g. it’s easier to remember a hyphenated phone number than a single long number because it is broken into three chunks instead of existing as tn digits.
What are the primacy and recency effects?
The Primacy/Recency Effect is the observation that information presented at the beginning (primacy) and end (recency) of a learning episode tends to be retained better than information presented in the middle.
- Primacy = information transferred to LTM
- Recency = information ‘dumped’ from short-term buffer
Evidence for the primacy and recency effects
Psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus created the term ‘serial position effect’ and conducted experiments in which he measured his own and others’ capacity for remembering lists.
The ‘serial position effect’ refers to the finding that, on list-learning tasks, the probability of retrieving an item is dependent on the item’s position in the study list.
