cognitive psychology 1 Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
The scientific study (which includes controlled experiments) of mental processes.
What is cognitive psychology also referred to as?
The information-processing approach. This is because of the analogy between the mind and a computer.
How does the mind/computer analogy work?
It assumes that the brain processes information from the environment in a similar matter as a digital computer. The hardware is the physical system (nervous system), the software are the mental processes (memory, attention, perception), and the mind and behaviour is information processing.
What is representational account?
Internal representations of external objects.
What is indirect realism (representationalism)?
The idea that we access external reality via representations.
What are propositional representations?
They are ‘token’ mental representations with semantic properties - they are tokens with meaning.
What do Shannon and Weaver, (1949) define information as?
The amount of entropy/disorder in a system. Information is the amount of surprise and it is a mathematical system which involves predictive probability in the system.
What do cognitive processes aim to do?
They aim to process this surprise and filter out any noise.
How is environmental information processed?
It is processed by several different processing systems (known as modularity) such as visual, auditory, memory, attention etc.
What is cognitive psychology interested in?
How and what information is processed, systems involved, types of errors made, speed and capacity limit, amount of control we have, and implications.
What approaches came before the cognitive approach?
Structuralist approach and Behaviourism
Approximately when was the cognitive revolution?
Around the 1950s, although there were things happening before that.
What is included in information flow 1?
Bottom-up and top-down.
What is bottom-up?
It is data-driven and begins with an analysis of the sensory input - for example, light on the retina - and perception is built on upon low level information.
What is top-down?
It is concept driven and includes high level cognitive influences; knowledge and experience influence our perceptions of the world
What is included in information flow 2?
Serial and parallel.
What is the experimental cognition approach?
It is very common. An experimenter controls the variables in an attempt to study only one other variable/system. Structures are deduced indirectly as a result of measurements of accuracy.
What is the cognitive neuropsychology approach?
It uses experiments/tests on samples of patients, and can sometimes compare them with a control group. It assumes the “modularity of mind” by Fodor, (1983) and works by deducing how systems work based on abnormalities and injuries to the brain.
What is the cognitive neuroscience approach?
It uses brain imaging techniques, such as EEG, PET, fMRI, and TMS.
What is sensation?
The physical stimulation of the sensory system (pressure on skin, light in the retina etc.).
What is perception?
The mind’s capability to refer sensory information to an external object and its cause. In other words, it is the experimental (consciousness) component (5 classic senses) of sensation.
What is consciousness?
The state of awareness of our own existence, sensations, thoughts, and surroundings. Its state is the opposite to unconsciousness.
Where are the primary receptors for the 5 classic senses?
- Eye: light receptive ganglion cells in the retina.
- Ear: timpanic membrane (eardrum), organ of corti, and hair cells in the ear.
- Skin: various mechanoreceptors.
- Tongue: taste buds in the papillae.
- Nose: cilia in the mucus layer of the epithelium which are situated at the top of the nose and back of the throat.
What areas in the brain are involved in the 5 classic senses?
- Vision: primary visual cortex.
- Hearing: primary auditory cortex.
- Touch: primary sensory cortex.
- Taste: amygdala and hypothalamus.
- Smell: pituitary gland.
Why does vision so many pathways and locations? And how does sensory information convert into other actions/perceptions?
Sight is the dominant sense in humans. Sensory information is captured, converted to electrical energy, carried along multiple pathways and processed in those locations for different purposes.
What is the ventral stream used for in vision?
Vision for perception.
What is the dorsal stream used for in vision?
Vision for action.
What proof is there that proves that perception is not accurate?
Optical illusions, the ventriloquist effect, and the McGurk effect. Perception is adequate, and we don’t sense or process everything we sense, nor do we always process explicit/conscious things.
What is the difference between consciousness level and content (according to Bor & Seth, 2012)?
Consciousness level is the scale of awareness from zero contents to fully aware, while consciousness content is moment to moment here and now experience.
What are the different levels of consciousness content experience (according to Baumeister & Masicampo, 2012)?
Low-level is basic here and now awareness that all animals have. High-level involves reasoning, self-reflecting, and future goals - only humans have this.
What is the easy/soft problem of consciousness?
Where does it come from? It comes from brain activity for stimuli processed.
What is the hard problem of consciousness?
How, where, and why?How does brain activity actually become conscious awareness and where does the experience come from?
How is consciousness measured objectively and subjectively?
- Subjectively is an individual’s own report and points at which individuals can/cannot report awareness of a stimulus.
- Objectively is an observer’s report which points at which individuals can/cannot make accurate forced decisions about a stimulus, or adjust a stimulus.
What is the binding problem?
If incoming information is extracted and broken down to be processed in many locations, how is it put back together?
What is precise synchrony?
Using the timing of a single cell firing to timestamp information. It is computationally expensive though.
What is general synchrony?
It is the general pattern of cells firing used to bind. It is not as detailed as precise synchrony, though.
What are the possible explanations for why we are conscious?
- Perceptual: perceiving our environment might help us better interact with it (or not).
- Action control: we have free well, control, and agency (probably not).
- Social communication: understanding and interacting with others (ToM), but what about other animals?
- Information integration: organised “information”, reflecting on our own experience, and allowing us to integrate experiences as we have them (but we don’t know why).
What is bottom-up attention?
Alertness or arousal - including reflexive attention, like towards a light source.
What is top-down attention?
Selective attention - we choose whether to react to something or not.
How can the eye be compared to a camera?
The brain and optic nerve are the processors, the retina is the film, and the lens, ciliary muscles, and cornea are optics.
What effect does acuity have in the eye?
Acuity is the highest in the centre of the retina and as something appears further from it, acuity drops a lot. Despite this, we perceive a world that is sharp in focus, probably because of our brain filling in blind spots and using frequent eye movements.
Why does saccadic suppression happen?
it happens to suppress motion blur between saccades so we see a stable world. Our vision stops temporarily.
How long could we be “blind” for due to saccadic suppression?
50ms x 4 x 60 x 60 x 16 = 192 minutes (over 3 hours) a day.
What is overt attention?
The focus of attention is what the fovea is looking at. Both attended information (everything in/around the fovea) and unattended information (everywhere else) are involved in this.
What is covert attention?
Looking at an object without moving the eyes towards the object to pay attention to it.
How quick are overt and covert attention?
Overt attention is around 3-4 saccades per second (1 every 300ms); covert attention takes around 50ms to shift.
What does voluntary orientation lead to
Faster reaction times.
What are the primary themes which characterise attention?
- Capacity limitation: our limited ability to carry out various mental operations at the same time requires a way to prioritise information.
- Perceptual gating (selection): conscious perception is always selective, but selection isn’t always conscious.
What is selective/focused attention?
The ability to selectively attend to certain stimuli in our environment while ignoring others. It is present for when 2 or more stimuli are present, and there are instructions to respond to only one.
What is divided attention/multitasking?
The ability to carry out several tasks at once. It is present for when 2 or more stimuli are present, and there are instructions to respond to all of them.
What is the vision attentional modality?
There is a limit on how much we can take in visually, since things in the environment are placed in different spacial locations.
What is the auditory attentional modality?
Stream of sounds from different locations.
What is an example of focused/selective attention?
Cherry’s Cocktail Party Effect (1953), which pointed out that we are able to follow one conversation in a crowded room where several more people are talking.
What is attenuation?
Sometimes, unattended things are still processed, which can occur depending on task demands. On occasion this means that unattended items bleed into the filter as they’re processed enough to become part of our conscious awareness.
What is the attentional competing hypothesis?
- Early selection: physical characteristics of messages are used to select one message for further processing and all others are lost (Broadbent, 1958).
- Attenuation: physical characteristics are used to select one message for full processing and other messages are given partial processing (Treisman, 1964).
- Late selection: all the messages get through, but only one response can be created (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963).
What is inattentional blindness?
What we do not attend to, and what we are not aware of.
What is memory defined as?
The faculty by which the mind stores and remembers information.
What are the memory processes?
- Encoding: transforming information into a form that can be entered and retained in te memory system.
- Storage: retaining information in the memory so that is can be used at a later time.
- Retrieval: recovering information stored in memory so that we are consciously aware of it.
How does the multi-store model by Atkinson and Shriffin, (1971) work?
Environmental stimuli > Sensory memory (SM) > Attention > Short-term memory (STM) ^ Maintenance rehearsal > Elaborative rehearsal < Retrieval > Long-term memory (LTM).
- i tried my best with this looool bc i can’t use pics, google it atp
What is iconic memory for?
Visual information.
What is echoic memory for?
Auditory information.
What did Sperling’s (1960) experiment 1 reveal about iconic memory?
It either has a limited capacity or the information decays rapidly.
What did Sperling’s (1960) experiment 2 reveal about iconic memory?
Participants could typically name all letters from any row,therefore suggesting that all 12 letters are initially available, and the information ends up decaying.
What are key characteristics of iconic memory?
Rapidly decays, ability to selectively report visual properties but not report category information, and information must be transferred from the sensory store to the short-term store before it becomes available to us.
What are the comparisons in decay for iconic and echoic memory?
Iconic memory decay happens within a second, while echoic memory takes a few seconds.
What is the approximate amount of items/chunks that our STM can hold (according to Miller, 1956)?
7 ± 2 items/chunks. However, chunk size can depend on information being encoded, some items being recalled from LTM, or duration of time.
What is a method used for improving the 7 ± 2 items/chunks?
Chunking information into smaller, more recognisable groups.
What did Cowan, (2001) claim about Miller’s 7 ± 2 chunks?
They are an overestimation since some items/chunks were recalled from LTM. A more likely proposition of 4 ± 1 was made.
