Exam 1 Flashcards
Cognitive Psychology
The study of the mind: memory, perception, attention, etc.
Socrates
Very interested in the nature of knowledge and belief. He created the Socratic method.
Aristotle
Developed the first known model of how memory works. He compared memory it wax seals: how impressions mold your mind. Younger people have “hotter wax” and it’s easier to have them remember.
Franciscus Donders
Ophthalmologist and physiologist. First to measure reaction time by flashing lights and having participants press a button when they saw the light.
Simple Reaction Time
Flash ->(processing)-> button press
Perceive the light -> physical response
Choice Reaction Time
Flash -> (processing) -> button press but 100 ms difference from Simple Reaction Time bc of choice between two buttons.
Perceive light -> identify location of it -> physical response
Cognitive Research
Lets us measure cognitive processes, which requires inference and requires a model of the processes.
Cognitive Models
Stimulus detection -> stimulus identification -> response organization
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Focused on learning and forgetting by studying meaningless syllables bc they were independent from a meaning bc that would lead to contextual clues. He did research on himself. He also looked at retention and improvement. He was the first person to discover forgetting curve by learning words and testing himself to see how much he forgot.
Savings
Being able to learn something a second time made it easier than learning it for the first time.
Spacing Effect
Spread out your learning, which allows you to remember more.
Wilhelm Wundt
Founded the first psychology lab, which was in Germany. Created structuralism.
Structuralism
Tried to break down the mind down into small pieces to see what it was made up like the table of elements. Wundt did this through introspection.
Introspection
What goes on in your mind when you see something. Introspection is unverifiable, unreliable bc people are different and even the same person could be different, and most mental processes are unconscious.
Behaviorism
All about the study of behavior and things that happen on the outside, which took the spotlight from the mind.
Stimulus -> response instead of stimulus -> mental processing -> response bc behaviorism only studies observable behavior. It was the dominant focus for a while. Can’t explain rats not going back to the same location on a maze.
Classical Conditioning
Pavlov’s experiment with dog, bell, and food, which led to salivation. Also, with Little Albert and his fear of small white animals.
Operant Conditioning
B.F. Skinner said, “All we need to know in order to describe behavior: reward good behavior and not bad behavior.” This is how animals are trained.
Cognitive Maps
Mapping out places in your mind.
Instinctive Drift
Going back to their instinct behavior.
Noah Chomsky
Famous linguist who argued that people understand the structure of language. A sentence can be grammatically correct but make no sense.
The Cognitive Revolution and End of Behaviorism
Made it okay to talk about how the mind works again like failure of conditioning animals, human language, developments in brain research, subjective experience, new models arose, bc behaviorism couldn’t explain this.
Behavioral Approach
Overt, deliberate responses like response time, accuracy, recall, etc.
Physiological Approach
Bodily responses and often outside conscious control. Measuring your brain’s activity and eye tracking.
Consolidation
Stabilization of a memory trace after its initial acquisition.
Cognitive Neuroscience
The study of the physiological basis of cognition.
Levels of Analysis
Refers to the idea that a topic can be studied in a number of different ways, with each approach contributing its own dimension to our understanding.
Neurons
Cells that are the building blocks and transmission lines of the nervous system.
Nerve Net Theory
A network believed to be continuous, like a highway system. It was proposed that signals could be transmitted throughout the nets in all directions by providing a complex pathway for conducting signals uninterrupted through the network. Discovered that it was not continuous by Ramon y Cajal.
Ramon y Cajal
A Spanish physiologist who was interested in investigating the nature of the nerve net. He discovered that the fact that the Golgi stain affects less than 1% of the neurons, made it possible for him to see that the nerve net was not continuous, but instead was made up of individual units connected together.
Neuron Doctrine
The idea that individual cells (neurons) transmit signals in the nervous system, and that these cells are not continuous with the other cells as proposed by the nerve net theory.
Microelectrodes
Small shafts of hollow glass filled with a conductive salt solution that can pick up electrical signals at the electrode tip and conduct these signals back to a recording device.
Nerve Impulse (Action Potential)
An electrical response that is propagated down the length of an axon (nerve fiber), which lasts 1 millisecond. APs travel all the way down the axon without changing its height or shape.
Neurotransmitters
Chemicals that make it possible for the signal to be transmitted.
Mind
System that creates representations (everything we experience is the result of something that stands for experience) of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.
Principle of Neural Representation
Everything a person experiences is based not on direct contact with stimulus, but on representations in the person’s nervous system.
How experience is determined by representations in the nervous system.
Quality Across the Senses
Different experience associated with each of the senses like perceiving light for vision, sound for hearing, smells for olfaction, etc.
Quality with a Particular Sense
Shape, color, or movement for vision, or recognizing different kinds of objects based on their shape or different people based on face.
Sensory Neurons (Receptors)
Firing based on light from the world in eye, touch based on pressure, etc. It’s based on external stimulus instead of other neurons.
Brodmann’s Area
Broke the brain down into thousands of pieces.
Single-Cell Recording
Placing an electrode right outside/next to a neuron and measure signals.
Disadvantages: Billions of neurons, but you can only measure one with this. Also, it’s very intrusive and probably the only people who get this are the ones who are getting brain surgery.
Electroencephalogram (EEG)
Measures electrodes externally using a cap and getting different brain waves.
Event-Related Potential (ERP)
Related to the particular stimulus given. For example, N400 refers to negative 400 ms in ERP which means that you’ll have a high jump in the graph (when the meaning is wrong) or P600 means a low jump (when the grammar is off).
Feature Detectors
Neurons that respond to specific visual features, such as orientation, size, movement, or the more complex features that make up environmental stimuli.
Hierarchical Processing
Processing that occurs in a progression from lower to higher areas of the brain.
Problem of Sensory Coding
The problem of neural representation for the senses.
Sensory Code
How neurons represent various characteristics of the environment.
