Functions 2: from mental chronometry to the "mind as computer" metaphor Flashcards
Who was maskelyne?
-the astronomer credited by e.g. boring if coming up with chronometry methods
-he helped draw lines of longitude and would look for when a heavenly body hit a point with a timer and can map out the movements of these bodies and map out where you are in space compared to earth -he goes off and measurements are different than they should have been when taken by his assistants - realized there are individual differences in when people can push a button or timer and the human body is an observation apparatus because your body has to register a body in a telescope and then hit a button he comes up with a way to measure individual differences in reaction time in order to correct for the differences
What is the definition of mental chronometry as defined by FC Donders?
fine grained measurements of how long a task takes to complete and it can provide insights about mental processes
i.e. people are going to push a button as fast as they can and then get an average over many times and now thinking as a psychologist or physiologist I have learned that this is your response selection time - can get an estimate of how long all of that tasks for the stimulus to get to the brain and you to trigger the motor cortex
Why would the reaction time take longer if you tell someone to push a button when they see a white circle but not when you see a black circle versus just pushing a button when you see a white circle with no black circle part of the study?
this takes longer because you need to evaluate the stimulus to see if it meets a condition and now response time is getting complicated and whether or not you need to respond - can take the difference between the two experiments response time wise and figure out how long evaluation of white versus black circle takes
In experiments of mental chronometry trying to figure out the difference in response time between two experiments that are the same by differ by one additional process what is the idea behind them?
-Task A involves a set of processes which includes stimulus detection, response selection, response execution
-Task B includes all of these things and something else
-we can estimate how long that something else takes by subtracting the RT for task A from the RT for task B
-THIS IS SUBTRACTION LOGIC
What is the modal logic for much of experimental psychology
-subtraction logic
-if there is a difference between conditions in how long they take to perform there must be an additional process that is happening in a condition that takes more time - going to talk about subtraction in metabolic neuroimaging; this is also applied in the commuter performance task - how long can you maintain focus when you are doing something boring like “push a button when you see an x followed by an a”
What type of logic do many neuroimaging studies try to depend on when trying to isolate cognitive operations in the brain?
subtraction logic
In the history of psychology, when looking at the gap between the late 19th C and 1950s, what happened in the early 20th C?
-heidbreder wrote a contemporary history of psychology - there is nothing you can properly call psychology there is no consistency with the methods used or findings deemed valid it was all a mess
What happened in the cognitive revolution?
-James Watson wrote a manifesto in 1913 advocating for radical behaviorism (skinner is lumped into this group) - decisions, memory, attention is all unobservable - all we can really hope to understand is behavior and to do this we have to do away with mentalism - can only look at animals and what conditions make them more likely to perform a certain behavior
-in the 1950s these people came along and they believed the mind was a thing you could study if you compared it to a computer
-in the 1930s many psychologists were still into the mind behavior never dominated - in fact only 25% of the most cited research was from behaviorists
Since in fact only 25% of the most cited research was from behaviorists, what was the biggest areas instead?
-the development of mental tests
-followed by older approaches to cognitive phenomena (gestalt, constructivism, structuralism)
During WWII digital and mechanical computers were built by allies for specific purposes, what are some examples of that?
-code breaking (Alan Turing’s Colossus)
-Gunnery (e.g. Norbert Wiener’s cypernetics)
-operations research (formalizes the management of resources)
During WWII, psychological research during the war also focused on practical value to the armed services, what are some examples of that?
-aptitude testing for personnel (draftees; who is going to have an office job and who is going to be drafted into the military)
-monitoring video displays (radar)
-radio communication in loud/distracting environments (jet cockpits, signals intelligence; measures people capacity to transmit information in loud environments in the radio)
After the war most computational and psychological research continued to be funded by who?
the military; need to stick people into the military system so need to characterize these people based on hoe well they can perform these tasks
Since we believe the mind is a computer what do we believe we can do?
decompose any cognitive process intro parts - alot of this comes from development of the computer and other factors
What were some of the early greatest hits of congntive science funded by?
cocktail party effect - us navy
cold war - machine translation - us air force
letter names are confusable for abc better to say alpha beta charlie - us navy
operations research - RAND
information available in brief visual presentation - airforce
Since much of what we know about perception, attention, language, memory, decision making and so on is framed by model and methods developed alongside computer technology, how does this effect cognitive neuroscience?
we have a tendency to tiunk about the mind as a kind of computer and is also due to artificial intelligence research that era
