Intro Flashcards
Who is the father of experimental psychology?
Wundt
Which psychologists are tied to Introspective Psychology?
Wundt and Titchener
Which psychologist is tied to behaviorism?
Watson
What is voluntarism?
The minds capacity to organize elemental mental content into higher level thought processes
Who is tied to Structuralism and Stimulus Error and focused primarily on perceptual descriptions (color, weight)?
Titchener
What are the problems of introspection?
- Lack of refutability
- Ignores real world and previous experiences
- Not generalize-able since so idiosyncratic
- What were ‘trained introspectors’ trained to do?
What followed and replaced Introspection?
Behaviorism
What type of psychologist was Thorndike, Skinner, and Pavlov?
Behaviorism
What was the downfall of Behaviorism?
Cognition, you cant ignore mental processes when observing behavior. how we understand and interpret situations influence the way we act and feel.
What was the Skinner Box?
Positive and negative reinforcement
Who is the father of cognitive psychology?
Neisser
What is the 4 step problem for studying cognition?
- Find real world cognitive problem
- Form operational definition
- Devise Empirical test
- Infer underlying mechanism
What are the 4 different ways to look at the mind/ brain?
- CognitivePsychology: Examination of behavior in “normal” subjects
Reaction vs response time. Response time is more important
• Neuropsychology: Examination of behavior in brain- damaged patients
• Neuroimaging: Measurements of neural activity across the entire brain, or some large subset there of (EEP, PET or fMRI)
• Neurophysiology: Recording from individual cells
• Others: Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS),
Computational modeling
What are the 3 ways that make an experiment solid?
- Reliable - can replicate the results
- Generalizable - not tied to specific circumstances
- ‘Statistically Significant’ - e.g., p < .05
What is Donder’s Method?
Cognitive Subtraction - Measure response times of different tasks then subtract
What are the 2 different methods to study cognitive psychology?
Behavioral
• Response Time
• Looking Time
• Eye Gaze Tracking
Neurological • Neuroimaging MRI/CT fMRI/PET EEG Single unit recording • Lesions & Patient work Stroke/TBI/Disease • TMS,ComputationalModeling
What are the 2 assumptions for the looking time method?
- Look when surprised or processing
* Look longer when difficult
What is the difference between MRI and fMRI?
MRI - structural
studies brain anatomy
one set of images
High resolution
fMRI - functional
studies brain activity
Blood Oxygenation Level Dependent (BOLD) signal
indirect measure of neural activity
measures deoxygenation (blood flow)
Neural (brain) activity causes metabolism which causes deoxygenation (blood flow) -> Measure blood flow, and you measure brain activity
many image sets over time (e.g., every 3 sec for 5 mins)
low resolution
A central problem in capgras syndrome seems to be a difficulty with?
an emotional analysis of faces
Many subcortical structures, such as the hippocampus and amygdala, come in groups of two. why?
It has to do with lateralization
Which of the following methodologies does NOT measure brain activity or structure?
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
How does a CAT scan work?
uses xrays to measure density
How does MRI work?
The scanner is essentially a large magnet. Atoms in the subject’s brain align with the magnetic field. The extent to which atoms align with the field depends on the kind of tissue (grey matter, white matter, CSF).
What is the fMRI logic?
When there is more neural activity, there is more blood flow, and there is more oxygenated blood (and less deoxygenated blood). Increase in oxygenation increases fMRI signal
Measure BOLD signal when shown one category versus another. Difference is the selective activation in that region for that stimulus
Scenes, faces, objects. Which has the highest fMRI signal?
Scenes
What are the strengths and shortcomings of neuroimaging?
Strengths:
– Allow you to identify brain structures involved in various mental processes (with mm precision).
– Can observe these brain regions in action.
Shortcomings:
– Only tells you that a region is active during a process, not that it is necessary for a process.
– Doesn’t tell you much about how processes are implemented at the cellular level.
– It is very expensive.
What is an EEG?
Record electrical activity on the scalp
Each electrode records 1000s of neurons
Can see precise timing but localization is poor
What are properties of Neurophysiology?
Humans: Pre-surgical electrical stimulation and/or recordings
Animals: Single-unit recordings and/or stimulation
High temporal resolution
Very high spatial resolution
What is a famous experiment using single unit recording (neurophysiology?)
orientation specific neurons, research on cats by Hubel and Weisel
What are the pros and cons of neurophysiology?
• GoodPoints:
– Allow you to examine response at the level of the single cell. (“Gold Standard”)
• BadPoints:
– Not so good for looking at response over large regions of the brain.
– Animals take a long time to train, and they cannot tell you how they do a task.
– Animals don’t have some abilities that we might want to study (e.g. language).
Describe studying lesions?
Explore what brain regions are responsible for cognitive abilities by exploring what happens when they are damaged or removed
Phineas Gage - showed link between frontal lobe and personality change
Capgras Syndrome – seeing loved ones as impostors
What are the strengths and shortcomings of neuropsychology?
• Strengths:
– Allow you to dissociate between different mental processes.
– Can tell you something about the brain structures necessary for a task.
• Shortcomings:
– There can be great variability among patients, making it difficult to establish structure-function relationships with precision.
– Only allow you to observe the processes that interest you in absence, not in action.
What is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation?
- TMS uses magnetic pulses to transiently disrupt brain function
- Experimentally induced lesion
- Variable temporal resolution (single- pulse vs. rapid-rate)
- Variable spatial resolution
Parvo cells do NOT differ from magno cells in what way?
Location in the visual system
fMRI signal increases when there is a
Change in oxygenated to deoxygenated blood
PPA vs FFA?
Scenes give you PPA activation, faces give you FFA activation
When do you do a CT scan vs an MRI scan?
You want to assess the brain, but the person has metal in their body
What is PET scan?
PET uses radioactive tracers.
good spacial results but poor timing resolution
What is the difference between EEG and ERP?
EEG are spontaneous, ERP is time lock
What terms are used in describing orientation?
Anterior
Posterior
Rostral (head)
Caudal (tail)
Superior
Inferior
Dorsal (top)
Ventral (bottom)
What is a lateral view of the brain? Medial view?
Lateral view is from the side
Medial view is from the middle (think midsaggital view)
What does the frontal lobe do?
Planning, Organizing, Inhibition
What does the temporal lobe do?
Visual and Verbal Memory
What does the parietal lobe do?
Spatial Knowledge, Language
What does the hypothalamus do?
Controls motivated behaviors. e.g., eating, drinking, sex
What does the thalamus do?
Relays sensory information to cortex
What is the precentral and post central gyrus?
Precentral gyrus is primary motor cortex
Postcentral gyrus is primary somatosensory cortex
Why do you need to show double dissociation?
how do you know if your task isnt just harder than the other one vs 2 different processes behind the tasks
GR had critical parts of his parahippocampal areas damaged as a result of stroke. An unfurtaunate side effect was impaireed ability to recognize places, even though later testing revealed his object recognition was spared. In order to establish a double dissociation, which of the following patients would need to be found? A patient with:
intact place recognition and impaired object recognition
Myopia (nearsightedness, when you can’t focus on distant objects) is when light in the human eye produces an image:
in front of the retina, causing the image when looking at a distant object to be farther away from the retina than closer objects
eyeball is too long
hyperopia is farsightedness
Retina and LGN have what type of receptive fields?
Retina and LGN have center surround
center surround are good for edge detections and sharper contrast
What are the differences between rods and cones?
• Rods
– High sensitivity to light
– Summed together since produce small signals – ‘Colorblind’
– Used for ‘Night vision’
• Cones
– Mostly at center of eye
– Color vision
– Three distinct types (underlies color vision)
In the LGN what is the difference between P and M cells?
Parvocellular:
Layers 3-6
Detail and Color
Magnocellular:
Layers 1, 2
Motion, Depth
What are receptive fields?
The area of the visual world over which stimulation affects a specific cell’s response
the receptive field in the visual cortex is different than in the retina & LGN
What are 2 themes of cognitive psychology?
- We cannot study the mental world by means of direct observation.
- we must study the mental world if we are to understand behavior, because our behavior depends in crucial ways on how we perceive and understand the world around us. However, we must study the mental world indirectly.
What is introspection?
The study of conscious mental events by “introspecting” or “looking within”
Involves the observation and recording of one’s own thoughts and experiences.
What is cognitive psychology?
Use experimental rigor of behaviorism but also embrace mental processes focus of introspection
Which of the following procedures is a better guarantee of random assignment in groups for a psychology study?
Flipping a coin
Recognition of all stimuli (not just faces) involves 2 separate mechanisms. Name them.
One that hinges on factual knowledge.
One that is more emotional and tied to familiarity.
How does the brain bind the different properties of an object together?
Parallel processing of spacial position using rhythm (neural synchrony) and attention.
READ
Object recognition is shaped by both bottom up and top down processes
READ
Information about the visual world is picked up by huge array of neural detectors, each tuned to a particular aspect of the stimulus information.
How does a feature net work?
When a detector receives some input, its activation level increases. The activation level will eventually reach the detector’s response threshold and then the detector will fire. When feature detectors are activated they trigger a response in the letter detectors, which trigger the bigram detectors, which trigger word detectors.
Which detectors fire most readily?
Recent and frequent firing detectors will fire more readily.
How does the McClellan and Rummelheart model differ from the feature net?
Detectors can inhibit neighboring detectors and detectors from lower levels.
Faces differ from objects how?
They are more spatially tuned to orientation.
What’s an example of a top down expectation?
I’m about to show you a word and it’s the name of something you can eat . . . celery. You’re expecting ur knowledge of food.
READ
Many of the steps we take have a cost attached.
Of the 2 types of priming which is has a cost attached?
Expectation-based has a cost; stimulus-based is free.
What are the 2 mechanisms involved in paying attention?
One mechanism inhibits unwanted inputs; the other facilitates desirables inputs.
