Intro to Cognition Flashcards
What is Cognition?
- Scientifically study internal mental behaviour or mediational process
- A response to Behaviourism
Name a well-known/primary behaviourist
BF Skinner
Who wrote a book called Verbal Behaviour and suggested that language can be learned by reinforcement learning principles?
BF Skinner
Name the 4 most important factors of cognition
- Language learning
- Internal Representation
- Value changes perception
- Magic number 7 +/- 2
Who introduced Language Learning theory?
Noam Chomsky
What did Chomsky’s theory suggest?
- Language is inherently generative
- Language is Learned
Who introduced Internal Representation theory?
Edward Tolman
What did Tolman’s theory suggest?
- Behaviour is goal-directed
- We can represent external world using internal mental representations
Who performed an experiment on rats to see whether they are able to learn the format of a maze without reinforcement
Edward Tolman
Who introduced Value changes Perception theory?
Jerome Bruner
What did Bruner’s theory suggest?
- One’s experience/expectation/knowledge can influence perception
Name and explain the experiment Bruner conducted to test his theory
- Rich-and-poor-children coin estimate test
- Kids were told to estimate the size of a coin
- Poor kids overestimated the coin size as coins meant more to the poor
- The poor’s “need” for money inflates their perception of the coin size
What is behaviourism?
- Studying only observable or external behaviour/response
Who introduced the Magic Number 7 +/- 2 memory theory?
George A. Miller
What did Miller’s theory suggest?
- Healthy adults with enough sleep generally can remember 7 things presented to them, plus-minus 2 things
What’s going on in the black box?
- Turing test
- Chinese room
Who proposed the Turing Test?
Alan Turing
Describe the Turing Test
- AI test which imitates human cognition
- Measures a computer’s intelligence
- A computer is considered intelligent if someone “conversing” with it could not tell whether they’re “conversing” with a computer or human
Who proposed the Chinese Room?
John Searle
Describe the Chinese Room
- A non-Chinese speaker sits in a room with Chinese characters and instructions on how to construct Chinese sentences
- Outside the room, a native Chinese speaker passes messages to the non-Chinese speaker in the room through a pigeon whole
- The non-Chinese speaker must reply to the message
- The non-Chinese speaker may follow the instructions provided to them to construct a message with the characters
What did the Chinese Room theory argue?
- Despite not having any prior knowledge of something, individuals are able to produce the correct answer/action by only referring to instructions given
- Even though computers can mimic human activities, they are unable to understand what exactly they are mimicking (lack human traits such as motivation)
What are the 4 ways we can study cognition?
- Cognitive Psychology
- Cognitive Neuropsychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Computational Cognitive Science
What is the aim of Cognitive Psychology?
- Understand human cognition by observing the behaviour of people whilst performing cognitive tasks
- Uses behavioural evidence such as response times
Which study of cognition only measures behaviour?
Cognitive Psychology
What is Top-Down processing?
Processing driven by intention, expectation, experiences and knowledge
What is bottom-up processing?
Processing driven by environmental stimulus
Explain interactions
Interactions between different cognitive systems occur in parallel
Name 2 strengths of Cognitive Psychology
- It is the 1st systematic approach to study cognition and provided a foundation for other approaches
- Diverse and Flexible
Name 5 weaknesses of Cognitive Psychology
- Low ecological validity
- Behavioural evidence only provide indirect evidence about internal mental processes
- Theories/models are often too general, no clear prediction
- Findings can be paradigm specific (narrow in applicability)
- No unifying model
What is the aim of Cognitive Neuropsychology
- Study patients with brain damage or neurological disease to understand how these affect cognition and to understand normal human cognition
Who are the 2 well-known patients in Cognitive Neuropsychology?
- Phineas Gage
- HM
What happened to Phineas Gage?
- Had a metal rod pierced through his skull and his personality changed from a nice person to a rough and aggressive person
What happened to HM?
- Had his hippocampus removed to cure his seizures
- Experienced long-term memory loss after hippocampus removal
Name 3 strengths of Cognitive Neuropsychology
- Double dissociations; evidence for modularity (Different parts of the brain specialise in different things)
- Causal links between damage and cognitive function
- Reveal surprising complexities in cognition
Name 2 weaknesses of Cognitive Neuropsychology
- Don’t typically know what patients were like before brain damage
- Patients’ brains can develop compensatory strategies to make up for the brain damage
- Sometimes rely on single-case studies
What is the aim of Cognitive Neuroscience?
Use info/conveying evidence from behaviour and the brain to understand human cognition
How are brain and behaviour both measured?
- Single cell recording to measure single neuron activity
- ERP to measure the pattern of electrical brain activity
- PET to measure positrons
- fMRI to observe which parts of the brain are most active
- MEG to measure magnetic fields produced by brain activity
- TMS which creates temporary brain damage
What does single-cell recording measure?
Measure single neuron activity
What does ERP measure?
Measure the pattern of electrical brain activity
What does PET measure?
Measure positrons
What does fMRI measure?
Observe which parts of the brain are most active
What does MEG measure?
Measure magnetic fields produced by brain activity
What does TMS create?
Creates temporary brain damage
Name the advantages of fMRI + ERP + TMS
- fMRI + ERP + TMS includes a range of spatial and temporal resolution (accuracy in discriminating between different brain regions and speed of detecting changes in brain activity), study functional specialisation
- TMS allows for causal inferences and is more flexible than Cog. NeuroPsych
Name 3 disadvantages of fMRI + ERP + TMS
- fMRI + ERP + TMS produce correlational data and not causal
- Over-interpretation of data
- Difficulty relating brain activity to psychological processes
What is spatial resolution?
Accuracy in discriminating between different brain regions
What is temporal resolution?
Speed of detecting changes in brain activity
What is the aim of Computational Cognitive Science?
To develop computational models to understand human cognition (not the same as AI)
What makes Comp. Cog. Science different from other studies of cognition?
- Stimulates/imitates human processing activities through computational models (program computers to imitate human cognition)
- Connectionist models/neural networks (math structures that “learn”)
List 2 strengths of Computational Cognitive Science
- Clear and precise theories and assumptions (requires detail and thinking)
- Used to model effects of brain damage
List 3 limitations of Computational Cognitive Science
- No prediction is common
- Hard to falsify
- Difficult to emphasise human traits such as motivation and emotion with a computer
Which prominent researcher was critical of the idea that behaviourist principles were sufficient to explain how children learn language?
Noam Chomsky
The thought experiment that can be used to argue that a computer does not have a mind of its own is known as?
The Chinese room
Which of the following can be considered a limitation of the Cognitive Psychology approach to studying Cognition?
Findings can be paradigm specific and not generalise to other tasks which aim to measure the same processes
Computational models of human cognition
1) Involve programming computers to mimic human cognitive processes
2) Aim to work in the same way as humans do, just not produce the same outcome
3) To be successful, one should succeed and fail the same way humans do
4) All of the above
4) All of the above
