Intro to Cognition Flashcards
Emergence of Cognitive Psychology
BF Skinner - behaviourist
Book “Verbal Behaviour” - children learning language could be learnt through typical reinforcment learning techniques
Behaviourism
Believes in studying only observable behaviours
Behaviourist Model
Stimulus - Black Box - Response
Noam Chomsky
Criticsed Skinner’s book and suggested behavioursm cannot explain how children learn language. According to Chomsky langage is an innate process , learnt where there’s “poverty of stimulus”
Edward Tolman
Challenged the behaviourist view that nothing happens between stimulus and response
Rat experiment - rata learnt the maze and where the exit was (goal oriented) not reinforcement motivated
Jerome Bruner
Asked rich and poor kids to estimate the size of a coin and found poorer children over-estimated the coin size
Agued that because the coin meant more for the poor children, their need of it affected their peception
George A Miller
Disagreed with behavirousim cannot explain everyday memory
The magic memory number 7 +/- 2 (span of 5 to 9)
Cognitive Model
Input - Mediational Process - Output
Cognitive perspective on the behaviourist “black box” model
Alan Turing mathematician and computer scientist
Created the Turing test - a PC could only be considered intelligent if it can pass for a human while conversing with a human
Hard to pass this test, but there’re some successful recent attempts:
- acting as a psychologisyt and reflecting questions back
-petrending to be a 13-year old easrern european boy
- playing the role of a self-absorbed person bringing the convo back to them
The Chineese Room Experiment
Searle, 1980 - A thought experiment
Book with instructions, person doesn’t speak chineese
The person uses the rule book to answer correctly
Cognitive Psychology
Behavioural evidence such as response times used as evidence for cognition
Bottom- up processing & Top down processing
Bottom up - driven by the environment, but the input -> output is an oversimplification
Top-down - driven by expectation and knowledge
Cognitive Neuropsychology
Neuropsychological patients studying (Phineas Gage and Henry Molaison) to study cognition
Strenghths: - double dissociations is when you test patients with different brain damage tested on tasks one patient can perform and the othe cannot - strong evidence for modularity (meaning certain areas in the brain responsible for particular tasks)
Cognitive Neuroscience
Single cell recording - use of microelctrodes to record the activity of a single neuron
Even-related potentials (EPRs) - same stimulus repeatedly, measures pattern of electrical brain activity from scalp electrodes
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) - brain scanning by measuring positrons
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) - imaging blood oxygenation using MRI (index metabolic activity)
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) - magnetic fields produced by brain activity
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) - temp. brain leasions though electrical curent through a coil placed nea the skull
Computational Cognitive Science
Bulding computer programs to model human cognition (different from AI)
AI - building compute systems producing intelligent outcomes (whatever that menas) don’t have to work the same way as people do
