Intro To Cognitive Neuroscience Flashcards
What is cognition
Process of acquiring organising and using knowledge
What is cognitive psychology
Study of how people perceive, learn, remember and think
What is cognitive science
Study of the mind using the computational metaphor
What is cognitive neuroscience
The study of the brain as it relates to cognitive processes
What are the 3 major areas cog psychology focuses on?
How we extract info from the external environment
How we store maintain and process the info
How we use that info
What did wilhelm wundt reveal in the first psych lab in 1879
- examined mind through introspection, analysing own mental processes
- introduced controlled conditions - same enviro, standardised instructions
What does behaviourism suggest (skinner Watson pavlov)
- study of observable behaviour born in 1913
- humans and animals should be studied using same scientific methods as in the natural sciences
What was influential about Noam chomskys paper “syntactic structures”
- challenged behaviourism
- beginning of cognitive revolution
What is top down and bottom up processing?
Top down- schema driven
Bottom up- stimulus driven
What did Simon and newell say thinking was like?
- a computer programme
- key concept = feature detectors
- brain bits are hardware
What is dualism
Mind and body are separate substances
What’s the dual aspect theory
Mind and body are two levels of explanation of the same thing
What is reductionism
Mind eventually explained solely in terms of physical / biological theory
What is phrenology
Differences in personally traits manifest in different cortical size and bumps on the skull
Crude division of psychological traits are not grounded in science (e.g. Love of animals)
What is functional specialisation
- doesn’t assume each region has one function / each function has a discrete location
- does assume some degree of specialisation of neurons in particular regions
