Introduction Flashcards
What is cognition?
It requires inputs and outputs and cognition is what happens in-between. For example, reasoning, memory, perception etc.
What is the mind, according to the textbook?
- “The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.”
- “The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning”
What is the mind, according to instructor?
The mind is a process (not a thing) emerging from the relations between other mental processes
What is cognition (will be on the exam)?
Cognition is the set of processes by which sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used
Processes that take sensory input and transform, reduce, elaborate, store, recover and use it
Assumptions of cognitive psychology?
- Mental processes exist
- Mental processes can be studied
- Human are active information processors
- Most processes in the mind are implemented in the brain
Cognitive variables - response accuracy?
Response accuracy measure whether or not a participant makes a correct response in a specified period of time when placed in a challenging situation
Cognitive variables - reaction time?
Reaction time (response time/response latency) measures the amount of time a participant takes to make a response
- Assumed to be filled with specific cognitive processes
Example, STROOP task, color naming task
Cognitive Variables - attention?
Eyetracking
Online studies, using the mouse to see where participants are shifting their attention
Cognitive variables - brain measurements?
Brain measurements:
- Electroencephalography (EEG)
* Event-related potentials (ERP)
- Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
- Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
- Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (TDCS)
- Lesion studies
Structural models?
- Representations of a physical structure
- Mimic the form or appearance of a given object
Example, mapping different areas to the brain to different functions
Process models?
Represent the processes that are involved in cognitive mechanisms, more abstract than structural models
Example, Input, sensory -> memory short-term memory -> long-term memory
Empiricism?
Position that all science should be based on observation
Aristotle: “no one can learn anything at all in the absence of sense”
Diogenes of Apollonia (~5th century BC)?
- Pre-Socratic thinker
- “Air” is the essence of nature/reality
- “Air” is also intelligence, which is common sense or intuition
- Intelligence is not a particular belief, contained in a mind, it is the mind itself
- Therefore all things are a mind (of various intelligences)
Plato (~427-~347BC)?
“…lovers, whenever they catch sight of a lyre… or anything else which their favorites are in the
habit of using… at the same time
receive in their minds the image
of the youth to whom the lyre
belonged” (Phaedo)
There is an association between what we see in reality and something in our mind and memory
Aristotle (384-322BC)? 3 Laws of association
Laws of association
- Contiguity: if A and B appeared together, experience of A will elicit recall of B
- Similarity: if A and B are similar, experience of A will elicit recall of B
- Contrast: if A and B are opposites, experience of A will elicit recall of B
Aristotle (384-322BC)? 3 Law of frequency -> School of thought
Law of frequency: The probability that the experience of A elicits B increases with the frequency that A and B appeared together before
The beginning of the school of Associationism
Aristotle (384-322BC), broadly?
- Broadly empiricist
- Tabula rasa empiricist -‘blank slate’:
The mind is blank at birth, contains no knowledge or reasoning skills until the world is experienced
St. Augustine (354-430AD)?
- Memory is inconsistent at times
- If memories are false, “Does the memory perhaps not belong to the mind?”
Trying to define and locate what is part of the mind
Ibn Sina (980-1037AD)?
Empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts
Example, seeing people having out at one time and other people at a second time. Concluding the concept of freindship
René Descartes
- Mind-body dualism
- Mind and bosy are distinct, but closely related
First Cognitive Psychology Experiment?
Donders (1868) studied how long it takes to make a decision
Reaction time (RT) experiment
- Measures interval between stimulus presentation and person’s response to stimulus
- Condition A Simple RT task: participant pushes a button quickly after alight appears
- Condition B Choice RT task: participant pushes one button if light is on right side, another if light is on left side
Choice RT - Simple RT = time to make a decision
Results: It takes 1/10th of a second to make decision
Mental responses cannot be measured directly but an be inferred from the participants behaviour
Donders’ Study of Reaction Time - Go/no-go task?
A) Go condition:
press button when square or diamond appears
Perceive shape -> Respond
B) Go/no-go condition:
press button when square appears, not when diamond appears
Perceive shape -> Decide go or no-go -> Respond
Results:
Go/no-go task resulted in longer reaction times compared to simple go condition
Wundt: Structuralism and Sensations?
- Established first scientific psychology lab a University of Leipzig, Germany
- Developed approach called structuralism:
Overall experience is determined by combining basic elements of experience called sensations - Used method of analytic introspection:
Participants trained to describe experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli
Ebbinghaus: Memory and Forgetting?
Ebbinghaus (1885) read list of CVCs (consonant-vowel-consonant) aloud to determine time necessary to repeat list without errors
After taking a break, he relearned the list
- Short-break intervals - less time to relearn list
- Saving = (Original time to learn) - (Time to relearn list after delay)
- More saving means better memory
Created the “Forgetting curve”, initial sharp decrees in memory, but the forgetting slows down as the timeline expands
William James’ Principles of Psychology?
- James was an early American psychologist who taught the first psychology course at Harvard University
- Observations based on the functions of his own mind, not experiments
- Considered many topics in cognition, including thinning, consciousness, attention, memory, perception, imagination, and reasoning.
Watson and Behaviorism>
Behaviorist Manifesto 1919
John Watson noted two problems with analytic introspection method:
- Extremely variable results per person
- Results difficult to verify due to focus on invisible inner mental processes (highly subjective reports)
Proposed a new approach called behaviourism:
- Eliminate the mind as a topic of study
- Instead, study directly observable behaviour
Watson’s “Little Albert” Experiment?
Watson and Rayner (1920)
- 9-month-old Albert became frightened by a rat after a loud noise was paired with every presentation of the rat
- Examined how pairing one stimulus with another affected behavior
- Demonstrated that behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind
Classical Conditioning?
- “Little Albert” experiment used classical conditioning methods
- Pair a neutral event with an event that naturally produces some outcome
- After many pairings, the “neutral” event now also produces the outcome
- Watson’s experiment was inspired by Pavlov’s research with dogs
Skinner: Conditioning and Behaviorism?
B. F. Skinner was interested in determining the relationship between stimuli and response
Operant conditioning
- Shape behavior by rewards or punishments
- Rewarded behavior more likely to be repeated
- Punished behavior less likely to be repeated
Behaviorism approach was dominant from the 1940s through the 1960s
Reemergence of the Mind in Psychology? (Tolman)
Tolman (1938) trained rats to find food in a four-armed maze
When a rat was placed in a different arm of the maze, it went to the specific arm where it previously found food
- Tolman believed the rat had created a cognitive map, a representation of the maze in its mind
- The map helped the rat navigate to a specific arm despite starting the maze from a different spot
- Rejected the behaviorist perspective for the rat’s actions
Tolman’s Maze and Cognitive Mapping?
Rat maze used by Tolman.
(a) The rat explores the maze.
(b) The rat learns to turn right to obtain food at B when it starts at A.
(c) When placed at C, the rat turns left to reach the food at B.
The Decline of Behaviorism? Skinner argued…
A controversy over language acquisition
Skinner (1957) –Verbal Behavior
Argued children learn language through operant conditioning
- Children imitate speech they hear
- Correct speech is rewarded
The Decline of Behaviorism? Chomsky argued…
Chomsky (1959)
- Argued that children do not only learn language through imitation and reinforcement
Children say things they have never heard and cannot be imitating
Children say things that are incorrect and have not been rewarded
- Language must be determined by inborn biological program
Information Processing?
Shift from behaviorist’s stimulus–response relationships to an approach that attempts to explain behavior in terms of the mind
Information-processing approach
- Way to study the mind based on insight associated with the digital computer
- States that operation of the mind occurs in stages
Attention and Flow Diagrams? (Cherry)
Cherry (1953) built on James’s idea of attention
- Present message A in left ear and message B in right ear
- Subjects could only understand details of message A despite hearing both messages
Broadbent (1958) developed flow diagram to show what occurs as a person directs attention to one stimulus
- Unattended information does not pass through the filter
Example of Flow Diagram: Input -> Filter -> Detector -> To memory
Artificial Intelligence & Information Theory?
Artificial Intelligence
- “making a machine behave in ways that would be called intelligent if a human were so behaving.” (McCarthy et al., 1955)
- Newell and Simon created the logic theorist program that could create proofs of mathematical theorems involving logic principles
Memory: A Higher Mental Process? (Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968))
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) developed a three-stage model of memory:
- sensory memory (less than 1 second)
- short term memory (a few seconds, limited capacity)
- long-term memory (long duration, high capacity)
Information we remember is brought from long-term memory into short-term memory
Memory: A Higher Mental Process? (Endel Tulving)
EndelTulving divided long-term memory into three components (1972)
- Episodic, Life events
- Semantic, Facts
- Procedural, Physical actions
Physiology of Cognition?
Neuropsychology studies behavior of people with brain damage
Electrophysiology studies electrical responses of the nervous system including brain neurons
Brain imaging
- positron emission tomography (PET)
- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
- both technologies show which brain areas are active during specific episodes of cognition
Electroencephalography (EEG)?
Oldest imaging method of those currently employed
– Electrodes on the scalp record the electrical activity of the brain
– The EEG waves (brain waves) reflect the total electrical output of columns of cortical neurons
Event-related potentials (ERP)?
- Averaged wave time-locked to a stimulus or response which can be compared between groups and conditions
- Averaging of multiple trials allows “zeroing out”of brain activity unrelated to task of interest
- ERP Components (Will be on the exam): peaks and valleys associated with specific cognitive processes
EEG/ERP?
Strengths:
- High temporal resolution (records in milliseconds)
- Inexpensive
- Non-invasive
- Direct measure of brain activity
Weaknesses:
- Poor spatial resolution
- Correlational: Can’t infer that activity causes behaviour
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)? (How it works)
Brain region is active
->
Blood flow increases (metabolic cost)
->
Amount of oxygen increases
->
Alteration of oxygen content affects the blood’s magnetic properties
->
Brain’s magnetic signal is affected
IMPORTANT: Doesn’t directly measure neuronal activity! Measure’s metabolic process that is probably connected to brain activity.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)? (Strengths and Weaknesses)
Strengths:
- High spatial resolution
- Non-invasive
Weaknesses:
- Expensive
- Poor temporal resolution
- Correlational: Can’t infer that activity causes behaviour
-> Indirect measure of brain activity
Brain Imaging Methods generally?
- There are many ways to get an image
- They vary in invasiveness, expense, and temporal and spatial resolution
- The technology is rapidly advancing, especially in MRI and fMRI
- These methods along with lesion studies, nonhuman animal studies, and computational modeling, allow us to zoom in on neural underpinnings of human cognition
Repetitive TranscranialMagnetic Stimulation (rTMS)?
Cantemporarily disrupt or enhance brain activity
- Repeated magnetic pulses over an area of the participant’s head
- Causes increase or decrease in activity in underlying cortex
- Measure changes in behaviourdue to more or less activity in region
Repetitive TranscranialMagnetic Stimulation (rTMS)? (Strengths and Weaknesses)
Strengths:
- Can manipulate brain activity directly to see its influence on cognition
- Can infer causality
- Non-invasive
Weaknesses:
- Relatively poor spatial resolution
- Can’t measure activity in deeper structures
Neuropsychology/Lesion Patients?
Lesion - Abnormality or injury to any part of the
brain
May be caused by:
- Congenital abnormalities (present from birth)
- Epilepsy/surgery
- Stroke
- Injury
- Disease
Neuropsychology - Use laboratory tasks to measure
behaviour that indicates cognitive impairment
- Can reveal normal cognitive processes that require the damaged region
Neuropsychology/Lesion Patients? (Strengths and Weaknesses)
Strengths
- Can demonstrate a region is necessary for a particular function (and not for another)
Weaknesses
- Patients in short supply
- Damage not neatly limited to one region
- Damage to one region could impact multiple cognitive processes
Computer Simulation?
Goal: have a computer respond to a problem by producing an output that matches the behavior of a real person confronted with the same problem
Concerns:
- Ecological validity
- Motivation and emotion
- Human development
