Lecture 01 Introduction to Cognition Flashcards
Cognitive Psychology
The operation of mental processes related to perceiving, attending, thinking, language, and memory, mainly through inferences from behavior
Aristotle
Laws of association
- Contiguity
- Similarity
- Contrast
Contiguity
The SEQUENTIAL occurrence or PROXIMITY of stimulus and response, causing their association in the mind.
von Helmholtz
Physiology of sensation
Fechner
Psychophysic
- how physical stimuli relate to mental intensity
Ebbinghaus
Memory process using “nonsense syllable”
Wilhelm Wundt
Conscious experience
- Sensation
- Feeling
Early studies in psychology
- Introspection
- Self-report
Dominance of Behaviorism
- Use of EXPERIMENTAL method and controlled observation
- Focus on STIMULUS-RESPONSE association in animal research
Resurgence of Cognition
- Information-processing approach
- Criticism of behaviorist approach
Information-processing approaches
- Information theory
- The model of human problem solving
Criticism of Behaviorist Approach
- Skinner: Language learning through conditioning processes.
- Chomsky: Children produce language that has never been produced or reinforced
“Language learning is rule-based”
Legacy of behaviorism
- Logical positivism
- Operationism
- Focus on experimentation
Information-Processing Model
- Cognitive process = software
- Brain = hardware
- A study of cognition is a study of how information is perceived, stored, transformed, retrieved, and utilized
Father of Cognitive Psychology
Ulric Neisser
- Integrate topics on memory, perception, attention, concept formation, language, and thinking
Current Approaches in Cognition
- Representationalism
- Embodied Cognition
- Biological Perspective
Representationalism
- Information from the world is represented in the mind.
- Ways to represent
1) Exemplar
2) Concepts with features - Cognitive processes “operate” on the representations.
Representational Models
- Symbolic
- Hierarchical Network
- Distributed Network
Symbolic
Information is stored as symbols
- Operated in the way of MATHEMATICAL symbols
- Cognitive processes as symbolic operations.
- E.g., perceptual system with feature detection (line, curves, etc.)
Perceptual System with Feature Detection
- Detect an object with curve
- Rule out representations with linear edges
- Identify object based on representation of object with curve
Hierarchical Network
Concept network like neurons
- Concepts are node
- Relationship are edges.
- Relationship between nodes have weights.
- Concepts are stored in hierarchy.
- Activation of a node will also spread to related nodes
Distributed Network
- Concepts are not represented within a single node, but distributed across many node
- Concepts are represented in pattern of activations
Examples of Embodied Cognition
- Production effect of reading
- People who were exhausted judge the distance to be further than those who were not
Embodied Cognition
- Cognition embodied in human body
- Perception, action, cognition are tightly knitted
Biological Perspective
- Cognition from how the brain works
- Specialized modules rather than general purpose device
- Neurocomputational model
- Neurophysiological studies
- EDA, EEG, fMRI, Eye-tracking
- Brain damage studies
