Lecture 1: What is Cognition? Flashcards
What is cognition?
- “The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and
understanding through thought, experience, and the
senses” - “Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate
new knowledge”. When you perceive or sense something, it is altered by prior knowledge. What you take in is influenced by prior processes. - Cognitive function, our thoughts and actions, is regulated by brain activity
- Cognition emerges from the connections of over 100 billion nerve cells in the brain
- Primarily concerned with understanding the processes that produce complex behaviors even though separate abilities are studied
- Memory, language, perception
How are cognitive abilities studied?
Cognitive abilities are studied separately but are not separable in reality
We want to distangle different cognitive processe systems (memory, perception, language, attention) that interact together. How do these different processes work togerher. If we look at and study one domain, we can distangle and understand it even though more than one domain contributes.
What are the types of cognitive research?
Basic Research
* Goal is to try to understand the world and its phenomena without regard to a specific end-use of this knowledge
* Understand how we perceive information, remember, reason and solve problems
* The goal of basic research is to understand how something works. To understand who we humans are as a species and what makes us tick.
* It is discovery based.
Applied Research
* Research with the end-goal of developing a solution to a problem. Applied research is to help improve tools, ways to develop a solution to a problem.
* Includes understanding natural changes to the mind, cognitive diseases and disorders
* For this type of research, you have a precise tool or process in mind.
* Ex: Cognitive decline in aging, human factors
Addressing Zoom fatigue
- We have a limit to how much information we can process. Research shows that when you process information from the world, you have a limit. Over zoom, you reach this limit sooner than in person.
- This limit might be reached earlier when Zooming than in
real-world scenarios because:
1.) A lack of information from body language, social cues, eye
contact. This makes you focus solely on th verbal stream.
2.) The audio signal is out of sync on Zoom, so there are higher demands on processing (Powers et al., 2011)
3.) The lack of immersion makes it easy to be distracted. Therefore, you need to give more focus.
Basic vs Applied
a) Laboratory experiment on the neural overlap between different types of memory
b) Testing the effects of nutritional interventions on cognition in un- housed communities
c) Using intact forms of memory to develop tools to improve quality of life for someone with Alzheimer’s disease
d) Determining the mechanism driving the link between gut health on brain activity?
a) basic
b)applied
c)applied
d)
Basic Research
Studying the brain and cognitions with the primary goal of developing theories without any regard to how his knowledge can be used to address a problem.
The research approach that studies intelligence by observing behaviours is known as
Cognitive Psychology
Human Factors
A field of psychology concerned with applying scientific findings to the design of systems that people interact with.
* study how people interact with machines and technology.
Conducting Research
Most research is guided by a hypothesis: A certain guess about the link between variables under study
* Phenomenon-based research: an “effect” is discovered, and
follow-up research examine the nature of the effect
* POPCORN!: someone left a kernel out and it was heated by the sun and then it popped into popcorn.
Experiments test hypotheses
* Manipulate an independent variable (IV: what you change)
* Test the effects on a dependent variable (DV: outcome)
* Factors that affect the IV-DV relation control or nuisance
variables
What are the different approaches to study cognition?
Cognitive psychology
* Study of Behavior to understand the mind
Neuroscience
* Study of the brain and linking it to the mind
* Asks: what parts of the brain carry out functions we see behaviorally?
Computational modeling
* Building and modelling the mind-brain connection
* Ex: artificial intelligence
Cognitive psychology of emotion
- Emotional enhancement effect: Emotional stimuli are more easily attended to, remembered than neutral stimuli
- Behavioral experiments show focal memory enhancements for negative stimuli in an image (Loftus et al., 1987)
- Poorer memory for the person’s face in _A__ than _B___
- Emotion has a strong effect on cognitive process. You will focus on the emotional thing in the scene and will remember it much more and above anything else.
- Emotional stimulus is mich stronger than any other.
- Negative emotional stimuli is remembered more than any aspect. Ex: People will remember the gun very well bit will not remmber what the person holding the gun looked like. However, if you replace the gun with a gatorade bottle, the person will remember the face of the person holding it.
Cognitive neuroscience of emotion
- Amygdala activity predicts memory for emotional but not
neutral images (Dolcos et al., 2004) - Test how individuals with brain injury will peerform on certain tests.
- Amygdala is connectecd to attention and memory processing
- The amygdala is very active when you see something emotional.
- The more your amygdala is enganged, the better memory someone will have for that event.
Computational modelling of emotion
These models are used to build robots or artificial models. If these can act and work like humans then we are able to further understand how humans work.
Artificial Intelligence
- AI to interpret and respond to emotion vis deep learning. You give AI models or agents a learning system and then train the AI agent on a large data base of information (huge database og emotional expressions) then AI has to learn how to classify all these emotional expressions.
- Challenges include differences in expression across cultures and people. There is a lot of variability in how we can express our emotions so it might make it harder for AI.
Applied research
This refers to research that is concerned with the end goal of developing a an application or solution to a problem.
