Lecture 2/3: History and How to Study Cognition Flashcards
What are the historical approaches to studying cognition?
1) Philosophical foundations from Ancient Greece
* Rationalism and Empiricism
* The mind was studied before the birth of cognitive studies
* The Philosophers in Greece were asking a lot of questions about human thoughts.
2) The early days of psychology as an experimental science
* Structuralism and Functionalism
3) Behaviorism and then Cognitive Psychology
* Focusing on actions to accepting thought
* Studying unseen mental processes in order to understand cognition
What is the philosophical foundations of cognitive psychology?
- Ancient Greek philosophers thought about the locus of the mind (sensations, memory) and basis of human personality.
-They wanted to look at how human personality and characteristics were lineked to these mental processes. Why humans act and behave a certain way. They explored where was the locus of the mind. - Many took an analytic approach to understanding the human mind by breaking it down into ‘parts’ to study.
- General idea accepted was to take an analytic approach to understand the mind (break down the mind into fractions). - Epistemology is the philosophical study of human knowledge (the nature of the limit of human knowledge)
- Aristotle, Plato
What was Platos main influences?
1) Knowledge involves experience and reason (prior knowledge)
* Deductive reasoning: you are using scripts and understanding of how the world works to understand something.
* 1. The world is a ‘reflection of our reality’
* 2. External (bottom-up, our experiences, external world) and Internal (top-down, things we know, thoughts, feelings,perception) processing interact
1) Rationalism and the importance of a-priori knowledge
* There is an innate aspect to our mental processes and reasoning (our observations might not always reflect the real truth that is out there because we use prior knowledge)
* Observation does not always lead to certainty. (innate: we are born with the capacity to reason, innate knowledge, use prior knowledge to guide us).
What was Aristotle’s main influences?
Aristotle was into observations and what we can learn from them. He thought that observation was the center of it all.
Emphasized empiricism
* Inductive observational reasoning
* Unlike rationalism, suggests to learn from what your see
* Foundation for the importance of observation
Foundational for cognitive theories that emphasize associations (e.g., memory theories)
* Thought arise from forming associations among
observations.
* We form associations between things that we observe and the mind is nothing withou these observations. Nothing is innate in the mind, we do not start with any processes.
Structuralism
*Identify the basic elements of thought
*Learn how basic elements combine to form complex thoughts. How these basic elements can combine to from more complex thoughts. Trying to look for the lego pieces in your mind.
*Relied on introspection and self report
*People report their thoughts or observations
*What might be a problem with self report?
- they are not reliable
- some people might be good introspection and some might not be. Differences in how people understand their own mental slates.
- Emotional state can alter what they report.
Wilhelm Wundt
- Began lab in 1879 and practiced Structuralism (looking at the basic elements of the mind)
* “Well, Wundt you know!”
* New science that fit in the logical framework of other sciences. - Wanted to identify the simplest units of the mind that he
thought followed certain laws to create complex thoughts
* Wanted to establish a ‘mental’ periodic table of elements
* If he found this he could fingure out how to put them together to form our mind. - Used empirical introspection
- Psychophysics
- Way to collect experimental data
- Psychophysics
What is psychophysics?
-
Psychophysics: study basic cognitive phenomenon by linking sensory experiences to physical changes.
- Establish a relationship between changes in a visual stimuli (physical changes) and when do people notice this change.
- E.g., measuring the threshold for feeling the touch
from a feather; the smallest amount of change in
pigment to notice a difference between two colors (when does it shift from one shade of blue to another shade of blue).
Unit of thought
Our thoughts form our ability to detect changes, understand phenomenons…
Explain Wundt’s Empirical introspection
*Experimental self-observation
*Often used mental chronometry: Estimating time for a participant to perceive something (“I see it”; “I hear it”)
* Created the ‘thought meter’: People would sit in front of a pendulum that swung from left to right. When it would ring, the person has to click a button as soon as they hear the ring. They then measured how long it took for the people to say that they heard it and look at where the pendulum (how far it travelled).
* Individuals were about 1/10th of a second off = amount of time it took them to process the noise.
Summarizing Structuralism
- Systematic observation of the elements of the mind
* Premise: Understanding these elements will help understand more complex cognitive processes, like perception, memory and learning - Criticisms
- Experimental methods were considered too subjective, relying on self report (introspection = too subjective)
- Approaches were too simplistic (focusing on simple sensory processes) –> focusing on the simple stuff without understand why we have thoughts and how they would shift in process.
Functionalism
*Asks why the mind works
*Not interested in breaking down mental states to basic
elements
*Cognition is about serving a function and so must adapt
to current goals
* the function of why we think and how we think is essential to understand how we process information.
Pragmatism? Who came up with it?
William James and pragmatism
* Pragmatic or opposed searching for basic mental elements (focused on practical to problems).
* Believed that consciousness is personal and cannot be broken down into parts as it is constantly changing. He believed mental processes are personal and subject to change. This is why there is no point of breaking them down into parts.
* Emphasized an eclectic methodological approach to study the usefulness and variability of accessing knowledge in the real world. Because we have all these changes in mental states, there was a lot of emphasis on different methods. According to functionalist, we cannot just rely on introspection, we need to use many methods.
* Idea that you can never have the same idea twice because you will never be in the same situation.
What does functionalism focus on?
Functionalism focuses on why the mind works and the ‘usefulness of knowledge’.
- Focus on the usefulness of knowledge instead of breaking down knowledge.
What did functionalism contribute? and what is a critism
It contributed an emphasis on the adaptive functions of our mind and how we use cognitive processes based on our settings
* Context matters!
* A criticism is that it is difficult to study some of these ideas (consciousness, imagery), especially if cognition is always changing! Hard to figure out how to study these ideas, how do we gt the rootss of it?
applied research
Behaviorism
- 1900s: Psychology is struggling to be taken seriously as a
science. Because there was a notion that studying the mind was not as applicable to the rigor of the scientific method. - This resulted in a shift from studying the mind to
behavior.
* Focused on what can be observed (input, output). Focus on the output of what somoeone does. Focus on the idea that we are going to look at response to stimuli in the environment.
* Behaviorism did not consider mental processes - Focused on animal research because there it is highly controlled
* Assumes all species obey the same laws of behaviour. Shift from human to animal research. Behaviourist used animals because you can cut open their skulls which you cannot do with humans (ethical issues) so you can get more control with animals.
* Emphasized the importance of controlled experiments.
What are the notable contributions of behaviourism?
1) Classical Conditioning (Pavlov)
* Learning by making associations between cue, a stimuli and the natural response
2) Instrumental Learning (Thorndike) and Operant
Conditioning (Skinner)
* Behavior is contingent on a schedule of reinforcements, rewards and punishments. Behaviours are the response to what response we are given (reward or punishment)
* Rewards encourage behaviors
* Punishment reduce behaviors
* Openrant conditioning is voluntary behaviour.
Why is behaviourism limited?
it does not account for internal mental processes and flexibility.
What are the problems with behaviorism?
- Overestimated the scope of their explanations
- Cannot account for complex human behavior
- The assumption that learning was the same for all individuals and across species is false. Learning is not only different across species but also between individuals.
Explain an example of behaviourism’s limitations
Language
* Behaviorism view is that language is learned through
conditioning (operant conditioning: reward/punishment). This theory does not explain how we learn to put sentences together.
* Latent learning: learning in the absence of any conditioning (learning without being told to do so)
* see Tolman experiments in textbook for more information if needed
* Children learn to apply language rules to new situations
* Children will pluralize objects by adding an ‘s’ even if they have never seen/hear the word (mices)
* We need to refer to mental processes to explain this behavior! It does not explain how individuals are able to learn to read, memorize (need to be able to recognize the word to understand it).
Another example: individual differences - If people can use mental strategies when thinking, then we need to study the mental processes.
The cognitive revolution
(1950s)
* Accepted that there are internal mental states, unlike Behaviorism but like Structuralism
* Accepted the scientific method to study these states, like
Behaviorism and other fields (e.g., math, biology)
* Came with the rise in technology and the computer that supported the view of the mind as a processor of information. The human brain is a processor, the mind anylyses information from the environment.
Cognitive phsycology:
* Humans actively process the information they receive from the environment
* The brain is the basis of mental processes
* The mind can be systematically and empirically studied
The view of information processing
- The mind and brain can be understood as a sort of computer that processes information in the world.The brain is like a computer, performs these computations - we want to study what these computations and processes are.
- Cognitive research focuses on describing the processes that manipulate information input from the external world to output (produce) behavior. Manipulate info that flwos from the outside world and then induces behaviour.
- Often use flow charts to describe these computations at specific processing stages …. Model these computational stages where info is being processed and how they flow to a different computational stages
box and arrow flowcharts
- Illustrates that processing occurs in stages
- Waugh & Norman’s model of memory
- The boxes represent different computational changes and arrows represent how the info flows from different computational regions.
Waugh and Norman’s Model of Memory
- The number of words remembered decreases as the distractor task increases in length
- You cannot rehearse information and allow that information to flow into secondary memory stage
- Info will flow from primary memory to that forgotten stage - more info will fall out and now flow to the nectt change
Why do we process information?
- We process information to reduce uncertainty (this is what the cognitive revolution wanted to look at).
- Since processing information takes time, the more uncertain something is, the longer it will take it.
- The amount of information processed is inversely related to how much we expect that information to occur. In other words, if we don’t know what to expect, we must process more.
- The more we expect sometthing to occur, the lesss processing we need to do. But if we arent quite sure or have lots of decisions to make, we will need more cognitive processing. The more info you need to process, the more ttime it will take for you to complete the task.
- Example: the zebra sentences. The sentence that contians more info and requires more processing because we are not certain about what the word could be. - In information processing, the amount of information provided by a given message is inversely proportional to the probability that that particular message will occur. More info given = less chance of it occuring.
What was William Hick’s experiment on information processing?
- William Hick (1952)
- The goal was to determine the relationship about how long it takes to make a decision and how much information is contained in the event.
- Research Question: what is the relationship between choice reaction time, a proxy for processing, and the amount of information within an event?
- Conducted a behavioral experiment measuring reaction time to detect light.
Webster and Thompson Experiment
Webster and Thompson (1953)
* Participants were air traffic controllers (the people who work here)
* They listened to two simultaneous messages: Each message had a call signal (familiar to the participants)
and unrelated words (unfamiliar to participants)
* Participants were to memorize and repeat back as much of these messages as they could remember. Call signal + 3 unrelated words.
What is the mind body problem?
- The mind-body problem comes from trying to answer the following question: How are mental events related to or caused by physical mechanisms in the body (brain)?
The two most common answers to this problem are: - Dualism: the mind and brain are separate entities that are equally important. They are fundamentally distinct substances but they interact in some way.
- Monism: the mind and brain are the same; Only one entity exists. There is no division between mental and physical processes. What that entity is can vary (based on different monist theories).
Dualism = Epiphenomenalism
- It is similar to interactionism as it suggest that the mind and brain are seperate entities but there is a limit in how they can inteact.
- Mental thoughts (mind) are caused by physical events (brain), but thoughts do not affect physical events
* One way interaction
* Only physical can alter mind. Mind cannot alter physical.
* The mind is a byproduct og the physical body. It is dependent on the physical brain. - Mental events are like steam coming off a train (Thomas Huxley)
* The steam (mind) does not affect how the train (brain) works, even if it is a separate entity.
* The steam is seperate from the train (seperate entity) but it comes off from the thrain, it is a byproduct. However, it will not alter the train itself.
Example of epiphenomenalism
Mental thoughts are the result of me having a physicla response to the hot pot. Me thinking the pot is hot will not cause me to pull my hand away, it is the actual physical response of the pain that causes me to pull away.
Thalamus
Hypothalamus
Amygdala
Thalamus and Hypothalamus: involuntary responses
Amygdala: emotional responses.
Functional Specialiazation
- Modern cognitive neuroscience identifies brain area or networks that supports a particular cognitive function
- Established via Neuropsychological cases and Neuroimaging tools (examples to come in a few slides)
- E.g., Fusiform face area responds selectively to the perception of faces
- But some evidence it just discriminates exemplars of any category someone has expertise
Greebles study in the textbook
Regions in the brain that responds only when people see a face. If FFA is damaged you cannot identify faces. Other theory: Maybe this region is active when we need to discriminate between thigs we are very good at doing. Ex: car, sheep.
Example of skin conductance
Example: individuals with PTSD often have problems with regulating emotions and tested them when listening to white noise (neutral, non emotional) noise vs conbat sounds.
* Three participant groups
* Veterans with PTSD, Veterans without PTSD, Control Participants
- Two test conditions
* White noise, Combat sounds - Higher skin conductance in people with PTSD when hearing combat sounds. Much higher skin conductance response for people that were in war vs controls. These sounds are still emotionally arousing for both but it is amplified when you have PTSD.
What is the classic finding of split brain cases?
- Left hemisphere supports speech and language
processing
* Without communication, information to the right visual field (left hemisphere) can be verbally named and
described in words - Right hemisphere supports visual-spatial processing
* Without communication, information to left visual field(right hemisphere) cannot be described verbally but can be expressed via visuo-spatial processes.
Essentially, Linguitic info to the right visual field can be procesed by LH. Linguistic info to the left visual field cannot be processed, cannot say what it is but can draw it.
Functional Specialization and fMRI
- Parahippocampal place area (PPA) for thinking about spatial layouts
- Supplementary motor area (SMA) for performing or imagining movement
Tested people in a vegatative state: Placed them in an fMRI and ask yes or no questions.
* People in non-responsive vegetative state via brain responses.
* Using brain specialization, ask patients to respond yes/no to questions by thinking about tennis (SMA) or walking through their home (PPA) while in an MRI scanner.
- depending on what they were thinking, different brain area was activated.
Brain stimulation
- Noninvasive method of changing brain activity that
can inhibit or increase activity (stimulate particular regions of brain) - A main form is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
in a focal magnetic field induces temporary change in
brain activity- Placed over part of brain. Electricity is indiced into a particular field of brain. We can either stimulate or impair the region of the brain that is under the coil.
TMS may improve memory
- Tested 2 groups of subjects: one group gets one variation, other group gets complete different variation. This gave a understanding of baseline memory function.
- Participants in the TMS group had improved scores (up to 25%) on the post-training compared to the pre-training memory test.
