Lecture One Flashcards
Introduction
What can you not directly measure in cognitive psych?
Internal mental processes
What do cog psychs measure instead?
Responses to stimuli or mental processes
What is ASS?
Methods we can use to measure mental processes
Anecdotes, Self tests, stream of consciousness
What is an anecdote?
Stories about the way we think
What is a self test?
Systematic about the way we think
What is a stream of consciousness?
Blurting out moment by moment whatever is on our mind
Who is the godfather of cog psych?
William James
What did William James write ab?
The species present. Published in 1890. perceived duration of the present moment
Asked about the length of that based on his own self experiences and self examinations of mental processes
Problems with introspection?
Introspection is
Prone to bias
Not accurate
Some mental processes may not be responsive to introspection
What is metacognition?
Systematic way of studying our thoughts
How does behaviourism explore the mind?
Associations and responses to stimuli
Assumes there are no internal mental processes
Skinner
Pavlov
Carefully controlled stimuli and measurement of behaviour
What are 4 issues w behaviourism?
We can form sentences we havent heard of before
Children can form language without explicit reinforcement
Language is developed according to stumble stimulus response
Learning language can be explained by stimulus response associations
What are 3 concepts of cog psych after cog revolution?
- The mind acts as a computer w info processing
- Decomposition - cognition is formed of many separate subprocesses interacting w each other & decomposing these processes allows us to study them in isolation
- Representations - Cognitive, processes acting on and transforming information
What is thinking?
The processing of mental representations
What are mental representations?
Mental states about things
(Mental state is an idea/image that stands in for something that exists in the world around us)
What is a mental state?
ideas/ images that stand in for something that exists around us
form mental representations
What is processing?
encoding, storing and manipulating mental representations
Cognitive neuroscience
Use brain imaging to look at what produces behaviours
We measure the brain in action
A variety of techniques
eg MRI, fMRI
Make inferences
When durations are less than 1 second in a task, what area in the brain is found to be active?
When a person is responding
to durations less than one second, the blood flow or brain activity active is in the cerebellum
associated w movement control
short durations important w how we control our movement
When durations of tasks are longer than one second, what brain area is active?
Greater activity in the prefrontal cortex, front of the brain
associated w complicated/higher level thinking
cog processes
supports decomposition, different areas of the brain so likely to be distinct subprocesses
What is one advantage of cognitive neuroscience and 2 disadvantages of cognitive neuroscience?
ADV- observe activity in the brain
DISADV -
Our methods are crude, we only get blurred and low quality view
Often provides limited conceptual insight
What is embodied cognition?
cognition are separate processes happening in our brain
embodied cognition- our bodies determine which stimuli we will experience and what kind of actions/responses we will take.
so it takes into account how our bodies shape how we think
(Focuses on action and behaviourally relevant tasks)
Our body shapes how we sense and act on the world, cognition needs to be understood in this context
