mid sem Flashcards
What is the relationship between cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience?
Both focus on understanding cognitive processes.
Cognitive psychology is informed by neuroscientific knowledge and behavioural representations.
Cognitive neuroscience draws on models, paradigms and knowledge from cognitive psychology.
Define convergent evidence
Different sources of evidence, often from different approaches, that arrive at the same conclusion
Define divergent evidence
Evidence that indicates where the effects of different manipulations diverge, often eliminating alternate explanations for an observed effect
Define subjective cognitive function
How a person experiences their cognitive function, typically assessed in relation to cognitive function in everyday life.
What is the Cognitive Failure Questionnaire?
The most widely used measure of subjective cognitive function. Higher scores indicate greater cognitive failures/poorer subjective cognitive functioning
What structural brain differences have been found to be associated with higher CFQ scores??
- Reduced activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) -> reduced error detection
- Reduced frontal and parietal white matter -> attention sensory integration and spatial awareness
What are the disadvantages to subjective cognitive measures?
- Self-presentation biases
- Reporting biases
- Metacognitive insight
- Reference group bias
What are some methods to measure internal psychological processes?
- Self-reports
- Peripheral physiological responses
- Neural activation in response to stimuli
- Behaviour measurement
What are some examples of tests that measure internal psychological processes?
- Stroop test
- Posner cueing paradigm
- Mental imagery involved in rotation of objects
What is synaesthesia?
Neurological condition where individuals experience certain sensory input in different sensory modalities
How does the brain structure of a synaesthete differ from a normal human brain?
- Greater white matter connections.
- Greater connectivity within the inferior temporal cortex for projector type
What is the difference between a construct and an operationalisation?
A construct is a theoretical psychological concept whereas operationalisations are the methods for manipulating or measuring constructs
What are two key factors that contribute to a good theory?
- Falsifiability: conceivable set of evidence or outcomes that would disprove or refute the theory
- Explanatory rather than descriptive: identifies the mechanisms via which predicted changes occur
What is the amygdala’s role in emotion processing?
- Fear conditioning
- Processing of fear-relevant stimuli, of fearful facial expressions
- Processing of negative and positive intense emotional stimuli
What are the two approaches to conceptualising emotion?
Categorical approach: assumes a handful of discrete and basic human emotions that are universal
Dimensional approach: assumes emotions can be distilled down to values along key dimensions, usually valence and arousal
What is the theoretical functional value of fear emotion?
Rapid identification of threats through expanded intake of sensory information and processing
What is the theoretical functional value of disgust emotion?
Constriction of sensory information
Describe a repeated-measures research design. What are the pros and cons, as well as the way to mitigate risk?
Every participant is in each condition or in each level of the independent variable
Pro: increased power, individual differences accounted for
Risk: potential order effects
Mitigation: counter balancing participants across positive and neutral conditions
Describe a independent groups research design. What are the pros and cons, as well as the way to mitigate risk?
Different participants in each condition/level of the IV
Pro: no potential order effects
Risk: individual differences
Mitigation: random assignment and large enough sample size
What is absolute performance in research interpretation?
The level of performance that would be expected on a particular task due to chance. Compared to relative performance.
What is a ceiling effect?
When a considerable percentage of participants score the best or maximum score, indicating that the task is too easy and the DV cannot be measured
What is a floor effect?
When a considerable percentage of participants score the worst or minimum score, indicating that the task is too difficult and the DV cannot be measured
What is a double dissociation?
When one patient shows a disruption in one domain and preservation in another, and another patient shows the opposite, indicating that these domains are independent
What is a single dissociation?
When a patient shows a disruption in one domain and preservation in another.
What is an interaction effect in research?
A reflection of either:
- where the effect of one variable changes in magnitude across levels of the other variable (quantitative changes)
- where the effect of one variable changes in direction across levels of the other variable (qualitative changes)
What does an interaction effect between variables look like on a graph?
Non-parallel lines
What are the two ways human can regulate their spatial attention processing?
Shifts of attention and resizing of attentional breadth
What is a covert shift of attention?
When attention is applied to a location that is different to where the eyes are focused
What is the Zoom-lens model of attentional breadth?
There is a trade-off between the size of an attended region and the magnitude of perceptual enhancement.
Predicts that attentional resources are finite and that all perceptual processing is enhanced under narrow attentional breadth
What is a direct replication in psychological research?
Where a study’s method is repeated as closely as possible to the original
What is a conceptual replication in psychological research?
Where different methods are used to test a single hypothesis targeting the same features/variables
What are likely causes of failures to replicate psychological studies?
- Unidentified context and individual-level effects: the original effect is real but not for all individuals or under all conditions
- Type 1 error: either by chance or poor research
What is statistical power?
The probability of correctly detecting an effect in a sample if it is there in the population
What are the discussed practices that contribute to a good research design?
- Power analysis for participant recruitment: stopping rule
- Transparency
- Preregistration: commitment to predictions, stopping rules
What are the covered types of reliability?
- Test-retest: over time, repeated tests
- Internal consistency: across items
- Inter-rater reliability: across different researchers
Define affective empathy
Feeling what someone else is feeling, with awareness of the source of the emotion
Define cognitive empathy
Being able to take someone else’s perspective to understand their thoughts, beliefs and feelings
What is the double dissociation evidence for the independence of cognitive and affective empathy?
Damage to inferior frontal gyrus: intact cognitive, impaired affective
Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex: intact affective, impaired cognitive
Define experimental control
The methodological choices in a study that are designed to minimise the effect of extraneous variables
Define ecological validity
The extent to which the conclusions of the study can be generalised to situations in the real world where the psychological process would naturally occur
What is the difference between basic and applied research?
Basic: scientific research that aims to increase knowledge and improve understanding of mechanisms or processes of interest
Applied: research conducted with the aim of solving a specific real-world, practical problem
What is the executive decline hypothesis?
The notion that executive functions decline with age, meaning goal directed actions decline
What is the inhibition hypothesis of aging?
The notion that inhibitory processes are impaired as people age
What is the dynamic integration theory of aging?
Older adults have reduced executive function abilities, meaning that negative stimuli is more difficult to process, leading a positivity bias under high cognitive load
What is the socioemotional selectivity theory?
Older adults are susceptible to positivity bias due to changes in goals to savour meaningful/positive experiences
What are the characteristics of magnocellular neurons?
Large receptive fields, faster conduction speed, poor spatial resolution, greater temporal resolution
Promote rapid processing at the expense of details
What are the characteristics of parvocellular neurons?
Small receptive fields, slower conduction speed, greater spatial resolution, poor temporal resolution
Bocanegra and Zeelenberg found that fearful faces (compared to neutral) elicited a bias towards preferential processing by which visual neuron type?
Magnocellular neurons
What cellular bias does better performance on a spatial gap task indicate?
Parvocellular neuron bias
What cellular bias does better performance on a temporal gap task indicate?
Magnocellular neuron bias
What did Gozli et al. (2012) find in their analysis of the effect of where an individual’s hands are in space on spatial and temporal tasks?
Hands near increases temporal task performance -> magnocellular
Hands far increases spatial task performance -> parvocellular
What did Pessoa et al. (2002) find in their study on the effect of attention on amygdala activation?
The amygdala was activated in the attended conditions, but not the unattended condition, indicating that stronger attentional manipulation can trump the amygdala’s emotional response.
-> Attention modulates amygdala activation to emotional stimuli
What was the issue with Gable and Harman-Jones’ research conclusions?
They claimed that motivational intensity in regard to a stimuli influenced attentional breadth, but failed to account for the valence of that stimuli
What evidence is consistent with the premotor theory of attention?
Covert shifts of attention involve weaker activation of the same neural circuits involved in saccadic eye movements.
Stimulating the frontal eye fields causes a covert shift of attention without overt eye movement.
What did Verissimo et al. find about executive function and age in their attention network task study?
Increased orienting processes
Reduced alerting efficiency
Non-linear executive function efficiency
