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PSYC3015 > mid sem > Flashcards

mid sem Flashcards

1
Q

What is the relationship between cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience?

A

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.

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2
Q

Define convergent evidence

A

Different sources of evidence, often from different approaches, that arrive at the same conclusion

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3
Q

Define divergent evidence

A

Evidence that indicates where the effects of different manipulations diverge, often eliminating alternate explanations for an observed effect

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4
Q

Define subjective cognitive function

A

How a person experiences their cognitive function, typically assessed in relation to cognitive function in everyday life.

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5
Q

What is the Cognitive Failure Questionnaire?

A

The most widely used measure of subjective cognitive function. Higher scores indicate greater cognitive failures/poorer subjective cognitive functioning

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6
Q

What structural brain differences have been found to be associated with higher CFQ scores??

A
  • Reduced activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) -> reduced error detection
  • Reduced frontal and parietal white matter -> attention sensory integration and spatial awareness
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7
Q

What are the disadvantages to subjective cognitive measures?

A
  • Self-presentation biases
  • Reporting biases
  • Metacognitive insight
  • Reference group bias
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8
Q

What are some methods to measure internal psychological processes?

A
  • Self-reports
  • Peripheral physiological responses
  • Neural activation in response to stimuli
  • Behaviour measurement
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9
Q

What are some examples of tests that measure internal psychological processes?

A
  • Stroop test
  • Posner cueing paradigm
  • Mental imagery involved in rotation of objects
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10
Q

What is synaesthesia?

A

Neurological condition where individuals experience certain sensory input in different sensory modalities

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11
Q

How does the brain structure of a synaesthete differ from a normal human brain?

A
  • Greater white matter connections.
  • Greater connectivity within the inferior temporal cortex for projector type
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12
Q

What is the difference between a construct and an operationalisation?

A

A construct is a theoretical psychological concept whereas operationalisations are the methods for manipulating or measuring constructs

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13
Q

What are two key factors that contribute to a good theory?

A
  • 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
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14
Q

What is the amygdala’s role in emotion processing?

A
  • Fear conditioning
  • Processing of fear-relevant stimuli, of fearful facial expressions
  • Processing of negative and positive intense emotional stimuli
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15
Q

What are the two approaches to conceptualising emotion?

A

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

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16
Q

What is the theoretical functional value of fear emotion?

A

Rapid identification of threats through expanded intake of sensory information and processing

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17
Q

What is the theoretical functional value of disgust emotion?

A

Constriction of sensory information

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18
Q

Describe a repeated-measures research design. What are the pros and cons, as well as the way to mitigate risk?

A

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

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19
Q

Describe a independent groups research design. What are the pros and cons, as well as the way to mitigate risk?

A

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

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20
Q

What is absolute performance in research interpretation?

A

The level of performance that would be expected on a particular task due to chance. Compared to relative performance.

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20
Q

What is a ceiling effect?

A

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

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21
Q

What is a floor effect?

A

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

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22
Q

What is a double dissociation?

A

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

23
Q

What is a single dissociation?

A

When a patient shows a disruption in one domain and preservation in another.

24
Q

What is an interaction effect in research?

A

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)

25
Q

What does an interaction effect between variables look like on a graph?

A

Non-parallel lines

26
Q

What are the two ways human can regulate their spatial attention processing?

A

Shifts of attention and resizing of attentional breadth

27
Q

What is a covert shift of attention?

A

When attention is applied to a location that is different to where the eyes are focused

28
Q

What is the Zoom-lens model of attentional breadth?

A

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

29
Q

What is a direct replication in psychological research?

A

Where a study’s method is repeated as closely as possible to the original

30
Q

What is a conceptual replication in psychological research?

A

Where different methods are used to test a single hypothesis targeting the same features/variables

31
Q

What are likely causes of failures to replicate psychological studies?

A
  • 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
32
Q

What is statistical power?

A

The probability of correctly detecting an effect in a sample if it is there in the population

33
Q

What are the discussed practices that contribute to a good research design?

A
  • Power analysis for participant recruitment: stopping rule
  • Transparency
  • Preregistration: commitment to predictions, stopping rules
34
Q

What are the covered types of reliability?

A
  • Test-retest: over time, repeated tests
  • Internal consistency: across items
  • Inter-rater reliability: across different researchers
35
Q

Define affective empathy

A

Feeling what someone else is feeling, with awareness of the source of the emotion

36
Q

Define cognitive empathy

A

Being able to take someone else’s perspective to understand their thoughts, beliefs and feelings

37
Q

What is the double dissociation evidence for the independence of cognitive and affective empathy?

A

Damage to inferior frontal gyrus: intact cognitive, impaired affective
Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex: intact affective, impaired cognitive

38
Q

Define experimental control

A

The methodological choices in a study that are designed to minimise the effect of extraneous variables

39
Q

Define ecological validity

A

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

40
Q

What is the difference between basic and applied research?

A

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

41
Q

What is the executive decline hypothesis?

A

The notion that executive functions decline with age, meaning goal directed actions decline

42
Q

What is the inhibition hypothesis of aging?

A

The notion that inhibitory processes are impaired as people age

43
Q

What is the dynamic integration theory of aging?

A

Older adults have reduced executive function abilities, meaning that negative stimuli is more difficult to process, leading a positivity bias under high cognitive load

44
Q

What is the socioemotional selectivity theory?

A

Older adults are susceptible to positivity bias due to changes in goals to savour meaningful/positive experiences

45
Q

What are the characteristics of magnocellular neurons?

A

Large receptive fields, faster conduction speed, poor spatial resolution, greater temporal resolution
Promote rapid processing at the expense of details

46
Q

What are the characteristics of parvocellular neurons?

A

Small receptive fields, slower conduction speed, greater spatial resolution, poor temporal resolution

47
Q

Bocanegra and Zeelenberg found that fearful faces (compared to neutral) elicited a bias towards preferential processing by which visual neuron type?

A

Magnocellular neurons

48
Q

What cellular bias does better performance on a spatial gap task indicate?

A

Parvocellular neuron bias

49
Q

What cellular bias does better performance on a temporal gap task indicate?

A

Magnocellular neuron bias

50
Q

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?

A

Hands near increases temporal task performance -> magnocellular
Hands far increases spatial task performance -> parvocellular

51
Q

What did Pessoa et al. (2002) find in their study on the effect of attention on amygdala activation?

A

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

52
Q

What was the issue with Gable and Harman-Jones’ research conclusions?

A

They claimed that motivational intensity in regard to a stimuli influenced attentional breadth, but failed to account for the valence of that stimuli

53
Q

What evidence is consistent with the premotor theory of attention?

A

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.

54
Q

What did Verissimo et al. find about executive function and age in their attention network task study?

A

Increased orienting processes
Reduced alerting efficiency
Non-linear executive function efficiency

PSYC3015 (2 decks)

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