Midterm 1 Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology?
How the mind acquires, retains and uses knowledge.
Introspectionism
Examination of one’s own thoughts and feelings.
Focused on the conscious though, qualities of mental experience, considered a non-science.
What three researchers were involved in Introspectionism?
1) Whilhem Wundt
2) Edward Tichener
3) Wiliam James
Why did introspectionism fail?
Because researchers could not distinguish between true + false observations.
What is the flaw of behaviourism?
Has a difficult time explaining how different stimuli could result in the same behavior since it focuses on understanding how one specific stimulus elicits one specific behaviour.
What researchers were involved in behaviourism?
1) B.F. Skinner
2) John Watson
Who criticized B.F. Skinner and why?
Noam Chomsky because he did not agree with Skinner’s view that language acquisition could be understood by behaviour + reward alone.
What is Behaviourism?
They believe that conscious experience is too subjective and unreliable. They prefer to study science directly and only account for what is observable.
What researchers were involved in psychophysics?
1) Ernest Weber
2) Gustave Fechner
What is psychophysics?
Mathematical relation between external stimulus and regular and measurable relation between environmental energy and mental process.
Who is Ulric Neisser?
He wrote the book on cognitive psychology.
Who is Frederic Bartlett?
Said that people rely on schemas to shape and organize their memories.
Who is Edward Tolman?
Learning = Acquisition of new knowledge not just change in behaviour.
Who is Donald Broadbent?
He established computer based vocabulary.
What caused the Cognitive Revolution? Why did people move away from Behaviourism?
Human behaviour is routinely determined by our understanding of stimuli.
Who is Richard Tolman?
A behaviourist who had rats run through mazes flodded with water and was unable to explain their behaviour, unless he considered the fact that they may have a cognitive map (Edward Tolman showed that the rats have cognitive maps and acquire knowledge).
Who is Immanuel Kant and what did he do?
He established the transcendental method that says we must to determine underlying causes leading to observed effects (working backwards).
For instance, we cannot see electrons, but we know that they are there.
What are the three components of the computer model of memory and the brain?
1) Environmental energy = information
2) Psychological processes = coding + representation
3) Memory = storage + retrieval
What are the three components of knowledge?
1) Acquired
2) Retained
3) Used
It is not just a copy of sensory input, but an internal representation of external realities based on memory + content.
What evidence do we have that different parts of the brain do different things?
1) Broadman’s areas (Nissl + Golgi stain)
2) Phineas Gage
We look at the brain using fMRIs, EEGs, PET scans, etc.
What are the three components of visual perception?
1) Form perception (what is it?)
2) Depth perception (where is it?)
3) Motion perception (what is it doing?)
How is motion perception divided?
1) Dorsal stream (where?)
- Posterior parietal cortex
2) Ventral stream (what ?)
- Inferotemporal cortex
What is the binding problem?
We have difficulties putting everything we work on together.
What are the two solutions to the binding problem?
1) Spatial Position (if properties come from the same space, then they belong to the same object)
2) Rhythm (if the different neural systems processing the stimuli are firing in synchrony, then they are processing the same object)
There is specificity of neurons in the visual system, so different neurons have different receptive fields, what are they?
1) Line orientation
2) Edge detector
3) Centre-surround (light in centre of rf or around)
4) Direction of movement
5) Dot detectors (light presented in circular areas)
What is parallel processing?
Explains how we can process colour, shapes, movement, etc., all at once.
Our what and where pathways are processed together.
Explain the match band illusion
Lateral inhibition exaggerates the contrast at the edge, process called edge enhancement (signal is decreased for a centre cell but increased for an edge cell)
What is the difference between perception and sensation?
Perception is NOT sensation.
Sensation is when our sensory receptors detect sensory stimuli.
Perception involves the organization, interpretation and conscious experience of those sensations.
What are the three categories of Form Perception?
1) Perceptual constancies
2) Perceptual organization of forms
3) Depth perception
What are the perceptual constancies?
1) Size constancy (at different distances…)
2) Shape constancy (at different angles…)
3) Brightness constancy (checkers board example)
4) Color constancy (despite illumination)
What are the perceptual organization of forms and their subgroups?
1) Figure/ground separation
2) Gestalt grouping principles:
- Similarity (row of flowers)
- Closure (pole blocking truck, filling in gap)
- Proximity
- Good continuation (X not 2 Vs)
- Common fate (school of fish)
- Simplicity (making out simple shapes within an object)
How is depth perception divided?
1) Oculomotor (accommodation of the lens, and convergence which is how eyes recognize distances of up to 10 m)
2) Visual (binocular and monocular)
- Monocular: static cues and motion parallax (images get bigger as you move closer)
Interposition
Close objects block far objects
Line perspective
Close converging lines = greater perceived distance (train tracks)
Reduced clarity
The greater the distance the less the clarity
Height in the visual field
Distant objects are higher in our visual fields
Relative size
Two objects are assumed to be the same size, the one that produces the larger retinal image (i.e. takes up more space on our retina) is assumed to be closer
Ames room
Tricks in size constancy and expectations to mess with our depth perception.
Shading
Contributes to our perception of dimension, and there is bias since we are used to light coming from the top.
Textural gradients
Texture appears smaller and less detailed when far
Structure through motion
Motion provides cues to 3D properties of objects, e.g. dots make 2 people dancing
Movement gradient, motion parallax
Things that are closer to us move much faster
What is binocular disparity?
Helps us draw inferences about depth, refers to the difference in image location as seen by the left and right eyes.
Global to local recognition
Recognize the whole followed by parts
Local to global recognition
Identify the parts followed by the whole
Reification
Treating something complex or abstract as concrete.
Perception provides more details than the raw sensory input.
The educated eye
Some experts are able to “see” better.
What are the three approaches to object recoginition?
1) Template matching
2) Feature analysis
3) Componential/ structure approach
What is template matching, the issue and solution?
Concept: Matching sensory input to stored templates.
Issue: Requires too many templates for all variations.
Solution: Using transformations to align inputs with templates.
What is feature theory? And how is Treisman’s Conjunction Search evidence?
Concept: Objects consist of separable parts (features like lines, edges).
Evidence:
Treisman’s Conjunction Search: Detecting a combination of features is slower than detecting a single feature.
Pop-out effects in visual search.
Structural Theory (Recognition by Components)
Objects are combinations of simple 3D components called “geons.”
Hierarchical: Objects can be broken into geons.
Geons allow object recognition from various viewpoints.
What are the two categories of Object agnosia?
Apperceptive Agnosia:
Can’t form a coherent visual image, but basic features are intact.
Associative Agnosia:
Can perceive objects but can’t associate meaning.
What is prosopagnosia?
Face blindness: Recognizes a face but cannot identify the person.
What does search asymmetries mean?
Definition: Some visual features are easier to detect than others.
Examples:
Easier to detect vertical lines among horizontal lines (or vice versa).
Recognizing the presence of a feature is faster than recognizing its absence.
Problem with geons?
Some objects are too complicated for geons
What is evidence for geons?
1) Priming only occurs when objects have the same geons
2) We can recognize objects faster when their geons are intact
What is the frequency effect?
Higher word frequency → Higher baseline activation levels → Easier to reach threshold for recognition.
What is repetition priming?
Recognizing a word is faster on subsequent encounters.
Activation energy required decreases with repetition.
What is Well-Formedness?
Faster recognition for words with familiar letter pairs (bigrams).
Example: Recognizing “SKORP” is easier than “XKQRP” because “SK” is common.
What are overregularization errors?
Irregular strings are often misperceived as familiar ones.
Example: Misreading “COSN” as “CORN.”
What is the context effect?
Reading the “MAN RAN” instead of “THE MHN RAN” even though the A and H look the same, because of context.
Robust Pattern Recognition?
Mechanisms like context and repetition explain the Word Superiority Effect, where recognizing a letter is easier within a word than in isolation.
What are the three components of attention models?
Alerting: Maintaining a vigilant state.
Orienting: Shifting focus to sensory events.
Central Executive: Directing attention towards specific tasks.
Directed attention?
Endogenous (internal), controlled, conceptually driven.
Captured attention?
Exogenous (external), automatic, data-driven.
Inattentional blindness?
Failure to notice unexpected events (e.g., door carrier experiment).
Change blindness?
Failure to notice visual changes unless they alter meaning (e.g., missing changes in a picture).
Radiologists Scanning X-Rays?
Miss subtle features like a “gorilla” in an image because they aren’t trained for unexpected anomalies.
Security Screening?
Miss unusual but non-specific objects (e.g., out-of-place items).
Dual tasking?
(Strayer and Johnston, 2001):
Listening (radio/audiobooks) is less disruptive than generating words or conversations.
Broadbent’s Bottleneck Model (Early Selection)
Unimportant information filtered early before higher analysis.
Limited processing capacity.
Treisman’s Attenuation Theory
Unattended information isn’t completely blocked but has its “volume turned down.”
Deutsch & Deutsch (Late Selection)
All sensory inputs are analyzed, but the late filter determines response relevance
Dichotic Listening Task (Cherry 1953)
Participants shadows message in one ear and ignores the message in another ear
Cocktail party effect (Moray 1959)
Hearing one’s name in an unattended channel distracts and is processed for meaning.
Priming Effect (Treisman, 1960)
Similar inputs from both ears combine during shadowing.
Recall meaning of shadowed sentence is biased by unattended words (Mckay 1973)
Space-Based attention
Valid cues improve performance, invalid cues incur costs.
Evidence: Space influences how attention is directed.
Object-Based attention
Patients with unilateral neglect syndrome were much quicker at identifying stimulus in the red circle than the blue, and when they observed it rotate, even if the red circle was now in their negligible side, they could still recognize stuff in it quicker.
Benefits of practice and automaticity
Practice reduces the cognitive load of tasks.
Divided attention becomes organized into a single task.
Downside to Practice and Automaticity
Automatic tasks (e.g., Stroop task) are harder to suppress when focus is needed.
Priming + attention - Low validity
Benefits of prime: Big (not huge)
Cost of being misled: Tiny
Priming + attention - High validity
Benefits of prime: Huge
Cost of being misled: Massive
Divided attention and multi-tasking
General Tasks:
Rely on shared cognitive resources (e.g., memory, decision-making).
Specific Tasks:
Evidence: Words in one ear interfere less with visual stimuli than spoken responses.
Example: Verbal responses interfere with verbal analysis.
Dual task response
Performance slows for simultaneous tasks requiring the same resources.
Example: Driving while on the phone creates a bottleneck in response selection.
Response selection bottleneck
Decisions about actions (e.g., driving and speaking) are limited to one action at a time.
