Midterm 1 Flashcards
Describe Plato’s view
- Idea was that we use logic to understand our world
- The world is a reflection of reality
- Proposed dualism and rationalism
- Knowledge comes from observation but is also “a priori”
What is dualism?
the mind is separate from the body
What is rationalism?
knowledge is acquired through reason, without the aid of the senses
Describe Aristotle’s view
- An empiricist
- Combined philosophical and scientific approaches to thinking
• Thought is forming associations based on observations
• The mind is nothing before forming associations
What is empiricism?
Knowledge comes only or primarily through sensory experience
What is structuralism?
Focused on identifying the basic building blocks of the conscious experience with analytic/experimental introspection
- Systematic, controlled observation was emphasized
- Focused on understanding the structure of the mind and higher cognitive processes
Who is Wilhelm Wundt?
Founded the first formal lab that studied psychological processes and proposed INTROSPECTION
Who is Edward Titchener?
Established experimental study of psychology and suggested that all things (sensations, memories) can be broken down into elements
What is funcitonalism?
- Focused on WHY the mind works
- Not interested in breaking down mental states to basic elements, but rather the usefulness of knowledge
- Did not think introspection was effective alone, focused on observing actions
Who is William James?
- Believed consciousness is personal and cannot be broken down into parts
- It is constantly changing, we never have the exact same idea
What is behaviourism?
- Study stimulus-response relationships; ignore mental processes
- Shifted from a focus on the mind to behaviour
ex: operant and classical conditioning
PROBLEM: failed to account for many aspects of complex human behaviour
Who is Ulric Neisser?
Responsible for birth of cognitive psychology
What was the main aim of the cognitive revolution?
understanding cognition involves breaking thinking down into abstract information into a series of steps or stages
What is the invariance assumption?
human cognition is promoted by processes that are
invariant & regular across situations
What is the control assumption?
situations/experiments can & must be controlled to allow
conclusions to be attributed specifically to the variable being manipulated
What are Personal-level explanations?
focus on describing & understanding the person as
an active agent interacting with their environment
What are Subpersonal-level explanations?
focus on describing & understanding the brain
mechanisms that support cognitions
What is cognitive ethology?
States that cognitions are contextualized to the situation in which they occur & vary as a function of the
situation
According to the classic cognitive view, what are the two things present at an information processing stage?
- Representations: a symbolic form of an entity
- Processes: what is manipulating or transforming the representation (the + in an equation)
What is the information theory?
• We are information processors and it takes time to process information
• We process information to reduce uncertainty
- The less likely an ‘event’, the more information processing
What is Hick’s law?
a mathematical equation to show that the more information contained in a signal (the more bits), the longer it takes to make a (correct) response to this signal (the more ‘energy’ consumed)
What is decision fatigue?
taxing cognitive processes has consequences on our ability to make later decisions
What is ecological validity?
the extent to which the findings of a research study are able to be generalized to real-life settings
What is a schema?
organized mental templates to assist information processing that direct exploration of the environment
What is cognitive ethology?
Recognizes the benefit of standard laboratory tests, but suggests that these alone will result in valid theories of recognition
- Cognitive processes are used differently depending on goals, motivation and our environment
What is cognitive neuroscience?
Examines the brain mechanisms that give rise to mental functions
What is interactionism?
a form of dualism that suggests the mind and brain are separate entities
What is Epiphenomenalism?
The view that mental events is the result of physical events (changes in the brain)
- The mind is a by-product of brain activity
What is parallelism?
The mind and brain are two aspects of the same thing
- Every event in the mind has a corresponding event in the brain
What is isomorphism?
A thought (the mind) is linked to the brain through a related pattern to what would be activation for an associated physical experience - but the OUTPUT is different
What is neural representation?
what we experience is driven by the particular computations that are performed by activated neurons
What is functional specialization?
- The brain is composed of modules, and each module performs one simple task
- Thought to be inborn compartments
What are modules?
Dedicated systems that work on specific input for running specific mental tasks
- Domain specific (only works on certain input)
- Works in a mandatory manner
- Shares the results of their processes to other modules, but not the process (a criticism)
What is phrenology?
Parts of the brain correspond to mental functions and personality characteristics
- Well-used mental functions cause the related brain area to grow and protrude (bump)
- Under-used mental functions cause the related brain area to shrink (dent)
What is the law of mass action?
learning and memory (mental tasks) depend on the total mass of brain tissue remaining after damage
What is the law of equipotentiality?
Any part of the brain can do the job of any other part of the brain
- Even if certain brain areas are specialized to perform functions, the brain is plastic and can override this specialization
What is an EEG?
measures the activity in a large group of neurons at certain times during a task
What is a PET?
Shows 3D images of how the brain is working and shows how certain functions affect the brain function
What is a structural MRI?
Shows the anatomy of the brain (volume, location of grey matter)
- Used to detect structural anomalies
What is a diffusion MRI?
uses MRI technique to measure the brain’s white matter tracts
What is an fMRI?
Measures activity in the brain through blood flow
What is transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)?
transient disruption or activation of brain activity by applying a focal magnetic field
What is synaethesia?
• A condition in which one sense automatically triggers the experience of another sense
- Grapheme-color synesthesia is the condition in which a person sees letters and numbers in colors
What is the McGurk effect?
Speech sound “ba” simultaneously presented with visual speech sound “fa” heard as “fa”
- A multisensory illusion that demonstrates the dominance of visual perception
What is an extramission belief?
the false idea that when we see, there is a ray that exits the eye into an object
What is the ventral pathway responsible for?
Shape, size, visual details
What is the dorsal pathway responsible for?
Location, space, movement
What is blindsight?
Damage to the primary visual cortex that results in perceiving without seeing
- Patients report no awareness of stimuli in their damaged visual field, but can correctly respond to question about objects presented in the damaged visual field area on a forced-choice task (guess if a light was on or off)
What is akinetopsia?
impairments in processing spatial info, but not object info
What is visual agnosia?
Damage along the ventral visual pathway that results in selective problems in visual object recognition or spatial
- Other non-visual forms of recognition are intact
What is the Extra-striate body area (EBA)?
the brain area involved in processing non-facial body parts
What is the Parahippocampal place area (PPA)?
the brain area responsible for the conscious recognition of places and scenes
What is the fusiform face area (FFA)?
the brain area responsible for the conscious recognition of faces
What is prosopagnosia?
The loss in the ability to recognize faces while the ability to recognize other objects visually is still present
- People with this rely on non-facial characteristics to identify others
- Results from injury of FFA
What is apperceptive visual agnosia?
A failure to recognize objects due to problems with perceiving objects
- Sensory processing is still intact
- Visual features can be detected, but there are problems grouping visual features into meaningful percepts cannot recognize objects, draw, or copy an object even if they have knowledge of that object
What is associative agnosia?
inability to associate visual input with meaning
What is the pattern recognition theory?
The idea that we match the pattern in visual input to existing patterns according to memory
What is the template matching theory?
Match the pattern you see, stored in short-term memory (probe) to memory traces (templates of previous objects you have encountered) in long-term (secondary) memory
What is the prototypes theory?
Compare visual pattern with a prototype, and the average representation of the object in memory formed from what is common among all encountered instances
- Allows for flexible object identification because a good enough match (resemblance) can support object recognition
What are feature detection theories?
Idea that complex information is broken down into individual parts (features) for recognition
- Each feature processed separately and then assembled into a pattern for recognition
Describe Selfridge’s pandemonium model
Bottom level:
• Individual features are represented (size, colour, shape, etc.)
Middle level:
• Detects particular patterns of features and decides if it matches its particular pattern
Top level:
• Decides which pattern is being recognized based on the input of the cognitive demons
What is parallel processing?
we perform many computations at once rather than processing information in serial order
What are geons?
Basic geometric shapes
- Have distinct properties that we can perceive from any angle, which account for how we recognize objects from different viewpoints
- Resistant to noise and this feature explains why object recognition is robust
What is the ambient optical array (AOA)?
The AOA is the visual information present at a point of view
- Changes in the AOA that are the cues about perception
What is the principle of emergence?
we use all Gestalt principles to form an object, therefore the object emerges from the image
What is sound?
A change in air pressure
Where does high frequency resonate on the basilar membrane?
Towards the base
Where does low frequency resonate on the basilar membrane?
near apex of membrane
What is frequency (Hz)?
rate of vibrations or changes in air pressure
What is amplitude or intensity (dB)?
magnitude of air pressure disturbance
What is the phase?
starting point of wave
What is loudness?
Interaction between amplitude and frequency
What is auditory scene analysis?
The process by which we form mental representations of sound (sound waves) into auditory streams
- Used to infer meaning to auditory systems and association of sounds with their sources
What is an auditory stream?
independent “unit” of sound to which we assign meaning
What is a spectrogram?
visual representation of sound
What is auditory grouping?
Grouping and separation of a sequence of tones into 2 auditory streams based on separation in time
- Gestalt principle of proximity (increasing presentation exaggerates the effect of differences in the frequency dimension, like one “high” melody and one “low” melody at high speeds)
- Stream segregation is higher at higher speeds
What is perceptual completion?
when we assign meaning to something that isn’t actually there, but is covered by something, which gives an illusion of completion
What is continuity?
A discontinuous soft sound is heard as continuous (perceptual completion) when covered up by a louder sound
- Sound becomes more continuous when white noise is added
What is attention?
Process we use to monitor information (this is highly debated)
What is bottom-up attention?
stimuli that pulls your attention towards it
What is top-down attention?
you voluntarily enact to direct your attention to something
What is selective attention?
attending to one thing while ignoring everything else
What is sustained attention?
maintaining focus on a task or to a stimulus
- aka being vigilant
What is divided attention?
shifting attentional focus between two things/tasks
What is spatial neglect?
• Neglect or inattention to spatial information in contralesional space
- Damage to higher order processing regions in the parietal lobes (involved in top-down attention)
What is change blindness?
failure to notice a change in the environment as you are focused on something else
What is the spotlight metaphor?
Attention zeroes in on a particular region in space like a spotlight and we move attention along the pathway
What is the filter model of selective attention?
There is a filter in our information-processing pipeline (perceptual analysis) that prevents us from becoming overloaded
What is the early filter model?
- Selects information for further processing based on common physical characteristics of a channel (similar spatial location, frequency of sound)
- A particular message from the perceptual input channel is analyzed for meaning and enters conscious awareness
- Info not selected by the filter is held in sensory buffer and lost over time
What is Treisman’s attenuation theory?
An early filter attenuates (dials down) the influence of unattended material
- Allows for some aspects of unattended material to be processed for meaning
- Such as your name or a ‘shocked’ word
What are late selection filter models?
We process relevant (attended) and irrelevant (non-attended) information and select what we want to attend to at the level of the meaning
What is controlled porcessing?
activities we must effortfully attend to consciously
What is automatic processing?
activities that do not require conscious attention to run smoothly
What is the load theory of selective attention?
Filtering will occur at different points in the processing pipeline depending on the task demands
- This is because we have limited capacity
- Task difficulty (perceptual load) determines how and when we select out attention to reach this capacity
What is the central resource capacity view?
One resource pool from which all attention resources are allocated
- The same pool for visual, auditory, taste, etc.
- Attention is like cognitive effort
What is the multiple resource capacity view?
Multiple resources from which attention resources are allocated
- Different attentional resources for vision, auditory, etc.
- Attentional limits depend on the similarity of the relevant and irrelevant information
What is change blindness?
failure to notice change when it occurs during eye movement away from stimuli or when vision is obscured
What is inattentional blindness?
Failure to attend to new or unexpected events in our environment that is in plain sight
- Ex: deer jumps in front of your car and you don’t notice right away even though you are watching the road
What is déjà vu?
• The impression of having experienced a situation that has never happened
• A new location is ‘perceived’ under distraction (inattentional blindness) so you aren’t aware of it but still ‘register it’
- The next time you encounter the location with awareness, it feels familiar due to implicit priming even though it is tagged as consciously new
What is inhibition of return (IOR)?
Attention is inhibited in returning to a recently attended location after a longer duration between cue and target
- Brain marks area as searched, so you’re not focused there anymore
What is the feature integration theory?
We focus on how we analyse visual scenes (object-based attention)
- Objects are collected of features and we pay attention to this feature differently for phases of attention
What is the pre-attention phase of attention?
different visual features are coded in parallel in separate feature maps automatically
What is the focused-attention phase of attention?
features are integrated together to guide a search, which is done in a serial order
What is a feature search?
Search for an object that is different from the distractors based on one feature
- independent of set size
- pre-attention phase
What is a conjunction search?
Search for an object that is different from the distractors on many features
- dependent on set size
- focused attention stage
What is overt visual attention?
Attending to something with your eye movements
- People fixate on eyes and mouth first
- People fixate on faces in a scene first
What is covert visual attention?
attending to something without eye movements
What is the task-switching paradigm?
Changing the task comes with a switch cost
- Switch cost: a decline in performance after switching tasks
- The cognitive system must be reset to engage in the correct behaviour
What is mind wandering?
A shift in mental resources away from a primary task and toward internal thoughts
- Action slips: when you complete actions that coincide with your internal thoughts rather than what’s happening in the external world
What is attentional capture?
A new stimulus is noticed even when attention is focused elsewhere
• Bottom-up cues from the environment (automatic)
What are the different ways that people can be blind?
Dysfunction of sensory receptors or dysfunction of information processing centers
What is the “unaware mode” of blindsight 1?
Above chance discrimination in the absence of conscious awareness
What is the “aware mode” of blindsight 2?
Awareness of certain types of visual events presented to the blind field (feeling that something occured)
What is the difference between 1st and 2nd order gratings?
1st: the luminance of the bright and dark bars is matched in overall flux of the background
2nd: randomly arranged granules
