Midterm 1 (NEW PROGRESS) Flashcards
What is the human brain often compared to?
- A computer
- It’s considered the most complex and sophisticated computer in the known universe
What are examples of activities that require intelligence (or cognition)?
- Talking
- Listening
- Navigating
- Reading
- Remembering
- Playing
- Working
What are examples of activities that don’t require intelligence (or cognition)?
- Lower-level functions
- Ex: breathing or digestion
What is the sum of all intelligent mental activities?
Cognition
What’s cognition?
- The acquisition and processing of sensory information about the world and within ourselves in order to make behavioural decisions
OR - The mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses
- Cognition is about processing external stimuli but also internal stimuli (dreams, thoughts)
What are different areas of cognition?
- Perception
- Attention
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory
- Language
- Problem-solving
- Decision making
What is the field of cognition primarily concerned with understanding?
The processes that allow things to go right and that produce complex behaviors
What year was dubbed the “decade of the brain”
The 1990s
What are the 2 major scientific disciplines that undermine the study of the brain and its functioning?
- Experimental psychology
- Neuroscience
Describe basic research
- Scientific research whose goal is to try to understand the world and its phenomena, without regard to specific end-use of this knowledge
- Use to understand how we perceive information, remember, reason and solve problems
Describe applied research
- Research concerned with the end goal of developing an application or solution to a problem
- Includes understanding natural changes to the mind, cognitive diseases and disorders
Describe the field of human factors
A field where research in perception can facilitate the design of systems with which people interact, such as machines or computer consoles
Describe the field of artificial intelligence
A branch of computer science and engineering that’s concerned with building machines that can perform some or all of the tasks that humans can do, and perhaps also some that we can’t do
What’s the rationale behind artificial intelligence from a psychology standpoint?
- That if we really understand how something works, we should be able to build it, or at least create a working model of it
- One of the best ways to gauge how much we understand what the brain does is to assess how well we’re able to build artificial devices that can produce its behaviour
What was one of the biggest surprises in the field of engineering in the 20th Century?
- How difficult it is to build a machine that can produce what we would consider intelligent behaviour
- Building a machine that can do the kind of things we humans take for granted (ex: recognizing objects, understanding language, making a plan) is very difficult
What used to be seen as the pinnacle of human intelligence?
The ability to play high-level chess
What’s Deep Blue?
- A chess-playing computer that beat the world chess champion
- It played chess by performing many simple operations carried out very quickly
What’s the difference between computer chess players and human chess players?
Computers can carry out millions or billions of calculations in a second while humans take much longer to carry out one calculation
What made people think that machines would one day be able to outthink people?
The deep blue chess-playing computer beating the world chess champion
What’s If-this-then-that programming?
When a human programmer specifies what a computer program should do under each condition
Ex: chatbots
What are chatbots?
Computer programs designed to carry on a conversation with a person in such a way that mimics real human interaction
What does the success of predetermined automation depend on?
- It depends on the predictability of the problem the machine will have to solve
- Ex: chess game is highly predictable
TRUE OR FALSE: The brain has unlimited processing resources
FALSE
- The brain has limited processing resources and it must constantly choose what to process among a variety of competing signals
What are the kinds of applications where machines have historically failed?
Those that require dealing with novel, constantly changing conditions that the machine has not encountered before
What do intelligent machines lack or struggle with?
Flexible intelligence
What’s the revolution taking place in Artificial Intelligence?
The programming approach of machine learning, where computers are programmed to learn, changing their behaviour to get better at some task
In the past decade, what are the techniques that the dominant form of machine learning uses?
- Techniques that are modeled on the brain
- These techniques are highly generic
What are the 3 main approaches to studying cognition?
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive psychology
- Computational modeling
What do the 3 main approaches to studying cognition contribute to research into cognition?
They contribute to the golden age of research into cognition
What’s neuroscience?
- The study of the physical brain and related systems
- Concerned with discovering the structures and processes taking place in the physical brain and linking it to the mind
- Asks: what parts of the brain carry out functions we see behaviourally?
What’s cognitive psychology?
- A field of psychology concerned with studying intelligence through the observation of behaviours (often using behavioural experiments)
- In general, cognitive psychology depends on measuring behaviours, such as how long it takes to respond to some presented stimulus, to develop theories of the underlying neurophysiological processes
What’s a naturalistic observation?
When researchers observe the behaviour of people or other organisms in their natural habitat, without any experimental intervention
What inspired the theory behind much of the research into cognition in the last approx. 60 years?
The rise of powerful computers
Why do cognitive psychologists often have to be clever to design experiments that can address a hypothesis in a meaningful way?
- Because of the inherently indirect nature of cognitive psychology methodology
- The results of experiments are hence also often open to interpretation and debate
What’s the goal of most research in artificial intelligence?
To build machines that can imitate human cognition, not as a means of understanding human cognition itself
What’s the Mind-body problem?
The question, or debate, of how mental events, such as thoughts, beliefs and sensations, are related to, or caused by, physical mechanisms taking place in the body, such as cellular or molecular processes in the brain
What’s dualism?
- Dualism views the mind and body as consisting of fundamentally different kinds of substances and properties
- Body = physical
- Mind = not physical
- For much of history, people believed in mind-body dualism
- Ancient and modern conceptions of dualism recognized that the mind and body have a strong relationship with one another
For much of human history, what did people assume about the relationship of the mind and body?
Many assumed that the human capacity for cognition couldn’t be explained based on the kinds of observable physical processes with which they were familiar -> due to the mind-body problem
What’s monism?
The view that there’s only one kind of basic substance in the world, whether exclusively physical or exclusively mental
What are the different types of monism?
- Physicalism/materialism
- Idealism
- Neutral monism
Describe the physicalism/materialism form of monism
- The view that all of reality is physical or material in nature
- Cognition is just another physical phenomenon and mental states can ultimately be explained as being based in the processes of the physical brain
- Any sense that there’s a non-physical mind is an illusion
Describe the idealism form of monism
- The view that all of reality is mental in nature
- The brain and all physical reality is really a mental construct, not the other way around
- Ex: in the Matrix
Describe the neutral monism form of monism
The view that there’s only one kind of substance that’s neither just physical or mental, and that mind and body are both composed of that same element
What is dualism often related or synonymous to?
With the idea of a soul or a spirit that’s common across people and time
Who first brought up Dualism in the western world?
- It was likely first formally articulated by the Greek philosopher Plato in around 350 B.C.
- He argued that the mind was based on an immortal soul that was, in some sense, more “real” than the physical world
What did René Descartes do in terms of dualism?
- He formalized the principles of dualism
- He proposed that the mind and body formed 2 different types of substance but that these could interact with one another
Who first identified the pineal gland?
- René Descartes
- The pineal gland is a structure in the centre of the brain
What’s pragmatic materialism?
- Science operates based on physical methods, measurements, and explanatory mechanisms and can’t test non-physical theories
- This view states that observable behaviour can be explained based on physical processes, but our inner consciousness may not be explained by these physical processes
- This view is also not based on the fact that we have a full understanding of how the physical brain works and how its function relates to behaviour (which we don’t)
- It instead reflects a belief that such an understanding is possible in principle, perhaps with the advance of scientific knowledge
What’s an example of pragmatic materialism?
Most working scientists who study the brain and behaviour subscribe to the idea that the products of the mind (ex: intelligent behaviour) may ultimately be understood in terms of the workings of the physical brain, without appealing to any sort of immaterial properties
How many neurons and how many neural connections is the human brain estimated to contain?
- The human brain is estimated to contain approximately 86 billion neurons with 7000 connections each
- That’s over 600 trillion (602 trillion to be exact) neural connections
What are the contexts in which the brain operates?
- The brain functions within a body: which provides it with sensory information and the ability to move
- This body is embedded within an environment and society: which determine what the inputs and outputs of the body are
- The local society of the person is itself embedded in the larger structures of the world: which determines the broader context within which the person may receive information and act
- Each of these is crucial to understanding the intelligent behaviour the brain produces and must be studied at their own levels to fully consider how cognition comes to be
What does our current scientific understanding of the brain struggle to explain in sufficient detail?
What makes different brains produce different behaviours
What gives us privileged access to the inner workings of our mind?
Through conscious experience of our own thought process
What’s structuralism?
- A school of psychology whose approach relied on the introspecting on one’s own conscious mental states to understand the mind
- Introduced by Wilhelm Wundt
- Criticisms:
- Experimental methods were considered too subjective, relying on self report
- Approaches were too simplistic (focusing on simple sensory processes)
What’s introspection?
- A technique employed by the structuralists to study the mind by training people to examine their own conscious experiences
- Visual imagery is a form of introspection
- In addition to its use as a data source, introspective processes can play an important role in generating theories that are then tested using other methods
What is Wilhelm Wundt credited for?
- He’s the founder of experimental psychology and the structuralist approach
- He’s also credited for founding the first scientific psychology laboratory
- He wanted to identify the simplest units of the mind that he thought followed certain laws to create complex thoughts
- He wanted to establish a ‘mental’ periodic table of elements
- He used empirical introspection -> psychophysics
- Often used mental chronometry, with which he estimated time for a participant to perceive something (“I see it”; “I hear it”)
- He created the ‘thought meter’
How do structuralists use the introspection technique?
- Practitioners were trained to carefully consider and describe their own internal conscious experiences in terms of fundamental “elements” of consciousness
- Their hope was that they would discover basic principles of how these elements combined to form the contents of the working mind
What’s replication?
An important mechanism of self-correction in science in which different researchers performing the same experiments using the same methods should get the same, verifiable, results, assuming the original findings are valid
What are the 2 reasons for the failure of the method of introspection to live up to its ideal as a scientifically valid method?
- Data that can only be seen by one individual and can’t be objectively verified by others is inherently problematic and without objectively measurable data, we can’t be sure what’s going on in someone else’s mind -> introspection doesn’t lend itself well to replication
- It can only access mental activity that’s available to conscious awareness. However, much of our brain activity takes place outside of awareness
What’s an example of something we know/do that takes place outside of conscious awareness?
- The knowledge of grammar, which is implicit and not available to consciousness
- However, people can be fluent in a language without having any explicit knowledge of its grammatical rules
What system performs a great deal of processing outside of awareness, in the early stages of brain processing?
- The visual system
- Can be seen in patients with cortical blindness
Describe cortical blindness
- Condition in which an individual with damage to the visual cortex will report having no visual experience, despite having working eyes
- They have damage to the visual cortex aka the part of their brain that processes incoming visual information before sending it to higher-level processing that leads to conscious perception
- People with this condition will report being blind in part or all of their field of vision
- While they report being blind, careful experimentation will show that they’re still able to behaviourally respond to visual stimulus (blindsight)
What’s blindsight?
A phenomenon in which someone who reports blindness due to cortical damage still shows behaviour consisting with some perception
What has research on cortical blindness and blindsight shown?
That people with cortical blindness may be able to tell with greater than chance accuracy if visual stimuli is in the right or left visual field, but they’ll insist they didn’t see anything or just guessed -> example of blindsight
What’s a consensus among most working scientists today about the study of the mind?
That a valid science of the mind ultimately must depend on phenomena that can be externally measured
What’s the think-aloud protocol?
Research method that involves having participants verbally describe their thought process as they’re performing a specified task -> similar to introspection
Describe behaviorism
- School of psychology that emphasized using observable stimuli and behaviours as the basis of scientific experimentation
- It was founded by John Watson in the early 20th Century due to his frustration with the introspection method
- This approach ignores how the subject generates the response from the stimulus and instead treats the intervening processes (ex: the brain) as a “black box” whose workings can’t be investigated
What’s a stimulus?
Anything used to stimulate the senses as part of an experimental procedure, such as an image or a sound or a smell
What’s a response?
The behaviour an experimental subject engages in after a stimulus is presented
What was John Watson’s belief about behaviourism and the study of the mind?
- He believed that in order to become a true science, psychology had to abandon discussion of internal mental states in favour of objectively observable data
- He replaced talk about “mental images”, “ideas” and even “memory” with the framework of stimulus and response
- Both the stimulus and response may be objectively observed and measured
- He derived some of the basic ideas for behaviorism from experiments performed by Pavlov in the 19th Century
What was Ivan Pavlov’s contribution to the field of psychology?
- He discovered some of the basic properties of the nervous system’s role in digestive processes, such as salivation
- He also discovered classical conditioning
What’s classical conditioning?
- Process in which an involuntary behaviour can be induced by a stimulus that wouldn’t normally cause such a reaction, based on the fact that the stimulus was previously paired with a different stimulus that naturally does cause that reaction
- This can eventually lead to that behaviour being elicited by the stimulus alone
What happens before the conditioning in Pavlov’s demonstration of classical conditioning?
- An unconditioned stimulus (food) generates an involuntary/unconditioned response (salivation)
- UCS (food) -> UCR (salivation) - A neutral stimulus (a bell) is then introduced and generates no conditioned response (no salivation)
- NS (bell) -> no response
What happens during the conditioning in Pavlov’s demonstration of classical conditioning?
- The neutral stimulus (bell) is paired with the unconditioned stimulus (food) which generates an unconditioned response (salivation)
- NS (bell) + UCS (food) -> UCR (salivation)
What happens after the conditioning in Pavlov’s demonstration of classical conditioning?
- The bell alone (now a conditioned stimulus) now generates a conditioned response (salivation)
- CS (bell) -> CR (salivation)
Pavlov’s classical conditioning can be considered a method for explaining psychology in terms of what?
In terms of laws concerning the relations between completely observable phenomena
What important idea did behaviourists derive from classical conditioning experiments?
That behaviour can be learned rather than depending on inborn (“innate”) behavioural capacities or tendencies
Which side would behaviorists take in the nature-vs-nurture debate?
Behaviorists like Watson were strongly on the nurture side
Describe the case of little Albert
- Watson believed in the idea that behavioural responses can be modified by experience so he conducted a set of experiments to prove that a young child could be classically conditioned to respond with great anxiety and fear to something that the child initially had no fear of
- Little Albert was a young child who was exposed to white furry objects after they had been repeatedly paired with loud crashing noise
- After the experiment, little Albert had developed a strong fearful reaction to all types of furry objects (not only white furry ones) -> generalization
- Watson concluded that phobias were likely conditioned responses
What’s a Skinner Box?
- A chamber used to contain and automatically provide behavioural feedback to an animal during operant conditioning experiments
- The lever in the chamber can lead to the release of food or an electrical charge causing a shock
- AKA operant conditioning chamber
What’s operant conditioning?
A method of conditioning that reinforces certain behaviours through a system of rewards and punishments
Pavlov’s dog and the Little Albert experiments are examples of the conditioning of what kind of responses?
Involuntary responses
What kind of experiments did B.F. Skinner conduct?
He conducted experiments in which rats could be conditioned to engage in certain behaviours based on either reinforcing that behaviour (through a reward) or punishing that behaviour -> operant conditioning
What’s reinforcement learning?
- Form of behavioural conditioning based on punishment and reinforcement (reward) feedback
- Serves as the basis for much of Skinner’s work
What did Skinner find about animals and reinforcement learning?
That animals could be reliably trained to perform or avoid many different behaviours
What was Skinner’s belief about behaviours and classical and operant conditioning?
- Skinner claimed that all behaviours could be explained based on a combination of classical and operant conditioning
- People learn which behaviours to produce in any situation, based on the reinforcement they received for producing those behaviours in the past
What’s negative reinforcement?
Removing an unpleasant stimulus
What’s negative punishment?
Removing a pleasant stimulus
What’s positive punishment?
Generating an unpleasant stimulus
What’s positive reward/reinforcement?
Generating a pleasant stimulus
What did Noam Chomsky argue/criticize about behaviourism?
- He argued that behaviourism could never achieve its goal of explaining behaviour through conditioning because people engage in novel behaviours that they’ve never had a chance to learn
- He pointed to language as a case where people generate novel, meaningful sentences that they have never uttered or heard before
- Ex: “I hate you mommy!”
- He had a huge impact on the field, convincing many that the basic program of behaviourism was doomed to failure
Describe Edward Tolman’s maze experiment
- First, the rat wanders around, exploring the maze without any food reward present
- Then, a food reward is placed in the maze and the rat learns to turn right to find it
- Finally, the rat is placed in the maze at a different starting point. Instead of turning right, as it learned to do previously, the rat exhibits novel behaviour and turns left to find the food
- This novel behaviour was demonstrated only by rats who were able to explore the maze before a food reward was present
What did Edward Tolman conclude about his maze experiment?
- That while the rats first explored the maze, they engaged in latent learning
- He proposed that they formed an internal “cognitive map” of the maze during their initial exploration that they accessed later on in order to choose a novel path to the food reward
What’s latent learning?
Learning in the absence of any reward or punishment conditioning
What fatal flaw did Edward Tolman’s maze experiments highlight in the behaviourist approach?
- These experiments showed how the behaviourist approach can’t account for the flexibility of cognition to generate novel, intelligent behaviours that haven’t already been observed or performed
- These novel behaviours must depend on more than stimulus-response pairing
- They require more complex kinds of processing that can only be captured by positing internal processes and mechanisms, such as cognitive maps
What is at the heart of what it means to be intelligent?
The ability to generate novel behaviours
Which subfield of psychology still widely uses the behaviourist methodological approach?
- Behavioural neuroscience labs, which use animal models to study the physiology of cognition
- Ex: Using reinforcement learning on a rodent to study the neural mechanisms of learning and memory
What are computers at their most basic level?
Machines that are able to automatically generate functions
What are functions?
- A mapping between one set of objects and another
OR - Mappings of inputs and outputs
- Functions take an input and produce its respective output
- Ex: the function of “addition” takes 2 or more numbers as an input and produces their sum as an output
What’s an algorithm?
- A set of operations that produces the input/output mapping of a function
- Method for producing the right output from the input
- Sort of like a recipe for producing the desired result
- Ex: the rules we learned to add 2 numbers together represent an algorithm
What helped trigger the start of the cognitive revolution?
The rejection of behaviourism and the rise of computers
What’s information processing?
- An approach in human cognition that views it as a type of computation with a sensory information serving as an input which is processed by the brain to determine a behavioural output
- According to this approach, cognition may be viewed as a kind of algorithm made up of sequences of operations or sequences of computational steps
- The goal of researchers of cognition is to determine what underlying algorithm/program the brain uses to compute its input/output functions
Object recognition is an example of what in cognition?
A function, where, for example, digital images of animals are the input and a label of the image category is the output
How is the cognitive approach to psychology studied?
Since the brain’s algorithms can’t be observed directly, this approach is based on the idea that we can measure observable behaviour to test theories of the underlying mental processes
What’s cognitivism?
An approach in psychology that uses behaviour as a method for developing and testing theories of the underlying processing of the mind
What’s an early example of the cognitivist approach?
Donders’ experiment comparing the reaction times in responding to a light stimulus under 3 conditions (detection condition, discrimination condition and choice condition)
Who was behind the emergence of programmable computers?
- Alan Turing
- In the 1930s, he described what properties a general purpose computing device would have to have to be able to compute any function
- He showed that it’s possible to devise a machine that can receive a set of instructions for what function to compute rather than being fixed to a single function
- This set of instructions is now known as a program and this is what gave rise to the idea of a programmable computer
- Turing’s ideas strongly influence the first designs of electrical computers in the 1940s
How did the first computers’ mechanical gears and electrical vacuum tubes encode information?
They could encode information based on whether they allowed a current to flow through them or not
What was the name of the first electronic computer?
Colossus
By the 1950s, what were computers capable of?
- By the 1950s, these computers began to perform tasks that looked like true intelligence, such as playing chess
- Newspapers dubbed them the “thinking machines”
Describe the detection condition of Donders’ experiment of comparing reaction times in responding to a light stimulus
In this condition, the subject had to respond as quickly as possible to the stimulus by pushing a button
Describe the discrimination condition of Donders’ experiment of comparing reaction times in responding to a light stimulus
- In this condition, participants were presented with 2 possible stimuli, such as left and right lightbulbs
- They performed a go/no-go task -> if one stimuli appeared they would respond by pressing a button; if the other stimulus appeared, they wouldn’t press the button
Describe the choice condition of Donders’ experiment of comparing reaction times in responding to a light stimulus
- In this condition, there were 2 possible stimuli and 2 respective responses, such as responding with the right button for right light and left for left light
Describe the findings of Donders’ experiment of comparing reaction times in responding to a light stimulus
- He found that the detection condition was the fastest, followed by the discrimination condition, and the choice condition taking the longest
- He reasoned that differences in reaction times were due to these different stimulus-response tasks depending on different combinations of underlying cognitive processes -> the more processes involved, the longer the response takes
Ex: detection condition only requires detecting that a light stimulus is present and producing a single motor response
What’s the imagery debate?
The long-running scientific feud that revolves around whether our brains encode spatial information in picture format (like a map stored in the brain) or in a descriptive format (like a list or spreadsheet)
Why do we say cognitive psychology is often an “indirect” kind of science?
Because the goal of the experiments isn’t the actual data observed but rather to test a more general underlying theory
What are the 2 types of research in cognitive psychology?
- Hypothesis-driven -> A certain guess about the link between variables and then study it
- Phenomenon-driven -> an “effect” is discovered, and follow-up research examine the nature of the effect
What’s an example of hypothesis-driven research in cognitive psychology?
Donders’ experiment
What’s an example of phenomenon-driven research in cognitive psychology?
- Illusions
- Stroop effect (classic example)
What’s the Stroop effect?
- A psychological phenomenon in which reporting the ink colour of words is slowed down when the words spell out the name of a different colour
- One of the most established and well-replicated psychological phenomenon
- This phenomenon was discovered and its accidental discovery has led to a rich body of research
What’s the independent variable?
The conditions that are being manipulated by the experimenter in order to determine their effects on the dependant variable
What’s the dependent variable?
The properties that are being measured in an experiment
What’s the point of an experiment?
To test the effect of the different levels of the independent variable on one or several dependent variables
What are the most common measurements of subject’s voluntary behavioural responses?
- Correctness
- Thesholds
- Reaction Time (RTs)
- Subjective responses
What’s correctness as a measurement of the subject’s voluntary behavioural response?
This measures whether a given response is accurate/correct
What are thresholds as a measurement of the subject’s voluntary behavioural response?
Manipulation of a stimulus on one or several dimensions to test what level or change in the stimulus people are able to detect
What’s reaction time as a measurement of the subject’s voluntary behavioural response?
This measures how long it takes a participant to produce a response
What’s the speed-accuracy tradeoff?
Sometimes researchers will analyze the RT data to determine whether participants are sacrificing accuracy in order to respond more quickly or sacrificing speed in order to respond more accurately
Why is measuring involuntary behaviours more complex?
Because it typically requires specialized equipment or trained researchers who can “code” the responses
What are examples of involuntary behavioural responses that can be measured
- Eye movements
- Pupil dilation
- Heart rate
- Galvanic skin response (GSR) aka skin conductance
- Facial and body gestures
How are eye movements measured and what do they indicate?
- Using specialized hardware (eye tracker) or just a regular camera and the right software to track and measure gaze
- The location of fixation can be useful for assessing the mechanisms of attention, interest, etc.
How is pupil dilation measured and what does it indicate?
- Using an eye tracker
- Can be used to asses effort, attention and responses to luminance (low-level optical factors)
How is heart rate measured and what does it indicate?
- Using devoted sensors (heart-rate monitors - HRMs)
- Provides insight into emotional state and arousal
How is galvanic skin response/skin conductance measured and what does it indicate?
- Using devoted sensors
- Can be used to measure emotional arousal (fear or anxiety) in response to experimental conditions
How are facial and body gestures measured and what does it indicate?
- Automatically measured by algorithms that use AI to detect the locations of facial and body points (pose estimation)
What are nuisance variables?
- Data in behavioural experiments being “noisy” due to for example, people not paying attention or making a mistake
- This variability can drown out the effects of the independent variable
- To address these issues, most cognitive psychology experiments will include trials
What are trials?
- Repetitions of an experimental condition, typically used in order to compensate for variability in performance across attempts
- The measurement being analyzed will usually be the pooled average across all trials in that condition, rather than the individual trials
What’s a between-subjects design?
Different participants are assigned to different conditions
What’s an assumption in cognitive psychological research?
- Different people’s brains are fundamentally similar in the way in which they perform a given cognitive task
- In most cases, it’s assumed that the variation across people’s performance isn’t due to fundamentally different mechanisms
What’s the field of cognitive neuroscience?
- It combines behavioural experiments with methods for measuring brain activity
- The combination of brain data and behaviour can provide a powerful form of empirical “triangulation” for a theory
Describe the field of behavioural neuroscience
- It incorporates behavioural experiments alongside physiological measures of the brain
- It mainly uses animals for research, which serve as animal “models” of humans
- Common technique in this field is to implant micro-electrodes in the animal’s brain in order to record the individual activity of brain cells while the animal is awake and behaving
TRUE or FALSE: The brain doesn’t operate in isolation
TRUE: The brain doesn’t operate in isolation, it’s a component of a highly complex web of connectivity within the body, called the nervous system
Where does cognition take place?
Primarily within the CNS and more particularly in the brain
What are nerves?
- Bundles of connective tissue (or axons) between neurons that allows them to communicate with one another and other parts of the body
- They can carry information over long distances
How can we think about the respective roles of the CNS and PNS in cognition in terms of a continuous loop of inputs and outputs between the body and the brain with the spinal cord as a sort of relay between them?
- The PNS provides the input by bringing in information from the external senses and passing it to the CNS for processing
- The CNS then sends a behavioural decision (control signal) as output back to the PNS to control muscles to generate a behaviour
- Information is passed back and forth through the spinal cord
- In many cases, the decision process will be much more complex, involving analysis of the sensory input and consideration of many other potential factors
What’s the nervous system?
A portion of the body consisting of neurons, nerves and glial cells whose function is to allow different portions of the body to communicate with one another and process information to coordinate and control bodily function and behaviour
What are neurons?
Specialized cells that can receive and transmit information
What are glial cells?
Cells within the nervous system that provide support for neurons and overall nervous system function
What’s the seat of conscious, voluntary action and is also the basis for all learning in the nervous system?
The brain
What’s the autonomic nervous system?
- A portion of the peripheral nervous system that connects to most organs in the body and regulates certain unconscious bodily functions
- Its overall role can be summarized as a kind of regulatory lever that cranks up, or down, certain groups of involuntary bodily functions (heart rate, digestion, respiration and sexual arousal) based on the perceived need for immediate action
- While the ANS consists of structures in the peripheral nervous system, it’s heavily regulated by structures in the brain (including the brainstem and hypothalamus)
What are the 2 subsystems of the autonomic nervous system?
- Sympathetic nervous system
- Parasympathetic nervous system
What’s the sympathetic nervous system?
- A subdivision of the autonomic nervous system that unconsciously regulates certain functions of the body to prepare for immediate action
- It reduces certain lower-priority bodily functions (ex: digestion) and increases others (ex: heart rate and respiration)
- Fight-or-flight response
What’s the parasympathetic nervous system?
- A subdivision of the autonomic nervous system that regulates bodily functions under conditions when immediate action isn’t needed
- It works on relaxing those functions that are needed for immediate physical action while cranking up those that are useful for longer-term survival (ex: eating and digestion) or reproduction (ex: sexual arousal)
What’s the brainstem?
A stalk-like structure at the base of the brain that connects it to the spinal cord and regulates involuntary functions like heart rate and breathing
What’s the hypothalamus?
A small but highly complex cluster of neurons that lies in the centre of the brain that regulates multiple involuntary behavioural functions (ex: body temperature, hunger and thirst, fatigue, and certain sexual behaviours)
What’s an example of an involuntary behaviour that doesn’t involve the brain?
Reflex action
What’s reflex action?
The simplest form of autonomic behavioural responses which occurs when a stimulus generates an immediate behavioural action triggered by the spinal cord before the information reaches the brain (spinal cord generates the behavioural signal without the brain)
What’s the cerebrum?
- The largest portion of the human brain, sitting at the top of the brain and consisting of the cerebral cortex and other related structures
- Contains several subcortical (underneath the cortex) structures (ex: hippocampus)
- Most of this structure is dedicated to controlling and regulating voluntary behaviour
What’s the cerebral cortex?
- Part of the cerebrum
- A folded, layered structure that’s the largest single structure and the most superficial portion of the human brain (closest to the skull)
- The outermost layer of the cerebral cortex consists of gray matter
What’s gray matter?
The outermost layer of the cortex, made up of neuronal cell bodies
What’s white matter?
The layer of the cortex underneath the gray matter, which consists of the nerve tracts that connect neurons to each other (axonal nerve tracts)
What’s the hippocampus?
A complex structure which is involved in memory formation and is structurally an extension of the temporal lobe of the cortex and is involved in the formation of long-term memories
What’s the contralateral processing that occurs for visual stimuli?
Everything to the left of the point in space you’re looking at (the left visual field), projects to the right hemisphere while the right visual field projects to the left hemisphere
What’s gyrus or gyri?
The hill-like projections of the folds of the cerebral cortex
What’s sulcus or sulci?
The valley-like indentations of the folds of the cerebral cortex
Why does the cortex take a folded-like structure in the skull?
The cortex is like a flat sheet that’s folded to allow more brain tissue to fit into a smaller volume
Why are human babies born less mature than other species?
Because our oversized brains would make birth impossible if allowed to develop more fully in utero
What are the 4 lobes of the brain and their functions?
- Occipital lobe -> vision
- Temporal lobe -> meaning of sensory information, meaning of language and visual memory
- Frontal lobe -> executive control and planning
- Parietal lobe -> attention, somatosensory processing and sensory integration
- These lobes are really large folds of the cortical sheet and are all connected (separated by deep sulci and fissures)
What are fissures?
A deep sulcus-like fold in the cerebral cortex
What’s the corpus callosum?
A band of fibers that connect the right and left hemispheres of the cerebrum
What are the functions of the left and right hemisphere -> hemispheric specialization?
- The left hemisphere is the dominant location of language
- The right hemisphere is the dominant location of spatial processing
What’s functional localization?
- The concept that certain cognitive functions reside in specific regions of the cerebral cortex
- The most direct and historically oldest indications supporting functional localization are from neuropsychology
- If damage to a specific part of the brain leads to specific impairments, this may be taken as evidence for functional localization
- Ex: Fusiform face area responds selectively to the perception of faces
What’s neuropsychology?
The study or observation of brain function and impairment due to brain pathology
What’s evidence for hemispheric specialization?
Victims of strokes that cause lesions/brain damage to the right hemisphere will show difficulties with coordination and navigation, while strokes that affect the left hemisphere will often demonstrate slurred or confused speech
Describe what evidence was found for hemispheric specialization in split brain patients
When staring at a fixation point and shown something in the left and right visual fields and told to describe or draw what they see, the patient responds verbally to the object in the right visual field but draws the object in the left visual field with their left hand
What happens when we show2 different images in each visual fields of a split-brain patient?
The 2 hemispheres of the same brain can’t agree on what the person sees because the left and right visual fields project to either the left or right hemispheres which are separated
What’s the emotional enhancement effect?
- Emotional stimuli are more easily attended to, remembered than neutral stimuli
- Behavioral experiments show focal memory enhancements for negative stimuli in an image (ex: remembering what gun he was holding but not his face as well)
- Amygdala activity predicts memory for emotional but not neutral images
What were the 2 Western schools of thought where we can find thinking about cognition in the philosophical foundations from Ancient Greece?
Rationalism and Empiricism
Who were the 2 ancient greek philosophers who were very influential to the field of cognitive psychology?
Plato and Aristotle
What were Plato’s views and approach to understanding cognition?
- He believed that knowledge involves experience and reason (prior knowledge)
- He saw knowledge as both the result of experience of our external world (bottom up processing) but also as the results of things we know and our distortions and thoughts and feelings that we’re bringing towards our perception, attention, memory, etc. (top-down processing)
- He used a rationalist approach which states that we have innate logic, knowledge and reason (we’re born with it) and we use these to guide our observations (meaning our personal observations may not always reflect the ground truth out there -> because we are using prior knowledge and logic to deduce any sort of truth)
What were Aristotle’s views and approach to understanding cognition?
- Aristotle was very focused on observation and what we can learn from it -> thought observation was the centre of human knowledge (empiricism)
- Empiricism -> all knowledge comes from experience and observation
- Empiricism’s emphasis on observation guides the importance of experimentation
- He thought that how we gain knowledge and have these complex thoughts is with how we form associations between things that we observe (not innate)
- Believed in inductive observational reasoning, which suggests to learn from what your see
- Foundation for the importance of observation
If someone strongly aligns with empiricism, would they say our actions are based on ”Nature” or “Nurture”?
Nurture since according to empiricism knowledge is not innate and is learned through observation
What’s psychophysics?
- Study basic cognitive phenomenon by linking sensory experiences to physical changes
- Ex: measuring the threshold for feeling the touch from a feather
What’s functionalism?
- Asks why the mind works, what’s its function
- Not interested in breaking down mental states to basic elements
- Cognition is about serving a function and so must adapt to current goals
- Main thinker who was a functionalist -> William James
- Focuses on why the mind works and the ‘usefulness of knowledge’
- A criticism is that it is difficult to study some of these ideas (consciousness, imagery), especially if cognition is always changing
What’s ecological validity?
The extent to which the findings of a research study can be generalized to real-life naturalistic settings
What’s Hick’s Law?
A mathematical equation to show that the more information contained in a signal, the longer it takes to make a response to this signal
What’s the relationship between information processing and uncertainty?
- Since processing information takes time, the more uncertain something is, the longer it will take it
- The amount of information processed is inversely related (negative relation) to how much we expect that information to occur -> if we don’t know what to expect, we must process more
What are 2 forms of dualism?
- Interactionism
- Epiphenomenalism
What’s epiphenomenalism?
- Mental thoughts (mind) are caused by physical events (brain), but thoughts do not affect physical events
- One-way interaction
- Suggests that the mind and brain are separate entities and that there’s a limit to how much these entities can interact
- The mind is a byproduct of the physical brain (it’s dependent on the physical brain)
- Mental thoughts are the results of the physical events -> these are separate but they won’t cause a behavioural response
- The brain response will lead to a behaviour -> may think you’re acting on your mental thoughts but you’re acting on your brain response
What’s interactionism?
- Form of dualism that states that the mind and brain are separate
- The mind and brain interact to induce events in each other
- Mind can affect body (e.g., thinking alters brain activity)
- Body can affect mind (e.g., hormones affect cognition)
- Subscribes to the idea we have a ‘soul’
TRUE OR FALSE: Cognitive abilities are studied all together
FALSE: Cognitive abilities are studied separately but are not separable in reality
- Ex: Memory, language and perception all interact with each other
What are 3 factors that lead to Zoom fatigue?
- A lack of information from body language, social cues, eye contact
- The audio signal is out of sync on Zoom, so there are higher demands on processing
- The lack of immersion makes it easy to be distracted
What are the factors that affect the IV-DV relation?
Control or nuisance variables
What’s computational modelling?
- Building and modelling the mind-brain connection
- Ex: with AI
How do basic and applied research questions interact?
Answering a basic research question can be used to springboard into applied research (not just black and white or 2 sides of a coin)
What’s synaesthesia?
- A neurological condition in which one sense automatically triggers the experience of another sense
- Grapheme-color synesthesia -> a person sees colors with certain letters or numbers (ex: always see 5’s in green and 2’s in red)
- Genetic component
- One hypothesis is that it is due to cross wiring (cross-talk) between processing areas in the brain
Is pain a sensation or a perception?
Perception
What’s the McGurk effect?
- A multisensory illusion such that there is a change in auditory perception from visual perception
- Leads you to “hear” what you “see”
- This shows us that there is an integration of sensory information
- This also illustrates the dominance of visual input
What’s early visual processing?
- Sensation
- Involves the eyes and the optic nerve
What’s late visual processing?
- Perception
- Involves the visual cortex (occipital lobe)
What’s Akinetopsia?
Visual motion blindness; cannot see motion
What’s optic ataxia
Inability to reach for objects with the ability to name objects
What’s prosopagnosia?
Selective deficit in recognizing faces; damage to the fusiform face area
What’s template matching?
Every object has a template in long-term memory
What’s the function of hair cells in the ear?
Hair cells transduce mechanical signal from the basilar membrane into electrical signal
What are the 2 cues for locating sounds in space?
Interaural time difference Interaural level difference
What are the key principles of auditory scene analysis?
- Auditory scene analysis is where we mentally represent the sounds we hear in the environment
1) Grouping
2) Separating
Gestalt rules
What’s the fundamental frequency?
Lowest frequency component
What are harmonics?
Multiples of the fundamental frequency
-> Influence what we hear
What’s temporal grouping and sequential integration?
- Connecting sounds together in time
- Getting different auditory streams of sound and linking them together
- When these tones are being played slowly, we hear them as being connected in time
- When these tones are being played fast, we think the high tones and low tones aren’t connected in time anymore and we hear a high stream and a low stream (we do this when we listen to people talking or when we make music)
- Making auditory streams based on their relationship with time
How are sound waves organized in the auditory system?
- In the auditory system, sound waves end up mixing together
- The goal of auditory system is to divide these up and identify each sound wave
How is the auditory system similar to the visual system?
- Both have a contralateral organization where sensory info entering right eye/ear goes to left hemisphere and vice versa
- Both have dorsal “where” and ventral “what” pathways -> dorsal = sound localization and ventral = sound properties
What are the 3 bones in the ossicles?
- Incus
- Malleus
- Stapes
What are the theories of Visual Object Recognition?
- Template matching
- Prototype theory
- Feature detection
What are the 3 types of attention?
- Arousal
- Bottom-up
- Top-down
What are the 3 types of top-down attention?
- Sustained attention
- Selective attention
- Divided attention
What are late selection filter models?
- We only filter out information after processing its meaning, therefore both attended and unattended information are processed at the level of meaning
- Information will be further processed and remembered only if semantically relevant
What are early selection filter models?
- Information is filtered out at the level of perception, based on perceptual or physical properties. Irrelevant information is filtered out before meaning is processed
- In the dichotic listening task, you could remember the following information about the unattended message
-> Loud noise, change in gender of the speaker (i.e. sensory features)
What’s the attenuator model?
- An early filter is applied at the level of perception, but instead of filtering out all irrelevant information, it simply dials down its influence
- Unattended information can be processed for meaning if important or unexpected (i.e. your name)
What’s the inhibition of return?
When the time between the cue and the target is too long (i.e. 300ms), our response to the target is slower because our attention has moved to another space
What’s spatial neglect?
- It’s unilateral
- Damage to the parietal lobes
- Results in an inability to attend to information in space contralateral to the brain damage
- Inattention to information in ‘contra-lesional’ space
- Often following right hemisphere damage because this hemisphere is specialized for spatial processing
- Attentional deficit presents across sensory modalities (not just vision)
- Isn’t due to impairment in sensory processing
- Left side of the world is out of awareness:
- They read only words on the right side
- They eat from one side of the plate
- They can only describe half of imaginations and memories
- Awareness doesn’t resolve the condition
- Internal representations (memories) are only skewed to one side
What’s a test we can give to people with spatial neglect?
Simple test for someone with spatial neglect is to get them to draw common objects or to draw lines through lines
Where is attentional processing located in the brain?
- A distributed network of prefrontal cortex (PFC) and parietal cortical regions
- If it’s a visual task, the PFC and parietal lobe will direct processing to the visual system
- Intraparietal sulcus + FEF in preparing to attention to something (top-down attention)
- Temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) and VFC in bottom-up attentional orienting
What are the 3 types of top-down attention?
- Sustained attention
- Maintain focus on one input for a long period of time
- Vigilance
- Divided attention
- Shifting attentional focus between tasks
- Multi-tasking
- Selective attention
- Focus on one input and ignore other information
Why do we have selective attention?
- Required because of limited resources
- You must prioritize what to process to act effectively
- What you attend to will depend on a given goal
- Spatial-based versus feature-based attention
What’s the Flanker task?
- Orient people to look at a particular space or feature
- You have faster times to detect a cue/image if it’s congruent
- People are faster at detecting a red stimuli if the cue is red (congruent trial)
What’s change blindness?
- The failure to detect changes in stimuli in an attended zone
- Continuity errors in film
What are the general types of attention?
- Top-down attention: observer guided controlled attention
- Bottom up attention: stimuli guided automatic attention
- Arousal: alertness and awareness
Describe the arousal type of attention
- Attention when you’re very physically alert
- Low arousal = when you’re tired and distracted
- You want some arousal so you can be engaged in a task
- Too much arousal leads to stress which can impair cognitive function
How can we measure change blindness?
- Flicker technique paradigm
- 2 highly similar visual images (e.g., scenes) are presented with an inter-stimulus “mask” (mask can slightly disrupt selective attention)
- Sometimes there are small changes in the images (e.g., color change, removal of window of a building)
- When asked if the 2 images are the same, or what changed, people are often inaccurate -> common result is that people can’t tell that there are small change
What have researchers found makes us more susceptible to change blindness?
Aging
What are the theories of selective attention?
- Early selection models
- Attenuator model
- Late selection model
- Load theory
Describe Broadbent’s early selection filter model
- States that you filter information at the level of perception, before information is processed for meaning (semantic analysis)
- The information enters the sensory buffer, and from the sensory buffer, we’re going to select information to attend to at the level of perception
- Anything that we want to get rid of or not pay attention to will stay in the buffer and decay relatively quickly -> information not selected by the filter decays
- Selects information for further processing at the sensory level -> doesn’t encode any meaning (spatial location, frequency of sound)
- Attended information is processed for meaning, enters awareness and leads to a response
- Sensory buffer -> short-term holding information (not information in conscious awareness)
What are dichotic listening tasks?
- Ps presented with 2 different simultaneous messages to each ear
- Ps are then asked to recall digits (either ear by ear or pair by pair)
- Recalling pair by pair means you have to move your filter from left to right to left to right -> which makes you lose info in the sensory buffer
- Participants are better able to recall information ear by ear than the simultaneous message
- Information is selected for attention, at perception (early selection fileter model)
What were some problems that were identified with the early selection filter models?
- In certain situations, un-attended information can “break through”
- At a party, you can attend to one conversation, yet hear your name if
spoken in a non-attended-to conversation (cocktail party effect) - Another example is in the study where participants presented with a word (e.g., apple) paired with an electric shock
- When they did the shadowing task with the ‘shocked’ word in the unattended ear participants had increased skin conductance (conditioning)
What’s balint syndrome?
A neurological disorder typically resulting from damage to both parietal lobes that carries several attentional deficits including occulomotor apraxia and simultanagnosia
What’s Treisman’s attenuator model?
- A theory of attention in which unattended stimuli are processed but at a reduced level relative to attended stimuli
- An early filter dials down the influence of unattended material
- Some aspects of unattended material to be processed for meaning
- Information passes, but some of it is weaker
- Offers a compromise between the early and late selection models
- The meaning of this reduced signal may be identified if it sufficiently matches some high-priority word (name) or an expected item (a word that may be more predicted by previous words)
What’s one way to explain the inconsistency to the early attention selection models?
We do filter or select information by the physical characteristics at the perceptual level but it’s not all-or-none, it just tunes down other info (puts the volume down on unattended info) making some unattended info pass through
Describe the late selection filter models
- We process input to the level of the meaning, and then select what we want to process further
- A model of attention that posits that unattended information is first processed in terms of its meaning and then filtered based on irrelevance to the current task
Describe William Hick (1952) early experiment on information
processing
- Information processing theory -> we process information to try to reduce uncertainty
- Research Question: What is the relationship between choice reaction time, a proxy for processing, and the amount of information within an event?
- Conducted a series of behavioural experiment measuring reaction time to detect light
- Participants saw a display of 10 lamps
- A lamp lit up every few seconds
- Participants were asked to press a button when a lamp lit up
- Across trials, the number of lamps that could light up: for some trials: one of the ten lamps (the same lamp) would light up & for some trials: any of the ten lamps could light up
- Findings: people were slower (higher reaction time) to detect a light if any lamp could light up than when only one lamp could light up
- Reaction time to press the button (dependent variable) in response to a light increased as the number of lamp alternatives (content) increased
What does the information processing theory mean for everyday life?
- The greater the number of choices (or uncertainty of choice) requires more information to process, and thus it takes longer to make a decision and makes the decision harder
- Ex: why it takes so long to choose a movie on Netflix (so many options)
- Why we have problem with long to-do lists (what do I do next?)
- Can lead to decision fatigue
Describe how information processing has limits from Webster and Thompson’s (1953) study of air traffic controllers
- Participants were air traffic controllers (the people who work here)
- They listened to two simultaneous messages: Each message had a call signal (familiar to the participants) and unrelated words (unfamiliar to participants)
- Participants were to memorize and repeat back as much of these messages as they could remember
- The air traffic controller participants could remember both call signals, but only one of the unrelated word messages for the simultaneous messages
- This is because the familiar call signals contain ‘less information’
- The unfamiliar unrelated word messages contain ‘more information’
- Cognitive processing capacity is limited, so we can only process some of the information input by our senses, partly determined by familiarity/certainty
Why do we process information?
- We process information to reduce uncertainty
- Since processing information takes time, the more uncertain something is, the longer it will take it
- The amount of information processed is inversely related to how much we expect that information to occur. In other words, if we don’t know what to expect, we must process more
- The cognitive revolution wanted to look at how we process information
- A lot of these models follow the assumption that it takes time for us to process information so we can use the time that it takes people to do tasks to find an estimate of how much information is processed
What are examples of psychophysiological measurements in psychology?
- Measure activity in the peripheral nervous system (i.e., not the brain) in response to things that humans perceive or imagine
- Eye movements (covered in attention and language lectures)
- Skin conductance
What are the strengths and weakness of using animal models as a method for psychology
- Researchers will use animals to conduct behavioral experiments, lesioning the brain or collecting physiological brain measures
- Strength:
- Provides a causal link between brain and behavior
- Foundational discoveries about how the mind works
- E.g., the prefrontal cortex is critical for short-term memory
- Weakness:
- Differences in brain structure and function across species puts limits on the generalization of these findings
- E.g., cannot provide a full understanding of human brain
What are examples of neuropsychological cases as a method in psychology research
- Study brain function by comparing the behavior of brain-injured patients to healthy control participants
- If brain injury to area X leads to impairment on specific cognitive function, then that brain area must support that function
- Follows ideas of functional specialization
- Split brain patients
