Module 2 Flashcards
Mind-body problem
Question of how mental events such as thoughts, beliefs and sensations arise from physical mechanisms in the body
Dualism
View that mind and body differ in substances or properties
Monism
View there is only one kind of basic substance in the world
Physicalism/materialism
View that all reality is physical or material in nature
Idealism (monism)
View that the only kind of reality is mental
Neutral monism
There is only 1 kind of substance that is neither material nor mental composing both mind and body
Descartes dualism
The mind and body are mind of different substances, but they interact in the pineal (no, it produces melatonin)
Number of neurons in the brain
86 billions
According to cognitive psychology, the mind and brain are made from the same substance, but intelligent behavior arises from the ____mind/brain
Brain
Structuralism
From Wundt and Titchener. This approach has the goal to identify the building blocks of the conscious experience through introspection.
Main problem of introspection as a method of scientific research
Lack of replication
Cortical blindness
Damage to the visual cortex causing no conscious sight, but reactions show unconscious sight (blindsight)
Behaviorism
Approach that emphasizes using observable stimuli and behaviors as the basis of scientific experimentation
Operant conditionning (Skinner) and intrusmental learning (Thorndike) are based on reward and punishment, and ______unvoluntary/voluntary behavior
Voluntary
Latent learning
Learning in the absence of any reward or punishment
Function
Mapping from input to output
Algorithm
Set of operations that produce the input output mapping of a function
This mathematician discovered what properties a general purpose computing device would have to have to be able to compute any function
Alan Turing
Program
Set of instructions for what function to compute
Transitor
Device used in computers to control whether or not a current flows through parts of a system
Neurons were seen as the equivalent of transitors encoding 1 and 0s because…
They too used a binary encoding system by firing or not
Cognitive revolution
Movement of the 1950s that proposed the mind could be understood as a computational system
Input of the mind according to the cognitivist perspective
Sensory information
Output of the mind according to the cognitivist perspective
Behavior or decision
What happens between the input and output in the brain
Information processing
Goal of cognition researchers
Determine the underlying algorithm or program the brain uses to compute its input/output functions
Machine learning
Technique in which the computer itself determines the correct algorithm
Flowchart
Chart showing a sequence of operations
The brain is the hardware while the mind may be the ____
Software
Cognitivism
Using behaviors to develop and test theories on the underlying processing of the mind
Order the different conditions of Donders’s experiment, based on observed average reaction times, from shortest to longest
- Detection
- Discrimination
- Choice
Donders’s experiment supported his hypothesis that different stimulus-response tasks actually depend on different combinations of ____
Underlying cognitive processes—the more processes involved, the longer the response takes
Stroop effect/stroop interference
Reporting the color of color words colored in the wrong color (e.g. yellow written in blue) takes longer than only circles of color
Galvanic skin response (GSR), also known as skin conductance (SC), can be measured may be used to measure …
Emotional arousal, particularly fear or anxiety, in response to experimental conditions.
Plato
Rationalism view:
* Knowledge is driven by implicit innate logic, not through learned experience
Aristotle
Empiricism view : observation is the source of human knowledge : we learn through associations of observations
Link between philosophy and cognition
Studying Philosophy
* asking questions about how and why we think
Studying Cognition
* gathering evidence to support the answers
Eastern philosophy
Everything, including the mind is impermanent; context matters
Western science methods
- Uses methods and experiences to reduce processes to their most basic level
- Seeks a more analytic understanding of the mind
Eastern science methods
- Uses methods that pay more attention to context and integrative
- Seeks a more holistic understanding
Reductionist view (structuralism)
To understand the mind, you have to reduce mental actions to simple pieces
Mental chronometry (Wundt’s empirical introspection)
Time for a participant to perceive simple
stimuli
Criticisms of structuralism
- Simplistic approaches might not be representative of cognition
- Introspection might be too subjective (people might not be so good at reporting what they perceive)
Functionalism
Cognition is about serving a function and changes with goals and context, which means it cannot be broken down into units. There is an adaptability of behavior or skill based on environmental needs.
William James’s empirical method
Direct observation and fieldwork rather than introspection
Behaviorism assumes ssumes all _____ obey the same laws of behaviour
Species (justifies animal research)
Pavlov classical conditioning is based on _____involuntary//voluntary responses
Involuntary
Positive punishment
Add unpleasant stimulus
Negative punishment
Remove pleasant stimulus
Positive reinforcement
Add pleasant stimulus
Negative reinforcement
Remove unpleasant stimulus
Criticisms of behaviorism
- Overestimated the scope of their explanations : the assumption that learning is the same for all individuals and across species is false
- Cannot explain complex human behavior
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863 - 1930)
- Opposed eliminating introspection because some psychological processes can only be studied this way ( imagination, judgment to come to a choice)
Language is learned through _______ according to behaviorists
Conditioning
Information processing view that arised during the cognitive revolution
Series of processing systems change information in systematic ways, which takes time (resources).
Our information processing capacity is limited :we can only process information for a certain amount of time.
Information goes from primary to ______ memory, but you have to rehearse it over time for it or it will fall out
Secondary
The number of remembered words decreases as the time doing a _______ task increases
Distractor
Why do we process information?
To reduce uncertainty
The more ______ something is, the longer it will take it to process
Uncertain
William Hick experiment
- 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 would light up : High certainty
- For some trials: any of the ten lamps could light up, more options : Low certainty
Results :
People were slower (higher reaction time) to detect a light if any lamp could light up than when only one lamp could light up : low certainty condition
Hick’s Law
The more information to process, the longer it takes to make a response to that information
Choice overload bias
Large number of choices (or uncertainty of choice) taxes information processes; which leads to overwhelmed feeling and poor choices
Decision fatigue
If we have to make a lot of decisions early on :
* Decisions become harder to make - and worse -throughout the day.
Over time,
* More impulsive
* Less rational
Ecological validity
The extent to which the findings of a research study can be generalized to real-life naturalistic settings
Interactionism (dualism)
The mind and brain interact to induce events in each other
Epiphenomenalism (dualism)
- Mental thoughts (mind) are caused by physical events (brain), mind does not cause physical events
- One way interaction
Social mirroring
Imitating the actions of others
* Related to empathy, the ability to take on the feelings and state of another
