perception, action and cognition Flashcards
what is nativism?
the idea that humans are innately endowed with knowledge
how did plato ‘prove’ nativism?
he wrote a play in which socrates questioned a slave about how to calculate the area of a rectangle and the slave worked it out, therefore the knowledge is inborn.
finishthis statement “If you know what you’re looking for, inquiry is unnecessary. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, inquiry is impossible. Therefore, inquiry is either unnecessary or impossible.”
Souls are immortal and have learned everything prior to transmigrating into the human body. Since the soul has had contact with real things prior to birth, we have only to ‘recollect’ them when alive.
what did descartes argue using analytical geometry?
if we can represent geometric relations with symbols, then we in our minds must use symbols and these symbols might approximate mathematic equations and this is what comprises mental representations
who created analytic geometry 500 years before descartes?
Omar Khayyam (1048-1131)
what claim did John Locke make?
He claimed that we are born without knowing ANYTHING
empiricism
who was the founding father of behaviourism?
John B. Watson
who created operant conditioning?
Skinner is regarded as the father of Operant Conditioning, but his work was based on Thorndike’s (1898) law of effect
According to behaviorists, all the world is, in effect, a Skinner box:
the environment is a place where behavior is continually reinforced one way or the other. Everything we do is a learned pattern of behavior shaped by our histories of reward and punishment
name all the elements of a skinner box
electrified grid, loudespeaker, food dispenser, lights and response lever
who wrote a book criticising bf skinner? and what was the basis of his critique?
steven pinker, the blank slate
- people are able to use languages because of our genes. Rats can’t talk. Crocodiles can’t converse. Ducks can’t dialogue.
-If it’s the case that genes underlie the capacity for language. You might then expect a genetic mutation that stops people from being able to make use of language.
A group of people in the UK that are NOT mentally deficient but have a huge amount of trouble using language.
what did immanue kant write about in his book ‘a critique of pure reason’?
he rejected Plato’s and Descartes’s argument that pure reason can be used to discern ultimate truths.
In the book, he also rejected Locke’s assertion that our minds are blank slates. Instead, Kant argued, there are aspects of reality that we cannot reach by reason alone because we have inborn ways of perceiving.
For example, if everything you see is rose-colored, then you cannot see the world as anything but rose-colored. No amount of pure thought will let you see the world another way. Paradoxically, then, the fact that the world looks rose-colored makes it impossible for you to know that it appears that way. Reason alone will never get you to that truth. You can gather data (engage in empiricism) until you are blue in the face, but your perception will always be rose-tinged. How you collect and appreciate data (empiricism)
first person to run a 4-minute mile in 1951 and was also a neurologist
roger bannister
what role does the cerebellum play?
muscle control, including balance and movement. And when patients have damage to this site, they struggle with some really fundamental balance and coordination tasks.
what is moravec’s paradox?
The basic observation is that things which we find easy to do as human’s - catching a baseball - are very hard for machines whereas things which are hard for human’s - calculating the trajectory of a missile - are easy for machines.
what are ‘affordances’ in design
“the design aspect of an object which suggest how the object should be used; a visual clue to its function and use”
what is the shared-effort model?
individuals who approached the door as it was held open would try to ensure that the joint effort expended by them and by the door holders was less than the sum of their individual efforts if the door was not held open.
how was the first motion picture ever, made?
In 1872, the former governor of California Leland Stanford, a race-horseowner, hired EadweardMuybridgeto undertake some photographic
In 1878 a guy called Edward Muybridge changed everything. He set up 24 cameras linked to tripwires to take photographs of a horse galloping. He developed and later projected the images onto a screen using his invention, the zoopraxiscope. The result was 2 seconds of movie history. Here it is, the first motion picture ever made.
the two phases in prehension:
Pre-contact phase:
Transport component
Grasp component
Rotation component
Grip and move phase:
Loading phase
Movement phase
what did acottish researcher, David Lee, theorise how gannets know when to retract their wings when diving to catch fish?
Through cinematic analysis, Lee and a colleague showed that the gannets pulled in their wings at a roughly constant time before contact with the water.
Lee and Reddish called this time “tau” or τ, the Greek letter for the letter “t,” the letter commonly used to denote time or moments of time in physics and other disciplines.
Time equals distance divided by rate, so time to contact could be specified by the ratio of distance to rate.
The distance to the water could be optically registered by the image of the water surface, with the rate being registered as the rate of optical expansion of the water.
The closer the birds got to the water, the more quickly the optically registered texture of the water surface would expand. Time to contact could then be based on the rate of optical expansion.
Once the rate exceeded some critical value, that would be the signal for the birds to close their wings and literally take the plunge.
what did shepard’s mental rotation task show?
The larger the angle, the more time it takes
These data supported the idea that there are internal mental events that support action and that they can be measured using something as simple as RT
donder’s law:
For any gaze direction, the eye always assumes the same unique orientation in 3 dimensions. The orientation is always the same irrespective of where the eye came from.
explain the experiment that Benjamin Libet undertook to uinvestigate the role of consciousness in the generation of motor action
Using a clock with a rapidly rotating dot, the subjects were asked to note the position of the moving dot when he/she was aware of the conscious decision to move a finger. Scalp EEG was used simultaneously to monitor brain activity during the experiment.Libet et al. (1983) found a premovement buildup of electrical potential called readiness potential (RP) starting ∼550 ms before the movement. Unexpectedly, the conscious awareness of the decision or “the urge to move” emerged only 200 ms before movement, leaving therefore a time lag of ∼350 ms between the initial rising of the RP and the conscious awareness of the decision to flex
Activity averaged to the point where the participant reports wanting to act
suggests that a substantial period of cerebral activity may be required for an experience of conscious intention or desire to perform a voluntary act
critique of libet’s findings
two recent studies have challenged this interpretation (Alexander et al., 2016; Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016). The first demonstrated that humans can still cancel the initiation of a movement, even after the onset of the RP up to a point of no return 200 ms before movement onset. Importantly however, it was found that, even after the onset of the movement, it is still possible to alter and abort the movement as it unfolds (Schultze-Kraft et al., 2016). Alexander et al. (2016) revealed that robust RPs occur, even in the absence of movement. Together, these two studies demonstrate that premovement RP is not sufficient for the enactment of a motor action. Therefore, the RP must encode processes other than motor-action preparation.
explain the findings of Roland, Larsen, Lassen, & Skinhoj (1980) study
People moved their fingers or just imagined moving their fingers while being PET scanned. As seen in Figure when actual movements were made, two areas of the brain were especially active: the motor cortex and the supplementary motor cortex. By contrast, when the same people only imagined moving their fingers, just one of these areas “lit up”: the supplementary motor cortex. From this result, it was suggested that the motor cortex is involved in moving the fingers while the supplementary motor cortex is involved in imagining the finger moving. Imagining moving the fingers wouldn’t be expected to activate the part of the brain responsible for sending neural commands to the finger muscles, but actually moving the fingers would be expected to activate the motor-imagery and the muscle-activation regions.
what are the 2 benefits of fMRI over PET, but what is the disadvantage?
- radioactive injection is not required in fMRI
- spatial resolution is better in fMRI than in PET
disadvantage:
Temporal resolution isn’t as good in fMRI, and movements, even small ones, made by the person in the fMRI scanner can cloud the fMRI signal, creating artifacts that can be tricky to remove
describe Owen et al.’s (2006) study ‘detecting awareness in the vegetative state’.
Doctors attending to this young woman thought they might be able to find out whether she was locked in. After getting permission from the family, the physicians told the young woman that she would be put into a special machine called an fMRI scanner; that this was perfectly safe; that she would be hearing a loud, rhythmic noise while in the scanner, for that is how the scanner works; and that she needn’t be afraid.
Then they rolled her into the scanner, and once she was in place, the doctors told her to imagine playing tennis, which was something she had done before. They also told her to imagine walking through her house, which she had also done previously (Owen et al., 2006).
When the doctors later examined her fMRIs in these two conditions, they found that different parts of her brain were activated depending on what she was asked to imagine herself doing. When she was asked to imagine playing tennis, her supplementary motor cortex lit up, but when she was asked to imagine walking through her house, a different part of her brain, the parietal cortex, lit up.
what is Hebb’s hypothesis?
the more often two interconnected neurons fire simultaneously, the stronger the connection between them
“neurons that fire together, wire together”
what were the findings of Basset et al.’s (2011) study?
They asked how DTI images may change over time. They had participants perform twelve-note piano-keyboard sequences in each of three sessions while having their brains scanned. Performers who improved more on the task as they went from one training session to the next were found to have greater flexibility in the connections formed in their brains. Consistent with Hebb’s principle, the more the neurons wired together, the better the improvement in performance.
What is Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)
It is an MRI technique that measures the diffusion of water molecules in the brain
how did charles sherrington (1857-1952) and karl lashley (1890-1958) differ?
sherrington believed in the empirical view, whereas lashley was more aligned with the nativist perspective
