PSYC 105 Final Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology
Study of the mind, specifically mental processes
Monism
The mind and the body are the same entity. Some believe only the mind exists and some only the body
Dualism
Mind and body are separate entities
Introspection
Earliest popular way to study the mind; looking within and recording one’s own mental processes and experiences; still can’t study unconscious thought
Behaviorism
Studying observable behaviors and stimuli, how does behavior change in response to stimuli; But it makes the brain look like a “black box” with no mental processes
Transcendental method
Inference of behavior is the best explanation for what is happening in the mind
The scientific method
The systematic and iterative process of hypothesizing, predicting, and observing phenomenon in order to generate knowledge
Constructs
Ideas we care about that can’t be observed directly. eg: happiness (broad idea)
Variables
Things we measure/manipulate that indirectly reflects constructs
Independent variable
The variable that researchers manipulate or assign to the participants, the hypothesized cause of the effects on the dependent variable
Dependent variable
The variable that researchers measure, the outcome of interest
Behavioral data
Measuring performance, eg: accuracy, response time
Biological data
Neuroimaging, neurological damage. Understanding what biological structures are necessary for performing a task
Comparing different populations
Do different groups of people behave in the same way?
3 functions of the brain
Creating a sensory reality; integrating information (making decisions); producing a motor output (responding to environment)
Frontal lobe
Motor, executive function (goal directed behavior)
Parietal lobe
Somatosensory, spatial information
Temporal lobe
auditory processing, emotions, language
Occipital lobe
Visual processing
Thalamus
Relay station for sensory information
Hypothalmus
Controls motivated behaviors like eating, drinking, and sexual activity
Amygdala
Emotional processing
Hippocampus
Learning and memory
Projection
Certain cortical areas map onto certain parts of the body; size correlates to precision and acuity
Neuroplasticity
The brain’s ability to change its structure, functions, or connections; Neuroplasticity enable cortical remapping (adjacent body part can take over)
Apraxia
Unable to move certain body parts
Agnosia
Inability to identify objects
Unilateral neglect syndrome
Can’t see/ignoring half the visual world
Aphasia
Inability to speak/communicate, language issue
Contralateral organization
Many neural pathways are crossed over; sensations from the right side of the body correlate to the left hemisphere and sensations from the left correlate tot he right hemisphere
Lateralization
The concept that each hemisphere is associated with specialized functions
Left hemisphere
Language and logical reasoning
Right hemisphere
Spatial tasks
Corpus callosum
Helps with communication between hemispheres; when severed leads to split brain patients
Sensation
The stimulation of sensory receptor cells, which is converted to neural impulses; the physiological basis of perception
Perception
The process by which the brain selects, organizes and interprets the sensations
Photoreceptors: Rods
Sensitive to low levels of light, lower acuity, color-blind
Photoreceptors: Cones
Primarily in the FOVEA, Cannot function in low light, higher acuity, color-sensitive
Blind spot
Area of the retina where the optic nerve is; Both eyes fill in for the other, brain also fills in information
Why do dim stars in the night sky fade when you look at them?
Because there are no rods in the fovea; it’s dim and we are highly focused on the star so we have trouble seeing it
Receptive field
The size and shape of the area in the visual field to which the ganglion cell responds to. The more similar to a ‘preferred’ stimulus the more often the cell fires
Lateral inhibition
Stimulated cells inhibit the activity of neighboring cells; increases acuity by enhancing contrasts; helps us see edges better
Bipolar cells
Enhance the contrast ratio for edge detection (lateral inhibition) and send signal to the ganglion cells
Akinetopsia
Inability to perceive motion
Parallel processing
Specialized regions are activated simultaneously; different areas have different purposes and work parallel to each other to help us perceive things
What pathway
Pathway connecting the occipital lobe and inferotemporal cortex (temporal lobe); Aids in identification of visual objects
Where pathway
Pathway connecting the occipital lobe and posterior parietal cortex (parietal lobe); Aids in perception of an object’s location
Associative agnosia
Can perceive entire object and copy but cannot name it; damage to what pathway; difficulty linking perceived object to stored knowledge
Apperceptive agnosia
Cannot copy from model but can draw from memory; damage to where pathway; Difficulty integrating features into a meaningful whole
Bottom-up processing
Processing sensory information, assembling, and integrating it; data-driven
Top-down processing
Using prior knowledge (expectations) to interpret sensory info; concept-driven
Gestalt psychologists on perception
The perceptual whole is often different than the sum of its parts; similarity, proximity, good continuation, closure, simplicity
Binocular disparity
The image of the same object falls on different regions of the retina for left vs. right eye, the disparity gets encoded as depth; greater the disparity, the closer the object
Convergence
The inward turning of eyes to focus on near objects
Perceptual constancy
Tendency to perceive constant object properties even though sensory info changes when viewing circumstances change
Visual illusions (brightness and color)
Our interpretation is affected by experience with light and shadow
Takeaway from illusions
Demonstrate how good we are at interpreting ambiguous sensory input, NOT how bad we are at perceiving our surroundings; top-down processing!!!
Feature nets
Each detector has an activation level, and it produces signal when the response threshold is met
Priming
A detector may take less stimulation to produce a signal due to frequency and recency
Recognition errors
Our input is often ambiguous and partial; more primed units are likely to fire
The Mcclelland and Rumelhart model
Information flows bottom-up, top-down, and within the same level; there are excitatory and inhibitory connections
Recognition by components
Feature net for 3D objects; Geons (parts of object) form objects like how letters form words; viewpoint independent- understanding structure from its part
Viewpoint-dependent recogntion
Like a feature net for views stored in memory from different angles; eg- motorcycle
Face inversion effect
Less sensitive to features changes when upside down
Composite face effect
Facial features are harder to detect in context than in isolation; faces are always processed as whole configurations
Multimodal perception
Integrating sensory signals from different modalities to form a unified reality
McGurk effect
Conflicting visual and auditory signals mutually influence our perception
Cross-modal perception
The influence between the different sensory modalities; nuanced differences between sounds and events may be learned through experience
Attention
Mechanisms that select select relevant perceptual input and reject irrelevant input
Selective attention
Tasks that require attending to one stimulus and ignore another; informs us about the process of selection and what happens to the unattended stimuli
Divided attention
Tasks that require attending to all stimuli; informs us about processing limits and attentional capacity
Inattentional blindness
The failure to see a prominent stimulus, even if one is staring right at it; Attention is focused elsewhere
Change blindness
The inability to detect change in a scene, despite looking at it directly; either visual or gradual
Dichotic listening task
Different audio inputs presented in each ear of headphones; Made to pay attention to the attended channel
Unattended channel in the dichotic listening task
Unlikely to remember semantic information, but may still be aware of physical attributes or potentially meaningful information (eg: changes in the audio)
Cocktail party effect
The ability to focus on one conversation and tune out other conversations in the background; BUT exception when you hear personally relevant information
Early selection model
Selection is based on physical characteristics; Failure to perceive; unattended stimuli receive less processing than unattended stimuli
Late selection model
Selection based on semantic content; failure to remember; some processing happened but irrelevant stimuli still made it to brain
Attenuation model
Attended information is enhanced, unattended is reduced, but both ARE STILL PROCESSED
Priming
A lower response threshold (the lowest point at which a particular stimulus will cause a response) leads to easier/faster recognition; especially frequency or recency of stimuli
Expectation based priming
What we use to selectively attend, effortful; Top-down activation of detectors you are expecting to use
Stimulus-driven priming
Requires no effort/cognitive resources; Bottom-up activation of detectors based on features in the stimulus
Posner task
faster to respond to expected arrow cue; expectation based priming (top-down) can be helpful but wrong orientation/misguiding has a cost
Attention as a spotlight
The movement of the ‘beam’ refers to the movement of attention not the movement of eyes; context affects voluntary eye movements
Endogenous attention
Consciously choose what we want to attend; voluntary/top-down attention
Exogenous attention
An external stimulus seizes your attention; involuntary/bottom-up attention
Is attention to object-based or location-based?
Face value = location-based; ACTUALLY BOTH
Binding problem
Parallel processing happens simultaneously, ATTENTION is the glue that combines the dorsal and ventral stream to perceive a single unified object
Feature search
Automatic and parallel; things “pop out”
Conjunction search
Effortful and serial; usually on by one, longer time to check more features
Feature integration theory
pre-attentive stage and focused attention stage
Pre-attentive stage
Features separated, parallel and automatic processing, separate features pop out
Focused attention stage
Features combined, serial processing (attention) to bind features together
cognitive budget
Divided attention will fail if the combination of tasks exceeds our limited mental resources
Generality of resources
A single pool of resources needs to be divided among multiple concurrent tasks
Domain-specificity of resources
Different modalities have different pools of resources, similar tasks compete for the same resources
Response selector resources
Required for selecting and initiating responses
Executive control resources
Setting goals and priorities, avoid conflict among competing habits/responses (eg: distraction)
Frontal lobe lesions
Deficits in executive control, make preservation errors (same response repeatedly when task requires change in response)
Goal neglect
Disorganized thinking/performance, doing things randomly without planning (rey osterrieth figure)
Task similarity
It is easier to do dissimilar tasks than similar tasks
Automaticity
Tasks that are well-practiced and require little to no executive control
Strop interference task
Say only the color of the word, not the written color
The modal model of memory
Acquisition, storage, and retrieval
Sensory memory
A brief store of raw sensory information; modality specific- iconic (visual) memory is the shortest
Working memory (originally STM)
Active manipulation of information entering the brain
Serial position effects
Recall likelihood is influences by the item’s serial position (order); WM-recency effect, LTM- Primacy effect
Working memory capacity
~ 4 chunks
Chunking
Grouping seemingly random items into meaningful units
Operation span
Measures the capacity when WM is “working, highlights the active nature of WM
WM components: Central executive
Direct attention and resources
WM components: Episodic buffer
Organize information into a chronological sequence, narrative/event
WM components: Visuospatial sketchpad
Planning visual and spatial tasks
WM components: Phonological loop
Auditory storage and articulatory processing (“inner voice”)
Maintenance rehearsal
Repeating information in a rote mechanical way
Elaborative rehearsal
Thinking about meaning, relating items to each other or existing knowledge; more connections, easier to retrieve
Intentional learning
Deliberate, with expectation to be tested
Incidental learning
Learning in the absence of an intention to learn
Explicit memory
Conscious, can be tested with “direct tests”
Implicit Memory
Can be tested by indirect tests
Mnemonics
Associating a well-known structure or sequence with a less well-known one; often rely on mental imagery, may not lead to better understanding and learning
Retrieval paths
Connections between new memory with existing memory; only useful if you can access them
Spreading activation
activation spreads to nearby nodes, decreasing in strength with distance from the original node; stronger when association is closer
Why do retrieval cues help us remember?
Having multiple cues = receiving activation from multiple sources -> increases the chance that a node will reach threshold
Context reinstatement
Mentally recreating the context
Encoding specificity principle
Materials are better recognized as familiar later if they appear in, or are cued by a similar context
Testing effect
Testing yourself is better for long-term memory retention; re study is good on the short-term
Memory is reconstructive
We often remember the gist of our experiences, use the gist to reactivate nodes and connections from original memory
Intrusion errors
Falsely recalling something that was not present in encoding; prior knowledge or other connection cause false recollections
Schematic knowledgable
Remember what is typical or frequent of a situation, built up on prior experiences
Misinformation effect
Our memory is susceptible to “contamination” by external sources
Confidence and accuracy
Confidence can be altered without changing the memory itself
Flashbulb memories
A special kind of episodic memory that we recall in great, vivid details; the involvement of amygdala in encoding and retrieval; vividness is often mistaken accuracy
Forgetting: Decay theory
memories fade or erode over time
Forgetting: Interference theory
The recall of some info affects the recall of other info
Proactive inference
Old affects new
Retroactive interference
New affects old
Forgetting: Retrieval failure
Memory is intact, but temporarily unable to access
Clive Wearing
Both retrograde and anterograde amnesia
Damage to amygdala
Little implicit memory (fear response), intact explicit memory
Damage to hippocampus
Little explicit memory, normal fear response
Concept
Mental representation used for a variety of cognitive functions
Categorization
The process by which things (like concepts) are placed into groups called categories
Definitional approach
Determine category membership based on whether the object meets the definition of a category; too rigid, not all members of everyday categories have the same defining features
Probability approach
The more characteristic features an object has the more likely we are to believe it likely part of the category
Family resemblance
Category members may not be defined, but rather resemble one another
Prototype approach to categorization
An abstract representation of the “typical” member of a category; an average of category members encountered in the past; fuzzy boundaries
High prototypicality
Category member closely resembles category type; the “typical member”
Low prototypicality
Category member does not closely resemble category prototype
Typicality effect
Prototypical objects are processed preferentially; highly prototypical objects are judged as the category faster
Naming effect
Prototypical objects are named first
Exemplar approach to categorization
Concept is represented my multiple exemplars (rather than a single prototype); representation is not abstract like prototype view; easily takes into account atypical cases
Global level
General category (eg: furniture)
Basic level
Somewhat specific category (eg: table, chair); the most special hierarchical category, quicker to identify and learned first
Specific/subordinate level
Very specific category (eg: kitchen table, dining table)
Inductive inference
The process of making observations and applying those observations by generalization to a different problem. Therefore one infers from a special case to the general principle
Bayesian inference: Posterior
How probable is the hypothesis given the evidence?; overall 1 is a better hypothesis than 2 or 3
Bayesian inference: likelihood
How probable is the evidence given that our hypothesis is true?; 1 and 2 are more likely to explain the data than 3
Bayesian inference: prior
How probable was our hypothesis before observing the evidence?; 1 and 3 are more common than 2
Core knowledge
The initial seeds of knowledge get learning started; early concepts of how the world works
Theory of mind
Babies are tying ideas of the world together, internally building their own theories
Phonemes
Smallest unit of sound
Phonology
How sounds connect to make words
Morphemes
Smallest unit of meaning
Morphology
How morphemes are combined to make up words
Lexicon
Representations of words, “mental dictionary” of all the info we know about a word
Syntax
Rules governing how words are combine to form sentences
Semantics
Literal meaning of words/sentences)
Pragmatics
Meaning in context
Which of the following is the best description of the sentence: “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”?
It is semantically non-sensical in english
Arbitrariness
Abstract symbols determined by convention, no inherent relations between sounds and meanings
Displacement
Can talk about things and ideas not in the “here and now”
Duality of patterning
Combinations of otherwise meaningless units are meaningful; separate = no sense, together = meaningful
Productivity
Speakers can create novel utterances they have never heard before, can create an infinite set of meanings with a finite set of units
Reflexiveness
Can use the language to talk about language itself
Recursion
Embedding structures within structures; hierarchical and potentially infinite
Language acquisition device
Internal (born with), general set of rules and constraints that are shared by all human languages (nativism)
Poverty of stimulus
Children can produce novel structures and learn based on limited and imperfect input
Linguistic determinism (stronger version)
Language limits/determines thoughts; no word for idea/concept = hard to solidify in brain
Linguistic relatively (milder version)
Language affects perception (but doesn’t determine it)
Egocentric frame of reference
In relation to one’s own position; common in english
Allocentric frame of reference
Independent of viewer’s pov, usually in relation to landmarks (uphill vs downhill, to the north)
Codability
Higher agreeability on the labels, usually shorter in length, easier for speakers to come up with; better recognition memory for more codable color
Categorical perception
The perception of distinct categories when thee is a gradual change in a continuum; Distinguishing within category items is harder and takes longer than between-category items
Word spurt
Around 18 months old children rapidly learn words at an exponential rate
How do children learn words
Look and name
Referential ambiguity
When learning new words with look and name is it talking about the object itself or its attributes?
Solutions to Referential ambiguity: Whole object
The label refers to the object rather than its parts (seen earlier in life)
Solutions to Referential ambiguity: mutual exclusivity
New word is probably a label for an object that does not already have a label
Solutions to Referential ambiguity: Taxonomic restraint
New word refers to a basic category rather than a theme
Solutions to Referential ambiguity: syntactic bootstrapping
Using the syntactic structure (grammar) to get the meaning; eg- this is a bif (noun/object)
Time course for learning grammar
U-shaped development; specific instances of grammar to overregularization of rules (using rules when they don’t apply to word like goed, wented), then gradually learning the exceptions/rules and improving
Critical period hypothesis
The process of lateralization (language development in left brain) develops rapids between age 2 and 5, then slows down, being complete by puberty; the period of maturation
Speech mitigation
Slicing of continuous speech sounds into appropriate segments
Coarticulation (related to speech mitigation)
A sound may be affected by features of adjacent sounds
Voice onset time (VOT)
The timepoint at which the vocal cord starts to vibrate; < 30 ms makes a p sound and < 30 ms makes a b sound; harder to discriminate sounds as we get close to VOT
Phoneme restoration effect
The effect of context on speech process; use semantic and syntactic information to “fill in the gaps”; more noticeable if sound is replaced with silence
Lexical ambiguity
Eg: “children’s stool good for use in garden” - what type of stool?
Selective access model
One meaning activated at a time; check serially in order of meaning frequencies until one fits
Multiple access model
All meanings activated simultaneously; all activated and make decision when context permits
Parsing
Computing the syntactic structure of a sentence; knowing the syntactic category, how units combine to make bigger units. Ambiguity exists on a syntactic level as well
Garden path sentence
Sentence leads you to one interpretation which turns out to be wrong; eg- while sarah was dressing he baby played on the floor
Late closure strategy
Attach incoming words to current phrase, rather than creating a new one
Grammatically effect
Errors often within the same grammatical class (nouns for nouns and verbs for verbs); eg- I’m stuttering psycholinguistics. vs. I’m studying psycholinguistics
Consonant-vowel rule
Errors occur within the same phonological class (consonants for consonants; vowels for vowels); eg- rule of rum vs. rule of thumb
Lexical bias effect
Errors that make up real words are more likely than non-word errors; eg- Deep cot -> Keep dot more likely than Deed Cop -> Keed Dop
tip-of-the-tongue
Failure to retrieve a word, often coupled with partial recall and the feeling that successful retrieval is imminent -> meaning and grammar can be accessed separately from pronunciation
Structural priming
Exposure to one structure increases the likelihood of producing that structure again, even when the semantic content has changed -> sentence frames can be planned independently of words (eg- active vs passive voice)
Broca’s aphasia
Halting speech, disordered syntax, comprehension intact
Wernicke’s aphasia
Fluent speech, adequate syntax, comprehension not intact
Self-monitoring
Speech errors are generally rare; Although our production system may be very efficient and accurate, there must be some monitoring mechanism that helps us detect and prevent errors before they are uttered; taboo errors (with swear/inappropriate words) are less common
Judgement
The mental process through which people draw conclusions from the evidence they encounter
Prescriptive theory of decision making
How to help people make better decisions
Descriptive theory of decision making
How people actually make decisions; e.g., the use of heuristics (mental shortcuts)
Normative theory of decision making
The supposedly optimal decision based on a set of principles
Dual process model: system 1
Intuitive, automatic, immediate, rely on heuristics
Dual process model: system 2
Analytical, controlled, cognitively demanding, more likely to be correct
Heuristics
Mental shortcuts, constructed based on prior experience to save time and energy; BUT they are not guaranteed to be correct; rely on attribute substitution
attribute substitution
using one attribute (e.g., fluency or similarity) to make a judgment about another attribute (e.g., frequency or probability)
Availability heuristic
Making a judgment based on how easily something can be recalled, the easier it is for something to comes to mind, the more frequent/likely/significant it is assumed to be; eg- fluency effects
Representativeness heuristic
the assumption that resemblance to the prototype reflects probability
Assumption of homogeneity
an expectation that each individual is representative of the category overall
Base rate
Actual rate of how common something is
Base rate neglect
The tendency to ignore the “prior probability” of
an event
Conjunction fallacy
An inference that the set of two or more conclusions is more likely than any single member of that set
Gambler’s fallacy
failure to consider the independence of probabilistic events; chance viewed as a “self-correcting” process
Anchoring and adjustment
the tendency to anchor estimate on first salient number then adjust up or down from there
Utility
The importance/value of each outcome
Probability
How likely each outcome is
Utility theory
Assumes that humans are rational actions who choose the option that provides the most utility; Utility can be thought of as the “expected value” of a choice; Expected value = probability of an outcome x value of the outcome
Prospect theory
People hate losing more than they like winning; The marginal impact of a change in value diminishes with the distance from a relevant reference point
framing effects
People tend to interpret a choice based on the given frame of reference
Frequencies vs probabilities
People are more likely to accept the test in the probability condition (eg- reduce chance of death by 1/3 over reduce 3 in 1000)
Problem solving
The process by which one determines the steps needed to reach a goal
Components of a problem: Initial State
Resources you currently have
Components of a problem: Goal state
End product
Components of a problem: Operates
A set of operations or actions taken to reach the goal state
Components of a problem: Constraints
Rules that cannot be violated
Problem space
The total set of possible moves within the constraints of the problem
Navigating the problem space: Algorithm
A procedure that inspects every possible move in the space by applying operations over and over again until goal state is reached; slow but guarantees a solution
Problem solving heuristics: Hill-climbing strategy
At each step in solving a problem, choose the option that moves you in the
direction of your goal; But does not work for problems that require you to move away from the goal for some steps.
Problem solving heuristics: Means-end analysis
Divide the problem into smaller problems then solve in any order
Problem solving heuristics: Mean-end analysis
Goal divided into many sub-goals
