PSYC1002 Flashcards
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What was behaviourism and who were the two major players?
• Behaviourism (1914) rejected internal mental structures, describing all behaviours as complex stimulus-response associations (Watson and Skinner)-it is a learning psychology focuses on learning behaviour, stimuli and processes. No point studying internal processes: consciousness-forbidden
.• Skinner thought freedom was bad-should have more reward/punishment system
• Thought learning was not able to occur without a rewards/punishment system. Humans had no internal drive to learn.
Why did behaviourism have to be abandoned
• Language- Skinner attempted to explain language in “verbal behaviour” – but proposal was not parsimonious. We likely have pre-existing structures to help us form language-language acquisition device of small children who learn language without punishment/reward
• Attention overload/limit- realised that couldn’t process everything at the same time all the time-important for the birth of cognitive psychology as behaviourism couldn’t explain this
-Tolman’s experiment
What is the difference between AI and cognitive psychology?
• Artificial intelligence- how humans could improve, cognitive psychology- what humans can do. Brought on by impractical serial exhaustive search from memory scanning example
What did Tolman argue in 1948?
- Disagreed with behaviourism- end of behaviourism
- Proposed that rats formed maps of the maze they were in, even without reward- said that rats had consciousness and that it wasn’t just simply a stimulus response reaction
Who’s data did Tolman use and what did this data describe?
• Experiment using Blodgett’s data
o Group I: control-run in maze once per day and found food in the goal box. Group I data resulted in shape of learning curve.
o Group II: experimental- not fed at all while in the maze for 7 days, then rewarded in maze from then on. Results didn’t show a learning curve and showed an extreme error curve drop once they did know where to find the food- suggested that rats had learned to build maps of the environment, and henceforth knew exactly where to go for the food- disproved behaviourism
o Group III: experimental- not fed at all while in the maze for 3 days, then rewarded in maze from then on
What was the impact of technology post WWII?
• Attentional overload:
o Discovering human limitations in mental processing
o The need for better training
o The need for better design
Ergonomics- an object’s efficiency in its purpose and comfort
• Computers take in and manipulate information
o Investigate mental processes scientifically
o Can use computers as a model for human information processing systems
o We can construct a model of cognitive processes and test the model by measuring human behaviour
What is the main cognitive model involving sensory memory, working short-term memory and long term memory?
- Sensory input is absorbed by the sensory memory: unattended information is quickly lost
- When paid attention to, information will transfer from the sensory memory to the short term memory: where unrehearsed information is quickly lost
- When properly encoded, this information goes into the long-term memory –> where some information may be lost over time
Who proposed mental chronometry?
Snodgrass
What is mental chronometry?
- Mental chronometry is the measurement of mental processes by the use of reaction time (the time thoughts take)
- Compare behaviour in two tasks that differ in only one mental process
- Choice RT – Simple RT=Estimate of stimulus evaluation time
- Can be used to infer the nature of the process
Describe Donder’s substraction method:
- Who and what it was influenced by
- How it worked
• Influenced by Helmholtz attempt to measure the speed of nerve transmission in the frog by measuring the time between the stimulation of a part of the frog’s body and the resulting muscular contraction. Since knew the approximate length of nerve fibres used the difference in reaction time as a measure of nerve transmission time.
• Donders reasoned that:
o A reaction: simple reaction time
o B reaction: choice reaction time
o C reaction: choice reaction time but with a response to only one response omitting all others (go/no-go response), theoretically discounting motor-choice time
o C-A= discrimination time
o B-C= motor-choice time
Why was Donder’s substraction method discounted?
o C had a motor choice time: the choice whether or not to have a response (Wundt)
Wundt proposed d reaction (several stimuli but only one response is made to all the stimuli-subject instructed to recognise/identify stimulus before responding)
o Experimenters were the test subjects themselves
Destroyed the assumption that stimulus input and motor-response time are equal.
What is simple reaction time?
the time elapsing between stimulus presentation and completion of the motor response
What is choice reaction time? And what does it include?
• Choice reaction time- two or more stimuli are presented, and the subject has to indicate which stimulus has been presented by producing one of two (or more responses), a different response for each stimulus. Includes:
o Discrimination time- the time to discriminate one stimulus from another
o Motor choice time- time to select one of the several motor responses
What is sternberg’s additive factors method and what does it involve?
- Involves manipulating the variables so that differences in RT between different levels of the same independent variable are used as measures of the duration of substages of the major stages.
- Involves binary reaction time paradigm- the subject chooses one of two responses in response to the presentation of a stimulus.
What does binary classification experiment mean?
more stimuli than responses: subject separates set of stimuli into two categories by responding to one set with one response and to the second set with the second response
How did Sternberg’s memory scanning experiment work?
• Subjects given short list of items to memorise
• Memory set size- length of the memory list
• Varied set procedure- memory set is either varied from trial to trial
• Fixed set procedure- remains constant across a blocked series of trials
• After the memory set has been presented to the subject, a trial begins with the presentation of the test item (probe): selected from the positive set or the negative set.
o Due to simplistic nature of task and a set size considerate of short term memory, few errors occur in this task and the major variable of interest is response time
What are the three different types of searches?
o Parallel self-terminating search- all objects considered at the same time
Predicts that negative responses will increase with set size, but at a negatively accelerated rate.
o Serial self-terminating search- search ends when object is found
On average, subjects need to search through (n+1)/2 items to find the matching item on positive trials (where n is the number in the memory set) but will need to search through all n for positive trials
o Serial exhaustive search- search ends when all items from list are exhausted. This is what humans do.
Number of comparisons that can be made in a second is equal to 25
Search is exhaustive because the comparison process itself is so fast that it is more efficient to complete the search through all the items than to stop after each comparison to make a decision
However, other researchers found evidence for parallel search through visual displays, and evidence for serial self-terminating search through long term memory
What are the 4 stages proposed by Sternberg for the memory scanning task?
- Stimulus quality:
a. Stimulus probe degradation- mean some manipulation that makes the probe more difficult to see
i. Sternberg found that degradation only affects stage 1 but not stage 2 - Size of positive set
- Response type (positive or negative)- Takes longer to decide in favour of a negative to a positive
- Relative frequency of response time- more probable response is executed faster
What is Posner’s same/different classification task principle?
- Subjects are asked to classify pairs of stimuli as SAME or DIFFERENT on the basis of some criterion.
- As the abstractness increases, so do the number of stimuli that are considered identical
Describe the letter matching task
• Subject presented with letters of the alphabet and required to judge as quickly as possible whether pair is the same or different (uppercase and lowercase same letters (Aa) are considered to be SAME)
• Results evidence that subjects match physically identical stimuli on the basis of visual rather than name characteristics during simultaneous matching
• However, during successive matching, suggests that letters are being matched on the basis of name as matches like AA are not made faster than matches like Aa.
o This suggests that the duration of an efficient visual code for matching is short (2 seconds or longer and it is inefficient)
Posner experiment of matching pairs to vowel or consonant category concludes that subjects must have gone through these nodes (consonants were matched slower than vowels because there are more of them). So physical matching faster than name matching, which is faster than rule-based matching (vowels and consonants). These extractions occur in a serial fashion.
What are some methodological issues with mental chronometry?
• Irreducible minimum reaction time- minimum time for stimulus input, decision and motor response time. Reaction times shorter than that are called anticipations.
• Warning signal- indicates to subject that second stimulus (reaction signal) will occur after some time interval (foreperiod)
o Reaction times shorter than irreducible minimum are discarded. Less of a problem in choice reaction time.
• Long RTs are outliers that can be caused by lack of attention
• Speed-Accuracy Trade-Off function:
o The faster, the less accurate the response to a stimulus will be (stimulus A might receive a stimulus response meant for stimulus B)
As ling as error rates are positively correlated with RT, low chance that data can be explained by speed-accuracy trade-off function
• RT can be affected by a subject’s familiarity with the test matter (such as alphabets of different languages)
Why do we have to investigate cognitive processes so indirectly?
• Introspective data do not provide valid insight into the determinants of cognition
• Some cognitive processes occur without any conscious awareness or control and therefore are not available for introspection
• Even our consciously controlled cognitive processes are subject to a variety of “cognitive biases” and reasoning errors that influence our interpretation of events without our awareness
-We are influenced by framing
-Hindsight bias
-Adjustment and anchoring
-Misconceptions of regression
-Anchoring in the assessment of subjective probability distributions
-Conformation biases
-Biases due to the retrievability of instances
-Biases due to the effectiveness of a search set
-Biases of imaginability
-Illusory correlation
-We seek order in randomness and ignore chance
-Insensitivity to prior probability of outcomes
-We ignore base rates/sample size
-Insensitivity to predictability
-Many errors actually make us more efficient at processing information but means we cannot accurately report our own cognitive processes
-Certainty effect
-Pseudocertainty effect
What are the three key processes involved in memory?
• Three key processes involved in memory;
o Encoding
Forming a memory code
Requires attention
o Storage
Maintaining encoded information in memory over time
o Retrieval
Recovering information from memory stores
What is attention?
focusing awareness on a narrowed range of stimuli or events